Listening to Billie (21 page)

And one day—rather a surprise—she invited Eliza to come over. Very curious, Eliza said she would.

Getting ready, in her bedroom, in a space of faint spring sun, Eliza considered that sometimes what-to-wear assumes the proportions of a much larger problem. In her bra and tights, she could come to no decision.
They
, the frightening unknown new friends of Kathleen’s, she imagined as stern and judgmental; they would be wearing genuinely old Levis—or, worse, harsh new ones. Should she wear her old Levis—or old gray slacks?

Kathleen, turned down by all the medical schools of her choice, had furiously decided to be a vet. “Fuck them all, I really
dig animals anyway. Fuck people.” She had gone to the school at Davis, and got her degree. She now worked in a pet hospital out on Army Street, and she lived with four other women, feminists, “and some kids and five cats” on a small street in the Mission District. In ten minutes she was stopping by to get Eliza.

What to wear, going there.

What would I wear if I were meeting Josephine for lunch? This Zenish question appeared in Eliza’s mind (as those other, not unrelated imperatives once appeared to Daria), and she thought, Of course, my gray suede pants and new gray boots. An outfit of which Josephine would not approve, but in which Eliza felt herself to be defined, established. Just now they were her favorite clothes, and why should she wear less for Kathleen and her friends? Why condescend in the dirty Levis that she wears for refinishing furniture?

Also, she thought defensively, if there was the slightest hinted remark about the expensiveness of suede, she could tell the truth: the pants cost twenty-five dollars. Bought in Rome, on her last trip with Harry.

(But Rome?)

Gray pants, black sweater. Was she trying to look severe?
serious
? She added a flimsy bright silk scarf.

And then, since Kathleen was not yet due, she went down to get the mail.

Bills, advertisements and a letter from the
Gotham
, a new and highly successful
Vogue-Bazaar
kind of magazine (more “literary” than either). To whom she had sent a long new poem. “We love it—a full page—five hundred dollars.”

All her ambivalence about that glossy magazine vanished, and Eliza experienced a moment of pure delight: they loved it—a full page—and so much money—so much more than anyone had ever paid for a poem of hers.

•  •  •

Now it was time for Kathleen, who was always prompt.

It would be a considerable mistake, Eliza decided, to tell her about the
Gotham.
Much better not.

“Well, you do look neat,” Kathleen commented with uncharacteristic friendliness as Eliza stepped into her battered car. Kathleen was wearing the hard dark Levis that Eliza had feared, and a sort of lumberjack plaid coat; she did not look “neat” but she did look content. She looked hard-working. Her graying brown-gold hair was tied back in a bun; her mouth was wide and pale, and firmer than before. Her eyes were lined and tired and at the same time very much alive. She went on, “You are a pleasure to see, Mrs. Quarles. Sometimes I forget how the other half lives, and looks.” But this was said with none of her old anger, and Eliza wondered if middle age, or nearly, was mellowing Kathleen.

Then all Kathleen’s familiar rage returned: driving across town, she was a continuous explosion of pure fury. “Fucking trucks—buses—cabs—Look, a goddam movie crew. Our fucking mayor can’t get enough of that stuff, can he. Will you look at that
building
? A bloody packing crate. Manhattan, here we come. Look, lady, move your fucking Cadillac along.”

The house, finally and violently arrived at, was a rakish small cottage on a steep and narrow cobbled street.

“It must be the last cobbled street in the city?” asked Eliza, getting out nervously.

“They’re taking the cobbles out next week. Look your last.”

Inside the cottage were several small rooms, in total chaos. Clothes books toys cats food. Trash. Cat shit. All scattered everywhere. Following Kathleen, Eliza picked her way through distrustfully, aware (ashamed) of the middle-classness of her
reaction, and already somewhat discouraged; she had meant to come and admire a new way of life.

In the kitchen three people were sitting at a large table. Two women and a little boy. One of the women was wiry, dark-haired; the other was soft and blond. The little boy was wiry, too, and dark; he was visibly his mother’s son.

Introductions: the dark woman is Lena; Angie, the blond; and Jared, the child. Saying “Hi” all around, Eliza realized that she was very slightly disappointed; having imagined—and, to a certain extent, feared—a larger group, she was braced for just that. She had, in fact, expected a sort of inquisition. (Josephine? She had a quick flash, a film-frame of her mother standing at the doorway, facing out to the porch, in Maine; Josephine severe and censorious. Had she been ready for Josephine?)

