by Rhoda Lerman
“Oh.” Speaking in the singular. It wasn’t with me. I bit my lip. I wanted very much to be the girl he loved.
It was all right, I kept telling myself as I took my overnight bag and my kiss on the cheek and my wilted rose. And it was all all right, I continued to tell myself as I kicked the vacuum cleaner and cried into the shower and tossed one of my mother’s three Rose China plates against the wall. “These are for you when you get married, Stephanie . . . take care of them.” I had refused his offer of aid in the elevator. “I’ll be all right, Richard. Really, don’t bother.” The sound of one plate hitting the wall sounded wonderful and, as if I had made it happen by tossing the plate, the phone rang. It was himself.
Himself was terribly sorry. Was I busy? I’m throwing rare plates against the wall, I didn’t tell him. He had to change a date. He had just glanced at the calendar at home and there was a grossly boring banquet he had promised a friend he’d go to and would I mind if we left for Westport on Saturday morning instead of Friday night. I didn’t mind because I still had two plates to go. He sent a kiss over the phone. I sent the plates against the wall and left their precious shards on the parquet until the next morning when I scooped them up, wrapped them in newspaper and shipped them from the museum to my mother in Munich and then sat for many unproductive hours while Sissy directed a score of workmen casting platforms for the crosses and I bit my lips, wrote my dinner and lunch dates neatly into my calendar and tried hard to keep my head from exploding until I could take my agony to Miriam’s where I would be going for her anniversary dinner. I really wanted to be loved. I really didn’t want to die alone. I really wanted to get married. I really didn’t feel like eating at the same table as Il Duce and I really wanted to talk to Miriam.
I couldn’t really talk to Miriam. There was another element at the table, a pretty one, the medical illustrator and she didn’t like peas. Miriam avoided my eyes and filled the dinner table with superb food while everyone else avoided the eyes of everyone else over the lace tablecloth. There was a fine and terrible line of sweat beads on Miriam’s upper lip as she refused offers of help and carried steaming bowls to and from. “You should try your peas,” Il Duce advised me. I nodded with a mouth full of peas. “You should try the peas,” he said to the medical illustrator. “Miriam grew them from seed.”
The medical illustrator, demure, embarrassed, mumbled that she had never liked peas and Il Duce, with a look of knives and no words, directed Miriam to the kitchen to get the girl something else and we waited for Miriam to come back while the girl talked about what a fantastic cook Miriam was and Il Duce talked about what a fantastic cook Miriam was and I talked about what a fantastic cook Miriam was and when Miriam came back I told her what fantastic peas she had grown as she served the girl corn on the cob which the girl ate dutifully in large desperate noisy bites. After mousse, after espresso, I caught Miriam in the kitchen.
Steam rose from a pan of dishes to cloud her face. “Don’t ask.”
“I don’t have to ask.”
“Look, your friend Richard’s friend is a nurse. Poor family. First generation. The patients all love her. Speaks Italian to the old ones even though she’s maternity. She’s lived with your friend for a couple of years now.” Miriam laughed that edging laugh. “So we both have little nurses.”
“And Richard Chamberlain?”
“Two weeks more and he’s off maternity. Then it’ll be okay. Meantime,” she jerked her thumb toward the dining room. Soap bubbles ran along her wrist. “That’s his present. A temporary sacrifice.”
“There’s sacrifice and there’s crucifixion, Miriam.”
The girl came into the kitchen and stood at the sink with us. She was very embarrassed. “Are you sure I can’t help with anything?”
“No, no, you go out and entertain him. That’s your job.” And the girl left smoothing her hair, not that embarrassed. “He’s improving, isn’t he? It’s working. Just time, time. You see, it proves my point. Richard isn’t sleeping with you because he’s going for the Big M. Il Duce wouldn’t dream of marrying that kid. I’m his wife. You don’t get rid of husbands. They don’t really leave.”
“I prefer the Big O.”
“Listen, dewy eyes out there is getting the Big O. But she’s never gonna get the Big Shit because the Big Shit is married to me and there’s no way to budge him. That is why you must have patience with your friend Richard. He is ready to get married. Don’t mess it up.”
