Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  “But where were you?”

  “I got such horrible cramps I had to lie down at Lennie’s. I’m still cramping and bleeding in gouts, but I’m so full of aspirin and wine I don’t feel a thing. Have some Chianti—it’s on my desk.”

  I fill one of the plastic cups we use for instant coffee. “What a relief. Donna, hallelujah! We’re safe.”

  “Everybody’s been such good guys to me.” Donna shuts the volume down by half. Turning to me, her face folds in on itself. “This summer scares me, Stu. Nothing’s duller than Flint in the summer. Except Flint in the winter.”

  “Please don’t get in any trouble. Please. Read and make money. Don’t even talk to a man.”

  “There’s no one to talk to. How can I get into trouble in Flint? I’ll miss Lennie like crazy.”

  Already his green nudes are gone and Mike’s tomes returned. The cozy network of our life will be dismantled tomorrow and we’ll leave this nest as bare as we found it. “I’ll miss you, Donna. I’m a little scared too. Next summer, maybe, let’s go to school.”

  She sits rubbing her belly. “I think I’ll take another couple of aspirins. What a long lonely summer it’s going to be….”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IT’S A GOOD SIGN WHEN A BOY TAKES YOU TO MEET HIS MOTHER

  SHORT BROTHERS TELEVISION has showrooms downstairs, but I work upstairs behind a bank of files at a desk covered with phones. The directory open before me, I dial each number in succession. When someone answers, I place the receiver next to a phonograph on which a record plays over and over a spiel about turning your old TV in now for a new set at a record-breaking-all-time-low price. Most people hang up. Some talk back but I am forbidden to speak, even to that poor grandmother who stuttered, “Hello, please? Speak slow, please. I can’t hear good. My son, you want my son?”

  I went out hunting for this job in full regalia, including my weddings-funerals-and-job-hunting hat, white gloves to carry, for they belong to Mother and do not fit my hands, and white pumps from my high-school graduation. As I dial the number and wait, dial the number and wait, I see Mother in the bright morning sunlight of my bedroom running sheets and towels through the mangle (she irons everything, including my father’s underwear and her own). She slid in an unironed towel, slid out an ironed one from the other end of the roller, folded and flipped it neatly behind her to the pile on the table. Her movement was beautiful, a severe and deft dance of the hands and torso, but her hand on the lever of the mangle with that livid purple burn hurt me when I looked at it. Did she feel guilty for forcing Matt out? Is that why she burned herself?

  While I ate breakfast, she stood at the stove running through her litany of how if I hadn’t spent all that money on silly college courses, I could have been taking a secretarial course and bringing home good money by now. I am out of practice at tuning people out. Away I mostly listened, except to Professor Grimes, friend to robber barons. Haughty receptionists, grim supervisors, typing tests with the stopwatch going, that would be my day. Lying about experience, lying about college. Then the boring routine that would eat the summer.

  As I hobbled on my tight pumps to the door, “Smile!” she exhorted, trotting after me. “Keep your back straight. Don’t answer back. Write clearly! Eat lunch in a nice clean place!” Suddenly she whispered in my ear, clutching my arm, “When they ask religion, say Episcopalian.” Her cheeks were scored with the effort of pushing that thought into me. “Episcopalian, Jill! Remember, they can’t tell.”

  I am back at my desk with all the phones, dialing while the strident insect voice on the record reiterates with undiminished enthusiasm the opportunity for low budget terms. She had to lie to get a job, and not about college. She is a figure shaped by troubles I will never have to know. Sometimes I do listen, even if what I hear isn’t what she is trying to tell me.

  “Mike, someone’s coming.” I twist off him and pull my skirt down. A man leaning on a cane steps through the pool of streetlight toward us.

  “Don’t tear from me like that. You half kill me.”

  “But he’d have seen us.”

  “How many people look into parked cars as they pass?” Dry stubborn tone. “How slow he walks, old man on a hot night. Missed a chance to give him a thrill.”

  I wish he could guess how someone passing wrings the desire from me, but I can’t say that again. I’ll provoke another scene.

