A Round-Heeled Woman (18 page)

Now, though, in 1965, the queen was dead, long live the queen, and here we came: my new husband, my new baby, and me, who couldn't cook or iron or play tennis or golf and who no longer played the piano. I did, however, continue to make mistakes.

The town thought I was a saint.

It was the laundry that did it. Every Monday morning, I washed the sheets. I hung them up to dry on the clothesline in the backyard; and when they were not dry but damp, just the right damp, I took them down and folded them into the laundry basket. They smelled of the fields and the sky and the sun and the richness of the loam from which my little town grew. In my life across a part of the world, some of it in the finest hotels, no smell, no fragrance of the elegant women and men who reside there, no sheets on the beds of the most exquisite hotels, can match the perfume of those sheets on my mother's clothesline in my town in Ohio. I took them down from the line and carried them across the street to my grandmother's basement. The whole town watched.

In the beginning, I ironed those sheets on my mother's mangle down in the basement, where she had been so happy smoking Luckys, drinking Coke, and listening to the Tigers on the radio. But her mangle was small; it required greater patience, greater coordination, than I had, along with a lot more time, which I didn't have. Across the street, in the basement of my grandmother's house, stood my grandmother's mangle.

My grandmother's mangle (my grandmother had been dead for many years) sat like a pipe organ against the cool, damp wall of her basement. It was hotel-sized. It operated on gas. It took a match to get it going.
Vwooom!
went the flames. It scared the hell out of me. But I grew to love sitting high on the bench, smoothing the sheet over the roller, slapping the lever down to bring the hot metal plate onto the sheet, pushing my knee against the control that set the roller in motion, its speed dependent on the pressure of my knee, threading the sheet, my fingers on either end, keeping it tight, slapping the lever up when things got too hot. It curled my hair, all that steam and the pride that went with it. I was a conductor, a maker of music, a smoother of sheets that would line the beds of the men who needed me.

Behind me in the fruit cellar were jars of pickled peaches and watermelon pickles and apple butter and strawberry jam, canned and stewed and sugared up and bubbled by my grandmother until her death and then by her maid, Ann. For almost fifty years, Ann lived in the house, the caretaker of everyone who came by, the baker of the best sugar cookies with a raisin in the center any child ever got for being good. I was an uninspired cook, so once in a while, laundry done, I would help myself to one of the jars, whose contents would complement the dinner I cooked that night for my men. Oh lord, I was trying so hard.

Then back across the street I trudged, laundry basket piled high with perfectly ironed and folded sheets and pillowcases, plus all the handkerchiefs my father might need. Mrs. Plettner peered from behind her lace curtains in the house on the corner, just as she had thirty years ago when I was five. Mrs. Leichty, in her house next to my grandmother's, peeked, too. As they watched and, I'm sure, smiled, I grew wings, a halo appeared just above the crown of my head, and soon it was all over town: That Janey, Doc's girl, why, she's a saint. Next door, inside the Short Funeral Home, down in a basement totally unlike my grandmother's, Jimmy kept on with his live things.

My son grew strong and loud. He dragged all the pots and pans out of the cupboards and banged on them. When I put him in his playpen, he yelled. I took him out. He yelled some more until I put him in his little red wagon and pulled him around and around the dining-room table until I got dizzy. He yelled when I stopped. I pulled again, faster and faster around the corners, hoping that he would fall out onto the carpet and never want to ride in that goddamn wagon again. The reason babies and small children are so adorable, so cute, so beautiful, is that, if they weren't, not many would make it to kindergarten; accidents would befall them. My son, of course, was beautiful; his grandfather thought so, too.

My father would come home around six or even later. I would be at the stove, my son on the floor, slamming lids and kettles around and yelling. My father thought this was funny. He loved it. He adored this baby. He laughed aloud when it was all I could do to keep from screaming. He pulled that goddamn wagon around the dining-room table and never once did he think, If this beautiful little boy fell out and just stunned himself on the carpet for a little while, maybe we could get some sleep. We were happy, the three of us. Even the arrival of my brother from his teaching day at the high school didn't interfere. We were one big happy family.

