by Rona Jaffe
Her mother vacuumed and put clean sheets on the large bed, did a big pile of laundry in the washer-dryer, and then she washed the dishes and scrubbed the bathroom. Felicity had her own little chores: she had to dust the tables and all those stupid fussy things on them, one by one, and wipe off the counter tops, and finally clean the greasy stove with Comet. She supposed her mother made Jake’s lunch here the way she had done at home, and she hated them both more than ever.
Why do I always have to be a part of this, Felicity cried out silently to her mother. Why do I have to be a witness, an accessory to what you’re doing to my father? It’s a crime to do that to your own child. If I was your lawyer I wouldn’t even defend you. I’d have the judge make you stop.
But no one made her mother stop, so for two more years Felicity had to help her mother clean Jeffrey’s apartment so she could carry on her affair with Jake. Felicity felt like Cinderella with the wicked stepmother. But she didn’t want the prince to come and rescue her. She was afraid of men.
* * *
Felicity was fifteen and looked like a young woman now, not a little girl anymore. She was tall and pretty, with her mother’s slim, sexy body. The years of ballet lessons had given her slender, curvy legs and arms, a tiny waist, and perfect posture. But her sister Theodora still was so overweight that it was unhealthy, and she was getting bigger by the day, no matter what Carolee did to try to control her. They had thought that when she reached puberty she might lose weight, but that obviously was not to be. Whereas Felicity dealt with the tensions at home by becoming emotional, her sister sedated herself with food. Felicity cried when she was depressed, when she was afraid, when something or someone hurt her. The only time Theodora ever came near tears was when she was forbidden dessert. To her that was deprivation, pain, and ridicule, and something that Felicity didn’t understand. If she had been fat like Theodora, Felicity thought, she would have been glad to have people help her stay on her diet.
Their father seemed to think that he had scared off Jake for good. A few times in the beginning he had come home unexpectedly just to check up, but when no one was there he was lulled back into his fantasy world where work took precedence over the needs of his family. He helped people who were sick or injured physically, whom he was not close to, whom he sometimes didn’t even know, and for this he was treated with respect. Whatever happened at home he was able to ignore.
Then that spring, when the trees were just beginning to show their fresh new leaves at last, when the air was soft and the days were lengthening into mellow evenings, her mother fell apart. Carolee took to her bed for fourteen hours at a time and grieved and wept, she stopped leaving the house, she couldn’t eat, and she refused to dress or comb her hair. She was a pathetic sight.
“Jake left me,” she told her daughters. “It’s over.”
“Why?” Felicity asked.
“He found another woman who’s single. She’s single, so he can leave his wife for her. That’s what he wanted. I couldn’t leave your father. I would have lost you and this house.”
You’ve told us that guilt-producing excuse often enough, Felicity thought. She was glad it was over, but still she couldn’t help feeling sorry for her mother who was obviously suffering so much.
“I loved Jake,” her mother said, in tears. “I never loved your father. I’ve refused to have sex with him for years.”
“Why did you marry him?” Theodora ventured to ask in a whisper.
“I was young and stupid. I didn’t know what I was doing. It was all a mistake.”
That summer their mother became gaunt. Her cheeks were hollow, her eyes swollen, her hair hung in her eyes like a witch’s hair. She told them she had lost twenty-five pounds. The weather was hot but she was always cold, putting on her bathrobe over the nightgown she wore all day, pulling it close, shivering. Her sharp elbows and knees protruded, her forearms and calves were just bone and ligament.
What power men have over women, Felicity thought. Having a man makes you happy, and not having one makes you miserable. Her mother, who had been a frightening figure, was now reduced to this wreck, too weak to chase her daughter around the house and hit her. Imagine losing twenty-five pounds from grief over a lover, Felicity thought. I hope she doesn’t die. . . .
But Carolee did not die, and when fall came she started fixing herself up and going out of the house again, and then she started to look better, and finally she was humming.
“I found someone new,” she told Felicity. “He knows all kinds of celebrities. He’s much more cosmopolitan and sophisticated than Jake was. I’ll take you along to meet him. We’ll have tea.”
“You’ll get caught,” Felicity murmured, not wanting to go.
“Not if you’re there,” her mother said, smiling.
“How did you meet him anyway?”
“Through Jeffrey.”
“Jeffrey?” Felicity said. “Is this one gay?”
“Of course not. I should know.”
“You’re not going to see him at Jeffrey’s apartment, are you?” Felicity asked, dreading having to clean again.
“He has a place of his own,” her mother said happily. “He’s single. He belongs just to me.”
So now began Carolee’s elegant period, and every week Felicity had to join her mother and her mother’s new lover, Ben, at Le Petit Grand tea room, where they pretended to be cultivated and English among the chink of china and the subdued conversation of old rich white people with nothing better to do. People stared at them and then looked away, pretending they weren’t. Felicity had to keep reminding herself that they were staring because the three of them were black, and not because they knew her mother was having an affair.
