Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  Actually he didn’t ignore it, but this is no time to pass on that painful hearsay. Outside a fine rain is visible only around each lamppost. I drum my fingers on the window pole beside us on the ledge. If the weather ever warms, it’s used to open the upper tier of windows over the big plate-glass picture windows. “Because instant acceptance is unreal. Because we’re arrogant enough to feel what we’ve done we have to digest and understand to grow—”

  “You make it clean.” She shakes her head, her hair whipping. “I hurt him. We? Why not say I’m sick.” She rakes her hands hard into her scalp. “I disgust myself.”

  “Easy, Donna. When you stop loving, what can you do but get out? That’s what you told me about Mike.”

  She glares. “Lennie says it’s your fault.”

  “Me? But why?”

  “He says you’re possessive and dependent, since you don’t have a man.”

  “Oh? How would he know what I depend on?” I hunch forward.

  “And Mike told him that old stuff about those girls.”

  Including you, which neither of them knows. We are silent a few moments while she kicks her foot punishingly against the wall, thud, thud, jarring me. “I’ll just keep doing this, won’t I, fucking things up till I’m too fat and washed out to fool a man into thinking he wants me.” The tears start again. “Everything that’s nice, I spoil. I make everything dirty! It’s me that’s wrong, just me!”

  “Donna, it takes two to fight. Don’t torment yourself.” I have a feeling that she is working herself into a frenzy of self-punishment.

  She slides off the ledge. “You’re in bed with someone and suddenly you wonder why you’re there going through the gestures. That terrible blankness. Then I get crazy, I get dirty and mean.”

  “I know that blankness.” I try to touch her shoulder.

  She shakes free. “You don’t know this rage. You don’t know how sick I am. I want to break up everything—”

  “Come, calm down, Donna. Come on….” I sound exaggeratedly flat. I try to establish eye contact. I try to take her hand.

  “I’d like to smash that window! That big expensive window on this goddamned stupid warehouse-dormitory!”

  I try to grasp her arm and pull her along. “Let’s go upstairs. My mother made a cake.”

  She thrusts me away. “So sure I won’t?” She grabs the window pole.

  “Come on, Donna.” I turn toward the door. “Stop it. Let’s go upstairs and talk there.”

  She raises the pole. I lurch back to stop her, but she is swinging it wildly by the end with the hook, the metal hilt whirring through the air. I duck just in time, throwing myself flat. With a sharp report like a pistol shot the hilt strikes the glass, opening a crack that travels from the impact point to the top. Then she lets the pole drop, staring at the streamered star where the hilt struck, the long crack. She looks dazed.

  I rise cautiously, brushing myself. “Oy, gevalt. What for?”

  “But… you didn’t believe I’d do it.” Small wondering voice.

  Hearing someone in the hall, I scuttle among the tables to ease the door shut. Then I cross to the pole, picking it from the glass splinters to wipe on my jeans. No fingerprints.

  “Must you play detective?” She runs to the door, eager to escape.

  “We better take the steps up. Don’t forget your soda.” We listen till the hall is safe, then climb to our room.

  “I’m beat,” she says firmly. “Soon as I shower, I’m getting into bed.”

  “I’ll study downstairs, but I’ll shower first.” I take my robe and towel. “What did I do with my soap?”

  “You were supposed to get some in Detroit.”

  “I forgot. Can I use yours tonight?”

  “You always leave it in the puddle so it gets gooey. I like my soap firm.”

  “I’ll be careful.” Her scolding assures me that she is done smashing things and that our life resumes.

  “All right, but don’t forget to buy soap tomorrow. You can’t expect me to remember everything for you. Your red dress still needs cleaning.”

  With robe and towels slung over our shoulders, I follow her down the hall carrying the plastic soap dish like a chalice before me.

