The Cost of Lunch, Etc.: Short Stories

by Marge Piercy

  So Mason quit school too and they went off to Chicago, where he tried to get gigs playing someplace, anyplace and they both went to night school. Mason got a job in a 7-Eleven and Kelly waitressed. They lived in a one-room apartment near the L. When I took the bus to visit them, they were fighting a lot.

  The first week in May Mr. Danelli came up to me as I was walking out of the school library and took hold of my arm just above the elbow. “Why don’t you come up and see me some time.? You haven’t been in the office. I want to see what you’ve been producing.”

  I told him I was really busy, it being the end of my senior year, and I wouldn’t have time for the Signpost. I suppose he understood, because he stopped saying hello in the hall.

  The girls continue to come and go in the Signpost office and he still has enthusiasm for his favorites. I see him differently now, good for another ten years of sending us out to do the things he didn’t and break the rules he can’t and fight off his temptations. He finds himself equally betrayed in our successes as by our failures. But I worry about that daughter of his.

  Do You Love Me?

  Circa 1960

  Oily night pads in. The city reeks. But it is chilly in the room under the eaves of the townhouse, where they pitch in bed. To her, Edmund feels all spines. He penetrates her like a question and she responds with her hips nervously, shallowly.

  “I don’t know if I love you.” Edmund, whom nobody calls Ed, is sitting on the bed’s edge, thinner than ever.

  She shivers with sweat. “Should I leave? Go back to New York?”

  “Of course not.” Politely. “Don’t be melodramatic.”

  “It’s worse since we started sleeping together.”

  “Worse?” He shoots to his feet, reaching for his briefs. “What’s worse? It’s enough to make anyone nervous, tiptoeing around my parents’ house.”

  “Why do we stay here then? Let’s go someplace else.”

  “You said you liked them.”

  “I do. Especially your father. He’s a dear.”

  He winces, misbuttoning his shirt. Waits for her to help him. In his angular face the grey eyes are set wide. They look past her, anticipating his flight down to the second floor.

  Tossing on the cot after he has left, she hears dry voices, the ticking of glib excuses of the men who have borrowed and used her. Her fingers scrape the sheets. She is twenty-three and he is twenty-eight, an instructor who was her section man in philosophy when she was in college, but she is his instructor in bed. She shares herself with him as a winning argument. But he takes her gingerly, and afterward, it is as if sex were something he had stepped in.

  After she graduated, they had run into each other in the coffee house she still frequented. They went out from time to time last winter and spring, evenings he had taken more seriously than she had. People said she was pretty; she danced well; there were always men. She had been astonished when he proposed she spend the summer with him in his parents’ home. He said they would learn a great deal about each other without being committed to anything, that she would like Boston and find their home comfortable. He was thinking about marriage: that amazed her. Therefore she did not say No, but Maybe. She took him home with her by way of testing, but learned little except that he settled easily into a placid boredom.

  Her photographer boyfriend dumped her for a moneyed girlfriend with a loft in SoHo. She stayed with friends, then other friends, sleeping on lumpy couches. She had imagined being an editor, making the delicate literary decisions she had been taught in college, but she was asked if she could type. She found a job so boring she would sometimes think she would die at her desk in the long mornings and longer afternoons. They started to talk at her about dressing differently. She called Edmund in Boston.

  Now the house encloses her like an elbow. The house is as busy with a hundred concealed pursuits and escapes as a forest. His father talks to his mother; his mother talks to the Black maid. She and the mother give each other little electric shocks. The father is okay—scotch-and-water, the Maine woods in hunting season, the local Globe and the New York Times, and a blown wistfulness in his thick face. The mother is tall and dry. She seems to move with the sound of tissue paper.

  Coming into Edmund’s territory, she finds that whether they are to marry, whether he wants to, grows every day bigger and bigger. She rests in his hands like something inert.

  Edmund lies in his ivory bedroom. He turns his cheek against his special firm pillow, drifting through his melancholy love for his married cousin Isabel—roses in waxy green paper, Limoges china. Soothing as his mother’s hands in childhood fevers.

