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Authors: Jane Juska

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BOOK: A Round-Heeled Woman
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In my new feminist persona, I stopped cooking again, but not, as I had back in Minneapolis, out of anger; this time it was out of some misguided sense of entitlement, to what I had no idea. Around five o'clock each evening, I did what Andy came to call the Swanson Shuffle. (We were a musical family.) Still dressed in my school clothes, which were actually my at-home clothes, too, I would lumber toward the kitchen, scuffing the floor as I went with my Dr. Scholl's clogs, my ever-burgeoning body hidden in one of my XXL muumuus. In cold weather I added knee socks and an L.L. Bean chamois shirt. “What'll it be, Andy?” I would call from the kitchen. “You want fried chicken, veal parmigiana, Salisbury steak? What'll it be?” He chose, I placed two dinners in the oven, fixed one more scotch and soda, and, when the timer rang, served them, irresistible in their aluminum trays, on the TV tables in the living room, where we watched cartoons. So, well, yes, we had a family dinner every night just like all good families are supposed to, just kind of different. Andy and I were a good family because he and I were in it, we were just kind of different. After one of our yell-outs, Andy stood next to me, shifting from one foot to the other, and said, “Do you think we should get a divorce?” Never, never, ever; I hugged him into quiet and wiped the tears from his cheeks. Our family was small but intact, nuclear to the core and indissoluble, though we would be tested, boy, would we.

For Andy, middle school, more demanding of his time and energy, became a nightmare. A learning disability? I wondered. Did he know how to read? “Andy,” I said, casual as could be, “read this story to me, will you?” He took
Time
magazine from me and read fluently several pages. “I got confused a little,” I said. “What did the story say about . . . ?” He told me. A word to our test-happy legislators: it's not hard to tell if a kid can read, can decode, can comprehend. All you have to do is listen. My son could read as well as I. Still, nine weeks into every quarter the failure notices came home, the announcements that my child was in danger of failing, was in fact failing, notices familiar to me as a teacher, notices I sent out to parents, most of whom reacted as I did, by yelling, berating, begging, blackmailing, promising expensive gifts, threatening to rescind telephone privileges, allowances, food, clothing, shelter, and junk food. To no avail: he refused to do homework, slapped together tooth-picks to look like stalagmites when an earth science project came due, scribbled onto a piece of paper a summary of
The Red
Pony,
which he never read. In Orinda, in those days, children did not fail, so his teachers passed him, and he steeled himself for high school. What torment it must have been to follow our one rule: No matter what, we go to school. With what despair he must have looked ahead to four years of high school.

With that history behind us, I oughtn't to have been surprised, much less upset, when midway in his freshman year of high school, he came home with his head shaved. His beautiful golden-brown hair was gone, nasty little bristles in its place; also gone was his appetite for anything Swanson's. He took the collar off the dog, put it around his neck, and announced his new identity: a vegetarian skinhead. I went next door and got drunk.

And so began the long haul that would end when he was seventeen, in the fall of what would have been his senior year had I not disenrolled him from the high school, where he elevated passive-aggressiveness to an art form. His schedule— mind you, I had been by this time a high school teacher for twenty years and so not naïve in this regard—put him in a government class that he never attended and into two periods of I.W.E.—Inside Work Experience—provided for those kids who couldn't tolerate five periods of sitting down in classrooms and listening to teachers talk. Andy's I.W.E. periods took place in the cafeteria, where he was expected to help the cooks and where he refused to carry vats because they contained chicken parts. The rest of his school day consisted of two periods of O.W.E. (Outside Work Experience), where he was expected to help the janitors clean up the school grounds and during which he hung out at the creek smoking something. This was not going to get him graduated.

No longer required to attend school, Andy became a Bartleby for his time: He preferred not to. No household chores, no job, no allowance, no social security number, no driver's license. He preferred to ride his skateboard the six miles up and over the hills and down into Berkeley, where he performed every so often with his band, Hammerhead, songs he had composed down in our basement, my favorite titled “Fuck Yo Mama.” At Mabuhay Gardens, a punk palace in San Francisco, he threw himself off the stage into the pit; in Berkeley he hid out on the roof of a college dorm, and experimented with drugs, alcohol, sex, and dodging the cops. A Sentimental Education for the eighties: Whatever would Flaubert say?

