The Longings of Women

by Marge Piercy

  Mary was mildly worried, but she did not think a successful musician was likely to pounce on Debbie these days, and Debbie had already had a kid from him, her ultimate goal with any man. Still, Mary always worried. Any man posed a potential danger to her. Debbie did not know if Bung would want to see his daughter or if that would be good for Robin. It was all up in the air.

  Every night when she got into bed, Mary lay with her hands clenched at her sides and went over her situation. She had her animal-tending business. Debbie did not pay her, but she had her housing and her food free, and a foothold in the community. She would be starting school in January under a special program for retraining older women where she would learn to be an accountant. She loved to go over numbers anyhow. Dealing with money for a living seemed somehow safe and cozy. From the animal-tending, she had saved enough with her nest egg to buy a Taurus with seventy thousand miles on it. Now she was squirreling away every penny to replenish her nest egg. She hated to spend money on a dress, but she had to look respectable at the wedding.

  Saturday afternoon, they took Debbie’s car, since it was newer than hers, but Mary drove. Debbie always preferred to be driven, a leftover habit from her marriages. Mary loved to drive. It was a pleasure she had been denied for years. She even drove the kids up to Ben’s daddy twice. She especially adored California highways, the distances were so long and she felt so free and privileged. She remembered, with superior amusement at her younger self, that she had once been afraid of highway driving—back when she had been married and had no idea what she could learn to do. It was a sunny fall day, everything ripening but no hint of chill in the air the way there would have been in the East. It was like being inside a perfect orange.

  After supper, which Mary ate sparingly to avoid heartburn, they walked to the hall where El Gato was playing. Students were lounging in the mild air, noisy in groups. Bicycles whipped past them. On the way, Debbie stopped suddenly near a kiosk of posters. “Oh, shit. Look! I wonder if she’s planning to visit.”

  It was a modest announcement of a lecture series on WOMEN IN POSTMODERN AMERICA, INTENSE ASPIRATIONS AND ECONOMIC REALITY. Both women stood in front of the poster looking at it glumly. What Debbie was reacting to was the speaker next month, Leila Landsman on homeless women. What made Mary grimace was the subject of the lecture. What did Mrs. Landsman know about being homeless? Mary could shut her eyes and see that great big old Cambridge house. Had spending a week with her made Mrs. Landsman an expert on women without housing? “Just when things are going so well,” Mary said tentatively. “Abel’s even getting B’s.” She could just imagine Mrs. Landsman starting to talk about Mary and how Mary’s situation had gotten her interested in homelessness. Just when Mary was being accepted, had friends in town, had joined the Methodist Church and the Library Committee. Shopkeepers knew her. She was greeted on the street.

  “A visit like that is bound to upset the children,” Debbie agreed vehemently. “Maybe we can say everybody has the flu.”

  They would stave her off. Now Mary girded herself to meet Bung. What a name, he sounded like a disease instead of a man, and that was how she felt about any man who threatened to move in on Debbie. She was always scared.

  She said to herself, Life has changed for me, but it could change back. I’m not invisible. I don’t haunt alleys and garages like a starving cat. People meet me, I have a name and they see me. I have a home. I have friends. Eight years of being trash, and now I’m human again. For poor Beverly, for Houdini and Mouse, for Samantha and Sly, I will dig in. I am rooted in these lives and I will survive. I hold my chance tight as a rope and I hold on. I won’t let anybody, El Gato Negro or Bung or Mrs. Landsman or all the king’s horses, shake me loose.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Leila

  “Daylight saving time ends next week,” Leila said to Emily, who was driving. “I hate it. Suddenly it’ll be dark when I walk home.”

  “No women like it. We never want more night. Listen, how do you think the house is shaping up?”

  “I think Mona may be a problem, but it’s beginning to cohere.”

  They were on their way back from Corrigan House, named for a woman who had given Rosie’s Place the down payment on a satellite house where a group of women, aged twenty-seven to sixty-nine, were beginning to live together. Emily and Leila had been working on a range of projects involving homeless women since the previous February, after the trial had sunk below the horizon and they had begun to talk over their adventure involving Mary Burke.

