Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  Under the suddenly full leaves of late May we walk around the lake among greens that look freshly painted, the colors still not dry. He carries field glasses, his light meter, lenses and camera. He poses me against the bole of a tree, lying in the grass, kneeling by a brown and piny brook. The air is clear. That we hear voices across the water now and then or see the two motorboats with the water skiers darting behind only sharpens our privacy. Eating regularly and sleeping long nights make me feel fresh as the lake. We toast marshmallows in the stove and once again he orders me to play chess with him.

  “We’re a sex machine,” he says with that throttled laugh. And, “From the back your body looks like a boy’s.” He enters my vagina from behind. That excites him. “Boy in back and girl in front—you’re a frigging hermaphrodite.”

  Later my head rests on his abdomen as he strokes my hair, but when I bend to kiss him on his half-erect prick, his hand on my nape squeezes hard to stop me. “That’s too personal.” The word lodges like a splinter in my chest.

  Afternoon. Rain hits the wind-ruffled lake. He has spread out his photographic gear on the table. As he cleans his lenses he whistles a Telemann air for flute. I keep wanting to hear the flute instead. I go upstairs to get away, installing myself in a monastic cube of bedroom that faces the water. I say to myself, Today I will work. Something not him to save me from despair.

  Is he a void I try to fill?

  Is he a need I try to answer?

  Your back sleek and sealed against my

  begging fingers groping fingers hungering fingers

  sealed. ice smooth coiled porcupine

  A pebble takes warmth from the tongue.

  A pebble sucks warmth from the tongue. Too active.

  A pebble warms on the tongue

  but cannot feed me. I return

  it to the beach where it lies cold.

  I shudder. Well, that’s one view of our relationship. But Peter is no rock —too active, manipulating, prodding, poking, setting up minidramas. Through money he controls our environment. No, my poem is neat self-aggrandizement. I am warm and he is cold. I am open and he is shut. Ah, the couple on the stove. I am naked, vulnerable, supine. He is clothed, protected, upright.

  We dance together, naked woman

  and man in full armor, clanking.

  When he presses me tight to his

  bosom, mine is impaled

  on a protective spike. If

  you love me you’ll kiss me

  he says and knocks out my teeth.

  If you love me you’ll save

  me from this imprisonment he

  says as he fits a new point

  to his lance and climbs

  on his horse and charges. You

  didn’t really love me

  he mutters to my corpse;

  that’s why I’m still locked

  in here. Oh, the love

  of women is weak. It sure

  is my blood sings like gnats

  in the evening as he

  goes clanking off.

  I feel like calling it “Man in a Can,” but I know better than to be flip. I can’t bring it to class anyhow. It isn’t in stanzas or regular meter and has no neat literary references and no ambiguity at all.

  My inky palm. Wind scuds the rain over the lake in waves over breaking waves. Peter as abstraction and Peter tinkering with his equipment. Work is a room where every object has a significant place, a room where I can have what I want or at least name what I have and name what I want. Without work I am too small. My writing justifies me: what am I doing here? Writing two poems. All is not waste. I am the alchemist, turning leaden failure into golden work. Even as I wrote that of him in a moment of recoil, I believe that trapped in him is a man struggling to reach the air. If I didn’t expect from moment to moment that man to break through, I would not be here beside this northern lake.

  How can these people, his uncle, leave such a pretty house to itself? Unlike the summer cottages my parents used to rent from ads in the papers for my father’s two-week vacations, this house is not furnished with battered mismatched pieces. Even the dishes are good china. How can they just leave good things here in the woods? How come they don’t bother being here?

  “They don’t use this place much anymore,” Peter explains as we curl up on the leather sofa by the stove. “It used to be nice, but it’s a bit spoiled.” He gestures at the lake where the sun is setting behind the far woods.

