Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Dennis headed out of the garage elevator and into the Agriculture building, through security, where he nodded at Clive, who touched his blue hat with the twisted yellow rope along the brim in hello, Clive who had been here even longer than Dennis, who was the first to tell him, The ID goes here. He’d touched his chest. Not here. He’d pointed to his breast pocket. Dennis headed over to the third wing, click click, tiny flecks of light bouncing off the linoleum floors, hallways like in high school, all the boys clinging to their books, backs against lockers, waiting for the girls they’d seen all summer at the pool to pass—Pitt Street Pool, goddamn, he still remembered those neighborhood girls in their capris and button-down shirts, scarves tied at their chins, disrobing, their new one-pieces beneath, and the way they slathered themselves in baby oil and spread out to cook, turning again to roast their backsides, deep lines from the plastic lawn chairs imprinting in their reddening flesh—then finally up to the fifth floor. He went into his office and threw his jacket over the desk chair; he loosened his tie and sat down.

  Worker bee, worker bee, he hated the thought, then another image of Vanessa rose up. Here she was seven, still his, on the Halloween she dressed as a bumblebee. Her legs sprouted from a big, round center, a pumpkin costume Sharon had covered in black-and-yellow fabric, and a headband strapped to her skull, with two black pipe cleaners attached. Sharon could have Rosh Hashanah and Passover. She could have Sukkot; she could build a fort and hang squash from it like teats for all he cared, because Halloween was his holiday, pagan or not, and he took the kids trick-or-treating every year. That year Ben had been a disappointing Pelé, the most distinguishing feature of the costume a large 10 taped on his MSI soccer jersey. The number covered his usual, everyday number 12, on his back and also on the front of the shirt, right over his heart. Ben had tried to paint his face with brown paint, and Dennis had forbidden it.

  “But why?” Ben asked. “Pelé is brown. Now I look nothing like him!”

  Dennis had known this was an opportunity for discussion, but he felt exhausted by the idea of it. Later, he thought. I will tell him about Paul Robeson another time. I will tell him the way we all once sang together one day, but not now. “People are very sensitive about skin color,” he’d said. “And when we paint our skin a color that we are not, well, that can be insulting even if we don’t mean it to be.”

  Ben had looked at him cockeyed, and Dennis had looked side to side to see if Sharon had witnessed the pathetic exchange. So much about his life surprised him—why he didn’t give his son some kind of window onto the imperativeness of civil rights and his sure view on this was one of these moments.

  “That’s so stupid!” Ben had said, stomping down the stairs. “Now no one will know who I am.”

  It was true, Dennis thought. Ben now looked nothing like Pelé.

  There are so many things that mark us, Dennis had thought to tell him, but he’d stopped himself. He thought of his mother, her foreign accent as much a moniker as is skin, though she could choose to keep her mouth shut. He used to will her silent; sometimes he couldn’t stand the sound of her voice. “Of course they will!” he’d lied. “The number ten is the dead giveaway. That’s the important part.”

  Ben sulked the whole evening, dragging his bag for candy—a Sesame Street pillowcase that didn’t help his cause—along the sidewalk and stomping up every ivy-lined walk in the neighborhood. This mood was worsened by Dennis’s rule that the kids could not eat a thing until they had sorted through each piece of candy, ensuring that no wrapper had been ripped open, that the homemade cookies and caramel popcorn balls, the loose M&M’s in sandwich bags tied up with orange and black, curling ribbon, had all been tossed. Every year his kids screamed to fight his policy, and they tested him blatantly, but crazies were out there, lunatics, even in suburban Maryland. Once a little girl at Ben’s school bit into a candy apple and nearly sliced off her tongue on a razor blade that was hidden inside. That was what Ella Larson had said, though it had never been substantiated. Who could speak more to the threat of food than Dennis? He thought of DDT, still used to save crops from being eaten up by insects—might as well gas us all—long after the ban was in effect. He’d been there, working with farmers to find viable substitutes, but no insecticide worked better than DDT. It’s why people used it on their lawns. Len’s father had sprayed it on his, and Len had mowed the lawn every week, DDT-soaked grass swirling all around him in the summer heat. Maybe that’s what made him a Republican, Dennis thought. It’s easy to talk the liberal talk when you don’t see people starving. DDT lets people eat! As a father, at least, he’d thought he could protect his own children, his lily-white, soccer-playing son, his little bumblebee of a daughter.

