Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  “Sorry, Howie. I’m a sloppy drunk.”

  He takes a step toward me, pauses. “I’ll get our coats. Are you really all right?”

  I nod but do not get out of his way. I stand against the door. With every muscle I wish he would take hold of me. Maybe he is my rational choice, but I can’t make that choice for both of us. The door opens and I almost fall in. Stephanie pushes past me, slamming it.

  “Jill! I’m glad you’re here. I thought you’d left.”

  “We’re leaving now.”

  “That dirty low-down rat!”

  “What did he do?”

  She wrings her hands with anger. “He wants me to pretend to go home and come back after. And clean up, I suppose! He’s playing a double game. I’m through!”

  “Get your coats.” Howie steers us each by an elbow. “I’ll see you home.”

  As we are putting on our wraps, Roger strolls up. “Leaving already? Things are just getting started.”

  “I do have hours. I’ll run along with Jill and Howie.”

  As he leans close to speak in her ear, she smiles through matted lashes. “Sure, honey. See you later.” As we walk down she twirls her scarf, laughing theatrically. “How long will he wait up? Not long enough. I hope Dorothy divorces him and marries her dentist. She strikes me as a cavity that could well be filled with gold.”

  Through the quiet streets we compete in laughter. Alcohol simmers in my brain. At the door Howie and I have no moment for private leave-taking that might connect with what almost did or didn’t happen in the hall.

  I lie on my bunk with questions circling and bobbing and pursuing like a race of carousel horses. If he is attracted to me, wouldn’t he have made a move? But I could not. I did not dare. If I let him know that I want him and he only likes me as a friend … I feel hollow. He could stop being my friend. I need him as a friend.

  Stephanie climbs into the upper bunk. “I can see why you like that guy Howie. He has a good sense of humor.”

  Will he laugh at me? I clutch the pillow as the bed swoops backward. I drink too much, I talk too much! Discipline. The bed rushes backward through the night like a crack express. Occasionally Stephanie sobs in the dark. I must think hard about him. Am I crazy, am I sick, am I corrupt suddenly to want him, after all these years? I don’t think I ever touched him before, except for holding his hand at his father’s funeral. Please bed, lie still. Oh, but I wish he had reached out, there in the hall.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  PROCRASTINATION MUST BE A GENETIC TRAIT

  MONDAY NIGHT OR rather 1:40 A.M. Tuesday a week and a half later, the cheap alarm I have carried into the kitchen with me ticks like a headache. My thick lids swell. I am sodden with instant coffee tasting of burnt cork. Sleep weights my brain while I try to atone, my neglect of the eighteenth century. Tomorrow morning an exam yawns. What have I been doing? Writing a verse play—a proper bitter cud of two lovers and how they died to each other, couched in the Bluebeard myth. Instead of the course’s prescribed readings, I have consumed not a taste of Pepys but the whole diary, mounds of Rochester, Defoe, Pope … and now all night I must tread the dreary rounds of those dull worthies who will stock the examination. In the middle of Thomson’s Winter it is winter indeed. Shenstone, Warton, Pomfret… eating excelsior. My chin slides forward, coming to rest on The Task.

  “Sleeping in that position will give you backache.” Donna carries in a typewriter with books and erasable bond balanced on top.

  “Procrastination must be a genetic trait.”

  “I didn’t get any work done this weekend.”

  “You met them? How did it go?”

  She shrugs. Face scrubbed clean. The skin around her eyes is blue and papery with fatigue. “Can’t say yet. They didn’t poison me. I’m not what they want, but I may be what they’ll accept.” She yawns.

  I yawn. We work in silence, facing over the kitchen table. When she rises in forty minutes to put on water for tea, she asks, yawning again, “Stephanie’s giving up on Roger Ardis?”

  “With bells and banners.”

  She nods. “Is she going out with your friend Howie, then?”

  “Howie?” I am wide awake. “What makes you ask?”

  “I saw her sit down with him in the Union yesterday. She was her … uh, animated self. Meaning she didn’t completely crawl across the table to sit on his lap but nearly.”

