Murder in the Collective

by Barbara Wilson

  “No…though I can’t help feeling a little dejected to see him with Zee now.”

  She sighed sympathetically, paused, and then, as if it had just occurred to her, jumped up. “I can probably get Doug now if I call. Before his class starts.”

  I got up and started rinsing the plates. I should have known their separation was too good to last. Doug was one of those thin, athletic types just this side of sports-fanaticism. He biked, he skied, he ran, he sailed, he’d been down to the bottom of the ocean and up to the tallest mountain tops. He worked at REI, the recreational equipment co-op, and he really got on my nerves. Penny found him terribly sexy, if a little lightweight intellectually.

  I stacked the dishes, decided to leave them for later and started reading the evening newspaper. The New Peoples Army continued fighting hard on the island of Mindanao and Marcos was getting ready for his trip to Washington, D.C., in the fall. There was a photo of him looking like a wax mannequin and a caption saying the Philippines might have to return to martial law if the bombings continued. That was a joke—as if he’d ever really lifted martial law. I thought about Zee’s uncle, imprisoned for ten years, since 1974, and about Zee. What would she do when her temporary visa ran out? I supposed she could always marry somebody in the States. Marry Ray, for instance.

  Penny’s laughter trilled in the hallway. She and Doug seemed to be on great terms again. I wished it had been as easy for me and Ray to make up. But just as it had begun, so had it ended. With fireworks. We’d managed to keep working together and now I guessed we were friends. We were civil anyway and once or twice, before he started seeing Zee, we’d gone out for coffee and managed to have an ordinary conversation. But there was no way of ever going back. I didn’t really want to.

  He was always too glamorous for me, too intense. He wanted to stay up all night talking art and revolution; I wanted to go to sleep. He wanted to travel to Central America and work with the peasants; I wanted to stay safely at home away from the right-wing firing squads. He liked a sniff of coke now and then, elaborate sexual positions, driving all night, experimental music, calling relatives long-distance. I liked gardening, silence, having people over for dinner, reading Ruth Rendell and E. X. Ferrars in bed with a cup of tea.

  He liked my “stability,” the sense of home he had with me and Penny. I liked his looks, his background, the flair he brought to everyday life. We thought we could change each other, but I just got more stubborn, he got more exasperated. It was a mess in the end.

  All the same, it had been a connection, an intimacy, that I now lacked. I hadn’t made a conscious choice to draw back from a new relationship. It had just happened. I didn’t seem to meet any new men; most of my friends were women, and the men I already knew didn’t attract me. I’d started out wanting to live a simpler life, on my own again, trusting my likes and dislikes, away from the heat of romance and anger, and had found it so natural somehow that I didn’t want to break the spell again.

  And yet, I realized as Penny’s voice got lower in the hall and I strained to hear, I was lonely. Lonely when any of my women friends fell in love and went off into the sunset with their cowboys. I knew it was normal, but I found it depressing.

  The receiver clicked back in place and Penny returned to the kitchen grinning cheerfully. “Well, we’re going to have a drink tomorrow night,” she said. “And then, we’ll see.” She sounded extremely optimistic.

  We talked about other things then: whether this heavy rain was going to continue and what that would mean for the garden; whether we pickled too many cucumbers last year; whether the fence would fall down if we didn’t fix it this year. Homely household details. We didn’t go back to the subject of B. Violet and Elena’s merger proposal. I guess we just thought we’d wait and see what happened.

  But something had already happened—to me, at least. In between the accusation of man-hating and the phone call to Doug, I’d begun to think I really did want to meet with B. Violet before completely dismissing the idea. I wouldn’t mind seeing that woman Hadley again and finding out what she thought about all this. She might be a member of B. Violet but I’d still liked her, and besides….

  Actually, I suspect the most telling thing about my conversation with Penny that night, in retrospect, was that the word “lesbian” was never used.

  Not once.

