Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  “That’s it. Our own path. A place for loving that’s ours.”

  We race down the slope. By a contorted tree he waits for me to catch up. The fleshy purple blossoms sprout from black wood and stark spines without relief of leaves. “A witch tree,” he pronounces.

  “Look, it has a name.” A weathered Latin label hangs at the first branching.

  “The Arb’s grotesque.” Pulling off a blossom he fixes it in my hair as we strike off through a valley of beeches.

  I must give you a sense of its bounty, this nurtured plot of well-used Arboretum. A dirt road branches through the wooded hills from the entrances: a back door for hobos by the burning dump, a formal entrance for Sunday drivers where fraternity row and rangy rooming houses begin to give way to wide-lawned residences that parents nod at from their cars, substance approving of substance—the route that winds down from a view of the river coiling like a scythe through the countryside and the two sentinel hospitals, University and the Veterans Administration, on opposite banks stolid in the distance. But the entrance worn by lovers is below the dorms, the route between ravine and cemetery that funnels into that first wide place that alone has a common name, the plateau; the other hills, ravine of rocks and green-eyed creek, submarine cove of waist-high ferns, hollow of slithering willows pocket dark, have names only for those who have lain and printed themselves on that earth.

  In the afternoons of spring and fall botany classes troop through behind their hearty instructors, taking notes and flushing couples from the thickets. Trees grow lofty here. Rumor has it the hills are accretions of old condoms, and perhaps the cast sperm has quickened the soil. At night we grope hand in hand while nymphs sigh in the tall and spooky trees and the flesh of lovers stuns from the dark like gardenias. No, you cannot visit this place. You cannot enter merely by walking downhill. You have to be so young you’re still scared by dark stairs. You have to believe sex is wicked and splendid magic. You have to be desperate and needy to taste the flavor of these trees and bushes, playground of drifters, joggers, botany field trips, fraternity beer parties, edgy delinquents with switchblades hot and shiny in their pockets, sunbathers, picnickers with babies and fried chicken but always and ever by sun and by moon and by rain under the cover of the leaves and the overarching branches, the lovers rustle.

  We stand at the forking of the road at the foot of a steep rocky hill. He pulls me up. I scramble after clutching at roots. We climb to a shallow bowl of Scotch pines. The shaggy poles rise straight with patches of russet wood showing through the bark. The sun slants through the high branches to make bright patches on the floor, thick and soft with blanched needles. He circles the rim with his head jutting forward. “Great site for a fort. It commands the road.” He stares at me and something tightens in his face. “Completely alone. If you yelled, no one would hear.” Tentatively he puts his hands on my throat, then hard. “Aren’t you afraid?”

  I smile. “No.”

  “You trust me.” He turns away, kicking at the needles. “I wonder how much? Even here we’ve been preceded.”

  Ashes beneath the needles. “At least a season old.”

  He nudges the old ashes. “This is our hearth.”

  “Maybe we could build a little fire and cook supper here sometimes.”

  “Right. Get those flat stones from the hillside.” He plunges over the rim and I follow, crashing through the thickets. The first stone I try to dislodge is embedded too deep but the second gives as I haul, sending a leggy thing scurrying. He is setting two level stones side by side. Sweat breaks out along my back, my hands are bruised, but the ring grows. Finally he fits the last stone in.

  He sprawls, and after a last survey, I join him. Labor has made the place ours. “Bet we could build a shack,” he says. “Why not? Two crazy poets gone back to nature. Once a month we trot out, me with a grandfather beard down to the waist and you in nothing but your long black hair, and order a few supplies. ‘Deliver them to the front gate of the Arb, please.’ “

  I rest my head on his arm. Interwoven branches. Slashes of late afternoon sky. “We could gather berries and nuts. Plant a little garden.”

