by Marge Piercy
“Will you ever let yourself feel it?”
“Of course. Just not right now.”
I don’t understand where emotions go if you deny them. Do they wither or molder or gather strength underground? Being nervous this evening makes me less warm and comforting than I want to be. I want to be graciously distracting, but all the time I am worrying about Donna and resenting worrying about her.
Probably she didn’t go out with the towny. Probably Peter called and she’s seeing him. Right now they are in bed together celebrating my removal from that charged space between them. I can’t say that my presence did Howie any good today, but his mother appreciated it and I owe him many good turns. It was me he asked to keep him company through the funeral and the burial, not Dick, not Bolognese. I am a little proud.
Maybe he would rather have asked Alberta on whom he has a crush worthy if totally futile. Alberta is as conventional in her ideas about love and marriage as she is radical in her economic politics, and would never consider a man seven years her junior. A sect is a religion that only a few people belong to and a crush is a love that is felt only by one, I think, minimizing labels for what we don’t happen to share. My eyes keep straying to the big Pepsi-Cola clock over the door to the kitchen. I do wonder where Donna is. With Peter, of course. He’d want to see her today. Off with the old and on with the new. It’s just all going to be awkward as a full chamber pot in the middle of our bedroom floor.
I suddenly realize Julie got married that summer to Carl. But when? I can’t remember that. It was hot and Julie kept worrying that it would rain. All I have is a snapshot of the three of us. Julie is grinning and has her arms around both of us. Her dress is white tulle and sticks out alarmingly. I remember she wore three or four crinolines under it, the stiff petticoats that were fashionable then and stiffened by allowing sugar water to dry on them. There am I on her left in the notorious dress. Looking at it now I still don’t understand what Peter was objecting to, but many years and a couple of husbands have taught me that when somebody wants out, even the caviar is too salty. On the right, Donna stands shielding her eyes from the sun. Something strange is happening to the old snapshots and Donna is fading. You cannot read her features at all because she and the landscape behind her are escaping from the paper into a featureless glare. In the next photo beside it, Julie awkwardly holds Carl, Jr., wrapped in a blanket, as she stands in front of a brand-new tract house.
I am sure Donna will be in our room. Across the hall someone is taking a bath. Wanda is chatting on the phone. Upstairs on the third floor Ravel’s Bolero plays loud. She is not in our room.
When Wanda hangs up, I grab her. “Do me a favor. I beg you.”
“Absolutely, kid.” She grins, sitting spread-legged in paint-stained jeans on the stairs. “Name your poison. Who do you want bumped off?”
“Quite a few people, actually, but I’ll settle for one phone call. If you call the number I give you in Detroit, just ask if Donna’s there. If he asks who you are, just say you’re a friend from her house. If you get her on the phone, just ask where I am, you’re trying to find me. I’m just trying to locate her.”
“So why can’t you call her yourself?”
“Because of the male person who may answer the phone. Do it for me, Wanda.”
“Okay, toots. But remember, the celibate life is the simple life.” She dials Peter’s number. Donna is not there but Peter is. So much for that gambit.
I go back to our room. My scalp is lead. The backs of my hands itch. Every time I look at the clock it is ten after nine. I have to fight the desire to call Howie and urge him to come back to keep me company. I have made Minouska nervous till she prowls the room like my black anxiety embodied. I cluck and call but she will not come. Only flattens her ears and stares, flicking her skinny tail. She keeps counting her two kittens. I no longer even wish Donna back, but only that I did not suspect where she is.
I am scared to the bone now. What is she doing to herself, and do I have to watch, to participate? Tendrils creep in my neck, tightening around my eyes. Glass ashtray heaped with butts. The one I stole from the sweetshop long ago to match her boosted teapot. Spiral that has not come to rest. I chain-smoke till my mouth stinks.
