by Marge Piercy
An old woman sat on the curb, shaking. A young man in a bathrobe who was awkwardly grasping a little dog was trying to comfort her. The dog yapped incessantly. A woman with a coat over pajamas brought out blankets. “I’ve lost everything,” the old woman was sobbing. “Everything! All my things, gone.”
Daria could not find Sandra María or her daughter. Frightened she turned back to the building. She could see flames shooting up from the top floor, where their apartment was. Had they really gotten out? She worked her way through the crowd, looking for anyone she knew. What seemed to be a large family group was talking excitedly in Spanish. Maybe they would know Sandra María. Still she felt shy about asking. She had studied Spanish in college, but she had never used it. Finally she picked out the teenage daughter of the family, whose hair was hacked off in a punk cut just beginning to grow out. Timidly she said, “I’m looking for my friend Sandra María. Sandra María Roa Vargas. That’s her apartment burning. Did she get out, do you know?”
Tall and chunky, the girl squinted at her. Yet when she spoke, in spite of her brusque manner, her voice was low and melodious. “Over there. In the doorway.” The girl jerked her shoulder.
She caught a glimpse then of Tom carrying a child in his arms and talking excitedly with Elroy. Suddenly they were all illuminated in a ruddy burst as the flames leaped through the roof and towered over them. She stared, involuntarily flinching. It was as if a giant rose suddenly over the street of low brick apartments. With a sharp rap and tinkle of falling glass, a fireman pushed a smoldering object through a window into the street below. It landed with a thud and scattering of sparks and lay there spewing smoke until it was well drenched. An overstuffed chair, had it been? Where was Sandra María?
She wriggled through the sidewalk crowd to Tom. At last she saw Sandra María, huddled in the doorway behind him. She was wearing a parka of Tom’s about three times too big for her, with a long pink nightgown underneath and bedroom slippers. Mariela had been bundled into her own maroon winter coat with mittens pinned to the sleeve, but her feet were bare. Tom had wrapped her legs in his muffler, but obviously he could not put her down, or her poor naked feet would quickly freeze. Mariela should not be outside dressed so lightly on such a frigid night. It was good after all that Daria had come. As she stepped closer, she saw Mariela’s face swollen with crying. “Give her to me, I can hold her,” she said to Tom. With a thud and splash, another piece of smoldering furniture fell to the street, flooded with water from the hoses and melted snow.
“She’s a lot to hold,” Tom said dubiously. “Hi.”
Mariela was six but small for her age, thin and light-boned. “I can hold her,” Daria insisted, holding out her arms. “What’s wrong, Mariela?”
“Bring her here,” Sandra María called.
“We left Mr. Rogers,” Mariela sobbed. “We left him inside.”
“You mean the TV set?”
“Her hamster,” Sandra María said wearily. In the harsh light of the streetlamps, she looked stricken. She stared at the burning building with a look of exhausted despair.
Daria tried to decide if she should say something encouraging, but the sight of the flames soaring from the top floor dissuaded her. “Are you cold?”
Mariela nodded. Sandra María stirred herself. Obviously she was finding it hard to do more than stare at her home being destroyed. “Oh, your thesis,” Daria said suddenly.
“My notes, my papers, my books. Everything except what was in my briefcase. I grabbed Mariela, my purse, my briefcase, and that was it. Then we just ran! The hall was already full of smoke.”
“You can’t stay here in the street. Do you want to come home with me? I have plenty of room.”
“I shouldn’t just stand here, I know it. We’re both frozen to the bone.”
“My car’s in Tom’s driveway.”
“Take us to my mama’s, okay? I want Mariela in bed.” Sandra María visibly roused herself, stood, thrust her body into motion. “We both have some clothes at my mother’s and she can take Mariela tomorrow while I check things out here. That would be the best choice, I think.”
“Maybe everything isn’t lost,” she said, sounding falsely cheerful. “And you’re alive and unhurt.”
“There’s that!” Sandra María stumbled along after her, her slippers sliding on the ice.
“Take my arm.”
