Even in early youth, when the mind is so eager for the new and untried, while it is still a stranger to faltering and fear, we yet like to think that there are certain unalterable realities, somewhere at the bottom of things. These anchors may be ideas; but more often they are merely pictures, vivid memories, which in some unaccountable and very personal way give us courage.
WILLA CATHER, Obscure Destinies
HAPPY FAMILIES ARE NOT all alike. I have belonged to three, now all families of the past, families no longer in existence, and they had little in common except for my membership.
The family my parents made was secure and practical and loving and staid. It sent my sister Evelyn and me off looking for excitement, in our diverging ways. During the steamy hot summers in Hartford we were restive. Late at night in bed we whispered about the exotic and cool places we wished we lived in: Norway, Alaska, the South Pole. And each morning as we watched my father set off uniformed and dapper in a business suit to peruse numbers and charts, we longed for our three weeks at the beach. We always had a good time at those rented houses, the same sort of good time every year, so that the summers run together in my mind, making one continuous summer, like a Platonic Idea from which any single beach vacation can draw its individual identity.
Except for the one summer, so idyllic that it stands apart with all the sensual detail of reality and none of the annoying abstraction of Plato. I don’t know why it was so perfect: some magic in the brown house itself, where we stayed, maybe, or some special concatenation of weather and internal chemistries. No rain. No toads in the garden. There must have been toads, but I have forgotten them. I did sometimes wake up at night terrified of the dark, but that was such a familiar panic, already a grudgingly admitted part of me, that it didn’t count.
Our life at the brown house moved in a cycle of order and harmony, a hypnotic rhythm which worked its way so deep in me that years later, it is still hard to accept that order is an anomaly, not to be expected any more. Hard to accept that the close harmony I shared in with my sister, she high on the dunes and I grappling below in the surf, will not come again. My sister is in Switzerland now, high in the mountains, as I might have foreseen. She was always a bit otherworldly, like Vivian. Evelyn too would have been capable of losing both her primary subway token and her spare in the snow, from holes in different pockets. Like Vivian too, she was overpoweringly sweet-natured, weaving a spell of entrancement wherever she went, and yet unabashedly selfish: younger daughters both, they looked out for themselves first and thought that only natural. Their refusals were final, while Althea or I can be coaxed into almost any favor. Evelyn spent her junior year of college abroad, met a Swiss businessman fifteen years older and married him, just like that, not to return except for rare visits. I felt deserted.
But that summer. The night before we left I watched my father undress when he came home from work. My father was a man who could not be rushed. And because his every move was slow and deliberate, the simplest gestures would assume a weight and texture of high significance. First, from the pockets of his navy blue suit he took out keys, wallet, handkerchief, loose change, several folded envelopes, a package of Chiclets, pens, pencils, cigars, matches, a little packet of business cards. It was like the tiny-car act in the circus, but in slow motion. He took off the suit and placed it carefully on a hanger. “Stay right there,” he addressed it, then me: “I won’t have to be wearing that for three weeks.” In his shorts and undershirt, he leaned toward the mirror and began clipping his mustache in neat, jovial little snips. I went to examine the suit, hanging on a doorknob. “What do you need all these pockets for?” “Pockets?” He came over, and with a hand resting on my shoulder he revealed the secret lore of men’s pockets. Upper left hand: the handkerchief folded in a triangle. Upper right hand: pens, pencils, cigars. Those inner breast pockets, layer upon layer of grownup business—cards, letters, mysterious slips of paper with numbers and names. Back pants pocket: wallet (“But don’t you sit on it?”), crumpled handkerchief (for use, not show). Front pants pocket for loose change and keys, rattling against the leg. And a strange little square pocket up near the belt loops. “Watch pocket.” “Watch what?” “For a watch, silly Lydia.” He rumpled my hair. “Dresses don’t have all those pockets,” I said. My future looked bleak and sparse. “No, but you ladies have your pocketbooks. They hold even more.” Pocketbooks were an appendage. Pockets were part of the suit, inseparable. Well, if I couldn’t have a suit I would have a man, at least, and I would know what wondrous things were in each of his pockets.
The next morning we set off for the Cape, unwrapping our pastrami sandwiches when we were barely out of Hartford. Hours later, nearing our goal, we were tired and full of trepidations, even Evelyn, wise for her six years, because my parents had taken the house sight unseen and paid in advance. We were relieved as soon as we saw it. More than relieved. Enchanted.
A rangy, gray-haired man called Mr. Wilson had built the brown house and rented it out for part of every summer. I regarded him as a kind of God or prime mover, to have been able to create such a paradise. Squarish, solid, and warm-looking, it might have sprung up as part of the natural landscape, an inevitable design against woods and sky, figure and ground merging. I also marveled that something so large as a house could have been built by one man. But Mr. Wilson had managed it all—walls and floors and windows, long brown beams on the ceilings, front and back porches with stairs of dark red-brown wood. Once when we met him in the drugstore I couldn’t resist asking again if he had really built it by himself.
“Well, like I told you before, I had some help with the kitchen and bathroom pipes, and with the electrical wiring. But otherwise, sure, I did it myself.” So nonchalant about his miracles.
The bedrooms in the brown house were downstairs and the kitchen and living room upstairs. When our mother told us to come up for breakfast or go down to bed, Evelyn and I laughed. Was it possible Mr. Wilson had made a mistake, or had he reversed the floors on purpose, for some deep reason beyond our imagining?
Evelyn and I slept in two small beds with a nighttable in between and two low chests of drawers opposite, where we piled our daily gleanings of seashells. The door was diagonally across from my bed: Evelyn liked it shut and I liked it open. Each night I yielded, and then after I was sure she was asleep I got up and opened it. The floor was tiled, a rare infelicity on Mr. Wilson’s part, for it was cold setting our feet down first thing in the morning. My mother mentioned buying a couple of scatter rugs in the five-and-ten-cent store a few towns away, but she never got around to it. A high window overlooked the woods; peering out at night I saw the dark tops of trees, like a comforter placed against the house. Over the right-hand corner of my bed was a tiny wall lamp, which meant I could read at night while Evelyn slept. I felt it had been provided especially for me, as if Mr. Wilson had anticipated my presence and understood my habits. There were those times when I woke in the middle of the night seized by panic—it was so densely black in the room. The worst thing about darkness in a new place is how it annihilates distances and proportions. I felt blind. I couldn’t orient myself in the space, couldn’t tell how near or far the walls were. The room might have been a cell or a cavern. But I remembered to reach up and switch on the lamp, and immediately all was well. This panic and its relief I also felt had been anticipated by Mr. Wilson, with the lamp.
Flowers were arrayed outside the brown house, with seashells around them in orderly protective rings. It was no easy task to grow flowers in that dry terrain, but somehow, miraculously, Mr. Wilson’s thrived in big clusters of red and gold and purple and pink, their faces turned up to the sun. There was one enormous sunflower, almost as tall as my sister, with which she held private converse every evening at dusk. I longed to know what they said to each other but had too much pride to ask. If I lingered nearby she would lower her voice to a whisper and soon stop altogether. I was pained by her secrecy but pretended not to care. Perhaps this was a small toad in my idyllic garden, but far greater than the pain was my admiration for Evelyn’s ability to keep her inmost thoughts to herself. I was a talker; my thoughts never seemed quite real till they were aired and acknowledged by someone else. Much later, when I took Vivian to the Children’s Zoo in Central Park and watched her face to face with the Shetland ponies, just about her height, I wondered what was being exchanged, and thought of Evelyn.
Mr. Wilson asked that we water the flowers generously, and so every evening we did, watering ourselves as well, with a long green hose. He told us to pick the vegetables as soon as they were ripe or else woodchucks would get them. Every morning before breakfast, while my father slept past his insurance company hours, we went out to the vegetable garden in our nightgowns, our mother carrying a long sharp knife. It was odd to see my mother wielding that glinty instrument outside of a kitchen. I knew a fairy tale in which the wicked mother takes her children out to the garden and lops off their heads in a trice. Of course I was aware that my mother, gentle and placid, could not possibly do such a thing. Nevertheless I behaved very well when she had the knife in her hand.
We were city people, ignorant of vegetable gardens, but Mr. Wilson had shown my mother how to cut the zucchini from their stems without hurting them. How fastidious a God, his care extending even to the lowliest of his creatures. My sister and I, his minions, helped twist and cut them off in the special way. We were not fortunate with the tomatoes; woodchucks mauled them every night. When we reached the stringbean patch my mother, a lover of raw vegetables, would say, “There really aren’t enough of them to bother cooking. We might as well eat them now.”
They were crisp and tart, the first juice on our tongues. They were born in the soil and grew up slowly in the sun, she told us as we munched; that was why they tasted so good. She said this so wistfully, I wondered if she was making comparisons. I knew how we were born. It sounded far better to be born in the soil and grow up in the sun. Once she personified the stringbeans that way, locating them in a natural cycle, it struck me that our chewing must be their death, and I had a queasy feeling. But I suppressed it and bit in as eagerly as before.
