Vida

by Marge Piercy

  “Where’s Ralph? Maybe I packed him” Tara said.

  “Don’t you leave Ralph!” Tommy kicked the chair legs. “I won’t go!”

  Tara was grabbing objects from here and there and dropping them in another carryall. “Look in the living room,” she said to Vida. “It’s a Huckleberry Hound dog.”

  Whatever that was. Toting the baby, she fumbled for a light and looked around the small living room. She found a child’s tennis shoe, a plastic fire engine and another pacifier. In the bedroom beyond, she found a heating pad, still plugged in; a cane; a bottle of liquid makeup; a pair of panty hose and in the crib, a lurid doll that had to be Ralph. “Got it!” she called.

  Tara had just dropped her purse and was lowering herself to grope for it. Vida saw that Tara could not bend her neck and realized she was partially immobilized from the last beating. Vida felt embarrassed at being judgmental about the lack of organization. “Can I help? I found these things”

  “If you can reach my purse. You can give me Beverly back”

  Vida recovered the purse, dropped what she had found into the second carryall and bundled Tommy out the door. Tara needed the cane to hobble down the cement steps. Finally Tara was packed into the back seat with Tommy beside her and the baby on her lap, and Vida slid into the driver’s seat. She had promised Joel, who was a little intimidated by the network of expressways around New York, to drive the first leg. “This is Dick, Tara”

  “Dick … Oh, that’s my husband’s name.”

  In the rearview mirror she could see Tara peering with sharp anxiety at the back of Joel’s head, which must look sinister.

  “Why don’t you call me … Sam, then? That’s my middle name.”

  She smiled, because Sam had been Natalie’s courier, meeting them before dawn and his school day with the food and final directions. For a moment she had hugged her too-tall, gawky nephew, and then she had given him an eagle feather she had been carrying for him since a meeting with Native American activists. “They’re in more danger just sitting in their kitchens than I am running before the law,” she had told Sam. Sam was the next generation, her inheritor, the child she might never have now. “The Feds are an army of occupation on the reservations. The war with cavalry is still going on. Ambushes. Running cars off the back roads. Burning families out”

  “What do you think that kid gets from your one-minute commercials for the revolution?” Joel asked afterward. “Handing him some damn feather”

  ”He’s not some random kid. He’s Natalie’s son.”

  Joel laughed. “Probably grow up and join the John Birchers.”

  “He’s half grown. Joel, even in America, not everybody hates their parents. Leigh always loved his. They were old commies. His politics are real different, but there’s respect. His old man’s dead, but he still goes to see his mother in Miami twice a year.”

  “What good old bourgeois virtue. Hot shit. You want to go see mine? We can find her at the local beauty salon getting her hair bleached or lying down with a headache drinking vodka in the afternoon because it’s not supposed to leave a smell on the breath. I always could smell it.”

  Now they sat in uncomfortable silence till Joel tuned the radio to rock music. He had positioned himself to watch the rearview mirror for a tail.

  “Er,” she said awkwardly as they went over the bridge, “we were told you’d pay us half on pickup and the other half on delivery”“

  “Half?” Tara sounded vague. In the rearview mirror Vida saw her clutch her purse. “Oh, is that what they said?”

  “They told us that,” Joel said humbly. “But if they told you something different … ?”

  “That’s what we were told by the woman in charge”“ Vida said firmly. If something went wrong and they had to ditch, let them at least get that. “Oh … half. That’s a hundred now?”

  “That’s right,” Joel said. “I mean, you have it with you anyhow, right?”

  In the rearview mirror she saw that Tara was looking scared, her hand at her soft, rather large mouth. “Suppose you just leave me, then?”

  Joel turned around in his seat. “We’re as scared as you are, Tara, but we won’t dump you anyplace. We promise!”

  Carefully Tara counted out the hundred to Joel. “Do I get a receipt?”

  “You get safety”“ he said grimly. “Let us hope. Your body is your receipt” They were getting off to a rotten start, and it was a damned long way to Brattleboro.

  “Mommy, I’m hungry.”

  “Oh, Tommy, why didn’t you eat your breakfast?”

  “You spilled my milk out.”

  “You wouldn’t drink it! I asked you to, remember?”

  “It was cold. I hate it cold. You got to warm it in the pan for me.”

