by Marge Piercy
“Done. Big deal.” Sitting on the bed she poked at the woolly mound. “Anybody home?”
“Ow. Quit that.”
She poked harder into what she supposed to be his ribs.
“Hey!” He wriggled his head out to glare. His hand pinned her wrist. “Want me to hurt you? I said quit that. Paul out there?”
“I sent him home to do his schoolwork.”
“The kid thinks you’re the hottest thing since little red peppers.”
“I’m flattered. He’ll be an attractive man, himself.”
“He’s not that young.”
“A bit young for me, though.”
“Why? In France … Or isn’t that the only reason?”
“Are you pimping for him?”
He gave her wrist a halfturn. “Just asking. Just curious. You must get frustrated under the status quo.”
“Not enough to start experimenting with kids, thank you.”
“He thinks I’m out of my mind for not … making it with you.”
“Oh?” said Anna with ice and high wind, and yanked her wrist free.
“But we would eat each other like cat and dog.” He sat up among the pillows, his pale blue eyes narrowed and lewd. “We’d destroy each other.”
“I’m sure,” Anna said politely, piqued and finally amused. He put such metaphysics into his sex. At times she looked at him and a brute physical curiosity played over her skin. She seldom thought of him as ugly now. His face had become part of his utterance. She edged away down the bed. “Leon, you can’t go on with ISS,” she said severely. “Your project is almost finished. You can’t go on wasting yourself on stupid short jobs.”
“I can’t? Nothing easier.” He groaned.
“It’s too hard on you. Maybe you should go back to school.”
He sat up glaring. “How? All that alimony to pay. How?” He was silent for a long while.
“Going to tell you a story, but don’t you ever repeat it to Paul. Okay? When I was a punk in school one time I was drinking with guys from Skokie, where I grew up. Guys at school. One had a car and we were out cruising on Forty-third and we picked up a whore, a young spade chick. Anyhow we shook her down. We scared her and took off her the money she had—forty-five, fifty bucks.”
She stared at him. “That’s one of the nastiest stories I’ve heard.”
“Why? The whores used to roll us all the time. They hated our guts.”
“Why not? You hated them too, for using them.”
“We felt very tough, very high.”
“The suburbs proving they’re tougher than the city folk. No, it makes me angry all the way through. Don’t you see—”
He laughed dryly. “You know what I did the next day? I went to the University bookstore and I stole books. I kept stealing books till finally even those jackasses got wise and the store dick picked me up. I had seventy-five dollars in books on me and I could hardly walk.” After a while he said, “You’re wasting your time with me.”
“It’s my choice. And my time.”
He lay in bed on his belly sunk in depression. She called a cab for once. For some reason she was haunted by the first winter she was married to Asher. She had thought him fine, serious, complete. Asher had still been in school, and they had lived in two vilely pink narrow rooms off a parkinglot, rooms the sun never poked into: rooms lit by dim bulbs and joy. Before they had begun to buy the perfect, exorbitant townhouse.
Coming in she opened her mailbox. Official looking envelope. She recognized the name of the city board. Yes, she was informed. Slowly she went upstairs carrying one more dismissal.
Monday, November 24–Monday, December 8
Monday, November 24: The anthill of the project. Out in the field interviewers met their men and women targets, sat in their homes and offices which they afterward described with what wit they could muster, listened and were seduced, angered, shocked and filled with suspicion. They dreamed the power struggles of the city in their pajamas. They ulcerated and connived and cursed.
The digesters sat in windowless rooms and coded, ran statistical analyses, composed graphs and indices. They worked an eight-hour day, yawned and went home. The wit, the passion, the anger went out in their wastepaper baskets.
The queens surveyed the work and saw it was of high professional standards and fulfilled the contract. They spoke of methodology, dealt with the agents of monies and shouldered the burden of negotiation. In their names—Rand Grooper, Norma Clay—all work went forward: they would swell in the journals and hew out their share of honorariums and consultantships on the repute of the vast labor. They were the source of money and legitimation. All the coolies ate their bread and slept in their shade.
