In her mind’s eye Marguerite sees a photo her grandmother keeps on the mantel of one antechamber or another. Grandmother-phalanges on her head, grandmother-mouth pinched in distaste, as if Marguerite’s hair were oily. Marguerite is baring her teeth to show that she’s recently lost one. Maybe it’s only that—the drippy, blood-scented gap—that makes Grandmother Webb queasy.
In less than an hour Marguerite is on the Newport Bridge, then traveling quickly overland. Deep, dark Jamestown. What was it like when there were Indians? The truth is she never really bothers to conceive it. She feels a swallow of guilt left over from childhood, from when her grandfather used to ask that question and it would fail to spark her imagination.
It’s a wet night and the carriage lights dance in slicks in her grandparents’ jet driveway. They’ve engaged a valet service. Here comes the hollow-cheeked, wind-breakered teenager: Marguerite gives up her keys and is satisfied to see his disappointment with the crummy little Mazda.
The coat check is an older woman with a wiry smoker’s body and long, varicolored hair who offers to pin Marguerite’s corsage of mistletoe. Her hands work above Marguerite’s heart for a few seconds. “You’ll get a hole in your blouse, dear.” Marguerite should have worn a jacket.
An old geezer, curved like a shrimp, is handing out snowflake goblets.
“Thanks,” Marguerite murmurs.
Already there’s enough collective, alcoholic heat to warm the cavernous miscellany of rooms otherwise known as one of their fair state’s most prominent piles. Marguerite wanders between drink stations with little cast-lit lamps among silent, penguin caterers.
There’s a prevailing sense of time and space in the great first-floor galleries. Time: quite effortlessly Marguerite can feel herself decked out in one of a succession of stiff red dresses that made her look, as a little girl, like a grocery-store poinsettia and never quite matched the sleek, fire-engine red of her grandmother’s sheath and spill of pearls. Marguerite was the one who felt too pink, or maroon, or orange, and it occurs to her now that Grandmother Webb’s social graces are informed by a bracing, innate gracelessness.
Space: she always came alone, without her mother. Suddenly she remembers a rather decaying cousin cornering her, sometime in the boarding school era. “Someone under the age of thirty!” Was it supposed to be a stage whisper? Marguerite knew who she was: Nancy Webb who had changed her name to Naima.
The cousin had hissed, “I’m looking to archive my correspondence with Betty Friedan.”
“You are?” Marguerite had managed. Nancy-Naima was so close Marguerite couldn’t help staring at the puffy peppered skin where the rest of the eyebrow had been before she picked it.
“We were extraordinarily close.” The cousin twitched furtively. “Our letters are extraordinary.”
Her eyes were the same yellow as her teeth. In fact, Nancy-Naima had a strange, collaged face, like a Picasso.
“In my day,” her face was in Marguerite’s face now, and Marguerite breathed shallowly, “feminists were girls who preferred typing and answering phones to raising children.” She ended on a furious note and Marguerite took a step backward.
Of course, there were cousins who, according to Marguerite’s grandmother, had “garden-variety” mental debilitations, but mostly, said Grandmother Webb dryly, they simply adored their cocktails. Indeed it was with witchy glee that her grandmother composed a punch by dumping out the year’s end of the liquor cabinet.
Nancy-Naima seemed to hold her highball in her fingernails.
Marguerite had excused herself abruptly, swiping a beaded glass of white wine from a side table. As she turned back for a guilty half second, it seemed that her cousin had two sad fish eyes on one side of her profile.
She can’t say she didn’t used to wonder about her father. Was her grandmother implicating him when she said “garden variety”? Marguerite had no reason to think so. Still. She used to imagine him wandering among lush, chest-high sunflowers, leeks, tomatoes. But she was never a prying child.
Now she lifts her neat little vodka. She rounds a paneled corner. There’s her grandmother’s long spine in that siren color. Her immobile upsweep: for a second Marguerite thinks she has grown even taller. There’s her throttle of laughter. It will never do to be caught skulking around corners. Grandmother Webb no longer has her guests announced, but she’d certainly prefer it.
