by Marge Piercy
“I agree. Do you mind if I make myself coffee first?” Were they going to have a genuine conversation about their predicament? She wished she had dressed too, instead of coming down in her bathrobe. “I want us to start over, but we can’t do that with you spending every night with Gail.”
“And let’s leave Gail out of this. I want to talk about us.”
“We can’t leave Gail out. For starters, what’s her name?”
“What does that matter?”
“Ross, I can find out.” She was pumping coffee from the machine, her back to him. “I imagine Tony will tell me that much.”
“Don’t think he’s going to take your part.”
“I don’t. What’s her name, Ross?”
“Damn it, you’re trying to take over the conversation. I have things I want to talk about.”
“So do I. We’ll both have our opportunity. What’s her full name?”
“Her name is Gail Abbot-Wisby. For all the good that will do you. I’m not leaving you for her. I’m leaving you to find myself.”
“Oh.” She swung around to stare at him.
“Damn you, Daria, I had things I wanted to say to lead up to this. You’ve forced me to dump the news on you without preparation. That makes me sound hard.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She forced herself away from the counter she had fallen back against; forced herself to stand straight. “The last few months have been some preparation.”
“I’m moving into an apartment in the North End—”
“The North End?” The old immigrant Italian neighborhood where her grandfather had lived? That made no sense at all: old tenements, narrow streets, espresso and bakery shops, pasta factories, marble cutters.
“Just on the harbor. It’s a condo we haven’t sold yet. I’ll write down the address for you.” He pulled out a business card and wrote on the back, leaning on the dishwasher.
She remembered it was still loaded with Christmas dinner dishes, as yet unwashed. She had a brief bleak desire to break them all. “You want me to believe you’re moving in there alone?”
He laughed dryly, a scratchy sound. “If you saw the size of the place, you wouldn’t ask. I have to get my act together, Daria. I have to find out who I am. Too many years I have permitted our life to unroll, one compromise after another, from the first—”
“I gather from Robin you’ve been rewriting history. Getting married was your idea and you were keen on it. I didn’t make you marry me. You had to argue me into it.… Remember?”
“The point is, the relationship is dead. We don’t share a common world view. You’re trapped in the liberal platitudes of a decade ago. You haven’t grown—except more demanding.”
“While you’ve been expanding your soul by becoming a slum landlord?”
“Don’t ape slogans you don’t understand. I’m involved in shaping the future of this city. There isn’t one parcel I own that won’t be excellent housing within five years. I’m building. I’m raising up.”
“You just mean you’re getting rid of people with less money and moving in people with more. I don’t know that I think Tony is a better person than Gussie, for example.”
“You love losers, you really do. Cesaro has a streak of that, but I doubt it will sway him in the long run. He knows where his interests lie.… Daria, can’t you see, you’re strangling me?”
“No. I do not see that I am quote strangling you unquote. I see that I was loving you. I see I was making a home for you and our children. I see I was honestly trying to communicate with you while you were deceiving me.”
“Daria, you’ve only kept me this long through guilt. It’s a death of the spirit to remain in a loveless marriage.”
“I agree your spirit’s in trouble. By all means give it oxygen in your condo with Gail Whistler.”
“Abbot-Wisby,” he corrected automatically. “I told you six times I’m moving in by myself. I’m going it alone. I’m not about to hurt you, Daria, any more than I must to survive. There’s no excitement between us. No lightning. No surprises.”
“Don’t say that, Ross. You’ve given me a number of surprises lately. You’ve surprised me half to death. And if I don’t have any novelty for you, maybe that’s because you haven’t paid enough attention to notice anything.”
“It’s gotten stale. It’s routine. It’s duty. It’s paying the bills. It’s just grinding along. I’m entitled to more. I want to start over again, I want a new life, a fresh chance. I want to do it right this time.”
“I don’t think there’s any right in what you’re doing.”
