by Marge Piercy
“Haven’t you ever touched yourself, kitten?”
“You shouldn’t ask me that.” She felt herself blushing. Her hand tightened around his thing.
“Haven’t you? Of course you have.”
“Just since I met you! Before that, I didn’t have to!”
“The fire I lit, I will put out,” he said softly in her ear, her hair, and put his hand between her legs. “That’s better. That’s good. Tell me you like me to do that.”
“Murray!”
“Ruthie!” He kissed her. His finger slid up into her. “It doesn’t have to be grim. We’ll do this thousands of times before we die, thousands and thousands and thousands. We’ll do it till we’re ninety. Does that hurt?” He slowly slid another finger and then another into her.
“Yes, it hurts.” She had her hand on his penis, so she knew it was only fingers. Still, “Hadn’t we better put that cover on you?”
“Okay. Now.” He took his hand away from her. Her body still ached where he had touched her, the sting of the stretching but also an ache that was wanting. He tore open the foil and fitted the rubber over himself. “You put him in.” He drew her slip up away from her hips and put his handkerchief under her buttocks.
“Me?”
“If it hurts too much, stop.” He lay down half on her and pressed his penis against her. Slowly he moved it back and forth, back and forth, until suddenly he slid in, as his finger had done, just a little. It did hurt but she thought, I must do this, I must, and she lunged forward, with a sharp tearing pain that brought tears to her eyes. Slowly the tears trickled over his shoulder.
“There,” she said.
“We did it.” He moved slowly in her at first and then suddenly faster. “Am I hurting you?” he gasped, as if he too was in pain.
She did not answer, not wanting to lie. Then he groaned and stopped. After a few minutes, he slowly drew out of her. The condom hung heavy on him with fluid, and his penis was smaller again.
They had to go back soon after that. “I’m going to say we went out and drank coffee down by Wayne and then went to a movie,” Ruthie said.
“If they believe that, they’ll believe anything.”
“You better hope they believe it. I’m praying.”
When she got in, Sharon was crying because she had just had a fight with Arty as he was leaving for work, and Rose was holding her and saying, he didn’t mean it, he didn’t mean it. Arty had lost his temper because Sharon always fell asleep before he left. He said his mother would sit up to see him out of the house, but his own wife was too lazy.
Ruthie felt profoundly relieved. She was safe from Rose’s attention. In the bathroom she carefully sponged dried blood from her thighs and washed the stained panty. She could not sleep, because she had slept during the day. This was the time of night she usually worked and she was wide awake. However, she played at going to bed until the house was dark and quiet and she could be sure everyone else was sleeping.
Then she sat at the kitchen table trying to make peace with herself over what she had done. Now she had to marry him. But she wanted to anyhow. At least they had had that much. Finally she took out her schoolbooks and studied, making notes for a paper she had to write. Homework was something that took up any spare moments she had. Was she a fool or had she done the right thing? There was no one to ask. She had put Murray’s desire in between herself and her mother.
Tomorrow they had only the hours until noon, so Murray would be coming over at nine. That would be their last three hours for nobody knew how long. Then she would eat a quick lunch with his parents and Murray and then they would take him to the station. She would try even harder than before to make them like her, for it counted more now.
She would say they were going on a picnic and take a blanket. They could go to a park and walk into the woods. Back to Belle Isle or to Rouge Park, which was farther but much bigger. She was a bad woman to plan so, but she did not care. He must carry off with him the knowledge of her love, even if she couldn’t give him anything else to take away. The check meant he was serious about their future. They would have a joint account like married people, long before they could have a house or a bed or a name in common. Every week she would put some of her paycheck in, toward that future that might never come.
BERNICE 3
Bird on a Wire
Bernice was using her electric cake mixer to beat the spot of orange dye into the viscid white oleo. Butter was not only rationed, it had virtually disappeared. At least The Professor was busy again. After a period in which everyone had been afraid the college was about to be closed down, St. Thomas had let women in and secured government contracts to train Army and Navy personnel. The Professor was teaching German, but he also had to fill in with French, Spanish and an algebra course, as the school had lost over half its faculty.
