by John Okas
Mature enough in the bustline to be a Cootie Cutie, maybe, but Miss Lord knows Gloria is young at heart and innocent about her own sexuality. Just a few months ago the sitter was pushing her to go out with boys, now she can’t warn her enough about them. A trio from a nearby prep school hang around the corner, waiting for Gloria so they can show off when she walks by. And lately she reports all sorts of strange men on the street stop her and try to say hello. Laudette tells her she must not consider talking to them for even a moment. She considers Laudette’s admonitions unnecessary. She has no intention of talking back. When men stop and stare, or talk to her, it makes her skittish. She gets the idea that they are interested in what she has under her clothes. And if she should stop to return their interest and imagine them undressed she suspects they would expect her to be at their mercy rather than the other way around.
In all her born days she’s never seen a penis in the flesh. So she thinks. Once when she was too young to remember, she hid in her mother’s closet and saw Harry Swan raise his love finger to her mother. This, though, is like something from another life. It’s in the background of her mind. In the beginning of the summer, she visits Thalia. Sharing a common curiosity, the girls go to the Main Branch of the Big Apple Public Library to look for photographs of genitals in medical texts. What they see makes them cringe: the examples in the books are of rare diseases and horrid deformities. With the idea that truth is beauty they go to the museum to look at paintings and stone statues on the theme of male magnificence. But the little drops of marble or paint meant to signify the crux of it are hardly enough to get worked up about.
Life is lonely at the top. It is a rare afternoon when the Bee goddess gets to feel the joy of girl-friendship. Silly girls, the two giggle over ice-cream sodas in the Museum Cafe, whispering about one-eyed monsters and little pee-wees.
But it’s not all laughs. Gloria gets tingles when she thinks seriously about the opposite sex. As boys seem too young and men too old, she turns her fancy on herself. She handles her breasts, runs her hands through her new head of hair, and feels spasmodic reverence for her womanhood. Is what they’ve got between their legs weaker or stronger than what she’s got between hers? She swears she will never let it compromise her independence, and feels her Daddy-o, always one to enjoy the relative and ideal positions the sexes occupied, smiling down on her from heaven.
The warm weather which spikes Gloria’s blossoming also increases her feeling of license. For the summer at least she will be free of ungoddessly SCUBA gear. Like her mother at her age, she has some urge toward showing off her body. She startles Laudette one hot humid Friday in July when she breezes through the kitchen on her way out for a weekend at Thalia’s beach house wearing a yellow sunsuit from the year gone by. Like her uniform, it is far too small. Laudette winces when she sees the baby’s legs all the way up to above her knees. What’s more, she has on makeup, some applied conventionally and some not, suggestive off-colors on her eyes and mouth to make them stand out. And there is paint on her finger and toenails. The sitter, who now has to look up to face the Baby, stamps her foot and hollers like a siren.
“No child I’m sitting for is going out of this house looking like that! Baby, how many times do I have to tell you, it’s one thing to flaunt it when you’re a baby, but quite another when you’ve got development on you! From now on I’m going to see that you wear dresses like a proper young lady should, and stop painting yourself up like some sort of heathen party girl. For starters you need the right foundation garment.”
Laudette reaches up on top of the refrigerator and takes down a package. “Here, I bought you this when I was visiting my sister Florene in Kingsborough yesterday.”
Gloria pokes her hand into the bag and pulls out a pair of starchy white cups, cardboard cotton and wire, sewn onto elastic strips that end in a hook and eye. She laughs so hard her mascara begins to run. “Lawdy Lord! Don’t scare me! I’ll die before I put it on. What’s the point of my having teats if I let you stuff them into this?”
“The point of your teats! You only look like you’re grown up, but you talk like a baby who doesn’t know anything about the facts of life. You have a lot to learn, let me tell you, Miss Smarty Pants. The way you look can get you into a mess of trouble. Just because a girl goes for jazz that doesn’t mean she has to go around dressed like a floozy, letting it all hang loose. Now put this on or I swear you’ll be sorry. There are health reasons, too. Without the proper support your good points will be falling down to your belly button like a pair of salamis. And if you don’t believe me take a look at the photographs in this natural geographic book here. Do you see these native girls? See what going without a brassiere can do.”
