Sisterhood of the infamo.., p.25
Sisterhood of the Infamous, page 25
“Jasmine told me about you,” Herb said to me, after I asked if we could play some Bowie. Jasmine moaned, or it sounded like a moan, whatever came from her mouth. It might have been a word, one that adolescent girls use to address their fathers, with the vowel elongated. But Jasmine couldn’t have said that, because Jasmine and her brothers didn’t have a father. They had a father figure. So they had to use his one-note name and stretch it into two notes—“Her-rb,” they might have said—though I wasn’t paying attention; I was more worried about what I would do next. But I’m pretty sure she did say this, “Her-rb,” because the next thing that happened was Herb, the man, the myth, the rock ‘n’ roll legend, said Jasmine’s name in the same way, all rhymey-sing-songy, but flat and indignant, as though we were living in a situation comedy, written for the lowest common denominator. We were all acting our parts with a set of musical instruments, the fabrics, candles, and incense as if this were an extraordinary home with an extraordinary family. The rules and the relationships were supposed to be different here: open, honest, and fair. People were supposed to be enlightened, accepting, and incapable of being shocked by the modern world and how its inhabitants related to one another.
“Do you know who Woody Guthrie is?” Herb asked. His eyes were on me, drawing me into a box, a corner, where he had unilaterally decided I belonged. I had been captured; I had fallen into a trap. I might as well have been a toddler back in the pigeon-toed brace; I couldn’t answer because he already knew the answer—of course I had no idea who Woody Guthrie was. And now I was going to suffer for it. I didn’t know who Woody Guthrie was because I was 17-years-old, I had been raised by wolves, and I didn’t know anything. All I knew were numbers and perhaps how to manipulate them. I was a genius, though, but Jasmine hadn’t told him that. She hadn’t told him anything. At least nothing about us, who I was, and what I was capable of. She should have told him, but she didn’t.
“Woody Guthrie said there’s no such thing as bad music,” Herb said. He may not have been a father in the technical sense, but he knew how to do what fathers do, lecture. Music was like food, he said; music was about communion and connections; not about people connecting to the music, but people connecting to people. Drums and percussion: that was the first music, he said. It didn’t have words or messages, only desire, a primal need to find union with other beings, other humans.
“But if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” I said, because if music was only about what Herb said it was, then he could justify anything in the name of music. Misogyny, for one thing: that was the central message of the Stones, Led Zeppelin, any number of stadium bands, the blues, and even some female artists whose names escape me at that moment, but punk was kicking them all in the groin and clearing out the sewer that was male superiority, arrogance, and hatred.
“Punk is the solution,” I told him, because I wasn’t going to be part of the problem, like Herb was, and like how I could see Jasmine was going to be. I think I repeated it, problem and solution, problem and resolution, because that is how you present an abstract when you’re writing an article or delivering your dissertation. At least Bowie held out possibility for those of us, like me, Jasmine, Jack, and Nicky, of another way of being. If I had been butch, maybe my citing of this line would have been credible. But I wasn’t butch, and he thought this little girl he had “raised” was like all the other little girls, hanging onto every deed and word of their patriarchal betters. He thought this woman he had shepherded through grade school, music lessons, into junior high, on from there into high school, and into pre-stardom was just like every other little girl who dreamed only of fame, glamour, and most of all the man who would supply it to her, without question. But Jasmine wasn’t like that. She was nothing like that. She had promised me I would get beyond all of that and together we would make our own world, where girls didn’t get shoved into categories, careers, bathroom stalls, or braces, and we could do it with our music and the way we played it, with a record deal so that everyone could know what we were saying and what was possible.
