The High Cost of Living by Marge Piercy

I make a dip for the chips? I’m bored silly with dips.”
    â€œDon’t. They all taste like sour cream with something odd in it.”
    â€œBrenda cried all the way to the bus. Imagine coming to the house that way!… Why do they carry on like scalded cats?”
    Leslie raised her brows. “Is that a serious question?”
    Sue pouted, sleeking her hair. She had put on a long blue and green Mexican hostess dress. “Do they figure he’s about to leave me? That’s what makes me spitting mad!”
    â€œYou never seem spitting mad.”
    â€œAll right, mildly bothered. I don’t like it slopping over anywhere near the kids.” She smiled absently, stooping to rummage the lower cupboards for more crackers to put out.
    â€œI suppose you only see the ones who make a fuss.”
    â€œOh, he’s honest. Honest George. He does tell me about all of them. Otherwise I’d poison him, right? Give me a hand up. I’ve got to lose weight this spring. You’re always so neat and trim. How come you never gain an ounce?”
    Leslie set Sue on her feet. Sue held on to her arms for a moment. “Maybe I should study karate?” Sue peered into her face. “But I wouldn’t, would I, honey? I’d never keep soldiering at it. I’d just go in there twice and pull a muscle I never did hear of before and give up.”
    The truth was Sue was lazy and never studied anything past a couple of lessons, whether it was trancendental meditation or conversational Russian. She read an enormous amount, far more than George, who stuck to journals and books in his own field. She read serious novels and books about genetics, books about education and art and the Etruscans and medieval icons, biographies of Freud and Helen Traubel. As compulsively as some women ate, she read. Sue had enjoyed a good education in the English department at Bryn Mawr, but she never seemed to have sheltered any ambitions Leslie could discover. Leslie could not understand such a large amorphous curiosity, a morass into which all that information and literature sank. Yet it was characteristic of Sue that no matter what book anyone might mention, she would have read it or would have acquired it and be about to. Reading seemed to be Sue’s profession. If she could be inveigled into real conversation, frequently her ideas were interesting. But nothing led to anything else. Maybe it was because she had never had to work, Leslie thought, puzzling over Sue.
    Once the students arrived, Leslie detached herself from Sue. The livingroom of George’s house reminded her of a failed church, high and gloomy with shadows clustering like bats in spite of the Design Research furniture. The livingroom stretched a full two stories, facing the cold gray north for a supposed view, a weak slope to the trees still standing in a thin band between this house and the next, and it looked like a room the sun never entered. Sue collected art. The livingroom was arranged to show off the prints, the hard-edge paintings, the welded metal sculpture, rather than to facilitate sitting or talking. As a result, George’s students ended up in two huddles. The first was centered on George, who usually sat by the fireplace in a leather sling chair, while at his feet the nervous masses huddled yearning to be noticed. Those were the students who kept their minds buzzing on number one goal, impressing George. The lazier, more confident, the hungrier, hornier students clustered in the kitchen near the food and the drink.
    Leslie wandered back and forth, a little bit the maid emptying ashtrays, collecting empty beer cans and glasses abandoned where they could be broken, putting out more chips or ice—a little bit the ersatz daughter of the house, called over by Sue or George to hear some point or tell some anecdote: the only female Sue trusted. His newer students tended to resent her ambiguous role, not comprehending it was all just part