‘I got me the only rose on the family tree,’ Mitch liked to say. When they were first married, Dolores took it as a compliment, and she’d colour a bit, looking rosier than ever. But after a while she caught on that Mitch was boasting about himself, not her. And, more than anything, was being mean about her sisters. ‘The thorns,’ he called them.
When the children came along, Mitch found a new twist on the joke. ‘Get ready, kids. Uncle Al and Thorn Selma are coming over – whatever you do, don’t let her hug you!’ Or, with a shake of the head, ‘Your Thorny Margaret, ain’t she the sharp one!’ Now that he’d got hold of it, he couldn’t let it go. If one of his daughters answered back or made a face, he’d say: ‘Uh oh, looks like we got a little sticker pushing out here! Where’s my scissors?’
‘Papa’s just teasing,’ Dolores told them, angry at him for getting them worked up, and angry at them for taking it to heart. ‘Barbara the barbarian,’ Mitch would mock the oldest, his way of making her obey. She blamed her mother. Other mothers thought about what they were doing, and named their girls something pretty, like Rita or Marilyn or Amy. Barbara took things into her own hands and called herself Babs. The younger girl was Theresa. ‘St Theresa, cut that out!’ Mitch would yell, though really she was the more obedient of the two. ‘We could call you Terry,’ was Babs’s suggestion. But Theresa said no, that sounded like a boy’s name.
Babs shrugged. ‘Suit yourself, St Theresa.’
Dolores felt for her girls, but they’d get over it. It was she who made herself sad. ‘You should take a baking class,’ advised her sister Selma, drying dishes after Babs’s sweet sixteen. ‘Learn to frost a wedding cake, there’s money there. Or get yourself a job. Look at me, you never see me bored.’
Dolores frowned. ‘Did I say I’m bored?’
‘I’ve got a place where they’re expecting me five days a week, rain or shine, cramps or no cramps. If I miss, the operation falls apart.’ Selma answered the phone at her husband’s upholstery shop, and between calls reshelved the fabric books and vacuumed up the lint. ‘Things are changing,’ she explained. ‘Ladies can have careers.’
Dolores couldn’t think of a career and didn’t want one, or any class either. She knew the name for what she wanted – flower power. She loved the sound of it. Once, at breakfast, she asked Mitch: ‘What’s this flower children business? Who gets to be one?’ She was at his shoulder, pouring him his second cup of coffee.
Mitch twisted around to look up at her. ‘You planning to apply? We got forms down the post office.’
‘That’s not what I mean,’ Dolores said, turning her back to set the coffeepot on the stove.
‘Better plan on dropping fifteen pounds. They got their standards, doll.’ He was laughing hard now, letting it out almost choking on his toast and coffee.
‘And don’t call me doll,’ she muttered inside her head. On their first date ever, he’d called her Dolly, short for Dolores. ‘Please don’t call me that,’ she’d asked him nicely.
‘Why?’
‘I just don’t care for it, that’s all.’
He’d sighed. After that, he called her ‘doll’, which was worse, of course. But Dolores didn’t have another protest in her, didn’t want him to be mad. It was the same on their next date, when he unbuttoned her blouse and got his tongue in there. She kept her mouth shut, trying not to breathe in the pomade on his hair. Only gasped once when he pulled her on his lap and began bouncing her, slamming her into his crotch, fast and frantic, until, his fingers digging hard into her shoulders, he let out a howl. When he was through, Dolores didn’t know what she was supposed to say or do.
Silly to bother about that now. She bought herself a spiral notebook with a paisley cover and started pasting in pictures from the papers and Time magazine. The first was one that Mitch himself had come up with. ‘Here,’ he said, shoving the magazine under her nose, making a point. ‘See what the world’s come to!’ When he moved his thick forefinger off the page, she saw a girl, not much older than Babs, picnicking with her boyfriend. He was in shorts and bare to the waist. She was bare all the way but turned so you could just see the curve of her cheek, one breast and the roundness of her arse up close. She was pretty all over. Like a healthy toddler, Dolores thought. Like her girls when they were babies, running into her arms, their cloth nappies bagging down to their knees.
