by Marge Piercy
‘No!’ she said to Figaro, meeting his golden stare. He was sitting by the door expecting to go out. ‘You don’t understand. Drunk nincompoops with shotguns and chewing gum for brains are running around spraying ooo pellets through the woods. None of us go out. Not today, not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow. Four more days. Some cats live in apartments in New York City and never go out at all.’
Figaro lifted his tail and mimicked spraying the wall, watching her as she charged him. At the last moment he flattened himself and disappeared under the couch. Dinah identified with him completely. She was already suffering cabin fever, and she knew at some point, danger get stuffed, she would go into the woods and walk. It was more than a physical need.
At noon she called Johnny, who had been named Siobhan, pronounced Shavahn by nobody except Susan. Johnny had been in middle school when she had renamed herself. Susan never called her anything except Siobhan. ‘Hi, Johnny.’ She realized it was eleven in Minneapolis. ‘Did I interrupt you? It’s me, Dinah.’
‘Hi, Dee-Di. Naw, I’m up and framing madly for a friend’s opening. I’m going to help him hang his show day after tomorrow. What’s new in the woods?’
She filled her in, finishing, ‘Are you coming home for Christmas? I had various ideas for making jolly.’
‘Home is here, I am home, and no, I can’t get away. I’ll come in the summer, I promise.’
When she entered Susan’s bedroom that afternoon, Susan was unwrapping fabric samples that had come back to her, fabrics she had designed for the New York house she free-lanced for. If the colours had turned out as she had imagined, then she would be in a good mood. Susan’s designs were vivid, handsome. They were based on what she saw around her, heightened and stylized. Dinah admired one particularly striking pattern of dark, dark green, scarlet and white. ‘Poison ivy in the fall,’ Susan said, holding out her arms to Dinah. ‘You really do like it? You don’t think it’s too weird, red and green, not Christmassy or chintzy?’
Dinah insisted how much she liked the fabric, again and again, until Susan seemed satisfied. Susan’s soft cool cheek pressed against hers with a scent of lemon verbena. It was a Christian Dior perfume, but to Dinah it smelled just like the herb in her garden. Dinah began to melt through her belly, that tightening and loosening at once, but then she became aware Susan was not responding. In disappointment she released Susan and stepped back. How could she break through to her? It was becoming a problem.
‘Come look what I found at the thrift shop.’ Susan adored poking through other people’s clothes. It was a bonus when she found old fabrics that gave her ideas, or when she found little presents for herself or Willie or Dinah, presents that did not count as extravagances because they were accompanied by a recitation of how little she had paid for them. ‘Just two dollars for this scarf! Just four dollars for this blouse!’ Now she was holding up a bed jacket quilted of heavy blue satin. ‘Isn’t this adorable? Bed jackets are out of style, but I love them. My shoulders freeze. They’re sensational for reading in bed, for proper lolling. Look at this blazer. Come, try it on.’
Dinah loved being invited into Susan’s room – which is how she always thought of that bedroom, even though Willie slept in it nightly and stored his clothes there. It did not look like Willie’s room; the livingroom downstairs was more his province, as was the kitchen. No, this was Susan’s room, with pale apricot walls and perpetual June at the windows in a print of pea blossoms and hummingbirds, with a milky green muslin coverlet heaped with pillows of velvet, damask, satin. It was the room of a beautiful woman who fantasized beauty and made beauty. The king-sized bed suggested a canopy, because a tiny print climbed the wall behind it and spread out on the ceiling. In the summer a fine mosquito net hung from a hook mounted there and the big bed became a gossamer tent in a mirage.
Everywhere that Dinah took the time to examine was some object Susan had found or bought or been given or made: a tiny vase of cobalt blue glass Willie had dug up from an abandoned dump with strawflowers from the summer still in it or a tin clay squatting woman Johnny had made in high school or a swallowtail butterfly chrysalis Dinah had picked up. Everything was in the right place. It was one of Susan’s artefacts, this room, as much as any of her designs for drapery or dress fabric, or her own clothing designs. Susan drank beauty the way nectar was drunk by the hummingbirds she adored, planting trumpet vine, red honeysuckle, cannas for them.