“Because you won’t see!” He drew himself up, his eyes almost popping. “You could see it if you wanted to. I am right! If you could be objective for two seconds, you’d see that. You just won’t admit it.”
“You want me to say you’re making a good choice?” she asked slowly. “I don’t think you are. It’s a cliché come to life.”
“Damn it, Daria …” He broke off, drawing his breath. “I’ll give you a more than decent settlement. You’ll have to unload this house fast. You’ll find you can’t afford it, and we need the cash.”
“I’m not moving. This is my home, even if it’s no longer yours. I will not leave this house until Tracy is done with college.”
For a moment he glared openly at her as if his anger had been struck with a loud clang. “I think you will. We’ll discuss it when I work out your settlement.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Today. I’ll pack now—take what I’ll be needing. Later we can make arrangements about the rest.… Why don’t you rout Teresa out of her bed and go shopping? By the time you’re back, I’ll be gone.”
“I don’t feel like being put out to pasture this morning, thank you. I have a lot of cleaning to do from our family Christmas, and Peggy’s coming in just for the afternoon.”
“As you please. Do it the most painful way, of course.” He stomped out and she heard him climbing the steps as if he were five fat men. Only then did she cry for a while, leaning against the still loaded dishwasher.
14
As soon as Tracy returned to college on January second, Daria felt the house swell around her, echoing like a church. As she tried to sleep, the house seethed with rustling, banging, muffled thuds. If she dozed, often she wakened in terror, sure an intruder stood over her bed.
Now for the first time, she was living alone. From the morning Ross had packed the set of matched leather luggage that had been a wedding present, she had given him up. She could not guess how he was changing and how he would further change, but she did not hope he would return. She grieved; she bled. Being deserted, discarded tore at her. She felt ugly, she felt used and used up. She did not, however, dream that Ross would return.
He had hurt her too deeply. He was no longer the man she loved. She had to understand him now not to love him better, to serve him better, but to be free at last of him. Their relationship was over, but not done with.
Because going to bed made her vulnerable to her fancies and fears, she retired late, to erode the long hours of darkness. Usually she was exhausted and managed to sleep. Then she woke between four and five every morning. Anxieties seemed suspended over her in a net that lowered instantly when she stirred. Finally she rose, ate a hasty breakfast and worked. The cookbook raced forward. She had no trouble concentrating. After the catastrophe, she had little to distract her and considerable desperation to goad her on.
Then she came downstairs to the house empty except for the ailing, heartbroken Torte and the kittens. Desolation settled over her like fine choking dust. How alone she was; how empty her life. She saw the years grey and dusty stretching ahead in which she was always isolated, in which she shrivelled slowly in her flesh and at last blew away on the wind, the fine ash she had imagined a cremation to produce before she had handled her mother’s weighty and coarse ashes.
Finally she called Gretta and invited her to supper. It was something to look forward to, the first
human face besides Peggy she had seen since Tracy returned to school.
“You haven’t seen a lawyer yet?” Gretta flung down her napkin dramatically, thrusting aside the poached salmon in hollandaise, although she dragged it back at once. “You’re mad! Ross is a lawyer and you’re vulnerable. It’s entering a tournament with a knight in armor and you’re birthday naked.”
“The only lawyers I know are all friends of Ross.”
“Well, avoid them. Go to the guy who got me my settlement. He’s a fighter. He’ll take on old Ross with zest. Otherwise, darling, Ross’ll pick you to the bone.… Are you sure you want to hold on to this big old house?”
“I’m not sure of anything.… You wouldn’t like to move in?”
“That’s sweet, Daria. If the timing had been different … But my apartment’s just a bus ride from Harvard Square, and I’m having an intense thing with a young man I met booking a tour. It won’t last long, but it’s fun.… Daria: have you ever had an affair?”
Two large tears rolled suddenly down Daria’s cheeks She blotted them hurriedly in her napkin. She was a large secondhand rag doll whose stuffing was leaking from a detached arm. “Of course not.”
