by Marge Piercy
“Why should you go work on some stupid paper you don’t care about?” Joel pursued his argument at the wheel. “Let them do it themselves”
“We’re bound by collective decisions.”
“What’s the use of the collective? You thought there was going to be a revolution. Too bad for you. Now you’re stuck out here—”
“Well, so are you,” she snapped, clutching herself. What did he know? He was just a kid, with no political perspective, no viable analysis, no long-term strategy. Just an impulsive kid who had been buffeted by moral qualms into bolting and running, and now he was stuck, as he put it.
“But we’re stuck together now!’ He beamed. “How’s that for a pun?”
He was light and she was serious about the discussion, a discrepancy that annoyed her. How could he imagine that telling her to sit out a decision of the Network was a joking matter? “I can’t just negate a decision.”
“What do you need them for, anyhow? I’m serious. It’s passé. You’re not doing anything that means shit to people.”
“Then we have to survive until things are moving again. In any revolutionary struggle, there are off periods, defeats, times of apparent inaction”
“Then why not sit it out for a while? We could pick some safe space. Some little town with a lot of ex-hippies. In Northern California. In Colorado. Oregon. Or back in Vermont. We could just settle. Find a house with some land. We could rent a house cheap and put in a garden. I could get an off-books job and so could you. Then you could think about politics and write your paper. But we’d be living like human beings for a change.”
She was astonished at the wave of, was it nostalgia that came over her? A couple in a little house with a view. Fruit trees, a garden, she could elaborate it endlessly, opening at once before her like a hobby, a piece of knitting, a daydream that could be carried on for months and even years: Add bees, slowly, add a couple of hives. A strawberry bed. A couple of simple chairs and a rough table out back. An asparagus bed. Dig it deep and shovel in aged manure. Mulch it well with dead leaves. Simple possessions from the secondhand store selected because they liked them. A country bureau, hefty but simple, with white shelf paper in the bottom of the drawers. Shelves put up for books they would accumulate.
“Why not?” he asked softly, turning to glance at her face.
“Because I didn’t go underground to hide, only. If I live in a little house with you and the two of us keep our noses clean and raise bees—”
“Oh, you want bees, my honey.” He was grinning.
“—then they’ve won, you see? They’ve forced us out politically. Made us innocuous. Taken us out of action”
“No, Vida. If we survive, we’ve won!”
“Survival is not enough!”
“Even together? That’s not enough?”
“It can’t be. We can’t let it be. We can’t settle”
He reached over in the dark to put his hand on her belly. “We’ll see about that.”
In the long November twilight of the late fall, the land was beautiful. Snow flowed over the hills, white under the blue-black sky. Around ten they slept at the side of the road for two hours. Then the car refused to start and once again Joel got it started finally. At the only all-night gas station they passed, he stopped and got the battery charged up, but it should not be running down in highway driving. “It could be the voltage regulator or it could be a dead cell in the battery,” he mumbled. “It’s not charging right” Fatigue burned behind her eyes, fatigue pushed on the thin membranes of her brain, fatigue sat in her stomach like an ill-digested meal; yet she could also enjoy the lightness it gave. It reminded her of an earlier life when she was always too busy. Fatigue was a drug she had used to be addicted to that rang on her nerves familiarly.
All night one or the other reached out in a passing caress. Constantly she wanted to make love, but they could not. It was too cold to simply pull off the road and go into a field or even to remain in the car with the engine off, and would it start again? They were nervous at the idea of pulling over and letting the engine run. “Lovers found dead of carbon monoxide,” Joel intoned. Whenever they saw a patrol car in the rearview mirror, whenever they saw a police car approaching, whenever they passed the state troopers parked on the margin of the highway, they fell silent and watched. They drove cautiously, crawling along. The car had a hole where a radio had once been. When they got tired of talking, they sang.
