by Marge Piercy
From the passage over the expressway, she looked toward the skyscrapers of downtown Boston, the outsized jets and tower of Logan, the nearer ships. The cracked steps led her down to Havre Street. She started along the row of houses, but when she came to hers, it was a parking lot. She stared over the wire fence. Her parents’ old house had burned down years ago, she had known that intellectually, but she had not been back and somehow she had expected to see it today. This was one of a chain of neighborhood lots that offered parking for the airport with a shuttle bus running to the terminals. Everything was paved over, the spot where their wooden house had stood, the patio made of bricks Frank and Joe and she had stolen, the table where they had eaten their most joyous summer meals, Nina’s precious roses. Tears welled up. Coming to East Boston had been a mistake. The snow had blown away but patches of ice lay in every dip of the sidewalk. She felt robbed of her own past. A parking lot! Surely she had never agreed to that.
Patsy, their old next-door neighbor, braced her. Patsy met her at the door, one eye partly closed by a stye and her white hair shoved in a net, wearing a housedress that would have fit a hippopotamus, one of the sort Nina used to wear. Where did they find them? Church rummage sales? “Them damn hypocrites on the mayor’s payroll, they make promises out of both sides of their mouths but nary a one they keep when it comes to putting back the money they suck from us in taxes. They just gave me the royal runaround on the phone …” Patsy had a cigarette dangling stuck to her chapped lower lip and another smoked by itself in an ashtray next to the phone. “Want coffee? Or would’ya rather have a beer?”
“Coffee.” She’d had wine with lunch and it had almost put her to sleep. “Milk, no sugar. Thanks, Patsy. I brought you something.”
Patsy received the enamel heart and photos as if grudgingly. Daria had no idea why Patsy should be annoyed. “Was there something else you had in mind? Something you especially wanted?”
“I’m a little surprised you coming around here. After what you and your fine husband done to us.”
Was Patsy going to try to make her feel guilty for not visiting the old neighborhood? She’d done so every week while her parents lived there. “What’s that, Patsy?”
“How’d you know we wouldn’t go up with the old house? How’d you like to wake in the middle of the night with smoke and flames pouring in and have to go running outside in your nightie in the freezing cold?”
“Patsy, I’m sorry about that. But it was an old house. You know how many fires there are around here.”
“A lot more than there used to be, you can bet on that.”
“One of the tenants started it, by smoking, if I remember.”
“That was the story, wasn’t it? With the condition the wiring was in, it wouldn’t take much. And now that damned parking lot. People roaring in and out all times of the day and night. It brings down a block. Some of us care about our homes.”
“Cesaro and Ross took that house over so my parents could have the money to buy into their garden apartment. They were living in an awful trailer park, without a tree for miles. Hot and dusty and depressing. Nina hated it.”
“I suppose you done what was right for your folks. But it wasn’t so easy on us. You know what they say about those fires around here. They call them Instant Parking Lot.”
“We were losing money on the house. We couldn’t sell it. We couldn’t raise the rents any higher. That’s why we couldn’t rebuild.”
“That’s what they all say, them that is destroying this place.” Patsy stood up. “I thank you kindly for bothering to bring me the relics of my old friend Nina.”
Back in the street, almost thrust out, she was still puzzled. Patsy had been their next-door neighbor all through her childhood. It was Patsy who had the key and made her lunch when Grandma was dying in the hospital. Patsy and Nina were always in and out of each other’s kitchens, and she remembered Patsy’s repertoire of cookies and cakes as well as her own mother’s. To this day she made a spice cake and a gingerbread that were imitations of Patsy’s. She stared at the place where the house had stood. Instant Parking Lot. Now what did that mean? What was Patsy hostile about?
Probably a class reaction, pure and simple: she had grown up working class and married out and by now her own work gave her an independent financial base. Yet Patsy had seen her many times when Nina had still been living next door, and always Patsy had had a warm hug and a great big grin for her. Maybe Patsy was just in a bad mood, feuding with the mayor’s office. Some people got cranky as they aged. She stared at the parking lot whose asphalt buried the purple eggplants that had gleamed to her late childhood eyes potently sexual, the day lilies, the irises, the red and green peppers and tall twining tomatoes, the bones of their dead pets, Scamp, Tiger, the painted turtles, fluffy Tyrone, her special cat.
Maybe Patsy was right to be angry. The lot was ugly. Mean. It felt like a desecration. She could not remember discussing that option. She remembered the incessant worrying when her parents wanted to move south—to be more precise, when Pops decided to. They had been sick a lot. Pops had an on-and-off bronchitis that threatened to become chronic and he dreamed of his place in the sun.
