by Marge Piercy
“Well, obviously she is. But now it all makes sense. We have to be careful to keep Whitney and Ronnie from finding out. They won’t be down with it.” Em smiled slightly. “I wonder what it’s like with a woman?”
“I don’t think Fern knows any more than you do.”
THE SECOND WEEKEND in April was mild. In Middletown and even on the surrounding hills and ledges, the snow had melted. Daffodils were blooming in gardens as they swept out of town. She was excited—this was their first trip together, the longest time on his motorcycle, and she was introducing him to her aunt, a tentative connection beyond the couple. But above all, it was spring. That morning she’d heard geese passing over as she trotted to class. Now she was gripping his back and holding tight and they were rushing north. She was sure she had felt nothing in her life as fully as she felt being with Blake. She was a different person now, her nerves, her body, her heart, her brain all forced into flower like a branch of forsythia brought into the house before the buds had begun to open on their own. From bare dead-looking branches, Alison persuaded flowers to open to adorn Rosemary’s desk. Blake had opened her into full bloom.
She wished they were going south on 91 into fuller spring, instead of north. As time and the miles passed, the season regressed. It grew chillier. Her thighs ached from gripping. Her kidneys hurt. Her discomfort grew but her joy remained. They could not talk on the bike, but she felt as if they were in strong and perfect communication, pressed together and riding the wind, as he called it.
They stopped for a late lunch in Brattleboro, not far across the Vermont line. It was a town that still had something of a hippie milieu, so nobody paid attention as they sat in a booth eating hamburgers and home fries. He beamed into her eyes, as happy as she felt. “This is a good thing,” he said. “We’re moving along together. Is that what you want?” He waited for her emphatic nod. “Because that’s what I want. To be blended together. To be one.”
She did not know what he meant. It sounded romantic, but they were so different their oneness was hard to imagine. She took it as a pledge of love. Her Blake was a romantic, and that was sweet. She passionately hoped things would go well with Karen, because she just knew he would be bruised if the weekend went badly. Of all her relatives, she trusted Karen most to be up to the situation, not to embarrass or humiliate her. If only they could live their whole lives the way they did at school, invisible to their families and their families irrelevant. That was paradise enough. That was freedom from the intolerable burden of being her parents’ third and least-favored child.
They reached the farm by three thirty. The sky was blue, but shadows of the mountains were creeping over the pastures. Snow still clung to the sides of the road, although south-facing slopes were clear. It was full mud season. They bucked and splashed up the road to the columned farmhouse. When Melissa jumped off the bike, her knees buckled. Blake caught her with a grin. “Takes some getting used to. You’ll straighten out in a minute or two.”
Karen had been out in the barn. She was wearing old green corduroy pants and one of Grandpa’s plaid shirts, her red-grey hair loose and her skin wind-reddened. Everybody shook hands awkwardly. Melissa felt like running, fleeing down the steep road. Why had she engineered this? It was going to be stupid and clumsy all weekend. She scarcely knew her aunt after five years, and why should Blake care?
Melissa was surprised to see Liz come out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a denim apron. She said, “I’m glad to see you.”
“Your aunt kept me on.”
“I haven’t seen a stove in a decade. I’d starve to death on frozen suppers.” Karen gestured toward the kitchen, the one warm room in the house. “Come have coffee or tea or whatever. Beer? Liz’s husband brews it.”
“Nasty stuff,” Liz said. “I won’t touch it. But Karen likes it. Or she’s too polite to say.”
“I drink it, don’t I? I’m off the wagon, but only for beer. After all these years dry, I’m a cheap drunk. One bottle is my limit.”
“Coffee, if you don’t mind,” Blake said. “We’re both chilled.”
Liz perked coffee and put out a crumb cake. “I have supper in the oven. Just take it out when you’re ready to eat. I’m off. The old man and I are stepping out tonight, over to White River.”
