“Well, everything always gets done…” Pauline began.
“No it doesn’t!” the porcelain girl screamed. “I can’t do it all!” I can’t take care of my sister and my father and go to school and apply to college and he the yearbook editor and have a boyfriend.
“Look, Molly-ooch, you’re gonna go to college, by hook or by crook.” Polly watched my face. “Let’s not have a nervous breakdown here. I’m going to take your sister to school and then I’m going to come back for you because I’ve got to get to the store or I’m going to lose business. The Pepsi truck gets there right when I open.”
Polly was a mass of flesh and hair and polyester pants being pulled on and a turquoise blouse. Where were her eyes? Her dressing was a drawing of a shade. With the final donning of the blue smock that said “Peacock’s Superette,” she drew that shade completely. What was she thinking in there? Her eyes were searching my shiny, tearful blankness, yet her own matte blankness held no reflection at all. The side door slammed. It was Gail, getting into the car. The side door opened. Gailie yelped and came back for her books. Then they both hustled out together. The side door banged more gently, Polly pulling it shut. Then the farts of the pink Plymouth starting.
Get dressed, I said to myself. Put in the rest of your rollers. Get out your makeup base. What have you got first period? I was going to be late. Polly would have to write me a late note. Inside, I felt a tightening so strong, so sphincter-like, that I held my breath until suddenly there was a loosening so reckless I thought I would break into a thousand pieces from the force of it, or drown. I reeled to my bed with a roller in my hand. Sat down on the bed, held my sides, and rocked back and forth. I could not stop rocking myself and could not stop the tears that broke my face into something human.
“Help me!” I called out loud in the empty house. “Help me, please help me, please.” A part of me was horrified to be calling out. It was like speaking up in class when the teacher hadn’t said your name. I’m going crazy, I thought. I’m going to need shock treatments like on Dr. Kildare. To another part of me the cry sounded lovely, a litany of beseeching. It was a kind of praying I could only do in emptiness.
“You know that you can come to me if something gets very very bad, don’t you?” my mother had said. But wasn’t this very very bad right now? It must not be, or Polly wouldn’t have said if. It must not be very, very bad yet. Do your hair. Get dressed. Go to school. Decide on the colleges, I said to myself. Get the applications. Write the essays. Meet the yearbook deadline. Go to the dentist for your root canal. Make dinner for Dad. Slice up the vegetables. Cook the hamburger patties. Iron him a shirt. Tell Gail to do her homework. Write down all the details for the senior honors historical research paper. Make an appointment with Mike to drive to the University of Buffalo Rare Book Room. I’d chosen option A, high honors.
“Please help me,” I whispered aloud, then called, “Help me,” then screamed, “HELP ME,” words that ricocheted. Why not scream? No one could hear me. I rocked back and forth. There IS something wrong with me, I thought. I’m not stable. They’re all adults, my mother, my teachers, the college counselor, they must think that I can do this. There must be a way to do this, if this is what they’re asking of me.
I heard Polly’s car roll up the driveway, but couldn’t seem to move from the bed. I was still wearing her bathrobe and holding the roller in my fist. “Come on, Mol! Hop in the car!” she called from the kitchen.
I didn’t answer, but with a force of will that surprised me stopped rocking.
“For crying out loud, Molly,” Polly said as she barreled into my room. “My God, you’re not even dressed.” She stopped, horrified. “Why aren’t you ready?” she said to my swollen face, a little tomato on a slender blue stem. “What’s a matter, Molsie?”
“I can’t go to school! I can’t do everything!” I blurted out. “I’ve been crying and crying and I couldn’t stop!”
“Listen,” Pauline said, turning on her heel out of my room toward the bathroom and the medicine cabinet, “listen, the doctor gave your father something for times like this. Here!” she shouted from the bathroom. “I’ve got it!” Pauline returned to me, huddled in her blue bathrobe on the side of the unmade bed. “You look nice in that robe. Here, they’re tranquilizers.”
“Ma, are you kidding?”
“No, I’m sure they’re all right. The doctor told your father that they were just for times like this.”
