by Marge Piercy
He stopped singing to keep his breath for the dance. The rhythm quickened and they circled each other feinting and tempting. She had a long braid thrown over one shoulder. She was pear-shaped and cuddly and frisked her round ass at him. Girding they teased each other. Her small breasts shimmered as she arched back and raised her hands high, high over her head.
He waited and then reached forward, took her firmly by the hips, lifted her high up in an arc and then brought her down slowly on his prick, slowly, slowly. He could feel the sexual vibrations back from the circle. Tensing his muscles, holding her firmly, carefully suspended and impaled, he moved half time against the increasing tempo, turning them slowly in the center of the moving outer circle, making a public ritual. Embarrassed, she leaned her head forward hiding in his shoulder, but her hips and firm ass responded. He could not tell if she came or only acted out coming, but it did not matter in ritual. As he came, he let his breath out in a loud high cry.
Thinking how in concert he had cried so hundreds of times and the girls would shriek back—an orgasm of the ears. As he started to slide out, he lifted her high and gently in the air again and swung her around completely, then slowly let her down on her feet. Quickly she ran out of the center to the waiting circle.
He looked around for the other girl. She was stepping in place alone watching and did not come forward. She looked rather frightened. He came directly to her and invited her forward, and reluctantly she came with him. Gracefully, sensually he danced with her, keeping back, and she began to relax, though if he came too near, her brown eyes would widen with worry. He smiled at her, shaking his head. Even he couldn’t do that twice in a row, and besides he did not wish to. She had prepared herself carefully, and he would wait for her. He would spend the night with her, he decided. She was plump the way he liked, and he liked too that she had stopped to make herself ready.
He danced well with her. He did not mean to do anything spectacular again that night. He liked to turn people on, and the outer circle were supposed to dig the solos. He had justified their eyes. She was good and responsive, and often she would inject an idea of her own and he would pick up on it. He did not have any intention of becoming a warrior, but the dance was his natural place. He looked around covertly and saw that many were still watching, and their glances were mostly friendly. Then his gaze brushed Billy’s, and before he could control himself he had looked away from that intense stare of disgust. The big war chief leaned against one whitewashed wall, never joining the dance but watching always. A concentrated hostility in his eyes like electricity.
While he was pausing, Corey came and signaled that he wanted to dance. He had been dancing for an hour most of the time monotonously with Joanna, the two of them in close absorption. Occasionally they would hold each other close. Then Corey would dance alone, sometimes in joy, sometimes in frantic pain. His almost hairless body was thin, with the bones starting through the dark skin. His penis was flaccid and disregarded, never quite erect, never fully limp. He was not graceful. His movements were hurried and jerky, or slow and sullen. But his dancing was wildly expressive. He danced in god’s eyes—in good or bad agony. He danced his visions. When he danced with Joanna he expressed inturned dependency, low-key sensuality—clutching the still center of his being.
Corey sought him out to dance, with steps and gestures wild but open. Corey was selecting him and dancing his affection openly. Corey, this dark skinny saint, was choosing him his brother. He could have picked up Corey in his arms and carried him.
Shawn wanted to go back to his girl. He was careful to throw her a glance from time to time so that she would know that he was meaning to return to her. She nodded at him with a strange smile, as if she tasted something bitter and sweet, and she waited. He could not refuse Corey. It was a ritual of pledged affection. In boyish admiration Corey had selected him and carried him off to make him a member of the tribe, to make him brother. He half suspected Corey had brought the Indians to his concert in the park not only because he expected the cops to come down on the kids, but because Corey had wanted him with the Indians. Or maybe began to decide to recruit him as he watched the concert?
When Corey had leaped onto the stage he had almost pushed him off. Something in Corey’s face had troubled him. Violence. Black tension, seething and cold. He had thought, a nut, and got ready to punch him. But Corey had spoken gently and tamed him into handing over the mike. Had spoken of the situation, had said, “We must” and never “I want” We must, you and I, to save the kids. And the mike had jumped out of his hands.
It was a long time since he had had a friend. Since the days of the solid group. Frodo was in the Seventh Army Band. Shep was assigned to the Parks Department in Philly. Shep wanted to get married, but couldn’t wangle permission. Wanted to marry old Melanie Clinton, who was teaching tennis in the parks to somewhat underprivileged children. He had seen her in Philly just after he got discharged and screwed her in the Porsche just before he sold that object. She still had no breasts. She was wooden and greedy and waspish. She had been a better lay at eleven—a better woman. It had depressed him. He felt he was smudging his own past. After that only groupies and a reporter who was supposed to be doing a story on why he had freaked out.
So he danced with Corey, remembering old unfriends and lost friends. Remembering how affection evaporated and left flabby memories. How the familiarity of old gestures irritated. Corey had chosen him friend and brother. As Corey’s skinny body hard and coppery with the big tendons and bones straining against the taut skin, vibrated and leaped before him, he moved forward and embraced him, hugged him close. The feel of their bodies touching was strange and a little chilling. Corey hugged him back, and that ended their dancing.
