by Marge Piercy
When she got back to where they were staying and walked in, the air was different: it was like running into a wall. There was a metallic taste of fear that sang in the air, there was the rough frenzied whirring of confusion. Even the house cat was affected and crouched on the highest shelf with his fur on end. Laura was sitting bunched up in a chair, white-faced with tension and so tight Beth could feel her muscles aching when she looked at her. Nobody knew whether Wanda had been arrested or what, but that morning a subpoena had been served on her to appear before a federal grand jury. Anita, a woman from the law commune, had been called and gone to investigate. Anita called back and told them the situation. A grand jury was supposed to be investigating how deserters from the Army got assistance in surviving in the States or getting across the border into Canada. Wanda’s ex-husband Joe, who had been working with G.I.s since the summer before, was probably the target.
“Then it’s okay,” Beth said. “She hasn’t seen him in three years, so they can’t do anything to Wanda. She’ll just tell them that she hasn’t seen him and she doesn’t know anything about what he’s doing, and they’ll let her go.”
“Anita says it might not be that simple,” Laura muttered. “She says that might not be the only thing they’re after.”
“But Wanda doesn’t know anything about Joe at all!”
Laura shook her head. “That isn’t necessarily so, Beth. Even you know some things about Joe.”
“I know I wish he was dead! It’s so unfair for Wanda to get into trouble for something a man did she hasn’t had … a penny or a kind word from in three years!” Beth paced the small living room. “But what else could they accuse her of?”
“It isn’t like a regular jury. They’re older, richer white people always, and they even run a credit check on them. They’re to bring in indictments that the government wants. Ninety-five per cent of the time that’s what they do—agree to prosecute. But Anita says that mainly they’re a device for investigating. They’re a way of forcing people to testify about each other. The F.B.I, can’t force you to talk, the police can’t, though they try. But a grand jury can send you to jail if you don’t answer their questions.”
“But Wanda doesn’t have anything to do with Joe any more. So she can say that and they have to let her go!”
“But you don’t love him, you hate him! He hurt you. He walked all over you and left your kids. Are you going back into that good-woman masochism for the sake of a man who used you as a punching bag?”
“It isn’t for him, Beth. Though I’d enjoy seeing him cooked in a pot on the stove on a slow fire, I wouldn’t enjoy seeing him on trial. I don’t want them to win—the state, the machine.”
“But you have to choose what’s important! If you don’t answer their questions now that they’re giving you immunity, they’ll send you to jail for contempt. Then you won’t be with us, you won’t be with your sisters—and you won’t be with me!”
“Come on, Beth …” Wanda was trying to make her smile. “I’ll sure enough be with my sisters. You don’t think they’re going to put me in a men’s prison, do you?”
“Why did you take the Fifth? They just asked you about being married to Joe! That’s a matter of public record.”
“Bethie, try to understand. Don’t roar at me so. If you answer any question on a subject, they have a right to force you to answer all other questions on that topic. If I answered any questions about Joe, even admitting I knew him, they could ask other questions.” Wanda buried her face in her hands. “It’s a blessing I had Anita! They wouldn’t let her come into the room with me. It’s scary, Beth, believe me. You act as if I had a lot of time to decide what to do. I couldn’t have my lawyer in there, so I insisted on going out in the hall to talk to her after every question. They wouldn’t let me write the questions down, but I’d remember them the best I could, and sometimes I’d have to go back and hear them again. They tried to intimidate me, telling me I was a real unco-operative witness and that would be held against me. Bethie, it’s scary. You’re in there with them, nobody with you, not even your lawyer. And they’ve invented this funny maze full of traps. If you say one word wrong, if you say the formula just one word off, it’s like some bad fairy tale magic, they get to chop off your head. They make up the language and the formulas and you have to do it exactly right in the right order. If you don’t say it exactly so, you’re caught. It’s like being forced back to eight years old, in grade school, and the adults get to make up all the rules. And every time you think you’re safe, they hit you with a new rule you didn’t know about. So that, whatever you do, you’re wrong.”
“But why can’t you just tell them the truth? Say you were married to Joe and now you’re divorced and you don’t ever see him any more. You don’t know what he’s doing, and that’s the truth. What do you care anyhow what happens to him? Why should you go to jail to keep him out?”
“I won’t help them! I don’t have to hold him on my back any more. I don’t have to service him in bed and board and be his practical-side old lady who has to think about rent and feeding the kids, freeing him for big thoughts. But he isn’t my worst enemy. The corporations that poison the rivers and make war profitable and the state that makes war—those are my enemies. This society taught him to take women and use them and throw them away. It taught him you marry a woman and then she gives you children and everything your heart desires till you trade her in on a prettier, younger model. This society taught him what it means to be a man—the fist, the balls, competing, winning, putting everybody down. In order to survive where he grew up, in order to be able to do something good at all, a Puerto Rican in white society, he became the knife that cut me. A gentle man, a passive man in East Harlem, Beth, he’d be crushed. He’d be rotting in a state mental hospital. He’d be a junkie. Joe made it as he could, but he never set the price of making it. He got to be a university professor, imagine that. Nobody else in his family got through high school—”
“I never got to college, but that doesn’t mean I have a licence to stomp people.”
