The last of her kind, p.17
The Last of Her Kind, page 17
3. Rote sex with too many partners had robbed sex forever of any deep magic or charge. She had learned to use sex both to get basic needs and to barter her way out of trouble (“Okay, but then you have to leave me alone”). Another runaway had given her this tip about cops: If you blow them, they don’t have much choice afterward. They either have to kill you or let you go. (“All I Had to Do Was …”)
4. Somewhere along the way she contracted a disease that remained asymptomatic, undiagnosed, and untreated until it had done enough damage to her fallopian tubes to prevent her from ever having children.
She had no intention of going home. And her drifting days (she said) were done. Even after she and Roach split up, she was determined to stay in the city. She was not eager to go home even for a visit, and in fact she and Mama would see each other only once before Mama got sick and died. No reconciliation, not even then. That was us. We were just not the kind of family who forgave one another or who asked forgiveness or tried burying the hatchet or hashing things out. “In our house,” Solange wrote in her memoir, “it was either silence or violence.” (When the book came out, a reviewer bemoaned the appearance of “yet another memoir about growing up grim, in a world marked by poverty, dysfunction, abuse, and bad blood.”)
After our mother died, I was haunted by the thought of her working in the nursing home. I’m not sure why it was that particular chapter of her life my mind kept turning to, but I kept thinking of her, in middle age (but in a life such as hers, did it even matter what age you were?), working in that sinister place. I knew it was sinister, because that was why, after a multitude of complaints, the authorities had finally shut it down. Now I was haunted by the thought of my mother at her job—some kind of attendant. To be honest, I never knew exactly what her duties were, I never wanted to know, and she certainly never talked about it.
Who can say how much her daily proximity to decrepitude, sickness, and death contributed to her own decline? My last visits home—I am talking about a time before she became sick—I had to brace myself not to flee her presence. She no longer went to bed at night. Instead, she fell asleep around eight or nine fully clothed on the couch and stayed there till dawn. And so it went, sleeping and waking, same clothes, day in day out. This alone made it hard for me to be in the same house with her. Once, I discovered her sitting all by herself in the kitchen in the dark. The sun had gone down hours before. For a few minutes after I turned on the light, she had not seemed to know where she was. No one could persuade her to see a doctor. But that was the way of most people where I came from. The most alarming and even painful symptoms could not budge them. They just drank more. People wanted little truck with modern medicine. Never let them cut you. This rule was passed down through generations. The worst alcoholics would knowingly warn, “Never take none of their poisons.”
As a mother, she had abdicated. She said, “I wash my hands of you!” Why should she give a damn about any of us? We were all monsters of ingratitude. (Just what it was she thought she had given us for which we were so monstrously ungrateful was a question we children would always be asking ourselves.) We were all our father’s children—bad seeds, she called us, as if she had been only some kind of incubator or surrogate mother.
Even at her calmest, all she could do was blame. In the end, it was against Solange that she rested her case. When Solange ran away, Mama said, she destroyed this family.
When I talked about all this with Solange, about the thoughts that were haunting me and how guilty I felt now that our mother was dead, she told me she herself was not haunted; she did not feel guilty about Mama at all. She said, “Remember that time Noel wouldn’t let her put on his snowsuit, and she got so angry she knocked him down and broke his arm?” Oh my god. I remembered. And I remembered how remorseful Mama had been. I remembered how afraid she had been that someone at the hospital would call the police on her. But at the hospital no one questioned the story she told them, no one called the police, and that scare had done nothing to reform her. Mama never changed her ways.
I want to repeat something I have said before: where I came from, my parents did not stand out. There was nothing exceptional about the behavior of either of them. I bring this up partly to help answer the bedeviling question, why didn’t someone try to do something? This was childhood. We accepted it. We were just another six kids growing up grim, in a world marked by poverty, dysfunction, abuse, and bad blood.
Mama was hopeless, Solange said. Mama was a criminal. No way Solange was going to waste time feeling sorry or guilty. “You know I’ve always thought of myself as an orphan.” Nevertheless, she had one of her worst breakdowns after Mama’s funeral. And years later, when she sat down to write, it was Mama who dominated Solange’s memoir.
And now here she is again, like a figure in a children’s pop-up book. And though I would like this to be Mama’s last appearance in these pages, I cannot say for sure.
What were my feelings when my long-lost sister turned up at my door?
