by Marge Piercy
“Short but sweet, like on the phone.”
“It would have been more convenient if you’d been fit to drive me home before laying Caroline. Or was I supposed to amuse myself with Leon?”
“Get off it, Annie. I didn’t plan this. I was coming back. It’s trivial.”
“Everything’s trivial! Don’t you put any value on yourself, if you don’t put one on me?”
“If you didn’t want to wait, all you had to do was call a cab. You’re not silly enough to be jealous?”
“Are you a public accommodation? A filling station?”
“You say I’m rude. Well, I can’t think of anything ruder than slapping down some chick who’s offering what she’s got.”
“Are you as nice to horny old ladies and dogs?”
He grabbed her by the upper arm. “Now look here, Annie—”
“Let go of me!”
Meeting her gaze he let go. “Why do you have to react this way?”
“Why do I yell when you kick me?” She clenched her hair in both hands.
He smacked his fist into his palm, turned away, swung back. “Anna, I’ve done nothing to you, nothing, except take a little long getting back.”
“I knew from the start what would happen, but I’m such a fool!”
“No, you never trusted me. You’ve always been hanging back.” He stood there hands working, and then he shoved them deep in his pockets. “As if it was my fault I met you married to that poor meticulous bastard who couldn’t hold you. You hung back from the time we met, dragging your heels, always ready to accuse me. You were born mistrustful!”
“Not born! How can I pretend to trust you?”
“You’ve said enough, Annie.”
“You don’t care, just so you can prove yourself! How can I live with a man who doesn’t believe in consequences?”
“How can you?” He shrugged, a bitter mask freezing over his face, buttoned his jacket and walked out.
She stood staring. On the door she had tacked a photograph of the Cretan great goddess, in shape like a chesspiece: not the well-known barebreasted figure from the empire but a later back-country goddess of a defeated power with stoic face and pillar body, arms stiffly raised past the head in blessing or surrender. She stared now at the worn face. She sat abruptly on a kitchen chair, her thighs loosely parted, her legs watery. She stared and stared at the door. He had closed it so quietly. The earthen woman stood aghast, signaled stop, the end. Anna groaned and then asked out loud, “What have I done?”
Monday–Wednesday, September 15–17
Monday Anna woke at seven alert with misery as she had the day before, the day before that. Light poured in the five windows on the rounded outer wall, more light since the building on the other corner had come down. Sun danced on the thread-bare red rug. Idly she disentangled her hand from the sheet and touched the rug. Roughness like a morning beard. Her skin froze.
He must have been waiting for a chance to break off. She searched through the days before her trip. He did not need her. Why had she insulted him? What else could she have done? She was preserved by disbelief, by pockets of fierce optimism. He would call yet, he had to: it would be so bad if he didn’t. She had only to stretch out her hand and dial. She would pretend she assumed Friday meant nothing. Say Rowley, guess what. No, could not.
She rolled out of bed. Why couldn’t it be Friday again, for one minute? But inevitable. She put on her robe before facing the mirror. Bluish smudges under the eyes. A grave look, yes, two days in the grave. How much of her life was she going to waste hauling from man to man?
Her bedroom had been a dentist’s office: she imagined its old floorboards saturated with pain. The receptionist’s office was her kitchen which she crossed to the hall bathroom. She shared it with a fairy in his late forties, Matt Fenn, who spoke often of his Show Biz days, and he had taken tickets at Riverview for the Ferris wheel. He was nosy but left the bath clean. She watched the tub fill and let herself into it. Suddenly, looking at her big body flushed and wavering underwater, she began to cry.
As she was toweling herself, she stopped. A phone. Hers? Wrapped dripping in the towel she ran. Him, please, him. “Hello?”
“Yeah, it’s Leon.”
“Oh.” Water rolled down her legs. “How are you?”
“Just called … to find out how you are … and things.” Limping.
“Yes, I’m just dressing to go to registration.”
“You don’t feel like having lunch then?” His voice raveled into silence so that she could not be sure he had finished.
