by Marge Piercy
“It’s me, old boy.” For the first time she patted him, gingerly. He ducked and then leaned into her hand. Then he began a circuit of the room. She watched him, fascinated by his attention to detail. She had to name him. Let’s see, his color was caramel, but that did not seem to suit him. Perhaps she had better wait until he showed more of his personality than a great interest in interior decorating.
When he got to the couch, he disappeared underneath. She tried, “Here, kitty, kitty.” Nothing happened. He was playing at being invisible. If you don’t see me, nothing bad can happen. This wasn’t too amusing. She listened to her messages, returned two calls, including Mrs. Souza’s. “I talked to our Becky for you, I told her how you wanted to hear her side. She’s had a hard time with the press. But I explained you weren’t a reporter but a professor, and she liked that. She agreed to talk to you, okay? You still want to?”
“Oh, yes,” Leila said. “I very much want to. When?”
“You’ll see what a good girl she is. Now she has to get her lawyer to agree. Okay? You’re a good woman, Mrs. Landsman, I know you mean right for our Becky.”
“The sooner, the better, Mrs. Souza. I’m eager to hear her side.”
She was an idiot. She had gone and gotten a cat and nothing to feed it and nothing to use as a litter box. She was shocked with herself. When Melanie had given her an African violet nine years ago, she had immediately read two books and a Brooklyn Botanical Garden pamphlet. Before David was born, she had read thirty books on child development. The nursery was outfitted by her seventh month. She had never plunged into a book as hastily as into Becky’s case; now she had acquired a strange animal on impulse.
She went out at once to Porter Square Star Market, returning in forty-five minutes with a bag of assorted canned cat food and kibble and a big plastic basin she filled with kitty litter and put in the upstairs bathroom. But if she had imagined being greeted, no creature was visible. He was not under the couch. He was not under any of the chairs in the living room. She spent a futile half hour crawling around the living room, the dining room and her downstairs study looking for a cat. He seemed to have evaporated. She opened a can of fishy glop and tried again, calling Kitty Kitty. Nothing.
Her effort to purchase companionship had been a complete bust. Obviously she should have taken one of the kittens. At least the kitten would have accepted her as a mother substitute. Perhaps her yellow-eyed tabby had opened a window and crawled out. He seemed just about hefty enough to raise one by himself. Getting a cat had been a stupid idea.
She walked into her bedroom to dump her purse and there he was, sprawled on her bed at what seemed about twice full-length. He was stretched out with paws extended over his head. When she came in, he opened his enormous yellow eyes and looked at her with studied languor. He did not appear frightened now or apprehensive.
Cautiously she approached him. Sat down on the bed’s edge. Reached out tentatively and patted him. This time she was rewarded by a yawn, a loud purr and a paw placed on her arm. I’ll take you, I’ll keep you, said the cat. You can sit on my bed. You can share my space. I am a great warrior and a great lover, and you are my mistress now. My name is Vronsky. You may call me that and many other things. This strikes me as a satisfactory home.
She called Shana and invited her to Thanksgiving with her grandmother. At one she called David to check that the tickets had come and to tell him about the cat and Thanksgiving. “Is Dad coming home?”
“I haven’t had a chance to discuss it with him. I assume so.”
David snickered. “Chicken. So I’ll see Aunt Debbie and flock. And Jane. You’ll have Jane, won’t you? Is she still with the weight lifter?”
“She did triathlon. She was a librarian, actually.” Her feelings were bruised by her son’s calling her a coward. She had been avoiding Nick for many reasons. She did not seek out being hurt. But David was right, she had to confront him.
Vronsky had a loud bone-rattling purr and a body on which there were many old scars and abrasions. His time on the streets had not been long enough to maim or debilitate him, but he had had to fight. Now he had arrived. He was very well pleased. He was even willing to follow her downstairs and eat a bowl of cat food in forty seconds.
However, when she ran him a bowl of water out of the tap, he gave her a reproachful look and lapped twice only. “You don’t like the chlorine?” She poured him a bowl from her water cooler. Everybody in Cambridge who could afford to drank bottled water because the local water not only tasted foul but was reputed to contain fourteen carcinogens. Vronsky drank the cold bottled water quickly. He was thirsty, but he had his standards. Obviously he did not feel it was too soon to begin that vital training that lubricated the loving relationship between the cat and the person he owned.
