The Longings of Women

by Marge Piercy

  “She was killed in a fire?”

  He nodded. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Thank you.” Subject changed. She was warned off. While he slipped into the kitchen beyond, she looked around. She had not broken eye contact since arriving, so this was the first time she was able to observe. The fireplace with its inset stove took up much of one wall. The ceiling was low, the beams exposed. The room had been replastered carefully. The Southwestern decor of the Zuni vases and the rugs, a Mexican mask, sat oddly with the old Cape, obvious remnants of his marriage, his life in L.A.

  The coffee table was almost hidden under a load of books and magazines, which she leaned to examine. Science News, Science, Natural History, Audubon, Sanctuary—magazine of the Massachusetts Audubon Society—Archeology Today, and various veterinary journals. A coffee-table book of Escher’s drawings, inscribed from Helen with Love. Helen wasn’t the wife. A girlfriend?

  It was clean enough; but with the books all over the living room, several lying open as if he, like herself, read four or five books at once and left them wherever he sat or lay to read one of them, she suspected he lived alone. Wouldn’t Cathy have mentioned a woman? Besides, Helen could be a sister, a sister-in-law left from his marriage. A colleague. His agent.

  An intelligent man. Studious, curious. She wandered the room, picking up objects while the animals watched: a geode, a large pearlescent shell, an oblong of petrified wood, an old blue hand-blown bottle, Hopi pottery. He had the habit of taking off his shoes wherever he sat down so that under the couch were shearling slippers and one moccasin; near his chair were two Clark boots; by the door were snow boots from L. L. Bean, soaked through. Apple cores had been forgotten, desiccated among the books.

  Most of the furniture was in earth tones, except for the strident mustard draperies on the windows. She was gazing at them when he appeared with coffee in mugs. “You’re admiring my hideous drapes. My partner Josie made them.”

  “So you have to leave them up?”

  He nodded. “I wish she’d asked me first, but she kept saying it was so dark in here. I wonder if I could bribe the dry cleaner to lose them.”

  She grinned. She was trying out various approaches, in a sense seeing what she could get away with, how far she could go in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere between them. “Why don’t you throw them in the washer? A man isn’t expected to know what’s washable and what isn’t.”

  “If they fit.” He nodded judiciously. “I don’t want my washer to break again. The repairman only works when he feels like it. He’s a mad surfer.”

  “How do you happen to live out here?”

  “It isn’t out here to me. I grew up in this house.”

  “Really? What did your parents do here?”

  “They left New York. My father had his first heart attack very young, and they changed their lives. We have wobbly hearts. My mother wanted to write, my father wanted to sit still and fish, so they bought a motel. It was never much of a living. They killed themselves all summer and closed it from the end of October until the beginning of April. My mother never did write.”

  “They’re retired?”

  “We’re not a long-lived family. Cheer up, I might drop dead at any moment and then Cathy will conduct you to Sam with lightning speed.”

  “You don’t trust Cathy.”

  “She means well. She’s just … not too well stocked upstairs. You’ve got awfully chummy with her. A professional necessity, I suppose.”

  “I can find a lot to like in her.”

  “She’s likable.”

  “At first I thought you might be interested in her.”

  His right eyebrow canted up. “Maybe you aren’t so perceptive.”

  “I said, at first.” She resisted the temptation to bond with him around Cathy’s general flakiness. “Obviously you two basically relate about Sam.”

  “I tried to take care of her after Mike’s death. Now she has a boyfriend, and she’s his problem. But Sam will always be mine. She’s too ditzy for me. I keep thinking she’s playing little girl. But what you see is what there is, I’m convinced by now. Mike and I had very different taste in women. If as they say, men marry their mothers, Mike went for our mother’s helpless side, and I went for her pretensions.”

  “I thought you were ordering Cathy around because you see yourself as the man of the house.”

  “No, I just see her as a little less mature and capable than Sam. I’m scared for him. Really scared.”

  She decided a statement was better than a question. “You’re going to let me talk to him now.”

