Cinnamon Girl

by Lawrence Kessenich

  I reported in at the strike committee table. Carl wasn’t there, but Bill Fleischer was. He sent me to a small meeting room on the third floor, in an area where a lot of student organizations had small offices. The room held a large meeting table made of some indeterminate dull yellow man-made material. Fluorescent lights glared down on it, reflecting off its shiny surface. The room’s only saving feature was a single, narrow window that overlooked the cement plain. I pulled open the bottom of the window to let in a little air, and a little air was exactly what it let in. An oversized, white-faced clock on the wall said it was 10:00. I sat at the head of the table and waited.

  Ten minutes passed and no one showed up. Then twenty. At twenty-five minutes past, a young man poked his head in and asked if I was there for the science fiction club meeting. I said no. At 10:40, I gave up and returned to the ballroom. Carl was there, this time.

  “Nobody showed up,” I said.

  He looked rather disgusted.

  “Fifteen rooms with fifteen discussion leaders and exactly seventeen people have showed up. Total. We put them all in one room, down the hall, if you want to join them. Otherwise, we’re organizing groups to demonstrate in classes again. They don’t seem to want to come to us, so we’ll just have to keep going to them. Sometimes the apathy around here makes me want to give up.”

  “You seem tired,” I said.

  Carl peeled off his wire-rim glasses and lay them in front of him, then rubbed his gaunt face with his hands.

  “I’m exhausted. I haven’t done a thing at the Social Action Center for days. Luckily, the Quakers are behind the strike, or I’d probably be out of a job.”

  “Is anybody down there?”

  “I’ve got someone tending the place, but he can’t make any important decisions, and he’s not exactly a whiz with administrative details. I’ve got to let it go, though. This comes first.”

  He put his glasses back on.

  “Thanks for listening to me complain,” he said. “I’ve got a lot on my mind. Now, about the classroom demonstrations. We’ve sent several contingents out already, but there’s another one forming over there. They’ve just had their crash course in non-violent resistance from Bill.”

  He pointed to the dais/bandstand, where about twenty students sat waiting for marching orders.

  “Will you lead that group? I don’t know any of them and you participated yesterday, so you know the routine. Enter the room chanting and take over the front. Don’t try to push the professor aside and take over the podium, but if he offers it to you, jump on it. If he won’t yield the floor, chant until he gives up, or just start talking over him. Don’t lecture; try to get people talking to one another. That gets the best results.”

  “Where do you want us to go?”

  “To Lapham Hall. There’s a big astronomy lecture in the auditorium.”

  I went over to the other students, identified myself, and told them what we’d be doing. I said if we succeeded in getting people talking, they were welcome to join in the discussion, but they ought to hold back until the class was engaged. I said their first task was to disrupt the class, to stop “business as usual,” so we could turn the students’ attention to the war. A couple of them looked unsure about this. Another looked a bit too eager, but overall they seemed like a serious, committed group. I asked for questions.

  “How do we know when we’re done?” one of them asked.

  “We’ll be done when the class is done—or before, if everybody walks out on us, which happened in one class I went to, yesterday.”

  “What did it feel like doing this? It seems strange, somehow.”

  “It is strange. It goes against our everyday ideas about leaving people alone, about not interfering with their life. We wouldn’t be doing something this dramatic if we didn’t feel it was important.”

  I felt as if I was reassuring myself when I said this. If I was queasy about leading a discussion group, I was downright frightened of leading a group to break up a class. It was one thing to go along for the ride; it was quite another to be in charge of the demonstration.

  There were no other questions, so we started over toward Lapham Hall. No one spoke along the way. It was as if all of us were gathering our energy to do something we were not naturally inclined to do. When we entered the lobby, we saw a few students standing around smoking, as if it were any other day on campus. I stopped my contingent outside the lecture hall and gathered them into huddle.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s just take a few deep breaths and start chanting. Let’s do ‘Hell, no, we won’t go!’ That tends to get people’s attention. We’ll walk right up the aisle and stand in a line across the front. Keep chanting, no matter what anybody says to you. I’ll raise my hand when it’s time to stop. Are we ready?”

