by Marge Piercy
Detroit in the summer gives me a hunger for any kind of love, like a drug I could take to quiet this pain which is not entirely memory, both rock and shadow. The smells of asphalt melting under the onslaught of the dirty sun, of burnt rubber, of cooked cars, of brains baking, of angers stewing, of violence on the boil, mix with the fragrance of iris and cut grass from a neighbor’s lawn, of the red roses that bury the fence under their perfumed tresses, the odor of parsley and sage growing just outside the back door in what was once my sandbox. I go about staring hard at the row of stores on the corner with their stamped-tin ceilings, the cinder block bars, the gasworks and the four-whore house on the next block. The neighborhood is turning all Black. My parents talk of leaving. The Djordjevicks sold their house to a colored bus driver and they got ten thousand, my mother says, ten thousand and the roof leaks. I walk fifteen blocks and see only two kids I knew. Kids. One of them is forty pounds heavier than when I last saw her and two babies lighter, one hanging on her skirt and the other in a buggy.
Running up the outside staircase to Callie’s, I bang on her door, but the man who answers is Black and suspicious. The room I glimpse past him has been repainted and paneling added. Something in me repeats like a mourner that this place I have hated is now, because I am leaving it, precious and necessary fuel to me.
I am lying on the old glider upstairs staring at the boxes I have packed and the odds and ends I have still to pack, when I recognize the car engine outside and run the length of the attic to peer out. White Sprite. Donna climbs out, silvery hair, dark glasses. I lunge down the stairs but cannot beat Mother to the door.
“Put on a little weight, urn?” Mother pinches Donna’s upper arm. “Never mind. You look better. You were too scrawny before. Did your mother-in-law buy you that outfit?”
“Marriage is fattening. All that entertaining.” Donna gives a high giggle and Mother chimes in.
“Now that’s too true!”
Donna is tanned: I cannot remember her being tan before. The slacks are linen and fit well; the polo shirt is narrowly striped turquoise on black. She says it is French. Her hair is not curled but cut in layers that make it fuller. No doubt about it, she looks good. Mother nudges us into chairs and bustles into the kitchen for lemonade. I have not had lemonade since I left home; it is the taste of summer in my mother’s house.
“So you’re done with school now, the same as me,” I say, although even as I say it I feel little is the same.
“Finally! But how come you’re not going on to graduate school?”
“I’m going to New York.”
Donna sighs. “It was hard, enduring classes to the end. I felt years older than everybody else. I kept looking at the girls in my classes and thinking, At least I’m done with that. The meat rack.”
“Don’t you think it was a waste of time and money?” Mother says. “After all, you’re married and what good did it do you?”
“I’d never have met Peter if I hadn’t gone to Michigan,” Donna says firmly. “And I was really stupid and naive before.”
“Take off your sunglasses in the house,” Mother urges. “You’ll ruin your eyes leaving them on.”
“Oh, they’re prescription.” Donna tilts them to show us. “Peter wants me to get contact lenses, but the idea of poking things in my eyes terrifies me. I can never put drops in.”
“But if he doesn’t like you in glasses,” Mother says meaningfully. “A thing like that can put a man off.”
Donna grimaces. “I’ll have to try them. I keep postponing the appointment.”
“How are you?” Mother asks, staring at Donna’s midsection. “Are you …?”
“God no!” Donna blurts out. “I’m careful!”
“Good, don’t be in too much of a hurry. Remember after you have babies, you’re never alone, not for years. Not in the morning, not at meals, not at night. You understand me?”
Donna nods. “It would be disastrous now.”
“How are you getting on with his folks?” Mother asks.
I am feeling left out. I will sit silently and pout and then they will see how they have injured me, bonding against me, the two of them, married women conspiring about The Husband together.
“I try to keep my mouth shut. I try and try. But I can’t sit through whole dinner parties without saying something, and then I do it! An idea comes out of me. An opinion. Something that actually demonstrates I’m a person and I read the papers every day and think.” Donna is looking at me now.
