by Ann Tracy
“That’s right,” Viv would say, “but how do you make chicken soup?”
Two pairs of well-loved eyes would narrow at me as I gibbered about hot water and celery. Two flawless faces would look at one another and then back at me. Two brushed heads would nod approval. I had passed again.
But I knew in my heart that I was a marginal pass at best, in a world preoccupied with love and marriage. Some days I was pretty, some days I wasn’t. My hair wouldn’t stay parted. The writing callus on my middle finger was dyed with ink. My clothes were good, bought at the same stores as Viv’s and Sabra’s, but standing alone in the middle of a room I would wrinkle and smudge. My sneakers came untied in the spring. In the fall my penny loafers shed pennies like copper leaves. I sniffled all winter and my pockets bulged with wet handkerchiefs. To be sure, I had some areas of mastery. I could get my lipstick on straight and blot off the excess. I could walk on high heels and not fall over. I could sleep on curlers and not toss. But I was full of secret flaws. I wore Windsong cologne, for instance, not because I cared about the scent one way or the other, but because I liked the free sound of the name. O Wild West Wind. I recognized that this was not the right motive.
I did not tell Viv and Sabra that I was in love. Not just because they would have scolded and laughed and stepped up the instructions for making chicken chow mein, but because volunteering information about the inside of my head honestly never occurred to me. They would have found my head furnished with all the wrong things—elephant-foot umbrella stands, say, where I should have had dinette sets. In fact, Viv and Sabra didn’t tell me much about themselves either, though when I got one alone she quite often told me interesting things about the other.
Of course some silences were the outward signs of tact and affection. For instance, I never told them that their eleventh-grade pancake makeup, which ended abruptly at the jawline, looked like orange masks. They in turn did not mention to me that my tenth-grade trick of camouflaging pimples with snippets of flesh-colored Band-Aids was more grotesque than the pimples themselves. I did not very often point out that certain of their boyfriends were scumbags. They almost never let me know quite how hopelessly out of it they thought I was. Perhaps they were more candid with each other, for they were roommates and shared the freedom of the outside world as well. I belonged only to the school part of their lives, but I belonged to it hard and would have welcomed a chance to kill for them. Their friendship buoyed and flattered me.
There was one other thing that I was keeping from them on this particular Monday, as well, though I think that they would have been both pleased and encouraging had I told them. I had decided, over the weekend, to start my first novel. I had originally planned to put it off until I’d seen more of life, but my moment with Dwight by the telephone pole had suggested what seemed to me an important truth, that the exterior circumstances of life weren’t much to look at and if I wanted to achieve greatness I’d have to help life along, supply events important enough to match emotions. I thought about this as I sat behind Viv in study hall, gazing absently at the extraordinary whiteness of her neck between her blue sweater and the feathery ends of her dark hair. If I scrubbed my neck all day and all night I’d still be swarthy. Sabra, across the aisle, was all attention to Taylor Hoffmann, the quarterback, who was evidently giving her some interesting signals.
How pleased they’d be with me, Viv and Sabra, when I pulled out the finished typescript like the king of rabbits. Dwight’s friendly face would glow too; did people fall in love with authors much? If I told them now, before it was done, would Viv say, “All right, but how do you make a novel?” In my house, as big a problem as making it would be keeping it private, something on a par with concealing a pregnancy.
Viv swung around in her seat. “Is there something wrong with the back of my head?” she hissed. “I can feel you staring at it.”
“No, no,” I whispered. “Sorry, I was just thinking.”
“Well think about math then,” she said. “Have you got the answer to number eight?”
I put down Les Miserables, took out my math book, and lost myself in abstract calculation. This did nothing to reconcile me to reality, though it did reinforce my notion that you can represent anything with the right symbol. As soon as I finished, I poked Viv in the back.
“A2+B2=4,” I said. “You missed the rally.”
“Big deal,” she said.
I surmised that things had not gone well with her fiancé that weekend. Likely Sabra would fill me in if she got a chance.
