by Brian Morton
Justin had gone to Emerson when she went to Oberlin, and for a while it had seemed as if they were growing in different directions. It didn’t feel like a bad thing; it felt a little sad, but mostly it felt natural.
But now he’d begun to show up again, Facebooking her, Gchatting her, sending thirty-second videos of toys he’d made for a design class, toys that marched for a few steps and then fell down. She didn’t know what she wanted with him, ultimately, but she found this very endearing.
When a teacher in high school once asked the class about people they admired, he chose not a real person but the Tom Hanks character from Big, who gets a job at a toy company and dreams up toys that no grown-up could ever have imagined. Justin’s aim in life was to make things that would bring people joy.
51
Florence offered a rather different model of how to be human. Much had changed, over the years, about Florence’s beliefs and the manner in which she expressed them, but Emily was coming to think that in the most important ways, she hadn’t changed at all. Florence had always been a feminist, and she’d always been a fighter.
In an essay that Florence had written about a historian named Gerda Lerner, Emily had come across the phrase “a militant ethic of overcoming.” The phrase, Emily thought, could have described Florence herself. She was always outraged, always indignant about something she’d read or heard or seen, yet there was something about her that was forever hopeful. She seemed truly to believe that she was taking part in a struggle that might yet end with the power of universal sisterhood and brotherhood winning out against the forces of sexism, exploitation, greed. In another essay she’d quoted a passage from Chekhov in which he’d imagined writing a story about someone who “squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop.” Florence had said that such an effort could be a lifelong project, and Emily had the sense that she’d described her own.
And she was always thinking. Even her habit of interrogating you was starting to feel not so obnoxious, because often she seemed to be thinking out loud, asking questions of you that she was also asking of herself. Florence seemed voracious for argument because she was voracious for learning.
Florence’s old friends were sometimes there when Emily visited. One day Emily left Florence’s apartment along with Vanessa—Vanessa, who had arranged Florence’s surprise party, and who had gushed so embarrassingly about her during the three minutes in which the party had lasted. Emily and Vanessa walked to the subway together, and, unsolicited, Vanessa began to talk about Florence.
“She gave me my life,” Vanessa said. “When we met, I was on track to being nothing more than a helpmate. I had my daydreams, but they all seemed out of reach for someone like me. Florence encouraged me—not just encouraged me: she wouldn’t leave me alone. I don’t think I would have gone to graduate school if she hadn’t badgered me so. I’m a shrink—I’m not sure you know that—and I wouldn’t be a shrink if not for Florence. I’d be seeing a shrink, maybe, but I wouldn’t be one.”
Emily was aware that she was beginning to idealize her grandmother, but she didn’t think idealizing someone was a bad thing, as long as you knew what you were doing. She couldn’t imagine an experience that could daunt the old woman. You could imagine a force that would defeat her—no one is unconquerable—but it was hard to imagine a challenge that she couldn’t somehow find a way to face on her own terms.
52
Sometimes Emily helped Florence with her errands. Venturing out in the world with her could be an adventure. She would stop to berate people who littered. One day she told a beggar to stand up straight and look people in the eye as he begged.
At a Duane Reade one afternoon, ten or fifteen people were waiting to pay for their purchases. Two cashiers were working, and there was one line. A man in a business suit took a look at the situation and evidently decided that there were actually two lines—a line for each cashier—one extending all the way into the distant reaches of the dental care section, the other magically unpeopled. Going to the head of the magic line, he started unloading his basket in front of a cashier.
The woman at the front of the actual line, a worn-out-looking woman in her thirties, stared at him with cartoonish outrage—her mouth was open—but didn’t say anything.
Florence wasn’t even in the line—she and Emily had just entered the store—but what she’d seen had incensed her.
“Can’t you see the line here?” Florence said to him, pointing with her cane.
“There’s two lines,” he said, without even looking at her.
“Take another look.”
“What’s it to you?”
“You don’t throw your trash on the street, you don’t serve yourself first, and you don’t cut in line. It’s called civilization.”
The girl at the cash register called out to the bedraggled woman: “Next customer,” and said to the man, “End of the line, please.”
“Fuck you, you crazy old bitch,” the man said to Florence. He dropped the basket and left the store.
The tired-looking woman came forward with her shampoo.
“Thank you,” she said to Florence.
“You should stand up for yourself,” Florence said.
53
“Were you talking to somebody?” Janine said.
“You scared the hell out of me, Mom.”
It was two in the morning. Emily had thought her mother had gone to bed hours ago.
“I’m sorry. I thought I heard you talking with Mark.”
“I was Skyping with Miranda.”
“I know you were Skyping. I thought it was Mark.”
“Yes, Miranda does sound a lot like Mark, now that you mention it. Except she has a deeper voice. What are you doing up?”
“I don’t know. Looking for snacks.”
“Well, go to bed.”