  A worker bee. Dennis imagined himself now, a garment worker, or a furrier, one of the Russians Sigmund was always trying to unionize in that brief period after the Jewish gangsters had laid off the garment industry but before the communists swooped in. Perhaps Dennis needed mobilization after all; or was he in a position of power here in this government building? It all depended on how you looked at it. He still believed; he was the same man who cried when those soldiers stomped all over People’s Park in Berkeley. The same man who cried as the hippies and the radicals actually banded together to turn that parking lot into a park, but he’d also cried because he had not been part of it, that he’d been here, here, worrying about his membership at the local pool club. The pools were not public in Washington, or not the good ones anyway. And here he was on his way to the administration building to discuss policy with the person who would discuss policy with the person who would then discuss it with the president. The president of the United States.

  Dennis closed the door of his office. At his desk he gripped the arms of the chair and wheeled it back and forth over the thick sheet of plastic until the front left wheel rolled off onto the gray carpet, stopping the chair suddenly. Dennis pitched slightly forward, like a crash-test dummy, his neck jerking forward. He stood up, flattened his tie, and went to open the locked cabinet to take one more look at the Landsat images before this morning’s status briefing.

  He rolled up his sleeves and lined the three most recent satellite images in a row. Dennis always thought the pictures—bright greens that marked urban spaces, reds delineating crops, and blues, the sea; colors as artificial as neon, set against black—were striking, far more worthy of a place over the living room couch than the ridiculous neutral painting on which Sharon insisted. He imagined mounting an image, hanging it in the living room, and having one of his Soviet colleagues over for cocktails. Though this was not protocol, the thought of Viktor Uspensky, with whom he’d developed a fairly informal if not personal relationship, thinking he was looking at a major artwork but seeing instead a satellite image that included his own home, amused Dennis. He pictured Viktor in his Stalin-era housing development, or in his little dacha, out in the front lawn, kneeling in the dirt and trying to coax his beets and carrots into growing big enough to eat. Would Viktor recognize his own home in these images? Of course he would; the Soviets knew everything. It was the Americans who were dancing so hard to catch up. Certainly we should know that by now.

  By his untrained eye, he gauged whether there was more red—sustenance, winter wheat and squash—than there had been last month. People were paid to translate this stuff a hell of a lot more accurately, but they were holdovers from Ford, and Dennis couldn’t stand them. He had a list of their names and extensions clipped on the folder containing the images, which were practically useless anyway, as they did not reflect the stockpiles. That’s what Herndon Skye, the guy at the top of his list, had told him. They could have tons of grain hidden anywhere, he’d said, but you know that, right? It’s entirely possible that the Soviets—those bastards—have been stockpiling for years. Now Dennis deduced that they would not feel this embargo in the least, and that the American farmers, DDT sprayers pried out of their white-knuckled fingers, would be the ones to truly suffer.

  The CIA’s job wa
s to determine if there were stockpiles. People from Intelligence were now illicitly skulking through the country trying to estimate the grain on reserve. Could that be Len? Who knew, he was always so purposefully vague about his job. He could be doing absolutely anything. I’m just traveling, he’d say. You guys can have the house for the month. He was always so generous, but sometimes it was nice to be in Skatesville together. Len’s wife, Annie, was a Southerner, and they had twin boys, and for years they’d take a weekend a summer together, despite Sharon’s clear dislike for Annie. She thinks she’s so damned sexy, Sharon would say, and it was true, Annie was always at the beach in a teensy knit bikini, swishing out of the sea, dripping with water, while Len smirked at her, burying his cigarette in the sand. She pawed at men when she talked to them—well, she did Dennis anyway—and she wore her hair long and parted in the middle, like a teenager. So what? Dennis would tell Sharon. So she thinks she’s sexy, there are worse things.

