Vida

by Marge Piercy

Lark nodded. “I understand. I don’t approve.”

  “But do you cooperate?” Eva asked.

  “Of course” he said. “That’s group discipline”

  ”Now, down to specifics” Roger opened his ancient leather briefcase. “What and where? No functioning plants. That’s just too bloody dangerous. We could do more damage than those blockheads that build the awful things. I understand Peregrine has some concrete ideas on construction sites, and so do I. Let’s take a look at the various possibilities and check them out”

  “We have two construction sites to choose from. We should scout them both tomorrow and then begin surveillance on the target we pick” Vida said. “We can figure out what kind of action to take once we’ve got our site and know it reasonably well.” She unfolded a map of northern New England and spread it on the table as the others moved closer to look.

  22

  They spent a week scouting the possibilities before they decided on an initial site where the Mohican Nuclear Power Plant was under construction on the Connecticut River on the New Hampshire side. Then surveillance began around the clock. Joel, Tequila, and Marti were involved now that the Board had finished meeting and the action had been launched. Every two days they met to correlate observations and get on with the planning. They planned a small local action soon and then a bigger action later focused on the corporate offices of the electric company.

  “First off today”“ Kiley rapped the big sheet of butcher’s paper taped to the plate-glass window. There weren’t an abundance of available flat surfaces in the A-frame where Kiley and Lark were sleeping and the meetings took place. The A-frame was located in between Hardscrabble Hill and Agnes’ farm, where Roger, Eva, Joel, and Vida were staying. “A timetable. And the wherewithal.”

  “Money?” Eva asked. She had pointed out to Vida how squeamish Kiley was about naming sex and money. “We have a contact for dynamite, but they won’t do it on the cuff”‘

  Roger laid out his pipe, tobacco, ashtray, and pipe cleaners on the table before him like tools for an operation he was commencing. “Do we have anything in the kitty?”

  Lark was treasurer. “We’re broke. A lot of our sources have dried up. My last trip to New York was wasted.”

  “Maybe this’ll loosen them” Roger said cheerfully. “But we need money soonest to prime the pump. I think we have enough cash between us to get a small load—enough to blow that earth-moving equipment. But for a more major effort we need a modest pile”

  “Joel and I have a possible job that could bring in something” Vida said. “A contract for a lawyer in New York.”

  “What kind of job?” Lark looked suspicious, his eyes narrowing.

  “Kidnapping two children back for the mother. The father took the kids to Michigan.”

  ”How do we know this is politically correct?” Roger challenged.

  Eva shook her head at him. “You identify with all fathers.”

  Joel sat by the window unraveling a length of old rope. He tended to place himself at the edge of the room during meetings. “We talked about doing that job, yeah, but to live on. We been broke for months. We can’t go on like we have. It’s too dangerous.”

  Lark asked, “How much money is involved?”

  “Fifteen hundred” Vida said. Joel threw her a dark fuming glare. Did he expect her to lie?

  “That’s great,” Roger said, gaining enthusiasm. “We can split it down the middle. It’s enough to finance our action and you can live on it for a couple of months besides”

  “I don’t think it’s fair,” Joel said. “The risk is all ours. For months we been on the road. Constantly hitting people for money. Both dog-tired. Vida was sick for weeks while we holed up in Brooklyn. I want to live someplace with her. It’s our right.”

  “We’re not in this for comfort and our rights” Kiley said. “Where do I live?”

  “You thrive on it. She doesn’t.” Joel glared at Kiley.

  Eva was frowning, hugging herself. Vida could feel Eva’s inner buffeting. Finally Eva burst out, “We’re not in this to burn ourselves out either. Haven’t we long ago passed the stage of trying to prove we can each take more deprivation, more loneliness, more danger, more tension, more fatigue than anybody else? We’re the survivors. Let’s give each other a little room.”

  “Peregrine proposed this action,” Roger said. “I’d have thought she’d be ready to support it all the way.”

  “The whole group agreed,” Eva said. “It’s not hers any longer … And you don’t seem to lack a desire for a little stability in your own life. How can you deny it to them?”

  Joel got up awkwardly and came over to Eva. “Thanks,” he muttered. “You really care about her too.”

