A Round-Heeled Woman (4 page)

What fun this all was. And so, except for those letters in the
yes
pile, I decided not to include my mailing address or my e-mail address or my phone number. I ended each letter with only my name. Seemed the sensible, the wise, thing to do. I would grow bolder in the weeks to come.

This triage was fun. I was having a party and, finally, every man present was paying attention to me! I picked up a long blue envelope with a famous name in the upper-left corner. This would be a definite
yes.
Whoops, a photograph. The fully erect penis belonging to the very famous name stared up at me. A self-portrait. Well, there it was again: a naked man or part of one. I still couldn't look very long. I read his note:
“Your message-in-a-bottle caught my eye in a pleasing way. . . . Much of what goes on in the
world amuses me, and I tend toward the sardonic view while remaining appreciative of life's ironies and serendipities.”
Well, he could write, no doubt about that. But I tossed Famous into the
no
pile, another decision I would come to regret. I had no idea that not many weeks hence I would recall the photo, not with disgust but with longing.

Now, in the first flush of triumph, I sat on my futon taller than ever before and considered the standards I had conceived during this first-round draft. They were rules gathered from my own experience and intelligence—I was feeling especially smart—that would guide me and those fortunate enough to become my lovers. Hubris, hubris, oh Jane, watch out. How come nobody who has hubris knows it? If you have hubris, are you automatically a hero? Are you automatically blind so that even in the end, somebody else has to tell you, like the chorus? If we did know, would we rid ourselves of it? Of course, if we did, there would be no stories, no plays, novels, poems; well, there would be poems—there are always poets and always will be— hubris is not big with poets. I was just at the beginning of my hubris, with more to come, so my rules came easily:

Political Affiliation

Never sleep with a Republican even if he looks like John McCain. It would be sleeping with the enemy.

Personal Affiliation

No married men. I was grown up now, not like in the early years of my marriage, when I thought this one little affair would enliven my stuporous married life. I was wrong; all I got was a stuporous affair. I was through lying in bed listening to guilty confessions, apologies, and self-recriminations from a married mess huddled on the other side of the bed.

Sexual Affiliation

No Kinky Sex. Whatever that was.

I would break them all.

I held my glass aloft and toasted myself. “To me. Long may I wave.” At the end of my first night of triumph—twelve letters, wow!—I dressed for bed: long-sleeved T-shirt, flannel pants elasticized at waist and ankle, truly a fetching sight. Oh god, what will I wear if . . . if . . . I opened my French doors to the cool, clear California air. It smelled of possibility.

In the weeks to come, I would receive six more packets, sixty-three letters in all.

FOUR

Oh, Danny Boy

I will be in town the weekend of December 2 on my way to Ireland.
Could we meet for lunch?

—DAN

I stood in front of my closet. Nothing looked right. All my clothes were old; almost all of them were either black or white and none of them included a skirt. Oh well, black and white is always safe; everybody wears black and white in San Francisco all the time: summer, winter, fall. I will not iron. I will not make this into a big deal.

But it was. I had not been on a date in forty-two years. My friends Alison and Scott, in 1983, had invited me to dinner “to meet a tennis friend of Scott's,” who, as it happened, was single. I don't count that a date, though. I count it as just another disaster. Alison and Scott discreetly left the dinner table, leaving me and this man—divorced, male, terribly good-looking and younger than I—alone. “What do you do?” he asked.

“I am a teacher,” I said. “An English teacher.”

“My worst subject,” he said. “I'm dyslexic.”

“Oh,” I said, “school must have been hard for you.”

“Actually, no,” he said. “Some girl always helped me, stole the tests ahead of time, wrote my papers for me. I did all right.”

Conversation turned to hobbies. “I read a lot,” I said before I could swallow it.

“My favorite thing to do,” he said, “is to go to the Financial District in San Francisco around five o'clock and watch the girls come out of the office buildings. Great sight.” He smiled, ruminating about his favorite thing. Not soon enough, in the silence that ensued, Scott and Alison returned, I said good night, and that was that. So that doesn't count. This one counted. It was going to be a date.

I DID NOT DATE in high school. The kids in my class, almost all thirty-two of us who would graduate, the largest class ever to finish twelfth grade, had been together since kindergarten. Many of our parents had gone to school together. In the upper-left corner of Ohio, where the earth was rich for farming, where cornfields provided the natural boundaries of town, where kids dropped out in tenth grade to help their fathers in the fields, this little town named Archbold, population 1,234, flourished during World War I, the Depression, World War II, the recession, and Ronald Reagan; it is healthy today.

