|
Avon Calling by Lynn Veach Sadler Sanford NC
I grew up in Metairie, too, a twig scarcely on the branch of the family tree that blossomed Ti-René Johnson. Most of what I heard from my mother was about “that China Doll in real life.” I was urged to be like her, have admirers to pick and choose among, marry for money, marry a man I could control with my looks, reestablish my family on the social scale, etc. I hated Ti-René Johnson. Be a simpering doll like that little maggot! You bet, Mom. Wait for me to click my heels and salute. Daddy hated it all, too. Hated being “beneath” his wife as she hinted at a good forty times a day. We weren’t sharecroppers only because they weren’t called that by the time I, their only child, came along in the sixties. We were “renters.” Daddy worked for the railroad. I just knew one day he’d never come back, and I prophesied myself right into the State of Truth. To support us, Mama sewed what she called “Ti-René Dresses” for ages one and up (up through proms and debutante balls and even wedding gowns). My mother’s fashions were well-known. She finally received five orders from Paris and thus died, I prefer to believe, a woman fulfilled, a woman happy. I should be thankful to Cousin Ti-René. If she had not been the model, though at great distance, I would have remained the Little Match Girl I was like to be when Daddy set off on the train that never returned. I had a mind. Learned to look upon such an accouterment as an obstacle, particularly in woman. Ti-René was to marry, and my poor mother wrote to request the honor of sewing the gown. She never received a response. Still, she talked to me, brightly all the way, as the media wooed Ti-René as though they, rather than the wealthy gentleman who had won it, were suitors for her hand. Mama cast no aspersions. She smiled and continued to sew for “the beautiful Ti-René.” It should have been enough that I wore beautiful clothes recognized sooner than later, as from my mother’s increasingly famous hand. It was not enough. When I was from her eye (and I went as far away to graduate school as I could go from Louisiana), I left those glittering clothes fallow in my closet and became Plain- [Hippie-] Jane. Only, I did have the small kindness remaining to pull one of Mama’s creations forth and wear it when I per force returned home. I hated Ti-René. Tried to be her opposite. Ti-René turned into her opposite. What was I to do then? Ti-René’s the Society Queen, so I’m a post-hippie hippie. And not easy in the role. I love the flowers and Peace and protesting something (what a contradiction), but not the free loving. I think all the bilge about exercising control over my body by letting others use it is just that. Bilge. The Aborigines in Australia are still in their take-back-our-culture phase. They’re singinggggggggg “Proud to be an Aborigine!” I was a prude, I guess, and too proud of being one. I think of myself as something of a Billy Budd. I thought I was being pretty smooth and pretty careful. When I couldn’t avoid a party scene, I’d pretend to go along until whoever it was got high or whatever, and then I’d skip. He wouldn’t know the difference. But I guess the main guy in the group I ran with was more watchful than I thought. He was after control, and I was interfering. This is the early eighties. We’re in between latent Hippiedom and Sexual Harassment. Nobody knows the labels. Label me “taken care of.” That particular night, when I started to slip off, my so-called “date” pretended to be obliging. The main guy and his pals were waiting for me at the door. They put a gag in my mouth, and that was that. My “date” joined the party. He was second in line. I lost count after that. There was no use going to the police. I’d been running with that sweet group for months. When I was physically recovered, I started attending sessions at a center for women. One night, a “sister” came in to lecture on the history of The Movement. She’d known Ti-René, cited her contributions. After my mother died, I’d heard no more about Cousin Ti-René, knew nothing of her metamorphosis. I’d hated Ti-René Johnson from as long as I’d been capable of hating. Now I hated men. All of them. For what had just happened to me. And here was this woman holding forth about the only person in the world, Ti-René Johnson, who felt the way I did: celibacy or die! I have not pursued Ti-René since I heard that woman lecture on her. I don’t know if she’s living. On that awful night, when they were done with me, they threw me in the trunk of a car and rode around looking for the right spot to toss me out. Big Tom and his gang were working on their bikes. I was practically delirious. Big Tom called a doctor friend who volunteers with him at a drug center, and they got me stitched up. Big Tom took me home to his wife, and they cared for me until I was physically recovered or close enough. They’d withdrawn me for the rest of the semester, moved me out of my apartment, and found one for me close to them. I worked at the drug center myself until I was back together. More or less. It was Big Tom’s wife who thought up the partnership on the water samples. We have a grant. Big Tom’s my co-grantee. If I ever win the Nobel, it’s apt to be co- with “Big Tom” Cates. Wouldn’t