by Marge Piercy
“It must have been flattering for you, a married woman whose husband was having an affair, to have a young man with a big crush on you. A nice-looking young man you were alone with after every rehearsal and performance.”
“For all of ten minutes in my car. Really! I feel like you’re making up a story that even you can’t believe.”
“What I may believe is irrelevant, Becky. It’s what a jury will think has been proven.”
They had Sam in her apartment. She had to make a move. “Perhaps he did have a crush on me. But I didn’t take it seriously. Would you take a teenager’s crush seriously? I thought he was a sweet and serious boy. That’s all I thought about him. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so nice to him, but I try to make people like me. I certainly have been nice to other people, like Helen in the building, who can tell you. I help her with sewing and walk her dog. I didn’t think being nice to a boy in my theater group meant anything—to me or to him. If I was wrong and he had a big crush, I wasn’t aware. He’s just a kid.”
She started out to see Sam Saturday, but realized a blue car was following her. Instead she drove to an outlet mall at the Canal. She called Sam from a pay phone inside. “Becky, the police were questioning my friend Gene.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why,” he whined, and she felt a chill of suspicion.
“You weren’t stupid enough to tell him anything?”
“Maybe we can get together Monday afternoon when I get home from school.”
“Did you tell Gene anything?”
Sam hung up. She wanted to strangle him. She wanted to pummel him. What could he have said to his stupid friend from school?
The blue car was still in the parking lot when she came out with some pantyhose. She thought of strolling over and asking the detective if he was enjoying his Saturday, but she decided the innocent would not expect to be followed. It was hard to resist, because she could see herself, cool and collected like Sharon Stone in the movie, going over to the car and standing hand on hip. Why had they fixed on Sam? She had never expected them to bother Sam. What was visible to link them? And what did Gene have to do with all this? He was a short chubby friend of Sam’s. They had most of their high school classes together and both planned to go to U Mass Amherst in the fall. She was getting very, very irritated with the police and she wondered if there wasn’t somebody, like the sheriff or a selectman she could complain to. They were screwing up her life, interviewing more and more people at random. It was growing intolerable.
She was at work the next Tuesday when two detectives marched into her office, Beaumont and another detective whose name she could not remember. “Mrs. Rebecca Burgess, you’re under arrest for the murder of your husband, Terrence Burgess. You have the right to remain silent.…”
It was just like the movies, except there was no music, and her boss and the girls she worked with were all standing around watching. “I’m sure I’ll be back soon,” she said to her boss. “This is all a mistake. Why they can’t catch the thieves is beyond me.”
Detective Beaumont actually put handcuffs on her, as if she were some violent criminal. As he led her out to the car, he said, “We did track the thieves, Becky. We found the pawnshop where Gene Wiggins and Sam Solomon pawned the TV, the VCR and a gold watch of your husband’s. The Wiggins kid is very talkative.”
“This is ridiculous,” Becky said. “I wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone my own husband. This is insane. I don’t understand how they managed to get my VCR or my TV or Terry’s watch.… Unless they broke into my condo while I was at work! Maybe Sam Solomon noticed the stuff we owned when he came up with Helen that time about the Dracula script. I can’t imagine why Sam and his friend Gene, who I only met once when he came to see The Witness for the Prosecution, would want to kill my husband.”
She was scared, she was really scared, but they had nothing to connect her with the murder. She would deny everything, and it would be her word against some fat little high school boy she scarcely knew. She would out-act him, out-tough him. They had no proof. They could scare her and threaten her, but then they would have to let her go.
SIXTY
Mary
Mary beamed as Debbie finished the chicken and the gravy. “That’s the best chicken I ever had,” Debbie said, lying back against the pillows. “Bruce—Ben’s father—”
“The one who sends the money.”
“That’s Bruce. Reliable but dull. Anyhow, he could cook up really good Mexican food—do you like Mexican?”
“I like just about anything,” Mary said tactfully. Mexican food gave her gas, but so what? “Do you like Mexican?”
