Chapter 10C

By ten fifteen that night we returned to Martha's place and set the tiny dining table with a bottle of wine, three cheeses, and two boxes of imported crackers. We kicked off our shoes. Martha struggled with the corkscrew. I fetched two glasses, helped her with the cork, and our table was ready.

"Begin," she said.

Almost two hours later I was slurring my words and pacing the living room with a cigarette in one hand and a wine glass in the other. I wasn't drunk, but I was "loose" for the first time in my brief life. I'd had my share of dinner wines on holidays back in Memphis, but little did I suspect that a small amount of "real" wine would extract from me such a detailed two-year autobiography. Defenseless, and listening to my own rambling sentences, I felt almost removed from myself, as if I were someone sitting beside Martha, who remained perfectly sober and attentive as she curled lazily on the sofa with her glass and crackers. I told it all, starting with the dumping of the Black Beauty; my three jobs, undertaken solely to get me to New York while sacrificing everything else; my isolation from my parents and my lack of friends, my efforts and adventures on the delivery bike and the paper route; my withdrawal from activities at school, my distrust of everyone; my refusal to accept my faults, my dislike of my own appearance and even of my way of speaking; my inability to live tolerably with my parents -- all of it tumbled out of me in stolid, dry detail, as if talking about it under the influence of the wine-induced fog made Memphis seem galaxies away. I was so mildly but pleasantly boozed, I felt as if I were describing someone else.

Martha listened calmly and solemnly, asking an occasional question to keep me on track. Just before one o'clock in the morning, I became drowsy and ended my story, settling with a sardonic laugh into a chair across the room from Martha, who smiled sleepily and sympathetically and brushed a stray hair from her forehead.

I sighed, "It seems so far away." I looked out the window at the roofs of the sleeping city. "I'm so far away from it now, I wonder if it really happened."

"Maybe you had to physically get away from it," Martha said, "before you could tell me about it."

"No," I said sarcastically, "first you had to get me fifteen hundred miles from home and put a bottle of zinfandel in front of me."

She smiled forgivingly. "You're not that drunk. Not on zinfandel. But, yes, I did ply you with liquor, hon. I'm sorry. No -I'm not sorry. I haven't seen this much of you in a very long time."

We both yawned. Martha suggested, "Let's get our jammies." We did, Martha slipping into a pair of pale blue pajamas while I donned a thin sweatshirt and jockey shorts, in which I usually slept. As we changed clothing Martha warned me, "I told Ronnie you'd be sleeping on the sofa in the living room. Let's just let her keep thinking that. Understand?"

But as we were putting away the leftovers, Martha said she wouldn't be able to sleep. "I'll make coffee," she said.

I said, "Coffee? At one A.M.?"

"Yes," she said frankly. "I wanna talk to you. Do me a favor while I make the coffee: go put your glasses on."

"Oh, Martha, I hate those damn--"

"Hon, go put your glasses on."

I did, reluctantly. In the kitchen she looked me over and decided that it wasn't the fault of the eyeglasses themselves. I protested, refusing to wear them any longer. She made me promise that I'd go with her to a shop where I could replace the cheap plastic frames with something more attractive. She urged me, "Don't passively accept the bad taste others force onto you, Steven. Your face is fine, you just need decent frames." But she wouldn't force me to would wear them publicly until I accepted myself with glasses.

While we sat at the dining table sipping French coffee, she took control of the conversation. She said:

We grew up without parents. In her case, she had a mother who was willing to be close to her in at least a minimal way, though they had never shared the same values and never would. Martha had at least the memory of a father, whom she described as tall, lean, intelligent, affectionate and independent; he was never very successful, but he was very much a man. He was close to his two daughters and encouraged them to think for themselves. He was killed overseas when Martha was eight. But in my case, she said, things took a different course. Martha saw my mother as a good, conscientious, likeable woman. Martha cautioned me that I should not think my Mom didn't love me; but I should accept the fact that Mom might never be the mother I needed. Nor did I have even the memory of a father, mine having died when I was barely two. In my family circle there were few competent male figures; those that remained were simply worn out, resigned to life as dictated by others. My overbearing stepdad typified the opposite extreme of heedless masculinity and intolerance. I'd apparently been living in an emotional and intellectual vacuum; I lived surreptitiously, letting others see only those parts of me that I could twist into a mere copy of what they expected.

I said glumly, "I hate all of them. I distrust and dislike every one of them."

"No!" Martha said forcefully. She pounded the table once with a clenched fist. "No, Steven! Don't hate. Understand. They did what they could. They did what they knew to do. It wasn't much, in my humble opinion, but it was the best they could do. And you do owe them respect. But nobody ever said you had to love them. Anyway, I don't think you can -- I don't think I could love most of the people I was involved with, either, not in the way most people usually do."

