The Longings of Women

by Marge Piercy

Cautiously, she had begun dressing a little racier after work. To go to his parents, she dressed much as she did in the office, but when they went out to a movie or to eat, when they double-dated with Chris and his current girlfriend, when, rarely, they were invited to a party, then she put on one of two sexy outfits she had, one all black, one purple and silver.

  She always wanted to stay longer than Terry did. She liked to dance, she liked to flirt, she loved the sense of being watched. Terry hated all that. He would say, “You were making eyes at Roz’s husband, you were! Everybody was looking at you when you were dancing with Jack.”

  Why wouldn’t he want people to look at her? “They just think I’m a good dancer.”

  “They just think you were acting like a slut.”

  “How dare you say that to me? I’ve never even kissed another man since we started going out!”

  “I don’t like the way you act sometimes. You get wild. Don’t you see how people look at you when you dance that way?”

  It was just the way the girls danced in the videos, the best imitation she could do. “Nobody but you thinks there’s anything wrong with the way I dance. A lot of people tell me I’m a good dancer.”

  “If my mother ever saw you, she’d pass out.”

  “Have you ever seen your mother dance? Hardly. She couldn’t dance if someone poured boiling oil on her toes.”

  If only she could go to parties, and he could stay home and watch TV, they’d both be happy. She didn’t want any of those guys. She just wanted to have a good time and be watched, be admired. Too much of the time, she was just part of the furniture, at work and at home.

  She never left off watching for an opportunity to get into the camera’s eye. She considered trying to start her own program. When she came up with an idea (I could teach adolescents how to put on makeup: we could call it, “The Eyes Have It”), she could tell that her boss did not listen. Sure, he’d say, how’s that letter to restaurants going? She remembered all the hours Sylvie and she had spent trying on faces before the mirror in Sylvie’s mother’s room. She knew that teenage girls would love a program like that, and she’d be the perfect hostess. She’d interview hairstylists and manicurists and give beauty tips, and every week her sister Belle would come on the program and do a makeover.

  In the condo, most couples who became friends had kids the same age. The Higginses were a little older than Terry and Becky, but after they all went out to Chinese one night and the husband kept staring at Becky, the wife stopped being friendly. Holly and Brad Reicher lived next door, but she was a flight attendant and very superior acting.

  There was an old lady just under them who was really sweet. Her husband was dead and Helen Coreggio lived with her dog. Helen had been a bank teller, but her passion was a community theater group, the Canal Players. Once in a while she acted a part, but mostly she made their costumes. She said it got her out of the house and gave her a whole group of lively people to be with.

  Becky felt Mrs. Coreggio, who told her very quickly to call her Helen, really liked her. Helen kept telling her she was cute as a button and she was smart as a whip. Helen did not like Terry because he complained about the dog. Helen was crazy about her dog, Florrie, and claimed the dog had saved her life at the beach once, although the story was different each time Helen told it. Florrie was part collie and part Great Dane.

  Helen had children and grandchildren, but they were scattered. Florrie was right there beating her tail on the floor and following every gesture Helen made with her great brown eyes. She was a big gentle dog, but she did bark whenever anyone moved in the halls. Becky could understand the appeal of Florrie for Helen: who wouldn’t want to be looked at that way, gazed at, every gesture studied? Florrie thought Helen the most gorgeous creature in the world.

  Becky only wished Terry would look at her that way, at least on weekends. But she was his old lady. “You’re lucky,” she’d hear him tell Chris. “You got it made. Nothing to worry about, nothing you have to do, nothing you’re responsible for. Don’t screw up. Just enjoy what you got, because it’s the best time in life. Once you get hooked, once you’re hitched, it’s gone forever.”

