Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  “She killed her. ODed. Too pure horse rode her into the wall.” We both contemplate the wall before us. “You see what comes down.”

  “I don’t sell my body. School’s interesting—I’m not so bored I need to do drugs. I’m financially independent of Mother and Dad.”

  “Mom says they send you twenty-five a month.”

  “I sure can use it. But you’re not imagining that pays for anything essential. Francis, you been home a couple of days and already you think you know more about my life than I do. That’s like Leo.”

  “Bullshit. She’s worried sick about you.”

  “Now let her worry about you.” I point to his guitar in the corner. “Learn any Mexican songs?”

  “I don’t know who’s worse out of tune, that or me.” He flexes his fingers on his knees.

  “What did you get busted for?”

  “None of your business, little sister. You never ask that.” He laughs shortly. “Just a little of my business.” He feels the sharp edge of his chin. “I was in a fight.”

  He could well have been and yet I do not believe him. For getting in a fight, they don’t put you in jail that long. We all have bad tempers and strike out, but never with the loss of reason it takes to maim or kill, unless it was self-defense. He offers me a beer and I sip politely. I want Francis to admire me, how I have grown, how I have changed, and to treat me as an equal at last. But I don’t think he is going to. I want to wrest approval from him. I have pulled myself way uphill from the tortured self-doubting cowardly waif he last saw. He must approve of me; he must.

  Things remain awkward, good by flashes. The best time is Labor Day when Francis and I leave the union picnic early for one given by his Italian anarchist friends. The food is better with wine instead of beer. Francis even dances with me. As always he is a graceful dancer but now I can keep up with him. Well behaved, a perfect sister, I flirt with the old men and not with the young ones and generally act with only a splinter of myself.

  As I climb the steps of the co-op with my suitcase and return to Howie’s car for a box of food from home, I am curious. A new graduate student housemother. Half the house will be strangers. As I lug the suitcase upstairs, an orange-haired girl in shorts is standing on a chair in my room doing something to the ceiling fixture. “Hi,” I say, “can I help? What are you doing to our light?”

  “I’m just putting on a new shade. No, thanks, I can do it. Are you going to live in the house too?”

  “Er. Did Donna switch off rooms to another one?”

  “No, this is her room. Hey, Donna!”

  She hurries from the bathroom scrubbing a towel over her wet hair. “Stu? How was Detroit?”

  “What’s up here?”

  “This is Rosellen, Stu. Rosellen’s going to live with me. Our schedules are in such conflict—you’re up so late and out so often. But there’s a great single room on third. I hauled your stuff up there and moved you in. You can have it to yourself.”

  I stare at her. “To myself.”

  “You know how I fuss about neatness.” Finally she looks me in the face. “You know it won’t work. The two of us in one little room again. We need some space, desperately.”

  Rosellen looks from one to the other, smoothing her bangs. “You used to room together? I mean, I could move—”

  “No, no,” I say. “Fine.” I pick up my suitcase.

  Donna follows me into the hall, asking softly, “You’re not angry?”

  “Angry?” I shake my head. The only feeling I can locate is guilty relief and a little amusement that she should have moved me into a room by myself: if not her for companion, none. I climb slowly, turned inward and waiting for the lurch of my heart, but only that shoddy relief spreads like a flowering weed. Our great experiment in honest intensity is declaring bankruptcy. Our sisterhood has been proved fictional. She isn’t my burden any longer. If there is to be a recording of loss, it does not come then.

  I walk around the third-floor hall. First door, Wanda typing. She waves. Then comes the little room under the eaves I thought Donna meant, but inside a young woman is giving herself a home permanent. In the third room a heavyset girl is doing exercises with thuds that shake the bottles on the dresser, while Lynn tunes a guitar. Last door shut. I knock. Walk into a burst of Greek dance music. My books are piled on the floor. The closet door stands wide and I see my clothes hanging there. The Greek record is playing on my little turntable. In the rocker sits Stephanie Barboulis, feet curled under her, marking time to the beat with her plump shoulders.

