I spun Mackenzie in the water and when I looked up, Blythe was blowing twin strands of smoke from her nostrils and frowning at us. “I could never have girls,” she said. “I don’t know how my mother did it. Three girls. Hell on Earth.”
“That’s awful,” I said. “My girls are sweet. They’re going to be my best friends someday.” Mackenzie squeezed my neck furiously and breathed her wet breath into my ear.
Blythe smiled, said, “I’m sure. But girls are just so needy. I had to sleep in my mother’s bed until I was almost sixteen. Plus, all the world wants to get into their panties, and you have to protect them, even from their own fathers and uncles and grandfathers. Boys can practically raise themselves. At least with them the Oedipus complex thing is simple. Screw Mommy, kill Daddy. Easy enough.” She laughed.
The four children all paused and looked at Blythe, but she lowered her glasses and winked at them and stretched like a great sleek cat. They returned to their play. Only I could have taken this seriously, and I wasn’t about to ask her to stop talking like this: nobody I knew was ever so reckless, and it filled me with a kind of ecstatic terror. When I looked toward the kitchen, I saw Pritch, Blythe’s husband, moving behind the window, wearing an apron and making dinner. He was a stocky man with the face of a Boston terrier, condensed features and bulging eyes, and I always expected his tongue to loll pinkly out of his mouth on a hot day. I feared him a little, for no reason I could figure out, and knew if he heard his wife saying such things before the children he would grow angry in his quiet, flushing way. I said, “Blythe. Maybe now’s not the time.”
“Oh, Harriet,” said Blythe. “We’ve both lived through all that feminist crap, probably even joined some of those clubs.” I blanched: I’d been the president of the Feminist Alliance in college. She said, “You were a lawyer, I did advertising. And here we are, housewives. No matter what we choose to do from now on, that’s what we are. We won’t be taken as seriously as the boys. We’ll be inferior, even if we could write rings around them. Which we can.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I believe the cream rises to the top.” I really did, back then.
Blythe carefully put out her cigarette. “Not in America, darling,” she said at last. “Here, the scream rises to the top. Home of the squeaky wheel, land of the knave,” and she laughed, pleased with her rhyme.
I went underwater to think. When I came up, I pushed my springy hair from my eyes. “Fine,” I said at last. “Then scream.”
Blythe gave a funny smile. “I intend to,” she said. She stood and walked to the diving board. Bouncing a little, she raised her arms and grinned, and then, despite all of my expectations to the contrary, she gave a rather clumsy dive, shaping herself like a candy cane and dropping deep with a splash.
I NEVER FELT COMPETITIVE WITH BLYTHE. I was skinny and small and plain, far poorer, far less charming. I’d never been to Europe; I’d never eaten escargot. My mother was from a small village in Latvia, my father only finished three months of college. Blythe’s family could recite all their ancestors since the Mayflower. I was not in the least the magnet for strangers’ eyes that Blythe was, with her stunning looks, her tight clothes.
Yet, for a long time, Blythe was a horrendous poet, writing song lyrics and thinking they were lovely. I had to tutor her, and I held tight to the small comfort of this superiority. In our class, I was the teacher’s pet, the one who could give moderate critique, the one whose poems he held up to the rest of the class as examples of anaphora, ellipsis, tone. And I would allow myself one tiny lick of judgment, like a child with a secret lollipop, when Blythe would sit across from me in the bar and breathe out the stories about her lovers; the undergraduate’s sweaty garret, the poetry teacher’s lust for clamps and rubber tubing, the way her shrink’s head resident (Blythe’s shrink refused to have sex with her) delighted in the cold examination table on his buttocks. I would never do any of these things myself, but did have a voyeur’s delight in hearing about Blythe’s doing them. In those days she seemed the distillation of life, and I felt some of my own returning, breath by breath, in her presence.
We grew close, then closer. L’amour fou, Sam called it, with a wry look on his soft face; folie à deux. One night in bed after a dinner party where the tiniest derogation had sent Blythe into a frenzy of sorrow (Blythe’s a princess, someone had said, and her whole face had crumpled), my husband assessed my friend with affectionate exasperation. “Like a Chihuahua,” he said. “Precious, trembling, breakable. She’s skinless, that girl.”
But I clicked my tongue and pulled my pillow from under his head. “You have it all wrong,” I said. “She’s something wild and sensitive and overbred. Like some Arabian stallion or something.”
“She can’t be a stallion, she’s a girl. You mean a mare,” said Sam, laughing.
But I was thinking of the way Blythe seized life with two greedy hands and gobbled, the bell-like laugh, the conviction in her voice when she spoke of her former sadnesses. I said quietly, “That’s where you’re wrong,” and wouldn’t respond even when Sam put a hand on my waist in apology.
Our class ended, the long winter passed, and in the spring Blythe and I both signed up for advanced poetry. Something subtle had been shifting in my friend for a few months: she had begun to come over during my children’s naps when I tried to clean the house, and sat at the table, twittering gaily about small things until Mackenzie and Susan woke and called to me from their rooms. One cold day she brought over a frosty fistful of crocuses, and while she talked her eyes followed me whenever I moved. I wondered about Blythe’s boys, if she’d left them alone, but knew that she had the money for a nanny. Not even Blythe, I hoped, would leave them alone, I thought, and hated myself for doubting her.
Then, the phone call in the middle of the night when, in the bolt-upright moment just before the phone rang, I knew it was Blythe, and that there was something wrong.
“Hello,” I said, but she was already talking, her voice vibrant in the dark.
“Harriet, Harriet, I’ve done it,” she said. “You have to see.” And before I could respond, I heard her drop the phone, her footsteps running from the room.
“Sam,” I whispered, putting the phone back in the cradle. “I think there’s something wrong with Blythe.”
“She’s crazy, dammit,” he muttered.
I had almost fallen back asleep when I heard the squeal of tires around a corner, and I ran downstairs in my pajamas. Through the screen I saw Blythe’s car ram the curb and narrowly miss the crabapple in our minuscule yard. The car ground to a stop and, its headlights still on, Blythe burst from the driver’s seat and hurried up the walk. Her hair was wild and her nightdress eerie in the stream of brightness and shadow. I cringed, expecting the lights to come on in the neighbors’ houses, but this was a place used to teenagers’ heavy metal past midnight, where neighbors inserted themselves into marital spats through the open windows of houses. Blythe’s behavior didn’t warrant a dog barking. She leaped the steps and thrust a paper in my hand. “Read it,” she said and gave a little crow. Then she grasped the poem back out of my hand and said, “No. I have to read it. It’s the performance that counts.”
Blythe stepped down onto the lawn and tilted the paper into the headlights’ beam. She let the paper drop so it floated down, and raised her arms so her sleeves were filled with light. And then she declaimed her poem at high voice. The neighbor’s beagle bayed along with her: she swept her arms up and out of the light, then back in, out, in. She was conducting the midges, the wind along the rooftops, the Schuylkill glimmering at the foot of the hill, I thought. Later I would read the poem itself and think, Eh, but in her mouth that night the words were full of needles and music.