Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  Donaldson appears all head. His long lean body calls no attention to itself, but is only a stand to hang his leonine head on, the large eyes fixed on infinity. He slumps there like an outsized right parenthesis, yet he too radiates energy, not physical like Alberta’s but intellectual. In droves we fall for his brilliance, but can you bed down with intellect? Alberta is not a profoundly sexual woman. Being in love is everything for her, rare and absolute, and sex comes along like an awkward wagon dragging behind.

  The curtains close and as the audience begins to clap I step out, waving them to momentary silence. “Dear friends,” I cry, “if you think this was a farce, you are dead right. Let’s laugh it off the face of our country.” I bow, the curtains part and the cast all come forward. We are a big hit.

  Applause, you can get drunk on it and then it’s gone at once while I stand backstage waiting my turn for the little dressing room so I can climb out of the dormouse pelt (left from a production of Peter and the Wolf) and the papier-mache head Alberta made, that I plan to hang on my wall. Howie is ebullient. He bounds up to Alberta to hug her awkwardly. I bet he’s been plotting all night to do that. “You were great!”

  “We were all not half bad,” she says mildly, disengaging herself. “Let’s hear it for the writers!”

  “We had a full house.” Dick, our treasurer, speaks happily. “We made our expenses back and we’ll finish out the year with a little extra in the kitty for the first time ever.”

  At the party Donna stays close to me and does not pick anyone up. Peter is off in New York on a job interview. It is not that I do not miss him, but suddenly I have a lot more time this weekend. Relationships do eat up the hours. Donna enjoyed being in the play, even as an afterthought. She has been studying hard for finals already. Charlie calls her every day. I hear the conversations when I can’t avoid it. Sometimes she brings the phone into our room on its long cord.

  All the conversations are variations on his asking, “But why won’t you see me any longer?” She says, “But I don’t love you.” He says, “But you didn’t love me before and you slept with me anyhow.” She, “That was a problem.” He, “You’ll come to love me. Because I love you.” She, “Charlie, you don’t even know me. I never acted natural with you. I don’t know if I’m capable of loving anyone. Go find yourself someone better than me. It won’t be hard.”

  This nub end of the school year I feel happy. Donna, Peter, Howie, my writing, my classes, my jobs, my political activity: all the golden balls float in the June light like perfect clouds. I am a juggler who has finally mastered her best trick. I am happy in my love for Donna which I call sisterly and in my love for Howie which I call brotherly and in my love for Peter which I call sexual and nurturing. I am even happy in my growing fondness for Minouska, who was named Eurydice, a name she refuses. She comes to Minouska, one of my grandma’s pet names for me. She stands beside my desk chair mewing plaintively, requiring me to pat my thigh six times repeating her name before she will sail up and land, belly dragging, and turn three, four times to curl up right over my cunt purring.

  Obviously, I have helped Peter. He is more human, more open. He will take a job in New York, where I may go after I graduate in a year. In the meantime we can see each other vacations. We have a kind of grace together now, not the all-consuming relationship Mike was, but a model of how it should be for a mature adult, I tell myself.

  When I am happy and when I am unhappy I draw people. When I am ordinarily involved and working and solving or failing problems, I am or seem less accessible. When I am opened like an oyster to the tides of grief or when I open myself to the rich flood of joy, people come to me. Tonight whenever I turn from Donna who stays close, Donaldson is beside me. He is looking at me a lot as Alberta looks at him and Howie looks at her.

  I begin to drink heavily for the first time since Donna and I reconciled. I feel as if the will and the pain of the people in the room push on me, closing in like falling furniture, something so tangible that the air thickens with fears and wishes. I loathe this feeling of being skinless and peeled to others’ needs.

  Why should the misfortunes of love and sexuality seem like a vast metaphysical disease to me, as if I saw deep cracks in things and under this ordinary badly furnished room of Dick and Carole Weisbuch, the terrors of outer space at the temperature of absolute zero yawn?

  “Heavens, that dress must be made of iron. You’ve had it since I met you,” Julie says. She has materialized before me in a shirtdress of pale green silk.

