by Marge Piercy
“Where’s Francis?” I ask.
“He shipped out on an ore boat,” Dad says. “Got his union card. Working the Great Lakes up to Duluth.”
“At least he’s working regular,” Mother says. “It takes a load off my mind, chickie, to know where he is so I don’t lie awake all night stewing and fretting about him, like I did when he was you-know-where down in Mexico.”
I want to say, Look, I love you, but it comes to me that is the last thing I can say directly. It is not said in this house. The flimsy walls would crack with shame if I spoke it. We have channels between us for insult, channels for negotiation and innuendo, for push and pull, even for comfort after injury, but none for affection. I am a daughter who does not fit into the narrow slot marked Daughter and they cannot rejoice in me.
Mother calls to me. She squats in front of the tall secretary dragging out the old album. She folds back the tablecloth Buhbe crocheted and plops it down on the plastic pad underneath. “You’ll want some of the family.”
I find she is right. Leaning on a plump elbow she turns the cluttered pages, touching her forefinger to her tongue and tapping fading snapshots of her family, frowning with a sucked-in muttering, nodding with a bittersweet pucker. Boys in knickers, girls with huge bows perched on their curls pose in ranks on the steps of dreary frame houses old even then. Mother’s face beautiful and heart-shaped turns up with a shy and pained smile as she sits on the grimy stoop of a tenement, one tentative hand still protecting a book and her long muslin dress brushing her high shoes. She was so beautiful, my young mother, that my heart throbs like a rotten tooth.
“There’s your grandfather with some of his friends, just before they killed him.” In a group of pickets, Grandfather puts his arm around a fat man with his arm in a sling. “Wasn’t he a man and a half? Look how he stood, like a king.”
With two young women, arms around each other’s waists, Mother in white shirtwaist and stem-narrow black skirt stands outside Wana-maker’s where she worked. Mother is on the left. With a corsage on her starched bosom and her leg nicely turned out, she waits hopefully in a model’s pose for the attention that will transfigure her world of trouble, poverty and sorrow.
“That’s him,” she whispers loudly. “Didn’t think I had any left. I thought your father ripped them all up.” A stocky man grins on a seashore in a striped thirties bathing suit. Dad passes us with a beer in his hand and says nothing.
“Who’s that with me?” Grinning through a missing front tooth I hold my skirt out daintily and embrace a spindly flaxen tot who stares not at the camera but at my cat washing himself. One thin arm extends futilely toward his furriness.
“Donna. You were four. Oh, you were such a sweet-tempered baby, Jill!” Her eyes rake my face accusingly. That baby, where?
Father’s face at his high-school graduation peers bright-eyed as a squirrel from lowered face, chin warring with stiff collar. Photographs grey as the gnawing rat of time. Albums should come engraved with grim Latin mottoes. Buhbe huddles spent and confused in the hot July sun on Belle Isle. Did she smell death in the dusty picnic air? What determined that she spoke Yiddish to me and I answered her in English? I will learn Yiddish and hear her voice again, reborn.
Mike and I drink soda on the steps. “Let me have that one.”
“Holding on to the past! That nothing—a hero made of straw! A schtroyene held!” She slams the album shut. “Enough! You’re never satisfied.” She glares at the photos she gave me. “Give you an inch and you take a mile.”
In a moment we are quarreling loudly, dissipating the smell of death and defeat in the only ritual we have.
Beyond the tracks the Huron glides by, gunmetal grey under high clouds. The hills of town rise behind the red-brick station. No one comes down the path to see me off. What a lot of self I expended here. So, you half-assed martyr, who do you want to gather on the platform with a band? A delegation of ex-lovers with bouquets of poison ivy?
The train coils round the bend of warehouses coming, so soon. Out I go as in I came and the town nestles on its green wooded hills puttering and intent on itself. I touch my battered blue suitcase for comfort, the same one I brought to school and put down in Donna’s room. Typewriter. New fiberboard case holding one cat doped into submission. Supper in a bag. The engine looms past, taller than I expect. The cars settle to a halt. Coach to New York? Steam tickles my legs as I drag my load on board.
