The Longings of Women

by Marge Piercy

  Finally forty minutes late, he arrived. He looked upset, angry, but he did not say anything to her in the house after he had greeted her, Mama, Gracie, Belle and the little ones, the audience that attended his arrival.

  He hustled her out to his Subaru, a graduation present from his parents five years before. She knew he wanted a new car; she had to make him want her more than a gleaming bright red Subaru without a mile on it, without a scratch or a nick on its sleek flanks. She waited till they were inside. Then she put a tentative hand on his forearm. “Is something wrong, Terry sweetheart?”

  “My mother is a … witch!”

  She entirely agreed, although she found his language mild. But she knew better than to let on to her hostility. “Why, Terry, what happened? What did she say to you?”

  “She started in, Don’t you have enough self-confidence to go out with a girl from our own background? One who can stand up to any kind of scrutiny? How long are you going to live on us? You’re twenty-seven years old. When will it end? As if apartments didn’t cost just about everything I make.” He drove furiously down the street, but he did not squeal around the corner. He always drove carefully; it was instinct to him. No matter how furious he was or how he gritted his teeth and mumbled curse words under his breath, nonetheless, he stopped at stop signs; he signaled before he turned. That kind of polite civilized core made her trust him. When he got them to a road that led to the water, to a pier with a clam shack that had just reopened for the summer, he parked carefully. Then he banged on the wheel with his fists and glared ahead. “If they want me out, fine. I’m moving out! Tomorrow.”

  “Where will you move to? Will Chris leave with you?”

  “I don’t want to live with that loudmouth! He makes me sick. They aren’t driving him crazy, nagging him to get a place. They know the stupid jerk can’t afford it, because he’s just a failure. Do you know how he’s managed to sell insurance? I’ll lay it out for you. There’s a two-hundred-thousand-dollar policy on my father, there’s a two-hundred-thousand-dollar policy on my mother, there’s a two-hundred-thousand-dollar policy on me. If we had a dog, the fucking dog would be insured for a hundred thousand. He sold an annuity to my aunt Kate. He sold supplemental health insurance to my uncle Rodney. We’ve run out of relatives, so he’s run out of sales. And they don’t ride him around the room, digging in the spurs and complaining how much money he’s costing them. He’s cost them a fortune. For what they’re paying in premiums, they could have bought me a damned condo on the water. For two years, he’s been selling insurance, and he’s never sold a policy to anyone who wasn’t a blood relative. He ought to get married and then he’d have in-laws to hit on.”

  The policies were for so much money, they were enough to buy houses, to base a life on. Her parents had probably never seen that much money, even if every penny they had ever made was to be heaped up in a pile in the yard. She was a little staggered at the thought. How much did such a policy cost? It seemed a lot better than playing the lottery, because people died all the time. If her parents had a policy on Joey, their money troubles would be over, it was that simple. “Why do they want you to move out? It would be wonderful to live with you. You’re mature for your age. You’re thoughtful. You work hard in an important and growing field—”

  “They always spoiled him. I never had a car till my senior year of high school, after guys with half the money my old man makes all had theirs. It was a wreck, an old Honda Civic. But when he turned sixteen, he got his first car. They always expected me to get A’s and then made a fuss over him if he managed a couple of B’s. It’s a double standard!”

  “Being the oldest, they leaned hard on you. And they still do.”

  “Right! You see it too.”

  “I see everything that happens to you, because I love you, and so I care about how people treat you. You’re a good person, and sometimes people don’t appreciate you, just take you for granted.”

  “I hate being taken for granted. I’m always the good one. I’m the one they made the rules for. Don’t bring girls home when we’re out of town. Be careful never to get a girl in trouble. Stay away from drugs. Don’t drive and drink. Don’t overdraw your account. Don’t borrow or lend. That’s a joke. My brother owes money on four credit cards. He’s overdue on all of them.”

  “By tomorrow, they’ll calm down and everything will be normal.”

