After splashing around in the seventies, we realized that a hot tub was not a form of self-expression and that even the largest didn’t lend itself to swimming laps. By 1980, a certain self-consciousness had crept up upon us so that casual sex began to suffer from the same sort of minimalism currently afflicting contemporary American fiction. Like a Beattie short story, casual sex left us hungry again just a few hours later. Like detailed descriptions about miles of malls, casual sex finally made us nauseous from too much variety and too little meaning. We became interested in love once again.
When we first started fraternizing with the enemy, back in the early fifties, we were very different from the way we were when we actually started sleeping with them at the end of that decade. Back in junior high we were boy-crazy virgins, terrified of being carded. Teenage sex was something that only happened in the dark in uncomfortable backseats at drive-in movies. The few times we had the opportunity to “park” in a passion-pit, our buttons got played with more than our boobs, and we realized that the greatest danger in petting was the possible dislocation of the nylon stockings we kept stuffed inside our ironed training bras.
Because our mothers were whiplashed by the cyclical social reaction to the Roaring Twenties, they crashed when the market did and became quite prudish. They came down on us when we started to date, making more of making out than it warranted. Pressing mad money into our purses, they left the pole lamp lit in the picture window of our living rooms, as well as any outdoor porch light, so we couldn’t even kiss a guy good night. Teenaged Depression Babies so confused sex with danger that, forever after, legitimate love felt non-carbonated and enormously disappointing.
“Hey. Pay attention, Diana,” Elaine says impatiently. “We’ve still got to decide which dress to take to Brownell’s tomorrow. That lady said shoes and … underwear … and everything.”
“Underwear? You think she means a bra? No way there’s a bra in this house,” Joanne predicts. “But you know something? I bet Sukie’d like to be buried in that paisley print suit of hers. She really loved that suit and you certainly don’t need a bra with it.”
Silence.
“Why does anyone need a bra if she’s lying, down?” Jeff asks.
We look at him with stoned concentration.
“Doctors say big-breasted women should wear bras even when they’re sleeping,” Elaine eventually volunteers. As a teacher she feels compelled to provide some explanation for everything.
“That was hardly Sukie’s problem,” Jeff observes.
“Actually, Sukie once told me she was glad she was flat-chested,” Joanne offers, somewhat defensively. “She thought she would have gotten into a lot more trouble if she’d been much bigger.”
“That’s probably true,” Jeff agrees.
“Oh, really. This is getting sick.” Elaine slaps her hand down on the table in disgust. “Why are we talking like this?”
“Because we’re stoned,” Joanne reassures her, sipping beer from a can.
“You know, things might have been better back in the old days,” I say in my anthropological professorial voice. “If people still laid out bodies at home in their front parlors, we could dress Sukie ourselves. Right here.”
Silently we share an image of Sukie laid out on the cabbage-rose, chintz-covered sofa in her living room where she’d always held court.
“Are you kidding?” Elaine squeals. “Do you really think Sukie would want all of us trying to dress her at the same time?”
“She maybe wouldn’t mind if we did it with the lights off,” Jeff volunteers. “You know that scene in Terms of Endearment when Shirley MacLaine tells Jack Nicholson if he really wants the lights on so bad he should damn well go home and—”
“Yah, we know that scene,” I say swiftly to cut him off.
Except perhaps for Joanne, none of us likes making love with the lights on anymore and we are even careful to avoid motel rooms where passing headlights might penetrate ill-fitted drapes and illuminate our bodies in some torrid, contorted position no longer tenable if visible. Nowadays we protect our flanks from view with sturdy vigilance.
“Listen.” Elaine begins to rev herself up again. “We’ve also got to decide who should be the pallbearers.”
Each death word catches us up short so that we must pause to internalize it before responding.
“How many do we need, six, eight?” Joanne prompts us.
“How about me?” Jeff asks.
“Well, I was really just thinking about friends of hers,” Elaine explains.
