I gasp. “Oh, you don’t really think it was just that, do you, Elaine?”
“Hey. I know what I know. If men don’t matter to you, Diana, if you don’t need a man in order to feel like a woman, that’s great. But for the rest of us, we have to live with our own realities. And I am bitter, I’ll admit it, even though I’m one of the lucky ones,” she continues. “I got left with some money—blood money because Nat felt so guilty. Otherwise … see, I lived my twenties and thirties and most of my forties based on the premise of my marriage and family. And now, just because Nathaniel made a unilateral decision, I’m stuck in a dead end that could easily last another twenty-five years. I’m just left with a lot of leftover life to kill.”
“Oh, Elaine, there’s so much you can do.”
“Like what, Diana? I tried so hard … to live a decent life, to try to make a difference, to do something of value, to help out. When I think of all those marches and sit-ins and demonstrations in Central Park, the Whitehall Induction Center. All those endless meetings, all those protests, all that effort. And what did it get us? What’s different now? Everything’s the same again; Reagan is just a pre-Watergate Nixon.”
“We helped stop the war.”
“I dunno. Maybe. We sure haven’t had any impact domestically.”
If we had ever gained any political power, we had two top priorities—nuclear disarmament and federal daycare. We would have converted our country from a war machine into a peace generator and reshuffled the social cards through a massive, world-class, national daycare program. However, for most of our adult lives we were either in the hands of the Republicans or in a state of war.
We are a generation of women who had everything, but found we couldn’t enjoy it when others had too little or nothing at all; we wanted to find a political solution to this economic problem, but still haven’t. We were the women who wanted to Make Love Not War and who wanted to restrict Arms to Hugging. This is probably because our generation can actually remember the hot flashes of the atom bombs that won us our victory over Japan but left us fearing future chilly scenes of a nuclear winter.
Elaine is not the only burnt-out case. At the present time, lots of us are suffering from severe political burnout. We are much more likely to send a contribution to some Sandinista support group rather than travel to Washington to demonstrate against apartheid or Reagan’s Nicaraguan policy. Although we haven’t stopped caring about the have-nots of this world and continue to buy and hang arpilleras—hand-embroidered scenes of oppression in Chile—we are no longer activists. If pressed, we will admit we prefer justice to freedom and that we are more interested in north-south problems than east-west ones.
“So I never developed a career for myself. Substitute teaching was just a chance to get away for a day once in a while. But all that time, Nathaniel was carving out his empire. I think our marriages started going down the tubes when our husbands got too successful.”
That has always been Elaine’s contention.
And maybe those were bad times for us when our men began sprinting ahead of us in life so that suddenly within our marriages there were winners and losers as well as husbands and wives. Maybe it was bad to feel as if the men had finally started their real lives while ours remained on indefinite hold. Confined by commitments, we felt excluded from the worldy adventures of our men, so some of us made other men our adventures. Then, guiltily, we became more watchful of our husbands and often made much ado about nothing. Jealousy is a tropical island where killer vines grow wild and strangle the giant trees to which they cling.
“I should have run for Congress. I don’t know know how Bella and Shirley did it. They had kids and husbands, too. But I just couldn’t juggle my time any better than I did. I felt too guilty about leaving the boys alone too much. It was only the volunteer stuff that didn’t pay—or pay off—that didn’t make me feel guilty. I know that’s a crazy reason to settle for getting pamphlets printed and picket signs made, but it’s the truth. So now I’ve got nothing to show for thirty years of volunteer political work.”
Elaine is inhaling rather than sipping her drink.
“Elaine, I was reading some more of Sukie’s journal and in one part she wrote about one night when she called you up crying about how empty her life was and how you talked real tough to her about getting back into shape and doing things for other people. You mentioned Nicaragua to her and helping Brenda out with the babies she adopted.”
Elaine looks at me. “I remember that,” she says sadly. “That was when Sukie was so bad off I looked like I was in relatively good shape. You know, all I think about lately are the wonderful summers we all had together. I think it was so wonderful, us being young mothers together with all our little babies. It was so fun. And so sexy. And nice.”
“Yes,” I say. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
“We looked like we were the mother’s helpers that summer on Fire Island.”
“Yes,” I say. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Summers were always the best times for us. Summers were like recess—sudden freedom from our sense of solitary responsibility. Summers were the only times when our routines took on the quality of shared adventures, when we changed from being Robinson Crusoes into Swiss Families Robinson. Summers were our play-toys, the teddy bears of our years, when we could all be together and every meal was a picnic and every night a slumber party.
Being young marrieds together in the late fifties and early sixties was delicious because marital sex back then was equivalent to drinking right after prohibition had been repealed. Just the fact we could do it—if and when we wanted to—made it special. That’s why there was always an overflow of afterglow at our group get-togethers. A blusher of sex colored the sweet young faces of our marriages and couples felt enormous sexual goodwill toward each other. People would come and go talking about The Alexandria Quartet and Durrell’s two-backed monsters—those genitally linked, seemingly inseparable Siamese twins known as husband and wife.
