The Last of Her Kind, page 3
Now that she is dead, when I think of her what I feel is mostly pity. She has become what memory often makes the dead: more sinned against than sinning. And when I think of her life—with its endless physical labor, its inescapable beatings and constant humiliations—that life can seem to me in many ways hardly better than a slave’s.
She had never finished school (her hands were needed on the farm), and though this was not unusual and there were plenty of others in that poor rural community with no more schooling than she had, my mother suffered this like a brand. So ashamed was she of her own speech, she did not like to open her mouth outside her own house. She did not want anyone to know (and neither did I) what a slow reader she was (in fact, she hardly read at all). She could not spell. Whatever long distance might cost, she would always rather phone me than write. Knowing her, she was probably afraid that someone besides me might see one of her letters. Then they would know. (Believe me, I would have made sure no one saw.) Sometimes I would use a word—skittish was one, I recall; another was benighted —and she would stare at me, lips compressed, and shake her head: never heard that word. And she did not like this, either, your using words she’d never heard. She could lash out if you did that. (“Listen, Miss High and Mighty.”) You were expected to be more careful.
Until I corrected her, she thought that the doctor had diagnosed her condition as very course veins.
Those veins that gave her so much trouble came of having six children, including one set of twins, in eight years. My father—where was he? Canada, we sometimes thought. It was where his roots were, anyway. (“You call this winter? You call this cold?” he used to tease. “You sissies don’t know what real cold is.” One of the few things about him I can still remember.)
Wherever he was, no one was looking for him. Whenever Solange, the only one of us who missed him and who would herself run off and disappear one day, used to pester, “Is Daddy dead? Is Daddy dead?”
“If there is a God!” Mama would roar.
That story goes something like this:
Another fair, this one itinerant. A fortune-teller, a gypsy who was not a Gypsy, just a former prostitute from Niagara Falls. Holding my father’s hand in hers, stroking his palm with one pointed red nail, she saw a long life, she saw a long, happy life of much good fucking, she saw tragedy should he let such a chance pass him by, and before the fair had folded its tents, those two had sneaked away—across the border, some said at the time.
Soon after he was gone, my mother sent Noel and Noelle to live with her sister in Rochester, and we were on relief.
It would never happen to me. My mother’s fate would never, never be mine. To begin with, I would never stay with a man who was going to be mean to me. I would walk out at the very first sign.
My best friend in high school, a tough but beautiful girl named Ina, whose homelife was very similar to mine, called me naïve. “Hey there, Georgy Girl, get real. They’re all the same, all these guys. They all slap their wives around.” Which was true. Okay, not Mr. Tansey who worked at the dry cleaner’s; we could safely assume Tiny Tansey had never slapped anyone. But who’d ever want to be with him? Okay, then: if I could not find a big, handsome man who would not slap me around, I would live without men. “What,” said Ina, blowing an ugly sound through her pretty nose. “And be like the walleyed wallflower?”
My heart shook. She was talking about that sad case, Miss Crug.
As it turned out, it was Miss Crug, who taught English and French, who really did have something very weird going on with that right eye, and who, at forty or fifty or whatever she was, still lived with her parents—it was that sad case Miss Crug who made sure that my fate would be nothing like Mama’s.
Halfway through my junior year I became her special project. Miss Crug was full of plans. Of course I was going to college, and I could do better than a state school, she said. She was sure I could get into one of the elite private schools. My job was to keep up the grades. Good that I played basketball and sang in the chorus. Better if I also joined some academic clubs—French, for example. It was said the SAT was not a test you could study for, but at least I could go to bed early the night before and eat a good breakfast. And remember, I didn’t have to score high on the SAT, I just had to do respectably. Miss Crug had sought the advice of her brother, who had gone to a state school like herself but now taught at Barnard.
She didn’t have to work hard to convince me. In fact, I never understood why Miss Crug carried on the way she did, as if it might be the end of the world (for her? for me?) if I didn’t follow her advice to the letter. She could get quite strangely worked up when we talked, insisting that I take this college business with the utmost seriousness and, as if no longer able to control herself, throwing her arms around me and holding me tight, stroking my back and kissing the top of my head. Then she would pull away and stare at me for a bit, her strange eyes that were never focused now focused at last—on some deep point in my soul that it would take me another twenty years or so to locate myself.
My mother didn’t have much use for Miss Crug. Like everyone else, she thought Crug was a weirdo; she laughed when she heard her called the walleyed wallflower. But she was all for my going to college, Mama said. She was already proud of how well I was doing in school, turning out to have what she called “a set of brains,” being a good example to the younger kids. But with colleges all over the state, and many close to home, she didn’t see why I had to go so far away, and to New York City, of all places. “I didn’t even know they had any colleges there.” She thought—
It didn’t matter what she thought. I was going. I got in, and I was going.