Dwight and I had exchanged the briefest of greetings between classes, and that was all. Now he was sitting four rows to my right and one seat ahead. I could watch him, though not easily. Perhaps if I willed it very hard, he’d turn and smile at me. I squinted my eyes, except for a bit of my right eye, which I kept trained on Dwight’s shirt collar. Oak desk tops, golden with afternoon sun, blurred and quivered through my lashes. “Dwight, Dwight, DWIGHT,” rose my silent scream. “Turn around, see me, SMILE.” I kept at this for a long minute or two, but nothing happened except that Viv turned around again.
“Good lord, Fish, have you got a pain or what?” she snapped.
The voice inside me left off screaming and said, “Indeed, madam. The joys of love are but a moment long, the pain of love endures forever.” My lips said, “Oh. No. Sorry.”
“I don’t know what ails you, anyway,” Viv said, but she said it with a tinge of affection, enough to keep me content. As for her not knowing, I was more than content with that.
CHAPTER THREE
I was eager to start writing, but I had to wait for a good chance. I hoped to get my typewriter upstairs, at least, before the family questions began. So the week wore away in homework and ball games and television and frustration, but at last, when I came home after school on Friday, I saw my moment. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table with a wire rack of hot chocolate chip cookies and a very old Jehovah’s Witness who had just made a mess of his cookie and was gummed up in melted chocolate like a fly in syrup. I knew him. His name was Mr. McGlaughlin. We always let him in and were nice to him, because we did that with people, even the crazy old lady next door, of whom I may say more later. (It was easy to get into my house; getting out of it was the hard part.) When Mr. McGlaughlin would say, “Do you know who the 144 thousand are?” my mother would say, “Yes, all Baptists,” and they’d both laugh.
“You know Mr. McGlaughlin,” she said now.
“Yes,” I said. “Hello. Glad to see you.”
He gave me a sad, chocolatey nod.
The sound of gunfire from the living room told me that Herbie was safely occupied with his after-school western. My father wasn’t home yet. I had to move fast, though.
I dropped my books, except for the lit anthology, in the dining room and shed my blazer onto the arm of a chair. The typewriter was heavy, not all that portable, but I snatched it up from beside the downstairs desk, swung it around the corner and sprinted with it up to my room, where I gently closed the door to the hall and drew a deep breath. Having taken the typewriter out of its case, I set it on my bedspread and looked at it to see if it might be leaking the words of my masterpiece already. It wasn’t, but they would come. My father had bought that typewriter for me the summer before, just given it to me as a surprise. He would have a surprise, too, if he knew what I was going to do with it.
In the lit anthology and the books on my shelves I hoped to find guidance in the art of making real life bigger than life. There was some typing paper in my bureau drawer, stashed in case of sudden furtive bouts of drawing or note writing, but I’d need more.
I began to take things off my dresser, the piece of furniture that most closely resembled a desk. I had just taken away the crocheted doilies and pushed the perfume bottles into the far corners of it when I heard my mother’s footsteps coming down the hall. Panicked, I began to sweep the bottles and jars back into the middle. Doilies! Where had I put the doilies?
The problem was,
my mother was good to me. She came in my room to vacuum and empty the wastebasket and put clean clothes away, and how can you quarrel with that? Her interest in the details of my life was jolly, open, non-judgmental. Also insatiable. As she knocked and came in with four ironed blouses on hangers I shuffled cosmetics with a wild hand.
“Cleaning my dressing table!” I panted.
“That’s nice,” she said, not for a minute deceived by so unlikely a story. She rolled her eyes now and then towards the typewriter on the bed. “Maybe you should throw out that bottle of Evening in Paris you’ve had since sixth grade and never wear.”
“I might do that, I just might do that,” I lied. I was used to the look of that bottle right where it was—round, blue, reliable.
