Vida

by Marge Piercy

“It wouldn’t cost much. Not if I keep it in good tune. Then we could travel easy, we could even sleep in it. It’d be like a base for us.”

  “Honey, why in hell do you want a car?”

  “Why don’t you want one?” Joel glared. “Don’t call me honey in that tone. Think how great it’s been having the little Subaru. The insurance is low up here. I could work on it and get it in great shape. When the weather’s nice, we can go camping.”

  “Why not go camping now? It’s as practical as using up our money on some great gas-guzzling ogre that’ll die in the first mountain pass!” She tugged on her hair in annoyance.

  “You don’t trust me. You don’t believe I’m a good mechanic. Listen, I could take that car apart and put it together in the dark. Blindfolded. With gloves on.”

  She paced as the cows shuffled. “We have to figure out what we’re going to do.”

  “I can work here awhile. I was talking to Steve. I’m better on the detail work than the couple he has now.”

  “I can’t stay here. They’d drive me crazy.” Steve reminded her of a fat and fangless Kevin, lording it over his household.

  “Just a few days. I asked Steve for five bucks an hour. No taxes out, no Social Security. If I put in a week, that’s two hundred right there”

  “Have you made up your mind if you want to go with me Tuesday?”

  “Yeah, why not? But what is all this? Are you still for real in the Net—”

  She stepped hard on his foot. “What did you think? If we want to work on opposition to nuclear power plants, we have to hammer out some kind of proposal. It needn’t be solid till, say, late this month. Probably not till after Thanksgiving. But we need some preliminary flag to wave at Kiley to draw out her reaction.” A scheme began to come to her. “Listen, I’ll take the car and return it. Then I’ll stay at Hardscrabble. You buy the car, get it in shape and I’ll wait upstate. You can come up there Monday night for the Tuesday meeting, if you want to, or just come up when you work out the week.”

  ”Ah, stay with me. We could get separated.”

  “Love, I’m going to push a plate into Steve’s face if I have to sit through another meal with him.”

  “‘Cause he’s loud. You like refined types. University men”

  “My dad was stone working-class and he never sat at the table like a pig in a high chair. Maybe he didn’t know what fork to use, but he knew how to treat people at his table” She stepped closer. “You’d never act like that. He treats Ellen worse than a cow.”

  “I don’t want us to be separated. It scares me.”

  She found it scared her too. “I’ll wait. Come to me.”

  To drive off in the Subaru for New Hampshire exhilarated her—going to an assignation with her husband in style. Oh, she had certainly traveled enough on buses for nine lifetimes, in other people’s cars, handed from car to car; but she had not climbed into a vehicle alone and roared off sedately in too many years for her to locate the last time. By habit, she minimized contact between herself and strangers. She took along cold chicken and filled the thermos with Ellen’s perked coffee, boiled to viscosity but hot and full of caffeine. Natalie’s gift accompanied her. She wished it were time to talk to her again.

  Of all the pleasures of her old life that she had not properly appreciated, the simple ability to pick up a phone and call someone when she wanted to know how they were, what they were doing, when she ached to hear their voice was surely one of the most precious abilities she had lost.

  “The first euphoria is over. We rub on each other. Traveling together is hard. Yet the connection holds—isn’t that a surprise?” She talked to Natalie as she drove. “Just desperation? Somebody to love after so long? Not that I don’t love you and Leigh. There are people who never stop missing the ones they love. I never get used to it: you’re there and I’m here, and why? You know, you go underground with a set of people and you’re condemned to them. If you can’t love one of them, find a mate, you’re out of luck. Eva was consolation but not passion. Every woman not you always strikes me they aren’t you. Except Lohania. She was herself. Yet even Lohania got jealous of you”

  Lohania and she had exhausted evenings in discussions about whether they should be lovers. They agreed it was a terrible inhibition that they could relate only to men, and they were warmly attracted to each other. But they seemed more comfortable talking about their attraction than acting on it. Half the people who knew them thought they were lovers, an assumption they encouraged, but the myth satisfied them for months. They could hold each other, they could cuddle, but below the waist stayed out of bounds. They drank wine, they got stoned, they finally dropped acid together, but they had affection rather than sex. Finally Lohania insisted they had gone too far to back down. It was a politically necessary step.

