by Marge Piercy
The chicken divan was still in the refrigerator, spoiled. Annoyed, she threw it out. He must not have eaten there at all. The milk too was spoiled. She took out the frozen grapevine leaves stuffed with ground lamb and pine nuts to defrost. That would have to be their Thanksgiving supper. Ross slammed the door of his study and shut himself in. He was acting out a massive sulk. When she knocked on the door to bring him a cup of coffee, he was on the phone and glared at her, putting his hand over the receiver as if something might escape.
When she had fed the animals, let them into the yard and thrown out the foul garbage that had been sitting in the kitchen, she went to her answering machine to play back messages.
Her agent Laura had called: call me back Monday and where are those new photos? We need them toute de suite.
An adult education program in Worcester.
General Foods re: new contest on gourmet food line.
Mellicent Products, manufacturers of the Smo-King Home Smoker, about commissioning a booklet of recipes.
Gretta: what’s this about cancelling Thanksgiving? What’s going on? Where are you?
Annette introjected an occasional plaintive query between the other messages, checking if she were back yet.
Leo her butcher sounded furious. Ross had obviously forgotten to cancel the goose. She would pick it up tomorrow morning, see if it was still good and make her peace with Leo, without whom no high-quality meat would grace her table.
Gretta called again sounding reproachful.
Channel 7 called about the series they had discussed with her. A couple of years before, she had done a slot on the morning show on Channel 4. Now Channel 7 was negotiating for a feature on their magazine format early evening show.
She read the note Peggy had left. Hadn’t Ross told her not to come in? She had trouble averting her gaze from the ashes on her desk. The sun had sunk beneath the curve of the hill. While they were gone the temperature had risen. Now it was well above freezing. Tomorrow she must make a bed for the ashes in the yard. She ought to do it right away, but she had not the heart yet. She must act before the ground froze.
Then she heard the sound of a car and ran to the window in their bedroom across the hall to look out into the street. It was his Mercedes pulling out. Where was he going today, Thanksgiving?
Slowly she returned to her office. She had to speak to someone. She called Peggy, on the pretext of arranging their work schedule.
“Of course I came in Tuesday,” Peggy said. “No, Mr. Walker never called me. Are you okay, Daria?”
“My mother died and I just had a fight with Ross.”
“When I got there Tuesday, everything was a mess! Torte had done his business all over the floor—not once but several times. He didn’t mean to. I don’t think anybody had walked or fed him, and the kittens were just crazy with hunger. I cleaned it up the best I could. Then I talked to that lady next door who always takes care of them when you go out of town.”
“Annette? Why hadn’t she come over?”
“Mr. Walker never asked her to. So I told her it didn’t look to me like he was around either, maybe he’d gone south by then. She said she’d take over. Want me to come in tomorrow?”
“Maybe you’d better. I feel way, way behind.” When she had put down the phone, she laid her head on her arms, cheek to her desk, and remained there too depressed to weep. Where had Ross been? Where was he now? Her trust of him was like her spine, a part of her body, the support of her life. She simply could not believe what was happening. Ross and Daria, Ross and Daria, that was who she was. For her whole adult life, her name had been Daria Walker, the name she wrote under. That was the face in the mirror. What was left to her if he turned against her, if he withdrew himself from her? How could he want to hurt her? How could he want to stop loving her, even briefly?
On Friday while upstairs Peggy typed the manuscript, Daria dug Nina’s ashes into the yard. By midmorning the sky was beginning to threaten as the air grew heavy with a leaden chill. First she dug a new rose bed, putting in peat, manure, compost, bone meal. Then she dug her mother into the whole bed. The ashes were coarse, gritty, with little shards of bone, odd brightly colored and pastel fragments, blue, copper, pink, black. Goodbye, Mama, she said to the rose bed. In spring I will plant roses that are strong and hardy and fragrant. I remember when you were lovely. I remember when you were happy, when you were the rose of Havre Street. Everything I am comes from you. Whenever I cook, whenever I write, I celebrate you and the kitchen of my childhood. That is my contribution: real food women prepared, rooted in peasant cooking and bound to the seasons and the changing times.
