Shelter in Place

by Alexander Maksik

  “Mrs. March,” I said.

  They squinted. They soured.

  “She’s married to my father.”

  And then someone said, “Ms.”

  This person, who once appeared so sharply defined, exists now only as part of that blurry mass of memory, like the waitresses at The Owl, like those friends on the beach in Big Sur, those friends I loved so much, who I could never leave, who I would never lose. Like so many people who’ve been taken by death, or by distance, or by time. Even those you’re not ever meant to forget, those you’re expected to keep forever clear and definite, even they blur.

  She said, “Ms. We use the neutral Ms. Regardless of marital status.”

  And another person said, or something like it, “We choose not to be defined by our partners.”

  “Well—” I said quietly.

  Quietly, though what I wanted was to chuck my chair through a window.

  “Anne-Marie March is my mother. I am her son. I am here because she asked me to be.”

  “And we are pleased to be here,” Tess said in her new politician’s voice.

  “We are all very happy to have you,” Marcy Harper said, smiling at me.

  All of us just children.

  There was a small scar. That’s when I first noticed it. Right then when she smiled. A small scar running up and around the outside of her eye, a soft C turned inward.

  “We’re certainly not here to lecture you,” she said glancing about the room.

  The others chastened.

  Her eyes were deadly. She was like Tess. She was like my mother. An intelligence and confidence to kill.

  I smiled at her.

  Someone asked politely, with caution, “Why does she want you to meet with us? Why are you here?”

  Tess, who had been sitting quietly, looked up. “We are here because Ms. March cannot be. Because you wrote to her. Because she asked us to see what can be done. What this small group might do. We came to listen.”

  Marcy leaned back in her chair, while the rest of them began to speak.

  You can imagine, no? Maybe you’ve been in those undergraduate classrooms with the freshly politicized. You’ve known the thrill of having outrage articulated. The thrill of finding others smarter, and angrier, than you are. Of believing, however briefly, that you might change things. That you might—and here phrases like corpses—make a difference, change the world. With knowledge, with awareness, with letter-writing, with discussion, with art, with marching, and placards, and editorials, and leaflets. With pure fury. You remember the way that felt. Whatever the injustice. The energy you had to fight it, the ways you would take back the night. What you’d do before you had to work, before you had to pay your rent, chip away at your debt, take care of other people, before the exhaustion came, and all that lovely fury turned bitter and cold.

  You remember the way that new language sounded, the repeated phrases, how you adopted them, and briefly believed they were your own. The novelty of that rage.

  And later how you ran up against its limits.

  They said, We are tired of the way women are treated. We are angry. We want to effect change. We want to act. They said, culture of violence and objectifying and sexualizing and demeaning. The rape. The abuse. They said, traditions, hypocrisy, double standards. Systemic, they said, and patriarchy. We must exit the patriarchy.

  They said, We admire your mother. Because your mother fought back. Because your mother refused to walk away. Because she did what we wish we had the courage to do. We will no longer grant permission. We too will fight back, they said.

  They talked until they ran out of language.

  Marcy spoke then. “I think the question finally is this: What are we willing to do about it?”

  She met my eyes.

  “Yes,” Tess said. “That’s right. That’s certainly the question.”

  “When you say you want to fight back, does that mean you believe in what my mother has done? Do you believe in fighting with hammers?” I asked.

  I carried the gravity of my mother’s violence. It was unearned.

  And then, “Your mother acted in self-defense.”

  “No, she was defending someone else,” I said.

  “And in that case, she’s justified. Self-defense or the defense of someone else,” someone said.

  “Why then is she in prison?”

  “The patriarchy,” they said.

  “No,” I said. “No, it’s the seven blows. She wouldn’t be there if it had been one, or even two. But there were seven. So the question is whether or not you believe in what she did. Do you believe Dustin Strauss deserved to die for his sins?”

