Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  “I do have a kind of TV.” I turn out the lights and motion him to sit on my couch/bed facing the windows, whose shades I raise. “I got the idea when I saw the man across the way watching me through binoculars. I’m serious, Howie. Just look.”

  “At what? Hey, what’s going on? Are the cats killing the dogs or are the dogs killing the cats?”

  “I have counted eighteen different and recognizable cats, who all make love or fight every night. Think, Howie, how quiet the nights would be if cats practiced oral intercourse! Then there are all the dogs chained up in yards of garden apartments who bark at the eighteen cats.”

  He points at Minouska, lying on his belly. “Does she get jealous and want some too?”

  “She listens, but she views them as the slums from which she rose.” She will not go out unless I take her.

  “There’s a bald guy playing guitar.” Howie is getting involved in my program.

  “He has a friend with a banjo and another with an accordion.”

  “Who are those two guys who walk around in towels? Don’t they ever pull the shades down?”

  “They never wear clothes and they never pull down the shades. See, there’s Binoculars. But the man who sits at the kitchen table with his hands over his ears while his wife yells, they’re not home. And the Puerto Ricans who play dominoes are off someplace. The old man always wins. And the woman who yells Shut Up that Noise, she must be on vacation too.” I kill time looking out whenever I am stuck. Red and yellow bricks, bricks plastered or painted, walls crowded with side-by-side windows. Flowerpots, flower boxes, plants on ledges and fire escapes. Clotheslines on pulleys to windows. Small patches of gardens sport a statue, an outdoor grill, rusting metal chairs, graveled paths.

  “Why are you living way down here, Stu? And why alone?”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  “It always grated on me.” He frowns. “How did I pick it up?”

  Three guesses. “I like living alone. You used to enjoy it yourself.”

  “I didn’t enjoy it. I was just too lazy to move.”

  “How hot it is.” I tug at my dress. “You’re always talking about your laziness, when you work harder than anyone I know.”

  He stretches his arms over the pillows. “I’m talking about a deeper laziness.”

  I gather Minouska nervously into my lap to be caressed. “I’m tired of so many lives impinging directly on me.”

  “Whose fault is that? You love gossip and intrigue. You have to be involved with everybody. Now you’re playing hermit.”

  “Hardly!” Caressing the cat feels suddenly too seductive so I put her down. A heavy sigh of wind moves through the room. Far-off thunder rumbles on the edge of hearing like a half-understood warning. “I’ve just never had a place of my own. Why are we glaring at each other?”

  He falls back, passing his hand over his face. “Why can’t it rain and get it over with?”

  Afraid he will become bored and leave, I search my life for anecdotes that can be rendered amusing. I cut myself into hors d’oeuvres. What does he think, hands crossed on his belly and only a grey glint under his lashes to show he is awake? I am his clown, while he imagines Stephanie. I want to fall on him in an attack both hostile and sexual and chew through his thick throat.

  With a clap of thunder, the storm strikes. I find myself crouching on the floor with my hands over my ears. Minouska rushes under the flap of bedspread to cower there. As the curtains blow in a surge of rain, Howie trots to shut the windows. A stab of lightning blazes over the housetops, the ailanthus trees dash and bow. He stands grinning at the lightning that crackles in a cascade of tumbling thunder blocks and driving rain. “Turn out the light again so we can watch.”

  A river coils through the air bearing leaves and twigs and paper, beating the treetops sideways and pouring over the roofs. The phosphorescent violet blaze of lightning turns the world on and off like a neon sign. Gradually the rain quiets to a steady downpour. He turns with a grunt of satisfaction, finishing his wine. “That was fun.”

  “Lucky that storms aren’t like fires. People who think they’re pretty can’t go around setting them.” I put on a record, Bach concerto for violin and oboe, but leave the lights off. “The wall’s hard,” I say. “You can put your head in my lap if you want.” Like, take a cookie.

