Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  “Ah, dearest,” he says, “don’t bite clean through my neck. My head will fall off.”

  “Sorry … Mike, I can’t, I’m no good. I can’t!”

  “Hey, are you bleeding? We must have done it!”

  “Either that, or we drilled a hole.” Then because I feel ripped and sore and the hot drip of blood scares me, “Mike, I’m sorry. I’ve got to draw back.”

  “I’m half limp anyhow. And to think taking maidenheads has been the great sport of the Western world. Makes you wonder what some people call fun.”

  I slide off his lap, seating myself gingerly. “Oy, it hurts to sit. Do you have a handkerchief?”

  “Look! We’ve gone clear through the seat.”

  We stare at the dark stain. “What can we do? At least I’m wearing black.”

  “I think there’s cleaning fluid in the garage. I’ll try to get it out tonight so she won’t see it.”

  “Suppose you can’t?”

  He shrugs. “Tough. It’ll stay there, then.”

  We dab at the stain, but it only sinks into the upholstery. “There I am all over your mother’s backseat.”

  “Well, at least we got through, old friend.” He grips my shoulder. “You’re a good soldier. Want to call it quits for tonight? I’m for a hot pastrami sandwich.”

  “I think I’ve had it, if you don’t mind.” I follow him around to the front seat, and we put ourselves together. “What time is it?”

  “Only eleven.” He smiles crookedly. “We’ll get you back by twelve thirty. That’s within the rules, isn’t it?”

  Howie zips up his jacket as we walk under the cobblestone arch. His parents go to bed early and for the last half hour his mother has been yawning around fiddling with window shades. But now that we’re outside I can no longer put off telling him. I cannot walk beside him under false pretenses. “Howie, I don’t know how you’ll feel—we’ve never talked about it. I hope you won’t be shocked. I’m not a virgin any longer.”

  He slows down, his chin doubled against his throat. “You …” I can feel him searching for the right phrase. “… had sex with him? That Mike Loesser?”

  “Well, does that bother you?” A tough disinterested voice I’m trying to squeeze from my throat.

  “Theoretically I have no objections. The double standard sucks.”

  “Theoretically?”

  He kicks a pebble tracked out from the drive. “He sounds sold on himself. Like that guy Beck at Great Books you used to have a crush on.”

  “I never did! Besides you haven’t met Mike.”

  “Well, you talk about him all the time.” He nudges his pebble from a lawn back to the sidewalk to kick it again. “Be careful, anyhow.” He turns and with his fist hits me in the upper arm.

  Startled I rub my arm and stare at him. He breaks from me, running to leap and smack his hand against the suspended bus-stop sign. Then he swings around the pole and comes jogging back to boom at me, “‘If I were tickled by the rub of love …’ who knows how I’d act? Maybe it’s good. Anyhow, I got Dylan Thomas, like you said. First he seemed weird. But Sandy had a record of him reading and it turned my head around—”

  “Sandy?”

  “This cat I know. He’s twenty, he goes to Harlem all the time to hear jazz. He blows saxophone. Anyhow, once I heard Thomas perform, I began to dig the stuff.”

  That argot annoys me, fake from him. He grew up in a Black neighborhood and now’s he’s going to Harlem as a tourist and imitating the speech of Black musicians. “Thomas is fine at his best, in six or seven poems,” I announce in my crispest CBC accent. “But Eliot’s really major. This is the age of Eliot, and you can’t understand it without him.” I lean against the pole. “Thomas is awfully uneven.”

  “Since when are you crazy for what’s fashionable?”

  “I’m not talking about fashion but fundamentals. Pound and Eliot are our fathers—”

  “Pound was a Fascist. He did broadcasts for Mussolini.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “The hell I am. Ask Mike. That’s where all this shit is coming from, isn’t it? Pound’s anti-Semitic. I read his fucking poems too when you said to.”

  “But, Howie, you can’t just like somebody because they sound good on a record—” The bus pulls up with a grinding of gears, startling us. I turn and jump on, fumbling for change. The doors close, the bus lurches forward. When I turn Howie is calling something after me.

