Five Women Page 4

  When she was little, Gara had adored her mother. They were inseparable. But by the time she was in high school she was ambivalent, which she read was natural, and by the time she went away to college she felt her home was an unacknowledged battlefield. Her father had abdicated his power over both her mother and herself long ago. Gara was still afraid of him though, in an odd way. She felt the anger in him, the hidden rage of the vanquished. She was sure he didn’t even know he felt like the side that had lost, but sometimes he seemed on the verge of hysteria. She supposed that was what happened to men who didn’t have sex. She knew he didn’t have a girlfriend. The very idea of being such an immoral person horrified him.

  Gara had already decided what kind of husband she herself would have. He would be charming and funny, he would never try to dominate her, but he would never let her push him around. She didn’t even want to try. They would have mutual respect. And although he would have to be the son-in-law, he would protect her from her mother.

  Her mother seemed to have an instinct about the kind of men who would protect Gara from her, and she hated them. It had taken until her daughter went away to college to allow her to have a key to the family apartment, because there was always someone there to let her in, wasn’t there? Now that Gara was dating, and it was embarrassing to have one’s mother waiting up to unlock the door, her mother hovered in the bedroom hallway, making little pretend-clumsy noises, waiting for the boy of the evening to leave so she could find out everything. The boys her mother approved of respected the presence of this chaperone; it meant Gara was a nice girl. Gara sometimes wondered if it was the daughter, not the mother, whom they were afraid of.

  She was, of course, still a virgin. It was the late fifties, and the only man a nice girl could go all the way with was the one she was engaged to, officially engaged, with a ring. The two worst things that could happen to you if you were single were gossip and pregnancy. There were pleasurable acts dating college couples did in cars that Gara was sure her parents hadn’t done even when they were married, but that was her own business. She pretended to be as naive as she was supposed to be. Everyone did.

  May was fatter than ever, and when Gara was home for vacations she persisted in revealing her body to her daughter even though Gara wished she wouldn’t. She liked to have Gara keep her company while she was having a bath and getting dressed. Gara didn’t know what to do. In a way she was mesmerized. She looked at her mother (the only middle-aged woman she had ever seen wearing less than a bathing suit) with a kind of morbid fascination. This was what could happen to you if you didn’t watch out. Didn’t May have any shame? But it was almost as if her mother, who was ordinarily extremely modest, considered Gara invisible, or perhaps so much a part of her that she was not an onlooker at all.

  They continued to have their mother-daughter talks in the bedroom, and shared things, mostly Gara’s life. When May was wearing one of her nice bathrobes it was actually a rather cozy situation.

  “I learned how to use Tampax at college,” Gara said. “A girl in my dorm taught me.” She was seventeen, and quite proud of this new step in her independence. “Thank God, no more itchy pads.”

  May was alarmed. “But you’re a virgin!”

  “It says on the box, ‘Good for Virgins,’” Gara said. Actually what it said was that they were suitable for unmarried women and girls, but that was the same thing.

  “Well, if you like them I want to try one,” May said.

  “You do?”

  “Why not?”

  “All right.”

  “I mean now.”

  Gara brought her the little blue box and May went into her bathroom and shut the door. It was sort of a nice surprise, Gara thought, that her mother was so open-minded and wanted to join the modern world at her age. Her mother opened the door.

  “Help me,” she commanded.

  She was standing there, completely naked, the soft, white tampon hanging out of her. She had apparently thrown the applicator away. Gara stared at her, horrified.

  “Put it in,” her mother said.

  She just stood there.

  “I can’t do it,” her mother said. “Push it in.”

  “If that place is big enough for me to have come out of, then it’s big enough for you to put in a tampon,” Gara said coldly, and walked out of the room.

  She didn’t understand why her mother needed to have so much control over her. It was as if they had meshed into one person, with no boundaries between them. Sometimes Gara felt herself disappearing, being eaten away. She began to be repelled when her mother kissed her, just as she felt violated and squeamish when a boy she found unattractive tried to kiss or grope her. The choice of who would touch her skin, her body, had to be hers alone.

  On the first date you weren’t supposed to kiss a man goodnight, on the second you didn’t have to but you certainly could, and on the third it was impolite not to. So by the third date you had been bought. Ideally, if you couldn’t stand him you wouldn’t have put yourself in that position in the first place. If Gara didn’t like a man at college, she never went out with him more than once, but at home, with her social life supervised by her mother’s constant nagging, it was a different story.

  “He called three times. Why won’t you give him a chance?”

  “I gave him a chance.”

  “It takes a while to get to know a person.”

  How could she explain about chemistry, about how one man made her want to nuzzle warmly into him while another made her feel cold and ill? “He’s not my type.”

  “Maybe he has a nice friend,” her mother would always say. It was the reason of last resort.