  “Sure,” he says with bland amiability and moves his head. As the music winds around us, joy melts through me to have him here, no matter why, dimly perceived in the all-mothering dark: his wide Slavic face, his grey eyes, his chest with the breath that gives a little ride to the glasses perched there. Love turns me to a lump, while the music, rich and sinuous, gives cover to my silence.

  When the record finishes, he lights a match to look at his watch. “Late. Damned late. I’ve overstayed. With the rain still coming down and I’m tired. Two subways and a hike on each end.”

  “You’ll get soaked. It’s coming down buckets.”

  Together we stand looking at the rain while we gravely agree that it is plentiful and wet. “You could look for a cab. If you think you can get one in the rain. Of course, you can stay if you like.” I switch on a lamp and we stand blinking. I hope that in the light my proposition will sound innocuous.

  He stares at the rain. “I can’t hack the subway tonight. It’s too damned far…. A cab is my food money this week.”

  “Whatever you prefer….”

  “I’m tired. I moved twenty-five boxes today.” He opens the windows on the rain and sticks out his hand. “You wouldn’t mind if I stayed? Really?”

  “Why should I?” I ask lamely. “By all means.” I hardly know what I am saying.

  While he is in the toilet I make up the bed with clean sheets. Nothing is more innocent than his staying. I slap the pillow flat. I don’t care! From my jewelry case I take my diaphragm and slip it in the pocket of my robe, putting that over my arm.

  When I come out of the bathroom in my turn, he has tossed his trousers and shirt over a chair and lies with only his arms above the sheet. He offers with gruff shyness, “I can take a blanket and sleep on the floor.”

  But he has already got into my bed. “This is fine,” I say loftily, turning off the light and hanging my cotton dress over his clothes. “The mattress isn’t bad.” I lay me down and there we are eighteen inches apart. I cannot tell if it is still raining out or only dripping on the roof.

  “Good night.” There absurdly we lie. I am stiff awake, too overwound to keep my eyes shut. My eyelids keep jerking open, window shades on too-tight rollers. I wish I could think of something provocative to discuss that would keep him awake, but I cannot stick two words together. My flesh prickles with nervous itches. The side toward him burns. Is he asleep? His breathing is deep and regular, but suspiciously so, as if overacted. My lungs have stopped working; they are stuffed with down.

  Desperately I want to sneeze and kick and scratch and buck and roll, to make him as uncomfortable and as insomniac as I. Why did I invite him to stay? I am sufficiently punished for my conniving. I am weary to tears and the traffic in the street seems to whine in my head. I will never sleep.

  Yet, late, hours later, I do. At least momentarily we both sleep because when we wake it is together at the same time locked in each other’s arms. With a sharp, wholly awake groan he tightens his hold, as our mouths find each other. I know immediately like the cutting of a veil that we have been involved in the same conspiracy; the readiness that meets mine is also from something long held back and rendered forbidden, except in the borderland between waking and sleep. We pull at the shields of underwear, separating only to shove those oddments away to the foot of the bed and close again.

  With heedless impetus he turns me on my back, his weight shifting over, and butts blindly till I part my thighs and move down to take hold of him, hard and stumpy, and slide him into me. Together we exhale a long breath and our mouths join more gently. Like someone exhausted after a long climb, he lies unmoving in me, just the pulse of him. Then with a
sigh he takes his mouth from mine and settles up, nestling my face between his neck and shoulders, and slowly we begin. Out of my mouth pressed to his salty skin a soft thick cry escapes and hovers over us.

  “I don’t mean friends,” Karlie said. “Look, you don’t have to act protective with me.” She leaned back on the table, ever closer to the butter dish.

  I moved the butter to safety. “But that’s what survived. I value friendship a hell of a lot—”

  “Then you weren’t really in love with him, you’re saying?”

  “I was, terribly. That never wore off. He had … tremendous physical presence.”

  “I’ve seen photos. He wasn’t exactly tall, thin and handsome.”

  “What makes a man a good lover isn’t looks or leanness. Maybe it’s the opposite.” I patted my belly. “Thin is not my ideal, anyhow.”

