by Neil Gordon
“Well it sure seems stupid to me now.”
“Only if you need to make a judgment.”
She looks at him now, in profile, watching the protest. “How do you know so much about me?”
“I don’t know anything about you. Except that you’re human. Just like me.”
This she understands with clarity. Of course she is. She always has been. And with the same clarity she can see that their arrest is now moments away. Indeed, turning, she can see that police vans are being brought up behind the soundstage.
She seems, however, to be the only person here who realizes this. The rest of the crowd, back toward Fort Benning now, is facing off against the MPs on the other side, as more people—here a young man, here a middle-aged woman, here a professorial gentleman in an overcoat—while behind them all the riot police form their cordon. She is, she realizes, about to be arrested and jailed for six months. And now she speaks again to the man in that shockingly small voice, the voice she has never heard from herself before, saying something that is true and has always been true, from the moment she opened her email in Philadelphia to this very moment here, and from which she has been running ever since.
“I can’t get arrested. I have to go to New York.”
He looks up and around them, with a calculating expression.
“Why?”
Behind, the growing phalanx of riot policemen, and behind them the whole wide world, the wide world in which she has written the work of her life.
“My father is dying. I need to go be with him.”
“I see. Well then.” He looks around now, and an expression of careful calculation crosses his face. “I wonder what we can do to get you out of here.”
The phalanx of police, behind them, is nearly in formation, with arriving cops joining the edge of the cordon on my right.
He speaks now as if to himself. “That looks about the weakest point over there.”
She sees what he means. “Maybe we can get through on a press card?”
“Maybe. They don’t like press much either.”
She nods, and licks her lips. “Then I’m fucked.”
“Maybe. Want to give it a try?”
They rise now, the man helping her up with a strong arm. He puts the computer bag over her shoulder. Then, with a hand on her back, he brings her to the right flank of the police cordon, as close as he dares, and stops.
“Ready?”
“Yes.” For a moment she stands, staring at him. “How do I thank you?”
“No need.”
“At least tell me your name?”
“Ralph.”
“I’m Isabel.”
“I know who you are. I work with Father Roy. He asked me to keep an eye on you after your interview. Thought something was wrong. In fact, there was something right. Very, very right.”
For a time they watch each other, because she so doesn’t want to leave him. Then he speaks softly.
“It’s time to go now.”
“You come too.”
“I can’t. I’m going to divert them while you try to get through.”
“You’re going to get arrested.”
“I’m always getting arrested. Go now, Isabel. You have somewhere to be.”
She nods and, in a flood of regret, turns again toward the police.
And without any thought, I know exactly what is about to happen.
I look back and see Ralph running toward the police, hard. At first they don’t notice, so he gives a yell—a loud one—and then they do. At full speed, now, he tackles a riot policeman at shoulder level, knocking him hard to the ground, and is immediately covered in a scrimmage of police.
Now there is a single cop holding a position where there had been five. It is toward him that I point myself. I pull out my press credentials, put my bag over my shoulder, close my jacket, and begin to run.
Can I get by? Almost. I am nearly next to the cop when he turns and blocks me, and I find myself stopped before the matt black of his riot mask, his huge, armored body in front of me, and he is raising his hands to put them on me when I step forward again and push my press card at him, screaming: “Out of my way goddammit or I’ll have you in court so quick you won’t know which way is south you fucking trailer trash cracker piece of shit bastard”—I am, after all, still Isabel, and now I know that I always have been, and always will—and shocked, he makes way, just like that, and I have crossed the line away from the protest.
Face after face, aged, kind, mean, young, soft, harsh, ugly, beautiful face after face after face as if they were all the faces of my life. The soundstage, the religious banners, the barbecue vendors on lawns.
Look at me. I have done the wrong thing.
I have left the protesters I believe in, to go be with my father: I have done the wrong thing, and sent Ralph to jail, and I have done it out of love.
And finally I find myself alone, where it all started, in front of the PVI array with the impassive agents running it.
Standing stock-still as if perfectly suspended, like my father and grandfather before me, like my aunts and my uncle, like my beloved Molly, like everyone I’ve ever cared about or admired, between what I believe and whom I love.
Just like them.
And realizing that, thinking, Oh my God, oh my God, didn’t you just, after all, make it here somehow? Aren’t you just, at fucking last, a big girl now?
May 2014
Boulevard Saint-Marcel
YOU’RE A BIG GIRL NOW
NEIL GORDON is the author of four novels: Sacrifice of Isaac, The Gun Runner’s Daughter, The Company You Keep, and You’re a Big Girl Now. He holds a Ph.D. in French Literature from Yale University and is a literary editor at the Boston Review as well as Professor of Writing at The New School and Professor of Comparative Literature and Dean of The American University of Paris.
Also by Neil Gordon
Sacrifice of Isaac
The Gun Runner’s Daughter
The Company You Keep
First published 2014 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2014 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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ISBN 978-1-4472-2791-5
Copyright © Saint-Marcel, Inc. 2014
The right of Neil Gordon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Lyrics from ‘You’re A Big Girl Now’ by Bob Dylan copyright © 1974 by Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2002 by Ram’s Horn Music.
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