I lay there for a moment, hurting. Then I became aware of the clack of heels on the pavement. A woman was coming up the walk: skirt, stockings, platforms.
She hesitated when she saw me there. And then, a look of disgust creasing her makeup, she stepped over me as if she were stepping over a worm or a fat greasy slug washed up in a storm. Her perfume was devastating.
VII
I have been meditating on the essential differences between men and women, isolating distinguishing traits. The meditation began with points of dissimilarity. Women, I reasoned, do not have beards, while they do have breasts. And yet I have seen women with beards and men with breasts—in fact, I came to realize, all men have breasts. Nipples too. Ah, but women have long hair, I thought. Narrow shoulders, expansive hips. Five toes on each foot. Pairs of eyes, legs, arms, ears. But ditto men. They are soft, yielding, dainty, their sensibilities refined—they like shopping. I ran through all the stereotypes, dismissed them one after another. There was only one distinguishing sexual characteristic, I concluded. A hole. A hole as dark and strange, as fascinating and forbidding, as that interdicted entrance to Grace and Rubie’s. Birth and motherhood, I thought. The maw of mystery.
I have also been perusing a letter from Rubie, addressed to a person named Jack. The letter is a reconstruction of thirty-two fragments unearthed in the trash behind the women’s restaurant. “I miss you and I love you, Jack,” the letter said in part, “but I cannot continue seeing you. My responsibilities are here. Yes I remember the night on the beach, the night in the park, the night at the cabin, the night on the train, the night in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral—memories I will always cherish. But it’s over. I am here. A gulf separates us. I owe it to Grace. Take care of yourself and your knockout nose. Love, R.” The letter disturbs me. In the same way that the women’s restaurant disturbs me. Secrets, stifling secrets. I want admission to them all.
VIII
The girl in the department store asked me what size my wife took. I hesitated. “She’s a big one,” I said. “About the same size as me.” The girl helped me pick out a pink polyester pantsuit, matching brassiere, tall-girl panty hose. Before leaving the store I also visited the ladies’ shoe department and the cosmetic counter. At the cosmetic counter I read from a list: glosser, blusher, hi-lighter, eyeshadow (crème, cake and stick), mascara, eyeliner, translucent powder, nail polish (frosted pink), spike eyelashes, luscious tangerine lipstick, tweezers, a bottle of My Sin and the current issue of Be Beautiful. At the shoe department I asked for Queen Size.
IX
After two weeks of laying foundation, brushing on, rubbing in, tissuing off, my face was passable. Crude, yes—like the slick masks of the topless dancers—but passable nonetheless. And my hair, set in rollers and combed out in a shoulder-length flip, struck close on the heels of fashion. I was no beauty, but neither was I a dog.
I eased through the gate, sashayed up the walk, getting into the rhythm of it. Bracelets chimed at my wrists, rings shot light from my fingers. Up the steps, through the front door and into that claustrophobic hallway. My movement fluid, silky, the T-strap flats gliding under my feet like wind on water. I was onstage, opening night, and fired for the performance. But then I had a shock. One of the biker girls slouched at the end of the hallway lighting a cigar. I tossed my chin and strutted by. Our shoulders brushed. She grinned. “Hi,” she breathed. I stepped past her, and into the forbidden room.
It was dark. Candlelit. There were tables, booths, sofas and lounge chairs. Plants, hangings, carpets, woodwork. Women. I held back. Then felt a hand on my elbow. It was the biker. “Can I buy you a drink?” she said.
I shook my head, wondering what to do with my voice. Falsetto? A husky whisper?
“Come on,” she said. “Get loose. You’re new here, right?—you need somebody to show you around.” She pinched my elbow and ushered me to a booth across the room—wooden benches like church pews. I slid in, she eased down beside me. I could feel her thigh against mine. “Listen,” I said, opting for the husky whisper, “I’d really rather be alone—”
Suddenly Rubie was standing over us. “Would you like something?” she said.
The biker ordered a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. I wanted a beer, asked for a sunrise. “Menu?” said Rubie. She was wearing a leather apron, and she seemed slimmer, her shoulders rounded. Whipped, I thought. Her ears protruded and her brushcut bristled. She looked like a Cub Scout. An Oliver Twist.
