Authors: Hortense Calisher
She made a wonderful friend, particularly just now, though Liz never thought of it as anyway but forever. Sonsie’s every remark was racy to her, her laughter straight from the navel; yet certain of Liz’s most hand-me-down concepts from school or family life she handled as if these were some kind of precious jewelry from uptown. When she came down in her sports coat and a fresh smear of violet, gave a flying poke at Liz’s belly and said, “Come on, baby, I’ll help carry you, let’s go uptown!” this was not because she was chafing; the domestic day never occurred to her as something to be fled or “filled.” She toured the stores with the gusto of the once deprived, and never bought except from catalogue. And in the studio, she would sit professionally for hours, taking out her pay in the only way she would accept—company. “Just think! We might never have met!” Liz said to her more than once. What fated riches she would have missed, of swapped cups of this for casually keyed confidences of that, of mutually sustaining hoo-hoos up the stairs. “Just think, if I hadn’t come to live here!” An echo always linked itself with this, of something else she was supposed to say, but could not remember. And at these times, Sonsie never answered anyway, except with a smile.
“When I was eight months gone the first twins—” said Sonsie, “I was already fifty pounds over, two-ten. Watch the pressure, the clinic said, but I never felt more fine. And Bailey his usual skinny one-sixty-five, nights we used to the laughing, he couldn’t keep to his side of the bed, he just rolled. His mother was with us at the time, what a sweet, white-haired jealous little old bitch she was. ‘Laugh,’ she says to me one morning. ‘From now on I’m carrying closepins in me apron pocket for you, from now on.’”
“Whatever for?” said Liz. The little seated figurine she held was finished, but something else was needed.
“That’s what I said, what the hell for. ‘To stick between your teeth,’ she says, ‘you get the convulsions. So you won’t bite your tongue.’” Sonsie lit a cigarette, her timeout signal, and the two girls relaxed, at ease like two workmen. Outside, through one of the white, fog-bound end-of-island days, they heard the organ tones of the harbor.
“Cup of tea?”
Sonsie nodded. “Ah well, she’s dead and gone.”
Liz leaned over the tea. A faint, dark zest came from the pot; they both liked it strong. Behind, on the stove, smoke lazed from the kettle. “Eight months
gone
. I never heard it said that way.”
“My mother. Lord God knows she
was
, mostly. Not that she ever told me nothing, not even about falling off the roof—I just watched. And would you believe it, when my monthly come on, I was young for it, eleven, wasn’t a thing I didn’t know about babies—except that. Bird’s-eye napkins was what she brought me, like the old-style diapers. You
washed
them and used them over, if you can imagine. My older sister—one in Watertown I take the children to, she slipped me two bits and told me what to ask for at the drugstore. ‘I’m not going let you do what she made me,’ she said, ‘having it come through on you at school. Having to hide them stiff things in your briefcase, to bring home again.’”
Sonsie brought her tea to the sofa, where she stretched full length, hooking on by one arm. Both of them observed the habits of each other’s houses in silent freemasonry, having a care for the chair that buckled, flipping back the rug that slid. Liz followed her, pulling up one of the new straight chairs in which she sat best now, legs spread. They had bought the Italian ones. “God!” she said. On this subject at least, she felt as learned as any. “How do you suppose they ever managed!” She took an emancipated sip of tea, elbows heavy on the table.
“Everything else, I already knew.” Sonsie blew smoke. “Or I learned.” She chuckled. “One time, I was only eight, my seatmate, an older girl, when she didn’t come back to school another kid whispered me why. ‘Oh honey,’ she said, ‘she fell in.’ And what do you think I said? ‘Down the
toilet
?’”
Liz laughed cautiously.
“Ah-h, come on, you don’t even know what it means yourself.”
“What?”
“Got caught.”
“Got c—oh of course,” said Liz. “Of course.” She poured them each more tea. “Convulsions,” she said, in an off-hand tone. “Why would she ever think you’d have those!”
“You gain too much weight, there’s a kidney condition could give you them. With me, it wasn’t anything but the twins.” She stubbed out her cigarette, shaking her head at it. A deep ground noise was coming from the harbor now, not foundering but steady, sounding in the floorboards as if something might rise there. “E-clampsia,” she said into it, with a delicately special enunciation, her medical one. The word floated there like an offering. She looked up. “Oh honey, you’re all right, you didn’t put that much on!”
