by Marge Piercy
“How does anybody know what to attack? Because intellectual labor’s been done naming names, naming corporations, fitting the links together. Marx didn’t spend his time breaking windows. He spent it in the British Museum.”
Lohania roused herself from her visible funk. “He didn’t advise us to spend our lives there. Theory without practice is masturbation.”
“And blind practice is a hole in the head. Why work at being stupid? It comes to some of us easily enough” Leigh snapped.
The argument had been going on for a year, Vida thought, eating her supper without pleasure. The parts of her life clanked like a machine needing oiling, whose parts no longer fitted. Never had any other woman she knew been blackmailed into sex in that nasty way Lohania had that afternoon. At least, Leigh would never have abetted that as Kevin had.
Jimmy and Kevin got up from the table to go to the Bronx. Vida caught Lohania in the kitchen. “Stay. Let’s talk. They ganged up on you today.”
Lohania gave her a tight wan smile, lifting her small chin. “Eh, what’s the use talking about it? If I think too much, I get depressed. Better to go out and do something real … We’ll show him what women can do”
“Aren’t you coming with us?” Jimmy asked Vida as Lohania slung her jacket over her shoulder and followed Kevin out.
“No. I better work on the plans.”
That was the only answer that would work. She could not say that she had been to so many demonstrations and pickets in the last month that marching had become meaningless, leaving her with a desperate need to be alone. Loose ends welled up inside her. She felt too coerced by the group to know what she wanted or felt any longer.
Besides, she hoped that if Leigh saw she was going to stay alone in the apartment, he might get rid of the Seventh Sister and spend some time with her. He was stuck in an earlier phase of mobilization. He still thought that fighting the state could be assimilated into a comfortable existence—going to a job every day, going to the dentist twice a year, breakfast in bed and late suppers with the two of them snacking on sable on black bread or rich duck pate from Zabar’s.
As with Daniel, as with Oscar, his conscience permitted him little luxuries she had had to give up, and the tension between them sang through the air of the apartment like an air conditioner that ran all of time with a flaw in its moving parts. She woke in the morning already haggard after four hours’ sleep, her body raw, her mind sore, her nerves stripped, and she felt a stab of guilt that she was still living. So many had died that to be alive required that the stub of life be used to best advantage. She was a tool. A fighting machine, Kevin called himself. That was what she ought to be. Then why was she lying on her bed flat on her back staring at the ceiling Kevin had spoiled with paint, fighting resentment that the ugly dark red doodles made her feel aesthetically attacked?
I must try to be simpler. If I were a real revolutionary I wouldn’t see the paint on the ceiling. Maybe Lohania doesn’t want sex in her life because she wants to strip down to the bone. Maybe she’s found a way to greater simplicity. Renouncing sexuality felt tremendously appealing to her as she glanced at the wreckage of her once cozy bedroom.
When she had met Leigh, she had judged him far more political than herself and had admired him passionately. But he remained safely ensconced in his profession. She thought of Kevin imitating Leigh at a demonstration: “And I say, when the club descends on your head, how do you feel, could you tell us now for our listening public?” It was true: he came to record, to interview, to report. He had his press pass. While he had been roughed up now and then, he had never been arrested and never really beaten. Of course, someone had to cover the demonstrations; yet covering them kept him outside the fray. He did not change as they changed, who had more on the line. Now he was news director of the listener-owned station. He was famous in the Movement in New York and beyond. Last month he had sat on a panel on advocacy Journalism at N.Y.U. Leigh’s work made him more respectable as he covered their work, which drove them farther and farther outside the hedges of legality.
But part of her missed him all of the time every day and night. She was lonely in a way she hardly had time to notice. All along her side where she had grown used to a friendly warm body, to companionship, to give-and take and good discussion, she was naked. She had not felt so deeply and constantly lonely in the midst of chaos since Greece. She did not feel loved.
