by Marge Piercy
Her eyes fixed on the darting tongues of the fire—orange with flashes of green—she half drowsed like a cat before the hearth. This was the first Christmas without Nina to talk to, at least on the phone. Nina had never liked Christmas in Florida; always she wanted to come north then. Daria yawned, her eyes closing. If she could pass through that scrim of memory that seemed so flimsy back into another year, how could she resist? To have Nina alive; to have Ross passionate and idealistic and sharing his work with her, to have the love between them alive and infused through every day like the air she breathed. The images of how it had been were so powerful she was tempted to believe all she had to do was force a little harder, try a little more intensely with him to break through, and suddenly all would be well again.
Suddenly she became aware of raised voices in the kitchen. Turning on the tree lights to excuse her rising, she waded slowly down the central hall, yawning.
“—a traitor, a Judas,” Tracy was saying melodramatically.
“Bug off, Teresa. You can lay that on me and then take off for Amherst where you’re out of it. All he’s trying to do is get his priorities straight. You just want him to be nothing for the rest of his life but our daddy.”
“Girls, could you forbear chewing each other out tonight?” Daria came into the kitchen shutting the swinging door. “If you want things decent, don’t start an open battle. And don’t involve him. Not tonight.”
“You’re the one who’s been poking into everything,” Robin said, her blue eyes slits of scorn. “Harassing him. Calling me up and accusing me.”
“I do accuse you of siding with his girlfriend instead of your mother, and I wonder how in touch with your situation you are. Are you so eager for him to leave me for her? He’d be leaving all of us.”
“He’s not leaving you for anybody. He’s trying to find himself.” Robin shook her head furiously, Torte trying to throw off water. “You made him marry you, and he stuck by it all these years.”
“I made him?” Daria asked quietly. She noticed Ali and Sheba on top of the refrigerator staring from one to the other, their ears flattened. “Where did that hogwash come from?”
“I know the facts, so don’t try to pass off any fairy tales on me. You were pregnant.”
“With you. How thoughtless of me. As a matter of record, it was your father’s idea to marry, not mine, and he had to talk me into it.”
“He felt obligated. How long does anybody have to feel obligated?”
“Getting married was his idea and he was stubborn about it. He wanted a wife, he wanted a family. And he wanted me. More than you are likely to imagine or he is likely at the moment to remember,” Daria said crisply. “Now keep your voices down and fight if you must about something other than the sex lives of your parents.” She marched out, shutting the door silently behind her in case she had not dampened their ardor.
She was furious as she plumped down in the rocking chair. How dare Robin insinuate she had leaned on Ross? She had intended to get an abortion. She had confessed her condition to Nina, and after some tears, Nina had come down firmly on her side. Ross was the one who longed for a child, whom he insisted on referring to as his son. Also he was madly in love with her, far more besotted than she was with him. Oh, she was fond of him, but she was not yet passionately in love. That had come slowly after marriage, which seemed to her a far more sensible and indeed traditional way to work out a good life. She darkly mistrusted infatuation, having had a ringside seat at the consequences of her mother’s infatuation.
She had slept with Ross, not out of passionate desire, not because she felt swept away, but because she was annoyed with herself for being twenty-one, graduated from college and still a virgin. She considered Ross a good choice for her first lover. He seemed considerate. She did not think he was soiled by the virgin/whore dichotomy cherished by the young men of her neighborhood. She would not become less to him by giving way. She had left home and moved into an apartment with two other girls. She was celebrating her independence of body, of life, of judgment.
Some thermostat on her sexuality had been turned far, far down in childhood so that she could protect herself from Nina’s fate, from the danger she sensed in adolescence from uncles, neighbors, from the boys who pounced and the boys who leered and the boys who begged. Years of marriage and three child-births had slowly freed her sexuality.
Ross had really loved her and she had flourished, whatever nonsense he was telling Robin now, whatever mythology he was cooking up. He had praised her body, he had followed her about the house touching her, watching her dress and undress, admiring her breasts, her buttocks, her hips, her hair, her thighs, admiring her elbows, the small of her back, her nose, her earlobes. She had felt opulent, regal, rich in favors. Then he had been easy to delight.
