Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  Kemp taught me to make the spaghetti sauce Howie likes so much. “No. Not true. Every friendship, every intimacy teaches. I’m learning.”

  “What? To fuck crocodiles? How much less does each leave?”

  “That’s not true. Mike almost killed me. I knit slow.”

  “What for? Is pain so much fun?”

  He fingers my bruises like a brother. Under his knowing jabs my fears light up until I cannot see his face. “Take your stuff. Get out, get out, before you undo everything!”

  “I’m not some appendage to your life. I don’t come easy, Jill. But I don’t let go easy.” He takes my arms. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. But I’m not done yet.”

  “Be done! Get out. I won’t listen.”

  “Stop reacting and hear me. I don’t want to break up with you. I’m besotted with you. I dream about your body at night. When I jerk off, I think about you.”

  “You do? Then if you want me, what’s wrong?”

  “The way we’ve been. We started wrong. It went on all crooked. Now we have the chance to start again right and clean. No hole-in-the-corner affair. None of this stop and start and mess-it-up crap. A new life.”

  “We’ll see each other?”

  “More than that. We’ll get married!”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” He takes hold of my chin. “I’ve been thinking it through all week. Let’s do it.”

  “Get married?”

  “I won’t settle for half a loaf. A piece or a part of something. You need me, Jill. The way your life is going, you’re wasting yourself.”

  “You mean … all that nasty yelling and all you meant was, you want to marry me?”

  “How much more do you want?” He laughs, letting go of me. “Did you ever make that coffee?”

  I swing around. I poured water through the drip pot, but I never added coffee. “We can have some hot water. Unless you’re prepared to go buy some champagne.”

  “Later. Make the coffee.”

  I spoon in grounds. “But why didn’t you just ask me? Like, ask me nice?”

  He gives me a look of bland disbelief. “Just strut in saying, Well, how about a little marrying today? Are you crazy?”

  I clutch my midriff. “Couldn’t you just move in? We could live together fine without all the official glue.”

  “No. And watch the coffee.”

  “Why not? Common law. Do it yourself.”

  “Because of family. Medical school. Taxes. And the need for you to stand up and commit yourself absolutely.”

  When the coffee is done I sink in a chair, my thighs watery. How buffeted I feel. “Say it again to me.”

  “That you have to commit yourself.”

  “No. The big thing.”

  He grins. “That we’re getting married?”

  “Better. But you really think I’m a good woman—all that? And you love me? Or do you? You never said so, ever.”

  “I love you.”

  “Finally! But just as I am—me? You don’t imagine me turning into somebody different after the ceremony?”

  “Nonsense. I expect you to turn into a little old lady eventually.”

  “I guess under the skin, subliminally, I believed my mother. That nobody would ever want me.”

  He gives me a slow amused smile, sipping his coffee. “I never believed your fulminations against marriage would survive a proposal.”

  “Don’t bet. Don’t think I’ll take an old hand-me-down marriage. I don’t want any marriage I ever saw.”

  “I’m only offering you one. With me.” He pulls me into his lap. “I asked and you took me and we’re doing it. For real.”

  I feel light as crumpled paper. I am going to be happy; I am going to make him happy. How extraordinary. How ordinary. I have arrived in a central safe spot where I am loved.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  OF CHAMPAGNE AND BLOOD

  ACTUALLY IT IS with Donna I have the champagne, real French and bought with her money. “We’re celebrating two victories,” she says in a happy rush. “Your getting married. And I know you’ll be just as happy as we are. Marriage is wonderful, Stu, the only way to live. It will be absolutely healthy for you.”

  “Tell me what the second thing is….” I do not know why I continue, it is nothing I think consciously, but a voice somewhere in my body speaks up. “Are you pregnant, Donna?”

  She visibly jumps. “Whatever made you ask?”

  “I have no idea. Are you?”

  “I sure hope not. Actually I found a tiny hole in my damned diaphragm a couple of weeks ago. I went immediately and got a new one. Not to worry, Stu. Just keep it under your hat. If my luck is rotten, I’ll deal with that problem when I come to it. What I had in mind was something more positive. I’ve been offered a job on the twelve noon news on 5.”

