I sat on the edge of my seat. “I was tired of the sluggish state-by-state plodding to win the vote, Thomas. The same thing is happening all over again with equality.”
“Yes, well, militants only brought you arrests and hunger strikes. I worried—well, at least you did return to Mrs. Catt and her older women’s peaceful strategies.”
He paused and rubbed his mouth in thought. I waited, looking as passive as possible, letting his temper ease. He worried?
“Enough of the past,” he continued. “Let’s look at today’s story: the great majority of the working girls today are unskilled because they are so young and because they quit when they get married. They work in crowded, sex-segregated jobs, excluded from most men’s jobs. So many competing for limited jobs has created a downward spiral in wages. We need to do something.”
Even though I had written an article agreeing with that, I felt rattled by his lecturing tone. “Women needing protection gives us an inferior and old-fashioned view. Women’s bodies are not so Victorian anymore, now that artificial methods of birth control, like condoms and diaphragms, are out there, well, if we can get rid of that damn Comstock Law. And then there’s the growing clerical labor force giving women a better working environment than in the factory. Oh, damn it to hell, I’m tired of it all!”
Thomas tapped his fingers on the desk, studying me in his intense way. “Why do you debate with me so strongly?” he finally asked.
“Just publish my article, please.” I placed the article I had read to Pearl on his desk.
He reached for his reading glasses and read my essay, looking down his nose through his lenses. He shook his head. “Woman, you could start an argument in an empty house.” He threw his glasses to the side and rubbed his eyes. “Pick a side and stick with it, Bess.”
I drummed my fingers on the arm of my chair and returned his intense stare. “Few men understand women’s movement, let alone work for it. Why do you?”
“My wife taught me a great deal. She once said I had enough of a taste for adventure and change to understand women’s evolution. In turn, I admired her ability to work in the drudgery of preparation and in the heat of the battle. I have no patience for such detail. As a true reporter, I only wish to move on to the next hot topic. You remind me of her somewhat.”
“Oh? Did she also lack passion?” His earlier accusation obviously still stung but I bit my tongue for my poor taste in bringing it up now. I attempted to laugh to soften the blow but he was not amused.
“On the contrary,” he said. “I have yet to meet another woman who cares as much.”
I care, I wanted to say. But its admission would only add to more poor timing. So I did what I was best at and changed the subject. “Why must women progress alone? Why can’t men and women right the world together? Bring in world peace and better education.”
“Are you back to supporting equal rights again?”
“Never mind,” I snapped. “Women must have freedom of choice in occupation before we have the power to right the world. Hopefully being able to vote will help us.” I thought about that for a moment. “No, that won’t work alone. You’re right about working girls. Discrimination in women trades is much deeper than in government jobs. It requires many small steps to break down the barriers from the working level. This is the only practical way.”
“Finally you got around to my way of thinking,” Thomas said with a knowing smile. “Now just stay put. We’ll make cleaning up the textile mill and factories around us part of my campaign to run for mayor. That’ll do more than any statute or law. You, as my campaign manager, are going to help me do that. We can right our own small world together.” He banged his hand down hard on his desk, giving me a startle. “Let’s move on with it then!”
That was my last effort on the Equal Rights Amendment for forty years.
I felt manipulated – and needed. I must admit that what made me burst forth and manage the campaign trail as if in hot pursuit was not the end-result - of course I hoped Thomas would win, but I had very little doubt that he wouldn’t. He was popular, well known for his accurate reporting, and respected as the newspaper editor.
With my sense of argument feeding Thomas’ speeches, and his sense of compassion for those around him, we usually walked away from the podium feeling confident that the audience was on our side.
I enjoyed that, yes, but my enthusiasm came from deeper within. Thomas was more right than he realized; he was righting our world, only our world had narrowed down to two in my vision. I thrilled in opening my eyes on a new day and thinking over the day’s schedule of events, knowing that within a few hours I would stand beside Thomas. His intensity and quick decision-making drew me in, forcing me to concentrate on the underlying details. A buzz existed around him, as if he were a honeycomb nesting busy bees. If I wasn’t standing beside him, basking in his light, then I felt as drab as someone sitting in the chilly shadows.
