The Longings of Women

by Marge Piercy

  “She likes nice things.”

  Becky had never made a roast beef or a turkey, and the many types of hams in the supermarket confused her. Everything seemed enormous. Still, Mrs. Burgess put out a lot of food every Sunday, and the men ate huge quantities. She decided that a roast beef was perhaps the simplest. She would just put it in the oven, turn it on and let it cook.

  She consulted Mama. “I put it in a pan with a little leftover wine, some tomatoes and onions and garlic and celery. I put the lid on and cook it for three hours, something like that.”

  “I don’t think they eat onions and garlic. She just cooks it on a rack. The rack gets really dirty and sometimes I have to scrub it by hand.”

  “I never make it like that. You know, we don’t eat so much beef. It’s expensive. We like our fish.”

  Becky was shocked how expensive, when she went to the Stop & Shop. Twenty dollars for a piece of meat? She should wrap that up and give it to her mother-in-law in a box with a pink bow. She found a cheaper roast finally, a round roast. That sounded nice. She had to buy a pan with a rack in the supermarket. His parents were coming at two. She put the roast on at eleven, to give it the three hours her mother had recommended. She put potatoes in with it and made a salad. She bought cooked shrimps that cost fifty cents apiece and made a cocktail of them to start with.

  Terry left the TV as she finished setting the table. He frowned. “It doesn’t look right. Where’s the fork for the appetizer?”

  “Terry, we don’t have extra forks. We only have settings for six.”

  “It doesn’t look the way it’s supposed to. Where are the flowers?”

  “Go out and buy some if you want flowers.”

  “It’s Sunday.”

  “Well, Terry, we certainly can’t go pick them, can we? What do you want? Your parents have been married for thirty years and they own every dish in the world and real silverware. If you want us to eat like that, ask them for silverware and fancy china. Then I’ll set a table the way your mother does. But silverware doesn’t appear when you want it, and neither do fancy tablecloths and glasses with gold rims.”

  “You should have got flowers.”

  “Why didn’t you? Remember me? I’m the poor kid from New Bedj your mother likes to wipe her feet on. What do I know about silverware and flowers?”

  “My mother has been really good to you. She gave you that pearl necklace you’re wearing.”

  And I’ll always hate it, Becky thought. Like little teeth shining, the better to bite you with. Like wearing a necklace of tooth enamel. She took a deep breath. She must not lose her temper with Terry, especially not just before his parents arrived. At least the food would be good. And the beautiful blue scarf was wrapped and ready.

  Half an hour later, the only sound was knives grinding against china. The roast was tough and Mrs. Burgess openly laughed. “Oh, Becky, poor thing, you’ve destroyed it. Did you start cooking it yesterday? You serve roast beef rare. That’s the civilized way to treat a cow.”

  Mr. Burgess ate with an air of dyspeptic martyrdom. Terry would not look at her. Chris was the only sympathetic one. “I’ve had worse. Give us a smile, don’t look so tragic. You tried. I never had a girlfriend yet who could cook. Nobody cooks anymore, except Mom. Mom’s an old-fashioned girl.”

  About the scarf, Mrs. Burgess was polite. “What a surprise. I always feel a scarf is a perfect present when you don’t know what to buy someone. I imagine you picked this pattern out? It’s so … colorful. I do want to thank you, Becky, for thinking of my birthday.”

  It was a disaster, except for the salad and the ice cream. I will never do this again, Becky thought, I will never be forced into trying to imitate his mother. They can take us out to eat. I am not going to be tricked into making a fool of myself on their terms. Ever!

  THIRTY

  Leila

  Leila had not spoken with Nick since he returned to New York. Hanging around a play already running was unheard of, unless there were rewrites in progress. It was not the play that held him in New York but Sheryl. She felt extremely distant from him—more than a couple of hundred miles. It felt as if their lives had disentangled. She was busy enough. Candidates for an open position were being interviewed at the rate of one a week, and that was an evening every time. She was considered deft at drawing people out in the informal dinner setting. The screening of candidates whose resumés looked good and whose publications were reasonably apt and frequent fell into a formal meeting in the department, and the wining and dining and careful scrutiny of the evening.

