by Marge Piercy
She pulled three dollars from behind a picture frame, dollars from her shoes, dollar bills under the lining of drawers, dollars rolled up in nylon stockings (she never wore tights), tucked into cookbooks and novels. She stood on a stool to reach dollars she had hidden on a high kitchen shelf (where all the whole grain and health foods I had sent her to control her blood pressure were stowed collecting dust), dollars hidden in a box of sweaters she would never wear in Florida. That night we counted slightly over $1,200 in single dollar bills she had saved from grocery shopping and hidden away from my father. That was what she felt that we needed a whole car to carry back to Massachusetts.
A few days after our last Monday phone call, she suffered a stroke. She lay on the floor while my father picked up all the pieces of a fluorescent bulb she had broken. Finally he called the rescue squad. My husband Ira and I flew down on standby the first night of Chanukah, but my father took her off life support while we were in the air. When we landed, she was already dead. She was perhaps eighty-seven. I never knew her real age as she had no birth certificate and made a habit of lying about her age, since she was considerably older than my father. She had had me when she was in her forties, about the age I was when she died.
While we were gone to Florida, I let my assistant Jean stay in our house, since she was going through an acrimonious divorce and seemed afraid of her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Earlier that year, Jean had complained of pains and gone to her gynecologist, who told her nothing was wrong with her except nerves. From her symptoms I did not believe he was correct. I suspect she had an ectopic pregnancy. I made an appointment with her at a women’s clinic in Boston. Her pains got worse. When she arrived and was examined, they discovered that her situation was critical and the tube was about to burst. They rushed her into an operating room and saved her life. I had always treated Jean as if she were family. At my wedding, she was a member of the party. She was small, like me, but with light silver-grey eyes and a cowl of very short blond hair, a little pug nose, a laugh that always sounded as if it were forced out. Every workday, we had lunch together and gossiped and chatted. I was glad to have Jean in the house to keep the heat on and the pipes from freezing, to feed the cats, to collect the mail while I was in Florida.
My brother and his wife were already there when Ira and I arrived. I asked my father what we should do with her things.
“Throw them out. Get rid of them.”
“You don’t mind if we take some things?”
“Why would you want that stuff? Just get rid of it all.”
Along with my brother’s wife, I went through her things quickly. What I took were photographs, my own books signed to her—my father had never read any of them—some shawls I had given her wrapped in plastic and obviously never worn, the rings cut off her fingers by the undertaker and that jade necklace. She had so little to leave me and I knew how she had cherished that necklace, proof my father had once cared for her. (When I was thirteen, she made a fuss about wanting a present from him for her birthday. He bought her a kitchen garbage can.)
I carried it into the living room, where he was watching a football game. “Do you mind if I take this? I know you gave it to her as an engagement present.”
“What?” He scowled at it before returning his gaze to the screen. “Never saw it before in my life.” He banged his beer can on the arm of his easy chair for emphasis.
A year and a half after my mother’s death, I was invited to a party on the Saturday night of Labor Day weekend and decided it would go perfectly with a linen tank dress in a color the store called celery. I always kept the jade necklace in my jewelry box in a little padded drawer by itself, a place of honor as my mother had always stowed it. I opened the drawer. It was empty. I felt true fear. How could I have misplaced or lost it? How? Certainly since my mother’s death, I seemed to have been permanently scatterbrained, absent-minded. I had lost more items in the intervening year and a half than I had lost in my entire life beforehand. But the jade necklace? I tried to remember the last time I had worn it, perhaps seven weeks before. But I was sure I had seen it more recently than that. But could I trust my memory? I had misplaced so many things recently.
I took everything out of the jewelry box. I crawled all over the bedroom floor. A flashlight revealed nothing but dust bunnies under the bed and in the bottom of the closet. I suffered with a stomachache all day. I must have looked in that drawer six more times, somehow expecting it to appear where it always was stored. Obviously I had done something stupid with it. Ever since my mother died, I had been misplacing things. I saw it as a metaphor, that since I had lost her, I kept losing other things, especially clothing and jewelry.
Monday afternoon of Labor Day, the phone rang. It was from Jean’s roommate, Roxanne. Jean had been working for me for seven years at that point and had moved twice since her divorce. She had moved in with Roxanne the year before and told me what a pill she was, but Jean liked the apartment. She said Roxanne was a cow and jealous of her. On the phone Roxanne sounded very nervous,
“I don’t know if I should tell you this. I really don’t know …” Her voice kept rising into almost hysteria.
“Tell me what?”
“Jean has been stealing from you. At least for a couple of years. At first it was things she said you gave her. A sweater, a couple of blouses, a skirt, earrings, that kind of thing …”
“Stealing?” I couldn’t imagine it. Jean had warned me that Roxanne was jealous of her.
“Food. A steak from the freezer. A bottle of wine. But lately she’s been bringing home stuff I know you wouldn’t give her. Fancy stuff. A gold Jewish star. A watch. A silver bracelet with turquoise set in it. A cashmere cardigan—”
“A jade necklace!”
“Yeah. Did you give it to her?”
