At home, she set the shopping bag of gifts on the kitchen table along with her canvas bag filled with papers to grade and work she planned to do in preparation for the second semester. She’d make a cup of tea, she thought, take a long bath. But reaching for the tin where she kept the tea bags, she heard a sound in the back of the house and froze, the hairs prickling at the back of her neck.
“Tom?” she called out.
But it was Bridget who appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. She’d cropped her hair and dyed it brown. She was so thin, Jane thought. Her bellbottom jeans were dirty, ragged at the hem; her old Shetland sweater baggy, worn at the elbows.
But her smile was the same, wicked and endearing. “Look at you! Miss Barth.”
Jane went to her then, threw her arms around her.
“Oh, man, I’ve missed you,” Bridget said, hugging her back. “It’s okay that I just came in, right? I still had my key, so –”
“Stop,” Jane said. “Of course, it’s okay you’re here. Can you stay?”
“Till Christmas. I’ve got, well –” Bridget shrugged. “Work. You know.”
Jane glanced toward the doorway.
“Cam’s not here,” Bridget said. “We split for this action that’s coming down. But, listen, don’t mention it to Tom, okay? The action. I’m just going to tell him that Cam and I have split, period. You know how he is about Cam. I don’t want to get into some kind of . . . thing with him. I mean it. I’ve missed you, Jane. I just want to hang out with you for a couple of days.”
Jane didn’t ask where Cam was or what action they might be involved in; she didn’t want to know. She regarded Bridget, disheveled, running her fingers through her chopped-off hair, and dreaded the arguments she knew would start, as soon as Tom got home from work and found her there – which would be all the worse for the resumption of the bombing this week.
“Well, fuck the system!” Bridget said, the moment he walked through the door. “The time is now.”
And they were into it.
Before the bombings had rattled her already fragile hopes, Jane had sometimes been able to believe it was with children like Daniel Pettus, given the skills to succeed, nurtured with kindness and attention, that we’d begin to see how different the world could be. She might even have taken Tom’s side in the argument, agreeing that it was only working from the inside that you could really make a difference – even knowing exactly what Bridget would have said in response.
But tonight Jane could not have argued in good conscience that anything anyone did could make any difference at all. So she sat, silent, her stomach roiling, as the argument escalated between them.
“Fucking murderers,” Bridget finally said. “Are you aware that they’ve dropped ten thousand fucking tons of explosives in the last four days? Ten thousand tons, Tom! The equivalent of the atomic bomb we dropped on Hiroshima? Jesus!”
“It’s a last-ditch effort,” Tom said. “I agree. It’s insane, morally corrupt, but –”
“But . . . what? You think that being a last-ditch effort – if that’s even what it is – makes all those Vietnamese people less dead?”
“I didn’t say that, Bridget,” he said.
“Same difference. Just because you didn’t say the words . . .”
“Hey, fuck you. Who made you the Queen of Peace?”
“Tom!” Jane said.
“What?” Tom said. “She thinks I’m a sellout. She thinks I’ve gone over to the dark side because I fucking think about things. Are you telling me I’m supposed to listen to that shit?”
“Leave Jane out of it,” Bridget said. “And listen, goddamn it – I think, too. I just don’t think what you think. I think it’s time we actually did something about the war. Something real. And while we’re on the subject of things we didn’t say: I never fucking said you were a sellout. You said it. But while you’re thinking so hard, maybe you ought to think about that.”
Tom gave her a long look, shook his head in disgust, and left the room.
“I’ll leave if you want,” she said to Jane. “I probably should.”
“No,” Jane said. “I want you to stay.”
But they were awkward together the rest of the evening, talked in fits and starts about nothing that mattered until Bridget yawned and said, “I guess I’ll go crawl into my old bed.”
Jane showered, took her time to go to her own bed where she knew Tom would be awake, waiting. He put down the book he was reading when she opened the door, folded back the blanket so that she could climb in beside him.