She was sorry she had come to East Boston. She was sorry she had left her car under the Commons and taken the damned subway out of some maudlin impulse of returning on foot. Now she had to hike all the way to Maverick in the face of the icy wind that scraped her flesh raw. She could recall Cesaro and Ross agreeing at last to buy out her parents. She remembered a period of collecting rents. Yes; for perhaps two years she had been the rent collector. She never told Ross how often she had to return sometimes to collect a month’s rent. They had put the house on the market but they could not get their money out. Then she vaguely remembered a fire. That must be seven years before. Six? How could Patsy still be angry?
The house had fallen into disrepair after her parents moved out. At the time she had been very busy. It had been a relief to stop visiting the wreck of the old house and to stop having occasional fights with Ross about fixing it up. She had felt ashamed of it.
The burning had felt more symbolic than actual to her, as if simply removing a worry: Patsy should be glad for a parking lot instead of noisy neighbors like that family they had to evict, and now her apartment received more sunlight. Daria trudged on toward the subway and toward her distant car, deciding she would stop for a brief bout of Christmas shopping downtown before getting her car out of the garage and heading home. The only time she ever willingly put in shopping was when she was buying presents. Today she would shop for Tracy and for Robin. That would fluff up her spirits.
7
The texture of their life together had changed. She knew he would blame that deterioration on the fight they had had on the plane coming north, but she was convinced he was using his anger as pretext. In the mornings he left immediately upon rising, dressed usually but not always, she noted, in his running clothes. Was he really running with Robin? Her doubt spread out its fine threads like the mycelium of a toadstool under the ground, wanting only stimulation to sprout in a new place.
Usually he was distantly polite. She felt like a servant waiting on him. She felt like Torte, crouching to catch his eye and wag a hopeful tail. However, if Torte succeeded in drawing his attention, he could count on being caught up and hugged, the warmth lavished on him she had used to enjoy. How long was it since he had paid half as much attention to her as to his dog? Then her pain would grow until she burst out questioning, asking, trying to touch him. He was still Ross, her husband; she was still the same wife she had been. It could not be so changed. This was a nightmare that must end. She had not become somebody else, she had not altered or corrupted. She lived by the values they had shared. He had to turn at last and put his arms around her and say he loved her.
Their incessant entertaining had trailed off. When she invited old friends, he would put in his time. She did not think anyone could tell they were no longer living as a couple, but the pretense exhausted
her and she stopped issuing invitations. He seemed to invite mostly his partners and the Petrises, whom she was coming to dislike, with their conversation confined to condominiums, bank gossip, mortgage statistics, who had how large a piece of what.
Three kinds of phone calls seemed to come in for him. Previously she had answered his phone as well as her own, but now he seemed to mistrust her doing so. Whether he answered his line in the kitchen or whether he took the call in his study, even through the closed door she could tell from his voice and the length of the call which of the three types he was on.
The first type was a standard business call. He sounded brisk, efficient, friendly but not overly: his office voice. He was on perhaps five minutes, perhaps fifteen. In the second type he barked into the phone and hung up almost immediately. In the third type, his voice took on a honeyed quality that turned her stomach as much as it roused her jealousy. Those phone calls could last up to an hour. He might emerge, pour himself a glass of wine or sherry and return to the same call. Occasionally he would issue from his office and go directly to his car. She would stand at the window watching him pull out.
She kept stumbling into efforts to recover that warm space that had been her loving marriage. She mentioned her agent’s pressure to produce new photographs for the reissue of her one out-of-print book as well as the Australian edition. Ross had always taken her publicity pictures. “I was just wondering, if you’d have the time?”
“When do you need the pictures?”
“You know how they are, yesterday.”
“I’ll have to see.”
“Ross, if you aren’t in the mood, it’s really all right. I can go to a professional. They have two they like to use in New York.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it.” He frowned. “Professionals, huh? Of course if you think they’d do a better job, that they know how to photograph you better than I do …”
“I didn’t mean that. Not at all. I couldn’t be as relaxed with anybody else.” She had a sense how archaic a statement that was.
“If you really want me to do it, I will.”
She was left not knowing if she should insist, in which case he was doing a favor, or if she should let the matter drop and be done professionally, which might be insulting. She decided to change the subject. “Patsy was rude to me when I brought her Mama’s things. She seems to have a grudge against us because of what happened to my parents’ house.”
“Who’s Patsy?” He examined his cuff.
He knew. “My parents’ old neighbor. She seemed upset by the parking lot. I didn’t know that was what had happened.”
“Why should you know? And who cares what that fat old bitch thinks about it? First she complains because the tenants are too noisy next door. Then she complains there aren’t any tenants next door.”
Of course he remembered Patsy. “I found it upsetting. Patsy being rude. The house and yard all paved over.”
He watched her narrowly. “Why are you taking a sudden interest in that property?”
“I hadn’t seen it in years.”
“Dragging back over there is bound to get you in a lot of trouble. That lot is a good steady earner.”