I was helpless, powerless to do anything but go to school, and worry about my son's future, my past failures, and his present whereabouts. I was not stupid; I knew my son was fighting me by way of the thing he knew I loved: school. What the hell could I do about it? At last, out of desperation, I did something. I called his father, who lived far away in Atlanta and had seen Andy rarely since we had separated, once or twice and not at all since his adolescence. During the early years of our life together, Andy's and mine, I gave serious thought to changing my name from Juska, which belonged to my former husband and had nothing to do with me. I talked about this possibility with Andy. “What would my name be?” he wanted to know. “It would still be Juska,” I said. “Can I go out and play?” Several days later, he stormed into the living room, where I lay collapsed on the couch yet again. “If you change your name,” he sobbed, “I won't belong to anybody.” And he cried. And I cried. And my last name is still Juska, and Andy and I belonged to each other until it was time not to.

“Tom,” I said into the telephone, “I have come to the end of my rope. Andy is . . .” and I listed all the things Andy preferred not to do, to be, to think. “It's time you took over.”

Such stammering, such ahems, such ahaws.

Weeks passed. Nothing changed. One night, in Andy's hearing, I called Tom: “I have bought Andy a ticket to Atlanta. Will you meet his plane?” How I was going to get this big boy into the car, let alone onto a plane, I had no idea. In the silence emanating from the other end of the phone, I said again, “Will you be at the airport?”

The next morning Andy was gone, run away. His note said, “Don't worry, Mom, I'll make it.”

So began my descent into hell. It was November, a November of day after day, night after night, of driving rain, of close-to-freezing temperatures, of no sun, no hope, nothing but fear for my son's safety. My son, my beautiful, funny, smart boy, was living on the streets of Berkeley. He was homeless. He was broke. He was a denizen of Telegraph Avenue along with scores of homeless people, many of them psychotic, some of them dangerously so. It was 1982, and oh, how it rained. These were dangerous times, the summers of love behind us, and Berkeley nights were dangerous places. Where would he sleep? How would he keep warm?

Every so often, the phone would ring and I would hear, “Talk to me, Mom. Just talk to me.”

“Where are you? I'll come and get you.”

“I can do this, just talk to me.”

“Oh, please, let me come get you, please.”

“I'm going to make it, I can do this.”

“Are you warm?”

“Better. I found a water bottle in a trash bin and I hold it over the sewer and the steam, the steam, and I put it under my T-shirt, and . . .”

“Where are you? I'll bring you some warm clothes.”

He hung up.

Alone, at home, I consumed ever larger quantities of scotch and fell into bed, where I dreamed the police had come to my house to tell me terrible stories of my son, and when I refused to come to the door, they slammed heavy chains around the house and beat the walls until I woke screaming.

He came home Christmas morning for one hour. He was thin. He was cold. He was exhausted. Merry Christmas. What does one give one's child when one's child is homeless, penniless, cold and tired and hungry? Money? “I don't need money.” Warm socks? “I've got socks.” Where are they? “I sleep in the stadium. I got socks there.” The stadium? “Cops don't find me there.” Breakfast, eggs, cheese, are you still a vegetarian? “Yeah, I could eat.” And then, “I'm going.” Oh, please, please don't go, I will cook, I will find money, I will . . . “I've gotta go. I'll be okay.” And he went. Omigod, and Merry Christmas.

Andy never came home again, not really. He got himself warm, dry, and educated. He got himself off the streets, got a job, an apartment, and one day, seeing an ad in a magazine for firefighting, got himself a future. Off he went to the high Sierras, where he talked his way into the junior college nestled into a lovely valley and where one of his teachers—a forester who walked the John Muir Trail each summer—taught him about the woods. He supported himself by washing dishes, clearing trails, mopping up pizza joints, and he paid his student fees at the college with Pell Grants. He never, ever asked me for money.

I was thankful he was safe. I was confused over what he was doing up there, nine thousand feet above sea level. One Thanksgiving, on my visit to the mountains and my son, his best friend, Al, and I sat together and watched video after video, Al having told me from the outset “I don't have many words.” Movies creaked by, one after the other, and finally I asked, “What do you think Andy's doing up here?” Al of few words answered, “I think he's looking for how to be a man.” Indeed, he was. He was looking for how to be self-reliant, strong, and independent, like the man he remembered as his father.

