by Marge Piercy
“That wouldn’t be because you were careful to please them so as to get them off guard, so they stopped being defensive and wanted to please you, now, would it?” She folded her arms. “It’s a power trip, and they were Uncle-Tomming too crudely for you. You go in for uppity niggers. It gives you more sense of having overcome.”
“You believe in being in touch with your feelings. I’m doing the same. I’ve been down in the gutter, Beth, and now I’m out and seeing clear. I have a little energy left from surviving to try for what I want. Surely a man is less oppressive who likes a little vinegar than one who wants nothing but sugar, sugar, sugar, all day and all night.”
Beth was struck by how unlikely her old fantasies of being with Jackson had become. She had made him up in part, while believing she was shrewd in perceiving him. A quiet industrious poverty in which they would each remotely and hermetically dwell. “You’re a white man from the upper middle class and even after you fell from grace you can be saved. Not on your father’s terms, sure, but on your own. Now take Miriam. She’s only been off the job market what—three years? But she’s scared. She isn’t sure she could make it for herself and her kids. Then there’s Sally, my friend. If she tried real, real hard, she could get a job as a waitress. What options do I have? When I was on the inside of the system, I was doing tweeny jobs for peanuts. Now I couldn’t tell you how I get by.”
“Beth, don’t start rattling some class consciousness you learned from a book. I’ve been poorer than you’ll ever be. I’ve been down and out like you can’t imagine. I’ve been to the bottom of New York and the bottom of Mexico City—and you can’t dream up a bottom more mean and dirty and violent.”
“But I wouldn’t be here if I’d been there. Women don’t recover. We don’t get a second chance. We’re too expendable.”
“On Skid Row you see a few female losers, but you see a lot more men. And in jail its ninety per cent men.”
“Right now that isn’t too real to me, as you might guess. But it’s just different trash cans. Men get thrown in jail, women get pushed into mental hospitals. There you don’t even learn survival skills and how to be a better criminal. You get drugged into forgetting why you were angry and what you knew.” She sat back suddenly and shook her head at him. “You’re getting a real bargain if I stay here, you know? I’m replacing both Phil and Miriam in your domestic economy. You can argue with me and I’ll fight to the end, and then we can go to bed too.”
“My sentiments exactly. Are you still saying ‘if’?”
Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and still she stayed. The defense committee finished the mailings she had been working on. Laura and Lynn went back to New York.
“It’s amazing how you turn me on,” he told her in bed. “Seeing as how you resemble a Playboy centerfold less than I do. Though I will say you have nice legs.”
“Listen to you! Always competing. You’re managing to feel superior because you’re fucking a woman who doesn’t have a fashionable body! You can even extract points from this!”
“Points and pleasure and insults too. What more could I ask?”
She amused him. He was keeping her and feeding her and petting her, like Orpheus. He felt he could afford her. She sensed by Thursday that he wanted her to move in. He would not quite come out with it, but he seemed to circle around and around saying so. “You don’t eat much. You don’t take up much space. You wear pants and a sweater and boots. Why, you’re the economical size woman. Eat like a mouse and roar like a lion, now that’s what I call an efficient use of energy. Very little fuel lost in that system.”
The sex was different: not better or worse than with Wanda. Being with Wanda was easier. Somehow they were loving each other and they pleased each other without calculating about it. The difference with him made it more intense. When she came, she had that sense of losing control, of being swallowed into her orgasm and then floating up to the surface again light and loosened. But making love with Wanda was loving. It was one of the ways they loved each other, and all day long there were other ways. Touching was loving like talking was loving like working together was loving. They made love to intensify the loving and then went about their business.
With him there was not the loving. And they had no other business.
Friday she told him she was leaving to hitchhike first to New York and then to Alderson. He tilted his chair back and looked hard at her. “What for? Just a visit?”
“I have to think what to do next.”
“Think here. Why not do this next? You’re already here and you’ve already let go of what you were doing.”