  Spoiled. I think of the treat it was for us if we got to rent a cabin in a row of cabins, three rooms and an extra cot on the porch. A rowboat was a big deal. Now his uncle has a house in St. Thomas. That’s in the Virgin Islands, Peter explains. They go there in the winter. In the summer they prefer Maine. I could stay here, I fantasize. Just stay here, with this house around me alone in all this space and I’d write and write. Would I be scared alone in the woods? I have no idea; I’ve never been allowed to find out. Imagine, to have places you can go off by yourself and be alone in a pleasant comfortable space. I catch a glimpse of the fact that Peter has brought me here because nobody in the family cares about this place; they are holding on to it as an investment when the land will be developed. Yet what is rustic to him is one of my first glimpses of what I would call luxury. All my life I have been crowded for space. Wedged in, jammed together, smelling and hearing each other. The silence of this place enters me through my ears and gives me enormous mental space to fill with words. What a privilege to enter this green world full of other creatures whom people have given names I do not know, neither the labels nor the furred, feathered or needled the labels call to mind, making precise what I see as quick blurs.

  Sun tints the morning to a painted egg. Rippled straw-colored sand. Filmy jade weeds. Silver in the weathered boards of the dock where I sit on a pier. On the rim of my vision he squints through his camera. “Look to the left and up. A little more.” I stare at a boathouse, a low uninteresting building. I try to look interested. He says, “I see things you don’t see yourself. Things others can’t see. I’m going to prove they exist.” Touching me through the lens.

  Now he has me wade into the water with my jeans rolled up, water so cold my bones wail. He poses me against the same pier with my hands behind me. “I used to be interested in textures,” he mutters. “The way a fly would see a book or an apple. But now I’m photographing dreams.” He uses the word a lot. This morning at breakfast he cradled his hot mug against his cheek, telling me, “I’ve got to get my dreams straight.”

  Standing up to my knees in ice water assuming a posture of bondage and feeling like a fool—parody of a fashion model, with my sweater pulled tight against my breasts and my back all goose pimples —I say, “What did you mean about getting your dreams straight?” Conversation turns me from object into agent again.

  “It’s time. It’s that or die inside, like my sister, like my brother. Are you going to help?”

  At first I think he means his nightmares. In sleep he grinds his teeth, mutters curses, rolls from side to side struggling.

  His hands move on his forehead soothing. The camera hangs like an outsized necklace. “I talk crooked and expect you to hear straight. But I make sense, if you’d listen!” He turns abruptly and stalks away, leaving me to scramble out, my teeth chattering. “Know what the old man said when I told him I wasn’t going to the traditional clan picnic? If you take another of your joyrides, don’t expect me to bail you out. You’d think I was a playboy! That’s how he talks to me. I racked up a car once when I was seventeen, and he’s still counting the pennies.”

  “You have to leave home. You never really have. Even going to Michigan, you’re within striking distance. Don’t take the job in Detroit, if you don’t get the one in Brookhaven. Go to California.”

  “You’re right—you see it! Yeah, my brother thinks he’s such a big man because he does a bad imitation of what my father turns out. My sister lives a mile away. We’re an old Michigan family, they say. Here long before the Fords�
��the salt Fords, they’re older than the Henry Fords. Yeah, I say, we were here a long time, a bunch of drunken French trappers cheating the Indians out of their furs and drinking bad rum and knocking up squaws. That bugs them…. You want to live on Long Island?”

  “What’s it like? I’ve never even been to New York City.”

  “We ought to go together. We will!”

  “Will we?” I hardly dare believe but wish he means it.

  “Scarface never lies, baby. My word is good as a bond. A tax-free municipal bond.” He is pleased with me. Gradually he has been loosening. We are making it a lot, for us; he is talking a lot. Sometimes he even embraces me when we are not in bed. “We’ll go this summer. If I get the job, you can come see me for long weekends.”

  The knot is hard and green … is too weak

  I write upstairs.

  The knot tucks itself there

  hard and green. If you grow

  impatient and slice into it

  you expose an intricacy

  that rots fast. But if you wait

  the sun opens it slowly

  one petal at a time among

  its thorns, my yellow rose.

  During supper he begins to close on himself a little. As I clear the dishes he takes his narrow head in his hands. “I’m getting a headache.” He slumps forward. I stand behind him massaging his temples as I have learned to do. “More … more … there.”

  At last he mutters, “Better. I’m a sick man. Will you bury me with soft hands? Hey, baby, want me to tell you a story?”

