Clothed, Female Figure

by Kirstin Allio

  Sort of on the sly, she’s developed a mild antagonism toward her students. The extroverts from New York and New Jersey; the male and female paper dolls from Hong Kong with British boarding-school accents; the anachronistic loners from Vermont or Nova Scotia; this semester, the singular auditor with virile red beard, woodsman of Washington.

  And Jonathan. She’s had grad students before, she’s had “adult learners” from the “broader community.” He seems different. She tries to put her finger on it. He’s absurdly confident for someone so unmanly. His sanctimonious enthusiasm: he’d be an ideal puppy, with a highly developed understanding of humankind’s nobility and a gift for pairing his owner’s scattered shoes. She can’t seem to stop herself. She imagines how effortlessly he must have fooled his mother into thinking he was a sensitive child.

  Her dingy apartment has an under-the-stairs pantry. She ducks in and grabs a bottle by the neck, snaps the perforated seal. She can take care of herself, it’s basic. Besides, vodka is a lot cheaper than therapy. A gluggy pour, at the beginning of a bottle. She distributes her empties among the neighbors’ recycling; her dear old landlord of the grape harvest needn’t be incited to judge her. If she saved the bottles up for a week the number would be alarming, but she knows better. She’s thinking about Jonathan. His silky hair—as if his hair hasn’t gone through puberty.

  In her mind’s eye she stares at him, enthralled, dumbly. Those dumb, beast-like dinosaurs. She knows they felt deeply. She knows Mr. Goff did, and she knows her mother. She pours again. The ice cubes rattle and bleed.

  Ginkgo leaves turned the yellow of wet paint and Dinah thought the New England fall was a beginning rather than an ending. Boys stepped aside to cup flames for their cigarettes after a late afternoon lecture and girls flashed their white, cramped legs. Dinah had already purchased a powder-blue wool dress coat that she carried over her forearm. She could pay the department store in monthly installments from her work-study. The early evening was staged with low indigo clouds that tamped down the sunset.

  The hall had been terribly overheated. One of Dinah’s new acquaintances had wondered aloud, indignantly, if they were supposed to be ashamed they were bored, beautiful, between eighteen and twenty, in ribbed tights and lambswool sweaters. In fact Dinah was ashamed, of her powder-blue coat, of her father watering jewel-green lawns in a powder-earth climate. She imagined him at the window of his truck: the skinned hills and the giant cloverleafs where there were once pocket neighborhoods. There was a white patch on Dinah’s mother’s cheek that suggested the skin was peeling painfully like a root vegetable.

  Just then, as if he had known she was pushing those thoughts away at that very moment, James Webb signaled from under a lamppost.

  He had a floppy haircut, dark hair that naturally tousled. He wore pressed khakis and a cricket player’s green-bordered V-neck. Between his thumb and pointer smoldered what Dinah was sure was a Camel cigarette. She broke away from her clutch of girlfriends.

  “When my father takes your arm,” James whispered, taking Dinah’s, “you are convinced that you, too, shall have crushed mint in your rum drink.” He laughed in her ear. “My father is the kind of man who plans to die no matter what he does.” He paused. “Do you like that?”

  They walked briskly, in unison, as if they were in an old movie. “You should see the cronies. You really should, Dinah.” He made a face. She hoped he hadn’t heard her breathing. “Mooning around the club like it’s the bedroom of a longstanding mistress.”

  Behind them, she thought, the entire sky packed up its colors.

  “Stabbing their jellied eggs, towels like rabbit stoles around their shoulders—” And then, almost curious: “I like that you don’t know all this.”

  He seemed to be examining her, but he smiled to himself, Dinah noticed.

  It’s all in Marguerite’s head. Gone to her head; if she doesn’t eat something soon she’ll have a splitter before she even gets tipsy. Long before she gets sober. When was the last time she got “tipsy”? Not only that her interest in Jonathan isn’t reciprocated, but that it may not be in her heart at all—wasn’t she talking about her headache? And she’s pretty sure she doesn’t want to bed down with him. Still, she forces a handful of salted almonds and bolts out the door before she can overthink it. She’s heading back to campus for an eight o’clock reading.

