by Marge Piercy
Caroline leaned toward him, said in a flat voice, “I got a letter from Bruce today.”
He looked at her hand. Ring was back. She was just being friendly.
“He’s arriving Saturday by plane.”
Did she want him to drive her to the airport? Vera passed them taking something from the sink, tore and glued. Swung around. “Crude, simple—as you see.”
Caroline drew her breath sharply, then slid down in the armchair gasping with laughter. “Oh, oh, she has you to a T!” The mask was all leer and droop, part hound, part lecher and smug with satisfaction. Huge green nose, brows of steel-wool, moustache of a frayed jump rope unraveled and slack, with wicked little tinsel pigeyes and great fat satisfied tinsel smirk. His vanity sputtered and yet he was tickled. He wished he were alone with her, damn it.
Still giggling Caroline swung the mask like a severed head. “Rowley, sometimes you do look just that way! Give it to me.”
“No,” he said. “I want to hang on that wall for a while.”
“Headless men can’t talk,” Vera said. “But no, you can’t have it. Paul hasn’t seen it yet.”
“But then?” Caroline poked it carefully in the green snoot.
“Maybe you won’t want it. It was too easy.” She watched through her lashes to see if he showed anger. “Don’t knock it apart.”
“I’m sturdy stuff. I take a lot of punishment.”
“I guess so.” For a moment as she took the mask from Caroline she smiled but this time without that edge of contempt. Then she put the mask On the worktable and drew the screen to. A silence built and stood between them. Caroline had her guitar before he could forestall.
“I’ve learned a new song.” She gave him her performing smile. “I was thinking you’d particularly like it …” She launched into “Which Side Are You On?” Sweat broke out on his back. He wanted to throttle her. He could not stand the damn songs, not to listen to them anymore. They gave him a feeling of awful embarrassment, as if some gross bag with eight chins had begun to flirt. He imagined cramming Caroline’s Martin right down her wide mouth. Wham. Just the pegs sticking out. He could write songs for a fat union:
We know just what we are for:
the more, the more, the more, the more:
bum the gooks, deport the spics,
for a wider, whiter, annual fix,
screw the reds at home, abroad:
Three cheers for NAM, HUAC and GOD.
Insularity forever,
Insularity forever,
Insularity forever,
for Privilege makes us strong!
His old man rotting in Gary. Still if he heard middle-class types jawing about unions he got blazing mad. Some heritage.
The moment she paused he bounced to his feet. “Got to be going.”
“I’ll go with you. I mean, can you give me a ride?”
He turned at the first bend to look back, but Vera had already shut the door. He heard the click of the chain sliding to, the clack of the lock engaging. Down the dim worn carpeted stairs after Caroline who descended slowly, so slowly he finally thought of asking, “Want me to carry the guitar?”
At the bottom she turned but instead of handing him the Martin, made a choking noise and flung her arms around his neck. The guitar landed case and all with a boom that made him wince. Jesus, she didn’t deserve that instrument. “Oh, oooh,” she burst out. Tears ran down her face against his throat. Cringing he put his arms around her. “There, Caroline, hey, what’s all this. Hey come on, baby, don’t carry on.”
Holding tight she rubbed her face into his throat, ground herself against him in passionate complaint. “I don’t want to marry Bruce, I don’t want to!”
“So give his ring back and flick him.”
“Who’ll marry me then?”
“Why should anybody?” He leaned awkwardly against a wall, a bracket with a broken bulb next to his head.
She sobbed harder. Her hands worked under his jacket. He lost his balance, ended up sitting on the last step with her sprawled across him. “You don’t want to marry me! You’ll make me marry him.”
“Marry anybody you want.” He made an effort to get up but she had the leverage. He lay on the steps with her treads digging into him and her soft but substantial body squirming all over. His tool was knocking against his belt buckle and the breath whistled through his teeth.
“You don’t even like me! You don’t care about me!” Her hands worked his shirt loose and crept under. The tears dripped like warm milk across his neck.
