by Marge Piercy
“Becky? Is that you? When can I see you?”
“Shhh. Don’t say my name in front of your mother. The police were just here, and Dick Berg told them about us. How did he know?”
“He wouldn’t tell them. He’d never do that.”
“He did. Sam, did you talk to him about us? Did you?”
“One time he was teasing me about you. That’s all.”
“I can’t believe this. We’re in real danger.”
“What does it matter? That doesn’t prove the other.”
“But it gives motive. It makes me look bad. Now you listen to me, Sam, you deny it and you keep denying it. We were friends. I helped you with your parts. That’s all. You admired me. You don’t know anything more. You hear me?”
“Why do you sound that way? I feel as if you don’t care anymore.”
“I love you, Sam. Watch what your mother hears of our conversation. I’m just nervous about the police hanging around. We have to be careful. It’s only for a short while longer. If we can go on fooling them.”
“I just don’t feel you care about me.”
“Sam, I’m scared, and you ought to be. We have years and years. We just have to get through this tunnel. It’s tricky. It’s dangerous. When they come to talk to you, you have to watch everything you say and how you act and your littlest reactions. You understand?”
He said he did, but she knew he was just too young to grasp what was at stake. She dreaded the thought of having her fate ride on Sam’s interrogation. She had never imagined they would trace her to him. Who besides Helen knew? Tommy, of course, but he would never tell. She did not think Helen had betrayed her. It was that damned Dick Berg, with his paternalistic attitude toward Sam, trying to protect him from her. As if Dick Berg didn’t smooch around with that woman who was playing Minna, Beryl, who was married to an oncologist. He was allowed to fool around, but Becky wasn’t.
She also suspected Ce-Ce. Ce-Ce had never liked her. Ce-Ce liked women who sucked up to her, flattered her, told her how remarkable she was. Becky didn’t think Ce-Ce was remarkable, just bizarre. With her hennaed hair and her jangling bracelets, she looked like something out of a time warp. Ce-Ce thought all women should make a fuss over her and envy her and all men should flirt with her. How could a detective take Ce-Ce and Dick Berg seriously? Perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps he was just fishing, trying to get a reaction out of her. All Edelson had were suspicions and gossip. Did he think she was going to act guilty? She had done only what was necessary. She had had no choice. There was nothing to regret, nothing.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Leila
Sam’s trial, severed from Becky’s, was mostly a formality, since he was pleading guilty to second-degree murder and no jury was involved. He would be sentenced after Becky’s trial. Leila thought that was unusually overt manipulation on the part of the State. Help us convict her and your own sentencing will be lighter. She went with Zak to see Sam. He was back in the Barnstable House of Correction. She had her twenty minutes first.
Leila looked at Sam with pity. She could not help confusing him at times with David. He seemed, like many bright boys, a combination of extreme sensitivity and total callousness. She did not think that the man he had killed, Terry Burgess, occupied him except as a problem. Before the judge, Sam had delivered a speech well rehearsed by his lawyer about his shame and guilt and how terrible he felt about the Burgess family. He had delivered it earnestly and properly, but she did not believe a word. She sensed that he was truly remorseful for the pain and trouble he was causing Cathy and Zak. The Burgess family he called the lynch mob. He could not extrapolate from his mother’s anguish to that of Mrs. Burgess. When he was forced to mention Terry, he usually broke eye contact and grimaced. “I don’t care what anyone says, he was a bastard. He used to beat her. I was a fool to get involved with her, but he deserved it.”
The Burgess faces were on the evening news as Becky’s trial began with the selection of jurors: a tight shot of Mrs. Burgess with her long sharp chin and her perfect teeth uncovered in a snarl; Mr. Burgess, with an ill-fitting mask over flesh grown watery, eyes popping with rage; Chris, looking sullen.
