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U niversi^ M icionlms International 300 N. Zeeb Road AnnAftJor, Ml 48106

1322862

JASON, JUDY COLLECTIBLES STORIES AND POEMS

THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY M.F.A. 1984

University Microfilms I n te r n st i o n â I 3»n . zeeb Rw . a m A**, mi 4s lœ

Copyright i9B4 by

JASON, JUDY All Rights Reserved

COLLECTIBLES

STORIES AND POEMS

by

Judy Jason

submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of The American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

The Requirements for the Degree

of

Master of Fine Arts

in

Creative Writing

Signatures of Committee

Chairperson:

yf ------

Dean of the Coll

DatâJ

1984 The American University Washington, D.C, 20016

TIE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRAEY ©COPYRIGHT

BY

JUDY JASON

1984

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DEDICATION

For my brother, Jim

M.A., Literature

American University

In Memoriam COLLECTIBLES

STORIES AND POEMS

by

Judy Jason

ABSTRACT

These stories evoke the conflicts of people who have been handed down assumptions through the generations about the definition of "womanhood" and "manhood." The characters doubt past values, and take "first steps" toward breaking out of one or another stereotype. In

"Collectibles," three generations of women compare pop idols and question the practice of putting men on pedestals. Anne Connelly in "Sitting Duck Lane" realizes that her options in life are limited. She escapes into the aisles of suburban shopping malls. In "TGIF," June

Gray is nervous about Fridays— the day that symbolizes her entrapment. In "Maid Marion on Mayday," a Vietnam veteran dominated by an authoritarian father finds a confidante in his sister, who is perenially pregnant.

The poetry section of the thesis consists of a unified sequence of poems excerpted from "Seatangle," a chapbook in progress. Childbirth, Catholicism, and wife abuse are strong themes.

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the inspiration that the following people have contributed to this manuscript.

Their influence at this particular time in my life has finally allowed me to realize my long-delayed dream of becoming a writer.

The members of my thesis committee, who, finally, let me be myself: Kermit Moyer, Kay Mussell, and Myra

Sklarew; my husband, Gary, who led me to my first fiction teacher, who in turn, acknowledged promise in my prose;

Peter Porosky, who laid the foundation for my fictional style; Carol Peck, whose constant positive reinforcement allowed me, at long last, the freedom to believe in myself and my poetry.

Ill TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT...... il

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... ill

STORIES

COLLECTIBLES...... 2

SITTING DUCK LANE...... 24

TGIF...... 57

MAID MARION ON MAYDAY...... 84

POEMS

THE BALLAD OF TWO VIRGINS...... 105

YOUNG WOMAN IN BIKINI BY THE SEA...... 107

WOMAN AS VULGAR MADONNA...... 109

PURPLING...... Ill

MEDITATIONS...... 112

CITY GIRLS, VINTAGE 1958...... 1 1 4

NINE YEARS...... 116

DELIVERY ROOM...... 117

WOMAN AS TEST TUBE/MOTHER AT NINETEEN...... 118

KITTY HAWK, ACRYLIC...... 120

NO VIRGIN...... 121

COLLAGE...... 123

EXCOMMUNICATED...... 125

UNPURPLING...... 127

iv STORIES COLLECTIBLES

I slam on the brake,

"Flea Market," Penelope, my eleven-year-old daughter, reads on our way across the gravel road to the whatsit building, "I suppose they sell fleas,"

"Wagon wheels," I say.

Penelope sniffs. "Oh, that," she says, "When are you ever going to buv one?"

"Probably never," I say. "I haven’t found the

right one yet."

The building is barn red. People swerve like ducks on a pond in and out of the aisles between tables crowded with collectibles, treasures, junk, or antiques, depending on which side of the fence you are on. Ladies

in outsize print dresses finger ceramic dogs, old tonka

trucks and bowls of green and pink carnival glass, vintage

1949.

"ElvisI" Penelope shrieks.

The lamp she has bumped into is four feet high with a ceramic base of Elvis and his guitar, his face

twisted into a note of some painful song like "Heartbreak

Hotel."

The sign reads $59.95. Crossed out to $39.95.

"That's a $20.00 savings," I say to my daughter,

2 "Mom, what would you iû with it?"

She turns to a box filled with keys, each 10 cents. "Can I get one, Mom?"

"A key," I say. "A key that fits nothing?"

"Only a dime. Ma,"

"No key, Penn." She swivels toward a stack of

National. Geographies.

"I'm worried, Penn. Someone's going to buy that

Elvis lamp who won't understand its 'camp' significance.

It'll end up on an end table by a sofa as if it were just some ginger-jar lamp on a night table."

"Ma, here's a National Geographic from 1951. Look at that old stove and that little girl in pigtails standing by her mother."

The National Geographic mother wears a ruffled white apron over an ironed dress. Her daughter, near

Penelope's age, wears a smile, a dress and an apron. She stares adoringly at the stove,

"I hate to see it, Penn. That Elvis lamp lost.

We could have used it as a conversation piece in our family room." I am beginning to sound like the princess whatsername who was raised in Brooklyn and married the king of some vague kingdom in the Himalayas. According to a quote in the Sunday supplement, what she missed most about her American upbringing was sitting on drug store stools drinking cherry cokes. She was pictured on a pillow cross-legged wearing an embroidered toga.

"What's camp, Mom?"

In ordinary conversation, I do not define my terms. But now that Penelope is eleven, I find myself consulting the dictionary more often. "Camp" in this sense, I know, is not in Webster's. I make up the following definition: "It's something so far out, it's in, so tacky, it's tasteful, so ugly..."

"It's gorgeous. Like this junk, Ma?"

The American-Himalayan princess had described sitting on drug store stools as camp. I spent my entire sixteenth year sitting on drug store stools flirting with the male counter clerks. I had not thought of this as camp.

I mumble something to Penelope that is either um or yes and dig into the pocket of my tan culottes for a dollar to pay for the three National__GeograDhics that she is refusing to put back. They are 25 cents apiece. I pay a rabbit-faced farm woman behind the table. Her smile is as toothy as Thumper's.

Outside, a wagon wheel is leaning against a gray milk can. More tables, arranged in a wide arc, seem prepared to attack like an Indian raiding party, I walk past a bread box worrying about the Elvis lamp.

The bread box stares at me. It is metal, rusting around the edges. The word BREAD announces its purpose. in the forties, to future generations, I open the door of the box and a smell accosts me, I am instantly reminded of my old metal Cinderella lunchbox that soaked up odors of each sandwich filling or pickle or boiled egg.

The bread box smells like my mother's metal step-on garbage pail.

"Isn't this exciting, Penn? Going back in time like this? That could be your great-grandmother's treadle sewing machine. She gave it to me and I gave it to

Goodwill before you were born."

A cowbell voice rings from behind a table, "Be sure to get some pictures of the grave, you hear? And the house. Ya know ya can go in it, right in it. When I was

in Memphis, ya could only see the grave and the swimming pool and his momma's grave."

"She probably has all of Elvis' old 45s, Penn."

A red elastic cinch belt circles the waist of the woman's hot-pink full skirt that hangs five inches below her knees. She is slim as a gladiolus stalk, "I bet she was one of those screaming girls of the fifties who sat in

the theater all day watching 'Love Me Tender' and forming

fan clubs. Penn, did I ever show you my Elvis scrap..."

Penelope's sniff reveals her braces. "You're

kidding. Ma, were you in love with Debbie Boone's father,

too?"

I think I hear her mumble a word that is either harumph or tacky, forcing me to ignore the question of Pat

Boone. I convince myself that a child who has just read

The Cat Ate Mv Gvmsuit is bound to be flip.

"I'll bet she buys that Elvis lamp, Penn," I say to a head of hair that suggests a Farah Fawcett/Dorothy

Hamill hybrid.

I am not sure what it is that lures me to flea markets like a beetle to a leaf— what pleasure it is that

I get from breathing in the dust of prior generations when life must have been harder, more tiring. During flea market season, I handle collectibles the way Bruce, my husband, once handled tennis rackets. It is my sport. My mood elevates as if I have just taken a Darvon or a

Librium.

Bruce used to call this flea-market style of home decorating, "early porch." He explained how country people used to keep inside furniture on their porches, even wringer washers and upholstered chairs with springs showing. This was in North Carolina where he grew up.

I am thinking of raw knuckles as I examine a worn washboard propped against an Avon sports car that looks like something out of F. Scott Fitzgerald. This brings me to the bowl. It seems, at the risk of sounding nostalgic, to have a familiar aura around it like a halo. Its fluted rim is brilliant turquoise.

"It's in good shape, Ma'm. You c'n have it for $5.00. Not a chip." The man's voice is cracked with age or pipe smoking. "Here, child. I'm givin' these away today."

Penelope's fingers which have only recently solved the riddle of the Rubik's cube are working now to fit a glass percolator knob back onto the lid of a dulled aluminum coffee pot. She twists the knob into the prescribed notches and holds out her hand the way my brother and I used to when our grandfather was giving out candy or nickels.

"Ma, look, he's not sexist," she breathes into my ear.

"That's a cat's eye, Penn."

I am not sure how I know this except that my brother Joel played marbles. I flip through a stack of old "Archie and Veronicas" and "Jugheads," wishing I had not thrown out all of my comic books at thirteen,

"Sixty cents. I used to pay a dime, Penn. Last

Saturday, I bumped into the comic book rack at the drug store on my way to get a cherry coke. I couldn't believe it. Archie and Veronica never grew up. They're still in high school."

My daughter thanks the gnarled man for the marble and tells me she has never heard of Archie and Veronica.

"My friends are into Judy Blume."

"When I was your age..." Penn looks at me in what I do not think is a stare of anticipation. However, I continue in a voice curiously inflected with tones of my own mother's voice. "...the neighborhood kids wouldn't speak to us if our comic book stack measured less than the height of our living room window sills from the floor.

And the longer our jump ropes, the longer our fair-weather friendships. I had the biggest collection of bride dolls," A glass-eyed doll is perched on a stand near

Penelope.

Penelope peers at the off-white dress and yellowed veil with a bored glance. She sniffs. This is a habit she has had since babyhood. At six months, as I stood her on top of her bathinette, her legs wobbly, still curved from the womb, she would sniff at me like a chipmunk.

Bruce nicknamed her Chip before he left. This brings me back to the bowl, A pastel floral design is clustered in the center. It is the design, I am sure now, of my mother's bowls. Vintage 1949, reads the label.

I would have been seven years old. My mother would have served string beans in it, or mashed potatoes.

That would have been before they came in a box. I have seen this bowl in a kitchen on a white metal table with a silverware drawer built into it. My mother would have washed the bowl by hand in a double porcelain sink. She would have been pregnant with my brother Joel at the time.

A box of Duz soap powder would have been on the window ledge because Ivory liquid would not have been invented yet, I would have asked her where Daddy was, and she'd have said, "somewhere in the Pacific near Korea."

Geography being vague to me, I would have gone on drying the bowl with a thin linen dish towel, white with hemmed edges. I'd be thinking how alone my mother looked in her maternity smock that covered a skirt with a circle cut out of its stomach showing the white of her slip and the bulge of the baby that would turn out to be Joel

(though I wasn't supposed to know how babies were born).

I'd have asked my mother if she wanted to play a game of Checkers or Fish or Old Maid after she had done the pans. I would have gone on drying the bowl with the pastel flower design clustered in the middle, assuming that when I became a mother I'd have one just like it.

I hoped that my husband (whom I would meet after I graduated from high school) would not be in the Pacific while I waited for the birth of the child I planned to have. Mama and I would have played a game. Then she would have asked me to rest in the double bed next to her, and she would lie there telling me stories of her childhood. On a night table by the bed. Art Linkletter's voice would be heard narrating "People Are Funny."

"Good shape, Ma'm, not a chip. I'll come down to

$3.50 if you really want it. Have to charge tax, though," creaks the voice aged from pipe smoking. Lines are etched 10

deep into his face as cuts carved into carnival glass. He lives in a shack by the road and keeps chickens and eats fish out of the Shenandoah, He makes a living from other people's sale of household goods.

I hand the man a five.

On the way to the Flea Market Snak Bar, Penelope asks, "Why did you throw all that old stuff out, Mom?"

"It reminded me of my childhood," I say. "Mama washing dishes. Mama's hands raw from bleaching clothes in the wringer washer. And me, after school, pushing a rag around the bathroom floor until the whole room would shine like a chrome toaster. I was the little girl in the

National Geographic picture, only instead of the pigtails,

I had dents in my knees."

"Then why are you buying it back?"

"It reminds me of my childhood,"

"Grandma said Daddy was right. You'd love living in a museum."

I think of my mother living in Savannah with her sister. She is happy. She comes to visit Penelope and me once a year at our tract home in a Maryland suburb.

Penelope did not know her grandfather, but my mother shows her pictures. When my mother comes, she brings a finished piece of her weaving for us to hang on the wall or a new afghan for the bed.

"Kids know a lot about their parents, huh, Penn?" 11

"Judy Blume isn't exactly Pollyanna, Ma."

"Is Pollyanna bad?"

"She didn't menstruate."

My memory takes me back to a little girl enamored by prisms of light. Now I know why she was glad.

"And," Penelope continues, "Pollyanna didn't worry about being fat or peer pressure..."

I do not know if the snack bar attendant notices that.two anomalies are ordering hot dogs at his window: the Pepsi generation and the nuclear age. My face is feeling as knotted and crocheted as the antimacassars my mother kept on the shoulders of sofas and chairs to prevent wear. They are selling now for a dollar apiece at the flea market. I study Penelope's face as she rolls her marble back and forth in her palm,

I am thinking I will buy her a baseball card or an antique tonka truck. She is good at soccer and math and running. The boys in sixth grade do not tackle with her since her karate lessons last summer. Penelope knows the effects of LSD, cocaine, codeine, pot, coffee, and cigarettes, and wears bikinis. When I was Penelope's age,

I muse, I was aware of two things: the Pledge of

Allegiance and "I Love Lucy." By sixth grade, I had learned that Columbus discovered America and Hannibal crossed the Alps. I wore dresses and slips and brown oxfords, I had a collection of bride dolls. When I 12

graduated from high school, I had heard the word Vietnam once...

Sometimes Penelope is a contradiction. She has a

Barbie doll who owns a house and car. Occasionally, she marries Barbie off to the Amish man-doll who sits on a shelf in her room under her Orioles banner. She carries a large-toothed, rat-tail comb that sticks out of the hip pocket of her jeans.

Still, she fusses with her looks— cares about being a girl. I have seen her sneaking curlers into her shoulder-length hair which otherwise would have no wave in it. For her. Kiss and Chicago have similar meanings.

"You know. Mom, I could never wear tennis shoes."

My head bows toward my feet. My royal blue tennis shoes are, I think, comfortable.

