The Bride of Catastrophe (27 page)

And indeed, he shook his head sadly as soon as my hand closed on a hanger—“No
flowers
,” he said, with a contempt almost as tender as affection. “Try the olive. It'll tone down the pinks.” He pressed a finger to my cheek as if it was a muffin he was testing, and my heart leapt. I'd fooled him. I really did look as gentle and flowery as a woman. “You want to play
against
type, in this case.

“That's a little closer,” he said, when I came out of the dressing room in something colored like a bruise, and stood in front of the mirror gawking—the dietary aide, the little squirrel, had disappeared. This person looked nearly like a predator, and seeing her I felt different than I'd felt in some months. Stetson had changed me into someone who might be attractive to Lee.

“I don't even know how this got in here—it looks like a tablecloth,” Stetson said, carrying the dress I'd picked first, with its depictions of morning glories twining, into the back room. My first task was to pack it up to send it back to its maker, and I went about it with brisk efficiency, imagining Lee would walk by and see me, and be enthralled.

*   *   *

AT HOME,
I called the hospital and told them I was quitting. I was shaking—I'd never dared quit anything before, for fear I'd get addicted to quitting and end up back home looking for a pencil for the rest of my life.

“You will
never, ever
work at St. Gerasimus Hospital again!” the supervisor said, sounding not unlike my mother. I felt responsible to seem undone, to weep and apologize and beg her to reconsider.

“Do you promise?” I asked. It was the first bridge I'd ever burned.

*   *   *

“
LOVE IS
a transforming thing!” Philippa crowed. “I must say, you've pushed the envelope in the stalking department, actually getting a job on her street. And fashion is an excellent field for you. We need bold vision, there's no appreciation these days of the way appearance can shape reality.”

“There isn't?” The phrase “bold vision” described Philippa, but she always saw her best qualities reflected in me. I'd be startled and disbelieving, then I'd catch a glimpse of the corner of something, and there it would be—bold vision, or whatever. “Seems like people think appearance can replace reality.”

“Which makes for absurdity. But it can
enhance
reality,” she said. We were hitting on our basic argument—something about the role of glamour in life. Philippa's childhood had been gritty and glamourless and alleviated only by celluloid; mine was all show so that every time I got a clod of earth in my hand I was grateful.

I was going to flout her, and her damned precepts, from now until eternity. She could hardly expect me to live out her notions after she'd left me. I refused even to try to be lurid anymore, I was going with Lee and her aspidistra.

“And happily ever after too,” I added, just to turn the knife.

“But,”
Philippa said. “The aspidistra motif—I'm not sure I fully understand. I mean, there was the time I followed Tallulah Bankhead into Saks and watched her try on hats, but I didn't actually buy a hat myself.”

“That's where we differ. I have a great sympathy for aspidistras.” I told her how my mother had tried to extinguish ours, and she began to laugh like a mad gambler who'd put a quarter in the slot machine and gotten more than she could have dreamed. “I do believe, Beatrice, that this is history's first example of a really heroic plant. I see it riding into battle astride its noble mount. It
is
going to emerge victorious!

“So, how are we to accomplish this?” she asked.

We agreed that I had to get Lee talking, draw her out of herself and into my web. Reenie was the potluck hostess next week, which complicated matters, but Philippa delighted in thinking through complications. What if I became Lee's confidante, so that, as she poured her fears and longings into my ear, her affections were to change course, by degrees, and begin creeping in my direction? Would that be possible?

“I don't know,” I said. “The thing is, Reenie keeps flirting with me.”

“Now
there's
a twist!” Philippa cried. “This could be fabulous.”

“How? It's just making Lee hate me!”

“It is making Lee rivalrous, and that alone is a fascination!” she said. “She's going to wonder what Reenie sees in you! Who knows where that could lead?”

“So she might fall in love with me to avenge herself on Reenie?” I asked, full of hope. I did not ask myself whether a love excited by spite was really the kind of love I was looking for; I was in no position for such a proud question.

