Current Affairs

by Raskin, Barbara;

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  Praise for the Writing of Barbara Raskin

  Hot Flashes

  “As important as The Group and The Women’s Room … A female Big Chill.” —Cosmopolitan

  “A landmark woman’s novel … Raskin has captured the feelings of a generation.” —People

  “Funny, perceptive, outrageous, and sad.” —The Washington Post

  “[Hot Flashes] will assuredly and deservedly take its place with such other contemporary classics as The Group, Class Reunion, The Women’s Room and Superior Women. In many respects, it is far more universal and therefore, more enduring.” —The Asbury Park Press

  Current Affairs

  “Just as she did in Hot Flashes and Loose Ends, Barbara Raskin provides fresh insights about fortysomething women in Current Affairs.” —Atlanta Journal & Constitution

  “Delicious, wicked.” —The San Diego Union

  “Fantastic … There is adventure, abandonment and adultery.… Stylish and slangy, written in a wild and wordy prose that is engaging and catchy.” —The New York Times Book Review

  Current Affairs

  Barbara Raskin

  WITH LOVE,

  TO MY PARENTS

  1

  #1 Down: “Flight-y free-lance foreign correspondent Stephanie Karavan” (New York Times Magazine puzzle, January 14, 1979).

  S

  H

  A

  Y

  It was never a piece of cake being the sister of Stephanie Karavan (a.k.a. Shay Karavan, a.k.a. Che Karavan), but things really got tough for me in 1975. That was the year she went to Ho Chi Minh City, the first American journalist to be invited there by the postwar Vietnamese government. During her twenty-day stay, Shay conducted thirty-two exclusive interviews with rehabilitated former Saigon prostitutes. On the return flight, she held on her lap a hand-carved ivory urn containing the ashes of an American pilot who had been MIA in Southeast Asia.

  When Shay landed at Kennedy—wearing a M*A*S*H-green jumpsuit she’d repatriated in a clothes exchange with one of the former hookers—she posed for a swarm of TV cameramen, but refused to be interviewed. Then she hurried aboard Air Force One, which the White House had dispatched to fly her on to Paducah, Kentucky. Only a front-page mission like this one could drag Shay Karavan to Paducah, but once there, she quickly arranged an impromptu photo-op/ceremony during which she wept as she presented the ivory urn to the grieving parents.

  Shay sold her article about the wartime lives of the Vietnamese prostitutes to Newsweek, becoming the first free-lance writer ever to score a cover story in that magazine. The details of how and why the Vietnamese government gave her the remains of an American soldier made the front pages of almost every newspaper in the world.

  It was shortly afterward that I first came upon S-H-A-Y as an answer in a Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. Later I encountered S-H-A-Y going in different directions in a lot of different newspapers:

  #10 Across: “Nickname of radical feminist writer” (Washington Post, July 19, 1978);

  #89 Down: “Female friend of Viet Cong?” (Washington Times, April 1, 1982);

  #9 Down: “Popular lady Sandinista supporter?” (USA Today, February 12, 1985);

  #43 Down: “Karavan to friends” (Minneapolis Tribune, August 8, 1986); and

  #104 Across: “One Stephanie” (Northwest Airlines in-flight magazine, Summer, 1988).

  Last March, New York magazine featured on its cover a hot-pink living room diagonally dissected by a satiny Miss America-type sash that red CHEZ SHAY. The accompanying article neglected to mention that Shay was only subletting the apartment from a plastic surgeon who’d gone off to meditate in a Tibetan monastery. Shay always had a terrible habit of redecorating other people’s places if she stayed there long enough. Besides painting Dr. Rizer’s walls hot pink without consulting him, she also had the carpeting pulled up because she thought it smelled like cat piss.

  Her hairdo (really just a Jewish Afro grown shoulder-length and gone crazy) was known as the “Shaysie” in East Side salons as well as in Broadway no-appointment-needed-walk-right-in-unisex hair cutteries. There is even a sandwich called the “Shay Special” (corned beef, melted Brie and sauerkraut on a croissant) at Herb’s, a Washington restaurant where writers and journalists hang out. Because a number of reporters in the national press corps still want to get in Shay’s pants, they always pump me for poop about her. When she occasionally meets me at Herb’s for a drink, all the guys go ape.

