by Marge Piercy
Going to George’s was a pleasure. She felt happier than she had in months, since that day on the water she held herself rigidly straight not to remember. She did not want to arrive at George’s, ever. She could keep going. Past George’s. The mythical male open road past the filling station and the pile of wrecks in the junkyard, into the oil slick sunset. Even if all her human relations had combusted, that was bullshit. No, her life was here. In fact she arrived early to help Sue in the kitchen.
She walked into a fight. The children had been given supper already and were stashed upstairs in the family room in front of the television set with the puppy. Suddenly in the last week Sue had changed her mind and given in to Davey and Louise’s perennial clamor for a dog. A clumsy Great Dane puppy, rawboned and bigeyed, was peeing on the family room rug upstairs. On the phone Sue told her, “He’ll be a protection. You know how unsafe it is.”
The children and the guard puppy were upstairs, but Sue and George were having it out in the kitchen. They had a habit of fighting in the kitchen ever since she had known them, arguing in tense unnaturally soft voices so the children would not hear. The children were watching reruns of The FBI and wouldn’t have heard them if they had shot each other. She wanted to go upstairs with the kids and Hoover’s blood-wet dreams until peace had come, but both Sue and George with different excuses drew her in.
“We have to get ready. All those students will be coming any minute.” Sue made as if to begin cutting cheese.
“But you like students so much. Suddenly.” George sounded sour. He was whining. “I think Sue needs help, Leslie. I think she needs help badly, but she won’t do anything about it.”
“You mean in addition to the cleaning lady?”
“Psychiatric help,” George snarled. “She needs a doctor.”
She was having trouble looking at George. She did not want to see him. It would pass, it would go away. She kept her eyes on Sue instead.
“He thinks I’m crazy,” Sue said airly, chopping the cheese into big crooked yellow hunks. “What’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, sugar.”
“When you put on that fake drawl, it drives me ape.”
“I come from Texas, sugar. Did you forget that? I wouldn’t if I were you. We have an open marriage. Wide open. That wasn’t my idea. Ever. It sure as … heck wasn’t my idea. Here I am bringing up two children, keeping house for you and entertaining—”
“Leslie does most of that and you know it.”
“I do not! I just follow directions on Thursday nights.” Leslie was getting very nervous. She edged toward the door. Upstairs the puppy was barking.
“I thought you’d straightened out since we moved here. It’s a step in the right direction, a better position, and you got all that old grant money you were crying for. I think you’d be too busy, the way other women’s husbands are. But no, I thought you’d straightened yourself out and quit that funny business. I mean, how old do you have to be? Sixty-five? You have two children. I’d think you’d leave tom-catting around.”
“How can you stand there and say that to me after what you’ve done? You’re the one disregarding the children. The mother has a responsibility!”
“I got a sitter.” Sue smirked.
“You’re home with them, you have to take care. I do a lot for them. I spend more time with my kids than ninety-nine percent of men do.”
“Sugar, if your thing doesn’t bother the children, I don’t see why my thing does. So there! Sauce for the goose!”
“If you don’t quit using that inane expression—”
“You’ll what? Are you going to threaten me? Leslie, I’m sure this is a real riot for you to listen to, because I’m sure you know as well as I do he’s carrying on again, this time with a … a nymphet. Did you ever read Lolita? She’s a high school student, a child. Do you believe it?”
Nervously in narrowing circles Leslie arranged sesame crackers on a plate. “You’ve lived this way a long time. Why are you disagreeing now?” He was in love with Honor, that must be it. He was really in love this time. He would leave Sue.
George whined, “She’s taken up with one of my students. My student, do you believe it? Really, even if you weren’t my wife I’d be embarrassed. Embarrassed for you.”
“I think Mark’s quite attractive. And I surely do think it’s unbecoming to you to be so jealous of me.” Sue laughed flirtatiously.
Leslie realized that Sue was enjoying herself covertly. For the first time in one of their fights Sue felt herself to be in a winning position.
