Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  He feels guilty about Alberta, a sore I seem to lurch into but actually touch intentionally. I need to understand. I still judge him for not keeping her. He loses his temper by growing taller and colder. The temperature drops forty degrees in two minutes while ice crystals form in his eyes.

  Stephanie and Howie spend every evening together, except the Tuesday nights PAF meets. When she has gone to him, her afterimage haunts the room. She paces, shaking her sleek hair back and talking compulsively of him. I hallucinate them in bed. Jealousy scalds me. Ever since I was in Detroit, too, I am haunted by myself as my mother’s heir and successor, of how the energy and vitality in her were leeched away by the grind of surviving. I have a vision of myself just before sleep as a mountain composed of millions of women, keening, begging, demanding the fulfillment denied them. All their thwarted wills flow through me.

  “You still want to make some money?” Kemp is brushing his hair in the bathroom mirror. It takes him ten minutes to arrange it to his satisfaction. He likes brushing mine for the sensual pleasure.

  “You know it.” I bring up the subject with tedious regularity because my panic is fed by Donna’s. It is soon or never. If I don’t get money some other way, I will have to put the bite on both men.

  “If you got the guts for it.” He eyes himself in the mirror as critically as Donna.

  “Try me.” I sound more confident than I am. Money, money. The hills of Ann Arbor feel lately like compacted bills. The booze that flows one weekend in a fraternity house would buy Donna free.

  “I’m thinking on it,” he says cagily. “If your nerve’s good. Because once you’re in on this, you’re in.”

  My mind summons up images of bank robberies, technicolor shoot-outs starring Randolph Scott and John Wayne; then my mind plays black-and-white gangster movies. Rat-a-tat-tat and James Cagney dies in the gutter. Edward G. Robinson is machine-gunned into a wall. I see stocking masks, fast black sedans taking off with a screech of rubber.

  “It’s a dental supply place.”

  “Dental supply?” I am almost outraged.

  “Babe, they put gold in teeth, right? But mostly we’re after drills, drill bits, equipment. I got a connection wants a load of it, but it’s pretty specific.”

  “We’re going to steal dentists’ drills? You’re putting me on.”

  “This is a right deal. The best kind. Where you got a buyer and you got a supplier. Now I’ve been looking over a place the orders go out from and it’s a piece of cake. In a block of offices. The night watchman makes his rounds every two hours. We’d have an hour and a half safe.”

  “Don’t they have an alarm?”

  “That’s my business. I got myself a key made but I have to check it out—make sure it works and see if a key triggers alarms. Tonight we have to make a spot check.”

  “What do you want me for? Is that why you’ve been teaching me to drive?”

  “Julietta, you don’t drive that well.” He laughs. “I got a list of what my man needs and Saturday night when we do the job you got to find what’s on it so the boys can move it out.”

  “A list? Of things like drills?”

  “All kinds of fancy expensive stuff. He—the man—can sell it in Detroit. Costs a fortune for dentists to set up in business. We’re doing them a favor.”

  “But I don’t know anything about dentists.”

  “I’m giving you a list. The boxes’ll be labeled.”

  “And I get a cut of what he pays you?”

  “A fifth.”

  He gets two shares. “That’s because I’m the contact with our man and ‘cause I do the headwork. Without me, nothing happens.”

  I am to meet him at eleven tonight. I sit through Friday classes in a stupor. “Miss Stuart, I realize your thoughts are far more stimulating than our poor seminar, but if you could bring yourself to shine the light of your intellect on Auden, we are discussing one of his poems and I have twice asked you for an explication of the closing lines.”

  Something about me annoys my professors in the department of English, even when I am unpolitical and trying to please. I am the wrong sex, wrong class, wrong ethnic mixture, wrong size, wrong volume level. Even when they give me A’s, they tend to be sarcastic and curt. Perhaps they suspect years in advance what I am going to do—write what they will never admire but will have to endure years of students who do. All time is an illusion: as I sit in his seminar my professor is punishing me for how annoying he will find my work in twenty years.

