The High Cost of Living

by Marge Piercy

“Are you waiting for me, or do you just like to piss in hallways?” Leslie unlocked the door and started up the straight steep flight. “That bell downstairs doesn’t work by the way.” Her adrenaline slowly subsided and she felt annoyed.

  “Yes, someone’s been using it for a pissoir. But as you guessed, I’m waiting for you. Don’t look quite so gloomy about it, it’s time we tried to talk instead of throwing darts over Honor’s head.”

  “I don’t know. I thought we could manage to avoid each other.” She stood aside for him.

  As she flicked on the overhead light and followed him in, he prowled about looking and then he whistled. “I have never seen a barer, more ascetic pad. I mean, the solitary cells at Saint Boniface were fancy by comparison. Saint Boniface was my alma mater, a home for uncurably delinquent boys. At least we had graffiti. What do you do here? Do you eat, do you sleep like an ordinary mortal, or do you go into hibernation? Maybe you walk in and turn yourself off like a robot?”

  “I don’t care for a distracting environment,” she said with a little amusement, hanging her pea jacket on a nail. She put her gear on its shelf and sat down crosslegged on the floor. “Do have a seat.”

  “I could go sit on the toilet. I assume you haven’t removed it? Or I could sit on your bed—your mattress. If you wouldn’t mind? I have a feeling you would.”

  “No more than I mind your sitting anywhere else. Do make yourself … less uncomfortable.”

  Sprawling then, arranging himself gracefully on her mattress covered with the only spot of color, an old but satisfying Indian blanket, he dug in his pocket and pulled out a flash of Old Goat Blended Whiskey. “What a relief, your mattress is foam rubber. I was worried it might be nails.… I thought this might make things go easier.”

  “Do you usually drink that?”

  “No. But I was weighing how much alcohol power I could buy for my money. We could drink that.” He pointed to a bottle of Benedictine she had been drinking a little at a time before bed.

  “I’m not going to get drunk with you. And I don’t like whiskey.” She got up and took an opened bottle of California chablis from the refrigerator, left over from George’s Thursday night. Sue tended to load her with whatever was left.

  “You’re not offering me the Benedictine?”

  “Want me to sit here counting every drop? It’s my bribe to myself.”

  “All right, I’ll drink your wine. I’ll save this for a seduction. Or use it for paint remover when I refinish my desk.”

  There they sat, he in a graceful sprawl on her mattress, she crosslegged on the floor with one hand on her knee and the other holding the tumbler of wine cold against her palm, while a silence fell from the air between them palpable and awkward. She had a feeling she was better at silence, better at waiting.

  She was right, because Bernard began to shift and then rose on his elbow and fixed her with gray eyes narrowed with irritation. “The thing is, it’s dangerous for us to act hostile over her head. You almost couldn’t resist saying something cute when I dropped that cue about hustling. I hope you didn’t bring it up later?”

  “You must know from Honor I didn’t.”

  “And you must know she’s too fine to carry tales.”

  “Aren’t you scared that’s too sticky for me too?”

  “Then you’re a fraud. You put up a front of being tough. So I treat you differently, expecting a different response.”

  “What?”

  “How you bristle. What are you afraid of?”

  “Afraid?” She was losing the advantage. “Don’t confuse distaste with fear.”

  “Are you so scared of me that you’d rather go on fencing than try to communicate?”

  “Why do you want to communicate with me?”

  “Got nothing to say worth hearing?”

  “Why should you listen?”

  “Why should I listen to Honor?” He held out his glass till she refilled it.

  “We can get to that in a minute. Why did you come here?” For the first time she drank some of the wine. It wasn’t good but it was cold. Then the cold wine hit her belly, which doubled up in protest. She winced.

  He was watching carefully. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m hungry is all. I haven’t eaten since lunch.”

  He got up to inspect her refrigerator. “Almost as bad as the room. Well, I see sprouts and eggs. Got soy sauce? If I cook a nice Chinesey sort of omelette, will you talk to me?”

  “Soy sauce on the shelves to your left. Yes.” Because in a moment of weakness, she was tired of doing for herself. She wanted to be cooked for, coddled, yes.