“Not while I’m so pregnant. I keep wanting chicken and green stuff.”
“Your color’s much better.” Mary thought Debbie looked ten times healthier than when she arrived. She looked rested, she had gained a little weight, she was sleeping enough. “I saved you out the other half of the breast, in case you want it.”
“You know just what I like. I’ll nibble on it.”
No wonder the chicken was good. She had put three tablespoons of butter in the gravy. The low-fat margarine that had been in the refrigerator when she arrived was still moldering at the back. Debbie was too skinny. Mary did not approve of starving yourself during pregnancy. Cindy had hardly gained the weight of her baby, and Marissa had been born as tiny as a kitten. Debbie’s kids were eating more too. They liked her cooking. No more tofu hot dogs and sprouts. Abel, who had been stuffing himself on Big Macs before coming home after school, arrived on time and called first thing, “What’s for supper?”
After they ate and she washed up, Mary tended the animals. Abel followed her around. “And then after she has this baby, she’ll get all silly again about some guy. You wait and see. As soon as the baby can walk.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Mary said. “Four kids are a sizable family. Maybe she was lonely. Maybe we can make her feel better about herself and her life. Maybe she won’t need another one.”
“I wish I had one of those trail bikes. I think they’re cool. But my father never sends any money.”
“Maybe we can swing it after the baby. Your mother’s going to teach me massage. I’m strong, you know. I’m stronger than she is. I can do it too. She thinks I should go for a license.” Mary scratched Nannie’s chin. “Now don’t try to eat my pants, you goose!” She headed for the horse barn, Abel sauntering behind her. She could smell tobacco on him, but she had chosen not to fight that battle. Let Debbie take that on. Maybe they should ask his coach to talk to him. He admired his basketball coach.
Abel had decided she was on his side. She was what he thought he had always wanted his mother to be, asexual, a good cook, available, solid. Mary studied each of the children almost as assiduously as she studied Debbie. Abel did not understand that Mary quite agreed that Debbie should be done with men. Anyone moving in here would displace Mary. She couldn’t let that happen. Debbie had four children, and that was enough. They could always adopt one if a baby was necessary. The kids looked different from each other anyhow. Abel was tall with dark brown hair, skinny, rangy. Robin was tiny and dark, with olive skin and Indian eyes. Ben was blond and chubby, with skin prone to burn and blemish. Who knew what the baby would look like? Probably huge and redheaded. She had seen photos of Red Rodgers.
They would collect more animals. They would take in stray cats and dogs, lame horses, crazy chickens, abandoned goats, cranky cows. They would fill the land with a menagerie until Debbie simply could not move. Debbie had a soft heart for children and a softer heart for animals. Debbie would not abandon her animals. She would be rooted here. It would be cozy and complete.
Every day Mary proved to Debbie and to the children how indispensable she was. She drove Robin to the dentist. She waterproofed Abel’s boots. She played ball with Ben. She played dolls with Robin. Now it was time for Babs to come over for fresh brewed coffee, a little Jack Daniel’s and a lot of rummy and hearts. Babs was going to look for a fourth
to play bridge. Mary had not played in ten years, but she had been notorious in her Bethesda circle. Everybody had wanted to be her partner. They moved their game into the bedroom and played on a tray put down beside Debbie.
“Spring’s coming,” Babs said. “Three ladies, how do you like that?”
“So early?” Mary asked. “Isn’t that great?”
“It’s God’s country,” Babs said. “Sometime I’ll take you down to the desert. I love it in February. Desert’s beautiful.”
“After Debbie has her baby. In March.”
“Right.” Babs nodded approval.
“I want to go too,” Debbie said. “It’s not fair to go without me.”
“You’re not going to want to go, I’m telling you now,” Babs said.
“I have easy deliveries,” Debbie said. “My last obstetrician said I was a natural.”
“I never had long deliveries,” Mary said. “Of course we didn’t have natural childbirth then and they knocked me out. I’d get to the hospital in a rush, lie down. They’d stick a needle in my arm and I’d wake up with a baby.”
