Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “Mother, I tried to call you yesterday evening until eleven-thirty, but you weren’t in your room. Finally that awful woman told me not to call anymore. Didn’t she tell you I’d been calling you?”

  Louise had been downstairs sitting in the bar till it closed. She had been with Claude Martel, a film director whom she had met at the Office of Facts and Figures. “She was asleep when I returned—we had a late meeting working out new guidelines. Why weren’t you at the station? You knew I was counting on you.”

  “I had an engagement. I couldn’t break it.”

  “You can damned well break an engagement when your mother tells you to meet her train! I had tons of stuff to carry.”

  “Mother, I simply don’t understand why you’re making such a fuss! You got home all right—here you are. If you’d been in your hotel room, you’d have received my message last night.”

  Louise had a brief vision of Claude Martel across the little table. She had had a flirtation going with a playwright on the staff, but the first real tête-à-tête with Martel had demolished that fragile construction. Claude was the son of a Rumanian Jew who had married a French businessman; he had been brought over to Hollywood in the late thirties and proved to be an accomplished director of talkies. Now he was with Universal. She figured his age to be forty-five. Vigorous, magnetic, dark-haired, with light eyes, he was the first man who had moved her since Oscar. In front of her daughter she felt slightly guilty at having sat up so late with him, moving beyond flirtation into exploration. He had said he would be in New York during midsummer and would see her then. Perhaps, perhaps not. She was sure he met a great many women younger and more spectacular than herself. Nonetheless to feel that attraction was reassuring that she was not doomed to essential fidelity to Oscar forever. That night felt dense and heavy within her, more sensual than her couple of times in bed with Dennis Winterhaven. Even though all that had happened was talk and hand holding, she felt touched by Claude as not by any other man since Oscar. Therefore she feared her daughter could read on her face that affair in words.

  “Mrs. Shaunessy’s calling us, Mother. She has supper on the table.”

  “I don’t want you being rude to her, Kay. You will cooperate with her and you will be pleasant to her.”

  “She’s not my mother. She shouldn’t try to push me around.”

  “She’s my surrogate when I’m away, and you should treat her well. Kay, you’ve always loved Mrs. Shaunessy. What’s this contemptuous attitude?”

  “You’re talking about when I was a child. Really, she’s just a servant. It’s not right for her to speak to me the way she does.”

  “She’s a person in her own right, and she’s known you since you were a little girl. She’s taken care of you. Where were you this afternoon?”

  Kay flung herself into a chair in the dining room with her face twisted into a pout. O adolescence, o bat turds, Louise thought. I never had a chance to put on airs and throw fits. Perhaps that’s a gift I’m giving her, the chance to lash out emotionally without it costing anything. Louise loathed fights at the dinner table, so she put off their confrontation until they had savored the roast lamb Mrs. Shaunessy had managed to procure. Dutch irises in a blue vase. Louise was still relieved to be home, but her bliss was mixed with irritation with her daughter.

  Having a housekeeper was a tricky business for her conscience, but once she had made that decision, she had settled into it. Without Mrs. Shaunessy, her efficiency would be reduced by half. They had made their accommodations long ago. They called each other by their last names and did not chat. Mrs. Shaunessy gossiped with her friends who worked in other households in the same big apartment building. Mrs. Shaunessy’s room was off-limits to the rest of them, and what she cooked for them, she ate in the kitchen—which was where Louise ate when she was alone, and where Kay ate when Louise was absent. Mrs. Shaunessy had Wednesday afternoon and Sundays off, when she invariably took the train out to the Five Towns area of Long Island, to see one or the other of her married daughters.

  Still Louise summed up the contradictions of her life in a phrase she had once heard herself say: “Just tell Mrs. Shaunessy to put the Daily Worker on the coffee table.” She was a sympathizer who had never joined the Communist party because always she could find some part of whatever line they were adhering to at the moment with which she disagreed. Always she had scruples, reservations, issues. It had been a long flirtation but she did not think unless she or the Party changed drastically that she would ever swear to love, honor and obey. The Stalin-Hitler pact had capped her decision like a tooth sealed for good.