Suddenly there’s a light touch between Marguerite’s shoulders. She jumps, sparking. She whips around before she can censor her electrical anticipation.
It’s a tuxedoed caterer, steering her off a collision course with the punch bowl.
A weakness of character that she can’t imagine the Indians, can’t even remember if they were Wampanoag or Narragansett. She’s seen their tools and replica dwellings. So why, then, does she keep imagining her mother?
3
Six out of nine students present, variously propped around the U of tables in the otherwise barren basement classroom. Webb Hall. Marguerite’s own lineage. Not even a map on the wall or a second-rate portrait of a third-rate university president. Jonathan Hughes with his cheeks in his hands, his lips a moribund colorless gelatin color, there really is something rubbery about his comfort level. The delphic incest of him bringing her coffee.
Her lecture is the new non-lecture lecture. It’s full of inviting pauses, collegial ellipses, and pop culture references. The idea is to get the students to think they play a part in their really very contemporary educations. Why? At least, answers her advisor, the new non-answer answer, this must be the posture of perennial PhD-candidate pseudo-professors like you, Marguerite. Why are her lecture notes wrinkled and damp like bed sheets after passing out on a bender?
The self-proclaimed logger’s son from the state of Washington is paring his nails. Jonathan is fiddling with a paperclip. The same way a paperclip gets metal fatigue and loses its squeezingness, so there’s love-of-life fatigue, and in Marguerite’s case it’s called a hangover. She is the paperclip, she has completely lost form and function.
Full disclosure? She’s been a graduate student for fourteen semesters. She knows how to spin her lecture, all sophistry, like cotton candy. All of a sudden the clever bit of metal comes spinning across the table. She stops talking and Jonathan blushes.
She has a requisite appointment with her advisor after class, before he heads off for his Parisian sabbatical cycle. His wife is a translator of considerable repute; and Swedish. She scoops up all the prizes.
Their last sabbatical—Marguerite has heard her advisor call it their “tour of duty”—Marguerite was the protégé-housesitter, as if her youth would rub off on their sheets and towels. They had decimated their party stash of ten-dollar-a-bottle cases, but left, of course, the library: rather famously, there were bookshelves built into every room of the otherwise neighbor-hoody, gambrel-roofed residence. Lintel bookshelves, bathroom bookshelves, and where the cheap wine should have been, bookshelves in the basement. Marguerite was charged with emptying the dehumidifier, a three-gallon trough of chilly water daily diverted from those garment-like pages. She dumped it in the front yard, and by the end of that year she’d drowned the massed periwinkle.
Now Marguerite spies some pages of hers on her advisor’s desk, his heavy hand upon them like a book weight. She braces herself for the well-worn quips regarding the duration of her “process;” beneath her advisor’s eyes are shadows like standing water.
“I’ve got the Faculty Club in seven minutes,” says her advisor. She closes her ears and opens her eyes to the monkey-brown hairs on the back of his hand and the wide, horned thumbnail.
She imagines him eating whole fish in Paris—lifting the feathery spine from the white flesh, or his wife doing it for him. In profile, her advisor’s Adam’s apple is almost greater than his chin. Marguerite smiles grimly. She sees inside the mind-chamber. Tall, white-robed sentinels of thought. As tall as boxwood giraffes. As tall as those steel-plated creatures in Mr. Goff’s dinosaur encyclopedia.
Suddenly it’s terribly vivid. Their cruel eyes and cauliflowered noses...
The earth was immeasurable. It stopped where the herd of Brachiosaurs stopped. Smooth earless heads and Mona Lisa smiles.
It stopped only in their imaginations.
Where was Quetzalcoatlus flying?
Was it more of the same or was it different?
In the artists’ renditions they always appear to be enjoying their ignorance.
When they lay down on their sides their bellies must have poured out around them.
It’s dark again and she pulls the blinds on the blank side yard of her building. She’ll get the blinds in the back, on the parking lot, later.
