Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  His classroom is not a gallery where we are invited to stand before one painting at a time, told what to see, asked for our cued responses, told to move on. Howie says Donaldson thinks the shortest way between two points is to fall down the stairs, but he comes, he listens, he rehashes the lecture with me afterward. Bolognese says Donaldson’s lectures represent the collision of Marx and the Marx Brothers, but he never sleeps as he does in our other classes, head tilted so the light reflects off his glasses, skinny hands pressed prayerfully to his nose, propping his head up. I am a little in love with fiery Donaldson again. When I am around him, I always seem to be hot or cold, sweating or freezing. Sometimes when we of PAF become mired in long procedural haggling till I am bored with what I see as the need of the men to argue ritually with each other over all petty points, ego tintinnabulating against ego like toy rapiers, I sit and try to undress him, but I never manage. He is too tall and skinny. I find only bones. The last time his parents visited he shaved his beard to make peace with them and he is suddenly younger looking. It amuses me that a professor should have still to please his parents. That gorgeous face like a ship’s prow lean and questing over a leather-covered skeleton. Yet if he touches my arm, I burn for half an hour.

  Dick, Bolognese and I sit shoulder to shoulder again in writing class where discussions are carried on by all with the impetus of those duels from the Saturday swashbucklers of our childhood, the Errol Flynn costumed chases with swordplay from precipice to roof beam, turret to ledge with great style and sickening vertigo. Here the safe hierarchy of the literature classes dissolves like wet pasteboard. Is imitation virtue? If Wordsworth wrote this way about daffodils, why can’t I? Who wrote the rules? Why can’t pigs fly?

  Here the bright boy scout who can run through the thorny interstices of Donne’s imagery bearing aloft the torch of inquiry gets a thrill from bleating out lines like:

  Truth is a holy temple fire,

  A light to guide and to inspire,

  Leading Mankind ever higher

  Through pitfalls deep and straights most dire….

  O dreary backwaters and rabbitlands of home, I want to be killing the Grandfathers, I want to be going at Them with an ax to clear the road, and here sit Bolognese and I quivering to defend The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock as legitimate poetry.

  The class is divided too into virgins and us. We sit in sweaty-palmed anonymity (anonymity tattering until in response to insult we rise naked in assertion, dripping expletives) while our sexual obsessions and accidents splash over the Puritan granite. I leave class damp with argument, hot with vexation, sore with ambition, wound to a pitch that could only achieve satisfaction in the instantaneous output of a six-volume Bildungsroman. Ugggggh! Ah there. Boxed to be sold.

  Therefore I do not cut my classes to sleep, as I had imagined. When I finally trudge wearily back to our room, Donna sits at her desk toweling her hair dry. “Nobody noticed you stayed out all night,” she says in a compressed voice.

  “Hot dog.”

  “You were with … Peter? Or?”

  “Of course.” I smile. She smiles. I think of strangling her, thin neck in my hands, bones as light as those of a fish.

  She stands oddly braced against the closet door. “Stu … there’s something you may not know … I think.”

  “There’s a lot I don’t know, Donna.” I use my street-kid voice and manner to hold her off.

  “Something I did.”

  One more confession. I have had enough of them. She can keep it, pickle it, can it, eat it for breakfast. “I guess it’ll stay that way, then. I cook tonight, so let me at that Spanish rice.” I go past her and out.

  I sit in the only comfortable chair watching, resting my sore muscles while Howie unpacks. His room is in a third-floor corner, part of it fitted into a tower. I am relaxed, easy in his presence, my arms and back pleasantly tired from moving him. “What happened to you yesterday? You weren’t at Donaldson’s lecture.”

  “Another operation on the old man.” He stoops to the suitcase to gather an armful of socks. “If I was a medical student already, they’d give me the straight shit. Now I have to pussyfoot around while they sweet-talk us. Mother has to get it from them, because she’s a nurse. It’d be a lot better if they told me and I figured out how to say it to her. She’s coming apart at the seams.”

  “She’s a lot younger than your father.”