Down a hilly narrow path through the woods in back of the house was a clearing, and in it was something that looked like a seesaw, except it spun horizontally, describing a circle parallel to the earth. Evelyn and I loved to ride it, but our parents insisted it was dangerous—if we stood in the wrong place it could saw us in half—and we must not go down there alone. They took us, and stood out of range as the plank spun like a planet with us, shrieking for joy, aboard.
Each day at around eleven we set off for the beach. Evelyn would wave and call from the back window of the car, “Good-bye, brown house. See you later.” I found that infantile, yet I envied her freedom to say it. Usually we went to the ocean, which my parents and I loved; occasionally to the bay, for Evelyn’s sake.
Endlessly, late at night in bed, in soft whispers, my sister and I discussed the rival qualities of ocean side and bay side. She liked the gentle, warm water of the bay since she was not yet much of a swimmer; I liked water that was rough and cold. The bay beach was covered with stones and shells that stung the soles of our feet, while the ocean floor was velvety. Plus the ocean side had those huge sand dunes she loved to climb, I reminded her. Yes, she said, the dunes were very important. But the bay side had that prickly grass to hide in. And at the bay we could walk far out before the water reached our chests. We could dig for hermit crabs on big muddy islands. But at the ocean those fierce waves attacked the moment we set foot in the water. She shuddered under the covers. There was also the question of sand. I pointed out that the sand at the bay was dark and coarse; it stuck to our palms and wasn’t good for building. At the ocean side the grains were fine and soft and packed well. We could play ball at either side, but it was often so windy at the ocean that the ball blew away and we had to chase it down the beach. Evelyn was inordinately afraid of losing things; she was afraid of wind because it blew things away. We once lost a kite at the ocean and she cried, until a stranger appeared from far off carrying it back to us. She ran to the stranger with outstretched arms. It was beautiful, like the enactment of a myth. Lost and found.
I didn’t like the wind either—the only imperfection of the ocean side—but not because it blew balls away. It was a disturbance that spoiled the stillness and harmony of the scene. The dependable rhythm of the waves was all the motion I wanted. Once in a while, for an instant, the wind did stop. A strange lull of absence fell on the air, and for that instant the tableau was fixed, levitated out of time. But only for an instant.
At the beach, my father would open the trunk of the car and announce, “Everyone has to carry something.” We were not a family who traveled light: blanket, pails and shovels and balls, plastic bear, towels, kites, rubber rafts, umbrella, sweatshirts, Band-Aids, suntan lotion, books, picnic basket. But the bearing of our burden was orderly too, each according to his abilities.
To get to the beach we had to climb down an enormous dune, which I believed must be the highest dune in the world. It would still seem high to me, high enough, not being a mountain person, but Evelyn has since found much higher places. We stood at the top for a moment to contemplate the world below. Three wide stripes were all the world: blue sky, black ocean, white sand. On the stripe of white sand, little figures like dolls moved about. Evelyn and I glanced at each other and smiled: soon we would be four more dolls on the stripe of white.
We raced headlong down the dune, dropping things along the way and climbing back up to collect them. Our parents more sedately took a path that arched sideways down the hill. When I asked how the path first got there, my father said it was made by the feet of people, all summer long, climbing down the dune. And each summer the path was in a slightly different place. During the fall and winter, when the beach is virtually deserted, he explained, the wind blows the sand around and resettles it over the old path, and sometimes snow covers it up. In spring, when the snow is gone, the path is gone too. Then summer again; people who love the ocean return, and a new path is made by their feet. “Do you understand?” he said. “Everything in nature goes in cycles.”
That wind, always. I nodded, and ran off down the beach.
“If you ever get lost on the beach,” my father told us, “look for the yellow and white umbrella with the blue rubber slipper on it.” The corner of one canvas triangle had come off its metal spoke, and my father would hang his slipper on the bare tip so it wouldn’t poke out any eyes. A number of times we did get lost. There were many yellow and white umbrellas; from a distance it was hard to see the blue slipper. I had to hold Evelyn’s hand and pull her along as she whimpered, assuring her we would spot it any minute. I liked the role of older sister. Two or three times I pretended we were lost, just for the chance to soothe her with that exquisite, knife-edged condescension.
Evelyn was a dune climber. Once she had cooled off perfunctorily in the waves, she would run back across the wide beach and start up the dunes. The slope was steep. She had to take deep breaths and use her hands to help her. When she got to the top she waved both arms above her head in semaphore fashion, celebrating her feat, and called to us to see how far away and solitary she was.
She felt very big and wonderful up there. She whispered to me late at night in bed that I shouldn’t ever tell anyone, but up there she was really the Princess of the Beach. I never did tell. Much later, watching Vivian running down sand dunes, bronzed and glowing, her thick black hair dripping iridescent sparkles, I wanted to fold her in my arms and dub her Princess of the Beach, but I felt it would be a betrayal of something. I hugged her and said it in my mind, but I wish I had out loud. Even though I am a talker by nature, I kept my word. Occasionally when I type those flimsy blue air letters to Evelyn I have the urge to address her as Dear Princess of the Beach, but I hold back. I still feel she deserted us.
After she finished waving like a semaphore she would run back down. Together the wind and the slope of the dune carried her, feet barely touching the hot sand. She couldn’t have stopped. I know how it felt because I did it myself, but without her sense of magical flight. She flew faster and faster. She zoomed. The ocean and shore rose closer. Near the bottom she let go and rolled in a heap the rest of the way. She dashed into the water to wash off, then dashed back to the blanket to ask our mother for something to eat.
I was a surfer. While she tried uselessly to resist the breakers, I welcomed them, then pushed farther on to jump over the crests or dive through them. Once in a while a wave would catch me unawares, churn me so hard in its roil and spin that I lost all sense of up and down, but I had survived before and knew enough not to struggle. I got up laughing, flung the muddied hair off my face and ran in again. I would wait for a really big one, stretch out on top and let it waft me in to shore. I was a mermaid cast up in a strange land, and I gazed around in wonder: what are these alien objects—towels, umbrellas, picnic baskets, humans? Since I was older and obliged to be more sensible than my sister, I never whispered this secret identity to her late at night in bed. Besides, I wanted to hold something back to get even for her private conversations with the sunflower.
When we tired of dunes and waves we built castles, tunnels, bridges, and with our mother’s help, a naked woman, larger than life, who lay on her back like a sleeping statue. She looked powerful—full thighs and belly and breasts; our mother had a very solid conception of the essential female—but benign. No sooner was she completed than a huge wave washed over her. Instantly she was hollowed out at the peripheries, diminished, like someone who has aged tragically and prematurely. I kicked in her remains. My sister was sad and wanted to rebuild her; even my mother was downcast, but I laughed and said she was only sand. I kicked at her with exultation. Since she was half ruined, she might as well be all ruined. What use was half a woman?
We stayed so long at the beach we could watch the tide change—it has a six-hour cycle. At low tide we waded out to mud islands where we huddled, shipwrecked, scanning the horizon for a sail. High tide, late afternoons, we sat on our blanket watching the waves inch their way up the sand, and measuring time by their growing reach. Waiting. Every few waves, our parents would drag the blanket farther back, but not much. I didn’t know it at the time, but they were playing a silent waiting game too. Sure enough, a stupendous wave would come heaving up out of the sea and rumble towards us. We sat excited but immobile as in a dream, daring it to wash over us, inviting it, teasing the power, accomplices in our own downfall. Till the very last second, I thought its impetus might stop just short of our blanket, our blessed island. And then the game’s great climax: a phony, belated scramble to escape, an assault of cold force. Our things were drenched, our pails and shovels gone. Evelyn and I ran to rescue them, while our parents wrung out wet towels and moved farther up the beach, this time in earnest. We pretended irritation but we were enraptured.
My father could have stayed at the beach forever. His great pleasure was being the last family, all alone against the three stripes. It was the waning, melancholy time of day when sandpipers arrive to brood and peck over stones at the water’s edge. Gulls swooped low over the crests. Our mother made us change into jeans and sweatshirts. “Come on, Danny. It’s getting cold.” He would not be rushed; he did not answer right away. Finally, “All right,” he would sigh, with one last gaze at the water. As before, everyone carried something. At the top of the hill my sister turned and waved. “Good-bye, beach. See you tomorrow.” I thought this talking to the beach was as silly as talking to the house, but silently I echoed her.
When we got to the brown house we would clamor for a ride on the dangerous plank that could slice you in half if you stood in its whirling path. Not now, our mother would say. First a bath, then a ride. And in the twilight, scrubbed clean, Evelyn and I sat on the polar tips of the world as it spun wildly, and when my father muttered that it was a dangerous toy, we felt the secret contempt children feel for caution. Every night we dropped into bed half dizzy with pleasure.