  She felt furious when she overheard him, but she wasn’t supposed to be eavesdropping, and what could she say? She had taken advantage of a fight with his parents to get him to marry her. She wasn’t overjoyed with their life, but at least they had a clean spacious sunny condo of their own. She loved it She bought dried flowers like Mrs. Burgess had and put them in two glass vases they had received as wedding presents. They had dishes that matched, they had a kitchen with tiles and appliances she kept without a fingerprint The bathroom was sanctified by cleanliness and smelled of pine disinfectant, aftershave and lilac bath gel. Even their towels were sets. The bathroom rug was fluffy and spotless.

  Every morning she woke and looked at the beautiful unmarred ceiling and the curtains with the blue and white pattern of perky sailboats, and she sighed with pleasure. Every evening after a day at work, she tried to do one good thing for this precious sanctuary from noise and dirt and squalor. She kept the windows and mirrors clear. She scrubbed the burners and placed over the heating coils pretty covers with daisies. No matter if Mrs. Burgess peeked in her drawers and in her corners, never did she find dust bunnies. I am a good wife, Becky told herself, and he doesn’t appreciate me.

  Helen appreciated. Helen told her she was one in a million, just the kind of wife she herself had been, but her husband, bless his sweet soul, had adored her. “We always had love, you know what I mean? I mean loving, you know?”

  Oh, they had sex on the weekend, hardly ever during the week any longer. It was fast and perfunctory. He barely touched her there anymore before he pushed in. She didn’t feel special to him. She was convenient. She was afraid to ask him if he was sorry he had married her, for fear he would tell her the truth, that he would rather be back in his parents’ home throwing his socks on the floor and having everything done for him just the way he thought it ought to be. They owed money on Visa and MasterCard and Diners Club. They were paying Sears for the blinds on time. Her car that had been his needed a brake job and new tires. The condo had a hefty maintenance fee, and their electric bills were scary.

  Sometimes she had nightmares that he left her, and she would wake up shaking. She would be wandering around the streets looking for her home, and she would not find it. She would be lost, shut out. She would know that someone had promised to love her, but that he had stopped and he had gone away and somehow he had taken their home with him. She was alone and she tasted sharp and bitter despair like ammonia in her throat. She did not tell him those dreams, for fear she would put ideas in his head.

  She asked her mama, “Did you ever worry about Papa leaving you?”

  “All women do. Men up and go, it’s their nature to be restless. Worrying don’t help. You should pray to God. A family is the best hold on a man.”

  Helen was more helpful. “Inertia is your best friend. He’s married to you, it takes effort to get unmarried. People are mostly kind of stupid, Becky. They get married, and then two years later, they say, Hey, I’m not single any longer. I got to support a household. I have to shop and cook and clean and worry about taxes. Then they have a baby, and they say, Hey, this is more work than I thought. I had the baby already last month and this month here I am still at it full-time, taking care of the baby. What happened to my life?”

  “I don’t really want a baby, particularly,” Becky said softly. It wasn’t a popular thing to say.

  “Why should you? A smart pretty young woman, you ought to be free to seize opportunities. I see you have ambition. You have dreams. Most people just have routines. You keep your chin up and know I’m rooting for you.” Helen was knitting her a long pale blue tunic sweater.

  Terry thought it was weird that she was friends with Helen. “Hanging around with an old lady, decrepit enough to be your grandma. That’s creepy.”

  “I like her. In my family, we all lived together. S
he’s interesting.”

  “What’s interesting about an old lady with a dog barking all the time? Don’t hold up your family like some kind of ideal. Two and three kids sleeping in one bed—that’s sick.”

  “If we’d had the money, every one of us would have had her own bed and her own room. My parents aren’t like yours—they don’t dole out what they have and expect you to grovel for it. What they have, they give—generously.”

  “We’re living in a condo my parents signed for. I drive a car they signed for. They bought the bed we sleep in. What did your parents ever do for us? Send some flounder and scallops by with Tommy? Give me a break.”

  To Helen she said, “I feel he’s annoyed with me all the time. Like every morning I wake up and think, Oh, what a beautiful place this is to be, and every morning he wakes up and thinks, How the hell did I end up here with her? I’m afraid to say what I think half the time because I feel things with him are just tentative. Like he’s still not sure he should have married me.”

