The Cost of Lunch, Etc.

Other books by Marge Piercy

POETRY

The Hunger Moon: New & Selected Poems, 1980–2010

4-Telling
(with Bob Hershon, Emmett Jarrett and Dick Lourie)

NOVELS

Dance the Eagle to Sleep

OTHER

Pesach for the Rest of Us

So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Writing

Fiction and the Personal Narrative
(with Ira Wood),
1st & 2nd editions

The Last White Class: A Play
(with Ira Wood)

Sleeping with Cats: A Memoir

Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt: Essays

Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now

The Cost of Lunch, Etc.

Short stories by Marge Piercy

© Middlemarsh, Inc 2014

This edition © 2014 PM Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Acknowledgments

“The Cost of Lunch, Etc.,”
Aphra.
“Saving Mother from Herself,”
Ms. Magazine.
“Going over Jordan,”
Transatlantic Review.
“Somebody Who Understands You,”
Moving Out.
“Do You Love Me?”
The Second Wave.
“The Retreat,”
Provincetown Poets.
“The Border,”
Crossroads.
“Ring around the Kleinbottle,”
Fifth Wednesday.
“The Shrine,”
december.
“The Easy Arrangement,” published in an earlier form as “Professor Wrong” in
Mr. Wrong: Real-Life Stories about the Men We Used to Love.
“Fog,”
Paterson Literary Review.
“What and When I Promised,”
Blue Lyra Review.
“Little Sister, Cat and Mouse,”
The Second Wave.
“I Wasn’t Losing My Mind,” published in an earlier form as “The Necklace” in
What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most.

ISBN: 978-1-60486-938-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013956923

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The Cost of Lunch, Etc.

Saving Mother from Herself

Going over Jordan

Scars

She’s Dying, He Said

Somebody Who Understands You

Do You Love Me?

The Retreat

What Remains

The Border

I Had a Friend

Ring around the Kleinbottle

The Shrine

The Easy Arrangement

What the Arbor Said

Fog

What and When I Promised

Little Sister, Cat and Mouse

I Wasn’t Losing My Mind

How to Seduce a Feminist (or Not)

Circa 1970

When the knocking came, Maud was taking a sponge bath.

Grabbing the sheet from the daybed she stuck her head out. One of the old men from the first floor stood there looking sore. “You got a phone call—why don’t you come down to the phone when I call? All the way up here on account of you don’t listen …”

Clutching the sheet she ran for the upstairs extension, right across from the john. Hearing Duncan’s voice she was sure it was all off. “Duncan, what is it? He can’t make it? He won’t meet me?”

“Of course, Maud, don’t get excited. Didn’t I tell you it’s all arranged?” His voice playing cool and dependable. “Just a little change of plans. First, we’re not meeting at my place …”

“Oh.” Goodbye to his wife’s potato salad, the sesame crackers and cheeses—Port Salut, Roquefort, Camembert. All day she had been figuring the odds on salami, slicing those virgin cheeses. Gorgonzola, Gouda, Brie.

“Bill wants to meet us in town, at the Low Blow. There’s a jazz man he wants to hear.” The familiarity of the first name hung on the telephone wire as if with clothespins.

She had an urge to add the last name. The lumpy old man from downstairs had not hung up. He wouldn’t know who
W. Saltzman was. They hated her in the roominghouse, her and the two still sexual men up on three: said they were noisy, said they used the phone too much. Doors opened eye-wide behind her in the halls, but when she spoke to them, the old men answered with suspiciously pursed lips if at all. Duncan was warning briskly that she not be late. He would pick her up—he and the wife, chuckle. Damp under the sheet she ran for her room. Duncan was eager to fuck her, would like to set up an extracurricular lay on Fridays after his last class. He taught at the college but lived in a house adorned with oriental carpets in an older suburb. With lumbering suaveness he tried to nudge her guilty for lunches at his expense in an off-campus Italian restaurant. Often he spoke of his friendship with the poet W. Saltzman, discovering in her work even more influence than there was, quoting the great man on trivial occasions. Introducing Saltzman was an attempt to net her in obligation: rubbing herself dry, she grinned.

Rhoda, his wife, was an excellent cook. Rhoda: chicken gently sautéed in white-wine sauce, roast sesame lamb, avocado salad. She would move in, if Rhoda would cook for her. But Duncan was a beefy milk-fed professor; from dead men’s bones he ground plastic bread. He was so sure she was his proper prey, a rootless, nameless arty girl half nuts and outside the pale: because it never, never occurred to him that she might be a real writer.

