6
“For What It’s Worth”
It was a glorious Saturday afternoon, unseasonably warm for November, and Jane and Bridget lounged on the porch swing, drinking tea, watching Tom wash and wax his MG in the driveway. He wore jeans and a faded blue chambray shirt rolled up at the sleeves. His curly dark hair had grown long enough to brush the top of his collar. Jane liked the way he looked, liked watching him so intent at his task, the last yellow leaves drifting down all around him. Now and then, he stepped back, squinted, and then zeroed in on some little spot he’d missed.
The car looked perfect to Jane. It always looked perfect. Tom’s obsession with keeping it that way annoyed her sometimes – he’d wash it again tomorrow, she knew. But on this lazy afternoon, it seemed endearing to her. When he finished waxing the car, he put the top down and the two of them took a drive together, leaving Bloomington behind for the two-lane roads that wound down through Brown County. Jane closed her eyes and felt the late afternoon sun on her face, listened to the music on the radio. Jefferson Airplane, the Doors. Then Buffalo Springfield, “For What It’s Worth.” The slow tremolo on the electric guitar bending the notes, the dirge-like rhythm of the bass drum brought an odd shiver of fear, a glitch of time in which she was approaching the Business Building exactly as she had last Monday afternoon, carefree, her last class finished for the day, thinking only of meeting Tom.
She thought there’d been an accident when she saw the cluster of police cars where Fee Lane T’d with 10th Street. But there were so many of them, a dozen or more, their red lights flashing. Then, like pieces of a puzzle falling into place, she saw the campus bus sitting outside the building where buses didn’t usually stop; police in riot gear guarding the entrance of the Business Building; students rushing toward it, students rushing away, and a growing number of people gathering on the lawn and sidewalk, overflowing into the street. Then the door opened and more police were herding and even dragging students from the building. The students wore black armbands. Some of them were bleeding, Jane saw. There was thudding and cracking, which she realized was the sound of students being struck by night-sticks. Some fell to the grass, some went limp and curled into themselves, protecting their heads from policemen, who kicked or struck them, shouting and swearing. The bench where she and Tom had agreed to meet was at the center of the melee, unreachable, and she was relieved to see him emerge from the crowd and hurry across the street toward her.
“Are you okay?” Jane asked. “My God, what’s going on here?”
He pulled a flyer from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. There was a photograph of a clean-cut business student wearing a suit, carrying a briefcase. “Watch your Appearance!” it said. “Are you All-American enough to be interviewed by the makers of jellied death?”
“Oh,” Jane said. “Dow Chemical. Because of the napalm. I read they were recruiting here.”
“Right,” Tom said. “Jesus. It started out, no big deal – a bunch of Baggers sitting around in the hallway outside where they were doing the interviews. Some of them were passing out leaflets. Okay, getting in the way a little. You know how they are. Then all of a sudden there were cops everywhere, everyone was screaming and yelling. But, man, the cops, they were crazy. No shit. One of them gave me a shove that almost knocked me down, and all I was doing was trying to get the hell out of his way.”
Jane still didn’t know how to think about what she had seen that day, or about what had happened the day after, when anti-war demonstrators planted themselves around the Auditorium and heckled the Secretary of State, who was giving a speech there. She had been taught never to be rude. But what were you supposed to do when you spoke peacefully, politely, as the students had done in the Business Building, only to be dragged away and beaten by police who didn’t agree with them? How else but through a breach of manners could students get the attention of the President and policy makers in Washington, let them know they would not be complicit in the destruction of Vietnam? She’d thought of Watts burning the summer after she graduated from high school, remembered how white people, her own parents, had condemned the violence. She had condemned it herself. Yet now it seemed clear that most white people had not really begun to take the civil rights struggle seriously until they saw that their own world might be threatened by continuing to ignore it.
She glanced at Tom, comforted by the sight of him there beside her, his hands on the wheel. Just the two of them. Jane was glad Bridget had to work this afternoon, glad to have this time alone with Tom without feeling she was abandoning her, free from the guilt she sometimes felt for her own happiness when she weighed it against Bridget’s sorrow about Pete.
She quickened now, thinking of the empty house awaiting them at the end of the drive. It was four o’clock, shadows lengthening across the brown, stubbled fields. The sun went in, and she sank deeper into the leather seat, pulled the stadium blanket up to her chin.
“Cold?” Tom asked
“Freezing,” she said.
“I’ll warm you up when we get back.”
“Yeah?” She smiled.
“Yeah.” He shifted, slowing down as they left the country behind them and neared the first stoplight in the city.
They’d take a hot, soapy shower together, Jane thought, as they turned into the driveway. Pull the shades, light the candles she’d melted into the empty Chianti bottles and set them on their dresser. She felt warm and sweet inside anticipating the moment they would slide between the cool sheets and make love. Tom turned off the ignition and put his hand on her thigh for just a moment before opening his door to get out of the car, and she knew he was feeling it, too.
But as they started up the front steps, Bridget opened the front door.
“Oh!” Jane said. “I thought you had to work till nine.”
Bridget opened her mouth but could not seem to speak.
“Bridge?” Tom said.
