Shelter in Place
Page 22
Laughter.
There was competition now.
Who could do what?
Who could do more?
Who could do worse?
So, someone threw an egg.
Missed.
Someone threw a bottle.
Now there was glass in the street.
“Fuck off, dyke. Fuck off, dyke. Fuck off, dyke.”
Faded. Failed chant.
Try again:
“Suck my cock. Suck my cock. Suck my cock.”
This one more successful. Call and response. Back and forth. Fraternity, sorority, fraternity, sorority. Men calling, women responding.
Low: “Suck my cock.”
High: “Suck my cock.”
Fade away. Laughter then a lull. And our formation unbroken. Candles still lit. Promises kept.
But always there is someone willing to cross the street. Rarely does he travel alone. So across Barry came three Beta brothers. Two shirtless, one in a red polo.
They were familiar to us from bars. Familiar to me and Seymour and Tess. The types, I mean.
We filtered them through our three respective lenses—barman, doorman, waitress.
We experts. We warriors.
They came on with the swagger of athletes at home.
They said, “What are you here for? What do you want?”
And we said nothing.
I can’t say who of our front line looked past them, and who looked down, and who raised her eyes.
But pretty soon they were right in front of Marcy Harper. The single black woman there. A fact worth mentioning, I think. Worth mentioning that we are in White Pine, Washington, in 1992.
In any case, she didn’t look away and she didn’t look down. Whatever the reason, the drunk boys were over the curb now, closer, focused on their single subject.
“What are you here for?” one of them said.
And the other: whining, slurring, repeating his call as if he were demanding the answer to some crucial existential question, “What are you for? What are you for?”
I kept thinking, trying to keep my promise, as a way to remain calm, He’s forgotten here. He’s forgotten here.
Then a litany: Cunt, whore, dyke, bitch, et cetera. The usual.
Then, noticing me and Seymour, faces shadowed by our hoods, they stopped for a moment. But they found their courage again, bolstered each other, and then to us: pussy, faggot, piece of shit, et cetera.
On it went. You can imagine, can’t you? The insults, the provocations, our refusing to respond.
What else then is there to do for those minds, those enemy soldiers?
So the whiner, the one in red, he put his hand over Marcy’s face and he pushed. She fell backwards into our second line, into two small women who couldn’t hold her. She landed on the grass, down but unhurt. And still we made no move. Someone found her candle, relit it. Up again. Back in formation. Tess stayed still. I did too. And Seymour. But he pushed an elbow into my ribs.
Which meant: If they do it again, Joe. If they do it again.
I nodded. And I knew that Tess was listening. That she was in agreement. Enough was enough. I also knew that Marcy Harper would be angry. That she wouldn’t want our protection, that she didn’t need it.
But whatever we may have believed then, I don’t think it was ever a question of protection. We were, just like those three fools in front of us, looking for war.
So when the red shirt laughed and put his palm on her face again and shoved, Seymour and I came through the front line fast. Seymour, following his open hand, came in a single move I knew from the bar. No talk, no warning, just his big fingers open as if around a fat coffee mug driving forward to the throat. He took that boy off the curb and into the street like he was some kind of inflatable doll. Driving him back and down.
Seymour kneeling above the kid now, choking him, holding his head to the asphalt, the boy making a horrible bird sound. And then one of the shirtless ones came toward Seymour, setting up with his leg, winding, but before he could kick I hit him hard in the gut and he fell back. I turned to face the other, who was moving, but not with much enthusiasm. There had been a change in the sound. Now more of them came from the lawn to the street. No more laughter.
Tess was off her line now too, her hood thrown back, yelling in her loudest voice, “C, let him go, C.”
And he did.
The boy rolling away, his hands at his throat. And now Seymour standing with me, facing the coming Beta. Who stood still waiting for the next move, the next decision, for someone else to make it. And Marcy and Tess both yelling, “Stop it. Stop. Fucking stop.”
The two of them brief partners. Same goal, different motives.
Tess in performance, determined to be seen as peaceful.
Marcy in real outrage.
The choked kid was being walked away. The women continued to hold their candles.
In the lull Tess was saying, “Go back, go back.”
Marcy saying the same.
We followed orders. We returned to our line. We waited. That was the end of it.
There were some trailing insults. Bluster. But nothing else.
Each of us stood our ground, kept our places. Burned the candles down.
And then we left. All of us walking in silence to someone’s house where we sat on the front steps drinking beer, while Marcy seethed.
She said what you’d expect, “We don’t need your goddamn protection. We don’t need to be defended.”
We were sorry. Seymour was quiet the way he always was after battle. Tess trying to play sympathizer and sister in arms, but getting nowhere.
Soon we said our goodbyes. Marcy Harper looking down at us from the top step as we walked away, Seymour lumbering along ahead, sullen.
And us three we went back to the truck, drove up to Lester’s and got lucky with a booth. The place was packed with guards, the music loud.
We ordered a pitcher of Olympia and a pizza.
Something had been proven. Tess had made her point.