“Must have put you off sleeping for a while,” Babs said. “Just kidding. I had four myself. It’s a good number, but you got to stop while you’re ahead.”
“Days are getting longer,” Mary said. “I noticed it tonight. Min’s getting frisky. Do we have to breed Nannie?” Whenever she said we, she felt it right in her solar plexus. We ought to get a new jacket for Ben. We have to get the roof on the shed repaired. Each time she waited to see if anyone was going to challenge that fragile we.
She called Cindy. “Oh, that woman, Mrs. Landsman. She was hysterical. She didn’t understand. I didn’t like to give my number to the ladies I worked for. It was unfortunate I collapsed in her house—I had pneumonia. I’m really sorry she bothered you. It was all her imagination, the whole crisis. As soon as I got on my feet again, I decided it was time to leave Boston. Such long cold winters. Sure, you can call me here. I’m a nanny on a ranch in the mountains, very nice. I might go back to school in the fall, part-time. Maybe Marissa would like to visit me here.…”
Debbie agreed that Mrs. Landsman had butted in, getting all excited and bothering Mary’s children. “The best way to get along with Leila is to stay away from her. She wanted to come out here and move in with me, but I put my foot down. No way, I told her, no way. We just don’t get along. And I’m not hard to get along with. Do you think I am?”
“You have a gentle, deep disposition. People think they can push you around, but you’re like a tree with deep roots. You bend but you don’t break.”
Debbie smiled, looking at herself in the mirror across the room. “Gentle but deep.… I see more than people think I do.”
“Absolutely,” Mary agreed. “That’s why you do so well with the massage therapy. People trust you.”
In the morning when Mary awakened in the room she shared with Robin, she looked out the windows and saw the live oaks and the scrub jays and the sun on the grass just starting to grow. The winter before, Red had begun finishing a room upstairs. Mary took over where he had left off. Babs showed her how to do simple carpentry. She could learn anything she had to, anything. The joists were all up and half the wallboard. The wiring was done. She would have her own room in a month or two, working on it at odd moments. It would be rough, but it would be her own.
Every day Mary rode Min. “I forgot how much I loved to ride,” she said to Debbie. It made her feel powerful. It made her feel in control for once. “I grew up in the country.” Well, sort of. Besides, this wasn’t country, like real farms. It was vacation country and country where crazy women like them could play rancher and make a living at odds and ends. It would do just fine. She was beginning to create a past that would lead comfortably to where she was. Sometimes she almost forgot she had been homeless so long. Almost. Every time she washed dishes in the kitchen that was sort of hers, she remembered what it had been like never to know where she would lay herself down that night, never to have enough sleep, never to have more than she could carry with her at all times. To always be alert and on guard.
As she followed Babs’s bay along the trail that snaked up a low ridge, she said, “I don’t know why Debbie is so down on Bruce. I like him much better than the last one, Red. And he pays what he’s supposed to. That’s a great virtue in an ex-husband. I suspect he was the best of the lot.”
“She’s better off without them all, if you ask me,” Babs intoned. “Not one of them’s worth his weight in horse manure.”
Bruce liked her too. When he had brought the kids back, they had a nice chat. Her politicking never stopped. She was running for election every waking hour. I am running for family member, will you vote for me? Do I have your vote this week, Mr. Abel, Ms. Robin? What’s my score?
Debbie was so important to her, she could not have begun to say what she really thought about the woman. She wanted Debbie more desperately than she had ever wanted a boyfriend or a husband. Making Debbie like her, need her, trust her, depend on her: that was her major job. She worked at it unstintingly. She would never badger Debbie the way her sister did, trying to make her be strong and calculating and cold. No, she would encourage Debbie to be herself and Mary would be strong for her.
She was sixty-one, and here she was launched on a new life. She had a roof over her head. Maybe she could really go back to school part-time nearby and learn a new skill. She would make money. She would be able to buy her grandchildren presents like a grandmother should, when she was working at a real job. Maybe in a year or two, they’d let her visit.