  “No it won’t be! I’m sick of her nagging me. Let’s see how they do without me to fix things that go wrong. I’m the one who, when the plumber doesn’t fix it, calls him and asks him to come back and do it right. My mother talks a tough line to us, but she gets phobic on the phone when she has to complain.”

  “Honey, you’ll feel better if you have something to eat. Let’s go get fried clams and some chowder and sit on the pier.”

  He let himself be led. They sat at a rough wooden outdoor table watching the fishing boats and the pleasure boats passing each other in the narrow channel. A big herring gull stood on a piling and watched them eat. She imagined it was a wise old female waiting to see if she was reeling in her catch successfully, or if she was going to let him slip away.

  “Baby, I think it’s real easy for parents to take you for granted, and in fact not see who you are. They knew you before you could speak, before you could walk, before you knew how to take yourself to the bathroom, even. They get confused between what you used to be when immature, and what you are now. Someone who meets you sees an attractive, bright together very mature young man who makes a wonderful appearance and speaks thoughtfully. Your mother sees a ten-year-old with his pants falling down, sitting on his own pair of glasses.”

  “That’s it. They don’t see me. They don’t even know me, but they think they know everything about me. My mother’s always telling me that she knows better than I do what I want.”

  “Eat your spinach, it’s good for you.”

  “I never minded spinach. I always hated peas.”

  “So do I,” Becky said. What did she care if she ever ate a pea again? “Isn’t that funny? I hate the smell they make cooking.”

  “That’s it. It turns my stomach.” They walked back to the car pressed side to side, his arm heavy around her shoulders, walking very slowly. It was beginning to cool and quicken toward night, a breeze rising off the water, the lights from the channel beacons blinking green and red. The gull flapped off. Becky wondered what the old gull thought of her progress.

  He started the engine. “Tomorrow morning, I’m going out and get the Sunday papers. And I’m looking at apartments.”

  “I know where we can get the real estate sections tonight. We have to drive to New Bedford, but my corner drugstore will sell us that part of the paper early. It comes separately, and they put them together.”

  “Really? We could look at it together and mark prospects.…”

  Sunday morning he picked her up at nine. The first two places were impossible, but the third, even though it was above a row of stores just off Main Street in Hyannis, was nice and light. The three rooms had been redone in a pleasant, up-to-date look. It was just a ten-minute drive from Terry’s home office. Terry put his arm around her shoulders. “We could share this. You could move in.”

  She moved deliberately away from him and made her eyes large. “Terry, you know it would break my mother’s heart if I lived with you without being married. I could never receive Communion. In the eyes of my family, I’d be damned.” She followed Sylvie’s old rule of presenting herself a good Catholic girl. Of course she went to bed with him; he was her fiancé.

  “You don’t want to live with me.”

  She decided to take her big chance. “I’d love to live with you, I’d love that more than anything in the world, but I can’t do it. We’re not married.”

  He looked around the apartment he had decided to rent, absolutely bare except for the refrigerator, stove and sink and the bathroom fixtures. Even the windows lacked shades. It was empty, a box to fill with some as-yet-untried, unlived
life. “So we’ll get married. I’ll show them I can manage without them. We’ll take out a license tomorrow.”

  Once again she found the strength to say no. “We’re not ashamed. And we need presents. We’ll set a date. What about the last week in June? That gives us six weeks. We’ll get married from your family’s church. Once the date for the wedding is set and invitations go out, my parents will ease up. I can start spending nights, so that I’ll be living with you in a couple of weeks. I can fix this place up right away. No more Naughty Pines motel for us.”

  And it was so. It was the beginning of her dream come true.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Leila

  Leila tried to examine Becky without staring. She could not tell whether the wan, drained quality was a result of being in jail. She looked thinner and more angular in person. They were sitting at a battered counter with a low grill between them, in the Barnstable House of Correction. To their right and left were a mother-daughter pair having a sullen, mostly silent session, and a husband and wife arguing about him bringing their children to his mother’s. A female guard stood with her arms folded, watching and chewing gum.

