by Dana Spiotta
Night Ops
ALL-NEW PVC-coated, pressure-sensitive, UV-resistant flexible-face vinyl. A building wrap, a bulletin. Not a billboard. This plastic hugged and clung to the brick face. And it was enormous, the whole wall of a building, with one hole for the lone window on that side. It upset Henry that they couldn’t even bother with painting anymore. The quaint ghost signs still visible fifty years later on the old brick. No, this was a computer-generated image, sleek and instantly reproducible. But not, at least, immune to the effects of a Stanley knife, a pair of decent bolt cutters, or any bladed implement. In fact, it was a fairly low-tech endeavor to cut these vinyl wraps down. But physically it was demanding—the sheer size of the job, the time constraints on accomplishing it, the low light available to do the work required—all conspired to nearly undo Henry.
Three times Henry undid their ad: the beginning of May, the end of July, and on September 3, his birthday. And three times the same ad was restored. They were in a dialogue, a private battle of wills. Go ahead, Henry thought, I got nothing but time. But it wasn’t true. Clearly they would outlast him. And what would he have accomplished? It wasn’t an appropriation. A displacement. An edit. A postmodern modification or improvement. A détournement. None of that. It was just his get-gone will. And it was his undeniable, get-gone need.
PART THREE
1972–1973
Speck in the Cosmos
BY THE TIME the bus reached Portland, Oregon, Mary had been Caroline for two days. Caroline had pulled her newly blond hair into a low ponytail. She pulled two tendrils loose over each ear and curled them into short spirals on her finger, blasting each with hair spray. She wore large round plastic sunglasses. It was decidedly different—she and Bobby always wore similar wire-framed National Health–type glasses, her hair always center-parted and pushed flat behind each ear. A carefully executed carefree look. Mary occasionally had snuck concealer here and there, but overt makeup was plastic, frivolous and shallow. Now, as Caroline, she put on some coral lipstick and felt unrecognizably safe. And as Caroline she hitched a ride south to Eugene and got the first job she applied for, cooking in a cafe. She would have made more money waitressing, but she wanted to be on the line cooking, hidden from view. And no one wanted a Social Security card or a driver’s license or even an address or a last name. They wanted to pay you under the table, in a white envelope of cash, just like the illegal Mexicans who prepped food and washed dishes and bused tables. And the apartment wasn’t so hard either, someone looking to rent out the space over his garage, a notice tacked to the co-op’s community board. All you needed was a security deposit, no lease, no credit checks required. And there was no reason not to trust her. She was hardworking and well groomed and inconspicuously average; and at night Caroline sat up in her bed and struggled to breathe, her throat tight and hard with fear.
She saw most-wanted posters in her head, her college picture. In her dreams she ran into people she knew, classmates and neighbors. She tried to say, No I’m not her, you must be mistaken, but then she would get confused and blurt out her name. Shout it, Freya, Mary. Caroline. She dreamt of jail cells and trials. Of Fred Hampton’s mattress. She even dreamt of telling them about Bobby, betraying him and saving herself. And she would wake up disoriented and ashamed. It would confuse her for a moment; then relief would start to come as she remembered that she hadn’t been caught, that it was only a bad dream, and then horror as she realized she was in hiding; that part was not a dream but her life now. She was Caroline from Hawthorne, California. Caroline Sherman. She had had a bad relationship. She had left Los Angeles to start over. This would suffice—people would find it quite reasonable for a woman to change her life over a bad love.
It had been fifteen days. Years would go by before she stopped counting days.
She cut vegetables in piles. She trimmed red peppers with wet hands until she became sore from it. She cut mushrooms, she piled them into prep containers for the line. My mise en place, she said, and the other line guys stared at her. “What, your Mr. Plas?” They laughed. She knew she was the garde manger, but they just called her the cold side. That’s me all right, the cold side. She threw lettuce in the stainless steel bowl with sprouts and sunflower seeds and just the right amount of dressing. She tossed it in the bowl with only one hand, just short jerks of her lower arm as she held the rim.
