Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  He is a needle, shiny, deeply thrust

  into my mind. My plans are broad and hard

  but blow like milkweed’s silk seeds in a gust

  of wind before his will. I have no guard …

  and on and on. He told me I had to stop writing what he called free verse and start writing sonnets.

  “What?” I am startled back.

  Dad has come down the high ladder from the roof. Rubbing his wind-reddened neck, he sits on the steps to smoke. “Stiff…. Damn it, forgot the hammer. Go up and get it, would you?”

  The dirty pink rag, Mother’s old panties, hangs limp and steaming from my hand. “Up the ladder? To the roof?”

  He grins with slight irritation. “It won’t walk down.”

  “I’m sorry, but, you know … Climbing makes me sick.”

  “You give in to yourself.” His eyes weigh on me, his teeth lock in his jaw. “You and your mother! Get it down.”

  “It’s just…” Judge, mercy! “Maybe you could get it later?”

  “No!” His big gnarled hands clasp on his knees as he glares.

  He wanted a boy. At twelve I made the grand try, rowed him around twilight-curdled mosquito bogs, impaled the worm flesh, pulled hooks from my hair, stared at the bobber and itched. For months on end I sat itching and sweating and trying for a poker face, straight wooden tight-lipped virtue, Robin to Batman, a real goy boy. I tell you, I tried.

  His knuckles bleach as he grinds his fists on his knees. In a moment he will explode. I scuttle to the base of the ladder. “Please. Maybe I can do it later?”

  He rises and I scramble up the first six rungs. One foot, then the other up beside it. My palms sweat against the wood. Nearer now to the chalky grooves of asbestos siding. Don’t look down. I got all my fears from her and he never makes her do this! The ladder wobbles, swaying. The rungs bruise my breasts as I lean into it. My calves stretch taut to aching. A cramp: smash on the sidewalk below, legbone jutting through. Now I am up at the roof level, but how do I step over?

  “I’m holding the ladder.” His voice from right below. “Just walk onto the roof. Go ahead!”

  Afraid he will shake the ladder in annoyance, I scuttle over onto the roof. It slants but I find I can rise slowly, tipsily. I am just above the level of the second floor on both sides and Le Roy next door, who’s in tenth grade gapes out at me. I swagger down the roof tree to the chimney. There’s the hammer. Nonchalantly I pick it up and swing it. I wish I could fly off into the big old elm tree in the yard, its buds greenish. Up here the neighborhood elms are impressive, an alternate spirit world above the streets. I wish I were a kite and the wind would lift me.

  If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

  If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

  My fifteenth year was Shelley’s. He was the first poet I loved, before Walt Whitman. Before Keats. Before Emily.

  “Jill! What’s happening?”

  Shit. What goes up must come down. I creep to the edge where below me the world rushes away in a cold waterfall of dizziness. He stands waiting. Closing my eyes I back into space, groping with my foot for the rung. Vacation in the mountains of Virginia, blue haze dissolving the horizon. On the ground Mother clutched her bead purse to her head shrieking, “You’ll kill her!” Above me on the fire tower Dad tried to twist my paw loose. Halfway and petrified, I wished the mountain would close over this monkey in the middle.

  I freeze partway down with the hammer clasped in one hand and my feet stuck to a rung. “Have you got it?” he calls. “Don’t drop it. Remember, I’m holding the ladder.”

  “Coming!” Voice of chalk.

  He takes the hammer as I step off, making a motion as if to slap me on the back. “Bet you’ll be glad that old roof won’t leak on you anymore.”

  My knees wobble. Where is the medal for cowards? I should be grateful instead of locked in my weird fears. “It’ll be much better.”

  “It’s nippy in spite of the sun. Let’s see if we can rustle up some coffee.” Buddies together, we go around to the grade door, avoiding the front room where Mother is still puffing and prancing like a toy dragon. He will protect me now for a while. I have paid my way.

  “Dad …” I pour the coffee from the percolator into his special tall blue mug. “I really want to go to the university, but I’m two hundred short. Are you going to be able to give it to me, do you think?”

  He frowns, silent a long time. I don’t dare ask anything else but sit and twitch. Finally he says, “Hubie’s really sending Donna there?”

