by Marge Piercy
“I don’t like leaving something important to chance,” Vida said. “We ought to decide on political grounds. What we hope to accomplish.”
“A big bang,” Randy said. “Show them we can hurt them.”
Lohania frowned. “They’re both good targets” she said slowly. “Destruction at either one will slow down induction, show people there are ways to block them taking kids. We can hit the other later.”
Provided we survive this hit, she thought, but did not speak. She despised herself for thinking of failure. Every day Vietnamese were dying in tunnels, in the paddy fields and jungles, in their beds, thrown from helicopters. Nobody asked them if they wouldn’t rather survive. Privilege, being a white American, made her able to quibble. “Flip a coin, then” she said despairingly.
“Here’s my quarter. Heads it’s Rockefeller, tails it’s Whitehall.”
Randy flipped and clapped the quarter onto the back of his hand. Then slowly he drew his hand away. “Heads it is. We got our target.”
”Now we should scout it,” Vida said.
“Bullshit,” Randy said. “We got the plans. You want to wise them up?”
“What’s wrong with scouting?” Lohania said. “I’ve done a lot of inside work and it’s a good idea to go in first with nothing on you”
“You never did this kind of work, Lulu,” Randy said, grinning. “This is heavy stuff. That’s what’s cooling you off”‘
“I’m not scared, I just want to do it right.” Lohania jerked away from his hand. “How come you’re so sure of these plans?”
“You think they tear down Rockefeller Center and build it again every year?” Randy shrugged elaborately. “Go scout it. I could care less. But if you tip them, it’s everybody’s ass.”
Lohania stalked past him to stand by Kevin, relaxed again on the sill. “I won’t tip them.”
Kevin gave her a finger poke in the belly, proprietary. “Now, we got a connection for the dynamite?”
“Sure, from that construction crew,” Randy said.
“What would we do without you?” Vida asked.
Randy narrowed his eyes at her. “Sit on your asses. Take books out of the library on chemistry. The only guns you guys ever laid hands on was staple guns.”
“Listen, you never taught me how to handle firearms” Kevin snapped. “My old man taught me, and I was using them when you were in college.”
“Sure, man” Randy slapped Kevin’s shoulder. “But none of these other kids ever saw a gun before except on TV.”
“I saw them.” Lohania leaned against the window frame. She was playing gun moll. At times, Vida thought, they all played roles from a B movie. Yet the excitement of sighting through a rifle for the first time, a used Remington Model 788, stayed with her. Lohania was talking about her father: “ … and a Colt .45 he kept in his dresser drawer”
“Is your dad in the rackets?” Randy asked. Lohania fascinated him. His eyes were usually on her, he listened carefully when she spoke, but Lohania was interested in Randy only as a cell member.
Lohania shrugged. “What does that matter to us? They don’t speak to me, I don’t speak to them.”
Her father ran a laundromat in Queens. Lohania’s family were a sore spot Vida was careful to avoid. She never asked questions, but let Lohania talk when her fountain of private bitterness welled over late at night, when something had shaken Lohania’s confidence—that reminded her of home.
“They really don’t speak to you? Ever?” Randy probed.
”No, they really don’t speak to me!” Lohania mocked Randy’s tone.
Kevin rescued Lohania from Randy by putting an arm around her shoulders. “Now we got a target, we got to get the dynamite, divvy up the tasks and pick a zero hour,”
She could not breathe, as if the room had grown suddenly hot and stifling. Were they going to do it? Really? She wondered if each of them secretly did not stare at the others and hope someone would back out … Oscar kept a rifle in his closet. Every so often he would take it out and fondle it, clean it, cart it around his bedroom. Show it to her. Then he would carefully put it back under the loose floorboard in its hiding place—broken down neatly and stored in its own plastic stock, The rifle assured Oscar he was a revolutionary, at war with the government, but she did not think he had ever fired it. Once Oscar had shown it to Lark in her presence and Lark had lashed into him. “You’re an asshole! They can bust you for that. It’s a toy—for you, it’s a toy.”
