by Marge Piercy
She hated when it rained and they could not walk. Every morning she took care of Mrs. Entemann’s children, from seven till three-thirty. She was bringing in money. Half she gave to Aunt Rose and half she kept for herself. Uncle Morris took her to the bank to open an account. She had a passbook and they stamped what she put in every week. She got a quarter an hour for minding the babies, because neither of them was toilet-trained yet and she had to be changing them all the time. Naomi took her change out of its hiding place and carried it to the bank. America seemed to be rich enough to survive. That decision made her feel less a greenhorn. She was becoming very American. Often people could not tell she was an immigrant.
When she got off work, she ran to see if Leib wanted to take a walk. If he didn’t, then she went to find her friends, but if he did, that crowned her day. She worried that when she returned to high school in the fall, he wouldn’t wait for her till she got home. It was July, but at least once a day, she worried about what would happen in September. She did not want their time together, their precious intimate time, to lapse.
“Italy’s all one fucking mountain after another, and the blonds—that’s what we called the Germans—were always above us on the next mountain picking us off. One killing obstacle after another, one more fast muddy river with the bridges blown, one more mountain so steep you know they used to send mules up to bring us food and ammo? We had a whole bunch of mule skinners attached to our battalion, and damned if those mules weren’t better fed and housed than us.”
He took her arm often, tucking it against his warm body, so that she could feel his ribs, his flesh against her. Sometimes when he was tired he leaned on her, and although he was heavy, she was proud to help him. He did not ask her if she would help. He knew she would. He needs me, she told herself, taut with pride.
Sometimes his voice seemed like an eagle beating its wings against a lid put on its world. His wanting was fierce, but so far it was stymied. He did not know yet what he wanted, although he knew well what he didn’t, to live and work like the people around him. He spoke of vague schemes but she did not doubt he would do something splendid soon.
“All my real buddies are in the Army, but Fatty Windsor is 4F. I might just ask him to give me a job tending bar. A lot of guys with good connections hang out in his old man’s bar.”
She listened passionately, every pore of her body absorbing his words.
“Now I’m finally of age, maybe he’ll give me a job. You know, when they drafted me, I was too goddamn young to get drunk in a bar? Now I’m twenty-two, and already they took my foot and gave me this piece of metal, already I got a family like a millstone around my neck, which who needs by now, and I got no skills worth writing on a piece of toilet paper.”
Often she grew weary of feeling guilty all the time because of her nightmares, because of her secret knowledge that Maman was dead and would never return to her, would never come and take her back home, and that her twin was a prisoner under the earth toiling and growing colder and farther away. The dreams came less vividly. She felt guilty too that she wanted them to fade away. She did not want to know. She did not want to be in Rivka’s body any longer.
It was the end of July and so hot that Detroit felt scorched, a pool of rancid oil. It had not rained in ten days and the air was used and thick. The grass was drying brown in Palmer Park. They had taken a bus today and walked in the park, because Leib hoped it would be cooler. He had been drinking beer, but said it just made him hotter. “Under the trees, it’ll be cooler,” he said, leading the way into the woods. His limp was pronounced. “I’m sick of the heat. I can’t sleep at night. Have you been sleeping?”
“Last night, Ruthie and I took off our nighties and we both slept in our panties, it was so hot.” She knew she shouldn’t say that.
“That must have been a gorgeous sight. Wish I’d been there.” He led her under a spruce and let himself down. “Ah, here it’s halfway to cool.”
The spruce made a dark tent under itself, as if they had entered a secret green room. She knew she should not be here with him. But why not? Nobody had said she could not walk with him. Trudi thought it was fine. When he did not walk the way he was supposed to, Trudi scolded him. Everybody felt sorry for him, crippled, but she did not think of him as a cripple. Her breath caught in her throat like the dry needles under them.