  Her foot swung in its scuffed running shoe. “Was he the great love of your life?”

  “No.” I grinned like a pumpkin. “Josh is. Haven’t you guessed?”

  She glared at me. “Did anybody at all really love him?”

  “Stephanie and Sarah and I—we all did, Karlie. He liked women who were scrappers—we all had a more tenacious grip on living than Howie ever had. We all survived him. We survived him very well—we couldn’t help it. But we all remember him. Strongly, fondly.”

  “And you’re all friends. That’s weird.”

  “Not to be friends would be weirder. In a political context, it’s easier.” If she wanted my life on a platter, she had to learn that only roasted piggies come that helpless, with apples in their gaping mouths. I used to confess, Karlie; I used to talk myself out all night. I wanted friends and lovers to accept me, to accept the things even I could not yet swallow or stomach. I suspect I wanted them to give me back to myself neatly structured and in luminous order. I have learned to do that myself fictitiously, the structuring, the order.

  “Nobody else has a Black aunt and a Jewish aunt and is supposed to be Greek and her father is a political saint!”

  Then I realized of course she didn’t want me on a platter, she wanted herself I might be useful to her, this fuzzy pubescent girl-child in whom I began to see a little of Howie, his bulldog persistence. “Why not stick around for a day or two? I have some photographs. Some letters.”

  “You’d show me the letters? Love letters?”

  “There’s love in them. But more discussing what we each were doing politically. Arguments about civil rights versus the war—the war in Vietnam,” I footnoted, “as a priority. The letters of writers are never truly private. Somebody’s going to edit them someday and everybody knows that.” Maybe Howie didn’t. I’m not sure he understood what I meant to do.

  “Can I see them? I don’t want to go home yet anyway.”

  I took her upstairs and rummaged through my files. I gave her the folders and sent her down to the tent to read while I went to work myself.

  In midafternoon Josh loomed over me with that tasty expression he gets when he feels I am not being correct, moral, generous enough and he is about to set me straight. “You have to open up with Karlie. She is his daughter.”

  Why didn’t I tell him right off about the letters? Partially I didn’t want him to waste the evening reading them and then twisting and turning in futile jealousy. Partially I wanted him to take me more on faith. We both get into that, wanting great love to be greater and absolute as a god carved from rock on an Egyptian hillside. “Everyone turns up again, Josh. Even the friends who went underground or moved to Japan to study Zen or married revolutionaries from Namibia all turn up except for the dead and sometimes even they come back. I’ve seen her three times—once in Truro in the fog I met her, out on the moors in a spot I try to avoid now when I’m alone.”

  “Did you ever see him?”

  “Howie? No. We mourned him so thoroughly. It was all talked out.”

  “Because he was a hero.”

  “After somebody’s dead you think of them as always dead, as if the story wouldn’t have come out all different if he’d not gone out that night and fallen into the ambush. The call said a sick child and the Klan was laying for him at the crossroads with shotguns as if murdering Howie could make a generation content to be pissed on. Now they’re all over the papers again.”

  “You should say all that to her.”

  “I guess so. I always think the young ones know more than they do.”

  I was making paella for supper when she asked me, “Did you and my father ever get together again after he married my mother? I mean, weren’t you ever lovers again?”

  I stirred and stirred the rice as it became translucent. “You know, Stephanie never asked me that. How come you ask?”

  “From the letters, I wondered. Didn’t you ever do it?”

  Only the living hurt; the dead don’t worry what you say about them. Their ears are full of mud. “No. I would’ve, but he was too loyal to Stephanie. He loved her too much.”

  She fixed me with a level skeptical gaze in which too I could read something of her father. “He wasn’t too loyal to have an affair with Aunt Sarah.”

  “It wasn’t an affair. They were working together and they were in danger together.”

  “Mmmm.” She stared at me, lowering her chin. “You people were all crazy, weren’t you?”

