by Ursula Hegi
I wish I could talk with Lotte about how riskly dissent has become. Ever since 9/11, patriotism has been edging toward nationalism. Two of my friends from the vigil are being audited. Some protestors are detained at airports long enough to miss their flights. There are days I feel afraid of speaking out. That’s why I must speak out, Lotte.
I wish I could tell her about the flags that came up almost as quickly as the Trade Center came down; about the grieving that brought all of us, much of the world even, closer in the days following 9/11, until Bush twisted our grieving to go after oil.
Most of all I wish I could talk to Lotte about her daughters, who’ve been coming at me with their mother-longing. After Lotte’s death, Annie was the one with the questions, wanting to have me fill in what she didn’t know about her mother. And now the little one. I’m not enough for them. Can’t be enough for them. Because I’m not Lotte.
Some days I search their faces for Lotte. Radiant and gutsy and lovely. Feel Lotte’s skin against my fingers when I lift Annie’s hair from her eyes, or when do I a tick search on Opal after she plays outside. Her sudden switches from bliss to rage worry Annie, but I’ve seen Lotte like that, have seen that mercurial side of hers. Like at that concert, held at a Masonic lodge. We were curious, left our seats to go exploring, whispering and laughing. In a dim upstairs hallway, a guard stepped into our way. Before he could say anything, Lotte demanded, “Where is the women’s wash-room? We’re missing the concert looking for a washroom.” Lotte. Showing off. Like Opal. Who can’t balance her rage and bliss the way Lotte could.
Annie used to be gutsy like Lotte, but she no longer trusts herself to be gutsy. I see the change in how she acts with Opal, out of fear that she’ll lose her too.
“How many, do you think, on this block?” Annie asks.
“Fifty thousand, easily…”
“No. Closer to a hundred thousand.”
“And all these other blocks filled with people.”
“Look at that—” She motions to a banner ahead of us. Somewhere in Texas a Village is Missing its Idiot.
“Mason would have come up with something like that. In comparison ours are wimpy.” Damn. I’ve been so careful not to mention him unless Annie does.
She tries to smile but looks stricken. As if remembering his death all over.
“I’m sorry, Annie.”
“You’re right. In comparison, ours are wimpy.”
“Nothing wimpy about peace.”
She’s looking around as if expecting someone. Or avoiding someone? Maybe for one of the people who came in on the peace train with us, more than thirty people from the peace vigil, starting early in Southampton, adding protesters at stations along the way. When we arrived at Penn Station, our group had over two hundred, and we tried to stay together as we headed east, all along merging with additional groups that thickened into one tide of protest on Sixth Avenue, where we marched north, then east once again, in this city that wouldn’t grant us the permit for a march.
By now, we’ve become separated from everyone we started out with, except Bill from Amnesty International, whose poster, Shame on You, George, we recognize far ahead of us. The energy of the protesters is incredible. Envelops us so we don’t need to be with people we already know. There are no strangers here.
Annie turns up her collar. “Bet you twenty dollars that Mason would have put something outrageous on his sign.”
I play along. “Thirty dollars.”
“Better be careful if you start betting against me. It could get expensive. Mason lost thousands to me.”
“That’s not all he lost.” Damn. “What a stupid thing to say. It’s not even what I believe. Did your mother ever tell you that I can be quite tactless?”
“Yes,” Annie says and covers her mouth.
“Extremely tactless?”
“Brusque. That’s the word she used for you.”
“I thought eventually I’d learn to not be…brusque, but so far it hasn’t happened.”
“But she liked that about you.”
“Really now?” I smile. “Brusque, huh?”
“Look at that.” Annie points out a sign: Let’s Bomb Texas—They Have Oil Too.
“So far my favorite slogan was on the T-shirt of that large-breasted woman: Weapons of Mass Seduction.”
“I liked that one too.”
“What else did Lotte say about me?”
“That you’re direct…rigorously truthful.”
“Also called tactless. I don’t mean to be.”
“I want to get used to hearing or saying…Mason’s name without crashing.” There’s something else beneath her words, wanting to push itself out.
I tell her, “Nothing you have thought or done will ever shock me.”
She blinks, raises one hand to her throat, and for an instant it seems that she’s weighing telling against not telling, and that telling is winning out. But all at once, protesters are pushing toward us, against the surge of our crowd. Coming back already?
“What happened?” Voices. From different directions.
“They’ve blocked Second.”
One voice. High. “Whose streets?”
“Our streets,” others chant.
“Whose streets?”
“Our streets!”
Standing on her toes, Annie is searching the crowd.
“Waiting for someone, Annie?”
“Not really…except for Jake…Maybe.”
I’m intrigued, of course.
Behind her, three people are dressed in duct tape, with duct tape across their mouths. Say No to Duct Tape.
“WHOSE STREETS?”
“Our streets!”
“What happened?” I ask a young man as he presses toward us.
“It’s closed. Up ahead. Those fuckers—Oops, I’m sorry, madam.”
“Well, I’m fucking shocked that you’d use that kind of fucking language.”
