Fly Away Home

by Marge Piercy

  “She just finessed you, Bro,” Elroy said. “She got to warn him right in front of you that we’re on deck here.”

  “Yeah.” Sherry blew her nose again. “Come on in, sit down real nice while I warn my husband.”

  “Whatever I do seems wrong. To you and to him. If I’m the owner of buildings I never heard of before, why don’t you give me a list of grievances? If I do turn out to have any connection, maybe I can change things. Wait a minute, I’ll get my recorder.” She reached for her purse, which always held the little cassette recorder she used for dictation.

  “We prepared a list.” Mac produced a sheaf of pages, neatly reproduced from good copy typed on a Selectric, like the one Peggy used upstairs. She thought they were supposed to be living in a slum. There were also copies of letters to and from New Age Realty, Walton Management, Red Robin Trust, Walkan Trust and an article from the Globe about a fire in which a child had died. Clippings from a local paper covered various SON protests and activities.

  “New Age. Red Robin. Walton. I never heard of any of these.”

  “New Age is who gouges my building,” Elroy said.

  “On the phone my husband said he didn’t own your building.”

  “Who does? Santy Claus?” Elroy laughed theatrically.

  “Don’t take my word for it. I seem to know less than you people do,” Daria said self-pityingly, fumbling with the heavy sheaf of papers. “It’s hard to be hated by people you never met before for things you didn’t do and know zip about.”

  “It’s hard to live in buildings that haven’t had a cent put into them for fifty years,” Sherry said. “The wiring could blow up in your face. The heat keeps going off. We’ve had seven fires—seven!”

  Fay sighed, her hands propped on her knees, spread wide in old polyester slacks. “I knew little Bobbie Rosario from the night he was born. I used to take care of him for his mother when she was at work. He was the brightest little kid. Could tell you every player on the Red Sox and the Celtics too.”

  That was the little boy who had died in a fire in October. What that had to do with picketing she could not guess. They might as well blame their landlords for floods and lightning. She did not want to raise the emotional pitch by trying to reason about a child’s accident. She remembered how much guilt was attached to Freddy’s inevitable death. She said slowly, “I know it’s hard for you to believe I’m ignorant of these buildings. My husband seems to have business connections I know nothing about. What I need to straighten things out is for you to lay off picketing this weekend.”

  “Oh, sure,” Mac squeaked. “Why should we call it off? Everybody’s hot to trot now. We work during the week, and weekends are the best time for maximum exposure. We’re planning to picket Friday night through Sunday night.”

  She had received one directive from Ross, to get rid of them, and she would. “If you don’t call it off, I doubt if my husband will return here. Then I can’t talk to him about the buildings.”

  “Where is he hiding?” Tom asked.

  She had a wicked urge to tell them. She imagined the pickets marching up and down outside that high-rise. “He didn’t say.”

  Tom stared. Eyes black as ripe olives. “You must have some idea.”

  She would not answer but turned her head away, saying to Mac, “What I want is to make a date with some of you. I want to see what you’re talking about on Monday. Those buildings.”

  “You want a tour?” Fay leaned forward. “Great. I don’t ask for anything better. I’ll show you around.”

  “I can come anytime, just so I’m free by two.”

  They arranged she would go to Fay’s apartment at eleven on Monday. She wrote the address and directions on top of the sheaf of photocopied material—broadsides, articles, letters to the editor published and unpublished, lists of violations, letters to the fire marshal’s office, requests to various city agencies and departments—Mac had handed her.

  They had all come in a VW van parked up the hill. She watched them pile in, Elroy giving Fay a boost. Tom was driving. On the side of the van a somewhat faded sign read Aaron Aardvark Carpentry Collective. The van rattled around the curve and down, out of sight.

  She was holding herself by her arms across her breasts and smiling slightly. That in itself surprised her. It felt like weeks since she had smiled spontaneously, not that forced smirk of appeasement. She ought to be frantic. Ross was again angry with her and had seized the pretext to run to his mistress. She had felt leaden with depression when she arrived and found the pickets. Now she faced trouble. Why was she smiling?

