by Marge Piercy
“You are being a complete and utter bitch, Daria. Complete! You’re doing this to frustrate me, but you can’t stop me. I’m free of you now!”
“Anything else?” one of the men asked dryly. They were lounging in the hall waiting.
Ross consulted his list. “That little table with rope-turned legs … where is it?”
“In my office.… No, not upstairs. Right here.”
“My study?”
“It’s mine now. Far more convenient. Peggy and I were always crowded upstairs. Ross, isn’t it time to give me the keys? You have what you want out of here now. I could use an extra set.”
He slapped his pockets. “Forgot them! Another time.”
She was not sure she believed him. Surely he had brought his keys along in case she was not home. Perhaps this was a final expression of his ambivalence about leaving her, retaining a last option represented by the keys. But the option no longer really existed for either of them. He would come to realize that, too. “Ross, I really would like them back. Could you drop them in the mail?”
“I can pass them along to your lawyer along with our new statement,” he said. “How’s that?”
He followed the movers with the table, fussing about its progress. Then he got into his Mercedes and drove off with a small burning of rubber. The movers disappeared for a while, leaving the van on the street. About an hour later they reappeared, finished roping the furniture in and drove off, presumably to the home of the Abbot-Wisbys.
22
Mariela invaded the kitchen. “Me, I’m going to learn to cook,” she announced. “Then I can cook for my mama. And All and Sheba. And Torte too. Everybody. We’ll all sit at the biggest table and me, I’ll be the cook.”
Daria could remember first Robin and then Tracy making little pies while she made big pies, giving them golf balls of dough to roll out and sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. She remembered Robin shaping round hamburgers like fat eggs, then being upset when they were raw in the middle. But Robin had wanted them round. She should have taught Robin to make Swedish meatballs instead, she realized. How silly of her. She could have saved Robin’s pride. She had been too distracted by cooking and cleaning and taking care of the children, trying to fix up the new house; she had been ghostwriting her first book.
She shook herself free of that sweet-sour nostalgia, caramel in a sore tooth. “If you want to learn, I’ll teach you. We’ll start with spaghetti. First we boil salted water in a big pot and put a dab of oil in.” She saw it then. Yes, as soon as she finished the calendar book: the mother-daughter cookbook. Or rather, mother-child. Ways to involve your kids so they don’t grow up helpless; teaching them to help rather than to hinder you. Teaching them to know and love food and cooking instead of craving junk food. It was a winner, she knew it. The hour was just a shade too late to catch her agent in the office. She’d call Laura tomorrow. Daria liked to know exactly what book she was going to be working on next, so that when she finished the current project she would not feel lost and aimless. But her recent life had been too chaotic and until this moment she had no energy to spare generating ideas. What she would do is divide the tasks of making typical meals into ones that the mother would perform and ones the child would do, designed to educate about basic skills and basic foods.
Mariela stuck with her until Sandra María walked in. Then Daria could speed up the process. She was still humming with her idea. If Mariela really wanted to learn, she would teach her as a way of working out ideas for the book.
She managed to eke out the first real salad of spring, their own vivid greens from the thinnings in the rows poking up and the thinnings from the peat six-packs she had put out that afternoon. Little baby finocchio plants, little lettuces, Chinese cabbage, turnip leaves, garden cress, arugola, the young violet leaves, chives and mint thrusting into the spring sun. Spaghetti alia carbonara—bacon, eggs and cheese. Pie from grapes she had frozen in September. As she put their meal together she found herself singing, again some song she had assimilated through her pores at Fay’s.
Sheba now ran for the food first and Ali stood a little aside, waiting. She was beginning to show and seemed to spend a great deal of time washing her own belly, but five minutes later, she would be chasing Ali upstairs and dashing over the furniture a foot above the wood like a kitten.
At supper Daria asked Sandra María, “Did you like being pregnant?”
Sandra María frowned, remembering. “Actually, no. It was all mixed up with getting free of that one. And I felt invaded.” She grinned at her daughter. “Even though I wanted her, wanted her so bad, I kept thinking there had to be some easier way. At the end it was hot and I felt like a wounded whale on the streets. But the minute she was born, all shining and curly, she was worth it and more.”
