Face to Face

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  There are times, opening my eyes in the morning, when I am astonished to find myself in alien surroundings; I close my eyes, not yet fully awake, and imagine taking my old route through the morning, first to the front windows to look out at the park and river and see what kind of day it might be. Not until long after the fire could I bear to remember in detail how it was to move through those rooms in patterns developed over the years; how, when it rained, I whisked from room to room in a well-worn path closing windows, then stood in the front watching it pour into the abundant river; how we put speakers in the kitchen so I could hear music while I cooked; how I was lulled to sleep watching old movies on TV up in the loft bed; and how, as I talked on the kitchen wall phone, my eyes panned every plane of the room, so every square foot is now forever printed on my retina—yellow walls, dark green cabinets, striped curtain, the arrangement of pots and pans on a dark red board; the plastic magnetic letters on the refrigerator that our grown children still fooled with, messages like Happy Anniversary or Good Luck on SATs, or messages from their friends—Julie Was Here; and the round white table which, to my father’s gratification, we bought at his store, and the orange chairs. For after my father’s red plastic chairs gave out we replaced them with wooden ones bought for a dollar each from a local synagogue that was clearing out old furniture. I made covers out of bright printed corduroy for their ugly plastic seats, covers that looked like shower caps, and the children, aware of my limitations in the domestic arts, laughed at them, but when stretched out they fit perfectly.

  I remember most of all being pregnant with my first baby in that apartment, and toward the end, when it was an effort even to move, sitting in the old wing chair looking out over the river, watching the moving lights over Palisades Amusement Park advertising things I cannot remember now but which twenty years ago I knew by heart. I would watch the letters slide by again and again, wondering what it would be like to be a family in that apartment, wanting the pregnancy over but fearing the birth, and falling into a trance induced by the glitter of the faraway roller coaster. Maybe I might live in that static condition, pregnant forever, a permanent trance. Years later they tore down Palisades Amusement Park to replace it with two high-rise apartment buildings which were nothing at all to look at. But on clear nights we could still lean out the window and see the strand of lights that was the George Washington Bridge looping above the water.

  We were ignorant then, our lives full of vast and unformed possibilities that narrowed and congealed to specifics. In that apartment we raised two children, and I made myself into a writer instead of dreaming it, and I learned that the getting of wisdom is something other and more fruitful than finding out the right things to do on every occasion. By the end, we were four grown people, two of whom had never known any other home.

  Two Fashion Statements

  The First Dress

  THE DRESS WAS SATIN, off-white, the color of heavy cream pouring thickly from a spout. It even smelled creamy. Rich. Sweet on its tangy, inevitable way to sour. It hung aloofly in my closet like an aristocrat mingling with the populace yet maintaining an aura, almost a halo. No banal cotton blouse or corduroy jumper dared rub shoulders, crowd, or crush.

  It was a mandarin-style dress, my mother said when we found it in a store we frequented only for special occasions. I forget the occasion for the dress. Maybe none at all. Maybe an act of charity on my mother’s part, as she sensed my vague, restless need for something, anything, hinting at a future more adventurous than the past. I wore the dress, as it turned out, on my first date. I was twelve and a half.

  Mandarin meant sleeveless, form-fitting, quilted, with a round stand-up collar resembling a priest’s and a narrow skirt slit on either side. Eloquent, understated, the most seductive dress ever to have embraced my waiting body. In it I became the girl I was meant to be, a worldly, pleasure-seeking F. Scott Fitzgerald girl.

  The boy component of the date was a dull-witted, amiable sort, whose invitation came as a surprise. Still, I leaped at the chance to embark on what I envisioned as my date-studded life. When he announced we would be going to Radio City Music Hall—Christmas stage show, Rockettes, and movie—I thought instantly: The Dress.

  After the subway and a trudge through snowy streets, I shed my winter coat to bare the dress, enhanced by nylons and pumps with Cuban heels. I sank back in a velvet seat in the chandeliered theater to bask in the dress’s splendor. And my own in it. Could this boy of clay appreciate our symbiotic beauty? Surely not.