Propped against the tiles of the kitchen wall just behind the mixer was a letter addressed to Bernice. It was back in its envelope, already limp with handling, but she knew by heart what it said. It advised her that she had an appointment with Jacqueline Cochran in Boston at the Ritz Carlton next Monday at 1:00 P.M.
Pinned to the wall of her room was the first news item, that Nancy Love was organizing a service of women pilots to ferry planes. Bernice had not qualified for that; Love was taking only the most experienced women pilots in the country, women with four, five, six hundred hours, women who had been flying professionally for years. Her hope had been humbled, and then she had been grounded. The coastal strip for one hundred fifty miles inland had been closed to civilian patrols. Now she could not fly at all, and her life pressed in on her, narrow as a typewriter ribbon.
Then an article had appeared saying that Jacqueline Cochran was organizing another ferrying service. She had written at once, but she had not heard for two months. Down in Houston, Texas, the first class of WFTDs were training. Bernice had her chance at the interview Monday to persuade Cochran to let her fly for the Women’s Flying Training Detachment. Enough literature had come for her to know she was well within the weight requirements, high for women’s bodies, and thus suitable for her big-boned frame.
Since that initial response she had been walking miles every day. She had joined a calisthenics class at the college; she studied her old manuals and read library books on aeronautics. What she had not done was tell The Professor about the interview. He had already dismissed the idea of her going anyplace. She only wished that the WFTD had the power to draft her.
Monday morning she got up before her father, made his breakfast, wrote a note about the interview and fled, running through the lightly falling snow to the little bus station behind the post office. She was in time for the 6:45 bus, crowded already by the time it reached Bentham Center. She stood near the back, all the way to Boston, arriving there two hours early.
She walked into a coffee shop filled with sailors, but she saw no place to sit and realized she was too excited to eat. She got a coffee to go and drank it sitting in the Public Garden. Boston was not as cold as Bentham Center, but had it been below zero, she would not have cared. Couples huddled earnestly talking or desperately necking on the benches, sailors and their girls. Thanksgiving was coming soon and she had ordered a turkey from the Garfinkles, who raised them. She wondered how Jeff was managing in London. She did not think the English celebrated Thanksgiving.
She tried to imagine what might impress Jacqueline Cochran, but she could think of nothing special about herself, except that she had managed to get her commercial license. If Cochran knew how many boring papers she had typed on how many late nights and through how many dreary afternoons, she would be moved a little. Perhaps.
Her heroine had been Amelia Earhart, but that did not mean she did not admire Jacqueline Cochran, who had come up from poverty, who had won the Bendix Air Race in 1938, the only woman in the race, Los Angeles to Cleveland in eight hours, ten minutes and thirty-one seconds, landing with less than three gallons of gas left in her tank. Climbing over a ferocious storm,
to twenty-two thousand feet in an unpressurized cockpit—that was how she had won that famous race. The next plane did not arrive for an hour. After that Bernice had put up her photo next to Amelia Earhart.
At twelve-thirty Bernice could wait no longer, for fear of being late. She headed for the Ritz where she huddled in the lobby waiting till she could persuade herself it was all right to go up. In her old grey coat, she felt conspicuously dowdy. She kept imagining she would be asked to leave. Finally at five to one she had herself announced and took the elevator.
Cochran had the room partially set up as an office, a big desk and chairs, files, a secretary in the next room, but it was still and obviously a well-appointed suite. Bernice had not expected the woman she saw at that walnut desk, an exquisite woman whose mink coat was tossed artfully over the back of her chair, made up like a model, with blond hair in gentle ringlets and brown eyes set off by mascara. In short, Cochran was stunning and dressed like someone Bernice would see in a movie, in a pale mauve suit with a watered silk blouse. Bernice had a momentary urge to weep. Cochran was never going to accept her. Bernice tried to remember that this was the woman who had set a record climbing to thirty-three thousand feet in an unpressurized plane, sucking oxygen from a tube with the temperature in the unheated cockpit sixty degrees below zero. This was the woman who would test anything, new types of oxygen masks, engine superchargers, spark plugs, airplane fuel and wing designs, who was absolutely fearless in taking risks and trying out whatever the inventors could produce.
