Am I your baby?
Yes!
If she didn’t yell loudly enough, Larry would repeat the question until he got the necessary zeal and volume. Linda was also worried that his interest in certain positions to the exclusion of all others indicated latent homosexuality. Inconsistently, she was also afraid that he was having an affair with another woman. She spoke of his possible lies with gusto, a strange mix of horror and hope. It seemed as though she believed, in spite of her professed agony, that her life would be terribly dreary without something to complain about. I had a sense that she eagerly anticipated her own betrayal.
(Jamie and I sang to each other, later, Are these my tits? Yes! Is this your dick? Yes! Am I your baby? Yes! Yes!)
Linda’s concerns brought the women back around to a gleeful reiteration of their philosophy, that men should be renounced, if not in fact then at least in their hearts.
“Shelley came crawling back the other day,” said Agatha, referring to a woman who had left the group. “She tells me she wants to help write the aging book. I said to her, ‘Well, you’re inactive now. It doesn’t matter how much you contributed before, you’re inactive now and our arms aren’t necessarily open.’ I told her that and I could tell she didn’t like it one bit, but she knew I was right. She knows there have to be standards.”
“I expect she wants to come back because she’s bored now,” my mother said. “Her husband left her after her tummy tuck, you know. Went off with another woman with big flaps of skin hanging from her arms.”
“I wonder if there’s a TV movie on tonight,” said Karen, a woman whom our mother sometimes disliked. “I saw one last week about a young retarded boy who went into a normal high school and became class president.”
“My friend’s daughter had a baby just like that,” Agatha offered. “She’s only thirty, so how could she ever had been prepared? She’s been on antidepressants for a year now. Imagine that. She has a whole life ahead with that child. I met one once and I could barely understand a word out of his mouth. I was truly mortified.”
“She might enjoy her baby,” my mother said. “People usually do, once they adjust.”
“They were sent to institutions when I was a girl.” This was Karen. “They were called Mongolian idiots. You could never get away with saying that now.”
“Lord,” said Agatha, “my friend’s daughter has aged a good five years since having that baby. And now she and her husband aren’t getting along and they’re talking divorce. They’ve only been married for two years, but it’s since the baby.”
My mother stood up and rearranged the books on the coffee table.
“I expect that it’s because of this woman’s attitude more than the baby. She needs to get herself to a therapist and sort things out. Life will teach her that you can’t plan everything.” She made a noise here, a kind of punctuating snort that meant the conversation was finished.
When the meetings were ending, one of the women usually made a rousing speech about the wisdom and freedom that come with age. This person was usually Agatha, who once told me it was important for a woman to walk as if she was hearing applause.
“When I was a girl, I used to have a party for my girlfriends every Friday night. Saturday night was for the boys, even then.” She rolled her eyes in pitying recollection of her youthful self.
“Back when we were around eight and ten, even eleven and twelve years old, we would have burping contests when ten or eleven o’clock rolled around and we were high on Coca-Cola and chocolate.”
My mother, as well as several other women, looked down in embarrassment at the mention of flatulence, and Agatha revved herself up, encouraged.
“Well, we would have these burping contests. My brother Ted had a microphone and speaker set and I would set it up in a corner of the basement and we’d each get up there one by one and do our best to pull off a belch while someone held a microphone to our mouths. Cecile was the best. She could do it on cue, and did she ever have staying power. Of course, the parties changed as we got older and the burping was no longer the climax. Some of us wanted to smoke. And then others still wanted to burp, so I had to stand up on the couch and say, ‘Listen, we can have it both ways. Those who want to smoke, gather over by the door. Those who want to burp, gather by the couch.’ And they appreciated that. We divided ourselves up pretty peacefully after that.”
The women were quiet as they waited for the rousing part, which they knew was coming. Agatha specialized in stories of adolescent silliness giving way to the discernment of middle age.