  “If I were a sculptor, I’d spend a year just doing old men.” He caresses my neck absently. “The character is there, the smile and frown lines, yet they’re more animal too—the hawk or bulldog or monkey trying to come through.”

  “I like that.” Burrowing. So tired, up since seven.

  His face breaks into a sly grin. “Confess I was working that up in a poem. Truth is, I talk to you all day inside my skull.”

  I catch my breath as we come together, but I cannot give over. I stare past his shoulder, turn cautiously so he will not notice. Someone by the bushes? My thighs ache. Headlights hit us casting the twin shadow of our heads on the backseat. I bury my face in his shoulder. The car sweeps by and its taillights dwindle in the rear window. Did they see? Oh, make it not matter. He gives a long throaty sigh as he loosens his hold. “Ah. Was that good for you too?”

  I have not come in so long that last night he accused me of not loving him. We had a scene for two hours. I do not know what to say. How can he not tell whether I come? With another woman, I could always tell. But I can’t face a scene. “Yes, I came.” False sounding. I add quickly, “What did you do today?”

  “Got up about eleven. Read some D. H. Lawrence. After lunch I hung around waiting for a call that never came.”

  “Mrs. Papich sent me to the post office and the printers.”

  “Then I went swimming with a guy from the neighborhood. He thinks I’m a big shot now because I get laid every day.”

  “You told him?”

  He sits up. “Why not? You tell people.”

  “How could you say it like that? Getting laid. Like getting your hair cut.”

  “I wouldn’t boast about getting my hair cut six times a week. What do you want me to say—I’m passionately in love, Reginald, hold my hand. A man can’t go around talking like that, pumpkin, it wouldn’t give him any points. What’s the big male dream? Every night a new plush woman, and in the morning, off with her head.”

  “All you want is a lump of meat.”

  “You might be surprised what a man does want. I’ll tell you a story.” His voice comes slow, singsong. “My cousin Sheldon was in Germany right after the war. He had this girl who’d do anything. Anything he asked and thank him for it. He says American women are cold and greedy. He hated to come back.”

  “Why didn’t he bring her home with him?”

  “She was a whore. That isn’t the point. He told me she was heaven and everything was downhill ever since.” He draws me to him so that my head tucks under his chin and his hands close loosely over my breasts.

  “Some heaven in other people’s rubble.”

  “You want him to pretend he didn’t like it?”

  “Why are we arguing about your cousin? Don’t I please you?”

  “There’s one thing ever so nice you won’t do. You won’t let me come in without that damn armor.”

  Bump. We have arrived. “I’m afraid.”

  “Of what? I wouldn’t come. It would be soft.” He murmurs against my throat, his fingers arguing in the small of my back. “All those clothes. We never really touch.”

  “Suppose you came without meaning to?”

  “I won’t stay that long. Just so we’d really be together for a moment.” When I am silent, he coaxes, “Don’t you want that too? To do that for me? D. H. Lawrence says …”

  Undressing I find my period has started. I circle the date on the calendar on my dresser before I pad to the bathroom.

  Standing under the cool patter I weigh my soapy breasts in my hands. What do I feel like to him? Ashamed I turn the shower punishingly
colder. Sometimes the girl of last year stands in me sneering, Don’t you ever think of anything else any longer? Bore!

  A light tap.

  I hunch forward. “I’m in the shower. Out in a minute.”

  Mother comes in anyway. “Thought you might like to use the lavender soap since you’re stepping out.”

  I stand with my knees pressed foolishly. The breeze from the open door raises goose pimples. “Thanks.”

  “It’s nice to have something special.” Her gaze moves over me like a fly walking. Abruptly she leaves.

  Again, while I am dawdling in front of the mirror, she sits on my bed with a sigh, fanning her skirt. “Spite of that rain, didn’t cool down much. What are you doing tonight?”

  “I don’t know.” I keep my head bent.

  “Do you usually see a movie?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What do you do the other evenings?”

  I shrug. “We ride around. We talk. We have coffee.”

