by Marge Piercy
She locks her fingers. “I tried out for her job. I mean, everybody did. I didn’t get it. But I’m glad I tried, because I’m moving over into a production job. Guy is taking me on probation as script girl.”
“No more invoices. I’m glad.”
“You sound it. Why should you be glad?”
“I wouldn’t want to type invoices all day every day. You’re smart and it’s time you got a better job.”
“What about you? What are you doing? Temp work is hopeless. You never get promoted. The agency takes more than half of what they charge for you.”
“I need time even more than I need money.”
She shrugs. We sit on the couch I sleep on every night, Minouska spread like a boa along the back. Stephanie cuddles up, sipping her wine, while her shoe dangles, dangles and finally drops. She coils like an odalisque, occupying two thirds of the couch. “The police swarmed all over us. I mean, you’d think she’d been murdered. What business is it of theirs whether she was having an affair or happy with the creep she married?”
“They think it’s all their business. They even read my poems.”
“They can’t think it was suicide. Nobody commits suicide that way. It’s because you’re trying to live you do it…. I think it’s horrible you found her. When I had my period last week, I kept imagining how she died and thinking that I was bleeding too hard.”
“If we hadn’t both got involved with Howie, we’d still be friends. I miss your company.”
“You should have thought about that before! About us being friends.”
“But, Stephanie, I’d been friends with Howie even longer.”
“I never believed in that business of men and women being friends.”
“Stephanie, half the time you don’t believe in this business of women being friends. I guess that’s all I believe in: friends of one sort or another. Almost always there’s some sex in it but it’s only one item among many.” As we drink, I remember the champagne Donna brought me. All the words, all the damn words that sometimes seem to kill but never save. Can poems save? What—memories? A poem as an engine to create a momentary flash of Donna.
“An item, hmmm? That’s one way to put it…. I used to wonder if you hadn’t ever gotten it on with Donna.”
“Were we lovers? No. Only once when I was thirteen. Never since. She was afraid of it.”
“You sound as if you’re sorry you didn’t.”
“It’s minor among my sorrows. But yes, I regret being scared out of my love.”
“Did you love her more than you love him?”
“When you really love people, there’s not more, there’s only different.”
“Love, love, love, Jill. It’s just words, like your poems. I want some thing real. Something I can grab hold of and feel.” The lamplight catches the green flecks in her eyes like beautiful marbles, the best agates I never wanted to play with but hoarded to hold in my hand.
Without thought, on the push of momentary impulse, I kiss Stephanie on her long mouth with the corners I know will be sensitive. It is not a passionate kiss; simply inquiring. But she kisses me back and I find I had forgotten the soft squirmy sensual delight of holding another woman. We kiss and kiss on the couch, our mouths turning into peaches and mangoes, our breasts rubbing through the thin fabric of her shirt-dress and my blouse. I am not pushing anything. I had not decided to do this and I am deciding nothing. The heat and the moisture envelop us, a small sweet orchard of rampant fruiting vines. We are grapevines clustered with purple fruit ripe among the trailing tendrils and thick leaves. The grapes burst on our tongues.
Suddenly she pulls back and jumps from the couch, going to smooth her hair at the mirror over the tiny fireplace Alberta loves, although she never puts anything in it but three very clean birch logs for decoration. “How did that happen? It’s very dangerous.”
“Not really,” I say. “No more so than the chocolate cake.”
“But how could you do that?” Howie stares at me. Alberta has left without us for the Young Progressives Forum, where Sarah Altweiler’s speech is postponed again because she is still in the Macon County Jail (so that Howie will not meet her until three years later, to be recruited). Howie and I are not going, for we are stuck in the kitchen area of Alberta’s apartment arguing. We have our most intense scenes in kitchens. “When Stephanie came to me, I couldn’t believe it.”
“I wanted to be close to her. I wanted to take her as seriously as I take you, I wanted to make that happen—”
“So you do a sick thing like that?”
“It was nice, actually. I baked her a cake—”
“Did you think she wouldn’t tell me?”
“I didn’t worry about it. Howie, there’s a slice of cake left. Alberta had some. It’s my best effort to date in the chocolate cake masterpiece category.”
Taking me by the shoulders, he shakes me hard. It hurts. Afterward my shoulders still hurt. “Are you crazy? Are you trying to destroy everything?”
“I think I was crazy right afterward, Howie. But not now. I don’t see anything that isn’t in the room for other people. I have to go back to work anyhow. Flying to Detroit and losing my security deposit and all have left me in debt to Alberta.” I know I am annoying him. I touch his cheek gently, trying a little body argument, coming up close. “Now that I understand, really understand, that we all die and at any moment, suddenly, I’m living my life a little differently. That’s all. I mean to express my caring all the time. I sensed an old jealousy in her I wanted to speak to directly…. Kissing isn’t fatal, dearest. No harm done. Stephanie just feels a little superior.”