Yet always there had been times he would rear back, when he would withdraw to gaze at her with a cold calculating scan as if deciding freshly if she were worth her price; moments when he would stare at her as if suddenly wondering if she was fully human. These were not usually times of argument or open anger. Often those moments of cold appraisal came when she was expansive, blatantly sexual, loudly happy, or sometimes with her family. At Tony’s first wedding when she had twirled around with Nina, insisting Nina get up and dance with her, she had seen him appraising them with that cold, cold eye.
Those had been moments of doubt, of withdrawal, when his childhood and the racial contempt of the blond for the dark, the Wasp arrogance and vicious training of his parents and class would surface, but moments only encountered to be defeated and dismissed. She had been his first choice. He had pursued her and launched a campaign to persuade her to marry him. Robin was too attached to her father to want to know. Where had that attraction gone? What had killed it? Because, she knew, it was dead.
Cesaro called first. It was traditional on Christmas Eve to call each other. “No,” he said firmly, “this year you come to our house. Come for dinner.”
“Cesaro, I already started with the goose. How about dessert together?”
“A goose, mmmm? That beats our ham. Are you having Gussie?”
“Yes. But I haven’t been able to reach Tony at all.”
“That high flyer took his wife and baby south to Jamaica. Some way to celebrate Christmas. It would depress me, but Tony gets a buzz out of spending.”
“I didn’t know he was going. He never called me.”
“Don’t fret, Daria. Probably didn’t have the time. You know how overheated Tony gets, all revved up. All right, bring Gussie and family along and we’ll see you about seven, for dessert.”
When she got off the phone she sat frowning. It was a clear break of their family pattern for Tony to go out of the country for several days without telling her. They could have exchanged presents before he left. “Ross … did you know Tony is in Jamaica?”
“Sure.” He rose from his armchair, luxuriously stretching, putting Torte down. “Left last Thursday. Ten days of fun in the sun. Some little resort where you come into Montego Bay, then fly over by small plane.”
“Didn’t he want to get together before they left? I have presents for them all.”
“They’re not milk, they won’t curdle. Besides, you don’t like Monica.”
“I don’t dislike her. I simply liked Gloria a great deal.”
“He didn’t kill Gloria. He just divorced her.”
“How convenient. Let’s have them all to a party together.”
The girls came straggling out of the kitchen. “Let’s sing some carols,” Ross offered. “Tracy, will you play?”
“God, Dad, I haven’t touched a piano since August.”
“Just the melodies. Look in the piano bench.”
Tracy sat slumped and pouting at the upright piano in the darker end of the dining room. “It’s out of tune.”
“I’m sorry,”. Daria said. “I forgot to have it tuned this fall. But play anyhow.” Your father’s trying, she wanted to say, please help him try. Ross had a
good trained voice. He had grown up singing in the choir of the Methodist Church. He had gone on singing in chorale groups, in Gilbert and Sullivan societies, in musicals until law school.
“It’s not that bad. Soldier on.” Ross clapped Tracy on the shoulder. “Come on, Robin.”
Tracy visibly flinched at his hand, but Ross was looking around for Robin. Tracy pushed her curly brown hair out of her eyes and looked with hard curiosity at her father before turning back to the keys.
“Dad, I can’t carry a tune,” Robin pleaded.
“Anybody can sing carols. Even your mother.”
They started with the easy ones. Daria did not sing on key and the first year she had lived with Ross, she had learned to keep quiet unless requested to sing as part of a group. Robin had inherited Daria’s lack of musical ability. They were working on carols Tracy and Ross had to carry while Robin and Daria hummed, squawked and faked it, when at nine-thirty his phone rang. He took it in his study. After grinding through “Angels we have heard on high,” the singing stopped. At first they sat around the piano, waiting for Ross to return. Tracy noodled around with her left hand making bluesy chords and progressions. After twenty minutes, they dispersed.
“I’m going to wrap presents,” Robin announced, as usual the last. “Where’s the paper? I’m doing it in my old room, so don’t anybody peek.”