Cochran had her file on the desk. “You were flying for the Civil Air Patrol?”
“Yes, but they’ve grounded us now.”
“When did you start flying?”
The first questions were obvious but the later ones, not so. Cochran asked about relationships with men. She seemed pleased that Bernice lived with her father, a respectable professor. “Will he object to your going?”
Bernice spoke carefully. “He’s very eager to contribute to the war effort. My brother’s in the Office of Strategic Services overseas. My father has been trying to get a war post in Washington. I feel sure he’d be excited if I could join the WFTD.” Bernice felt proud of her wording. The Professor would certainly be excited: she had not lied.
“Some of the questions I’ve asked I know have surprised you, but we have to be very careful with our girls. The public suspects women who fly planes of being racy and fast, chasing around a man’s world, as if the skies could be anyone’s monopoly. I’m as interested in the character of my girls as I am in their flying experience. Any breath of scandal and we’ll lose an irreplaceable opportunity for women.”
“All I want to do is fly,” Bernice said with complete honesty. “It’s the thing I do best, and the only time I feel completely happy is when I’m up there. It’s the best work and the best play in the world to me. Nothing competes with it. All I ask is the chance to do it. I’ll work hard and I’ll learn anything we have to learn.”
Cochran smiled at her. “I think that might be arranged, Miss Coates. Good day. You’ll be hearing from us.”
Bernice did not arrive home in time to fix The Professor’s supper, but she had arranged with Mrs. Augustine next door to invite him over, confessing where she was going. She gathered that he went and ate heartily.
“She’s a better cook than you are,” The Professor said, glowering out of his favorite chair by the Westinghouse console.
“Then you enjoyed your supper, and no problem,” Bernice said in that falsely cheerful tone she was always adopting with him.
“I don’t want to eat at the Augustines’ table. He smokes a stinking pipe with his coffee. I want to eat at my own table.”
“That summons was important. If the government needs me, I must go.”
“Your duty is here. You don’t have to run off looking for useful work.”
“I have a skill that few women have had a chance to acquire. Now suddenly it’s worth something.”
“They aren’t looking for a girl like you. If they write you again, I will answer them. You’re needed at home. They’ll understand.” The Professor erected the fence of Christian Science Monitor before his face. He read the Globe in the morning and the Christian Science Monitor every evening. A few moments later his voice issued from behind the paper. “Imitating your brother is a ridiculous thing for a big sensible girl like you to indulge in. The house has been better managed since you left off chasing out to the airport.” When she still did not reply, he actually put the paper down to look at her. “They don’t need a silly overgrown girl running around airports, and this woman, whoever she is, is just a flash in the pan.”
She would not engage him. She saw no use in arguing. She merely had to collect the mail every day before he saw it.
The trouble was as the weeks went by, she could not be sure that a letter had not come and been answered by The Professor. She did not dare ask her father or write Cochran’s office. She baked some cookies from a recipe that used potatoes. They came out better than most such efforts, and she presented some to the postman and then told him exactly what the envelope would say. She begged him to give her the letter personally.
This postman was not the same one, for he had been in the reserves, but an old man who pulled the mail around in a child’s wagon. She did not know if he would do as she asked, but five days before Christmas, the letter came. It told her to report to Westover Air Force Base on January third for a physical examination, Form 64, the same rigorous physical that combat pilots received. If she passed, she was in.
She read the letter standing on the walk she had shoveled yesterday, while the old mailman pulled his grandson’s wagon down the block delivering Christmas cards in large bundles. Then she ran next door, just as she was in her slippers, old jumper and no coat, to Mrs. Augustine’s kitchen.
