by Marge Piercy
So many of the kids she went to school with never seemed to think beyond the next date, but she was always figuring what was going to become of her. Her parents were sweet but hopeless. They’d been had by the bank and the credit companies and the government and the fish packer years and years ago. Everybody had sucked the juices and the strength out of them. Nobody cared what happened to them once you walked past the next house but one. Little people. Even their sweetness had a sour edge, like cream beginning to turn.
One thing she and Sylvie talked about incessantly was how to live, and how to get where they wanted to go. “I love my mama and papa, but I for sure don’t want to live like them,” Sylvie would say, beginning the discussion that had been going on for five years. “It’s a mistake to have your first baby within a year of getting married. Yeah, we’re not supposed to use birth control, but Father Corsetti, he doesn’t have to get up in the night and change diapers and do a feeding. I think it kills the romance between a man and a woman to have a baby too soon.”
Or Becky would say, “I love my parents and my nana, but I’d never have a big family. There’s nothing left for the husband, and only rich people who have someone to do all the work can have a life with seven children demanding something every minute. I never got what I wanted, and who did?”
Becky worked hard in her classes. It was easy for her to prepare at school, where she could always find an empty classroom so she could concentrate and study. Since she was super-interested in media, she quickly became one of the top students. Twice she had a teacher who mistrusted her—who seemed to see through the eagerness to the hunger, the calculation underneath—but those were among the few older women. The men responded well to her. She rarely flirted. Mostly she just listened with a passionate, honed attention and gave them whatever they seemed to want. She wanted them to welcome her to what they were and to what they did. They felt her admiration as a stimulant. Most kids sat in class putting in their time.
Several instructors in communication arts taught only part-time, some only one course. One was a journalist who also ran a cable interview show; one worked at the PBS affiliate in Boston; one edited a string of giveaway local papers; one was a disc jockey for a Cape station. She was more attracted to television or cable than to newspapers or radio. She wanted to be seen or to be around people who were looked at. Newspapers were what her father and mother read. She associated them with her father lying on the couch with the seat cover rucked up under him holding the paper out at arm’s length over his nose and yelling what the Red Sox had done and what the governor was going to do to them.
Her mother read the astrology column and the advice columns and all the gossip, as if she had ever in her life seen Madonna. Her mother loved newspapers. Becky hated shopping with Mama, because in the checkout line she would stand and read the National Enquirer and the Sun and cluck out loud over the woman who ate her baby and the television comedian sexually abused by saucer men.
No, she loved the clean tidy space of the evening news. Those people had never seen a roach or a brown rat. Those people had never had ringworm or scabies. Their underwear would be new and crisp as fresh lettuce. They would smell like expensive soap. Their nails would be clean and perfectly symmetrical. They would never belch or fart at the table. They did not drink Rolling Rock beer but champagne or Perrier. If they wanted something, they would not have to remember to say please, and their voices were like heavy silk.
In high school, boys had asked her out and she had gone, but she was tempted by none. Some she liked and some she disliked, but she behaved appropriately in what she and Sylvie called the Good Catholic Girl show. She went out with boys partly for status among her so-called peers, and partly to get out of the house. Sylvie and she double-dated when they could, but that did not always work out, as they had much more to say to each other than to any boy.
They attended Southeastern Massachusetts University together. Sylvie was taking a computer course. Sylvie had a seven-year-old Ford Escort her aunt Marie had given her, so they drove to school and back together. Sylvie subscribed to Cosmopolitan and passed on the issues to Becky, so they could discuss the articles that seemed to bear upon their lives and, more importantly, their dreams, their plans. Meeting a man she could really get interested in seemed as remote as being on TV at six every night “A professional man,” Sylvie said. “Suave and gentle. A man you can trust and open up with, the way you can’t with these losers.”
“A man who could teach you a better way to live. A man who knows how to dress, how to talk to people.” Becky’s voice softened and she leaned against the door of the Escort as if it were a shoulder offering comfort and support. “A man who could see who you wanted to be and help you become that! A man who respected you.”
But in their junior year, Sylvie fell in love with a complete jerk. He was Italian, like Sylvie, and he used to come into the bowling alley and grill. He was four years older than Sylvie and worked in his father’s Toyota dealership. His name was Mario and Sylvie kept saying how tall he was, which was true, and how handsome he was, which was ridiculous. He had a nose you could open bottles with. You could see where he had had acne, leaving volcanic craters. Becky could not tell when he was laughing and when he was choking to death. After Sylvie got serious about Mario, she still picked Becky up to drive to school and waited for her afterward, but their wonderful study times and long, long conversations about life and the future and what was truly desirable and tasteful, those precious moments when Becky was not lonely, ended abruptly.
