It seemed too hard that I should lose her as soon as I had found her. But what a sparkling good-bye-New-York-in-June it was! I made several visits to her apartment, where everything was in breezy disarray as the family packed—and shed—their American lives. Her parents, astonishingly open and kind, spoke a crisp, perfect English that struck me as both sculpted and witty, and treated me as if I were more adult than child, or just as much or as little as they were themselves. As for Letizia, I was her final, adoring American audience as well as her friend. I didn’t mind. Her performance was anodyne to the pain of detaching. She had a splendid way of acting her own emotions, of outlining them, like Matisse or Modigliani, just as her own paintings did their vivid masses of color, and I was spectator to the manifest, dancing art of her spirit, trying out her gorgeous enthusiasms—I who lived in such an ambiguous world of mixed and treacherous meanings, uncertain what it was safe to love or hate.
Brian Aherne was OK, she granted, but I must fall in love with Clark Gable. So she thought, and so did her doting parents, utterly bemused by their wild child’s cartoon of Love. They gave me an innocent permission my father—so solemn, so fearful of the seductiveness of dreaming—would never have given me. She took me with her to see Mutiny on the Bounty. She washed me in the geyser of her adoration of this splendid incarnation of virility. She told me that if I could not go instantly to see the film version of Gone With the Wind (which I confessed I hadn’t, and couldn’t), I mustn’t wait. I must instantly read the book.
And I did, but not in an instant. Never in an instant. Long after Letizia was gone, I lingered on it—over it—under and around it. I sank and plunged and wallowed in it. I palpitated and thrilled with it. I let it burn the fingertips that turned the flesh of its pages. I buried it under my pillow at night, and by flashlight read and reread it in the dark. And at last I understood what it was Carole had been trying to tell me.
The jasmine had bloomed and gone. It was draped now in big, loopy greenwear that drooped with the heat.
I was all body, that summer I turned fourteen. I needed to move—to dance. Afternoons when no one else was home, we danced, just Ann and I; we attached every scarf we could find in the house to our underwear and played La Gioconda over and over again on the phonograph, until the record began to scratch and bounce alarmingly. We could not resist “The Dance of the Hours”—mistakingly calling it “The Dance of the Seven Veils” for the vision of it—with its vertiginous brilliance and sudden inexhaustible shifts of speed. I knew it was a trope for my paradoxical soul; I knew it—my body knew it—to be about the inner unconquerable stillness that somehow held back the chaotic swift flight of time and yet also about the secret ecstatic rush within the same stillness. And we were like bacchantes, the two of us, scarves flying, flinging ourselves wildly across the long living room, crisscrossing back and forth until we were both sweating and breathless, until the soles of our bare feet were scorched and we finally slumped exhausted to the rug.
I learned how to swim in July. My mother seemed especially vigilant these days, as she accompanied Ann and me to the beach on the Sound, one dry blue-sky day after another, and sat with her tatting on a bench above the retaining wall, straining her eyes to find us now and then in the crowd. I borrowed a book from the library and studied strokes. In my zeal for the perfect crawl, sidestroke, backstroke, I forgot time, forgot to wave to Mamma, forgot to eat. Ann stayed close, struggling with the green water, and sometimes I would grab her, and hugging and splashing and laughing, we would bound out farther to a little deeper water, and I would throw her back, again and again, until once we bounded out too deep. But I was holding her in my arms, she still unable to swim. Yet I couldn’t find the bottom, and then neither of us could, flailing and thrashing the dark-green, salt-burning water; we could not get them to see us, just see us, and we were drowning, we were both of us gasping there, the black fear darkening my brain and drawing blackness down over an unending skyless minute.
Until I found it again, the muddy soft bottom, and pushed it away from my weight and threw her forward, my sister, safe. And then I remembered to lift my body and kick my found legs and move my arms, to ply them again in their smooth sockets to the shallow sandy water, to slush through the thin creamy water till I could look down and see my shining legs.
Together we found a place on the crowded arc of wet sand and sat, coughing, holding each other, trying not to cry, sputtering both of us with anger that not one of all those bathers out there—and the water had been crowded with them, hairy, big men, some of them so near—and not one, not one, had reached out an arm, a hand, to save us, they would have let us drown, right there in the midst of them, and the sun glaring down like God.
Soon after, in that same summer, I learned how to not to die of a fever that crushed me with delirium for nearly two weeks in August. And then, as soon as I was well enough to walk again, I learned how to bleed. My mother gently, blushingly, showed me what to do when it happened again.
I was thinner, I was taller. I felt strange to myself. I weighed in on the drugstore scale with a new penny and stared in joyous disbelief at the number that came printed on the little card. How had this happened? Like everything else, it had happened.
The boys in the neighborhood had picked up my brothers’ name for me. “Hey, Fat Fluffky,” they shouted from the street when they saw me back, bouncing the Spaldeen off the garage door.
“Not fat any more,” I turned and said.
Did she say that? “. . . Normal and average. . . .”
Miss Ridgeway (who had enjoined us never to call her Mrs.), the brilliantly focused little woman who taught us watercolor in our sophomore year, was accompanying a strange man one day through the classroom studio—perhaps an artist colleague or former student. Up and down the aisles they strolled, glancing to both sides, pausing when a student creation momentarily anchored their gaze. They had meant not to disturb us. All their comments had been murmured in the same passing undertone. And just so they had approached and gone by my tablemate, Judy, and me.
But we had heard it, distinctly, both of us. We had just laid down our washes, our big Faber & Faber genuine sable brushes poised to the tips of their exquisite points, waiting out that perfect degree of dryness to apply the first keystroke of wet color that would tell everything about the perfection of our technique. “These two?” she had said, softly, but in a kind of airy, dismissive way, waving the wand of her hand over us like some inverse godmother, “Just normal and average,” and then she and the strange man had moved complacently on.
The look of anguish Judy and I shot each other in that moment bonded us for life. Pegasus shot down in midflight, Icarus in meltdown, could not have suffered a more mortal hurt or fallen as far or as hard. It had been one thing to be ordinary, to be “normal and average” at thirteen, taking necessary small comfort from sharing freak-space on the circus midway. Now, taking our crafts from the hands of the masters, we had—we had been taught to have—infinitely more lofty expectations of the dynamics of being, had become initiates into the sacred mysteries of matter, of chaotic worldstuff yielding to the resistless grasp of human hand and eye. Our dreams of creation were passionate and holy, even if what we aspired to touch was the least hem of Cezanne’s garment, or John Marin’s, or Brancusi’s.
Oh, no, no. Normal and average would not do—not anymore. We had met too often in full assembly and intoned the noble poetry of our school song to the soaring music of Brahms’s First Symphony.
Now upward in wonder
Our distant glance is turning
Where brightly through ages
The immortal lamp is burning—
Our task unending,
Defending,