by Marge Piercy
Daria clutched Peggy’s arm and drew her toward a building as if looking into a gallery window full of gaudy sharp-edge paintings. She could not leave. She had to know more. “What are you going to do now?” Peggy asked.
“Follow her. I still know nothing about her. Nothing.”
“Here she comes,” Peggy hissed.
Daria kept her eyes fixed on the window. Superimposed on the jagged planes of the painting before her, Gail appeared stalking with a bobbing stride like a heron across the glass. Mechanically Daria turned, dragging Peggy after her. “She’s just going back home,” Peggy said. “You said she lives on Beacon.”
Daria still followed, hungry for any information, staring at the narrow back in a camel’s hair coat worn loose and long over a tweed jacket and a straight skirt. Gail had forgotten to tie the belt. One end dangled. Daria had an absurd urge to run up and catch hold of it, tripping the woman.
But Gail did not go home. Instead she turned on Marlborough and walked with her loose half-loping stride up the block and then glancing at her watch ducked into the doorway of a brick row house. As Peggy and Daria walked by, Gail was pressing a buzzer and the door was being buzzed back for her. A row of doctor’s signs identified her goal as they watched her disappear into a door just off the front foyer.
“Let’s hope it’s not an obstetrician,” Peggy said. Daria seemed rooted to the sidewalk, so Peggy strolled over to read the signs. “Either she’s got eye trouble or she’s seeing a shrink. You’ve got two shrinks in there and only one eye doctor, so the odds are on the shrink.” Peggy steered Daria back toward her car.
Peggy drove the Rabbit back to Lexington while Daria sat hunched over—as Gail had in the restaurant at the end—unable to keep from asking repeatedly, “But why her? Who is she? She must be brilliant. She’s probably an incredibly brilliant lawyer.”
“I don’t know.” Peggy shrugged. “Looks more like the type that maybe would hang out in the library. Like some academic?”
“No. She spends too much time outside.… Maybe she’s an athlete?”
“Chain smoking? Naw. She didn’t look that healthy.”
What famous Gails were there? The woman could be a writer. She did not have the presence of an actress or a singer, but she could be a composer. A painter. She could be a landscape painter. Or a sculptor, that would explain the battered hands.
She had seen her rival, her nemesis, and felt more confused than before. The affair must be serious. Gail did not appear someone capable of a brief happy fling. Rather she had looked mortally serious. What had Ross been trying to talk Gail into or out of? Daria supposed she would, unfortunately, find out. She would find out by having it land on her.
Remembering the peignoir set in Small, Daria realized that it would probably go on Gail without any trouble, for Gail was certainly thin enough, but Daria could not help feeling the result would be more comical than sensual. Certainly that gown would be short on her; but what Daria realized was that Ross certainly perceived Gail as small: in need of protection, perhaps, helpless, perhaps. As once he had perceived Daria.
Wait and see what happens, Annette said: wait and see what supposedly sound structural beam cracks next, what wall collapses inward. That made her think of the expectant tenants in Allston. I can’t begin to help them, she thought, clutching herself tight as if freezing. I can’t even save myself.
She could not take Annette’s soothing advice. Her surveillance was crude, bizarre, undignified, unethical and must continue. She felt too helpless in her ignorance, too close to going mad. Her life was torn open and her marriage woven of lies. She doubted how well she knew the man she called her husband. The truth of her life, the truth of her marriage, that was the only medicine that could help her. She could not bow her head and wait for this misery to pass. She had to understand it. To survive it, she must understand.
12
Friday Lorraine called to say Ross would not be home for supper; in fact he was called away on business for the weekend. Lorraine had become quite accustomed to delivering these messages in a perky upbeat tone, one that reminded Daria of the false cheer nurses often display among the sick and dying. It was a cheer designed not so much for the benefit of those in pain as for the benefit of those who did not wish to share that pain by contagion.
At seven Tom Silver called. “Did I interrupt your supper?”
By the mock solicitude in his voice, she recognized he hoped that he had. Her life, she thought, had become too complicated. She had forgotten Monday’s promise to the tenants. “I’m not eating supper tonight. Ross won’t be home this weekend.”
“Oh? Are you sure?”
“That’s what I was told.”
“That’s an odd way to put it.”
“I’ve given you exactly as much as I know. I’m telling the truth.”
“Where is he? Hamilton?”
“Your guess is worth as much as mine.”
“You won’t admit it’s a little peculiar? It’s seven P.M. Do you know where your husband is?”
“I won’t admit it’s any of your business.” She slammed down the phone.
He had stirred up a roil of emotions. She paced hugging herself and muttering, “Damn nosy beast bastard.” Daria seldom swore. At the moment she could not figure out if she was angrier with Ross or Tom Silver. Ross of course hurt her far more, but Tom Silver was a convenient lightning rod. These SON people were proving to be a damned nuisance, not at all appreciative of how she had tried to come halfway to meet them. Now they were going to make all kinds of impossible demands, another case of the powerless persecuting the powerless. She should have just let them shuffle around in the street.
She was still pacing the hall muttering while the cats watched from the stairs and Torte whined nervously when her phone rang again.
