Authors: Marjorie Lee
There was less to be said of Len. Len was a Very Sweet Guy. He had to be.
The Deitzes were sprung of other seeds. They had a great deal in common and most of it was trouble. Marian was Dissatisfied. Marian was Dissatisfied with Everything. Particularly, Marian was Dissatisfied with Jeff's income. Three top-flight analysts had attempted to point out the presence of the Bluebird in her own back yard. Still, Marian saw nothing but crows.
Jeff was, I felt at first meeting, the kind of man who might well be earning thirty thousand a year. Instead he was working for an uncle in the construction business at far less than he deserved.
"But why?" I wanted to know; and Frannie said, "Remember
Willy Loman? 'You have to be well liked'?
Well, Jeff isn't."
"I
like him," I told her.
"Wait," she said. "You won't. He won't let you."
And she was right. Jeff was a Sneerer: when his car broke down and you offered to lend him yours he called you a sucker; when he heard you'd just spent eighteen dollars on theatre tickets he told you the show was lousy; he got his off-brand Scotch at a special discount and the Highland Nectar you poured and handed him
wasn't worth the money;
and when you walked into a party dressed to the teeth and ripe for gaiety he asked you why you looked so
tired.
He was handsome; he spoke well; he knew a lot. But deep down inside of him, installed by long-forgotten devils of the past, there was a small, insistent mouthpiece that kept on
yah-yah-yahing.
I was far more fascinated by the relationships between Frannie and the female halves of both these duos. With Jeri there was an easy friendship going. "How could I fail to love her?" Frannie asked. "She's the only girl alive who's as full of bull as I am. She knows it; I know it. We're
safe."
It was true. At the onset of each wild adventure, career-wise or domestic, Jeri would telephone Frannie for the borrowing of a non-judgmental ear. And she'd get it. With, to all external appearances at least, an ego the size of Texas, Jeri bowed to no one but Frannie
—for the simple reason that Frannie expected her to bow not at all.
The relationship with Marian was harder to figure. Mangy-cruel as two pack rats, people were constantly wondering why either of them bothered to bother. But here too the basis of union was a kind of acceptance. Four years of on-and-off couch-hopping had given Marian, if little else, a truth-bent psyche. And Frannie, though a non-pro, was well up to meeting the challenge.
Marian, like Frannie, had a stunning young mother who was still running neck-and-neck with the Borgias and Medicis for the Heart of Gold Award.
Their friendship, they both agreed openly, was merely a matter of playing Bad Mother roles for each other.
"You sound just like mine," Frannie would tell her at the end of some devastating exchange. "Your obsession with money cripples your emotional eye to the point of total blindness."
"And you," Marian would retort, "are the image of mine. You both walk with your feet turned out like a couple of God damned ducks!"
"How can you stand it?" I once asked Frannie, being made of less durable stuff myself.
"Therapy," she explained, diving into a flagrant mixture of metaphors. "It's constructive to concentrate your venom on one particular dart-board. Shooting all your hostile eggs into one basket prevents you from beating on the
rest
of humanity. At the same time, through Acting Out, you mitigate the traumas of your poisonous beginnings... And anyway, Jo," she added with a slightly condescending smile, "hate isn't the worst thing in the world, you know. Hate's even healthy
—when it's honest."
That evening (possibly because Brad and I were new members in their midst) things went off rather smoothly. Len, at the time struggling against the might of Panda and Hallmark with sophisticated greeting cards, got into a discussion with Jeff on the national economy. Marc, with painstaking patience, was attempting to enlighten Brad on the complexities of forensic psychiatry. And the rest of us spent a good while hashing over the merits of Wingo's nursery school for Marian's four-year-old.
"It's worth every nickel," Jeri encouraged. "Dickie'll never get anywhere else the kind of thing he'll get at Wingo."
"Oh, I don't know," Marian said. "Next year he can go to kindergarten, and the suburban public schools are getting more progressive all the time. Frannie told me herself
—they make fudge at Llewellyn."
