Raw Silk (9781480463318)

by Burroway, Janet

  I agreed, confused, and he added, “Isn’t it amazing, absolutely, the way you, uh, keep going back to your childhood. Things, you know, that hardly struck you as mattering one iota at the time. Now my mother used to weave rugs, and it—weaving, you see—just seemed to me one of the boring things my mother did.”

  The gentlemen chuckled appreciatively, as if this grim discovery of the source of self were a matter for moderate congratulation.

  The meeting dispersed toward the bar while Malcolm and I wrapped up our sketches, and when we were left alone he said, “You’re suddenly depressed.”

  “You’re suddenly psychic,” I replied.

  “I’m always psychic.” And it’s true that for a placid soul Malcolm is uncannily sensitive to mood.

  “I don’t know. I guess I’m getting too old to play the ingénue.”

  “Nonsense, daughter. I’ll buy you a drink.” He swung our portfolios off the table and stacked them against the wall. “It’s wonderful being women,” he said. “We get equal pay and the doors held open for us.” He held the door for me. “Look, I’ll tell you something that’s got to cheer you up. We’ve been getting cut off from the switchboard every other call for the last six weeks, and the telephone people have been around four times. This morning the engineer came in and took the whole thing apart and laid it out on my desk. And you know what he said to me? He said, ‘Sir, there is nuffink phys-i-cally wrong with this telephone.’” He danced ahead of me to make sure that I was laughing. What difference does it make to Malcolm if I’m laughing?

  “You’re a honey,” I said, feeling tears somewhere, but farther back than my eyes, and Malcolm camped into the lift. “Well, I do know what the ladies like.”

  What I’d like at the moment, he thought, was a Campari, and he went to the bar to get it while I joined Oliver and Tyler at the window. I was surprised, passing a cluster of board members around Nicholson, to see the big dumpy girl from the tie silk shed. No cat in her now—she was backed into the wall staring down into a glass of the plasma they sell for tomato juice.

  “Who’s that girl?” I asked Oliver.

  “Who? Oh, that’s Frances Kean. New file clerk in Records.”

  “Oh?” That was funny. The class system is carefully maintained at East Anglian, and it’s rare for a secretary to show up in the executive bar, except by way of flirtatious invitation. This one didn’t look a likely prospect for that.

  Oliver caught my look because he said, impatiently, “She’s some relative of Nicholson’s or something.”

  “Oh.”

  “She’s a hysterical cow.”

  The bar in Admin is of the comfortable maroon-plush kind, halfheartedly modernized with fake wood and swivel stools. They’ve also taken out the leaded glass and installed two picture windows with a panorama of the car parks. In one of these there was a caravan, not unlike the trailer where I grew up, which serves as a canteen for the construction workers. The area around it was unusually full for a cold day, and something about the way the men lounged over the MGs and a Rolls or two suggested militancy even at this distance. I could pick out the carpenter Jake Tremain gesticulating to a group that faced him.

  “What’s up down there?” Malcolm asked, joining us, and Oliver grimaced. “Strikes brewing, looks like.”

  “I thought they just had a strike.”

  “This one’s not for money.” Tyler Peer knew about it. “One of the fitters went up to Edinburgh for his mother’s funeral. He’d already used up his vacation, so they docked him four days for it.”

  “They’re daft,” said Malcolm. “Why do they ask for trouble? Everybody’s only got one mother.”

  “That may be,” Tyler said jollily, combing at his walrus brush with his pipe stem, “but you’d be surprised how many favorite aunts die off among the working classes.” When we didn’t particularly laugh he added in defensive reflex, “It’s the principle.”

  Tremain punched a fist in a palm and I could see his forearm muscles flex, though it was really too far to see. The groups reformed, and he took in a wider audience with a flung, flat-handed gesture. My dad, who’s a Taft Republican, has a gesture like that when he’s angry, and his spatulate fingers are stronger than most wood.

  I said, “I know some down there I wouldn’t put in charge of compassion.”

  Malcolm stared. “You surprise me, mother. Are you politically on the right?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m politically in the wrong.”