  Tonight I am supposed to go to a PAF party. I’ll develop a headache at ten thirty. Not sleeping with Gerrit has some advantages. He’ll take me home from Dick’s and I will promptly slip out again.

  At supper Donna bolts the table. I follow her. She is throwing up. Afterward she lies on her cot weeping. Minouska kneads her shoulder, trying to comfort her. I hold her limp chilly hand. “If I keep throwing up this weekend, he’ll make me see a doctor. Then I’m done for! It’s all over then. I want to die!”

  “I’m getting the money. For sure! You go ahead and make the appointment for a week from now. You have the deposit. Give him your hundred down. Next Wednesday or Thursday.”

  “How are you getting the money?”

  “When I have it, I’ll explain.” Invent something.

  She sits up, staring. “I don’t want money from that hoodlum. Don’t you borrow it from him.”

  “I’m not planning to borrow it from him. Don’t worry.”

  “It’s that rotten self-destructive streak in me. Just when I have a chance at being happy, at getting what I want and heed …” She strikes herself in the side of the head. “I can’t believe I went and did that. With that goon! If only you’d broken up with Peter sooner! If only I hadn’t gone! If only I’d broken my ankle instead!”

  “Does Peter actually make you happy?”

  “Can any human being make another human being happy?”

  “Can a rhetorical question answer a personal question?”

  “Of course he makes me happy. He’s what I always dreamed of being. Only this thing is gnawing at me. I feel guilty with him all the time as if I’m putting one over on him. I have nightmares, Stu, where I hear myself telling him. In nightmares my tongue starts to move and I hear myself telling him and then it’s all over. He just walks out and leaves me and it’s over. I’m all alone.”

  “You’re not alone right now.”

  “In my nightmares I’m absolutely alone…. In bed I keep worrying he’ll notice something. Every time he touches my belly I’m scared.” She unzips her corduroy skirt and pulls her panties down. “Can you tell yet?”

  “You’re flat as a soda that stood overnight. Nobody could tell. In fact I think you’re skinnier.”

  “I can’t eat. Even when I don’t feel nauseated, I can’t stand putting things in my mouth and chewing them. I feel gross.”

  “Donna, you’re skinny. You weigh less than a hundred pounds. You look better to me when you carry ten pounds more.”

  She shrugs. “I can’t stand fat.”

  I remember Mother telling me you can’t diet a baby away. “Make the appointment. Trust me. I’ll have the cash.”

  “Sure. You’re going to buy a little press and set it up in the basement and run off my three hundred.”

  “If I have to.”

  “I do trust you. But you have less money than I do.”

  “Not by this time next week. I promise!” I will never tell any woman how to do it herself; I will never let any woman around suffer a baby unwanted, unloved. That is a promise I make to my own survival. I will get the money.

  “I have to get cleaned up. He’ll be here any moment.” She drags herself across the hall to the bathroom. “Go finish your supper.”

  I wish I could say I too was not hungry, in solidarity, but I am always hungry. I run downstairs to grab what I can while there is still something to grab.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  AT THE CENTER OF FEAR, EXHILARATION

  HOWIE CO
MES IN to Dick’s apartment with his arm around Stephanie’s shoulder in loose possession, their faces flushed as if they have just been laughing or making love.

  “They did what?” I ask, only half listening. Gerrit is upset about something he saw on the evening news. We don’t have a TV in the coop and I haven’t seen a paper in several days. People in my classes have been talking about who will get honors in English.

  “The Soviets invaded. Tanks in the streets of Budapest. It looks like World War Two footage, except instead of the Nazis, it’s the Soviets invading another Communist country.”

