The Longings of Women

by Marge Piercy

  Sylvie and she sewed bedroom curtains on Sylvie’s machine. They were just oblongs—a print of yellow and blue and white sailboats—hemmed at top and bottom, but they made the room cheerful and kept out the gazes of people in the building across the street. They lived on a street with apartments or offices over shops. His parents were upset when they saw where Terry had moved, which Terry enjoyed. She thought it was marvelous to live in Hyannis, just like the Kennedys, at a famous address, but he called it High-Anus and said it was nothing but malls and doctor’s offices and motels. She loved being able to run downstairs to ten restaurants. She had to drive to work on Route 28, and that was slow, but she found shortcuts. It beat commuting from New Bedford.

  She savored the odd hours when she was home alone. His mother called him over to fix something from time to time. Becky went when they both were invited, but otherwise, she avoided Mrs. Burgess. The marriage had no impact on the scorn in which Mrs. Burgess held her. Sometimes Terry played softball with friends from his college fraternity, and weekly he played squash with his brother.

  Those evenings she would visit her family or Sylvie. Other times she just stayed in the apartment, enjoying the space. The dry cleaner’s downstairs was never open in the evenings, and on Saturday, only until noon. The really noisy times were in the morning when the truck arrived from where they actually did the cleaning and again at the end of the day when it returned. Then the sound of men yelling and banging things around rose through the floor.

  She drifted through the rooms, touching the new objects, the lamp she had just learned she was not to leave in its cellophane wrappings. Sylvie had explained that was considered vulgar. She touched the newly bare lamp shade, she touched lightly the clean ivory wall, she stroked the Formica counter. When Terry brought a friend in, he always apologized and said the apartment was just temporary, and to be agreeable, she would smile and nod, but she thought this was paradise. Three rooms for just the two of them, everything so clean and sweet she could have popped the refrigerator and the vanity chair into her mouth.

  Sylvie kept asking her if she didn’t want to start a family, but Becky had never lived without babies and toddlers underfoot. To be alone was like the most powerful drug she could imagine, an ecstatic experience that reminded her of when Laurie had wanted to be a nun and gushed on and on about the presence of Our Lady. She had thought Laurie was making the whole thing up to get attention, but now she reconsidered. She was convinced that kneeling in the empty church, Laurie had experienced the joy of being alone and quiet for the first time in her life, and she had mistaken it for God.

  Becky wished she could bottle the quiet in her apartment and bring it to her mother. But Mama could not even come and see her often. Becky had realized with a little shock about the third week of her marriage that Terry did not like her parents. She had always assumed that sure, her family home was a dump, but that anybody who loved her would see how sweet and long-suffering and hard-working Mama was, and would honor her for her virtues. But Terry was uncomfortable around any of her family except Tommy. He recognized Tommy’s ambition, as he had recognized hers. Tommy too was marrying, and Terry thought that was a great idea. She did not know if that was because he felt that Tommy’s marriage would make her family marginally more respectable, or because Tommy would then be living out of the house Terry refused to visit.

  “Becca, don’t fight about it,” Tommy advised. “Just do what you want.”

  Mama noticed, of course; they all did. But Mama said it was better to have Becky come alone, because then they could have a real visit, instead of trying to be on their best behavior. Becky was embarrassed for Terry. He ought to have enough feeling for her to be open to her family. He ought to at least see what a good person Mama was, and Gracie, and how well-meaning Belle was too. It was a grave flaw in his character that he couldn’t overcome his family’s narrow-minded, middle-class prejudices. He would come around in time.

  She admitted that when she walked in the old house now she noticed the smells, the utter chaos, the inevitable decay and disintegration caused by eight people living in a small space. That was because she had managed to snare Terry and clamber into the middle class. She was not a better person man Gracie or Belle, just shrewder and more selfish. She wanted her life to be nice—she wanted that more than anything else. Now she had it and she meant to keep it. Someday when she had more money, she would do something for all of them. Like Sylvie’s aunt Marie, she would look and think intelligently about what her niece or her nephew needed, and she would provide it. In a quiet way Becky couldn’t share with Terry, Aunt Marie remained her measure of the good life. The elder Burgesses lived in a fancier and larger house than Marie, but she lived more amply. Marie had friends; the Burgesses had acquaintances, associates. Marie had fun; the Burgesses did the expected thing.

