The Longings of Women

by Marge Piercy

  Leila took a seat in the desk chair, swinging it around. “It must be very hard on you, worrying about your son.”

  Cathy perched on the bed, sighing deeply. “I’m awfully worried about him, but Zak found him a good lawyer, I hope, anyhow. That woman put him up to everything. She had a hypnotic influence over him.” Cathy stared at her to see if she agreed.

  “I haven’t even met her yet. I understand how upset you must be. Is Sam your only child?”

  “I have a daughter, but she’s already married.” Cathy sighed. “Too young, if you ask me, but of course she didn’t. Do you have children?”

  Leila answered her with a description of her son aimed at maximizing similarities. She must have succeeded, for Cathy said softly, “It must frighten you, learning about Sam, because you know, they sound like they could be brothers. Not that brothers are always the same. I mean, my husband Mike and Zak were nothing alike, except in their eyes and their hair. Mike was much … stronger. He sold real estate, and he was great at it, you know? He could sell an empty bag. He was real ambitious. If he hadn’t invested some of the money he made, we wouldn’t have anything today. Not a thing!”

  “Don’t be melodramatic, Cathy.” Zak had crept up the stairs and now he spoke from the doorway. “You make some money from your students, and I can always help you. You mustn’t give Mrs. Landsman the impression that Sam got into trouble because he needed money. He was just under the influence of an older woman who mesmerized him.”

  Hypnotize, mesmerize, they had a line going. She decided to give up for the day and see Cathy another time, without the overseer. She took down the information on Cathy’s studio. She would phone her there, tomorrow.

  She walked into her house, calling loudly. She was distinctly better pleased to be home than a week ago. She talked to Vronsky in the kitchen while she cooked. He ate his cat food and then sampled her cuisine, taking a faint superior interest in the news from his habitual perch on David’s old chair.

  Anytime she shut a door in his face, she heard a plaintive mew, then a louder noise, then a louder cry until he was bellowing. “Who did you live with? Why did they discard you? What happened? Did your person die? Move away?” She had trouble imagining anyone voluntarily releasing such a loving creature, but people threw away their lovers and their wives and husbands and friends every day. She did not. She persisted. She cherished. She held on.

  Every morning after breakfast, rain or sun, he asked to go out When she refused, he turned from the door and forgot. He liked looking out the windows, especially when birds or squirrels were about. On her lunch hour, she visited a pet store and bought him toys—balls that tinkled, feathered snippets on fishing poles, catnip mice. He found the jingle balls puerile. He batted them once or twice, politely, and then knocked them under the couch and forgot them, hoping she would also. However, anything that moved under her power he would chase, whether it was an elaborate feathered creature on a fishing pole or a piece of string from a bakery box of rugalach.

  In the first days she stepped on his tail and his paws often, until they choreographed their movements in the kitchen. She found him large-hearted and forgiving. When she came home from Lesley, there he was, as she had imagined, looking out the window. She remembered to leave a note for Mrs. Burke not to let him out. When she got home, there was a note in return. “In any pet supply store, buy a fine-toothed comb. Comb for fleas. Dip the comb in very hot water and dry on a paper towel. You will have the fleas under control in two weeks, Mary Burke. P.S. I make house calls to feed and spend time with cats when their owners travel. Please make arrangements well in advance if possible.”

  She had not seen any fleas, but Vronsky did scratch from time to time. She was not surprised Mrs. Burke knew about fleas, for she knew how to take tannin stains from teapots and how to fix a sticky drawer. Phyllis had not passed on household lore, as their apartment had been cleaned sporadically by whichever of them could no longer stand the dirt. Supper was slapped together by whoever was hungriest. When they had enough money, they got takeout. She grew up on a great many tuna noodle casseroles and macaroni and cheese dishes. Debbie’s general method of cooking was to open a can of creamed soup—mushroom was her favorite—and pour it over the chicken or fish or hamburger.

