The High Cost of Living: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  Tasha beamed. She was so happy that she did not even push Leslie about coming back to work on the rape project. She was tremendously sympathetic that Leslie had finally altogether broken up with Valerie. Leslie felt a trifle dishonest, because most of her pain had nothing to do with Valerie, and she wasn’t about to explain what it had to do with. But the comfort and the homey atmosphere were soothing anyhow. Rae relaxed now that she had made her hegemony clear. Rae was a big woman, but she moved powerfully and well; she strolled across the room centering it on herself.” When she got up to get more coffee or use the telephone, everyone watched her. It would have taken effort not to. Trust Tasha to take on a Black lover, Leslie thought sourly. Any Third World lesbian could have her for a wink. But she felt jealous. Rae would turn anybody on.

  Because of Debra’s quiet persecution, she quit going to the Queen of Hearts and tried the Pig’s Whistle instead. She disliked it. There were more men, more straight couples slumming, more johns cruising, and heavier old fashioned sex roles, the butches and femmes of yesteryear. Every time she talked to a woman, somebody was ready to slug her. She could not take it. She stopped going to the bars as abruptly as she had started and settled into celibacy again. She caught up on her sleep and worked even harder.

  Her sensei, Parker, said she was improving and that she must try for her black belt in a month.

  “That soon?”

  “You can make yourself ready, if you work the way you’ve been doing these past couple of weeks. Instead of the sloppy way you were doing in April.”

  She had a new kata to learn. It was the most beautiful she had studied and she did it for pleasure as well as the coming test. One particular set of kicks and blocks she loved, for it was a stately swift dance.

  Late Monday night she was working on the Simpson papers. When she took a break and was practicing her new kata in the women’s room, she caught sight of herself in a mirror and her mouth opened in astonishment. How graceful, how strong, how good she looked! In spite of her quick success in the bars, she had been feeling so ugly that her reflection attracted her gaze as a stranger glimpsed dancing in a crowd might. Under fluorescent light her hair was dulled, but her body moved like a big cat in swift dignity. She thought of Rae. She was pleased. She bowed to herself and blushed. At that moment she began to forgive herself. At least her body was trying to live up to her standards; her body was good the way a good bird dog was good (her old dog Satan, a part-Labrador retriever), the way a good race horse was good, good as a nursing baby. She, that querulous conversation within, she must try to be worthy too.

  Tuesday when she packed her rucksack with books and papers and got ready to leave, Cam was loitering in her raincoat at the door.

  “You left home, you moved out, um?” Leslie said, slowing her stride to Cam’s and simultaneously worrying about the time. She had to catch the Woodward bus.

  “Oh, Mark’s been after me to live with him.… His parents send him money and he’s got a really nice apartment in a high rise. It’s a studio but it’s air conditioned. That seems silly now …” She put up her umbrella and motioned Leslie to come under it. “But in a month it will be too hot here to live, you know. Oh, I guess you don’t. Mark says you come from a little town on Lake Michigan?”

  “Mark seems to think he knows a lot about me.”

  Cam fiddled with her scarf. They walked down the block together. Cam seemed nervous. “Is something wrong?” Leslie asked finally.

  “I’ve been worrying.… Honor is such a baby. She doesn’t know a thing yet, believe me. It’s all talk and pretend. She imagines she’s sophisticated because she read The New Yorker for a year when she was fifteen. Honest to God, she used to read it cover to cover. She got me to give her a subscription for Christmas. She’d read the listings of what’s going on about town—New York, in Detroit yet! As if just reading about all that stuff was magic.” Cam brought herself up short and tugged at her scarf.

  “She just doesn’t like being patronized. She doesn’t like older people coming on as if we know everything just because we’re older, especially just a couple of years older.” Was Cam an intermediary? She felt a stir of hope. Honor had asked Cam to speak to her. That was why Cam was so awkward. She would provide an opening. “I guess I’ve annoyed her that way myself.”

  “But she is young! She’s just seventeen. I know she told you she was a year older. I hope you didn’t believe her? She really hasn’t had any experience at all.”

