The High Cost of Living (29 page)

“Why? It's good for her to know different kinds of women who've made different choices—work choices, living choices, sexual choices. What's the point of her growing up imagining everybody lives in a daddy-mommy-baby family and votes Republican? If you think loving women makes me less fit to be her friend than loving men or dogs or vibrators, you just have to be crazy!”

“If I told Mama, she'd never let you in the house again.”

“How does she feel about your living with Mark?”

“She doesn't understand! She's locked in some weird Victorian notion of how people live and I can't get through to her! Okay, I don't want to tell her.… But I don't like your hanging around Honor either.”

“You used to see her as hanging around me. Look, I've never gone to bed with a woman who wasn't at least as interested as I was. Honor doesn't attract me that way. I don't like straight women. I don't usually like straight women as friends, and I sure don't need them as lovers.”

“If anything happens, Mama will think it's my fault. So will I. Because I could tell her.”

“Then you can set your mind—if that's what you call it—at rest!” Leslie pivoted. She saw her bus coming and sprinted for it. The rain felt good pelting her. As soon as she was packed swaying in the late rush hour mass, she began thinking of all she should have said. “You're a woman who hates women. I've heard you putting yourself down. Do you think Honor should trust you over me? You do nothing but criticize her. You're jealous! You don't respect her.” She almost missed her stop.

Tasha was trying to include her in social events, inviting her to eat at the house, inviting her to a party there. It was a nice quiet relaxed talky party, mostly women, five or six men, but everyone seemed to come in couples and know each other. She got into an unavoidable argument with the blond with the baby, Sherry, who was spouting nonsense about matriarchal prehistory, the worst kind of undocumented unproven wishful thinking.

“But writing came in around the beginning of patriarchy,” Sherry said. She smiled a lot when she argued, as if to make contact across the words. “The first thing they did with it was to cover up the past. To rewrite the old myths. How can you expect we'll ever find a nice box in the desert with a scroll in it saying, This is how things were before the male revolution, folks, with nice cross-dating in a language you happen to be able to read.”

“But your history isn't history, it's comic books. You just make it up wholesale to be the way you want it to be,” Leslie said coldly.

She felt as if the other women around her were annoyed with her for starting the argument with Sherry. Tasha came over and tried to mediate. “You don't really disagree about the facts we know. I think you just attach different importance to the evidence that remains.” Tasha looked momentarily pleased with herself as if she had produced a formula that had to work.

“I don't give women license to do slipshod work,” Leslie said, mostly to Tasha. She was annoyed with Sherry, all that smiling and nodding and really an inflexible position behind it. “I have to work twice as hard and be twice as good as the men in my department just to survive.”

“Twice as good at what?” Tasha laughed. “Not helping old ladies across the street. Goodness has nothing to do with it.”

“As a woman I have to be more scholarly, more precise, better documented, with sounder statistics. Why can't Sherry see that?”

“Cause it's like studying theology. Can't you see that? The winner gets to tell about the fight.” Tasha was glowing again. She would never be pretty—her features were crowded into her small triangular face—but she gave off a sense of loving energy that could replace prettiness.

“And to describe the loser,” Sherry said, patting Leslie's arm. “We don't
have
a history.”

They were trying to charm her, to cajole her into backing down, and she resented it. Tasha was saying, “You still admire that macher George. You think his way is
the
way. What are these damn Simpson papers you talk about? They're just a bunch of rich crooks. Essentially they're paying you off to put their house in order.”

“But they had an effect on how things are here. They made choices that shaped Detroit.”

“Boy, I don't doubt that,” Tasha said, laughing. “If you really did an exposé of them. Or even just so we'd understand how they screwed us. Is that what you're doing?”

“Not exactly.” Leslie sighed. Tasha was attacking just where Leslie feared the most. She wanted to leave. “But after all, I'm educating myself. Later I can do what
I
want.”

