Current Affairs

by Raskin, Barbara;

  “Oh, great,” I groan. “I’ll be sure to put that on my calendar.”

  It is almost five o’clock when we reach Christopher’s.

  Christopher lives on Thirty-sixth and Reservoir Road in a detached brick house that Shay convinced him to buy in 1980, right before they got married. Back then it had cost three quarters of a million dollars. Now it’s worth two million, but that doesn’t really matter much anymore because last year Christopher won the Mac-Arthur Fellowship, which guaranteed him $300,000 a year for the next five years. In other words, he’s now living on easy street right there on Reservoir Road.

  Although Shay was thrilled about Christopher becoming a MacArthur fellow, she moved out of their house a few months later. She said it was boring to eat breakfast with him. She said she’d rather eat alone and read the Post editorial page, which she also hates, rather than listen to Christopher drone on and on about Baudelaire.

  I should have known. I should have translated that message immediately:

  I’ve met someone new who’s much richer and flashier than Christopher Edmonds.

  Pulling into the driveway, I deep-park Christopher’s BMW, with its triangular yellow BABY ON BOARD sticker, and turn off my ignition.

  “Listen, Nat,” Shay whispers. “Don’t say anything about the … Contra Papers to anyone yet, okay?”

  The “Contra Papers.” It’s not an accurate title but it sure has the ring of history.

  Sighing, I reach over to depress the lock on Shay’s seat belt for her. In a flash she is out of the car, running toward Christopher’s front door, all else forgotten. To be truthful, I have to admit Shay really does adore her little granddaughter. Not that that’s hard to do. Amelia is the essence of lovable. Indeed, Amelia is almost edible. And that’s good, because of a lot of us have to pitch in to help with her maintenance.

  In the lives of our family, little Amelia functions primarily as an indirect object.

  Jealousy #786: Am I jealous that Shay has Amelia?

  Absolutely. Positively.

  For nearly twenty years I envied Shay for having her son, Steven, so why shouldn’t I be envious now about her having a darling little granddaughter? The fact that I’ve been sterile ever since I had an abortion—which Shay arranged for me when we were students at the University of Minnesota—makes me jealous of any woman with children.

  SNAPSHOT

  This is the official hospital photograph of Amelia Amanda Yellen, taken at George Washington on the night of her birth, June 12, 1985. She looks like your basic exhausted newborn, sound asleep after a harrowing birth and still peacefully oblivious to the perils of babyhood in the age of the postnuclear family. Before Amelia turned one, her mother was committed to the Hazelden drug rehabilitation clinic outside Minneapolis in a last-ditch effort to save her life. Yvonne was already a junkie when Steven Yellen knocked her up during their junior year in high school. They were married in Shay and Christopher’s garden on Reservoir Road. Yvonne wore a Mexican wedding dress that only half hid her protruding tummy. Steven wore a Greek wedding shirt and looked like he was in a state of shock. When Steven began his premed program at McGill University in September 1987, Amelia (then two) went to live with Shay.

  I couldn’t believe it when the court awarded my sister temporary custody of Amelia. Shay, who has no known address and one of the shortest attention spans in modern history, is as fickle a grandmother as she is a mother, mother-in-law, daughter, wife, ex-wife, girlfriend and—you guessed it—sister.

  When Steven was born, Shay asked Eli and me to be his godparents. That had a sort of poetic justice because Shay and Eli had served as “godparents” at my abortion back in 1967, when they were engaged. Shay had found the two med students who agreed to do it and borrowed enough money to pay for it. Eli had driven us to St. Paul to get it done and let me use his apartment while I recuperated from the little illegal operation that left me with a perforated uterine wall. At least Eli understood the reason, some five years later, when a gynecologist told us we couldn’t have a family.

  That’s how I learned that a bad abortion neuters a woman just like spaying does a dog. I always have to laugh when people say they’re fixing their dog. Breaking is what they’re really doing. I was broken and, like Humpty-Dumpty, nothing could put me back together again.

