by Marge Piercy
“What did she look like?”
“She was lean and mean, sort of a boy’s body. Blond hair.” Short, because she couldn’t find the time to fuss with it; bleached by the sun a pale white-yellow. Her eyes were light blue, almost turquoise, and contrasted with her skin, the color of a scuffed penny, to give her face the impression of a tomboy with dirty cheeks. Because she was employed by her father’s company, she didn’t have to dress for work, but drove from the stable to the office in blue jeans, boots and one of a drawer full of faded chambray shirts from which she carefully removed the sleeves at the shoulder seam with a razor blade. She smelled of leather and cloves and the horses she loved.
Vicki drove out to the site every Thursday afternoon with our paychecks. When she brought me mine, we talked. She told me she’d dropped out of community college. What she really loved was business, her dad’s business, making it grow, and her riding. “Nothing else in the world interests me ….”
Vicki was twenty and lived with her parents. I always asked about her horses because I liked to watch the sun-gold goddess gush like a little girl. Gallant Prince was a seven-year-old quarterhorse and Arab cross. Sheena was a chestnut mare, with a star and wide-set eyes; her filly’s name was Dottie because she was dun color with dapples. At least one weekend a month, Vicki went off to cross-country competitions. I knew nothing about horses and felt like Sancho Panza when I clambered up on one. But I had been a competitor.
“It’s almost like I hate it and I love it,” Vicki said. “All week and for a month beforehand, all I think about is the course. And then just as our number is called, just as I’m trying to settle Gallant down, I get so nervous I want to cry and run away.”
“Sometimes before a game, my stomach would clench so tight I’d get the dry heaves.”
She laughed. “I wish mine were dry.”
“But I felt so alive at that moment. That nothing else in my whole life had ever been or ever would be as intense.”
She said shyly, “Do you want to go with me to Bradenton for a show?”
“Where do you stay?”
“We’ll get a motel room,” she said.
The Monday after Vicki and I returned from Bradenton, I was afraid to face her father, but Wynn dropped his arm on my shoulder and asked me out to the house. From then on I was a regular Sunday guest. Unlike my own family, the Hardys didn’t carp at each other, complain about their neighbors or things that might have been, parties they weren’t invited to. They gave parties, every Sunday for bridge and barbecue around the pool. I got to know Vicki’s brothers and their girlfriends; aunts, cousins, all the family friends. I was so in love with the Hardys and grateful for their acceptance that it hadn’t occurred to me I might be exactly what they were looking for.
Vicki was still exotic to me. She made love the way she rode, with a fierce, faraway look in her eyes and tough silent concentration. She liked to be fucked hard, ridden high, and thrust herself to meet me with alarming strength. We never spoke in bed. Watching her mouth roll open, her head sway side to side and the shimmer of her tiny breasts, I imagined her riding me in her mind, across fields of new-mown alfalfa. Sex wasn’t easy for Vicki, but a matter of concentration and muscle control. Not unlike riding. Or for that matter, pitching. It was usually after sex that I wondered, Who does she think about when she’s alone? What does she want? I was afraid of the answer so I didn’t ask the question. I was too in love with my place in the family.
“After we got married, Wynn sent me to school. I worked days, took business courses at night. Weekends Vicki and I would go to one of her meets or just hang around the Hardys’ pool.”
Judith frowned. For a moment I had a sense of the litigator in her. “The woman you describe sounds damaged. As if some early trauma had damped her down and made her cut her losses.”
I stared. I could only say, “Nobody mentioned it until we were married and a friend of her mother’s started telling me how good she thought I was for ‘poor Vicki.’”
Wynn Hardy had caught his daughter with a boy named Mauricio, the son of a Cuban who worked for Wynn laying tile. They were just fifteen and went to school together. Wynn drove to the beach one day and found Vicki topless. He threatened if he ever saw them together again, he’d kill both of them. He sent her to a private school. She phoned her mother in tears every night.
