by Kate Wilhelm
Mesa had escaped the mobs, the anouncer said, and refugees were streaming into that suburb, fleeing downtown Phoenix. They were bringing violence with them, he had gone on to say, demanding shelter, demanding water, demanding the Mesa police join forces with the downtown police, who were clearly unable to control the mobs. The National Guard . . .
Jean had stood up numbly. “Mother,” she whispered.
The announcer was recounting the growing emergency, which had started when the government had curtailed water service to fifty percent of the metropolitan area, urging the people to store their furniture, leave the area until further notice. As the dwindling water supplies made further curtailments necessary, the first mob action had taken place in the ghettos of the city, where the Mexican-Americans took to the street. . . .
There was no phone service to Phoenix that night or the next day, and on the day after that Jean caught a plane and went to force her mother to leave her house on the edge of Mesa, Arizona.
Few people were going to Arizona, many were leaving. The roads were filled with cars, trucks, army transports. It looked like a disaster scene. The city was quiet now, almost normal, except for a low-hanging cloud of smoke. Jean caught a bus from Phoenix to Mesa. The traffic was bumper to bumper, all heading away from Phoenix. Nowhere was there anything green; every lawn had turned back into desert, every park was barren, every palm tree lifeless, every shrub and bush from every exotic land was dead. Only cactus plants looked untouched. They had seen it all before, they seemed to say.
Jean had to walk six blocks from the bus stop to her mother’s house. Most of the houses were vacant, windows boarded up, sand drifted around the doors and foundations. The subdivision streets were buried in sand. The houses in this subdivision all cost one hundred thousand and up, her stepfather had told her, and added that his was on the up side. His name was Teddy Caro, and he was president of the Caro Realty Company; he had left the area nearly a year ago, when electricity was first rationed.
Jean stared at the expensive house, hating it, hating the idea of it, hating her mother for being here, for having married Teddy Caro, a chiseler who had become rich selling desert land to wide-eyed Easterners who wanted a bit of sunshine and freedom.
The house had twelve rooms, a three-car attached garage, a swimming pool with a plastic cover strong enough to park a bus on, and it was all hideous, garish, with fake bricks on the house front, and fake herons in the sand, which had been a lush velvety lawn that had required a truck load of water to be dumped on it three days a week to stay green.
She found her mother in the living room, staring at the television set, which had not worked for months. The house was as hot and airless as a sunbaked tomb; there was no water, no electricity, nothing at all to drink, although there were empty liquor bottles in the kitchen, dining room, Stephanie’s bedroom, the living room. Stephanie looked at Jean without recognition, and then turned her gaze back to the television set. She was gaunt, hollow-eyed, and feverish.
“Mother, get up. We’re leaving now. Come on, you have to get dressed.”
Stephanie shook her head, frowning, as if she were being interrupted while watching her favorite show. Jean sank down on the floor by her and put her head on the couch, not weeping although she knew there were tears to be shed.
“Why are you doing this?” she whispered. “Why, Mother?”
Stephanie might not have heard; she made no response. Finally Jean had to haul her up from the couch, drag, shove, and push her into the bedroom, where she dressed her as if she were a child, and then they started walking toward the bus line. “I’ll put you in a hotel,” she said, not to inform her mother, she knew, but to break the terrifying silence that pressed in on her just as the heat and sun pressed against her.
“I’ll arrange for storage for your furniture and pack your things for you. But where will you go? Where’s Teddy?”
Stephanie walked obediently, and never spoke all that day or the next or the next, while Jean made the arrangements for her possessions. When she did break her silence, it was to scream, “You’ve stolen everything I have! Where are my jewels? Where’s my mink coat? What have you done with my cars?” She screamed until the hotel manager sent a doctor to the room and he administered a sedative.
“She’s very ill,” he said to Jean afterward. “She needs professional care.”
Jean looked out the window at the city, still burning in places because there was no water to spare for fire in that section of town, and suddenly she began to weep. Not for her mother, not for anything personal at all, she thought, but she could not stop. She was weeping for the city, for all of them down there, for everything and everybody. She was weeping because no matter where she turned she could see no hope that it wouldn’t all burn just as it was burning here.
Behind her the doctor was talking about her mother and drugs and alcohol and a slow process of self-destruction, and Jean could not respond because she was weeping too hard.
All those people driven out of Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California, Oregon . . . They had all been as desperate as she, more desperate. Since that day she had had four years of relative security. She knew she was very, very lucky.
The rain stung where it hit her face; it was blowing almost horizontally. At least it kept the thugs off the street, she thought, huddling down in her coat, ducking her head as low as she could and still see at all. The university grounds were nearly deserted; it was dinnertime in the dorms, and the night classes had not started yet. Across a wide ice-glazed lawn she could see all of Mac Hall, and King Hall, both lit up from top to bottom. The refugees from the Western cities had arrived that week, had taken residence there, and already they were making a difference on campus. Every day now there were strangers on the walks, eyeing the professors and students alike with bitterness and hatred. Some of them crowded into classes, sat on the floor in the backs of the rooms or lounged against the walls, muttering at times, holding private conversations. Three young women had sauntered into Jean’s class on Monday, had listened for ten minutes to her lecture on transformational grammar; then, with loud obscene remarks, they had left again.
