Fly Away Home

by Marge Piercy

  Her job was to pay monthly bills. Ross’s parallel job was to balance the checkbook. For the first time she realized that gave him an automatic review of what she had spent (“You really poured it out this Christmas”) while she remained ignorant as to whom he wrote checks. The drawer the checkbook stubs and bank statements were in was locked, but she found the key in his top drawer. First she went down the basement and found a bottle of a good well-aged Bordeaux—1970 Montrose—carefully carried it up and uncorked it. Then she ate the other drumstick and shut off the oven. At nine she doubted Ross was coming home.

  She spread out their bank statements from April on, to establish a pattern. She could deduce little from the checks. Most of his were written to one or another trust: Robert Realty, which she recognized, remembering Ross explaining years ago to his daughters that it was named half for Robin and half for Teresa, making Robert. Revco Realty Trust. Checks to Red Robin Trust. Walkan. Walton Management.

  Then there were the banks. South Boston Savings Bank. Baybank. And then again and again, the Allston Savings and Loan.

  She was astonished to see how much money poured through the account. Not much remained, but in the course of a month, a lot came in and a lot went out. Probably running the household averaged about a thousand a month. Beyond that she had business expenses, travel, her secretary, telephone, office supplies. But most of the money that came in from both of them did not go for Ross’s private suppers and lunches, nor for Tracy’s tuition and clothing. It simply vanished into the maze of trusts and banks.

  In the early days of their marriage, money had been a topic of frequent discussion, especially how it went. The money they managed to save was in an account collecting its three and a half percent interest toward the purchase of a car, a dream house. Freddy’s brief life had left them severely in debt. In recent years Ross and the accountant did her taxes. She had no clear idea how much she made in a year. It had never mattered. In fact it had been tactful not to care, although the amount had risen from a pittance to comfortable to well paid. What had it seemed to her to enquire: unfeminine? unwifelike? untrusting?

  If he were paying that woman Lou’s rent, Daria had no idea how to differentiate that from all the other real estate trusts he wrote checks to. As she sat sipping the good wine with her lap full of kittens and seven months’ worth of cancelled checks spread out on his desk, it struck her forcibly that this hectic torrent of money out seemed to have little to do with running a law office. These must be their investments—but in what? Old houses in Allston? That seemed bizarre. She had always thought of investments—in the few minutes of her lifetime when she had thought of them at all—as having to do with brokers, stocks and bonds, annuities.

  She returned the checks to the drawer, locked it and put the key back. Then she reset the lock and shut the door. Her head felt full of mud. The kittens had begun chasing each other in and out of the fireplace. Torte lay with his head on his paws growling softly, occupying Ross’s favorite chair as if to protect it from encroachment. His sandy eyes were open, brooding. She stood at the windows pulling aside the draperies to stare into the street. Snow was falling idly onto the old packed-down snow. Soon it would be Christmas. She imagined the five pickets marching in the dark with hand-lettered signs: MERRY CHRISTMAS, SLUMLORDS.

  How could Robin have turned against her? Robin’s adolescence had not been as stormy as Tracy’s. In high school her fierce competitive urge focussed mostly on sports; in college she attacked track, tennis and her classes. She had majored in business administration. Before Robin had moved into an apartment with two other girls in Back Bay, she had filled the house with books about being a successful woman executive, books about networking, magazines called Savvy and Women Working, books that coached aggressiveness and talked about “the edge.” Robin was so earnest and fierce that Daria often felt a special raw soreness in her. Robin needed intensely to win. At times Daria thought victory was a kind of drug for Robin, addictive as any other. But she knew women of her own generation had feared open competition, had feared winning, and what had that gotten them? Contempt. Perhaps Robin’s was the right way. She had always experienced a different kind of fearfulness for each of her daughters. With Tracy, she worried about men. With Robin, she worried about Robin’s ever higher standards for herself and her own performance. She worried too whether what Robin had chosen would satisfy her in the long run.

