Pretty Leslie

by R. V. Cassill

  Each of them “made out like bandits” (as her friends at Smith had put it in Leslie’s time) on the front room couch, and it was an open secret (Irene admitted to Leslie she had listened from inside the bedroom door) that Sarah had gone all the way twice. With different men. Further, Sarah came home late once with a fighting dike she’d picked up in a bar on Sullivan Street. The dike had wanted money or horse more than sex, so there was no loss except a certain amount of kitchen breakage to be allowed for after her departure. The parents might have stopped breathing altogether if they had known this much.

  But this much was not much for well-to-do girls underprivileged in experience. So more and more they fought about the rent always being late when it was Irene’s turn to pay, about spoilage in the icebox, about whether someone hadn’t deliberately knocked down stockings hung up to dry in the shower and purposely trampled cockroach wings into the mesh an hour before someone had a date with someone else’s ex-boyfriend. The literary and theatrical tastes they had shared in college began to seem like naïve misunderstandings of terms (“You think you’re talking to someone and it turns out just to be words. There’s no communication.”) as various men commanded them to pay attention to quite distinct sorts of books and plays.

  Then eventually Irene laughingly accused Sarah of masturbating. She had been listening again at the bedroom door one night when Sarah was on the front room couch alone. The wounded Sarah replied, with no laughter at all, that she was on the couch rather than in the room she shared with Irene because Irene’s latent lesbianism had shown plainly enough to disgust her lately.

  Leslie said with somber quiet that she was goddamned if her nerves could stand this wrangling any more. Both of them disgusted her. Both of them fell silent in respect, knowing that she would never have missed the opportunity to take sides unless she really meant to move. And if she meant to move, then presumably her parents had agreed she could have an apartment all to herself.

  That was right. She was engaged to Ben by this time. She had met Ben’s Aunt Peg, and Ben had spent several evenings at her home in Manhasset, establishing in her parents’ eyes the reality of that always hypothetical male who would someday multiply and divide the family by the formalities of legal marriage. In allowing her to take her own apartment (by this time allowing did not so much mean altering a commandment as simply scaling down the fuss to a degree that permitted her to overcome it, no longer making it all More Trouble Than It Was Worth), they trusted her not to waste the prospects Ben offered. She even went so far as to suspect them of nudging her into an availability which would make it easier to keep him lined up until he was ready to marry. That was damned old-fashioned of them, if true, but damned convenient for her and Ben.

  Convenient generally, but in the first several months of living in that apartment the unforeseen degree of loneliness had humiliated her to the soul. For literally the first time in her life she was living alone. At home there had been an older brother and a younger brother besides parents in the house. At college there had been roommates and the solid female cordon of the whole dorm, while on King Street there had been a traffic of male and female, busy as a bus terminal, always to rely on.

  She wasn’t bothered by the threat of muggers or by the dark entrance to her new apartment building where—as her mother pointed out on an early visit—a person might conceal himself behind the garbage cans, lying in wait.

  It was herself alone within four walls that began to scare her, as if that self could only emerge in isolation, as ghosts would need the trappings of a haunted house in order to make themselves visible. The female self, what a monster it was when it stood night after night in rude nakedness beside her desk or bed—the Fat Girl come back to deride the little, educated social doll she pretended to be. The fears of the dark she had long since outgrown and discarded seemed to know that now she was ready to entertain them better, and so they came back.

  The oddest thing, though, was not merely that she remembered the Fat Girl fantasies (so amusing and pathetic, really, that she meant to write a story about them), but that she started to get fat. She put on fourteen pounds in the two months after leaving Sarah and Irene, this in a springtime when her consumption of emotional and physical energy ran at a pace she had never matched before.

