Three Women by Marge Piercy Page A

he had adopted shortly after the marriage. She had chosen well in that regard, and as much trouble as Elena had got into, it might have gone far worse if Sam had not been there for her. Elena’s own father had disappeared before she was born. Suzanne heard about him very occasionally. He was in the mountains in Nicaragua. He had been shot down on the streets of Guatemala City. He turned up again in Chile. He was in jail in Panama. She wondered. His family had money, and she would not be surprised if he were running one of their corporations instead. He did Elena no good, except to excite her imagination. Suzanne still remembered seeing a composition Elena had written in her second college: “I am a bastard out of Brookline, Massachusetts. I am a bastard, the daughter of a bastard. My father was a hero and a guerrilla leader.” Suzanne sighed. Sam was looking at his watch.
    “Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t have been more truthful with Elena about her father. Then maybe she wouldn’t romanticize him so ridiculously.”
    Sam shrugged. “Compared to us, he was a romantic figure. You were crazy about him.”
    “For a while. For a while. Until he took to abusing me. I did not find that romantic.”
    “I bet you didn’t.” Sam grinned. “Besides, what harm does it do to give her a sense of a colorful background? It isn’t as if she’s about to go off to the jungle to look for him. Or as if she’s ever taken a serious interest in anything political.” Sam looked at his watch for the third time.
    Sam was waiting for Elena. Doing anything with Elena usually involved a great deal of waiting. Elena had only begun to dress when Sam arrived. They were going to a concert by a Chilean group. If Elena did not appear soon, they would be late. But Suzanne was determined not to hurry Elena. She was constantly telling herself to treat her daughter as if she were a houseguest rather than a child of hers. Of course, she rarely entertained houseguests. She was too busy. Aunt Karla came to see her and the girls every year, yes, sometimes with Rosella and the twins, and Beverly visited maybe once every five years. That was about it. But what she tried to keep in mind was that a hostess was far more polite to a guest than a mother to her daughter, and she needed to muster all her tact and resources to handle having Elena back home. She felt an intense usually subliminal fear for Elena, always, that she would get into some desperate trouble, that something violent would happen to her. For Rachel, her fears had always been more mundane. Don’t catch cold. Don’t strain your eyes. Are you sure you can handle six classes? But there was no limit to her anxiety for Elena.
    The redwood protest case has been postponed again, this time by the prosecution, so I am free to fly out. I have appointments with the people I have to see Monday and Tuesday. It sounds as if having an office there might happen, but I won’t know till I talk to supporters face-to-face and see if I can be effective in the Northeast. I’ll be flying in Friday night, hoping that we can spend Sunday together. Let meknow if that’s possible. How are your schedule and other commitments?
    Suzanne hit “return” on her E-mail program and sat there, trying to figure out what to say. Panic told her to type that she was going to be out of town, out of state, out of the country. She was planning to drop dead on Friday night. The memorial service had already been arranged. Jake was not invited.
    What does it matter, she told herself, if he’s disappointed in me. So what? So we will or will not continue corresponding. Maybe I’ll be disappointed in him. Of course I’ll be disappointed in him; how could I not be? What good can come of this? She could not think what to say and she ended up getting off the computer altogether, as if even being on a potential link with Jake was too dangerous to handle.
    Elena was still in bed. Suzanne ran upstairs to Marta. “He does want to