by Tricia Dower
Darnell says we should have refused to go over there, Joe said, refused to exterminate those people like the government’s trying to exterminate us, says we been brainwashed. I don’t know who’s screwing us over anymore, who isn’t.
From Vietnam, Joe sent me a photo of himself cleaning a rifle, smiling, looking relaxed. I saw dreadful scenes in the papers but could never picture him in anything worse than a camp with bad weather where mortars flashed like holiday fireworks.
I pulled him to me and rubbed his head, something that usually turns me on – the prickly crew cut against my palm, the spicy smell floating up from his scalp – but slumping against my chest, he was a little boy needing to be held. Trust in us, I said, trust in you and me.
I wouldn’t be with Joe today if not for the Conference of Christians and Jews the summer before my senior year. The faculty chose Sarah Silverstein and me to represent our school; I was the Christian, she the Jew. Busloads of us arrived at a campground bigger than a football field. We saw a film about a Negro couple who couldn’t rent the apartment they wanted in New York City. (Everyone thinks this stuff happens only in the South, but look at Joe and me, stuck on Haydock Street and lucky to get in only because Mrs. Will remembered Joe from his varsity days. He was in the paper a lot then.) I was so humiliated for that couple it made me ashamed to be white – or, more accurately, yellowish pink, this black/white thing a pet peeve of mine. I’d describe Joe as kind of pecan; Brother D, the color of soot.
Every day, groups of us sat in circles on the ground, except for a girl from the Bronx with great thigh muscles who crouched like a Vietnamese peasant. We talked about fear and hate and the power they have. One night, we were hanging around the canteen, drinking sodas, someone playing guitar. A boy from my group and I were so hyped about what we’d discussed that day, we couldn’t let it go. When the lights flashed at 10:30 for the girls’ curfew, we were still at it.
I’ll walk you to your cabin, he said, and we went hand-in-hand, talking so intently, nothing else mattered. I can’t tell you that boy’s name or if his hand eventually got warm and sticky in mine, that’s how focused I was on what we were saying, how focused I was on his mind. Only when I got inside the cabin did I realize he was Negro. For the first time ever I’d been unconscious of color. You might say, big whoop or, disgusting. I don’t know who you are, so I don’t know what you’d say. It was the most amazing moment in my life. I must’ve looked looped, bouncing from girl to girl, sharing my revelation.
You’re crazy, Sarah said – she who was in love with a Catholic who wanted to be a priest. Anyway, when I got back and my parents picked me up at the bus station, it was the first thing I told them. Imagine, I said, if the whole world could hold hands like that; if everyone, when they had to fill out a form and say what race they were, wrote down Human.
I was in the back seat of the car, my folks in the front, and they exchanged a look that said: I told you we shouldn’t have let her go, next thing you know she’ll be bringing one home.
When Joe and I eloped, they went into mourning, holing up in the house with the shades down for a good two weeks. Part of it, I’ll admit, was the shock of not knowing anything about him, not knowing we’d written to each other for over a year.
You’ll burn in Hell for your selfishness, Faye said, when I called from a motel on Route 1 to say I wouldn’t be home for a few days.
You never think things through, my father got on the phone to say. Where are you going to live? You can’t bring him here.
That was nearly six months ago. My father hasn’t worked since, due to the breakdown. Faye parks that at my curb. And get this: she tells everyone he’s depressed because he has cancer and not to speak about it in front of him but people know better. He doesn’t have cancer. He’s in the choir, teaches Bible class, sits on the ecumenical board – the whole shebang; it would shame him to confess that he can’t accept Joe. When a colored family joined the church a couple years ago, he was a regular Welcome Wagon, urging everyone to be tolerant. I hate that word. Church people are the least like Jesus you can imagine.
What should I call what I’m writing – a journal, a testament? You will have searched the apartment and eventually found it in the cedar chest I got for my seventeenth birthday (my hopeless chest, I call it). I embroidered six sets of pillowcases and hemmed a stack of tea towels before losing interest in filling it. As you’ve discovered, I keep sweaters in it now. The orangey-brown accordion folder holds Joe’s letters from Vietnam, organized by month; he may want them back. When I picture someone digging through my stuff, I get goose bumps, as if I’ve buried a time capsule. Makes me want to tell the whole truth, as they say, to be sure I don’t mislead anyone.
