by Marge Piercy
The package had not smelled like cheese; it had smelled like something dead. Really, she must be off her stride completely, because she had the ridiculous feeling that he was lying.
They ate at Chez Claude in Acton, an old favorite of hers, in the front dining room of the old house. Sitting across the small table from Ross, she counted her satisfactions. It was an old habit, touching bases, reminding herself how far she had come, how much she had to be grateful for. First she always put Ross. Unlike Robin and other women she knew who wanted to marry their daddies, she had always wanted to escape hers. To that end she had compiled a mental list of admired characteristics, the opposite of what her mother had to endure. She was happy in her choice of Ross, who exemplified every virtue her wandering father had lacked. She adored his solidity, his straightness, his rectitude, his tenderness, his capacity for feeling about the domestic. He was no hit-and-run expert, as her father was. He never needed to play macho. He was bright, he was sweet, he was good. No children could have asked for a better father. And he had as many buddies as her father did. He would always go the extra distance for a friend.
She had her health. She had two delightful daughters, lively, not shooting up drugs or flunking out of school, not moping around the house like Gretta’s son waiting for someone to appear and beg him to take a good job. Her daughters had never had to fight for attention, as she had after four preferred brothers had taken the lion’s share. All but one of her books were still in print. Why hadn’t Nina called today? She wanted to talk to Nina, but she was too proud to call on her own birthday.
She made a decent income from the books, from the Globe and other papers, women’s magazines, talks and demonstrations. As she looked into Ross’s cornflower blue eyes, she concluded her stocktaking. I have not wasted my life. I have almost nothing to complain of. Yes, I am happy. It was a duty, not to waste her life, not to wail and mutter along as Nina did. Yes, I am happy, we have a good life together in our good home, yes.
2
When Daria could not sleep, she had a few standard routines. Lying alone the next night, Sunday night, in the queen-sized bed, with Ross sleeping across the hall in Robin’s old room, she took herself back to the first eleven years of their marriage and called up all the places they had lived. As Ross had earned more money and as they had another child and then as the children grew, he was always becoming discontented with their dwellings and moving them on. They had trekked from Back Bay to Brookline to Arlington to Cambridge apartments and then to their first house in Newton, a move every two years. To put herself to sleep she would summon each apartment in turn, sketching the layout of the rooms, bringing them to life with their hues of paint, their windows, their view or lack of it, furnishing them with the right pieces in the right places.
Tonight she kept being distracted. She knew how to read his signs of discontent. Lately he had been dropping remarks about the house being too large for them. His restlessness frightened her, for she loved the house. It didn’t feel too big to her, for every room had its purpose, its aesthetic. She had put enormous effort into house and garden, her treasure, her artwork, her outer skin. Nina had told her often enough that she was house-proud. She rolled over in bed. In the hall she could hear the kittens scuffling.
Why hadn’t Nina called? She always called on Nina’s birthday. Why couldn’t it be reciprocal? Any particular girlchild in a family of six children, four of them boys, never feels cherished enough. Never had she considered she was given enough time, attention, money, privacy or love. In April Nina had announced she was very ill, and Daria had flown down to Florida. When she had arrived, Nina had seemed to be suffering from nothing more dramatic than bursitis. She had had enough trouble getting Nina to a doctor for that. She had cancelled two cooking demonstrations, turned in a piece on pumpkin entrées for The Cook’s Magazine late and had to have a friend fill in for her at cooking school; then Nina had simply not been ill enough to justify summoning her. It had been annoying. Now Nina was complaining again of mysterious pains.
She was never going to sleep, never. She was used to company in the bed that now felt too huge. Ross and she had always slept together, and some time during the night Torte would sneak out of his dog basket with the old braided rug in it and climb on the foot of the bed. Now he had followed Ross into exile in Robin’s room where Ross let him sleep in his bed all night. She felt deserted by her dog as well as her husband. Ross had been sleeping in Robin’s old room occasionally since August, but while she was gone, he seemed to have settled in there more permanently, across the stairwell.
She rose and opened the door, looking across. At once the kittens came to her, their pointed black faces and round yellow eyes staring up. Sheba understood at once and dashed past her, straight for the bed. Ali hesitated, skeptical, then followed his sister in a flying leap. The kittens had been Tracy’s idea. She had found them in August along with a third who had died, abandoned in the alley behind the Stop and Shop in an instant pudding packing box. They had entered the house on sufferance. Whenever they were mischievous, Ross would threaten them with expulsion.
As she lay down again they curled with her, Sheba fitting herself into her right armpit and Ali turning and turning and finally laying himself down pressed against her thigh. Purring, kneading, trying occasionally to suckle, they were warm against her, comforting. The bed did not feel quite so vainly large.
Her birthday had passed, Sunday had drained away with a quick gurgle, and they had not made love: an absence like a presence. She stroked Sheba, still cuddled into her. If only he would speak to her: I don’t feel well; I feel too anxious; I’m worried about something, and tell her for once what it was. Not being touched, not plunging in that hot private mutual turmoil made her feel papery, shadowlike, as if her body were vanishing.