She sat stiffly beside him. He opened his eyes and looked at her and grinned. “Come here, Naomi, my Naomi. Come here.” He put his hands on her shoulders and put his mouth on hers. It was not like being kissed by Alvin, although Leib too put his tongue in her mouth. He pushed her back on the needles to kiss her and her arms came around him. She loved him, she loved him with her whole life. The world rushed through her, wanting to offer itself in love to Leib, whose name was love, whose arms were around her, whose body pressed on hers like the world itself, heavy and inevitable.
He moved slightly off her and slid his hand up under her cotton blouse, closing over her breast. “I used to be in love with your aunt Ruth, do you know that?”
“Yes,” Naomi said. She could hardly speak. Her voice sounded as if it were crushed in her throat.
“You’re getting to look like her, the way she was when she was younger. You’re getting prettier and prettier.”
“I don’t look like Ruthie.”
“You look like you. I used to love Ruthie. Now I’m going to love you. Do you want me to love you?”
“I love you,” she said, her throat hardly letting the words twist out.
“Yes, my dove, my precious, my baby. Let’s see.” He put his hand into her panties, between her legs. She cried out involuntarily. “You’re a virgin, aren’t you, little one? You haven’t let any of the boys in yet.”
“No.” She could not stop him. She could not move. She sweated with terror. Where he thrust his finger into her, she hurt.
“Are you scared? Your heart is pounding. I’m not going to hurt you. I wouldn’t take you here. But you’ll love me, won’t you?”
“I love you,” she said in that throttled voice. She was glad when he took his hand away. He put it back on her breast, where it felt better.
“How old are you exactly?”
“Almost fifteen.”
“Too bad,” Leib said. “You’re too young, Naomi, but you’ll grow up and by then, it’ll be even better. You’re going to grow up for me, just for me, aren’t you?”
She did not know what he meant but she said, “I am growing up. I’m old for my age.”
“You’re going to grow into my woman. You’re going to be just what I want, aren’t you?”
“You’re married to Trudi.”
“I had to marry somebody. I knew something would happen to me. I lost my foot, but I could have lost my life. I had to make a son. That’s all right, Naomi, I’ll make others with you. Trudi is a fucking bore. If she was home all the time, I’d strangle her.”
She did not like what he was saying, for it frightened her. It opened a pit into which she was falling. She could not argue with his hand on her breast that was burning, his leg over hers, his mouth covering hers and kissing her. Surely that she had dreamed this so often had made it happen and she was the guilty one. She had made this wicked and dangerous thing happen by the magic of wishing it too many times.
“Take off your panties,” he said, pulling back from her.
She did not move. “You said you wouldn’t,” she pleaded.
“Honey dove, I’m not going to fuck you. The last thing I need is to get you pregnant at fifteen. I had kids your age in Naples, you know that? I’m keeping you for the right time, because you’re going to ripen just for me.” He put her hand against something stumpy and she knew immediately it was what Sandy had called the man’s thing. He pulled the panties off her and then he climbed on her and she found herself crying with fear, the tears rolling down her face. “Now put your legs tight together, that’s right.” He began thrusting back and forth between her thighs, rubbing against her hard,
but he did not tear her, he did not come in. “Here, get your skirt up out of the way.”
She stopped crying. “Trust me,” he muttered in her ear, and she held him and waited. He was not going to tear her open. He was just rubbing against her. After a while, it began to feel good in a scary breathless way. Leib loved her. She was a bad girl who would be a bad woman, but he loved her. After he had finished all sticky between her thighs, he made her spread her legs wide and wiped her with his handkerchief. “When you go home, wash yourself carefully, always.” He was smiling. “I thought you’d do anything I wanted, but I wasn’t sure.”
She put her panties back on and smoothed down her skirt. She did not know where to look, but finally, she could not help turning to him again, the dark beautiful sun that rose on her world.
“Don’t say anything, not to Ruthie or to Rose. It’s Ruthie you confide in, isn’t it? If you say anything to her, everybody will blame you and call you a bad girl, and I’ll have to move out. No more walks. You’ll never again be my dove.”
