The Longings of Women

by Marge Piercy

  They went up quietly, listening for danger. If a building had been opened by the homeless, Mary knew it could also be used by dealers, crack-heads, runaways, anybody who wanted to get off the streets. But they seemed to be the first ones in tonight.

  The first-floor apartment had its door off its hinges. “We think they did that to get rid of the tenants,” Beverly said, once they had made sure they were safe. “See, there’s a chair and a counter in the kitchen. There’s her mattress. You can sleep on it with her. She got her own blanket.”

  “I have a sleeping bag.” Mary unrolled it. “It’s my treasure.”

  “That’s great. Did somebody give that to Goodwill or the Salvation Army?”

  With Beverly, she could tell the truth. “I took it from the closet of one of my ladies. She wasn’t using it, and her son is spoiled rotten. He only used it once maybe—”

  “Don’t apologize. You’ll be snug in it tonight.” Beverly squatted in the bathroom on the tile floor where she had put down a hubcap. The floor was black and white tiles, cracked and dusty now. The bathtub had been taken out, but the sink was still there and the toilet with a broken seat. But there was no water anyhow, Mary remarked.

  “There is too water,” Beverly said. “We got everything here to be comfortable. They left a bucket. She filled it with snow and it melted. See? We got water to drink. Now see what else. You’re her guest. We can have hot water.” She rummaged in her bag.

  Mary said proudly, “We can have better than that. I always carry tea bags. You heat the water and we’ll have tea.”

  “Real tea! This is more like it.”

  Beverly had a cup of Sterno and some matches. She set the Sterno burning on the tiles and over it she rigged up a tripod with an old coffee tin she was using as a pot. It even gave off a little warmth. Mary took off her mittens and rubbed her hands together near the flame. She felt happier than she had since she had stayed in a nice house over New Year’s. It was cold, it was dirty, it was dark, but she had a friend and they were company and a little protection for each other.

  She had not had anyone to chatter with in years and years. She had talked to her husband in the old days, she had friends in the neighborhood, other housewives married to professional men, she had talked to her children until they entered that stage of adolescence when they protected their secrets from her as if her knowledge of something emotional would cause that crush or wish to instantly implode. Her ladies sometimes talked to her, but she did not give them anything personal back. Her revealing to Mrs. Landsman that she knew Beverly was a one-time risk, never to be repeated.

  Now she had a friend who understood. They compared notes on all the places they had slept or passed a night without daring to sleep. In many public places, it was forbidden to sleep. You could sit in the library, you could sit in a bus or train station, but you were never supposed to have to sleep. Nothing you really needed to do when you were homeless was supposed to happen. You were illegal. You were wrong to be alive and there.

  About nine-thirty, they heard a stir below. The Sterno had long since gone out. They hid against a wall and waited. “It’s Houdini,” Beverly said with relief. “Hey, Houdini.”

  It was dark in the hall and Mary could see little. Houdini was a small man, as she remembered him, but she could not see his features. He gave off a strong smell of piss and alcohol. The kid with him was skinny, a little taller than Houdini with light brown skin, and kept behind him. “Hi, Bev my darling, how are you? Who’s your friend?”

  “We met years ago, Houdini. I’m Mary. I met you once when I was with Samantha. Do you remember Samantha?”

  “Yeah, sweet Samantha.” He crossed himself. “Well, welcome to our humble abode, Mary Contrary, and remember, home is where you make it. We’ll be upstairs if you need us, ladies. Come on, Mouse. Pick up your end. See, we found ourselves a great piece of wood. We’re going to have ourselves a little fire to warm up. We got a door from an old car we can use as our stove.” Houdini and Mouse labored upstairs with their find. Houdini called down the stairwell, “This is the Ritz, ladies, and welcome to it.”

  “She hopes we can stay here for a while,” Beverly said. “These must have been nice apartments. She bets the people were sorry to get kicked out.”

  “I hated to leave my old apartment. I expected to live out my life there,” Mary said, crawling into her sleeping bag.