“But they’re for Daddy!” When he was maundering drunk, sometimes he, too, was unable to stop crying. Was I like him then? I am not. Was I that bad? Was this very, very bad?
“OK, take half of one. Half. Here. Open up the capsule. See? Empty half of it out on a piece of paper, then take the other half.” Pauline handed me the capsule.
I held it in my free hand. My other hand still clutched the roller. “I’m going to wait awhile,” I said, as if sleep logged. “See how I feel. I’m not sure yet.”
“All right, Mols. I’ll write you a note for a whole day off school. Take the tranquilizer if it gets really bad. The Pepsi guy is waiting for me, I’ve got to go.”
“OK, Ma, I’ll call you later.”
After she left, I put the hair roller into the pocket of the robe and went to the living room to watch the morning shows. During the first one I tossed the pill back and forth gently between my hands. Then all at once I put it in my father’s ashtray. I’m not like him, and I’m not taking his pills.
—
The programs rolled on till noon. Then I turned them off and went into the kitchen, still full of breakfast dishes. A small pan and bread and butter and Velveeta cheese. A slice of baked ham and a slice of tomato. I grilled a sandwich, poured myself a ginger ale, and ate looking at the comics in the morning paper. Then I trailed to the bathroom.
Think. Think. You’ve got to write the application essays. You’ve got to make the deadlines. You’ve got to. Polly was blank about the choices. “Don’t they help you with that in high school?” she had asked. “What does that college counsellor do, anyway?” But should I go? Should I leave you? What about Gail? What will Gail do alone? She’s going to he all alone with him!
You have to go, a reedy voice said inside me. To get out of this house. Out of Buffalo. And I was going, I had my hand on the bathroom door to prance out with my head held up, then remembered I hadn’t showered. I coaxed myself into the shower.
Hair lank and wet, the rollers forgotten till the next day, I lay on my unmade bed. The chenille bedspread, wool blankets, and faded pink sheets were messy, furry, and soft; I masturbated, dressed, and began to read a novel, not for school. I was all alone. No one could ask anything of me. I was sick today, mentally ill just for today. The panic had lifted so thoroughly I thought it would never be back. I’d had my call answered, my prayer. I’d caught my breath. Of course I was going to college, I would find some way to choose one and apply. Polly was right. Everything was going to get done.
“Hi, Ma,” I said after the eighteenth or nineteenth ring. (Polly didn’t answer when she was cashing out a customer.)
“Didja take it?” my mother asked.
“Take what?”
“The tranquilizer.”
“Nah.”
“So you must be better.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s steak in the meat compartment of the fridge for dinner,” she said.
“Yeah, I know, I found it.”
“Molsie, everything’s going to get done.”
“Yeah, I guess it will.”
“I’ve got a customer.”
“Well, ’bye.”
“See you later!” She hung up the phone. In the blankness of hanging up the heavy receiver I pictured her wiping her hands on her smock before she started ringing up the groceries.
—
A skinny gray house with white gingerbread, Victorian remnant surrounded by parking lots: bookshelves built in every room. The Saturday after my breakdown Mike and I drove all the way to R
ochester to forage in used bookstores. This place was my favorite because of the slenderness of the house and, inside, the willowy cases with their thin, thin books. I had four authors in my hand: Issa, Buson, Basho, and Shiki, the haiku masters. Each book, with its motif of bamboo or chrysanthemums, had a three-line poem perched on its pages, like a series of frogs on small flat rectangular white stones. Holy pages. I bought them all with the money I had, and afterward we went and had French fries and held hands in Rochester where we knew no one and could pretend it was Paris.
When I stood in the linen line in the basement of my dormitory on a Sunday night, I discovered the most important fact about college: sheets. My suitemates, Maggie and Lily, two sophomores who had adopted me, grumbled about having to stand on line for them, but I loved it the way I loved standing on line in the dining hall. To be served food I never had to cook myself by pleasant dumpy ladies with ladles, then, each Sunday night, to be the recipient of angelic wrappings, clean linens that I had not washed, or struggled to fold, or left in the dryer to become a wrinkled, itchy mess felt like heaven. The Sheet Angel was a benign, doughy lady in a flowered housedress who looked as though she went right home and made peanut butter cookies for her grandchildren.
