Emily ventured into herself with time on her hands. She plucked her eyebrows and wore a red flannel nightgown. The telephone was under her skinny bed. She was missing her classes. She had a pile of books on her bed and turned from one to the other, fixing on the life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti with pictures. Then went back to her eyebrows, wanting to remove them all. When they met in the kitchen Edith asked Emily what she’d done to her eyebrows and what was she doing in bed all day? Edith kept busy. The phone under the bed rang and Emily was allowed to disappear, back into her room, back to bed. I think I’ve started the back-to-bed movement and I may never get up, she said to Christine, her best friend. Christine tweezed her hairline to make her brow higher. There were short black stubbles along the edge of her scalp that she pulled out as fast as she could get hold of them with tweezers. Emily was short, Christine tall, and when they went for walks they’d point out other best friends who looked roughly the way they did. They’d see themselves in all kinds of people. Christine found it hard to get Emily out of her room.
Edith’s large prewar apartment was kept dark, long halls past unused bedrooms always unlit. One time Emily walked right into Edith’s door, at the end of the hall, and knocked on it by accident with her head. She liked to watch TV with Edith. Edith would talk during the old movies and tell stories about her dead husband. “He could cry at movies,” she’d say, “he was a very unusual man.”
Lying on the oversized marriage bed that Edith would never sell, Emily listened to her heart’s content. They shared Royal Lunch crackers and beer, until Edith announced she had to get up early and Emily left the room, walking again in the dark to her own.
Emily read Rossetti for sentimental instruction; people felt differently from her. When she was reading Oblomov he appeared by the side of her bed. She had awakened in the middle of a dream and there he sat wearing a brown velvet smoking jacket. His legs were crossed and he stared at her, pointedly. She opened and closed her eyes. He didn’t disappear. She turned on the light and he was gone. Maybe I do stay in bed too much, she thought, and quit reading the novel.
When she fell back to sleep she dreamt she saw the ocean but all the water had disappeared. She was able to walk on the ocean floor to the other side of the world. She was able to see the underworld. At the other side of the world were groups of girls whose eyes were colorless, or were they blind? The phone rang. Christine insisted that she go to school and that after that they go out. She said Emily had to. Emily said yes and closed her eyes.
Christine picked her up on her motorcycle. When Emily put on the helmet she felt as if she were part of a comedy team. Emily had on her oversized men’s army pants that she’d been wearing every day for months, no underpants, a T-shirt, and black heels with silver filigree buckles. She always attended to her shoes. Christine repeatedly told her it didn’t matter what she wore because she had such a great face, but Emily wasn’t sure. Christine wasn’t a bad driver except when she was feeling suicidal, which she always announced to Emily just before they started off. Why do you tell me now, Emily wanted to say. Some of Emily’s fears advanced with age, and others receded, like Christine’s artificial hairline. She still didn’t like high speeds and going over hills, fearing that there wasn’t anything on the other side. As a child the very idea of an island frightened her. Because it just stopped, just like that, and the ocean could wash over it. Later that night she and Christine went to a bar; Christine found someone and took him home; Emily took herself home.
For her part Edith watched with neutrality the comings and goings of her young tenant. Since Emily wasn’t her daughter, Edith could be relaxed, and sometimes even sided with her against her parents. All Edith demanded was that Emily keep the kitchen clean, not use too many paper towels (Edith dried them to use each twice), turn off the lights, not use her telephone, and for the rest, it was her life, she said to herself. Her two children, particularly the younger daughter, who was the baby of the family but not the favorite, were contemptuous and slightly resentful of Edith’s friendship with Emily. Edith acted more or less like a regular person with someone of their generation. Emily recognized the awkwardness of her position, but pretended she didn’t. Edith bolstered her self-esteem by inviting Emily to parties where her children could see how well the two of them got along.
Christine had a new boyfriend who occupied her nights, but during her days she faithfully phoned Emily. She wanted Emily to meet him although she said, It’s not serious, as if it were a childhood disease. They set aside a Sunday afternoon, but Christine and the guy didn’t arrive on time. Then Christine called an hour later and said they’d be there in another hour, and then they didn’t show up again. It went like that all afternoon and into the night and Emily was able to lose herself in a book or do her reading for school. She thought about Nora.
On one of her nights out she met a writer named Richard who lived out of town and had a sensitive nature. They didn’t see each other often, which suited Emily, but they did write letters, which also suited Emily. He wrote about deprivation, movies, his novel, and boycotting, and she responded in kind. To one of her letters he sent a one-liner: “Touché, I really don’t understand, which is precisely why I presume I would say imagine such a lot.” In his next he talked about Carol and the man she had married, presumably rather than him, and the different meanings of his “motto of the month, noli me tangere.” Her answer was an impassioned letter meant to save what was moving palpably away from her. His next ended, “I had a strange feeling while reading your letter, one to which I am not used. It occurred to me that in terms of correspondence you are giving much better than you are getting.…” She denied this in hers.
Then his letters stopped. Just a dull, stupid silence, during which Edith and she watched more TV movies and ate more crackers, Edith having waited for her companion’s return. Emily threw herself into her books and was pleased to find comfort in a line from Tonio Kröger, “Only a beginner believes that those who create feel.”
Part II
Chapter 4
When Grace contemplated suicide she was about as serious as when she’d threatened to kill her mother. She toyed with the idea, much as she’d played ambivalently with her dolls, or had thought about losing her virginity, an act committed enough times so that she no longer kept count. Losing your virginity is not the same thing as losing your life, her friend Mark chided, even if the sex isn’t very good. Grace and Mark held their conversations in dark bars in Providence, Rhode Island, where Grace had moved to be near the art school, which she didn’t attend, but which Mark had graduated from, staying in Providence only because, he said, nowhere else in America do the gay bars meet this standard of excellence. Mark was just dying to become a transvestite and had already dyed his hair red, which made him look more like Howdy Doody than Rita Hayworth, Grace told him. Grace was waitressing for money, an occupation, Mark felt, meant only for the fallen. “You haven’t fallen far enough,” he told her, “you’re too young. You’d be heroic if you were older and more tired and working behind a Woolworth counter or in a cafeteria.”