“The point is, then boys started to crash our parties and you’d find people necking in the closet. Girls started fighting over a boy who wasn’t much in the first place. We were all of us ruined. And it took us years to come back to the pure friendship with our fellow women that we’d once had. Some women are still out there and they haven’t come back. They’re getting up at five o’clock in the morning to make turkey and tomato sandwiches for His Highness’s lunch. Ladies, I wouldn’t go back to those days for all the tea in China. The intelligence I have now, the brains we share as a female unit, that is what our life journeys have been about. The power to be able to say, I’m fifty-two years old and I don’t need anything but myself at the beginning and end of each day. A team of wild horses couldn’t drag me back!”
Agatha shook her hips and hands and wrestled with the air as if a team of wild horses was in the process of trying to drag her back. The women hugged and departed in a tide of good will. And I went to my room, feeling discouraged. As I thought about how there was nothing preferable about becoming middle-aged and disdaining things like burping contests, clearly the delights of a much freer and more desirable time, I went through my mother’s closet, pulled out her most glamorous old dresses, and slipped each one on slowly. It wasn’t just my altered appearance in each dress that moved me. It was the foreign fabrics gliding over my shoulders, lapping at my wrists, not only the silks and rayons but also the scratchy wool that prickled me everywhere. I pinned my messy hair up in a pile on top of my head and dabbed on my mouth and cheeks the red lipsticks my mother had accumulated but never used. Then I stood in front of her cloudy old mirror and imagined myself older, but living in a distant past, the early nineteen hundreds. The last thing I would put on was an antique cameo that hung on a long, thin gold chain. It was one of the few objects my mother regarded with reverence. My father had given it to her; it had belonged to his grandmother. The word heirloom, to me, was heavy with honour and admiration, with a holiness both dreary and inspiring. The cameo was sacred and unusable. I was allowed to try it on, but never did anyone, even my mother, wear it out. Often, I tried to get my mother to wear it, but she said it was too valuable to be worn outdoors on any but the most special occasions. There was a sense of waiting about the heirloom, as if we could only guard it so that people in the future were able to enjoy its worth.
Like my continuing play with dolls, dressing up was not something I took lightly. I could not imagine outgrowing these games. Although I was always pestering Jamie to play soccer or Frisbee with me in the summer, to go tobogganing with me in the winter, I was blocked, in his presence, from accessing the serious hopefulness, the private and thorough happiness, I felt when I was alone.
Once when I was standing there in a long, forest green silk dress my mother had designed and sewn when she was just twenty, the cameo resting in the imagined presence of breasts, Jamie opened the door. In my house, we were usually respectful about closed doors and I felt a surge of irritation at his interruption, followed by embarrassment about the state I was in. Then he bowed, gallantly, theatrically, and came forward and took my hand. We danced around the room and he dipped me far back, until my hair brushed the ground.
Although we did play together, I had never thought that Jamie would be someone who could enter into transformation with me. I assumed that being a boy, and older, Jamie had no such endeavours, no childish joys he clung to, nothing like an heirloom that could sti
r all his dreams so severely. His face was athletic and serious, and sometimes insolent, a quiet insolence you had to look closely to detect. But I felt reassured in that moment that there was some part of him that was like me, and that we were safer for it.
ONE COLD OCTOBER day after school, Jamie and I were out in the ravine behind our house collecting leaves for an arrangement our mother planned to make for Thanksgiving. I resented the chore and trudged around in silence. She wanted only red, orange, yellow leaves, intact, and she had given us brown wicker baskets in which to carry them. Although neither of us followed her instructions happily, Jamie snapped at me when I started complaining. (He was thirteen, but he was that way. He would wander the ravine with a basket to make our mother happy.)
I followed him, in part because I felt he was trying to get away from me. He kept touching his shirt pocket, and when I got closer, I saw a piece of paper folded inside it.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Nothing to you.”
“I’m not asking what it is to me. I’m asking what it is to you,” I said.
“It’s just a list of things I need for the science fair project.”
“So show it to me.”
“I would, but you need to learn when something isn’t your business,” he said.
I supposed this was meant to sting me, but it didn’t because Jamie said it so acidly that I knew the paper must contain supremely important information. I kicked his basket out of his hand, and while he was still registering what had happened, I snatched the paper.