“Please,” I said, huskily.
She looked at me. “Is this your first time?”
I nodded.
She dug something—a lavender card—from an apron pocket. “This is our membership card. It’s twenty-five cents for a lifetime membership. Shall I put it on the bill?”
I nodded. And followed her with my eyes as she padded off.
The biker turned to me. “Ann Jenks,” she said, holding out her hand.
I froze. A name, a name, a name. This part I hadn’t considered. I pretended to study the menu. The biker’s hand hung in the air. “Ann Jenks,” she repeated.
“Valerie,” I whispered, and nearly shook hands. Instead I held out two fingers, ladylike. She pinched them, rubbed her thumb over the knuckles and looked into my eyes.
Then Rubie appeared with our drinks. “Cheers,” said Ann Jenks. I downed the libation like honey and water.
An hour and a half later I was two sheets to the wind and getting cocky. Here I was, embosomed in the very nave, the very omphalos of furtive femininity—a prize patron of the women’s restaurant, a member, privy to its innermost secrets. I sipped at my drink, taking it all in. There they were—women—chewing, drinking, digesting, chatting, giggling, crossing and uncrossing their legs. Shoes off, feet up. Smoking cigarettes, flashing silverware, tapping time to the music. Women among women. I bathed in their soft chatter, birdsong, the laughter like falling coils of hair. I lit a cigarette, and grinned. No more fairybook-hero thoughts of rescuing Rubie—oh no, this was paradise.
Below the table, in the dark, Ann Jenks’s fingertips massaged my knee.
I studied her face as she talked (she was droning on about awakened consciousness, liberation from the mores of straight society, feminist terrorism). Her cheekbones were set high and cratered the cheeks below, the hair lay flat across her crown and rushed straight back over her ears, like duck’s wings. Her eyes were black, the mouth small and raw. I snubbed out the cigarette, slipped my hand under the jacket and squeezed her breast. Then I put my tongue in her mouth.
“Hey,” she said, “want to go?”
I asked her to get me one more drink. When she got up I slid out and looked for the restroom. It was a minor emergency: six tequila sunrises and a carafe of dinner wine tearing at my vitals. I fought an impulse to squeeze my organ.
There were plants everywhere. And behind the plants, women. I passed the oriental girl and two housewives/divorcées in a booth, a nun on a divan, a white-haired woman and her daughter. Then I spotted the one-legged girl, bump and grind, passing through a door adjacent to the kitchen. I followed.
The restroom was pink, carpeted: imitation marble countertops, floodlit mirrors, three stalls. Grace was emerging from the middle one as I stepped through the door. She smiled at me. I smiled back, sweetly, my bladder aflame. Then rushed into the stall, fought down the side zipper, tore at the silky panties, and forgot to sit down. I pissed, long and hard. Drunk. Studying the graffiti—women’s graffiti. I laughed, flushed, turned to leave. But there was a problem: a head suspended over the door to the stall. Angry eyes. The towering Grace.
I shrugged my shoulders and held out my palms. Grace’s face was the face of an Aztec executioner. This time there would be no quarter. I felt sick. And then suddenly my shoulder hit the door like a wrecker’s ball, Grace sat in the sink, and the one-legged girl began gibbering from the adjoining compartment. Out the door and into the kitchen, rushing down an aisle lined with ovens, the stink of cooking food, scraps, greased-over plates, a screen door at the far
end, slipping in the T-straps, my brassiere working round, Grace’s murderous rasping shriek at my back, STOP HIM! STOP HIM!, and Rubie, pixie Rubie, sack of garbage in her hand at the door.
Time stopped. I looked into Rubie’s eyes, imploring, my breath cut in gasps, five feet from her. She let the garbage fall. Then dropped her head and right shoulder, and hit my knees like a linebacker. I went down. My face in coffee grounds and eggshells. Rubie’s white white arms shackles on my legs and on my will.
X
I have penetrated the women’s restaurant, yes, but in actuality it was little more than a rape. There was no sympathy, I did not belong: why kid myself? True, I do have a lifetime membership card, and I was—for a few hours at any rate—an unexceptionable patron of the women’s restaurant. But that’s not enough. I am not satisfied. The obsession grows in me, pregnant, swelling, insatiable with the first taste of fulfillment. Before I am through I will drink it to satiety. I have plans.