  Eva gave him an exasperated glance. “Too! You’re the one still to be tested and proved.”

  Vida wanted to put her arms around both of them. “I suggest a two-thirds/one-third split” she said. “We can ask for half the money as an advance. We’ll take the one-third split for the Network out of the advance. Five hundred should cover our expenses on the power-company action. Then Joel and I will take the second payment to live on.”

  “How soon can you get the advance?” Kiley asked.

  ”The lawyer’s waiting for us to get back in touch. We were okayed by the mother.”

  “Do it at once” Kiley was jotting on a calendar. “Get the money before Christmas. We can start the New Year with our broadcast.”

  Vida had not heard that old slang in a couple of years: a broadcast: an action. She smiled, “I’ll call the lawyer today. But we have enough cash for dynamite to take on a small action at once. We know we can place a bomb at the Mohican site, where there’s only one watchman to get out of the way”“

  Tequila stood, grinning. “We can get the dynamite today.”

  “Let’s jump right on it. By tomorrow at the latest. Tonight if we can.” Roger cleared his throat, rapped with his pipe. “I’d like to go home—I mean to Rochester—for the holidays. The kids will be disappointed if I don’t show.”

  “If Tequila leaves now and brings the sticks back, we can pull it off tonight” Kiley said, beaming at everybody. “It’ll be neat”

  “Go just for Christmas” Eva said. “If we’re, going to do a major bombing at the utility offices, we need to do surveillance for a lot longer and a lot more carefully than on the construction site.”

  Tequila left with what money they had between them to get the dynamite as Marti arrived, with Dylan along, to take the next shift of surveillance with Roger. Marti’s daughter Tamara and Roz were in kindergarten, but her son Dylan was too young and had to be parked in the A-frame for the rest of the day. Joel rose to the occasion as the one most sensitive, in Roger’s absence, to the demands of a bored and lonely little boy. Lark, looking up from his hand calculator and running a column of figures, instructed Vida, “Get it in tens and twenties. Leave the day after tomorrow. We’ll proceed on this end assuming you can get the money here by Tuesday night.”

  “So we’ll drop off the money before we do the job” Vida said.

  Kiley, working at the card table on logistics, refused to admit that children existed as children. When necessary she addressed Dylan formally. “Dylan, if you persist in kicking in the couch, you’ll scruff it. Then the people who own this house and who have been generous enough to lend it to us will be annoyed.” Dylan pouted and kicked the couch harder. He had been doing it unconsciously. Now he was seriously engaged in kicking the couch.

  Lark was uneasy around Dylan, although he had lived with him. Lark was more afraid of children. She wondered why. She was not much interested in them unless she knew a child personally, as she did Sam and Peezie and Roz, but what did Lark fear? Perhaps he thought the child would leap on him suddenly, like a large dog. Perhaps he hated to remember his own childhood. Perhaps something concrete disturbed him when he looked at children.

  When Lark talked about being in Vietnam, he always referred to the visit he had made as a representat
ive of the antiwar movement. He almost never meant the years he had spent there in the Army. She was curious, but a deep inhibition strained her from questioning him. Either you stayed out or you stayed in and took responsibility for what you might stir up, she felt. She divided her time between studying the topographic and site maps and playing with Dylan on the floor to spell Joel. They had an old squeaking duck pull toy and a new fire engine with a horrible siren to amuse him.

  Finally they got home to Agnes,’ a forty-minute drive west. Agnes sheltered the East Coast press of the Network in her chicken house. The house, gray with dark blue shutters, stood among dark drooping Norway spruce whose trunks were as big around as Vida. You came into a stately entrance hall with a loop of stairway climbing and a parlor to each side. Agnes, who ran a working goat farm that sold cheese to an organic wholesaler, was a fiercely antiwar Quaker and sheltered political fugitives. As a pacifist she had serious political differences with the Network but over the years had come to view them as her children. Like Eva she wore braids, but hers, gray-streaked and sandy, were bound around head with its blue eye and darker blue glass eye, her own put out by a stone in a civil rights demonstration in Selma years before. Her eyes were set in crinkles over jutting cheekbones that formed pouches in her cheeks. Agnes was as tall as Eva, but thinner. She wore clothes well and with an unconscious, almost incongruous flair going among the goats and puddles in a long green woolen Irish cape with a high collar. Her clothes were old but elegant still—tweeds, silks, linens of chaste but unmistakable quality. Agnes had an opulent swinging long-legged stride across the rocky pasture, up the hill, across the wide-boarded floors of her old house studded with bright rag rugs she braided. Vida thought of Agnes as always in rapid but fluid motion. Even when Agnes sat in a rocking chair by the Franklin stove her gaunt hands were busy piecing one of the quilts she made for use and sale.