Mitch’s thumb nailed the spot again, blotting out the girl’s flesh. ‘If I ever thought one of my girls …!’
‘They won’t.’
‘If you brought them up right.’
Later, with Mitch gone to work, Dolores scissored the picture out and scotch-taped it to the first page in her notebook. After that she kept the notebook hidden under the underwear in the top drawer of her dresser. She’d pull it out, when no one was around, to add a picture or turn the pages. For a long time, her favourite was a black-and-white shot of soldiers standing at attention while girls in thin summer dresses stuffed daisies in the muzzles of their rifles. Dolores didn’t follow politics, but one thing was sure – those girls weren’t ’fraidy cats.
But it was the soldier boys her eyes kept travelling back to, especially the smooth-cheeked youngster closest to the camera. There was something that touched her in the way he stood so still, letting the girl in front of him have her way. Probably he felt foolish, but he wasn’t going to yell or make a scene. He had his orders, Dolores guessed. But what if the girl stuck her tongue out at him, what if she slapped his face, what if she kissed him on the mouth? ‘He looks like a nice boy,’ Dolores thought. Her mind went to her Uncle Sammy who’d married late and had a child when he was fifty. He’d let that little girl do anything she pleased. One day, when Dolores and her mother dropped in, Sammy answered the door with metal curlers in his wispy hair. ‘We’re playing beauty parlour,’ he said and gave Dolores a big, fat wink.
Much later, when Dolores was grown up and a mother, she’d let her own girls brush her hair, curling it over their little fingers or bobby pinning it into a sloppy French twist. Sometimes they’d top off the ‘do’ with dandelions or stick buttercups behind her ears, then hold up a hand mirror so she could see. ‘Look how beautiful!’
‘Just call me Dorothy Lamour,’ she’d agree, which made them giggle.
Underneath the photo with the soldiers the caption said ‘flower power’. The first time she’d ever heard of such a thing. After that she saw it everywhere.
For instance, in one cartoon a crowd of college kids in beads and smocks and jeans, parading down the street, looking happy and as if they knew where they were going. But there was this cop in a phone booth. He was yelling, ‘Chief! They’re armed with petunias, marigolds and roses!’
Dolores kept staring at the kids in the cartoon, then in the mirror. Until one day she stopped curling her hair. Mitch knew something was different, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Of course, it didn’t take Selma two minutes to spot the trouble.
‘You’re not letting yourself go to pot, I hope.’
‘I’m not letting myself do anything.’
‘You don’t want to let yourself go.’
Every afternoon now, before the kids came home, she took her notebook to the kitchen table and set herself to studying the pictures, the same way she used to go at algebra problems, trying to crack the secret of x and y. Or the way she used to stare at models in Seventeen and Mademoiselle, to find out how to turn herself American-pretty. Her mother, who’d grown up in the old country, couldn’t help her there, and thought it was all nonsense anyway. ‘See how you worried for nothing,’ she said, when Mitch from a good family back home popped the question.
After letting her hair go straight, the next thing Dolores did was to go into town and buy herself a pair of sandals. Not the pretty white ones with dainty crisscross straps and skinny heels – two pairs like that were already sitting in her wardrobe – but Jesus sandals, brown and flat, with sturdy soles that could stand up to rain and take a person any place they got a yen to go. Pretty soon, except for church on Sunday, she was wearing them all day and everywhere. Now she could take the dirt shortcut to the postbox without twisting a heel, could cut across the damp lawn and not leave divots, could stand at the kitchen sink and wiggle her toes.
At the kitchen table, with her notebook open in front of her, Dolores was working on a list: ‘beads’, ‘fishnet stockings’, ‘tie-dyed shirt’. She’d have to go gradually, so that no one would notice. Like growing old, she thought. The folks who saw you every day didn’t take it in, and then, before they knew it, you were dead. Except her plan was to go in the opposite direction.
She was drawing a question mark next to ‘granny glasses’ when Babs walked in on her. ‘Ma, I’ve got to get my ears pierced.’ Dolores flipped the notebook shut. ‘I’m the only one left in the whole class. I need ten bucks right now, there’s a nurse at Woolworth’s.’
