by Marge Piercy
Demanding privacy, asserting their needs as a couple would never have gone over in the context of what Corey was always saying publicly. She was sure Corey had understood what she was doing, but had not helped or said anything. Only he would point out to Shawn with pride, “Isn’t it a groovy bed? Joanna built it.”
After all, he had to be alone with her. He needed to dump out his troubles and his agonies, needed to cuddle up and be loved together again if he was going to be any use to any of them. He was a big baby, always hanging on her, grabbing at her, rubbing his face in her breasts, singing songs to her knees and her cunt and her wild red hair.
“Look how high the hair grows on your belly. All that stiff carroty hair. How come it grows so far up?” He lay like a sea urchin, all angles and bones and huge luminous black eyes, twisted around her, prodding at her, peering. “Who ever heard of a girl with so much hair sprouting out of her muff? You’re not a girl—you’re an orange polar bear. You’re made for fucking in a cold climate. You’re what those black boys need to keep them warm in the Catskills when the snow comes down.”
He lay on his back with his hands under his head and sang in his harsh wavering voice:
“Joanna has a hairy cunt.
It’s the kind of cunt I want.
I get on my knees and grunt
for a touch of Jo-Jo’s hairy cunt!”
He would drive her half crazy with hanging on her and teasing her. There was a greedy baby in him that wanted all her attention, all of the time, always. That could not bear for her to look aside, to turn her mind away, to take up a piece of work. That if they had to be separated for a day would invent a hundred ways to make sine her thoughts stayed with him—by picking a quarrel just before she went off to the far fields to harvest tomatoes, or just before the truck left for the city for provisions. That if she paid too much attention to anyone else would contrive to collapse suddenly and mysteriously ill, exhausted, seized by depression. That pushed her toward other people, but before she could make real contact, pulled her back.
She had her weapons. She made him laugh at his carefully acted-out agonies. She made him aware of manipulating his own moods, till he would sometimes stop and grin and say contritely, I’m trying to pick a fight, aren’t I? He would stop himself, and he was obviously grateful to her for the discovery that sometimes he could just stop. She had allies: His own enormous will to be good. His will to be good for her, for himself, for everybody. He would tell her that she was making him human. She would say that they were giving birth to each other. They were bringing each other up right this time.
She had thought she was free when she was Joanna on the loose, but she had been a sleepwalker. Nothing had touched her, not even the brutal beatings, never the easy in-and-out sex. Now she was Joanna alive. She was good because she could help him and he needed her. By his need she measured her strength. And yet … if tomorrow he did not need her, if they were in fact growing each other up, what would she do then? Then who would Joanna be? He would still be Corey the leader, but who was she? She could still judge herself mainly in negatives, she could make lists of what she was not, starting with the fact that she was not a lush waster like her mother, that she was not closed and scared and squashed mean like her father. More than Corey, much more, she had stood alone, she had made it on the streets, she had had no one to turn to. When she fell, there had been no one to catch her. There had been no benevolent guide on her trips. “Now I have you”
“Now you have the tribe.”
Yes, but how? She remembered Harley introducing a newcomer: “This is Ginny. She’s in charge of planting. Ned and Francine head canning. Anita’s running a sheep project. This here is Joanna, Corey’s girl.”
Of course most of the girls were just names: “Nancy, Lena, Sue, Gloria, Hilary … “ They got stuck with all the inglorious daily jobs that made the place run. Unless a girl thrust herself forward insistently or forced herself into the warriors, she could spend her tribal life washing dishes and peeling potatoes and changing babies. A few men like Shawn disliked the sexual roles and consciously crossed over to help care for the babies. But the girls who did not push hard, found themselves quietly pushed down. Joanna herself was no nonentity. Indeed, everybody knew her not only on the farm but around the country: but they knew her as Harley had introduced her. “This here is Joanna, Corey’s girl.” She was brighter than Ginny, for instance: collards were a kind of cabbage, my eye.
After she had found out that Ginny used to be Corey’s girl in high school (not from him of course), she had tried to get to know her. She had thought it would be easy to form a sort of dominant friendship with her, because Ginny was pliable. But Ginny bent and sprang back. She listened and asked questions, but she did not confide.
Joanna tried to get her to talk about the other men she had been involved with, to lead up to Corey, but Ginny was as blank as paper. She would say only that she no longer felt close to Billy, that he had gone away into something where she would not follow him.
About Shawn, she answered, “It’s pretty, but it’s like water. He’s my friend. Shawn is changing every day—don’t you see? A little piece of him is way back in something else, and another piece is someplace we haven’t got to yet.”
Ginny’s way of turning off her curiosity. Then she looked straight at Joanna and said, “Someone’s been telling you history, um? Well, that didn’t mean a thing. I hated myself in those days, and Corey hated himself, so you wouldn’t expect that we could mean much to each other.”
“For me, that’s what it was like before the Indians. I mean, fucking guys when I felt like it or when it was easier to do it than not to. Before Corey, I don’t think it ever meant anything to me.”
