by Marge Piercy
Daria laughed a little hysterically. “This is all news to me!”
“Mama, he can’t move in on you if you don’t want him to,” Tracy said indignantly. “You speak to him!”
“But I’m by no means sure I don’t want him to,” Daria said slowly.
“But, Mama!”
“Tracy, nothing will happen without a great deal of talking, believe me.” As Mariela continued the tour, Daria hung back. To live with a man again, sharing decisions and chores and projects; but without sealing themselves hermetically into a couple. She could not resist wanting Tom there mornings, nights, weekends, casually there when she slept and when she woke, when she went on trips and when she returned. But she had learned how fragile the strongest ties could be. The closer someone came, the more he could hurt her and the larger the swath his going cut through her life. She wanted but equally she feared.
27
“Chicken with kiwi fruit. Sole with kiwi fruit—they mean flounder, of course. Salad of romaine, orange segments and kiwi fruit. Kiwi custard. Kiwi ice cream. It drives me insane!” Daria was crisscrossing her new bedroom tossing her clothing off as she paced. Tom lay on the enormous bed he had built for her, watching with a half smile. “It isn’t that I don’t enjoy the sweet morsels, but it’s pure fad.” Her blouse landed on the chair in front of her vanity. It had a greenish kiwi stain on the mauve silk, she noticed. “When I started off, it was truffles. That was how you made a dish elegant—truffled ham. Pheasant with truffles. Sole with white truffles.” Her slip sailed after the blouse.
“How can you sit down and eat twelve meals?” He lay in tank top and khaki pants, his massive arms cocked behind his head.
“I just have about two bites.” She sat down to get rid of her panty hose.
“And they all stand about and watch you eat, trying to judge the degree of your ecstasy by your expression?”
“If it’s a teaching format, you comment aloud as you go. When it’s a formal and even elegantly presented format like today, you keep a stiff face and write your comments. I’m cooked myself, anyhow. It’s so humid!”
“If you’re hot, why not turn on the air conditioner?”
“Air conditioner?” She swung back around. “What are you—” She saw it in the wall and ran to it.
“With the door open to your study, it’ll cool both rooms. I didn’t even have to buy the box. It was in the basement, ready to install in the wall. All I had to get was the air conditioner.”
“I’m too sweaty to kiss you, even. Wait till I’m back from the shower.”
“Do I look like I’m going anyplace? Nobody’s home but us for once. We have the whole house to ourselves.”
She had not said anything about an air conditioner, she hadn’t even thought about one yet, and he had anticipated her need. She felt grateful, and gratitude for Daria was a sexy emotion. She liked being the one who brought back stories sometimes, who could carry home excitement and anecdotes without feeling guilty. Never with Ross had she felt equal. Why would the sense of equality with Tom free up her sexuality? She did not know why, although she could formulate many guesses as the freshening stream poured over her and washed away the sweat and cooking odors and sense of having been immersed to her neck in overrich sauces.
When she came back to her room, she was quick with energy, almost tormented by it: too much rich food in the middle of the day had made her drowsy at first. Now, thoroughly digested, it made her jumpy, overenergized. Something about Tom waiting for her was exciting. Whether he finally moved in or didn’t, she wanted to keep this sense of herself as a separate active private person: not to live in the relationship as if in a house; not to refer whatever she did to him for approval or disapproval, for commendation or rejection.
She threw herself on top of him and made love, carried along by her energy. Between them was an ease in bed that she found excited her immensely. If she thought of something, such an impulse as she was experiencing now, she could try it out without dire punishment if her impulse did not ignite him. Firmly she held his hands above his head. Of course he was stronger than she, but the play force of the gesture seemed to excite him also. She faced over his body the massive headboard he had carved with crescent moons. Then she straddled him and kissed him from earlobe to hollow of throat, from the plum nipples with their surrounding aureoles of silky black hair down the slopes of his belly. Her fingers kneaded the great muscles of his thighs until she tantalized his standing purplish-headed prick with her hair, with the caresses of her hanging breasts, the lightest brush of her lips, the faintest pressure of her teeth, before she let loose his hands and mounted him. A sense of permission between them allowed them to play. She had the sense of rediscovering some pleasure lost since childhood; sometimes she felt as if they were going deep into wordless mammalian physicality, the sense of good earthy body meeting good earthy body.