  For her wedding, Marie had given her a gift certificate to Saks in Boston with a note attached. Her message was, “Go buy yourself some good clothes. Men don’t notice clothing, but they notice how you look. They want you to look like a million dollars without spending a penny.”

  Aunt Marie had made a transition to the middle class years before and could give useful pointers. Hardly anyone else could. Sylvie had been waylaid by starting a family. She no longer kept up with fashions or much of anything. Motherhood had closed over her like a warm salty tide in which she was afloat but swept along. Becky was determined to put off having a baby until they were thoroughly established.

  Far from longing for a baby, the way two women in her office were trying to get pregnant, she had been burping babies since she was strong enough to lift one. She knew far more than Sylvie did about maternity, but she never volunteered advice, because she didn’t want anybody telling her what a good mother she’d make. Someday, when the right sun rose over the right house on the right street. And they had the right bank account. Then she would have two children. Two only. They would get all the love she always dreamed of, the attention no kid in her family had ever been able to command.

  In the meantime, Terry needed taking care of. He tossed his clothes when he undressed, and she had to pick up his socks, his briefs, his tees from the floor and the chair and the top of his dresser. He never thought about laundry or dry cleaning. He considered his clothes a self-enclosed system that functioned automatically: dirty clothes off, then the next morning, clean clothes appeared.

  Still, she found his belongings cute. He had as fancy shoes as the kids who had run drugs in her high school. He had jackets with logos, outfits in which to play tennis or to ski or to ride a bicycle. It reminded her of a girl from middle school. The daughter of an ex-fisherman who had made money with The Guys on the docks, Tonia had everything. Her closets, like Terry’s, bulged with special clothes for parties to which she was almost never asked, for she was nasty. Still, Becky played with Tonia sometimes because she had so many toys. Tonia had a Barbie doll and a Ken doll, each with dozens of costumes—just like Terry. Dealing with his clothes felt like playing with a Ken doll. But it was hard sometimes to do the laundry on a weekend. She had to drive to the laundromat and wait there.

  Sometimes on weekends Terry just wanted to lie around and watch sports on TV. But some weekends they did something special. In August they went to New York with Chris and his current girlfriend Amy. They stayed in a hotel near Central Park and saw three movies and danced in a club. They went to the top of the World Trade Center and to Rockefeller Center. It was like a little second honeymoon, even though Chris and his girlfriend were along. On their real honeymoon, they had gone to New York too.

  Becky was not fond of Chris. He was always putting his hands on her. He spoke too loudly and laughed boisterously at his own bad jokes. He was nothing like Terry, yet Terry said Chris was his parents’ favorite. He was still angry that his parents had leaned on him to move out and let Chris live at home. Becky privately thought that the Burgesses had done her an incredible favor, so she was willing to put up with Chris when she had to. She just wi
shed it were less often. Lots of times when she and Terry did go out, for instance to a Sunday Red Sox game in Boston, Chris automatically went along, sometimes with a girlfriend, as often without.

  Saturday afternoon. Terry and his friend Lyle were sitting in the two decent chairs in the living room, eating potato chips, drinking lite beer and yelling at the TV set. It was the division championships for baseball. Becky was putting away clean laundry. On this warm September day, a fly bumped against the pane and she thought idly of killing it, but she did not. What harm was it doing? Just trying to escape. Why should she turn it into a mess on the screen? Instead she released the screen and waved it out with a dish towel. It buzzed off purposefully, as if to a secret meeting.

  “Hey, Becky, give us another beer.”

