Authors: Rachel Ingalls
The doctor’s name was Morse; she was married to another doctor. They had three children, two secretaries, a nursemaid, a cook, and a cleaningwoman who came twice a week. One of the daughters was in a lower grade at Alma’s school. Mrs Morse was intelligent, stylish, a first-rate diagnostician of physical symptoms, and someone you couldn’t talk to. Alma said she was fine.
‘I can see that,’ the doctor said. ‘I wish all my patients were so healthy.’
Alma smiled, put on her clothes and headed for the door. She didn’t ask any of the questions she might have put to an older woman who was also a doctor, for instance:
If
a
woman
gives
up
her
child
voluntarily,
do
you
think
she’s
really
loved
it?
If
she
didn’t
love
it,
why
did
she
carry
it
for
nine
months?
If
all
that
business
is
as
natural
as
people
say,
is
it
natural
to
take
a
baby
from
its
mother
for
any
reason
whatever?
And
is
it
right
that
a
doctor
should
be
helping
to
say
that
a
childless
couple
is
able
to
take
care
of
a
baby
better
than
its
own
mother,
just
because
they’ve
got
more
money
than
she
has?
Do
you
think
she
could
be
pushed
into
giving
it
away
and
then
change
her
mind,
so
she’s
been
thinking
about
me,
so
that
maybe
she
wants
me
to
come
look
for
her
after
all?
Do
you
think
she
was
bad,
and
that
she
got
pregnant
because
she
was
just
no
good?
Am
I
bad
to
want
to
sleep
with
Bruce:
because
we
were
brought
up
as
brother
and
sister,
even
though
we
were
never
really
related?
And
if
we
did,
is
it
true
what
they
say
–
does
it
hurt
a
lot,
can
it
make
you
sick
if
you
do
it
too
much:
what’s
it
like?
Bruce already knew what it was like. He’d wanted to find out without becoming involved, so he’d asked a friend of a friend and he’d made an appointment at a motel with a call-girl. After the first few times, he’d come to an arrangement with her, to see her once every two weeks. It wasn’t enough, but he couldn’t afford anything more. He hated her, yet she didn’t behave hatefully to him; she was ordinary. He couldn’t believe how matter-of-fact she was – almost apathetic. It was as if it meant nothing to her, as they said murder meant nothing to
psychopaths
.
His real mother might have been just like that.
He had dreams about Alma. In his dreams they made love and it was wonderful. He also, once, dreamt about Bess. But he didn’t want to have such dreams. His family was his family; it was important that they should stay the way they were. And it was even more vital that his feelings about them should be of a certain nature: filial or brotherly. If they changed, or if he himself did, the idea of the family itself could be altered.
When everybody at school started going steady, he knew that he’d have to have a date, too. He chose the class tramp from the year above him – a coy, lecherous girl with a gobbling laugh, abundant dyed hair and a weasel-like face. He used a
contraceptive
, as he always had, from the beginning. He said it was because he’d once had gonorrhea and there was a lot of it around. The real reason was that he wanted to be sure he never got a girl pregnant. She told him to take off the rubber because she’d had everything, so she was immune to all that stuff. Then he said that he really wore it because there was insanity in his family, but it skipped a generation: he was okay, but his kids were going to be crazy; it was sad, but true. She believed him until, apparently, she discussed the matter with somebody else. Then she said: Come on, his Pa was all right, wasn’t he, and nobody ever heard of insanity like that anyway, that skipped. He blew up and said, ‘Thanks for talking about me with all your
friends.’ And he told her that the reason why he wore a contraceptive was that at least twenty other guys had warned him: if you go down with her, it’s like sticking your prick into the town sewer, so watch out. She screamed and hit him in the face. He picked her up and threw her out of the car so that she had to walk home in the dark. They weren’t on speaking terms after that.
Alma started going out with boys, but she was shy with them. She didn’t want anyone but Bruce. She developed a friendly, joking manner that discouraged romanticism and if that didn’t work, she’d just say that she was old-fashioned and intended to save herself for marriage. She started to believe it, although she listened eagerly to what all the other girls she knew had to say about sex. She made up a story that satisfied them, too: she claimed that she’d had a dream about meeting a man four years after highschool and that he would be the one she married. She said that she’d know straight away, and she also knew that none of the boys at school was the right one.
One of her friends, named Penny, said, ‘I don’t see how you can be so sure. I mean, even if you find Mr Right like that and you get married in a silver cloud and all, why’s it going to stop you having some fun now?’
‘It wouldn’t be fun if he isn’t the right one,’ Alma said.
‘Sure it would.’
She didn’t believe it. She was convinced that you had to be in love. She became moody and short-tempered. She cried a lot. She lost weight and decided that she was going to be a dancer. Bess and Elton agreed to pay for lessons.
*
Bruce took up the violin. He said that he wanted to develop some minor skill that he could use in later life to annoy the neighbors.
‘That doesn’t sound like a very good reason, dear,’ Bess said.
‘That’s because it’s a joke,’ he told her patiently.
He’d saved enough to buy a fiddle that he’d seen in a pawnshop. Bess wanted to know what he’d been doing in a part of town where there were pawnshops. She didn’t ask where he’d managed to get hold of the money. He always had money. In the
winter he shoveled snow, in the summer he mowed lawns. He’d do deliveries, fix things that were broken, feed pets while their owners were away. He always had some job or other, often several. And he found himself a music teacher by looking through the yellow pages and phoning up one number after another: asking questions, until he’d decided which teachers he wanted to talk to. He settled on a man named Schneider.