She had opened a bank account here. Her checks had a picture of a cactus on them. She would be the perfect friend and mother and companion and caretaker and live-in nanny for Debbie. She would make them all need her, she would make them all love her, as she had failed to do with her own family.
Debbie said, “I love the way you cook. My mother could never cook. I’ve tried, I tried hard for the kids and every man I’ve been with. But I don’t really like to be in the kitchen. It’s not my style, you know? But I lie here and I smell your chicken fricassee. I never had a fricassee. I don’t even know what one is, you know that? And those omelettes with cheese and home fries. I could die for them. You have the knack. You could be a chef.”
“I don’t want to be a chef,” Mary said. “I don’t like restaurants. I just like to see the boys and Robin packing it away.” And you. I will feed you and take care of you and make you feel good, so that you’ll hardly need to go past the front gate again. Anything you don’t want to do, I’ll do for you, and you’ll be my perfect child. There was something in Debbie that had always longed to be taken care of, and Mary was homing in on that fantasy. She was going to take such good care of Debbie that Debbie would never even notice as the world slipped to a safe distance, away.
SIXTY-ONE
Becky
The moment the arraignment was over, Becky was grabbed by a matron and a male guard and rushed into a cruiser. She had no idea where they were going, but they only drove around the stone courthouse and through a parking lot, up a hill to a big brick building behind a wire fence. It was windy on the hill. The grass was turning brown, but from the hill, the bay was clearly visible, blue as freedom itself.
Over the glass doors, it said HOUSE OF CORRECTION. That was a laugh. Her whole life right now needed a lot of correction, but she wasn’t going to find it here. They were buzzed in and went down a corridor, through a metal detector. They took off even her belt. They took her purse. Everything was emptied. A woman in a box in the wall behind a heavy glass panel buzzed them into the Trap, the matron called it, and they searched her right there, between the inner and outer grates. Those metal grates closing made a definite and terrible sound, like fate. Then the matron hauled her up through another barred door to the second floor.
Becky just could not believe that she was shut up in a noisy, dingy, stuffy box. Terry would have been laughing—no, sitting there with that smirk he put
on when he thought he had been proved right. The whole Burgess family had that smirk: a super-tight, closed-in expression that said they were stuck on themselves and they felt superior, especially to her.
Bail had been set at fifty thousand, steep but the assistant D.A. had asked for no bail at all. He had stood there and argued that the crime was clearly premeditated. He said that a woman who could suborn a minor to murder her husband and carry out that murder brutally, he kept saying brutally, as if she hadn’t tried to keep things simple and clean, could not be trusted on bail. Her lawyer argued that she had strong attachments to the community and her family and would not flee—and that the state’s case was circumstantial. Her family had to bail her out. Maybe Tommy could raise some money. They had set the same bail on Sam, which wasn’t fair because it was his fault they were in here.
Sam and his fat idiot friend from high school Gene Wiggins had not dumped the TV and the VCR in the Canal as she had ordered Sam to do. If he had obeyed her, nobody would be in trouble. Her ex-lover, whose primary virtue had been to obey her, had struck out on his own in a fit of greed. The little jerks had taken the TV, the VCR and Terry’s gold watch, which had been a graduation present from some uncle, and pawned them in New Bedford. Sam knew perfectly well she came from New Bedford. As if two high school students could just barge in with a bunch of hot merchandise and nobody would notice. She was sure that had been Gene’s idea. She was furious at Sam for involving his fat stupid friend. They had been friends since middle school and they studied side by side. They had been outcasts together in school, in the chess club together. They had cooperated on some weird astronomy project for a science fair. Oh, Sam had talked about Gene. He had even suggested that she meet his buddy. She knew he wanted to show her off to Gene, to show Gene he was getting laid, but she had put an end to those fantasies at once and firmly.
How was she to know he had told the whole story to his chess buddy? She had been worried he might confess to his mother, that he might open up to the uncle. Never had she thought Sam would be such an idiot that he would confide in a kid he went to school with.