  He feels her in her attic room pressing down on his head. Why did he bring her here? Often he cannot remember. Sometimes she resembles his dreams of the girl who will belong to him, but sometimes she grates. He is amused to think she was born in a Western where names are jokes, the town of Dogleg Bend where dust shimmies in the streets under a sky of mercury.

  Once he went there with her. Her waitress mother, fat and messy, greeted her without surprise. Her younger sister seized her and they remained closeted for hours. She spoke to no one on the streets. She took him around a maze of overgrown fields and swaybacked houses, playing guide as if there were anything to be seen: that’s where we lived the year I was ten. That’s where my sister Jeannie and I used to fish on the sandbar. There’s where the Massey boys caught me when I was coming from the diner, and when I yelled, they jumped up and down on my stomach. That’s where I saw a wounded goose, in fall when they come over.

  He has brought her to his family as a well-trained retriever will bring something puzzling to lay at his man’s feet and wait, expectant. Is it good? Do we eat it?

  By breakfast-time the heat has begun to rise, seeping into the shuttered windows. Her face, cool from sleep across the English marmalade and muffins and yesterday’s flowers, seems young again, closed into itself. He wants to touch her.

  His hearty father makes a joke about their wan morning faces. His mother suggests with buttery kindness that the girl’s dress is somewhat short for the street. All eyes pluck at the seams of bright (too bright?) cotton. Do they know? Their hopeful politeness enwraps him. Yes, they would be glad to spread her on that maid’s cot, to serve her up to ensure that he is whole and healthy. His mother has always read books on mind-repairing. “Son, I want you to feel free to bring your friends home.” “Remember you have nothing to be shy about.” “I’ve asked Nancy Bateman—you know the Batemans’ adorable younger daughter?—to dinner Friday …”

  He says, “Mother, Father, we’re going to the cottage for a week. It’s too hot here. It’s unbearable.”

  Her eyes leap from their private shade, but she only takes more jam and teases his father. He knows, in deep thankfulness, that she is pleased and will reward him with an easy day. She will take his wrist in a hard grip and pull him off to play tourists in his own city. All day she will ask nothing. All day she will turn them into magic children from a story. He wants to push away from the table and hurry out with her.

  They go to the cottage. Coming back from the crossroads store with groceries, she looks at him beside her. She cannot imagine marriage. But she knows it is what makes a woman real, weights her to a name and place. That safe feeling she would seek walking in the old cemetery: names and dates neatly grouped in families, even the little babies accounted for. She wanted to get away as long as she can remember. But being a secretary is no better than being a waitress, except that her back and feet hurt less and her eyes hurt more.

  He says, “I thought you’d be more struck by the townhouse. We’re proud of the wood paneling and the staircase. It dates from 1830.”

  But all houses impress her. All other dogs have equally big bones. Walking beside him she catches her breath as they come over a hill and the ocean stretches out into haze. She is surprised again how tall it is, how much sky it uses up. That blue yawn is her future. She will drown.

  This cottage squats on the last dun
e, facing the sea. She puts down the groceries and sits at the white sea-blistered table. She sits still with concentration. On the table are shells and pebbles she has been collecting.

  She says without inflection, “I packed my suitcase.”

  “I saw you. Why? How can you leave?”

  “There’s a bus that stops on the highway at four-ten, the woman at the crossroads store told me.”

  “Why? Where do you want to go? You quit your job.”

  She lays out the pebbles in circles. “You don’t want me to stay, enough.”

  He sees himself returning to the city without her. The air will prickle with questions. Suppose after she leaves, he changes his mind and realizes he wants her? “Where will you go?” Her travel-worn suitcase with wheels that squeak stands at the door.

  She picks sand from the ribs of a scallop shell. “New York? Maybe I’ll go west. Maybe California.”

  Choosing a place so idly makes him dizzy. He sees her blown off like a grasshopper. People cannot just disappear. “By yourself?”

