Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  HARDSCRABBLE YEAR

  I ARRIVE IN the white room with tomato-soup curtains as graceful, as vigorous as a run-over cat. In Donna’s appalled stare I read my ghastliness. I weigh ninety-two pounds dressed. My skin is bluish grey. I suffer from anemia, colitis, eczema, toothache and insomnia. The first week I find two jobs. Financial independence is my deity; I will achieve it at any cost except my studies. This is the year that everything I touch turns into A’s, for I am only happy when utterly distant from my emotions. Four nights a week I work the dormitory switchboard plugging couples into each other. All day Saturday I take part in a psychology department experiment on ESP; I am fascinating to them because I regularly display negative correlation. When another subject sits in the next room trying to send me images on the special cards (circles, triangles, squares), I get them all wrong, whereas almost everybody gets at least a quarter of them right by chance. I block the images. I do not bother to explain about my mother. I let myself be studied and collect my dollar and a quarter an hour.

  I go out with men who ask me, and many do. For the first time in my life I am naturally cold. I have not recovered an interest in sex, which seems to me a device for converting will and energy into passivity and flesh. Dating abrades the nerves but kills time, not quite as well as drinking which I do with Theo other evenings after the switchboard. In Theo I find a vast tolerance at once warm and cold: cold because nothing grows in that waste, and warm because she means me well. Compulsively at a certain level of drunkenness I tell her my summer again and again. Do I imagine I will wear it out? At a further degree of alcohol in the brain I escape into pure energy and final numbness.

  At my desk I am finishing a paper on Twelfth Night, my favorite Shakespeare comedy with its mutable sex roles. November, but the day shimmers like painted cellophane under a glazed blue sky. After a week of icy rain the air is almost warm and I have the casements open. Now I watch Donna and Lennie trot briskly across the court, red beard and leather jacket, sleek blond cap of hair and blue wool coat. As they dance about each other gesturing, Lennie stomps in a puddle. I laugh and lean out to call to them under the lee of the building. Their sharp voices rise and I shut up.

  “I am not your mother! If you want to wear dirty shirts, stink up the world. I won’t be made to feel bitchy about it, I won’t!” Donna’s voice cuts high and thin. “Do I ask you to do my laundry?”

  “It was you who lost the laundry slip and now you blame me. If you yell at me again in front of my roommates …” Lennie trails off, sulking. “That’s castrating.”

  “It wasn’t my laundry slip. It was yours. And we’re never alone!”

  “Can I afford to move out? Will you live with me if I do?”

  I am bent over my paper as Donna bursts in. She flings her coat on the floor and herself on my bunk. “I just had a fight with Lennie again. He’s always trying to make me feel guilty! If he catches a cold, he makes me feel I’ve done it to him.”

  “Be careful. A little patience with each other …”

  “We keep fighting about you and Mike. As if Mike had a side. Men are so blind. Mike tells him how you got him in trouble with his family, trying to force him to marry you, and then dumping him. That’s how he tells it all over town.”

  “Julie keeps me posted,” I say dryly, looking out the window. “Lennie’s still waiting in the courtyard.”

  “He is?” She gets up to look, beside me. “Idiot!” But she grins as she pokes into the sleeves of her coat. “Stubborn as a rock!”

  The long grey winter settles in like a wolf feeding on a carcass. Julie talks about diaphragms. She is still not having sex with Van but they have progressed to fumbled petting. She believes in looking ahead, especially since, as she says, my case illustrates what happens when you depend on the man to take care. Van progresses no further as the months lengthen like icicles and drop of their own weight, but Donna and I discuss diaphragms frequently. Finally I make an appointment, although I have no immediate need.

  It is Christmas vacation and I make the appointment for the afternoon between my split shifts at the telephone company on December 24. I give my real name and say I am going to be married.

  “Where’s your engagement ring?” The gynecologist asks. He is fifty and frowns at me.

  “We don’t want to waste money on that. We’re both students.”

  He gives me a tight-lipped smile. “When you’re married, you come back with a ring and a license, and I’ll fit you. We don’t fit unmarried women.”