Mrs. Augustine looked for her glasses until Bernice found them for her on the windowsill between the begonia and the Dutchman’s breeches. Mrs. Augustine read through the letter twice before handing it respectfully back to Bernice. “Your mother Viola would be very proud of you. What’s The Professor going to say?”
“He’ll try to forbid me to go.”
“Will you let him?”
“I’ll feel guilty, but if they want me, I’m going. I could sound really patriotic, but the truth is, I love to fly and this is my chance. If I fly for this outfit all through the war, then afterward I have to have a crack at commercial aviation. I do want to help win the war, and I’m not doing a thing here, but above all, I want to fly.”
“You’ve given him your youth, Bernice. Get out while you can.”
Bernice wanted to embrace Mrs. Augustine, but it was too many years since she had embraced anyone. The only person in the world she ever hugged was her brother. She could not think of anything to say except to repeat to Mrs. Augustine her thanks for the understanding. Mrs. Augustine looked so drab, a plump middle-aged woman with greying brown hair up in an untidy bun, a woman who put up twenty different kinds of preserves, conserves, relishes, chutneys, canned fruit, the best cook on the block, that no one would expect her to entertain wild fantasies or encourage them.
Mrs. Augustine saw her to the door. “Your father can eat with us. He’s not the most agreeable man, but I don’t mind. Or I can take his supper over in a covered dish. You go fly your planes. I know a lady who’ll clean for him and do the laundry. She talks too much, but he won’t be around when she’s working. Between us, Bernice, we’ll figure it out.”
Christmas was a sour time. This was the first year Jeff had not come home for the holidays, nor had they had word from him in a while. All she could think about was her physical on January third. She continued calisthenics, although her class at the college was suspended for vacation. She cooked, she baked, she scavenged. They had a tree with real candles, as they always did, dangerous but beautiful. They exchanged their few presents and the radio alternated carols with news. The invasion of North Africa seemed to be proceeding less smoothly, with
the British and Americans bogged down attacking Tunis. On the Eastern Front, desperate fighting continued at Stalingrad. In the Pacific, desperate fighting continued on Guadalcanal. Some right-wing general had been assassinated in Algiers, but the killer, a young French student, had already been captured.
A Form 64 physical exam took all day, with her running from lab to lab with two other women in hospital coats, while the Army closed off the hospital section by section presumably to protect them. It was a big flap, but she was doing all right. She was certainly healthy: big and strong and healthy. That had always sounded like a curse, but today it was a blessing.
Two weeks later the notice came that she was to report in Texas to Class 43-4 at Houston Municipal Airport on February 1, 1943. She would have to pay her own way there. That was a problem.
She had borrowed two hundred dollars from Mrs. Augustine when she was getting her commercial license. Since she had been forcibly grounded in September, she had been doing a lot of typing, although half of her regular customers had left. She finally repaid Mrs. Augustine just before Christmas. Now she had only two weeks in which to earn the money to get herself to Texas. She had sixteen dollars. Today she would learn exactly what the fare was, and she would get that money, if she had to rob a bank. After all, Jeff had ridden the rails. If that’s what she had to do, that’s what she would do. She was off to Texas in two weeks, no matter what.
She began making arrangements long before she broke the news to her father. The Professor simply did not believe her. “You’re not going.”
“But I am.” She heard her own cheerful voice and thought she would have hated to be talked to in that empty vacuous way, but there was no intimacy between them. They simply could not communicate in any other way than by his issuing commands de haut en bas and by her replying in that fake cheerful tone as if totally unaware of his anger. They were caught in a bad family game that might change if their lives changed, not otherwise. She was not so much his daughter as his servant: the poor replacement for the wife he had loved, the only human being with whom he had been able to be intimate and affectionate. She should not have stayed home with him, she said to herself; perhaps that had not been filial duty but laziness. If she had gone off, he would have married again. Now he was too set in his ways.