Trance

by Christopher Sorrentino

  A glass of iced burgundy on the bedside table. Tania watches the Watergate impeachment hearings. By Thursday she is pretty much ignoring her standing orders to conceal herself in the closet when she is alone. Sometimes when the others enter the room, they find her leaning in the closet door, eyes on the TV, a cigarette burning across the room in the ashtray near the bed—not even trying, really, to fool them.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Watching this.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “What do you mean then?”

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Watching this.”

  “Is that what you’re supposed to be doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are you supposed to be doing?”

  “Waiting.”

  “Waiting where?”

  She giggles.

  “You think it’s funny, hah? Maybe you’ll think this is funny too.”

  Teko crosses the room, rapidly closing the space between them. Tania is caught between panic and apathy. So she tosses her wine at him. He freezes. There is the sound of the ice cubes hitting the carpeted floor. The expression on his face indicates his attempt to scale new heights of rage. Without a word she disappears into the closet and closes the door behind her. She stays there for the remainder of the night.

  It’s Nixon’s viscid gift that his presence haunts these hearings, clammily, despite his physical absence, his attempts to appear above the fray. Even Yolanda is made uneasy by the transcripts the White House has newly released in an effort “to put Watergate behind us,” the ones in which their profane, bigoted, scheming president vents his paranoia. Despite her generally inflationary use of terms like pig and fascist, the revelation of Nixon’s true character surprises her.

  “You met him?” she asks Tania.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How could you not know?” asks Teko, fixing an iced burgundy in the kitchenette.

  “I just don’t know.”

  “Oh, I can believe it,” says Yolanda. They’re both on one of the beds, leaning up against the headboard, watching television. Yolanda reaches out with her leg and seizes Tania’s foot between two long prehensile toes, giving it a little shake of solidarity. “They’re all alike. How could you tell the difference?”

  “Quit it.” Tania giggles.

  “Screw this,” says Teko vaguely. He drops into a chair, placing the wine before him.

  “But what was he like?” asks Yolanda.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “First you don’t know. Now you don’t remember.” Teko is pointing at her.

  “I don’t,” says Tania. It dawns on her, too late, that she’s been drawn into a trap.

  But tonight for once Yolanda doesn’t feel like joining Teko in batting her around. “I don’t see what difference it could possibly make,” she says to Teko as she hoists herself up and then weaves her way to the kitchenette to refill her glass.

  “It makes a big fucking difference,” says Teko. “As if her family and Nixon aren’t asshole buddies.”

  “Like, what, Teko?” Yolanda drops ice into her glass, “Like she infiltrated the group? Come on. We kidnapped her, remember? Anybody home?” She pauses beside Teko and pantomimes tapping on his head with her knuckles. He recoils angrily, but does nothing more.

  “Who’dja think you were kidnapping, chrissake? Angela Davis?”

  “We had nothing to do with that operation,” says Teko.

  “Pick, pick, pick,” says Yolanda.

  “We had nothing to do with it, Tania.” Teko rises, gesturing earnestly.

  “Are you apologizing to me?” Tania asks in wonderment.

  “Sounds like he’s copping a plea to me,” says Yolanda.

  “That’s enough out of you,” says Teko. Without warning he swats Yolanda’s drink out of her hand and then slaps her across the face. She stares, for a moment, at her hand, dripping with wine, and at the spreading stain on the carpet, and worries about inconsequential things, permanent marks and stains, the feelings that suddenly lance her from out of the midwestern early sixties. Sometimes she can smell the ammonia and Pine-Sol, see the gleam of the dark wood. This, dripping from her hand, is an insult to order. Such decadent worries, how dare she? She lunges for Teko, her indignation suddenly having taken shape, trying to stick her thumb into his eye. She misses, jamming it against the bridge of his nose, and each seizes up, Teko with his hands to his face and Yolanda with her wrist cradled against her chest.

  Tania notices, not for the first time, how absurd ice cubes look lying against the beige carpet.

