by Marge Piercy
She got up before Eva, who like Joel was slow to rouse in the mornings. Eva woke in stages, the alarm set and ringing, the alarm reset, the alarm ringing again, the underwear half on and the body prone on the bed again with the long braids hanging off the edges swinging slowly like a pendulum. Joel was already at the table reading a morning paper that Roger, who had stood the night shift with Lark, had brought in. Lark was still with him—unusual, as they did not often hang together—and everybody seemed subdued. They had begun scouting the utility office.
”Good morning” she said heartily. “We’re off to New York to bring back a barrel of money”
“In tens and twenties,” Lark said automatically. “Make sure they’re not sequential. Look at the newspaper.”
“They’ve caught somebody?”
“Alice and Bill got sentenced.”
She guessed, “Seven years? Ten?”
Joel handed her the paper and everyone watched her read. At first she could scarcely concentrate with those staring faces hanging there glum and watchful. The story was datelined from Los Angeles.
Two anti-war activists who spent the last six years fleeing charges stemming from a draft board demonstration were sentenced in Federal Court here yesterday.
Jean Diamond and Arthur Edward Baker, members of the self-styled Popcorn Conspiracy that attacked draft boards in Los Angeles in 1971 and 1972 turned themselves in at the office of the District Attorney on November 28. Diamond and Baker were arraigned yesterday in Federal District Court. They pleaded guilty to charges of creating a nuisance and obstructing governmental business and were given sentences of six and eight months to run concurrently.
Miss Diamond, a 30-year-old blonde who has been living in Los Angeles under the name of Alice Cork says that she and Baker plan to be married after they have served their sentences. She gave wanting a family as the major reason for their joint decision to end their six-year flight from justice.
Baker, 29, is a native of Austin. Texas. He hopes to return to social work school.
“Six and eight months to run concurrently” She put the paper down quickly, as if it had grown weighty. “They’ll be out by the summer … I don’t believe it. What does it mean?”
“Trying to drive a wedge in.” Roger banged his pipe in the saucer that served him as ashtray. “Separate those of us who don’t face heavy time. They’re giving extra-light sentences to the smaller fish to isolate us”
Joel raised an eyebrow but said nothing. He was mostly not looking at her this morning, which worried her. Was he thinking of turning himself in? Or did he think she thought he was thinking that?
“It’s bait, I agree. It makes me nervous” she said, clutching her forearms. What kind of sentence was hanging over Eva? She tried to remember.
”Of course, they’d send you and me up for life and throw away the key,” Roger said. “They get us on so many heavy federal raps we’d never see daylight.”
“Of course” She poured herself black coffee. “Well, on to social work school for Bill … I guess we should call him Arthur now. I never knew him as Arthur.”
“Art, he was. I thought I knew him” Roger shook his head. “Who’d have expected him to lose his nerve?”
24
As they drove the old car to New York, she could feel Joel brooding. Was he envying Alice and Bill? She cast about for a way to bring up the subject without seeming to mistrust him. At last he muttered, “So you did spend the night with her?”
“Of course. We agreed.”
“I only suggested it. I mean, if you really wanted to be with her instead of me. You didn’t have to. You can’t say I pushed you.”
That was what he was troubled about. She felt a rush of relief capped with annoyance. “So it was a trap—a cunning trap!”
“What do you mean, a trap? You’re too subtle for me—”
“Bullshit. You manipulate rings around me, Joel.”
“You wanted to be with her and you were. Did you make love?”
She would not admit they hadn’t. She had to keep the space with Eva she had won from him. “What do you think we did?”
“I wondered … Did you enjoy it?”
“Stop it! Stop it or I’ll jump out of the car! I mean it!”
“Sure, and go running back to her. Don’t let me get in the way.”
“How can you act this way? You said you were struggling to overcome your possessiveness. You think jealousy is real—you value it. It doesn’t mean you love me. The me you’re supposed to love has a long-standing relationship with Eva.”
“You want me to pretend I don’t feel what I feel!”