“I think it’s abnormal. Don’t you think he wants me?”
“Darling, worry about want and love and all that after the ceremony. Just don’t iron his shirts.”
“I also think he really loves that girl, Miriam. He said she’s nice, that she’d never make a fool out of him. I mean she’s an honorable woman. That’s what bothers me. I’ve sold out. . . right down the river. I’ve sold out to the devil. I used to be nice.”
“Devil, shmevil,” she spat as she tossed silverware into the sink. “I have to beat you over the head. You want to be moral? You want to be nice? Go over there and put your head in my oven and turn it to self-clean. You gotta be very rich or very young or very thin before you can afford to be moral. You see the ad? What’s a nice girl like you doing in an oven like this? You’ve seen that? You can’t stand the heat, Harry, get out of the kitchen.”
Miriam was hysterical, offering one strange homily after the other. I dried the dishes she passed me. The water she used was burning hot as if she were punishing herself. “Let me tell you about a moral act. Let me tell you my scenario for this evening. This evening I am flushing a bottle of Darvon down the toilet, pulling a suicide, and when he tells me I have to throw up, I’m going to make him throw up first. The whole anniversary dinner, the peas from seed, the mousse, the works, he’s going to throw up. Choke and gag and vomit and I’m gonna do it after you leave but while she’s still here and listening. So I’m on her conscience. Now, Miss Purity, Miss Honor Before Marriage, is that a moral act?”
I couldn’t answer.
“Here, allow me. I don’t take yoga for nothing.” Miriam stretched out on the kitchen floor, hand draped as in Ophelia, the scrub pad on her breast, eyelids fluttering, slurring. “I-can’t-live-anymore-like-this. I-can’t-wait-for-it-to-end. Watch-my-breathing-Steph.” She breathed very faintly. “Heart-slows-down-all-the-way-to-nowhere. I-hardly-breathe,” she said slowly and convincingly. “I-can-hold-it-eleven-minutes.” Then she popped up. “Want me to teach you? Isn’t it good? I’ve really been working on it.”
“Are you crazy, Miriam?” I knelt beside her. “Do you want help?”
“Crazy? Like a fox. I’m just not nice.” She stood up and smoothed her apron. “And I’m running out of weapons.”
When the dishes were finished, she and I went upstairs. The record player was on in the den, the door closed, “The Shadow of Her Smile.” Miriam had a great idea, she told me, a wedding present. Her bedroom was romantic, frilly and female, with perfume bottles of extraordinary shapes and cloisonné music boxes lining a French provincial dressing table. “I’ve got it figured out.”
The record player stopped on a bar. It continued to play the bar. Miriam and I looked at each other. “They’re not dancing, Miriam.”
“Funny about record players, isn’t it?” She started rummaging through drawers. A cigarette dangled from her lips. As she bent I saw that her eyebrows were gone, totally removed, from under her bangs. “You know someone’s gonna stop it soon but you just don’t know if you can stand it until someone does. It’s that space in between that’s so tough.”
“I’ll go down.”
“I believe that is already occurring without you. Let them be. Listen, I’ll become the second Mother Cabrini, crucified on my KLH. That’s funny, isn’t it?” She plowed through dresser drawers, shoving clothes away in closets and dumping old suitcases on to the bed. “God, where in hell did I put them?” The record player was growing louder even after Miriam kicked the bedroom door shut with one foot. “Clothes
closet. Aah, linen closet. It can wait. What we really have to do is find out about your nurse and just how serious that deal is, which means we have to do a number on her.”
There is a certain kind of woman in New York who can use the telephone the way other women use their hips. Miriam was expert at psychological harassment through Ma Bell. We’d worked together before.
“What’s the number?”
“Let’s not. What if he’s there?”
“Would you prefer a house call?”
“Miriam, what if she’s the right girl? What if she’s really the right girl?”
“No such animal.”
“But what if . . .” She was poised, one finger above the first digit.
“One in a million . . . okay, then we would have to get rid of her before he finds out she’s really the right girl. But she’s not. Nobody is.”
“I think she is.”