  She was honest with Jane, with whom as always she ate lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays. “I don’t feel particularly married right now—”

  “Are you looking around?”

  “Don’t be absurd, Jane. I find I’ve begun to enjoy living alone, although sometimes at night I can sense all those empty rooms around me, and it feels wasteful. When David and Nick were in the house, it never felt large.”

  “Nick’s an expansive man,” Jane said. “Won’t he get round you when he comes back?” Jane removed a browned leaf from her salad, grimacing. “And why isn’t he home? His play opened before Thanksgiving, didn’t it?”

  “His girlfriend’s pregnant.”

  “Oh.” Jane studied her salad carefully, frowning. “I know a good divorce lawyer. I have the feeling you’re going to need her.”

  Even though Leila had been telling herself that her marriage might finally be over, Jane’s voice resonated through her like a high dangerous tone breaking glassware in her psyche. She could not speak. Her eyes burned. She breathed deeply, quickly, as if oxygen could calm her. “That seems … premature.”

  “Does it?”

  “I don’t know any longer.” She let Jane hand her the name on a paper napkin. She shoved it away in a compartment of her wallet.

  Jane tilted her head. “Do you want me to go down to New York with you?”

  “Would you do that for me?”

  “Of course. I’d rather not, I won’t lie, but if you need backup and you want to confront him and the live-in, I’m your second.”

  Leila was moved. “Thank you. Right now, I don’t think I want to do that. I can see no advantage to operating on her turf—or his. The longer he stays, the more meaningful this separation becomes, but I am not in the mood to go and plead with him.”

  Saturday Leila met Zak for an early lunch in Sandwich, just before they were to go to the Barnstable House of Correction to see Sam. Leila was familiar with the building and the protocols, since Becky was upstairs in the same jail, but Zak looked pinched, nervous. “Are you regretting letting me come?”

  “I’m apprehensive, but I always get this way when I have to go into jail. I can’t help imagining what it must be like for him to be shut up there.”

  She nodded, understanding exactly what he meant. “I can feel my blood pressure rising whenever I go through the cage into the jail proper.”

  “It’s different for white-collar criminals. Business criminals get stored in sort of golf-green facilities. I visited one when someone I knew in L.A. got sent up for pirating tapes.”

  He was picking at his food. She was finding him to be a more likable control freak than he had seemed at first, but still someone who suffered from twenty sorts of anxiety in the course of a day. “Why did you leave L.A.?”

  “I have four standard answers to that, but the truth is, I’m not prepared to tell you yet.”

  “We don’t know each other well enough?”

  “Right.”

  “Why don’t I get one of the standard answers?”

  “I thought we were trying to be truthful in this mess. That’s the only way we can proceed together.”

  “Amen.”

  “Where’s your husband? He never seems to be around.”

  “In New York. He had a play open just before Thanksgiving.”

  “So he must be coming back soon.”

  Truth, mmm. She pondered truth in silence. Perhaps saying woul
d make it less potent, less painful. “He’s having an affair with an actress in the play, and she’s carrying his child. That was what I learned Thanksgiving.”

  “Oh.” He stole a series of glances at her. “It’s starting to snow.”

  “I hope we aren’t in for a storm.”

  “They said flurries as I left the house.” He cleared his throat. “He told you about the affair?”

  “He wrote a note and left it on my bed. But I discovered about the pregnancy myself.”

  “Oof.” He shook his head. Again he was silent for perhaps five minutes. She was not feeling enormously talkative herself. “You sound as if you mind as much as I would.”

  “I’m furious. I don’t know how to go on from this. I don’t know if he wants to. I don’t know if I want to.”

  “You know what would be novel? If we were truthful with each other. Something unheard of nowadays among friends or acquaintances, heresy between men and women. We wouldn’t have to let anyone know. We could simply be quietly truthful.”

