After that, the Italian Club bar was our hangout. It was the same room where Raymond had gotten drunk on Seagram’s 7s at our wedding. The room was big and dark like the belly of a whale. The bar was mahogany, and lined with guys called Rat and Indian, Chip and Skip, Buzzard and Deacon. Half of them were married and thought nothing of the fact that they were drinking at a bar every night. If their wives called looking for them, automatically the bartender said, “Haven’t seen him.” If they talked about their wives at all, it was as though they were aliens, who flushed their pot down toilets and had fits when they showed up drunk at dawn, then wouldn’t talk or have sex for days after.
“What,” I asked, “do you think gives you the right to drink at bars and have all the fun you want while your wife is stuck home with kids?”
“Hey, Hank, hit me.”
“Aren’t you going to answer?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Why don’t you put a bra on? You ever think your tits are going to end up at your waist by the time you’re thirty?”
“Like your balls’ll end up at your knees?”
“Hey, you’re all right. I like you.”
I’d read Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, and Si mone de Beauvoir, and I was ready, I was willing, I was chomping at the bit to personally fight for the rights of all women, with the help of my best friend and fellow victim, Fay. Since they wouldn’t listen when we talked, we took action.
On our list, we made columns headed: name, age, astrological sign, penis size, and performance, rated one to ten. Then we dressed up in our hiphugger jeans and skimpy jerseys that left our belly buttons exposed and strutted into the club to lure men home (never the married ones) to lay, fuck, hump, ball, screw—that’s the way we talked to amuse each other—and dispense with any nuance of love or romance. We got right to the point, which was to say, “Do you want to fuck?” If ever some guy had the audacity to try to light our cigarettes, say, we jumped all over him. “What do we look like, damsels in distress?”
Which in a way we were, because soon after we’d found the club, Fay’s creep of an ex-husband sneaked up in the night and stole back the yellow Dodge, leaving us carless and furious—because it had been men who’d knocked us up, men who’d left us with kids, and men who got the cars.
The night of Beatrice’s picnic, Fay and I were hoping we could get our mothers or Trudy our neighbor to take the kids so we could hitch to the club and pick up some guys, or at the very least have some drinks to take the edge off the acid. Which at the moment was making my ears fill with static. Jason had taken to burying me with grass and was almost finished. He was talking to himself in a murmur, “All I have left are her feet,” he said. “The toes are the hardest….” Amelia ran up. “What’re you doing?” she said.
“Burying my mother.”
“Can I?”
“All right. When we’re done, we have to find a flower. We can stick it in her mouth so it’ll stand up.”
“That’s enough,” I said, sitting up.
“Maaaa!”
Jason yelled.
“What do you want? You were making me dead.”
“Let’s do it to my mother,” Amelia suggested.
“Okay,” Jase said, then he and Amelia ran off
I felt abandoned, adrift, without Jason’s anchoring me down. I watched him and Amelia run across the lawn to Fay. They bumped shoulders and ran at exactly the same speed. Jason was six months older, but they were constantly mistaken for twins. Jason was the type who liked to go first and win, and Amelia let him. They got along as well as their mothers did. They slept in Jason’s room and got up together every morning before me and Fay, poured each other cereal, and ate it in front of the TV while watching cartoons. Fay and I slept in my room across the hall, but whenever one of us invited a man to sleep over, the other one slept on the couch and told the kids they couldn’t watch television. Then they sat in the kitchen and chatted like chipmunks or went out earlier than usual.
When I had a guy over and at some point of the morning we appeared in the kitchen, Amelia flirted with him, while Jason suddenly forgot how to do everything, like put on his own sweater or pour his own milk or talk if asked a direct question by anyone but me. As I’d always figured, Fay lucked out having a girl, because girls didn’t have a male territorial thing about boyfriends.
Jase had laid a bombshell on me the last time I had a guy stay over. The guy had lett and I was talking to Jase in a pretend foreign language to get him mad. I don’t know why—maybe because he was the wrong sex. Finally, he stood up, red in the face, and yelled,· “Stop !” I was shocked. Jason hardly ever lost his temper. I burst out laughing, then he looked like he might cry, so I said, “What’s the matter? I was just asking you what you want to be when you grow up, and you wouldn’t answer.”
