What’s Happening? Read online

  “Hey you … You little bitch,” Tony the bouncer yelled loudly at Laura as she returned to the bar. “You know you shouldn’t be making out in here, don’t you?” he said loudly, menacing her by thrusting his head close to hers and staring into her face.

  “So …?” she asked nervously.

  “So?” he asked imperiously. He enjoyed picking on her because she became so frightened and nervous. A butch would have punched him in the mouth if Tony had done that to her … but Laura shrank away. “Well, if you wanna stay here now you gotta give me a blow job. You’re a blower, ain’t you?” Tony said, smiling viciously, looking around for popular approval.

  “You rotten bastard. Fuck you,” yelped Laura defensively, edging away from him.

  “Come on, you little blower.” He grabbed her hand. “Here …” He put her hand on his manliness.

  She stood frozen with terror and surprise, then squeezed him hard where it hurt.

  “Aughhhh,” he bellowed with intense pain. “You little bastard whore.” He lashed his fist against the left side of her head above the ear.

  Laura fell back against the wall. She stood still, her eyes bulging with terror, her hands feeling for the wall behind her. She was like a trapped cat, studying her attacker, thinking furiously of escape. As he approached her, she slid cautiously along the wall to the door, bolting down the steps just as he kicked at her. Whimpering, she ran down the street, and rounded the corner into Minetta Lane.

  “Rotten son-of-a-bitch,” she murmured through tears as she strode quickly through the unlit lane toward the light of the Avenue of the Americas. She passed under the canopy of Raoul Johnson’s bar. Someone tapped a coin on the window from inside. She stopped and peered through the window. A friend waved to her to enter. Frightened and alone, unable to go home, she entered the bar.

  “Hi, Laura,” said the blond fellow who had tapped on the window. He was dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt. “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know, … nothing,” said Laura with a weak, resigned shrug. She sat on a stool, looking blandly over his shoulder at the wall.

  “I thought we were going to get together one of these days … What’s the matter? We’ll go to the movies or something.”

  “Okay, … one of these days.” She wasn’t really paying attention to what he said. She looked at her friend with the pathetic look of a lost puppy, holding the side of her head, tears still streaking her face.

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, I got kicked out of the Lisa.”

  “How? What happened?”

  “The bouncer called me something and wanted me to do something … and I told him to F himself … and he punched me.”

  “Oh, that’s real nice. You hang out in all the best spots, don’t you?”

  She looked at him guiltily. His admonition only presaged the annoyance that Rita and Jeannie would display when Laura told them.

  “Hey Laura,” a tall curly-haired fellow in the back called. Laura looked to the back, then at her disapproving friend.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, escaping toward the back. She sat on a stool next to the fellow who had called. He was a tall, thin fellow named George.

  “Whatta ya been doin’, baby?” he asked with affected, one-uplifted-brow casualness.

  “Nothin’ …”

  “Listen, I got some smokes that’ll make you fly. Whatta ya say you and me go to my pad and have a ball?”

  Laura made a face of disapproval. George chuckled and began to explain what kicks it would be. He bought her a beer. After many minutes she stood, turned, and shook her head all the while walking back to the front of the bar. George stared after her, shrugging disappointedly.

  “What do you call right back?” asked the blond fellow. “Like you were gone for days.”

  Laura smiled weakly out of the side of her mouth and half shrugged. Sammy the bartender put down a beer for her.

  “Hey … don’t you even say hello?”

  She looked up at Sammy. “Oh, I’m sorry, Sammy …” She wrinkled an excuse for a smile. “I didn’t see you. What’s the beer for?”

  “Your buddy bought it for you.” He jerked his thumb at the blond.

  Laura looked to the blond and flickered a smile. She appreciated his thoughtfulness. She didn’t even know his name. They had met at a party, but she had never found out his name, and now she felt badly about asking him what it was. He stood taller than she, watching her. She became flustered and sipped her beer, looking around, still pressing a hand to the side of her head.

  Josh Minot, Jeannie’s shaven-headed friend pushed the door open and walked into Johnson’s.

  “Josh!” Laura called to him, half lifting her arm to wave.

  “Hi, Laura,” he said walking over to her, “where’d you go? Like everybody was worried about you.” He looked over her head at the people seated around the room. She noticed his lack of interest.

