by Marge Piercy
So I looked hard at Helena. Her hair was that blond with seascape tones of green algae and sand. Her eyes were blue and perhaps looked so dark because the lashes were daubed a sooty black that blurred, as if they cast a shadow. She believed her sharp chin spoiled her face and told me she had grown her hair to soften it. But that sharpness brought out a questing, plaintive childishness. Did the sirens too cry, save me! take me with you! make me happy!
A week later I tried to deliver a warning, for I knew how Zak gobbled little girls with big eyes for breakfast.
“You have a compulsion to patronize me!” She perched on my couch with her knees drawn up, as if warming herself in her long hair. “Your life is shoddy, so you think others are shoddy too. Cow!”
She flung down counters of words like rolls of dice—words used to mean whatever she chose: “kind” applied from clothes to mountains; “nice,” a hard, almost spiteful moral judgment hurled down and if not instantly accepted, hugged back into a silence now large-eyed and accusing; judgments gratuitous, sharp as broken glass: “shoddy,” “gross,” “ratty.”
Two months later she had become the ingénue of a local theater in a loft. Zak, who had always advertised his heavy drinking, actually began to drink, and the last I heard, he was making movies for the training of traffic cops.
Two years later I met her on the Boul’Mich, and as the tourists trouped past the café tables, they looked on her as a genuine sight of the Latin Quarter, and surely they had their money’s worth. It was mid-July and hardly anybody around but Americans and a smattering of Third World students. I’d been using my summer vacation to sublet a tiny apartment in the 10th arrondissement on the cheap and try to figure out the next move in my life. I was sick of subbing, didn’t feel I had any talent for teaching children, and had no idea what to do next. In my room the growing pile of letters from Walt gave out ultimatums. He was getting his doctorate in chemistry with an assistant professorship at Stanford waiting. Short sure letters from a big calm man, who dominated me like a sandbag when I was with him. So I had posted myself at this crossroads waiting for the chance or man or decision to strike me, a long way from Chicago and hopeful that surely something more must be prepared to happen.
Helena’s parents had sent her on a student trip as a graduation present, but she’d quarreled with the group. The hotels her group had booked she pronounced sordid. She began sleeping on a park bench, rising at six and washing at the spout, combing out her yellowgreen hair, then climbing over the iron gate before the keeper came at seven to unlock the park and threaten stragglers with a night in jail. She kept her clothes with me. She would wash her hair in the basin, leaving the trap clogged, lie on my bed and, folding her arms, denounce the way I kept house or fell in love. “You lack style,” she complained. “Of course you’ll marry your chemist. You’ll have herds of fat babies and let them climb the furniture and you’ll explain everything!”
After she found a room she would drop in at supper, to stand on one leg beside the table. She would talk rapturously of the chicken she had eaten a week before or the biftek of last night. She ate whatever I gave her, but if it were only spaghetti or eggs, her eyes left me in her debt. Whenever I fed her I felt as if I were acting a ritual, at once big-lapped mama and mean pinching stepmother.
That week my friend Jay turned up, with his deep baying voice of a good hound and his redbrown mane and glasses sliding down his nose. His affection came down on me with a hearty clatter. I remember him saying goodbye in Chicago, buttoning and unbuttoning his coat nine times before he summoned the spirit to lift me off my feet for a brotherly kiss, knocking our foreheads together. I’d known him since I was a freshman and we were lab partners in Zoology.
He came from his first meeting with her like a stung Saint Bernard. First he appealed to me to confirm that she had not looked at him in the café, would never look at him, was with that asshole in shades. Then he urged me to promise that tomorrow would be different. How did she live, poor thing? Something bad could happen to her. We did not eat till ten, because maybe she would drop by. Then he dragged me from block to block, from café to bar looking for her till we were barking at each other.
By the next night it was “Talk to her. All afternoon and she wouldn’t say one word to me. She’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.”
