by Marge Piercy
They both walked softly, not hurrying, light on their feet. Vida with the bomb, Kiley with the wire cutters. The site was surrounded by a high wire fence, visible ahead of them now. They struck off on a path through the woods Marti and Roger had trodden for them that afternoon. It brought them up on the far side of the construction site from the watchman in the construction-company office at the gate. There were lights around the entrance and an around the office, but they approached across the excavation. Nothing but a vast hole and machines for making it vaster yet. Vida felt weightless, almost giddy. It was cold with no wind stirring, as if the night were frozen up to the sharp stars. The air felt dry and crisp against her face. Vida made her way slowly. She must not slip on the ice. It would be a rotten idea. Invisible ahead of her, Kiley must be kneeling at the fence.
When Vida stepped out of the woods, Kiley had the hole cut, the wires bent back and was through, waiting to take the bomb before Vida wiggled after. Then Kiley laid a piece of newspaper against the hole as if it had blown there, impaling it on the edges to hold it in place. They padded on carefully, Vida taking back the bomb. Right at the fence the snow was unbroken and the going difficult, a glaze of ice over a foot of snow. Near the equipment the ground was churned into deep frozen ruts of mud and ice.
Kiley pointed to a power shovel and a Caterpillar side by side. Vida nodded. Keeping to the shadow of the huge cab of the shovel, they planted the bomb on the side toward the Caterpillar. Even with the small amount of dynamite they’d had the cash to buy that day, they could damage both pieces. Vida checked the luminous dial of her old watch. Going in had taken them longer than anticipated, so they had only fifty minutes left on the alarm clock.
With Vida leading they retraced their steps, still moving cautiously until they were through the fence and into the woods and even then, taking care, they made as little noise as they could manage. Nevertheless, they went quickly, staying together. At last they came out on the access road and trotted side by side toward the highway, trying to listen hard for cars as they panted and ran. The bombing was in the nature of a tax they charged, she thought, for greedy and corrupt behavior; at the very least, it would make people talk about the power plant and why some people had opposed it. The communiqués that Eva and Joel were mailing tried to touch all bases, but came down strongest on the possibility of cheap hydroelectric power in New England and the high cost of nuclear plants.
Vida had written a couple of sentences she remembered as she trotted slightly in advance of Kiley, turning now onto the main road. Here they slowed down and kept on the shoulder.
“Car,” Kiley whispered.
They jumped into the snowy ditch and crouched behind some bushes. Vida checked her watch: eighteen minutes left—only eighteen. Vida had written, “Uranium and plutonium are the most costly substances known and among the most limited. To depend on them for our energy makes as much sense as burning gold.” Then she talked about their short useful life and long afterlife. “It’s like someone who hires a gunman who kills the enemy; then the gunman blackmails them for the rest of their lives, year after year, decade after decade. In this case, the blackmail goes on for a hundred thousand years.”
The car was past. They rose brushing snow. Vida’s feet hurt with the cold. She trotted on more stiffly. Kiley was in advance now. Finally they saw the car. Tequila was on the far side of the road so that he could face them. Kiley got in front and Vida in back. “Turn on the heat” she said. “I’m frozen” Tequila started the car at once, heading for Eva and Joel.
As he drove, Kiley squatting awkwardly in front and Vida with more room in which to maneuver in the back seat, both changed out of the wet clothes and into sweaters and slacks. Vida’s teeth were chattering. Why was she so nervous? Waiting to find out how things had gone with Joel and Eva. Her watch read blast in five minutes. They had shaved their safety margin too close tonight. Eva and Joel must be already calling in the bomb threat to clear out the watchman. He was too far from the blast to be injured, but it was well to get him off the premises. He would be told his office was about to blow up to get him out beyond the gate. However, Tequila should be making the pickup the moment they got off the phone, and they were just coming into the town. It would not do to leave Eva and Joel standing around outside the phone for any length of time. Where had Tequila left them? They drove past dark filling stations, a lumber mill, a funeral home, a school. It was past the time the bomb had gone off. She could hardly sit in the car. It seemed to her she could run faster than they were going. Main Street at last. Stores all shut. Skimpy-looking spruces were tied against the streetlights, and red bunting with pasteboard bells dipped over the street.
