The High Cost of Living: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  “Maybe Brenda wanted the scene so she’d know it was over.” Leslie was slicing a salami.

  “Why do they always think it won’t be over? Should I make a dip for the chips? I’m bored silly with dips.”

  “Don’t. They all taste like sour cream with something odd in it.”

  “Brenda cried all the way to the bus. Imagine coming to the house that way!… Why do they carry on like scalded cats?”

  Leslie raised her brows. “Is that a serious question?”

  Sue pouted, sleeking her hair. She had put on a long blue and green Mexican hostess dress. “Do they figure he’s about to leave me? That’s what makes me spitting mad!”

  “You never seem spitting mad.”

  “All right, mildly bothered. I don’t like it slopping over anywhere near the kids.” She smiled absently, stooping to rummage the lower cupboards for more crackers to put out.

  “I suppose you only see the ones who make a fuss.”

  “Oh, he’s honest. Honest George. He does tell me about all of them. Otherwise I’d poison him, right? Give me a hand up. I’ve got to lose weight this spring. You’re always so neat and trim. How come you never gain an ounce?”

  Leslie set Sue on her feet. Sue held on to her arms for a moment. “Maybe I should study karate?” Sue peered into her face. “But I wouldn’t, would I, honey? I’d never keep soldiering at it. I’d just go in there twice and pull a muscle I never did hear of before and give up.”

  The truth was Sue was lazy and never studied anything past a couple of lessons, whether it was trancendental meditation or conversational Russian. She read an enormous amount, far more than George, who stuck to journals and books in his own field. She read serious novels and books about genetics, books about education and art and the Etruscans and medieval icons, biographies of Freud and Helen Traubel. As compulsively as some women ate, she read. Sue had enjoyed a good education in the English department at Bryn Mawr, but she never seemed to have sheltered any ambitions Leslie could discover. Leslie could not understand such a large amorphous curiosity, a morass into which all that information and literature sank. Yet it was characteristic of Sue that no matter what book anyone might mention, she would have read it or would have acquired it and be about to. Reading seemed to be Sue’s profession. If she could be inveigled into real conversation, frequently her ideas were interesting. But nothing led to anything else. Maybe it was because she had never had to work, Leslie thought, puzzling over Sue.

  Once the students arrived, Leslie detached herself from Sue. The livingroom of George’s house reminded her of a failed church, high and gloomy with shadows clustering like bats in spite of the Design Research furniture. The livingroom stretched a full two stories, facing the cold gray north for a supposed view, a weak slope to the trees still standing in a thin band between this house and the next, and it looked like a room the sun never entered. Sue collected art. The livingroom was arranged to show off the prints, the hard-edge paintings, the welded metal sculpture, rather than to facilitate sitting or talking. As a result, George’s students ended up in two huddles. The first was centered on George, who usually sat by the fireplace in a leather sling chair, while at his feet the nervous masses huddled yearning to be noticed. Those were the students who kept their minds buzzing on number one goal, impressing George. The lazier, more confident, the hungrier, hornier students clustered in the kitchen near the food and the drink.

  Leslie wandered back and forth, a little bit the maid emptying ashtrays, collecting empty beer cans and glasses abandoned where they could be broken, putting out more chips or ice—a little bit the ersatz daughter of the house, called over by Sue or George to hear some point or tell some anecdote: the only female Sue trusted. His newer students tended to resent her ambiguous role, not comprehending it was all just part of her job.

  Who would George take up with? He always had something going, carefully casual and limited affairs with young women. They were pretty, uncommonly so, and quite young. Sometimes they were students, sometimes secretaries, and sometimes somebody’s girlfriend or sister. Valerie and she had once invented a murder starring George as corpse in which ever so many characters had motives for offing him. They had such fun they listed twenty-seven suspects, including Sue of course, his students, his colleagues, his ex-affairs, young men whose girlfriends or sisters he had briefly enjoyed. He never had an affair with a married woman or anyone belonging to a peer. He had been murdered by having the stem of his pipe coated with strychnine: he chewed his pipe more than he smoked it.

