The Cost of Lunch, Etc.: Short Stories

by Marge Piercy

  I pressed Vicki’s friend’s number on him, and he must have called because she came back the next morning looking a couple of years older and quiet for once. All she said was, “I’m seven kinds of stupid.”

  I was out Friday with a bunch of friends, but I found out the next morning that Cam wasn’t back. Vicki crouched in her bed, her face spotted with ink from chewing a pen, the floor littered with balled up papers I could see were fragments of a note she would never mail.

  Late Saturday afternoon, Cam arrived. They looked at each other, wary.

  Vicki asked, “Why couldn’t you come home? Couldn’t you do that?

  “I was finding something out. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “I’d rather have found out for myself.”

  “I had to find out for me.”

  Vicki stared without speaking.

  After a while Cam continued, “We’ll have to be frank with each other.”

  Vickie snorted. “I have been frank.”

  Cam sighed. “Allen has been acting innocent about what could have upset you. He claimed nothing had changed.”

  Vickie stood and paced for a moment. “When I begged him to explain, he said it wasn’t a mistake. Then he made a speech about how he is only half a man. The shadow of Janice hangs over him. Occasionally the shadow lifts, and then he can really see another person and care for her. These were just times when the shadow lifted. Then a lot about how he wants to break through and maybe I’m the one to help him.” She sank into a chair, grimacing. “He looked so sad I fell into his arms and we hoisted the damned shadow again.”

  Cam rolled her eyes. “That’s a fair approximation of the speech I got when I asked him what I meant to him.”

  “I thought you weren’t interested in him that way.”

  “I wanted to be sure. I was surprised when you came home that day, because for a while things have been happening.”

  “Cam! You too.”

  “But he tried the same thing this morning and topped it off with a lecture on my defenses. You can never get anything worthwhile unless you take chances, he said, and open up emotionally.”

  “That something worthwhile is him? We sure repaired his ego.”

  They got madder and madder. First they decided he was sampling them to choose. Then they decided he didn’t care which body was there, so long as it was warm and female. He had made each feel she was the one he was interested in, and that as soon as he was ready for a real relationship, it would be with her.

  I excused myself, leaving them to their angry spiral. I heard them leaving, but paid no attention. I was seeing Allen. If he wanted to buy me supper, why not? I was curious what he’d say about recent events. I told him I’d pick him up instead of him coming for me.

  The door was unlocked. I knocked once and walked in. The room was upside-down. Broken crockery on the floor. Torn papers. Books and magazines strewn about. His pillow ripped open and feathers stirring in the breeze of my movement. The draperies were pulled from their rods, those leather chairs overturned. Ketchup was rubbed into the mattress and the Swedish light pulled apart.

  “No permanent damage,” he said quietly. “Pillow easily replaced.” He was sitting on the floor with a wet towel over his face.

  “Your harem rebelled.”

  “It wasn’t a harem,” he said with irritation, then added smoothly, “To have a proper harem you need at least six or seven. Now I’ll have to begin collecting from scratch.” He waved me to one of the overturned chairs, letting the towel fall to his shoulders. “It takes two or three girls like that to make up one interesting woman, mature, like yourself. Women who know what they really want are rare …”

  “How long did you think you could keep on fooling them?”

  “I suppose you know quite a bit? I can’t understand how things got so congested. They didn’t seem the jealous type … I suppose we should start cleaning up.”

  “They outnumber and outweigh me. I don’t think I can afford this supper.” I started for the door.

  “Let’s do it another time.” He put the towel back on his face.

  I didn’t answer. I had lost interest.

  Vicki began to feel guilty about what they’d done and moved in with her friend from the office. We advertised for a new roommate. The new one is more my age. Cam worries me. She got a promotion and decided to buy a Prius. She is doing the cooking regularly and gaining weight. She says nothing real happened with Allen, but I have the feeling now that as far as men go, nothing ever will.