  “Don’t you ever go dancing?”

  “Dancing? No.”

  “Your father and I used to go to the Aragon Ballroom every Saturday. He used to be a fine dancer.” Smiling bitterly she fans her skirt. “You’d never know it now. Michael ought to get more dressed up when he comes calling.”

  “He doesn’t have many clothes.”

  “His mother should take better care. Have you met her yet? It’s a good sign when a boy takes you to meet his mother.” Leaning forward she smiles as she did in the bathroom, her tongue wetting her lips. “Is he affectionate, Jill?”

  How can she ask such questions? “What do you mean?”

  “Is he affectionate with you?” Her forehead puckers over a soft tentative smile.

  “He’s very intelligent.”

  Her hands rise and fall. “Do you care for him?”

  “I like him fine.” I wait for the sense of betrayal. Overpowering it is a greater sense of being trapped in a damp constricting curiosity.

  “You see so much of each other.”

  “Who else is there? Howie stayed in New York, at summer school.”

  “When I was a girl, I dated several boys. It’s not good to spend too much time with one—they get demanding.”

  Finally safe in the car I say to Mike, “You were late. Mother started grilling me—”

  “Her too? How did you guess to get dressed up? Mother wants to meet you.”

  “Oh.” A lump forms in my middle. “Why, all of a sudden?”

  “We’ve been having a dogfight. That’s why I was late.”

  “About me?”

  “Among other things.” He grimaces. “No importance.”

  I know Mike’s neighborhood because we eat in a deli there, on Seven Mile Road, where the woman behind the counter winks and pretends she will teach me to cook. Mike’s neighborhood is where the Jews moved after Howie’s neighborhood, upwardly mobile out of the ghetto but not wealthy. His street seems wider and flatter than mine. The lawns are deeper, the lots bigger and the houses mostly sprawl, farther apart. He parks in front of one of the oldest houses on the block, rather mangy stucco, vaguely Spanish, with the grass long above a For Sale sign in Mike’s best printing. “You didn’t say she was selling the house.” They will move? Where?

  “She puts that sign out every so often. Nobody wants to pay what she asks for it. She still imagines it’s the house it was when my father was alive, instead of everything slowly falling apart.”

  I can’t rid myself of the feeling of being watched, but we walk into a dark living room. I can see lights toward the back of the house. I follow him through large somber rooms past a polished dining room table, past dishes and silver pieces spaced on display in a breakfront. Beyond is a sun porch where I suspect from the litter of books and sewing, they do their living. Of the two women in wicker armchairs, which is his mother? They sit forward for a few seconds staring past Mike at me with such force I want to retreat into the dark, before they sit back with small inquisitive company smiles.

  Mike’s face hardens into annoyance. “Well, Aunt Ban,” he says to the much taller and leaner woman with cropped grey hair and the severely humorous face I associate with teachers, “what’s wrong, the whole clan couldn’t make it?”

  The corners of her long mouth dip. “Just visiting. Now won’t you introduce the young lady?”

  “Mother, Aunt Ban, this is Jill.”

  “Miss Loesser,” Aunt Ban corrects him. “And this is Jill …”

  “Stuart,” I reply.

  “I remembered it was something Scottish,” his mother says. “It’s so nice that you could come.” An old-young woman so erect only her nape touches the chair back, she is hardly an inch taller than my mother and must weigh a third less. Her hair streaked with grey is turned neatly under. Her makeup is pallid, her glasses colorless, her dress brown. In spite of the heat she wears the sort of thing I put on to go to work. Yet she seems girlish because of her slenderness, her firm calves, her large but shapely hands (like Mike’s) curled on the arms of her chair. I am wilting in the swampy night where no breath stirs, but she sits in her private air-conditioned space, motioning us to the settee.

  “Jill,” Aunt Ban repeats, “an unusual name these days. So English. Is that a name in your father’s family?”

  “No. My Aunt Riva—my mother’s sister—was in vaudeville—”

  “Vaudeville?” Mrs. Loesser repeats.

  Did I say jail by accident? That’s where my brother is, in Mexico, but never mind.

