Dance the Eagle to Sleep

by Marge Piercy

  It depressed her that she could only define herself in negatives. She was not like her mother, she was not like her father. The conventional masculine and the conventional feminine were for shit. The primary business of base ladies was to talk about each other. What her mother knew could be contained in a greeting card and consisted of You’re Supposed Tos and Don’t You Dares. It could be summed up as, “Don’t sit with your knees apart, Jill, you’re a big girl now.”

  She did not want to be somebody else’s wife or somebody else’s mother. Or somebody else’s servant or somebody else’s secretary. Or somebody else’s sex kitten or somebody else’s keeper. She saw no women around who seemed to be anybody in themselves. They all wore some man’s uniform. She wanted to be free, and free meant not confined, not forced to lie, not forced to pretend, not warped, not punished, not tortured.

  They could always put her down by telling her she was only good at criticizing and didn’t know what she wanted. But how could you know what you wanted if you had never seen it? Maybe it was only the made-up stories in books, in which people stood up straight and had feelings past nastiness and boredom and did things because they really wanted to. But if she was so filled with wanting, somewhere there must be something worth it. And she knew pretty much where to start looking. She imagined sometimes having the word free tattooed on her forehead, on her arms, on her back and belly, free, free, free.

  They could coerce her and they could imprison her but they could not bribe her. They had nothing to tempt her with. The things she really wanted they did not have for sale. What did they offer her? On the one hand, they pressed her to “be like mommy.” Little boys, be like daddy. Little girls, be like mommy. But if you raised your eyes from the wall-to-wall carpeting and looked, you had to shudder. It was the equivalent of a curse. Cut off your head, stunt your feelings, leap into a box and slam the lid tight. Spend the rest of your life charging your kids and your hubby for what you think you missed, sacrificing for them the self that never existed.

  Or a girl could daydream about being a famous face. She could dream about being photographed and stared at. She could dream that her face or her boobs would sell ten million cans of roach spray. She could dream that she would lie on a pink cushion with her bush carefully airbrushed out and millions of sad men would jerk off all over the page in preference to having anything to do with real hairy women.

  Well, she was hairy Joanna and she didn’t bother to count the boys she had decided to fuck and never had she pretended anything with any of them that she did not feel. Now she was in her ascetic phase. Sex here was obscene. She did not even touch herself. She was into discipline of herself for her own uses. She would have liked to be studying yoga or karate.

  She went on attending school till finals. She was not getting bad grades—not as well as she deserved, because the teachers disliked her. That the work was easy when she felt like doing it made her an even harder case to them. The powers had her summer planned: a maximum-surveillance camp for problem children. In the meantime, she did baby-sitting and snitched what coins she could and ate a lot, putting on the weight she always lost when she was free.

  They had her seeing the school shrink, and she played along. When he got too nosy about what happened when she was on the loose, she told him horror stories about her parents. He tried to find out what drugs she had tried and about sex. She told him she had petted a lot. He said the police matron said she was not a virgin. She talked about police matrons so graphically, he got squeamish. She took to rapping about her early childhood because that kept him from pestering her about reality.

  He was in his late thirties and wore a small, small mustache no grander than his eyebrows. She imagined him fingering it in the mirror. Did he ever do anything he wanted to? He told her he had gone to school for twenty years to be a shrink, and she understood that his guts had been completely wrapped in cellophane. She doubted whether he even knew that he was attracted to her, or that he hated her in a dull itchy way. That was all a manner of speaking. Correctly he latched on, hated, the doll in his head. He had no sense that intersected with hers, no means of apprehending who she was.

  The third day of finals, while her father was on maneuvers and her mother was out cold from the night before, she left the house in the morning with her stash and her sleepingbag, walked off the base, hitched a ride on the highway and flew like a bird out of the bushes. By nightfall she was coming out of the subway in Union Square, heading south and east. At the fourth address she tried, the guy was home and he said she could spread her bag on the kitchen floor.

  She kept all addresses in her head. A long time before, she had learned never to write down anything that mattered. What pulled her was getting out of the hate machine and getting to a place where people were gentle to each other, didn’t bug each other, shared what they had, shared their food and their bodies and their music and their space and their kicks. She would not grab at anybody or let anybody fix hooks into her. Women mostly wanted to take some man, turn him into a house and go sit in it.

  She was scared of them, not of herself, not of being alone or having to make it on the streets. She had gone down into her psyche on acid and walked the pavements peeled naked on mescaline, and she was not afraid except of what the hate people could do to her.

  They had tried to kill her. She was not particularly afraid of physical pain. She had been beaten many times. But they tried to make her ashamed. They tried to fill her with disgust for being alive, for her masses of red kinky hair they always wanted to cut off, for her soft and hard body, for her simple ready sexuality, for her hard quick mind, for her independence, for everything that was Joanna. They had tried to make her hate herself, and the worst fear she had sometimes was that they had in part succeeded.