The door opens slowly. Stiffly, fists clenched, Donna stands with her head hanging forward as if it were loose. The pen falls from my hand. She steps into the room and then gripping my desk chair, vomits. She turns, shaking her head, to walk a few steps and sit on the edge of her twin bed. Her chin is stained with something dark and caked. Blood? As she writhes sideways and begins vomiting again, I shove the wastebasket before her. Long after her stomach is empty she gags, her muscles jerking.
I sponge her face, take off the crumpled dress, torn in the hem, bodice smeared with dust and grease. Then I clean the floor, the chair, the basket. Smell of vomit thick in the room. I open the windows high. “What happened?” Ritualistic phrase. I ask it in dreams. Her teeth are chattering. Swollen spots that will be bruises mark her arm that lies limp on the sheet. Her panties are missing and on her brassiere are spots of what has to be blood, although it does not seem to be from her breasts. I reject this nightmare in which I lay out her body, smoothing the sheet. I am exhausted. Her face is badly swollen.
“What happened?” I repeat. “Are you hurt?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
“Are you bleeding anywhere?”
“I don’t know.” She writhes in the bed. “My back hurts bad.”
Gently I turn her over. More bruises. A cut on her right buttock. I get antiseptic and sponge it.
When I turn her back to face me, her eyes focus for the first time. “He had a car tonight.” Voice small and pallid, wondering. “I said I had to talk to him.”
“I thought you’d see Peter tonight.”
“He didn’t call. I couldn’t see him, being guilty…. I went through the whole routine how I was ashamed and I’d never done anything like it. I tried to flatter him, saying I got carried away.” She pauses. “My mouth tastes awful.”
“Want a glass of water? Tea? I could make you tea?”
“I couldn’t keep it down…. He said we’d go eat a pizza and talk. Then he parked by the river. I got scared. I left his car. He came after. He wanted to and I wouldn’t.”
“Why didn’t you leave?”
“We were out of town by the river. He caught me by the arm and he wouldn’t let go of me. I kept telling him to take me home. He kept saying I did it with him once already so what difference did it make?” She stops, leaning to spit blood into the basket. “He kept on.”
“Did he break a tooth?”
“I can’t tell yet. I fought so hard, Stu! I never thought men could really rape you, if you fought.” She twists under the sheet. “He wouldn’t stop. I held him off till my arms were so sore I couldn’t raise them. God, my back hurts. I think I pulled something.”
“Let me call a doctor. Or take you to health service.”
“No! I’m too ashamed. I don’t want this on a record.”
“Why should you be ashamed? You didn’t rape him.”
“I couldn’t scream. I can’t explain. I was afraid to. I was afraid he’d kill me if I screamed. He kept slapping my face when I tried to bite him. I had a nosebleed.”
The blood on her brassiere. “Donna, Donna …” I take her head in my lap. As if the touch released her, she begins to cry. Tears soak through my skirt, fitting it to my thigh like a warm poultice. I hug her frail head. “Donna, it’s all right now. You’re safe. And you didn’t give in.” I hardly listen to what I mumble. Tears flow across my thigh like blood from a female wound. At last she is inert and her breathing eases. Thinking she is asleep, I pick up her clothing to deal with it, but she stirs again.
“Afterward I got up as soon as I could move and I started to walk toward town. He kept insisting I get in the car. I wouldn’t. But then I was scared to walk on with my clothes all torn and messed up and my mouth bleeding, in the dark. Finally I
did get in the car. Then when we drove into town, at a traffic light, I jumped out. He left the car there and he ran right after me down the street.”
“Did he catch you?”
“No. I had a real head start by the time he parked. But I could hear him yelling. Stu, go look out the window and see if he’s still there, outside the house.”
The streetlight falls on a couple embracing under the low boughs of a sugar maple. “No one’s there.”
Restlessly she stirs, passes her hand over her eyes. “It’s terrifying to feel helpless. That someone can just take you and use you like that.”
“It hurt?”
“Like being torn. How it must hurt those young girls, virgins.” She holds the pillow against her. “But I didn’t give in!”
“You didn’t.” I stroke her hair. “Don’t talk. Lie still.”
“Promise you won’t tell anyone. Ever. Ever!”
