The Optimistic Decade

by Heather Abel

  That same afternoon, as Rebecca sat on the small patch of grass that was called a meadow, Ira began writing a letter. Not a letter to Rebecca, or at least, not solely to her. A letter to thirty thousand readers. He finished it on Monday and, sending the entire production staff home early, put the issue to bed by himself. Georgia was spending the day in an actual bed, their bed, although perhaps that pronoun was inaccurate, because Ira had been spending his nights on Rebecca’s twin, as Georgia wouldn’t have him nearby.

  When he arrived home, their (her?) bedroom door was closed. The only sign of his wife was the collection of Dannon containers in the sink: Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. He ate cheese, drank beer standing at the kitchen counter, and then, by habit, sank down into a preshaped indentation on the far left cushion of the living room couch. He flicked on the lamp, also habit, and then found himself at a loss.

  He’d never known a day not to end with newspapers. The New York Times and the LA Times had to be read cover to cover and clipped. The weeklies—In These Times and the Nation—couldn’t be ignored for longer than their appointed seven days. He did allow himself to delegate the puffery of the glossier mags—the New Yorker, Mother Jones, etc.—to Georgia. Each morning, the post office dropped off three waxed boxes filled with dailies from cities across the country—the Gazettes and Republicans and Tribunes and Posts—arriving a day late. The interns were responsible for reading through these and bringing him a folder of relevant articles. He read their clippings each evening as well, recycling most, attaching sticky notes to the others with a reporter’s name and FYI, an acronym Georgia always claimed he meant to stand for “Fuck Your Ignorance.”

  He read it all. He knew it all. Every piece of state and national legislation. Every instance of institutional bias, every legal challenge, defeat, and subsequent appeal. All the factions in the Movement, in the various movements; there was no Movement anymore. He could call anyone and make them talk. He could get a quote from a rock. From the most reluctant Republican, the most dishonest Dem. He could find the addresses of people who weren’t listed in phone books, show up with coffee and donuts, and come away with a story. He could file a FOIA request in his sleep. What good had it done anyone?

  His scissors and blue pen were on the side table. Three stacks of sticky notes. The trifolded Timeses from both coasts waited on the coffee table by his feet. In a burst of purposefulness, he stood to examine the bookshelf Georgia had filled with novels, the female authors plus Dickens on the upper shelves, Philip Roth relegated to the bottom for crimes of misogyny. But no. He’d never understood why anyone would read about imaginary people. Even now, with nothing else to do, it seemed like an indulgence.

  So he sat, reading nothing, until 10 p.m., which was a respectable time for sleep, although he wasn’t tired.

  Before dawn, he set off for Rancho Cucamonga, arriving just after seven, when the sky was the color of milk.

  On a street of warehouses, Ira rang an illuminated bell at the only worker-owned printing plant in California. He waited for the buzzer, pushed in the heavy metal door, and entered a small anteroom, where he could hear, but not see, the grinding of Gutenberg’s heirs. The churning of verbiage. The optimistic pressing of prose to paper.

  “Ira? The man himself?” Debbie sat in a wooden chair with her legs on a metal desk, holding the Metro section of the LA Times. Morning Edition on KCRW came from a radio on the windowsill. News, news: everyone wanted it; nobody did anything with it. Ira hadn’t seen Debbie in years—his production director now drove the proofs to press—and he noticed that she’d made the jarring decision to age. Her gray hair was cut short and spiky.

  “I wanted to deliver it,” Ira said, settling the portfolio of page proofs beside her metal desk. “Last one.”

  “I’m well aware. We’re screwed, so thanks. You were our only remaining large client. Apparently, everyone else does it themselves at Kinko’s now.”

  Ignoring this, he said, “Well, the occasion seemed to require certain formalities.” He nodded toward the coffeepot on the windowsill. “Mind if I . . . ?”

  “Go ahead.”

