Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  He didn’t wear jeans like the rest of us, but loose khaki pants and a shirt with buttons. He guided me into an Italian restaurant with an arm around my shoulder. Candle wax dripped onto Chianti bottles, and the waiters had accents. “You’ll come back with me?” he said as we ate the bread, waiting for our spaghetti and meatballs. That bright-eyed look again.

  “Yes,” I said.

  As we ate, he said, “You’re smart,” which pleased me more than if he’d said I was beautiful. “You made two good points tonight.” Then he repeated and enlarged upon them. By the time we left, I was leaning against him, letting myself put my hand on his back. We kissed hard in his apartment. Eli had vacuumed the rug, and I wondered if he’d planned in advance to bring me—or somebody—home.

  I wasn’t being stupid when I slept with Eli. I knew what I was doing, and I knew Helen would be hurt or angry—possibly both. I hadn’t changed my mind about Eli’s carelessness with women, but I wanted to touch his penis, to put it into my mouth, to be pressed into the mattress by his wide shoulders and big arms. It was refreshing to do something reckless for once. I phoned my mother and said I was staying with Helen, then phoned Helen to say I was staying with someone, worried that my mother would think of something to tell me and call me there. Life was different before cell phones, before caller ID.

  “Okay, I’ll say you’re asleep,” Helen said, not too interested. “But you know, Olivia, you’d better move in here.”

  I said okay, as pleased by the invitation as I was about Eli.

  She said, “Can you pay me something? You can sleep on the couch.”

  “Okay,” I said again, and returned to Eli, afraid he’d lose interest while I talked on the phone.

  My parents were accustomed to the truth from me and didn’t guess I was with a man—or perhaps they thought I was so sheltered that if I went to bed with a man, I’d blurt out my inevitable shock and regret. In that case, they’d reassure me. They’d agree it would have been wiser not to engage in sex before marriage.

  But when I said I was going to stay with Helen for a few weeks, my parents were troubled. They were uneasy about my participation in meetings and discussion groups having to do with the war, and they saw living with Helen—correctly—as a change that would lead to more of what made them uneasy. They were old Roosevelt Democrats. If they had ever been politically engaged, they’d lost that excitement, and they regarded patriotism—emotional attachment to country—as something one outgrew when one no longer had to stand in the aisles of Public School Something-or-other and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. They didn’t feel obliged to approve of the war in Vietnam just because their government waged it, and they didn’t approve. It was clear early that the war was a waste of time, money, and lives, and my parents thought our government should pull out. Loyalty and pride—emotions that motivated pro-war Americans—were patently silly to the Grossmans.

  But they felt the same way about antiwar activism. Our government’s insistence on fighting a losing war had become criminal, but the Grossmans weren’t the police. They remembered Hubert Humphrey’s opposition to racial discrimination in 1948 and hoped he’d be elected. When I came home from marches and rallies—spent, dirty, and discouraged, once my initial elation dissipated—my parents were embarrassed. What had made me think this was my business? Was I neglecting my college courses? (Yes, but not too much.)

  Now, as I packed my bag to move to Helen’s, my mother said, “You could find other friends.” I might get arrested and spoil my life, she said. I might be hurt. She shook her head. “Time after time, ‘Oh, Mrs. Grossman, I’m not hungry.’” She imitated Helen’s breathy, childlike voice, which made me realize how much it had matured. Now she had a low-pitched speaking voice, uninflected but emphatic.

  “Of course she was hungry!” my mother said, watching me pack underwear and blue jeans. “Did she think I was stupid?”

  A week or two after I moved in, Helen went to Chicago. There was no television in the apartment, and I followed the events taking place at the Democratic National Convention—the protests, the arrival of the National Guard, and the violence of the Chicago police, who kicked and clubbed demonstrators and arrested hundreds—as best I could. Humphrey criticized the police but criticized the demonstrators far more vigorously. He was nominated while thousands protested outside.