“Uh, it’s me,” Tom Silver said, rumbling and sheepish. “I want to apologize.”
“Why pretend you aren’t hostile, when you are?”
“Look, you’re in an ambiguous position, Daria.”
She felt a pang of annoyance at his using her first name; but then she thought of Fay Souza as Fay. She could hardly object. “Ambiguous, is it?”
“You’re somehow caught in the cross fire. Most wives in your position would be in the confidence of their piggy landlord husbands. Either you’re the best amateur actress I’ve ever met, or you really don’t know what’s going on.”
“Be generous. Just assume I’m an idiot.”
“Shit, Daria, you’re acting like one. You’ve made a big decision to be innocent. Totally innocent. What kind of luxury is that? No adult is as innocent as you make yourself out to be.”
“And nobody’s as morally superior as you make yourself out to be!”
“Um.” A longish pause hung there.
Why was she talking to him? Because she was miserable. Because she was lonely. Because sparring with him was better than staring at the walls while asking herself again and again what had gone wrong, what had changed Ross. All the spiky questions that made her bleed. Where was Ross? What was he doing right now? What was he saying to that nervous angular woman, seizing her hand avidly?
“If I’m coming down on you hard, it’s because we had another fire, just two doors down from Fay on Wednesday night.… Let me ask you a question. What on earth did you think when the dead rat arrived? Did you think it was a gift from an admirer? Something to cook?”
“What dead rat? Have you done something disgusting like putting a dead rat on my doorstep?”
“Back in October, Fay mailed Walker a dead rat from her basement. To your home address. This happens so often it slipped your mind?”
“Nothing of that sort … Wait. He did get a package that smelled funny. I’m trying to remember. Before my mother died, I know …”
“When did your mother die?”
“The Sunday before Thanksgiving.”
“Maybe that’s why you seem not all there. It’s so recent.”
“Gee thanks.
You’re a warm and comforting man. Heart as big as a pinhead.”
“Actually I do sympathize. I lost my mother a year ago August and I’m not used to it yet.”
“How did she die?”
“Drowning.”
“That’s terrible. An accident?”
“She drowned in the lake she swam in every August for fifteen years. She used to swim across the lake every morning right after she got up. Every August since I was little they rented that place. A week later and I would have beep there, with her. They said she must have had a heart attack.” His voice thickened and he stopped.
“Were you close to her?” Partly she asked because she was curious. Tom did not readily remind her of any of Ross’s friends. He was a new type to her. But partly she inveigled him into the personal to turn the conversation off her situation, the question of where Ross was and why she didn’t know.
“When I was growing up. Then we fought a lot. Everything I did was wrong to them. Then after my girls were born, we made up.”
“You were married?”
“Yeah. When this house was a commune, my wife Andrea and the kids lived here. Now it’s just me and the Becks who are still downstairs.”
“Do you ever see your daughters?” She felt as if she were questioning the ghost of Ross departed, Christmas Future. Do you ever see your daughters, do you care any longer, do you ever think of your ex-wife?
“When I can afford to. They live in California. I have them every August.” He cleared his throat. “How did we get into all this? You don’t remember a package arriving in October with a dead rat in it?”
“Actually on my birthday, a package came that smelled funny. Ross said it was a gift from a client, cheese that had gone bad.”
“Why do you suppose he didn’t tell you the truth, Daria?”
“Don’t practice being a detective on me. What I suppose isn’t worth much.”
“What’s going on with you and your husband?”
“A marriage. You had one of your own, right? Good night.”
“That’s a sore spot, isn’t it? All alone on the weekend.”
“Oh, shut up.” She hung up on him again. He did not call back.
She forced herself to work, for she was falling seriously behind schedule on her book. The Globe had made her rewrite her Easter feast piece three times because it had not sounded festive enough, her editor said. It was the first piece in a year they had made her rewrite. The problem was that she had had no Thanksgiving and she was not at all sure she was going to have a Christmas. She had to make one for the girls, but she did not feel close to Robin. They had not talked alone since that phone call. Robin had stopped turning up every Saturday and Sunday to run with Ross, knowing that Ross was seldom to be found in Lexington. But Daria must still make a nice holiday for Tracy and for her family. Christmas was a time when her clan always got together, the siblings still around Boston.
Normally she shopped early and then near the holiday bought last-minute edibles and stocking stuffers. Daria loved holidays and feasts. Since childhood, she had thrown herself into buying presents for people she loved. Then she had had so little to spend that every individual dollar represented a tough choice to ponder, to stretch out for all her siblings, parents, grandma, Pops’ parents, her aunts and uncles. She had kept a funny superstition as a child: she believed she must spend every cent she had saved during the year on presents or she would be unlucky in the New Year.
Sometimes Ross accused her of carrying that superstition into her adult life. Certainly she believed in more gifts than he did, and besides she could lose herself in locating the perfect sweater to go with Peggy’s black hair and blue eyes and then wrapping it so that it would be a surprise. If Daria dreaded going into department stores to clothe herself, she endured the crowds willingly when shopping for others. For one thing, she need not take off and put on her clothes eight times to buy a shirt for Ross.
