On Keeping Women Read Free Page A

you got it twisted about me, lady … I’m a worker. Who happens to be a parasite.” She stashed her hands on her hips. “Why else do you suppose I’m a radical?”
    Lying here in the weeds—there are stars up there now—it’s my firm conviction that life teaches everybody to be humorous about at least one thing. If so, it came to her and me late.
    “You suppose I could ask Officer Maraglia?” I say. “How to be a prostitute? A streetwalker, I mean.” What joy—to walk these streets.
    She looks over to where he’s disappearing, before she answers me. “Or a callgirl, maybe? Your arches are weak.”
    But then she feels my forehead, my cheeks. Draws me to her by the wrists, kisses one of them. And sits down so hard on a wooden piling that I fall into her lap. I can’t stay there. She can’t stay on the piling. We both stand up.
    “Wait a minute—” I say. One side of her dropseat’s been snagged open by the piling. I button her up again. “You suppose they have little dropseats, sort of out front? Or is that a vulgar thought?”
    She stares at the harbor. “I warned Charlie. That you were already over-prepared.”
    James comes up just then. I know he’s fond of me, though he’ll never let on. Still won’t. “Schizophrenia?” he says. “Often starts at fifteen.”
    “Seventeen,” Mother says, turning on me. “And lay off her. I’m the caseworker here.”
    My father comes down the pier, scratching. He’s wearing my mother’s green Loden cape. “Beautiful night, isn’t it. I couldn’t sleep either.” He moons at the river as if he’s forgotten he’ll be crossing it again, come daylight. But he’s heard her. “Come on, Renata, give it a rest. Give Lexie here.”
    As if it isn’t him who always harangues.
    James and I sideswipe glances again. We’re decently dressed, for us. For the hour, even formally. With parents like ours, we do what we can to restore the balance. Not that it works.
    I address them all. “Mother has her clients. And you have the plant. Plants.” (I couldn’t pluralize those now; he was vulnerable.) “And you both have James and me.” (I wouldn’t call that an advantage now, either. But for my short hour, I was relentless.) “And James has the morgue. What have I got?” I see Father open the mouth I’m already afraid is mine too. “And if you ever call me Girlbud again, I’ll positively leave.”
    “She wants a vocation, Charlie,” Mother says. “But she doesn’t know what.”
    I gnaw my lip, betrayed. And betray back, quick as I can. “I do so know. I’m not him.”
    James’s eyes widen. “Do you, Sis. You never said.”
    I couldn’t. There are technical words for sense-confusion; I know that now. And many avenues to it. Music that confuses us with pictures, of a kind the composer never planned. Odors with a little hush to them. Gin that makes Bach smell like flowers. My son, at six, said “Wednesday is pink.”
    “The city—” I wanted to say to them. “That you have burdened me with. No—trusted me with, too soon. Like jewels I’m to inherit but haven’t yet. I want the city, between my thighs.”
    “Want to study medicine too?” Mother says. “Maybe we could stake you.” Her tone’s as false as her puddings. “When it comes time.”
    “Sibling jealousy?” Father shakes his head, doubting; he’s the one who spends time with us. “No—I don’t think.”
    How smart they think they are, James signals me. About each other. And never see themselves. Or us.
    “No, I don’t want,” I say violently. “I hate horses.”
    Mother trembles. She feels professionally close to madness in others, but doesn’t want it in the family. “Overstimulated, see? And two years away from college yet. We’ll have to organize.”
    The policeman drifts over. Maybe he’s never been sure of us completely. A family who’ll stand on a pier at four in the morning, discussing its business … Outré, yes? And no doubt responsible for the way I can lie up