  He shrugged. His eyes seemed larger without the beard, more expressive, as if the beard had been a mask. “I suppose I am.”

  “I mean well. And nothing I do will affect the trial. By the time I start writing, the trial will be over. I’m not a reporter. I’m an analyst, long after the case is done with. What happened to that agreement you were having your lawyer draw up?”

  “I decided it was just expensive bullshit. I have to trust you or not, on my own judgment. Which hasn’t over the years proved much better than flipping a coin, but it’s all I have.”

  “You’re a master at self-deprecation.”

  He smiled wryly, meeting her gaze. “I’m someone who’s made lousy choices, Typically I’ve pondered and brooded and weighed every alternative, and then taken the silliest. Here I am, age forty-three, back in my parents’ house where I started. Back in my own pocket.”

  She tried to imagine herself in Philadelphia in Phyllis’s old apartment. “It’s hard for me to see myself returning where I came from. But this is a much nicer place of origin.”

  “I’m very attached. I’ve loved this house since I was a kid. I was always afraid my parents would move. In the summer, one of them used to sleep at the motel, in a little apartment. They’d take turns.” He tweaked his nose between his fingers, frowning. “I’m eager to get Sam out of the House of Correction, but I refused to go through a bail bondsman. I’ll breathe easier when he’s out of that cage.” He rose. “Time for lunch.”

  “Time for me to be going.”

  “Oh, I’ll make you lunch. You’ve come a long way to work on me. I’m enjoying it. The least I can do is make you lunch. You can leave just afterward. I have to pass by the clinic. It’s closed today, but I have a coyote in bad shape that got hit on Route 6.”

  “A coyote? Does it belong to someone?”

  “No, it’s a genuine wild predator and not happy at the moment. Somebody from the volunteer fire department brought it to me in his pickup. I think I can save it, but it’s touch and go. These—” He waved his hand around. “Only the blind cat, Homer, is mine. All the others are boarding or in the hospital. They like it better here.”

  “I gather you don’t treat horses.”

  “Not if I can help it. Coyotes are better behaved. What don’t you eat?”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Becky

  Becky and Terry had been married for a year and four months when they moved into a nearly new condo in Falmouth with a water view. That is, it was on the second floor and from the bedroom, a dip of blue showed between the buildings. His parents had co-signed the mortgage. The Burgesses dished out money to them now and again, money for a living room set this time. Terry bought the carpeting from the previous tenants, who were getting divorced. But every time the Burgesses paid for some object or gave them a check, Mrs. Burgess said, “We try to help when we can, since your parents never seem to do anything for you at all.”

  Becky wanted to say that her parents had done a lot for her: they had loved her more than she thought the Burgesses knew how to love anyone. But she kept still. She and Terry needed those occasional handouts. Without the help of the Burgesses, they would never have moved out of the apartment, which had proved hot in the summer and increasingly noisy after three skinheads had taken the apartment next door and begun staging drunken weekends.

  Here they had off-street parking. There were washin
g machines in the basement They had arrived in a place Terry no longer apologized for. Once again she regained that sense she had enjoyed right after marriage of things being perfect, unworn, unsoiled. Terry always said he lived in Old Silver Beach, the name of this part of Falmouth. It did sound inviting. There were not many condos around, but mostly single-family homes. She could take a shortcut across to work without going into downtown Falmouth and be there in ten minutes.

  Tommy had given them a second TV for the kitchen. She never asked where he got it, as she suspected it was a perk that went with Tommy’s relationship with The Guys. Tommy had decided to ease into that direction on the docks. It was not that he did not respect Papa, but that he felt he just could not get what he needed if he followed the straight and narrow. Becky did not think he was wrong. Tommy was her ambitious brother, and the older they got, the closer they felt. They understood each other better than anybody else in the family understood them. They were the outsiders, but they were loyal. Tommy was bringing in more than fish or scallops on his boat, but what did she care? He had married his girlfriend and he was taking care of his baby. Who could fault him?

