Vida

by Marge Piercy

  “Natalie, no!” She spoke too loudly. “It’s a dead end for you. They’ll only put you in for six months at worst. Then you’re free.”

  “I didn’t mean it,” she said mildly. “I have my kids to worry about.”

  “I could go underground” Sam boasted. “I’d be good at it”

  “Besides, I’m not fond of your companions. Joel’s the best of the lot … That cop whose wife we helped made trouble for us with the town. But Kevin’s the source of my sudden importance, I’m convinced”

  Vida shook her head. “Kevin would lie to them. That might do us some damage, because nobody’s clever enough to talk without giving away something they need. But he would never fink”

  “Kevin hates you. Don’t you know that?”

  “Here’s Joel” Sam piped up. “He’s got a package”

  The guard was watching them, idly, because they were the most animated group in the room, making it time to move on. “Come on, gang” she said, warming Joel’s cold hands between hers, “How come your thumb’s frozen?”

  “Let’s find a water fountain and you take your vitamins. The C’s are chewable.” He pushed one into her mouth. It was sour but endurable. She chewed busily. She squeezed his thumb again, asking with her eyes. “The glove’s torn. They were good gloves. I found them on a bus three years ago.”

  “Listen, we’ll get you gloves” she said. “We’ll stop at the Lost and Found. We’ll ask for men’s fur-lined brown gloves. I bet they have a pair. People are always losing gloves in the winter.” An old trick of her childhood from Ruby, the great improviser.

  Sam wanted Joel’s attention, bobbing alongside him clumsy and puppylike but already taller. “Uncle Joel” Sam said and then stopped, embarrassed. “I mean …”

  Joel smiled, that twist of his lips denoting pleasure. Sometimes when he was happiest he did not beam or grin but gave only that little smile, as if afraid his pleasure would escape from a big grin, or that to show the full extent of his joy would invite hardship or cruelty. “That’s fine. If we could get married, I’d be your uncle. Someday we’ll run off to Cuba. The Cubans are nice and they’ll marry us. Then we can have monogrammed towels and matching sheets and curtains and those things that make life a gas.”

  My family, she thought: my new family. So good that Sam and Natalie liked Joel. Natalie took her arm above the elbow. “You could get married now if somebody’d do it.”

  “My divorce came through?” She tilted her head, seeking a change of subject. “Do you like Monet?”

  “So they got married.”

  “Who?” She knew immediately, but refused to. She felt weak and tried to stand straighter in Natalie’s grasp.

  “Leigh and Susannah. They were married last Sunday.”

  “Oh. Was there a big party? Did you go?”

  “You know I was here. Monday when I got back Leigh called me.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t go. I have to say that. But I could use a spy in the enemy camp.”

  “Don’t feel that way. It’s over and done. You have your own life.”

  Her own life, her own death. For a moment she wanted to die on television on the evening news, as Jimmy and Belinda had, where Leigh would have to eat it with his beef Stroganoff. What was going on in him? From one marriage to another. Joel had turned to watch her carefully. Natalie was observant too. Only Sam was talking on, about how he had gone on a real fishing boat overnight when they went scalloping. Would Leigh persist in seeing her? If Susannah and Leigh shared a joint account, how would he explain the money he gave her? She needed that money; she needed it to survive. What would he honor of her old claims?

  It was not right for him to marry while Ruby was in the hospital; but he had not stayed close to her parents. He was uncomfortable around them, bored. He was used to his mother, with whom he could argue politics, one kind of leftie to another, swap gossip, share a sense of history and embattle-ment. He could not comprehend her link with Ruby, based not on politics but on a shared hard-luck childhood; on shared complicity; on shared bodily continuity—the same breasts, the same legs and green eyes; the same deep driving energy, in Ruby dissipated in endless chain smoking, cleaning, pacing. In Vida harnessed but the same force. Everyone was watching her now, and she had to summon strength to pretend calm. She wanted to drop on the marble floor and scream. She wanted to weep and be comforted. She wanted to feed Leigh rat poison and watch.