“Hey. Hold it.” Jeff starts to stand up, but then slides back in his chair for lack of balance. “I was her friend.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Elaine apologizes. “Anyway, even if we could find six guys who really were just friends of hers, everyone would still think they were her lovers if they carried her casket.”
“Who cares?” Joanne asks.
“Max might,” I suggest.
“Who cares if Max cares?” Elaine asks me. “The problem is, it just wouldn’t look right.”
“I can’t believe you’re still talking about things looking right, Elaine,” Joanne moans. “I mean I really can’t believe it.” Then she turns her head to exclude Elaine from her next remark. “Listen, why can’t we do it? Us and some of Sukie’s Washington girlfriends?”
“I’ve never heard of women carrying a casket before,” Elaine snaps.
“I don’t think they’re allowed to,” I concur. “Jewish law doesn’t even allow them to carry a Torah.”
“Diana, there isn’t any ‘them’; ‘them’ is us,” Joanne instructs me rather shrilly.
“Sorry,” I concede immediately. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”
I have already finished one can of beer and am solidly into a second. Also, it seems I become more stoned each time I speak.
“I think traditionally coffins are very heavy because the more they weigh, the thicker they are and the better they protect the body from … decay and everything,” Elaine explains.
“Are you kidding?” I chide her. “They only make them heavy so they can charge more. They’re heavy so they can be expensive. Didn’t you read Jessica’s book?”
“Well, it’s not like we don’t lift heavy weights all the time,” Joanne observes. “Heavy weights belong in the shitwork department. That’s how you can tell carrying a coffin is an honor. Otherwise they’d have had us doing it right from the beginning.”
“Really,” Jeff adds confirmationally, in a voice that sounds like it’s coming in over a Sprint line.
“Anyway. Who ever said we can’t lift or carry heavy weights? Remember when we had to get Sherry’s car over the snowdrift in her driveway so we could take Ricky to the hospital? And remember the time Pat and Annie moved Sandy’s grand piano when the floor in her apartment started to cave in?” Joanne is clearly getting carried away with the idea of carrying Sukie’s coffin. “I definitely think we should do it. I think Sukie would really like it a lot. I can call up and ask about a lightweight model, like one of those aluminum rowboats or canoes they make. Those things hardly weigh anything; Sue and Meagan can portage their canoe for miles.”
“Coffins aren’t made to order,” Elaine protests with a touch of hysteria. “This isn’t the Renaissance, remember?”
“Listen,” I interrupt. “Let’s do it. We’ll ask as many of Sukie’s friends as we have to, but let’s do it.”
And then, very slowly and shyly, Elaine and Joanne and I look at each other and smile. Because at that moment we suddenly realize that we are going to carry Sukie’s coffin and we feel glad as well as sad for the first time since she died.
“It’s sort of a … feminist statement,” Elaine ventures.
“Oh, please,” Joanne moans. “Save your analysis or I won’t be able to hack it.”
Injured, Elaine switches tracks: “Maybe we should go out to a restaurant and get some … lunch. Otherwise we’re going to get drunk sitting here like this.”
“Drunk isn’t the problem, stoned is,” Joanne responds.
But Elaine persists and, finally, after a tedious discussion, Jeff telephones to order some pizzas. As always, our talk about food is fraught with suppressed hysteria. Each of us knows that to eat a pizza in a time of bereavement is to flirt with nihilism. I have several theories about American Female Eating Habits that I plan to publish someday.
“Did you know Joanne uses her neighborhood Chinese carry-out so often that she even orders her eggs from them?” Elaine tattles critically. “She just asks them if they have an extra dozen on hand they could spare and to deliver them along with her dinner. I guess they must use them for egg-drop soup or something.”
Jeff smiles approvingly at Joanne for her ingenuity, and she then favors him with one of the long smiles that lights up her entire face. Jeff is not totally unresponsive to Joanne’s beauty.