White plastic arrows are stitched into the top of

Penelope's running shoes. A rubber-like lip curls up over the front of each shoe. I decide that Penelope's feet have the appearance of a sleigh ride in July. It is humid even on this road to Gettysburg and I think my ban culottes are comfortable. As Penelope stands up, she wrings out the sweat from the bottom of her t-shirt; it reads "Love is a Four-letter Word."

"I wonder if this marble is valuable," she says,

"do you know?"

"I played jacks." I say. "Can you get up to 13

tensies without dropping a jack?"

We walk toward the car. The gladiolus-stalk woman is leaving the whatsit building with the Elvis lamp on her hip.

"Ma, Ma; she did, she did."

I am close enough to notice the woman's layers of cranberry-red lipstick. Her hair is teased high, pulling her body up into the air. At the sight of the full-skirted Elvis fan, my origins become technicolor scenes in my memory. I see myself walking down a city sidewalk in 1953 wearing three coats of burgundy-red lipstick surreptitiously borrowed from an older girlfriend who already wore wire bras. My mother later made me wipe it off with three wet napkins and Bon Ami, then scolded me about the evils of makeup, (Penelope, who is not interested in wearing bras, sometimes wears several coats of chocolate-flavored lip gloss that comes in a crayola-shaped tube.) I was thirteen, I remember now, when I sat in the Hill Theater screaming for Elvis in

"Love Me Tender." My peers called me Long Tall Sally.

Once, I screamed for Frankie Avalon, in person. I was, in fact, in love with Debbie Boone's father and still have his record, "Bernardine." But after high school, my hero worship gave way to Bruce, who was stationed with the Army in Washington, D. C., where I worked in an office. I remember how Bruce and I were married a year after my 14

mother let me start wearing lipstick, and how I became

pregnant in 1970 following a long siege of worry about

sterility. The child turned out to be Penelope, more for my penny loafers than for The. Odyssey, which I had not

read at the time. By then, Vietnam had become a household

word repeated constantly on Channels 4, 5, 7, and 9. When

Penelope was three, she could say it, though it came out

something like Veet-mom or Bat-man or something equally

silly.

Then, in the seventies, I remember gaining weight

and contracting dry skin, even though I had used Noxzema

since the age of twelve and now use Oil of Olay; but I

remember finally feeling that I had become a woman, and I

thought how odd it was that before I graduated from high

school, I had heard the word Vietnam only once--more often

after I married Bruce. And how Barbara Walters became my

career idol.

My mind returns to the flea market parking lot

where the thin woman is driving away, the Elvis lamp

sticking out of the back of her chartreuse pickup truck

like an anachronism. Penelope is eyeing me as we walk

toward our white Pinto. Is she thinking of her classmates

who tease her about her mother being a radio announcer,

because their parents say they prefer a male voice?

I place my bowl in the back seat of the car as the

Elvis lamp glides by Penelope's eyes. 15

"Mom, are you sorry?"

"What would I ifi with a camp Elvis lamp,

Penelope?"

Penelope sniffs. "I think I'll collect marbles," she says.

I weave the Pinto in and out of parked cars, a few collectors' 1957 Chevrolets, a Volkswagen beetle or two, a black Mustang. We head toward Gettysburg.

"Rod Stewart is on tonight," Penelope says,

"Rod Stewart who?" I say.

"Good shoofly. Where'd your mama get it?"

"We drove up to Distelfink's, Grandma, after the flea market."

"That's what I miss living in Savannah is

Pennsylvania Dutch cooking. I don't bake myself anymore,"

"I see you kept the hex signs, Angel," My mother examines two Distelfink birds perched on a red heart inside a circle that hangs on my mushroom-patterned wallpaper, "This particular sign is a symbol of love and marriage, Angel. An Amish woman told me that in

Lancaster."

"I think it's true. Mom," I agree, shuddering at her use of my real name.

I pass around the bowl of string beans and 16

potatoes and ham. They are flavored with vinegar, the way my mother used to cook them.

"Um," she says, "taste just like mine used to, ant, Angel?"

I breathe deeply at the sound of my name again.

Most people call me Angie. My real name, Angel Noelle is a source of embarrassment. I have always felt like I should wear holly and bells and fly around over other people's heads.

"This bowl certainly has a familiar look about it,

Angel," she says, and then Penelope breaks in with her Rod

Stewart request again. A boy named Henry is having dinner with us. He is Penelope’s friend and he is gagging on the vinegar juice.

"Grandma, you wanna watch Rod Stewart with me?"

"Rod Stewart who?" My mother's face twitches as she sniffs into a Kleenex.

"Oh, Gram, he's a rock singer. Didn't you ever have an idol?"

"Frank Sinatra," my mother says, "He used to be thin. He's gotten a lot older--! have him on a 78, but

I'm afraid they lost me after Elvis Presley."

"After Elvis?" Penn continues as we grab our soda glasses and head downstairs to the family room.

"Sure, I bought one of the early copiesof 'Love

Me Tender.' I remember 'cause it was about the same time IT

Grace Kelly's 'True Love' was out and I bought that too."

"Grandma, you're a sucker, like Mora. You know, at the flea market she almost bought this El..."

"PenelopeI" I yell, clicking the television on full blast, as if by accident, then adjusting the sound downward. Penelope and Henry plop down on the floor and start to shoot marbles.

My mother says, "We'll make a deal, Penn, I'll watch the rock singer, Rodney Stewpot, if you watch

Lawrence Welk with me."

"Deal."

I do not interfere with deals made between my daughter and my mother, but the airing time (1:00 A.M.) seems to elude my mother's attention (and the airing time of Lawrence Welk as well, which is not even on tonight).

I spin the channels and the words, "Women and the Armed

Forces— A Special One-Hour Presentation" spread across the screen like giant stencils. My mother picks up her crocheting. She is creating a baby shawl for a friend in

Savannah who is expecting. Her needles and pattern and thread soon cover the sofa.

"Ma," I say, "you interested in...?"

Penelope shrieks, "I'm interested. Mom, leave it on, puh-leez."

"I'm not," says Henry.

Lines of uniformed women march across the 18

television screen in formation. The scene changes and one of the military women speaks into a microphone. A collage of battle scenes from some war shoots across the screen like the last round of fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Then another closeup. This time a foot soldier with a black smudge on his right cheekbone speaks: "If I'm gonna be out there in that dugout with a buddy, I’m sure as

'bleep' gonna pick some guy and not some 'bleep' on her period."

Penelope sniffs.

Henry says, "I'll bet that second bleep was bitch."

I watch Penelope flick a large marble into a colony of smaller, more helpless marbles. The little marbles spread out across the room in a fan.

"What a Pollyanna," Penelope says.

"Sounds like he's on his period," I say.

"Um," says Grandma, "In my day, we didn't speak

about such things out in the public domain, or on national

television."

"I bet you didn't have television in your day, in

all due respect, Ma'm," says Henry, "spesh-ly not

national television." Henry makes a beeline for the

upstairs bathroom. The door slams.

"Grandma didn't even have Kotex in her day," I say

to Penelope, in our presently safe female company. "Did 19

you, Mom?"

"Rags," my mother says, without looking up.

Penelope eyes her grandmother with new concern.

She examines her grandma's face, perhaps finding it soft-looking as I had found it many years ago. Her skin is still creamy, not unlike the texture of milk that comes in a can.

"Rags?" Penelope mutters.

"That's my dog's name," Henry offers, thumping down the steps. "I'll bet that first bleep was hell."

Penelope is intrigued with my mother, as she is not with Henry.

"Grandma, how did you feel when Grandpa was off in the service?"

"Lonely," she says.

"Didn't you sometimes feel like you absolutely positively hated being the one to have to stay home and wait and be bored and..."

"Penelope," I intrude. "Grandma didn't have much choice. She was pregnant with Joel."

"S’not fair," my daughter says through her nose.

"Is Lawrence Welk on yet?" my mother asks.

"Not tonight," I inform my mother as gently as I can.

"Rod Stewart— remember Gram? Lawrence Welk is on tomorrow night." 20

My mother sighs, hums under her breath. I listen, and the low murmuring hum seems a part of the house now.

I glance toward the empty table in the corner by the fireplace, imagining the Elvis lamp on it. Could have been Jimmy Dean or The Big Hopper. Monday, I decide, I will order one of those new metal lamps from the Sears catalog. I am sure now that I do not want to be the proud owner of a dead hero immortalized in ceramic. I do not want to worship anyone. I do not want to live in a fantasy world. I think about the announcer at the radio station who has asked me out to lunch. He looks rather ordinary. He haunts contemporary art showings downtown, and he is too old to be drafted.

Suddenly Henry jumps to his feet. "You're losing," teases Penelope, referring to the marbles competition. "You're losing, that's why you want to leave." Henry turns apple-red as I lead him to the sliding screen door. He whips it open, and his right forefinger sticks in the hole he poked in the screening one day by accident. He had offered to fix it for one dollar.

I slide down next to my mother, my blue bermuda shorts rubbing against her copper-colored polyester slacks. I dimly hear her say, "Is Rod Stewart on yet?" but I am fingering the baby shawl, thinking about tomorrow and the ride we will all take over the Memorial Bridge to 21

Arlington Cemetery. I will present my pass at the gate, and the guard will smile at me as if I am a privileged person. In Arlington, Bruce's grave is well kept. You are allowed to bring fresh flowers, and containers are provided.

We went there when I was little— my mother, Joel, and I. I would try to count the graves that checkerboarded off into the distance farther than even eyes with binoculars could see. My mind could not fathom the numbers, and even when I used fourth-grade multiplication— five hundred rows horizontal, one thousand rows vertical— the numbers would grow into a figure so large my brain could not conceive of that many of anything. Adrien, my best friend in fourth grade, and I used to ask each other, "Is there such a number as one

zillion— is anything that big? What if you get to a

billion, then what? "Your father's cemetery," Adrien had

said, "is better kept than the one my grandfather's in."

I watch the documentary flashing across the

television screen in the family room, feeling glad that I

am a radio announcer, sometime disc jockey, playing

fifties tunes and sometimes big bands. Radio, I think is making a comeback. "This is a special treat— watching Rod

Stewart," I say to my mother. "I usually make Penelope

listen to classical on the radio." Bleary eyed, my mother

nods. I can see the texture of her face. She is old 22

enough to receive discounts at the pharmacy, yet her wrinkles are smooth, thin lines. The edges of her eyes are not pulled taut into the crow's feet that usually mark a person who has worried all her life.

The final credits to "Women in the Armed Forces" roll across the screen. The 11:00 P.M. news appears, then

Johnny Carson. Bored, Penelope grabs two crochet hooks.

My mother leans over her, teaching her the method.

"Grandma, what would you do if you were drafted?"

"Me, at this age?" My mother's eyes open as rapidly as a well oiled rolltop desk. She is a woman of not a little culture, if you comprehend the roots and manners of the Pennsylvania Dutch. "Me? an old woman?" she asks again, clearly awake now, her lips smacking with possible answers, clearly complimented to be asked such a question by her granddaughter, as if Penelope really thinks she could ever be anything else besides a grandmother.

"S'not fair," my mother says, in a breathy nasal sniff, "us women staying home, doing all the waiting, ant?"

"Ant," sniffs Penelope. "S'not fair."

I nervously look about the room for my "camp"

Pennsylvania Dutch dictionary to look up the word "ant" and its many levels of meaning.

I watch Penelope's needle poke and twist at the 23

white string.

She is, I discern, creating a hopeless tangle of knots. SITTING DUCK LANE

"It's yellowl" Mindy exclaims.

Anne watches her mother-in-law poke her head into the uninhabited nursery. As Mindy scrutinizes the cheerfully furnished room, Anne studies her long, cylindrical neck. Even in its dried-bay-leaf stiffness, there are folds that reveal her age, her status as the matriarch of the Connelly family, which Anne married into seven years ago. Mindy buttons the last button on her chartreuse polyester blouse before heading to St. Jerome's for Mass this humid holy day,

"Yellow is bright," Anne says, "like the sun."

"Poor unborn thing...Mah-tin's room was blue— we kept the bassinet right by our bed till his father could paint the nursery walls."

"But yellow is such an untried color, don't you think?"

"Pink's nice for girls," Mindy mumbles, starting down the steps, still fumbling with the baroque finishing touches of her church outfit, which includes a string of pearls.

She angles her misproportioned body down the stairway in her beige Red Cross heels. Pulling a veiled straw hat out from under her arm, she slaps it onto her

24 25

oregano hair, cut straight and pasted flat on her scalp.

The black veil covers her face down to her chin in the way of fashion in the forties. It is the same straw hat,

Martin claims, that his mother has worn to Sunday Mass and holy day Masses ever since he can remember, except in winters when she wears a black velvet pillbox that she

bought in the sixties after seeing Jacqueline Kennedy wearing one just like it in the inaugural parade. On

Saturdays, when she goes to Confession, she wears a

pepper-black triangle of lace draped over her head, and

all this, Martin explains with a shriek in his otherwise

calm voice, when the Church lifted the hat-wearing

requirement years ago!

How he had celebrated with his college buddies when the fish on Friday rule was changed! Martin, Anne

reflected, was terribly unfond of fish--but his parent's

home, in what he jokingly called the Boston suburbs of

Rome, still served parslied haddock every Friday anyway.

And if his father Lewis couldn't get to the underground

Latin Mass out in the southeastern section of the city, he would play the record he had ordered from Ireland that

contained the entire Mass in Latin, and he would stay home

from Church. This he knew was a mortal sin, or at least

he strongly suspected it was, Martin further explained to

Anne. But it was a matter of principle over

indiscriminate change. If he did give in to going to Mass 26

at his own parish, his father would stare straight ahead at the altar when his neighbor in the pew would turn to shake hands with him in the custom of the new mass.

"Humpfl" Lewis would say as he turned to face the fifth station of the cross, one of a series of graphically carved pictures that hung on the side wall of the Church and depicted Christ's trials on the road to Calvary. Then he would walk out in what he felt was blatant protest of the new liberalism in the Vatican.

At Sunday dinner, Lewis would complain: "In my day, you didn't go to Mass to socialize--ain*t Bingo for that?" And all day Sunday, organ music and old classical

Latin hymns would permeate the rooms of the two-story New

England frame house as pervasively as if there were stereo speakers implanted between the studs.

St. Jerome's is a three-traffic-light drive from

Anne and Martin's rambler, thirty miles outside of

Washington, D.C. It is a gray stone Gothic structure built on a ridge on Chapelrock Court. A small black and white sign out front announces, Bingo, Thursdays, 7:30.

Parishioners are sparse at this early morning

Mass, and Anne is aware that she is one of only two women

in Church wearing a pantsuit. As she and her mother-in-law approach a front pew, she remembers how she had once attended a First Communion Mass for her neighbor

Karen's daughter. How she had walked up to the Communion 27

rail in the crowded Church wearing a smart, purple linen pantsuit. She recalls the hush that had fallen over the audience— no, the congregation— of stockinged, high-heeled women and suit-and-tied men. As she and Mindy squeeze past two people in a front pew, Anne's legs burn in a re-experienced twinge of embarrassment.

