Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  rococo cages decked by lonely wives.

  More birdbaths than birds adorn the tiny yards

  with cookie cutter shrubs instead of trees.

  The retired rock on tiers of porches

  watching the couples pass down to the sea.

  They sit into the dusk. Their faces hang

  waning in the gloom like wrinkled moons.

  Cards are fanned out under table lamps

  along the rows of humid living rooms.

  Talk somnolent as honeysuckle

  thickens the air and drowns

  the sound

  of waves.

  It goes on to 2. The Beach and 3. The Amusement Park. I work it over and over, wanting it to say something that I cannot force it to mean. I write the objective, observational poem I have been taught, carefully ironic and containing nothing of what burns a hole in my body like a sun shut up in a paper bag.

  Tuesday passes. I go to work in midtown. I come home and rewrite my Rockaway sequence some more.

  Wednesday passes. I come home and Howie is sitting on my stoop. As soon as we walk into my apartment, he throws his arms around me, before I have time to put down my big canvas purse, convenient for carrying off supplies. As we kiss it falls on my foot. In about two minutes our clothes join it on the floor.

  Just as well he is a medical student. Just as well or I’d be sore all the time and get nothing done. The last thing I expected was that under the conversation and the political work and the friendship runs this immense river of lust. Neither of us knows quite what to make of this vast powerful sweating body we become together. We spend a lot of time in bed. Then we feel guilty. We cuddle and stroke and caress and fuck. We fuck for a long time. We fuck two or three times in a sequence of night and morning. Then we run off from each other to the rest of our lives, a little frightened.

  As I do my marketing, suddenly I have to be careful of men. I have never before had trouble, walking quickly, sidling through the city like a cat through the labyrinth of courts and alleys. But now I dawdle, float. I exude something that is dangerous. Fortunately the weather is crispening. I can wear my old suede jacket or a raincoat.

  Today, early October Wednesday I am not working and the sun is hot and rough on my arms and face as I return from the market. Howie has given my body back to me. I feared Mike’s boast: that only in that tortured dominance would I ever love and enjoy fully. An obscure dispensation allots the full orgasm here and not there; denied importance when it’s missing; largely beyond control; when it’s given, like a sun of amoral rightness crowning my acts. I feel complacent with sweet roundness like a pear.

  Coming home with my shopping bags heavy with yellow apples, purple broccoli they call cauliflower, white fillets of flounder, bouquets of ruby lettuce, I see at once angling into a small parking space up the block, the white Sprite. My heart catches, a phonograph needle hitting on a scratch. I sink on the stoop with my packages and wait for her to arrive.

  She wears a cobalt blue sheath almost too tight to walk in, giving her a hip-heavy waddle as if she were a much bigger-bodied woman than she is. She is no longer slender, not overweight but filled out, squinting at me in the shadow of the stoop. She takes off her sunglasses and I see they are only sunglasses, not the prescription lenses of before. “It’s me,” I say, wondering if she can recognize me without her glasses.

  “Waiting for your true love, Stu?”

  “Or a bus. Or something. Maybe you.”

  She follows me up the steps, at about half my pace in the hobbling skirt. Inside, she surveys everything. “I love your place.”

  “You won’t lecture me on living here? All our friends from college faint when they see it. They won’t come east of Fifth.”

  “I love this neighborhood. I envy you, Stu.” She sits at my table as I put away groceries.

  “But you’re here now too. Obviously you made it.”

  “Well, yes. I won. But the trouble is, New York State isn’t New York City. I never knew how long Long Island is. I mean, do you grasp it? Have you ever been out there, in the great beyond? It must stretch halfway to Maine. Hours and hours of bumper-to-bumper late-model cars and jowl-by-jowl tract houses.”

  “You’re out in the suburbs somewhere?”

  “Oh, you got it, kiddo.”

  “In one of those houses that look like all the others.”

