by Marge Piercy
Sad, muted horn from the street. A foreign car in this neighborhood? Sound that quivers on my nerves. The junkman passing in the alley with his limp hat hanging over his tobacco face, the reins slack on his lap, the grey horse plodding. The big green wheels of his cart creaked while he lifted what looked like a wooden egg to his mouth and blew a questing entreaty. The other kids called him the sheeny, but when Mother heard me use that phrase, she had a talk with me. After that with self-attentive shame I stood by the hollyhocks and watched him lurch past, each shambling clop of the horse, each lunge of the big wheels over a broken brick or bottle shaking him limp as a tree but leaving him as finally rooted in his seat.
Backs of garages, rat tunnels, igloo garbage containers for the apartment houses, tiger lilies sprung from asphalt: the alley was my childhood boulevard. It led kitty-corner to the four-family where Joey lived. Skinny, dark, quick as a squirrel, he had the somber eyes and the grimace taut and bitter even at seven of the hard-luck fighter. When I was five, he asked me to marry him; Mother said I couldn’t because he was Catholic…. I can see myself dawdling in the alley the day his family moved, until finally he came out, looked at me over the fence and then rushed back in. I burst into tears and fled down our basement to smear myself with coal dust. I have always been in love, in continual sequence since the dawn of memory. Whether that is my sickness or my health, I cannot guess.
By the time I get back to school January 3, Theo has already been expelled from the university.
“They caught her with Dulcie,” Donna tells me, half scandalized, half amused. “Imagine Dulcie—that sexless officious thing!”
“Now I understand why Theo wouldn’t move into the co-op with us. But what happened to Theo? Where the hell is she?”
“They expelled her so fast she was gone before anyone even heard. I mean, there’s nothing scares them like catching a couple of women together. With girls being forced to live in the dorms, the deans are weak in the knees that the watchful rich daddies will pull their daughters out. So Theo hardly had time to put her clothes on before she was on her way back to New York.”
I try to find out where she is, but no one wants to be overheard admitting to having known her. I am politely dismissed, even hung up on. Dulcie has been sent home to Pontiac, but I can’t even get her number. I spend quiet times on the dorm switchboard pestering everybody I can think of. My only help is Julie. Oddly enough Julie does not worry about guilt by association. She assumes she is above suspicion. Friday she visits my co-op room with news.
“Theo’s parents wired her money for a plane ticket home. Then they committed her to one of those posh funny farms in Connecticut.”
“A nuthouse?”
“Only the highest quality nuts. Mostly women drying out, I expect. Sort of like a fat farm with bars.”
“Find out the name of it, okay?”
“I’ll try. I saw Mike yesterday—we have the same seminar in Ronsard. You can’t even sneeze in English. Anyhow …”
Lately I seem to be bleeding internally. Donna is over at Sal’s. Their romance has heated up after Christmas and I have noticed catalogs for American University and George Washington on her desk although she has said nothing to me about following him East.
But Julie is watching me carefully. “You spent a lot of time with Theo, in her room. I guess you’re missing her?”
Oh, we have arrived. “If you mean did I know she liked women, no. We never talked about sex.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Death and music and trouble and music and booze and music.”
“She was always playing records. A female jock with tastes for Handel and Bartók.”
“She taught me a lot about music, Julie. I do miss her.”
“Her or her record collection?”
“Both, I guess.” I take the easy way out Julie offers me, wondering why it feels so shitty to lie. I am also lying when I say I never guessed that Theo was attracted to women. Any woman who has ever loved another has a special sensitivity to that openness.
“It’s so … dégoûtant. . .” Julie muses. “What could they possibly do? Rub themselves together like sticks?”
“Ah, perhaps you should try out what men and women do before you judge what women and women do,” I say, dangerously I am aware. Julie never did seduce Van nor pry an engagement ring out of him. Now Van is at Yale studying comparative literature and writing letters back to Mike about how stimulating it all is. Van got a fellowship but Mike’s grades are not exceptional enough. His family would have to cough up the money for him to join Van.