  She made the coffee and carried it into the living room, as she always did. She felt that washing up the supper dishes ought to be Mrs. Shaunessy’s last job. Kay had begun drinking coffee recently. “All right, where were you this afternoon, Kay?” She tried to sound brisk, firm.

  “I had a date.”

  “A what?” But she had heard Kay clearly. “With whom?”

  Kay flipped up the ends of her hair. She jutted her chin up and held her lashes at half mast, imitating some movie star no doubt. “His name is Andy.” When Louise prolonged her stare she added, “Andy Bates.”

  “Do continue. Where did you meet him and who is he and why didn’t you talk to me first?” Louise had the sour thought that if her adolescence had been passed in a Dickens novel, her daughter’s seemed bathed in B movies.

  “I’m sixteen, Mother, I’m grown up now and it’s time you realized that. Girls grow up quickly during wars.” Kay listened to the sound of that with some satisfaction.

  “Since last week you grew up? Amazing. And who is this Andy Bates?”

  “He’s in the Navy—”

  “Oh no! A sailor? Where in hell did you meet a sailor?”

  “Outside the USO. We’re too young to go inside but we meet them outside. Your attitude is unpatriotic, Mother. I’m ashamed of you.”

  “I’m ashamed of you, picking up a sailor in the street and trying to tell me that’s part of the war effort. What did you do with him?”

  “Really, Mother, you sound like a Victorian matron about to show me the door. I went on a double date with him to the Central Park Zoo and then for a row on the lake. His liberty is over. I promised to write to him, but I won’t see him for months, if he doesn’t get blown to pieces in the meantime.”

  “Kay, he may be a nice young man but you can’t pick up men in the streets and expect them to act like gentlemen. You have no damned idea what you could get into. Some men are more than willing to use violence—”

  “Really, Mother, everybody meets informally nowadays, and if you really think he was about to ravish me in the middle of the zoo—”

  “You don’t know what that word means! I do not want you hanging around outside the USO asking for trouble. If I have to go to school every day and meet you and walk you back here, I’ll start doing so.”

  “Mother! Do you want me to die of embarrassment? I’ll quit school if you treat me that way.”

  “I doubt that. You’d get pretty bored at home. Look, Kay, if you think you’re old enough to begin dating, only on weekends and I want to meet the young men.” She sounded priggish and did not care. At Kay’s age she had had a honed sense of which men were dangerous and which not, a knowledge Kay had been protected from ever acquiring; nor did she wish Kay to need to walk around judging potential for brute force.

  Shouldn’t she consult Oscar? He might be able to reason with Kay far more effectively than she could; perhaps he could embarrass her into behaving less recklessly. She felt as if she ought to involve him, but she did not want to entangle herself in the dangerous strands of Oscar’s attention. Surely she could handle Kay alone, staying free of him for good.

  She was sitting up in bed with the blackout curtains drawn reading Saint-Exupéry’s Flight to Arras. Dennis had given it to her the evening she had not been able to keep him from proposing and then retreating wounded. Suddenly the phone rang.

  She frowned
. Late for someone to call. It was long distance. When she heard the voice with its hint of French, her irritation vanished. “Claude! Where are you?”

  “I’m still in Washington. But I have rearranged my schedule. Tomorrow I take the train to New York where I spend tomorrow night, and I see you, do you agree? Can you cancel what you are doing and see me? Because the next morning I must return to the West Coast.”

  “Tomorrow? Shall I meet your train?”

  “No, it will be congested. I am arranging this by seeing our big money person in New York. Some lackey will meet me. I will call you in the late afternoon and tell you when we will dine. Is that good?”

  “It sounds very good to me.”

  “I could not wait till summer, Louise, to continue our conversation. I consider it pressing. Do you agree?”