  She smiled at the memory and then saw Hennessy trying to catch her eye. Cam was not here; the play had two more weeks to run. In one of those loud buffalo plaid shirts he liked to wear, he looked like a hunter and she felt like a hunted deer. Pivoting, she dived into the pool of listeners at George’s feet. Actually it typified these gatherings that nobody ever listened to anyone except George and the voice of their own anxiety. They never heard what anyone said, even the person just beside them. But Hennessy wedged himself in next to her, his thigh heavy against hers. Hugging her knees, she ordered herself to be elsewhere; she would review her sensei’s admonitions for the last two weeks and think how best to apply them.

  Her new sensei, Parker, was the only man she could remember that she considered beautiful, as beautiful as a woman, although she did not desire him. She had never had a male sensei before, but Parker was good at instructing women. He was of medium height, his skin was copper-black, he was graceful and very, very strong. He looked sarcasm oftener than he spoke it. He had ways of glancing at her when she was clumsy that made her shrivel. She liked him immensely but could not tell from his vast fairness whether he liked her. Perhaps he perceived his students only in terms of their karate accomplishments and problems; she would like that.

  She jumped, realizing George had addressed her and probably repeated whatever he had said, because everyone was staring. She felt herself blush as if she had been dipped in boiling water. Hennessy said, “Hey, now I know why George calls you Red. Not just from your hair.” He patted her head as if she were a spaniel, grinning down at her.

  “What were you dreaming about?” George stroked his mustache peevishly.

  “Why the papers, master, only the papers.”

  “Then you must’ve found something more interesting than I have, to blush like that.”

  “It’s a reflex.… Can you figure what possible survival value it could ever have had for my ancestors to suddenly turn beet red? Fitting into a predominantly red landscape?”

  “Bright as a baboon’s behind. But evolution works by sexual selection as well as natural selection.” George would pronounce on anything. He had a weakness for biological theories, Ardrey and Wilson. She was off the hook, but he wouldn’t forgive a second lapse, for her attention was part of what he was buying. That quality of attention first made him notice her as a student, he had told her. “You’ll have to do everything not twice as well but five times as well.” He did not bother to tell her she’d have to be a decent politician to survive. She knew that, but she was not convinced she had the capacity. Maybe she could be seven times as good and they’d accept her.

  Honor was wearing a lacy nightdress with a lavender housecoat over it, trailing down to her narrow high-arched bare feet. “I’m afraid I’m catching cold. I feel frayed around the edges. That’s why I got into my nightgown when I came home.” She glided off to the room she obviously shared with Cam, one twin bed made up with an old-fashioned prim-faced doll sitting on the pillow—a doll that must have belonged to her mother—the other a tangle of covers and run pantyhose, rumpled bikini underpants. “Do have some of this cough medicine. It’s delicious and habit-forming.”

  Leslie glowered. “It has codeine in it. Why not just shoot up? A, you don’t have a cough yet. B, if you did, the last thing you should do is suppress it! Coughing clears your lungs.”

  “Leslie, you’re so righteous! What’s the difference between drinking wine and drinking this, except
it has a lovely cherry flavor?”

  “I don’t mean to be … righteous. I try to avoid the lesser temptations.”

  “I can’t even resist a second slice of lemon meringue pie, which isn’t my favorite, so I’m sure I could never resist a big juicy temptation, if I had a crack at one.… Paul’s the closest to a temptation I’ve met, and his ugly little dirty jokes turn me off.” She sat on the bench in front of a skirted vanity and motioned Leslie to sit beside her. The frilly dressing table was piled with a dusty havoc of glamour—half-used lipsticks, hand creams, throat creams, cakes of eye shadow, an electric curling set, powders and rouges that Leslie presumed were really Cam’s. “Look at this wicked new lipstick. It’s mauve.”

  She took Honor’s wrist, gently. “Please don’t put that crap on. You’re naturally …” She could not say “beautiful” again. Sometimes it seemed to her every time she looked at Honor she told her how beautiful she was. “… lovely.”