  “She lost her own family. They make all these mother-in-law jokes, but my mother moved into a family and she calls my bobbishe ‘mother’ and means it. She was born in Germany and got out early … so my father and his mother mean everything to her….”

  Listening, I watch him. Good strong curve of back, broad shoulders. Light thick hair on his arms where his sleeves are rolled up. Twilight pours in through the semicircle of tower windows, liquid, tangible, the color of lilacs. Spring thaw. Birds are screaming outside, excited at the longer twilight, the growing warmth. It’s mud time. “So how is your father, really? The sixth operation. I can’t imagine living through all that.”

  “Who can?” He shrugs. “He’s dying and it takes a long time. That’s what it amounts to. A lot of pain, for nothing.”

  “It’s getting to you.”

  “Goddamn it, how could it not?”

  “It’s good for you to admit it. Mostly you won’t.”

  “Oh, to you. Don’t ask me about it in the Union. I have to keep things in their boxes…. I’m hungry. Could you look at the bag of stuff Bobbishe sent back with me? Maybe there’s something you can heat up on the hot plate.”

  With a sigh I slide out of the chair and go look. “Kidney beans. I can make chili. My brother Francis taught me. I’ll get some ground beef, an onion, some spices at the corner, and be back. Give me some money.”

  While I am cooking, the smell of the chili powder reminds me again of Francis. Last time I was in Detroit, a package had come for me from Mexico. Inside was a wooden box with cacti etched on the side. When I opened the sliding top, a toy rattlesnake swung up and bit me on the hand. He’s always sending me things like that, when he remembers I exist. I’m permanently twelve years old in Francis’ mind. The last letter I wrote to him came back. Leo is marrying again to what my mother calls a hillbilly singer who lives in a trailer. Mother says she has a big bosom but buck teeth. Leo always introduces his wives to Mother; Francis never brings his girlfriends home. Mother never likes Leo’s wives until after he has left them, when she counts up their good points, commiserates with them by the hour on the telephone and oversees all her grandchildren zealously, explaining to their mothers how to raise them and buying them presents she can’t afford.

  “I ran into Peter Crecy in the Union yesterday.” Howie does not turn around as he speaks, dumping his shaving supplies on the bureau top with a clatter. “Challenged me to a chess match. Of course he beat me again. Then he climbed on the board and crowed.”

  “Why play him? You knew he could beat you.”

  “I didn’t consider my manhood at stake.”

  “What’s eating you, buddy?”

  He comes to stand by the couch, arms folded on his chest. “What do you mean?”

  “The way you talk about him. Always by his full name. Always in that tone, as if holding him by tongs.”

  “He practically referred to you as his mistress.”

  I laugh. “Oh my! He was too cheap even to give me a birthday present.” Then I see I have shocked him, that he did not believe Peter. My big mouth. Why should it matter? “I think maybe you still believe in bad girls and good girls.”

  “That clod. That fidgety little clod!” His hands twitch. “I don’t believe it!”

  “It’s not an article of belief. I am not in the habit of clearing my lovers with my friends.”

  “Maybe you should,” he growls. “That smug suburban fink.” Sinking heavily in the dusty mohair easy chair. “Maybe you’re right, anybody’s better than nobody.”

  “I never said that!” I finish browning the chopp
ed meat and onions and add them to the chili. I clear my throat. “Howie. Can I ask you something?”

  “I’ve paid for it. And last year I had a girlfriend in New York, before everything fell in and they started cutting up my old man.” He is being tough again.

  “Paid for it?” Marcie comes to mind. I imagine her got up in her lurid cruising outfit flagging down Howie. I know how whores talk about Johns. All Johns are ugly.

  He nods. “The first time. I was hanging around Woodward. She said ten dollars and I turned out my pockets. She settled for seven twenty-one and the lucky silver dollar Milt brought me from Reno.”

  “The first time?”

  “And the second and the third and so on. I never knew I could have a girlfriend till last year.”

  “Do you miss her? Your girlfriend in New York?”

