Funny thing was, no one ever picked up.
I finally left a message, saying that Kendra had been here, some things had gone down, I was worried about her. I pictured the house standing empty, its heavy curtains pulled against the light.
And here is how I remember her. Clarice. First seeing Clarice. It was the next morning, and I was coming in from my fencing class. I remember I was of course wearing the sloppiest clothes possible: plaid pajama bottoms, a puffy pair of faux-snakeskin British Knights scored at the Goodwill for $3, and a Misfits T-shirt that had been worn down to the state of fine tissue. Over this I’d thrown my favorite coat, a Joan Blondell number with a zany sort of shawl collar so big it pretty well stood up by itself. It was a shame I wasn’t also wearing cymbals on my knees.
A young man and a tall and erect older woman were in the lobby, which was basically an unpleasant, impromptu place with a stained couch. The young man had one foot on the coffee table and was checking his watch, while the woman stood cradling her coat at her hip as if it were a pile of fox furs. They both seemed offended by the unexpected shabbiness of the surroundings—Barnard was the second most expensive school in the country at that time—and they reminded me of nothing so much as a couple of toffs on the cover of a P. G. Wodehouse novel, waiting for the steamer to Le Havre, nostrils quivering with disdain.
Instantly I knew who they were. And I felt a troubling mixture of hatred and covetousness toward them. Also instantly I knew I’d get nowhere by being combative with such people. So I went up, stuck out my hand, and said, “Ms. Marr?”
The woman turned to me and began to look me up and down. Slowly. Very, very slowly, as if she were sizing up a beggar and wondering, Leprosy or no? Then she peered into my face with the most withering of looks. I recoiled. But in a moment I flashed back to the conscientious high school friend, the one who talks to your parents about the parish bake sale even as he’s wearing a spiked dog collar, and I smiled at her. I said my name, pronouncing it very Italianly to show I wasn’t some cultureless gavone. She softened a bit at this, taking my hand, and introduced me to her son Bertrand. He had a florid face and the high color of a Pre-Raphaelite painting and seemed to me dreadfully self-important. I thrilled to the memory of Kendra putting the gross old jar of Nutella in his sock drawer.
We rode up in the elevator together in silence.
They followed me down the long hallway of my suite and into the kitchen, which was piled with great bales of newspapers, Rolling Rock bottles, and heaps of pizza boxes and Chinese food containers. There was a paper napkin on the table on which someone had written Fichte go fuck yerself, and this I swiftly dispatched into the trash bin. They refused my offered cup of tea, and Clarice cautiously took a seat, first examining the table for contaminants before she placed her lightly folded hands upon it. Bertrand seemed to be looking for a piece of wall to lean against, but visibly rejected them all as dirty—as repulsive, in fact, judging by the ripple of contempt that passed through his person. Instead he stuffed his hands into his pockets and stood rocking back and forth on his feet.
This will sound strange, but I remember it suddenly struck me that Clarice wanted to be hip. I mean, odd to say, I sensed that she cared what I—an eighteen-year-old wearing a Mommy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight? T-shirt—thought of her.
“Where’s Kendrick?” she said to me quietly.
“Where’s Kendrick?” I repeated. “Well, she came and went, like I said. Out of nowhere she showed up on Tuesday—she told me she ran away from rehab, and she was back but they gave her dorm room away. So she stayed over. Then she disappeared the next day. She left me a note. Then my suitemate Ainslie told us something of hers had disappeared. Her prescription drugs.”
“Did you take them?” Bertrand asked me.
“Wait—what?” I said.
“Did you take the drugs from Ainslie?” he spat at me.
“What do you think, jerkhead?” I spat back at him.
“It is a stupid question, Bertrand,” Clarice said, waving him away.
“Not really,” he said.
“Bertrand, shut up or leave the room,” she said.
Amazingly, Bertrand left the room, slamming the door behind him.
“Now what is all this about?” Clarice said to me.