  And then a thing happened, so disconnected to the plush, the trailer in the lot, the ice in my Campari, that I have to say it came from nowhere. I don’t know where else to say. Oliver looked up and his face performed an instant of its mobile magic, eyebrows crawling over the bone shelf toward the sockets of his eyes, his mouth bared back over fully twenty of his teeth—I thought he must have been struck with a pain. He said, “Shut up!”

  The least moment of social disaster, like a tape recorder, makes minute sounds audible. Conversations around us faltered in their rhythm. Malcolm’s pocket change rang once. Tyler’s expensive pigskin shoes roared a few inches across the carpet. I swallowed plumbingly.

  “It’s stupid to put yourself down like that. You always do it!”

  I do, of course. Of course I do. I’m sorry, everybody, I don’t mean to apologize, but you see, my mother thought it gracious. It’s very stupid of me to make myself out as stupid, but you see … you see, I am employed in a marriage of which the first axiom is that emotion is private. I didn’t choose it, I might have been half of a pair that snapped or snuggled in company. But that is the given ground rule, the absolute. You see, when a man who won’t kiss his wife in the doorway of a boardroom, or acknowledge the source of a broken collarbone, when such a man silences his wife in public, it has the ring of authenticity.

  “Well, no, now, certainly no reason to put you down, Ginny, eh?” Tyler tried, but it didn’t work. I began to sweat in the awkward silence. A hot flash. I remember thinking, menopause.

  So then I set my hair on fire. I fumbled for a cigarette—I don’t ordinarily smoke but I carry a pack around in case I need a straw to clutch at—I pulled it out and was digging for matches when Malcolm whipped out a lighter and stuck it forward; I bent to it, the flame leaped up about two inches at the same time as a heavy lock fell forward and went up in a single clean crackling stink of yellow flame, taking a couple of eyelashes with it for good measure.

  “My dear, good God,” gasped Tyler and Malcolm, but by the time I clamped my hand to it it was out. I said how silly of me it was nothing, and did they know that singeing was actually beneficial to the hair?—and we stood grinning at each other in that penetrating eau de crematorium.

  “We put Jill in St. Margaret’s today,” I said loudly, which Malcolm and Tyler took for a change of subject. I stared at Oliver, daring him to know it was not a change of subject. But now his famous features gave back nothing.

  Tyler predictably extolled St. Margaret’s record in the 11-plus, Malcolm predictably assured us of the best of all possible worlds, and I predictably looked for some way to get out of there. As soon as I could I excused myself, flapped a good-bye to Nicholson—the big girl was gone—skirted the meeting in the car park and took my empty car to my empty house. Mrs. Coombe had left me a late lunch and a note with the suggestion that I heat the soup. This seemed fairly sensible, so I heated it, and then left it on the kitchen table.

  I changed into slacks and sheepskin and walked for an hour, trying to warm myself in the cold garden. Phaideaux, grateful for the long outing, unearthed his whole cache of balls for me. He would race across the lawn with the grace of the Queen’s own thoroughbred, and then drop one of the slimy things on my shoe and stand thumping his hindquarters idiotically. A regal oaf. I don’t love him much, but it’s not his fault. He was bred to look that way. Someone spent doggy generations coaxing out an imitation of a fetlock and giving his head a haughty tilt. The oaf survives inside.

  We went to the orchard and spo
ke a few words to Mr. Wrain, whose garden this really is, and who tolerates my inferior woman’s sort of love for flowers.

  “We’ve got the birds again,” said gentle Mr. Wrain maliciously, with a vague gesture to the meadow from which they come to steal our buds. I think he suspects that I balk his instructions and put my scraps outside, but I do not. I have far too much instinctive respect for authority for that.

  “You can’t have both plants and birds,” he warned me for the hundredth time.

  “Mrs. Coombe tells me you can’t love both birds and cats,” I said lightly, but Mr. Wrain only shook his head, to mean, that’s as may be. I wanted to suggest that, presumably, you can love both plants and cats if you dislike birds enough, but that’s not to say to Mr. Wrain, it’s to say to Oliver. Oliver’s “Shut up!” hung in my ears. Mr. Wrain replaced his cap and returned to his shovel, and Phaideaux and I went on.