“She ought to have them wrapped at the store, like Father does,” Tracy said with a little sneer after Robin went upstairs. She arranged herself in a graceful coil on the couch, contemplating the tree they had trimmed.
The rebuff formed but she would have felt hypocritical voicing it. She had a vague sense of Tony conspiring with Ross against her. That was absurd; her own brother would not side with her husband against his sister. Yet she felt a malaise she could not dismiss. They were tight around work, although she did not understand the nature of their connection. Tony had left his older wife for a younger wife. Perhaps he identified with Ross’s affair. She felt a tattered sort of monster, Frankenstein’s patchwork thrown into the fiery pit, that her own brother and her own daughter discarded her.
Robin stayed over, so Ross of necessity shared Daria’s bed, a situation she found she resented. By now she felt invaded when he entered the room that had become a sanctuary. When he took over the downstairs with his long phone calls to Gail or his loud hockey or football games, she could withdraw behind her locked door. All night Sheba and Ali kept trying to pry open the door. They also felt entitled. Torte ended up sleeping in Robin’s room, where he had become accustomed to finding Ross, when Ross was home at all.
Ross lay way over in the queen-sized bed, sleeping on his side in quasi-fetal position. She lay on her back at her edge, staring at the ceiling. She was a complete fool not to rub against him, not to try to seduce him. Didn’t she want him back? Shouldn’t she do anything at all to keep him?
She couldn’t. It was not exactly timidity that inhibited her, although rejection had abraded her confidence. She realized that she was no longer sure that she wanted him. That doubt paralyzed her with fear. Without Ross, what did she have to show for her life? Who was she? What would happen to her, dumped at forty-three? Surely survival dictated she should try to keep her husband. But who was he? Who was the man Fay, Sherry Sheehan and Tom Silver hated? Who was the man to whom they mailed dead rats? Who was this man who held her in contempt?
Yet he must feel ambivalent about what he was doing. Saturday he had come home to her with his bitten hand. He had invited the new neighbors over that Wednesday. He felt at least some conflict. In a way she could not yet comprehend, all his choices cohered, representing a pattern that had slowly come to exclude her, a pattern she could not trace. Nonetheless he must not be entirely committed to his new path. He wavered back to her. She and what she represented drew him swerving back. Yet Gail had only to call for him to forget Daria. What passionate hold had Gail upon him? Unexceptional exteriors could hide passionate responses; she was no beauty herself. Yet the woman she had watched him with was so alien to her fantasies, she had trouble focussing on the actual source of danger. She kept expecting the Lou she had imagined for weeks to spring from somewhere, as svelte, as flashy, as glamorous as Daria had anticipated.
It was a lopsided Christmas. Always she had bought the bulk of presents for everyone. Ross usually had Lorraine purchase a couple of pieces of clothing; then he would pick up an edible or drinkable treat. Sometimes he would take Daria to buy some major gift, a coat or an important dress. When he bought jewelry, he selected it himself, viewing jewels as investments. Daria had always bought their presents for the girls, letting herself go in shopping for them and for him. This year, her spirits had been too thwarted, her energy too marginal to create her usual abundance.
Ross, on the contrary, had turned extravagant. Skis for Robin; a parka, running shoes. For Tracy, a fine blue merino wool robe, La Bohème and La Tosca on records, a pair of ice skates, which Tracy might even use.
Traditionally, the way they opened presents was that after a sumptuous breakfast, they gathered in the living room and each opened one in turn. Usually Daria ran out fast, so she also opened what they called House Presents—things she bought not for anyone in particular but for the good or pleasure of the family, delicacies to eat, perhaps small appliances, vases, pillows or bedspreads.
This time she had bought no House Presents and her personal pile was enormous. She opened and opened two presents for every one of the others. An Italian leather purse, a lavender cashmere muffler, Opium perfume, lambskin slippers from England with fleece inside, a wallet that matched the purse, a key ring that matched the wallet, a beige silk shawl, a rather large striped kaftan, another kaftan in purple velvet with gold trim. He seemed to have fixed on kaftans as something that did not require too exact a fit, although she had not worn one since her last pregnancy.
