My mother took me along to that party because my thirteenth birthday fell only one day after, and she said we could imagine it as a party for me, a birthday party that only we two knew about.Wandering away from my mother and the friends embracing her, I went out alone into he rooms where the strangers were.Whenever I glanced up I met a glance,and nobody spoke jokingly to me the way they do to a child, and when men came up to me they treated me with a kind of knowingness, as if I were already steeped in the experiences I had only imagined.
I can see myself in memory as if I were observing another girl from a corner of a room: how she looked in a pale green dress that clung to the small breasts and the rounding hips, not in gathered stuff nor pleats anymore, not in autonomous material, but in the kind that conformed to the young body that was just beginning to make itself known, or its willingness known, or its own will known. And i can see how she turned to tantalize in profile, her fair hair cut short to her shoulders, no braids, no barrettes anymore, and I can hear a fragment of her voice , a voice that was changing like a boy's voice changes, but hers changed by anticipation, not high and uncertain like a child's.
My mother and I remained apart. I remember seeing her in a group way off in another room , and I remember wanting to be with her, because, as when I was a child, she'd served to protect me from persons who were overwhelming, and I remember being glad about the distance between us. with her bracelets clinking on her wrists, she gestured her flattery at the hostess and at the women's figures and the men's wit and wisdom, hypnotizing everyone into harmlessness.
My father came late to the party. We held hands and wandered around,popping canapés into our mouths and drinking whatever was presented to us in so many tinkling glasses, and when we had our fill, not just of food and drinks but of shrill voices and bursts of laughter, we found a room where nobody was.We sat down on an antique couch that i thought was too precious to sit on, a deeply blue, velvet couch, curved like a crescent moon, but there we sat and patted our stomachs and sighed long sighs from a surfeit of pleasure.
The young woman came in timidly, as if she needed to ask a favour from persons who had never seen her before.She seemed unsteady on her feet, and I guessed it was because of the drinks she must have had. She sat down at the other end of the couch, and on the other side of my father , and then I knew she had followed us.
"This is Mary, my daughter," he said to her, but it was more like a warning and not an introduction, and he didn't tell me her name.
"How are you?"he asked her.
"You know how I am ," she said.
"Mary, will you go?" he asked me, only it was a command."Where's your mother?"
But he wasn't much of a figure to command.There was a roughness in his throat like a cough held back,and his eyes were afraid. If he lost the authority of the father for that moment, he gained another kind, and it was the authority of the man experienced beyond his family's ever knowing.What he knew about his own life that his family didn't know seemed to grant me my own untellable experiences to come.It was as if he gave me carte blanche to the world.
I couldn't get up and leave them.I thought I might but I couldn't.
She didn't wait for me to go.She said to him in a low voice, her sidelong gaze on her hand smoothing the velvet on the couch,"I want to ask you if you ever came over to see me. I moved away so that when you came by you'd see that I wasn't waiting for you, but after I moved, I wished I'd stayed in the same place and gone on waiting."
She was no longer the fearful young woman in awe of my father.She was a voluptuous woman, with heavy thighs under her rose-colored silky dress.And when my father realized that I saw her as he had seen her in the past and must still see her in the present, then he got up and strode away from us both. For a few minutes, I sat with her, not saying anything as I would with a friend who had confided in me. She was stroking the couch, her hand moving in little circles towards the empty place where my father had been.
When I left her,I did not go trailing after my father.I wanted to find my mother,instead,and put my arm around her as a way of asking forgiveness.I felt that I could not look my mother in the eyes for a long time to come, and it wasn't because I knew she was betrayed and I couldn't tell her.With my discovery of my father and the woman, I hadn't thought about her.Guests were moving in a crowd toward the grand piano, where the entertainer was seating himself to play.I joined them and was pushed up close to him, a young man with slick, silvery curls and a smile that showed baby-small teeth.I'd heard that he was a cousin of the hostess, a singer who was making a name for himself int he nightclubs and at big parties. A black bow tie wobbled as he chatted with the guests gathering around the piano. The song he sang- his voice as changeable as his face, one moment quivery and the next moment smooth- was about a couple of lovers whose ineptness increased with their desire.Something went wrong for the lovers at the end of each stanza, after which he banged on the keys to emphasize each of their ridiculous disasters. They were all packed elbow to elbow,three deep in the ring around the piano, and all were laughing on cue at each defeat of the lovers. theirs eyes were closed up tight with their laughter or swam sideways, and one man kept his cigarette clamped between his lips just so the smoke drew his lips together.They were averting their eyes from everyone else's eyes.
My mother was in the crowd.I saw her across the piano, her face closed in between two other faces.She was sliding her eyes and clicking her tongue and laughing,like all the others around her, and i felt an up rush of love and concern for her.She had support in numbers, but no matter how many joined together at the piano and elsewhere to belittle lovers, I knew that all attempts would end in failure.