“No! Never. It’s the one thing my mother could leave me.”
“Please don’t call the police. I don’t want to get into trouble. Maybe I should’ve let you know sooner … It’s making me nervous, all this stolen stuff in the apartment.”
I was silent for a moment. My instinct was to handle it myself. “Is she there?”
“No. She’s with her new boyfriend. She picked him up in a bar two weeks ago and she’s been spending every night with him.”
“Give me directions. I’m coming over to get my stuff.”
Now she was silent. “I don’t want to get in any trouble.”
“You won’t. She can hardly complain that I stole my own things back. But if I were you, I’d kick her out or move before she does something worse.” I could not remember being angrier in years, maybe since my father had turned off my mother’s life support while we were flying down to Florida. Betrayal—that’s what I felt. I felt angry and I felt betrayed.
Ira remembered strange things that had puzzled him at the time. Once he had walked into her office downstairs and saw bags of groceries. Why would she bring them to work? Another time when I was out of town, he saw her wearing a dark gold sweater and said, “I gave my wife one like that for her birthday.”
She answered, “I liked it so much, I bought one too.”
Several times when I was traveling, she had acted seductively but he had just ignored it. He didn’t say anything because he wasn’t sure and he didn’t want to get her into trouble if he was wrong.
Ira drove and we found the house without difficulty. The apartment was accessed by a back stairway in a white clapboard house. The second floor had two apartments. The one Roxanne and Jean shared was in the back of the house, a living room with a corner kitchenette, two bedrooms. Roxanne greeted us nervously. “I don’t know what she’ll do.” She was a tall boxy woman with a long bark brown ponytail wearing old jeans and a new Red Sox tee-shirt.
“She’s the thief.” Nothing was going to stop me now. “Which is her room?” I waved the bags I had brought.
Roxanne pointed. Then she shut herself up in the bathroom. I had paid so little attention to her, I doubt if I would have recognized her in
the street. I was focused. I was on a mission.
Jean’s bedroom was a mess, the bed sort-of made, cosmetics scattered all over her vanity, along with a bottle of Femme perfume I recognized and plopped into the first shopping bag. I began going through her drawers. I didn’t care if she arrived or not. I didn’t care if what I was doing was legal or not. I found the necklace quickly and in fear that somehow it would disappear, I put it on. I found other jewelry, including a gold Mogen David on a chain that my husband had given me. Jean was not Jewish. I also found the clothes, the watch, the jewelry, the other items I thought I had lost. I collected them all—sweaters, blouses, scarves, a patterned half-slip, the silver and turquoise bracelet a friend had given me in Arizona. A half-open bottle of wine I was sure was stolen too was on her dresser, but that I left. I had the urge to pour it on her bed but resisted. I took nothing that I did not know for sure was mine.
I felt hurt that Jean would do this to me but also relieved that I had not lost my mind, had not become dangerously careless or absentminded. Roxanne told me as she ushered us out, almost pushing us through the door, that she did not expect Jean to return but thought she would go straight to work with me the next morning.
When she arrived Tuesday morning, I was wearing the jade necklace. I confronted her. I had placed all the items I had recovered from her bedroom in a pile on the table.
She kept not looking at me and I kept saying, “Look at me! What am I wearing?”
She kept saying her mother had given her the jade necklace and her boyfriend had given her the Mogen David. She wept.
I had a great desire to hit her, but I kept myself under tight control. I spoke quietly throughout, an edge on my voice but speaking softly so as not about to allow the scene to degenerate into a shouting match. I just wanted her out of my life. I wanted never to see her again, never again to have anything to do with her.
“You’re fired,” I said. “Now get out.”
“Are you going to call the police?” She had stopped crying and was squinting at me.
“Not if you get the hell out and never bother me again.”
She looked once more at the pile as if hoping to reclaim something from it. Then she picked up her purse and started out. She turned. “Does that mean you won’t give me a letter of recommendation?”
I never heard from Jean again, but I did hear about her. I didn’t ask, but people who knew the story told me tales. Nothing good. Cocaine and man trouble. I will never understand how I had failed to suspect her but, as I said, she had been with me for seven years and I considered her almost family: but family can turn on you as easily as a stranger. Now I remembered signs, walking in on her looking into the refrigerator, her constant sniffling that had begun after her divorce—but I knew little about cocaine. How every time I came back from a trip, I would miss something. I felt like a fool, but mostly I felt relief. I still have my mother’s jade necklace, and every time I touch it and every time I put it on, I think of Mother and I still miss her. I don’t think missing a mother ever stops.
How to Seduce a Feminist (or Not)
Mid ’70s
Sheila had known Gill on and off for a decade in flashes since she was based in Chicago and he in Los Angeles. They had both been both active in the anti-war movement and met occasionally in mass demonstrations or events where one or the other was giving a speech. She had gone on into women’s liberation and a teaching job at a small liberal arts college, he to the media where he was a frequent commentator on political issues. He was good-looking and photographed well, came across on TV as roughly charming with a warm grin.
