Rumors of Peace (7 page)

T
HE NEXT DAY
I again accompanied my new friend home. This time only Rudy was in. Rochelle took me into the living room, where she flopped down on the chesterfield, which stood at an angle, as if someone had once searched for something behind it and never bothered to push it back. “Horrible room, isn't it?”

The walls were burnt orange, the carved furniture massive, the lampshades of brown parchment stitched with leather thongs. There were a lot of podiatric supplies standing around and a lot of clay pots holding withered cactus plants. Above the mantelpiece, on which rested a dusty Spanish galleon and a burned-out light bulb, scowled a life-size matador in somber oils.

“We call it Dorothy's Dungeon. It's my Aunt Dorothy's brainchild. We hate it.”

“Why don't you change it?”

“I don't know. We never get around to it.”

Her own room was magnificent. My room was small and cozy. The plaster walls were light blue and now, since Karla's departure, Scotch-taped with pictures of horses and boats and mountain ranges torn out from old
Lifes.
The linoleum was maroon with a blue pattern, and the drapes, setting off white curtains, were also blue. This carrying out of blue throughout the room was Karla's doing, and it provided a pleasant
background of grace and symmetry for my clutter. It was a perfect room, and I would not have had another; but I stood awed by Rochelle's.

It was very big, almost too big, and covered with a very thick dusky rose rug. All the furniture was white, splashed here and there with bright throw pillows. The walls were papered in a pink and white flower pattern, and it was a room drenched and glittering with sun pouring through French windows that stood open to the back garden. Everything in it was extremely neat. Rochelle explained that she had been promised a phonograph if she kept it clean for a month.

“You want to see hers?” she asked, and took me back down the hall, where she cautiously opened a door. “Ixnay, don't go in. Nobody can go in.”

It was a room like her own, very large and sunny, but on the floor were small Persian rugs, and there was a fireplace, and the walls were lined with books. Here and there on the shelves stood small white statues of naked people or people in robes, all missing an arm or two.

“How come the statues are broken?”

“That's how they are. That's how your Greek statues come.”

Through the French windows I caught sight of the gardener raking.

“I'm sorry, he looks like a Jap to me.”

“Well, he's not. His name is Annuncio, and he's a Filipino. The Japs are all gone.” She sounded impatient. She wanted me to look at the room.

“Is that Greek?” I asked, pointing to a picture of some ruins.

“Yes. Your Greeks are a very ancient race. They left many ruins. Those are peacock feathers.”

A brass vase holding three peacock feathers stood by the bed, which strangely enough was just a mattress on the floor, covered with a heavy spread that looked like a Persian rug. On the spread lay some books and a pack of Fleetwoods.

“She smokes?”

“With a holder. She thinks it makes her interesting. Over there's where she studies.” She pointed to a desk piled with binders and untidy stacks of paper. Nearby, against a portable phonograph, leaned a long row of record albums bearing such unfamiliar names as Shostakovich and Vivaldi.

“Those are your classical composers. All she does is study and listen to music.” And giving a loud, repulsive blurt, she shut the door and took me to the kitchen. “Next time I'll show you Jack's workshop downstairs. He's a marine architect at Mare Island.”

“Mare Island could be bombed.”

“Oh well,” she said, throwing open the door of the large white refrigerator. Most people I knew kept their food in iceboxes and coolers. Nor did anyone I know have a telephone in the kitchen and another in the hallway. Many people, including my own family, had no need for a phone at all. There were floor gratings for the heat to come through. They didn't look very inviting. A wood stove crackled nicely, and on winter mornings it was exhilarating to race from your icy bedroom and warm your clothes on the stove top until they were roasting hot to climb into.

“He does inventing down there,” she said, filling up the table with bowls and jars. “His father was an inventor too. He got rich off a thing to bottle soda pop with. That's all you need, just one idea. I'm going to be an inventor too.” She fell abruptly silent, spreading white oleomargarine on a piece of bread and layering it with cheese, deviled egg, and sardines.

“I may be a trapeze artist.”

“I've got this aunt,” she said, cramming a corner of the sandwich into her mouth. “You can't guess what she is. A mortician. My aunt Margaret.” And she sat back with a food-muffled chortle. “I'm named after an undertaker.”

I glanced over at her. “I knew your name wasn't Rochelle.”

She lowered her sandwich.

“It doesn't matter to me,” I said, opening my lunch pail. “I'll call you Rochelle if you want me to.”

“Because I am a Rochelle. I am not a Peggy.”

I nodded, though I did not follow this.

