“How did you find me?”
“How are you?”
“Why did you come?”
“How are you?”
“Why didn’t you write?”
“I knew he’d be thrilled!”
“How is my mother?”
“They’re cute, aren’t they? He said they were.”
“Why did you abandon us? Didn’t you know we’d stick by you no matter what?”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry. I was so ashamed.”
“What’s for dinner tonight?”
“Bishop, my father’s dead!”
“What happened? Did he have a heart attack?”
The din in the kitchen went on as people pulled up chairs to the table and Rebecca, Bernice, and Cynthia prepared for the meal. Everyone was talking, laughing, babbling. We were still crying. Bishop tried to explain, Sandy tried to tell her story, I just kept stroking Bishop like a big dog I loved more than anything, and he kept touching Sandy and me, tears on his face.
“He killed himself, Bishop. With the car exhaust. He committed suicide. Can you believe it?”
“I can’t believe your father did that. He was so calm, so gentle.”
Sandy sobbed. Bishop held her while she wept. The others gave them some space, then talked around them. I sat with Sandy and Bishop.
“Why did he do it?”
“I don’t know!” she wailed. “No one knows! He just said he couldn’t go on.”
“Had he read Beckett?” asked Rebecca, who was sitting beside Bishop. Sandy and I went on alert.
“Yes, why?”
“Oh, that’s what his characters say. That they can’t go on. Can’t go on. But then they say they will go on.”
Sandy’s tears fell anew, and she left the table. Bishop followed her. The rest of us looked at each other. “Did I say something wrong?” Rebecca asked.
I shook my head.
Cynthia was setting the table—practically hurling things at it—and Rebecca and Bernice were putting out steaming bowls of vegetables and grains in the center. Then a bowl of cabbage soup was set on each plate.
“Should we put their plates in the oven?” Rebecca asked, referring to Sandy and Bishop.
“The food will dry out,” Bernice said.
“But it’ll get cold,” Rebecca countered.
Bernice shrugged and Rebecca got up, covered the plates with a dish towel, and set them in the oven on a low heat.
Stepan and Brad wolfed their food down; I’d never seen people so hungry. The food was bearable. I could do better, I thought, but then had second thoughts—maybe not, with their ingredients. No meat or fish, no butter or cream—no luxuries of any sort. Maybe I couldn’t do better. An electric lamp hung over the kitchen table; another hung over the sink, but in other parts of the room there were kerosene lamps. I asked why they had both.
“We have generator,” Stepan answered me. “Expensive to run. We try save money. So we use kerosene. Cheaper.”
For dessert we had one of the apple pies made with Crisco. It was nowhere near as good as Mom’s, made with butter. Not as flaky, and the flavor was not as good. It filled the stomach; that’s all you could say about it. Maybe I could add something to this commune if I stayed. But maybe they wouldn’t care, or even notice.
After dinner we had more coffee, not very good coffee, either, weak, probably made with some mediocre grocery store brand with something added to bulk it out. Chickory?
Sandy and Bishop came back.
“Sorry,” Sandy said.
“Sure,” a couple of people reassured her. They got their plates from the oven, sat down, and ate quietly.
When they had finished eating, Brad stood up and spoke as if at a meeting. Formally, he announced, “We’re really happy that Bishop’s friends Sandy and Jess have joined us tonight,” he said, as though he was the master of some ceremony.
Everyone chimed in, in agreement.
Brad turned to us then. “What are your plans? Have you come to visit, or to stay?”
I’m sure we looked dumb.
“Well, I mean, like, how long do you plan to stay?”
Sandy was embarrassed. She meant to stay, period. And I meant to stay as long as I felt she needed me. We were both noncommittal, saying we were unsure.
“Well, whatever you two do is cool, man,” Brad said, looking at Sandy and then at me. “I mean, you don’t need a visa to come here. But the thing is, a commune has rules, it has to have rules. And our first rule is that anyone who wants to can come here and stay for one night free. But after that, to stay, you have to work.”