  He’s stubborn when he gets an idea between his teeth. I plump into a seat. I’m not chained to an opinion just because I spouted it once in a letter. Imagine him trying to tell me I like Eliot because he’s fashionable. I like the way his lines stay, his slow music works on me. The rhythms sink in. But I didn’t say that—I said he was important. I haven’t read any Thomas since Mike took the book from me. The two scenes hang counterpoised, Mike using the fulcrum of his anger on me. I’m a fraud and a fool. I jump up and pull the cord.

  As soon as my feet hit the curb I begin running. It’s torture not to be back with Howie instantly, to have to carry my apology bouncing loose in me, to be saying it over and over to myself. The pad I’m wearing chafes my thighs. The bleeding has slowed down. Half a mile to go back to the cemetery. I have a strong guilty fear that what Howie said about Pound will turn out to be true. It wouldn’t matter to Mike: why wouldn’t it? Because he hates politics. Boring, he says. He is anti-communist by rote, because his heroes are. I am political in a way not currently meshing with what I do, but part of my basic equipment. I don’t think poets’ ideas are irrelevant to the effect or power of their work. Something in Mike’s heroes must be deeply flawed, although I cannot prove it to him yet.

  As I trot under the arch, the houselights are out but for one on the second floor. His room? His parents must have gone to bed. I can’t ring the bell, then. I can’t cart my apology home either. Must set things right. I’ll call Howie down. I stoop and gather a handful of gravel from the drive and toss it at the lighted window. The gravel scatters and strikes aimlessly over the bricks. Too weightless. I go back and search for a handful of larger pebbles. Howie would have to be deaf to miss these. Carefully I toss one, aiming at the sash so I won’t break the glass. The pebble hits and falls by the door. I more or less have the range now, and several more pebbles tick off. Is his bed by the window? I have never been upstairs. He’s sure to hear me. The curtain swirls against the square of light, parts. I gather my breath to call softly. His father’s ridged and sagging face, toothless now, the words gummy with spittle. “Who’s that? You get out of here.”

  I am already running past the corner of the house, the gravel flying up as I cut around the office. The old man’s gummy bellow of indignation pursues me. “Hoodlums!”

  Again we stop on a side street, this time an area of little houses and big trees. We are afraid of parks, because the cops patrol them. Before we settle on this spot, we venture out of the car to walk hand in hand around the block, checking its solitude. In the way the streets are laid out, parallel but not equidistant, in a small barn that still stands behind a house back from the road, in the many lots with gardens laid out, we can see the village this section must have been before the city grew around it. We wonder what lost name it called itself, wanting to swaddle it in sentiment as we would not the village itself. We walk farther than we meant to. Then slowly, slowly we wander back to the car.

  Dry cleaning fluid hangs over the upholstery. An anonymous brown stain marks the backseat. His mother said nothing. We are afraid to speak. The crackle of the condom. Pungent smell: the oilcloth of sailboats that used to cover the kitchen table. Or the smell of children’s raincoats.

  He smiles at that. “It is a raincoat.”

  Turned sideways he hides his face against my breasts. Then without looking at each other we slide together. (Doggedly in the bathroom I crammed the better part of a jar of petroleum jelly into myself.) He sets the movement and I follow clumsily. I do not want to think but cannot help it. This jouncing up an
d down. This localized petty jouncing is what I wondered about by the hour? All our loving and straining and groping toward this. We bounce mechanically as a merry-go-round horse. It hurts a little, a localized irritation, a sense of being stretched. Only that.

  Just one more lie that society springs on you. No wonder they want you to wait till marriage: who’d bother? I draw back a little, raise my cheek from his to look into his face. But he is strained, curiously strained, his eyes shut tight, his hands clenched on my hips. Am I hurting him? But then deep in me a kicking, blunt pulsation and as I watch he opens, flowers, a glistening softness spreading in his face. With a deep inturned smile his mouth softens, his eyes open. A laughing moan rounds his throat and he hugs me and inside, where for a moment I can’t locate him and tense my muscles involuntarily seeking, a vessel throbs and I cannot tell whose pulse that is, the hidden birdlike throbbing. His grip melts on me as he leans back and shakes his head, and throughout his arms and thighs a loosening warmth flows. He is radiant in his pleasure and I have caused this thing to be.

