After Greene
My mother told me not long before she died that she would be a lesbian if she could come back for a second go. Women, women. In the end it was her father whom she recognized as the family tyrant and her treacherous, unreliable mother whose good opinion she continued to crave, despite her life-long distrust of fellow females, including her own two daughters, despite her life-long belief in male superiority.
"I wouldn't have anything to do with men," she told me.
"But wouldn't you miss sex?" I asked. Her sexual energy was always a powerfully attractive aspect of her personality.
"Not as much as you'd think. You can have pretty nice sex with girls, and they just aren't as nasty."
She probably knew what she was talking about. She had spent her teens in boarding schools for girls, in Connecticut and in Paris. When I was in junior high there was a huge scandal involving a very young billionaire heiress who ran off with - and married - Porfiro Rubiroso. Gossip columns called him Ruby, a sparkling deep red jewel, a near cartoon-perfect Latin-lover gigolo. My mother roared with laughter and said smart mothers in that class made sure their daughters had affairs early, with reliable same-class men. A little birth-controlled fooling around would be considered insurance. One doesn't leave family position hostage to hot-girl folly.
She went on. She said parents of that class (her class, not mine) were perfectly happy when their nubile daughters had crushes on their boarding-school girl friends. A little lesbian sex offered a similar advantage. The heiress's vulnerability all went to show that her mother didn't really have much "breeding."
But my mother did not offer birth control to me. She kept her distance. We had no family money to protect but that's not the core of it. I was on my own in this area for other reasons. I already knew I was a possible enemy in her eyes. A sexual rival. Up to no good. She burned hot and cold with it.
Stop thinking so much, my peers had concluded. They were believers, all of my junior high friends. "Boys won't like you if " was their rosary. There's sisterhood, communion, and safety in following some simple rules. Boys won't like you if. And neither will we, they warned. But see, your hairy legs can be shaved child-bare. You can fix your face. Lipstick and a cheerful smile. You need a better haircut. You need a training bra. You need deodorant. Boys won't like you if.
By twelve I could no longer run as effortlessly as I had. My hips and thighs thickened. Gravity spoke. And even in the more open Northern schools, my quickness of mind subtly changed from advantage to disadvantage, almost as suddenly as it had when I learned, "We doan as quwestchuns n'theus skuul." They, on the other hand, they grew suddenly stronger. In seventh grade, Andrew MacIllhenny grabbed me around the waist in a tussle and a sexual shock buckled my knees. My head swam from it. Followed by tears. His hair was greasy and in school he was stupid!
More assumptions about female ability were embedded in almost every book I read - the more serious the book the more pronounced the underlying order seemed to be. Awareness was treacherous burden.
I couldn't eat it. I couldn't throw it off.
In three short years, Florence and I had nothing to say to each other. I was alone and she was not. At fifteen, she and her two best friends sat on her bed doing each other's hair. She wore the clothing of the tribe, pastel and fuzzy. Her speech had slowed down and was pitched in an unnaturally high nasally mainstream Southern that avoided all the snooty vowels of her Aunt Flora.
"Oooo, Joelle, keep it turned under this wahy. Is aweflea cuuute."
She'd never admit that anything had ever been different between us. I dreaded her telling her friends, as she certainly would if I provoked her, "Mahtha and Ah used t'pla the sillies gaimes." She was no longer detached, living over her life. It was almost admirable the way she was completely in it.
I was probably eleven when I first asked Lambert about women writers. My questions went on as I entered adult reading. I don't think he ever quite got why the questions kept coming at him. Oh, undoubtedly women could achieve! he'd admit. Childless women mostly. Virginia Wolfe, poor desperate suicide. Edith Wharton, never quite matching the achievement level of Henry James. And Willa Cather? He didn't explain his reservations about Cather though he recommended I read her. I figured out later that homosexuality was a curve ball for him. Threw off the order of things.
In the meantime my mother spent almost every morning of her life in Chapel Hill in her bedroom type type typing away. She was after writing comedy and that was fine. Social satire was totally appropriate for her in Lambert's eyes. She wanted to write a story for The New Yorker. Even better, a play for Broadway. Broadway glory would so become her. Her wit could trump Arsenic and Old Lace. Her knowledge of alcohol the wonderful Harvey. Fortune, fortuna, the tenth Major Arcana - would give her a rush around the great wheel, whirling through surprises and compensation. Too bad her stories for The New Yorker kept coming back.
My mother wrote every weekday morning.
One day I said that Aggie would make a great subject.
"Can't. Too close to me," she answered.
"Why don't you do it," she said, with an edge in it.
By which we could say she lacked the necessary stomach for blood. I would say she had ideas about her lady self that didn't include ruthless thief. She wrote to be approved of. And Lambert tried to approve. He even published a little volume of stories she wrote about her childhood in Rye, New York. The books were end-of- year presents for everyone they knew, but garnered no one's acclaim. There were no offers to republish in a more commercial format. No groundswell of recognition. Eventually she stopped trying to write New Yorker stories but way up into her eighties she worked on plays that she dreamed would be produced on Broadway.
What did I do with all these contradictions? Dreams of blues and purples. Hazy grasses drenched in sensation. Don't worry, move over. Basil King is wonderfully compelling, drenching, absorbing, uneven, unexpected. And sex all the time. Basil doesn't know he's much sought after. Or he does know and understands all too well what the implications are. His secret has been safe with me. Lucky me. Doll-sized my lungs swell with air to fill the whole house with vibration.