Emma and I never performed our mirror movement skit.
The final week of camp went by in a slow, gray blur. We must have been kept busy with the Peace Olympics. No letters came from Esther that week but Jake wrote, telling me he’d pick me up at 10:00 a.m. sharp on Saturday morning. He didn’t mention visiting day. Neither Emma nor I knew how to act with each other. Emma decided to go home at the end of the week too, instead of staying for the second half of the summer.
As we packed up the last morning, I carefully wrote my phone number and address on the dachshund autograph hound Emma bought at the camp store, trying not to rip the muslin with my pen. When Emma and I hugged goodbye, our bodies rocked back and forth as we swayed from one foot to the other. I didn’t want to let go, but what could I say to her?
I didn’t see Emma get on the bus back to New York City, and she wasn’t around to say goodbye when Jake came to take me home.
During August, I often thought about Emma. I fantasized calling her on the pink princess phone Esther had installed in my bedroom as a welcome home present, but I never did. Before school started, I packed away the paper doll collection Esther had made, each figure individually wrapped in a tissue and entombed in a shoebox in the closet. By fall, I realized that some of my old dreams had slipped away too, of becoming a pediatrician like my father or an art teacher like my mother. I refused to sign up for more painting classes, even though Esther insisted I had talent. I started keeping a journal and thought maybe I’d be a writer instead. But I never wrote a single word about what happened at Loon Lake. By the time school started, life was back to normal. Esther’s chemo was over and she returned to her classroom too.
After Loon Lake, I stopped calling my mother by her first name. I knew it made her sad, but I didn’t care. Maybe that was the point. Sometimes I used Mama. Esther hated that—Mama was what she called her own mother. I called her Mother or Mom. Anything but Esther. Esther was a young woman who once, a long time ago, did something with her sister that I didn’t entirely understand and couldn’t quite forgive.
PART THREE
s 2003
CHAPTER 38
Molly
I silenced the television and tossed the remote into the basket on the bedside table. I couldn’t stomach the pundits’ barely-suppressed glee about weapons of mass destruction. War was coming. And the domestic news wasn’t any better. The new treatments for breast cancer showcased on the health segment might be too late. My mother’s recurrence wasn’t responding to the new chemo. To ward off another crying jag, I grabbed my cell phone from the basket and punched speed dial 2.
Evan’s pottery studio was next door to my apartment, on the third floor of a renovated factory building not far from my parents’ house in western Massachusetts. The cavernous space where cleaning supplies and brushes were once manufactured now housed photographers and rug importers, nonprofits and land trusts. I felt comfortable with the eclectic mix of artists and borderline businesses. I ran a freelance writing and editing business from my studio apartment, teaching writing as an adjunct to pay the rent. Evan constructed large slab clay sculptures whenever he could carve a few free hours from his job teaching art at the community college. Over the past three years, we had sort of drifted into each other’s lives. Well, I drifted. Evan was clear from the beginning that he wanted to exchange more than greetings as we both ordered coffee at the deli downstairs.
Evan answered on the second ring. “Can you believe it?” he fumed. “No smoking guns. No illegal weapons, but those turkeys are going to invade Iraq anyway.” He paused. “Molly, what are you thinking about February 15?”
Evan wasn’t one to push. So it was curious that he hadn’t stopped mentioning the anti-war demonstration in New York, even when faced with my repeated non-answers.
“It’s going to be huge,” he continued. “International. Even the Art Department agreed to help rent student buses, and you know what they’re like. Hardly radical.” He chuckled and I could picture his goofy expression.
Evan must have noticed my silence. “You don’t have to decide now. No pressure. I’ll bring a picnic after work tomorrow and we’ll start the weekend early.”
That’s how it was with us: Evan asking. Me waffling. Evan waiting. No pressure: those two words epitomized our entire relationship.
