by Marge Piercy
She appreciated his understanding. It showed that he cared for her as much as she cared for him. It showed he worried about her well-being, not just what he could get out of her. All that was precious.
He even bought her a beautiful silk scarf and a pair of blue earrings in the form of flowers. He said they were cloisonné, a beautiful word she said over to herself whenever she put them on. His voice moved her far more than his face. He spoke with an exciting precision, his tongue caressing the words, with perfect grammar and crisp inflection. She loved to hear him say her name. She practiced saying words the way he did. She longed to sound educated, so that he would not be ashamed of her. Sylvie teased her about the new words she was using.
She hoped that someday Ted would marry her. When she was standing around the mall waiting for a customer, when she was sitting in a boring lecture, she imagined her life with him once she had her degree and they married. She saw herself laying a beautiful table for him with a perfect rose from the florist beside his plate. She was wearing a fancy long dress and greeting his friends from the station who had come to cocktails, to dinner on the deck. They were rushing off to summer on the Vineyard, where they would spend weekends with his friends who knew everybody there was to know around Providence and even in Boston.
He went to work extremely early, leaving home at five A.M. He took a nap after he got back in the afternoon, or he said, he would not have any evening life at all. She wanted to know everything about him, but she was too polite and too much in awe of him to ask unsuitable questions. She tried to notice everything about him, from the leather bedroom slippers he put on after they made love to the peanut butter (date and peanut, from some health food store) he put on crackers for a snack, not the Jiffy she had grown up with. Everything about him was superior. She listened to his program religiously—in the full meaning of the word. Not only did she listen compulsively and regularly, but she dwelt on every inflection of his rich voice. She studied his pronunciation and intonation. He was her standard of excellence.
“How did you like the little joke I made this morning about all the rain?”
“It’s wonderful when you loosen up that way suddenly. It’s unexpected and warm. You know how to speak to your listeners.” She felt he valued her criticism, her feedback.
She saved up comments from one date to the next. She wanted him to know how much she appreciated him. She thought of all those people listening to him every morning, and she wanted to tell them all that he was her boyfriend. Her fiancé. Boyfriend was such a silly word. He was not a boy, fortunately.
She was happy, terribly happy. Evenings she did not see him, she traveled back to New Bedford with Sylvie, who now wore a large engagement ring. Every weekday morning Sylvie still picked her up. Sylvie was the only person who knew about the affair, but then she was the only one who was aware that Mario and Sylvie were doing it too. They talked at each other about their boyfriends, generously allowing the other equal time.
“He’s so solicitous.” She said the word carefully. It was a new word she had learned from him, and it sounded sexy to her even as she said it, all those s’s, like his dressing gown sliding over his body. “He’s always absolutely careful to get me to Lady Grace or home at the time I’m supposed to be there. Never once has he made me late—not once, Sylvie. That’s what I call a responsible man.”
She would have continued that way through her whole senior year, except that spring vacation came in mid-April. She did not have to go to school and she was working the same hours. She imagined they would have more time to spend together. He said it was a very busy week for him. Very busy. She began to realize painfully that he saw as much of her as he cared to, that their extremely limited schedule suited him fine: why?
After the second argument, she enlisted Sylvie. Sylvie agreed to spend Monday night with her watching his apartment. He did not know Sylvie’s car. Sylvie lent her a jacket with a hood to hide her face. They brought a supply of tapes and a pizza and waited. Becky felt like an idiot. Probably he really was busy. He said he did a lot of civic work. However, they had not even waited two hours when he drove up with a woman and they went up to his apartment. They did not come down, although Sylvie and Becky waited as long as they dared. The lights went out up there.
The woman was not young, perhaps thirty, with short brown hair. She wore a trench coat that night, with a flash of black dress under it.
Sunday night, she confronted Ted. She did not say she had spied on him but that a friend of hers had seen him with this other woman several times. She described the woman. At first Ted denied it categorically. “Your friend is crazy. I don’t know who he’s talking about. I have a lot of friends and acquaintances. Half of them have brown hair. What does that mean?”
Finally he grew annoyed. They were eating in a fish restaurant near Newport. He put his knife and fork down on his plate and frowned. “Did you really expect that you would be the only woman I’d be seeing? A school girl who can only come out for a couple of hours twice a week? That’s ridiculous.”
“But it’s only till I graduate! I thought you loved me. I thought you really cared about me.”
“I’ve enjoyed spending time with you, but we really aren’t well matched—surely you realize that. Nadine is a professional woman. She’s a successful agent for my condo and dozens of others. I’m still in the process of getting a divorce, but when it’s over, probably we’ll marry. Who knows? I’ve enjoyed teaching you about the world. You’d never been in a decent restaurant till I took you to one. I haven’t made you any promises, and I find your attitude demanding. I’ve been kind to you. I’ve taught you how to behave. I owe you nothing. Now I’ll take you home.”
