Three Women by Marge Piercy Read Free Book Online

picking on the sixies. Elena had begun to grow tall, so she wasn’t towered over like most of her class, but that didn’t keep her from being a target. The first year, she tried hanging with the Latina girls, but she was studying for her bat mitzvah, and that set her apart. She wasn’t about to pretend she wasn’t Jewish.
    So far, she had done it all right, the way she was supposed to. Her mother kept telling her that Boston Latin was the place she had to be, like a private school except it didn’t cost anything. That was a big help after the divorce, since her mother had to buy Sam out of the row house they lived in on Rutland Street. She had gotten As in everything but math. Like her grandma, she liked languages. She was taking Latin because she had to and Spanish because she wanted to. She got through algebra only because the guy sitting next to her let her cheat off his papers. That was Evan, who lived in the South End too on West Newton, although he’d gone to a different grade school. Evan was almost as dark as she was and Jewish too. He was great at math, and in ninth grade, he took a science prize. He was skinny and wore glasses and refused not only to go out for sports but to take football or basketball seriously. Boston Latin was big on sports in spite of being an elite school: their traditional rivalry was the Thanksgiving football game with Boston English. Evan and Elena decided not to attend. It was like going on strike. They went to a slash movie instead and sat there laughing, making bets on who would get cut up next.
    The first time they had sex, they were stoned and kept giggling. It didn’t hurt, but it didn’t feel like much. They didn’t date like the straight kids. Both his parents worked, and her mother was always at the law office or in court, so they just fucked whenever they felt like it. When Rachel was home from grade school, Elena and Evan just went in Elena’s room and shut the door. They played music loud. She had Rachel cowed. She knew even if Rachel suspected anything, she wouldn’t tell Suzanne: she’d be scared to. Evan put on his father’s overcoat and went into an adult bookstore. He bought two books about sex and several videos. After that, he spent an hour looking for her clitoris till he found it.
    If other girls asked her about him, she said he was like her brother. They were alike, intense and dark and singular: more than her brother or her lover, Evan was her twin. They liked the same thrash bands that drove adults frothing insane. They also liked some alternative groups. They liked dark violent movies that felt real. They liked taking their clothes off and trying different things. They always did their homework together and they always had sex, using a condom. They went through a couple of packs every week. Neither of them could drive a car, for they were both fourteen. They had to use their bikes or the MBTA to go anywhere. They bought their dope in the neighborhood, at a spot outside a drugstore where guys she knew from grade school were selling. Evan lived in a brick row house a story shorter than hers, but his family had the whole place except for the basement apartment. Both of them loved their neighborhood, with its blocks that matched, each block a particular type of row house, but every one of them individual too, all red brick and some with funky little strip gardens in the middle of the street.
    Evan and she didn’t talk garbage like love and families. They talked about peace and death and hypocrisy and lies. They did his next science project together, and then they let the mice go in the basement of the school. She hoped they could make it on their own.
    She listened to the other girls talking about their boyfriends, and it wasn’t like that with her. She wasn’t crazy about Evan. She didn’t dote on him. It was as if they were each other’s shadow. He called them E squared or E to the second power.