Six

I
'D GOTTEN
The Moosewood Cookbook
because the most upstanding of our last dinner's recipes seemed to have come from there, and settled on a “Comprehensively Stuffed Squash” for its enormous number of wholesome ingredients. Lee was behind me, quiche in hand, as I carried this masterpiece up the makeshift steps at Reenie's. I didn't dare turn to look back at her: she'd see I was casing her, planning to break and enter. She'd probably call the police.

The house was a shell, really, with a piece of plywood laid across two sawhorses for a table and a bedspread tacked up as a bathroom wall.

“You came!” Reenie said.

“'Course,” I replied, stricken with shy happiness. So, it was scenario C: my favorite. I dared flash a smile at Lee, who looked as if she'd been run through with a bayonet. The others spilled in with their offerings while Lee busied herself setting out forks and knives from the drainer, with, I thought, a touching little officiousness, demonstrating what a very good little girl she was.

“Do you need help?” I asked, and she glanced up in irritation, wishing I'd go away.

“I could use some,” Reenie said. She was sweeping up a pile of fresh sawdust, which smelled of pure hope, and I rushed for the dustpan.

“You did this all yourself?” I said. “It's amazing.”

“She's an apprentice plumber, you know,” Lee said with pride.

“You did the plumbing yourself too?” I said. Reenie nodded and offered to show me the bath/shower installation, and I was so happy, knowing this would trouble Lee, that I forgot whose heart I was pursuing, and bolted up the stairs behind Reenie with a thrill of expectation as if we were planning to kiss at the top.

Reenie, however, wanted to show off the plumbing. She demonstrated the valves and faucets while I staved off a terrible urgency; Lee was downstairs, this was my one chance to be with her and instead, I was accidentally learning the difference between copper and PVC. In the midst of it, Reenie caught her own eye in the mirror, pulled a comb out of her pocket, wet it, and slicked her hair back with a gesture she must have learned from the movies. No one had actually done that since the midfifties, when my father, in his high-motorcycle phase, had worn his hair that way. My blood jumped: she was so thin and long-limbed and her movements so boyishly utilitarian, but her throat was long and smooth and white as milk, no Adam's apple—that sign of a man's secret vulnerability.

“Paper cups?” Lee said, standing in the doorway. “Do you have any?”

“Oh, God, I don't know,” Reenie answered, jumping up and brushing by us as she went down to look for them. Lee and I stood facing each other. She seemed to reproach me: she had dibs on Reenie, hadn't she made that clear? I did feel guilty—not for trying to steal Reenie's affections from Lee, but for allowing my own to waver. And out of that guilt, a thin tendril of sympathy began to grow.

“It's something to be proud of, building your own house,” I said, thinking that of course Lee loved Reenie—Reenie could
do
things. What skills did I have to show? My ability to keep the members of my family spinning like so many plates, so that as long as I kept running from one to the next, encouraging, consoling, nodding my head or shaking it, they would keep their precarious balance a minute more?

“I hope you two manage to get together,” I said, with resignation. “For her sake.”

And Lee blinked quizzically up at me, then her face shed its wariness and she nodded in agreement. “Thanks,” she said. “We better go down.”

By the time we got to Kingdom Come something infinitesimal, and essential, had changed. I'd told them all about my new job, and Pat had given the others that look she used to remind them not to trust me. “It doesn't bother you, perpetuating oppressive masculine ideals?” she asked.

Her tone made me feel so guilty and defensive, I barely heard her words. “It's a hundred dollars a week,” I said. I could afford to buy Lee a drink. She talked about Reenie as we danced, but it was a different kind of talk, more a way of getting to know me. We were at one with each other, now that Reenie had enchanted us both.

“She's
strong
,” Lee said, resting her head on my shoulder. “You should see her working. She just does the job step by step until it's finished, it's wonderful to see.”

A slow smile, tender bouyant breasts, the ability to listen avidly and guess what underlies a conversation, a dreamy willingness to fall open in a man's hands; I'd thought I knew the catalogue of female beauties—strength, or effort? No.