  “You think that’s a joke, something from the Malvina Reynolds song, ‘Little Boxes.’ No, we have an apartment in an apartment complex. Not a real apartment like this. It’s my mama’s dream come true. Everything’s electric. They haven’t yet got those windows like in Peter’s father’s Cadillac where you press a button and they go up and down, but that’s ‘cause the windows don’t open at all. It’s air-conditioned. You don’t even have garbage, like ordinary people. There’s a machine in the kitchen that eats it. You wash it down the sink and it makes this dreadful suffering noise and grinds it up. And a dishwasher. Even Peter’s mother doesn’t have that—just a Negro maid.” Her voice and gesture rise and dip with a mixture of enjoyment and dismay.

  I ask, “But what do you do?”

  “I play the machines. I put the garbage in the disposal and the dishes in the dishwasher and take the laundry to the laundromat. I play house.”

  “He works and you keep house?”

  “Don’t look at me that way. It’s every bit as boring as you imagine. I thought I’d be in the city and I could spend a hundred years just going to museums and galleries and concerts. But Peter and I are both in analysis. Peter’s analyst is out near Stony Brook, but mine is on Park Avenue. God, my analyst, he’s intense. I adore him. He shines in the dark, Stu. Transference, phooey, I worship him! Besides that I find him one of the most stunning minds I’ve ever encountered, it gives me an excuse for coming into the city three times a week…. Do you think I should go back to school, Stu?”

  “In what?”

  “Oh, physics maybe. Or psychology.” She grimaces, idly patting Minouska, who has settled beside her. “I don’t want to. I want something real to do.”

  “Donna, have you ever felt sexually besotted? Just obsessed with making love with somebody till you felt slightly nuts?”

  “Of course. I go a little crazy at times. Grab a stranger. Then wallow in all kinds of Catholic guilt. Dreary cycle.”

  “I don’t mean when you aren’t involved with someone. I mean when you love somebody and you’re involved.”

  “Isn’t that kind of electricity necessarily a phenomenon of not knowing the person yet? So that you can invent marvelous fantasy figures to inhabit that momentarily charged body.”

  “I guess, not for me. It’s Howie.”

  “You’re sleeping with him finally? But you’ve known him forever.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Maybe it’s the breaking of a taboo.”

  I’m unconvinced. “I’m afraid I’m turning stupid. Utterly sunk in the flesh.”

  “Better than being sunk in East Setauket,” she says glumly. “We started out sexually like lightning. Now Peter comes home muttering about his work every night. He feels he’s over his head technically. It’s my fault, of course, for making him leave Detroit.”

  “You aren’t making love?”

  “Not nearly as often. We’re both having some problems. I’m going to work on it in analysis. Dr. Evans says that one of my key areas of conflict is my sexual identity.”

  “I thought analysts weren’t supposed to say anything but mmmm.”

  “He isn’t that kind of classical Freudian. Peter’s analyst is interchangeable with a stuffed owl, as far as I can tell, except for what he costs. I can tell it’s going to take Peter years.”

  “Then what?”

  “We have children. We’ve agreed not to have babies till we’ve both completed our analyses.” She grins at me. “I’m sure I’ll want them by then. Dr. Evans says my fear of having children is related to my sexual identity problems.”

  The next letter that come
s from Stephanie, Howie brings to me and hands over wordlessly.

  Dear Howie,

  I went shopping yesterday with Sophie. I’ve been meaning to ever since I noticed at the picnic how pretty she is. It’s jealous-making, buying pretty things for another female even if she is only 14. But she is shaping up fast! Too young for you, though. My cousin Marina got married last week. I danced till I couldn’t stand. What food! She is six months younger than me and now she’s married already. You know I can’t come to New York yet, why ask? It’s been a long time and maybe we fade for each other, a little. Or that’s the impression I get, trying to squint across. But we’ll see each other Thanksgiving—won’t we? Is Jill’s place nice? Are you coming to Detroit Thanksgiving? Missing is a great pain—in every place. If you come early we can meet in Ann Arbor. I’m sure I could find someplace!

  Yours soon

  love XXXX

  Stephanie

  I cannot in turn show him the letter I got. She must have written them one after the other, I imagine, first his and then mine.