“Oh, we want to work!” I exclaimed, having already chosen my job.
“Yes!” Sandy agreed.
“Okay, good. Glad to hear it. We have three areas of work: the chickens, the horses, and the farm. Three of us have the horses pretty well covered. I mean, we can always use an extra hand, but we can take care of most things without help. Bernice and Rebecca do most of the care of the chickens—feed them, clean up the shit, sweep the coop, give them water, put ointment in their eyes, collect eggs. There’s not that much to do with chickens, so they also take most care of the house—the cooking and cleaning, although all of us pitch in with doing dishes and marketing and stuff, and we each take care of our own rooms, clean them and change our sheets twice a month. We all share kitchen and laundry duty, we have a schedule on the wall. Stepan and Lysanne do most of the farming; Rebecca and Bernice help too, and we all pitch in sometimes, but that’s the area where we need the most help. Especially in the spring and fall. So most new people are asked to help out on the farm. Would you be willing to do that?”
Sandy and I agreed we would, although my heart sank. I really wanted to run the kitchen. I thought that would be fun and I thought I could make a difference there. Anyway, I wanted to try.
“Right now, of course, there’s nothing happening with the farm. But in spring, it’s mammoth work.
“The next thing is sleeping. There are seven bedrooms and seven of us, but some of us are doubled up right now, so three bedrooms are free, so you can have one or two, whichever you want.”
Was everybody waiting, on edge, for our response? I must have been imagining it.
“Thanks,” Sandy said, the first time she’d spoken in a full voice since dinner had begun.
“So which will it be?” Brad continued, gazing at us in the tense silence.
“Huh?”
“Will you need one room or two?”
Oh! That was the big question.
Sandy consulted me with her eyebrows. “Two, please?”
“Yes,” I said. I wouldn’t mind doubling with Sandy if they were pressed for space, but we both liked our privacy. Could it have been that everyone now relaxed? And that Brad and Stepan settled back with a look of satisfaction?
“Third problem is money. When we started the commune, Charlotte, Jerry, and I each put thirty-five hundred dollars in the kitty. That paid for the house—which was eight thousand—put on a new roof, and did a little other work necessary for livability. To buy the horses, fix up the barns and corrals, do the chicken coops, and install a generator, we had to take out a mortgage. When Jerry and Charlotte left, we couldn’t afford to buy their shares back, but if the house is ever sold, they get a fraction of the purchase price.
“Bernice and Rebecca put two thousand dollars each in the kitty when they first came. We used that for a down payment on a plow. Lysanne put in three thousand, which paid off the plow. Stepan had no cash, but he chips in weekly. We all do—we have to chip in for food and fuel and water and paying off the mortgage and the plow, but Stepan chips in more than the rest of us because he had no buy-in money.
“He works at the post office three afternoons a week and six nights as a cleaner at the supermarket. The rest of us have part-time jobs. Stepan puts in a hundred dollars a week, which, with the ninety to a hundred dollars a week the riding academy earns, and the six-hundred-a-month board for the three horses, pays our over
head—fuel for the generator, the mortgage, and general repairs. Our money pays for groceries we don’t grow. So how much can you girls chip in?”
“I could get three thousand dollars,” Sandy said.
“That would be great!” Brad said warmly. “We really need it. We need a big dehumidifier for the basement and money to repair a leak down there. We may need a whole new foundation. We need a backhoe and a power mower to get in the hay.”
“I can get something.” I said. “I’m not sure how much.” I was trying to imagine telling Dad I needed money to live on a commune. I could see his face flush and his eyes widen from where I was sitting; I could hear him shouting, calling me horrible names. I wondered if Mom could get her hands on some cash. I hadn’t even thought about money before I came. You think commune and you think free.
“Anything would help,” Brad continued. “We live from week to week, and we never have any luxuries. We have no capital.”
“We sell our eggs every week to the grocery store,” Lysanne informed us.
