by Marge Piercy
As we walk out I have to ask, “Did you like my poem?”
“It’s soft, pumpkin. Too soft to waste on those jerks…. Of course it’s formless and silly. It isn’t art, naturally. You ought to have just given it to me. No point pouring it out on assholes.”
Donna waits outside and we head for the dorm together for supper. I take her arm. “How was I?”
“I thought you were terrific,” she says loyally. “You read too fast but with some feeling. At least your poems are about something human.”
“Didn’t I sound naive?”
“Only a little.” She squeezes my arm back.
“Did your parents like Lennie?”
“Oh, they had to go back home. They had a dinner date. They only came up for lunch.”
“They didn’t want to meet him, after all that?”
“Meeting them is hardly a pleasure I’m keeping from him, now, is it? I told them. That’s the big step…. We’ve been getting on so well, Lennie and I. Last night we had an hour alone in the apartment and we were lying in bed just after we made love. He told me I looked like a Modigliani nude.”
“What?” But I heard her. “Er, Donna, this is going to sound weird, but yesterday in the Arb Mike told me I looked like a Modigliani nude.”
We look at each other in disbelief. “Fuck them,” she says. “Do you think they get together over a beer and make up what they’re going to say to us?”
“It was Lennie’s birthday last week. I know Mike gave him a book. You get only one guess what it must have been.”
I am right, I know, they are innocent of collusion and yet we both feel cheated of our compliments.
The round world. The sense of community. We sit in vast overheated amphitheaters where the bald head of the professor shines at the bottom of the toboggan slide distant and cold as the moon while his words move into our ears and out our fingers. With electronically sensitive pencils we mark slots on multiple-choice tests and are issued our ranking. Education? That comes from each other. We go in a fierce noisy knot through exhibits and galleries while Lennie teaches us to see. We dismiss chunks of culture and gobble others. Books unknown to the departments of the university buzz wasplike between us, forming our language. Music is a passion and the structure of darkened rooms. We bang our ideas against each other. Lennie paints us in a red sea leaping like dolphins. None of us like the way we look but we each think Lennie did a fine job capturing the others. For two weeks everything we cook on Lennie’s stove is yellow with curry powder. We discover avocados. We put capers in spaghetti. We make up plays starring us.
The sun hangs like a tangerine in the long-needled boughs of our Arb room. The cupboard is a round cookie tin buried flush with the ground. It contains two saucers from my dorm, two spoons, a salt shaker from the Union, a can opener, a book of matches and an extra packet of condoms. Sometimes we study here. The late light slants a deep smoky red between the poles of the Scotch pines and gilds the eddying gnats. We eat supper of tuna fish with sliced onion and rye bread. The soft dusk liquefies, leaving the sky still milky. Sometimes we hear a couple talking on the road; sometimes headlights brush the shrubs of the slope, but we are safe above. Sex is easy now as talking.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE WORM IN EDEN’S APPLE
THE TIME I’VE wasted! The sweet term spent and the reckoning of finals due. From my endless literary arguments with Julie I had matter enough on Faulkner to grind out my term paper, but with my back to the wall in the top bunk and my knees drawn up, I devour the Spanish-American War according to Grimes. One fifteen. Smoke hangs just under the ceiling. Whenever I finish a chapter and pause to abstract it, I become aware of Donna making unnecessary excursions to desk or closet, getting up and down with sighs and scrapings. I know she wants to talk but I refuse to meet her overacted restlessness. The spring creaks as she tosses, sits up, flings herself prone again.
What was the damned immigration act called, the first that began the design to keep out people like my grandparents, all the dark-haired and dark-skinned? My mind blanks, gears momentarily locking. Donna hates the way I study, my mad concentration, but without a scholarship I would be back in my dead-end neighborhood like a boxcar stuck broiling on a siding. I view myself as a professional student: not that I mean to go on in academia like Mike but that it is my present work and I study for a living. Below Donna sets up a muffled sobbing. Damn you, let me be! “Is something wrong?”
