Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  “Your dresser’s covered with powder. Have you been using mine?” Donna hops down lithely, dusting her soles.

  “You told me I looked better in it. So I used it last night.”

  Donna looks sharply at the socks I’m putting away. “Hey, that’s mine.”

  I toss her the balled pair. “Should have known. They didn’t have holes.”

  “What do you mean? My socks aren’t new like yours.”

  “Well, how would you like to get fucking socks for Christmas? And the rest of mine are darned so lumpy they give me blisters.”

  As the record finishes, Theo unwinds to return it to its folder.

  “Thanks for bringing that by,” I say. “Stravinsky is ace.”

  “Oh … if you want to keep it for a week?” Seeing my expression, she lays the record in my lap as I sit among the laundry. “I’m off to the pool.”

  Donna mocks a shudder. “Chlorine. Cold water.”

  Theo gives that big smile with her eyes sad. “I wish you’d come to a meet sometime. Hardly anyone does.”

  As Theo swings out, Donna turns with her arms full of socks, dumping them at my feet. “I’m proving my point. Look!” She drives her fist in, wriggling her fingers through two holes at me.

  “Think I’m impressed? Look, taken at random.” I hold a sock to the light. “Five separate holes. Count them!”

  “Feel how lumpy this darn is. Feel!” She presses a sock into my palm. Our gazes meet and we burst out laughing, kneeling face-to-face over our wash. “If we were burning at the stake, we’d argue over who had a hotter fire,” she says.

  I get up to start the record over. “Suppose the music built and built and didn’t resolve?”

  She stands on one foot like a heron. “Do you think Theo’s queer?”

  “No,” I say loudly. If I wonder too, that is one thing I will not share with Donna. “She’s asexual. Something’s broken.”

  “Her hymen?”

  “Something more serious.”

  “I don’t know, kid.” She gives me that crooked grin with her eyes squinted. “It seems to be a pretty serious matter—like preparing for your Ph.D. orals—for you to deal with yours. Did Mike kiss you last night?”

  “Nope.” I glare at the pile of books by Pound and Eliot he lent me. “He’s forming my mind. He’s giving me a liberal arts course. At the end of four years he’ll kiss me and make me a proposition.” I manage to sound flippant but then I spoil it, chewing anxiously on my thumbnail.

  “Why don’t you and Mike come with us tonight? We’re going with Van and Julie to see No Exit at the Drama Society.”

  “Mike hates Sartre. I tried to talk him into going.”

  “Since Julie started seeing that grind Van, I spend more time with her than exactly thrills me…. Sometimes I think you’ve set out to gather in every misfit in this dormitory.”

  “What’s a misfit, Donna? What are we trying to fit into?”

  Donna softens, giving me a cuff on the shoulder. “I’ll tell you what —you can borrow my black jumper tonight. You’ll look great in that.”

  “Really, Donna?” In her clothes I feel magical.

  “But don’t get food stains on it or spill coffee on yourself.”

  “I won’t eat or drink! I won’t hardly sit down. I promise.”

  One of the lounges—bold and arid as an advertisement and patrolled by housemother and attendants who apply rules such as kissing with both feet on the floor—has been designated for coed studying. There Mike and I are entrenched the following Wednesday night, while I try to start a paper on the Cleveland administration, first or second. I am taking American history post—Civil War, but Donaldson is not teaching it and all the bubbles have gone out. Our lecturer Professor Grimes recites the text. Even the jokes are in the book. Yet the flunkies down front laugh loudly and take notes. On what? His ties? (Bow.) His part? (On the right.) Grimes drops snide references to what we may have mis-learned. “Contrary to what you may have gathered, Lenin was not one of the Founding Fathers, heh, heh.” He lectures on the violence of labor. My murdered grandfather mutters in my ear, violence is when we dare to fight back.

  Mike looms across the table writing in his loose-leaf of tooled brown leather. The neat columns grow in his curious ornate hand with its curlicues and pothooks, leaned a little back as if a wind blew against its progress. That loose-leaf contains something besides class notes. With a wicked and satisfied smile he alludes to it. “It’s evil stuff. I can’t let anyone see it.”

