Read Daughters of the Revolution Online
Authors: Carolyn Cooke
“What would they see?” she asked.
“What I’ve seen,” he said. “The way I’ve sorted and culled and discerned. They would see the essence of themselves. You know what’s the most erotic thing? Talking. I love to hear women talk. Tell me anything. Tell me your perceptions. Tell me how you think. Tell me what you thought about today. Tell me what you do when you’re alone. What is it like to be you? What do you care about? What do you think about falafel? Do you like circuses? If you could be any animal, what animal would you be?”
Walking home from the pub, EV felt avid and awake. Her shoes, at the bottom of her legs, carried her home. Now she knew: I can say yes; I can say no.
Later, in her bathroom, while brushing her teeth, she had an accident, a fall. Her eyes opened to white grimed hexagonal tiles
and red bleeding over shards of glass. Had her face shattered? Dizzy, she stood up and looked in the mirror.
His telephone number appeared in the phone book beside “P. Cornblum,” but blood fell on the page and blotted it out. She had to call information and write the numbers out on her hand with a pen. Finally she heard the telephone ringing under her feet. “Allo?” he said, very distinctly.
Allo
. Where did he think he was?
“I think I’ve been shot in the head,” she said. “Will you help me?” Even blurred and afraid, she took pleasure in having reason to disturb him.
He seemed surprised to see her. Through the red blur, EV saw the look on his face. “You weren’t shot; you fell down drunk,” he told her. He led her by the hand into the bathroom and showed her the red pool on the tile where she’d fallen on a pipe. “See the blood?” he said, pointing. “You fell here. You broke a glass. You have to go to the emergency room.” He handed her a towel, then rooted in her closet and brought out black pants and an unfortunate gold stringy sweater that looked like gorilla fur. He exhumed her red shoes from the tangle of gleaming sheets on her futon. “Oh, Angel Feet, I won’t ask why you sleep with your shoes,” he said. He turned toward the window while she changed, and actually covered his face with his hands.
Like a date, he held her arm while they walked downstairs. EV held the towel against her eye. At the door to his apartment, she leaned against the wall outside while he put on his beige raincoat and chose a book to read. “What are you reading?” asked EV.
He turned the spine to her and she read the title,
Attitudes Toward His …
, before her eyes filled up.
In the street, a metallic mist sprayed down. P. Cornblum hailed a cab, guided EV into it, named a hospital and a route, then pulled bills from his wallet to pay.
At the hospital, he sat beside her with a clipboard in his lap and raindrops on the lenses of his glasses and asked personal questions: “Place and year of birth? Social Security number?” He filled in what he knew: her name, EV Hellman, which he’d seen on the mailbox, probably; her address, which was also his. EV drifted in her plastic seat, and told him everything he asked. She heard one of the nurses say into the telephone, “Plastic surgeon—Central Park South,” and she jumped up. She walked stiffly to the desk, holding the towel against the damaged, leaking side of her face. “Can’t you get somebody cheaper downtown?” she said.
Several nurses turned to EV, a glare of uniforms. “Insurance?” someone said.
“Do you take Visa?” EV asked.
Of course they took Visa.
“Do you have a Visa card?” EV asked P. Cornblum.
“Oh my
God
,” he said.
“Relax,” EV assured him. She took hold of his cloth coat. “I’ll pay you back from my security deposit.”
A tiny smear of blood from her hand migrated to his sleeve and seemed to take him beyond horror. Then he laughed, a raucous bark. He handed over the clipboard and rummaged in his wallet.
A nurse wheeled EV away to a pink room, where eventually a man dressed in a nylon running suit appeared, a loaded syringe in one hand. EV’s hand shot out to stop him. “You can’t just stick a needle in,” she said.
He took a step back, the needle poised in his hand. “Excuse me,” he said. “I am Dr. Van. I just drove down from Fifty-ninth Street to sew up your face.”
“You expect me to sit here and not react?”
“What kind of reaction were you planning?”
“You’ll have to hold my arms down, something,” she said.
Dr. Van smiled. “You want me to get your boyfriend in here to hold you down?”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she said.
“I thought not.”
