The High Cost of Living

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Also by Marge Piercy

Novels

Going Down Fast
, 1969

Dance the Eagle to Sleep
, 1970

Small Changes
, 1973

Woman on the Edge of Time
, 1976

The High Cost of Living
, 1978

Vida
, 1980

Braided Lives
, 1982

Fly Away Home
, 1985

Gone to Soldiers
, 1988

Summer People
, 1989

He, She And It
, 1991

The Longings of Women
, 1994

City of Darkness, City of Light
, 1996

Storm Tide
, 1998 (with Ira Wood)

Three Women
, 1999

The Third Child
, 2003

Sex Wars
, 2005

Short Stories

“The Cost of Lunch, Etc.”, 2014

Poetry Collections

Breaking Camp
, 1968

Hard Loving
, 1969

4-Telling
(with Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie, Robert Hershon), 1971

To Be of Use
, 1973

Living in the Open
, 1976

The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing
, 1978

The Moon Is Always Female
, 1980

Circles on the Water, Selected Poems
, 1982

Stone, Paper, Knife
, 1983

My Mother's Body
, 1985

Available Light
, 1988

Early Ripening: American Women's Poetry Now
(ed.), 1988

Mars and Her Children
, 1992

Eight Chambers of the Heart,
1995 (UK)

What Are Big Girls Made Of
, 1997

Early Grrrl
, 1999

The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme
, 1999

Colors Passing Through Us
, 2003

The Crooked Inheritance,
2009

The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980–2010
, 2012

Made in Detroit
, 2015

Other Works

“The Grand Coolie Damn” in
Sisterhood Is Powerful
, 1970 (pamphlet)

The Last White Class
, (play coauthored with Ira Wood), 1979

Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt
, (essays), 1982

The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of Days
, (daybook calendar), 1990

So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Writing Personal Narrative
, 2001; Enlarged Edition, 2005

Sleeping with Cats
, (memoir), 2002

Louder: We Can't Hear You (Yet!), The Political Poems of Marge Piercy,
2004 (CD)

Pesach for the Rest of Us,
2007

My Life, My Body (Outspoken Authors)
, (essays, poems, and memoir), 2015

The High Cost of Living

A Novel

Marge Piercy

one

Leslie was balanced on the hard cushion of an antique chair designed for someone with a three-cornered behind. In front of her, too close, Hennessy straddled a chair backwards and loomed over her, telling loud anecdotes intended as far as she could guess as advertisements. “The minute Ted left the room, she walked over to me and stood there, just looking me up and down. Provocative. I could see she wasn't wearing a bra.”

“Lots of women don't,” Leslie said between stiffening lips. “It isn't mean to be provocative.” She slumped forward. She too was not wearing a bra. Was that what had pinned him to her of all the women milling around this apartment? Some flaw, see you were asking for it.

“Listen, she knew. Then she leaned way over with her tits sticking in my face and she said”—he attempted to copy a languid expression, lifting one beefy shoulder—“she said, ‘Mark, are you a good lay?' Just like that.” He paused for reaction.

She stared at him, she hoped impassively. He had an almost handsome craggy face spoiled by a too square, too heavy jaw and an expression that was a perennial pout. His body, the upper part of his face seemed older than he was—a second-year graduate student like herself—while the lower half of his face seemed trapped in sulky early adolescence. If she said nothing, nothing at all, he might go away. But exactly like her, he seemed to know no one at the party. It was Cam's fault they were here, because Cam was acting in the damned play she had also gone to tonight.
The Importance of Being Earnest
. Support dead fags. She was itchy with discomfort in this fancy room with its mixture of wonderful-to-look-at, impossible-to-use antiques and modern couches like velvet-covered marsh-mallows. The walls of the livingroom were decorated with drawings of naked women, and she did not like that; she did not like the way men used bodies like hers to pin up on their walls and sell toothpaste and decorate glassware and magazines.

“So I said, ‘Well, nobody's complained yet.' ‘No?' she said. ‘Let's see.' And she put her hand on me, right you know where.… You're awful quiet, Leslie. Don't you believe me?”