  “We didn’t have time, Tommy. This lady was in a hurry.”

  “There’s food in the bag” Joel said. “Why don’t you help yourself? Tommy can have something to eat from the bag back there.” His tone was coaxing, conciliatory.

  ”The kids aren’t usually like this” Tara said. “They’re upset by it all. They don’t know why we keep running. We never even moved before. We always lived in the same house.”

  She could hear paper rustling, so she assumed Tara was taking a look. “A chicken sandwich. You want a chicken sandwich, Tommy?”

  “No. I hate chicken. I want my milk.”

  “An apple. How about an apple?”

  “I don’t want an apple!” He started to bawl, and the baby woke and started to cry with him.

  “How about a banana?” Tara asked desperately over the din.

  Joel turned in his seat. “How about a banana, Tommy? We can both eat bananas, like monkeys!” He scratched his head, grimacing.

  Tommy stopped crying, although the baby continued. “How come you got sunglasses on?”

  “I like them. I like bananas too. How about you?”

  “Yeah, I like bananas—”

  “Good. Will you eat one if Mama peels it for you?”

  “You peel it! But how come you like sunglasses?”

  “How come you like bananas?” Joel still imitated a monkey, taking the banana and peeling it. “They taste good.”

  “Dark glasses feel good.”

  Tommy ate a banana as the baby sniffled back to sleep in Tara’s lap. A short silence was broken by Tommy, asking if they were there yet. Then he said, “I got to go, Mommy.”

  “Oh, Tommy. Already?”

  “Mommy, I got to!”

  “Number one or number two?”

  “Number one.”

  “Can he do it by the side of the road?” Vida asked. “On the Cross Island Parkway?”

  “All right.” Vida took the next exit and pulled into a Shell station, parking off to one side. “Take him in”

  “We can’t just go and use their bathroom.”

  “Tara, you got to,” Joel said. “They’ll be nice about it. If they aren’t, we’ll just go to the next gas station and try there. They won’t shoot you for wanting to piss.”

  “But why can’t you buy some gas or something?”

  “Mommy! I got to go!”

  ”Because the car’s filled up already. We haven’t used up enough gas to put any in,” Vida said.

  Looking furious, Tara got stiffly out of the car, poking the way on her cane with Tommy hanging off one arm and the baby waking up on the other.

  “Jesus,” Joel said. “We aren’t doing so good.”

  “I want to get out of the city”“

  “We can’t let the kids pee in their pants, Vida. Soften up a little. What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t like her. I want to like her, I do! She’s a battered woman, we’re finally carrying out a political task. We’re even getting paid for it. And I don’t like her. I want to drop her on her head off the expressway. I swear, if I was her husband, I’d kill her too! Don’t ever repeat that. But she’s driving me crazy.”

  “Vida, she’s scared, How can you be so hard toward her? She don’t
know who we are. We look weird” Joel squeezed her hand. “Now, shut off the motor and relax.”

  She obeyed him. “Is there coffee in that bag? Take a look”

  He screwed around to kneel on the seat and poke in it. “Something’s in the vacuum.”

  “Bet it’s Natalie’s good coffee. I’ll have a swig. Keep it in front. We have to drive.”

  “Baby, you got to soften up toward Tara. She’s in pain, she’s been through hell. Maybe she’s not such a wonderful woman, but she’s in trouble.”

  “What kind of woman marries a cop, anyhow?”

  “She didn’t marry a cop, she married her boyfriend. Come on, Vida, loosen up. What’s bugging you?”

  “Somehow she expects to be waited on. She expects it to be comfortable. We’re taking risks for her—”

  “She don’t know what risks we’re taking, and she better not guess.”

  “It’s awkward. The only way to get through this gracefully would be to establish personal rapport, but I’d just as soon not have to make up some elaborate story. It seems to me she doesn’t try to keep the kids under control”

  “She probably feels guilty about leaving him. She’s scared. We’re used to living out of a suitcase, but I bet she’s never done it.”

  She sulked for a moment, but guilt was welling up. She squeezed his hand back. “I’ll be better.”

  “Just shut up, drive and let me do the talking. I’ll fix it” Joel kneaded the tight muscles in the back of her neck. “Here they come” She set the thermos down in front and made herself smile at Tara.

