Authors: Marjorie Lee
I would miss her
—badly. What was I going to do every night? Catch a bite alone somewhere, or break out a package of frozen fish sticks and read a lousy magazine?
Two weeks to go,
I thought;
and Elizabeth Johnston Bradford Faces Life...
I got up and went downstairs again. But the gaiety had now gone far beyond me.
"...at the Atwater!" someone was squealing incredulously.
"I
always thought the Atwater was a place where you held a
convention!"
"Not Harriet Lyons!" somebody else howled. "Harriet Lyons wouldn't know the meaning of the
word!"
Then: "Stop worrying about Harriet," someone chuckled. "Harriet's a has-been. Frannie's stolen the stage. Where have you been? I've gotten it bona fide from three different sources."
"You mean about Brad?"
I walked straight into their midst, stepped over several bodies, and lowered myself to the floor beside them. The silence was deafening.
I went to bed soon after that, not bothering to announce my departure. I was tired and disgusted, and I dropped down on the spread with all my clothes on, blacking out immediately. But I think I awakened at one point, halfway, and that Frannie was leaning over me. "Take off that junk jewelry," I think she said. "You're liable to slit your wrists." But she said it softly, with kindness, and a catch in her throat. And she must have unsnapped my bracelets for me because the next morning I found them in the white cigarette cup on my table.
We all slept most of the next day, but late in the afternoon Frannie lit into me about Bill Brecker.
"Why did you disappear?" she asked. "He was looking all over for you!"
"He was looking for
you,"
I said.
"Me? What would he want with
me?
He was crazy about you, Jo. He said so. He told me he thought you were wonderful. You could have shown a little
interest,
for
God sake
—"
"Oh, can it," I cut in. "I'm old enough to be his mother!"
"Did I say you had to
marry
him? Couldn't you just have maybe
dated
him? When you go out you get around.
You meet people. You
—"
"Not with him," I said.
"Not with him because
—"
"Because he's so nice," she finished. "Because he's a
good,
sane,
normal guy who gets to work every day and
loves what he does and gets paid for it. Because he wouldn't make you miserable enough.
That's
why. Because you've got to be hurt some more. You're going to sit around waiting for Mr. Right to come along. And Mr. Right is going to be a tall, thin, beautiful fugitive from the booby hatch!"
"Please, Frannie," I pleaded. "It's Sunday. Let's have a Day of Rest, shall we?"
"You'll rest all right," she said. "If you don't watch out you'll Rest in Peace
—“
"Josie Bradford, R.I.P., Cornered Immortality; Made the top of Heaven's list As Miss Atlantic Masochist!"
"Did you just make that up?" I asked.
"Yes
—just; though I'll admit the idea has occurred to me before!"
"You know something?"
"What?"
"I wouldn't be at all surprised if one of these days I woke up hating you!"
"Neither would I," she said.
That Wednesday was Frannie's birthday. She was thirty-one. But in spite of violent reactions to most of the aspects of living, getting older didn't seem to bother her.
"I was scared of thirty," she said, "because
—you know; I told you once—my mother kept warning me I'd be dead by then. But the fact is, I'm looking
forward
to growing up, if you know what I mean. Actually, I've always wanted to be
forty.
Forty is so mellow, so mature. My fantasy is that on that day I'll get up real early in the morning and everything will be different. I'll just suddenly
—know who I
am,
or something!"
"You don't believe half the things you say," I told her.
"Well, of course I don't!" she said. "What am I
—
gullible?"
Marc gave her an irregular-shaped package wrapped in plain brown paper, tied with a length of fishing line. I watched with a mixture of awe and incredulity as she opened it. It contained a small spiral notebook, a bunch of colored rubber bands, a box of brass-plated paper clips, a tin of Band-Aids, a jar of caviar, a tiny potted cactus plant, a card of safety pins, a packet of six pocket combs, three bottle caps, and two rolls of Kodachrome film to be shot in Bermuda.
She was utterly enthralled; especially, it seemed, with the colored rubber bands and the cactus plant. She kissed him. It was a long one. When I saw her lips push forward I turned my head away.
