Vida

by Marge Piercy

  She had first seen the white farmhouse among its maple trees a year and a half before, in September of 1972. She and Kevin had driven all night from Detroit, arriving exhausted and desperately glad to find haven. In the late summer the picturesque rambling white house had seemed idyllic, topping a small hill on rolling land with a view of the long razorbacks that closed in the valley on both sides. It was the week after Labor Day, the air warm and still as honey. Old-fashioned scarlet roses bloomed against the porch; in beds along the foundation pastel asters sprawled, fuzzy lavender and frail pink. They had occupied the house with carefully chosen people, most of them fugitives, all in the Network. Tequila and Marti, legal and married to each other, had been living in the area long enough to be familiar with it, and they had located the farm for rent with the option to buy in a year.

  Coming up the walk leaning on Kevin with his long arm around her, she had felt like a bride. The first year under had been hell, with them hunted from hole to hole. It had taken a year to put the Network together, to gather in political fugitives, to learn how to survive, to give workshops in counterfeiting and establishing I.D., to learn to carry out bolder and better raids, attacks, guerrilla affronts. Now she and Kevin would live together for the first time. Their relationship would become solid and homely, less violent. That night, September 9, the first frost had struck. The temperature plummeted from 59 to below freezing. Ice stood in the yard. In the kitchen garden every plant perished except for parsnips and cabbages. The roses hung brown.

  She struck at the last cabbage so hard the knife sank into the old wood and held fast till she wobbled it loose. That fucker, she muttered. The thought of Kevin hurt, a bruise the size of a clenched fist in her chest, a bruise that never healed. Staggering out with her arms full of rotten leaves, she threw them into the compost barrel, then wrapped the salvaged portions in newspapers for storage on the porch, where the mice would surely find them again. She was filthy and stank. If Marti was done washing diapers, she would take a bath. She did not care whether it was her turn.

  She took a last breath of fresh air and plunged in: stale milk, sour baby smell, smoke from the stoves, stale tobacco and pipe smoke. She went up to the bathroom over the kitchen and strode in to start the water. Alice was throwing up in the toilet. Hastily she backed out, waiting. Alice emerged, looking yellow. “Are you sick?” Vida asked unnecessarily.

  “I’m pregnant,” Alice wailed, rubbing her nose.

  “What?” But she had heard. “How far along?”

  “I don’t know. I should have had my period four weeks ago.”

  “Why didn’t you say something? It won’t just go away. “

  “Bill and Jesse want me to have it.”

  Jesse was Kevin’s underground name—for Jesse James.

  “Bill and Jesse could take off tomorrow for a year. You know that. It’s February. They’re bored.”

  Alice started to cry. Vida held her. “Come on, you want to talk to me?”

  But Alice pulled away, looking yellower. “You smell just awful. I’m sorry.”

  “I was just on my way to bathe … Look, I’ll get cleaned up and then come and talk to you.”

  “I have to get the bread started … We need more wood chopped. You’re still chopping wood, right?”

  “Right” Should she chop wood first? It made her sweat. No, she couldn’t stand the smell. Each bathroom had a small gas heater, and while the supply of hot water was finite, it was renewable. She had only to light the gas and wait, scrubbing the tub in the meanwhile. No matter what she said, no matter how many signs she put up saying Please take your own dirt out of the tub with you, she could never persuade Kevin or Bill or Tequila to clean the tub after he used it. One of those slobs had left a used condom hanging on the back of the toilet like a squashed slug.

  With toilet paper she picked it up and dropped it into the wastebasket. From hard experience they had learned not to put condoms down the toilet, where they backed up the septic tank. Damn them, pigs were cleaner.

  She saw Oscar’s pink carcass slung up with the blood streaming. Kevin’s idea of a joke was to call the pig Oscar. He fancied he saw a comparison. She thought that in a way there was a likeness to her old lover Oz, because Oscar the pig had been at least as smart and considerably better-tempered than the humans around him and had remained sweet and useful for four months after his death. Their neighbors had done the butchering for half the meat, showing them how to cure and freeze and salt down. They were subsistence dirt farmers for real.