I can’t resist answering. “You get in political arguments?”
“You’d be surprised. We can get into one from a comment on how hot it is.”
“The weather,” I say, “is it the Russians’ fault?”
“When summer hit they made some snide remarks about quote the colored unquote opening the hydrants and how it showed they had no sense of civic responsibility, so there was no use pouring money down a rathole. I said I thought a rathole was an accurate description of some of the slums in Detroit and didn’t they like to use their pool when it was hot?”
“The rich are all fascists at heart,” Mother says succinctly, her hands on her knees. “We’re just laying chickens to them.”
She startles me, when out of her comes a pure political remark from her distant past. “Where does Peter stand in all this?”
“Oh, squarely in the middle.” Donna laughs. “I’m always making resolutions that I won’t get into a fight over there…. But you know in a way he likes it. Likes them focusing their discontent on me. I’m a lightning rod. He can mediate. It makes him feel mature and superior.”
“But he’s awfully dependent on what they think,” Mother says.
“I’ve got to get him out of here. He’s been offered that job at Brookhaven, finally, but at less pay. He said if I agree not to go to France, he’ll take it. So I said I’ll give it up to move to New York, but he’s still dillydallying. I’ve been trying out a line on him that his father remained in Detroit all his life because he was scared of New York. I think it’s having some effect.” Donna sighs. “But marriage is great, Stu, absolutely great.”
“Come on, Donna, marriage is only the sum total of separate events. It’s not a thing.”
“You don’t understand,” Mother snaps and Donna nods. Then the teakettle whistles from the kitchen. Mother bounds up to bring back the old tabby teapot on a tray with small cups.
“No tea for me, thank you,” Donna murmurs. “I’m half cooked.”
Mother holds out a cup to her. “Wouldn’t you like me to read your leaves? I haven’t since you were a toddler.”
Donna’s face contracts. She glances around as if beseeching me, the wall. “Oh, don’t bother! Please.”
“No,” I say. “She doesn’t need that.”
“Please. I don’t think I want to know my future.” Donna resorts to a weak giggle.
Mother looks at her with a measuring stare. “Perhaps some other time.” Her voice is sharp with disappointment. “If ignorance is bliss …”
“Donna, could you take me for a drive? I’d love to see Belle Isle again.”
She agrees instantly. I know Mother is miffed at our leaving, but I will deal with that later. Donna drives with style. In fact she handles the car better than Peter ever did. Does that bother him or doesn’t he notice? She has caught his daydream and outperformed, and in what else? For she is quicker, brighter and more desperate. I say, “When I was growing up and used to take the Tireman or the Joy Road buses downtown, I used to sit at the dirty bus window trying to figure out why the objects that gave my eyes the most satisfaction, the most to work on, were grimy tortured rooming houses and slum tenements with broken grandeur, the posturing of dead Victorian egos among the burning stench of people wasting. How can you come from Detroit and not think beauty must contain grit and rake you while it delights? Without an aesthetic that gives a place of honor to the power of incongruity?” I am surely trying to impress her anew.
“Peter has that Grosse P
ointe mentality, all right. Try to get him to do anything in Detroit. If he knew we were going to Belle Isle, he’d lecture me for an hour on how dangerous it is.” A red light halts us in the world that feels as if it is made of melting plastic. “Marrying me was his big act of rebellion.”
“Why do you think marrying a man is any better than living with him?”
“He isn’t committed.” The light changes and she drags a Corvette. “He doesn’t have to work things out. You think Peter would move to New York if we weren’t married?”
“He was thinking about it a year ago.”
“I’m talking about doing it. I’m his wife. That means I come before daddy and mommy and all the twirps he hung around the fucking country club with…. Oh, I’m taking tennis lessons. I dropped the French, since we’re not going.”
“Are you terribly disappointed? I’d consider a murder or two for a trip to France.”