“Do you know why there are so many carry-outs in poor neighborhoods?” he asks.
A respectful quiet descends upon the table.
“Because poor neighborhoods have lots of rooming houses where the tenants don’t have any kitchens, so if they want some hot food once in a while and can’t afford a restaurant, they can buy it from a carry-out and take it home.”
We discuss the political dimensions of Jeff’s remark, which have many Sukie-like overtones, until the pizzas arrive. Jeff answers the doorbell, pays the delivery man and deposits the two large fragrant boxes on the kitchen table. Sitting down, he casually begins to eat his way through one pizza. We, on the other hand, go into a kind of schizophrenic spin. Each of us eats one slice of pizza and then picks at a second, knowing we will always remember this meal amid our memories of Sukie’s death. As soon as we’ve finished eating, Joanne begins to feel ill. This is not unusual. Guilt-inspired nausea is quite common among our crowd.
The cardboard containers, stained by grease smears that look like North and South America, remain on Sukie’s counter hiding our leftovers for the next few days, during which time we pick at and play with the remnants, first skimming off stray pepperoni, then onions and finally cheese. Although none of us would ever eat the crust, fingernail troughs can be seen where the upper strata of topping has been scraped away.
“Look, I’ve got a confession to make and a question to ask,” Jeff says, establishing a serious tone as soon as he’s finished eating. “Now that I think about it, I’m afraid I might have hurt Sukie’s feelings, talking about wanting kids all the time. She never said anything about it, but now that she’s … gone, I’m thinking it might have hurt her.” He is chewing at his bottom lip, pondering the problematic past. “Did she ever say anything to any of you about anything like that?”
We all look at each other. Not only had Sukie never mentioned Jeff wanting a child, she had never even mentioned Jeff. In fact, she had continued complaining about the lack of decent men to date throughout the past year.
So none of us responds to Jeff’s question.
“Okay,” he continues, “on to part two. I know that you’re all pretty foxy women and that you know the score and that you’re smart enough to write pretty impressive articles, or even books, once in a while. Right?”
He waits until we all reluctantly nod our consent. We know, of course, what Jeff is going to ask. We know, from legions of other men before him, that he is now going to ask how, with so much going for us, we can be so goddamn insecure and unhappy. Of course, from past experience, we also know how difficult it is to explain the ideology of our unhappiness.
As Tolstoy would doubtless agree, all adolescent girls are unhappy, but each adolescent girl believes herself to be unhappy in her own unique and singular way. In truth, however, the high school unhappiness of sensitive American female Depression Babies was monumental because, during the forties and fifties, popularity was the only standard of success. Although we believed all the fifties fairytales we’d been told, we were born Outsiders. We were the girls whose bras the boys never snapped even though we wore tight Lana Turner sweaters. We were never loose enough to Lindy well and many mornings we went to school only because our lockers were there and that’s where we kept certain contraband items like cigarettes, tampons and racy novels. Academically we always had difficulty because we didn’t follow directions well.
It was always the other girls, the Prettygirls (sometimes even our very own sisters) who got to be student council reps, cheerleaders, homecoming attendants and prom queens. Even though we tried to imitate them, we couldn’t. It was not that the Prettygirls were actually prettier than we were, but rather that they always looked like Nicegirls Who Didn’t (But Who Really Did.) Primatively, we believed they possessed supernatural powers because their cashmere sweaters and Bermuda shorts kept their creases while the pennies they inserted in their loafers stayed put and, like the shoes, kept their shines. Everything about the Prettygirls stayed in place, especially their Nicegirl reputations which made our teachers think they were quiet, conservative, conventional conformists. This charade demonstrated that Prettygirls had magical powers more potent than reality and, of course, inimitable.