I studied her. She wasn’t her picture—that had been taken years before, anyway. She was impeccably groomed, her dark blond hair “lifted” very cunningly with flattering golden streaks. Her face was oddly downy, and on the side of her cheeks by her ears I could see a thick swirl of fair hair, suggesting some sluggish evolutionary tendency. Otherwise her makeup was immaculate, definitive, like that of an actress, especially her eyebrows over her uncanny ice-blue eyes. She wasn’t precisely a beautiful woman. There was too much hardness in her. I could imagine how that glamorous mouth would falter in anger, turn down and wither at the corners. I could imagine her yelling and even hitting. Somehow, beneath all the grooming and sophistication, I smelled something tentative, something unschooled that was trying to read me to find clues: what was the correct behavior in such an awkward situation?
“What are you asking? I told you,” I said to her, “someone took my suitemate’s prescription drugs and it wasn’t any of us.”
“How do you know it was Kendrick?”
“Look, she’s my friend. Do you think I enjoy doing this?”
“I’m sure it was Kendrick,” she decided, waving her hand in dismissal. She pushed angrily back from the table, fanned her hand over her face. “Why would she do this?” she said.
It was rhetorical, but I decided to answer it. I wanted to wound this woman.
“Well,” I said, in a voice dripping with sarcasm, “maybe because you put her in rehab instead of taking her to France? I mean, damn.”
She dropped her hand and looked at me. A sour smile came to her lips.
“Oh,” she said, “she conned you. You really don’t know our Kendrick. Little Miss Suffering. She’s a wily girl. She went to Bourgogne all right, and had a fine old time. Do you think she wanted to do anything when we got back? The girl is lazy, foremost. She’s a lazy little cow. So we get her sob story about her addictions, oh, my, my, my, so sad, and she wants to extend her vacation. She wanted another vacation really. So we send her up to Old Briar, which is a very nice place, and not cheap, and what does she do? She gets bored after a week and walks away. And in the meantime we get her straight-D report card. Oh, no, I should say—she did get a high mark in her bowling class.”
I felt my eyes filling up.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“She’s not an honest girl,” Clarice said.
“I just don’t believe it,” I said.
She had softened now, made her face kind. But it was the kindness of a woman talking to someone she pitied.
“She lied to you, honey,” she said.
Honey. She said it the same way Kendra said it, long and drawling. I got up from the table and went to leave the room, but I remembered stupid Bertrand in the hallway. Instead I went to the window and pretended to look out at the viewless airshaft view. But I was seeing nothing anyway.
“Did she take money from you?” Clarice said gently, behind me.
And I said no.
So it is an awful feeling, even years later. Being used. I understood nothing at that age. I was used to more straightforward cruelty, not subterfuge. I was used to angry Italians, yelling and violence. This was all too baroque for me. I remember thinking, This is the way rich people play, even though part of me wanted to disavow that sort of difference, wanted to disavow difference in the name of friendship. Or in the name of not wanting to be treated as something lesser.
Before she and Bertrand left, Clarice knocked on Ainslie’s door and gave her some restitution money. Three hundred dollars, Ainslie would reveal later, thrilled and instantly sailing down to Saks to get a pair of Gucci flats she’d had her eye on. I could have screamed out loud, because $300 was just about what I had given K
endra, and now I had nothing at all. Nothing at all, that is, until my next work-study check for $87.93 came in.
I think I must have pulled in a lot after that, shut down, become super-diligent in my studies. I felt burned and I shunned company, even of the friends I cared about and could trust. But what I did more than anything was banish Kendra from my thoughts.
I remember it was a cold winter.
Always it would be late at night, it seemed to me, and I’d be walking home up a wind-battered Broadway as trash blew by me. Maybe I was coming from the library, but it seems like I was always walking too far for that, so who knew? New York was a lot dirtier then, New York in the ’80s, much of which was really just a hangover from New York in the ’70s. It was crack-cocaine city, with prostitutes on nearly every corner of Broadway north from Seventy-Second Street until, for whatever reason, they vanished at the bend at 105th, by the Titanic Memorial. It seems incredible to me now, but sometimes just to get out of Columbialand I’d ride the subway for hours, doing my course reading this way. (I remember reading a book about a lesbian nun in Renaissance Florence in this manner, furious that I had to pause when the train dead-ended at New Lots Avenue.) Empty crack vials would go rolling the length of the train cars. There were a lot of crazies. People kept eye contact to a minimum.