Why did you leave me, now when I need you? That was how Nina must have felt when Grandma died, deprived of her own support in the house. Grandma never hesitated to stand up to Pops although in her own sly way. Grandma had bent and sprung back. A conspiracy of women, centered on their kitchens.
She had too many decisions to make; she felt like fleeing them. She felt like saying no to everybody: Channel 7, Mellicent Products, General Foods, Worcester Adult Ed. Whenever she was approached, she had to balance her desire to carry out a project with Ross’s potential annoyance. She felt tempted to decline everything. But would he then spend more time with her? Basically she tried to defer decisions. She declined Worcester. She took the next step in negotiating with everybody else, without committing herself.
She called Gretta and made up with her. Gretta’s son was going out that night, so she was spared him. She roasted the goose, putting it on in midafternoon. Supper would consist of Pierre, Annette, Gretta and the two of them. She did not feel like trying to corral an extra man to balance the table. She called Ross’s office to tell him what she was doing, but he was always in conference and did not return her calls.
By afternoon the first flat discs of snow were floating down. She felt grim with determination, marching about her tidy kitchen making the quince-based stuffing, making the cheese filling for the pumpkin, making the rum-maple-butternut pie. She would not live out Nina’s life, she would not. She had always considered herself more practical, luckier than Nina, better able to cope. In Nina’s death she felt the waste of a potential for love, the energy of a woman who opened to love like a rose. Nina had been a woman of daily strength, of strong emotions, of a yearning wistfulness. All curdled into complaining. All withered into martyrdom. As she felt her face moving into the lines of sour wasted grieving, she refused that mask. She would take back her life. She would make Ross love her again.
She managed to dash upstairs to dress with more care than usual. Ross arrived before the guests, as she was finishing the salad. He had no objections to the supper; perhaps he was glad to have a buffer between them. As they were talking, the kitchen phone rang—his line; they had never got around to changing it. She started for it but he barked, “I’ll take it.”
Dashing past her, he picked it up. “Hello, Ross speaking.” His face changed instantly. “You bother me around here again and I’ll take legal action. Don’t try to scare me. You’re a bunch of dirty loudmouths.” He slammed down the phone. Then he went in and turned on his answering machine.
She followed him to his study door. “Who was that?”
“Oh, just some troublemaker. Nobody.… When’s company coming?”
Saturday morning after a silent breakfast—Ross was holding to his anger like a banner, like a shield, like a magnificent steed he rode about the house—he went upstairs and began moving clothes and toiletries into Robin’s room.
“What are you doing?”
“I should think that would be obvious. If you insist on staying in this oversized barn, we might as well use the space. I want my own room.”
“But why? We have a huge bedroom. Why can’t we share it the way we have? I love sleeping and waking next to you.”
“I need space. Away from your demands, your suspicions, what you just love to death.”
She studied him, struck by his happy appearance. He was experiencing hi
s anger as energy. Ross’s myth about himself was that he never lost his temper. Actually he rarely yelled, although on occasion he did that also. He had the habit instead of preserving his anger and slowly leaking it until it colored the atmosphere of the house to a dark murk in which she found herself suffocating. She was supposed to have the hotter temper, but as the price of losing it with him was expensive and protracted, she had learned to control it. “What do you need a room for? I liked sharing the motel room in Florida. I felt closer.”
“Sure. So much you made a scene as soon as we got on the plane.”
“You’re putting more distance between us. How will we ever make up?” It would be harder for sex to happen between them. She could not help but feel that sex was the real motivation between husband and wife to come back from quarreling.
“I don’t feel close. Why should I be made to pretend? It’s important for me to be in touch with my feelings. You want me to go along being stoic and numb and just absorbing everything, taking it coldly and swallowing it. I’m getting in touch with my feelings.”
“What about the good feelings? Are you in touch with tenderness? Joy? Intimacy?”
“How about them? You don’t treat me especially great. Where do you see yourself showing me joy and tenderness?”
“You don’t share your life with me any longer.”
“You just about swamp me with yours. Your phone calls, your appointments, your dinners, your women friends, your books, your agent, your fussing and fussing and fussing around the kitchen. It’s just an ego trip. I need to find out what I feel. I need to discover what I want.”
