Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  With unkind heartiness Howie, who never drinks too much, asks, “Hung over?”

  “In a sense. I was thinking about Mike.” A knot of old emotions and an ongoing curiosity that is part concern. I feel as if I’ve become unauthentic in his presence; his gaze makes me an actor. “I haven’t spoken with him in months.”

  “Not that long since you spoke about him.”

  I look at Howie’s broad serious face on which the lines that will score the forehead are already faintly etched by his frown of worry. I know how often I think of Mike and how little by comparison I speak of him.

  “Know what you do?” He persists as if poking a stick through bars at me, I think. “Use that rotten experience to protect yourself against anything really meaningful with a man.”

  “I hadn’t noticed a line had formed.” But I am staring across. Perhaps Howie is right and I make every man, every imagined coupling, stand in contrast to my myth of first and total love, secure in its wrapping of violence and tragedy from inner decay. I must make Mike into a person I can size up. “This is absurd. I’ll say hello to him.”

  “He may not answer. Finish your coffee and let’s go visit Bolognese, if he’ll let us in. He has a new story.”

  “I want to know how Mike is.” A little opposition gives me impetus. Mike watches me coming with a sly look that I’ll bet is a bastard to maintain. I cross a tilted slab of stage, feeling too many eyes on me. I scramble through their gazes awkward as a damaged puppy, swaggering and recoiling at once. My notoriety is something I try to pretend I do not know about. I do not even know if I am supposed to be clown, menace, femme fatale, or culture hero-ine.

  “Mistress Stuart, how’s your boneyard friend?”

  “Howie, you mean? Just fine. Hi, Julie. Hi, Grant.”

  Julie purses her lips looking hard at me. She cannot quite bring herself to smile.

  “If he’s doing jes’ fine you must not be done picking his brains or his bones yet.” Mike raises his left eyebrow in that old gesture. For almost two years his presence has maddened me. It is irritating that the beloved should continue to look and act as the beloved did, and no longer be loved. It is as if they persist in the old tricks in order to tease you for your credulity or to flog you for having failed in your loving. Mike seems a parody of himself, but I must force myself to see him now. His presence has solidified. He sits like a Chinese sage, the bones in his head and body not padded by the weight he has put on but confirmed. An ironic line already shaping his mouth, he looks more than a couple of years older than the man I loved. His clothes are new, a black Shetland pullover that sharpens his pallor, grey flannel pants that actually fit. The collar of the shirt that shows between outthrust chin and new sweater is not frayed. His hair is somewhat longer, tumbling over forehead and collar, that dark, dark brown just a shade lighter than mine.

  I peer at Julie, who puts her hand quite deliberately over his on the carved wooden tabletop. Grant Stone, winking at me, puts his hand over Mike’s other hand, but Julie is watching me and does not notice. Mike endures both passions with equanimity. In a slow drawl, his gaze beating into mine, he says, “I hear that your hero’s risking his head. Or at least his chair.”

  It takes me a few minutes to understand he means Donaldson may be in trouble if we put on our HUAC farce. I do not bother to ask how he knows I sit in on Donaldson’s class, because his acquaintances always spy on me and report back. “So, what are you doing this summer, Julie?” I ask ingenuously, making eye contact. “You’re graduating, right?”

  “We’re not sure yet. Mike has been accepted to Yale but he didn’t get a fellowship. We’re thinking of going to graduate school here or at Northwestern. I’m accepted both places too.”

  What a married sounding We. No ring on that possessive hand. Mike looks into outer or inner space. Grant Stone says in Mae West style, “You ought to come up and see me sometime. I’m a broad-minded fellow and curious as hell. The world’s my thing.” He glances at Mike. “Don’t mind him glowering. He treats everybody as his serf.”

  “We—and that is the royal WE—” Mike announces, glaring at his family left and right, “We may go off to Madagascar and eat fried monkeys. We may retire to a Tibetan lamasery. We may sign up as a lighthouse keeper. We may go off to Morocco and screw Arab boys. We may go off to Antarctica and screw ourselves. Aren’t you bored, Jill? I think you look bored.”

