Sex Wars

by Marge Piercy

  “It’s great in the river here. Maybe we can go tomorrow?”

  “You go, Sammy. You’re still a kid. You should have some fun. I’ll stay here and cook rubber.”

  “You should go too. It gets awful hot in these tight streets. Stinks too, worse than the rest of the year. It feels good to cool down for a little while.”

  “Maybe. I’ll see.”

  “You work all the time. You work for Yonkelman six days a week. You come back here and you work on the rubber. Then when we have any time we can get away, we go running around looking for Shaineh.”

  “Is the life too hard for you, Sammy?”

  “I only run errands. Sometimes he just sends me back here. Sometimes I sit around waiting. It’s easier than what I was used to on the street. But you, you’re like one of the horses that draw the trolleys—you’ll work till you drop in your tracks.”

  “That’s sweet of you to worry about me.” She mopped the sweat from her forehead. It was running down her back, gathering under her breasts. “It’s just I can almost see what I want, but it’s still so far away, I’m running all the time to get closer. But okay, I’ll go with you tomorrow. We’ll dip ourselves in the river and wash the sweat off. I promise. Now we have to work faster. We can’t do one every hour.”

  “Every hour! Freydeh, it took us a month to do this one.”

  Mrs. Stone had told her she should not let Sammy call her by her given name, but she did not mind. Mrs. Stone kept saying he should be grateful. No, she wasn’t sorry to have that woman gone. She didn’t worry about Sammy taking advantage of her. They needed each other. They had settled in like a real family. It made her life less bitter to have him there. She felt from him in return a strong loyalty. Gratitude could turn sour, could turn into envy or resentment; she had seen that before. But loyalty was something that could last, like a well-made pot. Forget about boarders. She needed to put all her effort into trying to get launched in her new business. She didn’t want anyone interfering, telling her she was a bad woman. She didn’t think it wrong. Most women had more babies than they could raise or handle. Childbirth was dangerous and infants were fragile and weak. Children died in this neighborhood every day of a dozen diseases, they died of hunger, they died of thirst, they died of beatings, they died of the cold—half before they reached the age when they could care for themselves, ten or eleven. A good many of them were thrust out or ran away, like Sammy. No, she didn’t think something that might limit childbirth was a bad thing. She wished she had children, but most women had the opposite problem, far more babies than they could feed or care for. People like Mrs. Stone could not succeed in making her feel guilty for the work she had chosen.

  The next afternoon, Sammy reminded her of her promise. She was embarrassed. “What do people wear?” In the shtetl, she and the other girls had simply hung their clothes on a bush or spread them out on the rocks. They would post a lookout, who would come in later and be replaced by one of the girls who had splashed around already. Finally she put on her cotton dress. It needed washing anyhow. She would wear the dress into the water. She wanted to be modest. Flaunting her body was not the way her dear mother had raised her.

  She was nervous as they trooped to the East River, passing through the German section where both goyish and Jewish German-speaking people lived mixed up. Then they had to pass through the Irish section. Sammy clasped her hand in his and his other hand closed around a blackjack she had seen him slide into his pocket. Often Jews were attacked in these streets. They walked quickly through air like heavy woolen blankets pressing on them. They could smell the fat-rendering vats and the reek of blood from the slaughterhouses. Acid rose in her throat and she swallowed it down. “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea, Sammy.”

  “Just keep walking like you own the place. And don’t talk. If they hear you, they’ll know you’re Jewish. Keep quiet if anything happens and let me do the talking.”

  Kids on stoops eyed them suspiciously and groups of men turned and watched them. But the only hail they got was from a couple of guys who yelled obscenities at Freydeh, saying what they would like to do to her. She only knew that because Sammy briefly, gruffly explained and they walked faster.

  At last they got to the baths. She was nervous about how it would be. Sammy went in one door and motioned her to go to the women’s door. It was free but the towel cost a nickel. A German woman was blocking the entrance until each woman paid. Then she was handed a towel—thin as a piece of paper but it would do, it would have to do—and the German waved her through.