Oscar kept the rifle as a proof of his seriousness, as a talisman against co-optation, a fate they all worried about. Of course, no one had shown a sign in years of wanting to co-opt any of the SAW regulars. People in the other world viewed them as barbarians: professors, journalists, television people, editors, opinion makers who watched the slaughter every night in their living rooms called them beasts when they ran in the streets with NLF flags and broke windows. Nobody tried to buy them any longer. Over the years, her outside ties had atrophied. She knew by face and name two thousand Movement people, but retained no friends outside. Since the FBI had visited her boss and she had been fired from Kyriaki, she hardly ventured into the straight world. She had not done any neighborhood work or direct organizing among ordinary people since late in ‘68. Now, except across police barricades, she rarely saw a person who wasn’t close to a fulltime activist. She worked in the nerve centers of antiwar activity, writing propaganda, making speeches, stuffing envelopes, calling demonstrations, organizing defense committees, but nothing sufficed. Nothing satisfied. Nothing eroded the urgency she felt as she lay in bed at night and images of the war fluttered like filthy bloody rags in her head.
Another damn demonstration. Once more into the streets, dear comrades, unarmed and ready to be mauled. The spring and fall mobilizations, the marches, the rallies, the speeches, the endless slogan-filled speeches went on and on and on and meant nothing. Every day the oily malignant voice of the robot President uttered new lies and ordered more atrocities. Bomb the dikes. Bomb the hospitals. Chemical warfare. Mutations unto the fifteenth generation. A fertile land of rice and mahogany and fishing boats and rubber trees was being bombed moment by moment into the craters of the moon. Every day the cancerous war fattened.
She had inhabited the war since she could remember, and it had cost her years of her life. She had been beaten a score of times; she had had nosebleeds and concussion and bruises and sprains; she had been gassed into permanent damage to her lungs and a huskiness that never seemed to leave her voice. She was lucky. She had her eyesight and her freedom, while friends had lost both.
She turned to Kevin, braced in the window with his elbow resting on Lohania’s shoulder, and felt one with them. They had built this group because they could not stand futility. Sensing her mood, Kevin put his other hand lightly on her shoulder. Jimmy, crouched on, the floor looking alternately from Kevin to Randy for guidance, was figuring the amount of dynamite they needed to damage a couple of rooms. Bombing was an obvious idea: every day’s paper carried news of new targets and new attacks. Bomb scares were even more frequent, and every school and most of the office buildings in the city were regularly emptied by a student or employee seeking some interruption to the dull routine. Half the people she knew fantasized about blowing up one of the obvious monuments to military or corporate power that gleamed like diamonds set in steel around Manhattan.
“It’s a lousy time, in the middle of a serious meeting, to fondle your girlfriends,” Randy said sourly to Kevin. “Are we working or aren’t we? Coupling off is putting strains on this group”
“Garbage” Vida snapped. “We came in with the same relationships we have. They didn’t interfere with starting this group and they don’t get in the way of our operations. Can it, Randy, you can satisfy your other needs elsewhere.”
“Why should I have to?” He grinned at her. “Share and share alike.”
“All right, when we get the dynamite, you can insert the blasting caps.” A delicate job everybody seemed to think sh
e and Jimmy were best fitted for. A shade too much pressure and the whole charge would blow up in their faces. The two of them had done it on the bit of dynamite they had gotten to experiment with the month before, blowing up rocks in an abandoned quarry.
Waiting behind the shelter of a rise for the explosion had been unen-durably tense. They had been trying out a chemical time bomb, using a pipe filled with dynamite, primed with a mixture of potassium chlorate and gunpowder, and then enough sulfuric acid to eat through a cork. The bomb had gone off, all right, but not in three hours. In four hours and twenty minutes it had exploded, deafening them, rocking the earth, terrifying, exhilarating. But that would not do. The bomb had to go off when they expected, to allow enough time after they called in a warning to clear the building, but not enough time for the bomb squad to arrive, search and disarm the bomb. They had driven back to the city subdued, emotionally and physically spent. There had been both release and an access of terror in the explosion that had made it almost enough in itself to persuade them they had acted.