  “After all this time? It’s over two years, isn’t it?”

  Florrie put her huge head on Becky’s knee and whapped her salami of a tail on the floor. “I try to think of things we can do together. But he doesn’t have any interest in playing sports with me. When I try to watch a football or basketball or hockey game with him, he gets irritated when I start asking him to explain. Sometimes I sit there with the paper and I read him possibility after possibility. I say, Let’s go to a play, let’s go to a dinner theater, let’s go visit Newport and see the old mansions, let’s go dancing at that club by the pier, let’s go to New York for the weekend, they’re advertising a really good weekend rate in this hotel.”

  “You need to get out of the house yourself. You need some time apart. He never wonders for five minutes where you are. There’s no mystery in that. You make yourself boring by always being underfoot.”

  “I do go see my family a couple times a week. He never comes.”

  “But where’s the mystery, Becky? He knows your family. He despises your family—”

  “It’s not fair. They work twice as hard as his parents, and they get so little!”

  “You need to do something for you. Why don’t you come with me to the Canal? You’d love it.” The Canal Theater Company.

  “Plays seem kind of old-fashioned to me.”

  “You’d get out of the house, meet some people, have a good time. You’d get practice performing, even if you only do tiny walk-on parts. It gives you confidence.”

  “I’ll think about it.” Becky promised without conviction. She didn’t see how putting on old plays was going to revive her marriage. She thought her marriage was like Nana’s garden when she lay dying, little pale lettuce plants choked by jungles of rampant weeds. Becky hardly knew where to begin to clear out the weeds.

  She sat at her kitchen table on Saturday morning before Terry was up and asked herself what could be wrong. She had most of what she had desperately wanted. She took letterhead she had swiped from the office and made a list. What I Have she wrote, then crossed that out and put Becky’s Assets.

  1. The right kind of husband.

  2. A beautiful apartment.

  3. Some good furniture.

  4. A middle-class-type job.

  Then she made a list of all the new pieces of clothing she had bought, the scarves she had been given, the jewelry, all their wedding presents. She managed to cover three sheets of paper. What was missing? How could she be unhappy?

  THIRTY-THREE

  Leila

  “Vronsky, you’re getting fat,” Leila said as he lay on her chest. “You need more exercise.”

  “Mrrrmph,” he answered, kneading the space between her breasts.

  “What should I do about Nick?” She glanced toward the bedside table. In the back of her appointment calendar, she had the names and phone numbers of three divorce lawyers. She had called none of them. What did she want? The calendar rolled back. What could she have? Probably Nick part-time. Her husband having a baby with a young woman was not a situation she was prepared to ignore. They were essentially separated. He started teaching in January. Any moment he could appear and expect their life to continue and herself to act out ignorant complaisance; or he could appear and ask for a divorce. What she had to get straightened out was what she wanted: nothing she could have, surely, but of all the rotten options, which was the least unappealing?

  But how did anyone just end a twenty-four-year marriage? How could she forget a man who had been the spine of her life? But she had formed her own center, and around her moved the concentric circles of her work, her colleagues and students, her research and writing, her informants, her friends. In recent years, Nick and she had not tended to form new friendships as a couple, but individually at work. Gradually, perhaps they had been letting go.

  She still hoped for a miracle. Nick bounding back saying it had all been a mistake: Sheryl wasn’t pregnant, he had been a fool, and he was ready to settle down to an intimate and loving middle age. She grinned at Vronsky, whose yellow eyes blinked back. “Fat chance, huh? I know Jane’s right, but I can’t seem to do anything useful about the situation.”

  Becky had been crying. It was the first time Leila had seen her frayed. “My lawyer told me Sam is saying I seduced him into killing Terry. He’s plea-bargaining. They’ll knock his charges down to get me. It’s me they want, and they’ll promise him anything.”

  “So you feel he’s turned on you.”

