by Marge Piercy
She worked the rest of the morning if not well, then steadily on the Meditation for Flute, Cello and Piano that was to be performed by Kyle McGrath, who was the principal flute with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, her friend Nita who played second cello with the BSO and a pianist who was an old boyfriend of Kyle’s. It was scheduled for performance late January in Boston, on the programme of a composers’ group she belonged to – a rough association of mostly men and one other woman aged twenty-five to forty who wanted to get their work out. She had a little grant that would pay the performers and since she would photocopy the parts, gave her a pittance. The group rented the hall. Now the pressure was on to get it done. At twelve, Willie brought her mail. He liked to be the one to go to the post office in town. It was a social occasion, a chance to see who was around and pick up local gossip.
The electric bill. Catalogues. An invitation to a reception following a violin recital at Jordan Hall in Boston. A letter from the Department of English at Rutgers, one Professor Bob Sanderson addressing Mrs Edelmann, a name she had never used. She had been born Dinah Adler and she remained Dinah Adler. It was true that Mark and she had married just before his second operation, to facilitate her position visiting in the hospital and because he was beginning to think about dying and wanted her rights to his work secured.
Indeed, it was about Mark. Received a grant from the Nicholson Foundation … ongoing revival of interest in the work of Mark V. Edelmann … establishing a chronology and definitive text for the poetry. Hope that you as literary executor will cooperate …
Her first impulse was to lose the letter at once and pretend it had never arrived. Revival of interest. Useful as a plastic wombat, souvenir of Melbourne. Still she was Mark’s executor and while that had meant only occasional annoyance during the past eleven years, lately the demands for access to Mark’s papers had been increasing in intensity, complication and frequency.
She caught a glimpse of herself through the bedroom door, reflected in the mirror there. Her teeth were bared. She looked like a cornered vicious animal. Cet animal est méchant. Il se défend. She could not believe in their interest in him, his ideas, his work. All they ever did while he was alive was throw him in the slammer, insult or ignore him. When he was dying and could have used encouragement, some sense of posterity and continuance, where the hell was this professor? Nor did she want to open those boxes in which the past was stored like a powerful genie of trouble and pain.
She put the letter not in the basket of bills and urgent correspondence beside her computer, but under the basket. Then Susan appeared in her city clothes, a dark green suit trimmed in black velvet that brought out the green in her grey eyes. Susan nudged Dinah upstairs and advanced on her closet. ‘Wear the maroon wool with the surplice top.’
Dinah obeyed, letting Susan pick out the earrings and the panty hose, but she balked at the shoes and put on boots instead. She grumbled about getting dressed up just to take her clothes off for the doctor, but she knew Susan would not enjoy herself if she did not feel they were an elegant couple. Dinah would never look elegant, but she let Susan dress her.
They took Dinah’s old Volvo, a once-pricey car meticulously kept up by whatever mechanic was the year’s wizard. She did not know what happened to mechanics elsewhere, but two years was the local tenure. After that, they became ballerinas or therapists or divers. They tended to be bright men who got bored. The Volvo sported a terrific tape deck and great speakers, for Dinah never regretted money splurged on sound. However, with Susan in the car, they would chatter the whole way.
‘What are you scared of?’ Susan asked. ‘We should have gone two months ago. Do you think something’s wrong?’
‘It’s boring to get pried open.’ She fended Susan off with a rap about spreading your legs for the ob-gyn lady, but her mind was elsewhere. On what she wasn’t thinking about. It did make her anxious. Going to the dentist was nervous-making, but on an immediate level, just like childhood: how many cavities? How much pain? Going to this doctor raised questions about her life she did not want to face. It was an instant bellyache, a tightening in the groin, the cold seep of guilt.
In Dr Bridey’s inner chamber, those issues she was fleeing materialized. ‘Dinah, don’t you think we should consider a sterilization procedure? Instead of taking the pill for two decades? I want you to come off for a year anyhow.’ Dr Bridey was a stringy woman in her late fifties, with grey into blonde hair like bleached oak. ‘The laparoscopy procedure is one I can do in my office, under a local.’
