Why on earth couldn’t she be? What more could she possibly want?
Rachel remembered agonizing as a child, wondering if another baby would make Mama happy. Or was it her fault? If she were different, more obedient and proper, like the demure little girl with the watering can. Would Mama be happy then?
“Eat your breakfast, dear,” Sylvie admonished gently. “It’s getting cold.”
“I’m not very hungry.”
Sylvie’s face tightened. “Are you feeling all right?”
Here we go again. “I’m fine, Mama. It’s just that I didn’t get in until almost two; then when I finally got to bed, Portia wanted to crawl in with me. I think she missed me.” She peeked under the table at the fat black semi-Labrador retriever at her feet, now snoring contentedly. She tickled Portia lightly with her big toe, feeling a rush of affection for this mongrel she’d rescued as a pup. Then, glancing back up at Sylvie, Rachel saw her mother still watching her anxiously. “Honestly, Mama. I’m healthy as a horse.”
God, will she ever stop? My whole life, every skinned knee and scraped elbow; anyone would’ve thought it was epilepsy or cancer. Poor Mama. I’d come home bruised and scratched from climbing a tree or falling off my bike, and it would be she who would cry.
Rachel found herself remembering the time she’d gotten lost outside of Saks around Christmas time. She must’ve been five, scarcely big enough to push the revolving door. Mama had been looking at some stuff at a front counter, and Rachel had heard bells, jingling Santa bells from outside on the street. Just a peek, she had thought. She’d run outside for a minute, and then back in before Mama even noticed. Except there were just too many people. She got swept up and carried along with them like a leaf on a rushing brook. She couldn’t work herself free until almost a block away. And then it was snowing, fat flakes like cotton balls swirling down, [70] making it hard to see. By the time she got back inside, her shoes were soaked right through to her socks, and Mama was nowhere in sight.
Rachel never forgot that moment, that awful sinking panic. Even at that age she wasn’t scared for herself, but for Mama. She knew how frightened Mama would be that she’d disappeared. Rachel darted in and out among shoppers, holding back tears and searching up every aisle for her mother.
After she’d tried all the counters, she’d gone back outside. Maybe Mama was looking for her out there. She’d stood next to Santa for a while, watching him ring his bell, and people put money in his pot, and then a nice policeman asked if she was lost. When she told him she was, he waited there with her, and then a green and white car came, and another policeman drove her home.
Sylvie’s face as they came in the front door was burned into Rachel’s memory. The tissue-paper color of her skin, the puffy redness of her eyes. And how she’d trembled, dragging Rachel into her embrace, squeezing her so tightly Rachel could hardly breathe. And all the while, Mama sobbing, touching her all over, her hair, her arms, as if to make sure she really was there.
“It’s okay, Mama,” Rachel had tried comforting her, crying a little herself, burying her face in the sweet silkiness of her mother’s hair. “Don’t cry. Please. See, I didn’t get lost. Not really. I found my way home too, all by myself. Well, the policeman helped, but I knew the way. Mama? Mama?”
When did she first learn that other girls’ mothers weren’t like hers? Odd, how they dressed like Mama, had the same hairdos, and shopped in the same stores, though most of them weren’t nearly as stylish.
Mama was more fun, for one thing. She made everything they did together seem special, important. Other mothers took their little girls to the park, to puppet shows. Mama took her to museums, to mysterious tombs with gilded sarcophagi from ancient Egypt; and rooms full of wonderful paintings and artifacts, a whole Japanese village carved from a single ivory tusk, paintings of plump naked women and winged cherubs, intricate beaded purses sewn by Eskimos. And Mama, holding her hand, explaining each thing, making it all feel like a miracle.
Yet her friends’ mothers were much more relaxed in a way. [71] They applied Mercurochrome and Band-Aids to their kids’ skinned knees in the same way they might butter a piece of toast. They yelled sometimes, and fretted. But if you were fifteen minutes late from school, or came home with a bloody nose, they didn’t fall apart.
Yet, oddly, in a real crisis, Mama held fast. Rachel remembered, after Daddy’s heart attack, when Mama found her sobbing by his hospital bed, how Mama had taken her firmly by the arm and steered her outside into the corridor. She’d been stunned to see Mama’s green eyes flashing, not with tears, but anger.
