The Last Chance

by Rona Jaffe

  What kind of man, she wondered, put pictures of his kids right opposite the bed, so he would have to face them first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and after having sex? How could he stand it? Maybe his wife had made him take the pictures with him. Or maybe he had taken them to give the appearance of a doting father. Or maybe the pictures didn’t bother him the way they did her. Men had different sexual makeups from women, different systems of morality, she thought. She didn’t know how Reuben could get an erection looking at a baleful photo of his sons. It didn’t seem to hinder him.

  There was a bottle of Dom Pérignon waiting for them in the refrigerator. They drank a toast.

  “To our new life,” Reuben said.

  “To our new life.”

  She saw that he had even bought her a toothbrush. It sat on the ledge of the bathroom sink in its box, like a party favor. He had put a little card on it with her name and he had tied a silly bow around the box. Ellen was so touched that she wanted to cry.

  October 1975

  The day after her sister’s fourteenth birthday party Jill got her first period. She scrounged around her sister’s messy closet until she found the tampons. It was ironic, she thought, that she was sixteen and taking her baby sister’s tampons, because she had thought she would never need any of her own. Having a period horrified her. She tried to get the tampon in, but she got too tense and couldn’t. She didn’t want anything invading her body, especially down there. She threw the thing down the toilet and flushed it, put on her raincoat, and walked down Broadway until she found the drugstore that was open on Sundays. She was getting terrible cramps, so she bought an assortment of pills for that, some aspirin, and some pads that were supposed to stick to your underpants. She just helped herself to the things she needed and slammed them down on the counter as if she was used to such purchases, and the man who added her bill didn’t pay any attention to her at all. She had joined the rest of the female world. He had no idea what a trauma this was for her.

  Luckily her mother was away all day. Jill was relieved about the new guy, because he kept her mother out of her life when she most needed privacy. She took her pills and curled up on her bed, her knees to her stomach, wondering why cramps burned so badly when they were supposed to just cramp. Tears rolled down her face. She supposed now she would grow and change in every way. She wanted to die.

  Stacey was out doing homework at a friend’s house and her father was watching some sports thing on TV. Jill locked her bedroom door and waited on the bed until the pains got milder. She felt a little groggy. She got up and inspected herself in the mirror on the closet door, and then she stripped off all her clothes and inspected herself again, front, back, and side. She didn’t look any different. Her buds of breasts felt sore but they didn’t look bigger. There was a reassuring hollow between her hip bones, and her ribs went right up to her collarbone, it seemed. When she put her knees together she could get her fist between the insides of her thighs. Her backside was absolutely flat. She could count every little button on the back of her spine, and her shoulder blades stuck out like the tail fins on an old car. There was no place on her body where she could pinch the skin and find even a morsel of fat. She went into the closet and stepped on the scale. Eighty-nine. She’d lost all the blubber they’d forced on her in the hospital.

  Jill danced in front of the mirror, admiring her thin naked body, praying to whatever power there was up there that nothing would change. She wasn’t really having a deluge, just the beginning of a period. Maybe she wouldn’t have them every month. Stacey didn’t in the beginning. She wasn’t built like Stacey anyway, so maybe her body wouldn’t change much. God, she hoped not. She didn’t want men looking at her. She was scared.

  She got dressed again, put some records on the stereo, and went to bed. Those pills really knocked you out. She’d never taken any pill before except vitamins. She slept, and when she woke up it was seven o’clock. The last record had clicked off and the apartment was awfully quiet. She wondered where everybody was. Then she remembered her horrible condition and raced to the bathroom to inspect the pad. She wished everything was still normal like it was yesterday. She felt cold.

  They were all in the kitchen, her parents and Stacey. They were having cold cuts again. “We were just going to wake you up,” her mother said.

  “I’m just going to heat some soup,” Jill said. “I have cramps.”

  “Again?” her mother said. “Poor thing.”

  Jill thought it was funny that after all the months of faking, this time she had real cramps. She took the soup to her room and held the mug against her stomach for warmth. When it cooled she went into the bathroom and flushed the soup down the toilet. She inspected her face in the mirror. The same face, a little thinner than it used to be; she was getting older. The childish roundness was gone. She was getting to look more like her mother than ever. Those cheekbones, that horseface. She sucked in her cheeks. Oh, God, in a few years nobody would be able to tell them apart!

  When she got back to her bedroom her mother was sitting on the bed. “Feeling better?”

  Who said you could come in my room without my permission, Jill thought furiously. “Yes,” she said, “some.”

  “I used to have cramps too,” her mother said, “until after I was married. Once you have a sex life they go away.”

  “Do we have to talk about that?” Jill said.

  “I just thought it’s been so long since we had a real mother-daughter talk. I really don’t know very much about you lately, Jill. I don’t know how you feel about things; you won’t tell me. I don’t know who your friends are, if there’s a boy you like. We ought to be able to share more.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to be your friend.” Her mother took a pack of cigarettes out of her sweater pocket and lit one. She looked around for an ashtray, but there was none. Jill coughed pointedly and waved the smoke away.