  “I’m listening.” We sit on cushions in front of the wood stove. Glinting dully the eyes of the decapitated watch us.

  “I saw a sleazy movie on TV last time I was home. Pepe le Moko is the big cheese in the Casbah, where he’s got everything—almost—that he needs. The cops can’t touch him. He’s safe inside. But he falls for a broad from the outside. The cops send her away. To get her back, he has to leave his walls. The cops get him. End of Pepe.”

  “Who are the cops? Your father?”

  “No, the same as Pepe and the girl.” He rubs his forehead slowly. “Say the supplies are running out inside the Casbah and the walls are growing higher. All the time.”

  “Suppose she didn’t run.”

  “She has to. She can’t survive inside his walls.”

  “He doesn’t need his walls with her. She won’t hurt him. She isn’t anybody’s cops.”

  He laughs.

  “All she wants is to pass in and out freely! All she wants is for him to come out when he wants to. All she wants is to love him!”

  “We’ll see.” He smiles at my vehemence. “We’ll see. We’ll take things as they come.” His lucid gaze lifts to my face. “Go see if there’s any Scotch in the cabinet. My headache’s gone. Or if they left any cognac. That would be too much luck.”

  Sunday night I return well pleased with Peter and myself. See, I have opened my frog and a prince is stepping out. The images that flood my mind when I think of Peter are moving and gentle: his face stripped of mask, showing emotion, half fearful, half tender.

  Our door is shut, and when I try to open it, I find it bolted from the inside. Donna can’t be fucking somebody right in the house? But the opening door frames her in her old plaid bathrobe, hair damp from the shower clinging to her fragile skull. Her scrubbed face crinkles with excitement. She comes very close to me, crossing a boundary of physical contact that has existed since she told me she wanted to be free of me. “Shut it quick,” she whispers.

  “Are you hiding?”

  “If you don’t want her around, I’ll try to get someone to take her.”

  I look around. “Who?”

  “Shhh.” She pads barefoot to her closet.

  I look over her shoulder. Curled on Donna’s blanket a young cat lies washing its matted black coat, plainly pregnant and starved to the bone. The cat raises her triangular head from her raw side. Her ears flatten. Her yellow eyes wait on me. “Hello. Where did you get her?”

  “In the alley by Campus Drugs. I was walking off a depression. Wasn’t easy making friends.” She shows me her scored arm.

  “Did you break up with Charlie?”

  “Yes. I can’t do it. I have to be alone for a while. I have to get a sense of myself back…. Poor girl.” She kneels to stroke the bony head gingerly. “You can see she had a home till they kicked her out—how clean she tries to be.”

  The cat leans to her hand but watches me warily always. I get down on my haunches and blink my eyes, averting my gaze like a cat. “Welcome, new roommate. Can we get away with it?”

  “There’ll be a house meeting about it,” Donna says grimly. “You could try to line up votes, you’re good at that. I hate people! They get a cat and they don’t want to pay to have it spayed so it gets pregnant—of course—and then they punish it by throwing it out to starve to death. Female sexuality bugs people. We’re supposed to produce babies on request and not otherwise and orgasms on request and only in both cases with our proper wedded husbands.”

  I advance my hand to be sniffed. I smell interesting, like the lake and the woods and the cabin. And sex. “Poor body. What’ll we name her?”

  “Don’t be sentimental.” Donna reties her robe firmly. “Cats don’t have names. Or if they do, we don’t speak the language any more than you or I can pronounce Sally’s real Thai name. Doesn’t she have nice lines?”

  “And so many. Dig those vertebrae. Count those ribs.”

  “So we keep her?”

  “Till you move out,” I say, wary myself like the cat.

  She stands before me, emphasizing the awkwardness by putting her weight on one foot, holding the other ankle up behind her to grasp. “I know I’ve been dreadful. I hate how I’ve been. I want to stop. Don’t leave me just when I’m reforming.”

  Our gazes push away like opposing magnets. “Am I leaving?”

  “It’s just that my A’s never felt as big as your A’s. Except for Sal, and then it turned out he was just using me, my men are never as interesting as your men. As soon as something belongs to me, I begin to disrespect it. I began to disrespect you because you loved me. But I want to stop!”

