by Marge Piercy
“Alice knows what she wants: to have that baby,” Kevin said.
“I didn’t actually think so” Vida said mildly, aping Lark’s approach because it seemed to work better than her own of bluntly screaming at Kevin.
“Me, I’m the father” Bill said. “You got to talk to me”
“If you’re the father, I’ll talk to you. About contraception,” Lark went on without raising his voice. “Do you think a woman who may go to prison at any moment has a right to bear a child? Do you realize what it’s like giving birth in prison? Did you pay any attention to what they did to Erica Huggins? Giving birth in chains.? And then what? You want ‘our’ child raised by an orphanage? Adopted by rich jerks?”
“What kind of cowards and defeatist creeps are we to live thinking they’re going to catch us?” Kevin wiped his mouth, sneering.
“Where other lives are concerned, we have to assume that. As was decided in council. Who are you to set yourself up to change rules on impulse?” Eva cried, her voice hard. “You think rules are for us, but not for you”
Jimmy looked in mute appeal to Kevin, who stomped into the living room. She could almost feel Jimmy crushing his doubts as he followed. Lark went up to talk to Alice, who cried in his arms awkwardly, because she was a long and lanky woman four inches taller than frail Lark, complaining about the long winter and Bill and feeling politically lost and useless and pushed around, caught between the two factions that had polarized in the house. Kevin, Bill, Belinda, Jimmy and Tequila sat around the busted TV drinking local moonshine, a form of vodka from potatoes distilled in the next township by some freak ex-chemists who were doing a roaring business. She went upstairs and locked herself in, going quietly past the room where Alice lay weeping in Lark’s arms.
She looked around at the room she had labored to fix up and she wanted to scream, to shut her eyes hard and wake back in her own room in New York: her room where as far as she knew her clothes, her jewelry, her books and art objects were still stored. She wanted to return to her life. Enough of this already, enough! She was weary of it. She wanted to give up. She wanted to cry and collapse and give up and go home. She wanted to be Vida Asch again. She missed everyone she really loved. Oh, she’d take Eva with her, the one close friend she’d made underground.
Despair crushed her until she lay on her stomach and wept and wept until her eyes were swollen and the quilt soaked and her head ached and she could not breathe except through gasping mouth. Then she lay panting, and still she was trapped in that cold room she had painted white, not understanding how much white she would see in Vermont in the long winter, that room with old-fashioned sheer white curtains and white shades. The wedding-ring quilt she had found in the attic—worn and washed out, with some patches tearing loose—every month or so she took a needle to repair. On the walls were paintings, acrylic on paper, Eva had made during last winter and this one: views of another world. They showed a blazing cobalt-and-gold landscape where women walked in threes and fours with small children and sturdy animals. Fountains, stone arches, mountains, but not these beautiful low green mountains. Red stone. Volcanic rock. Eva’s painting had gotten much better in the last year. The earliest paintings Vida had put up because they broke the agony of the too-white walls and because Eva was her best friend here. Of course, Eva should have been working on her music; she had been a serious musician until she had been set up by an agent in a bust on the G.I. coffeehouse where she played and sang. But what can a serious musician do as a fugitive?
The drawing had got better, as had the use of color. All around Vida’s room the box-sized paintings marched (nothing too big to be moved fast), windows on someplace else. Lately Eva had been painting a series called “We’ll Go to California” 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Eva came from the West Coast. Eva was saying, We’ll leave this loud house and go to California together. Imagine, the paintings sang, a tree full of oranges like miniature suns, a sea the color of a blue jay, palm-tree lollipops.
Vida recognized in herself no California dreams, but she was at a dead end. What point was there living in this broken-down farmhouse chopping up cabbages and banging heads with Kevin, as if the puttering and maintenance and bickering were political acts? She had to get out of here, and without Kevin. What she had seen in him was a bad joke. She did not know whether he had changed or whether she had or whether she merely saw more clearly. Perhaps fugitive life had brought out the worst in Kevin. She knew she could have marched back and forth across his fresh grave with no other emotion than relief and a lingering hostility.
