The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  Our only heat was an aging kerosene space heater in the living room, and the only really cozy spot was our bed with its endless layers of ratty quilts salvaged from trash cans and institutional blankets ripped off from Worthley as our parting gesture. Since we were paying our rent and meager expenses with my dividend checks, we had no appointments to keep. Consequently, we spent most of our time huddled in this bed, not particularly knowing or caring if it was day or night.

  Eddie did, however, continue to play her guitar two nights a week at a coffee house in Cambridge, as she had when she was at Worthley. I became her groupie and sat alone at a dark corner table, listening to her protest songs and watching with pride as people admired her husky voice and her earthy good looks, which were amply evident in the black turtleneck and tights and skirt she wore for performances. At her breaks, we would sneak a joint together, hiding it under the table. We would get back to our dingy apartment at 3 A.M. or later and would sleep until late afternoon the next day. One day blended into another, and we lost all sense of the passage of time. I slipped into my majority — and into control of my trust fund — without even knowing it, until papers requiring my signature began arriving from lawyers and brokers.

  In the process of looking them over and taking charge of ‘my’ monies, a dilemma started nagging at me over the nature of my investments. Eddie and I, for all our languid lolling in bed, were also on the demonstration circuit. We had bought crash helmets and had put American flag decals on them, upside down. Like horse owners on the racing circuit, or football fans with season passes, we went to every demonstration, large or small, that we happened to hear about — peace marches, rent strikes, work slowdowns. Usually we took picnic lunches, and we had gotten to know many of our fellow career demonstrators quite well.

  One gorgeous October afternoon we went to a war protest in downtown Boston. The air was crisp, and the sun was hot, and colorful leaves skittered around on the pavement. We were all in high spirits, even more so when we saw how unalone each of us was, how packed the spacious courtyard was becoming. To the clerks looking down from the towering office buildings and dropping shredded government documents as confetti, we must have looked like a palpitating invasion of locusts.

  The speaker, a former official in the attorney general’s office who had lost his position due to his vehement antiwar stand, was eloquent on the topic of the futility of violence. Earnest young mothers with sleeping babies in back packs nodded intent agreement. Students led cheers at appropriate points. Suited businessmen flashed peace signs to delighted young rabblerousers. It seemed impossible on that brilliant afternoon that peace and good will could not prevail among all the peoples of the world; surely in a matter of days President Johnson would bow to the will of The People and withdraw American troops from southeast Asia. The crowds in the square, abasing themselves at the feet of the gleaming glass and steel government buildings, throbbed with brotherly love. And not the least Eddie and I, who hadn’t even brought our crash helmets, which at that time we reserved for use on picket lines at construction sites. As I surveyed the babies and the dogs and the mothers and the businessmen and the students and the government workers leaning out their windows, a lump rose in my throat. It was the same lump that used to rise there when, as a child, I had recited the Lord’s Prayer or sung ‘America the Beautiful.’ We could not fail! Eddie and I looked at each other, and then threw our arms around each other and burst into tears of joy. How sweet it was to be so right, and in such company!

  The glow lasted all the way back to the apartment. The sun was setting as we wearily climbed our dark dirty staircase, past the battered door behind which several children and their mother were shouting abuse. Eddie and I gazed at each other expectantly and walked hand in hand to our bed, trembling with moral and spiritual uplift from the triumphant afternoon. We enjoyed a round of incredibly passionate sex, culminating in a breathtaking series of multiple orgasms, triggered by the insertion of greased little fingers into each other’s anus.

  From Physiology 110,1 knew that our inordinate response to this gimmick was merely a function of the reflex stretch mechanism of our anal sphincters. But I was striving mightily to forget much of what I had learned at Worthley in order to elevate my view of our love to a loftier plane than chemical secretions and genetically induced reflexes. Besides, things were going on between Eddie and me that Physiology 110 hadn’t covered. For instance, the way in which our bodies, immersed in smells and sounds and sights and tastes, would suddenly lurch like cars going too slow for the gear they were in, until we were swept up out of the realm of physical sensation. Seconds or minutes or hours passed, we never knew or cared. Exciting stuff for a country girl, but sinister, too, as I lay scarcely breathing afterwards, speculating on its similarities to my plunge down the cliff from Clem’s speeding Harley.