He felt like yelling, Hell no! Something sloppy, opportunistic, sly and shiteating in her that he hated. But her breasts squirming against him raised the vivid image of her body, a body that naked in bed had never excited him as much: the jutting hips, smallish breasts, soft thighs and bony knees that now lit him up like a welder’s torch, at the same time the steps were breaking his back. His hand closed on her ass and he began trying to roll her over.
“You do want me. You do!” Her crying stopped. She put a hand on him, hot through his levis. A door opened somewhere up the stairs. He got up at once with her clinging. Stairs ended here. Space underneath closed in. Stepping down into the lobby for one minute he started for a burst red leather chair, but then he noticed the French doors and pushed on through the nearest with her, knocking it shut behind them.
They stumbled into tall wet weeds and grasses gone to seed, broken bottles and beer cans shining in the dark: unpromising. He backed her against the squat fountain in the middle, propped her on the rim. She was fumbling with him again, but he brushed her hand aside, got himself out, unzipped her slacks and pulled them just far enough out of the way along with her panties.
The angle was steep. He went thumping against the concrete rim, but she was excited and helping, and he shoved in. Then he realized they were in a patch of light. He looked up. No one at a window yet. The court echoed with television laughter, a manic avalanche of marbles. Anyone looked out, they would set race relations back a decade. He yanked her over into the dark.
Even as they jockeyed back and forth locked in uneasy balance and his excitement sharpened and sharpened, he still was half afraid he would blow the whole thing by collapsing into laughter. Over her shoulder he faced the bottom half of a castrated cupid. Lost it one damn wet night. They’d left the guitar in the hall.
“I’ve come,” she hissed suddenly. “You go ahead Please.” He did not believe her, but then he was not sure she ever did come, in any sense he could understand. She was crazy, out of her mind which wasn’t roomy to begin with. Her ring dug into the small of his back. He could feel her sudden nervousness, twitching on the wobbly rim. Once again he felt close to laughter. He went off the bottom feeling himself buck, but even then he thought, this is the end, not on a silver platter or a feather bed, I am not tangling with this one any more.
Saturday, November 8
He was hanging around the entrance to the 53rd Street Illinois Central station when Sam came sprinting down with her friend behind toting a dufflebag. They were both in levis and denim shirts like Bobbsey Twins, but she looked great with her dark hair slapping between her shoulders and her rosy face beginning to smile. She gave him a sharp wild hug and yelled in his ear, “Hey, this is Gino Warwick! Look.”
He looked. Gino was of middling height and skinny, even scrawny, with his hair worn long and a silly fuzzy goatee. His face set sullen: anticipation of him or hangover of the house? Could be grim there.
The talk in the car was all what time they had left here, arrived there. After every question and answer, Sam would turn to glow over the seat at Gino giving him quick encouraging glances as if he might get carsick.
At his place Sam followed him to the kitchen to help stash the beer and deli stuff, while Gino sagged in the big red armchair Annie had always sat in. She leaned on the kitchen table braiding and unbraiding her glossy hair as she talked, not from nervousness but spare energy. “Been dying to get you together. We listened to you last night.
He won’t say so, but he was impressed—had to be.”
“How were things in Gary?”
She made a sad puckered face. Looking down at her sneakers, her soft lashes brushed her cheek. “The doctors want him to have another operation. He’s refusing. I can’t tell if it’s because of the money or because he hates the hospital. I tried to talk to the surgeon, but you know how they are. You should go out there and find out what’s what.” Yente came rubbing against her legs, and she picked him up baby fashion.
Leaning against the stove he felt his body turn gross, waterlogged. “Maybe.”
She hugged Yente hard to emphasize. “You’ve got to! Make him go if he needs it.”
“Sam, how can I? What have we ever been able to make him do? I’ll find out if it’s only the money.”
“He says he can’t leave Mom again. But she could go with Harry.”
