Just like nothing happened. It was nothing, I said to myself. Yet that night after Lily came back, full of chat about Maggie’s performance and moving to New York for the summer because none of the Allisman cousins would be using the apartment, I still floated. Not flesh anymore, I was made of the poison gas that had infiltrated the room I had tried to lock against them. I’d only opened the door for mashed potatoes and milk shakes and movies to be sent in and closed it quick before the gas could come. But it seeped in anyway. It was your fault, I said to myself. You were the one who left home. Lily buzzed like a honeybee from suitcase to closet to telephone to desk to telephone while I tried to read Thucydides. Just after midnight she sat down on her bed. “Hey, you made the bed for me!” she said. She’d finally noticed.
“Yeah.”
Suddenly she leapt from her bed and came over to mine, sitting down next to me, angling her tiny bell flower of a head around to look me directly in the face. “Molly, you look like you have the flu.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
She put her thin arm around my back and rested her tendril hand on my other shoulder. “Oh, Mol, I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong.”
Her touch was as light as the touch of a sweet pea vine, and as tenacious. My back, stiff as a wire fence, returned to flesh, and I began to cry. When I could speak, I said, “I’m sorry!” But Lily still held on to my shoulder, so I said, “It’s all my fault!”
“What is, Molly, what is all your fault?”
“Everything!”
“Molly, do you think you can say more than that?” Then the story of Ted came up to my lips, but stopped. “It’s my parents,” I said. “They’re fighting and my sister’s there, and it’s awful.” I couldn’t speak the details. Instead, an idea came to me. “Oh, Lily, I can’t go home this summer, and I don’t know where to go!”
“But I’ve got the apartment!” she said gleefully. “You can live with me!”
—
When I dragged myself home during spring vacation to assess the damage, suddenly Polly was filing separation papers, and Gail was threatening to run away. Polly had begged her to stay in school, just to finish the year, because they were moving out. She was really doing it, divorcing Ted. My father was still in the house, though. The divorce was like a secret from him. I learned all I learned in the garage-like storeroom of Peacock’s Superette. It was dank as a cellar, even though it was above ground.
“Daddy and I are getting separated. But first I’ve got to sell the store. Then sell the house. And find a job. And a new place to live.”
“I’ll testify!” I said stoutly. “I’ll take your side in court!”
“You won’t have to do that, Molly. It’s filing papers with a lawyer. It’s paperwork, like taxes.” She was forty-eight years old and leaving Ted after twenty years and selling the store. Polly had not looked for a job since she was twenty-six, working at Bell Aircraft during World War II. Though she had run her own business, she had none of the low-level office skills entry-level jobs required.
“Where’s Gail going to go to school?”
“Wherever I get a place to live.”
“But where are you looking?”
“Near Flo.”
“But don’t you want me to come to court or anything? I can come back from school and go with you! Don’t you want me to look at the apartments?”
“You don’t have to, Molsie. You finish school. I’ll take care of things here.”
“Are you sure?” She had needed me for everything before, but now the rotten store and our house would be sold, and just Gail would live with our mother and it would be everything I had wanted but not in time for me to have it. Gail would have it.
“Then I might not come home for the summer, Ma,” I said.
“We’ll see,” Polly said, her voice rising from low in the belly of the blue grocer’s jacket.
“My roommate has a free apartment in New York for the summer. My faculty advisor said he would help me get a job.”
Polly’s face had a kind of unmoved knowing about it.
“Can’t you just stay home and work?” She spoke from her throat, in a growl-like cry.
“I can live free in my roommate’s cousins’ apartment they keep just for when they’re in New York, except they’re never in New York, so I can live there.” Polly was silent.
“They’re rich,” I continued, “that’s why they never use it. But Lily has the apartment this summer. So I can live there, too.”
“Can’t you work in Buffalo,” Polly blurted out, “like you did last year?”
I was silent so long I felt I was in an outdoor place of silence, like the garden at La Grange. No customers came in. Peacock’s had been losing customers to the supermarket down the boulevard. Her question hung in the air like a barn swallow, swooped, and was gone.