  “Doing weather?”

  “No, Stu. Real news. A giant step into seriousness. I know I won’t get the big stories, I won’t get to cover the mayor or even the city council. But no more leggy little costumes. No more cleavage. I’ve made it! Fashion, women’s stories, human interest.”

  “The noon news. How will that work?”

  “I’ll get up early and commute in. And I’ll be home every evening when Peter arrives. He’s really pleased.”

  “When will you see your analyst?” I am really wondering when I will see her, because I do my office work nine to five.

  “Emil can shove it. It’s Peter I need to work on communicating with, not some Park Avenue doctor…. I’m having a little trouble getting off those pills. If I want to see him awhile longer, I’ll get him to give me an earlier appointment.”

  “Is Peter giving you a hard time for wanting to quit analysis?”

  “He’s very superior about it. How it’s a real commitment and an ongoing process you don’t just dip into. How if I had really completed the analysis process, I’d want to have kids.”

  “Have you told him about the hole in the diaphragm?”

  “No….”

  “Won’t he be suspicious if you are pregnant?”

  “How will he know?” She pours us both more champagne. “My diaphragm was only a year old. My gynecologist changed my prescription last summer…. I’m going to need a new car soon, the Sprite is aging.”

  I clink my glass against hers. “I’m very happy to drink to the news on Channel 5.”

  “Stu, I’ve got to succeed at it. I feel as if this is my one real chance. Something I found myself. I’m not imitating you or Sal or Peter even. Nobody else thought I’d be any good at it. But I know Peter respects me more since I’m doing it, even if he gives me a hard time about working…. Five’s a network station, its ratings are decent…. When’s the wedding? Shall I go?”

  “We’re going to have to tell the parents first. We’re visiting them all in Detroit in two weeks.”

  “Really? Why not do it first the way I did?”

  “Howie says I won’t believe I’m married if we don’t do it head-on. He’s saving me.”

  “He probably is,” she says, pouring more champagne. “Here’s to being saved. Peter saved me.”

  “From what, exactly?”

  “My bad patterns. Destroying myself. Ending up alone and crazy. Winding up a two-bit whore or hanging around bars to pick up truck drivers.”

  “Donna, those images come from B movies. It’s like my mother who only knows of wives or old maids. Are we in the Middle Ages—marry or go into a convent? Do you know a lot of women who’ve gone through four years of a good college who are two-bit whores? I’ve known more whores than you have, and it’s a boring job. You do it for money—to support yourself or your kids or a habit.”

  “Peter’s friends keep asking me when I’m going to have a baby. All their wives are pregnant. Sometimes I feel as if every woman my age on Long Island is pregnant. But we can’t live on what Peter makes.”

  “Well, you arra
nged that, right?”

  “I was flip about it, as if it were all my clever plot, but the truth is we spend more now than we did then. He’d move to Detroit tomorrow, Stu. He could get a better paying position with Edison. Then his parents would build him a house. He hates being his father’s son, but he’s used to trading on that, and he can only do it in Detroit. Here nobody but a few modern architecture buffs ever heard of his old man.”

  “Don’t move back! I’d miss you like hell.”

  “I won’t! He’d be right back under their thumbs. All the work I’ve put into him would go down the drain. His father charges him in disrespect for every cent he gives—and our marriage will never survive if we’re near them. I’m allergic to his mother’s hair dye.”

  Minouska sits purring between us. Now that she has forgiven Donna, she always comes to sit near her, her eyes yellow slits of ecstasy.

  “I feel as if marrying Howie wipes away that old pain when Mike saw me as something my parents were trying to palm off on him.”

  “Aren’t you glad now he didn’t go for the idea?” Donna pours the last of the champagne, her movements clumsy and loose. We are both well on the way to being drunk. “Somehow I never imagined Howie for you. Thought you’d go for someone … more glamorous.”

  “If we live to be ninety, Donna, and marry five times each, we’ll never think each other’s husbands are good enough.”