She dozed off in the crook of his arm and did not waken till twilight.
A door had been cut through one wall of Daria’s new bedroom into the next room, now her office. Peggy was set up there with the files, a new cassette player for dictation with a foot pedal and headphone. Daria used the small recorder she carried in her purse more and more for notes, for letters, for travel and work-related expenses. She was far busier than she had been. Peggy was just finishing the manuscript while Daria had begun work on the mother-child book. She had become harder in her bargaining, for suddenly it all mattered far, far more.
In the past she had tended to turn down work that involved being out evenings, for she had not only to warn Ross far in advance but to arrange for Annette to feed him if he did not wangle a dinner invitation elsewhere. When her publisher put pressure on her to do an out-of-town gig, she cooked all his meals before she left and froze them. All the time Ross was running to the city the August before to make happy rendezvous with Gail, she was getting up at five-thirty to cook his supper and send it along in a picnic basket. What had he done with all those meals? Dumped them in some service station garbage can? But never had he been less than insistent on his due: a dinner from her cooked every night of his life. It would never occur to her to cook and freeze a meal for Tom before taking off for Philadelphia or Houston. He was a functioning adult; he could feed himself.
Her new bedroom, enormous and well lit by the bay window, was dominated by the huge bed Tom had built with its massive carved headboard. A shelf ran high above the cushions she had heaped there. On the floor was a six-by-nine, red-and-blue Hamadan carpet Cesaro had given her as a making-up present, she suspected. Cesaro had become quite friendly again. “I have taken your advice to heart,” he told her when he delivered the rug. “Rusty’s accounts are with another agent. I have even reopened a previous inquiry into one of his old claims.… Your detective struck me as quite competent.”
Tracy, home after finals, studied Daria’s room with a touch of envy, as if in its deep golds and tones of scarlet, she read some possibility that had previously escaped her. “It doesn’t look like your old room, Mama. That was light and airy … clean.”
“Austere.” Daria smiled.
The back stairway was still unusable. The former second floor kitchen was a general lumber room, full of tools, boards and sawdust. Her former bedroom downstairs was in the process of having a wall knocked down. All the bedrooms, however, were in order and kept their occupants busy improving them—all but the room that Tom might or might not move into, which stood with its door open like a question that asked itself whenever she walked along the central hall.
Endlessly they discussed his moving in; both flopped back and forth. It would be good for their relationship; it would be bad. They would become closer; they would fight more. His daughters would be upset; her daughters would be upset. It would be good for all their offspring. A few hot days reminded Daria that summer was coming and that meant the arrival in August of Tom’s daughters. Sandra María was scheduled to get her degree in two weeks and after a short vacation would begin work with a V
D clinic.
A couple of times Robin ate with them—or at least sat picking cautiously at the food. Robin was nervous with Daria’s extended family, but she was also feeling lonely. One roommate was moving out to live with her boyfriend. The other had a steady friend with whom she spent many nights. Robin was shy with Daria, as if she had come to a decision that she did not know her mother as well as she had thought. Robin’s tentativeness wounded Daria at first, but now she was reconciled to it, certainly an improvement on the open contempt that Robin had taken pains to act out toward her.
“But you and Tracy were always in the kitchen cooking up things, talking about everybody, always so thick. If I came in, I’d just do things wrong.”
“You were so impatient of mistakes, at least that’s how it felt to me. If you didn’t do something right the first time, you’d get angry.” She rested her hand on Robin’s shoulder. “Remember, I was as young as you are now when I had you. Almost exactly. And I was less mature at my age than you are—more naive, less experienced. I made a lot of errors. I wasn’t so smart, then.”
“My age?” Robin was struck by that. “And you had a baby. Why?”