She put on her good dress—the shade of blue was good, anyhow. The refrigerator held about a glass of milk and something in a napkin. She babysat occasionally for a couple she’d known during her stint teaching at the college. Besides baby food, she’d turned up maraschino cherries, cocktail onions and half a box of animal crackers.

She had consumed the cherries and onions and carried off the box.

She poured out a little milk and sat slowly chewing the crackers, eating each animal paw by paw and the head last.

She crossed to the john then. The light was on, the door ajar. The toilet was filled to the brim, splashing over to puddle the floor.

Lazily, like a carp in the bowl, a long cigar-brown turd floated. She backed out.

She had as landlady an ex-inmate of Treblinka. She would go down tomorrow to complain, and Mrs. Goldman would show her tattoo: Mr. Goldman and the little Goldmen long since ashes. Mrs. Goldman would assure her she was lucky to be in the United States and alive. She would retreat apologizing. Nothing was commensurate, and the plumbing broke every two weeks. Mrs. Goldman would hint she was flushing Tampax down the toilet, and she would deny it. Mrs. Goldman would bat her large weak eyes in disbelief. She and Mrs. Goldman would continue the argument as she backed up the staircase. Then Mrs. Goldman would utter a few Yiddish curses for women of loose morals and retire, slamming her door. Maud would piss in the sink as she did now, then run over to the college whenever possible. The college, where she had taught until replaced by a PhD, who was equally needy and would be equally badly paid, had useful facilities.

She reread the poems she had gone through five times. Saltzman could tell her where to send stuff, give her introductions, even help her find a job, point her out to editors, tell her how to get a book published. He was power. Besides it was getting to be winter. Though he was not her only literary pa, surely he would not mind the other influences. He was the local celebrity and everybody claimed to know him or his ex-girlfriend or his dentist. Imagining this meeting had soothed her to sleep bitter nights. She felt she was stumbling in darkness about to come round a corner into blinding light and be—not consumed but transfigured. Someday she would make it, why not now? She had to: how else could she survive?

The buzzer rasped. She jumped up. Turned, grabbed the envelope of poems. Saw herself in the bar bearing down on him poems in hand. She took out the bottom three, her cream, shoved them in her purse. Just happened to have on me. Well, shit, he could ask. Shrugging on her mouton coat. Going slowly down she felt the weight of the coat. It had been Sandy’s. A year in the state hatch, insulin, electric shock and hydrotherapy had dulled her, but not enough. When Mrs. Gross decided Sandy was getting too wild and must be put away again, Sandy went up on the apartment house roof and jumped. She saw Sandy’s long gentle face, her tea-brown hair, her freckled hands with the chewed nails, so vividly she could not take in Duncan. Docilely she followed him to the small Mercedes and got in back.

“What, Rhoda?” Maud came back into the present. “Oh, Harry the Tailor got robbed. No, they didn’t smash the window when they robbed him, it was a man and a woman and they cut him up.” She sat with head ducked, assuming Sandy’s old position with hands knit, foot tapping shyly. Dead, stone dead. “No, some kids smashed the window, after.” Mrs. Gross had acted funny when she gave her the coat. Maud had not wanted a fur coat—she thought they were gross, wearing the skin of some poor dead animal, but she did need a coat. Further, she felt she had a right to Sandy’s things. What she wanted was Sandy’s books, but Mrs. Gross brought out the coat. Mrs. Gross kept talking about how much she had paid for it, what good condition it was in, how little Sandy had worn it, till Maud had taken it to please her. She sat up, her knuckles bumping her teeth. Mrs. Gross had wanted her to pay for the coat. Then she began to laugh, covering her mouth so they would not hear.

Rhoda was sitting turned from Duncan. Her coat had a high fur collar, her reddish hair was done up in smooth whorls, and she radiated a faint smell of hair spray and spicy perfume. Rhoda did not like her because she was young,
single and therefore presumably scheming. She and Rhoda were always talking in oblique boring sideways conversations. If they were to talk straight out:

RHODA:
See my house! See my pretty things! They cost a lot! See how expensive I am.

MAUD:
If you can’t get out the door, have you tried the window?

RHODA:
See my man. No Trespassing! Keep Off the Grass!

MAUD:
It’s only lunch I want. I swear it’ll never happen while I’m conscious.

Duncan was of middle height but he sat tall: the Man behind the Desk. A dark blond thirty-eight, his jaw was square and he thrust it forward like a girl proud of her bosom. “Did you call Julie Norman about the seventeenth? I want her at the party.”

“Duncan, I hardly know her,” Rhoda whined.

“What do you mean, you don’t know her? What do you do at those meetings?”

“You know what I mean.” Rhoda’s neck arched from the collar, angry goose neck stretching. “She won’t remember me.”