Emily wrote a poem about receiving and sending letters that was so romantic it surprised her. She was aware of this tendency in herself, but it was usually mixed like a salad dressing with a lot of other tendencies and wasn’t so naked. The naked truth: the oil separates from the vinegar. She laughed and shoved it into the drawer she optimistically called To Be Published, and shut it. She never showed her work to anyone, although she didn’t consider herself a secret writer. She said she wasn’t ready and squirreled her poems away keeping them to herself even keeping them from Christine. It was another thing they fought about. You’re not a writer, Christine intoned, if your work sits in a drawer and no one sees it. When it’s ready I’ll show it, Emily would respond, as if her drawer were an oven in which her poems were baking. Christine and Emily fought and made up, fought and made up. Generally, they fought about intangibles, the ineffable. When Emily realized that she hadn’t seen one of her very closest friends in nearly a year, she startled, called her, and made a date. Christine acted like a lover betrayed. Emily went anyway. You don’t have to obey her, her other friend told her. I don’t understand what she wants from me, Emily added, to which her friend countered, What do you want from her?
Are we lesbians and we don’t know it, Emily deliberated when walking home, walking fast to speed up her thoughts. Her mind sorted things back and forth, a shovel digging up stuff and separating it into discrete piles. Except nothing was discrete. She’d been too demanding. On the other hand, I can’t stand it when she disappears for weeks with a new guy. That means I’m possessive about her too. She felt as if she were in a cave and she had always hated the dark. She visualized herself: a child, lying in bed, the blanket up to her eyes, no light in the hall, no light anywhere. What bothered her most was that there was no way to determine right and wrong, or to determine if those categories applied to relationships. She supposed that this was what was meant by mystery. They made up, they made up as they always did. They spent as much time as they could together. Movies, bars, school. They went to see Persona. When the two actresses’ heads merged, Emily screamed. Several people turned to look at her. You’re so emotional, Christine teased. Me? Emily asked, defensively, deciding in her mind that poets should be, a thought she kept to herself hopefully.
For Emily was hopeful, it was astonishing how much hope she had, Edith reflected as she washed the dishes, carefully drying the paper towels though she knew Emily thought that was cheap. Emily hadn’t grown up during the Depression. Edith always thought that thought and sometimes decided that that thought might be too convenient for all the questions it was supposed to answer. Well, it certainly was a part of it, she continued to herself as she put each dish away in the yellow cupboard. This was a rent-controlled apartment and she blessed the day she’d moved in, a young woman, with a husband and two small children, over twenty years ago. Finding herself staring at the cupboard, she shut it, conscious that the way her arm moved now was the way it moved then. She was never going to move. She could be very stubborn; her husband could have attested to that. And her children. “They’ll have to take me away,” she had said to her husband, who had been a sociologist. “You can’t stop change, Edith,” he had answered. “I’m not stopping it, I’m just not going to be a party to it.” Then, she remembered, he’d touched her on the arm and laughed. He had such a wonderful laugh, Edith thought, and left the kitchen,
“Makeup”—Christine smiled—“makes some of my imperfections more obvious. More perfect.” They had just eaten an enormous bowl of salad and tuna fish. “I like you without makeup,” said Emily, who wore less of it, or none. Emily was considering letting her eyebrows grow in. First, she thought she looked too much like Bette Davis playing Queen Elizabeth. Second, they looked like parentheses on her forehead. “I look like a clown.” “Of course you don’t,” Christine insisted. “Your face is perfect.” They smiled at each other over the big bowl. “Dare I eat a peach or wear my trousers rolled?” Emily mimicked. Christine smiled again, encouragingly — Emily had had a man over the night before—“let them grow,” she urged, as if growing one’s eyebrows signified activity.
It was Valentine’s Day, a fact the two young women noted, cynically, over the tuna fish, mentioning having received valentines when they were young, in grade school, Emily remembering her love for Peter. Dressing up. Kissing games. My mother taught me never to lie. She’d received this day a card from Richard, who was in Italy, driving around the hill towns. With someone, probably, she commented to Christine. Emily did not want to talk about last night. It was disappointing. Oddly enough, Edith had had a man over the night before too. Emily had gone in the back door — the maid’s entrance — and Edith had used the front one, as she always did, so, in a sense, they had missed each other. Emily heard a man’s voice in the morning. Edith saw a cigarette on her dining-room table. Both were made aware, but neither spoke of it. It was something they didn’t enter into with each other. Emily would never discuss sex with Edith, that was reserved for Christine. The subject with Edith was skirted; she amused herself with the image. We pull in our skirts so as not to appear like flirts. Emily never wore skirts anyway, which her mother found difficult to digest, like Mexican food. “And she always wears the same things,” she complained to her husband. “Those army pants that are falling apart. And she never tells us about her boyfriends. If she has them.” Her parents couldn’t decide which was worse — her having them or not having them. Emily’s father threw up his hands like an evangelist enlisting God’s aid. “It’s not normal,” he said. Both parents shook their heads in unison.
“My mother walked right out of the room when I walked in.” Emily was reporting to Edith about her latest visit with her parents. “She couldn’t stand the way I looked.” Emily started to cry then stopped, suddenly, just turning it off. A leaky faucet in Edith’s bathroom appeared like a cartoon in the older woman’s mind. She didn’t want to be emotionally involved, she kept telling herself, using those exact words. I do not want to be emotionally involved. The two women walked into Central Park and sat on a large grey boulder that stuck up from the ground, a tough couch for Emily’s sorrows. That’s how life is, Edith kept thinking, she’ll get used to it. Edith restrained herself from saying that your mother can’t help it. She had parents too. But she didn’t say it because she didn’t want to be an apologist for parents. Stretched before her she saw long lines of children and their parents and then their parents and their parents. “It must have been awful at the very beginning of time,” she said, ending her vision. “I’m just thinking out loud,” she told Emily.