  “Just for a walk,” she said unimportantly. “Is that other fellow still at the apartment?”

  “No, everybody split for their own pad. I’ll see you later,” he said, seeing a friend in the back of the bar.

  Laura turned quickly to her blond friend.

  “I’ll be right back.” She put down her drink.

  “Hey, don’t go, baby, the night’s just beginning.”

  Laura dashed out of the cafe and started to run. She ran across the Avenue of the Americas, up Fourth Street, and across Sheridan Square to Christopher Street. Out of breath, she walked very fast the rest of the way to the house and dashed up the stairs two by two. Cautiously, she opened the door of the apartment. The V of light cutting through the darkness revealed only one figure on Jeannie’s bed. Laura walked in slowly and quietly and shut the door. She peered through the slits in the curtain until her eyes made out the lone figure in bed. Rita was asleep, her arm stretched out across Laura’s side of the bed. Laura walked into the room, undressed quickly and slid into bed, curling up to keep warm. Laura lay her head across Rita’s arm, cuddled close to her warmth, and fell asleep.

  4

  The warmth within her family’s house could not penetrate the cold fear trembling within Rita. She was nervous; a queasy feeling rushed from her gnawing stomach into her dry throat. It was as if she were in some unknown, horrible place wherein ominous dread dwelt and from which she wished to fly. In the rose-print-papered room that had been hers, she sat before the plush scallop-shaped mirror of the dressing table brushing her hair with a silver-handled brush. This room, still reserved for her, brought back many memories. She looked at the reflection of the room in the mirror—at the bed, at the chair upon which the small dolls her father had once bought for her sat silently, at the white window curtains she had helped Mother sew, although Rita had really contributed merely occasional distraction. This nostalgia should have made Rita feel as if she belonged here. These surroundings were luxurious and nice, and yet they stirred up memories of intense adolescent violence, of seething tension and disagreements. Rita returned her attention to brushing her hair.

  The aroma of the meal being prepared rose to greet her. It was a thick, warm, inviting aroma, … yet it added to the chill of fear within Rita. Her fear was increased by the apprehension of the scene she was sure would start at dinner. One always did.

  Why had she come? she pondered. Why did she bother, when each visit only set off additional misunderstanding and hostility? She had returned because she wanted to be part of them; she wanted to belong to her family, she admitted to herself reluctantly. Not that she wanted to be a part of their socially dictated society, but that she wanted to be part of a warm, loving unit where the stress of the world would be forgotten in velvety, warm love. She insisted on being a whole part though, an individual part, not an undistinguished lump contributing only passive existence to the mass.

  Rita conjured up the scene during the course of the meal when Father or Mother would begin preaching of the evils of the Village and of the disapproval tha
t all good, honest, respected persons had for such a place and those who lived there. Rita’s parents couldn’t understand why a nice girl like she lived there. Hadn’t they given her everything she could have desired—clothes, toys, vacations—things comparable to that which children of only the best families received? “She’ll come around,” she continued, conjuring up their thoughts and words. “She’ll come around to our way of thinking when she realizes all the good things that our existence has in comparison to the degradation of the Village.” They want to assure themselves, perhaps to fill their lives with other vague dreams instead of stark reality, she interjected to herself. Something shall go wrong, something has to happen to upset the entire evening, Rita assured herself. She wished that just this once things could be different.

  “Rita!” Mother called from the kitchen downstairs. It was that familiar, prolonged call that grated against Rita’s mind. It wasn’t just a call, it was a yell—and yet it was more than a yell. It was a demand, an order. It manifested a complete disregard of Rita’s integrity and privacy. But more than this, the reason it chilled Rita to the bone, Mother’s yell was prompted by laziness. Mother strained her throat to obviate the necessity of walking. Rita had learned to despise people who yelled—lazy, slovenly people who would rather tear out their lungs with screams than walk ten feet and talk quietly like human beings. Rita avoided these sorts of people because they were actually dead, although frighteningly alive-looking. It was the foolish, unwilling-to-accept-difficulties approach to reality which this yelling manifested that most angered Rita.

  Mother yelled Rita’s name again.