But I was not butch. I was not impressive. I was less than five feet tall, and I had no vocal range; my voice cracked on high notes and it weakened, turning sharp and sour when I had to reach the low notes. My voice was untrained and erratic. And I told Herb it didn’t matter that Woody Guthrie was the first punk or what he said. It didn’t matter because Jasmine knew my music, liked it, respected it, and knew what I was going for because Jasmine wasn’t the little girl that he’d known since she was born or was five or six or whatever. He didn’t know Jasmine like I did; he didn’t know who she really was or what she had to hide from their family because she was afraid of them, just like I was afraid of my family if they found out we were lesbians. We knew families were a joke, and they were a trap; families are people you get thrown in with, and we were going to break out of them. I was breaking out of mine, and Jasmine needed to break out of hers if she was going to stop this game and be honest with herself.
“You, all of you, are part of the problem,” I said. “You call yourselves musicians. You call yourselves a family. But you have no idea what Jasmine’s music is really all about, what Jasmine’s all about. What me and Jasmine are all about.”
“What’s that?” Herb asked.
“Don’t you know? Isn’t it obvious? Or are you ignoring it on purpose, because it would spoil the little perfect picture you have of your daughter and what she’s been saying to you, to the world.”
Jasmine said, “Don’t, Barbara,” because she knew what was coming. Or she pretended that she did. It normally trailed behind her, like a scent, though now it hovered all about her, as if it were a film that kept people from seeing what she truly was. She was a hypocrite for standing behind that film and for embracing it as though it could protect her from everything.
“God, can’t you taste the duplicity in this room?” I said to their faces. Jasmine grabbed onto my thigh and squeezed, with every inch of her being. I was supposed to scream from the pain. “Do you know how it can destroy you, being willfully blind, ignorant, refusing to see?”
Jasmine said through her teeth, “Barbara, shut the fuck up,” and just as quickly smiled casually to the rest, “Don’t listen to her; she gets this way sometimes.”
“Get which way, honest? Truthful? Telling it like it is? Your daughter’s as gay as I am. She’s a lesbian. Behind your back she’s fucking girls, fucking the patriarchy. She knows all this is a farce. So much for—”
“I’ll get the dishes,” Jasmine’s mother interrupted, and Herb told “his” boys to leave the room. Jack and Nicky had rushed to Jasmine’s side. She could not look up from her lap even though I was calling her name, “Jasmine, Jasmine, look at me, you know it’s true,” but she couldn’t bring herself to say it, not in front of Herb and her mother, who like all the other mothers in this world was a ghost, a disappearing act, with nothing to say other than what the paterfamilias deemed acceptable to say. Here I had sprung all of the cages; I had liberated myself and Jasmine (Jack and Nicky, too), and yet none of us was moving. The adults were doing all the talking as if they could beat us back down again.
If I had been butch, this would have all turned out differently. I could have stood up from my chair and told them what’s what. They were shouting at me as though I were their daughter, their little girl, their property. They demanded Jasmine get rid of me, show me the door, and never see me again, but she kept her head down. She was speechless once exposed. If I had been butch I would have told her mother and Herb that they were the ones who were ingrates; they were the ones who were rude, but I realized that if I was the pure, truthful, faithfully righteous person I knew myself to be, I had to get out of there. I had to run as fast as I could. If I had been butch I might have been able to defend myself; I might have been able to take all that abuse. Had I known that my genes and environment interacted in such a way that I would experience the outcome forecasted for the butch body type, I would have stood my ground. I would have grabbed Jasmine and rescued her.
That’s what I should have done since I was butch—I am butch in terms of my morbidity. I am dying as though I am any other butch lesbian with breast cancer, side effects of chemo and radiation notwithstanding. Beyond loss of hair, vomiting, and the end of fertility or menstrual cycle, the side effects of the treatment can be more individual. But the correlation between being overweight and exhibiting a cylindrical-shaped, perpetually wearing a bulletproof vest type of body is one that can’t be ignored. Perhaps it is the cruel joke of estrogen, at higher levels in the less feminine bodies because of the fat cells gathered around the middle, or perhaps it is the higher levels of insulin that trigger the disease. We don’t know. And I don’t know for myself, since I was always too scared to go butch. I was scared of what my parents would think if I sawed off my long hair, if I let my waist go, widened and rounded it. My father always said I took the path of least resistance, which is the real reason why I went to college and went into mathematics; if I had really wanted to be a musician, I wouldn’t have let what he or anyone else thought get in my way. I could have taken lessons; I could have majored in music; I could have run away and joined a different circus if the one Jasmine, Jack, and Nicky were running off to wouldn’t take me. But my father never knew the effort it took not to become butch, not to give in to my body’s instincts. And now my body has betrayed me.