  Could I ask him casually, What do you think of Stephanie? But suppose he hasn’t yet? Donna is waiting patiently, and I am glad of the bedrock empathy that brings her to me with the observation, just in case it’s relevant, and lets me say bluntly, “Thanks,” instead of having to pretend the news does not matter. Stephanie never mentioned meeting him. I have exams this week, a paper due, a summons home I will feel guilty if I ignore. Mother has been in terrible pain with her teeth, the same rotten set she passed on to me. Francis made an appointment for her at some clinic downtown on Saturday morning but he wants me to come in and accompany her. I have to take the bus into Detroit Friday evening. What do I want from Howie? What do I dare want with him? What can I have? I would like to hypnotize him into answering me before proceeding.

  “What have you been doing with Howie? Waiting for him to grow up and get broken in? A dangerous business.”

  “I can’t be sure what I want.” Loyalty to the cemetery afternoons, the dialectical fencing, the love that was all words. “You can’t just add sex to what you have with a friend and see how it flies.”

  “Once you would have said, why not?”

  “Meaning the taste of blood has made me a coward? But, Donna, I never said, why not, to you.”

  “Why not?” She grins, looking years younger. “Sometimes I used to feel you were on the verge of asking or whatever.”

  “Same reason as with Howie,” I say untruthfully, for Howie never put pressure on me to become sexually involved with other people. Howie may think I am out of character or out of line, but he will not judge me sick. Theo, as far as I know, is still behind bars for asking that question. Donna is flirting a little with me tonight. “Did your period start?”

  “Not yet,” she answers with no surprise at my lack of transition. The subject is on her mind all of the time. “I’m supposed to get the results of the test tomorrow.”

  “Did you tell Peter?”

  She laughs, something catching in her throat—a rusty bike chain. We sit face-to-face again, and again we work in silence for half an hour. Then I break my concentration to rummage through the large refrigerator, looking for leftovers legitimate to nibble on. A dish of wilted salad. Some zucchini casserole no one could endure. She leans back in her seat watching me with a friendly gaze.

  “How was their place?” I ask. “Like the delivery boy, I got as far as the door.”

  “Beautiful, Stu!” Her eyes widen. “On four levels, with a courtyard where they retained an oak. Fieldstone fireplaces. Spanish tiles in the kitchen. Every bedroom has its own huge john. Abstract expressionist paintings the size of billboards in a living room you could use for a dorm lounge. Fabulous view of the lake. A maid and a part-time woman too. Darkroom fancier than my mother’s kitchen. A pool table. What I can’t get over is the details—like inlaid boxes of English Oval cigarettes put out for guests. My room had Early American antiques. A pair of tiny French poodles that belong to his mother called Droit and Gauche …” She stops abruptly. I can feel her editing the speech. Never again will she gush about Peter’s family. “They live quite comfortably.”

  Well, Peter should have enough money to support if not a tree in the bedroom and two maids, at least an army of Oval Early American poodles smoking handcrafted hookahs and dropping the expressionist ashes in Lake St. Clair. Although she sees Peter bringing her into the Cinderella world, I am sure she sees him as the jewel of that world, her own glass prince. “Would you be comfortable around them, Donna?”

  “But we won’t be around them. We’re going to live in New York. That’s my secret bottom line. I have to
get him away from them and I know it—I’m not as blind as you think—but what’s going to happen if I’m pregnant? I can’t bear to think about it and I can’t think about anything else.”

  “How much money do you have?” This litany, this litany. I go through it every four months with some woman and I have gone through it with Donna before. How much money, what shall we do, who do you know, and will they do it and how much humiliation and pain will it cost and will they do it in time? At least on this occasion I am prepared. “Donna, I have a list of abortionists. You don’t mean to have it, right?”

  “Are you kidding? I’d strangle a baby that looked like … that goon. I hate to go downtown now. I’m always afraid I’ll see him. Once I did, Stu. Really. It was him.”

  “Where?”

  “On Ashley downtown there’s a bar called Ovid’s. I saw him coming out of there when Peter was getting his car gassed up across the street.” She shudders visibly, goose pimples on her forearms. “I have a hundred dollars. I put it away gradually. I wanted to buy some clothes, good clothes.”

  “I have twenty-three. That’s it. But I could borrow some.”

  “How much do we need?”