  How vivid is the embrace in the hall after that unhappy party. Jealousy squats on my liver and howls. My mouth tastes of bile. Gerrit assumes I am upset about the Russians. How embarrassing to be so trivial, unable to join in the political argument that is raging. I slip away from Gerrit to get myself another drink, but there they are in the kitchen. By the stove where Carole Weisbuch is making tacos, Howie and Stephanie stand pressing so close Stephanie’s full stiff skirt is crushed and rustles with each movement. She is picking up packages of spices, holding them up for him to sniff. Her arms are bare from the shoulders. “And this is oregano. We use that in tomatoes and lamb—oh, wait till you have a real Greek leg of lamb!” She presses with the flat of her hand on his midriff, “I’ll make you fat!” while he bends toward her laughing and the skirt rustles wildly. “These are cloves you stick in ham.”

  “Cloves you stick in ham.” He sniffs the package. “They smell like you.”

  Analytically she tilts her head. “A little like my bath powder.”

  Bolognese leaning against the refrigerator is watching me with a somber gaze and in shame I realize he reads me clearly. I cannot keep my eyes off them. Their nonsense burns me. I’ve never seen that shimmer on Howie. With me he is serious or teasing or argumentative. I cannot kindle that face. I cannot make him laugh that carelessly. Though I talk and understand till my brain smokes, I cannot set round him that lion’s mane of joy.

  “And this is rosemary and this is basil—male and female created he them—and this is thyme.”

  “Put the jar in your purse.” His arm encircles her. His hand slides down to her buttock. “We never have enough time.”

  I spin back to the living room and attach myself firmly to Gerrit’s side, the way I never do. Finally through my haze the news begins to penetrate. Something shocking has happened, bad news for the Left, bad news for the world of future possibilities.

  It is easy to leave the party early. Gerrit is too involved to miss me. I go off alone and arrive home just after ten. If I dared I would get drunk, but Kemp has a right to my full and sober attention. I feel grateful to him as I wait, grateful because he has given me something compelling and frightening to do that draws my attention from my obsession, grateful because I will come through for Donna. Grateful because I will assuage my raw loneliness tonight with him.

  As I watch the clock I feel lost. How do people know who they are? They are the work they do. I am still a student. I call myself a writer but nobody else calls me that. If I knew how many years it is going to take for the world at large to ratify my vocation, I would kill myself on the spot.

  My mother is Mrs. Stuart: the mother of sons and incidentally of me, but firstly and always my father’s wife. That’s what her food and her few clothes and her hard-won gristle of security issue from. Donna wants to be Mrs. Crecy. Being Donna has scared her. I am Donna’s friend. That was part of my identity, that there were two of us struggling to make our way, conspirators and mutual advisors. We formed a small female government not in exile but underground. We made our own rules; now I lack them.

  Once I was Mike’s lover and that defined my world. When I was Peter’s lover, that defined only the content of certain evenings and what I did for sex. What I do with the men I see now is even more peripheral. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. My society tells me it’s wrong, my relationships are promiscuous and I am a bad woman who will come to an early and quite nasty end.

  For Stephanie the real work she does is Howie. Her classes are secondary. She piles up incompletes. Her friendships fit into the small accidental cracks of the day. She has no politics. I do not know if she holds any opinions she would not change for him aside from those she has evolved on how to attract, get, keep and manage men. Her love for Howie and her need for Howie provide her with a massive and intense purpose. Of every event and possibility that rises she asks herself, Is it good for the Relationship?

  To myself I feel small, fragile, lonely and very scared. I try not to think about what we are about to do, forbidding myself graphic images of stealth or violence. The hands close on each other toward eleven. I change into my black pants and black sweater, pin my hair up under Francis’ old cap as I did on my high-school forays. I put on my battered suede jacket—that rummage sale half of a riding habit—and slip out of the house through the kitchen door, fixing it so it will lock behind me. Quiet on my sneakers I come around and there is the silver convertible waiting for me.

  “What did you do to your hair?” he demands.

  “Pinned it up.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. Guess I wanted it out of the way.”

  “Not a bad idea. Long as you keep that jacket on, you could be a kid. Here’s the list.” He hands over a typed sheet as the silver barge churns off.

  “I’m supposed to make sense of this stuff?”