  “What did she do?” Aunt Ban asks, mildly titillated.

  Did I say she worked in a whorehouse? What’s with these people? All the Jews of my childhood were in show business, politics, the unions or in trouble. “Oh, she juggled. Anyhow one time she got a part in a musical—just when I was born. It was the Depression and everybody was out of work but her. I was named for the character she played.” Because she was our benefactor at the time and paid for the doctor. Aunt Riva is generous with the whole bedraggled family when she’s got anything to be generous with. I have known Jews who were down and out and Jews who were flush, but never any who really thought they were or ought to be respectable like this. It occurs to me my stereotypes are taking a beating today.

  Well, that silence steaming in midfloor like a pile of freshly dropped horse dung takes care of my first and last names: thank my parents I have no middle name. His hands clasped between his knees, Mike slumps with a tense furrow across his forehead. The women look at me with polite expectancy: this evening feels like Cold Springs when we visit Aunt Jean the minister’s wife who sits with a wound-up little smile waiting for Mother and me to do something terribly Jewish like crucify her collie Tam Tam. I hear Mother’s whisper, “Do you suppose she boils the teacups after we leave?”

  “Michael, why don’t you bring us iced tea?”

  A warning look from him. They want to catch me alone. “Anything else to drink?”

  “I believe Sue Ellen made a pitcher of lemonade. But bring the tea for your aunt and myself.”

  “Sue Ellen?” I ask.

  “The maid.” He rises with exaggerated fatigue. “Come on, you can carry the glasses.”

  “Your guests don’t want to run errands,” his mother says but I hasten after. Mike has hardly any clothes, yet he does not work and they have a maid. The kitchen is stuffed with twenty-year-old appliances my mother would pity. The refrigerator is half empty, nothing to tempt noshing. “Mike, what does the maid do? Is she pretty?”

  “She’s fifty, coal black and big as a house.” Against the refrigerator door he kisses me roughly, asserting something.

  Instead of just filling glasses, serving is complicated. “Mike as head of household will pour,” Mrs. Loesser says crisply.

  He serves his aunt first but she frowns. “All that time in the kitchen and you forgot my lemon?”

  “Sorry.” Chin lowered he strides out and back. Then without looking up he sloshes tea into glasses and passes them out.

  “Isn�
��t it stifling? Aren’t you glad you don’t have to teach in this weather, Ban?” his mother says.

  I ask, “What do you teach?”

  “General science,” Mike answers, giving her his best smile. “Any good snakes this year, Ban?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes, I have a lovely blue racer. Would you like it for the summer?”

  “Ban! You know Michael. Don’t tempt him. All his life he’s brought home strays. All manner of lost creatures from heaven knows where.” The small pursed smile does not change.

  What can I do but pretend I do not understand?

  His mother’s hands are braced over the ends of the wicker chair arms. Her gaze moves leisurely off my shoes to my face. My old winter flats. I have to fight the impulse to tuck my feet under the settee. “You’re attending the university also?”

  “Yes. I’ll be a sophomore in the fall.”

  Aunt Ban smiles faintly. “Are you planning to do anything in particular?”

  “I write.”

  “So many young people seem to want to be authors,” she says dryly. “What do you intend to write about?”

  Mike’s mother says gently, “Ban, I’m sure growing up in a rooming house, one must encounter many unusual situations.”

  “I didn’t grow up in a rooming house, Mrs. Loesser. Perhaps you’re thinking of Thomas Wolfe?”

  “I’m sorry. That must be another friend of Michael’s. It would be an awkward position for a young girl.” She sips her tea. “We had hoped to send Michael to a good Eastern school for his last two years …”

  Aunt Ban nods brisk agreement.

  “… but I suppose that will have to wait for graduate school.”

  “You’ve years of schooling ahead of you, boy,” Aunt Ban says with fierce good humor. “A long hard pull. You must apply yourself. This last semester’s grades disappointed us….”

  His fingers strum his knees as he looks from one to the other with the expression of an alert and earnest boy.