Not so sturdy myself, I avoided all physical contact with boys. When everyone began to go steady, I didn't. My mother had a lot to do with this. In eighth grade Dick gave me his ID bracelet. That meant we were a couple, we were going steady, no matter that we never went anywhere, that we were never alone, that we never actually talked to each other. He liked me; that's why he gave his bracelet to my best friend to give to me. I took the bracelet, which meant I liked him, which is what my best friend went back and told him. At Christmastime, during gift exchange in social studies class, I gave him a picture of me beautifully wrapped; my mom did the classiest wrapping of anyone in town. Miss Nafziger, the teacher, Old Step-and-a-Half, we called her— she wore a brace that clanked when she walked—made everybody unwrap their presents and hold them up for everyone to see. Dick unwrapped the picture of me and everybody laughed. Everybody but Dick and me.

When I showed the bracelet to my mother, she scowled. “It's ridiculous,” she said. “Before you know it, you'll want to wear lipstick. One day you'll have an accident because you're looking at yourself in the rearview mirror when you should be driving.” My mother could see much farther into the future than I could, none of it, apparently, to be wished for if I intended to be a girl.

My mother had a horror of “silly things girls do.” From my very beginning she fought to save me from girldom. She didn't like girls, thought them uninteresting, frivolous, useless. No daughter of hers would be a drum majorette—“Where did you get that baton? Get rid of it”—or a cheerleader—“I know what you girls are doing down in the basement,” she would say in response to our “Yea, team!” “Keep it in the basement,” she commanded. We did. When I was in my later teens, she would advise me, “If ever you're at a party, talk to the boys, the men. Conversation will be much more rewarding.” It would take the women's movement, some thirty years in the future, along with my experience as an unaccompanied woman, to convince me that my mother had been wrong.

When I began menstruating, the first girl in sixth grade to do so, my mother sighed, looked heavenward, and took me to the bathroom, where she told me that I had gotten the Curse, that I would have it every month, so get used to it. She gave me a Kotex, showed me how to hook it to the sanitary belt that stretched over my belly and was a sickly beige and bumpy, and left the bathroom. When cramps accompanied my “time of the month,” when I “fell off the roof,” when “company came to call,” my mother, clearly disgusted that her daughter would give in to woman's weakness, ordered me to get out of bed and walk. The pain is in your head, she said. Well, she was half right. In twelfth-grade physiology, I learned that female bleeding was a “sloughing off of the endometrium,” that the reproductive cycle was playing itself out in my body, and I was truly surprised. It was not my mother who told me about conception and birth and all parts in between; it was a high school textbook—and Norma, my best friend, who lived on a farm.

“You should give that back,” said my mother, pointing to Dick's ID bracelet. So I did. Only the teasing of my friends— girls all—would get me to shave my legs, and then not until tenth grade. By then—way before then—I had breasts to worry about. They were just so damn big. My mother's were a normal size though they drooped; she explained, when she caught me peeking, that in the twenties she had bound them, as was the style, so as to make girls look like boys; in my mother's case her breasts went with the rest of her athletic self. I wore blousy blouses, dresses full on top, my breasts never going with anything respectable. I never wore a sweater. Everyone would surely see how abnormal I was; my shame would be for all to see. My favorite article of clothing was a sweatshirt, size XL. I had six of them.

My mother was also a wonderful woman. She loved me and my sister, all of us, especially my brothers. My doctor father was too busy to have much of a hand in rearing us. But sometimes my mother insisted on his participation.

One summer evening, the summer before I was to leave home to go to college, my mother called upstairs where I was reading—I was always reading. “Put that book down and come down here,” she called. “Your father is going to teach you to dance.”

I pretended I wasn't there. I pretended that I was deaf, that I was dead. “Take off that sweatshirt”—my mother had X-ray vision, too—“put on a blouse and skirt and get down here.”

I had never danced with a boy or with a man. My town and the surrounding farms and my school were heavily populated with Mennonites, Amish, religious folk who did not allow dancing, movies, recorded music, television when it was invented. Now, my family, not being Mennonites, owned a record player and a television set; when it was on, our hired girl, Amish born and bred, kept her back to it; she would pass through the living room backward. I was fourteen before the town got a movie theater, a huge change. And dancing? Once, during my junior year, Sue Ellen, who, with her family, had once lived in Toledo, a city far to the north, talked the principal into letting us use the gymnasium for a school dance. About twenty-four girls and one boy—Johnny—showed up. Johnny, it turned out, could jitterbug (he was adopted), and so could Sue Ellen of Toledo. So they danced with each other and the rest of us took early training in wallflowering. Dances in the high school gym faded soon thereafter. Incidentally, we did not have a senior prom; we had a senior banquet. No dancing. And I went with the only teenage gay (I had no concept of that yet) atheist (that either) in Ohio. He was also poor, something unusual in our little town. His front door didn't even have a porch, just a cement block for a step. He didn't have a father either, just a mother who hardly ever came outside and who was old when she did. At the banquet, we had a good time. We talked about theater arts and laughed at the couples who were going steady. After high school, my date moved to New York City, became a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, married, and had five sons. You just never know.

