Section 1 Chapter 9: Caroline and Letty, Carmine Street Pool
Chapter 9 Caroline and Letty, Carmine Street Pool When Caroline came home from college after doing well on an art school scholarship complete with year abroad, she looked up Leticia Smith, neé Schwartzweiss, in the Manhattan telephone book. Letty had married someone, a non-Jewish man in the trades, well beneath her family’s taste, income and education, and was living in New York. The girls arranged, after many postponements and phone calls because Caroline was trying to make all her city visits in one day, to meet for a swim at the Carmine Street Pool: the perfect thing. In high school they’d enjoyed themselves as rival swimmers, Letty despite her weight, although neither had been the best, or even among the best, in their class. 51
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Letty was already swimming when Caroline jumped in. They splashed toward one another and briefly met at the end of the lane. Letty darted off immediately. “Hi.” “Hi.” Caroline swam slowly and evenly in good form. They would not race, but were having a “grace race”, as over the years they’d come to think of them. Caroline had invented the term, and she inevitably won. Letty solicited Caroline’s competition and Cary irresistibly succumbed. Her secret lament was only that Letty weren’t harder to beat: Unconsciously Letty engaged to compete only in areas of weakness; what her strengths were, Cary never knew. At their separate colleges neither had been popular. Neither had been content with her “stack in the pack”, as Cary called status, but their styles of social mobility were different. Letty’s way was to cadge the lower orders and assert her rank above them, while Caroline’s was to scratch above herself and rise. Caroline had cut bangs in her tawny hair, growing it long and straight; she wore torn jeans and hoop earrings, Indian bracelets and faded work shirts in the grungy, bohemian style of 1970. She had tried to make some smart, new friends in college, but wasn’t sure any of them sincerely liked her. She didn’t pledge for a sorority because the other art students ridiculed them and also because of her family’s pinched finances. She had thought about joining the cheerleaders, but none of the Jewish girls joined the cheerleaders; all of them joined the debating society. Caroline did, too, but soon dropped out because she could not orally present the arguments she argued in her head or sometimes in
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longhand. And she was too jealous of her own ideas for partnership or anonymous collaboration: It wasn’t in her to be someone else’s speechwriter: If she couldn’t state her own points, she didn’t want to prepare them for others, no matter how good at it she might have been. She could draw exceptionally well but that hadn’t helped her make friends: most art students were into abstraction; the fashion was not to think drawing from life counted smuch. And the other art students envied her favored position with certain faculty members, especially in Rome. So she hadn’t made friends in college, and was back here with her difficult friend from girlhood. In mid-lap Letty and Caroline passed each other face to face. Each was aware of the other’s familiar halfforgotten breath in her mouth, not sweet, not rank, and Caroline smelled something new — Letty smoked cigarettes. As children they had sworn they never would, and for Letty it was particularly dangerous, Cary suspected. She didn’t like the feel of knowing this and turned her face away, reminded of a day she once opened the door to Letty’s room when they were twelve or thirteen. She swam on to dispel the memory but it stayed with her. Letty had been lying naked on her beautiful Swedish carpet, spread-eagled, waiting for Caroline to walk in happy and excited to find her exposed. But instead, Cary bent straight down and punched her in the gut. Letty got up and pushed her face into Cary’s, provoking her to hit her again and again. That night when Caroline had gotten home, she tried her hand at a new experience, and climax was climbed many times thereafter to memories of pummeling her friend. For several years after, they
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experimented with harsh children’s sex, Caroline detesting it, but each time complying with fascination. Letty made her do things she wouldn’t allow her memory to hold, brutalizing her friend’s fat body in as many obscene ways as Letty could dream up. Letty was reckless and masochistic and Caroline became drawn in. Sex between the girls ended when they left for college, but in these college years Caroline found that she herself had become a reckless partner, having sex with strangers often, male and female. Promiscuity was not unusual for the times; she was expected to have sex with almost everyone she met. Everyone was. There existed an anxiety in meeting someone new until they fucked: it affirmed their meeting, confirmed their acceptance of, or unprejudiced equality with, each other. It would have been considered rude to have done otherwise. It was everyone’s habit to say yes to everyone, everywhere, everything, and to initiate foreplay instantly oneself. Usually Cary carried her diaphragm with her, although not today. Her plan was to just meet Letty here, then visit a teacher. Caroline quickened the tempo of her slow crawl, touched the edge, summersaulted twisting underwater like an otter, and swam the next lap in loose sidestroke. Her body had gotten sleek as it matured. “Come back,” she shouted, sputtering up to surface at the wall as Letty ignored her there and flipped, with her natural walrus form and power, to begin a new lap and not hear her say, “Let’s talk.” Privately Caroline had been burdened all her life with equal pity and contempt for Letty’s case. She couldn’t behave normally with her; she didn’t even look
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normal; she was so fat, and a girl just couldn’t be normal without a mother. To Caroline, Letty’s life had been aborted by her mother’s death, but the father had no meaning. She wasn’t much aware of Letty’s father or her own or anyone’s, another common attitude of that time and place: most men were amorphous figures who left most household policy to their wives. Most fathers and daughters of Ellenville weren’t close. Letty recognized the signs of Caroline’s inevitable “friendly competition”, her undisguised disdain. Caroline had once confessed the nature of the unspoken grace race, reminding her smugly that even as children it had been Letty who’d been most eager for competition. Letty turned back in mid-lap, winded, and glad to provide (false) evidence that it wasn’t she who might still be competitive anymore, I’ve been avoiding Cary at the bottom of the lanes — didn’t Cary notice -- not kicking off at the same time? She grabbed the edge but kept her shoulders under, chilly. Letty was cold even in the citymandated eighty-two degree pool. She couldn’t swim strongly enough to warm up. Once she sprung off from the wall, she slowed up as she swam. She was sorry she’d arranged to come. She’d get out of the pool as soon as possible and feign no rivalry. This was what she usually did. She had forgotten that she never liked her friend. Caroline caught up to her fast, and did a handstand underwater, reaching her shapely legs past Letty’s face, wiggling her toes near her mouth as she looked up at her friend from underwater. Letty imagined herself biting them, but she wouldn’t even grab them playfully. Cary emerged blowing bubbles. “So, what’s new?”