And so we separated, god what a wrench. How else could it have been, though, but violent and painful for both of us when, for most of our lives together, the two of us, mother and son, liked and loved each other and laughed and sang together? How else could he make himself into his own person except to find a world utterly different from the world of school and his mother? My son is the hero of his own life.

Now comes the happy ending.

In the mountains Andy learned the forest from the men who worked in the woods: the choke setters, skidders, fallers, and bullbucks. He got himself into the University of California at Berkeley, where he learned the forest in another way and earned a B.S. in forestry. When he talks about trees, he becomes downright spiritual. He is happily employed by an admired firm. He is funny, smart, and still very thin. He is kind. He is good. My wonderful new daughter-in-law, Karen, says about her husband, “Andy lives his integrity.” He totes the most ethical chainsaw in the West.

My son would be perfect if he read Trollope. But he doesn't and shows no interest in repairing this flaw. Oh, well, can't have everything.

FIFTEEN

The Man Who Got Away, or What Price Trollope?

As a longtime fan of Trollope, you are no doubt acquainted
with the Berg Collection.

—MATT

It was Matt who knew about Trollope. Matt zoomed all the way from northern Wisconsin, where he lived, to the top of the list of men I was determined to meet. Of all the letters that overwhelmed my mailbox, his was the only one that spoke knowingly of Trollope. Of course, many of the letters from men who answered the ad confessed to not knowing anything about him—“though excited to learn from good teacher.” Some wondered if I had misspelled
trollop,
others thought it was a cute play on my willingness to become one if I wasn't one already, “which soon I hope to meet if Venus rises in my house like I am when I read your ad.” Furthermore, I was not acquainted with the Berg Collection; I had never heard of it.

I wrote Matt at once, enclosing my address, my phone number, and my eagerness to know more, and did he have an e-mail address? No, he wrote back in longhand, he was a Luddite, did not own a computer, wrote sometimes on his old Underwood, did not own a television set, and went to the movies all the time when he wasn't filming them himself. He was a photographer way up there and often sold his work, went to New York frequently, sometimes to Los Angeles, and surely would stop by. But he never did. “Come to Brentwood this weekend,” he wrote, Brentwood being a lovely section of L.A. where smart people lived and worked. Oh, goodness, I couldn't, I had to spend the weekend in the dreary offices of the Educational Testing Service, reading those dreadful essays written by persons in other lands hopeful of passing this test and coming to America or at least rising in the ranks in their own land. I hated the work but needed the money, now, in partial retirement, more than ever. And over the years ETS, the outfit that gave us the SAT, the GRE, the MCAT, the GMAT, and the AP, not to mention the TOEFL, the TWE, and the CHSPE (pronounced “chispee”), had been good to me and the other teachers who spent their weekends reading dreadful writing for money. So, attractive as Matt's letters were, as well as the photograph of himself that he sent, I refused his invitation. Surely, another time would come along. Indeed, other times did come along, but Matt did not come with them.

Occasionally, a phone call from him did. His voice was sexy: medium-low, varied in pitch, controlled like an actor's, and practiced in vocal seduction. He had been married for a long time but wasn't anymore, his daughters were grown and wonderful, how did I feel about Roethke's poetry (I liked it very much), how many men did I plan to sleep with (eight, including him), how many had I already—“In my whole life?” “Yes”— (four), and did I know how unusual I was (so what).

His letters came, too, written in the fine hand of one who took pleasure in words written not printed, by fountain pen not keyboard, on thick vellum not computer monitors. His hand was strong; I liked him more with each passing letter. They were letters that told me about New York: where to go—the Rendell Gallery, the Morgan Library; where to eat—small restaurants with good food that cost very little; where to stay—a shabbily charming and affordable hotel in Midtown; what to see—the Sargents at the Metropolitan, the Stoppard at the Circle in the Square, and, of course, Trollope at the Berg. Eventually, I did them all. But it was the Berg that headed my list because that's where Trollope lived now.

In January, on my first visit to New York, leaving Robert, who was placating the pain in his back by lying down on it, I donned his down jacket, put on his mittens and my hat, and went to the New York Public Library.

