Pamela Erens - Eleven Hours

Julia hid her face to her eyes with the book, making a theatrically anxious expression, and asked, “Do you like it?”

Lore suppressed a tickle of irritation. The room looked, in fact, wonderful. She even liked the splattered cloth. “I do. It looks much better than before.”

“You’re not angry?”

“No, but you’re bold, girl, you’re very bold.” She laughed again and knocked Julia’s book from her hand so that it tumbled to the floor. Julia, who hated for her books to get roughed up, reached for it, but Lore pushed her back and straddled her, giving her phony punches while Julia put up her hands, giggling. “I wanted to give you guys a present,” Julia pleaded. “It’s your anniversary.”

“What anniversary?” Lore climbed off, out of breath. She went to get a glass of water.

“You’ve been together eight and a half months.”

“That’s an anniversary?”

“Why not? Do you think Asa will be aggravated?”

“Asa’s never aggravated by what you do.”

“That’s definitely not true.”

“I’ll tell him I like it,” Lore said. The new position of the couch made the room seem more spacious. And that spaciousness made it suddenly apparent to her that the walls of the room were very bare.

“We have to put some stuff up,” she said, pointing. “Here and here and here.”

“No kidding. I’ve been so good not to say anything about it. My friend Cliff’s work would look great here. He’s going to be a big deal one day, I’m really convinced, but right now he’s selling his paintings for almost nothing.”

“Great, we’ll look at them.”

“I want you to have a beautiful space.”

“Thank you,” Lore said.

“No, I really mean it. It’s important that this place look beautiful for the two of you.”

Asa was in fact taken aback by Julia’s redecorating. Julia and Lore had agreed in advance that he should find Lore alone when he came home, and that she should pass off the new room as her own work. But Asa didn’t buy it.

“Julia did this.”

“I did it, Asa. I thought it would look better this way.”

“No, this is totally Julia. This thingy on the coffee table — that’s Julia.”

“Okay, I asked for her advice. She brought the fabric, the rest I figured out myself.”

“Give me a break. This was her idea, whether you helped her or not, and I don’t like it. This is our place. It shouldn’t look like her. Do you get it?”

Lore, not a crier, felt something quiver inside. The idea of going back to the old room — how had she not noticed how bland, how ugly, it was? — dejected her intolerably.

“I don’t see anything wrong with making things a little nicer. I don’t have an eye for this stuff, and she does.”

“Lore.” He took her in her arms. “We can make the room nicer. We will make the room nicer. But Julia … she needs everything to have something to do with her. So fine. But not our place, Lore. Okay?”

He tried to warn her, Lore thinks now. She’ll give him that much. Or maybe he was trying to warn himself. She squirms against the backrest Carol has readjusted, trying to get comfortable again. She and Asa spent that evening pushing the couch back into position, folding up the wine-stained fabric, returning the chair to the bedroom. “At least let’s put something on the walls,” Lore said, and Asa answered, “Of course.” That weekend they picked out some pieces at an outdoor crafts fair, and Asa didn’t even bargain over the prices. But Lore never liked them as much as she was sure she would have liked the paintings by Julia’s friend.

Nurse Carol putters around, watering the hibiscus on the windowsill, checking bathroom supplies. “I’m surprised they gave you a room,” she says cheerfully. “You don’t seem to have much going on.”

Lore shrugs. She’s not going to defend her right to the room.

“Well, it’s slow this morning, I guess they don’t mind, but if it gets busy they’ll move you back to triage. Maybe that will motivate you, huh?”

“Yeah,” says Lore dryly. “That will motivate me.”

Silence.

“You’re not much of a talker,” says Carol. “I guess you can tell I’m a talker. I’m going to draw you out. Just watch.”

You’ve got to be kidding me , Lore thinks. She turns her head away.

“So it’s your first baby?” Carol asks as she wipes down the sink with a paper towel.

“No.”

Lore looks up to see Carol squinting skeptically.

“It’s my first birth, but not my first baby.”

“Oh, but …”

“I had my first pregnancy when I was raped. I had to abort it.”

“Oh,” says Carol, “oh.” She flushes and abruptly seats herself in the chair below the television bolted into the wall. She points herself in Lore’s direction, as if to announce that she is here, she is a ready receptacle, if Lore wants to unburden herself of any details.

Now why did I say that? Lore asks herself. That was vile, she thinks.

“It’s all right,” she tells the nurse. “It was a long time ago.”

Good God, why had she said that? But the plump little woman’s friendliness had been so false, so deaf; she’d wanted to say something to puncture it. Well, that had certainly done it. Where is Franckline, Lore wonders? Why did I say such a thing?

It was Julia who had been raped. It happened in the lobby of the Upper West Side building where Julia and her father lived. The man had cornered her in the entryway as she fished for her key. Asa blamed himself — he would never (he told Lore) be able to feel that it was not his fault. He and his older brother and their parents lived in a different building half a block away; the Foxes and the Lisks were old friends, in and out of each other’s apartments all the time. Julia and Asa had walked around the city for hours that night as they often did. They were high school seniors; it was past eleven. Generally Asa walked Julia to her door, as Morningside Heights was still a dicey neighborhood at the time. But that evening Asa was angry at Julia over her friendship with another boy in their class. “It was stupid,” he told Lore. “It was nothing. But at the time I was feeling like Julia shouldn’t ever pay attention to anyone but me.” As they’d walked about, Julia had listened sympathetically but refused to agree to put an end to the friendship. They got to Asa’s door and, miffed, he said goodnight and went inside. The way Asa remembered it, Julia hesitated, as if she wanted to ask him to continue on with her. Then she left. Julia said she didn’t remember the hesitation, or even the conversation, and commented that there were other nights she’d gone home by herself, it wasn’t completely unusual. But then the blows to her head made her recollections of the evening fuzzy.

Her mother by then was living in Oakland. She didn’t come to see Julia after the rape. Julia told Lore this a few weeks after they met and fell into a friendship that was as swift and buoyant as a love affair. “She didn’t come back to be with me or see how I was. It was my father who took care of me.”

And Lore had been shocked then about Julia’s mother, for she had a crush on this woman she had never met, this creator of enormous, disorienting canvases that you could see if you went to certain museums in Baltimore or Austin or Cincinnati. From far away they looked like quilts, but quilts with eerily realistic images — were there photographs pinned to the cotton batting? Closer in, you saw it was all paint. Paint had created the traditional triangles and floral patterns, as well as the grainy, spontaneous-seeming “photos” of contemporary black life and black struggle: police stopping young men in cars and confronting them on the porches of their homes, young women beaten by their boyfriends, but also family dinners and college graduations and people of all ages working at various jobs. Julia showed Lore the paintings in a large book, where the text said something or other about the artist challenging viewers’ assumptions about both black folk culture and the hegemonic Western tradition of realism. Lore looked slowly through the pages. One included an enlargement of a “photo” of a woman at a console of knobs and outlets, leaning in to make an adjustment. She was seen mostly from the back, and she and the console filled nearly the whole frame. Where was she? She could equally likely have been juggling an old-fashioned telephone switchboard or managing a launch at NASA. There were no particular clues in her navy skirt suit, her neatly pulled-back hair, or her discreet pearl earrings. Lore liked that the woman was placeless and without category, and purposely avoided the text accompanying the reproduction, afraid it might explain something. The woman might be highly educated, a gender and race pioneer, or very ordinary, struggling through an everyday job. Either way, though, she was in control of something, a massive set of variables that she had mastered.