  But on the whole, I had to admit that lovemaking with Eddie agreed with me, never mind what Mother would say. The goal being so much less apparent than in heterosexual encounters, more imagination was required. And after that evening’s display of imagination, I decided that I had to come clean. I felt dread unhinging my joints. How could she ever lick me to orgasm again if she knew the real truth? True, Eddie felt that the wealth should be shared, starting with my wealth. But would she still want to share blood money? On the other hand, I knew I couldn’t not tell her.

  ‘Eddie?’

  ‘Hmmm?’ she sighed, wrapping her arms around me from behind and burying her mouth in my neck just as Joe Bob had loved to do in the trunk of Doyle’s Dodge.

  ‘There’s something I have to tell you.’

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘Are you listening, Ed? This is very important.’

  ‘Hmmm? Can’t it wait?’ She nibbled my ear lobe.

  ‘No, it can’t. I have to tell you now. I can’t stand it any longer.’ I was about to cry.

  ‘Why, what’s wrong, Ginny?’

  ‘You know those papers I signed about my trust fund?’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘Do you know where my money comes from, Eddie?’

  ‘Where?’ she asked with a yawn.

  ‘Mostly from my father’s factory, that’s where.’ There! It was out. What Eddie did about it was up to her. At least I’d leveled with her.

  ‘So what?’

  So what? Had I misunderstood Eddie’s principles somewhere along the line? So what?’ Maybe there was no moral conflict in paying our expenses to antiwar marches with money generated by supplying explosives to that war? After all, what had Eddie been teaching me if not that logic a la Miss Head was flawed, that commitment and contradiction were the way to Truth? Perhaps the only conflict was in my own over-rational brain?

  ‘I didn’t even know your father had a factory,’ Eddie murmured. ‘What does he make?’

  Oh oh. So that was it. The truth wasn’t out after all. ‘Explosives,’ I whispered in misery.

  ‘You mean like for digging mines and building highways and stuff?’

  ‘No, I mean like for shells and bombs. I mean like for Vietnam.’

  No sound or movement came from Eddie for a long time. Eventually I rolled over. Her face was frozen into a grimace.

  ‘If you want to leave me, I can understand why,’ I said faintly. ‘I’m sorry, Eddie. I should have told you sooner. But I didn’t really get the picture until I saw those papers.’

  Eddie, still grimacing, said nothing.

  ‘Can you ever love me again?’ I wailed. ‘Can you?’

  Still she didn’t answer. I looked at her closely. She had fallen asleep.

  If that night I dared to hope that that was the end of the matter, the next morning I discovered I was sadly mistaken. When I got up around noon, Eddie was stalking through the living room muttering, ‘Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.’

  She resolutely refused to look at me or speak to me.

  I mumbled humbly several times, ‘I’m sorry, Eddie.’

  Finally she demanded coldly, ‘Have you told anyone else
about this?’

  I nodded no miserably.

  ‘You must tell no one. Do you understand? No one. My reputation could be ruined.’

  ‘You can count on me,’ I assured her gravely, as a pigeon pecked at the chipping putty around a broken storm window.

  ‘Now! As I see it, you have to cash in your stocks and invest the money in a company that makes medical supplies or artificial limbs or something.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘What do you mean you can’t? They’re yours, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but I can’t do anything with them until both my parents are dead. It’s a tax gimmick. To escape inheritance taxes. Besides, a subsidiary of the same corporation in New Jersey does make medical supplies — plasma bottles.’

  ‘Well, that’s something, I suppose,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Oh Jesus.’ She resumed her trek across the listing living room. ‘The corruption of it all is overwhelming. I’m so appalled that I can hardly bear looking at you, Ginny. I’ve been living on profits from companies that are fueling the war machine!’

  ‘I’m sorry. I know it must make you feel so dirty. I’d give anything to have been able to spare you this, Eddie. I’ve hurt the woman I love. I can’t bear it!’ I burst into tears and collapsed onto the rickety couch, which in turn collapsed onto the floor.

