by Marge Piercy
“But I bet it didn’t run any danger of burning down.”
“Oh yeah? That’s what happened to it.” Mr. Know-it-all.
“Fancy that.” Tom grinned. He had a big flashing grin but this time without warmth. “How your buildings do burn.”
“Boston’s built of wood. Wood burns.”
Fay came in shivering theatrically. “Cold out there.”
“Our lady of injured innocence is asking about fires. She noticed we have lots.”
“There’s violations of the building code everyplace. You saw the conditions in those basements,” Fay rapped out.
“Fay and Mac still think fires happen. I say it’s statistically improbable. In the past four years we’ve had far more fires per block than areas just as old.”
“Don’t get him started on his conspiracy rap.” Fay pointed her finger at him. “He’s one of those types who know just how to organize a picket and dig up the facts of who owns what, but they all grew up on Kennedy Comix and they think everything’s a plot. It’s the CIA, right, sweetie?”
The grey cat after long contemplation landed precipitously in Daria’s lap. Its fur felt like plush. “This cat is gorgeous.”
“You can laugh till you get burned out too,” Tom was saying when he turned to investigate the motion that had caught his eye. “Look at the tramp come on to her. He doesn’t care how many buildings you own, he likes the way you smell.”
She stroked the grey velvet. “He knows a soft touch. He looks like a very special cat.”
“Russian Blue. Scheduled to be offed because his eye color is wrong. I had to sign an oath to have him altered”—an oath! I was putting it off, the way I do things, and then one night, I dreamed this society to protect the racial purity of Russian Blues was after me.”
“Were they going to alter you?” Fay asked archly.
“That was the idea. So I got up and made the appointment with the vet.”
“Wouldn’t you like a coat made of this?” Fay played with the cat’s tail.
“A bed,” Daria said without thinking and felt herself blush.
“His name is Marcus and he doesn’t want to be your coat or your bed, although he looks like he’d probably sleep with you.… Did you take her to the row where Sandra María lives?”
“Not yet—” Fay began.
Daria interrupted. “I’ve got to get going.” She stood with Marcus still holding on. The light seemed to gather on the tips of his fur. She noticed a carrying case near the door. “Do you take him to work?” She determined to make her escape before Fay made her hike through another twenty basements.
“That’s in case of fire. You learn that a lot around here is in case of fire.”
“Will you tell us the truth about whether your husband is home next weekend?” Fay scowled with indecision.
“Call me Friday evening. I’ll know by then. If he’s home, picket to your heart’s content. Maybe he’ll finally talk to me about what all these buildings mean. Call in on my number, though. I’ll give it to you. Here.”
“Separate phones? That’s weird.” Fay preceded her down the stairs.
“I get a lot of business calls. He didn’t like answering the phone and having it be for me.”
“Just like a man. My ex, he pulled the phone out of the wall one day just because he got mad at my mother. She used to call around dinnertime—that’s when we both got off work. One night I burned a pie talking to her, and that did it. Pow, right out of the wall.”
She had an urge to tell Fay about the morning’s scene, still raw in her. She had never been really involved with any other man. Maybe all husbands acted in irrational rage sometimes. “Did he often lose his temper?”
“Only when he’d been drinking. Then after the electronics plant shut down, he didn’t have to drink to get mean.”
She wanted to ask what happened then, but she did not dare—not because it was not polite to ask personal questions, but because she did not want to hear tales about broken marriages. Broken like a leg, but a leg could be set and healed; it was only horses who were shot then. Failed marriage, like a failed exam. A twenty-two-year course of study and at the end you didn’t pass.
She realized she had waved good-bye to Fay and started off in a random direction, for she had no idea where Tom lived relative to where she had parked. She had to turn and run after Fay, who was waddling briskly downhill. “Fay! Fay! I don’t know where we are.”
Fay looked her over again, shaking her head. “You’re spaced. Do you take downers?”
“Nothing. No.”