“I’m sorry I got pissed off,” he said. “I should know better than to argue with her.”
Jane shrugged, blinking back tears.
“Shit,” he said, and sighed. He picked up his book, read for a few moments. Then put it down again. “Where’s Cameron,” he asked quietly. “Why isn’t he with her?”
“They split,” Jane said.
Tom shook his head. “Bridget doesn’t split with people, Jane. Did she tell you why she’s here? Really? How she got here?”
“No,” Jane said, which was technically true. Work, Bridget had said. Action. Jane hadn’t pressed her for details. “She came on the bus; I don’t know where from, though.”
“I don’t like this,” Tom said. “Something’s up and I don’t want us to get involved in it. Listen, I can’t cancel on my parents. I just can’t. But would you just come to Evansville with me tomorrow? We won’t stay long, I promise. We’ll stop somewhere and spend the night. When we get back, Bridget will probably be gone.” He glanced at her and saw that she was crying. “Come on,” he said, “Jane. We can’t help her.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t just leave her. And I don’t want to spend Christmas Eve with your parents. I told you that. If you’re so dead-set on being with them, go. But why would I go there so your mother can make me feel like shit again? I don’t need that.”
“Come on, she’s not that bad,” he said. “It’s not like –”
“She is,” Jane said, and turned away from him.
“Well, fuck,” he said, and switched off the light. “Fine. Whatever.”
Jane felt his tense, waking presence beside her in the dark. The words she wanted to speak formed and dissolved in her mind again and again, but she could not bring herself to say them out loud. Don’t go. Please. Stay here, with me.
12
“Purple Haze”
When she woke up, he was already gone. He was still mad at her, Jane knew, because there was no note to say what time to expect him back that night. He always left a note since the time, not long after they moved in together, he had decided to go out for a few beers with a friend on the spur of the moment and returned to find her curled up in the corner of the couch, pale and trembling, certain that something terrible had happened to him. It was never anything elaborate, just wherever he was going, when he thought he’d be back, and always, “Love you. Tom.” But there was no note this morning.
“I don’t blame you for not going,” Bridget said when she got up. “Mrs. Gilbert has always been a shit to you. She’s never liked you. She actually said that to my mom once.”
Jane glanced sharply at her. Bridget had always made fun of Tom’s mother – how uptight she was, what a snob. Jane suspected she got a kick out of the fact that Mrs. Gilbert thought she wasn’t good enough for Tom, that it pleased her to think she’d personally affronted Mrs. Gilbert, having been the one to introduce the two of them. But she’d never told Jane anything that Mrs. Gilbert said before or alluded to the fact that their relationship was a source of gossip among the ladies in Mrs. Gilbert’s circle of friends. Of course, Jane knew Mrs. Gilbert must talk about her. But hearing Bridget say so made her feel worse than she already felt, angrier about Tom letting his mother guilt trip him into going home for Christmas Eve.
“I never told you before because I didn’t want to hurt your feelings,” Bridget said. “I knew how you let her get to you. You always have. But you know, Jane, you rea
lly ought to think about where all this is going. If Tom won’t say no to her now, what makes you think he ever will? You watch. Ten years, maybe less than that, and he’ll be back in Evansville in a suit and tie. You can be one of those wives sitting around the pool at the country club. Or maybe you’ll have your own pool in the backyard. Is that what you want?”
“We won’t be like that,” Jane said.
“Yeah, well. People change. If they don’t think, if they don’t choose, they just drift into some life they never in a million years would have believed they’d be living. Look at my mom. She’s got a degree from Vassar, for God’s sake. She worked for Time magazine in New York. Then one day, boom, she meets my dad and there she is, marooned in Evansville fucking Indiana, with a boatload of kids and bridge club every Wednesday. And she doesn’t even care. She likes it! Fuck that. Honest to God, she’s the smartest person I know. It makes me furious every time I think about what she could have been. Done.”