She dialed the number. My heart stopped. “Just breathe in and out, Steph. Say ‘Hawng’ to yourself as you breathe in, ‘Saw’ as you breathe out . . . relax. Just sit, don’t be scared of her. You’re the girl he’s going to marry. She’s in troub—Good evening. My name is Carol Good from the Bye Dee Diaper Service and your name has been submitted to us by a friend who told us your very happy news which means we have a free gift for you and your husband a beautiful layette for the baby with a market value of thirty dollars plus a six weeks supply of Ivory Snow and a certificate for a studio portrait of the baby dear good for a year. Oh?” Miriam laughed, high and mad. “Someone is being funny. Isn’t that wonderful? Maybe your husband, maybe he wants you to have a baby. Do you have any plans . . . so I can file your card? After September. I see.” She nodded to me wisely. I tore pages from her phone book. “Let me write that down. Very good. You should know then. We’ll have our representative call on you with your gift and explain our service to you then. Very good. And that’s S L E N T Z?”
Miriam took away my phone book. “Oh! That after September. So I should file this for sometime the next year. Well, we’ll be sure to call you. The very best of luck.”
“I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it.”
“Hawng, Saw. Hawng, Saw.”
“I want to throw things out the window. She’s going . . . is she . . . going to marry him? Is she? Something is going on there.”
“She’s making a decision. She isn’t certain. Obviously she is in for a major disappointment.”
“Or I am.”
“Oh no you’re not. Oh no you’re not. Let’s just get to work. Come on, I’ll go through the closet again. I know the stuff is in there.”
“What stuff?”
“Weapons.”
Miriam talked as she worked in the closet but I couldn’t hear her muffled words. I sat on the bed. If I were home I would have shredded my own coverlet. But I didn’t shred blankets; I didn’t throw perfume bottles. I had until September. It was almost June. July, and then two weeks in August before he went away. And I had to face it, went away with her. I could forget the two weeks as a matter of fact because she’d be packing with him then. I had June and the month of July. “Miriam, she wants to have his baby. She’s a nice person. This is really lousy. Anyway, don’t people have throw-away diapers now?” I leafed through the phone book. There were still some diaper supply companies. “You have to admit there are very few women left in the country who genuinely want to have a baby,” I told Miriam. “That really says something for her.”
Then she burst from the closet. “Here! Are they gorgeous?” Triumphantly she tossed me an old white T-shirt and a grimy shoulder bag. “Is this terrific?” Across the breast of the T-shirt, running from shoulder to waist, was written in red, “Daniel Hechter.” “Would you believe that’s a fifty-buck Munsingwear T-shirt? And this . . . see this ratty thing . . . plastic piece of junk. That’s my Louis Vuitton bag. The shoulder strap is leather. In the sixties, my number two, the shrink, in exchange for fifteen minutes of me acting out for him a patient’s fantasy, gave me this bag which then cost him one hundred and eighty-five bucks and the older it is, the longer it looks like you’ve been rich.” She kissed me on both cheeks. “Welcome to zeregiment, mon petite. Maybe someday you’ll earn your own.”
“Did your bedroom look like this with your second husband . . . all the toile?”
“No, with him it was arty. With number one it was intelligentsia/bohème . . . posters and blue lights. Now this home, hearth stuff. Don’t you like my gifts?”
“I don’t really like status symbols, Miriam. It’s really out of my . . . uh, experience.”
“Oh, sure, that’s because you are a status symbol yourself. Listen, the act is no longer being a Jewish mother. What you lack attitudinally is life-experience at being a Jewish princess. It’s easy enough to be a mother. Now, you have your princess uniform. It’s a far more subtle act. The secret motto of the legion is: attack. But subtly. Never the jugular. Always the capillaries. See? Do their possessions, not them. Mothers attack them. Princesses have a more delicate touch. If he brings you rye bread with seeds, sigh and say you’ve been lusting for rye bread without seeds and if he brings you without seeds, sigh and say, et cetera. Always an A minus. Keep him coming back for the A. Never give it. Never! If you want to marry him, you have to keep him in line.”
