“Well, I guess I should take off,” Suede said. He walked up behind Coco and put both hands on her shoulders.
Coco wanted to whirl about and slap his face. “Have a good flight,” she mumbled, hoping the shuttle would crash.
I shall not cry in front of a stranger, she thought biblically. But then, what right had she to cry in front of a friend? Which was right? Or had a woman—wronged—no right to cry?
“How about a little good-bye kiss?”
Gross. Vulgar. Don’t think about what went on last night, what she had done. Coco turned, lowered her eyes as his face flashed toward her, and felt his mouth on her forehead.
“You can let yourself out, can’t you?” she asked, turning back to the stove.
“Sure. And listen. Thanks for everything.”
Then he was gone.
Coco waited a few minutes before lifting the frying pan off the burner. The butter had burned brown. She could hear a clamor upstairs in the bedrooms. Her heart was thudding, slowing down, and then speeding faster. Her hands were shaking. She turned off the burner, walked into the hall, opened the front door, and looked out to watch Suede weaving down the street, swaying beneath his duffel bag, swaggering with freedom. And that was when she saw a post-office card hooked over the doorknob—instant announcement that a special-delivery mailman had made an unsuccessful attempt to deliver a package.
“Oh, no, that’s too much,” Coco said outloud. Not an unsuccessful attempt to deliver mail now—not now, not when she’d been home all night and up at seven. Hadn’t the mailman rung? Was the doorbell out of order? Didn’t he knock? But then, why hadn’t Happy barked? What was it that the mailman was trying to bring her? The card, punched-out like a doughnut to hook over a doorknob, specified that her item could be picked up at the Girard Avenue Post Office. But wasn’t this the first day of a holiday weekend? Could the post office possibly be open on Saturday or Sunday or Monday or Tuesday on the Fourth of July weekend? Had Gavin sent her something? A gift? A bomb?
“Shit,” Coco cursed, close to tears. “This is really too much.”
Then the children started coming down the stairs, helping and hindering each other, hurrying to claim Coco as their Cracker Jack prize for the weekend. Coco came indoors hustled them into the den and turned on the TV to a roaring rerun of I Love Lucy. “I’m going to make the pancakes now,” she announced, but she paused for a moment to watch Lucille Ball bat her enormous 20-inch TV eyelashes at the Burman children, and wondered how Lucy’s newest marriage was working out. Then she walked back to the kitchen, made the pancakes, called the children, fed and banished them, cleared the table, stacked the dishes, and then sat down and decided, in a reasonable manner, to make peace with her kitchen.
It was quite clear that without a maid or a husband she could hardly exile herself to the second floor. Coco would obviously have to reconcile herself to centrality, domesticity, accessibility, distractions, noise, and the constant temptation of food. For the first time in many years Coco would be constantly confronted with jumbled drawers, and chaotic cupboards, non-graduated pots and pans, patches of spotted linoleum, crusted utensils, disorganized pegboards, splattered clock faces, greasy bulbs, finger-spotted walls, crumb-stuffed seams in the tabletop, dirty drip marks on the chairs, and food-splattered radiators. The kitchen returned a thousand indictments against Coco.
But she sat stoically on the chair next to the white wall telephone near the little wicker basket, hooked over a nail, holding a notepad for messages, several unmailed warranty postcards, and the list of emergency numbers. The Washington Post (still totally intact, untouched by manhandling, ransacking fingers) was at the far end of the table. Behind her, a row of greasy-finger-printed cookbooks marched across the top of the kitchen radiator within easy reach to look up some no-man-in-the-house tunafish-casserole or crab-stuffed-tomato recipes. But suddenly the shadow of Ann Carradine floated through the kitchen, stinging Coco with guilty fear. Was this what Ann had felt like thirteen years ago in May of 1959 when Gavin had packed his suitcase and left their Lake Shore Drive apartment to move in with Coco on Woodlawn? Was this how Ann had felt, and was this Coco’s punishment—neatly worked out by whom? the chairwoman of the Intercontinental Women’s Liberation Movement? The bursar at the University of Chicago, to whom Coco still owed $329 in library fines? Mr. and Mrs. Morrie Silverman? Mr. and Mrs. Courtney Carradine of California? The poor and wretched of the earth? Was this the retribution for what Coco had done to Ann? Had Coco made Ann’s heart hammer and her lungs collapse? Did Ann’s body sweat and her ears ring and her stomach rebel?