She made an odd discovery—no one asked her anything. She had her carefully worked-out tale of love lost—just enough Bobby to ring true. She realized or guessed that one day she would get to the point where she wouldn’t even know what was true and what she had made up. So she wouldn’t be lying any longer, even though some of it wasn’t true. Someday time would turn the lies into history. But she wasn’t there yet, a long way from it. Fortunately there was a kind of restaurant code that ignored people’s past. There was the dinner or lunch prep time, but talk was of baseball, or the song on the radio, or gas shortages, or the president, or how expensive rent was, or the guy in the news who killed his wife and two small children. No one said, “Caroline, why are you here?” “Where is your family?” “How old are you?” “What is your mother’s maiden name?” “What is your Social Security number?”
At the end of the shift some of the waiters and some of the kitchen staff would go next door to the Wheat Pub for a glass of thick, locally brewed beer or a cocktail. Caroline said no, she felt tired, and even that elicited barely a nod from the others. She was doing okay, she guessed. Twenty-eight days in and no problems except the airless terror that seemed to visit every evening.
Time just went by. There was of course the news. She hardly paid attention. She watched as the released American POWs from Vietnam walked down the steps from the planes and then fell to their knees on the tarmac and kissed the ground. The president seemed to be creeping toward disaster. It had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with them, any of it. She felt everything at a distance. She didn’t follow the Watergate scandal. But it was in the air she breathed. Breaking the law had become endemic. She saw the sweat on the president’s upper lip. She didn’t feel anything. No glee, no satisfaction. Instead she couldn’t stop thinking about Mrs. Mitchell self-destructing right on TV. Her sad, puffy hair. How even under all that stress and her obviously hysterical, perhaps drunk state, she maintained this elaborate, highly puffed coif. And then Mrs. Dean, also coifed, less puffy but equally blond, pale lipstick, shiny, polished face. Both of them stuck with their sweat-drenched husbands.
Faintly, barely, she told herself maybe no one cared about what she had done. She was like John Dean, who described himself to the press as just a “speck in the cosmos.” That was deeply reassuring, and it was also her worst fear. Time just went by.
Caroline walked nearly every evening to the food co-op. She bought bread and vegetables, a refillable plastic gallon jug of local beer. She found a glass of beer, or two, made the move from wake to sleep less fraught. She started a friendly rapport with one of the women at the co-op. She was a big blond girl, braless in a sleeveless T-shirt and proudly sloppy. She first smiled at Caroline, then started to say, Hey, how’s it going? An acquaintance like that is pleasant and then becomes tiring, as there isn’t much to say except Good. Just getting more stuff. How are you? And then you kind of wish the person didn’t work there anymore, so you could buy your things and not have the same conversation over and over. Caroline figured it would be like that. She was surprised when the woman introduced herself one day, about a month after the hellos began.
“I’m Berry,” she said, extending her hand.
“Caroline.”
Berry gave her a wide, straight, white smile. She was more earth baby than mother, fresh and attractive, even with her hair falling out of its clip and her unshaved underarms, which were hard to ignore because Berry enjoyed long over-the-head stretches often. Right as she rang up food, while she waited for your money, she would put an arm over and in back of her head and use the other arm to push on the bent elbow.
“I�
�m part of this women’s CR group, and we’re having a potluck dinner tonight. You know, empowerment, the usual raising of consciousness, blah, blah. But it’s fun, cool people. Beer, food. Maybe you want to come?” Berry waited a moment, then began bagging Caroline’s purchases. At the co-op you were supposed to bag your own groceries, but Berry maybe needed something to do while she waited for Caroline’s response. Caroline watched her finish, and she thought, What harm could it do? A little company, she realized, was what she desperately wanted.
“Okay.” She smiled at Berry. “I’ll make a sweet potato casserole.”
