Vida

by Marge Piercy

  “I’ll read it” she said more humbly. What he had said still stuck like a dart in her brain. She had to think about that, off in secret.

  When they woke, the windows were covered with frost tracery.

  “I can’t believe that just happens by itself. No wonder people believed in fairies,” he said.

  “Marvelous flowers. Aubrey Beardsley arabesques. Like Art Nouveau designs.”

  “What’s all that shit?”

  “Oh.” She could be startled yet, not just by him. The political children, how little they knew. They arrived at college knowing nothing but television. They never finished school. While in college they seemed to be taught none of the grounding in culture she had received almost automatically. “The pattern on the glass made me think of a style of decorating where everything curved and the ornaments were built on natural forms—like flowers, leaves. I’ll show you sometime and then you’ll know what I mean”

  The marigolds outside were brown. “Oh, of course,” she said. “It really was a frost.” She made their bed, tidied, both housewife and soldier’s neatness.

  “Is everything dead in the garden?”

  “Only the tender stuff. After breakfast, we better pick what we can save. The lettuce, the kale will grow all right for a while.”

  “How come? How come the flowers die and the lettuce goes on?”

  He always asked questions. He wanted to please, he asked questions, he needed approval in enormous heaping spoonfuls all day. She thought of him as innocent, but his eye was exacting.

  After a breakfast of the last of their eggs, he was shaving, with her perched on the toilet seat watching him, when they heard a car. Quickly he snapped off the light, wiped the lather from his face. She edged past him into the hall. The car had stopped outside. “It’s not Laura,” she hissed.

  “Let’s get out of here!” He thrust into his shirt.

  “Too late. They’d see us” Two people were getting out of the car, a man and a woman, while a child stayed in the back seat. They were walking down the steps toward the house, both carrying baskets.

  “We’ll have to hide,” he barked. “Come on.”

  They crammed into the closet of the bedroom where they had been sleeping. She was glad she had compulsively made the bed, that she tended to make beds as soon as she got up. Darting out of the closet, she grabbed her pack and his, dragged them in, shut the door but for a crack for her ear.

  “Laura! Laura! It’s Mike and Wendy,” a woman was calling. “Laura, are you home?”

  “She’s got to be here. We saw the lights. There’s dishes in the sink.”

  ”Her car isn’t here,” the woman said. “Maybe she went into town.”

  “We left the fucking door unlocked,” Joel whispered at her ear. She shook her head fiercely at him to shut up.

  “She wouldn’t go back to Boston and leave her door open,” the man said.

  “What should we do, honey?” the woman asked. Her footsteps came nearer. “Laura? Are you asleep?” She sounded in the room. Vida eased the door shut. “Nobody’s here either. She must have gone shopping”

  “Let’s just leave the stuff for her” the man said. “Come on, I got to get back to the job.”

  Vida took Joel’s hand. In the dark of the closet she scarcely breathed, standing pressed among Laura’s musty sundresses, beach wraps, the webs of spiders whose present whereabouts she preferred not to consider. Her hand was cold and Joel’s hot. His hand inched up to close on her breast. Standing crushed together, she felt his erection. Unbelievable. How could he get excited under these conditions? With Kevin in tight situations she had always had to pay as much attention to him as to the outside danger, because he might suddenly go berserk and decide to fight. With Eva she could draw comfort and worry about the real dangers. But Joel seemed to take danger too lightly. She realized he had never lived as a normal adult. Would the woman ever leave? Vida could have sworn she was poking around Laura’s dresser, handling things. Would she decide to go through the closet too?

  “Come on, Wendy. Don’t be so nosy. Suppose she walks in?”

  The steps pittered away. For an interminable period the couple muddled around in the kitchen. Once again, Vida made a crack for her ear. Wendy said, “She’s not here by herself, Mike. Look. Two of everything for breakfast.”

  “She got herself a boyfriend, finally. Remember that guy we saw paddling her canoe on Labor Day?”

  “I’d love to meet him. I wonder who he is.”