Then the kids rushed in. Petey gave her one and a half clay candle holders made by hand at Wingo. The missing half had fallen off in the bus. Blair presented her with a set of potholders woven at Llewellyn in a class called Functional Arts. And Stu came up with a Zippo cigarette lighter accompanied by a card which read, in a jagged red-pencilled scrawl:
Don't ask me to find matches anymore.
That day after school I drove over to
Vivien Van Gogh's
in Meade's Manor.
Vivien Van Gogh's
is a small avant-garde clothes shop owned and operated by a girl named Miriam Cohn. It was called
Vivien Van Gogh's
because Miriam Cohn was in competition with a similar shop less than a block away called
Margo Matisse's. (Margo Matisse's
was, for some strange reason, owned and operated by a girl named Margo Matisse.)
I went to
Van Gogh's
rather than
Matisse's
simply because I knew Miriam. She had two children at Wingo and we had met several times. She was a largish girl, a bit on the spreading side; and her foremost claim to fame in Meade's Manor was the fact that nothing bothered her. Various of her friends could always be found in the store in the afternoons, not buying anything
—just getting their anxieties fixed. Miriam was, in effect, a kind of ambulatory Miltown.
''Oh, hi..." she said as I walked in. "Want some coffee? I've just made some for the deadheads."
"Thanks, no," I said. "I'm in a hurry. Can I look around?"
"Sure, sure," she answered, casting a casual glance at a group of females sitting on Eames chairs towards the back. "But don't tell me you came to
purchase
something!"
One of the girls lifted her head. "If that crack was meant for me," she said, "it's absolutely unfair! I told you I'd buy something if everything in the damned place weren't Madras!"
"Nothing fits here," a second added informatively.
"That's a fact!" said a third. "If you want anything to
fit,
you have to go to Bergdorf Goodman!"
"Drink a little hot coffee," Miriam suggested soothingly. "It's on the stove in the bathroom. I have to take care of Mrs. Bradford. And hey, lissen
—there's a bag in there with a couple of salami sandwiches... What did you have in mind?" she asked, turning to me.
"A gift," I answered. "For a friend of mine. Something sort of
—classic?"
"Classic!" sputtered the first girl. "If your friend can't use a khaki loin-cloth you're out of luck!"
Nobody got up to get the coffee and sandwiches so Miriam excused herself and went for them.
"Here," she crooned gently, coming back with a tray. "Here, here..."
All conversation stopped. The faces of the girls seemed to soften like those of trusting children as, slowly, they put out their hands to receive the food.
I wandered around for a while; and then I found it. I knew the moment I saw it, lying in a tangle of pullovers and Jamaica shorts, that it had been made for Frannie. It was a Haymaker shirt of pure silk in pale, pale orange, and cut like a boy's. I could see her in it with the top button open and the sleeves rolled up above her elbows. I did a quick mental estimate, including taxes, and realized that the price came to more than half a week's salary.
It didn't make sense; but I took it.
When Frannie opened the box that evening she was moved to speechlessness.
"Jo," she said finally, in a voice that seemed to come from miles away. "Jo, it's so beautiful..."
Then she carried it into the powder room and closed the door. When she came out she had it on. The collar was open and the sleeves rolled up, as I'd seen them in my mind. The looseness of the shoulders and bosom tapered down into the narrow waist of the gray linen shorts she had been wearing. And she'd put on some pale orange lipstick.
"Take off your glasses," I said.
She did.
"You're a pretty girl," I said, appraising her squarely, seeing her eyes without their guardian frames.
"Don't tell her that," Marc said. "It's a waste of time. She doesn't believe you. Tell her she's awful. Then she'll think you're being honest."
"I'm not awful," she objected.
"All right: you're pretty."
"But I'm not pretty either!"
"Christ!" Marc said. "You can't even
lose
an argument around here!"
I laughed. Then I went over to her and lifted her face in my hands. "Happy birthday, darling," I said.