“Have fun,” Karen said, walking Liz to the door. Things had changed. They were on a first-name basis and seemed relaxed with each other. Only the cows had ever been at ease with Grandpa. When Melissa was little, he had scared her. When she was a teenager, she fled as fast as she could on horseback up the mountain and stayed away from him. Looking in the refrigerator for milk to put in her coffee, she noticed the buff wheels of cheese always filling half of it had disappeared. Karen too must have disliked the huge gum erasers.
“You got rid of the cheese?”
“First thing. The crows ate it. And the raccoons.”
“You’re keeping Liz on indefinitely, then?” Melissa asked. “It seems like you two get on well.”
“Liz didn’t always stay here. She took off and lived on the edge for years. Hard drinking. Dancing in bars. Up and down the East Coast all the way to the Keys and then out to Texas. Got really sick, went into rehab, then came back here. We understand each other. Couple of retired hard cases.”
“Are you going to stay up here and run the farm?” Blake asked. “You seem more of a city person.”
“Used to think I’d shrivel if I got farther up the Hudson than Nyack. But as I’m sure Melissa explained, I’ve been incarcerated the last five years. That’s like they cut a hunk out of you.”
Blake stared at her, sitting down backward on a kitchen chair. “Yeah. I can imagine. Even though I don’t guess it was a hard-time place.”
“Very genteel. Very dull. Five whole years wasted in the equivalent of high school study hall. It’s an old-fashioned sort of redbrick storage device for the sons and daughters and wives of the Establishment who bug their families too much. Alcoholics, kleptomaniacs, addicts of various sorts, cross-dressers, misbehaving wives with too many assets to divorce, the broken and abused—few of the abusers. A real mental institution that depends on state funding or insurance, they kick you out in a week, but there are people from wealthy families there who have been locked up for forty years. They couldn’t cross the road by themselves after all this time.”
Blake rested his chin on his arms folded over the back of the straight chair. “All because you had a girlfriend?”
“It was who she was.”
“Rosemary said she was a Communist,” Melissa cut in.
“Not even. Actually she was a believer in democracy. But they thought she was trouble, and she tried to be. She was passionate about the environment. They called her an ecoterrorist, but she never terrorized anybody but Dick and Rosemary’s imagination.”
“Did you love her?” Melissa asked. “Do you have a photo?”
“I had lots of them, but I suspect they went into the fireplace when I went into Mountain View. They wanted to erase her from the face of the earth.”
Blake tilted back and forth in his chair, frowning. “Do you think her death was really an accident?”
“I don’t think once I was tucked away that Dick or Rosemary had a motive. Anyhow, they wouldn’t go that far. Discredit her, yes. Start rumors, sure. Use their pets in the press, why not. Cook up some legal or financial trouble, sure thing. But what do you think, they went out in the woods with a missile launcher?”
“You can’t dismiss the possibility someone was out to eliminate her.”
“She liked risk. She loved flying. She had an instrument rating, but often she flew when it made me nervous. Yes, I can believe she went down in a thunderstorm over Illinois. I do believe that.”
Melissa was leaning on the big old stove. “You didn’t answer me, if you loved her.”
“With all my heart, with all my strength. The funny thing about being committed was, I hadn’t been drinking so much with her. I started drinking too much after I gave
up on tennis. After I met Eve, I didn’t need the bottle.”
“I’d still like to see the reports on the accident,” Blake said.
“I know. You want to see if the family is capable of putting out a contract, when they learn about the two of you.” Karen grinned. “They’re nasty, but they don’t kill people.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” Blake said very quietly. “Do you suppose supper is warm? I’m ravenous.”
MELISSA COULD TELL they liked each other. “He is absolutely gorgeous,” Karen said to her as they went riding the next morning.
Blake declined to get on a horse. “Two feet good. Four feet bad.”
Karen continued, as they took their horses slowly up the trail, “He seems bright and well-spoken. No matter what blather Dick and Rosemary spout when they finally meet him, you could do one hell of a lot worse. He’s a keeper.”