  The Shrine

  Sonia drove the Mercedes alone to Ithaca. She had not expected Ron to visit her sick mother with her—her mother had endured two episodes of breast cancer already, meaning she had been seriously ill for the best part of the last four years. Now it had spread to her bone marrow. Not that her mother was ever less than serious and Ron had several important meetings.

  Sonia made good time. She had an instinct for speed traps and only once was given a ticket in her whole adult life. It was a knack, knowing when she could speed without trouble. She thought of it was almost a metaphor for her life, knowing how to execute, know when to take chances and when to play it safe.

  The Upper East Side to Ithaca took over four hours, everyone said, but she made it in three hours and thirty-five minutes. Her mother had been moved from the hospital to hospice the previous week. Was she really, finally going to die?

  She followed the directions on her GPS. The hospice was unimpressive after the hospital, a former Victorian home. She parked, took a deep breath. Repaired her hair and makeup. She disliked seeing Frances if she were not well prepared, but how tough could it be if Frances was actually dying? Nonetheless, she fixed her face into a mask of concern and got out of the Mercedes. The heat struck her full force. It was only June 23rd, but her stilettoes sunk into the tar of the parking lot. In her head, Frances lectured her on how such high heels injured the back and who could remember how many inner organs? That typified the attitude with which Frances confronted the world. Never mind how you look, just be correct.

  She was ushered into the private room by a tiny woman with coarse grey hair hanging down her back clasped with a barrette in the shape of a butterfly.

  “Frannie! Your daughter’s here to see you,” she burbled. Frannie? She was surprised her mother let the nurse or whatever she was use a nickname that Sonia herself never uttered. Frances looked ghastly. There was little color in her face and she had lost so much weight she looked papery, her small bones jutting almost through her translucent skin. The room did not look like a hospital room. Sonia was a little shocked. She expected tubes, machines bleeping or blinking, the usual when Frances was hospitalized. It was just a bedroom with one tube with a little button. The room was full of flowers, probably from her mother’s old patients.

  “What kind of medication are they giving you?” She bent and pressed her lips lightly to her mother’s forehead.

  “No medicine. Morphine. At the end, I’m becoming a drug addict.” Her voice kept its husky dramatic quality. “I don’t suppose at this last stage it could be considered a problem.”

  She was about to ask how her mother was, but stopped herself. A senseless question. She rephrased. “Are you comfortable?”

  “They do what they can. They give me a matter of weeks.”

  “Weeks?”

  “Four, maybe five if I’m lucky—if that’s what you call luck … Where’s your husband?”

  “He’s in a meeting. I came up alone.”

  “Deciding what new kind of financial scam to visit on us poor folks who don’t run Wall Street.”

  Sonia took a deep breath. She would not rise to the bait. She was a clever trout, a rainbow trout, facing into the current, keeping safe by a big rock. Ron fly-fished sometimes. He found it restful. She would go along with a poetry book by some poet she considered possibly interesting or just her iPhone if they had reception. She would arrange herself on a shady bank in her Phillip Lim slacks—she had half a dozen as t
hey were her favorites—and some more casual top. She would have a hat along in case shade was not available. She took care of her skin. Some women who had begun their twenties fully as beautiful as herself looked like leathery hags by now from their sun worship.

  Her mother was talking about some local skirmish with developers she still tried to be involved in from her deathbed. Sonia nodded and murmured, staring at her mother, trying to find remnants of the beauty that had been Frances, that she herself had inherited. Not that Frances had ever had the sense to use what genes had given her. She barely wore lipstick. She wore loose pants, sloppy tops and those green smocks doctors affected. She had been twice married, her mother had, once to another medical student. That had produced her and her younger brother Carl, but her father had the brains to start a lucrative practice in plastic surgery that brought him to New York, while Frances dithered on with patients who often could not pay at all. The second marriage was to a local politico who left her eventually because her practice sopped up her time, leaving little for him, so he took up with one of his young admirers.

  “Have you heard from Daddy?”

  “George? Gorgeous George. Not in years. Why would I hear from him?”

