Braided Lives Read online

  Praise for Braided Lives

  “This book demonstrates the maturation of Piercy’s native talent for storytelling … we would have to look to a French writer like Colette or to American writers of another generation, like May Sarton, to find anyone who writes as tenderly as Piercy about life’s redeeming pleasures—sex, of course, but also the joys of good food, good conversation, and the reassuring little rituals like feeding the cats, watering the plant, weeding the garden.”

  —Judith Paterson, Washington Post Book World

  “A delicious binge of a book. I had a wonderful time reading Braided Lives, crying real tears at the sad parts and feeling real elation at the happy ones.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “This big, rich book has an authenticity of time and place that draws us into the story. The theme. That sex without birth control and abortion without legal protection cost lives. Piercy handles her theme deftly, so the lives of her characters and not the rhetoric of the author make us keep reading. Braided Lives is a novel that tries not to simplify but to clarify … and by so doing, it adds a great deal to our understanding of how things came to be as they are, and what some of yesterday might have meant.”

  —Marcie Hershman, Boston Globe

  “Marge Piercy is the political novelist of our time. More: she is the conscience.”

  —Marilyn French

  “A magnificent achievement. With beauty and mastery, she palpably creates, recreates a decade. Braided Lives is one of those rare, rich, valuable books that reveal how realities, class, sex, one’s times—shape generations.”

  —Tillie Olsen

  “Absorbing. Marge Piercy recreates the college campus of the fifties with all the desire, confusion, hypocrisy, and pain of young women’s emerging sexuality.”

  —Alix Kates Shulman

  Other books by Marge Piercy

  Poetry

  The Crooked Inheritance

  Colors Passing Through Us

  The Art of Blessing the Day

  Early Grrrl

  Hard Loving

  What Are Big Girls Made Of?

  Breaking Camp

  Mars and Her Children

  Available Light

  My Mother’s Body

  Stone, Paper, Knife

  Circles on the Water

  The Moon Is Always Female

  The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing

  Living in the Open

  To Be of Use

  The Hunger Moon: New & Selected Poems 1980–2010 4-Telling (with R. Hershon, E. Jarrett, D. Lourie)

  Novels

  Sex Wars

  Woman on the Edge of Time

  The Third Child

  Small Changes

  Three Women

  Dance the Eagle to Sleep

  Storm Tide (with Ira Wood)

  Going Down Fast

  City of Darkness, City of Light

  The Longings of Women

  He, She and It

  Summer People

  Gone to Soldiers

  Fly Away Home

  Vida

  The High Cost of Living

  Other

  Pesach for the Rest of Us

  So You Want to Write (with Ira Wood)

  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

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Braided Lives

  Marge Piercy

  © Middlemarsh, Inc 2013

  This edition © PM Press 2013

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

  PO Box 23912

  Oakland, CA 94623

  www.pmpress.org

  Cover design by John Yates/www.stealworks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-60486-442-7

  LCCN: 2012955001

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines, where excerpts of Braided Lives previously appeared:

  The Minnesota Review

  Maenad

  The Michigan Quarterly Review

  Earlier short stories incorporated into Braided Lives were published in:

  The Bold New Women, by Barbara Alson Wasserman, Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1966.

  off our backs

  One of the poems in Braided Lives was included in 4-Telling, Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1971.

  Printed in the USA, by the Employee Owners of

  Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.

  www.thomsonshore.com

  FOR ALL THOSE WOMEN WHO BUSSED TO STATE LEGISLATURES TO HARANGUE REPRESENTATIVES, MARCHED IN THE STREETS, TOOK WOMEN TO DOCTORS WHO WOULD HELP OR DID THE ABORTIONS THEMSELVES UNTIL THEY GOT SOME PART OF WHAT WOMEN NEEDED.

  Introduction to

  BRAIDED LIVES

  IT IS UNFORTUNATE that Braided Lives is so timely, since women’s hard-won rights are under vicious attack from the Right and from fundamentalists, from Congress and from state legislatures. It would be nicer if we could read this novel as historical fiction, but we are undergoing a powerfully funded attempt to roll back history. We are witnessing men who fantasize a return to the conditions of the fifties, plotting so that era’s constraints can return and women once again find their sexuality and fertility completely out of their control.

  The television program Mad Men has made vivid to viewers some of the enforced sexual roles of that time. Unfortunately, television makes pretty what was far from it. That era was far more bloody than cute.

  Most of you who will read this novel have never lived in a world before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal (if not affordable or procurable) for a lot of women. In Braided Lives, you enter a world that may be as strange and barbaric to you as the world in historical novels like my own City of Darkness, City of Light, in which an apprentice is hanged by the neck until dead for stealing a loaf of bread. Women of that time lived with a fear that may be hard for us to understand: that desire or even true love could kill; that to become pregnant when you do not want to is to enter a world of illegality and danger, of uncertainty and pain.

