by Marge Piercy
32
Another Desperate Soprano (Helen)
Helen had not intended it to happen. She believed in playing by the rules, and the rules did not include going after a married man. After all, she knew how bad that could hurt. Jerry had caused her enough pain during the two years they had been married to last her just about the rest of her life on that score. On the other hand, working with Neil, she couldn’t exactly be rude to him. She liked him. She wasn’t compelled to pretend she didn’t. The rules didn’t demand she lie in her words or her behavior. She did like him. He was the nicest man she knew, always cheerful and soft-spoken and gentle, with a kind word.
But she hadn’t gone after him. The only thing she could Charge herself with was inviting him up that night for a cup of coffee when he went out of his way to drive her home. Home to her dreary studio apartment on the bad side, the dark side, of Beacon Hill. But he so obviously wanted to come in for a minute, to go on talking. She had had no idea he would make a pass at her.
She could say to herself that she should have resisted. Oh, sure, fine. She wasn’t made of transistors and circuits. She was lonely and hard up. Why should she have to do all the resisting? She didn’t ask him to make a pass, but how was she supposed to play the Sunday school saint with him holding her against him with that sweet smile and she could feel his erection?
A piece of luck that picked her to happen to, a ripe apple falling in her lap. There might be some girls too good to grab it, but they’d had more luck in their lives than she’d had. She was a bit older than many of the men she met on the job. Many of them were still in school, and besides, too often they reminded her of Jerry. All long hair and dopy smiles and follow the line of least resistance and useless to the core. She couldn’t cope with that any more.
She had been lucky to get this job and she knew it. There was Aunt Maryrose, who’d raised her, daffy in the nursing home and eating up half her pay. Not that she begrudged it. Aunt Maryrose was all the mother she’d had. But Helen squeaked along and lived in her dim narrow studio with linoleum on the floor and the toilet in the hall. She had a beagle named Albert Hall left from Jerry and mice in the kitchen and unpaid bills from work done on her teeth and the nursing home calling her all the time complaining about her aunt.
Life gave her little room to swing her weight in. She had to watch everything. She watched what she ate, what she spent on carfare, what she spent on her body. She had to calculate everything. Nothing had been given her. And the last rotten abortion had cleaned her out for months. Twenty-four years old and three abortions. She would never go through another. If she had twins she would not go through that again. She would kill herself first! No matter if months went by and she never even kissed a man, she took her pills religiously. One a day, hope and pray. She could get pregnant from sitting on a man’s lap, she swore.
So she’d given in that February night. So? He wasn’t a rat, he wasn’t sick, he wasn’t vicious, he wasn’t mean. He was a good-looking, well-set-up man ten years older who had a soft job and earned a good living and was shopping around for another woman. If it wasn’t her, it would be another next month. Now she was into the soup, she might as well fight. Otherwise she’d just been had again. Again. He said his wife did not love him. She was demanding, selfish, thought only of herself. He wanted to be loved.
It was a chance, such a skinny chance. Then over spring vacation she saw Mrs. Stone at a party. A loud overweight woman in a dress that had been in all the stores three years ago. A sloppy woman who didn’t even wear a brassiere and laughed at the top of her lungs. She was arguing about military research with Dr. White, who was a project head, just as if she knew what she was talking about, leaving Neil to wander around the party and flirt with her.
Now Helen was to see them on home base. This was her scouting expedition. She had to drop off the typed report to him as soon as Greta finished it. After she collected the report, she stopped at the women’s lavatory to look at herself very carefully, before going down in the elevator.
She had a sharp way of viewing herself, detached and almost hostile. She was five feet six, one hundred twenty pounds. Morning and night she weighed herself. She had lightened her hair to a natural-looking ash blonde, worn shoulder length and softly waved. She had learned that men around M.I.T. did not like heavy make-up, and she had changed to brands that produced more subtle effects. Every time she got a job she had to change something to keep up with what was expected. She also knew that Neil liked her in light grays, greens, blues, cool pastel colors that suggested to him what he sought in her. His wife was evidently the orange and purple sort.
