The Road Taken, page 32
And finally it seemed as if everything she had seen throughout her hospital years was falling into place. She wondered why she had not understood life before. The Ginger who had felt sorry for herself because she was in a wheelchair seemed immature. It was not an easy situation, but it was, by and large, manageable. She had seen so many sick people, so much death and suffering, that she had begun to think she was actually lucky. She was intelligent and productive and immersed in work, she saw her future as something both predictable and a glowing surprise. Paralyzed legs were a minor disability. Chris had known that for far longer than she had.
She had not gone to his wedding, even the thought was too painful, but she had sent a gift: a silver picture frame, in which, she supposed, he would put a photograph of himself and his wife, or perhaps their children when they had them. A picture frame was both personal and impersonal. He might remember that they had sent each other photographs through the years, and had framed them. But a picture frame was actually nothing; without a person inside it was merely a staring eye.
There was no picture in the frame she sent him for his wedding present because what she was saying was: “From now on your life is up to you.” As hers was up to her. The thank-you note, from both of them, was in Sue Sue’s handwriting. Of course. It hurt for only a little while.
To her amazement Chris still called her from time to time, just to say hello. She had been his best friend, but now Ginger knew his wife would have to be his best friend or the marriage would not work. Ginger had been about to tell him that, but then he had stopped calling. He had probably figured it out for himself, or perhaps Sue Sue was jealous. Ginger didn’t call him anymore, although she sent Christmas cards, and so did he. When she got the second card, the second Christmas, she realized how long it had been since they had communicated, and after a brief pang of sadness she went back to start her day.
That Christmas was sad for another reason: Grandma. She could not come to family functions anymore because she didn’t know where she was, she was in diapers as a precaution, although “precaution” was a family euphemism for necessity, and she often had to be fed. Sometimes she got angry for no reason, her mind like a spinning top. No one took her to have her hair colored, and it was white and sparse. Her dresses always had food spots on them. Celia had loved clothes, but now she didn’t care. She had been vain and cheerful, and now she had lost her dignity along with the memory of all the things she had been so interested in. No wonder she was angry—poor Grandma—although Ginger knew the anger was also part of the disease.
Grandma had had a companion for a while now, a woman who spent her time taking care of such people and living with them, but it was clear that sooner or later Celia would need either full-time nurses, which would be prohibitively expensive, or have to go to a home. Grandma had faded so quickly! Rose looked at suitable places near New York City, and Aunt Daisy, who seemed even more distraught than Ginger would have thought she would be, wanted Celia to come back to Bristol, to an old folks’ home there. Bristol was where she would be buried, next to Grandpa. Right now, Ginger thought, she’s only buried alive.
Ginger went to visit Celia before Aunt Daisy and the soon-to-be-discharged companion took her back to Bristol. Her things had been packed, some to go with her, some to go into storage, others to be given away. It was as if she were already dead. She couldn’t take a lot of things with her to the home; she would have a roommate and there simply wasn’t enough space. Ginger was glad Celia didn’t know what was happening. Somehow Celia had gotten it into her mind that she was going on a vacation trip, and she seemed pleased. Over and over she asked where she was going, and when they told her, over and over, she nodded.
“Little Ginger,” she said, peering, recognizing her. They were eye level, both in their wheelchairs. Ginger could see from her expression that Grandma thought she was still a child.
“Tiny little Grandma,” Ginger said, and choked back the lump in her throat.
“Did you sleepwalk again?” Celia asked.
“Sleepwalk?”
“Oh, yes. You like to wander away. You give your parents so much trouble.”
“Not anymore,” Ginger said.
“You’d better not.” Celia looked stern.
“I won’t.”
“I don’t have much truck for children who disobey their parents,” Celia said. “Lock you in your room is what you deserve. I told your mother, but she cried when you cried. Did you know that? She let you out.”
Ginger recalled those nights when she was a prisoner and her skin began to crawl. “That was a long time ago,” she said.
“Was it? I don’t remember. Don’t let Hugh come to visit me on my vacation. I have no use for him. Never did.”
“All right,” Ginger said.
“Something wrong with that boy,” Celia said. “Always has been. I can’t stand him.”
“Look at the beautiful apple I have for you, Grandma,” Ginger said brightly, picking it up from the plate on the table beside Grandma’s chair. “Would you like me to cut it up?” Celia nodded, distracted.
She always was kind of mean, Ginger thought, and felt better. She, being a grandchild, had seen a more good-hearted Grandma than perhaps her mother and Uncle Hugh had, but she knew the other part of Celia had always been there, not even really disguised. Now she felt some relief. She knew the meanness would stay till the very end, and thus she would be able to see Grandma as a person; she would feel sorry for her, of course, but would not feel compelled to idolize her just because she was sick and pathetic. In a way, it would make it easier to see her go.