  “Just wondered. I had lunch with him last month. I did tell him you were having a relapse of cancer.”

  “I’m sure he was fascinated. So how’s your health?”

  “Healthy as a horse.”

  Frances held up a claw-like hand, the one not connected to tubes. “That’s a silly phrase. Horses have many problems. Especially overbred ones. Do you remember my friend Martha, the vet?”

  “Vaguely.” A big homely woman. No wonder she administered to farm animals. Frances had met Martha when a horse kicked her, so Frances took care of her broken collarbone and arm. All Frances’s friends had been dowdy wrecks, as she recalled. When her mother was home, one of those hapless females always seemed to be around talking politics, plotting some silly protest. How she’d resented them, taking her mother’s attention, praising Frances for wasting her time on charity cases and lost causes, forever hanging around.

  “You just missed Carl. He was here the last two days. He stayed in the house, as I hope you will.”

  “I have a reservation. Tomorrow I must be back.” She was glad she had missed her brother. They had absolutely nothing in common. Carl didn’t even have a relationship with their father, George. She had made sure to keep up hers. Her father had done a little work on her loosening throat, quietly, no charge. The money did not matter, of course. But she trusted his skill.

  “What’s Carl into these days?”

  “He runs his organic dairy farm in Vermont, same as the last ten years.”

  Cows. Typical. He’d married one.

  When Sonia escaped, she cancelled her reservation and drove straight back. It was a great relief to be on the road again. Frances hadn’t even asked her about her new book, how it was doing, nothing. It had been published by a prestigious university press, Wesleyan, and received decent reviews. Of course she had as always sent Frances a copy. She had managed to keep up her reputation as a poet in spite of not teaching, except for an occasional brief stint. After all, she had no need to do the dreary work of teaching undergraduates who pretended to be writers while spewing their callow verbal vomit. It was bad enough to have come from a family of losers; she had no desire to associate with more of them. She had not squandered her advantages—good looks, intelligence, talent in a field with little money but some glamour—to marry well and keep that marriage alive. She had been faithful to Ron and only flirted with other men when there was some advantage to it. He had lapsed briefly but she had forgiven him. She was not stupid enough to let go, although she could probably manage a good settlement by now.

  She had done well with their son and daughter. Liam was climbing in the same firm Ron worked for and Madison had married a lawyer with political ambitions. Madison was expecting. Though Madison lived in Denver, she and her daughter were in weekly communication. She would fly out there for the birth if she possibly could. She considered herself a much more effective mother than Frances. She had a closer and warmer relationship with both her children than Frances had ever tried to have with her. Frances had always been disapproving, from puberty on. Why are you dressing like that? Do you ever think about anything but boys? Who cares about cliques in high school? It’s all adolescent nonsense: never understanding she was studying how to manage men and other women, how to walk into a room, how to impress without seeming to be trying, how to flirt subtly but effectively. How to use little endearing gestures. She and her mother had lived in different worlds, and she was glad for that. Her world was so much more comfortable, so much more interesting. Frances could have had such a better life if only she had tried.

  Sonia slipped back into her routine, the appointments, the parties, the trips to the Hamptons, the redecorating of the living room, the conversations with Madison and her editor, the dinners with Ron, his colleagues and clients, with Liam and his new girlfriend Mia—who would not last long, she was sure. She called the hospice three times a week; she understood the importance of playing an expected part. Solicitation was required; she provided it. She polished her poems until they were hard as diamonds and sent them out to the correct magazines. She had her hair lightened a shade and shopped with her friend Marlena, who always knew the best boutiques. She and Ron often spent weekends with Liam at their near-beach house, but she preferred going back to the city with Ron during the week, even during heat waves. Men left alone in a hot place could get into trouble. Liam dropped Mia and took up with a Brazilian model for a couple of weeks. He went on a fishing trip with pals and the model disappeared from their lives.