  I was lonely while Helen was gone—and I’d been lonely before she went. I don’t know what I expected. Though Helen took any money I could give her, she was no more interested in me when we were roommates than she had been before. Barb was mostly gone now, living with a lover, and Angie was generally out or shut in her room. Camp ended, and I was free most of the time. Eli had found me a job waitressing a few evenings a week in a shabby restaurant.

  Helen returned from Chicago sick from gas and exhausted from a long, hot drive in a crowded backseat. She had a sprained ankle and a painful bruise where a policeman had smashed his baton into her arm. She wouldn’t talk much. Apparently she hadn’t been arrested—she’d been too sick and hurt to keep protesting. The night she came home, she slept in Barb’s bed. I woke up when it was not quite light and made my way to the bathroom. I was going back to my sofa to try to sleep some more, but Helen called me.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. Barb’s room was dark and stuffy.

  “My foot hurts,” she said, sounding like a child again. “I’m so hot.”

  I opened the window as wide as it would go. “Let me see.”

  She sat up and showed me her swollen, purple ankle. Her hair looked dirty, and of course she hadn’t eaten properly for days. I wanted to take care of her. If I could no longer be close to her through talk and shared thought, I wanted to help her to the toilet, to wash her hair, to wash her belly and breasts. You will say it was a sexual wish, and of course that’s so, but it was more a wish for the physical. I wanted anything that was Helen’s, and her body was part of anything.

  I was not to get it for long, but the next week—the end of August and the beginning of September—was the happiest time for me since those walks after school when we had just met. Now, leaving her lying there, I extracted the last four ice cubes in our tray, put them into a sock of mine, and tied it around her ankle, which I raised on a pillow. I brought sofa cushions and propped her up in bed, her back against the wall. She looked straight ahead at her foot, her face childlike and weepy. We had nothing to eat but stale bread and instant coffee. I hacked off bread and found strawberry preserves. I brought her breakfast and put it on a chair I had drawn up to the bed, then dressed and went out to buy food. The ankle was bad. I know now that she needed a doctor, but I was living in a fantasy—only I could help her.

  She didn’t object. Later that day, I helped her into the tub and didn’t wash her breasts—I was embarrassed—but scrubbed her back and shampooed her hair. We were all but silent. I got her into bed again, gathered her clothes, took them to the laundromat. Then I scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom and dusted the walls and ceilings in the other rooms, making myself sweaty and hot and happy. Angie woke late and left, and Helen and I had the place to ourselves.

  After a few days, Helen could walk gingerly with her ankle bandaged, leaning on me. I got her down the stairs and outside, where we sat on the steps of the building. In the apartment, we read at opposite sides of the room or ate. The weather was hot enough to make laziness acceptable, but then the temperature dropped, and in the fresh autumn air, she began to fret about doing nothing.

  One afternoon we made our way downstairs and sat on the cracked red stone steps in front of the building, squinting into the sun, our feet stretched out onto the sidewalk. I wore huaraches, but Helen was in bedroom slippers—her shoe wouldn’t fit on her swollen foot. For several minutes, she ran her finger over the flaws and broken corners of the step we sat on. Then, in a small, almost apologetic voice, she said, “Could you let up?”

  “Let up?”

  “You’re not leaving me alone for a second.”

  “I’m
sorry.” I was abashed. “I was trying to help,” I said, unable to explain what these days had given me.

  Her finger made taut whorls between us. “No,” she said. “You want to make me soft. You want me to stop struggling.”

  I hadn’t thought about it, but I’d have been relieved if Helen relaxed a bit, if she could become a part-time activist like me. “No!” I said anyway. “That’s not what I want. You have to do what you think you must.”

  I meant it as I said it. I felt guilty. I was glad when something distracted me from the war, from my frustrated rage and the grief that overcame me when I saw something about dead civilians or our local dead soldiers, with their ordinary, New York names—Italian, Irish, occasionally Jewish names, or names that sounded as if the holders might be black—but I too had the inchoate idea that it would be preferable not to be distracted.