She sat surrounded by gifts and empty boxes, store wrapped in shiny bright boxes in primary colors, with wavy ribbons and pretied bows, and she was stunned, glutted. She stared at the heap without comprehending it. Was he reconciling with her? Was he apologizing? She must have piled around her a thousand dollars worth of shopping.
“Ross, I’m bowled over. I don’t know what to say. Everything’s absolutely beautiful, but there’s so much.…”
“Didn’t I promise a nice Christmas? Didn’t I keep my promise?”
“Completely.” She stared, trying to read his eyes, his expression. He looked quite proud of himself.
Gussie, Don and their four children came for Christmas dinner. Before, they exchanged the presents Gussie had knitted for those Daria had bought. “No fruitcake this year?” Gussie lamented. “I love your fruitcake. It’s the richest.”
“I didn’t get a chance. I make them around Thanksgiving.” Daria felt low, using Nina’s death as an excuse. She had a strong urge to confide in Gussie, but the afternoon did not give her an opportunity. Ross insisted on showing Gussie all the presents he had given Daria, and Gussie was overwhelmed with jealousy. Gussie was hard put to find the money to get each of the kids one fancy toy they had been seeing on television for two months. Daria felt again the guilt that she was not doing enough for Gussie, but that was an old subject of debate between Ross and herself. If they had been close, she could have advised him not to show off; he simply did not think how that glittering display would affect Gussie and Don.
Daria did not take the time to do more than pile up the pots and scrape the dishes, loading them into the dishwasher. The girls were entertaining their younger cousins, playing Monopoly at the dining-room table. Gussie had followed her into the kitchen. “Daria, you know Bobbie enters high school next year. I’m thinking about enrolling him in Dominic Savio.”
“How come? We both went to Eastie. Parochial school’s awfully narrow.”
“Oh, with the bussing,” Gussie said. “They’re bringing them in there now, and he could be shipped off to Roxbury.”
Daria sighed. She burst out, “Oh, Gussie, can’t
you remember how the Irish used to talk about us? White people don’t go there, they’d say about Lauro’s Funeral Parlor or the Rialto Theater. They didn’t think we were even white.”
Gussie’s face was closed like a plump fist against her argument. “If it was money for your kids, you’d spend it readily enough. You and Cesaro.”
They drove in two cars to Cesaro’s house, Don getting into his car first and leading the way. It was dark and traffic was heavy. A fine snow dusted down, giving headlights a flickering quality. Cesaro lived a short distance off Route 2 in Lincoln, where he had a rambling old house, a low-ceilinged, small-roomed colonial section, an imposing Greek Revival part and various modern additions, all connected to the horse barn. Cesaro’s house lacked the unity Daria’s had, but it offered more romantic eccentricity, odd-shaped rooms, rooms that opened off other rooms. Both her girls had always loved to wander in it. Gussie’s kids had started about the house and the horse before dessert was half over. Even though it was dark, she knew Trish would take them out to the barn.
Vinnie served a dry chocolate cake. When Cesaro drew Ross off with the fine port afterward, she smiled, thinking that her brother was becoming more British than ever. Would he make it a regular feature for the men to withdraw over port and cigars? Then she realized he had not pulled Don along with them. Ross went off with Cesaro a little reluctantly, casting back upon her a look she could not read.
The two men stayed in Cesaro’s study for an hour. Passing close to the door, she heard their voices raised once. What were they arguing about? Business? Had Cesaro found out Ross was having an affair? How many people knew by now?
At ten they left, Gussie and Don taking the cranky overtired kids back to East Boston and dropping Robin in Back Bay. Only Tracy returned with Ross and Daria. Ross retired across the hall. Daria slept easily, for the day had seemed to heal them all a little toward each other. Perhaps Cesaro had put in a good word for her.
In the morning when she came down to start breakfast, he was already up, drinking a cup of espresso from the machine. “Daria, it’s time for us to come to an understanding,” he began. His voice was rich and resonant. He was fully dressed.