by Marge Piercy
He said, “We can run away together. We can hop on a bus tomorrow.”
“What would we do for money? I have less than two hundred dollars. Do you imagine he couldn’t trace us? There are only two bus routes off the Cape.”
“We can take your car and run away.”
“You think he couldn’t trace that car? He’d probably report it stolen. It’s in his name, not in mine. His parents bought it for him years ago.”
“We could go to Canada. Montreal.”
“First, we couldn’t work there. Second, understand his family has money. He can afford to hire a detective, and he will. We’d be fugitives. And you’ll never be able to see your mom or your uncle. You’ll quit school and never finish. You’ll never go to college, the way you deserve to.”
“I can’t bear this,” he said, his hands digging into her shoulders. “There’s got to be a way. We can’t give up! Nothing matters except you.”
“I don’t believe you. Or you’d have the courage for what we have to do.”
“People go to plastic surgeons and get their appearance changed. People even get their fingerprints changed, I’ve read about it.”
“Who pays for all this surgery? No, you just want to play games with me.” Finally she tore the sheet away from herself and embraced him. “One last time together, and then never again. Take me. Make love to me so that I remember you. Because I’ll never be alone with you again. Ever.”
She half expected him not to be able to, he was so upset, but at his age, she guessed nothing could get in the way. She had not been able to bring him around to her plan, but she would see what a few days without sex would do. This was the first time she had not come with him, but she was annoyed that he was resisting her. Men were always disappointing her. Even Sam. But she still hoped that she could bring him around.
FORTY-EIGHT
Mary
Mary was glad to have the abandoned building to stay in and Beverly’s company. Tomorrow, Wednesday, she was to clean Mrs. Landsman’s and feed her cats the next few days. She had not yet told Beverly she would be gone for four nights. Mrs. Landsman was finally traveling again. She was off to California early tomorrow; she would be gone before Mary arrived to take possession of the house.
This was going to be a cozy squat. Mrs. L. always had plenty of food in the refrigerator and the cupboards, and she did not keep a tight inventory. There were comfortable places to sit and draperies to draw. The kid and the husband were off the scene. She would take care of Bronskee and see how Kitten was doing. She thought of Kitten as her own kind, illtreated, unwanted. But at least Kitten might have a home. Mrs. Landsman seemed to have forgotten about the sleeping bag, at least Mary hoped so.
She had to figure out what to tell Beverly. She wanted to ask Beverly to come to the house and stay with her, but Beverly smelled. She was obviously a bag lady. She could not slip through the streets of residential Cambridge as Mary could. People who would not glance at Beverly when she was squatting by the curb or huddled in a shop entrance, would stare and start asking questions if she ambled along Garden Street with her shopping cart heaped with her bags and blanket. The homeless were either invisible in their expected hangouts, or stridently visible if they appeared beyond their grates and doorways.
Mary’s trick was not looking homeless, a task that had been difficult for the past ten days, sleeping in the abandoned building. Usually her clients were not at home when she arrived, and the first thing she did was clean up, wash her clothes. She had improved life in the squat by pilfering matches, an old pot, two plastic jugs to tote water.
Beverly panhandled some, but she hated it, and she was terrible. Houdini had a routine down. He could still do card tricks when his hands did not shake. His sidekick Mouse was illiterate, but he could heave and haul for cheap movers. Once or twice a week, they would need somebody extra for a heavy job. Mouse and Mary brought in money regularly, while Houdini and Beverly worked trash and garbage cans and the alleys in Back Bay. Gradually they were furnishing their squat. Mary and Beverly had two broken chairs and an old Formica kitchen table. They had several lengths of carpeting over the windows to keep the cold out They slept on another old rug, placed under Beverly’s mattress and her sleeping bag.
Every morning Houdini, Beverly and Mouse, if he did not have a job that day, went the round of Dumpsters, looking for returnable bottles and cans, items they could eat or scavenge. After lunch, they would hit the fast-food places again and the areas where office workers had lunch.