“The worst thing I could do is talk for you.” But the situation weighed on my matchmaker’s conscience. Besides, just once I wanted Jay to win a prize. He was much kinder and gentler than her usual pick-ups. He would be good to and for her. I told him to move some gear into my place and hang around looking intimate. The first time she really looked at him was when she saw him sprawled on my bed, while I stirred a pot and told her, sorry, this was supper for two.
Next day at the café, Jay draped his arm around my chair as we talked of going south for a week. I felt so clever as her plaintive glance coaxed at him and she dug her sharp elbows into the table and leaned forward. Oh, I know. To exploit her greed for anything that was mine was easier than to understand it. I only want you to see how easy it was to manipulate her, the quick solution to everybody’s woes. They talked about kindness. She told him he was kind.
That weekend they left for the mountains of Provence, and I was treated like a sore toe. I felt the cost to my public pride small compared to my regained freedom. Then I squandered that August with a young French lawyer and his family in Brittany. There I tried to persuade myself that fulfilling his (and his mother’s and his cousins’ and his aunts’) notions of wifehood would make me happy.
I got back to Paris in September just two days before my flight to find a scrawl from Jay, an address and a three times underlined, get in touch immediately. Apprehensive I sat on the Metro watching the Dubonnet signs flash past. I’d helped him put himself in the way of getting hurt, making him just interesting enough for her to pick up and drop. Still I was unprepared for his misery. He paced the hotel room, wiping his palms on crumpled pants, clawing at his stubble. They had spent the first few nights camping out, sleeping under a blanket wherever they could. Finally in a little hill town, they found a room. When they had to give that up because it was rented the last two weeks of August, they moved to a youth hostel in Fréjus down on the beach. They were both reluctant to talk about sex. Helena would have considered it vulgar to bring up and Jay was inexperienced and assumed she took the pill. It turned out she thought she couldn’t get pregnant right after her period. She was wrong.
In Paris, she disappeared. Then she emailed him from Chicago that was she pregnant. He asked her to marry him. She refused. He could not get a flight out and his reservations were not till the end of the month. He had written, emailed, called repeatedly. Whoever answered in Chicago always hung up. So he paced his room clawing his scalp and bumping into me. I promised I would see her.
Arriving in New York with eighteen dollars, I wrote Walt a shamefaced email asking for a loan and took my luggage to a friend’s apartment. I figured six days for a check to come, but by the fourth day, I was meeting the mailman. By the seventh, I thought silence an answer. I got a temporary job and called a friend in Chicago. The eleventh day a note came from Walt with the fare to Chicago and a ticket from there to San Francisco, to him, on the 20th.
I called from the station. Her mother answered. Helena would not come to the phone, but she had her mother tell me I could visit. On the bus I felt sick: headache, nausea. I kept imagining myself getting off and taking a bus right back to the airport. I had not been able to eat, and it occurred to me I was going through a mock pregnancy.
Kids passed in groups on their way to school, the backpacks, the clothes, the kids themselves looking very new. I saw the house, a wooden bungalow with every bit of ground sprouting a trimmed shrub circled by bricks, neat bathmats of lawn where I had often passed Helena’s bald little father kneeling prayerfully with a trowel. Now on the front porch she was sitting beside her mother on an old porch swing.
I wanted to run. Her mother sat painf
ully straight with her hands locked like rigor mortis in the lap of her wash-worn tunic and baggy pants. Her eyes, blue like Helena’s, had tight lines scored around them as if it had been a long time since she had seen anything she liked. Beside her with a jailed look, Helena wore a cotton dress that buttoned up the front. Her face looked childish without makeup as if her mother had scrubbed off her adolescence. I opened the gate and came up the walk lined with pink petunias as her mother rose.
“I understand you knew Elsie at school? You were with her this summer? And you know that man?” She made plain she understood the situation and it was no more than she had expected from allowing a young girl to run around. But Elsie had set her heart on going in spite of the cost—I could see they weren’t wealthy, couldn’t I?—and Elsie’s father had given in to her with no more thought about what would happen than you could expect from a man. She was one of those women who talked to you woman-to-woman without liking you any better for belonging to their sex but to whom men are children, and children animals to be disposed of for their own good. Helena stared at the street, swinging idly. I was sweltering, aware suddenly of how much weight I had put on eating the cuisine of my French lawyer’s family.