  While they were crossing the Throgs Neck Bridge, Joel started a steady patter of gentle questioning. “How old were you? … Wow, you got married young. You know we’re the same age?”

  “You’re twenty-five too? I thought you were younger than me”

  “I’m two years older” Joel said, and Vida quietly poked him. No facts! “I bet you dated Dick all through high school … Yeah? What was he like then?”

  As she remembered, Tara’s face in the rearview mirror looked tender, wistful. Absently she stroked Beverly’s damp head. “He was nice then. He was so nice to me. He used to pick flowers from the neighbors to bring me when I broke my leg … I never really knew any other boy. He was the one I loved from the time I loved anyone. We learned to I dance together. We learned to dive off the board. We used to go swimming and ice skating. He was on the basketball team. And I swam for our school … You’d never believe it now!”

  “I bet you were crazy about him. What position did he play?”

  “Guard. What did you do in high school … Sam? Did you play basketball too?”

  “I was too short. So what happened when you graduated? Did you get married right off?”

  “My parents were real strict. I was scared to do anything with him. Confession every week … Are you Catholic?”

  “No.” He winked at Vida. “A Jehovah’s Witness.”

  “That’s Protestant, isn’t it?”

  By the time she had taken the Hutchinson River Parkway to 287 and that to 22 North, Tommy had dozed off, the baby was sleeping and Tara was blowing her nose over scraps of her marriage. He’ll make Tara fall in love with him before we reach Brattleboro, she thought in a mixture of sour amusement and real appreciation.

  “ … used to come in his uniform and he’d be excited, hot in the face. Mad-angry and yet up, like he was high on something. Like getting mad used to make him feel good … When I get mad at somebody I love, my stomach hurts. But he used to kind of swell up and almost … look happy when he got mad at me.”

  Her old problem: sympathizing with the oppressed from a distance was often easier than dealing with somebody distorted, damaged by oppression. If suffering truly ennobled, why work to rid society of it? She was glad to be engaged in a real task, and she longed to like Tara, but she could not. Joel could, groping for the common experience, the common feeling. Natalie could. Natalie really could work with all kinds of people from different classes who had little or no conscious politics, without getting bored, irritable, superior, impatient.

  ” … then he bought me the new coat. This one. It’s from I. Fox, and it’s seal. I really wanted it. That old coat, it was nothing—a blue wool with a ratty collar … But he only got me the coat because he beat me so bad I had to go into the emergency room.”

  Driving cautiously, keeping an eye out for tails, observing every highway sign as they proceeded north on 22 through a morning whose overcast was darkening, she felt penitent. Joel was setting Tara at ease. Tara’s presence meant they could not communicate, and in her necessary silence she was keeping secrets from him. She had not told him about the planned meeting with Kiley—and who else? We, she had said, which could mean Kiley and Roger, Kiley and Eva, Kiley and Larkin—or some combination of them. It could even mean that Kiley, like Vida, was traveling with someone not on the Board. Why hadn’t she challenged that we? She felt she had given away a tiny advantage to Kiley by apologizing for her own company while not examining Kiley’s. She hoped it was Eva. Where was Eva? At least, Kiley would have news.

  Her own people, in the fullest sense, as Joel was almost but not quite. Should she bring him further into the Network? Should she try to work with him politically? Or was she about to involve Leigh more directly? The full success of her media project required Leigh’s involvement, but how realistic was that? She could judge that soon, when she saw him, as she must try to break through the detritus of separation to him. Must. And Joel? She had a sense of having got in deeper than she had intended, but how deep were they in it, really? He could bolt when he saw Kiley. It could all fall apart in a real quarrel. If only she could turn Leigh and Joel inside out and coldly, objectively examine what each felt!

  When Tara suddenly realized that they were on Route 22, not the Thruway or the Taconic, and started to complain, Vida did not let herself become defensive.

  “I’m not paying you to take me the long way around! This will add hours! My kids can’t sit in the car all day.”

