by Marge Piercy
In another sense the smiling faces in the post office were irrelevant, because the music the band played was not her music and not much good. What mattered to her music happened in Spoleto and Ann Arbor and Lenox and New York and what she did locally was diddling.
She got stuck behind a pensioner who drove ten miles an hour along the highway, so Jimmy was outside with the groceries when she pulled up on Main Street. ‘You owe them two eighteen,’ he said as he got in. ‘Lucky they remembered me.’ His ebullience was a little dimmed. Hard travelling. He had his mother’s hair, shock of reddish waves, and her fine pinkish complexion, but he was built tall and lean like Willie and had his brown eyes. He was quite gorgeous and quite conscious of it, the way a woman would be who had spent her adolescence in braces. His own torments had been skinniness and acne. Now his complexion was smooth and a couple of years of weight lifting had given him beauty and confidence.
‘Of course they remember.’ She leaned over to kiss him. After all, she was ‘from away’ in the local vernacular, but he was native, had grown up and gone to school here. He would always belong. In Souza’s they would put his shortages on a tab and the liquor store would extend him credit, if need be.
‘Home for the holidays?’ she asked innocently.
‘Sure, I always spend my last dollar crossing the continent because I’m so sentimental. You want to hear it all fast?’
‘Let me know what I’m going to be dealing with, kid.’
‘I thought I’d come back and marry you, before I got in more trouble.’
‘That’s a great idea if you weren’t already married. Come on what’s up? Or down. More like it.’
‘We lost the whole thing. We were making a go of it, but suddenly the money was melting away. Then we caught Jackie cooking the books. Lisa and I started fighting all the time, and then everything fell apart – the restaurant, us, my life. It’s all over. My life burned down to the ground and I have to start over. And I don’t know how.’ Jimmy’s voice died away. Then he said perkily, ‘That’s all the news from this end. How’s yourself?’
‘Most small businesses go belly up, no shame attached.’ Dinah turned off the highway onto the minor road that led to the ponds and eventually to the ocean. ‘I thought you and Lisa were having a baby?’
‘We are. She still is, but she’s counting me out now.’
‘So what are you doing here? Why didn’t you stay and fight?’
‘Fighting’s all we’ve done for months. I don’t remember how it was when it was good. I can’t even remember why I wanted her. Can we talk about something else?’
‘So far it’s been a mild winter. I just harvested my last savoy cabbages last week and I’ve still got arugula and escarole and bok choy …’
‘How are they? Is she okay? Her letters have been weird.’
‘Weird, how?’
Jimmy shrugged. ‘Weird bitchy. What are you doing with your life, all that. I don’t need it. I spend too much time trying to figure out what I’m doing with my life. I feel paralysed with trying to figure it out. I need to lick my wounds and sleep for about six months.’
‘When is the baby due?’
‘May. It was Lisa’s idea anyhow. Look, if she asks me, I’ll come back. I’ll try again. But I can’t sit there waiting for her to change her mind.’
Pulling into the driveway between both houses, she sighed. With Jimmy there was always one more layer to peel on the onion. The story would come out gradually. She hoped he wasn’t finagling to stay with her. The grant bought her time and the necessity to produce the big piece commissioned under it. No, Willie and Susan were going to have to fit him into their house. Woodsmoke was coming from Willie’s studio, so they must be back. ‘Go on in and say hello. I’ll come by around five to start supper. I’ll make oyster stew. We can start with ten on the half shell. I know how you miss them. Willie and I went oystering Saturday and there’s still two huge bags.’
She gave him another quick kiss and ducked into her house. She looked at her morning’s work as if it had just arrived in the mail from an enemy. Then she put on her pea coat to walk her sudden agitation away, following a network of trails that led toward the ocean. That was what she needed. To stand on the top of the dunes, gaze at the blue-black, white-toothed winter ocean climbing the sky and get sandblasted by the long rough wind, all the smells of the indoor winter blown from her. The winter tides and early storms had already torn away at the dunes and the shelf, leaving the narrow bench of winter beach in a strip along the exposed cliffs.
She could feel her mind opening and the nodes of her spine vibrating in resonance. When she was cold and clean through and through, she picked her way across the wide valley behind the last dune, hills and hollows bristling with poverty grass and golden heather, bayberry with tiny grey-green berries the yellow and black warblers ate, rosa rugosa with its big vermilion hips wizened by cold, tiny twisted old oak trees no bigger than beach plum bushes, blueberry bushes nine inches high. As she topped a rise, she smelled woodsmoke. Curious, she bore left on a trail she had not used in years, winding through wild grape into the pine and oak. She could not smell woodsmoke any longer but the trail had been walked lately and was less faint than the last time she had followed it. It did not threaten to peter out. Instead it wound through the woods, skirted a white cedar swamp, then climbed a ridge. Below her was a kettlehole from which the smoke was snaking.
