The teacher walked across campus toward where her car was parked. She was going to have her hair trimmed. Sometimes all her existential crises became focused on her hair; she would look in the mirror and see it zooping out all over the place and say in a level voice, “I don’t think that I can go on.” And then she would try to rescue her life, herself, by a visit to a beauty parlor.
She passed a student she had had last year, and smiled, said hello. The student, however, looked at her blankly, as if he’d never seen her before in his life. How is it, thought the teacher, that I can remember this guy — his first name, his last name, his ottava rima about “the chicken pox of the soul”—and he seems not to recall me at all?
In the hairdresser’s I smile at Yvette. I assume she remembers me, she’s done my hair before, but she seems to smile right through me, no ripple of recognition. Yet we’d worked up a kind of intimacy once, hadn’t we? We’d talked about men and ovaries and the effect of smoking on hair follicles. Now she doesn’t seem to know me from Adam. She massages my scalp, just as she did then. “What will it be?” she says. She runs her fingers through and through my hair.
At night my insomnia lies next to me, on the floor by the bed, like a cousin come to visit.
“I know you’re really crazy about me, kid,” I say to Darrel, who is also there and who doesn’t seem to notice the cousin. Darrel is on his side, turned away from me. I rest my head on his hip. “I know ya really are.” I have worked up a fake voice for this. It’s part Mae West, part pain reliever commercial. His eyes are closed. He turns to hold me, whimpers softly, then lets go, says nothing, rolls with all the blankets and slips promptly into sleep. I feel as if I’m in a war, lying in a trench with a dead person next to me, while the sky peels open in bright browns and reds like surgery.
Already we have settled into the tomb and heavy sleep of premature marriage. We brush our teeth in front of each other. We floss before bed.
I clasp my bare breasts to make sure that they’re still there.
Oh, where is the snooze of yesteryear?
Where are the negligées downtown?
II
“You have a choice,” she told her class. “The whorish emptiness of lies or the straightlaced horrors of truth.” On the board she wrote the words horror, nothingness, onomatopoeia.
There are reasons why Darrel and I don’t talk about the war, not the least of which is my own past. While he was off fighting and choking and hurling cognac against walls, I attended one campus sit-in, chanted “Hell no we won’t go” a lot, and then went home and read Mademoiselle magazine. I never threw things, I never said “pig,” I voted, my first time ever, for Humphrey, which later I was told was consummately unhip (“Benna, he was Johnson’s stoolie!”). Two friends of a friend of mine were trotting around New York with pocketbooks packed with homemade bombs and leaving them at government buildings. I, too, hated the war. But I drank too much beer and took midday pajama naps. I memorized passages from Romeo and Juliet. I actually liked the song “Cherish.” I had a loose yarn bag with a long shoulder strap and in it I kept only Kleenex, a comb, blusher, and a pack of Salems. On our way to Woodstock my college boyfriend and I got stuck in traffic and never made it to the festival. We turned around and went home, had supper at a dairy bar. To this day when I think of the sixties, I think of ersatz jazz renditions of “A Taste of Honey,” of Sergio Mendes’s “Fool on the Hill,” of dairy bars with vanilla egg creams.
In the windows of health food stores there are advertisements for Vietnams. Or so it seems at first glance — as if whole decades were just odd, imperfect anagrams of one another. George watches Dan Rather and at night asks me about the Vitamin War Memorial in Washington. “Vietnam,” I correct her, and then I explain it to her carefully, the birds and bees of America. “Hush,” I say afterward and hope she’ll go to sleep.
I’m just checking on her before I go to bed, but she hears me and stirs. “Mom?” She’s all creamy and rose with sleep. Her nightgown smells of Tide. “Can I have some honey milk?”
Honey milk is what I make when the weather gets cold: warm up some milk and add honey. “All right,” I say after some hesitation. I know sometimes I’m not a good parent. “But then you have to go to bed for good.” Milk, I rationalize, is a mild soporific.
“Goody,” says George, leaping out of bed with astounding energy. Maybe she was never asleep at all.
Downstairs we sit at the kitchen table and drink honey milk, me and the little minker mumper. She holds the mug with two hands and it covers most of her face. She talks into it. “We’re going to Beruba after Christmas, right?” I can barely hear her.
“Maybe,” I say. I’ve been halfheartedly to travel agencies, checking out package deals. I’ve priced the bus versus the train to New York, the cab to Kennedy. I’ve scrounged around and finally located an unused passport and my birth certificate in a shoebox full of appliance warranties.
George’s attention span is flibberty. She yawns. “Mom, what can I be for Halloween?”
When I was thirteen I bought a long black fall and went as Joan Baez. No one in Tomaston had ever heard of her. She was only just starting out in Boston cafés then, had only two albums out. Everyone thought I was a witch.
Gerard smiles at me. “You could make a belt out of old spice tins and go as a waist of thyme.”
“Thanks.” I’m drinking too much coffee, I can feel it.
“Or stick yourself all over with romaine and go as a honeymoon sandwich.”
“What’s a honeymoon sandwich?”
“Lettuce alone.” He slaps the table and guffaws.
“These are pretty bad, Gerard.”
“You could get a giant gray veil and go as an innuendo.”
“I could Scotch tape pretentious words and literary references to a fuzzy sweater and go as a book review.”
“That’s good,” he says, all positive reinforcement. “We could both dress up as puppets and sing ‘Zing Went the Strings of My Heart’ and ‘You Made Me Love You.’ Then we could beat each other up.”
“What would that be, besides weird?”
“Punch and Judy Garland!”
“Oh, my god.” I have to put my head down in my arms to get control of myself, I’m suddenly laughing that hard. “What’s wrong with us?” I’ve come back up for air. Hank is looking our way and smiling, shaking his head.
“Or,” Gerard is saying, “you could dress all in green and sing ‘In the Ghetto.’ ”
“Good grief, who would that be?” I can barely get the words out.
“Elvis Parsley!” Gerard’s pleased he’s entertaining me. My laughing is noiseless like pain. I accidentally knock over a water glass.
“God, Gerard. I think I’ll just cover myself with spots and go as a social leopard. Something like that.”
“What do you think of my villanelle?” asks Darrel. “Do you like it?”
“I do. I like it,” I say. One of the repeating lines is about the tongue of the tongue. I can’t read poetry anymore. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what it means. Darrel glances sheepishly up at me from beneath his eyebrows. He does this on purpose. “What do you think of this line here?” He points to the second line of the poem. It has a nice image in it, an ant trying to get to the other side of a bathroom mirror. He’s good.
“You’re good,” I tell him.
“I have a series of poems about insects in your bathroom.”
“You’re kidding. You’ve found inspiration in my bathroom?” Insects, yes, but inspiration? Among the plumbing and the creams and the tweezers and the friction pour le bain? In that embarrassing shrine to my insecurities? In that church of What Is Wrong with My Body? How could he have done it? Though once, now, I recall I did see something remarkable in the bathroom: A big fly buzzed right through a spider web and instead of getting caught in it, the fly ended up dragging the spider along on about six inches of spider silk torn from the web; they flew around the bathroom like that together all day, the spider a kind of astonished kite trailing behind. The whole thing seemed emblematic of something — though I wasn’t sure what.