I had promised that when I got to Barnard, first thing, I would look up Miss Crug’s brother, who taught religion, I think, but I never did. Nor did I ever write to Miss Crug, though I’d promised to do that, too—not even to answer a letter she sent me early that fall. In fact, I never saw or spoke to Miss Crug again. My mother called me a monster of ingratitude, a phrase she’d probably picked up from TV. Now, of course, she was all on Miss Crug’s side. That sweet Miss Crug who had done so much for me. But had I kept up with Crug, had I written her every week, had I kissed her hands and washed her feet, my mother would have found this equally vexing. With Mama, I could do no right.
I took the bus to New York, a journey that would take all day. Fresh out of bed hours earlier than usual, my mother didn’t bother to put shoes on to drive me to the station, and that is how I remember her, shuffling around the bus station in worn-out opentoed house slippers, her thin hair pulled back so tightly in a rubber band that patches of scalp gleamed through. (Why, Mama, why?)
No tears, but a squeeze I thought would snap my ribs from that woman who could do nothing gently. “Feel like I’m never going to see you again,” she grumbled, and I almost said, Mama, you have never seen me yet.
It was still dark as the bus pulled away, and not a mile on, we hit a deer.
From that same bus station about a year later, Solange would take off herself, a runaway. And for a long time, memory linked them: Solange gone missing, the dead deer.
Two suitcases: one old, hard, battered, and heavy; the other soft and brand-new. At the bus terminal in New York, a man appeared—big, handsome, smiling, as if he’d been sent to greet me. He offered to help, and I was surprised when, after hefting each bag, he chose the lighter one. And then, as if to prove that this really was a place like no other, a city where miracles could happen, he vanished into air.
One suitcase. I lugged it to the taxi stand. Twice as heavy it felt to me now, as if everything in the other suitcase had, by a second miracle, been transferred to it.
The taxi driver looked blank when I said “Barnard,” making me wonder if it could really be as famous as Miss Crug had said. But when I added “Columbia,” he nodded and took off.
“There you are! I thought you’d never get here! Are you having your other clothes shipped? Me, too. It’s so much easier. But you must be starving. You missed the Honey Bear welcome dinner! You also missed my awful parents …”
Blonder, thinner. But not prettier. I had been worried about that.
I didn’t say anything about the lost suitcase, just as I didn’t say anything about it to my mother when I called her that same night to say I’d arrived. It was only much later that it all came out—the suitcase, the man, Mama’s slippers, the deer—one night when Ann jumped out of her bed to come kneel beside mine—“Oh, tell me, George, please, what is it, what’s wrong”—having been woken out of a sound sleep by my sobs.
When you think about it, it wasn’t such a far cry from psychoanalysis, what took place in that room. Night after night, talking endlessly, supine (vocabulary on the SAT test), to an unseen listener. So—was anything cured by all this talk? Probably as much as has ever been cured by psychoanalysis. I know that I felt cured of something once I opened up to Ann. I felt lighter, happier, after telling her things I’d not only sworn I would never tell her, but I’d thought I would never tell anyone.
Another parallel with the talking cure: our talk came watered with tears.
A girl we knew then who was actually in analysis five days a week (she was herself the child of a Freudian analyst) had been asked by her doctor to keep a journal. In this journal, next to the date for each entry, she would draw one or more tears to indicate the number of times that day she had broken down. Only now does this strike me as odd (though not as odd as being in analysis five days a week); that girl could have been any of us. The moist, blotched faces of weeping were so much a part of that life—like the unmistakable acrid smell that lingered in the dorm lavatories for an hour or so after meals.
From the journal of the poet Louise Bogan, near the end of her life:
Tuesday, 26 July
3 pills by 9:30! Sub feelings, but no tears.
Wednesday, 27 July
No tears! 3 pills
Thursday, 28 July
2 early pills … No tears!
It’s the exclamation point that stabs the heart. (The pills were Librium.)
I sit and watch as tears go by was written above the toilet paper in one of our lavatory’s stalls, followed by a couple of neatly drawn pear-shaped drops, and all year long, various hands would add to these drops, until the entire inside of the stall, top to bottom, was covered. Other graffiti, in three different scripts:
Women are mostly water.
You mean: The world is mostly water.
You mean: The world is mostly women.
Once, late at night, when I went to take a bath, I found a girl who did not even live on our floor, fully clothed, curled on her side in the dry tub. Crying. I bent over her. Reek of alcohol and something else, a curdled smell, familiar to me. “Is there anything I can do for you?” Without even lifting her head, she said, “Yeah. Make me a virgin.”
“I’ll bet they’re all virgins, where you’re going” (Solange). “You’re going to a School for Virgins.” Her goofy taunt as she watched me pack. “I bet you won’t fit in with those girls,” she said. (Because she would not, could not, say Don’t leave me.) Fierce little Solange, kid sister, baby bad girl. My little runaway.