  Besides the goats, Agnes had several cottage industries going into which the fugitives who came through her household were easily if not always comfortably fitted: maple sugaring, apple growing, quilting, cider making, and of course the production of cheese, not to mention the ongoing tasks of cutting firewood, mending fences, shooting woodchucks, plowing and planting the kitchen garden. Now everyone stayed in the big house but Vida longed for the summer shack up in the sugar bush on the hill where she had hidden all by herself for a month the second year she was a fugitive. She imagined sleeping with Joel up there in lofty privacy; but of course, the shack was unheated and inaccessible in the deep snow.

  “I recall,” Agnes nodded. “I had to put you up there by your lonesome, as I had the Puerto Rican children. That’s when you made the Star of David quilt. The stitching was too coarse to sell it—you have no patience, dear. But the design was pretty and nicely worked out. That being so, I never minded keeping it around. It’s on Eva’s bed”

  By your lonesome. But she hadn’t been. That July of 1972 had been the first time since the early days of her marriage to Leigh that she had been thrown back on or escaped to her own company. The first night on the mountain she had not been able to sleep. At once it was deadly quiet and furtive with small mysterious sounds tickling the woods. The grinding of trucks, the growl of horns, the artillery of cherry bombs would not have disturbed her sleep in New York; here two dry branches rubbing tortured her. Yet by the third night she was accustomed to the small rustles in the silence and slept soundly. She walked long distances, bush-whacked to the top of the rocky trailless mountain, explored compulsively. She had to haul buckets of water two hundred yards uphill from a spring. Otherwise she kept busy with thinking. She realized that second week she did not miss Kevin, off in Montreal. Instead she experienced a sense of expansion, as if a rock had been lifted off her chest. The realization had frightened her. She did not see what she could do about it. Not that Kevin loved her. If he had ever loved anyone, he had loved Lohania. But he was dependent on Vida. Sexually he was obsessed with her body, her skin, her legs, her breasts—who knew? It had nothing to do with her as Vida the person, yet she had taken three years to understand that, for his need felt intense. Sometimes she thought, that if she died leaving her body intact, his sexual attraction for her/it/the thing would be the same. Perhaps not. Perhaps he needed that element of resistance her being alive provided.

  She had told herself it did not matter whether she loved him. She felt clear and hard on her mountain. They were a team. They were one, politically. Better to have no irrelevant personal fog welling up, no romantic distortions. Kevin and she were tools. Love was a bourgeois distraction. On August 2 Kevin had arrived and they headed for Detroit where they planned to organize some support and to make contact with militant Black labor groups—if they could.

  Shaking off her reverie, she followed Joel to his room. Agnes had given them separate rooms, over their protests. “I don’t care what you do if I don’t have to know about it,” Agnes said down her aquiline nose. Vida was astounded as always. Agnes did not approve of sex outside of marriage and she did not much approve of marriage. Under her roof the usual pairing and unpairing went on, but Agnes managed to remain ignorant. Vida sat facing Joel on the swaybacked bed. She said, “My problem is I seem to think I can adjust to anything at all if I have a strong reason. For a political reason, I can talk myself into agreeing to chop my arm off”

  “You mean this afternoon. Split the money down the middle?” He pulled her hair. “It’s getting pretty again. You lack imagination.”

  “That’s what Natalie always tells me.” She craned to look past him into the mirror on the dresser. “That time again. I’ll run into town and do my hair before we hit New York.”

  “I tell you, you lack imagination. Dye your hair black.”

  “Black?”