  He charges me fifteen dollars and I go home with a stomachache. I will not be that stupid again. I consult Donna. We go to the dime store together the second half of Christmas vacation, while she’s visiting her sister and brother-in-law. We pick out gold-colored bands. We pick out glass engagement rings. We make appointments back to back for the thirtieth of December. I am “Mrs. Mary Moore” from Yeats’s poem and my husband is Henry. Donna is Mrs. Leonard Rose: Lennie’s bride for a day. We leave with our prescriptions and fill them together. I adore my diaphragm, neat with its pellucid dome in its compact. I cherish it in my jewelry box as I will in a few years cherish my first passport, as something magical that permits passage out.

  My mother has bribed me to have my hair cut, paying for a real stylist down on Washington Boulevard, the most nearly fashionable downtown address. With the malls just beginning to erode downtown Detroit, Washington Boulevard is still an area where Mother goes nervously muttering, at the last minute trying to talk me into doing it at one of the department stores, Hudson’s, Crowley’s. Why am I willing? To destroy the last vestiges of the woman Mike had? Perhaps. No one wears her hair long except Alberta Mann and a few folksingers. I will try this accommodation, while refusing most others.

  The stylist is impressed by my hair, although he chops it off willingly. He asks if I want it. I say yes and then forget and he chases me half a block carrying it in a paper bag. Mother and I sell it to a wig-maker. They say if it were not black it would be worth more.

  Slipping the nail file back in its leather case, Julie joins her arms around her knees drawn up in tailored slacks. “Last night in the Union, Mike sat down with Van and me. He’d been drinking gin and he looked ghastly.”

  “Would he look better if he’d been drinking imported Scotch? Why say it like that? I can’t stop his drinking.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “What has it to do with me? I haven’t talked to him in weeks.”

  “He says it has everything to do with you.”

  To sit back I move a white plush dog with bells on nose and tail. Her room is paralyzingly neat, one Mondrian and one Klee reproduction matted on the wall, blue scarf on her dresser with cosmetics edge to edge, a row of pots and candleholders from gift shops equidistant along the window ledge and top of her bookcase. “Do you believe that, kid? That I’m working voodoo on him, like that shit he told Lennie?”

  “The excess is part of the young Rimbaud pose anyhow,” she says, adding to my blank look, “you should have read Rimbaud last year to know what he’s up to. I know you don’t read French well, but you could have found a decent translation.” Faint air of letting me in on a secret. “He is brilliant, you know. I have an IQ of a hundred and sixty and I can’t follow him at times.”

  “That’s because a lot of the time he doesn’t make sense.”

  “You can’t imagine what my high school was like. They wanted us adjusted, one jolly community of interests and green-clipped lawns. They acted as if I’d scored high to upset them. It was much too high—for a girl.”

  “My mother has a mistrust of intellect too. She suspects that brains are inherently subversive and dangerous and they get you dead. But you’re away from home, Julie. Really away.”

  “Oh? Am I? I’ll go back. A commuting husband and three point five maladjusted children with braces on their teeth going to child therapists and riding school.”

  “If you don’t want it, don’t buy back in. Join t
he circus. Join the WACS. Join the Communist party. Join a nunnery.” She makes me feel as if I’m sinking in down. I get up, pace to the window and back. “Visit scenic Antarctica. Work on a goat farm. Go on the streets.” I hear myself bellowing and fling myself down to ask mildly, “So how’s old Van anyhow? Have you had his sour cherry yet?”

  Quickly she moves the plush dog out of the path of my descending rear. “Never. I’m hoping his blood will thaw with the spring, if it ever, ever comes. I swear, Mike makes me think Van isn’t alive sometimes…. But at least Van’s trustworthy. He’d never talk about me. I’m too bourgeois to stand to have someone boasting about me the way Mike did about you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Her plucked brows rise. “Van told me when Mike used to come back from the Arb last year, he’d come into the room where his friends were playing bridge and he’d make a sign—”

  My body grows hot. “What kind of sign?”

  “For the number of times, he’d hold up so many fingers.”

  A hot coal burns in my chest. I could kill him. Those men laughed at me while I waltzed around on his arm like Juliet. “He treated me like a whore.”