“I’m going to come and visit, later on, Mom,” I said softly, “if I have the money, when you get your new apartment and stuff. Then I’ll try and come up from New York.”
—
Gail’s promise to stay in school lasted as long as it took me to ride the Greyhound bus back to finish my semester. She surfaced at the home of an old teacher of hers, who invited her to stay until the school year was finished. She stayed to take a high school equivalency, but disappeared again. Polly wound up with work on an orthopedic floor of a big city hospital, filling out the doctors’ orders at the desk. She’d gotten herself a job helping to heal broken bones. I didn’t have the money to go back to Buffalo to see her that summer, and I couldn’t have asked her for any. When we talked on the phone she was worn out and full of fear about the debts that had to be paid from the sale of the store. She wondered if she could even afford an apartment, maybe she should just move in with Flo and Ann Louise—they had offered—but she thought if she had an apartment of her own, then Gail would want to come home. “It’s a good thing you’ve got your scholarships,” Polly said.
—
“Hey, both you and your mom are looking for jobs at the same time!” Lily said when she showed me the friendlier-sized Village Voice. I’d ridden with her to New York, thinking I’d have the job that my faculty advisor arranged, though he hadn’t really arranged it, and after I recovered from the stunned fact that I, too, was without a job in a terrifying city, I became even more overwhelmed from reading the Help Wanted ads in the New York Times. But the Voice had an ad for an East Village au pair girl. I was the fifth to call but the only one to show up at the 8:30 A.M. sharp interview with the parents, a bead and incense seller and his wife, an actress. After they hired me to baby-sit their two little boys, I bought a piece of orange and purple psychedelic cotton and made a short, sleeveless dress by hand which I wore like a uniform. Every day I strolled the children past the drug dealers and the opened hydrants pouring water into the streets of the East Village. In the evenings I took the bus to the air-conditioned apartment on the Upper East Side and worried why my period hadn’t come, even though I had made a visit to a gynecologist and had a disc of pills.
I must be pregnant, I thought. But how could I have made a mistake? I had taken every last pill in the baby blue rotary dial—on time, every morning. Maybe the pill hadn’t worked. The boy I thought had made me pregnant had gone into the Peace Corps. Every day I practiced being a mother, and every night I worried I would become one.
For my birthday Lily wanted to take me for a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. She made tuna fish sandwiches on whole wheat bread. We rode the Ferry back and forth twice. The wind blew. I had tied a scarf around my head, à la Glamour magazine. The water was blue, the Statue of Liberty was green, lower Manhattan was grayish, greenish, blue.
“How did you tie that scarf around your head like that?” Lily asked. “You always know how to do these things so well.” She was so kind, and so pleasantly cool against the heat of the city, far away from her committees and campus campaigns. With the solicitude of a student nurse she asked me, in a tone she must also have used at her mother’
s bedside, “Have you written any more poems?” It was what Grandma Ruth had asked me in her letters.
“I’m working on one.” It was a poem about the boy far away and me in New York on my twentieth birthday, the last day of June 1967. I knew I could not take care of a baby. I did not want to leave college. I did not even want to baby-sit in Tompkins Square Park. I wanted only to eat tuna fish on the Staten Island Ferry as a friend helped me know who I was. The wind whipped the scarf around my head, and it whipped her curls across her face. “If my period doesn’t come, I’ll have to have an abortion,” I said loudly into the wind.
“Well, let’s hope it comes,” she said, cupping her hands over my ear, “ ’cause I don’t want to take you to that doctor.” As a belated birthday present I woke in a hand-sized circle of blood.
—
Chicken legs were 69 cents a pound in the D’Agostino’s on Second Avenue and 74th Street. I wore my specially knotted scarf around my homemade minidress. Nestled in my underpants was the string from a Tampax. I pushed my cart among the blondes in beige linen with pearls and sandals throwing filet mignons and salad greens into their carts. A girl, also blonde, but a shaggier, dirtier blonde, came up the aisle toward me. She was barefooted. She wore a black spangled flapper dress and ropes of jet beads and carried a khaki duffel bag. “Hey, Mol,” she burbled, “it’s me, I ran away!”