“There’s the phone,” Tequila said. “But I don’t see them.” It was a freestanding pay phone in the middle of a block.
“Go slow along the block” Vida said, leaning against the back of the front seat trying to see past Kiley. “There. In the bakery doorway.” She felt silly with relief. She slid over, opening the curbside door, and they hopped in Eva first. “How did it go?”
“Fine, except where you were guys?” Eva said. “We called it in.”
“Who talked?”
“I did,” Eva said. “Joel mailed the communiqués and dropped the letter at the newspaper.”
“I stuck it to the bottom of the outside door with masking tape. They’ll see it when they go to open the door tomorrow.” Joel craned around Eva. “What was with you all? We got scared.”
“The terrain was harder than we expected,” Kiley said briskly. “Such short delays are inadequate. As it was, we had to run back to the road. On ice that’s risky. What if one of us had slipped and turned her ankle? We’d have never made it to the car by the time the bomb went. Roger’s guilty of an error in judgment”
He was in a hurry, she thought, but would not say it aloud. They were all safe anyhow. Back to Agnes’ for cocoa in the kitchen. Agnes would be asleep and they would whisper, feeling like children staying up illicitly. Family troubles. Family. It was like a sore tooth, a broken tooth she could do nothing about but probe with her tongue. In New York she would manage to find out. If only she could reach Sam! Sam would tell her how Ruby was. He’d tell her straight, if only she could figure out how to get Sam on the telephone.
23
Joel and she were exhausted and fell asleep almost at once. In the morning she got up before him to chop wood with Eva. It was not until after the meeting at the A-frame to critique the night before’s action, read the newspaper accounts—too brief for their liking—and discuss possibilities for the larger bombing at the utility’s offices that finally, in the very late afternoon, Joel and she got time together to talk. Nonetheless she had noticed at the meeting that Eva and Joel seemed friendlier. They told their story together, prompting each other rather than interrupting or correcting.
Vida had done her hair and she was sitting in front of the Franklin stove in the parlor to dry it—there was no hair dryer in the house. One of the parlors was open and not exactly shabby but well used. The hardwood rockers and needlepoint chairs could take a lot of use, and had. The other parlor was kept closed up and unheated, making Vida imagine that it had forever been host only to weddings and funerals. Though most of Agnes’ younger life had been spent in Boston, this house had belonged to her family for seventy years, and her mother and aunts had grown up in it.
Vida’s hair was still damp and lank, but she could already tell it was going to work. She flirted with herself in the dusty mirror over the high kidney-shaped table. “Is it going to be good?”
Joel grinned. “Of course. Wasn’t it my idea? Do I ever steer you wrong?”
“I’m glad it went well last night.”
He mimicked her, repeating her mild statement and adding “So pleased we didn’t blow ourselves up and all get busted.”
“Did you enjoy it at all?”
“I’d rather be with you and work on that end. That’s the fun, I bet. I never did that … But Eva’s okay. She’
s funny sometimes. When we were waiting on the street, she said that if you left us there much longer, we ought to get Santa Claus suits and buckets and bells to ring and could finance the whole business and stand on the street without anybody paying attention.”
“So you kind of like her, maybe, you monster?”
”Yeah … If you want to spend the night with her tonight before we go off to the Big Apple, do it”
“Really? Are you testing me in some lousy way?”
“I’m trying to be generous and adult. I’m trying to give the ax to my own jealousy.”
“Joel, it’d be good for me. It’d make things much easier between Eva and me. I don’t want to hurt her. I know it’s rotten for her to see I’m in love with you the way I never was with her.”
She waited at supper, watching Eva across the table, able to smile in her calm oval face without guilt because she had something to offer, finally, that went a little way toward Eva. She loved the waiting, the sense of a present in store; but she felt impatient by flashes. Wary that if she waited too long Eva would have made other plans—agree to help Roger shop for toys for the children, agree to work on quilting all evening with Agnes.
