by Mary Gordon
I understood very well that there really wasn't anything I had a right to know. I wasn't close to anyone involved. I hardly knew Andrea, and I would be the last person Bertie would want knowing the details of her life.
I sometimes wonder what Bertie said to Tom. I could imagine her saying something like “Forget it, Tom, it's over, go on with your life. No one appreciates you like I do. No one understands you but me.”
And there'd be no one, no one at all, to tell her she was wrong.
Walt
I own a famous store. In the back of the store, we cook the food that people buy, the food we set out in the showcase. Our food is created as much to be looked at as tasted: it is a thing of the eye as much as the palate. More of the eye, perhaps, because it's food that's meant to be more representative than nourishing. People bring home my food so that in solitude or in their two-person families they can feel bountiful, part of the generous world.
Sometimes we cater parties, and I often wonder whether the hosts pretend to have cooked the food themselves. Now that my food is so famous and desirable (we couldn't possibly serve everyone who wants us) I'm more and more curious about whether or not people acknowledge that the food that they are serving came from me. It's questionable now whether people would receive more praise, would be seen as doing more for their guests, for having cooked the food themselves or having had what is required— luck? wit? discipline? connections?— to be among the ones I choose to serve.
From time to time I cook on television. I did today. This morning I woke up at four to be ready for the limo they were sending at five. It could have been dangerous, out on the street at that hour, but I didn't feel in danger. I'm often on the street at four, four thirty, on my way down to the market for what is to me the most pleasurable and most important part of my work. I love everything about the market: the hum and buzz of money changing hands, insults, praise, the sound of tearing paper, barrels scraping across pavement, snatches of song, curses, the glazed eyes of fish, the redness of radishes, whiteness of cauliflowers, dewy cabbages with the pallor of a damp summer moon.
This morning I wasn't dressed in jeans, workboots, and sweatshirt, my market garb, but in a long, wide skirt and a teal-colored silk shirt (for television it's important to have a well-defined neckline). Everything I was experiencing made me feel a rich and blameless joy. Innocently as a child, I reveled in it all: the deep breeze that lifted the hem of my skirt, exposed my legs to the damp air, then chilled them; the dark limo jetting through the half light; the new smell of the car's upholstery; the cavernous backseat where I could doze for the half-hour ride.
From the moment I got into the car, there was a while when everyone I saw was uniformed, beginning with my driver, proceeding to the guards of the television station: a series of underemployed young men directing me down corridors as if I were an astronaut and they were showing me the way to outer space. Even the receptionists wore blazers with the network's symbol on the breast. Among them, I always felt alone. I knew that I was neither one of them nor important enough to engage their imagination. Later in the morning, politicians, actors, sports figures would arrive. They would be important to the uniformed ones; they would receive their smiles, their engaged nods, their grateful gestures. Sometimes one of the young women would say: “My mother made that cheesecake you did on the show last month,” or “One of these days I'm going to try that cabbage soup.” That was the most I'd ever get.
After every TV appearance I make, two things happen. Business increases and somebody from my past reappears. This morning, after the TV show was done, I was in the back of the store going over the books. I do this now more than any other work. It's surprisingly pleasant, so different from the rushed, hot work done in the kitchen, the room of white tiles and stainless steel industrial-style appliances. Different, too, from the subtle, ingratiating work of selling that goes on in the front of the store: consisting as it does of the offering of samples, along with a word suggesting a paradisiacal outcome that can only be effected by the customers’ giving up more money than they'd like. As I was working in the back, the young man from Argentina who was serving customers up front knocked on the office door. “An old friend of yours is here,” he said to me.
At first I couldn't believe it was really Walt. I'd feared seeing him for so long that the reality of him was rather reassuring. Often, on the street I'd think I'd seen him, but I'd turn away, convincing myself that it was impossible for us to be living in the same place. Although we both were born here.
“I thought it was time I came to see you.”
It sounded like a threat, but I knew he didn't mean it as one. He never meant to seem dangerous; he wouldn't have understood if I said he'd often frightened me. “I only did what you wanted. That's all I would ever do,” he'd say if I told him he'd frightened me. But that's just the kind of idea that can set many horrors in motion. Certainly with somebody like Walt.
The way I've just been talking about Walt and me gives you the wrong sense of us. The wrong historical sense. And this story is very much of its time. The way I was starting to tell it is the way people told stories for only a few years: 1958-65. At that time there were a lot of stories about mysterious girls in sunglasses and sheath dresses, wearing very pointed shoes with very high heels, walking around Paris waiting to be killed. Pointlessly killed by strangers. They would walk into dark bars in Rome or Paris saying, “I only live for death.” And some dark man in a cheap suit would kill them. Probably they would have sex first. These girls always had the right kinds of cars. The cars were very important. The ominous sound of an expensive car door slamming in the empty, monumental street.
In 1965, these stories stopped being told; these films stopped being made. People became expansive. Their mysteriousness was drug-induced, communal. No one dreamed of wearing chignons or sheath dresses or high heels, except parodically. What happened to all those mysterious girls? What did they become when it was chic to be happy with wild hair and loose but transparent clothing?