Gail had borrowed bus money to come to New York. She had gotten a job at the candy counter at the Fillmore East, just a block from where I picked up the two boys I baby-sat. Into the mild murmur of the Upper East Side supermarket, she spoke in a loud gravelly voice, even louder when she said, “And believe me, we don’t just sell M & M’s! It’s the best candy counter in the Village!” She winked one bright eye, just like a macaw.
Ran away? On borrowed bus money? Here? I ushered her out of the D’Agostino’s, where our doorman had told her to find me, not daring to look around me at the checkout counter, the burn of embarrassment increasing as I approached our doorman again, of whom I was very frightened. I was sure I would be tossed out of the apartment I had no real right to live in anyway, bringing up a barefooted girl in an antique dress to the nineteenth floor. We entered the sparsely furnished Allisman place, with its odd blend of gold-rimmed china, but crummy stainless-steel cutlery, and Egyptian cotton, deep-blue towels, but ratty bedspreads.
“Hey, you live here? Cool! But it’s too far uptown. I like it downtown, Mol,” Gail said. I was quiet. I more than anything did not want her to ask to crash in the apartment I barely had a claim to. “Hey, Mol,” she continued, “Gram could’ve worn this dress! Isn’t it cool?” She did look cool. “I can’t stay long,” she said. “I’ve got to be at Max’s Kansas City! All these great people are there, Viva, and everybody. Wanna come? I left Buffalo, girl, Leslie Fiedler helped me. And now I’m at the Fillmore.”
“But Mom said you left two months ago!” Had it taken her two months to hitchhike from Buffalo to New York?
“Girl, it was an ape-fuck, no kidding. I went to California, Molsie. Hey, I’m going to introduce you as my little sister. I’m going to bring you to Max’s and maybe Andy Warhol will be there with Viva and I’ll say, Here’s my little sister!”
I looked down at my feet. A panic began rising in me, a kind of toxic carbonation, almost fizzing through my limbs and up my neck into my head. “I’m really tired, Gail, I might…” I trailed off, “…have to come another night.”
“Yeah? Well, whenever you want, baby sister! Hey, I’m never wearing shoes again! I’m gonna let big huge calluses grow on my feet and I won’t feel anything through them. People weren’t meant to wear shoes! Are you sure you don’t want to come to Max’s? It’s really cool there. We can sit with Viva!”
I looked down at my homemade electric purple and orange dress. It was out of place in the D’Agostino’s, but it would be even more out of place at Max’s Kansas City. It really was a kind of nerdy psychedelic dress. “I’m tired. I just got my period. I thought I was pregnant,” I began to confess.
“Me too!” she crowed. “Only I had to pay to get out of mine. I had to pay high, Molsie.” She stopped. “Hey, you got any tea or coffee or caffeine thing?” She followed me out to the kitchen where I put the teapot on to boil. “I called Mom from San Francisco,” she said, “and I asked her for five hundred dollars, and you know what the bitch said?”
She was calling Polly a bitch. Calling our mother a bitch. “She told me no. She wouldn’t help me.”
How alone Gail must have felt out there. How alone Polly must have felt, going to her new job at 6:30 A.M. and looking for an apartment at night. When she had the apartment, she hoped Gail would come home. Would I tell her where Gail was?
“So what did you do?” I asked. My eyes must have been round as coat buttons. Gail had had to have an abortion. And I had not. She asked our mother for the money. Why not the boy?
“Bill and Dan paid for it.”
“Two of them?”
“Yeah, and Cassie and Belinda took me there and stayed with me. I was fine. The doctor had those bung-out eyes, like a frog. They called him The Gardener. But I’m all right. That cunt, she could have sent me the money. Hey, Molly, I need a few bucks now. You got any money? This is a really nice apartment.”
She called Polly a cunt. Had I ever heard the word I’d only read in D. H. Lawrence spoken out loud? Oh, yes, I heard it in my father’s voice. Ted calling Polly a cunt. You cunt. Bitch. It was Ted speaking through Gail’s lips, like a mass of something, bruise-colored, growing….He was coming out of her mouth, like pus.