  The car is so cold her blood feels glassy. Her metatarsals, in last-minute flats, are actually throbbing. It’s possible she’s obsessed with the fact that the vehicle doesn’t even begin to warm up in two miles. The steering is stiff, the chill of the grave from the dashboard vents, the engine sounds like a cello under a frozen blanket.

  Creative writing department readings are generally held in an inhospitable, drafty black box on the newer, uglier, southern end of campus. Marguerite parks and fords the dark street. She affects her Brahmin stalk, she need not recognize people. All-weather smokers choke the sidewalk entrance and right away she sees him. He doesn’t smoke, but he’s talking animatedly to a skinny girl with an enormous nest of dreadlocks. Frozen baby birds in there, Marguerite imagines. The girl has hunched shoulders like a raven.

  “Marguerite!” he calls out instantly. Happily, if not heartily, and she’s forced to wave, then join him and the sullen nest-head.

  In the skirt of light from the propped-open door of the black box, Jonathan’s own coat of hair is loose and shiny. His mouth hangs slightly open. What does he see? She imagines herself, a hereditarily lean twenty-nine-year-old, architected by patricians, finished in graduating tones of blond like veneer samples. When she’s drinking she looks like a sunset. He has a plastic cup of wine—could he be nervous before his reading?

  A stage manager in Army Navy pokes her head out and points to Jonathan. Marguerite finds herself suddenly deflated. It takes her by surprise, she hates to see him going, and she doesn’t know if she can stand in the cold of the theater, or sit, as the case may be, through the whole reading, until the inflammatory wine at the end, and crackers.

  But the girl with the dreads is holding the door for her, and to escape now would take an effort. She finds a seat at the top of the bleachers. The reading starts almost immediately.

  “Hi,” Jonathan greets the audience.

  “Hiya,” someone replies from the bosom front of the theater.

  He smiles appreciatively. “I wanted to start—” He stalls a little with his papers. “I have this story I’ve been playing around with.” Renews his smile. He may have practiced without exactly knowing he was practicing. Once again she has an image of him in his bathrobe, and she doesn’t need any literary critics or psychologists to tell her she finds him vulnerable. Almost grudgingly she admits to herself that his delivery seems natural.

  “A story,” he says, “about my m-mother.”

  He laughs at himself, his stutter. Then he looks up more carefully from his pages. “She died when I was seven.”

  Marguerite’s ears are sort of ringing. Her coat is stunningly hot and heavy. Suddenly she’s aware of making an enormous amount of noise when she tries to free herself from it. All at once, as if in the heat of the moment, she realizes what a cheap coat it is, a faux ski jacket, she’s even let it get stained, she’s not a child. She didn’t see it coming. His mother. And here she is hunkered in the back, half drunk, cheaply jacketed. No way she’s looking around her. It would be unbearable to catch someone’s eye and have to make a sympathetic expression regarding Jonathan.

  He continues. “I have this photograph of her.” He raises his eyes, shoeless, puppy, velvet, as if the audience can see in his eyes the photograph. “It’s captioned by her mother.”

  He arranges his voice in a documentary voiceover. “At eighteen Leslie Klaveness left home for New York City.” He can’t help smiling. “I always loved the kind of bittersweet third person. It made me think my mother must’ve had a close friendship with her mother. The same sense of humor. You could say I was a little jealous.” He pauses. “In the photo, though, m
y mother is so serious. She’s pulled to one side,” and he shows the audience with his rather slight body how massively cumbersome the luggage. “There’s this heavy shadow over her chest that never fails to remind me of an X-ray vest.” Then he shrugs as if to say, how can he help himself? “It always strikes me that when you’re eighteen, twenty more years of life seem like plenty.”

  Marguerite lets out a little puff of air, she can’t help it. Are they to take it she died at thirty-eight? Marguerite would never offer up her mother. She can’t seem to regulate her temperature. She’s cold again, and she pulls the noisy jacket against her lap, finds the pockets.

  “After college I went to New York,” says Jonathan. “I had this little inheritance from her. I rented an apartment on West Eleventh Street. I thought it was a pretty quiet and tree-lined block for my money.”

  He pauses, he gets a few laughs; he must, of course, have a whole bevy of admirers in the audience.

