Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Sigmund grunted. “Yeah, I sure didn’t. But see, Ben? Dialogue!”

  Tatti shrugged him off. “And also, you remember my work at the record company, when the children were in school. Remember ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’?”

  Sigmund laughed. “‘Chattanooga Choo Choo.’ I remember when Boris tried to change the title.” Sigmund rubbed his forehead and looked up at his wife. “Won’t you choo-choo me home?” he sang. “How about some music?” he said, rising. Benji thought Sigmund might ask his grandmother to dance.

  Instead he went to the phonograph in the living room, and Benji leaned against the table as he watched him set the needle down. It was Donna Summer! His grandfather sat back down at the table ensconced in an old and sudden afternoon light, his face turned toward the golden stream of it, motes of dust dancing above his head, and somehow he ignored the growing crescendo of her singing. “We laugh, but that was a special time, Ben,” he said. “It sounds ludicrous now, but we felt things so fiercely. We were getting smaller, and history was getting bigger and bigger and bigger!” The space between his hands increased with each word. “And we thought it would bend to our submission. I went about my life, but I remember the way the movement claimed me. It was all very exciting.”

  Ben thought then of watching the Dead playing as the sun went down on some other coast he couldn’t see. It was the most exciting moment of his life—he felt as if he were waiting, asleep in the snow, for someone to kiss him awake—but in the end, it was about nothing but happiness. Was that enough to claim a man? He couldn’t help but think of Sigmund: The workers are hurt, they can’t support their families, how can we help? Don’t eat biscuits from the National Biscuit Company! American democracy is hardly democratic enough.

  “I was under the spell of the Russian revolution for a long, long time.” Sigmund nodded his head a little to the music. “But when FDR took office, forget it, the communists were by then all hapless instruments of the Russians. For me, communism became merely an extensive arm of the NKGB. You look skeptical, yet it’s true, Benjamin.”

  Tatti went to the living room, where she removed the needle from the record. “Why?” she asked. But Benji wasn’t sure if she meant Donna Summer or the thread of the conversation. “Something else, please,” she said, placing the arm of the player back in its holder and coming back into the kitchen, where she stood over the table. She nodded, at the silence perhaps, crossing her arms.

  “But your grandmother and I had already fallen in love.” Sigmund looked up at her. “For me it was always the heart above the country.”

  Tatiana smiled down at him.

  “But I would never go to the Soviet Union,” Sigmund said. “Never.”

  Tatiana came up from behind and put her long, thin arms around Sigmund’s neck. “Now how would we go there? How, Sigmund?” Then she let him go and turned to take a platter from the kitchen counter. She placed it on the table in front of them: black bread and herring and cucumber salad. “Enough with communism.” She raised her chin. “Now eat.”

  Professor Schwartz began his section on the sixties with the Free Speech movement, and Benji could see that his grandfather had a point. Professor Schwartz saw the left in two camps, he told the class. Ideas and action. Period. Yes, the earlier leftist movements were focused on labor factions, but that left, the twenties and the thirties left, just refused to get their hands dirty. With that, bam, the lights had gone, and black-and-white footage of students going limp in the arms of policemen, kids being dragged down the stairs of various city halls across the country, lit up against the wall.

  After the film was finished, a little, nail-bitten hand emerged out of the dark in the large auditorium. “And what, then, became of the New Left? What did getting one’s hands dirty lead to?” asked a long-haired girl in a peasant shirt.

  Professor Schwartz shook his head at the girl. “What did it lead to? Perhaps you mean what didn’t it lead to? The very fact that you can sit there and ask this question is because of what happened in the sixties. Social activism was born, my dear, there was a hell of a lot more out there to mobilize than the workers. The effects are still to be determined, of course. We will be seeing the effects well into the next century.

  “Not sure if that answers your question.” Schwartz looked in the vague direction of the young woman.

  “So you’re speaking about white males then. That’s what this class is, about the men in history, those who are responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today. Yet who is controlling the supposed revolution to change all that?” The young woman sat down with a snort and a flip of her hair. The girl seated next to her patted her on the shoulder.

  Professor Schwartz smirked. “And with that,” he said to the class, in the same manner Benji’s father would talk to him and Vanessa when trying to show the lunacy of their mother, “with that, I’ll let you go.” Schwartz looked at his watch. “But do think about it: think about what happened in the fifties, how students, who were really a very privileged group of kids, they were the children—men and women—of children who had worked very hard to get what their parents never had. This was the first generation to really question the status quo. Because they could. This is what I’m talking about. I am not talking the bona fides from the old-timers here. I’m talking about questioning authority. Actively, not sitting in a room and writing about it. Activism, as we know it now, the reason you can pick up a sign and march around on campus for whatever piddling little thing you believe in, we owe that to what happened in the sixties. Plain and simple. Okay.” He flicked his hands in front of him in a motion of dismissal. “Be free,” he said, as at the end of every class. “Be free, think about those class projects, and think about your freedom.”