“I won’t have it!” Sylvie had spoken sharply to her, the first time ever. “You carrying on like that, as if he were dying. He’ll get better. He’ll be fine. And for heaven’s sake, before you go back in there go to the washroom, splash cold water on your face. I won’t have Daddy wake up and think we’re sitting shivah for him.”
Yes, Mama was a mystery in some ways. Somewhere Rachel had read that silk threads woven into the same thickness as a steel cable would be stronger. Mama was like that, stronger than anyone suspected ... maybe even herself.
“Does it mean that much to you, me going to this party?” Rachel asked, watching Mama lift her cup to her lips, wanting so badly, even now, to please her, make that faint sadness behind her eyes disappear.
Sylvie gently put down her cup. “Oh, Rachel, it’s not for me. I want it for you, don’t you see? When I was growing up ...” A faraway look crept into her eyes, but she pulled herself short. “Anyway, it wasn’t so bad. Just ... lonely. Yes, a girl your age should be involved, have young men calling on her.”
Rachel laughed. “Young men don’t call on girls anymore, Mama.” They ball them.
She thought of Gil, and felt cold. She saw it was raining outside, heavy drops tapping against the windowpanes. Thanksgiving was a few days away, then Chanukah. She’d bought a great scarf for Gil, cashmere, a soft heathery blue.
Am I in love with him? But she couldn’t remember ever melting inside, the way you were supposed to, no, not even in the beginning. Charmed by him, yes, the way he laughed at her silly puns, and then came back with better ones of his own. His absentminded way of dressing, a leather bomber jacket and argyle socks, or a Brooks [72] Brothers jacket with paint-spattered jeans and scuffy Weejuns. The clever cartoons he drew in her notebook when they studied together.
But he was so superorganized, so ... goddamned pompous, a Haverford pre-med and he was already boning up on his specialty, thoracic surgery.
Rachel felt herself growing angry, at him, but then at herself.
Hey, it’s not his fault you’re frigid.
She thought back to when she first began dating, the summer she turned sixteen, out at the beach house in Deal. She had liked it when Buck Walker kissed her; it gave her a nice warm feeling. And sometimes when he, and then Arnie Shapiro, went further. Then, at some unknown point, it just ... stopped. The good feelings, the warm flutters. She would be aware of the hand on her breast, or between her legs, but the feeling was ordinary, no more exciting than being rubbed by a washcloth or bar of soap. She would find herself bit by bit drawing away. Not physically at first. Mentally. As if she had stepped outside her body and were hovering overhead, a ghostly sports commentator. Howard Cosell of the seduction scene.
And now things are really warming up, folks. He’s off, he’s running ... he’s—oh boy, look at him go—closing in on the goal line. He’s got that bra unhooked, and he’s working on her Dipper now. He’s really breathing hard, folks, he looks all done in. But, wait, something’s wrong. She’s backing off, she’s pushing his hand away ... she’s—let’s get a close-up of this if we can—intercepted him at the goal line. Tough break ...
She’d heard from boys, and from her friends, that a lot of girls cried at the last minute. Begged off on account of religion, morality, their period, wanting to save it for their husband, or just plain scared. So why, with her, was it the giggles?
She would swear to he
rself again and again that this time she would not, but then the giggles would start and she could not stop herself.
No boy, she’d discovered, could keep it up in the face of laughter.
She thought about last night, Gil driving her home from Bryn Mawr. He’d slipped off the turnpike, and before she quite knew where they were, he’d parked alongside the boathouse on Lake Carnegie in Princeton. It was dusk, the sky mauve, the water dark and still. It was too chilly to sit outside for long, but Gil insisted. [73] Organized as ever, he’d come prepared with a six-pack of Lowenbrau, a big bag of potato chips, and an old quilted mattress pad.
Then Rachel vaguely remembered clothes getting unbuttoned, feeling looped, wanting to pee more than anything. Then Gil’s zipper was stuck, and he got very red in the face and started swearing. Suddenly the whole thing seemed unbearably ludicrous, fumbling around in the freezing cold, Gil cursing with the pain of a doubled-over hard-on.