  “That takes trust,” she said.

  “But we aren’t really in each other’s life. We work in our little spheres. Maybe while we’re trying to make sense out of this rent in the social fabric, this murder, this media-inflated scandal, we can share what we see. I suspect you don’t have this habit with your husband, for instance?”

  “Once we did. Long ago. Are you truthful with your girlfriend?”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend. We better get going. We can leave your car here and go in mine.” He drove off slowly as the snow thickened, pelting down. The day was dark grey, dim as if they were inside some enormous ill-lit room. “I haven’t let anybody far into my life in a long time. I have friends who visit now and then. Friends I spend a night with in New York or Boston.”

  “I have friends too, but they’re women. My best woman friend died two months ago of breast cancer. I’m still missing her every day.”

  His voice grew so soft she had to lean toward him as he drove to hear what he was saying. “I left L.A. after the fire. It was a sudden canyon fire that bore down. When I could get into the canyon, the bodies of my wife and my baby daughter were found in the house. So was the body of another musician. A man. The au pair girl had been told to take the afternoon off.”

  “But if your wife was a musician, maybe they were rehearsing.”

  “They died of smoke inhalation. They were both naked.”

  “And you didn’t know before?”

  “I didn’t know. I didn’t even suspect. I was a fucking idiot.”

  “If you trust someone, why would you suspect her? If you don’t trust, then it’s over.” She listened to what she had said and felt desolation wash through her. More than half her life. She was striking off onto a grey foggy plain alone. “We’re both gloomy types at the moment. I didn’t used to be.”

  “Me neither. Believe it or not, I was perceived as easygoing. I wasn’t always mad as Chicken Little, not until my sky did fall.”

  “Now it’s fallen twice.”

  “I didn’t even live anyplace for five years after the fire. I did a stint being the vet at dog and cat shows. I shilled for a pet food manufacturer. I filled in for vacationing vets. I lived in Crete one winter and one spring in Provence, writing my dog book. When my mother died I came back here, spent a couple of weeks, moved my stuff in and took off again. It wasn’t until Mike had his heart attack that I really moved into my family’s house and stopped running. I started my practice. That nailed me down.”

  “You feel responsible for Cathy and Sam.”

  “I identify too much with Sam, that’s my problem. I see myself in him—the adolescent nerd, oversensitive, overimaginative, living in fantasy. One of my fantasies was that some wise sexy older woman would take me in hand and teach me all about life and love. Maybe I feel guilty because Sam got his older woman, and look what he learned.”

  “Can you see Sam accurately? Mightn’t your identification get in the way?”

  They emerged from the grey box. The snow thinned and they could see all around again. They were still going slowly because here it had snowed several inches. Five cars ahead a snowplow lumbered along, a tail of vehicles behind it.

  “Tell me about your son,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine we’re the same age and you have a son in college. My daughter would be ten. You got married much younger than I did.”

  “Nick was my college sweetheart. David. Well, he’s at Cal Tech now.…” She described David, she felt accurately, but also with her natural partiality. She finished the description, “I’m wondering if Sam will remind me of him in person as much as he does when Cathy and you talk about him.”

  Zak saw his nephew first as she sat in the grim waiting room; she was called as he came out. She went in nervously, with far more anxiety than she had felt before Becky. She feared, what? That Sam somehow would be too much like David? He was shorter than David but more muscular. In the photographs, he had looked slighter. Perhaps he had been weight training or filled out.

  His skin had an unhealthy jail pallor—bad air, little exercise, bad food, anxiety early and late. He squinted slightly as if the light hurt his eyes, staring at her warily. “Mom spoke about you. I guess it’s okay that Uncle Zak finally agreed you could come, although I don’t know what good it can do.” He whined a little. He sat limply, his muscles turning to water, his spine dissolving.