  They all nodded.

  “Okay, let’s start quietly, here in the huddle, then build up the volume. Hell no, we won’t go. Hell no, we won’t go.”

  They picked up the rhythm immediately. As the volume grew, we stood up straight, looking into one another’s faces for reassurance. The smokers in the lobby turned to watch us. The chant grew louder and more energetic. When it reached a good pitch, I threw open one of the auditorium doors and led them in.

  Every head in the room—and there were a couple hundred of them— turned to us. Some faces were amused, some bemused, some supportive, and others disgusted. A small, balding professor, neatly dressed in a gray suit buttoned all the way up the front, stood beside the podium. It was Dr. Keuchler, the professor I’d had for astronomy the previous fall. Immediately, I was embarrassed. Dr. Keuchler was an old-fashioned professor on the verge of retirement. He was formal and strict, but he loved his subject and his students. Even students who came out of his introductory class thinking he was going to be dull as dishwater were hooked by the end of the first formal lecture. I had developed tremendous respect for him during the semester and felt foolish breaking in on him. But it was too late to turn back.

  “Hell no, we won’t go! Hell no, we won’t go!”

  As we lined up across the front, Dr. Keuchler stood beside the podium, eyeing us, not with disdain, as I would have expected, but with real curiosity and interest. He did not attempt to continue lecturing. Some of the students in the class picked up our chant, while others started up a counter-chant.

  “Go away! Go away!”

  “Hell no, we won’t go!”

  “Go away! Go away!

  “Hell no, we won’t go!”

  Many of them stood up, either to support us or to try to shout us down.

  “Go away!”

  “… we won’t go!”

  As the counter-chants continued, Dr. Keuchler stood calmly at the podium, taking it all in, a half-smile on his face. He seemed to represent the experience of the ages, which had seen all this—and worse—before and was intrigued to see it again. On and on went the chants, one side against the other, neither wanting to give in. It seemed as if they would go on forever. Then Dr. Keuchler seemed to come to a decision. He picked up his briefcase from the floor beside the podium, gathered up his lecture notes, and put them inside, closed the briefcase, and started walking toward the coat rack that held his overcoat and hat. I was certain he was going to take his things and walk out, but, instead, he set the briefcase down at the base of the coat rack, and proceeded to take a seat in the front row of the auditorium.

  The moment Dr. Keuchler sat down, the chanting stopped abruptly. There was an eerie silence for a moment. He sat looking at me, his face displaying the same half-smile, which now seemed to be saying, “Your move, Mr. Meyer.”

  “Thank you for allowing us to speak, Dr. Keuchler,” I said. “And thanks to the rest of you for listening.”

  “Go away,” someone shouted from the back of the hall.

  “We’ll be going soon enough,” I said in the direction of the voice, though I hadn’t seen who it was. “But, first, we have something important to talk about. There’s a war going on in Vietnam.”r />
  “No shit!” called the heckler.

  This time I spotted him. He wore a white polo shirt and was being egged on by several guys around him.

  “The simple fact is, any one of the men in this room could be drafted to fight in that war.”

  “Not me,” the heckler called out, “I’m 4F.”

  Dr. Keuchler rose and turned around to face the heckler. He did not speak. He just looked at the heckler until the heckler sank down in his seat, not looking remorseful, but, I suspected, not about to open his mouth again while I tried to talk. Dr. Keuchler sat down again.

  “We’re not here to give you answers. We’re here to get you thinking about what’s going on in Southeast Asia and talking to one another about it. The whole point of this strike is to get you to step outside your routine and confront an issue that affects every one of you, directly or indirectly. I’ve got a brother over there. He happens to be pretty safe because he’s in the Navy and North Vietnam doesn’t have a navy or an air force to threaten his ship. But other people aren’t so lucky.”