They played try-on in front of the triple mirrors in Susan’s room. If she counted the triple mirror as three, Susan’s room boasted six mirrors, more than the rest of the rooms and Dinah’s house combined. They were high school girls giggling over clothes. They gossiped and drank tisanes and lay on Susan’s enormous bed. Both worked as volunteers in the town library one night a week, one of the true nerve centres of local life, and they caught each other up on what they had learned. ‘The Parkers are reading books on Egypt. I think they’re taking a cruise this winter up or down the Nile – I never understand which is up and which is down when a river runs north?’
‘Ginger Dove took out Moby Dick. I don’t think she’s read a book since Dick and Jane and see Spot run. Maybe she thinks it’s the story of a penis.’ Susan’s grey eyes flashed wickedly as she batted her lashes.
‘Hmmm.’ Dinah frowned. ‘I remember years ago Wendy kept it out for a whole year until we practically had to send the fire department for it.’
‘And then Carolyn Rindge. Just when she started chasing the Captain around. After he and Wendy broke up. Carolyn’s been taking out books on natural childbirth. Who do you suppose is the lucky daddy?’
‘He waited tables at the Inn last summer. Do you think the Captain and Wendy have split for good?’
‘For good or ill, it’s so. Do you think he makes them read it?’
‘Or he talks about it. Fascinating. Do you suppose that’s really it? The cause of a run on Melville?’ Dinah carried the electric kettle into the bathroom to refill and plugged it in again, letting herself drop back against the heap of pillows, each in a different fabric case.
‘Maybe he gives them a test before he’ll take them to bed.’ Susan giggled. ‘I used to have a crush on my English professor when I was in college, and I’d worry that I didn’t sound literary and grammatical enough.’
‘Where’s Toby living now that his house has been taken and sold?’
‘I don’t have any idea … I suppose he must have rented a place?’ The kettle was boiling and Susan slid off the bed to make tea.
Dinah could remember her first joy when she had fallen in love with Susan, perhaps a month into the affair that had not promised anything in particular when she lurched into it: the joy of suddenly realizing that more than another bed partner she had a friend, a woman in some ways like and in most ways different from herself, but there for her in a daily and intimate and all-encompassing way. She had someone to gossip with, to mend with, to switch clothes and earrings and all the little silly things she had done with Nita when they were roommates and going to Juilliard, with the other women in the band when she had played in the Wholey Terrors. They cut each other’s hair. They talked about which shampoo to use. They discussed whether Susan should dye her hair redder. They worried about their weight and they rated the men they knew. She had female friendship laid on like pure water from the well, something precious and daily and comforting as milk, something as intoxicating and joyful as wine.
While the tea was brewing, Susan drifted toward the dormer window. ‘Isn’t it disgusting? Look at them. Wouldn’t it be fun to drop something on their heads? We could stuff them as a fountain. Three hunters peeing in bronze. Let’s tell Willie to cast it.’
Dinah looked. Three hunters in bright orange were standing side by side to piss into the pond about a third of the way between the new house and Tyrone’s. They came this week to shoot the small Cape deer. In their fluorescent orange shells, they looked like walking neon pumpkins, squat, obese. She decided she would go off to the town where they did their sho
pping, fifteen miles away, and find a present for Susan. Something that would make her feel cherished. At the florist, she found an amaryllis that was supposed to open apricot, in time for the holidays.
When she got back with the gift, she noticed Willie standing on the pier gazing at the pond. She had become involved first with Susan, during one of Susan’s periods of intense discontent and ferment that long ago fall when Dinah had returned from New Mexico to reopen the house, closed after Mark’s death. Dinah had taken up Susan with little reflection because Susan was needy and there. Susan had never been with a woman before, but the idea was in the air, something a number of married and unmarried women she knew had done during the past seven or eight years. Dinah had had women lovers. She was moved by something inside a person, as if certain people had a magnet embedded behind the eyes and in the solar plexus, regardless of sex or body type.