You had to be young then, in the sixties. There were older women who wore black velvet pants and boots and white peasant blouses with brocade vests, or red crushed-velvet shirts. We pitied them. They wore too much makeup. When they got stoned their mascara smeared, and it reminded us of middle age.
Not everyone enjoyed the sixties the way people think. You needed some money or flexible plans. Walt and I had neither. We were both the first in our families to go to college. My father repaired TVs; he had a little shop in the town in Queens where we lived, Maspeth. After the store was broken into several times, he decided to get a guard dog. A German shepherd whom he kept chained in the store basement, tying him to a post in the middle of the small plot of grass in the back lot of the store so the dog could pee and shit three times a day. The dog never walked free. It was the nearest thing to a pet we had.
My mother, who'd lived above the store the first years of her marriage, was in love with her house, and the idea that its surface might be marred by an animal was unthinkable to her. She was so afraid of dust and grime that there were no carpets in the house. A speckled linoleum covered every inch of floor space: bedrooms, kitchen, living room, bathroom. Wherever you were in the house, if you looked down at your feet, you saw the same thing. At three o'clock every day, my mother would begin cooking: stewed meats, recipes made from ground beef, overcooked vegetables, some form of potatoes, a dessert. All her cleaning was done by noon; she prided herself on that. The hours between noon and three were spent on errands, or on mending or ironing. I don't think she ever sat down to read the paper or to make a phone call or to have a cup of coffee with a friend. Sometimes I would come upon her standing in the middle of the room wringing her hands. She was both honored and overwhelmed by the task of keeping house.
Certainly, she cared for me, perhaps even with some tenderness in the years before my memory, but it was clear to me from early on that we would not have much to do with each other. She didn't seem to have the time, and a
nyway, we shared no interests. My father came home from work at five fifteen, exhausted, even less communicative than he had been in the morning. At five thirty we ate in silence. We were finished by five forty-five, glad to be away from the table. My mother and I washed up. My father sat in front of the television. After washing the dishes, I went to my room.
In fifth grade, an art teacher famished for appreciation discovered that I had a talent for drawing. A talent for anything made me alien to my parents and their world, but drawing— creating things that were of no use— made the breach even wider. When I was much too young for this, my parents began to feel inferior to me. They stood back, so as not to be in my way. Eagerly, yet full of shame, they accepted Miss Jackson's offers of free art lessons and working trips to the museum. One night, when I was in high school, she made a drunken phone call to my parents, telling them I was a rose among thorns, that they didn't deserve to have me, but that she did, she'd never had anything, why should they have something and she nothing at all? After that call she never spoke to me in school, and there were no more trips to the Metropolitan. But by that time, I knew how to find my own way. I bought the New York Times and the New Yorker. I would read “The Talk of the Town” as if it were in a foreign language and think that the day when I could understand its references, I would have arrived. I went to the Guggenheim and the Modern and the Frick; I walked around Washington Square; I found my way to the Thalia. Long before I started N.Y.U., I had left home.
That was my journey out. Walt got out by being good in math. During the Sputnik years, there were a lot of opportunities for boys like him; his teachers, Christian Brothers, saw to it that he took the opportunities. We both took what was offered us, which would inevitably remove us from our parents, who were abashed even at our high school graduations, hearing our names called out in the auditorium, watching us step up for medal after medal. On the first day of college, they helped us bring our things to the dorm then left as quickly as they could. They didn't even say: “Don't let us down.” They didn't need to. We knew we never could. They had worked so hard. Whatever we did, we would never work as hard as they had.
Walt was in the Socialist Workers Party, and he said that to talk about your family was a bourgeois affectation. The only things he said about them— that they lived in the Bronx, that his father worked on the docks— were offered as evidence that his working-class roots were grittier than mine: the soil of struggle still clung to his; mine had been rinsed. We met in a class on Eastern religion. I think of him whenever I hear the word Zoroastrianism. It was the beginning of the course, when we were studying Zoroastrianism, that he first asked me out.
He wasn't at all what I wanted. Even his name seemed wrong; it was impossible to do anything with it that would make it sound hip, or sharp, or new. It sounded like a limp, white, tasteless vegetable: watery cauliflower in a chipped bowl, peeled boiled potatoes without salt. But from the first time he spoke to me, I knew I was exactly what he had in mind. He wanted to go home.
I was angry that I was so legible to him; I was trying hard to hide the clues about my past. I'd jettisoned all my new clothes— Villager dresses, Pappagallo shoes (the working-class idea of what the middle class would wear, all wrong as it turned out). They'd cost a month's salary from my summer typing job, but I didn't care. I started to wear jeans and out-Ian dishly colored shirts or short dresses. How did he recognize me in that costume? He always wore olive green work pants, desert boots, and a white shirt. The white shirt always seemed very clean, very well pressed. The boys I wanted were wearing work shirts and boots, heavy and dangerous looking; you felt that if they stepped on your foot your toes would be crushed, your arches flattened like flounders. You'd be happy to have them try it, just to let them know you didn't mind.