She turned abruptly, went inside. Following her, Jane saw her father on the couch in the living room.
“Janey?” He stood, took a step toward her.
And she knew Bobby was dead.
By snipers, near Da Nang, her father told her. “We just couldn’t bring ourselves to give you news like this on the phone. So I came.”
“But I didn’t see the car –” Jane said, stupidly. “Where – ?”
“Aunt Helen said take theirs. Ours is, well –”
Jane knew. It wasn’t reliable enough to make the trip.
“Honey?” He took a tentative step toward her. “Jane?”
She felt as stiff as a mannequin in his arms, and instinctively turned from him toward Tom, who took her hand and held it tightly. She should say something, she knew – at the very least introduce Tom to her father – but she could not speak. She only half-heard Bridget make the introduction, then explain that Jane’s father had arrived just as she was leaving for work, and she’d called in sick so he wouldn’t have to wait here all alone.
He’d been there more than two hours, Jane thought, and the panic she felt rising inside her was as much about the sudden, stark reality of her brother’s death as imagining Bridget and her father together, talking. About seeing the house where they all lived together through her father’s eyes.
The batik throws on the couch, the psychedelic posters on the walls, the red silk scarves she and Bridget had draped over the cheap lampshades. The double bed behind the beaded curtain that hung in the doorway of the room she shared with Tom. Would he recognize the scent of marijuana lingering from the night before? Had he been in the kitchen, where, just this morning, Bridget had tacked a new poster on the wall above the kitchen table: War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things?
It was nearly ten o’clock by the time they got home, but the house was bursting with people. As she walked across the front yard, Jane could see them framed by the picture window: neighbors and relatives, a few of her mother’s friends from the A&P. She could see her mother, too, huddled in the corner of the s
ofa, a handkerchief balled in one hand. Amy and Susan, their faces red and blotchy with tears. She stopped and took in the scene, as if it were something she was watching on television.
She could not go in, she could not. All she could think was that the little flag her mother had set so proudly into the corner of the picture window when Bobby left – a flag he’d given her, with a single gold star on a red ground to show that the family of a Marine serving his country lived here – should be removed. And right now, because she simply could not bear to look at it.
She flinched when her father lightly brushed her elbow to set her moving again. Stood, rigid, in the embrace of her Aunt Helen, who met them at the door. Then her mother reached up toward her much as she had the night of Bobby’s accident; but this time when Jane went to her she drew her close and held on so tightly and for so long that all Jane’s defenses crumbled and, finally, she wept.
Cry. Honey, you cry. You’ll feel better if you cry.
She could hear the women murmuring around her.
Get away from me, she wanted to scream.
Instead, she kept her head buried in her mother’s lap; let her eyes close, darkness descend. Hours later, she woke in Bobby’s room, alone. Had her father carried her there? She couldn’t remember. She was still dressed, her clothes rumpled. Her mouth felt sour, her head ached. She was starving.
The house was quiet. She opened the door a sliver and saw the living room was dark. She crept to the bathroom. Then to the kitchen, where she piled a paper plate with food people had brought and stood, eating, by moonlight. Back in Bobby’s room –
But it wasn’t really his room anymore and hadn’t been since he joined the Marines. It was Amy’s room now; she was sharing with Susan tonight as she’d done the last time Jane came home – months ago, in April. The curtains and bedspread were pink; there was a pink princess phone on the bedside table. Both Amy and Susan had phones in their rooms, something Jane had never dreamed of having when she lived at home. In high school now, they had bulletin boards, dotted with ticket stubs to dances and ball games, snapshots of their friends. Susan was a cheerleader, Amy the secretary of her class. Both of them popular. Happy.
She had meant to save them: to get through school, get a teaching job, and make sure that they had what they needed when it was time for college. So they wouldn’t have to feel guilty about going. But when she had said this to them last spring, Susan shrugged and said, “What if we don’t want to be like you?”
They were angry with her for upsetting their mother, arguing as she had against the war; they wouldn’t listen when she tried to tell them what she knew. This evening, they had avoided her. She had seen them through her tears, hovering near – as if they were afraid she might hurt their mother again. If they’d been able to choose which sibling to lose, they’d have chosen her, Jane thought. Wasn’t she lost to them already?
How long would she have to be here, she wondered. Vaguely, she remembered her father telling her that Bobby’s body was being transported from Vietnam. There’d be a calling when it arrived, in a few days; the funeral, of course. She’d read that the caskets of dead servicemen were sealed and could not be opened. Probably because they didn’t want you to see what had happened to them. She knew what her mother would do: prop that awful photograph of Bobby, all puffed-up and proud in his Marine uniform, against a wreath of flowers. She’d prefer that to looking at his real face, anyway, if he even had a face left at all. It made Jane shudder to think that, made her throat ache with tears – as much for herself as for her brother, because she knew that she would have to find her own way to grieve for him, alone.