For the first time Ginger wondered if this was a natural reaction. Is it perception, or self-preservation, she wondered now. Have I changed without noticing it and is this the way I’ve gotten to be because I see so much illness and suffering all the time? No, she thought, I haven’t changed that much. I’m not like a lot of other doctors I’ve seen. I still have feelings, I care. The doctors who don’t are cut off from their patients, and from other people, because they worked and studied so hard they never had a chance to develop social skills. They’re immature, and they may stay that way. They think they’re God. I know I’m nothing like that. I’m lucky just to be human. They would be lucky too.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Disco Joan, swooping through the perilous 1960s, was out nearly every night, part of the youthquake by sheer chance. Here in the decade that was just finding its raucous voice, when no one over thirty was to be trusted according to the baby boomers, when youth was idolized and age considered to have nothing to do with wisdom, Joan was in her mid thirties, passing; and still wild, still hungry, still unsure. During the week she went to work like a normal person, even if she’d had four hours’ sleep, toned herself down a bit although she was still in the vanguard of fashion, and kept her own counsel. She was, after all, an editor, and some people looked up to her. In these current, surprising times, she was taking pills again.
It took her an hour to get ready in the morning, and longer at night, but the ritual was part of the fun. She wore false eyelashes that looked like furry black caterpillars, which she glued on above thick black eyeliner; she wore pale pancake makeup and white lipstick; her hair was teased high. At night she added a voluminous hairpiece that rivaled the best Uncle Hugh had worn to his drag balls. Her little dresses were copies of Courreges, sleeveless, A-line, miniskirted; worn with short white boots, or sexy thigh-high boots, and the pantyhose (sometimes flesh-colored, sometimes made of fishnet) that had come into fashion by necessity because of the tiny skirts. When pantyhose first appeared Joan didn’t know whether to wear her underpants underneath or on top, and by the time she figured it out, like many others she had decided to wear none at all.
Her nephew Peter turned eighteen. The Korean “police action” had not affected the immediate family because no one was the right age, but the war in Vietnam was what they all feared now. When, after a time of great anxiety, the annoying asthma he’d had since childhood got him a medical deferment, they were all deeply relieved. Peter confided to Joan afterward that if he had been classified 1A he would have left the country to live in Canada; he was against the war. Joan knew she was the one to be trusted with such a secret because she was considered the rebel, the iconoclast. She would understand. Markie and Angel thought she was glamorous and Peter thought she was hip. Peggy and Ed talked about her behind her back. She supposed, and hoped, her own mother still defended her.
In the terrible spring of 1968 Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. Watching these two deaths, so close to each other, on television, Joan was, for the first time, ashamed to be an American. What must people in Europe think of such barbarians? The death of King sparked major riots in more than fifty U.S. cities, but not New York, where the liberal Republican mayor, John Lindsay, managed to keep the peace.
Between the two murders Andy Warhol was shot, but not killed, by a crazed feminist, founder of the Society to Cut Up Men. The times they are a changin’. Bulletproof glass was put up at the stock exchange, and people were afraid to ride the filthy, dangerous subways. Two of the top songs were the double entendred “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy (I’ve got love in my tummy)” and the acid high song “MacArthur Park.”
Hair was the hit show now, and Joan had seen it twice, owned the album, and knew all the songs. It was a longtime convention that actors in Broadway plays who needed to do something as innocuous as zip up their trousers tactfully turned their backs to the audience first, for there must never be any inference of what was inside that fly, but in the memorable last moments of Hair actors and actresses stood singing onstage stark naked, facing the audience, proud.
How extraordinary this new era is, Joan thought, part of it and yet standing aside to watch. It was the Age of Aquarius. Love your brother. Unless you were a cop, smashing and teargasing college kids who were demonstrating against the war. Or a kid, burning down your draft board. Or a white person trying to preserve the status quo in the South. Love one another right now. Which everyone who could get away with it did, and there was a marked surge of reported cases of venereal disease. If you got gonorrhea you were given penicillin and it went away. It was embarrassing but not a disgrace in Joan’s world.
Her IUD began to make her bleed. The lymph nodes in her groin swelled and hurt, and once a ribbon of blood ran inopportunely down the inside of her thigh while she was in a restaurant on a date. Her doctor took the IUD out then, under general anesthesia in the hospital, discovering it had eaten its way into the lining of her uterus, and gave her birth control pills. Now, with her big and tender breasts, she looked the way she had during her early pregnancy, but, as he assured her, she could make love without fear.
Make love? Joan was beginning to wonder what love had to do with any of this.
Love meant a lot of things, and people talked about love all the time. Threesomes and bisexuality had become interesting variations on dating for quite a few people, although homosexuality—considered a psychological illness and/or a disobedient optional lifestyle—was still something to be hidden from employer and family, even in a place like New York. One night Joan was taken to a straight orgy by a randy date. She refused to participate, but she was fascinated to be an onlooker. She knew some of the men there—they were men she had known from parties and would never have gone out with, so she certainly wasn’t going to have sex with them now—and she wondered if they had given the orgy so they could get laid by girls they otherwise wouldn’t have had any luck with.
