Three Women by Marge Piercy
Elena rose, stretched gracefully as a panther, and sauntered to Rachel’s room. She stood in the doorway, shaking her head. “I’m going to have to change things around. I can’t sleep in here, the way it is.”
There was no use in her arguing that the arrangement was supposed to be temporary. If Elena announced she could not sleep, she would not sleep. Rachel was going to get a lot of practice being forgiving. Elena was back, and maybe they could learn to talk to each other instead of always fencing, and heal some of their old scars. Maybe. Suzanne the top-notch negotiator always seemed to falter when she went head-to-head with her older daughter; Suzanne the litigator always lost her case when she was arguing points with Elena. Somehow she had to find a mode of communication between them that actually communicated. Once, years and years ago when Elena was a child, they had had intense intimacy. Elena had been her precious miracle, with her father who had disappeared into mythology leaving her a child beautiful as an orchid and strong as a tiger cub. Elena’s childish paintings had been lush, vivid, unlike the scrawls of other more ordinary kindergarten finger-painters. Elena had danced as early as she walked. How affectionate she had been then, flinging herself into her mother’s arms when Suzanne walked into a room. And how radically it all changed when Elena passed puberty.
“Elena, if we try, maybe we can make this work. Get along better with each other,” she said softly, trying not to put too much force into the words lest they seem a demand.
“It’s just for a while, like a month, six weeks,” Elena said. “We don’t have to get in each other’s way.”
“I want us to do better than that.”
“Whatever.”
Rather than intense preparation for her sexual harassment case, most of Suzanne’s weekend was spent moving Rachel’s things into temporary storage along one wall of the room she was still using as her gym and helping Elena move into Rachel’s room. A lot of Elena’s possessions and off-season clothes went into the basement, crowded before Elena’s stuff was shoved in.
On Saturday they had the help of a gangling orange-haired young man Elena knew from her former restaurant job. He was a sous-chef there, making salads and arranging food on plates. He was clearly smitten, but Elena was uninterested. “A big baby,” she said. “Sex appeal of a cooked shrimp.”
Sunday’s help came in the form of a man perhaps fifteen years older than Elena. He was of distinctly less use than the boy had been, puffing on the stairs. He complained of his back and wanted to argue about where things should be put. Elena and he disappeared into her room for an hour in the middle of the afternoon. What could Suzanne possibly say? It made her uncomfortable to think of her daughter in bed with that oily creep, but she knew she had to keep her reaction to herself. Elena had been sexually active since puberty, and there never had been anything Suzanne could do about it. It did not help her mood that she had not made love to anyone in twelve years. She turned on the stereo and did her laundry in the basement.
“Is he your current…” Suzanne fumbled for the word. Boyfriend seemed absurd for a forty-plus-year-old man, but she could think of nothing else. “…your current boyfriend?”
“I see him.”
I see him too, Suzanne thought, and I don’t much like what I see. “What does he do?”
“That’s all you ever ask about someone, isn’t it? Peg them. The next question is, where did they go to school?”
Suzanne waited. She was better at silence than her daughter. Finally Elena burst out, “He sells swimming pools. As if that defined who he is!”
“Divorced?”
“Twice. Satisfied?”
Suzanne shrugged.
Elena relented slightly. “Anyhow, he’s on his way out,” she said. “Doesn’t he complain all the time, a drone like Muzak in elevators? He’s boring. Like most of your generation, he whines.” Elena shook out her hair, weighing it in her hands. “Want a swimming pool? I can get you a deal.”
“Swimming is not my exercise. Nor his, I imagine.”
Elena snorted. “The only exercise he likes requires a partner.”
Suzanne was grateful to the outgoing pool salesman nonetheless, because when Elena was displeased with somebody else, she was friendlier to her mother.
They settled in gingerly. Elena was wooing the cats. Sherlock had succumbed to her at once, but Tamar belonged only to Suzanne and would not let Elena touch her. She had found them on the street, abandoned kittens of no more than seven weeks, flea-bitten, with worms of three kinds and a respiratory infection. Now they were huge and beautiful, Sherlock lean and muscular, with clearly Oriental head shape, a long nose (like hers). She considered his profile aristocratic. If she held him up extended across the doorway, his body stretched from doorjamb to doorjamb. Tamar was apricot rather than reddish and fluffier. Her eyes were huge and round, giving her a perennially astonished expression. She was as big as her brother but softer bodied. She had an enormous purr only for Suzanne. She slept pressed against Suzanne’s side and would have liked to keep her mistress on a leash. Both cats shared tiny squeaky voices, a remnant of their starving kittenhood and ludicrous in such large gorgeous cats.
Elena could not help being seductive with the cats, as with half the world. It was her way of wanting to be liked, Suzanne told herself. Jake and she had been chatting again about everything in their lives. She had told Jake all about Elena—well, a little about Elena would be more accurate.
