I am thinking of the months I went back to high school, to night school, making up for what I had missed. It was then I began to dream about my future. I went through school, I made up for the months I was crazy. I did it. But how do you fall in love? I heard Ma say to a friend of hers that there was nothing in life but men, nothing but love. “Jesus, when you come right down to it, what else is there?” she said in her flat, amused voice, as if she’d gone through everything and had to admit this truth. But how do you fall in love? I am thinking of Ma throwing things around the kitchen, drunk, crying, her face twisted ugly and the words ugly coming out of her mouth, when some man let her down—they were always letting her down, poor Ma, and she was kind of a pretty woman. Why did she open herself up to that pain? Again and again she opened herself up.
I am going to fall in love. Tomorrow night I’ll see the man I have picked out to love. He is already married; he has three children. I want him. I want him to marry me. I am going to make this happen and begin my life. We will have a bedroom together, we will have children, he will leave his own children behind. I am telling you these things even though you are a married woman and would not want any other woman to take your husband from you. But you are a married woman, I think, who would not mind taking someone else’s husband, so long as it happened well enough, beautifully enough like a story. Once in a while, though, I don’t believe my life will change. I don’t believe he will marry me or even think of me. I don’t believe something so strange could happen. And I fall into a sad state and can’t get out of it. I lean forward and my head droops between my shoulders, my bones seem to turn helpless, I think Why didn’t I die? Why didn’t he kill me? For thirteen months I was an animal. Ma uses other words, she says I was “going through a phase,” but I remember it all, I know. Never did I think anything in those months, but pictures floated through my mind, like a nightmare. Even when I was awake I was asleep. Even now, sitting in this library with time ahead of me, so much dangerous time, I feel in my arms and legs a strange soft sensation which is like a memory itself. I can’t get such memories out of my body. I felt no love for those men but I put my arms around them. They entered my body in its most secret place, those strangers, and the space between us was only a slick surface of skin and sweat. Is it different with love? What is it like to give yourself with love? Or do you lie there and feel terror to know that, love or not, a husband or a stranger, it is all the same and no words can change it? I was never in love. They did not love me. They embraced me again and again; in my mind I will always see a man embracing a girl who is me. I can see a man’s hands upon her body but the bodies are strangers. I can’t get rid of this memory. My body is like the body of an animal, or one of those things that are just one cell, very tiny, that keep everything in them of all their history and are always the same age, I mean in any century, at the time when Christ was alive or right now those things are always the same things, the memory is hard in them and it has nothing to do with their brains. I remember. I will live very long and remember.
So I came back. I woke up. I finished high school, I moved out of my mother’s place, I worked as a typist and got a room near a bus stop, I enrolled at the University of Detroit for one course in Fall, 1963, Composition, Mr. Kovack gave me a D. I enrolled for another course, yours. I came to class, I listened to you, I lay awake nights thinking of how I must not fail, how I must get a C in this course, how I must take hold of myself become like other people. But I did fail anyway, you failed me. You gave me an F.
You failed me.
That year at the University of Detroit was strange for me. During the day I worked. Three other typists, myself, a secretary. Downtown. I took the bus both ways. I hated it. I sat by myself. I was afraid but I kept on. I didn’t look for another job. I didn’t go anywhere except to work and to school. I didn’t dare go to the movies. I was afraid of those first few minutes when you can’t see well in a theater. At night, from seven until eight-thirty, two nights a week, I took a course at college. I tried to look like other girls. By then I had lost weight, my face had cleared up. I washed my face twice a day, I put cold cream on it, I did everything to it, and the face you saw, if you bothered to see it, was a nice face again. I bought shoes and clothes like the other girls. I put my hair up in rollers, I washed it all the time. I was a pretty girl. Now, at twenty-six, I think I am prettier. I deserve to fall in love and be married. In those days I didn’t dare to think about anything so distant, it was enough just to get through a day without breaking down. I never thought of marriage. I was afraid of men. What I envied in you was your easy way with men, the way you talked to them, like friends, other teachers I saw you with in the hall, friends with men? I didn’t think that a woman could be friends with any man. One day before class I saw you walking to the building with a man, a professor like yourself, a tall handsome man with gray hair, very well dressed, the two of you talking, smiling, like it was no accomplishment, and the two of you not seeing me, and another time I saw you, in a black Volkswagen, your husband driving you to school, coming up the driveway, your husband.
Everything in me aches for a husband. A house.
I carried this ache in me all my life, not knowing what it was. Everybody is flawed with it, a crack running through them. In you it is filled in for a while. You feel no pain. I know you feel no pain right now. I don’t envy you or want to be like you, I only want to escape the doom of being Maureen Wendall all of my life. I dream of a world where you can go in and out of bodies, changing your soul, everything changing and not fixed forever, becoming men and women, daughters, children again, even old people, feeling how it is to be them and then not hating them, out on the street. I don’t want to hate. There are too many strangers. I am writing this to a stranger, writing in a library about to close. You, the stranger, my ex-teacher who failed me, are reading this as fast as you can, you’re impatient with it. You don’t want people to make claims on you. I know. I don’t blame you or judge anybody. You said, “Literature gives form to life,” I remember you saying that very clearly. What is form? Why is it better than the way life happens, by itself? I hate all that, all those lies, so many words in all those books. What I like to read in this library is newspapers. I want to know. The old man is reading a newspaper, so is the man with the runny nose. Like me they want to find out what’s going on, what is real. They don’t have time in their lives for made-up things. But I remember you saying that about form. Form. I don’t know what that word means. Maybe my brother Jules would know. I don’t know. I myself am a certain form, a shape, sitting here with my head emptied out and afraid, that is all.