  He lit a joint and went to work humming softly at the hotplate. She was weary and her back ached. What she really wanted was to lie down or, second best, to lean against the wall. Would she let herself? Suddenly she was tired of her continual discipline, like a spring she had to keep winding every five minutes. She could feel the one big swallow of wine she had taken. She inched backward until she was resting against the wall. Ah, better. Actually she wanted to collapse. With him gone. But she could not quite wish that with the smells coming from the hotplate. She was enormously hungry.

  He brought over the plates of eggs. “See you look almost human now.”

  “Meaning I look for the moment worn out and defenseless.” She took a plate and ate. The eggs were good, which she said between mouthfuls. When they had finished he took the plates to the sink. She was not sure whether he meant to wash them, but she called, “Leave them.”

  “So you’re ready to talk to me?” He strolled back and sank on the edge of her mattress.

  “All right.” She laughed uncertainly. “I have the feeling we should shake hands. But suppose we just talk more to the point. Square one is that I’m as queer as you are, if not a little queerer.”

  “Yeah?” He batted his lashes. “What else is news?”

  “It’s not supposed to be news. I’ve been out since I was eighteen. I was married to a woman for three years—we considered it marriage. I’ve told Honor. Not that it sinks in, and I can’t exactly sit around Mama’s house waving copies of The Lavender Woman.”

  “You’re not real out. Not flagrant, as we say.”

  “I was outer in Grand Rapids. I don’t think I’d hit it off in my department. But I’m farther out than you are.”

  “I’m not closeted or out. I’m confusing and confused, dear heart.” He rolled over on the mattress, staring at the ceiling. Then he sat up and glared around. “What a monastic cell. Nothing to fiddle with. No bric-a-brac, no casual clutter. I bet there isn’t a book over there that isn’t for school.” He actually got up and peered at the board and brick shelves, the books piled in cartons. She waited through his fit of restlessness till at last he came back to the mattress again, facing her. “Are you interested in Honor?”

  “We both are, obviously. What else brings us together?” She sipped her wine. This time, with the food for cushioning, it did not hurt.

  “Now you see it, now you don’t; watch the moving shells and not the moving hand. You know what I’m asking.”

  “I’m a little in love with her. I don’t mean to have an affair. She’s too young.”

  “Oh, yes,” he sighed. “On the other hand innocence is lovely, isn’t it? It’s so different.”

  “From you and me?”

  “From me. Oh, Leslie, I’m not sure about you. I think maybe you’re more innocent than you think you are.” He grinned. “If I were you, I’d make love to her.”

  “And her mother too?”

  “Mmmm. Your objections are practical.” He waited while she shrugged. “What do you want then?”

  “To be her friend, I suppose.”

  “You supposes and who disposes? Will you wait for her?”

  “Come on! I admit I fantasize that in a year, after she leaves home, when she knows who she is, then I might be good for her. But I’m not stuck there crouching like a cat outside a mousehole. Did you think that?”

  “That yo
u might seduce her? Why shouldn’t I think that?”

  “I never in my life seduced anybody to anything. I can’t. I’m not so stupid as when I was younger, when I could never even ask for what I wanted, but always had to wait suffering and in silence for it to offer itself to me. Now I can ask. But I can’t try to … push on others, to make them want what I want.… I can’t.” Maybe that was what had gone wrong at Christmas with Val, why she had not been able to get her to leave Grand Rapids and come to Detroit.

  “You’re less calculating then I am. And more bourgeois. You’d really like to carry her off to a house in the suburbs and raise begonias.”

  “How do I know?” She shook her head impatiently while her hair caught at the nape slapped the wall. “With Val I couldn’t even walk down the street with my arm around her without some ape wanting to cream us. What in hell do you want with her? Hey?”

  “I’m a little in love with her too.” He drank off the rest of his glass and poured more. “But you at least know you could make love to her.… Actually I don’t want to. She doesn’t move me that way.… I adore her, but truly as a sister. Don’t raise your eyebrows. Why can’t I desperately want a sister again? I’d like to keep house with her too. I’d love to get rid of Mama and move in and have a little warm house to hold me. Why not?”

  “And a moment ago you were calling me bourgeois.”

