Mail by Mameve Medwed

Author:Mameve Medwed [MEDWED, MAMEVE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9780759521070
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2000-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

9

Sunday night, and I’m on the way to the airport. Traffic stuffs the tunnel like the filling of a sausage. I should have anticipated it, should have left half an hour earlier. I picture my mother and Arthur standing by the curb in front of the American Airlines terminal, tanned, wrapped in the plumage of their tropical leisure wear, toting their cardboard containers of duty-free rum, luggage piled at their feet, eyes searching the spiraling airport lanes. “Maybe Katinka’s been held up,” my mother will say. “She’s usually on time.”

“Zenobia is always punctual,” Arthur will state unsyllogistically. My car idles in place. I roll up the windows to keep out everybody else’s fumes. I turn off the radio. What was All Things Considered is now a crackle of static with the occasional recognizable word like an unfamiliar language with a familiar Latin root. Driving in on Broadway, I listened to a reporter discussing a starlet’s as-told-to autobiography; how she smoked pot, had an affair with Frank Sinatra, tricked a tycoon into marrying her. This last item grabbed me. I turned up the volume. Cheryl never did that, I thought, segueing from the general to the specific. Cheryl had an abortion so Louie wouldn’t have to marry her. Or so she wouldn’t have to marry Louie. Though why wouldn’t she want to marry Louie, I wonder now. These questions are rattling around inside my skull like a tune that won’t go away. I would like to know Cheryl’s reasons for saying no, what she knew that I don’t know. Not that I am considering marrying Louie. Not that he would even ask. Perhaps she just didn’t want to have the child. The child that Louie wanted. That Louie insists she wanted. I shake my head. My brain is as clogged as this tunnel. My gray cells have been fried by diesel fumes. There’s no clear path for my thoughts to follow. Still, they keep coming, random and disordered. Frank Sinatra. Cheryl. Starlets. Tycoons.

I think of great flirts, their poses of devotion, their shining eyes, their tilting heads, the way they listen. But am I so innocent of such wiles? I ask myself, jarred by a chorus of honking that makes me feel as if I’m trapped inside a teenager’s stereo. I remember my own beams of adoration as Seamus’ student. He lectured at Sever Hall where I sat in the front row, my hair freshly washed, my thighs Band-Aided by my most tantalizing miniskirt. I groan at this picture of myself.

By the time I reached the entrance to the tunnel, the radio had switched from flights of fancy to the flight of political refugees. Shame set in. I was enjoying the frivolous revelations in a celebrity bio when I should have been agonizing over the serious devastation of the dispossessed. I am a shallow person. One who can put down a fellow woman when I myself have made no case for sisterhood.

If I can just say no to sisterhood, however, I am stuck with daughterhood.

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