by Heather Abel
“After rest hour,” Caleb said. “I need to take this opportunity to conk out.”
Don shoved his hands in his pockets and looked out toward the Dobies, a lack of eye contact that always meant he was riled-up about something—the wrong kind of feed purchased, a new fecal disaster with the composting toilets. “If you have a minute now . . . it’s a matter I know you’ll want to hear about.”
Caleb noticed Rebecca climbing the porch steps, opening the front door of the white house, ignoring the imperative of rest hour. He told Don that his message would have to wait for another time, and he dashed across the Meadow to the house. Entering, he could hear twanging songs on the radio and the percussion of pots from the kitchen. He didn’t find Rebecca in the living room or in the kitchen; the downstairs bathroom door was open, the room empty. He took the stairs two at a time. Tuning fork, he thought. Piano tuner, he corrected. He loved this part of his job. He loved all of it.
Unfortunately, Ira answered instead of Georgia. “Rebecca!” he said energetically. “What’s the news from the far desert reaches?”
“It’s okay.” She couldn’t complain to Ira, who’d sent her here with such belief in her enjoyment. “It’s great.”
“Gorgeous, huh?”
“It’s nice. Lots of sage. That kind of thing.”
“So then what’re you doing calling home? Middle of the day?”
Rebecca neatened a pile of invoices on Caleb’s desk. “I just want to know what’s going on at the paper. I feel out of touch. What’s the cover this week?”
“The paper? It’s the same old. Isn’t that what people say? Same old, same old. And I mean that literally. The paper, like your poor papa, is in its boring middle age. But you! You’re young. You’re in nature. Mom says you keep calling. Are you worried about us for some reason?”
She wasn’t. She was worried about herself, but out of politeness she said, “I guess so.”
“Well, you shouldn’t worry. You really shouldn’t. We’re fine. It’s a waste of your time. You should be enjoying yourself. Have a blast! You’re not there for that long, you know. Carpe diem, as they say, although I’ve always wondered what, exactly, it means to seize a day. Maybe it means, stop calling us. Alright, pumpkin? Stop calling us and try to enjoy it. We thought it would be fun, so try, alright?”
Frozen with guilt over her unhappiness, Rebecca held on to the handset after she hung up, and was still sitting like this when the office door opened.
“That’s not going to help.”
She set the phone on the desk.
Caleb, taking up the entire doorframe, emanated casual disapproval. “Let me tell you, if you’re lonely here, the phone doesn’t help. Actually, makes it a lot worse. We should talk, don’t you think? Outside, though.”
Inside seemed preferable, but she followed him down the stairs.
“I’ve been hoping to get a moment with you,” Caleb said once they reached the Great Overlook, and then he crouched. She didn’t know whether she was supposed to crouch, too. She decided to keep standing, which was probably wrong, because now she was looking down at him as if at a toddler. His brown curls were level with her belly. Alone at adult height, she braced herself for condemnation. She expected yelling or that more unnerving quiet anger. But instead, he talked about what he’d seen of her at camp during these past three days and the week of training, how she was open and curious and clearly intelligent and he admired her. It was very pleasing to listen to this.
Then, he paused. His long brow furrowed. “Are you lonely?”
“I’m . . .” Was this a trick question? Was loneliness even allowed here? Llamalo’s private language exhausted her. There was a rule that stated which direction the bread basket should be passed and about who should make the batch of sticky herbal lip balm that smelled like urine, and that stipulated it be made on the first Friday of every session. There was a rule about who could ring the dinner bell. But when Rebecca had stopped three kids from pulling mattresses off their platform to build a fort, Mikala had intercepted, explaining that actually this was a fine way for them to explore the world as long as they returned the mattresses afterward.
Even so, Rebecca wanted to please Caleb, who had just praised her so stirringly. But how to answer? If he thought loneliness despicable, she’d disavow it. If, on the other hand, he was sympathetic to the longings of those more susceptible, she wanted to rise to his sympathy. Equivocating, she shrugged one shoulder. “It’s just . . .”