The three weeks went quickly. Mr. Wilson, who would be staying at the house next, appeared as we finished packing. Holding our hands, he walked around and examined his flowers.
“Thank you for taking care of them. You two really did a good job.” He was a benevolent God, provided you met his few simple demands.
We passed each other by, loading and unloading the cars, and I remarked to my father that this coming and going was like a cycle too. Mr. Wilson gave Evelyn and me an orange each for the trip home, culled from his giant bag of groceries; we hunted through our depleted supplies and gave him an apple and a cupcake. He said, “Did you ride on that plank back in the clearing? Did you like it?”
Oh yes.
“But you were careful?”
We were careful.
He shook hands with us gravely and patted our heads. A benediction. “See you girls next year.”
“See you next year,” Evelyn called to the house from the back window of the car.
But we never did see it or him the next year. In most ungodlike fashion, Mr. Wilson got sick and retired to the brown house year-round. We rented other houses near the beach but they were never as good. There were never flowers or vegetables either, just barren dusty miller. My sister grew older and stopped saying hello and good-bye to inanimate objects, out loud at any rate. Late at night in bed she no longer whispered things on the order of, I shouldn’t tell anybody but she was really the Princess of the Beach. Soon we moved to a larger apartment so Evelyn and I could have separate bedrooms. When our parents began leaving us alone without a babysitter, we would go to sleep in their big bed for comfort till they came home, and once again we whispered secrets. That was good but not quite the same.
I went to college and met the people who became my adult friends: Nina, Gabrielle, Esther, George. I married Victor and we whispered a lot in bed, on all sorts of delicious as well as grueling subjects. The unexamined life is not worth living, Victor quoted to me as we were falling in love. Impressive. But is the examined one? That is what I wonder.
My parents, who carried so many heavy things in their arms, in time weakened and died. When I think of them now, it is mostly their last years I remember, the specific declines in their bodies. But once in a while, in an unlooked-for flash, I see them as they were that summer at the brown house, my mother short and soft in her long yellow nightgown, barefoot, her cheeks ruddy and her straight cropped hair—dark like mine, dark like Vivian’s—still rumpled from bed, her face unlined and clear-eyed, her suntanned hands bearing the knife to the vegetable garden, deftly twisting the zucchini on their stalks without hurting them; my father, lean and hairy in his navy trunks, beginning to have a bald spot in his light brown hair but still able to awe us with a taut bicep, poised on top of the dune effortlessly holding umbrella, kites, rubber rafts, beach towels, paying tribute to the ocean he loved so well. These flashes are given to me, simple gifts, as in the Shaker song my son Alan used to play by ear: “And when we find ourselves In the place that is right We will be in the valley Of love and delight.”
I understand now why Evelyn liked the gentleness of the bay, and I marvel that I should have been so intrepid so young, inviting those rough waves to tumble me and rising laughing and ready for more. My sister crossed the ocean to live among mountains. I wish she had never left. I have never felt such rightness as I did that summer, when our proclivities and declivities complemented each other as neatly as the broken halves of a bowl. I would like to go back to that time. Not to the brown house itself, but to that condition, which though it partook so thoroughly of the natural cycles seemed utterly static and safe; a condition of harmony vastly inclusive yet lived against three broad, clear stripes; a condition of being intact and guarded by a wise and providential power. I can still see the brown house and those twenty-one days like one long sandy day, and hear my father explaining about the paths and the cycles. I suppose new paths are still being made every summer by the feet of people climbing up and down. I suppose nature is a cycle to which we contribute our lives and deaths and should do so willingly, but sometimes I just don’t want to be a part of it at all. Everything had the chance to be so beautiful, and look what has happened.
In college we took for granted our private distortions and perversities. They were not yet called “hang-ups.” We might deplore them as we deplored a birthmark or a thickness of the ankle, but that they were ours no less inseparably we never doubted. The fluid issues, open to constant reexamination, were ideas. They drew our fervent emotions like pipers charming rats. Over chocolate chip cookies in the small hours, we thrilled to Plato’s parable of prisoners in the cave, sadly debarred from the light of true wisdom. Through the grimy glass of iron-grilled dormitory windows we too—Nina, Gabrielle, Esther, and I—watched shadows, cast by intermittent traffic under Broadway’s street lights, and nodded sagely. Girlish still, we played with our ideas like jacks, feeling their cold hardness, pressing our fingertips against their sharp points and round protuberances, testing how many we could scoop up at once and cradle in our palms—twosies, threesies, foursies! Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Heraclitus—their names as exotic as their accounts of the nature of the universe. The earth is made of water. The earth is made of air. No, the earth is made of the four elements mingling, crowding each other out in a struggle for preeminence. No. “This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be—an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures. ...The sun is new each day.” The earth is fire. Heraclitus, sagest of all.
Other girls might pick up and drop the boys across the street at Columbia. Our way of being fickle was switching allegiance from Plato to Aristotle. For two weeks we thought Plato the last word, and prematurely believed the adage quoted by our winning Professor Boles, disheveled and abstracted as a philosophy teacher should be: that all the rest of philosophy was merely a footnote. Till Aristotle, who came dragging the reputation of a plodder. He even looked dull: the pages in his text were thinner, the lines of type closer together. But Eureka! The whole material world Plato had left behind returned incarnate, every seed, every egg with an earthly destiny to fulfill. Other girls might aspire to diamond rings or posts in student government; our mission was to locate Truth on whatever library shelf it might be found. And to see, as some hope to see God, entelechy: essence unfurling itself in the passage from potential to actual reality.
We slipped into middle age and a turnabout occurred. We have seen so many ideas come and go; they appear on the horizon as fleetingly as rainbows, they rise and fall and rise again like hemlines. They are our cast-off familiars, we keep them in the attic with our inappropriate dresses, too sentimentally valued to throw away, worn now and then in a frivolous mood. There is a place for Heraclitus and the notion of genesis in fiery strife, a place for patient Aristotle and even for the weightless Bishop Berkeley, a place for the existentialists and the masters of Zen. They coexist in tranquillity as they would in an afterlife; they drift in space as insubstantial ghosts do, and parlay their differences without rancor.
We still try to understand and look for truth. But without the same urgency. Paradoxically, our quest has become academic though we are long out of the academy. Urgency now is reserved for ourselves. In the midst of life, our children, husbands, work, money, aging parents, and shall we take lovers are the daily ontological quandaries. What a falling-off, from that grand fire of Heraclitus that sparked the universe, to our small fires within. And yet to demean the personal is a form of sophistry (Professor Boles was harsh on sophistry), as well as a form of self-deprecation, feminists say. In any event, what we discuss with fervor today is our lives, their inner workings. This is a tedious sort of fascination, a fascinating sort of tedium. A casuist’s labor. When we have thoroughly dissected our aberrations from some Platonic Idea of ourselves, parsed our neuroses, we move on to a more pragmatic question, just as Greek philosophy, Professor Boles tidily summed up, moved from scientific to epistemological to ethical: What do we know, How do we know it, and What are we going to do about it? What are we going to do about our own perversities? Ignore them where possible? Exorcise them? The patients of the better sort of doctors come away not so much purged as mellowed. Esther had herself analyzed.
It did not change her noticeably but maybe she finds life and herself easier to tolerate. Shall we accept them, even love them? Surely if we can be exhorted to love our neighbors and love our enemies, we can attempt to love ourselves. Or shall we exploit them for professional advantage, like politicians and military men, high-class whores and artists?
On the topic of friendship Aristotle says, “It is well not to seek to have as many friends as possible, but as many as are enough for the purposes of living together.” We were a family of sorts, a family of sophomores, sophomoric. We switched the roles of parents and children, depending on the need. After studying alone till eleven or eleven-thirty, we gathered in Nina’s and Esther’s second-floor dormitory room with the beige institutional curtains and brown bedspreads on the twin beds. Esther and I were the restless ones, changing our places nightly—the beds, the floor, the windowsill. Nina and Gabrielle were always, reliably, where they were. Gabrielle sat on the new amber shag rug that was losing its glow from absorbing Esther’s cigarette ash. She would have preferred a bare floor but she made do. Long-legged, hard-muscled, and ponytailed, Gaby did warm-ups in second position, flexing and pointing her bare feet, widening nightly the angle between her thighs till by graduation it was close to a hundred eighty degrees. In our freshman year she had directed a modern-dance performance illustrating the myth of Prometheus. That was how we became friends. We were in the corps, cavorting after her as she leaped magnificently across the gym, a living torch, even her flying hair one of the deeper shades of flame.
Nina took the single armchair, rust-colored. She fit in it best, neatly combed and neatly dressed in tweed skirts and nylon stockings that she didn’t remove till bedtime. She always looked impeccably like a lady. Her oval face, with its straight, clean features, was never shiny; her dark hair never escaped its pins. Everything about her face and body was fine and understated, so that later, when she deliberately cultivated glamor, it was like adorning a neutral base. I didn’t room with Nina, so I never saw her in morning disarray. But even in the required swimming course she remained herself, tall, slender, and composed in the regulation tank suit which made the rest of us anonymous. Our lockers were adjacent; as she undressed she folded away every light and clean undergarment. She never complained about menstruation, as everyone else in swimming sooner or later did; there was never a sign of it; she was unspotted and strove to believe the world was likewise. The years to come would unravel her beliefs and blot her purity, but leave her ladyhood intact.