She had been in a predatory phase, taking and trying new lovers as she might pick up a new instrument and test its capacities. It was several months after she was thoroughly in love with Susan that she had become involved with Willie, almost accidentally, almost to keep Susan, to bribe him. And found to her astonishment that she liked Willie better in bed than she liked Susan. He was more fun. He was at his best then, the physical Willie. She remained closer emotionally to Susan, who was nine-tenths emotion. Willie was remote on that level. Words were not his means of communication. Touch was.
So she went into his studio and put another log in the stove and gave it a stir. She sat cross-legged on the cot and waited. Willie came in whistling something tuneless, smiled as he saw her. He got the idea at once and began undressing as he walked toward her. He said nothing. Neither did she but she too began to smile. She suspected it would be a feral smile, if anybody saw it beside the two of them. Put the mind out-of-doors the way some people put their cats out. Although his instincts and reflexes were good, he was the least self-critical and reflective person she had ever been close to. But when she put her hands on Willie and lay down to his hot smooth strong body, the good muscles that came from chopping wood three hundred days of the year and from his own work too, when she walked into his body and took him into hers, it was better than words and better than emotion. It was, the way music was. It filled up the void. It pushed anxiety for her life and her work back beyond the lighted circle of her attention. It would be so easy to make a baby, she thought as their bellies rubbed. But Susan had to agree first.
Dinah cooked pasta with their own hot tomato sauce frozen from the summer and a little hamburger. Willie and she alternated cooking. Susan was much neater than the other two and compulsively cleaned and straightened, but she hated to cook. At supper, Willie had news from town.
‘Somebody’s shooting at the hunters,’ he said. ‘Somebody’s been shooting over their heads with a rifle. The police have been around asking questions. At first they thought the hunters were drunk. I mean, they were drunk, but somebody is shooting to scare them.’ Willie ate as much as the two women combined, but he never gained weight. He burned it up. Dinah loved to watch him eat. He ate with real pleasure, never just shovelling the food in, but savouring it without ostentation or self-consciousness. His hands doing any task from slicing bread to making love were strong, shapely, profoundly sexual. He had long fingers but the palms of his hands were massive.
Susan had news too. ‘Tyrone called this afternoon. He’s coming up for Christmas, definitely. He wants us to open his house, turn the water on, get some wood in. He’s bringing Laurie. She’s extremely depressed.’ Susan made her grey eyes large and waited for them to beg her for information. Even in winter a sprinkling of freckles lay like paprika on her pale pink skin.
‘That jerk Tom left?’ Dinah guessed.
‘He killed himself! Not intentionally, of course. It was a drug overdose. It turns out that Tom was a cocaine addict and Laurie didn’t even know it! Isn’t that a ghastly story? She found his body in their bed when she came home from work.’
‘She must be a little dense,’ Dinah said. ‘How could she not know?’
‘How could you tell?’ Willie asked. ‘Would you know if I was?’
Dinah laughed sharply. The idea of Willie as any kind of addict was absurd. He no more needed stimulants than Bogey or Figaro did. Natural vigour rose from him like steam from a fine horse that has run well. ‘How come Tyrone is asking us to turn his house on? He always has the younger Dove boy, Ozzie, working for him.’
‘Ozzie’s working for Allie at the doctor’s house – you know, the Captain’s,’ Willie said. ‘The Doves are making a bundle. Ozzie’s getting married on it.’ Willie was friendly with all the guys who worked construction. They respected him more than many of the other artists. They knew he was a superior carpenter and they saw his sculpture as fine construction too. They had seen too much art to be bothered by abstract shapes or high-tech lines. When Willie and Susan needed a new well, Bud the well-driller had traded them the job for a small piece of Willie’s he wanted for his new house.
‘So can’t Tyrone hire some other kid? How did we get drafted?’
‘Dinah, don’t be unfeeling.’ Susan shook her finger with its rings of gold and jade. ‘A friend in need.’