He nodded seriously, as if something had been confirmed. “Being lonely can make us antagonistic. I get that. I really do. When I heard what you said, I thought, ‘She must be lonely.’ ”
“What I said? I didn’t say anything.”
He smiled sadly. “I heard that you told some kids that there’s going to be a war over oil in the Middle East. You told them that they might kill and even die in this war. Do you really think they should be thinking about this right now?” He shook his head. “No, see, they’re here to figure out how to live.”
How had he known? He’d been across the Meadow from her. He was speaking in the same kind tone with which he’d complimented her, but now this kindness encompassed a vast disappointment.
“They’ve seen shit,” he continued, still looking up at her. “Each of them. There’s been pain. Even in their family. Especially in their family. There’s been love withheld. They’ve been demeaned. A kid in any family has seen shit.” He rose. “And they need you, these kids. They need you to offer something different. To listen to them.”
“I’ve been trying,” she protested.
“What if you try to stop holding yourself at a distance? Try that and I bet you won’t feel lonely. Keep away from the phone and you’ll settle in here better.”
The reprimand over, he headed across the irrigation ditch toward his yurt. What a waste, she thought, walking behind him to her platform. She could hear Georgia say that, and she thought it in Georgia’s sighing voice: What a waste. Caleb was so charismatic, so good at galvanizing people, at that sort of rousing talk that makes you feel like part of something greater, and to what use? To make sure some rich kids were well hydrated? Where was the public good? The whole world’s fucked-up, Caleb.
She heard the girls as she climbed the steps to the platform, which was built like an open stage, ready for drama. Or rather, they heard her. Someone said, “Shut up, you guys. She’s here.” The others began squealing, like a tree full of startled crows.
Except for Jenny P. and Jenny L., who lay reading on their own sleeping bags, all the girls were shipwrecked on Tanaya’s. Rebecca came to the foot of this mat like a dutiful nurse. “Do you need anything? Anyone want to talk?” They looked at each other. Eyes darting messages. Uh, no.
It had been like this since their arrival. She’d carefully chosen books to bring, but they weren’t interested in her reading aloud. She’d imagined intimacies, secrets shared, vulnerabilities laid out in front of her like offerings to the gods. She’d imagined guiding them from the pedestal of her nearly nineteen years, from the flashing lighthouse of college, but instead they sat on Tanaya’s bed singing Top 40 songs she didn’t know.
Lying on her own cot, two Jennifers and six empty beds away from the clique, she couldn’t make out what they were saying. She peeled a strip of skin off her fraying lips. In grade school, she’d been a strange girl with inexplicable clothes. Kids like Tanaya had shunned her. But at Berkeley, Rebecca had used her lefty cachet to become a semicelebrity among the nerdier crowd; her friends all knew about the time Angela Davis brought her to see a seal washed up on the oily Oakland sand; the bee sting she’d endured picking lavender at Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda’s Santa Barbara ranch; how she’d played hopscotch with the children of both jailed and wanted members of the Weather Underground.
“David,” she heard. The girls had become careless in their whispering. “David,” again.
She lay still to quell the synthetic shuffle of her sleeping bag. She wouldn’t turn her h
ead, so she didn’t know who said, “Well, that’s the way he looked at me. I’m sure of it.” “You wish.” “I heard he already made out with . . .” She missed the last word.
David David? What kind of a backward place was this? What garden of misfits, where Rebecca was reprimanded and David revered?
The Reagan Years: August 1982
Out of the whole world of objects, large and small, Rebecca, at age eleven, could draw just two: ballet shoes and detonating nuclear bombs.
It was the latter that she’d rendered on poster board, no more hiroshimas beneath it in her signature ghost script. Although the rally wasn’t until late this afternoon, she carried the placard as she crossed the lawn at Will Rogers State Park to attend a prerally picnic. She was particularly proud of this bomb. Her mom, walking beside her, was complaining about the shame of a well-watered lawn during drought. Her dad, a few steps ahead of them, had a green canvas bag slung over his shoulder. Rebecca was enjoying the clink of apple juice bottles from this bag, and the cheerfully outraged tone of her mother’s voice, and the squish of wet soil beneath her sandals. She was imagining the rally: how transit workers would emerge from the accordion doors of their buses, postal workers in pale blue would drop parcels and link arms with whole families of grape pickers, who would grab the hands of students, and President Reagan, known in her house only as “the Fucker,” whose fund-raising dinner they were protesting, would glance outside the window of the Century Plaza Hotel and see them—el pueblo unido—and he’d wonder, who was that girl with the bomb poster?