  They talked about food and weather and clothing. They talked about neighborhoods and cops and the Others, the people with homes. They laughed and giggled a lot. Mary thought she hadn’t carried on this way since she was a teenager and had her girlfriends to sleep over at her parents’ house.

  It was cold in the apartment, but with the windows boarded up, the wind did not whistle through. Mary put her sleeping bag next to Beverly’s mattress and blanket. Upstairs they could hear Houdini laughing and once something fell.

  “You’re not afraid of Houdini or that kid?”

  Beverly laughed dryly. “She’s scared of most men, but not Houdini. He’s okay. The kid is retarded. He wouldn’t hurt a flea. Houdini has a good heart. When he’s got a squat, he lets his friends share it. Some guys would keep a crib like this to themselves. She’s going to look for a piece of carpet tomorrow. She figures this is good for a while. We can fix it up a bit. Maybe find a table or something. Some pans. We can make it nice for ourselves. See if you can score some matches today. She’s running low.”

  Before they went to sleep for the night, Mary took her flashlight and went downstairs to use a corner of the basement as a toilet. It was always necessary to be extremely careful when relieving herself in the dark and the cold. It was easy to stain garments or get her hands dirty. A bad smell from an accident or carelessness had to be avoided. She could not simply wash herself, her clothes, even her hands.

  She was squatting in the dark just finishing when she heard a sound nearby. She shone the flashlight and then charged before she had time to think. The body of a cat lay on the floor. She did not bother to check what had killed it. The rats were eating it and they had freshly killed two kittens. What she heard was a third kitten hissing as it lay back against its mother’s quite cold body. She seized up the kitten, clawing fiercely, and wrapped it in her coat. Failing to think of anything else to do, she meowed at it. It slowly stopped struggling and clung to her. She carried it upstairs.

  “I found a kitten downstairs the rats were attacking. I brought it up.”

  “You can’t keep it,” Beverly said. “What will you do with it? They’re always coming in these buildings, the same as we do. They don’t live long.”

  She carefully unwrapped her coat. The kitten clung to the coat, shaking. It was small but complete, perhaps six weeks, perhaps eight weeks old. The rats would have made short work of it as they had of its siblings. She looked under the tail. Her siblings. “I can’t put her back to die. She’s hungry.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  Finally Mary gave the kitten some leftover crumbs of bread. The kitten ate them. What else could it do? It crawled into her coat and curled against her body for warmth, kneading her with its tiny sharp claws like a row of pins, kneading for milk that she could not give. She crawled into her sleeping bag with the kitten still holding on and tried to sleep.

  In the morning her alarm woke her in the dark. She tidied herself up as best she could, taking a small amount of the melted snow for necessary washing. The kitten did not venture far, too weak perhaps from hunger. It sat on the sleeping bag crying occasionally in a faint voice. She gathered up her bag and her carry-all and tucked the kitten into her coat. At the corner 7-Eleven, she bought a can of cat food and fed the kitten on a stoop, holding it enclosed in her coat. Her coat was going to smell of cat food.

  Fortunately she was going to Mrs. Landsman. That was a woman with a soft heart for cats. Mrs. Landsman was going to come home to a note and a kitten. If Mary got fired, she got fired. She would say she found the kitten outside in the street, alone and starving.


  She hadn’t been able to stay there in months, anyway. They were getting divorced, and the house would be on the market soon. Mrs. Landsman would either keep the cat or send it to a shelter, which would be a more merciful death than being eaten alive by rats like Kitten’s sisters. Kitten was purring now, her little belly distended with food. She had managed to eat half the can in five minutes. Mary promised to meet Beverly at the Symphony T station. She would organize some supper. Mrs. Landsman usually had something she could help herself to, and she would buy tuna fish and bread. Then they would go to their new hotel for the night, Houdini’s Ritz. She belonged somewhere. She had a friend, almost a family. They could fix that apartment up, they could. This weekend she would look for furniture and useful things people threw out. For once she had something to look forward to: a home of her own with Beverly.

