I turned around, stunned. Then I looked at the cop more closely.
“How much?” I asked, straining to make my voice audible.
“Fifty.”
“Officer, we’re on our way out to Long Island. Can we just pay you directly since we’re not stopping in New York and we won’t be able to get to court to pay the fine?”
The cop looked at me critically. I reached into my purse, pulled out my wallet and extracted five ten-dollar bills.
The cop stretched out his hand.
“I don’t have my receipt book here,” he said.
“Oh, that’s okay.” Leonard smiled reassuringly.
The cop took the money and walked slowly back to his car.
Theo was shaking.
Leonard started the car and we drove straight home.
Leonard never participated in another political action after that one and soon my own involvement began to dwindle. I always felt that Leonard’s behavior stifled my own, but now the past seems much more complicated than it used to and I no longer understand things with the clarity and conviction I once felt.
Unable to sleep, I get up, select another hunk of Sukie’s manuscript and then lie down again to I read it.
JUNE 1982
Here Are Some Things That Happened to My Friends:
Women I know, women in their forties, have begun having babies. Eve told me she was thinking about getting pregnant; she said it was hard to do after forty, but even if she ended up having a frog, she was still going to try.
Pat got pregnant at thirty-nine and went past her due date by several weeks. Quite desperate, she said to me, “If I don’t have this baby soon, I’ll be too old to have another.”
Carolyn, who teaches sociology at NYU, became engaged to a colleague who had been divorced three times. When they went downtown to a jewelry store to pick out their matching wedding bands, he knew his ring size without being measured.
When Joanne’s first lover finally, after three years of living together, asked her to marry him, they were sitting in a Parisian café. While waiting for her response, Ethan saw a beautiful young Frenchwoman walking past.
“Wow. Look at that sweet pussy,” he said. “I could eat her for five days running.”
Joanne didn’t marry Ethan but she never got over him either. Apparently he whispered in bed a lot which was something she loved and didn’t find again very often after they split up.
Myra once told me that her lover always remembered his former girlfriends by the car he was driving at the time of their relationship. He would say, “Okay. Let’s see. In ’77 I had my Corvette. I guess I must have been going with Lila.”
I didn’t mention that Myra always remembered foreign cities by the men she’d slept with there: Johannesburg was someone named Nels, Mexico City was Robert, and Katmandu was first Antonio and then Nicolas.
I think we live in very peculiar times.
Twice in recent years a woman who wanted to show me a picture of her lover handed me a newspaper clipping.
The last time that happened, I was talking to Beth, who had just returned from Ireland. Eventually her travelogue turned into a description of the Irishman with whom she’d been involved and she asked if I’d like to see his picture. Retrieving her travel-tired handbag, Beth extracted a deeply creased newspaper photograph. Lovingly she unfolded the frayed paper and smoothed it out to show me six tough-looking men, in heavy overcoats, carrying a coffin.
“That’s him,” she said tenderly, pointing toward the center of the picture.
My heart paused since I wasn’t sure whether she was indicating the coffin or one of the pallbearers.
“His best friend died in prison from fasting.”
“Oh,” I said.
That was the second time. The other picture had been clipped from a Lebanese newspaper and showed my friend Laurie’s lover—a member of the PLO—carrying the small casket of a child killed during an Israeli bombing of Beirut.
I think it is a very peculiar historical period if women carry newspaper photos of their lovers instead of snapshots.
Here Are Some Things I’ve Heard Lately:
I heard about a young woman who got married because she was five months pregnant and then miscarried on her wedding night. After delivering stillborn triplet girls, she left the States and went to live in an ashram in India.
I heard about a yuppie lawyer who was in group therapy for a year before realizing that another man in the group was having an affair with his wife. The other man liked and enjoyed the woman so much, the husband didn’t recognize her from any of his descriptions.
I heard about a man who struggled for three and a half years to win custody of his young son and then died of a heart attack on the day his lawyer told him the court had found in his favor.