“Far out,” Berry said and winked at her. Caroline walked home clutching the scribbled address in her hand. She wondered if Berry was a lesbian. Maybe Berry would fall in love with her and help her somehow. Somewhere she remembered Bobby warning her. It was so confusing—she shouldn’t be social, but she couldn’t be conspicuously antisocial. Make sure to stay away from the rads and the movement scene. This was okay, it didn’t sound too radical, it sounded small town and sweet.
Caroline remembered the first time she went to a consciousness-raising group. When you walk into a political group meeting without any men, you get a kind of rush. You realize you can say what you want, you are free from trying to win the approval of the men, the attention of the men, or figuring and worrying over the power relations of the men. Women in these groups made a real attempt at deep, foundational questioning: everything in your identity is potentially not real but an artificial creation of the cultural status quo (always patriarchal and suspect). It had seemed brave and bracing to her at first. She appreciated the issues, but in truth she would resist anything that included questioning and excluding Bobby. She refused to find solidarity that superseded their intimacy. Being “with” Bobby precluded her from questioning everything—and the point of these groups was a little mind-expanding, fundamental questioning. With some serious psychological self-analysis thrown in. After a few meetings, she had dismissed these methods as a kind of narcissism. The other women thought her doubts suspect, if not downright counter-revolutionary. And perhaps they were right. Her reluctance was cowardly. But she had her justifications: other issues and things she cared about were more important than women’s rights. She focused on opposing the war—and what did women’s issues mean in the face of the war?
But now she was Caroline, a woman alone. The Eugene Women’s Collective was totally different. She felt safe instantly. And this group of women seemed to have long recovered from initial reactionary anger and moved on to something more appealing. It was less a witchy coven of man-hating lesbians—a possibility that secretly freaked her out—than a social group with a political agenda. She imagined she had been missing subcultures of mother love, forgiving and nurturing. Nothing like the catty cliques of high school and college, where beauty reigned and all subjects related to men. These women acted easy and friendly. They ate and drank, and then began, nearly reluctantly, a discussion of various issues: women’s rights, certainly, but also vegetarianism, ecology and local businesses. Two of the women ran the Black & Red Book Collective. One had an Angela Davis Afro and her smooth, militant demeanor to match. That was Maya. She was the only black woman at the meeting, so the others constantly deferred to her. The other woman, Mel, never touched Maya but nevertheless made it clear they were a couple. The discussion turned to local politics, the University of Oregon and the chauvinism of the student activist organizations.
“I prefer the loggers to these ego-tripping U of O radicals. At least the loggers don’t pretend to care about women’s rights,” said Beth, a dark-haired, very thin woman.
“Yeah, these guys want free love and then they want you to do their laundry.” And so it went, and Caroline just listened quietly.
“Enough about men. We are not going to spend the evening discussing men, even criticizing men.” This from Mel. Caroline listened to Mel and then saw Mel carefully check her out. Caroline thought of how she looked to the others. She probably was the only one with shaved legs. And definitely the only one wearing lipstick, albeit a practically undetectable neutral peach tone. Caroline thought it went with the dyed blond hair. It wasn’t her, but that was the point. But no one seemed to notice. She felt okay here, inspired even. These women reinvented themselves: political lesbians, or merely libbers. Ah, liberation! Caroline always had to take a minute and work out what words the abbreviations stood for, or what the initials and acronyms referred to. She always had trouble with that, the way all the groups and movements shortened things and slanged them, or designed names just so they made acronyms, which were what they actually wanted to be called—like WITCH, the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. Designed for insiders—exclusive and status conscious, when you thought about it. Besides, the prepositions always tripped her up when she tried to remember what the letters of the acronyms stood for. Her brain didn’t naturally work that way. Bobby loved it, he created an acronym or initialism or nickname whenever possible. Bobby pointed out how that all comes from the military, how every subculture ultimately imitates the military, which is the mother lode of all exclusive subgroups. But Caroline thought it mustn’t be just exclusivity. The military has the most slang and acronyms because it has most need of euphemism. What does that tell you?
