Because the Hunk was the first person I saw once I decided to leave my house and be really friendly, I had made a mistake and used up all my intentions on the wrong person. So when I got home I put on my nightgown and threw up all afternoon, trying to still the demands of my brain with frequent offerings from my stomach. What I threw up looked suspiciously like the stuff on the street corner that I had been standing in. All that afternoon the song I had heard playing on his car radio when he rolled down the window kept repeating and winding into Debbie’s song in my mind, even when I retched: “Out came the sun … “ I think I can see clearly now … And the Winky Dinky spider was sitting on the spout, grinning and sunning himself. Now, one of the really bad things about these headaches is the constant repetition of a melody over and over in my head like a record skipping. Or it is as if my thoughts, which usually come one at a time, turning slowly across a lighted radio dial, suddenly come on at once. I hear all the static, songs, outside noises, and voices, along with the regular thoughts that keep coming, because I’m still hurtling through time with the rest of the world, even though I’ve fallen on the conveyor belt instead of standing at attention.
The spider crawled back into the spout, and slowly the pain faded, throbbed away. Toby was still asleep. I always make a resolution of some sort when I’m finished throwing up that I’ll improve something in my world because I worry so much about things when I’m sick. I keep believing that if I fix everything up, someday I won’t have anything to get sick about any more. Usually I clean up the bathroom, because it’s the first thing I see clearly when the headache ends and my vision opens up again.
Things looked a little different this time, however, and for the first time in a long time I looked down at myself for something to improve instead of bothering with the room. I wiped my mouth off and I swore I’d get rid of the faded, grayed nightgown I was wearing and get something new to wear, something different—softer. But I didn’t want to throw this old one away, because it was the first thing I’d worn after I’d seen him, and like a kid, I thought my life had changed. This was the first time I’d had the feeling of actually longing for someone since my honeymoon. Really, since before I got married, because I was sick on my honeymoon. This new feeling that had broken in seemed like sure-fire proof that I was no longer frigid. Since I would have pressed the nightgown in a diary if I kept one, it was natural to think of making a quilt with a square of this flannel for the keystone. So for the next two hours I forgot about the bus stop and cut out squares from the things I wanted to get rid of from the present, like old sheets and house clothes, and things I wanted to remember from the past: a square from the old plaid babushka, a piece of my high-school uniform, and some squares from my wedding underwear. At this point I was telling myself that I was celebrating the return of old feelings, and never mind what had been the instrument, and forget those hard forearms under the blue rolled-up sleeves and that giant lunar underwater watch that I’m sure glows in the dark. The idea of making something, an actual object like a quilt, out of this new feeling of longing was as satisfying as making a list of everything, absolutely everything, I wanted from the Alden’s catalogue, and then I wouldn’t want it so much any more. Also, I already knew that the only thing which will relieve loneliness, short of companionship, is routine. And now here was a comforting routine: lay the index card down, draw around it, cut out the fabric, pin it to the next square. Lay the index card down … this is how Aunt Ruth lived her whole life, I’m sure, each day a simple, square index card, filed away when finished, under the month, then the year, then the decade. Never any variation, any change, no surprises, never anything new. She had discipline, all right; day by day, she’d always do the same thing. Take any day …
Take Mondays, for example. On Monday, sure as the sun would come up, she’d be outside by eight o’clock in the morning, if it was below freezing and not raining, to hang her clothes. And let me tell you, there’d never, ever be any variation in how she’d hang them, either. She always separated the clothes: first, the darks from the whites, the silks from the cottons, into soft piles fragrant with the week just passed. Then she plunged the whites into hotter water than her hands could stand, stirring the biting bleach down into them with a broomstick handle. The washing machine would pound the underwear rhythmically against the bedsheets and the dish towels, and after they were rinsed and renewed and floating gently in cold water, it was my job to lift the clothes out and warily stick them by their lippy edges onto the turning hard rubber rollers of the wringer. I was supposed to maintain an unbroken chain of wet clothes going through, to hook a sock on to a washrag on to a giant long pillowcase puffing up like ravioli with the water, because that way I could keep my fingers on the clothes and away from the rollers.