13
ON TUESDAY AT MADRIGAL I TOLD RICHARD HIS TIE WAS OUTRAGEOUS AND he ought to try Tripler’s. On Thursday at the Saint Regis I suggested Dunhill’s because Tripler’s had obviously lost their buyer. Although I let down for La Toque Blanche, by the next Monday at Bosphorus East I advanced my position with the suggestion that he try Brooks because my father had always been able to depend on Brooks to be appropriate and by the next Thursday when I arrived at La Grenouille carrying my worn and filthy bag and wearing my yellowed T-shirt with women examining me hood-eyed and more men who looked more like Richard looking at me more than usual and Richard standing and waving, obviously pleased and proud as I joined him at a rose-laden table and I intentionally ignoring all through lunch his rather lovely tie of British silk, muted paisleys in ambers and beiges, Richard finally broke down and said: “You were right on about Brooks, Steph.”
“Oh.” My smile was wide and lovely. “Is that from Brooks?”
He returned my smile above the table. He grabbed my forearm under the table. “Stephanie, what the hell is wrong with this tie?”
“Richard, please. Really, this is so inappropriate of you. This is all so unimportant. It’s just a tie.”
His teeth were slightly clenched. I thought it was sexy. There was a delicious space between them large enough for the point of my tongue.
“I want you to tell me. You started this, Stephanie, so you’ll finish it.”
“I? Look, it isn’t written that I have to like your ties. I don’t care about your ties. I don’t give a hoot about your ties. Hoot hoot.” I thought he might recall our discussion of the owl and the pussycat but he was rather rigidly centered in on his tie. “I care, Richard, about your body and your heart. I am your friend.” I rolled my tongue across my lips. I found his agony very satisfying, a certain violence brewing which could well be translated to Body English in bed. “It isn’t cosmic enough.” He wasn’t amused. At all.
“Every day, Stephanie, I have to present myself to hundreds of people. The slightest off thing can shift a jury. I need to know precisely what you’re thinking about this tie.” He lifted its point to my face.
“It’s a jungle out there, isn’t it, Richard?”
“And war is hell.” Richard ordered a third cup of espresso for each of us. This would go on.
“Richard, you are a sexy man and I know, I just know that you’ve really got your orgasm together. Waving that tie before me is indeed a phallic suggestion. I’m beginning to like that tie more and more. But I am not thinking about it. I’m feeling it.”
“Either you start thinking about my tie or I’ll walk out of this place.” Richard was hissing.
“I’ll be delighted
to think about it. Okay.” I closed my eyes. “I’m now thinking about your tie. I actually have it in view. I’m thinking.” I waited and he waited. I began to squirm visibly on the chair. I could keep him here all afternoon. “I’m ready.”
“Well?”
“I keep getting phallic images, darling, and I lose the tie.” I pursed my lips. “Rub the end of your tie across my cheek, Richard. And then I’ll tell you.”
“Not here, for Christ’s sake. Stephanie, please concentrate. I don’t ask much of you.”
I sat up straight as an arrow. “I’ve got it.” I put my hand on his arm. “Now, look, don’t get angry.” It was delicious to watch him hanging on my words. Surgeon, turn on the oxygen, more pressure, vital signs reducing quickly. I was becoming an elemental necessity to Richard’s vision of himself. Drown in your narcissistic pool, baby. “Look, Richard,” I took a deep breath, then gulped loudly and started bravely. “It’s a little . . . uh, a little J.”
“What?” He squinted in disbelief.
“J. Yes, I think, yes, that is clearly what I responded to.”
“Jesus Christ, you are the most bigoted woman I have ever met.” It was said, that line, with a hushed reverence.
“Oh, Richard,” I kissed his cheek. “I’m sorry. I mean it’s all so stupidly unimportant.”
“There is no such thing as a Jewish tie or a gentile tie. Completely and totally irrational categories.” He took my hand. “Is there?”
“Bigotry is irrational. Anyway,” I continued lightly, loving the soft warmth of his hand around mine, “I don’t recall saying there was a difference. It’s just the way particular ties look on particular people. Try it this way, Richard. From the top? When the salesman shows you ties, does he pick out four or five and tell you they’d look good on you or does he just let you go through all the stock yourself?”