I heard of a man and woman—father of the bride and mother of the groom—who fell in love during the festivities preceding their children’s wedding. After the ceremony, they threw rice at the young couple and then jumped in a car and took off for Hawaii. They call themselves “out-laws” and are still living in Kona.
My friends have all been terrific about sending me weird newspaper articles, great titles, and descriptions of scenes they’ve seen or produced that they thought I might be able to use in a new book.
Recently I became intrigued by the young California man, waiting for an L.A.-to-Oakland flight, who accidentally boarded a plane to Auckland, New Zealand. He was returned on the next flight and immediately hired a Hollywood agent to sell his story to the movies.…
I have only recently realized that every clever thing a person says or thinks is not a two-word book title.
Last month, trying to remedy all my medical problems while still covered by Max’s health insurance, I discovered that I had traumatic arthritis in both my thumbs. This affliction was apparently caused by excessive typing at a desk of improper height. What an unromantic occupational hazard! Nevertheless, I find it difficult to hold a heavy Vogue nowadays because my thumbs no longer exert effective opposable force. If I remember my high school biology correctly, an opposable thumb is one of the primary differences between apes and humans.
Dorothy saw two policemen walking out of her apartment building when she returned home.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, running up the stairs toward them. “What happened?”
“Nothing, lady,” one of the officers groaned. “We live here. Cops got to live someplace too, you know.”
Arlene went over to her lover’s apartment, opened the door with the key he had given her, and saw him making love to his former wife on the living room sofa. Later that night, Arlene was sitting near her front window when a foreign student who lived in her building jumped off the roof. She saw his face as he fell past her floor.
Britt was helping her new husband fix up his study when she saw a letter to him from his first wife. The last sentence wasn’t complete but it began, “I could have forgiven you if she’d only been my friend, but my sister …”
That was when Britt began to notice other things too. Marty’s sexual preambles were coded for a different woman. He did things to Britt that his former wife, Ursula, had clearly enjoyed. Once Britt realized this, she stopped responding to her third husband’s first wife’s pleasure points.
Next she noticed that many of Marty’s other habits were probably Ursula’s preferences also. He folded the dishrag into a square before draping it over the kitchen faucet and turned paper napkins into tutored triangles with a practiced twist. Soon Britt began to identify with Ursula, and since Marty had betrayed her, Britt could no longer trust him. If it had only been Ursula’s friend—but her sister! Marty and Britt broke up six months later.
Elaine. I think Elaine broke up her marriage because she had gained thirty pounds and was unable to lose the weight. She started a fight with her husband, orchestrated its escalation, and somehow established the idea that it was he who wanted to get rid of her. The idea hadn’t occurred to Nathaniel before,
but a few weeks after their fight, he moved out.
I think what Elaine was remembering was a previous separation when she had lost thirty-six pounds and turned from a fat woman into someone who could wear jeans and enjoy a different life-style. For several months she had lived in a communal house that provided her with endless companionship. She enjoyed this interlude so much that after she reconciled with Nathaniel, she found their affluent, opulent—but isolated—life oppressive.
Within a month of their second separation, Nathaniel met a beautiful young woman who worked at CBS and turned to her for consolation. In the next two years, Nathaniel married the young woman and fathered a new baby. After losing her husband, Elaine gained rather than lost weight. She became even fatter and was desperately lonely. Perhaps it would have been better if she had just gone on the Scarsdale Diet instead of starting that first fight.
However, Elaine is a source of great comfort to all of us now. Maybe it’s because she’s so noncompetitive. Or maybe it’s because her self-esteem is so low that anyone in her presence has got to feel better. Perhaps it’s wrong to take advantage of that. But Elaine is our comfort station, our pit stop, our rest area off the high-speed highway of life. She believes in basics—in cozy bedrooms with perfect reading lamps, in planned menus and in reserve rolls of paper toweling and toilet tissue. The last time I was in New York she told me that the pickle in a Big Mac does not qualify as a green vegetable.