She remembered childhood trips. Vacations had freed Ruby and Tom from the press of daily quarrels and troubles and let them enjoy each other. Tom was never in as good a mood as when he was at the wheel of a big old American car like this sailing down a highway with all the windows down and Ruby rattling the maps in the front seat and Paul in back with her eating, nervously cramming into his mouth some kind of candy. In childhood Paul had been overweight. Of course, he was big-boned too, like his father, and when he hit sixteen he shot up and filled out. But earlier Paul was fat and pimpled, and if he was not eating malted-milk balls or Good & Plenty or Raisinets or peanuts, he was chewing gum. She had grown up without a sweet tooth because the sight of Paul endlessly chewing and sucking on candy had spoiled sugar for her. She loved her brother, but she didn’t want to be like him.
From a fairly early age she had been convinced she was the only one in her family with any hard sense, any intellect to spare. Tom ricocheted from catastrophe to disaster. His temper got him fired; his impulsiveness kept him in debt. Ruby had more practical sense day to day. She could be trusted to budget the available cash and put supper on the table; but she had no long-run strategy for getting them out of trouble. Vida was her mother’s conspirator. Paul was always in hot water with his father and often with school as well. When she was furious, she told herself she did not belong to them. She was a foundling. Her real mother was a lady doctor like the one who came to school and tested their tonsils and their hearing. Her real father was a war hero who had gone on to be something great like a movie actor or a politician.
As she drove with Joel snoring beside her across the snow-encrusted fields under the rising moon, its light coming over her shoulder like mild headlights from behind, she mused on her mother. Never had she really been able to persuade herself she was not Ruby’s daughter, not for long. She had her father’s red hair but her mother’s body: a good one for both of them, trim but lush at the same time. Why was it letting Ruby down now? Ruby the romantic, ran off with a tall red-haired stranger with whom she had nothing in common but intense sexual attraction and a hot temper and a working-class background.
Ruby had fallen in love other times; Vida had always known. Ruby couldn’t keep anything from her. While Tom was off in the Army of Occupation in Japan, Ruby had fallen in love with her foreman at the shipyards, Gene Cornutti, but had resisted. They went bowling with chums from the yard, they had a few drinks and made eyes at each other and once they necked in the car. Ruby was being faithful. Then she got laid off, with the other women. Gene got married. That was that.
Then in Chicago Ruby fell in love with the man behind the counter at the drugstore. Sanford Asch. A nice widower with two daughters. Jewish, doesn’t drink except for a little wine with dinner, a good man and steady and what heart he has. Vida had known every step of the way what was happening, even what Ruby did not tell herself. Ruby fabricated excuses—and stories to make it look good to herself. Vida felt as if she was slipping and sliding in the mud, but she kept her mama’s secret and she abetted her. She chose her mama. Her mother wanted what was good for her and Paul, and her dad didn’t. She knew that. He could win her, he could turn the house upside down with his fury, he could turn the house right side up with his good humor coming in with a turkey he had won, coming in with a half gallon of maple-nut ice cream, coming in with a bottle of Four Roses somebody had given him for a favor he’d done and a bouquet of yellow roses picked down the street. She chose her mama, and Ruby became Ruby Asch and she became Vida Asch. Natalie chose her. Natalie had been trap
ped playing little mother. She was tired of being so very good. She wanted to run off with Vida and play.
Actually, their mutual wickedness got its real kickoff when they were both fifteen and Ruby had a baby. At her age! Sharon, Natalie’s baby sister, was nuisance enough at ten, but Michael Morris Asch, called M and M by them, was too much to endure. To be expected to baby-sit for a screaming baby, to have their house turned into a large playpen and that little monster spoiled silly sent them into revolt. They cemented their own lifelong conspiracy as they fought their wars of independence side by side.