  The movie, no doubt panoramic, is long gone from memory. What I do recall is the boy’s hand inching along the back of the seat to attain my shoulder, which he stroked. This was an integral part of the date, arguably its purpose. The goal of my vague longings. Now that it was happening, I found it monotonous and distracting. A far greater thrill was the caress of the dress: satiny, clinging, transforming.

  The date came to an uneventful close. At school the boy and I behaved as if it had not taken place. No matter. In memory the date reposed amid crystal lighting and ruby carpets, in a dark hush. It had been a grand and fulfilling success: a date with my dress.

  Brief Encounter

  I thought they were extinct, done in by changing times as surely as bustles and crinolines, doublets and jerkins—until the breezy morning when a rack of unpretentious dresses fluttering in the air caught my eye. I slowed down. It was a cut-rate shop of a kind I remembered from my childhood, its cornucopia of homey wares and wear spilling onto the sidewalk. High above, the dresses seemed pretty on first glance. For a split second I idly pictured myself in them. Then, the shock of recognition: Housedresses!

  Could they be making a comeback?

  Housedresses, for those too young to remember, were what women put on each morning to do housework, until jeans swept them aside decades ago. Light-colored, with a floral print (small modest flowers, never big flamboyant ones), the boxy housedress was utilitarian and sadly charmless: A-line, which made for easy, girdle-less movement, short sleeves or cap sleeves, a hem just below the knee. Their coarse cotton grew soft with frequent washing; frequent ironing would restore crispness and prepare the dress for a new day of housekeeping.

  Plain, sturdy buttons marched down the front, and ribbons in the same floral pattern drooped from either side of the waist to tie in back. It was those buttons and those ribbons, as well as the A-line cut, that distinguished the housedress from the muu-muu, a related garment but very different in character. The round-necked muu-muu had no buttons or belt but was a huge ballooning sack that completely obliterated the shape of the woman within it. Nevertheless the muu-muu, a Hawaiian import, had more character than the housedress. True to its Polynesian origins, it was brightly colored and gaily printed with big lush flowers. There was something flashy and devil-may-care emblazoned on the muu-muu, a feeling distinctly absent from the housedress, which stood placidly for common sense and housewifely propriety. You could imagine women in muu-muus laughing loudly and dancing, the sack-like dress whipping almost ribaldly about their knees. Muu-muus were what Gauguin’s gorgeous nymphs might have worn in late middle age, their erotic sinuosity still lurking beneath pads of fat.

  In their housedresses, big women resembled upright mattresses, and small women, limp pillowcases on wire hangers. You can still see them in old postwar movies; Shelley Winters, the housewife of The Night of the Hunter, wears one as she’s stalked by evil Robert Mitchum in suit and hat: she looks soft and puffy, like a pinprick might crumple her. It is hard to imagine what else she might have worn, in her humble station. Women of the leisured class in movies of the same period, Barbara Stanwyck or Bette Davis-type women, or dowagers with uniformed maids, were portrayed lounging idly at home in floor-length satin evening wear or, in intimate moments, a negligee, another rarely seen but more lamentable loss. There was apparently nothing in between.

  The housedress was not designed to venture far from home. But for an expedition to the local shops, a fresh one, not yet faded, would do. The same cou
ld not be said of another kindred garment, the duster. Occupying a sartorial rung between the housedress and the bathrobe or nightgown, the duster was paler and flimsier than the housedress. It had buttons, but never a belt. Its A-line cut was ampler, but the real giveaway was the sleeves, wide and shapeless and reaching to the elbow. Somehow those big pathetic sleeves made it plain that the duster would not be leaving the house.

  But the housedress could go out and did. On the streets, with pocketbooks dangling from one hand and a small child from the other (I was one such dangler), the housewives were readily identifiable, like uniformed soldiers in wartime—and it was wartime. On the march, ready to assault the shops and gather booty for dinner.

  Those dresses billowing aloft were not quite the classic models of my childhood. Some were sleeveless, or short, or V-necked, or beltless. The colors were darker and richer-bold splotches, jagged stripes, even African prints. The housewives of yore would no sooner have been caught in an African print than on safari. I wondered who wore them now. Old women who had never stopped wearing them all those years when the rest of us were snug in our jeans? Or newly arrived immigrant women who were oblivious to their symbolism? Or maybe women who simply liked them. Was it possible to feel affection for a housedress?