“That he stayed radical means something. He made it in the white man’s world, but he didn’t pretend to think white. He didn’t change his allegiance. That’s why they’re after him, that’s why they want to break him. Well, Joe’s not my friend, and I don’t know, if he was lying on the floor, that I wouldn’t stomp. God, I have scars from him. But they’re my enemies much worse than he is.”
“But if you don’t answer the questions now they’re forcing immunity on you, they’ll put you in prison. They’ll put you in prison and there’s not one thing I can do! They’ll separate us. You haven’t seen Joe in three years. How much harm can you do if you answer the questions? You don’t work with deserters, you don’t know that much about what happens.”
“This is a fishing expedition, Beth. The questions they want to ask me aren’t just about deserters. They’re asking about the whole web of connections in the movement. They want to know who’s friendly with who, who lives where, in what commune, who sleeps with who, who gives money. They want to fill in all the missing connections so that people can’t disappear underground any more.”
“But they must know all that anyhow, they have all the phones in the country tapped!”
“Don’t exaggerate, Beth. They don’t know everything. Even when they ‘know,’ half of what they know is garbage and they want confirmation. Look, the questions they’re asking me include every address I’ve lived at since the year zero. Who else lived there? What vehicles have I owned and who borrowed them? Who was at the women’s conference last year in Boston and where did they stay? How did I travel from Boston to New York for the health care demonstration that summer? What meetings did I attend in that fall that plotted riots, demonstrations, or street actions—all lumped as one! Lots of questions about Bleak House, Beth. Who’s stayed there in the last year and for how long and exactly when. When people were gone on journeys and when they came back. I can’t answer those kinds of questio
ns, I can’t!”
“But it isn’t illegal to have demonstrations.”
“It is when they call it inciting to riot. Or conspiracy. Look, you can talk about stealing a parking meter. Now swiping a meter is probably a misdemeanor. But conspiring to commit a misdemeanor is a felony.… How many times have you sat around the living room while people went on á fantasy rap about shooting Nixon or blowing up the Pentagon … or hijacking a beer truck? Well, that’s conspiracy. That’s how they tied up the Panthers. Every time you say out loud, ‘Gee, I’d like to stick a knife very slowly in Henry Kissinger,’ you’re in trouble. Maybe an informer says to you, ‘Gee, how’d you like to stick a knife slowly in Henry K.?’ And you say, ‘I surely would enjoy to do that.’ Conspiracy, understand?”
“People don’t always go to prison. A lot of time juries see through what’s happening.”
“Yeah, but before the trial they’ve had you in jail, ‘cause they set bail so high on political people. So even if their case is made of cream cheese, you’ve spent two years in jail by the time the jury turns you loose. Your friends spent money they didn’t have to get you out and defend you. And whatever you were doing that made them want to lock you up, you aren’t doing it any more.”
“But this isn’t a real jury. Anita says the judge decides if you’re in contempt, and they can put you right in federal prison. You’ll be in their hands. They can kill you!”
“They don’t want to kill me, I’m a little fish. They want information. They say right out loud that they want to spread paranoia and mistrust. They can only put me away for the duration of the grand jury. Six months, a year.”
“We’ve only been together a year! Is that nothing? We can run away. We can go to Canada.”
“Love, they’re watching us. And what about the kids? Do you think, if we got away, they’d let us get near them? I am not going to lose my kids because I’m scared to spend six months in prison. I have to know that you’re with the children. Otherwise I can’t stand it.”
“Wanda, without you the group will fall apart!”
“Then it’s time for it to stop. Time for the women to take what they’ve learned and go out with it.”
“I can’t accept it!” Beth clutched herself. “I hate it! You’ve fallen into the good-woman trap! Sacrificing yourself for him. You don’t really identify with the women’s movement, not deep down, or you wouldn’t care about him! You’d do what’s best for us.”
“What’s best for us is not to let them use the courts to terrorize us. What is worse is to help the war machine hunt their prey. I believe in a separate women’s movement so we can be in control of our own political destiny, and our own struggle. Because nobody ever liberated anybody else for real. Because the only people who care about women’s issues are women. But I have to believe in making alliance with other groups who are fighting too, because we do want to win.”
“By going to prison in their place.”
“It’s nobody’s place to go! Or everybody’s to imagine she might have to. Beth, it’s only six months or a year. I was in jail for a week once and it was awful but here I am. Don’t you think to make a revolution we might all have to be willing to do at least that?”
“Why can’t we get away? So they’re watching the street. We can go over the roofs. We can go straight to the kids.”
“It’s hard, Beth, being a fugitive. Hard and hard and hard. Think about it. We’d have to change names and appearances and use false I.D. Hard to hold a job, hard to survive. We’d be alone. For six months, it’s not worth it. I’ll know that you’re with Luis and Johnny and you’re waiting for me, and the time will pass.…”
“So now you say it’s too late. Too late to live our lives, too late to be together, too late to work with our group and love each other. But not too late for you to be a martyr!”
