by Jane Rule
“Kate, I couldn’t possibly be beautiful.”
Standing there in blue jeans and one of Saul’s old shirts, your dead father’s watch hanging on your wrist, clay drying in the circles of your finger nails, you didn’t believe him. What should I have said? I could not say anything, nor could I turn away, caught by what you couldn’t see.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” you chanted, “who’s the fairest of them all? Not you, little dog.”
It was a bad nickname, one only I used, having given it to you because you would walk just half a step behind me with a shorter stride, with a trot if I hurried. Like so much else that you could have found offensive, it amused you.
That night, after we had argued about art as imitation or incarnation, you giving in to the temptation of a Christian esthetic, I looked at myself in the same mirror, but did not ask the same question, not looking for your kind of answer. I liked my face well enough, its high cheekbones and strong nose, the dark, carefully remote eyes. I hardly noticed my body, instrument not object. “How am I to use myself? What am I to do?”
At college, where we had roommates and lectures to go to and papers to write, we could discuss your problems and ignore mine. Traveling, we had to encounter each other’s difficulties, your vagueness and my obsession with details, your fear of most adults and my reluctance with strangers, your exhaustion and my restlessness. We had to encounter each other. And I had not wanted to.
I tried to explain my adopted sister and brother-in-law to you before we arrived in London; but, because they were old enough to be my parents, they were automatically your enemies, not in the real way they might have been, but simply dismissed into the dull world of authority and responsibility. Any man who went to the office, any woman who went shopping and dealt with servants and had her hair done could not possibly have anything to say to you. Frank, who is not easily offended, was the first man I saw suffer from your childishness. Doris was curious at first, then bewildered, but she never quite gave up. Last time I saw her, she asked about you. She said, when I told her what you’d done, “Well, He’s the one grown-up Who will let her go on being a child.” Doris, like so many children of ministers, had found having two fathers a bit much. I had more in common with you, having lost the only human father I knew when I was twelve, but I did not allow us to make common cause over that, either. Frank had been an unintrusive but willing substitute for official purposes. I think he was genuinely fond of me. It was gaining a second mother in Doris that was difficult. She was capable of being as suspicious as your mother, but she had never learned to be fearful. She invaded my privacy with more shrewd concern and indulgent affection than I could understand or handle. It might have been better for me if she had either never appeared or had been home more often.
Except for the war years, Doris visited Mother and me in the Bay Area once a year when Frank came to the States on business. She always brought me new novels and plays, and I did like discussing them with her, but I was as uneasy as I was flattered by the value she placed on my opinions, which were often based on experience she credited me with rather than experience I had had. With everyone else I had a more certain role.
In my last year in high school, I was captain of the debating team, captain of the swimming team, my top drawer rattling with medals for good attendance, good sportsmanship, good scholarship, good Godliness—a joy to my teachers and my elderly mother, a pain in the ass to my classmates, who were, just the same, never rude. I was at that time threatening to be a national swimming champion, which awed them a little and worried me a lot. I liked the prestige, but I hated racing. I was of two minds about entering a qualifying meet, but the coach, who had offered to take me to Carmel for it, persuaded my mother and Doris that I should go.
We drove down the afternoon before, checked in to a guest-house my mother was fond of, walked on the beach for an hour, then went out for an early dinner. The town was full of Rotarians. At the third restaurant we tried, we finally agreed to wait an hour in the bar. When my age wasn’t questioned and the coach suggested I have a cocktail, I agreed. Unlike you, I had always wanted to be an adult and was willing to make any of the appropriate gestures. Somehow we got into a friendly argument with four men at the next table. The coach was a Democrat; they were Republicans. That’s how it seemed to me then, but, of course, the coach was also a young woman, healthily attractive as gym teachers are supposed to be. More drinks came, and more. We did finally eat, and our Rotarians delivered us to our guest-house rather too noisily, shouting Republican slogans at our window long after they should have gone home.
I had not been drunk before, never having had the opportunity. I did not intend to be drunk then, and I was concerned about the noise we were making, troubled by the heavy uncertainty of my feet and tongue. My companion decided to take a bath. I was left with the complicated task of undressing myself. It must have taken me a long time. Finally I stood at the basin, thinking of brushing my teeth, washing my face, then trying to find my pajamas. As I stood there, a glass on the shelf fell into the basin and smashed. There were four glasses, and one by one they all fell while I stood watching. It seemed to me incredibly sad that every one should break. I began to cry. Perhaps her embrace began as a gesture of comfort. I was not surprised by it, nor by being put to bed. I was surprised by what she was saying, words I had read on fences and in literature but had never heard pronounced before.
“That’s what they say: give a little clootch whiskey, and what you’ve got is nothing but a piece of fucking tail, a little redskin cunt.”
I listened, so close to unconsciousness that it was easier to seem so than to sort out the appropriate response. I wanted to solve the problem about the broken glasses and I wanted to be sure the Rotarians had really gone home and I wanted to listen for stress, for accurate pronunciation just as I did in German class, and I wanted to go on trying to feel what I had begun to feel. The glasses began to fall again, but slowly this time, and they broke slowly in showers of light.