  The call she was expecting, had been awaiting for years, finally came the Wednesday after Labor Day. Frances had hung on far longer than her doctors had predicted. Typical. Ron accompanied her to the funeral, crowded with her mother’s seedy patients, nurses from the hospital, her brother Carl, his fat wife Annie and their four children ranging from fourteen to three, whatsit and whosis and whatever. Carl and Fatty had certainly bred. The offspring were all tall for their age and rangy, freckled and tanned and apt to stare at her. Even at the funeral, they were all in jeans. Ron found her brother embarrassing and she tried to keep contact to a minimum. She was always gracious to people like him. Once he had been good-looking enough. In high school he had been far more popular than she ever could be, because he played basketball. But he was aging rapidly, bald on his crown, his skin roughened by sun and weather, his blue eyes (like her mother’s, like her own) perpetually squinted. Cows and goats and sheep he lived with. Why had he bothered going to college? What does your brother do? He makes cheese. None of her friends knew she had a brother.

  Liam had found an attractive redhead and was sitting with her, looking more in her direction than at the service. Sonia fixed her eyes on the pulpit and ran through her week’s appointments: yoga Monday morning, call Madison at eleven, lunch with Marlena, then her own work until seven or so when Ron would come home. Tuesday, spinning class, then straight back to her desk until she had a facial at four and dinner with two other couples at some new Asian fusion restaurant the Times had written up.

  The service was resolutely nondenominational, Unitarian Universalist, and interminable. At last they were freed and declined the invitation to go out for meal with Carl, Annie and a gaggle of old ladies who had been friends of Frances. The three of them got into the Lexus with a tremendous sense of having done their duty. Escaping at full speed back to reality enlivened them and they chatted happily.

  It was actually Tuesday before she got back to her desk for real work. In her middle drawer were all the notes she had created over the years for that moment when her mother was no longer on the earth to refute her and she could begin a series of elegies in sonnet form. Begin creating the myth of the beloved, hard-working, self-sacrificing mother and the daughter who cherished, adored and now mourned her. She would have an entir
e section in her new book devoted to those poems. That would silence those who admired her craft but complained about “the icy heart of her poetry.” She’d heart them with all her power. She could almost see the reviews. She would create a color range of grey to blue in her imagery. Compare her to chicory that grew wild in vacant lots. Her hair to milkweed fluff. A frail woman who devoted her life to others, dearly beloved by all but especially by her devoted first born, her daughter. Now Frances was entirely hers at last to do with what she wanted. No distractions, no duties that were so much more important than her children or husbands, no patients calling all hours of the night with their petty emergencies, no local politics, no campaigns, no demonstrations. Frances had become a perfect doll for her to play with.

  Carl could challenge her, but he was not about to start reading poetry, even hers. None of her mother’s elderly friends would be a problem. The myth was hers to shape and amplify. At its center, the grieving daughter whose love for her mother created a shrine of words. Turning on her computer, she smiled. Long ago she had planned how to write this sequence and now at last it could be done.

  The Easy Arrangement

  In my life, there have been a great many Mr. Wrongs. I married one of them and spent time and energy and emotion on dozens more. My feeling is that in love you are entitled to a great many mistakes so long as you aren’t making the same one over and over. I have friends who always fall for the same man in various guises. One dear friend insists that she must have the right chemistry, a template in her brain that must match up for her to fall in love. That template ensures that the man will never be faithful but treat her like a recalcitrant dog.

  I have managed, however, with persistence and gullibility to commit a great many different mistakes, a whole galaxy of flaming errors. One of them I’ll call Oscar because that was not his name.

  Oscar was an intriguing mixture of bad boy and respectable professional. He taught American Studies at Sarah Lawrence. He was very “political” as those of us who work for social change use the word, meaning in this particular case that he had the vocabulary of a revolutionary but wasn’t one. He could sound quite the rebel, but he taught his classes and graded his papers on time, paid his taxes, was good to his parents and in truth an upstanding bourgeois son from an upper middle class family, raised in the suburbs of New Jersey off the Garden State Parkway.