Queenie

by Hortense Calisher

  You’re still with your age group though. Before you could do it, you had to find a place for it.

  And you’re still acting in good faith. What you and she are doing is rather conservative. But it isn’t science. And it certainly isn’t politics.

  I know who she is of course. Even in the nude, five wedding bands can be very characteristic. Even with her head on your shoulder, that fifty-dollar streak job is no freshman’s. And like always when she’s comfortable, she’s kicked off those alligator pumps.

  She had to be where we are; that’s her hang-up. But being an oldie, she went right to the top.

  So that explains who slams the door on the two of you, Dr. Werner.

  Because I hear Oomph coming back.

  So with apologies, that explains why I lock it.

  Serves you right, really. That was no place to bring a lady like Mrs. O.

  Oh Dr. Werner. If you and I weren’t so hot for vision, we could lead a practical life!

  So then I rush Oomph out. But at the elevator, I tell her to hold the button. “Forgot something. Be right back.”

  In front of that door, it’s peaceful now. Woe has come and gone. All that sincerity ought to make a wonderful wallpaper, though. I decide to add a woe of mine.

  Which I do very small, choosing a black marking pen and signing my full name. Then I put a buck in the collection box. Then I stand there, listening.

  Plenty of finks like me have left, but some of the faithful are still grieving. And somebody should give them a hand.

  I take a long breath—a penthouse childhood lets you yodel freely; mine can be heard a block away—and I let go.

  On the bus we luck into, which is parked while the driver files his nails, we look back. Yes, people are streaming out of there. When the bus starts up, takes us ten blocks to catch our breath.

  I say to Oomph, “What did you go back for?”

  She says, “My worry beads.”

  Ten blocks later, Oomph says to me, “I heard you yell. But not what.”

  I say—“The fuzz!”

  When we get to the dorm, Sherry is back. Cutch has absconded to Canada, then turned around and given himself up to the inquisition in Plainfield. Which he’s wired her he can do with more honor, since the local draft board there will be extra hard on him; his father is one of them. His message to us is: It’s now a question of whether his or the war’s put-on will hold out.

  Sherry’s hasn’t. She’s all cleaned up to go on over there.

  Mine hasn’t. “Personally,” I say, “I’m terribly tired of holding out.”

  Oomph’s hasn’t. She says, “Or if you’re not sure anymore what to hold out for.”

  The atmosphere in the room is triple gloomy—we are holding up the world together, but we are having trouble. And we miss Cutch’s axe.

  Just then the door busts open, and in march the two cookies. They have lost their corsages, but they are carrying banners.

  “We wanted you to be the first to know,” they sing out, and march off again. The banners say: “Dropping Out!”

  Not that we three haven’t thought of it. But who would want to be a minority along with those two?

  So there we are, stuck with holding up the world for them.

  Suddenly Sherry flumps out of bed and goes over to that old WE DON’T SAVE sign of ours, grabs out a big sheet of paper and covers the first two words, so it now reads SAVE. Oomph gets the idea, jumps up and shifts the paper so it reads WE SAVE. We start playing tic-tac-toe, adding all the variations we can think of, including SAVE US. In the end, I get left with the DON’T. Nobody says a word when I turn the thing on its side.

  At about five A.M. for us ceiling starers, I say, “We could pray.”

  They act like I’m cracking, but they grumble out of bed and down anyway, one to a bed.

  Sherry says, “What do we pray for?”

  I say, “The praying’s the point of it.”

  Oomph says, “Now my knees have done everything.”

  After that, we are stuck. There’s so much world welfare. Ours and other people’s.

  Inside me, of course, I’m still talking about mine.

  Oomph dear, I’m saying, you’ll always have to do it for a reason. You’re an intellectual. But I think for me, doing it for civil rights, or for diamonds either, is out.

  Aurine dear, I’m saying, I went to the party. I went to find out my kick. And I found it. Some of those bods I saw were fine. Or would be under other circumstances. But I promise you, I won’t waste myself. I want’a young man to be fucking me, not the world.

