by Marge Piercy
Some buildings were unlocked and some Fay had keys to, fishing them out of her knitting bag with address tags attached. Sometimes they knocked on a particular door or rang a bell. Then a tenant let them in, usually adding a litany of complaints to Fay’s list, dogging their footsteps down to the cellar, along dingy corridors, up to the roof, sometimes into individual apartments to view a leaky pipe, a falling ceiling, a hissing radiator or broken window.
“I’m Sherry Sheehan’s mother,” the pale invalid in the wheelchair announced proudly. “This is the lady Sherry visited in Lexington?”
The woman was small-boned and thus seemed round and pale as a mound of cotton batting in the chair. “How’s your case going?” Fay asked without obvious interest in the answer, a polite greeting.
“Our lawyer tells us it’s looking good.” Mrs. Sheehan turned to Daria eagerly. “I’m suing the MBTA,” she began, and launched into a meandering account of what sounded like six or seven years of legal maneuvering as she wheeled after them through the rooms.
“And suppose there’s a fire?” Fay asked dramatically.
“How do you usually get down the steps?” Daria asked Mrs. Sheehan.
“When I have to go the doctor or to my lawyer, then usually Tom Silver comes over and carries me. He says it’s easy.”
Fay glanced at the kitchen clock. “That reminds me, we’re running late. Take care.”
“Sherry will be so sorry she missed you. She’s at work. Sherry’s a secretary in the uniform factory over on Brighton Avenue.”
“Sherry supports her mother,” Fay said quietly as they climbed the hill. “She can’t even look for a better job out of the neighborhood, in case she has to get home in a hurry.”
As they approached a big three-story yellow house near the park at the top of the hill, they saw Tom Silver sitting on the stoop. “It’s locked,” he said mournfully. “The Wongs aren’t home and the workmen aren’t here.” In his pea coat and jeans sitting on the stoop, he looked like an overgrown boy without a key waiting for his mother to come home.
She peered at the house. While the grounds had been trampled and neglected, the house itself seemed handsome, well-built and in the midst of being remodeled. “What’s wrong with this one?”
“Last July, this is where Bobbie Rosario died,” Tom Silver said watching her carefully. “He lived on the third floor. That fire got the Rosarios out and now it’s being renovated. By you.”
“Aren’t you glad we’re fixing it up, if it is us, or my husband, anyhow? I thought you wanted things fixed up?” She stared at them and they stared back at her, each of them seeming equally puzzled by the other’s response.
With Tom along she toured more sites of fire, including the fancy condominium she had parked in front of. Tom said there had been a fire there a year ago. They crossed Commonwealth and showed her two boarded-up buildings with visible signs of scorching. They took her by another that seemed empty, although she could see workmen busy inside. They dipped into another with violations. Her feet hurt and she carried around a dull ache in her vitals. Lately her stomach always seemed upset. She threw up as often as she had during her first pregnancy: with Robin, who had turned on her. She plodded along between Fay and Tom, feeling small between them, hemmed in. Fay turned and peered at her.
“It did smell bad in there, didn’t it? It’s the rats.”
“Are you sick?” Tom Silver asked.
“It’s fine,” she said automatically but sat down on the cement step at the end of a front walk. She felt disoriented. She had no idea where she was or how to get home. Why had she come? It was a meaningless nightmare.
“You look green.” He was looming over her. “It’s pretty depressing, I guess, but isn’t it interesting to find out where your money comes from?”
That snapped her back. She sat up straight on the stoop. “Don’t be so moralistic with me. I know where my money comes from. I earn it. Whoever owns these buildings, and I wouldn’t expect you pay enormous rents, that isn’t what runs my household. Maybe my money is going into these buildings, although I can’t imagine why. But I’m not getting anything from them, so don’t dump on me like that.”
“Adrenaline rush.” Tom was grinning, although she could not see why. “Maybe you’re just hungry. Did the two of you eat lunch?”