“I was just wishing it was over.”
“Oh—it isn’t so bad. You’ll forget it the next day.”
“Oh, I don’t mean
that
. I mean this.” Liz lifted her arms at her sides, describing their barrel-curves.
“Year from now, you’ll catch yourself wishing you could put it back where you always had it handy. When you really tied down with it.”
Far in the distance, she saw a figure still single, ghost who had nothing in common with the two girls sitting here. The nagging memory now returned in full—of the girl looking up the staircase with its hanging ropes, wondering who would be her friend here, dallying with an impulse to run, resolving to save the memory of it to laugh over with the still unknown—the day she had come here, since buried by the days that were.
“You’re the kind going to have lots of milk, you’ll feed yours. That’s what the nurse in maternity used to say to me, every time she put the breast pump on me. It’s the little ones have it, not the big lunks like you.”
Sonsie had been here, that was all; except for Ivan’s wife, avoided by all, she was the only other woman here. The two other tenants were homosexual pairs known only in passing—two who tripped lyrically down the stairs, ignoring the ropes, and two quiet, sad ones who cocooned their windows as if in hiding and lived behind a barrage of music from which one peeped out looking for the other, like elves behind a waterfall. Meanwhile Sonsie had knocked at her door the very first day, bearing a plate of her pastry and a gift packet of tea. This was the context that had been waiting for her, here. And so Sonsie, with whom she had nothing else in common at all. Even David, at first surprised at their getting thick so quickly, had later been glad of it, now that he was out so much. She stared past her now at that other lone figure—it could not be—who had so little in common with herself. “You don’t mean they actually—you don’t mean it!”
“Don’t I.” The other girl stretched now, flaunting
herself
against that image in the hospital, her face angry, then suddenly laughed. “Bailey. He come in once before he should of, when they had the pump on the two of us, the woman in the next bed, her and me. He turned green, I swear it, then he backed out. I could hear him making a hullabaloo out in the hall. ‘Whatsa matter with him?’ I said to the nurse when she come to take me off it. ‘He throwing up out there?’ ‘Not on your life!’ she says. ‘He’s laughing. He’s laughing his head off.’”
Sonsie got up and brought the cups to the sink, holding them one after the other under the spigot, musing. “Not that I needed him, to tell me. Not even on the delivery table, when they put your feet in those stirrups, I didn’t feel that way. Nothing else in the whole business made me feel—that lowdown. Only that pump.” She stood there for a moment, head back, shrugging off the thought, then moved past the long worktable where the wax figurine sat patiently in the welter of its own chips and dust of them, and shouldered the chair with her purse hanging on it. “I told the kids—be back at five.”
“Sonsie.”
“Ye-ep?”
“What’s it like? You know. On the table.”
It was the unasked question. They would tell one anything but that—in a complicity as deep, one was never supposed to ask it. “Oh, it’s not so bad,” they said, forestalling it, or “They gave me something, you know—I wasn’t really there.” Or leaning forward, stretching their lips in steel-edged matiness, “You’ll find you can take it, just like the rest of us.” She didn’t give a rap for the pain, nor, she was sure, had they. Still, she leaned forward, with the steady, lucid gaze people fix on the impossible, just as she had leaned in the doctor’s office, when he told her. There was always the chance that they might still tell her the truth—that she was not like the rest.
“Oh—” Sonsie shook her head, sighing. “It—” she said. Her glance fell on the figurine. She put down the chair. Usually she had a bracing lack of interest in what was done of her, never came up to it afterwards as the amateurs did, never touched. Now, her face screwed up, she put out a hand, just above it. The figure sat patiently, as if waiting for final dismissal. “Why hon,” she said, “how did you ever—” Very gently, in spite of herself, she touched it. “How did you know. I had a hat once, just like that. How did you ever know.”
Both girls regarded the small statue in silence.
“I can tell you this—” Sonsie spoke in a whisper. “They he, when they say we don’t remember it.” She put out a hand, in another unwonted gesture. The hand was rescinded. “Why, honey—don’t look at me like that!” said Sonsie. “As if I were your mother.”
At the door, she shrugged, enemy or friend, hefting her chair again. “They say you won’t remember it—they lie.”
That night, undressing herself, Liz stood naked in front of the mirror, a game she sometimes now played. Behind her, David, already lying in bed, must be made to look. She had not yet caught him flinching from it.