The door closed behind her. Still panting slightly, I pushed the bottles back again and lowered the typewriter into the cleared space. I moved the lamp so the carriage wouldn’t hit it, and I opened the upper right drawer a couple of inches so that I could shove manuscript in with my scarves in a hurry if I had to. Then I rolled in a piece of blank paper, moved my hairbrush off my pillow, and lay down to think about titles. I should have at least—I’d read the phrase somewhere—a working title. What would cover, or suggest, all the breadth of experience that I hoped to explore? What would encompass the great themes of love, sex, death, and freedom, as well as any other great themes that might come to me later? I flipped through The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, handy on the bedside table, hunting potent phrases. And Naked on the Air of Heaven Ride by Louisa Fisher. Too racy. A Box Whose Candle Is the Sun by Louisa Fisher. Super, but too ambitious even for me, and not very pertinent. I was getting depressed. The combination of Omar Khayyám (“One thing at least is certain—This Life flies”) and the Friday afternoon exodus from school called up a familiar dread, never far off, that something would happen to my friends. Now and then they’d catch a glimpse of this—“It’s stormy! Be careful how you drive!” I’d cry—and then they’d jeer at me and tell me not to be such an old lady. I wasn’t fooled. Omar the Tentmaker knew. When I went back to the title selection, oriental gloom, perhaps, colored my choice, but it looked good in the middle of the first page.
ONE MOMENT IN ANNIHILATION’S WASTE
or
Love, Sex, Death, and Freedom
by
Louisa Fisher
I added the subtitle in case the title turned out not to mean anything.
And now, I said to myself, to Re-Mould this sorry Scheme of Things nearer to the Heart’s Desire. My fingers touched the keys, but Herbie’s knock, lower than my mother’s, made me snatch them back. I sprang up, running to open the door first and stand in his line of vision.
“Do you want any cookies?” he asked what he could see of my face through the crack.
“Oh,” I said, “that’s nice of you, very nice, Herb, but I guess now I’ll wait till after supper. I’m doing some stuff here anyway.” I suspected that he’d been sent (“Go ask Lou if she wants a cookie and find out what she’s up to”), but maybe not.
“I’ll be down pretty soon,” I said, not opening the door any wider. Herbie wandered off, looking sorry. I was a little sorry too, but an artist sometimes has to be ruthless. I sat back down at the dressing table. Get ready, world. Me and D.H. Lawrence.
Chapter One
Lucilla Shark threw back the blankets and slid from her bed, shivering like a mare at the caress of cold air on her skin. The solitude of the night was hers. In the dark she pulled on her clothes with no more consciousness of her action than some healthy draft animal, her large thoughtful eyes fixed on the darkness outside. She thought it better not to risk a light, but she had left her upper right drawer open when she went to bed, and now she slid her fingers into the opening and groped until they touched paper under her scarves. This she drew out and put, folded, into her skirt pocket, feeling the points of the thumbtacks secreted there already.
She listened to the animal sounds of her—
My father’s voice drowned the sounds of Lucilla Shark’s world: “Suppertime!” I pulled out the page, stuffed it in the drawer, and went down.
“I’m sorry I didn’t realize,” I said. “I was writing a letter.”
“Lucky you had your typewriter handy,” said my mother.
It was Sunday afternoon before I could get back to work on Lucilla Shark, but I’d been thinking about her. I sat at the dresser and willed the autumn sunshine away, called darkness into my mind. I spread my fingers with confidence.
She listened to the animal sounds of her sleeping family, the sweet breathings of her little brother, the unconscious growling snores from the room where her parents lay curled in their familiar dents. Her bare feet, silent on the stairs, brought her to the back door, where she put on her wool socks and loafers and tiptoed out.
Some compulsion too strong to deny drew her on as it drew the orange moon through the murk of the clouds. Steadily, inexorably, she made her way to the dead tree in front of the school, thrusting silver into the moonlight. She was all alone and exultant in the freedom of the nighttime world. She knew what she was going to do. She unfolded her paper and cupped the tacks in her hand. One at a time she drove them fiercely into the tree. Her poster gleamed in the moonlight—
A rap on my door. I jumped. The daylight came back.
“Are you warm enough?” said my mother’s voice. I could tell from the sound of it that she was pressing her cheek against the wood, wondering what I was doing.
“I’m fine!” I said. “Plenty warm enough, thanks!” I was in fact shivering, but it wasn’t from the cold, it was from the shock of being ripped from one world into the other.
