Vida

by Marge Piercy

  “We’re all getting divorced.” Natalie waggled her fingers at the busy waitress. Her brown eyes sought Vida’s. “How upset are you about it?”

  Joel sat up. “You mean you’re still married to that schmuck? You’re still married to him.?”

  “Probably not by now.” She brazened it out with a shrug. “His lawyer must do something for his money.”

  “Three coffees … “ Natalie turned to Joel. “The etiquette of the situation holds me back from asking all the questions I’d love to.”

  “What, do I love your sister? Can I support her in the style to which she is accustomed? Are my intentions honorable? Are my prospects good?”

  Natalie’s fat, happy giggle resounded. “This one has a sense of humor, for a change … No, I’m curious about you yourself. Where do you come from, originally?”

  “Born in New Jersey. When I was in the fourth grade, my old man’s company moved him to North Carolina. I suffered down there till they fired him and we moved West.”

  ”Suffered how?” Natalie asked. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”“

  “You are a sister,” he grinned. “The way I remember it is, I had trouble understanding how the teachers talked. Everybody made fun of me. It was wrong if I tried to talk the way they talked and wrong if I didn’t. Jewboy. Yankee, sure. I began to have what they called learning problems.”

  “What about the rest of your family? Did they hate it too?”

  “My younger brother grew up talking like them. I tried to make up for everything by eating. He never had weight problems, he always fitted right in … Today he’s probably minting money … I don’t know, maybe he’s pumping gas, who knows?”

  “You don’t have a Southern accent,” Natalie said. “Maybe just a trace. Where West?”

  “Sacramento … I liked it. I’d learned to work on cars. When we moved to Sacramento—my uncle was there—my brother moped but I was happy. I didn’t say a word to my parents. I didn’t let on, but I knew. That was my chance.”

  “To get out of the South?” Natalie asked.

  “To get out of myself. The fat stupid blubbering creep … I started running and swimming. I ran in circles in the backyard at first. So my mother, who’d been carrying on for years I was too fat, kept trying to push food at me”“

  “I remember the dieting” Natalie said. “I’m always plump, I just accept myself that way.”

  “I like you plump, Natty,” Vida said. “Everybody doesn’t have to look like a boy.” Were they getting on? She thought so; she hoped so. Joel was certainly opening up. Were they liking each other? She wanted to kneel on the floor and beg them.

  “So, did your life change in Sacramento?” Natalie asked.

  “Being into cars was mainstream there. I got into dope, I got into the Movement. I came in there doing my con job and I discovered I could even get laid … But I never believed in it. I knew I was putting it over on them. Inside, I was still back in Roanoke Rapids, the fat turd who picked last for every team.”

  He was bonding with Natalie around the weight, she thought. Telling her that in his mind he was still fat. She smiled.

  Natalie was confiding now. “ … so you got to understand my father and her mother fell clandestinely in love. Unlikely as it seems. Oh, Ruby has style, even flamboyance—”

  “For years that was all she had” Vida said. “Grit, persistence. And a conviction just from daydreams that things could be different for us”

  ”You like your parents,” Joel said wonderingly.

  “Oh, within limits.” Natalie laughed. “My own mother died when I was eight, and I didn’t resent Ruby. I was glad to be done trying to run the household with occasional cleaning women. It was like I could go back to being a kid again and stop being so damn responsible … A stepmother, you’re supposed to hate her. But Ruby was warm. I felt a little patronizing, I imagine: she’d been poor; my own mother had gone to college”

  “But suddenly we had each other. Given, perfect. The sister you fantasize”

  “So you aren’t real sisters” Joel said, picking the last crumbs from all their plates.

  “Yes, we are!” she said. “Nothing’s more real than that” Eyes. The prickly feeling of eyes. As if casually, she turned, playing with the ends of her hair, and found the gaze. A man at a table of men, wearing a business suit, not expensive. She let her gaze drift past him, smiling. In a softer voice she went on, “Someone’s looking at me. I’m going to get up to go to the john. You sit on awhile and then pay the check. Bring my coat. Watch that he doesn’t follow. I’ll meet you back at Lingerie in twenty minutes … If he does follow, Terry, shake him and we meet as previously set up … okay?”

