Free The High Cost of Living by Marge Piercy Page B

it.”
    He kissed one finger and touched her nose with it. “Good night, Leslie. Don’t be too sleepy to lock the door behind me. I found it real unpleasant waiting in your doorway.”

five
    Grumpily she sat on the arm of an overstuffed couch next to Honor, who was next to Paul. Paul had his arm around Honor and was cracking innuendo jokes in a steady stream she tried to shut out. The evening before, Bernie had come by to ask Leslie to fill in for him as he had to work and could not cover Honor the last night of the play, “when Paul may be especially clever or especially desperate, so you go and play St. Bernard in my place.” Therefore here she was perched uneasily on the arm of the couch smoking a joint Bernie had laid on her as recompense.
    It felt funny to smoke a whole joint alone, but nobody was paying any attention to her, which suited her, and Honor never smoked. Indeed, did she love Honor? No. That she was sure of. She had fallen in love only twice, once with Penny, when she was sixteen, and once with Val, when she was nineteen. Well, she should watch out, if such natural disasters came in three-year cycles. Of course they didn’t. Instead it was reasonable to assume that if recovering from the first—unconsummated, unacted—had cost her three years, then recovering from the fully realized second might take six.
    She did not think of herself as volatile dry straw catching at the first spark. No, slowly, painfully she succumbed, like a waterlogged green bough that took hours and piles of kindling to set smoldering. What worried her was that every time she had fallen thoroughly in love she was engulfed entirely before she allowed herself to realize what was happening.
    It’s true, she thought, I don’t make love. I fall in love, I make it happen like lightning striking. Therefore she stared sideways at Honor tossing her hair with a hand dramatically aloft and wondered. Penny had been big and blond, ample bodied as Honor was, but languid, easy, like a pool of sun-warmed water, her eyes big and brown and slowly blinking. She would never be attracted to Penny now. The last time Leslie had been in Ludington—the dramatic throw-it-all-on-the-table Thanksgiving—she had run into Penny coming out of Meijers Thrifty Acres. Penny had looked flabby, spent, one snowsuited kid tugging at her and the baby stuck in a shopping cart with the groceries she was pushing toward a station wagon.
    Valerie. Her mind balked. Valerie’s poignant face. Moon round yet hollow cheeked. Skin like dark buckwheat honey. In the summer Leslie never tanned as dark as the skin of Val’s winter belly. She freckled too much. Val’s skin was clear, so clear it seemed to have lighted depths. Valerie Mendoza. Everything about her was special and strange. Half of her was Scotch-Irish like Leslie but the other half was Filipino, which was itself part Japanese and part Spanish and part Tagalog. Her hair was black and slippery smooth, cut straight across her wide forehead in bangs and then straight again at her small shoulders. Her eyes were slanted and dark, but her nose turned up like Leslie’s own. In repose Val’s face seemed faintly amused. Her body was lithe, compact, perfect except for an appendicitis scar that proved she was mortal, that and her left breast being slightly larger than her right. Suddenly Leslie found herself squinting to keep back tears in the middle of the alien straight noisy party that happened around her like a swarm of insects. Honor could survive her absence long enough for her to scout something cold and unalcoholic, like water to drink. She found the small stool-and-counter kitchen.
    Cam came over to lean on her arm. “Well, so much for that play. What’re you drinking?”
    â€œGinger ale. I have to get up early tomorrow.”
    â€œListen, you’ve been wonderful for Honor. I appreciate it. I really do.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”