Earth, water, air, fire, Professor Boles told us the first day of The History of Philosophy 101. The story began simply. The second week they were all three out with flu. I was delegated to take good notes and report back without fail, as if the course were a serialized detective story. I went to the sickroom around midnight, fixed them tea and handed around the notes. Esther and Nina huddled under blankets, Nina in a bathrobe for once.
“She’s still wearing that gray tweed suit but she changed the blouse. And her hair wasn’t so wild today, and she had lipstick on. Maybe she was going out to lunch. The best thing she said isn’t even in the notes. You know how she tosses out these little gems? It’s not really philosophy, I guess. Thales, the one who said everything was water, also figured out how to measure the height of a pyramid. If you were ancient Greeks and had to measure the height of a pyramid, what would you do?” Silence. I crossed the room and paused a moment, for suspense. “He waited until that time of day when a man’s shadow became equal to his height. Then he measured the shadow of the pyramid.”
They didn’t seem very interested.
“Actually,” said Nina, “he could have measured a man’s shadow at any time of day and then applied whatever proportion he found to the pyramid.”
“God, she’s so smart,” said Esther despairingly from her bed. It was true, Nina was extremely smart. I certainly would not have thought of that. Did Thales? And yet it did not have the same poetic Tightness.
“For some reason,” I said, “that little story fills me with wonder. Why is that?”
“Because,” said Gabrielle. She was lying on the floor groaning with muscle aches but flexing and pointing her feet so as not to waste time. “Because it’s based simply on the measure of a man. Or it could be a woman just as easily. From the size and scope of one human body you can discover immense secrets of the universe. That’s what you like, Lydia. Your pride likes it.” Gaby had an odd and rare feature—one blue eye and one green eye. Most of the time there was only a shade of difference, but at moments of strong emotion or insight they flared up, each gleaming its own color. I used to stare, and then I got used to it.
Earth, water, air, fire. The way up and the way down. I remember all about Heraclitus though I haven’t much memory for ideas. I do have an ear for sound. I remember Nina’s and Esther’s voices playing counterpoint, a canon of repetition in shifting keys. Nina’s was clear and subdued, with a narrow range that dipped lower when she got irritated—one of the few visible signs. She also blinked when she was disturbed, and smiled. Esther’s voice was deeper and coarser, with an alluring crack in it, like some magisterial old woman who has smoked all her life. And Esther’s voice had amazing degrees of expression; it could travel from its natural deep tone right up the scale through a series of querulous, astonished, indignant, and facetious notes, and she hit every one of them, every night.
Nina: “Wisdom consists in speaking and acting the truth, giving heed to the nature of things.” That’s what Heraclitus says.
Esther: Big deal. So what else is new?
Nina: Now, the basic principle of reality is change. One element slides into another. Earth, water, air, fire. Fire starts in the sun, then becomes smoke, vapors, clouds, mist, rain, earth, rock. A gradual hardening. That’s “the way down.” Do you see?
Esther: The way down. Righto.
Nina: Then you have the way up. It goes in the opposite direction, a melting instead of a hardening. Rock, earth, dew, mist, rain, clouds, vapors, smoke, fire.
Esther: Rock, paper, scissors. Scissors cuts paper, paper covers rock, rock breaks scissors.
Nina (her voice getting lower and very calm): Do you want to learn this or not?
Gabrielle (from the floor, flexing and pointing, her book open between her spread legs): Leave her be. That’s her way of connecting. I do the same thing myself.
Nina: But you got ninety-two on the last quiz and she got sixty-two. The way up and the way down are going on eternally and at the same time, Esther, do you get it? There’s a rhythm in their opposition. The two main features of the way up and the way down are continuity and reversibility. She’ll definitely ask that next time. And the principle, remember, is change. “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.”
Esther: But is that true?
(That worried me too, silent in a corner with my book. Everything gives way? Nothing stays fixed?)
Nina: That’s not the point. Repeat to me, now, about the way up and the way down.
Esther: Continuity. Reversibility. Earth to water to air to fire and vice versa. Listen, I’m not dumb. I can remember. I want to know if it’s real.
Nina: First pass the test. Then you can worry about whether it’s real. That was very good. Also remember about strife. “All things come to pass through the compulsion of strife.” He means strife between the way up and the way down.
Esther (grabbing the book from her): “Fire lives in the death of earth, air in the death of fire, water in the death of air, and earth in the death of water.” That is pretty grim. Everything lives through something else’s death? I don’t think I like that.
Nina (ever calm): It’s not a hostile sort of strife. It’s an objective description of a cycle. Nature is that process. But I do think he had a preference. I think he liked the way up better. He says, “A dry soul is wisest and best.”
Esther: You ought to know.
Nina was hurt. She was doing her best to save Esther from failure. Back home in Indiana, if Nina had failed a test she would have been sent to bed without her supper for a week. Back home in Indiana, her duty was to excel, to obey, and to agree. Independent inquiry was rude and criticism was morally suspect. She had attended Sunday school in starched dresses every Sunday of her childhood, and curtsied for visitors, and if they asked how she was, was expected to reply, “Fine and dandy, just like sugar candy.” By the age of four she was trained to pick up all her toys and put them away each evening, and then her mother would supervise her prayers, said aloud, kneeling alongside her bed. She became a math and science whiz kid; she could remember anything schematic. Admissions offices wooed her. Though we tried to take her in hand, Nina could not help behaving, the first couple of years, as though she were a house guest of the college, too well-bred to question any of her hostess’s offerings. And when she felt she had failed to meet anyone’s highest expectations, she developed a slight stammer, which gave me a pang in my heart. It still does, though she has long ceased to blink and to smile, and has even learned to leave her living room strewn for days at a stretch. It was when she discovered passion that the careful surface began to alter: her parents had never shown or alluded to sexual passion, and so she thought adults, having outgrown the vagaries of childhood, were guided by reason.
We sat up late, talking of how we ought to spend our lives. Gabrielle aspired to Martha Graham’s company. A few Saturday afternoons she had urged me downtown to see Martha Graham as a violent Greek heroine or a goddess, swathed in fabrics that possessed a life of their own. Gabrielle said that with enough work she could bridge the gap between flesh and spirit, and we all nodded admiringly. One night I saw her toss down her copy of Pére Goriot (in French!) and scrutinize her body in the full-length mirror on the closet door. “A nous deux, maintenant!” she muttered. She would master it by force of will. What was flesh, what was spirit, and what was the nature of the gap, if indeed there is one, she didn’t say, and no one thought to ask.
Nina wanted a happy home life: happy children, happy husband, happy happy. I found that sickening. “Talk about received ideas! If you’ve never seen the ocean you think a lake is the greatest thing there is. I mean, who knows, you might find more happiness being ... oh, a madam in a brothel. It might do you good.” I had just read Mrs. Warren’s Profession.
“But why on earth would I want to be that?” she gasped.
“Especially with a degree from here,” Esther added.
“I would say that’s a puddle.” Gabrielle stood up to attempt a slow backbend. Her long fingers reached down for the rug behind her.
“The point is to make it new,” I snapped at them. I was reading Ezra Pound.
“That is true about the ocean, though.” Esther opened a box of Lorna Doones wistfully. “I remember the first time I ever saw the ocean, last year. And I had seen pretty big lakes. The Great Lakes, you know, are not exactly ponds. But still. It was at Coney Island. I met this guy Ralph at a freshman mixer. I didn’t like him that much and he was an inch shorter than I was, but I was lonesome. He came from New York and knew his way around. He had—”
“Esther, we’re in the middle of something.” Gaby made it to the floor—a high arc, a strip of olive-skinned concave middle exposed between sweatshirt and tights. In a strained voice she asked, “Is this going to be another saga of masochism?”
“No, no. I just must tell you. ... It’s not all that irrelevant—we’re talking about what we want most. He had a car, and he asked me what I would most like to see in New York City, and I said, The ocean. He laughed when he heard I’d never seen it. He had a nice laugh, sort of a low chuckle. His face improved when he laughed. When he wasn’t laughing it was very square and bony. Anyhow, he said it was especially beautiful in the fall, and the water was still warm from summer—you could dip your feet in. So, he told me to meet him the next Sunday afternoon at Alma Mater and he would take me. I didn’t even know what Alma Mater was but I figured I’d find out by Sunday—I didn’t want to sound completely ... you know. Well, Sunday came, and I waited at that goddamn statue for an hour. I was so furious I kicked it. It was cold, too, not one of those gorgeous fall days when you’d want to get your feet wet. After fifteen minutes I was ready to leave. I mean, who did he think he was? Then I thought maybe something happened and I ought to give him a chance. Can you believe that for forty-five minutes I stood there debating with myself, Should I stay or should I go? I do have some pride, but on the other hand I really wanted to see the ocean. Well. Just as I was about to leave, his little form trotted onto the horizon. What had happened was ...”