Fay patted her shoulder as if she had just come to a decision. “I guess this is all new to you. It took guts for you to come here and let us push you around. Listen, I’ll talk to the guys about holding off till you tell us if your old man is going to be around next weekend. Nobody likes to picket anyhow except Mac. He gets off on it. Thinks he’s a general. But the rest of us feel like horses’ asses. Now where did you park near?” Fay led her off.
Secure in her Rabbit again, Daria leaned out. “Just call on my phone, remember. I’ll tell you the truth, I promise. Till Friday.” She headed for home.
11
“So I have no idea at all what’s going to happen to us. To me,” she said to Tracy, trying to make her voice sound calm. “It just seems to get worse between your father and me.”
“I’ll be home in just ten days for Christmas vacation, Mama. Just hold on. We can all try to talk to him.”
“Your sister is on his side.” She told Tracy the story.
“Robin is a suck and a wimp,” Tracy said in disgust.
“Don’t turn this into a battle between you and Robin. Please. Maybe you can help. I’m feeling very alone. I’m not doing too well, Tracy, I’m not.”
“Of course you’re miserable. I’m devastated when some guy I only went out with for two weeks drops me. I completely understand, Mama, really. You have a right to be unhappy!” Tracy sounded brave.
Turning to her eighteen-year-old for comfort felt wicked, but she could not resist seeking support, for her need to feel loved by at least one daughter was too great. When she got off the phone to let Tracy attend her nine o’clock class, she was sobbing. When Peggy arrived, she had not got control of herself. Therefore she gave Peggy an account of her troubles too.
“I thought something fishy was going on, Daria.” Peggy nodded her sleek black cap of hair. “I thought that ever since I walked in and saw that big pile of dog-do and nobody seemed to know where Mr. Walker was hanging out.” Peggy was a tall big-framed woman who looked stunning dressed up, but who moved much of the time like someone who was afraid she might break china with her elbows.
In the day’s mail, her agent Laura returned the pictures with a brief note:
I know you like to use your hubby’s photos, but these are simply dreadful and will not do. Call me Monday and we’ll let your editor set up an appointment with whoever they’re using.
She called Laura at once. “But what’s wrong with them?” she asked cautiously.
“Daria, I know you adore your husband, et cetera, et cetera, and you’ve always made us use his less than professional quality shots. But these look like the mug shots of a bag lady. I showed them to your editor and she was rather sarcastic.”
“I don’t look like that?”
“Daria, are you kidding?” Laura’s rich laugh broke out.
“I thought the camera never lied.”
“Oh, come on, sometimes you like to play naive. With a camera you can make Attila the Hun look like Albert Schweitzer and vice versa. You put those shots on the back of a cookbook and everybody will think your food will make them sick. I saw some of the video while you were on tour, and you looked just fine. What’s the problem?”
The problem was that she now feared the camera. It would catch her misery in its box. She put off Laura by promising to find a clear date and call her back.
They did little work that day. Mostly Peggy and Daria drank coffee and
fiddled around with the manuscript, talking about relationships. Peggy had been married but she was back at home with her mother because her ex had skipped the state and run out on his child support. Peggy’s family lived in East Lexington near the Arlington line in a rambling grey house. Plenty of room for Peggy and her son Eric, but she found it difficult to return from independence, marriage, her own apartment to an enforced adolescence.
“Why not confront this bitch?” Peggy asked. “What’s to lose?”
“I couldn’t!” Daria thought about it. “Maybe I could. But I don’t even know her name. Just Gail.”
“You know where she lives.”
“It’s a huge building.”
“You followed him once. You even know where he eats lunch every Thursday from the American Express tabs—Frankie’s.” Peggy sat up, her blue eyes glittering with mischief. “We’ll both go. We’ll do it this Thursday. We’ll put on some getup and be on the spot before he arrives. We’ll scout out the restaurant and find some dark corner.
“Would you, Peggy?”
“It beats typing. Sure, you buy me lunch. I want to see who’s the bitch he’s cheating on you with.”
“We’ll do it.”
