by Marge Piercy
“How big an island is it?”
“Maybe a couple of hundred yards long. Look. Here’s the duck blind!”
It was a low open shed of weathered boards slapped together and much patched. Inside the air was damp and musty, while wasps buzzed ominously around their heads. Bernie could not stand upright. He stooped to crane out the slit of window. “Well, this has lost some of its magic.”
She snorted. “Maybe it’s lost all its magic.”
“Never mind. I know where we’ll go. Are you hungry?”
“Now that you mentioned it, yes. Why did you have to mention it?”
“Then we’ll eat. Come on.” He led the way among low scrubby trees, slightly uphill. Then over a faint ridge and down again. They had risen perhaps a total of twelve feet above the marsh.
“We come out of the bushes and there’s a Howard Johnson?”
He slapped the pocket of the jacket he had slung over his shoulder. “Foresight. I swiped chicken and goodies from the restaurant. You don’t appreciate me, Les. And I’m so good to you!”
“If those wasps would leave us alone, we could eat in the duck blind. Or the boat. Why can’t we eat in the boat?”
“Because we’re going to eat.… if it’s still here. And it is!” He led her out on an old concrete apron. Square holes stained with rust marched down the edges, where girders must have stood to support a vanished building. All that was left was a square of crumbling concrete with bushes growing through the cracks. It began on the gentle slope and ended about ten feet out into the water.
“What was it?”
“We never could find out. It was old when we were kids. We used to camp here. Ann-Marie and I even spent the night a few times. Very spooky. Damp but magical.”
The sun had baked the concrete so it felt warm as she sat on it facing into the marsh. A mile away a factory belched red smoke through five high stacks. Out beyond the maze of rivulets and open waters and marsh and islands, the main channel of the river meandered toward Lake Erie. Gulls hung over something in that channel toward the invisible lake, but she could not see what gathered them in screaming numbers. A dump or a sewer mouth? A great blue heron was stalking in the reeds a hundred feet away, but when she pointed it flapped heavily away.
“I’m glad we came out here,” she said. “Now gimme.”
Out of his pockets he took the chicken, six somewhat flattened sandwiches in plastic bags, pickles in another, a peeled but whole cucumber rolled in salt, three hard boiled eggs, a half bottle of red wine and a corkscrew. “This is none of your rotgut special. Look here. Saint-Estèphe. That’s a town in Bordeaux. This got all shook up, but it’s not a fancy wine and it’s young. I learned to sound knowledgeable about wines in that gyp joint. Monsieur would like the Rothschild Mouton-Cadet. It’s not very good but the name is fancy and famous and monsieur will like that snob appeal and it will set him back fifteen small ones, so he can suitably impress whoever he hopes to fuck, across the table.… My ancestors could have come from Saint-Estèphe. Actually I don’t know where they came from. My old man had trouble remembering where he was supposed to be born. We’ll have to drink it from the bottle because I forgot to bring the wineglasses, hanging from my ears no doubt. I’m sure an old trooper like yourself won’t object.”
“I thought we were supposed to have white wine with chicken.”
“Pas avec un poulet rôti, madame! Besides, I have no means of chilling a white. If you don’t want it, of course I will be obliged to drink it all myself.”
“Don’t bet on it. Um, the chicken’s good.”
“Best thing on the menu. It’s actually sautéed and then steamed, but they call it roast.” He got the cork out and passed the bottle to her after taking a swig.
They ate quickly, their feet hanging off the end of the cement apron at whose base the water murmured, faintly rippling. They ate their intended food and then they split what had been brought for Honor. “It’s good, it’s good,” she said, eating quickly and then reaching for the bottle.
“We still have rotten manners, my friend. We eat as if somebody’s going to take it away if we don’t finish before they grab it.”
Within twenty minutes they had eaten every crumb. “Did you bring dessert?” she asked.
“Aw, come on. It’s impossible to boost éclairs under my shirt. The same for chocolate mousse.”
It was a little cool facing into the breeze over the water. She backed away from the edge and spread herself out flat on the hot concrete. Out in the main channel she could hear motorboats, but only a cabin cruiser rode high enough to be visible. She yawned, yawned again. “I don’t know why I’m so sleepy. Maybe all the running this week.”