  “Will his family be nice to you?”

  “I can’t imagine why. I can’t see why any family would want me in it, to be honest.”

  “When are you going? Into the lion’s den.”

  “First week of September, before school opens.”

  She pats Minouska. “Who’s feeding her while you’re gone?”

  “Alberta’ll be back. I thought I’d ask her to come by.”

  “I’ll do it. As long as you’re gone weekdays.”

  “We’re going Saturday afternoon and coming back Wednesday.”

  “I have to come in to work Labor Day, so I’ll feed her Monday and every day till you get back. No problem. I’d enjoy it. Just remember to give me a key.”

  My instant respectability stuns. Even Bolognese seems mellowed by the news. Julie sends me a chatty letter stuffed with pictures of Carl, Jr., baby Constance, and herself big as a house in the background. Five children in a row. I counted them on my fingers just now. Julie loved having babies. She enjoyed pregnancy; after the first several she became involved in natural childbirth and the La Leche League. Like my own mother Julie was terrific with infants and young children, but about the time they started bringing home report cards and having social problems in school, she would begin looking at them with a colder eye. Her children after seven all wore a bewildered sulky air, ex-angels in exile. Carl had affairs from year one of their marriage but Julie ignored them, rightly considering them trivial. In ’68 Carl started smoking dope, growing his hair, running after teenyboppers, saying groovy and far out. He quit his job to develop his soul and at one point turned up on my stoop in New York. I was in my combat boots, down-with-the-running-dogs-of-imperialism phase, so I didn’t communicate too well with this oversized hippie sporting a Beatles haircut, a beaded headband and good leather attaché case full of drug paraphernalia. Julie had an official nervous breakdown. Carl was busted in Cleveland. His family’s lawyer got him off on condition he return to Julie. Julie was allowed to have one more baby in 1971, number six. Karma, Carl named her. Julie stopped sending Christmas cards and notes with photos about the time some of her friends began to have heard of me. She was insulted by the fuss. After all, she knew who I was, putting it over on everybody else. Quite so. I was sorry to lose touch.

  Our wedding plans please everybody as if we were fertilizing the earth and creating social luck. Was this all I had to do to make the whole world love me? I wish everyone I meet may soon be as happy: only in a world forested with lovers would I feel safe. In the bush of my head small drab birds warble fearful guilt about Stephanie.

  Sitting in the laundromat watching Howie’s clothes flash by like domestic television, his bright socks, his drab work shirts, I try to imagine marriage. I see us both working, a hum of productivity rising. He is healing; I am writing. We tell each other our useful busy days. In my wallet in the laundromat I am carrying a scrap of paper I found on my pillow two mornings ago. “Jill, I love you. We will have a life that shines.” Secretly I carry it with me folded to a soiled wad. Whenever I pay for anything, I touch it. I am loved. What could be more important? I ripen in that sun.

  “We’ll start looking for an apartment as soon as we get back from Detroit,” he says over fettuccine. Lunch is our big meal, with him eating a cafeteria supper in the hospital.

  “Why don’t we just live here?”

  “I can’t waste that much time commuting. I’ll have a heavy load in the fall.”

  A stab of regret, which I squash guiltily. My first home, my dear private place, my own.

  “Besides, everybody drops in on you here. I couldn’t study with all that ya-ta-ta-ta…. I hate living with Robbie and Steve. They’re the world’s biggest slobs. The bathroom smells like a subway urinal. The kitchen smells like the subway. We’ll live like human beings.”

  I’ll be an adult. Grown-ups. A sobering thought. I don’t believe it: we will play house.

  He holds my face between his palms. “I see the waif in you. The child who craves a home. The woman battered by the callousness of unfeeling men.”

  A tear forms in my eye. I feel frail. Of course I need taking care of.

  “We’ll have a few hard years. Then you’ll never want for anything. You’ll be able to do the things you dream about without getting kicked in the teeth. And I know you’ll keep me honest. You won’t let me take a suburban practice and push placebos to people who have nothing wrong with them diet and exercise wouldn’t cure.”