I couldn’t survive without Elaine.
Once Jackie told me a story. Her bed was pushed against a wall in her L-shaped bedroom, in her L-shaped apartment, in her L-shaped building. On the other side of her bedroom wall, Jackie could hear a woman sobbing, hour after hour, in the middle of the night, night after night. One morning, while waiting for the elevator, Jackie saw the door of the adjacent apartment open and a middle-aged woman emerge and approach the elevator. She smiled sadly at Jackie but Jackie was unable to speak or respond. Having overheard the woman’s intimate pain, Jackie was stricken with shyness. She was home several weeks later when the woman OD’d on sleeping pills and the fire department took her corpse away.
When Carol was little she, of course, watched the televised funerals of the Kennedys and Dr. King. Later, when a friend of ours died, she asked, “When’s the parade?”
Here Are Some Things That Happened to Me Recently:
An older man I know said, “Life isn’t fair because women have all the pussy.” This was too weird for me, especially since he seemed to be speaking seriously.
Last summer I went to an Orioles game, in Baltimore, where I sat next to two young men wearing cutoffs with T-shirts that read: WE RENT BY THE PIECE: FURNITURE FOR LEASE. During the seventh inning, a good-looking girl walked past and waved to both of them.
“Hey, do you know Mary Ann?” one guy asked the other.
“Do I know Mary Ann?” the bearded man next to me echoed in italics. “Hell, I was once married to her for one night.”
I knew what he meant. “We rent by the piece.”
Three times in my life I’ve been in bed with different men who, stoned or drunk, said something they considered memorable and asked me to get up to find a paper on which to record their utterances.
I’ve slept with two men who went to enormous efforts to get me to bed with them and then turned out to be impotent. What did they want? Did they think I might cure them? I don’t even know how the damn thing works. Did they want me to comfort or coax them into virility?
I’ve slept with two different men each of whom said he was considering divorce, but was also interested in another marriage. Both times I was able to stop myself from laughing. Recently I learned that in Brazil you can only get divorced two times. The third marriage is indissoluble. Final. Forever. Maybe that’s a good idea.
I can’t remember the last time I gave a completed manuscript to a man who didn’t return it covered with chicken-scratchy editing marks.
I have met several men who wanted to give me their telephone numbers but, even after a long struggle, couldn’t remember them. People who live alone seldom have cause to call home and consequently often forget their own numbers.
Once I met a very sweet divorced man who found his Sundays so excruciatingly long that he walked nineteen blocks from his home to buy The New York Times at a downtown newsstand, thereby killing some time, postponing the pleasure of reading the paper and emasculating his Sunday.
Three years ago, when I was still me, I got an assignment to cover a meeting of Latin American bishops in Pueblo, Mexico. Afterwards I stopped off in Cozumel. There I got dreamy drinking Margaritas in the restaurant of the El Presidente Hotel after we lost electrical power so there was no elevator service or lights. Sitting there, half drunk, I watched an absurdly short mariachi trumpeter, whose pants were so tight he had to be lifted onto the stage, flirt with me. I thought, Is this what it’s all about?
The next day, I dumped two pocketfuls of amphetamines into a garbage can at the airport when I saw security officers doing body frisks on the passengers ahead of me.
After Max left, I went to New York where a crazy lady at Penn Station who had been accosting a lot of people came up to me and asked, “What is your religion? What is your race? What is your creed? Who are you exactly?”
As soon as she finished her litany of questions, I burst into tears.
I still dilate upon my losses. The qualities of my pain are exquisitely distinct. Bittersweet or sour rushes of rage spiral through me. Geysers of grief erupt. I experience a rush of sobs for the past. To comfort myself, I pretend the truth hasn’t happened yet.