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY IS guarded by those stone lions you've seen in the movies, one on either side of the many stone steps leading up and into the library itself. The sight of those lions was, for me, like a lot of New York, a heart-stopper, as were the street sign that said WALL STREET, the Statue of Liberty, which rose out of the water when I wasn't even looking, Times Square, the Empire State Building, and all those places I had seen in the movies and read about for years and years of my life. Suddenly, they were live and in color, and they looked just right, just the way they looked on the movie screen and on the pages of the books I had dreamed over. In New York I stopped traffic—omigod, there's Bloomingdale's/Radio City Music Hall/St. Patrick's Cathedral/Battery Park—when I stood stock-still in the middle of the street or the middle of the sidewalk and people and cars would slow, even stop, sometimes almost bump me, often yell at me, and here came New York's finest on horseback, right down Madison Avenue, six of them, watch out everyone, I'm stopping to gape to ogle to adore the sights and sounds of New York City. Whoops, pardon me, excuse me, isn't this wonderful? Look! There goes a hansom cab! And that must be the Ritz!

Eventually, what I came to love most were the places I had never seen in the movies or read about in books, places like the New York Society Library, the Red Ball Bar & Grill, the Coliseum Bookstore, the Morgan Library. And the Berg.

One does not, however, just go to the Berg Collection. One has to earn the right. My hiking boots and my ready smile had gotten me anywhere and everywhere I wanted to go: London, San Francisco, Florence. Surely, the New York Public Library would welcome me. The gift shop did, and I'm wearing, as I write this, the $17.95 NYPL baseball cap (red) they were kind enough to offer in exchange for my Visa card. I could be wearing my Metropolitan Opera baseball cap (black), which I got for only $60, the contribution requested of a nonresident, small-time, fixed-income supporter. I no longer—yet another boon from New York—sign my full name on Visa purchase slips, just my initials and last name. I found that a shorter signature allowed time for more gifts, the large majority for me. New York City, like no other city I've ever visited, extracts one's money with a smile, makes one happy to turn over money one didn't know one had. The shops in San Francisco are intriguing, but there is always the pull of the out-of-doors: the hills and the sky and the water; in Florence the art tugs one away from the shops; in London it is the theater. New York is pure: it's money. Since returning from New York, I have managed to continue my accumulation of things unnecessary to a basic good life. But in January, still innocent of New York's seductions, I trotted up to the fourth floor, the Berg Collection; it was free.

It was locked. I could see through the iron grate and the glass behind to a small room, with four tables long enough for three chairs on either side, wide enough to hold papers and books. The walls, with the exception of the back wall, were book-lined, most of the books behind glass. On the back wall were oil portraits of the two Drs. Berg, I would eventually learn, though not without replacing my pride, my self-respect, my integrity, with lying and cheating.

People were in there. They sat at the tables, books and papers spread out before them, heads bent, pencils scribbling furiously, and how was that possible in the dim light? They would make themselves blind, my grandmother whispered. And there was a man who sat at a desk by himself who just had to be the librarian! I rattled the doorknob, rapped on the grate, waved at the librarian, who turned from his desk in time to catch my ready smile and mouth back to me, “No.” I spread my arms wide, palms up, and raised my shoulders toward my ears. I mouthed back, “How?” He pointed to a sign, a very small sign, on the lower right-hand corner of the door: ENTRANCE BY PERMISSION ONLY. I mouthed, “Where?” He pointed to my right. I reshouldered my backpack and trudged down the hall.

In a large room that looked just like a room in a library with a desk in the middle that looked just like a circulation desk behind which stood live people, who, just like librarians, would answer . . . “How do I get into the Berg Collection?” I asked the man behind the desk. “You can't,” he said. “You can't simply go,” he said, enjoying my incredulity. Now, as the sophisticated traveler I fool myself into thinking I am, I had seen this before, in the British Library, the new one. One has to get credentialed to get into where the actual books are, into the reading rooms. One has to be certified a reader, by whom I was never able to determine. However, this was America! This was the country of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine and the Common Man! Anybody who can read
can
read!

“You have to have a bibliographical entry; you're allowed four.” The man behind the desk gestured toward the walls, whose books, I noticed, were all bound the same, a solid sea of green bindings, gold letters on their spines. “Whom”—I hadn't heard that pronoun in a while—“is it you wish to research?” He glowered. Didn't anybody in New York smile?

“Trollope,” I said.

“Which one?” he said. A nasty little sneer curled a corner of his upper lip.

“Anthony.”

“Of course,” he said, as in, This woman would know only the famous one.