“In these tribes girls’ teats get stretched because the men and babies pull on them all they want,” Gloria argues calmly. And in a surge of physical expressionism, lets the straps of her sun dress fall off her shoulders. Her budding glands of milk and pleasure see the light of day. “Salamis, Lawdy? Stop kidding me. Get a load of these, I’m finally not a kid anymore!”
“Never, ever show your nipples in public! Not even if you have a screaming baby to feed!” Laudette gives Glory a slap on the wrist to let her know she means business. “Now if you don’t get upstairs and put on something more fitting, and wash off that paint and polish, you’re not going anywhere this weekend.” Sniff. “And what’s this?” Sniff sniff. “Is this cigarettes I smell on you? Oh my goodness! You’ll stunt your growth! The Dipster always said, ‘Where there’s smoke, the hell of fire water can’t be far behind.’ That settles it, Baby, you’re not leaving this house. No matter what. Now go up to your room.”
Whatever Glory wants Glory is used to getting. She frustrates Laudette by knocking on her mother’s door, thus forcing the sitter to defend her decision in front of Sarah. “Mummy, Lawdy says I can’t go out because she smells smoke on my breath. Is that fair?”
“It’s not just that,” the big sitter grumbles, “if someone would look at the way her daughter’s dressed and the way she’s painted up like the whore of Hanging Garden City, maybe she would come back down to earth and remember what a jungle it is out there and say what can happen to little schoolgirls in tight clothes. They get in tight spots! And someone ought to tell her to wear a brassiere because if she doesn’t every male in the species will figure her on having loose morals.”
Sarah, for all the muck she’s mired in, can’t believe how fast time passes. Yet, a mere thirty-one, she is young enough to remember herself at Gloria’s age. When early eros came to her stifled psyche, her parents greeted it as if it were a plague. They tried to brainwash her, but she corresponded with the Freethinker Press and got packages of poetry, humanist essays, and pornography. No doubt she would have been smoking and wearing party dresses too were any such things available in Zion. Gloria, you’ve grown up before I had a chance to get to know you. Is that fair?
The split peach knows religion is no help in stilling physical urges. If anything, the presence of a taboo only increases the attractiveness of sin. Restraints on sensual expression make sex seem more desirable than it already is. The best advice she can give her daughter is none: let Gloria remain free of preconceived notions about goodness and badness.
Sarah disapproves of the way Laudette lectures Gloria. The sitter’s sermons, increasingly fundamental and deprecatory, are similar to those of her father. On occasion she warns Laudette about it, but it does no good. The big woman talks back to her, but not directly. “I understand someone around here has a dispensation from morals. If someone hires a sitter, it only stands to reason someone wants the sitter to do her best to set a good example for the baby.”
Sarah accepts it because she has no choice. Firing Laudette is out of the question. Laudette is family. In fact, without Laudette there would be no family, just two pretty women going their separate ways. Anyway, Sarah knows Miss Lord has a generous spirit and loves her for it, and knows, even though she is constantly condemning her, that Laudette
still loves her too and cares for her. And Sarah has practical reasons for not wanting to provoke Laudette any further. She counts the sitter as of inestimable value in her own further quest for freedom.
“Well can I go or not?” Gloria breaks her mother’s deliberative reverie. “Thalia’s waiting, she doesn’t have all day, you know.”
“Gloria, I would rather you didn’t smoke and that dress doesn’t really fit right. Maybe you should change it.”
“Mummy, I really don’t think so.”