She brooded about Ross, she brooded about Christmas, she brooded about the angular brown-haired woman she had seen in the restaurant. She must work: she must stop worrying and work, now above all. She did not let herself finish the thought about why now was especially important, but tried to force herself along. She recognized that the creation and modification of recipes and the figuring out of how to describe each process clearly as a cheerful little soprano aria had always had as a base drone love for her family. This is how I cook, I Daria who love my husband Ross, who love my girls Robin and Tracy; this is how I feed them and keep them strong and happy. This gives pleasure.
That foundation had been attacked. Now her work must stand alone. She was not convinced it could, but it must. She had no other way to earn a living. This was a poor time to try to return to the school system, with ten thousand teachers unemployed in the Greater Boston area.
Innocent, that hulking sadist had called her, innocent as if that were an insult. Maybe at her age it was an insult. Was innocent the opposite of guilty or the opposite of wise?
By four on Saturday she had been successfully working for several hours, without the speed of former times but with some pages and sketches to show for her time. She was firm enough in her concentration so that several minutes passed before she realized that someone was upstairs in the house.
Standing rigid behind the door of her office, she wondered if it was a burglar and if she should try to escape. But the person was making no attempt to be quiet, talking to himself. It was just growing dark. She crossed the hall and yanked open her bedroom door. “Ross! I wasn’t expecting you. I mean, I’m glad …”
“What do we use for antiseptic?”
“What happened to your hand?”
“A dog bit me. Stupid beast almost took my hand off!”
“We should take you to Dr. Valentin. Oh, it’s Saturday. The emergency room at Symmes.”
“I don’t need stitches. It just hurts like hell. Where is the damned antiseptic?” His hand had stopped bleeding, but blood was smeared over his blue shirt and a suede jacket that she did not think she had ever seen before.
“Let’s wash it out with alcohol. I’ll scrub it. Then I’ll put Merthiolate on; if you like.”
He had been bitten across the fleshy palm of his right hand. Two canines had penetrated the skin on the back of his hand and one on his palm side. He bellowed and writhed as she washed the puncture wounds with soapy water and then alcohol. All the wounds began bleeding again as she cleaned them out.
“What happened? Whose dog was it?”
“I was just minding my own business and the damned thing jumped me.”
Gail must have a dog. Lately whenever Ross came in, Torte crawled laboriously over his jacket and pants to sniff them, making soft growly noises under his breath. Daria could not help being amused by Ross’s plight but she also could not help worrying; for twenty-two years, that had been her habit. “Ross, I think we ought to go in and have it looked at. A dog bite is potentially dangerous. Could the dog have had rabies?”
“Rabies! Just a damned spoiled brat.”
“You do know the dog, then. You should have it tested.”
“Lay off the rabies. There’s nothing wrong with that mutt a good swift kick across the street wouldn’t cure.”
“What kind of dog was it?”
“German short-haired pointer. What difference does that make?”
“This may sting.” She intentionally used the word her dentist favored when he was about to light up her nervous system like a neon sign.
“Yow!” Ross jerked away.
“Darling, I have to get Merthiolate into the wounds. You don’t want them infected. That’s your right hand.”
“Okay, get it over with.” He held out his hand and yelped again as she worked on each wound.
She did her nurse’s job carefully, with a pleasant tinge of sadism. When she had finished, she wrapped the hand in a loose gauze bandage. “I’d still feel a lot better if a doctor looked at it. You might need antibiotics. Why don’t I drive you to
Symmes?”
“Thanks.” He patted her behind with his left hand. “Let’s see what it’s like tomorrow. If it’s not better, you can drive me over to the hospital. How’s that?”
Apparently he was now spending the weekend with her. She could not help wondering exactly what had happened with Gail and her dog; she could not resist hoping this turn of events signalled a change. After creeping up on the idea with great stealth, she ascertained he was staying for supper. She drove off at once to see Leo, her butcher.
His shop was uncrowded, for it was late on Saturday afternoon. Leo was cool with her. No big hello, no warm greeting, no flirtatious sallies. She had not been buying her usual quota, although she hastened to tell Leo she had been travelling a great deal. She wasn’t going to feed Ross leftovers and she had defrosted nothing. This should be special.
“Come on, Leo,” she coaxed him. “I want something first-rate. Let me look at the noisette of lamb.… Or what have you in the way of veal? That’s the stuff, Leo. Right. I knew you could come through for me.… You know, I may be doing a television spot regularly soon. We have to talk about that.…”
He was beaming like a lottery winner. Now she was Ducky again. The veal was fine and pale.
Ross went downstairs to bring up a bottle of the Montrose. For once he seemed the man she loved, ready to eat a good supper and relish it, instead of behaving as if all food had become a plot to fatten him. Ready to share with her pleasure and conversation, ready to offer companionship. This night was a reprieve and as she went dashing about making ready, making pretty, she was determined to exploit the opportunity. She did not want to spend two hours in the kitchen that could be spent with him, so the meal she was putting together required skill and precision rather than extended labor.