“You know. I got pregnant and Ross wanted a baby. It seemed like a big adventure to me too.”
“A boy. He wanted a boy,” Robin said with her new bitterness. “Now he’s got a whole new crack at it.”
“You think they’ll have children?”
“Mother! Didn’t you know? Gail’s pregnant.”
She found she could not say anything. She felt kicked, kicked hard in the belly. Perhaps her womb contracted convulsively. She could only shake her head dumbly.
“I assume she was knocked up beforehand,” Robin said sourly. “Isn’t that his pattern? I think it’s tacky. A baby at his age. I don’t need a baby sister or baby brother. I think it’s gross.”
Automatic mothering came to her rescue. “I hope you didn’t say all this to your father?”
“Why not? If he wants to make a fool of himself, why should I pretend? Gail’s so used to training dogs, she’ll probably walk it on a leash and train it to go after birds.”
Robin was the only person she knew who was as ill-wishing about Ross’s affairs as she was, because they had both been left. She had been left sooner; Robin had been abandoned the more recently. Tracy had been getting along so painfully with her father that perhaps she cared a shade less.
Tracy and Robin at first avoided each other, but just this weekend, Daria had noticed them willing to exchange information. Tracy was job hunting and returned home exhausted and depressed. She spent a lot of time with her boyfriend, and when she was home, she fussed over Mariela and the kittens, who were just beginning to venture from the box. Tracy lettered large signs in red Magic Marker on all the doors: WARNING IMPORTANT DO NOT STEP ON TINY TINY KITTENS OR LET THEM OUT. Daria and Tracy were sewing curtains and draperies together. Daria was trying to understand her daughter’s attitude toward her boyfriend Scott: she did not seem passionately in love with him, as she had been with Nick, but she seemed intently interested. Daria was puzzled but did not want to pry too hard. Tracy had a great deal to become accustomed to this summer.
Sunday was the SON picnic and Softball game in Ringer Park. The night before, Daria had made her special cold lemon chicken in vast quantities. Tom had made his hummus and his three-bean salad. As they woke in the morning, Tom hauled himself up and parted the curtains in fearful expectation: the sky was a hazy blue. Tracy went off to the beach with Scott, but Robin, surprisingly, came with her special bat and her old mitt.
With Tracy, Tom felt at ease. To please Tracy, he had only to listen; thus he had quickly become her confidant. She loved having a man to share her dates, her traumas, her misadventures. She could flirt with Tom in total safety. She could require from him the inside track on what men thought and felt, as if they were all of one mind. “Why do men want their friends to like you, but get mad when they do?” “Why do men insist on driving, even when they can’t see straight?” Tom was better for Tracy than Ross had been in years. Daria could relax her defense of her daughter and coexist more gently.
Tom was slower to figure out how to interact successfully with Robin, but lately he had been showing her the work on the house in far greater detail than Daria would ever be willing to absorb. He had grown up around water, so Robin and he were planning to rent a sailboat to take out on the Charles the next weekend. He played backgammon in the evenings when Robin came to supper. Daria had not been aware either of them knew the game. “Mother! Everybody knows how to play backgammon,” Robin said with something of her old scorn. Tom said his playing dated from the last year of his marriage, when Andy and he had been searching for things they could do together that would not emphasize their difficulty in talking. Daria considered his being willing to play the game with Robin a gesture of immense goodwill.
They arrived early at Ringer Park—a rangy park crowning their hill between the various local institutions, the Jackson-Mann School, the boys’ club, the hospitals. The local streets tended to run up to it and end. It did not offer the long view that Summit Park across Commonwealth spread out, where sometimes she and Tom, or the four of them with Mariela, strolled on a mild evening. Sometimes when they were walking, she missed Torte freshly.