She wept all night, silently, lest her sister Laurie hear her. She explained the rupture to her family very simply by saying he began to press her to sleep with him, so she had broken it off. Sylvie she told the full story on the way to school Monday. Sylvie was furious at him, cursed him out. They were both late to class because Becky started crying in the parking lot and they had to wait till she stopped and made up her face.
By the end of the week, Sylvie was tired of hearing about the sins of Ted Topper and told her to forget him. She could not do that. He had lied by omission, as big a crime as lying outright. He had used her to fill in nights when his lady friend was busy, but he had never, never taken her seriously.
She was a dessert on a cart he had pointed at, and it had leapt onto his plate and said, Eat me. Don’t think twice. She stopped talking about him, but she thought of him constantly. She considered what to do to him. She thought of going to the authorities at the college, but what could she say? He had not gotten involved with her while she was still his student; he had waited until the next semester. He didn’t teach at the college full-time. He was not financially dependent on the school. They probably thought they were lucky to have him teach a course. They would view her only as a nuisance. It would get out that she had had an affair. The rumor might even wind its way back to her parents.
No, she had been discreet and so had he. Even where she worked, he had never walked into the store. Calling him in the middle of the night and waking him was a wonderful idea until she tried it and got his answering machine. Of course. She remembered him pulling the phone from the jack when they had made love—love?—and leaving the machine to deal with any calls.
Mail him a dead rat? He wasn’t home during the day. The janitor received packages and would smell something. Besides, what would that really do to him? She imagined running him down in the street, but she didn’t have a car, and Sylvie wasn’t about to loan hers. She could not count on him standing lamebrained in the middle of the street. His car was parked in the garage under his condo. She could put sugar in the gas tank, if no one saw her, but the chances of being caught were enormous, and how would she ever get there? He would just call his insurance company and rent a car while his was fixed.
Her favorite idea was running him down. She would shout to him,
so that he knew who was killing him. She imagined the impact of his body. She imagined putting on her brakes, not screeching, just firmly, then backing over him. With him would die her shame, her foolishness, her sense of being callously and casually used.
She hated feeling as helpless as he assumed, she was. She hated feeling like the little innocent simpleton he had written off. His to pick up, put on and discard. She could not endure imagining him dismissing her as easily as he had. I’ll take you home. I’ll drop you in the trash can. I’ll be done with you as quickly as washing my hands. Not so fast, not so easy, she wanted to say. I’m not dead yet.
She had loved him, she had idolized him, and he did not ever think of her. She would show him a thing or two about little diversions from New Bedford who had the nerve to want to make something of themselves.
She called up the number on the front of his condo and thus got the agent’s name, Nadine Bavard, and the address of her office. She worked all the next week on a letter, heartfelt and full of remorse, to Nadine, in which she apologized profusely for getting involved with Ted Topper. She had not known about their long-standing affair. He had been her teacher and he had seemed very sincere. She had never been involved with a man before, and she had no idea that this meant nothing to him. When she had gotten pregnant, she had naively expected him to marry her. He had explained then that he was involved with Nadine. She was dreadfully sorry. She had not known. She was having an abortion that weekend and would never see him again, but she wanted Nadine to understand she had not intentionally tried to take away anyone’s boyfriend. She felt very guilty about everything and she felt as if her life was over, but she was sure Nadine would understand, as one woman to another, that she had been misled and was more sinned against than sinning.
It was two weeks later in May and approaching finals when Ted Topper caught Becky as she left her class in cable TV production. “I want to talk to you,” he said, his voice harsh and rasping.
“Mr. Topper, I don’t want to talk with you.” She brushed past him.
He grabbed her arm, then looked around and dropped it “You’re a first-class bitch.”
“Why do you say that, Mr. Topper? Do you call all the young girls you lie to words like that?”
“You screwed up my relationship with Nadine. I’d like to break your neck.”
She smiled as she walked down the steps to meet Sylvie. She did not think of him with pain that week. When she thought of him, she felt a little pulse of delight. It would be a while before he’d take up with one of his ex-students again, she’d bet on that. He’d discovered not every girl was as helpless as he expected. She’d rather have run him down, but this was a reasonable second best. He had hurt her; she had hurt him. The score was one to one, and the game was over.
TEN
Leila
Sunday morning, Leila got a phone call from her sister Debbie, an unusual event. “Red and me are going to be East,” she announced. “We’re planning to spend Thanksgiving with Mama in Philadelphia. Are you coming?”
It took Leila a moment to remember that Red Rodgers was the current husband. “I can’t. Why not come here? David’s flying home. Will the kids be with you?”
“Of course. Did you think I’d park them someplace and abandon them? Oh by the way, I’m five months pregnant.”
“Yeah, Phyllis told me. Congratulations.” Debbie already had three kids by previous husbands or boyfriends. “I’ll try to get Phyllis to come up here for Thanksgiving. We’ll fit you all in.”
“Don’t bother,” Debbie said. “We can stay in a motel.”
“You don’t have to do that, Debbie.” Leila couldn’t remember if this one had any money.
“When I told Red you wouldn’t let him smoke in the house, he said we’d stay in a motel.”