She fretted while the meal seemed endless. Agnes ate slowly and asked a lot of questions. Roger and Agnes liked to argue their way through the evening news, offering opposing analyses and predictions. Joel was withdrawn, silent. Occasionally Eva took part when something caught her interest. Roger and Agnes were arguing heatedly about the changing political situation in China, a matter of equal ignorance to both of them. They had no special information. All they knew was filtered through the lenses of the New York Times and the Guardian and they might as well have been arguing about life on Mars. Life on Marx, she thought, amused, and tried to catch Eva’s eye.
Eva washed up afterward. Vida dried and put away, because she knew the kitchen a little better and because she wanted to catch a private word with Eva. Finally she managed. “Would you enjoy my company tonight, m’lady?” She played cavalier, taking Eva’s hand to kiss it.
She followed Eva up the kitchen stairs. Just as Eva was opening the door to her room, Agnes came down the hall. Shit, Vida thought, she would happen along. What kind of lecture will we get? But Agnes beamed. “Have a good chat, girls. Now, I don’t want a lot of tiptoeing around tonight. That young man you fancy is in the room next to mine, and I don’t want to be kept up. You just behave yourself, Peregrine. Eva is always a lady when she stays with me.”
Vida followed Eva into the room. Quietly Eva shut the door and tiptoed to the bed. “No tiptoeing,” Vida said, shaking her finger.
Eva sat down, grasping the soles of her feet in her hands. “Is it really possible she doesn’t know? Maybe she just doesn’t like men.”
”She likes men fine. She just doesn’t approve of sex, except between consenting goats for the purpose of freshening.” She sat down beside Eva and slid her arm around her.
Eva’s back stayed stiff. “We can sleep in this bed, but no making love”
“Why not? Eva, I do love you. Let me hold you.”
“Because you make it not matter. I don’t want to make love with you again until it counts.”
“Eva, it does count. Don’t—”
“Don’t say it.”
Eva had known she was going to say, Don’t withdraw from me. And meant she should not say it because she had done so herself. She was suddenly reminded of the flavor of intimacy between them—much in gestures, much unspoken and a lot that need not be spoken. In some ways they were suited. She had a pang of regret, while a fat tear oozed from her eye. In some ways Eva was infinitely more comfortable! They both leaned against the rickety headboard, side by side. “You look wonderful with your hair black like mine,” Eva said. “What made you decide to do it?”
“Why not black like yours? It looks wonderful on you.”
“And on you! You look even more beautiful now.” Eva beamed.
“You never saw me with red hair. Lark’s the only person in the Network who remembers the way I was.”
“And you, stupid. You remember. Don’t you count?”
“Eva, I missed you. I missed you a lot. It’s the truth. What I didn’t miss was L.A.”
“But I like it there” Eva’s voice trailed off. “If only you were a sun person like me.”
She could feel it growing between them, the myth, the body of explanations that would enable Eva to forgive her. Eva was a better person than she and longed to forgive. She was probably the most genuinely nice person in the whole Network, which was why Vida had got involved with her to begin with. And Vida, she was not so nice, offering up her hair dye as a sacrifice to each of her lovers in turn. But why not give a little pleasure?
Eva was saying, “I know now you won’t come back to L.A. But I’m glad it’s not over between us. That we haven’t lost each other.”
“Stay East then,” Vida said impulsively. “We can all live together.” She could make it work out, somehow. She loved them both. Eva didn’t like to have sex that often. It would work out. Why not?
Eva smiled, squeezing Vida’s chin between her hands. “I don’t like living with men, you know that. Joel seems very nice, but … I really do love L.A. There’s so much music, Perry. I got starved for music at Hardscrabble. It’s cold here, you can’t go outside. It bites you.”