“I didn’t even eat breakfast.” She had, but she’d thrown it up after a brief unpleasant scene with Ross.
“Come on, I might as well make lunch for you.”
“Me too?” asked Fay. “Or don’t I rate? How come you’re going to be nice to her?”
“I’m hungry. I have to eat before I go back to work anyhow.”
“I don’t think I can,” Daria began, but she was moved along between them, Fay’s hand on her elbow. It occurred to her that she was dreaming. Everything lately was a bad dream. But could a nightmare continue for months? Maybe she had been struck on the head and was lying in a hospital in a coma. None of this had happened. If only she made an effort, she could pierce this imitation grey sky and come to in her real life. She did not want to eat with these strangers. She wanted to be home, waking up to her life a year before. She felt dizzy. Maybe it was all the up-and downstairs, maybe it was throwing up breakfast, maybe it was the accumulated fatigue of sleepless nights bleeding into sleepless weeks. She had not the strength to break free of her captors. Passive, on the verge of tears, she let herself be dragged along. Would they poison her? She was being absurd. All they wanted was their buildings brought up to reasonable standards. Violations. The word suggested sexual pain. She felt violated by Ross’s rejection.
Trundled up the steps into yet another frame house, she paid no attention until on the stairway she looked up in surprise to notice it was paneled and carpeted. There were two apartments, a downstairs duplex and Tom’s flat on the third floor. “There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with this one,” she said cautiously but hopefully. She had seen enough broken windows and dripping pipes to last her. “It seems well maintained.”
“That’s because you don’t own it.” Tom unlocked his door and stood aside for them.
“Yeah, he’s his own landlord.” Fay dumped her baggy green coat on his leather couch and dropped beside it with a deep sigh, massaging her calf.
“You own this?” The living room was as big as hers in Lexington with many windows, a lot of greenery, a red enamel Danish stove and a sleeping loft. The rugs were Native American work from the Southwest, desert colors.
“With the couple downstairs,” he rumbled as if apologetically.
“You’ve done a lot of work on it,” she offered. In fact he must have torn out almost all the walls.
“That’s my job.”
“Aaron Aardvark, of the carpentry collective. That’s you?”
He stared at her. “Oh, the truck. You noticed.” He seemed pleased. Among his plants and rather arty environment, he appeared less menacing. He was a big man, big boned, big shouldered with something of a belly and a slump that exaggerated it. His lids, usually half closed, gave his face a dark sleepy look. A grey cat leaned out of the sleeping loft, then came tumbling down, twisting around his jeaned ankles and boots into the kitchen.
“If you’re a homeowner yourself, what are you doing in a tenants organization?” She raised her voice to be heard.
Fay put down on the coffee table the kachina doll she had been playing with. The table was made out of heavy handsome wood carved into an arc. “We’re not a tenants organization. We’re a neighborhood organization.”
Tom peered around the doorway from the kitchen. “I put a lot of work into this house. I don’t fancy being burned out when some torch sets fire to the wrong house one summer night, or when the wind gets a bit too brisk. I also don’t fancy being the last house standing for five blocks.”
“We roped him in.” Fay wriggled back luxuriously on the couch. “He’s an old war-horse. He knows how to do what we have to do.”
“Yeah, sure.” He groaned from the kitchen.
“Drafted.”
“You got nothing better to do,” Fay called. “You were bored.”
“I wasn’t bored. I’m never bored.”
“You and Superman. Never bored, never lonely, don’t need nothing or nobody.” Fay winked at Daria, startling her. “Just your stereo, your cat and a six-pack.”
“You going to sit on your behind insulting me? Will you set the table, or should we just eat on the floor the way you do at home?”
She saw herself saying to Ross, “Oh, you’ll never guess who I ate lunch with today.”
“With Gretta,” he’d say, sounding bored.
“Not this time,” she’d say coyly.
“Your agent came through Boston.” He sounded even more bored.
