The Longings of Women

by Marge Piercy

  “Thanks. That’s me. Rock-bottom sensible.”

  “Do you think that’s an unattractive trait? I want you to bring your pragmatic nature and your pleasant self out here. I feel crazy. I feel as if all the people I think I know in my life turn into ax murderers or secret adulterers. I’m in a state of real paranoia. Will you come?”

  “I’ll come.” Yet after the phone call, she felt strange. She felt as if she were doing something illicit. He was an informant like any other. Going to see him was not different from going to see Cathy. She had acquired this circle of more-than-acquaintances. She was still thinking about Zak when Cathy called. Leila was on the phone with her for forty minutes calming her down. Only after Leila had said good night did she realize she had never told Cathy she was going to have supper with Zak. Again she had the faint sense of doing something a little disreputable.

  Her phone continued to ring as soon as she hung up. Jane called to tell her about an argument she had had with a colleague. As soon as they finished their analysis and strategy session, Emily took the phone. “Leila, I feel funny telling you this, but do you know your husband is in town? Janie thought you didn’t.”

  “He’s in New York.”

  “I saw him in Harvard Square this morning. He was eating breakfast with a young woman in the Charles Hotel. That’s a place I take the boys when we’re in the Square and they have to pee. I swear it was him.”

  “Thank you.” Numbly she sat. Numbly she dialed the Charles Hotel. “May I speak to Sheryl Waters? She’s a guest.”

  “That’s room 440. I’ll ring it for you.”

  The operator came back on the line. “There’s no answer. Would you like to leave a message?”

  “Please. Tell them that Leila called. I’ll spell that for you.”

  At seven-thirty, her marriage was over. He was back but not with her. It was decided. She felt half-numb with shock. A great amputation had been performed, but the pain had not begun. She waited for the anesthetic to wear off.

  She was on the phone with her mother—Phyllis often called Sunday night—when she heard the door unlock. “Mother, I have to get off now. I think Nick just walked in.”

  “You haven’t had the locks changed?”

  “Not yet, Mother. I’ll be talking to you.”

  “You call me back after he leaves. If it isn’t too late. We go to bed by ten Sunday night. And get a locksmith tomorrow.”

  After he leaves. After he returns to Sheryl. She would not cry. She sat at the phone as he called her name rather tentatively from below.

  She came down the steps slowly, wishing she had had time to check her appearance. She was still dressed in her respectable visiting-prison clothes, for her hours on the phone had kept her from changing. Just as well, for she would simply have got into her nightgown and bathrobe and put her feet up. “Hello, Nick,” she said coolly. “You got my message.”

  “I was just in town for a lightning visit. The play closed.”

  “Too bad,” she said without inflection. “I’m sure it was a disappointment to you.”

  He looked sheepish, harried. “I should have stuck to my guns about New York. All I did was breach my own principles and give them a chance to go after me.” He flung his overcoat on a chair.

  She did not bother answering. She walked past him where he stood in the center of the living room and took a seat in an armchair. Vronsky jumped into her lap. “So you’ve brought Sheryl to Cambridge.”

  His face froze up and for a moment she could feel him grappling with the desire to lie. String her along. Then he sighed and let it all go. “I can’t abandon her. She’s out of work. She’s pregnant. She’s just a kid really.”

  She looked at him and she found she had great difficulty speaking at all. She could not seem to make words come out of her mouth. All the blood in her body was rising in a great hot wave to her head. One minute she was as cold as a granite slab; the next minute, she was cooking. Her brain seemed to be bubbling. Words were as distant to her as blocks of stone carved with runes she could not read. Vronsky lashed his tail to and fro. Perhaps her pheromones scared him. He jumped down and went to stand in the middle of the floor, howling.

  “Are you annoyed? You didn’t return my calls … I figured you understood I have to straighten things out. She wants the baby, but she doesn’t see what’s involved. I can’t just dump her in New York without a job and with no means of support.” He frowned at Vronsky. “What’s wrong with that cat?”