Whereas, the conversation was quite ordinary, rather mild. Where to shop, since the Safeway (cheapest) was being boycotted by the United Farm Workers (Chavez). The pain of IUD insertions (Angie). The inhumane suffering of cats in heat (Kathleen). The novelty of that particular neighborhood, the cobbles (Eliza).

Only the little boy made a certain amount of trouble; he wanted to go to the park; he insisted that it was time to go. They had promised. He turned to his mother, “Mother—”

“
Lena
,” she corrected. “And Angie’s going to take you to the park.”

“No, I want you to come.”

“Angie—”

“No, you,
Lena
—”

In the end, all three of them went, Jared between Lena and Angie, holding both their hands.

“We want him to relate to all of us,” Kathleen explained. “To be all his parents, less of an exclusive thing with Lena.”

“It must be sort of hard.”

“It is, for everyone.”

Another thing that Eliza was slowly reacting to (or recognizing
her own reaction), along with the extraordinary mess and the quite ordinarily nice young women, was the visible poverty in which they were living. It was all meager and shabby and uncomfortable; the kitchen shelves held a sparse array of big dented cans of cheap food brands, and on the floor beans spilled out from large paper sacks. Eliza would have liked to ask about the economics of their life; what she would
really
have liked was to give them a lot of money. (And, seeing this impulse, feeling its strength, she had a flashed vision of Daria: Daria giving her money to poor women, to everyone, and she felt great tenderness for her sister.)

“Well,” said Kathleen, “care for more coffee?”

“Yes.” (Although it has been terrible, weak and bitter.)

“We’re living in a very ideological way,” Kathleen more or less announced. And she went on to explain some of what Eliza had wondered about. “I’m the only one who really works,” she said. “I mean for money. Lena’s on welfare, she’s a sculptor—and Angie gets unemployment, she wants to be a mail-carrier. We all pool what we have, but then we often take in other women—women who’re just out of jail, or who just can’t find places. Things like that.”

Rather helplessly, Eliza breathed out, “Wow, that’s really
good.
”

Kathleen could no more accept praise than she could (probably) money, and she said, “Well, it’s not all that fucking good. There’s a lot left to do.” And then she asked, “Well, tell me about your people. Harry? Daria and Smith? And
Catherine
—how is Catherine?”

Eliza smiled, but rather sadly. “Catherine’s fine, but she’s got two babies now. They all seem terribly happy; she’s down at a place in the Santa Cruz Mountains, but still—”

“You’ve always been hard on her. You know, you’re more like Josephine than you admit. Catherine was supposed to act out your fantasies, a good college and all that, just the way Josephine was ambitious for you.”

This was quite true, but Eliza did not like to admit or to
talk about it; she was, in fact, terribly disappointed in Catherine. And so she said, “Daria is really terrific now.”

Kathleen was curiously uninterested in Daria’s being terrific; she frowned and asked, “How’s Smith?”

“Oh, he’s fine. Busy—you know.”

“I guess Daria watches him pretty closely?”

Knowing more or less what was meant, Eliza still asked, “How do you mean?”

“Well, he’s obviously a prime suicide candidate. As Daria would be the first to know. The third husband in your group to go that way. Just the suggestion could be very strong, with him.”

Faintly: “Of course I’ve thought of that,” Eliza said.

Then, perhaps fortunately, a cat began to yowl, and then another cat. Kathleen frowned, more concerned than annoyed. “Jesus, poor things. I’m spaying the female tomorrow.”

“Suppose she’s already pregnant?” Eliza asked unthinkingly.

“So? You’ve got something against abortions for cats?”

At this they both could laugh. And, for the moment, they forgot about Smith, and his potential for self-destruction.

A little later, Kathleen asked, “Did you hear about Miriam and Lawry?” From the glee in her voice, Eliza understood that the news would not be good.

“No.”

“Well, I read in some Hollywood column they broke up. He’s got some new Hawaiian chick. Christ, he really likes them dark.”

“But what happened to Miriam?”

“Shit, how would I know? She’s probably a hooker in Vegas by now.”