  My gaze slides past her to scan the room. Finally I have to ask, “How are you? … Is Mike with you?”

  “Mike is off at Yale for the weekend, whither his family is sending him in the fall. To get him away from me.” She sounds almost proud, but adds with immediate brute justice, “Of course he didn’t have to go.”

  “Maybe he felt he did,” I offer. Relief stuns me. Not to run into him ever again. “He feels very obligated to them.”

  “He didn’t feel very obligated to me…. He complained I’m too inhibited in bed. You were a virgin, weren’t you? I don’t know what the difference could be.”

  “I have no idea.” I suppress an urge to giggle. Can we be having this conversation? But Julie has always been completely open about sex, as if anything that happens to her has to be a shared joke.

  “I don’t think he ever really fell in love with me. I don’t know why. He loved you, after all. It seems to me he could have loved me if he’d wanted to. After all, I could talk to him about his work and I can read all the languages he can. I would have helped him in his work; I would have loved that.”

  “Maybe it’ll work out still. Once he’s through school.”

  “Mike? I’m sure he has somebody else already.” She points. “I have a new boyfriend. Carl Forbes. He’s from Chagrin Falls and my father’s gotten him a job already in the accounting section at the General Motors offices in Newtown.”

  I follow her finger. The guy is tall, ruddily handsome and vaguely familiar. I wonder if he was in one of my classes. Accounting? Maybe a lecture. “That’s wonderful,” I say. “Are you serious about him?”

  “Jill! Are you drunk? Look at my finger.”

  All that pointing. Oh. A chunky diamond on a white gold ring. “But you just broke up with Mike?” Did I fall into a time warp?

  “He’s more my speed, I think. He’s very experienced with women but he’s not too bright. In some ways that’s a winning combination. He knows he’s foundering…. Jill, everybody makes jokes about women getting the senior jitters, but I discovered some men get it. Graduating can scare them too. I’ve done all right.” Observing him growing a little too animated over Donna, she heads for him.

  Although when Donaldson casually puts his hand on my arm—and touching for him is never casual—my arm glows like a lightning bug with a cool yearning flame, I cannot look back into his hazel eyes under those auburn curls. I pretend I do not understand. I pretend I do not notice. I cannot hurt Alberta. Although I am so fascinated by him I would like to follow him home like a puppy dog, I ignore all signals. Stupidity covers me like a bird whose owner has thrown a blanket over its cage. Nothing must happen, I mutter in my head and laugh too loud and drink too much. Nothing will happen!

  Nothing does. Except when I am standing by Julie and her new boyfriend, Carl, he puts his hand on her ass and murmurs, “Baby, women are made for love.” I recognize him then. My first college date.

  Peter returns from his interview at Brookhaven sour and depressed. He has not been turned down but he has not been hired. Essentially he has been told maybe, by and by. The job offer in Detroit is industrial. Boring, he says. Detroit Edison is planning a fancy new breeder reactor near Monroe, to be named for Enrico Fermi, one of Peter’s heroes, but he still does not want to work in industry or in Detroit. He views himself as defeated. In his new job he will start at more money than my father ever saw, but I know how little that salary seems to Peter, who has no experience at living within any means he pro
vides himself and for whom almost anything he can earn as a physicist must seem minimal. Since the psychoanalyst of his choice is on Long Island, he must put off entering analysis too. I am ready to comfort him but confused. I was keyed up to say good-bye. I was set to endure having his slender hard body wrenched from me and only the cold comfort of letters and occasional phone calls.

  Now I am reprieved. I feel a muggy mixture of delight and resentment as summer school gets under way. The truth is I arranged my summer to comfort me for his loss and made a number of commitments and arrangements that depend on my having more time than I am likely to with Peter in Detroit. On the other hand, we have been doing much better. My angel clam has opened to me, so why stop when I’m making progress? He moved out of his dark comfortable room in June and is now living with his parents while he hunts for an apartment.

