by Marge Piercy
‘If she even said to me Hello, Johnny, my name since I got old enough to choose a name, I’d faint with pleasure.’ Johnny put down her empty beer.
Willie took that as a signal to rise. The situation was making him nervous, lest Susan realize where they all were. ‘Then let’s go say hello to Susan and get off to a pleasant start. Jimmy should be back soon and then the two of you can negotiate who’s sleeping where.’
Johnny waggled her long fingers at Dinah. ‘See you after first blood. I’ll bring my stash in.’
‘How did your show go in Rochester?’ Dinah asked.
‘I thought no one was going to ask me. As soon as we opened, we sold two big mothers and a little one. My dealer thinks I’ll sell most of what I’m showing. Even as I stand here, I may be getting rich – relatively.’
Willie knew he should have asked. Johnny needed to tell them her successes, for when she came home she felt instantly a teenager. He had been too worried about Susan to remember. He was angry with himself, even as he kept telling her how proud he was of her, talking excessively to make up for neglect. Behind his eyes dishes sailed through the air, books were thrown, vases broken, shirts torn in two, chairs kicked over. Susan and Johnny always got loud, and they could get very physical. Only Johnny ever reduced Susan to a screaming bitch.
Susan had obviously heard the van arrive or seen it outside, for she was in the kitchen waiting, in a mood of crackling high insult. ‘I wondered if something had happened to you. I saw your van arrive half an hour ago, but I couldn’t locate you.’
‘I saw Daddy was next door, so I popped in to say hi.’
‘Next door? I thought you had gone to Tyrone’s.’
‘I was on my way back. I had to talk to Jimmy about the gallery.’
‘Jimmy and Laurie went to the beach,’ Susan said. ‘I heard him tell you.’
‘I thought he might be back.’
‘Since when does Daddy peed an excuse to be at Dinah’s?’ Johnny asked.
‘Your father and I are no longer involved with Dinah. We’ve found that our lives are better without her.’
‘It seems to me you can only say that for yourself,’ Johnny said.
‘I’m speaking for both of us –’ Susan began stiffly.
Willie rushed to cut in. ‘It’s a complicated thing, Johnny, please let it alone. You just got here. I want to show you the studio I’m building for Susan. Come on.’
That evening Johnny helped him hang his show at the gallery. He had the centre of all three rooms, while the two painters showing with him had the walls. The gallery gave him a number of pedestals for the smaller works. The three biggest were freestanding. One piece had to be hung, and that was tricky. They had to unhinge the outer door to get the biggest piece in safely. Jimmy and Laurie showed up in midevening to lend a hand too. Normally Dinah would have been a big help, but she was lying low. Johnny more than filled in. She had a natural instinct for exhibiting.
Johnny slept at Dinah’s and spent the afternoon at the beach with Jimmy and Laurie. Jimmy and Johnny might insult each other every other sentence, but they had a mutual trust he liked to know was there. They enjoyed each other’s company. He and Susan must have done some things right. He had never been friends with anyone in his family. He had been too close to his mother in childhood and never close to any of the others, lacking the clear-sighted humorous undemanding affection his children offered each other.
Susan and he made love and then she served him an omelette and a salad, telling him she expected they would go out to a heavier meal after the opening, to celebrate. He hoped he felt like celebrating. He always imagined that no one would come, that they would set out the California chablis and the cheese and the fruit, and no one would walk into the gallery all evening.
The opening was successful. A lot of local people swelled the ranks – it looked good at an opening if it was so crowded nobody could see anything. Anybody actually interested in looking at the work would come back during the daytime when the gallery was empty. Willie felt a little guilty about his recent hostility toward Tyrone when it turned out he was taking them out to a late supper at Gilcrest Manor, the local snob restaurant, menus without prices and-a wine steward. Tyrone brought along his own guests and functionaries and Willie’s family, except of course Dinah. She wouldn’t have cared for it anyhow, he told himself consolingly, all the rich food, fawning service and not sitting down to eat until nine o’clock. He had the sense of enjoying and scorning the meal at once, as if thinking of her made him judgemental about things he would have taken for granted in her presence.