“I have to think of the bigger picture, getting him away from the poisonous influence of his parents. Marriage means taking your decisions seriously, Stu, not just bolting off the way we used to.”
The sun steel-clangs on streets that smell of tar as she whips the car through traffic. Behind the dark glasses her eyes are squinted against the glare. I experience a moment of pure loss thinking of Kemp. It was impossible because of his violence, his racism; it was impossible and yet I miss him. Physically, irrationally, I miss. It’s driving in the car that brought him back to me.
“The scary thing about affairs,” she is saying, “is you put everything, all of yourself, into every one and lose.”
“Doesn’t have to be that way. I want more friendship and less clawing and gouging.”
“But if you love, I mean. You’re burned afterward. So you do it again. A little less of you is left. Then a lot less. Marriage is different.”
“Yeah, divorce is worse than breaking up, I hear. I don’t see a neat progression and I don’t think there’s less of me. I open up differently with different people. Different selves emerge.”
Belle Isle is very flat out in the middle of the vast Detroit River, with episodes of little bridges, lagoons, flat open playing fields, groves, what I think of as casino architecture. It’s crowded today but there’s room for more. The yacht and powerboat clubs face Detroit, but on the side toward Windsor, Canada, people are sitting in chairs they’ve brought, sunning, listening to radios, drinking beer, fishing. It’s always cooler here. We park downriver, under the shade of a big weeping willow. She shades her eyes. “I’m always the same self. Me. The dumb scared child who shits in her pants. That’s what I’ve learned in therapy, Stu. You need a good therapist.”
I refuse to rise to the bait of our fortieth argument on therapy. “Sometimes I love Detroit.” I gesture toward downtown. “How it steams and throbs on a June day like this, an enormous wounded heart.”
She stares at the river flowing away from us downstream. “Do you remember how when we were freshmen we’d talk about when you ought to sleep with men and what was promiscuity and we were very grave and anxious?”
“We tried to make a new morality that works for us.”
“So I noticed how at first I thought three affairs meant you were promiscuous. Then I had three, so I thought having sex with somebody you don’t love is promiscuous. Then I had an affair with Charlie. Then I thought being involved with two men at once or taking somebody else’s man—so I broke every rule I made. It’s like there are no rules, really, and you can just drown in it.”
“But there aren’t rules. You do make up your own or just accept what somebody else made up for their reasons.” I feel shed like an old sweater. I get out of the car and walk toward the water. She follows me. I say, “I feel as if you’re more married than you are Donna. Marriage wraps you up like cellophane.”
“But it’s the thing I’m doing. The most important thing in my life. Everything else has to be secondary. Everybody sees less of her girlfriends after she’s married. Grow up!”
“Damn you, Donna, fight it! You need me in your corner.”
“He’s in my corner. You’ve been afraid to fall really in love after Mike. You’ll see.” She smiles, her gaze turned away. “You’re jealous.”
“Yes, I know. Donna thinks Carl and I are the Jukes and Kallikacks of our generation.” Julie pats her belly. She is pregnant again. “It’s far more practical this way. Get it all over with. I mean, I can’t do a bloody other thing now anyhow, so I might as well make babies while I’m raising babies, don’t you think?”
“Are you happy with Carl?” Has he stopped saying women are made for love?
“Of course! I have what I wanted—a husband, a house, my own family.” But the rest of the two hours she complains. He isn’t ambitious enough, he doesn’t listen to her father’s advice, he spends too much time in front of the TV and too much money playing golf. He never cleans the bathtub after himself. He doesn’t pick up his socks. He won’t brush his teeth before they make love.
But Julie adores her children unstintingly. Carl, Jr., is sweet and chubby, hauling about an immense once-white rabbit. The baby is featureless to me but beautiful to Julie. Julie as mother is Julie without sarcasm, rid of the necessity to make the first put-down. I feel she has developed a contempt for Carl already, based on conviction that anyone she can have isn’t worth having. “The major advantage to marriage as far as I can see,” she says when I repeat my conversation with Donna, “is, one, you get to make babies and they’re dumplings and they have to love you. And two, when you’re dating a man and you start having sex, you always have to. But once they’re married, they stop making a fuss. Five minutes once a week and you’re let off bothering about it the rest of the time.”