“Jealous!” George sputtered. “I’m humiliated!”
“The difference in our ages, of which you are making such a silly fuss,” Sue went on languidly, “is much less than the difference between you and your new young high school sweetheart.”
“She’s mature for her age,” George snarled. “She was the one who pursued it. She’s old enough to chase men. She comes on like the marines. They start running around very early nowadays.”
“Up here in the North, maybe. I’m really amazed, George, absolutely stunned how upset you are, I really truly am. I’ll bet Leslie is too. I never in my life imagined you’d carry on so about it. I really never thought you cared that much what I did in that line. And especially considering the way you’ve been handling yourself of late, George. For instance, Friday night. Now I know there’s no departmental meeting late Friday night. That’s a bad joke to play on your ever-loving wife.”
Georre was chewing his mustache. She had never seen him do that. She could not help enjoying the sight just a little bit. The doorbell rang. “Oh, god!” he groaned. “They’re here. Fuck them all.”
“Sugar, you’ve tried. We’ll carry on, don’t worry about us. You just go and talk at them the way you always do.” Sue turned her back.
When they were alone in the kitchen running around, Sue took the time to murmur at her ear, “I know that kid isn’t in love with me. He’s got a pretty young girlfriend who’s nuts about him. Why should he need me? He lives with George’s secretary. But he has gall, he has guts. You have to give him that. Let’s say it right out—he has balls! My, isn’t George livid? I was so amazed when the kid propositioned me. I was a little drunk, if you know what I mean. I sobered up like judgment day and all I could do was stare. I thought he’d lost his mind. He doesn’t like George, you know that? But he told me he’d been eying me for months and trying to work up the courage! Imagine. I was touched, frankly. But I’d never have done it if George wasn’t acting like a ninny about that child. He’s going to get into trouble, and I can’t tolerate that. It has to be nipped in the bud.”
“You’re very worried about it? That he’s serious?”
“Serious? Don’t be silly. Some high school floozy bold as brass? You know she even called him at home the other day?”
“She isn’t a floozy.… I think she was a … virgin, you know.”
“Oh, Leslie, you’re naive. So what? So was I. And I didn’t chase after him, you better believe it. And I didn’t try to take him from his lawful wedded wife. Cherries are still ten for the dollar around campuses, you know that George could care less.… Leslie, he couldn’t get up in the morning without me! He wouldn’t know what clothes to put on. He wouldn’t know where to find his socks!”
Mark did not show up that evening, although every time the door opened George glared at it. He was edgy, irritable. When people were finally leaving and she was picking up, he slapped her somewhat too heavily on the shoulder. “I’ll get that punk.” George was still chewing on his mustache. “I’ll have his ass barbecued on a pole! I’ll kill him academically. He better start learning how to pump gas, because that’s all he’s going to be doing from now on. Just because I had his assistantship dropped. His punk revenge—can you imagine the nerve? On a pole, I’m telling you, over a slow fire.”
She taught her first class. It went far more slowly than she had imagined. They covered less than a third of what she had anticipated, and she realized
she was going to have to rethink her plan. They were working in the basement of the house, covered with what mats they had been able to find and some old carpeting. She had to get more mats. The class was full, twenty women, all she had been willing to take, and there were women waiting in case anyone dropped out. She felt good about that.
She had meant to start teaching them to fall, but instead the first class was all exercises. It moved her, watching the women begin trying to use their bodies in a different way. She looked at them—skinny from dieting, thick around the middle, soft bodied, bulgy, floppy, all the marvelous round shapes of women—and watched them trying to stretch, trying to touch their toes, trying to do sit-ups. She could pick out the ones who had done at least something physical before. It moved her, watching them strain themselves. She had to keep a sharp eye out for those who would not be able to get out of bed in the morning. Grunting, moaning, sweating, they gallumphed around, awkward, earnest. Sometimes she almost felt like crying. They had put themselves in her hands to learn something new about how to be in the world, a new relationship to their bodies, to possibilities. She was to teach them a slim measure of safety and strength.