  “That’s just my morning expression.” Howie is putting on his yellow oilskin slicker and I must hurry to catch him. “Hey, wait for me.”

  “My breakfast is not only eaten but digested. I got tired of being put in storage.”

  Have I pushed him too far? “Please don’t be moody. You haven’t the ego to do it like the master over there.”

  To my relief he turns back to me. “Arf.”

  “He says Donaldson is going to get fired because of our play.”

  “Arf!” Loudly. Several heads turn. “Arf arf!”

  “Has rehearsing the play turned you cuckoo?”

  “Making faithful dog noises. You’re so easy to embarrass. I don’t think Donaldson will be fired. McCarthy’s fallen. The tide’s turning. Two years ago, maybe. We’re too late to be brave, kid.” We hike off toward Bolognese. “They’ve won what they wanted—they broke the Left. Nothing remains but a few study groups and some folksingers. Donaldson’s too popular to be got rid of easily.” Howie loves to sound cynical. I am not so sure.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  LE DÉJEUNER SUR L’HERBE

  AT FIRST DONNA is pleased with her new lover Charlie. He is twenty-four. (“A man ought to be a little older, Stu, because boys our own age just don’t know enough to keep us interested. But I admit Sal was too much older. He couldn’t take me seriously.”) Charlie is pleasant-looking. His voice has some rough honey in it I can always recognize when I answer the phone and he asks for her. He dotes on her. Being a graduate student who works for a sociologist, he has no money. In April he stole daffodils from his professor’s garden. In May he picks bouquets of lilacs from the hedge outside the astronomy building, their rich sexual fragrance dyeing the air in our room for a week before they droop.

  Tonight Donna sits painting on a face, with brushes, pots, powders, unguents spread out in a semicircle. She does her work slowly and with many wry grimaces. The dollface she will create is much admired by men, but in truth I prefer her scrubbed face with its albino pallor and sharp bones. “You seeing Charlie?” I ask.

  “Who else?” She shrugs in her plaid bathrobe. “Want to switch?”

  I grin. “Afraid not.”

  “You like him now, don’t you? You’re hooked.”

  “Good word—hooked. He’s like a stainless-steel fishhook in my gut…. Did you talk Wanda into switching rooms?” I try to sound indifferent. Every day I expect Donna to move.

  “I decided I couldn’t take her roommate Billy Sue.”

  “Are you sorry you moved into this house?”

  “It’s cheaper than the dorm and a lot looser. But who wants to live with a bunch of females?”

  “Jesus, Donna, I sure wouldn’t want to live with fourteen men. They’d all leave the toilet seat up and expect you to pick their socks off the floor.”

  “Men—not boys—men have something to offer—in fact, the world. If you want to learn anything, you have to learn it from a man,” she says sententiously, beginning to brush on mascara.

  It’s certainly true that the only woman who has taught us at the university was in Romance languages. “But you don’t think we’ve given each other a lot? And what are you learning from Charlie?”

  “Sadism.” She snorts and then swings around straddling her chair to face me with a sudden sharp giggle.

  “He’s sadistic?”

  “No, silly. He’s a spaniel. I swear I’ve got the worst of Lennie again —that guilt. Except that Charlie isn’t as good at making me writhe with it…. Is that the choice, Stu? A choice between letting a man use you like a tube of toothpaste, or usin
g him?” She looks rakish with one of her eyes mascaraed in rusty brown and the other lashed invisibly blond.

  “I guess I want to know if loving has to be fatal. Can you love somebody only a little and survive fine, but if you both really love each other, then he tries to bash you into the ground?”

  She sighs. “La belle dame sans merci is fine if you’re the pale knight interestingly loitering or littering your bloody hillside. But it’s a bone-crushing bore being la belle dame. You just sit there sneering all day and working in your bitchy little touches. It’s an art form but a limited one, like decoupage or pasting shells on lampshades.”

  “The knight is even more boring. Suffering is overrated as an exercise program for the soul. I wasn’t human for a year after Mike.”

  She nods, smiling crookedly. “But isn’t Peter sadistic, a bit? I sense that… tang in him.”

