The High Cost of Living

by Marge Piercy

  “Be careful, Honorée. Don’t drink it too fast.”

  “Leslie! I told you to relax. I’d think it was gross to get sloppy! But I think I could drink you under the table.”

  Bernie obediently poured more sherry into both their glasses and his own, standing empty. Then he put out the roach’s tail in the ashtray, commenting, “They don’t go in for the quality imported stuff. This is good old Toledo Green, a little moldy from efforts to jack up the kick.” He put an arm around each of them and his feet up on the coffee table beside the Tío Pepe. “Ah, satisfaction. A jug of wine, a stash of dope, and the two of you beside me in civilization! I could think of a lot more to ask for, actually, but this does fine for a basic set-up. We’d have to redo the place, of course. The taste is a little wobbly. This couch, for instance. You couldn’t do much but cuddle on it. If you tried to make love, you’d suffocate in the stuffing, you’d lose your partner and end up making it with a dead goose.”

  “Yes, let’s throw all this failed art out in the back yard and do something interesting with the space.” Honor stared up into the gloomy rafters. “A trapeze, perhaps. Myself, I actually like this couch. I’ll lie on it and eat chocolates when I’ve grown weary of the trapeze—Is there anything to nibble on?”

  “Don’t spoil your appetite for supper. We want to try lots and lots of dishes,” Leslie said.

  “I have one Mama, Leslie. When I run away from home to join the circus of the two of you, I don’t want to be mothered at all. I’ll wear spangles and décolleté as low as I want and eat chocolates by the pound and hang from my heels and have a pet monkey that pees on the furniture!”

  “Leslie will be the strongwoman and also the knife thrower.”

  “Well, she can’t throw them at me!” Honor said.

  “She can throw them at me. I know she wouldn’t miss, and if she did, she’d feel so very bad it would be quite worth it losing a finger or an ear.… I of course am the sword swallower. The magician. The famous disappearing man. We must all take several parts in a small traveling circus. We’ll ride bareback on the circus ponies round and round. We’ll do trapeze tricks and catch each other death defyingly as with no nets at all we fling ourselves through giddy space. And Leslie will tame the lions—which will consist of me in a mangy fur suit growling and snarling. She may lay her head in the lion’s mouth. Thus giving head I stand, the perfect circus lion. Then Honorée is shot from a cannon and I am the ringmaster and I saw Honorée in two—”

  “Oh, no! I’m not to be had so cheaply, at half price! I’m going to dance on a horse’s back in ballet slippers and orchid tutu.”

  “I like those Chinese acrobats who make human pyramids,” Leslie said. “We coud paint me with spots and I’ll be the leopard lady. I can growl too.” She produced a sample.

  “But can you purr?” Bernie asked.

  “I can. Listen.” Honor did, from deep in her chest.

  She leaned away from Bernie’s encircling arm to stare at them. They both looked radiant. Honor’s hair the color of orange pekoe tea shone in the firelight. The inner curve of a breast came and went in the V-neck. Her arms looked plump and rosy, even the elbows gracefully rounded, dimpled. Her long throat arched back and her mouth opened a little as she rolled the wine on her tongue. Bernie smiled in profile into the heart of the fire. The curve of his mouth was long and delicious. His curly hair caught the firelight. He looked lean and wound as a balanced spring. She had a startling urge to make love to both of them.

  She sipped her wine nervously. The impulse was not real. No, she never wanted to make love to more than one person, and certainly not to both of them. In reality it would be complicated and messy. It would be like one of those construction projects her brothers used to hate to get for Christmas. A flat box with a brightly colored space platform or rocket launcher depicted on the cover, with no resemblance to anything inside. A bunch of pieces and directions. Insert Flap B in Slot D. Glue inside edges. Do not glue Flap A–2 to Flap A–3. Then draw inner tabs through outer ratchets along side F. No, she could never desire Bernie, not for an instant. It was preposterous.

  They looked beautiful beside her and she did itch to touch them gently. It was the wine and the dope together before supper. It was sexual overflow from what had and had not happened with Valerie. It was the result of not having done karate all week. She had been drinking too much. It was pure silliness.