  Granted, the housedresses had marginally improved, yet they were unmistakable. I guess no style, however styleless, is ever quite extinct. They looked comfortable and safe, but I knew better. I didn’t dare go any closer. No, I stepped up my pace, as if the beckoning folds might reach out and seize me, swaddling me from head to foot.

  Face to Face

  THE CAT WAS OF no interest to me—I am not now and never was a cat lover. When cat lovers’ cats made their advances, I sat in frozen courtesy. But for reasons also of no interest, I had to spend four months with the cat and I determined, on principle, to make something interesting out of our enforced sojourn. I studied the features of catness that cat lovers go on about with such ardor: the rippling undulations of flesh and fur, the ingenious forays into high and low places, the fabled inscrutabilities. I was impressed. The cat lovers were right about all that. On the other hand, the cat was not aloof, as cat lovers had led me to expect, but affectionate: like an infant, he craved attention.

  I studied catness in stages, and soon I felt I had thoroughly witnessed its famous mysteries. Which is not to say that I plumbed those mysteries or that they were not worth plumbing, only that I had had enough: they were familiar now, and they were finite.

  I might have passed the remaining time indifferent to the cat, but there came upon me an unfamiliar sense of freedom and power in his presence. Alone with the cat in this singular situation—not quite solitary, not quite social—I was free to do anything at all. He would never tell. The cat would not reveal any bursts of temper, peculiar lapses, eccentric habits or rituals, vexing flaws. If by any chance it judged, it would keep those judgments to itself and soon forget, or so I assumed; it would not bring old grudges to the next encounter as a person might.

  Alone, we know who we are. In company our certainty is blurred. Other presences, like surgical lasers, penetrate and work subtle changes and adjustments on our innards. Also, in the company of others we hide our faults as best we can, or, failing that, tinge them with a whimsical, quasi-charming light, often deluding ourselves in the process. There is no need to hide our failings with a cat: the cat will never tell. With the cat I was not accountable, or not to anyone but myself. How I behaved with the cat would be a uniquely accurate reflection of character: rather than penetrating and altering me, the cat would serve as my mirror.

  Being with a baby comes to mind. Babies cannot tell either. But with a baby we are constrained to behave decently since, after all, it is a baby, and more often than not our own; moreover, if we behave badly with the baby we may suffer the ill effects later on. We need not bear the ill effects of our behavior with a cat: if it becomes unmanageable or neurotic as a result of mistreatment we can give it away, which is not ordinarily the case with a baby. So with a cat we see ourselves not through a gloss of social behavior but face to face, mirrored: who we really are in relation to the Other, who we might be in a situation of impossible freedom.

  Under the unexpected aspect of mirror, the cat became infinitely fascinating, and my stay with him became an exercise in self-scrutiny—part of my routine in any event, and now accomplished while I cared for the cat. Killing two birds with one stone, as they say, only nothing like killing was involved. I was kind to the cat, for the most part; I had little urge to be cruel, even when he was intrusive or irritating. That was a happy discovery. I was willing to stroke and give the affection he craved, even willing to play a bit. But only when I was in the mood. I was utterly free, with the cat, to indulge my moods, which were many and various, a freedom I had not felt with babies. You cannot ignore babies when you are not in the mood, or rather, you can but you will suffer guilt or worse. You can ignore cats without suffering guilt, at least I could. Did I hold myself to a higher standard of behavior with babies because babies are the same species and thus compel allegiance? Or was it simply greater love for the babies? I do not think greater love, though it surely existed, is the answer. Great love has never held anyone to a high standard of behavior, quite the contrary. At any rate, I was kind to the cat when I felt like it and ignored him when I felt no kindness, and these alternations were arbitrary.

  Maybe not totally arbitrary. The moods of moody people do have causes, tangled but not beyond unraveling, should we care to unravel. Mine, though, had nothing to do with the cat. They were strangely arbitrary. And when the cat seemed puzzled or dismayed at my arbitrariness I didn’t care, as I would have with a baby; I would have cared what a baby thought of me, aside from caring for the baby itself. Faced with a baby’s dismay I would have mustered a show of congeniality. With the cat I rarely made such efforts.

