by Marge Piercy
“We must discuss this at a meeting of the full Board” Kiley said. “Soon as we can get together.”
“Where’s Roger and where’s Eva?” Vida asked after the other Board members.
“Roger’s in Rochester,” Lark said testily, “living with some schoolteacher. We should talk some about that. Eva’s in Montana on a reservation, where she had friends from the old days.” At one point Eva had been a public-health worker with Vista.
Kiley continued, “Anyhow, you should produce a draft of your work on the changing nature of imperialism. We’ll meet near Agnes’ Can you hang around Vermont for a while? Three weeks, say.”
“We can get back in three weeks. My mother’s sick, and I have to travel”
“Be careful,” Lark stopped her, peering into her face with his intense cornflower blue nearsighted gaze. “If Kevin’s chattering, we’re all going to have to move our covers.”
“Kevin doesn’t know anything after ‘74” she argued.
“He knows about your mother. He knows you see Natalie. He knows you see Leigh. Let’s just try to keep a sharp eye on which way the hounds are running. On what scent and after what game” Lark said almost sweetly, leaning on her without seeming to.
“You take care of yourself too” She touched his face. “Kevin holds you responsible for his ouster.”
He smiled briefly, nodding ahead. “Isn’t he a little young?”
“Aren’t I a little old?” She let her hand drop.
“Vida, you never age. I think you’re more beautiful now than when I first met you. The hard edges are gone”
“In the SAW office, when we stayed up all night to write that pamphlet. Oh, my.”
“I let you write it. So you’d sleep with me.”
Briefly they kissed. His lips felt cracked, feverish. “Lark are you well?”
“I’m fine” He pulled away. They limped on after the retreating backs of Kiley and Joel. Lightly, lightly snow began to fall in tiny crystalline shards that glittered on her arms.
“Wait,” she called ahead. “Wait for us. I have a small action to propose. There’s been a lot happening locally against the nuclear power plant they’re building on the river. Why not do something minor? Remember how Eva told us that the Crees kept sabotaging the earth-moving equipment at James Bay?”
“Antinuke stuff?” Kiley turned, her eyes wide. “Isn’t that awfully … liberal? All the old Ban the Bomb marchers.”
“You’re too young to remember,” Vida said, more crossly than she intended. “Issues don’t go away because people have to work on something else. Ghettos and unemployment still exist when we forget about racism. Fifteen years ago it was nuclear testing. Now it’s power plants and the neutron bomb. Seabrook was a surprisingly big action—and think of all the others in the South, in California, Germany, Austria, Sweden. Energy issues are involved, health issues, farming, labor, public safety, genetics—”
“Whether there’ll be a world to bother trying to make better,” Joel blurted out. “I want a future.”
“Are you going to introduce an antinuke proposal at the Board?” Kiley asked as if she couldn’t believe it.
“I sure am” she said, deciding on the spot. “Anything’s better than another unreadable position paper written by a computer programmed to produce the style of literal translations from Sumerian. I’ll make a formal proposal in three weeks. Right now I’m making an informal proposition. Let’s do something. Together. Use our painfully acquired skills”
”I’m opposed to mushy politics that come from counting heads and saying, Friends of Ducks have forty thousand members, let’s support the Friends of Ducks … But a little action would be neat” Lark said. “I’ll compromise on the action if you drop the silly proposal”
“No deal on my proposal. I’ll win you over, I swear it. But let’s agree on a small action. Even guerrilla theater—real guerrilla theater, by us. You know that coup we pulled in L.A. Or a spot of sabotage—local, not too fancy”
Joel was staring at them, puzzled she knew, because suddenly all the tension had evaporated and they were happy together. We’re soldiers who feel better about ourselves when we’re fighting, she thought but could not convey the thought to Joel, who saw her suddenly close and acting like a family with the others with whom she had worked for years.
“Hi kid,” Natalie said from the phone. “How’re you doing?”
“How’s Ruby?”
“You got the word. Well, she’s in the hospital. I’m going back next weekend. It’s hard with things upheaved with Daniel. It’s not like he’s here anymore. I’m going to take Sam again, but I don’t know about Peezie this time. She has a meet.”
“Natalie, answer me. How’s Ruby?”
“Not so good, really.”“
“Not so good how?”
“Well … she had another attack in the hospital.”
“Another heart attack?”
“That’s it. A wee bit worse than the first”
“What’s the use being in a hospital if they let her have attacks like that?”
“Sweetie, I don’t think they know how to stop them. She’s cheerful— but there she is sneaking into the bathroom to smoke. She’s impossible. It’s like she can’t take care of herself”
“I’ve got to go out there.”
“Maybe we can smuggle you in. I didn’t see any security around the hospital … But listen, there’s a grand jury convening in New York that has us nervous. Investigating a conspiracy to shelter and harbor fugitives”
“That sounds dangerous. Who are they calling?”
“Nobody yet. But we’re waiting.”
“Give me the information on the hospital. I’m going out there”
“Be coolheaded for once in your life, please! You watch your step. Will he go with you?”
“Yes.”
