Stop That Girl (15 page)

“You’re going to see her?” Mom choked out.

“Well, what can I do?”

“You could not see her,” Mom said.

I was sitting in my closet, surrounded by my robe and my clothes and the tips of belts and scarves, peering out at Bart, who was rolling over to look at the clock. This is what he did whenever he was there and Mom called. After a few minutes, he’d start huffing and kicking the sheets around with his feet.

“But maybe, somehow, she’s better,” I said.

Mom said, “This is unbelievable.” She began to wheeze. “It’s like you’ve stabbed me with a knife.”

“But why?”

“How—I—how can you entertain the notion of seeing the person who all but ruined my life? Who—who exterminated my self-confidence, who destroyed my aspirations, who—who reduced me to rubble every waking moment of my youth?”

Her voice made me feel dizzy. I was stunned by how I’d miscalculated her reaction. “Mom, I’m not trying to upset you. I mean, she wrote to me out of the blue. What should I do?”

“Do what you want,” Mom said, and hung up.

I let out a scream and burst from the closet.

“What’s wrong?” Bart said.

“She’s mad about my grandmother coming!”

“Get in bed,” Bart said.

“I’m too upset,” I said, feeling like I might cry.

“She’ll get over it.”

“No, no, no, you don’t understand. This isn’t some little thing.” I went out to the kitchen and gulped a glass of milk, creating a frigid tunnel near my lungs. I gasped for breath.

Five minutes later, my phone was ringing.

Bart said, “Let’s unplug it.”

“What good would that do?”

“End the tyranny,” he said. “Keep you from being a slave.”

I detested Bart right then. For a second I imagined struggling with him at the edge of a cliff.

“You’re going to let Dr. Frost visit you?” my sister, Kathy, accused me, when I picked it up.

“Why are you joining in?” I said. “This is sick!”

“It sure is,” she said.

“Look, she wrote and said she was coming. It’s not like I invited her.”

“So you’ll just be gone when she comes, right?”

“This is the biggest schism of our lives, don’t you understand?”

“How can you do it to Mom? Do you know how upset she is? She’s in the bedroom crying!”

“I’m not doing anything to her.” Bart started kicking the sheets.

“Then tell her you’re not going to see Dr. Frost.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” I said.

We both hung up. I was shaking with rage.

“Come on, they’re manipulating you,” Bart said.

“Hey, don’t say that, you’re making it worse.”

Bart said, “Okay. If you want to stay on the phone all night, I’m leaving.”

I shrugged.

“You need to get a little separation going here. You talk to your mother every day!”

“Not every day.”

“You act like she drives you crazy, but you’re attached at the hip.”

I said, “Why should I take your advice? You
never
talk to your family.”

“I know what I’m doing, believe me,” he said.

I watched with dread as he pulled on his pants and left; then I too let myself out of the house and walked around the block, gulping fog like it was medication for what ailed me. Actually, I didn’t know what ailed me. I wondered what was driving me into this battle. After all, I wasn’t crazy about seeing Dr. Frost the day of the Ginsberg reading. But her visit seemed important and inevitable, the way an eclipse is known about for years before it occurs. I’d been waiting that long for a breakthrough. Why couldn’t anyone understand that?

Back in my room, the phone was already ringing. Mom’s voice was phlegmy. She said, “Get to the point. Exactly what do you have in mind?”

“Let’s say she stops by,” I began. “If she’s reasonable, great. If she’s creepy and weird, I’ll kick her out.” Then I tried some handy phrases like
I’ll be taking one for the team
and
This is a boil that needs to be lanced.
I was gambling that in the end I’d be seen as a hero. I imagined the reunion and saw the sun coming out from behind the clouds. I saw Mom and Dr. Frost beaming at me, together again, joyous and proud.

“I don’t like it,” Mom said.

“Why?”

“She’s insidious, and she’ll most likely say something to create a wedge,” Mom said.

“But that won’t work!”

“She always causes heartache.”

We ended up talking a long time that night. To regain our goodwill we veered from the subject of my grandmother. Mom wanted to hear the latest about the magazine, news of Bart and his studies, if Julie and I had been using the tea towels she’d sent, as well as the special German lint-removing brush, and an item-by-item appraisal of the latest batch of black sweaters she’d rounded up for me at the local thrift store. Finding stuff for me at the local thrift store, an especially fertile one, was her hobby. “By the way,” I said, “I think I’m getting into brown.”

“Brown. All right, I’ll see what I can find.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Don’t forget, it’s your grandfather’s birthday soon, you should send him a card.”

“I already did, Mom.”

“My God, I feel sick to my stomach,” she said.

“Why?”

“I’m frightened of her—I still have nightmares about her. It’s impossible to convey the horror she inspires in me. I think she may have tried to strangle me when I was a baby!”

What could I say to that? “Gee, that’s awful.”

“Yes, it is.”

After we hung up, I couldn’t relax. In a while, I called Bart.

“You can come back now,” I said.

“What makes you think I want to?” Bart said.

“Just a thought.”

“I feel like I should be mad at you, but I’m not sure why,” Bart said.

I was tired. “Just come over.”

“See you in a minute,” Bart said.

