The Longings of Women

by Marge Piercy

  And he hadn’t; but she had.

  FOUR

  Becky

  Her mama would never understand it, in fact nobody would, but Becky Souza went to the mall to be alone. In their old two-story house with their last two Chevies in the yard partly cannibalized, her father’s fishing gear, a boat he was slowly fixing up for Joey, the oldest boy, two of the local black dogs that were more or less Labs plus some collie and spaniel, her mother’s chickens and a portable radio always blasting out some game, while inside everybody tripped over everybody else and baby Sonny, her nephew, bawled, who got privacy—ever? With two bathrooms for twelve of them, no wonder the space between the lilacs and the garage always smelled like a toilet. She shared a bedroom with two sisters, Belle, who was three years older than Becky and studying to be a beautician, and spoiled Laurie, two years younger, who was coming off deciding to be a nun. What did Becky own, besides a cigar box of treasures? Some treasures. A silver dollar from Nevada her uncle Ray had given her. Her three pairs of clip-on earrings. Her cute black lace bikini panties bought on sale and saved for some guy who would be worth spending her cherry. No calls on that one yet.

  Mama shopped their New Bedford neighborhood, where the shopkeepers knew her by name. Half of them spoke Portuguese to Becky, who refused to answer in it. Mama spoke it as well as the French she’d learned at home, but Becky thought it was a mistake to speak anything but English. No, she went to the mall for privacy. She walked from shop to shop, hardly ever with a buck to spend, but pricing everything, looking, studying, seeing what there was to be had when the day came she could have anything in the place. Then she would not waste her money, the way Uncle Ray and Aunt Betty did when they won the lottery—five hundred dollars at once. They had blown it all on a trip to Las Vegas that had ended up costing them more than they won.

  A hundred times she had played that game: the game of Becky wins a hundred dollars, Becky wins five hundred dollars, Becky wins a thousand dollars. It wouldn’t be fair to play it for more than that, because if she were rich, she wouldn’t need to make careful choices, and that was the point of the game.

  First, she would get her hair done right. She would have her hair bleached, not like the other kids in eleventh grade, but the right way, so that it looked like hair did in the movies and on TV. Second, she would buy a good blue suit, to bring out the color of her eyes, just the kind her favorite anchorwoman favored. It would be so demure and yet sexy in a quiet, very controlled way. She would buy a real silk blouse. Good shoes from a department store. Then a good wool coat. She had spent all her money. She didn’t think she could get the kind of coat she wanted with everything else for five hundred dollars. A coat was the first thing anybody saw, and if you had a cheap sleazy coat, you were out of luck. You were classified before you opened your mouth.

  She loved her mama, she really did, but she wouldn’t look like Mama if she had to paint herself blue. Mostly she wore the leather jacket that had gotten too tight on her cousin Wanda. It was a bit tough for the image she wanted to project, but it was one hundred percent better than her gross bright green coat with the plaid lining her mother had bought her oldest sister Gracie half a century before. It must be eight years old anyhow. She hated it. She would rather have her teeth chatter like the sound of ice cubes clinking in a glass before she’d wear that stupid green coat where people could look at her. Green was not her color anyhow. Blue was.

  A lot of the time in the mall she just drifted past counters piled with sweaters or scarves and she dreamed. If she tried to think about anything at home, Mama would give her a task to do instantly. Go to the store and get two pounds of hamburger for supper. Wash out the tub. If the water’s hot, run a load of laundry for Gracie. Help Nana with the baby. Here she could just float along and think and think and think. She could imagine herself as her favorite anchorwoman getting dressed for the evening news. She could imagine herself taking her screen test. She could see herself explaining to Barbara Walters how she had prepared for her difficult, not to say grueling, role as Joan of Arc. Or Marilyn. But she didn’t have the cleavage. Well, that’s what silicon was for. If she needed big tits, she’d buy them. When she was tree and adult, she’d have enough money to buy what she needed. She knew she was smart and fast.