“Okay, Mom,” Janine said, in a little-girl voice, and closed the door.
Close call.
Emily was Skyping with Justin most nights now, but she always waited until her parents were asleep.
It was weird to want to hide him, since he was the sweetest boy she’d ever known. But she wasn’t ready to tell her parents that he was back in her life.
Her parents seemed to have complicated feelings about Justin. When she first used to bring him around, they’d liked him a lot. They’d liked him a little too much. Her only previous boyfriend had been moody, self-absorbed, leather-jacketed—basically, he’d been James Dean—and her parents’ mistrust of him had pleased her. But Justin they loved. Or rather, they loved Justin at first.
After a while, they began to have questions. He used to leave her little notes, in tiny handwriting, and one day, after she’d left one of them lying around, her father said, “Why’s his handwriting so small?”
It was the most innocuous question in the world, but somehow it bothered her.
Justin was vegan, as she was, but he took it further. He got skinnier and skinnier during their senior year, and one night when he was over for dinner he turned down the broccoli her mother had made, explaining that he was now trying to eat only the simplest forms of plant life. He was feeling increasingly bad about killing vegetables. She still remembered the look her parents exchanged. They thought she hadn’t caught it, but she had.
“Justin’s getting awfully skinny, dear,” her mother said a few days later. “Is everything okay?”
Emily replied that he was fine. She was indignant about it, and later she wondered why she’d gotten so bothered. At first she blamed her mother, for finding problems where there weren’t any, but later she started to think that she herself had been noticing problems for a while, and had been trying not to notice them.
One night that summer, a few weeks before they left for college, she slapped a mosquito on her arm—she had a feeling of accomplishment when she saw the smushed blood—and Justin got so upset that he jumped up and walked off and disappeared for the rest of the night.
And then there was the question of sex. She
and Justin had never actually had sex. In fact, she’d never actually had sex with anyone. With James Dean, as much as she had a crush on him, she’d held back, because she wanted her first time to be with someone she truly loved. With Justin, she’d spent a few months doing everything short of having sex, and it had seemed right: they were enjoying each other; they were getting to know each other slowly. But then there came a time when she wanted to have sex, and Justin didn’t. He said he didn’t feel enough like a grown-up.
She’d cared about him more than she’d ever cared about a guy, but she hadn’t been able to rid herself of the thought that it might be good for her not to be near him anymore. She knew herself well enough to know that she tended to take on other people’s troubles as her own, and she wasn’t sure she was strong enough to take on whatever he was going through.
But sometimes she’d despised herself for thinking like this. It was selfish to be so concerned about protecting herself when this gentle, generous, childlike boy needed her help.
When Justin had gotten back in touch with her a few weeks ago, she’d felt so happy to hear from him that she’d tried to push all her little question marks out of her mind. But she wasn’t sure what she wanted with him. And until she was sure, she’d just as soon that her parents not know he was back in her life.
54
Florence was planning to go to a meeting at NYU, not far from the library. She asked Emily to find her there that day and give her the next packet of research.
“Faculty meetings in the summer?” Emily said.
“It isn’t a faculty meeting,” Florence said. “It’s a protest.”
She put her fist in the air, signifying protest.
“What are you protesting?”
“A group of teachers and students want to keep the bloodmobile off the campus, and I want to put my two cents in.”
“What’ve they got against the bloodmobile?”
“The blood-donation laws discriminate against gay men. If you’re a man who’s had sex with another man, you’re not allowed to donate.”
“That’s crazy,” Emily said.
“It’s not so much crazy as cowardly. In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, they didn’t know how to test for HIV in the blood supply. So a law like that, as repulsive as it was—well, maybe it was the best they could do. But now? Now they can do the test, but they still haven’t lifted the ban. They’re cowards, they’re homophobes, they’re ignorant, or they’re some combination of the above.”
When the day came, Emily found Florence without any difficulty, but instead of just handing her the packet and leaving, she stuck around. She was curious about observing Florence in her natural habitat, the protest meeting.
The meeting, held in an auditorium in a building on Washington Square, was much more crowded than Emily would have expected.
When Emily got there, the meeting hadn’t yet started, but already there was an atmosphere of anger in the room. Emily felt both innocent and ignorant—a shameful combination. She felt innocent because she didn’t think she’d been in a room with quite the same feeling in it before. She felt ignorant because she had nothing to compare it to. She ran her mind through the novels she loved, trying to remember whether any of them had featured big meetings. There were parts of Anna Karenina where Levin was engaging in all these arguments about land reform, but she couldn’t remember them that well. She’d sort of skimmed those parts.
When the discussion got started, the issues seemed simple. A few people wanted the bloodmobile to continue to pay its monthly visits, because blood donation was important. Most of the speakers wanted to ban it, because the laws restricting blood donations were intolerable.
