Once, in Lourdes

by Sharon Solwitz

  “The problem is not,” said Arlyn, “your household chores. We got a call today. That concerned you.”

  Any contrition of mine was instantly gone. “Great,” I said. “My application to modeling school?”

  Elise giggled, then put a hand over her mouth. I was suddenly glad for her presence. But Arlyn wasn’t amused. “It was Jill. Your Slimnastics instructor, does that ring a bell? Kay, the class was for your benefit.”

  I could have guessed Jill would call. I nodded overvigorously. “But I wasn’t getting much out of it, I didn’t think I was bound to it.” I sucked my stomach in, showed her my loose waistband. “I’ve been losing without it.”

  “Kay,” Arlyn said, “do you have any idea how overweight you are?”

  “I didn’t ask for Slimnastics, did I? Did I?”

  “Elise,” said Arlyn, “how much weight would you say Kay should lose?”

  “Keep me out of this, Mom.”

  “Thirty pounds,” said Arlyn. “Maybe forty.” I tried to shrug, but my shoulders just twitched. Her eyeballs sliced into me. “It’s not just how you look, Kay, there are health concerns.” She listed numerous problems that arose from extra poundage, as if a person living in 1968 could maybe not know this. Did she think I was retarded? “I don’t think you realize how much you’ve gained this past year. What size do you wear now?”

  “Mom,” Elise murmured, “you’re making too big a deal about this.”

  “Let me finish, honey. I don’t think you have an accurate notion of your body, Kay. Those full skirts of yours—”

  “I’m not blind. Do you think I’m an idiot?” I pulled up my skirt. My calves looked fine, especially the one with the tattoo. I sat with my tattooed leg crossed over the other, 4EVER distinct and beautiful in the light of early evening. Arlyn, though, made no mention of it.

  “You’re not an idiot, Kay! Will you let me finish?” She spoke rapidly, a woodpecker drilling at my sense of things. “I have a girlfriend with the same problem. She’d look in the mirror, and I don’t know what she saw, but it wasn’t reality. It took her husband, friends, and a therapist to make her see. And after Weight Watchers, you wouldn’t believe how great she looks! Please, Kay, this might lengthen your life, and it’ll definitely make for a better last year of high school. Isn’t that right, Elise? Larry, what do you think?”

  Across the lawn, Dad was chipping now. I had never had golf lessons, though I’d have preferred them to tennis. I liked the look of chipping, the clipped, unhurried half swing, the way the ball hung in the air, then hit the grass and stayed put. He cocked his wrists and sent the ball in a pretty arc to the base of the poplars between our lawn and a neighbor’s. I used to love his large, regular, handsome-man features, the aggressive congeniality that got him good tables at restaurants. “Excuse me,” I said to Arlyn, and walked over to him.

  I apologized for interrupting him, whispering, as if it were more polite. “But, Dad, I’ve been needing to talk to you. I have this problem with…” I said, cocking my head toward Arlyn. “Maybe I should say she and I have this problem.” I almost took hold of his arm, I was so glad at last to be talking with him. But he looked at me as if he didn’t understand what I’d just said. I labored not to whine. “She’s on my case all the time about the weight thing.”

  “Kay, honey. Honey.” He wiped a dazed hand across his forehead. “She might go overboard sometimes, but she means well. She has your best interests at heart.” His voice was deep and sweet, like the voice of a TV newscaster. But this was not going well. “I have to be honest,” he said. “We were both upset about this Slimnastics business.”

  Then Arlyn approached, alarmingly resolute. “Tell him what size dress you wear. Go on, Kay.”

  “Please. Stop her, Dad.”

  He patted my shoulder, addressing Arlyn. “Let’s not put too much emphasis on her weight,” he said. “It was a problem for her mother.”

  “And I’m trying to make sure it doesn’t happen to Kay. I talked to her instructor. We had a long talk, Jill and I. She’s concerned and she has some ideas. She works with the kids on diet too, a sane calorie-based diet that will get the weight off and keep it off.” She was fervent. Her voice rose. “Kay may not think it matters, but one of these days she’ll have to get a realistic notion of herself or I don’t know what’s going to happen to her.”