  It was good to be in the scene. This was the world she knew. In a sense it was all she knew: the base-hell and the scene. She walked and walked the next afternoon in the hot dusty June sun and dug everything—the free kids in their colors, the posters, the headshops, the botanicas, the joyerías, the boutiques, the Puerto Rican mothers on the stoops, the ball games in the streets.

  The second day she was sitting in Tompkins Square Park when she picked up a guy. They had pirogi and walked around. Then she went to his pad. He had shoulder-length wispy soft brown hair and a silky beard and gentle hands. He made love to her rather languidly, while her mind kept wandering to the pretty objects in the room. Still it was nice to have sex again. She took a bath in the kitchen and he washed her back. He told her that he was a film maker and if she waited till dark, he would show her the film he was working on.

  So she waited and they ate pumpernickel bread and peaches and peanut butter and chocolate-covered graham crackers. He went out for a while, and she turned the pages of his books full of stills from movies and washed her hair and looked at the phone and tried to think if there was anyone she wanted to call. No one.

  They turned on, and he pulled down black shades and set up the projector and started explaining. The film was full of out-of-focus shots of traffic and a child reaching for a ball in front of a fire and lots and lots of trees blowing their branches against blue skies and gray skies and night skies and the moon in the branches—and a girl with big breasts jumping rope. It all had something to do with the four elements and the Tao. He kept explaining and she watched it all patiently twice. Then they went to bed and she fell asleep and spent the night.

  In the morning, he went to work and she took another walk.

  He had made a date with her for later, but she knew she would not keep it. She had learned enough about his world to satisfy her mild curiosity. Handbills were up in the park saying that Shawn and The Coming Thing were giving a free concert that night.

  She saw a girl she thought she knew sitting in the sun. It wasn’t the same girl but they turned out to know a couple of people in common, so they traded stories and sat together. Joanna had loaded her sack with chocolate graham cookies and peaches, and Clare and she ate the
m. Clare told her Shawn only gave free concerts now and that he was beautiful and she would give anything, anything to shack up with him, just for one night.

  Clare said the new head scene was called bread and it was cheap. Only the Indians had it. They used it together. They were a sort of cult, and they looked out for each other. Clare had had bread once. It wasn’t like anything else. It didn’t space you out. There was a lot of fake bread—everything from smack to speed—but you could only get real bread from the Indians. The Indians hung together; they lived in communes and danced naked and wore old clothes. They were not supposed to spend money. Clare had been attracted to them, but it was really too grim, with not even being able to wear nice clothes. And everything was meetings, meetings all the time.

  Around suppertime, Joanna got hungry but Clare wasn’t interested in trying to hustle some food. Joanna arranged to meet her at the park before the concert, and headed back to the guy’s pad where she had left her sleepingbag the first night. The guy was home putting silicone on a new pair of boots, and they talked for a while and then he wanted to ball. He was older or else he acted older, and he didn’t move her. She said it was her period. He said that was okay with him. She said he would make her sore. She argued with him for a while. Finally she gave up and sucked him off.

  He told her a friend was coming on business and she should go for a walk. She said she would be back later, but she picked up her sack and her sleepingbag and made sure she had her toothbrush and soap. She couldn’t be so uppity as to say she’d never come back, but she’d try sleeping in a doorway first. So often she thought people were okay, when it only turned out that they’d been too busy to try to take anything from her.

  As she hiked toward the park with her roll on her back, she made little noises of displeasure and searched her teeth for stray hairs. Old creep. She hadn’t been using up anything of his, sleeping on his kitchen floor. Hadn’t even been eating there. The body tax. To be obliged to have sex with someone was about the only thing that could kill it.

  She wandered in the crowd till she found Clare. Then they sat on the grass on her bag. Another group was playing first as the twilight thickened, a hot June night smelling of tar and rubber, smelling slightly green and moist too under the trees, smelling of smoked dope and of gunpowder from the firecrackers kids kept setting.

  When Shawn came on she had a funny feeling. She made Clare get up and wriggle closer to the stage.

  “Isn’t he beautiful!” Clare moaned. “Oh god, so beautiful!”

  They were too close to the shell to sit but stood pressed in the crowd. The sexual vibrations moved from swaying hip to hip, from belly to buttocks. Sound like a medium denser than air pulsed around them, sound in which they stood and breathed and shuddered like undersea plants.

  Hey jack-in-the-box,

  prisoner in the dock,

  boy on a string, hey woman stuffed

  baby just born

  and already on something.

  Look around and open your eyes

  you can’t help but see it

  you don’t even have to try.

  Ashes on the wind, ashes, ashes.

  Their world has gone

  out of its mind.

  See how rich the old men grow.

  So sleek, what do they eat?

  See how fat the old men grow.

  We are their meat.

  Look around, you’re not blind

  you can’t help but see it

  you don’t even have to try.

  Ashes on the wind, ashes, ashes.

  Their world has gone out of its mind.

  The board of directors votes a raise.

  The general cracks a joke.

  Somewhere they’re burning children

  and the wind smells like smoke.

  “Oh god!” Clare groaned against her.