“Look, I have a commitment to Wanda. I think I could have loved you. It would have been different. I prefer the life I’m living to somebody else’s.… I do think I could have, before.…”
“I think you could now. You haven’t said love and neither have I. We don’t know each other. Live with me, a month, two months, three months. Take what’s in front of you. Now you’re the one who’s afraid.”
“Yes. Because if we lived together like that I’d try to make you love me.”
“Do you have so little faith in yourself to think you wouldn’t succeed? Don’t you think I’m ready by now, ready for a woman?”
“I think you want that interesting, intimate struggle. You’d find that stimulating. I think I don’t want to face in toward somebody and make them my struggle—not even you, Jackson. I don’t want you for my life. With Wanda, we have problems, we fight, but we aren’t each other’s problem. We work together. I don’t want to love a problem. I don’t want that difficult, interesting relationship. I want to love somebody and face outward and struggle to change things that hurt me and hurt others. I don’t want to be fighting the person I’m supposed to be with.”
“Don’t you think you’re enough of a person by now to take on a real relationship with a man? Sure, it wouldn’t be cozy, it wouldn’t be easy. What is, that’s worth anything?”
“The theater troupe was just as real as arguing with you, Jackson. Can’t you see? You want me now because I don’t love you yet.”
“Because things didn’t work out with Miriam? I did care for her, Beth, but it was the way she was demanding. The way she pushed me made me clam up.”
“You push on a woman until you have her loving you. Then she isn’t anything to win, but a demand. Don’t you see it would be the same way with me?”
“No. You’re not the sort of woman with a real taste for complication and bringing the neighbors in and wanting to be a soap opera heroine that Miriam was. I think things would be pretty straight with us. I think we’d fight a lot—”
“But you’d win?” She shook her head. “No. I don’t want to fight with you inside a household. I’d rather fight City Hall. I’d rather fight the system that made us both.”
He shook his head slowly. Leaning back, he looked at her beneath half-lowered lids. “I don’t want to see what’s going to happen to you.”
“You won’t. But can I give you a dependent? A mate for Orpheus?”
“Oh, you still believe in heterosexual relationships between cats?”
“They’ll have to work that out. But if I bring you Lucy Stone from the country next time? She’s a beautiful calico, and I think she’ll be needing a new home. Too many kittens there.”
They had coffee together in silence, a reiterative sadness thickening the air. As he sat with his long hands clasped over his cup, seeking the steam, she could no longer tell what he was thinking and, more important, she knew that he would not any more allow her to find out.
She picked up her cloth bag of underwear and socks, stuck her wallet in her pocket, and kissed him good-by. He would not let his mouth respond. Behind her he walked to the door. “Good-by, Beth. If you lose that identity again, you know where to find it.” As she went down the steps, she did not hear his footsteps walking away.
30
Plot of the Wild Chicken
Breaking Through
She did n
ot really hitchhike to Alderson. After she had been in New York for five days Laura found a car for her to borrow. Laura offered to come along, but Beth said no. She wanted to talk to Wanda as nearly alone as luck would deliver.
The weather held. That made a great difference. Eight-thirty Thursday morning she drove in the lower gates. Hitchhiking was bad because all the towns around were hostile to the women in the prison and their visitors, and the chances of getting stashed away under some local ordinance, or any count they wanted to dump on her, were high. She even had to stay in a motel. Of course one of the side punishments of the way prisons were set up was that they were usually in places hard to get to and stay in if you didn’t have money, and only your friends and relations who could take off from work and had transportation could ever get to see you. A lot of the women in Alderson were poor black women from Washington, D.C., who ended up in West Virginia for convenience in sticking them somewhere, since everything done in D.C. was a federal offense.