“I liked pregnancy myself.” Daria smiled apologetically.
“How could you? Swollen up like that.”
“I felt … powerful. I felt bigger than Ross. I felt immense and that seemed special. It felt as if I could expand and simply expect everybody else to accommodate, for once in my life. I felt very satisfied with myself.”
“Then why didn’t you have more than two?”
“I had three. The third was born with Down’s syndrome, a valve problem in his heart and half a stomach. The doctor said it could happen again.”
Sandra María shuddered. “I had nightmares like that.”
“It was a nightmare. I couldn’t go through it again, I couldn’t!”
Meals were pleasant, the earthier cooking she preferred on a regular basis, the easy communication. In recent years she had made conversation with Ross, manufacturing it like ersatz butter out of the detritus of her day and what she fervently hoped might interest him. Inside as he had sat there spooning up coquilles St. Jacques, what had he been thinking as her voice flittered about him? Money? Always money? Empire building? Pyramiding mortgage upon mortgage, changing neighborhoods, emerging as a rich and thus well-respected large property owner? Some magic line he was hustling to cross between being a small insignificant landlord and being a man of real property, a prime customer of local banks, invited to sit on boards of directors, sharing big consortium deals with men who could buy him out now without blinking. Were those the dreams that had chased around inside his forehead as she sat across from him trying to make contact, trying to create conversation like plates of fancy but untasted hors d’oeuvres at a failed party?
After supper Ángel came over with rolls of film to develop and was disappointed to discover that the darkroom had been dismantled. However, the sink was still there. “Maybe I should get a safelight. I need my own equipment for printing, but it’s been nice to be able to develop while I’m here.”
“Great idea,” Daria said. The more ways her house was used, the better she liked it. She was obliquely proving to Ross at least inside her head that she could use such a big house, that without him she could create a rich and satisfying life. It was easier to strike up friendships without him, not only because they were attracted to different people but because she could simply go ahead and invite someone without consulting an elaborate social calendar.
Daria drove over to Tom’s, leaving Sandra María to study for an exam, Ángel to prowl the basement figuring out how he would set things up, Mariela to play with the cats. Fay and Elroy were both at Tom’s, doing the supper dishes—Tom had obviously cooked for them—and hot in an argument about Lou, who had become a family member. They knew his taste in clothes: the leather jacket and jeans when he was rehabbing or burning; the three-piece off-the-rack suits from Robert Hall when he was being social or businesslike.
They knew his pickup truck with the gear in the back; they knew the yellow Camaro he drove when out with wife and family. They knew the local bars and the Combat Zone bar at which he drank, sometimes too much, never with the wife. The wife stayed home and raised the children. Once she sported a black eye behind dark glasses. They fought, about what? What Lou did? He never seemed to crawl free of
debt. If Ross was overextended on a middling scale, Lou was stretched mighty thin on a piker’s scale. The buildings he bought had sometimes already been seized for back taxes and auctioned off, or he bought them from somebody else who had failed to make them pay. They were marginal. Everybody in the SON core group speculated on what prompted Lou to set to work on one building with his son and a couple of hired carpenters or to milk another until it was a shell with scarcely a functional foot of plumbing, and then torch it. Maybe he chose by whether he liked the building. Maybe it was the time of month, the phase of the moon. How broke he was or how broke he felt.
“We can con him,” Tom was saying, sitting over coffee while Elroy washed and Fay dried. “I know we can. He can’t be sure Mr. Schulman didn’t see him.”
“Tom, I talked to the police and the fire marshal’s office. They say we got nothing. It won’t prove in court.” Fay shrugged.
“But we don’t want Lou in court—yet. We want Lou sweating. We want to turn Lou so he talks about who’s hiring him,” Tom insisted.