We were not suited to peaceful protest. That kind of thing didn’t coincide with our vision of ourselves. Or, at least, Tess’s vision. But you have to understand that there was no great system in place. No grand philosophy. None of us could have told you what our ambitions were then. It was to do with rage and love and friendship. Boredom, too, if I’m to be honest. Let us not pretend that we were noble. Or entirely so. We were kids, after all. Which excuses nothing, of course. Only to say that reason was secondary.
We were not that night at Lester’s, nor at any other time, nor in any other place, talking politics and activism. Do not confuse us with movie militants in a basement room, cleaning our weapons, maps on the table. Or even with Marcy Harper’s disciplined and thoughtful campus variation.
That night we ate and drank and said nothing of import. No rousing speeches were made. But now we had an immediate and certain future before us. No ambiguity. No wondering what was to come. And I think it was that feeling of certainty and resignation that drew us from the night’s outrage and gloom into something brighter, into something nearly joyful.
91.
I’m afraid that I have made some fundamental error.
I worry that I did not look at Tess correctly. Have not. Through all the years together, and then from here, too, from afar, in all these increments of recollection.
What is the nature of this error?
I’m not certain.
Is it something to do with the way that I observed her? Something to do with beauty, with the effect her body had on me. To do, even, with the words themselves.
Beautiful, for one.
Think of the way I saw her in the bathroom that sad afternoon. The light on her breasts. The slope of her back, her thighs, her calves, her narrow ankles. All the rest I’ve described to
you. The power she had. Not she, but her body. You see in those descriptions that there are no scars. No blemishes, no hairs trapped beneath her skin. All that body and so little mind. Oh, but that’s not true either. More than anything she exists in me as a force, a heat deep in my spine, a turning in my chest. It is not her physical shape that stirs me most or first. And it never was, not even from the start. It is everything else: will, fire, fury, lust, intelligence, vision, heart, humor, conviction.
I am doomed to this litany, to confusion, to clichés, to dead words.
And yet, and still, the way she appears here to me now so clearly, I see no imperfection. And is that not a kind of tyranny? Haven’t I imprisoned her? Us?
She becomes material so easily—whole and in parts. Her skin, her eyes, her breasts, her shoulders, her mouth, her thighs. I do not mean to do it. But there she is assembling and disassembling.
Here I close my eyes.
The falling line of her throat.
Her feet, which she did not like for their size and flatness.
“Too big,” she said. “So ugly.”
But no, there was nothing ugly.
And I do remember scars.
One thin curve soaring from her hip bone. Left.
A lopsided diamond at her ankle. Left.
The start of a spiral on the meat of her shoulder. Right.
Coming home from somewhere in winter, her eyes red from the cold, nose running, hair a tangle, lips dry and flaking. Or the relentless pimples, which appeared on her chin late into her thirties. The lines at her eyes, and across her forehead. The flecks of grey in her hair.
It was all the same.
Her beauty deepened. I cannot change this, and I cannot avoid the word. For so long, I have tried to make her ugly in body and mind. But there is nothing to be done.
Through all the years we are expected to stop looking at one another, I looked. When abruptly we were no longer young. Through the panic of age, and accelerating time, and deteriorating bodies, through the shock of, the rebellion against, and, at last, the resignation to those things, I watched her. I could not stop and I wonder if there was an error there. A failing somehow. I wonder if through all that watching, I was doing her harm. If to see her always bathed in these golden lights was itself an act of violence. Was it the violence of worship? Have I, all these years, made her something impossible? Inhuman?
But then I remember my frustration, how often I hated her, how often we fought, her stubbornness, her selfishness, her disappearances, physical and otherwise, her cruelty and blindness.
I have not forgotten how anger flowed between us for so many years. That’s all there too and because it is, I believe I have loved her in spite of those things.
I believe I have loved her fairly.
92.
My father had constructed a life without us. At the meetinghouse he’d become friends with a tall, sturdy man in his seventies who had the face and demeanor of a character actor. He might once have played a noble cowboy, a wise cop, and now, while still handsome, was in fast decline. My father and Hank Fletcher, who was an easy six inches taller, walked together on the beach in the mornings. You might have confused the two for brothers. Hank, limping, hands clasped behind his back, cigarette in his mouth, and my father at his side, carrying that red Thermos full of coffee.
As far as I knew, my father had never had friends of his own. In the first Seattle days, good and old, my parents would, from time to time, have dinner with other couples, but I never once knew him to go out alone with anyone other than me, or Claire, or my mother. There was a time when he played center field in a Sunday softball league, but even then, after those games it was family picnics and barbeques, not men together in bars. His solitude, his reluctance, or incapacity, to make friends never occurred to me, not until my mother took a hammer to Dustin Strauss’s skull and we all found ourselves shipwrecked in White Pine.