I had stepped into a pop-up book full of scenes where parent-figures made decisions behind closed doors to keep the children from their adult worries, of children’s secrets that grown-ups miraculously knew about and pretended to ignore, affably watching from behind the newspapers they read on their davenports, or just out of eyesight on the wraparound porch, drinking their iced tea. Even the plain, lowest-bid construction of the State University of New York seemed to have the charm of a book, down to the cul-de-sac suite at the end of the hall I’d lucked into: three tiny rooms off a tiny common area that my suitemate Lily had commandeered. All that fit in these cells were our single beds and desks. Maggie Mack barely had room for her cello, and Lily Allisman barely had room for her famous behind. We each had a medieval slit of a window, and the little common area had no window at all. Like living in an appendix to the great intestine of the state university dormitory system, it was happily, uselessly cut off. There we each lived our secret lives, Maggie doing little but practicing the cello, Lily doing everything—on the phone day and night with anti-war efforts and assignments for the campus paper not to mention the assignments for her double major, Education and Sociology—and me eating and laughing and having time to dress myself, doing my work lazily and steadily. I had come to college to retire.
Maggie Mack was tall and big boned. Her large blonde head rested on square shoulders. Her wide hands easily gripped the neck of her instrument, and her square, flat-bellied body wrapped neatly around the torso of the cello. Two tiny blue eyes sometimes blazed from her ruddy face, though often they were hooded with concentration. Lily Allisman was delicate as a sprite, with brown curls and brown eyes in her pip of a face. A shock of white hair sprouted at her forehead, just like my mother’s. Lily’s slender arms, slender shoulders, small breasts and slight upper torso perched on a large pouf of a derriere. Crudely nicknamed “All-ass-man,” she looked like a wood nymph with a permanently attached toadstool to sit on. Only a few sophomores had been dumped with extra freshmen; Maggie and Lily seemed to take it as a badge of honor. Now they, from sophisticated downstate, had an upstate pet to train, though I was nearly untrainable. I even got up routinely for breakfast, and went to all my classes. Sized in between them, with my wispy brown hair and long legs, they sandwiched me into their lives.
When Maggie’s practicing and Lily’s volunteers cluttered our common area, I packed up for the library. In the library was a poetry room. No one was ever there. All the books were thin and all the poems perched like black islands on white pond pages. The saggy old couch let you sit on it for hours before the door squeaked open and someone else came in. I always slipped out then. For the poetry requirement, I’d signed up for a course with a real poet, and now I was required to write a poem myself. I figured out it would be six stanzas: two for Polly and Ted and Gail and me in Buffalo, two for us all in Tonawanda in the new house while Polly was at the store, and two for me now. I carried the poem with me. I got the first two stanzas fine, and felt a kind of horror and relief when I got down the next two. There were four lines to each stanza, one for each member of our family.
But now I was at the end, and I couldn’t get it. Maggie and Lily were in it, and Mike who called every Saturday night from Dartmouth, and the Sheet Angels, and the mashed potatoes in the dining hall, and the very couch I was sitting on, writing the last two stanzas. It was all too much!
The poetry room was like a chapel. The couch was like the altar. I’d looked in the mirror that morning and seen my face smiling. For a moment it seemed like a mask, yet I knew I was real; the smile was for nothing in particular except that I was not at home. But Gail was home. I had abandoned her for college as surely as Polly had abandoned us for the store. How selfish could I be? The stain of selfishness spread through me to my fingers, which lazily moved the pen. I could not get the happy ending of the poem. Who was I? I was nothing but wrong to leave them all. I didn’t deserve to be in this poetry room. Perhaps I didn’t deserve to live. Maybe I should just die. I saw the bare tree on the windy hill in my mind. I would hang there. Get realistic, you jerk, I said to myself. It will have to be pills. I could always go to the Snack Bar and cop enough pills to do me in. Tiny pills, like wild strawberries in my palm. There! I would put the strawberries in the end. I’d have Lily and Maggie and me eating strawberries in the cafeteria, just the way I’d started the poem in the kitchen in Buffalo. I was making art, the well-wrought urn I’d heard so much about in class.
