by Marge Piercy
She turned back and crossed the street, coming up behind him. He did not hear her, with the radio blasting away. She kicked the car door, standing there feeling like an imitation punk with her hands shoved in her jean pockets. “Hey,” she said roughly, not looking at him, “her mother came home early. She’s had her hours changed. Surprise. You better get out of here.” Then she turned on her heel and marched off. Behind her the radio ceased. She walked more quickly. Then she heard him gun the motor. He could not exactly get off to a squealing start in the old Mustang, but he turned it around in a driveway, and then went past her at what speed the wreck could summon, barging up the street leaving a wake of oily smoke to envelop her.
She thought she had avoided looking at him, but nevertheless she had seen him out of the corner of her eye. She kept seeing his face: haggard, furious, chewing on something—some sour rind of anger, of disgust, of frustration. He looked awful. He looked sick. What was wrong with him? Why was he acting so crazy? It did not concern her. It had nothing to do with what had happened with her, because he had run from her to Honor. He had run straight from her to tell Honor he loved her, interchangeable women. Never mind him, never mind him. Forget him. Never think of him again. Forget him as he had forgotten her. If only he was out of her life for good, out and gone. What a relief that would be. Never to hear his name again. She was proud of herself for having summoned the raw nerve, the strength to speak to him, for Honor’s sake. That made up secretly a little of the shame she had toward Honor. That was one stroke back from the thing she had done. But she was bothered by flashes of his haggard, desperate face chewing on cold anger as he slumped over the wheel with the radio on raucous and loud. It was not the face of someone in love, she thought. Only someone in raw need.
Tasha was insistently showing her the rooms of the women’s school, some freshly painted and inviting, others still begrimed with the dirt of decades. Two of the rooms were ready for use.
“It wouldn’t be like the rape hot line,” Tasha was saying. “I can understand your getting tired of doing that month after month. It’s such an emotional drain.”
“Can you understand? You never let on you could.”
Tasha shrugged. “To me it’s important to continue.… But this is different. It’s not emergency work. It’s not tending the wounded, Leslie.”
“Aren’t we all wounded?”
“Aw, don’t bullshit. We’re all wounded some, but you don’t have any trouble recognizing somebody who’s bleeding. Here you’d be working with women who want to learn what you’d be teaching them. You’d get feedback. You’d feel better, not worse.”
“Like the stupid fight I got in at your house.”
“Was it so stupid, Leslie? I mean”—Tasha took her arm—“do you really think that quantitative stuff helps anybody? I mistrust it too.”
“You mistrust everything academic.”
“But I don’t mistrust knowledge. I really don’t. Tell me what you’re doing at school. So I’ll understand. What’s that foundation paying you to do?”
“It’s pretty technical—computers and that stuff.” Leslie felt rotten. But she just could not tell Tasha what George had told her, the way he had described it. George liked to make things sound … oh, stood on their heads. She had to think up some way to describe it to Tasha so it would sound better. She had to think up some way to describe it to herself. “What are you living on, Tasha? Is the women’s school paying you?”
“You have to be kidding! We’re still raising money for the building. We need everything—tables, chairs, equipment, everything!”
“So what are you living on?”
“I still got unemployment from the hospital job. Maybe six, seven more weeks,” Tasha said.
“Then what?”
“I’ll find something. Another hospital job. Why worry now? I want to get the school on its feet first.”
“If I quit George, I wouldn’t get unemployment. I wouldn’t get anything but a job waitressing. I can’t even type.”
“But, Leslie, Rae works full time as a nurse. I’m not asking you to give up but one evening a week.… And you won’t look at the work you’re doing.”
No, I won’t, Leslie thought, feeling herself clenched tight. I won’t. You can’t make me. “Tasha, I don’t have any free evenings. I really don’t.”
“Why don’t you make one free?”
“It’s fine,” George said, slapping his palm down on her thesis proposal. “We’ll take it to the committee, but we’ll carry it. Good job. Now an outline. Let’s say by the end of June.”