  We were staying one town along the Sogne Fjord from Flåm after taking the narrow-gauge toylike train down from the swirling snow of the pass in and through the mountains in corkscrew tunnels past hundreds of waterfalls to sea level, a thin strand where there wasn’t any land at all between mountain and deep water. The lodge had only a few couples staying; we were the only Americans. Those days were the last mild weather of the year before the arctic cold moved over it all. A short distance inland and a short distance uphill winter had swept down. Here all the windows were open on the fjord and, on the landward side of the pension, to the apple orchard whose leaves were changing color, duller than the apples that hung there and littered the ground.

  The couple in the room just below us, whose porch lay right under our window, were French. Josh, who does not speak French (his Norwegian after two weeks was confined to where are the toilets, please, and thank you), could not understand why I had begun to glare at him. In fact we had fought, wept, reconciled and made love and were outside with our feet hanging off a rock staring at a ship putting out from the small dock in Flam while the spray from a cascade drifted over us, when I grasped it. The tone of their arguments got me, that couple below.

  They were intellectuals, some shade of left. He was engaged in a vast continuous proof of his superiority to her for which every event of the day, every object encountered, every newspaper discussed, formed the matter. He was busy crushing her and she was busy striving to avoid his anger. She read him all day like a weather map and moved accordingly, retreating off the edge into weak smiles and silence.

  That tourist was much better at torture than Mike had been, I realized. He didn’t have to raise his voice to lash her with anger. If you asked, they would say they were in love. He preferred victory over her to whatever other battle he might have engaged in, with state or party. Josh and I sat up talking and reading timetables and drinking the cognac we carried in our suitcase. Josh pointed out I am not married (no longer married) to the man downstairs and then he hiked to Flam to buy tickets on the steamer at 6 A.M. In the morning we were both cranky and snarled as we dragged our suitcase and L. L. Bean shoulder bag all the way to Flam and the ferry slip.

  Once we were out on the water in the pearly fog of dawn, I kissed his hands. I had escaped Mike again. I had escaped from that marriage again. We were voyaging together, our fourth year in the fall, and I could love without confusing it with having a tooth drilled without novocaine. Josh scolded me for confounding past and present as we ate our apples and cheese, shivering on the deck. We had to go back to Oslo soon anyhow, where my Norwegian publishers were expecting us.

  That night in the Hotel Terminus in Bergen I woke in the darkness hearing that man’s cold voice relentlessly proving her wrong, but it was only the rain, the cold steady rain of Bergen. I wanted to wake Josh and tell him I did not confound the past with the present but the past was the compost that fed the present and the worm that curled inside eating away its sweet wholeness. The past confounded me only when I believed it was passed and dismissed it. I love this man so hard it scared me, resurrecting old fears to walk through me again wearing faces and clothes I had forgotten I ever possessed. I am a person to whom sex comes easily and pleasantly and love hard; friendship is common and important, intellectual and political passion my daily bread, but sexual passion conjoined with love rare. Now I was with my friend who is my lover and I went back to sleep again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  IN WHICH BOTH JILL AND DONNA TRY A CHANGE OF ALTITUDE

  BY SPRING I have figured out that Donna and I should move into one of the cooperative houses owned and run by students, a federation that attracts those of us who need cheap accommodation, foreign students looking for company and those attracted by the progressive aura. Th
e one that has room for us needs a great deal of work over the summer, but by September—the beginning of our junior year—we can move in.

  Our housemother is Alberta Mann, at twenty-six considered mature enough to get a stipend from the university for living here and exercising supposed discipline. Alberta comes from New York, where her father is a lawyer whom HUAC has pestered, although that does not seem to have destroyed his practice, mostly in labor and civil rights cases. When he is working on a case that excites him, he still calls to give her bulletins, but carefully, always assuming as Alberta does that the phone is tapped. Alberta fell in love with a Black law student she met at a National Student Association conference when she was nineteen. Their marriage was annulled but Alberta did not return to school for another year. At that time she felt her father was a hypocrite to oppose her marriage, but she no longer thinks so; it was a disaster. The next year she met Donaldson. Now Alberta is in the last year of law school, having a hard time but persisting doggedly. Since her long affair with Donaldson seems to have come to a ragged ending, she has taken an interest in no other man. Their political work throws them together too much for her to have the opportunity to recover.