  Dear Stu,

  Sorry to be so slow answering. Howie’s complaining too. I feel incapable of writing. I feel too lost, desperate, confused—I tell you this in strictest confidence! So you have been seeing much of him, to judge from both of your letters. Tell me, does he love me? You must know by now. I can’t bear doubt, although I am full of it. Perhaps that’s why I must know he is sure, although I don’t believe it.

  I hate my classes. I’m working for a Greek friend of my father’s who has a printshop in Ann Arbor. It couldn’t be more boring! I work every morning for him, doing my dreadful typing. Is this all worth it? I hate my life. Should I go to New York? I have a chance for a good job in Portland, Oregon, where my uncle Teddy manages a hotel. George, the son of my father’s friend, runs the office. He’s dark and big built and handsome as hell. The type bred in my bones as attractive. He tries to seduce me, so slyly, so convincingly, without his father ever catching on. But my strong will saves me a day at a time. I couldn’t love him, it’s too much like looking in the mirror. Except he’s good looking and kisses so well….

  Howie’s letters are so banal. I tore one in a rage. I envy you living there! I feel years older than the good girls around me. What does Howie say about me? I wouldn’t be surprised if he had someone he was involved with for a while; I wouldn’t be surprised at all. I know him that well! Never tell him what I said I hope for with him, don’t you dare! I’m going out to a movie with George and I have a headache. Maybe his father does know he’s after me. Maybe they all know and it’s a plot.

  love, Stephanie

  Her head aches. My stomach turns over. I wish she had not written brightly to him, emotionally to me. I want her to guess all and not to care. How far that is from fact sickens me. I tell him only that she has written. When he waits expectantly, I flare up. “It’s too much, reading each other’s letters. You have to leave me free to deal with each of you as an individual.”

  He shoves his hands into his belt and looks out into the hollow center of my block, resting his forehead on the windowpane. “She mustn’t know. She doesn’t have to know.”

  The knife edge at my throat. “End it now?”

  He swings around. “End what? Knowing each other?”

  “Sleeping together.”

  “Want to hire a chaperone? An out-of-work housemother? Want to go back to pretending we’re just two of the boys?”

  “It wasn’t all pretending.” I stand. “What do you want, then? To see me for an evening now and then, secretly?”

  “Don’t be obscene.” He sits on the couch/bed, smoothing out the coverlet absently, picking off one of my long black hairs. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”

  “You love her?”

  “Damn it, don’t talk about that.” He scowls, haggard. “You haven’t asked how I feel about you. Don’t ask about her. This has nothing to do with words.”

  “What has it to do with?”

  “Responsibility.”

  “Ah.” I stand before a glass wall. “If that isn’t a word. You feel responsible for her?”

  “For both of you. For how I am.” His head hangs.

  “Don’t feel responsible for me. I’m responsible for me.”

  “She’s a kid trying on Halloween masks. She plays gypsy, she plays housewife, she plays femme fatale—and bang, she gets hurt.” He scratches his head punishingly. “At the same time, that she was a virgin gets me—”

  “She was?” I compose my face. “Are you sure?”

  He glares. “Well, of course!”

  “I mean, I didn’t know.”

  “Oh, she said she used to tell her girlfriends stories to make herself out experienced. I’ve done the same.”

  I wonder. No, this I can’t accept, this marvelously renewable virginity no traffic can dent, a hydra whose heads grow back as rapidly as they’re lopped off. I am furious with her for denying her self, her past, her choices, yet I am touched by her belief that this fraud is necessary, her willingness to perjure herself so that every man may be the first. It has a symbolic reality, but I am dazed by her. How must she have felt in his arms acting out ignorance?

  But he is snagged on my questioning. “Why were you surprised? You were her roommate. You’re awfully close not to know that.”

  “We didn’t discuss men much.”

  “It wasn’t just that she told me, it was the way she acted—”

  “It’s just my silly assumption that when people see each other, they’re sleeping together.”

  As if in gratitude at providing him with a way to let the matter drop, he puts his arms around me. “Bolognese’s in town. He’s found an editor’s job with Macmillan’s and he’s living in Chelsea.”