It was dreadful. Even in her fantasies, she had difficulty capturing his attention. Then she set off her firecracker. “No. With our tenants in SON.” Then there it was in the room with them, his new temper like a fancy attack dog, like a big bright cadmium yellow Doberman, slavering and growling and crouching to leap for her throat. He was always slamming doors nowadays and indeed seemed to have forgotten how else to shut them. He was always hanging up the phone on her, storming out of the room. This morning he had thrown his breakfast coffee against the wall, mug and all, and stomped out grinning. Afterward she noticed it was not his favorite mug.
“What?” she asked and felt herself blushing. The strangers were staring again. Tom was standing with a platter in his hand beckoning them through an archway to a table Fay had set. Frowning, Fay exchanged glances with Tom.
“I’m sorry,” Daria said. “What did I miss?”
“Depends on how long you been gone.” Fay shook her head dolefully. “Honey, are you all there?”
She felt tears burning the back of her eyes. She could not sit and bawl before these people, it would be too humiliating. She was disintegrating. She could not even manage a polite social facade. “I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m trying to deal with a number of problems, and sometimes they overwhelm me for a moment.”
Fay looked her over carelessly. “What is it, water spots on your glasses? Ring around the collar? I bet you don’t have rats and heat that goes out in every cold snap. Or wake up scared your house is on fire.”
“What do you want?” Daria stood. “That I have cancer of the bowel, my daughter is dying of leukemia and I married a dope fiend? Anybody’s problems are big as a mountain to you if they’re yours. Today I’d change places with a leper with shingles.”
Fay looked at herself in the shiny side of a coffee carafe and gave her hair a pat, wrinkled her nose. “I think our tour depressed the lady,” she drawled.
“I think the lady was depressed before our tour. I think we should eat while my omelette’s still warm.” Tom beckoned them in.
“Where’s the ketchup?” Fay bellowed.
“You ask for it only to drive me crazy. You want chocolate syrup for it as well?”
Daria had the sense of them as old friends with a set of routines designed to bang their differences against each other. Fay flirted some with Tom, probably out of habit. For a woman who was certainly fat, Fay had a frankly sexy manner, as if she had never doubted her own attractiveness.
“How is the omelette?” Tom asked her with a somewhat shamefaced air, as if he didn’t want to ask but couldn’t stop himself. This was a familiar situation.
“Very good.”
“Honestly. How is it really?”
The truth was, she only then began to taste it. She who believed in savoring every mouthful and eating only what tasted fresh and right now spent little time in her kitchen and ate at odd hours food she might not be able to keep down. He had made a fine classic French omelette with fresh herbs he must grow inside, as she did. “It’s delightful to have lunch made for me,” she forced out. “I’m always cooking for everybody else. When I do eat somebody else’s cooking, often it’s a formal occasion and I’m serving as judge and can’t enjoy.”
He had made a green salad and put out a loaf of bakery rye bread and some cheeses. She stopped with the omelette and salad. Perhaps her stomach had shrunk or perhaps dieting had become habitual, although she scarcely ever remembered to weigh herself. She knew she had lost weight because she could wear everything in her closet and even the tightest pants fit. But she could take no pleasure in her thinner self, as held in contempt by Ross as her rounder self and not her idea to begin with. She had only dieted to please Ross, and nothing she did pleased him. How odd that Tom could cook; Ross found it exasperatingly difficult to heat a dinner she had precooked for him. Although she often met men at book signings who claimed to have used her cookbooks, no men in her family ever cooked.
Fay finished her omelette and then plunked her elbows down on the table. “What are you going to do about what we showed you?”
“I don’t know,” Daria said. “I have to find out what we own, first.” The lunch had been intended to bring her into bargaining, she thought, to relax her into concessions. They still thought she had some power.
“You could try asking your husband,” Tom suggested.
“I could try.”
“Why wouldn’t he tell you?” Tom watched her narrowly.
“Perhaps he doesn’t think it’s any of my business. Up to now I’ve never interfered. He’s not thrilled by my new curiosity.”