Tyrone was giving him the dinner, but said nothing whatsoever about his work. Instead he decided to shine the light of his attention on Johnny, who was stowing away the food at a great clip. Both his kids had had the ability to eat for three. Susan presided from the foot of the table, beaming, savouring the food, the wine, the service, the atmosphere. Willie was glad to see that she and Johnny were making the best of the evening, each walking on eggshells while only offending the other perhaps half the time. Perhaps they were mellowing. Johnny had so far resisted insulting Tyrone. In the past she would have felt called on to make clear that he didn’t impress her by saying something as gross as possible. She was growing up, his bright daughter. She would surpass him. That was a reasonable fate.
The mellowness was wearing thin by Sunday afternoon. Susan tried to give Johnny a dress she had made. Johnny said, as she always did, that it wasn’t something she would ever wear. ‘You ought to give it to Laurie. We’re roughly the same size, and she wears that kind of thing.’
‘And what kind of thing is that kind of thing? You mean, something with taste, Siobhan? Something that looks as if somebody made it, as opposed to finding it at the Salvation Army reject pile?’
‘Mother, you make the same mistake over and over again of confusing your taste with all taste, your generation’s style for all style. I have my own, what suits me!’
Willie got up quietly and turned down the flame on the stove. He was simmering a tomato sauce for spaghetti. If he left it on a low fire, he could slip out to his studio till they stopped fighting. He could not endure to listen, for both were in pain now, both felt rejected, scorned; each longed to justify herself in the face of the other’s blind wrong. They were artesian wells of emotion, Susan under the guise of earth mother, Johnny under her punk glaze; each thought the other cold and themselves, hot. If he attempted, as he had used to, to explain one to the other, it would end up with both of them furious with him as well. No, he would extract himself from their fight. He put down the spoon and began drifting toward the door.
‘Look, Mother, your problem is trying to control everybody around you. You made up an idiotic name for me and you insist on being the only person in the world who doesn’t call me by my own name, Johnny. You’ve driven Jimmy out of the house by trying to control his sex life –’
‘I wanted him to avoid the pain waiting for him. Laurie won’t take him seriously for long. Tyrone is going to step in.’
‘That sad little twat is lucky to get him. She can be a big shot here. In New York she’s nothing but the talentless and luckless daughter of a middling successful money man.’
‘Since when are you so smart about love and marriage? You’ve never even been able to keep a boyfriend. You’ve never known how to act around men and you never will!’ Susan tossed her hair back in scorn. She was blushing with anger. ‘You wilfully make yourself bizarre and hideous!’
‘I’m not hideous. I look like an artist. I look young. You want me to dress like a middle-aged hippie!’
‘I’m paid for my knowledge of fabric and style. You’ve always been jealous of your own mother. Resentful of me. You don’t know how to make friends with women or how to get along with them. The only way you can attract attention is by making yourself ridiculous and unpleasant.’
Willie sidled past both of them and was opening the door.
‘Since when are you the expert? You fucked
up your relationship with Dinah and now you’re putting pressure on Dad to break off with her, just because you don’t want anybody to have a thing you don’t have too.’
‘Your father’s not involved with Dinah! These are private matters –’
Willie turned around. He had the impulse to run. Anywhere. Susan was glaring at him as well as at Johnny. He said, ‘I think we should lay off this topic right away. It’s a touchy subject. Johnny, shut up now.’
‘It was never private. Everybody in school knew about you guys. So that was the downside. The upside was Dinah herself. How can you pretend Dad isn’t involved with her?’ Johnny turned toward him, where he stood on one foot at the door.
He took a step toward Susan, then stopped. She was glaring at him. She was staring into him. Her face was red and white in blotches. His throat closed. She opened her mouth but said nothing.
Johnny spoke faster, scared by Susan’s reaction. ‘Of course you knew. But you’re making everybody tiptoe all around you. Jimmy knows. Even asshole Laurie knows. Laurie is going on about poor Susan this afternoon and how she really must have guessed but we have to be careful with her, like you’re some kind of invalid. It’s like when I was fifteen and fucking Allie Dove and everybody in town knew, but you had to pretend it was a big shock.’ She turned to plead with him, her voice rising into near hysteria. ‘Why can’t you tell Mother for once she’s off the wall and everybody knows it!’