“They pay that money into our account, and we use it for cleaning supplies and flour and rice and stuff like that,” Rebecca offered. “Peanut butter,” she added.
“But it’s never enough. We’re always in debt to them. Coupla hundred bucks.” Lysanne put in.
They were all extremely attentive during this discussion. Obviously, it was a major subject for them. “I’ll call my mom tonight,” I said.
“You’ll have to go to town. There’s a pay phone outside the general store,” Bernice remarked.
“I’ll go with her,” Sandy said. “I want to buy some wine. To celebrate being together again with Bishop and being with all of you. Do they sell wine in the general store?”
“Wine! Wow!” Bishop exclaimed. The whole group applauded in glee. Wine was a treat. “Yes, they do. I’ll go with you, show you the way.”
“Go ahead.” Rebecca spoke as if giving us permission. “We’ll clean up the kitchen.”
A little chill crept down my spine. Was that how it was? You had to have group approval to do anything? Was that how it was going to be living on a commune?
12
It was at the commune that my adult life really began. It was after I set out with Sandy, with two hundred dollars in my pocket and a duffel bag packed with books, underwear, a spare pair of jeans, a pair of sandals, and a half dozen tops and sweaters, that I grew up. It’s strange now to think how desirable it seemed, all through childhood, to be grown up; I equated adulthood with freedom and decisiveness, self-knowledge. But of course, these don’t come automatically, as I’d imagined, and they are not synonymous. Being adult means you’re responsible for yourself, which is burdensome, neither fun nor liberating. Still, I would not want to go back to being a child.
We settled in at Pax, the name given to the commune by its founders. Sandy got her mother to send her three thousand dollars, and my mother sent me fifteen hundred, all she had in the bank. We contributed the whole amount. With this money, the commune—we—voted to pay to have the foundation of the house firmed up and the leaks sealed. We bought a couple of big dehumidifiers for the basement, installed new gutters, and had the chimney cleaned so we could use the fireplace in the living room. That was nice: now we could sit in there on soft chairs, on special occasions, and be warm. We thought about buying an oil burner, but that was far too costly for us. The old coal furnace sat unused in the basement and we kept ourselves warm by the wood stove in the kitchen and the fireplace in the living room. The bedrooms and dining room (which we never used) were freezing cold from October through May.
We also bought a stallion, a good one who would bring in stud fees. The dehumidifiers were a real improvement—the house had been starting to smell moldy—but also a real pain in the neck: they had to be emptied every damned day. We had a schedule for that, as we did for kitchen duty. We still needed money to buy seeds and a backhoe, and both Sandy and I got jobs in town. Since we were now living with the degenerates on the commune, I didn’t dare approach Ginger, whose café would have been an ideal place for me to work. Sandy said it was her loss, but it was mine too. I got part-time work in the supermarket, which paid minimum wage and no tips, but my wages covered my share of Pax expenses and I had a few dollars a week left over for myself—just enough for cigarettes and tampons. For the first time in my life I was dependent on the library for books I wanted to read instead of being able to buy them.
The big question about bedrooms, I discovered later, was whether we were gay or not. Once we took separate bedrooms, everybody assumed we were both straight. Bishop hadn’t known any different before he left; even Sandy didn’t know until she met Sarah, though she may have suspected.
Sarah hadn’t come to Sandy’s house at all when Sandy’s family was sitting shiva, and when I asked Sandy why, she acted vague, saying, “Oh, you know, she doesn’t even know what it is, sitting shiva.” I thought they had talked on the telephone a couple of times but I wasn’t even sure about that. I privately thought it was awful that Sarah hadn’t stood by Sandy at such a terrible time, but of course I didn’t say so. I didn’t know what had happened between them. I wasn’t even sure if Sandy was writing to Sarah from Pax. I was afraid to ask, but it was on my mind often. We never discussed it. Nor did we discuss the fact that she had now simply left Sarah behind without a second thought. I took this as a measure of her desperation.