  Actually, I was the one who gave Shay the nickname she made famous. Only about two in 1948, when Shay was born, I found “Stephanie” unpronounceable; “Shaysie” was the closest I could manage. When Marge (I never know whether to refer to Marge as my mother, our mother or just plain Mother—which is Shay’s preferred affectation) also started to call her “Shay,” the name stuck.

  By the time she was twenty-five, Shay’s nickname already embodied all the crossword-puzzle clues used to describe her. She was a radical, feminist, literally fly-by-night free-lance writer who ran around the world chasing hot news stories without any staff press credentials. Even worse, she had no responsible editor back home to curtail any of her literary or sexual excesses. Shay fooled around with lots of VIPs who played principal roles in major world events. She also carried on with lots of the journalists who had run away from home to join the international media circus.

  Shay took her nickname for granted until 1964, when she had to write a paper on the Cuban revolution for her twelfth-grade civics class. Naturally enough, she fell in love with Che Guevara and eventually went to court and legally changed her name to “Che.” Then she embarked upon a campaign to get all of us to say “Shay” with a hard C instead of a soft one. She would retell the story about Harold Geneen, then president of ITT, whose secretary instructed people to pronounce his name “not with a hard G as in God, just a soft one as in Jesus.”

  Whatever. No one in our family paid much attention since it was too late in the game for us to change what we called her. During the seventies and eighties, Shay’s name became a concept, just like Cher’s did. “Shay” reflected a certain erratic, erotic, engagé approach to life that the public seemed to enjoy. Even her friendships with revolutionary leaders from four far-flung continents were tolerated. America lets its celebrities get away with murder so long as their antics don’t scare any of the neighbors’ horses. Because people-watching is America’s number one spectator sport, our country produces lots of characters but few leaders who have any kind of character at all.

  Anyway, I am Natalie Karavan Myers, Shay Karavan’s older sister. If I were placing a personal ad, I would describe myself as a: WJMF DINK BBW/MSW ISO TRANSLATION: White Jewish Married Female Double Income No Kids Baby Boomer with Master of Social Work in Search of Happiness. Although I fit the demographic profile, I am no yuppie. I suffer far too much to belong to that euphoric elite. Also, I am a purely political animal, which disqualifies me by definition.

  If I ever become an answer in a crossword puzzle, the clues would have to include:

  • Former parlor SDS-er, now Working-Assets-credit-card-carrying liberal

  • Pro-choice owner of three stretched-out, faded I FORGOT TO HAVE A BABY T-shirts

  • Organizer and director of a Washington shelter for homeless women that ran out of operating funds and was closed for the summer of the Greenhouse Effect.

  Sibling rivalry?

  Shay and I made up the term. We make Joan and Jackie Collins look like the Bobbsey Twins. We make the Ephrons look like the Andrews Sisters. We make the Mitfords look like the McGuires and the Gabors like the Len
nons. Whenever I meet someone new they always ask me, “Are you …?” and I say, “Yes. Yes, I am.” Most everyone goes, “Gre-at,” humming it like a mantra. What they should say is “Tough break, Nat. That must be a rough row to hoe.”

  Growing up with Shay Karavan as my kid sister definitely qualified as a shitstorm of a learning experience. I am forever poking through the past to produce proof of certain preexisting conditions that help explain our present relationship. My index to the past is a large photo album filled with snapshots that I carefully culled from our family collection. I have studied these photos so intently that now the Kodak images—rather than the realities they recorded—trigger my emotions.

