by Marge Piercy
FIFTEEN
Leila
David arrived back before Nicolas. Leila chattered with David nonstop from the time David got into the car at Logan, even though they had talked two or three times a week since he’d left for California. He was tanned and had grown another inch. He would end up as tall as Nicolas but smaller boned. He had a slightly hunched look, a starchless way of standing as if to contrast with his father’s massive presence.
He had new glasses, she noticed, dark brown frames, better looking on him. She drank him in in sideways glances as she drove. In him she had always been able to see herself and Nick, as well as her own father and mother. His hands were most like her father’s, shapely hands with long tapering fingers that looked more fragile than they were. In reaction, perhaps, to his father’s booming projection, he spoke softly. Often people had to lean a little forward to hear him. He could sound shy, but it was restraint, rather, a control. He did not like his temper or his voice to get away from him.
She adored her son, she admitted it freely to herself. She attempted to open her hands and her mind and let him go into the world, but she had always been an anxious and an interfering mother. She fought herself, but she knew she was only partly successful at controlling her fierce love.
“Did you get the new glasses because your eyes changed? Or just for cosmetic reasons?”
“My eyes changed.”
“In what way?”
“I’m a little more myopic.”
“Are you reading with good light in your dorm room?”
“Mother, myopia is hereditary.”
“If it’s hereditary, why don’t your father or I have it?”
“He is nearsighted. He just won’t wear glasses unless he’s driving.”
She wanted to know if his bed was hard enough for his back. She wanted to know if he had the right rain gear. She wanted to know if he was getting enough sleep, for he had a tendency to read late in bed. She wanted to know exactly what he ate for breakfast. She wanted to know about his new girlfriend Ikuko. She wanted to know how his roommates treated him, and whether he was tempted to settle in California after graduation (so far, far away from her). She controlled herself. He would be home until Sunday. She could gradually ask questions, she could proceed gently and slowly. She had him for almost five days now. She must keep from clutching.
She had done her shopping, picking up a fresh organic turkey from Bread and Circus, two fat buff butternut squashes, a pie pumpkin, salad greens including a pretty bouquet of radicchio that cost as much as gold per ounce, leeks to be braised, cranberries for sauce. She had bought a good fresh pumpernickel from Brookline and the hard rolls Nick loved in the morning.
“How’s Shana doing? Is her grandmother still there?”
“She may move in with me, as I told you. Have you thought about how you feel?”
He shrugged. “Shana’s okay. She’s like a pesky little sister. I figure you have to take her in if that’s what she wants.”
“Don’t you think Melanie would have tried to do for you? She certainly would have made Thanksgiving dinner for you.”
“Mother! Gross! Have you arranged for someone to sew the buttons back on my shirts should you be run over by a large truck?”
Vronsky was waiting just inside the big front door swishing his tail impatiently. When he saw David, he frowned, she thought. But David was an animal person. He had Vronsky circling him and purring in five minutes, rubbing against this new body servant who scratched under his chin correctly and behind his ears, slightly tufted as if he were a little lynx.
There was a message on her answering machine from Debbie, saying they were at the Westin, near the Prudential Center in Boston. She called back.
“Yeah, where were you? I called an hour ago.”
“At the airport picking up David. I’m hardly ever home before five. Would you like to come over?” Should she offer to go get them?
“Red wants to eat at this famous place he heard of. Red, honey, what’s the name of that restaurant? Durbin Park.”
“Durgin,” Leila corrected automatically. “I’m still waiting for Nick to arrive from New York, and I have cooking to do tonight. I don’t know what time Nick will be home. Could you maybe come over here?”
“Well, you sound a bit put out. Besides, Red has been looking forward to this place. He read about it in an airplane magazine.”
“Why don’t you go ahead? If Nick comes soon and he’s up for it, we’ll find you there.” Fat chance. That was not the sort of restaurant Nick enjoyed and she did not feel like running around town with him before they’d had a chance for some sort of communication.
