The High Cost of Living

by Marge Piercy

  “Not unless you have other friends to see. Monday we’ll manage it. Where will you be staying?”

  Val was therefore not inviting her to come and stay. And could not see her Sunday. “Are you … actually living with Lena?”

  “Yes, of course. Where will you be on Monday?”

  “I’ll stay with Mary and Liz. I’ll ask them, but I’m sure it’s okay.”

  “Better check. They’re a hotel for runaway wives these days. But it’s a good choice, Mary and Liz. I’ll call you out there Monday.” Valerie hung up.

  Monday we’ll manage it. Now what did that mean? That Lena was possessive and jealous? That Lena had forbidden Valerie to see her? A good choice, Mary and Liz. What did that mean? Mary and Liz were more her friends than they were Lena’s. Liz and Lena had had a fight a couple of years before on whether to form a coalition with a male-dominated Black group on issues of minority and women’s hiring, and neither woman had trusted the other since. Liz called Lena a racist, and Lena called Liz a fool. Didn’t Valerie’s being willing to make the phone call, to create the chance, didn’t that prove Val was still wanting Leslie? Hope tormented her in a cloud of biting flies and she twisted her head as she walked. Constantly Honor reproved her for walking too quickly. “We aren’t racing to Grand River. Nobody here will give you a gold medal for a fast mile!” Imagine her wanting to throw Honor down on the couch. She had an impulse to confess to Bernie at the first opportunity, but that gave a moment’s urge too much weight.

  “Why don’t you ever come and visit me?” she asked Honor. The words were out before she considered them. “I always come to you. You must get bored with the house.”

  “But Mama. You know she calls.”

  “How can she mind your visiting me?”

  “She’d find something. She’d object to my coming home after dark alone.”

  “I’ll bring you back. I’ll escort you door to door.” She saw herself endlessly trundling across Detroit on the buses and she winced. Why had she offered that, why?

  “I am curious. Bernar’ insisted your apartment is a nun’s cell. I’ve never seen Bernar’s lodgings either. Have you?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Why don’t you? You don’t have problems with mamas. Go and give me a report. I love to have each of you talk to me about the other. It’s endlessly fascinating to shift perspective.”

  “When you say that, you make me feel vulnerable. To think of you together talking about me.”

  “Of course we talk about you. Don’t you and Bernar’ talk about me all the time?”

  “Actually, no.”

  “Well, then, what on earth do you and Bernie talk about when I’m not there, if it isn’t about me?”

  “We don’t spend that much time together. At first we were sniffing suspiciously. Testing each other. Now we argue a lot about how we experience being gay.”

  “Gay—Bernie uses that word too. I hate ‘in’ words.”

  “The other choice is saying homosexual to cover both. I’m not homosexual. I don’t like homos, which sound like men to me. What a long awkward word. ‘Come to me, my homosexual baby,’” Leslie crooned while Honor laughed, looking around.

  “What do you find to argue about?” Honor was frowning slightly, peering at her. “That you should like men and he should like women?”

  “How we each feel about being gay.”

  “Sounds dull. I’m glad you do it together instead of attempting to include me, since I haven’t even had a chance to be heterosexual yet. Like the angels, I have no sex life at all.… I do envy you, able to run around and have assignations. You can visit Bernie. He can visit you. You can race around the city to shops and museums and restaurants, while I’m doing my homework.”

  Looking sideways at Honor, who was slowly twirling and untwirling a curl, Leslie realized with a chill that Honor was in fact jealous.

  At the Cunningham’s, Honor brooded on the nail polishes. “I’m trying to decide whether painting my nails is a vice I want to take on.”

  “Why bother? It can’t be good for your nails. Cam is always daubing at herself, yet I can’t see she looks any better for it.”

  Honor frowned at her extended right hand. “I don’t enjoy my hands. How peasantish they are. I covet Bernie’s hands. He has the hands I ought to have. No, you’re right, Leslie, I’ll pass it by. I don’t want to call that much attention to my hands. Now if women polished the tips of their breasts, that’d be another matter.”