  “He tries.” If I loved him the way I loved Mike, I would be in deep trouble; he would tear me into little pieces. But I love him only as much as is proper: more than he cares for me but with a clear sense of how he fits into the fervent chaos of my life. One at a time he jabs his finger into my piddly fears and childhood muddles and pus-filled vanities. He wants to defeat me and possess me. He wants to prove himself right and me wrong. I could warn him that bed is a poor place for arguing with me. I walk away from him into the war of attitudes in my classes, into hard argument with Bolognese and Dick and Howie, into the grimy fiddling of my various jobs, into my endless rebudgeting and borrowing and paying back and cadging meals. When I think of him, it is in brief sexual images like a muscle spasm.

  The composite flower of the house absorbs me. When I have half an hour I sit in the kitchen spreading my net of curiosity and talk hard to whoever walks in: the Thai physics student we call Sally, with her mind glinting from its sharp edges like an industrial diamond and her little laugh with her hand coyly across her mouth; fat Wanda, the house clown and arbitrator; Billy Sue, who ran away from a stepfather who raped her only to find misery with a truck driver. Now she works her way through ed school. I am drawn to her because she reminds me of Callie, but she combines Sunday piety with anti-Semitism she has learned to deny but can’t resist showing. Lynn is a hearty big-voiced folksinger, one of those women in whom I catch appealing glimpses of the independent tomboy of eleven or twelve, at that age when a strong girl is still a physical match for a boy. She falls in love and unrequited misery with charismatic men—including Donaldson and Rob Prewitt.

  I hear them often playing and singing a couple of nights a week in the living room: Alberta, Lynn and sometimes Rob Prewitt, who drops by with or without his girlfriend Stephanie, who is thinking of moving in next fall. When I hear Beatles songs I date events of the sixties. Rock music calls up a summer, a party, a friend, a trip cross-country, a political era. Folk songs are pegged to the fifties. Alberta, who has not touched a banjo in fifteen years and whose youngest son is drummer in a punk band called Toxic Shock, would be astonished if she knew how often it is her voice I hear singing the blues or old ballads:

  Hangs-a-man, Hangs-a-man,

  Slack your rope awhile.

  Think I see my father coming,

  Riding many a mile.

  Oh father have you brought me gold

  Or have you paid my fee?

  Or have you come to see me hanging,

  Hanging on the gallow’s tree.

  No, I have not brought you gold.

  I have not paid your fee.

  Yes, I have come to see you hanging,

  Hanging on the gallow’s tree.

  Then the mother comes and she’s coming to see the hanging too, and the brother and so on. Then finally the true love comes, and he’s got the money to buy her off so she won’t hang. I sang that song along with them with conviction till the last verse when I’d kind of peter out. Surely I had believed True Love would save you from your family, but that hadn’t exactly panned out. In my world if a female friend didn’t manage to scrape up the money somewhere, you hung and everybody applauded. The only saving factor in the grim exigencies of dating and mating was the feeble conspiracies of women who would pity each other at least briefly.

  The house is noisy enough so that if I didn’t keep late hours I would have trouble writing papers or poems, but it provides me with automatic intimacy. In any moment of despair or loneliness, I can find someone whose conversation, whose presence and peculiar song of self will draw me outward and ease that central ache I can label, sometimes ignore but never quite cure.

  “It belonged to Everett Carmichael,” Peter explains. At my blank stare, he does his equivalent of throwing up his hands: his delicate lids quiver. “My noble savage. I can’t decide if it’s annoying or refreshing trying to talk to someone who can’t read the social map.”

  “So who was Everett Carmichael?” Maybe the moose whose head eyes us. I thought only in cartoons did people have animal heads mounted on their walls. My uncle Floyd who used to hunt in the mine-hollowed mountains around Cold Springs had a freezer full of venison by mid-December but never a head or antlers.

  “He held one of the patents on the vacuum cleaner. But that doesn’t say who he was. The symphony was his passion. That was one reason why it was decent when we were growing up.”

  “They used to take us from grade school,” I remember suddenly. “To the Masonic Temple. They’d play Saint-Saens Carnival of the Animals and talk about the woodwinds and the percussion. I loved it. It was sumptuous sitting in the dark….” Peter has stopped listening. “So how come you can use this guy’s house?”