He made a fending off gesture. “Look, he was a man who felt himself there. He pushed on things. He made things happen. Now all he can say is she needs him home.”
“If he doesn’t have this operation, how much longer …?” Her voice had dropped to their old muted tones, conspiring. In the next room Gino was pacing noisily.
“I can try to get an estimate from the surgeon. If he knows.”
“Harry came over last night.”
“Mother called him?”
“I did. Thought Gino might as well see the worst of the family with the best.” But she was grinning as she nuzzled the cat. She had a soft spot for Harry.
“How’s tricks with Harry? Have they taken him into the Syndicate yet?”
“Actually he’s been giving Mom money. But he called Gino a commie dupe and said the Army would teach him to be a man.”
“Harry’s always been patriotic. Probably his greatest regret is he was a kid during World War II and couldn’t corner the black market.”
“Hey,” Gino yelled, “are you still in there?”
“Half a minute!” She put the cat down. “What happened with Anna?”
“Maybe we got tired making it. Year’s a long time.”
She slid off the table to punch him in the arm. “Liar.”
He laughed and reached for her but she ran out. In the living room Gino sat crosslegged leafing through his books. He held up one stuck full of notes. “What’s all this Bobbie Burns stuff?”
“I’m doing a special on him. Songs mostly. That is, the ones I can get Cal to let me do.”
Sam knelt behind Gino rubbing her chin in his haystack hair. He was surprised at his embarrassment. She had never doted. Gino gave him a look of disbelief. “To a wee mousie? To a mountain daily? Have fun.”
“He wrote fine raunchy songs. No poet has knocked out better.” The kid was ignorant. “So, what are you studying?”
Gino knotted his fingers in his meager goatee. “Are you going through the standard parental bit? We already did that twice.”
“Got some preferred way of sending information? Use it.”
“Why give you labels? Make up your own. Her other brother had plenty last night.”
“Gino, don’t go defensive on him.” Sam hugged his head but he ducked free. The look she threw Rowley said, isn’t he fine?
“You want us to sit and stare until we achieve a holy vision of each other? Or do I just wait for donations, like are you even a student?”
“I told you he was. But Gino doesn’t believe in letting ourselves be compartmentalized by administrative convenience,” she said proudly, kneeling behind the kid with her strong hands on his rickety shoulders. “College is a manpower-channeling factory, along with the draft, to service the needs of the system. Gino talks about the guerrilla student who operates inside the university making it serve radical ends and his real needs, a grasp on your own society, your body, your brain, your history.” All the while she talked Gino made faces of anguish but offered no comment. “Rowley believes the same way you do about education. You have lots in common.” A sneer hung in the air between them, before her highcheeked intent face.
“Is he from around here?” Rowley asked.
“From Midland, Michigan.”
He squinted, thinking. “Company town?”
“Stifling,” Gino said. “Dow Chemical. Model community when you’re not downwind. Little white houses in a testtube. Grass for a town of cows.”
“Your father work for them?”
“He’s a chemical engineer.”
“Oh.” Middle-class kid with grass on his face and a lot of crap about selfdevelopment. Par for the course.
“We have to go see them next.” Sam pulled her glossy hair together under her chin. “Maybe at Thanksgiving.”
“If you like each other, why care if your families think you smell sweet?”
“Because you know, families get excited,” Sam said patiently. “They might think we’re young to get married.”
“You are. I’m still too young.”
“You don’t understand. Even though there’s enough in our family to do it, I’m not scared of marriage like you are. Really.”
“Fine. A man who’s not afraid of fire isn’t required to jump in. Take your time, Sam. You’ve little call to be afraid of being single, either.”
“You’re turning into a bachelor!” Her dark eyes narrowed, her elbows came in. “I’m surprised at you. It isn’t always the woman who wants to get married. Some men want to marry a particular woman—”
“Get off my back. I guess you’ll marry someday, but there’s no damn hurry. Those couples tied around each other’s necks before they’re out of school. Wife knocked up, barrack existence—”
“Stop being superstitious. Getting married only changes my name and his draft card.”