The two women genuflect next to the fifth pew from the front, then take a seat. Anne, though hatless, tries to make her face appear serene, prayerlike as she kneels briefly in meditation.

If Mindy weren't visiting... Anne muses, just as a priest with a paprika-hued face swoops onto the stage--no, the sanctuary— like a fluttery peacock. She does not finish the thought, but stares at the priest. His regal white robes swish like a bridal gown. A platinum-haired altar boy walks beside him in attendance. It has been years since Anne has consciously remembered her childhood desire to be an altar girl. "You have to be able to learn

Latin," Sister Desdemona had said, but Anne knew, and

Maria Goretti Clark knew and Elizabeth Mary Peters knew, and all the third-grade girls knew, you had to be a boy.

And besides, the girls already knew the Latin responses of the Mass just as well as any of the boys did.

As the Mass begins, Anne stands and sits down and kneels and mutters responses in the same rote fashion she has been doing all her life. But she does not feel 28

anything. She cannot even remember if she has gone to

Mass at all on some holy days of obligation, the same way she cannot remember if she has taken her morning shower, though she is sure she has.

The congregation of people moves their lips in unison. If it weren't for Mindy, Anne begins again in her thoughts, she probably would have forgotten today was a holy day of obligation. She would be home attending to her own daily rituals, eccentric little habits that make her feel close to the pulse of the earth. She thinks how when she is alone in the mornings feeding the jays that patronize her bird bath, she feels a sort of grace flowing into her veins, a feeling as peaceful as the top of

Sugarloaf Mountain on a weekday.

In Church, she turns her head and looks past scattered rows of pious profiles. She is curious to see if there are any parishioners in the cry room. In the alcove above the vestibule at the back of the Church, the faces of two toddlers are splayed out against walls of thick soundproof glass. The sight of the babies' noses pressed there reminds her of the glass-walled monkey cage at the Washington Zoo.

Mindy's beads are notched between two fingers of her right hand. The carved crystal spheres hang in abstract curves from her knuckles. Her left hand grasps a missal from which she follows every word of the Mass for 29

the saint's day, mouthing her Hail Marys during pauses in the dialogue.

The communion bell pierces the air. With her eyes, Anne follows Mindy's black hat to the altar rail, A crowd of blackbirds seems superimposed over the row of communicants. The blackbirds that descend on her backyard every morning in huge families to eat the bread crumbs

Anne sets out for them in a soup bowl. She imagines Mindy sticking her tongue out to receive the bland-tasting Body of Christ wafer. As Mindy gropes her way back from the communion rail, her rosary beads slide from her fingers.

When she bends over in the aisle to retrieve them, Anne is reminded of an old Danny Thomas joke that is no longer funny.

As Mindy reenters the pew, Anne can see that her eyes are still tipsy from the three beers and two Sominex pills she consumed last night. On her blouse is pinned a button taken from a basket near the altar at the front of the Church: Anne reads the words PRO-LIFE,

Head still bowed in thanksgiving for the host,

Mindy utters a nasal snore; abruptly her neck jerks; she wakes up, and raises her head in saintly adoration of the altar and statues before her.

"The Lord be with you," the priest says, turning toward his people, signing a cross with his outstretched hands. 30

"If Lewis were here, he'd never stand for this

English Mass— he's not much for this newfangled conversation in Church, Anne..."

"And with your spirit," Anne answers the priest,

Back in the kitchen, Mindy is drinking her third double-strong cup of coffee of the morning. "After Mass,

I always feel so— well..."

"High?" Anne offered.

"That's a nice word, Anne. High."

"Like in high spirits," Anne says, walking over to the wall to click on the air-conditioner.

"Reminds me of a joke Lewis has been telling since

Mah-tin was a little boy at Seraphim Parochial... how did the little moron follow the big moron into High Mass?

"How?" Anne obliges.

"He brought a ladder to church." Mindy's thin frame shakes in laughter.

"Thank goodness they skip the sermons in the summer," Anne says.

Mindy swallows a little blue pill with her coffee and peels off her seamed tan stockings.

"Did you notice something strange about that priest?" Mindy asks.

"Father Sage? Oh, he's the gay one, Min..." 31

"Anne, how can you talk like that about a man of

God..."

"He's terribly pious, Min, a credit..."

"Namby pamby," Mindy says. "At St. Jerome's yet— and right outside the Nation's Capitol.

Mindy pulls another bottle of pills out from the

stuffed black leather purse with seven compartments that

never leaves her side. She downs a shocking pink pellet with another gulp of coffee. "Nerves," she nods.

"Sometimes I need two or three— what with being married to

a diabetic..."

"Did you think of a museum, Min?"

Mindy pats Shirley, Anne's dog, on the head as the

proud but unpedigreed beagle from the pound saunters by

her chair. The dog is grateful for the attention and

sprawls across Mindy's foot in repose. Anne pours a

Perrier.

"How'd you ever think of a name like Shirley for a

mutt?" Mindy asks.

"Shirley Jackson, my favorite author— she wrote a

story about a lottery, about a woman who was stoned."

Mindy stretches her long neck, lifting her left

ear toward the ceiling, painted avocado. "Stoned? Like

in the New Testament?"

"This woman who lived in a small village was

singled out to be stoned to death for no apparent 32

reason— just singled..."

"Gross," Mindy hisses, "but a deserved reward, no doubt...a witch or a..."

Anne is hoping she can make Mindy forget about sightseeing. It is hot, and invariably when his mother comes to visit, Martin is out of town trying to sell computers to some firm or other. "Flying home Monday,

Ma," he had told his mother on the phone upon her arrival.

"Anne'll keep you happy— she loves to play tourist--you might suggest the Monument— it's my favorite spot— from the top everyone down below looks like a dot, a tiny..."

"What else is there?" Mindy had asked her son calling from Houston.

"Jefferson Memorial? Iwo Jima?" Martin suggested.

Anne had seen the whole city at least seven times over with various and selected relatives who always arrived expecting her to be free, knowing she was not a mother like most women her age, knowing her jobs were part time. Next week, she thinks, she might as well take a job as a tour guide— she knew little things about Washington that automaton-like bus guides did not know. She knew that in winter the Potomac River froze over and people walked across it from one side to another— she knew that

Eddie Fisher had once sung with a band right in front of the Capitol building— she knew that when military 33

orchestras appeared on summer nights in front of that same domed building, no matter how you strained your ears, you could not hear the efforts of the harpist,,.

"So what is Shirley Jackson singled out for?"

"You should read 'The Lottery,' Min."

"I watch Hollywood Squares, I play Bingo, I fix

Mah-tin's father's meals— it's not so easy— feedin' a man without sugar— you should taste it Anne— all tastes like boiled, unseasoned noodles, and the kids are always calling home— Mah-tin's brothers and sisters, saints preserve us— who has time for reading anything but labels on peas and pill bottles— I'm getting good at that, also

Church bulletins..."

"You must have read something in your life,

Mindy."

"When I was a girl, I took out this book from the library and snuck it into the school room. It was so good, I couldn't put it down— Sister Marterine caught me peeking at it during arithmetic, but I just don't read like that anymore— it began with an R— Rachel, or anyway,

I remember it was written by somebody with the initials H. H. "

"Ramona?"

Mindy grins, as if remembering a pleasant experience.

"So, Anne," Mindy says, pushing aside her 34

chrome-backed chair to approach a small-screen television set on the kitchen counter next to the microwave, "I’m afraid to ask what name you have picked out for my impending grandchild?"

"Kate."

"Is that for another fancy writer?" Mindy spins the channel selector, leaning toward the television set to scrutinize the tiny numbers. "Ah--here it is I I hate to miss it— 'Tic Tac Dough'— there's a new champion— a housewife from Idaho Falls— think you're gettin’ over my head, Anne— fancy writers--I do pick up a diet book now and then at the grocery store— those twenty-five-cent ones at the check out?"

Anne sucks on the juice of her lime, wishing

Martin were home to take over. She browses through People

Magazine, an old Newsweek. She does not feel like going to the Monument, fighting city traffic.

The housewife from Idaho Falls is squeaking and shrieking and the M.C. is telling her how lovely she is.

On her way upstairs to change into her jeans, Anne passes by the nursery door. It has been standing open since

Mindy looked in at the crib she had sent six months ago when there had been a pregnancy false alarm. That time

Anne had been truly positive. Her period, she knew, had been seriously overdue. But she had felt pressured like a police detective to announce the capture of a suspect. 35

even if innocent. She prematurely announced her news.

Must have been the power of suggestion— of the prolific

Rand and Connelly families combined. This included her cousin Kevin and his wife Patricia, Martin’s brother

Lewis, Jr., and his wife Colleen, and Anne’s own sister

Marie. She had wrapped so many cute little baby gifts in the past three years she could not remember to whom she had given what. She attended all the baptisms and stood as godmother for Terra, her sister's child. True, she was beginning to feel always a godmother, never a mother— but not, she thought, to the point of inventing a pregnancy.

She hadn't invented it, she told herself. There were signs. Hadn't she been three months overdue, and hadn't she felt a pain deep in the far reaches of her body? And hadn't she gained five pounds?

"I'm not getting any younger," Martin had said when she asked him what he would do if she really wasn't pregnant. "The world's not getting any younger— I haven't drunk of the fountain of youth." Anne felt then that

Martin and all the relatives were watching her, all eyes were scrutinizing her life, the personal cycles of her body. And that she was not Anne to them, but a prospective baby machine. She was the family freak. And

Martin— wasn't he getting older?

Yes, there are, she admits to herself, times when

she feels unfulfilled, but she can't seem to separate her 36

own feelings from those imposed upon her by others.

Sometimes, she seems to detect a gap in her life, in her days. Yes, surely, as her cousin's wife Patricia had said, there are times when she feels aimless. And,

Patricia had suggested, a baby would cure all that.

Lately, though, Anne has started feeling as if she's being asked to do too many things that aren't her own idea. She thinks of a for instance: entertaining

Mindy while Martin is away. Mindy had really come to see

Martin— Martin is just not here yet— and it is up to Anne to think about what meatless dish she can serve, what grave Mindy might want to visit, what obscure relative's relative Mindy would protest was buried in what distant cemetery twenty years before when she and Lewis kept in touch with the political side of their family, then living in the District of Columbia.

Leaving Mindy in front of the excited television screen with her roasted coffee, Anne walks to the counter and downs four pills with Perrier. She wonders if the water from the little green bottles is really pure— if tap water is really contaminated with chemicals and bacteria— and while she is wondering this, she feeds

Shirley a biscuit. Shirley has gained weight— but hasn't every female gained weight in her midsection these days?

Nevertheless, she hopes that Shirley isn't in a family way, Anne recalls a cat rhe had once, and it had a litter 37

in her closet and the kittens were so tiny— one had been born prematurely and had been helplessly left there in her closet inside an open shoe box on a soft bed of crinkly pink paper— what did cats and dogs have to say about anything, she thinks.

Loudly, Anne runs the vacuum cleaner upstairs and wonders if Mindy remembers she must leave soon for her job as evening librarian in Suburbandale, her job that had been cut back to four evenings a week by Proposition 13.

Quietly, she saunters into the backyard, waters the grass, aims the green garden hose at the birdbath carved low into her lawn. She directs the hard spray at the scum that has formed around the center, fills it with fresh water. A sapphire-winged bird perches above her on a young maple branch. The branch remains balanced and does not sway but juts into the still summer atmosphere, not a leaf moving.

Now, as she reenters the house, she can see how miraculously soap operas have pre-empted Mindy's attention.

She throws together a snack to eat from a brown bag during her break and meditates silently on her good fortune at being spared the chance to play tour guide.

The repetitive city trip requires a facade. She won't have the chore of pretending to be awed by various pieces of sculptured stone.

Outside on the porch steps, Anne touches her 38

stomach with the flat of her palm, as if she has an ache; between her hips, the section of her body is curved, not entirely flat, but it is normal, she supposes, for a woman over thirty to develop body fat, a few rolls of extra flesh here and there. No, she reminds herself, she is not bulging with child— but for days after she and Martin have timed relations, she imagines that her midsection is larger, can even imagine an embryo curling up like a shrimp in her belly. She walks around feeling her stomach, and every day she feels heavier, as if she has put on a pound, and when Martin is home, he agrees.

"Dear Anne," she reads, on the way down the driveway after pulling the letter from the mailbox that hangs on the green wooden house slats between the door and a slim pine tree. "Terra just rolled over today. I wish you could have seen her. She's pushing herself up in the crib like a two-year old. Imagine— at three weeks--and

Anne she's cooing and smiles at me. She loves the yellow mobile you sent— follows the bright color with her eyes...

"Any luck yet? How is Dr. Roberts treating you?

Think you'll ask me to be godmother? Don't let Mindy talk you into naming it after Martin's father or angels forbid

Mindy herself. Pick a modern name. The Church... they'11 go along with it. Remember when you and I decided on 39

Terra? Doubt we'll ever call her Theresa. Well— time to nurse— writel Your loving sister, Marie."

Anne drives to the pay phone around the block on the road that runs parallel to her house. She hears the day librarian's voice and speaks into the black receiver over the sound of passing cars. "I'm not feeling well,

Martha--right, same thing— just came on me this afternoon— I'm sure by Monday, I'll be back in...right, nausea--sure, hope you can get Phyllis to sit in— see you next week."

The engine of her turquoise Corvette convertible is idling at the curb. She gears up to second, third, then crosses the highway onto the Beltway ramp. She switches on her Citizens Band Radio. Southbound CB'ers are reporting Smokies in the left lane, so she angles the vintage model Corvette into the middle lane and cruises at fifty-five. There's a police car in the rear-view mirror.

She congratulates herself on the car's smooth running after the oil change she gave it before the trip to the airport. A thyme-colored Dodge station wagon passes her.

Three grinning children wave at her in unison.

At the air-conditioned shopping mall, her first purchase is an aloe vera shampoo. It is natural and has a sunscreen in it. Good for dry scalp. She had not noticed this added benefit before. The fact justifies the extra two dollars she pays for the specialty shampoo. 40

On her way out of the store, which she thinks is called Olive Branch or Ambrosia or something like that, she spies some Chinese noodles and some breakfast tea from

London, She adds these items to her portable shopping basket, chats with the checker. At the last minute, she adds an herb sachet for Martin's chest of drawers.

There is time to contemplate her barrenness as she walks along the endless long aisles of the two-story indoor mall. Seven years, she thinks. Four, on purpose.

Then, when she had Dr. Roberts remove the coil, nothing happened. Three years of trying, and still, nothing.

She isn't sure what might have happened inside her body over the years since she lost her virginity at the age of fifteen. She had convinced herself that she was fully adjusted to that early shock.

When she and Martin got married, following the example of some of her college friends, she had the doctor fit her with a coil. For four years, she had worn it wedged inside her. Except for a dull twinge deep inside the muscles of her body, she had felt fine. Other women— she had read in the paper— had not been so lucky.