But whoops, there was my husband. Oh, dear. My father got my husband a job. Floyd and Dale built roads. They were friends of my dad's. They gave my husband a job building roads. My husband was good-sized, muscular, manly, you might say, with a body by Phidias. Back in Berkeley, he had gotten interested in Buddhism and had begun to meditate. In Berkeley, in the sixties, meditating was the thing to do; everyone did it more or less successfully. In Archbold, Ohio, in 1965, meditation was unheard of, and when my husband began to practice it during lunch break, when he stood on his head, for god's sake, the rest of the road builders had had it. This was Doc's son-in-law, so they wouldn't take overt action, but they wouldn't have anything more to do with this alien from California than was absolutely necessary. They froze him out. My husband must have been terribly lonely, though how would I know? We never made love, we were too tired; we never made love, we'd forgotten how. Shame on me, too bad for us; I just never paid the slightest bit of attention.

But I didn't. I was busy, busy, busy. Being a saint was exhausting. I just sort of forgot my husband, and the dreadful life he surely was leading. He moved out of our room (my parents' bedroom in the early days of their marriage) and began to build a sort of shelter in a bedroom in the back of the house. He put dark blue cloth over the windows, he made it dark, so dark no one ever went in it, certainly not me, and after dinner, which he ate mostly in silence, he went to his shelter. We spoke less and less. We never went anywhere together, not to dinner or a movie or a party. None of this bothered me at all. I was on speed during the day and tranquilizers at night. Next day I did it all over again. This routine worked to my advantage: for the first, and last, time in my life I dropped to a size 8. Finally, I was thin. I wish someone had noticed.

That summer, I moved, with my son, to the lake just as my mother had when her children were young. My father came up on his day off and on weekends. My husband came, too, though not so frequently, not so charmingly, not so handsomely, as his father-in-law. When he did come, he sat on the end of the dock and looked out over the water. It was easy not to notice the man I had married.

In August, my father betrayed me. Late one night, I heard his car pull up to the cottage, then a stumbling of feet, and then, “Jane! Wake up!” I climbed out of bed, shushing him not to wake the baby, and stood in my nightgown at the top of the stairs. At the bottom he stood not altogether steadily, his face lit with happiness. “I've met the woman I'm going to marry,” he said, and rushed on, “She won't hear of it until after a year, but then . . .”

“Congratulations, now go to bed.”

“Her name's Mary,” he called after me.

My heart turned to stone. I brought all my small-town, old-fashioned prejudices to bear on this dreadful circumstance: it was too soon, do we know this woman's family, does she have money of her own, how old is she, is she beautiful, more beautiful than me, than me, than me, oh you have tossed me aside again, how could you after all I've done for you? My father was fifty-nine years old.

It was a summer of lead.

I would try once more in my life to be my father's chosen one. I would pimp for him. After my divorce, for of course my marriage was in trouble from the first, when I was living in California with my son, after the death of my father's second wife, Mary, a woman who turned out to be a wonderful human being, my father journeyed to California to see his grandson and his daughter. His visit coincided with the comeback appearance in San Francisco of Tempest Storm, stripper par excellence.

My father had always been fascinated by naked women, by beautiful naked women. From the twenties, when he vacationed in Chicago—“the girls danced naked right up there on the bar,” he told me—through all the issues of
Playboy,
which he kept in plain sight in the bathroom he shared with my mother, my father the doctor had this hobby: naked women. Once, my brother came right at him: “How can you be interested in those foldouts when you see women without clothes all day long?” Our father answered, “That's different.” Well, that was more explanation than he usually gave us for anything, for everything, that puzzled us. Usually, he would say, in answer to our questions, “Go look it up.” This we could not look up.

In his second widowhood, I sent him porno books. I went down into the Tenderloin in San Francisco to porno shops and picked out these awful books:
Head Nurse, Student Teacher, Upstairs Maid.
These I would wrap in Santa Claus paper and send back to Ohio for his Christmas present. Finally, during one of his phone calls, calls he made at seven A.M. Ohio time, four A.M. California time, he asked for “more plot.” So I had to look a little harder. I don't know what it was—the women's movement, impinging adulthood, incipient common sense—but I stopped. What the hell was I doing providing anyone, and my father, of all people, with hard-core, badly written (I peeked at a couple) porn? Well, gosh, I was just trying to be a good daughter, trying to please my father in the only way I knew how. I pretended to myself that all this was funny, but it wasn't. I don't even like to put it in here. I am embarrassed even now. My god, would I stop at nothing?