  “Welcome!” She smiles from under thick bronze lashes. “I saw your cousin moving your stuff next door, so I commandeered you. I persuaded Joyce, whom I’d agreed to live with just the day before, that she really wanted to live alone. I couldn’t manage her, really, she’s a prude. She kisses a poodle doll with bells on before she goes to sleep.”

  “How do you know I don’t? Actually I prefer Basque sheep dogs. I bet you could have bought me direct from Donna, cheap.”

  “Because you’re a poet. I used to see you in the Union with the great Mike Loesser and that wild-looking painter, Lennie. I posed for him once, you know. I think he had a crush on me.”

  “I used to see you around with Rob Prewitt.”

  “It’s a mistake to go out with performers, they’re in love with themselves and everybody chases them.” Her straight sleek hair falls shoulder length, exposing her broad face with thick straight brows and big brown eyes with light green flecks in them, like little fish, I think. She wears a finely embroidered peasant blouse with drawstring neck. As she laughs it goes plunging off one shoulder.

  Out of my suitcase I pull a bottle of white lightning I bought from Freddie. Freddie is working for a guy who runs a still in his garage. Francis and I went there together to buy cheap booze. Finally the only way Francis acknowledges my grown-up status is that he will drink with me, on the porch late at night drinking the corn likker out of a brown bag under the glider, as if that fooled Mother inside watching TV.

  Chin out I announce policy. “I never make my bed. I keep late hours. My desk is messy but I’ll chop off your fingers if you touch it.” Reversing old promises to Donna.

  “Of course.” She throws up her arms, hopping out of the rocker to come skipping barefoot across to me. “Don’t worry! Why don’t we have a drink? To celebrate the new conspiracy of Stuart and Barboulis.”

  The tyrant in me blossoms. “Connivers, freeloaders and arty bums.” I pour a finger of the rotgut into two kitchen tumblers.

  “Yassou.” Stephanie takes a healthy swallow and gags. “I guess I don’t care too much for it. Not much flavor.”

  The flavor of molten steel. It tastes like my mother’s first husband, I think, but keep that to myself as I nod patronizingly. “Take small sips.” The green-flecked eyes admire. I look around. She has been unpacking out of an ancient black steamer trunk. “You know, we won’t be able to breathe till you get that monster trunk out. We better get Wanda to help us.”

  “I have a date with a man I met buying books.” Pouring a palmful of cologne she rubs it in her hair. “I prefer older men, don’t you? He’s a graduate student in sociology. I’ll get him to move it down.”

  “Instant captivity? I bet we live with it for a month.”

  Smiling broadly she hitches up her petticoat into the waistband of her skirt to keep it from showing where the elastic is shot. “Don’t bet. Wouldn’t want to take money off a poet. We each have our little talents.”

  By suppertime, the trunk is moved.

  We whitewash the sloping walls and make curtains of red burlap with the bottoms cut raggedly. Our clutters blend. We pool food, clothes, strategies for survival. Together we sneak into the astronomy department tea for free doughnuts, sociology tea for coffee cake, and when one of us goes out to supper, she brings home extra rolls in her purse. Stephanie lives on a slim allowance plus her summer bank balance, I on my new scholarship and a monthly pittance for working two evenings and Saturday
s in the library.

  Yes, we do fine. But I always hear Donna’s laugh bark in the hall and I question with a rawness in my chest what she is reacting to. I am always passing her door to see her bent fiercely over her work, making me wonder what is striking pleasure or defiance from her. Minouska, glossy and sinuous, curling at her feet or on her lap, comes up to see me far oftener than Donna does. I tell myself watching Donna chop gizzards in the kitchen that I’ve been replaced by good girl scout Rosellen and a cat. Every Friday after her last class, Donna packs a small suitcase and I hear the hornet buzz of the Sprite arriving. Peter waits and she runs out to him. Sunday evening he returns her. Out of some surprising delicacy, he rarely enters the house. If I did not see her driven off by him every Friday and returned every Sunday, I would not know they were involved.