When she woke, she reached out to touch his back, but her hand encountered the sheet, the quilt chilly from the night. She missed waking with him; every day she missed him. Morning had been the time they usually made love, before the girls were up. She had loved mornings in this house, to wake and have it hers again, a light house, a trim house, well proportioned and comforting in its age, having witnessed many generations and survived handsomely. It dated to 1840, although the type of architecture was older than that, Cape Cod cottage with a gambrel roof, two dormers in front, two dormers in back. The garage wing had been added in the thirties.
Monday morning: was that why she felt so blue? Sheba sat on her shoulder, purring into her neck. Ali, Tracy’s pun on where he had been found, stared into her face. She felt older this morning, in a grey twilight of the soul. Forty-three was middle age. How many women had lain in this room during the last century and a half wanting their husbands to love them again?
As her bath water ran she laid out a simple cotton blouse and an old skirt. Intentionally she had made no appointments today. Tomorrow her secretary Peggy would be in, as usual. Today she would slip back into her life and tidy it up. She let the kittens out to run down to their box in the little lavatory off the kitchen. In the mirror she saw herself, shoulders drooping. After Gretta’s marriage had broken up, Gretta announced she never missed sex. Making a fuss about it was like creating a mystique around brushing your teeth. Daria could not agree.
When they had first married, she had enjoyed sex for the contact, the expression of love, the holding. She did not think she had experienced a full orgasm until after Tracy was born. In fact she associated coming to want and need sex with moving into this house. Then the privacy, the knowledge that the girls could not overhear them since their master bedroom shared no common wall with either of the girls’ rooms eased her into strong sexual response. She could give herself leave to move, to speak what came into her mind, to moan, to sing out. Ross had been delighted and for some years, they had shared an intense sexual life together.
Gradually it had diminished. Several times before, his sexuality had gone into abeyance and then he had flared into passion again. Only this time was much to
o long. Perhaps work was taking him over. Once she had tried to bring up the matter with Annette, her neighbor, but Annette just said that she didn’t think anybody made love much after they’d been married awhile. Daria didn’t want to believe that all the joy could be worn out forever. She read a few books from the library. One suggested that males peaked early and women later. It felt sadly unfair that she should be receptive, sensually alive to him as he gradually shed his passion for her, slowly, a little at a time as imperceptibly as skin sloughs off. Never was there a moment she could grasp: I did that wrong. He would say he didn’t think most people were that into it after twenty years of marriage. He would say she simply could not understand the pressures on him, and that he was tired. He would suggest she take up some new interest or hobby.
The only conceivably useful comment Ross had made was about her weight. In puzzlement she stared at her body flushed and wavering underwater. She liked her body as it was. But she must diet. If he wanted skinny, she’d give him skinny. She couldn’t think of another ploy to try, in spite of all the boring and unctuous if not actually disgusting books she had read. Books about sexuality were the best arguments for chastity. Cookbooks were her preferred bedtime reading, so she always kept a couple on the telephone table. She found the illustrations in good cookbooks—those perfectly glazed turkeys, those feathery chocolate mousses, those terrine confections decorated with bits of truffle like slices of IBM stock—far more erotic than photos in the sexual manuals of position fifty-seven with his feet in her face. They suggested, those books on winning your husband back, that she dress up as a geisha or as a hen packed in plastic wrap from the Stop and Shop; that she learn to perfect all the little tricks the best call girls knew about oral sex. They didn’t suggest what to do if she brought herself to wriggle around and try some of Those meretricious maneuvers and the result was that her loved one went limp as a wet sock and inquired in icy tones just what the hell she thought she was doing?
Instead of her old skirt, she put on the flounced cotton Tracy had bought her last year and marched down. Ross was on the phone in his study, door shut. At eight o’clock? Really his work was taking him over more and more. Finally he emerged for a hasty breakfast. Perhaps he had forgotten his scheme to pare away even this rim of their day together by running early with Robin. She hoped so. “I’ll make that Western omelette you like?”
“Just boil a couple of eggs.”
“I’ll have the same.” Not that there was any pleasure in providing a clutch of three-minute eggs. Lately he would not be seduced through his stomach, always the surest way of commanding his favorable attention.
All his attention now was fixed on Torte, standing with front paws on Ross’s lap whimpering with pleasure. Ross could at least smile at her for half a minute. He had a slight paunch but more from lack of exercise than from overeating. Now he was dieting just like Robin, who always wanted to be thinner than she was.
Daria gave herself an hour to straighten in a rush before she went upstairs to work. When Ross and Daria had bought the house, he had decreed she should stop substitute teaching and stop making desserts for Mario’s and stay home. Then she had launched into her first cookbook. Before the children began school, she had never been alone for longer than an evening in her life. After college she had moved from her parents’ crowded house in East Boston to a small apartment in the North End with two other girls, and from that crowded nest she had married Ross. She could remember first savoring the tangible huge quiet of this house after Ross and the girls left for the day. It was hers, all of it, splendid, beautiful, sublimely quiet making her dizzy with freedom. She could organize her days however she pleased, so long as she picked up the children on time, took them to their various after-school events, kept the house prepared for the evening’s entertaining for Ross’s clients. Everything except cooking and gardening she did in a blind rush, so that she could saunter through the heart of her days in that rich fecund plain of space and choice.