Jean had been one of the group to campaign for the opening of all public buildings to the refugees. In principle she still knew it was the only thing that could be done as more and more people were forced from their homes and farms. She still argued their cause when it came up, as it inevitably did at any social gathering, but she admitted it was shitty in practice, if noble in intent.
At least, she thought turning a corner into the full blast of frigid wind, she did have a job that paid enough for her to live on, with a possibility of a future if she could endure the present.
The apartment complex was on campus; recently a steel door had been added, and all the windows were now barred. A security guard greeted her and continued his rounds as she fitted her key into the door. She walked up the three flights of stairs to the apartment she shared with Walter Hasek and as she climbed she felt her day sliding off her shoulders, her brief encounter with Arkins fading from memory; the sight of the steel door and bars and the thought of refugees waiting in the shadows to gang rape her all slipped from her mind as if they were all of no consequence. Within those three rooms there was no icy rain, no paranoid Arkins, no problem.
Walter didn’t get up when she entered the apartment. He was grading papers at his desk, and simply smiled at her. It was the smile that she always thought of when she brought him to mind at work, or walking home, or in class, wherever she happened to be. His mouth did not curve upward, but widened until it seemed to be a line separating his face into two sections. His black hair was so curly it almost frizzed, and he kept it very short; his eyes were as black as obsidian, his features as regular and perfect as those of Michelangelo’s David. He was nearly fifty, she kept reminding herself; he had been married twice, and had lived with neither wife more than a few years, but had not lived alone since his adolescence. She was one of an incalculable number of women
in his life. But she was the only one now, she always added almost smugly.
She went to him and kissed his head above his ear. He was reading an essay answer and she didn’t interrupt, but went on by him to hang up her wet coat and take off her boots.
Dinner was simmering in a pot, coffee was made—their one luxury—the apartment was warm and fragrant with good food smells. She poured coffee and wrapped both hands around the mug, and then sat down on the couch to watch him and wait for him to finish.
The apartment was very small, the kitchen not big enough for two people to enter at the same time; the bedroom was hardly bigger, and the living room had the couch, his desk, a card table, three straight chairs, and Walter’s music system with its components all over. There were books everywhere— on makeshift shelves, on real shelves that were from floor to ceiling on one wall, on every flat surface. There was a brown oval rug on the floor, a gift from Jean’s former roommate, who had lost her job and moved back to Chicago. The rug had been a gift to her, she had said, and it seemed it would go with the apartment forever since it was too hideous to move anywhere else, and it was warmer than the bare floor. There were two high windows in the living room, where Jean had hung bright woven tapestries from Paraguay.
“Let’s eat,” Walter said then, and left his work spread out on the desk. He went to stir the stew, and she set the card table, and soon they sat across from each other, eating.
“Old tyrant his usual sweet self?” he asked, pouring more coffee for both of them.
“You know it. They slaughtered him in Atlanta; he’s in a foul mood.”
“He’ll get over it. He always does. He knows exactly how far he can push you. . . . I’m going to start regular group counseling on Thursday nights. The new people.”
She groaned in sympathy. They had known it was coming, but had kept hoping someone else would get the first shift. The new people desperately needed counseling, and again it was fine in principle, and shitty to be caught up in it.
They finished the stew, talking easily about their day, about the next day, the coming weekend. Then Walter returned to his paper work, and she did the dishes, since he had cooked. She cleared the table and got out her own work and they were both quiet until nearly twelve. She finished first and sat back, watching him go over the papers line by line, word by word. He was a better teacher than she, and she knew it. She had too little patience with her students. To her, language was filled with mystery and magic; words were the long-sought body/mind bridge. She wanted to force her students to grasp the wonder and the power of words when they were understood and used correctly. Her students seemed to want nothing more than a passing grade with as little effort as they could apply. Walter accepted that attitude without the fury she could not avoid. He allowed them to correct papers, which he always graded on content and grammar, and if his students returned the assignments completely corrected, he raised the grade to the next higher one. They might not learn a hell of a lot about psychology, he said, grinning, but they learned about commas and paragraphs and how to look up words in the dictionary. Jean thought it was all a waste of time. They learned nothing.
Walter looked up and smiled at her; he put down his pencil. “Let’s go to bed.”
She nodded. She went first to brush her teeth and get ready for bed, and then she shivered under the blanket, waiting for him. The heat was turned down to fifty-five at ten every night, and the bedroom, on the north side of the building, cooled off almost instantly.
Then Walter was beside her and it was all right again. He brought with him such warmth that she forgot the icy rain pattering against the window, forgot the cold apartment with its ugly furnishings, and the computer terminal spewing out endless reams of paper for her to check. . . . There was only the warmth of his body and his gentle hands that knew all the secrets of her body.