Then Vicki stopped calling. The school called instead. The kids were caught in a bus station in Tampa, waiting for a connection to New Orleans. When Mauricio was returned to his home, his father and two uncles who worked for Wynn had been let go. Wynn never lifted a hand to the boy. His own father beat him half to death.
“What happened to Vicki?”
“Wynn got her an abortion. And her first horse.”
We received a three and a half acre lot from Vicki’s parents for a wedding present, large enough for a stable and a paddock. I used my bonus money for the down payment on the house, but the truth is, we wouldn’t have had a house at all if Wynn hadn’t built it. Soon he was talking about kids. We weren’t avoiding having kids, we weren’t using protection; we just doubted it could happen. Vicki menstruated with comical irregularity. I had a year to go for my degree when Vicki went to the family doctor for digestive problems. It turned out she was in her third month.
Wynn, Mrs. Hardy and I ganged up on Vicki to try to get her to stop riding. She stopped jumping, but that was all. It was a difficult pregnancy. She hated the changes in her body; she hated feeling fat. One Saturday she came back from the stables and her water broke. My son was born prematurely just after midnight Sunday morning. The birth was terrifying. Vicki was home from the hospital after two nights. The baby stayed three weeks. I’d been married to Vicki Hardy for five years and hadn’t the faintest idea how she would respond to motherhood. I was secretly afraid she’d just go off riding every day and leave the baby to the maid the Hardys had hired.
My first quarrel with Wynn was over naming the baby. My father had died a few years before, and while I didn’t expect them to like the name Sam, I wanted something that started with the letter S, as was the custom among Ashkenazi Jews. Steven or Seth or Stan—I would have been happy with any small honor to my father’s name, but the Hardys wanted Wynn the Third. I didn’t believe it.
“He’ll be called Terry,” Vicki said. “Tertius. It means ‘the third’ in Latin. That’s what we do in my family.”
“But not in mine, Vicki.”
“Why are you doing this to me?” She brought her hands up to hide her face. Arguments with her father could make her physically ill. “Why do you always think about yourself?”
I began losing my son before he was out of the premie ward.
Vicki took a leave of absence. I was at work all day and still finishing up school in the evenings. Vicki spent any time she wasn’t with the horses at the Hardy house. Terry was fussed over by his grandparents, by his nursemaid, by his mother and all the family friends. He was a small baby, but by the time he was crawling, he was growing every week. His hair was yellow at first, but gradually began to darken. His eyes were mine; his other features and his long lean body seemed to come from Wynn. He stood up at around eleven months and began to walk soon after that.
“I remember the day I began to feel superfluous,” I told Judith, “like a pitcher about to be cut. It was a Sunday at the Hardys’ pool. Terry was a year and a half and running around like a little colt. He tripped over a hose and fell on the concrete, banging his knee. He began to wail. I picked him up and kissed him but he wouldn’t stop crying—until Wynn lifted him out of my arms.”
“What happened to the marriage? Did Mauricio return? Did she have an affair? Did you?”
“It was a matter of business.”
Wynn got backing from a local savings and loan for a new development. The land was flat as a soccer field. The nearest town was fifteen miles away and the only view was the interstate. But Wynn had big plans.
He gathered the family around to name the place. Think i
n the grand Spanish style, he told us. He talked about an Olympic-size pool, a health club, an on-site shopping plaza and a long wide entrance road he called the Boulevard of Palms. Vicki’s older brother designed glossy full-color brochures in English and Spanish. I was in charge of sales, Vicki the office, Wynn and Vicki’s younger brother, construction. When La Fonda del Sol was featured in the Sunday real estate section, Wynn used the headline in all our ads: DEVELOPED BY THE HARDY FAMILY. Early interest was tremendous. Our clients were largely Spanish speakers buying their first homes outside the Miami area. Wynn had planned 130 four-bedroom homes with red tile roofs. Construction went on six days a week. The development was sixty percent occupied when the complaints began. Where was the swimming pool? The health club complex? Where was the on-site shopping center they had read about in the brochure? The nearest store was a half-hour drive. Trucks stirred up clouds of dust on streets that had yet to be paved; there wasn’t a tree planted on the Boulevard of Palms. Residents appeared at my desk every day, and all I could do was beg their patience and their trust, while I was losing my own.