  As I am returning to my room to find Donna, it occurs to me Julie will of course repeat that to Mike. “Jill says you treated her like a whore.” Why do I come to suffer under her cold curious gaze? Yet I will return obsessed to hear what she knows of the backside of my great love.

  My first civil rights action is meek. Eighteen of us gather in the blowing sleet to picket a local restaurant. Donna, Lennie and I march arm in arm. Donaldson is involved, which prompts Donna to try to awake my old crush on him, but I love her and no one else. My love for Donna is a small furry muff my buhbe gave me when I was five, ragged but still eloquent of another time and country, wherein my hands sought, to find only each other, but nonetheless were warmer.

  In 1955 we are only cautiously radicals “of sorts,” a professor in the zoology department having been fired after the last House Un-American Activities Committee incursion into Michigan for being “an avowed Marxist.” I go regularly to a study group where we look earnestly into each other’s eyes. Even to discuss civil rights or social change feels dangerous. The FBI may burst in the door; one of us may be an agent. A student in the Labor Youth League (membership of four) found out his girlfriend had been scared by the FBI into providing lists of everyone who attended his frequent parties. All of us know stories of teachers who lost their jobs because they once signed a petition for the starving children of Ethiopia or the bombed villages of Spain, thus revealing themselves Premature Anti-Fascists. The FBI agents visit the morgue of the school newspaper to read old editorials in case whoever they are investigating once wrote something critical of The American Way of Life. Ideas feel incredibly potent in this thick atmosphere. Passing along a copy of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma or J. P. Thompson’s History of the English Working Class feels like a brave political act.

  We are PAF: the Political Alternatives Forum. Even that bland label has to most ears a harshly subversive sound and I cannot pull Donna or Lennie in with me. Lennie doesn’t trust me—I am the evil bitch who wounded his poet. Donna claims to find the discussion dull, though she comes with me occasionally. “All those men and only two women!” Alberta Mann is the other woman, Donaldson’s girlfriend. Donaldson is our faculty sponsor, so we can be a recognized student group to stage our little protests, show an occasional film (Battleship Potemkin, The Grapes of Wrath, Open City), bring in a progressive folksinger, that is when we can get approval. We have to pass through two deans and a vice-president to sponsor Pete Seeger. We also hold forums on H-bomb testing, abolition of dormitory hours for women, the U.S. Marine invasion of Guatemala. At those timid meetings I live for a few moments in a world larger than that bounded by dormitory and classroom.

  My birthday. I no longer have time for the hours and hours of slow work at dental school, so I am going to an outside dentist. My birthday present from my parents is their paying my March dental bill. My only real presents are Pablo Casals playing two Bach partitas for unaccompanied cello from Theo and from Donna a black-and-umber cotton circle skirt. My parents don’t call. The day passes rather grimly with a midterm in Shakespeare. Donna comes home at four and carries me off into the desultory snow.

  “It ought to be spring, it’s spring by the calendar. We’ll make it be spring,” she announces. Coffee laced with brandy in a thermos, a blanket snuck out from her bunk, a little wheel of Camembert and part of a roast chicken: we dine in the snow of Island Park tucked in a bend of the Huron River. “Happy birthday, sweetie,” she tells me. “It’s got to get better from now on. Right? Right.”

  In the snow littering down in big unhurried discs we find two swings twisted up for the winter but not taken off, and unwind their chains. Side by side we swing far back, far up and out.

  “Donna, Donna, this is wonderful. It’s flying. I want to fly.” Again. Swinging high, high in an arc. I remember it from childhood. I always loved it. It’s sensual, the most arousing thing I have done in months. The blood pounds in me. The combination of caffeine and alcohol makes me energetically drunken so that I feel I could release the swing and sail out over the river, whose ice has broken but not melted.

  We lie on the blanket afterward finishing the coffee with brandy, the chicken. “What happened to me, I survived it, didn’t I? So I’m not really weak, I’m not a coward, I’m not worthless.”

  “You survived, Stu. I didn’t feel too sure at first, but I’m sure now. You’re all here again. Whoever said you were weak? Even since we were kids, you’ve been one tough customer.”