  “You’re good at studying. Just learn it. Tomorrow you find the stuff. It ought to be labeled. You’ll have a flash. You locate the stuff and Buddy and Ray will move it out.”

  He parks two blocks from the dental supply house, in an industrial section along the river. Friday night it’s quiet in this district. The air is cool and damp like stone against my face. A train is passing. We walk around the block. Then we squat behind a big trash container while rats crawl over my mind, waiting for the night watchman to make his rounds into our building so we can make a final check of his habits. A car speeds by. One of my tasks in childhood was to take out the garbage to the galvanized tin can by the alley. Garbage went into the covered container and trash into an open oil drum. Occasionally when I took out the garbage after supper, a rat would leap out and scuttle away. Whenever we were between cats, we had mice in the house. That never scared me but the rats ran over my nightmares. They moved like menace personified, close to the ground, fast, furtive, muscled and alert to attack.

  I hear footsteps. I am convinced we are visible, glowing radioactive through the wall of the igloo-shaped container. When I shift position, the folded-up list crunches in my pocket like a string of cherry bombs going off. Why do I think Kemp knows what he’s doing? Because I believe men I fuck. A perfect basis for getting involved in a burglary. Never again, I promise myself. Never again will I be without enough money for an abortion for me or for a friend. Never. I swear it, I promise it, I want to carve it into my arm. Never!

  The door has closed behind the watchman. We peer around the side of our bin. Lights go on and off. Ten minutes later he reappears and walks to the right toward the next building. I am getting chilled and I have to piss. Blood no longer moves in my veins. I cannot even see Kemp. He lights a cigarette and passes it to me. Twenty minutes. The watchman comes out and goes to the right again around the corner, scratching his ass as he walks.

  In another five minutes Kemp rises, leaving me behind the bin, and tries the key he had made. The question is whether it will set off the alarm. We assume they have one. I cannot see Kemp in the doorway. If I had to run I could not, for my knees are frozen. Then he comes strolling across to me. “Come on. Let’s head for the corner. We can see just as well from the next block if anything happens.”

  “Does the key work?”

  “It works. Now we’ll see if it triggered a signal.”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “No, but that don’t mean there’s not some kind of alarm that isn’t a fucking stupid bell.”

&nbs
p; We march down the street, wide as the Champs-Elysées, wide as a football field. He will not let me run, gripping my arm. “Take it easy, Julietta, easy does it.” Kemp doesn’t believe in running if you aren’t being chased. A car crosses the block and my heart kicks in my chest. Every car that passes is the police. We keep walking. Halfway down the next block we squat behind a truck. Five, ten minutes. My bladder hurts. I am not cut out for this.

  Finally Kemp agrees that nothing has happened and we are free to stagger back to the damned igloo to wait for the watchman to reappear in one hour and forty minutes—we think. I have discovered the route to instant arthritis. I piss behind a truck and then trot awkwardly to catch up with him. My knees no longer work correctly.

  When at last we reach his shack, Kemp is moody. We go to bed without having sex. I suspect from his body scent he has already been with a woman tonight, but I am indifferent. I curl like a mouse with a hard nut around a solid and permanent-seeming kernel of fear.

  Will I have enough nerve tomorrow? Will I disgrace myself by panicking? I know Buddy and Ray resent my being involved and think Kemp is crazy to include me, which may be true. My fear of being financially dependent on a man and my constant need of money interact to coerce me into trouble. I am so frightened I cannot grasp myself, cannot find a core of self in the murk of fear. It is as if I had dissolved in a cold swirling fog. Whenever I drift toward sleep, I wake suddenly with a jolt as if falling. Who am I? I feel lost and invisible. Nowhere can I find images that give me aid or comfort in determining what kind of human being I must try to be, what is a woman fully enabled and alive.

  After a silent eggs and sausage breakfast, he drops me at the co-op. I type a paper, put in my time cleaning the bathroom, go off to the library to work in the periodicals room. I perform jaw motions usually related to talking as the day proceeds in swift jerks and long stretches when time stalls utterly.