Real conflicts arise when the girl grows older; as we have seen, she wished to establish her independence from her mother.
This was a story not a poem. Emily could use dialogue, direct argument between Christine and herself. But Emily wasn’t sure she knew what the argument was. Sometimes she thought that if Christine asked her for one more favor, she’d strangle her. Then she hated herself. Christine shouldn’t ask her so then she wouldn’t have to be put in that position. Anyway, she couldn’t say no. But there wasn’t a story, — there’s no plot in what’s not there. So much seemed not to be there, and yet normally she was very articulate, able to express herself with language, language her best ally when it wasn’t her worst enemy. Like now. What did Christine want from her or want in general. Who is Christine, she wrote, and felt disgusted. The unexpressed is stronger than the expressed, it must be, she thought. She looked up ineffable and wrote, My relationship with Christine skirts the ineffable. Except Emily didn’t wear skirts and why should she write about women who did? Could she use that figure of speech when it represented another kind of woman? Or, which woman was she writing about? Anyway, the thing didn’t have a plot, no drama, didn’t build or go anywhere. Emily comforted herself with the idea that plots were like skirts, you either did or you didn’t use things like that. Why do people want stories to go somewhere, she asked herself, and retired to bed.
In a well-regulated human heart friendship occupies an honorable position, but it has neither the mysterious splendor of love, nor the sacred dignity of filial devotion. And I never called this hierarchy into question.
Over Christine’s bed was an old photograph. It was torn from a book and much cherished by her. Two adolescent girls are in party dresses. They are playing blind man’s buff. One of the girls is standing at the side of the door, in the foreground. The other, blindfolded, is coming forward, one hand out in front of her, reaching, the other arm quiet at her side. She’s reaching and bent forward, as if misshapen by her ambition. She’s in a white dress that’s down to the floor, although the neckline is cut lower than one might expect for the period and her age. The other girl, the one who watches has drawn back her black dress, just slightly. There’s sunlight behind them. It’s a romantic image, poignant and eerie. The eerie quality is what made the photograph perfect. Christine wondered if everything romantic was eerie, unnerving, because of how it always ends. The girl who is blindfolded seems like she doesn’t know that, is innocent in white, while the girl in black, her hand cautiously holding her skirt, eyes wide open and looking, appears to know what the other doesn’t. The future is the foreground. When she made love to men below that picture, Christine held that irony inside her. Her efficiency did not extend to, in fact was circumvented by, her relations with men. Just what, she laughed to Emily, do they really want? Emily wanted a copy of the picture, but Christine didn’t want her to have it. It was enough that they borrowed each other’s clothes and books. I have to have some things for myself, Christine thought.
This time the dream Emily told no one was set in the American West. The girl who was and was not Emily — in it she says, adamantly, You’ve got me wrong, I’m not Emily — is wearing a bright red dress, very long, trailing on the floor behind her. The red dress is cut perfectly to her perfect body and one by one the men lift that long red dress and enter her. Her arms and legs are tied.
Woman is offered inducements to complicity.
Christine is driving me crazy, Emily thought after waking up with trouble from that dream. She always makes me feel I’ve done the wrong thing. I can never please her. She’s more beautiful. I can’t trust her. Yet she felt she had no reason not to trust her. These thoughts weren’t exactly thoughts. Emily didn’t want Christine to meet Keith. She decided they would fall in love and then she would have to stop speaking to both of them. She pictured the scene: walking in on them in flagrante. Christine jumps up and runs toward her, while Keith manages his embarrassment by lighting a cigarette almost casually. These kinds of thoughts were intrusions that Emily felt were willed by forces outside her. Hers and not hers. Just like the dirty dreams. The line between fantasy and reality can be walked like a tightrope, and often Emily could not read between the lines. It made reading Kafka effortless, things just as they are. She felt that both of them were realists because they didn’t have to distinguish between kinds of experience. Of course she recognized herself as a paranoid and it made her feel modern and better adjusted to whatever was to come. Her story about herself, Keith, and Christine continued: the two girls were looking at each other in the mirror, so that to the other there were two images to see, the real and the reverse image of the real. Each girl spoke to the mirror image, in reverse, and the person in front of that reflection. They had a normal conversation, but inside the person and beneath the image there was the reverse, mirrored by the mirror. The reverse was apparent to the other, and not the self. Emily thought that whatever she was thinking, Christine might be thinking too.
Papa used to say with pride: Simone has a man’s brain; she thinks like a man; she is a man. And yet everyone treated me like a girl.
When Emily returned to making notes for her paper, it was a relief. The Puritans were in Vietnam, another holy mission, all for their, the other’s, good. Of course it had to do with money — capital, she wrote, hearing the word in syllables — but in the heartland, they’re not thinking about money, they’re thinking about God and doing right, evil Commies. She’d have to clean up this paper and put it in the right language. If I ever graduate, she thought, it’s because I’ll have agreed to this language. She still couldn’t tell if she was learning anything. That’s why it took her forever to finish one of these papers. That should be obvious, she thought. It surprised her why things were obvious to her and not to someone else. Christine and she were not really surprised by each other’s connections. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell Christine about her dreams. Emily had read that in England people who had seen the Loch Ness monster called themselves experienced monster-watchers. You can’t restrain your monsters ail the time, they slip out, awkward, angry, and ugly, to embarrass and humiliate. Emily got humiliated as fast as she got red under a hot sun. She turned pale when she’d made a mistake, let something slip, and felt really dead from embarrassment. Those little deaths — the one she hadn’t experienced in sex — she had experienced through mistakes, errors, flaws. She tried to observe herself, to contain that which might reveal too much. She could see a kind of parallel between her containment policy and those global efforts on the part of her government, but to bring that into her paper would be another line of thought again.
Keith phoned just as she wrote, Fame and paranoia are transformations, convoluted forms of salvation and sainthood. I think I can prove that, she muttered as she picked up the receiver. Their record was selling, but he didn’t have any money. Puritans wanted to conform and have the world conform to their idea of what God would want. Keith kept talking and she kept writing, pausing only to say that she’d have dinner with him and could lend him some money, if he’d pay her back soon. Perhaps if she wore a long red dress. She hated that thought almost as much as Christine hated feeling undressed no matter what she wore. Not exactly undressed, but raw. Like an uncooked egg. Christine’s soft-boiled egg had been much too runny, and she ate it with annoyance. When she was a child her mother would put pieces of bread into a soft egg, so that the yellow was almost soaked up and she could eat it. Christine couldn’t bring herself to do it, baby herself that way. Life without mother had to be categorically different from life with mother. She had just spoken with her mother, who had again asked for a raise and then in anger put her eyeglasses on upside down. They laughed about it, her mother’s ineptitude, and it would be a good story to repeat to Emily. Emily, she thought, would love it.