“Donna, I won’t, but why? Being raped is terrible and painful, but you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Everybody makes jokes about it. Everybody thinks that’s what you really want. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want him. I hated him. I was scared of him. I was terrified lying there. I was terrified he’d do something even worse and cut me up or kill me. I was sure he was going to kill me and leave my body there.”
I stroke her head, her thin silky hair. “Shhhh,” I say. “I’ll never tell anyone. Never.” The night is small and hot with a lid like a casserole holding us. In a dull soothing voice I try to lull her, stroking. “Tomorrow is Monday and the week begins. I have a paper due on Donne’s ‘Extasie.’ My lecturer Fells spent the hour Friday deciding Donne had never achieved a true mystical experience—such as I’m sure he does every morning before breakfast on dry toast—and could be dismissed as a Catholic manque.” Donna snorts, her body unclenching slightly. My tongue clacks in my mouth like a dried piece of leather. “Fells’s method is to work our way through the body of somebody’s work, like Donne, logging as we go, finding the flaws in all the supposed great works, until one or two absolutely perfect masterpieces are left standing, and then move on with our chain saws to the next mountain.”
The toilet flushes again and again, our housemates clatter upstairs. Minouska comes to explore her, sniffing. Goes back to her kittens. Donna’s fine hair tangles under my hand. Finally she sleeps. Maybe she does need Peter. Maybe he can do better than I at keeping her alive and well. I seem to have failed her. I sit on while the amorous lowing of the front-porch leavetaking rises and falls, a gelid grey despair weighting me quiet and still.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
OLD ALLIES WAVER AND NEW ALLIANCES FORM
MONDAY DONNA DOES not go to her classes. Exhausted, she lies in bed. I tell the other inhabitants of the co-op that she has a summer cold. No one is markedly curious. It is the end of August and some of the women like Donna and me will be here in the fall, some like Alberta are just finishing up and ready to leave Ann Arbor and some are only taking summer courses. The house has a loose disjointed feel, so that no one pays as close attention to others’ welfare as in the winter. Her bruises and weeping are invisible.
Monday evening after supper while Donna is napping, a teacher here for the summer calls up the stairwell, “Donna Stuart, Donna Stuart, you have a visitor.”
Peter? Grimly, making myself smile ferociously at the treads, I march down. The guy standing in the hall is not familiar to me. Then he is. I know exactly who he is, about five nine and big-boned, his hair in a blond ducktail. For a moment he reminds me of Matt, but Matt soft in the waist and slope-shouldered. Awkward in the hall. “You get the hell out of here,” I say. “You’ve done enough to her!” I stop three steps from the bottom to keep some height on him.
“Who’re you? Where’s Donna?”
“Sick in bed from what you did to her, what do you think? You son of a bitch. I’m her cousin. If you ever show your face around here again—”
“Go on, what do you know about it? She went out with me twice.”
A coat tree stands in the corner of the hall. As I glare at him, I am suddenly moving forward past him to seize it, raincoats, umbrellas and all, and swing it. It hits him a glancing blow on the shoulder, tumbling him backward into the wall. I swing the wooden coat tree around again and he is out the door and down the steps. I follow to the screen door, weak in the knees, my rage gone as it came, out of nowhere, to nowhere. “And don’t come back!” I yell, wanting to sound fierce.
The guy at the wheel of the silver convertible out front is laughing as my victim climbs in the other side. Then the dark-haired driver takes off with the obligatory screech. I pick up the raincoats and umbrellas scattered over the hall. The teacher stands in the doorway to the living room, watching me with an expression of alarm. “As you were,” I say to the coat tree as I stand it in its corner.
I feel better as I climb upstairs, less helpless. Donna sits up. “Where were you?” she asks.
“Just talking to Howie.”
“You like being one of the boys.” She shakes her head sadly. “Don’t you think they ultimately unsex you?”
“Nobody else can either give me my sex or take it from me,” I say companionably, perching on the edge of her bed. “Want some tea now?”