  Nobody in her family seemed to know it, but as much as she loved them—and she really did love Mama and Papa and Gracie’s kids Sonny and Tina and her sister Belle and her favorite brother Tommy, the closest to her in age and temperament, she loved them and wanted to do for them—she wasn’t going to hang around the way everybody else in her family just seemed rooted in the sand of their yard. Nobody ever seemed able to get farther than a neighborhood away. Even Nana was still living in this house that had been hers since 1948.

  The mall was clean. Guys swept it every day. Cleaning women made it nice every night. But mostly it was nice because it was full of clean things. Some of them were good things and some of them were sleazy, ugly things she wouldn’t wear to drown in, but all of them were new. Not yet broken. Not yet worn, cracked. One of the worst things of never having money was always having to make do with what was second best. She would see something she really wanted, a dress, a kind of shoes, a kind of purse or necklace. But there was never enough money for the real thing, or even for a good imitation of the real thing that nobody could tell apart anyhow. No, she had to make do, if she got anything at all, with the cheapest knockoff that immediately fell apart or began to develop piles like hideous zits or the thin plastic cracked and showed the pasteboard underneath. So that not only didn’t she have what she wanted, but the imitation couldn’t fool her for five minutes. It was better to have nothing at all. Then she could still dream about the perfect thing. She wanted to be cool and finished, no rough edges, no cracks, nothing raw or unkempt.

  She was educating her eye and her hand for the day when she would need to know about clothing and accessories. Fortunately the sales ladies were always being fired or quitting. Therefore few of them gave her dirty looks or tried to make her uncomfortable about trying on skirts she had no money to buy. Sometimes she pretended she was thinking about buying an outfit, but mostly they didn’t pay much attention to her, and she could just say it didn’t fit.

  Sometimes she sat in the mall and studied. It was quieter than at home. There she did her homework sitting in the truck, but Papa and Tommy left really early to go fishing. When it wasn’t too cold, she sat in an old car that still had its seats. She had her B-plus average to maintain because, if she failed to get a scholarship, she would not be the first person in her family to go to college. She would not have her exit papers from the fate of her sisters. Already Gracie looked like their mother. Oh, she cut her hair shorter. They both wore polyester pants and overblouses. Their expressions were the same and why not? Their lives were the same, except that Mama had her Church of the Sacred Truth.

  Mama had been raised in a family of French-Canadian Catholics who had moved down from Maine to New Bedford, but she had converted to a Pentecostal church that offered talking in tongues, swaying, screaming, confessions in public, nightly excitement. The women had more fun there, Becky could see that. Every so often she went with her mother, just to get out of the house, but it wasn’t for her. No exit from the neighborhood there. Just a lot of overweight miserable middle-aged women whose husbands beat them or cheated on them or drank away their earnings or went down in a gale and left them with a houseful of needy noisy kids. Good women, and what did it get them? Goodness had to be its own reward, because they didn’t get any other. They could be big shots in the dingy storefront, then they went home to the same dreary mess. Becky knew Mama had been pretty—her wedding picture stood in a forest of snapshots of family—fair like herself and tiny. It was a warning. This could happen to you.

  Becky went to Mass sometimes, on the more festive or solemn occasions, but God was a concept she had quietly discarded shortly after her confirmation. She told no one of her loss of faith, because it would have upset Mama
, even Papa, no matter that he went to Mass only at Christmas and Easter and when somebody’s boat went down. His family was Portuguese and Catholic but only a few of the women took it seriously. The priest was a nice harassed man who did the best he could, but she had stopped telling him anything real even before she lost her faith. How could he help her with being a girl?

  Gracie had married her high school sweetheart, and that had lasted long enough to squeeze two babies out of her. Then he’d started knocking her around. One Saturday he went to the corner and never returned. Now Gracie was back, crowded in with the rest of them. There were no role models at home for being a successful modern woman. Becky had to study it on the TV, paying close attention to details of manner, dress, voice. Those were women who had created themselves, as she would. She read about them in TV Guide, in magazines.