  “We’ve all had experiences,” Leslie said slowly. “Even in sense deprivation, you have experiences.”

  “Don’t try to misunderstand me,” Cam said shortly.

  “I’m not. And I am not understanding.” She felt her defenses hinge down. She stood straighter, she took longer strides. “I know Honor is young. I couldn’t hardly miss that. She’s in high school, after all.”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “No, I don’t.” Leslie’s face froze. Her back was hardening concrete.

  “Honor is very innocent, and if anything happened to her, it would be just terrible. It wouldn’t be fair! She doesn’t have any experience even dating boys!”

  “Are you worried about Paul?”

  “You must think I’m stupid or something. Mark had to tell me you’re a homosexual.”

  “If Mark had to tell you, it can’t be very important to your understanding of me, can it? Do you imagine Honor doesn’t know?”

  “Well, I hoped she didn’t!”

  “Why? It’s good for her to know different kinds of women who’ve made different choices—work choices, living choices, sexual choices. What’s the point of her growing up imagining everybody lives in a daddy-mommy-baby family and votes Republican? If you think loving women makes me less fit to be her friend than loving men or dogs or vibrators, you just have to be crazy!”

  “If I told Mama, she’d never let you in the house again.”

  “How does she feel about your living with Mark?”

  “She doesn’t understand! She’s locked in some weird Victorian notion of how people live and I can’t get through to her! Okay, I don’t want to tell her.… But I don’t like your hanging around Honor either.”

  “You used to see her as hanging around me. Look, I’ve never gone to bed with a woman who wasn’t at least as interested as I was. Honor doesn’t attract me that way. I don’t like straight women. I don’t usually like straight women as friends, and I sure don’t need them as lovers.”

  “If anything happens, Mama will think it’s my fault. So will I. Because I could tell her.”

  “Then you can set your mind—if that’s what you call it—at rest!” Leslie pivoted. She saw her bus coming and sprinted for it. The rain felt good pelting her. As soon as she was packed swaying in the late rush hour mass, she began thinking of all she should have said. “You’re a woman who hates women. I’ve heard you putting yourself down. Do you think Honor should trust you over me? You do nothing but criticize her. You’re jealous! You don’t respect her.” She almost missed her stop.

  Tasha was trying to include her in social events, inviting her to eat at the house, inviting her to a party there. It was a nice quiet relaxed talky party, mostly women, five or six men, but everyone seemed to come in couples and know each other. She got into an unavoidable argument with the blond with the baby, Sherry, who was spouting nonsense about matriarchal prehistory, the worst kind of undocumented unproven wishful thinking.

  “But writing came in around the beginning of patriarchy,” Sherry said. She smiled a lot when she argued, as if to make contact across the words. “The first thing they did with it was to cover up the past. To rewrite the old myths. How can you expect we’ll ever find a nice box in the desert with a scroll in it saying, This is how things were before the male revolution, folks, with nice cross-dating in a language you happen to be able to read.”

  “But your history isn’t history, it’s comic books. You just make it up wholesale to be the way you want it to be,�
�� Leslie said coldly.

  She felt as if the other women around her were annoyed with her for starting the argument with Sherry. Tasha came over and tried to mediate. “You don’t really disagree about the facts we know. I think you just attach different importance to the evidence that remains.” Tasha looked momentarily pleased with herself as if she had produced a formula that had to work.

  “I don’t give women license to do slipshod work,” Leslie said, mostly to Tasha. She was annoyed with Sherry, all that smiling and nodding and really an inflexible position behind it. “I have to work twice as hard and be twice as good as the men in my department just to survive.”

  “Twice as good at what?” Tasha laughed. “Not helping old ladies across the street. Goodness has nothing to do with it.”

  “As a woman I have to be more scholarly, more precise, better documented, with sounder statistics. Why can’t Sherry see that?”

  “Cause it’s like studying theology. Can’t you see that? The winner gets to tell about the fight.” Tasha was glowing again. She would never be pretty—her features were crowded into her small triangular face—but she gave off a sense of loving energy that could replace prettiness.

  “And to describe the loser,” Sherry said, patting Leslie’s arm. “We don’t have a history.”