  “I know. You’re right. I just don’t want things to get out of balance.”

  “Out of balance? Look at her, Larry. Don’t make me the bad guy!”

  “Of course you’re not the bad guy.”

  “All I asked was her dress size—”

  I covered my ears. “Shut up. Shut up, both of you!”

  He dropped his club and put his arm around Arlyn, who was stiffly shaking. To me he held out a placating hand. “Please try to calm down. Why not answer her question, sweetie—what’s the harm? Tell her your dress size.”

  It was a trap, I knew, for my good-girl self, taught by my mother to answer when spoken to. And for my idiot self, who never knew whether to tell the truth or roll my eyes or cry. My head filled with commonplace numbers—my age, sixteen; my Evanston house number, 1911; the first five digits of pi after the decimal point, 14159; the year American women were allowed to vote, 1920—which I’d never bothered to memorize and here they were! Of course I knew my dress size. “I wear a junior eleven. Sometimes a thirteen.”

  On her patio chair Elise closed her eyes. Arlyn looked faintly, infuriatingly sad.

  “I do! Go look in my closet and see!”

  “Kay,” said my father, “I’m less concerned with your weight than this class-cutting.” He shook his head. “You lied to us. That’s not the sort of thing I expected from you.”

  My chin was quivering. Dad used to look young for his age, younger than other kids’ fathers, much younger than my mother. But after Mom died his face started to get puffy, and right now it looked swollen, if not rotten inside. If I touched any part of him, I thought, my hand would sink in. “Obviously,” I said sternly, “you’re on their side.”

  “Don’t talk like a nut, Kay. I’m on your side too! There are no sides!” Shining upon me his face of pseudo love and pity, he said, “I want life to be easier for you.”

  “Kay,” said Arlyn, “in less than two weeks you’ll start your senior year. Wouldn’t you like to go out on dates? And to the prom? You have such a pretty face.”

  A sour rumbling had begun in the pit of my stomach. There was a name I wanted to call Arlyn that I’d never said aloud. It sat on my tongue like a piece of walnut shell. “I have no interest in the prom.”

  “You think so now,” Arlyn said, “but what will happen when everyone’s talking about it? High school could be such a great time for you.”

  “No one will talk about it. No one with brains!”

  “Oh, Kay, I just don’t want you to miss out on—”

  “There’s nothing to miss out on, nothing I want!”

  “Keep your voice down.”

  Obviously, there was nothing to be gained here. I closed my long-suffering eyes.

  “Look at us, Kay, when we’re talking to you.”

  I didn’t know what to do. Generally with these people I’d assert myself for a few volleys, then apologize, or choose not to apologize and suffer in a different way. But now I couldn’t bear the sight of Arlyn’s pretty forty-year-old face. I saw Arlyn as my father might have seen her when she interviewed for the accounting job—petite, outspoken, with the casual self-assurance of a woman who’d supported herself and her daughter for ten years, a woman with a college degree. My mom made beds, meals, small talk. She became weak and could barely drag herself up the stairs. Relentlessly energetic, Arlyn was the opposite of my mother. I could not look at her. I would not.

  “Look,” said my father. “You chose to quit your exercise class. From now on your weight is your own business—your problem to solve. But you lied to us, which I consider more serious. You are grounded tonight and tomorrow. Is that clea
r?” He and Arlyn exchanged a look of frustrated patience. “When your physics grade comes, we’ll revisit this.”

  “Uh-oh,” I murmured. “Just wait till you see my physics grade.”

  Now I had his full attention, though it gave me no pleasure. I had simply pushed open a door onto a new corridor. For better or worse we were strolling down it. “What makes you think I’ve been going to physics class?”

  Elise had given up all pretense of reading. Arlyn’s jaw was working. “Kay,” said Arlyn, “did you fail physics?”

  “Well, there’s a chance I won’t fail if the world comes to an end. Or if what’s-his-face Carstairs loses his grade book. He’s kind of spacey.”

  “Kay,” Arlyn said, “you are so hostile.”

  My father said, “Are you trying to get my goat?”

  “Why would I bother?” I stood my ground. “You’re such a dork! And she’s a”—I spelled it out in a stage whisper—“B-I-T-C-H.” I squeezed my mouth shut against the burgeoning tears.