Gill wrote that he was coming east for a conference in Chicago in July, suggesting he visit her. Could he stay since the budget for hotels was adequate only for a Red Roof Inn out in the far suburbs? She said, sure. She had a floor-through in an old brownstone on the near north side—not yet upscale at that time—and a spare room. Friends not infrequently came through town and stayed. She generally made a pot of stew or soup that lasted her several days, but cooking for the occasional guest gave her an opportunity to try out something from the several cookbooks she had purchased for her kitchen.
Gill arrived at O’Hare and was picked up by someone from the conference and dropped off at her apartment around seven. Sheila had prepared a chicken dish that could sit in the oven turned down to 175. He said he had eaten on the plane but chowed down as if it had been a week since he’d tasted food. She was pleased; if she went to the trouble of cooking, she wanted her food appreciated. “God, this is really good,” he said several times. “Perfectly cooked, well spiced.” During supper he regaled her with stories of his recent appearances and a book deal his agent had engineered with Random House. “Got a six-figure advance coming,” he said between mouthfuls. It wasn’t till she was serving ice cream and bakery pie for dessert that she realized he had asked her nothing about herself.
Gill did not volunteer to do dishes, but she asked him to wash and she would dry and put things away. He washed, but sloppily. She said nothing. He didn’t seem accustomed to doing his own dishes. That meant a compliant girlfriend back in L.A.
After coffee, he sat on the couch and patted a place beside him, but she took a chair across the room. She hadn’t imagined intimacy with him. After all, in the days of what they had called The Movement, people had crashed at any acquaintance’s place without expecting to get laid. People shared what they had: food, clothing, a place to sleep. He had asked and she had agreed—to sleeping quarters, not necessarily to sleeping together.
He took out his toke bag and rolled a joint. A little uneasy at crossing to him, she let him bring it to her. She was staying off that couch unless she decided otherwise.
He leaned back lazily, grinning at her. He was tall and solidly built, with long medium blond hair in a ponytail. He no longer wore aviator glasses—probably, like herself, onto contact lenses. He radiated confidence and pleasure in himself. Well, she chided herself, he had done well without obvious compromise and did she want every man as neurotic as her ex-boyfriend Terry? Gill was even more attractive than he had been years ago.
“I have a gig at Madison starting in September,” he said, his eyes fixed on hers. “Be there for a year. It’s not that far, is it?”
Sheila shook her head. “Easy drive.”
“I figure I’ll be doing two classes and a seminar, so I could drive down weekends to Chicago …”
“It’s surely doable, but you might enjoy Madison.” She hoped he wasn’t about to quiz her on the University or the town. She hadn’t been there since the anti-war demonstrations.
“We’ve known each other for how many years?”
“Seven or eight, I’d say. Why?”
“And we’ve stayed in touch.”
Occasional letters, a phone call or two, drinks together at conferences. “Off and on.” Sheila forced a smile, wondering where this was leading. If he wanted to crash with her weekends, that would be a bit much. She wasn’t running a B & B.
“I think it’s inevitable … that we’ll get involved. It’s been moving that way for a long time.” He patted the couch beside him again. “Inevitable.”
She drew a sharp breath, flummoxed. It wasn’t that she didn’t have what she considered convenient sex. She still saw Terry sometimes. They had not broken up dramatically, just eased off and let it dwindle. But this guy lolling there on her couch telling her that she had no choice, it was just fate that she should have sex with him—she wanted to slug him. Choice was her bedrock belief about being a woman. She thought fast. “Gill, I have a boyfriend. A longtime thing. Pretty serious.”
“Then where is he?”
“Off seeing his sister. She just had a miscarriage.”
He looked around. “Does he live with you?”
She couldn’t fake that. No male clothes, no shaving equipment in the john. “We’ve tried that. Right now we’re on different schedules so he has his own place.”
“Is it an open relationship?” Stil
l hopeful.
“That doesn’t work for us. I don’t have the time or energy.”
He looked disgruntled. She understood he had thoroughly planned his coming academic year. Whoever was doing his dishes in L.A. was not accompanying him, so he had scheduled weekly bedtime with her in his photogenic head. Too bad.
In the morning, Gill took his stuff and left. Maybe he had a second somewhat less inevitable option on his to-do list.
Mid ’90s
Amy was celebrating the primary victory of their candidate with the rest of the staff and a good number of volunteers. If Robin won, she would be the first woman senator from their state—ever. Amy believed in Robin with fervor. After all, she had written two of Robin’s position papers prior to the debates, the one on abortion and contraception and the one on economic parity. Robin would fight for women and minorities and all the other causes Amy believed in.
There was Prosecco, beer, cookies, deviled eggs and an assortment of canapés donated from a restaurant that had quietly fed them several times during the campaign. Fortunately there were sodas, too. Amy didn’t touch alcohol. Her father was a drunk who had beaten their mother, her older brother and occasionally her before he drove the family car into an overpass, killing himself and one of his drinking buddies.
Hardly anyone else abstained, although Robin confined herself to soda and nibbled sparingly of the hors d’oeuvres. But one other staff member too stayed off the booze—Brian, who was the point man on gun control and the environment.