  Her brothers—except Tommy—teased her about the way she talked, when she remembered to talk correctly, which was most of the time by now. Even the girls at school were nasty about it. She had only one close friend, Sylvie Damato, whose family was Italian and ran a bowling alley and grill. Sylvie did not laugh at her for trying to talk correctly and trying to figure out how to dress. Sylvie had a little pocket money from the grill and she could buy magazines, which they studied together harder than they studied any textbooks unless they had a test coming. They were in the same social studies class. Both did well in school. Sylvie lived in the North End too, but a couple blocks farther north where more trees grew.

  Sylvie was just as determined to go to college as she was, but Sylvie had a role model, because her aunt Marie was in real estate and owned her own house in Cohasset. One of their favorite excursions when they could borrow Mr. Damato’s car was to visit Aunt Marie, who drove a glossy new Subaru with a sun roof. Aunt Marie had to be at least forty but she did not look old. Her hair was auburn and she worked out at a gym three nights a week. She was the only woman the girls knew who lived on her own (she was divorced) and did not look anything like their mothers or like the whores who worked downtown. Aunt Marie dressed like the women on TV, in smart suits and clean crisp shirts or in silk shirtdresses and her hair always done. She wore little bright earrings and designer scarves. Whenever Becky sat and looked at Aunt Marie, she felt as if she was looking at something she could really, really be. Aunt Marie would give the girls espresso she made in a machine in her beautiful kitchen straight out of a magazine, or even a tiny glass of sherry. The kitchen shone with dark yellow tiles, begonias in the window, bright blue plates all matching.

  Becky thought to herself she would give away the next twenty years if she could wake up just like Sylvie’s aunt Marie. That was living. Everything else was slow sticky drowning. But Becky was not going to founder. She was going to learn to swim, out of her house that smelled of fishy oil, out of the North End, out of New Bedford, into the world inside the TV where everything was new and nice as a perfect iced layer cake at a wedding.

  FIVE

  Leila

  Leila had sworn she would not tell David what was happening with his father, but he could always empty her out. He knew exactly where silences lurked under the conversation, and he would not stop probing them until he found out what she was withholding. Maybe it was his scientist’s curiosity. Since kindergarten he had been sensitive to friction between his parents. She held the phone away from her ear and sighed.

  “So what news did he have? Of course he didn’t come all the way to be charming. He laid something in your lap. Did he tell you not to let me know? Then why are you lying? But sitting on something is lying, Mother. You can’t keep family things from me, it concerns all of us.” David rarely raised his voice. His manner was gentle, soft-spoken, a new-age wind chime of a late adolescent; but underneath lurked a will like a brass-tipped battering ram.

  It was a demanding love, but a very real one. As mother and son, they knew each other unusually well. David had always been available to her as she had been there for him, until he had gone away to college. It was time for him to leave home, to leave her. She knew that but missed him constantly. He had stood in as head of the household for years, dealing with plumbers, electricians, painters. “This is Mr. Landsman,” he would say on the phone, lowering his voice. They would assume it was the husband calling. Nick was poor at handling practical problems. He would start out to explain to the contractor that the garage door didn’t work and end up drinking with the guy and going to a ball game. The door would never be fixed. He had to charm men as he had to seduce women. Ultimately the contractor liking him was more important than the garage door working. She decided to change the subject “How’s your new girlfriend. Emma?”

  “Emma’s history. She flunked out.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Not really. She was using up too much time.”

  “But I thought you liked her.” Ease up, Leila. “Anyone new?”

  “I went to the movies Sunday with Ikuko.”

  “Japanese?”

  “Only by ancestry. She was born in Santa Clara. She won’t flunk out. She’s smarter than I am. She’s into AI already.”

  But just before the rambling conversation tapered off and they said good night, he returned to the attack. “Father’s a user. You can’t let him put you through a shredder. He’s having an affair in New York, isn’t he? Some ditz near my age. Don’t let it get to you.”

