The Longings of Women Read online

  Countless women who had married when she did had given up their friends. She could remember when she had felt almost as close to Lisa as to Melanie, Lisa who vanished into her marriage as into a closet. Leila and Melanie had stayed close over the decades, in part because Nick did not possess her as so many husbands ate up all of their wives’ attention. She had enjoyed the time and energy to return to school, to get her doctorate at Brandeis, to take on a career and to go as far as she could. She was able to carry out her research, think through her ideas, write her books. No doubt one reason their marriage had lasted was because she remained interesting to him, and for that she credited her work. She was out in the world too. She had anecdotes, stories, new people, departmental controversies to bring home.

  Her friend Jane viewed her marriage as a frightful aberration in an otherwise rational woman. While they’d been friends, Jane had been through tumultuous romances with three very different women who had all similarly broken Jane’s frangible heart. “Don’t you worry about AIDS?” Jane would demand.

  “He doesn’t pick up women in the street. He gets involved with one woman at a time whom he knows fairly well—someone connected with a play he’s directing.” She did not tell Jane what Melanie knew, that ever since she had borne David, she had been less attractive to Nick. From time to time, his desire would surface, like a reprieve of an earlier song. Each time she would talk herself into believing that this time he would once again be as physically smitten with her as she was with him.

  She felt her love for him stirring within her. She always loved him, but it was often dormant, a quiet caring. Melanie had several times suggested that one of the strengths of their marriage was that they did lead separate lives and spent part of every year apart. Therefore they were always new to each other. They could never take each other for granted. They were always bringing something, if only a few weeks’ experiences, to the other.

  Perhaps. But she missed him when he was apart from her, and she loved him most, not in her mind’s eye in absentia, but there with her. The house was a hundred-odd years old. They allowed it to be cool, even cold at night. While Nick was away, she slept under a feather quilt her mother Phyllis had given her when she had set up housekeeping. While Nick was with her, she threw the quilt over a chair and slept under a blanket.

  She felt herself shifting from one economy, one set of demands to another. Yet he would return tomorrow to New York. This was a flying visit, and they should have made love. In the morning, she would put together a special breakfast to seduce him. She would bring coffee in bed, café au lait with something special. Yes. It had been sweet of him to suddenly want to see her, and she must break from her melancholia and make the time good. She would tear herself away from Melanie and go to New York next weekend.

  She woke before him and ran down to make what would not be breakfast exactly—later for that, downstairs—but coffee and something: the something she decided upon, with the freezer blowing in her face, was honey cake Melanie had made at Rosh Hashanah. They often brought their families together for holidays. Leila was the better cook, but Melanie was the better baker. She thawed the honey cake and brought it to him warm on a beautiful Imari plate he had given her. May it sweeten the rest of our years together. The tray looked inviting as she balanced it carefully upstairs, steaming coffee, slices of cake (Nicolas had a sweet tooth the size of his home state of Texas, an accent he had long since discarded except when he wanted it), even a pink chrysanthemum snatched from a bouquet. The Imari plate Nick had brought her one year when he had been at a theater festival in Kyoto.

  He woke more slowly than she did, with a widely played drama of yawning and stretching. Bearlike he tossed the covers and flung out his arms. Then he settled back for his coffee, asked about Melanie when the cake was explained to him, clucked sympathetically. Leila learned more from observing Nick than from listening to him. Now she watched him lick his fingers, glance at the clock and then at her body. They would make love. She would know his heaviness on her, his large hands molding her, his mouth tasting of coffee against her tongue, her breasts, her belly, her sex. Her body began to stretch and stir, coming alive from the core as it rarely did these days. Now he was on her and in her, riding far into her as she groaned and her hands scrabbled on his broad back.

  By the time he dressed and showered, he had to leave at once—no time for a real breakfast. “I’ll get something at the station—or on the train. Not to worry!” He grabbed up the rest of the honey cake from the kitchen table and ran out with only his bulging leather briefcase for luggage.