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Letty had nothing she wanted to tell her. This meeting was a mistake, she thought. “Let’s swim more,” she answered. Caroline shrugged assent and took off with a racing butterfly, but Letty scooted underwater across two lanes to the ladder, and climbed out of the water. She clanged her way up three flat aluminum steps, smashed her way into her designer flip-flops, pulled her towel off the hook and pushed herself hard against the exit. Cary stood up in the pool and watched her. I don’t care; let her see what I look like now, Letty thought. She had deliberately arrived an hour early to conceal her gross body from her attractive friend, not so much its bulky form, but its mottled surface. Her form was nothing new to Caroline, but new to Cary should she see it: Letty’s new husband had beaten her badly; her body, although not her face, was horribly bruised. Letty entered the sour locker room alone. The few other solitary women kept discretely to themselves, head down. She was the largest woman in the area, and all were in states of undress. No one would look more than furtively at her and she could probably count on no one speaking. She didn’t want some do-gooder asking if she’d been beaten up, “abused”, they call it, “ battered”, but most New Yorkers could be counted on to mutely respect mute privacy in any circumstance — for fear of reprisals as much as anything. Oh, why had she suggested they swim today? Swim, of all things, especially at the public pool. She cursed herself; on purpose she’d wanted Caroline to see her body, craving to be humiliated as usual. Such was the role she could easily make Cary play, but she didn’t have the stomach for it today, she thought, thinking of how much a person’s body does their thinking. 56
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She scraped off the pinching bathing suit, watching in the mirror. She had never seen herself in so large a mirror before, never so accurately could look at herself. She faced the mirror squarely: harsh red lines eroded her flesh where the suit had bound. Sometimes I feel farther away from things below me, and I see more top than sides. Vertigo gave her the impression she looked down on the mirror image, or the mirror could possibly have been angled out at the top: she wasn’t sure. Which parts of my body are still a girl’s; which parts are already a woman’s? The bruises weren’t as bad as they could have been. She stared at her reflection, and wished she saw in faintest shading, the hint of a structure of muscle and bone within. She saw real bone articulated at the elbow and wrist and imagined a more direct line between them. She could be a beautiful woman if she wanted to, she thought. More beautiful than Cary, who had some good points but would never be anything more than plain, she tried to make herself believe. But she knew Cary had become a real stunner. Letty knew she had some good features of her own, though too: her complexion truly glowed when it wasn’t bruised, and her large dark eyes shone out from delicately pointed facial bones, smooth forehead, eyebrows full and arched. Her mother had been the most beautiful girl in her high school: Letty and her mother had one face. Letty hadn’t begun to gain extra weight until her mother’s cancer had set in. What have I ever gotten out of this friendship? So her family was richer than Caroline’s. So she had a handsome brother’s memory to wound her with — Cary’s crush on him had never been secret. Why had she allowed Caroline to retain such a strong hold on her for so long — only to increase her jealousy? She used to be able to make Cary 57
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do things against her will, that was one thing she prided herself in, but was such a thing lasting? Letty’s marriage hadn’t won her any points. She turned in the mirror. How much did she really look like this and how much was distortion? The puckers in her thighs were real, and the overhanging flesh bags rolling everywhere were real, not just symbols of the elevated disgrace she felt. Letty faced her jealousy of Caroline, and faced the perverted pride she took in her own repellent corpulence. But her bluffing bravery failed the moment it was roused. Caroline entered the locker room and Letty quaked. Their eyes met in reflection first, but Letty whirled around and shook enough to hear her breasts and buttocks flap. Off-balance, she reached out for support and slapped her palm against the wall-length mirror, which quivered for an instant before it cracked and shattered, crashing to the tile floor.
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One-Chapter Excerpt pgs 52-59 from Literary Novel WISH FOR AMNESIA Author and Photographer: BARBARA ROSENTHAL Chapter 9: “Caroline and Letty, Carmine Street Pool” photo pg 52. Two Girls, Carmine St Pool. 3-78-4-17, NYC, 1978 photo pg 59: Fourth of July, Clariden, IN. 1.05.13.24, Indiana, 2005 All work © copyright Barbara Rosenthal, all rights reserved.