The Longings of Women

by Marge Piercy

  Joan said, “She’s promised to quit, and she’s supposed to get one of those patches installed as a Christmas present for me. I’m not Jewish. She won’t let me give her a Christmas present, but that’s hers to me.”

  “It’s a present for all of us,” Leila said. “I’ve been trying to get her to stop for the last twenty years.”

  “If you had more children, Leila, you wouldn’t fuss so much. Mother’s an adult—she’s a nurse, for heaven’s sake.” Debbie shook her head pityingly. Three children and a fourth on the way and she was still thin. Her belly was growing, but the rest of her remained childlike. Standing near Debbie made Leila feel oversized, baggy, sagging, bursting with flesh. Debbie was petite. She herself was the economy size. Debbie’s hair was lighter than Leila’s and finer, and her features more delicate. They had early been assigned their roles: Leila was the smart one; Debbie, the pretty one. Leila was responsible; Debbie, sensitive. They were still fighting for Mama’s attention, and Mama was still overtaxed and wanting them both to cool it and shut up.

  Nick and Red went to work on the problem of the table: it would accept enough leaves (with some help from a screwdriver and an oil can and a lot of heaving and cursing) to seat twelve comfortably, but they were fifteen. A card table had to be stuck on the end, either straight or as an L. Then Debbie realized Ben had disappeared. After a frantic half hour, he was located under Leila’s bed, nose to nose with Vronsky like two cats having a Mexican standoff. Robin was happy at David’s computer playing some space game.

  Joan and Debbie took over the setting of the table, getting into an intense and technical conversation on massage techniques. Joan was a nurse; Debbie was a massage therapist. Leila, whose meal was under control and on schedule, basted the turkey and prepared the pie. Now Phyllis was regaling everyone with hospital horror stories, while they hauled every available chair to the L-shaped table hidden under two solid-color cloths and one Guatemalan print.

  In the living room, Red began to entice Nick with real estate. “Just thirty down and you have hold of property worth two hundred big ones in today’s marketplace. You can’t pass this up. It’s a sure thing.”

  At four-thirty Shana and Mrs. Peretz came in carrying a covered dish. Shana was all in black, with heavy eye makeup. She had cut off her hair, which intensified her starved hollow-cheeked look over her black turtleneck. She flung herself in a chair in the living room and looked around. “Where’s David?” Nick sat down next to her and tried to chat her up. Mrs. Peretz had brought a sweet-potato dish which had to be heated, an almost impossible task that required repacking both ovens. Joan took that over, while Leila ran upstairs to fetch David to talk to Shana. Shana was talking to Nick about death.

  Shana bowed her head when she saw David, but the effect was spoiled when she burst out, “Guess what, David. My dad’s arranged for me to attend Westborn–Mt. Stephens! I can enter next week, in mid-semester, and I can ride. They have horses!”

  “Where is Westborn–Mt. Stephens?’ Leila asked, confused.

  “Just ten miles from Dad. I saw the school and it’s great! It looks like a little village, with two horse barns and a paddock and miles of trails. I can’t wait!”

  Leila went slowly out to the kitchen. She didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved, but she felt like a fool. Only she seemed to have taken seriously Shana’s request to live with her. David appeared a moment later. “Well, so much for that. I’m ecstatic her father bribed her to move. She loves to be the center of a drama, doesn’t she?”

  “Look, she underwent a great strain and a great loss. Whatever makes her feel better.”

  David surveyed the stove top, the countertops, peered into both ovens. “There’s too much food.”

  “There’s supposed to be too much food at Thanksgiving. That’s the point of it,” she said patiently.

  Nick appeared in the doorway. “Leila, you’ve forgotten to change. Time to get dressed.”

  She looked down. She was still wearing the pants she had been baking and cooking in all day. “Oh well. Nobody comes to look at me.”

  “Come on,” Nick said severely. “David will take over while you’re upstairs.” Taking her arm, he led her off. On her bed she saw that he had laid out three dresses. Nick had the same critical eye for women’s clothes he did for men’s. He had made over her style years ago. She had tended to wear layers and layers, under the impression it concealed the body that had always felt too big. He had trained her to dress to emphasize her stature and figure.

  “I doubt I can wear the blue one. I have to be at my less chubby range.”