She sobs louder.
Was it the McCarran-Walter Act? No, that was recent, designed to keep out people like me, subversives, prophets, agitators, wild poets. What was the first act that slammed the golden door? When did Eden forbid the wretched of the earth? Marking my place, I clamber down. “What’s wrong?”
Arching her back she grasps the posts that support the bunk. “I want to die! I want to die, I’m so scared!”
“Come on, you know your stuff. Finals are just con games.”
“Finals?” She sits up, scrubbing her eyes. “I’m eight days overdue.”
“Are you sure?”
“You sound like Lennie! You think I can’t count?”
I hold my own belly. “What a rotten time for it.”
“How can I concentrate?” Her pale lashes are matted. “What will happen to me? He leaves for New York next week. I have to go home to Flint.”
I lean my forehead against the bunk. “Aren’t there lab tests?”
“Lennie’s finding out. I have so little time if it’s true.” She locks her arms around her knees. “If I am, how will we ever get the money?”
“How much do we need? I have twenty-some.”
“Lennie’s roommate knows of a doctor who does them. At least two hundred, he thinks. Maybe two fifty.”
“Mike must have something. What about Lennie?”
“Not much, twenty or so, but he figures he can borrow more and sell books. Stu, I’m scared. Think of it growing inside. Peter has money but Lennie says he’s tight. Peter always thinks everybody’s trying to use him.” She blows her nose hard. “I have twenty-eight and I can get ten from Estelle by telling her I have to see a dentist. She’s big on getting your teeth fixed.”
“Two hundred! After his last exam I’ll hit Mike. I can’t risk throwing him off stride.” I squat at the shelves. “We could sell our books too.” I squelch a pang of anticipatory loss. “It can’t be true!”
“Yeah, like getting struck by lightning. Why me?”
I put my arm around her shoulders. “We’ll get pledges, but don’t believe it.”
“Suppose something goes wrong? Suppose I bleed to death? Do they cut you open?”
“Shhh. We’ll go to a real doctor.” She feels breakable. Through the straw of her hair her pink scalp shows faintly, damp with sweat.
“So much money down the rathole. You know I think if I went to Peter and asked him myself, I bet he’d loan me money.” Slowly her body relaxes. “I’d have the nerve, I know I would. The hair of the dog —you wouldn’t think I’d get ideas about men.”
My arm around her shoulders is beginning to ache. “You can ask him.” Peter: air of polite chill, the planting of a dart. What does she see in him?
“Stu, life is so simple for those fireproof pink bitches down the hall. They give nothing, they never get hurt. Or am I just jealous because they’re innocent?”
“What’s innocent about them—their politics? The candles they burn before Saint McCarthy? Their pocketbooks?”
“Their idea of conflict is being on a diet, or giving up chocolates for Lent.” Her hands tighten on her belly. “What am I going to do? I keep seeing pregnant women in the street like whales.”
I rise. “Lennie and I will worry about money. You just study.” Shoving the drapery aside, I lean out. Smell of damp grass. A bell dongs. “Two, already. Try to sleep.” I feel soggy yet I can still touch a core of alert concentration like a scalpel embedded in a sponge. Ah, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—that’s when it began. People with my eyes. Acr
oss the court a light winks out. Our friends in their beds must pay a bit of the price to buy Donna free. In trouble how we need goodwill, far more than we have ever earned.
Dear Jill,
No, nothing is wrong here. Matt finally left just in time for your mother to get your room ready. In a huff he went down and enlisted. Your mother burned her hand ironing, which is why she hasn’t written.
I am glad to be done with roomers for a while. We did not find the ideal. According to your mother he would not smoke, drink, entertain callers, use the bathroom facilities, receive or make phone calls. He would leave at 7 a.m. and not return till 10 p.m., when he would go directly to bed or sit quietly without burning electricity.
Have you been following the baseball season? I think if they don’t develop more strength in the bullpen, the Tigers are in trouble. Don’t stay up late. A little study at a time is better than haste at the end.