For instance, I’m technically not a teller (they get paid more), but nobody else does what I do, either. I’m in charge of vacation and Christmas clubs, U.S. Savings Bonds, and the safety deposit boxes in the vault. I like the variety. I got the job when they put in air conditioning and a woman who’d been there for fifteen years couldn’t take the cold, even with a sweater. When it’s not busy, I get to calculate the interest on the regular savings accounts and write the amounts on yellow cards. This is not what I thought my career would be. I wanted to be a lawyer, an aspiration my father said was unrealistic. He would have paid for college if I agreed to become a teacher, which – no offense if that’s what you are – I found too ordinary. Before I married Joe, I was saving for law school. That money’s gone.
Here’s something else: I’m not always sorry when Brother D comes over. He keeps Joe from the crying that freaks me out, gets Joe laughing, mostly about stuff they did in ’Nam that I don’t find funny, like dropping their pants to show some scared Vietnamese kids that Negroes don’t have tails or painting “four more killing days to Christmas” on a Quonset. Their laughing sounds so twisted at times you’d think they were being tortured. But, any kind of laugh from Joe frees me up. When he’s depressed, I can’t get anything done and my shoulders ache from carrying his mood around with me. With Brother D there, I can do stuff like clean out the refrigerator, change the wax paper lining in the kitchen cabinets, and straighten up the drawers. It’s me, not Joe, people will say was the bad housekeeper when they poke around.
I’m not afraid to die, even a little eager in a weird sort of way, assuming something comes after. Once when Joe was choking me I glimpsed how it would be. It felt safe, like being rocked to sleep in someone’s arms or maybe going on a space walk. Since then, I’m okay about it, except for not knowing what my body will do. I heard that when you put a dog down its muscles relax, if you know what I mean. I will be so embarrassed if that’s true for people. Lately, I’ve been giving myself an enema before bed. If that doesn’t work, please tell whoever had to clean up after me I’m sorry.
Joe was a year ahead of me in school, but I knew him, everybody did; he made most of the touchdowns. We caught the same bus to school, at different stops. He’d be up front in his varsity jacket when I got on – such a charge having a star on my bus. I’d say hi and sit close if I could. He’d say hi, too, but hardly ever look me in the eyes.
Afraid to, he said the night we first hooked up. His old man would have slapped him upside the head – Joe’s words – after telling him umpteen times: find yourself next to a white girl, nothing to do but pretend she doesn’t exist. Joe’s folks grew up in Alabama, you have to make allowances. They feel betrayed, for years having taken Joe to potluck dinners at AME churches all over the state so he’d meet someone safe. He’s welcome to go around and see them and his brothers and sister if he doesn’t bring me, but only if it’s dark outside and he calls ahead.
On the bus, I didn’t look at Joe’s face, either, for more than was necessary, something I learned before kindergarten when the only dark people I saw were on the way downtown to the doctor’s, the bank, and the store that x-rayed my feet before I got new shoes. Faye would pull me to town in a wagon
once a week in good weather. Don’t stare, she’d say and twist my nose when I did, making my eyes water. I envied those children in the summer, their mini-park with a fountain that sprayed into a wide, oval cement basin. I couldn’t play in it because of polio, Faye said, and the notion got buried in me for years that colored people were infectious.
On the bus, even when I spoke to him, I focused on Joe’s wide hands, so patient-looking resting on his thighs, the fingers spread open. I wondered whether he was more or less like me inside, whether he hated or envied me. He was different from the cocky ones who strutted down the halls; he kept some of himself back. It upset me that no one else on the bus talked to him. I felt responsible for him, worried when I missed a day.
I was the one who didn’t talk to them, he told me not long ago. They asked stupid questions like, we gonna win the game this Saturday, Joe? How the hell would I know?