More people read on the train in those days, actually, instead of being all plugged in and oblivious. You would see people reading James Baldwin, Renata Adler, Semiotext(e) books, Things Fall Apart, thick new novels in hardback. You read and you kept one eye out, you know, just in case.
When early spring arrived, I guess I started to come out of my exile. Seeing buds on trees seemed to jazz up everyone, and Riverside Park became the place to go. April found Audrey, Trina, Fang, and me down there in the park, sitting on the wall and eating big Toblerone bars while smoking cigarettes. This seemed European to us, smoking and eating at the same time. I remember these things as if we were static beings before a constantly rolling screen, as if we had sat there for weeks, the four of us, on the wall in Riverside Park.
In time, talk turned to what everybody would be doing that summer.
I had no desire to go home, but neither did I have the money or savvy to make other plans. Another group of friends, women I was less close to but mostly liked, talked about us all going out to the Hamptons, renting a place together, and waitressing by the sea. This sounded great (though I hadn’t a clue what these “Hamptons” were—I thought it was someone’s last name), but I had no idea how to realize it. In this particular group, I have to say, were some very entitled girls—I cringe now to think of the way we, Jews and non-Jews alike, threw around “JAP” as if it were okay to say—and part of me felt somehow touched to be included at all. I mean, these girls were not punk rock, quite the contrary, so in a way I was their funny mascot, the person with crazy hair who would do and say outrageous things and then get suddenly shy and artistically sensitive. Later we would grow apart, but back in freshman year I think the group’s draw for me was their utterly flawless upper-middle-class lack of alienation. They just did things. There was no angst or questioning. So when they were like, Hey, let’s summer in the Hamptons, they were talking about an easy reality, while for me it was almost like saying, Hey, let’s go to Galaxy NGC 1300, it’s only sixty-one million light-years away.
So most of that clique went to the Hamptons that summer. Audrey went back to Bumblebee, Trina and Fang went down to D.C., and I had no choice but to go back to Suck City and temp.
I remember my mother picked me up from the train station in her Ford hatchback with its antiabortion sticker on the bumper. She was so glad to see me. She asked me nonstop questions, and she genuinely wanted to know about my life, about my new friends, about what I was reading and the art I was seeing. Maybe she wanted to remind me that she had interests and talents, that she knew things too. Maybe that she had been young once, with a future ahead of her. I knew the story, but it just seemed so abstract from the woman who was my mother, the pious, disappointed lady whose vinyl purses and endless patience made me so pissed off and miserable.
Yes, I knew the story. She’d immigrated when she was a little girl and had gone to high school “with the Quakers,” as she would always say, the only Italian in college-prep courses among the many Boones and Howells and Smiths. She’d gone to the University of Pennsylvania on a violin scholarship, taken life drawing at the Academy, and had an actual career back in the day as what they used to call a “commercial artist,” working for an architect in Philadelphia. She drew with flair, had a great line, and she was chic, popular, WASP-looking. As a child I’d tunnel deep in her closet to find her fur, a full-length cape coat from those cool, clear days of the 1950s, now covered in an old sheet. I’d rub my face against its arms and plunge my hands into its pockets, where I knew there was a crumpled but fascinating-looking silver certificate dollar bill from 1947. There were other things in that closet: a golden chain-mail evening purse still in its fancy pale-pink box, a bundle of filmy tissue paper printed with cursive French that yielded a darkly glittering garnet brooch, a glossy black Wanamaker’s box that contained an impossibly snow-white stole, light as a confection. Gifts from men, I knew; they seemed dangerous. This was of course before my mother married my father, quickly realized the mistake she’d made, and, as I saw it, signed away any agency she had in this world. By the time I was a little girl she had perfected her hiding and was able to pass as a mild neighborhood church lady, handy with “creative” projects such as making colorful posters for the parish Christmas bazaar. Yes, she’d really hooked her wagon to a star.