I cannot resist a purplish phrase I once read somewhere: “I felt my blood leap at the sight of her.” Of course, for some time, I had been expecting her. From the time of that first postcard, I think, I had been preparing myself for what was nonetheless a great shock.
First there was the distraction of getting her out of those wet clothes. I gave her my bathrobe and some thick socks, and I hung her things to dry in the bathroom. She curled up immediately on the rug near the radiator, but it was some time before I could bring myself to sit down. She was smiling at me, but it was a nervous smile. She had taken a huge step coming here, and she was nervous, uncertain, anyone could see it. She had something of the meek, penitential air of the returning prodigal. But she was not humiliated. She was not crushed. There was an element of pride or perhaps defiance that flashed through—I saw it more and more often as the night wore on and she grew more relaxed. It was there, I saw, in certain gestures, a way she had of twitching her long hair back from her face, and the way she smoked, or more precisely the way she flicked her ashes from too far away into the shellacked clamshell I used for an ashtray, missing it. (We both smoked Newports—how about that?) And don’t think she was here to ask anyone’s forgiveness (she was a George, remember). I had the impression that were I even to hint to Solange that she had been guilty of the slightest sin, she would have drawn herself up and flounced from the room. Her sauciness, which I well remembered, and which had driven my mother and not a few teachers mad, had become something else, less playful, harder-boiled, a kind of knowingness—oh, she’d seen a few things these past three years, she knew all about life, so don’t go thinking she was a kid anymore, she was all grown up, far older than her years, older than you, Big Sister, make no mistake. She would lock eyes with you and then let her glance slide sideways right off your face: insolent. The dry, throaty chuckle she sometimes emitted now, and which I certainly did not remember, had a mocking, crowlike tone. (When Zoe was a teenager, she would develop some of these same mannerisms, a glance, a laugh, that got under my skin.) I knew it was mostly a pose, but it was Solange’s favorite pose for quite some time, and she struck it so often I was tempted to say, as some parents do when a child keeps making a face, Keep it up, missy, and you’ll stay that way.
But that early glimpse of her vulnerability (she had taken the big step, now how would she be received? Welcomed with open arms? Door slammed in her face?) brought out the tenderness in me: as if her heart were in my hands.
Right off, there was something reassuring to me about the way she looked: poorly groomed and underfed, perhaps, but in general like almost any other girl her age. And she behaved, too, like any girl her age: giggly and vivacious, fast-talking and very talkative—she could talk all night. And yes, I wanted to hear every word of her adventures, even the upsetting and scary parts, but first I wanted to feed her. I picked up the phone and ordered a large pizza, and when it came we wolfed it down straight from the box, sitting on the floor. A festive spirit had taken hold of us, and a sense of complicity in something vaguely naughty, like kids staying up past bedtime because their parents are away, that was the mood, and it brought back certain nights in the dorm. It brought back Ann, oh my heart, who’d had the same habit of leaving the crusts piled in the pizza box like small bones. Softly the radiator hissed, the room filled with heat. I watched the color come into Solange’s cheeks and felt the color in my own. As they dried, two locks of hair framing her face corkscrewed fetchingly. Tomato sauce stained her lips, making the tales that poured from them seem even more lurid. I had put on some music. “Oh, wait!” she interrupted herself. “I love this song!” We had to be quiet and listen all the way through, and then I had to pick up the needle and play it again. Who knows where the time goes?
“That’s what I want,” Solange said excitedly. “That’s the kind of song I try to write.”
She was full of dreams.
After we finished the pizza, she produced an expertly rolled joint from her pack of Newports. It had become an increasingly rare event for me, getting high, but Solange could not remember the last time she had gone a day without getting high at least once. She smoked far more of the joint than I did. The effect of the pot was to make me quieter and her livelier; her talk became more and more dramatic. It was not unlike watching a piece of alternative theater of the kind that was beginning to be popular: lone performer onstage, rapping. Even the bathrobe was the right touch.
I was entranced. A dizzying thought struck me: I had a sister. A real sister, not a fake one like Ann. I had Solange and Solange had me—no room in my head for the thought that we would ever again be separated. And in fact, between then and now, with very few lapses, Solange and I have spoken with each other nearly every single day.