Ben was very light-skinned, and he dressed as well as Jake had. Felicity had to admit that Ben was almost as good-looking as Jake, but she didn’t like it when he pretended that her mother was his wife and that she was his daughter. Why don’t you have a daughter of your own, she thought, annoyed and resentful. He told her he had never been married. He was obviously bad news, in any one of a number of ways. She hadn’t decided which way, because she hardly knew him, but she was sure it would reveal itself in time.
She was so on edge and tired of her life. She couldn’t wait to go away to college, to law school, to get started being a lawyer, to get away from her mother and these domestic dramas. When she was accepted at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, she knew that at last she was on her way.
It was the time of rebellion in America, and nowhere more than on the college campuses. It was also the time of emerging Black Pride. Students, more than anybody, hated Nixon, because they felt he was a tyrant; because he was against liberals, blacks, Jews, and students; and mainly because of the war, which they were convinced was immoral and wrong. They were against the pig government, and the pig cops. When the National Guard killed four unarmed students during an antiwar demonstration at Kent State in Ohio the other students all over the country thought, “It could have been us.”
Felicity’s school was very politically active, with a large black student union. Now, for the first time, she began to look for her own racial identity. She went to meetings every week, to lectures on unity and Black Pride, read books to raise her consciousness, complained with the others about the lack of books on black history, and felt free to resent and speak against the white oppressor, the Man, instead of trying to be like him so he would accept her.
When she left home Felicity was still being forced to dress like her mother’s little clone: matching bag and shoes, white gloves, pearls, every hair in place. As soon as she got to college, all that changed. She wore nothing but beat-up jeans and sexy little tops, and bought a few dashikis so she could dress like her African brothers and sisters. She tried in vain to grow a suitable afro. It was just soft curls, when she wanted impressive ethnic topiary, but no one seemed to mind. For the first time in her life she was p
opular, she had started to fit in somewhere at last.
She still had white friends, but now that she had started to date she dated only black men, holding fast to her emerging sense of herself. She was aware how immature she was when it came to men. Given her sexually precocious childhood it seemed to her she should have been less uncomfortable and frightened, but it apparently didn’t work that way. Along with their own voice, her generation had delightedly discovered sexual freedom, but she had not. She couldn’t help thinking about her mother, who was so unhappily obsessed with sex and love.
However, because without even being aware of it she had absorbed a certain body language from watching her mother all her life, Felicity was naturally seductive and charming with men. The tilt of her head, her pout, her smile were all Carolee. Felicity listened to her dates talk as if what they had to say was the most important thing in the world, even when it was idiotic. Although she hadn’t done it purposely her way of dressing was provocative, and she was curvy and pretty. Her dates could hardly keep their hands off her. But when she got frightened, which always happened when they tried to get physical, she withdrew. She quickly got the reputation of being a cockteaser. That was the last thing she wanted to be, but she didn’t know how else to handle her fear. Her freshman year she remained a virgin.
The college meals were starchy, unbalanced, and abundant For the first time in her life, Felicity started to overeat. At breakfast she broke the sweet, crumbly muffins apart, noticing the streaks of grease they left on the plate, and ate three. No matter how bad the food was, she devoured it. At night when she was studying she was always available to go out for pizza with her friends, who had rejected dinner although she hadn’t. Suddenly she was hungry all the time, a strange sort of hunger because it was more like an emptiness that sighed through her body, something less akin to appetite than to fear. Chewing and swallowing sedated her. Wasn’t everybody scared their first year at college? So many choices, all that freedom . . . Felicity looked in the mirror, trying in vain to close her jeans, and knew she was getting fat. She thought of Theodora.
When she went home for Christmas her jeans were a larger size and she was wearing baggy sweaters outside them so her mother wouldn’t notice. The dashikis she had bought at college made a good disguise too. She was afraid to weigh herself because she knew it would make her depressed.
“You look a little chubby,” Carolee said, eyeing her.
“I always blow up when I’m expecting my period,” Felicity said offhandedly.
At the end of her first year at college when she came home for summer vacation she was even fatter. There was cellulite where none had existed before, and she felt heavy and logy. She got on the scale for the first time since the previous September, with trepidation, and discovered she had gained twenty-four pounds.
“What have you done to yourself?” her mother cried. “You look like your sister!”
Theodora sulked and turned away.
“I’m on a diet as of this minute,” Felicity said.
If her mother could lose twenty-five pounds in a few months without even trying, surely she could lose twenty-four over the summer when she was trying very hard. Her sister turned back to look at her with a sardonic expression that said: Join the club, and Felicity thought: Never.
Felicity had learned about syrup of ipecac at college, from her roommate, Iris, who was slender and popular. She bought a bottle, and all that summer, no matter what she ate, she made herself vomit afterward. Ipecac had the nastiest taste imaginable, and after she threw up particularly violently her eyeballs were red and she was afraid they might bleed, but the extra weight began coming off fast. The ipecac also made it possible for her to binge whenever she felt so empty she couldn’t stand it anymore. She stuffed herself only when no one was around. Full or empty, her stomach hurt all the time.