As she listened to the arguments, she didn’t know how she felt. On the one hand . . . But on the other hand . . .
When some of the speakers were making their points, other people were snapping their fingers. At first it struck Emily as inexplicable, but then she realized it must be some political-meeting version of applause. The finger snappers looked serenely approving of what was being said.
She wondered how this custom had come to be. What was wrong with clapping? The finger snapping made it seem as if a group of beatniks had beamed in from a 1950s jazz club.
After many people had spoken—students, teachers, other people who worked for the university—Florence walked slowly to the microphone. She looked uncharacteristically fragile, and she was leaning on her cane, but her voice was strong.
“Some of you might remember Larry Ackerman. He used to teach sociology here. About ten years ago, he had the bad fortune to get hit by a car. He was hurt pretty badly, and he needed transfusions on a daily basis. Everyone who loved him was lining up to help. But Larry was a gay man, and many of his friends weren’t allowed to donate. I remember Larry’s partner talking about going to the blood bank and being turned away. He felt humiliated—and he felt angry, because he knew that his blood was clean. He’d been tested; Larry had been tested; and they’d been a monogamous couple for years.
“I’m no scientist, but even a glance at what the experts are saying is enough to make it clear that we need to do everything we can to take that stupid and offensive law off the books.”
People were snapping their fingers like crazy. The beatniks were liking what they heard.
“At the same time as we’re defending our sons and our brothers from being stigmatized and excluded, we need to make sure that we’re not victimizing another group—people who can’t survive without blood transfusions. We’ve got two vulnerable groups here, and we have to look out for both of them. We need to educate, we need to organize, we need to speak out, we need to exert all the pressure we can muster to get the law changed. And at the same time, we need to encourage those who can give blood to give it.”
The fingers had stopped snapping.
“I know this is complicated,” Florence said. “But social change usually is. So I’m saying that we need to respect the complexity, and to do justice to both vulnerable parts of our communities. We need to welcome the blood drive, and encourage people to give blood; and we need to use the blood drive as an opportunity to educate people so we can change this disgusting law.”
When Florence finished, she turned away from the microphone and walked back to her seat. The room was silent.
55
The meeting went on for another hour. Most of the people there wanted to ban the bloodmobile, and finally someone made a resolution to stop it from entering Washington Square Park. It was due to arrive in less than twenty minutes. The resolution passed; the meeting was over.
Emily took the elevator with Florence. When they emerged from the building, about twenty or thirty students had already formed a line at the north entrance of the park. There was a light drizzle; Emily and Florence stood not far off, under the arch.
“I can’t see any of the teachers here,” Emily said.
“They must have gone off to Starbucks.”
“Should we go off to Starbucks too?”
“I’d like to stick around,” Florence said.
A short time later, the bloodmobile came down Fifth Avenue and crossed into the park. It was met by a line of students, chanting . . . something. Emily couldn’t make out what they were saying.
The nose of the bloodmobile was in the park but the body was still on the street.
More quickly than Emily would have thought possible, police cars appeared—three of them—and then two police vans. From each of the cars, two cops emerged. From the van came more intimidating figures—four, five, six officers in riot gear. They were clad in black from head to toe, with thick vests and helmets with tinted visors.
“Starbucks now?” Emily said.
“This is why we’re here,” Florence said. “To make sure the cops don’t get out of hand.”
“Are you sure that’s possible?”
“Of course not. But sometimes it’s amazing what a sobering effect an old lady can have. Particularly an old lady with a cane.
”
She looked at Emily as if she’d just remembered something. “You should probably go home, though. It wouldn’t do for you to get arrested. Your papa wouldn’t be proud of that, I assume.”
“Why should I get arrested? We’re just standing around.”
Florence laughed and shook her head.
It was true that her father wouldn’t be happy if she got arrested. It wasn’t like he defended everything the police ever did . . . but he was a cop, after all. Emily had noticed that when a subject like police brutality came up, he was never as open-minded as you’d expect him to be.
“If I have an arrest record will I still be enjoyable?”
She’d meant to say “employable,” but she was so nervous that she got mixed up.
“I don’t know how to answer that one, my dear.”
The cops had taken their nightsticks out.
“That’s my cue,” Florence said. “You stay here. So you can remain enjoyable.”
She smiled at Emily—suddenly Florence looked distinctly young—and moved toward the heart of the trouble.
56
Emily hadn’t moved. She wanted to follow her grandmother, but she was afraid to.
Another van had arrived, and more black-padded men stepped out. There were more police than students now.
The riot police—there was something inherently terrifying about them, something intended to terrify. With their thick black uniforms and their dark visors, behind which you could see nothing, they seemed to represent violence and nothing else. Emily remembered something she’d read somewhere about how a man won’t kill you if you can look him in the eye. Your humanity will find his humanity and he will stay his hand. But these were people who could not be looked in the eye.