  As they walked back along Grand River, past the wig shop, two bars, one closed by the police and boarded up, an empty store with a broken window, a dry cleaner’s, a liquor store, knots of men stood in front of the bar and again in front of the liquor store. Leslie moved over to pass in between the men and the girl. Past the muttered, the loud comments, the leering, the obscenities, Honor kept quiet. Then when they turned onto her street that went straight for half a mile to her house (and straight for miles after that in both directions in a grid pattern with numbers that rose into the 20,000s), Honor said, “I really do like my breasts. I’m proud of them, I like to look at them and touch them. But when I walk past a group of … louts like that, it’s ugly. Maybe I don’t want to be touched at all by anyone. To be … used. To be torn open and used.”

  “You could make love with women for years and still be untorn.”

  “I’ve read about women raping other women. In prison.”

  “I’ve known hundreds of lesbians, and I have never once known a woman to force another woman. Ever.”

  “What I’m trying to say is, maybe I’m narcissistic. Will I ever fall in love? Perhaps Mama has trained me to be so self-involved I’ll never, never care for anyone else except as a friend. Every day I imagine making love. I imagine the scene, the mood, how I’m dressed, what we say. But when it comes to what they call the nitty-gritty, I fade out.”

  “Could that be lack of experience? Or maybe you’re not attracted sexually to men.”

  “I like the way Bernar’ looks at me. He flatters me. It feels sexual, but there’s no threat in it. He won’t ever … attack or make a pass. Not that I’d want him to. I adore being friends with him.”

  “I also … admire you,” Leslie said quietly.

  “I love to be admired. The both of you make me feel wonderful, ever so much better than those street louts or the goon squad at school. Maybe what I need is a civilized lout. I don’t know. Sometimes I see myself in Faulkner. You know, our house as decaying manse. Mama and I ending our days together, tremendously old women. Her still sewing perfect lovely gowns for me and insisting I can’t wear them to the corner for fear of being ravished. She’s ninety-five and I’m almost seventy and we’re living in a maze of bric-a-brac.” Honor screwed her face up, holding out a palsied hand and speaking in a cracked voice. “Now, my baby, how are you feeling this morning? You look frail. Fine, Mama, shall I wear the pink marquisette or the blue voile? The blue voile, my darling, but do put on your shawl. And take a parasol to protect your tender complexion from the sun. Nowadays people are all courting skin cancer, the way they expose themselves. You have a lovely bloom and you must protect it. Now don’t walk too far and tire yourself. Perhaps to the garbage can in the yard and back.” Her shoulders were hunched, she held her hands as claws. “And don’t speak to the neighbors, they’re not what I’d call nice.”

  Leslie laughed, a little scandalized that Honor could satirize her dependency. “Your mother didn’t care much for Bernie and me, did she?”

  “Whatever made you imagine that?” Honor snapped back to defend her mother. “She wants to meet both of you again soon.”

  “She was angry about the earrings.”

  “Really, Leslie, she had wonderful things to say about you. She said you could be terribly attractive if you tried. With natural red hair and a creamy complexion, there are dozens of colors you can wear that make me look sallow—if you didn’t run around in jeans all the time. Right after you’ve washed it, your hair gleams. O
f course it’s not thick like mine, but if you wore it curly the effect would be stunning. She says you have perfect posture—the way I ought to, she says, although I do think I have a devastating walk—and a good figure, if you dressed so it could be seen sometimes!”

  “I have good musculature too.” They were passing a coal yard. Leslie stripped off her pea jacket, thrust it at Honor, rolled up the sleeve of her workshirt and made her biceps hard. “See?”

  “Leslie!”

  “I worked for my muscles. I was born with my hair, and my hips just grew. But every muscle represents years of effort.”

  “You say you don’t want to be like a man. Why are you ashamed to look like a woman?”

  “I dress for comfort, durability, cheapness. I’m not entirely indifferent. In addition to my everyday gi—gi, that’s what I wear for karate—I have a special gi that’s bleached, for ceremonial occasions. Honorée, the way I look, that’s how I look when I wake up, when I get out of the shower, when I make love. It’s just me, all the way through.”

  “I see that you want to be loved in despite. You want to say, Take me or leave me. Bang. Just as I am.”