  4

  A MEETING WITH B. VIOLET was scheduled for the Tuesday evening of next week. I asked Elena if we could see their books in the meantime or at least a few quarterly statements. She called Fran and came back with the information that they didn’t want to make any figures available until they’d been assured of some definite interest on our part.

  “Just for security reasons,” said Elena.

  “Bullshit,” said Penny, who’d arrived in the interim. “What do they think we are, the IRS?”

  Elena only shrugged. “Maybe after the meeting, if everything goes well.”

  There was a tension in the shop that hadn’t been there before. A new feeling of suspicion and uncertainty. I came across Jeremy and Ray muttering together and discovered June and Penny huddled in the same way.

  Only Zee seemed to be outside it all; she was absorbed in her Filipino action group. They were getting ready to protest the Marcos visit to the States in September and were putting out a newsletter as well. Zee was responsible for its production, along with two men, Benny and Carlos. Some days all three of them were underfoot, acting like Best was the office of the Manila Times, talking in Tagalog, gesturing fiercely. All right I thought, so Marcos was a fascist megalomaniac who had ruined the economy and tortured everybody, but this was still a printing business, wasn’t it? In America.

  I remembered when Zee had first come to work with us last year how fascinated I’d been with her stories of the Philippines, its seven thousand islands, its blend of peoples, its history of struggle. She’d shown Penny and me slides one evening of Manila: Roxas Boulevard, Makati, the Wall Street of the city, Rizal Park on a Sunday with families everywhere, free concerts and picnics…and then, without warning, a series of horrible, falling-down slums full of swollen-bellied children, diseased beggars, child prostitutes—garbage and suffering flooding through the sewerless streets.

  I’d been horrified and moved, and I’d admired Zee intensely; she was political but beautiful with her chic clothes and fine jewelry. American feminists were so deliberately tacky and utilitarian; I knew—I was one myself, in my overalls or jeans and tee-shirts, my sensible shoes and total lack of ornamentation.

  Zee was like a tropical bird bringing news from another world, and I had liked her and been interested in her until the moment she became lovers with Ray. Then all of a sudden her jewelry was a symbol of upper class oppressiveness; her clothes were disgustingly feminine—look at those high heels and how could she work in a print shop without getting dirty?—and even her political enthusiasm was cause for suspicion. I told myself that Zee was a privileged woman from a highly connected, though currently out-of-favor family in the Philippines. If Marcos didn’t knock off any more of her relatives, someday when he was overthrown or dead of natural causes, Zee and the rest of the Oberons would be riding high again. They were lawyers, weren’t they, not peasants or workers, and they owned a couple of sugar plantations in Luzon and real estate in Manila. Zee probably wasn’t that serious about revolution; why should she be?

  “I don’t think you’re being fair to her,” Penny told me, after listening to me harangue one day. “Zee is incredibly dedicated to the newsletter and organizing in town. And her clothes didn’t bother you—you know she makes them herself and everyone wears jewelry in the Philippines—before she got involved with Ray; you thought she was exotic.”

  Ashamed, I’d said, “I’m not jealous, really. Let’s have her over to dinner soon. She and Ray. No, I really want to…”

  But we’d never quite gotten around to it. In the early period of the collective’s history we’d all spent a lot of time, maybe too much time, together. Afte
r Kay left, however, and Jeremy came, after Ray and I split up and Elena joined, we’d become more formal, less friendly. We were all so different. Sure, we had brunch meetings and an occasional beer after work, but June was really the only one Penny and I saw much of, and it was really Penny and June who were friends.

  I never knew what Zee thought of me, whether she was sorry not to get to know me or Penny better. We were women, but we were white, and who knew what Ray had told her about me? She was always polite, but she was polite to everyone, polite and reserved, except about political questions. She sometimes looked as if she were waiting for something more from me.

  But at this point I couldn’t manage it.