  Casually she rose, stood over the table talking for a moment, then sauntered toward the bathroom. She went in and then came out a moment later and strolled out of the restaurant. An elevator was just loading, and she hurried to squeeze in.

  Natalie had arranged housing for them from the list available for the conference in a house in Dorchester. They shared watery zucchini soup and heavy wheat bread, a salad too generously filled with inadequately washed, sour sprouts. The food was free and they ate it. She tried to be grateful, cursing her food snobbery that after seven years of exile and often hunger had never deserted her. Finally the many children were put to bed and the adults vanished, leaving Vida and Joel the dining-room floor to spread their sleeping bags on.

  She asked, “What did you think of Natalie?”

  “She didn’t like me.”

  “How can you say that?” She was astonished. She could see Natalie at the table eagerly swapping childhoods. “She hardly ever opens up with men that way. She told me she liked you a lot.”

  “Really? What did she say?”

  “What I said. That she liked you a lot.”

  He scowled. “You made that up.”

  ”I did not! She told me that when she was saying goodbye.”

  “How much did she slip you?”

  “Two hundred.” She tasted guilt. Natalie had little extra. She had a parttime teaching job and a minor stipend from the battered women’s I shelter where she worked for over forty hours a week.

  “Wow, with the dough for running that woman to safety, we’ll have it made. Think she could give us these jobs pretty often?”

  “Mostly the shelter works fine and they don’t move women. But Natalie knows everything going on. She does liaison a lot with other political groups. She’s an incredible organizer, Terry—”

  “Why do you got to call me that? Nobody’s listening.”

  “We’re in somebody’s house. We have to use the legal names.”

  “We’re alone in the fucking sleeping bag. You think they got the sleeping bag bugged?”

  “It’s a habit. All we need to do is slip once in public and not say Terry or Vinnie—”

  “I hate it! I hate for you to call me that name.”

  “Love, keep your voice down. I understand—”

  “Call me by my name!” He lay rigid, his fists clenched.

  “It’s dangerous”

  “We didn’t get here by playing it safe. Call me by my name!”

  “Why are you coming down so hard on me about this?”

  He turned onto his belly, pushing his head into the sleeping bag. “I’m lost! Who am I, anyhow? Where are we going? Just running. From who? Do they give a fuck anymore? Just running in sand. I want to remember who I am. Call me by my name when we’re alone. Call me by my name!”

  She sat up beside him, hands twisting in her lap. She could not do it. Years of security habits; years of taking care; years of never knowing when she was bugged, watched, photographed, filmed; years of having to break dear old habits seized her tongue. It’s so hard for us, she thought, staring around at the dingy but cheerful room with its hanging plants and combination of political and travel posters on the walls. Why was she with this creature? How had she ever thought life with him was going to be a bowl of nonchauvinist cherries? She could be in a
hundred rooms in a hundred houses kneeling on more comfortable beds with saner and stronger men— or better yet, alone! Why didn’t she just bolt and run?

  He raised his head and looked at her with accusing brown eyes that reminded her for a moment of Natalie’s. “You’ll get bored struggling with me. You want to leave me for some guy who’s got it all together.”

  ”I never met a guy who had it all together.” She could not leave him for anybody. He was a lot of trouble, but he was in touch with her, and she had been lonely for a long, long time. She knelt to put her arms around him and into his ear she whispered, “Joel. Joel. My love”

  10

  She had expected to call Leigh from a roadside booth Wednesday morning, long after Joel and she had picked up the battered woman, Tara, and started north, but Tuesday night the pickup was put off until Thursday morning. She and Joel ended up in the cheapest motel they could find in Hempstead, waiting. She had to call Leigh Wednesday from a pay phone three blocks from the motel.

  “Are you coming out of New York soon?” she asked him. “I’m nervous about going there right now.” She was too close for comfort.