  His tedious jealousy of tedious young men. She smiles. Her heart is chipping at her ribs. The road comes over the last dune fitted to its curved flank in a question mark. She does not dare turn from him to go inside and look at the clock. Will she really have to go? Will she have to get on that dirty bus and use up her last few dollars on a cheap motel? She concentrates on his bent head: want me! Want me, damn you. She is not sure how much money she has in her purse and wishes she had counted it in the bathroom.

  He is staring at his knuckles, big for the thinness of his hands and bone-colored with clenching. “Do you love me?”

  She turns her head. Her gaze strikes into his with a clinking, the stirring of a brittle wind chime. He is thinking about girls, the difficulty, the approaching, his shyness, the awkward phone calls with silences that open under him like crevasses in a glacier.

  She is wondering what she is supposed to say. “What do you care?”

  “I have to know.”

  His long milky face, pleading laugh, set of mismatched bones. He is gentle. If he does not touch her with passion, neither does he hurt her. That is very important, not to be hurt. “Of course I love you.”

  “Do you?” Once again he ducks to stare at his knuckles.

  She must risk breaking the tension. She goes to read the clock.

  “What time is it?” he calls.

  She comes back to answer. “Five to four. I hope I haven’t forgotten anything.”

  A strand of hair in the washbasin? Steel hands press on his shoulders: decide, decide. His father’s voice, rising with the effort to contain his temper. “Squeeze the trigger, Edmund, squeeze it. Come on, it won’t wait for you all day. Do it!” The rabbit bolted into the tall grass. In his relief he shot. His father strode away. Be a man, be a man. Pressure of steel hands.

  He has always been fastidious not to give pain. “Let’s walk down to the water.”

  She shakes her head. “Not enough time. I can’t miss the bus accidentally, don’t you see?” In New York it will be hot. She will call somebody. She will sleep on a couch, and the next day again she will go around to the temp agencies in whatever is still clean. Men will pester her on the street, men will buy her supper and expect to lay her as payment. “I can’t sit here any longer waiting for you to decide if you love me—can I?” She claps the sand from her palms, hating herself for having listened to his quiet voice, for having given herself into his hands like a bag of laundry.

  He cradles his head, elbowing aside the shells and pebbles. They move him, the sort of treasures a child might hoard. He feels wrong, not sure why. He hates the carelessness of men like his father, men in the fraternity of his college years whose act of power is to give pain. He does not know what he wants, only that everything is going away. She is about to walk off with that flimsy suitcase and leave him tangled here.

  She reads his face—sullen, puzzled. He will let her go. Her skin crawls. One more defeat. “Well, want to walk me to the crossroads? It’s time.”

  But he does not rise. “Stay.”

  Hope scalds her. She wants, wants so badly that surely she must win. “Why let it drag on?”

  “You know it’s hard for me to figure out what I feel sometimes. I’m slow to react. I can’t just decide like that.”

  “You can tell if you love me. You could tell you wanted me here for the summer, before.”

  He is afraid, but of what? Her leaving? “But I do love you!” He breaks from his chair, snatches the suitcase from her. “I do love you. I want us to stay together.” The words slam like a door he is finally through. He feels weak with relief. He has done the right thing. He too will have a wife. He will have a wife and children with his name.

  “Then I’ll stay.” She stands quite still. That blue future gathers itself in a wave and goes crashing over her. I’ve won! she tells herself. Now I’ll be safe. Now I’ll belong. And I’ll be ever so good to him. I’ll never take another bus. I’ll never sleep on somebody else’s couch again.

  But her spine is water and her hands curl up remembering that vertical house, his parents with their expectant eyes, his ivory bedroom with its air of sickroom. His thin arms fold around her in a tight but formal embrace like an up-ended box.

  The Retreat

  Circa 1970

  Always the bedroom is dark. Oh, there are windows, two, onto a canyon echoing neighbors’ sorrows and appliances. The crash of a bottle. A husband and wife tearing at each other. Children disemboweling a cat. The pelvic throb of mating cries, falsetto yowls over electric guitars reverberating like a permanent hangover. Noises pulse from other boxes.