  “Ah, Jill,” he mumbles, “you almost killed me.”

  “I could feel you.” Kissing his cheek and eyes and throat and hair. “I could feel you!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE ROUND WORLD AND THE HIDDEN PLACE

  JULIE AND I show each other literature papers for criticism. Donna, who has decided to major in art history, stays out of this exchange, but Julie and I relish argument. I have come to her single room with the same bland blond furniture as ours but neat as ours never is. Her bed is covered with a navy corduroy spread pulled taut as a pool table, with a stuffed poodle bright-eyed against the extra cushions that turn it into a couch. As we sit primly at opposite ends she tells me she learned to make her bed correctly in camp. A camp to me is where my brothers went when they got drafted, where they did learn to make beds, although with Leo you’d be surprised how fast he forgot.

  “But everyone goes to camp.” She stares.

  “I never knew anyone who went.” Camp must be where kids learned the corny songs they sing at what are supposed to be jolly college evenings: “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt,” “Rise and Shine,” “Taps,” “Smiling Through.”

  “But that’s what you do in the summer. This summer I’ll return as a camp counselor. That’s what you do after you’re too old to be a kid at camp.” Julie is nonetheless in a friendly mood. She brings out a jar of smoked rainbow trout pâté to spread on melba toast from one of the CARE packages her mother mails. I eat the bounty as if accustomed, for I am always hungry.

  Julie wants to open a new subject. Her method makes me feel whatever it is bumping like a shark beneath the floorboards. I have to idle along and wait for it to emerge, teeth gleaming. She did not have sex with Van during spring vacation. As she put it, “The matter simply could not come up!” Julie makes fun of her love life; she assumes that if she is involved in a scene, it must be somewhat ludicrous. Laughing at herself before others get a chance. A pervasive loneliness in Julie makes me patient with her, a loneliness scarcely abraded by Van, her family, the other girls she chatters with, her heavy load of classes, Le Cercle Français, the literary magazine to whose meetings I go with her. She does not write and has gravitated toward the unappreciated function of advertising manager. Other staff members are astounded when she succeeds in selling ads to local merchants. We cannot think of any reason they should place ads with us.

  “I wish you’d come riding with me Saturday or Sunday mornings. It’s quite inexpensive here and the trails are beautiful.”

  “Ride? Ride what?”

  “You needn’t prove your proletarian origins hourly. You’d love it if you tried it. It gives you such power, such energy!” Eyes gleaming, she flushes.

  “Energy? How come?” Myself up on a horse like a cop or a bronze general?

  She sits bolt upright. “This powerful beast is lending you his strength. You and a magnificent animal move as one. You’re ten feet tall and you can gallop!”

  I have never actually touched a horse or an elephant either. I am intrigued. “How cheap is cheap?”

  “Just three dollars an hour.”

  “At the phone company, I get a dollar thirty-seven an hour on long distance. The damn horses make more an hour than I do.”

  While Julie is silent, I wait. I don’t think horses are the hidden agenda. With her middle finger she wipes the can of pâté and licks it as delicately as my old tuxedo cat. “Have you ever thought about nuclear holocaust, Jill?”

  “Oh, every night between twelve and one. What’s up?” I have a flash of delighted surprise. I have heard of Ban the Bomb marches. Could Julie be interested?

  “Remember around December when we had one of those tedious crises, and for about a week everyone went around thinking the Russians might be about to drop the Bomb?”

  “So what else is new? That’s our childhood, in a sentence.” I was in grade school when they began making us crouch under desks with our eyes covered against the blast; when they began marching us down into the cellar to stand under the steam pipes, where I would sarcastically point out that if even a tiny bomb fell nearby we’d be instantly cooked. Actually Mother set the style of sarcasm. When we were led on a tour of Uncle Edward the minister’s bomb shelter—the only one that anyone we knew had or could afford—my mother muttered running her nail along the rusty cans, “Well, chickie, they’ll have a hot time dying of botulism and rheumatism if they don’t kill each other first. Rather’n be cooped up in a root cellar with your uncle Edward, I’d take my chances with the Russians. Canned pork and beans, they’re going to gas each other to death.”