  “What do you care. Some doctor. Let’s get out of here”

  “Wait. I’m writing a note. Mike, should I ask them over?”

  “Forget it. I want to watch the World Series. Who wants to spend the evening with some doctor? Her going on about radiation and nukes.”

  Finally the door shut. After a while they heard the car start up and drive off. Joel pushed the closet door open and drew deep breaths. “Thought I was going to suffocate”

  “We had plenty of air, dear one,” Vida said. “This closet is roughly slapped together.”

  “I get claustrophobia. You don’t, huh?”

  ”If I did, I guess I’d be dead. Once I had to spend fourteen hours locked in the trunk of a car”

  “What did you do about going to the bathroom?”

  She laughed. “That would be the first thing you’d think of. I pissed in a jar”

  “Who the hell were those people?” Cautiously he moved out of the bedroom, walking on the balls of his feet. “I thought she was going to start searching the bedroom.”

  The kitchen counter was covered with green tomatoes, undersized bell peppers, eggplants the size of a thumb, fingerling zucchini. “The frost last night. They had to harvest everything. They had so much they decided to give some to their neighbors—I bet they’re the lights we see at the end of the pond.”

  “They could make themselves a nuisance.” Joel glared at the produce.

  “Which reminds me, we better go out and salvage what we can. Then we have to think how to shut off their curiosity”“ Walking, Vida felt weak through the legs. She picked up the note.

  Dear Laura, Here are some extra vegetables from our garden. Hope you enjoy them. Let’s get together if you’re going to be around. Your neighbors, the Kensingtons.

  “Green-tomato soup” she explained, chopping. “I remember it from my childhood. Ruby always had a garden. She doesn’t cook a lot of different things, but what she does she cooks well. Sort of Cleveland Jewish peasant plus what you learn to please a goyishe husband who was a meat-and-potatoes man.”

  “Who’s Ruby?”

  “My mama. I always called her Ruby. My father—my own father, I mean—didn’t like it, but ‘After all, that’s my name’ she’d say. Ruby Rose Lyubkov Whippletree, and then Asch. She should have stopped with the Ruby Rose.”

  “Was your old man Jewish or not?”

  She sliced the tomatoes in silence, deciding whether she wanted to open that up or not. The trading of intimacy, was it worth the bother? Traveling, she tried not to invent excessively. Her own stories had sunk deeper and deeper into her.

  “You don’t want to talk about it?”

  She shrugged. “For a long time I haven’t … It seems fruitless.”

  “Think I’m too young to understand? Try me”

  ”I guess I’m not sure what’s happening,” she said baldly.

  “Who do you love?’’

  “Who?” She felt almost afraid to answer. “Natalie, Ruby, Leigh. Paul— that’s my brother. My friend Eva”

  “You’re loving people in the past. But we’re stuck here. We’re not even real to them. All you really want to do is crawl back into your own past. That’s why you think I don’t count. ‘Cause I wasn’t around then, back when you think it was all really real.”

  They lay in bed. He kept his back to her. Putting her arms around him, she tried to thaw him into forgiveness. “Joel, you’re right. I agree. I’m trying to hold on to the past, because the present isn’t feedin
g me and I’m scared.”

  “I’m small potatoes compared to Leigh and Natalie and Kevin. All the big guns.”

  “That’s not true” She cuddled her face into his neck, pressed her breasts into his back curving away from her. “I’m scared, is all.”

  “What are you scared of?”

  “You.”

  “How come me? A little shit like me.”

  “Joel, why do you hate yourself so? I know I could love you” Why had she said that, why?

  For a long time he did not answer, until long after she had let go of him and lay on her back staring at the ceiling. Finally he said, “But you don’t want to?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “You couldn’t.”

  “How can we argue about whether or not I could love you? Joel! I like being with you.”

  He flipped to face her, the atmosphere at once lightening. She had the feeling he was smiling in the dark. As if idly, he began to play with her breasts. “You like to fuck, don’t you?”

