“Because I say so.”
“But why? What do you think will come of it?”
“I don’t know. I only know she’s clever, she deserves an education, and she’s going to get one. This is America. The girls are not cows in the field only waiting for a bull to mate with.” I stared at her. Where had that come from? My father had been dead only five years, she was in full widowhood swing.
The moment was filled with conflict and bravado. She felt the words she spoke but she did not mean them. She didn’t even know what she meant by an education. When she discovered at my graduation that I wasn’t a teacher she acted as though she’d been swindled. In her mind a girl child went in one door marked college and came out another marked teacher.
“You mean you’re not a teacher?” she said to me, eyes widening as her two strong hands held my diploma down on the kitchen table.
“No,” I said.
“What have you been doing there all these years?” she asked quietly.
“Reading novels,” I replied.
She marveled silently at my chutzpah.
But it wasn’t really a matter of what I could or could not do with the degree. We were people who knew how to stay alive, she never doubted I would find a way. No, what drove her, and divided us, was me thinking. She hadn’t understood that going to school meant I would start thinking: coherently and out loud. She was taken by violent surprise. My sentences got longer within a month of those first classes. Longer, more complicated, formed by words whose meaning she did not always know. I had never before spoken a word she didn’t know. Or made a sentence whose logic she couldn’t follow. Or attempted an opinion that grew out of an abstraction. It made her crazy. Her face began to take on a look of animal cunning when I started a sentence that could not possibly be concluded before three clauses had hit the air. Cunning sparked anger, anger flamed into rage. “What are you talking about?” she would shout at me. “What are you talking about? Speak English, please! We all understand English in this house. Speak it!”
Her response stunned me. I didn’t get it. Wasn’t she pleased that I could say something she didn’t understand? Wasn’t that what it was all about? I was the advance guard. I was going to take her into the new world. All she had to do was adore what I was becoming, and here she was refusing. I’d speak my new sentences, and she would turn on me as though I’d performed a vile act right there at the kitchen table.
She, of course, was as confused as I. She didn’t know why she was angry, and if she’d been told she was angry she would have denied it, would have found a way to persuade both herself and any interested listener that she was proud I was in school, only why did I have to be such a showoff? Was that what going to college was all about? Now, take Mr. Lewis, the insurance agent, an educated man if ever there was one, got a degree from City College in 1929, 1929 mind you, and never made you feel stupid, always spoke in simple sentences, but later you thought about what he had said. That’s the way an educated person should talk. Here’s this snotnose kid coming into the kitchen with all these big words, sentences you can’t make head or tail of …
I was seventeen, she was fifty. I had not yet come into my own as a qualifying belligerent but I was a respectable contender and she, naturally, was at the top of her game. The lines were drawn, and we did not fail one another. Each of us rose repeatedly to the bait the other one tossed out. Our storms shook the apartment: paint blistered on the wall, linoleum cracked on the floor, glass shivered in the window frame. We barely kept our hands off one another, and more than once we approached disaster.
One Saturday afternoon she was lying on the couch. I was reading in a nearby chair. Idly she asked, “What are you reading?” Idly I replied, “A comparative history of the idea of love over the last three hundred years.” She looked at me for a moment. “That’s ridiculous,” she said slowly. “Love is love. It’s the same everywhere, all the time. What’s to compare?” “That’s absolutely not true,” I shot back. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s only an idea, Ma. That’s all love is. Just an idea. You think it’s a function of the mysterious immutable being, but it’s not! There is, in fact, no such thing as the mysterious immutable being …” Her legs were off the couch so fast I didn’t see them go down. She made fists of her hands, closed her eyes tight, and howled, “I’ll kill you-u-u! Snake in my bosom, I’ll kill you. How dare you talk to me that way?” And then she was coming at me. She was small and chunky. So was I. But I had thirty years on her. I was out of the chair faster than her arm could make contact, and running, running through the apartment, racing for the bathroom, the only room with a lock on it. The top half of the bathroom door was a panel of frosted glass. She arrived just as I turned the lock, and couldn’t put the brakes on. She drove her fist through the glass, reaching for me. Blood, screams, shattered glass on both sides of the door. I thought that afternoon, One of us is going to die of this attachment.
