by Marge Piercy
But Tom had not dropped out of Harvard; he had dropped out of Southeastern Massachusetts University. Tom received no allowance from home. His parents possessed the accouterments of working-class comfort: an aging two-story wooden house with an apartment upstairs where his oldest sister lived with her husband and kids; a rented cottage every August; a dinghy with a motor; a new car every four years; a huge color TV and for his mother, a subscription to three different book clubs. However, they never got much ahead.
The movement had talked much about class in its later years, but only as the full furor of political ferment abated did Tom begin to brood about what class meant. His friends resumed at Harvard or Boston University. They emerged doctors, lawyers, professors of history, political science, economics or Far Eastern studies. His friends moved up from the casual journalism of the underground papers to the Phoenix and then to the Globe, Channel 4, CBS, UP, forever up. The little details that had once demonstrated his solid proletarian credentials now told against him. In the tight world of Boston, it would have been better to emerge wordless from the jungle like Tarzan than to have put in three years at Southeastern Massachusetts University.
Tom was twenty-six when he married Andrea, in 1973; she was twenty-two, a year out of Vassar, passionately in love with him and soon pregnant. Daria remembered what it was like to get used to being married and used to being a mother all so quickly, a note that sang to her of her own experience out of much that was strange. That baby was the first daughter, Rosa; the second came two years later and was named Georgia (for Georgia O’Keeffe and George Jackson simultaneously, Tom told her). Andrea’s father was a developer and her mother an assistant principal in a small town near Schenectady. They gave some help till Tom, unable to wangle a real job in journalism, joined a carpentry collective and learned on the crew.
The next year when Andrea decided to go to graduate school, her parents came through with the tuition, astronomical since she got into Radcliffe. Feminism having influenced their marriage by 1977, Tom took over a large share of parenting. Moreover they lived in a commune where everybody shared child care. Andrea had pursued her degree in political science, finished everything but her thesis within two years and landed a teaching job in U. Mass Boston. By the time her thesis had been successfully defended, one chapter had already been accepted by the American Political Science Review and another by Foreign Policy. When a job offer came from Santa Cruz, it was clear that Andrea would take it and increasingly clear she would just as soon not take Tom.
Exactly what had happened between them neither Fay nor Sandra María nor Dorothy could tell Daria. Afterward Tom had crawled into himself. Except when his girls were with him in August, he had spent his time working with his carpentry collective, puttering around his kitchen, playing with his cat and reading a great deal in pursuit of the education he felt he had fudged. Only the organization of SON and the rash of fires had dragged him reluctantly from his routine. “He was turning into an old maid,” Fay said. “At least you been good for him.” Grudging praise. Perhaps Fay felt Daria had stolen Tom; that one of his own from the neighborhood was entitled when the giant finally woke from his sorrow.
They made love powerfully and warmly. They worked together politically. They talked. They argued. He loved finding unlikely restaurants to spring on her: Armenian, Vietnamese, Portuguese. They vied with each other in cooking. But he did not open up verbally. She felt that thick shell inside his skin, protecting tissues and organs. She resented it. She poked, she prodded. He denied he had anything to say about himself. He described himself as simple, physical. He was far more communicative in all other respects than Ross had been, but he persisted in referring to himself as one who dealt in grunts and moans. The only road in was sexual, when his protection fell away.
If he doesn’t open to me soon, I’ll give up, she would tell herself. Who wants to deal only with a surface? But the surface was pleasant, sensual, at times joyful. She was beguiled, she was busy. Then she would experience an ashy despair and ask, Will he ever trust me? Will he ever open? Is he capable of giving himself in love?
Tom had hired Sylvia and Orlando to hang around with him while he searched for the man they had seen on the roof. A week, two weeks passed. Tom was also asking questions widely but discreetly in the neighborhood. Orlando’s father owned a Spanish-American grocery where Orlando himself worked, more to have a job than because they really needed him, as his older brother worked there too; still it was a social node of the neighborhood, and someone there should have recognized that man’s description. Every night Tom was glum. “That guy’s vanished. Sometimes people know who I mean, but nobody knows who he is.”
Finally a hint. Orlando said, “I keep asking around too, you know. Boz told me he used to see that guy all the time over on Brainerd. Going in and out of that crappy building my bro Roberto lived in last year with that blond bitch.”
“Did moustache live there?”
“Naw. I asked Roberto and he says he used to collect the rents.”
“Mmmmm. That side of Commonwealth.… You know the number?”
“Man, you can see it for a block. It’s standing there empty. They had a fire.”
“A fire. A fire!” Tom clapped Orlando on the back. “When?”
Orlando shrugged. Sylvia, who was leaning on the kitchen counter petting Marcus, cleared her throat. Sylvia was the girl Daria had met in the street the night of Sandra María’s fire. Her punk cut had grown out considerably. She was a big-boned girl who tried to look tough but who seemed to Daria on closer inspection rather sad, disconsolate. She stuck close to Orlando. “Just after I was out on school vacation. So the end of February.”
“Great!” Tom exulted. “You kids have done just great!”
“But we don’t know who he is,” Daria objected.