“Why in hell should he do that?” Elroy demanded. “I know. All we got to do is pay him twice what the landlords do. Easy, man.” He pulled an imaginary roll from his back pocket and peeled off bill after bill. “We just buy him. I’ll just sell off the Rolls or that spare Mercedes.”
“Since we can’t afford greed, we have to work with fear,” Tom said.
“Wow, I got it!” Elroy snapped his fingers. “We threaten to burn him out.”
“We have to make him feel he’s the patsy. He’s going to get the law down on him while the big guys get away free.” Tom radiated excitement.
“The only thing makes me feel some hope is we got ahead of those guys at least once.” Fay was drying slowly, polishing a plate over and over. “I’m proud we stopped a burning. But this cops and robbers stuff, you should watch less TV. I think we’re on to something with the neighborhood patrols.”
“But, Fay,” Daria objected. “It works in the short term, but how long will people give up sleep twice a week to patrol buildings?”
“She’s not wrong,” Elroy said. “We can keep it up, but how long?”
“As long as people don’t want to wake up to a fire,” Tom said.
“People got other things on their minds, you know. Right after a fire, they worry about fire. Then the bills come in, they worry about bills. Then their lover starts running around on them.” Elroy shook his head.
On such a fine evening people kept dropping by. Daria was tired and had to get up early. She had a lot of work to do with Peggy tomorrow. She decided this was one of those evenings when she could not wait out everybody else.
“You’re leaving.” Tom walked her to the door, looking downcast. “Can I come by later?”
“Not tonight. I’m tired. Let’s make it tomorrow for sure.”
“Come over at seven, and I’ll make supper.”
“No, you come by my place. Then we’re sure of having the evening.”
In the hall he kissed her good night; then she hurried down to her car in his drive.
She did go to bed early and slept soundly, with Sheba curled under the covers against her side and Ali on top of the quilt at the foot of the bed. Very late she wakened once, the habit of long years of being sensitive to the children in the night, a habit established when she was breastfeeding and never entirely lost. Footsteps in the hall. Sandra María probably. Couldn’t sleep? Ten to two by the clock. Or Ángel? No, she had not seen his car outside, so he must have gone home before she returned. She dozed again; it was as if she had never awakened, for the small noises of the house entered her ears, were registered and dismissed without quite drawing her from the warm cave of her sleep.
Ali’s yowling woke her gradually. She had the feeling, as she rose sluggishly from sleep, that he had been yowling ever more frantically for a while, that he had run back and forth across the bed to wake her before he crouched making his deep plaintive bellows from the floor. She felt a surge of annoyance. Damned cat! Sometimes in the early morning he demanded to go out, before she was ready to rise. He would howl and wake her until she threw him out of the bedroom. That early morning waking was a habit she was trying hard to break. She woke angry at him, a bar of headache pressing against her eyes. Damn. His piercing wail. “Ali, shut up! Damn you, shut up!” she yelled, sitting up, and began to cough as if choking.
Something wrong. Awkwardly, weakly she rose from bed and almost passed out. For a moment she thought she was having a stroke. A stroke as Nina had. She was dying of stroke. She could not breathe and her sight was failing even in the dark. But why was Ali upset, running frantically across the bed and around the room now with his fur on end?
She was coughing, choking. Without thinking she staggered across the room and pushed at the window feebly, pushed the window finally high. Her dizziness, her nausea receded. What she was smelling was smoke. Smoke? Her brain felt sore. She took deep, deep breaths of the clean pure air and gradually realized how full of smoke the room was, a layer in the middle of the air. Mariela! Sandra María. She rushed to the hall door, flinging it open, then shut it immediately as more acrid smoke surged in and she felt hot air push on her. Her house was on fire! She fumbled for the switch. The light still worked. She must wake Mariela and Sandra María, she must. Torte was sleeping in Mariela’s room; maybe he had wakened them. But she heard nothing except the crackling now of the fire and a dull thud as something downstairs fell. Grabbing her shawl she ran into her bathroom and soaked it. Then she held it before her face as she opened the door to the hall, shut it behind her to protect the cats, and ran across the hall.