  After her bath, she chopped wood in the last dying light. Eva came out to watch her companionably, sitting on the fence with her arm in a sling. She had fallen and broken it three weeks before, chasing a terrified chicken. Eva was her ally in trying to change the balance of power in the house, as was Larkin, who had arrived the week after Eva broke her arm. He stayed in his room most of the time reading, writing, going over reports and communications.

  Kevin, Bill, Belinda and Tequila hung together, although Tequila was not so much hostile to her as loyal to Kevin. Eva, Alice and Vida formed another mutual-support group. Marti tried to remain neutral, although she would support her husband, Tequila, if she was forced to take sides. Basically Marti functioned as child-care worker and main mama, even to Belinda’s baby, Roz. Belinda did not like the sexual division of work either, but she solved the problem individually by becoming one of the guys. Belinda had not slept with anyone in years—since Felipe, the father of her baby, had gone to prison. Jimmy was torn. He and Belinda were close as friends, close politically, but his older loyalties were equally to Kevin and to Vida, and he banged and knocked back and forth between them in growing misery.

  Eva was singing something she had written a little while back, before the TV had broken. The men had not been in a good temper since. Vida rested on her ax, unzipping her down jacket as heat billowed out. Her body steamed on the clean chilly air.

  Let him turn, let him turn

  Like a torn imperial flag

  On the dirty air and burn.

  Let him flutter like a rag,

  Eva sang in her strong cello-like contralto. Vida chopped until the light was gone. At moments like this she loved Hardscrabble. Then she stacked the wood and put away the ax and bit. Her shoulders ached pleasantly. While she stacked, she and Eva heard the truck arrive, but neither turned her head and nobody spoke to them. The women’s chopping wood represented an uprising and would be ignored by Kevin and company, coming from town where they had got a day’s work on a road crew cleaning culverts and drains.

  Eva got down off the fence to put her good arm around Vida, still singing

  Let him see his henchmen buzzing

  to the committee like scared flies.

  Let the hangman hang himself.

  Let him choke on his own lies!

  Rubbing her hip where she had landed earlier on the ice, Vida ambled reluctantly toward the house. “Alice is pregnant.”

  “Aw, shit” Eva said, but then cheered up immediately, tossing a black braid over her shoulder. “I can go with her to the clinic. I’m useless for the moment, anyhow. It’ll be nice to talk to some activists and find out what’s happening in the women’s movement here.”

  “She’s thinking of having the baby. “

  Eva snorted. They climbed the ice ruts in silence for a moment. Then Eva poked her gently. “Whose bright idea is that?”

  “Jesse and Bill.”

  “Sure. They do a lot of child care now … Wouldn’t it be nice if we could put them in the deep freeze for the long winter? Or send them into hibernation like bears or woodchucks?”

  “Why would we ever thaw them?” She smiled at Eva.

  “Oh, my” Eva was startled. “I’m sure it’s hard on your relationship being shut up here together all winter long …”

  “What relationship?” She kept smiling. “We seem to be in the relationship of permanent opposition. What have we agreed on in the last year?”

  “That we need anoth
er wood stove for the upstairs.”

  Vida laughed, stomping the clotted ice from her boots before they entered. “Why does it scare you—Jesse and I falling apart?”

  “We’re stuck. You can’t get a divorce underground. We have to get along.”

  “The Board meeting should clear the air. We’ve a lot to thrash out.” In the entryway she paused, hanging her jacket. “Jesse and I may have to sit on the BOD together, we have to go on living in this house, but no matter what policy we lay down at the Board, I don’t have to sleep with him. Anymore.”

  “Has it come to that?” Eva blew her nose.

  “Come and gone and gone some more!” She projected at Eva a strong desire not to discuss it, and Eva fell silent. She remembered Jimmy, of all people, coming to her room a few nights before to try to reconcile her to Kevin.

  “But he’s miserable” Jimmy had said. “Under it all, it hurts him. Why can’t you make it up?”

  “No!” she had said to Jimmy. “I don’t want him that way.”

  “For the group,” Jimmy pleaded.