“Found a whole bag of doughnuts on a bench at the Arlington T stop. Some fool went off and left them. Not day-old either,” Houdini boasted.
“In the women’s room at Filene’s, she found a scarf. You can borrow it, Mary, and in a phone she found twenty cents. Also that candy machine in the Washington Red Line station is broken again and if you jiggle it right, it gives you what the last person bought. She had a lovely candy bar with nuts for lunch.” The wages of Beverly’s day of ceaseless scavenging.
They all went through the streets alternately looking down, hunched over to see a safety pin, a bobby pin, a comb, a good butt, a half-eaten sandwich, a useful bag, pennies, cans or bottles that could be turned to cash; and quickly looking around to make sure no trouble was about to land on them, no kid was going to attack, no cop had picked them out to bother.
Although they had tried to come and go quietly, some of the neighborhood kids noticed them. Two days before, someone had come in and messed with their stuff, urinated on one of the rugs, broke some bottles. Beverly had been hassled on the street and had taken to carrying a heavy stick she had whittled to a sharp point. She was afraid of rape, afraid of mugging. She was afraid of the kids, but kids were everywhere, and this was a good squat.
Mary could not tell if Beverly’s fears were justified, or leftover paranoia from her rape and beating. Mary had never been raped, although she had been chased down the street several times, propositioned, slapped around. Beverly said most of the bag ladies had been raped. The police generally thought it was funny. No one had ever been charged in the assault on Beverly.
No, Mary could not bring Beverly back to Cambridge with her. She would depart the squat for the four nights she had secure at Mrs. Landsman’s. She was fighting a head cold anyhow, probably from the smoke and being chilled all the time. But she could not figure out any way to insert Beverly into her scam and take her to Mrs. Landsman’s large and comfortable house. She felt guilty that she could not share her squat, as Beverly was sharing, but Mary had the feeling that would be the end of everything.
Gingerly Mary raised the issue over coffee made in a misshapen aluminum pan over a fire of Stemo. “One of my ladies says I can stay in her house for the next three nights.” Later she would say she could stay one more night. “Then I’ll come back. She had a family emergency and she wants me to sleep in and take care of her kids.”
“Is she paying you extra?”
“Some. You know how they are.” She felt guilty lying to Beverly, lying and keeping the warmth and the good bed to herself, but Beverly had been twisted out of shape by life on the streets. She talked to herself and she swung her new stick menacingly as she strolled. Mary was afraid to leave her scant possessions in the squat, in case the kids came again.
“I’m saving for a car,” Mary confided. “I know I can’t make enough for an apartment, but if I could buy an old station wagon or an old van, then I’d have it made.”
“She’d like one of them mobile homes,” Beverly said, leaning back on her greasy blanket. “Winnebagos, they call them. You could just sit yourself down and live as good as in a house. Follow the sun. Now wouldn’t that be something? One time, a bunch of us a got a site at a campground on the Cape and we slept there for a week. Now, that was grand. Then for another week, we slept out in the woods. Then it started raining all the time and we had to come back.”
“All those off-season houses, sometimes I think about them. I met a woman like us last year in a mall, we
started talking. We recognized each other. She spent two years in Maine. She had stayed in rich people’s summer houses.” Rich people. Mary smiled. With Jim, people like those had dined at her house. They were not rich people. Only to the poor. They were affluent. “But she got caught. One of the kids came up suddenly and called the police on her.”
“What did they do to her?”
“The kids roughed her up. The cops kept her in jail overnight and then one of the local ministers put her on a bus to Boston. She was looking for another resort. She was thinking about the Vineyard.”
Beverly rubbed her sore feet. “Now, where in Maine? She knows Maine like the back of her hand. Don’t you love how we can sit up and talk here? This is real freedom, Mary. We can make it nice here, our own.” Beverly sounded calm, content.
Mary had worked for Mrs. Solano today, and she had some leftover bread, nice Italian bakery bread, and a couple of apples they split four ways. Also a few biscotti and some walnuts and carrots. She took what would not be missed. Houdini could not chew the wahiuts or the carrots, since he didn’t have enough teeth left, but he soaked the biscotti in water. She had stopped and bought hot dogs, which they boiled in the battered pan. It took forever over the Sterno, but the smell was great. They ate them with the bread.