  “Things okay with Jane?” Leila asked with the same suppressed anxiety she always felt. She desperately wanted them to stay together, so as not to be caught between them. She needed and loved them both in different ways.

  “It’s better since Chuck is more independent. He’s nuts about soccer now. That helps. Gives Jane and me more time. Here we are,” Emily said, pulling up to the curb. “From the women’s shelter to the cat shelter.”

  “I only have five,” Leila said defensively. Two she had taken from Zak and the fifth had turned up in the yard, pregnant and starving. Probably she had some kind of sign on her house like hoboes used to leave for someone who would feed them. Stray cats knew. However, five were in a way less work than one or two, because they created their own society, they amused each other.

  Four were lined up just inside the door. The fifth, silky Coquette, lay on the couch awaiting her due. Leila opened the window to their run in the yard and they all sauntered out. She changed quickly into jeans. Before supper, she would have time to plant a few of the bulbs she had mail-ordered. Seven months ago, she had moved into this ordinary house just over the Cambridge-Somerville line. The house was wooden, two stories with five-room flats up and down. Upstairs was occupied by a couple in their late fifties. He worked for H & R Block and she was a legal secretary. Leila still was not sanguine about being a landlord, but their rent covered the mortgage. The house had been hideously remodeled in the early sixties with fake pine paneling and false ceilings she had torn out. It had a good new furnace and lots of windows to the east and west. Her bedroom faced the garden at the rear. The living room and joined dining room had nice old wood paneling that had needed cleaning and ghastly green and pink posied wallpaper that Emily and Zak had helped her remove before it induced suicidal depression.

  “Well,” Zak said when he saw it, “I think you call this a fixer-upper.” She had realized she did not care whether Zak liked it; he was not going to live here. The same was true of her son, now engaged to Ikuko. It was a priority for Leila to have a house she could afford by herself, one she could heat, hold on to. In spite of her accountant’s paean to mortgages and deductible interest, she would pay off this mortgage as rapidly as she could. There was nothing in the world like dealing with the homeless to make a woman engage in financial planning. It might not work, for there was no avoiding catastrophes, but meeting former housewives, teachers, factory workers, waitresses, secretaries made Leila understand how fragile were the underpinnings of security for women. A man left or died, a job ended, a factory closed, a fire burned out her building, and she was out of money and on the streets.

  She had also bought the house for the yard. If the out-of-date air of the house needed correcting, she loved the ordinary tackiness of the yard. It had a big vegetable garden near the back fence. In the center was a shaggy dandelion-infested lawn surrounded by old-fashioned perennial flowerbeds with an occasional rose, mock orange and lilac. There was even a battered wooden chair with blistering white paint where she often sat, as she did now, looking up at the darkening sky. She had plans to enlarge the vegetable garden and pave over the sad lawn with bricks. The neighbor’s maple had just begun to blush, speckles of red and orange on the green of the wide leaves. She shouldn’t sit here.

  Why not? Aside from her duties at school, she was on no one’s schedule but her own. For years her days had been shaped by the needs of Nick and David. No matter what she was doing, she must rush home to start supper; she must run d
owntown to buy socks and underwear; she must deal with the laundry; she must take David here and there and run errands for Nick.

  Sometimes she missed a family, at supper mostly. She did not mind the tenants as much as she had expected. If she heard strange noises in the night, she did not jump. It was probably just Ernie going to the bathroom. She did not care for their taste in music, which ran to show tunes, but then they must not enjoy hers. They watched a lot of television, including late talk shows, but their bedroom was in the front. Ernie and Jocelyn had no interest in the yard, no children, no pets. The music to Annie and the sounds of “Jeopardy” leaking through the ceiling were bearable. Too many vodka bottles went out in their trash, but on the whole, they were ideal tenants.