  The baths were out on a pier in an elaborate floating building, the women’s on one side and the men’s on the other with high wooden fences enclosing them off from each other or from any observer. A square pond was open to the water below and the sky above. She walked gingerly along a floating dock that moved under her feet, that rolled with each passing boat. There was no collection of bathing beauties in fancy long woolen suits here, such as she had seen in the windows when she had strolled along Fifth Avenue. These were stout neighborhood women and their children, splashing about the way she had with her sisters and friends, in her own little river back in the Pale. They were dressed any which way in whatever they dared get wet. The German woman at the door had told them all in German and English they could not wash themselves, but everyone was doing so anyhow, as best they could. She had a little piece of soap with her, made from suet and wood ash from the fireplace. For once all the women were getting along, the Irishwomen, the Hungarians, the Germans, the tough American-born. She heard two women speaking Russian and dog-paddled over to them. She suspected they were Jews because she had not met a Russian in New York who wasn’t. Yes, one of the women was still wearing the shaytl, the wig worn by all married women back in the Pale except for a few freethinkers and prostitutes.

  She greeted them in Russian and then in Yiddish, so they would know who she was, and she told them where she came from.

  “Is that near Vilna?” the younger of what she guessed were two sisters—the one not wearing the shaytl—asked her. “We’re from Odessa.”

  “About three hours’ journey by horse. Have you been here long?”

  “A year last month. It’s lonely for us. So many many people and so few speak the mother tongue. I’m Giborah. That’s Hetty.”

  They compared notes. Giborah was unmarried. Hetty’s husband worked as a peddler and so did she. Giborah had been betrothed, but her fiancé had been murdered. “Which shul do you go to?” Hetty asked her.

  Freydeh didn’t want to admit she didn’t go to shul. “I went to a German one on Allen Street, Beth El, but it was strange. All in German with little Hebrew and no Yiddish. All the melodies were different.”

  “I know what you mean,” Hetty said. “We go to a tiny shul in a storefront on Orchard Street, but it’s real.”

  “She means like we’re used to at home,” Giborah said. She was maybe two, three years younger than Freydeh and so thin there was just skin over the bones of her hand. Her hair was light brown and almost straight. Her gray eyes were watering from the river—it was none too clean, but it was better than not being washed. Hetty was round. Her face was plump, her chin perfectly rounded, and her eyes were gray-blue. Giborah did most of the talking for both of them.

  Freydeh reminded herself to thank Sammy for making her come to the river. Maybe Shaineh had found that shul. She had always been a good girl and attended regularly with their parents and other siblings, long after Freydeh refused to go because it was superstition and she was a bold freethinker. There were not many of their countrymen here in New York, so if Shaineh was looking for a shul where she could feel at home, that might be a place she would visit. Maybe ask for help. “I would love to go to your shul with you. It would make me feel more at home.”

  Giborah squeezed Freydeh’s shoulder with her bony hand. “You come along, absolutely. You come to our flat Friday just after supper. We live at 71 Grand over the kosher butcher. The fourth floor back. You find us and
we’ll walk to the shul.”

  Hetty nodded. “It’s good to find a landsman, believe me. You come.”

  Freydeh promised she would be there Friday next week for sure. She would try not to hope too strongly, but she could not help wishing it were next Friday already. She used her little bit of soap, washing herself through her clothes and washing her hair, long and dark and heavy, loosened on her shoulders and then soaking wet. She wrung it out like a mop and then pinned it back to dry. The day was so hot, it should dry fast and then she could put it up properly. It was not seemly for a woman her age to go about with her hair loose. Men would stare.

  The attendant was calling to them. “You been in long enough. Come outta there. Your time is used up.”