Finally Helena said, “Leave us alone, Mama. She and I want to talk. You can tie me to the railing to make sure I don’t get away.”
Sniffing, her mother slammed into the house. I sat immediately. “Look, believe me, I’m sorry. Do you want to marry him?”
Her eyes turned so dark with anger she looked herself again. “I should marry him? He wasn’t good enough for you.”
“Look, if your mother won’t help you, and I guess she won’t, I think I can get the money for an abortion from Walt.”
“And let me bleed to death or end up sterile! Mother warned me about abortions.”
Talking to her was like sticking my fingers into a fan. She went on at me and all the while her mother was noisily vacuuming just inside. “You tricked me! I never would have slept with him, but you pretended he was yours. You made a fool of me. Did you go to bed with any of them? You’re a fake!”
I was reduced to asserting my sluttiness. “Look, since Jay wanted you and not me, doesn’t that put you one up on me somehow?”
“He isn’t a man. He’s a fool, an awkward bumbling child. Why should I want him? How could he be so stupid and get me into this mess?”
We got no further that day.
The next day her anger had muted to scorn and she would talk about the baby. Though with her slender body, all arms and legs, she looked less gravid in a general way than I did, both she and her mother spoke as if the baby were already in its crib. They convinced me she meant to have the baby, and that if Jay tried to see her, her mother would call the police.
Why did I keep going back? I couldn’t let that police matron of a mother get her claws in another baby. I had started the mess by using Helena’s peculiar regard for me, that backhanded possessiveness. And I was afraid, for her and for me. My last day I asked her to meet me for lunch. I still hoped I might talk her into taking the situation into her own hands. “Mama won’t let me leave the house.”
“But you’re twenty-two—”
“Will you support me and my baby? Oh, you just want me to die!”
Since I was going to the airport, I brought my suitcase along. Her mother did most of the talking, listing grievances stretching from the hard life as oldest kid in a big family to her husband’s worthlessness and her daughter’s disregard. “I wanted her to be a school teacher, to rise in the world. But she didn’t take her certificate. She studied playacting and she lied to me while we were paying for her useless degree.”
After I called a cab, Helena came out on the porch to wait with me. I think my suitcase infuriated her. “Will you sleep with Walt? Oh, I hope you get pregnant too. What will I do with it?” She fixed her fingers into the flesh of my arm. “It’s your fault, and I’ll hate you as long as I live! I’m ugly now, because of you, you!”
A flash of conviction shocked me. I heard myself say, “Helena, I’ll take the baby. I promise, I’ll take it from you and raise it as my own.”
“You’re lying again.” She still clung to my arm when the cab pulled up, and I was afraid she would not let me off the porch. As I drove away, I could see through the back window Helena standing beside her mother, a thin and angry prisoner. The print of her fingers and thumb stayed on my arm almost until the plane took off.
I sat on that plane in a frightened stupor, trying to make sense of things. I could not go all the way to California only to tell Walt I had not decided. I could not think. I felt trapped, squashed. As soon as I saw Walt at the airport, I began to run, and when he put his arms around me, I cried myself weak. I thought telling him the story might bother him, but he was very kind.
A month later we married, and I was pregnant myself when we flew to Chicago for Helena’s delivery. Her mother wired me, but it was too late. Helena signed the baby away unseen. Sitting in that narrow house, she had a strange taut power and even her mother seemed wary of her. The rest of my pregnancy felt anticlimactic.
I wish her well. I owe her my marriage, in a way. Tell her I’m happy, and I hope she is. We have a boy, Alec, in high school and a girl, Paige, in middle school now, besides my baby, Abigail—she’ll be waking soon. Walt’s an associate professor and we do all right. By the way, he’ll be home at five, so I need to pick up and start supper soon.