  She was expecting to move up at work too. She still had not got them to put her on the air, but she was going to become the director’s secretary when his secretary left at the end of the year. Mr. Carter liked Becky, who fetched and carried for everybody and filled in every niche left vacant. Nowadays she had more and better clothes to wear to work. “You’ve learned how to dress,” Mrs. O’Neill, the bookkeeper, remarked one day, totally startling Becky, who had never seen Mrs. O’Neill even look at her. “Your taste has improved.”

  Becky thanked her with pretended humility but she wanted to say, no, my pocketbook has improved, you horse’s ass. Everything that people judged her by always came down to money. What she knew how to do, her makeup, her house, her furniture, her silverware, her dishes: it was all dollars made visible as objects of rank and what people agreed to call taste or beauty. She felt a deep rusty anger, but she suppressed it. Instead she said to Mrs. O’Neill, “Why, you always dress so nicely, a girl can’t help but learn by observing you.”

  Mrs. O’Neill gave her a tight-lipped smile, the first that Becky had ever received. “You’re a smart girl. Unlike most of them.” From that time on, Mrs. O’Neill placed her in a higher category. Mrs. O’Neill was not only the bookkeeper but one of the people who had put up money for the original business. They were now part of a larger company, but Mrs. O’Neill had stock. She also had the most secure job in the office.

  Becky quietly accumulated a mental dossier on Mrs. O’Neill, given name, Katherine. She lived in Sandwich, two blocks from her favorite daughter, and was said to have an entire room of tropical fish. In her office, she had an aquarium with angelfish. When Becky came in extra early or stayed late to finish up a report or a mailing, she would hear the blub blub of the bubbler in the aquarium. It was a soothing sound.

  The other women who worked at Sound Cable made fun of Mrs. O’Neill. She was just this middle-aged bitch who had her own office and did the books. Becky, who always watched for lines of power, had been trying to cultivate Mrs. O’Neill. Now Mrs. O’Neill actually nodded to her with a little noise in her throat when she came in, something she had previously reserved for the three highest-paid men in the office.

  She suspected maybe it was Mrs. O’Neill who had suggested she be promoted to be secretary to Mr. Carter, the director. There was only one higher position on the clerical side: office manager, and Gwen did not seem about to leave that position for another twenty years. Unless Gwen were to be run over by a truck, Becky was not about to become office manager.

  But why wouldn’t they let her on camera? Even something stupid like reading the local ads for service stations and restaurants or doing the weather or the weekly Adopt-A-Pet. She was more attractive than the women they had running shows, and she knew she could do a more professional job. How could she get them to think of her in the right way? Once they saw her behind a computer terminal, she was stuck as a clerical worker. They could not imagine her performing, conducting interviews, reading news.

  Still, she could scarcely complain: three years before, she had started as a receptionist. The outgoing secretary would start teaching her the job right after Thanksgiving. She had not found the way to break through yet, but she never let opportunities slip past her. When Terry discovered that many of the people who had shows on cable were unpaid, he had begun trying to discourage her ambition to stand before the camera. Once in a while, he would urge her to ask for a raise, but she would be getting one starting the first of the year. She was not about to rattle the bars. She was too replaceable. Terry didn’t seem to be trying to improve his own job situation.

  She tried to get him to look for a better job, at a company with growth potential. He was not interested in job hunting. He said he had no time for it during the week, and weekends he needed to relax. She had liked it better when Terry was furious at his parents, but when they co-signed the mortgage, he moved back home emotionally. Once again he was vying with Chris for their approval and their money. They doled out money like gold stars for pleasing them.

  Over her reluctance, it was established that every Sunday they ate “dinner” at his parents. Dinner was served at two, which meant it killed the whole afternoon. They ate ham or turkey or a roast beef, big heavy meals. Afterwards she was expected to help Mrs. Burgess clean up, while the men took out the boat or just sat and watched a game on TV. It was not Becky’s idea of a fun day, one of her two days of freedom.