  “You look to me as if you’ve lost weight. Try it.… There, see? Now, wear navy tights with it, navy pumps and let me see your earrings. Something big and dangling.”

  Nick was the only straight man she had ever known who could dress a woman head to toe attractively and efficiently. He had an eye. He was putting together a costume for her. He had her dressed in twelve minutes. The dress did fit. She had not weighed herself all fall. She was grateful to him for thinking of how she looked. Maybe he was beginning a cycle of finding her attractive again. Shyly she glanced at herself in the mirror, and for once, she rather liked what she saw. She would never look petite or svelte, but she did look rather elegant, almost handsome.

  Nick gave her a quick but feeling pat on the rump as they left the bedroom. “That’s my big beautiful doll. Strut your stuff.”

  It was five-thirty when Leila passed the hall clock, and Jane and company were nowhere to be seen. Everybody had been invited long before she intended to serve, just to avoid this kind of fretting. She called Jane’s house. Jane answered.

  “Where are you? This is Leila.”

  “We’re getting ready. Why, what time are you going to serve?”

  “Right now,” Leila said. “Please just come as you are.”

  Debbie and Shana had formed an alliance, Leila noted. Shana had abandoned the attempt to impress David and was looking at photos of Debbie’s horses. “Two of them all your own!” Shana crooned. “How happy you must be.”

  A little later Leila heard Debbie saying, “Oh, so she was trying to get you to move in with her. She tries to take over.”

  “Oh no!” Shana said. “It was my fantasy. I didn’t think my dad wanted me, and I was leery of his new family.”

  Finally at five after six Jane sauntered in. Jane was the style of lesbian that men usually liked, because she was elegant and attractive to just about everybody. She wore her auburn hair as a sleek cap. Her blouse was creamy silk under a cashmere blazer. Her pants were draped black silk. She wore large square-cut earrings of amethyst. Jane was never without a partner for longer than a month. She had incorporated elements of style usually labeled masculine or feminine into her range of costumes. Today she was the young Katharine Hepburn, Leila guessed.

  Her newish partner, Emily, was tall. She was also big-boned, on the heavy side and wearing shit-kicker boots. She was all in various levels and layers of tweed. Her hair was flyaway pale brown. She wore no jewelry except for a gold watch. She looked uncomfortable and sullen, dragging along two boys who looked much like her, except for being half her height. One, Tim, was working on the girth. The older, Chuck, went straight for the TV and the football game.

  Nonetheless, Leila herded them all toward the improvised table. Every chair she could muster and four from Jane. She had Nick at one end, herself at the other. She was flanked by Mrs. Peretz on her left, who looked terrified and had withdrawn into a crouch in her seat, and Phyllis on the other—so she might monopolize her mother’s attention. Joan was next to Phyllis, so she would be near someone she knew. Then came Emily. Maybe they could talk medicine? Then Emily’s two boys. Jane was on one side of Nick and Shana on the other. That should improve his spirits. He always flirted with Jane, who flirted back. Next to Shana she had put David. Then Robin, who related to David with enthusiasm. Then Debbie between her two children. Then Red next to Mrs. Peretz, and back to herself. She would b
e up and down half the meal anyhow. Her chair was nearest to the kitchen door, and that was convenient.

  “What is this stuff? It looks like Wheatena,” Chuck said.

  “Cream of chestnut soup.” She reflected fondly, glancing at her son’s fine profile, that David had been a willing eater. After a finicky period around seven, he would try anything. “Catfish and rattlesnake, wow.”

  “The Boston Lyric Opera approached me about staging Don Juan next winter. I’m considering it. An intriguing figure,” Nick said. “The great lover.”

  “I never saw Don Juan as anything but a notch collector,” Jane replied. “A seducer if the woman succumbed on schedule, otherwise a rapist. A lover? He never loved anything but his prick.”

  Chuck giggled. Emily threw Jane a look of cold fury. “We should watch our language at table,” she said in a throaty voice, beautiful and rich.

  “Do you sing?” Leila asked on impulse. David was clearing and she was carrying out the turkey and its accompaniments.

  “Contralto. I’m in the chorus of the Handel Society. Do you sing?’

  “I used to.”