  The weekend after July 4 he takes me home for the first time. I am geared up to meet his parents, a stomachache all the way in the Sprite, but it turns out he has an apartment of his own in the sprawling multi-leveled family enclave. We climb a flight of steps to a second-floor door on its own little terrace. Peter has a large living room with a view out the far end to the lake, St. Clair—littlest of the Great Lakes chain but quite big enough. You can’t see Canada across it.

  When we came across the border from Detroit to Grosse Pointe Woods, the world changed. My city is a Black city. This is a white world, to an even greater degree than Ann Arbor, which after all has the old Black neighborhood around Detroit Street sloping toward the river and a smattering of Asian and Black students. But here the only Blacks I see are maids getting off work for the day, dragging their tired feet down to the bus stop. The Grosse Pointe suburbs are fancy, but in spite of the big trees, no greener than the city. In Detroit lush wild jungles sprout on any vacant lot in the slums. Here in fact nature is under strict control; armies of gardeners prune the hedges and lop back the trees and uproot the hardy weeds for expanses of flat lawn glinting under sprinklers. The houses seem to be vying in grandeur, pretension and size. Even the small lots sprout enormous houses.

  In Grosse Pointe proper, a few blocks only, the streets wander down to the water where the biggest houses of all preen themselves before their view. But in Grosse Pointe Shores, the lake lies across a busy street from the houses and is almost inaccessible, marked with signs that forbid parking, stopping, swimming, fishing and would dearly like to forbid your looking. The signs proclaim all these activities dangerous, as the gentle sand beach slopes away gleaming in the sun like clean kitchen linoleum that nobody walks on. In order to keep the hoi polloi of Detroit from shlepping out here to use the beaches, the inhabitants are willing to sacrifice their own use.

  “So what do you do when you’re dying for a swim? Use the pool?” I had noticed one near the house, kidney-shaped and vast.

  “The yacht club. Everybody goes there.” He points toward the left. He explains that within a mile radius there are various country clubs, boating clubs, yacht clubs. “The Detroit, the Crescent, the Grosse Pointe —you can’t walk two blocks without hitting a fence.”

  I wander around the living room, much neater than his old room. He has been reading the Detroit News, Playboy, and a physics journal. A couple of big glossy books of photographs lie on the glass-topped coffee table, the rya rug showing through. Five photographs of me are arranged in aluminum frames on the wall over the pale nubby couch among perhaps twenty others of women and of landscapes.

  When he sees me staring at the wall, he motions me to sit on the couch. He fans out photographs—eight by tens on matte paper—over the coffee table.

  “See?” he asks insistently. “I caught it. The things I perceive that you don’t even realize are in you. Now you can tell what I meant about photographing dreams.”

  Maybe. The photographs are of professional caliber and the young woman in them could be a model or a starlet. She is all soft invitation, gentle radiance shimmering from her flesh like watered silk. Every curve invites with the passive gorgeousness of a ripe peach. For a moment I fall in love with myself on the table as he mixes martinis, watching me in the mirror over the little bar. My god, I think, is that me? I don’t spend a lot of time staring in a mirror and nothing in my life ever prepared me to find myself or to be found by anyone else beautiful. Is that what he means by not knowing myself? In a fine clear moment of narcissism I could wish to fuck that body on the paper. But that isn’t me in any useful sense. I do see myself in the bathroom mirror mornings with my eyes half open, my lips curled in a sneer of only partially diluted exhaustion. I meet myself scratching my ass and picking my nose. I am the cold hard intellect that improves my scholarship a step at a time until I am able to pay for far more than my tuition in the fall, so that for the first time since I stopped begging the difference from my parents, I will not have to work while I go to school this September. The dormouse is as much and no more me then these faces that are all lush softness. He has taken my backbone out so I do not scrap or snap. If I were truly that passive plum of a woman, Freddie would have had me on the kitchen floor at age fourteen while the iron burned through my father’s shirts above. Today I would be where Callie is, pregnant again, longing to move out of a three-room walk-up, at best working in the typing pool of a local office.

  I don’t know in what words to praise them. “They’re beautiful,” I say. “Much more than I am just walking around.”