  He draws me closer. “Can’t you see us all ragged and fierce and hairy? There’d be rumors—wild hermits, live in trees and throw rocks at strangers. We’d set traps for rabbits. Somebody’d catch sight of us running along all shaggy like Bigfoot…”

  Gently I brush the needles from his hair. When his eyes gloat on me with that dark somber shining, I am beautiful. The ground prickles, scented with resin. Above branches rub and dip. No footsteps to set us misbuttoning, only the chatter of a squirrel, the pulse of bird wings. Weight my body rounds to. This time before he enters, he touches me, fumbling with powerful effect. It had never occurred to me that he could touch me, for that seemed to me to belong to those distant pleasurable games everyone seems to agree are more dangerous than drag racing. Then he moves in me alive and warm as if he turned and leapt. I close my eyes and our bodies swell huge. Deep and elongated we grow rushing backward like fast trains. Half afraid of the hot lick of urgency I clutch him, the scratchy flame that catches and fades, catches and fades in my cupped distorted upward-striving body.

  Then I am freed falling backward while the star streaks, hovers burning and finally explodes and the streamers flare through my thighs and breasts and arms, the sparks hang and die one by one. It feels right, it feels familiar, it feels ancient.

  When he has come and slides out of me, condom dragging, I say, “Mike, I came. I did. I really did.”

  “I knew we’d break through soon. What’s it like for you?”

  I loll in my muscles, warm as bathwater. Effort to talk. The completeness of pleasure separates us. “Heat… urgency.”

  “For me too.” He settles curled against me. “Must be the same.”

  “Stupid we can’t know. I’d like to crawl into your fingers and look out through your eyes.”

  “You haven’t read Plato but he puts it nicely. We were round animals once, but the gods got jealous and split us. So we’re all trying to find our other proper half.”

  “Mike … the way you touched me first? I liked that.”

  “Oh.” He is silent. “The guys told me to try that when I said you weren’t coming.”

  I sit up, clutching at my scattered clothes. “What guys?”

  “The guys in the dorm.”

  “How could you discuss me with them?”

  He grins. “They’re envious because I’m getting laid regular. My stock has shot up. You’re telling me you don’t talk about sex with Donna or Julie?”

  “But not what we do.”

  He shrugs. “Actually it may have been Lennie’s idea. It’s easy, once you get the knack of it.”

  I sit still clutching my sweater. All over town he has been discussing my body and its habits. I want to crawl into the earth. I sit on, trying to plane down my shame roughly so I can fit past. I will brazen it out with all of them. What else can I do?

  Churchgoing students in heels and suits tap by staring at Lennie’s painting and at me drumming my feet on the wall beside the dormitory. The green and empty athletic field stretches away, a little haze shimmering over it in the onslaught of the already pounding sun. From the tennis courts comes the regular pock-pock of volleying. Of all the times for Donna’s parents to pay a surprise visit! This is the weekend of the May Festival and both Mike and I are reading along with eight other poets this afternoon. I was in the bathroom throwing up from nervousness when Uncle Hubie and Aunt Louella suddenly arrived. Now there is no time for me to fret about my first public appearance as poet. I had to sneak the two canvases down the back stairs and wait outside for Lennie. Finally, there’s Lennie in his leather jacket and red beard bucking the churchgoing flow. He waves back, stepping up his jouncing walk.

  “Donna’s parents came. She didn’t want them to see the nudes, not just yet.”

  He cocks his head. “Wait here. I’ll be back.”

  “Where are yo
u going? Hey!”

  “To meet her folks.”

  I grab his arm. “Don’t do that to her. Let her find the nerve herself to tell them. She will.”

  “When? What’s hanging her up?” He squints at me. “Does she think it was easy to tell my mother?”

  “Today she’ll tell them. She promised. Let her do it her way.”

  He runs his finger along the stretcher. “You always stick by each other. Don’t you?”

  Uncle Hubie puts down his fork. “Lennie. What kind of a name is that?” His hair still brown on top makes me realize how much Dad’s has silvered.

  “It’s short for Leonard.” Donna’s gaze touches me for strength. “Just a nickname.”

  “Leonard,” Uncle Hubie repeats. He and Aunt Louella look at me and away. “From New York, you say? New York City?”

  Will they ask it while I sit here? We are dining at the Colonial House where students come only with parents. The waitresses wear black dresses and rustly aprons. As Aunt Louella eats breast of chicken, she darts glances at her daughter. They are alike only in their almost albino coloring. Aunt Louella is a paper-thin woman awkward as a damaged grasshopper and prone to wringing her hands nervously. Her voice is a rising whine. Something in her is always trembling. “Is he a nice boy?”