  So that’s my discovery, both of you.

  Doing it for no reason must be best.

  Now can we all stop saying fuck? Because it embarrasses me. Maybe when I have the big Anglo-Saxon moment itself, I’ll feel different.

  But the two of them are still waiting for me to pray, I see. I have to shut up inside for once, and start talking.

  “Oh girls——” I say, “I know now what politics is. It’s when you are the victim of other people’s backgrounds.”

  Sherry says, “But how is that going to help Cutch?”

  Oomph says, “And how is helping Cutch going to help us?”

  Then we see the sun is coming up. Who knows, maybe we helped it. And we get back to bed.

  From her bed Sherry says, very soft, “The climate of Puerto Rico is very mild.”

  From hers Oomph says, even softer, “Thank you for trying, Queenie. But I saw them.”

  In mine, I sit straight up. I’m talking. “Oh, happy, happy, happy!” I yell. “I’m not happy anymore.”

  HARK!

  THREE

  Queenie:

  DEAD WRONG BUT ALIVE

  Dead wrong of course, the next morning.

  Dead wrong now—oh

  But tenderly

  Heel and toe

  And all night

  “Dead dead wrong” sings my little banjo And in no mood to be right!

  All along, bo,

  To join humanity, Joe,

  All you have to do is be wrong—

  That’s the song, that’s the jive—dwba, dwba—

  Dead wrong but alive!

  (from the musical Queenie—An Old-fashioned Girl of Today—copyright Raphael & Rey)

  THE MINUTE WE WRITE that last line, Giorgio says I must get out of bed at once, and cable it home. He says if everybody our age could just cable that, even from around the corner, their families would be satisfied. Truth is always best, he says. And they will be so glad to know that we too are stuck with it.

  “Youth is our real crime,” he yawns, leaning back. “And they are in constant agony, at no longer committing it.”

  So I get up and go downstairs, which in any island hotel in our part of the world is never far. Cabling home is a luxury I never tire of—how the truth must be piling up on Fifty-Seventh Street! English negligees make me feel lavish too. Italian sandals for the scorpions; a note for civilization—it’s the leather they bite. Inner cables to myself are piling up everywhere.

  And in the center is my little turned American head. Which thanks to one man’s talent, plus an enormous number of what seem to be perfectly okay credit cards—someone is at last helping me turn.

  So I write the cable as suggested. Adding only, “And in the Hotel Bienvenida.”

  Since there are dozens of those on this continent, the clerk advises more info under “Sender.”

  I add, “And in bed.”

  Giorgio says you dream what you get.

  Because one morning back at the college, couple months after the grieve-in, I wake up and know I am right! From the beginning. A happy childhood can be tranquilized. Personal despair is what counts. But a world-soul simply will not stick with it. And from what I suspect—in this connection unhappy childhoods are not far behind.

  I can’t ask the girls for sure, because morning is actually four o’clock though sunny, and they’ve already gone.

  Oomph to Delaware, to one of her fat
her’s weddings.

  Sherry to stay with Cutch’s parents and meanwhile organizing committees for compassionate visiting, until she can get into prison herself.

  It’s Easter and everybody except the housemaids has gone. Christ has risen, and they are cleaning the dorm. With fumigants and vacuum pumps.

  …I can hear Oomph last week, wondering if what she has found in her pants is one of the ichneumonidae. She was in my zoo class and assimilated very quickly. I can still hear Sherry scratch…

  I am alone with my ghosts. And I wonder if we three will ever meet again in our lifetime. I have a premonition. Maybe it has all gone bust and I am educated? Too soon. And with nobody around worth a damn to tell it to.

  But if I don’t want to die a louse’s death, I better hike on home.

  So I shoulder my strap-bag, and start walking. Because the bag hasn’t a cent in it.

  Oomph borrows. I lend. Sherry takes.

  Usually she leaves me a token. But I bear no umbrage. We’re a commune—in a pinch they would do the same for me, again. With us, giving is taking.