  I don’t know where all that talking had come from. Or the affect, the courtroom register. The new momentum, the enthusiasm for my vague position. Tess made some move to speak. A breath or a cough. I knew she’d imagined the meeting otherwise, that she was to be the leader, but I went on anyway.

  “My question is real,” I said. “Not rhetorical. I wonder what you think. Does violence call for violence? Does a man deserve to die for beating a woman?”

  “No,” someone said, of course not. And someone else, “No one deserves to die. No.”

  “And yet, you have made my mother your hero.”

  “It wasn’t intentional. She lost control. She couldn’t take it any longer. It was the last straw. She snapped. It could have been any of us. Any of us could snap. There is always a limit.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It could have been any of us.”

  Marcy spoke again. “Could it have been you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But you are not as angry as we are, Mr. March.”

  “No?”

  “No. That would be impossible.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because you’re not a woman,” she said. “And no matter whose son you are, you can’t know the anger, because you can’t know the fear.”

  “I don’t claim to.”

  “And yet you’re here. Another man at the front of another room. Self-satisfied and superior. Another man illuminating the world for us silly girls.”

  And even as arrogant and as stupid as I was in those days, I knew enough to keep my mouth shut. Because she was right. Because I was precisely what she described.

  “Another man running the room, while a woman sits at his side with her mouth shut.” Marcy flashed her eyes at Tess, a look that contained no sympathy, and then she turned back to me. “You are here as a guest, Mr. March. You can spare us the lectures.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Okay.”

  And because I was humiliated, because I was a graceless fool, I stood up and left the room without apologizing. I walked out onto that wide lawn and bought a cup of coffee from a cart and sat with it on a bench.

  My shame made me angry.

  Tess would be furious.

  And yet I was surprised to find that I hadn’t been deadened by the experience. The wounds were superficial. In the fresh air, my adrenaline diluting, I felt oddly energized, thrilled by what had happened, surprised by a sense of pleasure.

  Soon the door swung open and Tess crossed the lawn. She narrowed her eyes at me, mocking, scolding, but she wasn’t angry. And the relief of that only brought me higher. She sat at my side and ran her hand through my hair.

  “Joey, Joey, Joey,” she said, teasing. No more admonition than that. Just the two of us side by side on a bench in the salt air.

  62.

  I had no true conviction. There was nothing beneath my sad performance in that Emerson seminar room. What I wanted then were orders. What I wanted then was the freedom of being someone’s soldier. And Tess must have known. Whatever the reason for my stubborn resistance—fear, the state of being young and male—it had passed as quickly as the time it had taken Marcy Harper to dispatch me from her
table.

  “We’re going to do it, Joey,” Tess said, her fingers still moving through my hair. “With these people or without them.”

  “What is the it, Tess?”

  “I’m not sure. But I think we have an idea, don’t we? I think we have some idea.”

  I shrugged.

  “Anyway, fuck these women. I’ll tell your mother.”

  I smiled. “I like Marcy Harper,” I said.

  She laughed and turned to me with her sharp, murderous eyes.

  “Yes, so do I,” she said, though I didn’t believe her.

  We were quiet for a long time. In the weak sun, Tess stroking the back of my head, coffee turning cold in our cups, we watched the mundane drama of Emerson quad on an early winter’s day.

  After a while, Tess began to talk.

  “In Portland once,” she said. “My first year in college. I was what? Eighteen? I was downtown at a café, at a little outdoor table. A few of us had come up for the weekend, just to get away from school, to be somewhere else for a change. My friends had gone off somewhere and I was alone, reading by myself. There were people everywhere. I was caught up, completely lost in whatever the book was. And then all at once I could sense someone behind me. I thought at first maybe it was the guy who was working there, so I started to turn my head, but just as I did there was a low voice in my left ear. I could feel breath on my neck. I froze. It said, ‘What are you reading?’ I didn’t respond. I stared at the pages, praying he’d go away, but he stayed there breathing on me. He smelled like toothpaste and sweat. I kept my eyes on the page. I couldn’t move for some reason. Then he whispered right into my ear, ‘You fucking bitch, you fucking whore, I’m going to follow you home and rape you.’ I made a noise then, a little cry of fear or surprise or outrage, but still, even after that, I couldn’t move. And he mocked me. He imitated my sound and he did it perfectly, too. Then he kissed me on the cheek, Joe. It was so vile. I closed my eyes and when I opened them I couldn’t feel him there anymore. It took all my will to turn, but by then he was gone. There were people everywhere and they all seemed like they were walking away from me. I looked at the others sitting around tables, but none seemed to have noticed anything. I’m sure they thought he was just my boyfriend stopping by to say hello.”