  “She has a fine voice but she hardly ever raises it,” Nick said. “An admirable thing in a woman.” He made the mistake of trying to fill Emily’s glass as he poured out a chardonnay around the table.

  “I think there’s a great deal too much of that at Thanksgiving,” Emily said. “Perhaps that causes some people to forget there are children at the table.”

  “That’s one thing we’ve never had a problem with,” Mrs. Peretz said. She was looking over Jane and Emily carefully. “Drinking. Jews drink wine, but we don’t get drunk. I think people who grow up drinking wine don’t have so much trouble with alcohol. It’s just a food you take in moderation.”

  “Wine has the same effect as any other form of alcohol,” Emily said. “Wine is not food.”

  Nick said expansively, “We’re in a time when people more and more define themselves by what they consume and do not consume—vegetarians, vegans, smokers, nonsmokers, macrobiotic, low-fat, no-sugar. It becomes a full-time occupation keeping track of what each person eats or drinks, so that a dinner party like this almost needs to be run through a computer first. Europeans find us ridiculous in the moral importance we attach to our habits of consumption.” He was trying to defuse Emily’s reaction by making the topic more general. Down the length of the table, he gave Leila a rueful look. She felt the old connection with him. They were in tune.

  “Several European countries have much higher rates of alcoholism than we do,” Emily said firmly, putting her fork down.

  Even Mrs. Peretz began to eat much more slowly. Leila cast about for a riff, any riff, to move the conversation to cheerier grounds. “Turkey is a funny name, isn’t it, for a native American bird?’

  David understood her ploy. “Maybe they thought that’s what the birds were saying: ‘Turk-kah-turk-kah-turk,’” he gobbled by way of illustration.

  Robin and Tim found that hilarious. For the next twenty minutes, they kept repeating, “Turk-kah-turk-kah-turk.” Emily beamed. Leila at once understood that Emily was her kind of mother, overprotective, anxious, reining herself in but always on the prowl for trouble.

  The tempo of the eating picked up again and everybody seemed determined to be jolly. Jane said conversationally to Joan and Phyllis, “How long have you two been together? As a couple.”

  Phyllis grinned. “Are we that obvious? Actually we meant to be. It’s been three years. It’s the best damned marriage I ever had.”

  David gave a low whistle. Red scratched his head and made a face at Debbie, who looked at Phyllis with her finger against her lips and then at her children, who were still gobbling, in both senses. Leila was too stunned to say anything at all. Nick came to the rescue. “I propose a toast to the new couple—new to us. You seem well suited.” He raised his glass.

  Emily did not allow herself to be provoked this time. “To Phyllis and Joan. It’s never too late to get your life together.”

  Leila found her voice. “I only wish you’d told me sooner. All that time wasted worrying about your being lonely. Mazeltov.”

  Then the phone rang. The answering machine was usually on, but someone had turned it off. “Let it go,” Leila suggested. “They can call back.”

  But Nick was already on his way. He answered it in the kitchen and then raced up to his study to talk. “I won’t be long,” he said.

  Everyone had seconds and some had thirds. Leila kept wondering why she hadn’t guessed about her mother. But who attributed any sexuality to their own mother? She’d stuffed Joan into the category of nurse-friend. David helped her clear. The phone was still off the hook in the kitchen. David put his finger to his lips and moved toward the phone. She shook her head wildly NO and he shook his head vehemently YES. He wrote on her grocery pad, Scared? We need info.

  Silently they leaned over the phone where it dangled. Nick spoke loudly, as he always did. “Honey, babe, but you’re with your friends. I set up a cast party. I’m sorry I can’t be there with you—”

  “It’s so depressing without you,” a soft voice said. Their foreheads touched as they bent to hear. “Everything’s empty when you’re gone from me. My morning sickness came back again.”

  The room whirled around Leila She leaned on the table, suddenly nauseous, dizzy.

  “Now don’t use that as an excuse for doing anything foolish, Sherri. You know I’m crazy about you, and I’ll be back Sunday. Maybe sooner if I can get away. I have obligations here.”

  Leila grimaced. Here she was, a big fat forty-five-year-old obligation.

  “Don’t you think you have obligations to me as well? But I don’t care about obligations. I care about seeing you, holding you, being with you.…”

  “Do you need help?” Debbie asked dubiously.