It was not a list, but a note, which I had suspected. Curling over the page, in large flowery letters, were these words: “I know. Mrs. Greyson is the worst. Algebra is going to be brutal! Don’t you think she looks like a basset hound? Save me a seat in French if you’re there first? Luv, Heidi.”
“Who’s Heidi,” I asked, although I thought I knew just who Heidi was.
“Just a new girl,” he said. “She needs my help with math. She lives on Birchmount.”
This was what I had thought. Late that summer, a family had moved onto the street that curved into ours. Talk of the girl, Heidi, with the long blonde hair and black velvet headbands and the miniature schnauzer, had overtaken our neighbourhood all through August.
“She’s not even pretty,” I said, wishing I hadn’t let that out. “Do you actually think she’s pretty?”
“I guess she looks the way a girl is supposed to look,” he answered, then took back his note and stuffed it messily into his back pocket, as if the note no longer mattered now that I had read it. He went back to collecting leaves.
I felt what would become a familiar feeling in future years: immediate dislike of a girl I had never spoken to.
Often, when Jamie and I were younger, we would play dead. I usually woke up early, but rather than getting up, I would lie in bed thinking. It gave me a sense of freedom and safety, as well something like premature nostalgia for my childhood life, a pleasing and gloomy sense of its brittleness, to think of my mother and Jamie sound asleep in their rooms. I also felt power over the whole street, to think that I alone was awake at six o’clock. So when Jamie came into my room on Saturday and Sunday mornings to wake me up, I was well prepared. I would pretend to be dead. After several weeks, this was no surprise to him; it was understood that I would be dead each morning. The key to the game was in his manipulation of my body, my attempts to maintain the appearance of death while he tried to expose that I was alive. He would creak open the door and tiptoe over to my bed, hope to startle me with a loud yell. This part was ordinary, and I prepared myself by thinking of the black spider that lived behind our laundry tub, or the taste of soggy cauliflower, anything unpleasant, so I could keep my composure. Then he would tickle me, twist my arms and legs up and around. I was allowed to hold no tension in my body. He would put a hand under my nose, and if he felt breath, he had won. But I could sense when his hand was approaching, and I was good at holding my breath, had done so in the YMCA swimming pool for as long as a minute. Then he shoved my entire body and I had to stay limp. The game usually ended with his win, when he jumped on me. He was careful never to come down too hard.
Jamie was collecting leaves with a meticulousness that bordered on parody. He picked up a leaf, held it up to the sun, inspecting, then put it in his basket if he deemed it satisfactory. I thought he was putting on a show, proving to me how far I was, and how far Heidi was, from his mind. I got an idea. Along a short, steep hill down in the ravine, there was a long flight of wooden steps that were in need of repair. Usually, we ran up and down the hill next to these stairs, but this time I raced down them and threw myself off the last step. As I fell, I screamed, and then I lay in the mound of leaves at the bottom of the stairs. My eyes were closed, and I heard loud rustling, pounding steps and Jamie shouting my name. His voice had never sounded so sharp and nervy, like a row of pins sticking straight up.
He ran down the hill, not saying a word, as if he already suspected I was unconscious or gravely wounded, incapable of speech. I went with this. He knelt beside me and touched my arm cautiously.
“Claire?” he said. “Wake up, Claire.”
I could feel him hovering over me and it was difficult not to laugh.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, God.”
I knew that his hand was on its way to my nose, so I held my breath. I loved the feeling of holding my breath. I often did so at night before I fell asleep to see if I could capture what the moment just before death might feel like.
“Wake up, Claire. Open your eyes. Claire.”
He never used my name so much. I was about to sit up and tell him I was fine when he jumped up and ran back to the house. When he was out of sight, I got up and made my way home, gathering more leaves as I walked. I took my time. My plan was to walk into the kitchen as if nothing had happened, with an armful of leaves, which I would dump cheerfully on the kitchen table. I would go about my business without a word to Jamie, pour a glass of water, and take a long draught. I would say, in the British accent we often used with each other, “Fancy meeting you here.”
Through the back screen door, however, I could heard hiccupping.
“Ta-da,” I said, bursting into the kitchen and throwing the leaves up in the air. I spun around with my arms out as they fell to the ground and said, “All alive.”