  Anyway, I can’t deny I’m jealous that Shay has a little granddaughter whom strangers assume is her own last-minute baby. Shay looks exactly like all the late-thirties first-time mothers pushing prams along Wisconsin Avenue. And, of course, she loves it when people assume Amelia is her daughter, because then she can shock them with the truth, which definitely dramatizes her youthfulness.

  From the car I watch as Christopher opens his front door.

  Christopher is ten years older than Shay and the WASPiest man I’ve ever known. He is very tall, very lean and still very blond, both inside and out. His personality is as blond as his hair. The exact antithesis of Shay, he is restrained, refined and reflective. He speaks slowly and takes action only after a great deal of forethought. He is low-key, low-profile and probably gets out of the shower to pee.

  Obviously Christopher and Shay got together because opposites attract; they are apart now because opposites attract only briefly. The great pain of Christopher’s life is his separation from Shay, whose comings and goings bedevil him.

  Unable to contain his pleasure at seeing his estranged wife at the front door, Christopher bends down awkwardly to embrace her. But Shay, who is trying to see around him for a glimpse of the baby, doesn’t even notice his effort to greet her. This realization splashes Christopher’s face like a pitcher of cold water. It is followed by a chaser of plain old-fashioned pain and longing.

  Now I can see Amelia edging around Christopher.

  She is knee-high and wearing a yellow sunsuit. She has Shay’s dark curly hair and her father’s big brown eyes. Her little nose and mouth turn upward like a sticker.

  Amelia sees Shay.

  Shay sees Amelia and starts to dance a red-hot-mama number right there at the top of the stairs.

  Amelia wiggles around Christopher to get through the doorway.

  Now Shay starts doing the dirty boogie.

  Amelia is clapping her hands and laughing. Now Christopher is laughing. Now Shay is laughing. They all talk excitedly for a moment before Shay comes running back to the car.

  I roll down my window.

  “Let’s stay here and take a swim, Nat,” she pleads. “Come on. It’s so hot. A swim will feel great and I’ve got a bunch of suits inside. One of them will fit you. Just call Eli and tell him to come here after work instead of going home. Then Christopher can barbecue us something so we won’t have to worry about dinner.”

  Shay uses Christopher’s house as her cabana.

  Although she won’t sleep there anymore, she and her friends use the pool, the patio, and the house (as an adjacent dressing room) any time of the day or night. Besides making frequent unannounced visits with small groups of uninvited guests, Shay also occasionally throws a big pool party there when she’s in town. That’s when she rounds up all the usual suspects so she can see the entire press pack at one time. Sadly enough, Christopher is pleased by this turn of events because it allows him to see Shay more often and stay in touch with her old crowd.

  Jealousy #787: Shay’s friends are legion and legendary; mine are anonymous and actually number only three, all of whom are away this summer. Shay’s friends are Washington political hotshots who make things happen. Most of them are spin doctors, who appear on TV immediately following a news event to explain to the viewers what they just saw happen—oral instant-replay people. Shay likes these media machers because they blur the distinction between reporting and creating news. They act as both judge and jury.

  Shay cannot remember the names of my girlfriends. She always calls Angie Annie and does not recognize Helen outside of my kitchen.

  Since I’ve always found it easier to indulge Shay than resist her—especially on
a hot day—I shrug and accept the invitation. So the next thing I know I am sitting beside the pool, still fully dressed, talking to Christopher, when Shay emerges through the back door wearing only the bottom half of a bikini. She is holding Amelia’s hand and looking both innocent and happy.

  Here’s how Shay thinks:

  I am her sister. I have seen her breasts.

  Christopher is/was her husband. He has seen her breasts.

  Amelia is her granddaughter and is absolutely crazy about breasts.

  Since all of us have seen Shay’s breasts, what could possibly be wrong with a collective screening?

  What my sister consistently chooses to ignore is the metaphysics of human psychology. To Shay, her mindset is reality; all the rest is sound and fury.

  Totally unselfconscious, she approaches the pool.