After every argument about L.A. for the rest of our lives, Vida thought, Eva will look at me to see if I haven’t changed my mind. If Joel leaves me— he’s so young and moody—would I go back? Wouldn’t that be tacky? But who else would I go to? Better Eva than Lark; better Eva than anyone else she knew. Why couldn’t she have both? Eva thought she would not like living with Joel. “Joel isn’t like Kevin—I mean Jesse—you know. He’s not macho”
Eva hugged her, sharply. “Silly. We can compromise. We can live in a two-flat house in Kansas—that’s halfway. I’ll live downstairs and he can live upstairs and like Persephone you can go back and forth, half time with each of us … Why not be Persephone rather than Peregrine?”
“No! I do not feel like a maiden carried off. And you’re younger than me, and so is he. I think of myself more as a Ceres, if we’re typecasting”
Eva only laughed at her. “Turn out the light. We’ll be wakened at six, never fear, and it’s ten … Remember when we went backpacking near Mount Baldy and that butterfly sat on your wrist and dried its wings?”
“Did Alice really turn herself in just to have a baby?”
Eva sighed in the dark. “Perry, it’s not ajust. Don’t you ever want a baby?”
“Actually, rather seldom. I want my family mostly.” Ruby, Natalie, Sam and Peezie. “I want my life back.”
“What I wish is I could play with other musicians more. Perform … I used to have fantasies of appearing someplace suddenly in a mask and playing and then rushing off into the night. Or making records from underground.”
“Why couldn’t we do that?” She poked Eva’s arm gently. “Why not?”
“I can’t claim our little dribs and drabs of money for making a record of my music—come on. It doesn’t make sense” But Eva turned onto her side to face her, rumpling Vida’s hair gently. “Do you hate Alice now?”
“I’m kind of scared what she might say”
“She won’t say anything. She’s our friend. I trust her. I think she had a right to take her chances,” Eva whispered.
“But she broke discipline, Eva. She should have come to the Board.”
“We’d never have said yes, as a Board. We’d probably have separated Bill and Alice ‘for their own good’” Eva sounded a little bitter.
“You wouldn’t ever do that. Would you? Turn yourself in? You wouldn’t”
“Perry, don’t you ever imagine it? I mean, then we wouldn’t have to face the problems of what to do politically now, with things all scattered. We’d have the same problems as other people.”
”We’d be giving up, Eva. Letting them win.”
“Maybe th
ey win if we stay like this. What would we be giving up? We have to invent things to do now.”
She felt frightened. Cold. “You wouldn’t do that. Would you?”
Eva patted her shoulder tenderly. “Never. Don’t sound so scared. I’m just talking … You’re my family. We’re all so close I couldn’t bear just the thought of cutting myself off, the way Alice did. Only it makes me feel bad when they talk about her as a traitor … “
In the dark Eva lay against her, silky and long and resilient and soft, but Vida could not bring herself to seduce her. She did not feel as if she had the right. Feeling the gentle rise and fall of Eva’s breast against her side made her smell something sweet, the bush growing outside their old house that she had never identified. All trees and bushes were alien, as if she had found herself on another planet. She did not know the names of the trees along the sidewalk or the names of the weeds in the cracked earth of the yard. At the foot of the hill an old house was surrounded by a stucco fence covered with a vine bursting into huge purple flowers that rustled between her fingers when she touched the petals like the silk of a dress. Ruby, she always thought. Mama. In the rainy season the roof leaked in their bedroom, into a metal pan. Plunk, plonk. On warm nights the voices that floated like perfume from the next house were Spanish. For weeks at a time she would dream every night of Natalie or Ruby and wake up feeling entirely in exile. In the long hot dry days she imagined herself mummifying, like a dead mouse Eva had found once when all of them—Bill, Alice, Eva and herself—had been out in the desert rehearsing an action.
Eva thought living in the East was all Hardscrabble Hill. Vida fell asleep plotting how she would persuade Eva to love Vermont and persuade Joel to love Eva and Eva to love Joel and they would live together—yes, whether they liked it or not they would like it. She would make it all come out.