There were things I didn’t like about the way Wynn did business. He had a Spanish-speaking salesman but wrote up all the contracts in English. He never told people they’d have to bear the cost of being connected to the local sewer system. Vicki said I didn’t understand his financial pressures, the headaches that kept him up at night. But I couldn’t keep quiet any longer.
“Wynn, I have a problem,” I said one night over a beer.
“You have a problem? Find a place at the back of the line, son, there’s a lot of people ahead of you.”
“I thought we could talk about some of the promises we made.”
“And what promises might they be?” he said tiredly.
“The pool. The health club.”
“I know all about it.”
“Then what are we waiting for? We made a deal.”
“You made a deal? Your name is on that piece of paper with the bank? Do me a favor. Until you have the union and the inspectors and the bank on your fucking back, just sit in your little air-conditioned office, do what you’re paid to do and keep your mouth shut.”
“Maybe I can’t do that.” I hadn’t meant it as a threat, but these were good people. No, they didn’t speak native English but they worked hard for their money, the way my own father had worked, twelve or fourteen hours a day, and it was wrong to make them come begging for the things they’d paid for. “It just doesn’t sit right with me.”
“And I’m supposed to give a fuck?” Wynn’s eyes burned blue fire. “If I was you, I’d watch my own backyard.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means if what I hear about my daughter and her friends down at the stable is true, if I ever see another grandchild it’ll probably be brown.”
My hand closed around a bottle of beer. I knew Wynn Hardy and I knew his game, insults instead of answers, but he always aimed for the heart and he’d cut me, hard and deep. Vicki and I hadn’t made love six times since our son’s birth. I felt like one of those horses who stand at stud. I felt, rightly or not, I had been used to produce the next generation of the Hardy family and that everything I had, including my son, belonged to them and not to me.
That night I told Vicki about the unfulfilled contracts, the violations of federal law. I wasn’t going to force another family to suffer the same mistake mine had, sinking farther into the hole to salvage what they’d invested. It took my father years to admit he’d been a fool to take on a dying business in a rotten building, but he would have been the first to tell you that it cost him his marriage and everything he had ever been able to save. Finally I think it cost him his life.
“We’re leaving here,” I said. “It’s time to strike out on our own.”
“I can’t do that, David. Terry loves his family. I can’t yank him away from Mom and Dad. And the foal is just at the training level. She’s supposed to take her first test next month.”
“We can’t stay here, Vicki. Trust me. We’ll make a better life.”
“But I like it the way it is.” I had never heard that sharp edge on her voice. “I love my family. I thought you were one of us. If my father needs you to stick by him, I don’t see why you can’t. What’s the matter with you, David? Why do you always put yourself first?” That night she packed Terry off to her parents’ and never came back.
When I went to see him, he hardly seemed to know me. When I brought him a toy or a book, he didn’t need it. He had plenty. Anything I gave him disappeared into the Hardy family and seemed to dissolve. When I tried to take him someplace for a few hours, he cried.
They wanted full custody. I gave Vicki the house (after all, Wynn had built it), and in return she asked minimal child support. I was supposed to have visiting privileges, two weekends a month, but Terry hated it. I was this stranger who came to drag him off to the movies or the beach or McDonald’s, away from his grandparents’ pool, his cousins, his golden retriever. I was working construction, living in a furnished room on the Gulf coast, and every time I brought him home to my place, he seemed to stare at me with Wynn’s own contempt. When Vicki remarried, I moved back up north. I send my monthly check and visit twice a year and try not to think of him every time I see a kid his age.
“Most of us don’t seem to get it right the first time,” Judith said, taking my face between her palms. “But it might be possible to do something about your custody arrangements …. How old is your son now?”