  Shay has Art Deco breasts, like the ones featured on the original paperback cover of Darkness at Noon, which Koestler described as fitting inside champagne glasses. It is obvious, however, that Shay has been swimming elsewhere, in less congenial pools, because both her breasts are quite white compared to the rest of her body.

  Only the two toast-colored nipples match her tan.

  Christopher looks at me and shrugs. I lift my eyebrows a little and sigh. Then we smile tolerantly at each other.

  Once again we silently forgive Shay’s transgressions because her sins are not venal.

  She is out of control, but usually commits only victimless crimes.

  Actually I am quite crazy about Christopher. In fact, I like Shay’s first husband too. Barney Yellen has a storefront law office in Adams-Morgan, almost directly across the street from my shelter. Barney and I both belong to that group of advocates who continued working with anti-poverty programs long after the “Great Society” ended and they ceased being fashionable. Nowadays I see him more often than I see Christopher. Usually he’s with his significant other, a good-looking blond reporter from the Post named Victoria.

  Barney Yellen is an interesting man with a strong sex drive, a huge drinking problem, a lousy liver and a dirty mouth. Because his head is still stuck in the sixties, he continues fighting old fights and getting into trouble on Saturday nights. The day after Amelia was born, Barney gave Yvonne a copy of Baby and Child Care that Dr. Spock had autographed for Barney in a jail cell they shared in the Tombs in 1967.

  “Aren’t you coming in?” Shay calls out to us as she picks up Amelia and slides into the shallow end of the pool.

  Amelia squeals with delight when the cool water licks her legs. Mischievously, she reaches out to clasp Shay’s breasts as if they are water wings. Both of them are laughing as Shay begins a series of small knee bends to get Amelia accustomed to the water.

  Then they play in the pool like two happy campers.

  After a while, Christopher goes off to telephone Eli, and I move my director’s chair, shaded by the thick wall of bamboo trees that encircles Christopher’s property, into the sun. Living in the inner city as I do, where the homicide rate rises with the humidity, where water pressure is low and blood pressure high, I tend to forget about such amenities as pools and shaded gardens.

  When Christopher returns, he sits down again and reports that Eli will arrive shortly. Then he begins chatting amiably, in his dry monotonous voice, about the mail and telephone messages awaiting Shay inside the house. I only half listen while I watch Shay and Amelia playing in the bright chlorine-tinted water. Within the wasted Washington landscape, only Georgetown remains green and fertile. Here, despite the drought, gardeners somehow keep the trees, grass and shrubs growing and the jewel-clear swimming pools cool and deep.

  Never before have pools felt as counterfeit as they do this summer. Yet here I sit, in a cool corner of a well-kempt Georgetown garden, surrounded by all the embellishments of affluence that make people forget about political commitments and turn ideals into intermittent and conditional things. Now I have let my sister, the political lightweight, the loose cannon in my life, entice me into this garden, where my brand of personally painful, unrecognized and unappreciated hands-on politics is easily dismissed.

  After spending most of June in my non-air-conditioned Home Away from Home storefront shelter for homeless women on Eighteenth Street, I felt my physical discomfort start turning me against my clients. Being hot all the time made me cranky and impatient with the pale, morose, overweight women who arrived dressed for a snowstorm in the Arctic. Suddenly the odors that rose from beneath their layers of clothing began to nauseate me. All the aversions I had finally overcome, with great effort, began to reemerge in the horrendous heat. I was almost glad when we had to close the place down.

  But I have tried to do my part. For almost twenty years I have held down tedious, underpaid social-work positions that always made me feel whatever I accomplished was too little and too late for too few. Of course there were never enough public funds to support and sustain important projects that could have alleviated some of the suffering. One federal administration after another misdirected money into military budgets rather than toward welfare programs. Since Eli and I moved to D.C., I have worked for three different city agencies—housing, welfare and adoption. Two years ago I put together a coalition of local church groups to co-finance with the D.C. government my shelter for homeless women.