  She could see Nick’s mouth moving and his eyes fixed on her. She realized that the thing in her, the force that was rising like hot thick liquid, like lava in her body, rising up to her brain, was rage. She was standing. She was making a noise. It was not words. It was a sound like a red banner coming from her mouth. Her hand closed on a vase on the coffee table, a vase of boughten chrysanthemums, and the vase was flying through the air. It hit his shoulder with a loud thwack. Flowers and water ran down his body. The vase fell on the floor and broke.

  “Jesus! You could have killed me.” He was rubbing his shoulder. “You hurt me. You really hurt me.”

  “Good! I wanted to.” Now she could talk. Her throat was loosened.

  He backed away, eying her warily. “What do you mean, throwing objects around like a kid in a temper tantrum?”

  “Get out. You belong in the hotel with your pregnant actress.”

  “Leila, I’m ashamed of you. You’re falling apart. You’re out of control. You look crazy, do you understand that?”

  “Get out of my house.”

  “It isn’t your house.”

  “You don’t live here any longer. You left.”

  “Leila, you’re overreacting. I’m embarrassed, frankly. What I’ve always admired about you is that you’ve been a mature, stable woman—”

  “Rock-bottom sensible. The bottom just melted. Rock melts if it gets hot enough. You didn’t know that.”

  “Are you drunk? Have you been drinking this evening? Have you been sitting alone here night after night drinking?”

  “I haven’t been alone night after night.”

  “Are you telling me you have a boyfriend? I don’t believe it This is a cheap attempt to make me jealous.”

  “Jump to conclusions on your own time. I told you to get out and I mean it. I’ll throw things until you leave.” She looked around for something to grab. A fat book?

  “Don’t bother.” He put on his coat, backing toward the door. “I’ve never seen you so out of control. You’ve lost it! You can cool down and then we’ll talk. But I’ll tell you, Leila, acting crazy and violent may impress your academic friends with how upset you are. It just turns me off. I hate bad acting.” He slammed the door.

  Slowly Vronsky came out from under the coffee table and glared at her. Well, is it over? he seemed to be asking.

  “It’s over. It’s all over.” Now she did cry, lying facedown on the couch. She cried and cried, for all the years gone, for the love that had burned up entirely, leaving only a charred smell, unpleasant, rank. Before she went to her ten o’clock class, she must make an appointment with one of the divorce lawyers. She realized not only was her marriage over, but she did not even particularly like Nick. They had become only an irritant to each other.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Becky

  One evening in March as Becky and Terry were eating pizza and watching the news, she bit down and her cheek lit up and she screamed. The pizza fell from her hand and she rose, knocking her chair over backward. Terry gaped at her. “Are you choking?”

  If she was, she’d be dead, for all he was doing about it “Something’s wrong with me.” She realized it was her tooth, although the whole left side of her face throbbed.

  It turned out to require a root canal, which cost four hundred dollars and used up four afternoons. The dentist also found three more cavities. She was shocked by the rebellion of her body. Would she be toothless soon like Mama? Mama had worn ill-fitting dentures for ten years. Becky began brushing he
r teeth zealously and even flossed. The idea of her beautiful white teeth crumbling away appalled her. Who would want a woman who kept her teeth in a glass by the bed? It was well into April before she was free of the dentist.

  I’m getting older, she thought, and my life is standing still. I’m losing it. I’ve got to seize my life and do something. She tried to talk to Sylvie, who advised her to have a baby. She talked to Mama, who told her to pray and trust in God. She talked to Tommy, who said, “How about a vacation? Everybody gets dragged out. We all got bad teeth, anyhow. It runs in the family. Find some kind of deal on a vacation. I hate to see my favorite sis depressed.”

  She stopped at the travel agent’s in a mall near her office and grabbed brochures of Jamaica, Trinidad, Grenada, the Virgin Islands. When she got home, before she could speak, she took note of Terry’s slump dead in the middle of the couch. “What’s wrong, honey?” she asked cautiously. The last time he’d been so down had been when the Celtics had got knocked out of the NBA finals.