  We will be together; I have not since early childhood known the taste of certainty. He is promised to me like dawn and dusk. Those broad bones in his thighs and forehead, the mossy hair, the wintry eyes and stubborn mouth: he will not walk away. All my brambly ways now stand revealed as roads leading to him. All accidents and blows I gave and got, needful preliminaries. We’ve grown out of each other and now we grow back together, round as a poem.

  “How’s he going to support you? Some people when they think they’re in love believe the moon’s made of green cheese and they can eat it with a long-handled spoon. Listen to me, Lady Jane: life in a cold-water flat will be hard on a girl who’s been taking it easy in college all these years instead of out earning a decent living.” Mother’s hair bristles and flutters like black flames. Her small plump body prances on alert. To and fro she marches banging pans on the stove and dishes in the sink.

  “Mother, who supports me now? Me. I’m not about to quit work.” At the wobbly kitchen table I pause with knife in midcarrot, struck by how much she is enjoying this drama. Before her energy the house feels rickety, as if she might break through its walls, flimsy as stage scenery: but she never does.

  “What do you know about keeping house? You’ll be scrubbing your fingers to the bone for a boy younger than you who’ll be tired of you in no time and chasing after high-school girls.” She grasps me by the upper arm. Dark eyes scrape my face. “Are you in trouble?”

  “No. I’m not pregnant, I do not plan to be pregnant.”

  “Ha! How many women plan to be caught? There’d not be half the people on this street if babies listened to planning!”

  I laugh. It strikes me that she can be salty. If she were not my mother, would I appreciate her more?

  She intones mournfully, “You’re too young to settle down.”

  “You were younger. The first two times.”

  “Shhhh! Oh, in years. But I knew the world, chickie. I’d boiled water for my brothers to be born and wiped their bottoms and bargained with the undertaker for coffins—they’ll rook you every time. How can you marry into a graveyard family? A father to bury his
mistakes, now isn’t that something?”

  It is one of her virtues that she never for a moment considers Howie a good catch. “His father’s been dead for years, Mother. They kicked his mother out of that house. She lives in a three-room apartment with his grandmother.”

  “Poor boy!” She clucks her tongue. “He lost his papa young, the way I did. Poor woman! To be uprooted and stuck in a little bitty apartment with no yard or garden and I bet the neighborhood isn’t safe.”

  It’s supposed to be safer than this one, but I keep my mouth shut. Take any source of good feelings available.

  When Howie comes to dinner, mother is a steel kitten. Defiantly she wears an old housedress when he arrives. Then she disappears. Dad is hearty and miserable. He huddles in his armchair smoking furiously, his eyebrows meeting in embarrassment. His hands harden into the bole of a gnarled winter tree. Alone with me these days, he talks about last night’s game between the Tigers and the Yankees. He seems primarily worried I may have become a Yankees fan.

  Mother emerges in a purple frock festooned with sequins. As we march toward the dining room table three feet away, she pinches Howie’s arm. Under the lopsided chandelier of four light bulbs we sit down to pan-roasted chicken. Relax, everyone! If I did, I would slide under the table. LOVE THY DINNER PARTNER, a neon sign flashes over my head in hearts-blood red and truelove blue. Howie is ensconced on his dignity like a hard cushion. Mother tilts her head coquettishly, fluttering her lashes; then throws him dark musty glances of scorn and mistrust. Dad daydreams of fishing in an icy mountain stream a mile above our plates.

  “A civil ceremony with some justice of the peace you rout out of bed—call that a wedding? Bad start, bad end.” Mother nods sagely over the chicken breast.

  “We’ll need the money after we’re married.” Howie is practical and foursquare here, everything battened down. Wise but distant—his medical manner to be.

  “We’ll see what your mother says.” She cocks her head as her black eyes needle him. “What will people think if you have some hasty hole in the wall wedding?”

  I say quickly, “Nothing they’ll still be thinking in a year. We don’t want a whole Fourth of July parade and fireworks.”