  “The defining feature,” he says, “and let me tell you, I knew I was unconscionably lucky to have found an apartment with any f-feature—was a marble fireplace. It looked like tapioca.” A hint of writerliness. Marguerite recoils.

  “My father sent me a package of my mother’s artifacts. I had always meant you to have these. It was so novelistic. There was a day book, and a pair of tortoise combs, which should have gone to my sister, and a bundle of early letters from Barb McLaughlin—childhood friend? To Leslie, my dad had scribbled. All the envelopes had been discarded.”

  He pauses significantly. Marguerite has to admit she’s poised. “To save space?” says Jonathan. “The envelopes that would have had her address on them.”

  He takes a sip from the same plastic cup, which now appears to be half filled with water. “Anyway,” he says, “this is how I wanted to start my reading. With this letter. I—I’m going to recite it,” he offers humbly.

  “Dear Leslie,

  “I enjoyed your charming description of the rooms on West Eleventh Street overlooking the Jewish cemetery. A “pocket,” as you call it! Of course I did not know that the Jewish people kept their own. Me, I’d prefer to lie in a quiet valley. I’m sure you are very fortunate to have a landlady like Bernice, whom you mentioned, looking out for you. Although it is hard from my point of view to imagine any “dog-eared Bohemian” in charge of an entire building! You know how I, the most practical girl in Pennsylvania, can hardly keep up with the housework.

  “A marble fireplace! Well you should ask Bernice to be sure about the chimney before you go drying your hose or, as you say, burning your papers. Send me your papers, instead, Les! I’ll keep them for you until you’re famous!

  “We did have a chimney fire here because of nesting swallows...

  “You see?” says Jonathan, sliding his glasses up with a knuckle. Even from her nosebleed seat Marguerite can see he’s gotten sweaty.

  He leans forward. “Picture me setting the letter down beside me. I’m sitting on the bare wood floor, I have no idea at all how to obtain furniture. I barely know how to feed myself. I don’t have to go to the single west window, across from the fireplace, to see my mother’s view.” One last pause. “I’ve already spent hours looking down on that pocket cemetery.”

  5

  Dinah Holly stared at the green and white linoleum, every stain obvious in the harsh glare of the university-run coffee shop. James maneuvered his chair so he could stretch his legs out beneath the little white table. He squinted at her and her heart raced like a rabbit’s. Her hands were warm from the thick white coffee mug—he had bought her a hot chocolate.

  Yes, driving gloves; and at twenty-two he kept martini makings in the kitchen of his off-campus apartment. His walnut hair, his cigars, his gentleman’s manners juxtaposed with an adorable, adolescent thuggishness...his father was the president of a bank with branches that overarched the Eastern Seaboard, he told her. His family’s “summer cottage” was eleven bedrooms and a mansard roof, high hedges and a whole Stonehenge of chimneys.

  Dinah imagined herself grazing on seaward lawns, twirling batons of crabstick among those sloshy Daughters of the Revolution (James called them drakes and tomcats) with inverted lips and dresses as thick as linen tablecloths. She loved the unctuous smell of boxwood, mothballs, and the Atlantic.

  James shared his apartment. Cousin Henry was possibly a graduate student, possibly not this semester. He had the same thick roll of hair as James, the same wafer-white chest with rosebud nipples. They had the same compulsion to clear their throats, which every time made Dinah start, but Henry Webb had a shallow laugh like a shale shelf, three inches of water.

  His neck was skinnier and his hands, with nails the same rosebud pink, were smaller than James’s, as if they could pick locks, poke things into knot-holes. He had a weakling’s bag of tricks, James said, and the unpitiable nature of an asthmatic. At the beach club, Henry had been known to spit into the beverages of cousins who beat him at tennis, examining the foam of his own saliva before handing the concoction over.

  The three of them drove around on weekends. They made fun of the provincial surroundings, the mom-and-pops, small dirt roads that squirreled through the forest. James and Henry recounted beach club antics from last summer or the summer before. They declared that mental illness was rampant, genetic.

  “Our grandparents!” cried Henry, the natural braggart, “were second cousins!”