One woman had bled internally and died before she reached the hospital— another had become pregnant with the coil inside her and miscarried the baby. She thought again of how the coil had never really bothered her, except for a dull ache, and how relieved she had been that she and 41

Martin could start their married life without the worry of children, even if sometimes Martin made her feel guilty about going against her religion. How sure she had been that the only thing standing between her and motherhood had been a spiral of some metal or plastic material buried deep inside her.

She ambles into a book store. Alexandra Penney, she reads, How to Make Love to a Man. How long has it been since Martin made love to her without procreation on his mind? She can't remember. She wonders if the book could somehow revive his interest in their lovemaking.

She turns the pages, then glances at the bookshelves next to the best sellers. Books on sex education for adolescents and children. They have gone beyond the birds and the bees, she sees. The pictures are graphic. Advice much changed from her own girlhood. It is all right now to talk about where babies come from. There is a picture of a woman, her midsection exposing a fetus curled inside her body, "Women have eggs in their bodies," she reads,

"tiny eggs about the size of these dots They're kept inside the woman's body, near the womb. To make a baby, a sperm from the man has to get to one of these eggs in the woman."

Things had begun to change, even back then, when she was thirteen. Her mother had communicated things to her quite clearly. But despite her early sex education. 42

she knew she had remained emotionally ignorant. That had not stopped her, though. At fifteen, teased by girlfriends for being a virgin, she had purposefully set out to destroy the stigma.

She had forgotten the boy involved, but could remember his words: "Baby, baby, so good, baby, now, now— uh, you're so good, baby." Clumsy words.

She had carried out her plan to become a real woman on the soil of a field scattered with ancient plantings, part of an old country estate that had become an urban dairy farm. Not the back seat of a car. At least she had that. Some fallen vines and branches had been under the blanket and thorny prickles had poked through to her bare skin. Yes, she had quite forgotten the boy involved. While the boy had hovered over her body like a heavy blanket, his arm had forced a low-hanging pine branch to brush against her face, and she kept hearing the sound of cars off in the distance and could even vaguely see them through the dogwood trees that had lost some of their leaves. Her privacy had been violated by the traffic. She thought how it would have been to marry a strange boy of sixteen, a boy whose name had never meant anything to her, a boy who had only assisted her in losing her virginity. Her child, she thinks, would have been eighteen by now.

Her mother had suggested the abortion. As she 43

observes the decor of the shopping mall, she tries and tries to remember the boy's name. This is her sixth shopping mall of the week, and it is still only Thursday.

She will have to be sure to pay the VISA bill before

Martin sees it.

This mall has the usual array of specialty stores that edge two layers of aisles set on top of each other in the way of a cake. It is neo-Victorian in style. This contrasts with the decor of the ultra modern boutique where she stops to try on a chic jogging outfit. She is proud of her figure as she postures, circling like a model in the small dressing room in front of a trinity of mirrors. Though she isn't as slim or young-looking as she had been in high school, her legs are trim. The high cheek bones sculpted into her pale skin please her, and the wedge haircut with honied bangs that brush the top of her eyebrows flatters the oval shape of her face. She avoids fats, choosing instead lettuce salads, and her drink is no-calorie Perrier; she is sure that after her pregnancy, she will regain her figure with little effort.

She adds the lemon-toned jogging shorts to her bloated shopping bag.

At the center of the mall, an elevator appears to be a shuttle suspended in space. It rises up and down, as if under its own power. Only for a moment as she rides to the upper level does she think of the 18 percent interest 44

on her American Express card. It is almost time for more pills. As soon as she swallows them, she knows she will feel dizzy. The doctor has increased her dosage from four to eight a day. A stroller appears at her feet on the small square of the elevator shuttle. Two tiny eye-dots gaze up at her. She feels like a giant bird standing over a gnat baby.

"Hi," the baby says. She isn't sure at what age babies start talking and the "Hi" startles her.

"Hi," she says. The baby's eyes widen into a broad extraterrestrial expanse as he realizes he is being spoken to. The baby is dressed in blue, and rides in a blue stroller. The image of another baby, dressed in yellow, flashes through her mind. Its face resembles the face of a sixteen-year old boy whose name she cannot remember. She shakes her head to banish the image. It is the same image that haunts her dreams and she can never tell if it is a boy or a girl.

She walks under the giant ferns suspended from the ceilings of the mall. Intricate grapevines are scrolled into the iron railings circling the upper level. She passes a store selling gigantic ceramic sculptures. Some strange multicolored bird with a pronounced beak stands in the window. In her dream last night, she had conceived quadruplets. She did not feel prepared to be the mother of four children all at once, so the dream doctor had 45

suggested she abort all four of them. When she woke up, there were intermittent pains in her abdomen.

At a souvenir store, she charges a palm-sized replica of the Washington Monument for Mindy. The elevator transports her back to level B where the car is parked. There is still daylight outside. She heads for a mall in another outlying area of the city. She wears a yellow sun visor, and speaks into the microphone of her

CB. She gives out the time in response to the request of a truck driver on the way. His name is Cowtown Drifter, and he is hauling a load of frozen beef from Fort Worth to

Alexandria, but as he moves ahead of her on the Beltway, she carefully avoids giving him her twenty (she checks this location herself and finds she is at the seventy-five mile marker). Giving out her twenty would allow Cowtown

Drifter to act as her back door, warning her of any approaching Smokies. Giving out her twenty also sometimes means unwelcome visitors at the driver's window, saying,

"Hey, Foxy Lady, how 'bout a cup o' coffee?" The first time this happened, she had been outraged. Then she realized that no one was responsible for maneuvering her into such a vulnerable position but she herself. She spoke mostly to other women now. Besides, her handle was not Foxy Lady; it was Bluejeans.

A woman on a motorcycle whizzes by, her helmet cutting a ridge into the neck of her long black hair. 46

"Break 19, Break 19," Anne says into the CB microphone.

She announces her handle, and she and the motorcycle woman, whose handle is Two Wheeler, chat. Two Wheeler says she is a student at a college in Connecticut, but she is heading to Virginia Beach to work at an umbrella stand with some buddies for the rest of the summer. What with the price of gas climbing over a dollar a gallon. Two

Wheeler says, she can't afford to drive a car.

Anne pulls into a parking space on Level A.

The Madonna Land Maternity Boutique is on the lower level of the new mall. The chrome-like, sterile decor of the just-built center with its white walls reminds her of a vast gynecologist's office. The same sedating music, the same cold silver trim like the stirrups on the examining tables. Again she thinks of her failure as a woman. "You are not ovulating," Doctor

Roberts had told her. She had wondered that day if there was such a thing as a castrated woman. Martin had been planting seeds in unfertile soil for three years, and before that she had worn a coil for four years— for birth control purposes. And for seven years, she had felt a dull pain inside the hidden parts of her body.

Silver-framed pictures of women with only faces and no bodies are hung every few inches along the walls of the mall. The women have full lips, pouting and painted scarlet. Some of their hairdos are short and spiky, their 47

earrings styled in coils, like springs or intrauterine devices. Their eyebrows are unpluoked, bushy in the style of the current teenage rage, Brooke Shields.

She finds the Madonna Land shop, but as she tries

to enter it, her head fills as full of static as an early

fifties television set. She feels as if the dizzy black

and white lines are visible on the screen of her face.

There is no knob on her body to control the nausea, the whirling. Pictures of babies on the walls seem to be

flying toward her from outer space like multicolored

meteors. She leans against the glass counter just as the

clerk races forward to help her.

"Crackers," the clerk says, "always keep 'em on

the counter for emerg--"

"Please," Anne says, and stuffs two saltines into

her mouth, chewing them and swallowing quickly. "Thanks."

"Nausea— all day, not just morning," Anne tells

the clerk. Her hair is bleached white. Anne rests on a

stiff chair with a steel back; through a haze she watches

a woman with a puffed-out stomach model a maternity

T-shirt in front of a round mirror with gold veins. Her

woozy eyes make out the words THIS IS ONLY TEMPORARY on

the red maternity top.

"'Sa myth," the clerk says. "Even my husband,

he’s a doctor, calls it morning sickness. All-day

sickness, if you ask me. When I had my Davie, it was all 48

day, all night, for the first three months. How far along are ya, honey?"

"Two and a half months," Anne says, still munching saltines.

"Now you just sit right there till you feel like trying something on, sweetie."

Anne thinks of the risks. Increased dosages of fertility pills carry increased risk of cancer, of multiple births, of birth defects. Dr. Roberts warned her before prescribing them. She feels sick, the way she felt last week when she and Karen tried to go for a swim at the neighborhood pool. In the water, she had suddenly weakened and Karen had to pull her out. Her head had been heavy, she couldn’t see...it seemed all the time now, this sick feeling.

In the dressing room, she feels motherly. The shift dress, designed for the early stages of pregnancy, is becoming. If she arrives home wearing this figure-hiding shift, maybe Mindy and Martin and all the rest of the relatives will be happy. Maybe they really do not want a new baby in the family, maybe they just want to see a pregnant Anne. It will not be a temporary condition. She will start wearing maternity clothes now and wear them every day, and when anyone asks her when she is due, she will simply say the first thing that comes into her mind. 49

"Slimming!" eyes the clerk. The dress is black linen with white piping around the neckline. "Does your husband want a boy or a girl, hon-bun," the white-haired haze says, as if Anne were a restaurant and her husband were ordering carrot cake.

"A baby," she smiles. "Martin's just hoping for a baby. You see, the nursery is already painted yellow."

The clerk stalks from the dressing room. Even so,

Anne buys the dress, carrying it home in a plastic bag decorated with pink and blue party balloons that say

"Madonna Land Boutique, Where Every Day is Mother-to-be

Day. "

The gray air is cooler outside now. With the top down, her hair whips frantically around her head and pulls against her scalp. She merges from a ramp into slow traffic on the blacktop of the Beltway, easing across white lines into the fast, sitting-duck aisle on the far left. On the CB, truck drivers are making plans for the night.

"My, you had time to shop?" Mindy's voice is low, monotonal. "I'm fixing a tuna salad for us. Did they convert the library into the Suburbandale Plaza, Annie?"

Mindy moves about the kitchen preparing the meal in the reverent way an altar girl might prepare the 50

sanctuary of a Church before Mass. She chooses two everyday gold-toned goblets and pours a Miller into hers, spring water into her daughter-in-law's; she has meticulously arranged two place settings with wheat-colored stoneware and stainless. She continues to mix up a salad for the two of them, mumbling something about morons and ladders and mass,

"Martin's brother called, Annie, 'bout an hour ago.

Says his Dad is up to his old tricks, starving himself.

Uh, and, he was nice enough to inquire whether you and

Martin had gotten in touch with the stork yet. Still trying, I says."

Anne takes a seat at the rectangular chalk-colored table, as Mindy asks, "By the way, do you know why the stork stands on one leg?"

"No, Min, why?"

"I don't know, I thought maybe you did. Lewis knows, but I can’t remem..."

Listening to Mindy, Anne laments the double life she leads.

It will have to be different now, she decides.

She chews an olive. The television set still drones like a background hymn written for the music of the Connelly clan. Anne reaches to the floor, finds what she is looking for in her shopping bag and wishes she could talk to Mindy instead of escaping into other worlds, into 51

scattered shopping malls dotting the suburbs. She decides not to show her the maternity dress, even while regretting the chance to share in what would only amount to Mindy's unjustified delight.

"Well, how nice, Annie, a souvenir. Lewis'll just bust a gut— he collects 'em— even from Boston, he has a little Tea Party ship he just treasures— but Annie, I can't stay— I just talked to Martin's father and he's not good— I believe if I'm called into heaven before him he'll just waste away on boiled water— I asked him what he ate since I left and he said coffee, he's had a lot of coffee." She sticks her fork into an olive, eats it.

Anne pokes at the tuna. "You'll be going back to

Boston then, before you even see Martin?" She touches her own forehead, and it feels cold as plastic.

"It's that or the death of a diabetic. Annie— I don't want to be labeled a murderer in my own parish.

Father Burns'd sure never give me absolution for that.

Y'all right Annie? You look peaked, drawn out."

Mindy lays a hard-knuckled, strong hand over her daughter-in-law's. The other woman's grasp is cold, then warm, her fingers crabbed from age, her hand fleshy and human. There is electricity in the air and the two skins shock each other like the quick surge of an incubated egg in its dish or shell.

Releasing herself from her seat at the kitchen 52

table, Anne stands tall like a new woman, flashes of dizzy interference still buzzing inside her blood. She climbs each step with the authoritative confidence of a person who knows the dizziness will pass. Her body feels like the engine of her car when the spark plugs are not gapped precisely, and the vehicle bucks and bounces until the plugs are replaced and measured accurately. She walks past the yellow nursery, into the bedroom where the next bottle of fertility pills stands starkly on her dresser, set apart from the face creams and tubes of lip gloss in light shades.

She stares at the pills, lies down on the white chenille spread, the one that reminds her of her room when she was a teenager. She can remember sitting on the soft white, ribbed cover while her mother talked to her about sex and boys and the risks involved. Almost in a detached way, she muses now, presenting textbook facts: here is the sperm, here the egg, in a sing-song pattern, wanting to spare her daughter the grief she had been through, teaching her, the next generation, in the only way she knew how, put off by her duty to inform her daughter, yet determined to tell her.

Why had her own mother helped her get an abortion, when she didn't believe in them? She could get in trouble, her mother had warned her. Her friends had ended up marrying too young, one of her mother's cousins had to 53

be sent to a home for unwed mothers— a classmate had died from a self-inflicted abortion, the consequences of sex, her mother had warned, her firm hand gripping her daughter's. Perhaps in the back seat of her mind, Anne had thought of "consequences" in the field with the boy whose name was now lost to her. She had set out to lose her virginity and she had. Her girlfriends had already lost theirs. It was dumb to be a virgin at fifteen. She would show them.

As a teenager, she had not fully comprehended what a fetus was, though she had seen pictures in the encyclopedia, and once the school had shown a film on a home movie screen in health class. She cannot remember what the film was called. She remembers the farm. The camera had moved in closely to magnify the full udders of the cows. Next, a closeup of a woman's breast, a baby nursing. The boys in their first or second year of high school giggled and snickered and popped their illegal bubble gun. Anne wondered what was funny about the whiteness of a woman's full breast, what was funny about motherhood. Perhaps the boys were laughing at the comparison of women to cows. She had played down her breasts after that, wearing, instead of the popular tight sweaters, blouses with camisole tops under them.

What would Martin do? She had heard of kings beheading queens who failed to bless their kingdoms with a 54

male heir. She had heard of decrees granted to husbands whose wives remained infertile.