“Whatever. We’ll see you tomorrow. What time do you want us?”
“Around five for dinner, but why don’t we get together earlier?”
“We promised the kids something nice—”
David spoke up. “I’ll meet you at the hotel at ten and we’ll figure something out. Most good things for kids are shut, but I promise to look at the papers.” At some point he’d picked up the extension and been listening.
“Ten’s too early, we’re on California time,” Debbie said. Leila excused herself, leaving them to negotiate. She was still expecting Phyllis.
She made her maple Bavarian cream for tomorrow while David was unpacking his suitcase stuffed with dirty laundry. Then he lay on the couch with Vronsky on his chest telling her his adventures at school while she trotted in circles straightening, fluffing pillows, waiting for the cream to set enough to add Madeira. She put the cranberries on to cook in kosher wine, threw in a handful of orange peel, rushed back to David. His eyes were a lighter brown than hers, the color of wet sand. Her own eyes were strong coffee. “Ikuko has eyes as dark as yours,” he told her.
Nick had called three times during the day: once to say he was leaving New York at eleven; once from New Haven where he had got off the train to see a friend in the drama department; once more from the train station after David was home to say he was boarding the train but that it looked to be very crowded and he would probably have to stand all the way. She wondered if she were supposed to say, Oh, how terrible, why don’t you stay where you are? She did not. She said she would meet the train out at Route 128, because downtown would be a mess. He said he’d take the train to South Station and a cab home, not to worry. He’d be there by eight at the latest and they could all dine.
It was actually nine-fifteen before she served Nick supper. David and she had eaten a pickup meal of spaghetti with wild mushrooms and a little chopped meat and lots of basil. She heated it for Nick, who ate with enjoyment but obviously not with real hunger. He had been taken out to a great lunch in New Haven to discuss collaborating on Ibsen’s Master Builder. Nick saw in it a great and lasting parable of male and female relationships.
Nick was intrigued by her own new project, although he lost interest when she confessed she had not yet met Becky. “They sound like a boring bunch of suburban losers,” he said. “Speaking of losers, critics are a sorry lot these days. Even the ones who liked my Oedipus missed the point. Critics are getting younger and stupider. What isn’t based on comic books or the TV they grew up on, is beyond them. They have no knowledge of culture beyond the last ten years.”
“What we find, Dad, is that you people thought of culture as Greece and Rome and some Victorians. We have to be multicultural—that dirty word—because the world we live in isn’t white and European any longer. I meet guys who couldn’t tell you who Oedipus was, but they know all about Japanese sword fighting and anime. There are dozens and dozens of ‘cultures.’”
“Anyone want dessert? I have two kinds of cookies, some rugalach I got in Brookline this morning—”
“Rugalach always reminds me how when I was little, you used to make pies. Apple, rhubarb, blueberry. And you’d make extra dough and roll it out and bake it sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar for me.…” Sometimes when David was remembering his childhood, his voice would take on a slow, hypnotic coloratio
n.
“I brought you a present” Nick rummaged in his briefcase. “Peterson’s Field Guide To Western Birds. I figured you’ve been doing some hiking.”
“Let me see. That’s great. Ikuko and I spent a weekend in Joshua Tree. It’s really gorgeous.”
“What does she look like? Got a photo?” Nick asked.
“Actually, yeah.” Grimacing, David dug out his wallet. He looked torn between embarrassment and pride. “That’s her leaning against the rock.”
Nick smiled. “She’s lovely. Classic Japanese features.”
“She’s really bright,” David said with mild defensiveness, lest he be thought to have selected his girl for her looks.
Phyllis called. “I’m out on 128 in a Sheraton. Where’s Debbie?”
“At the Westin. Mother, how come you’re out there? You were going to stay with me.”
“My roommate Joan decided to come. She didn’t have anything special to do, and we usually have Thanksgiving together. So, we’ll see you tomorrow.”