  She watched him off, still in her peignoir, and then wandered disconcerted through the house. As she passed her study, she saw the winking red eye of the answering machine. She still felt guilty she had not managed to get a healthy breakfast into him before he rushed out. She must figure out whether to take the shuttle or the train or to drive to New York next weekend. At least she would be done with the stupid trial.

  It was Mrs. Peretz. At the sound of her voice, Leila knew. She knew. “Leila, she died at two A.M. She died last night.” Leila sat in her study at the desk covered with student papers. At first she felt nothing. She seemed to have no reaction at all, and she told herself she had done all her grieving in anticipation during the last months.

  Then she began to weep spasmodically. She could not seem to stop crying. What she felt most sharply was deserted, abandoned by the woman she had always been able to talk to about anything in her life, in her work, in her mind. Melanie, even Melanie dying, was still her other, better, warmer, gentler half. She had loved Melanie since they had first sat up all night talking instead of studying for a psychology exam. Leila was a commuter and desperately happy to have a friend at school.

  She washed her face hard and ran a bath because she did not want to smell of sex. It was a cool gold day under a dark blue ceramic sky. Yellow leaves from the enormous maple in the yard were idling down to the ground paved with gold. She had to get organized. She had to call Mrs. Peretz and Shana. But she needed to be washed and dressed first.

  Melanie was someone she could always trust to complain to about Nick or her marriage, because Melanie would—unlike, for instance, Jane—assume that of course Leila had to make it work. Melanie and she had married their college boyfriends, stayed with them, had one child each, ended up in Boston and made careers for themselves a little later than they had at first intended. Their lives had been joined since adolescence. In many ways Melanie was the sister Debbie wasn’t, although Debbie was her flesh and blood.

  Dressed in white blouse and black suit she sat down and called Melanie’s house. Shana answered, her voice hoarse. “Oh, Leila, I kept thinking Mother was going to come home again. I kept hoping every day. She did it before. Why couldn’t she come home?”

  “I’ll be right over. Is your grandmother there?”

  “She’s at the hospital, but she’ll be back. The funeral will be tomorrow. I already called Rabbi Katz, Grandma told me to. Please come over. I don’t know what to do.” Shana began sobbing.

  By contagion Leila did too, then wiped her face roughly. “There’s an enormous amount to do.” The busier they were, the better for all of them. Fortunately she was good at doing. “Make yourself a cup of tea and sit down. By the time you drink it, I’ll be with you.”

  In fact there was no one in the world she wanted to be with as much as Shana, because they were equally robbed and bereaved. Melanie had told her seventy times, Watch over Shana, and she would. She had first held Shana right after the home delivery, still stippled with bright birth colors and screaming as if being born were cause for a broken heart. Shana’s father had a new family in Amherst. No, Shana had her grandmother and she had Leila, and Leila must make that enough for her. Now she must call David and leave a message for Nick, so that he’d hear it whenever he reached his sublet apartment. It was time to put aside her grief and get moving.

  TWO

  Mary

  Mary woke, sleeping on top
of Mrs. Douglas’s bed. They had canceled her this week because Mr. Douglas was going to a sales conference in Puerto Rico, and Mrs. Douglas was going along to sun herself. That meant Mary was cleaning only four days this week, so she wouldn’t be able to put aside her five dollars; but more importantly, it had given her a place to sleep last night and tonight too. They were due back Thursday. She had set their alarm for six so she could take a nice bath this morning. When she had a borrowed house, she took as many baths as she could to make up for the nights she slept at Logan or in a church basement or any other stolen place. Last night she had done her laundry and packed it carefully into her carry-all. She always had her big flowered carry-all and her great old purse, so that she would never give the impression of a bag lady, just a cleaning lady going to work.