She made excuses, preoccupied with a chill in her scalp. He is interested in me. Don’t be absurd. Yes he is. Discourage him quick.
Registration was hectic and boring and she was glad of it. She sat in the gym riffling the catalogue, dividing and stamping forms and yawning, yawning. Beside her worked an older man and one her age who talked only to each other. The associate professor did not approve of females and the younger man was a PhD bucking for tenure. She was happy to be ignored, for she feared if anyone smiled warmly or asked how she were, she would burst into selfpitying bloom.
An old student came to register, a paperclip bowed and thin boy with blotched shy face under tumbled hair. She loved him and had spent hours tutoring him in the drafty room she and the other tweeny teachers shared, and she wanted to whisper, Freddy, I am so sad. She had never told him anything that had happened since she was ten. Long mutterings among stacks of graded test papers, books loaned and returned, papers passionate as love letters on Caste vs. Class as Concepts in Social Stratification, Draft Dodgers or Culture Heroes: a Survey of Student Attitudes toward CO’s. She always had students she granted hours before or after classes. Now she would feel less neutered in that exchange.
Although she did not have her PhD she was being rewarded with a small class in the family this fall. If a subject bored her, she maundered, but if she were interested she could find rapport with the class like a handle hidden under the desk and bear down. Not that she did not hate the textbooks. She had dropped out of graduate school because sociology seemed such a lot of scholastic, pseudoscientific obfuscation. The kids went into sociology because they had a sense of something wrong, a sense of their society pushing on and warping people and they wanted to understand it and change it. But their professors were working for the Department of Defense or market research firms or IT&T or General Dynamics. When she had been a student at Inland with the University still trying through homeowners associations to keep its neighborhood white and with bopping gangs fighting in the streets, there had been no course in the department which confronted racism. There had been, however, professors working on pilot counterinsurgency projects for penetrating black militant groups and putting down the expected riots.
She was a popular teacher and the other teachers patronized her for that. She was confused herself. She did not want her students to die slowly or at once. They streamed through, always too many to deal with, and if she selected a few to teach, that was in spite of her job, not through it. If she had anything to teach them, it was the opposite of the course, and never as authority-surrogate.
She managed to pass the day without speaking of herself, without turning her face to anyone. How many days would go that way? She felt chilled traveling home on the El looking into ashy backyards of the Black Belt. Her building was integrated: one prune-faced spinster who had come back to school for an MA in education. Her landlady celebrated her liberality by ending repairs and telling blacks who applied that she had Done Her Bit. Even so she felt martyred to her principles, brought on by a flunking medical student who drank a container of insecticide in his room.
But the roaches seemed not to mind integration. They flourished and filled the walls. Chicago roaches were large shiny waterbeetles that could wear the eastern cockroaches for shoes. She found them even in the refrigerator. No one grew used to them, but anyone could learn to live with them. Like other things, including loneliness.
Sh
e walked from the trolley stop, the pink air of sunset still warm behind the silhouettes of the turn-of-the-century three- and four-story apartments with stores on the ground floor that lined the street. Her street was like a bright grimy fringe on the green carpet of middle-class housing that stretched toward campus. Weeds were beginning to grow on the corner lot, and already a shortcut was trodden across. She stopped at the candystore for a paper. Mrs. Feldman leaned her fat arms on the counter, reading a column of classified ads with a spoon for pointer.
She sat on a stool and ordered coffee to put off going the last block home.
“Hey, Mrs. Feldman, looking for a job? Going out in the world and leave Mr. Feldman to cook his own hamburgers?”
The woman laughed politely, but the lines around her mouth did not ease. “They won’t say when they’re tearing us down.…” She waved her hand at the stamped tin ceiling. Like her parents’ store. “What can you do? Mr. Feldman says we should give it all up, but I say we have to find another place—what else can we do?”
Feldman’s coffee was no longer good. It tasted of rust.