  He poured the coffee into a mug ringed with brown residue, tore open two sugars, and emptied them. He took the chair across from Debbie, crossed one leg over the other. He remembered fifteen years ago when she and her girlfriend—Barb? Eileen?—formed a CR group with Judy and Georgia and three women who later moved to Oregon to become potters—or was it weavers? All of them so sexy. Deb would wear this little black vest over her T-shirts, and he wasn’t supposed to stare. Every Tuesday, Ira and Rebecca, banished from the house while consciousness was being raised in the living room, would walk hand in hand to eat mu shu pork and egg rolls at Green Leaves, their own consciousness as low as ever but their spirits raised delightfully by the chemical compounds of salt and sugar and MSG.

  “Think you’ll miss it?” Debbie asked, a coolness to her blue eyes. Still sexy.

  “Miss what? Miss futility? Miss preaching? Miss the choir? Miss insisting that, despite all evidence to the contrary, we’re helping the arc of history bend toward blah blah blah?”

  “So, no then.”

  Sitting here, he could almost muster nostalgia. There used to be such a charge to it all, an indisputable urgency. A frantic, purposeful six days. And then that lacuna of time after he’d drop the paper off with Debbie and before he discovered the issue’s mistakes. Eight hours spent in an addictive stoned-out satiety of a job accomplished.

  But then, a few years ago, depression, sludge in his veins. Every new subscription was equalized by a canceled subscription. He spent his time begging for money from foundations, trying to tailor articles to their mercurial enthusiasms—the environment, one year; “positivity in politics,” the next. He couldn’t exist like this anymore.

  “I didn’t tell anyone,” Debbie said. “Followed orders like a good soldier. So your secret’s in there?” She pointed at the portfolio. “Your reason for jumping ship? What comes next for Ira Silver?”

  “Georgia calls it my ‘suicide note.’ She refused to read it, and I wouldn’t let anyone copyedit, so you’ll be the first.”

  Debbie swung her legs off the table, leaned toward him. “And then what? Everyone learns in a few days when they get the paper? What’s your plan for when the barrage comes? Sit in the office and field angry calls?”

  “My actual fear, Debbie, is that fewer people on the left will muster anger than we might like. A tide of complacency is sweeping our shore. And I’d like to believe the reactionary press will be cheering, but the truth is they’ve ignored us for years.” He drained his coffee, put the mug on her table. “Look, could you talk to Georgia maybe? Reach out?”

  “Why?”

  “She’s in a bad state. She’s not taking this well.”

  “Ira, seriously? She’s not taking this well? You made the unilateral decision to shut down the newspaper. You’re basically firing her. Have you even given this any thought? We warned her. We all did. We said, ‘Don’t have your husband be your boss.’ But she insisted you two were equals, making equal decisions. She always felt this compulsion to help you, since the day she met you. And now she’s supposed to take this well?” Debbie stood up. “I have to get your pages back there. Unless you want to deliver them yourself? Some closing formalities?”

  “It’s all yours.”

  He walked out empty-handed, the street of warehouses a fitting backdrop for this anticlimax. But what had he expected? Gratitude? A gold watch for his service to the cause?

  He took side streets to the 134 to forestall his return home to Georgia and the empty hours (what did come next for Ira Silver?), and just before the highway on-ramp, he further delayed the inevitable by turning into the vast and largely empty parking lot of a shopping mall.

  Why not spend his free day the way all other Americans spent theirs? Obedient to the purring demands of capitalism. He strolled inside. A mall, it turned out—he’d never been in one before—mimicked a village: narrow streets an
d women sweeping, turning on lights, and calling to each other. The menfolk were in the fields.

  Was that why all the women smiled at him? They walked in twos, sweat-suited, sneakered. He soon found himself in an atrium of potted palms and a penny-pelted fountain, the heart of the mall, where the twin escalators acted as artery and vein.

  Ira escalated. Only one store had not yet turned on its pulsing music, so he entered it. The shopkeeper stayed near him as he ran his fingers along the sleeves of hanging shirts, wondering how she’d arranged them equidistantly. She seemed to really want to help him, and Ira, encouraged to please her in turn, said, “I’m trying to buy a gift for my wife.”

  Did Georgia prefer soft fabrics or structured? Was she a winter or a spring? Was she petite or full-bodied? Here, the shopkeeper mimed breasts, flat and full, in front of her own lovely plum-hued chest.