  At first I was playful with the cat, and it loved to play. After a while I noticed that while I didn’t mind having him curl up warm against my body, I no longer was inclined to play. I ought to play, I thought: the cat needed, or was entitled to, or at least would have enjoyed, play. But for various reasons I no longer felt playful, and after some moral struggle I decided I need not force myself to play with the cat as I surely would have done with a baby, who needs play for its civilized future.

  So this cat would have to do without much play. He would be an infrequently played-with cat, and if his mood became somber in consequence, like mine, so be it. Failure to play was not mistreatment. Anyway, the cat would never tell.

  If I was not obliged to play with him, I was even less obliged to sleep with him. Yet when he took to sleeping in my bed at night I liked feeling his ripply warmth nearby. I could even imagine myself a great-hearted cat lover, which I knew I was not. When he walked up my back and pawed at my face, though, I had no qualms about pushing him away. Qualms arose when he settled in the precise place at the end of the bed where I wanted to move my feet. The cat could not be faulted, yet my feet longed for that very spot. Why not just shove him over? The cat was sleeping. I have a keen reverence for sleepers; they seem so trusting and vulnerable, so touchingly benign in a near-sacred way, that I hate to disturb them. Still, it seemed overly scrupulous to sacrifice the comfort of my feet merely to avoid disturbing a cat, especially when in all likelihood he would promptly fall back asleep. On the other hand, who was I in the hierarchy of creatures, and of what importance were my feet, that this minuscule comfort should take precedence over the cat’s sacred sleep? Wakeful and distracted, I pondered whether the need to move my feet might be born of a perverse, unconscious urge to cross the cat. No, I thought not. At last, overcome by the absurdity of self-denial, I would nudge him over. He looked innocently aggrieved and sometimes went away altogether. I wished I could explain and persuade him to return, only not to that precise spot. And his catty inability to grasp this explanation was frustrating and came between us.

  Cat lovers say cats are a comfort but I rarely fou
nd this to be so. Though his warmth at my side was pleasant, like a living pillow, the cat did not relieve loneliness or grief or frustration. Nor was he company: his cat silence, his very inability to tell, which conferred such freedom, was a drawback when it came to being company. The cat was more a burden than a comfort. As cat lovers are always saying, cats require little in the way of physical care, far less than infants. The burden was not physical care. The burden of the cat was its presence. It was there, inexorably, and as such demanded a response, whether attention or indifference. Even ignoring a fellow creature requires effort, and for the conscientious and scrupulous, possibly more effort than attention. But I made this effort. Now and then I regretted my inattentiveness and tried to make amends, treating the cat as I treat people, following the moral imperative that the needs of others have some claim on us, as we strive to believe. But only now and then, in an arbitrary way.

  Physical care aside, the cat was a burden as infants are burdens and not company, except with infants we bear the burden as an investment in expectation of future return: a baby will grow to be company, a comfort, while a cat, though it ages and endures, never outgrows catness. Besides, we are responsible for raising the babies, not only for their future good but for our own, since if we do not raise them properly they will continue to be a burden. Also, people will readily see we have not raised our babies properly. Would people censure a cat’s behavior and judge us to be poor cat raisers? I think not. The cat would be thought to have a bad nature: we would claim we had made every effort to raise it properly but its bad nature defeated our efforts. This excuse, rightly or wrongly, would not work with a child. The parents are held responsible. Nurture is more in vogue than nature.

  Once, as I tried to nudge the cat off my desk—for he had the habit of leaping up to sit on my spread-out papers, a habit that was cute once or twice but soon palled—he slipped and landed not on his feet, as I had heard cats always do, but on his back. He looked stunned and distressed. I was distressed too, not only because I had had no intention of hurting him, but also because if he were maimed for life, I might be suspected of cruelty or violence. True, the cat could not tell—even if he could, my nudge had been gentle, not violent—but the vet might harbor suspicion. Mistakenly. Luckily, after a tense moment the cat rose and sauntered away.