Braided Lives by Marge Piercy

Author:Marge Piercy
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2013-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

LE DÉJEUNER SUR L’HERBE

AT FIRST DONNA is pleased with her new lover Charlie. He is twenty-four. (“A man ought to be a little older, Stu, because boys our own age just don’t know enough to keep us interested. But I admit Sal was too much older. He couldn’t take me seriously.”) Charlie is pleasant-looking. His voice has some rough honey in it I can always recognize when I answer the phone and he asks for her. He dotes on her. Being a graduate student who works for a sociologist, he has no money. In April he stole daffodils from his professor’s garden. In May he picks bouquets of lilacs from the hedge outside the astronomy building, their rich sexual fragrance dyeing the air in our room for a week before they droop.

Tonight Donna sits painting on a face, with brushes, pots, powders, unguents spread out in a semicircle. She does her work slowly and with many wry grimaces. The dollface she will create is much admired by men, but in truth I prefer her scrubbed face with its albino pallor and sharp bones. “You seeing Charlie?” I ask.

“Who else?” She shrugs in her plaid bathrobe. “Want to switch?”

I grin. “Afraid not.”

“You like him now, don’t you? You’re hooked.”

“Good word—hooked. He’s like a stainless-steel fishhook in my gut…. Did you talk Wanda into switching rooms?” I try to sound indifferent. Every day I expect Donna to move.

“I decided I couldn’t take her roommate Billy Sue.”

“Are you sorry you moved into this house?”

“It’s cheaper than the dorm and a lot looser. But who wants to live with a bunch of females?”

“Jesus, Donna, I sure wouldn’t want to live with fourteen men. They’d all leave the toilet seat up and expect you to pick their socks off the floor.”

“Men—not boys—men have something to offer—in fact, the world. If you want to learn anything, you have to learn it from a man,” she says sententiously, beginning to brush on mascara.

It’s certainly true that the only woman who has taught us at the university was in Romance languages. “But you don’t think we’ve given each other a lot? And what are you learning from Charlie?”

“Sadism.” She snorts and then swings around straddling her chair to face me with a sudden sharp giggle.

“He’s sadistic?”

“No, silly. He’s a spaniel. I swear I’ve got the worst of Lennie again —that guilt. Except that Charlie isn’t as good at making me writhe with it…. Is that the choice, Stu? A choice between letting a man use you like a tube of toothpaste, or using him?” She looks rakish with one of her eyes mascaraed in rusty brown and the other lashed invisibly blond.

“I guess I want to know if loving has to be fatal. Can you love somebody only a little and survive fine, but if you both really love each other, then he tries to bash you into the ground?”

She sighs. “La belle dame sans merci is fine if you’re the pale knight interestingly loitering or littering your bloody hillside.

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