Maybe Phyllis hadn’t wanted to do all the driving herself. She had insisted on driving rather than taking a plane. It was eight hours, and Leila was willing to bet that when Phyllis had contemplated all that driving, she had drafted her roommate. She had been sharing her apartment in the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia with another nurse for three years. They were both in their early sixties—about the age of Leila’s cleaning lady.
“Well, we ended up with seven less people in the house than we might have had,” Leila said as she finally faced Nick alone. “Maybe we can talk.”
“Not tonight, light of my eyes. I’m half drunk, half hungover and all bushed. You won’t get more than mumbling and a hug out of me tonight.”
“Nevertheless, Nick, we’re going to have to talk. Tomorrow might be really crazy, but Friday then. We have a lot to work out.”
He groaned and mumbled something, his eyes already closed. Vronsky got into her side of the bed and tried to get her to move over to the middle, where she usually slept. She must let go of her anger, she must. She would ruin her life if she did not. Tomorrow was a holiday, and it was the duty of a hostess to put aside her small problems to make nice. After all, Becky would not be enjoying Thanksgiving dinner with her family. Cathy Solomon might have her prickly brother-in-law Zak for dinner, but she would not have her only son. Terry’s parents would never see him again. Melanie’s daughter had to come to Leila. Of all the families she had begun to study over the past couple of weeks, only hers was intact. She must make herself rejoice and she must create a warm holiday that would reconfirm the three of them as a family unit. It was her job to rebuild and conserve. And how often did she manage to see her mother? She saw Debbie every two years at most. This was a holiday in which everyone was coming together, and she had to forget her disappointments and her moodiness and make it work.
About noon, Jane called. “What do you want us to bring?”
“Oh, some wine.”
“Emily doesn’t drink wine.”
“Then bring what she does drink,” Leila said patiently. She had met Emily a couple of times, but she tended to get her confused with the one before, the librarian who did triathlon. Emily was tall too but she was an ear, nose and throat doctor. Jane had recited to her once some statistic on how few women were that kind of doctor.
“You remember that she has two boys.”
“Boys?” Leila did not remember. Jane went on about her lovers and it was hard to keep them separate. “How old?”
“Eight and ten.”
Leila started to say, I wish you’d told me, but of course Jane must have. “If they need anything special to eat, bring that if you don’t mind. But you know there’s always lots of food.” It was a tenet of Leila’s that at Passover and at Thanksgiving, there should be way too much food: product of a childhood of haphazard meals and half-empty refrigerators with nothing more substantial than open jars of pickles and maraschino cherries and ketchup to satisfy the hunger of an oversized and rapidly growing girl child. “Anyhow, they won’t be the only children. We’ll have my sister Debbie’s kids. Bring a lot of wine anyhow. We’re going to be, let me see, if I count Shana and David as adults, we’ll be at least eleven adults and five children.”
There was a little silence. “Are we holding this in the Harvard gym? What you’re really going to need is some chairs. Got enough dishes?”
“You know me. I have dishes and dishes. But chairs, yes, that’s a great idea. Avoids me having to sit on a footstool and three phone books.”
She had cooked no feasts, no real dinners in the last month. She wondered why a day of cooking made her feel like a good woman. Her own mother had been inept in the kitchen. Perhaps she was living out a myth of the ideal mother. Phyllis was quite real and lumpy and nothing like the mothers of the sitcoms that issued into her brain from the grainy black-and-white TV of her childhood.
Phyllis would clump home from the hospital and put her feet in a tub of hot water with piney soak in it in the kitchen with the TV on, smoking and reading women’s magazines, regaling them with the latest tidbits. “Do you know if you wash your hands in coconut milk, you’ll look years younger?” Neither Debbie nor Leila wanted to look years younger. They could not wait to grow up. “Ha. They ask fifty men what they look at first, and they say a woman’s face. Barefaced liars! You talk to fifty men, and forty-nine of them talk to your tits.” Phyllis had a great raucous laugh.