“I won’t say anything. I promise.”
“Not to your best girlfriend. Who’s your best friend?”
“Sandy, but Aunt Rose and Mrs. Rosenthal don’t speak to each other.”
“You don’t say anything to her. Nothing about how you know about men now, nothing. Promise?”
“Nothing,” Naomi repeated solemnly. “I promise.” It was like a ceremony, a vow with the dark tree bending with its green wings spread down to the ground, brooding over them.
DANIEL 7
Flutterings
It was a quiet shock Daniel felt, yet it reverberated through his life for weeks. A chill of depression lay on him in the sweltering August, as green leggy flies with iridescent wings and black flies and flies with the heads like jewels that drew blood when they bit, when mosquitoes and yellow moths and moths like scraps of paper bag all swirled in through the open windows and flittered around him as he worked. He wanted to exhaust himself at OP-20-G. He wanted to go out with the boys afterwards. What he didn’t want was to go home.
Never had he lived with a woman before and therefore, he concluded, never had he missed anyone as he did Louise. He had a physical sense of severance. Furthermore every object released memories like static shocks. She had left in such a hurry that he was always finding her hairpins, her books, her lace-edged handkerchiefs, her fragrance for a time clinging to chairs, to pillowcases, to dresser drawers. He should not have moved down there, he knew it, but he could not endure Rodney any longer. He simply could not go from being with Louise, living with a daily sensual elegance, to sleeping in the living room on his mattress among Rodney’s abandoned boxer shorts, beer bottles and chili cans.
The downstairs apartment was haunted by Louise. Was he angry with her? Yes. He could not forgive her for abandoning him. He was not used to women leaving him, yet the sense of being deserted was familiar. It made him remember how he had felt when his father had left them in the Bronx and gone off to China, left them to suppers of beans or oatmeal, to studying by candlelight because the electricity had been turned off for failure to pay the bill, of his feet always hurting because his socks were darned lumpy. The other kids had teased him because his father had run away, they said, run away to China.
That summer his mother had found a kitchen job in the Catskills and his older brother Haskel had gone along to work as a busboy, but he and Judy had been left with a neighbor. He had never spoken to Judy about that summer, but he had felt abandoned. Crying alone, he had decided nobody cared for him in his family, nobody, that they viewed him as an accident that had happened to them.
He was still stunned that Louise had left him. He had known, of course, how much she disliked her job at OWI and how frustrated she felt. Yet she was writing interesting articles, always, and she could have gone on doing that. Sometimes he blamed Kay. Louise always felt that whatever damn fool thing Kay did was Louise’s own fault, issuing directly from a failure of upbringing. Daniel thought that after an early point, kids pretty much did what they felt like. The world the new generation lived in was different from their parents’ world in its pressures, fantasies and standards, even its jokes and bywords. Kay experienced her war and Louise lived hers.
Why had she left him? Sometimes he was convinced it was to get back with her exhusband, who always loomed off there on the edge of Louise’s mental landscape. Oscar was still her inner measure of male. She hadn’t given him enough time to replace Oscar, and why not? That was the sore he returned to, licking and licking until it was infected.
Since he was fifteen, he had always been in love. Even during his chaste months at Harvard, he had been in love with his exacting mistress, the Japanese language, which he imagined as a courtesan with enameled face out of Hokusei, mocking him from behind a fan, body rippling under a silken kimono. Now he had bad dreams. Often he dreamed of Louise, leaving him again and again.
He had had two letters from her, letters from London, but he had not opened the first until the second had come. He had taken great pleasure in picking it up each day as he came home from work and then tossing it down again, forcing it to remain silent, dumb, rejected. Now that there were two, side by side, his curiosity overcame him.