  “Hey?” Joanna poked her in the ribs. “Guess what?” At first she had not been sure. She never paid much attention to the hero pictures girls collected. Mostly at concerts she hadn’t been close enough to see if singers had two heads or three. Who cared? But craning her head up at the shell she could see him well enough. Clare was moaning, cupping her belly.

  “Hey? I know him, Clare. I met him.”

  “You’re stoned.”

  “No, I’m telling you. I didn’t know who he was. I mean, I said I was Joanna and he said he was Shawn, but I never thought twice. It was in a crash pad on C, and who’d expect him there? Then the pigs arrived and busted us all. It was last year when I was sixteen, late in the summer.”

  “How do you know it was him?”

  “I can see him with my own eyes. He’s not hard to recognize from last year. He looks thinner maybe.”

  “Maybe that was when he ran away from the Nineteenth Year. Did you really talk to him? Did he speak to you?”

  “Sure.” She looked at him standing with feet spread, guitar held across his crotch, head thrown back. “I screwed him.”

  Clare hit her in the arm. “Stop trying to put me on”

  “Don’t get excited. We slept together while we were both in that pad. Two or three days, I don’t remember.”

  “Oh, my god.” Clare thought for a while, poked her again. “So if you really know him, we can go see him afterward”.

  “Shit, Clare, he wouldn’t remember me. Somebody he balled a couple of times last year.”

  “Why not, if it really happened? You remember him”

  “Yeah, but I remember everything about that because the pigs really worked me over. They broke one of my teeth. See this one? It’s capped”

  “Was that the last time you ran away before this?”

  “Christ, no, you think I’m a Sunday tourist? Twice since then. But that was the worst beating I ever had, except for one time in the Women’s House of Detention. Then the screws beat me till I started bleeding, you know, as if I was having a period.”

  “Maybe you can’t have babies now.”

  “Well, who wants to? I’d be glad for that. But they wouldn’t do me the favor.” Joanna touched her hard belly.

  “I’d like a baby, if I could keep it. I have lots of ideas about how to bring it up, but they don’t like to let you keep a baby if you’re on your own. Which is a fat laugh. I hardly ever talked to my father in my whole life, except when I flunked something. I’d love to have a baby, if they wouldn’t take it away from me.”

  I met an ulcer

  coming down the street

  with a briefcase and a belly

  and a tie

  that said tweet tweet

  like a dying canary

  in a coal mine.

  Why do you hate me?

  Why do you hate

  what I do? I don’t do it,

  I won’t ever do it,

  to you.

  I met a plastic petunia

  pushing a baby carriage

  piled with bits of glass.

  She offered me a bite,

  I said, no thankful,

  and her great dane

  bit my ass.

  Why do you hate me?

  Why do you hate

  what I do? I don’t do it,

  I won’t ever do it,

  to you.

  I met a general with stars and bars

  driving his tank.

  He said, my boy come here, come here.

  Lie down in front.

  I want to test the brakes.

  I said no dice

  and he called me Queer.

  Why do you hate me?

  Why do you hate

  what I do?

  I don’t do it,

  I won’t ever do it,

  to you.

  Back behind them, people had started dancing in a rough circle. “Hey, Clare. Let’s go back and join them. I want to dance. It’s been so long, so long”

  But Clare was moaning and swaying and grinding her hips. Joanna nudged her harder. “I want to dance. Come on!” She couldn’t get through to Clare, so she edged
away by herself. Later on she’d find Clare or she wouldn’t. Anyhow, she didn’t want Clare pushing her to make a fool of herself with Shawn. Girls were strange. They thought getting fucked by somebody famous would electrify them. Somehow a white light would shine into their cunts and suddenly their lives would have meaning. The god would touch them and bring them into the sunshine. Then everybody would see who they were: secret princesses.

  Shawn had been all right but only half there, like somebody stoned. He was angry and raw and kept his thoughts locked in. He was like a dozen other boys, except for being better looking. She remembered that his eyes were a deep dark startling blue. He had used his tall lean athletic body well and he had a big prick. But the sex had been nothing special. His prick might be a yard long, but his mind was someplace else. His voice was unmistakable and cut through the electric flak. Big, powerful and golden it rose. But she couldn’t remember his speaking voice. Mostly he had mumbled. He was a man like a dozen others who had entered but not touched her. Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. She never pretended except when the powers had her entrapped.

  After her arrest, the cops had questioned her a long time trying to establish who she had been having sex with, and she remembered now that they had asked again and again about Shawn. She denied everything. She didn’t care if the doctor reported sperm in her. She went on denying. If anything had happened, it must have been when she was asleep and how could she know? That was all she would say and they could not crack her. She didn’t care whether they sent her to jail or home. Probably they’d been out to get an extra charge on him. She was glad she had not talked. He had his own problems. The radio didn’t play his records any more. He was blackballed.

  She pushed her way into the circle of dancers. First there was a rim of people watching. Then a slow circle moving. She could see now that kids came into the center to dance usually by ones but sometimes in couples or threes. When they came into the center, they would throw off their clothes and one of the people who seemed to stay there would gather the clothes into a pile out of the way. The kids seemed stoned as they danced, in intense and almost palpable vision.