  “I thought you gave up smoking,” Jill said.

  “I just bought this pack yesterday. See, it’s more than half full.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t smoke in my room.”

  “All right,” her mother said pleasantly. She dropped the lit cigarette into the empty soup mug. It sizzled as it went out in the bit of liquid that was left in the bottom. Jill wanted to throw up. “How’s school?” Ellen said.

  “Fine.”

  “You must have different teachers this year. Do you like them?”

  “They’re okay.”

  “What’s your favorite subject?”

  “English,” Jill said. She felt humiliated at having to answer these childish questions, especially since she knew her mother didn’t give a damn about any of it. She wondered what her mother would say if she started giving her the third degree, starting with “Where were you today, I know you weren’t with Margot like you said.”

  “Maybe you’ll be a writer.”

  “I doubt it,” Jill said.

  “You ought to start thinking about college.”

  “All right.”

  “Do you have any idea where you want to go?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to go to my old alma mater?”

  Jill shrugged. I’d die first, she thought.

  “They have co-ed dorms now,” her mother went on. “It seems so strange. How would you feel about living in a co-ed dorm?”

  Jill shrugged.

  “They say it’s just like brothers and sisters,” her mother went on. “Incest taboo. You date boys from other dorms. Still, I wouldn’t like to have to share a bathroom with boys, would you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a funny thing to say to one’s own daughter, Jill, but I hope when you go to college you’ll have a few affairs. I wouldn’t want you to do it now, you’re too young, but later, when you’re older, I hope you do. I hope you’re not a virgin when you get married.”

  Jill stared at her mother. I’m dreaming this, she thought.

  “We were all
so innocent and so scared,” her mother went on. “We were full of guilt about nothing. Your generation is luckier. You can be friends with boys, share things with them. You can talk to them. When you get married, you won’t marry a stranger.”

  “Why are you lecturing me?” Jill said.

  “Oh, Jill, I’m not lecturing you. I just want to be your friend. I want you to be my friend. I want you to understand life, and I think I can help you. I used to have wonderful talks with my mother when I was your age.”

  “That’s when she told you to marry a stranger,” Jill said.

  “We couldn’t be frank about those things,” Ellen said. “But I can be frank with you, and you with me. You’re lucky to have an understanding mother. If you don’t use me, you’re going to be sorry.”

  Jill felt the guilt her mother always tried to arouse in her, and then she felt rage radiating through her body right down to her fingertips. It crackled like electricity through the wires of her arms and legs and pressed in on her heart. She struggled for breath, and sighed deeply.

  “I have a headache, Mom. Could we talk another time?”

  “Will we talk another time? Will you talk to me?”

  “Yes, sure. But not now.”

  “All right,” Ellen said. She picked up the mug she had defiled and kissed Jill on top of the head. “Get in bed and watch TV. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

  “Good night, Mom.”

  Jill locked her door and opened the window wide to get the smell of smoke and her mother’s perfume out of the room. She felt as if she were strangling. The air rushed in, and she leaned out, gulping it. She drew back after a moment. Heights frightened her. She was always afraid she might fall or get carried away by some madness and jump. She shivered and shut the window except for a crack. Didn’t her mother realize that when she was talking about when she was young and ignorant and had married a stranger, she was talking about Jill’s father? Her mother’s past was like another person in the room. She tried to imagine her mother as an eighteen-year-old girl at college going out with boys. In the olden days they had dates, and they kissed goodnight and necked, and they wanted to save their virginity for their husbands. Jill knew all about that from her friends. They sat around and talked about their parents’ high school and college days, and they were amazed and amused. Jill and her friends adored old movies about the fifties. She liked that television show about teen-agers in her mother’s day. She supposed her mother had been brought up to believe you had to be married before you ran around. It was really weird what those old people thought. But I could have tolerated all that, Jill thought, if she only didn’t try to manipulate me all the time. She has to manipulate everyone. It’s like she doesn’t feel safe and satisfied until she has us all following her rules. She does that to make sure we’re all in our places, like toys in a box. If she knew I never went out alone with a boy in my life she would have a fit. I know what it’s like to have a brother-sister relationship with a boy. It’s all I have. I never want any other kind. I think my mother is crazy. I think she’s really a certified lunatic. But nobody puts her away, because she’s the boss around here. God, it’s terrible to be a kid and have no power at all! I wish she was dead.

  That month, October, two things happened that Margot thought were quite incredible. One was that Kerry finished the novel he had been writing, handed it in to his publisher, and the word swept the publishing business that it would be the hit of the following fall. Margot heard it first from Nikki. Even though Kerry had a different publisher, Nikki had heard. It annoyed Margot that he was not a failure. All this time she had been consoling herself that Kerry was just a rich dilettante, that he would never finish his book, that it just gave him something interesting to talk about to impress people. Now he had managed to fool her again.