  In England, in January, the dead things think it’s spring. The daffodils are impudent, an inch and a half high in the hard ground. I went to spy on the raspberries and the little gray bushes like whiskers—I haven’t learned their names—and the apple trees, that all have the buds of their leaves. And I stared at the peony sprouts exposing themselves along the southern wall. They’ll have spoiled for me the delicate blossoms in the water colors of Kanõ Sanraku, but that is not their problem. They shove the rocks and the rot of their old leaves aside; their angry red phalluses rupture the ground.

  How did I come to be the mistress of an English garden, with symmetrical stone paths and the rosebushes planted in a chessboard pattern of pink and red? And a half-timbered manor house with pipes outside and old nests protruding from the eaves like leftover thatch? I dreamed greedily of such houses as a child, but the greed was for the dream. They existed in a haze of Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm; I never even idly wanted to own one, in detail. At the back door is a metal arch planted in a concrete slab, with a bar across on which to clean my Wellingtons. The bar fits into the heel and scrapes mud forward off the sole, and the sides of the arch swipe clean one side and the other. How many miles have I come from sand and crabgrass to make myself familiar with, deft at, such an operation? We have modernized the house, but its alterations of me are structural.

  I have thought that we ought to regard all this with a little ecological awe, because surely we are the last generation that will be able to buy, young, into real land. If my grandchildren can’t see other windows from their windows it will mean that they’ve inherited, or that they’ve spent fifty years at getting rich. Jill’s grandchildren will tell their grandchildren that we walked on grass. I have thought that such an awe might represent a claim on an English garden, for someone who never knew a garden as a child. The fact is that I had one claim, and I have sent her away. The compost heap stinks of the absence of Jill.

  I came in, laid the fire and had tea with Phaideaux. At five o’clock I called Miss Meridene. She said that little girls often scream the first, even the second and third times their mothers leave them. Jill promised to settle in beautifully, she said. And indeed, she said, she was at that moment having her second helping of rice pudding in the dining hall.

  Raveling

  5

  JILL IS AWAY. FRANCES is committed. East Anglian has merged with the Utagawa Company and Tyler Peer is headed for Osaka. Oliver was passed over for the job. My dad is dead in Seal Beach and it’s as remote to me as somebody else’s earthquake.

  But why I am sitting in bed half deaf with minor lacerations, major bruises and a ringing lump on my left temple perplexes me. The official explanation is that I had a car accident, and since I could see them from my window, the mini exposing its broken underbelly from the ditch, all fours helpless in the air while bobbies directed traffic around the tow truck, this explanation has a certain force of credibility. I try to resist it. My sheet is littered with rejected hydrangea designs, and Mrs. Coombe has just brought me a cup of Earl Grey in a Limoges cup, so I don’t suppose I look like the victim of a street brawl, but the image keeps belching up into my mind.

  Question: Were you much affected by your father’s death?

  Answer: I came out in a blue bruise and went deaf on the left side.

  But I didn’t yet know my dad was dead when the bruise came out. And my attitude has none of the saving selflessness of grief. Everybody knows that a blow on the ear affects your balance, though Dr. Rockforth offered this news to me as if it were fresh from the computer. In fact I wouldn’t need to be in bed at all except that when I stand I tend to lurch in the direction of my lump, and as Dr. Rockforth says, what we must avoid at all costs is a further blow. He raised his forefinger, saying this. From a position of disequilibrium I was inclined to take it as a lodestar, the only fixed point in a shifting firmament. At all costs, avoid a further blow.

  My hydrangeas look lopsided to me, though whether I have drawn them lopsided and am seeing them accurately, or have drawn them accurately and am seeing them lopsided, I can’t decide. Perspective is something I mastered early, and to feel it slipping makes me want to thrash and scatter the pages on the floor. I don’t.