After they made love, Walter kissed her eyelids, and got out of bed again. “Go to sleep,” he said softly. “I have a little more work to do.”
He put on his robe, paused at the window, then said, “It’s snowing.”
Jean dragged the blanket off the bed and stood by him wrapped in it, watching the snow. The wind had died completely. The flakes were large, the kind that drift in any breeze, but now they were settling down like horizontal curtains falling endlessly.
Walter patted her bottom and left to finish his papers, and she stood looking at the snow. For a moment she imagined she was one of the flakes, starting to earth from an immeasurable distance away. At first, drifting downward, searching, she was herself, but distinct from all others, apart, eager for something, anything; then the quick descent in the upper layers, in a hurry to reach a goal, gathering particles as she raced downward, and finally braking with the realization that when the goal was reached, she no longer would exist, but would be one with everything else. What she had taken to be distinct, unique, was simply a variation; each was drifting slowly, inexorably, unable to stop, to reconsider, to pause and reflect on larger causes; each was destined to join the great white mass of everything. A violent shudder seized her and she hurried back to bed and drew up her legs, trying to get warm again.
It was always like this, she thought suddenly. He knew her needs and never failed to satisfy her, but then he withdrew, left her alone again. He was . . . kind to her, she thought. Indulgent. When he should have been passionate, he was indulgent instead. She blinked hard.
They had met when she volunteered to be a subject in the research he was doing in depression. He had needed people in all stages of depression, he had announced in her psychology class, stopping in only long enough to ask for subjects. And he had needed people who had been depressed and were over it. All stages, pre, during, post, he had said, grinning.
He had not used her. During the first interview she had said, “I have no great talent, I know that. I’ll get a degree and go into teaching linguistics. That’s all I want. I want to be self-supporting, and I know I am competent, but not brilliant.”
When he learned that her serious period of depression had been ten years before, he had told her gently and firmly that she would not do. Even then he had been kind and indulgent, she thought, hugging her knees to her body, seeking warmth.
She had not seen him again for nearly a year, and during that time she had earned her master’s degree, and had begun to teach, and work for Leo Arkins.
The next time they had met, each had been heading for the administration building and they had reached the door together. She had remembered him vividly, and was surprised and delighted when he remembered her.
“Jean! How are you?”
“Good. How’s your research coming along?”
“Never ends, you know how that goes.”
They went in together, chatting, and when she turned toward the office, where she had an appointment with the housing administrator over problems in the dormitory, he had asked:
“Can I buy you a coffee later?”
Taken off guard, she had nodded silently. He was twice her age, established, tenured; she had not thought of him that way.
It had started so simply, she thought. Everything always started simply. Simple surfaces, complex depths. As long as she had been able to accept the surface as everything, life had been easy. Then she had learned that there was a surface tension to everything and everyone that was highly reflective, and it was safe to skim near it without disturbing it at all. All that one saw with the surface tension unbroken was what one chose to see, what could be understood, because it was the self reflected back. But once the surface had been stirred, one was drawn into the vortex of currents, cross-currents, riptides, and nothing was clear or simple or manageable.
For months it had remained simple with Walter. They had seen each other now and then, for drinks, for dinner a time or two, to go to a concert together. Then she had moved into this apartment, Janice had moved out, and suddenly nothing was simple any more. The first time Walter had made love to her, the surface tension had vanished, and
she had been caught in the whirlpool ever since.
It was her fault, she knew, because she loved him too much, too foolishly, childishly. And she knew that he loved her. She tried to be more like him—calm, kind, thoughtful—but she could not keep it up” The adolescent romantic girl in her yearned for mystery, excitement, passion, and would not settle for indulgence and beef stew.
Her muscles ached now, and she straightened her legs, feeling the chill of the sheets, shivering again. Distantly the chimes in the tiny chapel struck two.
Leo Arkins was less furious than he had been the day before. He paced the tiny office and gave a detailed summation of the conference. He recounted the speeches others had made, refuting them point by point.
“Of course,” he said, “Ollifant was good, but he relies too heavily on statistics, mathematics. They all fall asleep as soon as he brings out his charts and figures. I fall asleep. And they hissed Murchison off the stage.” He laughed maliciously. Murchison always managed to bring in his origin-of-speech theory no matter what the title of his paper was; he brought it in as a footnote if it did not fit anywhere in the text. They always hissed him off stage.
Jean finally had finished checking the sentences and sentence fragments offered up by her terminal. The hundred or so that she had singled out for further consideration were now being processed, and although it had been only a minute or two since she had started this new processing, already the paper was flowing out, folding itself, on and on. Now there were two lines of print: the sentence she had chosen, and the one the computer chose to follow it. Again, most of them were nonsense. She wanted to get back to it, to finish her day’s work and leave. The snow was six inches deep, the sky leaden with low-hanging clouds threatening to add another six inches by morning.