Watching her, I felt surges of love that threatened to choke me. I told myself she was my responsibility now, and the thought filled me with pride. I remembered a time when, as a child, I had found an abandoned cat and bundled it home, throbbing with tenderness and with this same pride. Kitty was now mine to love, mine to care for (little did I know she would run away the very next morning), and this feeling of being someone’s savior and protector was so elating I wanted it to go on forever.
Listening to Solange—her talk increasingly birdlike, sharp and twittering, the effect of the dope on her speech or on my hearing, I was not sure which—I was grateful, too, for the chance I saw being given to me, a chance to atone for not having been a better big sister before, a chance I had secretly prayed for.
It may be significant, and so I put it down here, that around this time I had begun to fantasize almost constantly about having a baby. I had no husband, I was not even serious about anyone, but the conviction was growing in me that the kind of love I was craving could only be satisfied by having a child. And I was not wrong. Shortly, indeed, there would be no doubt in my mind whatsoever: having children was the one thing in life I knew for certain I wanted. And when I was feeling despondent, I would even comfort myself with fantasies of the children who would one day love and be loved by me. Just the sight of a pregnant woman or a woman with a baby or toddler could make my heart beat faster.
These feelings set me apart from most women my age I knew. Most of these women were torn about motherhood. If there was one thing they knew for certain, it was that they did not want to end up like their own mothers, women whose lives had been given over to the demands of marriage and family and who seemed, in the eyes of their daughters at least, to have missed out on just about everything. In fact, in one generation, the lives of women had changed drastically enough so that countless girls grew up to discover they had almost nothing to say to the women who’d raised them. By this time, one was used to hearing girls and young women vow never to be saddled with a family—it was the feeling of many of my co-workers at Visage, for example. Others were open to the possibility of marriage, and perhaps one child, someday (provided they could pursue careers as well), but they had a lot of living to do before settling down, and they were certainly in no hurry.
I was the only one in a hurry, the only one who could not wait, the one who had got it into her head that her real life would not truly begin until that first child was born.
I knew these feelings might not be understood or might be frowned upon, so I kept them mostly to myself. But why curb my dreams? At times I’d be seriously carried away and imagine myself with a whole slew of kids—why not five, why not ten? At the very least I must have two, for I must have both a boy and a girl.
Listening to Solange and, later, thinking about all she had experienced since I’d last seen her, I committed the sin of envy. It was like the envy I had so often felt with Ann—or even, strange as it might be to recall now, when Guy announced he was going off to war. When did I fully see and accept it—that my life would be short on adventure? Solange was right when she said—and she said it often—“You’re a lot more like Sister Sister than you’ll ever be like me.” (Except it was not the Trinity but the tutelary spirits of house and home that would win my devotion.) In my whole life I would never see half the places Solange had already seen by the age of eighteen. She had lived out one of the big dreams of the day. See the U-S-A in your Chev-ro-let! (In those first days of television, when Dinah Shore belted out the Chevy Show jingle, whole families would sing along.) America is asking you to call! I had made my way to the Big City, but she had vroomed from coast to coast, zigzagged all over the patchwork quilt of states. (America’s the greatest land of all!) No skills, no money, a girl, a mere child, she had managed somehow not only to keep herself alive but to have an extraordinary time. Eighteen, and fixed for stories till her dying day. When did I figure out that life had nothing like that in store for me? I have gone through bad spells, times when, thinking about others’ lives, the challenges faced and the risks taken, I have felt shame and loathing for myself. I have accused myself of cowardice, lack of imagination, of ambition, of will. (And if truth be told, it has not always been I myself making such accusations. I have been blamed by others for my timidity; I have heard my passionate love of reading denounced as an addiction, a vice, a cowardly avoidance of the challenges, dangers, excitements, and even duties of real life.)
That night, because it was much too late for Solange to go back downtown, we slept in the same bed. We slept head to foot, as we had done when we were little girls.
In the morning Solange was up first. I was driving a car over a waterfall when I awoke to the noise of the shower and the muffled strains of “Amazing Grace.”
At work, people remarked on something different about me, which I was hard put to explain. Except for Cleo, no one had been told that I had a sister who had run away.
I once was lost but now am found. Around that time, it seemed you could not go anywhere without hearing that song.
Solange was delighted when I told her I had hallucinated her in the movie Woodstock. She wanted to see some mystical meaning in this. Another movie had come out, another documentary, about the Rolling Stones concert that had taken place a few months after Woodstock, and though I did not glimpse Solange anywhere in Gimme Shelter, this time she was truly there.