‘I don’t want to. Let me stay on just one year more. Just one.’
‘That’s irrational. Unless you do plan to have a child? How old are you?’ Dr Bridey squinted at the chart. ‘Thirty-eight. I assume not, then.’
‘I haven’t decided,’ Dinah squeaked. She could scarcely breathe.
‘Time will decide for you,’ Dr Bridey said with a wee grin. ‘Okay, Susan, your turn.’ However, she renewed Dinah’s prescription.
Susan, who had been sitting in the next cubicle, must have overheard. At supper in Legal Seafood, she said, ‘Why not have yourself sterilized? It’s a silly fear. Do you think you’d be less of a woman?’
Dinah put down her fork, her throat closing. ‘I haven’t decided.’
‘Well, Dinah, I’m not going to get you pregnant, and I know you wouldn’t suddenly decide to have a baby with Willie. That wouldn’t be fair.’
‘Well, it’d make more sense for all of us than doing it the turkey baster way with some random donor, don’t you think?’
Now Susan dropped her fork. ‘I raised two children. I had enough of diapers and rompers and play groups and PTAs. That’s not what I want from life, Dinah, and I’m shocked. You’re going through some phase. Really! Are you prepared to give up your music, your career?’
‘No. It would be hard. That’s why I haven’t.’
‘And that’s why you won’t.’ Susan picked up her fork again. ‘I know it’s sensible for us to split a half bottle, but I miss the dear old days when nobody thought twice about polishing off several bottles and zipping off home. I must say, sometimes I think the world gets drearier every five years!’
‘It does seem that way,’ Dinah said sadly, when she would normally argue with Susan. It was her way to try to be determinedly upbeat, her habit since childhood, since nothing in her life that was problematic or painful or disturbing was more than piffle by comparison with her father Nathan’s life. She could feel his heavy gaze upon her now. Did I survive for this? Oh, he was on her side with the music, yes, but he would not forgive if she did not bear a child. That he had been dead since she was thirteen did not relieve her of that gaze. A survivor can watch from the grave, she thought, as her father himself had never felt free of the regard of those who had not survived. All her life would be lived with some sense of that gaze, as some people’s might pass under what they felt as the eyes of God or history. It was not something she could make Susan understand. History and her father had their expectations of her. It was growing time to fulfil or permanently fail them.
Chapter Two
LAURIE
Laurie had had a bad day at work. Manning Stanwyck, who managed the Spring Street Gallery, and the artist whose show they were hanging, Carl Roper, were engaged in a war about what was to go where. In carting the heavy acrylic boards and canvases about, Laurie had pulled a muscle in her back and had a headache besides from Carl’s cigars. That she utterly despised Carl’s nasty nudes with automatic weapons did nothing for her temper. Sometimes she thought Manning, who was supposed to be a friend of her father’s but who had his resentments too, delighted in treating her as a slavey. What on earth was she supposed to be learning? The mentality of a scrubwoman? How to control the temper she had not inherited from her father? She felt unappreciated, underutilized, undernurtured. She also felt subtly tricked. Manning was supposed to be doing her a big favour, for which she was required to be grateful and enduring.
Then to top it all off, one of he
r absolute culture heroes Sean Corrigan came strolling in and pronounced that Carl had no idea at all how to display his work. It became evident that they were involved, but they were obviously getting on as badly as she was with Tom. She had seen Sean before, of course, on television, at an opening at the Whitney that Tyrone had finagled two invitations to, once when Sean had come along on a gallery visit with a collector who was thinking of buying the work of a friend. She admired his criticism so much she found her hands sweating onto the acrylic. She longed to say something that would make him look at her with those intense blue-black eyes, to see her. It would be so incredible, but by the time she formulated some sentence she could utter, Sean and Carl and Manning had swept off and Manning was motioning to her as to a slow dog, doing everything but whistle for her attendance. At last she managed to blurt out, ‘Mr Corrigan, I thought your column on Documenta was brilliant.’
‘Oh, did you attend the show?’