Jane called to make sure she was planning to attend a faculty meeting that would deal with questions of affirmative choice and tenure. Jane, she realized quickly, was also making sure she was invited to Thanksgiving. Leila might have forgotten the holiday, but nobody else had. She must call Nick. She found herself telling Jane at great length about Vronsky, as if he were a new friend. He was excellent company. He climbed into her lap for the first time. He barely fit, but they both found the contact reassuring and pleasant. She figured out it had required perhaps an hour and a half for him to take over the house. He had already found a table that received afternoon sunlight and butted the magazines from it. He had big strong paws clever and able at opening doors and cabinets and pushing things aside or off surfaces he craved. Alternatively, he could run among her cosmetics with all his bulk and not even tip over a perfume bottle.
“I must call Nick,” she said to Vronsky. “He’s my husband, but he’s with another woman. He won’t be at the apartment he’s borrowed, but I have to figure out exactly what message to leave. He always says he’s at rehearsals, but I bet I have trouble getting him because he’s spending nights with her—the sugary-voiced Sheryl. Vronsky, what am I going to do?”
Finally she dialed Nick’s number. She did get the answering machine, as she’d expected. One hand gripped Vronsky’s ruff hard. “Hi, Nick, it’s me, Leila. We all need to know when you’re coming home for Thanksgiving—when you’re arriving. David will be home Wednesday at five. Shana will be here. So will my sister Debbie, her husband and children. Let me know your plans. We’ll have a great feast.”
Now didn’t that sound civilized and inviting? She had kept her voice light. She had often been told she had a pleasant voice; in fact Nicolas used to tell her that. It was a voice in the lower registers for a woman. In glee club in grade school, she had sung alto. In college she had sung in the chorale. She remembered the difficult pleasure of Carmina Burana and Alexander Nevsky. She and her mother and her sister used to sing while they did household tasks. They joined on pop songs, Beatles songs, songs from her mother’s youth. Phyllis was fond of show tunes, Rodgers and Hammerstein. Debbie had a high thin voice. Phyllis had a big voice but scratchy from smoking. Maybe it was a sign of settling into middle age to remember her childhood almost with nostalgia, that poor bumpy overloaded childhood which she felt extremely lucky to have escaped whole and functional.
Now Debbie was coming here. A new man and a new baby for the new man every few years. Red Rodgers had installed her on a sort of mini-ranch in the mountains between San Diego and the desert. He had bought her two horses and a nanny goat. Leila said to Vronsky, who was staring into her face, “What would my sister do with a horse? Like me, the only horses she saw till she was twenty-one were under a cop. Personally I find them intimidating. It’s like trying to drive a Mack truck by sitting on the roof.”
They had supper together in the kitchen. Vronsky ate on the floor, then sat in the chair on her left, David’s place. She had bought swordfish, which she broiled. “See, a real meal.” She gave him the skin. He ate it avidly, then counted every bite till she gave him a piece. She was jumping at sounds, waiting for Nick to call her back.
The thought of the
holidays coming with all that cooking and eating made her feel clumsy and oversized. Nothing she did or refrained from doing would ever make her slender, but facing the holidays, she was motivated to try to streamline herself, especially with Nick returning soon.
After supper she made sure the draperies were tightly drawn. Then she looked for something to dance to. The classical CDs she and Nick purchased, but David bought the rock. She did not recognize most of the groups. First she put on Bruce Springsteen and went wiggling, lurching, leaping around the living room. Next she found a CD of old Eric Clapton. Many songs were slow, but she danced to three of them before the CD came to “Layla.” Suddenly she found herself lying on the couch with Vronsky on her stomach, quietly weeping.