One by one the pieces were added to the wet chain rolling upward, squeezing, splashing water down my arm. If I were to let an unconnected knee sock slip out of line, it would suddenly start flapping round and round, and the wringer would scream to a stop, jammed. Once I tried to reach in for a sock before it started to go around and that was how I got my whole arm, up to the elbow, crushed by the rollers. My arm was so skinny that it didn’t really hurt any more than an Indian brush burn, but Aunt Ruth got so upset that she hit me with the empty laundry basket before she loosened the rollers and freed my arm. She sat down on a pile of the darks to catch her breath, and said, “Keep it up—you’ll give me a heart attack.” Then she picked up the basket, and the washing continued.
Once the clothes were all squeezed out, she would carry the heavy peach basket lined with tomato-patterned oilcloth up the cellar stairs and out into the sunshine to hang them while I got dressed for school. I could watch her from my bedroom window as I dressed, as the towels went up, one by one, labels facing in, fancy side facing the neighbors. She always hung my undershirts discreetly at the end of the line, all facing sideways, phlegmatic next to her boisterous melon-size bras. She’d bleach and bleach and mend her big white underpants and then hang them in the sun to whiten like cotton fossils, and as I’d wave goodbye on the sidewalk, I’d see her struggling to get the long, gray clothes props stabbed into the lines at just the right angle—a lone Iwo Jima figure against the chicken coops and garbage cans, making the lines into triangles and the sheets into sails, masted before the helpful wind. Each week when I came home from school at three-thirty, all the clothes would be picked and she’d be at the kitchen table, folding them, folding, endlessly folding. Her big hands were of the same texture as one of the clean dish towels she would smooth first into a square and then into a smaller square, and when she had a tall stack, she would run her hand along its edges like a banker counting the day’s receipts.
“The only compliment my mother ever gave me in my life was that when I folded clothes they always looked like they were ironed,” she said, and that was that—every Monday the scene repeated itself and another index card was filed away.
For me, however, in this neighborhood, every day was incredibly different from the one that came before. I had expected to be talking to our new redheaded neighbor today, for example, and who would have guessed that instead I’d be crawling around on the bedroom floor looking for the pincushion and making a quilt of my own? I didn’t see if he was wearing a wedding ring or not, because I really didn’t believe I’d ever try to fool around with him, or with anyone back then. The second Great Truth of our marriage, in fact, the Golden Umbrella, was that we were a special couple, ours was a special love. We were different from other people. Other people fooled around, we didn’t.
However, my stainless-steel corollary was that I was a “bad seed,” that I could be happy only with “forbidden fruit.” I picked up this theory while reading a book called Strange Fruit that Aunt Ruth got from the book drop and kept hidden behind the atlas. All my important conceptions of the world were formed from the few books that were in her library. “The pear shape is the saddest thing in life for some of us,” is from a ladies’ grooming and dressmaking book; “The greatest happiness in the world is simultaneous orgasm,” from Sex Life in Marriage; and “If a woman stimulates herself, sensation will never mature to the vagina and she will never be able to experience the adult joy of orgasm during intercourse,” from The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Sex. I, of course, turned out to be pear-shaped and completely frigid in married sex, having frozen myself forever to a heart-thumping but immature location of joy from the unfortunate reading of Fanny Hill. The great pleasure I got from reading these forbidden fruits convinced me of the truth of the other statements.
But this new quilt was already starting to change my life, I could feel it, or maybe what I could feel was the pincushion sticking me in the knee. The thing is like a Viking war wheel because it’s full of straight pins that have gotten lost inside and the only way you can find them is to knead the thing with your fingers until one sticks you, and then you pull it out. Which reminds me of the war movie I once saw in which a lady spy, called “Pockets,” because of the way her breasts filled out the army fatigues, was hiding from the Nazis in a wooden wagon filled with straw. They were approaching the dark border crossing when a German guard called, “Halt!”
“Hi, Mommy, I’m home!”
And you knew she was in there, somewhere under the straw, a plump mother-type who held all the important secrets on her person.
“What are you doing?”
So the Nazi, just to be sure there was nothing amiss, poked his bayonet through the sides of the wagon, there … there … there! I pulled a straight pin out of my knee and stood up.
“Mom, I need some help! Please come outside, and help!”
The gardening neighbor wasn’t the only person who could play outside. I checked on Toby and then went to find Debbie. All summer she had been asking for help to learn to somersault. I’d watched her from the window the last couple of times as she knelt down, placed her hands flat on the ground in front of her, stood up, and then walked toward her hands until her back was arched. Then she would wait and look at the upside-down world framed by her arms and call to me for help. She wanted me to push her over but I thought she should learn to do it by herself. A third Great Truth that Jack and I share, about which there is no disagreement, is that we are going to raise our kids better than we were raised. For me this means giving Debbie a sense of self that will keep her from needing to sniff under her dress just to see If she’s still alive, and it means not lying to her about things.