Why could she not persuade Lark to argue in the Board that for two of the leadership to occupy one isolated house was absurd and she would be ten times as useful anywhere else? That would be her humble approach: send me where I’m needed. Let me organize an action in Toledo, in Houston, in San Diego. Let us open a new front. But save me from rotting in this house in a rotting bond with someone I have grown to loathe. On the trip to New York she would work on Lark. He was stationed in Buffalo now.
She felt exhausted with weeping but too lethargic to do more than undress and creep under the covers. The sheets were so cold they felt wet. What she ought to do was get up and put on that ugly flannel nightgown from the Thrift Shop, but she sprawled flipped on her back like something fallen, unable to sleep, unwilling to get up. She had run out of willpower. She wanted someone to call her Vida; she wanted someone to hold her and love her and coddle her; she wanted to be herself again! Voices rose through the floorboards, harsh laughter that jarred her as if it had been twice as loud. Anyone else’s voices would not have scraped her raw.
Yet she must have dozed, because she woke when someone banged on her door. “What is it?” She hopped up instantly, stepping into her pants. Rammed her feet into boots without bothering with socks.
“Damn cunt! Open up.” Kevin was hitting the door with his fists.
Bastard. She had thought it was an emergency, a raid, but it was just nincompoop Kevin pounding her door as if he wanted to break in. “Lay off the door! I’m asleep!” she yelled.
“Open up, you hear me? Come on, cunt, open up!”
She pulled off her pants and boots and put on the flannel nightgown to climb back into bed. Warm this time.
“Go to bed, you shithead. I’m asleep. I’m not opening the door”
“Damn you, open it!” He gave it a terrifying whack and the door shuddered but did not break. She heard him cursing and hoped he had broken his hand. Probably he was kicking it; the worst he would get was a sore toe. She could hear Marti’s voice saying. “ Cool it, Jesse. You’re scaring the kids!” The baby Dylan and Tamara and Roz were crying down the corridor.
“All right, I’m coming in” he bellowed. The blade of his hunting knife thrust into a crack in the old jamb and forced the bolt of the lock inside. In the drawer of the old nightstand by her bed she had a knife too. She reached for it and sat up, switching on the reading lamp clamped to the headboard.
“This is my—my room!” She sputtered with anger. “I don’t want you in it! I never want you in it! I locked the door to keep you out!”
He slammed the door back against the wall to the trickle of falling plaster.
“I’m coming in. We’re getting things straightened out, Davey. You’re mine and you’re going to start acting like it.”
“You don’t own me. Get the hell out!” She felt too exposed in the bed and leaped out on the far side, flashing the knife. “Get out!”
“You think you know how to knife-fight, little punk?”
“I think I can cut you some.”
He stood laughing, but he was not amused. He was scraped raw with desperation. “My reach is a foot longer. You need a lesson who’s who around here.”
There were no guns in the living section of the house; she had been responsible for that. She had argued at length against storing guns around the living quarters, but her real reason had been that she thought Kevin with a gun would shoot her. But she had not anticipated that a gun would make
them physically equal, as a knife didn’t.
“Stop it!” Lark stood in the doorway zipping his pants. “Nobody gave you the right to threaten one of us”
”Keep out of this. This is between my girl and me”
“I’m not your ‘girl,’” Vida shouted. “I don’t want you!”
“The fuck you don’t!”
“Get out of her room! You can settle arguments between you with mediation. Things are going to pot here. We mean to intervene, and we’re going to get everything straightened out even if we have to break up this house to do it. “ He walked by Kevin, calmly.
“Let her alone,” Eva sang out. She blocked the doorway with an ax in her good hand.
Jimmy stood in the hallway blinking with sleep in his rumpled pajamas. Vida saw him as a child. Yes, she had played Mama and Kevin had played Daddy and he had made of them his family. The trauma in seeing them fight so viciously paralyzed him. He could only stand blinking, his hands clasped behind him as if tied.
“Who the fuck are you to tell me how to treat her?” Kevin said Lark, ignoring Eva, but he was watching the ax out of the corner of his eye. “She’s mine. You’d like to get your hands on her, wouldn’t you?”
