In Her Day Page 5

  If I were Ilse’s age, she asked herself, would I make the same choice? The pressures are different now. Those young people I saw at Mother Courage have many more opportunities than we did. But I’d still be drawn to the past, to beauty, to concrete proof that even in our worst times we sought to make at least one thing beautiful, a chapel, a manuscript, a cloak. I’m not sure those women in their workshirts and little enamel stars understand that or even want to understand. Were I twenty-one today I’d make the same choice again. I’d still do it alone I guess, alone but for the help of Miss McPherson. She looked down at the first page of her paper:

  The Roman Empire in its decline withdrew from England and Western Europe like a great river receding, leaving small puddles of Latin, of learning, in the rough lands it had formerly conquered.

  She knew her work was good and she was glad to be alive.

  “Then what happened?” Carole implored, reaching over to grab another pickled egg. “Delicious, Dell, give me this recipe before I go.”

  “It’s Pennsylvania Dutch. Oh, yes, well it seems BonBon and Creampuff pulled every string they had …”

  “Adele, that was a bad one.”

  Adele threw her head back and howled. “That one was so bad, honey, I didn’t even know about it.” The plain red turtleneck brought out Adele’s best skin tones and she wore a necklace of orange beads interspersed with tigers’ teeth. “Well, in fact, it’s the truth, they did pull every string they had to get Maryann the runner-up or second lead or whatever you call it in this traveling tent show. God knows where she is now but last night she was in Maryland right outside of Washington, D. C., and whoever was there will never forget it.”

  “If you don’t get to the point I’ll open that damn bird cage and tie you under your Montezuma water wall!” Carole raised her voice and Lester thought it was his cue.

  “Bwana, White Devil! Bwana, White Devil!” he shrieked at the top of his little lungs.

  “Not now, Lester, Mother’s talking,” Adele called over her shoulder.

  He put his crest down and shifted his weight from foot to foot.

  “Okay, now in fairness to Maryann we have to admit she can sing a bit.”

  “Agreed,” Carole said.

  “She’s in ‘The Music Man’ playing a prim and proper character singing a song or two.”

  “She is acting.”

  “According to BonBon, when you’re working the tents you wear battery packs taped to some part of your body where it doesn’t show. You know, for the mikes. Maryann was wired for sound. She had an ariel running down the small of her back and another wire up to her lavalier.”

  “Sounds dirty but I thought a lavalier was something dangling from your neck with Kappa Alpha Theta at the end of it.”

  “Close enough. That’s what they call those little microphones you wear like a necklace. And they have switches so you can turn the sound on or off. If you’re going off stage for a costume change or whatever you turn your pack off otherwise everyone will hear what’s going on.”

  “I think I know what’s coming. She walked backstage, started with her blue language and then stepped back on stage as River City’s bastion of morality.”

  “Carole, it’s worse.” Adele’s sides were already heaving and she reached over and put her hand on Carole’s forearm, paused, then lowered her voice to try and keep from exploding. “Maryann exited all right and forgot to turn off her pack while she walked into the bathroom and let fly. It must have sounded like the ‘1812 Overture’ and she was making it worse by talking to herself about it while she was on the can. Honey, when that child walked back on the stage the entire audience suffered a fit of mass hysteria. And no one in the cast had the heart to tell her what happened for fear she’d be too mortified to continue. For the rest of the evening the audience laughed every time she even so much as breathed. Maryann thought she had comic genius because she received a standing ovation at curtain call. Wasn’t until she took her make-up off that the woman playing Marion the librarian, oh what’s her name, some Hollywood star exhumed from the fifties? Well, it’s not important. But the great lady felt upstaged by a bowel movement so she informed Maryann in no uncertain terms to turn her pack off or she’d shove it up her ass which would certainly put an end to her troubles.”

  “Adele, stop. You’re making my stomach hurt I’m laughing so hard.”

  The two of them made so much noise that Lester started up again.

  “Bwana, Bwana. White Devil. Balls, said the queen. If I had two I’d be king. If I had four I’d be a pinball machine. Bwana!”

  “Cool it, bird,” Adele sputtered trying to catch her breath.

  By now the community of birds was in an uproar and Lester sang, “Everybody’s doing it, doing it.”

  “Damn that LaVerne. She’s been teaching Lester vulgar rhymes and he loves them.”

  “I’m going into the bathroom to get a kleenex. After that tale I have to blow my nose and wipe my eyes.”

  “Carole, be sure your battery pack is turned off.”

  “I’m coming right back. No show tonight.”

  “Doing it, doing it, picking their nose and chewing it, chewing it.” Lester was wound up.

  “Stop it. Do you hear me? Stop it.” Adele shook her finger in his face and he shifted from foot to foot again, enjoying the attention.

  The mynah attempted a song but Lester outshouted him, “Doing it, doing it. Bwana. Ack. Bwana.”

