The High Cost of Living

by Marge Piercy

  Another couple dropped in, Vicki and Meg. Like Liz and Mary they had children, they rented an old farmhouse although they raised only a few vegetables, they lived on marginal jobs and little money. Joints traveled around the table, they drank the coarse wine and gossipped. She tried to stir herself and ask about everyone she should be interested in. It had begun to rain again. The wind went around trying the doors and the windows, rattling the sills, while the rain drove against the western side of the house. She felt cut off from the women in the room. If she were living here alone, having lost her lover, they would be wary of her. She had seen it ten times. Couples. She would be lonely here without Valerie, she would be forced to find another lover just to be welcomed back into the community again. This was the only place she had ever found acceptance as a lesbian, yet the narrowness of the world they created here grated upon her for the first time. She preferred these women—Vicki and Meg, Mary and Liz—to Lena’s affluent professional propertied lesbians with their satin shirts and their stylishness and their sour wit. But she had lost her cohesion with them.

  “Oh, Kathy. She’s having an affair with a man,” Mary said contemptuously.

  “With a man?” Leslie repeated.

  “Some big slob she met iceboat racing,” Liz added.

  “You win some, you lose some,” Meg said.

  “But I thought she had her head straightened out!” Mary’s round face was pink with feeling. “Then to go back to it all. It’s depressing! Then she keeps dragging him around with her. She wanted to bring him to Beta’s party, imagine that!”

  “But Beta’s had men sometimes. That Ronny. That black guy Rich,” Leslie said mildly. Suppose I told them my best friends in Detroit are a straight woman and a man.

  “But they’re gay. And Lynn will be there. Lynn was in love with Kathy,” Liz said.

  Meg said, “Kathy was just experimenting. Now she’s done playing with us. Too bad if you happened to get hurt.”

  “Do you think she’s really straight? I think she’s fooling herself,” Mary said. “She got scared. You watch. She’ll keep switching. Getting involved with a woman and then running back to reassure herself with a man.”

  “She’s a dangerous fool,” Meg said shortly. “I don’t want to deal with her any more. I can’t stand women who hurt women and then go and cozy up to men. If she falls through a hole in the ice in her precious boat, it’s no loss to us or any other woman.”

  How could she have spent two hours with Valerie and asked her nothing? How could Valerie have granted her only two hours? In the morning she would call. It was ridiculous to have to meet her clandestinely. They had lived together for three years; why did she have to sneak around and make assignations? I had her in my arms and I let her walk out the door. I took the quick comfort and let the important matter go. I’ve lost her. No, this afternoon, mine. Hold her. I feel so cold.

  Phone conversations like five-minute vacuum aspirator abortions. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t be difficult.”

  “But you’re impossible! We have only a little time!”

  She would hang up with her heart thudding and could not accept that the conversation was over. Too short, too violent, too mean. It was not what she meant to say. She paced and sometimes she called back and sometimes that worked and sometimes it was worse.

  They sat in a coffee shop selected by Val on the sole criterion that nobody they knew would see them there, a greasy spoon in the factory district near the river, brick streets that trucks rumbled through. They sat in a booth and argued in voices pitched barely loud enough to hear each other.

  “She’s found out you’re in town,” Val said, hands laced over her coffee. “She plans to invite you to supper.”

  “I won’t go.”

  “Why not? She’ll be suspicious.”

  “She ought to be. I want you to come back with me.”

  “Leslie! Stop it. You know I can’t!”

  “Why can’t you? You aren’t doing anything in particular. You’re going to school part time taking silly courses and you’re working part time in Lena’s store. What’s wonderful about all that?”

  “I like my classes. Really, Leslie, you’re male dominated in your values. You believe all that nonsense, you think if you work hard and jump all those academic hurdles, they’ll reward you just as if you were a man and give you a job and let you in their club?”

  “But what are you learning? Just nonsense.”