  I lay weeping on the faded flowered rug. Eddie squatted down like a baseball catcher and caressed my moist face. ‘There, there. Don’t worry. We’ll figure something out.’

  What we figured out was a trip to Tennessee to picket the factory and to confront the Major with his war crimes. If I couldn’t divest myself of my stocks, I could at least funnel some stockholder input into the executive level.

  As she surveyed the huge white-columned mansion, Eddie grumbled, ‘Jesus. It’s downright feudal!’ Maybelle, our cook, came rushing out and whirled me across the lawn in an embrace. I tried to offer her my hand in a gesture of dignified equality instead, having read disapproval in Eddie’s face. But finally I gave in and whirled with Maybelle of my own accord.

  ‘Law, yes!’ Maybelle said to Eddie in her Power to the People T-shirt, ‘I done been wid de Babcocks eber since Miss Virginia was two foot tall! Law, I used to set her in mah lap an’ teach dat po li’l thing how to tie her shoes…Why, Miss Ginny, she don’t hardly know nuthin’ ole Maybelle ain’t taught her. Why, I declare, iffen…’ She went on and on, her accent getting thicker and thicker, thicker than I could remember its ever having been. I studied her black face closely and thought I detected malicious pleasure in her eyes. Whether the malice was directed at Eddie or at me, I couldn’t be completely certain. Eddie was thoroughly scandalized.

  Mother showed us to our rooms. ‘It’s so nice to meet you, Edna. Ginny has written so many interesting things about you.’

  ‘Unh,’ Eddie grunted.

  Mother had placed me in my old room, and Eddie across the hall in Jim’s old room. Eddie had briefed me on how to handle this situation in a morally upright fashion.

  ‘Mother,’ I announced, blushing scarlet, “Eddie and I will be sleeping in my room.’ There! I had done it! I had come out of the closet, and before my own mother!

  Mother said gaily, ‘Fine, dear. Fine. You girls have a slumber party if you want to.’

  I was content to let the topic drop, but Eddie kicked me with her Goliath sandal. ‘Ah, Mother, Eddie and I will be — ah — sleeping together in my bed.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Mother said brightly. ‘That’s fine, dear. Whatever suits you girls is fine with me.’

  Eddie shrugged.

  The next day Eddie and I made a couple of signs; they read ‘Workers Unite! All Power to the People!’ and ‘Tennessee Westwood Corp.: Fascist Flunkies to the Imperialist Pigs!’ We drove in the Major’s Jeep across the river to the plant and stationed ourselves in front of the chain-link fence and began to march back and forth with the signs.

  A security guard came out, studied the signs, and said, ‘I’m afraid you girls had better move along.’

  Eddie bristled at being called a ‘girl.’

  ‘It’s all right, I’m Major Babcock’s daughter.’

  ‘Yeah. Sure you are,’ he said.

  I flashed a Shell credit card at him like an FBI plainclothesman and he said uncertainly, ‘Oh. Okay, Miss Babcock. Sorry.’

  Just then the noon whistle blasted. We dropped our signs to cover our ears, then picked them up just as the night shift streamed out the gates, heading for the parking lots. Several workers in their green twill work clothes studied the signs; most didn’t notice them. I recognized faces here and there, people I’d been in high school with, people I just knew from a lifetime in the same town together.

  Two young men were studying Eddie’s sign. We sauntered over to them.

  ‘F — A — S -,’ one was saying. They blushed when we stopped in front of them and glanced around nervously to see if anyone was noticing or caring that they were about to be sucked into conversation with two weird young women in Power to the People T-shirts who bore incomprehensible placards.

  ‘Fascist,’ Eddie said for them.

  ‘Fascist,’ one repeated with a dopey grin. ‘Whas that mean, anyhow?’

  Eddie looked at him in disbelief. ‘Fascist? Ah — well, it means, like Hitler.’

  ‘Shoot!’ one said, spitting on the sidewalk.

  ‘How do you feel about what you’re forced to make here?’ Eddie asked diplomatically, as though the two men were dwarfs out of Das Rheingold. ‘Explosives for Vietnam.’