  After she hung up, she felt guilty, self-indulgent. It was too late to undo what years of growing up had produced: a boy who was much closer to his mother than to his father. That did not seem to have hurt him with women. For a straight nerd type, the winner of science fairs and scholarships, he had had his first girlfriend when he was thirteen and never been without since. He was good-looking, certainly, but he seemed completely unaware of his appearance. Always there was something untidy in his dress and wistful in his manner. Every new girlfriend thought she had discovered a sexy soulful unknown beneath the super-serious manner and the air of being always a little socially confused and unbuttoned. She tried to like his girlfriends and quietly failed. Her fantasy was to marry him off eventually—at age thirty perhaps—to Shana.

  It was three hours earlier in California, and he would have wakened her if she had gone to sleep at her customary hour. Instead she was lying in bed surrounded by photocopies of articles on the murder of Terry Burgess. His distraught widow tried bravely to be helpful to the police. Then some two months later, Becky Burgess and her accomplice Sam Solomon were arrested.

  Falmouth, Massachusetts, June 20

  Last night, Rebecca Burgess came home from Sound Cable TV company where she works as a secretary to find the body of her husband, Terrence Burgess, sprawled in a bed splashed with his blood. Police say he had been beaten to death perhaps two hours before. The bedroom showed signs of a fierce struggle.

  According to police sources, the intruder entered the apartment through a sliding glass door from the deck. The TV, the VCR and some gold jewelry were missing, as well as cash.

  A neighbor, Mrs. Helen Coreggio, heard thumping from upstairs. She said there had been a robbery in May in the apartment complex. She suggested that the same burglar had returned, but that this time he had encountered Mr. Burgess in bed.

  The articles were not helping. The view of Becky Burgess was too abstract. First she was a fragile victim; then she was a murderer. Leila could get no sense of the woman underneath the clippings.

  The next day, she called in a favor. She had helped out May Rollins on the evening news when the inmates rioted at Framingham women’s prison, and again during the trial of Linda Sue, an abused woman who had killed her husband in her backyard with his own shotgun while he was beating their daughter. Leila had been an instant expert for May. May owed her. And May came through. Leila drove to WBZ at noon to view videotaped footage of Becky. The widow had ceased being Rebecca Burgess to the media by the first week of the case.

  There were miles of footage to view and Leila had to skip lunch. Becky had been a willing witne
ss for the news. She had talked and she had talked and she had talked. She was full of helpful theories and suggestions. She couldn’t keep her mouth shut.

  She was a sharp-faced woman of twenty-five with enormous light blue eyes. Her hair was blond and fleecy, a halo of pale curls around her face giving her a frail ingenue look. At some point she had got rid of her local accent. If Leila shut her eyes, she could not tell May’s voice—a tall gorgeous Black woman from Detroit who spoke as if she had gone to Radcliffe—from Becky’s. They both sounded brisk, sweet, cultured, perfect ladies but right on the ball. Oh yes. Luncheon voices, tennis voices. Polite, mildly competitive, clean-living ersatz Wasps, but too bright, too edgy finally to pass.

  Obviously Becky (Now Leila was doing it; the accused had lost her last name. The Becky case. Did Becky do it?) loved the camera. She flirted with it uncontrollably. She spoke to it earnestly and devotedly. It was the eye of a lover, of God. She was engaged in special pleading with the camera-eye. Look at me, see me, love me. Leila could never stand to watch herself on TV, always asking, Am I really that big? She took up too much space. She was too tall, too busty. Strapping, she had been called since girlhood, a hideous word that suggested that perhaps she should be strapped in or down. But Becky’s turning to the camera with a fervid appeal was only another form of wanting to fit in, to be liked, to be accepted. In the shots of Becky’s natal home, the Souza family, Leila read the poverty from which Becky was clearly striving and straining upward.

  Am I doing it right, Leila felt her asking through all the smiles and bright glances. Am I acceptable? Can you like me? Can I seduce you into approving of me? Becky was small. Her bones seemed as fine as those of a fish. This was the woman supposed to have beaten to death a husband described as six feet tall and an avid skier and golfer and squash player?