“Kathleen! That’s horrible—how can you?”

“Look, Eliza, I know a lot of women to worry about. I can’t add one more black hooker to my list. And you’re really nutty about black women. Why don’t you try living with one? See how you like it.”

“I don’t much want to live with anyone. But you could really be wrong about Miriam. She could have found someone else, too. Guys were always following her around.”

“Oh, who gives a shit about Miriam, anyway. I never think about her. Lawry either. All that’s dead.”

But for Eliza all that past was continuously present. She could see Miriam in a stiff white lab coat that camouflaged her awkwardly top-heavy body, crossing the street to the hospital. She could see Gilbert Branner, stroking his hair, not speaking to Miriam, not ever. She said to Kathleen, “I really cared about Miriam.”

“You care too much, about everyone. I think basically you and Daria are a lot alike.”

Kathleen was often correct, but did she have to give out so much truth? Eliza pondered this, feeling both bruised and cowardly. And sad about lost Miriam.

She decided that she had been there with Kathleen for too long, perhaps heard too much, and so she got up to go.

But at that moment Lena and Angie were heard coming in the front door, and then walking back to the kitchen. “We left him in the park with Carol—she’s got Tony there,” they explained; and Angie said to Eliza, “You’re not going? Stay and have some more coffee—we’ve hardly seen you.”

Oh, they like me, Eliza thought, quite pleased and a little surprised. She accepted more coffee, and they all smiled warmly at each other. Except Kathleen, who was spewing smoke, then stopping to cough.

“I read a poem of yours in the
Nation
a couple of months ago,” Lena said. “I really liked it.”

This was so unexpected (these women had time for reading poetry?) and so genuinely
nice
that Eliza was more or less thrown off balance, and she said what she had been holding submerged in her mind all morning—what she had not meant to say. “A funny thing happened to me today,” she said. “A couple of months ago, I saw a copy of that new magazine, the
Gotham
, in
my dentist’s office [she noted that she had felt it necessary to explain that she did not buy it] and I saw some poetry in it, so I sent them a new one, long, about five stanzas, and they’re buying it! For five hundred dollars.”

“Oh, really? How terrific—that’s really great—five hundred—wow—terrific,” said Lena and Angie.

“Some fancy dentist you must go to” was all that Kathleen said. But Eliza told herself that Kathleen only sounded so gruff, so cross; Kathleen was really a warm and kindly person; she had always said this to herself, about Kathleen.

“I was really pleased,” Eliza admitted. “I know it’s a silly magazine, and all that. Still.”

“I think it’s wonderful,” said Angie.

Soon after that, Eliza left; she went home on a series of buses, having been scrupulously directed by Kathleen.

The next day she still felt high, warmed by that pleasant success, and also warmed by what seemed a friendly visit with Kathleen. Meeting those nice feminist women.

More or less in that spirit, she telephoned Kathleen, meaning to thank her, to say what a nice time she had had.

Kathleen listened, but so silently, with such an almost audible stiffness, that Eliza, to herself, sounded ridiculous, banal—a silly woman mouthing politenesses. She could hear Kathleen emitting smoke, and her cough.

“Well,” Kathleen said at last. “It must have been quite a day for you. Slumming in your grey suede pants and bragging about slick magazines. You may not know it,
Mrs.
Quarles, but to some people five hundred dollars is a hell of a lot of money. Welfare checks don’t come to anything like that.”

Thrown off base—a generally pacific person being attacked by a practiced fighter—Eliza felt her mind actually reel, and she answered foolishly. “Those are very cheap pants. I got them in Rome for twenty-five dollars.”

“
Rome
!” Kathleen shrieked the syllable. “Rome, yes, on one of your frequent trips abroad. Maybe you can get a job as a foreign correspondent for the
Gotham
”

“Kathleen—really—”

“
Really
, you come over here and condescend to some very nice women, with your unimportant five-hundred-dollar checks.”

“Kathleen, five hundred dollars is very important to me. I need it, and I know it’s a lot of money.” But as she said this, Eliza’s voice broke, and she felt as guilty as though what she was saying were not true. Her hands were trembling, and she managed to say, “Kathleen, I hate this conversation, I’ll call you later.” She hung up, just before she began to cry.