  Lohania thought they ought to go off to a motel, but Vida objected. Instead, they kicked out Kevin and Leigh for the weekend; took the phone off the hook (a preliminary to sex, whose accompaniment was always the mechanical protests of a telephone uncoupled) and marched off to bed to get on with it. Actually she had enjoyed making love with Lohania. At first they were clumsy, but the unease passed. They discovered they could experience multiple orgasms with each other and made love until they were both sore and feeling a little piggish, passing a whole weekend in sensual experimentation while the war burned and all their brothers and sisters rushed about their business.

  Brothers and sisters, lord! We did call each other that. She squinted to read the road signs. Please don’t snow! Amazing, but we did. From Black religious influence, civil rights days? Whenever it was, it passed in the conflagration, and nobody says it any longer. It would be too sentimental, too warm for the ‘70s; but I liked it. You just can’t say, brothers and sisters, you are a bunch of yellow-dog running lackeys of imperialism, guilty alternatively of right opportunism and left-wing infantilism. It said we wanted to be each other’s families. Not that it didn’t foster its own flatulent style. The male leader pretending folksiness in a Harvard accent crossed with a drawl borrowed from Bob Dylan records or movies about hoods, “Gee, brothers and sisters, I kind of tink we ought to maybe do this here ting … “But it left more room for paying attention to each other. We did trust each other, amazingly. We were wide open. Anybody could come in, and many did. We coupled off, but we tried to stay open; we did try to care. We were big on Love. A lot of the time it meant nothing but a buzz in the head and an idiot grin, but sometimes it meant trying a bit harder to be close, to listen, to understand.

  Lohania and she had not continued as lovers. Why? It took too much effort. It was easier to fit into the men’s schedules, easier to focus on the men’s demands. To bring them together required disrupting everybody’s patterns. Lohania said Vida was really in love with her own sister, Natalie. One day they had a fight about their relationship. Lohania insisted that Vida couldn’t put more effort into loving women because she was hung up on Natalie and Natalie was the one she really wanted.

  It was that burning cold year. Everybody spun crazy with desperation to stop the war. She had run downstairs to Natalie, who was having a shouting match with Sam because he had knocked baby Peezie on the head with a plastic dump truck.

  Peezie had been named Phyllis Ziporah, after Daniel’s and Natalie’s dead mothers, but after Sam had renamed her she was never called anything but Peezie again. Her name had represented an unsuccessful compromise between Daniel’s claims and Natalie’s, for Daniel had disliked the name Ziporah as much as Natalie had disliked the name Phyllis.

  “Natalie, stop this and listen to me!”

  “You stop it!” Natalie sat down thump in a chair. “Take over. Make order from chaos. I quit!”

  She could hardly hear her sister over the din. “Shut up, you brats!” she roared at her nephew and niece. “Let’s have some discipline. Do you think the children of Chinese cadre stand around screaming and beating each other on the head with toys? You shouldn’t get them those department-store toys anyhow, Natt
y, it trains them into consumption patterns.”

  “Fine, fine” Natalie brayed. “Go ahead. Take their toys away from them!”

  They were screaming louder. Vida climbed on a chair and addressed them sternly. “Stop it. Quiet!” But they did not become quiet. She thought about belting them, but she did not think that Vietnamese hit their kids and she knew that Native Americans didn’t; it must be incorrect. But how the hell did you shut them up? “Okay, march,” she said. “Into your room.” She picked up Peezie, who promptly kicked her in the ribs with her fat little legs, and dumped the kid into her crib. Then she went back and hauled in the flailing Sam and stuffed him into bed too.

  “Now you stay in here until you’re quiet.” She slammed the door.

  They were screaming but more dimly, through the shut door. She sank into a chair with a big sigh. “Better?”

