The Longings of Women

by Marge Piercy

  The nurse’s station was perfunctorily decorated, a plate of Christmas cookies set out on the counter. Beverly sat up in the half-empty room. Two of the patients had been released in time for the holiday. None of the original women with whom Beverly had shared the ward were still there. The others had been discharged; different women had come in their place and left again. Beverly’s injuries had been serious, her condition bad, but they were also keeping her rather than discharge her to the street. Someone had taken an interest. A program had been found to cover her, but she was going to have to leave soon.

  Beverly was fiddling with her cropped grey hair, growing back where they had shaved her head. “They’re going to discharge her to Pine Street.”

  Mary nodded. She had worked on Mrs. Landsman to find a place for Beverly. “You can’t go on the streets the way you are. Better to stay in a shelter till the weather warms up. As long as they let you stay.”

  “She always managed. She’s tough. But she hates the noise and the prying. She remembers Pine Street in the old days. They took your stuff away at night. It’s all the time waiting in line. They took your soul away.”

  “I didn’t like it either,” Mary said. “But if I was injured, I’d do it till I was strong again. They say it’s nicer now.”

  Beverly loved the pants. Why could she do the right thing for her friend, but never for her daughter or her grandchildren? That night, lying on the Anzios’ couch, she kept thinking about Beverly leaving the hospital. It was one of the worst days of her life when she had to leave her little apartment. Not that it was so wonderful—she had been ashamed of it, not understanding how lucky she was to have a so-called studio apartment, no matter how noisy and dilapidated and scurrying with mice that fouled her food. B.U. had bought the building to turn into student housing.

  Her apartment and her job vanished together. She worked in a stationer’s shop in the same block, and the renovation threw the store out a couple of months before she was evicted. Teodoro’s Stationers could not find rent low enough so the marginal business could thrive. Mr. Teodoro was soon working at Stop & Shop, and she was running through her money in bottom-drawer motels.

  Before she had been evicted, it had become evident she could afford nothing that existed, and the wait for public housing was forever and a day. Finally they had thrown her few things on the sidewalk in a pitiful pile she had had to walk away from, carrying her two suitcases and her raincoat and winter coat, her quilt. She was too stunned, too numb to cry. She kept looking back at her table, her chair, her bed, her pots and dishes. What would become of her?

  There had always been neighborhoods of cheap rooming houses when she was growing up. When had they disappeared? Where did poor people live now? Everything she could find was beyond her income. She wrote to Cindy and she wrote to Jaime. Cindy sent her a letter full of advice on budgeting her income, a check for two hundred dollars and a long complaint about the cost of raising children in the Washington area. Two of her kids were in private schools. She simply did not have any discretionary income. What had happened to the settlement Daddy had given her?

  Given me, Mary thought. I earned every penny, and he never gave me a cent more than the nasty judge made him part with. Where did it go? To relocate here. To pay bills. To buy medical insurance, now lapsed because she could not make the payments. To buy a winter coat. To put down as a deposit on phone, electricity, rent. To fix her car, while she had been able to keep it running.

  Jaime put a twenty in an envelope and said he would send money whenever he could. The next month he sent another twenty. Nothing the next month. Then again. Once in a while he sent a twenty, always folded up neatly in a card with a joke on it. She forgave his failure to help her. Over the years he had probably given her more in his impulsive and disjointed way than Cindy with her lists and her excuses. And he had far less money to start with. Cindy made some money from her silly boutique, and her husband minted it.

  Every day for the next two months, Mary looked for a job, but jobs were like ex-husbands: they wanted someone young and slender. She had had friends in the building, but they were scattered. Several had gone back where they came from, moving in with relatives in Tennessee or Kansas. Three women had moved together into a winter rental on Revere Beach, where they let her use their phone. She got into the Y for three weeks, then her money ran out. She could not find a job, and soon she was down to her last ten dollars. She was frankly terrified.