  Almost ten years ago, Dennis remembered now, they were all at the house together and the kids had finally gone to sleep. The four of them were sitting out on the porch in mismatched chairs drinking Len’s mint juleps and talking about how much they hated Washington. The city, of course. Because Len would never discuss his job. Their distaste for the town and the bland people who inhabited it was a running joke. Or more, their disdain was not important because of the unacknowledged feeling that all this was temporary; back then Washington still had the potential to become their town. It was like the beginning of their marriages. Their offhand comments about the trappings of married life—arguments recalled, acted out, and laughed at in exaggerated public charades—meant little because it had not yet taken on a darker, permanent cast. Their marriages had not yet become what they now were, unchangeable perhaps, without the potential to become something else, something better, still magical.

  Dennis looked over at Sharon as she unfolded her legs and got up.

  “I’m going in,” she said, looking straight at Dennis.

  No one moved. The chairs squeaked along the creaking floorboards of the porch.

  Len looked up at her and smiled. “So soon?”

  Sharon crossed her arms and nodded.

  “Well, sweet dreams, sugar,” Annie said.

  Dennis knew that Sharon, who had probably expected the party to disband with her leave-taking, had no choice but to go inside now. He waited to see what she would do.

  When she turned toward the door, Dennis said, “I’ll be in, in a bit.”

  Sharon quickly shut the screen door, and then Len got up, and Dennis and Annie followed him, the three of them stumbling out into the front yard and toward the woods. Annie’s shapely hips and browned legs, emphasized by her frayed cutoffs and illuminated by the moon, sashayed in front of him as they walked along the loamy earth, thrashing through the night forest. When they got to the small clearing that marked the end of the property, they sat down on the thick, damp moss-covered rocks.

  Len took a joint out of his crumpled pack of Luckys. “Can you believe this is our life?” he said after lighting it and passing it on to Annie. He stared up at the sky.

  Dennis didn’t know if this was a bad or a good thing. “This seems to be exactly your life,” he said, inhaling. He could taste Annie’s sugary lip gloss on the joint. “This was your plan, wasn’t it? You don’t seem that different than I expected, I mean. Other than the voting for Nixon. I don’t know why I didn’t anticipate that.” Dennis laughed.

  “I voted for Humphrey,” Annie said. She was propped on her elbows, her head leaning back, dark brown hair spilling down behind her.

  “You did?” Dennis turned toward her. “That’s so sweet. I had no idea.”

  “Yup,” Len said. “I never mentioned that?”

  Annie giggled and took another drag on the joint. She crossed her legs, Indian-style, and Dennis, who was lying down, caught a flash of her pubic hair in the moonlight.

  “Nope,” Dennis said. He wanted to reach up and grab her hand.

  “So. Your life is different then?”

  “My life is different,” Dennis said, sitting up. He ran his hand over the back of his head and felt his hair feathering along his palm. “It sure is.”

  They finished that joint and smoked another, and Annie and Len smoked several cigarettes apiece, then the three of them sloppily made their way back. Dennis stood before the house, the little picture windows glowing from the orange light of the living room and the wooden kitchen through the gray dark. It was all so pleasant, but it didn’t seem real. Once they were inside, Dennis watched Len and Annie leaning into each other, giggling up the stairs—they always made such a goddamn show of it, Sharon was right—and he turned to go into the guest room.

  “Hi,” he said, after he’d peeled off his shorts and T-shirt and gotten into bed. The cotton quilt smelled of wet leaves and insects, and he slid under it, pressing against Sharon. He brushed her hair out of her face and skimmed his hand along the side of her neck, then her breasts.

  Sharon looked up at him, her dark eyes shining. “How could you have let me go?”

  “What?” Dennis instinctually lifted his hand and brought it to his hip. “Let you go where?”