  “I think, actually,” she says, “that I met President Eisenhower.”

  Tania has lived in three closets since February. This is the worst yet, because she shares it with the clothes. In other words, she doesn’t feel as if it’s hers. She considers telling this to Teko and Yolanda, suggesting that maybe they could fold their clothes, or some of their clothes, and keep them in the bureau drawers, and then the closet could be hers alone, and she wouldn’t say a thing about spending all the time in it they wanted her to. She is vaguely jealous of the clothes, she realizes, realizing also how strange this all is. She has become an expert at living in closets, has developed unambiguous preferences (e.g., length is infinitely more desirable than width), has slept in them and eaten in them and read books in them and been raped in them and recorded messages to the People in them.

  This, just generally, is not the life she was raised to live. Here is a seizure of a kind of exquisite loneliness, a sudden shuddering. She wants to pick up the phone. She wants to go out for drinks. She wants the free fresh wind in her hair. She has always thought of herself as a simple person, but as her life has repeatedly cycled into the simplest of patterns—waiting, in an unadorned space—she has found that she is much more complex than she’d thought, both stronger and weaker, smarter and dumber, surprisingly void of sentimentality, abruptly affectless in grief after two days of crying herself blind.

  She also holds dueling loyalties in her mind. Lately she’s been thinking a lot about her old friend Trish Tobin. Trish’s parents happened to own the Hibernia Bank, whose Sunset branch the SLA robbed in April, both to “expropriate” the very money that was paying for this motel room and to provide an appropriately public venue for Tania’s own coming out. She and Trish had a lot of fun together and she wanted to send her a postcard after the robbery, just to let her know it was nothing personal.

  But no postcards. No phone calls. No nothing. And without Cujo she suddenly is a very lonely guerrilla. She misses Gelina and Fahizah. Gabi too, kind of. But Zoya and especially Cinque she’s pretty glad are dead. What she admits to herself once in a while is that if she were given a choice, she would add Teko, Yolanda, and herself to that pile of smoking corpses, in that order.

  Tania blinks in the scrubbed light. The sun tingles on her bare arms. It is the morning of May 27, Memorial Day, and she is standing outdoors for the first time since the previous Monday.

  During their week inside Yolanda grew embarrassed enough to start carrying their empty gallon jugs of wine—they finished five—out to the Dumpster herself, so that the maid wouldn’t see (Teko ridiculed her bourgeois propriety). But what else was there to do in there?

  Well, Teko, at least, had been planning, setting down on paper tentative plans for a more or less triumphant (as he saw it) return to the Bay Area. He worked with road maps and local traffic reports and his own rash ignorance. First he wanted to drive straight up the coast on Highway 1; next was a plan to head out past Palm Springs for a few days’ bivouac in Joshua Tree, and then up, through the Mojave, through anciently dry lakes, through the country of dead roads and ghost towns, right under the very nose of the enemy (Marine Corps Base, Twentynine Palms; Fort Irwin; Edwards Air Force Base; Naval Weapons Center, China Lake), the sound of whose exploding ordnance crackled through the calm arid sky beyond razor-topped fences.

  “Drive t
hat lemon into the desert?” asks Yolanda. “Are you nuts?”

  “You picked it.”

  “I wasn’t planning on joining the Donner Party.”

  Finally Teko reluctantly suggested “the obvious one”: straight up via the seam of the state, Interstate 5. But they would have to wait until the holiday itself, when the roads would be jammed and the three travelers would be able to slip through checkpoints and roadblocks relatively inconspicuously.

  In the parking lot, Tania hefts a duffel bag containing the submachine gun, the carbine, the shotgun, the ammo belts, the sheathed knives, and some loose ammunition and puts it in the Corvair’s tiny trunk. Teko’s hand is in his jeans as he adjusts himself, preparatory to settling behind the wheel. Yolanda places a bag of snacks on the floor of the car, then pulls her dark dress away from where it is stickily clinging to her chest.