  “I got my pink slip today. In two weeks, I’m history there. They’re down-sizing.”

  “You lost your job?”

  “Isn’t that what I said? We owe money on all the crap in here. We have payments that will use up our savings in two months.”

  She sat down and took his limp hand in hers. “You’ll get another job. You’re a bright man with a good education. You can find something better.”

  “In this job market? Every day I’ve said to myself, how lucky I am to have a job at all. And now it’s gone.”

  “But there are lots of computer companies. Surely one of them will be glad to hire you. You just have to get out and get your resumé around.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.”

  It turned out Terry was right She began to understand he had minimal training. He had taken the job straight from college, and that was the sum of his experience: he had installed commercial systems, both hardware and software, at small companies around the area. He had never really done programming or design. There was a lot of competition for the kind of job he was prepared for, because anyone better trained could do that easily; and there were many better trained and more experienced people in his field who had been thrown out of work. When the installation base was rapidly expanding, jobs such as his were being created weekly. No more.

  He had fifty resumés run off. He sent them out, he carried them around, he left them in offices. He had one interview the second week, two the third and then no more for two weeks. His energy dissipated. He did not get up when she did. He stayed in bed, annoyed if she made too much noise. Usually he was home when she got home, already impatient for supper. Sometimes he was out with Chris or Lyle.

  Mr. Burgess played golf and began to bring Terry to his club twice a week, so that Terry would meet someone who might hire him. Terry now spent an increasing amount of time improving his golf, presumably to impress some mythical businessman who would hire him to install computers on the basis of his golf swing. Becky had observed growing up how quickly men thrown out of a job could settle into routines that filled their days and evenings, leaving little time to hunt for a job they became rapidly convinced did not exist. She was worried. They were scraping bottom every month. They were getting by, but just barely.

  Terry always seemed to have money to spend on golf. She suspected his father was giving him a couple of twenties every time they got together, but since Terry did not tell her or put the money in the common household kitty, she could not prove it. She took to going quietly through his pants and removing a few dollars and some change whenever she picked his pants off the floor or a chair to hang them up or put them in the hamper.

  All of her salary was going to maintain the condo, buy food and pay bills. She could not even give Mama a little money. They were rapidly using up their savings. He had always been careless with money and never knew exactly what he had in his wallet—a fact that astonished her. When she was shopping, she ran a tab in her head. She never used a calculator; she had never owned one before the bank had given them a card-sized calculator when they had opened an account. Secretly she despised him for being sloppy with money when they were having such a hard time, much as she was coming to feel contempt because he could not go out and get a job. Other men had been thrown out of work, other men in the same condo complex, and they had found jobs.

  The neighbor who had angered his wife by flirting with Becky was laid off. He worked at Burger King for two months before he found a decent job managing a resort motel. Every man in her family had done odd jobs now and again. But Terry would not consider anything that wasn’t “in his field.”

  She sounded out the women at work. Two of them had been through long periods with a husband out of work. Gwen’s marriage had broken up. She had lost the house where they had lived, and she had been with her little boy in a tiny apartment ever since. Mary Lou got a pinched expression on her face. “It wasn’t so bad,” she said. “It was only a year. After a while we hardly talked. The worst part was, he kept getting mad. Screaming, yelling, hitting on me. I never saw him as a bad-tempered man before that year.”

  Just wait it out, Mary Lou said. Gwen came into her office the next morning. “I can tell you’re pretty fed up, the way I was. But remember, you lose it all when you get divorced. One day you got a house, a nice car, a closet full of clothes, you’re shopping for furniture and the newest gadgets. The day after the divorce, you’re in a rented slum, you have big bills to meet and you wear your clothes till they fall apart And you can’t see any way out Ever.”

  Mary Lou brought her a motivational tape her husband had used. On the way home, Becky listened to it It made her feel energized. She would do something for herself. She would confront her fears and make lists, and each day she would conquer one thing she had hesitated to tackle. She would grow stronger. She would accomplish her goals. Yes.