He laughs aloud. Raises his poster. Bush is a Fucking Idiot.
“Don’t go back,” a woman shouts.
“I’m not even sure Jake is here,” Annie says. “And if so, that he’ll find us.”
Quite a buffer. A hundred thousand people to keep Jake apart from her.
But all I say is, “Where did you tell him to meet you?”
“We left it open.”
Suddenly, I’m separated from her.
The mass of bodies closes around me.
King George Rules Through Fear.
I Don’t Want Him Speaking on My Behalf.
“Annie!”
“Whose streets?”
A roar: “Our streets!”
“Don’t go back now!”
“We’ll get through!”
A hand grabs mine. Annie. “Hold on.”
I hold on.
“Whose streets?”
“Our streets!” Louder yet, breaking through the chant.
All these different groups, bonding, the young and old, the radicals and the religious…
“Let’s go back and head north on Third,” Annie suggests. “And then see if we can make it over to First.”
But I pull her forward. “Whose streets?” I shout.
“Our streets!” A scream now.
“Whose streets?”
“Our streets!” Annie and I join in the roar as we approach the barricade.
A woman gets past the string of uniforms by showing an ID. Then two men. A young couple.
“They must live in that neighborhood,” Annie says.
I swing my protest sign to my back. “Do what I’m doing. I’ll explain later.” Slowly, I walk toward a young policeman with a great black mustache.
Annie snags my elbow. “Don’t—”
I tuck her hand under my elbow so that it supports me. “Sir?”
His fingers stray to his mustache. “You cannot get through here.” Long eyelids. Bony temples. I imagine him good with sex, a modest man who astounds himself and others.
“My mother—I have to
get to my mother.”
“I can’t let you through, madam, unless you have identification that you live here.”
What is it with this madam shit?
“My mother is in a wheelchair; This from me? I’ve always been superstitious about lying and still believe that you make true what you lied about. “My mother lives over there…”
“What’s your mother’s address?”
I scan the street signs behind him. Near water, I have an intuitive compass, but in the city, I set off in the wrong direction. “Corner of Second and Fifty-seventh, Officer. We have to get to her.”
He studies me. His features are so mobile, a mirror to his thinking, and his fingers are on his mustache again. Those beautiful long eyelids. A swell of lust comes at me, so fierce, I want to get him into a doorway. But I remind myself to look distraught and so wobbly that he’ll have to envision my mother as a very old woman in a very old wheelchair. Given how I need Annie’s arm to stand at all, any mother of mine would have to be close to a century old.
When he waves us forward through a gap in the barricade, Annie hesitates, but then she runs after me. “You’ll get us arrested,” she hisses.
“I would do anything to see my mother in a wheelchair.”
“You told me your mother died when you were in your twenties.”
“So I’m resurrecting her.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“A wheelchair is better than the grave, Annabelle.”
WE STRIDE across Second Avenue and avoid a pile of horse droppings with a poster stuck into the middle: Bushit. All at once I feel watched. I turn. Search. No.
“Where are you taking me now?” Annie says.
“I still want to get us to the stage area.”
BigC is meeting us by the stage, where she’s supposed to connect with six women from Ohio who’ll sleep at her apartment overnight. At the last vigil in Sag Harbor, she invited Annie and me to stay with her after the protest. When we told her we’d need to get back to Opal and Pete, BigC e-mailed a peace group that’s coordinating sleeping places for out-of-town protesters. I wonder how she’ll find them.
“We’ll never get through,” Annie says.
“Don’t worry. My mother will get us through.”
“You told me she never left Germany.”
“I feel really close to her today.” I slow my steps, make them unsteady as we approach another barricade.
“Please, don’t.”
“Your mother wouldn’t have hesitated for one moment. Did you know that she never paid for a speeding ticket in her life? One time, in Southampton, we got stopped, and she told the officer she was so glad he’d come along. Asked him, ‘How do I get to the other end of town and to the highway? I’ve tried five times now, and I’m totally lost because this road always spits me out here.’ He gave her directions, delighted to be helpful. When Lotte and I did our cross-country drive—”
“Ladies—” An officer holds up her hand. Large nose, expressive eyes. “You have to go back, ladies.”
“I understand, Officer. But my mother lives two blocks down from here. She’s in a wheelchair and—”
“I cannot let you through.”
“—and the nurse is leaving at one-thirty”—I rev up my accent. Usually it’s faint, but I can do just-off-the-boat—“and we have to get there before she—”
“Go, go.” The officer waves me through. “Not you,” she tells Annie.
“Oh!” I make my voice quivery. “But that’s my daughter. Annie? Annie, dear, I need you to lift your grandmother from—”
“Go.” The officer opens the gap for Annie. Doubt in her eyes. Doubt and the fear of a lawsuit.
When we’re far enough away, Annie says, “What about your cross-country drive?”
“Lotte was speeding, and a cop car followed us. When she stopped and the cop came to our car, she said she was only speeding because she’d started menstruating—”
“Oh no—”
“—and didn’t have any sanitary pads and was trying to get to a drugstore so she could keep from soaking through the seat and—”
Annie is laughing. “Poor man.”