So here was my mother commanding me to dance with my father. I skulked into the library, where my father sat reading the newspaper. “He's easy to follow,” said my mother. “He always does the same thing.” What same thing? I watched as Mom put a Bing Crosby record on the turntable. “Blue Room”: oh god, I was going to have to slow-dance with my father. How incestuous could this be? Fortunately, I did not know the word
incest
either, so instead of bolting, I stood forlornly in the middle of the room.

“Ed, pay attention,” said my mother. “She needs to know how to do this.”

Reluctantly, my father put aside his newspaper and stepped forward in dance position. He smiled, not much more at ease than I was. But my father loved music, particularly Bing Crosby's music, so he quickly found the rhythm and led me about the room.

“Excuse me, I'm sorry, whoops . . .”

“Relax,” said my father.

“He's doing the same thing over and over,” my mother called from the sidelines.

“Relax,” said my father. “Just follow my lead.”

“Put your hand up over his shoulder,” my mother ordered. “Don't drag on his arm.”

I couldn't. I stumbled over my own feet, stepped on my father's feet, dragged on his arm, until at last the record ended. My father breathed a sigh of relief, my mother just sighed, and I scurried back upstairs to my book.

But she wasn't finished preparing me for college. I had to learn how to play bridge. Every night after dinner, she and my father and my brother, three years younger than I, would gather at the bridge table in the living room. While I tried to shuffle cards and deal them gracefully, the way my mother did, my father read the newspaper. “Ed, put that paper down,” my mother would say. And he would while he bid or played the hand. Otherwise, he was completely uninterested, oblivious to all but his newspaper. My parents were good bridge players. This must have been hell on them, for I never learned how to play bridge, though my brother got quite good; actually, I did learn how to play bridge—badly.

The next college prep course my mother gave me I aced. It was How to Mix a Drink. “Never, ever stir a drink with a spoon,” my mother admonished as she got out the ingredients for the cocktail hour. “Remember: the spoon is the enemy of the highball.” I nodded solemnly. “If you want to stir it,” she went on, “use this.” She held up her index finger. “It's nature's swizzle stick. Here.” She held out the properly mixed scotch and soda. “Drink this.” It tasted terrible. I scowled. “That's all right, honey,” she said. “You'll get used to it. Like coffee.” I didn't like that either. “Another thing,” she said. “When you drink gin and tonic, always leave the lime in the glass when you mix the next one. That way you'll always know how many you've had.” Oh gee, would I remember all this? I envisioned college as one big cocktail party that I would pass or fail depending on my bartending skills.

Well, she had done all she could. She sighed and said to me, on my final day at home, “I worry about you. You're too nice.”

The next day my mother and father drove me to Ann Arbor. I would spend my sophomore year playing bridge; by my junior year I could drink right along with the best of them, which made dancing not quite so terrifying. But in the first semester of my freshman year, I did something my mother had never said a word about: kissing. I wasn't too nice after all. I was a girl.

NOW, HERE IT WAS, forty-eight years later, 1999, and I was going on a date. Just me and a man in a public place.

“Your choice,” he had said when I phoned to accept his invitation.

The Zuni Café in San Francisco is cool. It is the best place in town for people watching, not that it's full of famous people but that the people who come here are interesting: sort of theatrical-looking, offbeat, European or punk or sometimes African, most times all mixed up. In fact, it's where Nicolas Cage used to hang out before he changed his jawline and ripped his abs. The Zuni makes me feel like I'm in another country where, though I am an obvious tourist, the natives are happy to see me. It also serves the best hamburger in town and the very best Caesar salad anywhere. So whatever else might happen, I figured I would get a good meal out of this.

I was early. I am always early; comes from being a teacher, I guess. So I waited for this man upstairs in the café, the Zuni being on three levels, our table-to-be on the third. I sat, my back to the wall, facing the entryway. Here he came.

Bantam rooster, I thought, as I watched him come toward me. His chest stuck out, his legs were shorter than mine and more bowed, and along the top of his head the gray fuzz of his hair made a perfect coxcomb. He strutted. I smiled and held out my hand. He ignored it and sat down.

“Haven't had a drink in two years,” he said. “Coffee!” he called to the waiter. When it came, he clattered the cup in the saucer, and as he raised it to his lips, his hand shook so violently that the coffee splashed onto the white tablecloth. “Another cup!” he ordered. “So you're a teacher, are you?” Before I could answer, he said, “Me, too. Business math. Being sued got me sober.”

“For what?” I asked.

“Sexual harassment,” he said. “Of course they'd try to get me on that. Natural to suspect an ex-priest of something that stupid. Sorry about the tablecloth.” We both looked at the cloth around his place, wet through, the dark of the coffee spreading into the middle of the table. The waiter came forward, quickly and efficiently exchanged the stained cloth for a new one, and took our orders.