  “Reasonable enough.” Even over the phone Leigh’s voice was caramel. “Not clear if old Kevin’s going to be tried for gunrunning or old stuff or all of it”

  “You haven’t talked to him?”

  “He gave a press conference with his Mafia lawyer last week—a surprise in itself—sounding blustery and martyred. I went and he looked right through me. Wouldn’t recognize me when I tried to ask a question.”

  “Not good.” Jealousy? Contempt? Kevin had always detested Leigh, but arrested politicos usually wanted his attention. “A Mafia lawyer?”

  “A good one. Pricey.”

  She speculated glumly, but she could not protract the phone call. “What’s your travel schedule?”

  “Let’s see. Got my calendar handy … At Thanksgiving I’m going down to Miami to see my mother.”

  “How would I get to Florida? Besides, it’s dangerous. Too many Cuban exiles, too many Feds.”

  “Well, this coming weekend we’re visiting friends of Susannah’s who have a ski lodge near Twin Mountain—that’s up in New Hampshire.”

  “You’re a skier now? I don’t believe it.”

  “Nah, I just watch the idiots risk their bones while I toast at the fire”

  This weekend … Leigh, I can make it. I can meet you nearby … Are they political?”

  “They’re musicians. Classical. You know, resonance up where brains ought to be. Fine mahogany heads … But good-hearted. Both first-class cooks. He cooks Roman and she cooks Indian and Mexican. He is Italian, she’s a Wasp. So it goes. You could call in on their phone. Pretend you’re my fucking station. They always hector me.” He cleared his throat. “But we won’t have much time. I can’t disappear on them for hours. Brief meet—if you think it’s worth the bother.”

  “Of course it’s worth it” she said hotly. “To me, anyhow.” She had been gone from him altogether too much already. Should she break her own rules and meet Susannah? Their involvement seemed to have thickened to the point where it would be more useful if she made the woman take her into account; yet Leigh had gone through fifteen women in the last few years.

  Time to check in. She dialed. “Hi. Peregrine reporting. Who’s this?”

  “It is I” said Kiley’s crisp high voice, assuming quite correctly but, Vida felt, a little arrogantly that she would be recognized. “We need to talk. Preliminary to the full BOD.”

  The Board of Directors—what had at first been slang for the central committee of the Network had taken over, so that the joke had become the real name—were due to meet, but now Kiley was pushing for something less formal. “How about Goat Heaven?” Agnes’ farm, up in Vermont. “Or Hardscrabble Hill?” Eva’s name for the farm they had all lived on, a name from an old song about circumstances not far from what theirs had been that desperate time in ‘73-74.

  “We’ll leave word both places. How soon?”

  Suppose they got Tara moved tomorrow. Well, give an extra day for problems. “Friday?”

  “Friday we’ll have word at both places. Meet a day or two later.”

  “I’m not alone” Vida said. “You know him rather well”

  “I do?” Kiley waited her out.

  “He has big green glass eyes like a stuffed pussycat” Vida said.

  “Oh … Mechanic.”

  Mechanic? A connection closed in her head, two wires finally touching. Joel was Mechanic: the wizard deserter who fixed old cars that Kiley had discovered. “Should he come? Can he come, rather?”

  “I never used to bring him” Kiley said. “But if you want. It’s not official, after all” She hung up for punctuation.

  Maybe she shouldn’t, she thought wryly. It would certainly be a test of his true interest. She hurried back to the motel. What was on Kiley’s huge and pointed mind? Lucky that Joel was a mechanic, given the condition of the car they were to use.

  The car belonged to the son of the woman who was sheltering Tara, and it was home because it had needed a new clutch. After they delivered Tara and her children, they were to bring the car up to Goddard, near Plainfield, Vermont, where the son was studying social ecology. The car was a bronze Subaru several years old that had been driven through fire and mud and storm, but Natalie insisted that the garage had checked it out thoroughly and put on snow tires.