But there were the photographs, photographs of my mother, Rachele, before she was my mother. Beautiful, elegant, young. Laughing.
Of her five children I was the youngest, so everyone else was out of the house by then and doing their own thing—my brothers, Horatio and Sandy, and my sisters, Olivia and Stanze. Except it turned out that Horatio, who was by then nearly thirty, had had another manic break, so he was there, padding around the house with the plaid bathrobe of his boyhood tied up under his armpits. He and I would sit and eat cereal at the dining room table together, hiding our faces behind a big box of cornflakes. He barely spoke to me, or to my mother for that matter, but he didn’t seem to mind my company so much, which was a change from his attitude toward me during childhood. I think we each recognized in the other just how down we were to be home again.
The most salient memory I have of that summer was that there was a rerun of a PBS miniseries about Lillie Langtry on at the time, and through some tacit understanding Horatio and I would find each other in front of the TV at the unlikely hour of 5:30 each morning to watch it together. I also remember that in this series Oscar Wilde was presented as a heterosexual man, deeply smitten by Lillie’s charms—pining and sighing and languishing, a Jersey lily in his hand—and Horatio and I were both richly amused by the inaccuracy of such a representation. Anyway, he and I would watch this show together, deeply engrossed, and then exactly fifty-two minutes later, turn off the television, sighing our own sighs. It was time for me to get ready for work, and it was time for Horatio to go back to bed. My mother would be dressed by then, sitting at the dining table with a cup of tea before her, The Pocket Treasury of Novenas to Our Lady in her hand. She’d be eager for the time we’d have in the car together that morning, the half hour it took to drive me to my temp gig at a blank suburban office park on the way to another blank suburban office park where she’d worked for some years, after reentering the job market in middle age. She was still a commercial artist, but by then it was called a “graphic designer,” and she made a poverty wage, $5.45 an hour, as a permanent freelancer working for one of the richest corporations in the world.
She was grateful for the work.
In the evenings it was easy enough for some high school friends to pick me up, and we’d get some cheap eats, tool along the strip-mall highway that cut through the north of the city, hang with the decaying group of street punk
s who frequented a certain Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot, or go to the one art-house theater to see Eating Raoul for the nineteenth time. Those of us who were in college knew this was nowhere, and those of us stuck there seemed bitter and sarcastic or else were quick to point out the changes our absence had caused us to miss. Check it out—there’s a new Happy Harry’s on State Street. Each night I’d get dropped off at my mother’s house and find her sitting up waiting for me, dozing on the couch with the radio for company. She would kiss me good night, able to go to bed now that you’re finally home, Chess. Never mind my argument that she didn’t need to stay up, she didn’t know the hours I kept at school, so what’s so different here? But she never could hear it. And then the next morning Horatio and I would be back in front of the TV at 5:30 again to watch Lillie Langtry, anticipating the fresh installment with a kind of insane hunger.
I couldn’t wait to get back to New York that September. And when the weather turned unseasonably cool in late August, my bags were already packed.
8
I don’t remember fixating much on Kendra at the beginning of sophomore year. She hadn’t come back to Barnard after all, and when it was clear she’d dropped out I did some initial conjecturing—I’d heard a rumor that she was living in a squat in the East Village—and then I let it go.
That first semester, actually, although I was constantly busy I was also miserably depressed. I was spending most of my time with Audrey, drinking, smoking, pitching pennies into the empty airshaft, and feeling trapped by the city. Audrey was doing increasingly erratic things, like ripping color-plate pages of crucifixion scenes out of expensive library art books and walking around with an eight-by-ten-inch framed picture of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux in her book bag. Having to ask the newsstand lady to break a buck for bus fare would send her into a tailspin of nervousness. She could spend hours dissecting a line from a Joy Division song or The Cloud of Unknowing, exercises that inevitably reduced her to tears of exhaustion. Hindsight being twenty-twenty and all that jazz, I realize that her mind was starting to unravel at that time, and loving her as I did, part of me was attempting to follow her down that path.
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