She wrote him that the only thing she missed from Washington was him. The phrasing irritated him. She was supposed to be a writer, sensitive to language, yet she called him a thing. That was how she thought of him: a body, a convenience, a small pleasure to be put away after its season. I am Madame Butterfly, Daniel said to himself. He despised himself for his grief, but the world seemed to him full of shrill and gentle cries of pain.
The commander he had replaced had come out of the hospital and resumed his old post, so Daniel was back decoding and translating messages. Part of the American strategy in the Pacific was to bypass many strongly held Japanese islands, leaving them in isolation so that while they were unconquered, they were useless and in exile from the war. These ports and islands sent and received messages which OP-20-G had to monitor. The pathos of these little garrisons moved Daniel. They could not be resupplied or evacuated, but held out hundreds of miles behind enemy lines with their dwindling supplies and evaporating morale, radioing passionate devotion for the emperor and samurai sentiments to their superiors, who were writing them off as dead losses. They were bombed now and then, more for practice than for any military end, while leaflets urging surrender rained on them whenever any appropriate officer got around to ordering it done.
Although he wrote only brief formal notes, he went on receiving occasional letters from Louise. Then he began to see her articles. That is, he took to buying Collier’s every week, because something from her was usually there. It was masochistic, yet he did it.
When the pieces on children growing up in subway stations gave way to stories about the daily life of artillery units and tank crews, he realized that she could be killed. Correspondents were shot, they were torpedoed, they were blown up by land mines or artillery shells or bombs that fell on them as on the troops. He was safe in Washington reading other people’s mail while she was off sticking her nose into foxholes in France. Why? He could not quite put together Louise in the kitchen making gefilte fish or kasha varniskes with Louise kneeling behind a stone fence, as she was shown in an accompanying photo, her familiar face daubed with mud, the rest of her indistinguishable in its bulky khaki from the GI next to her. He stared at the photo on and off for the rest of the evening. Why? he asked himself, and he could not answer.
Abra had gone to London with her man, in vain pursuit of Oscar’s undying love. If a woman was in love with a man and that man went to war, then if a woman could, she would go also, providing she had no children to hold her back. But Louise had gone off to war with the same motivations as any other war correspondent, for glory, for curiosity, for vague patriotism, for clear anti-Nazi motives but also as a shrewd career move. Finally that bothered him. He could not quite put that ambition together with the yielding body, the soft warm breas
ts and belly and the eagerly thrusting, welcoming hips. Why should those warm lips and those encircling arms and that body that smelled of a French perfume carefully dosed out each day, just one drop behind each ear and one drop behind each knee, why should that body so familiar to him under and over and twined with his own offer itself willingly to danger and discomfort? He accused Louise of concealing something hard and unwomanly in herself, an ambition complicated and functional as one of those rifles he had never learned to handle.
In June, Abra had written teasingly that she had figured out from his reticence that he was having an affair with Louise, and she praised him as the last gentleman, the noblest Victorian of them all, but by the time that letter arrived, Louise had vanished. By the time Abra had his answer, she also had Louise in London and Oscar panting after her. Her next letter was perhaps the most naked she had ever written him.
I don’t know what I might have done in this war more useful than what I am doing, but I doubt there would, honestly, be much. That has to suffice, but it’s cold comfort at the moment. One of the mistakes I’ve made has been to let Oscar become my life. I see that clearly, how it happened, why it happened, but it has meant that whereas in New York and even in Washington, I swam in a school of friends, and other people’s ideas and perceptions inevitably jostled and changed my own, I have been alone in an artificial semimarriage with Oscar since we left the States. I have made no friends here. I have got into the habit of confiding in no one, except you; and you had not till your last letter been particularly open with me.
I have a strong sense how costly this mistake has been, but perhaps I have shrunk from making friends for fear their observation would throw light on my relationship with Oscar I have been at pains to avoid. In some sense, I am still to Oscar what I was: his valued and hardworking research assistant. I feel as if I am waking from a long paralysis, but to what except despair I cannot imagine.