  That black model was still living with him. Apparently she knew how to handle him. It further annoyed Margot that a twenty-year-old girl knew more about how to handle a man than she did at forty. She felt that everything she had ever learned about men and life no longer applied. She was as ignorant as a new-born baby. What defenses did she have any more when the world had changed so?

  The other incredible thing that happened was that Margot broke her rule about keeping her private life separate from her work life and went to bed with someone from the show. He was a new young cameraman who went out with her one day when she was taping with the mobile unit. She had never seen him before. He was tall and rough-looking and sexy, and she figured him to be about fifteen years younger than she was. They had a drink together when they finished working, and she let it drift on until she ended up in his mangy little apartment on the lower East Side. By now she was used to mangy little apartments. That was where young boys lived. The double bed completely filled the small bedroom, and he hadn’t changed the sheets for months. There were bars on the windows because he lived on the ground floor. He had a motorcycle which he kept right in the apartment so no one would steal it. It filled half the tiny living room. The worst part was that he lived with his brother, and in the middle of copulating, the brother appeared and looked right at them, then calmly went into the living room, where he spent the rest of the night on the couch.

  No, that was not the worst part. The worst part was that Margot knew the brother was looking at them and she didn’t care. She felt perversely proud of herself that the young man knew she was sexy and desirable.

  In the morning she had breakfast with the two of them. The brother was an unemployed actor and he was two years older. She loved that she had gone to bed with the younger one. The older one was as attractive as his brother, and he looked at her as if he would have liked to have a chance with her if she wasn’t already taken. She wanted to tell him she wasn’t taken, that she’d forgotten his brother’s name. She was beginning to feel hostile as her customary guilt took over. As soon as they finished breakfast she left and took a taxi home. It cost her a fortune.

  The young cameraman didn’t call her. She realized he was used to casual sex. She hoped he would never mention what had happened, not to her and especially not to anyone at work. She arranged her schedule so she could avoid him. Why hadn’t she picked someone respectable she had interviewed? There were plenty of them; lawyers, scientists, businessmen, even employed actors. Published writers, movie stars, congressmen. Why did she pick the dregs? Why couldn’t she control her insatiable ego? Or lack of ego …

  She kept seeing that tiny room again in her mind, the filthy sheets, and the black iron bars against the grimy windowpane. The little curtains that had so touched her because he cared about his place now seemed as tacky as they actually were. The glamorous motorcyle (that meant youth!) now struck her as offensive. The older brother’s uncurious eyes burned into her mind. Had he thought she was pathetic, a joke?

  Her boundaries were melting. She could no longer count on the rules she had set for herself to control her instincts of the moment. She was increasingly depressed and couldn’t sleep at night. She got more sleeping pills and began taking them regularly, with a drink to speed them along. She poked a hole in each end of the small capsule with a pin so they would act faster. Sometimes she crashed into a dreamless sleep, but some nights the pills didn’t work at all. She would lie in bed, perspiring, reliving moments she would have given anything to make not have happened. She redid the dialogue in her mind, making the scenes come out the way they should have instead of as they had. Finally she would get up and take another sleeping pill, sometimes even another. She was afraid they would be gone, and what would she do then?

  She got another prescription. The doctor didn’t seem to notice their frequency. She still had her little hoard. Every night when she took her pills she felt sorry for herself because she was alone. Weekends were unbearable. Everyone she knew had someone to spend weekends with. Saturdays were all right because the streets were full of people, the stores were open, she could shop or pretend to shop. But Sundays were endless. She read the entire New York Times and watched tel
evision. After a while she found she couldn’t even read the Times, she could only look at the ads and the headlines. She was too nervous to concentrate. It was impossible to read a book. She was too depressed to go to a movie alone and too depressed to call someone to go with her. She napped a lot on Sundays during the day. Then at night she wasn’t sleepy at all and had to take an extra pill, sometimes two extra. She drank all evening. At times she wondered if she wouldn’t be better off the way she had been before, making a fool of herself with anonymous young men. Other people did it.

  Her depression was like a physical pain. Although it was only October, already she was thinking of Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Nobody her age paid any attention to New Year’s Eve any more, but you couldn’t avoid Christmas. Should she go home to her family? She hated her family, what was left of them, and they acted as if they hated her. Besides, traveling during the holiday was intolerable, and she would probably have to work. Whom did she have to give presents to? A lot of people in the office she didn’t even like. She would have to brave crowds and spend a lot of money, for what? Maybe she wouldn’t give anybody anything, start a new trend. Let them hate her too. Business gifts were hypocritical anyway. She knew the minute she heard those carols on the radio and in the street she would go into her usual bad mood. Rachel would give a party; that was nice. Kerry would be there in his glory as the future famous author; that was not nice. He would be with Haviland. That was not nice either. Margot would have no date she wasn’t ashamed to be seen with, so she would be alone. That was the worst. She would have loved to bring someone they all would recognize from the show, but they were all married. Christmas they would be with their wives and kids. Ugh.