“Sometimes I dream about food,” Houdini said. “Roast chicken. I used to love chicken at Sunday dinner. And chocolate cake.”
Houdini’s feet were bothering him. Mary could not stay in the room when he unwrapped his feet, it made her gag, but Beverly helped him. Mary was ashamed that she could not stand the smell. He had foot ulcers, and his socks had worked into his skin. Finally Mouse and Houdini retired upstairs. Sometimes she wondered if they were lovers, but she didn’t think so. They both drank in place of sex. If they were, they had a right. It was small-enough comfort they all were able to give each other. Years ago, she would have thought an old man (if Houdini was old, in fact) and a kid together, both male, were a terrible sin and a scandal, even worse because of the mixing of races, but she did not think so any longer. They took care of each other as best they could. If she had learned anything on the streets, it was to judge people by their kindliness, not by their looks or race. Jim, who called her Holy Mary when she was scandalized at people’s carryings-on around them in Bethesda, would now have been shocked by her easy tolerance of what he would have called deviates.
Staying here was flirting with life outside the pale, life on the streets, yet she had not felt so at-home with anyone in years. She was honest with Beverly and the boys, she was herself. She could let herself begin to care for Beverly. She would miss her friend’s company tonight. A friend: how could any of her ladies in their comfortable houses understand how rare and precious it was for her to have a friend? When she had lived in Bethesda, friends were women with whom she played tennis, went to the beauty salon, played bridge, exchanged recipes. With Beverly she shared the truth of her life, she shared security and danger, she shared what food and warmth they had between them. On the streets, friendship could mean life or death. Samantha’s friendship had saved her life eight years before.
“Her head bothers her sometimes,” Beverly confided. “It hurts where they worked on her. She gets terrible headaches. She sure wishes she had that stuff they gave her in the hospital. But she never did see pills like that lying around the street.”
“I’ll look through my ladies’ medicine cabinets and see what I can find.” Mary crawled into her sleeping bag, fully dressed, and fell asleep in spite of the cold. She always woke up three or four times during the night. She had to pee. Somebody in the street would scream, or a car would hit another with a resounding crash. A fight would break out. Bottles would smash against the house. She did not take that personally, as the house looked deserted. She never peered out, for fear of being seen. Neighborhood rivalries and quarrels were not their business. Only survival was.
She woke up sweating. Her first thought was she had a fever. It was strange to be too warm. Then she was choking and she realized it was smoke. She struggled out of her sleeping bag and stuffed it in her carry-all. Then she shook Beverly. “The place is on fire!” she screamed.
Beverly did not wake up. She moaned and turned over. Mary grabbed the bucket of water they were using and poured it on Beverly, who sat up then, cursing. Mary had accidentally poured water on herself. Her feet were sopping and she had splashed herself up the front. “What the fuck are you doing? Woman, are you crazy? She’s soaking wet,” Beverly screeched.
Mary ran into the hall, shouting upstairs, screaming to Houdini and Mouse. The stairway was full of smoke. “Beverly, we got to get out now.” She tried to remember if there was a fire escape. “Come on, Beverly, now!” She ran up the steps yelling for Houdini and Mouse. The downstairs was on fire. She smelled something. Gasoline. Somebody had torched the building. “Beverly, come on, it’s going up! Now!” She ran back and dragged Beverly upright and tried to pull her along.
“Leave her alone, she got to get her stuff,” Beverly said between hacking. Coughing and fumbling for her stuff, she punched Mary. Mary went over backward and struck her hip hard.