‘No, but …’
He turned away with an amused grimace. Her chance to impress him blown. Furthermore when she got out of the gallery finally, exhausted, the fine clear morning air had turned to six o’clock sleet. She could not get a cab to stop for her. Usually she walked to work in the mornings and returned on foot the twenty-odd blocks home from SoHo north and a bit west to her Chelsea apartment, but her back hurt, the slush soaked her Adidas and she shuffled down into the subway in bad humour.
Next week was Thanksgiving, when she and Tom always went to her mother’s. She would gladly have forgone that for Tom’s parents, but they lived in Santa Cruz and she could not get off the gallery for longer than a day during this busy time of year. She had thought of the job as a kind of toy job, what fun, working in a gallery, meeting other artists, getting inspired to do her own work; but it had turned out to be nothing of the sort. Manning expected her early, late and every day as his girl of all work.
Going to Mother’s always began well, with everyone on best behaviour, the spread splendid, gradually soured as her mother’s blood alcohol level rose and ended every year with Mother crying about her ancient history divorce and the dead end of her life and the lack of appreciation of her only daughter. Then Laurie would go home with Tom and he would take out on her the lack of pleasure of the evening.
One reason she could not quit the gallery (aside from Tyrone having got her the job) was because Tom had been fired eight months before when his publisher had been eaten by a conglomerate, and he had not found another position to his liking. Eight months was a long time to watch soap operas and pretend to be writing a film script. Lately she did not really want to go home at night any more than she wanted to go to work in the mornings.
I need a lover, she thought, not meaning it because the last thing she felt like was spending the effort to know another human being in full vulnerable openness. It seemed just too much work. Even with the subway she had to walk five blocks to her apartment, stopping to pick up deli for supper and a bottle of wine to bribe Tom into being nice to her tonight. Maybe we’ll make love, she thought, and allowed herself to fantasize about him in one of his better moods, playful, teasing, maybe even passionate. The supper had been selected with his preferences in mind, even though she knew just about everything she bought tonight was fattening and she had not even walked home. Fettuccini with pine nuts in a creamy sauce. Roast beef. Duck pâté. Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk. Sourdough French bread. A Beaujolais Nouveau. With sleet sticking to her lashes and her sneakers oozing, she nonetheless trudged more cheerfully along her block and up her slippery front stoep. Surely Tom would accept this offering and reward her with a good affectionate evening.
When she came in, dumping her wet gear in the foyer, he did not answer her call. Was he out? Asleep? She carried the food into the kitchen, put it on the black marble counter and stove that stood in the centre, called again and looked for a note. Could something have come up? A job interview? At seven in the evening, no way. ‘Tom!’ she bellowed again.
She was not completely disappointed, she realized, shoving the food into the refrigerator much too big for their needs. This kitchen seemed to have been designed for far more than the coffee-making or microwave defrosting they carried on in it. Tyrone had had it remodelled for them – all ash and glass, black and white marble – when they married. No doubt he imagined she would act like one of his wives and ‘entertain’. She felt Tyrone’s care for her, as if he had wished her marriage better than it had gone. If Tom was out, she’d just microwave a frozen diet dinner (atoning for her failure to walk home and the lunch she had eaten) and take a long hot bath. She’d stick an old Woody Allen or Hitchcock movie in the VCR, put her feet up and drink the wine herself. Or she’d watch one of those PBS specials she was always taping and forgetting, the programmes the VCR watched for her like a hired servant.
She went upstairs to the loft bedroom to change out of her wet clothes and run that bath. The shades were up, the room dark. She switched on the light and then she saw him lying on the bed. There was no moment when she thought he was sleeping. From the instant she saw how he was lying and the way his face was twisted, she knew he was either dead or teasing her, engaged in one of those vicious terrifying practical jokes he visited on her from time to time.
She did not scream. She shut off the light in a reflex of denial. Then she turned it on again and made herself approach him, managing to believe that he was fooling her, that he was playing dead. ‘Tom!’ she said sternly. ‘Stop it! I’ve had a rotten day. I brought you take-out, just what you like.’ Her voice trailed away. She stood over him, holding her breath.