“Don’t cry Don’t cry. It’s nothing to cry about.”
The next morning we did not discuss anything that had happened the night before. We agreed that breakfast was not a good idea. I had to swim at ten o’clock; we’d eat afterwards. It did not occur to me to refuse to swim. It was important to behave as if nothing unusual had happened.
I could not make myself go into the pool to warm up. I stood in my dry suit, my feet and hands blue in the warm morning sun, waiting to be forced by the gun. Only after I hit the water did I discover that it was salt. I swam eight lengths of the pool, my teeth clenched against my rebelling guts, touched in, lifted myself half out of the pool, and vomited with fountain force to the cheering crowd. It is the only record I have ever set. I never swam in a race again. If that had been the humiliating end of it, I would have felt punished enough for my sins, but we had a three-hour drive home after that, and the lead item on the sports page the next day would be NEW NATIONAL RECORD SET under a picture of me retching up the whole of the night before.
“Flu,” the coach said to my mother and Doris, delivering me into their hands, but just half an hour before we arrived, she had persuaded me to try the only cure she knew, a little hair of the dog; and, as Doris held my protesting head fifteen minutes after I got home, she said, “Flu, my foot. You’re drunk.” I was too busy proving it to deny it.
Then she sat on the bed, wiping my face with a cool wash cloth, smiling and shaking her head, talking to me. “So, okay, how long has this been going on?” She didn’t expect any answer, and she didn’t get one, but she had a captive audience and enjoyed it, imagining both my fears and my sins in exaggerated generalities which were, nevertheless, alarmingly accurate. I have never told Doris anything. She always tells me what I’m up to. And, if she’s troubled by her imagination, she never admits it.
But you weren’t aware of Doris at all, except as she was one of the authorities to be placated with childish good manners. You stood when she came into the room
with the memory of a curtsy stammering in your knees, made any request with an apologetic preface, answered any direct question as if you had been called on to recite. Frank suffered from your behavior even more than Doris. In your hands his good manners turned into willful attacks on your independence. He found himself at the brink of a real argument over carrying your suitcase. You would not go through a door before him, a problem he finally solved by forceably taking your arm and escorting you through. His tactful compliments were received with such surprise and suspicion that he gradually gave up any attempt to talk with you. Then he felt rude in his own house, uneasy. If you had been twelve, he would have known what to do. He would perhaps have taken on your instruction as he had his own daughter’s, and to some extent mine. But you were twenty and now so close to being a woman that it was impossible to treat you like the child you also were.
“E.,” I suggested finally, “why don’t you relax with Frank and Doris? Try to get to know them a little bit.”
“Why?” you asked, surprised.
“Because they’re human beings. You might even find you like them.”
“I do like them, Kate,” you protested. “It’s just that we don’t have anything in common.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Find things in common. Take some interest in what they care about.”
“What do they care about?”
Put that way, the question had no real answer. For you there was one source of identity, the measure of commitment one had to people and ideas, out of which should come the work one did. Neither Doris nor Frank was put together so tidily. Frank was a successful but not dedicated banker, a theoretical liberal who took his conservative social responsibilities seriously. He had a wine cellar, a rose garden, season tickets to chamber music concerts, a wife and two children, perhaps occasionally a mistress, but certainly not in London. About most of these subjects he was pleased to speak briefly, and he was also interested in listening, but obsession with anything was for him a breach of good taste. In your terms, therefore, he cared about nothing. Doris was even more difficult to identify. The measure of her efficiency in any job was the measure of her boredom with it. What she enjoyed, she dawdled over and rarely finished, part of her pleasure being the freedom to be inaccurate and incomplete. There was never an error in her household books, but often flower arrangements waited for their final greenery until blooms were falling on the carpet. She made a similar division between people, careful and exacting of her own kindness with those to whom she was bound by nothing but duty, casual and sometimes wittily critical of the friends she chose and obviously loved. Even if you had been able to distinguish this pattern, you would have judged it shallowly perverse and missed the point, at least the human point. I could not answer your question; however, you heard my complaint and wanted to please me.
“Doris,” you began the next night at the dinner table, forcing yourself to call her by her first name, “how long does it take to have a baby?”
Frank looked up surprised.
“Why,” Doris said carefully, “nine months.”
“No, I know that. I don’t mean that. I mean really how long, how long out of a life, two years? Five years?”
“That depends, doesn’t it?”
“But on what?” you persisted.
“On how much money you have, on how much of a mother you want to be, on what kind of a life you mean to interrupt.”
“But it’s no good having a child physically, just that, is it? That isn’t what people mean when they talk about being fulfilled as a woman, You’d want to know your child. How long does it take to know your child?”
“It depends on the child,” Frank offered, sensing the opportunity you were offering, no matter how grossly. “How long did it take your mother to know you?”
“She doesn’t,” you answered. “And she’s never tried. She spends all her time trying to turn me into someone she’d like to know. So I have no measuring stick. How long did it take you?”
“With my son,” Frank answered, “I think I sin as your mother does. With my daughter… well, what man would dare to claim he understood a woman, even a very young one?”