Dr. Van called down the hall for a woman, who held EV’s arms to her sides while he pricked and sewed. “You’re lucky you got me and not some intern,” he said. “This gash is an inch long—wreck your face.”
“Will I have a scar?” she asked him.
“Of course you’ll have a
scar
,” he said.
When he finished, he held up a mirror and showed her the black stitches from her eye to her cheek; they ended in two loose bristles near her ear. He handed her a pen and a square of yellow paper (a Post-it note!) and said, “Now, EV, put your phone number down here. If you turn out well, we can probably get this job written up in a magazine.”
EV wrote down her name and telephone number. Dr. Van folded the note and slid it into the pocket of his running pants. He took her chin in his hand and turned her face this way and that, admiring his work. “Good, good. You should do something about that pink hair, though,” he said. He winked at EV, strung a black patch over her damaged eye, then was gone.
The woman who’d pinned EV’s arms rummaged in her pocket and handed over a piece of candy. EV said, “Thank you,” and held the candy in her hand. The woman waited, but EV wouldn’t be cowed. Even a small hard candy could unleash her appetite.
“I don’t have insurance,” she said. “But he put it on a credit card.”
The woman shook her head. “I’m with Social Services,” she said. “If you want to change your domestic situation, I can help.”
“What would happen if I told you my boyfriend hit me?” EV asked.
The woman’s hand moved close to the sleeve of EV’s gorilla sweater. She looked as if she’d like to touch it. “Well,” she said, “You can go to a safe house if you want. I can help you to get a restraining order.”
“Oh,” said EV. “Well, he didn’t hit me. We were having, you know, vigorous sex, and a painting fell off the wall.”
The black patch over one eye ruined her sense of distance. EV walked carefully toward P. Cornblum, watching her feet move across the floor. The rain had left dark, destroying spots all over her red suede shoes.
“You look like picture day in hell,” he said.
He guided her by both arms into a Yellow Cab, and they slid across the black vinyl seat.
“We could go somewhere and have a drink,” EV suggested.
“Are you out of your mind?” he said.
The rubber tires sluiced through rainwater; then coins and paper money changed hands, the taxi door closed behind them and P. Cornblum’s key turned in the lock. The soles of their shoes made scratching sounds on the tar paper the super had nailed to the stairs to protect the peeling linoleum.
Scratch, scratch, scratch
—like hens scrabbling in dirt.
He led the way. When they reached the third-floor landing, EV pinched the sleeve of his raincoat.
“If I’m quiet, can I come in for a minute?” she asked him.
The beige back of his raincoat softened, then hardened and squared. He turned around and faced her. There was no effort in his face, no effort at all; it was completely natural. She felt he might be on the verge of telling her some terrible truth she half-wanted to hear—but no. He crouched on the floor and pulled off her red shoes. The damp leather clung to EV’s feet and then gave way suddenly as he threw the shoes—
bang
and
bang—
against the wall.
G
od held the line and Carole did not graduate. She was sent away, back home, presumably in disgrace. Later girls at Goode fared better. They studied abroad, won the chemistry prize and the Spanish prize, distinguished themselves at lacrosse, on violin. They marched for equal rights and equal pay, the right to consume birth-control pills and protest against nuclear power; they became treasurer and even head of class. They raised money for scholarships, organized and excelled. They ventured into the world, taught prostitutes in Central America to read, electrified villages in Africa, invented lucrative investment products on Wall Street. They entered the House and Senate, or raised children who did; they became cantors and neurologists.
Carole returned to Brooklyn, to her single working mother. It seemed to those she left behind like a vaguely terminal condition. Carole had had a chance; she’d thrown it away. Only Aileen Rebozos kept in touch with her and sent updates to
The Goodeman
. For an awkward year, Carole worked in some kind of shop. She held a tiny show of men’s heads in a gallery—but in Brooklyn. She went abroad—to Paris and Ghana! Two years later, Mrs. Graves received a letter from Carole, curtly asking God for a recommendation and a transcript to be sent to the Rhode Island School of Design. God, by now miserably emeritus, wrote with grim pleasure of Carole’s crimes against the school, her failure to graduate, the arrogance with which she’d occupied the new space that had been made for her—and for women of the future.