Sarah ventures gently to contradict Laudette, “Actually, Miss Lord, for a weekend at the seashore I think the dress might do. What do a few ounces of cotton, a few dabs of paint matter? As for the smoking, well, we’re not going to be hypocrites, are we? I won’t tell her not to use the filthy things until I swear off them myself. And if we try to prevent her by punishment we’re only going to turn her into a liar about doing it, and make the thing we’re trying to turn her away from seem more desirable, don’t you think?”
“No,” says Laudette, facing aside, “I don’t agree, not at all, not one bit, whatsoever.”
Gloria wins on the stalemate. While the big sitter talks to the wall, and her mother starts saying her “cheese”, she skips out of town dressed for the sun, snapping her fingers and tapping her toes.
More Crap from Mummy
Messages now come to Sarah, not in dramatic psychosexual upheavals, or through the medium and the fruits and nuts, but from simple intuitions. “Little voices”, as she calls them, tell her everything; she knows what she has to do. With Harry gone and Gloria well on her way to adulthood, the split pea can resume her search for free thought. She takes to the atlas to map out the next phase of her destiny. By October she has done more than seriously think about taking a trip to Pingp’yangpoong. She has already made arrangements to go. On the first of the year she’s scheduled to leave for the Mahabharatan subcontinent, around Cape Boaz, the southern tip of deepest darkest Jujuba, on an international medical supply ship flying a flag of mercy. From there, she’ll go north as far as the train will take her, pick up some guides, leg it on the long trek up the mighty Pu Mountains and start looking for Lord Bharavi in the flesh.
The circumstances surrounding the death of Corn Dog opened doors that shed some light on the dark side of her soul. Now, with Harry’s passing, the marble goddess feels the block of this material world could fall away from her entirely, that her spirit could be on its own, following in the streamlines of the buck, the same lanes that Z cruises, where the nature of the body is voidness, were it not for a pair of sticky particulars. One is the mother-daughter talk. Unless she tells Gloria now, levels with her sister-to-sister about who she is and what she’s done, she imagines she will go to her grave holding the secret of her denial of the child’s real father’s identity and the part she played in his death. But she has had this ache in her head for over a decade and, as is so often the case with chronic pain, as the years go by the sufferer becomes one with the suffering and doesn’t mind it as much. It’s the second item that’s more upsetting: over ten months have passed since Harry’s death and Laudette is still being contentious and threatening to quit, all because of Sarah’s open admission that she thought her husband’s end was a stroke of good luck.
If she quits, thinks Sarah, I’ll have to kiss my travelling plans goodbye. I’ll never find anyone whose hands I’d trust more to leave Gloria in than Miss Lord’s.
Yet every morning the big woman clomps through the house eating donuts and praying out loud heedless that Gloria, getting ready for school, is within earshot. She begs the Almighty’s pardon for Sarah. “Emanual, forgive that girl for she knows not what she did when she wished Sir Harry into Your care. Please send Your Brand, Your Holy X-Rays and make her see the light and hear Your angels’ horns and heavenly choir, anything that will deafen her to those goldarn little voices.”
Sarah notes the irony. She berates herself when she keeps things inside, yet the few times she has tried to open up, as when she told her father about her love, the ladies who lunch about her past, and lately when she tried to explain to Laudette the metaphysical particulars of Harry’s passing, she has drawn censure. She must wait until Gloria is off to school to defend herself.
“Why I didn’t go for the buck when I had the chance is something I’ll never be able to explain, but you, Miss Lord, forgave me for it instantly. I guess you only forgave me because you knew how much I was suffering about it. I thought I could be truthful with you about Harry. Now after all these months you still damn me for what happened to him. Harry died of natural causes. All I did was accept them and work with them.”
“That’s not what someone said on that day that will live in infantry. Someone said she witched it on him.”
“I’m sorry I don’t live up to your moral standards. But I have my own,” Sarah offers, her voice weakening.
The sitter folds her arms, turns her back, and walks away.