"Yeah," Frannie sighed. "They make fudge. But what good is it? They use a recipe!"
At about two a.m. Frannie, somehow having dropped ashes into her glass, left the room to get a clean one. Then, quite suddenly, Brad was missing.
Walking casually into the kitchen, I found him being absolutely true to the old ice cube alibi. There he was, struggling with a trayful between his hands. His struggle with the tray between his hands, however, was more likely necessitated by the presence of Frannie
—between his arms.
"You were great," I said to him in the car on the way home. "Just great."
"What?"
"I'm tired," I said. "That's what. I'm tired of playing towel-girl to a half-baked Casanova; tired of wondering who'll be next on that sexy little roster of yours; tired of digging you up out of all the damned kitchens of all the damned wives of all the damned world. What do you suppose
she
thinks of you? Of both of us? I like them. I want them to like us. But can they? Will they have a chance to?"
"I was helping Marc," he answered blandly. "The drinks were getting warm."
"You mean
you
were."
He smiled. "You floor me, Jo," he said softly. "You positively floor me. I told you. She's nothing but a little kid with big glasses and bitten nails."
Though not especially given to little kids with big glasses and bitten nails (except in their correct chronological age-group) I found as the weeks went by that I was growing closer and closer to Frannie.
Remembering now the initial flush of our friendship I confess to a feeling of ambivalence: (what, for instance, of the kitchen scene?) Yet, there must always be some small smudge of doubt at the onset of any new experience; one moment at least when there is question and the desire to withdraw. Still, the simple truth is: I wanted her close. In all my years of moving from city to city for Brad's ever-changing jobs I had had to forfeit the possibility of lasting relationships. Never before had I been given the chance to lapse warmly and securely into the natural nest of female consortion.
Now: here was Frannie, ready, willing, and able to fill the void. And in spite of the huge black frames behind which she seemed to hide and her hands which were definitely those of a self-gnawed little girl there was an adult side to her that was strong and stimulating.
I began to see how it was possible for a spiritual oak of a girl like Jeri Perloff to bend before Frannie's subtlest zephyr; and also why one like Marian Deitz fought for her individuality against it. I soon found myself listening over and over to Frannie's records, trying my best to sound intelligent in my analysis of lyrics and deliveries which until now had seemed nothing but inane. And I read the books she told me to read because they were, she said,
essential. Essential
for
what
I didn't quite see, but the urgency with which she presented them was enough to swing me into line.
Her literary taste, along with her choice of music, was limited to the contemporary: it ruled out the past completely, almost compulsively, and stopped just short of the avant-garde. At times it seemed that if it weren't for life-savers like Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and J.D. Salinger she might have perished of cultural malnutrition altogether. But then
—who was I to criticize? Aside from my concern over Wingo's young enrollees, a smallish interest in Leftist politics, and the constant re-evaluations I was called upon to make in order to stay married to Brad, I hadn't had a provocative thought since college.
Coming across an old faculty report on her which had been stuck into a book I borrowed, I was not surprised to read: "Frannie rarely comes to class prepared with the assigned material. Instead she makes up her own facts as she goes along. I would not know how to grade her if we
did
use the grade system here; but she has been most interesting to the group and to myself."
When, on returning the book, I handed her the report and kidded her about it, she smiled. "That was Hadley," she said. "Taught a course called Today's Classics. She was terrific. Five-feet-eleven, can you imagine? I mean without heels."
"Just what," I asked, "did her height have to do with her competence at teaching?"
"Oh, nothing, I guess." She sighed, falling suddenly into a meditative depression. "I wish I were tall," she mused. "I wish I were so tall I could watch a parade over the heads of everyone else in the world..."
"Well," I consoled, "when you get right down to it, how many parades does a person have to watch in this country?"
"Oh, Jo!" She grimaced. "You know what I mean!" And of course I did
—
that
time; but there were others when I didn't have a glimmer.