The giggles had just erupted, like beer fizzing over the top of a can.
Wiping her eyes, weak and ashamed when she’d finally managed to subdue them, she told Gil, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”
Gil, no longer tugging at his zipper, his lower lip edging out in a pout, seemed transformed from the young Gregory Peck she’d once felt attracted to, to a petulant little boy whose favorite toy had just been snatched away.
“Oh, I think you do. I think you know very well,” he said in an injured tone. “This isn’t the first time, as we both know. And what I’d like to know, what I’d really like to know, is what it is about me you find so goddamn funny.”
But he looked so comical, with his face all screwed up, and his hair full of foxtails; and then the lake water lapping against the shore in the darkness, making her want to pee worse than ever. Again, she felt the urge to giggle rising in her.
“It’s not you, Gil,” she gasped. “It’s me. I get this way when I’m nervous. You know, like people who laugh at funerals. I get all tied up in knots inside, and then it ... it all just bursts out somehow.” Funeral? Oh God, she thought, what a comparison.
But his mouth went slack, his anger fading a little. “Goddammit, Rachel. What did you think this was? A quick roll in the hay? Satisfying some itch? What are you so nervous about? I love you, goddammit.”
Then the giggles, with a demonic life of their own, began clawing their way up her throat. She bit her tongue to hold them.
But his declaration, thank God, had shown her a way out, clear as an exit sign flashing on in the dark.
“I’m sorry, Gil,” she managed to say, tears filling her eyes—[74] tears of pain brought on by her throbbing tongue. “I like you. I like you a lot. But I guess I don’t love you. Not enough to ... go all the way.”
Yes, right, and then next month or next year, as soon as she fell in love, it would be different. And then she’d feel all those things she was supposed to feel.
Then it was Gil who was laughing, bitterly, as now he tugged up his zipper. “Love? You think that’s what’s holding you back? Jesus, you’re even more screwed up than I thought. The truth is, you don’t even like sex. Unless maybe it’s a woman you want.” He began folding up the mattress pad with jerky thrusts of his arms, then stopped, fixing her with a baleful glare. “Whatever it is, I hope you find it. I sincerely hope you do. Just from now on leave me the hell out of it.”
Now at the memory of it, Rachel winced. Then she thought of late last night, home at last, lying awake in bed, aching with Gil’s words. Desperate to prove to herself she wasn’t frigid, she had even tried masturbating.
But groping under her nightgown and rubbing herself down there struck her as even more ridiculous than the things she’d done with boys, like bumping around in the dark without a flashlight. Would she even recognize an orgasm if she had one?
Finally, she had just given up and wept. She’d end up a medical curiosity with a paragraph or two written about her in some sex scientist’s monograph. A freak.
She’d have no one to love her. No one she could love back.
A clattering noise brought her back to the breakfast table, and Rachel looked up to see Bridget’s broad back disappearing into the serving pantry with a pile of dishes.
“Anyway, it’s not as if I’m lonely,” she lied to Sylvie, keeping her voice light. “I’ve got you and Daddy and Portia.”
Daddy glanced up from his paper again. “Well, I’m happy to see at least that your mother and I are included with your dog. Only, I do wish you wouldn’t feed her at the table.”
Rachel snatched her hand from under the table, where Portia was greedily licking the last of the toast crumbs from her fingers.
“That’s all, you big beggar,” she scolded the scruffy Lab at her feet, then sneaked him the last of her toast.
[75] She heard Daddy grumble into his newspaper, “Why the devil is Kennedy going to do P.R. in Texas of all places? Who needs him there? He ought to get busy mending a few fences in his own backyard. I don’t like the way things are heating up in Indochina. It’s got the smell of Korea all over again.”
“Gerald,” Sylvie scolded affectionately. “Of all things, please let’s not talk about war.” She turned to Rachel, her face lighting up. “I thought we might go shopping this afternoon or tomorrow,” Sylvie ventured cautiously. “For a dress. A new dress for the party. Cassini has a wonderful new collection at Bendel’s, just wait till you see.”