She stands up, walks to her dresser, picks up the small plastic bottle, a gray cylinder. Shirley pads into the bedroom. Anne lifts the dog into her arms. She can feel the dog's heart beating against her chest as she walks toward the yellow nursery. The crib is spicy cinammon-toned wood, but the walls are a brilliant enamelled sun color. Babies like yellow, but Martin isn't getting any younger. She herself is thirty-three, not an age when one's only interest should be cruising shopping malls. Why hasn't anyone noticed her age, her life style, the gap in her life of things that she has never done?

Why hasn't anyone noticed that she isn't getting any younger? Or identified the dull, persistent pain embedded inside her body, nagging her with reminders of places she has not yet travelled to? Of subjects like law, anthropology, and advanced car repair that she has not yet fully explored.

She thinks of her sister's husband Ted who plays golf on Saturdays. Of her cousin Patricia whose husband is in the Army and stationed across the world. And of

Martin who ordinarily travels two weeks out of the month.

She thinks how dizzy she is now, and how she has tried to tell them all— one by one and collectively.

She tried to tell them at family get-togethers, at 55

Christmas, two years ago, at the Marblehead vacation a year later— something she has known about herself for some time, something confirmed by the aching vacuum inside her body that sometimes gives her physical pain. The pain of knowing you have lost control of your own life.

She closes the door to the nursery.

She will write to them all. Tell them she just doesn't have the feeling of maternal responsibility that her mother had to have all her life for her five children.

Explain to Mindy how she seems not to have inherited the same genes that set her mother-in-law into a pattern of raising children for life. She will agree that Martin isn't getting any younger. She will remind them that neither is she.

The snap of the childproof pill bottle opening reverberates in the empty hall.

Inside the bottle jostle fertile pellets the color of whole dill seed.

She walks into the bathroom. It is dim. She turns on the row of balloonlike vanity lights over the sink and tosses a brief glance at the woman in the rectangular mirror, the face that seems back on earth now.

She moves precisely, in deliberate, measured motions, aware of Shirley's gentle breathing in her arms.

The cold white lid slams noisily against the porcelain tank. She thinks how Mindy will hear the 56

clatter, the repetition of clanks, how she will wonder at the series of flushes that will take five minutes to complete. TGI F

"S'nice," one of Eddie's boys said when he saw our new split-foyer, five-bedroom house, "but I liked our old one better."

This boy's name is Robert. Robert is not one of my favorites. He is sixteen, pimply, butts into adult conversation, and shoots firecrackers. He has been on restriction since Eddie and I met.

Robert and I have had continuing arguments over the women's underwear ads that he cuts out of the Sunday supplement and keeps under his pillow. He says they are not there. I say I may be forty but I can still see pretty darn well, and my eyes see nearly nude women under the pillow.

I am no prude but I have my priorities.

"Aunt Rebecca cooks this too," Robert is fond of saying at the dinner table. "Only from scratch," he adds, embellishing one of his frequent loving remarks about

Eddie's sister. When Robert is around, my teeth remain in a permanent clench. Now that Eddie does the cooking,

Robert's remarks at the table go like; "Gee, Dad, howja ever figure out the chili recipe? This is great chili.

Dad, just like Aunt Rebecca's."

The morning schoolday shuffle is going on in the

57 58

kitchen. I am still lying in bed reading an Ann Beattie story when I hear the final stair creak. The front door slams, and the last of our aggregate family of seven children is off for the bus. I am nursing an early spring allergy. But I get up, put on my black chinos, determined to face the outdoors on my own terms. I wiggle my tee shirt, with the big red T on a yellow cotton/polyester

setting, over my head, and go outside.

The rock garden is shaded by a young silver maple

tree, a friendly enough companion.

The June strawberries are coming in. And since I

am named after this month, I am ecstatic that the mild

temperatures match the mild flutters in my blood. There

are a few assertive weeds to be pulled out from around the

heather, some patches of grass to be coaxed back into the

yard.

I wonder why people who have been through first marriages that culminate in divorce seem to hoard their

segments of alone-time as if these few moments or hours

were their last ones on earth. My morning solitude is more sacred to me than the caffeine that wakes up most of

the country every day. Yet, this morning I am destined to meet my new neighbor. I feel a little put off when she

catches me in my most vulnerable position— crawling around

in the dirt. It isn't her smoking that bothers me. I

used to smoke. But I am shaky about Fridays— it was Emily 59

Dickinson, I recall silently, who said, "All men say what to me." So maybe it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that this new acquaintance would arrive at this exact moment and give me her version of "what."

"Nice tree," my neighbor says. She walks toward the three tiers of my gardening masterpiece. I size her up, noticing that our hairdos are different, our height similar. Her sick-leave Friday has somehow coincided with mine on this quiet day when the lawn is damp with an uncut lushness of new grass the hue of fertilized jade.

"Beverly Bushnell," she says. "June Gray," I oblige.

"I'm afraid to plant trees, afraid they won't

grow. What rare flowers are these?" she asks me.

"Carnations."

"Carnations? I planted carnations once. They died. Are you sure the Homeowner's Association allows all

this planting, all these rocks?"

"I am a homeowner," I say, yanking a weed out from

between my carnation plants. "I like rocks. They're

quiet, and even if the carnations don't come back up, I

tried. It's the trying that counts, don't you think?" I

am convinced that this strange woman is the double of my

Aunt Marion, who always misses my point by the breadth of

a spider thread. There are three foundation shrubs in

front of Beverly's house. They were planted haphazardly

by the builder. 60

Maybe it's just easier when you're related to someone to overlook small ideological differences,

Beverly catches her wedge heel on the peaked surface of a rook, a prize that Eddie and I dug out of the side of a mountain one camping weekend. I reach my arm out to prevent her from falling down the three levels of my carefully cultivated, seasonally timed garden.

"Do rocks grow?" my daughter Nicole asked me when she was three years old. "How else did they get there?"

I advised her pointedly, as pointedly as one can advise a three-year-old. This is the same child who called a chicken a bird at the community barbecue.

"I don't have much time for planting rocks workin' full time for Holly Girl Temps."

"You're working for Holly Girl full time, Bev?"

My voice strikes a flutelike note of enthusiastic indifference. A gnat tickles my nose. After my divorce, eager to please and advance in the job market, I had worked for Holly Girls for a year. All I could remember was pouring coffee for a succession of bosses, as if I had never left Ralph, as if I stopped being an invisible housewife only to become an invisible office housewife. I had been assigned to a succession of companies from a large manufacturer of military aircraft (I typed invoices and poured coffee) to tiny lawyers' offices (I typed letters and poured coffee) until finally, after rebelling 61

against this coffee-serving chore as "not part of my job description," I was not called back anymore.

"They keep callin' me in...must like my work— get to go 'round to different offices. Sure beats punchin* time clocks in Hagerstown. Guess they like me...money helps..,three boys in college." Beverly struggles with the pocket of her salmon flowered shift, extracting a cigarette.

"Give me another year, Bev, I'll be in advertising full time. I've been writing copy at home, freelance." I look up at a face that seems to be hoarding smoke--"I admire you, Bev— can't seem to survive clerical work myself— finger poking someone else's creations all day, every day. Q W E R T Y U I 0 P, qwertyui..."

"My God. You've memorized the first line of the typewriter. How in the...?"

"A S D F G H J K L— that's the second line, only I can't pronounce it."

"With the boys in college...my age..."

I coax the purple ajuga toward a bare spot,

"I'm still a secretary myself, Bev," I say in the direction of a listless rock, gray as office walls or

Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Beverly puffs, exhales charcoal smoke. "But not for long...I went to a psychologist. She said if I didn't stop repeating

'qwertyuiop' over and over in my mind, I would go crazy. 62

So I enrolled in college. I'm not sure it's working.

Now, in addition to typing all day, I write term papers.

By now, the keyboard is a rubber stamp in my brain, anyway. But I think I'm improving now. I'm working on a

Master's Degree in marketing and writing advertising copy at home, freelance— in fact, I may be switching jobs soon."

"Is that ivy? Doesn't that interfere with the mower, June?"

"Robert hasn't complained." I pat a long ivy stalk into place as if it's a strand of flyaway hair on a headfull of curlers. Beverly plops onto the upper level, her backside snapping off several three-pointed ivy leaves.

"I have this friend at Holly Girls...has a degree— like you— commercial art— uh— or is it fashion design. Anyway. She's got her eye on a job in New

York— you wouldn't believe the contacts she makes working temps with Holly Girl..."

"How long's she been there, Bev?"

'"bout seven— uh— seven years..."

"Saundra types a hundred." Beverly's voice affects a lilt on the last syllables of her sentences, as if she is junior-high-school age, relating an unbelievable story to her mother after school. "Lucky they keep me on with my forty-five w.p.m...." Beverly's face is 63

thoughtful, as she looks at her hands. They do not appear used or arthritic, but carefully cared for, perhaps a little dry, as if she is a woman who washed dishes for many years before the age of the electric dishwasher.

"Do they still make you serve coffee?" I ask her, standing up now, brushing grains of rich topsoil from my chinos.

"Oh, well, sure— that's just part of things...! could give Holly Girls your number...drat, June, my phone's ringin'." My neighbor rises in haste, crushes a cigarette stub on the plump rock. I try to rescue a limp ivy vine that has somehow twisted itself upside down among the other ivy vines. I yank it back into place, but it doesn't want to stay. So I reconsider and allow it to dangle there freely, poking the end bud back into the soil so that other vines will begin to form from this mother stem.

How lucky I suddenly feel, after meeting Beverly, that I have at last acquired the title of Office Manager at Blank Public Relations. Why didn't I mention this fact to my new neighbor, I ask myself? I decide my reticence has something to do with not wanting Beverly to think I am trying to one-up her on the ladder of clerical advancement. Office Manager. Just another high-falutin' term for secretary, ray Aunt Marion would say. She seems to come through with her characteristic insight when I 64

least have a need for it. At Blank PR, I still type for the male bosses, but I do not pour coffee for anyone but myself. When I brought my own electric coffee maker to work, the other Office Managers followed suit— except for one diehard whose secretary is nearing retirement and insists on plopping her boss's steaming cup right down in front of him five times a day much to his delight. On one extended assignment at Holly Girl, Friday was my day to clean the pot.

"My God," Beverly says, walking away toward the sidewalk that leads to her white colonial— "Q W E R...A S

D F..,," I hear her murmur.

Some unseen pollen attacks the linings of my nose and prompts an uncontrollable sneezing fit.

So maybe we got off on the wrong foot, I think.

Maybe I am even a little jealous of Beverly's staidness, her satisfaction with her job, her feeling of being lucky to be working. How could she know of my years of struggle to break away from the keyboard, the way my mother had finally broken away from her wringer washer? Perhaps

Beverly sees the typewriter as a tool that liberates her from housework, while I see it as just another kitchen sink— and typing for a living as just another repetitive task like dishwashing, pawned off primarily on women due to the monotony of it all. It is easy for me to merge form letters with dirty dishes in my thoughts. Some 65

nights in ray dreams, I am leaning over the sinkwashing letter after letter, each one corroded with garbage.

Other nights, I am sitting erect at the typewriter typing.

Dear Sir, Dear Sir, over and over again on an endless sheet of flat white dishes that roll through my platen.

"You've come a long way, Baby," the advertisement had boasted on television. But after my divorce, the office hadn't seemed such a long way to have come from my ten years of futile domesticity,

I stare at my rock garden. The tri-colored phlox has spread over three tiers since Eddie and I bought this house two years ago as a substitute for our planned trip to Paris. This time the trip had been foiled by a custody battle instituted by Ralph, my former husband, who had never shown any interest in his growing daughters: Nicole,

Colette, Camille, and Michelle, before Eddie and I got married, adding his sons, Robert, Steven, and John to our family. An instant replay of my ten-year marriage to

Ralph invites itself into my thoughts unwanted. It is mostly when I am outdoors that this happens.

There is Ralph in our old house, relaxing in front of the televised football game. There he isn't— anywhere in the house--and it is 4:00 A.M. There he is again, driving the car, the football game droning on the radio.

The months change. It is baseball season. Ralph is in front of the television, by now moved into his den. The 66

game is going into ten innings. I do not know who is playing. All teams are the same to me, all seasons run into one another. There is no spring, no fall, only innings and half-times. No hiking or camping or sunsets or summer afternoons, only scores. There I am in the old house at the dinner table. It is Friday. I have made homemade bread, I have cooked spaghetti sauce all day.

The table is set. Ralph is late. The train came three hours ago. Sitting at the table, I have this empty feeling, but Nicole, Colette, Camille, and Michelle must not know. "Daddy is working," I say, "Soon he'll call."

The girls go to bed; I feel nervous. It is 5:00 A.M.

"Why do you come home at all, Ralph, If you didn't come home at all— I could understand— then I could leave— find a new life for myself," He ignores my questions. He is running after me in my own house. He leaves again. Maybe the bruises won't show this time. Maybe the neighbors won't hear, this time. The only time Ralph ever noticed me and the girls is when we left. He broke down and begged, said he knew what he'd been like. "It's too late for you to leave, June," he said. "I've put ten years of my life into this marriage— so have you. It's too late to go now."

It was too late and I left, leaving behind the coffee pot but pilfering the coffee measurements and scoop, so that Ralph would have to buy his coffee at 7-11 67

for months before he figured out how to use the pot. That day had been much like today, but our yard was beginning to show bare spots from neglect.

Don’t look back, you tell yourself, but the past arrives to greet you every day.

The daydream ends. Well, I muse, if not

Paris— New York, maybe— what would it be like? Me. In the Big Apple writing advertising copy— Eddie dealing with the soggy underwear ads retrieved from the washer; Eddie reading the reprints of the day sent home by the new principal of Westlake Junior High; "The General Problems of Teenage Drinking," and the one from "Reader's Digest";

"Marijuana Alert III," I fill my palm with strawberries, eating them while seated on a tree stump, regretting the loss of the tiny white winter buds from the evergreen heather plants.

I breathe in the air of the garden, hoping it is enough to sustain me. I was one of those tranquilized housewives of the sixties. Complain about anything, get a prescription for an upper: everything will seem all right even if it isn't. I remember now. Darvon. Then Elavil.

Worked fine for a while. Then the pill would wear off and the problems would still be there. But after the divorce, it had been different. Then the whole world turned into an upper.

Divorce was freedom— it was the single parenthood 68

that confounded me. I remember that nondescript Friday, a

TV-dinner Friday, a thinking-of-nothing-in-particular

Friday when I had become suspicious arriving home from the office. There was the hint of an slightly familiar smell in the halls of my apartment building. In the living room were a dozen kids and a bong, Colette's friend, Loreen, was giggling and seemed to be at the center of things, wearing her thin peasant dress, her outdated chains of love beads.

Outside had been balmy breezes, springtime optimistically budding on the forsythia bushes. Inside, incense had spread its pungent aromas into the hallways, seeming to soak the slate floors and brick walls.

I could not locate the parents of eleven "high" teenagers, so I did what I had to do. Threw them out.

"Mah um," giggled Colette, "they're my friends,"

Who to blame? Colette or Loreen?

