by Marge Piercy
“Picking and politicking and pursuing sweet pussy.”
Oh, yes, she thought, he had been one of those. He had his banjo on his back. From under his fringed leather vest he took his stash and offered her a joint. It was a social thing, like a secret handshake. “You need a place to stay?” She asked because she felt obligated. What was one more on the floor? All the people she knew had the sense they could travel from city to city and always they would find Movement offices and people to put them up and feed them. She could go anyplace and be recognized by clothing, by catchwords, by hair and dress. Hospitality was a sacred obligation, like sharing your dope with anyone present.
“Yeah, I’m staying with a great chick in SoHo, but I wouldn’t mind … “
Leigh was at her elbow, Nagra on the ready. “Hey, I heard you blowing that banjo … Introduce me.”
Fortunately, she made out the words embossed on his much-decorated guitar and realized that was the name he went by. “Yellow Brick Road, this is Leigh Pfeiffer. Yellow writes some great songs”
She got them going together and then faded back. Lohania was dancing alone, absorbed. Every bit of her body shimmered and shivered and wriggled in its separate but conjoined ecstasy. Her eyes were half shut. Some kids were playing with long paper streamers, weaving patterns in and out. It was a scene of fantasy from the back of her head, a subversive musical comedy poured out of the closets of America, people dancing in the streets, bumping in huge good-natured crowds, peaceful as soap bubbles jostling. Never would the authorities be able to cram the genie back in the bottle: this was a permanent change of the American psyche. Daniel didn’t grasp how powerful beauty and energy were. When the music changes, the walls of the city tremble, she quoted to herself with a smile.
Back at the bench, Natalie was getting to her feet. “Sam’s cranky. I think it’s time to go.”
“I’ll see who I can round up.”
She took Lohania gently by the arm, bringing her back to the dusty afternoon. Kevin was lost, but Lohania did not seem worried. “He’s supposed to eat supper at his ma’s house in Newark, so he can make his own way.” Lohania spoke fast, as always. She had no accent but a standard New York one. “He’s gone off drinking with some old alkie he knows from the docks. You’d be surprised where he finds them … He’s standing in some dim Irish bar on Amsterdam getting them to tell him stories about the black-and-tans and the IRA … My feet hurt. Hey, Sammy, come to your tanta. Whoopsa, you giving your mama a hard time? … So, who’s he gonna look like this time?”
“Don’t call my baby he. I don’t want a boy, and I wish people wouldn’t assume I do.” Natalie sounded cross.
“Want a girl? Or something else?” Lohania stuck out her tongue. “Mama, we’re going to take you right home and fix you up. A nice meal. A back rub right where it gets you in the small of your back. Tonight I cook!”
Vida found Daniel deep in conversation. Proprietarily he put his arm around her and gave her waist a squeeze, without interrupting the flow of his argument: “… and force heavier and heavier demands on welfare until the whole system buckles.”
How dare he act so patronizing? “Natalie’s tired. She’d like to leave.”
“Fine,” Daniel said. They were both always saying that when nothing was fine; it was a habit of their coupledom. You could say to them, I have pneumonia, and they’d say, Fine, I’ll call a doctor. “I’ll see her later. You girls run along.”
Really, she thought as she dodged through the crowd, he acted superior just because he had a university job. Girls! Leigh was the only man she knew who did not diminish the woman he was with, who did not think because they fucked that he owned her or she was his little garbage bag. Daniel treated Natalie just like … a wife. She was fiercely grateful to Leigh, dodging a circle dancing around a couple of conga drummers, for their way of being open, trusting and above all respectful. She could love other men briefly, affectionately, as friends, as lovers, but only Leigh could be trusted in the center of her life. No other man could ever love her and let her survive intact, her appetites, her abilities, her will, her intellect not diminished or pruned but encouraged. She peered into openings in the throng as she slid through, hoping to see him.
