While Grace was determined not to have children, she was equally dead set against remaining a virgin. She had passed through some of the preliminaries described to Celia as no big deal. She didn’t really care that her reputation was shot to hell, like her souvenir target from shooting live bullets at Coney Island. She wasn’t, after all, going to live in Brooklyn her whole life, about that she was certain. She chose an older guy who had graduated from high school, gone early to Vietnam, and returned to the neighborhood, a man, she thought, he’d have to be. He was necessarily different from the other boys and wouldn’t talk about the war, so he, too, had a secret. Her intensity was equal to his, if coming from a place where he had never fought. She was intent upon showing abandon, by ceding herself to the enemy, and very deliberately surrendering, without knowing the terms of the peace. She told Celia that she hadn’t bled.
Her last winter in high school was as cold a one as she could recall. But even on the coldest days, visiting the zoo in Central Park was a relief, a small vacation from, her crowd and her reputation. It was so cold that the skin on her ankles dried, stretching too tightly across the bone like leather. The skin cracked and bled, something Grace imagined happened only to old people. After a hot chocolate in the cafeteria, Grace walked toward the polar bears lying in the winter sun, their massive coats keeping them warm. As nature intended, Ruth might’ve put it thought Grace, as she pulled her coat closer to her. She walked past them, into the park.
Everything in the park seemed sharp, crisp, enclosed by the cold blue sky. The landscape was a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces could all break apart if touched. From nowhere fifty or more stray cats moved toward her in a group. They were skinny and sick. She thought they might devour her, and though it was crazy, she ran back to the cafeteria and bought as many frankfurters as she had money for, returning to the cats who were waiting, it seemed, for her. She tore the meat and bread into little pieces and threw the food to them. Tribute, or bribe, or sacrifice, the pieces were gone in no time. Turning to leave, Grace saw an old woman coming down the path. She said she fed them every day, that the park wanted to get rid of them, kill them. I won’t let them, the frail white-haired woman declared. The ASPCA really hates animals, she told Grace. Had Grace been on speaking terms with her mother, she might have told her that.
Celia applied to college, but Grace’s grades were low, and it looked like she might not get into one. I may become an artist or an actress, she told Celia. I love movies. And circuitously hearing about Grace and the Vietnam vet, her brother had a talk with her in which he warned that giving it away wasn’t going to get her anywhere. “You did it when you were my age,” she said. “I’m a guy,” he said, “it’s different.” “Fuck difference,” she said.
It was during that same cold winter, in her seventeenth year, that Grace held a kitchen knife in her hand and pointed it at her mother. Undoubtedly this is a scene repeated in many households, or so Grace reasoned, for she decided it wasn’t so strange to want to kill one’s mother. She never leaves me alone. When Grace lifted the knife — she was at the sink — Ruth stopped yelling. The effect on Ruth was immediate and in a way funny. Grace had never seen her mother so much at a loss. The look satisfied Grace and she set the knife down slowly, her eyes fixed as sternly as she could make them on her mother’s startled face. Grace stared hard at Ruth like a gunfighter in a showdown.
It’s one thing for her to yell fuck you at me, Ruth told her husband, it’s another thing for her to threaten me with a knife. But nothing at all was done to Grace, whose behavior had pushed her in her parents’ eyes, into a territory that transformed her from just bad to perhaps crazy. What punishment could fit the crime of attempted matricide? These weren’t Greek queens and kings whose realms were at stake. These were middle-class white people with problems. Grace felt that she had made a lasting impression.
Chapter 3
Hilda was Emily’s second piano teacher. How Emily knew Hilda was a lesbian, though she was only eight and not living among sophisticates, is something she’s not sure about even today. How she learned was more mysterious than what she learned.
Hilda’s partner taught piano also and her name sounded like Mr. Mars when said quickly. She wore grey suits, had short white-grey hair, and her face was round and soft, with a benevolent smile. She drove the old Dodge that waited for Hilda after lessons. To Emily the car and the partner were one.
Emily loved the two piano teachers, particularly Hilda. She wore delicate blouses and full skirts, whose fabrics, in many different colors and patterns, were often like fields of flowers around her arms and legs. She didn’t seem to try to match things, it was her way of being natural. She was tall with big breasts and given to hugging Emily’s father to her impressive chest where his head would land with embarrassment. He’d blush and she’d say how adorable he was.
The whole family liked Hilda, who was strange and remarkably white-skinned. The skin on her hands was so pale that her veins showed blue like rivulets. Her nails were cut short and round, and looked as if they never touched anything even though she played the piano every day. Hilda visited only once a week, but she was important to Emily. For one thing she was different from her family.
Emily’s family were FDR Democrats. Hilda appeared at one lesson wearing a rhinestone pin, made of initials, on her flowered blouse. Emily asked, “What is that?” “I — K—E,” Hilda announced. “I — K—E”? Emily repeated, not putting it together. “Ike, Ike,” Hilda pronounced vigorously. Emily was stunned. Hilda was a Republican. She even wrote songs for Ike. So did her partner with a man’s name when said fast. How could she be for Ike? Ike and not Adlai. Disenchanted, Emily withdrew somewhat from her piano teacher. This heresy, not Hilda’s affection for women, put a first wall between girl and the woman. Emily continued to take piano lessons but began to think that Hilda might not know everything.
No one had ever mentioned lesbianism to Emily; it didn’t exist as good or bad to her. But Republicans — her family was definitely against the Republicans who, she imagined, must be bad, like the Yankees. Emily had become a Dodger fan when she was three and one of her playmates asked what team she liked. She didn’t have a team yet and asked her father, who said he was for the Dodgers.
Emily’s best friend Nora also took lessons from Hilda. The best friends met when they were five. It was, in Emily’s memory a formal first meeting. They stood cautiously behind their respective mother’s dresses and said hello. In what seemed like no time they were best friends living, as they did, just around the corner from each other in houses that were almost the same painted in different colors. It’s funny that they met behind their mother’s dresses, for it was then a literal truth that they stood in their mothers’ shadows. The two women were friends for a while and then Emily’s mother stopped speaking to Nora’s mother because of something she said. Emily never knew what.
When they were five Nora was not yet homely and Emily did not seem unsure of herself. Though it was Nora who struck people as uncertain and nervous, it was Emily, more often than not who apologized to Nora when they fought. At a young age Emily saw herself as slavish but didn’t know how to keep Nora’s love.
At six Nora used to hide under the kitchen table, covering her heart with both hands, expecting it to stop at any moment. She feared death early; she was precocious that way. Emily used to stand near the kitchen table, looking down, while Nora huddled under it. She tried to convince her that she wasn’t going to die. Nora’s parents sent her to a doctor. Her mother waited outside his office. After a while Nora stopped hiding under the table and clutching her heart and her parents said she didn’t need to see the doctor anymore.