  “I suppose there are five or six bathrooms in this mansion. What I need is only one, but that one rather soon.” Honor rose and swept her gown over her arm. “Where would I find it?”

  “There’s a lavatory off the kitchen, just to the left.”

  With his free hand Bernie sipped his wine. Then his arm tightened on her shoulder. He gave a little tug drawing her nearer. “What happened?” he asked, turning to look hard at her.

  “It’s over. I’ve lost her.”

  His hand dug into her upper arm and he stared into her face. “Are you sure? You did see her?”

  She nodded. “Yes on both counts.”

  “If she’s hostile, that doesn’t mean she’ll stay so.”

  “She wasn’t. Except when I tried to push her. She was ready to fit me into her schedule. Ready to make love. At times that wouldn’t annoy her keeper. Who’s keeping her in Toyotas and school and new clothes.”

  “That’s stinking.” He took her face in both hands. “I can’t tell how bad it is. You say it … numbly.”

  “I cried for two days. I am numb. I can’t tell what I feel.”

  The way he held her was odd. It was not gentle. It was not the way he always touched them, very airily. She realized he wanted to take hold of her, the energy was something held back. She was not frightened, blinking at him. She felt a little smile tugging at her lips. “I’ll let you know tomorrow how I am after I find it out tonight It’s good for me to be alone.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She was not frightened because she wanted to explain to him that it was silliness. It came from drinking sherry on an empty stomach and smoking dope and sitting in front of the fire on a too soft sofa on the first evening of balmy warm spring. The air was soft. The wine melted them to taffy. “I’ll survive.”

  Honor called from the kitchen. “I found some cookies. Either we go eat now, or I’m going to have some. I’m starving!”

  They used Bernie’s car. “But tomorrow we’ll take George’s,” Leslie promised.

  “Tomorrow!” Bernie sang out. “I’m edgy about it. Really, you must promise not to be disappointed. There’s nothing to see but scummy water and ugly houses and for thrills an occasional junkyard. You have to promise not to expect anything.”

  “Oh, but I’ll be tickled to be traveling in George’s brand new Cordoba with an FM radio. We can pretend we’re on a real trip.” Honor was bubbling again.

  In the back seat Leslie felt guilty. They did not try hard enough to take Honor out of her house. They did not insist enough. The girl was overwhelmingly excited by a trip to a house in a subrub with a real fireplace, a visit to what would doubtless be an ordinary Chinese restaurant, the prospect of a Saturday morning drive in a new car out to a rural slum thirty miles south. They did not try hard enough. Honor was hungry for experience, yet they came to see her out of their lives without attempting to let her into theirs, without trying to free her. Leslie promised she would do better. She would begin immediately and seriously to free Honor from her mother’s excessive protection. She would not take advantage of the situation for any gain to herself. She would not think of herself as the world that Honor needed to explore. She would not confuse her attraction to Honor with anything necessarily liberating. If after Honor was freer in her choices she chose Leslie, that might happen, it might well happen. She would be a good friend to another woman, and that woman would grow stronger.

  Sometimes she thought Honor enjoyed lying to Mama, that it became an end in itself. She drove George’s Cordoba to the Rogers’ house first thing Saturday morning because Honor wa
s supposed to be spending the day with her only, rather than with her and Bernie, because as Honor explained, Mama knew she had gone to the ballet with Bernie the night before and had insisted upon reacting to the event as if it were practically a date. Therefore on Saturday morning Honor decided it would be necessary to de-emphasize Bernie. Although it made more sense geographically to pick up Bernie first, she drove to Honor’s without him.

  When she rapped on the door, however, Mrs. Rogers let her in and Honor was nowhere visible. “Do have a cup of coffee,” Mama said, smiling faintly.

  “Er … Honor isn’t ready yet?”

  “Honor forgot I had made a doctor’s appointment for her this morning for a check-up. Her father has taken her.”

  “Oh. Will she be back soon?”

  “I don’t know how she happened to forget. Wishful thinking, no doubt. Are you sure you won’t have some coffee?”

  “Perhaps I should come back later.” Bernie was going to be crushed with disappointment. Why hadn’t Honor called?