that be too, too “As the World Turns”? I went to India with a group advising on water safety. On my own, I visited one of Mother Teresa’s orphanages in Mumbai (the original name of Bombay before the British “Rajed” it and what it’s being called now). My guide was an ex-government worker named Mani. On the way in the taxi, she went on and on about the beggars. “Pimps” (the word Mani used) steal babies and send them out with pretend-mothers, who beg supposedly to keep their children from starving. Some of the children, when they get a bit of age, are maimed and set out by their pimps to beg. They’re punished, Mani said, if they don’t being in enough. (Can I still have children? After what happened to me, I mean. I had to be stitched up big-time.) (My mother sewed. Her daughter had to be sewed.) No, the only people (outside of the men from THAT NIGHT, which, like AIDS, would be less frightening in small letters, but it remains, probably will always remain, THAT NIGHT) that I really can’t stomach are the Idea Smashers. You know them. You say, “What if . . . ?” and, before you can finish, they’re shouting that it’s “too much work” or “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” or some such hammering-down-of-the-coffin-lid. Maybe I’m unduly sensitive because I think that’s what I did to my mother. The woman was a marvel in her way. An entrepreneur before her time. And I never praised her or encouraged her. I blamed her for my father. He was her blind spot, but she was mine. (One of mine.) My mother, I realize now, isn’t the only one who evoked my worst self. Despite never being acknowledged by the Ti-René Johnson set, Mother gained us some status with her design work, as I’ve explained. In high school, I liked to be a free spirit. The one person who moved easily between the country kids and the town kids. Aloof from all groups and cliques. But I wasn’t really aloof. I wanted to be admired by the townies. I can see that now. One of the kids from the country asked me to a football game. The town girls I ran with found out and told me in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t go. And, my God, I stood him up. I was not proud of that sell-out then. I’m horrified by it now. I played at Hippie. Look at what it got me. Then I was playing it again, with Big Tom, for a good end: to get the waters of this nation cleaned up. I always worried, after the night I was gang-raped—. That’s the first time I’ve been able to use that term, and there it is, replete with its own little self-contained hyphen! Anyhow, I always was afraid that I had somehow been responsible and would feel that I had. All that victim’s crap, I know. I think the women at the center where I heard about Ti-René thought they had failed me. Were unable to effect a clean or near-clean extraction of me from the Land of Victimicide. It turn, I felt that I had failed them because I couldn’t seem to get myself extricated. Gang-raped gang-raped gang-raped gang-raped gang-raped gang-raped gang-raped gang-raped gang-raped gang-raped gang-raped gang-raped gang-raped gang-raped gang-raped gang-raped gang-raped gang-raped. Now it has not only a hyphen but a capital letter and a period. I have made my sentence into a sentence. Am I free? I am freer, at least. Didn’t I read that Viktor Frankl died recently? Why didn’t he spend more time working with rape victims? There was a lot of rape in the concentration camps, wasn’t there? You know, I keep trying and trying to think of some pleasant episode of the boy-girl variety in my life before the watershed event of The Gang-Rape happened. (There. I’ve said it again. And in its new swaddling clothes.) I can’t. Can’t think of a pleasant episode of the boy-girl variety in my life. Now, surely, I went to school dances, ball games . . . . I wasn’t a wall flower. But I can’t dredge up a good memory from the lot. Close-down. Black hole. I have a confession to make. I used to make up scenarios about what a meeting between Ti-René Johnson and me would be like. They went something like this. TI-RENÉ You’re telling me we’re cousins? LOU So my mother would have me believe. TI-RENÉ Why’ve you waited all this time to come forward? LOU My mother tried to make contact. Your side wasn’t interested. TI-RENÉ Well, nobody ever shared anything about it with me. What do you do? LOU (Modestly.) I’m a microbiologist. TI-RENÉ Sounds like a real profession. Good for you, Kid! LOU You didn’t do too badly yourself. TI-RENÉ What Feminist handbook did you read? LOU I heard it mainly from a woman lecturing at a woman’s center. TI-RENÉ What were you doing there? LOU I’d had a bad time. TI-RENÉ A man, of course. LOU Men. TI-RENÉ Many men? LOU A gang-rape. TI-RENÉ (Nodding as if she knows.) You know what I was for? LOU (Nodding.) Celibacy. TI-RENÉ Are you celibate? LOU I was for awhile. TI-RENÉ Same-old same-old. Avon calling all over again. LOU It’s Mary Kay now. TI-RENÉ Is it really? LOU Ships that pass. TI-RENÉ Avon and Mary . . . Kay, was it? Avon and Mary Kay are ships that pass? LOU I meant you and me. I can’t see a different ending after all this time. Ti-René wouldn’t have any sense at all of my involvement with her. Make that her involvement with me. But I think I’m at peace with Ti-René, whatever happens.
|