Free Three Women by Marge Piercy Page A

it on with that writer guy you were interested in?”
    â€œI’m bumping along, what else can I do? I haven’t had any luck with him yet, but I haven’t given him up for dead. So how’s the restaurant?”
    â€œI was fired.”
    â€œThose kind of jobs, they’d just as soon get rid of you as exploit you. Hang around too long and they figure maybe you’ll get something on them. The fish is rotten. The kitchen is full of roaches.”
    â€œAll of that!” Elena laughed. “I got evicted and so I moved home. I’m looking for work. You know, Mother doesn’t really like having me around. I’m always in the way. I always was.”
    â€œElena, nobody can not love you! You and your mother, you just never understand each other. You’re more like me, you’re spontaneous and you get into trouble and you have a big mouth and men are always wanting things from you. She never does anything off-the-cuff. She’d have liked you to make a reservation six months ago. Mother, I plan to be fired next February and then I plan to be evicted, so you can expect me around the first of March.”
    â€œGrandma, you have the wickedest tongue. So how come you called?”
    â€œI’m raising money for some tenants fighting eviction—”
    â€œAh, you want to put the bite on Mother.”
    â€œWell, she can afford it. She makes more money than the rest of the family combined. Look, I’ll call back tomorrow evening. Where is she?”
    â€œTaking some guy to the airport. I don’t know where she met him, maybe at some conference?”
    â€œSuzanne has got herself a boyfriend?”
    â€œI been trying to figure that one. He didn’t sleep here. Frankly I think he’s just a friend of a friend, whatever. But she got decked out to see him.”
    â€œLet me know. How about yourself, my beauty girl?”
    â€œNobody I give a shit about, frankly. Just guys.”
    â€œWait till you get to my age to be disillusioned. By now either I already did a thing with every old geezer I meet, or I might as well have, because I know his whole story from his ex-wives and ex-girlfriends. Or I had one just like him in ’fifty-five.”
    â€œI want something more special, something purer, something more intense. Something that matters, Grandma. Not a guy like a Diet Coke, not a guy like a hamburger. I want to be moved. I want to be forced to care. I want to love, really love, again. Do you think I’m too burned out?”
    â€œNo, precious. You’re full of fire. You just need someone strong and right for you.”
    The next afternoon, Beverly went up to the Bronx to walk the picket line with her friends in the union. They were good kids. They worked so hard and they got so little. Her heart went out to them. She talked with dozens of them, 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