Sandy was a good-hearted liberal Democrat, against machine politics, for civil rights, devoted to Adlai Stevenson. At age sixteen, studious Natalie had already moved to his left, where Vida followed her. They collected clothes and canned food door to door for the voter-registration drive in Mississippi, where sharecroppers were being starved into submission. Mounds of bagged clothing took over the entry hall of their house. They were nonviolent but militant, and their heroes had been beaten, jailed and maimed in Alabama and Mississippi. They went to rallies with the air of prayer meetings where men on crutches and women with arms in casts told of events on that battlefield and planned local wade-ins, swim-ins, to desegregate parks, pools and beaches in Chicago. They picketed Woolworth’s on Saturday mornings. That was their rebellion against Sandy and Ruby, who kept asking, But what are you doing outside Woolworth’s in the rain? They marched, Vida flirted and Natalie argued with the boys in the picket line and they began to live in a wide world, they began to live in history.
I can’t make a romantic folly out of Joel, she said to herself, staring at the road, the walls of darkness to each side slipping under the car. This is my life, what I have made of it. I can’t give it up for anyone. My integrity is to go on.
Joel moaned in his sleep. His snoring stopped as he drifted up from true sleep into dreaming. His fingers convulsed in his lap. Once his whole body shuddered. Headlights behind her maintained a distance but were persistent. The same car had been behind her for close to twenty minutes. She slowed down more and more and put on her turn signal, waiting. The car hung back for a while. Then it speeded up and passed her. She remained at her slow pace until it had gone far ahead. Okay.
Why wasn’t she angry at Joel for trying to deflect her? For trying to get her to settle for survival? When he suggested flouting the will of the collective, she was angered because scared. What had they but their frail organization, thrust from a common history and built if at times jerry-built of a common politics? However, when he suggested the two of them chose going to ground together, she was flattered. It was a temptation to be resisted, but one whose very existence she appreciated. After all, Leigh had never suggested he give up his job, sneak out of New York and meet her in Dubuque, Iowa, to set up a new life together … He hadn’t, had he? Well, he had his political duties too. He was more serious than Joel, less serious about her, perhaps. She could not help being struck by that observation and wounded by it. Perhaps Leigh had never thought of the possibility. Either people imagined the fugitive life as romantic—robbing banks, meeting with vanished celebrities, escaping ahead of the posse with a pistol in your teeth; or they imagined that you must be hidden in a room literally underground (like Laura’s Newton cellar), confined to a safe cell or spirited out of the country. Few people could imagine the limited options that existed, but the fact remained that there were always options and daily problems of something to eat, something to wear, someplace to sleep, somebody to talk to, somebody to sleep with, work to do and rest to seize.
But Leigh had lived with her in Philadelphia, going back and forth each week. It had been as it was when they were first together: he had the interesting life, she worked as a secretary and he brought news of the world to her. His being in what he called Filth-a-delia was a mixture of sacrifice and retreat. If he had wanted to be with her again, why had he never brought it up, at least as a daydream?
With a muffled grunt Joel sat up. “My back hurts, “ he grumbled.
“Let’s stop at the next coffee shop that’s open. We can stretch our legs, one at a time to keep the car running.”
“Where are we?”
“Just passing our old hometown. Erie, Pennsylvania. I have some bad news to report: you’ve been fired from your siding business. Absenteeism”
“Good. Now I’m an ex-siding man for sure . . “ He yawned. “Want me to drive?”
“After we stop. Watch for a place: Something has to be open”
“Oh, for a bed. A nice big bed with clean sheets and some blankets. We’d hold each other and cuddle. In the morning we’d make love”
“To be with you makes me glad. Do you know that?”
“Why not? Am I not the greatest lover in Erie, Pennsylvania? And all points east and west and in between? At least, that’s the line you hand me. I’m beginning to believe it. All these houses of sleeping women, women lying awake beside fat and snoring husbands, they don’t know what they’re missing as we go by.”
“You were snoring a while ago yourself … “
“Hey, watch it. What’s wrong?” he shouted.
“I don’t know.” She gripped the steering wheel tightly, bringing the car slowly over to the side of the road. “It’s a tire. We got a flat”
They did. The right front tire was utterly flat. She had pulled off onto the gravel shoulder, where ice stood in the ruts.
“Damn bolts seemed to be rusted on,” Joel said, trying to turn them.
“I thought the tires were supposed to be new?”