  Now Robin had turned on her. Daria could not move from that, as if impaled. She had always identified with her mother, even in trouble, in defeat. She wanted to have a better life, but she was on Nina’s side. Maybe her sin was a silent bargain with Ross. After Freddy, she had not wanted to try again for the missing son. You can have Robin and I’ll keep Tracy and you can turn Robin into whatever you wish: was that the silent treaty? If so, perhaps Robin was right to hate her. Perhaps she had sacrificed her older daughter.

  That was ridiculous. Ross was a good father who adored Robin as Robin adored him. All children prefer one parent over the other. Why should she demand both her daughters side with her? She tried and tried to be rational, to tear herself free from the pain. She was like wolves she had read about who were killed by putting a little blood on a very sharp knife. The wolf would lick the knife and keep licking it until it had cut off its own tongue because of course the knife would continue to be covered with blood. The wolf would then starve to death or bleed to death. She must tear herself from the cold bright knife and walk away.

  Torte was deliriously happy, lying on his back kicking with his stiff paws and whining with pleasure. Ross was home. Sunday around one he appeared to finish the leftover chicken for lunch, with good appetite and a bottle of the same 1970 Montrose he went into the basement and brought up after he eyed the bottle in the trash. It seemed they were competing to drink up their small stock of very good wines. Cesaro had given them that case; he knew wine and gave generous presents.

  She had an agenda. She had even made a list upstairs; not that she was about to read it to him, but she was prepared. The trouble was, he had his own agenda.

  “When are we going to put this barn on the market?”

  “And if we sell it, will you then live someplace else with me? Or will you live with your girlfriend?” She stood, her hands on her hips facing him.

  He was sprawled in his favorite chair, foot tapping, hand on Torte’s head. “How do I know? How do I know anything about myself? When have I been allowed to have any feelings?”

  “You’ve always had plenty of feelings, Ross, and you’ve expressed them in a variety of ways.”

  “I act out of guilt. I act out of obligation, compulsion. I act out of habit. I’m dying inside! Can’t you see that?”

  She hated it when he got rhetorical. When he made speeches, she found it hard to penetrate the busy surface of the words. “We’ve gone through many changes in our life together. We moved and moved and moved because you wanted to. It wasn’t good for the girls, and you knew it. They were always being uprooted and starting again in a new school. That made Robin superaggressive and Tracy overly dependent. If you’re really tired of this house, you know I’ll miss it—but we can look together for something exciting. Then I’d be in favor.”

  “Too many years of compromise and habit are choking us. Gritting my teeth and buckling down. Fulfilling my responsibilities and commitments, again and again and again and again!”

  “What do you want, Ross?”

  “I want to want! To feel again. I’m increasingly cut off from the deepest, strongest part of my being.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’ve cut yourself off from me. When we met, you had trouble feeling. Remember how stifled and locked in yourself you felt? Remember how we celebrated when Robin was born? Remember when we had our first garden party here, you said you’d never felt so proud and peaceful?”

  “I need to find myself! I’m trapped. This house is a noose. This marriage is a noose. I want to feel the joy of being alive again!”

  “
You mean, infatuation is fun. I remember that. But I put that aside for our marriage.”

  For a moment he gave her a look of cold fury. Then he laughed, dryly. “Do you encounter many temptations, Daria?”

  She felt as if he had punched her, only words instead of wind were knocked out of her. She stared back. What she remembered was the temptation to tell those pickets where he was Friday. To gain time she seated herself in the rocker beside the fireplace, noticing as she kept her face averted from him a little water on the grate. A leak, that big sinister-looking Tom Silver had said. “If you mean, do I wish to have sex with individuals whom I meet on the road,” she said with flat clarity, “no. I don’t know if the opportunity is even there, to be honest, because I never let it arise. Why on earth should I want to? I don’t feel much for people I meet casually.”

  “What do you feel for me?” He forestalled her as she started to answer. “I know you’ll say, love, love, love, but I doubt it. You’re not interested enough in me to feel love. You depend on me, you lean all over me, you use me. I’m the one who balances the checkbook and brings home the bacon. I’m the one who takes both cars in whenever anything goes wrong with one of them. That’s who I am.”