The dinosaur encyclopedia cracks and out falls a purple mimeographed handout, some teacher’s ovoid handwriting. Out falls a feather-colored leaf, out falls a snapshot. Marguerite and her mother with bare legs, bare toes dug into the sand, the slant of the sand down to saltwater. They’re both wearing shorts hardly bigger than underwear. They’re looking straight into the future. Primitive, two-dimensional, as if their shared code of self-consciousness has been shattered.
Marguerite pours herself a vodka. What’s new. She disembowels a drawer for hidden—from herself—cigarettes. Conversely, Grandfather Webb likes to call water vodka.
She pours again. She’s as heavy-handed as a dinosaur. There’s a lot of ice-yellow callus. Like topaz. In fact, this dinosaur thing serves all her purposes.
Fifty to one hundred and forty-five million years ago huge bones clanked and thudded over huge earth. Like prisoners in chains. Not much has changed. She’s still chained to her vision of the past: its terrible innocence.
She has the foresight to dump the ice and vodka mixture into a promotional gas station travel mug that is so ugly no one would imagine it held such a beautiful liquid. A private joke. She drinks it down and then replenishes it before she lurches out of her apartment. The night is as cold as a reptile. She means cold-blooded. There’s a surging sound in her ears—imagine if a single ocean wave could sustain itself like a highway. She fits herself behind the wheel of the self-deprecating little Mazda—95 South. The exits burst on the scene only to evaporate. Atwells, Thurber, she possibly blacks out around the airport. Did she mention the darkness? The ground falls away and the muddy air presses closer.
Up and over Jamestown. Up over the threshold to Newport. The off ramp curves around the dark cemetery. The streetlights are unto themselves, car headlights are mixed with an equal part of darkness, there’s a dense fog that could turn to snow at any moment. Marguerite turns onto Maple Street. The house and the cottage are dark. It’s still Christmas party season. She pulls into what used to be Andrade’s Liquor. She asks herself if she thinks she’s some secret agent of autobiography.
She has a hard time attributing the car in the single gravel parking spot to Mr. Goff, although she can barely see it. The dark seems to bleed up the house seamlessly from the sidewalk. The harder she stares the less she can see. There’s no Rhody flag flying its single wing off the ledge of granite. But come on, Marguerite. In this darkness, the gold anchor would be invisible.
Her mother’s maiden name was Dinah Holly. She changed both names when she married. Diana, as she now called herself, may have come from humble people—remarked Grandmother Webb, blinking her bald eyes rhetorically—but her beauty was extravagant. Diana’s mother was a dark German. Her father had fought the Germans at the age of forty, taken a German bride at forty-five, and failed to teach her English. Diana said once that her father was an early environmentalist. At least a preservationist; a Californian, ravaged and scarred by cancerous sunspots. Marguerite imagined that if you’d seen the three Hollys together you’d have thought trolls had kidnapped a baby goddess.
At seventeen Dinah received a scholarship to an East Coast university. Did that university—Marguerite’s grandparents’ alma mater, Marguerite’s too, several times over if she ever finishes—know, somehow, that Marguerite’s mother’s hair was the lustrous black of a polished plum in an expensive Christmas box? That her lips scrolled like the prow of a friendly ship when she smiled?
Of course they didn’t. Dinah Holly was summarily brilliant, and she had written in her application that she wanted to be an economist.
Her father drove her across the country in his landscaping truck with an army blanket laid across the bench seat. The repressed environmentalist. Marguerite pictures him both pained and proud when California earth blew out of the bed of the truck in every state they passed through.
When they reached the college—university, Dinah corrected her father softly—the green quads like a chain of lakes were teeming with young people, pink and silver. The trees, elms and maples, ginkgos and magnolias, were crowned with gold where they touched the polished sky. Their shadows were cool and moist, mushrooms made fairy rings where the day before students had flopped down with their notebooks. There was a buoyant mist that smelled faintly of the bays of the Atlantic and the shallow salt river that, Dinah’s ogling roommate informed her, was as moody as a dorm full of coeds.
Dinah watched her fellow students veering away from their parents. She didn’t miss her own, but she had a strange sense of missing herself, as if for her parents...as if, even before her daughter came along, Dinah Holly knew what it felt like to be a lost parent.