  “If you like misery. How’d you like someone three times your size to pick you up and shut you in a closet? Imagine a cop fifteen feet tall”

  “Oh, come on, there has to be discipline. You spoil them,”

  “I recall you liked being spoiled as a child.” Natalie picked sand from the corners of her soft brown eyes.

  “Come on, Natty, stop listening to them scream. Listen to me. I have something serious to talk to you about.”

  “And kids are basically frivolous. Sure.” Natalie folded her arms. They were not getting on well lately. They had political differences.

  “You know that Lohania and I have become lovers.”

  “That’s supposed to be serious? Davida! Spare me.”

  “You don’t think relationships between women can be serious?”

  ”I have more serious relationships with the women in my consciousness-raising group than you do with any woman. Including Lohania. You’re serious about Leigh and she’s serious about Kevin and you’re both serious about Kevin and Leigh, but you are not serious about each other. An orgasm or two doesn’t mean you put each other first” Natalie turned the ring on her finger round and round, more in annoyance than nervousness.

  “Do you deny the importance of orgasm? Do you disagree with Reich? Oh, Natty, Lohania says you and I have a basically incestuous relationship but we’re scared to consummate it. We love each other but we shy off from expressing it.”

  “Sweetie, we express it all the time. We’re not doing so hot lately. But you’re my best woman friend. You’re my sister. We need to talk more. You need to stop trying to feed me the correct line of the week and we need to just talk the way we always did. You need a women’s group of your own”

  “Do you deny the nature of our relationship? Don’t you want to force through the taboo that divides us?”

  “Not particularly, Vida. I think we have enough trouble both being involved, if you want to call it that, with Jimmy. And he’s just like … a dependent, a grown-up child we share.”

  “It’s a bourgeois hang-up. Lohania thinks you’re obsessed with minor contradictions, such as the woman question, because of those hang-ups.”

  Natalie’s face drew together in a scowl. “What hang-ups?”

  “Look at your life. Husband, babies, toys, dinners. Are you so far beyond Ruby and Sandy? We can’t make a new society in the shell of the old if we’re living a middle-class existence.”

  “I’m involved in women’s politics because I am a woman. I am a woman with children. I’m not about to throw them in the garbage because Lohania doesn’t think it’s revolutionary to have kids this year.”

  “Natalie, are you unwilling to try to get to the bedrock of our relationship?”

  “Vida! The bedrock is love. I do have taboos about getting into bed with you. So we make it together. So tomorrow you have to break taboos and make it with the kids. The next week it’s the dog. No, we have to draw the line someplace. No dog shit in the kitchen and no fucking the dog. No fucking children. No fucking sisters, sweetie” Natalie sat back, giggling, beaming at her. “You’re silly, sometimes, but I love you anyhow.”

  She was with Leigh on a trail in Crawford Notch, an easy climb on an old carriage road through the snow. They sat on a bare ledge at the top of a small mountain overlooking the notch, with the sheer walls of Frankenstein Cliffs before them. She had taken off her left glove and he had taken off his right so they could hold hands, looking at the V of the valley below. Traffic was light on the twisting highway, and they had met no one else on the trail. “I can almost imagine we’re taking one of our normal little vacations— when we’d suddenly steal three days and run off to Assateague in Virginia, Shenandoah, the Berkshires, the Adirondacks. We’d run away together and get marvelously restored. I’ve never enjoyed traveling with anybody in my life the way I love traveling with you,” she said.

  “I hardly ever get to do that anymore. This weekend is an exception. I can’t take off much”

  “But you’re reaching people. There isn’t another radical has your access to radio time in New York, and you know it.” Besides, she did not want him going off on lovely jaunts to all their old oases with Susannah.

  “Truer words” Leigh rubbed his beard. “Even Harvey got the ax. I’m the last of the redskins riding the airwaves. The corporate word reigns supreme, except for my two cents plain.”

  She envied his ability to use his talents doing political work every day and come home with a feeling of accomplishment. He had brought tapes to play, and she had enjoyed a couple but finally persuaded him to let her take the rest away. She did not want to use up their time together, however interesting she found his broadcast journalism. He had made it clear at once that they were not to go off to a motel. He was afraid to be seen, and he was probably, she thought sourly but with resignation, saving himself for Susannah later. Nothing had been said like that. Rather, he’d strongly suggested they take a modest hike together, something they hadn’t been able to do in a long time.