“Maybe he’s the rent collector. Maybe he’s the owner,” Tom said. “If we know the address we can find out who owned it. Daria, go down to the tax assessor’s office and get the info tomorrow, okay? After supper we’ll cruise past the shell and get the exact number.”
“I’ll find out what address the tax bill was sent to,” Daria said, making herself a note.
“I guess you’re done with us, huh?” Orlando said. “I mean, we found out what you wanted to know.”
Tom looked hard at him, probably reading the disappointment. “Not yet. We still have to keep an eye out for him in the neighborhood. See what he’s into, what he’s up to.”
“I didn’t mind it at all,” Sylvia said in her low melodious voice. Her voice always surprised Daria, as if a tough little game bird should suddenly warble. “I ask about my brother too when we go around.”
“Your brother?”
“Eduardo. He disappeared last summer.”
Orlando shrugged. “So he ran off. Big deal. Your mother leaned all over him.”
“He wouldn’t go without saying good-bye except he’s in some kind of trouble.” Sylvia trailed off.
Mariela had just learned to fold and cut pieces of paper into snowflakes, experimenting with different materials including the day’s Globe as she lay on the living-room floor. The floor was bare now, the boards sanded, refinished and studded with small Oriental rugs. Sandra María and Daria had done the floor the previous weekend. Daria thought the room looked warmer and certainly less pretentious than it had. Mariela’s toys lay here and there, and on the arm of the smaller rocker, a Beatrix Potter book about a mouse that Gretta had given Mariela the week before.
They were still working out a division of tasks, a way of living mutually pleasing. Daria had discovered that, frankly, she did not like Sandra María in the kitchen. Sandra María if she set out to heat water in a kettle would let it boil dry. She would put the garlic press in among the forks, where it would be lost for two weeks. Daria claimed the kitchen as her turf. She cooked, she cleaned up, she planned meals. Sandra María cleaned the downstairs and took care of the laundry, which always seemed sixty percent Mariela’s clothes. They both
shopped together or separately and cleaned their areas of the house. As the earth thawed they began putting in the hardy garden, planting sugar snaps, Lincoln peas, spinach and rocket, fennel and lettuce. All the south-facing windows were lined with flats of tomatoes, sweet and hot peppers, eggplants, broccoli, red cabbage. Ross had never let her take over the public parts of the house with seedlings, so she had had to buy most of her tomatoes and marigolds in previous years. Starting them was more fun. She almost wished Ross could see how different the house looked. It even smelled different. It was less to be contemplated and admired and more to be used. She felt the spirit of the house approved.
“You really like living with her …” Sandra María said softly as they both watched Mariela, dark curls obscuring her face as she cut away clumsily at the folded paper. When she finished a design, carefully she shook it out and then looked up at them, holding high the symmetrical pattern proudly and demanding great praise. “I worried beforehand. It’s been a long time since you lived with young kids.”
“Not so long. Maybe that was the happiest part of my life. It makes me feel better to remember, as if there’s some continuity and everything isn’t destroyed.”
“Daria, he can’t destroy your life.” Sandra María jerked her chin in the direction of her busy daughter. “Her father was a disaster with fireworks. But out of him, look, my pearl.” Sandra María settled back, putting her bare feet on the hassock. She wore a kimono and her hair was up in rubber curlers. On her lap was a tangle of Mariela’s clothing she was mending. “My own mama tried to make me marry him. But I knew I’d got in something sticky. I put my back up and kept saying no and he took off, which I never for one minute regretted. I think he would have abused her, because he’d started on me.”
“That’s one thing Ross never was, abusive. I don’t think he ever hit the kids. I did sometimes, I admit it. Sometimes I think I lost my temper more with them because I couldn’t lose it with him.”
“See!” Mariela was demanding their attention. “See how I did? I made hearts. You know how you do that? You fold up the paper …” Mariela insisted on demonstrating.
When Mariela finally returned to her experiments with scissors and paper, Daria said, “One pleasure I’ve discovered with Tom is the simple one of losing my temper with an equal. Not with the kids, where I really shouldn’t have—”
“I don’t know about that,” Sandra María said. “It’s rotten to hurt them, but it’s no good never to get mad. You bring them up to think nobody will ever scream at them. Then when somebody raises their voice, they wilt or fall right over.” Sandra María held up a pair of denim overalls. “Damn, I sewed it through. Got to take it out and do it over, ai yi yi yiii!” she yelled and then subsided. “Mariela, give your mama the scissors for just a minute. I goofed. I sewed your overalls shut.”
“Sometimes I think Andrea sewed Tom’s mouth shut before she left. He has such a strong sense of his own vulnerability and he’s got in the habit of protecting it so well, he’s on the point of losing it altogether.”
“Well, you go on working on him. I get can’t over how he bounds around these days. You know, you aren’t the only one to have a go at him. He had lots of visitors, Daria. Women I think he’d been involved with back before Andrea. They came and they tried. You’d see them with him a couple of times, and then no more.”
“I know what defeated them. That protective cocoon.”
Sandra María sewed doggedly for a while. Suddenly she smiled. “I can’t tell you how good it is to sleep again.”
“You mean because it’s quieter here.”
