Sex Wars by Marge Piercy Read Free Book Online

She couldn’t find you. When she finally got to the address you’d given her, they said you didn’t live there. So she cameback to me. I remember her because she was so pretty and little and she cried so.”
    “Is she still living with you?” Freydeh took the woman by the arm and she must have grabbed too hard, for the woman flinched.
    “Watch it! That hurts.”
    Freydeh let go. “I’m worried about my sister. Is she with you?”
    “She ran out of money, so she had to go.”
    “Where?”
    “How would I know?” The woman was glaring at Freydeh, rubbing her arm ostentatiously.
    “Didn’t she leave a forwarding address?”
    “How long do you think I keep that? I’m one woman running a boardinghouse full of people who come and go, who sneak out without paying their bills, who eat like pigs at the trough. You’re lucky I remember her at all.” She turned and dived back into the milling crowd of hawkers and the confused immigrants staggering out with their battered luggage and bags and bundles on their heads, on their backs, clutched to their chests like babies. Women in shawls looking as scared and overwhelmed as she had felt six years before.
    She sat back on a bench with Sammy, her head in her hands. “Sammy, what would you do if you were Shaineh and dumped down in the city without no one to care for you? Where would you go?”
    “Girls go on the streets all the time, just for that. ’Cause they got no home, no money, no friends.”
    “Sha! I won’t think that. She could go to a shul for help. Go back to the neighborhood where she expected to find me and where at least some people speak Yiddish and start asking. That’s what we’ll try next.”
    “Are you really going to cash that money order?”
    “You bet I am. When I find Shaineh, I need a place to put her, I need a place to work from, and you need a place to sleep too, if you’re going to help me.” She tried to make herself sound more cheerful than she felt. Whenever she imagined Shaineh alone and friendless and lost on the streets of the city, she panicked. “So are you in?”
    “Of course I’m for it. If you really mean it.”
    She stood, motioning for Sammy to walk with her toward where they could catch a horsecar uptown. She was a little sorry to leave the trees, their buds just opening into tiny leaflets. The smell off the water was a combination of salt and sewage, freshness and decay. It felt good to have wind in her face, trees over them, but it was time to go to their neighborhood.As they left the park, ladies drew their skirts aside as if their passing could soil the fine silks. Gentlemen strolling along, pipes in their mouths, expected them to get out of the way. Now they were back on cobblestones slippery with horse urine and manure. Sailing ships stuck their sprits overhead, some with carved ladies. Big truculent-looking steamships loomed over, stories high. “I hate living in other people’s kitchens, sleeping in chairs, sleeping on the floor. This is blood money. I saved it a penny at a time to bring my parents over. Now they’re dead and Shaineh’s lost. But if I work for myself, I can look for her without begging Yonkelman, Oh, please, mister, please, let me have Monday off, please, sir.”
    “I thought you liked working in the pharmacy.”
    “It’s better than being a peddler or making flowers like the Silvermans. But I just get by. I can just scrape up a tiny bit each month to save. The way it is with me now, I’ll never get ahead.”
    “What do you really want?” Sammy swung around to stare at her, his hazel eyes startling in his face reddened and weather-beaten by his days and nights on the street, ingrained with dirt and coal dust in spite of her earlier scrubbing.
    They waited for a horse-drawn streetcar, in a crowd of others collected on a corner. “I want a little house. I want to be independent. I want Shaineh to live with me.”
    “Don’t you want to marry again? The guys say that’s what every widow