Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  “Cribbets says the worst thing for a writer is to get involved. A writer needs wide experience but he must keep part of himself detached.”

  If he loved me and I am still me, why can’t he love me? I haven’t changed. “Oh? Did you bring your notebook tonight?”

  “I don’t expect you to agree. Every woman resents a man’s independence. She wants him hanging at her breast like a baby.”

  “I write as much as you do. And you’re not independent. I come closer to supporting myself than you do.”

  “Inevitably, you’re a woman first. And most of what you write is just merde.”

  “Oh? You never said that before.”

  “It was implied in everything I explained to you about aesthetic theory. You don’t expect me to take it seriously. Do you realize I’ve spent years thinking about aesthetics? Planning my career?”

  “Mike, if you want to end it, say so. Don’t poison it.”

  “Don’t be melodramatic.”

  “Don’t you understand they won’t send me to school if we aren’t married? You won’t see me. I won’t be around.”

  “Move out. You’re eighteen.”

  “If I leave I can’t go back. They’re my parents!”

  “You’ve enough parents to spread all around the city and have enough left over to free all the orphans. He’s living in the Victorian Age and she’s a power-mad witch.”

  I should keep quiet, I know. “Mike, won’t you marry me? I have no skin left. Why do you make me beg?”

  He stares ahead, his arm with the muscles knotted hard against my touch. I slide away to the door. “Sorry. I’m upset. You’d better take me home.”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t marry you.”

  “Of course.” A rock in my gut: the embryo? “Take me home anyhow.” I will never tell him, after tonight.

  “We haven’t fucked yet.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Oh? After all the trouble you got me into? Don’t try those withholding games on me. You think I’ll come around, then. No thanks. Come here.”

  That night I experience sex as pure pain.

  As I come up the walk with the steam of rush hour still printed on my skin, my wrinkled dress, Mother peeks out the window. “You’re late,” she says nervously.

  “The bus broke down.” I sit wearily across the table, taking up a knife to peel potatoes.

  “Jill.” Her tongue pink and rough as a cat’s darts out to lick her lips. “Do you want to marry him?”

  “I never did.” I wince. “That’s not apropos, is it?”

  “It’s a long time, marriage.”

  “I don’t think this one would be.”

  “I’ve been thinking. We could send you someplace else to school, if you’d give him up….” She trails off questioningly. We look at each other with a frank bald weariness.

  “It’s late to apply.”

  “You could get into Wayne.”

  “It’s not as good a school as the university.”

  “He isn’t worth the pain, honey. He’s weak.”

  The protest rises in my throat, sinks back.

  “You’ll get over him. You’ll be more careful, won’t you? I can’t stand to see you look so pale.”

  “You don’t look so hot either.” The scroll of peel uncurls from my knife. “Why did you have to interfere?”

  “You weren’t happy. I could see you weren’t.”

  “I was. You think I’m happy now?”

  “We could send you someplace else to school. Away from him.”

  “Berkeley?”

  “So far? Well … Sarah’s in Sacramento. They have a college there too. You could work till February and then go.”

  “Would Father agree?”

  “He hates Mike.”

  “He hates me too.”

  “Don’t say such things.” She rubs her nose. “He’s tired. He wants it over and done with. We could bring him around.”

  “I don’t know.” The sectioned potato bleeds chalky juice that makes my palm itch. A live thing one cuts up. Trust me, she coaxes, and then what?

  “You’re young,” she whispers. “How can a man tell you aren’t a virgin if you hold yourself tight? I never told Max about Sam. Being a widow at seventeen, it was too much! Being supposed to wear black and never go dancing. He never would’ve known if your uncle Murray hadn’t dropped it. Then I persuaded Max the marriage had never been, what do you call it?”

  “It’d be selling out what we had. You and I will never agree about what that love meant to me.” Past tense. I hear myself.

  “You had a sordid affair in cars and fields and God knows where, like thieves. Don’t glamorize your mistakes when I’m trying to help.”