After a moment he stretched but beside her, spreading his jacket under his body. “What I forgot is a blanket.” He took a joint from his shirt and lit it, sucking smoke and passing it. She shook her head no. “I’m too relaxed already.”
“Never too relaxed. That’s like too happy. Neither of us is the relaxed type. It’s a rare pleasure.”
“I feel like a snake sunning.… I don’t mind snakes. I never was afraid of them, even the massasauga rattlers we’d find in the gravel pits.”
“Only people make me afraid. No animal has ever attacked me. Except for bacteria and viruses, if they’re animals?… We were sick a lot as kids. We had the reputation of being dirty and tough. There weren’t hardly any French-Canadians in our neighborhood. My parents’ friends lived in Detroit Beach, near Brest, fifteen miles, something like that, south of here? The people were Polish, Irish, and the ones who called themselves just plain Americans—the Wasps—and then the kids up from Appalachia that everybody called hillbillies.… At school they were always hauling us out to the nurse’s office. They were terrified we were going to turn out to have TB and spread it around. We were the first to catch anything and give it to everybody else.… We weren’t stupid, any of us, except maybe Denise. I think Ann-Marie was the smartest. But they made us feel they didn’t want us in school, and we didn’t want to be there. We hated to be split into different classrooms because of our ages and having to sit way at the back. When Mother was sick or away in a sanatorium, we just wore whatever wasn’t too filthy. And then always trying to get money out of you for this and that, and of course we never had any unless we took it off some other kid.”
She yawned again. Her eyelids drooped. “You were a lot closer to your sisters than I was to my brothers.”
“Especially Ann-Marie. But yeah, we played together. Sometimes my mother was home and sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes she had to work and sometimes she had to go in the state sanatorium. We were a tribe, we stuck together. We kept each other warm. I miss that, yes, I miss it still. I’ve been cold all along my side ever since.” He took hold of her by the shoulder and hip and turned her, half pushing, over on her side to face him. “Please don’t go to sleep. Please, Les. Don’t go to sleep and leave me here alone with my ghosts. I need not to be alone here.”
“Sorry.” Her eyes fluttered and drooped. She felt thick. “You should have brought coffee instead of wine. I’m trying to wake up. We could get up and run.”
“On a full stomach? No, I’ll pinch you whenever you start to drift off.” One hand lay on her hip to prevent her from rolling onto her back again. She wriggled uncomfortably. The cement cut into her bottom hip. “Here, lie on my jacket. Put yours down too. Like that.”
She lay stiffly on the jacket facing him. The distance was too short for her to be quite at ease. Soon she would get up. She must wake herself. The wine, the food, the sun made her fat and heavy. The blood buzzed and simmered in her head, a huge overripe melon full of flies. Her arms and legs were distant and floating like logs in a tepid pool.
“Ann-Marie and I were nuts about naming. We named everything, every channel of the river, every hump and tussock that could be labeled island, every pimple that might be called a hill, every slag heap we could think of as a mountain.”
“Nobody comes here exce
pt to shoot ducks?”
“This island? Nobody except us. We used to catch bullheads. Ugly bastards as slimy as nightmares. They lie in the mud of the bottom and wiggle antennae. They can give you a nasty cut on the hand. Slime monsters. You don’t scale them. You nail them to a board and skin them alive.”
“Ugh. Why do people always describe as nasty the creatures they’re going to torture?”
“Touché. People used to say they tasted like chicken, but I thought they were better.… Ann-Marie did make a map of our world. We had it on the wall. She made lines for latitude and longitude, just like the maps in the textbooks, although we didn’t know what the lines were for. We just knew they made maps real.” His quicksilver eyes were burning with excitement, he spoke rapidly, his voice rising and falling. The gaze of his eyes was bright and intense, a hook she kept slipping off, drifting down. “My youngest uncle, Jean, got killed in Vietnam and they brought his body home. We went up to Sherbrooke for the funeral. It made a big impression on us kids. When our dog got struck by a car, we carried off a flag from the drugstore—under Ann-Marie’s skirt, bless her pure gall—to bury him in. We called him Al Capone. We shot off a cap pistol at his funeral and Ann-Marie made a speech. We always had mutts, we had the rowboat, we had each other. Our junk-heap wilderness.”