As the dance was gradually breaking up, he went upstairs with his plump girl. Her hair was straight and caramel-colored, and she kept herself clean. She smelled like soap and tea. Her nails were short and scrubbed and her toes were little pillows. He sucked them as she giggled with delight. She had freckles on her shoulders and even lightly scattered on her big soft breasts. Her name was Ginny and she had been in the Indians from the first. She wanted to please and she wanted to be pleased and she was alert to small wishes in his body. She liked to fuck for a long time gently nibbling his neck. Her body delighted him: soft and springy, and between the lush breasts and lush hips a true marked waist he could squeeze.
She was waiting to see if he wanted her to go. “Sleep with me. Not much room in the cot, but how much room do we need, Ginny?”
So they settled down to snuggling and soft talk. He was full of questions. He felt, in a way, he was taking the tribe to bed with him. He had always been that way, saying to himself, this is my first black girl, my first Japanese, my first Italian, my first girl from the mountains, my first Chicana, my first Romanian … Always imagining he could taste in her flesh the experience of being in some other skin. Denise had been the same, his pursuit of the ordinary, which in itself was exotic to him.
Ginny had run away from home to join the Indians, before they really were the Indians yet. No, she had not hesitated. Her parents did not love her; how could she miss them? She missed her younger sister. She would like to steal her away. There had been too many mouths to feed for her parents to pay much attention to the ones in the middle, especially girls.
There was a kind of shame when she spoke about herself. Her eyes were a light brown, the color of maple sugar, and he would have to keep making her look at him, because their gaze would drop away. She wanted to know about him. Then the eyes remained on his face. He found himself telling about his past two years in a soft deliberate way that left in the failures and the vacillations and the anger. She listened carefully and touched him.
He got up to piss. As he walked between the rows of bunks, something made him turn and in the almost dark strain till his eyes accustomed. Joanna astride Corey in a bunk. They had a blanket pinned up to give privacy, but he could see in from the end of the bunk. It was a fierce tot
al act quickly over and all the time they cried to each other. It was like birds fucking, like sparrows. Quick and fierce and uttering sharp cries. He pissed and returned to his cot and the snuggle of Ginny’s sprawled flesh, his head turning in toward her shoulder. He remembered Joanna now, though she had been different with him. But that fierceness: her nails in his back. Hot sweaty fumbling in her sleepingbag. He wondered if she had told Corey.
For a little time, his money had been his. Shawn was amused at how it fled him. A couple of months—time that had brought him little pleasure. What had he done with it? Hired musicians, tried to give free concerts. Now he had turned it over. What the group had was used by decision of the group for the good of the group. Everything was mumbled over and haggled out until everyone had chewed and swallowed the decision. No leader derived his position from anything other than the feeling of others that his ideas were worth listening to, that he cared for them and that they cared for him.
What Shawn could do was express for them, move them, make their feelings real and articulate. He had been given his people. If he could not take their ways and rituals with seriousness, what had he ever cared for that he could not con a little, could not tease and play with? He had found a way to be healed again in his music. It was the we-sense of his old group expanded, the only we he had ever found, except sometimes in bed.
They bought a large, run-down farm in New Jersey, a wooden house nobody had occupied for ten years, a decrepit barn and various enigmatic sheds half caved in. Most of the land was in thick second-growth woods and scrubby brush and bushy pastures. A stream ran through it, coming down from a low mountain on the north. The first day with the first truckload, they discovered poison ivy and blueberries. They moved people out in the truck as secretly as possible. The purchasing squad consisted of the oldest and straightest-looking, who bought quietly in scattered towns.
The priorities were digging latrines, putting up a tent city, building an electrified fence and putting in crops that could still make it that year. Ginny, who was in charge of planting, made lists from books on vegetable farming and ordered the seeds and directed their sowing according to the book, without in some cases having any notion what she was trying to grow: beets, collard, kale, lettuce, spinach, turnips, lima beans, eggplant, peppers, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, melons, green beans, Swiss chard, soybeans, squash and corn.
“What’s collard?” a girl asked.
“It’s a kind of cabbage” Ginny said firmly, and nobody thought any different for weeks.
Billy formed a crew, mostly from kids he had trained, to get a lab set up. They took over the building that had been a chicken house until the kids raising chickens complained. Then they put up a tent with a cement floor for temporary use and began excavating for the underground lab Billy had argued for. He said repeatedly that the electrified fence was just plain silly as protection, that they must give him more money and a lot more labor to make the farm secure. But few wanted to spend the effort yet.
They had left a skeleton crew on in the communes to recruit and organize. It was summer, and Corey argued that the communes would fill up in a matter of weeks. Some kids could not get used to farm work. Moze and Chuck and Greek Steve went back to the city after two weeks. They did not like the emphasis on physical labor, and they missed the street action, the tang on the nerves of danger. Billy defended their choice, saying warriors must not soften.
They had lots of injuries and sunburn and wasted effort. Most of the kids had little experience using tools, and they mashed their fingers and split their thumbs. But they were not afraid here, never afraid, and for most of them that was new and beautiful. They had been living in a drone of anxiety since they could remember. In dreams, they were back in school and afraid. In dreams, they were on the streets, and if they were not too stoned to feel, they were afraid. Here they were alone with each other in their own fields. It was easy to be good at something, if only at digging holes, and the holes had to be dug.