“What’s so wrong with being happy?” Jane asked.
Bridget didn’t even answer. Just launched into an account of the last blow-up she’d had with her father over her relationship with Cam.
“Fucking Judge,” she said. “Nosing around, calling up favors. Like I didn’t know Cam’s politics myself. Like I was going to say, “Oh, thanks so much, Dad, for checking with the FBI. You know how much I respect the work they do.”
She called her sister Colleen once in a while, she told Jane. Fuck the rest of them. Fuck everyone who refused to see what was going on. And the ones who saw and quit trying to do anything about it – fuck them more.
That’s me, Jane thought – and at that moment saw herself through Bridget’s eyes. The truth was, she’d been deluding herself about everything. Her relationship with Tom, which, when she thought about it honestly, had been tense for a long time now. He didn’t, couldn’t, understand why she spent nearly every waking moment grading papers, making lesson plans, thinking about the children in her class and what she could do to help them. He was growing impatient with her chronic sadness.
Jane needed air, she needed Bridget to stop talking for a while, so she suggested treating her to breakfast at the Ashram Bakery, where she usually went with Tom. Bridget argued against going – she wasn’t hungry, it was stupid to waste money in restaurants – and only agreed when Jane said she was going herself, one way or the other. Once there, she headed for a booth at the back and slid into the side where she would be least likely to be seen. She wore a ratty stocking cap pulled low over her eyes, bent over the menu when the waitress came to take her order. As if anyone would have recognized her, Jane thought. She no longer looked anything like herself. When her food came, the waitress had to set it in the middle of the table because she was holding the newspaper up to cover her face.
Christmas Eve and, still, the bombing went on, the front-page story said.
Jane was frightened for her. Bridget ate virtually nothing, gulped down cup after cup of black coffee. She was smoking; her nails were bitten to the quick. She was jumpy, constantly looking at her watch as if waiting for someone to arrive. Cam? Jane had half-expected him to appear once Tom was gone. But there was no sign of him and, as far as she knew, Bridget hadn’t heard from him since she’d been there, nor had she tried to call him. Something was up, though, and Jane was also frightened by the possibility of what it might be. There’d been a series of what the Weather Underground called “armed actions” since Bridget left with Cam in the spring of ’71. Bombings of the San Francisco Office of California Prisons in retaliation for the killing of one of the Soledad Brothers; The New York Department of Corrections in Albany, to protest the killing of twenty-nine inmates in the prison riots at Attica. The bombing of the Pentagon on Ho Chi Minh’s birthday last May after the U.S. bombing raid in Hanoi.
Bridget disappeared into the bedroom after breakfast. To read, she said. But when Jane peeked through the keyhole of the locked door, she was fast asleep, one arm thrown over the duffel she’d set beside her on the bed.
“What’s in it?” Tom would have wanted to know. Rightly, he’d point out that if she did something stupid they’d be complicit, having let her stay with them when they knew of her involvement with John Cameron.
“Bridget would never do anything to hurt us,” she’d have said back. “She’s here because she’s in trouble, because she knows we love her and won’t let her keep on destroying herself.”
She believed this, but what could she do? Bridget had spoken of an “action” the day before; she’d temporarily split from Cam, she said, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t somewhere nearby. There was an Army recruiting office near the Square, the Armory on the outskirts of town, Fort Benjamin Harrison just sixty miles away, in Indianapolis. It made perfect sense: a Christmas action to make a statement against the unconscionable bombing of Hanoi.