With no gun turrets, no barbed wire, just a mesh fence around it, Alderson was a genteel prison. She drove up the winding drive past the warden’s house to the inner gates, where she parked by the visiting room. Alderson looked like a college campus or a boarding school for girls: trees and red brick buildings, the dormitories called cottages. Most of the guards were not in uniform. Wanda had remarked that it reminded her of high school: the dress codes, the sexual hypocrisy, people going steady and jealousy rampant, the insistence on being ladylike and prissy, the total arbitrariness of the rules, under which at times they would come down on prisoners for minute infractions, and other times they would let much go by.…
Waiting while they checked her name on Wanda’s list, Beth tried to smile, tried to answer the questions politely. If they took a dislike to you, they would keep you waiting half the day. They would not call Wanda till they felt like it. Wanda was a troublemaker, they said, and once when Beth had come she had been turned away because Wanda was in seclusion in Davis Hall. Seclusion was their soft name for solitary. She had been locked in a strip cell for challenging a screw who was hassling another woman.
So she waited and waited, clutching her arms, staring at the wall, watching the door. She might wait two hours and then they would come and tell her Wanda was in Davis Hall again. Hall … like a girl’s boarding school. Then suddenly, coming in behind a guard, Wanda. Thin. Very thin. Sallow. Prisoners did not get outside much. They used to do gardening and farming, but it wasn’t considered ladylike enough, so those jobs weren’t passed out any more.… Wanda’s face broke into a huge grin of pleasure. They were allowed to kiss. They were allowed to kiss each other once at that first sight and once when Beth left. In between it was a matter of who was on guard. And the weather. Today the sun was shining. It was a gorgeous blue and yellow early November day and the prisoners and their visitors were allowed to go outside. All the way down Beth had kept saying under her breath over and over again, ‘Just let it be sunny, just let us be outside together.’
She took Wanda’s hand as they went out. The guard was watching them but did not say anything. It was all a matter of who the guard was or how the guard felt that day.
“You’re so thin!”
“The food is shit, love. I can feel myself slipping toward malnutrition day by day. I can get mad about it. No vitamins, no minerals. Just carbohydrates. The institutional all-starch diet!”
“I was so scared you’d be in solitary again.” She took Wanda’s face in her hands. The guard took a step toward them, making a sign, and quickly she dropped her hands.
“I fight them. I have to, Beth. They turn us into children. The whole place says we are bad wayward children and they’re going to break us real slow. It’s a soft, slow oppression. They’re always telling us to be nice…. I was on six o’clock lock for two weeks but that isn’t the end of the world. I try to play it on the line where I don’t get sent to Davis but I don’t get depressed. We get stagnant. It’s a slow loss of pride, a leakage of self.… If only I could see the kids.… What did Anita say?”
“That we haven’t a chance of getting them back. The courts have never once given custody to lesbian parents, even if you’d never been in prison. We have too many counts against us. Being poor alone would do it She said to forget it … as if we could.”
“That’s what she said to me. I asked her to dig more. See if there wasn’t some way, any way.… I asked her, if we separated, would they give me the kids back.”
“Oh.” Beth felt as if she were going blind in her body. Stone.
“Beth, once I had the kids back, I figured we could go away and that the basic problem was to get Luis and Johnny. Beth, don’t look like that. Anita said it didn’t matter. A lesbian past and a prison record are sufficient. There is no legal way we can get our children back.”
Beth’s gaze went to the horizon. Down in this valley, valley so low. She felt wizened, crushed. She felt a vast weight coming to bear on her. The word “oppression” came to her, not as a movement catch phrase—the oppression of women, the oppression of gay people, third world oppression, working-class oppression—but as the real weight of the system, of the hostile state crunching her under. “Why do they do this to us? We’re so little.”
“The family is the stone of which the state is built,” Wanda said dryly, “or didn’t you believe our own analysis? … Beth, understand, I have to get Luis and Johnny with me. I know what it’s like for them there. I know my father will punish them daily for being my children, for being alive and vital and earthy and strong. He’s going to try to crush us in them. I can’t rest while they’re captive. I just can’t.”