“Beth, Beth, don’t hurt me! I don’t want to be a martyr. I feel like somebody being run over slowly by a big truck! Don’t you think I’m afraid? Don’t you think I’m scared out of my mind?” Wanda’s face began to quiver and wizen. Then the tears burst out. Beth began to cry at the same time. She threw her arms around Wanda and hugged her close. They held each other, their tears running together down each other’s cheeks, salty on each other’s lips.
Wanda burrowed close, her hands convulsive and taut on her back. “Beth, I’m so scared you can’t believe it. So scared! Scared of being hurt. Scared of being beaten. Scared of being inside and going crazy. Scared of never getting out. Scared I’ll give in and talk and hate myself. Scared of being separated from the boys. Scared of losing you. Scared of what this will do to Luis and Johnny. Let me go, I’ve got to blow my nose.” Wanda pulled from her and walked back and forth rapidly, clenching and unclenching her hands. “Got to get control. Hold on. Help me to hold on.”
“Why? It does hurt. It hurts so bad.”
“Because I’m afraid already. Beth, I keep remembering things …”
“Remember us. Think of us!”
“One time in New York I ran into one of the Young Lords with a little girl, about Ariane’s age. Such a pretty little girl, but she didn’t talk, she didn’t say a word. I was teasing Jesús, was she his, because he wasn’t married, and he got very proper and dignified and explained he was taking his turn with her while her mother worked. She was the daughter of one of the New York 21. Her dad had been jailed waiting trial on one of those incredible hundred-thousand-dollar bonds just before she was born, and he’d never seen her. He’d never been allowed to see her! All those years taken away from his woman and his child, and who can give that back? I’m so scared they’ll take the boys from us.”
“Because we’re lesbians.”
“Courts always take gay women’s children. Because we’re not a family they recognize. I’m scared, Beth, scared!”
“I will try to hold everything together. I will try.” Beth took Wanda’s hands and unclenched them. Wiped the tears from her cheeks with her finger tips and her mouth.
“There’s still a chance they might not get the contempt. Anita’s trying to quash the whole thing. But there will still be ways we can communicate. I trust Anita.”
“I’m trying to trust her. And you. That you know what you’re doing.”
“Then go to the boys. Leave for New Hampshire now! Quickly. Don’t hang around. If I get off, you’ll know it. If I get sent to prison for contempt, Anita will tell you how to communicate with me. I’ll put you down as my cousin or something.”
“Don’t talk that way, Wanda.”
“It’s the only way I can talk. Take care of everybody for me, for all of us.”
29
Everything Comes to the Woman
Who Doesn’t Wait for Anything
Summer when you love somebody and you’re with them, Beth thought, it envelops you in green and lush and wet and warm. It seconds your love-making. It gives you flowers and fruit that tickle your senses to open wide. It gives you grass to lie on and streams to bathe in together. It gives you the sun to warm your bare bodies. It gives you moonlight to talk by. But summer when your lover is seven hundred miles away in a federal prison, it’s just a hot corridor to get through, somehow.
She tried to scrub away her self-pity. She was not alone. She must stop sulking and brooding and lying awake in an empty bed. She must care for those she loved too, her sisters, the children, especially Luis and Johnny. The first month back at the farm she felt closer to them than ever, closer especially to Luis. Johnny, being small and vulnerable and emotional, she had always felt close to, but the more competent Luis—almost her size at eight and growing daily—it had taken this loss to bring them to each other. He was protective and big-brotherly toward the other children, and now somewhat so toward her as well. That was hard to accept and yet she found herself finally moved by it. There was something of sexual stereotyping in his assumption of big-brother roles, yet something too of simple good will and gentle care for others. At eight he was far from naïve and watched his ton
gue with anyone from outside. Sometimes he fantasied about his father out loud. The bitterness Wanda had shared with Beth she had never spoken to them. Luis remembered his father far better than Johnny did, who would sometimes ask about some man, especially about pictures of cowboys, if his father looked like that. Luis was proud that they had not succeeded in serving a subpoena on Joe, who had disappeared and was still invisible. He was not underground—he had not changed his identity or his appearance—he had simply removed himself to friends in San Antonio and was watching the progress of the federal grand jury that had pulled in Wanda. Beth knew because Wanda knew: Joe had communicated with her right after she got to Alderson. That same week someone had telegraphed Beth two hundred dollars from Albuquerque, with a happy birthday message for the kids. Gee, thanks, Beth said to the image of Joe the Mustache in her head: can you spare it? But they certainly needed it in the house.
It was July before the state came down on them and the children in a custody fight. Beth was at Alderson visiting Wanda when it began. Wanda’s parents asked for and got the court to award Wanda’s children to them. Round Earth was supposed to leave for a trip through upstate New York the next week, but Beth balked. She panicked and then ground to a halt. She had run frantically from town to town finding a local lawyer, who told her she could do nothing. She spent hours on the phone to Anita pleading with her to produce a solution, till Anita started screaming with frustration that she had five clients in prison already, and she could not invent laws for Beth’s sake. Round Earth was coming apart at the seams: no money to pay the rent, their lives jangled too much to fit with the older material. Laura took off first, going to New York with Lynn to join a gay women’s printing collective. Some of the women decided to go on working together in Putney, Vermont.