“Perhaps I should,” she says and actually blushes.
The end of term, the end of classes, finals and new trauma. Big Sal says good-bye to his class and leaves without telling Donna anything. Instead she receives by messenger a dozen yellow roses with a card saying, “My own sweet rose, it’s been great and I’ll always love you. S.” A package arrives from his secretary with all the things she had left at his apartment packed neatly in it, robe, diaphragm, perfume, hairbrush, nylons. A week later a second and last package comes from Garfinkel’s in Washington containing a negligee. The note says, “In fondest memory to my darling girl, S.”
I have never seen a negligee before. It is pale blue and silky with much lace. Donna carts it out in the backyard. There we pour gasoline on it and burn it ritually.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ANY STORM IN A PORT
“IF PAUL ISN’T there I’ll throw a fit.” Donna tugs at her sweater. She is back to dressing like a college girl, while the fancy black and fancy blue sheaths hang in plastic at the back of our closet. “All the graduate students in poli sci go for the free cookies. Oh, why does he stare all the time and not ask me out?” Paul is in one of her classes.
The political science department’s weekly tea. Donna is a political science major now, a legacy from Big Sal. “Perhaps he’s shy, baby. Take it easy. You’re not over, you know, what happened yet.”
With a sigh she takes my hand in her cold palms and squeezes it hard. “I feel old, Stu, old. How long before I get hold of my life?”
“Living’s a slippery thing, ma Donna. We’re novices.”
She turns back to the mirror to glare at her reflection. “Can’t even tell what I want. One week I’m a political scientist. The next, I’ll be a prominent critic. Then I think I should study science. But whatever I turn to, it never feels real because it’s still just me. Sometimes all I want is a good screw. Sometimes to kill myself—me and a dozen others.”
“Good. Let’s make a list.”
“Think you wouldn’t be on it?” Her lips pull back. “You don’t know me! The day you see, you’ll hate me too. Sal saw through me.”
“Garbage. Your damn sin and confession upbringing makes you fear hell where there’s only mistakes and impatience and people bumping on each other.” I get up and put my arm around her gingerly, to comfort without alarm. “We’re just learning our ABCs of intimacy.”
She dodges my arm. “We’re all such shits. We’ll find out what you’ll accept, when it hurts you, someday.”
“Donna. Slow down. You run from me. You run from man to man. Why can’t we take walks? Read poetry? Sit and talk to each other?”
“You never talk to anybody until midnight and then with a glass of bourbon in your fist…. Stu, walk me over. I feel like such an ass, chasing this jerk.”
The snow blows down the street, blinding us, clotting in our lashes. She walks with one blue-gloved hand protecting her cheek. “How’s Peter? Aren’t you sleeping with him yet?”
“He hasn’t tried again.” Although I always carry my diaphragm with me when I see him, that is only as a fail-safe device. I have no particular desire for Peter. Strange how startled he was when I mentioned Donna had dated an Indian student. “What happened to that guy Sol?” he asked. Peter never did get Sal’s name straight.
“Maybe he can’t get it up!” Her high laugh is chopped by the wind. In the Fishbowl lo
bby she gives me a glance of appeal. “Do I look all right?”
Facing the plate glass I sit on a bench to watch the storm. Almost time for my writing class. Hypnotically the snow pelts down while students pass sliding on the tile streaked with dark prints. Donna is hard to live with. She pursues violent attractions, abandons them with disgust, sets herself impossible tasks and derides her failures. Why can’t I help?
Donaldson stands in front of me grinning before I focus on him. “Such concentration. Do you write in public like Sartre?”
“No, I sleep in public with my eyes open, like a cat.” That loudmouth folksinger Rob Prewitt is with him and winks at me. Hanging on Rob’s plaid arm is someone who looks vaguely familiar and who greets me by name. Smooth bronze hair, wide hips and plump arms bared under a kind of cape. Dressed like a gypsy in full-flounced skirt, peasant blouse, coarse stockings peeping out, big gold hoops, she stands out in the press of students.