I had first noticed Evan one afternoon at the college. It was an April-tease kind of day; the bright sunshine promised warm weather, but the wind had teeth. After a few minutes, I abandoned the picnic area and moved inside with my tuna sandwich to a corner table in the cafeteria. I graded essays from my Comp 101 classes, despairing that the students would master the concept of an introductory paragraph by May. A lanky man in clay-splattered overalls walked by my table carrying a tray. He looked at me oddly, making me wonder if I had spoken my derogatory opinion of the students aloud. I watched his ponytail swing across his back before returning to wandering thesis statements and split infinitives.
A few days later, I was paying for a decaf latte at the deli on the ground floor of my apartment building when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around to the bib of those clay-streaked overalls.
“Are you following me?” he asked.
“I got here first, so you must be following me.” I never said things like that, not to men. My mother often observed—accurately and ruefully— that I was missing the gene for flirting.
He laughed. “I’m Evan.”
“Molly.”
“I teach art.” He brushed at dried clay stuck to his overalls. “Mostly ceramics.”
“Freshman comp,” I countered. “Creative writing when I’m lucky.”
He grinned. “Since we seem to have the college and this place in common, would you like to have lunch sometime? Either venue.”
I hesitated.
“No pressure,” he said. “I’ll see you around.”
Around sounded good.
Even though the February 15 protest was two weeks away, and Evan said “no pressure,” I didn’t sleep well that night. In the morning I dragged myself down from the sleeping loft and sat with my coffee mug at my writing desk. By eleven thirty in the morning I had prepared the writing prompts for my Monday evening fiction workshop, crafted encouraging critiques for the short story elective I taught at the high school, and refilled the paper supply in the printer. I proofed my new ad for the Women’s Times, then reread the letter from the women’s minimum-security prison inviting me to teach a winter semester creative writing class for inmates. My stomach churned at the thought of helping prisoners find their voices. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear those voices.
And I still had no idea what to tell Evan about the demonstration.
I leaned both elbows on the table and looked through the studio windows at the hunchback shape of Mount Tom. The first time Evan visited my apartment, he walked into the middle of the mostly empty room and pointed at the desk facing the inside wall. “You’re wasting the view.”
He promised it would be worth the extra money to build a desk all along the eastern exposure of the loft, so that I could roll the office chair from computer to writing space to files without losing sight of the mountain. He lugged his tools from next door and constructed the table, taking a day off from his slab-built sculptures that looked like vastly pregnant women or tree trunks with tumors, depending on my mood.
When Evan arrived late that afternoon, I was contemplating a framed series of my mother’s paintings, hung on the wall over the one-person table in my kitchenette. About a year after the Loon Lake debacle, my mother started seriously painting again. She’d had some success, a few shows in Northampton and Amherst, and people bought her paintings. Her work was small, less than eight inches square, as if she didn’t deserve more space in the world. Most of her paintings were wildlife scenes—there was one of Sadie and Hawkins, one of a deer in the snow.
But my favorites, the ones I hung in my apartment, were what I thought of as her political art, the work she did for the World
Peace Org. You know, those holiday cards they sell every year with season’s greetings in forty-two different languages? Stylized children holding hands around the ravaged and flooded globe, or dancing in front of the smoking ruins of their refugee camps, or wandering through jungles behind soldiers wearing ammunition belts and carrying automatic rifles. And she had this signature, like Hirschfeld’s Nina: a small drawing of an origami crane tucked in the leaves of a tree or hidden in the design of a skirt. Her cards were very popular, especially once people caught on to the cranes and started looking for them in each piece.
I once overheard my parents argue about those paintings. Jake wanted her to charge for her work. “No,” my mother told him. “They’re my contribution to the movement.”
“Contribution?” he asked. “Or penance?”