  FORTY-SIX

  Leila

  The night was pleasant, if somewhat hushed. In the morning, Zak left before David had organized himself for breakfast. Then all was frantic until she had him packed up, delivered to Logan Airport and on his plane west. She came back to the house empty but for the expectant Vronsky on the rug where he always met her. Once she had bundled the tree she had not wanted into the trash, she felt more relief than sadness.

  David was growing up and he was rushing off to his first real relationship with a female. Whether it worked out in the long run or not, at least this strong attachment to Ikuko was a good sign. Sometimes she worried that she had held him too closely to her, that she had partly replaced the absent husband with the present son. Now he had pulled free. That was one reason she had not concealed from David her connection with Zak.

  Zak had come through for her. As the week went along, she thought from time to time of calling him, yet she did not. She tried to examine her lack of urgency. She sat up in bed surrounded by her notes on Becky, one hand on Vronsky’s nape, and considered. She felt a more comfortable distance from Nick. He was seamlessly absorbed into coupledom with Sheryl. It was peculiar to her how Nick and she could have slept in the same bed, put parts of their bodies into each other, been intimately involved in the details of daily life, and now have almost nothing to do with the other. He was drawn into a new couple and about to hatch a different family.

  Perhaps she was putting off seeing Zak exactly because he had been so protective and useful. He had acted … husbandly. He had done it well. But she didn’t desire a husband. She was still getting rid of one who had sucked up a good half of her daily output of energy for two decades. “You and I have reached a pleasant accommodation of wishes and needs,” she said to Vronsky, scratching him gently under the chin. “I don’t know if I can do that with Zak, frankly.” It occurred to her that Zak had not been on the phone proposing a rendezvous. Did he also have the sense of becoming a couple much too quickly?

  They both had skills for a serious relationship, but perhaps they were too ready to stick it all together and let it run. She could end up living with him because they both knew so well how to live with a partner. He was, for all his travels, a thoroughly domestic man.

  Another week went by, and still they did not talk. Becky was opening up. At one point on Saturday she said to Leila, leaning close, “You think I did it, I can tell, but you still like me. Don’t you think that’s kind of crazy?”

  “If you’d hurt someone I loved, I’d hate you. But I never knew Terry, and his parents have been unpleasant. I try not to make a judgment about whether you did it, but simply to keep an open mind.”

  “I know you have to say that, but neither of us believes it for thirty seconds,” Becky said, wrinkling her nose.

  “Try to believe it. But I’m glad that you know I like you. I’m not supposed to like or dislike you, but I find that I can’t help but respond.”

  “People like me better now, unless they’ve already decided to hate me,” Becky said, staring at her hands. “It’s fascinating. Don’t you think it’s because I’m famous now?”

  “Do you think that’s it? Or have you changed?” She thought of the people she had interviewed who had known Becky. Her family mostly adored her, but people she worked with did not. “She was a manipulative little bitch,” one of her teachers, a radio announcer, told Leila. She noticed that people often spoke of Becky in the past tense. “She was cold. She didn’t care about anybody but herself,” a woman in Becky’s office said. “You’d have to keep after her to pry loose a few bucks for pizza or a shower or a going-away present.”

  “She was efficient, but she was always trying to get on camera,” her boss said. “She never gave up. Thought it was glamorous.”

  Her previous boss said, “She wasn’t the friendly type. She did her work but she didn’t give much of herself.”

  She found Becky reserved and careful, but also capable of charm. Perhaps murder had improved her self-confidence. Gently Leila probed in that direction—how Becky might feel she had changed.

  “I’ve always been too trusting,” Becky said, looking at Leila from under her lashes.

  Leila did not believe this. She thought that Becky was always on guard. She had to be.

  “Well, what worse can happen? My husband’s murdered, and I’m going on trial. My own boyfriend, my ex-boyfriend, is accusing me. I might as well relax, because I’ve already been run over by a semi.”