  Joel wore dark glasses and a ski cap pulled low on his forehead, concealing his hair. She had a frosted ash blond acrylic wig over her dyed brown hair and different dime-store glasses than she usually wore. It was just getting light when they pulled into the driveway, right on the dot, but the woman was not waiting. Vida had to go and rap on the door of the little apartment tacked on the back of the long, low brick house. She hoped that it was the right door and she was not waking the other families who lived in this house—three apartments in all. She could see her breath. The sky looked as if it might rain or even snow—low ranks of clouds scrambling by, tumbling over themselves in the strength of the wind blowing off the cold gunmetal sea just three blocks to the east. In the early-morning stillness she could hear the surf. No lights were on in either of the neighbors’ houses, but a cat crossed from yard to yard, ducking under a boat trailer. Where the hell was the goddamned woman named Tara? Her stomach tightened.

  Lightly she rapped on the door. She did not want the neighbors, the occupants of the other apartments, to wake, to observe. Joel looked absurd standing in the driveway beating his hands together to keep warm, with the ski cap pulled down and sunglasses on at dawn of a cloudy day. She rapped again, restraining the impulse to shout.

  Finally the door opened. Tara, a plump blond woman in her late twenties wearing a print pantsuit and a neck brace, peered out at Vida, a baby crying behind her. A boy bundled up so he was shaped like a beet in his maroon wool coat sat on a kitchen chair with his legs stuck straight out. A glass of milk was sitting on the table in front of him, and something pinkish had spilled on the floor.

  “I’m Cynthia. We’re here to transport you. We expected you to be ready”

  “We’ll be ready in a second. Tommy! Drink it down. We have to go soon.”

  “Don’t want it. It’s cold.”

  “All right! But don’t tell me you’re hungry in a little while!”

  Tara, juggling the crying baby on her right arm, took the glass in her left hand and emptied it into the sink. “We just have to clean up breakfast dishes—”

  “Leave them.”

  “We can’t go and leave the breakfast dishes. It’ll just take five minutes”

  She hardened herself. No delaying tactics. “We’re leaving now. If you want our help, put on your coat and come … Your shelterer will clean up. It’s just one more favor. The biggest favor you can do her now is to clear out before your husband arrives and shoots up the place.”

  “We’re not catching a plane. I just have to clean up the kitchen.”

  �
�Tara, this car leaves now. Get in it or stay. We have other deadlines to meet. You aren’t the only woman in trouble.”

  “Oh. You help other women.” Tara paused in her dashing to and fro. “Just a minute.” She put the baby under her arm, still squalling, and rushed to get a suitcase. “You can take this out. And the baby’s things” She pointed to a plastic carryall.

  I’m a genius, she thought. That was the right thing to say to get her moving. Stooping, she picked up the suitcase—Jesus! full of gold bricks, no doubt—and the carryall and staggered out to the car.

  “What’s happening in there?” Joel hissed, his shades shoved back on his striped ski cap like aviator goggles.

  “Just stow this stuff in the trunk. Put newspapers over ours so she doesn’t see what our gear looks like.”

  “Just get her out of there! We don’t want to be seen”

  “Honey, I’m trying” Briefly, nervously they touched dry lips. Over her shoulder, as she trotted back, she said, “Put the food in the car. The Bloomie’s bag full of sandwiches and fruit Sam gave us.”

  “I’m hungry! I’m hungry!” Tommy was shouting. “You took my milk”

  “You said it was too cold” Tara was writing a note. “You wouldn’t, drink it” SORRY FOR THE MESS, it said.

  “But you threw it away! I wanted you to warm it on the stove.”

  “We have food in the car” Vida said. “What goes out next? Where’s your coat?”

  “Your doggy, Tommy. What did you do with your doggy?” Tara asked frantically, trying to shove her arms into her fur coat while holding the baby.

  “Let me take the baby”“ Vida said. Reluctantly Tara handed the baby over, and Vida cuddled it. She had not held a baby since Vermont, that winter of ‘74. She saw a pacifier on the counter, and as the sobs checked she offered it, and the baby sucked. Better. “What’s … baby’s name?” She avoided a pronoun.

  ”Beverly. She’s a real good baby. I don’t know what she’s upset about this morning.”

  “Ralph” Tommy said. “Call him Ralph”