  The next day as she read her Globe at breakfast, Nick’s face beamed at her. The Don Juan he had staged for the Lyric Opera got a rave review. “Fresh and savage approach that makes Mozart as contemporary as rap.” Well, it was certainly a subject suited to his talents. She would keep her sarcasm to herself. Did she have to congratulate him? No, she did not, no more than she had on the birth of Sean Oliver the previous June.

  A letter was in her mail at school from Becky. After her ten o’clock class, she shut herself in her office to open and read it. She had put it off, because she was quite sure Becky was angry. She had shown Becky the manuscript.

  Dear Professor Landsman,

  I call you by your full name, since it’s clear I haven’t known you at all. The woman I thought I knew could not have written what you have written about me!

  I spoke to you openly and honestly, convinced of your sincerity and your open-mindedness. But you deceived me cruelly. You made me think you believed in me, that you believed in what I was saying to you. Anyone who came to know me, to really know me, would know without a doubt my innocence, I am entirely convinced of this.

  Obviously you had made your mind up beforehand, or perhaps the story you told you feel will attract a wider public than my own sad story of betrayal.

  You believe the appeal process is over, but it is not. As long as I am kept in prison unjustly, I will continue my appeals. I will not give up. My family believes in me and my true friends believe in me. I am bitterly disappointed that I opened my heart and my life to you, and you let me down. You turned on me. You bought the story of the D.A., using Sam Solomon’s crush on me and his desire to say anything at all to save his own hide. I had my suspicions when I saw you with his family.

  I do not wish to talk to you again, or receive any communications. I will not let you fool me again. You say you’ll be revising the pack of lies and gossip you call a book, but I don’t for a moment believe that you will change it nearer the truth. I will be talking to my lawyer about possible action.

  Good-bye, very sincerely,

  Becky Souza Burgess

  Leila was saddened, but not surprised. She had suspected Becky would not forgive her for what she had written, but her editor thought that she was far too sympathetic to Becky. So far nobody was happy about the book. Zak and Cathy worried about how Sam came across. Becky’s family felt let down. Her editor wanted a sexy seductress. Leila was alone with her roughly-arrived-at truths, under everyone’s guns.

  Saturday morning she headed for the Cape. Zak and she went for a long hike on the bay side. They walked out on a long stretch of low hills thinly dotted with pitch pines, abrupt clay cliffs and marshes that divided Wellfleet Bay from Massachusetts Bay, four miles of a spit sometimes narrow and sometimes ample. They carried water and lunch. They picnicked at the very end, where they leaned against a log and faced west, water on three sides of them and only a narrow bridge of sometimes submerged sand binding them to dry land and safety. Gulls came close to squawk and beg. Zak saw a seal out in the Bay, but she did not look quickly enough.

  Sitting staring at the waves with their small white manes, a pair of terns zooming past, the sand under her heated by the October sun and half a Cornish hen to chew on and his neighbor’s last tomatoes, she felt replete. She gazed at Zak, who was lolling with a half smile. As she watched him, he checked his beeper, then relaxed again. He had warned her he could have to jog back, leaving her to carry out their light gear and return on her own. That was why they always took two cars.

  Sometimes she felt as if she did not appreciate him enough, but she really did. Looking at his sharp profile moved her now. Once she had stared so at Nick’s hands, powerful and stubby. Now she looked at Zak’s more elongated fingers, narrower palms, and something opened and moved inside: the anticipation of excitement, of pleasure. When she looked at him, she found him attractive and awaited his gaze that found her attractive too. That was the key to her new sensual confidence. Here she was at forty-six, feeling more secure and comfortable in her sexuality than she had since she got pregnant with David.

  She was not someone who needed competition or jealousy to pique her sexual interest. She was happiest when her desire was anchored in one person, who wanted her as much as she wanted him. Perhaps it was a deep wish for security that had dogged her since her bumpy childhood; perhaps it was just a natural monogamy that felt solid as bedrock in her.