His eyes were open and staring and his mouth was open too, his tongue thrust out. With great difficulty she made herself touch his cheek, gingerly. He needed a shave. His cheek was cold already. Then she screamed.
Chapter Three
DINAH
Dinah stood at the windows that overlooked the pond. She faced east across waters that were a light dusty blue flecked with white, shallow waves the wind scudded into dingy foam on the sandy shore before her. She was lighting Mark’s yahrtzeit candle and reciting the mourner’s Kaddish in Hebrew. ‘Yigadal veyitkadash shemei raba …’ The words came to her always in her father Nathan’s intonation, the vowels, the accent closer to Yiddish than the pronunciation from Hebrew school. Her father lit not one candle, but every year on Yom Hasho’ah, more yahrtzeit candles than she could count. Her mother always worried that the flimsy wooden house would catch fire and burn down. That day too her father always gathered with other survivors for a memorial or, some years, a protest. When Nathan spoke, she had felt proud of him and unworthy. He was a frail vessel of history and pain.
She could not say Kaddish in English, because the words would have bothered her. She did not believe in a personal god, only in her duty to light the yahrtzeit candle and say the prayer. Mark had been deeply religious, in that he had believed himself compelled to struggle for justice in the world, to engage in that repair of the world, tikkun, which is commanded to the just.
Susan had gone to a parochial school. Willie had been raised a Presbyterian. Sometimes Dinah felt lonely and strayed in her Jewishness, out here on this sand spit in the woods among gentiles. The damned professor from Rutgers was threatening to come during his Christmas vacation to get his hands on Mark’s papers, and she could not justly stop him. Mark had left her his papers, not to rot in boxes but because he believed his work would survive. A candle flickered in a window, visible to the gulls hurrying toward the ocean, a quarter of a mile past the trees on the far side of the big pond.
Outside Willie was chopping wood for all of them, the rhythmic movements of his long body elegant and efficient. How well he moved, always. Susan, up early for her, came out to scatter ground food for the birds and fill the feeders. A chickadee flew down to take seeds from her palm. She had trained them to come to her. Dinah could not help smiling at the sight. Susan’s auburn hair escaping from a mauve silk scarf, a long kimono in a peony pattern she had d
esigned wrapped round her, she looked ethereal in the orange light of the low sun, chrysanthemum bronze through the pitch pines. If Willie was elegance in motion, Susan was elegance itself, a beauty Dinah thought had only ripened over the last decade. Dinah herself was a bird of passage Susan had tamed to her hand.
She sat at her piano. Because of the dampness she tuned it frequently. Pianos were as individual as flutes, and this one was decidedly masculine, bearded, stocky, with a tendency to heroics. She called him Chester. She was not entirely satisfied with what she had done with the Meditation for Flute, Cello and Piano. It was still too thin. She would have liked to add an instrument or two, but she was confined by the commission. Which she was lucky to get. So often then the piece would be performed exactly once for an audience of three hostile critics, fourteen superior academics who thought you ought to be writing in their particular mode, a handful of musicians who might or might not be stuck in the nineteenth century and sombody who would be sure to come up afterward to demand what you thought you were doing and what it all meant. She could not think about that. Health lay in concentrating on the work itself, believing passionately that it would ultimately survive and reach an audience who would perform it, listen to it. Truly perceive the movement that was the music. She was making the cello part extra rich for Nita, trying to do it subtly so Kyle could not object. She wanted to show off Nita’s deep singing tones. But the piano part was the weak line, those ascending figures perhaps numbing instead of driving into the flute cadenza.
When she rose to stretch and looked out next, Willie had taken off his jacket and his sweater, in the heat of splitting the logs wth maul and sledgehammer. He wore a silk undershirt Susan had given him. Susan had discovered that silk long underwear was practical and pleasing. Their winter temperatures never sank below zero and usually hovered in the twenties. Watching his muscles hump and slide under the silk tee, she gloated on him. He was an amazingly good-looking man. Physical strength and gentleness of disposition made for a fine lover. Willie was obviously taking the day off. She should keep that in mind – unless Susan wanted. They communicated their sexual intentions differently, each of them, but usually not by words. Glances, smiles, an inclination of the body.