  “Professor Hanratty, do something about this bird you inflicted upon me.”

  “Maybe if we go back to the coffee table and ignore them all they’ll settle down. Right, Lester?”

  Lester stopped his rhymes and was now into jungle calls.

  “That’s an amazing sound. I’ve never heard him do that before.”

  “For all I know that could be his natural call but with Lester nothing is natural. He probably picked it up off a Tarzan movie or LaVerne’s been coaching him again behind my back.”

  “I’m eating another one of these eggs.” Carole plucked one out of the white bowl with her left hand, keeping her Coke at the ready with her right. “So did Maryann quit in a moment of embarrassment?”

  “Maryann? Leave that role as the mayor’s wife? She opens the refrigerator door and does twenty minutes.”

  Lester had calmed down to an occasional screech although he muttered, “Balls, said the queen,” a few times in a low voice.

  “How’s your paper coming?” Adele inquired.

  “Sensational, I think. I’m essentially finished with it except for polishing the writing itself.”

  “Am I going to get to read it?”

  “Of course. Would I submit something for publication without the scrutiny of my most esteemed colleague?”

  “That’s right,” Adele answered, her mouth full of egg. “M-m-m.” She swallowed. “Today I got a call from that young guy down at University of Pennsylvania and he wants me to go on his dig in the Yucatan next summer, all expenses paid.”

  “Oh, Dell, that’s wonderful.” Carole put her Coke down, got up, and just missed slamming into the coffee table in her haste to get to Adele sitting in the huge wing chair. She hugged and kissed her. “God, that’s exciting. Have you told Verne?”

  “No, I thought I’d wait until she gets home and tell her in person. I know she’ll be happy for me but she won’t want to spend close to three months alone next summer.

  “Maybe she can take a few extra weeks off around vacation time and join you.”

  “That’s what I hope she’ll do. Since we know this early, she can make arrangements at work. They love her at Bloomies anyway and you know LaVerne, she’ll come back with a whole line of something hot from Central America. That girl’s a fortune teller. She senses what people will buy. She’s usually a year ahead of Women’s Wear Daily.”

  “True. While I’m up want anything from the kitchen? I’m getting another Coke.”

  “Yeah, bring me a Coke too and potato chips. I feel like shit food.
”

  “Okay.”

  Carole’s activities in the kitchen attracted Lester’s attention, particularly when she opened the noisy potato chip bag, and he chattered a whole row of something unintelligible although the last word was distinctly snot.

  “Here’s your drink. What’s that on the record player? With all the commotion around this place I didn’t hear it.”

  “LaBelle. Remember when LaVerne and I took you to the Baths? This was the group singing there.”

  “They were heaven,” Carole recalled. “What a wild night.”

  “How’s Ilse?”

  “Fine. She’s responsible for a big dance at the Firehouse tonight so she’s busy with that.”

  “Been about two months now, hasn’t it, that you’ve been seeing her? You getting serious?” Adele looked directly at Carole.

  “She’s likeable and you know the attraction between us is incendiary. I’m getting a crash course in women’s liberation though. I could do without some of that. Anyway, Adele, if I were serious you’d know about it.”

  “Sometimes people are in deeper than they realize.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s happening. I’m wary. There are times when it’s deja vu. Here she is saying something that’s absolutely a new thought to her but it’s the same thing we said or went through twenty years ago.”

  “I hate to admit it but there do seem to be phases, stages of life.”

  “I’m beginning to think we’re all conscripts of civilization.” A wry smile appeared on Carole’s face.

  Adele pointed a finger at her, “Conscripts or not, oppressed or free, honey, the conspiracy of the living is to help one another carry on.”

  “Adele, you’re marvelous.”

  Adele nodded. “Yeah, I even think so myself, sometimes.”

  “If Ilse were here she’d say you should think that all the time. Women have a low self-image, too little ego. We need to bring that out in each other. I get so bored with the stuff Ilse tells me to read—fallopian tubes, ovaries, uteruses. Jesus Christ, I’m not interested in my plumbing.”

  “I read the ‘Woman-Identified Woman’ paper you passed on to me. Made a lot of sense but then it was written by lesbians. I can only take the doomed-by-our-ovaries ladies for so long myself and most of the other stuff I’ve looked at all had that complaint quality about it. And the incredible emphasis on sex, gay or straight. Maybe it’s their age or maybe it’s that the more repressed you are the more interesting sex is as a topic. All I know is I don’t want to hear it.”

  Carole sighed, “I know. Half of the stuff she gives me to read is so badly written or run off so fuzzy I can’t make it out. Doesn’t apply to me or to you. I don’t feel inferior to men. I can’t remember ever feeling inferior. I knew as a kid that boys got all the breaks but it made me mad—just made me fight that much harder. I’m not sitting home with three bawling kids and I have other things to do besides complain about how awful men are. Bores the hell out of me.”