“Pretty new. Probably picked up a nail.” She looked at the worn tread and hoped they did not encounter weather of the kind that had hit them when they’d had Tara. With a yell he finally got the bolt loosened.
After the tire was changed, his hands were too cold to drive. On they went toward Ohio, the waxing moon bright on the ice-glazed snow, the pale ribbons of highway. She felt as if she could drive forever under the moon. Fatigue was burning in her veins like Benzedrine. They were two ghosts in a private afterlife driving on. Her eyes felt full of ashes.
You are my sunshine
My only sunshine
they both belted at the top of their lungs. Joel had a fine deep singing voice, much deeper than his speaking voice. She sang in a wobbly contralto that sometimes came upon the melody and draped itself there in relief and sometimes wandered away lost, but remembering, always remembering the words. She was always the one who sang the words to the third stanza when everybody else gave out after one and a half. What a waste of brain cells.
As I walked out on the streets of Laredo
As I walked out In Laredo one day,
they warbled, more or less together. Coffee soon, by the light of the brillig moon.
Una mañana del sol radiante
Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
Una mañana del sol radiante
Saldré a buscar al opresor.
He didn’t know the words to that or the other Spanish-language songs. “How come you know them?”
“Because of Lohania. She coached me in Spanish. We planned to go to Cuba together on a Venceremos Brigade in the spring, the next spring.” She rubbed her nose which had begun to itch. “She didn’t get to go either. I was under, she was waiting to go on trial … Lohania wanted to go to Cuba so bad, but she was scared silly they wouldn’t let her in because of her parents. We were still waiting to hear when the ceiling fell in.”
“But she’s out now? Do you want to go see her sometime?”
“She started using drugs inside, and I don’t know if she ever got clean. With a drug bust hanging over her, she’s too vulnerable. That’s how they recruited Randy. They sure got their money’s worth. He had real talent. And they expunged his record, too.”
“You talk about him awful cheerfully”‘
“We shouldn’t have let him penetrate us. We were too stupid and too naive. God, how he hated us! Except for Lohania. He got her a deal, I think. He w
anted her.”
“Did he get her?”
She bit her lip. “I hope not.” The past was pressing too hard. “Look at the moonlight on the fields. Isn’t it beautiful? Maybe nobody loves this country as much as fugitives running before the wind, back and forth across it.” Moonlight on ice. Kevin was driving the stolen car, she was riding shotgun, Jimmy called out instructions from the back seat. That was the first year; they had no rules for survival. They drove across Pennsylvania to the town, the street, the house. Ice in the driveway. Jimmy fell. Then a flashlight caught them in its beam and they halted, feeling the bullets they anticipated. “A fucking trap!” Kevin grunted, and Kiley’s cool voice came out of the dark: “Well, it might have been, with you lunkheads barging in without even scouting. Really!” On the moonlit ice they had met and embraced; Vida had wept tears of joy. No more alone. Lark’s frail body in her arms, the chiseled miniature features of Kiley. Roger, tall and shuffling, carrying a rifle was the only stranger to Vida, though she knew him by reputation from his work in the antiwar movement in Seattle. Jimmy like Vida, knew Lark from New York SAW and Kiley from Boston SAW, but Kevin knew only Lark. They had founded the Network that night. Joel could not understand her loyalty to the structure that had kept her from utter despair and given her an organization. She said to him, “Nobody knows this country like those who hide in its folds and crevices. Our land. Our country. That’s what the screeching paper won’t say.”
Joel grimaced. “Sure. Let’s have a parade. First float, man branding a runaway slave. Second float, soldier bayoneting an Indian baby. Third float, Pinkerton shooting a striker. Fourth float, flyboy dropping napalm on pregnant woman.”
She tapped his knee. “There’s something in what you say, Mr. Bones. But it also produced us. This country is a long war. It’s our history too. Tecumseh and Mother Jones and Ida Tarbell. You must love who you are to love anybody else and to make good politics. Natalie always understood that. It took me a long time to see it.”