  My only defeat was in failing to persuade Theo to move with us; I still don’t understand why. I don’t mind crossing campus to her, but inevitably I see less of her in the late evenings, which have been our intimate time. I didn’t expect Julie to move into these frowsy accommodations, but I did think Theo would. She claims to be too lazy. I drink now with Alberta, who is fond of bourbon. I think of the bourbon I buy as Old Overcoat, the cheapest brand that tastes as though it were cooked up last night out of caramelized straw. Alberta buys Wild Turkey and shares it with me. Her husband of three months taught her to drink bourbon, she says; her family drinks Scotch and martinis. Alberta has the single room next to the white corner double that Donna and I share. Alberta’s room is sumptuous, heavy fabrics, interesting textures of burlap curtains, velvet spread, corduroy-cushioned Danish chair, tones of mustard and gold and dark woodsy brown. Donna seldom drinks. She is high and giggly or melancholy after two shots; she disapproves of my drinking and tells me I stink when I come in to go to bed.

  Now Donna stands in front of the full-length mirror she found in a secondhand store, putting her hands on her hips and turning to watch the line of the tight skirt over her small pert ass. “See, I can get into it finally.” It is a black sheath dress she bought at a rummage sale, narrow enough to fit tightly on a barber pole.

  “Yeah, after starving yourself for two weeks.”

  She rests her hands on her hipbones. “Americans eat too much.” Usually no matter how wonderfully luminous her skin, Donna greets the mirror as if it were the eye of an enemy. But today she allows herself a pursed smile of pleasure. Even with her skinniness the dress is so tight it requires a girdle and hobbles her so that she must take tiny, tiny steps like a windup Chinese doll. The effect, however, is what I’d call sophisticated and that’s what she’s aiming for.

  “What kind of party is it?”

  “Sal’s just having some friends from the department and a few grad students to meet Edmund Rosco while he’s in town.” Her voice still cannot quite say “Sal” naturally. It sticks out of the sentence like a flashbulb going off as her voice rises a little in controlled anxiety.

  I don’t ask if she wants me to come; I know better. Salvatore Spinellosa is her private adventure, a foreign correspondent usually attached to the Washington Post, here for a term as distinguished visiting lion. He teaches one seminar and gives a few lectures while he writes a book on the Middle East. He is in his forties with hair as black as mine, silvered over his ears. Six feet tall, he carries his potbelly well. He has gradually covered Donna’s dresser with French perfume I dip into when I dare. I know she is going to buy a safe and lock it away from me eventually, but I cannot resist. I like to smell my body with the musk of perfume rising.

  Donna is wearing a bra based on the design of a medieval iron maiden, pushing her up and out into the décolleté. Now grinning at me in the mirror, she hangs her little gold cross around her neck.

  “Holy shit,” I mutter. “Didn’t know you still had that.”

  “It’s real gold,” she says defensively but she is eyeing herself with wicked satisfaction. “It gives him an extra frisson.”

  “I suppose he needs all the help he can get.” I do not believe Donna is in love with Big Sal, although she staunchly insists that she is, and I am furious with him for being the occasion of her lying to me.

  “He’s a man of many talents,” Donna says. “Some of them above the waist and some of them below.”

  “Oh. You mean he digests well.” I hate her forcing her body into the confines of the dress. I hate her hobbling across the floor on four-inch spike heels to dip carefully, holding her breath, to retrieve the velvet envelope of evening purse he gave her.

  “Maybe you’ve forgotten what else men can do.” She hobbles out while I am still trying to think of a retort.

  Because his father is dying of cancer of the stomach, Howie has transferred from Columbia to Michigan. He has bought himself an old grey Plymouth he manages to keep running; weekends he commutes into Detroit to visit his father in the hospital and to do what he can for his mother and grandmother. Often I have coffee in the Union with him, Dick Weisbuch and Bolognese, who share with me a writing class and a course in the metaphysical poets and share with Howie and me membership in the PAF.