“If you feel in a stupid way, I want you to fight it. Jealousy is a cozy pain for you—just too damn comfortable!”
“It’s not so comfortable! I was hurt.” But his voice was by now more playing at self-pity than embodying it. “Why did you stay the night with her? Why didn’t you do whatever you do and then come to me? I couldn’t sleep.”
“Sweetheart, we were talking. We had a lot of catching up.”
“Did you sleep?”
“Some. I woke and missed you and lay awake a long time.”
”But if you woke, you were sleeping. I didn’t sleep at all … What’ll we do about lunch?”
“I packed it—hard-boiled eggs, cheese sandwiches on whole wheat, pickles, Winesaps and a jug of Agnes’ cider, a little hard”
“And the thermos—did you fill it with coffee?”
“Oh, Joel, I’m sorry. I forgot. I left it there”
“Ha. Look in the back seat. I remembered. I made a whole pot and poured it in.”
“Then let’s have some. Want me to drive for a while?” They were at ease again.
They had their second flat tire on the Hutchinson River Parkway. While Joel was changing it, she called Oscar. He offered to call her back and two minutes later did, at the pay phone where she was huddled. She meant to talk him into calling Chicago for her under some pretext and getting word of Ruby. But Oscar had his own news. “Yes, deario, I’m off to the hustings to deliver blows for the good lavender cause,” he said in his nonchalant way. “We’re launching our annual assault on the piggy City Council. But Natalie is out of the can and drooling to behold you. I have a number you’re supposed to call … By the way, squirt, did Natalie have a big romance with a karate instructor, a Nisei woman, a few years ago?”
“Yeah. But it’s been over for a few years too.”
“Some gossip travels slowly. East Norwich is a long ways from the Lower East Side. Hmmm. Natalie, of all people. We’re everywhere, as we keep telling the city fathers. Natalie, the original married lady—”
Natalie would have news of Ruby and Paul’s trouble. She felt calmer, knowing she would find out everything about her family soon. “Natalie’s home now? Back on the Steering Committee of dear old SAW, you guys used her being married and having kids as an excuse not to relate to her. Like that turned her into your mother”
“A very cold Touché. Your Leigh is a bore, by the way. He approaches me as if walking up to a large ravening dog, saying Nice, nice doggy and trying to move his feet without coming any nearer.”
She glanced over her shoulder. Joel had the old tire off. “Just so he gives you the check every month. Do you have one for me?”
“I’m to get it from him at the council meeting. He’s supposed to be covering us. I enjoy collecting from him. It makes him so twitchy. He walked into my office and I said, ‘Behold the married man. You’re gaining girth as well as descendants’ Frankly, he’s getting a pot. He said, ‘Come off it, Oscar. I’ve been married before and it never cramped my style’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘your first wife wasn’t the crampy type’ ‘It’s an open marriage, Oscar’ he said. ‘Oh’ I said, ‘is it open for her as well?’ Because how open can it be for her with a belly to wheel around? ‘It’s open for me’ he said. ‘I’m not about to be boxed by anybody.’”
“That sounds familiar” she said with slow nasty relish. Joel wa
s fitting on the spare. It was lucky Oscar had suggested calling her back, as she would have run out of quarters long ago. “I thought he’d discarded that rhetoric”
“My guess would be he finds the belly oppressive and he’s passing time elsewhere.”
“Already?” She could have bussed Oscar. He knew just the gossip to make her feel on top. “Oscar, I shouldn’t be so tickled, but he hurt my pride”
“He did that before … years before. You came to me pretty sore, chicken—I remember that.”
She was startled at his mentioning their romance, more than a decade in the past and in another life. She had vaguely assumed he must be ashamed of it. “You were very good to me.” Joel was tightening the lugs.
“Leigh wants to see you, by the bye. He suggests a rendezvous.”
“What does he want to see me for?”
“How do I know, squirt? He can’t resist you.”
“We can resist each other just fine. He can shove his little rendez-vousie. How’s your lover? That good-looking young man I saw at the ferry.”