  Maybe it was the company. She who was used to seeing many people now was alone a great deal. Who would want to see her? What did she have to offer except tears, confession, pain? She was boring Gretta, as Gretta had used to bore her. Perhaps she had become so lonely that even a group of angry pickets provided some kind of company.

  Perhaps she enjoyed having a slight shred of power over Ross, the power to go and view the buildings he would not inform her about. The power to loose the pickets on him at his girlfriend’s. She felt quite virtuous that she had not done so immediately. She still could.

  She wandered around the living room, putting the rocking chair back in its corner, idly straightening. She would comb out the tangle with those people who thought they were her tenants. Ross could not speak to them, but she could. They did not put her off. Fay reminded her a little of Patsy, who was always on the phone fighting for her neighborhood, taking on the mayor’s office. Fay she thought she could reach.

  Suddenly she became aware she was smelling the chicken. It was ready to eat, but Ross was not coming home. She must turn it off. She wished she had someone to eat with. For an instant she thought of Cesaro and felt a stir of empathy with him. He was easy to mock in his Anglophile tweeds, but actually both of them had been aspiring in the same direction, toward what they had perceived in adolescence as gentleness and civility. Both of them had married Wasps, both had bought and adored old houses, both loved to putter around inside and outside. She and her next youngest brother would have made a highly compatible couple. That also made her smile.

  If she actually did own those buildings—which she doubted—she could take a hand in managing them. She couldn’t see why Ross always felt they were short of money. Surely they could afford to fix up those buildings, however they had come to acquire them. Probably some client had defaulted on a fee and turned over to Ross some worthless building instead. She was curious, yes, and she wanted to show those people how they had misjudged her. It was Fay she saw herself talking with, making everything clear, Fay who looked a little more like Patsy the more she imagined speaking with her intimately, woman to woman. If they had been causing trouble since March as Ross had said, she would make peace. In a way she had always been Ross’s social arm, explaining people to him and him to people. He would see how valuable she was to him. But she would not mention yet to Ross that she had made an appointment with Fay for Monday, unless he was very, very nice. That would be her own private excursion.

  9

  By suppertime Saturday, Daria felt crazed. She had not heard from Ross since the phone call the afternoon before. She had called his office repeatedly, leaving messages with the answering service. She stood in the kitchen wringing her hands. Torte had been irritable all day, barking at nothing, hurling himself at the kittens whenever they ventured down onto the floor. The kittens would arch their backs and spit or simply leap up on the counters to peer balefully down at him.

  She could not reach Ross. She could not reach him physically, she could not reach him emotionally, they could not communicate and now she finally could not even pick up the phone and call her husband.

  At once she felt herself swelling and withering. She felt gross far beyond what she knew to be her weight. Her flesh had turned to mounds of cold mashed potatoes. It was vast and watery and all of it hurt. At the same time she felt shrunken to the size of a mouse. She was someone other people could walk through.
She was Nina. She was her dead mother whom she had brought home and planted in the yard, for whom she had ordered rosebushes the night before from Pickering’s catalogue, wanting old-fashioned hardy bushes that would last for years, with strong fragrance and bushy growth. She wanted to honor and cherish the memory of Nina; she did not want to become her.

  Yet she saw Nina wringing her hands with that same gesture, yes, the same gesture, standing in the kitchen that opened into the yard and crying to her own mother, “Perchè? Perchè?”: Why has he done this to me? She saw Nina hurrying to the living room to peek out the window over the couch, to see if he was coming back to her. She saw Nina turn her head away in the street, grasping Daria hard by the shoulder and rushing her past some woman who wore in memory ever after the lurid aura of mysterious shame. She was not supposed to look. If she did, Nina would slap her afterward. “Why did you shame me? Why did you look at that whore?”

  But she knew Nina had wanted to look too, for even when she was little she understood that Nina was not really angry with her, that in a few moments Nina would gather her close and kiss her, tender, solicitous.

  She held her hands against her thighs to forbid them to twist around each other in that gesture of despair, of entreaty, of futilely washing her hands as if to rid herself of the dirt of misery.