  I lean on my braced hands. “I want us to be close again.”

  “So do I, Stu.” Her hands clasp themselves behind her back. “I want us to stay together.”

  I squeeze my wrist. Pulse, a slow fountain of hope. “I’ll keep my stuff neater. And I’ll cut down on the drinking. You learn out of books and movies that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re a writer. I think I’m over the brunt of my bang-up. Really.”

  “Take me back, Stu?”

  “Who said you’d gone anyplace?”

  But she had. She had. We name the cat Eurydice. You bet your next rent payment I’m not going to spoil anything by taking a sharp look backward, to hell where we’ve just been.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  GAME CALLED ON ACCOUNT OF PAIN

  HOWIE LEAPS ON the table, dressed in a checkered business suit stuffed to make him rotund. He belts out his big song in a surprisingly decent baritone:

  “I am the judge.

  I am the jury.

  Kiss my behind

  Or you’ll feel my fury!

  We got subpoenas.

  Immunity too.

  You can’t touch us

  While we cream you.”

  Donaldson and Rob Prewitt play the other HU-WHACK members. Bolognese enacts a stool pigeon, Dick and Alberta, the witnesses. I play the dormouse member of HU-WHACK. I fall asleep and slide out of my chair and tip over the papers. Every so often I wake up ostentatiously and shout, “Hold the witness in contempt. Hold everybody in contempt. Hang ‘em all.” It has been unanimously agreed that under no circumstances do I sing. Donna plays the committee’s secretary, a part created for Stephanie that requires only that Donna undulate around in a tight skirt showing her legs whenever possible. Stephanie and Rob broke up. Rob has been flirting with Donna, but she is not i
nterested. Alberta has a way of watching Donaldson when he is not looking at her. The person who watches Alberta is Howie. He sings:

  “I call up the teachers,

  I call up the hams.

  From lions they turn

  into little white lambs.

  Baaaa! Baaaa! Baaaa! Baaaaa! Humbug.”

  We have a full house for our decidedly amateur production. Basically the daring of attacking HUAC would produce laughs even if we weren’t funny. We are breaking a taboo. It’s hot in here under the lights in my dormouse papier-mache head. Now Donaldson, in his ordinary clothes skinny as death but improbably handsome, sidles up to Alberta to sing:

  “Oh tell me now in forty-two

  Did you sign a petition I’m asking you?”

  How can he not love her? Wearing a sort of red girl scout uniform with shorts, she looks healthy, radiant, strong enough to fight at a barricade and carry him off to safety, if necessary. She sings:

  “How can I recall, Representative dear.

  I was nine years old, that very year.”

  Donaldson: he is thin as Bolognese who stands near him on the stage, whispering in his ear like I ago but altogether lacking his magnetic presence. Donaldson is tall and negligently tweedy. His quintessential outfit is a good Harris Tweed sports jacket worn with a flannel shirt and chinos. Women want to tidy him up. Bolognese is ageless; Donaldson at thirty-four (Alberta told me his age) is boyish. Since he shaved off his beard, he seems closer to us. I guess that’s why he grew it. He sings:

  “There are Commies of ten,

  premature anti-Fascists of six,

  dwarfs, midgets and trolls:

  we know their tricks.

  There are babies today

  agitating in bed

  whose bottoms are pink

  and faces, red!”

  Alberta pirouettes. She has enormous stage presence. That surprises me, but then she is a folksinger and lacks only her banjo.

  “Oh, I was a red diaper baby.

  I even had a Paul Robeson doll.

  Now you think I will squeal on my parents,

  But blood is much thicker than gall!”

  They generate electricity, this used-to-be couple. How could he prefer anyone to her? Alberta is plain good. She’s bright and political and caring. If ever I saw a wife going to waste, that’s Alberta. She even takes care of me, but she’s her daddy’s girl and she loves only daddies. When I’m sick she makes me tea with much lemon and a dash of bourbon so I sweat out my fever. She gives me vitamin pills and sometimes a scarf or necklace she has grown tired of. I adore being taken care of by Alberta, and I bet he did too. I think she will make a great lawyer.