Christmas was not a big holiday for Dinah, but it was for Susan; Dinah had been thinking how to make it especially fine for her. She had tried to reach Jimmy in Seattle, but the number had been disconnected. Now her plans were swept away. Tyrone would take over everything.
‘Have you heard from Jimmy?’ she asked them, but dubiously. If he was in trouble, Jimmy was more likely to call her than his parents and more likely to ask her to break bad news to them.
‘Not since maybe a month ago,’ Susan said. ‘I wrote him. I like the children to come home for the holidays.’
‘I have something you’ll like,’ Dinah promised over coffee and went running across to her house to fetch the amaryllis in a pot. Dinah found them more strange than beautiful, a being from a science fiction planet, but Susan liked them for their out-of-season exoticism, their huge naked flowers without leaves to soften them. ‘It should bloom before Christmas.’
‘What colour will it be?’ Susan flushed with pleasure.
‘A sort of apricot pink.’ Like Susan herself, Dinah thought.
‘I’ll put it in the bedroom next to my workbench, where I can watch it.’
It was the fifth day of deer hunting season. The afternoon before it had snowed lightly. Dinah could no longer endure being housebound. She shut in the cats and did not take Bogey, as any animal would be in more danger than she considered herself to be. She carried a broom, for she meant to sweep any tracks of deer she found or stomp them out with her own. It was one of her little tasks to erase deer tracks before and during hunting season, even though it meant for that period walking with her head down instead of looking around. Dinah had certain religious duties that visited themselves upon her, for instance taking turtles safely out of the road at mating and egg-laying season every year. Feeding the birds even during blizzards and when it was blowing from Canada was another.
At the top of the ridge that lay beyond the pond and the old house, she sat on a fallen pine and listened attentively. Hunters to the west. Shots beyond the road. Two dogs barking furiously from the dunes. She made her way down off the ridge, bushwhacking through the oak woods. Finding a deer trail she walked on it, destroying the tracks. Two of them, one bigger. Even with her extra effort, she moved quietly. She liked to move well in the woods, not disturbing the other animals more than she must. She liked to see them. She needed to. It was a passion she kept to herself, as she did when she found a fox den or even a racoon tunnel.
Thus it was that she climbed out of the kettlehole to another slope and saw beneath her a man lying flat on his stomach sighting down the long hollow where the three orange hunters were arguing. He was slight and wearing old fatigues. His hair was black and covered his nape. She crouched and then quietly she worked her way off the ridge through the kettlehole and back
the way she had come.
Now she knew who was shooting at the city hunters, but it was not something she was about to share with even Willie or Susan. It was Toby Lloyd, whose house the rich doctor was gutting. She had recognized him lying below her and she had even seen the M-1 rifle in the house no longer his. Toby was exercising his hunting skills on the hunters, although so far he had not killed any. She doubted he would, but she was not sure. It was in any event Toby’s business.
Soon she heard voices and hid. Even the winter woods offered sufficient cover if you knew the lay of the land and where the thickets remained impenetrable to a casual gaze. If she made an awkward noise, she might be shot, but she found herself happy, hiding like a deer in the thickets and watching the hunters. She might be a little crazy, and so might the Captain, but the hunters were completely crazy running around spewing beer cans and emptying their shotguns into trees and neighbour’s dogs. The light was fading grey and ashy. They walked out of her sight, but she could still hear them.
Once they had made their way out in the direction of the road, she rose. Willie was cooking his special fried chicken tonight. It was four but dark. She made her way down to the pond by its glint among the trees and then padded along the shore home. Her house was unlit.
She had a sense of someone looking at her through the livingroom windows. It was a familiar sense, one lined with pain. The last winter when Mark could no longer walk with her, often she had returned from a hike designed to wear herself out to find him sitting without lights watching darkness claim the world, waiting for her but busy, very busy dying. He would have understood her walking over the deer tracks; he would have understood Toby defending the woods and deer from city hunters in their neon gear. Mark had been a deeply political man, fire out of rock, a slight body housing fierce passions.