  The core of falsity in the search for love: a woman gives herself to a man as if that got rid of the problem of making an identity, with a most personal god to reward, pardon or damn. No matter who holds me in his arms my eyes are brown, my teeth poor, my poems unwritten; I must conclude I am more honest alone. On the dustheap and junkyard of my desk I prop my elbows. I will find my work. I have talked and talked, smeared my world with borrowed words and made nothing truly new. Let love strike like lightning if it wants me. I have enough else to learn.

  As I return to the co-op just at curfew, Stephanie is saying good night on the porch to Roger Ardis, a lean paper clip of a man with a wispy beard that reminds me of lichen. Whatever he is saying makes her laugh bubble up frequently, but she breaks from him to follow me inside. My sweater, her skirt, my striped knee socks, her glass beads, if ownership remains. We clatter upstairs. I start blocking out a paper on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Facing me she opens a book but her eyes fix on the window. A pencil loosely held between her blunt fingers with their nails of burnt orange taps, taps.

  As we undress she says, “I don’t normally confide in women, they’re so catty and hypocritical. I mean, you can’t shout the truth out the window, but you have to tell it to yourself, no? How many affairs have you had?”

  “With men? One that meant something—Mike—and one that only worked at it.”

  “Is that counting your boyfriend?”

  “No such beast.” Turning out the light, I crawl into the lower bunk.

  “That guy I always see you with? Broad-shouldered, with curly hair and glasses. He was in that play—the one I was supposed to be in but Donna stole my part after Rob broke up with me.”

  “That’s Howie. I’ve known him since high school. Listen, I’m not getting mixed up with anybody. It breaks my back.”

  “I thought you’d had lots more!” The springs groan as she rolls over to peer down through the dark. “I’d heard you’d slept with everybody in PAF. I must say I wondered about Bolognese. But I suppose if you were making it a complete set?”

  “Untrue.” I am a little alarmed. “A complete set of nothing. Never touched a one of them.”

  “He’s actually sort of intriguing. I wonder if his skin is cold. He makes me think of Count Dracula.”

  “He’s very bright,” I say loyally. “And political.”

  “Then no trespassing for me! I had enough of that with Rob. He used to call me his vacation. But he treated me as a child-mistress—he’s only twenty-four. He was never serious with me. It was perfectly evident he wasn’t even thinking of marrying me.”

  “Did you want to marry him? If you don’t share his politics—”

  “Of course not. A folksinger? I wanted him to want to. Can you imagine what my pa would say? He’s looking for a suitable husband for me. Greek, about forty-five and in business. I’ll fight that battle when I get to it. He’ll leave me in peace as long as I stay in college. But don’t you think Donaldson is cute?”

  “I adore him. But I always think of him as being permanently on some level involved with Alberta Mann.”

  “It’s true, they almost did get married. But then he wouldn’t. I bet he’s hard to pin down! Don’t tell anybody else I’m not a virgin, okay?”

  “In this house? Besides, nobody’s likely to think you’re one.”

  “It’s one thing to suspect. Never tell a woman anything you don’t want a man you’re interested in to know.” She sighs. “So you don’t think there are many? Rosellen wipes the toilet seat before she takes a crap because she honestly believes that’s how you get VD. Donna sure isn’t….” Stephanie’s voice drifts down through my drowsiness, counting me to sleep with numbered maidenheads.

  Donna pats herself with bath powder, staring, absorbed, at the pale radiance of her thighs. “Whenever I run into you, you’re with Howie lately.”

  “Why not? He’s my best friend.” I climb into the full bathtub.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t end up with a single.” She shaves her leg in the basin, stroking the flesh gingerly with a razor. “Honestly, I really thought you would. I moved your stuff into that single and I don’t know what happened.”

  “I like old Stephanie. She’s alive.”

  “Is that it? See if you can get her to cut down on the dime-store jewelry and the—gasp—dime-store perfume.”

  “That’s her style. It works for her just fine.” And how can you take girl scout Rosellen, big-eyed and banged and ready for Junior Achievement? A life on the Welcome Wagon. I start to laugh suddenly, wanting to make Donna see how ludicrous we are, both naked as worms with the words proceeding between us in carefully wrapped packages.

  Maybe she does see. “I know that Roger Ardis. He had a wife. It may be he’s misplaced her…. Damn!” Blood bubbles from her calf. She dabs wildly at the cut with toilet paper, panicked.