  “I did want to speak to you for a moment If you have the time?” A gentle irony tinged Mama’s voice. She had a fine speaking voice actually, low, musical, but as capable as Honor’s of taking on a cutting edge. Baby blue eyes fixed on her, waiting.

  Leslie sat on the edge of a chair. She accepted coffee and waited, wondering where Cam was. Beyond an occasional rattle and clank of chains from the basement and a low mutter of growling, she heard no other sounds of living beings in the house. Dead, all dead. Mama had poisoned them all with her coffee. They lay each in their bedrooms in the awkward postures of strychnine seizure. Within seconds she too would be lying on the carpet turning blue and lashing her spine like a rattlesnake until she gave a final spasm and lay still. Mama would plant them all in the back yard in the sorry bulb bed that ran against the western side of the slot between neighboring slots, back to the tool and die shop. She would die with Valerie’s name on her lips and be buried between Honor and Cam.

  “I expect you think I’m a bit overprotective with my daughter?” Mama did not go on but waited and finally outwaited her.

  “Well, you know, er …”

  “That I’m overprotective?” Again she waited, smiling faintly. Her blonded hair was less curly this morning and her scalp shone pink where the morning sun turned her hair to insubstantial fluff. She sat well on the sagging couch, braced against the sag. Her shoulders did not give at all. She was a well-built woman still, wearing one of those cotton housedresses of the sort her mother used to wear. Middle-aged swaddling clothes. This one still had some crispness, pleasant blue and white flowers that reminded her a little of the chrysanthemums on George’s new couch.

  “Well, er, I suppose it’s a question of what you’re protecting her from, in a way, you know. Er, ah, I mean, some things we all want … her to be protected from … but, then, again …”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Lightning and grizzly bears, rapists, that kind of … But she has to meet people and learn to act independently too and take her place …” She could not quite croak out “in society” or “in the world”; the clichés simply dissolved in her mouth to a solid wad of glue and she was stuck.

  “Yes, I know you do think I’m overprotective. But what you don’t understand is that Honor is more delicate than she appears.” Mama’s eyes grew large and watery with sadness. Her lips parted slightly and she looked earnestly into Leslie’s eyes. Her head was tilted to one side, her plump hands caught each other in her lap.

  Would she be surprised if I kissed her? Actually the problem was that she was responding to Mama as a woman rather than as the prop, Honor’s mother. That was inappropriate both from Honor’s point of view and Mama’s. But she could not fend off a pang of empathy for the woman there, married to a preoccupied gray ghost, with one daughter off in Ohio being privately and distantly unhappy, Cam about to leave home as soon as she could finance it, and the swan’s-neck daughter stealthily preparing to snip the threads of coercion. Mama was still attractive, although she put no effort into it. All the effort, the energy, the fantasy were sucked from her own life into Honor. What did Mama think of what she had settled for? Was it fun to be a floor supervisor for the phone company? Did she worry about being laid off? What would she do after Honor too fled the house? Did Mama look forward to a pension? Did she ever lie in bed and want to die rather than to get out of bed one more day?

  “Honor had rheumatic fever when she was eight, you see, and it left her with a weak heart. She may appear robust, she may appear normal, but she’s not. She has to avoid violent exercise and too violent emotional upheavals. You know she doesn’t take part in the more demanding parts of physical education at school? She’s excused for medical reasons. Because of her heart. I imagine in fact you didn’t know. Honor doesn’t like to talk about it. I think she’s secretly ashamed of not being normal, of having to take care of herself in a way that few children her age must. But it requires a certain amount of restraint on the part of everyone around her. Not to allow her to overdo. Not to overstimulate her. I think yesterday was very exciting for Honor, and no one is happier than I when I see stars in her eyes. But when she wanted to skip her doctor’s appointment this morning to go running around some more, I had to put my foot down. You must agree to help me protect her also, to be a true friend to Honor. Because her heart could give way. She’s not able to do all those things a normal teenager could.”

  “I don’t believe a word she said,” she told Bernie. “I’m going to ask Honor.”

  “But if it’s true, she might be furious.”

  “If it’s true, I want to know. And I want to know what doctors she’s seen and what their opinions are and what can be done about it. I can’t believe she has to go through life with a label invalid around her neck.”