No, you don’t understand. I can’t see her. I’m not afraid of a scene, after this long. It’s only that I have nothing to say, not even to myself. Isn’t it funny? I was always mothering Helena. How could I have thought she was the weaker of us two?
I Wasn’t Losing My Mind
My mother married for the first time when she was seventeen to escape a job as chambermaid in a hotel catering to traveling salesmen. She had been forced to quit school halfway through the tenth grade to bring in money to her poverty-stricken family with too many children to feed. The marriage was a disaster. She was more miserable in that marriage than as a chambermaid being sexually harassed by male travelers. She was able to get the marriage annulled, she told me, because it was never consummated.
Her next marriage was to a smalltime businessman with whom she had a son. That marriage lasted well over a decade. During the depression, she ran a boardinghouse to help out. There she met my father and eloped with him.
Whatever chemistry they had at first, and it must have been strong, by the time I was born it was gone. It was the marriage of the dog and cat. They could agree on almost nothing. Since he was the breadwinner, he had the power, but she was a great sulker. Although he did pretty much as he pleased—he bought a new car every two years while there was no money for her or me to go to a dentist—she had her own ways of making his life torturous.
My mother and I were much closer than I ever was to my father, who never got over the disappointment of having a daughter and not a son of his own genes. After all, she had produced a boy for her second husband. My brother came to live with us, and my father preferred him, although he was often harsh with him during his adolescence. I was even more rebellious. Both my brother and I left home as soon as we could.
She had few nice things, but one of them was a jade necklace my father had given her when they eloped. It had an oblong pendant intricately cut and hung on a fine gold chain with smaller globes of green jade set into the links—surprisingly delicate. I seldom saw her wear it. I think she felt few of her clothes were good enough to set it off. But frequently she would take it out, show it to me and hold it, finger it, admire it.
In a nostalgic mood, she would call me into her bedroom. She would drag from the closet a small pink piece of furniture about two and a half feet high with little drawers. It was small enough to be something made for a child. She kept it as far back in the closet as she could where it was hidden by my father’s and her own hanging clothes. In its drawers were scraps of velvet, satin and silk, pieces of flowered cotton and rayon
. They were not for quilting or patching but rather as visible mementoes of her earlier life when she still could entertain hope.
She fingered a scrap of orange silk, worn almost translucent. “I wore this gown to a party. It was for St. Patrick’s Day and they all yelled at me for wearing orange. How did I know about their saints?”
She tossed her head, calling up the ghost of long spent flirtations. “But he asked me to marry him anyhow.”
“Why did you turn him down?”
“He drank too much … Like your father.”
She pulled out a bit of brown lace backed with green shiny satin. “This was one of Rose’s costumes in George White’s Scandals.”
My aunts Rose and Evelyn had both danced in Ziegfeld Follies, other shows and revues, and Rose performed in the movies. My Halloween costumes were glamorous hand-me-downs from Rose’s acts.
“Do you remember when I used to wear this?” A bit of turquoise cotton with white and yellow daisies. I remembered. She had still been beautiful then, her face like a flower: before her only pleasure was eating, especially cake and cookies and pies she baked.
But the session always ended with the jade necklace. She would take it from her jewelry box in which it was the only real piece, clasp it around her neck and finger it, her eyes going blank and blind as she revisited a more promising past than anything the present offered. She would rise abruptly, order me to shove the miniature chest of drawers into the back of the closet. Then as she returned the necklace to its place, she always said, “Someday this will be yours.”
The last time we spoke on the phone, she reminded me that I was to have it. After they moved to Florida against my mother’s wishes, we spoke every Monday when my father went out to play bridge at the senior center. She seemed afraid that my brother’s fourth wife would take the necklace. As she was not ill, I couldn’t understand why she brought that up. But then she had demanded we drive down the previous winter because she had something important to give me that could not be brought back on a plane. Again, when my father was out of the house, she collected dollar bills from every conceivable hiding place.