The ocean made it all worthwhile. Esther got her feet wet. They ate hot dogs, rode the carousel, seized the brass rings, shivered on the boardwalk, necked in the car. She caught a cold. He phoned several times but she refused him since she hadn’t liked him very much in the first place.
“Did you know there’s a club, the Polar Bear Club, of people who swim all year round? While we were freezing on the beach this troop of people, mostly old, I mean middle-aged, forty, fifty, came running past us and raced into the water. They splashed around for a couple of minutes and then raced out. He told me it was the Polar Bear Club. Can you imagine? It couldn’t have been much more than forty-five degrees.”
We talked about what we would change in the world, if we had the power. Stupidity, I said. And chaos. Her parents and her legs, said Esther. In general she would prefer to be a Modigliani rather than a Rubens. Nina said timidly that she would not keep Richard Nixon as Vice-President. There was something about his face she didn’t trust.
And what we feared most. Our fears are touching, like old family photos of our grandparents as babies, swaddled in lace gowns and bonnets, overstuffed, innocent of life and death, and absurd: sexual frigidity, being locked in a closet with mice, mental stagnation, childbirth, failure, public humiliation. Today I would gladly suffer public humiliation if in return I could change the course of one specific afternoon. Any of the other things too. Even the mice.
“I can’t believe it! I really can’t believe it!” Esther stomped through the room in her blue baby-doll pajamas, flapping her notebook around.
She had the soft, pink-tinged skin of a strawberry blonde, and she was rosy with vexation. “First they say everything is in constant flux. The basic principle is change. ‘Everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.’ Remember? So okay, I figure I’ll have to live with that. And now they say that nothing ever changes? Everything is fixed? Never began, never will end? An arrow can’t even hit its target? What kind of nonsense is that?”
The Eleatic school, very uncharming. “What is unthinkable is untrue.” “Movement is impossible.” Parmenides and his henchman Zeno poured reason like molten lead into the veins and arteries of the universe, and the system stiffened into paralysis.
“You’re not supposed to take it literally,” Gabrielle told her. “It’s just another phase. The other ones were poetic, these are intellectual. They’re trying to think clearly.”
“But why would anyone want to think such things? Look, are you going to deny what you see with your own eyes? Can I or can I not walk across this room?” She demonstrated, stepping over Gaby.
“Not in the abstract, you can’t,” Nina said. “Between one step and the next is an infinity of little steps. You can’t get through infinity.”
“Are you trying to tell me you believe this garbage?”
“Well, uh, I wouldn’t say I believe it in the sense you mean, no. But I do, uh, understand it,” Nina stammered. She could be imperious drilling Esther by rote. When it came to defending a position, she had to blink a lot. “It has to do with a kind of relentless thinking, Esther. Carrying something to the very end, like a clue in a mystery, even if you don’t like where it leads. It’s more honest that way. It seems to me, at least.” She cleared her throat and recrossed her legs.
Esther stared out the window at the November rain; she was silenced, braiding the fringes of the beige curtains. She rarely carried any clue to the very end. “I’m cold,” she said finally. “Where’s my bathrobe?”
“I put it in the wash. I was doing my own things and I thought you wouldn’t mind,” said Nina.
“I don’t. Thanks. But it doesn’t help the fact that I’m cold. Unlike some people, my body temperature moves, hot to cold, cold to hot.”
“Close the window, then, and wear mine.”
A truly Christian gesture, seeing that Esther was such a slob. She had grown up with three generations of messy, uncommunicative family living under one creaking, leaking roof in Chicago. “You bourgeois types wouldn’t believe them!” she told us condescendingly, and we couldn’t. There were a senile maternal grandmother, an incontinent paternal grandfather, aunts and uncles who dropped in and out, besides her parents and three older brothers. Like a commune? Gaby suggested. No, no, not at all like a commune. No Brook Farm. No principles. Just a collection of people, barely a family. There were vague investments they shared; living under one roof made the money go farther.
Esther’s people, as she called them, took their own meals at odd hours, nodded cursory greetings in the halls, and lived for the most part in pajamas. There were cats, her mother’s. “Her warmest feelings were reserved for the cats. She held them all the time. Me, never.” It was like a poorly run hotel, she said, no one minding the front desk. “And I. I was an afterthought. An accident, I mean. I’m sure they weren’t still doing it. He probably fell on her in his sleep, or something like that. I was a grown man’s wet dream.”
Her father didn’t talk much to his children, but he would sometimes warn her brothers against the corruptions of capitalist success. (Not much danger of that, Esther noted with relish. One was in the army and one worked as a garage mechanic. The third built sculpture out of debris.) “My father was a leftist when he was young. An organizer.” A twinge of pride seeped through, like light through a slit in a curtain. “He got disgusted, I guess, in the thirties when the war came. He gave it up.” When, wearing her baby-doll pajamas, she ran into him in the kitchen at midnight, both in search of leftovers and surprising the water beetles into a frantic scurrying, he hardly gave her a glance. “But he shared the food. You’ve got to give the devil his due. Anything he found, he gave me half. Each according to his needs, you know.”
On warm days, atavistically, Esther might wear bedroom slippers to class if she could get them past Nina. It was Nina who reminded her diplomatically to get her shoes reheeled, to hang up her skirts so they didn’t crease, to buy new bras when the old ones lost their shape. Nina was uncomfortable seeing large breasts flop around. Perhaps she reminded her about taking showers too: whenever I met Esther ambling down the hall in her ancient green flannel robe, a wet towel slung over her shoulder, pinkish skin aglow and golden curls dripping, she would announce with a certain belligerent pride, “I just took a shower,” as if I couldn’t tell, or needed to know for the record.
“I am a product of will over chaos,” she declared every so often. “How else do you think I got here?” Leafing through a Guide to American Colleges and Universities, she had liked the sound of the small women’s college abutting the great university, and she liked the distance between New York and Chicago. After a few bitter remarks about private education under capitalism, her father agreed to pay the bills, though he considered the venture pointless. “If you think you can find a better husband there than here, be my guest.”
“That wasn’t so bad. That I could take. It was my mother who nearly did me in. ‘New York! My, my. Do you really think you can manage? I wonder who looks after you girls.’ Looks after! I don’t think she looked after me from the first morning she deposited me at kindergarten. ‘But if you feel you must, dear, I certainly wouldn’t stand in your way.’ Stand in my way! She wouldn’t stand, period. She was always lying down. Reclining, you know, on one of those old-fashioned chaises, sort of like Mme. de Stael awaiting her guests. She took naps on and off all day long and never bothered to comb her hair when she got up. She would powder her face, though. She was overpowdered. She had a powdery look, you know what I mean? Like you had an urge to sort of dust her off.” Esther could keep us laughing, but it was unwilling laughter. I hoped she was exaggerating. “‘Be sure to take good care of yourself out there, Essie. The change of air ... You were such a delicate little thing when you were a baby.’ Nine pounds four ounces. Delicate! And she only nursed me for two weeks. Two goddamn weeks. She said I bit. She said I was born with teeth. ‘Remember, if you don’t like it you can always get on a plane and come back home.’ Home! Sure, so I could join her and we could rot together. Of course she wanted me home—who else would do the shopping and cooking, such as it was.”
“Esther, I didn’t know you could cook.”
“Will over chaos.” She ripped open a sample pack of cigarettes. “I’d be happy never to see a pot again for the rest of my life. The kitchen positively reeked of cats, the garbage piled with all those open cans. I tried, believe me. But you can’t get rid of that smell. It’s an indestructible smell. No one else seemed to smell it except me—they were inured.” Nina shuddered. She loathed cats, like her mother before her. “Well, anyway, then she would turn back to her needlepoint. Discussion of my education is finished. She was always doing needlepoint: cats, horses, zebras—she hung them all over her bedroom. Her big excursions were going out to the needlepoint shop. She’d get all dressed, and powdered, naturally, and put on this dark green coat with little foxes’ tails hanging from the collar that made her look like something in those cases at the Museum of Natural History. She would come home all atwitter with a new piece of burlap or whatever the hell it is. Take a plane home! I would rather have died than gone home. Do you remember—well, I guess you wouldn’t; I hardly knew you all then, except Nina—that first semester I spent three weeks in the infirmary? Everyone thought I had mono, I had all the right symptoms. But I think I was having some kind of collapse. I wouldn’t let them call home. I threatened to hang myself if they did. But they made me compromise. I would call my mother and say I wasn’t feeling too well and just sort of chat, so Dr. Peters wouldn’t be in any trouble, I guess in case I died or something. Peters must have listened in on the extension, because after that she didn’t bother me any more about calling. She gave me pills.”