  Throughout this whole story, Tess had kept her hand on the back of my head. Eyes dead forward as if she were speaking to the passing students, or to herself. Now she turned to me. She slipped her left foot beneath her right thigh the way she liked to sit on the couch at home when we were talking, or when I was reading and she suddenly wanted to play.

  She is leaning toward me, the incredulous expression, part pain, part disbelief.

  “We drove back to Eugene. I looked out the window and said nothing to my friends about it. But that man was everywhere. His breath. His lips on my cheek. His hissing voice. I was only terrified. And disgusted. I wasn’t even angry yet. And when I got home I went to a phone booth and called my mother. This was a little less than a year before she died. She still hadn’t told me she was sick. I called her and told her what had happened. It was a Sunday night and everything was so quiet and dark. The phone booth was outside our dorm. I wanted the privacy of it. I remember every detail of making that call. Walking out into the night in sweats and an old T-shirt, barefoot. My hair still wet from the long shower. The fear I felt crossing the dark walkway. The fear I felt standing alone. A frightened little girl all lit up in a glass box. Determined to stay there. I told her my story and when I was finished she said, ‘Well, Tess, you know, it’s always the goddamn same. There’s nothing you can do, but put your head down and protect yourself. It’s the way of the world, I’m afraid.’

  “And I said, ‘Of course there’s something you can do. Of course there is.’

  “She may have begun to talk, might have said, ‘once . . .’ or ‘when I was your age . . .’ but in the end all she told me was, ‘You’re lucky, sweetheart. They do a lot worse.’

  “‘What do you mean?’ I asked, not because I didn’t know, but because I hoped she would tell me her own stories, because for a moment it sounded like she would, but she didn’t. All she said was, ‘You know exactly what I mean, Tess.’

  “I waited for a moment. I remember there was a long pause, and how badly I wanted to ask about her life, but just couldn’t get myself to speak. And then she said, softer, ‘You have to be careful, honey. That’s all. You have to protect yourself. It’s the most important thing.’

  “I remember it so well, Joe: standing in that cold phone booth, the quiet world outside, listening to my mom’s voice. I can see her and I can see me. Me. Myself a thousand years ago. That girl missing her mother, her mother so afraid for her daughter. Just the two of them talking across those lines.”

  That was the story Tess told me one afternoon. Or as well as I can render it. It can’t be accuracy that matters. It can’t be accuracy that honors. It must be desire. It must be purity of intention. It must be love itself. And now, here I return through all the layers. Through my memory, my desire, Tess’s memory, what she withheld and did not, knowingly and unknowingly, her mother’s memory, what she withheld and did not, knowingly and unknowingly, and so on until we are returned to the bench at Emerson College.

  From which we wandered out along a campus path to the ocean.

  We walked and walked and then, when the wind came up, hid out high in the dunes. There she told me that after her trip to Portland, after the call to her mother, she had joined groups like Marcy Harper’s. That she’d marched and protested. She’d spent years doing it. Writing letters and organizing concerts and stapling flyers to telephone poles.

  Shameful as this is to admit, child that I was, until then I’d never thought of the way women live. Even after my mother did what she did. It wasn’t until that day out in those dunes. Sitting with her, listening to her stories. A litany of minor and major violence. That stark difference in daily experience. The normalcy and constancy of fear. I’d never thought about it. Not really until Tess came along.

