‘Not so new,’ Peter said. ‘We’ve been together for a while now.’
‘Since before the fire?’
‘Yep,’ he said, after thinking back for a minute.
When Daisy had started dying, Trudy became more and more belligerent, finally getting beaten by a cop with his nightstick at a demonstration at Macy’s and then getting kicked in the back a few months later at the Stock Exchange. Around the time of her second beating, her sister Sam got off drugs for two months and later for two weeks.
‘Are you kidding me?’ Molly said. ‘You mean all this time that Kate and I were running around protecting your ego you had another girlfriend?’
‘Well, you’ve got to take care of your own needs,’ Peter said.
‘Thanks for the advice.’
After his death the bulk of Horne’s holdings had been purchased by the president of a major chemical company who was himself assassinated by a man dying of cancer.
‘Well, I gotta go,’ Molly said sliding off her counter stool.
‘To a demonstration?’ he asked, smiling.
‘As a matter of fact, yes. I’m going to Saint Vincent’s Hospital, where a man dying of AIDS was called “fucking faggot” by a security guard in the emergency room.’
‘Well, good luck,’ he said. ‘You approach the world your way and I’ll approach it mine. “Let a thousand flowers bloom,” said Mao Tse-tung, right?’
Molly went into the cold toward James’s house. She had been rather soft-spoken lately. She was conserving her energy. She didn’t hang out much and liked to read People magazine, listen to the radio and sleep in her clothes. It was a saturation therapy. On the way to his apartment, she was thinking about how sometimes the city gets so beautiful that it’s impossible to walk even one block without getting an idea. The idea she got was to try to remember the truth and not just the stories.
The others were waiting for her in James’s living room where they had been trying to come up with a plan for a demo at the Meadowlands for the next Jets game.
‘We only have an hour before we have to meet the others at Saint Vincent’s,’ James said. ‘So let’s try to get this meeting over with quickly. Here is a map of the stadium.’ He handed out Xeroxed sketches. ‘Now, the goal of this action is to give women support for asking men to wear condoms, right?’
‘Right,’ said Jo-Jo, a recently recruited gay skinhead who came to Justice on his skateboard, even in the snow.
‘So, we’ve made up these bumper stickers to put on all the cars in the parking lot. They say “Men, Use Condoms or Beat It.” Jo-Jo, what’s your report?’
‘Well,’ he said, putting his jackboots up on the coffee table. ‘I called up Trojan, like you said, and they will donate ten thousand free condoms for us to distribute to men and women as they go into the stadium.’
Molly sat back into the cushions on the couch. She was very tired. She held a warm cup of tea in her hands and brought it to her face. The radiators knocked. The winds rattled the shaky windowpanes.
‘I’m tired,’ she said.
‘I’m tired too,’ James said.
‘So many people are so self-satisfied,’ Molly said. ‘They sit around, they don’t do anything.’
‘Suffering can be stopped,’ James said. ‘But it can never be avenged, so survivors watch television. Men die, their lovers wait to get sick. People eat garbage or worry about their careers. Some lives are more important than others. Some deaths are shocking, some invisible. We are a people in trouble. We do not act.’
Then everyone went to Saint Vincent’s because there was nothing more to say.
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Copyright © Sarah Schulman 1990
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Sarah Schulman has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters and events are all fictional and the product of the author’s imagination.
First published in Vintage in 2019
First published in Great Britain by Sheba Feminist Publishers in 1990
First published in the USA by E.P. Dutton in 1990
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781473568549
People in Trouble Page 21