  She had sold off her microwave, her jewelry, her good watch, her clock radio and most of her wardrobe. She had to winnow the artifacts of her life, the photos, the letters, the mementos. She threw away her old report cards and honors and diplomas. She tossed her wedding and divorce papers. Most of the mementos of her children she sent to Cindy and Jaime, keeping only a couple of photos. To Jaime she sent most of the photos of her parents, her grandparents, baby pictures, the record of her life. The letters she simply tore up.

  She ended up with what would fit on her back, into a small suitcase and into a large fabric carry-all she had used to take to the beach all her kids’ paraphernalia. On April 7 she walked out of the Y she had been calling home and into the city, with no idea what was going to become of her.

  She was on the streets and terrified. She had no idea what to do with herself, where to go, how to manage. In six months she had gone from being a woman with a job and a little apartment and all the normal wardrobe and items—clock radio, electric toothbrush, microwave—that she had taken for granted as props of any normal life, to being a woman with a small suitcase she lugged about with her and a large fabric carry-all. She did not know where to go to the bathroom. During the daytime hours, she used the public library bathroom or the bathrooms in the department stores.

  The first night she tried to sleep in a doorway, the suitcase was stolen. That simplified everything. It was the other street people who told her what to do. They thought she was funny, trying to sleep on the street in a peach-colored, satin down quilt she still had from her old life, carrying around a little pillow for her head.

  The first days on the street, she kept bursting into tears. She could not believe this was happening. She was becoming dirty. She smelled bad. Her clothes were beginning to fray, stiff with dirt and wrinkled from being slept in. She was Mary Ferguson Burke. She had gone to college. She had raised two children. She had entertained the assistant undersecretary of commerce. She had belonged to a country club. She had had an all-electric kitchen. She had been photographed with Cindy, both astride on bays, for an article in a local paper on summer activities. She had owned forty pairs of shoes and eight coats and a dozen cocktail dresses. Now she was sleeping in a cardboard box in an alley, wearing filthy rags and smelling like garbage.

  People would look at her and look away, they would stare through her. They would give her glances of disgust. She was a pile of dog shit on the pavement. She should be scraped off and put in a Dumpster. A younger Black woman named Samantha took her in tow. She had been hit by a car in an alley and walked stiff-legged, favoring her right side. She had lost half her teeth, but she still had a smile that made Mary feel warmed. Mary learned to stay away from her when she had not had a drink yet and again when she had too much, but in between, Samantha was kind and wanted to help. She decided Mary should try shelters and took her to the women’s side of the Pine Street Inn. Samantha preferred life on the streets because she was crazy in love with an alkie they called Sly. She took Mary to Morgan Memorial, showed her the shelters, soup kitchens and where to get off the streets to keep warm, where to get water, how to pee in alleys without being seen. “Remember, honey, everything you got to do is wrong. It’s against the law to sleep, to wash yourself, to pee, to take a shit. Everything you got to do, you can’t do it if the law see you. Now, I can’t pass no more. They know me. But you, you can still walk through a crowd, but you can’t go along shuffling. You got to pick up your head and look like one of them tight white women. Then you can pass and hang out without them hassling
you all the time. They like to beat on us. I can’t get by no more, but you can. You just got to try.”

  Samantha, dead of hypothermia three Januaries before. She had seen it on the evening news while camping in one of her clients’ houses. Samantha was the first Black friend she had ever had. Without her, she would not have made it.

  Even now the smells overwhelmed her: sweat, vomit, urine, dust, disinfectant, the smells from the big kitchen. Always twenty people were coughing every moment. Stand in line to get in the door. Stand in the ugly lobby waiting to get inside. Get in line for your foam cup, your paper plate, your utensils, your starchy supper. Get in line for your towel. Line up for a shower. Line up to get your bed for the night. Line up if you want a locker, but there’s a four-month waiting list. Get in line for your meds if they gave you tranks. Lots of the women were on Thorazine or something equally numbing or destructive. Stand in line to get clothes from the room, get a clean nightie.