She never talked to Theodora about it because somehow Theodora seemed to represent the enemy. But Felicity thought about her sister gnawing constantly, like some kind of huge, neurotic woodchuck, and for the first time she thought she understood her sister’s pain. She also wondered if Theodora had chosen to become the outsider in that family, rejecting her mother’s ideal of womanhood and thus rejecting her mother’s unhappy life. She didn’t discuss that with her sister either. They had never clung together when they were threatened by danger, they had never been close. Each in her own way had been too busy trying to survive. It was sad, but at the bottom of her soul each of them knew she would turn on the other one if she had to, because that was the way it was.
By the fall Felicity was thin again, even thinner than she had been before the episode, and her mother was so relieved she bought her a new wardrobe for her second year at college—letting her pick the clothes herself—and a small scale for her dorm room. When she got back to school, Felicity went to a doctor her friends knew about who gave her a prescription for diet pills. Everyone was taking diet pills, and everyone knew they were full of speed, but nobody thought there was anything bad about that including the doctor who prescribed them for her. The pills and her willpower kept the gorging at bay, and whenever it overtook her Felicity knew she had the disgusting ipecac. It was no big deal; it was just what you had to do.
Her junior year she was finally ready to have a real boyfriend. His name was Lincoln, and she met him at a school party. A friend had brought him because he didn’t go to college anymore; he had dropped out as a way of rebelling against his successful parents. She identified with that; she was rebelling, too. He was dabbling with writing, with painting. He was sitting on the floor, next to the window, his dark chiseled features outlined by the glow of the setting sun, his fingers long and sensual the way she thought an artist’s should be, and the first thing she thought when she saw him was, That’s for me. He was good-looking, smart, and fun to be with. He was the man who taught her about sex. When they started going together she was so timid she wouldn’t even let him put the lights on when they made love, but he was very gentle and persistent, and eventually Felicity was able to relax. She was a child starving for love, and Lincoln made her feel safe, made her understand that lovemaking could be a generous thing, a sharing and giving of love. Soon they were living together off and on, in her off-campus apartment, for which she paid the rent.
She and Lincoln stayed together while she finished college. When they talked about their plans for the future Felicity didn’t know how they would ever work it out. She wanted to go to law school; he didn’t know what he wanted. He was very bright, but she was beginning to think he was much too unfocused about life. He wasn’t even serious about his art. None of the things he wanted to do fit in with her own middle-class upbringing and her upwardly mobile ambitions, which had solidified through her new sense of entitlement. When Felicity brought him home to meet her family, her mother at first couldn’t cater to him enough, under the guise of encouraging the romance (but Felicity suspected she was flirting, and watched helplessly); and then when Carolee realized he was really very interested in Felicity she became violently opposed to him as a good-enough husband for her daughter. Now she didn’t want Felicity to see him at all.
“If you don’t break up with him you’ll get trapped,” her mother told her. “Listen to me; I know.”
Felicity tried to persuade Lincoln to go back and finish college and consider going to law school afterward, but he didn’t want to. Then she got into Harvard Law.
As a woman and a black she felt she had two extra reasons to be the best she could, and she studied long hours; and while she studied, Lincoln played. It was obvious by now that they were drifting apart, but she didn’t know what to do about it. Then one day he simply didn’t come home. He stayed away for three weeks, and she was frightened and miserable wondering where he was while her mind wandered in class and she worried about keeping up with the work. Sometimes when she was trying to study in the library she found herself dissolving into tears instead, in front of any
one who cared to look. And then he came back. He told her he had been with another woman all that time but that it was over and he was back now.
Felicity didn’t know why he had told her about his affair, but when she discovered he had been cheating on her something inside her went cold and dead. It was over, and there was nothing Lincoln could do to make things the way they had been before. She made him move out.
I shouldn’t settle for a man like him, Felicity thought to console herself, and concentrated even harder on her studies. Her mother was delighted they had broken up, and gave herself the credit for showing Felicity what a bad mistake she could have made. They both finally agreed on something, that a much better man would come along.
After all, look what had happened to hopeless Theodora! A brilliant student, she had gotten into Radcliffe, and in her junior year, Theodora became engaged to Calvin Longman, a black Harvard Medical School student with a great future and who didn’t mind how enormous she was. This happy ending for her was a complete shock and a wild stroke of luck. She was so secretive that no one in the family had even known she had a boyfriend. Felicity thought Calvin was unattractive, not that it mattered; Theodora was in love.
Theodora and Calvin were married in the family’s church in Detroit the day after her graduation. Felicity thought they must have bought all the white tulle in the whole city. Theodora looked like a galleon in full sail coming down the aisle, and she had a long train that hadn’t been seen since royalty. The radiant couple were hoping to have four children and live in Cambridge, where he would do research. It was also the day after Felicity’s graduation from Harvard Law School, but she attended the wedding alone.
Felicity was pleased for her sister, who had never had much happiness, but she was also bewildered and—she had to face it—jealous. How is it that she picked the right one for her right away and I have such bad taste? she wondered. Am I stupid? Maybe it’s because Theodora knew to grab her chance, and my chance just hasn’t come yet.