An old house stood there, just two rooms she remembered from exploring it, with an old rounded roof and a stone chimney. Now someone had fixed it up weather tight. Had added a porch, a glass greenhouse lean-to and put up a shed. There are styles in carpentry, signatures that another carpenter will recognize. Toby had built that shed; it was almost identical to the one he had knocked up in his old yard. So this was where he was living. She became aware he was looking at her through a window. She waved and turned away at once, lest he think she was spying, which of course she was. Exercising her damned curiosity.
She heard his steps behind her on the path and had a moment of indecision that surprised her. She wasn’t afraid of him, surely. Why that quiver of unrest? Perhaps because she had spied on him twice now inadvertently, and that was never a wise idea. She had seen him lying on his belly sighting down a rifle at three hunters. She had no idea how the loss of his house had affected him, but she doubted it had filled him with joyful goodwill.
She halted and turned. He was coming fast. Toby was of middling height and compact build. He moved quietly and quickly as a bobcat. His hair was dark, but his eyes that met hers steadily as he caught up were pale blue in a face that still had the leathery tan of a fisherman.
‘Looking for me?’ He was not smiling.
She realized he might have seen and followed her tracks the day she had observed him shooting at the hunters. She nodded and did smile, what she hoped was not a placating smirk. ‘I had no idea you were in the …’ she hesitated to call it a shack ‘… little house there. I didn’t know whose smoke I was smelling.’
He rocked back on the balls of his feet, one hand in his jacket pocket, the other at his side. ‘We keep passing each other in the woods.’
‘There’s plenty of room for both of us.’ Then she decided to raise him. ‘I didn’t tell anybody. Why should I? I like the deer better anyhow.’
‘I don’t mind the people who belong here. Only the others.’
‘Like me?’
‘You’re from away, but you’ve never bothered me.’
‘How come you moved into that little house?’
‘My great-uncle built it after he left his wife, because she was temperance, they say. I used to bring girls there, back in high school.’
‘They’re ripping the guts out of your family house.’
‘I thought of burning it down. But with pitch pines, it’s hard to control a burn.’
‘Well, thanks for not doing it. Although I share the sentiment.’ She thought of asking openly if he was done testing her, but she decided not to push
her luck. She saluted and walked off, almost expecting him to stop her. She imagined a bullet entering her back. But when she reached a switchback and turned, he was strolling toward his shack. The woods were big enough for both of them, as she had said to him. She only hoped he wasn’t going to interfere with her pleasure in walking.
At home she called her old friend Nita at once. Nita, who played cello with the BSO, understood the scope and size of her luck. ‘I just saw an article about Itzak Raab. I’ll look for it. Honey, let’s celebrate!’
The professor from Rutgers came. Dinah thought of herself as cool and rational, intellectual, against Susan’s emotionalism and Willie’s immediacy. The first hour with the academic reminded her of how little she was a true intellectual. She did not doubt her own intelligence, but the intellect was not primary for her. It was only part of the whole, the senses, the loud cries of the body, the leap and mutter of the emotions, connection to land and air and water and all the other creatures who flew and trotted in and out of her attention inside the web she shared with them.
Professor Sanderson had no idea who she was, for he announced he was uninterested in music. He wanted to question her and work on Mark’s papers. He called it establishing a chronology, but for her it was a breach of privacy.
He was of middling height and weight with sandy hair and the sort of slightly British accent often affected in East Coast English Departments. He dressed in good tweeds and walked briskly. He meant well, for he was truly interested in Mark’s poetry, although Dinah could not imagine why. What compulsion had been created in him? What would Mark have thought? Would he have been amused? Would he have been helpful? On a good day, perhaps. She endured his probing the cavity of loss as best she could. His desire to establish exactly which poem had been written in what order and the dating of the earlier drafts which filled many boxes puzzled her. The last draft was the only one that mattered, right? The rest was detritus. Opened cans. Chewed bones. As someone who worked and reworked her scores, she ought to make a bonfire soon.
He stayed in town and walked out to her every day, a walk of two and a half miles each way. She had fantasies of a snowfall that would seal the roads and keep him out, but daily he came with his polite curiosity and his questions and his need to shuffle through the papers. She got little done. When she discovered her music irritated him, she sat in her straight chair playing the flute by the hour. On the piano she ran through versions of her student compositions from her serialist days and her early minimalist pieces where motives changed as slowly as stalactites grow. She had exhausted five or six different musical identities before minimalism, although by the time she came to it, the name was silly, because the composers she admired were constructing complicated richly textured big pieces. After a while she forgot him because ideas for the commission began to coalesce, dimly, furtively. Tomorrow she would give a last polish to the Meditation and send it off.
She moved to the window and picked up her flute. She had larger ambitions for this piece, something highly textured. It would start with a version of the melody to which she had been saying the Alienu in her head, the flute alone and then joined. She hated the dramatic entrances of the solo instrument in concertos, like a grande dame sweeping into a party late and overdressed. She had five or six of Raab’s discs. Next time in Boston, she would pick up more: she would survey his technique. This piece would begin very quietly, a melancholy wail of the flute.
When Professor Sanderson appeared beside her, she looked at him without recognition. ‘If you want to use the papers, you have to leave me alone when I’m working.’
‘I thought you were just trying to tune it.’ He smirked.