But then Ira stopped short and turned toward his wife and child. “Look, I’m sorry. I can’t do it.”
“Ira, don’t,” Georgia said. “Not today.”
“I can do the picnic. The picnic’s fine. But I can’t go to the rally.”
Suddenly, the grass was a canyon, and Ira had slipped and fallen in, leaving Georgia and Rebecca on the lip, looking down at him.
“You know how it’ll be,” he continued. “We’ll stand in the area cordoned off by the cops, making sure not to upset them. We’ll wave our little signs around.” He grabbed Rebecca’s poster and pumped it up and down. “And when they tell us to go home, we’ll go home and sleep well, as if we’ve done something.”
“That’s a lovely drawing,” Georgia said, draping an arm around Rebecca. “I think Rebecca really wants to go. She worked hard on her poster.”
“No, I don’t.” Rebecca pulled away from her mother, that cloying shore.
Ira reached out to give the poster back to Rebecca. “I’m sorry if it’s disappointing, pumpkin. But who voted for Reagan? The workers of the world. We’re their enemy. That’s the entire problem. That’s the unsolvable. And how do we fix it? We stand outside Reagan’s hotel?”
Rebecca saw a thousand placards, a reef of bobbing coral fans, and she was standing in front of them, clutching her poster. By chance, all the girls from her fifth-grade class would happen to pass by, walking splay-toed, with ballet shoes tied over their shoulders. “Is that Rebecca?” “Who?” “Rebecca. You know, the girl who sits in the second row?” “No way.” “Yes way.” “No way.” “Yes way.” “No way—you mean Rebecca who doesn’t even have hair long enough to French braid?” “Look how she knows all of them—farmworkers and students and union leaders.” “I thought she didn’t know anyone.” Tate, the smartest ballet girl, would purse her glossed lips. “No, she must know all of them. She must know everyone. Even transit workers.”
Rebecca looked at her father. Dive in, his expression said. Dive in with me.
She dove. “I get it. The rally won’t change anything.”
Georgia sighed, and they continued on to the patch of lawn that held their friends and their friends’ kids—those who were named after foliage and those who were named Jessica or Matthew but had been adopted from Ethiopia and Vietnam. In her gloom, Rebecca chose a spot on a blanket on the outskirts of the gathering and opened Island of the Blue Dolphins. No, she didn’t want a sandwich. Ira said, “Fine. Suit yourself,” and she said, “Fine. I will.” He hovered for a moment before joining his newspaper staff in a circle of overturned buckets, commandeering the conversation jovially.
“So my nephew called completely out of the blue.” Ira was starting a story Rebecca had already heard twice. “Last saw him twelve years ago. Now he’s just out of college.”
“We sent him a subscription to the paper for graduation,” Georgia chimed in from a bedspread where she sat with Judy, a former dancer, who still cut the collars from shirts and sat with her legs frogged together.
Ira glanced over at Georgia and then continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “He called to tell me that he wants to—he absolutely has to—go to Wyoming or someplace and start a utopian commune for kids. ‘A utopian commune’—the actual phrase he used. I said, ‘You mean a summer camp?’ He said, ‘Nothing like any other summer camp. The kids will never step inside.’ In other words, this camp is special because it’s his, because he will lead the youth through the wilderness.”
Rebecca watched as other conversations stalled out. The copy editor ceased talking to three women in wraparound skirts. The production assistant turned her head toward Ira’s voice as she scooped pasta salad onto a Styrofoam plate. Joe, bald and slight, like Gandhi, stopped lecturing a squadron of bearded fathers and looked over.