Leigh was angry with her, too, and she felt guilty, as if she had let him down by getting too involved with Kevin. But she was angry at his anger too: he was punishing her for taking their mutual ideas too passionately and too far. He ought to try to change with her. Soon she would set between Leigh and herself an act that she could never tell him. Once done, no undoing. She mistrusted all decisions lately, because stopping to think, to weigh alternatives seemed fused with cowardice. Thinking itself was suspect, for it was the liberal rational heroes who had created this war. She had never kept anything from Leigh except other people’s secrets. She would not tell him about Lark’s leg or Oscar’s occasional impotence; but she told him honestly what she did and felt. She was not permitted to talk to him about The Little Red Wagon, but that silence was becoming a lie.
Unable to rest, she went to her vanity. In the long May twilight, her hair shone crackling around the brush. For the first time in weeks she sat down at her vanity, pushed aside the litter of pamphlets and marking pens to put on a dab of Madame Rochas, her favorite perfume that Leigh gave her every birthday, even this year. Then she drew lines with the eyebrow pencil over and under her green eyes to set them off. She dabbed on a light coat of makeup from a bottle drying up from disuse. Then, as a last concession, she put on a pale green minidress she had always thought of as her doll’s dress. It was simply cut, falling from the yoke like the dresses Ruby had run off on her machine for Vida’s two dolls, Betsy and Marilyn. For a moment, she inhaled Ruby’s scent: a little sweat (she did not use deodorant, believing it caused cancer), an inexpensive flowery perfume, violet or lily-of-the-valley, cinnamon, onions, ginger, all blended into Mama-smell. She wanted to rest against Ruby and weep. And sleep.
Slowly she strolled toward the light and voices. She had only the time when everybody was gone. Kevin would break up her little game, if he got back too early. Leigh and Karen were sitting at the round dining-room table, where Karen had spread out photographs she was showing him. The Greek saddlebag purse yawned on the table, so that Vida could see it held two cameras and an assortment of lenses. Mopsy had come out of Leigh’s room, where she had been spending a lot of time sleeping on his bed, and sat tight against his thigh, trying to get attention. Occasionally he rumpled her ears with a casual hand.
“Actually, that was Kenya,” Karen was saying in that high cooing voice. “That’s a Masai village. Those boys are all warriors.”
As Vida walked into the circle of light, their unfriendly faces rose from the photographs in one motion. “Hi,” Leigh said. “Thought you’d gone.”
“No. Everybody else is off to the picket line in the Bronx”
“What’d you think of the coverage we gave that tonight?”
She debated whether to admit not hearing his show. “Actually, the news about Kent State shook me up so much, I don’t remember anything else.”
“I have a theory about that” he said to Karen. “When you come on with a blockbuster story, you might as well shut up then. Nobody listens. I’m going to try working up to big stories.”
Karen laughed in a high tinkly burst. “Like those old-fashioned British papers that used to have lost doggies on the first page and The Queen Assassinated on page twenty?”
“Somebody bombed Dow Chemical with an incendiary bomb at dawn in Rockefeller Center,” he said. “Not unlike napalm, although nobody was there. But they must feel like their products are coming home.”
“How awfully clever,” Karen said. “It’s all very Robin Hood, all these merry bands blowing up a different corporate office every night. The insurance companies
must be ticked.”
If you think it’s so cute, you can both come along. Look at me, damn you, she addressed Leigh silently. How can you dote on that caricature? She strolled to the window to push it up. “Warm tonight.” Mopsy came to her, grateful for the moment’s attention. Every time she looked at Mopsy lately she felt guilty. Now she felt united with her dog in trying to capture Leigh’s attention. He did look at her as she raised the window, the dress rising on her long legs. “Where are you going all dressed up?”
“No place. I thought I’d run down and get some cold beer at the Dominican grocery. Then I thought I’d just take a night off and hang out here and read. Take a long bath. Relax.” How seductive can I be, with her glued to him?
“They have that Mexican beer I like, Dos Equis.”
“I’ll get a six-pack” She could not continue watching them look at Karen’s photographs. Maybe if she went down for the beer, Leigh would catch the hint and get rid of Karen. She could not remember the last time they had been alone together in the apartment. “Come on, Mopsy, old girl” she said gently. Mopsy forgave her with passionate wriggles and bounced after her to the door.