Love, Dad
In the stream of students, Mike appears from his German final. I jump from the grass. “Over here! How did you do?”
“Don’t ask. Don’t talk about it.” He strikes a match that goes out, strikes another. “Hopped up with Dexedrine. I must have filled three bluebooks.”
The benches along the walks are empty, the campus a quiet park. Most students have left and the rest are buried in study halls or exam rooms. I grip his arm. “Donna went for a pregnancy test today.” And didn’t come back. We were to spend the early afternoon selling our books.
“What?” He breaks stride.
“She’s fourteen days late.”
He whistles. “They must have been careless.”
“Donna says no. They always use a condom, like us.”
He walks more quickly uphill, past a girl wheeling a trunk. We no longer touch as we walk.
“I have twenty-two dollars. Donna has thirty and Lennie has twenty-four and he borrowed forty. What can you spare us?”
“What are you talking about?”
“For her abortion, if she is pregnant. We need at least two hundred, maybe two fifty. Can you borrow anything? How about hitting your friend Van?” My words tumble out. I have patiently held this in till the end of finals. “She’ll save what she can this summer, working, and pay us all back in the fall.”
“You want me to give her money for an abortion?”
“A loan. Not a gift. She can pay you back first.”
“And you assume I’ll chip right in.” He strides along swinging his arms in an exaggerated way, lines pulling at his forehead.
I skip to catch up. “We’re only taking pledges. She’s off getting a lab test.” We pass my dorm on the way to the Arb.
“I won’t help finance murder.”
“Aw, come on, Mike. Murder? Don’t be legalistic!” The casements are open, the draperies on our windows drawn against the sun as I left them. Suppose she panicked and didn’t take the test, another day lost with time running out?
“You’re no nitwit. It’s murder no matter how you slice it.”
We cross and begin the descent to the Arb. “Having a baby you don’t want is slower murder. For both of you.”
“If you don’t believe life is sacred, nothing’s left. It just all comes to death and eating a banana is just like knifing your father.”
“Bullshit, Mike! That’s just words. A fancy position for a man to take, I mean it. I care about Donna. I’m willing for chickens and cows to die to feed her, and this embryo to keep her free.”
“Shut up and listen. It was in the papers, a man robbed a grocery. He held up the grocer with a gun and to scare him, he fired in the air. The bullet went through a curtain and killed the man’s wife, who was hiding there.”
“Donna’s real. An embryo’s only potential. I don’t want any baby born ever who isn’t wanted, chosen, waited for.”
“Like that man, you want to kill someone you’ve never seen.”
“It’s her body—don’t you see that? She’s no incubator, neither am I. What do you want her to do—have the baby and quit school? Go on welfare? Ask Lennie to marry her? Kill herself?”
“That’s her business. What do you expect from someone who’d fool around in their own family?”
“What was that— How do you know about her brother-in-law?”
“Lennie, of course.”
“He told you? How could he!”
“He’s a decent guy. The story shocked him. She’s got the morals of an alley cat.”
“Why are you so highfaluting moral all of a sudden? What are we going here to do but fuck, just like them!”
“It’s not the same.” He grabs me by the shoulders. “And you’re not the same as that little shikseh bitch!”
“Mike, don’t even start that! I’m a mongrel and don’t forget it. You’re as bad as her parents.”
“Just because she’s your cousin you don’t have to worship her. She’s always trying to undermine me.”
“Mike, she wanted me to like you. You’re crazy!”
“What did you call me?” He moves to block my path, glaring.
I have been shouting at him. That scares me. I swallow my voice small and say, “I mean irrational about this.”
“Pumpkin informs me I’m irrational!” His voice is mild with a forced control worse than rage. “I told you my reasons while you just moan hysterically about that bitch. You want to break laws and take ridiculous risks that could get us all into trouble. Haven’t you said you know I’m the more intelligent?”
I am a little shocked. He knows more than I do. I’ve said that. “Sometimes I can be right. I don’t want any child born who isn’t wanted. Really wanted.”