  Here’s the first picture in my album:

  SNAPSHOT

  That’s me being held up high in my father’s arms on the day after Shay was born. Daddy himself dressed me in my High Holidays peach-colored coat, bonnet and matching leggings before taking me to Swedish Hospital so I could peer through the newborns’ nursery window at my only sibling. Daddy kept pointing toward a particular bassinet and I finally saw her. She was sleeping, swaddled like a Chinese doll. A speck of sand was lodged in the corner of one eye. I asked what it was and my father said the Sleep Fairy put it there. I believed him. “Peanut” is what my father used to call me. “Snookums” is what he called Shay when they brought her home to the square stucco house on the north side of Minneapolis that we shared with our father’s parents, Bubbie and Zadie.

  Things like Herb’s oversized menu, the “Chez Shay” New York magazine cover, U.S. coverage of Shay’s trip to Ho Chi Minh City (featuring articles with lengthy quotes from Shay explaining why the Vietnamese government viewed her as representative of the most enlightened and progressive elements in America) and all the newspaper crossword puzzles that used S-H-A-Y as an answer are taped inside a huge scrapbook our dad started keeping in 1967.

  I inherited this reference work after Dad died because every family needs one sensible person who will save engagement, marriage and birth announcements, newspaper stories that mention relatives, graduation or recital programs, bylined articles, showbills, campaign literature and first editions of books published by, or about, any relative.

  Although Marge keeps these scrapbooks at home in the den closet, I am responsible for sending her all relevant materials. I became Shay’s Boswell because, unlike my sister, I am systematic and organized enough to clip and paste, or at least save things. In other words, not only did I have to eat shit on a daily basis, I had to preserve it for posterity.

  Am I bitter?

  Is the Pope Catholic?

  The melodramatic events that interrupted my life two years ago, during the Greenhouse Summer of 1988, finally dismantled the writer’s block from which I’ve suffered ever since Shay took up journalism. I had always planned to be a writer, but the moment Shay matriculated at the University of Minnesota J-School, I switched my major from English to social work. Very few sisters have ever been successful in pursuing the same careers. Anne, Emily and Charlotte Brontë did it some hundred and fifty years ago. Now the Ephrons—Delia, Amy and Nora—as well as the Shanges—Ifa, Bisa and Ntozake—seem to be doing it also.

  But they are the exceptions. Not long ago I heard that Joan Collins, who had studied acting since childhood, was outraged when her writer sister, Jackie, began turning up at London theatrical auditions to compete against her. Maybe that’s why Joan wrote her own first novel recently. Catty sisters are always ready to invade a sibling’s turf; they are instinctive crossover artists.

  But who’s counting?

  Who’s keeping score?

  My sister began her serious invasion of my life on the Friday before the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. Although my husband, Eli, and I ate breakfast together that morning, he was in a big hurry to get downtown to cover a Jesse Jackson press conference. Washington bureau chief for the Minneapolis Tribune, Eli doesn’t really have to hustle all that much anymore. Lately, however, he seems to be in a big hurry to get somewhere else a lot of the time. A real big hurry.

  After he left, I went outside to sit on the back porch while I drank another cup of coffee and did the crossword puzzle. Although I am a crossword junkie, the minute I saw 7 Down, “aridity,” I let The Washington Post slip to the floor. Throughout June and July, crossword-puzzle writers, like everyone else in America, had become obsessed with heat and drought. Their puzzles were full of words like “siccative,” “desiccate,” “exsiccate,” “evaporate,” “dehydrate,” “Gobi,” “Sahara,” “scorch” and “rivel.” One week The Washington Post used “sere” five times.

  So instead of doing the puzzle, I began to survey the devastation in our garden. My climbing rosebushes bore neither blooms nor buds. The hydrangeas had no flowers. Our huge mimosa tree no longer opened its buds in the morning or reclosed them at night. Instead, it was stuck at some half-mast position as if in perpetual mourning. Only a few of our old perennials sported any splashes of color. Indeed, the ground itself had begun to split and crack. It looked like land photographed from the air by National Geographic following an earthquake.

  Washington had had no rain for thirty-four days. An open umbrella of haze shaded the city from morning to dark. The stench of dry rot pervaded everything, and government buildings had begun to reek from environmental as well as political pollution. I was thinking about rain, trying to remember where I’d been the last time it rained, when the telephone began to ring.

