by Marge Piercy
“Not as my wife.” He turns to Rosellen, all good sense and downright winning charm. “Now tell me, do I have to be cast as a villain because I don’t want a flea-bitten cat on my honeymoon?”
Rosellen blushes and stutters and says she’s sure she wouldn’t know.
“But I can’t just leave Minouska. I can’t throw her away like an old tennis shoe.”
“I’ll take her,” I say. “She was both of ours.”
“Would you?” She looks at Minouska, who lies very flat on the bed with her ears pressed to her head and her eyes wary slits. Minouska knows she is being talked about and she is scared. I knew it was too good to last, she is thinking.
“Sure,” I say.
“Just for a while. Till Peter and I are settled. I don’t think she’d mind that so much.”
“Let me have her, then.”
Peter expels his breath in exasperation. “The two of you and your baby substitute give me a bellyache. Okay, hand over your black baby and let’s get on the stick.”
In blind haste Donna and Peter gather the luggage, shout their good-byes and go clattering out. Then I am standing on the porch, jostled by my housemates, and she is gone. Slowly the women disperse but eddies of excitement disturb the house, preventing all work by making it trivial. Minouska leaps up on Donna’s stripped cot and sniffs it, turns and paws and turns again, plumps down in a neat coil to wait for Donna and supper.
Upstairs in our room, Stephanie plucks her brows with a tweezer, frowning. “She made it. How did she get him to do it? There’s something heady about a wedding, like a parade. No matter whose parade it is, you find yourself wanting to march too.”
“Where? Off the edge?”
“It’s all these affairs that waste you.” Stephanie sighs deeply, staring at herself in the mirror. “All that work and it goes nowhere. What’ll happen to me if Howie doesn’t come through? Who will I meet once I’m out of college?”
I lie on my bunk facedown. I can see it, the wish for the seal of approval of marriage that comes while standing between the mirror and the bed in a litter of cosmetics and mended underwear and all the miracle-working creams and lipsticks that wrought no miracles, when you see with a stealthy chill that the smoldering evenings, the cozy mornings, the conversations like chess games, the words that filled you like a clear glass with champagne, the words that ignited the air, have all left you hungry as a girl lighting candles on her thirteenth birthday, have left nothing but chaos to be structured in confession. Only let me remember what more I know, that a great-grandmother too has only her skin and her hunger.
I hate this marriage! I wanted her to finish with Peter. I wanted anything but her gone and my side bleeding as if something I had taken for granted, taken to be my own skin, turns out to be hers and ripped from me. He could not resist that jab. Men never believe in the friendships of women. But we are not over. Her books to be mailed first. She writes, thanking. I answer. She’ll be lonely in Detroit. Put in a poem or two. She has not seen my work in a while—surprise her. News and gossip. Minouska. Visits back and forth. She is not dead, just married. We have plenty of time. We will continue.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
IN YOUR COMMENCEMENT IS YOUR ENDING
WE EXPERIENCE A week of perfect spring in mid-March and then the snow comes down in a wet fury as if to abolish even the memory. It’s an early April Sunday around noon and I am reading my notes on Dubliners for my honors thesis, when someone knocks on my door. “Approach the presence,” I bellow.
The door opens and Donna comes in, snow melting on the shoulders of her tailored black coat, her little fur cap. I shriek surprise, repeating her name three times.
She shivers, her high boots leaving a wet trail. Shyly she laughs, patting the snow off. “I was home for my mother’s birthday. I decided to stop by. I have to leave by two thirty, at the latest.” Minouska trails her sniffing, sniffing, giving puzzled cries of query. It has been two and a half months.
“Wonderful…. Is Peter with you?”
“He couldn’t get away.” Circling the room she looks at everything blankly, pauses over the typewriter. “Did I interrupt you?”
“I’m trying to figure out how Joyce gets his effects with language.”
As she sits in the desk chair to look, Minouska leaps into her lap, sniffs upward toward her face. The wet spider-silk hair clings to Donna’s cheek as she bends to read a page. “It looks very technical.”