  Honor grimaced into the mirror, making a face with one eye strained wide and the other squinted. “If I’m … lovely … as you say … why does everyone hate me?”

  “Who hates you? What are you talking about?”

  “Nobody in the play likes me. I can tell. I don’t know how to talk to people.… And at school, they hate me.”

  “Listen, the kids who enjoy high school, they’re all assholes, Honorée. Believe me, everybody you’ll be friendly with when you go to college, when you ask them about high school they were all miserable.”

  Honor put her elbows down hard on the vanity, shoving aside the cosmetics. “Such an ugly thing happened. In the cafeteria. Buck Rogers—his name is Bill but he calls himself Buck, and every time we’re in the same class, we have to sit by each other when they do it by alphabet. He plays basketball and he thinks he’s sexy.… Ugh, he’s so gross!”

  “What happened?” This was the cold, she was sure, what was really ailing Honor.

  “He said to me in front of the whole line, ‘Hey, Dictionary—’”

  “What?”

  “Oh, that’s what some of them call me. Miss Dictionary. They’re such cretins.… Anyhow, he said—very loud—‘Hey, Dictionary, I can’t decide what’s bigger, your tits or your ass or the words you use, but I’ll tell you what. I’ll fuck you anyhow, if you’ll wear a gag. How about it?’” Honor gave a yank to her own hair. “I felt so stupid, I couldn’t think of a come-back. All the conversations that go through my mind all the time, and I always give myself such witty dialogue, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I almost cried! I felt so humiliated.… I’m never going back!”

  “He probably really is attracted to you, and he doesn’t know how to approach you, so he punished you for it.”

  “Sometimes I feel like such an anachronism. I want to be a Great Lady, and whatever will I do with my life?”

  “Finish high school and get away from home for a start. It will get better then, believe me.”

  “How can I leave Mama? I think she’s bred me so I can’t. I’ll turn into an old maid and age behind drawn blinds playing with cosmetics and dresses.”

  “Are you aging at—What age are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “You’re not getting social security yet,” Leslie said mockingly, but she shivered. Was never leaving a possibility? Was that why Cam had brought her sister to the theater? Nervously she picked up a small metal box from the dresser and fiddled with it. Suddenly it began to tinkle out music. “What?”

  “Mama and I found that at a garage sale. We search them out sometimes on weekends. Dad never goes. He doesn’t like to do anything Mama does. He likes to hang out with what Mama calls his cronies—two friends he plays penny-a-point pinochle with every Friday night. They must be the last pinochle players in the world.” Honor took the music box from her. “I bet you didn’t notice what’s inside?”

  “Some earrings.”

  “Those are real garnets. They belonged to my father’s mother. But I can’t wear them, they’re for pierced ears. Mama won’t let me get my ears pierced. She talks about infection. It makes me furious! I’m trying to get Bernar’ to go with me to have it done. I’d have the nerve then. Once it’s done, what can she do? I don’t suppose your ears are pierced?”

  “Wrong. I had it done when I was fourteen. I used to wear big gold hoops.”

  “I should think silver would look better with your hair?”

  “I used to be partial to a shade of red-gold I thought matched it. Now gold’s so expensive it’s ludicrous that when I was fourteen and a biker’s old lady I used to wear gold in my ears.”

  “I’ve never seen you wear any jewelry but your man’s watch.” Honor lifted the loop of Leslie’s hair that covered her ear, on its way to the rubber band that confined it. “You do have a little stud—but just on one side. Did you lose the other?”

  “Val—Valerie and I—used to buy a pair of post earrings together. We’d split the pair and each would wear one. Val has the mate to this turquoise stud.”

  “Valerie. I thought you didn’t have a sister.”

  “No, we lived together for three years.”

  “I don’t know if I’d like to live with another woman. I’ve had it with sisters.”

  I’ve got to do better than this, she thought. “We were lovers, Honor, Honorée.”

  “And when you were fourteen you really slept with a boy? Is that what you mean by the phrase you were a biker’s old lady?”