  The beds were a foot apart and she slept on her purse and wallet. She could hear this one muttering, that one in some kind of withdrawal, the other just crying. She could hear and smell them all and she could guess what she must seem like to others.

  She could not let herself be pushed down into the faceless mass of “guests.” She was not an alcoholic, she did not use drugs, she had not been abused beyond the ability to function. She began to volunteer. She wanted to distinguish herself in the eyes of the staff from the helpless hopeless women around her. But it was hard. It was hard to remember that she had ever had a real life. At five A.M. they had to be up and by eight, they were out on the street again to pass the day until late afternoon.

  She had felt like a baggy body for which there was no room but this large storage bin. Many women were sick. Some were severely malnourished. Many had ulcerating sores on their legs or feet, sores that stank. It was not avoidable when a woman walked all day long on pavement in ill-fitting shoes and worse-fitting socks with holes in them.

  There was no privacy, no silence, no place she could call her own. Every night that she managed to get into the shelter, never certain because beds for women were limited, she never knew where she would sleep. Nothing belonged to her. No space was her own. She was called a “guest” but she was on sufferance. Act up and you were excluded. The staff had changing blacklists of women who were no longer allowed inside. Life and death in the winter and sometimes in warmer weather. Life on the streets killed you slow, but sometimes people or the weather saw that it happened a lot faster.

  She volunteered, she made herself useful, and the staff liked that. Soon she no longer smelled. She showered, she washed her hair. She began trying to get work again, but putting down the address of the shelter was iffy. Still, it was better than no address. She had been a secretary, she had sold in stores, she had been a cashier. She could find nothing. She looked far older than she had six months before. Her hair was scraggly and iron grey with an odd stain that had got into it one night when she slept on a grate.

  She took pains with her appearance, but it was difficult. There were only three little mirrors over the three wash basins for the whole facility. The light was dim. Still she put on makeup Saturday and went to see her old friends in Revere Beach. They were scared too. They had to be out of their rental by the end of May, and they had no idea where they were going. They asked her where she was living, and she said, with a friend. I just sleep on her couch—it’s temporary. They apologized and said they couldn’t offer her their couch as Gigi was sleeping on it. But Gigi cut her hair and gave her a home perm. It felt wonderful to be with people who remembered her, who did not know she was no longer a person but a statistic, one of the despised who were thrust from the table and the room.

  The shelter was a holding area to keep the women alive one more night. When she finally got a job with a cleaning service, she decided that she was rejoining the ranks of the living, however much stealth and subterfuge that took. She would hide like a mouse in the walls of the middle class. And she had.

  FORTY-TWO

  Becky

  On Saturday morning, Becky wished Terry a wonderful weekend, kissed him good-bye, telling him she was off to do the laundry. The day before she had switched cars with Sylvie. Becky had confided that she thought Terry might be having an affair, and she wanted to follow him and check it out. She had also borrowed a dark brown wig from Belle, saying it was for a joke at the office. With dark glasses and her wig, she was not afraid of Terry recognizing her. He was not the world’s most observant guy. She was half convinced that if she followed him in her own car, he would not notice. Still, she enjoyed taking the precautions. It made her feel as if she were in a TV program about a woman detective, tough, able, efficient, with a gun in her glove compartment. Papa had a shotgun Joey used to take when he hunted rabbits. For years Papa kept an illegal .22 semiautomatic in his boat, but when the Coast Guard started getting excited about fishing boats and drugs and pulling searches, he had brought it home and kept it beside his bed in the end table. She had never used a gun. Maybe she’d ask Tommy to show her how.

  She waited in Sylvie’s car. She was betting he would turn right toward the Sound. He did. If he was heading for his parents’ house, she would turn around. At the second light he turned left, toward his parents, and she shrugged. She would follow a bit farther. Maybe Cerissa/Heather was a figment of Becky’s guilty imagination.