“I still remember him backing away from our car.”
“He probably posted it on the bulletin board at the station under ‘Excuses we haven’t heard yet.’ ” Annie links her arm through mine. “Mason would have enjoyed getting past the police.”
AHEAD OF US, a man and a woman walk with their feet turned outward, so that the feet in the middle—her left, his right—seem about to trip each other, or trip anyone who might try to pass them. But we manage to get ahead of them and turn to read their signs.
Make Out—Not War.
Hail to the Chief. Except the H of Hail is crossed out and changed to J. And the C in Chief to T, so that the sign reads: Jail to the Thief.
“Great,” I tell them.
“All these months with you—” Annie falters.
“Yes?”
“—have been incredibly…peaceful after all that with Mason. I like how our day-to-day life is.”
“It’s good for Pete and me too, having you and Opal with us.”
“Even here at the protest, I feel peaceful. In some bizarre way.”
The next barricade is defended by an officer who has the expression of someone who’s not brainy but very quick.
I squeeze Annie’s arm. Tilt into her. Point past the barricade. But the officer is already shaking her head.
Gently, I ask in my just-off-the-boat accent, “Would you please hear my reason before you shake your head?”
The officer shrugs.
“My Mutter…mother is in a wheelchair. My Mutter needs around-the-clock care. Her morning nurse left. Half an hour ago. If we don’t get to my Mutter very soon—” That quivering voice…I got it right. Also the closing of my throat.
“Mother, please.” Annie braces my arm. “Officer—” She takes a long breath. “Her mother, my grandmother, is very old, ninety-seven, and she has severe health problems. She doesn’t speak English…so even in terms of using the telephone…she’s helpless. We were supposed to be there an hour ago, but it’s been impossible to get through, as you know.”
“What’s your grandmother’s address?”
“Sutton Place,” I blurt.
“Sutton Place and Fifty-third,” Annie modifies.
“I’m so proud of you,” I tell her when we’re past the barricade. “The toughest one so far.”
“I’m getting into this.”
“I like you spunky.”
Annie flips my protest sign to the front. Adjusts hers. “She’ll come after us and arrest us if she sees that we’re part of the protest.”
“I don’t see any contradiction. We were part of the protest for a while, and now we have to take care of my mother. That officer doesn’t want to be responsible for the death of an old woman in a wheelchair.”
“You’re the one who told me if you use illness or a broken-down car or whatever as an excuse, it’ll happen.”
“And I believe that.”
“Then what’s…this?”
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if my lie brought my mother back from the dead?” I’m struck by sudden, incredible happiness.
“I can just see you and an older version of you…in the apartment that will always be a few blocks from here.”
ON THE peace train back to Southampton, I have a sudden longing to hear Pete’s voice. It’s almost physical, that longing. I picture him walking up the steps to my cottage, slow slow, but no longer with a cane, his body as erect as he can make it, knocking at my door. But though the door opens, I can’t see his face. I can’t even remember it.
When we reach North Sea, the lights are on, and he’s sitting at the table, reading the Times. Opal is sleeping on the pile of carpets, one fist around her plastic boy doll.
I step behind him. Hold him hard. “I missed you.”
He tilts up his face. His dear, familiar face. Kisses me.
“How was Opal?” Annie asks.
“Sophisticated…and…delightful…”
“Thank you so much for looking after her.”
“Is that…what I was…doing? We…both thought…Opal…was looking…after me…”
When Pete stands up, one pant leg is higher than the other, and in that heartbreaking moment his bare, veined ankle reminds me once again how frail he is. And yet, what we are to each other—lovers, best friends—is sweet and intriguing. Soon, we’ll lie together for another night, skin warmed by each other, and perhaps he’ll tell me again that I’ve become too tender with him. So many ways of making love.
I link my fingers through Pete’s. Ask Annie: “You want to let Opal sleep where she is?”
“If I carry her upstairs now, I’ll only wake her. I don’t want her to be scared…waking up in a different place than she’s used to.”
Pete presses his thumb against my palm. “We’ll hear…Opal from our…bedroom.”
Mason
“—that I would have liked it even more if you hadn’t been there.”
I felt like crying—stupid—and I did what I usually do, forced it away. I said, “If showed.”
“I bet.”
“You always liked him best. Even when we were kids. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.”
“We’re both saying things we don’t—”
“If’s just that I had to know what it would be like for you and him…and I thought that once I knew, we’d get beyond this and—”
You shook your head.
“I want you to look at me again the way you did when we ran into the waves with all our clothes on. Remember how alarmed Opal was? Told us she didn’t want us to be nutty. But then she ran in and splashed us. Oh, Annie, we both did the worst we’re capable of. Knowing that will make us better together.”
“No.”
“I mean it, Annie. I’m going to…end it.”
“How then will you do it? How?”
“I know exactly how. And once you know, it’ll be done.”
“I don’t want to listen to this.”
“Are you trying to rush me, Annie?”
“This is crazy stuff.”
“Are you trying to have me do it tonight? Because once I do, you and Jake will never be able to be together.”