“I think the sixties did us in,” Elaine says reflectively. “All that wildness. We were married—but nobody felt married. Or else it was those open marriages that made being single seem so sexy. And now our marriages are gone and it turns out that being single sucks.”
“Well, we’ve just got to pick up the pieces,” I say energetically despite the enormous fatigue enveloping me. “Listen, I’m starving.”
“I’ll see if there’s something to eat.” Elaine stands up again—large, yet ghostly, in her nightgown. “But I know my major problem is that politically I’m burned out. You want a refill too?”
Reluctantly I hand her my glass.
Politics played an important part in our lives.
Domestically, few of us have been to any campaign victory parties above the local level. On the other hand, although we often arrived with different men, we went every four years to Democratic National Conventions so as to stay connected with the political mainstream. In Miami, in 1972, someone asked Sherril if she was a Marxist; she thought for a while and then said, “No, I’m a registered Democrat.” We were always Democrats unless, of course, there was a reform ticket on the ballot. Some of us even saw ourselves as insurgents.
During the 1960s, when lots of people had no last names and gangs of white teenagers lived in Central Park during the summertime, we engaged in daily, hand-to-hand, jungle-style combat against the forces of evil. We worked with protest or poverty groups housed in ramshackle buildings above shops, wearing signs like ATLANTIC TRANSMISSIONS, on the wrong side of town. Lavish with our time and energies, we spent years working on doomed projects that always fizzled out but which the FBI believed dangerous to our national security. In later years, we often panicked when coming home from abroad because we feared finding our names listed in that big black looseleaf “lookout” passport-control notebook consulted by U.S. Customs officials.
The interminable seventies were sad times for us. Our friends became selfish and moved to the West Coast or to apple orchards in Vermont
. Our children all wanted to go to Brown and our husbands looked unhappy. We still believed that war was unhealthy for children and other living things and though we tried desperately hard to Ban the Bomb, Stop the Draft, and End the War, we always clapped during performances of Peter Pan to show we believed in fairies—just in case.
And then, shockingly, even the seventies ended.
“I wish you could have heard everything Max told me,” I say when Elaine reappears.
She is carrying fresh drinks but no food.
“Why?”
“Well, it was informative and … sort of moving in a way, how connected he’d really been to her. Max is a pretty intimate man.”
Elaine starts to cry.
“Why did we junk our plans for this summer?” she asks me. “It was the first time we did that in seventeen years and it was wrong. We’d all have been together someplace this weekend and then maybe Sukie wouldn’t have died.” Elaine wipes away her tears with the back of her hand. “But I think none of us could bear how sad it was last summer, all of us alone, no men, none of the kids showing up, and feeling ashamed of how we looked on the beach. But the worst was the way we kept trying to act like we were having fun when we weren’t. I think that’s the real reason we canned our trip this year.”
But now my head is spinning. The room is spinning. I am tired and drunk and almost comatose from hunger. The last thing I’d eaten was my miserly ration of pizza pie.
“I don’t feel good, Elaine. I’ve got to lie down.”
She slumps into a corner of the sofa, crying softly into the pillows.
I don’t know how to help her.
Would the existence of a man in Elaine’s life really save her? Is that all that matters? Is it only a man who can erase that kind of pain?
I stop and bend over to kiss the back of her head. She lifts her hand and I hold it for a moment.
“Go to sleep,” I say. “It’s almost four o’clock.” I take the half-empty glass of vodka from her hand and leave it on the radiator before I run upstairs.
But as soon as I lie down, the riotous feelings Max stirred up in me return. Again I feel the rushes of tenderness, the unalloyed yearning, the terrifying physical desire. After holding back for so long, I had suddenly felt summoned again, as if I were being beckoned back from a point of no return.
What did Max want from me? His youth back? Another crack at marriage? A professional girlfriend in New York? Some sweet September sex? What did he think we would be or do in bed together after so many years of wondering, after a quarter-century of warily watching each other. What kind of players would we be after all that had gone down between us?
I lie in Sukie’s bed while her room whirls around me.
Like beads on a necklace, bright broken pieces of the past string themselves together into a chain of memories. The chain swings in front of my eyes like an infant jungle gym hung across a crib. I hear bits and pieces of brief conversations from ten or twenty years ago. What I hear and see are scenes from a marriage. My marriage.
Once we were in Kingston where the rain provided the sound effects. There was a steady dripping sound all day long. It surrounded the small hotel where we were living. It sounded as if a million faucets had broken at the same time and begun splashing water onto the ground. It sounded like when the gutter around a roof needs flashing, so that water runs down in a steady stream rather than draining. The dripping stopped only when a solid downpour of heavy rain interrupted its disconsolate tempo.