Was this a trauma that afflicted only single parents?

Why hadn't the other mothers told me about this phenomenon that since the fifties had replaced sneaking drags of Lucky Strikes after school?

For this I had postponed my life for ten years?

Was I being punished for sneaking rides home from high school with a boy when I was, in fact, forbidden by my mother to associate with cars or boys? 69

I made an appointment with Colette's

junior-high-school principal about this event. I remember

his eyes were red and dilated. "Mrs. Gray (At Westlake

all women with children are commonly addressed as Mrs.),

Westlake Junior High School has not as yet taken a

position on pot at this time in this particular universe

or semester," is how I recall his comment— though it may

have become distorted in my mind since 1977.

I wrote a letter to Capitol Hill, Aform letter

arrived from the House of Representatives addressed to me,

Ms. June Gray. Indeed, there was a bill pending before

Congress— the Family and Child Drug Act.

Take consolation, I tell myself, you are still one

of three million parents on the mailing list for the

Family and Child Drug Act...

It is midmorning now. A white sun appears, a

guest of the black skyline. What appears to be sumac is

wrapping itself around the adolescent maple. Eyes

watering, I walk into the house. I pull off the cotton

fingers of my green gardening gloves one by one,

scratching at what might be a rash on my arm. Spring, I

hope, will follow me inside.

Instead, the front door greets me as I walk past

it into the bedroom.

Its chain lock.

Its dead bolt. 70

Judge the thickness of the wood. Compare it to the thickness of your skin, the breadth of a person's sanity.

Because you cannot divorce your children, you never divorce your husband. The papers exist, with their seal, their finality. You even retrieve them from their file folder once a week. You stare at them. All ties are severed, they say in legal formality. But, says the court— he is their father, their father, their father.

Gallantly you go on pretending he doesn't exist, until the

Friday night he beats down the door like a one-man delegation from the Save-the-Children Foundation. To rescue them, like lost sheep, from the only parent they have ever known. Save the children, the children, the children,..

Where had I gotten the idea that divorce meant the end of Ralph's control over my life, my thoughts, my bed... ?

Tell yourself you live in a closed, protected environment, now.

There is certainly no reason to believe these

Friday incidents will happen again. Still, Fridays unnerve me. Christ died on Friday. Incense invaded my apartment on Friday. On Friday, five years ago, Ralph broke in to my apartment, an event that has come to be called "the incident" by my family, an event against which 71

everything else that ever happened in our lives is measured. It could happen again. It could never happen again. Not with Eddie here. Now I have a new husband.

Now Ralph is no longer the man of this house. Now there is a dead bolt. This time I am remarried. This time I am not corrupting the children.

Soon I will be June Gray, M.A, Now are those June strawberries, those layers of phlox.

Once there was an illusion of freedom. Now I am free to do as I please, to move my muscles in a protected way. Now there is the dead bolt. Now there is Eddie.

Now there is the marriage license at the courthouse— how did they know who I was? The people there. I could have been a bigamist. I could have been anyone. They asked

Eddie his name. Eddie Reese he told them. They asked me my maiden name. In the confusion of forms, I somehow managed to retain the name I had been using since the divorce. It wasn't my father’s name or my first husband's name. In fact, it had no connection with any man. Gray.

A good-enough name for starting over. They didn't ask me about this, and I didn't tell them, because I was afraid they would stop me from having my own name somehow.

I know a lot of parents whose children take drugs.

Some of these parents have been married a long time to each other. They have never experienced divorce. They are happy families. 72

The name of my lover was Emile.

Propping two pillows on the bookcase headboard of the bed, I grab a paperback and leaf through it the way you do when you need to to change your thoughts for a while in some mindless movement. It is the French-English dictionary I bought four years ago when Emile said, "If you are going to Paris, go now--do not procrastinate until you are an old woman."

In the dictionary, "rendezvous" is still underlined, from when I had been practicing my high-school

French.

"Go without me," Emile had said, "You have to see

Paris without me— it is an order. Come back, tell me

about your rendezvous." I think now, how does one say

rendezvous in the plural? Better, meetings. Liaisons.

It is four thirty when Nicole jogs into the

strawberry-wallpapered kitchen in her moody blue running

shorts and plugs in the toaster oven. Precisely at this

moment, an explosion occurs outside the red-curtained

window.

"Where'd Robert get the cherry bomb?" I ask,

reseating myself on a chair farther away from the window.

"School," says Nicole, "Ma, when I was a tiny

helpless infant--long before the incident-— did you nurse 73

me?"

"What's this for?" I ask, "another autobiography in English class?"

"No, sociology."

"You are studying the sociology of your mother?"

"Mah-ah. Children. Child raising. Community

Life. Families. Today there are social centers. We have a social center at school. The mothers come. Their babies socialize with other babies." She pours a glass of milk into an amber iced-tea tumbler.

"What do they talk about?"

"They don't talk, Ma-ah. This encourages sociability— from the crib. Did you nurse me, ma?" She chews on an English muffin pizza with the energy of a toddler teething on a crib slat.

"Nicole, in 1968, I was Simplicity's thrifty mother of the year. I sewed two baby dresses from one

36-inch square of polished cotton for 98 cents."

"Was that before permanent press?"

She forgets about the nursing (was it Colette or

Nicole?).

"What are you doodling on the napkin, Ha?" She leans over me like an umbrella, reading aloud: "'Have you hugged your parent today?' Oh, Ma, another slogan— that's worse than Sex is Love, Love is Sex..."

"Where'd you see that, Nicole?" 74

"You doodled it in the dictionary. Mom--can I run ten miles tomorrow soon as I get up, 'bout six thirty?"

She hugs me, perhaps as a bribe.

I have mothered a morning glory who jogs.What a fool she was, I told her, for not joining the track team.

"Learn a lesson from your mother," I said, "don't be sedentary." Now there are drug awareness courses in the schools. Now there are natural highs.

It is the following Friday.

The nylon tent is a brilliant color of red which stands out like a fourth dimension against the backdrop of the eminent pine trees of the forest. My Aunt Marion, born in the same generation as my mother and my next-door neighbor, Beverly, says if she ever travels on weekends or cross country, she will only stay at the best motels...

Eddie and I sit on the picnic table staring into the hypnotic silence of a steady campfire. I throw my head back and look up.

The night mist is illumined by the blue fire and three muted citronella candles. I see wispy dogwood branches, their white starry flowers glowing in the night.

These branches of mature dogwoods interlace with pine branches and the whole forest is more beautiful upside down. I mention this to Eddie who is breathing warmly 75

into ray permed hair. He seems enamored by the dogwoods glowing, but I am not sure if he understands about the upside down. "Thank God it's Friday," he says.

Zipped inside the double sleeping bag with Eddie,

I wonder, could Norman Rockwell paint this picture? Or

Currier and Ives? Better a Jackson Pollock abstract, with lines that move in and out of each other graphically in unconventional directions.

Inside the tent, of course, there is no strawberry wallpaper. There are only two windows. They are made out of screening and can be zipped shut. Sleeping on the ground like this is good for your back. You can watch the bugs through the semi-transparent red nylon walking up and down outside. If it rains, the floor of the tent will flood. But everything carries risks. It is risky changing careers; it is risky planning for Paris.

Morning over the campground is creamy gray; the atmosphere drizzles milky rain. We walk in our hiking boots, our plastic rain jackets, curious about the history that lies in these fields. Across the road there is a cemetery plot. Eddie points to a series of upright marble tombstones. Thirteen soldiers of the Confederate States of America died in the last days of the war.

Three of the dead soldiers are Albers, Grogan, and

Rand. Five more are buried within the confines of a plot enclosed inside a black iron fence, its pickets tipped 76

with arrowlike points. These five are unknown, and this

fact is noted on their epitaphs. One is Union. I imagine

these young men struggling across the battlefield toward

each other— Albers, Grogan and...Eddie takes pictures with

his Nikon EM.

Quiet air surrounds the graves like the mist over

a moor in a Gothic romance, a tangible substance you can

touch. It is peaceful as a rock garden here, sedate, but

as escapist as Paris.

Around the corner from the burial plot is

Appomattox Court House where Lee surrendered to Grant.

Across the road behind a wire fence is a cow pasture.

Eddie points to a brown calf staring at me. The pasture

is dotted with such calves. Their mothers are intent on

one thing: eating the damp grass. The brown calf nuzzles

against its mother's neck; their faces rub together. The

mother continues chewing, long strands of greenness

stemming from her mouth. I think of the meadows in

cigarette commercials, the rustic settings of whiskey ads.

I picture myself jogging across the pages of Potomac

Weeklv through fields of dogwoods and pines in my 38C

Haidenform nursing bra. (Was it Colette or Nicole?)

Though I cannot decide why, I feel strangely sane

here, and acutely free. Is this mother cow indifferent or

protecting her sanity? If she were suddenly to become me,

the mother of seven children in various stages of puberty, 77

would she spend twenty-four hours a day worrying about her

brood? Would she "obsess" about one of the four girls

getting pregnant, Robert getting a girl in

trouble,..Steven and John discovering marihuana, malt

liquor...

The bull in the field stands ominously behind the mother cow. The size of his body and hard penis unruffles me. "Why is there only one bull, Ed?" Eddie's

grandfather was a farmer. I have only seen farm animals

at county fairs closeted in stalls. I do not hear Eddie's

answer. He clicks a picture, I can only stare at the

bull, his huge firm body, his harem of cows.

It is a brilliant holiday Friday, prophetic of a

warm, light-filled summer, Nicole jogs by my desk later

than usual, which I note with a questioning glance. "Mrs.

Bowers is going with me today, Ma,"

"Who is Mrs. Bowers?"

"The woman next door— you know— Beverly."

"Since when has Beverly started running around the

suburbs with a teenager? She's lived here a year and I've

never seen her outdoors twice in the same week..."

I can see Beverly's auburn head through the screen

door, a sweat band stretched across her hairline. She is

bending and stretching in a warmup routine. 78

I approach her timidly.

"Hi, Bev."

"You don't mind— Nicole and I— it's safer to run in twos." The wedge heels are gone. In their place are a pair of baby blue Olympic jogging shoes.

"How many miles are you up to, Bev?"

"Seven. They have these aerobic classes up at the high school— you work up gradually, first walking, then dancing, then... what're you typing in there, June?"

"Term paper— my last one, a market survey for a new shopping center— imaginary, of course,"

"I thought you wouldn't go near a typewriter."

"I thought you hated the outdoors."

It is not an unusual suburban sight— three women in various stages of aerobic fitness, their breathing, running, and timing at quite different levels— taking up the width of Hemlock Drive, then on down to Somerset and up Lakewood, back to Community Court. "Damn joggers," says one man on a bike. Beverly breathes hard as she runs. "Had to give up cigarettes," she says to me, as I huff and puff to keep up. "Doctor's orders."

"So what do you do with your hands now?"

"Too busy to think about it. I quit Holly Girl you know."

"You quit? I thought you liked temporaries..."

"I did, till the night Gene--that's ray 79

husband— woke me up at two o'clock in the morning telling me to shut up— he didn't want to hear any more

gobbledygook— talking in my sleep. He suggested I take up

snoring, or find a new job."

"Qwertyuiop?" I ask her.

"Qwertyuiop," she says.

"You know, I have the name of a fine

psychologist,.."

Beverly puffs, laughs, and turns a corner.

"Where ya working now, Mrs. Bowers?" asks Nicole.

"...applied for this training program I read about

in the paper?" Her face, no longer that of a pale

redhead, appears to be turning the shade of maraschino

cherry juice. "...and I always have had this interest in

puttering with light cords and electric appliances. I can

fix anything around the house that has a plug— ever since

that shop course I took in high school. They took me on

as an electricians's apprentice."

"Mrs. Bowers— do they need any part-time help?"

asks Nicole.

"I'll check— pays $30.00 an hour, after training.

Up from $4.00 at Holly Girl,"

Nicole looks at her curiously. "Mrs. Bowers, do

you remember nursing your kids?"

After our jog, I collapse on the bed, still

flexing my arms and legs to cool down gently and not 80

hyperventilate. I pick up the paper from the floor, where

I had thrown it earlier. Financial section, editorials, astrology. My horoscope reads: "Your mobility may not be upward, but take heart; it could involve travel. Do not be hampered by the demands of loved ones. They will survive and be the stronger for your absence,"

Dear Children,

This morning Eddie and I ate breakfast on the Left

Bank. We had almond croissants and coffee and it came to

$12.00. Yesterday we walked along the Champs Elysee.

Camille— I was reminded of your namesake— is it Dumas or

Dumas fils? The Parisians seem to sneer at us when we ask directions to a certain street. With our pidgin French it is not easy to communicate, though many people here do speak English. Luckily I have been able to use "Ou est la salle de bain?" with some success. I am trying to remember if tables are male or female, C'est aujourd hui jeudi, le 9 Septembre. Pretty good, huh? Comment allez vous, monsieur? Je vais très bien, merci, et vous? As I suspected, these phrases do not get one very far on the

Left Bank. Tomorrow— the Louvre. Eddie is not much for art (unlike Emile) but he is enjoying the sightseeing. I hope you will take a lesson from this and study your 81

languages well.

Are you all staying away from pot while I'm gone?

Remember it leads to the harder stuff. (This is for

Nicole— you were nursed for six months in 1967.) I hope you are all being careful. You know how I worry about pregnancy. Remember, herpes is no fun.

Love,

Mom

P.S. Nicole,

Would you believe? I warned you someday you'd pick up the phone and hear my voice saying, "Bonjour."

Well, this letter will suffice. Bonjour. Of course you remember Emile and his soccer games. He had to coach on the side to support his mother in Amiens. I was mulling over the thought of looking her up— he used to send her a check every month--probably still does. She thinks he is rich in America— Emile thought what a big joke— him a poor

French teacher in Virginia.

If I was going to Paris I would have to go that year he said— that was 1978— or it would be too late.

Well, it's too late, and I'm here.

Guess he was referring to my impending status as a senior citizen single parent— too old to get pinched.

Remember how he used to play classical music for us in the neighbor's apartment? And when we went to see Maria 82

Callas at the Kennedy Center? (He thought I was more into

Linda Ronstadt and you told him there was no comparison...)

So then "the incident" happened, and he had to be there at the time...and the money went for the

"restraining order" with enough left over to buy the tent...

Anyway, Nicole— I want you to call him— get his mother’s address and have it ready for me when I call next week— I am sending this letter by express mail. Tell

Emile I get a little tired walking so much— but I'm here,

and I'm going to look up his mother as I was going to

before..,

I don't think Emile realized the extent of my fear

of flying back then. Remember that first plane trip I

took alone to Florida when that businessman in jeans had

to hold my hand on takeoff or I would have screamed? I

got a wailing migraine at 15,000 feet. Then I had to sit

in the waiting room at Orlando Airport reading Redbook

until my sister came to meet me. Three men in suits and

ties tried to pick me up and two Hare Krishnas cornered me

for money. Tell him I am enjoying the Mouton Cadet and

French pastries and passing up the pinches. Oh— and tell

him his mother is probably right— life writes straight in

crooked lines— but I would add to that— life rewrites the

calendar to its own devices,,.) On second thought, just 83

read him this letter.