Sandy had pulled away a little, become a little secretive, almost reclusive. Maybe it was because on a commune, you are surrounded by other people all the time. You can’t escape them except in your room at night. The others didn’t seem to want to—most had partners, so they had company, including in bed, and they seemed to like that. At night, when I’d be alone in my room, grateful for the silence and the privacy, Bernice or Rebecca or Bishop would knock on my door, wanting to talk, wanting me to listen to music or their new poem, wanting to borrow a book. Sandy said this happened to her too. These people always wanted to be together. I was as nice as I could be about it, but for me it went against the grain. I needed solitude.
On the other hand, Sandy’s new personality had appeared before we left for Pax—her prickliness, the feeling I sometimes had that she might hurt herself. As if she lived on the edge of something.
Sandy and I had it easy when we first got to the commune, because it was winter and the farm was in a dormant state. We helped out with the horses and chickens (shoveling manure, mostly) and by fixing fences. We bought paint and painted the downstairs rooms, which brightened the place a lot. Our spirits were high when, a few days after we arrived there, in January 1973, Nixon ended the war. By the beginning of April, all our soldiers had returned home, that is, all but the fifty-eight thousand who had been killed, including one Patrick Connolly. There were now more than three hundred thousand veterans in hospitals or homes, in wheelchairs, on crutches, wounded, maimed.
People at Pax talked about the war a lot, and all of them opposed it; it was all “us and them.” It was generally assumed that we, as protestors, had ended the war. But I had different ideas. I didn’t discuss them with anyone. I knew they would not like them, and I couldn’t defend my bitterness—they were so sure we’d had an effect on things. I didn’t want to have to fight with Brad, who was a little intimidating. My thinking was that this was the most protested war in American history. Bishop said that people protested other wars—the Civil War, the American Revolution. But people didn’t protest any war as hard or for as long as they did this one. Yet this was the longest war the country had ever fought. If you counted from 1950, when Truman first sent American advisors there, it had gone on for twenty-three years. If you counted from 1954, when the government surreptitiously sent soldiers over there, then for nineteen. Or if you counted from 1960, when troop numbers started to escalate, it was thirteen years. And even if you only counted from 1964 and the fake reports about the Gulf of Tonkin, it still went on for nine years: much longer than the American Revolution, the Civil War, the War of 1
812, or the French and Indian War. And to me that indicated how our government felt about us. As if they said, Okay, you go ahead and protest, we’ll show you!
I didn’t want to talk this over with my friends. I didn’t want to hear one of them agree with me, to say, Yes, because we protested, the government prolonged the war. Just to show us who’s boss. To put us in our place.
I couldn’t have borne to hear that. I could hardly bear to think it.
Almost everyone at Pax hated the government, I knew. They thought government was an elite entity that took power only to increase it and had no interest in us. Some of them even thought it was okay to attack government installations, for example, nuclear bases. Only Bernice and Cynthia supported traditional parties and politics. I kept quiet mostly, because I just wasn’t sure. But I yearned, oh, I longed, to believe the government was what I’d thought when I was little, a group of men (I had always imagined them as white men) who cared about the welfare of the country as a whole, who worked toward that, although they sometimes made mistakes.
So Watergate was especially fascinating for me. If ever there was proof that the government was not interested in the people, that was it. At the end of January, before all the troops came home from Vietnam, the Watergate burglars were convicted, and by that summer, the hearings had started. This caused an uproar in the commune, because most of us felt we absolutely had to have a television set to watch the proceedings. We could hear them on the radio, but we wanted to see them. But that would mean we’d have to buy a television set and then scrimp on all other uses of electricity, or pay whopping bills for generator fuel. In the end, we bought a set, put it in the kitchen, and that summer, kept running in to watch it. The farm did not get our full attention that year, but Watergate made us happy, very happy. It made us feel we did matter, we had some power, government could be called to account.
The Love Children Page 19