  “If the doctor in Dexter will do it, three fifty. I haven’t checked his prices this fall.” Bleakly we look at each other. “Don’t worry, we’ll get it,” I say heartily. She is my friend again. In some subterranean cavern awakens the hope of winning her back. I will save her, I myself, not Peter. I will go to Detroit and be good to my mother and make her love me. I will come back and seduce Howie magically without his realizing I am seducing him: he will think it is his idea. I will find the money somewhere and save Donna. Everybody will love me, because I am good and indispensable.

  Beside me on the bus my mother fumes in her old muskrat coat with her hair standing up like angry black flames around the red toque. I have forced her to go. What intoxication to find I can assert and insist now, as if absence had turned into authority! She argued, she pleaded, she made excuses. She said she had a headache, a stomachache. Her feet hurt. Next week would be better. Ah, the sharp salty pleasure of forcing somebody to do something you consider good for her. I am mothering my mother with all the harsh efficiency she has often used on me. For your own good, I croon. “Why I go to the dentist all the time. I practically spent my first semester in dental school. Because you never took me to the dentist, I had the worst teeth they’d ever seen.” Make her feel guilty. Then do for her what she wouldn’t do for me. Oh, the pleasure of growing up. I always knew I’d like being an adult.

  Dr. McMeel is downtown in an old building where we sit for almost an hour before she is called in. I have a feeling this dentist was picked out by price, but he may be the only dentist Francis found out about by asking—where, at the corner bar? I shouldn’t blame him. At least he made the appointment. My father has done nothing but put pressure on her and pooh-pooh her fears, as I have been doing. This guy does a volume business with a clientele that is mostly poor and mostly Black.

  Well-thumbed copies of Life and The Saturday Evening Post and two ancient National Geographies somebody has ripped pictures out of. I have my homework. I do it for an hour and then for another. What is happening? We’ve been here since nine forty-five. Now it’s one and I’m hungry. I begin to wonder if there is another exit. Perhaps, confused, she left by a different door. Feeling like an idiot, I ask the receptionist, who makes me feel more idiotic. I return to my seat. Probably Mother has Dr. McMeel telling her his life story.

  When she comes out, she is staggering. She walks as if by brute willpower, one step forward, pause, then the next step forward. Her mouth is smeared with caked blood where she holds a mass of wadded tissues. “And this is the prescription, Mrs. Stuart. You get this filled downstairs.”

  She will not look at the receptionist. I take the prescription.

  “And that will be seventy-five for the extractions, Mrs. Stuart, and twenty down.”

  I count the cash out of her purse, a clump of wadded-up bills, fives and tens and ones folded together in a bulging coin-purse. The last six dollars I pay in coins.

  “Your teeth will be ready next Wednesday.”

  She leans on me in the hall, her face turned away. I ask, “What did he do to you?”

  “Lee me alone!” Her voice is funny, a husky lisp with a hint of coyness.

  “Did he give you novocaine?” I try to look at her but she keeps her face turned from me. I am almost carrying her. I realize as we reach the street I am never going to succeed in dragging her to the bus. “Mother, can you stand here? Lean on the lamppost. Please. I’m going to get a cab.”

  “Ha.” She turns her head away from me. “Who nees? Wase sa money.”

  I have to force her into the taxi. “Mother! What did he do to you?”

  Her cheeks sag, suddenly flaccid. She looks older than she looked this morning. I cannot stand her pain. “Puhd ‘em all.” She turns away from me, holding the wad of bloody tissues to her mouth.

  “He did what?” But I figure it out. “He pulled some teeth?” I had some pulled when I was sixteen, but since I went to college, they don’t seem to pull teeth. They do all kinds of fancy and time-consuming work, but rarely do they extract.

  “All! All!” She bares her bleeding gums at me. Her mouth is full of dark blood welling. Her eyes burn with rage.

  “But why?”

  That night I eat alone with my father. She is staying in bed. Occasionally the springs wince and she gives voice to a broken muttering, a formless lament that rises and falls again behind the closed door. All day she has taken nothing but weak tea. I cannot endure seeing her look old. I don’t want her to put on that strange ravaged face. Suddenly she seems made of eggshell and rice paper. Sharp edges everywhere she could be blown against. Myself the sharpest edge.