When I hear that Francis is home for Labor Day, I make immediate arrangements to drive in with Howie, who is moving his mother and grandmother into a small garden apartment out Seven Mile Road, about a mile and a quarter from where Mike’s mother lives.
When I walk into the tiny square living room, Francis is sprawled on the sofa with his feet hooked over the arm reading The Racing Form. He glances up and looks me over. Rolling onto his elbow with his lazy grin, he then recognizes me. “Goddamn it’s you,” he says accusingly. “Jill!”
I hug him but he is stiff with me. Skinny, skinny. Because I am so pleased to see him with his tough grace, his way of moving and sitting, never even flicking the ash from his butt without style, it is a while before I notice how bad he looks. “Where’s Mom and Dad?” I drop on the couch turned sideways to absorb as much of him as possible.
“Doing the shopping…. So, you’re a coed? You’re going to college and taking courses and rah-rah football games and all that?”
“Aw come one, Francis. I sell my football tickets—”
“Yeah? I could get you a good price for them, if I’m around.”
“I’d like that. Francis, what happened to you? Where were you?” I count years on my fingers. I haven’t seen him since I was fifteen. “When I wrote you at that Texas address, the letters just came back.”
“I was in business down Méjico way …” he says. Then he looks at me, his dark eyes that are my mother’s and mine squinting with wry amusement. “Actually I got busted.”
“You were in jail?”
“In Durango.”
“That’s in Mexico or Texas?”
“That’s in hell, that’s where it is. But don’t you tell her. This is strictly between you and I.”
“I wouldn’t dream of telling.” But I bet you tell Mother yourself. “How long have you been out?”
“About six months. If I would’ve come up any sooner, she’d have smelled the jail on me. When I crawled out of there on my belly I looked like a starved rat.”
“You look fine now,” I say, part truth, part lie. He’s a good-looking man on a small-framed lithe model. His curly black hair is receding a little and he is so thin I could cut my face on his chin. He looks years older than he ought, older than Leo, lines around the eyes, lines scoring the mouth. As soon as Mother gets some weight back on him, he will look more like himself. I tell him about the HUAC play we put on and what we’re doing in PAF, for Francis is the only one in the family I like to talk politics with. He’s a left-wing anarchist.
Now he’s skeptical. “Bunch of college kids, what’s the point? They won’t do nothing. Now you put that on at Ford’s, you’re getting someplace.”
“You have to reach everyone,” I
argue. “College is where I am. A lot of people go now, Francis, not just rich kids. Donaldson, our faculty sponsor, points out that most people graduating college will be working for wages. They’ll be doing cleaner work than their parents but with no more power or control.”
“Is he the guy she said you got mixed up with?”
“Professor Donaldson? Of course not. What was she telling you anyhow?”
“Some guy knocked you up and wouldn’t get hitched then. Why didn’t you come back home?”
“What for, Francis? I didn’t have the baby. Why don’t you move back home? It’s a little dull here for both of us, right?”
“It’s not the same thing,” he says stubbornly, making me wonder if Mother has set him to trying to talk me back to Detroit. “I’m not about to get knocked up.”
“No, Francis, you look more like you been knocked down and knocked out. I am not about to get pregnant anymore either.”
“Yeah? You telling me you learned your lesson and you’re running around on the loose and you don’t go near no guys?”
“No. I’m telling you I got myself a diaphragm. Now lay off, Francis. I haven’t asked about your sex life, in jail or out.”
“Jesus,” he says. “I go away for a while and everything turns to shit. You think you know what you’re doing. I’ve known a hell of a lot of women, and I know what happens to girls who think they can hit the road like men.”
“Aw come on, Francis, you’ve known a hell of a lot of whores. And so have I. We both have had good friends on the street—”
“Your old pal Marcie …” He draws his finger across his throat.
“What do you mean? Somebody beat up on her?”
“Dead. Two weeks ago. Guess you don’t keep up with home.”
“Who killed her?” It occurs to me as I say it that I’m being silly. But what disease kills a twenty-year-old? Car accident?