  SNAPSHOT

  This is eight-year-old Tyrone, who was my favorite client for three years and the reason why I left the adoption agency. I had finally placed him in a foster home with a woman who actually liked children. This was an exceptional placement, and it thrilled me—until my first home visit a week later. That was when Tyrone’s foster mother announced she couldn’t keep him because he upset her two foster daughters. “What’s the matter?” I asked. So she beckoned me to the living room, where Tyrone was watching TV and milking his penis, which he had pulled out through the open fly of his blue jeans. “He does that all the time,” his foster mother whispered. “He won’t stop. That’s why I can’t keep him. He doesn’t think there’s anything wrong about doing it in front of people. He keeps doing it till he’s done. Nobody ever told him he shouldn’t do that, so he doesn’t believe me when I say it’s nasty. That’s why I can’t keep him. Sorry.”

  Being a social worker often makes me feel like an anachronism. Everything I care about has become passé. In this time and place, compassion for the wretched of the earth has gone out of style in a big way. Greed is in: Excess is our order of the day, outrageous excess in everything but human empathy. Sometimes I feel as if I’m the only one left in America who gives a damn. Beneath my breasts (with their inverted nipples) fierce political feelings flourish.

  I am a secret subversive.

  SNAPSHOT

  That’s me standing between my grandparents, my Bubbie and Zadie, revolutionaries who escaped from Leningrad in 1915. I’m maybe ten years old in this snapshot, so it must have been 1956. Every night Bubbie told us bedtime stories. Her favorite one was about a terrible midnight pogrom when the cossacks attacked the farm where she lived with her parents and thirteen brothers and sisters. According to plan, they all ran out to the barn to hide in the hayloft. Everyone climbed up the rope ladder and through the secret trap door in the ceiling. But their father, who climbed up last, couldn’t fit through. His stomach had become too big to slide through the narrow opening. Bubbie’s mother kept pulling him up by his arms, trying to unjam him, but when the cossacks rode into the barn they cut him in half at his waist, which released his head and upper chest into the arms of his family. It was that story which made me a political person. It wasn’t by choice. I used to cry and beg Bubbie not to tell that story anymore and she’d lay off for a while, but eventually she’d put it back in her repertoire.

  I am a political person. I have a politics, which is something Shay no longer has.

  Having a politics is like a strong aftertaste in my mouth, a constant reminder that flavors everything else.

  Having a politics is like trying to remember the lyrics of some old
tune that keeps running through my head, driving me crazy.

  Having a politics is like wearing bifocals that force me to see causes and their effects wherever I look.

  Having a politics is something that I can neither avoid nor control. It runs unfettered through my system.

  Actually, I don’t have a politics. It has me.

  3

  Around seven o’clock my husband appears on the path that winds around the side of Christopher’s house. Eli is a favorite male type among discriminating women. From the teddy-bear genus, he is of the cozy, cuddle-up-by-a-fire species. As children know, there’s lots to be said for teddy bears. They remain the world’s número uno choice of sleeping partners for good reason. Up until recently, Eli was as cozy and comforting as a stuffed animal in or out of bed.

  He is wearing the khaki cotton suit I like best of all his summer clothes. By the end of the day, it is as wrinkled as his forehead. This suit makes Eli look like a foreign correspondent who’s just landed in a new country with jet lag, a deadline and lots of currency from the last place he visited. Although Eli’s probably annoyed about being summoned to one of Shay’s command performances, he’s wearing a noncombatant expression, which means he’ll eat the inconvenience for the sake of some peace and quiet.

  There is both good news and bad news about Eli Myers.

  The good news is that Eli’s a fabulous person. He is one of the most popular men in Washington. Unlike most other journalists, Eli is a fairly noncompetitive reporter—cooperative, supportive and accommodating. He is widely adored by the men in the national press corps for his high spirits and keen political insight. Women are nuts about him because he’s smart, funny, sweet and sexy.

  Very sexy.

  Although after twenty years I have memorized most of Eli’s sexual moves, he is so smooth and steady in the sack that I remain horny for him all the time.