  Leslie was unable to turn her head. She could not tell if Honor was speaking personally, saying, You want me to love you in despite. Or generally. She could not tell. She could not turn her head and look at Honor. “Maybe.” Finally she turned, but now Honor was waving languidly to a girl who shouted from a passing Rambler. Loved in despite: was that true? Every time she had Honor neatly classified in age group and virginity, Honor startled her. “You mean to say that I … I ask too much?”

  Honor was staring after the car, shaking her head. “She was my best friend. Barbara. In the seventh grade till the ninth. In our sophomore year she fell in love with a creep named Zack. She had sex with him in cars, in drive-ins, at the beach, on the playground, in the bleachers, every place I suppose he could manage to ram it into her. Really. I don’t know what she got out of it. She told me once she never had an orgasm. But if he frowned, she cried. She cried, she took Quaaludes, she cried and drank, she cried and got pregnant and had an abortion, she cried and he left her anyhow. Now she’s involved with another jerk I can’t tell from the first except he has pimples and plays ice hockey and is even stupider. Mama wants to know why I don’t have girlfriends. Barbara was my best friend. We had secrets I wouldn’t even tell Mama. We were going to live together when we grew up, and after we got married we were going to name our daughters for each other. Maybe that’s the one she had out at the hospital.”

  “It hurts a lot when women let men come between them. Are you afraid to be close to another woman because of losing Barbara?”

  “Barbara lost Barbara. I’m not afraid—I’m close to you. Not to mention Mama. I’m sorry I went on about Barbara—my man, my man, anything for my man. You tell me I’m too traditionally feminine, but I’m not that traditional. I find her a mess. There’s no … style, what Bernie calls grace.”

  “I don’t think any woman sets out to make a fool of herself. What she imagines happening is romantic love. What she gets is a bloody mess where pulling out feels as if she’ll lose everything she put in. See, I remember all that. I was Barbara in high school. Except I was too stupid to know when I got pregnant, and I lost it, like you’d lose your dinner if you ate something that upset your stomach.”

  “I’m glad you told me about being pregnant. Bernar’ told me, but I wanted you to feel free to talk about it yourself.”

  “That’s years ago. It doesn’t press on my mind.” Yet she was upset to think of Bernie telling Honor behind her back.

  Mary picked her up at the bus station in Grand Rapids to drive her out to the farm. Like herself, Mary came from a small city in Michigan, Holland in Mary’s case, where the tourists flocked for the tulip festival and carried home plastic replicas of wooden shoes and windmills. Mary was plump and flaxen blond. She taught chemistry in night school and commuted from their farm, filled in Saturdays in a medical lab.

  It was dark when they arrived. The house stood at the head of a circular drive; anyhow a sand track ran in a circle in front of it past the rusting skeleton of a car. A front door, hardly ever used, led into the old parlor. They went around to the back, entering a long porch where potatoes and onions, garlic and apples were stored in bushel baskets. The kitchen was steamy and thick with good food smells. “We killed a chicken for you,” Liz said, kissing her. “It may be tough, but it’ll taste good. I made soup from it.”

  Liz came from the UP—the Upper Peninsula. She had grown up on skis and she was sturdy. Her light brown hair was cropped, she was a little shorter than Mary and Leslie herself, and she had a loud abrupt infectious laugh that had been the first thing Leslie had noticed about her in the old days when they had met in a local lesbian rap group. Liz had a four-year-old from a marriage still legally in force, although her husband had disappeared right after the birth of Rosellen. When Leslie first met her, Liz had been on AID, but the farm was in both women’s names now and they farmed seriously. They raised all their own vegetables, most of their own fruit, and they sold lettuce, beans, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and pumpkins from the tailgate of their truck in the farmers market in Grand Rapids.

  The kitchen was hot from the wood stove they cooked on. All the kids were there—Rosellen and Mary’s fraternal twins, Bob and Yevette, who were six. Mary was divorced and once in a while she got forty a month child support. Still it was Mary who had saved the money for the down payment on the farm and it was on her feeble credit they had finally procured a mortgage. The house was seventy years old and needed work; in fact work sank into it almost without a trace. An army of women could have swarmed over it for a year with saws and hammers and left it only habitable. Mary and Liz and the kids seemed mostly to camp in it, using the livingroom and kitchen heavily while they put their effort into the land. The land fed them. The house would come later.