  “Honey, we were the sane ones. We still are.” I tasted my seasoning and added a few more threads of saffron. Alberta and clan were coming to supper and I determined to enlist Alberta in a history lesson. I began to get excited. I bet I had that old clasped-hand SNCC button in a drawer someplace and the song-books. I bet she doesn’t even know SNCC was the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. “This Little Light of Mine.” If only Alberta still played her banjo. “In the fifties we were all a little crazy, but we’ve been getting clearer and clearer ever since.” Even Josh didn’t have a grasp of the political history of the early sixties. For Alberta and me to share our common web of work and friendship with Karlie, with Josh, with her own kids, would be the best home movies we could dream up. And the paella was going to be superb.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  ONE, TWO, THREE, MANY

  SO WE PASS the night and Labor Day morning able to be gentle and inventive and curious now that the violent closing has torn the modesty long knit between us. I know too as I touch the corners of his wide mouth that we still ride the wave of impetus, before the slack when we have to talk. This shall be an only time, or else it represents the end of whatever innocence impulse can claim. No matter what happens, the sun has come into my flesh. I bask in his arms. Behind his half-closed eyes, a glint of milky blue-grey in the light spilling over us, a decision is made and I resign myself to it even as I argue and wheedle and promise with my body. From the ledge Minouska contemplates us. I want to incorporate this joining whole, drink it through my pores and reassemble it, already memory as it happens.

  Finally we rise. I could sacrifice a boar to him, decapitate an ox. I only make scrambled eggs, toast, drip coffee. He sits back from his breakfast yawning. Suddenly his posture stiffens. “Forgot to use anything! Is it too late?”

  I have always told him the truth. This would be a poor time to stop. “I have an evil mind. I put in my diaphragm.”

  “Oh.” He squeezes his nose. “I wish you hadn’t told me. We could use the myth that it happened in the dead of night. Slambang surprise.”

  “It only implied my readiness.”

  “Gee thanks. It was a long time coming.”

  With a chill of disappointment I look at his young slightly sullen morning face, realizing the decision I had imagined in his eyes is unmade. Thus far I have come with at least the shadow of Stephanie’s permission, the evening, the impulse. To ask more is to take what she would not permit if she could stop me. Nor am I sure I can reach him. I step around the table. “Surely you’ve made me pay for every bit of blindness, every bit and then some.”

  With a grunt deep in his chest he takes me on his lap an
d rocks me against him, hiding his face in my breasts. I feel rather than see the grimace that pulls it rigid. His breath touches me through the cotton. I stroke his sandy hair, thick and coarse as dune grass, curly as moss. A beach where we will go today to lie under the sky and stare at the lashing water.

  Tomorrow his classes begin. Tomorrow I call my temporary agency for my next assignment. Tomorrow we resume or we abstain. Today we pack a picnic lunch and ride the subway out to Rockaway, through Brooklyn and across the marshland. The day is flat and intense, like a photograph of itself, an effect of intense color and hollowness, not of emptiness but of strangeness, as if the little houses were secretly filled with arcane light, a sense I will associate years later with acid and with danger.

  Everything moves me. Everything is pregnant with words we do not say. There is an aura of silence about us as we move through the slow afternoon past the trim, the gaudy little houses, through the sands littered with thousands of bodies in little scraps of latex and nylon. We walk in a magnetic field of intense lust. His body has become sex to me. I feel as if my cunt were full of warm honey all the time. Every touch jostles me into wanting. The center of gravity in my body is about two feet lower than usual, right in my crotch. I am so distant from the practical, the day is almost over before I think to ask him why he didn’t drive last night, and learn of the death of his car the week after his move. It threw a rod, and he stripped it of identification and plates and reported an abandoned vehicle. He feels guilty, of course.

  When we stickily part Monday evening, exhausted with sex and talking about everything but what we are to do, I work on a poem. I write, rewrite, work through draft after draft.

  Rockaway Beach, Long Island

  1. The Town

  On Rockaway Beach, bargained from the sea

  by timely dumping of ancestral garbage,

  jostling for space the houses preen,