  “It’s a state we both aspire to, in our various pitiful ways.” He smiled. “I want her to save me. From myself. My rotten life. My desperation. I want her to believe in me. Violins please.”

  “We’re both crazy, and she’ll go to bed with that lecherous creep Paul.”

  Bernard rubbed his chin. “I think that can be stopped. I’d be furious, I’d howl for months! But Paul’s a busy man and Cam’s usually on the spot.”

  “Ber—I don’t know what I call you. I can’t bring myself to call you Bernar’.’”

  “Oh, Honor’s French phase. Call me Bernie—half the world does. I’ll call you Red.”

  Perhaps she jumped, for he raised an eyebrow. “Please don’t,” she said, “it has too many smells attached.”

  “Did your lover call you that?”

  “Val? Never. It was my high school name. Red—or Ready.”

  “What were you like then?”

  “Very chicky. Then bummed out and quiet. I was going to ask you something: Was Cam ever involved with Paul?”

  “Cam? Why did you think so?”

  Leslie shrugged. “The way she was upset over him coming on to Honor.”

  “Will find out. I hang around there with Honor. Paul’s gone so far as to ask me if I want to try out for a part.”

  “You don’t want to?”

  “Not all gay men want to be actors, didn’t you know?”

  “No, but most vain men have fantasies about it.” She smiled, her head lolling against one shoulder.

  “I try not to be vain.”

  “Do you try very hard?”

  “I have no vanity, no respect for myself, nothing to stand on. You don’t know me yet.”

  “How could I, even if you were transparent as a clean window? Instead of kinky and weird and sideways. I’m tired. Very tired. Go home, Bernie, we’ll talk again.”

  “Will we?” He stood over her.

  “Sure.” She laughed weakly, her eyelids at half mast. “We have so much in common.… Truthfully I enjoyed it.”

  He kissed one finger and touched her nose with it. “Good night, Leslie. Don’t be too sleepy to lock the door behind me. I found it real unpleasant waiting in your doorway.”

  five

  Grumpily she sat on the arm of an overstuffed couch next to Honor, who was next to Paul. Paul had his arm around Honor and was cracking innuendo jokes in a steady stream she tried to shut out. The evening before, Bernie had come by to ask Leslie to fill in for him as he had to work and could not cover Honor the last night of the play, “when Paul may be especially clever or especially desperate, so you go and play St. Bernard in my place.” Therefore here she was perched uneasily on the arm of the couch smoking a joint Bernie had laid on her as recompense.

  It felt funny to smoke a whole joint alone, but nobody was paying any attention to her, which suited her, and Honor never smoked. Indeed, did she love Honor? No. That she was sure of. She had fallen in love only twice, once with Penny, when she was sixteen, and once with Val, when she was nineteen. Well, she should watch out, if such natural disasters came in three-year cycles. Of course they didn’t. Instead it was reasonable to assume that if recovering from the first—unconsummated, unacted—had cost her three years, then recovering from the fully realized second might take six.

  She did not think of herself as volatile dry straw catching at the first spark. No, slowly, painfully she succumbed, like a waterlogged green bough that took hours and piles of kindling to set smoldering. What worried her was that every time she had fallen thoroughly in love she was engulfed entirely before she allowed herself to realize what was happening.

  It’s true, she thought, I don’t make love. I fall in love, I make it happen like lightning striking. Therefore she stared sideways at Honor tossing her hair with a hand dramatically aloft and wondered. Penny had been big and blond, ample bodied as Honor was, but languid, easy, like a pool of sun-warmed water, her eyes big and brown and slowly blinking. She would never be attracted to Penny now. The last time Leslie had been in Ludington—the dramatic throw-it-all-on-the-table Thanksgiving—she had run into Penny coming out of Meijers Thrifty Acres. Penny had looked flabby, spent, one snowsuited kid tugging at her and the baby stuck in a shopping cart with the groceries she was pushing toward a station wagon.