  “You’re confined until further notice. Don’t walk away, young lady.”

  I turned and ran into the house, out of range of them. But I heard it anyway: “Larry, she hates me. I’ve always felt that.” Elise followed, trying to explain or give comfort, but I couldn’t stop for her kindness. Up in my room I locked the door, spurred by the remembrance of something my mother had said to me the week she died. The words had frightened me so much I must have put them in storage, retaining only, at times, a feeling of mild dread. But now a murmur arose in a fold of my brain, threatening to ignite into consciousness. I rummaged frantically through my middle dresser drawer for the bag of chips I had hidden. Gone! Like a scared wild animal I turned around and around in this room that wasn’t mine and never had been.

  Voices clawed at the door. “Open up!”

  “Please, Kay.”

  Pounding. My dad: “I’ll let you know when this is over. When school starts, senior or not, you’re coming right home after school! I’m not joking.”

  Arlyn: “Do you think you’re the only person with feelings in the world?”

  It was a flimsy lock. He opened it with a screwdriver, marched in, and removed the phone. “You can use this again when you receive our permission and not before, do you hear? You’re not too old to learn respect.”

  When he left, I relocked the door, though it was obviously useless. A little later there was a knock of the quiet sort. Arlyn, softly: “I have news for you, not that you’ll appreciate it. I talked to Mr. Carstairs. There’s a chance he’ll let you take the final. He’ll let us know tomorrow. I’m leaving your book bag outside the door.” Her footsteps walked away, then returned. “In the meantime, I hope you’ll be thinking about important things. Like the kind of person you want to be.”

  I was still pacing. Something in Arlyn’s voice conveyed genuine concern for me. She had obviously gone to a lot of trouble. But, as always, when my gratitude met Arlyn’s composure it shriveled and died. When her husband died, she found my father, who was richer than her first husband and probably loved her more. This was a woman for whom things would always turn out right. Certain people were like that.

  Fully clothed, I burrowed under my covers and fell asleep. In my dream my mother sat on the edge of a lawn chair, leaning forward with her mouth half-open, as if she was about to speak or throw up. I woke just before midnight with the back of my leg throbbing. It had just occurred to me that when P-Day came I’d be up in this room. I snuck downstairs to the kitchen phone and called Saint, then CJ, then Vera. No one answered. I found a Band-Aid and put it over my cut.

  Back in my room, unable to sleep now, I sharpened a pencil and started a sketch of Saint on his motor scooter, but the handlebars looked wrong and so did his arm. I turned off the light and lay down again, feeling grossly heavy. I was a prehistoric mammal on the verge of extinction. A vegetarian dinosaur, weakened from foraging tundra that couldn’t produce a leaf in the glacial cold, too tired to flail out of the tar I was sinking in. My mother’s words came again, distinct, inevitable, not her last words but the ones I would call to mind from now on, on the brink of anything: Your father doesn’t love me anymore.

  19

  The World Without Me

  The last week of August 1968, five months after Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed, less than three months after Bobby Kennedy was killed, Democrats gathered at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago to nominate for president the lusterless, well-intentioned man who would lose to Richard Nixon. College students, hippies, and Yippies drove or hitchhiked to Chicago to back Gene McCarthy, protest the war, or just see the show. The Yippies backed Pigasus, a live pig that was led around Grant Park on a leash. To maintain order, Mayor Daley instructed the police to shoot to kill. Kill arsonists; cripple looters.

  There were hot days, and nights almost as hot, in which protesters, journalists, and bystanders would suffer tear gas and bloody beatings captured live for TV. But up north in Lourdes, we, the renegades of 4EVER, weren’t watching TV or reading the papers. It was P-Day minus three, and I was still in seclusion, phoneless, my friends banned from contact with me. Whoever called got my father or stepmother and the same facts—house arrest till further notice. Cruel and unusual, but what could my friends do? Explain to my jailors that my punishment interfered with our plans for suicide?

  I longed to be rescued. I wanted a ladder propped against my window in the dark of night and to ride off behind Saint on his scooter like Guinevere with Lancelot. To that end, I left my window open. But they had even removed the phone from their room so I couldn’t use it when they were downstairs. And there was always one of them in the house.