  “Don’t say it as if you were observing I like to kick old ladies down the stairs.”

  “Is it the same with any guy?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Some women get off on strangers, let go best with somebody they don’t feel intimate with—”

  “That’s what you’re like?”

  “No! I have the most response with somebody I feel close to.”

  “But you came with me.”

  ”Maybe because we’re both fugitives. And you were very gentle.”

  He was moving his finger around and around her clitoris. Then he slid two fingers deep into her.

  “You’re juicy already. Want to?”

  “I don’t even know if you’re excited”

  He laid his prick against her. “I’m excited.”

  When they were resting entwined and sloppy with semen and sweat cozy with pleasure, she realized that the sex had been marvelous. Suddenly they had moved to another level. She had not been conscious of his experimenting on her, and he did not remain rigidly in control. She had come and come for what felt like minutes.

  “Maybe because it’s all getting better and better it scares me. It’s moving fast,” she whispered.

  “Who knows how much time we got?”

  “Before you have to go someplace else?”

  “There’s no place I have to go. Depends on you. And on how much time before they make a special out of us and burn us on the evening news like Jimmy and Belinda.”

  “It’s better for you too, now?”

  He laughed. “Terrific. Coming back to life. It’s like my body’s been numb.”

  “From what?” She was dying to ask him about Kiley.

  “You won’t even tell me about your mother.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  He chuckled. “After a good fuck, you’d tell me anything”

  “Don’t say that! It alarms me.”

  “Kiley didn’t like sex. She liked being wanted, because that’s power. At first I thought she enjoyed it with me. I’d swear she came. But after a few months, she wouldn’t even let me eat her. It was like maybe once a month I could make her come with my hand and I could rub myself against her ass. That was our sex life.”

  “Didn’t you mind?”

  “I went crazy. Maybe she did love me at first, but I think she didn’t for a long time. I wouldn’t give up and let go.”

  “If she didn’t love you, why didn’t she break it off?”

  “I guess it was convenient” He grimaced. “Kiley’s a lonely person. Maybe she even got off some on making me suffer”

  I can’t latch on to him because he’s a good lover, she thought; we can’t live in bed. But that was her forebrain issuing memoranda from the dean’s office that all the workers—the feelings, the muscles, the gut—were about to throw in the garbage.

  “Laura told me the wife taught school and he’s a carpenter. So eleven ought to be safe,” Vida said as they walked around the pond. They passed boarded-up houses, houses empty for the winter; but when they came to the edge of the woods near the Kensington house, a white colonial of two stories with an attached garage, the pleasure fled and they huddled behind a high blueberry bush. The Kensington house was built directly on the road that led out to Route 6, but they had approached on the path that went round the pond for privacy. Now they had reached the far border of security. “I’ll go alone” she said. “She’ll be less alarmed if she’s there”

  “Suppose he’s goofing off work? I’ll go”

  “The car’s gone.” They could look through the garage window and see the doors open. A small motorboat was up on sawhorses. A kid’s bike lay on its side in the grass. They strained for sounds from the house. Vida felt like a child. Sometimes she felt as if becoming a fugitive had reduced her to permanent childhood, to playing continuous hide-and-seek. When she and Natalie were thirteen, this was the sort of game they had played: pretending the adults were cops, the enemy, Them; sneaking around pretending danger. Even after so many years of pursuit she had trouble believing in this game: that now a slip would cost her her freedom and perhaps her life. They could not skulk all day staring at the blank windows of the white house. “I’ll go. A woman is less scary.”

  She marched resolutely out of the orange-and-brown woods across the damp lawn to the door. A red ball covered with blue stars lay in the path. Then she saw movement at a window, and it was all she could do to force a smile and keep marching. Somebody at the curtains.