“I was trying to see if I could be as precise about prose as I could be about poetry, or anything in that direction….” I trail off.
She is not listening. Her hand lingers on Minouska’s narrow head.
“Will you be taking her with you?” I ask.
She laughs. “Don’t worry! She’s yours, now and forever. Though I should never have left her—no, I shouldn’t have.” She hugs Minouska suddenly. Startled the cat slips from her, leaping to the window ledge where she balances warily with flattened ears.
I say lamely, “You moved too suddenly.” Minouska spent the first month after Donna left wandering the halls of the co-op yowling with her tail straight up. My fellow housemates almost made me get rid of her; only I delivered an impassioned speech about grieving for lost love as a basic mammalian trait. Then I had a serious talk with Minouska about survival. She began to eat again. I stole her delicacies to win her affection, but we have settled on cat food and kidney. While I work she lies black paws crossed on my desk, blinking sensuously. She has the manners of a grand coquette, but I find under her fur the remains of old lacerations. We please each other.
Donna rises, brushing cat hairs from the sleek coat she has not removed. “It’s chilly in the house, isn’t it? Have you had lunch?”
I shake my head no. “I can make you some soup. Or scrambled eggs.”
“Let’s go out. I don’t really want to see anyone else here. I feel guilty, but we have so little time.” She turns in a slow circle as if looking for something she does not find.
As we leave she nods at the bundles piled in the hall. “What’s going on? Somebody else getting married and moving out?”
“We’re collecting clothes and food for Mississippi.”
“For Mississippi?” She laughs. “Like children’s war relief?”
“Just about. They’re starving the Black sharecroppers down there, who’ve got involved in a voter registration drive.”
“It’s nice something political’s happening,” she says vaguely. “I should register, now that I’m finally in the eyes of the state a certified goddamn adult.”
The snow thick and wet encircles us, lining our lashes and clinging to hair and brows, to the fur of her cap. She has the little white Sprite parked nearby and with a sense of ashen familiarity I clamber inside. “You borrowed Peter’s car! That must be true love.”
“Rather it must be that Peter’s father gave him a Porsche finally, for getting his Ph.D. As promised. This is my car now. I love having a car. I took driving lessons from this weird cowboy. Whatever happened he never raised his voice. He just chewed gum and looked bored. I’m a real adult, Stu, with my own car and my own husband and my own life!” She drives with careless dash, skids at the corner, pulls out of it and slows down slightly. “What’s with your love life?”
“I neither love nor live,” I declaim. “I am immovable as stone.”
We eat at Metzger’s. She orders a large lunch for us, urging choice on me as if the eating itself were the reason for our being together. As we drink dark beer, awaiting our food, I question her, “How’s Wayne? Do you like it?”
“I’ll get my degree in June. I can’t tell you how I hate going to classes twice a week. It’s a complete bore. In my own head I’ve graduated and I’m done with all this. What I want to learn, they can’t teach me here.”
“And with Peter? How is it going?”
“His parents want to buy us a house. If they do, he’ll never leave Detroit. There was an opening at Argonne but he decided he hates Chicago.” S
he gives me a sliver of grin. “It’s a struggle.”
“Then his parents have accepted you?”
“Let’s say they’ve accepted me as his first wife. But they’re putting the screws on about kids.”
“And Peter?”
“Oh, he adores children.”
“The hell he does. Since when?”
“Since we got married.” The food arrives. She stares at her sauerbraten without recognition, picks at it, nudges it away. “But it means he’s serious. Committed. Of course we’ll have them eventually.”
“You never wanted children.”
“Stu, you know how immature and self-destructive I used to be…. Julie’s baby was born last Tuesday. Five pounds, four ounces. A boy. Carl, junior.”
“I ought to go see her. It’s just impossible to get there.”
“She’s euphoric. I wonder if it’s some drug? Slaphappy.”
“What are you doing besides school, Donna?”
“We socialize a lot with the other physicists and their wives. I think of it as the Beef Stroganoff War. Who can make something fancier every Saturday. Sundays we spend with his family. Today I’m missing that. Pity! Stu, they make me aware of how much I have to learn to be his wife. All the social things I don’t know. Innuendo of phrases and addresses and schools.”