Sam’s anger was directed at Becky. He leaned back from the flimsy wire barrier, clenching his fists. “She lied to me. She told me he wouldn’t give her a divorce. He did beat her, I saw the bruises. But he wanted a divorce, his parents say so. But they’d say anything. She made me feel like I had to save her, I had to. She seemed so afraid of him. I’d only seen him once, at the play. I thought he was this heavyweight But he wasn’t strong. He was taller but he wasn’t as strong as I am. She could have got a divorce anytime, and I’d be going to college. Why didn’t she just get a damned divorce like everybody else and leave me alone?”
“How did you come to accept the idea of killing him? That was a big step, wasn’t it?” She asked aloud the question she had asked herself again and again.
“It was like there was really nobody in the world but her and me. I wanted her so bad I can’t tell you. My grades had taken a dive. I couldn’t concentrate. I’d sit in math class, I’d be in gym class, I’d be in study hall, and all I could think of was being with her. In bed, I mean. Not that we had a bed very often. We mostly used the backseat of her car. I just wanted to be alone with her and for everything else to go away.”
“So he wasn’t real to you?”
“I couldn’t even remember what he looked like. I still can’t. I’d never spoken two words to the guy. You have to see, from the moment I kissed her and she let me, and she kissed me back the way nobody ever had, it just wasn’t real. I was in a movie, understand, I was in a dream. It was too totally good to be real. Nobody else and nothing else got through. I couldn’t even hear what other people were saying to me.”
“Sam, why did you and Gene pawn the VCR and the TV? Did you need money that badly?”
“I know it seems now like I was an idiot. But I couldn’t throw good stuff in the Canal. It felt too wasteful. I was raised to finish all the food on my plate, to wear clothes until they wore out, to think about what things cost. And Mom recycles everything. I just couldn’t throw that stuff in the Canal, you know? I couldn’t do it.”
“But why did you involve your friend?”
“She hardly had time for me after the murder. She kept saying we’d have all the time in the world soon, soon, but in the meantime, she wasn’t trying, she wasn’t trying at all.”
“So you turned to your best friend?”
“I felt crazy. I felt kind of lost. Like I couldn’t believe we’d done this thing, and now I couldn’t even be with her. I had to tell Gene. And he said, well, you can’t just keep that stuff under your bed. Let’s sell it. Maybe we can get enough for it all to buy some kind of wheels we can share. So then at least I’d have something. And then I could go see her when I wanted to.”
A few minutes later, he was talking about his plans. “Zak says maybe I can get a degree inside. Then when I get out, I’ll at least be a college graduate.” Leila looked at him, young and unformed-looking with his life gone into the ditch. He terrified her. She could not bear to think that David could make a stupid mistake—hit someone with a car, whatever—and everything would be utterly changed for all the years he lived.
Six months ago, Sam had been at the center of Cathy’s life and Zak’s; now he was a hole they moved around. Sam belonged to the State, to the assistant district attorney, who was coaching him daily, going over his testimony. Sam worked at his testimony the way he must have done for his classes, before Becky. He had been a good student.
While Zak was with Sam, she walked among the cars of the parking lot. The day was mild. The snow had melted, laying bare the dead grasses and sodden leaves of fall: a dank monochrome world, all beiges and browns and greys. In the distance, Massachusetts Bay looked made of zinc.
For Zak and for Cathy, there was a deep embarrassment in thinking about Sam. He had ruined his life. He had grossly spoiled his own plans, and that act of u
nimaginable violence had severed him from his intimate family. Cathy loved her son, certainly, and Zak loved his nephew, but that love had a sore hidden side. That love had lost its trust. There was an unspoken feeling that there was something wrong with Sam that they could not grasp, that they were somehow responsible for but would never know how or why. He was more of a stranger than they had realized, and now they could not forget.
Zak was always quiet on their return from Barnstable. Often they saw Sam separately, because Barnstable was much closer to Zak than to her. Other times, she knew Zak appreciated the company, even in silence. For weekend visits, they linked up. Then mostly they went to the Cape. With her house being shown to prospective buyers, she found it pleasant to get away. Today, however, they were headed to Cambridge, since they had tickets to Mark Morris, along with Jane and Emily. Jane was cooking supper, an interesting if sometimes harrowing experience. Jane liked dinners to be authentic, even if that meant eating a Berber dish with one hand and no utensils, squatting on the floor. Leila was not worried about Zak. He took such things in stride. She was mainly worried that Jane might plan something so elaborate they would be late to the Wang Center.