“You’ve got Mariela.”
“Mamá, hold on,” Mariela said. “You always make me put on my boots.”
“Hijita mía, there was no time for your boots tonight. Just be good and hold on to Daria and we’ll go to your abuela’s.”
“What about Mr. Rogers?”
“Mariela, we can’t do anything about him now. Your poor little cold feet!”
Daria drove them to Dorchester and saw them safely inside. Then she sat a moment in her car uncertain what to do next. Obviously she could go home. She couldn’t understand why Tom hadn’t simply loaded them in the van and taken them at once to Sandra María’s mother, but she had not minded helping. Finally, without being sure why, she returned to Allston. The burning building seemed to summon her, as if to witness what fire really meant. Perhaps that was why Tom had called her, to involve her, to show her, to cause her to bear witness.
As she drove back slowly, she realized that Sandra María would be homeless now. She liked Mariela, thin as her mother, darker of skin and very fast in reaction. Mariela was a skinny bright little girl who would be fun to share. Yes, she thought, I will invite Sandra María to move in. She’s a student and hardworking, she’s serious, and Mariela will fill the house so that there’s no more room for loneliness and silence and the house will be only the proper size again. But Sandra María doesn’t have a car. That will be a little difficult. Maybe we can share the car too: we’ll figure it out.
As if under orders she parked again in Tom’s driveway. The fire trucks were still down at the foot of the hill but the urgency was gone from the firemen’s movements. No more flames showed at the broken windows, although smoke still drifted up and out through the damaged roof. The fire itself seemed from the outside to have been mostly confined to the upper floor, but Daria supposed it was a bigger mess inside, with water damage as well as what the flames and the smoke had done. Glass lay all over the street and the sidewalk.
Tom was talking with one of the firemen, arguing it appeared. When he saw her he gave it up and came toward her. “Are they okay?”
“I took them to her mother’s. Mariela’s still crying about her hamster. Sandra María seemed stunned.”
“They can’t help but smell the damn gasoline, I swear it!” He shook his head in fury. “Those people, the captain said, those people live like animals: they drop their garbage in the hall and they drop their butts everyplace when they’ve been drinking wine. That’s what that damned racist creep said.” He linked his arm in hers and bore them away uphill. “Watch the ice.”
“Then slow down. What happened? How did the fire start?”
“That old woman, Mrs. Richter, she smelled it. She doesn’t sleep soundly and something woke her. She thought she heard somebody on the roof—she has the top back, next door to Sandra María. After that she was too terrified that a burglar was going to break in to go back to sleep. Then she smelled gasoline. She was still thinking about that when she smelled smoke. She put on her robe and went out in the hall and found the upper stairway to the roof on fire. So she grabbed her little dog and ran downstairs shouting and banging on doors.”
“Did everybody get out?”
“They did, and for that I’m glad. It was a professional job. I bet the damage is confined to the stairwell, the roof and the upper apartments. And the smoke detector Sandra María put so much pressure on Revco to install, never functioned. It was a dud or turned off.”
She turned to look back at the firemen still working on the building. One of the trucks was leaving. She felt suddenly weary through and through. She did not accept his paranoid assumptions for a momen
t, but she was too stunned by the power of the fire to argue. She thought she could understand why he had to believe such a disaster could be blamed on some individual.
“Be glad it’s Friday,” he rumbled. “Local fires are usually in midweek. Tomorrow we can all sleep late.”
“Not too late,” she said. “My daughter’s coming home for her break.”
“I thought you weren’t on good terms now.”
“This is my younger daughter, Tracy. She’s on my side.” Strange what they knew about each other, an intimacy of convenience. Sometimes she thought he had already learned too much about her life. “You saw your own daughters at Christmas, didn’t you?”
He sighed for answer. Then he said, “It’s hard like that. August is better because there’s time for it to be ordinary and natural again.”
She slipped on the ice, he steadied her and she yawned. Oh, she was tired. It amused her to note that she was not at all nervous about being out in the middle of the night, walking up the deserted hill with Tom. She had her private bodyguard. “Do you think Sandra María might move in with me?”