”He’s a nice boy. You be good to this one and he’ll be good to you.”
“He’s jealous because I love you so much.”
“He’ll grow out of that nonsense” Natalie said grandly. “Just bring him along a step at a time. Now, in Chicago I got a friend who can take messages for me and you. Here’s her number. I’ll clue her in when I arrive. She’s used to all this stuff. She won’t ask questions. She’s a Frenchwoman in her sixties and she was in the Resistance and then active against the Algerian war. She runs a boutique. In fact, I’ll arrange for her to give you an address.”
“You mean you’ll pay for it. You don’t have the money. Especially with Daniel out of the picture”
“I’ll get the money from Sandy. Don’t worry. How are those boots?”
“Wonderful. I wear them all the time now.”
“Take your time and take it easy. Ruby’s going to be in the hospital for a while, I’m afraid. Here’s my friend’s number …”
“Should we claim this one?” She was dipping condoms in black dye. They were all at Hardscrabble Hill, where in 1973 Kevin had got a case of condoms, which had been moldering in the basement ever since. Hardscrabble Hill stood at a halfway point in Vida’s mind, much neater and more livable and closer to being a successful working farm that it had been when she left, but a long way from the prosperity of Agnes’ farm.
Of the inhabitants in 1974 only Tequila and Marti and their children remained, along with Belinda’s baby, no longer a baby, who had fake I.D. at age six.
“With a simpleminded leaflet like that? Not on your life” Kiley said. “We have reps to maintain.”
“Besides, we have no line on this” Lark was attaching leaflets to dyed balloons of former condoms. “It isn’t an official action. Just us having fun”
That they were, in spite of her own edginess at Hardscrabble and having to soothe Joel down every hour like a pot that kept boiling over in the middle of canning. She remembered canning tomatoes and applesauce, the women except Belinda—Alice, Eva, Marti and herself—closeted with increasing irritation in the hot moist kitchen like a Turkish bath while the men smoked dope—K
evin, Tequila, Bill—and Belinda—on the big front porch … “I wish Eva was with us!”
Tequila, dark, with a low-slung muscular build and surprisingly light gray eyes in his round face, winked at her. “Soon. We’ll party together after the Board meets late this month.”
She was glad she was with Joel: he stood between her and Kevin’s ghost. The walls were scarred with their battles; their hard sour words could suddenly seep like poison gas from the cracks. She had lived here, yes, but she had fled. Every room in the wandering house on its hill, every shed, every table and chair evoked a time she preferred to forget. She was fond of Marti, Tequila, the kids, but she was restless in their house. Marti and Tequila were legal, and they were buying the farm. Tequila was essential to their small action because only he could fly a plane.
Tamara, Dylan, and Roz were all playing with the balloons. She tried not to stare at Roz, to look for Belinda in her chubby face and sturdy legs and little potbelly. Belinda had had hair of corn silk, her skin almost albino, but her daughter had hair the color of clover honey, and her eyes were dark brown and shining. Roz thought she was Marti’s kid, along with Tamara and Dylan. Vida did not approve of that falsehood, but she was no longer helping raise all three. She had fled Hardscrabble and returned only on short visits except for two years before, when she had been mending from an accident. When Eva, Lark and she had bombed IT&T on the anniversary of the overthrow of the elected regime in Chile and the institution of terror, the bomb had gone off early and sent a piece of metal into her leg.
She was glad they were spending only one night here. If Joel came back with her for the Board meeting, she would try to arrange for them to stay with Agnes. Joel felt awkward with Lark and Kiley, but he seemed to warm up to Tequila, Marti and their family. When he got tired of blowing up balloons, he lay on the floor playing with a Lego set alongside Roz, Dylan and Tamara. They climbed over him pulling and hauling, resentful when he spoke to the adults. “Jo-ul, Jo-ul, Jo-ul!” Roz chanted, pulling at him with doting gaze and fierce pudgy hands, treating him as a mixture of Prince Charming and a floppy dog,
Vida and Joel had had a brief but vital time alone upstairs in the afternoon when Kiley had been off with Lark printing up the simple half-page statements, some to be attached to the black balloons, some to float free: if there were an accident, this would be radiation. You’d be dying along with your children and your cows and your chickens. If it were a small accident, your milk would be bad and your land tainted and in ten or fifteen years you would have a good chance of getting cancer. The back told in smaller print about accidents, contained and not contained—Windscale and Brown’s Ferry, Idaho Falls and Monroe, Three Mile Island. Tequila and Marti had been experimenting with CB radio for putting out political ideas, and they planned to follow up after the action to lay down some explanation and pick up reaction.
An hour before dawn, Tequila, Joel and Vida were dropped outside the tiny airstrip where Tequila meant to borrow a plane. Kiley and Lark roared off in the farm truck to release propaganda and balloons from the ground and meet them where they would land.
“Not that one, it’s too fancy” Tequila said as they walked along the mooring strip, looking at the tied-down planes.