Despite thinking about it all day, I had reached no conclusion about the demonstration. Or about the prison writing course. Still, I was delighted to see Evan. The pockets of his overalls were stuffed with chilled Pinot Grigio, softened Brie, sesame baguettes, a ripe mango, and a chunk of dark chocolate bark with almonds. We wrapped our selves in the ratty quilt I kept handy for the frequent failures of the building’s heating system and watched the sunset ignite the bare cliffs at the top of the mountain. Evan pointed to a hawk riding the thermals in a lazy spiral. When we were first dating I told him about Sadie and Hawkins and he admitted similar childhood fantasies about flying. I hadn’t used Sadie’s wings in years.
Evan brushed the crumbs from his overalls, then leaned back, spreading his arms along the back of the sofa. He looked at me. “So. What are you thinking about the fifteenth?”
“I don’t know.”
He touched my hair. “Talk to me.”
“Demonstrations can be risky.”
“The NYPD has crowd control down to a science,” Evan said. “They keep their cool.”
I shook my head. “Things can spiral out of control. Not just the cops.”
“You’re worried about what you might do?”
My mouth felt dry, my tongue enormous. I felt myself awkwardly stumbling into saying things I never talked about. Never.
“People get excited. Angry,” I said. “They do crazy things. You know.”
“I don’t know. What kind of crazy things? Tell me.”
So I did. I told Evan about my mother and Aunt Rosa and their brave stupid action. I repeated every detail I could remember from Emma and the archives and from the surreptitious reading I’d done at the campus library: the mounted policemen clubbing teenagers, the small hard green apples, the paralyzed cop, the girl wearing a Vietcong flag who’d been hit so hard by a billy club that she never spoke another word, the trials and sentencing. Esther testifying and Rosa going underground. I told him about Rosa going to prison. About two sisters wrenched apart. About meeting Emma at Loon Lake and our fumbling attempt to make it right, and how profoundly we failed. Once I started talking, the whole story spilled out, words tumbling on top of rusty words. In the two decades since learning the family story in the dusty camp archives, I had never told it to anyone. When I finished talking, I felt emptied out, newborn and hungry, and there was only silence.
“Wow,” he finally said. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Maybe that’s why I never told you before. Or anyone.”
“But you talk about it with your mother, right?”
“She pretends it never happened.”
“Your dad too?”
“Especially my dad. I think he’s even more scared than my mother.”
“What about your brother?”
“I think Oliver lives in California. He hasn’t been home in years. It’s partly my fault; I never said a word to him about what I learned at camp.” I rubbed my eyes. “I’m not proud of that. He found out during his freshman year in college, doing research for a history paper on the Vietnam War. He saw the photograph on microfiche, recognized our mother and read her name in the story. When he came home for spring break, he confronted our parents. Really let them have it. ‘You taught me to be honest,’ he yelled at them, ‘but you’ve lied to me my whole life.’ My mom cried and apologized.” Was she sorry for what she did, for not telling us about it, or that we found out? I never knew which.
Evan stood at the window, facing the mountain. Dusk had doused the flaming sunset into smolder. “So. Molly?”
“Yeah?”
“Was it worth it, do you think?”
“What do you mean?”
“What your mom and aunt did. I mean, it was spunky and bold and all. But did it make a difference? Was it worth it?”
“I don’t know.” I had to excavate each word from the dark chambers of my heart. “I never asked.”
His question was so basic, so profound. Twenty-three years earlier, at Loon Lake, I had tried to figure it out but couldn’t. I had never been able to measure the cost of my mother and Rosa’s actions, the effects it had on them and our families, and the other people whose lives had changed that day. To balance that cost against what they accomplished, when they stopped cops from beating up protestors. What about the collateral damage? Did the injured cop have kids? I had once asked Emma but she didn’t know.
Now I suddenly needed to know what happened to that officer and his family. Why now? The return of my mother’s cancer? The demonstration on the fifteenth? Or Evan himself? I didn’t know. I took Evan’s hand with reddish clay caked around his fingernails, and kissed his knuckles.
“Guess I’d better find out,” I said.