Now they planned to use a bomb with a clock, very traditional and reliable. She asked, “Tomorrow, same time?”
“They sentenced the group that bombed the draft board in Brooklyn” Jimmy said. Faithfully he clipped the Times every morning, as when he used to do power-structure research.
“Yeah? So what did they get?” Lohania asked, pretending faint interest.
“Thirty years” he said softly.
“Thirty years?” Lohania repeated, staring.
“Wow, that’s a long time,” Kevin said. “I can tell you, a year is forever. Even with good behavior, they’ll be old when they get out.”
“Some state rep is asking for the death penalty”“ Vida said. “Rockefeller just wants to make it mandatory life … Well, till tomorrow?”
“Look, all I’m supposed to do, I need a day to get the stuff arranged, you guys” Randy complained. “We need an extra day to get all our shit together”
She smiled involuntarily. That phrase—one Movement people kept using lately—about getting your shit together always made her see one of those shiny black dung beetles that had been common on the goat paths, rolling their bundles of goat turds uphill end over end among the rocks of the Cretan hillsides.
“… then we’ll close the gap between jawing and doing something” Kevin was saying, rubbing his hands briskly. “Hey, Vida, let’s go home and rip one off” He didn’t really mean they should run home ahead of Lohania and Jimmy and jump into bed. Rather, he was teasing Randy in his sore spot. Randy really wanted Lohania but he would have settled for Vida.
As they left singly, timing their going as they carefully arranged their coming, she went first to start supper. Back in her kitchen, she stuck the pot roast in a skillet to brown and then looked for onions to slice. Nothing in the drawer but dry skins. Wasn’t anybody doing the shopping? They would be seven to twelve for supper tonight, but nobody shopped. It annoyed her; she blocked her annoyance, as she was learning to do. They weren’t starving. Still, onions were vital to pot roast, and she was hungry. She had been up since six, delivering pamphlets to chapters across the city, and had eaten no lunch. The smell of browning beef lapped at her stomach and filled her mouth with saliva. She put the roast on with the dregs of a bottle of red plonk and ran down to Natalie for onions to add. Natalie’s house was better organized and she was sure Natalie had done her shopping.
When she rapped on the door, Natalie stood inside and talked through the door. “Daniel, if that’s you, you’re early. I told you the meeting would run till four. Go get a cup of coffee or see if anybody’s home at Vida’s”
“Not even I am home at Vida’s. You’re having a meeting?”
Natalie undid the door. “Hi. We’re just finishing. I didn’t want to let Daniel in. I swear he likes to walk into the middle of our women’s meetings. It bugs him that there’s anything in the whole universe he can’t control!”
“You don’t let him in when you’re meeting? Do you throw Sam out in the street too?”
“I would if Sam acted the way Daniel does. Oh, heh, heh, the ladies. You mean I can’t stay? I’m not welcome! You mean just because I’m a man … “
Why was she pretending she didn’t understand? Daniel patronized her too. He assumed nothing she could have to say politically could be as interesting as anything he had to say, and that if they disagreed, it was because she didn’t follow his fine reasoning. Yet that circle of women sitting on the old red couch, the rocking chairs and the floor disturbed her. Their eyes went over her and mostly, politely, they looked back to each other, but one or two stared longer.
What did Natalie say about her? Did they sit around discussing how she ought to be working with women instead of The Little Red Wagon? Suddenly she recognized that stocky woman still watching her as Jan, who had served on the New York Steering Committee of SAW as long as she had been Oscar’s girlfriend. After Oscar had broken with Jan, she had heard Jan was taking it badly. Since then Vida had seen Jan only at demonstrations. Now here was the girl Lohania had used to call along with Brenda the Bubble Gum Twins sitting cross-legged on the floor weighing fifteen pounds more than she had, with her hair growing out brown from the scalp, dressed in basic Army drab and looking grim enough to curdle milk. Oh, Jan’s going to try to talk to me about Oscar, she thought. Her anger at Oscar was strictly political, and she did not want to confuse her precise disgust at his Schactmanism with what must be Jan’s woman-scorned dreariness. Oscar had been forced out of the Steering Committee to lick his wounds at C. W. Post, where Daniel, who supported his opposition to the more militant tactics SAW was adopting, had got him a teaching appointment.