“I can’t.”
“Red, you have to.” He grinned his little square grin, enjoying applying the pressure. “You’ve got no choice.… Okay, dismissed. And send in Hennessy. I have a little bad news for him.”
What was the use of good news to her about the proposal when it only made him push her harder on an impossible schedule? She felt as if she were staggering out of his office. Hennessy was down the hall in the room where the teaching fellows and research assistants in the department hung out, where they shared desk space and met students. She came in a little shyly, because she did not spend a lot of social time with the other students, two thirds men, and because she had her own desk outside George’s office. This seemed a traditional smoke-filled room, a male enclave. It took her a moment through the haze of smoke and her shyness to pick out Hennessy straddling a chair backwards and boasting, as usual, to the only woman in the room. “So I walked into my bedroom and what was all over the floor but a woman’s black lace undies—”
“Hey, Hennessy,” she said gruffly, to cover her embarrassment. “George wants you.”
“How come?”
“How would I know?”
“I thought you were into all his secrets, hey, Red?” Hennessy very reluctantly rose from the chair, and the woman with evident relief pushed out of the room past Leslie.
“It’d take ten r.a.’s to keep track of George’s secrets, don’t you know that?” She walked beside him back to the office. He was looking a little worried, his broad forehead wrinkled, his mouth pouting more than usual.
“What did he say, exactly?” Hennessy asked.
“Just to tell you he wanted to see you,” she lied nervously.
Cam was on the phone. She blew a kiss at Hennessy. “Hi, darling. Hey, Leslie, it’s my sister, but she wants to talk to you.” Cam did not look at all happy about that, but handed her the phone and looked down as if going on with her work. But Cam did not resume typing. She pretended to be proofreading.
Leslie had to take the phone call at Cam’s desk, sitting on the edge. “Leslie, here. How’re you doing, Honorée?”
“I’m furious at Bernie, just furious!”
“What did he do now?”
“I walked into school this morning and there was a note stuck to my locker. Anybody could have read it, it wasn’t even sealed. Listen to this: ‘My sweet love, Don’t let your mother’s tyranny’—spelled t-i-r-a-n-y—‘keep us apart. We can beat the rap if we stick together. I’ll be on tap all day hanging around this dump. Know I’m always with you and never letting go. Love, XXXX, Bernie.’ He stuck it right on my locker!”
“How did he get into the school?”
“I don’t know! He didn’t have a pass and there’s a cop. I was working on library staff at the check-in desk when he came barging in as if he owned the building. I didn’t know what to do!”
“Why didn’t you tell him to go outside and wait?”
“He wouldn’t, Leslie! He just wouldn’t.… I got Phyllis to cover the desk for me, and I went into Conference Room Two with him. That’s where we keep pamphlets. Its right off the library, the walls are half glass and everybody could look right in and see us having an argument. Mrs. Schumacher, the librarian, stuck her head in to see what was going on. Heaven knows what she thought. I pretended I was helping him find a pamphlet, but I was supposed to be at the check-in desk and she knew it.… He’s going to get me in trouble
at school. He never finished high school, and I’m afraid he’s going to see that I don’t.”
“You were embarrassed.” Honor was so young, Bernie and she kept forgetting. Honor was embarrassed in front of the kids she went to school with. Leslie felt a moment’s twinge of sympathy for him but she quieted it. “What on earth does he want? He sounds desperate.”
“He’s certainly making me desperate.”
“Er … has your mother actually forbidden you to see him?”
Honor sighed. “In effect.”
“So that’s why he’s desperate.”
“Why can’t he be patient? After all, I’m lying to her for his sake. I’m sneaking around. He’s putting pressure on me to lie and sneak around still more. He doesn’t seem to understand that I do live in Mama’s house and she works hard to support me, and she and Dad have saved for years so I can go away to college. I know all that. I’m not stupid. I’m not blind. She wants me to have what she couldn’t. She wants that as desperately as Bernie wants me to go sneaking around the streets to see him!”