"What can I give you for yours?" she asked quickly. "When is it? August? August what?"
The phone rang. We looked at it for a second. We had all developed a certain amount of apprehension about it because of Brad. But it wasn't Brad. It was Long Distance: Frannie's mother.
"Yes... thank you," Frannie said, her voice-tone at least an octave higher. "Oh, yes... very nice. A little plant and lots of other things: caviar... and stuff from the kids; and the most wonderful shirt from
—a friend of ours. Yes... yes... fine. Don't worry. ... All right... Yes ... all right. Soon... Really? Oh, that's marvelous. Yes... No... No... Now don't; just
please
don't... All right. Goodbye..."
She put the receiver down and stood there, seeming slightly dazed.
"What did she say?" I asked.
"Oh, she wanted to congratulate me. And she wanted to know if Marc had given me anything
decent..."
"How nice," Marc said, curling his lip. "There's nothing like sincere maternal interest. What else?"
"Well, she asked if I'd stopped smoking," Frannie answered, picking up a cigarette and Stu's lighter. "And she said she has this date with this new man she met and he makes elevators and he's a millionaire. And she asked how we were and said it was a miracle we hadn't all ended up in a mental hospital yet; and was the front door knob polished, and did the children brush their teeth because if they didn't they'd all fall out... And..." Her voice began to trail away.
"Let's have it," Marc demanded. "What else?"
"Well... did I love her; you know
—she always asks me
that...
And then she finished by telling me that I wouldn't
—that I wouldn't live to be forty..."
The next evening the man called about my apartment. Somebody else was interested, and did I want it or didn't I? Yes. I wanted it.
So the day after, Frannie and I went out and bought several gallons of rubber-base paint; the kind you put on with rollers. Frannie had a lot of suggestions about color combinations, but I finally convinced her that you couldn't go Dramatic in a cubby hole, and we wound up with a safe light green, plus some gay chintz with green and yellow flowers all over it for a studio couch cover, cushions, a chair slip, and a pair of draperies. I'd have to have draperies in spite of the summer heat. There was an ugly iron fire escape outside the window that would be terribly depressing to look at; besides, the whole thing faced a courtyard with a hundred other windows staring curiously into mine.
That same night we lugged Frannie's portable sewing machine down and I sewed while she painted. That Frannie should own a sewing machine came as a real surprise. I was less amazed only when she confessed she had never learned to use it.
The painting took longer than the sewing did: we kept going back for a week of evenings and some afternoons, together
—or meeting there. I had two keys and I gave her one so that she could get there ahead of me on the days I was held up at school.
Armed with gin and soda, Frannie painted with a vengeance
while
she painted; but she was constantly knocking off for a Rest Period. This meant she'd drop the gooky roller right down on the bare floor boards, curl up on the studio bed, and start up discussions on Stimulating Subjects.
"What do you think of homosexuality?" she began suddenly one evening when she had accidentally kicked over the last can of paint and there wasn't really much else she could do.
"What do you mean, what do I
think
of it?" I asked over the whir of the machine. "It's not exactly something I've given much
thought
to!"
"What I mean is
—" She poured a second drink slowly. "What I mean is, do you accept it as—part of the universal psyche? Can you—well, place it
calmly
within the bracket of Man's total make-up? I mean
—" There was another pause while the soda splashed in. "I mean, do you think it's—natural?"
"Sure I think it's natural," I answered. "I think it's natural for homosexuals."
"Have
you
ever
—had a brush with it?"
I looked up. "Are you kidding?"
"No. Really. Have you ever had
—well,
feelings
like that about another woman?"
I shut off the machine and lit a cigarette. "Frannie, my sweet," I said, "I should think after all this time, after all the dirt I've given you on my illustrious past with
men,
you'd be able to conclude all by your little self that my glands are in ship-shape order!"
"Screw your glands!" she exclaimed. "Who's talking about your
glands?
Wake up. Radclyffe Hall flunked out in the Twenties!"
"I never read it," I said, starting the machine again.
"Did you ever read
Lady Chatterley's Lover?"