  Nicolas had converted her to good food and gourmet specifications. His mother was still an excellent cook, switching between three styles with ease: general Texas, best displayed in chili or barbecue; Mexican; German Jewish, especially when dealing with chicken or noodles or cabbage. The first time Leila had made supper for him, he had been appalled. After they married, he presented her with Julia Child Volumes One and Two.

  He was a man for whom the quality of things mattered, whether it was the wine he drank with supper or the vodka he consumed just before. He was just as fussy about his clothes, although many people would not have guessed so, since his taste did not run to American or Italian designers. He liked cashmere or merino black turtlenecks worn with one of three Harris tweed jackets. For pants he liked chinos or cords that coordinated with the jackets. The most expensive item on his body was usually his shoes or boots. He had wide feet. She used to tease him that his feet were square. They were hard to fit and he was extremely sensitive to the kind of leather and cut. Usually she was the one who replaced whatever wore out, but it had taken him years to train her in exactly what he would wear and what he would never, never be seen in.

  Christmas. She had forgotten it She had not grown up observing it, but in his Texas home, they had made a great deal about it. She had learned to oblige. She was fitted to him. She simply knew thoroughly his likes and dislikes, what it took to please and comfort him, what amused him, what disturbed him. Such knowledge was even more specialized than Mary Burke’s lore of how to remove stains from baseboards and how to identify the spore of mice. He was coming home for Thanksgiving. She had permitted herself to become extremely annoyed about an unimportant affair such as he had had fifteen times before. That relationship would be ending this very week. The play was open. It was a brief unpleasant incident she must put behind her. He needed a woman when he was out of town with a play, and he always found one, young, insecure, hopeful.

  When the play was set to run, the relationship was over. She did not like it, but it was nothing that would affect either of them a week after he returned. It was ending, whether Sheryl knew that or not. She thought of that young woman, twenty-four and probably lonely and desperate in New York. Soon Sheryl would be alone again. It was not fair, but getting involved with a very married man was not smart. She could pity the young woman, abstractly. But Sheryl had not asked her for advice or input, had she? Leila was about to pull her own life back together.

  FOURTEEN

  Becky

  Becky heard the first report at work. Sound Cable had a local news show at 12:30, after the regular channels did their noon news. They figured they picked up people who were mad for yet more news, or who hadn’t got to sit down in front of the TV before they missed the headlines. Roger, who read the news as well as doing the interview show and “Dining Out,” was recently divorced, but he wasn’t interested in her. He went for private school graduates with family money. She could not help disliking him because he reminded her of Ted Topper. Besides, she didn’t like being obviously written off by one of the few possibilities at the office.

  Therefore she wasn’t really listening to the live news as it was pumped throughout the office. She had finished her sandwich and black coffee, scanned the want ads quickly, making sure nobody saw what she was doing, tore out the one possibility and stuffed it in her wallet. Then a name penetrated her consciousness. The Mary Helena out of New Bedford. Distress call received by the Coast Guard.

  She called home. The phone rang and rang. Finally little Tina picked it up. After a frustrating conversation with the four-year-old, Becky got Tina to fetch Nana. It was hard on Nana to come to the phone, but Becky had to know. The Mary Helena was Uncle Ray’s boat, the one her brother Joey
worked on. Tommy worked with Papa, but Ray had only daughters. Everybody had gone down to the docks, except for Nana whom Gracie had left with the kids.

  Becky got an immediate tension headache fitting over her skull. A distress call but the Coast Guard helicopter couldn’t find them. Radio silence now. It was a stormy day, the wind lashing curtains of water scudding across the parking lot, the pines swaying and the oaks swishing their heavy leaves. Why had they gone out, with a storm predicted? Because half the time there wasn’t a storm when the radio said so, and it was money. Ray was sending his girls through college. Joey wanted to marry his girlfriend. Ray had been fishing for thirty-five years. He boasted, “I know the sea better than any yuppie in a blue suit who stands in front of a weather map.”