Nineteen-seventy? They had certainly married by then. They were arty hippies. Nick studied at N.Y.U., finding an occasional acting job off-off-Broadway and sometimes even off-Manhattan. She took a secretarial job to pay the rent on a 12th Street walk-up between Avenues A and B, with a bathtub sink in the kitchen, bars on the windows. They were robbed three times. Fortunately they didn’t have time to watch TV, because they never had one after the second burglary. But what made her cry was remembering how Nick had loved her then, how they had danced together in the concave-floored kitchen and then fallen into the jangling bed. She was drunk on love, drunk on his body and his mouth and his hands and his voice, his eyes, his talent. That had been a brief period, after college and before David, when her body had been ripe and glowing. Then she had felt almost pretty, and at parties, men had flocked around her, embarrassing her. She had loved to dance, to use that body that had always been too tall, too big, too in the way, too much. The passion of her new husband for her body made it pleasing even to her. The next year when they lived in a loft building with other would-be theatrical couples, Don Margolis had told her at a party, “You have the body of a primitive queen—proud, sensual. A fertility goddess.” She had run away flattered.
She lay listening to the song and it was as if a hot humid wind blew through her reeking of sex and the scent of those days in New York, the odor of young bodies sweating as they danced, of incense and Chinese food, of red wine and spilled beer and ripe peaches, of patchouli and sandalwood, the perfumes she had worn then, cheap, obvious, simple and forever redolent of sexual satisfaction and casual daily joy. Loving had seemed easy and natural, just the way their bodies came together. Then it was gone.
She held Vronsky, who purred and stared into her face with his knowing yellow eyes, and she wept—wept for days and nights gone twenty years, wept long after the CD had finished and she lay on the couch hearing only the sound of an occasional car passing in the street.
Love had been her miracle. That such a man could care for her, the big awkward studious girl from the Philly ghetto, had never ceased to fill her with surprise and quiet anxiety that he would suddenly realize who she really was. But nothing she had given over to him had kept Nick in love with her the way she was still in love with him. All her sacrificing meant was that she was home, paying the bills, and he was off in New York with Sheryl.
ELEVEN
Mary
Wednesday morning, Mary arrived to clean the Landsman house. Mrs. L. was off at work, but her new cat Bronskee was overseeing everything. Mary bustled around in a good mood because she had her next week pretty well solved. She had been staying a lot in church basements and, on one mild night, in a gazebo in one of her ladies’ yards, and another night, in an unlocked garage. She had a bothersome head cold and her lower back really hurt, from sitting up all night or scrunching up in a seat. But next week was Thanksgiving, and she was set from Sunday night on. Mrs. Landsman had a lot of vitamin C, so she was taking it every two hours with hot peppermint tea. Mrs. L. wasn’t a woman who counted her pills. Mary had to get in shape or she’d be in real trouble.
The DeMotts were going to Florida over Thanksgiving, to visit his parents who’d retired to Sanibel Island. About thirty years ago, her husband, her children and Mary spent ten days there. She remembered her two-piece turquoise bathing suit Jim was crazy about. It was a color they used a lot then, in architecture, in furnishings, in clothing. He couldn’t keep his hands off her when she wore that suit. She was fair and she had to be careful in the sun. Nobody had heard of sunscreen in those days so she just burned. Seashells. Conch shells. On the terrace was an outdoor shower behind a screen. Once, feeling daring, they had made love in it while the children were at the beach. When a man was so crazy about you, it was hard to imagine that a time would come when he just wanted you out of his way, when he treated you like a piece of cheese that had turned bad. Her sin was to get middle-aged. Time nibbled away at her looks.
It happened so gradually that she simply didn’t realize she wasn’t a pretty girl any longer. Mary never got fat. Oh, she put on some weight—not as much as he did, but some. She thickened around the middle, in the ankles and upper arms. Since she was a baby she had always been pretty, so she took it for granted. Maybe she should have dyed her hair, but when she asked Jim, he pooh-poohed it, saying he liked her the way she was, he liked her natural. All her ladies dyed their hair. She should have had sense enough just to do it and keep her mouth shut. Most of her women were afraid that their husbands would leave them, the way Mrs. Landsman worried about her husband taking off with one of his bimbos.