Midway down the car I stow my luggage in the rack and the box of dulled cat at my feet as quickly, time ebbing, I press my cheek to the dirty glass. Good-bye to the vaudeville where I learned my pratfalls. The coach lurches forward, pauses, glides with a high springy feel past the station. In five minutes we are out of Ann Arbor, heading eastward. I have made a plodding beginning at learning my craft, my politics, my needs. I have acquired a dependent. Across the deepening twilight of the rippling belly of mid-America we glide through little towns and middling towns where cars crouch on the far side of zebra-striped barriers, their headlights brushing me as I flick past, toward loneliness and beginning again. East to the ocean I have never seen.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
A LIFE ALONE IS NOT NECESSARILY LONELY
BY AUGUST FIRST I am settled in my own apartment on East Twelfth Street just off Second Avenue, in a big living room that serves as my study and my bedroom and a small kitchen just twice the size of the full bathroom I have learned is a luxury on the Lower East Side. From the previous tenant I inherited the table and three kitchen chairs, a chest of drawers and a machine-made Oriental, along with a permanent supply of small tan and mahogany cockroaches and large shiny coffee-colored ones. At first Minouska pursued them, but I gather their flavor is foul.
I have already established a pattern of doing temporary office work for an agency and posing for art classes, part-time jobs that give me time to write. My apartment is an oven on hot nights, when I trek over to Alberta’s to sleep, about a ten-minute walk. Alberta has an air conditioner in her three-room apartment, which feels much more spacious now that Minouska and I are not clogging it up. My first purchase was a double bed (I am as usual full of hope) and my second, some curtains (one of the men across the hollow court of the block uses binoculars). Minouska lets me know that what she always dreamed of was a nice apartment, the two of us, with ledges that catch the morning sun and a bed heaped with pillows to sprawl on.
I have the fourth-floor walk-up in the back for which I pay $67.50 plus utilities. For the first time in my life, I live alone. My plates from a junk store, my silverware stolen from the Union, my glasses from Woolworth’s, my door from the brownstone’s basement, on legs that I myself attached, my pans from Goodwill and my mother, my books shipped from Detroit, mine! I course with the same euphoria of freedom those first weeks in my own, my first, my paradise of little hotbox apartment that I did when I first came to Ann Arbor. From my six weeks as her roommate I got closer to Alberta than I ever had been, but I could not write there and I was always aware how much space Minouska and I took up. Like my mother, Alberta would point out to me better jobs than I wanted, thinking I should prefer a job in publishing to three days in a dress house, two days in a cosmetics mailorder business.
On Second a few blocks south is a market whose stalls offer still lifes of fruit and vegetables, barrels of oysters and clams, ripe Sicilian olives, ropes of smoked fish, smoked eels from Long Island. Cooking is an activity Alberta took up at one time, perhaps for her husband of a few months, perhaps for Gerrit; considered and dismissed. She is a believer in take-out and restaurants. Her idea of cooking is to purchase a barbecued chicken from the Jefferson Market and stick it in her oven for ten minutes. When I moved out, she gave me an old Joy of Cooking from her brief domesticity, and I had my first cookbook affair.
The pleasures of a single existence are intense but unexpected. I have never read poems about the love of one’s own kitchen, pots, towels, cat, books. I meet men in the city as easily as a finger stuck in water comes up wet; friends o
f friends, people I knew slightly in college, men I fall into conversation with. I spend enjoyable evenings but decline to become involved.
I am cooking a rice pilaf with chicken for Alberta, who reclines on my bed/couch smoking a miniature cigar, a habit that drives her father crazy. She is leaving his law office. Professional intimacy has not proved comfortable.
“I interviewed at Corbett, Corbett, Bates and Bernstein.”
“Alberta! I know that’s supposed to mean something, but not to me.”
“They’re a firm specializing in domestic cases.”
“What does that mean? Not foreign?”
“It means low ranking. It means my father screaming at me and storming out of his own office and slamming the door and then having to walk back in because of course it’s his office. It’s divorce. Separation. Child custody. Women, bubeleh, women.”
