security at Langhorne College. He and his son moved into an ugly modern house just outside town which was, Jon once said, four times the size of the Brooklyn apartment they’d shared with his grandparents.
He had stared openly at me in English class, and afterward I heard him ask Jackie Belknap who I was. “Gulden?” said Jackie. “Study, study, study, bitch, bitch, bitch.”
“Just what the doctor ordered,” said Jonathan.
He was good-looking in an odd kind of way, with eyes a little too close together and dirty blond hair, a strong jaw and surprisingly full and feminine lips, very red. These last gave him a powerful aura of sexuality which was not in the least misleading. But we were a match as well, both of us quick and anxious, driven and oblivious to the effect we had on other people. Hungry puppies, as Jeff would have said. Jeff would have said that someday wewould wind up eating one another up. But I wouldn’t have listened.
Jonathan’s father had remarried when we were in college, to a secretary at Langhorne. That Thanksgiving, he and his wife—“call her my stepmother and die,” Jon said to me early on—were three hundred miles away at her daughter’s. We walked in the door of the house and began to remove our clothes before it was even closed.
In movies there is always something sexy about such a thing, about the sight of gray flannels, red turtleneck, flowered panties, gray socks, in a Hansel-and-Gretel trail leading to the bedroom. But as I was struggling with hooks and eyes as though it was the most important thing in the world that I be naked, there was something so driven and desperate about it that by the time I was on my back on the bed all pleasure had vanished. I almost said aloud, “All I really want to do is sleep.” But not to Jonathan. Not ever to Jonathan.
It had been a long week leading up to the holidays. Sometimes my mother would twist in the chair and I would know that something was gnawing at her belly and her lower back. Certain lines about her mouth, once only smile lines, began to deepen with her grimaces. Her hair was wispy, the thin and awry fuzz of an infant, and each morning she wrapped her head in a scarf and pulled a few strands from beneath it to soften the sharp bones that showed so clearly now in her face.
And the rages began. The worst was the day when I brought the wheelchair out. Once the pain came in earnest she was like that, turning from time to time into a person I had never seen before. She raged against several members of the Minnies who wanted to make her honorary chairman of the tree ceremony and spare her the work of decorating. She raged at the way Mrs. Duane had rubbed her back in the bookstore, “petting me as though I were a dog.” The outbursts seemed so different from her usual self that I sometimes felt as though the cancer itself had a voice, and I was hearing it. Or it was the voice of the morphine.
“I am not an invalid,” she cried when she came down from a nap and first saw the wheelchair folded in a corner. “First you dope me up and then you want to turn me into an invalid.” She sat down heavily on the living-room couch, holding a pillow to her belly like a shield, and raged at the wheelchair and at me. “Put it away right now, Ellen. Put it away or I will roll it down the street.” She picked up a Styrofoam ball and with shaking hands tried to push a gold sequin into it with a drawing pin. “It’s humiliating,” she said, and the sequin dropped to the floor.
“I just want you to be comfortable,” I said.
“You want me to be dead. You want me to die so you and your father can get on with your lives.”
She was wrong. I had hoped the wheelchair would give her back some of her dignity, not take it away. And I’d hoped I’d get her back, too, for a few weeks more, another book perhaps, another series of lessons in her old familiar domestic life. But I knew the only thing that would restore her to her old self, bouncing on
He had stared openly at me in English class, and afterward I heard him ask Jackie Belknap who I was. “Gulden?” said Jackie. “Study, study, study, bitch, bitch, bitch.”
“Just what the doctor ordered,” said Jonathan.
He was good-looking in an odd kind of way, with eyes a little too close together and dirty blond hair, a strong jaw and surprisingly full and feminine lips, very red. These last gave him a powerful aura of sexuality which was not in the least misleading. But we were a match as well, both of us quick and anxious, driven and oblivious to the effect we had on other people. Hungry puppies, as Jeff would have said. Jeff would have said that someday wewould wind up eating one another up. But I wouldn’t have listened.
Jonathan’s father had remarried when we were in college, to a secretary at Langhorne. That Thanksgiving, he and his wife—“call her my stepmother and die,” Jon said to me early on—were three hundred miles away at her daughter’s. We walked in the door of the house and began to remove our clothes before it was even closed.
In movies there is always something sexy about such a thing, about the sight of gray flannels, red turtleneck, flowered panties, gray socks, in a Hansel-and-Gretel trail leading to the bedroom. But as I was struggling with hooks and eyes as though it was the most important thing in the world that I be naked, there was something so driven and desperate about it that by the time I was on my back on the bed all pleasure had vanished. I almost said aloud, “All I really want to do is sleep.” But not to Jonathan. Not ever to Jonathan.
It had been a long week leading up to the holidays. Sometimes my mother would twist in the chair and I would know that something was gnawing at her belly and her lower back. Certain lines about her mouth, once only smile lines, began to deepen with her grimaces. Her hair was wispy, the thin and awry fuzz of an infant, and each morning she wrapped her head in a scarf and pulled a few strands from beneath it to soften the sharp bones that showed so clearly now in her face.
And the rages began. The worst was the day when I brought the wheelchair out. Once the pain came in earnest she was like that, turning from time to time into a person I had never seen before. She raged against several members of the Minnies who wanted to make her honorary chairman of the tree ceremony and spare her the work of decorating. She raged at the way Mrs. Duane had rubbed her back in the bookstore, “petting me as though I were a dog.” The outbursts seemed so different from her usual self that I sometimes felt as though the cancer itself had a voice, and I was hearing it. Or it was the voice of the morphine.
“I am not an invalid,” she cried when she came down from a nap and first saw the wheelchair folded in a corner. “First you dope me up and then you want to turn me into an invalid.” She sat down heavily on the living-room couch, holding a pillow to her belly like a shield, and raged at the wheelchair and at me. “Put it away right now, Ellen. Put it away or I will roll it down the street.” She picked up a Styrofoam ball and with shaking hands tried to push a gold sequin into it with a drawing pin. “It’s humiliating,” she said, and the sequin dropped to the floor.
“I just want you to be comfortable,” I said.
“You want me to be dead. You want me to die so you and your father can get on with your lives.”
She was wrong. I had hoped the wheelchair would give her back some of her dignity, not take it away. And I’d hoped I’d get her back, too, for a few weeks more, another book perhaps, another series of lessons in her old familiar domestic life. But I knew the only thing that would restore her to her old self, bouncing on
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