  She was quiet. Her hair caught the sun, and she shaded her eyes with her hand. “Okay,” she said. Then, “What about Eli?”

  “Eli? What about him?” This was early in my affair. Eli and I saw each other a couple of times a week. He acted thrilled and nervous—dazzled. He somehow knew I’d respond to vulnerability, and maybe I even knew he was faking, in part, but didn’t care.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she said solemnly, after a long pause.

  “Slept with him?” I hadn’t been sure she knew. “But I didn’t think you—”

  “Not because of me,” she said. “I don’t get hung up.”

  I turned. “Oh, come on, Helen, of course you do!”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “But?”

  “But you do. If you’re so into health and safety, you should have protected yourself, Olivia. You should have stayed away from him. You know what he’s like.” The finger made more whorls. “We don’t have the luxury to make ourselves as unhappy as you’re going to be when he drops you.”

  “What?” I laughed at her. “Since when is it a luxury to be unhappy?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I examined my feelings. How much would I mind when the affair was over? Two images came, one after the other. First, I pictured myself shaking the hand of a shadowy woman, putting my hand on her shoulder and squeezing, then releasing her so she could hurry into a bedroom. But then I pictured something else: myself screaming, leaning out a high window and screaming, my arms spread wide.

  “You’re jealous,” I said, to distract myself from these unsettling thoughts.

  “You don’t understand me,” Helen said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever understood me.”

  I didn’t think she was jealous, but I would have preferred it. What she had said was true: I wanted her less angry, less political, more vulnerable about men.

  “I don’t know if you’re capable of sacrifice for a cause,” Helen said. “You don’t know what it means.”

  I had been a fool. So I moved—briefly—back to my parents’ place, saying I needed to be closer to the college. Classes started. For a couple of weeks, I kept to myself, studying, though I belonged to Students for a Democratic Society. I was a junior, thinking about graduate school, taking advanced literature courses. English majors were less involved in protest than people in some departments. I didn’t talk to Helen, just lived at home, spent time in the library, and worked.

  But even at home, there was plenty of discussion of political subjects. My parents were trying to persuade their friends to vote not for the protest candidate, Dick Gregory, but for Humphrey, despite the violence in Chicago. My father shouted and pounded the dining room table. Humphrey had been a progressive all his life, while Nixon had been a reactionary. Whatever else happened, he repeated, Humphrey was the better choice. It was the argument I’d made to Helen in the spring: we were going to have one of these people, so we might as well pick the best.

  My friends and I thought voting for any candidate in this election (in which most of us were too young to vote) would be a mistake: nobody with sense should participate. That fall, Helen had persuaded me, and I could not believe that the vote, when I got it, would be worth much.

  The night of my worst fight with my father, I came to the table reluctantly, knowing the conversation would turn to the election and the war, maybe knowing that I’d take it there if my parents and brother and sister—who were now developing opinions as well—did not. Humphrey had said that if he were elected, he’d end the bombing of North Vietnam, but the speech in which he had said it had been so full of attempts to please everyone, so defensive, that it infuriated me—while impressing my father.

  Sure enough, while the food got cold and my mother fretted, my father and I screamed at each other. My brother cried. He wanted me to keep living at home, to get along with our parents. The pull was intense—I too wanted to be at home, to forget, to allow myself to believe what part of me knew was the sensible position. For hours at a time, away from home, I thought the protest movement would succeed, that the American system might be radically altered. At home, that seemed as impossible as what I knew was impossible—that my mother would stop bringing platters of chicken to the table, that my father would stop calling my sister “my fine feathered friend.” He’d said it all her life, and nobody knew why.

  My throat was sore from shouting, and my mother kept saying, “Stop it, Olivia, stop it!” though she usually called me Olive, as requested. As I shouted, I understood what Helen had meant, why taking care of her—all that silly cooking and cleaning—was wrong. I’d seduced both of us away from the war. Nothing should have let us forget it.

  “Some kind of genius, you’re supposed to be!” my father shouted. “You with your fancy brain!”