“No harm done, no harm done!” His fists clench. He throws himself away from me, bringing himself up against the refrigerator. “Do you believe that?”
With a wave of ice gliding up my trunk I see that things are chilling quickly. A good energy is escaping through every pore, leaving me with empty folded hands. “Howie, can’t you imagine sometime you’d be with a close friend? Say you’re with Bolognese and he’s upset or grieving. Can’t you imagine putting your arms around him and holding him? Can’t you imagine having sexual feelings?”
“What’ll you do the day he makes a pass at you? It may take him five more years, but sometime when the two of you are sitting up past midnight nitpicking on each other’s work, he’s going to strike like a snake. Will you feel sorry for him? Will you have some of those momentary sexual feelings you’re touting?”
Just enough truth to hurt. Bolognese’s long olive face bent over our pages dances in the room between us. “He wouldn’t.”
“You’re lying.” He holds himself. “Jill, you have to give it up. All this chasing and tree climbing. Look, if two people are walking down the street and they come to a corner, they can only go one way.”
“And sometimes they can’t. Why not have a coupling where I can now and then walk around the block by myself? You don’t trust me.”
“That night I came back to you, I didn’t say I was moving into your life, Jill. I said I don’t like your life. It’s sloppy.”
“Come in the living room. Sit down.” I take his hand.
Reluctantly he follows me into the living room but will not sit on the couch. He stops at Alberta’s desk, looking at my poems without reading them. “What’s this?”
I walk over. “The name of the doctor who did Donna’s abortion.”
“I thought you didn’t know it.”
“I wouldn’t tell the police. I wrote his name and address down so I wouldn’t forget. I have an idea about setting up a way women can have after-abortion care.”
“A doctor has to report an abortion, if a woman goes to him for care.”
“I know it’s not legal. But it has to be done.”
“Jill.” Now he is standing right in front of me. “You can’t marry me and do all these things.”
“When you scolded me, I always heard the affection in your voice. I told you I didn’t want any marriage I’d ever seen. I
thought we could invent our own.”
“Like a circus tent, three rings going at once and a freak show on the side.”
“You don’t want me,” I say quietly. I feel like an exploded clock, my works all over the couch. “How can I afford you?”
“Of course I want you. Even standing here, I have an erection.”
“But not the me inside.” I look up into his changeable eyes of a cloudy day. For a long time they have been watching me and I have watched him back.
“I won’t let you make a fool of me.”
“I can’t kill myself to become your wife. You have to want what I really am.” I stand up and put my arms around his strong thick neck. I brush my mouth against his. “Howie, I love you. I love to be with you. Why isn’t that enough?”
“Enough for what? Let go, now, damn you. Let go!”
“I don’t want to. We’re friends. Howie, you can’t go from loving me to hating me. I won’t allow you. I won’t!”
“Then let go. Let go or I will hate you.”
I let go and step back. He picks up his khaki jacket and a moment later he is gone.
A slow loosening goes through me, a desire for him so strong I think I will fall to the floor. It passes. “Why are you so fucking scared?” I scream at the door.
I give Minouska some chopped-up gizzards and then slowly strip and put on my bathrobe as if I were ill. My love glows uselessly as a bulb left on in a locked room in an empty house; outside the meter slowly turns and that is the only product of the wasted energy, the spent light.
Scouring the tub, I find myself humming a sad modal melody. Listening, I stop cold. Then with a shiver I clearly hear Donna singing behind me:
“How shall I my true love know
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff,
And his sandal shoon….”
My neck bristles. I do not turn. I had forgotten how she used to sing, her soprano thin as mist. She sang enough off-key to offend Peter’s good pitch. Then she did not sing anymore at all.
The way it worked was, you called a number and asked for Donna. That was my idea, the name. You left your name and number. One of the eleven women in the group called you back. We’d talk a little on the phone, then arrange for you to come to a meeting place. From there you’d be taken to the office, where one of us would counsel with you. The whole procedure was explained. Then we’d set up an appointment to meet again on the same corner. That day you’d be taken to the clinic. Aftercare was available on the spot or by calling the original number. We provided the cheapest and safest abortions available.
The original contact was based on blackmail, but soon we didn’t need Donna’s doctor. Maybe three thousand women, mostly poor, many Puerto Rican and Black, a lot of them married with more kids than they could handle already, three thousand women over the years remember Donna who got them out of trouble; who brought them better lives for themselves and the kids they had and could try to love. Finally our demonstrations and pressure, our unremitting pressure, those dreary bus rides to Albany and Washington legalized abortion and Donna was retired.
