Sex Wars by Marge Piercy Read Free Book Online Page A

wants.”
    “I loved my husband. I don’t know if I can love another man that way. What I want, I can work for.” They pushed onto the trolley and it was too crowded to talk for the half hour it took for the streetcar to shove its way through the mobbed streets. After they had gotten off and begun to walk again, she said, “There’s this woman I heard speak, Ernestine Rose, and she’s all for women. She says we’re the equal of men and we should keep our own money and we should be treated equal by the law and in the courts. She’s a Jew like us, a rabbi’s daughter who fought and won her inheritance in the courts. I liked hearing her talk that way. She made me feel like I could do anything.”
    “Until you get slammed down again,” Sammy muttered.
    “You get knocked down, you get back up. Nobody’s going to help you up. Except if you have a good partner and good friends and a good family. Then somebody will help you. Otherwise, if you fall and you don’t get up, you’ll be stepped on, you’ll be run over and die in the street. Understand me?”
    “I got no family.”
    “Ah, but you have something better. Me.” She clapped him on the back. “I will find Shaineh, I swear it. But now we got to figure out how to get my money back out of this stupid piece of paper.” She touched the money order in her bosom. She would not let go of it for anything till it was turned into real money. Gold coins, not paper money. Until then, she would sleep with it, she would eat with it, she would wear it to work. It was her future and Shaineh’s and Sammy’s too. Their future in a single piece of paper.

THREE
    M ONDAY MORNING EARLY, Henry Stanton caught the train for the city. In Elizabeth’s spacious house in Tenafly, New Jersey, there was a room for her husband, but it was far easier when he stayed at the flat in Manhattan. Once their parting embrace would have been passionate. Now they spoke a lukewarm goodbye, she waved perfunctorily and returned to her breakfast.
    “Has Mr. Stanton gone?” Susan stuck her head around the corner, ready to retreat. Susan preferred when Henry wasn’t around. He demanded too much of Elizabeth’s energy, and since his misconduct in the customs office, Susan had allowed her contempt for him to burgeon. Susan’s family, the Anthonys, were Hicksite Quaker, unyielding in their moral views.
    “Gone to the city. He won’t come out again for a couple of weeks.” Elizabeth took another pastry from the platter Amelia had set out. Amelia was more friend than servant, a Quaker woman who had been her housekeeper for a quarter century.
    Susan grasped her hand. Elizabeth glared. Susan’s bony hand was tight around her more fleshy wrist. “Mrs. Stanton!” Susan employed that starchy formality even when they were alone, in spite of their twenty-five years of intimate friendship, often sharing Elizabeth’s house. “You must not gain more weight.”
    “I enjoy my food. Heaven knows how we fight battles every single day, every week, every month, every year, every decade… You’re badgering me about food the way you used to badger me about the conjugal bed.”
    “Every time Mr. Stanton bothered to come home, you’d end up expecting again. Why couldn’t you abstain? For a moment of pleasure, you once again plunged yourself into an exhausting round of child-rearing.”
    “I enjoyed it, Susan. I was still in love with him. I liked making love with him. I didn’t wish anything to interfere…” She could never make Susan understand how crazy she had been for Henry—her knight—full of courage, facing down mobs of pro-slavery zealots, fighting passionately for abolition. He had been tall and handsome with a resonant voice, a fine speaker. If now he was shopworn with bad political compromises, she could still remember when he had seemed the epitome of bravery. “I liked motherhood, or I wouldn’t have had so many. Anyhow, there’s never been a woman so happy to reach menopause. Not that I