  And taking is giving. If you don’t understand that about us, you don’t understand anything.

  I walk purposely slow. I’m going home in reverse. To seek my fortune there. And breaking in Oomph’s fifty-dollar, bought-for-the-wedding shoes. She looked under the bed, but not under the covers, where I was wearing them.

  In my bag is a critique on me from the Registrar.

  Confidential, and not to me. But in the spring, when the establishment starts mumbling to itself, we all feel an obligation to ransack the files.

  “Miss Raphael is a precocious young woman”—I’ll say, straight A’s, B’s and C’s without working!—“who has not yet adjusted to college life.” Who they are talking to, we have never yet found out.

  But Sherry’s comment is a comfort to me. “In that position college is only an adjective. The noun is life.”

  So at about 110th Street, I drop a tear for her, into my own handkerchief. Which is wrapped around her new passport I already feel she gave me. She won’t be needing it in prison. Besides, the name on it is fake. She looked everywhere for it except inside Oomph’s shoes.

  So, penniless and anonymous, I find myself at the north entrance of the park.

  I’m the perfect candidate for suicide, but to my temperament that type of despair is not personal enough.

  I’m also the perfect murderee. That isn’t me, that’s American parks.

  So I decide to play Russian roulette with myself, and walk through. On a strictly fair bet with the cosmos, already checked out with the I Ching.

  If attempt is made, I plan to offer up the diamond I happen to have concealed in a Tampax. Hoping to be quick enough on the draw so my attacker won’t think it’s a bomb.

  Ordinarily, that kind of stash is safe enough in your bag. But I had a feeling last night those girls were desperate.

  My bargain with myself is: If I’m murdered, I will never confess again. That’s what the I Ching says too.

  But if I come out safe on the park’s south border, it will be a sign the stars think I should take my habit abroad.

  Because what’s really bugging me is that I’ve run out of interlocutors…

  People to report to, imaginary or otherwise. Life enhancers! Father-images who can’t talk back, even to the most original sin…

  So from Ninety-Seventh Street, and way deep into the Ramble, I am very preoccupied.

  First off, I am practicing my draw. Only in mime, of course. Each time adding a quick kneel-and-plea-for-mercy routine from my old acting class at Deforming.

  Going along, I work up quite a little improvisation. Those are probably the most Phaedre-like gestures ever to be produced in a park.

  Meanwhile, I’m progressing southward steadily. And though by now I’m deep in muggerland, and prospective knife artists and rapesters flit by, not a one draws near me.

  Because all the time, up hill and down dale—I am also interviewing interlocutors. For the purpose of speaking boldly to the empty air in full Stanislavsky scope, the bird sanctuary is really beautiful.

  …I try out Mao, Tito, the Shah of Iran, even a few female personalities in case a member of the Mayor’s antidiscrimination committee is walking her wolfhounds—all of them on the principle that now I’ve been through the deity, the church and university, the only interlocutors left to me are in public life. But I get all the way to the Children’s Zoo, which is still pretty safe even if you’re unaccompanied by one, and not a single notable works out…

  So what the hell, my draw is perfect by now. And it’s one way to get through Central Park.

  I end up kind of steamy at the zoo proper, and gazing at the largest chimp madonna, who is sitting with squeezed eyes and a smile, in a bowknot around her own child. Which has squeezed eyes and a smile. And is probably dreaming of being off somewhere, in its own bowknot.

  Does it crave to explain itself to itself? How far down the line does spiritual experience stop?

  …By the ache between my armpits, I’m about to have one. The best I can do is fold my arms around myself, in rough imitation of a lonely bowknot, and wait…

  Oh, it’s spring, I think shivering; maybe I am suffering from parthenogenesis! Human beings are not supposed to. To reproduce themselves all by themselves in whole or in part. But in my chest cavity where only a few weeks ago a thumping world-soul filled it, something much less practical is surely forming. Much more lost and intense. Like if a poem is coming on and your protoplasm is not fitted for it. It’s nothing I could tell a zoo lab assistant. It’s the sort of thing you tell a chimp.