She herself could scarcely believe what she saw there; it would be over before she believed it, the brown, secret navel now exposed forward like a rising third nipple, or as if there were about to poke from it the pink organ of a small boy. Under the belly, the skin was gauzy as an old wrist, the veins distended, unearthly blue. Above its curve, still high, her breasts rested, no longer triangular, not yet full. In the mirror, her face, for months a peach-bloom oval, now showed still another alien—the peculiarly socketed “mask of pregnancy,” fallen inward, toward birth, as the aged face falls toward death. She felt herself a confusion of sexes, ages, indeterminate in the many-limbed toils of something antecedent to any.
She turned sideways, examining the line where hip met buttock, testing the skin with her fingers. On each of Sonsie’s hips there were ridges whose glistening snail-tracks were deep enough to follow with the fingertips, traced on that calm Maillol curve like the marks the sea makes, withdrawing from sand. Common enough on women who had carried too heavily, the doctor had told Sonsie, tossing this into Sonsie’s ragbag of tips from seatmate and sister, where it remained as the marks had on her—nameless, commonplace and permanent.
“I’m not carrying—too heavily,” Liz said now. “I should go back to—pretty much the same.”
“Of course you will,” said David.
Oh, he was trying to keep in step with her, but could he have any idea of how far he would have to reach to be where she stood—as she saw herself in the glass—heels dug in, leaning back against the hard, amniotic weight of all that had been thrust upon her? From another orb she regarded him in the glass, lying there feckless behind her, in the simple one-track rhythm of his world, between them, true or false, all the dark, venous coil that now defined her away from him—as if she walked in a magnetic field on which secret facts flew to her, to which he was lead. If I’m late, they’ll “induce” me—castor oil. If the water breaks, it’s a dry birth, girl. Hubble-bubble. The Kaiser was a breech—he had a withered arm. Spring forever, O Republic, from the dust of my bosom. Of course, my hair may fall out afterwards. The look on my face, however, is medically documented. Quite common—but, luckily here—won’t last. I am still Persephone. It’s only a mask.
Oh, she must try to reach him, therefore her nightly game.
“You were absolutely right,” she said, “about Sonsie. We really have almost nothing in common. I just realized it this afternoon.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he said. “I didn’t. What I said was, living so close, maybe you shouldn’t get so—spend so much ti—”
“Well, it’s the “same thing,” she said. “It’s going to be a drag, to break off.”
“You girls have a fight, or something?”
“Of course not. I just realized.” She stared in the mirror, chin lifted. He seemed no nearer. “A girl like her. What do you suppose we could keep on finding to talk about? What do you suppose we do talk about. We girls.”
“Oh—house-stuff. Sex, maybe.”
“Se—!” As with most women, what they did with their men was never mentioned in those terms, between them. “Why, she never mentions it.” Sex was Sonsie’s modesty—theirs. “Nor do I.” It was the one adage in the manual that had not been discussed—“Intercourse should not be engaged in after the seventh month.” She gazed at him now with a remote, calculated pity.
“Us, then.”
“You? Oh—men. Yes—we talk about you, some.” Her smile was almost for Sonsie. The men, never appearing intimately in those conversations either, instead were slid along in their grooves like puppets, moving jerkily in scenes devoted to the habits, care and feeding of, et cetera—never really to
them
. “What do you talk about, with Barney?”
“Work.”
“See!” she said.
“She’s a good egg,” he said severely. “She may not be in it for brain. But you knew that.”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “I know. And she’s not such a dumb bunny. The way she had to grow up,
kicked
up. By that mother of hers. Why, in a peculiar way I really love her, you know? Not just like.”
“She’s something to look at,” he said. “I wonder if I could catch it on film. Not sexy. She’s like some big, clean—not Venus exactly. But not Diana either.”
“You should see her in the nude,” she said. “She has one of those, almost abstract bodies. Like a good statue. As if it had already been through—you feel a kind of peculiar sympathy—” One hand smoothed her own hip. Suddenly, she wheeled clumsily to face him. “Dave! You don’t think…” Her mouth was open, eyes screwed tight, ready for horror, comically trusting as a young bird’s. The child had not dropped yet, according to Sonsie, yet its weight on her thighs was such that it toppled her forward, unless she kept her hands under it. She held them so, holding her belly like a great football. “Do you think—you think I could be a Lesbian, or something?”