“What’d he want from you? Free ad space?” asked a young man. Rebecca couldn’t remember the name of the newest intern, but they were all the same: recently graduated from East Coast colleges; thrilled to do menial tasks for free; in awe of Ira.
“Why’d he call me? Why does anyone call me? He wanted my help. Apparently, he needs money for this wilderness experience. Thoreau’s cabin in the woods isn’t good enough for him. He wants a donor, a patron. Let’s see, should we make a list of those who deserve funding more than an overprivileged college grad with a hankering for an epiphanic experience?”
Now, even the academics on the far blanket had stopped talking to listen: the UCLA sociologists, the teachers from Hollywood High who had organized the walkout.
“The ten million unemployed,” the intern began. “Welfare moms, disabled . . .”
But Ira waved him away. He hadn’t meant a spoken list—even Rebecca knew that. They all carried the list in their heads. Ira swiveled to face the copy editor and continued. “You know what infuriates me the most? The sense of entitlement. These young men and their belief they can change the world just by being themselves, totally divorced from the social movements already in place. Go to South Central. Go to South Africa. Go to Nicaragua. Maybe you’ll learn something”
“El Salvadór,” the intern offered, with an overdone accent.
Ira looked at the young fathers. “Stop moving to the fucking woods and claiming you’re a good person just because you grow your own goddamn vegetables.”
“Right, what about all the shitty food options at the supermarkets where poor people have to shop?”
“That’s it.” Finally, the intern had said the right thing, and Ira rewarded him with a nod. Rebecca watched the intern straighten his back, a proud duck.
“So what’d you tell him?” Joe called out.
“What do you think, Joe? I told him to fuck off.”
“Ira! Come on. Tell them the truth,” Georgia chided. And then to the crowd, “Even he won’t treat his nephew that way.”
Ira grinned, pleased with himself, arriving at the punch line. “Okay, listen. You’re all going to love this. I saved his life. I gave him Peter Finkel’s number.”
“Finkel?” the copy editor asked incredulously, pushing her round glasses higher on her nose. She’d taken off her blouse to sunbathe in an orange bikini top, despite the wind, and Joe was massaging her shoulders.
Ira drummed on his bucket. “That’s right. Because, god knows, Finkel isn’t going to part with a dime for this kind of thing. He’ll never go for it. Rejection’s the best thing that could happen to my nephew. I saved his life—got him out of the
woods, literally. Now he can do something of significance. Maybe he’ll come intern here.”
They all laughed—Finkel!—Ira the hardest. Rebecca scowled. Perhaps Ira could crawl out of the canyon, but she was stuck down here in the loamy limestone, hands unable to find purchase. She felt a stab of pity for Caleb and his encounter with Finkel, a stab of pity for herself and the placard she wouldn’t hold.
And then she saw David running toward her, treading on cuffed cords, windbreaker flapping, blond curls bobbing, skateboard under one arm, the other waving.
Georgia and Ira, Joe and Judy. The two couples had met on a voter registration drive in Mississippi. Ira had convinced everyone to start the newspaper in LA, where Rebecca and, a year later, David were born. Although they went to different schools and were two grades apart—both with late summer birthdays; Rebecca’s parents entered her in kindergarten young while David’s parents heeded the advice to start boys late—they’d shared a childhood, buckled side by side in cars; sweaty juice-stained legs stuck together; left to amuse themselves during meetings and rallies.
“Finally, you’re here,” he said, dropping next to her. “Want to play?” No need to specify which game: Years ago, they had invented the land of Unionionion and had spent their childhoods defending its unionized onion farmers against scabs and management. “We are all onion farmers” was their motto.
“I’m reading.” She turned a page to demonstrate. “Organized labor is dead—haven’t you noticed? Besides, it’s really a stupid game.”
He spun a wheel of the board he cradled in his arms. “I kind of like it.”
She loved it. I’m suffering, she wanted to say. “I’m not going to the rally.”
“But I thought we—”
“Is Reagan going to end the arms race because of me, holding a poster on TV?”
“Is that what your dad said?” David was clever.
“It’s what I think.”