  “My brother’s in the jungle,” said a woman in the front row.

  She was dressed conservatively, in a plaid skirt and a spring sweater.

  “Would you mind getting up and turning around to speak,” I said. “It’s hard for people in the back to hear you.”

  She did as I asked. “My brother’s in the jungle,” she repeated. “He wakes up terrified and he goes to sleep terrified and he doesn’t have the faintest idea why he’s there.”

  “He’s there because he loves his country,” said a middle-aged man in the back row.

  “He does love his country,” said the woman. “But he doesn’t see what good he’s doing his country over there. He says he’d be happy to defend the United States if anybody attacked it, but he knows he’s not defending it over there. He says he might even be willing to fight for South Vietnam, if it had been his own choice. But he doesn’t understand how a bunch of politicians can make him fight in a country half way around the world that is no threat to our own country. He just wants to come home.”

  The woman sat down. No one spoke for a moment. I was just about to invite other people to speak when the middle-aged man stood up. He had gray hair and black-rimmed glasses and wore a white shirt, open at the neck. “My son is over there, too, and I’m proud of him. Hell, he doesn’t understand exactly what it’s all about, but he doesn’t think he has to. He trusts his government and he believes it’s his duty to serve when ordered to—just as I did in World War II. He’d be a whole lot safer over there— and so would your brother, young lady—if you demonstrators didn’t give aid and comfort to the enemy by publicly opposing the war, making the communists think this war doesn’t have the full support of the American people. I wish every one of you—”

  “It doesn’t have the full support of the American people,” said a young man on the aisle near the wall, “and it’s a lie to pretend it does.”

  “Don’t you call me a liar, young man!”

  “I’m not calling you a liar,” he replied. “I’m calling Tricky Dick a liar.”

  “That’s no better,” said the older man. “You’re talking about the president of the United States!”

  “Yes, a president. Not a king, a politician, an elected official. I have a right to call him anything I like.”

  Suddenly, the room erupted with voices taking sides with both speakers. It was impossible to make out what anyone was saying. I knew it was my job to restore order, but I wasn’t sure how. I went to the podium, not sure what I was looking for, and found a large textbook on a shelf inside it. I picked it up with both hands and used it as makeshift gavel, pounding the top of the podium. It took awhile for the pounding to be heard above all the voices, but finally the fracas died down and everyone looked up at me. I admit to feeling a sudden sense of power, winning the attention of such a large group. But immediately I felt inadequate to the task of directing them.

  “Maybe we’d better speak one at a time,” I said lamely. “It’s only polite.”

  Only polite? That was the kind of thing my mother said. I felt like an idiot. But it seemed to work, momentarily. A female student in the middle of the auditorium raised her hand. I nodded to her. She stood up.

  “I wonder if we could have a show of hands. How many people in this room think the war in Vietnam is justified and should go on and how many think we should get out as soon as possible? I’m for pulling out. How many are with me?”

  Every one in my contingent raised their hand, of course, but so did at least seventy-five percent of the people in the auditorium.

  “It looks to me,” said the woman, pinning me with her eyes, “that you and your friends are preaching to the converted. Besides, you’ve made your point. Now, why don’t you get out of here so we can have an astronomy class.”

  “Yeah!” some others shouted. “Get out of here!

  Let us have our class!” This was an unexpected turn. I was at a loss for words, momentarily. Dr. Keuchler saved me again. He stood and faced the young woman. The room quieted down quickly.

  “Miss Johnson,” he said, “a discussion involves much more than one group of people convincing another group of people of their point of view. Even if everyone in this room agreed that the war should end, we could still learn a great deal by discussing it with one another. Why don’t you share your thoughts on the subject with us.”

  Now it was Miss Johnson’s turn to be surprised. As she stood thinking what to say, Dr. Keuchler sat down. “Well … I think we shouldn’t be there. It’s a war that has nothing to do with us.”