  Had Ross left her? Had he simply walked out? She did not even know. She picked up the phone and put it down, picked it up and put it down. But Robin was not a helpless four-year-old. Robin was an official adult and Ross was using Robin to see his girlfriend. She had to know if Robin was conspiring with him. She could not endure suspecting her own daughter, yet she found herself angry with Robin. She could deal with that: at least she knew where Robin was.

  She called her. One of the roommates answered. “Oh, Mrs. Walker. Robin! It’s your mother.”

  She decided to wade right in. “Robin, I need to reach Ross. I know where he is but I don’t have the number. It’s essential that I reach him.”

  “Why would I know? You leave me out of this.”

  “Because you know he isn’t home. You didn’t arrive to run with him today. This is Saturday and you always run here.”

  “I don’t want to get involved in this, Mother! It’s your fault! You keep making scenes and a fuss.”

  “We both know where he is. On Fairfield and Beacon. Perhaps we can go over there together—”

  “You’re crazy! On a weekend? He’s in Hamilton …” Robin broke off.

  Hamilton? That meant exactly nothing. “Is that where he called you from?”

  “It’s your fault, Mother. You don’t appreciate him. He’s got to grow and change and everything, just like me. Now you just leave me out of all this! I can’t stand this mess.” Robin hung up.

  She was lying on the floor weeping. She had lost her husband; she had lost her mother; now she had lost her daughter. She wanted to fall asleep and never wake. It felt like dying. She could feel the organs of her body being slowly ripped out of her.

  She wanted to talk to Nina so badly she was blankly furious for a moment. Damn Nina for dying. Why couldn’t she talk to her mother? She was an orphan, a motherless child. Of course she wasn’t an orphan, but her father would hardly receive her sorrow with interest. She sat up. What a fuss she had made about the matter of whether she called Nina or waited for Nina to call her. She had been ridiculous. It would be a sublime luxury to be able to pick up the phone and talk to Nina.

  She could not lie on the floor like a sick dog. She grasped a chair and pulled herself up. Hamilton, Robin had said, Robin the daughter who had turned on her. The daughter who did not love her. Was Hamilton a town? In the corner cabinet in the dining room, she looked through the drawer of maps. Southern New England. She tried H under the index of Massachusetts towns. N-2. She found it, a small town north of Boston, a few miles outside circumferential Route 128 near Cape Ann, located between Ipswich to the north and Prides Crossing to the south.

  Did he have two girlfriends, one in the city and one in the country? Had they gone there together? Did her family live there? Friends with a large house? What friends? She saw Ross smiling as he used to, hand resting lightly on the shoulder of a slender faceless young woman, chatting with friends around a fire in a secret life, an alternate parallel social universe excluding only her.

  Perhaps because of talking to Robin, she imagined Lou as just a few years older than Robin, blond like Robin, aggressive and ambitious like Robin. Perhaps a young executive. A woman fresh out of law school. Moved from a small town to the city to share an apartment with other girls—unless Ross was paying for that apartment. What did she know? She was the last to find out anything. Ross and Robin, laughing together at her.

  She could no longer stand still. She wandered the rooms of the ground floor. Torte was pulling himself stiffly upstairs. Could dogs get arthritis? He really should go to the vet. He had not been since his shots in February. She could not tell if Torte was feeling ill or simply protesting Ross’s absence. She stood looking after him, worrying.

  She called Tracy, the daughter who was still hers. The dormitory switchboard operator told her the room did not answer. Then she realized it was Saturday night. Of course Tracy was out. Did she really mean to unburden herself on her eighteen-year-old daughter?

  She wandered through the formal living room with the carpeting Ross had insisted on and the small Oriental laid over it, to the dining room with its braided rugs on the wide floorboards, to the kitchen back through the hall to the living room. Everywhere her glance took in a sideboard, a pitcher, a set of andirons they had found together on a September Saturday, on a June day sweet as a plum. The early years in this house, Ross and she had driven off to New Hampshire many weekends to auctions, to sales, to little shops. Everywhere photographs beamed at her. It could not all be lost! Ross had taken the pictures except for a few where she had snatched the Nikon briefly and caught him off guard.