  Becky began by apologizing for being in the correctional facility. “My family is still getting the bond money together. I’ll be out soon. But my husband and I had gone through our savings—and Mr. Green is expensive. I despise being in here, but it’s a matter of cold cash.” Then Becky asked Leila about herself, who she was, where she lived, the nature of her work. Leila decided as she patiently filled herself in for Becky, that it was partly caution that prompted the extensive questioning, but it was also simple curiosity. Becky seemed less impressed by her academic credentials than by her infrequent appearances on local news programs and public affairs programming, as an expert on women and violence.

  Leila was trying to see in the woman before her, a good four inches shorter than herself and one third lighter, someone who could bash in her husband’s head. Certainly a good-sized man would have had no trouble defending himself against her. She decided to take another look at the description of the body from the coroner’s report. Leila wondered if Becky were physically able to commit the crime she had been charged with.

  “How did you feel about those women, the ones in Framingham who let you interview them?”

  Tricky question. Oh, I just loved every one of them? She was dealing with a fairly shrewd young woman, although one capable of great folly. “They were markedly different individuals. Some I disliked, but I tried to be fair to them. Others I felt that I understood pretty well. Some became my friends. I’m still in touch with them.”

  Becky nodded. “Suppose you don’t like me?”

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Leila said gently, giving Becky her best smile. “I think we can communicate—at least I very much hope so. If we can’t, I promise to drop the project.”

  “I don’t want to spend my life in here,” Becky said. She added quickly, “I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill anyone. I’m going on trial because I went to bed with a high school boy. I mean, he was a senior but they speak about him as if he’s someone I was baby-sitting, really.”

  “I agree. You’re being tried for sexual crimes.”

  Becky sighed, her chin in her propped hand. She looked into Leila’s eyes. “No matter what those sleazy tabloids say, I wasn’t taking advantage of Sam. I was crazy about him. Honestly. I didn’t see him as a boy. I saw him as a better man than my husband.”

  “Then why didn’t you leave?”

  Becky looked surprised. “Sam couldn’t live with me. He was going to college in the fall. He had a scholarship. He had obligations to his mother and his uncle, who were supporting him. I understand family obligations. A month never went by that I didn’t hand part of my paycheck to my parents, to help them out. They never put that in their dirty stories.”

  “Your family’s loyal to you. That doesn’t always happen, you know.”

  Becky’s face spasmed into an odd small quirky smile that looked involuntary. “We … have to stick to each other. Anyhow,” she added in a lighter tone of voice, “Sam’s family is sticking to him too. They’d cook and eat me to get him off. The Burgesses would like to execute me themselves.”

  Leila saw a flash of anger there. “You didn’t get along with them?”

  Becky ran her thumb and forefinger along the sides of her pointed chin, reflectively. “I remember the wedding. Now you have to understand, there was no way my parents could afford that wedding. I didn’t go for a great big splashy one, although I wanted to. I mean, how often do you get married?”

  Becky seemed to be awaiting an answer, so Leila said, “Actually I’ve only done it once.”

  “How old were you? Did you have a big wedding?”

  Becky was questioning her again. She made herself answer patiently. “Twenty-one. No, we were married by a rabbi in his study. But you were married in church, weren’t you?”

  Becky nodded. “His family’s church. I thought it would be more real to him that way. But it made everything more expensive. Did your husband’s parents take to you?”

  “Not at first.” She wasn’t about to explain to Becky the difference between German and Russian Jews, and why she had seemed uncouth to them, while to her they had seemed Jews bleached of Jewishness, besides the strangeness of Texas Jews who spoke with a drawl to one from Philadelphia. “After I had my son, things got better. You had trouble with his family at the wedding?”