  “We see things so differently. I can’t take a bribe to break with him. I have to choose it.” I also can’t trust her. They won’t send me anyplace except out to work at a dead-end job. They want nothing good for me, nothing I want for myself, not an education, not freedom, not compatible friends, not love, not a chance to write.

  Her eyes flash narrowly as she slices the potato into smaller and smaller chunks. “Think about it, Jill. Think it over.”

  “Are you alone? I have news.” Mike’s voice slurs with excitement.

  “They’re on the porch. Can you hear if I speak this softly?” I want to ask what happened to him last night, that he didn’t come at eight, but I don’t dare.

  “Night before last I talked to my cousin Sheldon. He said to tell Mother, that she wouldn’t kick me out. So I did it.”

  “What did she say?” I hold my stomach.

  He laughs shortly. “That’s why I couldn’t call yesterday.”

  “Does she want to see me today? Should I come over?”

  “She’s tearing her hair that I ever brought you in the house. She says your parents haven’t a leg to stand on. She called her brother-in-law, he’s a lawyer.”

  “They haven’t been talking law, Mike.”

  “She locked up the car and threatened to take a leave of absence to watch me.”

  Why does he sound so flattered by the fuss? My hand on the phone does not sweat because it is too cold. “Planning to stay home?”

  “I’ll get over in a few days, when she cools down. But I’m glad I made a clean breast of it, finally. Throwing myself on the mercy of the court. The relatives are up in arms, phone calls and visits and summonses! They haven’t been this riled up since Sheldon got caught cheating on an exam.”

  “I can’t talk anymore. Good night.”

  I walk toward the bathroom to be sick. Twenty-nine days and no period. Twenty-nine mornings with that razor edge cutting me from sleep, twenty-nine days of seizing hope from every cramp and twinge, looking always for the blood that does not come. Red is the invisible color of hope.

  Saturday morning I wake to see Mother standing by my dresser holding my calendar. Her face is hard. “Jill, are you with child?”

  I swing out of bed, clutching my old pajama bottoms with one hand. “I don’t know.”

  “How late are you?”

  She can count it too. “Thirty-two days.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I heist up my pajamas. “Are you kidding?”

  “Do you have other symptoms?”

  “Nausea. I’ve been throwing up.”

  “Do your breasts itch?”

  They begin at once, O psychosomatic me. “I’m late because of the turmoil.”

  She shakes her head briskly. “A month late? Never. You’re regular, like all the rest of my family.”

  Outside a mad robin chirrups in the tree. “You think I’m pregnant?”

  “I knew it! You disobeyed me, going behind my back. Now you’ve brought this down on yourself.”

  “If you try to make me marry him now I’ll leave this house.” I step closer to her clenching my free hand.

  “Does he know?”

  “No! And he won’t either. I’ll walk out and you’ll never see me again
. You won’t know whether I’m alive or dead, but I’ll never marry him.”

  We stand with our faces a handsbreadth apart while her black eyes try to force mine to flinch. I will not be put down.

  “We have to talk fast. Your father’s in the yard gabbing with old man Wilensky. You don’t want to be saddled with a fatherless child!”

  “I don’t want it. I want an abortion.”

  “No! They’re dirty men, Jill. They charge a fortune and they blackmail you.”

  “We needn’t give our right names.”

  “It’s against the law. You can go to jail. Your father would kill me!”

  “People go to them all the time and don’t get caught.”

  “Half the time they don’t do it right. No!” Her hands seek each other in her apron, her gaze darts about the room. “They butcher you so you can’t have babies after.”

  “Mother! I’ll take my chances. I’ve got to.”

  “No. You’ve made your bed and you’ll lie in it.” She shifts from foot to foot, her face twitching. “All right. I’ll tell you what to do.”

  “Mother, a doctor knows what to do. I don’t want to kill myself.”

  “Then have the bastard if you won’t listen to me.” She turns and pushes past me.

  I grab her arm. “Mother, don’t!”