Lohania pushed the stroller and sweet-talked Sammy, as Natalie and Vida strolled home arm in arm up Broadway. Broadway was a paler continuation of the park, with Sunday-afternoon crowds milling from shop to shop and old people sitting on benches between the uptown and downtown streams of traffic, a puddle of strutting pigeons at their feet. “Sorry I got crabby,” Natalie said. “I just want to go home and get our strategy together for the staff meeting”
Cool shadows crept across Broadway, the sun slanting down over New Jersey. Vida caught sight of herself in a mirror in a shop window and grinned. Her minidresses sometimes looked like a little girl’s frock, sometimes like uniforms from Star Trek, the costumes of a future where the dull grim problems of racism, poverty, starvation had all been worked out. “Natalie, Lohania, do you ever, ever feel like this is just the center of the universe.?”
“A real New Yorker talking”‘ Natalie patted Vida’s behind. “Who’d ever know she came from the Midwest?”
“I mean here and now. When I was in high school, remember. Natty, I had this idea of history concentrating in moments of decision. Like 1890 was the time to be in Paris and 1917 in St. Petersburg. It feels that way now—as if things are happening faster than we can understand. As if we’re pushing on some corner about to turn the whole thing over! We’re making history—”
“You’re a romantic”‘ Lohania snapped. “History is a science”‘
“I don’t believe that.” Interest lit up Natalie’s face, making her look all of eighteen, digging her hand into her brown curls, wrinkling her nose. Natalie loved to argue about ideas, now as when they had first met, when Natalie was twelve-and-a-half and Vida twelve. “History’s a myth. A million things happen in every moment. Each historian selects certain to stress. The stock market. A cholera epidemic. Wars. The changing status of women. The baby boom. The inflation rate. The rise of soybean production. The thawing of the Antarctic ice cap. The extinction of species. A strain of bacillus resistant to penicillin … The War in Vietnam obsesses us, and for good reason, but a historian in the superpower of Togoland in 2067 might ignore the affairs of the backwaters of North America altogether”‘
“Pluralist nonsense,” Lohania said. When she talked Marxism, she looked different. Her mouth drew thinner, her eyes narrowed and shone, she stood with her small shoulders thrown back. Lohania nursed a raw sore anger toward her parents because they had taken the family from Cuba, because they had punished her for being dark, because they doted on her brothers and scorned her. “When you comprehend the economic base, when you master the dialectical process, when you analyze the stage of imperialism we’re entering upon, then you know what moves history and how best to throw your forces into the struggle”‘
Vida tuned out the theoretical argument. What they had to decide was what to do at the meeting; once they got upstairs, that was their agenda. Every person in SAW had their own politics—anarchist, liberal, communist, democratic-socialist, syndicalist, Catholic-worker, Maoist, Schactmanite, Spartacist—but what mattered was the politics of the act. Decisions rose from solving problems in struggle. Everyone was accommodated in the vast lumbering movement. Vida was content to be of the New Left, without a fancier label. All that hairsplitting—that was what the poor Old Lefties had sat around doing in dreary meetings in the fifties nobody else attended while the resident FBI agent took notes. Now they knew that everything must be done and they must speak to everyone, through the poetry of the act, through the theater of the streets, through the media, the music, irrationally and rationally and subliminally. History was a sense of urgency, a rush in the blood and a passion to make things better, to push with her whole life on what was. SAW was a fiercely, totally democratic organization, open to anyone with or without the low dues, with an elected leade
rship usually galloping in one direction while the members marched in another. Chapters did as they pleased and projects happened because enough people did them. Program was hotly debated and then often coldly ignored, unless it really was up from the grass roots. SAW was uncontrollable and lush as a vacant-lot jungle.
When they walked into Vida’s apartment, the living room was filled with twenty people sitting on everything available and the floor. Leigh looked annoyed. “Closed meeting. Only Roach staff”“ Mopsy wriggled to be petted.
