Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

One of the greatest sources of pain and contention between us was the fact that I did not “bring my friends home.” My father suggested often: “Why don’t you let Helen have a little party, Jess? — You could have some of your friends from the University out one Saturday evening, and you could dance if you wanted to … mother would prepare you some sandwiches, and you could have beer. …”

My mother shrugged as if she didn’t care. “She doesn’t want it. We’re not good enough for these friends of hers, my dear. Don’t you know that? Her head’s turned by fine houses in Johannesburg.”

How could I explain that what was the matter was that everything would be too good for my friends? That they would leave wet rings on the furniture and put their feet up on the sofa, and perhaps use somebody else’s towel in the bathroom (towels were sacred personal possessions in our house). I could imagine exactly the kind of evening my father visualized; I had been to them in the houses of other sons and daughters of Mine people. My mother would work all day preparing homemade sausage rolls and round water biscuits spread with cheese and potted relish, and when the evening came would have everything set out on a table in the living room, under an embroidered net. A dozen bottles of lemonade and a dozen bottles of beer would be stacked in one corner. All the lights would be on, the two silver vases filled with flowers, and not a piece of thread, a newspaper or a used ash tray would betray the fact that the room had ever been used before. Into this overawing atmosphere of preparedness the guests would come, clattering over the bared expanse of floor which instantly killed the spontaneity of the desire to dance, and very soon, quite unable to keep away, my mother would appear as if by accident at the door, dressed in her best frock and smiling confusedly, and in no time my father would have set himself up jocularly in shirt sleeves to act as barman. And they would both hang about, like parents at a children’s birthday party, protesting all the while that they “did not want to disturb the young people.” An inverted snobbery made me burn with shame at the idea. I could not face the picture of the people I knew with their uncluttered lives in flats and rooms, suddenly finding themselves in this church tea-party atmosphere.

The same kind of situation arose over the men who took me out. Charles Bessemer was a good example. My mother and father were vaguely disquieted when, as I did the night he took Mary Seswayo to Mariastad, I telephoned unexpectedly from Johannesburg to say that I would not be coming home. Because I went to places they did not know and with people whom they had not met, I think it was as if, when I put down the telephone, they felt me swallowed up into an anonymity of city streets. Though they would have been astounded at the suggestion, the principles of their code of behavior toward young men were entirely sexual, the elders of the tribe measuring the daughter’s choice of mates against the background of her own home, the young male assessing the worth of the family and consequently the girl whom he was considering. This was the way it was always done on the Mine and in Atherton in general, where as soon as a young man became interested in a girl, and long before there was any talk of marriage, he was taken about everywhere with the family, to cinemas and social gatherings, so that if and by the time marriage resulted, he was already inculcated in the kind of life the girl’s family had led and which, without question, he would be expected to lead with her, trooping off as ants go to set up another ant heap exactly like the one they have left.

Joel came to the house, of course, but the fact that he was a Jew gave him a position of peculiar if wary privilege, like a eunuch. But this young man Charles Bessemer affected them conventionally. I had made a point of mentioning him to them although I had not spoken of others, unconsciously, I believe, as a kind of compensation: he was a Protestant Gentile, like themselves, and in addition, a doctor. — This I had discovered from Isa; it was typical of him that he should have preferred to let me go on thinking he was a medical student. — I offered him as the only thing I had that might please. He must have roused hopes in them that my withdrawal from the life and opportunities of the Mine was not a deviation after all, or if it had been, was merely the clever short cut to a life on the same safe pattern, but a higher level. A doctor from Johannesburg. I could see that the possibilities of this pleased them. And for the first time I saw a similarity between them and Joel’s parents, whom I had long ago resigned myself to accept as irreconcilable strangers to everything in my mother and father. But now I saw that the idea of a doctor in the family pleased them in exactly the same way as it would have done the Aarons. I recognized in their questions the tone of the discussion when it had been suggested, that night at Aarons’, that Joel might have studied medicine.

Now there was no cold pretended lack of interest expressing disapproval when I said I was going here with Charles, or there with Charles. “Did you have a good time?” my father would beam, as if there could be no doubt about it. (I often wondered what he visualized when he said this — the Masonic dances of his youth, I am sure, with young ladies dangling silk-tasseled pencils from their little programs.) “I’d give you my pendant,” said my mother, “but I know you wouldn’t wear it. …”—The women I knew longed for the strange, monolithic rings and heavy beaten silver jewelry made in the style of Berlin in the thirties by a German refugee, and because they could not afford his work, wore Zulu beadwork that in its primitive gaiety gave them the look of peasants.

My excuse for not bringing Charles home was the demands of his job. How he would have thrown his head back and laughed his explosive laugh if he had known. And how horrified he would have been at their picture of him as a rising suburban G.P. in a blue suit; Charles who wanted so much to be free (of quite what, he did not know) that the moment his good work — and he was good at his work — brought him promotion or the chance of permanency in a hospital, he resigned and went somewhere else. “What does he do, is he in private practice…?” my father asked. I told them that he was assistant medical officer at the big tuberculosis hospital outside Johannesburg. My mother got the look on her face she had had when there had been a whooping-cough outbreak at school. “Well, I hope he’s careful,” she said, “but I don’t suppose you could get it, just going about with him.”

I felt suddenly forlorn. I had a sudden flash of this young man and me, lost in each other’s mouths, utterly mindlessly mixed in the drunken secretions of love-making, our faces faintly sweaty and smeared with passion like a bee mazed and messed with pollen. And as I looked at my mother and father I seemed to see them as if they were actually receding from me, in the blur and strain of irrevocable distance. It was a floating, drifting feeling, with the powerlessness of dreams.

Our life at home went on, touching at fewer and fewer points. Charles Bessemer, like the hope of a sail, passed. They regretted him more than I did, I am sure. After a few weeks he moved on, whether because of a new job or a new girl I no longer remember, or perhaps never knew. I think he must have tired of me because the promise of my passion in our encounters in his car came to nothing; when he began to consider where we might go to conclude our love-making, he saw me brought up short, like an animal galloping toward an abyss. In my eyes he saw the contradiction between my headlong passion and a prohibitive fear that survived the moral code of my parents which I believed I had rejected. To satisfy both sides of my nature, I contrived to cheat them both. By denying myself the final act of love, I kept to the letter of the moral prohibition, and by allowing myself all intimacies short of the act itself, gave a kind of freedom to my natural self. He was probably disgusted with me. In any case it did not matter; there were others. The important thing was the knowledge of being desired that brought me to a consciousness of myself as a woman among the women I knew, that looking around me among my friends, made me feel myself received into the fullness of life, the revealed, and the hidden.