  “Like a worm.” Tears started slowly from the corner of her eye, one at a time, which she attempted to snuffle back and then scrubbed dry with her knuckle, roughly. Becky seemed ashamed of crying.

  “That must be devastating.”

  “I loved him! I believed that he loved me. I really loved him. How can he turn and try to help them keep me in this disgusting dismal place?”

  “You feel you trusted him and he’s betrayed you.”

  Becky nodded fiercely. “I know so well what that feels like, so damned well. Excuse my language.”

  Leila realized that Becky never swore. To say “damned” was a major breach of her own self-imposed rules. She was soft-spoken and well-spoken, avoiding what she would probably call vulgar expressions. But today she had been wounded. “Why do you say you know what betrayal feels like?”

  “Let’s just say, it’s not the first time I ever had the experience.”

  “In your marriage?”

  “In every part of my life.” Becky shrugged. “Look at me, waving my hands, shrugging my shoulders. I spent years with Terry learning to sit still and now here I am, acting like a peasant again, as his mother would say.”

  Leila understood that Becky had changed the subject, but also had given her a glimpse of old pain. “Was Terry the faithful type?” Leila asked as if offhand.

  Becky shrugged. “Let’s say the other woman in his life all the time we were together was his mother. She was competition enough.”

  “In what way?”

  “Haven’t you seen her on television? She’d like me fried. She’d like me hanged and quartered. She’d like to do it herself.”

  “What did she have against you?”

  “You mean, before she decided I murdered her son? She thought I was déclassé. We’re all Catholics, so it wasn’t that. We’re all the same kind of Catholics: make the kids go to catechism and get confirmed. Go to Mass on Christmas and Good Friday and Easter and then again when you get into some kind of trouble. Otherwise you’re on your own.”

  “What was it then?”

  “My being from a Portuguese family. I mean, it’s not like I know ten words of Portuguese. It’s not like Terry has some kind of high culture. So he went to Falmouth Academy, so what? We both went to college. The reality was, him and me and all the rest of us, we’re not Portuguese or Irish or whatever, we’re all the children of television. That was my babysitter. That’s who taught me about the world. So how was Terry better than me?”

  “You’re bright,
Becky. It’s interesting to talk with you.”

  Becky laughed sharply, a sound like a slap. “I am bright. And I’m not supposed to be. I’m supposed to be stupid. A lot of the time the people around me just haven’t noticed.”

  “Was Terry bright?”

  “I never considered he might not be before I married him. I assumed he was because I thought anybody who dealt with computers had to be smart.”

  “But later on, you were disappointed?”

  “Men are always disappointing, aren’t they?” Becky made a sour face and turned half away.

  “Sam’s supposed to be intelligent. Is he?”

  “He’s so smart, he’s trying to kill me. I suppose if he confessed to killing Terry, he must have done it. But now he’s going to pretend I had some part in it. He’s turned on me. I can’t believe he’d rob me. I always thought that kid did it—Gene, the friend of his who was caught selling my TV and VCR.” Becky clamped down. She had arrived at a story and an explanation she would polish at her leisure. Leila let her talk on, nodding and clucking, aware she was going to get no further pushing Becky today.

  As soon as she got home, she called Zak. “I saw Becky. She told me Sam has confessed and his lawyer is plea-bargaining for him.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this on the phone. Would you come to supper?”

  “It’s five-thirty already. I can’t drive two hours there and two hours back tonight, and I have a class tomorrow.”

  “What time?”

  “I have a ten, an eleven and a two.”

  “All right, drive out after the two o’clock. I’ll know more by then anyhow. I’m in a state of shock. Cathy was hysterical. Fortunately her boyfriend arrived and sat on her. She was making so much noise, there was no space for me to have a reaction. But now it’s hit me. Sam really did kill Terrence Burgess.”

  “Why do you want me to come?”

  “I need to make sense out of this. Don’t you?”

  “But can I help? Do you trust me now?”

  “You seem to me somehow rock-bottom sensible—”