  Four summers in Dennis Port. Then Boothbay Harbor. The girls pranced in shorts, suntanned and wet, grinning. Torte was a puppy leaping high as Ross’s arm after a proffered tennis shoe. There she was in black bathing suit stretched out with her eyes shut. He had crept up on her to take that picture, saying it was the soul of sensuality. How sweet her flesh had been to him then.

  She heard herself sighing, sighing as she passed from picture to picture, little portholes to a sea of shared joy. In Boothbay there they stood on the deck of the Fergusons’ boat. Fergy was a lawyer too, but he dealt in divorce. She passed on quickly. That wife, Moira, those twin boys: Fergy had divorced them five years back. The last time she had seen Moira, Moira had been working as an Avon lady while the boys were in school. The conversation had been embarrassing.

  That landed her. She took out the chicken held on low in the oven. She waved a drumstick cool and ate it standing. Then an idea came to her. She went to his study. The door was locked, but in an old house, locking a door had only a psychological function. She slid a dinner knife between jamb and frame and popped the bolt of the lock. Then she walked in.

  She wanted the bills, the recent financial records. As she paid monthly bills, she laid them in his basket and he filed them. First she found the folder of Department Store Charges. Lord and Taylor, the November bill:

  October 20 Dept 18 Women’s accessories: $89.95

  That must be her shawl. Purchased the Friday before her birthday, not the day of her birthday. Immediately below it:

  October 20 Dept 54 Nighttime lingerie: $99.95

  He had bought the shawl for her and and the beautiful black peignoir set for his girlfriend, spending about equally for both. How thoughtful and balanced. She was furious. Somehow the boxes had become confused. Perhaps Lorraine had bought both and mixed them up?

  She found other purchases not for her and certainly not by her: perfume, September 14; pet accessories, August 29; sweaters, November 30. Bloomingdale’s yielded nothing. Too far from his office? Saks revealed gloves; houseware (she could not remember his p
urchasing anything for the house) and back in August, a man’s robe she had not bought. She could scarcely recall Ross buying himself clothing. The robe must be for that apartment on Beacon. Therefore in August that relationship had been well enough established for him to be needing a robe to wear there.

  Next she tried American Express. They both had cards, but on the same account. Of course he ate out frequently with clients. However Ross’s means of keeping track of business expenses aided her work: he checked off his business-related expenses to simplify deductions for his accountant when their taxes were prepared. After she marked her own business expenses in green, he went through and circled his in red.

  Last August while she and the girls had stayed in the rented house near Newport, work-related matters had required Ross to spend several days—and nights—in the city each week. One of those weeks he had obviously gone to Maine, for there were lots of suppers for two at Down East restaurants. Her time on tour had been particularly busy also. Obviously Lou did not cook for him, as that trip was represented by a dinner out every night. She now knew where he had been when she could not reach him from Florida: there was a chit from a restaurant in Magnolia on Cape Ann for that night.

  They had their favorite restaurants, certain ones which began to appear regularly in July. During August the lunches became more frequent. During September they met at least twice a week. Thursday seemed to be the day they never missed. She seemed to remember Thursday sometimes figuring in those notes. Weekend chits often came from north of Boston, Ipswich, Rowley, Rockport. She could mark every trip she had made (to New York to see her agent and publisher; to Hyannis for a bookfair; to Chicago to judge a contest, and that tour) by the flurry of nonbusiness activity. Ross was honest in his income tax returns and apparently did not try to deduct her. Maybe Lou wasn’t a lawyer.

  Daria almost wished he would walk in and find her going through the bills, for then they would have to talk. But she grew fed up with her detection without being interrupted. She abandoned her search from a sense of despair. She knew when his affair had begun—tentatively in July and then seriously in August—but what good did that do her? At least it had not been going on for years and she, too dense to have noticed. Before July she could find little out of the ordinary reported by American Express or MasterCard.