  In a world before Roe v. Wade, women faced the experience of forced motherhood, of signing babies away, of abortions carried out without anesthetics. There was also a very real fear of bringing shame on your family, of losing your scholarship or job, of being forced to drop out of school and perhaps not being able to return, of ruining your relationships, of arrest and imprisonment, of accidental sterility, of infection and pain, of death. Even after death, the shame would continue. Dying of an abortion was not at all uncommon, but usually covered up. Such a death would be a newspaper scandal if revealed, so it would be concealed if the family were able to persuade the doctor to fudge the cause of death (“her heart stopped”). When abortion was illegal, an estimated 40 percent of maternal deaths were from botched abortions or self-inflicted abortions. You could die a great many ways then: of bleeding to death, of septicemia, of tetanus.

  Braided Lives revolves around the friendship of two women in and after college. The main protagonist, Jill, is the closest I have ever come to basing any fictional character on myself, and this is one of the few times I’ve written fiction in the first person. It was a tremendous loosening and, to this day, I love the style of this book. Of any prose I’ve written, I think it’s closest to the way I think and speak, except for my poetry. It is not a truly autobiographical novel, although some episodes are similar t
o or the same as what I’ve done and gone through in my own life. If you read my memoir Sleeping with Cats, you can tell the difference. Braided Lives is more of a large, intricate structure built on events of those years, some of which are drawn from lives far different than my own.

  At the core of this novel is what young women’s lives were like when they were forbidden to have sex outside marriage, although probably a majority of them did so anyhow. It depicts what it was like when contraception for unmarried women was as difficult to come by as the Republicans would like to make it today. It tells what happened to women when abortion was illegal and anticipates how women—yes, women, not politicians, not the Supreme Court—forced the issue until they had gained control over their own fertility.

  The two main characters in this book come from Michigan’s industrial working class: Jill from Detroit, Donna from Flint. Jill is Jewish, although mostly in a cultural sense. Donna was raised Catholic. Both struggle with their sexual identities, their ambitions, and their relationships with men—in one case the same rich, cold, manipulative Freudian, Peter, who pits them against each other and almost destroys their friendship.

  The novel is full of the cultural wars of the fifties; the incipient, mostly underground, political ferment that led to the sixties; the rebellion of women against the rigid sex roles (and the equally rigid clothing and undergarments that fill some aging men with desperate nostalgia) that emerged later in the women’s movement; and the desire for something other than the conventional straitjackets of marriage that ruled those times. It centers on what it was like to be a woman when the men who hate female sexuality had full control of the laws and the medical establishment and the work and social options available to a girl coming of age.

  Braided Lives is also full of vividly created characters: Jill, dark and street-smart, falls in love easily until it almost kills her. Jill is seeking to find her way as a poet, seeking a way to be authentic in her relationships. A bit of a thief and an adventurer, inchoately political, she is a survivor who compares herself to an alley cat. Donna—a fragile, pretty blond—hopes to find security and fulfillment through men, while compulsively using sex as obliteration. Mike, Jill’s first adult relationship, is a follower of Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence—a heady mental cocktail of the era—who tries to dominate and control Jill absolutely. Howie is Jill’s friend from high school and emerges as her strongest relationship and most powerful lover, but he is also the same for Stephanie, the flirtatious coquette who believes that a set of rules will guarantee success in the game of love that she plays using perennially renewable virginity.

  Jill’s mother, Pearl, is a palm reader to the neighborhood and a woman fearful of the world beyond the poverty and working-class life she has endured, who tries to force her daughter into a mold she understands. Jill feels a loyalty to the friends and allies from the old neighborhood, where she ran with a gang and seduced girlfriends, but feels just as strongly a fierce need to escape. College is all her idea and she must put herself through it at a time when that wasn’t as nearly impossible as it has become since, but hard enough.

  Braided Lives will give the reader a strong, gritty, rich look at what the Right and fundamentalists are trying to bring back decades after it was swept away by the movements of the sixties and seventies. If you as a young woman or a young man imagine that the attempt to push back women’s sexual freedom and ability to choose when and if they will have children would not impinge on your life strongly, read on. Who is the person who does not control her own body? A slave. Braided Lives recreates the lives of young women when falling in love could prove fatal, when pleasure could kill you. Without the ability to control if and when she gets pregnant, without the ability to choose to carry a baby into the world or not, there is no sure career path for a woman, no successful attempt to budget for herself or her family, no way to ensure she can provide for her children as she desperately wants to, no way to equality in the workplace.

  When this novel was first published, I received death threats from anti-choice people. Whatever life they were pro, it wasn’t mine or that of any woman I have ever known. I purchased my first answering machine to screen out their tirades and attempts to intimidate me.

  Never doubt that access to contraception and to abortion are life-and-death issues for women. Letting those rights go can kill you. It surely did kill many women in those bad old days that conservative men look back on with piety and the sense that, for them, those days were fine indeed.

  Marge Piercy, 2013

  CHAPTER ONE

  IN WHICH JILL FORCES HERSELF ON HERSELF AND BEGINS

  THE DAY BEFORE yesterday was my birthday and Josh boiled two lobsters in seawater and then baked a chocolate cake for the party later, so rich I wanted to eat it in tissue-paper slices. As the sun shone warm for late March, the first seedlings, the cress, broke through the ground in the garden we had plowed and planted last week. All day I was glad but curiously light and cut loose.