‘You know what papa said.’
Babs waited.
‘Okay, bring me my pocketbook.’
It wasn’t ’til later, with the lamb and okra simmering for supper, that Dolores remembered what Babs had ahead of her. If she knew Mitch, he’d come to the table, take one gander – and bombs away! ‘You couldn’t wait to cross me, could you?’ Babs would sit there in a pout, her hands in her lap, and, if she knew what was good for her, not saying anything.
But that’s not how it played. By six o’clock, Babs was in a mood, every few minutes waltzing into the kitchen and hugging her mother. When Mitch walked in the door, she sashayed right up to him, couldn’t wait to show off the evidence, tiny gold studs that had come home to roost. She lifted her curtain of hair with her arms, turned her head this way and that. ‘Papa, don’t I look pretty?’
‘Isn’t one hole in your head enough?’ he grumbled. And let it drop. In bed that night Dolores dreamed of young soldiers in granny glasses nibbling her ears.
The next morning she phoned Woolworth’s, and the person who answered said, ‘Yup, ’til the end of the week.’ She grabbed her handbag and headed out of the door. ‘Might rain,’ she thought; but she didn’t turn back or wait for the bus.
Street after street, she was remembering things. When she was a girl, you wouldn’t think to pierce your ears, not if you lived to be a hundred. Once, though, a new girl, as dark as Dolores and with little gold rings in her ears, came into the classroom. She could hardly speak English and her name was too long and too hard to say. Mrs Conlon led the little girl to the front of the room and turned her around to face the class. ‘I don’t think our new friend will mind if we just call her Frances.’
When Dolores reached Centre Street she slowed down, shifted her bag from one arm to the other and came to a stop in front of a bakery. She stared at the cupcakes and cream pies and then her reflection, trying to picture that little girl’s face.
‘What’ve you got on your ears, Frances?’ At break, a fresh boy in the class came up close and pointed. Frances stood very still, her face red, her dark brown eyes ready to cry. ‘What the heck are they?’ He was showing off for the big kids. Two older girls shoved him out of the way, then reached over and twisted Francies’s ear lobes ’til the tears leaked down her cheeks.
‘Ugh!’ one said. ‘She’s got nails in her ears!’
After that, only Mrs Conlon and the principal called her Frances. In the playground she had a naughty new name.
‘Hey, Fannie,’ children would yell, running circles around her. ‘Hey, Fannie!’ No matter which way she turned, they were tugging at their ear lobes and laughing their heads off.
At Woolworth’s the woman behind the counter said: ‘Make yourself comfortable, a couple of young girls are ahead of you.’ Dolores sat on a stool by the jewellery case and leaned over to look at the studs. Tiny crosses, tiny pearl shapes, teensy daisies. ‘The smaller the better,’ she thought. The only jewellery her mother ever wore was her wedding band. But in the old country a gypsy woman had come around each spring, with needle and thread, to pierce the ears of the little ones. ‘Did it hurt?’ Dolores asked. Her mother couldn’t remember.
Dolores had known other women from the village, some old enough to be her grandmothers. All dead now, her mother dead, too. When she was small, those old ladies gave her the creeps, and any time they dropped by to drink Turkish coffee with her mother or smoke a Philip Morris, she hid out in her room. But her mother always called her and made her kiss their damp cheeks and sit quiet while they gossiped in a mix of Arabic and English. ‘Don’t let them talk to me,’ she’d pray. She couldn’t bear to see the shiny vaccinations, big as silver dollars, on their arms; and their nylons rolled down to their ankles in summer; and the bedroom slippers they wore even to the supermarket; and especially their soft grey whiskers. Not to mention the holes in their ears. A long time ago, her mother’s lobes had knit themselves closed. But these ladies must have been dumb as dishwater and put on heavy earrings every day. Dolores could tell because their ear lobes were droopy and yellowed, and showed gashes half an inch long. ‘You could hang a camel from them,’ her father used to say.