“Well, yeah, I…I have the grocery money. Fifteen dollars. Here.”
“Hey, thanks, well, I’ll pay you back when I have it.”
I was going to have to borrow bus money from Lily. It was all I had until they paid me the day after tomorrow. There were enough groceries till then, unless Gail stayed.
“I gotta go to Max’s. Sure you don’t wanna come? Somebody’ll pay for your dinner. I always get someone to pay for mine.”
“No, really, I’m just going to stay home.”
“OK, I’ll call ya, or maybe I’ll come up here and visit ya in the next coupla days. I gotta work at the candy counter the next coupla nights. We got some great shit down there if ya want any. I can cop for ya.”
“Great,” I said. No way on earth was I buying drugs at the Fillmore East. My sister and my father never got caught at anything. But I would. I’d look up and the room would be empty and all I’d see would be the veiny yellow eyes of a policeman.
Then she hopped out to the elevator and was gone. When I told Lily later, I realized I didn’t even get a phone number from her, let alone an address. Of course, I hadn’t wanted them. The little blue vein that had pulsed wildly at her temple was now pulsing wildly in mine. I should be taking care of her….
In the two years since I had broken up with Mike, I had fallen into four sexual dalliances, a bout with mononucleosis, and twenty or thirty head colds. Now in the spring of my junior year, I procrastinated in the corner room Lily had managed to commandeer, hunching up my shoulders to see how my hair would look longer, obliterating for whole ripe moments the job of four papers due.
“You need a break, Molly. You need to get out,” Lily said when she bustled in. The sought-after corner room had its own bathroom. We moseyed toward the mirror over the toilet to put our makeup on. It seemed that Lily wanted to fix me up with a graduate student section advisor whose name was Jonathan Stewart Mull. John Stewart Mull. Immediately the mnemonic song from Phil 101 pinged through my brain,
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
Oh, what a pill
That John Stuart Mill!
I had a birth control pill in my hand. I hadn’t had sex in three entire months. Still, I ate the pill.
“He wants to take you to dinner,” Lily went on, waving her mascara wand.
“Dinner?” In 1968 on that campus, no one was taken out to dinner. You were taken to the boy’s
apartment to sit on the floor, and after you smoked hash and listened to Ravi Shankar, you crawled onto a mattress with a paisley bedspread underneath a Peter Max poster and tried to have sex.
“He’s a graduate student, Molly,” she admonished me. “He’s sophisticated. He’s from Manhattan.”
“What does he look like? Is he smart?”
“Of course he’s smart, he’s a graduate student!”
“So what does he look like?”
“Molly, one thing you’ve got to promise me,” she began, then was joined by another voice. It was Maggie at the door with a duffel bag and her cello. “Promise us!” They laughed. Lily and Maggie had met Jonathan in New York. He was a pal of Maggie’s new boyfriend, our new young music professor. The maestro had abandoned his classes for a world tour, and this young pianist, unmarried and with two small, neat eyebrows, was his emergency replacement.
“I’m not making any promises till I know what he looks like.”
“Promise us you won’t drop this guy, Molly, he’s too nice, he’s too sweet, he really needs a girlfriend,” Maggie said.
They loved him. He had driven Maggie and her cello up from New York. Then he had run errands for Lily and the campus paper. In the Snack Bar he put their food on his tray and carried it all to the exclusive graduate student side and sat down and invited them to sit down, too.
“You’re not telling me the thing I need to know.”
“He’s cute, Molly, really, he’s nice-looking,” Lily said.
“But.”
“But what?” they wailed.
“I don’t know, but you’re not telling me something.”
“All right, he’s a little heavy,” Maggie said.
“He’s a little overweight,” Lily concurred, “but he’s adorable. Really. See? Here he is in the newspaper.” She unfolded the local paper and pointed to an ad for new hot water heaters. There was a bearish looking man with black curls above and a mustache below dark almond-shaped eyes. The dressing gown he wore gave him an Edwardian air. The smile was Russian prince. “He’s like Sebastian Cabot!” Maggie chimed, referring to the portly, sophisticated TV actor, who was also a chess-playing intellectual, connoisseur, and gourmand.
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 9