But when she came up, having for once properly curbed Mopsy and given her a little run, the light was still on in the dining room as she put the beer away, but only the photographs remained on the table. She rifled them briefly. Aesthetic poses of the picturesque Third World. How would you like it, Karen baby, if some photographer from Kenya marched into your kitchen and your bathroom and snapped photos of you at your colorful native pursuits? American woman wearing hair dryer. American woman at appendage-coloring rite. American man shortening grass in ritual area.
Resisting an urge to throw Karen’s photographs out the window to snow as confetti on Broadway, she walked slowly back toward her room. Mopsy’s claws ticked on the floor behind her, wet nose against her dangling palm. The lights were on in Leigh’s room, and she could hear music from within but the door had been shut in her face. Leigh was always on his private enlisted phone, chatting, flirting, arranging interviews, part work and part play and part seduction, and for a moment she listened, hoping. She heard Karen’s tinkly laugh and did not hope any longer.
She slammed the bedroom door, tore off the dress and flung it on the floor. In the heat of the stuffy night her teeth chattered. Her bed was filthy. Roughly she yanked the used sheets off and rummaged in the hall closet for clean ones. Did nobody ever do the laundry? That was how she was going to end up spending her stolen night: doing the laundry in the basement with Mopsy for company while Leigh screwed that simp. She lay on the stripped bed with her face against Mopsy’s warm flank trying to make herself move. She was glad when the phone rang, and she went to answer it and heard Lark’s voice.
“Listen, Asch, get down here. Am I glad I caught you! We’re having an emergency meeting of the Steering Committee. We have to respond to the shootings.”
“When?”
“Right now. Pelican just went up to the Bronx to pull our staff off the picket line. We have to get on the streets fast.”
“I’ll be right down.” She hung up to step into her jeans and yank on her T-shirt. With great pleasure she banged on Leigh’s door. “So long,” she yelled. “The Steering Committee of New York SAW is meeting. We’re going to knock through a TDA for Kent State. Tell everybody where I am. And have a ball!”
The hell with him. On impulse she dashed into the dining room grabbed a photo and wrote a note to her roommates in purple marking pen on the back of it, then stuck it near the door where they’d see it. A little vandalism for the Vassarette she hoped would give him syphilis. “No, Mopsy, stay! Stay, girl.” Maybe he’d like a job with New Day too. Off to greener pastures.
”We aren’t his brothers and sisters anymore, we aren’t his comrades, we’re his fucking material,” she said as she burst from the elevator and raced across the lobby, waving to Julio, their friend who tipped them to surveillance, and then into the street. She felt like Wonder Woman streaking through the city. Fast, fast she went down the block, too fast for any man to give her trouble. Running lightly in her sneakers. Into the subway, she vaulted over the turnstile and bolted into a train. That was Movement style, perfectly executed. Show the people they can do it too. An example to other women.
Tomorrow she’d tear that dress up and make a rag of it. Tomorrow she’d be on the streets; they’d bring the city to a halt. They’d show the government what it meant to shoot down kids and try to terrorize the Movement. Then the day after that, The Little Red Wagon would roll. Leigh didn’t matter. She had wanted to break security to talk their action over with him, she had wanted to break the faith of their group for the sake of telling Leigh what she was about, but he had stopped her. She would show him. He didn’t have enough respect for her. He didn’t know how serious she was. So much the worse for him. He’d see.
13
The SAW demonstration took a day to mount, and all their plans got kicked over another day, while two Black students were shot in Mississippi and Randy fumed. When Vida stopped by the apartment to change for the streets, Randy and Kevin were head to head in the dormitory living room.
“Man, your priorities are screwed up” Kevin snapped. “Why does it matter exactly when we act? We can’t make a direct connection between that induction center and Kent State or Jackson State.”
“Suppose you get busted fighting cops? That ruins everything” Randy said, exuding sulkiness thick as cold gravy.