She did not kill him. She did not even answer him. She simply got up, ushered him back to the hall and returned to her flute. For Itzak Raab, she ought to cook up some very good soup indeed. Yes, this was where to start. Then she would think hard about structure, shape and scope, the kind of architectural planning of larger pieces that always made her feel as if she were moving mountains and seas around in her head. Musical ‘ideas’ – as if they were ideas. Dances, they were going to be, the sections of the suite. The flute would dance, and around it and with it, the other instruments. This was what her mind did best. Never otherwise did she feel as alive.
Chapter Six
WILLIE
Willie loved the way they did Christmas. For much of his life, the idea of Christmas had been more compelling than the reality. Beforehand there was the excitement of what he wanted and thought he might get and the attempts to guess or find what he thought others wanted, all the wrapping and the hiding, the buildup to the presents and then afterward a terrible void soon filled with quarrels, broken objects, broken promises, his parents clashing in harsh whispers and harsher silences.
The intricacies of the triangle assured them all of busy times. They opened some presents together, but each of them was entitled to separate time for a private present or two with the others. They had worked out a long time ago that they would go to Dinah’s for Christmas Eve dinner. Then they would adjourn to Willie and Susan’s to open some presents with the children when the children were still at home, later on just the three of them.
After that Dinah went home and Willie gave Susan her private presents from him. Then he and she would go up to bed. They always made love on Christmas Eve. Willie would have been frightened if they had not, for it would have seemed to him unlucky. In the morning he got up early and went to bring Dinah her presents. They made love that morning. By the time they had breakfast, Susan would be up. When Susan had finally made her toilette and had brunch, she would go to find Dinah and they would share early or midafternoon of Christmas Day. Willie would go for a long walk after lunch, weather permitting, to give them the house alone together. If it was snowing, he would just go to his studio. Then in the late afternoon, the three of them would walk to the Bay. They would all feel cherished, they would feel each relationship individually burnished and their ties strengthened. Christmas, Willie thought, was preeminently a holiday for celebrating his unique family.
The holiday started days before when Dinah and he began looking for a tree. They were technically stealing it, as they did every year. They liked to find a shapely and bushy young pitch pine. Willie had grown to prefer the long needles and the irregular shape of the pitch pines to the symmetrical bought trees. It had to be a specimen tree, one that had grown not in the woods but out where it got lots of direct sun, but one that had not split into two or more trees, as they often did in good locations. Along the sides of roads or the old railroad cut were good places to search for full trees, or in areas that had been cleared but then not built upon, so that the pines had begun to come back.
Over the course of the last week they had argued their way through five candidates, going back to compare them and finally reaching agreement. The chosen tree was located on land belonging to people from Newton, the Hills, on the next pond over, Bracken Pond. They had a slope that had burned years before they bought it. Several bushy new trees were coming up. They had to be stealthy, because while the Hills seldom came at Christmas, some of the other summer people might be on that pond.
That morning he got up before dawn. Dinah was already bundled into jeans and a parka, stamping her feet by the truck and blowing steam. Willie had thrown the axe and the saw in the back of the truck the night before. The engine seemed uncommonly noisy as the exhaust fumes floated low to the ground in the frigid air. There was little snow in the woods – it had thawed a few days before – and he guessed the temperature was probably no lower than thirty. Still it was nippy. There was a salt tang to the damp air. It was no longer night but that grey time just before sunrise would begin to tint the sky. They drove slowly, but he felt as if they were making so much noise they must be waking everybody for miles.
Dinah was excited. She kept reaching over and squeezing his knee. She was bouncing around in her seat like a kid. Suddenly he did not mind the noise the old truck made. Doing thing
s with her turned into a game, something even more special than it would have been without her. ‘We should have a song,’ she announced. To the tune of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ she sang, ‘Stealing the tree, stealing the tree, won’t you come a thieving my Willie with me …’
He cast over the morning’s activities, but unfortunately he could not figure in time for a roll in the hay. Her cheeks were pink even in the grey light. She looked like a plump impish baby in the down parka.
They pulled off the road and cut the motor around the bend from the Hills. Then they hastened single file on an old path that led to the former house site – an old cellar hole where a house had burned twenty-some years before. The tree they had chosen was just ahead, outlined against the pale shimmer of Bracken Pond. None of the ponds had yet frozen over. They were cold as death but clear. The whack of the axe seemed monstrously loud and echoing. He hit it six blows and it toppled. Dinah finished the cut with a saw and then they were pulling it along back through the woods to the waiting truck. They threw it in the back, pulled out without turning on their lights and Willie drove as fast as he dared, jouncing and rattling along the maze of wood roads to their own.
Once he pulled into the drive both houses shared, he heaved a great sigh. They let down the tailgate and wrestled the tree out. ‘I think it grew since we cut it,’ Dinah said as they got it up on the porch. It seemed to cover the porch entirely.
They always set their tree up in Willie and Susan’s livingroom. Dinah had not grown up with Christmas trees and did not own ornaments. She did not put up her own. That made the one they stole and set up together even more special, he thought.