Compounding our struggle, stimulating our anguish, swelling our confusion was sex. Me and boys, me and maidenhood, me and getting on with it. Safeguarding my virginity was a major preoccupation. Every boy I brought into the house made my mother anxious. She could not but leap ahead in her thoughts to the inevitable moment when he must threaten her vital interest. But she knew the danger came not so much from them as from me. With all her extraordinary focus on romantic love, and her sure knowledge that my generation of girls was made as miserable as her own over the loss of virginity before marriage, she nonetheless knew that something was loosed in me that had never been loosed in her; that she and I were not allies here in a common cause. If I came in at midnight, flushed, disheveled, happy, she’d be waiting just inside the door (she was out of bed as soon as she heard the key in the lock). She’d grasp my upper arm between her thumb and middle finger and demand, “What did he do? Where did he do it?” as though interrogating a collaborator.
Once, when she was positive I’d slept with the boy I’d gone out with, she pinched my arm until my eyes crossed in pain. “You’ve tasted him, haven’t you,” she said, her voice flat with accusation and defeat. That was her favorite euphemism for intercourse: “You’ve tasted him, haven’t you.” The phrase never failed to shock. I felt it in my nerve endings. The melodrama of repression, the malice of passivity, the rage over an absence of power, all of it packed into those words and I knew it from the first time I heard them. When she spoke them we faced each other across a no-man’s-land of undefined but unmistakable dimension.
Nettie listened to us in amazement, and with transparent glee, convinced that every serious quarrel brought me closer to her. That year it became clear she had entered into competition with Mama for my allegiance. She wished to exert the primary influence over me. What she knew about men and women, life and the marketplace, education and the right husband would get me from the working-class part of the Bronx to the middle-class part of the Bronx. Every mother on the block knew that was the goal—Selma Berkowitz had the first nose job anyone had ever heard of because the Berkowitzes were planning to move to the Concourse and get her “a doctor for a husband”—and Nettie thought she could do better by me than any of these women. My mother? She was Anna Karenina. What did she know of maneuvering real life into position so that a girl could make the best bid? Nothing, absolutely nothing.
Nettie pushed my hair away from my face, stood back, and looked at me critically. “Your eyes are your best feature,” she said. “Wear your hair so that everyone sees them right away.” She straightened the skirt on my hips, the blouse on my shoulders. “Your figure is sexy,” she said. “Wear simple clothes. No ruffles.” Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully, and again came a piece of instruction on how to carry myself to best effect. She was arranging an object in a framed space. That, she said, was how a woman operated in the world. She arranged and presented herself, and what she hoped to get out of life was determined by the arrangement. Nettie wanted me to memorize her own arrangement only so that I might improve on it. She expecte
d me to mimic and surpass her.
She knew that teaching me to be a seducer of men carried its own particular danger with it, but danger was not her province. Her province was preparing me for the best shot at life we could manage between us. It went without saying that if I became the hottest number on the block I’d be running the risk of rape and pregnancy, but those were the rules of the game, weren’t they? A girl had to be sensible. Knowing how to give as little as possible to get as much as possible was something I should have taken in with mother’s milk. My virginity was of no concern. Sooner or later I’d sleep with someone, no matter what she or anyone else said. The thing, of course, was pregnancy. That would be large trouble. Surely I didn’t need instruction in how to avoid that, did I? I was a smart girl, a college girl. Now, let’s see, green really is your color.