“What’s the difference? It’s all the same war.” Kevin slapped Randy on the back and strolled off. “We’ll see some fine action”
Randy slammed out of the apartment. Kevin grinned at her. “It’s here. Stored in Lulu’s room.”
“It?” Then she understood. It was as if he had shoved his fist into her abdomen. “Oh.”
Together they went in and looked at it, packed neatly in the box. Her hands were sweating. She could not find anything to say. They locked the door, locked the dynamite in. Then Vida had no more time to think. She ran from one meeting to another—the teachers’ group, the welfare mothers, the city planners, the taxi drivers. By the time the demonstration came, she could not whisper without pain. Her voice was entirely gone. Lohania, Jimmy and Kevin were in the streets, the Steering Committee of SAW, kids from the fifty-odd chapters, people from all the off-campus antiwar groups. She noticed Oscar, Natalie, Jan, Bob Rossi in a separate Maoist contingent, his ex-girlfriend Brenda with some bikers, Pelican. Everybody was out and running, while the police were rioting and breaking heads. She did not see Randy.
He disappeared completely until after the demonstration, whereas he was usually one of the busiest street fighters, always calling for a charge, the first to pick up a rock or toss garbage cans into windows, to rock a car over, to set a fire in a trash basket. Vida, who was always trying to keep action directed against political targets, did not miss him, but she was surprised he could stay away.
She could remember the peace parades down Fifth Avenue dressed in their respectable best, marching with agreed-upon placards along the negotiated route. Always they had been pleased how many old people turned out. Yet in such legal parades she had been beaten the first, the second, the third time. Always the newspapers reported half the numbers, and the war went on. Gradually the activists a grown tired of standing and being beaten on, and they had begun to run, to regroup, to taunt; gradually they had begun to fight back, to pick up the tear-gas canisters and return them, to come back at the police with clubs. Usually they got beaten anyhow. They were not often outnumbered, but they were outgunned, and the police tended to attack many on one.
Now when they went on the streets they expected to fight. Beforehand she was in terror, with an ache of fear growing stronger and stronger as the moment approached. It seemed to her that for years she had been forcing herself into the streets into more and more danger, and yet the war went on. First it had been a matter of moral courage, to pick up a sign and march against your own country’s war
; but it had become a matter of brute physical courage.
The night after the demonstration, Randy came back, chastened and ready to make up. She sensed that he felt like an ass for missing the big action, and she put herself out to be nice to him. Brought him coffee and a plate of the chicken-and-barley soup she had made left-handed and even forced herself to smile at him.
“What happened to your arm?” he asked.
“A cop grabbed me.” She had an Ace bandage around her right wrist. “I got free, but my wrist is a little sore.” They were tending their injuries and feeling that deep mutual sense of relief. These rest periods after a demonstration were the most peaceful times she knew now. They had gone out and fought and they had all come back: no broken bones, no broken backs, no bashed-in heads, no blindness, no maiming, no one shot. They never guessed before they went on the streets a particular day or night what level of response would be dealt them: clubs and gas only, tear gas or Mace or the fancier chemicals, rubber bullets, shotgun pellets, lead bullets. Would the cops just bust, or would they bust and beat, or would they beat to maim?
She grew weary and sometimes disgusted with the efforts to prove herself again and again and again, as if they were all earning some sort of revolutionary merit badges. Now, at least, they had all tested their courage, they had all tested their commitment, and they had survived. The mood in the room was easy and loose; they were warmer together than at any other time—the bond of people who faced something and helped one another through. She loved frail Jimmy, who had slipped through unscathed; she loved Kevin, the brawler, the scrapper, the hero of every fray with his right hand bandaged and a Mace burn on his ankle from kicking a canister. She loved Lohania, her head in a bandage from a scalp wound, eating soup with a broad smile. Two of her beautiful green nails had been broken but she was carefully building them back with an ill-smelling chemical from a bottle, layer upon layer, to match the other daggers. She ate with her left hand only while the artificial nails dried on the right hand.