“Because I’m not afraid. When a landlord is after you, you live in fear. Will they burn you out, the way it finally happened? Or arrange a little accident? Or hire muscle? Or just harass you and your child? This February the bulb kept being missing at the last turn. I’d put a new bulb in and again the next day it would be gone. I can’t tell you how that scared me. Every time I had to come home at night, I’d start thinking how that bulb kept being taken out by someone and what for? Why did they want the stairway dark?”
She did not want to encourage Sandra María’s paranoia about the Petrises, Mr. and Mrs. Egg, bland and grey with their aviator glasses. “We have our own problems without a landlord. Who do we call if the furnace goes out?”
“Oh, Daria, you already solved that problem. We call Tom.”
It was her turn to present Tom with a card from her research on who owned the burned building where Orlando had seen the moustache. “Golden Realty,” she announced. “Belongs to one Louis Henry Ledoux. His home address is in Belmont. He works alone, apparently, but he owns several buildings.”
Tom reached for another drumstick. “Our next step is to visit lovely Belmont. How would you like to keep me company at dawn outside Louis Henry’s?”
“A stakeout, like in the movies,” Sandra María said. “Be glad, Daria, that spring has come.”
“Glad? It’ll be cold enough.” But she began to get excited. “I’ll pack us a breakfast tonight. Thermos of hot coffee. What else can we have for breakfast in a parked car?”
“You aren’t going to have steak? Like a cookout? I thought Mamá said you were cooking steak? I don’t like steak. It’s too red and dripping. I like chicken. Why can’t we have a chicken out?”
“Mariela, don’t feed the cats under the table! The food gets into the rug,” Sandra María said, doing something with her foot.
“But they like it!”
“But I don’t.”
“We could feed them at the table,” Tom said. “They’d like that.”
“We could feed them on the table and we could eat on the floor,” Daria said. “I’m going to make some kind of fruit bread. Cranberry? Apricot? Cranberry-apricot? Cranberry-apricot-orange?”
“Can we do that, Mama? Can we do what Daria says?”
Sandra María glared at them both. “For two people who claim to have raised kids yourself, the two of you have both forgot what’s a joke and what’s not funny to a little kid. No, Mariela, we can’t eat on the floor and let the cats have the table. Not unless the cats wear clothes and eat with knives and forks. If you teach them to eat with knives and forks and spoons, they can sit at the table with us.”
“Okay! It’s a deal!”
That night for the first time Tom slept over at her house, instead of her going home with him. Mariela was long asleep. Sandra María did not believe in lying to her daughter about her own involvement or about Daria’s, but Daria was not used to such openness and felt easier if Mariela did not know.
It was strange to lie with Tom in what had been her matrimonial bed. It made her wonder if he had ever felt peculiar about being with her in his apartment. She asked him.
“I built the sleeping loft two years ago. Andy never saw it.”
“When I can get you to say anything about her at all, it’s like a door slamming in my face.”
“Your skin is the world’s softest.” He was stroking her. “The silkiest fur made into flesh. It feels edible. As if I could bite into you and you’d be sweet and juicy like a fully ripe plum.”
He was changing the subject, but the flattery made her feel gorgeous to him. She could not escape the awkwardness of being there with Tom while the ghost of Ross watched. But Ross was miles away with Gail Abbot-Wisby and her two-hundred-marching-dog band, and never thought of her except with fury that she stood in the way of his immediate marriage and his getting his hands on the money he saw as frozen in the house. She could not keep her room as a shrine to a dead marriage. Still this night was another step into an intimacy still partial that she was not sure could ever fully develop.
The Belmont house was a sixty-year-old Cape that had had strange things done to it. It had picture windows prized into its facade. It had a cupola stuck on top, modern and raw looking in its shingling. It had a long addition strung out behind it with sliding glass doors and awning windows. It had a garage added and then some kind of room over the garage, in the
form of an imitation barn with hayloft doors, a breezeway intervening. It was a corner house. Its neighbor had thrown up a wall of shrubbery and cardinal autumn olive, a fast-growing screen. Here lived the owner of the building on Brainerd, burned when it had taxes owing for five years and the city had begun moves to take it over to sell at auction.
She had never been in this neighborhood in Belmont before, although Tony lived only ten blocks away, just off Common Street in a big brick Tudor on a fancy street. Belmont was a changeable town. They were across Common, in an area of many multiple family dwellings, some triple-deckers and many two-story buildings with one or two or three apartments, a neighborhood of aluminum siding and do-it-yourself home improvements. Most of these buildings were owner-occupied with at least one rental unit carved out of them. Nobody paid attention to the van.
They huddled low in the seat of the van, drinking café au lait from the quart vacuum bottle and eating prebuttered slices of cranberry-apricot-orange bread and nibbling temple oranges. They cuddled and nibbled and the waiting was not unpleasant. Daffodils were blooming beside the walk, made of reddish cement slabs in an S design from curbside to the front porch, past bright plastic duck and ducklings and a recently planted sapling with a label still affixed from the nursery. Inside the wire fence they could see a half grown Doberman pacing, a tricycle tipped on its side and a plastic baseball bat, left out in the light morning rain.