Daria had been the calm one, the one who held her friends’ hands, who saw them through their troubles, who listened, who nodded, who made tea and gave sage advice. In the last couple of months she had withdrawn from almost everyone, but now she could not survive alone. She found herself confiding in Gretta, in Tracy, in Peggy and now in Annette finally, sitting in her sunny maple paneled blue and white tile kitchen. She noticed as she talked that she was most forthcoming, most truthful with Gretta and Peggy. Tracy and Annette she fed a censored version which did not feature her steaming open of the letters, her inventory of their charge accounts, her morning of surveillance. She told Peggy and Gretta the more sordid details, because they were divorced. They had endured the splitting of their world, the sundering of the whole that had composed their lives.
Annette clucked and comforted. “Pierre had an affair. I never told you.… Do you remember the Archibalds?”
“The Archibalds? Her? But she’s six feet tall.”
“Pierre is six four. What I’m trying to say is that it isn’t the end of the world. Affairs are transitory things. Men like to prove themselves, but they get bored. You can make a small thing into a large one by fighting too hard. My advice to you is, keep your mouth shut. Don’t let him provoke you into fights. When it’s all over, you’ll still be there.”
She wanted to take Annette’s advice, but found it hard to follow. Since the fight when Gail’s name had been mentioned, Ross had taken to spending many evenings out. Although he would scrupulously have Lorraine inform Daria by four o’clock if he planned to miss supper, she never knew whether he would walk in at nine, eleven or not at all till the next day. She started at every sound, sitting up well past midnight in case he did appear.
The house felt huge around her. Torte hated Ross staying out as much as she did. He would not give up and come to her bed but waited in Ross’s room. If the door was shut, he would whimper till she opened it for him. In the middle of the night she could hear him making disconsolate noises across the stairwell, dragging himself up and downstairs looking for his master.
Perhaps Ross was right and the house was too big. She had never felt that before. The house had always been overflowing with the children, their friends, Ross and his business associates, her friends, Cesaro’s family, Tony’s family, Gussie’s kids. She lay in her bed wrapped in the birthday shawl to keep her shoulders warm with the kittens curled with her. They welcomed her into their litter, purring against her thighs, stalking her fingers drumming on the counterpane. She felt vulnerable in the house. She could feel all the doors, the windows as potential dangers. If she dozed off, she imagined heavy footsteps approaching. It seemed to her anyone could break into the house at will. Its vast emptiness frightened and reproached her.
Wednesday night Ross had invited the couple of the endless cocktails and rubberized scallops; she could not imagine why. He surely did not intend to initiate an endless series of dinners, so why return their invitation? He had also asked his partner Roger Kingsley and wife Barbara. Perhaps spending so much time with his girlfriend was wearing that affair too hard; perhaps Annette was right and it would end soon. Yet she felt as if Barbara knew something and was avoiding her gaze, as if Barbara felt embarrassed by her, bad omen of married women, scarecrow in the marital fields hanging on display in her somewhat loose finery of past years.
The evening ran very late. Without explanation, without preamble Ross followed her upstairs and into the room that had been theirs and was now hers alone. He climbed into bed with her as if this were any old night the previous spring. He did not initiate sex, but he gave her a brief kiss as he turned out the lights. “That spinach pasta you started with, that was excellent,” he said ruminatively. “When they call next time, make an excuse.”
She could not sleep. Tomorrow she was going to see the woman he had been preferring to her. In magazines, on television, across restaurants where she lunched with Gretta in Harvard Square, she kept seeing women who became the Gail of the day. Usually she saw Gail as tall, blond, impeccably dressed with the sculptured cheekbones of a model. Sometimes her hair was artfully curled; sometimes it was a brief Sassoon cap; sometimes it was long and flaxen, straight and fine as shot silk to the slender shoulders. Once Gail was a voluptuous brunette in a silver taffeta dress and mink stole Ross ogled, who inhabited a Ford commercial. Once Gail was a redhead hailing a cab in Harvard Square, wearing a mauve suit and carrying a lizard skin attaché case.
In the morning Daria avoided the mirror. She brushed her hair without looking. She felt ashamed. Something was wrong with her: middle age, and that meant she was ready to be traded in, a discard. He preferred to hers a body that had no stretch marks, no belly too rounded, no breasts that sagged in their fullness. Everything would be hard and firm as a mannequin, seamless with no hint of use or time or will of its own.