  “It was his hunting lodge. Now it’s my uncle’s but they hardly use it. It is a little … overblown.”

  It actually reminds me of a small wooden church with its high ceiling and the gallery around the top. Up there are cubbyhole-sized bedrooms but they’re too drafty. We’re sleeping downstairs, near the wood stove and the view of the broad wind-ruffled lake. From the obviously modern glass wall at the lake end of the living room, you could almost believe this is still wilderness; but when we take out the little sailboat he calls a catboat, we can see other cabins tucked among the pines. Still the lake is hardly what I’d call crowded, even for Memorial Day weekend, although yesterday some water skiers were out with two motorboats late in the afternoon.

  I am not sure whether we’re supposed to be here or not, because Peter creates an aura of forbidding me to ask. We stopped at a real-estate office in a nearby town. Leaving me in the car, he walked in and got the key. The people there, Peter said, see to the maintenance of the old house. Peter had called ahead and the water was turned on, the refrigerator running. It was magical to arrive at six o’clock with our supermarket groceries at a house in the woods at the end of a long bumpy and arbitrarily winding road and find the lights on and the house humming to itself, sitting there under its gingerbread. I expected a witch or the three bears. Instead all those old dead heads regard us, elks and stags with mournful glass eyes and a solitary bear with a leathery mouth open on mean teeth, little pig eyes still contemplating its murderer’s just desserts.

  Now we lie in bed trying to provoke each other to rise first into the cold that leaks through the wooden walls and rises from the stone floor. Finally I make a deal with him that I will start breakfast if he will light the fire, gone out during the night. In a lean-to against the north wall, neatly piled logs in very short lengths reach to the ceiling. Somebody cut it. I would lay a bet it was not his uncle.

  Peter kneels in front of the green enamel Jotul stove with its bas-relief of a naked woman being serenaded by a man in bohemian attire who strums a guitar. The stove is pretty but the picture bothers me. Why is she naked? Why isn’t he naked? She will get covered with mosquito bites. If it’s cool enough for him to be comfortable in his ample garments, she must have gooseflesh and tomorrow a cold. What is he singing to her? Eskimo immolation songs for isolating old ladies on ice floes? Peter and I have never before shacked up together. He has the disconcerting habit of tweaking
or grabbing parts of my body at random moments that makes me feel clumsy and overripe, like a dish of fruit in the middle of a dinner table.

  I shiver over eggs sputtering in the iron skillet, the thick Canadian bacon he likes that is new to me. He assumes I know how to cook. My cooking to date has consisted of opening cans of sardines or scrambling eggs when my parents were away or when my working caused me to miss my father’s mealtimes, and the simple preparations at the co-op, following instructions and easy recipes from our house steward. Peter makes precise requests and I supply imprecise results. He knows exactly what he wants to appear on his brown quail china plate—bacon crisp but not burnt; eggs thickened to the texture of good hollandaise sauce; toast caramel brown; coffee black and sweet—but I know neither what he means, being unused to fine distinctions in food, nor how to produce what he wants inside the massive frying pan.

  Then wrapped in sweaters against the early morning chill we take scraps of toast to the dock, coaxing minnows from among the fronds of waterweed. White froth touches our shoes as the wavelets lap in and I toss crumbs to the fish.

  As the day warms we drop layers of clothing and take out the catboat. I scramble to obey him, confused but game. It is odd to be out on a field of water with so much water under us, making me feel entirely out of place and elated. We skim and turn and skid over and execute maneuvers he devises while I feel like part of a sea gull. Then at last he is content to drift gently before the breeze. I dabble my hand over the side to feel the tug of the water. Smoky green reeds poke from a submerged sandbar. Near shore I can see the rippled bottom. The sky floats milky over us. How have I touched him? Flat blue eyes, thin nose with pinched nostrils, supple mouth, exquisite hands pared and functional as the design of suspension bridges. Each body I love has its own aesthetic, I am discovering, its own proper scale and metaphors, its fruit and flower and mineral and seasonal imagery.