“Then why bother?”
“Because if you feel around long enough we’ll get into a fight and break up. Like you and Anna. That’s not my idea of what I want to happen.”
“If something busts you up, then you better not get stuck so tight you need a lawyer to untie you.”
“Oh Rowley, everybody fights. If we weren’t related how many times we’d have written each other off! You’re being trivial!”
“Sam, the way people act in school has zero correlation with what they’re going to sound like later. Everybody’s an intellectual, everybody’s a rebel. Everybody’s set to lead a life honest to their values—whatever those turn out to be, when things start costing.”
“Everybody doesn’t sell out, Rowley! You don’t believe that either. Don’t you have faith enough in me to think I won’t, and that I wouldn’t pick somebody who will?”
A look of intense irritation had been growing on Gino. Now he hauled himself up off the floor and stood head forward like a stork with rundown heels. “She means this whole scene to be pablum, but it’s not working. It’s only making it worse on you, thinking you can change things. Don’t choke on it, but we are married.”
The kid dared to pity him. “Shit!” Rowley found himself crossing as if the floor tilted, walking into his desk. He stood observing that he had not paid his telephone bill.
“I’d never act this way if you did something you really meant!”
“Like shoot the mayor? Well, now.”
“Look at me.”
He swung around. She flushed. “When? How? You notice I don’t ask any more, why.”
“The weekend after I called you.” She went to stand beside Gino, who rested an elbow on her shoulder, and looked at him directly now. His eyes were a slatey dark blue. She asked, “Want us to leave?”
To smash Gino’s flimsy long head against the basement wall. He drew a deep abrasive breath. “I don’t want to quarrel with you.”
“No annulment threats?” Gino drawled.
“She did what she wanted. You don’t have to worry about our folks. They’re scared of courts. The old man served a term for a sitdown strike, in the sweet past.”
“My family can’t do anything they haven’t already, for other reasons. It’s what you might cal
l a very loose connection.”
“Gino organized a demonstration at Dow. About eighty of us went down there and leafleted and did guerrilla theater in front of the gates. When he got busted, his father wouldn’t bail him out.”
“He was scared.” Gino shrugged. “I wasn’t. I can’t bail him out of where he is, either. And he’s in for life.”
Cheap imitation of me. She was too young to have developed a taste in men. “Notice I don’t ask how she’ll be supported either. I know.”
“Rowley! Help me only if you mean it. Don’t beat him over the head. You’re acting just like they want you to, putting him down on sight, ready to think you must know better. Big brother, you’re acting like a trained seal, and it brings me down.”
“Look,” Gino said in his flat drawl. “I’m used to making it on twenty bucks a week, and she’ll learn. And no apologies from me. She’s got a brain and muscles, and she won’t starve unless she wants to. She’s tougher and smarter than you think—and less than she thinks.” He gave her a little more of the elbow.
He could not realize it. Harry he’d never been close to. But she had been his person since she was a baby. He had first been pleased with her when she was six months born, with moist black curls and enormous eyes. He considered he had had a lot to do with bringing her up and setting her straight. His parents named her Sandra, but he had called her Sam, and his name had stuck. Now this skinny cretin from a company town, this gangling, sourmouthed lichen-chinned heir of a chemical engineer had the right to call her anything from Sandy to Tootsy, haul her around, give her orders, read her mail, pump her full of limp fuzzy babies, and decide when and if he saw her. He could not believe it. He picked up a glass ashtray and smashed it on the desk. Broken shards exploded. He had to pick splinters off his shirt, out of his moustache, out of his palms. Her face was drawn tight with strain. Another girl would be crying, but he had raised her tough.
He marched up to Gino. “Look you aren’t exactly prepossessing …” which made the boy laugh before he brought back the high horse expression, all nose and goatee. “Sam isn’t stupid, so you must be good for something. I guess you’re both pleased with each other …”