Like the Victorian house in Cold Springs, Julie’s split-level has two living rooms, a formal parlor done in white and blue for company (not including me) and a family room where they actually spend time. About Donna, Julie declaims, “She can’t go on fiddling. Either she has to produce an heir, or go back to school, or go to work. No other choices. She’s a fool if she doesn’t pick babies.” Then she tries to condole with me on not having nailed down Donaldson. “He would have been a real catch. Then you could have stayed in Ann Arbor.”
I almost shudder.
The night is hot and thirsty. The elms stoop under the burden of dusty slack leaves. Around the streetlights flying beetles and moths form speckled halos. Detroit stirs and seethes around this quiet street. It is crackling and sputtering, slamming cars together like crushed tin cans, rushing ambulances through the night, shooting off Saturday night specials and cherry bombs, racing its engine, bursting into rhythm and blues or country music from rival car radios as they squeal down the street in a movie chase and then halt with a screech at the stoplight, their radios blaring even louder. Everywhere people are fucking and fighting and blowing off the anger of the grim and grimy workday. The whole city is on amphetamines. On uppers and booze. It sings funky and grinds its teeth, cool and hot at once and hungry for something to kill the pain.
“New York,” my father mutters with deep suspicion, rocking on the porch. “I was there once. They don’t have one hotel, they have two miles of hotels. They don’t have one pawnshop, they have two miles of pawnshops. Streetcars up in the air too noisy to hear yourself. It’s a dirty place. No trees. No light.”
Every day Mother marks the newspapers, circling with red crayon jobs for secretaries and receptionists. “We’re looking at houses,” she says. “We’ll get a bigger house. One with plenty of room for the boys when they come home and you can have a room all to yourself. You could save a lot of money with a good secretarial job and living at home. Get yourself some clothes and have your hair done and see Donna whenever.”
She works hard, my mother in her little house. The soot floats down day and night. Sheets on the line yellow in the acid rain from the factories. Every two days the sills must be washed. My father tracks in grease from work and his clothes have to be prescrubbed at the washboard
before they go into the washing machine with its wringer where she catches a finger at least once a year.
She sits nearsightedly squinting at the old sewing machine, shortening a coat she bought too large at a rummage sale. She is always making over, trying to create something nice and pretty or at least serviceable out of what somebody with more money has discarded or sold off cheap. Things break and she fixes them, mends the old chair, glues the cracked plate, darns the worn sock. All day she scrubs and cleans and mutters. The bills come in and she mutters. She wants it nice, the house, her life. She irons even the sheets and towels. She wants to be a baleboste and she is still showing her mother she can do it better. She was angry at her mother; she stayed angry. Not enough in a family of twelve for any particular girl-child.
He works hard, my father, long hours. His hands are relief maps of burns and scars. His back is stooped from peering forward into engines. He has a permanent hacking cough from smoking and from breathing exhaust fumes. His light grey eyes are squinted as if against a glare; they have the air of having wanted to look into distances rarely offered them. At fourteen he worked evenings and weekends and he has worked ever since.
With my books and my papers and my ever more peculiar interests and passions and ambitions, my friends they mistrust, I come into this house like a hot wind, casting dust in their eyes and spoiling their food. I want to make them happy. I pursue them around the house trying to share my ideas, to please, and I terrify. I am nothing they know what to do with. They tell me about the daughters of their friends, the girls of the neighborhood. Audrey had twins, both boys. Joyce is engaged to a pipefitter. Neighborhood news. Freddie is in prison at Jackson not for the still but for a robbery Mother thinks he didn’t commit. Sharkie is in the army in Germany. Callie is working at Awrey’s Bakery, along with Le Roy next door, who told my mother.