—
In the late fall I took the bus to Rochester, changed for the bus to Albany, changed for the bus to Rutland, Vermont, and changed for the bus to Hanover, New Hampshire, thirteen hours. There was only one place in the vicinity of Dartmouth College to lose your virginity, a run-down clapboard inn with space heaters and crinkly plastic shower curtains and brown toilet paper. Mike and I had to hitchhike there. He was small and dark and thin and Jewish, like a dense little cat’s-eye marble in a basket of tennis balls that were the Dartmouth boys—thick-necked, blond, and beery. He hated it. The senior confidence we’d both wallowed in had disappeared. We were frightened freshmen now. But he’d gotten the condoms and I’d gotten my bus ticket. I knew that I was supposed to be transferring my orgasm from my clitoris to my vagina, like Freud said, but I also knew it wasn’t happening, so I was probably defective. I was going to have to make the best of it.
Exhausted from the four buses, I got my first migraine, and lay on the worn bedspread with a cold washcloth on my forehead while Mike periodically came over and held my hand.
“Let’s take a shower,” he coaxed. “Here we are, away from everybody.”
“OK, but listen, are we going into town afterwards?”
“Well yeah, we have to. There’s no food here, and I saved up to take you out to dinner.”
“Oh, Mike!” I screeched irrelevantly, the washcloth falling over my eye as I rose, reeling from the migraine. “What am I going to do about my hair!”
“Your hair’s fine.”
“But it won’t be if we take a shower! I’d have to curl it and wait for it to dry!”
“Nah, you’ll look fine.”
“No I won’t!” I stormed from the tiny, breathless hurricane inside my head. “I’ll look terrible!”
He turned on the shower. “It’s nice and warm,” he called, coming into the room and standing next to me. I reached up and he reached down and we held each other on the bed as the sound of the water lulled us. We kissed and moved against one another with our clothes on, and he unbuttoned my blouse and I unbuttoned his shirt and we moved off the bed and stood. Knowing he’d never get the back undone, I unhooked my bra. We stood in our pants and looked, even though we had seen each other before, and I wished my nipples were pointed and hard. And then we tried to take each other�
�s jeans off, and began to laugh when we wiggled out of them, but this was serious. We walked naked toward the shower. Remember every minute! I admonished myself. Oh God, my hair! I broke for my suitcase, grabbed my pink shower cap, and squashed it on my head. “OK I’m ready!” I said, and we slid into the now lukewarm shower.
“I guess we let it run too long,” Mike said.
But we washed each other until the water was cold as an outdoor pool and the sky outside deepened toward sunset. Finally we turned off the nozzles and got the skimpy towels and half dried ourselves before we rushed to the bed and threw ourselves under the covers where Mike fumbled with the condom. The rubber and tinfoil together smelled like bug repellent. My nipples had hardened and so had his penis, though I had barely touched it. It rose of another volition. I’d tossed the shower cap on the floor—at least I had my own hair on. Our pubic hair, straight when dry, had curled with moisture. We were ready to have Mike lie on top of me, and so he knelt on the bed—we’d thrown off the covers by then—and solemnly he peeled on the condom. “How did you learn to do that!” I exclaimed.
“They tell you on the package.”
“Oh.” He was ready, and he lay down on me and was strangely heavy, even though I’d opened my legs. After a while he found the entrance and moved his penis inside me. I thought, We’re doing it! and tried to move my hips and groan and whisper a little, in a fake way, knowing I should. Then we synchronized just as we did when we walked down the street, left legs out, then right legs out, in unison. Only now the unison was a core of us, like a pear. I lost myself for a moment in a picture of a green pear, and then Mike stopped moving.
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