  Or ask.

  O chimp—how was it for you, when you first knew you were going to be alone forever and ever with your lyrical self?

  Is it a pink sensation, like swallowing your own tongue and slowly savoring it? Is it like weeping for your future in a dream because you haven’t had it yet, and waking from the nightmare to find it’s still with you?

  The wonderful thing about chimps is that you can find one in any capital city. And they will always give you the same reply.

  So now can I limp on home and settle down to looking for a lover?

  Once you choose a career that should be easy, providing it allows for both.

  Maybe that was always my conflict; now maybe I’ve solved it. As Sam Newber says, if you’re a respectable candidate for suicide and murder both—what other road is open to you but art?

  I can always choose which one later.

  It would be nice to have a poet in the family, but I’ll never feel anything but prosy. Just put one foot after the other and limp home.

  One big foot. Because Oomph’s shoes hurt….

  When I get there, the air has that good deserted feeling. A note says Aurine and Oscar have gone to join the tycoon, in Palm Springs. His firm wants to buy the tenement block where L’Alouette is for an office tower, and rebuild the restaurant. “They’ll call it Les Alouettes,” Oscar’s note says. “They think big.”

  Aurine is already doing it. She’s left five hundred bucks in bills in case I want to fly down. Or fly “anywhere the world is suitable for Easter.” And says please to look on the hall table for my mail.

  I glide by without stopping. There’s only a thick letter that must have my midterm grades on it. This time of year, there should have been a postcard.

  On Gran’s TV, I see the fifty bucks for the burglar has increased to sixty-five.

  Inflation is everywhere, even in my aunt and uncle’s relationship.

  What are those two doing, traveling with a third anyway? Catch me somebody, before my education is complete.

  Up, up quick to the attic, where a young girl can still be naïve. You get what you can dream. You dream what you can get.

  I spend the night pawing through my trunkful of adolescent drawings, composition, jingles, part-songs—including a requiem for several animals, to see if I can turn up a career there.

  Even finding some
lines On My Narcissism, an early pensée:

  I know the cold raptures of my own skin

  Dark behind it is the room with no loves

  In the gilding light my naked figure, a Braque violin.

  I’ve done everything too young—except for what counts.

  The whole trouble with living is you don’t start with a requisite knowledge of yourself. Ought to be given you at birth like a pedigree—or a horoscope in which you can believe. Like, “Fucking won’t really interest you. For you marriage with an old man—you haven’t enough energy for a career.” That’s not me, of course.

  My trusty little tape recorder is there of course, in with all those cassettes. They’re not art, they’re me, but maybe some kind of a switch can be made. Hang your childhood on a limb, your mike around your neck, and start wandering.

  Maybe family confession is best.

  …Maybe if I sit quite still by the telly and tape nothing, somebody will come and burgle me….

  Tell me a movie, Gran. In the studio of my heart.

  Yes love. It’s called She Dreams of Him.

  She dreams of him. A Green Mansions bird boy? A Cheri? No, this is America. And not a belle epoque.

  I suppose a man like any girl of today puts together, made of sneak dreaming and open viewing?

  Or maybe some lost grocery boy of infancy, with homburg-ribbon father-image bound round him like black sticking tape?

  Along with whatever NBC daytime can tell me about that lost platonic half of ourselves we want to go to bed with.

  …Is it a twin she wants, you viewers? A not impossible American male who is not a virgin at heart?

  Not a roué—they always have bad breath. And are not really intelligent.

  Not an Oscar—he’s a husband. Though a good uncle. Bad husbands, that’s what the weak protectors are. And the good ones are tyrants, beating you with their money belts. They don’t know about love—that’s what they keep you for.

  Go, go, Granny, what if it should be love she’s dreaming of?

  I look down at my tapes all neat in their bag. The Piranesi Tape. The Father Detwiler one. The Monsignor. The Werner one.

  O Channel Two, let me tell you…