“Leslie, why don't you get involved in the women's school? Use your skill now for us. Rae's teaching a course on the history of Black women. You could do a history course. Local. Women's history. Whatever.”

“Not old wives' tales, which is all you people care about,” Leslie said gruffly. “I don't have the time.”

George was always pulling her into the domestic corners of his life. Almost she expected him to summon her to take notes while he was sitting on the toilet. He did not have her sense of privacy. Sometimes that made her feel like a servant, a real domestic. “You're part of the family,” Sue was always telling her, but never said which part. Sue had grown up with Black servants and had one still in the cleaning lady who came three times a week. Leslie felt bogged down in their domesticity, always alien to it, the behavior of a different species, the dominant species which threatened the existence of hers, heterosexual man and complaisant woman and their offspring. Yet at times she could feel their house as a refuge. George is my protector, I shall not want.

He was talking in exuberant snatches over his shoulder as he roughhoused with Davey and Louise on the floor of the family room (TV, comfortable furniture, toys scattered so that the unwary foot would crush plastic). She could not watch George with his kids without feeling envy. Yes, she envied Davey and Louise the love they got without having to beg, a father who played with them on the floor, in the yard, who took them to the zoo and sailing and thought that was fun. She envied them the room each had, the fish, the hamster, the clean nice furniture. She envied them the creative day care, the Montessori kindergarten, the gentle exciting grade school they had started, the chance to be precocious gifted children. Who wouldn't be a charming bright-eyed genius with that kind of attention? She would not mind being George's kid instead of his research assistant. Louise's finger paintings were thumbtacked to the walls of his office. Imagine her own father putting up some daub Leslie had smeared, even if he'd had an office. The only time she'd drawn on a wall she'd had her face slapped and had to wash the wall down. Nothing remained from her childhood, nothing cherished by anyone; even her outworn clothes had been used up as rags.

George was especially exuberant because this Thursday evening there was something to celebrate: he had got his Rockefeller grant for the book they wanted to do. They would have the money for the capital investment project. “It's going to be real on a scale that'll make an impact if we do it right, if we carry it off elegantly. Nothing is more satisfying than busting myths,” he said, lying on his back while Louise bounced on his chest. “I'm going to take the myth of the robber barons and reduce it to rubble. The development of industry was always intelligent and efficient. Money's always had the smarts here. We'll demonstrate it, and that's going to put us on the map.” It meant a good dissertation for her, better than the previous game plan, with money to support her directly on that work. “We'll farm out the boring papers,” George said. He didn't mean it—he'd keep control and of course the money and credit. But he'd let the papers absorb more grad students who were protégés of others in the department, and he'd withdraw his best talent into the capital research.

“Get trucking on your topic,” he ordered. “I want a proposal from you by next week. Ow! Ow! I give up, Davey. Uncle!”

“Next week! I can't.”

“You've been dawdling. You haven't got years and years, Red. How long do you think I'm going to stay here?”

“Do you have another offer?”

“Sure. Not one I'm ready to take. Hey, you watch it, you're ticklish too, lousy-Louise. Grrr. I don't even have to touch you to tickle you. Watch, I'm just going to point my finger at your belly and you're going to be tickled. One, two, three.… See, I told you.… This book is going to do it, but why sit it out here till the book's done? We'll make the move on the basis of the first papers we present. Full steam ahead.”

Cold iron in her stomach. So soon. Would he take her with him? She couldn't switch schools again in mid-Ph.D. She had to finish before he left, or she was done for. She had better be done with everything but her dissertation by halfway through next year. She felt harassed, evicted. Now the dissertation topic would come right out of the work with George, and she would be paid; but she had to rush. Why, how lucky to have lost all her human relationships in the course of a week, because from now on her social life would be confined to saying hello in the elevator.

The food was set out, the wine, the cans of soda and beer, and now students and staff were arriving. Leslie was startled to see Mark and Cam come in with Honor. What was Honor doing here? Why had Cam agreed to bring her, after that wonderful chat? She suppressed the impulse to bolt the room. If Honor came knowing she would be here, perhaps there was a chance to reconcile. She hung back, watching. Honor was more dressed up (the gauzy blue gown) than anyone except Sue, who had on a long maroon dress.