She believed failure of language belied deeper failings in the counterculture. The names just became more and more divorced from their meanings. What was the point of using a name in that way? Shouldn’t a name remind you of who you are, or are trying to be? Did they really want a name to be part of a secret, exclusive language—a club that intended to exclude, that deliberately obscured things for outsiders? Was the need to be exclusive sort of reactionary, oppressive and even patriarchal? Caroline knew she was onto something, she was learning how things get away from people. How gradually they, what? Become the very thing they long to escape.
What were these women up to? Trying to recast their lives without men. Trying to forget the entire culture, trying to question all the things they had presumed their whole lives. And why couldn’t Caroline have done that? Why couldn’t she have been a radical separatist, at the margins? How different it would have been if she had tried to save just herself instead of the whole world? But that was what she was now—a movement of one. The most radical separatist of all. You are moved to save the world, and then you are reduced to organizing everything just to save yourself.
Mel dominated the group: when she spoke, and although she spoke softly, the other conversations yielded and attention was paid. Mel’s aviator-shaped wire-rimmed glasses caught some of her hair in front of her ears, under the frames, Steinem-style. Mel spoke of entrepreneurial self-sufficiency, not domesticity. She wanted to expand the co-op. She wanted to force banks to give low-interest loans to women-owned businesses. Mel didn’t have anything to say about abortion, the pill or the hierarchies of orgasms. After it was over, Berry walked Caroline home.
“Freaky group, huh?”
Caroline smiled.
“Melinda doesn’t respect me because I still fuck men,” she said. Caroline nodded. So Mel was Melinda. She already hated the name Caroline. She made a promise that the next time she had to come up with a new name, she would choose one that had a man’s name for a nickname.
“But she’s trying to free herself of all the disempowering stuff that gets fed us from day one. I agree, look at the women you see in the movies and on TV. Ask yourself what we are being sold by the establishment.” Caroline nodded but kind of lost interest. She was weary of those words. Empowerment, establishment, military-industrial complex. Male chauvinism, imperialism. Syndicalism. Leftist. Marxist, Maoist. The oppression of all that freighted rhetoric, the ists and isms, made her feel spiritual fatigue. She knew this connected to her current predicament in profound ways, if she cared to examine it, which she didn’t, not yet.
There was an undeniable innocence to her first year underground. Before Caroline’s big screwup (which, really, she should have seen comin
g), she existed in nunlike simplicity. Her constant fear ordered her life and gave her purpose. Everything pertained to her maintaining her liberty, nothing else applied. Every decision, every waking and sleeping moment was enclosed and ordered by her fugitive status. Sometimes, as she lay in her bed, she considered the possibility of turning herself in. But she knew what happened to other fugitives when they turned themselves in—unless they informed on their colleagues, they got long punitive sentences.
Time just went by. She began to think of time as something she had logged in since the event, as if that might earn her something. Later she would look at time like scenery outside the window of a train, just a way of noticing what had passed her by, or what she had passed by. Another birthday for her sister, or her mother. As time accumulated, she thought less and less of turning herself in—being a fugitive was becoming her identity, the journey turned into the thing itself, the reason for being. In and of itself, her underground life felt like an accomplishment. She was recast, and it grew harder and harder not to continue. Prisoner or fugitive? But couldn’t she perhaps live forever at the margins, and have a good new life? By the summer of her first year underground, she even enjoyed occasional periods of comfort.
She continued to cook for the CR meetings. Vegetarian chili. Rhubarb pies with wheat crusts. Nut loafs and spinach lasagnas. Everyone loved her food. She even became friendly with Mel. Mel believed traditional women’s work needed to be reclaimed for their own purposes. She tried to help Caroline.
“You should quit the cafe and work at the bookstore. We could offer some light food in the back, where the reading tables are. We could start with baked goods and coffee.” Mel pushed her glasses up. She held herself stiffly. She didn’t wear a bra, but her sweatshirts concealed her breasts anyway. And when Berry flounced around falling out of her shirt, it was obvious that Mel found it all a bit too voluptuous. This annoyed Caroline; she sensed it was something complex and unfair in Mel.