  My father and I try to make conversation. We discuss the Tigers. The last team I followed was six years earlier, but I try. He talks about the Russians with a plaintive irritation, as if I were somehow in the confidence of Khrushchev. Lacking common subjects we fish for neutral ones and come to a series of dead ends like a set of roads paved near Cold Springs for a suburban development that was laid out but never built up after the mines closed. We go up each cul-de-sac and find nothing and hastily return. Finally we talk about the weather earnestly. It is a wet fall, yes, and a cool one and not much sun. Yes. Then he finds a subject: the virtues of polyester. Mother has bought him some polyester shirts and Orion socks and he describes their superiority. Listening, I realize how Donna has educated me in inappropriate snobbery. I may have only five shirts and three of them from the Nearly New Shoppe, but they are all cotton or silk.

  By Sunday Mother gets up. She is not capable of lying long in bed no matter how she feels. She makes regular meals for my father and me (Francis has moved in with a friend in Ecorse, a working-class suburb; he has got a job at Great Lakes Steel) while she eats consommé. I go down to the corner store on Joy Road to get her some jars of baby food. At table a hectic bitterness works in her, pulling the corners of her small mouth down, pinching her nose. I am not going to render her speech as she sounded. We could figure out what she was saying, well enough.

  “My anniversary present,” she calls the bridge being made for her. She has never stopped minding that my father won’t observe their anniversary. “That’s what your father gave me for Halloween. Now I’m an old witch.” She droops, her short neck bent. “I can’t eat this slop!”

  Dad puts down his fork. “Suppose I cut the beef up fine, Pearl?” His voice is shy and tender. We avoid each other’s gaze, conspirators who robbed her of her teeth.

  “I think that dentist was a quack.” She picks at the baby food, a tear running down the groove beside her nose. Without my demon appetite I would flee the table. “I saw those teeth he pulled, my teeth! There was a lot left on some of them.”

  “But you were in pain.” He pleads with her. “You were lying awake nights with the pain.”

  “I let him go a
head because I was sick and tired of both of you badgering me. He said it was cheaper to pull them than to fill them, and it’d only take two visits. Otherwise I’d have to go down there for months.”

  I want to lay my head down on the table and weep. What is the use arguing with her now, as my father becomes entangled in doing? The teeth are pulled. Even now I wonder why. Were they that bad? Was he a man who saw no reason to bother with a woman without money, like the dentist who pulled three of mine when I was sixteen? Did she really do it to save money? That’s possible. It’s painfully hard for her to spend money on herself. Of course, I think, it isn’t her money. She does not work for money, she works for free, and that makes all the difference.

  When I get off the bus with my suitcase and basket of food, it’s ten thirty. I do not head for my co-op but go directly to Howie’s. As I walk between houses muffled in fog, the blocks feel elongated. I walk and walk and walk. This weekend has peeled a skin from me, leaving me raw to my hope. Brother me no brothers. I go without plans or prepared speeches. On the bus I would not permit myself a fantasy. I only know that I want him but that I do not mean to impose that wanting on him, that I am unwilling for the least fence of reticence or awkwardness to build between us because of my sudden lust. I have no idea how to bring off this miracle of indirection and discretion but trust to blind luck. Indeed! Shall I walk in, take off my coat and then the rest of my clothes to stand there naked? “Hey, Howie, what does this make you think of?”

  I halt in the fog. No light shines from his corner room. He must be out. Damn. Well, I could wait awhile in the hall. Maybe he’s napping. I climb the stairs to rap on his door. “Howie? Howie, are you home?” I shift from one foot to the other in the dim hall.

  Sounds. A line of light suddenly marks the door. He is home! “Jill? Is that you?”

  “The very same. Let me in.”

  “Just a minute.” He adds something I can’t catch. Absurdly electric with excitement, I turn to and fro in the hall, urging him silently to hurry, hurry. As the door swings open, Stephanie dances across the room barefoot, tucking her blouse in. With a breathless laugh she combs her hair back with her fingers. “You got my note? Good. Howie came by to see if you were back, so we went to supper.” She laughs again, not nervously but in high spirits. “How was Detroit?”