For how long?
If you had been dropped from the moon into our bedroom, you could have told it was in the Northeast because of the temperature. In no other part of the country do people have to keep their houses as cold. But our land was beautiful, with the wet snow dragging down the branches of the pitch pines, with the cardinals, the jays, the finches jostling around the feeder outside. Bird food was expensive this winter. As Josh filled the feeders, he announced the cost; but when the next blizzard arrived, he pitied the birds again. The summer people always say, oh, it never snows on the Cape. They read that in a book someplace. We were snowed in at the end of our road, waiting without impatience for the town plow to clear a path to us, while the cats slept in a pile like a patchwork fur quilt, keeping each other warm at the foot of our big bed.
“I get scared. I get very scared,” I told Josh, sitting up in bed.
“But you aren’t trying to be a poet now. You are one.”
“I was writing poems then that everybody ignored. Now I write poems enough people read for them to survive. It feels fragile. The poems have to get printed for people to find them and like them. They have to get distributed. Writing is only the precondititon to the life of the poem, but writing is the only part I control.”
“No matter how much you love me or whatever happens between us, you aren’t going to give up. You’ve written for years. And what would pay the electric bill? Together we just make it.”
“Together we make it just fine. Sometimes,” I added ominously. “When you aren’t being impossible.”
“You’re never impossible, of course.”
“I’m merely difficult. I’ve always been fearful, all my life. I get it from my mother.”
“Are you more scared of the economy or the government?”
“Don’t know if I can differentiate. It sure is cold.”
“Well, sweetie,” said cheerful Josh, “you want them to warm it up with burning witches and women’s clinics or with a nice war?”
“What’s that?” I ran to my office window to look out. The plow blinked its lights like a toy locomotive as it bludgeoned along. I returned to Josh, still sprawled in bed. “I’ll carry the compost out if you’ll take the trash to the dump. You’ll have to dig out the blue car.”
“I’ll get the mail if you’ll call the plumber.”
“Okay. And while you’re in town, get milk. And yogurt. And the papers.” Together we wrangle and bargain our way along. Scared. I am running scared, I am running. The times tighten, harden on us. I am not quite as tough as I used to be, accustomed as I have become to loving, to eating regularly, to drinking wine and having music canned at hand; although in some ways I am stronger. What I want is clear to me as counting. We worry together, singing our fears like the chorus of spring peepers that in a month we hope will cheer our evenings from the marsh. They only want to get laid. We also require that. How dangerous is it to want each other as the temperature drops and friends dry up and blow away? In wanting each other we each want a world in which we and our work can survive, and that’s where the trouble starts.
I have moved into a small but sunny apartment on Second Avenue. I am doing more posing and less typing this fall. I have a new secondhand mattress and some of my old furniture, but the rooms are sparsely furnished. With my notebook under my elbow I lie on the floor nose to nose with Minouska, who is telling me how this is the apartment of her dreams, best of all with its fascinating musky smells of previous tenants. I begin to realize that contrary to the popular belief about cats, Minouska likes to move with me. How many apartments in the slums of how many cities will we share, each one as we settle in, pronounced by her delightful? She will live to spend her old age with me and other companions, human and animal, on our own delightful and hard-worked couple of acres. My familiar, who will die in my arms on the Cape and be buried under the wisteria.
For my totem, the alley cat. All cats really want to live with me: this is one of my quiet secrets. Sensuality speaks to sensuality. We blink. They allow the approach of my hand and their sleek flanks delight me in return. We find each other beautiful and each of us means by the hand as well as the eye. We share too the situation of small predators who easily become prey. I have my equivalent of claws and teeth, and indeed my arched back and loud hiss are my best defenses. When I need to hide my size and weakness, I can look fiercer than I am, but when I cannot talk or threaten or argue my way out of trouble, then I am in a lot of trouble. We are scavengers in the alleys and streets of a society we do not control and scarcely influence. We survive and perish both by taking lovers. Freedom is a daily necessity like water, and we love most loyally and longest those who allow us at least occasionally to vanish and wander the curious night. To them we always return from the eight deaths before the last.
About the Author
MARGE PIERCY is the author of seventeen n
ovels including the national bestsellers Gone to Soldiers, Braided Lives, and Woman on the Edge of Time; eighteen volumes of poetry; and a critically acclaimed memoir, Sleeping with Cats. Born in center-city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan, and the recipient of four honorary doctorates, she has been a key player in many of the major progressive political battles of our time, including the anti-Vietnam War and the women’s movements, and more recently an active participant in the resistance to the Middle Eastern wars. Currently she is involved in trying to shut down the Fukushima clone Pilgrim Nuclear Reactor to save all those who have no way to evacuate Cape Cod.
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