“We won’t stay with the karate ritual that men have developed,” she said suddenly. “At the beginning of the class instead of bowing we’ll hold hands in a circle. Would you like that?” She wanted the class to feel warm. She began to remember hating her own body, she began to remember feeling afraid, unable. She wanted each of them, she wanted the weakest, flabbiest, most out of shape woman in the class to be at ease. If she could not love anyone else, maybe she could love her students.
She stood in Bernie’s old room. It was up under the eaves and faced the next house. He had done his best to make it warm and livable, the ten by twelve feet of it with a bed under the slope of the roof and a desk in the dormer looking out on what light there was. He had tacked up reproductions; from somewhere he had got travel posters and a woven hanging. The bedspread was the inevitable Indian cotton. Half his clothes were still in the closet.
“He just take what he can stuff in that duffel, put it on his shoulders and go off bumming,” his landlady said from the doorway. “If you a friend, you may as well take the books or whatever you want. They just going to haul it away.”
She could find nothing to indicate where he had gone—no note, no map, nothing. No letters summoning him. The room was surprisingly free of personal clutter, things with names on. Some roses withered in a vase with a little stagnant water at the bottom, far below their dead stems. She could not think what to take, yet she felt the need for something. A French dictionary? Not French-English, but French to French. But what would she do with it, except remember him and never use it? She ended by taking a cashmere scarf she remembered him wearing back in the winter. He had not bothered with it, although it was handsome. Burt had given it to him, she remembered. That was her souvenir: her assertion of dumb connection. The landlady was watching her with a pitying expression. Was she so obvious? She thanked her profusely, took the scarf and left quickly. Her bike was chained to a tree outside, and she was glad to roar off down the street.
“I don’t understand it! I don’t understand! It doesn’t make sense. How could he change!” Honor raised her head to speak. Then she let it fall again into Leslie’s lap. “Overnight. It can’t be real. No! I don’t believe it!”
They were in Cam’s livingroom. Cam pacing, smoking a filter cigarette, pacing. Leslie sat on the daybed which Cam had hastily closed. A tag end of sheet stuck out from under the cushions. Honor lay half across her crying. She had been crying for perhaps an hour straight. Honor’s face was swollen, her lids red and enormous, her nose sore, her hair plastered to her cheeks. It was as if she had been broken and her lifeblood oozed from her eyes in water. Even the daybed was damp by now. Mark had been sent to the library, into exile from female troubles.
“He’s so attractive to women,” Cam said. “I never believed those stories he told me at first. I thought he was just trying to impress me. But it’s true! They fall all over him.”
Honor clung to Leslie desperately. “Why did he say that? I can’t believe it! I can’t. He’ll change his mind, he has to. He loves me, I know it! He said he loved me, he said it twenty times, I swear it.” Honor wept and wept. Leslie stroked her back. There was nothing sexual in it. She felt only pity and a little boredom, because an hour was a long time to sit on a brown and orange tweed daybed, lumpy and prickly under her, and to listen to the hum of the air conditioner, Cam’s worrying and Honor’s sobbing.
“I’ll tell you how it happened,” Cam said. “She came right up to him, that cow, and she put her hand right on his prick as he was sitting there. Do you believe it?”
No, Leslie thought, I remember that story. But he did go to bed with Sue, somehow. He really did. Nobody else would for seven years, and then he did. Maybe he was as surprised as she was.
“He’s dropping out of school, he’s lost his assistantship. At least he’ll never see her again. He doesn’t love her or anything. It was just sex. I could have killed them both, but never mind. I don’t know what we’ll live on. I have to get a good job.”
“Oh, George won’t fire you, don’t worry,” Leslie said. “He said you’re a good secretary.”
“Won’t fire me? Leslie, I quit!” Cam chain-lit another cigarette. “I quit this morning.”
“You quit?” Leslie sat up, automatically adjusting Honor.
“You don’t think I’d go on typing that creep’s letters after what he did to my sister? Making him coffee. Saying, Yes, sure, of course, all day. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.”