She waited for me each day after school and kept calling out, “Mom! I need help!” She tried riding her bicycle without the training wheels, and when she fell she gave up and said she’d rather walk. Then she tried roller skating on the small slope of the driveway, and when she ran into the garage doors trying to stop, she again went back to simple walking. She would even have given up her somersault attempts if she hadn’t inadvertently discovered the wonder of seeing the world upside down. I remember how for me the wonder at the disorientation could quickly turn to the fear of being frozen forever in a half-completed circle, with the axis of my brain and neck locked and the entry back into familiarity forever lost. So I didn’t somersault much as a kid. I remember my last bicycle ride, when I was following my friend Mary Lou through the summer-morning back roads near her house and pretending it was my own neighborhood. Her blond pony tail had disappeared over the crest of another hill, and I was still trying to pump to the top of it. When I made it, I waited for my breath to stop hurting and watched with longing as she blurred brightly down the steep road ahead—she seemed to have no fear of falling at all. Since I was embarrassed to walk my bike down the hill, I started on the descent by gripping the handlebars hard, and as the speed picked up I knew I was nothing more than a gyroscope on an invisible string with the wheels of my bike off the road and flying a little on a scrim of air and I heard the wind screaming, “Fall, fall, fall!” past my ears, so I broke the tension by steering into a pothole. Then I remember I was upside down and I felt the bicycle chain biting into my leg and Mary Lou’s pony tail brushing my cheek as she bent over me to see if I was still alive. When I opened my eyes, I saw the swaying tree branches far overhead and the sun flickering through them like a million flashbulbs going off. I could see the newspaper story. There would be a photo of me, bloody, crumpled, and the headline would scream, UNGRATEFULL CHIED TRIES TO PRETEND THIS IS HER NEIGHBORHOOD AND DIES IN THE ATTEMPT. I hate irony. “Woman Who Swore She’d Never Set Foot in Airplane Dies on First Trip.” The Reader’s Digest just loves that sort of thing—the worst one I ever read was about a man who had been completely burned in a car accident, spent thirty months getting new skin to grow, and then, pow! died in a fiery crash on the way home from the hospital.
My last roller-skating experience was the afternoon a bee flew into the neck of my polo shirt as I was rolling down a long, sloping street on one of those days when I should have been in kindergarten. When I felt it buzzing in my undershirt, I started pumping my arms up and down like a windmill to try and crush it, which acted just like the propellers on an airplane, and I picked up speed and overturned a garbage can before I crashed into the telephone pole. Richard Murphey was trying to unbutton my shorts as I lay on the concrete looking at the afternoon sun in between the TV antennas, and whenever I look up at the wires I can still feel the concrete on my back and I can distinctly hear a child’s voice calling, “Mom! I need help!”
Debbie was slowly rotating on the crown of her head in the grass, still waiting for me, and when I came outside, I must have looked like an alien suspended in her view, with my feet attached to a ceiling of grass and the waters of the sky racing under my head. I had managed to somersault as a kid by closing my eyes to the sickening juxtaposition of earth and sky, of sun burning into the ground, of the grass rolling upward. So I got down on my knees beside Debbie, put my head on the ground, and brought her reddening face into focus. Then the upside-down world swayed around me and I couldn’t roll myself over. Seeing Jack’s face upside down is one thing, as long as I myself am upright, but turning my whole self upside down is something else entirely.
I could see the grass was still wet from all the rain we’d been having and full of broken dandelion stems and long, wet worms crawling from their holes. I could sense the glinting, burning bright sun and the ants and the pill bugs and the cutworms that were fighting under my palms at the very moment I pressed my hands into their dark world. I realized that if I tried, with my thirty-pound hips, I would get started in my roll and then fall over on my side like a flaccid tire that has just lost the magic of momentum.
Instead, I stood up, brushed off my hands, and, when my vision cleared, I realized I had been looking into the round wire-rimmed glasses that shone like twin suns on Maggie’s long face.
“It’s the lady! The lady!” Debbie said, upside down, with her small lower jaw protruding.
“I’m no lady, I’m Riva’s mother,” she laughed, and then, “How about coming over for some coffee?” she asked me. 🏠