Ringer Park was a neighborhood possession, one side sloping down to the athletic field outside the school Mariela was again attending, enormous, redbrick and aluminum. The outfield was busy with pigeons and blackbirds, flapping up in great whistling flocks every time they were disturbed. The SON picnic was up on the hill, not all the way on the rocky crown where trees grew thickly but on the high grassy plateau, a tree or two for shade but plenty of space to spread out blankets. Already people were milling around, throwing Frisbees, sampling each other’s provisions, admiring babies, tossing a ball around in anticipation of the SON softball game scheduled to start at one. The SON softball games were held Sunday afternoons, composed of teams varying in size from six to twenty players of ages ten to seventy. The two teams, the reds and the greens, were sorted out by means she had never identified, but Tom was always catcher for the reds.
It was hot for early June. Elroy, resplendent in white, the leanest, most elegant dandy on the hill, told Daria how pretty her sundress was. Tracy had picked it out. Tracy had taken over selecting Daria’s clothes. Sylvia was glaring at Orlando as she sat on a blanket with her mother and younger sister. She refused to get an abortion and Orlando had dropped her. Now he was ostentatiously ignoring her, hanging around with a group of young people drinking beer. Tom was watching both of them, but when she asked him what he was thinking, he told her he was thinking of teaching Sylvia carpentry if she wanted to learn. “You feel responsible for them?”
Tom nodded. “In a way. I’ll help her through it somehow.”
Fay’s son Johnny lay in the grass with his ghetto box against his ear, withering the green for a quarter mile. Fay called after Daria, “Hey, I hear Tom built you a bed big as a dance floor.”
“She has standards to keep up,” Sherry said, pale and undersea-looking as she hung limply over the back of her mother’s wheelchair. Tom and Elroy had carried up Mrs. Sheehan and Mrs. Schulman, and then their chairs. “Lexington has come to Allston, ha!”
Being happily a food snob, she stuck to her own food and Tom’s. Wearing a sundress and sitting in a patch of shade, nonetheless she was hot. She was not tempted by Fay’s chicken salad, partially because she had contempt for anything made with commercial so-called mayonnaise with its sickly flavor, and partially because she had told Fay she was making her lemon chicken in great quantity and was annoyed that Fay had gone ahead with her own chicken dish, in equally great quantity. She did have a bite of Mrs. Schulman’s challah, eggier than she was used to and braided in a circle. That was good, and she offered her compliments to the old woman in her wheelchair and at length extracted the recipe, writing it on a paper plate. Mrs. Schulman must knead the dough on a board across the arms of the ch
air. She avoided Sherry’s hot dogs and potato salad, sure Sherry might be tempted to poison her.
The ball game went on forever. Robin singled to right in the second inning and had a home run in the fifth. She popped out to Mac in the seventh, but in that interminable inning, after Johnny hit a home run with two on, when Robin came up for the second time, she had slammed another line drive and brought Ángel in for a run.
It was midevening when everybody except Daria and Robin started throwing up. She was too frantic to think of calling anyone, when her phone rang. It was Mac. “I’m dying. We’ve been poisoned!”
Daria said pityingly, “I think it was the mayonnaise.” Her old enemy. It could have been that potato salad, but she would bet it was Fay’s chicken.
Nobody died or even went to the hospital, but everyone they knew was sick all night. It was fortunate they were controlling Lou, she thought, for the whole neighborhood could have been set afire. The next morning Mac called again. He was still sick and going over to Harvard Health; but he had an appointment with Lou at eleven. He had called everyone else in the SON core group. Those who had recovered sufficiently were at work and everybody else was in bed, as were Tom, Sandra María, Mariela and even Ángel, who was in Tracy’s room laid out like a corpse, as if to move would bring back the frenzied vomiting.
Daria was annoyed to find out she had to meet Lou in a bar. She had ever entered a bar alone in her life. She brought a large book to read and dressed drably. Nonetheless she walked past the entrance to Scanlon’s twice before darting in.
At eleven the bar was mostly empty. The few patrons were at the bar itself, except for one old gentleman who sat nursing a hangover in a booth at the back, looking through the want ads of the Globe spread out on the scarred wood. She sat in the second booth, facing the door. When the bartender very leisurely came over, she said, “I’m waiting for a friend. Could I just have a cup of coffee?”