  A little before ten he slams it shut. “Let’s take a stretch. We’ll leave the junk here. Nobody’ll steal it.”

  The snow has softened into a slow casual rain. He raises his big black umbrella, our hands touching on the bone handle. I ask, “What’s the use writing a journal if you won’t show it to anybody?”

  “To get it all straight in my mind. So I can escape from those depths and begin again.” He grins. “I call it, ‘Love Letter to a Scar.’”

  How can you call a diary anything, except Diary? Then one little question among the several hundred I am dying to ask him squirms out. “How did you get that scar? The little one beside your mouth.”

  “In a fight….” He swaggers a little.

  I don’t believe it. One thing I like about Mike is that he isn’t strutting and muscle-bound like Matt. He’s skinny and completely unatlhetic. His only sport is weight lifting, he told me: he likes to lift a full glass and then an empty one. He may or may not drink as much as he suggests, but he never took to street fighting, I know it. That he was beaten up I can believe and I want to put my arms around him and tell him it’s over, it’s all right, and now he’s where brains and not muscles count. “I think it’s very distinguished.”

  “A dueling scar. My pal Davis and I fought once at Cranbrook when we were after the same girl. A dumb sexy blonde who sang opera.”

  “What was she like? Did you go out with her?”

  He shrugs. “Davis made her. But he’s a fairy anyhow. He was always sucking up to Cribbets.” His voice loud, drubbing me.

  At the foot of the hill near the heating plant steam pours from a manhole billowing over the wet pavement. “Hell’s down there. Sinners like us are turning on spits,” he declaims.

  “Sinners like you. I claim nothing.”

  His voice is polite and mild. “Are you a virgin, then? I think it’s very nice. A woman’s virginity is the finest gift she can give.”

  “Appropriate for birthdays and Christmas, as well as weddings?” I start walking rapidly. He is laughing at me and I hate it. Gauche, grass green he thinks me. “What’s the damned time?”

  He holds out his wrist. “Ten twenty.”

  “Come on. We’ll just make it.”

  As he runs beside me uphill, “My books. Bring them out.”

  “I can’t if I’m late. Hurry.”

  “If we don’t make it… My journal. Don’t read.”

  “You want… me to know you.”

  He stops short and turns. “If you read it, I’ll know. If you read it, you’ll be in my past. You’ll become an entry.”

  “Like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “Don’t threaten me, Mike.”

  He lets his umbrella fall to grab me by the shoulders. “Promise me you won’t. Don’t you understand what’s happening?”

  “No. I’m tired of mystery. I understand nothing.”

  “What’s happening” He kisses me.

  A hand on the nape of his neck, I kiss him back. His lips are cold and fresh, his hair wet. Drawing back we stare. His eyes hold me as if I floated on them. He fumbles at the buttons on my jacket and imitating I open his coat. The large buttons slide easily through the worn rotted holes. The wind cuts me and I shudder. He tries to draw the old coat around us like a tent but the wind flaps through. Together we fill the coat, our mouths joining again open.

  As he lets me go and we begin to run, he repeats, “Promise!”

  As I come in, Donna turn
s rubbing her eyes. “Late, Stu?”

  “Six minutes.” Tossing my wet jacket over a chair I put the loose-leaf on the dresser, lie down and begin to stare at it. “See that loose-leaf?”

  “It’s not hard to see. Mike’s isn’t it? Nice leather.” When I only nod, she asks, “Want me to kiss it?”

  “You can flush it down the toilet.”

  “Are you mad at him?” She sits beside me, her face immediately tense with indignation. “What did he do?”

  “Not mad. Hand me the cigarettes from my purse, won’t you?” When I am with Mike I forget to smoke. I wonder sometimes how I remember to breathe, for I feel crammed into my eyes and ears and fingers, crowding hard at those windows looking to fall out at him. “In that lousy binder is a journal. He told me if I read it, I’d become an entry. No more Mike.”

  “Cute. Read it, of course, but don’t tell him.”

  “He says he’d know if I read it.”

  “He’s trying to scare you.” She reaches for it.

  “Don’t.”

  Reddening, she swaggers away. “It’s all yours.” With a quick shuddery yawn she begins brushing her fine hair.