  “Sure.” He shrugs. “Not really. We had trouble talking. If we could find something we could talk about like a movie or something from class —I met her in chemistry—we’d beat it to death because after that there’d be this awful silence while I tried to think of something, football, the weather, anything to talk to her about.”

  That reminds me of being thirteen and trying to talk to boys. I know I have replaced Donna with Howie, as she has withdrawn from me. I cannot talk with Howie on the same wavelength of intimacy or honesty I could talk with Donna because he is after all not a woman. On the other hand we share a political life. If you asked me who my best friend is, for the first time since I left home I would not answer you, Donna. I would say, Howie. He is my best friend. I would never say, Peter. He is my lover now, but he is not my friend.

  “You have no sense of reality.” Peter shakes a stream of sugar into his coffee. “You think you can pile your neuroses in a closet and go waltzing around. You think you’ll never have to work on yourself and deal with your problems.”

  “I don’t think sitting in a room talking to some guy at health service is dealing with my problems. What do you really get out of therapy?” He goes to a guy in Detroit twice a week.

  “Self-knowledge. Coping. Besides, therapy is just a stopgap measure. Once I land a good job, I’m going into the real thing.”

  “Huh?” I am eating my chicken potpie, looking vainly for chicken among the potatoes, carrots, peas and gravy. Chicken potpie is memory food. It makes me think of traveling with my parents when I was little, since it was a dish I never got at home and often ordered in diners or those small-town restaurants called Martha’s Home Cooking. In civil rights and early writing days when I was poor I ate frozen chicken and frozen turkey and frozen beef potpies by the dozens. Those years are marked in potpie containers and the starchy contents in my stomach. Once I ate smelt for ten days because a vast bag of it was on sale, frozen, in a Chicago supermarket. But that’s another fishy story. Peanut butter. A vast heap of spaghetti with a little dab of sauce.

  “I’m searching for a good analyst.” He eyes me through his blond lashes. He looks forward to analysis much as I did to my first sex: it will be moving, awesome and change his essence. “I want a good one. I’m prepared to buckle down for a long haul. That will be my real education.”

  “In what?”

  “All we ever know: self. I’m ready for it.” Then a few moments later he tells me, “You take yourself too seriously. All those compensation mechanisms because you’re not fulfilling yourself as a woman. You refuse to work within your limitations.”

  “I know my physical limitations. If I have less than four hours’ sleep, I concentrate badly. I know my body can betray me, by getting pregnant—”

  “What? I thought you were using the diaphragm. What is this?”

  “Theoretically, Peter. I’m speaking theoretically.” I use the diaphragm with a passion equal to if not exceeding that with which I enjoy sex.

  “Because if you get yourself into that state, don’t start hearing wedding bells. I know a good abortionist in Detroit.”

  “Do you? What’s his name?” I take out my Spanish notebook and prepare to take down the name.

  “What for? What’s up?”

  “Nothing, Peter, relax. It’s just that somebody’s always needing the information.” I don’t exactly know why I always write down that information, but I have started keeping names, approximate fees and instructions in the back of my Spanish notebook. There has to be someone who knows, I figure, and I am willing to be that woman.

  “Where you ought to be going is to my man at health service. Landauer. That would do you wonders.”

  “I should go offer up my secrets to the enemy? I should say, You haven’t got me yet, but here’s my valuable gut if you’d like to do a better job on me next time? Besides I can’t afford it, even with their sliding scale.”

  He calls me paranoid. When supper is over he pays the cashier for his meal and walks out. “Peter, you forgot me.”

  “You can buy your own supper. Why should I pay all the time? We aren’t married yet.”

  “I wouldn’t have eaten so much if I’d known I had to pay.”

  “Just out for what you can get, see?” He is only half kidding. Part of him believes everybody is out to take him. I am almost mad enough to stalk off. But what will happen if I do? He will pick up another girl and swindle her into bed. He will get laid, I will get none, and he will have the satisfaction of demonstrating he does not need me. Therefore I follow him. The trouble is I always do want to be fed. Whenever he takes me out I eat as much as I dare, making up for my missed meals. Hunger is a wind that blows through me most of the time. As I sharpen into life again, I am hungry for food, hungry for work, hungry for learning, hungry for love, hungry for sex, hungry for friendship. I experience myself as a clamorous need, a volume level of desire turned too high.