I didn’t know what supine meant. I looked it up when I got home. (Strictly speaking, then, the declaration that had provoked such a storm should really have been: The only position for women in SNCC is supine, not prone. Stokely Carmichael.)
Matter for endless speculation: who was a virgin, who was not. A guessing game, since, each for her own reason, some who weren’t claimed they were and some who were claimed they were not. The era of free love might have been upon us, but I knew plenty of girls who were saving themselves for marriage. At least, that was the plan. That’s how it was in those transitional days: curfews might have been abolished, guys might have been stealing our covers every night, but early that same fall, Columbia frat boys staged an old-fashioned panty raid (not the last of them, either).
What was an orgasm? In the beginning, only one of us—Sylvia Lustman of Los Angeles—knew. When her boyfriend, Gabe, came to visit the dorm, stares followed him down the hall. So ordinarylooking, and yet!
It was called, sadly enough, the Big O. Hetty Moore, from a large Irish-Catholic family, accused us all of being naïve and shared with us her mother’s warning: with most couples, it took years before the wife’s orgasm could be achieved.
One thing we never guessed, and the revelation of it gave us gooseflesh: homely, keep-to-herself Kitty Hornby (painful later to recall how behind her back it was Horny Kitty)—the one we’d guessed not only to be a virgin at the time but most likely to remain one right up to graduation and even well beyond that—Kitty Hornby of Wheaton, Illinois, turned out to have been pregnant all along. Her last night back home (she confessed to her roommate, who later told all), she and her boyfriend had taken the big chance and said a proper grown-up good-bye. Her first time! She left for Thanksgiving break (not showing yet but with a face as round, jaundiced, and deadpan as the moon). And that was that. The thing most feared. The thing that could just swallow a girl whole, make her disappear without a trace.
All that year we trooped (in pairs: no one would have dared go alone) to a clinic on West 125th Street, in the shadow of the world-famous Apollo Theater. The marquee proclaiming THE GREAT JAMES BROWN, THE KING OF SOUL, was COMING SOON could just as well have proclaimed the coming of the Pill. New then, many times stronger than any contraceptive drug prescribed today, it came wrapped in rumors of irreparable damage to health and chromosomes. We were guinea pigs—and never more willing ones.
A busy place. A long wait in hard plastic chairs. The only magazines on the table issues of Ebony. Everyone who worked in the clinic was black, as were the other patients, none of whom were as young as we. Ann flipped through the magazines. (“I really should subscribe to this.” “God, look at these women. I wish I had that skin color.”) I leaned back and studied the cracks and stains in the badly water-damaged ceiling. The Catholic in me imagined that ceiling crashing down on me. I thought about Mama: “You get yourself pregnant, and you can forget you ever had a home.” And: “If women were as strong as men, half the world wouldn’t be here.” (The wisdom of Ina.) I had a boyfriend, but I was not in love with him. I had never been in love with anyone, though I seemed to dream of little else. Love—already I had begun to fear it would never happen. My deepest fear: that I was broken.
Before you could get your prescription, you had to have an examination, and before the examination, a little lesson about sex (as if any girl wanting to go on the Pill needed to be drawn a picture) and contraception. (Nothing about the Big O.) The nurse with her life-size vividly colored plastic models of genitals, one in each hand, like puppets. She had to do this all day? How did she keep from laughing? And the doctor, who of course had to be a man, doing his thing all day—how did he keep from crying?
Afterward Ann insisted on walking over to the Apollo. Street vendors out in full force that fine day. Wigs of platinum, silver, and auburn synthetic hair catching the light.
A man in a white robe and skullcap was telling a crowd that the end of the evil race of Caucasia was near.
Ann wanted tickets to see James Brown. The woman in the ticket booth looked truly alarmed. “You got to be twenty-one,” she said. A lie.
It was supposed to have been so exciting, going to school in Manhattan. But for all the time we spent off campus, we could have been almost anywhere. That first year, I don’t remember going to a single museum or concert or play. I don’t remember hardly ever leaving the neighborhood except for a couple of trips down to Times Square and Greenwich Village. Going out, we kept to the same Broadway hangouts: the West End and the Gold Rail. A block east, on Amsterdam (as far east as most would go): the Viennese restaurant, the Hungarian pastry shop, V&T’s Pizzeria. And that, pretty much, was our world. Rarely did we venture below 110th Street. To the west lay Riverside Park, where we were cautioned not to walk alone, not even in daylight, and of course never at all after dark. There was no movie theater in our neighborhood, and what movies we saw were usually ones that were being screened on campus, old films, foreign films like The Battle of Algiers and Jules and Jim and Persona. Like most city neighborhoods, that one has gone through many changes over the years, but a few of the old places remain. They are places I would not enter casually today. Even friendly ghosts can stop hearts.