Prettygirls taught themselves private-school cursive script and used fat round donuts rather than dots over their i’s and j’s. With daring bravery, they crossed their t’s with jaunty uphill slanty, rather than straight, lines. They all knew how to make dips: avocado dips for their Prettygirl pajama parties; deep dips to the floor when they jitterbugged at mixers; and—most wondrous of all—curvy dips in their bangs, which they set with magical bobby pins so that their hair always did what they wanted it to do. Later on, in the Kennedy sixties, they were even able to fall asleep with huge fat rollers affixed to their heads, creating big, beautiful Jackie! bouffants all night long—another thing we couldn’t do and a major reason why we didn’t all jump on the Kennedy bandwagon.
Like sorcerers, the Prettygirls, whose first names invariably ended in an “i”, broke a limited number of enchantments in order to release a few Prince Charmings for themselves and left us only with a battalion of frogs who wore glasses. Eventually we came to suspect that their magical powers had something to do with hickeys because, unlike us, the Prettygirls started going out in tenth grade, steady in eleventh, and all the way in twelfth—activities that usually involved hickeys.
Gracefully, the Prettygirls made all the required costume changes from Bermuda shorts through pedal pushers, capri pants, gibson girl blouses, poodle skirts, crinolines, wired bras, strapless bathing suits and taffeta prom gowns complete with wrist corsages. They were elected Best Everything including Best Dressed even though they always wore their boyfriends’ XL club jackets over everything except when they took their graduation pictures wearing Peter Pan–collared blouses, Revlon Pink Lightning smiles, White Shoulders perfume, a fraternity pin and their hair flipped up on both sides. Prettygirls had no acne, tummies, uncertainties, problem parents or academic concerns. Shortly after high school graduation, they all married the captain of the football team and sadistically asked us to stand up for them (as if they needed assistance) at their weddings—thus forcing us to buy many different-colored taffeta bridesmaids’ gowns and to keep dyeing our linen pumps from lilac to fuchsia to chartreuse and then back again.
We couldn’t—wouldn’t?—do anything the way they did it. In truth, we couldn’t even answer the questions posed by Kotex “Are You In The Know?” quizzes that ran in Seventeen and Mademoiselle. We didn’t score well because we simply couldn’t believe it was wrong to swim before the fourth or fifth day of a menstrual period. We weren’t even prepared to acknowledge that periods lasted that long. Intellectually and artistically famished, we remained socially alienated wallflowers at the orgy, tortured by our own nonconformist instincts plus dreaded eruptions of acne. One of the few thrills of those years was our discovery of homemade brick-and-board bookcases—a design (imported into our sterile environment by some older sibling come home from college) which we immediately duplicated in our bedrooms.
Ignorant of
the long tradition of dissent within our society, we were shocked and bitter—only a decade later—to watch rebels revered as heroes. Those of us who had suffered from “being different” during the fifties, and who would have killed to be “popular” back then, felt cheated as well as confirmed during the revolutionary sixties.
“The thing that killed me most about Sukie was how sad she was when I met her.” Jeff grimaces from the memory. “It was awesome how sad she was. And even though I tried to loosen her up, and we did have some fun, she just couldn’t take me seriously because I was fifteen years younger than her and because she had such a hangup about her age. And her weight. And her wrinkles. Shee … it! She had the whole schmeer.”
Jeff picks up one of his boots and gently rubs the leather with a cocky thumb. He has now become a member of that vast army of male observers who see all our absurdities without understanding them.
“You know what I think? I think Sukie got hooked on that American propaganda about people being happy all the time. I think that’s what caused a lot of her troubles.”
He was, perhaps, right. Chinese parents never mention happiness when asked what they wish for their children. Grown-up DEBs can think of nothing else. We believe the Declaration of Independence guaranteed us happiness, not just the right to pursue it. What’s troubling Jeff is the fact that we all look like winners but feel like losers.
The telephone rings and Jeff answers. He holds the receiver away from his ear so that a hysterical female voice at the other end of the line can be overheard.
“Yah,” he finally says. “It’s true. She’s dead.”
Now there is even more commotion from the incoming call and Jeff moves the receiver farther away from his face.
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