  The fleet was made up of old boats they kept repairing. The prices were better than they used to be, but there were less fish and they had to go farther and stay out longer. Scallops were the meal ticket. But the rake was dangerous and hard to manage in heavy seas.

  She had never been as close to her brothers Joey or Rennie as to Tommy, her favorite, but she loved Joey. He was not as bright as Tommy but sweeter tempered. Laurie had gone through a period of being extra holy, of wanting to be a nun, and Joey, Tommy and Becky had caught the brunt of her piety. She was always telling on them. That had made them pull together against her. Laurie and Becky never got along. They were always fighting over the same space, the same things. Laurie was only two years younger, but Becky never felt they looked like sisters. Laurie was plain and taller, with long brown hair that was her best feature, pouring like silk down her back. She was studying to be a dental technician. She was always doing something to her teeth. For six months she had worn a chlorine mouthpiece to bed to bleach her teeth white. Now she had alarmingly white teeth that looked like so many well-scrubbed washbasins. When she opened her mouth, they seemed to leap out of her sallow narrow face.

  Joey was the plainest of the boys, as if what looks the family enjoyed had been lavished on Tommy and Grace, when she was younger, that is, and, Becky felt, had fallen on her and certainly on Grace’s kids. Belle was plain, but she made herself up and did her hair in the latest style. Joey was of middle height with a red birthmark on his cheek that looked like a burn. He was soft-spoken with a raspy cigarette voice, for he had smoked compulsively from the year he turned thirteen. He smoked Camels and his fingers had a yellow tinge. He was lean, hard-muscled like all the boys. The dogs were more his than anybody’s. He went hunting all fall but he never caught anything but an occasional skinny rabbit He just liked to take the dogs into the marshes. They all came back stinking from the muck, exhausted and happy.

  He’d barely scraped through high school, still had the same girl. Becky was scared for Joey, in a cold sweat. She ground her teeth from nervousness, clutched herself, paced the office.

  She called her uncle Ray’s house, got his wife, who fell on the phone as if parked right over it. “The Coast Guard won’t go out again. They say it’s too rough. They won’t send up a helicopter. I’m sick. What’s the use of them? We should ask them to go out when it’s eighty and the Sound is flat as a parking lot? Now’s when we need them, and they say it’s too rough. I hate them! Ray’s such a good man, and they won’t go out.”

  Becky went back hesitantly from her desk to the studio. When Roger got off the air, she asked him, “If something comes in about the Mary Helena, would you let me know? Please. If you hear anything.”

  “How come?” Roger stared at her. “A fishing boat?”

  “My brother’s one of the crew,” she mumbled. She was embarrassed. Nice middle-class girls did not have brothers on fishing boats.

  But she guessed wrong about their reaction. One by one her superiors and the other secretaries and the cameramen and even the manager came and spoke to her. It was as if, by having a brother on the news, she had gained status. With her, they too became part of the news. Nobody suggested she go home early, which is what she would have liked most and what she did not dare ask for, but they all wanted to chat her up sympathetically.

  “We could do a little memorial on it. Boost our ratings in New Bedford,” she heard the manager saying to Roger. “Community service. Get on it.”

  She wanted to tell them that they couldn’t bury her brother yet. Boats often disappeared and then showed up again. They could be blown off course by the storm. Their radio could be dead. They could be drifting. Nobody had found wreckage. She was angry, but she could not let her anger show. It was bad luck as well as meanness to write off somebody’s life like that.

  The wreckage showed up two days later, when the seas had subsided. Ray and Joey did not wash up. The memorial Mass was held without a body. They had nobody to bury in the family plot. Joey was gone as if he had dissolved. Everyone in the family was grieved, but in a strange subdued prolonged way. Belle had nightmares and kept waking Becky, who wasn’t sleeping too well to begin with. He had vanished from his place. Not that there was anyplace really his in the tiny overcrowded house.