“I won’t try it with a big jackknife, you better believe that” Lark walked over to her, still crouched by the bed with the knife hanging loosely in her hand, feeling ridiculous. “Are you all right?”
“My dignity’s bleeding. I don’t like scenes. I don’t like my door forced. And he’d better believe, I won’t be forced either. I’ll kill him”
“We aren’t in this to kill each other. You cool it too, Perry.”
She wanted to cry. Did he expect her to take it calmly? Reprimand Kevin mildly as he raped her? Eva pushed in past Kevin and knelt by Vida, still holding the ax. Marti crowded into the room too and for once took Vida’s side. “The kids are bawling. They’re terrified. What kind of shit is this? Jesse, don’t you wave that knife around here. I’ve told you not to bring sharp knives into the house and leave them around where the kids can hurt themselves. I cleaned and washed all day, and I’m bonetired. I won’t put up with this!”
Jimmy had not spoken a word. Silently he followed Kevin. Kevin retreated in a sulk to his room. Slowly the others dispersed. Vida spent the night in Eva’s room with the door locked and a chair wedged under the knob. In the morning she did not even see Kevin as she packed her knapsack to leave early with Lark.
“What’s our business in New York?” She was driving. With his artificial leg Larkin could drive, but it tired him. He would spell her one hour in four. Off to New York! That was her secret mecca, not Eva’s luscious sunbaked orange-grove California dreams. The fugitives had learned how dangerous New York could be; yet it remained The City to her, pulsating source of energy.
“You want a mediator to negotiate between you two?” Lark asked.
“I can’t stay in the same house with him. It wastes everybody. “
“Politically you don’t seem a compatible team any longer” he said tentatively. “But you’ve always worked together.”
“I’ve worked with a lot of people,” she said. “I used to work with Jimmy. I work well with Eva. You and I work well together.” Would he suggest she leave the Board to avoid fights with Kevin?
“Yes, that’s what I think” he said. “But you will admit things have been stagnating.”
“Absolutely,” she agreed fervently. “We’re holding each other back politically.”
“I have to fund-raise in the city,” he said. “And I wanted us to have time to discuss program for the coming year. Besides, I can’t drive alone to fetch Kiley.”
Leigh! She must see Leigh. She felt as if she had just been offered a vacation in the paradise of her choice. Three months had passed since their last meeting, and while things had been much improved between in the past year, she could only hope he wanted to see her as much as she wanted to see him.
“First we’ll have to drive into Manhattan while I see Dr. Manolli,” Lark said. “You wait. Then take me up to Co-op City. We have a shelter there … You want to see the doc?” Lark needed help from the doctor, and besides, he had all the fugitives’ problems to relate and prescriptions to collect.
“I’m fine! I’m wonderful … So you think it would be good if I left Hardscrabble?”
“What do you think of Eva?”
“Eva? I love her. She’s very just, Lark, sweet tempered day to day. But she’s not afraid to take action or stand up to anyone.”
“I’ve been quite impressed with her politically” he said gravely, cracking his gaunt knuckles. “You know, at first I think some of us looked down on her because she was framed. Most of us acted, as you did, or chose to come under because of our analysis. But Eva got pushed”
She wondered if she should say she thought some of them looked down on Eva because she was a lesbian; but she decided not to cross words with Lark. He was unprejudiced toward gay people as far as she could tell and opposed to taking political positions on gay rights at the same time, because he was always terrified of offending the Cubans, the Chinese, the Albanians. “Eva’s tremendously hardworking. And she’s bright. She reads everything.”
“She seems serious” he said. That was one of his key words—she remembered that. Why was he asking questions about Eva? “Maybe we didn’t respect her so much politically because she came in late, and because she’s a musician. You don’t think of musicians as cadre”
“But Eva’s really cadre,” she said nervously.
“I think so.” He nodded. “She must take a greater role.”