“Now, Beverly, now!” Mary stamped her foot in frustration and grabbed her purse and carry-all. Most of her stuff was in the corner and it was too late. She ran for the stairs with her coat half on and plunged into the smoke. Her eyes burned and she could not breathe. She kept running. Her coat was on fire. She let it fall and kept running. The fire had been set on the first floor. She ran through it and down the steps to the basement and through to the street. Whoever had set it at least had not locked them in. The door swung wide. She ran out. Her sweater was on fire. She remembered about falling down and rolling. She rolled on the filthy wet ground. Then she picked up her stuff, stamped out the cinders, the sparks that had landed. She was without a coat. She unzipped her sleeping bag and draped it around her shoulders. When she turned back, she could see flames even through the boarded-up windows. “Beverly! Beverly!” she screamed. “Houdini! Mouse!” She called till she was hoarse. Somebody pushed up a window and yelled for her to shut up.
“Call the fire department,” she croaked back. “The block is burning.”
She kept coughing. She had breathed too much smoke. She felt dizzy and short of breath. She could not get enough oxygen into her lungs. She was freezing and wet, but she could not stand anything against her arm. Her right arm was badly burned. It hurt so intensely that tears kept running down her face. Maybe she could go to an emergency room. Maybe they would take care of her. She had to work in the morning.
Still it felt like half an hour before the fire truck arrived. “There’s three people squatting in that building,” she said to a fireman, tugging at him.
“Get out of the way, lady. Go home. If they’re alive, we’ll find them.”
But of course they weren’t
FORTY-NINE
Leila
Leila got off the plane in San Diego to a temperature of seventy-two under a dry sun, but her sister Debbie did not meet her. Instead, at the baggage carousel, a tall big-boned woman with a shock of stand-up white hair was waiting for her. “Howdy. I’m Debbie’s neighbor, Babs. She asked me to bring you from the airport. I got my pickup outside in the lot.”
Babs was not talkative on the drive to Santa Ysabel. Leila learned that Babs had never been East, was that rare breed, a born-and-bred Californian from Mecca, where dates were grown near the Anza-Borrego desert. Babs had been married, had four kids, all grown up, and was a widow. That was the sum of what Leila, who had interviewed murderers and battered woman, attackers and victims with remarkable success, was able to pry from the taciturn woman at the wheel of the old red pickup. That and a few attitudes. Easterners were not much use. Debbie was hopeless but good with horses. Her kids were okay, especially Robin. Her husband Red had been a pain in the butt.
When they reached the remarkably green mountains, patches of snow began to crust the ground. These southern coastal mountains rarely
rose above three thousand feet, but that seemed enough to change not only the climate but the season. Leila thought it would have been nice if somebody had warned her. She had brought clothes suitable for L.A. in January, but apparently not Santa Ysabel. She was nervous and annoyed that Debbie had not come to see her.
“She hates riding in the bumpy truck. Scared of losing the baby.”
Debbie already had three kids by three different husbands/boyfriends. Only one of the exes, the therapist Bruce, paid his child support regularly. Once in a while a check came in from the musician. Leila had never been to this place. The last time she had visited Debbie, Debbie was living in Pomona, in the Valley, where she had been into compulsive spending and had racked up six thousand on her credit cards.
After the therapist husband had decamped, peppering the financial landscape with letters that he was no longer responsible for her debts, Debbie had decided that she had been corrupted by consumer culture. She had been ready for the suburban cowboy, Red Rodgers. Red had parked Debbie here, where the battered pickup jounced over deep ruts of mud and rock, back among the pines to a raw-boned ranch house that looked pried from a development.
Surrounding it were a paddock where a horse and colt stood in the shallow snow, outbuildings, sheds, a chicken run, a barn, the remains of a vegetable garden, a couple of dead vehicles, all fading into the surrounding forest. The woods were pretty, but the house was a faded pink with aluminum gutters. An upended tricycle lay beside the remains of a snowman. Why did she feel so depressed? Why did she want to turn and run back to Cambridge?
Debbie was waiting in the kitchen. Three children and a fourth on the way, and she was still thin. Her belly was big, but the rest of her stayed childlike. Standing near Debbie always made Leila feel oversized, huge, baggy, sagging, bursting with flesh. Never had there been a problem in childhood or adolescence in differentiating between her clothes and Debbie’s. Hers were the economy size; Debbie’s, the petite, cute things.