  By the time the meeting with B. Violet took place the following Tuesday evening the weather forecaster’s increasingly timid prophesies had been realized. Not only had it stopped raining, but it was actually hot—seventy degrees and climbing. The air was at first steamy as a bathroom with the door closed; then the earth dried out and it began to feel like another climate had come to visit. Seattle reacted predictably. It called in sick to work, took off its shoes and sweaters and hit the glorious outdoors with sunglasses and fast tanning lotion. No one knew how long it would last. These could be the only sunny days all summer!

  We met at seven-thirty in our shop. It was the first time any of them had been to Best Printing, and they spent the initial ten minutes walking around and commenting about the space. To my mind this smacked a little too much of tape measures and moving vans, and I felt my co-collective members rustling about uneasily in the background. Jeremy hovered protectively around the entrance to the darkroom, and June joined him.

  At length, however, we all seated ourselves in a circle of chairs in the office, and finally I had a chance to look at everyone from B. Violet together.

  There was Fran, sitting next to Elena: Fran with her thatchy white-striped hair smoothed down and her prickles temporarily out of sight. She was, in her way, a rather regal figure, a sort of Queen Victoria of dykedom, with her fleshy, handsome face, black-fringed light hazel eyes and ramrod posture. I thought she must be at least six feet tall. She sat with her legs far apart like a statue of some nobly unrelenting idea, with a notebook in her lap.

  There was Margaret and, next to her, Anna. Both of them were light-haired and on the small side, wearing jeans and worn, striped shirts. Margaret had her sleeves rolled up and bit her nails sometimes; Anna had a black vest and noticeably large breasts. Otherwise they were remarkably similar. From the way they shot comments back and forth under their breaths, I guessed that they were very good friends, if not lovers, and from the way they shot glances of hatred at Elena I guessed that our favorite merger-urger was high on their shit list. I wondered how Fran had been able to talk them into participating in this meeting at all. She couldn’t have initiated it completely on her own; therefore she must have had help from someone, namely Hadley, who sat there so nonchalantly, chewing gum, with her long legs stretched out to the limit and her head thrown back as if she were enjoying the pattern of the ceiling’s cracks.

  There was something extremely likeable about Hadley Harper. Just her name and even where she came from—“Huyooston,” she’d drawled in her slow voice when I’d asked. “Yuh, deep in the heart of Texas.” She was all legs, almost hipless, with wide strong shoulders and elegant collarbones that bisected the deep V of her heavy blue gabardine shirt. Her medium-length hair, stuck carelessly behind her ears, was straw blond and prematurely gray; her eyes were a startlingly clear shade of turquoise blue, like that of a swimming pool in the desert at midday. Her speech, and her smile too, came more from one side of her mouth than the other, quizzical and amused.

  I wondered, as we all settled ourselves, what some of the others in my collective were thinking about B. Violet—whether they’d already sized the women up or were waiting until they started talking to make decisions.

  “So,” said Elena, brightly and firmly. “Shall we get started? Decide on an agenda? And a facilitator? We should have a facilitator.”

  Everyone looked around at their own and others’ shoes and sandals. After a pause both Hadley and June spoke at once: “I’ll do it.”

  “Go ahead,” said Hadley.

  “Oh no,” said June. “You do it.”

  “I’d rather you did.”

  “Christ,” said Penny irritably. “Forget the facilitation. Forget the agenda. We just have one thing to talk about, and that’s why B. Violet wants to merge with Best Printing.”

  “Wants to!” hissed Anna, crossing and uncrossing her arms over her large breasts, as if the charge were too much to bear. “Wants to!”

  After that it was temporarily a free-for-all.

  In retrospect I’m glad it happened that way. Oh sure, we could have been all nice and polite with an agenda of why and where and how and who, and a facilitator attending to the feelings of all concerned, keeping the discussion clear of roadblocks and making sure no one went off the deep end, but if it had happened that way I’m pretty sure it would have been uncomfortable and inconclusive. This way, at least, everybody got their feelings out.

  And nasty they were too.