  She took two more out of the refrigerator. Was Lyle staying to supper? She hoped they would go out to eat. There was nothing to feed him. She had done a little shopping when she was coming back with the laundry, but she hated hauling heavy bags up the steps. She always tried to get Terry to do the shopping with her, but he didn’t like to. He said the supermarket was depressing. Also he would buy steaks and snacks and exceed their food budget. They were saving for a house. Supposedly.

  After she brought the beers, she stood a moment, waiting to see if Terry would talk to her, but his eyes were on the screen. She carried a pile of washed clothes into the bedroom to stow them in their proper drawers. She heard herself sighing. She realized she was bored.

  She tried to shake herself out of her funk. After all, if she was home, what would she be doing? Her old home. Doing housework. Doing laundry, just like now. But at least there was always someone to talk to. Sometimes when Terry was home, it was lonelier than when she was there by herself.

  Maybe that was one reason people had babies so early. A woman wanted someone to pay attention to her. A baby at least would cry if its mother walked away.

  Really, she had exactly what she had wanted. What on earth was wrong with her? It wasn’t as if he didn’t love her. Every night since they started living together, he wanted to make love. It was much faster than it used to be. Sometimes she came, sometimes she didn’t, but what did it matter? It was over in fifteen minutes, and it kept him happy. That was the important thing, wasn’t it? She had to figure out what she wanted that they could afford to buy, or where she wanted to go to eat. That was it. If she concentrated on that decision, she would be happy.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Leila

  Zak lived off a road scattered with old Capes and modern ranch houses, SOLOMON the rusty mail box said. The sand road had been plowed, but it was still rough and icy going. The road twisted between two houses, dipped down past a bog, rose again up a hill of pines, snaked down the other side past two right-hand options. Finally it arrived at an old grey house among Norway spruces, not a common tree on the Cape and lending an air of slight gloom. Beyond the house was a small pond, surrounded by oaks and second growth—rum cherries, aspens, an occasional pitch pine. Two vehicles stood outside, a blue Toyota truck and a red Jeep sedan, neither new nor old, a hefty investment in all-weather vehicles; or did he live with someone? He was so involved in Cathy and Sam, she had assumed he lived alone. Maybe he had a visitor? She sat in her car feeling foolish.

  She had a stomachache, that sour clenching with which her body registered a protest at being forced to do something she had no desire to go through. How often in her marriage she had envied Nick, who seemed to have little need to do what he did not want to. For him it was enough to explain blithely, I didn’t feel like it. As if she had ever been in the mood to cart David to the dentist, looking pale and shrunken and with the air he wore so well of going to his execution stoically. She was forever doing things she felt had to be done. This book was an exception, an indulgence, to write about something at once as heavy and frivolous as murder. A hole in the social fabric, an individual aberration. Not so much a social problem of the sort she usually tackled as a slippage.

  What galvanized her was the impression of being watched, a slight movement at the window. Resolutely she opened the car door, slammed it smartly behind her, and marched to the house, trying vainly to remember how annoyed she had been that this uncle had placed himself firmly in the way of her interviewing Sam.

  She banged on the door, two fast knocks, and stepped back. The door opened at once. Dressed in a muted plaid shirt and jeans, he was smiling slightly, as if trying not to. It took her a moment to realize why he looked so different; in fact he looked more like the photo she had seen of his brother Michael than he did the man she had met before. “Where’s your beard?”

  “In the septic system. Sam’s lawyer told me to shave it off. We obey our lawyers.” He stood aside to let her in.

  Quickly she marched into the living room. There was a fire in the fireplace, but confined in a stove with glass doors. This was a reasonable compromise she had considered for their porous house, but Nick liked the open fire. Once upon a time, they had used to sit in front of it embraced, legs stretched out, toes almost in the fire. Here two dogs, an unclipped poodle and a spaniel with its leg in a cast, a long-haired black cat and a tabby with a shaved belly were at various wary distances from each other on the Navajo hearth rug.

  “Do you feel undressed without it?”