“But he didn’t marry that. He had girlfriends for years from that world and he felt stifled by it.”
“Every man wants it both ways, right? And I’m studying conversational French at Berlitz. We’re going to France at the end of the summer. Do you believe it, Stu? We’re going! That’s our belated honeymoon.”
Conversation stalls. A sense of something wrong, a quiet agony ticking like a jeweled watch inside her forehead. I ask automatically of my aunt, her mother.
“She does love me, she really does!” Donna speaks vehemently. “It was like being in a warming oven, there. I got her a pretty shawl—I’ve never been able to give her a real present before.” She speaks of her nephew, Estelle’s son. “It’s ghastly, seeing him play with his armory of guns and death rays, his jet fighters. He has everything but a toy H-bomb and a little fallout shelter.”
“Sure, baby dolls for the girls and guns for the boys. Toys for adjustment.”
“But they don’t really prepare you.” She stops poking at her food to grin at me. “I was watching baby Gloria with her board with the different-shaped holes and the blocks that fit exactly.”
“Toys for frustration? That’d prepare you for the world. A peg-board with all round holes and nothing but square pegs to smash in.”
Her laugh barks out. “And instead of cute cuddly dolls, dolls that keep shitting like real babies. Dolls that cry like hell all the time, an awful terrified squeak. Walking dolls that limp.”
“Marbles just a little flattened on one side. Guns that misfire or blow up—”
“And a dollhouse with an almost sealed basement full of roach eggs. Just a little hole left where they crawl up as they hatch, so you clean and clean and never can be rid of them!”
We can still improvise together, but in such a way as to kill my appetite. She insists on paying, murmuring without any sense of letting out secrets, “I’ll just tell Peter I had to eat on the road. He won’t even know I stopped or saw you.”
It is only I, following her out, who am embarrassed.
Exasperation having conquered tact, lust having conquered timidity, I say loudly and bluntly, “Well, why not?”
Gerrit’s hands lace over his cup, as if protecting his coffee from me. “I can’t take advantage of you.”
“But can I take advantage of you? What’s advantage? Seeing what might be nice? I’m not a virgin and I turned twenty-one two months ago.”
“You wouldn’t respect me if I let this happen.”
I giggle. “At least you don’t say you wouldn’t respect me.”
“I don’t know if I would. It seems … unnecessary.”
Does he have any sex drive at all? When I cry in front of him, he thinks there’s something wrong with my eyes. He can only view expression of emotion as aberration or sickness. What is his mother like, I wonder, knitting, knitting? She smiles as she knits. Beams on her beamish boy. “Does everything have to be done out of necessity? You need to eat to live but you don’t need steak. You could live on soyburgers and dog biscuits.” Then I am afraid I may have given him an idea.
“I don’t get involved with students. I don’t approve of the jerks who do. It’s using position.”
“You aren’t my professor. You haven’t been for four years. You aren’t even in my department. You can’t even put a letter of recommendation in my file. American history, they’d say, what’s this?” I am pushing him past any real thought of consequence because what is happening is interesting. I don’t think anybody has ever pushed him quite this way, or maybe Alberta did. “Wasn’t Alberta your student at CCNY, before you got this job? She followed you here.”
“Well, and look what happened!”
“What happened? You almost married her? That was a close call.”
“I almost fucked up my whole career!” he says and jumps up, pacing to the other end of the tiny kitchen.
Oh. Of course. Having a Communist for a girlfriend is bad enough, but marrying one! To be a Left lib without a label, that’s the ticket to survival. Dissent but not subversion, forums but not fights, exactly how far you can go without losing your job. In spite of Mike’s predictions two years ago, Donaldson marches on. There is no use being snotty even as I sit in his kitchen drinking coffee I made in his pot: he is the best of the bunch. At least he stimulates thinking in his students. Because of what he just blurted out, he is glaring at me and it is time for me to go home in the rosy May evening.