Every time the thought that Bridget might actually have a bomb in her duffel bag made its way into her consciousness, Jane’s heart raced with terror and she busied herself with some pointless household task or quietly stepped out into the frigid December air to shock herself into some semblance of calm. She unwrapped the gifts from the children and wrote thank you notes to ground herself and set her mind at ease. She and Tom would take the gifts to the nursing home tomorrow, as planned, all but the Christmas ornament Kathy Frank had given her – a pretty glass angel, which she hung carefully on the tree she and Tom had decorated together. She turned the lights on against the gloomy afternoon, stepped back, and looked at it, remembering the Saturday afternoon a few weeks before when they went out to Kathy’s parents’ farm to cut it down. Kathy’s mother had invited them in for hot chocolate and Kathy had sat, rapt to find herself in the presence of Miss Barth’s boyfriend. They’d laughed about it driving home, at how surprised children always were to see their teachers out in the real world – as if when school ended every day they stepped into the coat closet and just waited there until the first bell rang the next morning. He’d been so sweet to Kathy. Jane remembered that, too, and how it had made her see, suddenly, what a good father he would be, if –
She thought again of what Bridget had said to her that morning, tried to imagine herself a wife – any kind of wife – but she couldn’t. Let alone a mother. God. She could barely take care of herself. Even right now she had no idea what to do about Bridget. She longed for Tom to appear and take charge and at the same time bristled with aggravation knowing he’d be perfectly comfortable in that role. Life was so easy for him. He always knew what was right, and she would always be dependent on him, always let him lead the way. How could that be a good thing for either one of them?
Bridget slept into the evening and, when she woke, the two of them sat down to eat the vegetable soup Jane had prepared. She was hungry, ate as if she hadn’t eaten, really eaten, for days. They sat at the table a long time, reminiscing. She was calmer, Jane thought. Funny, like she used to be. Telling Jane about the time Tom’s mother had gotten lice at the beauty shop and doused everything in the house – including herself, Tom, Tom’s dad and the dog – with kerosene, she laughed in the old way, simply delighted at the image of Mrs. Gilbert in such a state, not mean-spirited at all.
She’d be leaving in the morning, she said. Time to move on.
“Stay?” Jane asked. “Please?”
She shook her head, sadly it seemed to Jane. “No,” she said. “Can’t.”
She retreated to her room soon afterward, probably to avoid seeing Tom. Jane thought he would be home by nine o’clock, but nine came, then ten and eleven and he still wasn’t there. He had bought a bottle of champagne the day before Bridget arrived and put it in the refrigerator. When he got back from Evansville, they’d drink it opening the presents they’d bought for each other, he said. Had he forgotten that? Where was he?
It was her natural inclination to worry and, as it got later and he still didn’t come, she grew increasingly fearful he’d been in an accident. But what scared her even more than that was the
possibility that he’d stayed in Evansville to make the point that he was tired of this shit with Bridget and was no longer willing to put up with it. Or worse, what if his staying away meant that he was no longer willing to put up with her, Jane, and turned out to be his first step in leaving her forever?
Jane waited till midnight before going to bed alone. She slept restlessly, waking over and over again to Tom’s absence, running through a menu of scenarios ending each time with the image of him asleep in his bedroom at home – the shrine, he called it, untouched since his departure for college eight years ago. A little after three, she woke to the familiar squeak of the floorboards and thought he’d come home, but then she heard the click of the back door closing and footsteps hurrying down the steps. Bridget leaving.
She didn’t think – just threw on jeans and a sweatshirt, grabbed a jacket, and went after her. It was five blocks to campus from their house, a straight shot, and she saw Bridget instantly, hurrying in that direction. The windows along the street were lit only by Christmas trees, which cast wavy, colored light onto the yards and, setting out, Jane thought of the children inside, fast asleep in the houses, dreaming toward morning. When Bridget crossed University Avenue and disappeared into the trees on the old part of campus, she remembered the ROTC building. Of course. She looked to make sure the street was empty, then broke into a run to catch up with her.
“Fuck!” Bridget said, wheeling around. “Jane. You scared the shit out of me.”
But she didn’t seem that surprised to see her, Jane thought. Not really.
“What are you doing?” Jane asked.
“Come on,” Bridget said, stepping farther into the shadows at the edge of the woods. “You know what I’m doing. It’s why you’re here.”
An American Tune Page 14