Miss Clay had been in her twenties a supporter of Henry Wallace. She gave money with leaden regularity to groups launching sit-ins, kneel-ins and teach-ins. Of her recent projects two had been paid for by the Army, one by AT&T, one by General Motors. A recent study under her supervision of lack of panic during a blackout in major cities would be used to prove the citizenry would accept nuclear bombardment with frontier humor. She lived with her mother in an older high rise with beamed ceilings owned by the University. Anna delivered machine runoff there. Miss Clay collected prints by coming artists and attended the ballet when there was any. Born of a professor in Nebraska, she had attended Wellesley and spent an occasional summer in Europe. Her prime interest was understood to be the dynamics of social change. Anna wondered what that meant to Miss Clay.
Rand Grooper was quickspoken, and his lean body curled protectively around an early ulcer. A meticulous dresser who sought in his mirror images from Playboy, he found receding sandy hair, the rednecked ironjawed face of an Ozark pig-farmer. He owned a beautiful malcontent wife, four precocious children, a split level he could not afford in a suburb he could not stand. He signed checks for the ACLU and read the Nation, but he was mobile as a barracuda and in the world were only those out to knife him and those he had cut. He spoke often of professional ethics. His eyes were wistful.
Meek and lowly, chin tucked in, Anna sat in her tweeny’s desk washing their data and hanging it out to dry. They both wrote as if they had been bitten by a government pamphlet on payroll addressing procedures. In the questions, in the choice of interviewers and interviewees, in the definition of politics and leaders and meaningful acts, lay the results of their study beforehand.
The citizen participation required by law had certainly occurred. Neighbors met and met again. The meetings of blockgroups could generate powerful feelings of concern, could be the closest these people ever would come in their lives to feeling themselves involved in meaningful decision. The blockgroups met and considered with passion the planners’ proposals and hashed out a consensus yes or no. Of course they really could not vote no to the whole plan, that would be irresponsible. Maybe they could suggest a different use for a lot or a different placing of one-way streets. The proposals were drawn and the issues joined elsewhere. Ideas sent up from the groups, unless they were minor and convenient, died. Never in the whole study would anyone ask, Who gains from all of this? Who owns Chicago? Who’s getting richer? What does each man control or own? At Inland University and at ISS, sociologists did not ask such questions: that was never in the contract.
Thanksgiving: Over the city of blackened stone, the charcoal ramparts of the Loop and the steel men breathed, the lead gray battlements of the University, the frozen turmoil of shore, the cube houses laid out on treeless streets once prairie, a mile of K’s (Komensky, Karlov, Kedvale), a mile of L’s … Over all the tall snow stood in the air and filled the rutted streets and capped the sluggishly moving cars. Snow flittered past the plate glass. Night settled in damping everything but the muffled ghostly falling, the spook snow materializing around the greenish streetlamps. Leon’s was cold but not nearly so cold as home where the city was skimping on coal. Food smells softened the air, roasting duck with apple and onion inside.
They ate, picking the bones and passing the brown rice, salad and
spiced cranberries back and forth. Leon had dug out a yahrzeit candle and its light merged with the ghostshine from the street. After they had eaten to drowsiness for warmth they crept into bed dressed, huddling under blankets. He let the candle burn on his high chest of drawers, left on the light in the other room that threw long shadows and a path of light across the bed.
With his hand Leon made shadow pictures on the wall, rabbits and stagheads and striking cobras. He was cold, cold. Her nose pinched.
“Paul should’ve stayed with us and had a good feed instead of going home where his sister can pin him down again.”
Anna giggled. She felt ten. “There isn’t room in the bed.”