Howie hauls Stephanie’s black steamer trunk up from the basement, and out of a whirlwind of skirts and dresses and sweaters, two piles emerge to restore us to hers and mine. “Why are you going home for the summer to Port Huron?” I ask.
She speaks from the depths of the closet, throwing shoes out behind her like dirt from a hole she is digging. “You sound just like Howie! Really!”
“He’s right. You could finish up your degree at summer school.”
“Nonsense. Most of my incompletes are papers I haven’t written, and I can work on them just as well at home, and a lot cheaper. Stu, you just don’t understand. You and Howie don’t have real families.”
“My parents are pretty real. Howie gave a whole year to his.”
“They don’t seem to care what you do, where you go. You’re off to New York, and you don’t even have relatives there.”
“It’s not true they don’t care. They try to control me. I left home so that they couldn’t.”
“If I didn’t come home for the summer, everybody in the neighborhood would ask where I was. My father expects me to work in the store. They pay for my schooling and they expect me to come home when they want me home. They’d never agree to summer school.” She tosses my black turtleneck to me. “I’ll have all summer to work on my father and my mother, separately, to persuade them I can go to New York to work. I do have an aunt there in Astoria….” She pronounces it as if it were Greek—Ahs-tor-ree-yah.
“At some point you’re going to have to go public about Howie—tell your parents.”
“Ummm. It’ll be trouble.” As she packs, the room looks bleak and bare.
“I can see you after the fourth kid finally telling them it wasn’t a virgin birth after all.”
“My father’s not naive. Just possessive.”
“Is it because Howie’s Jewish you’re afraid?”
“He doesn’t look very Jewish. But he’s clearly not Greek…. Is this yours or mine?” She holds up a Liberty print blouse.
“Never saw it before in my life.”
“I swear it isn’t mine…. Stu, what’s the point causing trouble when we aren’t about to marry yet? When we’re finally going to do it, I’ll fight those battles. Suppose I went through all the
fighting and suffering and then we didn’t get married? They wouldn’t trust me anymore and I’d be nowhere.”
I pack, dividing my stuff into what will go into temporary storage in Detroit, and what I’m carrying along to New York that will wait in Ann Arbor while I say good-bye to my parents. I will be staying with Alberta at first, on Horatio Street in the Village. Today my father will fetch me and boxes. Wanda will feed Minouska. Then I come back, collect the rest of my stuff and head for New York by train. Alberta will meet me next Friday. To my naive surprise I have learned my parents do not give a damn about my graduating with honors, and would only go to the commencement in the spirit of attending a funeral out of obligation. We will none of us go to commencement.
I have not been able to write Donna. I can’t endure the idea of Peter picking up my letters. I think of her daily as if an unanswered phone were ringing in me. Oddly enough we communicate through Mother. Estelle calls my mother frequently, too frequently for my mother’s pleasure, to complain of how unfriendly and superior Peter’s family acts. Donna calls my mother to complain in general and to pass messages to me. I give my mother messages for Donna. Mother is switchboard central. “I call when he isn’t there,” she explains. “It’s easier on Donna.”
I ask hopefully, “You know his schedule?”
“I just concentrate before I dial.” She smiles serenely. “I can tell.”
Mother has arranged a rendezvous for tomorrow noon at the house. I would rather meet Donna downtown or at the Art Institute, but if as it seems I can’t call without tipping off Peter (am I to assume he has forbidden her to see me?), I have to take Mother’s arrangement as a given.
Mother is on Donna’s side now. I can’t believe how Mother approves of my ex-roommate, my cousin, my old conspirator. Does that mean she is accepting me more? I never give up. In a chamber of hope deep in the sinuses Mother opens her arms wide as a queen-sized bed and gives me a salute of victory and cheer, crowning me with roses. Mother bursts into a full operatic aria entitled What a Great Daughter I Have! I sing loud as a chorus of three hundred, Oh, Mother, You Are the One! My One and Only Mother! All images I have of deity are based on early perceptions of thee, source of milk and mothering, source of joy and sorrow, source of sweet caresses, random blows and fearful absences! Never grow any older and adore me again. The universe is just as tricky and just as arbitrary as thou, and almost as beautiful.