“A schmendrick. He has fantasies he’s a great chef, but of course he expects to cook by divine inspiration.”
“It’s all over, Oscar?”
“Except he comes by and complains. Let me describe an evening chez nous. I’d come home from school, worn out, exhausted by the good fight, wanting to roll over and play. He’d have every pan in the kitchen out and he’d tell me we’re having a fish timbale, an intimate dinner at seven, then we’ll go out to a movie and drop into our favorite bar for a Sambuca and coffee. At nine, the smell of burning crud. After ten, three dry fish croquettes emerge with runny spinach and some desiccated potatoes. I have to clean up. After all, he cooked. No! I had to get rid of him” Oscar laughed cheerfully. “Big blue eyes can’t make up for ten burned pots to clean, and the food was giving me indigestion …. How’s your pretty young man?”
“About five feet away, glaring at me. He’s just changed a tire. I’m still crazy about him.”
“You both have such big green eyes. I’ve never had another lover with green eyes.”
”Are you going to flirt with him all day?” Joel rasped. His hands were covered with grease, and he was scowling. “You can walk.”
“Oscar, I have to get off” She hung up and slid into the driver’s side. “At your service. Actually, Oscar was flirting a little. It’s the telephone. He’d never do so in person for fear I’d take him up.” She glanced at her watch, pulling out into traffic. “I can’t believe how long I talked to him!”
“Neither can I,” Joel said sourly.
“I never gossip on the phone that way anymore. Feels wonderful! Oscar asked after you, as my handsome young man”
“What does Leigh want?”
“Who knows? Who cares?” She realized that she had fallen into a little trap, admitting she had a message from Leigh. “When are you seeing him?”
“I’m not. He can communicate through channels. We better drive over toward the north end of the subway and look for a cheap motel”
The Board had decided to foot the bill for two nights in a motel rather than send them back to Park Slope. They took the Cross County west and found a modest old motel in Yonkers, where they checked in as Mr. and Mrs. Sam Walker. Joel took a shower to wash off the grease, while she went in search of another pay phone. She wanted desperately to see Natalie; she had to set up a meeting with the lawyer; she had nine prescriptions in her pocket to get renewed from Dr. Manolli, the M.D. who helped them. Joel knew she intended to see Natalie and the lawyer, but she could imagine no reason he had to find out about Dr. Manolli, who was a Board secret. All these activities had to be fitted into forty-eight hours to get them on their way back to Vermont by Tuesday afternoon at the outside, so it would be tight.
She got Natalie and said the few words in code that would establish where and when their real call would occur. “Hey, how’s your weight? Did you lose ten pounds yet?”
“Nine! Off my hips” Natalie sounded choked with excitement.
“Off your hips, o-kay! And how are your first, second and third children?”
“My second is best. The first is okay. The third is … out”
Therefore she would call Natalie at 9 A.M. on one of the pay phones from their second list. The lawyer she set up an appointment with late in the afternoon of the next day. Again the lawyer insisted on meeting in Manhattan. She got Dr. Manolli’s answering service. Useless. She had to talk to him. She would have to call later.
Joel stood at the window of their motel room, staring at the parking lot gray with snow. “This time I’ll see the lawyer.”
“How come?” She was startled. Simultaneously she felt how much easier seeing Natalie would be if she didn’t have to run into Manhattan and what a poor basis for decision that was.
“How come not? The contact was made when we met Mrs. Richter. That bitch lawyer knows me. In fact, she seemed a lot more comfortable with me than she did with you.”
“She’s a woman who relates to men more easily than to other women. We should encourage this?”
“We should try to reform her while collecting our money in tens and twenties?” Joel snorted, pinching his nose. “The truth is, you don’t trust me not to botch it.”
The truth was, she hardly did. She was used to doing things herself. Joel was impulsive, moody, easily distracted; and she had to trust him in the long run. “Why do you want to do it?”
“Because, nook, it’s dangerous for you to go into Manhattan.”
“You too.”
