Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

Theo is silver, silver and teak. She looks years older than she is, but she still looks good. She is thin and wiry with the brittleness of an ex-alcoholic who is aware that is a choice that she makes again every day. She knows a great deal about nutrition but she is also a food faddist with a satchel full of supplements she urges you to try. Theo is a therapist specializing in alcohol and drug problems, because what else does she know more about, except music? Her avocation is building and repairing flutes. Her country living room is half grand piano and half wood stove. When she was busted at an antinuke demonstration last winter, her current lover—a musicologist at Bennington—discovered the bondage of feeding Theo’s horse, Theo’s chickens, Theo’s nanny goat, Theo’s five cats, Theo’s two terriers, Theo’s resident bird population and Theo’s friendly skunk. She tends to see her lovers in town. Although her house smells like a stable, I love to visit because I too enjoy animal company and when she is off at work, I bang on her piano and play her records loud. The horse, however, overawes me.

  It was Alberta who got Theo out at last. In those days Theo was a mess, incoherent, depressed, addicted to tranquilizers. That first year we wondered if we had made a naive mistake. The women’s movement gave Theo a spine. I can still remember how off-putting the younger women found Theo. With their worries as the mothers of young children or their raw political savvy and fury against the male organizers who had denied them the equality they were fighting for for others, they saw Theo as some potty, boozy dowager aunt maundering on. But they learned. And she did.

  “Enough of press releases,” Theo announced that morning. “We need a traveling exhibit. Part art, part circus.”

  Unusual suggestions always fire me. “A huge wall-sized quilt made of the flower faces of dead women.”

  “You know, we can silk-screen photos right on fabric. I’m serious. And little memorials. And a lot about children, what happens to children who aren’t wanted. A lot about child abuse and the sexual abuse of children. My dear, in a week I collect enough information about the ravages of children to fill a hall.”

  When you live in the country, everything political starts on the phone. Where does it end? It doesn’t, silly. You end. It doesn’t.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  WHAT IS TAKEN AND WHAT IS TAKEN AWAY

  THE DRIVE BACK is interminable. I look out the window while Peter makes resolute small talk, seeming elated. When we finally arrive at the co-op, I half expect him to bound in ahead of me to find Donna, but he says nothing except, “We’ll keep in touch.”

  “I’m sure,” I say grimly and climb the front porch steps. The old house stands with its doors and windows flung wide uttering light to the humid night. As I walk from room to room calling names, I find lights left on over desks with books spread open, lights over dressers with cosmetics awry as if the inhabitants had been all enchanted away. Minouska comes meowing tail high to meet me: I alone have escaped to tell you. She takes me to her kittens and behold, their eyes are open.

  A door slams. I go warily to meet whoever it is: Alberta, who is studying for her New York bar exams. Too soon she will leave. “Nobody’s home,” I say.

  “I am. You are. Are we nobody? I just went down to the corner for some tampons. Ever since I’m not with Donnie, I forget when my periods are.”

  I cannot quite bring myself to tell her my evening. I say only, “I just broke up with my boyfriend, the jerk.”

  “You can’t marry somebody who doesn’t share your politics, anyhow, so why waste your time? Oh, Howie called from Detroit. He left a message for you to call him back whenever you got in. He said whenever you got in, three times. And here you are early.”

  I don’t recognize the number—not his family’s house, not the hospital. I dial and the phone is answered, “Feldman’s Mortuary, can I be of service?”

  “Is Howie Dahlberg there?” I talk standing. It hurts to sit down. When Howie comes on I ask, “Your father?”

  “He died this afternoon. The funeral’s tomorrow at two. Would you come in?”

  “Sure,” I say immediately and then wish I hadn’t. I don’t really want to go. “You want me there especially?” “Would I ask if I didn’t?”

  I waver a moment and then loyalty overcomes me. He is my source of strength, my buddy. “Where is it? Should I wear black?”

  After I hang up I realize I have offered no consolation in conventional formulae or gracious original poetry. None. He wanted none. He is businesslike, numbed into performance. I do not in the least feel like taking the bus into Detroit tomorrow like a pool ball bounced off the walls in some game I don’t control. But what the hell. Let him get from me what he needs. He’s entitled.