“You were talking stupid.”
“I know. Sorry. But answer me. What do you want to be?”
“A cop.”
“A pig! What do you want to be a pig for?”
“So I can shoot people.”
This coming from a kid who never had a toy gun in his life? This coming from a kid who’d been taught, make peace not war? Then the obvious dawned on me. “You want to be one because Pop is.”
“No sir.”
“Jason, if you become a cop, I’ll disown you.”
“What’s disown mean?”
“It means I’ll never talk to you and you can’t come in my house anymore.”
“Don’t say that.” Now he looked like he was going to cry again.
Then I remembered reverse psychology. “Go ahead. I don’t care. If you want to be a cop, be a cop.”
As I watched him and Amelia at the far end of the lawn reaching into a bag of marshmallows Beatrice was holding, I began to dream, one of my favorites: What would my life be without Jason? I’d be living in New York City, appearing in a play. Probably Hair. One night John Lennon would show up without Yoko and we’d go out for drinks. Then I axed the fantasy. I tried to Be Here Now and think of the good things about being a mother. I couldn’t think of one good thing. Not one. What I thought of was Lenny LaRoyce and his bus. Fay and I’d gone to high school with Lenny, and when he got out of the service, he converted a school bus and drove it across country. When he returned recently, he parked his bus on his friend’s lawn for a couple of months and began dropping by the club. Fay seduced him. Then one night he invited Fay and Amelia and Jase and me to sleep on the bus. Wouldn’t you know the couple in the bunk above Jase and me would have to get hyperactive in the middle of the night and start humping and bumping and moaning and groaning to beat the band? Jason woke up and said, “Ma, what’re they doing?”
“Having sex,” I said.
“What’s sex?” he said.
I’d told Jason the facts of life since the day he was born practically, because I believed sex was a natural part of life and nothing to be ashamed of. But he never remembered. It wasn’t the time to repeat the whole thing again, so I said, “Sh, go to sleep.”
When Lenny invited me and Fay to go on his next trip and to bring our kids, I seriously considered it. But then I thought, Oh right, and then I’d have that feeling of guilt, like I was doing the wrong thing, whenever Jase woke up in the night hearing people screwing.
I watched him sticking up his face and hands with marshmallow and thought I should tell him he’s had enough, but who wanted to listen to him whine? Fay walked over then, sat next to me on the grass, and watched the party from a distance with me: Beatrice and her nine-to-five friends eating hot dogs in bikinis. Finally, she said, “Let’s blow this stupid picnic,” which was exactly my sentiment.
Of course, Amelia and Jase had a fit because of the marshmallows, but our timing was right, because a minute after we stepped onto the road, we got a ride home.
We found no one to baby-sit that night, so after the kids fell asleep, we sat on the front stoop and tried to will some guys to our house. I was thinking specifically about Hal, the bartender, who hurt my feelings because he gave me drinks on the house and let himself be seduced but had never once called or even spent the day with me after a night together. The last time he’d dropped me off in the morning, he’d said, “You’re hostile, you know that? You think you’re Janis Joplin. You’d better get it while you can. What do you think’s going to happen when your good looks fade?” Then he’d reached over and opened the door for me to get out. He said, “Better make hay while the sun shines,” as he backed out of the driveway. This struck me as mean, which was probably why I liked the guy to begin with.
Now Fay said, “The only time they come by is when they know we have drugs.”
“All we ever do is talk about guys, think about guys, and go to the club to look for guys,” I said. “How can we call ourselves liberated?”
“We do what we want and we don’t take shit.”
“We need money,” I said.
“I’ll be rich one day,” Fay said. “Then I’m coming back in a red Ferrari.”
“We could go to the club. They’d all want to drive it, but we wouldn’t let them.”
“I would.”
“I wouldn’t. I think I hate men more than you do. Maybe it’s because you had two brothers.”
“You had a brother.”
“Come on. He was the only son in an Italian family, plus, we never talked.”