Lizzie looked happier too, for Thomas was coming to the Lighthouse several times a week for dinner to discuss campaign strategies with me. He always insisted Lizzie eat at the dining room table with us. I worried about the inappropriateness of colored help dining with us but of course this was not my decision to make.
“Lizzie,” Thomas said one night, “Annan is swarming with committees. Rather than one person getting under the load and working it the old way, we need a full room of folks talking about it. Committees begat conferences and conferences begat working groups and working groups begat reports. Two heads are better than one I know, but twenty tongues give us more advice than action. Now I have a committee who tells me that we need to institute a unified system of milk depots throughout Annan that can give out certified pure milk to mothers for their babies. They claim this was done in New York City and the death rate went down considerably. What do you think?”
Lizzie protruded her thick lips in deep thought. “I’ve been listening to all these issues and how you want to solve them for the people, Mr. Pickering. When I was marching for suffrage, there was one thing I learned about the public and that is they’re like a spoiled child crying for more candy. What you’ll need as mayor, Mr. Pickering, is to be both parents: the father who lays down the law and the mother who holds the child to her breast. Committee or no committee, you’ll be the boss. Now don’t take offense to this, but this is where you and Bess come in, because I see you as the mother and Bess as the father. You think with your heart and want to give it all away, but Bess thinks practical, with her head. Now about the milk, breast milk is the best purity one can get, but some women can’t and some women won’t. Says it’s too much of a bother, so they want to give their babies cow milk. Cow milk is for calves. How would a calf grow if we was to give it woman’s milk? Not very well, I wager. But for women who can’t, we need to help them and we can’t very well sit good mothers around town offering up their breasts for babies. So what we need is clean cow milk. So I say, if you want water, go to the well. The tit will talk.”
“Lizzie, watch your language with Mr. Pickering!”
“Do you mean go to a dairy farm, Lizzie?” Thomas asked, rudely ignoring my admonition. “We could do that easily enough, with Bess’s uncle’s dairy farm. Set it up, Bess. We’ll take a photographer with us. He can take photographs of me working on the farm for publicity and we can talk to your Uncle Jesse about the milking process. We’ll kill two birds with one stone.”
When we pulled into the farm yard of clucking, scattering chickens, I half-expected Grandmama Garnet’s short solid frame to appear at the screen door. Garnet hadn’t approved of my “un-womanly ways”, and wondered out loud if I was ever going to settle down with a husband and children, as God had intended. I remembered the last time I’d entered this well-worn living room, its sameness shattered by the open coffin displayed under the window, furniture moved to accommodate, giving it a strange-house feel. Thankfully, the furnishings were back where they belonged, where they’d always been for as long as I could remember. Still, some
thing was amiss with Garnet’s absence, like something left unsaid.
Aunt Edith looked as old and gray as Grandmama Garnet used to. Uncle Jesse, on the other hand, had aged more slowly, a deep dimple giving his grin a boyish mischievousness. He scratched the back of his curly-haired head when Thomas asked him for an interview, saying he supposed he could do that, but didn’t know if it would be interesting enough to anybody else. No one seemed to care much about farming anymore, he said. He was having trouble keeping help out here, with only one son out of six interested in dairy farming. Two sons had been lost to the war - one was buried in France and the other was never found. Another had been killed in a factory explosion in New York City years ago. The other two had moved on to the excitement of city life, I heard him tell Thomas as they walked out to the barn together.
Good riddance to Joey, I said to myself. I thought it unlikely that Joey was lost over in France, but more likely hiding with some French girl, and would some year show up here again, when he tired of her. I knew first-hand how he felt about girls.