  I go back to my room slowly, my knees loose-hinged, and get down on my hunkers to watch Minouska with her all-black and her gray watermarked tabby kitten suckling. We are going to have to find homes for them, a siege that will take all the skill, flirtation and shrewdness we can muster. Then I want to have Minouska spayed. Donna hesitates, identifying. Donna.

  I hear the screen door open downstairs and somehow I know that this time it is Donna. I get to my feet. On the way across the room to my bed (we have twin beds here) I glimpse myself in her long mirror. What’s wrong with this dress? I still don’t know. I still think it’s sexy. I have a vulgar passion for low necklines, perhaps because my breasts were the first part of me ever admired and I myself tend to seek comfort in them, as now, when I bow my head and my hands close each on one. Why should I, who wait to confront her, feel guilty?

  Donna flings through the door, starting as she sees me. “Aren’t you early?”

  “That is true.”

  She yanks her shirtdress over her head and lets it drop, kicks off her sandals. “I’ve hit bottom.”

  A loose surge of disbelief, a colder rising tide of foreknowledge. “What now?” I fight the urge to stop my ears.

  With hasty motions she strips. “I picked up a town boy and screwed him.” Her lips pull back over her small perfect teeth. “I hope I get syphilis.” She runs across the hall to the bathroom.

  Her mattress-ticking shirtdress slowly deflates. Picking up her towel and robe, I follow. Without covering her hair she plunges under the shower, then pulls the curtain closed.

  I stand outside, hands crossed over my chest. I question, she answers. What good does it do? I don’t want to listen. “A town boy?”

  Her eye appears at the parting of the yellow plastic curtain. “I felt so lonely. No one to talk to.” She ducks back.

  Because I was with Peter? Does that make it my fault? Was I too dense, too self-involved to notice what was happening? If I stayed with her, would that help? “How did it happen?”

  She peers out. “I had an appointment with Professor MacLean this morning to talk about my project for sociology. I’d drawn up a questionnaire about women’s attitudes toward each other—things we talk about —to do a study in the dorms. He thought it was a joke.”

  “Donna, who are you punishing? Him? You? Me?” My voice spirals up. I pull the curtain open to look at her.

  She faces into the full splatter of the shower. “I saw him looking at posters outside a movie. He seemed … big, defeated. Gypped.”

  Laughter rattles in my head. “May you never feel sorry for a horse.”

  “I wanted someone lonelier than me. Somebody I could pity. Somebody where I could feel I was better than him.” The water is turned off and her hands grope for the towel, which I hold out. “I didn’t know I was going to fuck him till I did. So ugly!”

  Wrapped to the neck in her plaid robe she pushes past me and climbs into bed, leaving only her eyes exposed. It occurs to me to tell her the kittens have opened their eyes, but that seems irrelevant even to me, who feel like a wineglass broken into forty shards of thin curved glass.

  “I have a date with him tomorrow,” she says.

  “You’re not meeting him again?”

  “He knows where I live, Stu. He walked me home.”

  “I’ll say you’re
not here.”

  “No.” Her hands tug at the sheet. “He said he had a friend. Come with me, Stu.”

  “Howie’s father died. I’m going into Detroit for the funeral.”

  “Why?”

  I want to say because he asked me, but she is asking too. Instead I say, “Donna, you don’t have to punish yourself any longer. Peter and I broke up tonight.”

  She sits up abruptly. Her face scrubbed raw beneath the skullcap of wet hair, she looks frightened. “Did he … I mean, who broke it off?”

  “He left your letter in the kitchen for me to find. On the counter.”

  “Oh.” She seems afraid to ask anything. She does not deny having been there.

  “I read the first page. But I didn’t let him know. He may suspect, but he doesn’t know. Then we broke up by mutual consent. So, if you want him, he’s all yours.”

  “Are you furious with me?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were seeing him?”

  “He made me promise not to tell you. He said he needed time to make up his mind. He says you overreact to everything.”

  “He could make you promise, but he couldn’t make you keep that promise. I don’t give a shit about him, Donna! Why didn’t you level with me?”