  “Did you get the furnace fixed?” Leslie asked, sitting at the long rough table.

  “Not yet It’s so old. I don’t know that it’s really worth it.” Liz shook the short brown hair out of her eyes, giving a last stir to the pot. “Oil’s so high. There’s all the wood we can burn in our woods, and we have to thin the trees anyhow. Part’s natural woods, but part was planted in Christmas trees, Scotch pines, and they’re too close. They never got harvested and it’s a mess.” She brought the soup to the table.

  Every plate was different, from rummage sales, and “Everything comes from the land, everything!” except the cheap red wine in gallon jugs. “But we don’t see why we can’t make our own wine eventually. We have grapes started. Bobbie! Quit picking out the pieces of chicken. Just take it as it comes, Bobbie! Or I’ll have to serve you instead of letting you take for yourself like a big person.”

  “What’s this about runaway wives?” Leslie asked.

  “Oh!” Mary laughed. “We’re part of the underground railway of abused women. There’s houses in Chicago and Minneapolis. I hear maybe one’s getting organized in Detroit. Is it true?”

  “I hadn’t heard,” Leslie said guiltily.

  “Well, if a woman or her kids are in danger and the man discovers where she is at one of the regular houses, we’re one of the hidey holes she can come to with her kids till she can get help or figure out what to do. We just get the cases in real trouble—I mean they’re all in real trouble—mortal danger.”

  “What do you do with them?”

  “We play with them!” Yevette said loudly. “Sometimes they got real babies.”

  Over more of the wine, wrapped in an old quilt and cuddled on a straight chair near the potbelly stove in the livingroom, she listened as they caught her up on the world she had left to pursue her degree with George: matings, partings, firings, hirings, parties, and quarrels. “We didn’t ask anybody over tonight because of what you said about Val. Are you officially here or not?”

  “Not yet.” Leslie sounded grim even to herself and she tried to smile into L
iz’s square face and Mary’s round one. Her own was baked dry on the cheek toward the stove and frozen on the far cheek. She felt awkward. She was happy to see her friends again, yet clearly she had not come to be with them. Everything in her was in abeyance. Her whole body held its breath and she was rigid all the way through with waiting.

  nine

  “Mary can give me a ride into the city. Or I can hitch a ride easy. I can walk to Route Forty-five—it’s only a mile—and hitch in.”

  “What for?” Valerie sounded miffed. “Where can we go in town? I’ll drive out there. I’ll arrive, oh, about one. I have a class I can cut.”

  “Class? You’re going to school?”

  “Tell you all about it. One o’clock, see you.”

  “Drive? You have a car? You’re borrowing Lena’s?” But Val had hung up.

  At one the house was empty. The twins were at school, Mary was teaching, Rosellen was following Liz through the muddy furrows. They had a share in a tiller, and Leslie had spent the morning plowing in cover crops on the upper fields, which were dry enough to work. She took a shower—hot water was one luxury they had—combed her hair back, put on the vest her lover had given her and began to pace.

  She vibrated nervousness checking the house. She was sleeping in the room that had been the parlor of the old farmhouse, next to the room they used now as a livingroom. It had been fixed up to accommodate the abused women Mary and Liz occasionally sheltered. She tossed her sleeping bag on the central bed, a sturdily built platform with a mattress on which she had in conscious hope put clean sheets. The rest of the room was filled with bunk beds, shelves holding an assortment of toys and clean linen, a rag rug, bright red and white curtains. She opened the door between the old parlor and the present livingroom so the potbelly she had stoked well with wood might send some heat in. In case, in case.

  The livingroom was a big square room with windows on two sides hung with curtains in a blue print. An old couch, V-shaped with hard use, faced a couch constructed of a plywood platform with pillows on it. Liz must have built the bunks and the couch. Otherwise there were straight chairs and a bookcase running to children’s books, The Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening, Department of Agriculture pamphlets on bramble fruits and potato storage, old and new herbals, Patience and Sarah, and Mary’s chemistry texts. It was already one-forty. If only she could turn off her mind, turn off her nerves. Be frozen until Val’s arrival thawed her to life. Where was she?