  Then instead of going straight ahead, he turned off north. This was not the way to his parents. She followed him through two more turns into a development of winding streets with baby trees shivering alongside the curb before largish houses a little close to each other. She pulled over and watched him go another two blocks. Then she drove on, slowly. He was parked in the driveway of a house surrounded by shrubbery that must have been hauled in almost full-grown, for the house, like the others, could be no more than three or four years old. New rose bushes were in bloom along the drive.

  She waited in the cul-de-sac. He came out with a tall girl in safari clothes, carrying golf clubs and a bright blue canvas bag. She was giggling and tossing her hair, just as blond as Becky’s. Becky lowered her glasses to squint. The girl didn’t seem any prettier than her. The house was even bigger than that of his parents, although not as well located, being in a development and not on the water. Still, this girl’s family had bucks. Becky was being replaced by a more appropriate model. She was willing to bet, if his parents hadn’t actually introduced him to Heather the Safari Queen, then they had certainly colluded in the affair.

  Now he was going to his parents. She followed farther back, just making sure. He was taking Heather to his parents’ house, probably to pick up Chris. She remembered bitterly when Sylvie and she had watched Ted Topper and found out about his fiancée. Ted and Terry merged in her mind into one man who had let her down. She was always being betrayed by men she trusted. She was always giving her love to men who turned out to be all façade and no heart.

  She made a snappy U-turn, giving an old guy the finger, and headed back to the condo. She had just been given a license to screw the daylights out of Sam, but she did not fool herself that she wouldn’t have done so anyhow. No, what mattered was the threat to her survival. She was not moving back home. She was not moving back tomorrow or the next day or ever. This was her home, not his. He didn’t care about it. She loved it passionately. No way he was going to get her out. She’d fight him. She’d show him what it was like to try to drive her down, smash her back where she came from. She’d see him dead first.

  She imagined him breaking his neck falling off a rock in the White Mountains. Dying of a head injury from a traffic accident. She imagined him paralyzed in a wheelchair unable to speak or move. She would screw Sam right in front of him. She would show him.

  Sam didn’t have a car. Just before noon, she called him to make sure his mother was out. She told him to walk to the end of his road and meet her there. That was safer. She was going to have to be very, very careful that nobody saw them together, bec
ause all Terry needed to dump her tomorrow was to catch a hint of Sam.

  Sam was pacing back and forth looking at his watch and staring all around. As he got in, she drove off at once. “Is he gone?” Sam never used Terry’s name.

  “He’s left for a golf weekend with his brother.” She held back telling him about Heather. She did not want her value demeaned by infidelity. No, she wanted to depict Terry as the jealous possessive husband who must be defended against, so Sam would be scared of being careless.

  “Do you like to play golf?” He was making nervous conversation.

  “I’ve never done it.”

  “I went once with my friend Gene, we rented clubs, but we were lousy.”

  They had these inane conversations—what kind of cake do you like? Did you see TV last night?—and all the while he was staring at her breasts. She smiled slightly. He was really cute, her Sam. When she parked, she made him stay in the car and reminded him to lock it. He was to wait ten minutes and then walk up quietly.

  She ran upstairs and tore off her jeans and shirt. She was wearing a fancy blue bustier and a blue bikini. Now she put on a matching negligee. This was the outfit she had worn for her wedding. She had not bothered in months. Terry scarcely looked at her. He had taken to fucking lately with the TV on. In fact, they rarely had sex recently. That was one reason she suspected he was getting it somewhere else.

  When she opened the door and motioned Sam in, she could see him stare at her and almost flop over like a tenpin. He surged forward and grabbed her against him. She had planned to draw it out, to play games with him for a couple of hours, but he was kissing her so that she could hardly breathe and his hands were closing on her breasts already. The hell with the delay. She’d give him fun and games later. He was pushing her toward the couch.