In the hospital, after her husband beat me up, a doctor was trying to take blood out of me. I was conscious. He had a big needle and was poking in my arm for a vein. He couldn’t find it. He took the needle out and put it in again, poking for a vein, and he squeezed my wrist to make the vein swell so he could get inside it, but still that didn’t work, so he tried my other arm, holding my arm out now because I was crying. I keep thinking of that, the needle going in and trying to find my vein, the doctor, a man, poking in my arm for a vein and not finding it. I would have made the vein big and soft for him if I could, but how can you do that? Finally he got the blood. He said, “She’s got to have a Wassermann,” to someone, not talking to me. I would make myself open and ready for love but how can you do that, how can you change yourself?
It is almost closing time in the library.
There is no end to this.
What form is there to the way things happen? I wanted to run up to you after class and ask that question, cry it out at you. Your words were wrong! You were wrong! One day the secretary at work ran in our office. She said to us, “My God, the President was shot! the President was shot!” Mandy, the girl next to me, jumped up and knocked some papers off her desk. They all began asking questions. The radio was on in the next room. Our boss came in, he was very upset. I straightened up the papers and while I was bent over my mind
ran along as fast as a train, thinking, There is something happening here I should understand. In the restroom Mandy was crying and I didn’t want to look at her, those tears, her shoulders that were shaking. I said to her, “But people die every day. Right here in Detroit they get shot like that.” Some terrible invisible thing was passing close by me. What was it? Why couldn’t I understand? Out on the street people were strange, all upset. I wanted to run up to them, grab their arms, I wanted to shout, “But why? Why? Why is everything stopped? Why now? What has happened? What is it?”
When I got to school that night everybody was talking about it. Some girls were crying. A boy made a joke about Mrs. Kennedy’s pink wool suit, something about strawberry jam. The girls drew back from him, making faces. I sat alone by myself, alone, silent. But people die every day, I thought. Who was John Kennedy that he couldn’t die? A bullet entered his skull in a certain way and what was inside that skull was ruined. It will happen to us someday. It has already happened to some of us, and it is happening right now in Detroit. A girl said, very excited, “Did you hear about some professor in Finance? I think it was Finance. He came into class and said, ‘Thank God somebody had the guts to do it!’ That’s what he said, right to the class.” The girls exclaimed over this, shaking their heads. One of the boys laughed. I touched my face to see how my skin felt, hoping no one would look at me, hoping they wouldn’t find out my secret.
A few minutes to nine. The librarian switches the lights off and on, to warn us. Time to get up, get going. Put on your overshoes. It will be very cold outside. The man with the runny nose looks up, surprised. Is he afraid? Nowhere to go? He has a pale, pouchy, freckled face and a rumpled shirt. Better not look at him. The clock hand jumps another minute, the old man folds up his newspaper with care, returns it to the shelf. So much for that day. His hands are fastidious. He lingers there, arranging other newspapers into piles. By the radiator the woman sighs a sigh I can hear across the room, pushes a magazine away from her as if pushing a plate away, stares at the table top. And I, I am sitting with my heart beating steady and slow, writing all this down out of hate, because it seems to me now that it’s you I hate, my ex-teacher, a woman, but that’s crazy because I didn’t know you and I didn’t do any work for you, maybe I could have passed the course and maybe not, how was it your fault?
But yes. I hate you and no one else, not even those men, not even Furlong. I hate you and that is the only certain thing in me. Not love for the man I want to marry but hate for you. Hate for you, with your books and words and your knowing so much that never happened, in a perfect form, you being driven to school by your husband, and now there are even photographs of you in the paper sometimes, you with your knowledge while I’ve lived a lifetime already and turned myself inside out and got nothing out of it, not a thing. I don’t know anything now, anything more than I knew before. Those men taught me nothing. I don’t even hate them. I lived my life but there is no form to it. No shape. All the people who lie alone at night squirm with hatred they can’t get straight, into a shape, all the women who give themselves to men without knowing who those men are, all of us walk fast with hate like pain in our bowels, terrified, and what do you know about it? You write books. What do you know?
The woman by the radiator gets to her feet. She is heavy, she seems pained when she stands: thick cream-colored fat-marbled old legs, poor legs, veins cracking and rising to the surface, a woman of middle-age. Oh, we women know things you don’t know, you teachers, you readers and writers of books, we are the ones who wait around libraries when it’s time to leave, or sit drinking coffee alone in the kitchen; we make crazy plans for marriage but have no man, we dream of stealing men, we are the ones who look slowly around when we get off a bus and can’t even find what we are looking for, can’t quite remember how we got there, we are always wondering what will come next, what terrible thing will come next. We are the ones who leaf through magazines with colored pictures and spend long heavy hours sunk in our bodies, thinking, remembering, dreaming, waiting for something to come to us and give a shape to so much pain.