High melodrama, that’s what it was. She wondered how much of it Cam could follow, pretending still to proofread the same page of a speech George was delivering. “I’ll meet you later and you can tell me what he really wanted in Conference Room Two.”
As Leslie went back to her desk, she smiled wryly: Letters, phone calls, assignations, rendezvous, accidental meetings, meetings not accidental, scenes of high passion and great wordiness. Avoiding Bernie as much as she could, Leslie was playing against a hidden antagonist. Bernie and she were fighting for Honor, but she was committed to taking no satisfaction except the moral one from her struggle. She must try to remember that. Since Monday of last week she had managed to avoid the sight of him, although his name was always on her lips. Out of my life, she thought, I want you altogether out. So I never hear your name again. It always hurts. To say your damned name hurts. She imagined him dead, struck down suddenly in the street by a car, and she felt a sense of enormous relief.
Hennessy came bolting suddenly out of George’s office. “What’s up, baby?” Cam said to him.
“Come on,” he said. “Come outside a minute.” Then he glared over Cam’s head at Leslie. “I bet you’re behind this.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Leslie said nervously, half rising. George must have told him his assistantship would not be renewed; he wanted to give it to that guy with all the mathematical background he had fastened on as the star of his methodology seminar. She could not say that, though, since it wasn’t arranged yet and George would not let her reveal his plans, so she was stuck with the lame pretense of knowing nothing.
Cam gave her a puzzled glare and followed Hennessy into the hall to hear his news.
She ate nothing. She could not. She was tight and loose at once. She was tight because it mattered, it mattered a lot. She was astonished to find out how much she wanted that rag, how much she wanted that authentication. She did not like looking into herself and discovering such a passion lurking where she had thought of herself as being pure. But she was loose because she was convinced that she was ready. Her body had never felt so good.
From the moment they bowed in, from the first ceremony, she felt right. Somewhere in her a supersitition curled that she was acting correctly in her life and that therefore she was going to perform well. The day was long and most of it was spent waiting and watching. Everyone must perform, from the black belts to the white belts, even the children. There were special exhibitions by her instructor and the instructor of the school they were holding the ceremony with. There was a visiting expert who gave a demonstration also. When she performed her kata, she knew she was good. Her dance was beautiful and swift and strong. It was how it should be. The kata danced her. She felt less sure in combat because she was overmatched. The Black woman she was fighting had twenty pounds and three inches on her, and no matter what anyone said, that counted. She was good, she was very good. Leslie wished briefly she was watching her from the sidelines instead of out there in the still center facing her. Her heart failed her and she lost a point right away. Then she decided she must flow with it and do the best she could.
She lost the match but won her belt. At the ceremony she kept waiting for the pleasure, the triumph to hit. She felt weak and almost depressed. She went out for a Chinese meal with the other students from her class, and for once their sensei went with them. She ate, she tried to chat, she accepted congratulations, but she kept feeling strange. It was hard to remain at the table throughout the long talkative meal.
“I’ve been cruel to him,” Honor was peering into Leslie’s bathroom mirror. She had no hesitation about coming to Leslie’s now and in fact dropped in more freely than Leslie really liked, when she was trying to clear up her end-of-term work. “Look at the gorgeous earrings he gave me yesterday. Aren’t they wonderfully gypsyish?”
“I wonder where he stole them.”
“Leslie! Do you suppose he did?” Honor sighed, making them swing and tinkle. “It’s so sad. I can’t wear them anyplace where Mama might see them. But at least I can wear them in school.”
“You really shouldn’t just appear without calling. Most of the time I’m not home.”
“Oh, I don’t mind dropping by George’s office to look for you. It’s a treat to get out of the house, and I can always say I’m coming to see Cam.”
“I got my black belt, Honor. I won it.” She watched Honor’s face carefully, hoping to taste some victory or satisfaction in her reaction.