Wednesday afternoon the phone rang. She sat rigid over the work-plan she was typing. A bolt went through her, holding her painfully but securely to the chairback. Him. Of course not. Don’t think it. Him. She tore free and picked up the receiver.
“Miss Levinowitz?”
No. Not. Why should he? A few minutes passed then before she understood what the polite voice wanted. Secretary of her department chairman.
“What, you’re taking my classes away? What are you talking about? I’m down for four.”
“As I said, Miss Levinowitz, Mr. Bodford is very sorry, but the fall registration was misestimated, and we’re forced to cut back our classes.”
“But one class. I can’t live on one class. You know it’s too late to find anything else. It’s unfair.”
“If you’d like to talk to Mr. Bodford!” said his secretary, prissy with annoyance.
“You’re damned straight I would.”
“Well, Miss Levinowitz,” said Mr. Bodford, pronouncing her name as if it hurt his jaw. “We regret this very much and I want you to know how much we appreciate and nothing personal and no contractual obligation and our PhD’s and impossible to estimate and with any fairness and one of the risks of the game and perhaps next semester and perhaps we could arrange a second class if we juggle our schedules and try to understand and …”
“One course I can’t live on, two courses I can’t live on. This is a fine time to tell me. I eat as much as a PhD. You can keep your course. I quit!”
She hung up and sat quivering with surprise. Her head prickled with remarks she should have made. Yet she was half shocked that she had had the courage of her indignation. She couldn’t live on what they were offering, but it was a start. She hoped the other little shits would draw comfort from her gesture.
At least she was finally out of debt. She ripped the prospectus from her typewriter and flung it in the garbage, sent her notes and exam ideas sailing after. No job and no man: she ought to leave this town. Damn them, she was a good teacher. She felt a pang for her students, those hers already, all her parttime children, her carefully distanced lovers. She rescued her notes from the garbage and brushed off the grounds. Some other time maybe. She had a forgiving disposition. Up to a point, up to a point.
She took out her checkbook and worked at it, soothed by figures. The dirty sun filtered through the steelmill fumes and permanent sootstorm the South Side called air to expire on her face without warmth. She brushed the thick springy hair from her eyes. One hundred ninety-eight dollars and twenty-three cents. She was good at being frugal. She began to work out a budget.
If she got sick or had an accident, it would be gone. Even a string of bad cavities. No one had to care what became of her. Oh, her parents, in a formal sense. Like gentle gray hamsters they lived in the old flat in Cleveland and ran what had been a drygoods store and was bleakly surviving as a cheap clothing store that still sold a few patterns and yarn and thread, with new fluorescent lighting under the high stamped tin ceiling. During highschool she had worked behind the counter. She could still smell the mothball odor of certain drawers, see the packets of needles on which women dressed in the mode of 1920 sat sewing.
Her parents knew nothing of her. “My oldest dotter, she teaches college out West, in Chicago. Yes, in college she teaches.” A photo of her stood on the buffet taken at high-school graduation (big, sleepyfaced, shy, oddly inert in the robes), fortunately almost obscured by the many many pictures of her sister’s two boys. Three years younger, Estelle was already the ageless housewife with a strong resemblance to their mother emerging. Estelle now treated her as if she were younger, but seemed so naive she thought of Estelle as stuck forever at eighteen. Estelle and Ben had a house twenty minutes by car from her parents, and there was a great deal of visiting.
From a distance she loved them, loved to shop with extravagance for birthdays and bring them pretty things they would never buy themselves. Visiting them, she was exhausted after half an evening. A numbing gas that turned her bones to lead seeped from the television. She could never believe how little they knew or cared about her life and the world it was lived in. When her father, who was slumped comfortably with his round shoulders in the roundbacked chair eating decorously a dish of chocolate icecream, remarked that America oughtn’t to let those Chinese reds threaten us, but we ought to go in with a couple of big bombs and show them who they were talking to, she felt in their innocence a streak of evil and sat bemired biting her tongue. While she was married to Asher they had taken an interest, but since their loud reactions to the divorce, little. Except for one, conversation with Estelle.