“The Feds don’t sit around with my photo. I’m a face among a hundred thousand. When they put the collar on one of us, it don’t even make the evening news … I never lived in this city. Nobody in New York cares who I am.”
She hugged herself. “Why go alone? We could both go.”
“That’s just as dangerous for you as going alone. And yes, I want to go. You have to put it in my hands.”
“All right” She had a dreadful sense of letting go. If anything went wrong, it would be her fault before the Network.
Natalie was thinner and her color was poor, her face broken out for the first time since she had tried the pill. Vida took Natalie’s face between her hands, saying foolishly, “You went to prison for me.”
“Well, aren’t you worth forty days of idiocy and minor brutality?”
Startling herself, she giggled.
“You’re supposed to deny it was for me.”
“I beg your pardon. Let me take that again, sweetie. Oh, no, dear sister, it was not for thee. I did it for Goddess and country. The movement. Herstory. The glorious revolution.”
She held Natalie’s hand as they walked a path among towering firs. A few inches of grimy snow layover the hillside, but the sun glinted on the glassworks of tiny icicles on the dark branches. They were meeting, as so often, in the Botanical Garden in the Bronx, where Vida had come by train and Natalie by car. “But it does make me feel guilty.”
“I did it for me too. After all, I have to live with myself. I’m liking myself better these days.”
“Because you went inside? Because you took a stand?”
Natalie waved her arm. “Because of surviving it—the noise, the awful food, the lack of privacy. Time! I’ll swear I’ll never waste another day in my whole life dawdling around the house feeling depressed and unable to get out of my robe. Reading week-old newspapers and doing three tasks at once halfheartedly while the TV spills out talk shows”
“Don’t be ridiculous! You waste less time than anyone I know”
“You don’t know, sweetie. For years I’ve had down days. Days I just can’t cope. Can’t get on with anything. Can’t get up and out or at it or whatever.”
“Not enough to keep you from being invaluable politically.” Then she remembered herself years before denying other confidences Natalie had offered about how she felt boxed in, ignored, walked over as a wife and mother. “Do you feel guilty about … down days?”
“Sure. But I’m beginning to think they had something to do with Daniel. For years and years I’ve treated him like the weather, the climate. Something given. My husband.”
“Why didn’t you ever leave him, Natty? Why?”
“Why didn’t he ever leave me?”
“I can’t understand. You weren’t happy with him since, oh, maybe six months after Sam was born”
“Funny we both pinpoint it there … I don’t know why, it makes me feel good that you remember it the way I do.”
She stopped. “I haven’t given you enough. Ever. I moved into your home. I moved into your life. Same way in New York, I arrived raw and bleeding. I’ve never given you enough.”
“Well, I’m the one always feeling guilty and having to be nice. That puts me at a disadvantage. But don’t change the subject. I’ve been realizing things about how I acted with Daniel. I took responsibility for a lot of my life, but I always treated him as a given. I think I felt as long as I had him, I was all right—respectable, married, secure. You know, I think my mother dying scared me a whole lot.”
Something. A cold finger touched her. “Natalie, what do you have to tell me? Natalie!” She grasped her by the arms.
Natalie looked away and then into her eyes, almost embarrassed. “A week ago, baby—six days. Last Tuesday. I flew out there for the funeral” She put her arms around Vida.
“Why didn’t you … “ But how could anyone reach her, tell her? “Mama’s dead? Ruby’s dead?”
Natalie nodded, holding her tight. She felt squashed. Angrily she thrust Natalie away and walked off the path into deeper snow, kicking it up with her boots. Boots Natalie had bought her in the fall at Filene’s, she remembered aimlessly. Her head hurt. She ran into a fir as if it had suddenly leaped in front of her. The pain helped. She kicked the tree, kicked it again and again till her toes were bruised. She banged her head on the bark till Natalie seized her from behind. Then she turned, struck Natalie’s shoulder and collapsed against her. She could scarcely tell what she felt. She was buffeted; she lurched and turned. It seemed to her she felt nothing but long shuddering tremors, the cracks in things.