In what? Kevin and Eva were bitter enemies, and she had not helped them get along together, always running to Eva with complaints. At ten she stopped to call Natalie and set up a meeting for the next morning when all Natalie’s kids would be in school or day care. Obviously she would have the car, so she chose the Bronx Botanical Gardens and asked Natalie to contact Leigh and arrange a rendezvous out of Manhattan with him. Maybe a motel on the Island or near LaGuardia.
After the call she was flying. Feeling no fatigue, she drove on past the scheduled shift change. She was soaring, grateful to Lark, solicitous of his comfort. At the same time, she recognized that if he had been warmer to her the night before, more consoling, she might have ended up in his bed instead of chastely in Eva’s. Now she was glad she hadn’t. Really, Lark would be a tremendous improvement on Kevin, and she could feel his interest as a hum of suggestion between them. She wasn’t the best fund raiser in the group and knew few contacts to scatter big bucks on them. No, Lark had his reasons, both political and personal, which she would decipher with time.
February in New York felt almost tropical. She and Lark visited Dr. Manolli in Washington Heights. Then she dropped Lark in Co-op City, towers on reclaimed garbage, where they were to make their headquarters for the next couple of days. She parked near the Mosholu Parkway gate to the Botanical Garden. No snow lay on the ground except for granite-hard patches of ice beside the paths. Her feet touched pavement and bounced, springy. The temperature was a balmy 37 degrees, with a wan sun trying to burn its way through a yellowish haze.
At once she picked out Natalie’s old green VW bug. Natalie was sitting inside, reading a book of whose title Vida, leaning against the glass, could see only WOMEN, which made her smile. What else would Natalie be reading about but WOMEN? Women in World War II. Women in the Work Force. Women of Ethiopia. Women of Sixteenth-Century England. Women in the Construction Trades. Women Writers of Provence. Women Healers of the Upper Volta. Women in the French Commune. Natalie’s hunger was vast. She tapped on the glass. Natalie but down the book and hopped out to embrace her.
“Natalie!” Vida hugged her and then frowned. “Where are you?” Natalie felt slight like Lark.
“Great, huh? I weigh 115 exactly. I haven’t weighed this little since high school” Natalie unzipped her down jacket to show off. She was wearing a maroon warm-up suit striped along the side.
“But …
you’re awfully thin.”
Natalie beamed. “Peezie wanted to learn karate. We’ve been going.”
“Isn’t she awfully young?”
“Six, and strong-minded. Er, what do I call you?”
“Peregrine at the moment. Stick to that.”
“My sister, the falcon. Endangered species. It’s fun galloping around the gym at the junior high Monday and Wednesday nights. Really, it all started because I confronted Daniel. I said, Okay, you just broke up with your girlfriend. What would it take to get you to pay that kind of attention to me? He said, Lose weight.”
“He’s stupid. If I was a man, I’d like fleshy women”
Natalie squeezed her shoulder. “I don’t notice he’s any more interested, but my instructor’s an angel. Speaking of husbands” She rummaged in her shoulder bag. “I guess you read this and then eat it or it self-destructs, right? Honeymoon in Queens for you!”
“Oh, Natty, when?” She grabbed the paper to read off the motel. “Did he seem glad to hear from me?”
“Glad is no word for it. He got so excited he dropped a coffee cup all over my shoes.”
“Really? He wants to see me?” She hugged Natalie. “Let’s walk. It’s so gorgeous here.”
“Gorgeous?” Natalie looked around puzzled. “Tonight. At seven. He’s coming straight from work.”
“How can I wait that long? I’m sorry. Of course I can wait. I’m just as happy to see you, really and truly.”
“How’re you doing in your life? You look a little tired.”
“I’ve given up on Kevin. How could I have ever have loved that bag of wind?” They passed the white metal-and-glass conservatory.
Natalie nodded toward the building. “Want to go in?”
“No, let’s stay outside. It’s so springlike.”
”Springlike?” Natalie shook the curly hair out of her eyes. “Kevin isn’t only wind. He’s a man of action and you were into action, shvesterlein. You were the action-faction. Kevin’s a street fighter. Like falling in love with a police dog, but then, I don’t see much in most men besides privilege and arrogance, or privilege and self-pity.”