Free Three Women by Marge Piercy Page B

he had practiced distance running, but then he had taken up weights instead. She really liked him, but she didn’t see the point in wasting all that time heaving and grunting around a gym, paying out good money to pretend to be a teenager. He was some kind of therapist, she had never gotten it straight. The truth was, she thought all therapists did was persuade people that problems were theirs, not the system’s. Why blame General Motors or Coors or General Dynamic, if you could blame Mommy? Jim had been a college teacher, but in a budget crunch, he had been laid off. Like so many. She’d never had a profession beyond being an organizer, although she had worked at a great many jobs. But none of them had meant a thing besides a paycheck and a chance to do some political work. Sometimes, just a paycheck.
    Beverly sighed. When she looked back over her life and thought about all the good changes she had hoped for, she could get into the dumps. But what the hell. You just had to keep slugging and have fun along the way. Mao was kneading her chest with his paws. She knew he was hungry, and she felt guilty. Finally she hoisted herself up. Felt dizzy again. Now what? High blood pressure? She rarely went to the doctor—just a waste of time and more money for the drug companies. Dr. Moss had given her those ghastly pills that had made her feel like her head was disconnected from her body. She had stopped taking them two months ago. She wasn’t going to poison herself to profit some drug conglomerate. She undressed and put on her nightgown. She sure wasn’t going back out, as wiped as she was.
    She dragged herself into the kitchen, ashamed of her fatigue. She opened a can of salmon and split it with Mao, toasting a bagel left over from Marta and Jim’s visit. Marta shouldn’t have let herself go gray. Shemade more money than Jim. That didn’t shock Beverly the way it would have a lot of women. After all, her own mother, working as a button maker, had made more than their father. Papa got what work he could on the Lower East Side, but Mama had always been the real breadwinner.
    Many political women had been able to get work when their husbands were blacklisted or worse, so it was no big deal to her that Marta earned twice what Jim did, but she could tell it was an issue to him. He had not expected to have to go back to school at thirty-six and begin a new career. Eight years later, he was always looking back over his shoulder at the life he should have been leading. She suspected him of getting it off sometimes with his women patients, but she had never said a word to Marta or certainly not to Suzanne, who’d make a federal case of it. She wouldn’t just see that a little of that on the side probably kept him from seriously straying. After all, a guy in a position of authority and sympathy with a woman patient, why wouldn’t they both be tempted? She just observed the signs and kept her mouth shut. Beverly had known Marta as long as she’d been tight friends with Suzanne. As husbands went, Jim wasn’t half bad.
    She had wondered how it would go with the three of them sharing that big old rambling house, wondered if Suzanne wouldn’t be tempted by Jim, wondered if she could bottle up her jealousy at living with a couple. But Suzanne had always been controlled, except for that early fling with the Latino guy. Beverly had not liked Sam. His politics were okay, but he was a cold fish, superrational, the kind of guy who would rather argue all night than have a good time. He had married again, a woman who had a trust fund and no ambition but to please him and keep him, and she did. Too bad Victor wouldn’t marry Suzanne. She would have liked him for a son-in-law, but Victor wasn’t the marrying kind. Apparently Suzanne could live in the same house with Jim for years and never give him the eye. Admirable, sure, but a little inhuman. Suzanne had set out to make herself over into a flawless woman, one without weaknesses. A perfect