  Gara had met a boy at college whose mother, it turned out, was a friend of her mother’s. Not a close friend, but someone she knew socially. His name was Marvin Wink, formerly Winkelstein; he was going to learn to be a stock broker after he graduated, his family lived in a nice house in the suburbs, he had his own car, his father was a rich doctor, and his mother was a hypercritical harridan of such proportions that her son had developed a stammer that became much worse when his mother was near. He was too tall and soft and heavy for Gara’s taste, and when he was with her he was unable to say her name because he liked her so much. He called her “G-g-g-Gary.” Whenever he danced with her he got an immediate erection, and she always pulled away. For some reason May considered him a suitable boyfriend for her.

  She was in love with someone else. His name was Luke, he was handsome and funny, and he lived in California. She hadn’t mentioned him to her mother because he wasn’t Jewish, and she knew her mother would say he would never marry her, and that if, unfortunately, he did marry her, they would forever after fight over the children’s religion. Gara didn’t want to marry him because she considered herself too young to know whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, but she was in love with him all the same, and they had as much sex as they could, as often as they could, without going all the way, although they had talked about that, too. She was going to be a senior in the fall, and the thought of choosing her own lover, without even the mandatory ring, was beginning to seem quite tantalizing.

  But in the meantime it was spring vacation, Luke was with his family in California, and Marvin Wink was here in the suburbs of New York. He called Gara constantly, and finally, because he had gotten theater tickets and her mother was nagging her, Gara said yes.

  She started to worry immediately. She didn’t much like him, he made her nervous, and after spending all that money for a Broadway musical and taking her to dinner and driving in and having to drive back again, she knew he was going to try to kiss her goodnight, and she was expected to let him do so even though he made her feel sick. She felt manipulated and twelve years old.

  What would be so terrible if he put his warm, possibly wet mouth on hers? She didn’t know. All she knew was that she couldn’t, she just couldn’t, and she was
going to have to. When Marvin picked her up she could barely be civil to him, and her father had to make all the conversation until they finally left for the show. They would eat afterward at Sardi’s, where there were supposed to be celebrities to look at.

  Their seats were in the mezzanine. Gara didn’t even know what she was seeing. The lights seemed too bright on the stage, the colors too garish. She began to feel lightheaded, and nausea rolled through her.

  “I’m going to faint,” she whispered to him. She put her head down on her lap because she had heard that if you did you wouldn’t black out. Marvin was frightened. “Are you?”

  She supposed she had fainted, because when the lights went up after the first act she noticed everyone near them was staring at her. People were murmuring with concern. She’s sick. Are you all right? Is she all right?

  “I have to leave,” Gara said.

  “G-g-g-Gary, what’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know.” She hoped she wouldn’t throw up.

  “Do you have a doctor?”

  “It’s the middle of the night. I’ll be all right. I just need to go home. I’m sorry I spoiled your evening.”

  “No,” Marvin said. “I’m taking you home with me. My father’s a d-doctor. He’ll look at you. You’re very pale.”

  “I’m always pale.”

  “I’ll take care of you.” At least since she was sick he wouldn’t try to kiss her. She let him lead her to his car and drive her to the suburbs, to his parents, while she half-dozed.

  She hardly knew his parents and was ill at ease. By the time they got there she wasn’t feeling faint anymore. His parents were so tiny—how did they have such a big marshmallow of a son? His mother, who had unreal-looking dyed black hair, glared at her. His father was concerned and kind.

  “Polio,” his father said.

  “Polio?” That was absolutely ridiculous; she’d had a shot. People didn’t get polio anymore.

  “You never know,” his father said.

  Gara wondered why, if she had such a contagious disease, none of them was avoiding her. She decided that his father would have diagnosed her with the Black Death rather than think that she just didn’t like his son.

  “We’ll take you home now,” his father said, “and tomorrow you get your mother to take you to your own doctor.”

  His father insisted on driving the two of them back to New York so he could keep Marvin company on the return trip, and feeling protected by her “polio” and the presence of his father, she actually had a pleasant time.

  The next day her mother took her to their family doctor, and waited outside while she was being examined. Dr. Spear was a kindly, middle-aged man with thick white hair. He looked like an actor playing a wise doctor on TV. Blood pressure, temperature, heart, lungs, blood. There was a nurse. Then he asked for the speculum and gave Gara the first pelvic examination she’d ever had in her life. Girls had them only if they were going to be married. She wondered if Dr. Spear thought she had fainted because she was pregnant.

  “Are you in love with this boy?” he asked.

  “In love? No!” She was insulted that he could even think it. “I’m in love with someone else.”

  “So why were you out with this one?”

  “My mother made me.”

  She got dressed and met him in his office. “There’s nothing wrong with you except that you have low blood pressure,” Dr. Spear said. “Under stress it’s possible to feel faint. Do you often go out with people you don’t like?”

  “When my mother makes me,” Gara said. She wondered what he must be thinking of a girl so dominated.

  “Well, tell her you won’t. Go out in a group if she wants you to go out. You work hard at college, and when you socialize you should have fun.”

  What a nice man he was, and so understanding. She wished she had a father like him. “Thank you, Dr. Spear,” Gara said.

  Her mother was alone in the waiting room, looking anxious. “I’m fine,” Gara told her. “He said I have low blood pressure and I shouldn’t go out with anyone I don’t like.” But she knew the truth was that she had fainted from fear.