“In a way you had a happy childhood,” she mumbled through closed eyes, wanting to prove she was listening.
“Hold me, Les, be affectionate. I need you to stay awake and be with me. I feel extremely close to you. For years I never remembered my childhood. I never talked about it except to make up lies.” He held her against him loosely.
She felt uneasy against him on the spread jacket. She could imagine them seen from above, embraced like lovers on the cement apron. She felt like explaining to the blank air it was not so. But she was sleepy and relaxed still. She had promised to try to be more affectionate. She put her hand tentatively on his shoulder, bony, sharp, hot in the sun. The bare skin startled her and she blinked her eyes open for a moment before she remembered that he had taken his shirt off ages ago. “Lies?” she repeated. “Like pretending to come from a middle-class background? I’ve done that. Sometimes it’s just keeping your mouth shut when people make assumptions. Or talk about them.”
“There are other ways of lying. Telling it like it was, except that it didn’t feel that way. I’ve never told anyone but you that I had a happy childhood, Les. A father who drank, a mother with TB, a dirty drafty house where the power company cut off the electricity every six months and we’d stumble around in the dark. Who else but you could believe I was happy? You aren’t supposed to love your older sister the way I loved Ann-Marie. Not just because it was sexual, and it was, but because you aren’t supposed to love a sister that much. If we hadn’t been so mean and tough, they would have called me a sissie. Hanging around with girls. Tired to your sister’s apron strings. You know how cruel boys are to boys? Almost as mean as they are to girls. How kids hate each other, it’s wonderful we don’t all break each other’s necks in the seventh grade. We would if we could. We’d bash each other’s heads in if they’d let us. We’d eat each other’s brains with a spoon like a vanilla ice cream sundae.”
“Ugh, that’s a bit graphic. I hated grade school. For years I had dreams of being tortured there. It was a prison. No wonder Honor hates school.”
“I can’t stand lying in this beautiful hot sun—the first good sun of the year—with my clothes on. I look splendid with a tan, and my hair bleaches some. I hate white marks on my body. If I had another sugar daddy, I wouldn’t have to work in that crummy gyp joint.… Not that I want one. I don’t want to take any more lovers because I need money.” He sat up and stripped rapidly, kicking his pants off. He had nothing underneath them. She edged away, carefully not looking. “Don’t you want to sunbathe?”
“I wouldn’t be comfortable.”
“Oh, Leslie, are you modest? I can’t believe it. I have no modesty whatsoever. I could walk naked up the street if I felt like it.”
“It’s not modesty!”
“What is it then?” He chuckled. “Are you afraid I’ll ravish you?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Well, at least take off your shirt and enjoy the sun.”
She remembered wanting to. She did feel a little formal lying completely dressed beside him completely nude. “Nobody comes here? What about the duck blind?”
“In the fall they shoot ducks. Nobody comes here to smoke or drink or fuck. It’s too far. There’s hundreds of nearer places you can find. The neighborhood’s full of little dead ends, clumps of trees and bush, old junkyards where you can crawl into a wrecked car.”
Stiffly she took off her tee shirt, but she could not keep herself from crooking her elbow across her breasts.
“What a day!” he said. “I feel as if the sun is licking me. Isn’t that erotic? Burt had a dog named Lucky Pierre. A poodle. But not one of your yappy little dogs. A big dog-sized hairy intelligent poodle. I really loved that dog. I miss him. Burt used to accuse me of loving the dog better than him. But it was easy to love Pierre, he was such a passionate sunny spirit. I’ve never been able to have a dog since I was a kid. One other thing I can’t afford. I don’t get meat myself when I’m not eating at the restaurant.”
“What kind of dog was Al Capone?”
