Rubyfruit Jungle

by Rita Mae Brown

  My date with Paul turned up and I went, out of a sense of blazing curiosity. What could these two do? Did he tell her these absurd stories? There was only one way to find out.

  Paul took me to an Italian restaurant and then fumbled for the next move. He obviously wasn’t used to female attention and was at loose ends. I suggested we walk in Riverside Park for awhile. I told him I’d walk him home since he lived right on the Park. It took us one half hour to go four blocks. We arrived at his door and he started to hobble in, then turned as if struck by a blinding thought. “Would you like to come upstairs and look at my thesis? It was highly regarded at Harvard.”

  “I’d love to see your thesis.”

  Paul spent the next hour and one half explaining to me the supreme importance of punctuation in early twentieth-century poetry. He worked himself into a lather over the horrible idea that poetry was ditching punctuation. After this diatribe he took a swig of Squirt and vodka and started a tirade against Edmund Wilson. Without warning he stopped talking, lurched off his side of the sofa and kissed me—with those teeth. Jesus. Before I had time to get myself geared he dove into my crotch like he was right out of Dawn Patrol and he slobbered all over me. Paul didn’t believe in warming up.

  “Paul, why don’t we go into your bedroom?”

  “Oh, right.”

  Once in his bedroom I was greeted with fresh horrors. Every inch of him was covered in hair. Right out of the trees he dropped and into my crotch. I must be in love with Polina to endure this orangutan. God. Paul was jabbering and rolling his eyes. I thought either he was going to have a seizure or dive on me again when he suddenly flipped over, held his decently sized prick in his hand, and put his other hand on the back of my neck drawing me to him.

  “Where are we?”

  I was on. “We’re in the men’s john at Times Square in the subway.”

  “No, no,” he shrieked. “We’re in the ladies room at the Four Seasons and you’re admiring my voluptuous breasts.”

  “Goodbye, Paul.”

  I didn’t break off with Polina right away. I guess I needed her too much—the conversations, the theater, and her stories of Europe where she grew up. I tried to ignore the sex, but Polina was getting more and more into it. It hit rock bottom for me when she wanted to be told she was a golden shower queen. Polina had saved her urine in empty glass Macademia nut jars for me to admire while I told her the story of her mighty pissing powers in yet another fantasy men’s john. No way I could hack that. I asked her if maybe we could be friends and she nearly had a coronary.

  “Friends, what do you mean, friends? Here I am on the threshold of powerful sexual discoveries and you want to be friends?”

  I tried to tell her to find other women, but she wanted me. She wanted me but she was ashamed of me. She wouldn’t introduce me to her friends or let me come by for her at work. Afraid I’d flash a lavender neon “L” between my tits, I suppose. More out of loneliness than love I stayed with her. My classes at school were all men and they had it in for me since I was doing better than they were. Of all careers I thought film would be somewhat open, but their pathetic egos had bloated to outrageous proportions behind a small Arriflex and they resented a woman who could compete on “their” territory and worse, win. The bars weren’t a hotbed of intellectual ferment, even though I had found some nice ones uptown where the merest hint of roles would have frozen you out. Roles were for truck drivers to these women. But I could only take so many conversations where big names were dropped like napalm to inflame your brain with admiration. I don’t give a shit who you know, I care about what you do. These highclass dollies weren’t doing much. But I couldn’t go back to the sleazy Colony or Sugar’s where the bulls still put butch hair wax on their crew cuts. So there was Polina for all her fantasies, a seemingly better choice than any of the others.

  It was Alice who resolved the problem. The three of us would go out from time to time. I was too dangerous for her friends but I was good enough for her daughter. Polina’s double-think was astounding. She encouraged my bond with Alice. We were closer in age than Polina and I were, which wouldn’t have made a difference if Polina didn’t harp about her age constantly. Alice was only six years younger than I was. I began to feel guilty for being born in 1944. The “old lady,” as she referred to herself, looked down her nose at our music, the films we shared, and the magazines we read. She was not above patronizing either one of us for our years and our tastes which drew Alice and I closer together, as generational hostility always does. Alice knew her mother and I were lovers and she thought it was great. She also knew about Paul and considered him the original human slug. One yellow, acid drizzle day she confessed, “You know Mom wants to sleep with me?”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “She won’t admit it but I know she does. I think I’d like to sleep with her. She’s very good looking, you know. Too bad it would freak her out. Incest doesn’t seem like such a trauma to me.”