  “Cold, mostly. I grew up here, but years in L.A. make me unused to the cold. Now I get wind burn.” He waved her to an armchair, removing a cat. “She’s blind. But I don’t suppose you drove all the way out here to examine my naked face.”

  “You know why I’m here. You’re blocking me.” She decided to take off her coat. That would proclaim she was staying until she got what she wanted. She felt very watched. At least five animals were gazing at her. No, six. A bandaged parrot was also staring.

  “Good morning, America,” it squawked hopefully. “Pretty baby.”

  “You can’t have found me without help.”

  “I’m a resourceful woman.”

  “And Cathy’s a bit of a twit. She’s mad at me. She can’t see the larger picture.”

  “Can you? You’re hurting Sam in the long run. I’ve talked with Becky, after all. I’ve talked with Terry’s parents.”

  “Sam is still trying to shield her.” His watch beeped. Out of his pocket he drew a vial, took out a pill, grabbed the tabby and got the pill down its throat in ten seconds. “Sam has to stop worrying about her and believe he’s in real trouble himself.”

  “Do you believe he murdered Terrence?”

  “Is this an official interview?”

  “Do I have a tape recorder running? I tape all my interviews, for my own personal protection and in the interests of accuracy.”

  “I think about it all the time. Endless brooding, without issue.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I can’t imagine Sam killing anything larger than a mosquito. He’s softhearted. He loves animals. I’d hoped he’d get his degree and go into practice with me.” From somewhere a kitten had crawled into his lap. On the back of the rocker, the blind cat nuzzled his hair.

  “The love of animals and the capacity for violence are not necessarily incompatible. Prisoners keep cats or birds, if they’re permitted. A hit man may be a loving father and husband.”

  “I’ve told myself that. Yet I can’t imagine, I can’t picture Sam beating a man to death. It’s going to be very, very difficult, if not impossible, for a jury not to convict him. I keep thinking that he’s protecting her.”

  “Have you seen Becky?”

  “A little fox-faced creature of infinite slyness.” He paced slowly to the windows and back, the blind cat on his shoulder, the kitten in his hands. The floor was made of wide old boards, taking a nice polish. Scattered here and there were Navajo and Hopi rugs, bright against the dark wood. He paced in a wide circle around the chair he had motioned for her to take. Every time he passed, the dogs thumped their tails.

  “Pretty baby,” the parrot squawked. “Love me tender.”

&nbs
p; “She is not a big strapping woman. No jury will believe she beat her husband to death while Sam watched.”

  He sighed. “Do you think he’s guilty?”

  “I have trouble imagining Becky killing her husband, now that I’ve talked with her. I keep confusing Sam and my own son David. David is strong-willed but very gentle. Killing has always seemed to me to require a lack of imagination, a refusal of empathy. I can’t imagine David willfully hurting anyone, given his capacity to extrapolate from his own feelings. He’s always saying things like, We must have respect for all life forms.” She wondered, shocked, how they had begun to talk with each other, instead of making speeches.

  He sat down gingerly in a rocker some distance away. “I haven’t been able to bring myself to ask Sam directly. I’m afraid of what he may answer. So far he’s insisting he’s innocent, but his friend Gene has talked and talked. The police may offer Sam a deal if he cooperates, but that assumes he did it.”

  “Once the papers and the evening news are full of descriptions of a murder and who they say did it, it’s hard not to assume it’s fact in the same sense as reportage of what the stock market did.”

  “I feel responsible for Sam. In loco parentis.”

  “But he has a mother, Cathy. And he’s seventeen.”

  “In my head, he’s still fourteen. Anyhow, seventeen’s young enough. I was a real horse’s ass at seventeen. I never made a right decision. I don’t think I made decisions. I just toppled into things.”

  She looked at him, having trouble imagining him as an impulsive adolescent. He seemed, as Cathy had characterized him, a control freak. She must have smiled because he added, after a moment, “You doubt my memory. My wife—Corinne,” he amended, with the air of correcting himself, “she used to doubt I’d ever been an adolescent. She claimed I was born forty. That was when she was annoyed with me.”