by Dana Spiotta
“I think Berry is lovely,” Caroline said to Mel one day as they sat on the couch and ate chili. There was a lounge area upstairs from the bookstore, and they often had the CR meetings there. Caroline didn’t know why she said it, except Berry was finger-combing her hair absently and she did look lovely. Berry always seemed to be touching herself, and it made her appear suggestive and sybaritic. But it wasn’t for show, it wasn’t a display. It was just her, and the way she felt free to enjoy the thousand tiny soft delights of her own body.
“She’s a slob. She has this flower child gluttony about her. It’s a waste of energy,” Mel said without hesitating. “You get the sense that she wants the easy way out of everything.”
“That’s a pretty shallow extrapolation. Do tough people have to look tough?”
Mel fixed her eyes on Caroline. “If you look tough, you get treated a certain way and it helps you become what you want to be.”
“You want to be tough?”
“Hard, in fact. Immune to the whims of the body. And what weaknesses I have are my own business.” Mel turned away, and Caroline knew the conversation was over. Mel had such certainty. But she didn’t rant, she didn’t bluster. Caroline admired that. Mel somehow escaped being smug because she didn’t say more than she had to. Rants always make it seem as though the person ranting is desperately trying to convince himself of something. Or maybe the ranter becomes so interested in the rhetoric of what he is saying that convincing is beside the point. It is just about language and pattern and repetition. And the rush of words and adrenaline as it all spills out, exhausting any opposition with an overload of words. Mel was not evangelical in this manner.
Strange Caroline felt this way now. Bobby, after all, made ranting such an art. Whole days could go by and she wouldn’t think of him. Already.
Less and Less
CAROLINE AND Berry ate dinner at Caroline’s small table and watched the president give a speech. Again, Caroline noticed the sweat on his upper lip. It was hard to listen to him. He spoke about himself in the third person and described the “rather rough assaults” the president must suffer. He stood at the lectern with a peculiar, forced smile on his face. It was very specific, this expression of resentment and humiliation. What was it? Caroline shook her head. It was vulnerability. The bastard. He was melting before their eyes, and it was a lousy thing to watch. Berry ignored the TV. Animated bubbles advertised Dow Bathroom Cleaner. “We work hard so you won’t have to.” Caroline turned it off.
Berry sipped wine from a pottery mug. She described, in detail, her last breakup. Her last sexual fling. Caroline listened and drank her wine and watched Berry wind a piece of blond hair around her finger.
“I don’t know why I do it, sometimes.” Berry pulled her finger from her hair, and the little curl sprang back toward her face.
“I feel like when I don’t want to I’m being uptight or something. You know, we are supposed to be open-minded and loving, right? And not make sex into these power games between men and women but make it equal.”
“But you still feel lousy about it in the morning.”
“I have some hang-ups still.”
“Maybe you just don’t want to have sex every time. Isn’t that allowed?” Caroline said.
“But I do want to, I just think it still means different things and we all pretend it doesn’t.”
Caroline poured what remained of the wine into her mug. Berry lit up a joint pinched in a roach clip and took a drag.
“Maybe I should just become a lesbian. Like Mel.” Berry offered the smoke to Caroline. Caroline took a hit and exhaled slowly. She thought it risky, but then it was okay. Time between sentences elongated and expanded. She felt good, all in one place for a moment.
“Is that really how it works, you just decide?”
Berry started to giggle. Caroline found this funny too, and she laughed. It was strange to hear herself laugh.
“Can’t you tell that Mel has the hots for me?” Berry said, still laughing.
“Yeah, I noticed. You’ve got her wrapped around your little finger.” Caroline snorted into her hand, then coughed, laughing. “Everyone wants you, Berry.”
“Of course they do.” And Berry thrust her breasts out a bit and made mock bedroom eyes. Caroline opened another bottle of wine. Berry scrounged in Caroline’s purse for some cigarettes. She pulled out one broken Parliament. “You should lose the purse,” Berry said. “Let go of all the stuff you lug around everywhere. Do you really need it?”
“No, I don’t.” She stared oddly at her purse. It seemed a foreign and ridiculous object. Then she was at a loss, fixated on the leather shoulder bag. Caroline forced her attention back to Berry and tried to think of something to say, something to keep the mood going. But she shouldn’t have worried, Berry would never allow conversation to lag for too long. She just needed to take another hit off the joint. Berry tilted backward in her chair until it hit the wall behind her. She smiled as she looked at Caroline.
“Well? Aren’t you going to tell me about the big heartache you seem so sad about?”
Caroline shrugged.
“C’mon, what’s the big mystery? Was he a married man? Was he a woman?”
Caroline sipped her wine. “He was a Republican.”
Berry giggled and coughed on the wine. “I have always had a thing for David Eisenhower, myself,” Berry said. “Or even Nixon. I’m serious. I watch him on TV, going down, angry, trembling, scotch on his breath, hunched in his awful suit. And I think I’m attracted in some perverse way. His repression—”
“Okay, enough.”
“Do you think I should bring that up at the next CR meeting? Oh, Mel, I’d like to discuss my sexual fantasies about the president.”