  “I agree I’ll see you tomorrow, Claude. Now, good night.” She suspected that if Claude pushed her hard enough, she would fall into his arms. Obviously she had made an impression on him as he had on her, but would the second meeting stand up to the first? Not to worry, she ordered herself, figuring how she would work an appointment to have her hair done into her already tight schedule and what excuse could get her out of seeing Katharine Cornell in Shaw’s Candida with her friends the Bauers after all the difficulty getting tickets. She would send Kay instead, pleading unexpected board work. The Bauers were accustomed to their friends being called to Washington and joining agencies as dollar-a-year men. They would not question her need to meet a deadline. Tomorrow morning she would have Kay help her sort the box of papers, which would impress Kay with the truth of her tale. The way was cleared for folly.

  I have been faithful to Oscar not only during marriage but long afterward, even when I have occasionally dropped myself like a load of clean unsorted laundry into another man’s bed. “I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.” Louise smiled at the memory of that heavy breathing poem of her adolescence, passed around among the more literary and emancipated coeds, who had thought it sexy until they discovered Joyce and Hemingway. Claude was of Oscar’s caliber, and even a brief gallop with him would be good for her sense of identity and possibilities. Louise sighed, wondering if she should have taken up writing steamy novels instead of slick fiction, because in none of her stories could her heroines experience the furnace of sexual desire that roared there at the center, fueling her life with its energy.

  Louise felt too excited to sleep, but she wanted to look her best. Finally she rummaged in a drawer for a sleeping pill. She had not taken one since those months after Oscar had moved out. She could remember her misery, but tonight she had an aerial view of that hell, neat as quilted fields far below. Tonight if she needed help to sleep, it was because her life felt overly full, rather than emptied.

  When she awakened, she remembered two sexual dreams. In them she had lain not with Oscar, who still seemed to control her dream life, or not with faceless youth, young anylove, who sometimes replaced Oscar. She had dreamed of lying naked body to body once and then again with Claude, so that as she rose to face her day, she found herself already thinking of him as her lover, as a man who had already twice given her pleasure.

  NAOMI 2

  Today You Are a Woman

  It happened at school, when Naomi was outside in gym class playing baseball. They stuck her in center field, far, far from the batter, where her only terror was that the ball might suddenly fly at her. She was not used to playing baseball. She would swing at the ball when it was her turn, and once in a while by sheer luck she hit it. She had learned to run then very fast, and she understood where to run first, and where to go next.

  However, when the ball suddenly chose to dive straight at her, she never could figure out what to do with it. She would stand with her arms straight up and sometimes it would veer abruptly and bounce by her, or it would hang over her head and then land right on her, or it would come to her outstretched arms and then wickedly bounce off them and hop away. Out in the grass of the outfield she prayed that the ball would not pick her to attack today.

  All spring it had been raining, but today the sun shone and the sky was blue, blurred by a yellow brown haze from the factories. Dandelions were blooming in the outfield. In French they were called pissenlits, piss in beds, but they were the same flowers. She had eaten the greens in earlier, better springs. The girls rubbed dandelions under each other’s chins, saying that was butter.

  In right field next to her Clotilde was standing. It had seemed a perfectly ordinary name to Naomi’s ears, until she had heard how the other kids teased Clotilde, who was a light-colored almost grey-skinned plump child with hair as kinky as Naomi’s and only a little darker. Clotilde did not speak the way the other colored girls did. Her mother dressed her in pinafores, and she wore a little gold cross on a chain. She was Catholic, but did not go to the parochial school, she had explained to Naomi, because they were Poles there, and indeed that made sense to Naomi, since the Polish kids fought the colored kids as often as they fought the Jewish kids, and neither Jews nor colored people were welcome in Hamtramck, the Polish town enclosed by Detroit but with its own government.

  Now Naomi noticed that Clotilde had drifted as if blown gradually by the wind over to her. Clotilde was not looking at her but forlornly in the direction of home plate, from which she too must wish as fervently as Naomi nothing would come at them. Clotilde was always the last chosen of the colored girls, because she had no athletic interest or ability.

  “Tu es de Paris, vraiment?” Clotilde asked from the side of her mouth.

  For a moment she was not sure Clotilde was speaking French, for it was a singsong French with a number of elisions and some syllables pronounced that Naomi had only heard said that way in Provence. Then Naomi began to talk to her, fervently, furiously. “How is it you speak French? Does your family speak it? Where are you from?”