  “You’re such a mess, Jill. Half blind faith and half self-hatred.”

  But I prefer myself to these perfect images. “Can I have copies?”

  “They’re for you. So you can remember how I see you. So you can keep in mind the woman you could be with me, for me. I have my own copies, framed. I put the best ones up on the wall this week.”

  As we sip our martinis, he keeps glancing from me to the photographs, searching for confirmation of what he shot and processed.

  When he has downed a couple of drinks he grips me by the elbow. “Okay. Time to meet Mother.”

  “I thought we came upstairs to avoid her?”

  “I like to keep my options open.”

  His mother is lying on a white-painted wrought-iron chaise longue cushioned in aquamarine. She is about Peter’s height and as thin. She has less belly than I do. Bones and suntan, she wears a beige bikini, sunglasses with a graduated mauve tint. Her hair is just the faintest shade yellower than Donna’s. I am surprised to see that it is probably as long as mine used to be, worn up in an elaborate French knot. Her expression I cannot tell behind the sunglasses. Her lips part in a small discreet smile and she extends her hand, but not to shake because she waves limply.

  “Yvonne mentioned that Peter had brought someone up.” She nods then at the pool. “Did you want to swim?”

  “I didn’t bring my suit. I wish I had.”

  “There might be something in the changing room that would fit you.” She peers at me. “Perhaps not.”

  Peter is fidgeting and she turns her invisible gaze on him. “Petey, you look unhealthy. It’s well into July and you look as if you’d just crawled out of a cave.”

  “Very few physicists spend the whole summer on the beach.”

  “Oh nonsense. You don’t even have a position yet. There’s nothing to prevent you enjoying the club facilities with your friends. Your friends here,” she amends, obviously nervous he may decide to take me. “In Maine we’ll get you back into shape.”

  “What’s this about Maine?” I ask him when a maid brings out a phone to her and we retire to the other end of the pool.

  “They want me to go with them.”

  “Are you going?”

  “Perhaps. I don’t know, Jill. Depends on what happens at Argonne Labs next week. Maybe they’ll hire me immediately and I’ll move to Chicago. If not we’ll work out a way for you to spend some time in Maine.”

  I don’t even bother arguing. I am in summer school and working and I wouldn’t have the money for a jaunt. Before going out to supper, upstairs while Peter slips
on his sports jacket, he says, “Well, I did it, didn’t I? Introduced you to Mother?” Pointedly he hands the photographs to me, as if accusing me of forgetting them.

  As we wait for our prime ribs, he fans out the photos again, looking quizzically from them to me. I have learned to eat my beef rare; otherwise he mocks me. It was an acquired taste but it has taken; if I ever ate a steak alone, I would now eat it rare. I have not been able to learn to like martinis but that forms no obstacle tonight as we are drinking beer —he legally and I on the old fake ID furnished by him when we first began to go out together. He fingers the photographs so obsessively I half expect him to take them back, but as we are getting up, once again he pushes them toward me.

  As it turns out I don’t see much of Peter during the summer. After he is not hired by Argonne, he has until August 10 when his job at Detroit Edison officially begins. He vacations in Maine with his family until he must return for work.

  Summer in Ann Arbor: the air is heavy as wet wool. Breathing is an effort you must force on yourself. The humidity is an absolute. We live as if in the back room of a laundry. How often Donna and I say in the tentative cool of the morning that we will hike out to the country after class, that we will hitch a ride to go swimming, that we will pack a picnic supper for ourselves. How often when afternoon lies over us like a vast hot sea of lassitude on whose bottom we barely crawl, we decide after all we will just stay home and sit on the porch. We see a lot of movies the summer of 1956, because the theater is air-conditioned. Minouska’s favorite place is the bathtub when not in use; she spreads out full length like a drawn bow of blackness seeking the cool the porcelain can offer. One wet night she gives birth, straining and striving, purring and uttering deep cries, and forces out with long pauses one black kitty, one grey tabby and one dead black and white. We will have to find homes for them in the fall.