  No, a white cat was rubbing against the window as she came up. Pet me. A long-haired white cat with blue eyes rubbed its forehead against the glass. “Hello, pretty,” Vida whispered. She opened the screen door and stuck a note where it would be obvious: a note thanking the Kensingtons for the food and saying they were Laura’s tenants. They were leaving soon and did not know when she planned to come out. Joel had invented the tenants’ story, saying if they claimed to be Laura’s relatives, Wendy might still be interested, but nobody would care about somebody renting a place for two weeks. They’d only be sorry they’d wasted their vegetables.

  She hastened to him across the lawn, and impatiently he stepped out to meet her. “Nobody there but a pussycat.”

  ”That ought to hold them.” He took her hand and they strolled back. “Tonight the summer people who still come out weekends start arriving. We better keep close to home and lay low till Monday.”

  “Let’s leave our lights out and just have a fire. We don’t want anybody else dropping in.”

  Dragging the mattress from the bedroom, they slept near the wood stove. That night two more houses showed lights. In the morning they chopped wood. Then she tried to work on her paper, gave it up and read the pamphlets Joel had been underlining. Then they took a cautious walk, made supper. Every day they made love twice. Vida, who had not had much sex in years, felt overwhelmed. More and more she had lived in her head and her nerves and less and less down in the rich body with its bird and frog songs, its yammering complaints and its overweening thunderous urges. The descent into the flesh startled her. She had thought of herself as grown past the violent onslaughts of desire. Now she felt as if she was in heat, as if wanting him was a constant whether she was momentarily aware of the response or not, that wanting him was a condition lurking in her that need only be triggered to surface. In fact she studied the pamphlets, making notes to prove to herself she was still politically motivated; if she could concentrate on an argument, she was not altogether lost.

  Finally the city people left and Monday came. “When Jimmy was resenting me he said I’m always in a relationship with a woman.” Joel walked the woods road toward town, kicking a small rock before him, chin jabbed into his chest. “That I run from one to another like a rabbit streaking for a hole. If not one hole, then another”

  Now he’s issuing warnings. Have we moved too fast? She kept her back very straight, pacing along. “I haven’t fallen in love with somebody in years.”

  “But you’re still in love
with this Leigh?”

  “But I’ve loved him for fourteen years … For a year and a half after Kevin, I didn’t sleep with anybody.”

  “How come? That’s a long time to sleep alone … I’ve never gone that long, even when I was really on the run. I mean, I’d pick up somebody … then I’d get involved.”

  “I felt like Natalie was right, there was something cuckoo in how I acted with men. I had to live without a core relationship with a man. I had to be alone in my … my innards, my soul.”

  “You seem like a real strong woman. I can’t see why you had to cut yourself off like that, just to prove something to your sister. She’s married, right? Who’s she to tell you that you got to hang by yourself?”

  “It wasn’t proving it to her. It’s just when she talked about women’s issues in New York, I was a pure Marxist-Leninist and I shut her up. Then when I started knowing things wrong in my own life, I felt she’d seen a lot I’d missed.”

  He shrugged heavily. His bones seemed to enlarge in his face and forehead. “Maybe she’s right. That’s what I ought to do—be a hermit. Maybe Jimmy was right.”

  Three pay phones stood in a row outside the pharmacy. Joel loitered, pretending to skim notices on a weathered board. Cake sale for the volunteer fire department. Yoga lessons. A ‘73 VW station wagon with snow tires. At five to 10 she set herself up, coins arranged in rows, phone code turned back to digits, cold hands grasping the phone. The street was mostly empty, cars clustered around the open coffee shop. People walked with collars turned up against the drizzle. The measure of how far she had come with Joel was that she no longer knew whether she wanted Natalie to tell her to come to Long Island or to caution her to hold for a week. She wanted to see Natalie, but she also wanted more time with Joel. The intimacy they were weaving could be cut off. She felt guilty at how intensely she wanted another week alone with him. By next Tuesday at the latest they must leave anyhow, as Laura permitted no one to stay longer than two weeks.

  Ten. Time to dial. It rang. “Hello?”

  “Natalie!” She should not have burst out, but she knew she hadn’t mistaken that wry throaty voice. “Hi, love. How are ya?”