Swallowing, she smiled. “At Clara Bebb's we had contests. Listen.” And she delivered herself of a rich, protracted belch.

“I didn't know you could do that at a private school.”

“You can do it anywhere. Try it.”

I shook my head. You could not belch at the table. At meals you
behaved with decent manners. It was a special place, the table—and suddenly I saw the Polish family simultaneously seated at theirs in the backyard and lying machine-gunned in the open field. Everything in the kitchen, all sounds, smells, colors, seeped away into a stillness.

“Are you mad about something?” I heard Rochelle say.

I looked up. “No. Why?”

“You've just been sitting there, not saying anything.”

I kept sitting there, not saying anything, but looking at her now. “Do you ever—” I hesitated.

“Ever what?”

“Think about the people who get killed in the war?”

She gave a reflective nod. “I think it's terrible. I think everyone should live in peace and brotherhood and have enough to eat.”

It was so exactly right, so beautifully expressed. Looking at the round face across from me, I began to feel a shimmering realization of our friendship, as if this were the moment of its baptism. There was a fluttering in my chest as I sat forward. “I feel exactly the same way, Rochelle. And then you look at the pictures in
Life,
like there's one of a Polish family machine-gunned in a field, and you know that they eat and drink—I mean they did—just like we're doing, you and me right now, and they were as real as us—and now they're dead and finished.”

“I know,” she said with a sad nod.

But I didn't want a sad nod. I wanted her own dead Poles, her dark cellar, her burned Jap heads.

“But how do you really feel, I mean—”

She sat thinking. “Well, I feel bad. Killing's a terrible thing to do.”

She spoke sincerely, but it was not enough. “Do you hate the Japs?” I asked with sinking hope.

“Sure,” she said, reaching for the pickles. “Don't you?”

I only nodded, the kind of a nod you give in place of an answer too big to articulate. And dropping the subject with disappointment, I felt a strong need to hurt her.

“If your father's an inventor, why doesn't he invent a bigger table? This is a cruddy table.”

She looked down with mild surprise. “It's sort of small, I guess. They
bought it when they got married, and I guess they just never thought of getting a bigger one later. Anyway, we practically never eat together.”

“Yeah, well that's a cruddy way to live.”

“Really?” she asked, not offended, only curious.

My nastiness faded. She looked so accepting and content sitting at the little table behind her jars and bowls. If she had no Poles or burned Jap heads, maybe it was just as well. Because I realized that what I liked about her was that she made me feel cheerful, as if nothing were very important.

T
HE INTERNAL ORGANS OF THE FEMALE
, our gym instructor warmly informed us, were like a little sack. A little basketball, if you will, suspended from a thread. When you were small, you could jump around to your heart's content, but as you grew older, the little basketball grew heavier and the fragile thread came under greater strain, which was why you didn't see lady bronchobusters and prizefighters. Did we all understand so far? And she gave a reassuring smile behind an uplifted forefinger.

Silence. Nods.

Well, then. Exercise was fine, exercise was necessary, but within limits. Now that we stood on the threshold of womanhood, these limits were about to be put into effect. Which brought her to the point she wished to make. When we crossed this threshold, we would not be asked to take part in games, for it was during our monthlies that the suspended basketball was at its most vulnerable and must be treated with special care. We would say, “Excused,” and sit quietly in the locker room, chatting or doing homework.

A ripple of titters.

“It's nothing to giggle about, girls,” she said benignly. “You'll see that it's a very natural thing, a very marvelous thing. It's Mother Nature,” she concluded with a cheerful toot of her whistle, dismissing us.

I touched my stomach uncertainly, with some anger. “Mother Nature,” I whispered contemptuously to Rochelle, “a little basketball!”

“Mother Basketball,” Rochelle threw scornfully over her shoulder at the instructor's back.

But within days Rochelle was pretending to have crossed the debilitating threshold in order to sit back from toe touching and basketball and munch U-No bars in the locker room. Whereas I pushed myself to the limits of these activities, to prove that my insides did not and never would hang from any flimsy thread. Mother Basketball was much taken by my zeal and flashed me smiles of commendation, but I could not forgive her for the picture she had painted of my insides, and I refused to smile back.

Rochelle could not understand this. “She's really nice,” she would insist.

“I know she's nice. I like her.”

My friend gave me a look of puzzlement.

I had the same puzzled response to her when she spoke the degrading word, “Excused,” when she grew wide-eyed and sweetly courteous before my parents and store clerks, and when one day she announced, “Forget Rochelle. From now on it's Sandra,” and a week later ousted Sandra for Adrienne.