  What holds me is the sense of Peter as a prisoner in the finely molded cage of bone that is his skull. What captures me is the elaborate game he constructs around me, traps and lures and attacks and feints and withdrawals. What brings me back to him is the sex, athletic, physically complicated but emotionally simple as a good workout. He is full of experiments. We are always laboring in strange yogic positions. He bites harder than I like, he uses his fists and elbows. It leaves me pleasantly used and with an interest in my body’s health. My mind labels elements sadistic, elements masochistic, but I feel nonetheless perfectly safe.

  If he would touch me before he came in, if he would eat me, I would come better, but he says wanting that shows I am sexually immature and stuck in the clitoral phase of development. If I was a real woman, he says, I would not need stimulation. He has learned that certain things you do in bed are healthy and certain things are forbidden because unhealthy under his Freudian code. I don’t know who assigned all the point values but they have nothing to do with what feels good to me. He is also uncomfortably (for me) aware that I want sex oftener than he does. Though I try to be subtle in my expression of desire, he is quick to sense a source of power and at times he enjoys deferring my pleasure more than taking his own. That too is interesting, so unlike Mike that I unlearn my barely formed generalizations about male sexuality. I also learn more about my own. Wanting him more than he wants me makes me aware of myself as actor, as agent, even if frustrated. Lying caressing him tonight wondering if we will or we won’t, I think of Alberta who always talks about sex as something men do to you. She is passionately active politically, passionately passive sexually, I surmise from our late night conversations over the Wild Turkey.

  Tonight we do. He is semiviolent, battering on me as if I were a door that could admit him to oblivion, a tunnel through which he could pass prick first to Somewhere Else. Relaxing afterward with his sleek-skinned neat body against me, his eggshell head sullen with pleasure at my breast, I am moved for him and his inturned pain.

  “I’m no good,” he mutters. “I’ll never be any good. For anything. For anybody. There’s something deeply crooked in me, all the way through. I’m a runt. That’s what he used to say. I’m shorter than he is. How can you be shorter t
han your father? Every generation gets taller. He’s five feet eight. Gene, my brother, is five feet ten. I’m a throwback. I get lost in crowds. Nobody ever looks at me and thinks, He must be brilliant. I’ve never had love at first sight. I don’t deserve it, maybe. Then or ever. I’ve never had real love. I’ve never been loved and I never will be loved … because there’s something deeply wrong with me.”

  “Peter,” I hold him like a petulant child, “you just need to open up. That’s all. Reach out! Of course you can be loved. Don’t I love you?”

  He snorts and sits up, staring at me with narrowed eyes. “You what?”

  I hadn’t paid much attention to what I said; now I feel stuck with it. So what? Loving is easy; it grows on female trees. Love comes up thick and abundant and ordinary as grass. You can love anybody if you want to. “I said I love you. I want you to feel better about yourself.”

  “I knew you could love me. I had that sense.” He rubs his nose, almost glaring. “I knew you could! Ha. Then why can’t you learn to play chess?”

  “I can’t put that much effort into a game. My mind wanders off to poems I’m working on or papers I’m writing,” I say apologetically. “You have lots of people to play chess with.”

  “But we have to share more things. I have to develop you.”

  Like the fields populated in my childhood with pheasants and rabbits developed into dreary little tract houses, I think, but then I am pleased as I consider that is after all his way of caring. He is opening up, he is cracking open, my beautiful pastel egg.

  A couple of mornings later as I am eating breakfast in the Union with Howie, I feel a cumulative dissatisfaction like an itch between my shoulder blades: intolerable to sit in the Union across the room from Mike three or four times a week and never speak. We are dawdling over our second cups of coffee when Mike takes a table, attended by Julie and Grant Stone.