The year Joe graduated I bought a yearbook and had him autograph it on the bus. To one of the nicest girls in school, he wrote across his picture, God bless. What a letdown. To be honest, I expected more appreciation.
A car backfired last night on the street outside our bedroom and before my brain could identify the sound, Joe rolled me onto the floor and pulled the mattress on top of us, knocking over a lamp we’ll have to replace now. Don’t move, he whispered.
What’s up? I said, winded and startled to find myself on the floor but also – I know this sounds stupid – thrilled he wanted to save me, too.
The enemy’s all around, Joe said, but you can’t see them.
Wake up, babe, I said, you’re here, you’re home, and he said, I know where I am. I can look at here and there at the same time.
It’s hard to know when Joe’s sleep-talking because he doesn’t mumble and gets annoyed if I tell him he’s dreaming, so I play along or say something else until he wakes.
A car backfired, I said. Could have been a gun, I suppose, but I heard a loud muffler right after, probably some hoods cruising town.
He groaned and stood like a shot, throwing back the mattress. I helped him put the room back together and sat on the end of the bed with him. What a candy-ass I am, he said, scared shitless by a car. I kissed his hands and he said, my poor angel with the violet eyes, not right, you having to put up with this. I walked to the window, raised the shade to let in the moon. I hate it when he talks this way, don’t know how to convince him I’m where I want to be.
Only a year not knowing if each day was my last, he said, more to himself than to me. No freedom bird to the States for the VC. Thought more than once about shooting myself in the foot to be lifted out of there. Charlie’s got more guts than me.
If you’d grown up there, I said, you’d be used to it, too. Sometimes having no choice only looks like guts.
No, Joe said, they believe in something keeps them firing when they’re getting wiped out, when only one left, no way he’s gonna survive. Whole time there I never believed like that. I would have died for Darnell, sure, for the others, too, but only because we were connected; nothing to do with belief. Sometimes I’m so lonely for those guys, feels like my chest will explode. Nobody willing to die for you here.
The way he said that made me feel small. Maybe nobody rushing to fall on a grenade, I said, but you and me, we gave up our old lives for each other. I crawled onto the bed behind him and stretched out my spine.
Married people are supposed to do that, he said, it’s not the same kind of sacrifice. Know what’s different about Darnell since he got back? He’s intense as a guerrilla, on a mission, nothing more important than what he’s doing.
I lifted my leg and let the moonlight paint a line down the middle of it, making one half light, the other dark, listening to Joe but thinking how hard it would be to hold hands with Brother D and lose consciousness of his color, it’s what he wants you to see the most.
Going to school is important, I said.
Sure, sure, Joe said, but Darnell comes out of those meetings buzzing with life. I’m dragging my ass around every day just trying to concentrate, can’t keep a thought in my head.
There are people who can help with that, I said. We’ll find the money.
No docs, no shrinks, I’ve told you, Joe said. Darnell doesn’t need a shrink. Time I went to those meetings with him, see what that’s about.
Black Power, I said, that’s what it’s about, romantic hooey to get you to sacrifice yourself for your so-called race. It won’t get rid of your nightmares.
You don’t know that, he said. Darnell says a lot of healing goes on in those meetings. Says only way our people can be sane is accept we’re aliens in a foreign land.
My land? While Joe slept, I conjured up the rape of that slave girl so long ago, wondered if she was repulsed by her baby’s green eyes, the red in its hair, if she had to close her eyes to nurse it. I wept for a while then got furious at Brother D for telling stories that keep the hate alive. How can you heal when you trade one enemy for another?
The days get shorter and colder and the strangest things make me weepy. My hormones must be out of whack. When the Wurm sisters strolled into the bank this morning, in their matching tweed coats and lace-up shoes, I was overwhelmed with affection for them. I’m ashamed to say I’ve made fun of them before with Earl, the way they show up once a month to clip bond coupons, their vacant smiles as I unlock the brass gates to the vault, how I carry their heavy box – the biggest size we have – to a closet, show them in, go back to my station and silently count. Before I get to ten, one of them comes out and asks, may we have a scissor, dear? Earl agrees that giving them the scissors right away would spoil it for them. The whole ritual and their saying, scissor, not scissors, usually cracks me up. This morning my eyes filled and whichever one it was had come out for the scissors said, anything wrong, dear? I was thinking how much I’d miss them, isn’t that something?