  “God damn it,” she says, “it’s too hot to wear synthetics. They don’t breathe.”

  “So go change,” says Teko. “Anyway, you don’t even look like you’re on vacation.”

  Memorial Day, to remember the fallen. For their purposes, though, it is Day Eleven, Year One.

  “Crunch! Crunch!” goes a Granny Goose Sour Cream ‘n’ Onion Potato Chip, crisply delivering its valedictory inside Teko’s mouth. Tania briefly wonders who will fry the potato chips when the revolution comes. Potato chips were invented by a black man, Cujo had once told her.

  “But do you think he got the credit?”

  A question to ponder in the closeted dark.

  RISING OUT OF THE basin, the outlying beach the dun edge of ocean’s glimmering, the end of America, the memory of a dream; dropping again into fertile bleakness, flat and fruitful and rolling toward the horizon through the Central Valley, miles of cultivated moonscape punctuated by giant elevated signs to announce flamboyantly fulfillment of the more subdued blue pledges of FOOD PHONE GAS LODGING, markers proclaiming the famous names that outshine the little towns that host them, farm towns whose fortunes are entwined with the road’s, the land that was their reason all but irrelevant now, a mere furrowed moment in the dust and glare and insect spatter of freeway mph, hypnotic and droning; on the radio here shitkicker music, or religious zealots barking sulfurous and contagious fear out over these unspoiled plains of almonds, cauliflower, grapes, lettuce, onions, peaches, soybeans, watermelon; with miles of freight lined on the distant rails, hauling cargo from one end of human endeavor to the other; BRIDGE, and you look to see what torrent rushes by beneath as you pass, and it’s just a dry gulch, a wash, an arroyo, such words occurring lightly to the native-born Californian, painting ideas you hold close about the land (and here you’re with these outlanders, tourists really, guns and ambition notwithstanding); lemonade springs and rock candy mountains: the car burns at its steady fifty-five, which saves gas and lives in that order, every now and then a policeman in his black-and-white drawing parallel to peer in from behind the tinted aviators and from under the hat that conceals the Human Face of the Law. Stop. Gas. Snacks. You’d like a movie magazine or a National Enquirer. You just want to know what’s up with Jackie O, you little twat, is the unvarnished opinion ventured from the driver’s seat, and you know you could shove another brick of envious rage up his ass by mentioning that you’ve met the bitch, yes actually personally MET the FUCKING BITCH. Pacheco Pass and onto 152, sunlight spread across the windshield, imbuing the crushed insects with a delicate glow plus dangerously obscuring the view; you pass through Gilroy where there’s a kinda cute ‘n’ kitschy little restaurant/hotel/gift shop, Casa de Fruta: Everything is “Casa de” something—Casa de Coffee, Casa de Gifts, Casa de Wine, Casa de Sweets, get it?—mercifully zipping straight through to hook up with 101.

  Here, as you approach San Jose, where the old orchards have been turned under the earth, new housing rises, and the places in which its residents will labor appear, equally new, monuments to the city’s ambition to sow itself beyond its boundaries, the orphan seeds of such civic aspiration sprouting right up to the very edge of the road, lighted and empty, solitary cars in the enormous lots, lining the freeway for miles, all the way north this replication of an epic and futile vanity, in a night that smells like rain. Home again.

  HOUSEWIVES SENT THINGS OVER, casseroles and vats of chili. Succor all with food. It was an expression of sympathy that had more force than words. Send enough food to construct a golem, another Alice; enough food to represent every single meal she’d eaten. Hank was touched, though Lydia found it mildly distasteful that fried chicken, urns of coffee, and macaroni salads were turning up, unbidden, on her doorstep, left like floral offerings (“In the middle of the night!”). She said, finally, that she thought it was funereal. The alien food would have to remain outside the house, like some kind of stray dog. She had a folding buffet table brought up from the cellar and placed on the lawn and directed that the spread be laid out daily for the reporters and for anybody else who wanted it. FBI men in shirtsleeves and TV reporters with their microphones stuffed in the pockets of their blazers lingered together in the sun over paper plates of chow. Pour out a half-drunk cup of coffee on the lawn at your peril, gentlemen. Genuine Zoysia grass. The lady of the house is ever vigilant.