  “Oh, yes,” Donna says fervently. “He’s very nice.” Under the table our hands clutch.

  Aunt Louella’s gaze shifts to her daughter and away, as if she feared to look at Donna too long. Hubie and Louella are both unprepossessing human beings, Uncle Hubie the least attractive of the Stuart men with his underslung jaw and eyes perpetually squinting. How did they give birth to Donna? They view her with suspicion, as too attractive to be safe. Her face has ordinary sharp prettiness, but her skin, her body, her hair are luminous. Aunt Louella stammers, “I mean, really nice?”

  I nod wildly. “And intelligent.” Mistake: Aunt Louella ducks her head sadly and Uncle Hubie looks grimmer.

  Tryouts for the poetry reading were held on four consecutive afternoons. Although I went to hear Mike, he was in class taking a test when I did my stint before a jury of the editors of the literary magazine and two of the faculty who teach creative writing. People glance at me half with pity as I take my place in the row of straight chairs lined up across the back of the small stage, for I am obviously, very obviously, the youngest, the greenest, the wettest of the poets. Seven of the poets are men, all eight feet tall and bearded. Several are Korean War vets in school on the GI Bill, with wife and children in the audience scowling at the other performers. One of the other women is also married; her husband and two sons sit blinking and waiting. The other is a suave and beautiful senior, daughter of a professor, about whom Mike entertains sexual fantasies, trying to prompt me into jealousy.

  I know Dylan Thomas started or restarted poetry readings, and I go to any and all the university sponsors. Because of the Hopwood Awards and a writing program and an English department renowned as a bastion of the New Criticism, lots of writers come here and lots hang around Ann Arbor. I know I am out way past my depth. On the platform I clutch my arms so that my hands will not visibly shake. In my lap the pages of my couple of poems vibrate on their own as if a small earthquake had its epicenter right under me. Mike sits beside me but he is busy making his mean tough faces, chin pulled way in and eyes glaring.

  Mrs. Starini reads first, poems about her sons, her husband, her domestic labors. I wonder why she is first, since she has published several poems already. Only now thinking about it from the distance of years do I understand the editors, the other poets, despised her for her domestic themes and for being dumpy. She was punished for lacking appeal to their gonads. I listen, scared. I try to tame the audience as Mike instructed me by staring from face to face. I find Donna in the second row with Lennie. No parents. What happened? I will read to her. I am saved. Julie and Van are sitting on the aisle. There’s Alberta Mann with her shiny hair wound in long braids around her oval head, a grave expectant expression on her olive face, but Donaldson is not with her. Damn it. I want him to be here. Maybe he’ll come late? She has saved a seat next to her. Her big feed bag purse sits on it like a dog.

  The second poet is one of the teaching fellows. He reads dreadfully in a thick mumble poems on obscure points of philosophy, but the committee did not dare leave him out because he is a favorite son of the Resident Critic and is also noted for his acid attacks on everybody else. The knowing audience is still trickling in, many coming late to miss the losers—including of course me.

  I stand. For a moment I think I will not be able to hike the last mile to the microphone, gleaming in a shaft of sunlight like a battle pike. I am wearing a dress Donna picked out, a dark burnt orange skirt and pale pink bodice, Grecian-looking I think with the criss-crossed halves of its bodice above a fitted waist and full skirt. She paid for half of it as a birthday present and I paid for the second half. Mike is behind me but I feel as if I am reading to him, for he has not heard this poem. I felt shy about showing it.

  Love, I grew up lopsided,

  jaded by proxy. Not dis- but merely un-illusioned,

  by hearsay and wide reading

  made cynical, already without innocence,

  only ignorance and fear my dowry.

  How can I explain this to me?

  My days have shot up

  with clutching elevator intensity.

  I lean on the hands of clocks

  to will you out of buildings….

  I read to Donna, who sits still and unblinking as if her concentration sustained me crossing an abyss on a tightrope. In her lap her hands are clutched, washing themselves like her mother’s.

  I want to empty myself out for you,

  have you swallow my history, memorize my ages.