  “To match mine. And show off your pussy-green eyes. We’ll both have black hair and green eyes.”

  “Oh, you want to be my brother.”

  “Your baby, your brother, your lover, your sugar daddy, your soul mate.” He pinned her to the bed, nibbling along her neck. “Eva really cares about you. I’d never do that—argue in favor of something that lets an ex-lover of mine enjoy her new lover?”

  “Hello? Hello?” Agnes rapped on the door. “Is Peregrine in there with you?”

  “Sure.” Joel grimaced.

  “Tell her I need help with supper.”

  “Tell me yourself!” Vida slid grumpily out of bed. “Agnes has an instinct”

  It was a matter of peeling and chopping. She worked as fast as she could and then made a quick trip into town. She needed to pick up a bottle of hair dye, and she wanted to catch Paul at The Brass Monkey; she could do both from the local drugstore.

  “Brass Monkey,” the same bartender’s voice said.

  “I’d like to talk to Paul Whippletree? He comes in every night around this time after work”

  “Yeah, but not this week … Fred!” he shouted off phone. “Paul ain’t been in, has he?” A moment later he spoke into the mouthpiece again. “Family troubles. You got to get him at home.”

  “Thank you.” She frowned at the dial of the pay phone. She certainly could not call Paul at home, though she was worried enough to be tempted to try it. What kind of family troubles? She hoped that Mary Beth was sick or had caught him in bed with Joy. Not that she liked wishing hard luck on her brother, but she just wanted the trouble not to have anything to do with Ruby. She stood several moments longer trying to think of someone else she could call to get word of Ruby. It was time to get back to Agnes’ and set the table. In New York, she could think of some way to hear news.

  Right after supper they all met back at the A-frame. Naturally, Agnes was to know nothing of their activities. Vida argued, “But since Joel and I will be off in Michigan and we could even get stuck there for a while, we ought to get the lion’s share of the action tonight.”

  Lark nodded. “But not together.”

  Roger said, “We’ve noticed some tension between Eva and Joel. We want them to work together calling in t
he warning and putting out the communiques.”

  “Munitions will be you and I,” Kiley said, “with Tequila standing by. Roger has prepared a bomb with an hour delay after placement”

  Kiley, Tequila and Vida got into their night clothes, dark with ample pockets inside and nothing that could catch on a wire. All five of them piled into the most reliable car, Marti’s relatively new dark green Saab, and Tequila drove slowly and carefully, avoiding bumps, toward the construction site.

  She sat in the back seat between Eva and Joel. Eva was singing softly, hunched, as if to pull her extremities out of reach by contracting her body. In danger, Kiley grew manic. Tequila affected a bluff front, all combat boots and elbows and hearty chopped-off laughter. He and Kiley kept up a brittle nonsense argument about union organizing, work none of them had ever tried. Roger, who had long ago been active in the teachers’ union in Seattle, was, of course, not in the car to hear them. Vida doubted they were listening to themselves, let alone to each other.

  Joel held her hand hard. She wondered how he would do in the action. She felt responsible for him, uneasy and then guilty for the lack of trust her unease suggested. As if to apologize, she squeezed his hand. It was not sweating, whatever that meant. If he grew rattled or panicked, he would endanger them all; moreover, he could deeply embarrass her before her peers. She felt a stab of annoyance that they had refused to let her work with Joel. She was convinced that if he did blunder, she could cover for him. Eva was a good soldier but a little phlegmatic and not the fastest to improvise in a tightening vise.

  The two in the front seat chattered and the three in back were silent, except for Eva’s soft singing. Darkness had come early and thickened. “It’s the solstice,” Vida said suddenly. A small slice of moon hung in the windshield just over Kiley’s head.

  “That’s an ancient witches’ holiday,” Eva said. “We’re celebrating.”

  “Midwinter’s Eve fires” Vida answered.

  As they approached the spot where Kiley and Vida were to get out of the car, everyone fell silent Standing on the road’s edge as the car sped away to drop Eva and Joel in a nearby town, Vida thought of her mother. Family troubles. Don’t let her be sicker. Turning then on her heel she followed Kiley along the shoulder of the access road.