‘Oh shit oh shit oh shit,’ Willie muttered, staring at Susan whose jaw had fallen slackly. ‘Johnny, don’t talk about what you don’t understand!’
Susan was backed against the stove, where his sauce was simmering. ‘Willie, what in hell is she talking about?’
‘Nothing, Susan, nothing,’ Willie said.
Johnny said over his voice, ‘You have to know. Come on, Mother, be honest for once. Stop pretending that because you couldn’t keep it together with Dinah, that Dad isn’t still with her. It’s ridiculous! Dad is fucking her, Jimmy is living there, and you’re pretending she doesn’t exist. I was embarrassed that she wasn’t there last night, really embarrassed for this whole family! It’s like you’re forcing everybody around you to lie because you want to lie, and I think it’s shitty.’
‘Willie, you goddamned bastard!’ Susan picked up the tomato sauce and its saucepan and flung it forward so that it spattered over the room, over Johnny and over him, hot and scalding and burning his arm so he heard himself bellow. Johnny screamed in pain. Then Susan ran sobbing from the room.
Chapter Forty
LAURIE
Laurie was summoned on the phone by Dinah and told to bring ice. Jimmy and she were in bed and almost didn’t answer. ‘Something’s wrong across the pond!’ she said to Jimmy, stepping into her slacks. ‘Susan has found out.’
The atmosphere in Dinah’s kitchen was grim and businesslike. Johnny’s right arm, right shoulder and right breast were scalded, as was Willie’s left arm and hand. Dinah was treating them with ice, their stained clothes stripped off. Johnny wore a kimono of Dinah’s that Susan had probably made some years before, and Willie, a terry robe of Jimmy’s.
‘Shouldn’t they go to the hospital right away?’
‘Second-degree burns. We can handle it. By the time they drive for an hour and then get through emergency room triage, they’ll be blistering.’
Johnny had obviously been crying, but now she was acting tough. ‘I’m not going into Emergency and say, my mother mistook me for a pizza and poured boiling tomato sauce all over me.’
Willie kept silent, compacted. His face was clenched on itself. He was hunched on a straight chair looking more frightened than angry.
Jimmy said, ‘I’d better see Susan. She must be locked in the bedroom.’
Laurie asked, ‘Should I go with you?’
‘If you really want to.’ He grimaced at her. ‘Hang back though.’
They crossed the yard among piles of lumber and the garage doors waiting to be installed. The kitchen still reeked of tomato sauce. The stove had been turned off, but the sauce was splashed everywhere. It looked like a scene in a teenage slash movie, blood on the walls, blood on the table, blood on the floor. Jimmy made a pass at cleaning, using a whole roll of paper towels. When he gave up, the kitchen was still splattered with what looked like sticky gore. It turned her stomach. As he went upstairs, she trailed behind him. ‘Mother!’ He knocked on her door. ‘It’s Jimmy! Can I come in?’
‘Go away.’
‘Mother, please open the door. It’s just Laurie and me, no one else.’
‘What do you want?’ She sounded stuffed up.
‘To make sure you’re all right.’
They heard the springs creak and slow footsteps. Finally the lock turned and Jimmy pushed the door quickly open. Susan had been crying. Her face was swollen, her cheek reddened and ridged from the coverlet. She huddled on the bed’s edge and did not look at them. Laurie was a little frightened by her dishevelled appearance, for Susan resembled Laurie’s own mother when she had been drinking for hours. Susan had always been well turned out, attractive, together. ‘Why would I be all right?’ she asked rhetorically in a smothered-sounding voice. ‘I have just discovered my husband has been lying to me for months. He’s having an affair with a woman he promised me he was done with. My son has been lying to me. Everybody has been laughing at me. Everybody!’
‘I’m sure it hasn’t been months,’ Laurie said nervously. ‘It’s been very recent, and we just learned about it after Jimmy started staying next door. Nobody wanted to upset you, Susan. Nobody wanted to hurt you.’
‘If nobody wanted to hurt me, why am I hurting this way? Why do I wish I were dead?’