  Hold my desires and small pleasures between your palms

  till they glow warm from your body

  like beads from a broken amber necklace.

  I want to take your will like your tongue

  in my mouth and feel it stirring.

  The amber necklace is Aunt Riva’s and had been Buhbe’s. I develop enough courage to glance swiftly into the audience. Theo has come in and sits at the back, out of place in dirty tennis shorts with her racquet beside her chair. She sits nodding her head like an old woman, unselfconsciously enjoying the sound. Donaldson never came. Alberta’s purse still perches on the chair.

  Love, go slowly.

  I am a chandelier suspended by a single wire.

  Love, go strongly. If you hesitate

  I will constrict violently and crush myself

  like an imploding egg….

  Suddenly I am done. I flee the microphone. People are applauding, politely I suppose. I can tell from the way the other poets look at me that I am not writing the way you are supposed to, but the glare Mike wears upsets me. He didn’t like the poem? I do not hear the next two because I am still trying to figure out if I did all right and why Mike frowned. I sit shaking like a dish of aspic, sour and quivering. I cannot believe I read my love poem before all these strangers; yet it did not feel personal.

  Now Mike seizes the microphone and launches into his first poem. His voice fills the room, deep, resonant but carefully devoid of any emotion except perhaps scorn:

  … like maggots crawling through the rotting meat

  Pale, omnivorous they ooze along

  Behind their busy teeth. The dead are sweet

  to them….

  That’s about professors. Sometimes I can figure the poems out. The next is about suicide which he considers the most poetic subject. People talk a lot about gratuitous acts. Everybody is reading Camus’s L’Etranger. Even if they read it in English, they call it L’Etranger. I consider that character a creep, but I don’t dare say so again. Gratuitous is a lovely word. Stealing is gratuitous. Besides there being simply no way I could stay in college without stealing most of my textbooks and supplies and incidental clothing, I am partial to that moment when my skin becomes all eyes
. Years later kids in the antiwar movement will call me bourgeois when I habitually refuse to join their ideologically motivated shoplifting. But I don’t have to do it anymore, I say. I don’t have to anymore. I figure I wore out my luck years ago when I needed it.

  Thus the hatchet crashes making hash of mommy,

  How it flashes rising like a sun.

  How it dongs on bone like a churchbell.

  Now the blood leaps up in laughing come.

  That’s called “The Triumph of the Familial Ax,” about Lizzie Borden. After Mike reads he stands glaring at the audience. There are two obvious factions, those who applaud and those who ostentatiously do not. I glare at them too.

  One of the eight-foot-tall giants reads, a sonnet of impeccably stony address to Saint Sebastian. Gilt-edged security poems on Brancusi, Fragonard and God. Then the pretty senior Kate reads, all her material drawn from fairy tales, mythologizing her life, her lovers. It is strange and foggy but not uninteresting. She reads in a clear slightly affected voice. Mike looks at her with that expression partway between a leer and a sneer that annoys me. He calls her a castrating woman. She has a racy reputation, although as far as I can tell she has done little to deserve it besides write an occasional poem that suggests a knowledge of the other sex. She is not here with anyone; she has not taken any of them as lovers. Perhaps that is her crime. A professor’s daughter, she is at home in Ann Arbor and just a little independent. Grant Stone reads last, a series of sestinas. If anything is more boring than a sestina, it’s several sestinas. A gaggle of geese. A sunday of sestinas. Then he reads some short rhymed poems:

  Complaint of the Much Married Woman

  I gave myself to various men

  but they always gave me back again.

  Everyone is so happy to get to laugh that he receives roaring applause. With a leonine grin he stands and drinks it in.

  Afterward he strides up to me. “I did so enjoy your reading. It was … hypnotic…. ‘I want to feel your will stirring in my mouth.’ How marvelously phallic.”

  I am quite sure I have not been complimented. Mike separates us at once, arm around my waist tugging me back to a fierce argument about whether his work is prosy. One young man quotes Yvor Winters, one Hugh Kenner, one John Crowe Ransom, one plays it safe with Eliot. In a way Mike’s poems mean to irritate and thus their fury validates him.