‘You won’t feel a thing,’ the nurse said. She was standing at a little wooden table behind a curtain, and on the table was a towel and on the towel a metal contraption that reminded Dolores of pap smears. ‘Don’t worry about a thing, sweetie. I do this every day and nobody’s sued me.’ The nurse poured alcohol on a cotton ball and dabbed at Dolores’s left earlobe.
‘Tell me what you’re going to do.’
‘Well, I make a mark here, just where the hole should be. And then I staple the stud in.’ She sounded matter-of-fact and cheerful.
‘Make a mark?’
‘Unless you’d like to do it, yourself, hon. Some people are very particular –they want it just so, not too high, not too low, not here, not there.
‘Oh no, I trust you. Then what did you say is next?’
‘The needle jabs right through here’– she kneaded one earlobe – ‘the soft, fleshy part. That’s the trick, you see? We don’t want to run into cartilege.’
‘It’s not a big hole, is it?’
‘Oh, no, dear.’ She was brandishing the contraption. ‘That’s a good girl, try to relax.’
‘Does it scar?’
‘Shouldn’t.’
‘You mean it could?’
‘You’re a worrier, aren’t you, hon? You know we could have been done by now.’
‘I’m afraid I’m not very well,’ said Dolores. ‘If I’m better, I’ll come back tomorrow.’
‘Whatever you say. But we got this far, it’s a shame not to finish.’
Riding home on the bus, Dolores was confused. Couldn’t tell up from down, couldn’t tell forwards from backwards. By the time she walked in the back door, she was feeling the way she used to after a killer maths test, sure she’d got an F and scared what her parents would say. Of course, this wasn’t the same. If she didn’t want her ears pierced, if she’d thought better of it, that was nobody’s business.
She dropped her bag on the kitchen table, then went into the living room and curled up on the sofa. She’d forgotten about Mitch all day, but now she could hear him again in her head. From Day One of their marriage, he’d told her: ‘You’re my wife. Be normal, you hear me? Don’t call attention.’ And that’s what she’d tried to do – what she’d always wanted even before Mitch came along. When she was a kid, she hated being almost dark as a coloured and having a mother who laughed too loud and sometimes spat right in the street, and old ladies around who didn’t know the difference between slippers and shoes, and a father who reeked of cigars and tipped his hat to her girlfriends. Nobody else’s father did that, not even to grownup ladies. ‘Your father has a moustache,’ the lady at the corner store said to her one day. And then the woman laughed, her thin lips thick with lipstick.
Now out of the blue, after all those years of not calling attention, she’d got this idea. Wanted something those girls in the pictures had, though she didn’t know how to name it. But she’d only been fooling herself. Because how could she be like those girls who knew where they were going and weren’t under anyone’s thumb? They were so much younger and thinner and didn’t have Mitch to answer to. Still, it was something deeper. No Old World in their head.
‘It’s all for the best,’ she said finally, dragging herself up from the sofa and into the kitchen. Hungry for something sweet, she rummaged in the cupboard over the fridge. The bag she wanted was right where she’d stashed it, but ripped open and cleaned out, except for broken bits of chocolate and a heap of crumbs. ‘Those were my cookies.’ She shook the remains of the bag into her mouth. Her eye fell on a fresh jar of peanut butter, the girls’ favourite brand that she’d bought them just yesterday. She unscrewed the lid and scooped out a fingerful, then stuck her finger in her mouth and sucked it clean. She experimented with forefinger, middle finger, ring finger, but her pinkie worked best. Scoop, suck, scoop, suck, ’til half the jar was gone and each breath she took tasted of peanuts.
Almost nauseous, she drew a glass of tap water to wash away the taste. Outside, the rain had finally come, a vicious downpour. Through the window over the sink, Dolores could just make out the shuddering clothesline and, in the border along the fence, the bowed heads of dahlias, mums and late-summer roses. Could make out, too, where she’d gone wrong. Next time she’d print DOLORES in big, red letters on a sheet of paper and attach the paper to the bag with an elastic band. Or with a darning needle. Or with her mother’s six-inch hat pin.
Mitch or the girls, it didn’t matter. From now on, anyone poking where they didn’t belong would be sorry.