This poet ate his salad with his
fingers, leaf by leaf, while talking to me about the antithesis of nature and
art. I couldn’t take my eyes off the pale, stubby white fingers traveling back
and forth from the poet’s salad bowl to the poet’s mouth with one dripping
lettuce leaf after another. Nobody giggled or whispered rude remarks. The poet
made eating salad with your fingers seem to be the only natural and sensible
thing to do.
None of our magazine editors or
the
Ladies) Day
staff members sat anywhere near me, and Betsy seemed
sweet and friendly, she didn’t even seem to like caviar, so I grew more and
more confident. When I finished my first plate of cold chicken and caviar, I
laid out another. Then I tackled the avocado and crabmeat salad.
Avocados are my favorite fruit.
Every Sunday my grandfather used to bring me an avocado pear hidden at the
bottom of his briefcase under six soiled shirts and the Sunday comics. He
taught me how to eat avocados by melting grape jelly and french dressing
together in a saucepan and filling the cup of the pear with the garnet sauce. I
felt homesick for that sauce. The crabmeat tasted bland in comparison.
“How was the fur show?” I asked
Betsy, when I was no longer worried about competition over my caviar. I scraped
the last few salty black eggs from the dish with my soup spoon and licked it
clean.
“It was wonderful,” Betsy
smiled. “They showed us how to make an all-purpose neckerchief out of mink
tails and a gold chain, the sort of chain you can get an exact copy of at
Woolworth’s for a dollar ninety-eight, and Hilda nipped down to the wholesale
fur warehouses right afterward and bought a bunch of mink tails at a big
discount and dropped in at Woolworth’s and then stitched the whole thing
together coming up on the bus.”
I peered over at Hilda, who sat
on the other side of Betsy. Sure enough, she was wearing an expensive-looking
scarf of furry tails fastened on one side by a dangling gilt chain.
I never really understood Hilda.
She was six feet tall, with huge, slanted green eyes and thick red lips and a
vacant, Slavic expression. She made hats. She was apprenticed to the Fashion
Editor, which set her apart from the more literary ones among us like Doreen
and Betsy and I myself, who all wrote columns, even if some of them were only
about health and beauty. I don’t know if Hilda could read, but she made
startling hats. She went to a special school for making hats in New York and
every day she wore a new hat to work, constructed by her own hands out of bits
of straw or fur or ribbon or veiling in subtle, bizarre shades.
“That’s amazing,” I said. “
Amazing.” I missed Doreen. She would have murmured some fine, scalding remark
about Hilda’s miraculous furpiece to cheer me up.
I felt very low. I had been
unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee herself and I felt now that all the
uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t
hide the truth much longer. After nineteen years of running after good marks
and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down,
dropping clean out of the race.
“Why didn’t you come along to
the fur show with
us?”
Betsy asked. I had the impression she was
repeating herself, and that she’d asked me the same question a minute ago, only
I couldn’t have been listening. “Did you go off with Doreen?”
“No,” I said, “I wanted to go to
the fur show, but Jay Cee called up and made me come into the office.” That
wasn’t quite true about wanting to go to the show, but I tried to convince
myself now that it was true, so I could be really wounded about what Jay Cee
had done.
I told Betsy how. I had been
lying in bed that morning planning to go to the fur show. What I didn’t tell
her was that Doreen had come into my room earlier and said, “What do you want
to go to that assy show for, Lenny and I are going to Coney Island, so why
don’t you come along? Lenny can get you a nice fellow, the day’s shot to hell
anyhow with that luncheon and then the film premiere in the afternoon, so
nobody’ll miss
us.”
For a minute I was tempted. The show certainly did
seem stupid. I have never cared for furs. What I decided to do in the end was
lie in bed as long as I wanted to and then go to Central Park and spend the day
lying in the grass, the longest grass I could find in that bald, duck-ponded
wilderness.
I told Doreen I would not go to
the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney
Island either, I would stay in bed. After Doreen left, I wondered why I
couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and
tired. Then I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t,
the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.
I didn’t know what time it was,
but I’d heard the girls bustling and calling in the hall and getting ready for
the fur show, and then I’d heard the hall go still, and as I lay on my back in
bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger
and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it. Then the phone rang.
I stared at the phone for a
minute. The receiver shook a bit in its bone-colored cradle, so I could tell it
was really ringing. I thought I might have given my phone number to somebody at
a dance or a party and then forgotten about it. I lifted the receiver and spoke
in a husky, receptive voice.
“Hello?”
“Jay Cee here,” Jay Cee rapped
out with brutal promptitude. “I wondered if you happened to be planning to come
into the office today?”
I sank down into the sheets. I
couldn’t understand why Jay Cee thought I’d be coming into the office. We had
these mimeographed schedule cards so we could keep track of all our activities,
and we spent a lot of mornings and afternoons away from the office going to
affairs in town. Of course, some of the affairs were optional.