  I nod fervently. He knows, but does he believe what he knows? “Donna always did better in school than Estelle.” Her boring straight-laced older sister, married and living in Detroit. “Donna got a scholarship. Like me.”

  He pokes the applications. “You haven’t finished filling these out.”

  “I thought I should wait to hear if I can go. If I tell Donna I’ll room with her and then I cancel, she might end up with just anybody.” Why do I always feel like an actor if I ask help from him? The role is awkward and shames me. When it all comes down, he has the real power. It’s his money. Mother asks before she spends, but he never does. It took me years to understand that, because Mother seemed so strong when I was little. She was the sun, source of warmth and nourishment and life itself; all other planets and lights bobbed around her. Why should she lie to him and wheedle and plead? I couldn’t comprehend it. Why was she strong before me but weak before him?

  “Go ahead and tell her you’ll share a room with her. We’ll manage it.”

  I grab the forms and take them off to fill out, before he can change his mind.

  When I come home from work Tuesday, Dad’s car is in the garage. Home so early? All the furniture is back in place and Mother is dusting. She nods to me with a meek stricken air, her mouth pursed, her eyes lowered. Yet I feel a guarded smile in her silence. She dusts with coy gestures, as if resting with secret satisfaction in her plumpness. Smell of fresh paint. Did she finally get her way on the kitchen?

  I don’t see Dad. I walk to the kitchen door. “Jesus!”

  She is at my shoulder instantly, pinching my upper arm. “Shhh! He’s in the basement. He came home at noon in a temper, and then he did it. Don’t say a word in front of him!”

  Our cabinets are Chinese red, all right, and that wall is yellow. The wall by the driveway is pink. The back wall is buff. The wall behind the table is wildly striped with broad bands of turquoise, red, pink, blue, green, and white and black enamels. I cannot help giggling and suddenly she laughs with me, covering her mouth with her hand. “That man is a riot!” she says admiringly. “That man!”

  General Custer High School: brick monolith, cold red whale where this Jonah grows thin on blubber. Bog-water soup stink of the lunchroom. Musty odor of the auditorium. Sportsmanship Assembly, our principal rolling his false teeth around in his mouth as he gurgles, “Boy-yahs and Gur-ruls,” no more fights with broken bottles after the games. Bells for the period jangle off the puce ceiling and battered locks. Here boredom is sliced by the hour and the room and the tracking system. Here you take Boredom 1x (which means you’re tracked for college), followed by Boredom 2x, and if you pass all the tests you get to move on to Advanced Boredom. Here if you ever, ever tell the truth you will be mocked, failed and sent to the principal’s office. Note passed through me in civics: “Don’t you think Jim is a doll? Did you ever go steady? Your friend, Wilma.” Answer passed back through me. “Jim who? Yes once for 3 days with Bill Mciver. Your friend, Sue.” The Custer Custodian windowless office. There I, news editor, sit on a table swinging my legs and gossiping to put off going home.

  Zipping my jacket, I push on the heavy double doors. The sky drips. The flag flaps at the top of its pole in the wet wind, clanking the ropes and metal rings that raise and lower it. Cars pull squealing from the lot and shoot into traffic. As I wait for my bus, a girl beside me shouts, “G’wan, ya never did! Don’t hand me that BS.” Blue lids, a silver streak in he
r brown hair, green nails. Hard bulge of calf above spike heels. She carries a freshman lit book, but I must look years younger. I feel barely female beside her. Like me she is protesting but I have created a gap I can cross now only with difficulty. Still I am closer to her than to those confident girls in pastel sweater sets and pleated skirts who go steady with young men with orthodontically corrected white teeth and campaign posters and button-down shirts and blazers. I work with those girls on library staff and other stupid extracurricular activities I have volunteered for since I figured out you were supposed to, to get into college, but I don’t know how to chat with them. When I approach, they fall silent. I am the school radical and they don’t know what to make of me, except fun when they can. I know they are comely, those boys, but they move me no more than a handsome greyhound might. The bland neat couples move off toward the parking lot or the bus that goes west into the more middle-class section the school also serves.