  “I am not a thing to be given him to keep him happy. I will not fuck him for political reasons.” Her bluntness had shut Jimmy up.

  Vida and Eva entered the kitchen together. Kevin was watching the door, leaning on the newer of the refrigerators scratching himself under his wool shirt. That hard lean hungry look, the fury under fraying control: once that had caught her on fire. His gaze raked them as if accusing them of conspiring. “How much wood can a good fuck chuck, if a good fuck could chuck wood?” he asked loudly. “Where’s Lark?”

  “Upstairs, I imagine,” Eva said. “Are we ready to eat?”

  “Larkin went off in the Saab” Marti said, carrying Tamara to her high chair to insert her. Tamara kicked hard without real malice or disapproval, simply exhibiting the habit of always struggling against the high chair. Tamara was robust for a two-year-old as Marti was robust for a woman, both square, chunky, broad-faced, a little dour around the light eyes with their light lashes that often seemed stuck to the fair skin. Sleepy dust, Ruby used to call that exudation from the eyes.

  “Without explaining himself,” Kevin said, glaring at Vida as if she were responsible for Larkin.

  “I assume he had business,” she said evenly. “Board meeting soon.”

  “How much wood can a cold fuck chuck, if a cold fuck could chuck wood?” he chanted.

  God, he was an idiot. How had she managed to overlook for years how stupid he was? Nothing in that magnificent tall horsy skull but sinuses for resonating that loud know-nothing voice. When Leigh had called him an ignoramus, she had had the blindness to disagree. Now he was hung around her neck like an idiot child.

  Lark slipped in quietly as they were sitting down to supper—everybody but Alice, who was being sick again upstairs. If we have a little luck, she’ll turn out to have flu or mononucleosis instead of a baby, she thought, glancing at Lark. He was looking better lately, not as drawn and exhausted as when he had arrived. Maybe the house was helping him, although she had trouble imagining that anyone could experience Hardscrabble Hill in February as a rest-and-relaxation furlough.

  “Board meeting set for Sunday. Roger’s on his way,” Lark said. “Perry, you and I got to pick up Kiley in the Bronx.”

  The central committee consisted now of Kevin, Roger, Kiley, Lark and herself. Vida had been elected to replace Belinda, when Belinda insisted on having her baby. Belinda had felt it was all she would ever have from Felipe, who was in Sing Sing on a forever sentence and with the word of the system over him that he would be killed inside. Belinda had insisted on giving birth over all arguments, and that had precipitated the Board ruling that no fugitives could bear children. Yet when Roz was born, Belinda had had trouble accepting her baby—blond like her and female like her, with only Felipe’s dark eyes. Felipe was a Puerto Rican independentista Belinda had loved without requital for years in the New York political scene, until fugitive life had brought them briefly together. When a sympathetic lawyer had brought him news of Roz’s birth, he was more upset than pleased; he had a wife and family in Brooklyn.

  When Belinda had heard his response, she had gone into a depression. She stared at her baby. “It’s all a mistake,” she said.

  “No, it’s a baby,” Marti said. “A healthy one. A good baby”

  Belinda loved her baby, but almost surreptitiously. She would run into the nursery and seize Roz up and hug her and then run off.

  Vida had been to only two meetings of the Board, and they still made her nervous: to be on the Board was a big responsibility.

  “Why the two of you driving down?” Kevin asked. “What for?”

  “If we take alternate shifts, we can drive without stopping. We leave in the morning” Lark cracked his knuckles. He would never admit he couldn’t drive that many hours.

  “Man, you could walk there and back by Sunday.”

  “We have fund raising to do. The doc to see.”

  What was Lark doing? Something was up. Kevin pulled at his chin where the beard used to be. “Real chummy, the two of you in the truck”

  “We’ll take the blue Saab.”

  “That don’t start half the mornings,” Tequila chimed in amiably.

  “I had it worked on today. A deserter down in Tunbridge can make anything run. Calls himself Terry. Kiley told me about him …”

  ”I know him” Jimmy said resentfully—jealousy? “He’s my friend. Kiley just met him when she was here last month.”