There was quite a pause. Then I
said meekly, “I thought I was going to the fur show.” Of course I hadn’t
thought any such thing, but I couldn’t figure out what else to say.
“I told her I thought I was
going to the fur show,” I said to Betsy. “But she told me to come into the
office, she wanted to have a little talk with me, and there was some work to
do.”
“Oh-oh!” Betsy said
sympathetically. She must have seen the tears that plopped down into my dessert
dish of meringue and brandy ice cream, because she pushed over her own
untouched dessert and I started absently on that when I’d finished my own. I
felt a bit awkward about the tears, but they were real enough. Jay Cee had said
some terrible things to me.
When
I made my wan entrance into the office at about ten o’clock, Jay Cee stood up
and came round her desk to shut the door, and I sat in the swivel chair in
front of my typewriter table facing her, and she sat in the swivel chair behind
her desk facing me, with the window full of potted plants, shelf after shelf of
them, springing up at her back like a tropical garden.
“Doesn’t your work interest you,
Esther?”
“Oh, it does, it does,” I said.
“It interests me very much.” I felt like yelling the words, as if that might
make them more convincing, but I controlled myself.
All my life I’d told myself
studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do,
and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all
A’s, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me.
I was college correspondent for
the town
Gazette
and editor of the literary magazine and secretary of
Honor Board, which deals with academic and social offenses and punishments--a
popular office--and I had a well-known woman poet and professor on the faculty
championing me for graduate school at the biggest universities in the east, and
promises of full scholarships all the way, and now I was apprenticed to the best
editor on an intellectual fashion magazine, and what did I do but balk and balk
like a dull cart horse?
“I’m very interested in
everything.” The words fell with a hollow flatness on to Jay Cee’s desk, like
so many wooden nickels.
“I’m glad of that,” Jay Cee said
a bit waspishly. “You can learn a lot in this month on the magazine, you know,
if you just roll up your shirtsleeves. The girl who was here before you didn’t
bother with any of the fashion-show stuff. She went straight from this office
on to
Time.”
“My!” I said, in the same sepulchral tone. “That was
quick!”
“Of course, you have another
year at college yet,” Jay Cee went on a little more mildly. “What do you have
in mind after you graduate?”
What I always thought I had in
mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study
all over Europe, and then I thought I’d be a professor and write books of poems
or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these
plans on the tip of my tongue.
“I don’t really know,” I heard
myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I
said it, I knew it was true.
It sounded true, and I
recognized it, the way you recognize some nondescript person that’s been
hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces
himself as your real father and looks exactly like you, so you know he really
is your father, and the person you thought all your life was your father is a
sham.
“I don’t really know.”
“You’ll never get anywhere like
that.” Jay Cee paused. “What languages do you have?”
“Oh, I can read a bit of French,
I guess, and I’ve always wanted to learn German.” I’d been telling people I’d
always wanted to learn German for about five years.
My mother spoke German during
her childhood in America and was stoned for it during the First World War by
the children at school. My German-speaking father, dead since I was nine, came
from some manic-depressive hamlet in the black heart of Prussia. My younger brother
was at that moment on the Experiment in International Living in Berlin and
speaking German like a native.
What I didn’t say was that each
time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those
dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.
“I’ve always thought I’d like to
go into publishing.” I tried to recover a thread that might lead me back to my
old, bright salesmanship. “I guess what I’ll do is apply at some publishing
house.”
“You ought to read French and
German,” Jay Cee said mercilessly, “and probably several other languages as
well, Spanish and Italian--better still, Russian. Hundreds of girls flood into
New York every June thinking they’ll be editors. You need to offer something
more than the run-of-the-mill person. You better learn some languages.”
I hadn’t the heart to tell Jay
Cee there wasn’t one scrap of space on my senior year schedule to learn
languages in. I was taking one of those honors programs that teach you to think
independently, and except for a course in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and a seminar
in advanced poetry composition, I would spend my whole time writing on some
obscure theme in the works of James Joyce. I hadn’t picked out my theme yet,
because I hadn’t got round to reading
Finnegans Wake,
but my professor
was very excited about my thesis and had promised to give me some leads on
images about twins.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I told
Jay Cee. “I probably might just fit in one of those double-barreled accelerated
courses in elementary German they’ve rigged up.” I thought at the time I might
actually do this. I had a way of persuading my Class Dean to let me do
irregular things. She regarded me as a sort of interesting experiment.
At college I had to take a
required course in physics and chemistry. I had already taken a course in
botany and done very well. I never answered one test question wrong the whole
year, and for a while I toyed with the idea of being a botanist and studying
the wild grasses in Africa or the South American rain forests, because you can
win big grants to study offbeat things like that in queer areas much more
easily than winning grants to study art in Italy or English in England; there’s
not so much competition.