  Books under one arm I hang from a strap near the back door. At the back boys are shouting dirty cracks. One sings:

  I got a gal in Singapore,

  baby, honey,

  I got a gal in Singapore,

  She’s nothing but a two-bit whore,

  honey, baby, mine.

  I got a gal lays on a rock,

  baby, honey,

  I got a gal lays on a rock,

  All she does is stick my cock,

  honey, baby, mine.

  The girl with the silver streak is close to tears shrieking, “Shut your fucking mouth, Jerry, or I’ll slap it shut!”

  I hunch to my books. Why do they hate girls who do? My daydreams twist like knives in me. I try not to fantasize about going away to school, not to blur it with false expectations. What have I agreed to in Donna? Will she spy on me to her parents and mine? Uncle Hubie is a bully. The way he looks at Mother and me is chilling. I have made common cause with Donna at weddings and funerals.

  I haven’t seen Donna since we were fourteen at Uncle Floyd’s funeral, the only son-in-law and a miner. In the anthracite mine, they were working too far under the river and the river broke through. Four of them were killed. The river filled the mine and threw all my other cousins and second cousins and first cousins once removed, all the Welsh kin, out of work. I remember Aunt Elaine hunched over with grief as if she were sick to her stomach.

  My thirteenth summer, Donna and I were in Cold Springs together. We climbed the mountain over town. We slept upstairs in an attic room and giggled all night. We swam in the old quarry and had supper just the two of us with Aunt Elaine and Uncle Floyd in Cokeville where he showed us the mine entrance and the great machines and the shifts pouring in and out. He fed us venison. When he was not working, he loved to be up on the mountain among the trees. Donna was small and blond with skin that burned in half an hour and seemed to tear on every fence we scaled, on every blackberry bush we picked from. I was always leading her into temptation, but I remember that she always went. I remember her crying when Uncle Hubie scolded her for getting blackberry juice on her white dress and for falling into a creek in her pink dress, but I don’t remember her ever saying what would have been true, “Jill made me do it.” I liked to show off before her intense blue eyes, the color of the flowers of the chicory that grows wild in vacant lots.

  I loathe visiting my father’s father, the old patriarch in his Cold Springs house built in 1889, where he reigns over the daughter who got stuck home to take care of him. Aunt Mary is now fifty-five and my grandfather eighty, but he still walks a mile to town and back every day although now the town has grown out to them. In recent years I have had the excuse of working summers and vacations. My father’s family look down on Donna’s mother as a Catholic. Uncle Hubie was working on the line at Flint Chevrolet when he met Aunt Louella, but now he is a foreman. He is on the side of management, so my father and Uncle Hubie argue some. Uncle Hubie bought a house in a white neighborhood. It is small but brick. I wonder if Donna has turned into one of those girls in pastel sweater sets.

  When I walk in from school, one of the neighbors, Mrs. O’Meara, sits at the kitchen table with Mother. Mother reads palms on occasions when she chooses, but she will read tea leaves on request. Before the gaudily striped wall Mother and Mrs. O’Meara lean forward with the earthen teapot from Buhbe between them, its bulging sides like the coat of a tabby, while around its broad base like offspring the “interesting” cups are clustered.

  “Chickie, have a cup of nice hot tea? It’s Darjeeling.”

  “But will he marry her?” Mrs. O’Meara whines. She wants Mother’s full attention. Small dogeyes wait. Mrs. O’Meara is as short as Mother. Like children playing tea party their feet do not reach the floor but curl around the chair rungs.

  “There’s no stopping him, he’s that dead set on her.” Mother sits straight, her shoulders thrusting back the chair.

  “But if he leaves me I’ll rattle around in that house.”

  “Youth and age! You’ve had your life.” Mother fixes her sternly. “But if you made a little apartment upstairs so they’d have their own place, that’d be different. They can’t be too eager to shell out for the rents the dirty landlords are gouging out of folks these days.”

  “Pearl! That’s it.” Mrs. O’Meara even smiles at me. “A little apartment upstairs. I could fix it up cute—”

  “Time to put the chicken on.” Mother bounces up. “Keep me posted.” When her patience runs out, it disappears all at once. She is already slicing onions, the knife flashing.