But none of it took. I was entranced during these woman-making sessions of ours. It was exciting, the way Nettie talked about men (her contempt was so educated!), and I loved watching her put herself together, but I couldn’t concentrate on the task at hand, and its ultimate purpose remained an abstraction. I wanted to wear clothes the way she wore them, but I didn’t want it enough. While I was with her I was absorbed by the glamour of costume-making, but away from her I’d lapse into my old forgetful habits of dress, couldn’t remember what went with what, how to pull it all together. Certainly I couldn’t remember that the way I dressed and held myself was a tool of the trade, an instrument of future gain, a vital means of achieving the image that would bring into my sphere of influence the man who could deliver up as much life-and-world as I had a right to hope for.
It wasn’t that I doubted the necessity for such allure: who was I to doubt what all around subscribed to? Wasn’t my mother as good as saying with every breath she drew, “Life without a man is unlivable”? And wasn’t Nettie actually saying, “Men are scum but you gotta have one”? The message was not open to interpretation, a three-year-old could have repeated it: “If you don’t get a husband you’re stupid. If you get one and you lose him you’re inept.” I knew, beyond knowing, this was non-negotiable truth. Yet I couldn’t pay attention. I was like the modern girl in the nineteenth-century novel: Yes, yes, but not right now.
Right now, only two things held my interest: talking books and ideas at school, and getting hot necking with Paul or Ralph or Marty in the hallway, on park benches, in the back seat of a car. A creature of immediate experience, I could not be compelled by the promised benefits of an unseen, unfelt future. But then again, who among us was so compelled? We were all creatures of immediate experience, none of us delayed gratification. Nettie said she was urging me to arrange myself so that I might secure a better piece of the action, but in fact she herself was hooked on the daily practice of allure. My mother said I needed love to experience life at a high level, but in fact mourning lost love was the highest level of life she had attained. We were all indulging ourselves. Nettie wanted to seduce, Mama wanted to suffer, I wanted to read. None of us knew how to discipline herself to the successful pursuit of an ideal, normal woman’s life. And indeed, none of us ever achieved it.
Yet the idea of such a life never loosened its hold, and day by day, month by year, it drove each of us deeper into conflict. It was a given that the more uncertain we were, the more self-righteous we would become. It was necessary for each of us to feel special, different, destined for a superior end. Divided against ourselves, we withheld sympathy from one another. Secretly, each of us identified a collection of undesirable character traits in the others from which she separated herself, as though dissociation equaled deliverance. “Thank God, I’m nothing like that,” each one said to herself of the others, at least once a day. But judgment did not bring amelioration. We could purge ourselves of neither fantasy nor rage. Beneath an intact surface each of us smoldered in silence. It was the smoldering that did us in. The quarrel between Nettie and Mama, when it broke out, moved with the speed of brush-fire. Released from subterranean heat, it burned so hot, so fast, within seconds it had achieved scorched earth: on this ground nothing would grow again.
It’s hard for me to remember when I first realized the tone of each woman had begun to alter severely when she spoke of the other, but one day my mother said, “All she does is switch her ass up and down the block. Why doesn’t she go to work? It’s a shame for all women, the way she carries on,” and I looked up from the kitchen table (I was doing homework, she was at the ironing board). She had spoken such words often but, always before, the harshness had been cut by an exasperation in her voice that betrayed affection. Now the tone, like the words, was only hard.
“So she doesn’t work,” I said calmly. “So what? You object to her being on the dole?”
“It’s not the relief I object to. It’s the way she is with men. I think it’s disgusting.”
“You do? Most women envy the way she is with men. They wish they were as good at it as she is.”
“I’d rather die than be that way with a man!” my mother said, the words bursting from her.
“No kidding,” I murmured. “Die?”
She looked up from the ironing board, turned full face to me, and in a voice trembling with contempt said, “You’re a child, you know nothing of life, nothing.”
Suddenly I felt uneasy. What were we talking about? I mean, what were we really talking about? She had always felt constrained to temper her judgment of Nettie. Now some recklessness was driving her to leave restraint behind. Why? What was making her so angry? The afternoon light, always mild in the kitchen, seemed to weaken perceptibly, grow pale and thin. Some tender threat rode the air. I shivered, and felt anxious. Melancholy pressed down on me.