Melissa felt blessed. As they took their short ride, turning around when the snow became too deep and the going treacherous, she remembered many summer rides with Karen when she had been eight, ten, twelve. Riding had been an escape for both of them from Grandpa’s rigid expectations and the cold unpleasant regimen of the farmhouse. Being in Vermont had been a mixed experience. She felt disregarded by Grandpa, parked here by her parents for convenience. Yet she loved the farm animals, she loved when Karen was around. She adored running up the mountain to sit on a rock and feel herself completely, beatifically alone. To be alone was a rare pleasure. There were always her siblings. If not always her parents, there were the people who worked for them, did for them, wrote Dick’s speeches and press releases, planned his campaigns, raised money and spent it, nannies, tutors, cleaning women, cooks, caterers, secretaries of various sorts, interns, assistants, aides. Eyes were always on her.
To be alone was to stare at everything, feeling herself the only, the private consumer of these mountains, these ledges and firs and brambles, the birds that crossed her path, the animals rustling the underbrush. All for her and her alone, the squirrels, the weasels, rabbits. She loved them with her eyes and ears, she gobbled them, she relished them. Then she would sink into one or another fantasy without danger of being caught daydreaming, a capital offense in Rosemary’s eyes. She would spin out elaborate movie plots starring herself, with no one to interrupt, no one to make her lie about what she was thinking. She felt then as if she had really escaped her life, her self, her circumscribed destiny.
She had not been supposed to read comic books: Rosemary was passionately opposed to them. But Billy and she had managed to buy them in secret, for they both liked the adventures of superheroes, sharing them the way they shared an occasional toke nowadays. She had not imagined herself to be a mutant with powers like the X-Men because she liked better to imagine hidden powers that no one would guess until she revealed them. Suddenly she would emerge from her quiet ordinary shell and save everybody. Then they would admire her. Then they would see the powerful and wonderful being she hid inside.
Now she rarely fantasized that way. She had not realized the change until this moment bobbing on the roan mare Guinevere behind Karen, who was riding Legerdemain, the horse that Grandpa had left to her father. She enjoyed on a normal day short piercing fantasies about Blake taking her here or there, sharing something that she had enjoyed, making love in different places, getting married. Having children. She imagined his family embracing her. They would protect her from the scorn of her own.
But these daydreams were fleeting. All those years, as long as she could remember from first grade on, she had carried her stories with her as some girls carried knitting. They were ready to open for her in dull classes, during lectures, during boring concerts and bad movies, when she was supposed to be studying in her room, when she was sitting at agonizingly stiff family dinners that seemed to last a week. What had happened to those fantasies? Blake. Blake had happened in all his real body and strong will and sweet succulent smile. Blake had touched her, and all those heroes of a decade of imagining had turned to powder and blown away. Suddenly the path seemed too long and she wanted to be back in the farmhouse with him.
Karen was talking about Eve. “She was always up for everything, but mostly she led the way. I’d never gone white-water rafting before Eve, and I’m sure I never will again.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“Only with her. She loved adventure. She loved testing herself. Together we had this illusion we were invincible…. Blake said you were researching something about Dick?”
“I want to be a reporter, you know? Like an investigative reporter? So Blake put me in touch with a guy whose father does that, and he’s learning to do the same thing. I’m getting the how-tos from him. Daddy is just the obvious subject, that’s all.”
“You don’t have to be defensive with me. Eve and I were pushing on him about his role in the Susquehanna River debacle…. You know, we had a lot of material. I wonder what happened to it? Eve probably still had it when she died, but I think when they put me away, she lost heart.”
“The Susquehanna River project? I vaguely remember that.” She had loved the melody of the name. Dick had a plaque on his office wall honoring his role in the project.
“The Susquehanna River Basin Commission is a tristate effort to clean up the Susquehanna and its tributaries, to control flooding, to develop green tourism and manage water use,” Karen rattled off. Obviously at one time she had talked about it a lot. “It was supported by environmental groups—including the one Eve was on the board of—along with fishing and recreational interests and local residents not too fond of cancer and floods.”