  Leslie laughed with relief. Honor wasn’t going to faint or scream. “I don’t think I was ever a virgin. I probably had sex some time up in the sand dunes when I was nine. I suppose before fourteen it doesn’t count. Yeah, I was involved with first one guy, Billy, and then Cliff. I was involved with Cliff from, let’s see, around Christmas just before I turned fifteen until halfway through my sixteenth year. It was practically like a two-year marriage. Cliff was my first marriage and Val my second.”

  “It’s amazing to imagine having sex for years by the time you were my age. Just think, you’d already broken up with Cliff! Oh, there must be something wrong with me!”

  She blinked. Honor had taken it like a sugar pill. Or had she? Had she just somehow not listened? She could hardly say, Hey, never mind the early heterosexual stuff, you have to focus on what matters to me. “It was my first try at breaking out of the house. Not a smart way. It’s lucky I didn’t get pregnant and stuck for good. But the gang seemed high on energy, style, speed. That’s what drew me. Except I liked books. They were escape too. I always liked to read from the time I discovered that. They were someplace else, like the gang.”

  “How did you happen to go to college?”

  “I had a high school teacher who decided I was a diamond in the rough. Miss Greening.” She had loved to talk to Miss Greening, Miss Greening loved to talk to her. Both of them were perishing of loneliness. Because she had already been in love with a woman, although nothing passed between them, she felt more sophisticated and more corrupt than Miss Greening, who did not know what the attraction between them was. She knew. She was grateful, but knowing made her fierce and bumbling, awkward and lumpy. Miss Greening helped her, gave to her, shared with her, and she was deeply, passionately grateful. Even though she was not physically attracted to the dumpy gray-haired woman, she wanted to make love to her out of love itself. But they remained Miss G. and Leslie, and all that was ever given to the affection was a peck on the cheek at final parting.

  “Every time I turn on the stupid TV, I see some man I could have a passionate affair with,” Honor mourned, holding her hair on top of her head and turning to and fro to eye herself. “Why don’t I meet any in real life? Maybe they all left Detroit.… I had a fantastic dream about Paul. I do have the best dreams! If I could film them, I’d make a fortune! They’re like ten-course dinners. I dreamed I was married to him. He was, how shall I say? playful but affectionate.”

  Leslie laughed. “Sounds like a Saint Bernard puppy.”

  “Sunday I told him I’d dream
ed about him, and he forgave me for our tiff Saturday and got all enchanted up again.”

  “Are you really interested in him?”

  “He’s fun to practice on. I can’t help it if I’m feeling fine. I’m not going to act dull and dreary on his account,” Honor said loftily.

  “You don’t even like him, do you?”

  “What has liking to do with it?”

  “I wouldn’t want to … touch someone I didn’t like a lot.”

  “Pooh. I don’t think sexual magnetism has much to do with liking. I like Bernar’ more than anyone—except possibly yourself, Leslie, and I’ve known him longer—but there’s no electricity. I can’t imagine him sweeping me up in his arms and throwing me on the bed.”

  “Gay men seldom do that sort of thing,” Leslie muttered. “But why do you want to be raped?”

  “I don’t want to be raped! I don’t even like having my hair pulled when Mama’s trimming it. But I want a masterly sort of man. If I were tremendously experienced and sophisticated, like yourself, Leslie,” she added wickedly, “I’d know just what to do, and then I wouldn’t need to imagine the man taking charge. All I know is how to flirt, and I’m still learning that. How else will anything ever manage to happen?”

  Tuesday she was coming home just after ten in good spirits. She had made a breakthrough, she had done very well in karate class. Her instructor had given her a nod and said, “Like that, watch,” to another student. Afterward she had showered at the dojo and rubbed out her bruises and changed and even hung around socializing in the glow of the thing well done. As she passed the dark shoestore with its heavy metal grates pulled over the windows and approached the street door that opened on her stairway, she saw someone in the doorway lounging, and at once she crouched into a ready position, letting her gear drop.

  “Really, do I look like a ravening menace? You’re much more dangerous than I am on a dark street.”

  She recognized Bernard’s voice before she picked up her gear and moved close enough to see him slouched outside the locked door.