When Amy took over Bobby’s room, she’d lined up some of his favorite things on the top shelf of the bookcase, which now seemed like a little shrine: his Rin Tin Tin, ratty and threadbare, all the paint worn away from its plastic snout; his cigar boxes full of baseball cards; a model ’55 Chevy. Jane had made fun of him for sleeping with the stuffed dog when he was a little boy. And for the simple pleasure he took in the baseball cards, the endless hours he spent organizing them and playing some game he’d made up, throwing dice and moving the cards around an imaginary ball field. The hours he spent gluing and painting model cars and, later, tinkering with real cars in the driveway. How she had hated seeing him there, wrench in hand, his jeans filthy with oil. His greaser friends bent over the engine.
She thought of Tom then, how not even twenty-four hours ago she had sat on the porch watching him wax his MG, amused by his obsession, and it struck her that he and Bobby would have talked about cars if they’d met. Tom would have examined the engine of whatever junk car Bobby was working on, as curious as Bobby was about its problems. He’d have tossed him the keys to his MG and said, “Take it for a spin.”
She thought of sitting at the kitchen table with Bobby over Christmas break, laughing about their mother. Of the letters he’d written to her, how touched she’d been when, recently, he asked her to send him some books he thought he should read. It was just so wrong that this had happened to him, just when he’d begun to get his life together. Her stomach churned, as if she had eaten something spoiled. She felt agitated. Trapped in this tiny room where he had spent countless hours of his childhood.
She’d unpack, she decided. It was something to do. But when she opened the suitcase Bridget had packed for her and saw the same gray wool jumper and white silk blouse Bridget had lent her for the dinner with Tom’s parents when she was in Evansville after Christmas, she closed it and lay down again, overcome with exhaustion. It was a beautiful outfit, expensive. A gift from Bridget’s parents.
“Wear it,” Bridget insisted that day. “How were you supposed to know you’d need something to wear for dinner at the country club with your boyfriend’s snobby mother when you packed for Christmas break?” Though they both knew that even if Jane had known, she wouldn’t have had anything nearly as nice to wear for the occasion. She had nothing decent to wear to Bobby’s funeral, either – which, of course, was why Bridget had packed the jumper for her yesterday. But the simple sight of it had brought back Tom’s mother grilling her about her family in that syrupy, condescending voice, the way she’d introduced Jane to anyone who came to the table as “Tom’s friend from school.”
“I told you she was uptight,” he said, afterwards. “Plus, she was freaked out because, when she asked, I said, yeah, it was serious between us. She’ll calm down when she gets used to it. Don’t let her intimidate you.”
But Jane still cringed every time she thought of the way Mrs. Gilbert had looked her up and down in that beautiful jumper, as if she’d known it couldn’t possibly belong to her. Fearful she would somehow find out that Jane’s mother was a grocery store clerk and her father was a steelworker who drank away most of his paycheck. That no matter how hard her mother worked, she could not make ends meet and any unexpected expense – a flat tire, a tooth that needed to be filled – would mean going without something else they needed.
Now she’d wear the jumper again, only this time it would be Tom meeting her parents. They’d like him, of course. What wasn’t to like about Tom? But, more importantly, Jane knew they’d be predisposed to like him once they knew he was important to her; they’d assume she would be involved with a person of good character. It was the thought of Tom coming to the funeral as he had promised he would and finally seeing exactly where she came from that made her feel sick with apprehension.
It wouldn’t matter to him. She knew that, knew what he’d say if she told him how she felt. They’re good people. They love you. Why would you be ashamed of them?
Still, Jane couldn’t help imagining his first sight of her childhood home: the linoleum floors, the shabby furniture, the gold drapes from Sears that her mother had saved months to buy.
She curled up, vibrating with shame and dread and sorrow. Then, finally, slept.
7
“White Rabbit”
Sometimes Jane thought it seemed as if Bridget were the one whose brother had die
d in Vietnam. She was enraged by what had happened to Bobby. The day after they returned from the funeral, she joined Students for a Democratic Society and threw herself into working against the war. When a letter from Bobby arrived, mailed the day before his death, Bridget took the snapshot he’d enclosed and taped it to the refrigerator: Bobby mugging with his buddies, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, tanned as a lifeguard, his buzzed hair bleached white from the sun.
“We need to remember,” she said.
“Bridget,” Tom said. “Maybe Jane –”
“No,” Jane said. “She’s right. We do.”
Tom didn’t press it. Later, though, when they were alone, he said, “You know, Jane, she shouldn’t have done that. How did she know it wouldn’t hurt you to see it there?”
She just shook her head. The snapshot did hurt her, but how could she explain that the twist of pain that came each time she saw it was a good thing, something real? Mainly, her own grief oppressed her. It felt less about Bobby’s death than about what a terrible sister she’d been to him and how it was too late now to make up for it. About her failure to be a comfort to her family, even to feel as if she belonged to them through the long hours of the calling and even at the funeral.
She thought constantly about the reception at her Aunt Helen’s house afterwards, where she had stood awkwardly in the living room, receiving condolences from friends and family.
“Your brother was a hero,” her Uncle Bert had said to her. “All those boys over there are heroes. I’ll tell you something. I read about that mess with Dow Chemical down at IU last week, and I told your dad if you were one of mine I’d yank you out of that place before you could say ‘Jack Robinson.’ I hope to hell you were smart enough to steer clear of it.”
An American Tune Page 9