Beth tried to shake out of her numb grief and listen. “But Anita says we can’t get them back.”
“Legally. But I’m going to do it anyhow. To run away with my own children.”
Beth wrung her hands. “Do you wish we’d run away before?”
“We would have been hunted by the F.B.I. A child custody thing just isn’t that big. My parents don’t have the money to track us with private detectives for months and months.… By ‘us’ I mean me and the kids.”
“You don’t want me along.” Beth grabbed Wanda’s hand. Cold as hers.
“It won’t be easy being a fugitive, even a small fish one. We’ll have to be alert and wary all of the time. We’ll need false I.D. We won’t be able to do theater, maybe for a long time.”
“It won’t be easy?” Beth laughed. “Easier together than not. We can’t let them bust us up. Besides, you need me to arrange everything. What do we do first?”
Other prisoners and visitors sauntered past, a fat black woman about forty with two women who might be her sisters. A guard walked behind them.
“Oh, it’s not so bad since I’m off that stupid secretarial job,” Wanda said in the same voice. “I’m doing tutoring. Helping the Puerto Rican sisters learn the pig’s English. Actually I kind of like it. I get to talk Spanish a lot. Did you see Roberta? She’s been working nine months on one of those big fancy flags. We make those big flags for special orders, and seals with eagles in satin. Nine months of women’s slave labor. Lot of anger gets sewn into one of those banners. Nine months. She could have had a baby, she says. She has one, but she had to sign it away in the spring.”
“Isn’t she kind of old to have a baby?”
“Old?” Wanda looked startled. “She’s eight years younger than me. This is her third time in. Hustling and skag.” Very casually she looked around. “The kids write me sad wooden letters, obviously censored. My father won’t give them my letters.… You’ll have to see Luis anyhow. But exercise care.”
“What’s the first step in our running away?”
“Do you want to be a fugitive?”
“I feel like one anyhow. I want to be together with you. Loving each other, we’re always fugitives.”
“That’s romantic and metaphorically true. Being real fugitives is something else.” But Wanda was sounding cheerful. “Beth, helping the kids escape is o
ne thing. Going with us another.”
“Not so. I’ve crumpled up since you went in. I’m ashamed of myself, how little I’ve done. But I’m awake now. I truly am.”
Driving back to New York, she felt small still but no longer crushed, no longer helpless. Quick as a mouse and slippery and wary. She must first create new identities for all of them, and find a home in another city. Then she must figure out a way to pick up the kids without Wanda getting caught in the process. She would need help. She would need a whole lot of help. Then she hitchhiked to Boston and began.
She would never have guessed beforehand who would end up in her scheme. Who would want to help. Who would be clear and able. Who would be trustworthy. For several weeks she worked on new identities: Wanda was a widow named Marie; she was divorced and named Cynthia, called Cindy. Luis was Robert; Johnny was Mark. Then she went to Cleveland to prepare the lives they would assume. The grand jury had not subpoenaed any new witnesses and was preparing indictments. Soon it should be finished and Wanda would get out of prison. Beth must be prepared on the day Wanda was released. Once Wanda was known to be out, the children would be watched more carefully.
Briefly she saw Luis twice. It was cloak and daggerish on the flatland of tract houses, but he enjoyed it, like hide-and-seek. And understood. She was coming to have a new respect for Luis, for children generally: that they were people in a fuller sense than she had quite grasped. They could never speak for more than ten minutes.
“Oh, they make us go to church and confession and all that stuff. It’s no worse than school. The teachers here, they sure are cross to kids. It’s full of crap. If I use words like ‘crap’ the old man hits me. What I hate the most is when the old man gets excited at night and starts talking about Joe and Wanda. How they’re rotten dirty, the dregs of the earth. The old lady’s not as bad as he is. She says to us when she tucks us in that she’s sure our mother loves us anyhow.… Do you believe it?”