10
July 1966. Jules was still so glad to be back north that he didn’t mind driving his mother every week to the hospital where his uncle was—had been for some months—sick with a mysterious sickness and not getting any better. He told himself that part of life was driving people back and forth to hospitals, visiting hospitals, occasionally getting stuck in one yourself. While in the Southwest he had been in hospitals three times for various troubles. The climate had weakened him, made him prone to headaches, eyeaches, dizzy spells, and once he’d been hit hard with a tire iron, his knee nearly smashed, and while in the hospital he had tried to clear an island of quiet around him so that he could think, plan his life. But the hospitals were all so noisy—night and day were mixed up, sleepless nights and sleepless days, too much eating, too much exposure to other people—he came to the conclusion that it might be better to have no brains at all, to lie there and wait.
Now that his mother was going out with a new man, things were looking up—still, things should look grim for a hospital visit, so she looked sad. Jules could read her mind. He was fond of her, loving her for all the things that had exasperated him when he had been younger. He liked his mother’s bouncy step, going up the stairs to the hospital. It was something he could count on.
“You’d think I’d be fed up with this city by now,” Loretta said, “but on a day like this it’s hard, the day is so goddam nice. If Brock would just get back on his feet again—”
“He’ll be all right.”
“Now they say liver trouble. Liver, kidneys, what is it? He reminds me of our father, your grandfather. There are men like that all over the world, they just can’t get back on their feet, they can’t get going, they stumble and fall and if you’re a woman you got to try to raise them again. But you can’t. A woman spends most of her life on her hands and knees scrubbing up after them and washing their dirty clothes and shaking mud out of their shoes and cooking up big dump-piles of food for them—they eat like pigs and they drink like pigs, they drink like fish. They’ll talk your head off with what they’re going to do when they get well but in the end you’re the one who gets the job, you yourself, and that’s the only way you know where the money comes from and if there’s going to be any. That’s the only way. With them it’s all talk and puking in the sink from them drinking too much, and their breath stinking from their rotten yellow teeth, and any whore that walks by in the street can get them to follow her, while somebody else stays home cooking and cleaning up all their filthy mess. Now this one is down sick. What the hell is wrong with him?”
Her anger had accelerated steadily. Now she turned to face Jules.
“I don’t know. They’ll fix him up, don’t worry,” Jules said with a cheerfulness that went no further than his smile.
They passed the reception desk in the foyer, walking on old tile that was not very clean, headed down a corridor cluttered with carts of linen, carts with dirty dishes stacked on them, carts with soiled bedding, making their way quickly along past the X-ray room, past the vending-machine room, to a dark corridor in which an elevator was just discharging some nurses. Jules stuck his hand into the elevator to keep the door from closing and he and Loretta stepped inside, familiar with the greenish light of the small car and its mellow hum.
“I hate hospitals, they give me the creeps,” Loretta said.
“Be glad for hospitals,” Jules said.
His life now was not unpleasant. He had a job with his uncle, his father’s brother, Samson Wendell, a man of caution and flabbiness and bad temper, the kind of man Jules imagined he could handle. A job with Samson Wendall! No matter if the job wasn’t much, didn’t pay well—Jules believed in the future. The old man had come around one day, nosing around for Jules; his own son had gone from one college to another and was now hitchhiking through Europe, lost somewhere in Europe, baffling and angering the old man, and so
he had turned up looking for his nephew, of whom he had heard extraordinary things in the old days of Mama Wendall, who carried tales from household to household. At that time all the prophecies of Jules’s superiority had gone unremarked or had been greeted with scorn, but now, mysteriously, some flower had bloomed in Samson’s head and Jules had a job at his plant in Wyandotte. He was growing up at last. He was twenty-seven years old.
This part of the hospital was for welfare cases mainly, and therefore many Negroes were about in various stages of undress, sitting up, reclining painfully, lying motionless beneath stark white sheets, bed after bed of sick, harmless people. Jules steered his mother along. He dreaded her whispering to him, “Aren’t you glad you’re not a nigger, at least?” which she had said to him in the past. They passed open wards, a long line of beds. Loretta looked around pityingly. She was so conscious of being white! And finally she did turn to Jules and say in a low voice, not quite a whisper, “Jesus, how’d you like to be a nigger and sick on top of it? I did that much for you at least, kid.” Jules expelled his breath to show sympathy, humor. Actually he was immensely grateful for being white. In Detroit being white struck him as a special gift, a blessing—how easy not to be white! Only in a nightmare might he bring his hands up to his face and see colored skin, Negro skin, a hopeless brown nothing could get off, not even a razor.
Brock’s bed was between two unhappy beds, the occupants dying slowly and without beauty or mystery; in one, an aged Negro man who had had several heart attacks, a fat man become skinny; and in the other, a middle-aged white man, Greek or Italian, who lay in a stony silence and stared up at the ceiling, emitting a strange odor, almost the odor of the grave. When someone came to visit him they were silent, everyone was silent.