  I recognize my sister’s rushed breathing as soon as I lift the receiver.

  “Nat?” she whispers hopefully.

  “Oh, hi, Shay.”

  I emit an internal groan.

  This I need.

  “Natalie. I’m in some deep shit.”

  This I need like a hole in the head.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I can’t really talk about it right now. Can you meet me at National this afternoon?”

  Oh great. A little mystery to add to her mystique. A little London fog for atmosphere.

  “Where are you, Shay?”

  “Long Island.”

  Uh-huh. She’s on one of her air-travel binges. My sister bops around the country collecting frequent-flier credits as if the airlines award Pulitzer Prizes for every fifty thousand miles.

  “Who’re you with, Shay?”

  “I can’t talk now, Nat. I’ve got to move fast to catch my flight. It’s USAir eight forty-three and it gets into National at two-thirty. Can you meet me?”

  “Jesus. I’m supposed to have lunch at one o’clock with Eli and some people we visited in Moscow. Why can’t you just take a cab?”

  “Well … actually … I have to talk to you right away,” she says slowly, letting hurt hug each word before she releases it.

  Translation: How can you let your own sister take a taxi when she’s in trouble? What would Mother say?

  Great. This is really great.

  Just what I need right now is my kooky kid sister coming back to guest-star in my life for a while.

  Last summer Washington was attacked by locusts, this year by drought, and now Shay’s back in town.

  I feel like the Passover pharaoh.

  Personal plagues: My husband is unable to focus, not to mention anything more exotic, on me for more than five minutes at a time. This is a fact I can no longer ignore since it’s been going on for several months now. Also, because my shelter has been shut down, all our local bag ladies are back on Columbia Road again, carrying their brown-paper weekenders packed for eternity. Down-and-out men hit the road; down-and-out women hit the street.

  But despite my silent inventory of troubles, I capitulate to my sister, as usual.

  “Okay, but I can’t make it before three-thirty. The Nelsons were very nice to us when Eli and I were in Moscow. We stayed with them for almost a month.”

  “That’s okay; three-thirty’s great, Nat. Thanks a million. I owe you one.”

  You don’t owe me one, I think, replacing the recei
ver.

  You owe me a million and one.

  AP WIRE SERVICE PHOTO

  This is the best picture I have of Shay. It shows her on a cigarette speedboat knifing through the inter-coastal waterway in Miami in pursuit of some Latin American cocaine king, possibly Carlos Lehder Rivas. Presumably she would have turned him over to DEA authorities (granted he was really in Miami) if he hadn’t escaped under strange circumstances. Anyway, her pursuit of him—four years before his actual capture—became a national news story. In this shot, Shay’s dark heavy hair is flattened back by the wind and that, plus the deep tan burnishing her skin, makes her remarkable blue eyes seem even lighter than usual. I always thought this shot shed a lot of light on the reason Shay can get away with everything she gets away with.

  Over the years my sister has frequently been featured in the “Newsmakers” or “People” sections of the weekly news magazines because of her good looks. Everyone agrees that Shay’s a stand-out beauty—even at crowded airports. But at three-thirty today, there is no sign of her outside USAir at what she regards as the low-rent end of National Airport. Shay thinks of the north terminal as a slum because all the shuttles leave from the main building.

  As soon as I wiggle my way between two hotel minibuses toward the curb, an aggressive traffic cop begins signaling me to move on. I smile, wave and gun my engine. As soon as he turns away, I switch off the ignition and stay where I am. Circling National Airport at this hour, either in the air or on the ground, is suicide. Every minute I can stay stationary is priceless.

  It’s almost four when Shay comes running outside with her big red shoulder bag swinging back and forth like the Foucault pendulum at the Museum of American History. She is carrying an assortment of mismatched bags plus my pink umbrella, which she borrowed three years ago after promising to return it the very next day. Only Shay would carry an umbrella, my umbrella, during the worst drought America has suffered in fifty years.

  Trotting along beside her is a man carrying several more of her bags. He is not a porter. He is just a man. Probably he was a passenger on her flight whom she vamped a little.