It was early afternoon when Leila heard that laugh exploding in the front hall, Apparently Nick had let her in. “Yeah, this is my mate Joan. So, how have they been treating you? Looks like my daughter hasn’t stopped feeding you too much and too often, hey, Nick?”
Leila tossed her apron on a chair, rushing in. Phyllis gave her a peck on the cheek. She wasn’t one for a fuss. Then Leila shook hands with Joan, a woman who could have passed for Phyllis’s twin. They were both five feet six, solidly built women neither thin nor fat, with broad faces and grey hair chopped short, both wearing loose pants and tunics with earrings to show they were dressed up. Phyllis’s were gold hoops inlaid with her birthstone, garnet, Leila had given her; Joan’s were plastic turkeys in honor of the day.
“So did Debbie really fly out here?” Phyllis bellowed. “She never comes East. She hates the East. She likes those wide open spaces. She’s even got horses now. I can’t imagine a horse for a pet. Joan and I have a poodle.”
“Maybe I’ll get one of those Shetland ponies,” Joan said. “If people can keep little pigs for pets, why not little horses? Course we’d have to yank out the wall-to-wall and put in straw.”
“The way we keep that apartment, who ever sees the floor?”
Both women laughed and let Nick bring them a couple of beers. Phyllis always had her cronies, nurses she had been close to for twenty years, thirty years, women in whose lives men came and went like colds that arrived suddenly and hung on a while, or else guys who couldn’t marry them because, like Phyllis’s last boyfriend, they had a wife somewhere. If one of this circle of tough hardworking loud and foul-mouthed women married, it was generally to a husband who turned out to be a compulsive drinker or gambler or something worse, and pretty soon all the other women were saying, Louise, you got to dump him, Louise, you got to show him the door. And Louise did. In childhood Leila had told herself, I will pick a bright healthy worthwhile man and I will make a lifelong marriage with him, I will.
Both Phyllis and Joan made perfunctory gestures at helping, but Leila knew better than to let her mother near her kitchen. Phyllis, Joan and Nick sat watching football, none of them real fans but all willing to pass the time and make lewd comments. Nick offered to bet on the outcome of the game, but Phyllis refused adamantly. She would not bet on anything. She would not even play penny-ante poker. “Gambling stole my husband’s life. Gambling took the roof off our heads. Flush your money down the toilet instead. Or just give it to me. I know how to use it.”
Joan chuckled. “She won’t let me play the lot
tery, even.”
“Everybody in theater is a gambler,” Nick said. “Who needs the thrill of a horse race when you’re betting your career on an idiot play?”
Leila liked the ritual feel of preparing a feast. Some items on the long menu were new, clipped from the paper or found in a cookbook read in bed the week before, but some were old favorites David would have been furious if she forgot, like the two desserts, the cold maple Bavarian cream and the hot rum pumpkin pie. It was her folly, partly designed to please her family but partly designed to please herself. Beyond that, she aimed to impress some archaic deity, a goddess who would reward her for being a good woman by allowing her to keep what she had. Soon she would add a daughter, Shana, to the household. The family still held and even grew.
SIXTEEN
Leila
Debbie, Red, Robin and the littlest, Ben, arrived at four-thirty. As David had advised her, Abel, the fourteen-year-old, had stayed in California with his best friend. Watching Debbie and Phyllis greet each other, Leila thought that, while she always felt the odd one out, everyone in her family was awkward in affection. Phyllis, however, was at ease with her grandchildren, getting down on the floor and making faces at Ben, who clutched his mother’s leg and glowered. Within five minutes, Phyllis had him giggling helplessly. Robin was the fey dark one, the only girl, and Phyllis was able to kiss her as she could not her own daughters. But Phyllis looked up at the six-foot-two, potbellied frame of Red Rodgers, and she had nothing to say except Hi there. Finally they bonded around smoking, standing together in exile on the porch puffing at the street.