  Has Howie changed? I study him as he sits with his elbows thumped on the table before him. Built like a fort, Donna said caressingly, but awfully young. He has matured over the past two years, jaw, neck and wide shoulders carved from the earlier fat. Sometimes he moves with confidence; sometimes he shambles like a bear in captivity. He is dogmatic and shy at once, hiding his constant worrying over his father as if embarrassed by his own grief. Monday, after a weekend of sitting by his father’s hospital bed and of soothing his mother and grandmother and cleaning out the gutters on the house and putting up storm windows, he drags back to school exhausted. The two halves of his life do not mesh.

  He likes to ride Bolognese, who lives alone in a rooming house on Packard, goes to bed at eight and rises at four to write cold electric fables. Lean, olive-skinned and neat, Bolognese views the world with icy mistrust.

  “Listen, you cold bastard,” Howie says genially, “you’re locking yourself in a closet like Emily Dickinson. I see a great spinsterhood ahead.”

  “Good work comes from inside,” Bolognese drawls. “With great effort.”

  “Sure. Like a starving man trying to shit.”

  Bolognese sits with fingers hooked over the table edge. The closest he comes to registering warmth is during their battles. “I see. The great doctor is going to close his office at five, kiss his fingers to his dying patients and go nightclubbing. A time for work and a time for play, or how to be piss-poor mediocre all the time.”

  “When I have fifty grandchildren singing me happy birthday, you’ll be dead from overwork and they’ll put a pretty marble stone over you for the pigeons to shit on.”

  “The two of you can do my research.” Bolognese includes Howie and me in a wry glance. “You’re both so good at getting what you want. And Dick can eat for me.”

  “Now you’re both right.” Dick is a mediator who thinks if we all married and ate good home-cooked meals, we’d be as plump and cozy as he is. Dick has a baby, financial troubles and the surest future: he will finish his Ph.D. and write “on the side” while teaching. I think his optimism greater than mine. I enjoy sitting with them and joining in their rivalries, particularly pleased to be here not through the patronage of any of them, nobody’s girl, but by proved competence. Occasionally Donna comes along as she will to PAF meetings, but the boys flirt with her, competing awkwardly, while the tone of insult puts her off. She calls Bolognese the Undertaker’s Assistant, and I laugh. But I respect him. He is serious about writing. Like me, he has no nets under him, no family w
ith money. He works hard, he reads whatever I show him and says straight out what he likes and dislikes.

  Peter across the table: clean-limbed English schoolboy. Clipped blond hair, black-rimmed glasses strident on the young mask of clear-skinned slightly fragile face. Hard to believe he has six years on me or that he is a graduate student in particle physics, working here with Glaser who invented the bubble chamber. He slides the Mosel across the checkered cloth. “The sauerbraten must have been good tonight. I like the girls with hearty appetites.” We are in a dark booth at the Old German.

  “You’ve found one.” I still work the dormitory switchboard, forcing me to miss meals at my co-op. We have shared four suppers, a movie or a play, then a drive back to my house where Peter double-parked, slid over for a mannered kiss and departed.

  “Not surprising. Like pregnant women, we both eat for two. Ourselves and our neuroses,” he announces.

  “To make them grow?”

  Earnest face except for that deepening groove beside the mouth. “Takes less energy to go straight ahead than forward in circles.” He traces epicircles on the cloth.

  “And less to sit still. What do you mean?”

  “That’s a proposition of geometry you grasp intuitively, or not at all.”

  “You’re awfully arbitrary, Peter.”

  “But ‘awfully’ right.” He refills the wineglasses.

  With the sense of being rebuffed I chatter, “It’s strange to drink in public. Whose ID card do I have?”

  Quick grin. Point for him. “No idea who the girl is.”

  “One more thing I should grasp intuitively?”