  “He doesn’t trust me. He doesn’t realize how bloody broad-minded I am. Any experience carries prestige, even with a rhinoceros or .his grandmother. He thinks I’m too gauche for the truth.”

  “You’re making a crisis out of nothing. If you’re interested—and you’re practically quivering—read it. I bet it’s boring. Now I’m going to bed.” Her bare leg disappears into the upper bunk. “Worry about that stinking journal in the morning. I bet he isn’t lying awake.”

  Hands clasped behind my neck, I lie taut, my nerves whining. Damn leather binder, rival, trusted over me.

  I get up, cross to the dresser. The binder weighs heavily in my hands as I flip the pages so that I can see only the outside bottom corner of each. Pages of German glossed underneath, lecture notes, till finally I reach a closely written section. Mike in my hands. Phrases flash into view: “tormented by unfathomable lust…” “She, sitting in the chair, her pendulous …” breasts? Who? “… could not see in the dank fog more than the outline of the dark prow bearing down….” “… His aquiline profile sneering. I fought to control my rage.” I hear Mike’s voice saying these scraps, his deep reading-aloud voice projecting. “Nevertheless, C’s persistent efforts to intrigue me by hints of Wildean decadence …” “blood spurting from his opened veins like geysers …” “… hips swayed as if the power of the waves were in her …” I taste excitement like acid in my mouth. My palms leave damp patches. Disgusting. Mother in my attic room, rifling my papers. I snap the binder shut and toss it on the dresser.

  When he comes by on Thursday after his classes to pick up his loose-leaf, he asks with a wide grin, his eyebrows shoved high, have I read the journal?

  “No. I kept my promise.”

  “Good girl. I knew you would. You’re honest.”

  But I could swear for an instant there’s a slackening of disappointment in his face.

  CHAPTER NINE

  IN WHICH JILL CONSIDERS THE TEETH OF THE LION

  MARCH HAS TWO weathers, rain and snow, with sleet the median: sodden, frozen or half-and-half. The spongy earth sucks at our feet when we wander into the country. Branches drip like icy sores on our heads. We have no place to sit or stand or lean out of the rasping wind and the sniveling skies. Hands joined in Mike’s pocket, we walk between buildings that are great honeycombs of privacy from which we are shut out. We shuttle through the university searching a room some careless janitor left unlocked.

  I know his days; I can see the buildings of campus and the streets of town like a chessboard where he alone moves crowned through the ranks of professors and pawns. At seven forty-five each morning I call to wake him. Now I must get up. I do not understand why he wants me to do this, as he is often too sleepy to say more than, “Morning, pumpkin. Damn, I’m sleepy. Up till three.”

  Whenever our schedules can be wrenched to touch, we meet. Five minutes in the Diag, a square in front of the library where many paths of campus converge, five minutes in the drafty vestibule of the old romance languages building. Sometimes over coffee in the Union he shows me a poem. First he reads it in that special loud voice. Then he lets me look.

  HINC ILLAE LACRIMAE

  At the windows dusted with grime he stood,

  The stained shade flapping limply at half mast.

  Disgust sat on his head like a monk’s hood

  As he gazed upon the land of his brief past

  And briefer future. He dreamed of knightly good

  But found within and out mere nightly nastiness

  of men who rutted, cheated as they could.

  There boredom stretched its dominion smoking, vast:

  The city prone with black thighs spread

  to naked sport lit only by the lewd

  and bloodshot sign that blinked inside his head.

  The razor at his wrist first sipped, then chewed.

  The new mouths in the spare flesh outspewed,

  vomiting him whiter than the bed.

  If I ask too many questions or am not quick enough in praise, or praise the wrong elements, he withdraws, hiding in his loose clothes. Carefully I proffer my reactions, grooming them to his pleasure.

  One night prowling between homes where the blue glimmer of television shows through windows, we find a garage with doors ajar. Outside an icy drizzle falls, but in here the air is dry with a keen cold smell of paint and gasoline. We wedge ourselves between the grille of a Ford and a lawn mower leaning tipsily against the back wall. Coats unbuttoned we press together. “We’re safe for a bit,” he murmurs. “We’ve shut the Greyzies out.”