“It’s such a nice day,” the voice went on, “that we thought we might drive to the fire tower and buy some apples on the way back. The whole family. Are you too busy to come?”
“No, oh no, not at all!” I exclaimed, throwing doilies on top of the typewriter to hide the paper. She might give up nuzzling the door and open it at any moment. “I’ll be right down, I’d love to go, you go on ahead and get ready,” I babbled.
I heard laughter in her voice as she left, calling down the stairs, “Grab your jackets, she’s coming!”
Well, nice, I guess, to be wanted. But I decided right then never to be a pervert. I mean, what do you do if someone comes in while you’re wearing rubber underwear and hitting yourself with a whip? It’s hard enough to cover up a novel. “It’s the mosquitoes,” you’d have to say. “They’re so bad this year!” My knees were shaking a little when I went downstairs, but nobody commented.
The outing was in fact a pretty good one after all. The leaves were still in full tilt and I’d taught myself how to stare at them until the world shimmered and slid away. I climbed about half way up the tower. Lucilla Shark would have gone to the top, but more than halfway up it shook too much for my taste. From there I could see over rows of hills and feel myself delightfully alone. (They looked familiar, those little folks on the ground looked familiar. Had I met them? But they had nothing to do with me.) Queening it in the tower was like sitting in the front of the motor boat in summer, making myself forget that there were people behind me, one of them indeed steering the boat. Solitude, velocity, elevation. Even a Fish in a tank knows some delusive sensations of freedom.
CHAPTER FOUR
After I took my books home on Thursday, I went for a walk alone, hoping that nature would chase certain goblins out of my head, which is funny because I guess in a way the goblins were about nature. But scenery was okay—leaves, so smooth and separate; rocks, leading their dry, civil little lives. I felt better as soon as I was away from campus and down by the empty public buildings, like the Baptist church and the Grange Hall, white-clapboarded and silent. I stopped to lean a minute over the cemetery fence, staring at a front-row stone, 1853, on which an ornamental “Miss,” spotted with lichen, stood about eight inches taller than the name of the dead woman. Bet there was a story behind that, but nobody remembered it any more.
> Had she, like me, wished that people were made out of something more dignified than meat? Would my gravestone say “Miss”? And what was I going to do when I came to the sex part of my novel?
Because, in truth, the whole topic of sex made me fairly nervous. No, not nervous—phobic. My problem went beyond not enjoying the undistinguished grapplings with the boys who walked me home, for I knew that the they, too, were just learning technique. One part of it was my own feelings of monumental ignorance. I dreaded the knowing leers of certain boys younger than I and not generally considered bright, whose specialized knowledge I did not wish to plumb. When anybody told a joke, I tried to sidle out of the room before the punch line, in case it should depend on some double meaning beyond me, in case I should laugh too hard or not enough or in the wrong place, and so give myself away as an ignoramus. When I was younger, thirteen or so, it had taken even less to upset me. I blushed at the very sight or sound of certain unfamiliar words that might prove to be lewd—scrofulous, maturation, pedicure.
The newest gall was a vile-sounding question that the boys shouted around the corridors, like half a riddle. How had it gotten to be so important to me? How could it seem so sinister? I didn’t even know the answer to it, and I was afraid to find out. The boys knew that, and loved it. “What do cowboys like?” they’d ask each other and crack up at an answer that they all understood and didn’t need to voice. Nothing like a silent allusion to make anybody feel like an outsider. But you understand, and the boys certainly understood, that I wanted to be inside even less than I wanted to be outside. So if I leaned out the hall window to look at the autumn, the question would wing up from the boys’ smoker below—“Hey, Fish, what do cowboys like?” They’d laugh to see me pull my head back in. Or it would whisper from the back of the study hall, floating like a malign wraith to my seat—“Cowboys, what do cowboys like?” I’d pretend not to hear. They weren’t mean to me otherwise, not at all, and I guess they thought they were just having fun, but I could feel underneath it some pecking instinct. Worst, from the steps of the boys’ dorm: “Do cowboys eat fish?” I ignored that one hard. Guess I didn’t fool anybody.