Reverberating loudly enough through those years, intensely enough to reach me even through my self-absorption, my righteousness and debilitating love for Tess, was the knowledge that my father was an isolated and lonely man. Even if he would never cop to the accuracy of such descriptions. Never. Because they could be construed as weaknesses, as flaws, and he could not acknowledge such things, or even their possibilities. Not to me. Not beyond the general, the safe concession that, yes, we are all flawed, none of us is finished improving, et cetera. No more specific than that, no more damning than the broad damning of human beings of every kind, and everywhere.
To convey to you the nature of those years in White Pine, there can be no separating these three fundamental and confluent facts:
1. My mother’s incarceration and subsequent change of demeanor and, of course, what brought her there.
2. My gradual understanding that my father was, save for his son and imprisoned wife, friendless and lonely in the world.
And 3. My love (measly word) for Tess.
Which is all to say that it was a surprise to witness my father’s renaissance: first the meetinghouse, and now Hank Fletcher.
I would like to tell you that it was entirely pleasant. I would like to say I was big enough of heart by then that to see my father walking side by side with his handsome new friend provoked in me feelings only of happiness and warmth, but I am humiliated to tell you that this is not the case.
My displeasure, my suspicion and petty irritation was, in part, to do with the Quakers. Perhaps I was protective of my father, whom I imagined to be weakened and vulnerable. And I could not distinguish Hank from the church, even if I had no reason to be suspicious of either.
More than his newfound Quakerism was that I was resentful and suspicious of his willingness to continue his life, to live without us, to do what was foreign, and therefore become foreign.
But what do I know? Have I not proven time and again, how little I know of myself, how foolish I am, and, most important, most simply, how often I am wrong? Well, I am ready now, in the way I believe my father was ready then, to give myself over to the intelligences of other people, other institutions, mysteries greater, and more interesting, than the self.
I am prepared to surrender.
How many times have we read some version of it? We must abandon our rule, our dominance, our control, our charge. It is the only way to peace, et cetera.
Anyway, for the time being, now there they are, the two of them walking south along the beach. A pretty day, not too much wind, warm enough for both of them to go without hats or gloves, sun coming and going, red Thermos in hand, cigarette between Hank’s fingers. And me, I’m sitting up on the promenade with the love of my life. We’re eating fried clams from red baskets and the seagulls are at us, flapping their wings and screaming to one another.
In a few weeks we’ll all have dinner together. Tess and I, Hank Fletcher and my dad, and Seymour. A new iteration of an old family. Another version in such a long series of years, and families.
I say to Tess, I say with my mouth full, “Ah, Dad’s new friend.”
Or maybe I say something worse, something vicious, or in a crueler tone, and Tess, she tells me I’m an asshole. She explains to me once again that I should be kind to my father, and then she says, offhanded, not as some great pronouncement, “Sometimes I think he is braver than any of us.”
And I ask, “Braver even than my mother?”
“Yes, Joe.”
I look at her then, the side of her face, grease glossing her lips. I don’t know Tess to dismiss my mother ever, not in any way. She gets up and brushes her hands on her jeans. Slap slap slap. Back, forward, back. Universal pattern, universal rhythm.
She walks out to the metal railing and calls to them, “Richard, Hank.” Three syllables. Another unit.
The two men turn and look up, and when they see her there, smile and shine and wave. I watch her disappear down the steps to the sand, vanishing i
n segments—feet, legs, waist, shoulders, neck, head. Gone.
93.
My mother in prison, a dying animal. Some essential thing leaching out of her. My father shifting. The muscles around his eyes softening, relaxing, providing his face a new peace. In those days, in memory, he is so often in the distance. In the meetinghouse. On the beach with Hank. Crossing the yard, walking to the front door of his house. There is always a separating space—parking lot, sand, promenade, lawn.
Meanwhile across town: Tess pacing her cell. She is seething. She is losing weight.
Seymour is biding his time. He smokes. He gulps his whiskey down. He sweats. He eats little. Yet I have the impression he is never as drunk as we are. Always on the lookout, he is the careful one. He watches us. We make him nervous.
We are a single sick body. We are legion. Hot, sweating, trembling, hungry.
We were drinking too much. Those late nights at the bar, those afternoons on our off days, took on the mood of a lunatic militia’s operational meetings. No matter the time, the location, there was always some version of the same staging, the same blocking. Seymour and I stayed seated. Tess began in some elevated position—bar top, chair back, windowsill—and progressed, eventually, inevitably to standing. This is the sensation of that time, the visual tone: Tess high, us low. Tess in motion, us still. Leader and led.
What have I not told you? What have I not remembered?
Other rapes in other frat houses. No one’s surprised, of course. This we learned first from Marcy, and then from the White Pine Witness, proud pursuer of truth, rectitude and gun rights. I cannot remember the order of events. What we knew when, and all that. What difference does it make?
Whatever the case, this is what we came to know in those weeks before we fled White Pine for Seattle: No one had been arrested. Investigation ongoing. One rape was perpetrated by a group. A single witness had lost sleep and so came to the police. Or to the administration. The fundamental facts matter. And they are always the same. They compose the same stories, and are repeated year after year after year after year. The same violence, the same failures, the same impunity, the same verbs, the same nouns.