Some of the college girls twirled the ends of their hair in class or took off their glasses and put their cool fingers over their eyelids. All the girls crossed their legs, and, despite her parents—they must have, indeed, missed her—Dinah followed. Her hair had magnificent reddish highlights under a lamp or in the sun and other girls commented, even crowed over it, as if beauty were collective. She had dark freckles and narrow eyes that sparkled when she was nervous or happy.
In the first few weeks of that first semester a young man caught Dinah’s notice. He was tall with broad shoulders and a lantern jaw, but Dinah thought he probably wouldn’t be a sportsman. He had light, flickering eyes: she couldn’t see him at the dull repetitions of a ballgame. Besides, there was something loose in the way he held his body that simultaneously repulsed and thrilled her. He had a despotic mouth that turned down at the corners when he smiled.
He seemed oddly old-fashioned in his starched shirts, but then he would turn, say, after tucking his pendulous necktie between the buttons, and his eyes were phosphorus.
He had no compunction about rising and interrupting the lecture. No doubt he was far beyond the callow shrugs of his compatriots. The professor was a small man with flaps of skin for eyelids who addressed him by name, as if he were someone famous. Indeed he had the same name as the hall, Webb Hall, the same name as the horse-faced men in the dark, greasy portraits in the foyer.
Dinah wouldn’t have breathed a word of her interest. She had no idea that such a whisper would draw other girls closer. Neither did she send any loose-lipped letters to California.
One morning she arrived for class early. The carved doors of Webb Hall were so heavy that, before class, a slight Christ-figure of an Azorean janitor tied them open against the wrought-iron railing. This morning he hadn’t been around yet. The doors were not locked and the large brass ring was slightly oily when she gripped it. Inside, the windowless foyer was a leathery brownish black, and for a moment Dinah had the dizzying feeling of pitching forward.
Sometimes it was hard to tell if you were really awake in such darkness.
She noticed a concentration of dark as tall as a grandfather clock in the farthest corner. But before she had time to be frightened, there was a voice, wryly sympathetic. “No need to worry.”
“Hello?” said Dinah.
He leaned against the inner door and a dull shaft sanded with grains of dust split the foyer.
He held out his hand and Dinah was aware of a tangy, animal smell. Her own body? She tried to back away, embarrassed. But he caught her, suddenly playful, as if they’d known each other since childhood. His hands on her bare arms were a uniform, cool texture. He spoke c
almly. “You’re early.”
Of course she was. She was never at the right moment. She was all the way from California. She would soon forget her parents. Her father’s heart eroded as an old canyon, her mother’s German customs at Christmas and Easter.
Inside the hall, the windows were narrow and cloudy, pasted with a decoupage of the wings of insects. The air was dense and chilly. Dinah thought of the gravel pits she visited with her father. He was forced to do roads, as a landscaper. If she closed her eyes she could still feel the truck jounce over the lot like pioneer hardtack.
They sat together. It would have been even stranger if they didn’t, thought Dinah. She opened her book. Silence. Sitting still was rushing forward. He clasped his hands behind his head and tipped his chair back.
Soon enough students began to filter in, first the oddballs and the studious, then toward the sound of the bell the coffee-drinkers and chatterboxes. The professor announced his arrival with the groan of an interior door so that before he reached the podium the hall had fallen silent. Dinah had not managed to read a single sentence. She knew James Webb was watching her. She turned and his chair struck the slate as if from the impact of her gaze upon him. She licked her lips. Something smelled acrid like fresh urine.
There they were, in his lap: a pair of hand-sewn, deerskin driving gloves.
4
From an early age Marguerite understood the basic premise. Grandmother Webb must have hinted, and the cousins were at once blunt and ferrety. The scholarship girl from the gaudy West and the aristocratic, old-money Easterner.
“We would have been friends,” Marguerite ventured, once, shyly. She meant if they’d been girls together. And then she was embarrassed. As if the fact that Diana was her mother was a strictly benevolent coincidence.
Clothed, Female Figure Page 20