  “Will you listen, then? I’ll tell you what to do.” She rakes me with her gaze. “You’ve always been a weakling and a coward. Sickly since you were seven. You’ll have to do this for yourself. You’ll do what I say or I’ll wash my hands of you. If you go running around to doctors, and you can’t trust a one of them, only in it for the money, I’ll tell your father and he’ll make you have it.”

  “All right.” I sit on the bedside clutching my stomach. Fish cold.

  “Don’t think it’s easy. It’s hard, hard.”

  “You’ll see that I’m strong enough.” The bile wells in my throat and I swallow it down. “Tell me what to do.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE AGON

  STEAM CLOUDS THE mirror, coalescing on the yellow wall and running down in rivulets. While the tub fills I sit on the toilet seat staring at my belly smooth and flat from harsh laxatives. Under the cushion of fat lurks the womb, spongy fist that will not open while in it cells divide and divide. The steam swirling hot from the tub smothers me as this body goes its animal way. I seldom felt feminine: I felt neuter. An angel of words. I could imagine myself a Hamlet, a Trotsky, a Donne. I thought I was projects, accomplishments, tastes: I am only an envelope of guts. This is what it is to be female, to be trapped. This sac of busy cells has its own private rhythms of creation and decay, its viruses and cancers, its twenty-eight-day reminders of birth and death. My body can be taken over and used against my will as if I were a hall to be rented out. Hot baths with Epsom salts, hot baths with pennyroyal; I am parboiled and still pregnant.

  I loved and got caught and that phrase has teeth. Like my mother to cuddle a dark-haired girl-child and suckle it on my frustration and beat it for my hungers and bind it for my loneliness. To sacrifice myself for a girl-child whom I will try to teach to sacrifice herself, a chain of female suffering. I lower myself into the scalding tub, groan, heave out, plop back. In the cannibal pot I stew. Only I will know how I sometimes dream of that small changeling dribbling love on my breasts and how sick is that dream quivering with power. It would love me, poor bastard; it would have to.

  “We’re just as good as his folks.” Mother scrubs at the pot furiously.

  “Good we may or may not be, but it’s a matter of class.” I am sweeping the floor.

  “We’re just as middle class as they are. We own our house. We own our car, only two years old and paid up. What’s wrong with him?”

  I don’t know how to sort out what I feel, such a welter of pity and love and irritation. “Sure, everybody’s middle class, right? But some are more middle class than others.” I have been reading Orwell.

  She looks at me in blank rage, standing there with her worn posied housedress soaked through with dishwater, wearing old grey tennis shoes and Orion socks yellow with washing, and she waits for me to tell her why Mike and family consider us a few steps down the social ladder. Is this what I went to college to learn? “I will not, I will not marry him, so it doesn’t matter, does it? What they think.”

  From the dark porch my parents watch the street arguing about Milton Berle, whom they watch every week and every week quarrel over. My mother says he works hard; my father says the network bosses are fools to pay him thousands for putting on women’s dresses and making faces. I think Father suspects Milton Berle is Uncle Murray in disguise and waits for Berle to try to touch him for a twenty. Alto and baritone my parents’ muted descant rises over the cars dragging at the corner and squealing down the street, enters the stifling kitchen where Mike stares into his cup. He yawns, flexing. “You don’t understand, Jill. She doesn’t put me through scenes. The family’s civilized. It’s just the barbs. My cousin Sheldon saying, Sex for a homely girl is just her substitute for a pretty girl’s flirtation.”

  “Do you think I’m homely, all of a sudden?”

  “My aunt told him you were. Mother thinks you look Oriental. That with roomers in the house, your real father—”

  “I won’t hear!” I jam my hands over my ears.

  He pulls them down. “I’m supposed to keep this poison in? At Uncle’s last night they had a simpering piece from Swarthmore dangling in front of me the whole time.”

  “I hate them!”

  “You can’t. We come as a set. Now I’ve been considering how we can show them. How we can get my mother to stop making fun of pumpkin and see her good points the way I do.”