“But that’s stupid,” you said. “Women are people. You could certainly understand me.”
“Surely, what Esther wants to know is how much time there’s left for being something other than a mother,” Doris said quickly.
“Yes,” you said. “You see, first of all I want to understand the nature of the world. Then I want to marry and have a child to fulfill myself as a woman. After that I want to be a sculptor, a great sculptor. When I’m old, I’ll join a contemplative order of some kind to serve God. I have to figure out the number of years each thing will take.”
“I see,” Doris said. “Well, I’d say five for the child, wouldn’t you, dear?”
“Five or six at the most,” Frank answered.
I was tempted to share their stifled hilarity because you were ridiculous, sitting there outlining your life, but I was also tempted to believe that you might, in your willful innocence, actually keep destiny in your own hands. There was about you such insensitive integrity.
After dinner, when you had gone to your room to write letters, I sat with Frank for a while.
“She thinks of herself as an emerging nation, as in need of five-year plans as India or Russia,” he said.
“She has a lot of natural resources to develop,” I said.
“True. But I don’t see any place in her plan for a course in investments. Does she know that one day she’s going to be one of the richest women in America?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t.”
“I can’t help knowing,” he said. “Be careful of her, Kate, won’t you?”
“How… careful?”
“I don’t mean anything personal. It’s just that she wants so much and doesn’t know what she already has to offer.”
I couldn’t be with you every moment. I didn’t want to be. There were other people to see. If I left you alone for a few hours, I never knew what you would find and bring back. Sometimes it was only a first edition or a seventeenth-century amber ring (which I wouldn’t accept then, and, of course, have now), but more often it was a young composer or painter or actor, awed and irritated by the ample comfort of Doris’ and Frank’s living, fortunately unaware of how modest it was compared to your own. But for all the irritations of those first weeks, I was more independent of you in London than I could be once we left for the Continent, and there were the selling galleries to discover together, the late Turners at the Tate, the good arguments about T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry. If the summer had gone on like that, I might have been able to cope.
Why was it that we decided to bicycle? I had never been enthusiastic, though I’d taken a couple of bicycling trips in southern England two summers before. It was probably your idea. I didn’t find out until we were trying to get our new bicycles from one side of London to the other that you hadn’t been on one since you were twelve. I was ready to leave them with Frank and Doris, but you insisted that you would practice in the three days we had left. Off down the crescent you’d wobble, dressed in blue jean pedal pushers, pale blue wind-breaker, and white baseball cap, your dark hair more horse’s mane than pony tail, vanishing between double decker buses.
“Don’t watch,” Doris said kindly, as I stood on the drawing room balcony.
“It’s a sick fascination.”
“You worry too much. I’ve never seen you so motherly.”
“She’s such an idiot,” I said. “Who do you suppose she’ll find to bring home today?”
“You don’t have to be jealous of her young men. They’re all homosexuals.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yes, blatant or latent. It’s hard on Frank. He finds her very attractive. ‘What a waste!’ he keeps saying. Are you serious about her, Kate?”
“It’s nothing like that. In any case, I’m never serious about people.”
“She�
��s rather remarkably beautiful.”
“Or ugly,” I said.
By the morning we were to leave, you claimed to be able to ride with no hands through the traffic at Hyde Park Corner, which, even in those days, was terrible. We planned to leave a lot of our belongings with Frank and Doris, either to be shipped to us later or to be collected on our way home. Clothes never mattered to you anyway, unless they had about them the character of costume. I remember the first time you wore your academic gown at the Freshman assembly.
“Gosh, this is the life of the mind, all right. I really feel it, and I want to feel it all the time. In England, students do, don’t they?”
“Feel the life of the mind all the time?” I asked.
“Wear gowns.”
“They were monks once, too,” I said.
“And thinking ought to be holy,” you decided. “Or reverent. I wish I had a religious vocabulary What’s the difference between holy and reverent?”
“ ‘Holy’ comes from the same root as ‘whole’; taken over by the church, it means coming from God, therefore pure or sinless. To be reverent is to be loving and respectful at once. I don’t know how I could think about history or philosophy, for instance, if I had to think like that.”
“But you do think like that, Kate. Maybe I should be a Christian. Do you think I could be?”
“The vocabulary’s free in any dictionary.”
“But to have it mean something…”
“Well, save religious box tops and see.”
As I inspected your double pack that morning in London, I thought perhaps you had taken my advice. There were pamphlets and postcards, deer antlers and junk jewelry, books and notebooks, all packed round with Kotex and toilet paper, emblems of one of your shynesses.
“But, little dog, you have to take some clothes.”
“I was going to,” you said, “but there isn’t room. I can tie my coat onto the back.”
The performance that followed reminded me of Fish, a card game I played as a child. “I have two pairs of shoes,” I would say, and you’d answer, “I have none.” You would have liked to add, “Go fish!” But I changed the rules. Out of your pack would have to come the antlers, into it the required shoes. In the end, this long-disputed first edition of Milton was the only thing I allowed you to take because you insisted that you needed it. One of your summer projects was to memorize the whole of Paradise Lost. I never heard anything beyond the first book, but I can hear that still: