by Marge Piercy
Vida loved even Randy, eating soup with a checklist on the table of everything they must remember, listed only by abbreviation or careful initials. If it were not for his dedication, they would probably have chucked the whole idea, she thought as she slowly ate her own soup, for their satisfaction had a lining of stupor and masked a craving just to let down and relax for a while. Lark had talked to Kevin just before the demonstration asking him to come to a factory in New Jersey where SAW was holding talks with the more militant workers. Kevin was not a member of SAW but Lark wanted to draw him into working-class organizing, He was sure Kevin could talk to the workers. Maybe he could. Vida would have liked to see Kevin drawn into regular organizing and made responsible for more than his big mouth.
Without Randy, no doubt they would have talked a lot but let the bombing die. They were overcommitted organizationally. She would have to steal the time tomorrow from hours supposed to be spent collating pamphlets and meeting with representatives from high school papers. Lohania and Jimmy would be defaulting on other obligations. For their common act of war.
Jimmy and Vida prepared the bomb except for attaching the clock and set it out next to the briefcase that would carry it. They could not attach the wires to the alarm, since clocks know only twelve-hour cycles. Then they all went for a brief walk in Riverside Park to review their plans. Randy left them there to head home. The whole family retired early, before Leigh came home. Kevin followed Lohania into her room to give her a back rub and change the dressing on her head and never came out. Jimmy went to sleep on the living-room floor.
Vida was glad Lohania and Kevin were together, sleeping in there with the dynamite. She hoped they would rise happy with each other. She did not undress, but lay on her bed with the light on going over the plan of the morning, hoping Leigh would come home. She wanted to talk to him. So many things could go wrong; she needed to feel close to him again, at least briefly, fleetingly.
When she awoke in the middle of the night, he had got past her. Standing outside his door, she could hear him snoring, but she did not know if he was alone. She pissed and returned to her room, undressed and got into bed properly, nudging Mopsy over. She did not sleep again. She watched the hands creep in their slow inevitable descent toward six and watched them begin to rise again, up to seven, when she shut off the alarm as it began to ring.
When she got to the kitchen, she put on coffee. Moments later, Kevin stumbled in groggy with Lohania behind him. “Go shave, my dearest,” Lohania said to him more tenderly than she had in months. “Show Vida your haircut that I laid on you. You got to look respectable today, if you can make a pass at it.”
“Yeah. Sure” Yawning, Kevin shuffled off to the other bathroom to use Leigh’s razor. His pants hung loose around his hips. With scissors Lohania had cut not only the hair of his head but his beard down to the stubble ready for the razor. Vida hoped he would curse and make a lot of noise while he shaved off his beard to rouse Leigh. She still wanted desperately to see him before she left. Suppose she were killed this morning? Suppose she were busted or shot down on the spot? Suppose they really didn’t know what they were doing and the bomb exploded in the briefcase, and that was the end of them?
She felt distant from Leigh as if a deep rift valley had grown between them, as if an earthquake had opened a fissure and their continents were shoving apart. She could not go and wake him. She did not know who might be with him, and the others would be upset. But if he woke and came out, she could snatch a moment. After the water boiled and she started the coffee dripping through, she ran back to dress, slamming the door intentionally.
A beige linen dress just three inches above the knees, demure and proper, that she had not worn since she had been fired from her job. Gold nonhippy earrings. She piled her hair into an expert French twist. Her hands remembered, for she had worn her hair that way in Greece. She put in the amber comb that had belonged to Grandma, to hold the twist in place. Ruby had always worn her hair short. Shoulder bag. Panty hose. Passable sandals with a little heel, almost matching the bag. She eyed herself. Put on makeup carefully, not to stain the dress. She had forgotten to put on makeup first. To protect her dress she had to borrow a towel from the bathroom where Kevin was with fierce concentration and some blood shaving off the remains of his wiry golden beard.
On a final inspiration she fumbled in the back of her vanity drawer, among lipsticks and curlers of past styles, for a small jar of eye shadow. Lavender eye shadow. A few Movement women used eyebrow pencils or eyeliners but nobody in the Movement ever wore eye shadow. It was one of those magic lines of demarcation. Eye shadow was what her sister Sharon wore in suburbia. Married ladies with Black maids wore eye shadow. There! She finished by applying makeup to her hands, covering chemical burns that might attract attention.
Seeing one another in their bourgeois finery was disquieting. Jimmy looked as if he were about to graduate high school or attend his mother’s funeral. He had a narrow maroon tie tucked into the neck of his navy suit and striped shirt. “Oh, Jimmy, you cut your hair!” He had. A mortal sacrifice. Without it his ears stuck out, red and naked, making him appear seventeen.
Kevin did not look successfully bourgeois. He emerged a working-class hustler. The madras plaid sports jacket he had borrowed did not quite fit, tight in the back for his musculature. The shirt was open at the throat. He had held up his khaki pants with a leather belt, borrowed at some point from Leigh probably without permission, because Leigh hated to lend his clothes. He had combed his hair neatly and slicked it back with water.
“Lohania cut my hair” Jimmy said. “But wow, Kevin, you look different without the beard.”
Actually, she had had a moment of fantasizing that perhaps he would have no chin at all, but Kevin was handsome without the beard, although less interesting-looking. Almost blandly handsome. A young man who’d sell you a can opener in a hardware store. Lohania looked every inch the secretary on her way to work, in a blue-and-white print dress the same length as Vida’s with a straw bag and little heels. As a last touch she had put on a wedding ring. “Natalie says this makes every woman invisible,” Lohania said giddily. “We haven’t seen you looking like the New York Career Girl on the Go since you worked at Kyriaki, Vida. Like that you could walk into the Pentagon.”
Randy was the surprise. He had just arrived, in time for breakfast. He too had his hair cut short, like Jimmy. “Did Lohania cut your hair too? Last night before you left?”
“I got it done at a barber. Thought I might as well do it right. There’s one open till late on Columbus.”
He looked so straight she could not get over it. He wore a lightweight brown wash-and-wear suit, a striped shirt, a square-cut tie with a print of towel tiny anchors, polished dark brown shoes. He even had a crisp white handkerchief in his jacket pocket. In these clothes, suddenly class is with us, she thought: he looks like he could be Kevin’s cousin who’s the striver and strainer. He had in fact gone to some little Catholic college in prelaw.
“Okay”‘ Randy said edgily, holding out his wristwatch. “How do we divvy up the tasks? Three with the clock, two to give the warning and distribute the communiqués … Jimmy has to go with the clock because he set it. He knows it the best”‘
“And I go with the clock”‘ Kevin did not argue. He announced.
“Sure, man”‘ Randy deferred. “Okay, the ladies have been complaining about women’s lib. Let one of them go with the clock. The other can do the phoning of the warning and the delivering of the communiqués with me. Let’s flip a coin. Heads, Vida goes with the clock; tails, Lohania goes.”
“Come on, come on, tails!” Lohania chanted. “Show me tails!”
Vida said nothing. The shiny coin gleamed in Randy’s hand. She knew it was coming down heads; it did. “Okay, let’s move out” she said. The longer they hung around, the longer she had to feel scared.
As they rode down in the elevator, Randy and Lohania giving them a fifteen-minute head start, she said to Kevin and Jimmy,
“Did you notice that whenever Randy flips a coin, it’s a shiny quarter and it comes out heads? I didn’t say anything because I’d rather go”
Kevin chuckled. “Yeah. It’s a trick quarter—heads on both sides. I didn’t want to say nothing either. Better for us to take the heavy risks. She’s had enough grief in the past year”
At the moment she loved him, taking his hand between hers, the hand not carrying the briefcase. “She has!”
“But she has to heal herself, you know? Got to come out of it herself”
“But Kevin, sometimes a person can want a little coddling, a little tenderness. Need to be gentled”
“Not in a guerrilla situation. Lohania’s tougher than you think. She’s coming through”
“I’m surprised Randy didn’t fight to take my place” she said.
“Didn’t turn out for the demo either” Kevin stopped on the street corner as if sizing up the weather, the day, and completed a leisurely inspection. “Getting soft. Chickening out. We got to run some discipline on him when we get through with this.”
“Oh, you didn’t buy his sudden conversion to women’s lib?”
Jimmy spoke up suddenly, his voice high and choked, “Y-y-you don’t really think Randy is scared?”
”Why not? I am.” She stared up at the brown-blue sky of polluted sunshine between the buildings on Broadway. She imagined woods, hills of western Connecticut along the Housatonic where Leigh and their friends used to go hiking on a Sunday, easy walks in the boulder-strewn woods. One spring Sunday porcupines had been chasing each other, indifferent to them.
“Yeah, but we’re going. K-K-Kevin’s saying Randy’s too scared to go” Jimmy fell into anxious step beside Kevin. “You don’t mean that! Not about Randy.”
“Shut up,” Kevin barked. He was gazing intently into a store window.
“What is it?” She felt cold metal in her.
“We’re being tailed.”
“Are you sure?” She tried to stare past him for reflections. Jimmy started to turn, and Kevin gripped him by the arm. “Keep walking. Never look back. We’ll shake them in the subway.”
“Sure,” she said. “They can meet us down at Rockefeller Center.”
“Do you mean that?” Kevin said. “Think they been tipped?”
“Let’s lose them first. Then we can consult.” She picked three tokens as if casually from her purse. “Don’t let’s get busted with the clock on us”
“What do you want to do?” Kevin barked. “Drop it in the trash? They’d see us” Kevin ambled along, waving his free hand as if in relaxed conversation. “They already seen us with the case.”
It was next to impossible to go on walking slowly. She wanted to turn, she wanted to turn and look so badly she could scarcely control herself. To turn and face their pursuers. To break into a run. Dash for it. To grab the case from Kevin, toss it into a doorway and make a break. On they strolled. As they came up to the first entrance to the 96th Street station, Kevin said, “I hear a train, now run for it. We’ll take any train”
Vida pressed a token into Jimmy’s hand and then one into Kevin’s. She then fell in behind Kevin, who was a good battering ram through rush-hour congestion. Jimmy, after trying to slip through on his own, fell in behind her, and they thrust for the gates. Kevin went over the turnstile; Vida and Jimmy used their tokens. “The local’s in,” Kevin shouted. He got into the train first and forced the doors to stay open as they slid under his arm and in. The doors slammed shut and the train started. They collected together, hanging from straps. The briefcase was clutched between Kevin’s legs.
The express passed them just after 72nd. They got off the local at 59th and trotted into Central Park, watching carefully, circling back, watching. They were no longer followed. Finally they sank on a bench and stared at each other. “Stay here,” she said. “I’m going back to a phone booth and call the house.”
“No, we’ll stick together. There’s a phone booth at the zoo. Let’s haul ass over there.” Kevin stood. He had a need to keep moving that she could feel. “Why would they have followed us today?” She asked argumentatively. “It can’t be chance. They knew”
“Did any of us say anything on the phone?” Jimmy asked.
“Don’t be funny”“ Kevin walked faster. They had to trot to keep up. “We’re a year past saying anything real on the phone. Maybe they got the kind of tap on us that picks up room conversations. How about that?”
“Maybe” she said slowly. “We’ve talked a bit in the apartment. But not much. Not enough for them to put it together.” And I didn’t tell Leigh: I never did.
“How do we know they put it together?” Jimmy’s hands kept knotting in the pockets of his suit jacket. He shoved his hands into the pockets, where they twitched and struggled like captured birds. “They knew we were going to do something today. So they followed us.”
“I don’t buy that,” Kevin said. “We did all the arguing in that room or in the park. We never discussed target or timing in the apartment.”
“Could the SRO room be bugged?” she asked.
“That’s one possibility,” Jimmy said slowly. “They’ve been waiting for us to act so they could grab us with the clock.”
They marched across the park, pushing themselves. They were all three scared. But they were used to being terrified and acting in spite of terror, used to forcing themselves to fight fear and transcend it into courage. She felt proud to be with them. “I wonder if Lohania and Randy got followed too? They have the statements on them. It doesn’t matter we have the bomb. They’re in the same conspiracy. I hope they paid attention.”
“Dolpho’s not so street smart, but Lulu is. She’ll spot them … There’s your phone” She dialed Leigh’s unlisted number. Since the chaos in the apartment, he had had his own phone put into his room and would not let anyone else use it. He claimed he needed a phone kept free to reach the station and to be reached, and that the regular phone was in use eighteen hours a day.
“Leigh Pfeiffer speaking” his voice came through.
She felt an enormous relief. Now let him catch on for once. “Leigh, this is your old Greek friend. Vasos’ ex-wife.”
“What?” But he recognized her. “What’s up around here, anyhow?”
“Never mind. When did Lohania and Randy leave?”
”They haven’t—”
“Great. We can warn them. Why haven’t they left, do you know?”
“They’re waiting for you to come back.”
“Waiting for us to come back? Why?”
“Didn’t you call a while ago and say for them to wait for you? What’s going on around here? What’s all the mystery?”
“Who answered the phone when I am supposed to have called?”
“Randy. He said it was you. The other phone”
“Leigh, something’s rotten. I can’t explain. Lohania will, afterward. Get Lohania, but don’t say in front of Randy that I’m on your phone. Just get her into your room.”
“Sure. Hey, someone’s at the door. I’ll get her”
She waited and waited. Vaguely she could hear occasional dim sounds, but nothing she could identify. She waited and waited. “Deposit ten cents for the next five minutes” the operator said, and she did and waited. Nothing. Why couldn’t he get Lohania in there? Then she thought they might be tracing her call, and sweat broke out on her hands as she gripped the receiver, straining to hear. Why didn’t he come back? Five minutes and more had passed. Then she heard voices. Not Lohania. Men yelling. She could not make out any words. Then she heard a voice close to the phone say, “Hey, Sergeant, this phone’s off the hook.” She quietly replaced the receiver and backed away from the phone.
When she turned at first she did not see Kevin or Jimmy and went faint with panic. Her sight was riddled with black spots as she forced herself to breathe slowly, not to hyperventilate. They had walked toward the entrance and stood watching her. Kevin was drinking coffee from a vendor.
How did she walk towar
d them? How did she keep from running? “Let’s get out of here. East. Keep walking. They busted the apartment” She took Kevin’s arm and Jimmy’s arm for comfort, but then let go. Their strides were too dissimilar; Jimmy stepped twice to Kevin’s once. “Listen, Randy told Lohania it was off. To sit tight. That we were on our way back. He told everybody I called and said it was off. Then while I was talking to Leigh, somebody came to the door. Cops. I’m telling you, I’m sure they were raided.”
“How could Dolpho think it was you?”
“Either they imitated my voice. Or he’s an agent”
“Dolpho an agent? I might as well suspect you. Or me. It was his idea. If we ever had a hothead, it’s Dolpho”
“Kevin, we can’t go on with the plan. They have the communiqués. They know where we’re going. They know what kind of action this is and the target. They know how we’re dressed.”
“What do you want to do? Turn ourselves in? Fuck that.” Kevin walked even faster. The shiny new briefcase banged against his hard calf muscle, bulging through the thin material of his pants.
“We can’t just quit” Jimmy said. “If Randy is an agent … If they grabbed the communiqués, they have us for conspiracy.”
“We might as well bomb something,” Kevin said reasonably, changing arms with the briefcase. Now it hung between Vida and him. “What else can we do with this Tinker Toy? Unless it’s set to go off and get us”
“I set it” Jimmy said. “I’ll vouch for it”
“Man, your life depends on it” Kevin laughed, a barking sound. “So what the fuck do we do with this live one?”
“We had other targets. Let’s hit one,” Jimmy said.
“No” she said. “If they know about Rockefeller and Whitehall they know the others.”