  Elaborately she shrugged, detaching her arm from Natalie’s nervous hot grasp. “Why, that man sure does like to be married. You’d think he’d enjoy being legally free for a week or two. He’s compulsive as Henry the Eighth, just got to have a wife. ‘Course, I haven’t done a lot of cooking or cleaning or mending these past years. I guess he felt a little neglected, but you know how it goes when one’s work keeps one on the road constantly! Just another marriage broken up by professional demands.” This mocking performance was Ruby too. She could see her mother, her eye black from a fight with Tom, toughing it out, standing with one hand on her hip, a pose Ruby never struck except when she was putting on an act. “Now, you know that man is clumsy. Stuck his elbow right in my eye as he was turning over in the bed. I swear, I might as well walk into work and tell the girls my husband beat me, because then they’ll know I’m really covering something up, like I got drunk and walked into a door.”

  Natalie glanced sideways with narrowed brown eyes and probably recognized the performance, although not necessarily. With Sandy, Ruby had not needed often to summon that tough lady out of her bruised innards, so that Natalie had seen only a few times that Ruby with a few touches of Bette Davis in her gamier roles, of Joan Crawford, of Lauren Bacall. Her mother had loved those strong ladies and gone to all their pictures, she and Mama at the matinees before the prices went up. Tom fell asleep in the movies and so did Grandma, who had trouble following. That interfered with Ruby’s concentration, so that she preferred to go with Paul, until he would no longer go to silly women’s pictures, too much of a man at thirteen, and Vida, who loved sharing the tears and the talk afterward. They gossiped about the characters as if they were neighbors, about whom they also gossiped constantly. Do unto the neighbors as they do unto you. The neighbors in South Euclid pointed to the Whippletree family as an example of what happened when you married outside your own kind: she’s a Jew and he’s an American, and look, they fight all the time. You can hear them down the block. She makes eyes at all the men, and he drinks like a fish. Stick to your own kind and you don’t get into trouble.

  “Natty, I have to see Mama. Make it happen! I’m good at disguises. You check things out at the hospital. Even if it’s only five minutes, I have to see her!”

  “Shvesterlein,” Natalie said in a lugubrious voice, “nohow. If you get busted trying to see her, Ruby’ll have another heart attack. I’m not kidding”

  “You wouldn’t have to tell her. Natty, check things out. Draw diagrams. Look at exists and entrances. Steal me a white coat. Watch the schedules day and night. I need to see her.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Natalie said. “Now it’s time to eat.”

  “Yeah, I’m starving,” Sam said.

  “Look at him,” Natalie said proudly, “He eats like a bull—like a bull elephant. He’s going to grow up to be one of those basketball freaks, fourteen feet tall and you have to send him telegrams to tell him to wash his ears. I have to get a bank loan to take him to lunch . . “ Then, realizing that mentioning cost when she was about to treat them was tactless, she barged on, “but it all turns into brains and muscles. This is my pride and joy. And Peezie! I wish you could see her racing. With my short fat legs who’d think I’d give birth to a gazelle? Peezie should have been your kid, Vinnie. She’s got your legs. Racehorses, both of you. You could run like the wind” Natalie turned to Sam and Joel. “She was wonderful in demonstrations. Me, I’d get mad and I’d march around, I always felt lumpy. Like the cops were going to look at me and say, Get that one, she’s a sitting duck. A marching duck”
She shepherded them down the stairway toward the cafeteria.

  “You’re upset that he got married?”

  “A little bit.” She was lying on the cot in the back room of Madame’s boutique. She could not call their hostess anything but Madame. The image in her head had been of a petite charmer with blue hair dressed in a ruffled crepe de chine. Madame was a mountainous woman who spoke with an odd British accent and told them she weighed thirteen stone. Stones seemed the right thing to measure her in as she stood towering over them. Madame’s shoulders were broad, her hips broader, her hands large and squared off. Her hair was short, crisply curled and shiny black. Her face was wrinkled into long drooping folds, but her walk was brisk and her voice loud enough to hear across the street. Madame called all of her customers by name and inquired after the health of their grandchildren and dogs. A simple little thing you could wear to a luncheon that looked to Vida like a jersey house-dress went for about $160 and was the bottom line. Natalie’s idea of getting Vida a new dress there cheap had quietly perished.