Currently, however, I am unable to make bail. Criminal trespass (Rubie testified that I was there to rob them, which, in its way, is true, I suppose), and assault (Grace showed the bruises on her shins and voice box where the stall door had hit her). Probation I figure. A fine perhaps. Maybe even psychiatric evaluation.
The police have been uncooperative, antagonistic even. Malicious jokes, pranks, taunts, their sweating red faces fastened to the bars night and day. There has even been brutality. Oddly enough—perhaps as a reaction to their gibes—I have come to feel secure in these clothes. I was offered shirt, pants, socks, shoes, and I refused them. Of course, these things are getting somewhat gritty, my makeup is a fright, and my hair has lost its curl. And yet I defy them.
In drag. I like the sound of it. I like the feel. And, as I say, I have plans. The next time I walk through those curtained doors at Grace & Rubie’s there will be no dissimulation. I will stroll in and I will belong, an initiate, and I will sit back and absorb the mystery of it, feed on honeydew and drink the milk of paradise. There are surgeons who can assure it.
After all, it is a women’s restaurant.
(1976)
THAWING OUT
They were feet that he loved, feet that belonged in high heels, calfskin, furry slippers with button eyes and rabbit ears, and here they were, naked to the snow. He was hunched in his denim jacket, collar up, scarf wound tight round his throat, and his fingers were so numb he could barely get a cigarette lit. She stood beside him in her robe, barely shivering, the wild ivy of her hair gone white with a dusting of snow. He watched her lift her arms, watched her breasts rise gently as she fought back her hair and pulled the bathing cap tight to her skull. He took a quick drag on the cigarette and looked away.
There were maybe twenty cars in the lot: station wagons, Volvos, VW Bugs, big steel-blue Buicks with their crushproof bumpers and nautical vents. An inch of new snow softened the frozen ruts and the strips of yellowed ice that lay like sores beneath it. Beyond the lot, a short slope, the white rails of the dock, and the black lapping waters of the Hudson. It was five of two—he checked his watch—but the belly of the sky hung so low it might have been dusk.
A moment earlier, when Naina had stepped from her car, a chain reaction had begun, and now the car doors were flung open one by one and the others began to emerge. They were old, all of them, as far as he could see. A few middle-aged, maybe. Some in robes, some not. The men were ghosts in baggy trunks, bowlegged, splay-footed and bald, with fallen bellies and dead gray hair fringing their nipples. He thought of Buster Keaton, in his antiquated swimsuit and straw boater. The women were heavier, their excrescences forced like sausage stuffing into the black spandex casings of their one-piece suits. Their feet were bloated and red, their thighs mottled with disuse, their upper arms heavy, bulbous, the color of suet. They called out to one another gaily, like schoolgirls at a picnic, in accents thick with another time and place.
“Jesus, Naina,” he whispered, turning to her, “this is crazy. It’s like something out of Fellini. Look at them.”
Naina gave him a soft tight-lipped smile—a tolerant smile, understated, serene, a smile that stirred his groin and made him go weak with something like hunger—and then her mother’s car schussed into the lot. The whole group turned as one to watch as the ancient, rust-eaten Pontiac heaved over the ruts toward them. He could see the grin on Mama Vyshensky’s broad, faintly mustachioed face as she fought the wheel and rode the bumps. He froze for an instant, certain her final, veering skid would send her careening into the side of his Camaro, but the big splotched bumper jerked to a halt six feet short of him. “Naina!” she cried, lumbering from the car to embrace her daughter as if she hadn’t seen her in twenty years. “And Marty,” turning to envelop him in a quick bear hug. “Nice weather, no?”
The breath streamed from her nostrils. She was a big woman with dimples and irrepressible eyes, a dead ringer for Nina Khrushchev. Her feet—as swollen and red as any of the others’—were squeezed into a pair of cheap plastic thongs and she wore a tentlike swimsuit in a shade of yellow that made the Camaro look dull. “Sonia!” she shouted, turning away and flagging her hand. “Marfa!” A gabble of Ukrainian, and then the group began to gather.