  Afternoon. Heat packed like grime into the sockets of her body, she lies prone. Let out early today because the air conditioning broke in the false moon of fluorescence and files, she came home and did not pause at the refuge of coffee shop where students sit in swirls of talk and where she sometimes sits pretending she is a student still. If you are a student people talk with you, they ask questions. If you are a working wife they look through you. She came home to clean the apartment thoroughly. Today she would set everything right.

  She entered the dark, the summer sun fading into her skin. Their rooms felt packed with stale breath. On the cot that served as couch, the coverlet frowned wrinkles. On his desk her husband’s work crouched waiting for him. Posters tacked to the walls look faded, outdated. Who cared about that band any longer? Not her. Then she wanted only to be swallowed into sleep. Fingers sunk into the pillow now she runs through clotted thickets hung with huge red flowers. The pursuing male, naked anyface, runs close behind. She stumbles. He overtakes and takes her. Memory of orgasm, the overtones from silence. She rises into shame. Kneels in her sweat scrubbing the roach-stained floor. When he comes home, it will be nice for him.

  He wakes in the dark. Though the bedroom is always dark, night thickens it. Coming from a late seminar, he saw the white wafer of October moon, but it cannot enter here. Straightening his knife-blade back, he heaves the chilly air into his lungs. Peers into the dark. Hears only the wind scraping drifts of fallen leaves and discarded papers in the canyon between the apartments. Why should sweat slime him as if an army of frogs had crawled over his skin? Her hot body swamps his flank. The walls lean inward. He thrust free of the coil of sheets, gathering his pillow and the spread from the foot of the bed. As if he stood in a cave and looked out, at the corridor’s end white moonlight pierces the bay window of the living room to freeze on the rug. She wakes, rolls on one round elbow to see him, pillow clasped to his shoulder, dragging the spread behind like a broken tail of a peacock.

  “Where are you going?”

  “The couch.”

  “Why?”

  With the wincing shrub she knows too well, he ducks away. “I can’t sleep.” He stalks toward the white field that waits at tunnel’s end. His side of the bed cools under her searching hand. In some unconscious way she has failed or offended him. She calls his name. The word fades.
>
  Light comes down the corridor from the living room where he studies. One o’clock. She must get up at seven for work. The wind will freeze her as she waits for her bus, ice will enter her ankles. Kneeling naked and winter pale on the bed, she sees herself in the wavery mirror over the dresser that came with the apartment. He grunts distantly. She calls louder.

  “What is it?” he says like a groan.

  What? Me. Your wife you see as demanding. “When are you coming to bed?”

  “When I finish. Go to sleep.”

  She weighs her breasts in her hands with a smile of derision. When I was a graduate student, I did finish. She had left after her masters to support him, as his family, as her family, as he himself expected. After all, a physicist is more important than an English doctoral student. And do I believe he will be different later? I feel disloyal judging him. I am not supposed to think this way. But he is never done and I am always waiting.

  She puts on her only nightgown, pre-wedding extravagance in blush silk and lace, brushes her hair crackling. In the wavery mirror, she seems to be dissolving in her flimsy nightgown. Why should she be more attractive dressed in this thin strip of silk than standing as herself? A pierced unicorn, image of a tapestry she saw at the Cloisters in Manhattan with another man years before, looks over her shoulder from the wall. Her husband tacked it there. She is not the unicorn, blood bubbling on the ice-white flank and deflowered by pike and dogs. Her face fixed in a smile, she goes barefoot into the living room.

  Afterward she sleeps curled toward him, relaxed, looking pleased. Afterward he sleeps too and dreams of a bleeding unicorn who stares at him with his mother’s eyes. He grinds his teeth and groans. His out-flung arm strikes her. She wakes and leans to see him in his struggle. Her eyes drip hot as candlewax down her cheeks. Winning is losing and losing is losing too. Even in sleep they are chained together and she is dragged like a broken tail through his nightmares.