“For a thirteen-year-old, you sure are prissy,” Joey said to me. He jumped up to latch onto a barn rafter and swung back and forth. He landed on his bum in the hay beside me.
“I’m not prissy,” I said, brushing off the hay he’d scattered onto my lap.
“Yes you are. You don’t play like you used to. Why do girls stop playing when they grow tits?”
“I’m going to tell on you, if you keep talking like that,” I said, trying to sound angry, but secretly feeling flattered that he noticed at all.
His papa’s dimple showed in his cheek, and his mother’s deep brown eyes locked mine. “Nah, you’ll not tell. You and I are too grownup for that. Besides, you followed me in here.”
“I did not. You said you wanted to tell me a secret.”
“I do.” His mouth moved to my ear. “I think you’re pretty,” he whispered.
Smiling bashfully, I looked away. “Thanks.”
“We’re going to start dating people soon. Want to practice kissing?”
“I don’t think that is proper.”
“I told you, you were prissy.”
“It doesn’t sound right for two cousins to kiss,” I said, avoiding eye contact with his lips. He was too cute for a cousin’s own good. I stared down at the entrance below our loft, wondering what Uncle Jesse would think if he walked in just now.
“We’re not hurting anybody. It’s just pretend. What if you really like a boy someday and when he kisses you, you kiss like a fish.” He sucked in his cheeks and gave me a fish-kiss on the cheek. Where did he get such nerve to talk this way?
His closeness gave me goose bumps that caused me to giggle.
“Well, hopefully he’s not a shark,” I said, watching my feet tap together.
“Just one kiss,” he said, moving closer.
Just one kiss wouldn’t hurt. He smelled like hay and the chocolate cookie we just ate. His eyes locked mine again and his face covered my vision. There was nowhere else to take my attention. His lips touched mine and then pressed.
“Kiss back,” he muttered between my lips.
I did. He pressed harder and we remained like this for an interminable amount of time. Just when I was wondering if I was supposed to do something, his tongue slipped between my lips. I tried to back off but his hand held the back of my head.
The kiss, my struggle – something perpetuated a spark in him. In one quick movement, he sprawled my legs and forced me back. He kissed me harder and sloppier and his slobber and heavy breathing repulsed me.
I pulled my head away enough to speak. “Get off me!” I whispered.
His rock-hard pelvis rubbed against mine, and his hand grabbed my breast and squeezed. I pushed him off with a yelp. I sat back up, picking hay out of my long hair and wondering if he was angry with me now, and if I had done the right thing. I had wanted his attention, but not this.
“I’m not interested in fighting off boys,” I said, astonished at my own calmness. “I’m going to fight for girls. I’m learning how at the Lighthouse. So don’t try that again, cousin.” I emphasized ‘cousin’ to get the meaning across. I hate you, I said silently.
He stood up, his calm matching my own. “You’re a queer, and you’re a tease. One of these days, a man will put you in your place.” He walked over to the ladder and stepped down. He soon paused in his descent, only his head and shoulders visible, his cheeks as flushed as after one of our potato sack races. “You’d better start getting used to this, because those little tits of yours are just going to shrivel up and fall off like rotten apples from the tree if you don’t let some man nibble at them. That’s what you’re put here for.”
I watched Aunt Edith take her apple pie out of the oven and test her potatoes, her apron-covered paunchy stomach catching oil and water as she worked, her calico dress the same home-fashioned ankle-length dress of my childhood. I wondered what she would think if she knew that Joey and I had kissed in their barn loft so many years ago. I wondered if she knew she had raised at least one chauvinistic boy. I doubted that ‘chauvinism’ was a word she would use or understand. Uncle Jesse likely controlled everything.
Poor Edith. I felt sorry for her limited, isolated life here. Such a simple housewife. She had no exposure to the world beyond with not so much as a radio or the electricity to run one. It didn’t help her misfortune that when she spoke, her false teeth rattled loosely.