“Hiya … Stephanie.” The name comes back. Peter’s party long ago. We chatter brief banalities about PAF and then I watch them off. Lennie enters sponging snow from his head and beard. Our gazes dodge, slide guiltily back. He plods toward me, drying his glasses on his denim shirt. “How’re things?”
“Fine, Lennie. How’s your work going?”
“Okay. I’m taking figure drawing with Russo—good man.”
“Good.”
“Mike is doing a little better,” he says aggressively, as if giving me an up-to-the-minute report on an accident victim. “He’s got a room by himself on Division. He’s drinking but he made up his incompletes.” He shoves his hands deep in his leather jacket, rocking on his boot heels. “And how’s Peter Crecy?”
I get up to face him, resting my knee on the bench. “Fine. When I have supper with him tonight, I’ll tell him you asked.”
No, that sour grin is not of embarrassment nor accusation but an old man’s expression, a knowing grimace of humor rooted in pain. He turns on his heel and sidles off with a backhanded wave. I look after him, judged. Faithful still to Donna? Our common ark of love on the cocoa sea he painted has gone down, and none of us doing right well by ourselves. Yet I would not go back into that tight place.
We are supposed to be planning a PAF forum this afternoon, but Bolognese came back from the dean of students with the absolute refusal of our speaker, a lawyer considered tainted by his appearance before HUAC. Donaldson sets his auburn hair on end, ruffling it. “We’ll just have to be our own forum on this one, then. We can’t let them scare us off the issue.”
Howie is discussing the need to dramatize the issues, when Alberta pops out of her seat. She is so excited she has unwound her dark yellow scarf and waves it like a banner. “We’ll be HUAC ourselves! We’ll be the committee and we’ll visit campus and hold hearings!”
“A play,” I say. “We’ll write a farce and put it on.”
We decide to base our satire on the mad tea party in Alice with the Red Queen thrown in. Bolognese and I with Donaldson’s help will do the writing and everybody will make suggestions and act in it. I feel out of breath just sitting here. My wrists and throat pound as they do when I run uphill or when I am writing and an idea carries me racing forward so I forget myself entirely. Suddenly it is six thirty. I forgot to ask Howie to let me see his watch and now I’ll be forty-five minutes late meeting Peter.
I trot to the Union but he is not there waiting. Now what? I run to his house. The snow has stopped and the sky is clear up to the polestar glittering. The wind breathes ice on my cheeks.
Rooming houses lurk under the night sky on Division. February ice. As I pass one of the tall houses a movement in a corner room catches my gaze. A thin arm reaches through the couple of inches of open window to tap ash from a cigarette. The face drifts into the light in profile, then is thrust back laughing. Mike. A glimpse then of someone in the room, a flash of bright pink. His arm pulls the shade leaving me with my prying face of surprise angled up. Did he see me under the streetlamp?
I clatter up Peter’s steps gritty with rock salt. Through the draperies light shows from his room. I slip into the pocket of hall and bang on the door. “Peter!”
Nothing. I feel as if he is inside yet he does not answer. Why did I assume he would come back here? I give the door a last thump, then leave a note. I swing by the Union once more and then I go home.
I am still waiting in my room for him to get in touch when Donna comes in with her blue wool coat draped over one shoulder. She looks sharply at me but does not speak.
“What I’ve done! The PAF meeting ran late and I missed meeting Peter at the Union. How do I do these stupid things? But we had a great idea—”
“Why make such a fuss?” She turns her back, brushing her hair with vehement strokes. She is wearing it extremely short, a cap fitted to her head.
“But he’ll be angry, he always thinks I do things on purpose.”
“If you couldn’t remember you had a date with him, obviously you don’t care.”
“I just got caught up in the meeting. We’re going to put on a play about HUAC. Bolognese and Donaldson and I are going to write it, hey? Come on, Donna, what’s wrong with you anyhow?”
“I’m tired is all.”
“You’re tired a lot lately.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She swings around, glaring.