  “It’s safer, Tara. No tollbooths. Less state troopers. You don’t know for sure your husband isn’t looking for you. He may have something out, officially or unofficially. We’re better staying off interstates. I’m taking this to New York 55 and then over to U.S. 7. That’s in Connecticut. We’ll be over the state line in another thirty-five, forty minutes this way”“

  “Seven’s supposed to be pretty,” Joel said soothingly. “Once we’re on 7, we can stop as often as you want to”

  “My neck hurts. It’s hard to ride in a car. It’s hard on my back”

  ”That’s a neck brace, huh?” Joel said. “I bet that hurts a lot! What happened?”

  It wasn’t that Vida had never been beaten: she had, most outstandingly by the Tactical Police Force and by the American Nazi Party. Of the two, she remembered that the TPF had concentrated on her head and shoulders and the Nazis on her body. In both cases several men had beaten her together, with obvious pleasure and without her being able to do more than try ineffectually to protect herself. Once or twice Kevin had hit her. Not once or twice. Twice, and twice only. The first time she had not spoken to him for a week, and the second time she had never returned to his bed.

  No, the pain went further back. Ruby with a puffy face in the mornings. Tom had been away in her early childhood, off in the Marines fighting Japs. When he came home on furlough it was a rowdy few days with kisses and tears, with Vida and her grandma and her older brother Paul sent off to the movies a lot. Paul and Grandma and she had gotten used to life with Mommy. Mommy worked for the Navy, driving to and from work in a blue Hudson picking up fellow workers. Paul and Grandma and Vida and Mommy made supper and cleaned up together. Vida always helped around the house. Tom had been drafted too late to be discharged right after VJ Day. Therefore, he had served in the army of occupation in Japan, and Vida was five and Paul was ten when Tom came marching home.

  The only time Tom hit Vida was when Ruby brought some outrageous act to his
attention which she did less and less because of the consequences, or when Vida was too obstreperous when Tom had a headache or a hangover or was feeling put upon. Only rarely did he hit her. But he hit Paul a lot. Tom seemed infuriated to come home and find a half-grown son. Respect, he shouted; obedience and respect. He loosed a lot of anger on Paul, and Paul withdrew. His ears would get red below his pitiful orange crew cut, and he would clench and unclench his big marvelous hands that were his father’s hands too; but Paul never hit her or anybody except other boys at school. “/ only hit people that’re bigger than me!” he screamed once at Tom when he was being punished for fighting in the schoolyard, and Tom hit him again, in the mouth.

  That made Vida feel torn, confused for Paul. But when Ruby walked out of their bedroom in the morning with a bruise on her cheekbone or her arm, when Ruby’s face was blown up with that red puffiness, when she painted on too much makeup and still you could see something was wrong, then Vida hated her father and wanted him to go away.

  She was his favorite. He took her on his lap and sang to her about ”Anchors Aweigh, my boys,” “Coming In on a Wing and a Prayer” and “Solidarity Forever” and “From the halls of Montezuma” and “Sons of toil and danger, will you serve a stranger and bow down to Burgundy?” He sang in a loud, rousing baritone that rippled through her as she sat on his lap, bounced by his jogging foot. Sometimes he made the eagle on his biceps wink at her, and sometimes he showed her the other tattoo that said “Tom and Ruby” on a heart inside leaves and flowers as pretty as the handles of Mommy’s good silver-plated spoons from the set Grandma had started for her when they got married, but that never got any further than the teaspoons. Vida’s first and deepest loyalty was to Ruby, but she felt a muddy complicity. Somehow it was her fault—the bruises, muffled thuds and whimpers and occasional moans in the middle of the night. When he walked out on them all after a bad long period when he had been out of work, she had felt guilty because she missed him terribly and guilty because they were happy without him.

  Then Grandma died suddenly of a heart attack. She was only sixty-two, but she was overweight, and she worked in a bakery. Grandma got out of work late, she was running for the bus and she just fell in the street. By the time somebody called an ambulance, she was dead on arrival. Ruby had cried for weeks. They were a line of women who loved their mothers. She wondered if Peezie carried that on. Physical identification, yes, and solidarity in the face of pain, loss, poverty, hard times, persecution, just plain trouble in the form of man or state or economy or law and the slow or violent destruction of the body. Her hands tightened on the wheel convulsively. She stared at the highway through the day that felt like dusk, with the clouds so low and ominous. She missed Ruby, missed her desperately. Year after year after year … Of course, Tom had come back in six months and moved them all to Chicago …