  Her off-season clothes she shipped every year to her son Jaime in Hawaii. They did not have room in his little apartment for even an extra box, but he stored her things in the back room of his surf shop. Then in spring she would write to him to send her the box, and when it arrived, she would ship her winter stuff off. It would have been easier to send it to her daughter Cindy in Chevy Chase, but Cindy hated storing and shipping Mary’s things.

  They had four kinds of cereal open: bran flakes, raisin bran, granola and cornflakes. She helped herself to a modest amount of each. She had bought milk and a half pound of hamburger meat the night before and a head of lettuce. The rest of her supper she had put together out of leftovers and items she dared appropriate. When she borrowed her clients’ houses—the people whose houses she cleaned or whose animals she fed and walked—she was extremely careful. She was clean, tidy, quiet. She was truly transparent, passing through the lives of the people whose houses she slept in without leaving a trace or residue, except sometimes a sense of puzzlement, minor arguments and accusations. Who ate that lemon yogurt I left in the refrigerator? I could have sworn we had a can of chicken soup.

  She had keys to every house. Mostly she brought her own food in, and always she carried her trash out. The movie she had watched on the VCR last night, she had rewound. Any dishes she used, she washed at once. She did not drink or smoke. She slept lightly, a legacy from her time on the street, when she had slept only in snatches. She always had a clear escape route planned. She knew every door and every window. If someone had an alarm system, she made an excuse not to clean for them again. She woke at every sound, bolt upright and ready to flee. She could never let herself fall into a really deep slumber; it reminded her of the way she had spent her nights when her children were infants.

  She liked sitting at breakfast with “Good Morning America” on. When she was cleaning, she usually kept a set on so she could follow the talk shows, for company. She had never learned to work stereos, for she was not musical. Her father used to say that she had two clay ears. She loved real coffee. She made it drip right into a mug, for she had a tiny Melitta insert that fit over the cup. The Melitta from a church rummage sale she carried with her along with her fork, spoon and serrated knife, can and bottle opener. Saturday rummage sales were great. She could be there from when they opened until they closed and nobody would look askance. Her good wool skirt came from a sale in Brookline.

  Time to leave. She could not wait longer, because the neighbors would be going out to their cars. She was good at slipping in and out of houses and buildings on the sly. She was grey-haired, five feet four, a short stout woman cleanly and respectfully dressed. She was strong, although her feet gave her trouble. Now she had to walk around for an hour and a half until she could go to Mrs. Landsman’s at nine. Could she dare arrive fifteen minutes early and say the trains had been quick? She was supposed to be living with her married daughter, who was ashamed of her mother’s being a cleaning lady. She had a post office box, she had a checking account with $609 in it, but she could not afford rent deposit, utilities deposit. It had taken her almost five years to save the six hundred. It was a nippy morning and she walked briskly. If she had not been toting her two heavy bags, walking would have been pleasant, but soon, her shoulders and back ached.

  She had learned a good pace for residential streets and a faster pace for public streets, with pauses to look into windows and lean against them. To sit down cost money. It was too early for malls. She had spent the night in Arlington, so she would simply walk to Cambridge, use up the time and save the bus fare. After she had walked for forty minutes, her arms were throbbing. Her shoulders felt as if they would pry out of their sockets. She went into a laundrette. She had to use the bathroom, but there was no place to go. She would have to wait till she got to Mrs. Landsman’s. She should not have treated herself to that second cup of coffee. A harassed mother trying to get her laundry together before taking her two kids to day care paid her no attention. The woman was using three machines at once.

  It felt good to sit, even on a slatted bench. When she had been a girl, Mary remembered that she had adored a comic book character called Invisible Scarlett O’Neill. Scarlett had the ability to press a spot on her wrist and become invisible. Mary had found the idea of escaping from the perennial monitoring of mother, father, older brother, teachers a perfect fantasy. She was a curious child, but whenever she asked about anything, she was told ladies didn’t inquire about that or little girls didn’t need to know. She had been constantly told that ladies were not nosy. So she had dreamed of being invisible and going where she pleased and learning everything hidden.