“Mean? You’re irritable. Did you eat with Paul? Are you going out with him?”
She draws a hand across her forehead. “Oh, him. He’s married.”
“How do you know?”
“He was at the tea, all right. Gossiping about the high cost of babies.”
“Donna, I’m sorry. Where were you, then?”
“Curse men who don’t wear rings.” She raises her head and seeing me waiting for an answer, winces with irritation. “Out! Out, mother mine by appointment of who?”
“Sorry. But what can I do about Peter?” I pace. “Maybe I should have waited at his place. Now no supper. I’m hungry.”
Her hands attack her hair. “I don’t care! Just don’t go on about it!”
Martyred I stride in injured silence to the closet for a can of sardines, open them at my desk.
“That smell! The room stinks of fish.”
I will not turn around. Why is she so cross with me?
She raises the window to the cold air. “Living with you is like hanging on to a seesaw.”
I finish the sardines and drop the can in the wastebasket.
“Are you going to leave that in here to stink?”
“Even I don’t eat tin. Get off my back, Donna.”
“I want to.” She leans tensely against the door. “I want to live with someone else.”
“What?”
“I want to move out of this room. Living with you is too hard on me. You drive me crazy!”
For a moment I feel nothing. Then pain begins to resonate. “You want to move out? To live with somebody else?”
She nods. “I have to. Understand, Stu, I have to.”
“Sure thing.” I take my towel and toothbrush and cross the hall to the john. Can’t believe. I stand at the stained sink facing the mirror, foaming white mouth in a fixed grin taking the toothbrush. I thought she needed me. Thought she wanted the way we strike on each other and nurture each other. Fool. People get tired of you. Vampire. Magpie. Fool. You want too much, you lean too hard, you spill your guts on the floor. Even my parents can’t stand me. Nobody can.
She stands at the window with a taut nervous smile. Her painted nails click on the ledge. “We interfere with each other. You’re always wanting to talk when I should be working. You don’t need to study the way I do.”
“Fuck it, Donna, if you didn’t keep changing fields, you could take a normal load of courses. You’re damned smart. Why didn’t you say something to me about what was bugging you?”
“What good would it do? You can’t stop. Then your stuff all over. You make me feel guilty because I’m neat—”
Petty reasons st
inging like black flies. “Shut up!”
“Don’t yell at me, Stuart. I’m trying to be reasonable!”
I am crazy with rage, I want to pound her face in. My anger terrifies me. My voice issues from me in my old gutter nasality, “Shut up, you motherfuckin’ whore, shut your shitass face!”
“Don’t scream! You demand too much. You jab at me and probe. You try to run my life. You try to drag me along to everything you do—”
I grope behind me, grasp something. Throw it hard overhand. A box of powder slams off the wall and shimmers down on her. A cry chokes in her throat as her arm snaps up to shield her face. Then she is sneezing, turning blindly in a swirl of settling powder. I grab my coat and run out.
Running, running blindly, I pause at last to ask myself after a few blocks, where? On State Street I duck into the drugstore to call Howie. No answer. I walk back along State to the Union and circle the tables. Mike sits with his tooled leather binder open before him. Grant Stone sprawls low in a tilted chair, running his hand through his florid hair, yawning. Julie sits primly on Mike’s right working on a French translation. The arm of her pink sweater rests against Mike’s arm in its old unraveling sweater. Oh. My goodness. Well.
Cold, it’s cold outside. My jacket leaks through its poor seams. Where? Where else? At the corner of Peter’s street a car grinds in frozen slush. As I climb his steps, the engine still grunts, the wheels still spin. Through his closed door music permeates the hall. I knock. Creak of bedsprings and then his voice. “Who is it?”
“Jill. Let me in.”
He slides the door aside. His face is blank and sullen. He looks seven years old and sulking. “What do you want?”
“Sorry I missed you….” The heat swells in my lungs. Padded cave of room. On the chocolate spread the impress of his body, a slit envelope, pages of a letter.