Peggy made her wear a peculiar black hat that concealed her hair and Peggy’s mother’s old sealskin coat. Peggy herself wore a blond wig. Frankie’s was a dim oak-paneled high-ceilinged room that was a restaurant at mealtimes and a bar in between. They arrived just after it had opened at eleven forty-five and asked for a booth far at the back. “I’m allergic to cigarette smoke,” she explained to the waiter, thinking of Tom Silver. Unfortunately American Express bills did not include information on time of day, so they might be in for a very leisurely lunch. “Eat slowly,” she admonished Peggy. “They could come in at two.”
She had no trouble taking her own time on the food. She had to chew and chew each mouthful before swallowing it. She did not think they were likely to be conspicuous in their booth. The main thing was to keep an eye on the door.
A little after twelve-thirty, she caught sight of him as he was crossing the room in the direction of several occupied tables. She scanned them fast. Couple, two men, three women, couple, a woman alone. Not that one, she felt instinctively. Her eyes travelled the range of tables before him, the booths against the wall. But when she glanced back, he had already seated himself with the woman she had dismissed as a possibility.
After that she did not try to eat. She stared at them, looked away, stared at them, looked away. She was afraid they must feel the pressure of her gaze. Even sitting, the woman looked gaunt. She was brown-haired, angled awkwardly forward as she tugged nervously at her cardigan and then chain-lit a cigarette off the butt in the ashtray. Her hair was nondescript, falling down straight all the way around just below her chin line, a lighter brown than Daria’s. She looked about thirty. Thin she certainly was but did not in any other way resemble the radiant model of Daria’s fantasies. She was very, very plain.
Peggy watched too, turning to crane over her shoulder. “I’m going to the john the long way. They’ll never notice me. I’m going to get a closer look.”
“She c
ould be a client.”
Just as Daria spoke, Ross leaned forward and took the woman’s hand. They were strained forward over the table, talking fast and earnestly. That had to be Gail. She stared at them both in profile, angled over the tabletop making a bridge that almost met. Martinis arrived. Ross was doing most of the talking, trying to argue Gail into or out of something. She recognized the pose, the occasional flat hand gesture, the expression of intense concentration as if moving a mountain with a teaspoon.
“Well!” Peggy bounced onto her seat in the booth. “Maybe she’s a great lay.”
“I like sex perfectly well,” Daria said defensively.
“Maybe she sucks him off all the time. If you don’t like sex, sometimes it’s easier to please a man. I mean, she’s not exactly a raging beauty.”
“Look at them, Peggy. They’re lovers, check?”
Peggy glanced over her shoulder again. “Check. I’ll tell you one thing. Her clothes may not look glamorous, but they’re bucks. Tweedy, country, but heavy bucks. Thick cashmere. Harris Tweed, designer silk blouse. She’s wearing about fourteen layers, so she must have blood of ice water.”
Ross left first. The woman sat finishing her last cigarette. Ross and Gail seemed to observe some strange propriety about not arriving or leaving together. Then Daria, who had already paid the bill—in cash—walked out slowly, detouring past the table where Gail was just picking up her shoulder bag and a package bound in twine. Daria thought her gaze rested on the woman’s face only for a moment but when she walked out into the air and let Peggy lead her away, she could see every feature etched vividly as if outlined in white light.
The face was long, ending in a chin that came almost to a point. The mouth was wide but the lips were thin, as if drawn with pencil. The eyes were wide in the narrow face, but Daria had not been able to tell their color. The hair was thin and fine, flyaway, of a light undefinable brown. The skin was a little leathery for her probable age, the skin of someone who was outdoors a great deal and whose naturally fair complexion was toughened by the sun as by the cold and the wind. Her hands were those of an overgrown child, with nails bitten, with stains of tobacco and something red. On the table among the cups and cutlery they crept over each other like albino grasshoppers. She had looked nervous sitting at the table alone, as if suddenly exposed. Her shoulders hunched, her head bowed, she did not look up as Daria drifted slowly past.