‘Mother, Johnny shouldn’t have stuck her elbow in it. Dad wanted to talk to you about it. Dinah wanted him to. He’d promised her he’d tell you, but he just didn’t know how.’
‘I can see how it would be a problem.’ Susan stood. She picked up a Tiffany-style lamp beside the bed as if casually and threw it against the wall so it shattered.
Laurie backed away till she was sheltered behind Jimmy. This woman had gone crazy. This woman had become violent. Her own mother at worst was a sloppy crying sort of drunk, not a dangerous maniac.
‘Mother, over the years you’ve been furious with Siobhan many times. You’ve had terrible fights. Yet you’re still mother and daughter. We’ve weathered a lot of bad scenes with each other.’
‘I will never forgive that lousy pig bastard for what he did to me. I’m through with him. He lied to me. He lied to me day in and day out for months. He was fucking her while I was in New York and that’s where he was every time I called and he wasn’t here.’
‘Mother, everybody lies sometimes. I’m sure you’ve had to lie to Dad at times. We all do things we don’t want to own up to.’
‘In twenty-six years of marriage, I have never never lied to him about another man. Ever! And I had plenty of opportunities. He made a fool of me.’ She began to sob again, throwing herself facedown on the bed.
Laurie felt embarrassed. She didn’t know where to look. She sidled toward the door. Jimmy sat down on the bed’s edge and stroked Susan’s tangled hair. ‘Mom, don’t take it so hard. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s only Dinah. What did he do he hadn’t been doing for ten years?’
‘It isn’t the same! It isn’t the same. It’s the opposite!’ She wriggled away from his hand. ‘Don’t touch me. My own son! You lied to me too. You took his side. You took her side against me.’
‘I didn’t take anybody’s side, Mom. You never even explained to me what happened between you and Dinah. I just tried to stay out of the way.’
‘Not one of you was faithful to me, not one!’
‘Mother, what does that mean? That I should have run and made trouble between you and Dad? Siobhan just did that, and look at the mess. I had faith you’d work it out, the two of you.’
‘There’s nothing to work out. Nothing!’ She began to cry harder, grinding her face into the pillow.
Laurie crept still nearer to the door. She was appalled by Susan, and she wondered how Jimmy could sit there calmly forcing himself to touch her. Susan’s heavy emotionality felt like ugly greasy makeup that could come off and stain hands and clothes. Was Susan crazy? Throwing the boiling sauce over her husband and her daughter, throwing the lamp at the wall. She couldn’t conceive of Tyrone acting like a maniac; her own mother cried and carried on, but never had she lost control so completely.
She tried to recall whether Jimmy had ever behaved that irrationally, that violently in the years she had known him. She did not think he had, but she wondered if that wild behaviour was somewhere in him waiting to be unleashed. One reason Tyrone had got sick of Janette much more quickly than her own mother, whom after all he had really loved, and Glenda, the most recent wife, was that Janette had a temper she would release freely like a bad dog. But that temper was a trained poodle compared to this ravening beast.
It was a mess, the lives over here, the husband wrapped up in towels and ice in Dinah’s kitchen, the daughter too. They did not know how to conduct their affairs properly. They were weird and tacky, as she had thought when she was in high school and this bizarre triangle had begun.
Finally she fled the hot claustrophobic bedroom. She made her apologies to Jimmy, who was too engrossed to notice her escape. Home! She did not go straight to the boathouse but rather to the big house, to consult Tyrone. She found him in his office. Donald had just driven the weekend company to the airport, and Tyrone was dictating to Sally. She had been entering figures on the computer.
She did not bother asking Sally to leave, as Sally had witnessed their life for years. Sally belonged to Tyrone, really, in the same way that a car belonged to him. Laurie thought that she would only quit as one said a car had quit, by breaking down. Laurie felt gently calmed as she sat in Tyrone’s office with the amber monitor of the computer lit and faintly humming, with Tyrone’s beautiful Chippendale desk on the pastel Oriental before her, with the books in leather bindings and the Japanese floating world prints in bamboo frames, with Sally crisp and cool and sympathetic, but quietly, tactfully so.