She went out with boys from her classes and she even persuaded herself briefly she was interested in one, Bobby, but he turned out to have a drinking problem after she had already got involved, so she got uninvolved. She had seen too much drinking already. She didn’t find guzzling beer the least bit romantic. She seldom found any of these actual or potential boyfriends truly stimulating, except in odd moments, maybe at the beach with the sun setting, sometimes driving down the highway with the roof down in one’s convertible or sometimes dancing. Then she would feel herself to be truly alive. With the music turned loud and the roof down and the wind ruffling her hair, she felt like someone in a movie, the way it ought to be. She remembered how once she and Sylvie had been double-dating two lame dudes who had borrowed somebody’s four-wheel-drive car for an afternoon’s picnic—takeout from McDonald’s and a case of beer. They were lurching along a sand road dodging branches. After the first time they stopped and the girls refused to do anything physical with them, the two guys sat in front together, leaving Sylvie and Becky to the narrow bumpy backseat. Sylvie said something then that Becky had always remembered. “You know, if this was a movie and there was a score playing, think how great it would look. I saw a movie once where some woman was shopping in a supermarket and this jazzy music was doing dum DUM dum DUM DUM till you felt like she was dancing, but I sat back and said, Whoa, baby, I do that every week and it’s no damn fun at all. Music makes it feel like something.”
Becky had thought Sylvie’s remark an amazingly profound statement. Anything went down better with music. When she had had sex with Bobby, the boy who turned out to have the drinking problem, she had found it went much better if they played something sultry during it, so that it became almost a kind of dance. That made it less tacky.
What she learned quickly from the boys she dated in college was that her parents were as crazy as she thought when they called themselves middle-class. They said, when the issue arose, especially her father, “We’re as middle-class as anybody else. We own our own home. We even got the mortgage paid off, which is more than a lot of those yuppies in their new developments can say. I own my boat and I make my payments regular. We always have a car. We always have a truck. We got a TV and a VCR and you’re going to college. We done okay for ourselves, and don’t you forget it.”
She tried to avoid having her dates come to the house to pick her up. She suggested going out from school or meeting them someplace, but inevitably they had t
o bring her home. She could tell the moment her date saw the family home that she dropped in status several degrees, sinking, sinking, sunk. He became more sexually aggressive, as if because she lived in a sagging wooden house with rusting car hulks in the yard, she had to put out. If a boy didn’t treat her with respect, he wasn’t going to get a thing off her. That was her rule and she never broke it.
In January, an instructor she had had the fall before began putting himself in her path. He read the local news on a radio station in Providence. She had enjoyed his class, although she was more interested in television news. Nobody was teaching that, however, so she took what she could. Except for the stars who ran talk shows, nobody impressed her more than anchormen. They were the face of the day. They told people in the morning what was to come, and in the evening they explained the world. They were a habit for everybody who watched them, glamorous and familial at once, like Sylvie’s aunt Marie.
She had heard Ted Topper’s voice many mornings over the car radio. In his class the first day, she had been pleased that, for once, he looked like his voice. So many radio people were really gross when she saw them face to face. He was six feet two, lean and bearded. He stooped a little more than he should have and had an odd shuffling walk, but he dressed conservatively and well. He had an easy honied voice that slid into the ear and made everything seem all right, even if he was describing a six-car pileup on I-95 or a fire that had wiped out a family. His manner in person was soothing too. He seemed relaxed in front of the class, perched on the edge of his desk with his hands in the pockets of his natty blazer, chatting as if to friends of his years in the business. He told funny stories about power failures, hurricanes, snowstorms, celebrity shenanigans, politicians screwing up. She felt invited into the confidence of those who truly knew.
She took his course in the fall, and in the winter, as soon as she was no longer his student, he put himself in her path. He called her into his office and suggested they have a chat about her future in radio. She was too desperate for kind attention from somebody who was almost a celebrity to tell him she had little interest in radio. Better radio than Lady Grace or the grill where Sylvie worked. She realized quickly that he was more interested in her than in her potential as a broadcast journalist. When he asked her out to supper, she was not surprised, but she was mortified about having to ask him for a ride to the mall, sandwiching supper in between classes and the job she did not dare skip out on. Her manager might like her at Lady Grace and she might have a few repeat customers, but she was immediately replaceable.
She was thrilled to go out with Ted, although she had a certain amount of trouble remembering not to call him Mr. Topper. It seemed somehow disrespectful to call him by his first name, since he had been her teacher, but after he kissed her, it felt more natural to say “Ted.” It was hard to fit seeing him into her schedule, since he lived twenty minutes the other side of the school, and she was without a car. He seemed very understanding about picking her up somewhere other than her house, and he was tolerant of her ridiculous hours.
The whole tone of the relationship acted on her nerves, waking her sensually. She loved eating in swanky little half-lit restaurants. He especially liked country places where it was quiet and they could really talk. He liked to discuss his work. She knew she had little to offer in return, but she tried hard to respond intelligently to his stories, and that seemed to satisfy him. “Dr. Allen, he does that call-in medical segment. Did you hear him this morning? He had an old lady on who wanted to go on about her hemorrhoids and her bowels. I had to cut them off. I couldn’t eat the rest of my doughnut.”