  They saw Madame only as they arrived and she left, hurrying off to supper at a special table in the kitchen of the restaurant her husband owned. Every night she ate there except for Mondays, when the restaurant was closed and so was the shop; that night, she told them, she cooked wonders for him. As Madame prepared to get into her nightly taxi, the same driver coming by for her at six, she often gave them a little present: English tea biscuits somewhat stale; bonbons, which turned out to be filled chocolates; a tin of macaroons. Everything she gave them they ate with puzzlement. Where did Madame get the little goodies and why?

  The back room—in sharp contrast to the store with its floral carpeting and white Venetian shades—was dusty and bleak. Racks of dresses stood waiting to be shown among sewing and pressing apparatus, a cot, a couple of broken chairs, piles of boxes to be folded and formed, a hot plate and a sink and toilet.

  Joel did not press the issue of how upset she had been until he had finished heating the canned soup and served it in plastic containers from which they had emptied straight pins. After he had supervised her swallowing the soup—she was feverish and did not want to eat— he frowned. “Are you starting to lie to me on a regular basis? Or do you just think I’m stupid? About politics, about Marxism about the theory of economics maybe. About you, no, I can tell when you’re ready to fall down. Why do you think you’re sick tonight?”

  “Because I’m tired and run-down. I’ve been fighting off a cold for three days.”

  “You’re telling yourself it’s okay to be sick. You want to collapse and lie in bed and suffer. You think it’d bother him? She’s no competition to him, this one. She probably falls on her knees and admires him. Can I suck your electric prick? She expects him to save her from boredom and Long Island. Listen, you’re well rid of him, but you’re too caught in your old patterns to figure that out. I love you ten times more than he ever did”

  “I believe you. It’s just depressing. And he didn’t tell me he was going to. He let on to me he wasn’t.”

  “Why should he ask you before he marries her? How come marriage means so much to you? Big revolutionary broad.”

  “Because it was a real commitment. Then we had a lot of work getting out of that married box. It was hard to get people to stop relating to me as somebody’s wife. For a woman that’s deadly, because you really do lose autonomy, seriousness. Miss X can lead an army, but if Mrs. X tries to be a general, everybody says, ‘Where’s her husband?’”

  “Baby, so you’re free at last” He put his hand on her belly. “But you aren’t glad.”

  “Now he officially belongs to this woman. She’s involved in all his decisions.”

  He frowned. Then he raised his eyebrows. “Oh. You’re scared he won’t give you money anymore?”

  For an instant she was angered, because she was worried about that but didn’t want to mention it, and because that wasn’t the source of pain. It was simply more dignified to acknowledge the crass motive. “So? We’re broke. I feel entitled. When I ran, he ended up with everything, Joel—our checking account, our savings account, our dandy rent-controlled apartment, our china, our furniture, our stereo, our comfort and standard of living … The last year we lived together I wasn’t making money, but earlier I was the real breadwinner.”

  “Fuck his money.” He swaggered to the hot plate to put on water for tea. “We’ll make our own. We’ve done it before.”

  “Since we bought the car, we’ve been living on what he gave us.”

  “Your alimony checks. Big deal. Tell Natalie to get us some other gig.”

  “Natalie has a lot of heat on her. But there are other sources. I’ll think about it” She looked at him and he looked back at her with the dead weight of fact. “We have twenty-four dollars left. Not enough to get back east. I don’t want to hit Natalie. She’s broke.”

  “Yeah, she’s in a lot of trouble. I like her better this time”

  “You like her because she likes you. You don’t see her as a person yet.”

  “She’s so much older than me it takes time.”

  “Joel! She’s only six months older than me!”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Joel, she is.”

  “That’s weird,” he said. “You seem closer to me and she seems closer to my mother. Don’t be so upset. It’s just that she’s a mother and she’s overweight.”

  “You should have seen her when she was taking karate and got into her only affair with her instructor, a Japanese-American woman named Suki. She dropped twenty pounds.”