The next evening, I drove to my parents’ house. Snow followed by freezing rain had transformed the woods, and the roads were crunchy under the tires. I considered turning back, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to summon up the courage again. Besides, the trees in my headlights sparkled with ice. It was magic, if you ignored the brittle branches across the road.
I hadn’t told my parents I was coming. I let myself in with my key, maneuvered around Jake’s snowshoes and poles in the small mudroom, and hung my parka on top of my mother’s wool coat. I stood in the kitchen for a moment, looking at the small alcove desk my mother still used, even though Jake tried to convince her to convert one of the empty bedrooms into a study. On the corner of the blotter stood a stack of my mother’s holiday cards, with her crane hidden on each one. On a whim, I took the top card and slipped it with its envelope into my bag. Then I turned toward the living room, toward the murmur of voices interrupted by the staccato noise of television gunshots.
The room was dim, lit only by the cop show on TV and the pulsing coals in the fireplace. My parents were intertwined on the sofa facing the television. My mother’s legs rested across Jake’s lap. His hands massaged the instep of her foot, plagued by cramps since her first chemo. They both seemed to register my presence at the same moment and turned to me, identical expressions of surprise, then pleasure, then worry legible on their faces.
“Is something wrong?” my mother asked.
I shook my head. “No, but I need to talk to you both.” I turned off the television, switched on the overhead light, and sat in Jake’s leather recliner, facing them.
My mother struggled to untangle herself from Jake and sit upright. He helped her. They looked at me across the room.
I leaned forward. “Three things.”
Jake nodded. “Shoot.”
“First, I have a boyfriend. Evan.”
Strange, isn’t it, that I had never mentioned Evan to my parents? Some other time, when I had a moment, I would have to contemplate what that said about my relationship to my folks, or to Evan.
My parents smiled. “I thought there might be someone,” my mother said. “I’d like to meet him.”
“When you’re ready, of course,” Jake added.
“Secondly, Evan and I are going to New York for the big anti-war demonstration.” I surprised myself with that. I had meant to say that I was considering going with Evan, but that’s not how it came out.
“There could be trouble,” Jak
e started.
I ignored him and continued talking. “But before that—and this is number three—I have a question for you, Mom.”
“What is it?”
I slipped off the recliner and sat on the rug near her. I took her hand, the one that wasn’t clutching my father’s. “Was it worth it? What you did in Detroit, with the horses?”
Jake erupted in protest. “Molly, please. Don’t bring up all that old stuff again. Your mother is sick.”
“No, it’s all right, Jake.” My mother took my face in both her hands. “It’s complicated. If I had a simple yes-or-no answer, I’d give it to you. But I don’t. And besides, it would be my answer, not yours.” She released my face and sunk back into the cushions. She closed her eyes. “When I have a little more energy, I want to talk to you about it. And show you some old things, some letters.”
That’s what I expected. I stood up and smiled at my parents. “By the way, I’m going to Detroit this weekend. Just for a few days.”
“That’s four things,” Jake said.
“Why?” Mom said. “To see your grandmother?”
“I’ll stay with her, but I need to talk to the cop who got hurt. Officer Steele.”
After a short silence Jake spoke. “That’s nuts.”
Esther smiled. “Good for you.”
CHAPTER 39
Rosa
The last time she was in Ann Arbor, Rosa had lost her baby, almost died in childbirth, and gotten arrested. She had only wispy snippets of memory from that day: the steamy heat, the jangle of Emma playing with her keys, the piling-up of contractions, the metallic stench of fear and blood. Certainly last time there was no guy in a business suit at the airport holding a sign with her name on it, and no one chauffeured her to the campus hotel in a biofuel car. The tweedy academic dean who gushed at her at the cocktail party was a generation younger than the dean who expunged her academic record when she went to prison. Even the January freeze seemed more forgiving. Maybe that was her fleece-lined trousers; in the 1960s she wore miniskirts despite the harsh Michigan winter.
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