“It's too confusing,” I said. “I'm calling you Peggy.” She sulked, but only for a while; then she was Peggy without complaint. Nothing left a dent; she always popped out again as if made of rubber. It was bewildering, but it was the quality in her I liked; as if her rubberiness made it less worrisome that even when I laughed the hardest or ran the fastest, the great joy no longer came.

I liked doing things with her too. We chewed gum surreptitiously in class and developed a sinister background for the Gestapo teacher, Mr. Lewis. We studied as little as possible, united by the philosophy that being at the bottom of the heap was good enough reason not to try. I showed her my favorite books, Andersen's fairy tales and
Madame Bovary,
and my mildewed oranges, and introduced her to my spying trips, and dragged her down to the creek, where she puffed along good-naturedly, never minding if she tore her clothes or stepped in a dog pile. We spent a lot of time at each other's houses. She liked Mama
and Dad very much and said Peter was really keen, and when she met Karla one weekend, she thought her very glamorous. She said I was lucky to have a sister and brother like that.

I felt a passionate loyalty to her and accepted all that she said about the intolerable Helen Maria. But the outrageous creature, with her brittle English accent and strange clothes and fits of anger, was seldom in evidence, nor were her parents. The family rarely collided for lunch and was never home in the afternoons when I went there from school with Peggy. Or if Helen Maria was, she kept severely to her room.

But one afternoon she walked directly into the kitchen, where Peggy was having a snack, and seated herself at the table with us. She wore a sea-green dressing gown. A pencil was stuck behind her ear. “My sister informs me that you read. What, precisely?” And she added crisply, “My sister herself is an
aficionada
of dreadful little mysteries featuring girl detectives. Well, speak up.”

“I like to read H. C. Andersen,” I said nervously.

“I have never heard of him.”

“He just writes fairy tales.”

“Do you mean Hans Christian Andersen? Why didn't you say so? Who else?”

“Flaubert.” Flawburt, I pronounced it.

“Who?”

“Flawburt. He wrote
Madame Bovary.
”

Peggy leaned forward. “Madame Ovary.”

“Go on. Ignore her.”

“Well,” I said, with an apologetic look at Peggy, “also Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo.”

Helen Maria gave a minor nod of approval. Then, withdrawing her pack of Fleetwoods and a long amber cigarette holder from the pocket of her dressing gown, she lit up with a large flourish.

“That doesn't make you look any better,” Peggy said, imitating her with her hands.

Her sister gazed at her coolly, then turned to me. “Peggy is actually a highly intelligent person. At least one assumes so, considering the genes.”

Peggy's lips parted. Her whole body seemed to expand.

“There are problems, however. At Clara Bebb's she fiddled her time away.”

“Oh?” I said as Peggy's eyes jumped back and forth between our two faces like those of a tennis spectator.

“I should probably have kept an eye on her, but we led separate lives there.”

“Were you at Clara Bebb's too?”

“Yes, it was from there that I matriculated.”

It sounded improper to mention, vaguely shocking, like “menstruated,” but I nodded.

“She matriculated with honors,” said Peggy.

I nodded again, blushing.

“You don't matriculate with honors,” Helen Maria told her. “You graduate with honors.” She turned back to me. “Since then I've commuted to college in Berkeley. I would prefer to live there, but my age is against me. Peggy and I have always found Mendoza lacking.”

Peggy's eyes lit up like lamps at this bracketing, but I was offended. “Mendoza is the best place,” I said. “Haven't you ever been in the creek? Haven't you climbed around the hills?”

“I have not.”

“You should.”

“I'm not a pantheist. That's not my particular cup of tea. But your ardor is laudable.”

I wished she would not use unfamiliar words. Only because these were accompanied by a brief smile did I know she was saying something favorable.

“In June when I graduate—”

“She's doing four years in three,” said Peggy.

“—I shall leave Mendoza. Forever, I hope.”

“She's getting a scholarship to Oxford, in England.”

“England?” I said. “What about the war?”

“Yes,” said Helen Maria reflectively, “I have certain pregnant feelings about the war,” and I gave a start as the cigarette butt suddenly shot from the holder into the ashtray.

“There's a button on the side,” Peggy explained.

“It was given me by our aunt Dorothy, who ruined our living room,”
said Helen Maria. “She is a gifted but tragic woman.”

“A wino.” Peggy nodded at me.

There was a silence.

“What do
you
read?” I asked boldly.

“Apart from my curriculum? At the moment,
Lord Jim
.” She stood up and gave a dry, artful pause. “But I differ with Joseph Conradically.”

With that she swept from the room.