  “Things you call nonsense.… You’re so sure you’re right, you don’t even look at our work before you pronounce one of your judgments from on high! I don’t think doing water colors by myself is higher or superior to designing sets for our group. Maybe I work better with the content given.…”

  Leslie had a moment of doubt. But no, it would just be the bunch of them running around like little girls in their mother’s old white curtains declaiming poetry. Valerie just didn’t want to buckle down to working alone.

  “… I wish she didn’t make me work in the boutique. It’s boring and my feet hurt. But it’s better than working at Bolt’s thirty-seven and a half hours a week!”

  “It wouldn’t be better if you had to live on what she pays you. Val, come with me. We don’t need much to live on. You can work part time in some store in Detroit.”

  “Detroit has terrible unemployment, and how can I leave in the middle of the quarter?”

  “Val, I love you. I still love you.”

  “I love you too. That’s why I don’t feel guilty being with you. We were together before I ever met Lena, so it isn’t like being unfaithful.”

  “It’s not Lena you’re unfaithful to, it’s me. You can’t love her.”

  “But I do.”

  “No! Come back with me. I’ll do anything. I’ll rent a car to move your stuff.”

  “Leslie, don’t push me around again. I’m in school, I do love. Lena. You went off to Detroit because you wanted to. Damn it, Leslie, you always want to turn me into a wife!”

  That old accusation, from their last year together. After all, if Valerie would really buckle down to something, she would respect that. “I have to get a degree!”

  “Now I’m getting a degree too. Even if you call it silly. At least Lena thinks about what’s good for me as well as what she wants.”

  “A car, a suede coat, classes, a Navajo bracelet with real silver and real turquoise.” She pointed to Val’s wrist.

  “Why shouldn’t she give me things? You would if you could. Or would you? Maybe you’d insist we live on beans and rice forever?”

  “I’m getting my degree. It’ll only take two years more. I swear it, two years. Then we’ll have some money. Two years isn’t forever, Val.”

  “Nothing is, I suppose. Why do you want to waste the time we have together arguing?”

  “Because we needn’t have only a couple of days. You can come with me. I don’t want to leave you here.”

  “But there’s no reason for me to be in Detroit. I don’t like Detroit. I don’t know anyone. The only reason I’d go is to be with you, and you’d be studying and working and at the dojo all the time, just the way it was here. What would I do with myself? My friends are here, I have a life here. I can’t just walk out on Lena after all she’s done for me.”

  “That’s called a price tag. They know about that in boutiques.”

  They sat in the kitchen of Liz and Mary’s farmhouse, keeping their voices down. “It is depressing here, it is! It’s cold and it’s cluttered and it’s ugly. Everything lying around. It’s a mess! They must like it that way, but I don’t,” Val said scornfully.

  “But you used to be comfortable here. They have kids and kids make a mess. They farm, that’s dirty. Food grows in dirt, you know.”

  “Don’t take on that high superior moral tone with me! You don’t like mess any better than I do. I remember you going on about dishes in the sink!”

  “You’re in the crowd now around Lena and Beta, the ones
with money and snob appeal. We’re all supposed to be sisters, but they have more money and more control and more options, and they decide things to suit themselves.”

  “You like to be uncomfortable! You think that’s superior. But it isn’t. It’s just uncomfortable!”

  They could not use the old parlor because Pattie (the woman from Chicago who had a black eye and a bandaged-up hand) was in there with her little boy Dick working jigsaw puzzles. Pattie was nervous of being around lesbians anyhow, and had thawed only a little toward them. Val and Leslie had to creep upstairs, where the stove was lit only at morning and night and the air was heavy with cold.

  This time she made love to Val first, in Mary and Liz’s bed. After Val had come and began to make love to her she could not respond. When Val touched her she was dry; it almost hurt to be touched. Gently Val’s mouth wet her, but instead of becoming excited she began to cry in hard racking sobs. She stopped and took control of herself. Sitting up on the high pine bed, she seized Val by the shoulders. “I can’t, I can’t! I don’t want to feel it if we can’t be together.”