  They brought any kind of liquor. They drank it out of the bottle until Henry took Dinah aside and insinuated that she, being the girl, was expected to provide the ice and chalice. James drove steadily when he was drunk; when he was sober his driving was a mean streak. He’d go for miles in the wrong lane, until something happened to Dinah’s equilibrium and she lightly fainted.

  Sometimes, at Henry’s suggestion, they swerved off the road and walked for a while into the forest. Henry jumped about laterally as if in tennis, and was always drawn to the sound of water. The woods had ample veins of it.

  When they came to a pool in a stream or a Guinness-thick beaver pond they sat down to rest and James eyed her until she couldn’t stand it. She rose self-consciously and went to him. Sometimes they had forgotten the liquor in the car, they were so drunk when they left the car in a ditch or a pull-off, and then the sound of the forest gradually became scratchy and close and James’s desire for her drained like color from his face while her longing for him increased. He pushed her away and Henry watched carefully.

  She could never quite figure where they grew up. They laughed: the beach club, New York, dark Satanic boarding school, and “Damnit, Henry, do you remember that time in Paris?”

  It seemed to Dinah that there was no layering of time between generations. The grandparents were superimposed on the grandkids, the given names were the same, all the Jameses and Henrys, and everyone lobster pink, Lamarckian, from summers on the Atlantic.

  James would always kiss her goodbye when they dropped her at her dormitory, but if he kissed too much, his lips became covered with something like flour. Dinah’s were chapped, too, from the unfamiliar furnace heat. In fact her bottom lip had split in the night, and she’d woken up to the hissing and clanking radiator, the taste of blood, smell of iron.

  He took her to the beach club in the wrong season. The place was nearly deserted, and Dinah imagined the ruins of a Roman settlement: actors in sandals, dusty nubs of stables, a snaggle-toothed tower against a rougy sunset. She told him—shyly, sparkling—and he was pleased as any tutor.

  The foreign help had long been visa’d back—in James’s father’s day they were Irish, now they were all from Eastern Europe. Relishingly James described for her the Slavic girls with tight scalps and the springy boy gymnasts occasionally called upon to fill in a game of tennis; he caricatured for her the matriarch of the next-door cabana, breeder of Shetland ponies, with a forelock of thick strawberry-blond hair absolutely unaffected by rogue coastal weather; and her ponies, sulky dwarves with oversized teeth their owner called “bone structure.”

 
; The cabanas were closed and they looked like nothing more than a row of public restrooms. The sea was heavy after a storm, mud brown, churned up and hollow-smelling like a rotted-out tree trunk. The sand had been scoured and then pummeled with rocks and there were ugly, soupy rivers running widthwise.

  James showed Dinah the hedges of honeysuckle that extended to marsh grass behind the cabanas. He led her along the rabbit paths; had she ever tasted honeysuckle? You pulled the stamen through the slender horn. Early summer, he smiled apologetically. Each flower gave up a bead of sweet, lymph-colored liquid.

  Did she know horsetail? Did she know he had loved her since the dinosaurs?

  The wind was like sandpaper against the cement boardwalk. As if he were brought to his knees by it, James said, “Don’t go back for Christmas.”

  Once Diana was a parent chaperone on a school field trip. The maritime nature center was close by; nonetheless, the fourth graders were required to board the nauseating midmorning school bus. There were presentations on pollution, ospreys, oysters, whales. There was a booth for listening to the mating calls of certain seabirds, and there was a life-sized model of a right whale.

  The right whale was so called because it was the right whale to harvest. Diana wasn’t like the other mothers, who read in uninflected voices. Even the teachers edged closer to listen. Her voice was rushy and melodic, the same as when she told Marguerite stories in their loft over ginger ales and gin and tonics, that narrow ribbon of dark between them.

  The right whale always swam against the shore, Marguerite’s mother continued. Ideal for the whaler: no fortnight upon fortnight leaving wife, children, and difficult mistress. Its blubber, melted and boiled, was ninety barrels of oil. It had baleen like fine dry grass before a fire. Every part had a use except its heart, which was four hundred pounds, read Diana.

  Afterward they ate their bagged lunches in the sand and crispy seaweed. Not only her friends, but classmates Marguerite had never spoken to clustered around her beautiful mother. Marguerite had to make space for them.