  “We should start down.” She did not want to, but she was getting cold sitting on the rock.

  “Yeah” He made as if to get up, but didn’t. Something was coming. She waited. Something he didn’t want to tell her.

  “The divorce?” she said.

  “Oh, it’s coming along. Listen. I talked to your sister this week.”

  “Is anything wrong with Natalie?”

  “A lot of surveillance. But that’s not it … Your mother isn’t feeling too well.”

  “Ruby? But she’s tough as a mule.” Why, when Vida was a baby, Ruby had received an award from the shipyard for never missing a day. Oh, she got colds and sore throats—she smoked incessantly, a cigarette always in her mouth or dangling from her fingers, often one lit in the ashtray burning down while she had struck her lighter for another, that little snap of the wrist and flick of the chin—but never did she go to bed sick. When Joel talked about his mother lying down with her headaches, her backaches, her muted hangovers, her devastating periods, her ennui, when he spoke of his mother stretched out beneath an ice pack or taking antidepressants, her Elavil, her Tofranil, Vida thought of Ruby, who didn’t much believe in aspirin. She had grown up thinking of women as hardier than men. Tom got sick; Ruby, never. Tom went to bed moaning. Sandy wanted to be waited on. Ruby did the waiting. “What could be wrong with mother?”

  “I don’t know exactly. It’s not … very serious.”

  He was holding something back, she could smell it, and she felt a rush of anger. Handling her again. Always he hid problems and attempted to manage her reactions. “Tell me directly. What is it?”

  “Now, don’t get excited.”

  “I’m angry because you won’t tell me. Give me Natalie’s exact words. Exact.”

  “How the hell would I remember?”

  “You have a damned good memory. Journalist!”

  He snorted. “Ruby had a mild aneurism.”

  “Aneurism? What in hell is that?”

  “I think it’s in the blood vessels. A constriction.”

  “Aneurism … Is that a heart attack?”

  “It
was a mild one.”

  “How mild?”

  “She’s in the hospital, but they expect her to be home in a week or two”

  “What hospital?”

  He took her hand. “Hold on, now. You can’t do a thing about it. She’s in Mount Sinai, in the heart unit.”

  “Sandy must be crazed with worry … A heart attack. Why did she have a heart attack?”

  “Apparently she had a mild one before, but she didn’t tell anybody.”

  “Oh, that’s just like her! Don’t talk about it and it’ll go away. That’s Ruby. What caused it?”

  She was trying to dig out the car—they had an early snowstorm and she was late to Sharon’s. Anyhow, Natalie’s flown out to Chicago—”

  “Then it’s serious.”

  “Don’t exaggerate! Don’t get worked up! Natalie expects to be back by Monday—she just went for the weekend. She gave me some new numbers for you to call Tuesday in East Norwich.”

  “Tuesday. How can I wait that long?”

  ”Cool it, kid. Ruby had the heart attack Wednesday. You’ve waited four days to hear about it. You can wait three more days for an update. It isn’t that critical. Ruby’s going to have to lose some weight and stop smoking and watch her diet and behave herself.”

  “But she’s not fat!” Vida said, rushing to Ruby’s defense.

  “She’s not exactly svelte. You know she and Sandy have been putting it on year after year” He stood now, pulling her up. “Let’s go. Vida, don’t worry about it. Natalie’ll have a full report for you at ten on Tuesday.”

  “Could you please remember my name is Vinnie?”

  He laughed with relief. “When you start lecturing on security, I know you’re okay. Think the hibernating chipmunks will turn you in?”

  “Habit saves. Or habit betrays” They could not walk arm in arm through the uneven terrain covered with snow. Because of the snow the ground seemed to radiate light under the lowering sky.

  “Well, how’s your life? Your private life first” she asked.

  “Oh. Susannah. She kind of wants to get married”