So anyway, off my father and I went on a date to San Francisco—my son being underage, like seven, and forced to stay with a sitter—to see Tempest come back. These were some of the good days in North Beach, the time of “Topless,” the time of “Male Strippers” as well as “College Girls Onstage!” And “Lewd Sex Acts!” up and down Broadway. Okay, they probably weren't good days, but everybody looked like they were having a lot of fun, including the topless girls, who jiggled into the faces of men who left their desks in the Financial District for a business lunch in North Beach. I suppose girls were exploited, but they didn't seem to mind. I suppose girls pandered to men's basest desires and men succumbed to them; they didn't seem to mind either. The scandal was that the performers weren't paid enough, and gradually that changed, so that Carol Doda, the reigning Queen of Topless, made a ton of money.

In The Pussycat on Broadway, the main street of the section of San Francisco once called the Barbary Coast, my dad and I sat together, swizzling our scotch and sodas, and waited for Tempest to appear. The music swelled, the loudspeaker did, too, and “Here she is: the one, the only—Tempest Storm!” Cymbals. Tempest Storm was beautiful. She had gorgeous long legs swathed, like most of the rest of her, in pale peach chiffon the color of her hair. She glided across the stage, exposing nothing and at the same time everything. “Gosh,” I whispered to my dad, “she doesn't look a day over thirty-five.” My father, the doctor/porno-fan/naked-women expert, leaned over and said, “She's fifty-four.”

Across the street was The Condor, home of Carol Doda, famous for her forty-two-inch bosom. Carol Doda was not fiftyfour, not thirty-five; she was in her prime, which, unless you prefer them really young—and my dad didn't—was now. We stood in the back of the room and watched her descend from the heavens to the top of a grand piano: first her jeweled feet, her slim, trim legs, swathed in nothing at all, her twenty-three-inch waist, twinkling away in a jeweled corset, and then— cymbals—her breasts. Way outsize, way out of proportion, way way silicone. My father was mesmerized. Gee, if I had played my cards right . . . We were escorted to a table. In the front row. To get to it, we had to pass right in front of Ms. Doda, now sliding her little tongue across her bee-stung lips and her little hands up and down the microphone. The stage lights bright, the rest of the room dark, my father was momentarily blinded and stood before Ms. Doda, like a bat caught in the light. Ms. Doda smiled down at him, leaned down from the stage, forty-two inches struggling to stay within the confines of her corset. Whoops! There they came. Cymbals. She took the glasses off my father's face, held them up to the light, and said, “No wonder you can't see!” And with that, she rubbed them, my father's trifocals, back and forth, up and down her breasts. Returning them to their rightful place, she said, “You have a fine evening.” My father was in seventh heaven. He was amused. He smiled. He laughed. He had a fine evening. So did I. I had finally been of use. What a date!

But all that came long after I abdicated my throne as the martyr of Archbold. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I was deposed. By a pretender named Mary, whom, to give myself a little credit where little is deserved, I grew to admire and respect and love right up until her death from pancreatic cancer in the eighth year of her happy marriage to my father.

And so, not long after my father announced his plans for marriage to this then-stranger named Mary, I climbed down from my grandmother's mangle and—for the last time—left the security of my little town and followed my husband to Minneapolis, where he had been awarded a fellowship in psychology. Whither thou goest. In Minneapolis, I would give up my wings and the halo that went with them. I would don the cloak of infidelity, of duplicity, and I would launder it in booze. In my father's house I had discovered that, if I had a drink around five, the amphetamine I had taken that morning would be reactivated. If I needed serenity, whoever said alcohol and pills don't mix never tried scotch and Valium. If I had trouble sleeping, there was always the Seconal, which years before my mother had shown me how to prick with a pin if I wanted fast action. From my father's medicine cabinet I had filched an ample supply of everything it might take to ignore the frozen north, my unfortunate husband, and my own screwy self. My secret pharmacy would see me through the winter no matter how cold it turned out to be.