I don’t believe in Faye’s Hell but there has to be a settling of accounts, so to speak, like balancing out at the bank. Some days I come up short but it’s usually just a few bucks and Earl dismisses it with a wave of his hand, no big deal. If I’m a bit short when I get to Heaven or wherever, I hope it’s like that.
I’ve been writing for months not knowing who you’ll be. The police officer who makes the official report? Reverend Moore from the church that’s no longer mine? God, what if it’s Faye and she destroys what I write?
I could use some Valium, it’s hard to stay perky, but darned if I’ll ask Dr. Eversoll. He makes me call every month to renew my prescription for the Pill, must think delivering me twenty years ago gives him the right. Thought any more about counseling? he asks each time. Who does he think will pay? It frosts me that he assumes I have to be bonkers to love Joe. Frosts me even more that the Pentagon insists Vietnam vets are in such fine shape they require no special treatment. The Pentagon should try sleeping with Joe. And get this: the woman I got at the VA today called them Vietnamese vets, even after I corrected her.
I lost track of Joe once he graduated until December two years ago, less than three months before he landed in Vietnam with the first of the Marines. He’s proud of enlisting, proud of making up for his father getting himself 4F to escape the second war to, ha ha, end all wars.
We ran into each other at the Second Presbyterian where my father and Joe’s sister were performing Handel’s Messiah with every Protestant choir in town, such a huge sound it gave me chills. I wore my white wool coat with the imitation leopard skin collar and matching hat; he was in dress blues two pews in front of me and zap! – spotting him was like stepping onto the bus in high school again, pretending he’d shown up just for me. I studied the back of his head all through the music, mentally tracing the rigid collar around his strong neck. How fitting, I thought, that he’d gone into the service, remembering him on the bus as stoic, brave even. Afterward, I waited for him at the back of the church.
/> You must like uniforms, I said and he smiled, recognition coming into his eyes.
You must like jungle cats, he said, tapping my hat, such confidence from him giving my stomach a jolt of nervous surprise. He offered me a ride. I ran back to tell my father who was changing out of his choir robe that I was leaving with a friend. I just didn’t say which one. Faye wasn’t there to dodge, the Messiah always a few choruses too long for her liking.
Where to? Joe said and opened the passenger door, which may seem like a small thing to mention but it’s amazing how many guys don’t. I was impressed. Said I wouldn’t mind going somewhere to talk for a while, to catch up.
We went to a root beer stand that was closed for the winter and sat in the lot until Joe got worried the cops would show up and hassle him for bothering me, so we drove to a park where families skate on the pond and the police ignore couples in cars.
Something inside was telling me to resist Joe, to tell him to take me home, but there with the engine on and the heater full blast, I found myself wondering what he’d taste like, of all things, wondering how big he was and if it would hurt. I’d just broken up with a guy I’d come dangerously close to going all the way with, so I was primed, if you know what I mean, not that it’s any excuse. Hard to believe how unresisting I was, you’d think I’d had a Tom Collins. I’m still embarrassed about it.
Joe got into a state when he realized it was my first time. Jesus, what have I done? he said, and I felt guilty like I’d deceived him in some way, but he hadn’t asked.
We didn’t talk on the drive home except for me to give him directions. He pulled over to drop me off half a block from my house and said, gotta be back at base next week, can I write you? The tenderness in his voice felt like pity and my arms and legs went spongy with shame. No need, I said.
I want to, he said, and when my shoulders shook, he slid over and held me until I was still. I’m so grateful, he said, so undeserving. I would have dissolved into dust if he’d said he was sorry. I said he could write me in care of the bank, I trusted the mail boy. His letter from Camp Lejeune came a few weeks later but I didn’t answer, not convinced he wasn’t simply feeling obligated. He wrote a second time, about his orders for Vietnam, and I decided it would be unpatriotic not to write back.