Barring stolen travellers checks or other catastrophes, we'll be home on the 14th, bringing as many souvenirs as we can transportons.

Instructions, in case you have forgotten: air out the tent, run the vacuum cleaner. Keep Robert away from the toaster oven, and hide the Sunday supplements. Don't forget, you were going to tell your English teacher:

Virginia Woolf is every bit as good as Ernest Hemingway.

Do not forget your zapper when you jog without Beverly.

XXXXXXX.

Love,

Ma-ah MAID MARION ON MAYDAY

"If I were you, Tim, I'd skip out— go to

Canada— come back when it's all over. If I could go to war for you, I would— but I'm a girl..."

Tim chuckled. "What would the Army want with a perenially pregnant woman? Vee, why are you having all these children?

Vera looked at her brother with his long,

Jesus-like hair and leather sandals. He was still her younger brother Tim, skinny, weak. She pictured him holding a rifle, killing a Viet Cong. She saw him lying in a silver box. She stared at his younger but wise face.

She hadn't had to tell him she was pregnant again. He had guessed.

He was a decent uncle to her three children. He had the ability to make her feel like a little girl the same way their father could, but Tim was the only person she could talk to who lived in the present. When she talked to him she felt a part of things.

"Have you forgotten?" she asked him. "Matt and I are Catholic."

"Oh, crud, Vera, that's all well and good, but face reality, if you keep on going at this rate, by the time you're forty-five, you'll have seventeen children.

84 85

Haven't you and Matt heard about the population explosion?"

"Sure," said Vera, "but the Pope hasn't."

"You're so cut off from life, Vera, from what's happening,.,"

"Well, the children are here now— I can't send them back. I'm a mother."

"So you are, sister, but what in Hell's name made you get married so soon?"

She felt antagonistic because Tim was single and free to do what he pleased, make decisions— he was almost out of college with a degree.

"I guess— to get away from Daddy, mostly. And everyone else was getting married. Mama and Daddy never mentioned college for me— just you— you had that insurance policy."

"Daddy," he said. "Was Daddy all that bad? I know a lot of guys who had it worse..."

Vera was four years old when Tim was born. As they grew older together in a house of anger and shouting, they mostly saw each other at dinner, when it had been everyone for themselves against Daddy. Daddy's moods,

Daddy's tantrums. But Tim's reaction to "Daddy" had not taken place until he was in college and Vera was married.

It had been a day like today, only Tim had been visiting his sister in her own house while the kids were in school. 86

He talked to her as she ironed in the living room.

"Did you see that George Carlin routine the other night?"

"I missed it."

"It was so absurd, Vera. You know Carlin. He can take roaches and turn them into high comedy." But abruptly, Tim’s voice had assumed a staccato screech like a siren. He stood up, hands gesturing agitatedly in front of him. "Why me?" he shrieked, "of all the sons in the world— why did my own father pick on me— that's all I ever was to him, a cockroach."

"You can get away now, Tim— it's not too late."

That day, he had sunk back down into the black wide-armed chair that matched the sofa. Creases of worry engraved themselves like premature age lines into his face.

But today, the roles were reversed, and Tim seemed intent upon advising his sister.

She saw his lanky body swerve around the corner of the doorway, then heard him clomping down the steps to his basement room in their parent's house. He returned with a book.

Tim had underlined a passage; "There seemed to be an eternal maidenhood about her; and when he thought of her mother, he saw the great brown eyes of a maiden who was nearly scared and shocked out of her virgin 87

maidenhood, but not quite, in spite of her seven children.

They had been born almost leaving her out of account, not of her, but upon her. So she could never let them go, because she never had possessed them." Vera had read

Louisa May Alcott, Edgar Allan Poe, some Dickens in high school. She had not read D. H. Lawrence.

"Sons and Lovers, 1913," Vera noted.

"Keep it," Tim said. "I’ve read it."

Vera looked down at her stomach, at the round soupbowl bulge that had replaced the flatness once sleek as a dinner plate. She remembered how, at eighteen, she had been shocked at the pain of childbirth, the stretching of her breasts and stomach over the nine months— then the unexpected build-up of pain as labor progressed and she felt her body being torn open.

She followed Tim into the kitchen, holding the book, as he filled the tea kettle, "Mama never mentioned the pain," she said to him. "I guess I gave up when Pope

John died. First President Kennedy... then. Tim, when

Pope John announced Vatican II, I thought for sure the

Church was catching up with the times. Then the guitar mass came in. And then, remember? They dropped the Latin and started saying the Mass in English. What else could I think--I mean I ’d never been so sure of anything in my life as I was about birth control--that it would be a natural next step. That it wouldn’t be a sin anymore to 88

use contraceptives."

"Never happen," Tim said. "The whole guilt trip is institutionalized."

"Such a joke," Vera went on. "The rhythm method— half the month abstaining from sex— taking your temperature every day...what futility. Seems to fit right in with Matt's scheme of marriage, though, having sex only to make babies... sometimes I feel like I married the

Pope."

They carried their tea into the living room, setting it on the pale maple coffee table that matched the end tables, "Vatican II was just another Camelot in disguise," Tim said, "like peace in the world and children's rights, legalization of pot, you know, all that good stuff that never happens but everybody always talks about."

He stared emptily at the floor, twisting his small mustache pensively. "The Pope doesn't know the rest of the country is into making love, not war," he said. "01'

Paul the Sixth really screwed it up with 'Humanae Vitae' didn't he?" Tim propped his legs up on the brown

"leather-look" hassock in front of the sofa.

Vera picked up the Church Bulletin from its usual conspicuous place on the end table.

"Listen to this, Tim. Last Sunday's Bulletin,

'Each and every marriage act must remain open to the 89

transmission of life,' Father Samuels read this from the pulpit— right out of the encyclical— on the same day they circulated the anti-abortion petition during Mass. Matt got mad at me— I wouldn't sign it. About a third of the congregation walked out, Tim. I couldn't believe it. If we'd ever tried anything like that in Catholic School..."

"Don't you see, Vera, The laity is rebelling; they're becoming divided on issues, just like the country... it'3 the pill against 'Humanae Vitae,' The people against Pope Paul— well, at least he forgave the

Jews. "

"...and we did get the guitar Mass," Vera added.

Tim braced his chin with his hand. "You know

Daddy and Mom won't go to one— or to any other English

Mass. Daddy's bought the old Latin liturgy on records and plays it at home. And— you won't believe this,

Vee— they're going to that underground Church out in

Virginia where the renegade priests say Mass only in

Latin."

Vera thought how it had only been lately that she

and Tim could talk like this. How for most of the years

of their childhood, they had shared fears, but hadn't been

able to communicate them to each other. Both had

developed their own private ways of coping with the

seeming lack of love between their parents that, at any moment during their childhood, could erupt into violence. 90

Mostly, they had learned to stay out of the way. The trouble was, the Lumbachs moved so often that sometimes

Tim had no room of his own. He slept on the sofa, in an unfinished attic, or in a makeshift basement room,

Tim was studying the front page of The Washington

Post, and Vera noticed that he still had that nervous habit of clearing his throat constantly and never really seemed at ease. But there was a shared calmness between brother and sister that Vera valued more than any friendship. He provided the only affectionate link with family— outside of her grandmother— that she might ever experience. Certainly, he did silly things. He wasn't perfect. He wasn't very good at holding part-time jobs.

The one at the parking lot had been rather absurd— Tim having taken the job the day after passing his driver's test on a oar with an automatic shift. His anger had shown on his face, mostly anger at his own inadequacy, when he had told his sister how he couldn't get the cars up the ramp, how he couldn't figure out the various types of gear shifts. She knew he told her these things because she was the only one who wouldn't laugh, who encouraged him to try again, not to give in to what she could see was a sinking feeling of incompetence about himself. The one job that he had achieved success at, he quit, saying he didn't want to spend his life as manager of a hamburger joint. 91

She hoped he was forgetting some of the ways his own father had...well, abused him. It was the type of torment not frequently associated with bruises or broken bones, although their mother had had plenty of the first and many near misses of the second.

How could you define the intangible? Vera wasn’t sure. Domestic terrorism? She was still trying to figure out the whys of her own childhood, a time spent alternately hiding from Daddy, trying to talk to Daddy, or trying to save her mother or brother from Daddy. Well, she thought to herself, let's just say, neglect. Then she rejected neglect as an awful umbrella word. No. More than that, she thought. Daddy set Tim up for failure by not teaching him anything and then laughing at him when he failed.

Tim was bounced back and forth from one pole, being ignored, to the other pole, being noticed, but never being talked to. Daddy seldom talked, communicating instead with scowls or gruff stares. The "being noticed" meant being picked on, so Tim learned not to ask questions, not to make himself conspicuous. According to

Sam Lumbach, Tim had never done anything right in his life. He could not brush his teeth, take out the trash, nail a nail straight, Vera could remember Daddy calling the four- and five-year old Tim from another room only to tell him to go back, he didn't want anything; or, he would 92

stealthily, with an amused and menacing look on his face, place his foot where Tim would trip over it as he came running into the room. Why, she thought now. Why?

In kindergarten, Tim had played the role of Maid

Marion in a Robin Hood skit and his father had never stopped teasing him about it, Sam Lumbach guffawed about the Maid Marion role on into Tim's adolescence. "I'll never forget, Sarah," he would say, "Tim running out o' those woods in that dress..."

And then she thought about Daddy now. When he had a couple of beers in him you could get him to talk. He had strong opinions on things that weren't necessarily related in any obvious way. He hated the Japs, sports, and banks. He loved mountains, trains, and seclusion, wanting nothing more out of life than eventually to live alone (with his wife) in a trailer "miles from nowhere" where he wouldn't have to speak to anyone. And the oddest thing of all about Daddy, Vera thought, was that he loved his own father and mother enough to call them every single day of his life, saying, "Everything all right?" over the local phone lines 365 days out of every year— while in his own house, he could barely recall that he had a son.

Sometime before his teens, Tim took to whatever space in the house or apartment he could call his own at the time and rarely showed his face. He spent hours— so far as Vera could tell— doing nothing. But then 93

occasionally, he would share a poem with her, and that’s how she found out they were both of one mind. Both had discovered that pencil marks on a page could relieve some of the pent-up tensions of their inbred existence.

Pencils were instruments they could control. They could tell their stories to paper. Otherwise, as juveniles, both knew their viewpoints would never be heard. Later, in high school, Tim felt he had found his literary counterpart in Kafka, who had, Tim discovered, written a short story about a sensitive young man who turned into a roach in the presence of his father.

And so, for a time, after Sam Lumbach began to catch glimpses of Tim with his pencil and paper, the my-son-the-poet joke superseded the my-son-Maid-Marion joke. Because he was incompetent and because he was a boy, he was not expected to run the sweeper, do dishes, or learn to cook. Still, he had that college insurance policy.

Vera's thoughts stopped, as the front door of her parent's rented house opened. Sam Lumbach was home from work. Tim removed his legs from the hassock. His teacup finger trembled like an old man's, but he gave his father a nod.

"Hi, Daddy," Vera said.

In the space of thirty seconds, the living room was emptied, leaving room for Sam Lumbach to sit down in 94

his recliner to stare at space or walls, after he had removed his gun from his hip.

Sarah's chicken pot pie was made from scratch.

The family ate hungrily through the strain of the unusual talking at the table. Tim poured his usual catsup on the thick homemade square noodles and stirred it into the potatoes, carrots, and celery. It was difficult to find good home cooking anywhere in Maryland, but even in the

Lumbach's home state of Pennsylvania, no Pennsylvania

Dutch restaurant could duplicate Sarah Lumbach's pot pie, the thickness of the sauce, the homemade taste of the pot-pie dough. Everyone knew that Sarah Lumbach exploited herself in the kitchen making meals for the family even after Vera had married and left home, but no one bothered to complain. So through the years of fighting and screaming and tears and the tortured absences brought on by Sam's unexplainable binges of temper, there had been this one constant: Sarah's cooking, that was almost worth risking being knocked to the floor by Daddy.

The confrontation this evening concerned Vietnam.

Tim's graduation from college was imminent. He had a girl. Sam Lumbach knew nothing of Denise, but Sarah suspected that Tim was seeing someone, Sarah had gone so 95

far as to plead with Vera to say something to Tim before he got too wrapped up with some Protestant flowerchild who ironed her hair. Vera knew that Denise planned a career in early childhood education and that Tim had met her in sociology class.

Tim had made plans to go to Canada, Denise would go with him. They would live together, get jobs there, support the anti-war movement from outside the country,

Sam sat on the captain’s chair. He blessed himself, mumbling grace full speed ahead like a runaway locomotive: "Bless us, 0 Lord and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty through Christ Our

Lord Amen." Sarah was still turning circles in the small kitchen, retrieving things for the table, as the family started to eat.

"Boy," Sam started, addressing Tim, "you been hidin' in that oversized three-room schoolhouse now for four years never takin* your head out o' those books. And whatja learn? To be a man? To serve your country? No.

You learn poetry. My son, the poet traitor."

Vera winced, but spoke up. "Daddy— he's just one of hundreds.,."

"Mama's boy— I guess they might have called me that once myself— that time in the Navy when they threw me overboard and told me to sink or swim..."

Sarah kept a votive candle in front of St. Jude's 96

statue on the Early American hutch. It was burning now in the cramped dining room. Vera was afraid that in the tension her father would knock it to the floor and burn the house down.

As the phone rang, Daddy was wiping up the pot-pie sauce with a crust of bread, saying, "Timothy Michael

Lumbach— you never have to show your face around here again. You'll learn to spit shine your shoes, make a bed four-cornered— if you get to the Navy first, the Army won't get you. I had to go back in once, and I was a family man. It's your country callin', boy, make a man out of ya," Sam Lumbach drummed his fingers on the table to the tune of the William Tell Overture, the theme song that had been used for The Lone Ranger television show.

Da Dun, Da Dun, DaDaDunDunDun,

Sarah answered the wall phone, handed it to Tim,

He pulled the long cord around the corner toward the basement steps below which his makeshift room was located. The curled cord forced the door to remain partially open, Vera heard that shriek in Tim's voice again.

"Oh no!"

Sam was asking Sarah if she had gone out to get a case of beer that was on sale at the liquor store.

Sarah's lips were moving silently. She ate little, mouthing the words to a novena she was reading from a 97

small blue book.

"Why?" Tim asked the caller in a low murmur, a whisper he had cultivated as a result of living in such

close quarters with his family all his life. Vera

strained to hear. "Yeah, uh huh...I see. I'll miss you."