  “Nothing was good enough. His father kept glaring and snorting and looking down on my parents. Mrs. Burgess kept making these acid comments. At one point my mother started to cry, not like mothers do at weddings, but because Mrs. Burgess was making her feel bad for her dress, for her hair. I could have slapped her. I felt she was going out of her way to poison my wedding day, and I couldn’t even call her on it without making things worse.”

  “Did your families get along better later on?”

  “They never saw each other again. Ever. Tommy came over, but everybody else felt too uncomfortable around Terry. He made it painfully clear he didn’t want to deal with them. He acted as if he expected me to dump my own parents, my whole family, and pretend they didn’t exist.”

  “That must have been hard. Did you try to change his mind?”

  “I just saw them without him. But sure, I resented his attitude. I resented the little digs from his mother, and Terry never stepping in, never defending me. He took it for granted that his mother would look down on me. I never got used to that, ever. I mean, what had she done with her life?”

  “Did they put pressure on you to start a family? Did he want to?”

  Becky shook her head no. “It was out of the question, financially. Even when Terry was working, we had the condo to pay off.… Is your husband a professor too?”

  “He teaches drama at B.U. But he’s primarily a director. Of plays.”

  “What’s his name?” Becky sat up, peering at her with a sudden visible increase of interest. When she was interested, her face had more color. She looked almost vibrant.

  “Nicolas Landsman. He has a play now off-Broadway in New York, but usually he—”

  “I know who he is!” Becky drew herself up. “Remember, I was involved in theater.”

  “Of course you were,” Leila said gently. The truth was she didn’t think of a local production of Dracula as theater.

  “I never grew up around plays, so it was exotic to me. But I took to it naturally, everybody said so. I’d love to meet your husband.”

  “When he comes back to Boston from New York, we could figure out how to arrange that.” He’d adore meeting Becky; he’d dine out on it for a month.

  “Really?” Becky sounded skeptical. Her mouth twisted slightly. “Oh, because I’m in all the papers—a depraved murderess who runs around seducing children.”

  “That’s the up side to notoriety. Everybody wants to meet you.”

  Becky grimaced. “I always had a fantasy of being famous. But
not like this. Did you ever want to be famous?”

  “For me making a living was more important.”

  “But what about your husband? Doesn’t he make big bucks?”

  “He makes a living, but because he’s on the road a lot and likes things nice, he spends a lot too. Basically I carry the house.” It felt extraordinary to say out loud what she had concealed for years. Only Melanie had really known.

  Becky’s gaze rested on her, a little amused and a little resigned. “Doesn’t it turn out that way oftener than you expect it to?”

  “You didn’t expect your husband to remain out of work so long.”

  Becky sighed. “I didn’t. I felt as if he didn’t really try to find work. He wanted work to find him.”

  Their time was up. “I hope,” Leila said hastily as she was rushed out, “that we can talk again soon.”

  “I’d like that,” Becky called after her. “I enjoyed our conversation.”

  In the car, Leila ran over the afternoon and realized how little she had gotten from Becky. Becky was going to be difficult to penetrate, for she was careful how she presented herself after her savaging in the media. Still, today she had finally met Becky; she was scheduled to see Sam. She was making progress. Traffic on the expressway into Boston was slow, because snow had begun to fall. It came down slantwise, small fast hard snow, more pellets than flakes. It piled up on the side of the road like detergent, coating the banks.

  Once off the expressway, she had to drive slowly. The streets had not been swept and the pavement was slippery. She was glad David had taken the car to have snow tires put on. She dreaded dealing with mechanics. She could get around prison officials and police detectives, administrators and lawyers, but mechanics made her feel at once elderly and childish.

  Vronsky was watching from the table that gave him the best view of the street. She could see him meowing at her through the window. When she unlocked the door, there he was. He attempted to lead her directly back to the kitchen. “A long time since breakfast, huh?” The little pebbles of snow slowly melted on her coat arm. She beat her hands together to warm them. “I want coffee, bad. What do you think of that?”