  Val put her hands on either side of Leslie’s face, giving her an exasperated smile. “Leslie, why make things difficult? It was so lovely Monday and yesterday, so lovely. You’re the most wonderful lover, it’s just beautiful to be with you. Why can’t it be like that? We can see each other when you have a vacation. It doesn’t have to be over. Why do you want to be so demanding and absolute?”

  “Because it hurts.”

  “You make it hurt, silly. Go back to school and you’ll be super busy with classes and your work and your Great God George and your karate and your discipline, and you won’t think of me once a week. Come on, we could easily go on seeing each other when we can, and things could work out fine for us! You say it’ll only be two years.”

  “I can’t wait.” She felt as if she were choking, as if her vocal cords were swelling in her throat and choking her, swelling with tears and the words she could not find to say.

  ten

  “Even if you didn’t have a good time in Grand Rapids, I’m glad you’re back early. Besides, whoever heard of anyone having a good time in Grand Rapids? It’s a contradiction.” Honor paused in front of the high fireplace. “Can we have a fire?”

  “We don’t need one, for a change.” Then seeing Honor’s drooping neck, arc of disappointment, she added, “Oh, why not? I think I remember how to open the flue. I’ve seen George do it twenty times.” Making a fire was one of the few tasks at which she had no practice in George’s house, because he fancied himself a great fire layer. It was a ritual with him and the kids. Exactly so much paper, so much kindling, three logs in a geometric arrangement carried out with earnestness and frowns of concentration. Davey dragging a log by its end across the Danish shag rug.

  She and Honor made a messy fire but it burned. The fire was unnecessary because for a change the weather was good. Her last day in Grand Rapids rain had fallen, and rain had shrouded the bus on her return. But today, Friday, it was high spring. Spring came to Michigan suddenly, violent and languorous at once. The air was so soft she melted into it.

  George had not joined Sue at her parents’, making Sue resentful. The plumbers had come but they had not finished. Now George was off with Sue and children on a four-day Puerto Rican jaunt supposed to restore harmony, and Leslie was house sitting and plumber watching. That gave her George’s car, after she took them to Metropolitan Airport. When the plumbers finished in late afternoon she drove to Honor’s and brought the girl back to keep her company while she cleaned up after the plumbers and tested the hot water.

  Now she poured Honor a little Tío Pepe in a wineglass as they sat contemplating their fire. Honor wore an apple green dress down to the floor with a high stand-up collar and a V-neck, and she looked particularly rosy. But then she was particularly happy. Even visiting this house was a treat. Bernie had traded the early part of the week with another waiter who was also a student and wanted to go home to Port Huron for spring vacation. Bernie worked lunches all week and suppers too in exchange for Friday and Saturday off.

  First they would all eat at the Szechwan restaurant Bernie had found. Then Bernie and Honor were going to a ballet; the American Ballet Theater was in town, and they had tickets. They had not got a ticket for Leslie because she had not imagined returning early. Tomorrow Bernie wanted to visit his old home.

  “Something odd happened while you were gone,” Honor said, looking less happy. “Monday night I went to rehearsals with Cam. They’re doing Pinter’s The Caretaker. I suppose I wanted to flirt with Paul a bit. I miss that. Cam doesn’t have a part—she’s very disappointed—so we just stood around. Bernie came over too. Then Paul did something ugly. I was walking past him and he reached out and pinched my buttock, very hard. It wasn’t even sensual. It hurt and I cried out. Then he laughed and asked me if anything was wrong. I asked Cam to leave. We had her car. Bernie didn’t know what had happened and I didn’t want to explain with Paul standing there gloating because he’d humiliated me. So we left and Bernie hung around.”

  “His pinching you isn’t odd, just nasty. What do you want from him, Honorée?”

  “Nothing. I hate him. He’s a pig. But Bernie told me Wednesday that Paul had … propositioned him that night after rehearsal.”

  “I don’t suppose Bernie was interested.”

  “Do you believe it? I mean, why would Paul do that? He’s ridiculously heterosexual. Staring at my breasts, pinching my behind, always leering. Cam warned me he’s a womanizer.… Why would he suddenly switch?”

