Three Women by Marge Piercy Page B

see me! He wants to spend Sunday with me. What am I going to do?”
    “I guess you’re going to spend at least part of Sunday with him.” Marta smirked. “So what could be so bad? Even if it’s a disaster, you can eat out for a month on the story. It’s romantic, Suzanne. Meeting a man on the Internet is so trendy and fin de siècle. I’m rotten with envy.”
    “If you truly are, dearest one, you can meet him in my place. He doesn’t know what I look like.”
    “Hmm.” Marta pretended to consider, head cocked. “But Jim and I have to go to New York this weekend.” Her son, Adam, was at NYU. “He’s showing the film he made. I have to go see it. I was thinking of asking Beverly if we could sleep on her couch. I don’t want to drop a thousand for a stupid weekend. If we have a free place to stay, we can fly instead of driving and worrying myself sick about the car.” Marta had a new Jeep Cherokee she did not look forward to parking in Manhattan.
    “Ask her. Beverly likes you. In fact I think she likes you better than me.”
    “Well, my mother always liked you better than me. We should have traded mothers twenty-five years ago and made everybody happy.”
    “What a wonderful idea.” Suzanne sat up. “Elena could get into that. Suppose when you went away to college, you exchanged parents. Everybody by lot draws somebody else’s. Or a computer could make matches. So much less angst. I think I’m onto a great piece of social engineering.”
    “You’ve changed the subject from Jake. Jacob Kallen, eco-terrorist.”
    “He is not, counsel. He is an eco-activist.”
    “Jacob, who wrestled an angel, or god, or whatever.” Marta played with her long braid the color of weathered shingles. “Think he might want to wrestle you?”
    “Don’t be obscene, Marta. This is an absurd tête-á-tête I backed into. The truth is, I never thought of him as a real man. He was a figment of my computer. And I liked it that way.”
    Suzanne did nothing about Jake that day. The next morning she did not even turn on the computer but spent an extra fifteen minutes on the treadmill, then took a long hot shower. By the time she had breakfast and dried her hair, it was time to rush off to the university.
    The gender equity committee of the law school met every Thursday at seven-thirty, so she had supper with Alexa, a friend from women’s studies, and then went to her committee meeting. When she got home just after ten, Elena was watching a gangster movie on TV. At the next commercial she strolled into the kitchen, where Suzanne was setting up her coffee for the next morning. “Oh, some guy called. From California. He wanted the address and directions.”
    “Is he going to call back?”
    “He goes, ‘Well, is she going to be around?’ Anyhow, I looked at your schedule and I told him that Sunday looked clear all day. Is he some kind of friend of yours?”
    “You told him I’m going to be around? On Sunday?” She spilled ground coffee all over the counter. “You said I was going to be here?”
    “Well, aren’t you?”
    “I hadn’t decided.”
    “Whatever,” Elena said, losing interest. She strolled back into the living room, where her movie had resumed.

6
    Suzanne
    Suzanne spent an hour dressing for lunch. Jake had called her from the Inn at Harvard Square. She felt like a bloated adolescent about to go on a date: ridiculous and pitiful. To spend all this time worrying about her appearance was humiliating. No matter what she did to herself, she would still look forty-nine and she had never been beautiful. She was simply pleasant-looking and small, and that summed up the best she had to offer to the gaze of any man.
    The truth was, most of her clothing that could be called dressy was selected for class or for court. She had a bunch of suits in gray or navy and some silk dresses, conservative and careful. She had two party dresses she wore at holiday time. She had a couple of caftans, comfortable and