  “Doucement, doucement,” Clotilde warned. “We are not supposed to speak in anything but English, as you know. We must be quiet. But I was born in Martinique, where I have a great deal of family and it is very beautiful with no winter and the white people are not as mean as here. I know how people here make fun of you when you do not speak English at home.”

  “It feels so good to speak French, to hear it, I feel like crying!”

  Unfortunately the shortstop threw the next batter out, ending their conversation. Naomi was squatting among the dandelions looking for one that had made a seed head so she could blow it off, watching to see when she would have to go to bat, when she realized she felt wet between her legs.

  Could she have peed on herself? She waited till she came in from the field at the end of gym class and changed out of the shorts the school had made her buy, long gym shorts in ugly navy. Big stain of red, of blood, the size of a half dollar. She remembered a story on the radio about a little girl dying of anemia and the blood rushing in her ears. Then she remembered the time Jacqueline left a napkin in the bathroom. Maman had slapped Jacqueline and called her a dirty girl, but then Maman explained to Rivka and herself how little girls became women.

  Then they asked Jacqueline privately. She lay on their parents’ bed reading Wuthering Heights, an English novel. Both Maman and Papa were at work. Jacqueline assumed an air of great importance. It was nothing, she said, although some girls made a great fuss about it and lay around all day with hot water bottles and took many aspirin. She herself thought it was merely boring. But it meant you had become a woman. It was like a private bar mitzvah and more real, because it happened when G-d chose. Then you would notice how you waxed and waned with the moon and that your time would come at a certain point in the cycle of the moon.

  Naomi knew that the girls were always talking about periods and falling off the roof and that time of month, but she wasn’t going to say one word. They might make fun of her or that mean Joyce might tell the boys and then she would simply die. She stuffed toilet paper into her panties and walked very carefully to her next class.

  At home Au
nt Rose was yelling at Sharon about changing the babies right away. Naomi stood about on one foot and then on the other waiting to talk to Aunt Rose, but when Rose noticed her, it was only to send her to the bakery for pumpernickel and to the dairy for a gallon of three percent milk.

  Finally Ruthie came home for a quick supper, changing the white blouse and dark skirt she was required to wear at work. Ruthie had three such blouses and two such skirts that she was forever washing and ironing. She kept them all the way over on the right of the closet they shared, for they were never worn on any other occasion. Naomi viewed them with respect and was careful not to muss them when she looked for something in the closet. Ruthie had about an hour before she had to rush to class.

  Naomi caught Ruthie in their bedroom as soon as she could. “Ruthie. Something happened to me today.”

  “Something good or something bad?”

  “I don’t know.” Naomi shrugged uncomfortably. The question itself disturbed her. Was the blood a punishment or a passport to adult freedom?

  “If you don’t, who does?” Ruthie was digging in the back of the closet. “It’s time to start wearing cottons. What a day to be stuck inside.”

  “There’s blood inside my panties.” Naomi sat miserably on the very edge of Ruthie’s bunk. “It’s what do you call it in English? My periods.”

  “Period. Is it really? Did Mama give you a napkin?”

  “I didn’t tell her yet.”

  “You need a sanitary belt and a napkin.” Ruthie rummaged in her dresser. “You put my belt on for now. Tomorrow I’ll buy one for you downtown.” Ruthie stroked her hair, asking anxiously, “Do you understand what it means?”

  “Now I can have babies.”

  Ruthie laughed. “Not on your own. Only by getting in bed with a boy, which you shouldn’t yet think about for a hundred years.” Leaving her to put on the pad, Ruthie skipped off to the kitchen, humming.

  Naomi could not see why her getting blood in her panties made Ruthie feel bouncy. Maybe it was because Ruthie wanted to have babies, not for years, but she wanted babies. Naomi did not think she did. She wished she could tell Rivka that, for she had used to think they were so adorable that whenever she saw a mother pushing a pram, she would stop and make a fuss. Rivka said that was disgusting and gooey. Now since Naomi was around babies every afternoon from the time she got off school until their mothers got them, she had grown disillusioned. Mess and caca, crying and falling out of chairs, throwing their food on the floor, that was the rule.