“She's, she's just so…” Lee said, smiling hopelessly, dancing without reference to the heavy beat, as if to refuse its drive. Beside us Susan bopped miserably, like a chicken trying to fly, but the men around us seemed to be riding astride the music, and when the beat quickened they went with it together. I felt their vigor and loved it. I was skating at a rink once, falling down every twenty feet, when “You Beat Me to the Punch” came on and I did a perfect spin all of a sudden. The music had seemed to ask it, and I wanted to oblige. It was like love, I thought, looking up into the mirrored ball, feeling the bass thump in the floor. I was among my own people at last, and Lee was coming around, and Philippa wanted to hear the story. I glanced over and saw Pat flash a warning at Lee, and a dark glance in my direction. Guilty, without knowing why I should be, I stiffened, and bounced back and forth on the balls of my feet, dancing the way Lee did.

She was so quietly certain of everything. No, she said when I asked if she'd like another drink; she never had more than two. At midnight she said, “I'll drive you home,” without inflection, as if this was just the next task on her list. Pat looked wary but Lee didn't register it and I decided I must be misinterpreting. We went out to her car, a fifteen-year-old Mustang convertible, gleaming like a new apple, confirming my every sense of her, and she unlocked the passenger door for me with an offhand courtliness worthy of James Dean.

*   *   *

TWO HOURS
later we were still sitting in it, parked in Frank's driveway, with the engine off and the radio on. Lee was telling me about herself, or trying to. Her father was a certified public accountant, her mother a registered nurse. She'd grown up in Levittown, gone to secretarial school and junior college, moved up through the ranks at Aetna. She was in the education department now, teaching adjusters how to evaluate claims.

“Wow,” I said, when she told me she had graduated from college in 1969, “You were
there
.”

“Where?”

“
There
. In the sixties!” I breathed, my mind filling so full of images that Charles Manson, Abbie Hoffman, Bobby Kennedy, and Malcolm X all streamed together in a righteous, murderous procession. Straight out of the television and into my unconscious they'd come, while I worked my long division at the kitchen table, and what they had said to me, in unison, was:
Come, grow, and soon passion will blaze up in you and your life will begin to mean something. Make love, not war!

“I can't believe it; you were there,” I repeated, thinking that if Lee's hair had been long, which it must certainly have been back then, she'd have looked just like the woman at Kent State who had knelt beside her friend's body and shrieked at the heavens.

“I suppose I was,” she said, writhing a little. “It didn't really get to us. I mean, there were some troublemakers. I mean, not troublemakers, I don't mean that, but you know—I wasn't in with that crowd.”

I hadn't realized such a wave could sweep over a person and leave him or her unchanged, but looking at Lee—at her hair-brush, actually, which sat ready on top of her purse in case her inch of hair should become disarranged—I saw it was true, that she was more normal even than I'd dreamed. I'd kept my fascination with normality secret, even from myself—as one might when wishing for anything forbidden—to make love to another woman, say. Now I found I was trembling. Here was a gentle, quiet woman, the perfect antidote to myself. To touch her would be to lay hands on everything I'd ever longed for. Of course she didn't want me: Why should she? But I'd convince her to love me and when I had, I'd have conquered the world.

“No troublemakers in Levittown,” I said.

“Well, not at Central Penn U.” A light rain was falling, and with it the first yellow leaves from Frank's maple tree, which stuck to the windshield like paper cutouts on a schoolroom window. The comfort of fall—the chill, the dark, and the pleasure of drawing inward against them—came over me. Lee made no move to leave and I felt she expected something from me, but I didn't know what it was.

“Would you like to come up?” I asked, feeling finally that I'd rather take a chance on being rejected than disappoint her.

“No thanks,” she said, with a faint laugh at my eagerness, though she still didn't move. I didn't like to get out and seem to reject her just when she was having the pleasure of rejecting me. So when she started to talk, I kept still and listened, even though the subject was Reenie.