  “You don’t love him. Otherwise I never would have.”

  “Oh, Donna, I was attached enough. But he dispensed with that. It was my period tonight and he doesn’t care for blood, so he fucked me in the ass.”

  “In the ass.” Her eyes narrow with interest. “I’ve never done that….”

  “Be my guest. I don’t think I’ll shit without pain for days. My goddamned ass is bleeding, which is why I’m lying like this.”

  “You broke up with him because of that?”

  “I broke up with him because he wants me to be somebody else. I broke up with him because he’s cold at the core. Because he has a hard sadistic streak up his middle. He’s a no-win game, Donna. He makes you try to get him to love you, but you’re never quite good enough. He broke up with me because the game’s worn out with me and he wants to play it with you.”

  “Oh, Stu, you and Peter are a mismatched pair. I never could understand why it dragged on. He and I are much more alike.”

  “Last spring, what exactly happened?”

  “Oh, he told you about that?”

  “He told me nothing. I asked him nothing. You tell me.”

  “After that graduate student I had the crush on turned out to be married, I went to the Union and there was Peter, waiting for you as it turned out. I sat down, we started talking. You didn’t show up. I don’t know how it happened but we left together and went right back to his place and fell into bed.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping with him yet. Why didn’t you just get involved then?”

  “We had a fight five minutes later. The intensity scared him. He made a crack about Lennie, how Lennie was a loser and I’d never had any experience with a man I couldn’t push around. I lost my temper and we lit into each other.” She seems glad to talk. Sliding out of bed clutching her damp plaid robe around her, she stands over me, hovering. “Stu, understand. It’s not like any other man for me.”

  “You don’t know what it’s going to be like.”

  “But you don’t either, Stu. He and I, we hit it off hard and fierce. I get at something in him nobody else can—he told me that.”

  He offers every woman a little come-on. To you only can I tell this tale of my secret sorrows and you only can save me.

  I look skeptical enough for her to rush on. “It isn’t like anybody else for me. It has all the fierceness of when I fall into lust with somebody I shouldn’t touch. Then all the tenderness I felt for Lennie. Peter won’t see I truly loved Lennie, but I did. He just never got to me sexually the way those mean studs do.”

  “That is a lot to base on one quick fuck and a blowout.”

  “But I know I can be faithful to him. It’s real. Oh god, if only I’d known what you were going to tell me tonight! Now I’ve blown it. If he knew, he’d dump me like that.” She snaps her fingers.

  “Take the bus into Detroit with me. See your sister. See him. Come to the funeral. It’ll keep you out of trouble. When you aren’t here, the guy will know you don’t care to see him again.”

  “No. I can’t bear to face my therapist and tell him what a mess I got myself into. I’ve done it already, Stu. What good will running do?”

  “Avoid a repetition.”

  “I won’t do it again. I won’t! You’ll see. I have to prove that. I have to prove it to myself.”

  “You can’t unfuck him, Donna.”

  “Yes, I can. I can get myself back from him. This time I’ll face the ugly thing I’ve done and take control. Then I’ll be safe. I’ll know I can control myself and it won’t ever happen again.”

  “Donna, you can’t make this guy act out a little magic play with you.”

  “I’ll act cold and say I’m miserable and shocked. I’ll make a big fuss about how awful I feel. I’ll tell him I can’t go to Mass tomorrow because of what we did—he’s brought up Catholic too. I know how to get at him.”

  “I don’t want you to go! It’s crazy.”

  “It’s not crazy. And I’m not. I won’t be crazy and sick. I don’t want to be out of control. I have a chance to fix my life now, to prove I’m not a rotten nymphomaniac, and to get what I want. Come with me, Stu! Please.”

  “No! It’s stupid. I promised Howie I’d go to the funeral. I’ll get a ride back in with him and be here by eight or so.”

  She lies in her bed, turned to the wall. Minouska springs up and climbs over her. She cradles her cheek in the cat’s black flank. I would like to shake Donna from her rigidity. “Donna, listen,” I begin. She does not open her eyes or acknowledge me. Her breathing is deep and regular but as I bend over her, her lids quiver. I decide I will go sit in a hot bath for my ass in spite of the warmth of the night. I turn away and take Joyce’s Ulysses off to the tub to read. When I finally go to bed, she really is asleep, snoring softly, a placid, secure sound.