Marty felt the wind on his exposed hand and he took a final drag on his cigarette, flicked the butt away, and plunged his hand deep in his pocket. This was really something. Crazy. He felt like a visitor to another planet. One old bird was rubbing snow into the hair of his bare chest, another skidding down the slope on his backside. “A toast!” someone shouted, and they all gathered round a bottle of Stolichnaya, thimble-sized glasses materializing in their hands. And when one old man with reddened ears asked him where his swim trunks were, Marty said it wasn’t cold enough for him, not by half.
They drank. One round, then another, and then they shouted something he didn’t catch and flung the glasses over their shoulders. Two ponderous old women began fighting playfully over a towel while Naina’s mother shouted encouragement and the others laughed like wizened children. And Naina? Naina stood out among them like a virgin queen, the youngest by thirty years. At least. That’s what it was, he suddenly realized—an ancient rite, sacrifice of the virgin. But they were a little late in this case, he thought, and felt his groin stir again. He squeezed her hand, gazed off into the curtain of falling snow, and saw the mountains fade and reappear in the distance.
Then he heard the first splash and turned to see a flushed bald head bobbing in the water and the old man with reddened ears suspended in the air, knees clutched tightly to his chest. There was a second splash—a real wallop—and then another, and then they were all in, frolicking like seals. Naina was one of the last to go, tucking her chin, planting her feet, her thighs flexing as she floated out into the tumult of the storm and cut the flat black surface in perfect grace and harmony.
The whole thing left him cold.
They’d been going together a month when she first took him to meet her mother. It was mid-October, chilly, a persistent rain beating the leaves from the trees. He didn’t want to meet her mother. He wanted to stay in bed and touch every part of her. He was twenty-three and he’d had enough of mothers.
“Don’t expect anything fancy,” Naina said, sitting close as he drove. “It’s the house I grew up in. Mama’s no housekeeper.”
He glanced at her, her face as open as a doll’s, high forehead, thick eyebrows, eyes pale as ice, and that hair. That’s what caught him the first time he saw her. That and her voice, as hushed and placid as the voice talking inside his head. “How long do we have to stay?” he said.
The house was in Cold Spring, two stories, white with green trim, in need of paint. It was an old house, raked back from the steep hill that dropped through town to the foot of the river. Naina’s mother was waiting for them at the door. “This is Marty,” she pronounced, as if he could have been anyone else, and to his horror, she embraced him. “In,” she said, “in,” sweeping them before her and slamming the door with a boom. “Such nasty day.”
>
Inside, it was close and hot, the air heavy with the odor of cooking. He was no gourmet, and he couldn’t identify the aroma, but it brought him back to high school and the fat-armed women who stood guard over the big simmering pots in the cafeteria. It wasn’t a good sign.
“Sit,” said Naina’s mother, gesturing toward a swaybacked sofa draped with an afghan and three overfed cats. “Shoo,” she said, addressing the cats, and he sat. He looked around him. There were doilies everywhere, lamps with stained shades, mounds of newspapers and magazines. On the wall above the radiator, the framed portrait of a blue-eyed Christ.
Naina sat beside him while her mother trundled back and forth, rearranging the furniture, fussing with things, and all the while watching him out of the corner of her eye. He was sleeping with her daughter, and she knew it. “A peppermint,” she said, whirling round on him with a box the size of a photo album, “maybe you want? Beer maybe? A nice glass of buttermilk?”
He didn’t want anything. “No thanks,” he managed, the voice stuck in his throat. Naina took a peppermint.
Finally the old woman settled into the sofa beside him—beside him, when there were six other chairs in the room—and he felt himself sinking into the cushions as into a morass. Something was boiling over in the kitchen: he could smell it, hear it hissing. Sitting, she towered over him. “You like my Naina?” she asked.
The question stunned him. She’d tossed him a medicine ball and he was too weak to toss it back. Like? Did he like her Naina? He lingered over her for hours at a time, hours that became days, and he did things to her in the dark and with the lights on too. Did he like her? He wanted to jump through the roof.
“You call me Mama,” she said, patting his hand. “None of this Mrs. business.” She was peering into his eyes like an ophthalmologist. “So. You like her?” she repeated.