  “Let it coagulate,” I say. “It’ll stop by itself.”

  “It’s not stopping.” Setting down the razor she rubs steam from the mirror, eyeing herself in that hostile appraisal. “I want to get married! Tomorrow isn’t soon enough. I want it done with. I’m sick of this. Julie’s pregnant already and I’m still running in circles.”

  Stephanie sticks her head in. “Greetings. Get out of the tub and let me in, or I’ll be late.”

  “There’s no hot water. This is hardly tepid.”

  Wrapped in her mandarin robe she plumps down on the toilet seat. “Guess I’ll stay dirty. Back to the earth.”

  Resolutely ignoring Stephanie, Donna continues, “Sick of meaningless shopping around for a decent relationship. Beginning and beginning and losing it all every time. I feel too old for this. I want it out of the way. I want to move on! This business of dating and affairs and breaking up consumes my life when I ought to be free to move into a profession. It’s mounting an offensive on two fronts at once.” She dabs at the still bleeding cut.

  “Bullshit.” I pull the stopper and climb out. “You never can have anybody, like you put them in a box and go on to bigger things. Plus you’re talking about market-economy sex: you invest in somebody and lose. Like what have you lost and what can you win? Loving is an action. You can’t have love, you can only do it.”

  A brief smile like a grimace. “Fine rhetoric, Stu. I do mean to have something, for a change. I’ve been had, quite enough.”

  “If you think adding Peter’s problems to your own will simplify your problems, you haven’t discovered life inside the Chinese box factory.”

  “When you really love someone, it’s simpler to be married.” She wraps a towel around her and goes out, leaving the door ajar, her leg still bleeding.

  Stephanie shuts it. “Paleface is getting the senior jitters.”

  “It’s a mood. Buy now, pay later.” What does Donna want from me, an hour of intimacy a week to keep in shape?

  “I’ll never understand why you’re so close. Family ties are gratuitous to me. I have a kid sister and a married sister and they’re no more like me than two strangers.” Cheerfully, squishing upstairs before me in loose slippers, “Besides, blondes fade early, you know.”

  At the turn I look back. The door to her room open, Donna lies o
n the bed wrapped in the towel. With her cheek cradled in the cat’s flank she strokes while Minouska carefully washes her flaxen head, licking and pausing to sneeze and trying to settle the fine hair. The look on Donna’s face scares me, while Minouska shudders with pleasure. She has fallen into good times. Five days a week she is Donna’s only intimate. Weekends she comes up to me, plaintive, questing, looking for Donna around and around the room before she settles for my lap or my bunk.

  “There’s got to be a cutoff point. There’s got to.” Howie eats the pizza as fast as I do but he is glowering.

  “It’d be easier if you weren’t so close to home.”

  “Well, I’m not going to med school here whatever happens.”

  “What’s keeping them in Detroit?”

  “My mother’s job and my grandmother’s circle of friends. She must have forty old ladies she visits with. My mother’s more isolated. She has friends on the job only…. Ah, Jill, I’ve given them a year. I can’t carry them anymore. I can’t.”

  “Why do you feel so guilty?”

  “Wouldn’t you?” He takes another slice.

  “I’ve had to put space between me and my parents. There’s distance anyhow between me and my father—we’ve never been intimate. He didn’t take much interest in a girl-child. My mother, it’s more like after a divorce. Puberty separated us.” Growing a rival woman’s body, that was my sin. The blood came between us as if I had begun menstruating to fault her. No more hugging, no more being kissed and cuddled. Suddenly it was all, “Sit with your knees together, are you trying to show men everything you’ve got?” And, “Exactly where did you go after school? It doesn’t take two hours to go to the corner and back.” No more the posy in her garden, I was something to be policed, both evil in myself and potentially inspiring of evil from men.

  “I love my folks. I want to go on having a decent relationship with them. I don’t want to live like you do.” He rakes his hand through his tight curls. “I want to feel connected. But I’m drained. I haven’t done a goddamn thing for a year but my classes and them.”

  “Why can’t you just say that to them?”