  Skinny birdwoman, cold and fleshless. “Your mother and I love and hate in polar opposition. I can’t be me and please her. Why should I crawl?”

  His eyebrows climb his forehead. “A strange tone for someone begging to be part of that family.”

  “I’m not begging now.”

  “That’s a fact. Where does this hard line come from?”

  “From me. I’m not interested in marriage any longer.”

  “So you set yourself against me. Going to show how stubborn you can be.” That silky voice. “I want the pumpkin to be good, but she’s trying to be a stone instead. So you can arch your back and stand up to me. Do you know what I can stand?” Taking the cigarette from his lips he pushes it against the palm of his left hand. He turns it back and forth, his gaze on me. The sparks flare against his palm and shower into his lap.

  “Stop. Mike, stop it!” I tug at his wrist. He grinds the lit cigarette into his palm until I shudder with convulsive weeping. “Stop it, oh god, please, Mike!”

  At last he snuffs it in the ashtray. “Shall I do it again?”

  “No, Mike, please!”

  “Do you think that hurt as much as what you said?” “I’m sorry.”

  “Why do you cry if you don’t care?”

  “I do!”

  Footsteps. I wipe my eyes but Father sees. “Any coffee left?”

  “I think so.” I fetch the pot from the stove and pour it.

  He looks and looks at Mike. “You’ll have plenty of time to make her cry if you do marry. Why don’t you go home now?”

  The house is quiet except for Dad’s snoring. I sit nude on the old glider in the attic smoking a last cigarette. Maybe Mother doesn’t really know how. It’s not working. My eyes chafe as if the sockets fit too tight. That trick with the cigarette. Must he always break me down to get his way? I cry away my reason.

  Flinching I bring the cigarette to my palm. One, I will count slowly. Two, so hot it feels not hot but sharp, three, like a needle. No, broader. Four, a drill lighting up a nerve. Five, shouldn’t concentrate on it, one illuminated point. Six. Think about what, then? All worse. Seven. Too quick there. Go back. Six. Maybe if I do this, I can abort myself. Seven. Then never again will he be able to break me down with a cheap trick, eight, although I won’t tell him I
did it too. It would just up the ante. Still if he tries it again, nine, I will remind myself it’s not so bad. Even longer I could. Ten. I grind the butt out.

  I roll into bed, hanging my hand over the side with the palm still convinced the cigarette is eating it. I will not let him squash me.

  Mother sits on the couch, her thighs spread wearily. “You aren’t trying hard enough.”

  All the furniture is shoved back to back. I let the rust chair stay blocking the passage to the dining room and drop in it in humid collapse. “How can I try harder?”

  “If you want this baby, say so. But don’t fool around.”

  “Mother, damn it, I’ve lost twelve pounds with laxatives and taking those vile herbs and throwing up and jumping off porches.”

  She snorts. “You can’t diet a baby away.”

  “I’ve lifted and heaved and jumped and poked and twisted and boiled myself.”

  She looks at her plump hands red with washing. “I don’t know …”

  “Mother, maybe it isn’t going to work. Let’s go to a doctor. Please.”

  “And end up in jail? Never. You do it yourself, they can’t prove it on you. They can’t take you to court.”

  “I’m sick as a dog. I can’t stand without dizziness. I almost passed out climbing the stairs at work yesterday. But nothing happens!”

  “Keep your voice down.” She taps her foot. Her thighs quiver nervously under the washdress. “There’s another way. But it’s bad for the heart.”

  “Anything.”

  She turns her head away. “We’ll get you quinine and you take that and then the next day a mustard bath. If that fails you have to open the womb yourself. There’s no more time.”

  I am watched all the time at home but at work since I have given up lunch I have time to get my rolls of quarters at the bank and shut myself up in a pay phone on a corner. I am calling New York.

  “Is Lennie there?” I ask the woman who answers. “I’m a friend from school.”

  “What friend?”

  “My name is Jill.”

  “I thought maybe you were that Donna. Lennie’s been expecting her to call. Just a minute.”