Perhaps there was one night when it did not betray me, and it was that night at Jasmine’s. Jack eventually asked me, years later, what was I thinking that night, and I don’t know. I don’t remember. But I do remember having Jasmine’s attention that night, knowing that I was losing it and that I may never get it again. And her family, so perfect and chummy, was fake, or Jasmine was fake. I had to see which was which. I had to show them that I could see right through their deception: Herb’s medieval fiefdom, his vanity project, and the rhythm section/ensemble he had filling out his mediocre jamming. I could see right through Jasmine, and Jack and Nicky, too, leaving punk to become backing musicians in a pop act that would probably fizzle before the decade was finished. But I would have been in this forever—music and punk rock—if I had been given the chance Jasmine, Jack, and Nicky got. If I could have commanded an audience like they did; so I showed them. I showed them I really could have. I did.
Chapter 18
The cops came back. I was in my pajamas when they came on the weekend. It had to have been a weekend since Dorothy and Marion were there. Finally, they came. They came on a Friday night and put a sign on the door: “Patient in Hospice: No Admittance Without Prior Approval,” and the number of the hospice office to call. The sign was no bigger than the “CAUTION: OXYGEN IN USE” sticker in the window, but it was more effective. Dorothy and Marion put an end to the crowds. Or maybe people stopped showing up when that reporter did his story on the television about the possible ties Barb had to accused murderer James H. Stevic Jr.
I felt bleary with exhaustion, incompetent, and useless since Dorothy and Marion had arrived to take charge. They hugged the nurses, asked after their families, brought them chocolates and gift baskets with teas and bubble baths—for all the shifts. Days, nights, and weekends. They brought a special cream to use on Barb’s feet and hands, and they gave the nurses samples of it. In other words, Dorothy and Marion were prepared. They took steps, had strategies, and knew to think about things I hadn’t thought about. I was the one from New York, where you tip and gift so you don’t have to cajole and beg. Clearly, I hadn’t learned anything.
When Dorothy and Marion had called me, I threw some clothes in a suitcase and used my husband’s credit card to pay for my flight. He told me not to worry about the babysitting; that he’d take care of everything—the groceries, our daughter’s play dates, and her lessons—so I could concentrate on Barbara. It had been a week since I’d last seen them, and I don’t know how long since I last talked to them. I was becoming disoriented; I was unsure how much of the past week had actually happened and how much had I dreamed; and I wondered whether I was dreaming when the knocking at the door began. I tried to blot it out and dismiss it as something Dorothy and Marion could handle; something they would prefer to handle without me. But I couldn’t get that sound out of my head, the pounding that alternated with the doorbell, like the games of my childhood youth coming back to haunt me.
“I know this is a bad time,” Greg Onderdonk said. He was standing in front of the cops but without any confidence. I thought maybe the cops had made him do it—front their latest invasion—by how tentatively he stood, like he couldn’t wait to run away and let Simpson and W-Y-R-E-C-K-A take over for him.
“Only the worst,” I said, although I knew it wasn’t true. Things would get much worse once Dorothy and Marion left after the weekend.
“There’s been a new development,” Greg “Herman’s Hermits” Onderdonk said.
“What?” I asked, but I knew. We all did.
“Could we come in, ma’am?” W-Y-R-E-C-K-A asked softly, but I wasn’t buying his timid act. I had seen how he moved and how he held himself.