Mr. Landsman brought one home once when she was cleaning. He was so shocked when he walked in the door and there she was in the kitchen mopping the floor that he couldn’t cover up his astonishment. “Who are you?” he asked. It was true they hardly saw each other, but she’d been cleaning for them for a year. But she wasn’t real to him. She wondered if he thought the house cleaned itself every Wednesday. No, because every so often Mrs. Landsman would leave a note, “Mr. Landsman says that he would like the blinds dusted, if you have time this week.” Requests were phrased that way. Polite, which Mary appreciated. She despised ladies who spoke to her more rudely than they addressed their dogs.
Anyhow, he walked in with this creature in her early twenties but caked with makeup and wearing what Mary thought was maybe a Halloween costume. They stood flatfooted watching her clean for five minutes. Then he seized his girlfriend by the elbow and they fled.
With the DeMotts gone from Sunday to Sunday, Mary would just move in and stay there, careful as usual. She needed sleep badly. That was one of the worst parts of being homeless, never getting to really sleep. Sometimes Mary could steal an hour and nap at her ladies’ houses. Today she cleaned the downstairs frantically. Then she lay down on top of the Landsman king-sized bed, set the alarm and let herself snooze. Fortunately she was a light sleeper. Nobody’d ever caught her sleeping on the job. When she had a real place to stay, she never needed to nap. She was a wee bit run-down, but she mustn’t get sick. No, with a nice quiet week at the DeMotts, she’d get herself together and come out of it fit and rested. Her life was always about to tip over like a precarious pile of crockery she must keep balanced.
Mrs. Landsman had picked up an alley cat and now he was lord of all he surveyed. Mrs. L. left Mary notes about not letting him out the door, as if he were stupid enough to walk out on a good deal. He looked Mary over and told her where he wanted to be rubbed and scratched, but he pretty much stayed out of her way. He wasn’t spooked by the vacuum cleaner. He just climbed on top of the bookcase. When she took a nap, he lay down next to her. “Oh, now I’m good enough to cuddle up to.” She thanked the Lord that cats couldn’t talk, or she could just imagine what an earful her ladies would get, because most pets were bored and they watched every step she took. They practically counted the silverware. She’d be fired on the spot, if Bronskee could speak English.
The house was different. She could tell the husband or the son was coming home. She thought it was the son for sure, because Mrs. L. had left instructions she was to clean his room, which Mrs. L. hadn’t bothered with since Labor Day. She told Mary if she got done early, she could leave early. Mrs. L. didn’t understand: she ha
d no place to go.
Until she could squat for the night, whether in a basement or a garage or someone’s momentarily vacated house, she had hours to kill. She rode public transportation out to the end of the line and back. She walked around. Malls were for sitting. She always looked respectable enough not to be bothered, so long as she didn’t become familiar. Once again, her invisibility helped. Malls were full of old people killing time, retirees, people on fixed incomes in tiny rooms. We’re all superfluous and we go to the mall the way in the past we might have sat in the sun in the village center watching the world go by.
She knew all the malls she could reach by public transportation. She went today to Chestnut Hill, where there were comfortable seats and greenery and even music to listen to. If they had live music, she could safely sit for a long time. She used to go to the Museum of Fine Arts on their free days, but now they had none. Didn’t want the homeless sitting among the paintings feeling good.
Sometimes she went to the Lechmere Mall. It hadn’t enough benches. Strip malls were no good, like Fresh Pond. No place to rest her bones. She could shuffle from store to store, but there was no proper inside. Arsenal Mall was useful. Harvard Square, Porter Square and Downtown Crossing had buildings made over with shops inside, good for bathrooms and getting out of the cold, but not as good for sitting around all evening. In nice weather, Downtown Crossing was okay, but she had to watch her bags. Faneuil Hall was great, but there was a lot of security, so she had to be cautious. She bought something, ate it slowly and kept the wrappers so that she could appear to be having a snack.
The trick was not to sit in one place too long, to move in and out of the shops regularly. As long as she appeared to be shopping, and she always had a shopping bag, then she was fine. She was careful to change her bag regularly so that it was not shabby. In sunny weather, there were joggers and mimes and lovers holding hands. Lots of kids didn’t finish their lunches before they started asking for dessert.