Goodbye Without Leaving Read Free Page B

lacked faith in myself. While that may have been true, it was not what I meant.
    â€œI mean religious faith,” I said. “I’m nothing. I’m a lapsed Jew from an assimilated family. I don’t belong anywhere. I’m alone in the middle of the universe.”
    This caused Doo-Wah actually to kiss my nose.
    â€œOh, come on , little girl,” he said consolingly. “We all that.”

5
    My earliest memories were musical. My mother, for whom music was background noise, painted on Saturday afternoons while listening to the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on the radio. I hung out in the kitchen, where whatever housekeeper we had, kept the kitchen radio on. The first time I heard Chuck Berry sing “Roll Over Beethoven” I was dazzled. I stood in the kitchen in a perfectly rapt state. I took money out of my piggy bank to get this record. I played it on a child-size phonograph in my own room every minute that I was alone.
    This room was done after my mother’s style. On the wall were framed watercolors of me at various stages: in a straw hat eating a watermelon, playing with someone else’s Persian cat (we did not have pets), at the piano, and so forth. My bedspread was a pink and yellow quilt. My curtains were a faded rose-infested chintz, and on the floor I had an old Persian rug.
    Eventually I dismantled this room. The watercolors came down and were stacked in my closet. The quilt, which had always daunted me by its being old and expensive, was changed to an Indian print bedspread. The children’s books were banished to the cellar and my teenage books were settled on the shelves. And while I sought to keep my mother out, she got in anyway and edited me. I found certain books vanished—my mother thought they were seditious or too sex-soaked for a young thing like myself. Gradually, I learned what every upright teen with a snooping mother learns: to hide everything, and I was good at it. I could hardly wait for the wonderful day when I would graduate from high school and go away to embrace my own destiny with no one around to tell me what to do.
    At college I passionately wished I were either very tall or quite short, extremely beautiful or terribly ugly. I wished I had a long funny nose, pierced ears and lots of shiny black curly hair. Or that I were oversized, like an equestrian statue, or had some odd quirk in my background, like having grown up in Cambodia or Hong Kong or on a sheep ranch in Montana. Of course, my mother was a portrait painter, but that did not seem as glamorous as having a father who had been blacklisted or a mother who studied primitive tribes in Africa and South America.
    As I learned from the thousands of women’s magazines I read on the road with Ruby, people, especially women, never see what is actually in the mirror. Once in a while, lifted on a pleasant little cloud of marijuana, I liked to lean back in my extra-padded Strat-o-cruiser seat, look out the window and wonder: can you see what is in the mirror? How much does a mirror distort? Was it not a terrible ironic joke that, of all the people in the world you need to see clearly, the one person you can never clearly see is your own self? Was this not in fact a tragedy? Then as I began slowly to come down and was left with that unpleasant little buzz you get from inferior reefer, the plain truth would emerge: people never like themselves anyway. Was that not the truth? Were there actually people who looked in the mirror and broke into a contented smile of acceptance?
    My hair was neither blond nor brown, although as a child I had the loveliest mop of ringlets, according to my mother’s portraits and the seven thousand photographs she and my father took of me. As I got older, my hair got darker—what a slump for my artistic mother! I was five foot four. My legs were neither long nor short. I was not short- or long-waisted. In fact, I was a fairly regular-looking person, easily pretty enough