“If he was here, you think I’d set such a lax example? I am a father, after all.” Silence trickled between them. He flopped onto his back staring at the ceiling. Candle flicker rippled across his broad face. “A year,” he mumbled. “Seven more months to go. Got to get money. Got to get a film financed. If I just had enough bread to do one I have in mind, it would knock people on their asses. But I owe the processing lab, I owe everybody.… It was the kid being born as much as old Joye finding out about Caroline that busted things up. All of a sudden Joye started singing about how she couldn’t raise her child around drunks and perverts and colored dragqueens—that last for Elliott whose stuff I really dig and besides he’s very gentle with kids. Jimmy needs a nice safe lawn, good schools where he won’t get his head bashed in. All of a sudden she’s become her mother, she has fangs and teeth … But the most significant thing about your breakup is who you picked. Asher was Jewish and you chose a nonJew to haul you out. Knowing you wouldn’t marry him, right?”
“I could say the same about Caroline, but it’s nonsense. Rowley’s real. The most evident thing is him, not a label.”
“Is your being Jewish a label?”
“It was only an issue once. My parents saved up and went to Yellowstone. Like mice, Leon, so furry and scared. I don’t know where my father got the chutzpah to close the store for two weeks. They called me, they’re going to stop: they’re dying for a piece of meat. For eleven days nothing but lousy fried fish. I go to a Jewish butcher for a beef roast and carry it home to kosher. Rowley watches—he can’t believe it. You’re killing that meat! He is laughing and at the same time, shocked. He thinks it’s the most primitive bloodfear he’s ever witnessed. I get furious and start yelling, antiSemite!”
“Choosing him was a revolt against your whole Jewish past.”
“My past is not Asher! Maybe Asher’s what my parents think they want. Maybe not even—you couldn’t pinch his tuchus. I don’t know why he married me. He didn’t trust me. And by his values, look what I went and did!” Her hands twisted in the blankets. “I thought he wanted what I could give him, but people give themselves what they want. You do not marry your complement as Asher and I tried to do, because what you aren’t you aren’t because you don’t want to be.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I love Caroline because she’s goyish and blond and smalltown and not too keen upstairs. Because she’s my red, white and blue shiksa made of ice. Because she wants so bad to be loved and doesn’t know what it means. She could sit on a pile of corpses and look soft and cute.”
“Maybe you like her better as a symbol than you would at the breakfast table.”
He laughed, but his voice emerged in a groan. “Got to get to her before time runs out. When I’m here alone at night the top of my head pulls off. I talk to Paul, I talk to you but you don’t believe me. You don’t see!”
Monday, December 1: The air smelled like a furnace room. A gray lid of clouds rested on her head as Anna marched down her street, just returned from the Loop where she had picked up a document for Miss Clay and incidentally a new red brassiere. Fire? The sidewalk was crowded ahead. No firetrucks, only an ambulance pulled over. One of the wrecking crew? People were milling around the front of an empty building. Its stores were already boarded up and two doors nailed shut, but the third in the eye of the crowd stood open.
“Come on, get back.” A cop pushed on the crowd. “You never saw a looney before? I’ll bet. Come on, get back.” From the fringe she found herself thrust forward as people surged and shoved back under pressure and counterpressure.
Two attendants hustled out an old woman half their height clutched between them in a straightjacket. Her thin hair was on end and in her pinched, frightened face her lips moved constantly. Her dress was a bad joke, dirty, drooping, down at the hem: but her eyes pleading with onlookers were lucid. “I told them I couldn’t pay more,” she kept saying in a dry whine. “I just want to stay where I am. That’s all. Just want to stay put. Thirty years, that’s a long time and never behind in my rent, you ask them.” The doors of the ambulance shut.
“It’s disgusting,” the woman next to her muttered, shaking her sleek feathered head.
Wednesday, December 3: Paul leaned toward her as they walked. “People find us an interesting sight.”
“Because we’re gorgeous. They think I’m a cradlerobber.”
“They think you have bizarre tastes.”
“I must, to do this. Don’t you feel silly?”
“No, in a way it’s fun,” he said stoutly. “Now that her fiancé’s here, what does Leon think he can do? Picket her?”
“Search me,” Anna said bitterly.
“You’d be much better for him.” He caught up a gloveful of snow and walked packing it.
“Thanks loads. Everybody has the right to choose his poison.”