  He had refashioned a life from his burnt-down past. He spent far more time outdoors than she did, walking, puttering, chatting with his neighbors, exercising the dogs that were always in his house. He read a great deal. He was fond of baroque music and of jazz. He sought time for contemplation, for being still and silent. On evenings when he didn’t have to deal with some animal emergency, he often sat in his rocking chair surrounded by and communing with eight or ten different animals of three or four species, listening to some new jazz group he had read about. One of their cheap dates was to go to Harvard Square and comb all the CD stores.

  “I have a gig in San Diego next month. Do I have to see Debbie?”

  He stirred, yawning voluptuously. “Why not wait until you want to?”

  “You’re sublimely sensible. Why not indeed? They’ll never know I’m out there, if I don’t tell them.”

  “If you want to see anyone, why not visit your son at Pasadena?”

  “He’s slipping farther and farther away.” She had a moment of melancholia. David no longer talked with her every other day; once every week or two sufficed. If he came home at Thanksgiving, it would be with Ikuko. His time would be shared with Nick and Sheryl.

  On the way home the next afternoon, she realized she had not told Zak about the letter from Becky. She did not like to admit to him how much she had liked Becky. She could not blame Becky for her anger. As arson was a way of converting old wood into money, a landlord’s garbage into gold, so insurance was a way of turning a useless and unloving spouse into a fat check. Becky had not been able to resist. Her anger finally loosed itself. Women were often terrified to let their anger out, for fear it would destroy everything. Usually it did no more than break a dish. Becky had been different. For being a wife who had used up her husband with no more regard or remorse than men frequently showed toward women, she had removed herself from the circle of women into infamy.

  As a woman alone Leila was aware how she had ventured out too beyond that presumed safe circle of wagons. She was still a woman whose energy overflowed toward others. But at last she had more of a sense that she could choose to whom and to what she would give.

  Melanie had died a year before, not on this date in the regular calendar, but yahrzeits were kept on the lunar Jewish calendar, and tonight, she would mark the anniversary of Melanie’s death. At sunset, she lit the yahrzeit candle in its narrow glass in the bathtub, because while she was observant, she was also terrified of fire. Vronsky, Waif and Coquette lined up to watch her with slitted eyes. The other two, Curry and Chaplin, were wrestling in the hall. Vronsky and Waif were always together, but all other relationships were volatile. Two cats curled up smooching in the morning might spat and spit in the evening.

  I miss you, she addressed Melanie, after saying the Mourner’s Kaddish. No one can replace a friend as close as you, no one
can remember with me all those years. My best friend now is sometimes Zak and sometimes Emily, in different ways. The biggest surprise is that I truly like living alone.

  She had new friends who were meaningful to her, but perhaps her growing interest in women without homes was the most important thing she had opened herself to in the year since Melanie’s death. It was a matter not only of studying them, as other academics were doing, but of working to provide options, openings. She wanted as many choices as she could have, and she wanted those women to have choices too. An affluent woman could decide to be footloose and cast down a sleeping bag in the shade of her credit cards. But these women had not asked to be cold and hungry, unwashed and lame, sick and terrified. They were the also rans, the sorry about thats, the maybe next times, the can’t use yous, the too olds, not pretty enoughs, doesn’t know how to dress, more profit if we condo-ize, this factory is not showing enough return, if we keep her on we’ll have to pay a pension, she’s so dark skinned, if you take off for your kids, you’re out.

  What it amounts to, Melanie, is a new riff on that old Billie Holiday song: Bless the woman who has her own. I’m no longer the wife of Don Juan. I find it satisfying to work with other women who have been pushed out the door to find a little of their own. I sometimes run into acquaintances who pity me for no longer being Nick’s wife—a man famous in the way we know, not like basketball stars or the leads in TV sitcoms, but someone who gets into the Boston papers now and then. My own modest success enables me to live; his gave me nothing but trouble. At any rate, this fall, this year, this season in my life, I have my own. All human arrangements are fragile, but I make my choices as I go. Perhaps if you were alive, we would live together now, but there is no one I want to accommodate. At last I am my own woman.