  When I am with him time hangs in a queer stasis. We move into a dark pocket where there are only intensities of touch and stare. I keep my lids wide as we kiss, watching his eyes flow into one large eye. The Cyclops, we call it. His sliding hands cradle my belly, close over my breasts. I cling, hands groping at the taut bow of his backbone. I draw back and touch his eyelids with my tongue. Ice breaking in the veins and marrow loosing a flood of want, my body bends to him. He conjures me into motion unsensual, ascetic as an arrow eating its arc in air toward its target.

  He mumbles in my hair. “Do you have any doubts?”

  “Doubts?” I repeat, confused. We have argued about religion several times.

  “Look. Either I love you or I’m crazy. Do you love me?”

  I rock back against the car, clenching my hands on the cold grille. “That word! So fancy. I don’t know. I think so….” I trace his cheek. “Love is what stuck my parents together, gouging each other. Love is what Mother calls it when she reads my mail or my diary…. How can you tell?”

  “I know. That’s how.”

  “I don’t think I ever really loved anybody but Donna before—”

  “Maybe you are queer.”

  “Don’t be jealous of her. She brought us together.”

  We leave the garage. As we cross the street a car passes, casting our shadows forward, great long-legged creatures with one fat joined arm. But Mike stalks in injured silence, staring ahead.

  “Stu, what do you think you’re doing?” Donna kicks off her boots to pad over with a plaintive smile. “I brought you a roll from supper and an apple.”

  I reach out of bed. “Thanks.”

  “Are you sick? Did Mike do something?”

  She has interrupted a prolonged fantasy on the meaning of those scraps of his journal I stole with my eyes, shamefully. I said I did not read it, but I read those fragments. C.: Cribbets? The singer he referred to, what happened between them? Whose pendulous breasts? Maybe I am just too naive for him. I roll off the bed quilt and fall onto the floor. My head bumps but I will not give my stupidity the consolation of rubbing it. “I’m such an idiot, Donna. Am I in love?”

  “Holy mother, how do I know? Don’t you think so? You’ve used the word yourself. You’re mooning like a twelve-year-old.�
�

  “I used it in its loose sense—like I love tangerines or Blake. You love Lennie?”

  “Yes. And how!”

  “What do you mean?”

  She ruffles my hair. “I like to go to bed with him. I want to make him happy. If I don’t see him, I miss him. I’d marry him tomorrow if my folks wouldn’t blow a fuse. But none of that means the same as saying I love him.”

  I run my nail along the radiator face, then catching her expression, stop. “I want experience. I want to use my life fully. But what I’ve fought for, waited for and finally got now is a little freedom.”

  “You think he’s going to put you in a cage?”

  “Love says, mine. Love says, I could eat you up. Love says, stay as you are, be my own private thing, don’t you dare have ideas I don’t share. Love has just got to gobble the other, bones and all, crunch. I don’t want to do that. I sure don’t want it done to me!”

  She straddles her chair facing me, her navy skirt riding up. “What do you feel when you look at him?”

  I reach for my jacket. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? Then you’re not in love.”

  “I mean there isn’t any me. It’s as if I evaporated.”

  “Where are you going? Don’t you want me to come with you?”

  “Sorry for all this. I promise to come home sane.”

  “Stu. If this is making you unhappy …” She taps her foot. “Don’t run away. Forget the sullen bastard!”

  Most of the doors stand open on the corridor with after-supper traffic in and out. A buzzer rasps and a tall auburn-haired woman trips out to answer the phone, acrobatically running up the zipper on her skintight sheath dress over the girdle and waist cincher as she ankles past. Some backseat part of me would like to be courted at length and succumb with grace. Love on the rest of the corridor is pin-swapping, dulcet fraternity serenades, the swish of cocktail dresses, odorless corsages of small orchids. Why must I take decisions like a coal truck on a rutty road? Yet even as I pity myself, I remember our athletic chairman, Dulcie, with her lean competence and perennial tan, took an overdose of sleeping pills between semesters. The maid found her, Dulcie’s stomach was pumped and she spends several hours a week seeing a psychiatrist at the Neuro-Psychiatric Institute. She has taken off the engagement ring with the karat and a half diamond. Dulcie will not tell anybody what happened, so rumors are still proliferating.