  Ben was proud to prescribe a diet for her, was not so much professionally abashed as just more professionally interested in her when she gained even more weight on the diet. Of course she cheated. Lunching with the office gang, she drank martinis and ate French sauces that would have given a pot to Don Quixote. But he never assumed her problem was merely one of calories. Both amateurs in that field of mystery where the soul shows itself in the form of the body (though he was trained and “psychiatrically oriented”), they guessed in many a speculative session that she had “hidden reasons” for wanting to be fat.

  “It’s psychogenic false pregnancy,” Ben guessed, smiling the Buddha smile that promised it didn’t have to be that if she didn’t like the idea. “It’s a good sign of good intent. Marry me.”

  “No,” she said, pouting coquettishly—and could afford the coquetry since they both knew full well she would marry him before much longer. “No. It’s something you’ve done to me, making me so repulsive to man and beast.” She puffed out her cheeks to exaggerate her bloated condition. “It’s the smart-young-thing equivalent of keeping them barefoot and pregnant to keep them out of circulation. It’s really your psyche getting into my soma, and I’m such a loving broad I go along with your wishes. So you’ve got to stop wanting me this way. Tell me I’m hideous. Ben, you’ve got to be revolted by the way I’m puffing up.”

  He promised he would be, but plainly wasn’t.

  “Hick, hick, hick,” she called him when he doted on her swollen breasts and middle.

  All complacently, he answered, “I’m just a lad from Kansas.”

  “You may like it,” she said morosely, “but they tease me at the office. Ben, you’ve got to do something.”

  What he could not do—perhaps because she (or her female other self) misled him so cunningly—was make an effective connection between her fantasy life and this inexplicable increase in weight. She began to think quite persistently and consciously of the frightening self she must confront alone in her apartment as the Fat Girl and even to tell herself, like whistling in the dark, “Fat Girl’s going to get you tonight, ha-ha,” as she rode home from work on the subway. Really there was a great mysterious shock in riding down from the busy, reassuring gregariousness of the office in midtown, where everybody loved Leslie (with such facility, so smoothly, as if she to them and they to her were a part of the famous employee-benefits policy provided by the magazine) to the silent varnished door one flight up from the garbage cans behind which nobody hid, setting the little brass teeth of her key in the receptive lock and opening with a quick thrust to catch, for once, a reassuring actual glimpse of the fat female who lived there. (If she had seen Her, she might have been excused from trying to swell enough to let Her see Herself in the bathroom mirror. Unable to glimpse and exorcise the creature she knew was there, she tried simultaneously to appease and subvert the presence.)

  Her portable typewriter was a weapon of defense. She began to work on her diaries again, rattling out page after page of dialogue recollected from the office or self-analysis, to be mostly discarded as soon as Ben or Sarah or Irene or Mary Jo (hardly ever any other men; she wasn’t dating much since she got engaged) came to rescue her by taking her out to dinner and drinks somewhere around the Village. The diaries now were not what they had been in adolescence, a way of learning herself, but rather a way of putting a screen of words between what she understood and what she was afraid of finding out. The act of typing earnestly, as much as anything, served to keep the Fat Girl at bay.

  When she had no plans to see Ben at all or not until much later, seven o’clock of a May evening seemed to her the worst time. If she was not clattering madly at her typewriter then, she was compelled (almost
literally compelled) to sit near the window and watch the street in order not to be aware of what was going on in the apartment behind her. But even the street became like a mirror, treacherously showing who lived in the apartment. In one fiery warm sundown she watched Bert, the policeman (whose name she knew just as she knew the names of the bartender in the neighborhood bar and the man in the delicatessen and the sweet couple who ran the gallery two doors south)—watched him wade into a gang of Puerto Rican boys with his club. Probably the boys had invaded the neighborhood from the Chelsea section, and more than likely they had given provocation. But she made no such interpretation. She saw the violent silhouettes moving in the garish colors of light that swept her street from the Hudson River end. Her heart leaped when she heard a boy scream with a broken arm. And she turned from the window to confront a smile like that on her own mouth.