  “Me neither, but then I can’t really say much about that because I didn’t grow up with my real parents. But I never have been able to figure out why parents and children put each other in these desexed categories. It’s antihuman, I think.”

  “Yeah, parents get freaked out about everything. Mom must have a heavy case of repression going, because she’ll never deal with the fact that she digs my body.”

  “She’s got more going than that.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s the old girl cooking up?”

  “Nothing. Just don’t sleep with your mother. I’m not against incest if both parties consent and are over fifteen, but your mother’s on her own weird trip.”

  “Tell me her trip.”

  “No, I don’t kiss and tell.”

  “Oh Molly, why do you have to have morals?”

  “Because I don’t have money.”

  “How are your morals when it comes to sleeping with me? I’m jail bait, ya know.”

  “Alice, your spirit of romance is so delicate. Moves me to tears.”

  “Please sleep with me. I feel like I can trust you. You won’t get into a big, heavy thing about it, you know?”

  “I know, but what about your mother?”

  “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.” Alice giggled and slipped me a sly look. “I’ll give you one perfect, yellow rose for your sunshine soul and then will you sleep with me?”

  “For one perfect yellow rose—yes.”

  Alice jogged down Broadway looking for a florist’s shop, ran inside a tiny one, and emerged, rose in hand. Off we went to 17th Street, to the cockroaches and the steam heat that never steamed. But Alice steamed and shook and sighed, and she hadn’t one sexual quirk in her mind. She loved being touched and she loved touching back. Kissing was an art form to her. She was there, all there with no hang-ups, no stories to tell, just herself. And I was just me.

  Alice’s survival instincts were sound. She knew we’d have to sneak around to see each other more often. Polina’s warped Victorian mentality would get watersoaked if she read our beads. When the three of us were out together, it was a unique form of torture. Once in the balcony watching Rozencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, Polina held my left hand while Alice played with my right thigh. The play made no impression on me at all, but I clapped wildly at the end to let off all that trapped energy.

  Polina threw us together, hoping it would happen, yet terrified of it at the same time. Somehow I was the sexual go-between for both of them. I was a kind of telestar for them to bounce messages off to each other. There were times when I felt lonelier with them than without them.

  One Saturday afternoon looking out over Harlem and hearing the steady drums from the park, mother and daughter entered a time-honored fight. Polina accused Alice of behaving like a child over some trivial item and Alice replied that Polina was suffering from hardening of the arteries, specifically in her head. This kind of cheerful banter went on until Alice in a fit of untried ego hit her oldest competitor: “I’m not a baby anymore. For Chris
t’s sake, Mother, I’m old enough to be making it with your lover, so dig it and get off my back.”

  “My what?”

  “Molly and I are lovers.”

  Polina recoiled. She fumed in Italian and rattled so fast all I could catch was “Basta! Basta!” and a slap across the face. When her streak of bilingualism petered out she ordered me out of her life and Alice’s life forever in unmistakable English. Alice protested, but Polina curbed that strike with the threat that she wouldn’t send Alice to college if Alice persisted in this relationship. Alice was a shrewd sort and she had no intention of working her way through college, especially after contact with my life. She bowed to her mother’s superior material force. And I gracefully exited to 17th Street where the hounds of hell gnawed at my ankles and the waterbugs organized a safari through my kitchen.