“Wow,” Leslie said. “I know you need the job.”
“Oh, I don’t expect you to quit,” Cam said hastily, trying to make her feel good. “I’m just a secretary. I’ll get another job.” She paused by the daybed. “You want me to hold her for a while? Your arm must get tired.”
“No, it’s fine,” Leslie said, feeling rotten.
“It’s easier for you to comfort her. We’ve never been physically affectionate. Something in our house keeps us from it.… Poor kid.… At least Mark says he’s not interested in Sue, if I can believe him. I always thought he was making up those stories!”
“Maybe he was,” Leslie said, who was sure of it.
“How do I know she won’t come after him?”
Honor was slowing down. Perhaps she could not cry any more. She blew her nose repeatedly, she filled paper handkerchiefs and gasped for breath. Leslie hoped Honor was almost done crying. She was late for work: for George of course. She imagined slitting his throat with a thin sharp knife. She imagined pushing him out one of the windows of his office, watching him float down in the air, turning over and over. She had a large sharp ax on her shoulder and she was cutting him up like firewood, hacking and hacking. She would never be free of anger or of dependence. How could she have hit Honor? She would never be able to hit George. Even after she got the infernal degree, she would still need him. She would need him for ten years. She couldn’t even speak her mind to him.
What could she say to Cam, who had stood up for her sister and quit George? What could she say, that she was too important to do that? What could she say, that her career was too important? That security meant too much to her? That she needed money and respect and prestige and a toehold in the middle class more than Cam did? Some reckoning was coming due. She had to face what she had not been facing.
Honor sat up, blowing her nose. “I love him, Leslie! I do. It can’t be over. He can’t mean it. She has some hold on him. He doesn’t love her, he can’t. I know he loves me.”
Me. Who do I love? Nobody. I’m afraid to. I’ve protected myself too well. Nobody. I wouldn’t take a big enough risk to love her, poor heavyhead like a huge baby on my shoulder. I came closest to Bernie, but not that close.
At the window Cam chain-lit another cigarette and fingered the stiff ends of her hair. “I better bleach my hair and take a hard look at my clothes
and start reading the want ads. We’re going to be short on the green stuff. Honey, Honor I mean, if you want to stay here, I’ll call Mama and tell her I’m taking you to something, we’ll make up a good story. You can sleep with me and we’ll send Mark to a friend’s. No! I don’t trust him out of my sight, that two-timer. You can use my plaid sleeping bag.”
Honor felt her cheeks as if they were strange to her. Then she stared at her hands. “I don’t have anything. Not even a letter. He never wrote me a letter.” Slowly she put out her tongue and licked the salt from her mouth. “I know he loves me!”
“I don’t think it has anything to do with love,” Leslie said, working her arm free. Her biceps felt cramped. Funny, you could study self-defense but not self-opening. “I think love’s a rarer phenomenon than we’re led to expect.”
“Leslie, you’re my only friend. Oh, I wish I could talk to Bernie now. Maybe we could call him up. I got so mad at him, but at least he was always my friend.”
“He’s left town.”
“What will happen to me? I feel such pain I think I’ll die!” Honor pushed her hair back, groped for her purse where it had fallen. “If you don’t call it love, what do you call it?”
“Pain. I call it pain.” Leslie got Honor’s purse for her. She watched while Honor wiped her face, combed her hair, dabbed at her rumpled dress. “Do you want to stay here with Cam?”
Honor shook her head no.
“Do you want me to give you a ride home on my bike?”
“No!” Honor snorted. “Can you hear what Mama would say? I’ll go home on the bus. I’ll sit way at the back so if I cry nobody will see.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay, honey?” Cam asked, sitting down with the newspaper and a marking pen.
“I have to go home,” Honor found a small square of mirror in her purse and squinted into it. She stared at herself with a blank resignation, as if looking through her face to something else. “Tomorrow I’m supposed to start work as a receptionist for my doctor—the one who gives me the notes letting me out of gym.”