  “Aw, Donna, you’re just easy to fool.” I know she cannot afford this celebration, that it is purchased by giving up something else, and I am doubly grateful. She gave me my birthday.

  During spring vacation Donna goes to New York with Lennie. When I get back from Detroit, her luggage waits in the room, but not Donna. Squeals, giggles, romping in the hall. Dormitory life lacks dignity, I think. There has to be an alternative. I resolve to investigate. Close to curfew, Donna runs in. “You’re finally back!” Dropping her purse she hugs me, her sharp chin against my cheek.

  “How was New York?”

  “Oh.” She hangs up her coat, giving it a careful brushing. “We have to live there, Stu. It’s the most real city.” Her voice sounds forced. Her skin is blue with fatigue under the eyes.

  “Is anything wrong? Were his parents mean to you?”

  She winces. “They were so sweet I was embarrassed. Let’s get a soda downstairs. I’m dying of thirst.”

  In the corridor the house athletic chairman Dulcie is heaving her suitcase out for a janitor. She gives us a grin half antagonistic, half patronizing. “Well, well, the James sisters. What trouble are you up to?”

  “Now, podner, we don’t look for trouble, it looks for us. And when it finds us, even trouble runs.”

  Donna jabs irritably at the elevator button. “Why do you answer them? She does think we’re sisters, by the way.”

  Seep of pleasure. In the mirror opposite the elevator we are framed. “Like negative and photo—me dark and you light.”

  “Outside.” She strikes the down button with her fist. “I got away from Lennie to wander through stores along Fifth Avenue. Lord and Taylor’s. Bonwit’s.” We ride down. “Money must take the hard edges off living. Beauty in the most casual objects. Small pleasures greasing the way to big ones.”

  “We’re not likely to find out.” I don’t want Donna traveling through expensive stores in a daydream I cannot share. “Start craving those things and you’re hooked.”

  “Start?” She laughs, a parched cough. We pass the row of dark dining rooms to the cubicle where the machines glow. As she uncaps her soda and tilts the bottle, lines of strain stand out.

  “Donna, what happened in New York?”

  “Nothing.” She walks rapidly back. “Nothing that happens to me has any importance, because I’m a pi
ece of shit!”

  “Did you have a fight with Lennie?”

  Her mouth curls as if she will laugh but instead she bursts into sobbing, grinding her palms into her eyes. I take the soda and steer her into the dark dining room, past the tables to the ledge that runs below the tall windows. “Shhh, Donna, please.” I stroke her, soothe her. “Don’t cry…. What is it, tell me? What happened?” Droning on I persist, until exhausted she leans her cheek on the pane letting the breath from her parted lips steam across the glass.

  “Why couldn’t he let me love him my own way? Why does he have to try to make me into his mother? All the time his eyes on me pleading. I’m not like his mother, I’m not a self-sacrificing lap!”

  “Why should you be? But you’ll make up.”

  “I made sure that can’t happen. Stu, he’s all the time trying to pull the reactions he wants from me. I had to fight not to be deliberately Midwestern. And in museums!” Her voice climbs in a tight spiral. “Sometimes I think he has no taste but what’s a defense for his own work. But I can’t tell—he’s ruined it for me. I can’t stand paintings any longer. Something in me shuts off.”

  “What did you fight about? His work?”

  “Tonight I told him I was sick to death of him.” Her voice breaks. Her hands claw at her arms. “I told him about Matt. Oh, say I lied. So what? Sometimes you hound me worse than he does.”

  I guess I knew, for I feel nothing. “He reacted badly?”

  “He said, but why? I said, because I wanted to. Because I was tired of waiting for him to find a bed. Because Matt had a good build.” She laughs like glass breaking. “Besides it was a foot long. I wasn’t so much excited as curious.”

  “Was he good?”

  “Too fast. But it was an experience, like being charged by a buffalo herd. I don’t think I like big pricks, but how was I to know beforehand?” She rubs her eyes roughly. “I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know! I make up reasons. I do things like I’m falling downhill, and then I make up reasons. Lennie said he’d ignored my past because I was lonely and everybody needs love. He did ignore it—why wasn’t that enough for me? I must be a complete bitch.”