She had been helping Estelle put away clothes warm from the dryer, when her sister paused with a folded sheet held to her plump breasts. “So now you’re on your own, where do you live? In a dormitory? Or one of those co-ops like you used to?”
She had been startled. “No, in an apartment. I have a small apartment.”
“To yourself? My, isn’t that strange.” Estelle thought about it, still holding the sheet. “It must be kind of nice, coming home and stretching out with all that room to yourself. But aren’t you scared at night?”
Did Estelle really think she slept alone? With embarrassment more for Estelle than herself she looked into her sister’s large deepset brown eyes that mimicked her own. She hardly felt proud of it, but everyone who knew her at all knew that if she were taken down to Antarctica and marooned, when they came to dig her out she would have evolved a passionate entanglement with a seal, she would be enmeshed in a violent and harrowing triangle of penguins.
Something must have shown. Estelle, who had married from home right after highschool graduation, stepped closer to peer at her. “Do you date now? Do you go out with boys?”
Boys. “Yes.” And she had thought she would tell Estelle about Rowley, by way of trying it out. What she had anticipated: Yes, I know he isn’t Jewish, but …
“That must be … fun.” Estelle was looking at her carefully, trying to read something. “Do you tell them you were married? Do you call yourself Miss or Mrs.? Don’t they wonder where your family is?” Estelle’s blind strong curiosity gave off whiffs of dissatisfaction. “Of course you don’t have a place to ask them in to sit … How do you make them bring you back on time?”
Remembering, Anna sighed. They had never been as close as Rowley and his baby sister were. He was helping Sam through school—his parents couldn’t with his father sick and his mother a woman who had never worked outside the home. Sam was a bright kid but strongwilled, and one of these days she and Rowley were going to have a battle …
With a start she came back to the room seeing the stained lecture notes and columns of halfmade budget. If only she could forget for a whole day, for half a day, for an hour that he existed.
At seven as she was broiling a lambchop, he called. When she heard his voice she thought he was going to ask her
to supper. She would not say a word about the chop. But he asked, “You want to come over and pick up your things? If you want to.”
“Yes, of course. Tonight. If you’re … if it’s convenient.”
“Anytime. When you want.”
“I’ll be over about eight.”
“I’ll pick you up.”
“Don’t bother.”
He did not argue.
By then she could not eat the chop. Changed her clothes. Decided she looked too dressed, too arranged, and changed again. Walking through the darkened streets, a scrappy chill wind on her back coming in spurts off the lake half a mile east, she played over and over again their brief exchange. An excuse to see her? He needed none. No, he wanted her gear out, he wanted the clean definition of a break. She almost hated him as she approached his house, past the cavernous old apartment houses the University was always secretly buying and then making a scandal by evicting all the old tenants, into the streets of frame and shingle houses. Hating was sordid. She disapproved of women who spoke with venom of men they had loved for no reason than that they had stopped. She disapproved! She always was disapproving of something. One would think her a moral animal. I try, I try, she muttered.
The house pulsed light: probably everyone home, the relatives upstairs, the Williams in between, the downstairs Rowley. She did not want to go in, not at all. The tension that had caused their breakup came from this house, for if Harlan were to lose it and Rowley had to move around the same time she was put out, they could not have gone on as they had. Whether they decided to live together or not would be a decision, a judgment: and they must both have perceived that subconsciously. As she hesitated, she thought that he might look out and see her dawdling there. Down the walk she marched to rap briskly. She must give him back the key. To save the price of having a new one made for Caroline?
“Hello, Rowley.” For a moment she was tempted to use his first name, George. He hated it, saw that few knew it. Rather than face him she passed into the livingroom, bruised to see it looking as it had. Did she expect the walls to run blood? Yente howled welcome, climbing her leg, pawing and complaining and butting his head until she took him up. On her shoulder he set up loud rough purring, kneading her and in his excitement letting his claws unsheathe.