  “If you think that B. Violet wants to join a bunch of males and straight women, and to be stuck in a little corner of your shop, out of the way, you’re crazy,” said Margaret, taking up where Anna’s speechless denial had left off. Margaret had obviously brought her mental ruler to bear on our square footage and had automatically decided that they’d be relegated to the back if they moved in.

  “There’s nothing that says if we merged we’d have to stay in this exact space,” said Elena, which drew a howl from Penny:

  “You must be kidding—do you have any idea how much moving costs? Not to mention the cost of not doing business?”

  “I’m sorry,” Jeremy put in nervously, angrily, “But, like, you know, I just don’t want to be apologizing all the time for being a guy. I’m sorry, but I just don’t.”

  “You’re apologizing now,” snapped June. “You don’t have to do that. Nobody should have to apologize for anything. We didn’t start this,” she added.

  “I feel the same as Jeremy,” said Ray. “I refuse to apologize, and I also feel that we have our own problems here that we’re working on in terms of racism. We’ve finally worked some things out and now to have four new members, all white…”

  Zee nodded vehemently, but said nothing. Margaret and Anna glared at her as if she was the male plaything incarnate.

  “It’s not at all clear to me,” I said, “that B. Violet would have to become members of our collective. We might be able to work out an arrangement of sharing some facilities, but keep our own separate decision-making processes intact…”

  Elena gave me an encouraging, even grateful look, which moved me to try to expand this idea that had only just occurred to me, but at that moment Fran, who had been gathering her forces like a hurricane cloud over in the corner, burst out in tones of wrathful contempt.

  “You are so fucking unrealistic,” she said, pointing directly at Margaret and Anna and possibly at the silent Hadley, too. “You’re so determined to keep B. Violet—in spite of everything, no matter what—that you refuse to realize that nothing can stay the same. We can’t continue as we are—on the Road to Bankruptcy…”

  “I knew it,” said Penny, her punk hair completely on end with horror. “You just want us to take over a failing business, sap us of our resources…”

  “Kick out the men,” Jeremy continued.

  “And ignore the racism issue,” finished Zee.

  “Do I detect a note of hostility here and there?” put in Elena sullenly.

  “You know,” said Hadley. “You’d hardly guess it, but B. Violet isn’t so very bad off.”

  It was the first time she’d spoken and for some reason it made an impression. It might have been the slow drawl of her voice, that sounded like we had all the time in the world to work this out; it might have been the ironic smile that put a curve i
n the right side of her face.

  But whatever it was, it restored us, at least for the moment, to our senses. I wondered briefly how this calm personage had ever gotten hooked up with the wild-eyed Fran and the smugly hostile Margaret and Anna.

  “We have assets,” said Hadley. “No doubt about it. All the equipment is relatively new, in working order and, more important, paid for. We also have some debts, not large but persistent; we’re just paying the interest right now. We’ve also got a number of outstanding accounts receivable: local political groups whose fundraising events didn’t cover their costs; feminists who think that business runs on slogans like ‘Sisters pay last, if at all’; and even a few regular old companies who think that a business owned by women isn’t really a business at all when it comes time to write a check.”

  Hadley smiled again and her brilliant eyes traveled around the room, stopping on Zee. “So it’s hard times for us white girls. A lot of people are having hard times. And things might be better if we could join forces with you all—more traffic, more steady customers, more pressure on them to pay. But I do understand a merger would also create problems—for us and for you. Racism’s a serious issue, and not one we’ve dealt with in a work situation. But there are other issues, like homophobia, that you all could probably stand to have your consciousness raised about, don’t you think?” She paused and looked at June, who smiled diffidently.

  “Well, thanks for your comments,” Penny said briskly. “I think they helped us all settle down, at least. I recommend that B. Violet sit down and work out some kind of proposal so that our collective can go over it and decide if a merger is in our best interests—no pun intended.”

  I expected someone to challenge this, either someone from our collective who would feel that asking B. Violet for a proposal meant we were taking this idea seriously, or Margaret or Anna who would reject it summarily because they didn’t want to put the energy into something that would only take place over their strong objections.