“That’s one of the pleasures of being left. You get to indulge yourself.”
“I’m not the type.”
“Everybody is somebody’s type,” Gretta said sententiously. “It would perk your spirits up. But getting a housemate isn’t a half bad idea, if you do plan to stay.… What was his lady’s name again?”
“Gail Wisby. He said, Gail Abbot Wisby—one of those triple names. I suppose that means she’s divorced?”
“I suppose,” Gretta said. “You call my lawyer tomorrow morning first thing, you hear?”
The most humiliating moment of the interview occurred as she was telling the chronicle of events and came to the day after Christmas. She started to cry, right there in his carpeted office overlooking Milk Street, with the portly balding man in his three-piece grey suit surveying her.
He gave her a seven-page form to fill out. Immediately it became apparent she knew the answer to almost none of the questions about expenses and assets and liabilities. “But, Mrs. Walker, you must know what you earn. You pay income tax every year, right?” He waited for her agreement, watching her as if suspecting she did not even pay taxes. “Then even though you file a joint return with your husband, you’re a small business. Your earnings, your expenses are listed separately, inside the return.… You don’t have copies?… Take a Kleenex, Mrs. Walker, you can ask your accountant for copies. You do have an accountant?”
“My husband does. His accountant does both our taxes.” She felt as if he surveyed her, an aerial reconnaissance plane circling over and photographing a ravaged city. The destruction was apparent but his job was survey, not pity. He was not convinced anything could be salvaged. Probably he would recommend razing her life. She left his offices completely demoralized. The divorce would obviously be excruciating and she would end up homeless and impoverished. He refused to estimate costs.
She did not know if she could force herself to see him again. He made her profoundly uncomfortable. He made her feel an absolute fool. Perhaps she was.
That night she built herself a fire in the fireplace. Then she remembered, as the room filled with smoke and Torte cowered barking in the hall and the kittens dashed about, to reach up and open the flue. She found an open bottle of decent cognac in the back of the liquor cabinet. Pouring herself a snifter, she settled down with the lawyer’s endless questionnaire. Peggy had brought together some facts for her. Daria had pried open the locked door to Ross’s study. Obviously, he had emptied two of his drawers, but that was all. As he had said, he would be getting the bulk of his materials later. Would he just walk in, the way he had done when he was spending the evening but not the night with Gail? That possibility unsettled her. She hoped he would call first. That would be civilized. Surely he would want to be civilized. He had left December 26. This was January 7, and she had not heard from him yet.
Among the items he had taken appeared to be their income tax returns. However, Peggy had made an estimate of her income for the past couple of years and had also estimated house expenses, since one-sixth were deductible as Daria’s place of business, so they had some idea between them what figures they had given Ross each year. At the end of her first set of figures, her expenditures exceeded income by four thousand dollars.
She could not survive! She could not. Ross was right. She was useless and helpless. Then she thought, no, I will not go down. I will get a housemate. I will find a woman to share this house with me. I’ll write an ad this very instant.
On her lined pad she wrote, “Woman in 40’s, grown-up daughter.” No. “Woman in 40’s, college-age daughter home sometimes, wishes woman to share lovely house and garden, good schools nearby.” That was important only if the woman had children. She considered and decided she would not mind sharing her house with children again. She would send the ad in tomorrow. But was there actually enough room if the woman had a child? She could move Tracy down to Ross’s study. She must clear his things out. Then the woman and her child could have two adjacent rooms upstairs with the shared bath, the room that was Tracy’s and the room that had been Robin’s.
Besides, she did not eat that much and neither did Torte or the kittens. She had her garden. She would put in more vegetables in the spring. In a small East Boston yard, Nina had grown almost all the vegetables they ate summer and fall, and then would can and freeze for the rest of the year. She would not be entertaining lavishly, carrying the liquor bills or the fancy wine tabs. She would use recipes from her own working mother book, the kind of economical dishes she had made in her early marriage. She would do more Italian cooking and less French. Her new housemate might share food costs.