“I met him at a demonstration,” Caroline said.
“Where?”
“Berkeley. He was active in, you know, the usual groups. It’s like you always see the same people at the demonstrations. Well, he stood out. He was from L.A., but he became involved in the campus activities around San Francisco. He was very plugged into the scene, you know, everything I wasn’t.”
“I met Sandy at a demonstration. I picked him up the first time I saw him,” Berry said. She munched on a fat, cigar-shaped pretzel stick in between tokes and playing with her hair and sips of wine. Crumbs landed on her breasts, and she brushed them off without really breaking her chewing stride. “Do you want to know what I said to him?”
“Sure,” Caroline said.
“I seriously said this, Caroline. I’m not kidding.”
“What?”
“I said, ‘Do you want to come home with me and get high and screw?’”
“That was clever,” Caroline said.
“He didn’t say a word, just followed me right out of there.”
“You don’t say.”
“I was very pleased with myself. I just picked him and that was it. What is his name?” Berry spoke through her now soggy pretzel stick, still perched cigarlike in the corner of her lips.
“Who?”
“Your man. The heartbreaker.”
“Bobby.” Caroline was pretty high, and she also thought she just wanted to say his name, feel it come out of her mouth, hear it hang in the air for a second. But then Berry repeated the name, and when Caroline heard Berry utter it, she wished she could take it back. She felt the hollow in her stomach, then a queasy, drunk feeling. Berry smiled and waited for her to speak again. Fuck it, Caroline thought.
“He had a lot of creative ideas about the world. He was buoyant and possible in a way that most people aren’t. And he fell in love with me, which was probably the thing I found most impressive.” Berry crossed her legs on the chair and leaned forward. She looked pretty in the candlelight. They were listening to the latest Dylan “comeback” album, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Berry played “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” three times in a row. They both agreed it was the only good song on the album. Caroline thought Berry looked like the women Dylan wrote about,
bejeweled and disheveled and bewitching, ornate in body and soul, or at least it looked that way from where Caroline sat, stoned and a little drunk.
“I never had a lot of men interested in me,” Caroline said.
“C’mon,” Berry said. “That’s not true.”
“No, it is true. But I wasn’t interested in a career in men. So it wasn’t a problem. I was interested in, well, society. Improvement. Moral perfection. I could have been a nun. But he was playful and passionate. Always very bright, and unfailingly convincing. And he had incredible confidence in his opinions.”
“Like what?”
“Like?” Caroline paused and collected herself. She shrugged. “Hmm. Like Dylan was great because he went electric. Or my Beach Boys records were shallow or even reactionary. Or that you should only smoke pot in a pipe. Or that the business world was more the enemy than the government. Or that you should be a vegetarian. He was certain of a lot of things. I was not certain, but I was learning to be. Anyway, I was certain of him, at some point.”
“So what happened?”
Caroline watched Berry get up and cross the room. She sucked at the pretzel as she walked and tossed the record she was playing on a pile of other uncovered records. She pulled out a Roberta Flack album and put the record on the turntable. She began to sing along to the music, looking at Caroline.
“I can’t talk about it yet. If that’s okay.” Caroline was too tired, too high to figure out how to lie or not lie at this point. “I can’t talk about it.”
There was a pause. Berry finally chomped down on her pretzel, chewed briefly and swallowed.
“The first time ever I saw your face,” Berry sang to the record and started laughing. Caroline also laughed, suddenly relieved, then sang with her a bit, laughing harder. Berry choked on bits of pretzel dust in her throat.
“I’m sorry,” she said, laughing even harder.
“No, it’s funny.”
“Love is very heavy,” Berry said, not laughing any longer. Caroline began to understand she could just not say anything, and people would make up their own lies for her. She just had to remember to say less and less. Say and do less and less.
In August, Caroline started up a tiny cafe at the Black & Red. She had been at it only a few weeks when Bobby came up again. Mel sat in the back office talking on the phone. She nodded as Caroline entered. Caroline looked at the books and newsletters on Mel’s desk. She must have had every counterculture rag in existence. The top paper was the issue of Rat with the infamous Radical Lesbian’s declaration in it. Caroline figured Mel had positioned it for effect. The cover was smudged and hard to read. Why must revolutions always have crappy type and poor ink quality? Why aren’t they beautiful? Mel finally said, “Okay, thanks,” and hung up the phone.
“Bobby wants you to know he’s okay,” she said to Caroline. Caroline felt her chest completely empty out.
“What?”
Mel just looked at her.
Just breathe in, Caroline thought, and say nothing. But she heard what Mel said.
“How did you know?” Caroline finally said, her voice choked.
“I didn’t know, I just suspected.”
“Did you talk with Bobby?”
“No, I didn’t. I think he was at a safe house in Los Angeles a while back, but I don’t know where he is now.”
Caroline felt enormous relief. He was safe somewhere. Then, more than relief, she felt suddenly hurt that he hadn’t really tried to contact her. That there really was no message. Some part of her believed somehow, still, that she would be in contact with him. And there was only Mel, staring at her.