  I stood, went into my room, and paused. I could sit down and start studying, but I’d be shirking my duty to help clear the table and wash the dishes. If I wasn’t home, I wouldn’t be shirking. The logic seemed fine at the time.

  Again, I stuffed a bag with books and a few clothes. I carried it and my portable typewriter into the dining room, where my sister and brother were finally carrying dishes into the kitchen. I kissed my mother. “I’m going to Helen’s,” I said. “I need to write a paper. I need to think.” I didn’t want to be dramatic. I said something friendly to my brother and sister, said, “See you, Dad!” and left. It was close to ten when I got to the apartment.

  After that, I lived with Helen most of the time for more than a year—when the restaurant gave me enough hours and I had money to contribute, when avoiding home was worth the long subway ride, when my parents’ fretfulness and my sister’s and brother’s questions made me too uncomfortable to continue there. I was living beyond my means, not just financially but emotionally too, and when I was home, I was always in danger of seeing that. The surest sign that I was living on bravado was that the cockroaches in the apartment no longer bothered me.

  In general, I was too busy to care where I lived. I was in class, or on the subway—where I read or wrote papers in notebooks, typing them later—at the restaurant, at a meeting or rally, or in the apartment just trying to sleep, sometimes on the sofa, sometimes in a room nobody else was sleeping in. Barb still lived there now and then, and I noted with some surprise that I didn’t mind her dirty sheets. When the lack of decent food was too much, I’d go back home for a few days, restlessly bypassing family life, using my parents’ apartment primarily as a place to sleep.

  My classes remained real. I was someone else at school, and my professors would have been surprised to learn that I didn’t lead a regular life. I remember no books I read that fall except nineteenth-century British novels—Middlemarch, for one—but I must have taken other subjects as well. At the apartment, I read those long books as a way of being alone, because what went on in the apartment disturbed me, too. When I couldn’t bear the war one more moment, I sat on the floor with my typewriter, typing up the long papers I’d scrawled in pen.

  One Sunday, I came back to the apartment after a demonstration—dirty, starving, exhausted—to shower and eat quickly, then w
rite a paper, due the next day, on a story by Henry James, “The Private Life.” It’s about a writer whose alternate self goes out among people while the real man can be glimpsed working alone in his room. I was that writer, as I read. The story was about me, except that I didn’t know how to perform the supernatural feat James had allowed his character, and so I never got enough of the private life, the inner life. I felt in the wrong when I wasn’t out there shouting or when I retreated to my parents’ apartment.

  Helen was usually at meetings I didn’t have time for. She had boyfriends who sometimes scared me. Eli still wanted to sleep with me, and I thought I might lose interest before he did—when the cat hair and the knowledge that there were other women got to me. But I turned up at his apartment once or twice a week, partly because it was cleaner than ours (except for the cat hair) and because he introduced me to people. Sometimes I wrote papers there, where I could sit at a table and not have to deal with my mother. Once, Eli made love to another woman in the bedroom—a stranger to me, young and blond—while I wrote in the kitchen. That’s what I mean when I say I lived beyond my means. I didn’t mind. I was so certain I shouldn’t mind (exclusive sexual ties were bourgeois, boring, fussy, unimaginative) that, at least consciously, I didn’t.

  When Barb definitely moved out, Helen got her room, and now I had the space behind the living room couch that Helen had occupied before. Angie was in and out. I sprayed bugs and cooked, comforting Helen—who regularly got arrested and spent all-night sessions on strategy I didn’t want to hear about (but was intensely curious about)—with whatever food I could buy cheaply.

  Gradually, I met Helen’s other friends. Somewhat to my surprise, most were smart people who made clever arguments and didn’t become self-congratulatory and sentimental. I’d been assuming that anybody more involved in antiwar work than I was probably a hothead, and hotheads didn’t make sense. If these shrewd, well-read people thought protest could change the system, it might be so. There was a group at Columbia, where Helen still had connections, and she had friends at City College as well.