Rachel’s heart sank. At least thirty dresses hung in her closet upstairs, many with the price tags still dangling from the sleeves, and Mama wanted to take her shopping of all things.
How simple and pure and easy if the only clothes in her wardrobe were what she had on—baggy fisherman’s sweater, jeans worn to the softness of flannel, her old kick-about loafers. In these she felt safe, her own true self. She imagined the dress Mama would pick out. Soft silk or chiffon, pale as the dawn, with billowy sleeves and a skirt that floated about her knees. And then she’d end up going to Mason’s party like a beautifully wrapped gift box but with nothing inside it.
Miserable inside, she smiled anyway, anxious not to snuff out Mama’s eager look, wanting to hold on to it, even if it meant pretending for just a little while to be Mama’s girl with the watering can.
“Tomorrow,” she promised. “We’ll go tomorrow, first thing.”
Two days later, Sylvie sat in the wing chair across from the library television, the images on the screen blurring as her eyes filled with tears.
In between the commentators, the condolence messages from heads of state around the world, the newsreel footage of him as a young congressman, of his marriage to Jackie, they kept reshowing the same nightmare: the motorcade, the open limousine with the President smiling and Jackie chic as ever in a pillbox hat, waving to the crowds. Then everything going a little crazy, Kennedy suddenly slumping forward, a black stain, blood on the back of his head. Jackie [76] cradling him, then starting to climb out over the back of the car, and being held back by a Secret Service man. The limousine speeding away.
Sylvie rose, stiffly, and flicked the television off. Her eyes hurt. Nearly midnight now, and they’d kept vigil around the TV since early afternoon, she and Rachel, too stunned to do anything else. And then Gerald had closed the bank and joined them. Everything, he’d said, was closing.
She and Rachel had been trying on dresses at Bonwit’s when they heard. Rachel had agreed to go to Mason Gold’s party, but she was impossible to please as ever, every dress too fancy or frivolous.
Sylvie suddenly found herself remembering the day her water had broken in Bergdorf’s.
Sylvie felt a dull pounding in her temples. Rachel and Gerald had gone up hours ago, but she knew that if she went up, she would only lie in bed, her mind bringing back things she couldn’t bear to remember.
Sylvie crossed the darkened study full of Gerald’s things, the solid furniture—so much a man’s room—books, and old photographs of his parents and grandparents lining the walls, the Regency break-fr
ont containing the librettos to every opera ever translated. The stereo, and underneath, stretching all across one wall, his record collection. All the greats. Caruso. Pinza. Callas.
She stopped at his leather-topped partner’s desk, and fingered the engraved silver letter knife Rachel had given Gerald on his last birthday. Old, heavy, beautifully worked, exactly right for him. She understood him so well. The two were a perfect pair, so devoted to each other.
Sylvie felt a pain then, as if the letter opener had cut into her chest. She was all alone. Gerald would never know of the terrible choice she’d made, never share her pain. How many nights had she lain awake in anguish, weeping silently for the dark child of her own body she would never hold in her arms, never see grow up?
Yet Rachel, not to have known her, that also would have been terrible. Sylvie couldn’t imagine life without Rachel. Impossible.
Yet sometimes she sensed a wholeness missing from her love for Rachel, the feeling of something permanently torn that could never be perfectly mended. How she envied Gerald, not knowing; he had Rachel, whole, without compromise, completely his.
[77] Looking at Rachel these days, Sylvie saw fleeting images of Angie Santini, Rachel’s real mother.
That stubborn streak of Rachel’s, was that Angie’s too? Insisting on being a doctor, of all things, a life devoted to all that was ugly in this world—sickness, pain, death.
I’ve tried so hard to make her mine, cultivated, ladylike. But she’s her own person, not like me, or Gerald either. Strange how she’s so small and dainty ... and yet so willful, so independent.
Sylvie remembered Rachel as a toddler, no more than two, an enchanting child with periwinkle-blue eyes and a cloud of soft amber curls. Sylvie had tiptoed in to see if Rachel had woken from her nap, and was stunned. Rachel had managed to climb out of the crib, and grab a clean diaper from the changing table. With her old wet diaper and rubber pants sagging around her ankles, she was struggling to pin on the clean one.
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