  The best moment for me was when my friends drove up with signs they had made: FREE KAY CAMPION. KAY 4EVER! “I love you all!” I screamed from the window. They left and returned with more emphatic signs: END FASCIST PARENTHOOD. CAMPIONS CRUEL TO CHILDREN. They marched up and down the driveway—I could see from my room—till a cop pulled up and confiscated the signs.

  Most frustrating, though, was not knowing what was going to happen on Pledge Day. Would they do it without me?

  I cried as they drove away, imagining dawn in sixty hours, when they would jump and I wouldn’t be there to join them—or (my secret wish) to stop them.

  20

  CJ

  P-Day minus two. The early, desultory male dinner has concluded (lettuce with Wish-Bone Italian dressing and frozen pizza) and CJ doesn’t know what to do with himself. Saint’s mother wanted him home with the family tonight, and Vera declined without giving a reason. The three will get together tomorrow morning and discuss how to liberate Kay. Meanwhile, CJ lies down on his bed and tries to bring himself to climax with only mental images, a feat that Saint said he had achieved. CJ is not successful.

  Already depressed, he becomes even more so. His mother is coming home early from her mission of mercy—coming tomorrow, in fact, with her sister, who needs to be, right now, with people who love her. Aunt Lottie is a talker. There will be long dinners where he and Danny sit with napkins on their laps while the sisters discuss people that only they know, alive and dead. There will be at least one private mother-son discussion of how he has spent this summer in which he neither worked nor went to summer school; is something bothering him? She won’t call him lazy; her great fear is that he’s unhappy and she’s somehow responsible for it. And even if he swears that he’s happy, it will end with her feeling bad. He used to see her as weak-willed, since she quit work to raise the children and never contradicts his father. But she has a variety of friends who are always calling to talk or make plans with her. With her gone, the phone hardly rings. She has a good heart, he is starting to think, not that it matters. He has stopped seeing his shrink, his MAOI inhibits nothing, and maybe he’s just imagining it, but he’s felt a current of something arcing between Saint and Vera that makes him contemplate his death with less aversion. Right now he is eager for P-Day, after which, unavoidably, the group will have refound their
four-way equality.

  With nothing else to do, CJ goes into his parents’ room and checks his father’s stash of condoms—untouched (good man) during his wife’s absence. In the master bathroom he opens the drawer belonging to his mother. Among other tools that serve female beauty is a cache of lipsticks of multiple hues. He selects one called Gypsy Rose and brings the tube back to his room, where he tries it first on notepaper, then on the side of his hand. The red is darker than he expected. Then comes a tap on his door and his father’s overenunciated English: Would CJ kindly join him downstairs in a game of pool?

  There is but one right answer. CJ’s father has an aura of unassailable correctness that CJ has never been able to undercut, and a pool game is the usual prelude to a shaming. To sustain himself CJ applies the lipstick to his lips, heavily, unambiguously, a transgression for his father to note and overlook. Try to overlook. It may be interesting.

  The game that ensues in the dark-paneled, Oriental-carpeted game room is standard for them. CJ breaks, shoots till he misses. Better than usual tonight, his lips moist, he drops three balls before turning the table over to his father.

  The man’s hands on the cue stick are the precise and urgent hands of the surgeon he is, a man who snips unruly cartilage, who files down a renegade spur of bone. If the hands belonged to someone else, CJ might have loved them, loose on the stick but in absolute charge—stopping the cue ball dead as its mark hits the pocket. He marvels—at the hands, the stick, the sequence of balls, the locus of force transferred so deftly that the final drop is almost silent. Half a dozen similar nudges and the table is clear. After which the man sets the stick down and delivers the expected coup de grâce. “I need your assistance.”

  “Oh dear, you know how busy I am.” CJ eyes his father in his pale gray summer-weight suit jacket. It’s six-thirty P.M., and soon the man will drive off to rehearse with the Midland Quartet (he conducts), but now he wears what he wore this morning to the hospital. The word “dapper” comes to mind. “Natty.” CJ says extra-casually, “What could anyone do for you that you couldn’t do better yourself?”