  The middle-aged man in the back spoke up again. “The Germans taking over Europe had nothing to do with us, either. Should we have just let the Nazis do what they liked? The North Vietnamese murder South Vietnamese villagers who won’t follow them. Should we just ignore that?”

  “Germany declared war on us,” she replied, more self-assured, now. “North Vietnam didn’t do that—or, if they did, it wasn’t until we got heavily involved in the war. I don’t think the North Vietnamese are saints or anything, but the South Vietnamese are the ones who ought to be fighting them. We can send them help—even volunteer soldiers, if anybody’s interested—but I don’t think we ought to be drafting our young men and sending them over there to die for something they don’t believe in.”

  A chorus of voices rose in support of Miss Johnson. She looked pleased with herself for holding her own and sat down.

  The discussion went on for the rest of the period. At the end, Dr. Keuchler stood to thank us, which led to a spontaneous outburst of applause from the class. Looking out at all those clapping hands was the high point of the student strike for me. I was happy I’d succeeded as a group leader, but, more importantly, I was happy we’d accomplished exactly what the strike was intended to accomplish, to get people to give the war the attention it deserved. At that moment, it all seemed worth it.

  10

  LATER THAT DAY, I SAT on the lawn at the nursing home where Claire worked, regaling her with my exploits as a strike leader. Cars whooshed by on Oakland Avenue. I was so caught up in my impassioned description I didn’t notice when her attention began to wander. Finally, she stared for an inordinately long time at the passing cars.

  “What is it?” I said, irritation creeping into my voice.

  She looked at me. “It’s hard for me to hear about all this when I feel like there’s nothing going on in my own life.”

  “Nothing going on? What about Jonah? What about pre-med?”

  “Jonah is … Jonah. He’s not me. I’m just his caretaker. And I haven’t been studying chemistry enough lately, so I don’t know if pre-med is going to happen.”

  “Whose fault is that?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you want to do it, you’ll do it. If you don’t, you won’t. It’s just like this strike. I could’ve begged off. Nobody would’ve cared. But I wanted to do it and did it. Nobody can stop you if y
ou really want something.”

  “Is that so, Mr. Know-It-All? You try raising a kid and cleaning up bedpans for crazy old people and see how much energy you have left for making something of yourself. I’m so sick of hearing about what a hero you are in the strike.”

  “I didn’t say I was a hero. I just said I was glad I was able to help.”

  “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. You puff up your chest like a rooster. You really think you’re the cock of the walk since you fucked me, don’t you? Well, I feel like shit, and you’ve hardly even noticed. You’re so full of yourself since this strike started you don’t even see me anymore.”

  She stood up. “I’m going back to work, now. I’ll see you at the house later. Or maybe I won’t. I suppose that depends on whether they can live without you at the Union, tonight. Come back down to earth, John. I don’t want a hero. I want somebody who loves me and listens to me.”

  She stalked off across the lawn.

  “Claire!” I should have gone after her, but my own hurt and anger prevented me. “Claire!”

  She kept right on going. I went back to eating. Why should I let her upset me, I thought. I knew what I was doing for the strike was worthwhile. I wasn’t going to let her cynicism taint it. I ate the last few bites of my sub and the unfinished half of hers.

  Then I started to feel remorseful. Perhaps I had been paying too much attention to the strike and too little to her. Ultimately, she was much more important to me. Perhaps that was exactly why I’d been paying more attention to the strike than to her. I was afraid of how important she was becoming to me because I was unsure if she would ever be mine.

  I crumpled the greasy, white butcher paper that had held our sandwiches, carried it inside with me, and tossed it in the janitor’s wheeled trash cart parked beside the reception desk. I asked the receptionist to get Claire on the phone for me. She called the floor and asked for her, then handed me the phone. It took a few minutes for Claire to pick up.