  “What did the doctor do?”

  “A complete exam. A gynecological exam, too.”

  “He didn’t break the hymen?” her mother asked, her voice rising with alarm.

  She hated her mother for caring about her virginity more than anything else about her. She felt, again, as if she were for sale. No, he just pushed it aside, the way the boys do at college, Gara wanted to say, but instead she said, “No.” She had no idea if she even still had one.

  They went home. “His parents are going to think you’re sick,” her mother said. “They think there’s something wrong with you. You have to go out with him again and not faint.”

  “I can’t do that!” Gara cried.

  “You have to. His mother is a big bitch. She’ll tell everybody you’re not well and then no nice boy will take you out.”

  “I can’t,” Gara said.

  “You will.”

  Her mother gave her a bottle of smelling salts that smelled pungently of ammonia and lavender, and so a week later Gara found herself having lunch on a banquette at an expensive French restaurant, with Marvin at her side and the little bottle of smelling salts under her napkin. Her head was reeling, and every few moments she sniffed at the smelling salts and wondered what he must be thinking about this strange behavior. She hoped he thought she only had a cold.

  Cut, chew, and swallow. Talk a little when you have to. Don’t faint. Soon it will be over. She wondered what would happen if she did faint; would she have to go out with Marvin Wink over and over until she didn’t? Probably. Her mother was crazy. Who cared what his mother told her friends? If she was such a big bitch why did her mother care at all what she thought or what she said? Her friends couldn’t have been anyone she’d want to know.

  What could Marvin’s mother say? That Gara was frail and prone to collapsing, the victim of some mysterious disease, possibly fatal, that would make her the wrong choice for the wife of their sons and the mother of their sons’ children? May had often told Gara that she, and not the boy, had to be the one to call it quits. No matter how boring he was, how unsuitable, you had to make a good impression so that he asked you out again, and then you could refuse to go. What people thought of you was everything. You had to be perfect.

  Was that true? Were people so judgmental and cruel? Gara supposed so. It was what she had been hearing, in one way or another, all of her life.

  Chapter Four

  FELICITY FELT SAFE at Yellowbird with Gara. Without being conscious of the progression she had begun to think of Gara as her “good mother” as opposed to the one she had actually grown up with. Gara was only fifteen years older than she was, but it wasn’t an age thing; it was Gara’s protective attitude and willingness to listen and to give good advice. She loved that Gara was a therapist—it was like having an extra free one of her own. On the sound system Minnie Riperton was singing “Perfect Angel” in her sweet, high, trilling voice like a streak of silver.

  “Oh, sing it, Minnie,” Billie said, at the bar.

  “Perfect,” Gara said, “is a word I never want to hear again.”

  “Who wants anything to be perfect?” Kathryn said. “That would be boring.”

  “Or any one,” Gara said.

  “I’m perfect,” Eve said. She said things like that, and then she got a belligerent look on her face waiting for you to disagree. The other three women just turned and stared at her. “We’re all potentially perfect,” Eve explained. “It’s how you feel about yourself. When I give myself the power, I have it.”

  “The wit and wisdom of Eve Bader,” Gara said dryly. Eve smiled.

  “I don’t allow negative vibes,” Eve went on. “This audition I did today, I knew I was in control because I was psyched up to be the
person they wanted . . .”

  Felicity tuned out and allowed herself to obsess about her lover, Jason. He was tall and black and handsome, he was a successful suspense novelist, he was intelligent and interesting, and he was a wonderful lover. They had a chemistry together that was obviously destiny. Why hadn’t he called for a whole week? She had left him two E-mail messages in their private code and that was enough begging; he had to be the one to call now. Master, please instruct your slave. She knew how sick that sounded, but she also knew she was an emotional masochist, if not a physical one. That was just the way she was.

  Jason went along with it and liked it. He would never hurt her body—physical pain was not her thing, it revolted her—but he tortured her mind. She didn’t know when he would turn up next and when he would disappear. He was aware that she suffered when he stayed away, but he had no idea how terrible it was for her. It was as if everything they’d had together that was loving and good had simply vanished, with no explanation and no trace. She felt like a lost child. He couldn’t imagine the depth of her fear . . . or maybe he could.

  It had been so passionate and wonderful last week; maybe that was why he hadn’t called. They had brought in lunch to their secret pied à terre and hardly touched it. She had closed the curtains and lit candles, and they had smoked a joint together, had a glass of wine. They’d had sex on the bed and in the bathtub, and she’d had three orgasms, leaving her exhausted and euphoric. He had finally said he loved her. How could she be so stupid? Of course he would never call her again; he was married and couldn’t afford to fall in love.

  Felicity knew there were tears in her eyes and tried not to cry at the table in front of her friends who were having a good time. Gara had said Jason always called eventually, but Gara was just trying to be encouraging. Love was the fatal word, and he would never see her again. He would find another woman to take her place, one who wouldn’t threaten him by making him have emotions.

  Or maybe it was just that he was tired of her and had found the other woman already. He could have been lying when he said he loved her. Maybe she’d been deluding herself and he had been seeing the two of them all along.