Sam Lumbach grinned at his daughter. "I'm a poet

and my feet show it— they're Longfellow's." Vera smiled

at Daddy, the fake practiced smile.

Tim's girlfriend was jilting him, and Daddy was

cracking the Longfellow joke. Tim did not return to the

kitchen. The family heard a loud crunching noise. When

her mother opened the door, they saw that the gray drywall

in the unpainted stairway displayed a hole the size of a

fist.

After basic training with the Army, Tim was flown

directly to the war zones of Vietnam. "They're training

us for combat," he wrote his sister Vera, "They're

preparing us to be prisoners of war." Vera read his

postcards in the middle of making the bed in the morning.

She read the newspapers. The streets of Washington now

seemed always full of war protesters. She sent an article

of protest to the Liauorian, then realized she had not

picked the right market. Though they had published her 98

humorous article on motherhood, they rejected the short piece on the morality of long, drawn-out wars not fought by the politicians who authorize them. She felt helpless, like excess baggage in the world, a pregnant anachronism in a time when people her age were involved in all the turbulent affairs of the decade. In her own city, the young were establishing new attitudes about peace and war.

New, "natural lifestyles" were being advocated by women who rebelled against bras and the lack of male involvement in the parenting process and by men who rebelled against suits and ties and being stereotyped as macho.

For a year, she felt helpless. Was Tim becoming a man in Vietnam? He was quietly sending his poetry back to markets in the states. When Sam received the small payment checks in the mail, he tore them up. Nobody heard about the Purple Heart until later.

According to Sarah Lumbach, it was her prayers that saved her son from terminal enemy fire. Tim was welcomed home one year after he left. Vera saw to it that a long banner was hung on the front of the Lumbach house.

Tim had not been a coward. Now the Lumbach family had a veteran of their own,

Tim exhibited the same exacerbating muteness that had characterized him when he left. The war, Vera suspected, from his refusal to talk about it, had influenced him deeply. But he was outwardly unchanged. 99

the same old Tim, afraid of contributing to family conversation in fear of being laughed at.

First came the celebrations: the ice cream and cake, as if it were someone's birthday. Next, the readjustment to Tim's silent presence in the household.

Then, the hocking of the purple heart— the bronze star.

Finally, the day on television.

"Mama, Mama, Grandma--Uncle Tim’s on television."

The Lumbach living room was dim, like the sanctuary of a church. The candle to Saint Jude now burned in thanksgiving for Tim's safe return. What time of day was it? Perhaps nearing evening, but the shades were drawn and you couldn't tell, and the television tube lit the living room with beams that resembled small, blinking black and white spotlights.

Justine, Natalie, and Camilla, randomly watching a channel, had spotted Tim on the screen.

Vera ran into the living room from her parent's bedroom, where she had been resting on the bed, Sarah appeared in the doorway of the kitchen with a wet dishtowel and a dripping dish.

"Vera--lord— if that isn't your brother, I'll eat 100

my hat..."

Vera moved closer to the large screen console.

Sarah said, "That's his long hair, if I'm living and breathing...your father's been begging him to get it cut again— the Army wouldn't have put up with it,"

"That's him, Mom."

"Judas Priest, Vera, your father's on duty outside the Capitol today."

"Ma— calm down; here, take a spoonful of your nerve medicine. The police'll get them under control."

"I knew he's been up to something. When he's not in the basement studying for that masterful degree, he's out picketing, thinks he's pulling the wool over my eyes or something; I'm his mother, I sense these things..."

Vera watched fires smoldering in the streets, trash cans rolling across rush-hour traffic lanes. She felt helpless. She saw bedsprings blocking the way of commuters on Constitution Avenue, Volkswagens deliberately parked in the middle of the street. Then the T. V. announcer's voice; "Ted, we wouldn't advise anyone to come out here now if they don't have to. These veterans seem intent today on blocking traffic, keeping the commuters from getting home."

"Bill, can you tell us exactly what the intention of the demonstrators seems to be now?"

"Well, Ted, their next move is to march on 101

Goldwater's apartment. As you can see, their wheelchairs aren't stopping them."

Vera could see the protestors gathering bricks.

As the camera made a sweep of the street, there was Tim again, rolling a trash can toward the T.V. announcer. The camera moved, became momentarily paralyzed on a young man in a wheelchair, missing both legs,

"Vera," Sarah said, "get some matches. Light the candle in front of Saint Joseph; the police are carrying clubs...suppose Tim gets..."

"Tim can take care of himself, Ma, don't worry,"

The Capitol Building came into view as the special news presentation broke into a commercial for Getaway

Spas,

"I'll get you some coffee. Ma."

Justine unwound herself from her pretzel position in front of the set.

"Mom, what's Tim doing?"

"He's marching on Washington, Justine."

"But why're they setting fires and the police throwing tear gas...?

"Tim and his friends are trying to stop the war."

"The one that's been going on so long?"

"Vietnam— that's what it's called."

"But howcome they skipped World War III and howcome... ?" 102

"Tim and the other soldiers you see there on the screen just came back from the jungles near a place called

Saigon— they want the fighting to stop before it turns into World War III."

"Do you want the fighting to stop, Mora?"

"It's not that easy, Justine... not that..."

The loud commercial ended.

Lloyd Barrister from Channel 42 was stationed at the Capitol steps. Sarah tried to find Tim in the confusion.

"There— there," said Natalie, "that's him walking up the steps."

"Natalie, get your finger off the screen." Vera thought she spotted Tim's khaki shirt. Then there was no mistake about that funny little twisting of his mustache.

Now he was being handed a sign by a woman marcher wearing flare-leg jeans and a wrinkled muslin overblouse.

Tim pushed his way through to the front of the line of protesters. The lettering on the sign was large, but Tim was getting knocked around and couldn't hold it steadily, so Vera couldn't make out what it said,

"Several arrests have been made," said Lloyd

Barrister. "I repeat, arrests are being made."

"Is Uncle Tim going to jail. Mom?"

Sarah was pressing her hands to her chest as if she might explode. 103

"I knew it, I knew he'd run into your father if he persisted in this..."

Sam Lumbach, holding a club, was one of several policemen forming a line to hold back the chanting, picketing crowd. The crowd swayed as the officers yanked the lettered messages from their hands, throwing the signs to the ground.

Tim had climbed up the Capitol steps so that he was briefly visible above the ground-level melee. He was struggling with an officer wearing a Congressional police uniform, an officer almost evenly matched in size and strength, but for the club. As the policeman gained control of Tim's sign, his uniformed figure became a momentary blur. He stumbled and tripped down several steps, making it necessary for him to hold the sign straight to balance himself. The camera moved in for a closeup of the stumbling officer. For a brief moment, Sam

Lumbach, his police cap askew, was seen on national television holding a sign that read, in large, printed letters: PEACE.

"DaddyI" said Vera.

"Tim?" said Sarah Lumbach.

"Grandpa and Tim," said Justine.

The sign hit the ground, and Sergeant Lumbach found himself face to face with his own son. POEMS THE BALLAD OF TWO VIRGINS

Q: How would you address these areas of special concern to women? a. Domestic Violence

A: The absence of any morals in the public schools and the nation are responsible for the present domestic violence. You will never find any domestic violence in a marriage contracted by two Christians who were virgins prior to marriage.

Politician, Voter's Guide, 1982

My husband was a churchgoer,

his mother a martyred saint,

i myself never missed mass.

Then i had him baptized into

my faith, my own mother:

his godmother. The waters

poured over his Christian

head again, double Christian

triple pure, two virgins

together. Where comes

the bride? i, so virginal

i couldn't find his balls;

he so virginal he turned

on the television. After (no stanza break)

105 106 the wedding night, our virginity continued until our firstborn came.

By then, my husband was jerking off in the shower, i myself went to church.

In our second year of wedded bliss, i started wearing long sleeves most of the time, wide-brimmed hats, our sex life, still virginal, i never wore shorts, mini­ skirts; modesty won out. even my eyes were shaded. YOUNG WOMAN IN BIKINI BY THE SEA

The clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him; and the grey warm air was still: and a new wild life was singing in his veins,

James Joyce A_...,p.pr,t r ai t...p f ttia_Ar-iLi&.t. as a Young. Man, 1916

All sand paths lead to battered shores

even as white surplice-sky

descends, merging this huge waterbed into night.

Why should the moon,

arclike, punctuate black

sea-sky in perfect collusion?

Thin as a fish,

she is engulfed in cassock’s fold

gnatlike, organic as seaweed.

The second wave slaps her legs

What force lures her

into this sacristy of sharks?

Enter the dawn (a new lover's face)

chiaroscuro. No cleric's robe,

no charcoal jetty of mediation.

107 103

Her morning skin is gray, her back a dolphin arc controlling the tides. WOMAN AS VULGAR MADONNA

I remember your mother— the most beautiful Madonna and at the same time the most complete woman of the world... She would suddenly say something so unexpected from that Madonna face, one thought it vicious.

Virginia Woolf A Wrlterls. Diary. 1953

Believe me in my Madonna face.

Do you think me vulgar in childbirth legs spreadeagled with the broken waters of new life?

Do you think me vulgar in bed, my fingers aimfully drifting along your anxious flesh pulsing for my vulgarity?

Believe me when i say fuck me, but do not take me literally.

Believe me when i say (no stanza break)

109 no

1 am two people in this one face. PURPLING

She will wake in jail, and add another blotch to the spreading bruise that is her life.

"A Christmas Poem" H.L. Van Brunt For Luck; Poems 1962-1977

What was it about the forgiving that invited purple to her skin?

Was it the haddock for dinner or the babies' cries smothering his stereophonic Ip's?

She was a good wife.

She never stayed out or betrayed him.

Sometimes the bruises showed, but she always explained them away.

111 MEDITATIONS

Outside, the child molesters circled the streets in their everyday suits and ties.

Inside the chapel an eight year old pondered the sins of the world, eating her lunch in the pew in cloistered silence of Saturday sacrifice, serving her vigil to save mankind — the quiet of grace piercing the bones of her knees alone before the altar divining sacred mysteries behind her eyes (no stanza break)

112 113 smugly thinking of all the sinners she would save. CITY GIRLS, VINTAGE 1958

Mary Lou and Bridget Marie's halos shine on pimps ambling on sidewalks of virtue/vice; devils and archangels interlace.

The whore on the next stool reads Camille; the drunk pisses all over the park.

Hamburgers at the LT Club are a dime.

They finger rosary beads at Lenten time. Truck drivers of red-cobwebbed eyes entice them into their cabs for rides.

Nuns pass in the street and scowl.

Prostitutes smile.

114 115

By the barracks where soldiers sin, homilies ring warnings of venereal disease in spring; heads bow in retreat, kneelers wear thin.

Outside darkened doorways of bars, two prayer-stained girls swing bucket bags, sneak inside devoid of identity ordering vodka and ice on their way to Confession at sixteen. NINE YEARS

On my wedding day i dropped a mirror.

What did i know?

Mama's forties was her own vale of tears,

What did i know?

My garter was blue.

My dress virgin-white, i walked down the aisle.

What did i know? i did everything right from cradle to bra.

Hama's sobs belonged to her.

What did i know?

116 DELIVERY ROOM

Spring is a pregnant woman overdue breasts full-budded with milk of her fruitful season her uterus plump with seed.

This frigidity is uncharacteristic of her.

Today is warm. This morning water broke from her sky.

She has delivered her child wild barefoot torrid as summer.

117 WOMAN AS TEST TUBE/MOTHER AT NINETEEN

They had been born almost leaving her out of count, not of her but upon her.

D.H. Lawrence 5ons. and-LQ..v..e.r.s, 1913

"As many as God sends us,"

he had said. (His voice followed me through hospital halls.)

Then he arrived— tickling

my toes that edged

the crackly sheet

like a hem.

i awaited the shock

of the first of many

babies machined through

my body as test tube.

(Once i could have modeled,

they said; once i could have

been a scientist.) Violent peaks,

counted tremors: through the water

tears a child with perfect

fingernails. (i recalled myself:

a flat-chested child, dreaming

of motherhood, dressing my bride doll.)

118 119

Overhead, the Angelus rang.

My storaach-mountain flattened like percale not into the valley it had been not into the meadow where once nothing grew, KITTY HAWK, ACRYLIC

Imagine babies drooling in sandholes, children buried in sand

(umbrellas escaping in contemptuous wind),

Catamaran flops lifejacketed sailors onto sand; all the while i am a moon-daughter carved into shore; privateer of a crop of orange fans, washing up through the motion the wetness that seeps through my toes.

Caretaker of grain-pebbled surf land-hugging spectator, watching a dog fetch a frisbee at wavecrest.

Sea oats are acolytes, wheaten chains petition for sunsets that never desist.

Families toast like artifacts.

Then, paint me again beached on a cul de sac, anchored on land in aconite stasis of black-green weeds, in the snarl of sumac, cockleburs.

120 NO VIRGIN

Sometimes it seems they came from nowhere...Having erased that time when love pulled eagerly at the thighs...

"The Children" Susan MacDonald I Hear Mv Sisters. Saving, 1973

Perhaps easier to pin them on the stork, these infants dropped into my lap by the bird of childhood myth.

Orgasmic bypass, rape spiritual as Immaculate Conception.

No Visitation. No Annunciation.

Only a certain virginity, a limp, indifferent act between that son of Plato, that daughter of romantic love. i strain to recall the eagerness, the thighs— to pretend a holy carpenter came to my rescue.

121 122

One epiphany remains: my children were brought by the stork, though i am no virgin. COLLAGE

Framed faces of pale women peer up from under jagged newspaper; dead flowers press on pretty faces; ivory hands hold spotted glasses filled with estrogen.

A cross beneath a circle forms upon torn tissue: blue and pink. The day today is very warm for jogging and geraniums almost bloom white fingers of pure women turning days ticked off by clicking birth control pill case.

Yet pollen blows from full-leaved trees and rests upon bluegrass.

A youngish woman dressed in red and torn in two smiles down into a baby's eyes.

What beauty in a summer day (no stanza break)

123 124 that causes coleus to rise.

The sun today shines dazzling rays onto begonia pots. The mourning woman clicks away and eats her morning estrogen. EXCOMMUNICATED from life i sit -- morose, not knowing where to turn, a marked woman without an altar, grief, my bedmate — i, the incredulous lost sheep not sought for the fold despite indulgences that fill a cathedral. i seek refuge in bars where God smiles down at me from stained glass

Tiffany lamps and comes to me — (no stanza break)

125 126 though my name can never be

Mary Magdalene, UNPURPLING

It is spring: purple vestments break ground, iris ears lean priestlike in her yard. The sun spins round in its chalice, though it has been seven days since her last Communion.

She purples into the Lent of her life, confessing behind baroque curtains of her prayers, mouthing the penance of victims: her humble Saturday beads.

Until spring comes again in non-violent tones

(branches of gold absolution) when warranted new states of grace rise sinless as bulbs in their ritual lightenings of bruised earth.

127