  “Ann Arbor’s reassembling here.”

  “He didn’t get the fellowship he wanted, so he’s working for a year. He asked how you were and I half jumped out of my skin. All I could think of was that he knew. Then I felt a funny sort of jealousy, with him asking how to reach you, and I wanted to tell him about us. I had to force myself to give him your phone number.”

  “I’ve told no one.” Except Donna and Alberta, it occurs to me, but they’re my friends. Of course his two roommates know where he sleeps half the nights. Actually a fair number of people know, when I consider.

  He rests his chin on top of my head, sighing with weary satisfaction. “It’s hopeless, hopeless.” He has an erection.

  Maybe she’ll never arrive. Maybe she’ll fall in love with that guy George. I don’t believe it for a minute.

  The weeks chug by. This is a drier, sunnier November than I have known, more fall than winter. Sometimes when he is studying late at night, he calls me, waking me. “I must be a sadist,” he says in my ear. “I enjoy waking you. Like touching you with the phone. It’s clumsy but it works.”

  Should I turn on a light? No, he is vivid in the dark. “I’m missing your anatomy.” In my drowsiness words come slowly.

  “Tell me how you’re lying. Is the sheet over you? Did you dream yet? What did you dream about?” When I wake into sunlight, that brief conversation in the dark feels more dreamlike than my real fragmentary dreams.

  I march through the streets of my day with that bodiless caress around me like a shawl of light. It amazes me that we can pass through our lovemaking as through the sun’s heart, that I can touch his body good and real as table or bottle of milk and please him and all seems natural. It amazes me that I do not perish of intensity and fullness but go on breathing and working. If I lack anything in November as the earth cools around me, it is a cult, an archaic goddess simple and ambiguous and powerful as blood to whom I could carry my love like a naked votive figurine, crude, the genitals exaggerated and the expression almost appalled, the arms upraised in supplication.

  A crisp Saturday in late November. Last night when we went with Alberta and her date to see The Threepenny Opera in the Village, it snowed but did not stay, a dusting, fragile, evanescent
but clear in its portent. Now the sidewalks are dry and the temperature around forty-five. Howie is arguing against the Staten Island ferry, claiming it will be raw out on the water. We are half naked and entwined on the floor eating slices of pear and Havarti cheese. When the phone rings, too lazy to struggle free of his grasp, I lean way back and drag it to me thumping along the floor. “Stuart speaking.”

  He mimics me, tickling my bare sole.

  “This is Bolognese. I just saw Stephanie, and I gather she’s on her way over.”

  “Oh.” I fumble the receiver. “How did you know? I mean … thank you.”

  “Howie’s there, isn’t he? What do you mean, how did I know? I knew before you did.” I can imagine his sardonic olive face.

  “That was Bolognese,” I say. “Stephanie’s on her way here.”

  “God!” He lets go my ankle and jumps up. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Don’t panic.” I grab his extra shirt and sneakers to stuff them in a drawer. “Help me make the bed.”

  “What are you going to tell her? What does she mean by not writing or calling? Why the hell didn’t she let us know she was coming?”

  He had fifteen good reasons for not flying home at Thanksgiving, but they amounted to me and cowardice. This is the immediate response. I throw my arms around him. If he cannot choose, I will fix things so he won’t have to. “We’ll tell her. We can’t treat her like a child. Somehow we’ll manage, the three of us.”

  “Manage what—a massacre?”

  “Stephanie will accept it.” I am surer that I can bring her to it than him. “Talk to her. Tell her what happened—or do you want me to?”

  He goes frowning to the window. “Of course. Only I’d be pretty rotten if I let you.”

  I dare not approach for fear of irritating him. Instead I hand him his shirt and then wash dishes, dry my hands and comb my hair. I would like to advise him on introducing the subject properly but how angry he would get if I tried, effectively prevents me. I am poised with my hands clasped, trying to think of something magical to say that will overwhelm him with the realization of how lovable I am in this last paring of our time as a couple, when he says with dismal relief, “Your buzzer. That’s her.”