  Rita brushed her hair more furiously, concentrating on each stroke, on the hand movement, on the quality of the hair. She wanted her mother to scream her lungs out … Scream, scream, scream, you dumb witch, Rita prayed inside herself, her head pounding with rage, scream till your throat is sore and aching … till you can no longer talk or even whisper … till you die … then perhaps you’ll realize what it’s all about. … She gritted her teeth.

  “RITA” Mother yelled again, a hint of desperate, annoyed frustration prolonging each sylable until the name became a chant, filling every passageway in the house.

  You rotten lazy bastard. Rita’s head shook with rage. Rita knew Mother was now disgusted, afflicted and tortured because her screams were not answered. If only she were sensible enough not to yell, not to demand, order, … once, … just once. Rita held her hands to her head to block out the haunting screams.

  Someone knocked on the door. Rita looked up quickly. Before she had a chance to bid the person enter, the door opened and Father peered at her inquisitively, suspiciously, frowningly.

  “Well? What’s the matter with you? Can’t you hear your Mother calling you? You need a special invitation?”

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized automatically. “I’ll be right down.”

  She turned back to the mirror to check if she had adjusted and changed her make-up and hair sufficiently to look the way she knew her parents would think presentable. “Presentable” meant whatever was accepted and worn by Mother’s and Father’s friends, other people, the world in general. Mother’s and Father’s friends also only wore things that were “presentable.”

  Father was standing in the doorway, Rita noticed, still studying her reflection in the mirror. Father was short—short and stocky, tending toward the paunchy. He hunched over a little with age, though he was only fifty-five, and waddled slightly duck-footed. His face, once seemingly bold and fearless, was putty-like, haggard, without conviction, forceless. He had been brave and tough, had fought to keep for his family that small glory he had achieved by his labor. He had been able, by incessant toil and adherence to a principle of conformity to social dictates, to lift them above the wretched life he had spent in a cold-water flat as an immigrant laborer’s son, to give them a comfortable existence in one of Brooklyn’s most luxurious sections, to make them respected in their Temple and neighborhood. And now he wanted only to be quiet, sleep and rest; his family was comfortable.

  “Well, come on. Dinner’s ready.” He continued watching and waiting. He searched for some physical defect or weakness, for the joint in her Village-wrought armor, against which he could loose the tirade of the respectable on living in the Village.

  Rita stayed in the chair purposely, annoyed at his insistence in treating her like a child, like a mindless lump of clay.

  “Well?”

  “All right!”

  Rita couldn’t remember when this now-open conflict had started. When she was young everything had been fine. As she matured, feeling her own will and weight a bit, enjoying the social equality and freedom Father struggled to provide, the conflict began to rise. Perhaps it was because Rita didn’t seem to fit exactly into the stereotyped position her parents felt they, and, therefore Rita, had to reflect. At first, this stereotyped position demanded that Rita supress only minor feelings or thoughts. As she grew older, however, the position became more arbitrary, demanding, oppressive. It was vexing to hear, This is what they’re doing. This is what they’re wearing this year. Why don’t you be like everybody? Wasn’t she a person too? Couldn’t she decide for her own being? She, like Thoreau, wondered “by what degree of consanguinity they are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly …” Who the hell are THEY anyway? This outside direction began to back up in Rita’s mind like a log jam, until she felt they were prescribing her entire life.

  She remembered how she began, just for spite, for kicks, to do things that this unwritten, unnameable code wouldn’t have approved: how she stole cigarettes from Father’s package, how the smoke tasted awful, and how she beat the smoke out of the bathroom window with a towel. It was an exciting feeling to have done something unusual, something daring, something she had thought of by herself.

  After a while, this socially-dictated position which Rita was supposed to reflect became so ludicrous in her mind that she was able to follow the precepts which her parents and they dictated only with the same precaution required in taking vile medicine: swallow hard and grimace. This made her more sick and more restless, however. She couldn’t stand the stifling rules imposed on her without reason; she couldn’t stand being a lump of clay. She wanted either to enjoy life or to end it. Thus, she fled from her family’s house to find the freedom and tolerance and independence for her own opinion in the Village. Then, whole areas of darkness fell away from her eyes. Like a newborn child, she began to discover hidden aspects of herself. Suddenly, she disagreed with her parents about more things than ever before. Somehow, they seemed even more stagnant, static, molded, the way everybody was.