  Well, at sixty-one, she had succeeded in her wish to become invisible. She walked through walls. She came and went without being seen or heard. Never had she guessed in her years of marriage, childrearing, entertaining for her husband and housekeeping that she would live out that fantasy, often in fear and danger of discovery or violence. Surreptitiously she slipped off her worn shoes. A couple were doing their laundry before work and fighting openly about his mother’s demands. Mary sat there as if she were a pile of laundry. They barely registered her presence. She thought that if she were an intelligence agency, she would hire women like herself, because she could go almost anywhere and no one looked at her. Half the time, when she passed a security guard, he thought he knew her. He’d seen dozens like her, and he wouldn’t want to look at her anyhow. She was safe in his book, a grandma, an old bag. She didn’t count. So they didn’t count her.

  She was a little alarmed that she had not been able to walk the distance without resting, but the bags were heavy. She had to keep up her strength, her health. Sickness was forbidden. Sickness would be ruin. Years ago, when she was a housewife, she used to have an exercise bicycle. She went horseback riding with her daughter or another housewife in Bethesda, where she lived with her husband Jim. Now she got more exercise than she needed.

  She arrived at Mrs. Landsman’s just at nine. She was upset to hear Mrs. Landsman on the phone as she walked in. She preferred cleaning when the people were away at work. A client’s presence severely limited her scope. Normally she cleaned in a frenzy and then investigated. She played detective. Each time she selected one room to study thoroughly, to learn where everything was kept and to read whatever was legible of their lives and intentions.

  She knew a great deal about her clients from their desks, their dressers, their appointment calendars, their wall calendars. She listened to the messages on their answering machines. She could tell their income levels and their major problems, health, business and personal. People did not have many secrets from those who cleaned for them. Mr. Douglas coddled an ulcer and liked dirty movies of women together. Mrs. Douglas had a lover, a married doctor she met every Friday while Mary cleaned her house. Mrs. DeMott had had liposuction. She hid caches of cigarettes all over the house. Mr. DeMott used eight kinds of medicine for constipation. Mr. Anzio was in trouble with the IRS for back taxes. Mrs. Anzio was on tranquilizers. Their daughter was anorexic and wrote fantasies of suicide in her diary. Mr. Landsman was unfaithful to his wife, and she put up with it.

  It was important for her to keep track of their habits so that
she could fit herself into the interstices of their lives. The class of people she cleaned for traveled a goodly amount, and she must know their times of arrival and departure. During the day, if she had not had a hidey hole the night before where she could catch some sleep, she had to know when it was safe for her to sneak a nap.

  But Mary hated to be examined in turn. This was rarely a problem. Some of her clients felt compelled to ask questions, not from any desire to learn about her, but from a misguided sense of courtesy, that they should show some interest. It was easy to disengage. She told them a few truths, that she was of Scotch-Irish lineage, not regular Irish. She let them assume she was an immigrant or that her parents were. She never said that her family had been in this country for one hundred sixty years, that her father had owned his own business, that she grew up in a house as pleasantly furnished and appointed as their own. She implied she was a widow; never that she had married a geologist who, now that he had retired from the Department of Energy, ran a small but lucrative consulting firm while living with his third wife and his second set of offspring. Her class drop would transfix and repel them at once. It would certainly make them uneasy. It was better to seem simpler than she was, a denizen of that class which did for them unobtrusively and faded back into the grey of genteel poverty. Never let them know who you really are, how you live, and that you can observe and think, that was her motto.

  They wanted a cleaner to be subservient, busy, with extremely limited horizons. But some were curious. Mrs. Landsman was one of those. She wasn’t comfortable with having someone clean her house, but she worked, fortunately, so Mary seldom ran into her. Mary liked the house. Mrs. Landsman was untidy but not dirty, and there were always interesting things to read and look at.