  “Faggot,” Kevin said softly and almost fondly to Jimmy.

  “He said it had the wrong spark plugs and the ignition cable was frayed. He tuned it, and it’s perky now.” Lark spoke in his flat Midwestern voice, casual and almost without affect, but his bright blue eyes never left Kevin’s face. “I think you ought to take the black Dodge over to him. The cars are Network property, not your high school hot rods. Don’t touch the engines, guys, if you can’t do better than you’ve been doing.”

  “Who said it was the wrong spark plugs?” Bill boomed. “He don’t know his ass.”

  “Then why is it running so good? He’s a real mechanic. You ought to be glad we’ve got one.”

  “How the hell would you know?” Bill watched Kevin to see if he should attack Lark further. “You never tried once to work on those cars.”

  “I’m not into proving anything on a car. Only interested in getting it into shape to be used. I’m surprised how you guys have lost political steam up here. You need to refocus. Where’s Alice tonight?”

  Tequila and Marti, husband and wife, exchanged a guarded glance at the question, and both became very occupied with their plates. Jimmy stopped eating and stared at his knuckles. He looked pinched with worry.

  She was sure the question was not as innocent as it sounded, Lark’s thin face waiting blandly. Anyhow, she was going to answer truthfully.

  “Upstairs having all-day morning sickness.”

  “Morning sickness?” Lark repeated. “What from?”

  Kevin guffawed. “If you don’t know by now, it’s too late to give you a description.”

  “Why hasn’t it been taken care of?” Lark asked gently. “Has no one volunteered to go with her to arrange it?”

  “I have,” Eva said. “I’m useless with my arm broken anyhow.”

  “Eva, with both arms off, you wouldn’t be useless,” Lark said.

  Jimmy made a noise of assent, glad of a friendly word at the table. A bit of blame and a bit of praise, Vida noticed: Lark took his leadership role seriously, one reason he had been on the Board since it had been organized out of panic and early chaos. When Kiley and Lark had chosen to go underground in the fall of 1970, Vida told Jimmy she thought they were crazy: imagining doing voluntarily what the three of them had been forced to. Kiley and Lark had expected an imminent revolution and were preparing. So much for that guess, she thought, but what a relief to have him in the house. Such a different kind of man. She had matured these last years, and she had no female
masochism left. Lark was asking, “Some kind of problem with the clinic? How good is Alice’s I.D.?”

  “Good” Jimmy started to say, when Kevin cut in.

  “Why should she have it out? We’re doing fine with Marti’s two kids and Belinda’s baby.”

  “Marti’s not a fugitive” Lark said softly. “We agreed last year fugitives have no right to bear children. Nothing has changed.”

  “Aw, dig yourself, man, a lot has changed. They’re not on our tails night and day. They got their own troubles. Hey, when are we getting that fucking TV fixed so we can see them impeach him?”

  All through Watergate, everyone except Jimmy and Vida had been mesmerized by the set. They watched the action, they watched reruns, they watched the nightly recapitulation of what they had watched during the day. Since the TV had broken, tempers were booby-trapped among the fugitives and friends. She could not share their obsessive satisfaction. For her it was Eichmann punished not for mass murder but for being caught with his hand in the till, and sentenced to exile from the Elks and having his American Express card cancelled. Jimmy agreed and hated the spectacle. He accused the rest of the snowbound house of believing in the ultimate justice of the system and expecting to see it on TV like the shoot out in a Western.

  “I’ll talk to Alice after supper” Lark said, laying down his knife and fork. He ate a third of what Kevin, Tequila and Bill put away. Often he fasted. He did eat fish; perhaps, she thought, because the Vietnamese ate a great deal of seafood. He was partial to a fermented fish sauce called nuoc mam that nobody else could tolerate when he produced it—except Jimmy, who never tasted his food anyhow and ate it as politically correct and to please Lark. She had the feeling that the sight of others wolfing down hunks of chicken made Lark squeamish. Eva too was a vegetarian. If Kevin could have made it happen, they would have had meat every night as much to affront Eva as because he liked it. Since they could rarely afford meat they had not raised, that possibility for discord was muted.