  I dreamed of sewer lagoons underneath the skyscrapers, where I could navigate a Con Edison raft to take me out of this crazy city with its crazy people. Give me one sharp pole to fight off the blind alligators thrown into the drainpipes by people who bought them as babies on trips to Miami Beach. Miami Beach, so close to Carrie with her crotons, ixora, and blind pride. Miami Beach where the geriatric generation buys sequined colostemy bags to match their shoes. Even if I made it through the drainpipes to the Inter-coastal I couldn’t land there. There is no place to go. Here I am in the Hanging Gardens of Neon, hustling my ass for a degree and living in shit. Shit worse than Shiloh and damn, is there one person in Manhattan who isn’t a radiated disaster area? Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the disaster area, or am I still full of Dunkard ways and simple dreams? Maybe I belong in the foothills of Pennsylvania with the Mennonites and the Amish and how the hell can I make movies out there? You can’t even have electric light bulbs out there. In Logic 101 this is called being on the horns of a dilemma. Either way you get gored. But if I had money maybe I could slip out of that dilemma. I mean, if I had money I wouldn’t be at the mercy of chance, peanut intellects, and amputated emotions so much. With money you can protect yourself. But getting it is another story. One more year and I’ll be out of school. An instant fortune. Oh sure, I can slip into the cracks of the pavement, because no one will hire me. Shit. Well, I’m not giving up. But I’d like to rest every now and then. I’d like to see the hills of Shiloh again and lay my body down in the meadow behind Ep’s place, out where they buried Jenna. Maybe the smell of the clover will get me through one more winter in this branch of hell. Maybe I can keep myself together with a day in the country. There’s still no price on the sun.

  I hit the road and hitched to Philadelphia. There I got picked up by a truck driver of the male variety who tried to feel me up when I fell asleep, but I snarled at him and he withdrew his offending paw. He dropped me off at the bus station in Lancaster. After an hour’s wait in the hazy lethargy of the Greyhound terminal I boarded the bus. With a rumble it roared off farting thick black pollution in its wake, fouling the low green hills of southeastern Pennsylvania. The hills were also fouled with huge billboards advertising Tanya and Ford and saying “Drink milk, it’s nature’s perfect food.” Every now and then I could catch a glimpse of the countryside through the thickets of advertising.

  Once in York, I had to catch two buses, but I finally got to Shiloh. The green bus stopped in front of Mrs. Hershener’s and I jumped out. Same old screen door, same tarpaper shavings in the drive. The porch was half decayed and the Nehi sign had been changed to 7-Up the Uncola but those were the only signs of fifteen years of progress. The road down to Ep’s place was still dirt with a few blue stones thrown on it to pretend it would be serviceable in the rains. The sun was high over my head and milk-white butterflies chased butter-yellow ones over June grass and plowed earth. I took a deep breath of air and got higher than orange sunshine could ever get me. My feet took off and carried my body down the road. I was running and pumping and pushing those legs that damn near had shin splints from all that New York City pavement. Pretty soon I was waving my arms and yelling and there wasn’t one face to look at me and think, “What’s that nut doing?” There was nobody in sight, just the butterflies.

  Around the bend, down the hill, and there was the old frame house. Wash was on the line and the house had a fresh coat of white paint. I went up to the door, out of breath, and knocked, but no one was home. Good, because I didn’t feel like asking anybody if I could go rest by their pond. In the little patch of concrete by the front porch were the two pennies stuck in there when Leroy and I started first grade. “Long as we got those two cents,” Carrie would say, “we ain’t broke.” The rabbit pens were gone and the pig wallow had been planted with pansies and fandango petunias.

  The pond was the same old pond. The edge was rimmed with green slime and tall grass full of frogs’ eggs jutted from the still water. Foam gathered around the tall grass. I dropped down by the pool, put my arms behind my head and watched the clouds. After awhile the insects and birds took me for a rock. A caterpillar bumped across my left elbow and a mockingbird was careful to shit on my foot.

  I opened my eyes, slowly turned my head, and stared straight into the eyes of the biggest goddamn frog I’d ever seen. That frog wasn’t scared of me, that frog was defiant. It stared at me, blinked then puffed up a red-pink throat and let out a croak that would have delivered Jericho. From the other side of the pond came a returning belch. And two little green heads peeked out of the water to investigate this mammal on the shore. Amphibians must think we’re inferior creatures since we can’t go in and out of the water the way they can. Besides being biologically superior, that ole frog is more together than I am. That frog doesn’t want to make movies. That frog hasn’t even seen movies and furthermore that frog doesn’t give a big damn. It just swims, eats, makes love, and sings as it pleases. Whoever heard of a neurotic frog? Where do humans get off thinking they’re the pinnacle of evolution?