“I remember Father giving speeches for it. So why do you call it a debacle?”
“Baby niece, he may have given speeches blessing it, but he screwed us. He took the protocols we had worked out and watered them down to suit the big polluters, so that they might have sounded great in a sound bite on the evening news, but little real got done, and that little the people of the state paid for, not the polluters. He had a big contributor who developed golf courses. Now golf courses used to water only tees and greens, but in recent years, they’ve been watering fairways as well—and thus using one hell of a lot of water.”
“I always thought of golf courses as being boring but benign. Just a bunch of middle-aged people walking around banging on balls and then ending up in the clubhouse drinking themselves sodden.”
“Not only do they use way too much water, they frequently dump herbicides and pesticides into the drinking water. The Commission had been trying to get golf courses to sign on to the protocols about water use, but your father unilaterally excluded them.”
“A golf course, could it really matter that much? That’s a big long river.”
“It doesn’t take a lot in the water to cause cancer. It was during his reelection campaign for governor that Dick got Father to stash me away. I don’t imagine Dick had trouble talking the old man into it.”
“So why did he leave you the farm, then?”
Karen looked back over her shoulder at her, shaking her head. “Because I’m good with animals. So he left his cows and horses to the one person who would take their well-being seriously. It wasn’t to take care of me, Melissa. It was to take care of his beloved cows.”
“By the way, my roommate at college is a lesbian,” Melissa said. She was feeling proud of herself about how cool she had been when Fern told her, and she figured that might be worth a few points with her aunt.
“Yeah? I hope her family takes it better than ours did.” Karen looked back over her shoulder, giving the reins a little shake to move Legerdemain along faster. “Good luck to her. She may need it.”
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN •
Melissa and Blake went up a second time to Vermont, to visit Karen. The snow was gone, the cows, out to pasture cropping grass. Liz had talked Karen into a goat named Thelma, and the chickens were laying madly. Karen said she was settling in. “After Mountain View, this place is buzzing with excitement. It’s about al
l I’m capable of handling. We’re putting in a kitchen garden. Even I can pick lettuce and boil beans.”
FERN AND MELISSA were watching Emily getting dressed, changing her clothes, tossing them around the room. Whitney had gone to a frat party. Melissa rescued a red silk top from the floor. “I always liked this color on you.”
“It emphasizes the sad fact that I have no tits.” Em threw it back.
“How about the blue stripe?”
“Makes me look fat.”
“You aren’t fat,” Melissa said plaintively. “You’re absolutely skinny!”
When Emily had left and Fern and Melissa returned to their own room, Fern said, “Emily doesn’t like her body much, does she?”
“I used to hate mine too.”
“It seems too weird. To hate yourself. I mean, she isn’t ugly or deformed.”
“Do you like your body?”
Fern thought for a moment. “I guess I do. I mean, it works just fine. I like to push myself hard, in practice, doing laps, but that makes me feel good. If I didn’t like my body, I’d work out more, that’s all.”
“It isn’t that simple!” Melissa shook her hair back. She was growing it out the way Blake had asked her to. “None of us are really beautiful.”
Fern looked at her blankly. “Yeah, but since none of us are, why does it matter? It’s like saying none of us are six feet six or double-jointed.”
“You are.”
“I’m just flexible.” Fern could do backflips and not only touch her toes but lay her palms on the ground by her feet.
“I hated my body until Blake liked it,” Melissa said.
Fern looked at her with visible pity.
THE NEXT TIME Blake went to New York, he let her come along. They stayed with Slam, a friend of his from high school who was going to NYU and lived off Avenue C in a small dirty apartment whose floors creaked and seemed to sway when she walked across them. Downstairs was a falafel place. The apartment smelled of cooking oil and insecticide. They slept on a mattress on the floor. She had never done that, and it was kind of romantic in a way, like that musical the gay guy on Blake’s hall kept playing, Rent. But everything was dirty and she hated using the bathroom. She was sorry she had nagged Blake to come.