“A yellow mutt. But with wonderful speaking eyes. He could beg the life out of you, he could coax your supper off your plate when you were hungrier than he was.… I’ve tried for years to perfect that look. If I had my old yellow dog’s look just right, the world would be my salted peanut.”
“I think you’re perfecting it,” she said sourly but relaxed again in the curve of his arm.
“Ann-Marie was the hero and I was the villain. Or else we’d be something like Star Trek. I got to be Spock, which is the best part, naturally, secretly lusting after the captain forever. Or explorers or pirates, guerrillas, bank robbers. I was always willing to be the villain when we had villains. I’d kidnap Denise or baby Mike, and Babette would be my sidekick. I didn’t mind dying at the end, because I got to be dramatic and evil before. Ann-Marie was the hero type—like you. A striver and strainer, as the Blacks say. They all live across the river, downwind from those belching stacks. We looked down on them, I can’t for the life of me imagine why. We all lived in the same dumps and grew up to work in the same mills or collect the same unemployment, and they had more fun. We were convinced of that, deeply convinced, and we hated them for it. Anyhow they looked like they were having more fun.” He cuddled up to her, his cheek against her shoulder. “I still miss Al Capone, I miss my mother, I miss Ann-Marie. I miss her more lately because I let myself remember. You and Honor make me remember. I shut myself up, cold. Sometimes I think all you have to do to be desired, to be an ultimate sex object in this society, is to be cold all the way through. The world will cream a path to your door to impale itself on you if you’re only an icicle.”
“You don’t seem cold to me.”
“I’m not with you. Or with Honor. Because I’m coming back to life. And I feel safe with both of you. You’re all I have of … real connection. I still have the needs of a child. I’m not a child, you know—that makes it harder. There are few kinds of hell I haven’t seen from the inside. I could tell you stories that would make Honor grow pale and your eyes melt with that serious glow.”
“Bernie, you haven’t a pose that annoys me more than your world-weariness!”
“Dear heart, when you’ve been rolling in shit you must have something to say for yourself. You have to make the best of it, and the best is to boast that at least you did roll in shit.”
She sighed. “You make sure we never know how literally to take the shit.”
“Listen, once I saw a punk movie in New York playing in a rerun house where I was sleeping. It was about an Italian street urchin who witnesses a crime and blackmails a respectable family to take him in. He’s hungry, he’s tired of stealing his bread. Well,
one thing and another, their influence melts his grubby proletarian heart. And when he can no longer blackmail them and they can hand him over to the cops, they reach out with loving arms to clasp him to their familial bosom. You follow?”
“Follow where? Every poor kid dreams at times that she’s really the lost foundling of some rich pig.” She looked away from the intensity of his demanding gaze. His hand, fallen on her rib cage, dug into her flesh for emphasis.
“At the end of this sentimental tearjerker, our filthy street beast stands silhouetted against the waves of an ocean beach. His foster father holds out his arms to him. A moment of stillness. Our beast can’t believe they really want him, the crumb-bum, him, the proletarian turd. Then he tears down the beach into his new father’s arms to a thousand violins and the crashing of the surf. Here I cried.” He grinned mirthlessly, his hand hard on her rib cage as if to prevent her from rising in revulsion and moving away. “I cried like an old maid at a wedding. And when I recovered from my embarrassment at my own secret taste and maudlin tears, I knew precisely what I wanted. Simple. I want a home. Will you laugh?”
“No. I’m in exile. From where I don’t want to be and ran away from at the first opportunity. An old maid is a woman who hasn’t sold herself in marriage to a man, by the way, Bernie.”
“For most people home is the taken-for-granted. I’m sorry, I won’t use the phrase again. It’s the place you fight to leave. Afterward you speak of making yourself at home in other houses. But I still wander outside the first shelter.… My life is just a messy interminable game of parchesi. Where the whole object is to get the little wooden idols home and you almost make it and then somebody knocks you all the way back.… You know the whole concept is phony. It’s just an empty square where nobody’s waiting. But sometimes I think I’m stuck in that kid’s game. It’s déclassé. Other people get to play adult games like backgammon and twenty-one, poker and chess. Here I am living my life out in a crappy children’s game that relies entirely on chance!”