“But why was your mother like that?” Gaby asked. “What happened to her?”
Esther was surprised by the question. “I don’t know that anything special happened to her. That was how she was. I never really thought much about why.” She shrugged and lit another sample cigarette. “Her sister was like that, her mother, maybe I’ll get that way too. Maybe it’s in the genes.”
It was Nina’s and Esther’s room we gathered in because my roommate had to go to bed at eleven-thirty; she claimed her brain cells could not function on fewer than eight hours of sleep. Until eleven-thirty she sat hunched over her desk in her flowered flannel pajamas with feet, like Dr. Denton’s, winding her lank brown hair around her fingers and squinting over thick biology textbooks whose colorful diagrams of inner organs were unsettling. Particularly unsettling was the female sexual and reproductive system, viewed in profile section. To me it was a woman bisected vertically. I have seen that profile many times since, in gynecologists’ offices and in those booklets that explain sex and menstruation to little girls, and still it appears so remote from what some writer called felt life.
My roommate, who came from Denver, ate bananas while she studied. In her open, easy accents, she told me the virtues of potassium. Like me, Melanie was always hungry and always slim. She let the peels pile up on her desk, so that the studious evenings unwound in a sensuous banana aroma, like incense. Mornings brought the bittersweet smell of rot. To offset the banana peels I ate oranges, the large, thick-skinned kind. Orange peels left out overnight do not stink. But sometimes I ate the peels as well. The fleshy white part kept some of the sweetness of the pulp; the closer I got to the outside, the more tart. I loved the bumpy texture but I took very small bites because of the acid. Melanie never thought this slow, luxurious nibbling at the rinds was at all peculiar. She also never seemed to mind my turning on the light in the middle of the night, if I chanced to awaken and panic at the dark.
We were not together in the room very much: for hours every day I used a piano practice room on campus, while she peered into a microscope. Weekends I went to free concerts or lay on my bed reading, eating oranges and an occasional banana; she was out with her boyfriend. Each May we chose to room together again. After graduation we said good-bye warmly, embracing through our identical commencement robes. I think it was the only time we touched. She still sends me Christmas cards from Maryland, where she is a professor of gastroenterology at Johns Hopkins. From Melanie I learned about coexistence, and since then, when Victor and I have had bad spells, thwarting each other’s groping efforts at contact, I have suggested that we try simply to coexist till things improve. I envision us like Melanie and me, for four years sleeping, eating fruit, working, dressing and undressing, demanding little, feeling the mild good will which Aristotle says does not involve intensity or desire yet is a kind of inactive friendship: the parties wish each other well but would not go out of their way to do anything for each other. Victor has no interest in coexistence, though. Victor wants all or nothing.
Gabrielle’s roommate was quite a different matter. An anachronism, years ahead of her time, Steffie Baum slept guiltlessly with the boys across the street. She even stayed out overnight. Apparently a network of Columbia students rented some cheap apartments nearby for their rendezvous, and worked out careful schedules, but I knew nothing yet of the details. Steffie was a small, curvy girl with a pretty face and large, unapologetic blue eyes that could hold a steady gaze longer than anyone else’s; Steffie was never the one to avert her eyes first. Her other impressive feature was her hair, satiny and long enough to sit on. She changed its arrangement each day as if to demonstrate her infinite variety: loose and flowing, a tight bun, two braids resting on her bosom. Whatever the hairdo, she moved through the dormitory halls and in and out of the shower with an enviable easy languor. We assumed this easy languor came from the carnal knowledge we lacked. We may have mixed up cause and effect.
(Technically I didn’t lack it. There had been a boy in high school who pushed his way through once, quickly, in the dark. He offered me a challenge and I accepted, to show I was afraid of nothing, at fifteen. But in spirit I was still virginal. I hadn’t felt much except shock at my own daring.)
Steffie was the sort who could do everything well and remain likable. She got excellent grades (a history major), though she cut classes to the legal limit. She sang in the Gilbert and Sullivan Society. She wrote for the school paper. The year she did theatre reviews she asked friends along on her pair of press seats. I got to see The Threepenny Opera and studied the musicians while Steffie took notes with a little pen that had a flashlight on top. She tried to organize a tutoring program for children in the slums bordering the college, and when her recruiting failed, since it was hardly an era of activism, she tutored on her own. And yet with all this, she managed to tiptoe down the corridors long after signing in for the night. In sneakers and ponytail she looked like a runaway child, a bag over her shoulder containing a toothbrush and comb, the next morning’s books, and a nightgown—she didn’t wear pajamas like the rest of us. Some boy had taught her how to unlock the door to the emergency exit with a pair of pliers so the bell wouldn’t ring. We shook our heads with worry. She was never caught, though, and for that we called her lucky.
She might have been one of us, but we kept her just outside our inner circle. That world would claim us all too soon. We deferred it. It was not an era of voluptuousness, either; it was the late fifties, a quiescent time. Except when Steffie appeared mornings after, unchanged, efficient and alert in class, I felt a bit of a fool. I was always competitive, and the sight of her gave me a vague physical unrest.
“Aha! So there is change after all! Everything is not so static. I knew it. I knew it,” Esther cried in triumph. It was nearing Thanksgiving and fittingly, we had reached the Pluralists: Empedocles, mystical poet, Professor Boles announced, as if he were about to enter from the wings. And Anaxagoras, prosaic man of science. Thank goodness they happened along—Parmenides had brought matters to a dead end with his fixed and eternal universe. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Nothing can come of nothing, she quoted. Speak again. And these two spoke, clearing a middle path. All was not constant change, they concurred. But nor was all immutable. Beneath the undeniable evidence of change was something enduring, something that abided. No power could take it all away. A vast relief eased through me as Professor Boles unraveled the plot, grinning like a master detective, her wild gray hair afloat.
Back to the beginnings again: earth, water, air, fire. But not as simply as before. The four elements are the roots—and how we loved that word, roots; it gave us a sense of getting intimate with truth. Every mortal thing is made of the immortal elements in diverse combinations. An intricate dance, the four roots forever mingling and separating, cleaving and riving, world without end. And what propels this fantastic parade? Ah, Empedocles, what a romantic. Love and Strife. Love joins together, Strife axes apart. “And I shall tell you something more.” Oh yes, Empedocles, by all means speak again. “There is no birth in mortal things, and no end in ruinous death. There is only mingling and interchange of parts, and it is this that we call ‘nature.’”
And as if this were not enough, Anaxagoras, prosaic man of science though he was, went him one better. Not Love and Strife, but Mind “took charge of the cosmic situation. ... Mind set in order all that was to be, all that ever was but no longer is, and all that is now or ever will be.” That suited me fine. No death, and Mind in charge.
Nina did not share my relief. “It’s not any ultimate truth. It’s only part of an ideological sequence, and naturally it gets a little more sophisticated as it goes along.” She paused to light her weekly cigarette. “All of this has been completely superseded by modern science, of course. It’s only of interest historically, and maybe poetically.”
I wanted to protest but I didn’t know how. Nina was admittedly the smart one, and already she was stammering less.
“I’m not so sure they’ve been superseded,” said Esther. “Look, Anaxagoras says there’s a little bit of everything in everything else. Black and white have the seeds of gray. Food has the seeds of the blood and bone it’s going to help make. That’s pretty clever. It’s not so different from your periodic table of ninety-two elements or however many there are. Everything starts from—”
A neighboring door snapped brusquely shut. Loud, ponderous footsteps.
“Oh-oh, the witching hour,” Esther moaned. “Honestly, we ought to make a scarecrow some night, just to make Mrs. Ramsey’s job more exciting. She hardly ever gets the thrill of discovery.”
The college had lately adopted the progressive policy of allowing males—presumably the boys from across the street—to visit in the dormitory rooms till midnight Thursdays through Saturdays, provided the doors were kept ajar. This was an advance over the former policy of allowing males only in the small ground-floor rooms known as beau parlors and equipped with floral-upholstered sofas, provided, again, that the doors were kept ajar and all four feet remained on the floor. (Nothing specific about feet was enjoined in the new rule.) For enforcement, Mrs. Ramsey, a short squat woman, made the rounds at midnight in her tight black rayon uniform and black oxfords. Mrs. Ramsey was wasted on us: her face was so impassive that she might have policed on a much grander scale, in a sheikhdom, a sultanate. Fortunately for some, her heavy tread gave a few seconds’ notice. She granted a warning knock before flinging doors wide. I wondered if anything could jar that face—a naked male, maybe with an erection, maybe inserting it into willing flesh ...
“Hi there, Mrs. Ramsey,” Esther called brightly, springing from the bed. “Not a thing here to worry about! See?” She yanked open the door of the closet. One half was an orderly array of dark smooth clothes obediently on their hangers; the other a jumble of stripes, prints, peasant skirts swirling into each other, shoes heaped on the floor like abandoned auto parts, a green slicker painfully lopsided on a hook that pierced its shoulder, two enormous straw hats sliding from the top shelf. Esther dashed back to lift the bottom of the bedspread, inviting Mrs. Ramsey to have a peek, but the woman, unfazed, had turned to go. Maybe beneath her face she was contemptuous. Her toneless words trailed after her: “Please keep the noise down.” Esther leaned out the open door and called down the hall, “Cherchez l’homme!”