She said we both grew up as if on a deserted island. We developed our own means of survival, our own ideas, our own view of the world, our own morality. In many ways most children grow up to be like their parents, she said, but in our case we grew up to be more like ourselves, untended, untaught except through our own isolation. "If we feel unloved," she said, "it's not because we weren't loved. It's because we weren't loved for who we are."

The night wore on with neither of us able to stop talking. The subject eventually moved to the unique relationship between us.

"It just happened," Martha said, lighting another cigarette and hugging her knees to her chest, her feet propped on her chair seat. "It's so strange, how it happened. Neither of us had the slightest idea what we were doing. We couldn't trust what others told us, because we'd already learned something different. What they told us made sense only in their lives, not ours. It just happened that way." She knocked the ashes off her cigarette and asked me, "Were you ever afraid you'd die and go to hell?"

I inhaled and blew out with a bitter huff. "There is no hell," I said. I told her I'd never felt that we were wrong; it was everyone else who was wrong.

She said, looking down as if remembering, "I was always afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"I don't know," she said, absently and sadly. She paused. She rubbed her shins and then fiddled with her toenails. "I was afraid of a lot of things. But, then, I tried anyway. I was always afraid I'd never be smart enough to be a teacher. But fearing it, somehow, made me need to do it."

"Working on the delivery bike was like that. Physically, I'm not cut out for it. The other guys have an easier time of it. I came to that job and the first thing I learned was that I couldn't do it. All it did was make me want it."

She made a wry little smile. "You don't belong there. You belong in the theater. You belong in creating and in doing. I wish you didn't want so much to be like everyone else. You're not like everyone else, Steven. You can't be and you shouldn't be. You can't be someone else and neither can I, despite how others might demand it and regardless of how much we might want it." She crushed her cigarette. "That's Ronnie's problem. She wants to be me, she wants the same boyfriends others have, she wants to be anyone but herself. I can't be what my mother wanted. And I won't be what Mr. Buchanan wanted. I'm not submissive, and I'm not a saint. I'm stubborn and different. I learned to be alone and to see what others do without being involved in what they do. Maybe that's why I could stay friendly with your mother, without feeling guilty about her ignorance of us. I'm different and rebellious and wicked and I can't help it. I suppose you and I could attempt to do and be what others want -- we might even be good at it. But we'd suffocate."

We both yawned, stretching in our chairs and moaning about how late it was. We saw through her living room window that the sky had begun to brighten. Birds chirped outside.

I yawned again. "I hope I can get to sleep."

"After all this? What would keep you awake?"

I thought about it; I was tired, but tense and impatient. "Thinking about all the things we talked about. Worrying, I guess. Wanting it to change, or... wishing it were different."

"You can't change what's happened, hon."

I yawned again. "No. I guess not."

"You're at a disadvantage, not knowing what a father is. I don't know myself what it means to have one, in the way most people do. But I am a teacher, and I did learn things that helped me. I don't know what I can be to you. I certainly can't replace the people you should have had. But I can teach you... if you promise me something."

I rubbed my swollen eyes. "Another promise? Okay. What's the deal?"

"Promise that you'll accept the fact that you're not stupid, you're not ugly, you're not incompetent. It's just that -- and don't take this the wrong way, hon -- it's just that you have things to learn. Promise you won't beat yourself over the head for what you can't be."

"Easy for you to say," I told her dryly, and reached up to scratch a pimple under my chin.

Martha gently pulled my hand away from my face. "Don't, hon. Don't do that to your face."

"But it itches," I complained, scratching again.

"No!" Again she took my hand, this time holding it firmly and close to her. "Listen to me. If you don't like the way you look, do something about it. I'm going to show you how. This morning I'm sending you to someone at my health club. He might strike you as very eccentric, but I want you to listen to learn from him. His name is Fiore. He trains athletes and dancers. Promise you'll listen?"

I said petulantly, "Oh, okay,"

"Don't say okay unless you mean it."

"Okay," I said, halfheartedly.

"You think I have a nineteen inch waist because I mailed in enough box tops? Fiore showed me how, and I want him to show you how to get rid of those damn things on your face by the end of this week. Promise me you'll listen to him."

"Okay."

"And work hard."

"Okay, okay, promise."

"Don't pout, Steven."

"What's the sense of it? Seems like such a hopeless case."

She sighed irritably and shook her head. "Where in the world did you latch onto such a low opinion of yourself?"

"I just... learned to face facts, that's all. I'm not pretty, I'm not anybody. I'm not very smart, I'm clumsy, I sink into a hole in the ground when I'm around people, and I -- "

"Oh, hon!" she said, her voice heavy with anger and disappointment. She gripped my hand tightly, frowned at me, and then dropped my hand onto the table. "Steven, what's happened to you?". Groaning with frustration, she rose from her chair and walked to the living room window, sighing distressfully three or four times. She leaned against the window frame, folding her arms and gazing outside.