Free Three Women by Marge Piercy Page A

some in Spanish, some in French as best she could, the Haitians, the brothers from Mozambique. It was a cold raw day with a wind that felt like it was peeling the skin off her face. They had bitter coffee in a plastic container, and one of the women went off for sandwiches and chips. After she had marched the line for a couple of hours, her knee began to give her trouble. After two guys from the American Nazi party had beat her up in Central Park years ago at an antiwar rally, her knee had never been the same. They liked to target the women, especially to gang up on women they guessed were Jewish.
    She had to stand on the subway going home as it was already rush hour, and she just stayed on the express to Ninety-sixth. When she gotto the top of the steps, she felt dizzy. She dragged herself along the twelve long blocks to her apartment past the unisex beauty parlors, the theater that showed Spanish-language films, the shoe shops, the hardware store, the nail salons, the gym, the travel agencies. She was too tired even to stop and pick up something to eat. She thought about chicken from the take-out place but she didn’t have the energy. Maybe she had something she could defrost. She was beat. If that Chino-Cuban place that had been on the corner still existed, they would have delivered. She was struck by how as she went through the streets of her neighborhood, she marked distances by landmarks that no longer existed. Oh, that’s a block from where the New Yorker bookstore used to be. Yeah, she’s upstairs from where Murray’s Sturgeon was before he moved. Turn left at where the Thalia was. A map of ghosts.
    She let herself drop on the couch in her apartment. Mao came and lay on her chest. He felt heavy, but she was too tired to push him off. In a way it had been nice to have Marta and Jim here. She enjoyed the gossip about Suzanne, things Suzanne would never tell her. She enjoyed having an independent relationship with Suzanne’s best friend, and she enjoyed having a good-looking man like Jim around. Still, the apartment was small. Although the couch opened into a double bed, there was only one bathroom. She was not much of a hostess, but she did run out for bagels and lox and cream cheese, and make them coffee. It turned out Jim was no longer drinking coffee. Beverly sighed. People increasingly seemed to define themselves by what they didn’t do: didn’t smoke, didn’t eat fat, didn’t eat meat or anything palatable. Didn’t wear leather. Didn’t drink. Didn’t. If you ever said you loved something, they would say you were addicted to it. What a boring bunch of people the next generation had turned out to be. Jim was a handsome man, a little younger than Marta, but he kept himself up. Since he’d lost his teaching job and become a therapist, he spent a lot of time at the gym. She had never known anybody who worked out the way people did now. Guys were never hesitant in the old days to take off their shirts. Everybody felt as if showing some skin was a treat to the other sex. Women didn’t feel they had to look like bone thin models to turn on a guy, and guys didn’t think they had to be built like Charles Atlas. After all, a lot of them did heavy labor. In fact her friends used to laugh at the muscle guys. Oh, they liked some strength in a man, but not those carved muscles that were all the rage now, like pet snakes, she thought, exotic, useless, and time-consuming to keep up.
    Two boys in the neighborhood had drowned last September, jumping into the river to swim in their clothes. Men did that more often these days, because they were getting to be as vain and ashamed of their bodies as women. They were embarrassed to strip to their underwear. They might not look like an underwear ad from the subway, Calvin Klein and his ghouls. So they went swimming in their clothes to cool off, and the waterlogged oversize pants dragged them to their deaths.
    But Jim was proud of his body. He liked to show it off. For a while