  The store smelled of cinnamon air-fresheners; the woman was deeply tanned (yes, her skin was a cinnamon color, but he scorned others for describing brown-skinned people as spices or teas or chocolate or nuts), with something sparkly around her neck. She wore a soft, tight purplish shirt—not a blouse, not a sweater, something else.

  “Are you a winter?” he asked.

  “A fall.”

  “And do you perhaps sell that particular shirt?”

  She smiled, touched her actual chest. How did he look to her, with his newly elongated forehead, his hair receding and graying? Like Debbie, he’d made the mistake of aging.

  “Could I buy it?”

  “Of course. So she’s a fall, too, your wife?”

  A fall? “Well, I guess! She wears shirts like that.” Although he could only picture Georgia in the blue button-down. “Or, I should say, she likes autumnal colors. At the very least, she talks about missing fall. We’re originally from back East. Traded in the land of seasons for the land of smog.”

  “It’s not strange to not know what size your wife is,” the woman said, guiding him to the rack where the shirt waited. “Most men don’t.”

  “She’s not very big,” he said, appraising her, the skin of her shirt as plush as deer antlers.

  “Then perhaps she’s small?’

  How would he hand it to Georgia? Would he leave it on their bed? Her bed? Would this gesture be enough to allow him to sleep there again? Or, at the very least, would it enable him to stand by the sink chatting while she cooked chicken? Here, with the quiet encouragement of the saleswoman and the cloying spice smell, it seemed likely.

  “Small. I suppose that would be logical.”

  She plucked a shirt from the rack, wrapped it in rose tissue paper, just a shade lighter than the shirt, and sealed the paper with a silver sticker. Ira had no idea if this was standard shirt-buying procedure, and he considered that he might have been awarded something special. He whistled some lines from the Gilbert and Sullivan tape he’d been listening to in the car as she made an impression of his credit card and he signed his name, returning her smile at the accomplishment of a completed transaction.

  On the highway, with Georgia’s downy shirt in the passenger seat where hours before the newspaper had sat, he hummed happily. So shopping did indeed have salutary effects. Americans were not dumb after all!

  Only when he pulled up to his own driveway did he feel the grim irrevocableness of his actions. Soon, the printing would finish. The distributors would haul away the stacks, slap a mailing address on each copy, trucks and airplanes conveying them to the chill of a West Coast summer and the swelter of New York apartments and to the earnest subscribers in the Midwest, to every college town, to every mediocre library that hadn’t lost its funding. A few days later, papers would arrive in the hard-to-reach rural addresses. Three for the environmentalists in Yaak, Montana. Twenty-seven in Hawaii. Eighteen in Puerto Rico. One for a counselor in a small mining town in Colorado. A few days after that, airplanes would cross oceans, carrying papers to England, Spain, Italy, Japan, Portugal, South Africa, New Zealand, Poland. It had taken him years to build up this subscription base. His paper would soon be gone, all gone, and he was left with this: pink tissue and a shirt his wife would never wear.

  The Reagan Years: September 1982

  The orthodontist tugged yellow and green rubber bands between the hard knobs of her teeth to separate bone and allow, in the coming weeks, wire and metal to enter, and Rebecca thought about David. The orthodontist hovered his bearded mouth over hers, his breath as brackish as seaweed on the sand, steaming with flies, and she thought about the beach and David.

  She had a crush, she knew now, gazing past the orthodontist’s face to the stickers on his ceiling—queen, kiss—something to distract recumbent kids, but nothing she knew. David would explain the difference, sitting on her bedroom floor, her tape player between them. It had been a month since she’d seen him at Will Rogers, but he’d be at her house this evening, and what would happen then? The orthodontist sang along to the radio, “It’s the eye of the dah-dah, it’s the thrill of the dah.”

  When he levered her chair upright—“You’re all set, sweetheart”—it felt difficult to close a mouth that had been stretched open for so long. He told her to come back in two weeks when he’d remove the spacers and put on braces, and ta-da! Straight teeth. “It’ll hurt tonight. Take an asprin or something.”