  The day I learned to draw a cube I had exiled myself to the railway trestle beside the channel because the folks were quarreling. There’s no room to avoid a quarrel in a trailer. I’d tried to play Monopoly with Jerry-Mick outside, but the channel breeze was fitful, and keeping the money under rocks got to be a bore. Anyway, Jerry-Mick cheated. I heard Mom say, “What does it matter?” And Daddy, “I won’t do a botch, that’s what it matters. I won’t do a Jap job. They can get somebody else.” I guess they did.

  I blew on the dice and daydreamed a princess whose dress was blue cobwebs, who got doubles and bought Park Place and got snake eyes and bought Boardwalk and passed Go and landed on Chance, which said Advance to Go.

  Jerry-Mick said, “I haven’t got all day.”

  Mom said, “She’s seven years old and she’s never slept in a bed that’s a real bed!”

  I scooped the game together and sent Jerry-Mick home, and I went down to the trestle, where I puffed at twigs held between my index and middle fingers like Jerry-Mick’s godforsaken mother. Dollar crabs scuttled from rock to rock. The fact is that I liked my hide-a-bed well enough, but I was infected by my mother’s martyrdom, and inclined for the moment to link myself to the war-homeless waifs of London. I sighted down the channel to the horizon and imagined myself sitting crosslegged on the ocean looking east to the next horizon, and so on to the next, and the next, which was like trying to imagine eternity except that sooner or later you’d sight land, and with the next hop you’d hit flat up against the coast of the Enemy.

  Daddy came plump and owl-eyed in his steel rims to sit with me. He always carried a yellow tablet and a sanding block in his pocket, and when he felt at odds with himself he honed an Eagle Alpha No. 2 to a brittle point.

  “How do you make a box?” I demanded.

  He showed me how to draw a rectangle, superimpose another on it slightly lower, and connect the corners. I could do it the first time, and my self-esteem increased. But Dad himself didn’t need the rectangles; he could sketch a house front and then extend its walls deep into the distance of the flat paper. What he was drawing now was our trailer, with some sort of slant-roofed extension over it.

  “I tell you what I seen a fellow do in Capistrano the other week. He built himself a sort of a redwood carport over his trailer. So.”

  He added a bougainvillea vine, ornamental concrete blocks, and one of those plaster plaques of a horse head that they sold down along the highway. “You could get a fair-sized living room on one side, and a little bedroom on the other, eh?”

  I nodded, coveting a real bed.

  “But if you wanted to move on, all’s you’d have to do is hitch up and drive out from under it.”

  This was a familiar argument; I was able to contribute. “If we wanted, we could park at Curry Cones and have mile-high cones for breakfast.”

  “Sure. We coul
d set off anywhere it took our fancy.”

  But we never did. He wrote me just before he died that the bougainvillea had knitted the aerial to the port roof, and that the hydrangeas were up to the window-sill. The “mobile home” stayed where it was, and it was the ocean they moved—dredged out the channel and dug a bay on the other side for a marina. “That’s California for you,” I tell the English.

  I have long understood that my father’s illusion of mobility, in which I implicitly believed, is what gave me the impetus to travel. But I don’t think I realized that while I traveled the trailer was holding America down for me, anchoring it to its rightful place on the globe. It’s arranged that Mr. Beckelstein, who owns the trailer court, will handle the funeral and inherit the trailer in exchange. Dad’s ashes go into the channel, and when they do, America will drift off somewhere as vague as Katmandu.

  When I first came to live in England I understood very well that the news doesn’t give the character of a place. I read about American strikes and riots and thought, well, but life in Seal Beach is all surfboards and roller rinks. And then I guess in the early sixties it began to change. I knew I’d never be English, I knew the Sunday supplements were no more accurate to the texture of life than before, but I began to lose the sense of what it was like at home. Home wasn’t there anymore. Kennedy went and Watts erupted, the National Guard moved into Berkeley. I began to realize that I’d grown up in California in the great calm between the Depression and the Awful Affluence while England was under blitz, that I was sitting in an English rose garden while California burned. I’d settled myself, by accident, out of the range of real violence … and that’s, maybe, why I’m half deaf from a blow on the side of the head?

  When they opened my dad up for a kidney stone they found out he had no liver. My dad was a Baptist; he never had a drink.