“Listen, listen to this.” Gabrielle had been reading all the while. She would not object to such antics, nor would she take part. “Empedocles says some wonderful things. This is very a propos: ‘It is in the warm parts of the womb that males are born; which is the reason why men tend to be dark, hairy, and more rugged.’”
“I guess that has been superseded by modern science,” I said, and Nina smiled faintly.
“‘Abstain entirely from laurel leaves,’” Gabrielle read on. “Oh, and this one is very passionate: ‘Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands away from beans.’ I wonder why. Oh dear.” She sighed and fluffed out her long hair, just washed and drying at the open window.
“What’s the matter?”
“‘I wept and mourned when I discovered myself in this unfamiliar land.’”
She looked up, her eyes filled with tears. She had been brought to this strange land as a child of five. Her parents were French, her father in the diplomatic corps. Could a small child really feel that kind of pain? Or could she summon tears for Empedocles?
“That’s how I felt,” said Esther, “when I came to New York, even though I was glad to leave home. That’s why I went to see the ocean with a boy I didn’t even like and let him paw me. I was so lonesome. That’s why I got mono, or whatever that sickness was, and the only thing that kept me here was imagining the satisfaction on my mother’s face if I gave up and went home.”
“So you’re glad you stayed?” asked Nina.
Esther looked around at all of us. “Now? Sure! Sure I’m glad I stayed. I’m fine now.”
We all went home for Thanksgiving, and on the first day back Nina tucked in the lower right-hand corner of her mirror, the place where some girls kept photographs of their boyfriends or families, a three-by-five card. On it, typed, were the questions that members of the sixth-century B.C. Pythagorean Brotherhood asked in their daily examinations of conscience: In what have I failed? What good have I done? What have I not done that I ought to have done?
“What is that supposed to be, a mother substitute?” Esther demanded.
Nina smiled. She rarely tried to justify herself.
“You told us we took it too personally,” I reminded her.
She smiled.
We pointed out that the card was inconsistent in spirit with what was ranged on the dresser top just below it: Revlon Touch & Glow liquid make-up, Jean Nate spray cologne, Nivea cream, Cutex colorless nail polish, an ashtray with tortoiseshell barrettes for her mass of black hair, perpetually bridled, silver-handled hairbrush, five lipsticks. She accepted our teasing and said, “It may be best to stay in balance by keeping one foot in the real world and one foot in the ideal.”
“And who said that?” Esther wanted to know.
“No one.” She smiled in earnest this time. “I made it up.”
On the three mornings we had The History of Philosophy we would meet downstairs at a quarter to nine and walk over together. Nina began not appearing. “She was already gone when I woke up,” Esther reported. “That’s odd, isn’t it?” She would greet us in class, composed as ever, maybe a bit quieter than usual. Since Nina was not the kind you could interrogate, Gabrielle, the ever-resourceful, undertook some research. The Pythagorean Brotherhood, she learned, followed a moral and mystical regimen for purifying the soul and attaining wisdom. “‘They performed their morning walks alone and in places where there was appropriate solitude and quiet; for they considered it contrary to wisdom to enter into conversation with another person until they had rendered their own souls calm and their minds harmonious. It is turbulent behavior, they believed, to mingle with a crowd immediately on arising from sleep,’” she read to me. “Is that what we are, a crowd?” We were wounded.
“She’s probably working on her memory, too. Listen to this. ‘To strengthen their memory the students began each day, on first waking up, by recollecting in order the actions and events of the day before; after that they tried to do the same for the preceding day, and so on backwards as far as they could go, taking care to make the order of recollection correspond with the order in which the events had actually occurred. For they believed that there is nothing more important for science, and for experience and wisdom, than the ability to remember.’”
I tried it for three days and gave up. I could remember many things, but not in the order in which they occurred. They regrouped themselves in thematic patterns like music, as if memory were coaxing life to make more structural sense than it possibly could. “Do you really do it?” I asked Nina, alone. She nodded. “It helps keep things in order.” “I thought you had things in very good order.” “Oh no, Lydia. Inside is all turmoil.” Her face was troubled. Unblinking and unsmiling, it seemed to cover webs of complexity. But I couldn’t press her further. The others were about to join us; we were having a Chinese dinner on Broadway to celebrate Nina’s nineteenth birthday.
The pre-Socratics were superseded. Only in poetry did they remain unsurpassed. Earth, water, air, and fire. The way up and the way down, eternal and reversible. Professor Boles confessed she had lingered too long under their spell; now we must move more swiftly. Past Plato and Aristotle and the medieval schoolmen. The weather grew cold as we progressed in a northwesterly direction to encounter three Continental Rationalists, three British Empiricists, and three German Idealists. Cunning minds indeed, to have arranged themselves in geographical triads.
“I think, therefore I am?” It was just after Christmas vacation and Esther, fresh from the homestead in Chicago, was in a querulous mood.
“I think, therefore I am? I don’t get it. It doesn’t sound authentic.”
“But it’s as simple as can be!” Gabrielle exclaimed. “He wants to start from scratch. How do you know you’re there? Because someone is asking that question.”
“Yes,” said Esther, “I realize that much. But before I even ask the question—not that I personally would ever ask such a question, I have never had such high-class doubts. But all right, suppose I had. Before I would even hear that clever little voice asking that clever little question—God almighty, I feel, I touch, I smell, transitively, that is. I mean, thinking is a pretty advanced thing. If the guy wants to be primitive he’s got a long way to go, if you ask me. Throw me one of those cigarettes over there, would you, Lydia?”
Among the chewed pencils, tangled beads, hairbrush crammed with shed gold hair, and crumpled paper on Esther’s dresser top, were half a dozen open sample packs of cigarettes. I reached over and picked up a miniature blue box with white and yellow trim, containing six cigarettes. “Hit Parades. Hit Parades are the absolute worst, Esther.” I tossed them over.
“I know.” She shrugged. “But listen, they’re free.”
We didn’t yet know about tar and nicotine. Once a week bland-faced young salesmen in business suits walked through the smoking section of the library offering free samples of atrocious new brands. Esther accepted them indiscriminately; when the young men pulled out their market-research questionnaires she responded that they were all terrible, but she would take another of each, thank you. She seemed always short of money, and practiced other small and arbitrary economies—denying herself a four-dollar scarf in winter, or a dollar movie at the Student Center. Her father provided a checking account, but she used it as little as possible. I imagine that self-denial made her feel closer to this father who barely acknowledged her existence and also warned her brothers against the corruptions of capitalism.
She lit up a Hit Parade and tossed the match, still aflame, across her bed into the heavy, mud-colored ashtray she had made in high school and brought with her all the way from Chicago. She was proud of it. She said it was the only decent thing she had ever made with her own two hands besides sandwiches and stews.
“Esther, someday you may set this place on fire. I worry when I get into bed and you’re still smoking in the dark. I can see the little orange circle flashing around.”
“Sorry.” Esther leaned over to reach her ashtray and blew out the match; her breath sent up a black spray that drifted down to settle on the bedspread. “Oh well. Sorry again.” She tried to brush off the ashes but they smudged. “Anyhow, there is one thing I like about Descartes. Here. ‘To accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognize to be so ... nothing more than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I would have no occasion to doubt it.’ In other words, don’t believe anything until you’ve proven it for yourself.”
“Well ... not exactly,” said Nina. “Not in science. It would be absurd to start from scratch every time you devised an experiment. Some things we take on faith, from past research.”
“Nothing on faith! Nothing on faith! Isn’t that what it says right here? I don’t believe there’s an unconscious mind. I don’t believe there’s a God. I’m not even convinced there are little protons and electrons. Give me a microscope, let me see for myself.”
“I’ll vouch for them,” said Nina. “Won’t you take my word for it?”
“No. You believe what you’ve been told. Didn’t you believe in heaven and hell for the first fifteen years of your life?”
“This sort of jejune discussion is not what Descartes had in mind,” Gabrielle said severely from the floor. “Not what he had in mind at all.”
“Jejune?” said Esther with a lively flick of her curls. “Jejune? Is that French?”
I also found the three Continental Rationalists disappointing, but I tucked in the right-hand corner of my mirror the sentence that most intrigued me: “The effort by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself.” Spinoza. I didn’t really know what it meant, but I hoped that I would in time, and that it would be worth the wait.