  Valerie. Her mind balked. Valerie’s poignant face. Moon round yet hollow cheeked. Skin like dark buckwheat honey. In the summer Leslie never tanned as dark as the skin of Val’s winter belly. She freckled too much. Val’s skin was clear, so clear it seemed to have lighted depths. Valerie Mendoza. Everything about her was special and strange. Half of her was Scotch-Irish like Leslie but the other half was Filipino, which was itself part Japanese and part Spanish and part Tagalog. Her hair was black and slippery smooth, cut straight across her wide forehead in bangs and then straight again at her small shoulders. Her eyes were slanted and dark, but her nose turned up like Leslie’s own. In repose Val’s face seemed faintly amused. Her body was lithe, compact, perfect except for an appendicitis scar that proved she was mortal, that and her left breast being slightly larger than her right. Suddenly Leslie found herself squinting to keep back tears in the middle of the alien straight noisy party that happened around her like a swarm of insects. Honor could survive her absence long enough for her to scout something cold and unalcoholic, like water to drink. She found the small stool-and-counter kitchen.

  Cam came over to lean on her arm. “Well, so much for that play. What’re you drinking?”

  “Ginger ale. I have to get up early tomorrow.”

  “Listen, you’ve been wonderful for Honor. I appreciate it. I really do.”

  “What do you mean?” Leslie asked warily. Was Cam being sarcastic? Yet she seemed as blowsily open as a big cabbage rose.

  “I know she’s bright—she’s always been a bookworm and teacher’s pet—but I worry a lot about my kid sister. Mama keeps her on such a tight leash, I wonder if she’ll ever get loose. It isn’t natural for her to see so few people. She’s not ugly or anything, she ought to find a boyfriend. She doesn’t even have girlfriends the way I always did, someone to giggle with and go shopping. She just knocks around alone playing games with the mirror and trying on my clothes when she thinks I don’t know it and using my make-up and eating too many sweets and pretending she’s in a movie. But I can’t get through to her. She thinks I’m trying to boss her around. It’s hard to be an older sister, you better believe it.”

  “But that’ll all change when she goes away to school.”

  “If she goes away. There’s not much money. Who wouldn’t like to go to a school in some place like C
olorado or New York City? Mama’s not real keen on it. It’s a race between her wanting to hold on and wanting to push Honor. Besides, Honor’s lazy. I’m scared she’ll never leave home. You know, she doesn’t even wash out her own underwear? She gets away with murder.”

  Leslie grunted, shifting from foot to foot. She wanted to hear everything about Honor, but she did not want to be guilty of disloyalty. With Cam she drifted back into the livingroom. Honor was standing tapping her foot to the music in the blue paisley corduroy dress. Paul was wearing a suede suit and he looked hot, red in the face, fiery rather than sweated. He kept touching Honor on her arms and shoulders, her waist, her back. Once as his hand slid out of sight low on her back she pointedly moved away. But not far.

  “That’s why I’m glad you’ve been spending time with her. Because she listens to you. It’s miraculous!” Cam laughed, throwing back her head so that for a moment in gesture she resembled her sister. “She worships you. All day long it’s ‘Leslie likes my new sweater. She says it’s becoming.’ Or ‘Don’t bother me, I’m reading a book about Emmeline Pankhurst Leslie gave me.’ ‘I have to have the kitchen. Leslie’s coming and I must bake a cake.’”

  “That’s not for me. Don’t believe the propaganda. Your sister’s the one with the sweet tooth.” And Bernie.

  “She’s going to ruin her complexion.” Absently Cam touched an old scar of acne near her temple. But Honor’s skin was flawless. How could Cam help being jealous if only because of their mother’s preference? She found Cam’s view disquieting. It was like looking at op art, lines that kept changing focus. She tended to think of herself as dancing attendance upon Honor. More than likely Honor was using her as a blanket excuse. Her name was sui generis or gender safer than Bernie’s and probably stood for both of them.

  “I like her, genuinely,” Leslie said brusquely. “She’s not quite like anyone else.”

  Cam gave her an amused sideways glance. “You can say that again. Lord, why couldn’t I have a nice giggling gum-chewing teenybopper sister like everybody else? I’d put up with it, I’d be so tolerant! Instead I have a kid sister who offers to write my paper on Ibsen so I won’t flunk out, but only if I’ll pay her five dollars a page.”