She’d forgotten that Leigh had warned her the newspaper staff would be meeting there. “Sorry”“ Lohania and she trotted downstairs after Natalie. The phone, which had taken its Sunday-morning break, was ringing, as usual, every ten minutes. After Natalie had begun feeding Sammy canned goo in his high chair, Vida or Lohania continued whenever she was called to the phone. Lohania began supper, a process continued by whoever was not at the moment dealing with problems. Vida took calls about a women’s-caucus meeting (Wednesday night. I’ll try to make it. I have to meet with some chapter delegates from Queens College. Of course I think it’s important, but … I’ll put her on. Natalie!) The feed is broken on the Multilith press; who knows how to fix it? (Victor does. Call him at Betty’s after eight); Do you have a copy of Gorz’s A Strategy for Labor? I’m writing an article. And when are we going to see each other again? (Leigh has a copy. I’ll bring it to the Steering Committee. I love you too, Pelican, of course.) Nan got busted spray-painting at Whitehall Induction Center (Call Martin Abrahmson at his home number on Central Park West. The number is … ).
Natalie’s apartment was not as sunny as Vida’s, down three floors and facing West End, but the atmospheric difference was in the style of messi-ness. Not as often were random Movement extras from Tucson or Seattle camped on the living-room floor or taking unaccountably long baths reeking of dope and bubble bath or tying up the phone in long-distance calls to Alaska on fake credit cards that would be traced here in two months. Instead, more toys lay scattered underfoot, more small garments were abandoned on chairs and odd plastic nipples of the pacifiers Sammy insisted on sucking were stuck like flattened mushrooms to the sink drain-board and the windowsills. Both apartments had the air of being part-time offices, with mimeographed piles from mailings and political-education pamphlets stacked in every closet and covering varying amounts of the floors.
Daniel burst in, his face florid. “The kids were sitting in to protest ROTC and the administration bastards called the police. Lots of casualties. One with a broken back. They threw him down a flight of steps. I’ve got to get on the phone.”
After Lohania cut short a call to Newark about starting a community radio station, Daniel took over for a series of staccato queries. Then he stormed into the kitchen, shoving his arms into his “respectable” overcoat … “Who’s got the emergency kitty?”
“Upstairs, my room. I’ll go with you” As Vida ran beside him up the service stairs, feeling the anger and concern radiating from him like heat from a burner, she was sorry she had felt negative about him all day. It was she, Vida, who was saying at meetings that they must attract more ordinary people into war protests, and then she became impatient because Daniel and Natalie were a real couple and had babies all the time.
“I know the kid whose back they broke” Daniel muttered. “His brother was killed in Nam. Big gangly overgrown mutt just turned nineteen. And the papers will go on about student violence tonight.”
She found the money for Daniel without disturbing the Roach staff. As they were leaving, she encountered Chapel Hill couple carrying their sleeping bags. “That meeting seems like it may go on for hours” the guy said. “We’re going to stay up by Columbia.”
“Sure. Take care,” Vida said, wishing she could remember their names.
After Daniel rushed out, a pork chop in his hand, Natalie, Lohania and Vida sat down to eat, while Sammy kept up a steady babble. He was playing baby. When he felt his mother was failing to pay all of her attention to him all of the time, he deployed a battery of devices. One of the ploys Vida found the most irritating was when he pretended to be a baby again and drooled and cried and made nonsense sounds at the top decibel level his baby-bird throat could gape. GAH GAH GAH GAH, he bellowed, banging a spoon, and then he giggled and waited to see if Natalie would not pick him up.
“Turn it down, Sammy. I have to talk to your Aunt Vida and your Aunt Lohania. You can it, now; I mean it,” Natalie said—her voice, however, wheedling.
”Goo Goo Goo Goo Goo Goo Goo Goo Goo,” Sammy shouted.
“The basic problem” Natalie bellowed grimly, pretending she could not hear Sammy, “is to ensure that this coming demonstration has political content. That the kids learn about the nature of the power structure and imperialism and not just get some exercise. We’re moving people, yes, but we’re not changing the way they think.”
“What did you think of the Fair?” Lohania leaned back in her chair, touching up her nails with Mauve Magic. She had the longest nails Vida had ever seen in real life. They were a particular vanity and passion, a hobby, an artwork. Lohania liked them to be slightly grotesque.
“Eh . . “ Natalie sighed, letting Sam crawl into her lap and sit there, grinning, victorious. “That’s not my favorite constituency, strung-out kids. How can you talk to somebody who’s stoned all the time?”