Jamie’s face was blotchy. His chin was so red it looked as if someone had punched him. My mother was trying to calm him down. She was not in a panic. In spite of our father’s accident, she was not overprotective. Indeed, she was quite permissive, as if letting us live freely were a testament to her strength. Believing that accidents were just that—accidental and uncommon—was a matter of pride with her. She was also not in a panic because she always suspected me of subterfuge. However, she did glare at me. Jamie didn’t much look at me at all. After enduring my mother’s lecture over dinner about how not knowing when to stop was about the most unlikable quality a person could have, I thought it was over.
Just a week later, I was dressing up in my mother’s bedroom, and Jamie walked past the half-open door. I had adorned myself with my mother’s pearl necklace, the cameo necklace, and strings and strings of gaudy plastic baubles, as well as clip-on rhinestone earrings. I was wearing my mother’s flashiest dress, a gift she had never worn, a fiery red dress with a deep V-neck bordered with shimmery beads. I was also wearing my favourite of her high-heeled shoes, a black patent-leather pair she had deemed tasteless an hour after buying them.
“Care for a dance?” I said in a high, artificial voice as he passed.
He paused at the door and took me in. What I saw in his face was like nothing I had ever seen in anyone, even a friend or classmate I’d had a nasty fight with. It was a look that shrivelled me, so that I no longer felt wild and unpredictable, beautiful. I saw that dressing up had not gilded me, bestowed a momentary glory. To him, at least, it degraded me.
“You’re too old for that,” he said, and walked away.
&nb
sp; MY WORLD WAS FULL of women I was determined to be nothing like: my mother, who had told me once that she had lost all the sexual feeling in her body, as in an epidural; the group women, with their custard stomachs and their wide shelves of breast; a single mother whose children I babysat once a week, who came home from blind dates and flopped down on her sagging grey couch with a tall bag of rice cakes. She liked to give me advice. “Keep all the mementos given by lovers,” she said. “You never know if you’re going to have another.” Her children were eight and four and she hadn’t met a man worth a moment of her time since her husband left when her youngest child was six months old. Love letters, pictures, tacky presents like gold-plated necklaces with intertwined hearts, even notes scribbled in a rush and passed during class, all the evidence that someone, somewhere, had cared once. “Never throw it all out in a rage,” she said. “There might not be a next time.”
The idea I got from women was that once you got a taste of men, you were likely never to be the same, as content and self-willed, captivating, captivated. Whereas before you might have been curious about oil painting, or the lives of the Romantic poets, once you had a man you would never again be interested in anything other than having a man. Your life would be unspeakably changed, as with a drug addiction. It would be less opulent and satisfying, bereft of wonder, but you would think it improved, you would think yourself grateful to be saved. I decided that when I eventually had my first boyfriend, I would never let him get away. Alternately, and improbably, considering my fascination with sex, I planned to engage in a life of antiquated spinsterhood. Not for me the independent women who simply never chose to marry, but the glorious spinsters of the early nineteen hundreds, austere and disapproving, sexless rather than sex-deprived, eyes dancing with teacherly criticism and self-satisfaction.
I often recalled the vision of my recently widowed mother. With her large, wide-set eyes, her simple clothes and pale pink lipstick, she looked almost like our much older sister. Shock and melancholy did not age her. Rather, there was a pale light in her face, a sadness that was unexpectedly sultry. For her children, she had to believe that life was not ruined. Solitude made her dreamy looking, as if she had recaptured something of her youth now that she had to go on pure hopefulness as she re-envisioned her life. In the week that followed our father’s death, our dining room table was covered in varieties of desserts I’d never heard of. Black Forest cake, strawberry shortcake, chocolate raspberry truºes, fluffy white meringues with blueberries nested inside. Our house was always full of visitors, and Jamie and I would take a lemon meringue pie out to the backyard and sit under the old maple tree and eat the whole thing, passing the fork back and forth. Our mother told us that our father had not gone through pain, that car accidents could be rapid and strong and erase life instantly. This seemed almost magical to me, that our father could be alive one minute and dead the next. It seemed like a trick: the ultimate, coveted transformation.
The Virgin Spy Page 2