Leonard and I sat inside at the bar, helping ourselves to beers from the unlocked cooler that was run on an honor system. We were staring out through the latticework at the patio. The broad green leaves of a palm tree arching over the terrace were funneling raindrops down onto the tables from where they rolled, like marbles, onto the tiled floor below.
Leonard had made me come to Jamaica with him. He said he had business there with men who would expect him to bring his wife. He said it was vitally important, that it meant a great deal of money to us. He also said that though his business was with white Jamaicans, all of them were deeply involved in helping to develop the island for the betterment of the blacks. He said that Michael Manley had failed to bring prosperity to Jamaica but that the new president, Seaga, would improve the economy through foreign investments.
I made myself believe him. I made myself go down to Kingston.
Later, in our room above the bar, we got dressed to go out for dinner at the home of a government minister. I put on a white safari suit studded with redundant pockets, a pair of outrageously high linen sandals and huge golden hoop earrings.
Jazzy Petain picked us up at our hotel. He was a white Jamaican, bright, personable and friendly. He drove us far out of Kingston to an outlying village, where he pulled off the narrow country road and drove up a jungle trail before stopping at a wooden shack shaped like a kiosk in the center of a small clearing.
Jazzy’s wife, Lina, looked like a Hemingway heroine—long hair the color of bleached muslin and pale skin licked by the sun. She welcomed us at the doorless entrance to their house and led us inside. The shack had few furnishings, all of which were authentically primitive. The windows had no screens. The floor sloped so that the rear of the house was only inches off the ground. The room was filled with the sounds of snakes slithering around in the bush, accompanied by the cymbals of larger jungle animals breaking through the thick underbrush that embraced the house.
Nevertheless, this rudimentary shack had a servant—a large black woman who had prepared a meal that she served to the four of us whites on an open deck off the underdeveloped kitchen area. The food was elegant, the setting exotic, the Petains unique. I was enchanted by Lina, whose British family had lived in Jamaica for generations. She explained that she was devoting her life to developing new agricultural products for the area. Her commitment to the island and its natives was awesome and I was enchanted with this handsome, resolute woman.
After dinner, Lina asked me if I’d like to take a walk around the farm with her. Flattered, I said of course.
Then she led me outside and directly into the jungle. I became terrified as she kept pressing farther and farther into the bush and I followed her in silent panic. My high-heeled sandals sank into the rich loam. I could hear invisible animals smashing all around us. Intimidated both by the jungle and by Lina’s bravery, I forced myself to keep walking as she talked about teaching new agricultural methods to her neighbors and about the difficulty of raising experimental crops.
Finally we came to another scooped-out clearing which contained a shed made of flattened tin cans. A large black man was standing in the doorway.
Lina went up to the man and embraced him tenderly. He kissed her several times with insistent passion. After several minutes, Lina extricated herself from his arms and signaled me to follow her back into the jungle.
Obediently I walked behind her.
“I thought you might be wondering why we live so far from Kingston,” she said. “That’s my lover. I didn’t want to be too far away from him. He’s helping me farm my land. When you get back to the States, would you take the trouble to send me some almanacs that deal with raising corn in rainy climates?”
Although I said yes, I never got around to it. On the airplane home I tried to make some sense of Jamaica and that encounter in the jungle. Was Lina really trying to develop new crops to grow in the tropics or was that only a cover for her lover? Did she despise her husband’s political equivocations or was she even more of a phony than he was? I felt bad. Sad. Had.
I said to Leonard: “I’m sick of the sorts of people you know. I’m going to find a seat in the smoking section.”
Another time, after meeting a plane, we pulled out of Kennedy International Airport. In the backseat sat our friend, a white South African political activist who had just entered the country on a false Dutch passport. We were all feeling hyper after the pressure and tension of waiting for the flight and then waiting to see if Theo would get thr
ough passport control.
“Well,” Theo said, taking some papers out of his inside jacket pocket. “At least I didn’t have to use these Dutch work papers. That would have been much worse, more dangerous.”
He began shredding the incriminating documents into small squares and then, opening the car window, threw them out so the wind would carry them away.
I was the first one to see the squad car with its twirling red light on the roof.
“Oh my God,” I moaned.
Sitting beside Leonard in the front seat, I told him that the police were signaling us to stop.
The squad car parked close behind us. The cop who was driving got out and walked over to our car. Leonard rolled down his window.
“Okay,” the cop said, holding out his hand.
Leonard produced his car registration and driver’s license.
The cop carried them back to the squad car to call in the information.
“I need a lawyer,” Theo said, breathlessly. “Who do you know in New York?”
“We’ll find someone good,” Leonard said. “I’ll call someone as soon as they let us.”
The cop returned. He leaned through the front window that was open and looked into the backseat.
“Something you wanted to get rid of pretty bad, back there?” he asked, looking at Theo.
Theo stared straight ahead, silent.
“You know the price of a ticket for littering?” the cop asked.
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