“We’re reaching them” Vida insisted. “Sure, you can’t get into long rational arguments with them like you can straighter people, but they have a feeling for who lies to them and who tells the truth. We have to reach everybody, my darlings, everybody—and we’re doing it. We’ll mobilize every sector and we’ll stop the war by Christmas—or at any rate, by the spring.”
“If we don’t get out some troops for the demonstration a week from Thursday, they’ll think we’re losing momentum. The media bastards are always saying we’ve peaked—as if we were some advertising campaign” Lohania snapped.
She had a vision sometimes of a movement like one of the big spring parades—not the kind of more militant demonstration SAW would be mounting, but the big spring mobilizations with old people and mothers pushing strollers and men in suits and kids in bodypaint and rabbis and priests and shamans and marching bands. Everybody would belong—every-body but the ruling class. More and more people were against the war; more and more people were for change. The climate of the age was warming. She felt bursting with strength when she thought of how far they had come, from a tiny minority, timid and isolated, to a force that felt as if it was becoming the mainstream. Now there were social workers for peace, sanitation workers for peace, secretaries for peace, grandmothers for peace, zoo keepers for peace. They would take the country and make it fulfill its promises, its good dreams.
When Leigh’s meeting finished, he came downstairs. Sammy was tucked into bed, still audible, while Vida made notes on points to present at the meeting of the Steering Committee. Lohania was giving Natalie a neck rub. When Leigh came in, she halted and winked at him. “So, the Roach got its priorities straight for another issue?”
”Only a mere four hours to reach four decisions … What did you do with the men? Eat them like black widow spiders?”
Natalie’s eyes shone with anger. “Men project their own violence onto women!”
Lohania fluttered her lashes. “Since when do you mind being eaten?”
Vida said nothing, for she interpreted Leigh’s question as meaning Is Kevin gone? He had come down not after her but after Lohania. The two of them had not made love all week. Vida had no desire to interfere, but she wished she had second-guessed them earlier. She saw herself stretching out in her big bed for a nice night’s sleep. Good to have an occasional night by herself. The propaganda wasn’t working. She felt too overwound to remain alone.
She excused herself and called Pelican Bob back. “I found the Gorz. If you want it, I can bring it by.” Nine thirty on a balmy October night; there were lots of people on Broadway. Pelican lived on Claremont by Tiemann, right
off 125th, so she would have two short blocks to trot from the bus. Further, she experienced the pressure put on all Movement women never to admit being afraid in the streets, afraid of any neighborhood, especially Black.
Pelican Bob was nicknamed because he had grown up in Florida and once, while stoned, he had broken his usual reticence to speak for perhaps half an hour on the virtues of that bird. There were many Bobs in the New York Movement, so the title helped. She did not want to sleep with Pelican, but dropping by his apartment would be pleasant. She could relax and incidentally lobby Pelican and his roommates to support her in Tuesday’s meeting. She might need his vote. She had slept on their couch before.
Into her Greek carpetbag she packed her working clothes for tomorrow. The only disadvantage of sleeping at Pelican’s was everybody’s ribbing when they saw her dressed for her secretarial job; but probably none of them would be awake when she left.
8
The next morning, nobody at Pelican’s was awake. Her dress for work was demure, the skirt not as short, the colors not as throbbing, no long dangling tinkly earrings. She daubed on her off-white lipstick and combed her hair back, put on her paisley hat and a flowered shift and she was ready for Kyriaki. Perhaps she spent an occasional impulsive night out to appreciate her household. Sour milk in Pelican’s kitchen, Wonder Bread, potato chips. In her apartment Leigh rose with her and breakfast was a social occasion, sometimes the only quiet time to talk until night brought them to bed together. The tub at Pelican’s was stained with the dirt of the ages, and the toilet smelled of men who pissed in the dark and sometimes missed. She hated to begin the day without a good hot scrub and soak.
On the subway she put her mind into shape for her job, doing English-to-Greek and Greek-to-English translating and typing. At Kyriaki they assumed that she was Greek—she had applied for the job under I.D. still in her old husband’s name—and that she had then married outside. Her name was Mrs. Pfeiffer there. Never had she been Davida Asch on the job. She enjoyed being half invisible, as if under an alias.