“Here’s a good one. A Cessna 172” He took a stick and tested the gas in the wing tanks. “It’s a good size. Easy to drop things from because the wings are high. And I learned on it.” Before getting inside, he tested the wings, the propeller, pulling and hauling on the plane in a way that alarmed her, suggesting that the wings were only lightly attached and might at any moment fall off. Then he jimmied the door and hopped in to jump the ignition. Vida bundled the balloons and leaflets inside with Joel’s help and then Joel untied the plane and got in himself.
There was no reason for anyone to stop them, even if anyone had been around so early in the morning. The little strip had no tower and takeoff was a matter of Tequila’s craning his head to look around and then taxing into position. Vida loved small planes, and as they finally took off down the dark runway, which Tequila insisted he could see, she felt a surge of delight: a stolen plane, an action and a pearl gray dawn coming out of the gloom of the night.
“We’re really doing it,” Joel said over his shoulder. He was sitting up front beside Tequila. She was wedged in behind with the black condoms and the papers. “I didn’t think we’d just do it!”
She squeezed his shoulder through the pea jacket. “At our best, we act rather quickly. Hey, Tequila?”
He nodded, squinting into the gray twilight. “It’s a good thing today, to get out and play a little.”
They did act well and easily together: that was one of the best legacies they carried on from the ‘60s. Joel had come in on the tail end, so he didn’t know the wine-tart pleasure of believing you could act and change things and going ahead. The act as theater; the act as pure joy. The act as collective art, improvised and sensual. Yes, he had missed that, but he was getting a taste here and now. Simple but nice, she thought. The air was bumpy as the plane chopped on, droning busily across the fields, the woods where the snow lay thatching all, the fields where it had melted and the pastureland where it still spread. The sun was up now behind an overcast in swirling shades of gray on gray, and the land tilting below them was broad and beautiful. The mountains lay in ranks with plumes of cloud trailing along the ridges. Tequila banked, getting ready to come in low, as Vida began handing the propaganda up front to Joel. Joel had been good on the airstrip, helping to pull the plane out, nervous but together.
It was a gesture that she continued to find small but pleasant, flying low over New Hampshire and Vermont, circling the power plant to drop their load in small clumps. At ten thirty they landed at an abandoned fairground where there was a stretch of cement just long enough for Tequila to bring them in. The landing was jarring, the plane bounced hard, and for several moments she was scared. They bumped to a stop at the far edge, surrounded by weeds growing from the wide cracks. “We’ll call the airfield for the owner” Tequila said. “We might want to borrow it again sometime”
Kiley and Lark were waiting with the truck. Joel and she sat in back in the open bed, clattering toward Hardscrabble and their own Chevy waiting for them to set out for Chicago that afternoon.
15
The obvious route from Vermont to Chicago across Canada was too risky. They stayed off the turnpikes, in part to save money, because they had little left after buying the car. “But I’m glad we bought it. You were right” she said, driving. “It gives us the flexibility to make this trip and get back when I have to.”
“Why go back? You don’t believe in their position paper.”
“The place to say that is with them.”
“Let them write their stupid paper.” Joel was slouched in his seat with his feet up on the dash. He had put three days into working on the car, a two-door black Chevy sedan they called Mariah. In the Finger Lakes region of New York, from a roadside-table turnoff they watched the sunset, vast and roseate with grandiose bands of crimson clouds. They had a bag of apples from the Hardscrabble Hill orchard and the remains of a Hardscrabble chicken they had been eating all day. The eggs were good and plentiful by now, but eating the chicken required a lot of chewing. They were athletic chickens, lean, muscular, always in training for a flight to the trees.
She felt stretched, as if her feelings were forcing them selves open inside her, forcing the skin of her mind to expand like the walls of a balloon. She was wildly happy to be sitting in the car beside him, a small metal world encapsulating them. She was wildly happy to be allowed to love him. A license had been given her to lavish feelings and desires and all the riches of her soul on another person after years of measuring her reactions, of concealing, of declining, of pretending not to recognize signals, of turning aside and turning off and turning down the volume. Years and years of carefully dampened responses had alternated with periods of permitting herself severely limited connections. Now she was licensed to be in love.
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br /> At the same time, she vibrated with fear for Ruby. She felt like her old spaniel Mopsy with one ear cocked toward Chicago (Worry, worry, is Ruby all right? What’s happening?). The other ear was cocked back toward New York. Strange squeaks of hidden gears grinding came to her as the apparatus of the State prepared to try to crush her and hers. She was afraid, she was worried, she was overjoyed. She felt like a cave of the winds where violent emotions were suddenly unleashed from heavy leather bags to blow in contradictory irresistible gusts in the sinuses of the mountains.
Her absorption in the orchestrating of her rich emotions ended abruptly when they got back into the car and it wouldn’t start.
“An old car, an old car, it’s trouble,” she fussed.
“Aw, shut up” he said, leaning into the engine. “You thought it was a great idea an hour ago.”
She had to stand holding a dim flashlight while he poked and prodded the battery. Finally he said, “The terminal connector is too corroded. It’s not making contact” He took the cable off the terminal and by the light of the flashlight carefully scraped the terminal and then the cable connector. When he finished and tightened the contact again, at length the car started.