Her office was what was called the maid’s room still in family parlance, as if to create images of luxury and bourgeois domestic ease that amused her, because if there was a maid it was herself. Growing up in East Boston where several of her mother’s friends cleaned the houses of people who had seemed rich to her then, she could not bring herself to hire someone to clean her house. She felt all people were morally obligated to deal with their own dirt. Furthermore she knew exactly how cleaning ladies talk about the filthy pigs they work for, rendering her incapable of taking on that role. It was a sticking point between Annette and her, Gretta and her, because everybody thought they had a special relationship with their own cleaning lady, who naturally adored them. Since the house had been an extravagance when they moved in (low though real estate prices had been compared to now, as Ross never grew weary of reminding her), she had justified the lack of domestic help financially.
Her office, then, was over the attached garage, with a steep narrow staircase going up from the kitchen. She could also reach it through a stark little hall off the far side of the master bedroom. The coldest part of the house, nonetheless the room had a dormer window opening on the garden. The room did not look chilly, for she had painted it in peach and pale leaf green. She sat at the library table overlooking the garden and picked up the pages she had laid down two weeks before. She had arranged her work on this book so that each month she was writing the correct chapter, seasonally focussed to use whatever a home gardener would have in abundance and whatever would be cheap and plentiful in the stores. They were going to market a calendar with it. On her table stood a butternut, an acorn, a buttercup and a Hubbard squash, the latter two grown by Alice. She winced at the drawing she had made two weeks before and crumpled it. She would not draw them together as she had planned, no, but she would do each separately with no attempt to draw to scale and then work them into the text. Realism was not her forte. Her agent Laura said her vegetables all looked like character actors.
As she went over the pages Peggy had prepared in her absence, her depression began to lift. She felt proud of the summer’s work. She wished she had shown September to Tracy, the only person in the family who took any kind of interest in Daria’s work. Her method in all her books was to introduce a basic recipe, the process set out in detail, and then present a list of variations, each with a flashy name. Then a woman following a variation (she imagined her readers as women although she knew better from book signings) would feel each time that she was making something special for her family. A catchy name made a cook feel better about her work. Beef in bread lacked the panache of Beef Wellington. Similarly her Chicken for Remembrance sounded much zippier than chicken sautéed with rosemary, garlic and some white wine added. Queen Anne’s Veal suggested delicacy better than breaded veal slices baked with a light cherry sauce. She was selling the reader on trying something, and the reader had to sell her family on eating it.
At two she broke and went down for her mail. A note from Laura about an Australian adaptation of her working mother cookbook with a reminder they needed new publicity pictures for that edition. Ross always took her pictures. Lately he had been putting off a new session, but she had used the last of the most recent batch and had to have new ones. Her phone bill. Ross’s American Express bill. Rather high, although the charges from her recent trip weren’t in. She went through and checked off for him her business-related expenses, grouped under her card number toward the end of the list. A birthday card from Nina two days late with a note stuck inside, that scrawl she moved her lips to decipher:
… cold here so what’s the use being in Florida when we freeze. I wish we were Home where we belong with old friends and Family except of course your Father wants it this way.…
Of course. She was always saying that herself, from her mother’s lips. Of course it’s raining today, we planned a picnic. Of course the car won’t start. Of course he lost it. That sour assumption of martyrdom was what she liked least in Nina and what she fought hardest to stave off in
her own life.
… grapefruit now all over the trees in the yard. It has a black rot on it but they taste good anyhow. But I can’t seem to grow roses down here, remember our roses. Liz always said I could grow roses out of asphalt but no luck here …
… headaches and my back keeps me awake … worry about water they say we may run out.…
… your Father’s habit of disappearing when I have lunch on the stove and then expecting everything perfect when he pops in from nowhere. He is eating six nights a week at the Restaurant I am home here alone … worry with Joe working so hard he will get a heart attack like his Brother.…
Nina’s letter depressed her and she put the rest of the mail aside unopened. She rose and went out under the slow drizzle. Fetching a trowel, she moved the anchusa from its spot too far forward in the border for its height. A shovelful of compost, a touch of bone meal.
When she stuck her hand in the pocket of her corduroy gardening jacket, she found a rolled packet of radish seeds left from her late August planting, some plastic ties and there, damn it, the key to the lock on Tracy’s bicycle she hadn’t been able to find for her yesterday.
Weighing the big key in her hand lifted the depression from her. Years ago, that key in her hand. When Robin and Tracy had been tiny, she had made a little money by preparing fancy desserts for her brother Joe’s restaurant in Revere. Then Mario’s had hired her at far better wages. She remembered going to the North End at ten in the morning and letting herself in. She had a key to the outer door and then that odd-shaped key to the cabinet where liquors were kept. Mario’s had only a wine and beer license, so the liquors were just for her to make rum chocolate mousse, brandied peach torte, zuppa inglese. She had loved the stale but intimate smell of the empty restaurant. She had loved taking out her keys and moving about in the huge kitchen. Her first book had been ghostwritten for Mario, who was still proud of her.