  In the lobby, a dark room with an inky fish tank, she stood clutching Ira’s credit card, but the receptionist refused to look up from the mausoleum of file cabinets. Outside a small window, rain fell. Rebecca took the opportunity to study the other patient, perched on the edge of a chair, a girl with such a tiny nose. Tiny hands with a unicorn ring. Tiny emerald earrings glittering in tiny ears like mushrooms. A tiny silver bracelet on her wrist spelled what must be a tiny version of her name: pmg.

  She looked nothing like Rebecca. And yet, her prettiness offered Rebecca hope. It seemed possible that Rebecca was actually this girl. Now that she had a crush, she was no longer herself; she might instead be tiny, too.

  Without responding to any visible or audible signal, the receptionist called, “Patricia Gonzalez. He’s ready for you now.” The girl passed by Rebecca, who closed her eyes in the hopes that some loveliness would transfer osmotically into her.

  At home, she fixed her hair in an approximation of PMG’s, something involving a white scrunchie, like a cloud over the hillock of dark hair, and rehearsed a greeting in the bathroom mirror: “Hey, what’s up?” She felt proud of the rubber spacers that could be glimpsed between white enamel when she spoke. She changed from sweatshirt to sweater and back to sweatshirt again and was ready for David hours before he would arrive.

  A short struggle with the kitchen’s sliding door and she was in the backyard, where rain shook the bougainvillea petals and bowed the heads of dandelions. Worms, released from the soil, climbed upward into the grass. She stepped quietly into the garage and could hear Ira, although her view of him was obscured by the intern cubicles.

  “I can’t ignore it, Georgia. Don’t tell me to ignore it. They’re acting like idiots.”

  So many afternoons spent here, reading on the floor while Ira made phone calls, the cynicism in his voice comforting (“You expect me to believe that?”). He’d hand her books on Tubman, Truth, Chavez, Gandhi, X, Debs, Ethel and Julius, but it was Ira whose story—of SDS and arrests in Mississippi and Chicago—she admired most. To love him was to bask in his surety.

  Rebecca walked around the cubicles to stand at her father’s desk. Against the far wall, Georgia twisted a paper clip at her desk, listening with pressed lips to her husband. “It would be negligent not to write about their idiocy,” he shouted. “They’re pledging total loyalty to a company, the richest company in the world, that doesn’t give a shit about them. So if I’m attacked as antiworker, because I say that the workers are acting like idiots, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t take an Ivy League education to figure all this out. The oil companies are speculators. They will pull out. This is not a new situation.”

  “But what I’m saying
is that it’s Exxon’s fault,” Georgia said. “That’s what you need to focus on.”

  “Of course it’s Exxon’s fault. That’s indisputable. I’m just saying, who’s going to hold Exxon accountable if the government won’t and the workers won’t?” Ira stood as if propelled upward by his outrage and began walking back and forth as he talked. “It’s total collusion in Exxon’s fantasy of a free market without externalities, a fucking lovefest between the assholes who make the profits and the idiots who sell their labor. Carter pronounces energy self-sufficiency to be the ‘moral equivalence of war’ and suddenly everyone, even the unions, bend over backward to let Exxon rape American land. They should be prepared. They should be organized. It’s a voluntary refusal to connect the motherfucking dots.”

  Who else saw the world the way it really was? What other father connected the motherfucking dots? She wanted to be worthy of him, an impulse that—with nothing else to offer—made her lunge toward him with her mouth open. “Look, Dad.”

  He stared at her without saying anything. It was too warm in here to wait so long, too musty and moldy. Spores grew on paper, and there was plenty of that: tombstones of newspapers and columns of computer printouts and obelisks of spiral notebooks, and on the walls, yellowing cartoons, curling posters, against this, for that. All the paper was quietly waiting.

  Finally, he said, “What are you showing me? Does something hurt?”

  She pointed.

  He gazed uncertainly. “That’s new? All those little colored bits? Jesus Christ, of course. You took my credit card. Everything I’ve scraped together going into your teeth. Poor people don’t have teeth, much less straight ones.” He directed his shouting to the back of the room: “Everyone, sell more ads, pull the lead. We’re going to kiss Exxon’s ass, get some of their money. Rebecca needs new teeth.” This was Ira’s kind of joke, except that sometimes he was serious.