  ‘Oh, is that what they’re for?’

  ‘Yeh, dummy,’ the other said, laughing and poking him in the side.

  ‘Shoot, I don’t care,’ the first one said. ‘I jes work here, thas all. They pay me an’ I do like they says.’

  ‘Well, I care,’ the second one said.

  Eddie brightened. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I got me a brother fightin’ over there, an’ I aim to keep his guns loaded, I can tell you that!’

  ‘Oh,’ said Eddie. ‘Well, do you know anyone who doesn’t like making stuff for Vietnam?’

  The two looked at each other questioningly. ‘If they is any such a one,’ the second one said, ‘I’d better not hear about him.’

  We slunk off in search of more cooperative prey. We cornered a skinny, meek-looking middle-aged man. He was standing by the chain fence, which had several strands of barbed wire across the top. When he saw us bearing down upon him, he tried to sidle away, but we had him surrounded.

  ‘Look,’ he whispered nervously, holding up his hands to fend us off, ‘I don’t want no trouble. I got me five kids.’

  With relief I spotted Harry from Building Maintenance, whom I hadn’t seen since the summer I worked in the factory. He recognized me as well, in spite of my current disguise as savior of The People, and waved wildly. ‘Lord, I guess it’s been two years since I seed you! I like to not knowed you.’ He nodded at my wheat jeans and T-shirt and the braid down the middle of my back, Red Chinese-like.

  ‘Harry, tell me the truth now,’ I said. ‘How do you feel about making bombs for the war?’

  He sighed wearily. ‘Well, honey, how I feel is that hit beats the hell out of them coal pits up at Sow Gap.’

  ‘But Harry!’

  ‘But I ain’t makin’ ‘em, honey! I’m jes maintenance. Anyhow, if your daddy says hit’s right, then hit’s right by me, too.’

  ‘Speak of the devil,’ Eddie drawled.

  The Major in his pinstriped suit came marching toward us at an incredible clip. I automatically flinched.

  ‘What are you girls doing?’

  I blushed and shrugged sheepishly.

  ‘Virginia! If you and your friend don’t dispose of those signs and get out of here immediately…I’ll cut off your dividend checks!’

  ‘You can’t! They’re in my name now!’

  ‘I can do whatever I please. You seem to forget that I run this place.’

  ‘Then you can make something else besides
bombs?’ I asked hopefully, not knowing that I had punched his button.

  ‘What I am doing here happens to be essential to national security, my dear child. A strong offense is the best defense. I know that some people’ — he glanced contemptuously at Eddie -’would like to bring this nation to its knees and hand the keys to its portals over to the Communists, but I am not one of them.’

  I decided that this was not the time to point out that he was mixing his metaphors.

  ‘I fought too long and too hard against Hider not to have learned that you can’t allow tyranny of any political stripe to get a toe hold. Besides, what’s manufactured in this plant isn’t my decision. Those decisions are made at headquarters in Boston. So why don’t you two hop the next plane back to where you came from with your idiot signs and your half-baked political opinions?’

  ‘Bastard!’ Eddie hissed as we slunk over to the Jeep. ‘Christ, what a bastard!’

  Back in Boston, Eddie and I concluded that the best thing for my political development would be to sever all ties with my reactionary family. They were obviously the source of all my neuroses and bourgeois political attitudes. It was best never to get in touch with them again, thereby liberating myself with one deft hack from the net of capitalist hang-ups they had cast over me.

  ‘You can’t allow your roots to become ruts,’ Eddie announced. ‘Or routs.’

  I got a Standard & Poor’s sheet on Westwood Chemical Corporation and calculated the percentage of profits stemming from the Hullsport plant. Then I deducted that amount from our spending money as the quarterly dividend checks wandered in, and sent donations to free schools and people’s clinics and minority liberation groups throughout Boston. Let admirable ends justify nefarious means, we decided. Eddie took further comfort in the fact that we were boycotting one aspect of the corrupt death-dealing male power structure that was perpetrating all the misery in the world by seeking our sexual fulfillment elsewhere.