  She gave the tape to Terry at supper. “Are you serious? Chris and I used to make fun of people who played that stuff. I remember in my frat house, there was a guy who ate up that psycho-babble. He was always discovering his inner child, expanding his boundaries, all that shit. Come on, Becky, be real. Take that garbage back to the girls in the typing pool. I’m not stupid enough for those cheap psychologizing slogans to work on me.”

  “If you feel superior to anything or anyone who might help you, where will you find help?”

  “I don’t need ‘help.’ I need a frigging job. I have eighty resumés out I go to every interview I can wangle. I pursue every contact I have a crack at. Get off my back. I can’t create companies that don’t exist, and I can’t fix the economy single-handed. Although I bet you think you could.”

  He got up from the table where they were eating Stouffer’s frozen dinners and stomped out of the apartment, leaving her the dishes of course. She decided she would just leave them, the way he did. She went downstairs to Helen’s, to tell her woes to a sympathetic ear, but Helen was walking out the door. “I’m off to the Canal. The next production has an older woman, and I’m trying out for it tonight. Becky, why don’t you come along? Give it a chance.”

  Becky got into Helen’s car. Didn’t the tape say, If you don’t try new things, you’ll be stuck with the old things? Don’t lead a dust-collector life. Push on. She was pushing. If Terry was too smart to be smart, she wasn’t. She’d take all the help she could get: from Gwen and Mary Lou, advice; from the tape, energy and a checklist on her progress; from Helen, an escape from the marriage that was shredding under stress like a cheap blouse bought at the mall when she was too young to know about clothing. She would go with Helen and pretend to be someone else.

  The Canal Theater Company met in an old Masonic lodge that was underused. When the Masons met, the first Monday of every month, the theater group had to clean up for them. But then the building was theirs again. The honcho seemed to be a woman named Cecelia, about fifty and very lean, with henna red hair, long primitive earrings that jingled, a patchwork skirt that swept the d
usty floor. She was called Ce-Ce and was quite self-important. Becky did not take to her, but she set out to ingratiate herself. She fetched and carried. Then she tried out for the smallest female part in the new play they were casting, Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution. Becky was to be one of the jurors, as was Helen.

  It was a sizable cast. Becky was surprised, thinking they would do simple plays with only three or four characters, but Helen explained to her that the more people were in the play, the more people came. Everybody could coerce their family, their friends and lovers, neighbors and their co-workers into coming to see them play, even if all they saw was Susie in a wig pretending to be a maid.

  The cast ranged in age from Helen, the oldest, to a high school kid playing a cop. His teacher had the male lead. Helen was right, it was fun. They all kidded around. Ce-Ce was dramatic and called them frequently to order, but Becky observed she did not really mind if they horsed around. A pot of coffee stood on a hot plate, and people brought in cookies and soda and potato chips. Becky, who had been too angry at supper to eat, filled up on potato chips. Everybody flirted. Nobody’s spouse or significant other was around. Most of them were probably married, but this was time out She wondered if any of them really followed through or if it was all flirtation.

  Helen said on the way home that she would have to search the thrift stores for forties suits and dresses. Then there were the barristers’ wigs and gowns. Becky perceived that Helen liked best having to struggle and sweat over the costumes, because that made her feel important to the group. Helen liked to be in a play but did not get frequent opportunities. Becky did not care about her part, although she would have enjoyed getting dressed up in something sexy or outlandish.

  In the meantime, she would watch them all carefully and figure out how to make herself visible and important in the eyes of the other members of the company. She flirted a little with the high school teacher, Dick Berg, the male lead, but then she realized he had something going with the woman playing Romaine, a tall self-assured blonde who was married to an oncologist in Hyannis. They were always exchanging meaningful glances. When Becky left with Helen, she saw them kiss good night in the parking lot. A place for heavy flirtations, for a little fun, for stepping out of character and who would know?