  They both knew what worse was likely to happen, so neither mentioned it. Instead Leila asked her what she would really like to do. “Oh, I want to get off, of course. Then I think I’ll move into Boston, to escape all the fuss and the gossip, you know?”

  “Then what, if everything works out?”

  “Well, remember that woman who had the affair with the guy running for president? Gary Hart. She was on every talk show and then she was a spokeswoman for jeans. I’d rather be an anchorwoman, but I wouldn’t mind being the spokeswoman for something glamorous, like designer jeans or perfume or whatever, while I’m so well known.”

  They were in the visiting room at Barnstable House of Correction, as sad and bleak a setting as Leila could imagine, but Becky was smiling now, her sharp chin dug into her hand. Becky was running through all the talk shows, the ones she liked and the ones she thought tacky. Leila felt oddly moved. Becky was Leila without books, without the resources of the library to open a world beyond the tube. Without a cultural background, any girl’s dreams could sound tawdry. Leila had learned to dream correctly.

  Leila arrived home with the first urgent desire to see Zak she had experienced since the night with Nick and Sheryl. She felt awkward, uncertain what the silence on his end meant. Obviously they had both gone farther and faster than they meant to, but had he responded by deciding to quit? Their times together had been extraordinarily pleasant and rather easy. Yet both reacted with fear. She found she could not make herself call him. The coward’s way: she wrote a note. “Dear Zak, We seem both to have fallen down our own rabbit holes. Would you like to get together? I would love to make you a meal for a change, if you’re in the mood for coming in the city this week or next,” was what she wrote on the fourth revision, copied into a perky card. Then she sweated how to sign it. Finally resolved upon: Warmly, Leila. That shouldn’t scare him too badly, and it was tentative and casual enough, she hoped. Maybe taking a chance with her, risking a new and real relationship had been as out of character for him as it was for her. For once, she had broken her own rules and gambled.

  Sunday morning she answered the phone, half-expecting Zak, and Mrs. Burgess greeted her. “If you could come today—it would have to be early—I could talk to you about my son.”

  Within fifteen minutes she was driving toward the Cape, quick, before Mrs. Burgess changed her mind. She had no idea what had prompted the call, but she was delighted. Mrs. Burgess greeted her at the door and ushered her this time into the downstairs family room, an area of beat-up sofas, overstuffed chairs, a big TV and stereo with CDs and newspapers scattered about. “My husband and my son Chris are off at the boat show today, so we have a little tim
e.”

  “You don’t want to talk about the murder in front of your family?”

  “My husband has had two heart attacks. We’ve kept the boys … I mean we kept it from both of them and now from Chris. They both happened while the boys were in college. Francis can’t get excited. I try to stand between him and all the scandal and gossip, but I’m not always able to keep it from him.” Mrs. Burgess was a woman without animation, someone who had perhaps been sat on so hard in her childhood or adolescence that she would always speak almost without inflection and certainly without raising her voice, but what she was saying carried conviction.

  Leila moved so that she could see past the reflections on Mrs. Burgess’s glasses, to see the woman’s eyes. Mrs. Burgess did not allow many expressions to touch her face. “You thought that talking with me in front of your husband might excite him dangerously?” Here is a secretly emotional woman, Leila thought, without outlet. Would she someday explode?

  “Exactly,” Mrs. Burgess said. “We live under that cloud. That was why I’ve been trying to sell this house. We need something easier to manage. We need to live in a senior community with a medical facility right there. It breaks my heart, but I was never able to make Terry understand why the two of them had to stand on their own feet. I didn’t want them far from me. I just wanted them to settle in their own nice little places nearby so we could sell this white elephant. The taxes are huge and so is the upkeep.”

  “But you haven’t sold it.”

  “The real estate market is slow. And after what happened to Terry, I just couldn’t ask Chris to move out. I was afraid. My son only married that vixen because he felt rejected. I never meant for him to feel that way—I was only trying to protect his father.”