”I can come back” Vida offered nervously. “I just dropped by”“ She didn’t want to say in front of the women that she had come to borrow onions. They might think it was regressive that she did the cooking, whereas only Lohania and she knew how, and she hated to eat canned spaghetti.
“It’s four, Natalie said, “If we don’t keep to a deadline, we go on forever”
Jan stood, “Announcement! I’m running a printing workshop starting tomorrow evening for any woman who wants to learn. We have a press at the center now, just a small Multilith, but look at the rape pamphlet and you’d be surprised at what we can do …”
Just what the Movement needed: yet another printing press. SAW had a perfectly good printshop. Then she remembered there had been a fight between a women’s group and the printers about something the women wanted run off that the printers, all male, had refused to take.
“While we’re learning to print, we’ll do some fun things like run off our own stationery, so you can learn layout too … “
Here they were, facing off the cops every day, enduring tear gas and bayonets, and these nuts were designing fancy stationery. As Jan walked out in a knot of women, Vida turned her back and thumbed the pamphlet. It really was about rape. She felt embarrassed. What a weird subject! Next they’d be doing pamphlets on mugging or toothache. “What is this stuff?” she demanded of Natalie as the last visitor straggled out.
“We find in groups that half of us have been raped. You see, when women start to talk to each other, the old assumptions crumble.” Natalie gave her a hug, “Glad to see you!”
“Half the women in groups. You get the ones who are mad already”“
“Don’t you think rape is common?”
“Come on, Natty, what do you mean, common? Is murder common? It sure is in Vietnam.”
Natalie rubbed her eyes—a gesture of fatigue, “How about you? You’ve been raped.”
“What are you talking about?” She paced, but carefully. Natalie’s was not an apartment where she could pace restlessly or passionately: she’d end up on her ass with a plastic pull toy under her and two kids screaming she’d just broken Jeremy.
Natalie settled at the dining-room table with a deep sigh, “Don’t you remember Vasos? He used to force you regularly.”
“Oh” She saw herself p
inned on the bed under Vasos, unable to cry out because there was nothing but humiliation in screaming when your own lawfully wedded husband exercised his conjugal rights. When he thrust into her, it hurt. She would feel torn. If she was lucky, he would come quickly, but if she was unlucky, he would go on pounding in her, each stroke burning her raw. Afterward when she pissed, it would hurt all night. Vida sat down at the table across from Natalie. “But it isn’t rape if you know the guy”“
“If you murder somebody you know, it’s murder. If you rob somebody you know, it’s robbery.”
“But … he didn’t have a gun or a knife.”
“Did he need one?”
“I could have fought harder, I used to fight him as long as I could and then I’d give up.”
“Why? Why didn’t you try to kill him?”
She twisted on the chair. Something she did not want to remember, those months before she had succeeded in running away, “It was his right— he kept saying that. He was stronger than me, and his weight alone would push me down. And it was his house, his family, his mother and father in the next room, his brothers down the hall, his country, his language his courts, his law.”
“Isn’t it usually?” Natalie poured some peppermint tea, nudging the cup across, “Remember, I was raped at college.”
“Raped? Oh” She remembered Natalie coming in with her blouse torn, carefully not opening her coat until she was in the room they shared in the dormitory, then sitting numbly on the bed’s edge. For the first few hours Natalie could not cry. “That guy.”
“Because he was Black and I was white, I thought it was my fault, It was our first date” Natalie tweaked her snub nose, squeezing. “In those days, we didn’t expect trouble from men on the first date, if we were supposed to be nice girls,”
“But isn’t it like a racist cliche? Black man rapes white woman?”