Elena got into a mess with two boys when she was fifteen. Fortunately this whole tragedy happened around the time that law schools were briefly searching for “qualified” women to hire, to keep their governmental funds. I had been serving as adjunct faculty with the university law clinic. So finally I was offered a full tenure-track faculty position, and I took it so that I would have more time home.
Understand, being a law professor is kind of cushy. The way the tenured faculty complain about the students and facilities, you’d never know it, but actually it’s far more relaxing. You don’t make the huge bucks, but it’s prestigious and you have plenty of time to take cases you want to take on the side, increasing your visibility, reputation, and sometimes making lots of money if it’s that kind of case. Since I was absolutely riddled with guilt about Elena, the offer no matter how crassly motivated came at a time I needed to regroup. And I’ve been teaching there ever since.
I appreciate that you haven’t asked me exactly what happened to Elena. I think that even today, I couldn’t write it down. I’ve never been able to come to terms with it, I know that. Someday I will, and then I’ll tell you the whole story.
I envy you knowing your daughter so well. I lost custody years and years ago, and so I rarely see Leaf, and never alone. She’s twenty-five and married already. She works in an insurance office in Boise. My last photo of her is from her wedding. I haven’t lived with her since she was five and my wife left me. I was a quintessential hippie then. I worked in a head shop, I was an orderly in a hospital, I sold hot dogs at the beach, I was a messenger. My wife just got sick of a life on the edge of nothing in particular and went home to her parents in Idaho. She got a divorce with a judge who considered me a menace to society because my hair was shoulder length and I smoked dope. I think off the record he also considered me a dirty Jew who had no business with a blond and lovely daughter of Idaho. He kept calling me a New Yorker, although I grew up in Worcester.
Even after I cleaned up and finished school, she—my ex-wife Patsy—had no use for me. She never believed I’d changed. Whatever I said to her, she had this Oh Yeah look in her eyes, sort of squinted, letting me talk but never listening.
Patsy was crazy about me when we were first together, but after our daughter, Leaf, was born, she began to judge me and our life. I should have caught on but I was so comfortable doing whatever I felt like when I felt like it, a perennial adolescent all through my twenties, that I just never saw what was happening. I was so used to Patsy adoring me, so used to being adored, that I never noticed how pissed off she wa
Suzanne read the message that night in her office while Elena was moving stuff around in the next room. Suzanne was exhausted and would normally get into bed by ten-thirty on a Sunday night and read for fifteen to twenty minutes, something soothing like catalogs or a travel book about the Greek Islands or New Zealand. It was not that she intended to take an expensive or extensive vacation anytime soon, but someday surely she and Marta and Jim too would go off and see some of these places together. She had abandoned her earlier dreams of traveling with her daughters. Elena would not willingly go down to the corner deli with her, and Rachel was keeping kosher now, which made cooking for her less than fun. Kosher vegetarian: one of the world’s lumpier cuisines. Rachel never talked about going anyplace abroad now except Israel.
Tonight Suzanne was overexcited. She was yeasty with hope she labeled irrational that perhaps she and Elena could actually get along, could reach some breakthrough in communication, in affection. It was a new chance. She had never expected Elena to live under her roof again. Yet now Elena’s sounds seeped through the wall. Moving furniture? Pounding nails? The sound of salsa through the wall. She had overcome her earlier stupid sense of being invaded. Wouldn’t Jake be jealous of her, not only in contact with her daughter but once again living with her? She should appreciate what she had, instead of sulking about her privacy and her routine. She was lucky to have her daughter with her, and she should dedicate some of her energy to making things better between them. Still she had her policewoman to worry about, the sexual harassment case against the Dedham Police Department. She wanted very badly to win this case, for her client Sherry, and because if she won, it would set a precedent in the area, letting many other women who had been treated just as badly come slowly out of their private hells and begin to demand justice and reparation. The Latino music came through the wall to her where she lay wide awake in her bed, and she found herself nodding to the beat.
She suddenly thought of Victor, his lean body, his olive face with the sculptured cheekbones and the sensual mouth, and even after all the troubles and all the years, something moved deep down in her. How she had been mad for him. Besotted. When he touched her, her bones liquefied. Her brain turned off like a computer whose plug had been pulled. They made love mostly in Spanish, besides the universal language of their bodies. How could she have loved him so strongly? But she had. He was not her first lover, but he was the most potent male force that had ever entered her life. He had left her pregnant, shaken, and mistrustful of the power and danger passion held for her. He had taught her how easily she could be rendered foolish, passive, all the things she despised; how easily she could be hurt. That was twenty-seven years ago, and still she shuddered. She had learned after that adventure how to protect herself from the possibility of subjection, her defenselessness before her own body’s desire. If only Elena could learn the same at a smaller cost. She had bequeathed to her daughter her terrible vulnerability, but not the lacquered shell she had grown to protect it.
3
Beverly
Beverly climbed the steep stairway from the 103rd Street subway station. “May, hello.” She greeted the homeless woman who always sat on the landing, where Beverly paused to catch her breath. Stairs took her breath away lately.
“Hello, Beverly. Is the world treating you all right today?”
“Not bad. I just hope the snow holds off.”