The real estate market was sluggish, and so far Leila had not received an offer she could accept. Nick was far more eager, but she wasn’t dragging out the process to annoy him. She simply wanted to come out of the sale with enough money to buy something. She wanted a yard; she wanted two bedrooms; she wanted to be within walking distance to work—a mile-and-a-half radius.
When they reached her house in their separate cars, Zak dropped into a chair. “I wonder if I could have killed Corinne. But this was premeditated.”
She turned on the coffee machine and sat on the couch. “Do you believe a lot of thinking went on in Sam’s head?”
“I find myself staring at him while we’re talking and trying to imagine him bashing in someone’s skull with a hammer. The police never recovered the weapons, but according to Sam, he used a hammer and she used a golf club. It wasn’t one of your antiseptic executions from across the street.”
Leila had read the same reports. “Would you feel better if it was?”
“I’d understand it. If you could press a button, wouldn’t you wish for your ex-husband to cease to exist?”
“I can imagine it,” she said grimly. “Poof and he’s air.”
“Well, this wasn’t poof and Burgess didn’t vanish. They must have stood there beating the shit out of him for ten minutes. I see myself walking in on Corinne and that loser she died with. I see myself making a scene and calling her a bitch and a whore. I see myself breaking things. I can see myself vindictive as hell, trying to take Lauren away from her. But I can’t see myself beating her to death. That’s a boundary I can’t cross even in my imagination.”
“In my life, there’s a point where I give up and cut my losses. Becky didn’t have that point. Her feelings are really hurt that Sam has turned on her. She keeps telling me she trusted him, and now he’s just like the other men she knew. What did she think he’d do under pressure? Take the blame?”
“We’re both unwilling to know what it would feel like to decide to kill someone and then to do it. Yet in war young men and boys, just as gentle and as thoughtful and as sensitive as Sam, commit atrocities against combatants and nurses and ordinary wives and mothers.”
“Maybe you just learn to make a big Them/Us division. Us hurt. Them get hurt. Us count. Them don’t count. Us can eat Them.”
Zak rose and held out his arms. “It’s this enormous burr we keep rolling uphill. Let’s let it go. We can agree we’re not going to kill each other.”
“I think I could make an absolute promise to that effect.” She stepped into his arms and for a moment they just held each other, hard. “Would you like it in writing?”
“Sometimes, Leila, I feel like a herbivore, a sort of buffalo at best, compared with a sleek predator. We admire predators—panthers, lions, tigers, even wolves. Maybe to be naturally thoughtful and hesitant to use violence is to be somehow second rate, To be in the middle of the social food chain. Especially if you’re a man. This society thinks real men are violent.”
“I don’t want to be a predator—I don’t want to be involved with one either. I’m not surprised when a man’s violent I’m pleased when he isn’t. But I have mixed feelings when a woman’s violent. On one hand we feel she’s giving us a bad name, bringing down our moral real estate values. On the other, she made it into the big time, we can do it too. That’s part of why Becky fascinates me. She broke the rules in all senses.”
“Do you wish you could? Secretly?”
“The rules I want to break are the unwritten ones that say that now I will be lonely, that my life after divorce will be desolate and bleak.” She pressed closer to him, feeling his body real, limber, firm against her. “I want to begin naively and freshly with you. I want to figure out how to be together, as if there were no expectations and no unwritten rules of success and failure. I want to figure it out without prejudice, without old habits.”
“That sounds meek, but it’s a huge demand. It’s trying to rewrite our social DNA.”
“I never asked you what happened to that coyote you had in the clinic?”
“I healed him and let him go at the dump … I don’t think I want to know your line of thought. Look, out of our gentleness, we can just grub along and try to love each other.” His hand closed warm on the nape of her neck.