She tried waiting him out, but he waited too. Could he really think not wearing a bra was an automatic general come-on? She had on a denim shirt, and her concession to the party was a fancy leather vest covered with an intaglio flowery design, two years old but still beautiful, that Val had given her for their second anniversary. “Sure I believe you, Hennessy.” Politeness got the best of her.

“What's this Hennessy bit? Call me Mark. Jesus, we see each other every day.”

Almost. They had the same boss. She refused to call him Mark. Formality was a poor defensive weapon but a comfort. He was inching his chair forward again until he had walked it well into the space she counted as her own, forcing her against the misshapen back of the chair. She imagined lashing out with her foot, a quick chop to topple him. Her mouth twitched in a quarter smile.

Taking that for encouragement, he reached for her hand. Big hot grasp. She could not kick him, because they worked together for George: Professor Sanderson. George was her bread and butter, her thesis adviser, almost her fate. George had brought her along to Detroit and the University when he had changed jobs, carried her along with an appointment as his research assistant with his files and his map collection. Therefore, she could not kick the chair out from under Hennessy, but she could pull her hand away. “Sorry. I have to pee.”

Through the crowded party she nudged her way, past the couples dancing, the thud and growl of the speakers. She got stuck next to a long glass table. On it besides glossy art books was an ashtray in the shape of a woman. It wasn't the kind of cheap thing her brothers might have had, like a hula girl on a highball glass. It was artful, sort of African, and therefore all the more shocking, as it was supposed to be. The butts ground out on the woman's hollowed belly jarred Leslie. She gritted her teeth, suddenly hating the whole room of strangers. There didn't seem to be another woman alone who wasn't trying to pick up one of the available men. What was she doing here, among women who looked through her? She wanted to break the ashtray, but there were too many people around. She did something else, fingering her vest. She had seen an extension in the hall. She scooped up the phone as she walked past and took it on its long cord into the bathroom, shutting the door.

She dialed Valerie's number in Grand Rapids. Let the owner of the ashtray finance her call, Paul What's-his-name. Creighton. The director of the play. Her heart was pounding in her throat, her wrists. It rang and rang. Why did she think Val would be home on a Friday night? Because she did not want Val to be with anyone else. The phone was answered. She shut her eyes, shut them tight, to hear Val's high voice.

“I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is not a working number. This is a recording. Please check your number and try again.”

She dialed Grand Rapids Information. “Do you have a new listing for Valerie Mendoza?”

They had no listing. Broke? Phone shut off? But Val had not vanished; she had moved in with somebody and that was the truth. She knew it. Let it not be Lena. But she was sure it was.

Enough. Time to get out. She wriggled along, awkward, diffident, to the bedroom at the end of the hall. Even the bedroom was full of people drinking and talking. There she saw Cam Rogers sitting against the bedroom wall, beside the bed heaped with coats. Cam worked for George too, as his secretary. She'd sit beside Cam and pay her a few compliments about the play before rescuing her pea jacket from the bed and going home where she belonged. “You were wonderful,” Leslie began, squatting down. But Cam wasn't listening. Her head tilted against the blue wall, she brooded. “Is something wrong, Cam?”

Slowly Cam turned, focusing on her. Drunk? “Hi there, old Leslie. You liked it, huh?”

She had begun to be casually friendly with Cam, a big amiable scattered woman who when she wasn't working for George studied dramatics and acted with the local theater group. Cam did not attract her; she was too obviously heterosexual, even victimized, a big soft woman not quite able to carry off her own act. Her hair was bleached and she made jokes about dark roots; her eyes were elaborately made up in two shades of eye shadow and her long lashes seemed to molt. Her daring purple jumpsuit was creased in the wrong places where she had been slouching against the wall. Leslie could take one look at Cam and draw in with the scent of her musky perfume that Cam would always be falling in love with someone who wouldn't love her back, and now Leslie searched where Cam was bleakly staring and tried to decide who might be making her unhappy tonight.