“Move in with you?” he repeated, openly surprised. “Did you ask her?”
“I only thought of it after I dropped her off. Do you think she’ll consider it?”
He plodded uphill, frowning. “I think so, Daria. She’s lost that place, so much is clear. She doesn’t want to move in with Ángel. And she doesn’t like Mariela’s first grade teacher.”
It surprised her what he knew about the people around him. Ross would never have known that Gretta disliked her son’s teacher, or that Fay had just given walking papers to her boyfriend because he drank too much in front of her boys. For a man, Tom had an uncommon interest in the details of people’s lives. Gossip, Ross would call it, but she thought it was just being interested in people. She stumbled on the ice and he righted her.
“I’ll admit to being surprised how you two get on, the way you’ve become friends.” He was still mulling over the possibility. “It might work out. Ask her tomorrow, before she makes other plans.… Sandra María, by the way, can’t boil an egg.”
“I can cook for her and Mariela as easily as for myself. In fact, I’d prefer it. I miss the company.” She yawned again, hugely. Oddly enough, it felt almost cozy stumbling up the hill together. Maybe she and Tom were also becoming friends, as unlikely as that sounded. Surprisingly, they talked easily to each other, and there was little nonsense between them.
He steered her firmly past her car. “I’ll make coffee. You shouldn’t drive home half asleep.”
“You needn’t bother.” She yawned again. The excitement of the fire had brought her to full alert, but that verve had ebbed and left her limp. She decided not to argue further and added lamely, “If you want to?”
His apartment was warm and smelled of bread and cinnamon and faintly of marijuana, which he must have been smoking earlier; or someone had. He owned no ashtrays but in a saucer a thin butt reclined. He noticed her gaze as he hung their coats. “Waiting for the kettle. Oh, do you want some dope?”
“I don’t have the habit.” In spite of her fatigue, she looked around curiously. He must have made the coffee table with its curves and strong grain. All the wood of the archway and sleeping loft had been shaped and rubbed to bring out its warmth and texture.
“I used to. One period of my life I was stoned for a year. You could have smoked my body fat to get high. But I’ve lost interest.” He had tucked an ivory pajama top into jeans to go out for the fire; its full sleeves made it resemble a pirate shirt, his earring glinting.
“You divide your life into sharp neat phases when you talk. As if you were a different animal in each: that was when I was a little green caterpillar.”
He laughed, letting himself down with surprising lightness beside her on the couch. “Men like to make their lives out to be more rational than they were. We don’t like to admit how much energy we spend just chasing some scent through the grass.”
“I see that in Ross. He’s rewriting our common history and all—”
“No Ross tonight. Leave him outside. Enough. Besides, I’m not rewriting my history. Just trying to organize it so it makes sense to me.”
“In a way that’s what I’m doing too.”
“I know that. And in my underhanded overheated way I’m trying to help.”
“I guess I do know underneath it all you mean well.…”
“But what?” He extended his arm along the back of the couch.
She felt almost afraid to notice the gesture. “Oh …” The words came out of her oversized, balloons bouncing in space. “I guess it’s just how we rub each other the wrong way.”
“Rub each other?” His hand slithered down from the back of the couch to close over her neck.
Her body responded by becoming very still and going into a state of warm shock. It took her several moments to remember how to form words. “I hope you aren’t going to do anything silly right now. That you aren’t thinking of anything silly.”
“What I’m thinking about is exactly what you think I’m thinking about. Which is what I’m usually thinking when I’m around you. Except that I’m tired of thinking about it.” He did not lunge at her then because he moved very slowly toward her on the couch so that she could leap up, could move away, could rise, could say something in protest, in anger, in rebuff, at least say something; in fact what felt like a glacier of time passed over in which she could have done many small abrupt actions that would have prevented his closer approach, and in which time she did nothing but stare at him with the skin on the back of her neck burning and her body in a state of anxiety and intense seething curiosity and apprehension. Repeatedly she ordered herself to get up off the couch, but she did not move, except suddenly to remember to inhale when she realized she was holding her breath.