  They were trying to charm her, to cajole her into backing down, and she resented it. Tasha was saying, “You still admire that macher George. You think his way is the way. What are these damn Simpson papers you talk about? They’re just a bunch of rich crooks. Essentially they’re paying you off to put their house in order.”

  “But they had an effect on how things are here. They made choices that shaped Detroit.”

  “Boy, I don’t doubt that,” Tasha said, laughing. “If you really did an exposé of them. Or even just so we’d understand how they screwed us. Is that what you’re doing?”

  “Not exactly.” Leslie sighed. Tasha was attacking just where Leslie feared the most. She wanted to leave. “But after all, I’m educating myself. Later I can do what I want.”

  “Leslie, why don’t you get involved in the women’s school? Use your skill now for us. Rae’s teaching a course on the history of Black women. You could do a history course. Local. Women’s history. Whatever.”

  “Not old wives’ tales, which is all you people care about,” Leslie said gruffly. “I don’t have the time.”

  George was always pulling her into the domestic corners of his life. Almost she expected him to summon her to take notes while he was sitting on the toilet. He did not have her sense of privacy. Sometimes that made her feel like a servant, a real domestic. “You’re part of the family,” Sue was always telling her, but never said which part. Sue had grown up with Black servants and had one still in the cleaning lady who came three times a week. Leslie felt bogged down in their domesticity, always alien to it, the behavior of a different species, the dominant species which threatened the existence of hers, heterosexual man and complaisant woman and their offspring. Yet at times she could feel their house as a refuge. George is my protector, I shall not want.

  He was talking in exuberant snatches over his shoulder as he roughhoused with Davey and Louise on the floor of the family room (TV, comfortable furniture, toys scattered so that the unwary foot would crush plastic). She could not watch George with his kids without feeling envy. Yes, she envied Davey and Louise the love they got without having to beg, a father who played with them on the floor, in the yard, who took them to the zoo and sailing and thought that was fun. She envied them the room each had, the fish, the hamster, the clean nice furniture. She envied them the creative day care, the Montessori kindergarten, the gentle exciting grade school they had started, the chance to be precocious gifted children. Who wouldn’t be a charming bright-eyed genius with that kind of attention? She would not mind being George’s kid instead of his research assistant. Louise’s finger paintings were thumbtacked to the walls of his office. Imagine her own father putting up some daub Leslie had smeared, even if he’d had an office. The only time she’d drawn on a wall she’d had her face slapped and had to wash the wall down. Nothing remained from her childhood, nothing cherished by anyone; even her outworn clothes had been used up as rags.

  George was especially exuberant because this Thursday evening there was something to celebrate: he had got his Rockefeller grant for the book they wanted to do. They would have the money for the capital investment project. “It’s going to be real on a scale that’ll make an impact if we do it right, if we carry it off elegantly. Nothing is more satisfying than busting myths,” he said, lying on his back while Louise bounced on his chest. “I’m going to take the myth of the robber barons and reduce it to rubble. The development of industry was always intelligent and efficient. Money’s always had the smarts here. We’ll demonstrate it, and that’s going to put us on the map.” It meant a good dissertation for her, better than the previous game plan, with money to support her directly on that work. “We’ll farm out the boring papers,” George said. He didn’t mean it—he’d keep control and of course the money and credit. But he’d let the papers absorb more grad students who were protégés of others in the department, and he’d withdraw his best talent into the capital research.

  “Get trucking on your topic,” he ordered. “I want a proposal from you by next week. Ow! Ow! I give up, Davey. Uncle!”

  “Next week! I can’t.”

  “You’ve been dawdling. You haven’t got years and years, Red. How long do you think I’m going to stay here?”

  “Do you have another offer?”

  “Sure. Not one I’m ready to take. Hey, you watch it, you’re ticklish too, lousy-Louise. Grrr. I don’t even have to touch you to tickle you. Watch, I’m just going to point my finger at your belly and you’re going to be tickled. One, two, three.… See, I told you.… This book is going to do it, but why sit it out here till the book’s done? We’ll make the move on the basis of the first papers we present. Full steam ahead.”