We’d been together a year and a half. Until the magazine happened, I’d been hanging by a thread, at least academically. I went to my classes—history, mostly—and listened to the lectures, but never did the required work on time or with much enthusiasm. Occasionally, something would strike my fancy and I’d pour my guts into it, like “The Saga of Wang Tung Ping,” which I wrote for a Third World Studies class about the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The assignment was meant to be a ten-page research paper, but “Wang Tung Ping” came in at fifty-five pages. Despite the bibliography, which documented the eighty-seven books and articles I’d used in my research, my professor was annoyed. “Not what I asked for,” he wrote. Starting the magazine with Bart was the best thing that had happened in college so far, and what threw us together in the first place.

Bart was from Cleveland, Ohio. His dad was a welder at some company with defense contracts. He probably spent his days blowtorching tanks and bombs, but no one knew. I’d met his family on a trip we took together over Christmas break (Mom was mad I didn’t come home, Bart triumphant), and the main thing I’d noticed was that Bart was more annoyed by his own family than he was with mine. He referred frequently to the lifetime prison of their Catholicism, which had placed him, in his youth, at the hands of loathsome nuns. Not a cliché, he declared stoutly. Bart’s parents spent a lot of time watching TV in a living room dominated by a large defunct aquarium full of miscellaneous objects, like dog chews and newspapers and a bowling pin and some coffee-stained pink slippers and a plastic bag of yarn knickknacks made by Bart’s mom for craft fairs at the church. His dad hardly uttered a word, preferring to glower at everyone coming and going through the door. And his mother seemed nervous and reserved, wearing an apron at all times, even over her nightgown. Portraits of Bart’s smiling older twin sisters, champion baton twirlers in their day, proliferated throughout the house, hinting at the era of trophies and saddle shoes the family must have considered its prime.

We spent as little time as possible in their company while visiting, hanging out at the corner tavern and playing pool and catching up with Bart’s old friends. Bart’s network in Cleveland was vast and multilayered. Friends and their brothers and sisters and second cousins seemed to pop up at the tavern in waves, full of the latest on who’d gotten pregnant, married, or killed in a car crash, and in a way I wondered why Bart wanted to leave it all behind. His sisters were local celebrities. These people’s parents had known his. Their grandparents had known his grandparents. Both of us were pretty much anonymous in our seaside town in California.

The first time I saw Bart he was eating alone in the dining hall. I watched him a few nights in a row. He was always eating alone but reading interesting books. One night I sat with him. We played pinball after dinner and he talked about how boring and castrated everybody was. He didn’t like anybody, felt superior, and coming from where I did I was used to this kind of person. One thing led to another.

Our spirits were high in those days before Ginsberg’s visit. For one thing, Carter Berlin turned out to be a master. We loved his work, especially an epic poem about being a tenant in a neurotic household entitled “Avocado Pig No Fun.” It was as honest and real as anything we’d ever published, and, furthermore, he had friends who were busy writing, and now we had things to choose from, and we began to commission artwork, and we planned some readings for our contributors too. Every day turned up some new task that we were more than happy to do.

Spring unfolded early, and that week before the reading I had reason to think this was a place in which I might live forever. (Though I was planning to move to the East Coast after I graduated to find a job at a
real
magazine.) Acacia bloomed all over town, the grass came up soft and scalloped with wild nasturtium, and the sky was a shade of blue so innocent it could have been the color of light before time. Then the day before the reading, everything changed. A warm wind moved in from the west, blew over the clammy ground, and a thick gray mist cloaked the town. You couldn’t see what was here. That morning I hid anything in my room that revealed too much about me, picked up a lemon cake at a nearby bakery, filled a bowl with camellias from our front walk, and wrote Dr. Frost a note welcoming her and telling her when I’d be home from the event, which I called “a greatly anticipated encounter with a literary giant.” She’d approve.

Julie, who jogged, showered, and finished all her classes every day by noon, said, “Don’t forget, I like grandmothers.”

“Hope nothing happens to change that,” I replied.

In the early afternoon, Bart phoned.

“Hey, can you get ahold of Doug’s car?” he asked.

“I can try. Why?”

“Turns out Ginsberg can’t do the interview now, but says if I can get him to Bonny Doon tonight, I can interview him in the car and maybe talk some more up there.”

“Oh, my God, that would be incredible. Bonny Doon’s probably twenty minutes away! We’d be with him for at least twenty minutes!”

“I know. Maybe you should clean out Doug’s car,” he said. “It’s a dump.”

“Okay,” I said. “Want to help? My grandmother’s coming, and I’m kind of nervous.”

“She’s coming
today
?”

“It’s likely.”

“You’re not going to bring her to the reading, are you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Look, I’m up at school now and I’ve got classes, and then I have to prepare for the interview. Can you manage the car without me?”

“Sure, all right,” I said.

“Oh, and don’t forget, bring copies of the last few issues, so we can show him what we’re doing.”

“I will. See you then!” I said.

I was restless. Having this chore would do me good. I made the arrangements with Doug, ran the eighteen blocks over, drove the car back to my place. It was not a prepossessing vehicle, but Ginsberg surely wasn’t impressed by material things. All the better, it was an old hulk. The dashboard seemed to be disgorging itself bit by bit, dropping a web of wires and metal boxes and bulbs down onto the place where legs went. The car didn’t have power steering, so even though it was a compact, it felt like a tank. You could feel the weight on the tires when you turned. It leaned heavily to the right. I fished many layers of garbage from the floor, discovering hard and moldy things that could not be named: two large trash bags full. Then came the cleaning with a bucket of warm soapy water and a few rags. Every square inch. It was necessary. A previously encrypted stench had been let loose. Every time a car came around the corner, I looked up to see if it was my grandmother. I hurried.