  Rita followed Father down the stairs toward the kitchen, wishing there might be a way through which they could understand each other more.

  Their house was large and spacious. It was a private, three-story wood-frame house with turrets and ramparts and terraces reaching into the sky like a medieval castle. The architecture of all the houses on this street was similar. Each new house followed and matched the time-worn, approved pattern of the one before it. Father had had it built for Mother ten years before, and what a wonderful present it would seem, except that it was a demanded present, dedicated only to the neighbors, and erected not by love, or for the comfort of those who lived within, but by a need to have an external monument to the prowess of its owner.

  Rita thought the house foolish, like everything else in it—wasteful, tasteless. It was foolish to build a house using modern materials to falsely recreate ancient expediencies—supporting beams which did not support but hung, just as the people within did not support changing life but clung frightenedly to prescribed traditions. “If it was good enough for others, it’s good enough for us,”

  The interior was decorated gaudily. Her parents and their friends were influenced in their tastes and followed those modes that were expensive, massive, and patently luxurious—regardless of the needs of the room. Velvet drapes hung in huge f
olds from a cornice across an entire wall in the living room. Ornate scallops topped these cornices, and flimsy curtains underscored them. Plush overstuffed chairs and couches were spotted about the room. A thick rug with a design of flowers and vases covered the floor. A piano that no one played and candelabra and knicknacks, all bedecked with designs and gilt, completed the ostentation of the room.

  Her parents’ entire life was, like this house, equally without reason. All undertakings bore witness to the fact that they could be afforded; money was spent for the sake of spending it, regardless of the tasteless, choking effect.

  “You sit over here, dear.” Mother pointed to Rita’s seat at the kitchen table. The kitchen was the family room, where the family spent its time. The gaudy, rich trappings in the other rooms were preserved and enshrined to the honor of Pecunia Rex. The family remained in the kitchen, content with the warmth effulging from the other rooms, not deeming themselves worthy enough to enjoy a luxurious life. Those rooms were reserved for friends and other worthy people.

  The way Mother said “dear” annoyed Rita. It was hollow, and Rita wasn’t deceived by this false show of sweetness. Had Mother called her a Village tramp, Rita might believe her. This sweetness was contrived and phony. Mother was too busy with the house and bridge games ever to have many real emotions.

  “Randy,” Mother called to her young son. “RANDY.” The yell sent a shiver up Rita’s back.

  “Randy. Will you come to dinner …”

  Randy was a hulking boy of thirteen, with glasses, a bent nose, thick fleshy lips, and crooked teeth. Mother loved her poor little Randy more because of his imperfections. He was Mother’s favorite plaything and lover. Often, Rita had been revolted while sitting watching television at home, Mother in a shabby house dress and curlers in her hair, Randy lying on the floor like a bloated oxen in pajamas, when suddenly, about bed time, the boy would begin to hug and kiss his Mother. Randy knew that Mother liked to be told he loved her, and he would play his cards to the full to stay up late to watch another T.V. program. Rita felt sorry for Mother; Father was usually out and Mother alone. But these scenes with Randy were repulsive. Father, when he was out, was usually with another woman. Why shouldn’t he be? Rita asked herself, considering the benefits of staying at home with his wife, her mother—the benefits of staying at home with a cretinous woman of forty, who felt firm only with the love of a child; a woman beyond whom adult love lay as a barren island; a woman who didn’t know enough to get out of bed in the morning to get her husband’s breakfast; a woman who wasn’t woman enough to keep herself attractive for him; a woman who still enjoyed the childish gossip that she had enjoyed when she was eighteen; who got a kick out of smutty little tawdry jokes; and who coyly flirted when she was out with the “girls” on the town. Randy was the only human with whom Mother could feel at ease emotionally, and even this would change when Randy was old enough to go out with friends at night. Rita thought that Mother would soon have to realize that one had to be capable of love to be capable of being loved and that love wasn’t something stocked up in a magazine, toy, or candy store. Love had to be understood and nourished for itself; in this house, Rita thought, they were lucky their bodies were nourished, much less their souls.