Shawn dug postholes and mended fence and learned to do rough carpentry and simple wiring. He invented a new kind of chair that nobody liked but himself. Working in the fields, working on construction, he grew brown and muscular and healthy. The work felt good because they decided together what must he done and how they must do it. It was rational. It was for each other.
He never forgot in some corner of his mind how fragile it was: they had set up a kibbutz in New Jersey and all the sane joy that they had was in secret. In the center of the empire it was illegal to want to live in a human way. But he knew he had passed some simple point. Never would he take to the streets because it was proven to him that millions of children were dying of starvation in Latin America to make certain corporations and very specific men with very specific family names even grosser and wealthier, that peasants were forced off their land in Venezuela and shot down in the mines of Bolivia so that the fourteenth largest corporation in the world could become the thirteenth largest … it was all sick, it was all evil, it did not touch him.
But he would pick up a gun to defend this farm.
He would not join the warriors. Something in him was set on edge by them. But he got Corey to teach him how to use a rifle. He knew that if he had been sent off to fight someplace instead of put to work for the Youth Services Bureau, he would not have liked shooting peasants, but he would doubtless have killed them as directed. Yet he had not killed to protect his small family. Violence is the property of the state. The state is the mechanism by which those who own everything get us to obey them. To become human, he had to take back the will he had given up. It was a quiet change. He did not talk about it. He knew that Corey saw it in him.
Similarly, he saw in plump shy Ginny a sense of herself. She fluttered less to please. Even if she made up answers to questions she did not know, she did know more about the planting than anyone else. She liked herself better. She felt she was someone real. She no longer wanted to be Joanna, who seemed so tough and sure of herself and sure of her style, and who had someone to love her. She no longer wanted to be Carole, who was thin and a warrior. She no longer wanted to be Sylvie, who was blond and always had somebody to sleep with. She no longer wanted to be pictures in magazines or girls in advertisements. She wanted to be Ginny well.
Intense exclusive couplings like Corey and Joanna were rare in the group, and he did not form one. He tended to choose new girls and show them off. If he came back to Ginny every couple of weeks, it was in part because she was growing such a sense of herself that he had to feel connected to her, in the group. She talked oftener in meetings. She spoke bluntly and simply, with an occasional homely example, and then shut up. Often the others, accustomed to the male warrior style, just did not hear. But some were learning to listen.
The one person who never danced was Billy. Sometimes he walked out at the close of council. Other nights he sat against a wall taking bread and watching with set face. People tended to leave a gap in the outer circle before him. Shawn felt sure Billy hated the dancing. He felt Billy came close to hating him, and stayed out of his way. He did not dislike the big awkward war chief, but his life looked barren. Often he would become aware that Billy no longer saw the dancing, that he had withdrawn into an isolated high.
Shawn seldom took bread when he wanted to dance. He did not need that total concentration. He wanted to stay detached enough to dig his own performance and those around him. Often he took it when he was going to sing. He was better on it: he could drive himself harder for longer. It made him feel as if he came to an intense point. He wanted to push forward on a beam of light. He became the beam, the laser. Everything else fell away.
He had persuaded the tribe to relax their ban on the artificial, pointing out that they used electric lights and tools. Now he had his Fender and a loose group of musicians so that the music was not quite so tincan-naïve. The drummer, Dolores, was too pregnant to play but she shook a tambourine, and soon she would he his drummer again. That Puritanism against the arts he had to fight q
uietly but steadily. Music was his oxygen. “When people are starving, how can you blow your horn?” “Because people are starving, I must not leave off blowing my horn” There were no people so primitive or poor they did not practice arts: except a thoroughly exploited, colonialized, proletarianized people—thoroughly robbed.
Shawn left the farm only when they needed him to perform. As soon as the closed truck entered the city, he felt his muscles tighten. The communes were full again, even though the police had found one and broken it up. Corey had to go back and forth. But when he was on the farm, often they worked together. Sometimes they worked in an easy silence. Sometimes Corey talked from the inside of what he was trying to do. Trouble and decisions. Here, trouble had faces and Shawn could speak to it, but outside was noise to him.
The sun was hot. They were stripped to the waist up on the roof of the house, laying new shingles. Corey was not allowed to work among the crops because he could not learn to tell a weed from a plant. He would forget where he was and step on the rows. The sky was glassy blue. The roof under them burned their knees. The water in the canteen was warm in his mouth as he stopped to drink.
“First I saw that child labor had become child consumption. That our role was to eat shit to make the system grind on. That we were set up in a scene where we couldn’t do anything real with ourselves or each other, penned into scenes where what we did together was spend money and learn to treat each other as objects—dating scenes. I saw that to survive we had to stop wanting their things and only want what we could give each other. That the system makes us useless to it and to each other until we’ve gone through all the grades they set up, and then they use us for fodder, for all the functions they don’t want to pay money for, and then they’re ready to fix us into our slots to keep running twice as fast in the same rut, chasing mirages. You can’t become a man at twenty-two if you haven’t been allowed to grow into a man.”