“You need prior approval,” I said, pointing at the sign.
“You don’t want to do this out on the street,” the detective-sergeant said. He stepped up and gently moved The Hermit aside. The detective-sergeant was carrying a notebook and opened it, like he was about to read something official and damning.
“All right,” I said.
They knew where to go, this trio. Into the kitchen, standing around the table. Not sitting down, because they were all business. The business of arresting me or Dorothy and Marion. They were going to arrest somebody, it looked like. But it couldn’t be Barbara. They hadn’t brought in a stretcher. Her death was the only thing saving her, apparently.
“I told you not to say anything to the press,” The Hermit said.
“You came all the way up here to tell me that?”
“No, not exactly,” The Hermit said, and I was surprised to see him march in place for a moment. He had been lifeless, practically, when I had needed him and suddenly he was jumpy, unnerved by the situation he had avoided. “But if you hadn’t said anything to that reporter—”
“I didn’t say anything to that reporter,” I said. “All I did was the math.”
“What?” The Hermit asked, like he was outraged.
“All right, all right,” the detective-sergeant said, and he put out his arms, like he was trying to keep the peace and break up a fight. “What Mr. Onderdonk is trying to get at here—”
“If you hadn’t said anything—” The Hermit was bouncing up and down on his toes, like he was trying to be taller but couldn’t hold the pose right. Like whatever he was saying was supposed to elevate him in his own estimation; or that it should have elevated him in the cops’ minds. “—they wouldn’t—”
“We would have figured it out,” the detective-sergeant said, and he patted the notebook with pride. It must have been all in there, the story of Barb’s life twisted to satisfy the needs of the cops, the grieving public. “Eventually.”
“You’ve exposed your sister to all kinds of liability,” The Hermit said.
“What?” I said.
“Liability. Do you know what that means?”
“I know what liability means,” I said, although I wasn’t sure just how it applied in this situation.
“Do you know the standard of proof in a liability case is less than in a criminal trial?” The Hermit’s curls were bobbing around his chin, ears, and neck, like he was in a slow-motion shampoo commercial. It was all he could do to keep his kinetic energy in his head and face, keep it from traveling through the rest of his body. “Do you have any idea what a civil suit will cost; what it will do to my business?”
“We’re sorry, ma’am,” W-Y-R-E-C-K-A began.
“You’re sorry? That I’m ruining this man’s business? You’re going to arrest me for that?” I knew my voice was too loud, but I didn’t care. I needed Dorothy, Marion and the weekend nurses to know what was happening, because I couldn’t deal with the absurdity myself.
“We’re not here to arrest you,” Simpson assured me. “Or anybody,” he said to The Hermit. “We just need to talk.”
“To Barbara? She’s really not up for it,” I said.
“Look,” Simpson said, and he looked tired, washed out. This must have been his day off; it was not only on his face, but in how he stood, in a slack, lackluster pose. “James H. Stevic: he knew your sister. Or she knew him. We haven’t worked out the nature of their relationship.”
“You opened the door to this,” The Hermit said to me. His face was shining, although there was no perspiration or tears. Maybe he was melting. “There will be lawsuits—”
“That’s not the issue here—” Simpson began.
“As executor of this estate, for me it’s the only issue. I have to know what I’m dealing with—”
“Mr. Onderdonk made a deal with us,” Simpson said in a kind of sing-songy apology. “He’d tell us what he knows, and he could accompany us here to see what you know. What anybody knows. That’s the first step. Before we start talking liability and wrongful death suits, we have to nail down some things. The money trail still zigs and zags. But it’s all headed in one direction.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Justice, justice demands,” Simpson said, and when he looked down at the floor, like he was gathering his most profound vocabulary, I was afraid he would launch into a soliloquy. “We have to try, for the record. We have to try one last time. We have Mr. Onderdonk’s permission, that’s all we need, legally,” he declared. “Unless you want to stop us, and then you’d be interfering with our investigation.”