One day during this same period of time Nettie and I were trying on some old dresses she had pulled out of the back of her closet. She put one on me, a clinging jersey, and at once we both saw how womanly my body had become. Nettie’s hands came together in rapture. “Oh!” she gasped, “you look marvelous.” Then she giggled like a mischievous child. “You wear that on the street, your mother will have a heart attack.” I laughed, too, but beneath the laughter something clicked. That’s right, I thought, she’d hate to see me in this dress, she’d consider it a betrayal.
“She’ll say you look like a tramp,” Nettie said. “She’ll say you look like me.” My head jerked toward her.
“She never said you look like a tramp.”
“Maybe not, but she thinks it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Oh, come on.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “She loves you. She worries about you.”
“The way she worries about you when she pinches you till you see stars? ‘What did he do, where did he do it?’”
I blushed and felt disloyal.
“She’s jealous,” Nettie said hotly. “Laying there on the couch all dried up, five years without a man’s hand on her. You know what they say, don’t you? You don’t use it, you lose it. That’s your mother. She wants me to lose it, too. And you, also.”
It wasn’t the words that startled me. I’d heard them, or ones like them before. It was the bitterness in Nettie’s voice: unexpected and unleavened. Again anxiety floated into the room, and again I felt threatened. Something sad and hopeless stirred in the air. It etherized me, this sad thing. I felt the energy evaporating in my body.
On a Sunday afternoon in late fall the three of us were in the kitchen. Nettie was fixing my hair in a new style and Mama, in a rare cooking mood, was making potato pancakes. The atmosphere was easy among us. Sarah had stopped by for an hour and, as always, had had some wonderful bit of gossip to bring in from the street. Today she had walked through the door saying, “Well, Mrs. Kerner is getting crazier by the minute. I just ran into her. You’ll never believe what she said to me.”
Mama supplied the rhetorical transition. “What did she say?”
“She said her pubic hair is on fire because the man downstairs is sending up radiation.”
“Wha-a-at?”
we all chorused.
Nettie laughed so hard I had to pull her back onto the bench.
“Migod, migod.” Mama shook her head, a hand laid against a cheek. “They’ll have to put her away soon.”
“Did she actually say pubic hair?” I asked. Sarah nodded. “And radiation? She said radiation?” Again Sarah nodded. “See?” I was triumphant. “I told you she was a very intelligent woman.”
Now, a couple of hours later, Mrs. Kerner was still on our minds. Mama lifted the edge of a pancake out of the sizzling oil, peered at its underside, and announced, “That woman never should have stayed at home. She should have gone to work.”
Beside me, Nettie stiffened. I, too, went on the alert. These words might be a prelude to the kind of veiled criticism Mama often made. Apparently talking about someone else, she would deliver a monologue, clearly aimed at Nettie, on the virtues of going to work.
“How could she have gone to work, Ma?” I asked. “She can’t do anything.”
“She could do, she could do. Everyone who wants to can do something.”
“Something people will pay for? Mr. Kerner says he should get paid just for keeping her in the house.” Without warning I had arrived at a piece of wisdom about marriage. “Come to think of it, that’s exactly what he does get paid for. Why else does he work except to keep her in the house?”
Nettie laughed briefly. She was not yet sure of her position in this exchange.
“Very smart, very smart,” my mother grumbled ominously. “If she would work he wouldn’t have to keep her in the house. She wouldn’t be crazy, and she could tell him to go to hell. Did you ever think about that, my brilliant daughter? That maybe she’s crazy because she can’t tell him to go to hell? When a woman can’t tell a man to go to hell, I have noticed, she is often crazy.”
Nettie was looking at her nails by now, smiling to herself. Mama turned unexpectedly away from the pancakes. She saw the smile.
“You think you tell them to go to hell, don’t you,” she said softly.
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