  Still the early jets would zoom overhead in Detroit rattling the dishes in the cabinets. In high school I wrote poems about waiting for the death to rain fiery down, since you could not tell Ours from Theirs if missiles collided overhead and the difference seemed academic. Who would ever know who pushed the final button? When I look through my poetry notebooks from high school, half the poems talk about fire bombing, a world in ruins. We grew up expecting Armageddon any afternoon in the midst of bland tedium.

  “Suppose you didn’t go with the first blast? Highways clogged with millions of refugees. No gas. Cars stalling, abandoned. Food running out, water contaminated in the cities …”

  After reading Hersey’s Hiroshima I had nightmares. I was coming in low over the broad Detroit River, its brimming plain of water choked with gutted ships, some still aflame, floating corpses charred like wood. The waves had an oily sluggishness and as I swooped lower I could see dead fish belly up among the torn and cooked bodies glutting the river. No, I think, no. “With the fallout, better to die sooner.”

  “How would you know how much you’d catch?” She shakes her head impatiently. “Van and I hatched a plan in December I’ve been thinking about on and off ever since. He loves to ride, too. That’s how we met. The idea is to head for the riding stables and take each a horse to ride and a couple to carry supplies. Then, head out.”

  I stare at her. “People die of overexposure. People starve if they’re lost in the woods of the Upper Peninsula for a week.”

  “Horses eat grass. Even in winter, I’d wager you could dig enough grass from under the crust of snow.” A petulance in her voice. A slight whining of insistence. “One possibility is to head north at once. That’s why I have that map of Michigan up.” She points.

  I grunt noncommittally. Her nails are lacquered a cautious petal pink. Those hands are going to wrest a living from the wilderness?

  “The other possibility is to ride west, give Chicago a wide bypass and go up through Wisconsin into Canada—north into unoccupied territory. To start over. Sanely. With horses and supplies. You can plow with horses, you can haul wood with them.”

  “It’d take years. You’d starve. You can’t eat grass.”

  “I was a girl scout until I was fifteen. I know how to live off the land. I can tell edible from poisonous plants. Imagine starting over, Jill. That’s when I
felt closest to Van. He seemed so decisive then. I could almost see the two of us riding off with a great pillar of smoke still hanging in the sky—about to launch a new world.”

  “Adam and Eve, isn’t it? Or the desert island. Making up a world from nothing with a man.” But to create such charnal privacy, the universal chaos is which she can imagine herself at last freed from constraints of class, family, sex roles, social expectations.

  “Jill, don’t you want to survive? You’re a battler. That’s why I want you to come riding with me. You ought to learn how.”

  She has a lot invested in this fantasy; I hope she will not regret airing it, but it stinks of the decay that comes from opening a closed place. “People would try to stop you and you’d have to kill. For what? To squat in the damp woods rubbing two sticks together and giving birth in a lean-to?” I slide off the neat bed. “Besides, if they’re taking out Ford’s, they’d get us anyhow. See you later.”

  “If there is a later,” she says sourly as I slip out the door.

  Mike holds out his watch. “I’m supposed to be discussing a passage of Rilke. Sharp knows I’m missing because the class is small.”

  “Shhh. Don’t remind me where I ought to be.”

  “You can borrow botany and history notes. It’s not the same.”

  We cross a loop of road to climb between cherries in white bloom. “Maybe you shouldn’t cut so often, then.”

  “How can you say that? I do it to be with you.”

  My hand in his is the pivot. The buds have cracked open, the distance is hazy with green. As we cross a meadow, brittle stalks of old weed snap underfoot and we crush the pliant shoots. I imagine popping a sapling in my mouth; the wood would have a cool crisp taste like celery from Mother’s garden and the buds would taste sharp and a little bitter.

  We run up a grassy slope to the flattened top. Where we lay last time is marked by a fresh heap of beer cans. I step back. “It’s spoiled.”

  He looks back at the path. “Any path is likely to be worn by people. We’d have to make our own.”