  “Let me go inside,” she said. “All alone. You just left me here all alone and went off with them.”

  Dennis turned away from her, his heart racing. From what? The marijuana? His erection? His disappointment? “I thought that’s what you wanted. To be alone.”

  “You did not,” she said.

  Dennis thumped his pillow. “Good night, Sharon.” He lay back down loudly, trying to still his thumping heart and will himself to sleep.

  When Len offered him the house for the month, Dennis had asked where he was going, and Len turned silent. Hello? Dennis had wanted to scream. It’s me! But he was being ridiculous. Annie probably didn’t even know where Len went off to or with whom he met, though Dennis didn’t get the feeling that she really cared either. He tried not to be bothered, but it really bugged him. This was Len! And Dennis didn’t even know what the guy did for a fucking living, though a few weeks later, when they’d gone to Skatesville alone, the only way to get Sharon there again that summer, Vanessa had found some Chinese jade medallions in a drawer in the living room, and Dennis had thought perhaps Len was doing work in China, for his beloved Nixon. This, based on a frigging piece of jade.

  Gary Jensen, also with an elusive job description, was Dennis’s contact at the CIA, and Dennis needed to be in touch with him about the Landsats. He had met Gary at Skatesville years ago and would have called Gary a friend, primarily at first because of his connection to Len. How else would he have found himself alone with him on the Chesapeake, sails unfurled, taut in the wind, the boat flying beneath the Bay Bridge toward the sea? Dennis, who as a boy had only watched the boats coming in from the Sound every Sunday, now opened sailing season on Gary’s boat each year. For fifteen years they’d done this. By now they were friends. Dennis knew of Gary’s two affairs, and that he’d almost left for the twenty-two-year-old secretary he’d schtupped for over three years every Tuesday in a room at the Mayflower. He knew when Gary’s daughter went to Hazelton. Gary had rubbed the sides of his head when he’d told Dennis that she was getting electric shock, and Dennis had found this such an empathetic gesture, it had almost made him cry. He could not imagine living through that with his own daughter. Though he’d slowly become friends with Gary, still he couldn’t help his resistance to the CIA; he would never shake his childhood association of that institution with the FBI as a hated branch of government. He heard his father’s voice: A tool of the ruling class!

  How different were these times, really? Dennis could still see those Rosenberg boys running from the loose grip of their unkempt grandmother. Though Sigmund had many doubts about the Rosenbergs’ guilt, he had thought it shameful how long it took the communists to come to their defense. Sigmund had rescinded his allegiance to communism by then. Dennis was two when Stalin signed the pact with Hitler,
and that was the moment when it was over for Sigmund. He’d ripped up his party card right then and there, he’d often said. From then on, as long as American communism had ties to the Soviets, it was not for him. Communism was synonymous with Stalinism, he’d say, and fascism too, and did no one notice the utter horror of the Moscow Trials? Where is everyone? he’d say, his fist shaking the kitchen table. It’s like the whole damn planet has its head in the sand.

  The American communists, they left those poor people to the dogs. Not until the Rosenbergs became a useful PR tool did they raise their pens in protest. Not until the communists started acting like the capitalists and realized they were as marketable as cereal. Then they embraced them.

  Goddamned communists.

  Tatti usually remained silent when Sigmund and his friends ranted about her homeland. But when the Rosenbergs burned, her horror seemed to give her voice.

  “The chair!” Tatti had clutched her chest when the verdict came down. “A woman. Done in. By. Her. Own. Brother.”

  Dennis had thought of what his uncle must have been like then, imagining him as Santa Claus. He wrote Misha notes in huge print that his mother would translate into Russian. We wish you were here with us, he wrote. This is a picture of my house, he’d write beneath a crayon drawing of a brown house with picture windows and a green lawn, red flowers the size of trees bordering it, fluffy clouds hovering above. Dennis could not read Russian, and the Cyrillic letters in his mother’s handwriting looked like a strange and unbreakable code.