Probably not because some people are losers and Ann had not only survived, she had flourished, had triumphed. She had never rung up Coco’s apartment in the middle of the night or appeared at the door to demand a confrontation or asked for any alimony or threatened Gavin or tried to seduce him or carry on or cry. But maybe Ann had always known she could make it alone—so cool and California was she, so tough and self-sufficient. Still, perhaps just that first night alone, forced to remain in Chicago for several more weeks until graduation, perhaps Ann had felt the same kind of panic. Perhaps that first night she hadn’t known she could become a journalist, a well-known New York radical-chic type who would run with the Beautiful People and In-Intellectuals and Writers and Artists and Pols and Athletes and who would always be smiling out at the world of some Editor’s Notes.
Don’t think about Ann, Coco’s pre-lib Chicago counselor advised.
nineteen
Coco drew a laborious breath and looked around the copper-tone coordinated kitchen with the sad dingy white ruffled curtains and thought: Well, here I am. She should never have become such a snob about kitchens. If she were really a great writer, the fact she had to sit at a cup-scarred table with crumbs in its seams should not adversely affect her work or her talent. Perhaps there was even a new variety of discipline to be achieved in such surroundings. With a surge of optimism she hooked her shoulderbag purse over the back of the kitchen chair and extracted her little notebook with a new Paper Mate cartridge pen clipped to its cover. But suddenly Coco felt acutely cramped; the three-by-five-inch sheets looked too small, too confining and restrictive.
Coco’s life was different now. She must prepare herself for a period of expansion. Remembering a sketchpad that was down in the cellar, impulsively she sprang up from the chair and ran downstairs to the basement, clapping her hands on the stairs to warn rodents of her approach so they could hide. It’s here somewhere, she thought, moving slowly through the piles of boxes, crippled suitcases filled with outgrown clothing, torn screens, training pots, broken appliances, sleds, skates, skies, and shovels until she saw the sketchpad that she had used when she took still-life classes at the YWCA poking up from behind the forest of fireplace logs. Perfect. Coco squinched her eyes tight so as to miss the exodus of insects that would be dislodged, swatted the drawing pad against the wall several times to knock off dust, roaches, plaster dust or centipedes, and then carried it back to the kitchen.
Spread open, the pad covered the entire tabletop. This was psychologically reassuring but impractical, since Coco couldn’t reach the far page, and also because the edges molested the children’s vitamin bottles. So she folded it back in half and felt pleased by its extraordinary expanse of space. Now she could make different lists simultaneously on one page—lists of new clothes she would need, people she should invite over, organizations to support, ideas for articles to write, new telephone numbers that would enter her life, and all the social engagements that would ensure from her new (what?) Condition. On a single page Coco could list everything that needed doing, plus have plenty of extra space to doodle, set down a coffeecup and keep an ashtray—right there next to what she wrote.
Since she was experiencing some dull cramps in her stomach, Coco poured a little cream into her coffee and then attacked the sketchbook.
CALL U AND MAKE APPOINTMENT WITH DR. FOLLY
FINISH PH.D. DISSERTATION RIGHT AWAY
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br /> CALL EDITORS OF CITY MAGS
CALL WOMEN’S LIB OFFICE
CALL DEMOCRATIC CENTRAL COMMITTEE. GET ACTIVE. TRY TO BECOME D.C. NATIONAL COMMITTEEWOMAN IN 1976
FIND MIKE’S BASEBALL MITT
TRANQUILIZERS???
SCORE SOME DOPE
MAKE APPT. WITH DERMATOLOGIST
CALL LISA MEYER AT THE FREE FARM. LIVE AT FARM WITH CHILDREN?