  Lydia was the one wearing black.

  “How do they get onto the grounds?” she wanted to know. She meant the food, the people who brought the food.

  Grounds. Lydia forcefully insisted that it was merely a six-bedroom house, the sort of home anyone with a large family might own, but if it suited her to speak of “the grounds,” she wouldn’t hesitate.

  Every day, black.

  Family snaps. Distribute pictures to the press but the press did them no justice. This was where Hank felt what the other parents felt, what Lydia denied them. The press turned it all into something else, something Hallmark. Here was a picture of her First Communion. A picture of her seated in a tiny bloated airplane at an amusement park, just tucked in like someone going on a long and mysterious journey, her unreadable look fixing the camera. Here she was with Stump, with her grandmother, in Europe, up at Wyntoon. And the press said tiny hopeful. The press said aglow with. The press said happier times. The press said no hint of. A bad translation, but why would you bother. To what end could the nuance be applied?

  The story—such as it was—was as simple as “she went through a screaming period.” Screamed her displeasure at everything. Just seemed to scream until he’d felt it necessary to approach her on his knees, to embrace her softly, gather her into his arms, and whisper requests that she just stop. The story was how do you please a little girl who demands juice but throws across the room the cup you’ve filled and kept cool in the fridge, anticipating her return from an afternoon’s adventures? The story was she stepped off the sidewalk once, turning back to give him a look of hopeful noncompliance before he lurched forward, arms and legs working automatically, his mouth saying no. The story was she sat on his lap while he read to her and he got an innocent erection. The story was she never really liked having her hair washed. The story was what would all these wise second-guessers say if their own daughters took up with an Eric Stump? No? Stay home? The story was the same for everyone: There were the sixties, here were the seventies, and it had seemed so certain that the whole thing was going to blow over, leaving them untouched.

  GRAND CHILDREN PLAY IN THE backyard. Shouts and tumult, tears and anger, amid the long shadows. Occasionally an adult will break from one of the groups clustered on the redwood deck to descend to the swing set, jaunty, ice tinkling in a glass, offering assistance or arbitration, an apparition of middle age materializing among the weepy kids.

  Susan Rorvik’s mother watches with a sort of cringing posture that all but says, Where are my grandchildren? A cigarette burning constantly between the first two fingers of her right hand. Though it would be a comfort to Susan if this were her major concern. Her mother browbeat her and her cousin Roger to show up here in Palo Alto for this family reunion, to demonstrate to the world at large, or
to the relatives at least, that they were living, healthy, not particularly treasonable members of the clan. Because although Susan had been gratified, enchanted, even, by the minor celebrity brought about by her recent appearance on the evening news, she hadn’t anticipated the possibility that these exact same broadcasts might have reached the members of her own extended family. Her mother set about to disabuse her of her ignorance: She may be more well-known than the average weirdo on Telegraph Avenue, but in this South Bay backyard she is nothing less than a superstar! She wants an existence in Berkeley separate and distinct from the rest of her life? Particularly the life that she enjoyed (which is the only word for it you have to admit) until she’d “run off” to Isla Vista? She wants to say what she says and do what she does in the service of her ideals as a so-called independent adult, but she wants it all to be completely irrelevant, forgotten, when she saunters into the bosom of her family? Well, guess again.

  Susan’s offered no rebuttal to her mother’s viewpoint or advice or whatever it had been intended to be, which was delivered to her via two telephone calls and one of her mother’s famous letters. She’s been too exhausted, having left a nice, quiet, but poorly paying job working at a bookstore to wait tables at the Plate of Brasse, a restaurant located in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, where the doormen wear shoddy-looking Beefeater uniforms.