* * *
One Saturday afternoon I drove back from a shopping trip in town to the little carriage house Brad and I rented and found her convertible in the driveway. It gave me a great lift to see it there. I honked a tattoo on my horn so she'd know I'd arrived and then flew in, grinning from ear to ear. She was lying on our second-hand sofa, head on one of its threadbare arms. Beside her on the coffee table there was an almost empty gin and soda and an ashtray spilling with butts.
"You been here long?" I asked.
"Two hours or so." She swung her jeaned legs down and stood up to stretch.
"Didn't you get bored waiting?"
"Bored? The quiet was heavenly. When I left the kids with the day's worker they were playing dodge-ball in the livingroom."
We went into the kitchen then to refill her glass and to get one for me.
"I've been thinking," she said, sliding onto a wooden chair. "How come you haven't divorced Brad?"
The question took me by surprise. "Why would you ask a thing like
that?"
"Oh, I don't know... but it does seem rather obvious that you
—well, that you don't really like him too much."
"I do like him!" I blurted defensively. "It's just that sometimes he's a little
—oh, a little impossible to live with, that's all."
She laughed. "So I'd gather."
"What do you mean?" I knew what she meant all right, but I was annoyed
—as I always was when I had to face the fact that Brad's shortcomings were obvious. Now, willfully hurting myself, I pressed her further. "What, precisely, do you mean?"
She looked away. "You know," she said.
Had there, then, been sequels to the ice cube episode? My annoyance flared. "If you mean his penchant for
les jemmes,"
I said, "don't take it to heart. You, baby, are approximately Number Twenty-Five..."
She lifted the glass to her mouth with both hands and focused her eyes on the rim so they seemed to cross a little. Then she pulled one knee up against her chest. I was sorry I'd said it.
"What I mean is
—" I began, trying to make amends.
"Forget it, Jo," she interrupted. "Standing in queues for things has never appealed to me. Not for inessentials anyway."
I had been put in my place in a way I'd watched her stop others. Having enjoyed witnessing those thrusts, I was less intrigued when I myself was the target. "I happen to be used to it," I said, attempting to be light "Got him that way myself, as a matter of fact"
She looked up, interested.
"That was twenty-seven years ago," I said, wanting for some reason to tell her things. "He was twenty-two then and I was nineteen, in on a college vacation, supposedly visiting an old Baltimore aunt of mine. He was living in a little dive near the Patapsco River with this woman my aunt knew, named Sonya, who was old enough to be his mother. She must have been tired of playing Jocasta though, because she was really insistent about my coming up for dinner to meet him."
"So you went?"
"So I went. And stayed for three weeks, I might add. Then I had to go back to school; but after that it got to be my headquarters for holidays."
She reached for a pack of cigarettes on the table and lighted one thoughtfully. "Could you
—could you
enjoy
a thing like that?" she asked. "I mean
—with
her
there? Wouldn't it sort of
—cramp a person's style?" Then she faced me, eye to eye. "Unless, of course," she added, "one
needed
an audience for
kicks..."
Her earnestness amused me. "Don't tell me you're shocked," I said. "I thought you were rather Bohemian yourself!"
"I am neither shocked
nor
Bohemian," she stated flatly.
"Well, you sound pretty unfettered to me," I argued. "At least in comparison with most of the people around here. I can't say I've heard of many Pillars of Society going to cocktail parties with their slacks' crotches torn out."
"Don't be deluded," she said. "Mere counter-phobic action. Jewish: Middle-to-Upper-Middle. Chicago's
Marjorie Morningstar. Uncle
was my grandmother's brother.
Neville Sapperstein
could have been my nephew! I'll admit I've made an honest
try,
Jo; but you can lose a leg unfettering yourself from a setup like that..."
"It doesn't show at all," I said. "Not the kids, or Marc either. I wouldn't have known if it hadn't been for the law firm and the mention of Mill Pond. Not that I ever know who's what anyway...I never think of it," I added, flushing just slightly at the partial lie.
"You don't have to think of it," she said. "I do."
We were quiet for a few minutes. It wasn't until after I'd poured her another drink that she carried the conversation back to Brad. "He must have been really something in those days," she began.