  As if to let me know what it thought of my cognitive processes, the Goliath let out a mighty bellow and flew straight up in the air, terrifying a dragonfly cruising at low altitude. Its four feet touched earth; it hurled itself back into the air and landed in the pond with a truly heroic splash that soaked half my shirt. I sat up and watched the ripples race each other to the edge, where they were lost in the scum; then I saw its huge head pop up out of the weeds. That damn frog winked at me.

  I got up, brushed myself off, and trotted down by the gully, through the drainpipe and out the other side and started up the road to Leota’s old house. I congratulated myself on being small enough and skinny enough to slip through the drainpipe.

  Mrs. Bisland was still living in that house. The shrubs had grown and it had aluminum siding but other than that, it looked the same. She looked pretty much the same too except now she was completely gray. She was surprised to see me, fussed over me, and asked how Carrie was and how sorry she was to hear about Carl passing on back there in ’61. Did I know Leota had married Jackie Phantom, who owns a body shop right out in West York, and they’re doing real good? She gave me their address on Diamond Street and I trudged back to Mrs. Hershener’s, went in, and bought a raspberry ice cream cone. The lady behind the counter told me Mrs. Hershener hung herself three years ago and not a soul knew why.

  Mrs. Bisland called Leota because she was looking for me. I didn’t have time to knock on the door before it opened and there was Leota—same cat eyes, same languid body, but oh god, she looked forty-five years old and she had two brats hanging on her like possums. I looked twenty-four. She saw herself in my reflection and there was a flicker of pain in her eyes.

  “Molly, come in. This is Jackie, Jr. and this is Margie, named for my mother. Say hello to the lady.”

  Jackie, Jr. at five could say hello with a reasonable degree of accuracy but Margie hung back. I think she’d never seen a woman in pants before.

  “Hello, Margie. Hello, Jackie.”

  “Now Jackie take your sister out in the back and play.”

  “I don’t wanna take her out and play. I wanna stay h
ere with you.”

  “Do as you’re told.”

  “No.” He pouted until he near tripped over his lip.

  Leota slapped him one on the back, collared him out the door, and the screams didn’t die down for twenty minutes.

  “They drive me crazy sometimes but I love them.”

  “Sure,” I said. What else could I say? Every mother says the same thing.

  “What brings you to York?”

  “Thought I’d take a day out of the big city.”

  “Big city? You aren’t in Florida? Oh, that’s right. I believe I did hear from Mother that you’d gone up to New York. Aren’t you afraid you’ll get killed in the streets—all them Puerto Ricans and niggers?”

  “No.” There was an awkward silence.

  “Not that whites can’t be violent too. But you’re up there where all kinds of people are bunched together. I’m not prejudiced, you understand.”

  “I understand.”

  “Are you married yet?”

  “Don’t you remember? I told you when we were kids that I was never getting married. I kept my promise.”

  “Oh, you just haven’t met the right man.” Nervous laugh.

  “Right. Everybody says that but it’s a load of shit.”

  Her face registered the obscenity but a faint hint of admiration played at the corners of her mouth. “I married Jack right out of high school. I wanted to get out of the house and that was the only way, but I loved him too. He’s a good husband. Works hard, loves the kids. I couldn’t ask for more. You should see Carol Morgan. She married Eddie Harper, remember him? He was two years ahead of us—he drinks himself sick. I was lucky.”

  I looked at the neat little house with plastic covers on the furniture and ceramic lamps. The kitchen had a table top full of kidney shapes in thin lines over the formica and there was a bunch of plastic mums as a centerpiece. The living room was an oasis of avocado wall-to-wall carpeting. Leota would have shuddered to see my milk cartons.