  Cold iron in her stomach. So soon. Would he take her with him? She couldn’t switch schools again in mid-Ph.D. She had to finish before he left, or she was done for. She had better be done with everything but her dissertation by halfway through next year. She felt harassed, evicted. Now the dissertation topic would come right out of the work with George, and she would be paid; but she had to rush. Why, how lucky to have lost all her human relationships in the course of a week, because from now on her social life would be confined to saying hello in the elevator.

  The food was set out, the wine, the cans of soda and beer, and now students and staff were arriving. Leslie was startled to see Mark and Cam come in with Honor. What was Honor doing here? Why had Cam agreed to bring her, after that wonderful chat? She suppressed the impulse to bolt the room. If Honor came knowing she would be here, perhaps there was a chance to reconcile. She hung back, watching. Honor was more dressed up (the gauzy blue gown) than anyone except Sue, who had on a long maroon dress.

  She ran errands, she kept an eye on the supplies, she had earnest fleeting conversations, she sat at George’s feet, all the while wishing she were home in her neat stark room alone. A headache made a lump behind her eyes. Everyone seemed to be smoking more than usual and the air felt stuffy and soiled.

  Honor danced up to her. “Aren’t you going to speak to me?”

  “I wanted to. I wasn’t sure that was what you wanted.”

  “How humble. And perceptive. I wasn’t sure I did either, but I’m bored. What a lot of dull forlorn people one must encounter in graduate school. Perhaps everyone who likes people at all or is good at doing anything must leave, abandoning the sad cloddy types to plod along.”

  “Maybe it’s more like the Army. A few years under an alien regime, with no time to do anything you want.”

  “Well, my life is definitely more interesting.… Definitely.”

  “I’m supposed to ask who or what, aren’t I?”

  “You know who. Bernar’ and I have been getting
closer and closer. It was perceptive of you, Leslie, to think of him in a way I hadn’t. How fascinating you should have done that.”

  “You give me too much credit. I think of him as a snake in the grass.”

  “Oh, pooh! Just because he rejected you. You must be more broad minded. We can’t all be attracted to each other, can we?”

  “What happened between him and me isn’t what he told you. You’ll fingure that out sometime.… So you think you’re in love with Bernie?”

  “How blatantly patronizing! I think I’m in love! I think you just insulted me. Good night.” With a flounce of skirts she stalked away, over to George, who was poking the fire. As Leslie watched, Honor took up a position with one arm against the fireplace wall and began flirting outrageously with him. Soon the other students were drifting away resentfully, because George was no longer listening to the bright remarks they spent ten minutes thinking up. He was not even looking at them when they spoke. Honor was putting on a performance for Leslie’s benefit that Leslie thought was at least equal to her Cecily.

  I won’t give her the satisfaction of standing here suffering, she told herself and marched to the kitchen. There Sue was in an odd petulant mood. She was drinking a lot, not wine but vodka mixed haphazardly with whatever came to hand: orange juice, ginger ale, cola. “He’s going to be a big success, isn’t he?” Sue took her by the hand, squeezing.

  “Sure,” Leslie said awkwardly.

  “I never expected it. You figure on that? Why, when I took up with him, sending my parents climbing the wall, he was a campus radical. He organized a teach-in, he was a hippie with hair down to his waist who used to hold his jeans up with a piece of rope. I just don’t know, and that’s the bottom truth, Leslie. Life is full of surprises, ain’t that the truth? You know he got kicked out, fired from his job at Champaign-Urbana? In 1970 when I was carrying Davey? He was just an assistant prof. And for a year he couldn’t find a job sweeping streets. We had to live off my parents, which was no treat! I swear it would’ve been less of a hassle to go on welfare! That’s because I didn’t come into my own money till I was twenty-five. That’s how my granddaddy set it up. Honey, the first thing I ever did besides buy a decent king-sized bed and a whole bunch of clothes for Davey and George and some halfway decent maternity clothes for me—I was carrying Louise by then—was to pay my parents back every red cent we’d borrowed from them.” She paused, lost. She could not remember what she had started out to say, and turned appealingly to Leslie.