  “I bet she was attractive that way.”

  “To tell you the truth, I like her better plump and a balabusteh. A little sloppy in her person and curly and feeding everybody.”

  “How come she got involved with a woman?” The kettle whistled and he went to make tea.

  “Why not? That’s who she mainly meets. Imagine big Daniel on top of her. She must have felt smothered.”

  “Is she still involved with that woman? Smokey?”

  “Suki insisted she leave Daniel. Daniel said he’d go to court and take the kids. I think she feels it’s not fair in her situation to get involved with anyone again.”

  ”Nobody?”

  “Joel! Don’t get that tone of voice on your face. You aren’t Freud’s gift to Natalie. She sets her own priorities. They aren’t the same as mine. You just love and respect her as she is. You hear me?”

  “I neither wept nor screamed!”

  “But you wanted to.”

  Her sinuses were draining forcing her to spit delicately into a crumpled paper handkerchief as she huddled in the doorway of a doughnut shop. Paul’s Malibu was parked across the street. She had to hope he came out of the bar, The Brass Monkey, alone. Her plan she was to intercept him, but she was freezing to death waiting. Before flying back last night, Natalie had given her Paul’s schedule. The sisters had decided Paul would be the new go-between, but that he could not be consulted in advance. Natalie felt sure Paul was not being watched; it was Natalie’s observation that the right believed their own myths about the working class being solidly conservative and acted on such presumptions.

  Four years ago Paul had been in the process of divorcing Joy and wedding Mary Beth, and she had got sucked into family squabbles and had risked a sudden appearance from underground to put in her lively and unpopular opinions. It was getting dark and harder to see men’s faces as they pushed out through the padded door, their heads ducked into the fierce wind. She thought she saw him and started across, only to stop and turn back in the middle of the street when she got a better look. Pacing in the doorway, she beat her hands together to fight numbness.

  Suddenly Paul pushed out the door with another man. What should she do? She immediately knew it was him: not because he looked exactly as he had four years before, but because he looked too much like Tom to be anybody else but his son. She was almost afraid at the resemblance. Not that Tom would have turned her in. He had a rough
patriotism and a pride at having served in the Pacific, but he had a strong sense of class. He hated politicians and the rich. His anger was undependable, turned as easily inward or against his family as out into the world. She’d come running up to him when he entered the house saying to him, “Here’s Daddy’s little girl!” and he’d swing her up in the air, but the seventh time he might knock her across the room shouting, “Don’t jump on me like a puppy, you noisy brat!”

  Maybe it was that memory of violence which paralyzed her. Now Paul was slapping the other guy’s shoulder and they were both ritually laughing at some ritual joke. The guy turned and walked down the block to his car, Paul waved after him, then turned to his own. She let him start unlocking the door before she crossed. Coming up behind him, she took his arm as a bus whooshed past close enough to stir her jacket, “Don’t jump, big bro. It’s me. Don’t yell. Can I get in the car with you?”

  “What? Jesus, Vida, what happened? Did they give you amnesty or something?”

  “No, and please let’s get in the car. Could you not use my name, pretty please? Call me Cynthia, remember?” She went around the car and got in the other side as he reached over to unlock it. Then she gave him a kiss, his face crinkling up in a big beery smile.

  “What a surprise! You almost gave me a heart attack. You can’t just come up behind somebody in Chicago and grab them and not give them a heart attack … “ He realized that the reference was tactless. “Er, well, have you seen Mama?”

  “Not yet. Natalie says they’re watching the hospital. That’s what I’m here for, to see her.” She had a scheme, but she had to work on Paul to get him to agree. She owed it to her mother to see her no matter what the risk was, to be clever and able enough to pull the visit off. That was her daughterly duty.

  “Hey you want to go back in and have a drink? It’s not a fancy bar—”

  “We can’t go anyplace where you’re known. Let’s get a bite to eat somewhere they won’t wonder who you’re with.”

  “Mary Beth’s getting supper for me at home.” He eased the car out of the tight parking space and into the rush-hour traffic. “I’ll call her from where we go. She’ll think I’m seeing Joy, but I can deal with that.”