  “Er, Pearl …” Mrs. O’Meara pauses at the head of the back stairs. When women come to consult Mother, they always come in the back way. “What happened to your kitchen walls? Who did that?”

  “My oldest son Leo’s gone into the paint business. He was just trying it out. Of course we’ll paint over it this weekend.”

  “Trying it out?” Mrs. O’Meara stares at the striped wall hoping for some piece of gossip. Mother is as out of place in this neighborhood as a tawny lioness. She will not even follow Mrs. O’Meara’s glance, only nodding matter-of-factly as she slices.

  When Mrs. O’Meara has eased herself out, Mother shakes her head. “Silly old fool! I never tried to keep my sons tied to my apron strings. A son has got to go out on his own.”

  A daughter too. I do not contradict her, but Leo marries every two years. As Mother screamed at Francis last time he was home, he’s stuck on “hanging your hat up with nothing but tramps and tarts.”

  I say only, “I’m going upstairs to study.”

  “Don’t you want lunch?” The knife goes snick, snick.

  “Ate a sandwich at school.”

  “Have another cup of tea while I put the chicken on.”

  “No thanks.” The paint fumes are still strong, saturating even the attic stairs. I climb slowly, savoring the ascent above the house into my privacy. My eyes rise level with the floor and through the open door I see it, a broad yellow wall. My glider has been pushed to one side, my books piled haphazardly, my papers (rifled? read?) in a heap, my room turned inside out and painted a shrieking yellow. I leap to the doorway, sick but unbelieving. No. We are so locked in combat anything can serve as assault one on the other, presents, meals, even paint. Then I fling my schoolbooks across the room and plummet down the steps.

  She swirls from the oven to face me, her face tight with an imitation smile. “Doesn’t it look cheerful? I worked all morning to surprise you.”

  “Like hell. How dare you take over the only thing I have?”

  “Don’t scream at me. Any normal person would thank me. Hiding up there day and night.”

  “Damn you! You’ll do anything to hurt me. You try to eat me alive!”

  “Don’t talk to me that way, you little worm! There’ll be no more rooting in dirty books like a pig in its sty!”

  “You have no right! Surprise—knife in the back.”

  “Yowl! Yowl like a cat. You walk around with your head up your ass and your ears full of shit, you complete klutz, and t
hen you wonder why you don’t know anything!”

  “I’ll never forgive you for this! Never!”

  I duck but not quick enough. The heel of her hand strikes me on the mouth, jolting my head back. “Forgive me? You poor blind ugly slut! You dirty little gutter worm living on your own shit!”

  Crying already, stupid with rage and self-pity, I turn, jamming my hands over my ears and rush out. Running till my side jabs, then walking block after block, teeth chattering, sucking my swollen lip and clenching my fists, finally I wear my anger numb. Then indifferent and cold to the pit of my brain, cold through all my knotted muscles, I turn and walk home. I will get away. I will not give in to them. I will get away.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WHEREIN WE LEARN THAT SNOW LEOPARDS BARE MANY TALES

  WITH THE KEY I just signed for at the desk in the lobby clotted with families and luggage among the rubber plants, for the first time I enter the small double room. Light from the courtyard pours between draperies of tomato burlap, roughening the texture of the white walls and casting shadows from the plain blond furniture and the heap of boxes and suitcases.

  Mother bustles past to drop her load. “Well! So tiny. Looks like a cell, chickie. You’d think for what they charge …”

  I start, a shock of instant contact meeting my cousin’s stare. For another moment she stands rigid in the corner where she must have backed at our noisy approach, small and flaxen with a hard pallor (why do I remember in the zoo one spring afternoon with Howie meeting through the intervening bars a snow leopard pacing alone round and round?), before her high voice bursts from her frantic as a trapped bird in inane family greetings.

  Dad rumples his hair in disappointment. “Hubie and Louella left? Kind of thought we might see them. Have supper. I said we should get an early start.”

  “That’s your quilt on the bottom bunk?” Mother beams at Donna but the poppies of her hat jiggle ominously. “Of course you’ll want to change around each month, to be fair.”