“That’s my problem with this women’s lib shit. I’d rather hang out with men than women. Face it. Women are boring. All girls talk about are their babies, their husbands, or their boyfriends, or the fucking sale at some stupid store. Look at Beatrice. Pastel
pantsuits.
Her makeup in a goddamn tackle box. Fucking push-up bras. And she thinks we’re crazy? Most women are dumb.”
“That’s only in Wallingford. And they’re not stupid, just unliberated.”
“That’s what you think. They’re worse in Pennsylvania.”
“I disagree.”
She took my cigarette and dragged from it. “Well, I think we’re alike anyhow. We’re both tactless. I couldn’t believe when you said to Beatrice, ‘Nice bathing suit. It matches your skin.’ Her bathing suit was fucking
orange.”
“I didn’t even think it was rude. I guess it was.”
“That’s what I mean.”
The next morning, we didn’t talk. We took our last two hits of speed and set to cleaning the house. Fay took the kitchen and the bathroom. I took the living room and the bedrooms. After a couple of hours I heard the kettle whistling in the kitchen and sat down at the table for a break. Fay had finished the kitchen. The counters were bare and shiny and the emerald-green floor looked like it was covered with ice. She’d picked bright yellow flowers for the table, and by the end of the day there’d be flowers in every room, including on the tank of the toilet. As I sipped my tea—from a cup Fay always made sure had a saucer beneath it—I thought how much better life was now that Fay was my roommate. I watched her take the cellophane off my Kools and crinkle it in her fingers, which moved like spiders’ legs. I felt like I was studying a person who was alone. She bit the inside of her lip and began forming the cellophane into a sculpture of a discus thrower. Fay was a great artist. Back in high school, when the art teacher asked her to paint a Santa on the glass ramp between two buildings, she painted him giving the finger. When the teacher told her to go erase it, she erased everything but the hand with the finger, and got two weeks’ detention.
Fay was only five feet tall, and everything about her was miniature, except her hair, which was like a lion’s mane. It was in two thick and long pigtails that stuck out from the sides of her head and draped over the tops of her arms to her elbows. I thought she was beautiful. She thought I was too. She said I had a classic Roman nose and an interestingly angular face. She’d done several sketches of me during our evenings alone. She said she would make a painting one day when she could afford oils. She said she’d call it Beverly. I wondered how long living together would last. I supposed it would end as soon as one of us fell in love. Maybe that’s why we always made fun of each other’s men, because each of us was afraid the other would get too attached. Fay got up and put Carole King on the stereo. I wondered if she thought about me whenever she heard “You’ve Got a Friend,” the way I thought about her. I sat back, closed my eyes, and realized I was actually happy.
We’d made a deal with Lenny for that night. He’d use our house to sell eleven pounds of marijuana, because his bus was being watched by the police, and we’d get an ounce of pot for our trouble. Since Fay and Lenny had to stay home to sell the pot anyway, Fay would baby-sit for Jason while I went on a date with this guy named Brad I saw sometimes, even though Amelia was spending the night at her grandmother’s.
I was probably shooting at cans in the moonlight with Brad’s .38 when Fay and Lenny and the buyer, who Fay said had a long ponytail and smoked incense-smelling cigarettes, were weighing pounds of pot in my kitchen, and Fay noticed the Uglies on the front stoop. Without thinking twice, she did what we always did: positioned the stereo speakers in front of the screen door to drive them off. This was in retaliation for their forbidding Jase and Amelia to play on their side of the yard, because we sometimes let them run nude in the neighborhood.
This time the Uglies called the police, who appeared at the front door. When Fay answered it, she slammed the door in their faces and said, “We’re fucked. It’s the pigs.”
When I returned home in Brad’s pickup truck, three cop cars were crisscrossed on the lawn, their red lights spinning and bouncing off houses. “Turn around,” I said, feeling a lump like an apple in the middle of my chest.
We went directly to a bar. “Let’s book,” Brad said. “I got this buddy on a commune in Colorado.”
“With what money?”
“I got five hundred in the bank.”
“No strings? If we were just friends, that would be cool?”
“Cool.” He nodded.
I looked at him then and knew for certain the only reason I was with him was because when I squinted, he looked like John Lennon. “If I left, after seven years I could get clemency and come back?”