greengrocers and bookmakers, but what gets called feistiness might just be a fallback mode for the thwarted.
Before she died my mother told me she’d vowed to avoid that curse. She was Hazel Dubnow then, a modern girl like the girls in the modern movies. She had a college degree, semibrazen lipstick, knew some Keats, a few knock-knock jokes. She’d come by bus to New York City, found a furnished room, an advertising job in Midtown, friends who took her to the theater, the philharmonic, to openings, happenings, any kind of occurrence at all.
She made notes for one-act plays on office letterhead, dated account reps she detested, sots who’d suck her breasts in taxicabs, but she could stomach their ineffectual slobbering because she was a tough girl from Pittsburgh and at least these fools had more dough than the apes of the Allegheny. She was always gazing over their shoulders, anyway, off into some future soft blur where she’d dine on quail and caviar with the wits of her era. These men would bow to her mind before their sensual, precise, perhaps European mouths ever got under her sweater.
Hazel skipped a lot of lunches, saved up for a ticket to Rome, rode through the countryside on the backs of motorbikes with grappa-slugging painters who were probably also in sales, felt that familiar drool slide down her chest, flew home. She had ideas at work for ad campaigns, but who wanted to hear them? Not Swint, her supervisor. He shoved her down on his desk one night, commenced something novel, went for her panties, outright. Hazel
fought him off, ran down to the street, hailed a cab, resigned by phone the next day.
“Good girl,” said Swint.
There she sat in a coffee shop with some stolen stationery trying to fashion this heartache into a play she’d never finish when Daddy Miner walked in, slid wordless into her booth. That was his big move back then, Hazel told me, to sit down without asking, light a smoke, smile with a worldly tenderness, as though he’d just found what he’d been seeking but wondered now if the journey had not sapped him of his power to love. Who could resist such charms of weariness? The rest, as they say, was history, or herstory, as Hazel would later put it, repeatedly, never quite able to hide the pickle juice pucker it made of her mouth.
Next stop, our very own Eastern Valley, Hazel stumbling through a waking dream, a kerchief on her head for the supermarket like all the other mothers and mothers-to-be. The split-level Marty and Hazel finally decided upon was some jumbo model much admired in the region, and they had more yard than most, and they had me, Baby Lewis, whose developmental fumblings, I pray, bought Hazel enough joy to offset the depression for a while. But Marty was gone for weeks, scouting locales for new schemes to ruin them, and Baby Lewis was probably more chore than beguilement and the neighbors, even the Jewish neighbors, didn’t quite get her jokes.
And you’d think that would be the end of that, but that’s never really the end of that, or only in the modern movies. Because Hazel was tough, Catamounts, and, as you might recall, a sorceress. She decided to live her life, but not die of it. That’s what she told me, anyway, and what she told me is all I’ve got to rely on.
She said she became a witness to what she’d come to conclude was her bondage, found books by like-minded women, found women with like minds, too, started groups, newsletters for the groups, a theater collective to perform the plays she wrote for all the
groups. Laugh at it now, Catamounts, God knows my father did, but it was dangerous and new to Hazel, and what can you admire more in a person than the will to danger? Sure, her rants could be ridiculous, stridency smothering wit, and yes, she took it too far with me, who wasn’t her enemy, just her son who happened to have a cock, but even so, she’d saved herself, or at least altered the terms of her internment.
It couldn’t last forever, of
Before she died my mother told me she’d vowed to avoid that curse. She was Hazel Dubnow then, a modern girl like the girls in the modern movies. She had a college degree, semibrazen lipstick, knew some Keats, a few knock-knock jokes. She’d come by bus to New York City, found a furnished room, an advertising job in Midtown, friends who took her to the theater, the philharmonic, to openings, happenings, any kind of occurrence at all.
She made notes for one-act plays on office letterhead, dated account reps she detested, sots who’d suck her breasts in taxicabs, but she could stomach their ineffectual slobbering because she was a tough girl from Pittsburgh and at least these fools had more dough than the apes of the Allegheny. She was always gazing over their shoulders, anyway, off into some future soft blur where she’d dine on quail and caviar with the wits of her era. These men would bow to her mind before their sensual, precise, perhaps European mouths ever got under her sweater.
Hazel skipped a lot of lunches, saved up for a ticket to Rome, rode through the countryside on the backs of motorbikes with grappa-slugging painters who were probably also in sales, felt that familiar drool slide down her chest, flew home. She had ideas at work for ad campaigns, but who wanted to hear them? Not Swint, her supervisor. He shoved her down on his desk one night, commenced something novel, went for her panties, outright. Hazel
fought him off, ran down to the street, hailed a cab, resigned by phone the next day.
“Good girl,” said Swint.
There she sat in a coffee shop with some stolen stationery trying to fashion this heartache into a play she’d never finish when Daddy Miner walked in, slid wordless into her booth. That was his big move back then, Hazel told me, to sit down without asking, light a smoke, smile with a worldly tenderness, as though he’d just found what he’d been seeking but wondered now if the journey had not sapped him of his power to love. Who could resist such charms of weariness? The rest, as they say, was history, or herstory, as Hazel would later put it, repeatedly, never quite able to hide the pickle juice pucker it made of her mouth.
Next stop, our very own Eastern Valley, Hazel stumbling through a waking dream, a kerchief on her head for the supermarket like all the other mothers and mothers-to-be. The split-level Marty and Hazel finally decided upon was some jumbo model much admired in the region, and they had more yard than most, and they had me, Baby Lewis, whose developmental fumblings, I pray, bought Hazel enough joy to offset the depression for a while. But Marty was gone for weeks, scouting locales for new schemes to ruin them, and Baby Lewis was probably more chore than beguilement and the neighbors, even the Jewish neighbors, didn’t quite get her jokes.
And you’d think that would be the end of that, but that’s never really the end of that, or only in the modern movies. Because Hazel was tough, Catamounts, and, as you might recall, a sorceress. She decided to live her life, but not die of it. That’s what she told me, anyway, and what she told me is all I’ve got to rely on.
She said she became a witness to what she’d come to conclude was her bondage, found books by like-minded women, found women with like minds, too, started groups, newsletters for the groups, a theater collective to perform the plays she wrote for all the
groups. Laugh at it now, Catamounts, God knows my father did, but it was dangerous and new to Hazel, and what can you admire more in a person than the will to danger? Sure, her rants could be ridiculous, stridency smothering wit, and yes, she took it too far with me, who wasn’t her enemy, just her son who happened to have a cock, but even so, she’d saved herself, or at least altered the terms of her internment.
It couldn’t last forever, of
Similar Books