“I think it sounds a lot more interesting than corporations.”
“Me too. But I know it shouldn’t. It’s declining real power. My father says it’s not political, and of course it isn’t.” She sighs.
“You can’t say it doesn’t matter if a woman has to stay married to some man who beats her. Or if she loses her kids. Or if she has to go on welfare.”
“I feel pulled to it. It is more interesting to me, Jill, even though the law involved is less exciting. He—Bernstein, that is—offered me the position and I took it. I didn’t know I was going to till I heard myself accepting.”
We eat in the nook part of the kitchen, opening on the courtyard from which a faint breeze touches our faces. She has brought Frascati. That summer I decorate, as do all bohemian graduates, with candles in wine bottles and cheap art reproductions of Miró and Chagall. What my guests have been bringing me to drink sits around in the form of empties with crooked candles dripping down wax that is supposed to hide the labels.
Often we promenade the Village, looking in windows of earring shops, wandering through small galleries, stopping for cappuccino. Sometimes we go uptown to a meeting about civil rights called by CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality). We sit on a blanket and listen to chamber music concerts in Washington Square Park. We go to French and Italian and Japanese movies. We listen to debates about nuclear weaponry and disarmament and socialism. At the coffee hour afterward we meet more young men, with whom we go out sometimes together and sometimes separately on weekends. We are united in the desire to avoid spending money on our jaunts. Although Alberta makes three times as much as I do, she spends three times as much. Her rent is high. She dresses well in crisp suits, has her hair done once a week and eats in restaurants. We are both always short.
My next-door neighbor is an earring maker named Conrad who has a basement shop on MacDougal the size of a shower stall. A follower of Gurdjieff, whose book he lends me for a weekend (“Forty-eight hours. It shouldn’t take you longer than forty-eight hours to read it”), he explains he is becoming a superior machine. He is on a higher plane of being than I am. He sports a bushy blond beard, wears a red shirt and whines about how bohemians are spoiling the neighborhood. Quiet (I imagine him sitting in the dark all evening with his arms folded practicing inner discipline) he complains about my noise—typewriter, phonograph, friends.
Under me is a gay waiter who tells me his motto is never the same one twice. He frequents the St. Marks Baths and has a myna bird named Gorgeous George who cannot learn to talk. I hear what my downstairs neighbor is trying to teach him and maybe the bird is simply a prude. Minouska saw it once and began to sing with lust.
Across the hall from the waiter are two women studying art at Cooper Union, a local art school. On the floor below are a Puerto Rican couple with a baby and an old woman whose mother is in the nursing home, The Sons and Daughters of Israel, down the block. The Black janitor lives in the front apartment below ground level. The garden apartment is inhabited by a professional couple (both leave in the morning in suits, carrying attaché cases) who scream in a language I will not learn till next year is Hungarian, and a poodle who yaps. I try to practice my Spanish on the young mother when I catch her alone at the mailboxes.
The freedom to work ignites me. The best thing about being a writer is that I get to sit down and write. I love the luminous cone of concentration. I love stopping and then taking a moment to remember who and where I am. What I do not love yet is what I write. Something awkward, inert lurks between the vision and the word. I cannot yet say what I mean.
Every couple of weeks I type poems and send them into limbo—some little magazine where they age for three to five months to come back coffee stained, to be retyped and sent out again. I have a big chart of where my poems have been and are to give me the illusion of progress. The Tuesday my first poem is accepted by Fugue, Alberta brings a bottle of California champagne and I discover I can get drunk in twenty minutes.
Some days I work for money at boring jobs in offices where I steal paper. Some days I sit at my trestle table and work on my poems. Already I feel as if I left Ann Arbor a year ago, for the melancholy and sense of defeat I carried in my chest like a glacier have more than melted, wholly evaporated. This is my own, my adult life.
It is then with a pang of dismay I answer the phone on a Thursday at five forty-five in late August as I walk in from work, with my newest affectation, a clipped, “Stuart here,” and in my ear Howie drawls, “Well, I’m here too, what do you know about that?”