CALL PARK SERVICE ABOUT 4TH OF JULY FIREWORKS
CALL GAVIN
CALL SYLVIA AND HANG UP
FIND OUT WHERE GAVIN IS LIVING
CALL SUEDE TO SEE IF HE GOT HOME SAFELY
ORDER GIN FROM WOODLEY’S.
Coco lit a cigarette and wrote: QUIT SMOKING
Now that she was a Parent without a Partner she would have to be doubly careful about not getting lung cancer, since she had become totally responsible for not turning her children into orphans, social misfits, drug addicts, autistics, pyschopaths, homosexuals, under or overachievers, criminals, perverts, kleptomaniacs, or slow readers. She simply couldn’t afford a premature death if she had to avert each of these disasters four times over.
DRUGSTORE—GET SENECOT ANTI-CONSTIPATION PILLS. TODAY!!!
She finished her coffee, toyed with the unfamiliar residue of cream on her tongue, recapped her pen, and sat motionless.
“I am scared shitless,” she said to the clock, which was apparently suffering from a stroke that had left it paralyzed at 9:21.
Gavin isn’t going to call me. Nobody’s going to call me. I’m so terrified I can’t breathe.
Okay, so you’re afraid, the post-lib cheerleader conceded. But that’s only anxiety, she explained in an educational tone of voice. That’s all it is—an attack of anxiety.
But where had it come from, so full-blown and with such devastating psychosomatic accompaniments?
OF WHAT AM I AFRAID? Coco printed pompously in fat squat letters, filling the hoops of the O and the D.
I AM AFRAID OF … She paused, groped, and wrote: FAILURE. That was good. Strong. But what kind of failure? She wrote (1) ENGINE FAILURE (2) HEART FAILURE (3) SOCIAL FAILURE. All morning long Coco had unconsciously been listening for the sound af a jet airliner, waiting for clearance to land at National, lose one of its engines right over the Burmans’ house and then dive straight down onto her roof. She and the children and a hundred and seven strangers would die instantly, and the Washington Post would innocently assume that Mr. Gavin Burman, husband of the dead housewife and father of the four dead tots, was also lost in the holocaust. Then Gavin could take off with Sylvia for Samoa and live happily ever after.
Jessica came into the kitchen. “I don’t want to watch television anymore.”
“You have to, Jessica,” Coco said firmly. “It’s compulsory until twelve.”
“But I’m tired of television.”
“Well, go play in the backyard.”
“I don’t want to.”
Coco’s will was wilting while Jessica’s stubbornness seemed stronger than usual.
“Can I invite Sarah over to play?”
“We’ll see.”
Jessica looked at Coco with pure hatred and then turned around, wiggled her butt in an obscene gesture back at her mother, and disappeared.
I shouldn’t let her get away with that, Coco thought, lighting another cigarette, but she’s too strong for me, too put-together to handle. And now Gavin isn’t here anymore to back me up against her. Now it’s just going to be me and Jessica battling it out for twelve more years until she splits and goes off to raise horses and organic tomatoes in Vermont without so much as a good-bye or a thank-you or a P.O. box number. And even worse, how could Coco manage to raise the boys all alone, especially now when the country was planning to change over to the metric system within ten years. How would she cope with the lump of anxiety lodged in her diaphragm so she couldn’t catch her breath? (Was that really the right word? Did they really use the same word for the breathing organ as they did for contraceptives?) And if she could never catch her breath again (unless Gavin came home) how could she play shortstop in the spring or save several of her children from drowning in different depths of a long pool at the same time or, even worse, bend over upside-down to center a pass so that the world came spinning up at her from between the triangle of her legs, making the football go crooked, and making Mike mad?