“What some people will say in front of thousands of others is really embarrassing. But you were wonderful this morning, Ted,” she told him. Of course now when Sylvie drove her to school, they listened religiously in silence, except for making small comments. Sylvie admired him too, loyally. “When you read the headlines, you always make it sound so dignified and yet important too, even when there’s hardly any news at all.”
“Did you hear my goof this morning? I pronounced the capital of Afghanistan wrong.”
“Ted, who knows and who cares? How many people can tell you the capital of New Hampshire, and that’s the next state?”
“You really think it slid by?”
“Absolutely. I never noticed it. Will two people even know?”
“But those two people will write in, and the station will think I’m incompetent. There’s always guys in the wings waiting to take over.”
“Nobody has your voice or your presence. You make people feel good.”
When she went back to his apartment with him after the fifth supper, she knew she was going to have sex with him. He was a mature man. She could not pull her Good Catholic Girl act. She had eaten all those expensive meals. At supper she had drunk her share of the wine tonight. She was going to let him do it to her.
But the experience was utterly different. It felt pleasant to lie kissing in his king-sized bed with lovely plaid sheets. Everything was clean and sweet-smelling, including him. He said it was bay rum aftershave. Soft music played. The lights were low and modest. He had a condo in a made-over textile mill. He said it had a water view, of a tidal river, but of course it was dark. He was not in a hurry. She had never been with a man who was leisurely, who touched her as if he knew exactly what he was doing. The second evening they made love in his bed, she had an orgasm. She didn’t know at first what was happening. She cried out, then felt embarrassed. When he realized the experience was new to her, he was amused. He teased her, asking her if she liked it well enough to want to do it again, saying that now she would be insatiable.
It was the first affair she had ever had, not counting the aborted mess with Bobby the drunk. Even if they could only see each other Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, he was very understanding and usually they got together twice a week. She could not spend the night at his small but luxurious apartment, but he seemed to accept that also. She was grateful that he did not insist she see him more than she could, and that he accepted the strictures imposed by her living at home—that her family must never guess she was having sex with him. He was far more understanding than the boys her own age she had dated. He seemed determined to watch out for her reputation, and that made her feel he truly cared for her. She felt cherished, as she had always wanted to be; he did not push her, he did not try to make her give what she couldn’t. A mature man, a real man, she told herself, had patience those adolescents she had been with before simply could not imagine offering a woman.
She was happier than she had been since she was a very little girl. Maybe since Laurie, the youngest, had been born, replacing her. Her life had truly begun. She had found a man to fit her dreams.
EIGHT
Leila
Leila had plenty of experience doing interviews. She established her ground rules. Offer only enough of yourself to make the subjects feel you are open. Be sympathetic, always. Appear to be on their side, but make no promises. Never forget what you want to find out, but let them talk about what they want enough of the time so that they don’t feel as if you are using them. Take whatever they offer of food or drink, but if nothing is offered, never ask for more than water. Always use the bathroom, even if you don’t need to, because much is revealed by a family bathroom.
She drove through New Bedford streets lined flush with three- and four-story frame houses that filled their lots but for a cupcake-sized yard. The stains of industrial-strength air had etched the wood. The Souzas lived in the North End, where the houses were smaller and farther apart, with real backyards and gardens. They had taken over a vacant lot, so there was room for rubbish and old cars in this corner lot, a chicken house in back. Where several of the houses down the block had Virgin Marys in the yard, this one had a small patch of red chrysanthemums still bravely showing blooms withered in the recent cold snap.
The living room of the Souza house was worn and dowdy but bursting with life. Somebody had little childre
n. Snapshots of family members stood on every flat surface. Obviously they did not read much—she did not see a magazine in the house, let alone a book—but toys were everywhere and half-completed projects, somebody’s jigsaw puzzle, a coat being hemmed, a chair upended to be reglued. They all looked on the small side, weathered, seamed by life and hard winds blowing untempered to them. They tended to talk at once, the husband, the wife, the teenager they called Laurie, the oldest daughter Gracie who had a little girl. All were fiercely loyal to Becky and all were furious at the newspapers and the TV. They served her homemade brownies and strong coffee.
Mrs. Souza was a square intense woman with slightly popping blue eyes. She kept saying that Becky was a good girl, a loving daughter who had never fooled around but worked hard. His family had thought she wasn’t good enough, when she was all too good for him. Other Souza family members came in and stood around, generally not sitting but hovering. A swarthy man who resembled the father stood with his arms folded, glowering over his mustache. Tommy, he was introduced. “Tommy has his own boat now.” The father was dark, with almost black hair and snapping eyes, skin darkened and roughened by the sea. The mother was fair, and all the children took after one or the other absolutely, as if the genes could not mix. Mrs. Souza said, proudly or defiantly, Leila could not tell, that unlike her husband, she was not Portuguese but French-Canadian.
They all wanted to talk about Becky, stories about how she created a video memorial to a brother who had died at sea. They showed that to her. She extracted little from it, except a sense of how proud they all were that it existed. Mrs. Souza showed her photographs of Becky graduating from grade school, middle school and a local college. Always Becky was smiling a huge white smile, while in each picture her hair was blonder and she was thinner.