“Better to kill him unseen?”
“‘Man’s happiest lot is not to be’—didn’t you quote that Sophocles at me when you were going on about the ecstasy of suicide?” How did these privet leaves get into my hand? I am tearing them. The sunlight cuts my eyes like broken glass. “Those sperm you slough off in the bushes or flush away—murder? Nature is waste. Women—Donna and I—can breed fifteen, twenty children from our wombs like litters of puppies before we die of exhaustion.”
“Nature is waste! Jill’s doing her own thinking now. First you scream at me and call me insane—”
I reek misery. “I’m sorry. I said I’m sorry.” It comes down to him siding with fathers, the heavy-bearded fathers of his imagination who say no to women and turn us to pillars of salt.
“Why should you run around begging money to cover her?”
“I’m responsible for her. She’s my best friend.”
“What about me? We’re back to Plato’s round men. Either your missing half is me or you’re a lesbian and your other half is Donna. There’s that bad experience with Callie you told me about.”
A dank weight of hopelessness settles in me. What was bad about it? It was the only warm thing in my life when I hated school, when I felt a misfit, when my mother no longer held or caressed me, for I had become sickly and skinny and too smart and uppity. “I love you. How can you refuse to believe that?”
“If you really love me, if you loved me as much as I love you, other people wouldn’t matter. You wouldn’t carry on about her.”
“She’s in trouble! If you love somebody, why should it make you despise other people? I don’t believe that!”
“Because you don’t love me as much as I love you. You’re scattered. All I need in this life are you, that letter Pound wrote me and a handful of truly great poems.”
I would say food, water, a little sleep. Talk. Writing. Do I need him? What does it mean to be needed? “You won’t help us, so let’s just forget it.”
He stands hunched over me. “Suppose I tell you not to interfere?”
“You can’t. I have to follow my own conscience.”
“Against what you admit are my right reasons? Even if I ask you not to?”
Right reasons? Alien moralizing. He tries to twist me in his hands. “I have to.”
“Because you don’t love me enough t
o do what I ask.”
“Mike! Stop it!” I explode into tears and after watching me weep, he puts his arms around me, stroking my hair and murmuring, “There, pumpkin, there’s my baby.” What are words for if I cannot make him hear me? He plays the father when I cry. As we walk off across the plateau he cradles my hand in his and hums, as if because I cried and he did not, he has won.
He stops short. “Is that rain?”
A light pattering in the trees. “Must be the wind.”
“Must be.” We walk on. Then he flings out his arm to stop me. “Hey!”
Before my face a wizened caterpillar the color of a dried leaf turns slowly in midair. I stumble back. From the caterpillar a filament reaches into the leaves overhead. “That’s the sound. These trees are being eaten up. Let’s get out of here.”
“There’s noplace to go. Maybe they don’t eat pine needles,” he says.
We pick our way through crackling woods where leaves break off and float down, past a small maple shrouded in gauze webs. Under the pines no caterpillars hang, at last, only mosquitoes that whine around us. To keep them off we light a small illegal fire of twigs inside our hearth. Under the smoke we lie on our bellies eating partly cooked, partly raw hot dogs, charred on the outside and cold at the center.
Then on the needles we move in toward each other as so many times. Love is a heavy thing, I think, still worrying at that hard bone, need. What does it mean to need someone? It feels to me like being turned or turning him into a thing.
As I walk wearily along the corridor, no splashing, no singing, no laughter comes from the shower room. Luggage waits outside doors. Near our door the drive of Bartok’s Second Piano Concerto comes muffled. As I open the door it hits me pulsing. In bra and pajama bottoms, Donna is doing a bump and grindy ballet.
“Hey, what?” I stare at her. “Are you okay?”
Her face crinkled in a grin, she throws her arms around me, breathing sour wine. “I started! Right after we left the doctor’s office.” She stops to catch her breath. “Oh, Stu, I’m so happy I’m out of my mind!”
