knew, which was that the erotic haze around us would always remain as unconsummatable as the romance of a reader for a character in a book.
After I hung up I stood there with my hand on my parents’ mustard-colored phone, pondering what he meant by “weekly group for people like me.” My mother glanced up from her Short Story International. The #100 bus hauled by, up 239th Street. Both my ignorance and my insight came from bookishness, I knew. How much bigger my life might be if I could thrust aside my books! And yet I couldn’t really picture a life bigger than a life in books. I’d grown up in book country and it was where I meant to live. I picked up “Hills Like White Elephants,” which I happened to be reading even though I had no idea what it was about. What did it mean, for the woman to have an operation to “let the air in”? And why were the man and the woman in the story in such bad moods? I needed to read everything much more closely, I suddenly felt with an urgency that made my head pound. I could scarcely bear the weight of my own ignorance. Try to understand, try to understand, I told myself, bending over the book again. Why was I so obtuse?
I stared at the type so closely that it seemed a pillared temple-front colonnade I could enter. The mattress creaked in my father’s bedroom as he turned, drowsing, taking a break from his worries. My mother flipped a page of her magazine. The world around me was bewildering, unkempt, shifting, repetitive, and with no index or glossary, no chapter titles. But although there was much I didn’t understand in my reading, there was much that I did. I recognized the girl saying fanciful, clever things—performing. And the longing of the young man to stay at the bar where the people are “reasonable.” “What is your group?” I wanted to ask the proofreader. “How are you happier? Why are you calling me?” Afraid to demand the answers of life, I bent closer to the page. The city itself waited patiently, constructing and destroying and raising itself again at the end of the subway line. Sitting at my way station, I realized that an era of my life had ended. It was possible to change one’s fate; one could be happier. How? The book told me the answer but I was not yet willing to pay the price it stipulated and so kept on reading, although I was sick at heart.
In the years before I discovered how to think, I was lucky enough to have two best friends. They lived in opposite directions, and every day at three p.m. outside J.H.S. 141 in the Bronx we stood on a corner and they sang to me, “Walk my way.” “No, walk my way.” I always chose to walk with Stacy, who was mean, rather than Emily, who was understanding. Still, I would toss imploring looks over my shoulder at Emily as I vanished down the street as if to say, “I adore you, you can see I’m helpless, can’t you? Stacy’s an ogre, I have no choice in this, and you are my absolute favorite.”
And Emily was. She was a passionate, windswept, science-besotted only child always in the grips of a cold, and with hot-pink crumpled tissues tumbling out the sleeves of her sweaters, and innumerable missed days at school. Our emblem was Nostradamus’s prophesying, severed head lurching across a laboratory floor—we’d seen it on Creature Feature one Friday night when the rest of the world was asleep. First we’d turned off the bedroom lights and held aloft lit wands of sparklers—a seething fountain of stars and asterisks scorching into our gaze an instant before they wove into the air our names, and then, after a further spewing, blinding moment, divined the names of our husbands, the cities we’d visit, the artistic or scientific works we’d accomplish, the lolloping, incandescent skirts we’d wear someday, before the guttering nub scorched our fingertips. (Emily’s father had brought home the illegal silver stalks from New Jersey; her parents were divorced and he was always corrupting her with treats, for which she held him in resolute contempt.) After that, we’d eaten string cheese we frayed with our fingers, a sophisticated delectable “gourmet food,” a braid of caraway seeds and tangy fat, and watched, glaze eyed, from our beds, as across the rough-hewn Gothic lair came Nostradamus’s chopped-off head, still alive, jolting forward on its stump of neck, ranting its visions of the future.
“Nostradamus’s head!” we murmured to each other after that, and burst out laughing to ward off our horror of that unvanquished skull. In those days it was unknown what would become of us. Women intellectuals still had something of the mutant and pitiful about them: Madame Curie sickened by her radium, “She’s in the library!” a howl of horror rising out of It’s a Wonderful Life. Emily and I were bookish girls—she even more than I because she could indulge her passions, having no siblings and a bedroom of her own in which to pile her ever-increasing volumes.
She stayed up however late she pleased. As long as she was physically in bed by ten p.m., her mother didn’t monitor. The door to her room was solid oak. Emily read novels to her heart’s content under her black-light blanket. At last, losing the train of the story, she turned off the overhead and flicked a switch on a midnight bulb, and her blanket pulsed with phosphorescent hot-pink lines, whorls and carbuncles and exploded fingerprints, the insignia of the maze of existence itself somehow, a labyrinth burning the dark.
No such decoration in my own bedroom, which I shared with my sister. I taped up only the earth from space, a circle isolated far off in a sea of black; it had been given away at school. Anything else was mockable—likely to inspire my older siblings’ ridicule. I played no records of my own, hung no art of my own, certainly lit no incense of my own, all of which Emily did without a second thought. It was as if, instead of my being merely a Bronx daughter of a newly middle-class family, I were some orphan ward, beholden. I returned to Emily, still sealed, the album of Hair she’d given me as a birthday gift, with its acid green and sickly lemon color-fields clashing behind a young man’s backlit, luminous ’fro. We played Emily’s copy of that record over and over in her bedroom—“LBJ, IRT, USA, LSD,” the chorus dreamily harmonized—but my family’s stereo sat in our living room. I couldn’t possibly enjoy listening to those songs in my own house! Wasn’t that obvious to Emily?
And yet I craved what seemed her daring verve. We both fell in love with Tony Curtis in The Great Race, but she bought a chunky, toppling paperback that listed every picture he was in, and she spent her final year of junior high watching each and every one, even if it came on at three thirty or four a.m. She cranked her round neon-orange wind-up alarm that exploded with a firehouse jangle, and then set a checkmark beside each movie once it was seen. In contrast, my own passion remained flat, static, hidden within me like a wick engulfed in paraffin. She and I both prized self-forgetfulness but only she pursued it. And I found that aggravatingly admirable—that she did the thing, she did it, whatever anyone might think!
Whereas Stacy, in contrast, was worldly. She never dismissed what others might think. By “success” she meant precisely what most people meant. She was an impeccably groomed, ambitious, pragmatic figure sweeping down the street in a long coat that gave her the silhouette of a queen on a chess set. I was drawn to her because she too was a girl of imagination, a girl ablaze, although her focus was altogether different. She folded and stapled pretend bankbooks and induced me to invest my allowance dollars with her, and she took lessons riding English-style on horses in Harrison, New York, her hips hoisted aloft as the horse loped, her spine straight as our teacher’s wooden pointer. Her father was a corporate lawyer, and it was assumed that she, being the eldest, and clever, would triumph in life as well. He drove a low white Jag like the runabout on the Monopoly set, and they summered on Fire Island, where she wore low-slung bellbottoms streaked with bleach, and her mother shopped for clothes only at “boutiques.”
“Are skinny-legged jeans in, in Riverdale?” Stacy asked the last time we spoke. She’d finally moved to Harrison after years of riding lessons there, and now owned a horse, and planted an herb garden, and had a live-in maid. “A live-in maid, Bonnie!” she repeated when my response was insufficient. Her father had even made a postcard of their sumptuous Tudor house, which she’d shown me the last time I visited. The postcard was 1950s sepiatoned, with a scalloped edge—a campy artifact whose jolly façade and cool irony impressed me. And then she called with her question. She had a new set of girlfriends