  “Sex is sex to lots of people. He wanted someone and thought Bernie was available. Doesn’t even mean he’s interested in Bernie. Because a person doesn’t act out same-sex attractions doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Everyone of us had a mother, for instance—”

  “But Bernar’ is always seeing homosexuality every place, you know how he is! He could have … misinterpreted Paul.”

  “People don’t make those kinds of mistakes. I’ve been stupid and not seen when people were after me. They were too subtle or I was preoccupied. But I never thought somebody was coming on when they weren’t, whatever they might say afterward.”

  “I can’t believe Paul would be interested in another man. He’s just too much of a letch about women.” Honor fidgeted with her hair ends.

  “Why does his wanting to fuck Bernie mean he wouldn’t like to get his paws on you? What does it matter anyhow? Nothing happened, right?”

  “Bernar’ could be wrong about Paul.”

  “Why does it matter so much? Does this turn you off? Or make Paul’s interest in you less exciting?”

  “Here comes Bernie, that’s his car.” The high anguished shriek it made whenever asked to negotiate a corner, however slowly. “But you ask Cam if she’s ever heard of Paul being interested in men before.… I can’t ask her myself because I’d have to explain. But you can easily ask her.”

  The purple Mustang rattled up the drive, something loose dragging beneath it, perhaps the muffler; and as it clanked along it laid down a gray wake of fumes that slowly rolled through the hedge bordering the drive onto the neighbor’s lawn.

  Bernie sat down between them on the long couch that had recently appeared in the livingroom—very low and long and excessively soft so that Leslie sank in it as if into a feather bath—covered with a Chinesey print of chrysanthemums in gold and green. He poured himself a generous glass of sherry and began imitating the unseen neighbors behind the hedge.

  “Do you smell that, Ralph? What is that?”

  Ralph, coughing. “What is it, Ida? Is something on fire?”

  “Do you suppose they’re having a barbecue?”

  “On their front lawn? I hope they’re not that type.”

  “Ralph, do you suppose their house could be on fire?”

  “If it is, I suppose we’ll hear about it soon enough.” Coughing. “Perhaps we’d better go inside.”

  “Honorée,” he added in his own v
oice immediately, “you look absolutely beautiful.”

  “So do you, actually.” Honor laughed. “You’re competing unfairly.”

  “Do you like this? I stole it especially for the occasion.” The shirt was a dark silky-looking blue. He brought out his makings and started to roll a joint until Leslie stopped him.

  “Don’t waste your own. I know where it is here.” She got George’s downstairs stash from the kitchen, where it was hidden in a large jar whose label claimed it held oregano, the pizza spice, from Kroger’s.

  “This is lovely.” Bernie kicked off his sneakers and settled far down on his spine. “The fire is silly but pretty, the sherry nice, the company extraordinary, the setting is bourgeois cozy. I’ll take it all, wrapped up.”

  “George’s sherry, George’s dope, George’s sofa, George’s fireplace, George’s car, George’s house. Hmmm.…” Honor rubbed her nose. “I’m curiouser and curiouser and curiouser about George. Cam is always alluding to him as if to some act of God. Does he really have an existence in the flesh, or is he a fictional person like a corporation?”

  “A bit of both.” Leslie surprised herself with a cough of embarrassment, half giggle, half disclaimer. She felt guilty sitting on George’s brand new couch discussing him. She also had a moment’s uneasy fantasy that a tape recorder hidden in the down would record every word of her disloyalty. She shared the joint with Bernie.

  “Puerto Rico, adiós. Then the plane describes a graceful parabola and falls gently into the sea. Blub blub. Adiós a George y mujer y niños. Under the waves all. And we just quietly move in. Think how exceedingly comfy we could be here together, we three,” Bernie crooned.

  “Until the first mortgage payment is due.”

  “Les, be good. Right now, this moment, we live here,” Bernie coaxed.

  “Yes, Leslie, you’re suffering pangs of reality. We have quite enough of that every day. This is vacation. They’ve left us this playpen. Bernar’, pour us both some more delicious sherry.”