It was midmorning and they were standing on a slight rise that separated the rows of garden vegetables from the stubble of the harvested cornfield—a rise in which one of the security tunnels had been dug. Ginny frowned and turned from her. Made a slow circuit of the horizon. Turned back with her face calm and blank again. “I wasn’t saying that Shawn or Billy meant nothing to me. Because you have an old-fashioned type of possessive relationship, you can’t imagine you can care for a man without feeling stuck to him” Ginny spoke softly, but Joanna felt as if she had finally knocked on stone in the girl. “What happened with Billy was very important to me. He was the first person I ever met who dealt with my brain at all. He didn’t want me to love him particularly, he didn’t even particularly want to have sex with me. He wanted to be admired, but he had only learned to be admired for doing certain sort of inhuman things well. He wanted to be seen as a human being. I could understand, because that was what I wanted, too. But I was so crippled that I couldn’t imagine anybody would have a reason to pay attention to me for myself.”
“Girls are brought up to feel that way.”
“Oh, yes. Well, my head was full of sand. I knew that the ideal girl is frigid—attractive and full of guile. She’s an actress before anything. She pretends a certain response but feels nothing that she can’t control. But I was tickled pink if a boy paid attention to me. I did everything but wag my tail. So I was an easy lay. And I despised myself.”
“I wasn’t into the guilt thing. I just sort of took the meaninglessness for granted until I met Corey”
“But to me that’s the same old bag. Taking your meaning from outside. Saying, he loves me, so I’m real after all”
“I don’t think that having a relationship here implies the things that marriage meant outside.”
Ginny gave her that bland impermeable look. “I guess I do think so. Possession is possession. You think that because I don’t live with one or the other of them and because I don’t say that Billy or Shawn or anybody else is central in my life, that those are just casual lays. I think in a way I see where they are and what they’re into clearer than anybody could who was involved in ‘having’ either of them”
Realizing they had come to an edge, they both drew back.
Still she recognize
d that Ginny had done important work, and she had not. Joanna tried reorganizing the food-ordering procedures, but that brought her into conflict with the kitchen staff and she backed off. She had either to accept an area of responsibility and carry it through, or stay out. Something not staked out yet. Then she worked up an orientation course for newcomers.
She tried to give each new person a clear picture of where everything was and what everybody was up to on the farm, and a sense of how the project fitted into the over-all strategy of the tribes. She wanted each one to have a sense of possibilities, to have a fair chance of choosing work he or she would like, so the newcomer wouldn’t get stuck digging holes or washing dishes because he was a new kid. At least people who arrived in the next month didn’t think of her as just Corey’s girl. She had a little following among them—they might come to her for information or advice or to rap. They listened to her ideas with the kind of attention they’d show to any of the accepted leaders.
Suppose she’d joined up with the Indians on her own because she’d been hanging around the Lower East Side that June. Surely she would have joined. She’d been attracted by the dancing and curious about the bread. Suppose she’d met Corey after she had already come into the tribe. Would she have been a warrior? An organizer? She imagined herself doing something really tough on her initiation: some act of exemplary and dangerous terrorism that everyone would admire. Of course they would have ended up together anyhow. Who else would put up with Corey, really? Who else could break through all his nonsense and touch him? No, they had to be together, but imagining that coming about in different ways was an interesting fantasy. She played with it when she was taking her turn on the kitchen work she hated. The one good thing about traveling was that she got out of it.
“Suppose we’d met the first time I ran away from home?”
“You’d have hated me.” He made a crooked face. “I was awful!”
“But that’s scary: that we could meet and not recognize each other.” If they had met, would Joanna be different now? Would Corey? What did that mean?
“You were the captain’s daughter. I was a juvenile delinquent.”
“I was not! I was a runaway.” She squinted in the mirror, trying to make her face old. Where would the wrinkles be? She drew her face haggard and called him to look. Instead, he made his sinister half-breed villain faces. He would not interest himself in how she would look in thirty years.
In November they traveled out on Long Island. A tribe was occupying a colony of fancy beach houses—eight kids who seemed to have known each other for years. One of the houses belonged to the girl Gisele’s parents, and it turned out they were there with at least tacit permission, although her family pretended not to know.
Joanna was quickly put off by the scene. The boys and girls, pretty and sleek and healthy and by no means uniform in their dress, reminded her of sea birds that shrieked and mewed along the beach and went diving to seize some scrap of garbage. They lived in one house at a time until they had broken everything in it and filled it with garbage—until nothing worked and everything was clogged and fouled. Then they abandoned that house and moved on to the next. They played cards and tried on clothes they found in the closets and watched television and chased each other around the dunes and played touch football. They had a supply of bread, though they did not manufacture it, but they used whatever they could find on the market, and they had a whole pharmacy of pills and powders. The communal dance was bluntly an orgy, and both Corey and she stayed out of it. It did not follow their council, because the group had little to decide. There was almost no work to apportion, besides minimal cooking and fetching provisions. They were the children of abundance turning plastic plenty into waste.