“He was nine last month.” I dug in my wallet. “Every year they send a photo after his birthday with a card he signs thanking me.”
“Who did you cut out of the photo?”
“Wynn, Vicki and her two new kids.”
“Ah …” She was silent, staring at the card-sized image of a tanned and healthy little boy beneath a palm tree. Under a shock of dark brown hair, his pale eyes stared into the camera with a big grin—not at me, at whoever was taking the picture. He had broad shoulders and chubby red cheeks; the son I wasn’t allowed to name.
“I do a lot of custody law …. If you want things changed, we can talk to someone I trust down there ….”
“What do I have to give him, Judith?”
She looked at me the way no one else ever had. “I’d say a lot.”
“When I get hopeful, I imagine him striking out on his own to find me when he gets to be seventeen or eighteen, being curious, maybe as a kind of rebellion. But none of the Hardy kids ever left home. It’s a fantasy.”
“Maybe not,” she said. “It happens. Think of it this way. If your marriage had worked out, you would never have moved back here. You’ll have a house again, and a wife, but more suited to you. More caring.”
“I doubt it,” I said.
“I don’t.” She kissed my lips lightly. “Are you hungry?”
JOHNNY
Johnny Lynch was up at four A.M. with a feeling so foreign that he had to talk to himself to understand it, coax himself down like a cat from a tree, as he’d coaxed his wife so many times. Although he was no stranger to the rush of adrenaline and the cold draft of sweat on his forehead, it wasn’t until the drive into work that he could even name the problem. Fear. Back to his own office for the first time in eight weeks, at the desk he’d had custom built—thirty-two inches high to accommodate his knees—and instead of speeding down the highway, he slowed for every yellow light. He was as scared as he’d been of the nuns in school, of his father’s rage when he couldn’t make good grades. In order to succeed, he had purged himself of fear, learned to plunge through it, and in so doing understood that the others were more scared than he was and would fall in behind him once he cleared the way.
Johnny Lynch was sixty-eight. He’d lived twice the life of most men his age and felt half the man he used to be. The last time his dog had flushed a duck from the tall reeds behind the dike, he’d had all he could do to lift his shotgun and aim; the recoil nearly brought him to his knees. By the grace of th
e Lord, or maybe to provide Him with a good laugh, Johnny had survived this last bypass—if he could call the list of foods he couldn’t eat, the things he couldn’t do, surviving.
This was the day he had anticipated for three weeks in bed and another five in a Fort Myers resort that felt like a cemetery with palm trees. Now, three hours back in his office, the well-wishers dismissed, the mail stacked in piles of importance, he sat at his big cherry desk like the ruler of an empty kingdom. The phone didn’t ring, the door didn’t open. Maybe he shouldn’t have demanded this afternoon’s meeting with the bank. A wiser man might have waited; a lesser man wouldn’t push. But finally, he was John Mosley Lynch, and he preferred bad news to silence.
He used to order his desk blotters thirty at a time. From them, Maria copied notes he scribbled while on the telephone, the numbers and contacts he gleaned, the names and the tips and reminders. Now there were few of those. He still had the real estate business, which did well despite the competition. (There hadn’t been any when he began because there was no housing market in Saltash. He created it.) But the big deals were few and far between. To develop property you needed major financing now, for the endless surveys and design reviews, the regulatory hearings created to discourage all but the most determined. He had little interest in summer rentals and second home sales and left that to the girls, most of them grandmothers by now. They were demanding a new secretary, a younger girl who understood computers. As for the law practice, the indictment had all but ended that. He’d beaten the bastards, but it cost him a fortune and his reputation. Before he was indicted, even as the rumors swirled and his partners ran scared and the newspapers descended like vultures on a roadkill, there was no other lawyer worth hiring in this town. He had written the damned bylaws: zoning, health, conservation. Only after the case went to court did he find out who his friends were, who gave him their business and who turned their backs. Six years had passed, six long years of damage control. The worst of it fell on his wife, God rest her delicate soul; a finer woman had never lived.