He kept wanting me to read what he thought were Marxist classics. Every time we went out he'd give me a new book: The Master and Margarita, a multivolume biography of Lenin by Rok. I took pleasure in refusing to read these books. I was reading Siddhartha, and Walt Whitman, and Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet.“Why don't you ever read anything real?” he'd ask. I'd shrug in a lazy way that he found sexually inflaming. “I just want to kiss you … I just want to kiss you,” he would say. Firmly, I would shake my head no. “I don't want to give you the wrong idea,” I'd say. But everything about my being with Walt was wrong. I kept telling him that, but I continued to go out with him.
Sometimes we'd go to demonstrations together, and, taken over by a wave of political fervor, I'd let him hold my hand. He would analyze, in class terms, our relation to the demonstrating crowd. We were further away from them, he kept trying to remind me, than from the cops who were trying to beat us on the head. “So what?” I'd say. “So everything,” he'd reply. But he was always so anxious to touch my hair, to put his arm around me, that he couldn't keep his mind on his arguments, and they lost their force.
I wondered at the time whether it was to get more information about my class status that he showed up at my house, unannounced, one day during spring break. He called me from a phone booth in the candy store on the corner and said he happened to be in the neighborhood. Nobody ever just happened to be in my neighborhood: they either lived there or they were visiting someone. But it was an hour subway ride from the Bronx, and I felt I couldn't send him back.
My parents never had visitors, and even someone requiring so little impressing as Walt made my mother feel inadequate and unprepared. She went to a lot of trouble to serve us “a nice lunch”: tuna salad sandwiches with sweet pickles mixed in. She wouldn't let me lift a finger. “You kids are tired from all that school,” she said. I didn't try to change her mind. Afterward, when I walked Walt to the subway, he said, “Your mother is a worker, and you oppress her like any boss in any factory anywhere in the world.” I was outraged by that. I felt like an exceptionally dutiful daughter since I visited my parents ten times more than any of my friends whose families lived in brownstones right in the Village or in large, cool apartments on the Upper East Side. I also felt a mixture of pride and resentment in not taking any money from them. “I don't take a cent from them,” I said. He said that was nothing. He could see the real story. He wasn't like the rest of my fancy friends.
To these new friends I proffered my past as a sort of exotic plumage that would make me worth their interest. I would imitate the men on my block who shouted at war protesters: “Why don't you go back to Russia where you came from.” I would make fun of the foods they ate (ambrosia: a mix of sour cream, canned mandarin oranges, coconut, and baby marshmallows), the pictures on their walls (waif-eyed little girls or toreadors), the TV shows they watched (Wunnerfulla, wunnerfulla, I would say, like Lawrence Welk). I prided myself on how far I'd come, and I knew I could never go back. Walt denied the distance. When he finished college, he was going to be a labor organizer. I pointed out how reactionary American labor was, how racist, how war-loving. He insisted that was not their essential nature but a perversion of capitalism, relatively shallow, easily changed. “Besides,” he said, “it's easy for you not to be a racist, you never see any blacks. I bet there wasn't one black kid in your high school class. Your whole idea of race is a big bourgeois fantasy.”
He snickered when I told him that I'd accused my cousin of committing a sin when he said he wouldn't “use a toilet a nigger had just used.”
“Well, aren't you a real little liberal,” he said. When I got mad and walked away from him, I saw the panic in his eyes. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I just want you to be real.”
It frightened me that he seemed to know so readily what was real, to be able to discern so easily when I was being unreal or not real, or whatever the opposite of real was. I wouldn't have dared to say to Walt what I only half believed, that what you hoped to be was as real as what you came from, maybe even what you were. He would have said that was bullshit, that what you were was what you were, everything else was a fake. I was always afraid when he talked like that, as if he were in danger of smashing and th
en stealing the ruins of what I was painfully trying to create and protect. I was always afraid that I would let on too much, give him the wrong clue, and he'd move in and defoliate the territory I was only tentatively exploring. I knew that at any moment I might let something drop and he'd pounce on it. So I had to be very careful of what I told him. If, for instance, I began to feel safe one night and told him my childhood fantasy of a black friend, he'd have made me feel like a fool.
But that story was one of the ways that, in my childhood room, I could know myself as heroic, different from those among whom I lived. Each night after the TV news of the desegregation of the Little Rock schools, I would make up stories of the children I had seen, brave little girls in stiff dresses and tight braids, walking like the saints past fat-bellied and brutal men who would have been quite glad to shoot them, to set their dogs on them, to blow them up. I pretended that one of these girls was sent to my class to get her away from danger. But I was the only one in the class who would befriend her. One day in the playground, someone pushed her off the swing. A deep cut formed, running from her elbow to her wrist. The teacher said that one of us would have to give her blood, would have to have his or her arm opened identically to hers so that the blood would flow from arm to arm. I stood up by my desk. “I will do it,” I said without flinching. Awestruck, my classmates watched as I pressed my arm, vein to vein, against my friend's and saved her life. My blood mixed with hers. After this, we held hands every day in the playground. The other children wanted to play with us, but we had nothing to do with them.