  “It is a bit pat. Mama reveals all. Fucks up my day as if incidentally.”

  She was driving and Bernie was navigating. An early overcast had moved off east and the day was warm, suddenly, by eleven. “It must be seventy!”

  “Why couldn’t she come? But thank you anyhow for carrying me on my sentimental journey.”

  They were driving down West Jefferson, the old bricks showing through the asphalt. The river was always beyond the factories, beyond the rotting empty green grounds of deserted Fort Wayne, beyond the mills of Great Lakes Steel. On their right ran a row of old bars, unbroken fringe to the decaying ethnic neighborhoods beyond. They were headed downriver. “Why am I always thinking that we’re playing at being adults? I just had the feeling vividly. That here we are in George’s car, playing. Is it because we waited so long to grow up that we don’t feel grown ever?” she asked him.

  “To be grown up in America, it’s to buy a car like this one. The poor never grow up. George is Daddy. Besides, you and I will never be Daddy or Mommy, so how can we grow up anyhow? What do you want to be when you grow up, my son? I want to be an old fag, Daddy.”

  “Is that why I always think that I’m playing whenever I find myself feeling good? Because the way I feel good I’m not supposed to be feeling? Right now we look like we’re supposed to. A couple out on a Saturday drive,” Leslie said.

  “But we aren’t doing it right. We ought to be on I-Seventy-five in this car, not clumping along between the mills and the bars. It makes me think of my old man, that’s why I dig it. We’re sneaking south.”

  “Besides, we won’t be poor. We’re both wiggling upward, Bernie, we’ve shed our class. We’ve flayed ourselves bare and plastered over our bleeding flesh with accents and books and classes and everything we weren’t and wanted to be.”

  “Do you like yourself?” He had a southeastern Michigan map open on the lap of his jeans. He had shrugged off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. One arm rode on the rolled-down window, the other on the back of the seat.

  “I guess not. Not yet. I’m an unfinished project and I show too many signs of haste and wretched planning.” She laughed shortly, more of a cough.
/>
  “How come you didn’t go home this vacation? It can’t be more than an hour or two further on the bus from Grand Rapids to Ludington.”

  “I’m disowned.” She laughed, again with no mirth. “Sounds melodramatic, like disinherited. You’ll never see a dime from my purse again, that is if I ever have one.”

  “Ah. They wouldn’t join the supportive parents of gays associated.”

  She snorted. “Yeah, that did it.”

  “Why did you tell them?”

  “Don’t you have to finally? I mean, sometime? It made me feel so … weird when I came home. All the questions about boyfriends and when are you going to get married and don’t you want to meet a nice boy. I wanted my mother to understand.”

  “So one Christmas morning you said, Guess what?” He made a gesture of opening a raincoat to expose himself.

  “Actually I brought Val home with me for Thanksgiving. After all, I was twenty-one. We’d been together for two years. Yeah, I had a fantasy. I wanted something from my mother, some sign, some approval.” She took her hand off the wheel to scratch her head roughly. “I can’t go home now. For real. They won’t have me. You wouldn’t think it would bother me, but it kind of does. People murder and their family sticks by them. It makes me mad, really.”

  “It makes you feel rotten, really, you goose.”

  “Should I pretend it doesn’t?”

  “To me, no. Orphans together.”

  “I wanted to tell my mother. I wanted her blessing. I wanted to say to her, Look, here’s Valerie. I love her and I live with her, see?” She made a face so fierce it stretched her cheek muscles. “To hell with all that. It stinks. I’m a theoretical lesbian nowadays. The rest of my life is just as unreal to them—grad school, George, quantitative history.”

  “My home fell apart. It started when Ann-Marie died. Then my mother. She was still young, she never got fat like other mothers. She was thin as a girl. People would think she was our sister. She had TB on and off but she died from breast cancer. She didn’t even know she had anything wrong. She had so much trouble with her lungs, the other thing came out of the blue. The doctor who found the lump wasn’t even that kind of doctor, he hit it by accident when she came in for the TB test. They said she had cancer, she went in the hospital and they cut her breast off. She came home and she cried a lot, she was so embarrassed, and then they took her back in. They said it was all through her body. She died in the hospital.”