  “I want us to have a good time together. Ross, we haven’t taken a vacation alone together in years. You won’t take the time off. This summer, you were in the city in August more than you were with us. We’ve gradually stopped doing the nice things together, the—”

  “The seeds of discontent were planted long before.” His voice was resonant. “In neglect they have grown tall. Will I forever feel I have negotiated an unacceptable compromise for myself?” Something about the phrase he really liked. She could see him listening to the sound of it. “An unacceptable compromise,” he repeated sonorously, rolling his voice in his head like brandy in a snifter.

  She thought he was speaking for that woman, as if she could overhear and applaud. “What compromise? Ross, isn’t it possible that what’s getting at you is that you’ve been doing a kind of law that doesn’t excite you? You felt burned out by what happened with your advocacy work in HUD. Maybe it’s time to turn back to public interest law. That would give you the passion in your work—”

  “You’re living in the past. I am involved in my work, Daria, it’s simply that you take no interest in it whatsoever. How can you imagine for five minutes the kind of pointless treadmill hotdogging I was doing then compares to the work I’m doing now? My work has one hell of a lot more to do with the real world and what the Greater Boston area is going to be like in ten year. How viable life here is going to be for the people who create jobs and pay taxes.”

  “I haven’t refused to take an interest in your work. You don’t talk about it.”

  “You cling to old ideas. The compromise I’m talking about has gone on from the beginning, anyhow, and time has only deepened it.”

  “A pity you never got to use your courtroom manner,” she said, feeling herself grow tight. “What compromise are we discussing?”

  “Our marriage was a compromise from the beginning—”

  “That’s the worst retroactive nonsense I’ve heard! You wanted to get married, if I may refresh your memory, you wanted it a lot!”

  “If I may refresh yours, you weren’t exactly intact.”

  “I was perfectly … intact! I wasn’t afraid of an operation. I’m not a practicing Catholic and hadn’t been since I was twelve. Nina knew I was pregnant. Please don’t make over my past as well as your own. I wasn’t suicidal or dependent on you. I was working, Ross.”

  “You were a kid with a teaching certificate and no experience at all. I felt responsible, the way I always have, to my own hurt.”

  “Ross, what you felt was lonely. You were in love with me. You sure did act as if you were.”

  “It’s the recent years. I’m sick of gritting my teeth and pulling the load. I can come back to life, I know I can. I want to feel alive!”

  She wondered why he sounded like an ad for some product offering instant youth, a face cream, a cigarette, a brand of jeans. “You’re saying your new girlfriend makes no demands—yet—lays no responsibilities on you and thus makes you feel unmarried. To be twenty again, this time without pimples.” The edge on her voice astonished her. This was the first fight they had had in which she had not quickly blundered into tears. Something about his rhetoric distanced her, as if he had been rehearsing speeches.

  “I didn’t expect you to understand.” His face drew in, his shoulders hunched. “I need to find myself! If you won’t help, I’ll do it alone.”

  “Alone? Have you been spending a lot of time alone?”

  “And you leave Robin out of this. You made her feel dreadful.”

  “I would imagine she’d have a few qualms about being used by you as a cover for seeing your girlfriend.”

  “And you leave Gail out of this too! This has nothing to do with her.”

  “Gail? Who’s Gail?” Daria asked blankly. If his girlfriend was Gail, who was Lou? Did he have two girlfriends?

  But Ross hurtled from the room and crossed the hall to his study, yanking futilely at the door. He had forgotten locking it. “You bitch!” he hurled over his shoulder. “That’s all I’m saying about her, so forget it.”

  “Ross.” She came up behind him as he rattled the knob, finally remembered and fished out his key ring. Many keys, she noticed, very many. “I know we have to talk. We must change our marriage. I believe in your anger and your pain. But spending every night with … Gail?… is no way to work out problems between us. Can’t you see that?”