  Which revolution is my model? Benji thought, walking down the steps toward Usdan, where he ran into Schaeffer, on his way back from his Victorian-novel class.

  “That class is loaded with chicks,” he’d said when Benji had first made fun of him for taking such a course. “There are literally two guys in the class.” He’d recently broken up with Eliza, which had put a cramp in the foursome, though both parties still claimed to be the best of friends. Often Benji and Rachel saw them sharing a cigarette in Usdan, or happily throwing a Frisbee on the lawn, Eliza’s head scarf trailing behind her.

  “I could never just hang out with you as friends,” Benji had said, squeezing Rachel’s hand.

  “That’s because you are so invested in ownership. We don’t own each other, you know. And we don’t merely share sexual experiences together. It makes perfect sense to me.”

  Benji had started to make an argument for loyalty; he’d taken a deep breath and was about to tell her what bullshit she was spewing, but he’d stopped himself.

  “It’s loaded with chicks for a reason,” Benji had said to Schaeffer. “It’s such a girlie class.”

  “Naaah,” Schaeffer had said. “It’s pretty damn interesting. What, reading is for girls? Come on, Benji.”

  He’d nodded, conceding. It was so easy to change his mind, Benji thought, does that mean I have no point of view?

  “I think it might be my favorite class,” Schaeffer said. “And the professor keeps talking about these clitoral moments. I swear to God, she’ll say”—Schaeffer raised his voice to a pitiful squeak and spoke with an English accent—“‘this novel is composed of a series of clitoral moments, not the traditional trajectory of upward action with only a single climax in mind. These are clitoral moments, many small climaxes that, as we all know, are far more pleasurable for the duration.’”

  “Is she British?”

  “Naah, she’s from Texas, but you get what I mean. It’s hysterical, most of the girls nod their heads, and you know, or I know, they’re all thinking about how many times they can come in one night. I mean except for one or two, they’ve got no idea what she’s even talking about, I can tell.”

  Now, seeing Schaeffer, several spiral notebooks and a copy of Adam Bede
slid under his arm, Benji wished he had signed up for the class, which struck him then as far less confusing and somehow less personal than what Benji was beginning to realize he’d taken on. Those Victorian texts had a narrative. Clitoral moments or not, there was a beginning, a middle, an end.

  “Hey, Schaeff,” Benji said now, coming up from behind.

  “Oh, hey!” Schaeffer said. “Where you headed?” Benji thought about his plan to quickly grab a falafel sandwich from the Nature’s Way stand in the dining hall and go back to the dorm, to clean and get some work done before ending up at Rachel’s for the night, in preparation for his parents’ arrival. At the least he’d thought he’d clean up his desk as he’d promised Arnie, and definitely outline what his American Protest! project would be.

  “I don’t know, I’ve got so much shit to do. So of course I’m thinking about blowing off the rest of the day.” Benji laughed.

  “Me too.”

  “Are your parents coming?” Benji asked.

  “My parents?”

  “Yeah, for parents’ day.”

  “I didn’t even know it was parents’ day,” Schaeffer said.

  Benji stopped walking and closed his eyes. “Really?”

  “Your parents are coming?”

  “And my sister.”

  “You told them?”

  Benji let out a long sigh. “My mother read about it in some newsletter.”

  Schaeffer started laughing and hitting his hip with his notebooks.

  “Shut up,” Benji said. “Please. I can’t fucking deal with them coming.”

  “Oh, it will be fun!” Schaeffer cleared his throat. “I bet Arnie’s parents are coming too!”

  “Let’s go smoke,” Benji said.

  “At my place,” Schaeffer said, as they wended their way through the student center quad. “I’ve got better weed. And we wouldn’t want to smell up the room with Mummy and Daddy arriving so soon.”

  When they got to Schaeffer’s suite, he put on American Beauty—No bootleg today, he said, I kind of want to hear it clean and shiny and produced today—and handed Benji the bong, a red Plexiglas cylinder covered in multi-colored dancing teddy bears. He lit the bowl and Benji took in a deep hit. Exhaling, he felt himself loosening. It was as if his body had been curled up in a drawn net, and now the fastening had been cut. His shoulders fell, as if they’d previously been tied to his ears, and his stomach and chest opened. He handed the bong back to Schaeffer, who filled the bowl up again. Schaeffer leaned back and lit up, the red tube now a massive line that looked to Benji as if it were cutting his friend in half.