He took a lesson twice a week. No one in the family ever met Mr Schneider but from the sound of Bruce’s practicing at home, he seemed to be able to teach a lot of music in a short time. A long while later, Bruce told Alma that Mr Schneider was a musicology student, only a couple of years older than he was himself – still in his teens. It had amused him to see how everyone, without knowing anything about the man, believed that a music teacher should be ancient, white-haired and, probably, someone who spoke English with a thick accent.
* * *
After school Alma would ride all the way across town to do dance exercises in a small room over an art gallery. There was a bar and nightclub next door, a fact that bothered Elton and Bess. But Alma wasn’t afraid. She immersed herself in her afternoon practice the way a novice would sink her personality into the formalities of religious training. When men spoke to her on the street or made more determined attempts to pick her up, she took no notice. They tried frequently; she’d turned into a
good-looking
girl. And the clothes she wore, the way she did her hair, made her seem older than she was.
What she couldn’t discuss with her parents she could talk about directly with Bruce. She told him, ‘You know how I feel. I never said it, but you’re the one I want. I used to see you going out with that girl and I hated her so much. You could have gone out with me. You like me: I know that.’
‘I love you, Alma,’ he said.
‘To marry? Or, we don’t have to get married. We could just sleep together.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because maybe you aren’t my sister, but I feel like you are.’
‘Isn’t it ever going to change?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘And you’d want me to marry somebody else?’
‘Yes, of course. Eventually.’
‘But I don’t want anybody else. I want you.’
‘You’ll find somebody. Listen, if you just want a guy to screw around with, there’s the whole world to choose from. But somebody to understand you and give you support in what you think, and be really close to you – that’s different.’
‘That’s marriage,’ Alma said.
‘Are you kidding? Marriage is the in-laws and the
Thanksgiving
dinners and thank-you notes and bringing up the children.’
‘But you start with love, and working together as a team.’
‘I can work with men. I don’t need that kind of thing. What I need is somebody to be my sister.’
‘I could be both.’
Bruce said, emphatically, no: it wouldn’t work to mix things like that. You had to be one or the other. It could ruin everything.
She thought he was right, but she wanted to be the one who wasn’t the sister. It didn’t occur to her that the whole question of being a sister or a lover, having a real parent and an adoptive parent, feeling love or desire or friendship, was one that could be with her all her life and to which there might not be an answer.
Her teacher, Merle Singer, told Bess that Alma was her best pupil, although she had started so late, and that if she wanted to, she could make her living as a dancer. Three of her pupils, including Alma, had what she considered the perfect physical proportions for a dancer. Some teachers, she knew, held the opinion that the shape of the body determined the nature of the dance, but she had seen too many exceptions – cases where the shape was not conventionally pleasing but the movement was good. Of all her promising students Alma alone stood out. The two who, according to the rulebook, should have equaled her were ungainly and without musicality. When Alma danced, her
smallest gestures were charged with meaning and beauty. You couldn’t explain something like that simply on the evidence of measurement and ratio. She had the talent. But – just as important – she had the good health, stamina, will-power and concentration to succeed in competition against other girls who might have had better training.
‘If you want to go on,’ Bess said to Alma, ‘and really try for a career, we’ll help you. It means a lot of money at this stage, so think carefully. Merle is sure you can do it, but she talked about the drawbacks too: it’s a short working life. You wouldn’t have the time or energy for anything else. It’s easy to injure yourself – the professional ones sprain and break things all the time. And getting to the top and being famous means a whole series of lucky chances that just might not ever happen. So, you think hard about it.’
Bess was proud of Alma. Bruce had the brains; that was a good thing for a boy, but he could be cold, secretive and unforgiving. Neither she nor Elton knew all the time what he was up to. Alma shared herself. And she’d turned out to be beautiful-looking, Bess thought – just like some kind of foreign actress, but underneath it a really nice, down-to-earth girl. Other mothers had daughters who were drinking hard, who were going to bed with just anybody and were being arrested for dangerous driving and all kinds of wild behavior: they didn’t care what they did. Elton said you had to blame the parents, but Bess wasn’t so sure that that was all there was to it. Some went the wrong road, no matter what you did and some won through in spite of
everything
. She and Elton had been lucky. ‘You know,’ she said to Alma, ‘we’ll be happy with whatever you choose. It’s only a matter of getting the timing right, so you don’t spend years working at a thing you’re never going to want to use.’
‘All right,’ Alma said. ‘Give me a few days.’
She thought over what Bess had said. She liked dancing. She enjoyed the exercise and needed the expression of movement. But the glamor of the stage had never drawn her. Her place was on the other side of the footlights, following the story – that was what she had always loved. And that was something she could
have for the rest of her life. If she felt no sense of dedication as a performer, it would certainly be better to stop now.
She told her parents and Merle that she intended to go on doing her exercises in private and maybe taking a class or two every once in a while, but that she was giving up the dance. She was thankful, she said, that she’d had the opportunity to train for long enough to find out that it wasn’t the right thing; some girls, she knew, were thwarted by their parents, so that they had the idea forever afterwards that they might have been great artists if somebody hadn’t prevented them. She realized that it wasn’t the profession for her, even though she was good at it, because there were other things she wanted to do with her life. A girl who wasn’t so good, but for whom dancing was the only interest, could give an audience more.