  She did pity him. He was a good-looking boy in a gentle puppy mode. His hair was curly, like Zak’s, dark brown. His eyes were hazel, bloodshot now, clashing with the greenish brown. It gave him a wild, slightly alien look. His nose was sharp but well modeled. He had once had acne, visible in the roughness of his cheeks, but he had already grown out of it. He looked slightly elfish, she decided. He gave her a tentative smile. “I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t even know who I am. I remember my mother, I remember Zak, I remember school, but it’s as if I’m looking at it all from the top of a high mountain, and everything is tiny and miles away, you see?”

  “Being held here is making you confused about who you are?”

  “Reading about myself in the papers, watching them talk about me on TV. Watching them talk about Becky. We’re villains in a soap opera, see? It’s all there on the television, and I keep staring at it to find out who I really am. But it’s like a movie about somebody else. I get scared sometimes that maybe I’m going crazy in here.” He was watching to see how that went over.

  She wasn’t going to get involved in his riff about going crazy. “Do you love Becky, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I was crazy about her, you know? She was everything to me. At first I felt like I’d made her up, like she was the best dream I ever had.”

  “Do you still feel that way?”

  “I barely remember her. The TV gets in the way, you know? We haven’t seen each other alone for weeks. We haven’t even been in the same room since the arraignment. Our cases were separated early—”

  “Wasn’t that your folks’ idea?”

  He nodded. He had a loose, rather heavy way of nodding, as if saying, sure, sure, sure. “Zak got me a lawyer he says is good. Now we don’t even have the same lawyers.”

  He kept eye contact all the while he was speaking. He stared into her eyes. It was disconcerting and uncomfortable. Probably he had been told to do that by his lawyers, but it distracted her, it made her need to look away, and then to feel as if she had lost some minor contest. She would have liked to beg him to be more natural, but there was nothing normal about his situation. He was saying, “I read everything in the papers about us. Maybe if I read what everybody says, finally I’ll understand it.”

  “What are you trying to understand?”

  He visibly recoiled, squinted again. “Oh, just the whole thing. You know.”

  “Not really. I’m trying to understand it too, but you know more about it than I do.” She was careful not to sound as if she assumed his guilt.

  “Do you think I did
it?” He asked point blank, as if reading through her careful phrasing.

  “This is the first time we’ve met. I reserve judgment until I know Becky and I know you well enough so there’s some basis for me to believe in your guilt or innocence. As it is, I put the media to one side and I try to see things freshly. I try to look at you as if I knew nothing about you, and you were a friend of my son’s.”

  “Cathy, my mom, thinks because you’re the mother of a boy my age, you’ll be sympathetic.”

  “She’s right, of course.”

  “You saw Becky, Mom said. What did you think of her?”

  “I don’t know her well enough yet.… I was wondering, how did you happen to join the theater group?”

  “My high school teacher thought it was something I’d like. Budget cuts made the school drop the senior play. I think a lot of guys who have trouble talking to girls like to have a role to play, you know? I was brave on the stage. In class, at parties, I was totally scared to death of making a fool of myself. Up on the stage, I’m fearless. Like I can do a pratfall or kiss the girl and no problem.”

  Here he was in jail, worrying about being too shy. “And Becky was in the theater group?”

  “She joined it six months after I did. We were both gofers at first. I helped with props and she worked on costumes and we did walk-ons. I remember playing somebody’s grandfather in a white wig. It was totally ridiculous. But they started to give us parts finally.” He started an inventory of all the parts he had played in various old chestnuts and Broadway plays his group had put on. She felt a sense of relief that she had not had to watch any of them, but she maintained an air of bright interest.

  Talking about his time in the theater company, he was relaxed, animated, sometimes almost funny. He seemed a bright, sensitive seventeen-year-old, not one who could have bludgeoned his girlfriend’s husband to death. She studied the two images and they did not balance. Not yet. He wanted to please her, to charm her. It was second nature to him to try to be liked. In mid-sentence, he would pause, staring to read how she was liking him. Adolescent anxiety cubed.