“You’re going to figure that out by moving across the hall?”
“It’s a start. Then at least I’ll have some little place that’s really my own.”
She felt a tug of anger. After all, he had his law office and his study, much larger and pleasanter and certainly better heated than hers. “Ross, it almost feels as if we’re separating.”
“By all of fifteen feet. Don’t be melodramatic. It makes me feel swamped. When you overreact, I can’t figure out what I feel. It drowns me out.… Is that the phone?”
He rushed downstairs to his study to listen to the monitor on his answering machine, shutting the door behind him. Whoever it was did not please him, for he was upstairs a moment later. She felt absurd chasing him back and forth across the central hall. Robin’s stuff was out of her room, Daria noticed. When had that happened? Robin had left a great many objects and clothes behind when she moved into the tiny apartment in Back Bay she shared with two roommates. Had he packed up Robin’s things, or had Robin?
Down the basement she went to look and there stacked against one wall were eight boxes neatly labelled in Robin’s squarish script, Robin’s Summer Clothes, Robin’s Books, Robin’s Hiking Gear. He left the house before breakfast now most weekdays to run with Robin; he had plenty of time to urge her to pack up and get out of her old room. They ran together in the city mornings and then every Saturday in Lexington. Daria felt conspired against.
After Robin and Ross had gone jogging that afternoon, she laid out a nice lunch: cold goose, leftover pumpkin casserole warmed and a freshly made salad. Robin would eat only the salad, after washing off the dressing. “I’m on a diet, Mother.”
She contemplated her daughter’s thin wrist lying on the table like a winter twig. “Honey, but why? You’re too thin now.”
Robin stared. “How can you be too thin? Don’t try to sabotage me, Mother.”
She studied Robin, blond with a snub nose and uncertain chin, who had no breasts, no hips, the body of a twelve-year-old boy. When Daria had been a little girl, she had stuffed pillows under dress-up clothes to look like a woman. Robin had begun dieting at puberty and never had she stopped.
“It’s a matter of willpower,” Robin was asserting. “You must take control.” Ross was nodding. Both of them seemed to be obsessed lately with notions of control. Without realizing, she began eating frantically, stuffing her mouth with the goose, the pumpkin. Robin turned from her with a grimace.
Daria rose and fled to the kitchen, leaning against the refrigerator. Tears ran down her face. Food had always been a source of pleasure, something to be shared, something that centered the house, the family, something to give and enjoy at once. Was food love to her? Or a way to command love? Perhaps she just enjoyed it, plain and simple. Sometimes she was forced to see herself as Robin saw her, a fat middle-aged failure. Why did her daughter judge her a failure? She did not know. It was as if being forty-three in itself made her a failure to Robin. Yet Robin admired her father at forty-six inordinately. Perhaps because Robin denied herself food as a source of pleasure—being rather a source of disgust so that her favorite verb for eating anything was pigging out—she could only view her mother’s professional involvement with food as a sin.
However fast Robin ran, it was never far enough; however thin Robin starved herself to become, it was never thin enough. Her very bones appeared too large to her. At the same time Robin was hotly ambitious and seemed to believe that she would be rich and what she considered a success in a matter of a few years, that executive power and vast responsibility would become hers if she but hurled herself into her job with fierce enough energy.
Sometimes Daria felt as if her older daughter had made every choice since puberty in an effort to distinguish herself from Daria as well as from Tracy. What did Robin see in her that made her daughter flee so hard in any other direction? Alone with her, Robin sat with elbows pulled in, chin lowered. With Ross her eyes grew large and her manner spirited. They both looked ruddy and cheerful, drifting from the table into the living room and turning on the TV automatically. They were having an animated chat about football and the virtues of down versus artificial fabric vests, from which she felt excluded as she had used to when Grandma and Nina spoke Italian. She never knew whether she was being denied some spicy story or whether they were just discussing the daily soaps, whose characters they gossiped about as regularly as the lives of their neighbors. Even when they gossiped in English, she could not always guess if Lydia lived on the next street or in the TV.