  “You think you can coax me back into a little box. But you can’t.” He slammed the door of his study. Torte sat down outside and began to howl. She had a feeling of victory in that for the first time she had not broken down, and in that he had finally admitted there was another woman (two other women?); but it was a Pyrrhic victory, for he was furious with her. At least, she thought, trying to quieten Torte, she knew now she was sane. Nothing of what had beset her had been imagined and he was currently involved with a woman named Gail. Perhaps the peignoir had been for a previous girlfriend, Lou. She would watch and see if any more of those notes came. At least he had finally admitted to one involvement, and that at least was a place to begin trying to talk. Maybe this would be a turning point.

  10

  On Monday Daria arrived early for her appointment with Fay Souza, so she drove around awhile, tempted to turn and go home. The only thing that made her keep the silly appointment was the fear that having promised and then reneged would make matters worse. She was surprised to notice that the neighborhood to which she had been directed was near Brookline, where one of the many apartments Ross and she had occupied still stood, six large sunny rooms in a yellow brick courtyard building. More clearly than that apartment she remembered the food shopping, the best she had ever enjoyed. Brookline looked as prosperous as ever, the bakeries and butcher shops as inviting.

  While she had lived in Brookline, she had never been sure where it left off and Boston recommenced. She realized she had in fact spent time in Allston; she had simply thought she was still in Brookline. The wide boulevard of Commonwealth was in Allston, she discovered. Some of the apartment houses that lined it had been refurbished into flashy condominiums with gaudy canopies out front; others next door seemed to have slid into disrepair, four names to a buzzer.

  The streets were tree-lined. Fay’s street curved uphill in a neighborhood that seemed an uneven mixture of three- and four-story brick apartment buildings and two- and three-story frame houses. Like all of Boston it looked bleak with the snow heaped up, but her gardener’s eye could pick out fruit trees, rosebushes, arbors in yards. It looked like a perfectly decent place to live, not beautiful like her own hill, but pleasant. They must have very minor complaints.

  Fay occupied the ground floor of a three-story wooden duplex painted a faded but vile green suggesting mold. Fay’s own apartment centered around the kitchen, obviously the fami
ly room. Fay slept on a convertible couch in the living room, set up as a beauty parlor with two chairs with dryers over them. Fay had a worn gold band on her ring finger, but Daria did not believe her to be married. There was something a little too direct and unbuttoned about Fay. Whoever had fathered her children was long gone. However, Daria was surprised to observe that while in her memory Fay had taken on Patsy’s face, she was not at all Patsy’s age. Rather she was Daria’s—or considering that her boys were both in high school, perhaps she was even a little younger. Daria caught a glimpse from the kitchen of the sons’ bedroom: an enormous poster of the Clash and a chart of martial art positions. A bicycle leaned awry. Would a son side with his father? She tried to concentrate on what Fay was telling her, statistics about heat and water, apartments intentionally left vacant, repairs unmade.

  The kitchen reminded her of ones like it where she had spent much of her childhood, but she had no time to relax before Fay led her off on a tour, gripping her firmly by the arm as if afraid she would suddenly run away. Down basements they went to peer at furnaces and piles of rubbish, at aging boilers, at boxes of wiring. Suppose she looked through the negatives in Ross’s darkroom, would she find Gail’s face at last? Fay pulled a flashlight from her knitting bag. She also had a clipboard in it to which she referred, pausing to catch her breath and cursing softly as they climbed. Panting, Fay would recite lists of violations as they ascended stairs, as they descended stairs. Some of the stairs themselves were broken. Daria began by writing notes diligently, but soon she gave up. She kept thinking about Ross sleeping, eating breakfast across the table from another woman. She assumed Fay or Mac Ogilvie had it all written down and probably photocopied in the hundreds. They marched through three-deckers, through sprawling eccentric houses put up in installments by mad carpenters, past rows of identical cheek by jowl brick apartment buildings spanning the hill like a wall. Daria was lost. Their trek was bizarre. Fay must be giving her a tour of every multifamily dwelling for blocks, but what was the point? Was she standing in for every landlord owning property in the entire area?