  “What’s wrong with me?” she demanded of Ben when she reported to him all an engaged girl would like to report of her reaction.

  “Well.…”

  He was smiling, hesitant, eager to help if and when it became apparent that she needed help, but nevertheless reluctant to annoy her with ponderous analysis based on thin evidence.

  “But I’m a liberal,” she protested. He laughed as if his heart would break.

  “If you’d only take my psychic life seriously, you could help me get into my summer clothes,” she said, panting. And because he had laughed at the wrong time (What would have been the right time? She loved his ease and counted on it for reassurance, but assumed the right time to laugh was some ideal moment that could not be placed in the actual calendar of their hours together), she did not tell him then or ever how the Fat Girl had led her from the window to the bed. She had lain, sweating and shaken, with an afterimage of sundown brilliance fading to violet intense abstraction in her optic nerves and the sound of the angry scream throbbing like a pulse in her ears. She wondered, with her eyes opening on the telephone, whether she should call the police. (But Bert was the police. For what further sacrifice or immolation were they to be called?) Eyes closed again, she felt the smothering envelopment of a husk around her, flesh enveloping her flesh like a lewd apparatus to move her supine joints and muscles, a not at all liberal will enveloping her will, forcing her to confess how much she liked to see the cop slashing with his club.

  Surely it was not her own hands that opened and adjusted her clothes as she lay there in terror and delight. It was not the perfect A.C.L.U-A.A.U.W. type, eager to be a suburban wife who donated tithes to progressive causes and slum clearance, whose damp tracing with a middle finger transposed the actual scene in the street into darker and less tolerable pantomimes. Day before yesterday at lunch Peepers had told the gang a story: A Negro woman in South Carolina was held on the fender of a car. While headlights played on her, she was raped repeatedly by a gang of whites. At lunch, Leslie had been as shocked and angered as anyone else, but what had been a growl of pity and hopelessness was, in this re-enactment, a hungry moan of assent.

  She would never tell anyone that—not even herself in her brisk hours of competence, wit and friendliness.

  Not long afterward (and still almost a year before she was married) she had got her promotion from copy editor to junior reporter. For once in her life she knew how hard she had worked for something. Office politics aside (and her vast ignorance of music aside, too, though that was the field to which she was assigned), she understood that the managing editor and the Man himself (Doom, Peepers called him, taking the name from a story of Faulkner’s) would never have let her name go on the masthead among the reporters if she had not, in job after job of increasing responsibility, shown them her capacity to concentrate energy where it counted. She did not have to know music as long as she knew where and how to go for the newsworthy word on it, and would never shirk her commitment to the assignment until it was done.

  It was a big thing—the reasonable, practical compensation for her misfired dreams of becoming a great writer like Thomas Wolfe—and she wanted to deliver the prize she had won. She wanted to take it to Ben, beam modestly, and say, “There.” But after work on the day the word came down, she had some drinks of celebration with Peepers and Cornwall and Meredith Gilley—all of them reporters of some standing, glad to welcome her now as an equal. About ten-thirty that night she taxied home alone, expecting to find Ben in the apartment, since he had a key now and had promised. He had been there but left a note saying he was back at Bellevue, would probably call later. In any case, she was to go have dinner if she hadn’t already eaten.

  She didn’t want food, and in her disappointment blamed Ben for urging her to take it on and thereby put on even more weight. Now that she was advanced and would, from time to time, be traveling all over the country, she had to slim down.

  Her disappointment led to no outright rebellion. She knew she damn well didn’t want to stay in the apartment with the Fat Girl on this of all nights. But instead of going back uptown where she knew she’d find at least Cornwall and Meredith rounding out the evening with food, she put on a Spartan humor and old clothes, and went to the neighborhood bar.

  She had buddies there too—Max the bartender who was studying social psychology at the New School, Biddy the Beautiful Barfly who was a very inexpensive, talkative companion and who boasted that at seventy she still didn’t have to wear a brassiere, Oscar Holt, the Social Democrat, and a painter named Carpenter who told her stories of good times on the Project back in the thirties.