With infinite slowness and patience as if she were a bird that might fly off or a strange cat that might bolt, he eased his body toward her until his thigh was pressing hers and then he put his other arm around her and bent to kiss her. At the last moment she gave a great shudder and attempted to avert her face as his mouth moved over hers, which opened as if to speak but let in his tongue instead.
Kissing him was very different from her experience of twenty years. His lips were full, sensual, active. Ross had narrow lips and the tendency to hold them rigid when he was kissing. This was something far more sensual, more enveloping, more overwhelming. Way, way back, yes, kissing Dominic had been that way, almost frightening, as if she might lose herself, as if she might escape through her parted lips, that her essence, her soul would pass out of her in kissing, or maybe only that her control would melt. She did not want to let herself dissolve into passion.
It was her sense as Tom kissed her that he was holding her with extreme care, that he was controlling himself as if in pincers. He was afraid to frighten her, to push her. That sense of a difficult control over what?—passion? Appetite? His desire?—moved her until she realized with a knowledge of capitulating to unexpected disaster that she should never have permitted him to touch her if she expected to extricate herself. She experienced him suddenly as vulnerable and that undid her. Even as he constricted and constrained his desire, what he had to control made her feel him as extraordinarily open to harm.
The kettle was shrieking. She finally took her mouth away. “The water’s boiling.”
“Damn it. I should never have put it on.”
“Turn it off, then.”
He drew back slightly to fix his gaze on her. Dark eyes, large, wanting, fierce black eyes of specific and singular hunger. Something slipped in her, worked loose, a slide of warm mud deep inside, a thawing downward from the head slowly through the chest and into the groin. He said, “I don’t know if I care to let go.”
“I’m not about to disappear.” She sighed.
He bounded to the kitchen in three strides, silenced the kettle and came galloping back.
Staring at him she babbled, “Thi
s is not the best idea. We have to work together. I’m in the middle of a divorce and Dorothy says it’s a time to be careful. Discovering an attraction doesn’t mean one should act on it. I’m ten years older than you are—”
“Seven. Daria, shut up, please. Come on. We won’t get there by talking first.” He drew her to her feet, his hands, low, enclosing her buttocks. Then he had a sudden idea and picked her up, carrying her across the room to set her up on the sleeping platform. “See, there’s some use to being built like an ox.”
“You’re still mad about that.”
“Daria, if you don’t know you were goading me sexually, it’s because you don’t want to admit it yet.” He scrambled up beside her.
She had a sudden sharp sense of being out of place, sitting up on a sleeping platform, an object as exotic to her as an igloo, about to permit this large hairy stranger to penetrate her body. But only her mind was wary. Her body was sensuous and clamorous as Sheba’s had been. “I guess we should get undressed,” she said calmly. She was a little shocked at herself; she had taken five months to reach this point with Ross, the only other man she had ever slept with.
For the first moment their nakedness collided, her teeth chattered briefly, an instant of shock, of fear. Then she relaxed. She imagined a great pile of clothes, of words, of masks, of postures and poses and cherished notions all fallen on the floor under them. Of course each of them would resume their clothing and their opposing notions. Probably they would also resume their sparring. But this too was real.
He was the more active and she the more acted upon, as it had been in the early years with Ross, but Tom did not otherwise remind her of her husband. His body felt different. His bones were bigger, his musculature far more pronounced, his body hair more plentiful and more irregular. In places his body was smooth and sleek, in places covered with a pelt. He was more attentive to her reactions than she was used to. Over the years women must have instructed him about their bodies until he knew many different caresses and zones of arousal. He did not fall into her and flail there but felt his way by trial and response, tuning himself to her breathing, her little movements, her hands and flesh responding against him. Again she had the sense of an exhausting control in charge, a restraint that totally directed him. At last he slowly urged his penis into her, sliding himself gradually forward until she lunged to complete the coupling. He moved carefully in her for perhaps a minute and then the control blew.