She ran errands, she kept an eye on the supplies, she had earnest fleeting conversations, she sat at George's feet, all the while wishing she were home in her neat stark room alone. A headache made a lump behind her eyes. Everyone seemed to be smoking more than usual and the air felt stuffy and soiled.

Honor danced up to her. “Aren't you going to speak to me?”

“I wanted to. I wasn't sure that was what you wanted.”

“How humble. And perceptive. I wasn't sure I did either, but I'm bored. What a lot of dull forlorn people one must encounter in graduate school. Perhaps everyone who likes people at all or is good at doing anything must leave, abandoning the sad cloddy types to plod along.”

“Maybe it's more like the Army. A few years under an alien regime, with no time to do anything you want.”

“Well, my life is definitely more interesting.… Definitely.”

“I'm supposed to ask who or what, aren't I?”

“You know
who
. Bernar' and I have been getting closer and closer. It was perceptive of you, Leslie, to think of him in a way I hadn't. How fascinating you should have done that.”

“You give me too much credit. I think of him as a snake in the grass.”

“Oh, pooh! Just because he rejected you. You must be more broad minded. We can't all be attracted to each other, can we?”

“What happened between him and me isn't what he told you. You'll fingure that out sometime.… So you think you're in love with Bernie?”

“How blatantly patronizing! I
think
I'm in love! I
think
you just insulted me. Good night.” With a flounce of skirts she stalked away, over to George, who was poking the fire. As Leslie watched, Honor took up a position with one arm against the fireplace wall and began flirting outrageously with him. Soon the other students were drifting away resentfully, because George was no longer listening to the bright remarks they spent ten minutes thinking up. He was not even looking at them when they spoke. Honor was putting on a performance for Leslie's benefit that Leslie thought was at least equal to her Cecily.

I won't give her the satisfaction of standing here suffering, she told herself and marched to the kitchen. There Sue was in an odd petulant mood. She was drinking a lot, not wine but vodka mixed haphazardly with whatever came to hand: orange juice, ginger ale, cola. “He's going to be a big success, isn't he?” Sue took her by the hand, squeezing.

“Sure,” Leslie said awkwardly.

“I never expected it. You figure on that? Why, when I took up with him, sending my parents climbing the wall, he was a campus radical. He organized a teach-in, he was a hippie with hair down to his waist who used to hold his jeans up with a piece of rope. I just don't know, and that's the bottom truth, Leslie. Life is full of surprises, ain't that the truth? You know he got kicked out, fired from his job at Champaign-Urbana? In 1970 when I was carrying Davey? He was just an assistant prof. And for a year he couldn't find a job sweeping streets. We had to live off my parents, which was no treat! I swear it would've been less of a hassle to go on welfare! That's because I didn't come into my own money till I was twenty-five. That's how my granddaddy set it up. Honey, the first thing I ever did besides buy a decent king-sized bed and a whole bunch of clothes for Davey and George and some halfway decent maternity clothes for me—I was carrying Louise by then—was to pay my parents back every red cent we'd borrowed from them.” She paused, lost. She could not remember what she had started out to say, and turned appealingly to Leslie.

“You had a real hard time starting out,” Leslie edged away, hoping to turn Sue off. She was not sure how much of this Sue really wanted the others in the kitchen to hear. “I told George I'd bring him a refill.”

“He ought to be drinking real bubbly tonight instead of that sour-piss white plonk.”

She took a glass of wine to George, who received it with a quick automatic wink and turned back. He was still talking to Honor, who was baiting him about how boring she found the idea of quantitative history. “Sounds just like painting by number. What happens to Cleopatra's nose and Napoleon's personality?” Honor was touching her own long nose flirtatiously. Then she stopped abruptly, looking startled.