Corey watched it all for a couple of days before he began to try to talk to them. Joanna was plain disgusted. She found having to maintain any pretense that these were Indians more than she could manage.
Corey directed most of his arguments at Gisele, the girl who had started the group. She was a willowy tanned ash blonde with a neighing laugh, somehow an inordinate number of shining white teeth and the facility for looking straight through Joanna. He based his approach on trying to show Gisele how they had failed to stop consuming, and that that was the basis of their continuing class relationship. They were still wanting the same things; they had just found an easy way to get them for a while. They had dropped out of the service mechanism, but they were still firmly plugged into wanting and belonging to the same shiny things that the society had been using all along to manipulate them. They were not making their own culture. They were still plugged into the spectacle. They were not free. They were not yet Indians.
Gisele listened, claiming that they were twice as free because they could freely use the society to support themselves. It was a true guerrilla warfare situation, Gisele said, in that they were living off the countryside.
You have not yet broken your ties, Corey said back. Guerrilla warfare, nonsense: this is only a family quarrel. You are not working in a counter economy, you are not recruiting. You have not yet left home.
Joanna spent her time sitting out on the dock freezing in the jagged wind, wrapped in a blanket over her coat and watching the gray waves and the white birds. The fourth day in the afternoon, Corey came and plunked down beside her. He spat into the waves and spat again. “Shit”
She looked at him sideways. His face was soft and sullen and yet amused. Only a slit of black eye showed under lowered lashes. Lip thrust out. Slightly swollen. “My, my! What have you been doing with yourself?”
“So, she got me.”
“Was there any doubt? Isn’t that what we were waiting for? Can we leave these decadent little creeps now?”
So Corey for once gave up on a would-be tribe, and they left. They talked to the Suffolk County tribe that was making their bread for them, and discovered they didn’t like the beach folk either: felt used and patronized. They cut off the bread supply to the beach and let them be.
Corey was in a sluggish depression for two days. He finally told her what had happened. He had gone into the john to piss, not shutting the door because he never did. Gisele had followed him in and as he was finishing, she had helped herself to his prick. He had not been able to keep an erection, with her half seated upon the laundry hamper stuffed with used towels, and she had mocked him. That had made him angry enough to harden, and the act had been completed upon the lowered toilet seat. It was his opinion that that was where it belonged. As he left her, he had reached over and flushed the toilet to demonstrate his feeling.
“Oh, how can you be such a hypocrite? What else were we waiting for?”
“I was trying to get through to her. She had enough guts to drop part way out.”
“So why didn’t you go on trying to get through to her?”
“Because I’m not a machine. I don’t like to feel used”
And he hated to be laughed at, she thought. It felt good to be back at the farm. It felt good to be among their own people. To see the dance as it was supposed to be, instead of a crude parody. Though the dancing could frustrate her at times. Often it was just a way for Corey and her to express affection: no different from couples dancing at a high school prom, in a way. Corey had a responsibility to the ritual at the same time, and had to be keeping an eye out for people whose visions frightened them, for hysterics and bad trips. He was good at calming. She suspected that he played around with hypnotism in inducing or turning off visions. She suggested as much, and he got angry and scornful. “Hypnotism! What kind of bunk is that? You’re just not the visionary type, so you have to think there’s some sort of hocus-pocus going on”
He would use a bead necklace or a feather to send them under, she was sure, and his calm voice to call them back. Sometimes he would dance alone, lost in a savage agony in-turned and burning. If she danced off then by herself, he would grow angry. Indeed, his dances were regarded with respect and people gave him room. She did not like them, but she kept her min
d off that. Something violent and awkward and exhibitionistic made her want to turn away.
When she danced, she danced to a pattern that pleased her. She worked out steps that were graceful or sensual or amusing and then improvised against that pattern. But Corey would not let her improvise against him. Once in a while dancing with somebody else, she would really get going. Then she would feel a sense of continuity in being Joanna. How often she had danced alone in her room. For a while she had had ballet lessons, when her father had been assigned to Fifth Army Headquarters in Chicago. Though she had started out way behind the other girls, she was naturally well coordinated. But the teacher never made her a favorite. Madame LeBoeuf had said that there was something coarse in her movements. Too much earth. More fire, more air!
She was a much better dancer than Corey, but he wouldn’t admit it. Sometimes when he was gone for the evening, she danced and danced. Even with Shawn: he was graceful and clever, and they improvised along a fine thread of connection. There were other good dancers, and those nights she would dance with all of them. Once in a while Corey would be in a calm laissez-faire mood, and then she could do the same while he was present.
Naturally, the sexual dimension was missing. He would say, “You can be with somebody else if you want to. We don’t own each other” Sometimes when he was high or feeling his charisma, or conversely when he was depressed and wanting to prove himself, he would dance a lot with others, mostly girls, but also those mocking competitive prancing duels with other warriors. But always the time came when he turned and collapsed, pulling her to him from across the room, from whomever she was with or whatever she was into.