“Look, I don’t want to talk about this with you. You are safe here for now. I’m the only one who’s figured it out. But who knows how long that will last. You better be prepared to move soon. You’re still hot, you know that, don’t you? You have to keep moving, especially the first couple of years, and everywhere you go you endanger what’s going on there.”
Caroline looked down at the dirt on the wood floor. Why dirty floors, always?
“Caroline?”
“Yes?”
“You have no right hanging out with us—it is dangerous. Dangerous for you and for us, do you understand?”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Mel moved the papers together on her desk as though she was finishing a grueling performance report, or an employee termination, or a blackball.
“There are places you can go. I know some safe places where there isn’t scrutiny, or they don’t mind the scrutiny, or where everyone is hiding out so one more doesn’t matter.”
“Our intentions—” Caroline said quickly.
“—look, I’m not a supporter of tactics that give them an excuse for more harassment of the left. But that doesn’t matter. What’s done is done.”
“But—”
“I don’t want to hear about it. It is already too much. It is all too much.”
“Yes.”
Sunday Morning Coming Down
CAROLINE WAS Freya and the feds pounded on the door. She was in the motel again, but for some reason there were weapons all over the room. She wore a miniskirt and knee boots, like Bernardine Dohrn, bullets strapped across her chest, commando-style. They were pounding at the door. “Open up!”
She awoke in her apartment in Eugene, no guns, no Bernardine Dohrn getup, just washed-out blond Caroline. But someone was pounding on her door. She jumped up, looked at the bedside clock. 3:30.
“Caroline, it’s me, Berry. Please, please open the door.” Berry was knocking and begging at the door; she sobbed and was getting louder.
“Berry?” Caroline said and unlocked the door, undid the chain, turned the dead bolt. Berry was leaning against the door. Her nose bled and her lip bled. She pressed her scarf against her mouth.
“Oh my God, what happened? What happened to you?”
“Oh, Caroline, it is so bad,” she said and started sobbing again. Caroline pulled her into the apartment, and Berry ran past her to the bathroom. She heaved and retched into the toilet bowl. Caroline held her hair back as she vomited. Berry caught her breath and winced. She touched her split lip. “That hurts so much,” she said and then retched again.
When the heaving finished, Berry sat weakly on the floor by the bowl of the toilet. Caroline wet a washcloth and wiped Berry’s face very carefully.
“Let me see. What happened? Who did this to you?” Berry started crying again. Caroline wiped the blood off her nostrils and cheek. Berry winced and pushed her hand away.
“Does it hurt bad?” she asked.
“Not too much, but I’m pretty drunk right now. Look at me. I’m a total fucking mess. I am going to have black eyes tomorrow, too.” Berry’s lip was already swelling. Caroline went to the other room and grabbed an ice cube tray from her minifridge’s tiny freezer. She dumped the ice in a dish towel.
“We have to ice it so it doesn’t swell.”
Berry still sat on the bathroom floor, her legs spread in front of her. She wore flimsy Indian leather sandals, with just a center tie and a strap around the big toe. Her feet were dirty. Her purple gauze peasant dress was pulled up over her knees, and there were drips of blood on the blousy drawstring neckline. She tried to pull her frizzy blond curls out of her face with one hand while the other held the ice pack to her lip and nose. She still cried but no longer sobbed.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Are you finished throwing up?”
“I think so.”
“Do you want to lie down?”
Berry shook her head emphatically. “God no. If I close my eyes I will be very ill.”
“Well, let’s get off the bathroom floor and go to the couch. That will be a start.” Berry nodded. Caroline helped her to sit and wrapped a Day-Glo orange caftan around her lap.
“Maybe some food? I baked bread today, and I have tahini to put on it.”
Berry nodded. With the swollen lip she looked like a pouting little girl, nodding
through her tears at the idea of food.
Berry slid from the seat of the couch to the floor. She sat cross-legged, leaning her back against the legs of the couch, gingerly and slowly eating Caroline’s bread covered with jam and tahini. They sipped tea, and Berry stopped crying. She pressed the ice against her face between bites.
“Better?”
She nodded. “Thank you.”
Caroline shook her head.
“I was having a drink at the Timberline.”
“A logger bar? Why would you go there? Who were you with?”
“No one. I went on my own.”
“Why?”
Berry shrugged, sniffing. She wiped her nose with the edge of the dish towel.
“I wanted to. You know, I wanted to go to a bar by myself, and I wanted to see men with muscular arms. I didn’t want some groovy guy. I wanted to see real, straight men—the guys who look good in their jeans. And I know women don’t go in that bar by themselves. So that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want to be scared of any place.”
Caroline nodded.
“I wanted to see if I could pick up a guy, in a real bar. And not have a relationship, just use a guy like a sex object. I wanted to overcome my hang-ups about sex, you know? And I wanted some unhip guy so I could blow his mind with my liberated ways. Besides, some of these guys are sexy.”
“I guess.”
“Anyway, I thought there would be a sort of Kris Kristofferson type, you know, working class—”
“Unpretentious.”
“Yeah, down to earth and at least a little grateful for my attention, not entitled to it or expecting it like these longhairs around here, you know?”