“Oh.” I choke. “You are,” I add, and the woman who chats in sidewalk cafes and dim bars and spaghetti joints and French restaurants about abstract expressionists, Sartre and nuclear disaster, quite wilts. “Oh, you’re here. In New York. When did you arrive?”
“Yesterday. I’m staying with my aunt Manya on West End. Why don’t you come up and see me sometime? Like now?”
“Why don’t you come down and see me sometime, like now? I don’t live with my aunt anybody. I live by myself and my neighborhood is marvelous to walk in.” I am a Lower Manhattan chauvinist. I believe real life stops at Fourteenth Street. Up north is where I work for money.
“Give me the address.”
I do. “Shouldn’t I give you directions? What cross street are you near?”
“Now hold on, landsman. I lived here for two years, remember? I’m the expert.”
“Oh, Howie, they tear it all down every year. It’s just a concrete stage setting.” We are so sophisticated, two transplanted Detroiters, that I grin to hear us and then I am pleased he called. Old languors have no place in my busy city life. Why moon over any man? Pooh, I had my choice of seven this month and bit into none of them. I have outgrown this weak and woozy longing and am prepared to be wholly a friend. “So come. My name’s on the bell.” (J. Stuart.) “Is Stephanie with you?”
“No. She’s in fucking Port Huron. You’ll hear my complaints soon enough.”
He comes to supper and does complain, while I cook him the identical meal I made for Alberta last week—practice makes perfect—till I send him out for wine since it didn’t occur to him to bring a bottle. He gets a white Rioja we sip as I finish putting our meal together.
“Stephanie didn’t make up her incompletes. Now she has to go back and put in another term. I ask her, What did you have to do this summer that was so damn important you couldn’t make up your class-work? She rattles on about her family and working in the dry cleaner’s. What it comes down to, is that when she’s home she blends seamlessly into the world she came from, and I’m just not real to her.”
“Parents, her sister, her grandmother all in that house. It might be impossible to work there.”
“Then why didn’t she go to summer school? It’s a case of being adult enough to know what you want and pursuing it. But she’s acting half the time like a woman and half like a child. I come last.”
I have to soothe him for her absence, the irony making me glum. The next week I do the same things with him I do with Alberta. It’s almost the same, isn’t it? Almost. After he leaves me, I never sleep.
Labor Day
weekend the city broils. If I wasn’t seeing Howie, I’d go stay at Alberta’s. She’s out in Bridgehampton visiting friends, but I have the key to her apartment. Tonight, Sunday night, maybe I’ll carry Minouska over after Howie leaves. Minouska would follow me into the subway if I’d let her, with her passionate loyal fixation. If not watched, I may at any moment disappear, like Donna, from whom I have received two enigmatic postcards.
July 15, 1957
Dear old Stu:
It’s warm in the cocoon and sometimes dark too but they say darkest before the dawn. I’m delivering ultimata but out of strength or desperation only the Spirit of Chrismas Future knows. Nymph in thy orisons be all my sins remembered—so I can forget them.
Donna
August 12, 1957
Dear Stu:
It’s closer, but to what? May the next you hear from me be a local (nontoll) call but don’t hold your breath. I’m turning into a high-class infighter. The slimiest innuendo in the Middle-Worst.
love & angsts
Donna
I return a postcard with my new address and phone number and a quotation from Proverbs: “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.” I hope we are not sending cute postcards back and forth for the next ten years or until she gets bored with her husband.
The air is sulfurous and fills the lungs with pillow stuffing. The city smells like an old ashtray. Clouds pile up over the East River while the air clots. I am trying veal paprika on Howie, with spectacular success. He even wipes his plate with his finger after the bread has removed the last trace of sauce. It has turned dark early. I speculate, “Feels like fall already, the days suddenly shorter.”
He squints out. “I think it’s just going to rain.”
“That would be lovely. Wash the city. Wash the air.”
Howie has found an apartment with two other medical students on 109th and Amsterdam. He moved in yesterday and spent today unpacking and putting up shelves. “I don’t have enough energy left to go out. I wish you had a TV.”