“That’s wonderful. But I like coming by here.… It’s really to much … stuffier somehow with Mama home all the time. I’m not used to it! I’m used to more freedom.”
She needed intimacy: someone paying attention to her, a woman giving her attention, so she could feel what was happening in herself, so she could sort out what was wrong. Somehow a phase was over. “I’ve lost all sense of purpose in my karate. I’ve got the black belt, and I don’t know why any more.”
“Well, I never did understand it. I suppose it’s like getting a badge in girl scouts or an A in English comp.” Honor stole another glance at the earrings, setting them tinkling.
“I just can’t remember why I’ve been doing it, I can’t remember why I’ve been pushing myself harder and harder. I can’t remember.”
“Leslie, we’ve been too hard on Bernie. It’s not his fault Mama is mistrustful of him—and he took me out for an Italian ice. I had such a marvelous time with him. We’ve been misjudging him.”
“But he hasn’t misjudged anything,” Leslie said sourly, putting away her problem like a game Honor refused to play. “Mama gave you a watch, so he’ll give you earrings.”
“Leslie, he can’t be that calculating. Really!” Honor touched the earrings. “Do you know what he said about you? He said you fall in love with people who are different from you because they’re different, but then you try to turn them all into yourself. You try to turn everybody into you.”
“Nonsense!” Leslie said angrily. She was in this game to win nothing, she must remember that. Slowly with each day of struggle she was beginning to relinquish Honor. “How would he know? How would he know anything about who and how I love?”
“I guess we all think we observe each other accurately,” Honor said. “That’s how you think you know he’s calculating, isn’t it?”
Leslie paced across the room angrily from the window on the fire escape to the window overlooking the busy street. Something caught her gaze. She swung back and looked again. Damn him! “I see we have a stake-out across the street,” she said lightly.
“A steak house?”
“Bernie on guard. Watching this very window.” She stared at him through the window and balefully he stared back at her. He had made no attempt to conceal himself but stood in the middle of the sidewalk.
Honor ran over to the window, nudging her aside. She laughed and waved. “What a surprise! Shall I ask him up?” she said wickedly.
“Are you jealous? Bernie says you’re jealous.”
“I say Bernie’s jealous, and there’s the proof.” Leslie pointed at the window. “Your faithful dog.”
“It is a little heavy … but oh well. I’ll go down and see what he wants. Maybe he’ll give me a ride home.”
seventeen
“He’s driving me crazy! Look what he stuck on my locker! Everybody’s teasing me. And my counselor called me in to tell me all visitors have to check in to the office! Thank God it’s too late to affect my recommendations for college.… Look at it!”
Bernie had written on a page torn from a notebook. She had a brief pang of conscience, that she should not read his letter to Honor. But after all, how could she give advice? And she was curious, she would admit silently to herself.
Dearest Honorée.
After a blinding flash of pride, I need time before I can see what I did wrong. And you jumped on me so hard, all for what other people say. Who cares? But this is more than an apology, an apology only says I’m sorry, this says I love you.
Baby, I’m sorry more than I can say for my “pushing you.” But you have to believe me. I’m sincere not only in what I say now but in everything I ever said to you.
Others around you accuse me of many things including lying, as if I could ever lie to you. Perhaps my greatest thanks to you is due for the few moments when I learned what it feels like to know a home and a family. I want to prove to you how much you mean to me. I miss you, I know you are missing me. You have to see me and let me explain and show you. I have a lot to say to you about yourself too.
Love,
Bernie
“Now read my reply and tell me what you think.” Sitting on the faded couch, Honor handed Leslie two pages written in dark chocolate marking pen on a moss green notepaper she had just bought. “Doesn’t it look good enough to eat?”
Leslie sighed, carrying the letter to the chair by the window where Honor’s father usually sat. A light dusting of ashes littered the floor around it. She began to read: “‘My dear Mr. Guizot.’ That’s overdone. Call him Bernie. You never had a relationship where he was mister.”