  She told me the way they had all slowly given up. The way they had lost the energy for the fight. Kept their heads down. The older ones ahead of her graduated, went off to work. They went on about their lives. Took it all for the way of the world. Just as her mother had said to do. Awful but unchangeable. Like so many other things. And if I want to have a job, and if I don’t want to be alone the rest of my life, and if I want to have children. So keep your head down, don’t make eye contact, keep walking.

  But Tess wouldn’t do that now. “Something has changed,” she said.

  First when we fell in love. Then when she’d learned about my mother. After she’d gone to see her. Now she was energized. Now she was on fire again. For the second time in her young life.

  We loved those vast Washington beaches. Their dark mirrors, water sliding across the wet sand, the doubled pipers hunting crabs. We stayed pressed together, side by side, facing the sunset. Just our heads above the edge of dune, looking out over the giant beach.

  We were up there on our bellies, in our sniper’s nest, protected from the wind blowing hard and cold, straight on shore, me with my binoculars, Tess with her rifle.

  63.

  I went for a run this morning. It wasn’t even light out. Not that it gets very light lately with the weather we’ve been having. Rain and fog, rain and fog. But I woke up this morning and ran, slicing through the grey, straight on into the trees. I was loose and light. I could have kept going too, but I wanted to be back here before I lost it. You can’t always have me gloomy. You can’t always have me scratching around in the weeds. It gets tiresome, I know. Believe me I know.

  No bird, no tar today. You see how it’s arbitrary? How yesterday’s brain would tell it another way? And tomorrow’s will another? There’s no logic to it. It’s just the way it comes. One day, fire, the next day, black swamp, and that’s the way it will alw
ays go for me.

  Isn’t it strange that I’ve given darkness its objects? Made it the tar and the bird. Given it weight and talons, substance and movement. But the other thing, the burning rise, the upswing, the brightness, the clarity, the elevation, and sure vision—all of it is abstraction. The language of religions, of revelation and epiphany.

  None of which is right.

  It is not God I see. It is not God I feel.

  I can’t imagine what you think at this point, but trust me that I have no illusions. Not now. Not any longer and certainly not of that kind. It’s not God I felt. It is only supreme and wild pleasure. It is only illogical assurance and conviction. What is that exuberance called? What fits in that empty space? What animal? What substance?

  I can’t find it.

  It is neither beast nor object.

  And maybe it’s better this way.

  Maybe that’s the real beauty, the true magic: the dark dying exists in me as a tangible thing, while the other is beyond the realm of language.

  Tess and I were out on the Olympic Peninsula hiking the Cape Alava loop. It was early spring in one of our first Seattle years.

  We’d come around a point and found a doe giving birth to a fawn. Not fifty feet from where we stood, its little legs dangling from its mother, and Tess grabbed my arm, dug her nails into my skin. As I watched the fawn fall to the pebbled beach, the doe nosing it up to its feet, there was a splitting in my chest. I pulled Tess away as quietly as my heart would allow. I shook her and said, “Did you see it, Tess? Did you? Come on, we have to swim,” and I began taking off my clothes.

  “It’s too cold, Joe. It’s going to rain again.” She had her arms around me. “Slow down, Joey, slow down,” but there was nothing she could do. I was naked and running across the slick rocks, through the wind, toward the ocean. I slipped and fell and felt nothing. Soon I was at the very edge and I dove headlong into the water. I tore open the back wall of a wave and called out and laughed at the soaring gulls and swam pulsing with elation, brimming rapture, qualities of pleasure I’d never known, while Tess stood alone, so far away on the shore calling to me, words impossible to hear, but I could see her as if she were there above me balancing on the surface of the water. I swam and swam and drank the salt water as if it flowed from a spring and felt none of the cold, none of the rain, not my broken thumb, nor swelling ankle, nor bleeding knee, only pleasure, only water and air and whatever it is that sends me into the world like that.