She called her mother’s best friends in East Boston, Liz and Patsy, and made a date to deliver the mementoes she had brought for them, photographs, a dresser scarf Nina had stitched in her tiny fine hand long ago, embroidered with flowers in five colors; a brooch in the shape of a big flowered enamel heart Patsy had always admired. Monday, after a luncheon in honor of her retiring editor at the Globe, she would drop by.
The luncheon was difficult. She decided that she missed the old custom of wearing mourning. That would protect her from having to deal with the sally, “How was your Thanksgiving? What did you make this year, Daria?” The face asking to salivate, to envy, to gourmandize vicariously. “Rather grim really. Nothing at all. I just buried my mother.”
Mourning was an excellent social signal, giving warning. She had the choice of trying to shunt people off with polite empty pleasantries or of producing that really fatal reply that dropped into the luncheon like a splat of sauce on the tablecloth. She found she had little she wanted to say to anyone except, “Fine, thank you, except my mother just died and my husband is having an affair with somebody.” Ordinarily she would have scorned the lunch, five pea pods laid out as a flower with four shrimp and a slice of orange. Nouvelle cuisine had always appeared to her something invented for people who ate in restaurants too often. But she had no appetite today.
Leaving her car in the Commons garage, she took the Blue Line to Eastie. That made her feel curiously adolescent, as if the bag she was toting might be full of schoolbooks rather than keepsakes. At Maverick she marched up the wind tunnel exit to the cold blast of air from the harbor. She remembered when Maverick had been the end of the line and she had used to wait for the trolleys. Then only the Sumner Tunnel connected Eastie to Boston, that and the old ferry to the North End they had ridden every Sunday to visit Pops’ family. Liz lived nearby behind the police statio
n on an alley named Elbow for its crooked shape, where she had the top floor of the narrow wooden house.
Liz held both Daria’s hands as they sat on the bowlegged couch under the same painted velvet picture of a lady being serenaded that had hung over it all through Daria’s childhood. “You look so like her, like Nina, sweetheart. She was the prettiest girl in our high school class, but she never had eyes for anyone but your dad.… When you were just a little girl, remember sitting out under the arbor in back of your house squeezing the skins off the grapes to make jam? Your dad used to make wine, remember? We all had such good times then. You remember my husband, Daria, you remember Bart?” With Liz, Daria had to drink tea and eat supermarket cake, of which she consumed the slimmest slice she could induce Liz to cut. Liz wept and Daria snivelled. She left feeling more lugubrious than when she had arrived.
The cold wind tried all the buttons of her coat as she walked north on Meridian to Paris. Havre was the next one over but it was cut by the toll booths at the end of the tunnel. She could hear the kids yelling in the playground at Holy Redeemer, where the Notre Dame nuns no longer wore the habits they had when she was a child there. A kid ran across the street in an Eastie jacket, the navy and gold winter version. She had had one of those. She had inherited it from Franklin when it got too small on him; of course it had had his name embroidered on the sleeve. Nina had reembroidered it for her so that it was truly hers. When she had finally agreed that she had outgrown it, it became Gussie’s, and was once again reembroidered. A badge of local pride.
Just past Santarpio’s pizza a caterpillar of wire at the top of poorly made cement steps stretched over the expressway. After they had built that road, when she was a teenager, she had prided herself on always crossing through the traffic instead of going safely over, she could no longer remember why. How broad and low the sky seemed over East Boston, with almost no trees on the streets to soften it, with the houses built flush to the sidewalks. Everything was white or grey or bleak pastels, so that even the occasional brick school or very occasional brick apartment building seemed harsh in color by contrast. All the lushness was hidden from the streets. Between every house there was a walkway, often barred by a high gate padlocked or bolted. No stranger could guess the secret world of the backyards, where in May the peach trees blossomed all over Eastie, where grapevines were trained to arbors and roses coiled over fences, where tomatoes offered their lush fruits, where right outside the back door a terrace of patterned bricks or patio blocks had often been laid so that it offered an outdoor table, some chairs, an external room under the flapping of the perennial multitiered laundry. Backyard barbecues and blue and white madonnas stood side by side. This was the world of her childhood.