  “There’s enough water in the river for all of us and ten times more,” Freydeh called back. Hetty and Giborah were scrambling to the planks to get out, but Freydeh was not easily intimidated by another woman. She had the confidence of her physical strength.

  “Your time’s up. Now come on out or I’ll take a hook to you.”

  Hetty and Giborah were motioning to her to come out. She did not want to shock her new friends by making a scene, so serenely and slowly she paddled to them and hauled herself out of the water. She could dry herself sort of with the towel, although of course almost all of them had to put their wet clothes on again, as she did. All but Hetty. She had brought a voluminous black gown she could step into, making her wet clothing into a bundle she could carry in a basket. Freydeh suspected they had more money than she did—three of them working. Someday she would have more than three dresses, two wool and one cotton, and maybe even a bathing costume.

  When she got outside, Sammy was waiting for her, his tattered clothes steaming in the sun. Like her, he had gone in as he was. The women looked at him with disapproving glances. “This is Sammy,” she said. They looked from her to him. There was little physical resemblance. “He’s my adopted son.”

  Hetty nodded. “Parents dead?”

  “Yeah.” Sammy preferred that story. But he was staring at her. When they had walked a block, he said, “That was a big lie you told.”

  “Not such a lie.” She shrugged under her wet dress. Water vapor was rising from her as if she were a stove with a kettle heating on it.

  “I don’t know what that means.” He kicked a stone into a puddle of horse urine. The streets around here weren’t paved. In hot weather, the wind blew dust into the faces of pedestrians like them.

  “It means we’re a family. Unless you don’t want to. You don’t have to.”

  “For how long?” His chin was still dug into his chest.

  “Families are forever. Till they die.” She looked around carefully. “We have to pay attention. We’re in the Irish now.” She touched his arm.

  She stopped to buy eggs. They came in fresh every morning but she had to buy the cheaper ones, packed in brine. The better eggs were packed in bran. Someday.

  When they came into their hot and airless rooms, they sat down across the table they ate on. Sammy was sulky. Another would have thought he was angry about what she had said, but she knew him better. He was afraid. Afraid to hope. Afraid she did not mean it. She had come to feel strong affection for him. If she was never to have children of her own body, then she at least could take in a child who needed a family as much as she did. But she wouldn’t push things. They sat there in silence for a while and then she said, “I’m going to change into something that isn’t sopping wet.”

  She went back to the airless little bedroom. Her body felt clammy, even chilly under the wet clothes, but a few minutes out of them would restore her to being too hot like everyone else on the bottom of Manhattan. “If you felt like going down to the courtyard, you could bring up a bucket of water and we could sit with our feet in it. That would give us a little relief.”

  He thought about it, head propped on his hand. “Okay.” He did not move for several minutes, but finally he took a bucket and went out to climb down the four flights of steps.

  Below in the street, a drayman and his helper were trying to remove a dead horse. It had been worked to death, poor thing, and died of the heat or thirst. It was as skinny as Giborah from the river, but still weighed more than two men could easily shift into the wagon. The horses pulling it were not happy and kept snuffling uneasily. They knew what they were expected to carry off, and they did not like it. Some fellow feeling among horses for their fallen, she thought. Horses she was not comfortable with. Cows, chickens, sheep, those she knew familiarly. She had lived with them. But horses were something else. Dangerous feeling. A man up on a horse felt superior and had an advantage. But horses were not to blame for how men behaved once astride. Horses were probably good creatures left on their own.

  Across the street, every fire escape was loaded with people. She had tested theirs carefully, and when Sammy came back they could sit out there. When the sun began to set, they could go back to work on their rubber project. They were not natural chemists, either of them, but she was determined.