  “Becky, put the pickles back in the jar. On the counter. Wrap the roast beef. No, Becky, not in aluminum foil. In plastic wrap. How am I supposed to see through foil? Becky! Think for a minute now and then. No, Becky, don’t save the salad with the dressing on it. It gets soggy. If you wish to save salad, you must wash off the dressing gently and then dry it just as gently. That’s the correct way to save salad. You have a great deal to learn about running a house properly.”

  Mrs. Burgess would supervise every step she made around the kitchen, for Mrs. Burgess had one way and only one of doing any task. The top shelf of the dishwasher was loaded with glassware and bowls and cups and saucers. The bottom shelf was loaded according to a precise preordained pattern with dinner plates and serving utensils and pans. Everything in the kitchen had a niche. Becky was used to her family’s kitchen where everybody stuffed things where they would fit; or her kitchen in the condo with plenty of empty cupboards. A shelf might have three boxes of breakfast cereal and some snacks on it. Above it would be a couple of cans of tuna and soup. Mrs. Burgess had racks of knives of all shapes and lengths, drawers full of mysterious gadgets, three sets of dishes. Becky felt like a recalcitrant slave. She did not want their heavy bland meals and she did not want to spend her Sundays cleaning up. She would have been happier with a hamburger or a chef’s salad and some free time.

  Saturday she had to clean and do the laundry. Once in a while she got Terry to go shopping for furniture and once they visited a street fair with Tommy and his wife. Saturday night, they went out to eat and to a movie. They always made love on the three weekend nights, and sometimes once during the week. For her, proof that he still wanted her was more important than the actual sex. She doubted that sex was ever going to mean a great deal to her, not compared to having a nice life.

  She loved their tidy roomy condo. It had romantic casement windows. Cranking them open felt more dignified, prettier than raising the double-hung windows of her family home, always warped, always kept up by a stick or a beer bottle. She even liked the dove grey carpeting that had come with the condo. It was soothing, the color of the waves on a cloudy day. She liked being near the water. They had moved when it was warm enough to swim at a town beach nearby. It thrilled her to toss a little bag Belle had given her (it advertised cosmetics) over her shoulder and stroll along the road to the beach with a cover-up over her bathing suit, or if it was hot enough, nothing at all but the bright blu
e suit, the sunglasses one of Chris’s girls had left in their car. Then she felt like an actress in a movie. She saw how men looked at her. They were not really seeing Becky Burgess. They were seeing a thin blond in a bright bathing suit. It did not matter. Their admiration fed something in her that was starving. When the fall advanced, she felt bereft. She had loved the sense of walking through her own daydream, perfect for once, prized, gazes following her like the train of a ball gown. All she lacked was a sound track.

  Terry was not affectionate. She thought that perhaps neither of them knew how to be. Sometimes he picked up his mother’s way of talking to her, as if she were stupid, as if she were on a lower plane of being. She felt that the Sundays they spent with his family reinforced attitudes she had thought dealt with and defeated. He had a way of saying, “Your family,” that was just like his mother’s. She could not challenge him. He did not say anything overtly bad. Who could prove a tone of voice? Who could touch an attitude that did not speak itself in open insults? It was like trying to locate a bad smell that no one else noticed.

  He decided they should have his parents and Chris to a meal on his mother’s birthday, the first weekend in November. “Why don’t we take them out to a nice restaurant instead?” she asked.

  “And drop a hundred fifty bucks? Forget it. No, they helped us with this condo. We owe it to them to have them over. Mother says every week she wants to see what we’ve done with it.”

  “But that’s a lot of cooking, Terry.”

  “So, you’ve got all day. It’s for my mother, Becky. It’s her birthday, and it’s what she’d like. You aren’t trying with her.”

  “I am so trying … So you want to have them over this coming Sunday?”

  “Right. And we have to get her a present. And a card. A nice present, but don’t spend too much. It’s tight this month.”

  “It’s tight every month. Maybe you should pick it out. I don’t know what your mother likes.”