Carole wrote in her essay about being the only one, and then one of a very few of the first:
It didn’t matter so much that the Head was a sexist or a bigot or a snob, or basically uninterested in my testing him. That didn’t harm me. I was used to it; I already had an aloof and absent father. God Byrd was just one person—a person he never had to question or think about—and I had more than one identity. How could that not be good? I had to decide on what relation I had to other people. Some people willed me invisible at Goode. I mean, the assumption was that we—students of color, girls—would simply assimilate. Nothing would really change. That was the point, wasn’t it?
My mother—she died this year of cancer—was ferocious, determined. And all her determination centered on me. It was what she gave me instead of affection, mostly. She didn’t talk to me gently; she didn’t ask what I wanted to do. She saw life as a struggle—that’s why she sent me to a virtually all-white school. If it had been an all-white, no girls school forever, she would have been even more determined to send me there.
At Goode, they repressed our true nature the way farmers stop watering their tomatoes, leaving the plants limp to swell the fruit. We were like that, “dirty girls” so parched and thirsty and stressed, it’s strange our pencils didn’t snap in two when we bit them. I don’t remember critical thinking, logical inquiry, the quadratic equation, plane geometry, dactylic hexameter, Bernoulli’s principle, the past participle of the verb
tenir
, the first element on the periodic table, the capital of Benin, the vice president under Taft, the rules of soccer, lacrosse or tennis, whether narcissism comes before or after the Oedipus complex, whether the prime rate goes up or down in a recession. What I remember is boys everywhere, like big white mice.
I remember white men talking, talking, talking. No one asked about my experience as a human being. The Goode School was like a huge white skin that covered everyone—that covered me. My whole consciousness was black and poor and female every second of every day. The experience damaged, sharpened and defined me, and I would not trade it for anything.
After RISD, Carole went to Yale. She won prizes; her name turned up, sometimes attached to the Goode School like a burr on a wool scarf. She found a dealer and “turned out,” as Mrs. Rebozos put it. That was the point, wasn’t it? That Carole should carry with her the air and substance of entitlement, and a strong character. That she should “turn out,” as if she had been white and wealthy, and a boy.
P
ilgrim was perfect. Behind his metal-framed glasses he had blue lupine eyes, which hardened at the center to a bead. My daughter EV met him in New York. She sent me a picture of the two of them together, and right away I encouraged her to invite him up to Maidenhead. At my age, experience is like treasure saved up in the backs of drawers: Suddenly, you can’t wait to give it all away to somebody who might use it.
EV resisted—but resistance is good. She sipped her coffee, which was all she’d take in the morning, and said, “Do I have to?”
Just a few years ago, EV was a chubby child. Now she weighs about eighty-five and eats practically nothing but hard candy and dry toast, though she still drinks. That’s bad, I know, drinking with no vitamins going in, although thirst is a kind of hunger, which gives me hope. I’d thought a lover—like Pilgrim—might frankly say, “EV darling, a little flesh is useful in bed.” This is hard to talk about. EV used to come home from school and put away cheese sandwiches and Little Debs; I spoke up then.
We drove to the airport together. EV asked if she could drive, and I said no, better not. The car’s practically new, a headstrong Peugeot with barely seven thousand miles, and I know its temper best.
I suggested that we go early and stop for lunch at China Hill. “We could have a drink,” I offered, in case she thought I was trying to force-feed her.
The last time I’d been there was six years ago, when EV was in high school. A doctor’s office two towns over had called to confirm her appointment to get birth-control pills, and I offered to drive her—and buy lunch. That time, we drank a bottle of Blue Nun and ate sweet-and-sour chicken. I remember it as a highlight of our life—two hours of explicit mother-daughter talk. (I’ve got nothing new, but a good story improves, up to a point, with age.) It turns out EV had lost her virginity at fifteen—I was shocked and impressed to hear it—with her thirty-two-year-old math teacher in a trailer behind the general store, influenced by beer, distorted by fantasy, a fake-fur rug under her back, a mirror on the ceiling, the “older man” flattering and encouraging her. EV has always been competitive and eager to shock, but that’s natural—we’re so alike. I was glad she’d found a way to tell her story well.