No doubt Phyllis, who hated to cook anyhow, said, Call your sister. She’ll have us up there. “So how come you’re flying East?”
“Red had to go to Texas so much this year, with his daddy dying, that he racked up all these frequent flier miles. So we figured we’d come East and let the kids see their grandma before I get tied up with a new baby. A real family Thanksgiving. Last year we went to Red’s family in Amarillo.”
Debbie was living somewhere near San Diego. Leila had never been there. The last time she had visited Debbie, two years ago when Leila was West for a conference at U.C.L.A., Debbie was living at Pomona, in the Valley, with her then husband, Bruce the therapist. Leila had met the Marlboro Man briefly when she was lecturing in L.A. last April. He was called Red Rodgers, which always gave people a sense of having heard of him until they sorted out they were thinking of Roy Rogers and Red Ryder. Red Rodgers had been a rodeo performer, but now he seemed mainly concerned with real estate scams. He was a gambler too, loved the horses and the poker tables. That was the real reason Leila disliked him. She was crazed about gambling. The idea that Debbie had married a man with their father’s vice drove Leila wild. She was sure he would leave Debbie in poverty. Since she was a child, she had felt responsible for Debbie, yet she had never succeeded in taking care of her little sister—only in annoying her. Being judgmental about Debbie’s life had never done any good. She must try to be accepting. With Melanie gone, Debbie was more important.
She remembered Robin, the only girl, very well, and Abel, the oldest. She tried to reach Phyllis, but her mother must be at work. She wished her mother had an answering machine. She had bought her one a few years ago, but Phyllis claimed not to be able to use it. Here was a woman who worked in the intensive care unit and ran fourteen different life-support machines, and could not remember how to turn on and off an answering machine. Phyllis wanted to be free of anything complicated when she walked in her front door. Phyllis had had a roommate, another nurse, for the past three years, but she wasn’t home either.
Thanksgiving. Leila had not thought about it, beyond sending a ticket to David. She had not even brought up the holiday with Nick. She had been ducking conversation with him, but that avoidance was self-destructive. After all, she loved him, she still loved him passionately, and that was what mattered.
She should start inviting people, make a full table for an opulent spread. That would give her something to plan for. A nice homecoming for Nick. A wonderful feast with people all around the table. She liked to bring Shana and David together. Let him see how pretty she had become. Perhaps that would be a good time to talk to Shana seriously about when she might move in.
Now for the pet. She drove to the Animal Rescue League. The woman on duty took her past the cages of condemned cats in solitary, to the kittens. A strong smell of disinfectant, under it the sharp tang of urine, the smell of fear. “You can think about it,” the woman said, as Leila stood confused in front of thirteen assorted kittens tumbling over each other in two spacious cages. “We keep the kittens a couple of weeks.”
“What about the cats?”
“The older animals we keep for two or three nights, depending how crowded we are.”
She looked at the rows of mature cats, some battered, some looking as if they had homes until some feline catastrophe had sent them on the streets and now to the gas chamber. Execution for homelessness. “I don’t want a kitten. I want a mature animal.” Like me. Slightly overweight, knowledgeable, having a hard time of it.
She could not bear it as she walked along. Some of the cats had given up and gazed into space, waiting for death. Others pressed against the cage bars. Some stared as if they could with their eyes command her to choose them. Oh, they understood. One cat reached through the bars and laid its paw on her sleeve. No claws showing, just the paw. She turned and looked into its yellow eyes.
“That’s an altered male, maybe two years old.”
He was a big-boned tabby with thick fur and a nick out of his left ear. He had the slightly jowly look of a male who has been intact past puberty. His eyes were enormous and compelling as he cocked his head and held her with his paw, the claws now very slightly out to keep his grip. “I
’ll take him.”
“We have a few questions first.”
A few questions: it was harder to rescue this poor cat who was about to be suffocated than to pry a mortgage out of a bank. She had to specify her intentions, give her history related to animals, explain how her hamsters had died, exactly (as if she knew why hamsters lived or died), promise never to let the cat out of her house or presumably her sight.
She had to buy a carrier from the shelter, since she had not thought to bring anything with her. Of cardboard, it was small for his bulk. He got into it willingly. In the car he howled twice and then was silent, going to whatever fate loomed over him. She could have been an animal experimenter. She could be someone with a pit bull to train on blood. She could be a coke head or a drunk. He had been turned over to her, and he knew only that the unknown was better than the death that every mature cat in that place could smell and taste.
He was hefty, all right. She lugged him gracelessly from the garage to the house and up the steps, thumping in the narrow confines of the box. Finally they were inside. With a big grin, she opened the top of the box. His ears were pinned back against his head and he looked ready to fight. His eyes were yellow slits of menace. In his throat he made a strange guttural sound. She walked away and sat down in the living room. A moment later he jumped from the box, crouched in the hall on the small Oriental there. He examined it like an expert in rugs, every thread. Then he checked out the hall table on which the family mail was usually arrayed. He looked at the stairway but he entered the living room, stiff-legged and half-crouching, stopping when he saw her and then slowly approaching to sniff again.