And how could she ever assemble tricycles from Sears which arrived in sixty-three pieces, for Nicky or Joshua in Christmases to come or move the spare tire in the trunk of the car to make room for five suitcases or turn over her king-size mattress when one side got bumpy or smelly from baby pee? And how would she ever fix the bathroom door when the knob fell off? Would she have to Band-Aid all the suspicious locks into their sockets again? And what if she were inside the bathroom when the handle fell off, and Josh was loose in the house hunting for some Mr. Clean to drink and die from? How could she manage all alone now that she was developing instant emphysema, now that her veins were constricting throughout her body, slowing down circulation to make her high-blood-pressure victim or to create a birth-control-pills-plus-bad-circulation clot that was probably forming right now and traveling around casually looking for a direct route to her broken heart or addled brain?
“Mom, can I invite Sarah over now?” Jessica reappeared in the doorway, her thin little chest pumping from the short run to the kitchen and her shy lyrical face contracted with the urge to make a non-negotiable demand.
“Later,” Coco said. “Just watch television for a little longer. I have to make some telephone calls.”
“But when?”
“Later. After lunch.”
Jessica’s blue eyes, dark beneath the shadow cast by her extravagant lashes, evaluated Coco’s sincerity and waited to see what her mother was really going to do.
Impulsively, to prove her virtue, Coco lifted the receiver and dialed the indelibly remembered number of the D.C. government. She asked for the Public Health Department, and then, even though Jessica, reassured, departed, decided to use the unexpected Saturday-morning connection to launch her semimonthly complaint.
“Rat Control.”
“Yes, sir. I want to request that our alley be baited.”
“Have you seen any rats in your backyard, lady?” the man asked.
“Yes. Oh, yes,” Coco said enthusiastically.
“Well, we don’t take care of rats on private property,” he said with finality. “You’ll have to find a private exterminator.”
Coco envisioned the man ready to slam down his receiver. “But they came in from the alley,” she protested.
“Yah. I know, lady. But we don’t take care of rats on private property.”
“But they’re back in the alley now. They just went back out to the alley.”
“Well, then, that’s different. Okay. What’s your address? We’ll bait the alley, if they’re really in the alley, but not if they’re in your backyard.”
Coco provided her address while she uncapped her pen and wrote CALL NADER’S OFFICE. She no longer had any doubt that the D.C. city government had actively contributed to her psychological deterioration. If city officials were crazy, what did they think would happen to concerned citizens? And female non-voters without men were doubly jeapardized. Governments never feared ladies who didn’t have rich, powerful or community-oriented husbands in reserve. Coco lit another cigarette.
Now that she was single again, she could no longer make veiled threats of male intervention if the Health Department harassed her. She could no longer pretend she had a joint checking account when Garfinckle’s stopped her from charging because her balance was too high. Now she no longer had any backup for emergencies, no one to interpret federal economic policy or explain what was bad about property taxes that sounded graduated, no one who might hear the alarm clock on Monday morning if she didn’t, no one to chase a mouse or kill a giant water bug or provide an extra key when she locked hers inside the car or leave a residue of change in pants and j
acket pockets for the newspaper boy so he didn’t have to make two trips. Now Coco had no man to deal with insurance claims, tuition loans, plane reservations, indignant creditors, obscene callers, nasty neighbors, incompetent repairmen. Now there was no channel-changing, prescription-fetching, garbage-disposing, fuse-changing, vomit-cleaning, noctural-infant-high-fever colleague, skipped-a-monthly-period conspirator, tight-space car-parker, no Office or Business Telephone Number to Call in Case of Emergency When Mother Cannot Be Located.
Tears filled Coco’s eyes.
Nicky came into the kitchen and climbed up on a chair. “I want to go to der park, Mama. Take me to der park.”
“A little later on,” Coco murmured.
Nicky was almost three. He shouldn’t be lisping. It was obviously psychological. And Coco had never even mentioned it to Dr. Finkelstein. During none of those thousands of dollars of hours had Coco ever informed her psychiatrist that her middle son lisped. All Coco cared about was herself. Thus becoming the unwed mother of four defenseless, neglected children was poetic justice. Now she would have to learn how to pay attention.
“Okay, Nicky. We’ll go to the park, and I’ll even make us a picnic lunch to take along,” she offered guiltily. It was almost eleven o’clock. “At twelve we’ll take a picnic and go to the park.”
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