“As do I, dear.”
She knew all the street people in her neighborhood and made it a point to speak to them, the ones who weren’t too far gone. Half of them were mental. Fucking budget cuts. Save the state money and dump patients on the street. The other half had just lost too much. Flo Kennedy had said many years ago that every woman was just one man away from welfare. Of course that hadn’t applied to her, since she had never relied on the support of any man since her poor father. Well, every old person was just one lost check away from the streets. Who said that? Beverly Blume.
She had been out to Brooklyn to see her sister Karla, as superstitious as ever. They had been fighting about Rachel. Beverly simply could not accept that such a bright able girl should do something so useless as becoming a rabbi. Karla was thrilled and defended her grandniece—as well she might, since she was the one who had infected the whole family. Beverly would never forgive her for that. It was one of the worst mistakes she had ever made, leaving her daughter, Suzanne, with her younger sister while she was down south organizing textile workers. Oh, she was as proud of being a Jew as Karla was, but it was the cultural heritage that meant something to her, not the religious mumbo jumbo. Why seek out irrationality when it leapt at you from the TV, from the tabloids?
But at least she had to give Karla credit for overcoming racism. After Suzanne had gone off to law school at Harvard, Karla had adopted first one mixed-race child and then another. She often said she would have adopted ten more if she’d had the money to support them. So after helping Beverly raise Suzanne, Karla had spent her middle years raising two more girls, Suwanda—generally called Wanda—and Rosella, with whom Karla had moved in when her health began to fail. It was her weight that was doing her in, but Karla had always loved to cook and eat. Karla lived now with Rosella, her husband, Tyrone, and the twins. Karla was very involved with Rosella’s children and Tyrone’s family, the way she had always been involved with any available kind of family. Karla was in many ways a very traditional woman.
“Miller, how’s the leg?” She greeted him at a table outside a Latino café on Broadway. It was cold to sit outside, but Miller had always smoked, and like her, he wasn’t about to stop because people had got fussy about it. God, to imagine how he had made her blood race. Was it Dorothy Parker who compared love to a bus accident? You were just going along the street minding your business when bam, love fell on you and flattened you. Or picked you up by the nape of the neck like a huge eagle and bore you off, tore your heart and liver out, and then let you fall half a mile to earth. Certainly Miller had made her feel as if every bone in her body had been broken when he left her flat and took off with that Greek girl, Marina—who later became a follower of some guru and shaved her head like a bowling ball. Beverly stood patiently while he complained of his rheumatism and his heart before she could turn the subject to the governor and the mess he was making in Albany. He had promised to repeal that stupid mandatory sentencing law, and he had dropped it after election like a lump of dung. There were women in there for half their lives because of a purseful of marijuana, while gangstas who slit open their girlfriend’s belly were out in eight years. Women were the mules, the bottom of the heap. Suzanne would understand about that, even if she didn’t see much of the way the world worked.
Now here was Miller with his legs stuck out as if they could no longer bend, his complexion pickled, glasses thick enough to walk on like river ice. She could give him a big smile and a hello and not be able to imagine how once he had burnt her eyes like the sun itself. He had been a vigorous, charismatic man, full of stories and a line thick enough to tether an ocean liner. “Oh, Bev, you’re the only woman who’s ever understood me. You have the mind of a man and the body of a houri.” For a year she had been crazy about him and then he had bounced out the door, gone. And always, always, even in bed she had called him by his last name, for he would tell no one his given name. She had seen it years later in the FBI records when she had got her seven-foot stack under the Freedom of Information Act. Hymie, his name was, and he was ashamed of it as too Jewish, a borscht belt joke.
He had never been a good speaker, but he was a solid man in a demonstration, and he had thrust his tough big body between her and danger more than once. How he had loved a good fight. He was a natural brawler, quick and effective with his fists. She had liked that. They had enough talkers. She knew it was silly to respond to physical strength and daring in a man, but she couldn’t help it. It was after such a demonstration they had first gone home together and fallen into her bed. What an explosion. She could r
“Eh, Gutiérrez, cómo va?” She always spoke Spanish to the dry cleaner, to the fish peddler, to the super. She’d had to get her good suit dry-cleaned after her old friend Charlotte’s funeral, it had been so muddy, and she’d need it Sunday when the neighborhood organization dedicated the pocket park she had helped lobby for, where the kids could play safe out of the streets. She wished she knew some Korean to speak to the greengrocer. She loved languages and had learned a bit of eight of them, just enough to get along and have a friendly conversation. She had friends who did crossword puzzles, but she had always learned languages for fun. It was a game you could play with people instead of alone—the best kind. You only had to be willing to take a chance, to make a fool of yourself and be a child in another language. Sometimes she felt desolate when she realized that at her age, she would never learn Chinese the way she had always intended. It was like realizing you were never going to meet that one person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with, that it just wasn’t going to happen. Not that she truly minded living alone with her cat. She had only herself to please, and she was pleased with herself, as she always said when anybody asked her if she didn’t get lonely.