Gabrielle, in a royal blue leotard and tights, sat with the soles of her feet touching, her class notes in the parallelogram formed by her legs. She was eating Pecan Sandies. Every few moments her long bare arm would extend mechanically up towards the bag on the windowsill. She rarely indulged that way, only when she was getting her period and craved sweets, but it was the night before the final exam. I was replaying Professor Boles’s voice in my head; I heard tones and intervals, with words giving them boundaries and shape. The hard part was restoring meaning to the words. Nina’s and Esther’s duet was a distraction.
“Entelechy, Esther?”
She was smoking ravenously. “Entelechy. Each thing’s essence moves from its potential to realization. Aristotle.”
“Very good. What are the four ways? Or she may call it the four causes of a phenomenon. With an example.”
“Material, formal, efficient, final. The example in the book is a house. But a house is so unoriginal. If she asks that I’m going to use something else. A shoe.”
“Why not start with the house?” Nina cajoled. She was eating too. She had even kicked off her black pumps, and sat curled in her chair, a box of Mallomars on her lap.
“Such a conventional mind, Nina. It’s a pity. Material cause: bricks. Or mud, as the case may be. Ice, for an igloo. Formal cause: plans or blueprints. Efficient cause: labor. Tote that barge, lift that bale. Final cause: someone needs a place to live.”
“Very good!” Nina’s eyes shone with pleasure. Her labor was paying off: Esther was being built. “Of course on the exam you’ll leave out the asides.”
“But the asides are my essence. Give me a Mallomar, would you? I’m thin this week. Now I will tell you about a shoe. Just to show I can do it on my own. Material cause: leather. More likely plastic, these days. Formal cause: design for a shoe, I suppose. Efficient cause: same thing, labor. No! Elves! Final cause: The foot wants a covering. Baby needs a new pair of shoes. Shall I go on? I could do more complex things. A nervous breakdown. A painting by Picasso. An orgasm. Hey, would you like me to do an orgasm? I’ve read all about it.”
“There really isn’t time,” said Nina coolly. She licked chocolate off each finger. “I think we’d better go on to his ideas about friendship.”
Gabrielle suddenly moaned in agony. I thought she must have pulled a muscle. “Oh, this stuff makes me so sick,” she growled. She stood up in one spasm of motion, swishing her hair around, waving the sheaf of notes in her hand. Her voice spiraled; the mellow, sensible girl was left far behind. “Sick! A whole term of trash! I thought there’d be some connection with reality. But all this is nothing but classification. Three grades of faculties of the soul. Four kinds of law. Four cardinal virtues. Is that truth? It’s some kind of mumbo-jumbo numerology! Five proofs of the existence of God. Oh sure, first you decide what you want to believe, then you invent the reasoning.”
Her face glistened with sweat. She bolted through the room, a jagged path of bright blue, and flung open the window. A gust of air rushed in. With her wide, broad-shouldered stance, every bone and curve articulated in the leotard, hair blowing and head lifted high in indignation, she seemed at last the Martha Graham tragic heroine she longed to dance. Woman confronting the betrayal of the intellect. Her eyes were shadowed; I couldn’t see their colors.
“That was wonderful.” I applauded. “Brava!”
“I’m not fooling around, Lydia. We wasted so much time. Look, the so-called enlightened ones are no better.” She riffled through her notes. “Hume. Such an original mind, she told us. But the same old thing—seven different categories of relationships. Would you like to hear them?”
“No!” Esther said. “And could you please stop running around the room? You’re making me dizzy.”
“Oh, all right.” She dropped to the floor and breathed deeply. “Also those fallacies. They made up as many fallacies as truths.” She was calmer; we were still transfixed. “Fallacy of ambiguity, fallacy of equivocation,” she droned. “Fallacy of composition, fallacy of division—I can’t even remember all the fallacies.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “The fallacies are fun.”
“Aha, speaking of fun—have you run across the Hedonistic Calculus, by any chance? Jeremy Bentham? I know it wasn’t in the course but I happened upon it. The Hedonistic Calculus helps you choose between competing but mutually exclusive pleasures.” She grabbed a book and leafed through. “I bet you didn’t know there were seven ways to measure your pleasure.”
“Gaby, really. Talk about jejune.”
“I didn’t make this up, Lydia. This is the product of a great mind. Number one. Intensity of the pleasure. Number two. Duration of the pleasure. Three. Certainty or uncertainty—that means how far the experience is guaranteed to deliver the pleasure.” Her lips moved tentatively in a gamine kind of smile. The Greek Fury was giving way to a Gallic wit. “Four. Propinquity or remoteness—how close the pleasure is, in space as well as time. Five. This is a good one. Fecundity. How likely is it that the pleasure will lead to subsequent pleasures of the same sort?” She had us laughing, in relief as much as amusement. The impending test was forgotten. “Six. Purity—the absence of any little bits of pain mixed in. And seven. Extent. How far can the pleasure be shared with others?”
“Well,” said Esther. “We could go out and share a pizza, at least.”
The next morning Professor Boles, looking melancholy in her old gray tweeds, asked us to trace the successive phases of pre-Socratic thought. I think she loved the Greeks and hated to see the semester over. Dutifully, sophomorically, I repeated vision after vision until I reached the mystical poet and the prosaic man of science, who reassured us that there is indeed movement (and with it possibility, and hope), and underneath, the eternal and the immutable. Something abides, I wrote to her in my blue book, like a personal letter, my heart in my pen. Those elemental roots—earth, water, air, fire. (“Good but too literal,” she commented in red pencil. B plus.)
I was disappointed that there was no question remotely connected with how Thales measured the height of the pyramid. Even though Nina was right—Thales could have measured a man’s shadow at any time of day and applied the shadow-man ratio to the pyramid—I found the appeal of the story lay in the waiting. I imagined him patient and serene, maybe eating cookies and talking to his friends, waiting for that ripe moment when an insubstantial shadow on the sand inches up to a human magnitude that can break down a pyramid’s recalcitrance. But it was a no-nonsense exam.
“That was not really related to the course, Lydia,” said Gabrielle. “Only of biographical interest. Are you taking the next semester?”
“Sure.” I remembered her outburst of the night before. I would take it warily, not expecting truth but simply watching the mind flex and point. (I could never hold on to that correct attitude, though. Not then and not later.) I would devote my better energies to music. Practice more, learn the oboe too, and venture across the street, where the Eastern European professors were playing with computers and electronic equipment.
Naturally Nina was going to take the second semester. Esther also, to our surprise.
“Mais certainement,” she said. “I looked through the syllabus and the reading list. It says the world is all blind irrational striving. Someone’s will and idea. I mean, even the titles are terrific. Fear and Trembling? The Sickness unto Death? Believe me, I’m going to do just fine.” (She did. Professor Boles didn’t know what came over her. How the tables were turned! In the glow of early May sunshine Esther would try to explain to Nina what Sartre meant by bad faith, and what he meant when he said, “We were never more free than during the German occupation.” “How could they be?” Nina sat dulled with puzzlement. “Because they were close to the edge, stupid.” Esther was not a patient tutor. “Because they were close to death. Death,” she whispered hoarsely. “Everything they did had to be real. No time for fooling around. They had to resist, Nina. Make their lives mean some-thing.”)
Meanwhile we sat in the West End Bar sharing a bottle of wine to celebrate the end. Nina said, “I thought it was a pretty easy exam. Did everyone answer that question about Aristotle? I mean the little optional one.”
We had all answered the optional question about Aristotle on friendship. We grinned at each other across the table, suddenly shy.
“So what did we all say?” I asked.
“What did you say, Lydia?” Gabrielle’s eyes shone blue and green, and she flashed her quizzical, wry look. At those moments I could swear she had the trace of an accent too, or maybe it was only an inflection of the voice. It still happens once in a while. The alien vowel, the sprung rhythm flickers by, almost between syllables, and vanishes.
“I? All right. I said that there are three kinds of friendship. The first two kinds, friendship based on utility and friendship based on pleasure, are transient, and endure only as long as the friend continues to be useful and pleasant.” I was reciting Professor Boles’s words from memory. “But the third type, which is perfect friendship, is a friendship between equals, and founded in goodness. Each person wishes good for the other just as she would for herself; in fact Aristotle says ‘a friend is another self.’ The principal virtue of friendship is loving, and since it is a mutual love of character rather than of any passing quality such as pleasure or usefulness, it endures a lifetime as character itself endures. Which is not to say,” I concluded, and I poured wine slowly for all of us in turn, the way my father used to do at our Passover Seders with his teasing, maverick expression, “which is not to say that such friends cannot also be useful and pleasant, since whatever is enduringly good cannot be otherwise. I made it short, because after all, it was only worth five points out of the whole term’s work.”
We drank to it.
And then, slightly drunk, for we were young girls not used to wine, we danced our way back to the dormitory, prodding the reluctant Nina. It was the fire-bearer dance Gaby had choreographed the year before for the Prometheus myth—live torches flaming up Broadway in winter’s quick coming of dark.
And then, years later, they tell us that there has never been any such thing as friendship among women, only rivalry, and that it is time to attempt Sisterhood. Sisterhood. The word has a grating sound. A friend is another self.