She stood very still. That was the first time either had mentioned love. But, she thought, I loved Melanie as much as I loved Nick, and she didn’t eat me up. She didn’t make me feel lumpy and asexual. Maybe we can work at loving each other weekends in a careful and easy way, two creatures of glass and gristle. Then she leaned back and smiled at him, her hands sliding down to his buttocks. “We can only try.”
FIFTY-EIGHT
Mary
“You can’t tell me what to do.” Abel glared at her. “You’re not my grandmother. Besides, my grandma’s a dyke.”
“What kind of nonsense is that?” Mary was nervous, standing in front of the overflowing pail of compost it was Abel’s job to take out. Her authority was flimsy, invented. He could simply refuse her, and what could she do?
“Red said so. Before he left. And I’m glad he left, because he was an asshole. My friend Lobo says he was a con man and that my mother was conned.”
She decided to ignore his foul language for the moment. She was in enough trouble. “Love makes people see the best in each other. Your mother wanted to believe in her husband—the way she wants to see the best in you. You shouldn’t believe everything a man says about his in-laws. I never met your grandmother, but I know she’s a nurse. She was married and had two children, so I’d just forget what Red Rodgers thought about her—and most other things too.” Mary kicked the pail, lightly.
“You can’t make me do anything.”
“You’re getting to the age when nobody but the law and your own good sense can make you do anything,” Mary said, trying to keep her voice from trembling. “Since I can’t lift it, I’ll just get your mother out of bed and she can take it out.”
“I don’t want her to do it. That’s not fair.”
“It’s her or me, Abel, and I can’t.”
“It’s a cheat,” Abel said. “I’m always having to do the dirty work.”
“That’s what you get for growing up,” Mary said. She actually could lift the pail, although it was plenty heavy, but if she did, she’d be doing that every time and all of his other chores too.
Robin, the little dark child with the Indian eyes, was easy. She was starved for love. She was the only girl, the child not of a marriage but of an affair. Mary suspected the father was Latino but no information on him had been given her. Robin just wanted to be held and fussed over. Mary won her right away. They were sharing a room and Robin came into her bed whenever she was scared at night. Mary cuddled her far more frequently than she had her own children. Robin was affect
ionate enough to wiggle through Mary’s awkwardness. Robin had her problems too. She was not always truthful and she had a bottomless sweet tooth. If Mary did not watch, she would make herself sick on candy and on cookies. Robin adored Abel, who largely ignored her.
Ben was difficult. It would take time. He hung on his mother. The baby would force him away a little. She would bide her time and work on him then. Abel was causing her the most problems. He was in rebellion against his own mother, and he saw her as an ersatz mother come to try to coerce him into toeing the line. If she did not win him over or at least neutralize him, she would not be able to stay, once Debbie got on her feet. She would be more trouble than she would be worth to Debbie, without Abel’s permission, essentially.
She studied him. One strategy was to ask nothing of him, to smile and let him go, but she had a strong feeling that would not work. For one thing, it ran against her own character. She had never let her own kids get away with murder, and she would not be able to control herself. Second, she felt that laxity would simply fertilize Abel’s contempt.
He was pushing against the boundaries, but he still needed and wanted them in place. She had to get him on her side, but she had no idea how to manage that. He had been uprooted too many times; he had too many pseudo-fathers. He was sick of people who came into his life, grabbed some authority, took over and then vanished. He was not lovable, but she did not mind his sore pride. She thought she probably understood it better than his mother did. Debbie was having trouble with her oldest son, and if Mary could only get around him, Debbie would be better disposed toward her.
Debbie was mistrustful of her. “If my sister thinks she can control me through you, she’s crazy. I don’t want anything from her and I don’t need anything from her. She thinks she’s right all the time, there’s one way to do it and that’s her way.” Debbie had been sitting up in her bed resting against a pile of pillows, frowning. Her ankle was in a light cast and crutches rested against the headboard. Debbie looked overwrought and miserable.