  This night it just happened that Bert, the policeman, came in, too, around one-thirty, and when she announced she was heading for home, said it would be a pleasure to see her safely there. He walked beside her with his nightstick dangling from his wrist, hardly saying a word (and probably thinking how handsome he was with his short-clipped blond hair rising in a perfectly straight line from his collar to his cap—no back to his head at all). Quite, quite amusing, really, considering what she really thought of him.

  But at her door he tried to come in. There was a half-comic, partly ugly, absurd and frightening struggle with the door itself, in which at one time she pinned his wrist and knee between the edge of the door and the jamb. Then, when he was inside, without preliminaries, he tried to force her onto the bed, still not saying a word.

  They fought by the window, rolled biting and kicking and clawing each other across the big rag rug which was the only thing she had brought from home. They managed to upset a sack of empties in the Pullman kitchen. The icebox door was pulled open by someone’s hand desperately clutching for a stay. The lemon-colored wedge of light that came from it was the only illumination of their battle.

  He was stronger than she, of course. She “got out of it,” she supposed, only because he lost interest in going through with his first intent.

  He began to punish her with his nightstick. At first the blows seemed directed at the backs of her knees, as if he meant to bend her legs suddenly and force her down again. But then he went over into pure chastisement of the ragged, lurching creature whose wrists he held in his left hand.

  She was a sight by this time. Her hair was a great mess, blouse and jacket gaping. Her girdle had been tugged down nearly to her knees and she hobbled grotesquely in one shoe as she tried to dodge the sting of the stick.

  He beat her across the front of her thighs, on her haunches and belly, and in the morning she found a single, straight blue line of bruise across her chest. He hurt her about as badly as she could be hurt without sustaining a serious injury. When he was through, he tossed her down like old clothes and walked out serenely proud of his profile and his authority. She was not even sure he had lost his cap in the struggle.

  But nevertheless, the whipping was salutary in some way she could not have foreseen. It seemed to have fumigated the apartment, exterminating the haunts. When she put her torn clothes into the incinerator, it seemed that many perverse fears and dreams of childhood went down the chute with them into the flames.

  She flew out to Minneapol
is on an assignment (her first as reporter) within forty-eight hours, and Ben never had a chance to see the bruises. He never heard about the battle, either, and since the worst of the fantasies were purged now, there seemed less reason than ever to tell him about them and submit to his analysis.

  She did not (as she half expected to) regain her slender figure in the months thereafter, but the Fat Girl—the oppressive, invisible mocker who had shared so many nights with her—came back only one more time. That was on the hot Sunday when Ben—so uncharacteristically, so shockingly—forced her body to respond in a way she hated. It had upset her as if she had come, in all good faith, into a room where her true love had promised to wait for her and there, on a soiled, rumpled bed, among cups and comic strips, had found him wrapped in the dumpling dimpled arms and bulbous legs of a fat intruder.

  chapter 13

  SHE HAD PRACTICED EVASION and defense all her life; so she should have been as safe inside the sophisticated harlotry of manners and rationalization as a Crusader’s wife, protected by moat, stone wall, and chastity belt from the lust of the stay-at-home besieger. A shield of rubber, proportionally as tough as the oxhide shields of Amazon warriors, protected her from conception. Emotional prejudices of twenty years armored her against “caring” for the pioneer between her knees. The horse and foot of her experience (“I’m a married girl, after all; and there are no novelties for me”), phalanx behind phalanx of assurances that sex was only sex, and minefields of prejudice about female rights would appear to have made her impregnable. So if she was taken—taken in the ancient and unalterable sense implied by the myths (carried off by a bull, trodden by a swan, enveloped by a divine fog)—she was taken by treachery. And since she was taken thus completely, the treachery must have been her own, like a suicide.