Three Women by Marge Piercy Page A

who can never be satisfied anyhow!
    It seemed to Suzanne that Elena somehow occupied seventy percent of the apartment. Her jacket lay on the back of the couch. Her CDs were scattered about as if flung. She left the television on and wandered away. Her flame red brassieres and bikini panties hung on the rod in thebathroom. She was on the telephone as much as in high school, when Suzanne had gotten Elena her own phone in self-defense. Furthermore Suzanne had to deal with Sam, who dropped in on his adopted daughter a little too frequently for Suzanne’s comfort.
    Sam was ensconced on her couch at the moment. “I pulled Judge Fogarty. That man must be a hundred years old. Why don’t they have mandatory retirement for judges? It would help if they had to leave the bench before senility overcomes them.”
    Sam was big—broad shoulders, big bones, and curly sandy hair. He had been a good-looking man when she had married him, twenty-three years ago, but he had spread out considerably since then. She had never been madly in love with him the way she had with Elena’s father, Victor. She had not wanted to be. She had seen herself going down the same road as her mother, rendered idiotic by blind passion for a series of ill-chosen men. Sam had been a rational choice. She had made that choice as much for Elena as for herself. She had loved him, certainly, but with clarity, with her mind as well as her body.
    Their careers had got in the way, so that in an average week, most of the time they spent together was in bed and almost all of that, asleep. They were both young political lawyers very much on the make and far more passionate about their cases than about each other. Their marriage had disintegrated under the pressure. But Sam had always been a good father, to his three children with his current wife (who did not work); to his own daughter Rachel and to Elena, whom 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.
    â€œSometimes 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.”
    â€œFor a while. For a while. Until he took to abusing me. I did not find that romantic.”
    â€œI 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