Fay tapped her arm. “We can put some pressure on. We’re thinking about coming back with our signs this weekend.”
“I don’t know if he’ll be there. If it’s only me, you don’t get much mileage out of it.”
Tom leaned back in his chair, his lids half lowered but under them his eyes were observing her like a cat watching a bird, she thought. “Where would he be?”
Daria simply shrugged.
“Are you going to play dumb with us?” Fay, wagged her finger. “Where does he hide out? In his office?”
Daria shook her head. “He’s been spending weekends on the north shore. A place called Hamilton. That’s all I know. It’s a little town between Prides Crossing and Ipswich. I found it on the map.”
“You’re married to the guy and you don’t know more than that? Baloney.” Fay was rummaging in her knitting bag.
“You don’t know Hamilton?” Tom raised his thick eyebrows. “Princess Anne rode there I believe when she visited the States,” he drawled with a put-on accent. “Horsy people. The right sort, you know.”
“Rich people?” She tried to grasp the situation. Was he involved with some rich heiress? She could see her: blond, beautiful, dressed in a jodhpur outfit leaping her horse over a fence like the Olympic team she had watched on television. On the other hand, why would a rich heiress want Ross? A married forty-six-year-old real estate lawyer with two grown daughters?
“You could say that.” Tom sat bolt upright. “Hey! What are you doing?” He was glaring at Fay.
Daria turned to look at Fay, surprised by his panic. Fay had lit a cigarette. As far as Daria could tell, it was an ordinary tobacco cigarette out of a True package.
“I forgot, I forgot. I’ll take it on the porch.” Fay shook her head at him, sauntering out through the kitchen door onto a porch.
Tom waved her out, fluttering the door to clear the air.
“You don’t like smoke.” She was glad to change the subject.
“I’m allergic.” He made a face of apology and disgust.
“Really allergic?”
“Why do people always ask that about smoke? If you say you’re allergic to ragweed or roses, nobody ever asks if you’re lying.” He was talking more softly now as if embarrassed.
“I don’t like it—it gives me a headache when Ross has people over who smoke all evening—but I’m not allergic.”
“If it gives you a headache, you’re probably mildly allergic. Anyhow, I smoked for years and years, so it’s worse for me.”
“Then how did you get allergic?”
“I got chronic bronchitis. For two years I was damned sick. A
lot of people who have to stop for medical reasons develop allergies.”
“Maybe it’s the body protecting itself.”
“But it’s a damned nuisance.” He rubbed his dark hair. It was thick and glossy and black, moderately long, with a little sawdust caught in back. “I can’t go to bars anymore. Most restaurants I can’t go to. Most parties.” And I’m always having to explain, explain, explain. I just can’t deal with people who insist on smoking. And if you try to explain how you got this way, they don’t want to hear it. It scares them.…” He glanced toward the kitchen door. “Fay’s okay, she just forgets.… How come your husband disappears weekends and you don’t know where he is?”
“How come you imagine it’s any of your business?”
“We have to be detectives. If SON hadn’t done … actually it was me and Sandra María. If we hadn’t gone through a paper chase down in the Registry of Deeds, we’d never have figured out who owned those buildings.”
Sandra María must be his girlfriend. The apartment was too neat for a man living alone, although she saw no signs of female presence. She said coolly, “I don’t know if you’ve found out yet.”
Tom looked at her, his eyes sleepy, skeptical, “You won’t acknowledge yet that you own Fay’s building?”
“No. It’s too … unlikely.” As he turned his head toward her when she spoke she noticed that in one earlobe he had a stud earring. She could not take her eyes off it.
“Because you think of yourself as a nice sweet liberal lady and not a slumlord?” The black eyes glinted anger under the heavy lids.
“I wouldn’t call this any kind of slum,” she snapped. “I don’t know where you come from, but this seems like a perfectly decent neighborhood to me.” She kept staring at the stud winking at her. Maybe he was gay; that would explain the cooking and the ear jewelry. “The house I grew up in was in worse shape than any of these.”