She seemed to read that on my face. She suddenly asked if she could show me her stocks. Edith invested in stocks? She led me down to her cellar where shelf after shelf were filled with jarred vegetables, beans, fruit - hundreds of jars. Pickle barrels, baskets of apples and onions and potatoes sat on the dirt floor. She chatted on and on about how her egg and soap sales were still in good business, and about how she planned to set up a market stand at the end of the laneway, now that motor cars regularly passed by.
I got her message: she had filled her space completely.
Secretly I longed to be the round peg that fit perfectly in the round hole like she did ... like Mama did … like even Aunt Opal. They had such purpose. I sent out a silent wish to Joey that he, by now, had opened his eyes to all that women were put here for. He needn’t have looked beyond his own backyard.
Thomas scooted his chair from the table and gulped down his remaining half glass of prohibited red wine. He had brought up a bottle from the cellar explaining to our raised eyebrows that this 1910 Bordeaux was only going to turn to vinegar if we didn’t drink it, and besides, this was a night to relax. He indeed looked as if he had achieved his goal as he looked about the dining room.
“Thank God the ghosts are gone from here now.” His cheeks were flushed and his lips were stained a deep red. “When I look around, do you know what I see?” He didn’t expect an answer and we didn’t give him one. “I see you, Bess, and I see you, Lizzie, and that is all. And when I think of the bedrooms upstairs, I know a woman is up there with a small child sleeping, waiting for her husband’s drunkenness to wear off, and that is all. There is no one in the master bedroom waiting for me, half-propped on pillows, surrounded by books, the death-look on her face being ignored by both of us. No, my beloved wife is gone from here, gone on to happier places, leaving behind a wish that I find happiness too. Who would have guessed I would go full circle and find it back here, the place I ran away from?” He nodded to his thoughts. “Yes, indeed, I feel as if I’ve come home again.”
I poured him more wine and raised my glass to him. “Welcome home, Thomas.” Our glasses touched with a tinkle.
Lizzie slipped from the room, taking some dishes with her.
Thomas took another drink and sat his glass down. His fingers moved up and down the stem, our eyes watching this.
“Where are you, Bess? Are you at home here?”
I nodded. “More and more it’s becoming so. For years this was my workstation, but now our chapter of women have scattered, the back parlor has been returned to its original state,
the new shelter downtown is taking in the majority of battered women. The Lighthouse is becoming less of a house, and more of a home … I feel somehow attached. Could I be growing roots?”
“I hope so.” He leaned toward me and his warm fingers circled my wrist. “Bess, you and I … we’re well suited, don’t you think?”
I finally touched that floppy hair on his forehead and moved it over to his temple. I could only nod, so consumed I was by his intense green eyes searching mine.
“Bess, you may be shocked by what I’m going to say, but I’ve been waiting a long time to say this. There was so much in our way. We both had ghosts from the past we were running from. I ran for years, working my life away. So have you – I know you so well. But we were running in circles, with one foot always centered here. Center your life with me, Bess. I want you to marry me.”
Had I only started blossoming at this moment? All my senses opened and leaned toward him as a flower would to the sun’s rays, wanting to see and hear more. I reached for his hand and brought it to my mouth and inhaled its manly scent, my eyes watering, it couldn’t be helped. I had dreamt and had nightmares of this - the reality of his present affection clashing with my past decisions.
He patted my hand. “Good then, you’ll marry me.”
I shook my head with regret, tears flowing. I pulled from his grasp and grabbed my napkin. The sound of my unrestrained sobs filled the room.
“I can’t,” I muttered between gasps. “I’m already married.”
“What?”
My hands shook as I attempted to keep up with my eyes’ salty production. “You don’t know me as well as you might think, Thomas. I made one huge mistake that very few know about.”
“Where is your husband? Why don’t I know about him?”
I forced myself to meet his stare; his eyes were now the green in the ocean before a storm, but he was still leaning toward me in that concentrated way of his. I hadn’t lost him yet.
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