She had been living in Berkeley then. She had stayed on in California after Grover and Pam returned east, thoroughly burned out from the struggle for survival in the jungle that the Haight had by then become, and having decided they wanted to be with each other after all. She had been taken in by some students, was being passed from dorm room to dorm room like some kind of clandestine pet or mascot. Again—and in spite of warnings from astrologers—everyone wanted to be there. The concert was being billed as a second Woodstock, the West Coast Woodstock, Rock ‘n’ Roll History—free: a gift from the Stones to American fans. But according to Solange, you could tell it was not going to be a lovein long before the first punch was thrown. Much would be made of the fact that the first thing many people saw when they began arriving at the Altamont Speedway the day before the concert was a large butcher’s cleaver lying in the dirt road leading to the concert site. People hiking past it slowed down to stare, but no one wanted to touch the mean-looking thing. All gave it a wide berth, as if it were indeed the ill omen hindsight would make it.
The flying fists, the flying beer cans, the Hell’s Angels with their whirling chains and thrashing pool cues, the stretchers bearing the wounded away, the killing. I had heard about all this—everyone had—right after it happened. But it was one thing to hear about a murder and another to watch it on-screen, knowing it was not just the new, real-seeming violence of, say, The Wild Bunch or Bonnie and Clyde.
It had been reported that a fight had broken out between two men—something about a girl, something about race—and one of the men, who was black and who had a gun, was killed by the other man, who was white and who had a knife. But in the movie the gunman appears to be aiming at the stage, and the knifeman, a Hell’s Angel, appears to be doing the job for which he’d been hired, and possibly saving Mick Jagger’s life.
Mick Jagger, Mick Jagger—
You make my heart stagger—
I’ll be the sheath, baby—
You be the dagger—
For years his name would be a kind of measuring device. I would count the number of times Solange mentioned Mick, and when that number began to climb I’d begin to worry. I could even see a direct relation between the number of times Solange mentioned Mick and the number of pills she had skipped. I got good—expert, even—at this sort of thing over time, but in the beginning I was helpless. I was naïve. So my sister swooned for Mick Jagger; millions of other girls did, too. Everyone knew how susceptible girls were—Beatlemania was still a fresh memory. And popular music was now a force in people’s lives as it had never been before. I had never questioned Solange’s devotion to the Stones, which began long before Altamont and before she ran away; I was a big Stones fan myself. And I’ll bet we weren’t the only ones who played our forty-five of “Satisfaction” so many times we destroyed it. I remembered that back in school, digging the Stones more than the Beatles made you cooler—though the coolest of all scorned the whole lot of British Invaders as faggots stealing off their black betters, and to someone like Guy, if it was not black (sole exception: Elvis), it was not rock and roll. As for the posters covering every inch of Solange’s bedroom walls; the bubble gum cards and T-shirts, the pendants, belt buckles, key chains, and other fan paraphernalia she collected; her bottomless hunger for every detail about her idol to be gleaned from teen magazines and other sources, from the dullest news item to the wildest gossip; the way she had whole chunks of his biography by heart; and her threats of suicide over the affair with Marianne Faithfull (who would attempt suicide at the end of that affair herself)—well, all this just meant Solange was hard-core. And once she started writing and singing songs herself, I supposed it made sense that her idol, at his peak then, one of the biggest pop icons of all time, should have become an even greater obsession, so that when Solange told me she had written over a hundred songs to or about Mick, I saw this as extreme, but I did not see the harm. It would take a long time for me to accept that Mick Jagger was to Solange what Jesus Christ, Napoleon, Hitler, and JFK were to others in whose company I remained stubbornly reluctant to put her. She had a drug problem, no kidding, and she had always been an excitable, reckless, unmanageable girl—no surprise this combination could lead to trouble, that the drugs could exacerbate whatever emotional or personality problems might lie underneath. This I could believe. But I also believed that underneath underneath, my sister was normal. And who could have known, watching The Ed Sullivan Show that Sunday evening in 1964 (“And here they are, ladies and gentlemen, please—welcome—the Rolling Stones!”), how could Solange and I, still grade-schoolers then—how could we ever have guessed what role the band’s front man, with his delightful resemblance to the girl star Hayley Mills, whom we adored, would come to have in our lives?