  Sound Cable did put on a memorial program, with local big shots from the co-op and the packers. They put her on too and her brother Tommy in the navy suit he had graduated high school in, tight but serviceable, and Papa and Uncle Ray’s wife, two of the daughters, Joey’s girlfriend.

  Becky did not like the way she looked in black. Lisa, one of the secretaries, lent her a grey suit, which she wore with her own best blue blouse for taping. Roger wrote out a speech for her, which was dopey but she did not fight. She stood looking into the camera. Out of the corner of her eye she could see herself on the monitor. They promised her a tape afterward.

  She was the only person besides Roger, who was narrating, to be on twice. She got to talk about Joey first, and then about the family’s feelings for the sea, one of the speeches Roger had written. She spoke right to the camera and kept her gaze on its big eye with the red light overhead.

  Afterward Roger said, “You came across very well. Good presence.”

  “I studied media in college. It was my major,” she said, to remind him that she had gone to college and that she had been trained. She passionately hoped that the bosses had felt that way too. Maybe they would use her in front of the camera again. They had to see that she was not just a receptionist.

  The next week, her family had another requiem Mass to attend, but this time there was a body and a real funeral. Nana woke them screaming and then groaning, but by the time they got her to the hospital, she was unconscious. The next day she was dead.

  Mama said after the funeral, “It’s a pity they don’t make a video for every time somebody dies, and then you’d have something to hold on to. With your poor brother, we don’t have a grave, but at least we have that video, and you look so pretty. It makes me feel better that they did that.” Mama patted Becky’s shoulder gently. She was not a woman for a lot of hugging, she was too tired most of the time. But lately she had been touching all of them, as if to make sure they were really still there. “I wish we had one of Nana, from before she got cancer.”

  Belle nodded her high do fervently. “That video was something special. And if you didn’t know them personal, they wouldn’t have done that for us, let’s not fool ourselves. Boats go down every summer and winter, and they don’t ever make a video for the family.”

  Within a couple of weeks, they all seemed to breathe easier. Becky missed Nana, but her long slow dying had drained energy that none of them had. Maybe the reason people like her parents had big families wasn’t the Church nattering at them, but so that if somebody died, the house was still full of people. Middle-class people hardly ever had seven kids. In future, she might edit her family down to a more acceptable size. I am one of four children. Three would be better, but she felt that was too much of a reach.

  At Sound Cable, nobody suggested she go on camera again, although she kept hoping. She knew she had done a good job. Even Roger had said so. However, one married secretary would be leaving in October and moving to Hartford. B
ecky was told she would take over that job, and she should improve her typing skills. She did.

  It was hard to get time alone in the house, but sometimes at night when everybody else had gone to bed or was out late, she would play the tape. She turned the sound way down or muted it, but seeing herself framed in the TV gave her patience. At least she had that video. In the borrowed dark grey suit and the perfect blue blouse, she looked right. She appeared as if she belonged there, in the eye of the camera. Perched on a stool in front of the set, Becky was moved by herself, her obvious sincerity, her candor, her presence. Why hadn’t the others at Sound Cable noticed how natural she was on camera? She did not know how to break through to be noticed.

  If people did not look at you, did not listen to you, it did not matter who or what you were. The myth was that if you were pretty and smart, you would get what you wanted, but she could stare at herself on the video and see that she was pretty. Her face was as pretty as half the women on the TV every night. She was blond, she was young, she was thin. She was the smartest person in her family, and she had more brains than anybody else at Sound Cable.

  So why, when she spoke, did no one listen? Why didn’t they notice how effective she was on camera? Why didn’t anyone pay attention? It took something she didn’t have yet, but she did not know what. Luck, certainly, but you couldn’t earn that or buy it at the mall. Those girls that Roger went out with, they were not as pretty as she was, but they got good jobs. Money made people pay attention. Money made them turn and notice you, and then they saw how pretty you were, and then they said how smart you were. Good clothes made a woman visible. Now they all looked right through her. She sat in that office useful and unnoticed as a computer terminal.