“But … didn’t we sell it to some company? It looks like a chain of them.”
He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. It was a new mannerism he had. She kept thinking he was imitating somebody, but she had no idea who. He asked, “What I want to know is, how long are we holding on to this barn?”
“Since when is this house a barn?”
“It’s too big for two people.”
“It’s my office as well as my house. Tracy comes home every few weeks and every vacation.”
“It eats money. Heating it. Having to commute into the city every time I need anything. You don’t care, you just sit on your fanny transplanting bulbs and making up recipes for fat ladies in Medford. I spend two-thirds of my life commuting.”
“That’s because you aren’t spending any time with me. I’d love to know who are you spending evenings with.”
“I asked you months ago to let me put it on the market. This damned mausoleum represents frozen money. It’s tying up capital for no reason.”
“Where do you want to live anyhow?”
“There are extremely handsome and civilized condos down on the harbor in the city. Those renovated warehouses are stunning. You park right there. You can walk all over downtown. You can even keep a boat and dock it right outside.”
“A boat?”
He grimaced, turning away. “I didn’t expect you to understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Everything here is for you!” he cried out. “Your office, your secretary, your answering machine, your daughter, your friends, your garden, your damn huge cash-eating barn! I’m tired of carrying it on my back. I’m tired! I want for me, me! I want something for me! I’ve been working for twenty years to keep you and your kids and I’m sick of it.”
“But I work too,” she said slowly. “I was working when you met me. I subbed till you wanted me to quit. Then I started writing the cookbooks.”
“Fat books! That’s what they are: fat books!”
His anger so stunned her that she let him walk into the living room and turn on the TV loud to a basketball game, without daring to continue the discussion. He used television as a device for silencing her, watching it far more than he ever had. Mostly he watched sports, which he knew she found boring and which he had always disdained. Vicarious jocks, he used to call his cronies. She sat through hockey games, basketball, football asking him the rules, trying to take an interest. He would answer her questions but he would not look at her. He never took his gaze off the screen.
After a while she felt invisible. The pattern of the couch would begin coming through her skin. Then she would find herself in the kitchen eating. Suddenly she seemed always to be dieting or stuffing herself. Food was becoming her solace. Standing she ate a fine terrine she had made for supper yesterday before Lorraine called to say he was tied up and would not be home for supper. She was loving herself with the terrine. She was mothering herself.
Often she retreated to her room, letting the kittens in. They curled up with her purring, washing each other, lying embraced. It was as if she shared the bed with two small lovers. They lay cheek to cheek. Each became upset if the other was too long out of sight. Brother called from one end of the yard or the house, and sister came running. They slept with paws around each other, bellies pressed or head to tail and tail to head.
She had begun to keep the house colder so that Ross would complain less about bills. It would be a great loss to give up her bedroom with the slight slope of walls under the gambrel roof, the cleanly proportioned mullioned windows, the old wide boards worn satiny. She loved the subliminal contact with the many women who had lived in this house over the last hundred and forty years as she went about cleaning, as she sat looking out on her garden, as she cooked, as she worked.
She got into bed with the cats, wrapping around her shoulders the shawl he had given her in October, and read. Lately she had been going to the library and bringing home armloads of books, but she had also been rereading books she had loved twenty years before, even books from her adolescence pilfered from Tracy’s shelves. She reread Jane Eyre. There the gruff male had truly loved under his cruel exterior. He had tormented Jane but he had loved her. She cried herself to sleep wanting to believe.
She reread Wuthering Heights, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, The Wind in the Willows, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Then she realized she was reading her way back into childhood. Up in her room she felt like a crazy old lady with her cats and her childhood memories, wrapped in her shawl and crying alone.
One evening Ross answered the phone and accepted an invitation for Sunday night from a new couple up the block because, she suspected, he was caught by surprise, expecting a different call and could not think of an excuse fast enough—generally a trick he was good at. S
aturday morning he announced, “All right, all right, we’ll do those shots you want. Is that how you want to be dressed?”
Of course it wasn’t. She had just been out turning the compost pile. If only she had washed her hair the night before, but she had been planning to use that time alone in the house while Robin and Ross jogged together. As she rushed around her room, she tried to remember what she had put on to be photographed the last time, so that she wouldn’t wear the same thing. Finally she flew across the, back hall and looked at the covers of her books. Lucky she did, because she had laid out the blue wool again. As he photographed her, she felt stiff and strange and silly, smirking and posing and feeling coldly judged. The camera had never seemed more like an insect eye observing her as possible prey.
On Sunday they dutifully trudged through the new slush over old ice five houses uphill and around the bend to a stucco house put up in the twenties. She knew its long living room well because the Fergusons had lived there before their divorce. The house had turned over in the interim to a couple whose husband had then been transferred to Saudi Arabia.