  Loud voices brought her to the window again. A fight had broken out between two groups of young men, so far only a matter of shouting and strutting, but those scuffles could turn deadly fast. They were all in their shirtsleeves, brandishing their fists and shouting in German. She could understand them, but the reason for their fury was obscure. Something about a debt owed for a bad bet. Bored men could always find something to fight about. Sammy should have been back up by now. The last thing she felt like doing was going down four flights of steps to look for him, but the fight could turn violent any moment. If he was her foster son, the way she had said, then she had to look out for him. Never mind that as a street arab he had seen hundreds of fights and probably been in plenty himself. That wasn’t his life now, and she could not let him risk getting hurt by standing too close. Even watching a fight was dangerous. She heaved herself out of the chair and went down the steps, as quickly as she dared in the dark. In the stairwell, it was always midnight. Hot and dark and steep, without a breath of air other than fetid smells.

  As she had suspected, there was Sammy on the stoop with the full bucket beside him. The door was open to the street and he was watching as the first blow landed. All at once it was a tangle of shoving and punching bodies, shrieks and curses. She grabbed him by the shoulder and drew him in.

  “Hey, I want to watch.”

  “Upstairs you got a good view and no trouble. Come on.” She took the bucket from him and pushed him ahead of her down the hall, up the stairs. She could tell he was annoyed, but she was bigger than him and he could not get past her to climb down. Realizing he was stuck, he began to run up the steps in order to get to the window in the flat.

  He reached the room a good two minutes before her, puffing along with the full bucket and careful not to spill any. He was out on the fire escape already. She put down the bucket and climbed out beside him. One man was swinging a club. Another went down cursing and after a moment she could see a comma of blood seeping out from under him. Another was kicking a man who had been pushed down on one of the stoops. From a window above a woman threw down the contents of her chamber pot on the fighters, splattering them. They cursed at her.

  “There’s more where that came from!” she yelled in German. “Now go back where you belong and let our lads alone.”

  “Who says this block belongs to you, bitch!” The man shouting up at her was suddenly smashed in the face. His teeth exploded.

  “Brass knuckles,” Sammy said knowingly.

  Suddenly they were all scattering and the man who had fallen now lay in a widening spiral of dark blood, the back of his head caved in.

  Freydeh took Sammy by the elbow. “Look. That’s how the street life ends. If you ever think it’s boring with me, look at that poor stupid lad bleeding out his life. I don’t want that for you. Do you want that?”

  Sammy was staring down, his mouth fallen open. “I knew him. He ran numbers out of a parlor on Orchard. He used to give me
little jobs sometimes.”

  The draymen had come out of the courtyard where they had taken refuge and went back to trying to lift the dead horse into the cart. When they finally had it loaded, they picked up the corpse of the numbers dealer and carried that off too. If he wasn’t dead already, he soon would be. It was all the same to them. Just garbage to haul.

  ELEVEN

  MRS. STANTON, YOU’VE alienated folks by what you’ve said about ignorant Negro men having the vote while women are denied. How can you say that, being such a close friend of Frederick Douglass?” Susan stood over her with arms crossed.

  “I feel betrayed. We fought for their rights, but they won’t stand with us for ours.” She winced as if struck. The pain was still raw in her. Frederick kept saying it was the hour of the Negro, but apparently not of Negro women. “He’s far from ignorant. There isn’t a better orator in the country.”

  “Nonetheless, we must watch whom we alienate.”

  Elizabeth sighed, cheek against hand. “Contributions are drying up.” Since they’d started the National Woman Suffrage Association, they had not drawn donors. Women who could afford to give judged them too controversial.

  “Money is the least of our problems. My Quaker upbringing has taught me how little I really need.” Susan smoothed down her plain gray dress.

  “My dear Susan, you may not need money, but the movement does. The press costs money. Paper, printing, postage. Meetings eat up money. Conferences run on money. Travel is expensive—railroads, stages, hotels, meals. Publicity for lectures and meetings. Money is the engine that moves us down the track. Without it, we’re stalled. And we are stalled.”

  “Why won’t the Boston women come in with us? We should stand as one.”

  “They see us as too radical. They want a very nice movement.” Elizabeth said “nice” as if the word stuck in her teeth.