  In midafternoon I suddenly knew why. When my mother last read my palm that summer I left home for good, she told me I would die between the ages of thirty-eight and forty-two. I had passed out of a zone of danger.

  “How could you have believed her?” Josh asked.

  I didn’t: some child closeted in me did. As I ran out of the house yesterday at seven to drive to the airport with my head stuffed with the grit and sand of fatigue, something was nagging at me. All day in airports and bumpy planes, I hunched notebook in hand expecting a poem to issue from this curious itch, but it didn’t.

  I was met by three graduate students and taken to my motel. A workshop followed with some good questions and a chance to make a few political points, a potluck supper with the local women’s center, my reading. I strode to the microphone in my velvet gown patterned like a starry night and knocked over the water pitcher as I adjusted the micro phone—always preset too high. “We expected you to be taller,” they said, as they always say. Then I went for their hearts. Passion out of accidental circumstance transcended is what they’re buying.

  Afterward at the reception, the timidity, the weirdness, the undulating snake dances of ego before me kept me on edge. “Aw, come off it,” I wanted to say. “It’s just this person, me. All those years when I made a living at part-time secretarial work, people like you wouldn’t even say hello to me. What’s the fuss?” They think I am the books solidified, but the books are the books. I’m just this round cranky tired woman who would rather be home in bed with Josh by now telling the beads of our days and making the amber of that reality shine with the heat of our bodies. Too much self-regard has never struck me as dignified: trying to twist over my shoulder to view my own behind. And it is not a mirror I want but a long view back. I feel as if I have come through rough terrain and across the wasteland around factories and down unmarked city streets without a map and I both know and do not know where I have been. I want to explain to somebody. To me? To Josh? The hypothetical gentle reader? For though I have crossed the danger zone alive, still at forty my life was wildly shaken by divorce, and if I find myself still myself now, that seems more of an accomplishment than it used to. I also find myself hard in love in a way I have to search far back in my life to match.

  It is not that whole busy swarming life, then, I feel compelled to march through leading you in a crowd of tourists into the bazaar but those few years when I became the woman I have somehow in all weathers and colors of luck remained. I want to revisit that burned-over district where I learned to love—in friendship and in passion—and to work.

  Today three planes end to end like rackety subway cars through the clouds have brought me home safe at last, so I’m inclined to dawdle here where there is always wind fresh off the ocean and the sound of wind chimes and gulls crying and cats mewing on the wrong side of every door and one of our typewriters going. Whenever I get back, I wander in circles singing, so glad to be back, so glad to be back. Are you so damned sure you’d like to meet your young self face-to-face
? Mother of what I am now, sucker, poser, kid rawer than I would like to admit and yet survivor, with the wariness and strong stomach of the scavenger. I can summon up pity for a battered alley kitten. Annoyance. Patronizing approval. The desire to stick my fingers in and make me prettier, cleaner, braver, better. But what I really feel penetrating my ribs like a knife is stark terror lest somehow entering that mind I’ll be trapped back in that skinny sixteen-year-old body. I hardly got through the first time. My idea of hell is to be young again. Ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys, cats and dogs, have mercy on the candid for they get what they crave: an education.

  To it, then. It’s March of 1953. I am sixteen, soon to turn seventeen. The Korean War seems to be winding down; the Rosenbergs are convicted and waiting in prison; Eisenhower has been president since January and Washington emits clouds of grey fog on the news every night; times are pretty good in Detroit for the workers on the line. Give me a sprightly fife-and-drum accompaniment in the back of your head. She is—all right, all right—I am striding from tie to tie between tracks orange with rust while on my left run the shiny tracks on which still once an hour diesels streak by. Ragged stalks of last year’s weeds swish against my jeans. Between the tracks puddles stand from yesterday’s rain. Not even a rim of ice today. Mother was disinclined to put me into brassieres till high school, so I developed early a slouch and a walk to shield myself, a quick steady glide that still brings me in and out of rooms a little on the sly, for I am small, dark and move fast. Alone I swing along at a good clip past the back picket and wire fences of wooden houses turned in rows like soiled cupcakes to occupy what in my childhood had been a patch of industrial wilderness between the blocks where workers live and the factories where they work. When the UAW (United Auto Workers) is out on strike, our neighborhood runs on empty and the men are testy on the street corners where their kids usually hang out.

  In those trash-scarred prairies and thickets Callie and I used to play explorers and scientists and bank robbers and commandos. There we found a dead pheasant and held a funeral in spite of maggots, found trodden weeds and discarded condoms, found a nest of bunnies we could not save from a dog. Last year Callie got in trouble and quit school. Walking I mourn the Callie of twelve whose lanky tomboy rebellion alternated with keeping her nails long and purple and sulking over confession magazines we swiped from drugstores. The roar of a train hits me and I jump, not having heard it come up on the good track. Swoosh-click, swoosh-click the cars loom past, Santa Fe, Chesapeake, Southern Pacific. I wish I could go away, away.