The ebullient, “mop top” Beatles were still the favorite musical group, and by now, looking back, their original shocking haircuts seemed clean cut and tame. Everyone, men and women, had long hair, and if you were confused as to which one was the male, then the more fool you, old fogy. Man, and a dog, had orbited the earth, the first moon walk would be coming soon, and the big-eyed model Jean Shrimpton appeared on the cover of a fashion magazine in a space helmet to celebrate the successful travels of astronauts. Another model, Twiggy, twig thin, concave, androgynous, insisting she ate candy bars, turned a generation of young women who idolized her look and did not have her genetic construction into anorexics, bulimics, takers of diet pills that were only speed in an acceptably named form.
Anorexia nervosa was a disease that was rampant but was still unknown, undiscussed. If you didn’t die of starvation you might die of an overdose of drugs, and who would know the difference? You could not be too thin. Drugs made it easy. And as Joan, along with everyone else, had discovered, they also made you able to stay up all night. Except for her hormonally induced big breasts, Joan was thin, but she was not anorexic, and speed was her drug of choice. It made her able to juggle her two worlds. As always, her family disapproved and worried about the “normal” part of her life—an unmarried career girl with no lasting relationship, who wore too much makeup and knew the clubs—suspected a tiny bit of the part that would have shocked them speechless, and had no idea of the extent of it.
Recreational drugs, Joan knew, made you happy, even though they occasionally made you paranoid or permanently deranged. There was pot, and hash, and now there were Tuinals, Valiums, Percocets, Placidils, methadrine, cocaine, mescaline, poppers for sex, and for mind expansion the beloved LSD. Turn on and drop out. Or just turn on and fake your life. And there were still the old faithfuls: Although cigarette advertising was now forbidden on television, cigarettes and alcohol continued to be major sources of pleasure to millions.
That year Celia died, trapped in the forgetfulness and confusion of her ripped brain synapses, slipping away in her sleep after a bout of pneumonia in the retirement home. It’s time, Joan thought; if Grandma knew what the world has become it would have killed her anyway.
Joan was ambivalent about it herself. She had grown up with a certain morality even though she had always broken the rules, and by separating herself as an observer while participating at the same time, she was able to adapt. If only I’d chosen a different life, she sometimes thought, with a moment of odd longing, but knew that was stupid. She had chosen this one.
Joan’s favorite discotheque was Arthur, named after George Harrison’s haircut. With the velvet rope outside to keep out the crowd, and only the famous, beautiful, or lucky people let past it, Arthur was the chicest club in New York. It had two little rooms and a band, and was filled with celebrities and stars and intellectuals mingling with hookers and hustlers and the occasional unknown young couple from Queens who were pretty to look at. She was known at Arthur and was allowed in whenever she came. She always brought a friend or two, or a date, and then when Arthur closed for the night she went on to an after-hours club, not always with the friend she had arrived with, but a different one, and stayed until morning.
The after-hours clubs were constantly being closed down by the police, so when you got there they had often vanished, although there would be someone to tell you where a new one was. On the night before Thanksgiving, Joan was at an after-hours club in a dingy little building somewhere on the West Side (she was too stoned and high to be sure where she was) with a gay man she would probably leave later, or he might leave her, if either of them met someone appealing, or just got tired enough to go home.
In this club, as in all of the very late ones she frequented, there was one room for heterosexual couples, which was fairly empty and fairly staid, another room for lesbians, where Joan never went, and a third room for homosexual men, which was the room she liked. Joan always went to the room for the gay men because it was crowded and lively and she had a lot of acquaintances there. She would go to the bar and drink vodka and tonic, smoke, and talk to strangers. Sometimes there were celebrities at the bar, famous men she would never have had the courage to speak to under other circumstances, but who were perfectly charming to her here.
She wasn’t planning to stay long because she had to go to her parents the next day for Thanksgiving dinner, which Rose liked to have early in the afternoon, but as the night wore on Joan decided it didn’t matter if she stayed up late. It was at that moment when she looked across the room and saw what she realized, after a couple of minutes of staring at this oddly familiar person, was Uncle Hugh in drag.
At first she was disbelieving, then bewildered, and then horrified. He was not a pretty sight. She knew about Uncle Hugh, she had figured it out years ago, but she had never seen him this way and certainly not at this age—he was sixty-three, why was he still doing it? He looked like an overdone old matron who had once been very attractive. He wasn’t the oldest drag queen in the room, although close to it, but he was the only one who was her uncle. Joan’s first reaction was to turn away and pretend she hadn’t seen him, and hope he hadn’t seen her.
And where was Teddy? Was Uncle Hugh cruising? Were all men pigs? Was she right to think there was no such thing as lasting commitment? Did they too have separate lives? Did Teddy agree? She was standing there with her mouth open and her eyes probably bugging out when Uncle Hugh turned and saw her. Even under the heavy makeup she could see he was taken aback. He had never been judgmental about her, how could he be, but seeing her here in this place made the secret part of her life all too real. Not that there was anything wrong with her being here. You saw everyone at the clubs. It was just that she and Hugh were family.