I study my photograph albums, seeking to discover who I was when my children were babies. I am determined to retrieve a former version of myself from some earlier edition. This has become very important to me. A few days ago I decided I had simply forgotten the person I used to be. I believe people can erase their previous selves just as infants turn into babies and then into toddlers and then into real children in whom the newborn is eternally buried like a little Russian doll inside a larger version of herself.
I remember when all our friends had new babies and we used to take them with us to dinner parties and leave them centered on the host’s master bed. Paul, who named his daughter after his dog, told me about a New Year’s Eve party he went to in New York where rowdy, boisterous guests threw their coats over a baby sleeping on the bed. Later, right before midnight, the mother went in to check on the infant and began screaming as she pulled the heavy winter wraps off her baby, flinging them like parachutes into the air. The baby was dead.
My photo albums are almost too chaotic to serve as memory joggers. There is little order to them, certainly nothing chronological. The best-organized album holds baby pictures of Carol that I study carefully, trying to remember who I was when she was an infant. Am I still the same woman or has that girlish young mother totally disappeared? I am as surprised at seeing my young self as I was when I first saw photographs of only black faces in Kate’s family album. Photos of black faces struck me as strange after a lifetime of albums filled only with whites.
Many famous people used to visit us; we went ice skating with them or on picnics or to parties, but I was too proud to ask for their autographs or take their pictures.
Max and I are still together in many photographs.
Who took those pictures? Where are those people now?
What I can’t accept are the shared memories that were also divorced—devalued and depreciated by our separation.
What happens to memories that cease to be mutual and are no longer reinforced? Isn’t the birth of a baby less dear when remembered alone? Isn’t an averted airplane crash less real if only one person recalls it? Isn’t a tragedy more painful, a fear more fearful, a dread more dreadful, when suffered alone? And what of the deaths of friends we suffered together, the illnesses of children, the intricate understandings of inexplicable forces from the past?
Certainly there were moments at restaurants when our family shi
mmered with closeness. There were car rides that didn’t become irritable. There were mornings when mutual expectations fused into familial joy. I am very sorry I didn’t keep a journal back then, when the kids were babies. As a writer that would have been as natural to me as a photographer taking pictures of a new infant. Now I remember so little. Just a few things. I do remember when David said to me, “I’m sorry you and I couldn’t be little at the same time together. I would have brought you home from school.” He wasn’t yet six when he said that. But he was right. We would have been great pals. In fact, we are.
In our family, more was always better. Less was never enough.
I can no longer recall the extreme anguish I suffered in the first few days after Max left. I do know that for the first week I wore sunglasses around the house, even at night, so my children wouldn’t see how much I’d been crying. I believe God fixes things so that even enormous losses, like labor pains, are forgotten. If women could clearly recall giving birth, they might very well embrace celibacy and cease to reproduce. If I were able to relive my sense of loss when Max left, I would probably cease to love anyone ever again.
So God lets losses fade.
What I can still remember clearly is my anxiety. I remember it as if it were an old house in which I used to live. I can remember all its nooks and crannies. I lived within that edifice of anxiety for so long that it became a permanent kinetic memory that won’t quit. I would do anything to avoid having anything like that anxiety ever again.
NOVEMBER 1982
Early this morning—it is Friday—I decide to spend the day outside my house. I get dressed in black corduroy jeans with a black turtleneck pullover sweater that David says makes me look like I have a whiplash. In a sense I do. Briskly I walk down Connecticut Avenue to the Bread Oven, a French patisserie on 19th Street. I come here hoping to encounter some old friend—or perhaps to meet a stranger. I will, at least, taste the sweet residue of thick French coffee in my mouth as I squander my morning.
The restaurant is full of sunlight that shimmies across the long baguette ovens lining one wall. The din of dishes and dim voices reminds me not of Paris, but of novels by Jean Rhys, who painted such lovely scenes in pale pastels. I have always cared fiercely about Rhys’ heroines, who try not to look shabby while eating their single meal of the day in some Parisian café. Her stories provide lyrics for our songs of loss.
Hot Flashes Page 21