When she found the house, Neil was watching Walter Cronkite and Mrs. Stone was feeding the children in the kitchen. Mrs. Stone was not nearly as fat as she had thought at the party, and she looked almost pretty smiling at the little girl, who was telling her a story about a cat named Annie-poo. But she was wearing an old pair of corduroy pants and an Indian shirt that had seen better days—had once been bedecked with mirrors but had lost most of them and faded unevenly. Indeed Mrs. Stone had large blue stains, probably paint, all over pants and shirt and in her hair. Helen could see up close that there were a few long white strands among the black in her hair—nothing a touch-up wouldn’t have caught, but evidently she did not bother. She was not keeping up with Neil. So often women didn’t. Helen felt a little anger toward the woman: didn’t she understand that Neil spent his time around women who were young and pretty?
No, it was the children who would represent the obstacle. The boy was a baby, fat and splattering food in all directions and babbling incoherently about banana. He was cute enough, and if he hadn’t been so daubed with food she would have picked him up to hug. The girl was lovely and awfully precocious.
“Do you work with my daddy? Are you a professor too? I rode up and down in the elevator where my daddy works and I saw all the electric typewriters in a room and when I pressed it went XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX!”
Neil could not hide his pleasure at seeing her, even though she tried to avoid meeting his gaze in the house. His face quickened, he seemed to grow more angular and boyish, his eyes kept moving to her and staying there. She was afraid that Mrs. Stone would notice, but she seemed beyond noticing anything, running from the stove where pots were bubbling to the little boy, dabbing vegetables on himself and the wall, to Ariane, who was at the table singing to herself about a big pink froggy instead of eating her chicken.
What to do? Should she get pregnant as a means of forcing the issue? Or didn’t she have to? So hard to know. She did not want to push him more than she had to; he complained of his wife as pushy and demanding. He had been moving steadily toward the final commitment. He had even spoken of the settlement problem, saying no matter what happened they couldn’t be too strapped, because he had a lot of stock in some company and it was all in his name. He had made a bad mistake, he said, choosing the wrong kind of woman, but didn’t he deserve something besides fighting and contests of will and a wife who kept trying to change him to somebody else?
When she left, Neil walked her to the door and stepped outside. Right there on the porch he risked kissing her, he held her desperately against him and kissed her. “I can’t stand this,” he said. “You come in and then walk out I’ll think of you all night. Listen, Saturday. Can I come Saturday? We have to talk seriously.”
She walked down the block. It was getting dark and it would take half an hour at least to get home on the subway. Then a steep walk uphill at the other end to her dreary studio, ho-ho, as they called it, where Albert Hall would be dying to get out to do his duty in the street and her supper of frozen chicken pot pie would be waiting to be popped in the oven. Then the phone would start ringing and the head nurse from the home would be on her back about how they had had to give more sedation to her aunt. It was a hole in the wall, a horrible place, and she hated Aunt Maryrose to be stuck there. Weeping in her bed and incontinent. Polite word for a nasty fact. She said they wouldn’t he
lp her to go to the bathroom when she had to.
Well, she wouldn’t be in her rotten studio long and she wouldn’t be alone long. She swung her arms as she walked and she wasn’t even afraid of the dark shadows of the hedges and the passers-by who always looked so sinister after the sun set. Everyone deserved a little happiness. There were obstacles, there were difficulties, but he wanted her. He was quite used to getting what he wanted. So unlike Jerry, he was strong in his own quiet way. Her first marriage had been a disaster, but she thought her second had to be better, with her so willing to work and work at it, unlike some women. He was beginning to love her, he was wanting her, and soon she would not be alone any more.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marge Piercy was born in Detroit and attended the University of Michigan and then Northwestern. She has lived in Chicago, Paris, Boston, San Francisco and New York before settling on Cape Cod. She is married to Ira Wood and they live in Wellfleet year round. Piercy travels all over the country giving readings, lectures and workshops. She is a poet and playwright as well as a novelist.