  “Surely since Ilse’s a lesbian herself she understands we’re different from housewives. I don’t know though—maybe there are housewives who are lesbians. Let’s face it, we pushed for careers. I suspect a straight woman our age with a good career feels a lot like we do.” Adele furrowed her eyebrows.

  Carole stalled a moment. “She thinks lesbians are the vanguard of the women’s movement but I think she sees all women as victims. She happens to see us as the strongest women. But she has an excuse to cover everybody’s failure or special bitch. It’s male supremacy or capitalism or racism. I get them mixed up.”

  “They are mixed up.”

  “Dell, I never was interested in politics and a women’s movement doesn’t make me any more interested in politics than before. I think politics is the framework of a nation, fundamental, but I’m interested in interior decorating not carpentry, know what I mean?”

  “We’d better look out or the house will fall down.”

  “Ha. You’re right but I still can’t work up enthusiasm for the subject. You know, I would have been head of the department if I weren’t a woman; hell, I’m still not a full professor. I hate all that. But what’s most important to me is to do my work and I happen to think that work is important. How can I do my work if I’m on some picket line or down at the women’s center answering telephones? You tell me?”

  “Obviously, you can’t. But I can tell you this,” Adele stated.

  “What?”

  “The ideas of the movement are getting to you. You wouldn’t be questioning yourself, your work, if you didn’t feel some pull.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” Carole waved her hand.

  “Uh huh.”

  “Adele, stop sitting there like a Cheshire cat.”

  “You don’t have to defend yourself to me but you ought to take a step back and see that Ilse is more important to you than you’re admitting and what she stands for is having its effect. To even consider the ideas is some fragile kind of involvement.”

  “Sometimes I think you know me better than I know myself.”

  “What are you doing on September twenty-ninth?” Adele shifted gears.

  “Nothing, why?”

  “How would you like a date with destiny?”

  “Sounds mysterious.”

  Try as she would Carole couldn’t ferret out of Adele what was going to happen on September twenty-ninth. All Adele would tell her was to get gussied up and be ready by seven in the evening.

  Carole stayed on an hour after that. She and Adele never ran out of things to talk about. Then she walked home, sorting her clothes out in her head. She promised Ilse she’d come to the dance tonight and she had no idea what to wear. But then she remembered it really wasn’t that important. Ilse didn’t pay much attention to her clothes. She was in too big a hurry to get them off.

  * * *

  Wooster Street lies in the heart of Soho where the narrow streets prevent the ugly, light-manufacturing buildings from running into each other. Many of the buildings were reclaimed in the late sixties, early seventies, by artists searching for cheap space, a commodity in ever-diminishing supply in the bursting city. The idea quickly caught on and inside those grimy exteriors flourished magnificent lofts enriched by the particular talent of their owners. The Firehouse sitting in the middle of the block had been converted for use by gay political groups.

  Carole sprung out of the fat Checker cab and thought she’d be run over by a fire truck—the place hadn’t been touched on the outside. The door hung open to let a little air in the three-story building. Music blared into the deserted street and bounced off the buildings in a muffled echo. The smoke inside was so thick Carole couldn’t see much except the two women behind a table at the door. She paid her two-dollar donation, ventured in, and gave up on ever locating Ilse. A winding, metal staircase was to her right, a literature table took up space underneath it and, behind the table, basement steps were jammed with people running up and down getting drinks. Beyond that was a long space mobbed with women. There were women in workshirts, women in sequined halters; there were women in old band uniforms and women in no shirts at all. The place was such a racial mix that Carole might have thought she was at a gathering of the United Nations’ employees except for the fact that they were all dancing with each other. That and how would the United Nations react to bare breasts?

  She’d never find Ilse but she might as well try. As she plunged through the gyrating hundreds she became acutely conscious of the fact that she was a good fifteen years older than the oldest of them.

  God, I’m glad I wore my jeans, she thought. She also wore one of LaVerne’s Nik-Nik blouses but considering the heat of all these pressed bodies and the new dress code, it didn’t matter. Her height and firm body turned many a head as she wandered through. The dim light softened her deep laugh lines and she could have passed for thirty-four, if she cared about looking young which she didn’t. Her first gray hair appearing at age twenty-three didn’t reconcile her to t
he inevitability of age. She remembered her mother joking that no one minded getting older, they minded looking older. But she didn’t understand that she was going to age like her mother did in Richmond, like Grams did up in the foothills before Winchester; not until Margaret’s death did she understand that simple fact.

  Bumping into the young bodies touching each other in celebration of the night, each other their youth, Carole slid back into time, toward a turning point in her own youth. Surrounded by strangers she was pulled back by a slumbrous undertow, back into a time when she knew no other world but the world of the young, innocence laced with ignorance. She returned to the moment when she learned what we each must learn. She was twenty-five years old, soon to be twenty-six.