When the hep kitten Gloria comes home from school, she finds her mother in the back parlor, at the piano, waiting for her. Sarah bids Gloria have a seat on the bench next to her. Gloria takes the high end. Sarah stares at the keys as she speaks, Gloria likewise, as close to sister-to-sister as they’re going to get. “As you probably know I never was a good mother,” starts the peach gloomily, stumbling over the words. “At first, I thought that because I was young I didn’t know what I was doing, but as I got older I didn’t grow any wiser, only more tolerant of my ignorance.…” She rambles, full of explanations, hints, and apologies. The heart-to-heart talk goes astray, “It was tough for me to get along and I never had much time to spend with you. From the beginning I was afraid of everything and I masked my fears in makeup and fancy clothes. You were a special child. At first I thought you were retarded, then I saw how bright you were. You could see clear through me. You seemed to sense how uneasy I was with you and you did me a favor by being standoffish.” She sighs. “You’re brave like your father, not frightened like me.”
“My father?”
“Just forget him,” begs the split pea. It’s the best she can do.
Just more crap from Mummy then, Gloria thinks, nothing new here. But actually Sarah does have a surprise for her. She clears her throat and gets the talk back on track. She intends to reveal her wanderlust. “My tour of duty is up, both as a wife and as a psychic warrior. In a few months Mummy is going to see her Teacher, who lives on a magic mountain in the faraway East.”
The child is mother to the woman. Gloria looks down on Sarah and shakes her head, poor silly Mummy.
Sarah chokes, continuing. “You see, I love Lord Z, and I want to marry him. I think that he’s already married and has more than one wife, but I don’t care. It’s ironic because—did I ever tell you?—I was brought up in a sect of religious fanatics who practiced polygamy. I think part of the reason I love Z so is that he reminds me of the Old Goat I was forced to pray to when I was a girl your age.”
As it was in the beginning, to Glory Bee, God is omnipresent. She feels her inner space as full of God, and the world around her as God’s country, and thus sees no reason to travel, either mentally or physically, to find more. Her mother is like a hungry ghost transposed, a flesh and blood being trying desperately, impossibly, to ingest soul stuff. However, knowing nothing else but God, Gloria cannot see that her mother lacks clarity of inner vision. She cannot understand why her mother goes to such extremes in search of spirituality. Instead of being patient with her, Gloria is aggravated by her stupidity.
Bad enough Mummy talks about these fruity fantasies as if there were real, but to act on them and actually go on a wild goose chase, looking for magic mountains and swamis on the wind—what a sad case! With the double whammy of money and beauty, why doesn’t she use her powers to make home life easy and men manageable? If a beautiful woman, just past thirty and filthy rich, can’t make the mountain come to her, who can? And of all the times to travel, Nastis in the Titanic, Kimrakazis in the Deep Blue Sea!
The cat girl thinks she might be able to get rid of two birds with one swipe. “Lawdy? Mummy, I think you should know: she keeps telling me about a death wish you put on Daddy-o. I tell her she’s full of soup, and she shouldn’t be talking about you behind your back. But you know her, she won’t listen. I think I’d be a lot better off staying here on my own, so I don’t have to hear what a rotten egg you are all the time. Don’t you?”
But Laudette’s audacity only goes to further reassure Sarah that without the sitter’s cooperation she will not be going anywhere. However loud Miss Lord is about the uncanny factors that went into Harry Swan’s demise, that’s how meticulously true to her word she is when it comes to staying perfectly “mum” about the Corn Dog tragedy.
And regardless of Sarah’s own reluctance to overemphasize moral principles to Gloria, never before has she counted more on the sitter’s good sense. Although all along Sarah maintained that she preferred Gloria raised as a freethinker, now that the girl has developed into a young woman, the split personality, remembering all the trouble coming of age caused her, is not so sure she wants her daughter on the loose looking for the free love she sought. While Gloria has a mature face and figure, looking almost old enough to be mistaken for Sarah’s sister (were you to look beyond the superficial feature that one sister would be white as snow and the other tan as toast), she is still only a thirteen-year-old girl, not a baby who needs sitting, but a minor, not yet of age legally or otherwise to go without adult supervision.