“Garage available,” she tacked on. “Quiet pretty street.” She added her phone number. She could cancel Ross’s phone at once; that would save a little. She had the thermostat turned down to 60 and sat near the fireplace with both cats in her chair like living hot-water bottles. Torte came and went, dragging himself about querulously searching for Ross, demanding doors be opened to continue his search. He finally settled chin on the hearth staring morosely into the fire. The last few days she had not been able to get him to eat. He was in mourning.
Tomorrow she would cancel the phone. She would caulk the windows, a job she had begun in November and abandoned. She had bought six boxes of caulking, sitting in the basement.… What would happen if she had to fix the plumbing? If the furnace suddenly quit? If something went wrong with the toilet? If her car would not start?
What did other women do? They learned to fix things. They learned to call plumbers. They called friends. Gretta’s son knew something about cars, for he worked on his mother’s. The library would instruct her. Daria was a great believer in going to the library and finding a book when she needed to investigate any subject. On impulse, displacing both cats, she marched down to the basement and stared purposefully at the furnace. It was squat, menacing. It hummed meaningfully. She retreated, sure if she approached too closely, it might suddenly explode.
She would start with something easier: her finances. Yet however she tried, she ended up with projected expenses surpassing projected income. Take more lectures, do more cooking classes and demonstrations, close the deal with Channel 7, write more. Talk to her agent.
Make more; spend less; buy nothing; find the lost income: that was her program for survival. Her phone rang. “Uh, hi,” Ross said. She almost dropped the phone. She managed to squeeze a greeting from her collapsed throat.
“I need more clothes. I forgot my slippers and my boots. I thought I’d come by.”
“Not now!” she said in panic. “I’m busy.”
“You don’t have to be there.”
“I mean I have company. It would be awkward.” Why had she lied? Just from dread at seeing him suddenly.
“Oh. Anyone I know?”
“Ros
s, how about tomorrow around five?”
“Around five? That’s a little awkward.”
“Not for me. For me it would be the most convenient time.”
“Umph. All right. Five. Really, I don’t need you to be there.”
“This is my home. I’d prefer to be here.”
“Legally it belongs to both of us. Equally. You should remember that. You made me go through that damned fool business of changing the deed and reregistering it three years ago.” He hung up.
Still mad that she had made him change the deed to joint, as she had thought it was all along. Interesting, she thought, but could wring little pleasure from his continued pique. Now she would have to see him tomorrow. Why hadn’t she simply let him come ahead? But why allow him to see she did nothing but huddle by the fire in a big cold drafty house, alone except for her animals, her familiars. She must find a housemate and soon. Now how could she concentrate on anything for the next twenty hours except that she must see him?
The next morning the first job she had for Peggy was typing the ad. “You’re really serious?” Peggy asked, smoothing down the shiny black bowl of her hair. “About getting somebody in here with you? You’ve never done anything like that.”
“Yes, I have. Before I was married, I had roommates.” She stared at Peggy. “What about you? Want to get away from your parents?”
“It’s hard living with them. Every time I meet a guy I might be interested in, it’s awkward. But my mother baby-sits for me. And living with your boss, I don’t know, Daria.”
“Well, think about it.”
Peggy surveyed the two rooms carefully. Then Daria sent Peggy to the supermarket for boxes. When Peggy left at three to do some photocopying, Daria ventured into the room that had been Robin’s and then Ross’s and began packing the rest of his clothing. She cleaned out the closet, the dresser and then the toiletries and medicine he had not removed. She felt a pang when she noticed he had not taken his hemorrhoid medicine, for he was prone to that under stress. Then she was angry at herself for worrying. Let him suffer hemorrhoids till he couldn’t sit; that would be Gail’s little problem.