“Up there,” he pointed. “Those volumes on the top shelf.”

“Thank you.” At least he talked to me. Oh, dear, the top shelf was way, way taller than I am, and I saw no ladder, no cherry picker, no long arm of the library, by which I might extract the proper volume from its aerie. Aha, there was a chair, and if I stood on it and reached . . . Once more, I eased my backpack onto the floor and, in the interest of good manners, took off my boots. As I climbed onto the chair, praying that my socks were sweaty enough to hold me fast to the slippery seat, I could hear behind me rufflings and subdued snorting, then the heavy step of the Man behind the Desk. “Here,” he said. “Allow me.” He stretched a bit, reached up, and pulled a green volume down. “This is the one you'll need. Be careful you don't fall.”

Was I grateful? You bet I was, for now, getting into the Berg Collection had become more than just seeing Trollope; it was my own cause célèbre, my raison d'être, my finish line. I looked at this volume of biographical entries. I had no idea what to write down. I just wanted to see a manuscript. I wanted to see what it looked like, if it showed the speed at which Trollope wrote, which, given his output, must have been very fast. I wanted to see if Matt's comments about his first draft being pretty much his last showed. I wanted to be in the presence of writing I had so much for so long admired. But I had to have four bibliographical notes, so I copied four items and marched to the circulation desk, where I thrust them triumphantly beneath the nose of the librarian. “No,” he said. By now I was no longer smiling, but the librarian began to smile, a glacial move for him, and said, “It is not I who can grant entrance. You must go across the hall. Knock first. Good luck to you.” Was that a smirk or a sneer? Or could it be he really meant it? You just can't tell about New Yorkers.

Four annotations pinned to my mitten, pack once more strapped to my back—I was feeling more and more like a Sherpa without the Sherpas' lifelong conditioning—I trudged across the hall and knocked on the door. “Come in,” said a Voice from behind the door. I opened the door and resumed smiling. “You can't come in here with that,” said the Voice. “With what?” I asked. “Your backpack. All belongings must be checked or lockered on the first floor of the library.” The Voice got up and left the room.

It had gotten very hot in this library. That's the thing about places with seasons like New York. Winter is very cold, so inside is hot. Why they don't make it just warm I don't know, but they don't; inside feels good at first, but before long you're mopping your brow. Which was what I was doing, that and worrying I would smell up the wool turtleneck tunic, which was practically all I had to wear on this wintry visit, and which was now soggy beneath Robert's down jacket. So I hurried down the stairs to the first floor to get lockered. (A note: the New York Public Library does have elevators; however, they went the opposite way of me—up when I was going down and vice versa. Besides, I considered all this climbing sort of like the Stations of the Cross, like I had to suffer along the way in order to be worthy of the Holy Grail soon to be mine.)

Where do you put things once you've lockered? I was cooler, but, pocketless, I was devoid of anything useful, such as paper and pencil, photo ID—what if I died in there? And the locker key: where was I supposed to put that? I felt denuded, easy prey to thievery, to chicanery, to loss of identity, and to depravity as yet unimagined. I put the key in my boot, my hiking boot, which they let me keep, along with the four annotations by now crumpled and kind of pasty in my hand.

Back up the stairs to the fourth floor, lighter and freer without most of my worldly possessions, confident that I had at last followed all the rules, I entered a new room, this one nearer the Berg but still far away, where the Voice, the one that had commanded me to get myself lockered, now sat behind a long, long table. And now there were two, another one at the other end of the long, long table. I was about to be interviewed.

I hadn't seen herringbone like that since Fraternity Rush in 1954. Rep ties, either. But these two, these medium-young men, were right out of a John Cheever story about two fellows who hadn't quite made it at Yale so decided to come out in library school. Gay men are the same as straight men; there are lots of different kinds, just as there are lots of different kinds of women, some of whom are even girls. But among all the variations, there are, in particular, two kinds of gay men: one kind likes women, the other does not. Behind the table sat a man of the latter sort, no question about it. To his left, three chairs down, sat a second man whose tolerance I could not immediately discern.

“I'm back,” I announced as if everyone would care.

With his chin, the man who did not like women pointed to a chair onto which I was to sit. He was to be my inquisitor. “Why is it”—he looked at a space somewhere beyond my head—“you wish to visit the Berg?”

BOOK: A Round-Heeled Woman
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