My brother’s wife, Corky, is in the wicker chair in my bedroom tweezing her eyebrows, my magnifying mirror an inch from the tip of her nose. When I first met Corky, she was a student at Hunter; she wore long Indian dresses and high heels and had long hair. Now she wears running shoes and baggy slacks, has a sort of bowl haircut, and goes by her nickname instead of Charlotte. Plucking her eyebrows and being pregnant are two of her new self-improvement plans, along with taking driving lessons. She has come into the city from Morristown to spend the weekend, while Archie—new husband, my brother—is away on business. She is sitting by the telephone, waiting for her call to the obstetrician to be returned. Archie, on the phone last night, insisted that Corky check out whether it was all right for her to continue with her aerobic dance classes. Her end of the conversation was a long protest about his trying to make her into a neurotic now that she was pregnant. She gave me the phone and asked me to reason with him, but I stayed out of it. He and I discussed the progress of the wisteria. The wisteria in the back garden has leafed out and shot up four stories to my roof, where it cascades over the low brick railing and has worked its way through the skylight. In the morning, I find crumpled leaves and small purple flowers scattered over my sheet.
I’m stretched out on the bed, printing a letter to my grandmother. My grandmother can’t read my writing, but she is insulted when I type. She calls my typed letters “business letters.” I have a piece of lined paper underneath my writing paper so that I will remember to print large enough. As my letters go on, they tend to look as if they’d been put through a funnel. I reread my last sentence: “AS SOON AS THE WISTERIA GROWS, THOUSANDS OF TINY ANTS CLIMB UP AND COME IN THROUGH THE SCREENS.” It seems not just distressing but alarming, put in such large, blocky letters.
The phone rings, and Corky pounces on it.
“I feel so silly asking this, but my husband . . . Oh, the nurse . . . But I don’t have any bleeding! . . . Is this because you think I’m
I ink out my last line and print instead, “ISN’T IT AMAZING THAT A HUGE WISTERIA VINE IS THRIVING RIGHT HERE IN NEW YORK CITY?”
I go into the living room. The view out of the tall windows is of the projects the next street over. Below me, in the back, are gardens, with high walls dividing them. Next door, two actors stand at opposite ends of their garden, each reading aloud from an identical book.
“ ‘What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord, or to the dreadful summit of the cliff . . . ’ ”
“Again!” the actor from the far end of the garden hollers.
“ ‘What if it tempt you . . . ’ ”
“Oh, yeah. ‘It waves me still. Go on, I’ll follow thee.’ ”
As I’m watching, trying to block out Corky’s mounting hysteria, I see a kid of about ten, who has hauled himself up so that he can see over the fence of the adjacent garden. He throws something—a stone or a bottle cap—and screams, “Get back where you belong, faggots!,” drops to the ground, and runs toward his back door. Then I hear the ice-cream truck come down the street, playing its carrousel music. As my grandmother recently wrote me (with a fountain pen, flawlessly executing the Palmer method), “Sandy darling, everyone in New York’s always worked up.”
“All right, I’ll do it your way,” Corky is saying, as I go back to the bedroom and sit on the bed. She sounds like some brave actress in a nineteen-forties movie. This notion is reinforced by her bottom lip, quivering.
Two o’clock in the morning, and Corky and I are the last people in the restaurant except for Wyatt, my longtime friend. He’s just shaken some vegetables around in a pan and brought them to the table, along with a bottle of pepper vodka. A truck rattles by. Corky and I share the last slice of lemon meringue pie. Wyatt’s key ring is on the table: four keys to the restaurant, so he can set the alarms before he leaves.