She could see flames in the hall. The entire floor seemed to be burning, below. She saw flames licking at the baseboard, flowing like bright water in reverse up the wall. For a moment she could not move, hypnotized by the flames below her.
She raced into Mariela’s room first. But she could not wake Mariela, sprawled in her single bed, the bed that had been Tracy’s. She thrust open the window. Torte woke from his doggy bed and wagged his tail. But she could not stir Mariela.
She rushed next door to Sandra María. The hall was filling with thick heavy black smoke rising from below. She felt the nausea seeping through her again. Her head throbbed, swollen, huge. Her skin hurt. She could scarcely see. Her eyes watered and felt raw. Her throat was sandpapered. Whatever was attacking her seemed to pass right through the shawl, although that kept her from convulsive coughing. She flung open the door, slammed it behind her and shook Sandra María, hauling her back and forth by her thin shoulder. Even at this moment she could not help noticing how young, how vulnerable, how lovely her friend looked tousled and flushed with sleep, her face rosy. Finally she began to slap Sandra María hard. Sandra María groaned and kicked, turning over. She pushed Sandra María to the floor where she landed with a thump, whimpering. Daria fell beside her where the air was better and slapped her again and again. Finally Sandra María tried to sit up. “The house is on fire! Listen to me, Sandra, the house is on fire! We have to get Mariela and clear out!”
“Mariela!” Sandra María rose in an adrenaline rush and flew next door. Daria followed, coughing. Sandra María was already shaking Mariela, shaking her violently, but her small head just snapped back and forth. She looked rosy with health, peacefully asleep, but she did not wake. The child must be unconscious, in some kind of faint. Daria yanked at Sandra María’s arm. “Come!” she spat out. They were both coughing, choking. The flames were licking at the bannister, smoke pouring from under the carpet runners on the treads. Mariela was still breathing shallowly, rapidly, but could not be wakened. Daria again yanked hard on Sandra María’s arm, doing a dance of panic. Finally Sandra María lifted her daughter and carried her over her shoulder, staggering. Then she paused in the doorway, choking and shuddering as she stared with horror down into the flames.
The air scorched Daria’s nostrils, her throat, her lungs. She thought her forehead would burst. She could not speak for coughing
but motioned Sandra María to follow her as she tried to drag Torte by the collar across the hall. But he would not go near the flames spreading up the stairwell. She tried to grab at him and her hand closed on something hot, burning. She screamed and started choking. She could not get her breath. Torte snapped at her, tearing loose, and ran back into Mariela’s room.
Daria flung open the door to her bedroom and dragged the almost blinded Sandra María staggering under her daughter’s body into the room. They were both coughing convulsively. Daria felt as if she would never be able to breathe again, to draw the air she needed into her aching and scalded lungs. “The little stairway,” she gasped.
She ran past Sandra María to see if the back hall was still passable. Smoke hung there but not as black and oily as in the central hall. She saw no flames below. She motioned Sandra María past her and down. From the chair by her bed Daria seized her coat, thrusting into it, grabbed her purse and tore the sheet from the bed with Sheba wrapped in it. Then she called to Ali and Torte. She could not get her hands on Ali but at her heels he ran down the steps as she followed Sandra María. “Torte! Ali!” She coughed and choked and called, tears running down her face as she half fell down the steps behind Sandra María. “Torte! Ali!” She could hear Torte barking behind her. She croaked their names again and again, flinging herself down through the dark.
The door to the garage was still locked. She fumbled with it and then they poured through. No flames in this part of the house yet. She dumped the sheet containing Sheba in the backseat, grabbed Ali from the garage floor and thrust him in as Sandra María laid Mariela down in the backseat. Then Daria stuck her keys in the ignition. “Go! Take her to the hospital. Quick!” She raced across the garage and opening the fuse box threw the main switch to cut the power in the house.
Sandra María started to slide into the driver’s seat. Then she stopped, still coughing brutally, and turned a panicked face to Daria. “But I can’t drive stick shift.” Sandra María hopped back out. “I’ll take my car! Where’s the hospital?”