  Some people look smaller in grief: Howie’s grandmother. She seems to weigh sixty pounds and have as much substance at the grave as a furled black umbrella. Some people come loose from their center and spread out: Howie’s mother looks as if she had gained thirty pounds and as if her arms had grown long and gangly, pulling partly out of their sockets. Her dress hangs in back. She leans on Milton, Howie’s older brother who fought in Korea and didn’t want to be a doctor and works for a plumbing and heating firm. Milt looks vague in the cemetery, as if worrying about something distant, his bills, his children, his wife. He holds Mrs. Dahlberg with an arm around her shoulder and by rote he gives comfort, but his eyes are distracted.

  Standing beside me, Howie has hardly spoken. I greeted him when I arrived at the synagogue, just in time for the service. I sat toward the rear. The room was only a third full. From the conversations I overheard afterward, I realized many of the mourners were in the funeral business and couldn’t help judging the job critically.

  This familiar cemetery is now a graveyard where the dead are put away rather than a promenade where I go to argue and debate with Howie, to confess and to question. The sky flattens us like a steam iron. I sweat in my black shirtdress. When I touch my scalp, I burn my hand. About thirty of us are gathered at the grave.

  I take Howie’s hand, like grasping a piece of stone in the shade. He lets me keep his hand, but he is so rigid I think if he bent over, he would be permanently creased into that new shape like a cardboard cutout. Sweat stands out on his broad forehead but his hand is cold marble. A monarch butterfly zigzags across an avenue among the mausoleums toward us where we stand on the plain of small crowded graves. Right across from me I read:

  REBECCA MOSHER BELOVED WIFE OF AARON MOSHER LOVING MOTHER OF SANFORD, SHEILA AND ROBERT

  1898-1942

  A Hebrew inscription underneath I cannot read. A short life.

  It is Howie’s turn to step for
ward and toss in a handful of dirt. I like the literalness of the gesture. Several wreaths, rather fancy, friends in the business. Howie looms beside me again. People are saying goodbye. We walk among the Mogen Davids and the stone flowers in stone urns and the modern high-gloss slabs of dark granite streamlined as if to rush off somewhere in eternity. He says, “We’ll have to get out of the house now. I’ll have to help her look. Milt doesn’t have room for both her and Grandma.”

  “Why move so fast?”

  “Because the house comes with the custodial job. The new guy’s been good about not moving in while Papa was in the hospital…. Now finally my family won’t live in a cemetery.” He smiles wryly. “A bit late to improve my social life in high school.”

  He wants me to drive back and is astonished that I don’t know how. “I’ll teach you,” he promises. “I wish I had already.”

  We are close and yet silent. He has the radio tuned to a Black station and the R & B thrums my body. For long moments I forget to be serious and loll there in the hot car, enjoying the music, enjoying being driven through the flat summer with the windows open and my hair blowing. We stop to eat at a Greek place in Ypsilanti, the industrial town next to Ann Arbor where Kaiser-Frazer just shut down. Neither of us can slip back into a collegiate setting yet. At five forty-five the restaurant is half empty. We both want wine badly but Howie does not succeed in ordering it. He will not be twenty-one until he finishes the university.

  “Come on,” I say in exasperation to the old waiter. “We just buried his father. We just came from the funeral.”

  “The law’s the law,” the old waiter tells us mournfully, but he lets me order retsina on my fake ID. We sit in a booth and drink wine from the same squat glass.

  “Where’d you get that?” He picks up the ID. “Doesn’t look like you.”

  “Peter gave it to me. As I broke up with him yesterday, you can skip the obligatory vomiting and stomping…. You’re still numb, aren’t you?”

  He nods. “I’ve walked through it all. I can’t let myself feel yet. I’d fall apart—like Mother. You can’t have everybody fall apart. I took the best role, being practical, making arrangements.” He finishes a glass by himself. “Why does this taste like something you should use to take paint off a door?”