  Her face burning, Leila leaped in front of David to block the phone from view, but she was sure Debbie had seen something. Behind her she heard David hang up the phone, none too quietly. “David’s just loading the dishwasher. Why don’t you and I put the Bavarian cream and the pie on the table?”

  Leila was shaking when she sat down. When Nick finally reappeared, nineteen minutes later, everybody else was eating dessert.

  “I’m a sorry excuse for a host, but that was a call from my cast In New York, where we just opened,” he explained to the table at large. “They’re partying together and put in a group call.”

  Leila was deeply involved in a conversation with her mother about how she had met Joan and how they had got together. Phyllis seemed embarrassed but also relieved. All those stupid conversations, Leila thought, about her situation. It seemed to her a marvelous and sensible choice. Here they were, two old women considered by society to be on the shelf, who had managed to find each other attractive and lovable. She kept her gaze on Phyllis, who was beaming. She could not look at Nick: she was in equal parts ashamed and angry. He wanted to leave early? Great, she wanted him gone. Let him charm Shana. Let him charm Jane, who could never resist flirting with him, while Emily glared. Leila was on Emily’s side, plain big Emily with the two kids who obviously was crazy about flashy Jane. Emily seemed to sense her sympathy and warmed to her. All four kids, including the toddler Ben, left the table to watch TV. Emily turned toward Phyllis and Leila.

  “My mother was a nurse too. But she quit a few years after she married my dad. The nurse’s dream. She married a doctor. Then she gave birth to two doctors.” Emily grinned. “I want my kids to be auto mechanics or whatever. But I never, never, never will urge them into medicine.”

  “It’s not such a bad job, being a nurse. And you meet some great women. Besides, three more years and I retire. We’re going to buy ourselves a Winnebago and hit the road.” Phyllis smiled at all of them and took Joan’s hand.

  Emily was looking at Jane. Love shone in her eyes, making them luminous in her long face. Leila felt a pang of envy. She wanted to be looked at that way. Nick was giving her occasional glances of
apprehension. Perhaps he remembered he had not hung up the phone in the kitchen. Perhaps he had left the phone off, hoping she would overhear and he would not have to tell her. Perhaps he was merely worrying about how to get away. Emily looked at Jane with the glow of love, and Nick looked at her as one might view a car door that would not shut properly. This Thanksgiving was doing nothing to bring them together, but rather she felt the disquieting rift widening between them. If Sheryl was pregnant, she would never forgive Nick: never.

  “You got some crazy family,” Red was saying to Debbie just behind her in the kitchen. “We should have gone to Texas.”

  “But your mother doesn’t like me.”

  “Your mother’s a dyke,” he said. “I can’t believe it. We’re getting out of here tomorrow. I don’t want the kids exposed to this kind of thing.”

  “Red, they’re just old ladies, what do you want? The kids don’t understand.”

  “We’re getting out,” Red said. “We’ll go to New York.”

  Bon voyage, Leila thought, but I must keep Phyllis from figuring it out. She won’t get mad at Debbie, she’ll just assign me to straighten her out. I don’t have the energy to clear up anyone else’s confusion. I’m suffocating in my own. What is going to happen to me? What can I do? Debbie will call me to commiserate and be furious when I tell the truth, that Phyllis has the best marriage in our family.

  SEVENTEEN

  Mary

  Mary had Thanksgiving nailed down. Thanksgiving wasn’t much of a holiday if you weren’t married, she thought. Fortunately at least one of her clients went away every year: if not one of her cleaning clients, then one of her pet service clients. Mrs. Carten said to her, “My Boots really takes to you. He never seemed to like the pet sitter I had before.”

  “He can tell I’m fond of him,” she said vehemently. The truth was, of course they liked her. She didn’t bop in, throw some kibble in a bowl and rush out. They were allowed to sleep with her. Naturally they perked up when they saw her, impressing their owners. The Rogers had a parrot she managed to befriend, so it greeted her. She had this ridiculous fear the parrot would somehow tell on her, but it could only repeat phrases. Good morning, Good morning, it would say any time of day or night. Luckily, she did genuinely like animals, because she thought they could see through people who put on a show. They remembered who was kind and who was mean to them. In her old age sometimes she liked animals better than people. Certainly no dog or cat left you because your hair turned grey or you got thick around the waist.