“Takes two to choose, and whatever she’s after, Leon can’t buy it for her.” He let the snowball fly out splat against a telephone pole. “Where’s that architect’s office?”
“Ought to be this block. There’s the car,” she hissed then, grabbing his elbow. “There.”
He looked toward the parkinglot. “You sure?”
“Of course. That funny green.”
“British racing green. That’s a Jaguar XKE.”
“What does that mean?”
“You wouldn’t exactly trade one in on a Rambler. Leon will be sad.”
They passed the windows of the office and both took a quick peek. Bruce was looking at the model of the Suburb in the City, his handsome still-tanned face puckered as if he were silently whistling in high spirits. He leaned forward and gave a building a flicked nudge forward. They hurried on out of sight. “And you claim you don’t feel silly,” Anna said.
He corrected the fit of his gloves, tugging. “Vera’s jealous of Leon, you know?”
“I also have the feeling she does not care for me.”
Paul smiled. “Vera’s a small woman and she doesn’t like big women. She thinks they’re going to sit on her. And she doesn’t understand you.”
She slung back her head to laugh. A stray lock jiggled against her cheek. “Do you?”
Paul pulled his long sophisticated face. “Better than Leon does, you can be sure.”
“I will not be understood by someone ten years younger.”
“Seven.”
“Eight.”
“Besides, Vera’s more sensitive than I am, more cautious. She doesn’t mix with the ofay, except a couple of old girlfriends from home. Which is why I know it’s pure spite that she’s letting this stud who must be thirty hang around with his tongue out. She says Leon knows him.”
“What’s his name?”
“His last name’s Rowley. I don’t know his first.”
“George. He’s thirty-one. How that cat does get around.”
“You know him, uh?”
“We’ve met.”
Saturday, December 6: Rubble, snow and local merchants’ seasonal cheer. The stamped tin ceiling of the old A&P hung down rumpled and awry among its smashed walls. Loaded with Hanukkah presents for Estelle’s kids she peered over the top of her bundles as she plodded along, idly watching a man walk toward her. Not a graceful walk but swinging, a big man who walked well in a loosejointed, rambling … Rowley! No moustache. Embarrassed, star
ing at him staring back, she turned and blindly crossed. A soft plop of pain. “Annie! Hey there!”
She clumped to a stop. “Hello. Didn’t recognize you.”
“I had no problem,” he said dryly. “Listen, you know what? Sam got married.”
“Your sister? What on earth for! I mean—”
“Who knows what for? To some halfassed suburban rebel with fungus on his chin.”
“Did Vera make you shave your moustache? That’s how come I didn’t know you right away.”
“The hell you didn’t.” He grinned in anger and she leaned away from him. “Say hello to Leon.”
“I usually do.” She turned with a shallow wave and trotted off. Why did she say that about Vera? Stupid Anna with the big flapping mouth.
That night she went out with a computer technician from ISS, as much because Leon and Paul were clearly planning something without her as because he held any promise. The evening went accordingly.
Sunday, December 7: “What good is a paper with no comics?” Leon asked his weekly question and fingered his unshaven jaw. “Why isn’t there coffee?”
“Anna’s too busy studying the paper,” Paul drawled from the floor. “Then she’ll recite it.”
“Wait your turn,” Anna said righteously from the forest of the Sunday New York Times. “When I finish I’ll make coffee.”
“That’s what I call real gradualism.” Paul was lying partly wrapped in an old Army blanket. From its drab roll his head stuck out into a sunpath shining like bronze.
“Dit you have a good time last night?” Leon asked archly.
“Moderate,” she said.
“We went down to the Birdcage. No drinks served but lots of ginch. Jazz wasn’t half bad, uh Paul?”
“Not bad, Lion. They had a flautist with soul and a good baritone sax. But the bass player was a zombie.”
The guy on drums was a winner too.” They exchanged the bored glances of connoisseurs.
“So? All culture makes Jack dull. What are you giggling about?”
“We hung around awhile.” Leon made a gesture indicating duration. “Then we cut out with a couple of chicks. Brought them back.”