  “You going to make it to the Jersey shows?” Schaeffer asked, blowing out smoke.

  Through a keyhole, thought Benji. “Absolutely. You’re coming too, right?”

  Schaeffer nodded. “Feel better?” he asked after they’d each taken another hit.

  “A little.” Benji did not admit to the vague feeling of paranoia fluttering in his stomach. What would it be like having his family up here? He didn’t want to stop his life, but he didn’t want it on display for them either. He knocked his head softly against the wall, where Schaeffer’s Janis Joplin poster hung. “I think I gotta get going.”

  “No way! I get you stoned and you just take off?”

  “Okay, okay.” Benji sat back.

  Schaeffer filled the bowl again and they each took another hit. If you should stand, then who’s to guide you? Benji loved this song. He just loved it. They were silent for a while, listening to the rest of it. If I knew the way, I would take you home. It almost brought him to tears every time. Just as the tune was ending, and with a burst of energy, Benji said to his friend, “Let’s get something to eat, and then I think I really have to deal.”

  After Benji and Schaeffer ate huge sandwiches with pickles and mayonnaise and mountains of turkey and Swiss cheese on dark rye at Sherman, Benji walked around the pond toward Deroy, the trees still without leaves, old ladies’ fingers clawing into the gray sky, which looked as hard as porcelain. He imagined reaching up and punching it open, into spring. The pond was a sheet of black glass, no telling what lay beneath. He squatted down and dipped his hand into the half-frozen water. The water was numbing, but it also felt soft and comforting. It was true about ripples in still water. Now they traveled out and out, and Benji watched as his small presence expanded along the surface.

  He wiped his fingers on his jeans and heard a cosmic amount of noise coming up from the field, where he and Schaeffer had passed a makeshift rugby game earlier. Chapels Field, surrounded by various religious houses: a synagogue, a mosque, a church, each place of worship was built to stand alone, none in the shadow of the other, Ben was told on his campus visit last spring. It had been raining like hell as Ben and Dennis and Sharon, along with several other prospective students and their parents, sank into the mud of the field.

  “It’s a remarkable feat of architecture and a beautiful metaphor wrapped up in one.” The tour guide had smiled smugly and held her umbrella unsteadily against the downpour.

  “If this isn’t an omen,” Dennis had whispered to Sharon, loud enough for Ben, the tour guide, and the several other drenched kids and their parents to hear.

  Sharon swatted Dennis’s shoulder, as Benji wondered whether his father meant the rain or the architectural achievement.

  The tour guide continued, “Like so much here at Brandeis University, Chapels Field is about freedom. And equality. That’s what Justice Brandeis stood for as well.” She’d held out her hand to the field and was immediately smacked by rain.

  Benji thought now of high school: being on the field at practice, the leaves turning, the smell of autumn, that ethereal golden light of afternoon on the field. He thought of the feel of the ball on his knees and thighs, on the tips of his toes, on his forehead, the way it became a part of him on the best days, another limb. He remembered the irreplaceable feeling of running down the field, how it had felt that nothing could possibly come between his body and what was in front of it. Everything was ahead. He saw the bleachers filling, his mother shifting from side to side on the hard seats; he saw Erin and Nikol and every other girl he had ever known or kissed or fucked, cheering for him. Now he was on a different path.

  The screaming Benji thought he’d heard coming from the field drew closer. He thought of the rugby games in Maryland, the rugby queen, that poor girl who never seemed to mind getting the keg turned over on her head followed by the mighty yelps and screams of the players and the bystanders. Surely they didn’t have such sexist practices here, Benji thought as he turned toward the field. All this noise wasn’t simply over some lacrosse scrimmage. He walked from the pond up the stairs, toward the growing din, some kind of a protest. It was streaming down from the student center up the hill. Athletes were gathering on Chapels Field—some of them were suited up as if they were just about to play—soccer, baseball, basketball, tennis. Brandeis had no football players, just as his high school friends had warned, and he found himself aching for that promise of a football game, the fall air, alumni filing in with their ugly carnations stuck in navy lapels, the sight of players on the field all stuffed up in their padding and helmets. Today, bats and balls and mitts and rackets were strewn all over the field haphazardly; it looked like a sports extravaganza, some kind of twisted jock fantasy.

  Two soccer players, still dressed in cleats and guards, came running toward the steps just as Benji had taken the last stair.

  “What’s going on?” Benji tried to stop them. “Wait!” he said, struck by fear. Something was happening without him. The sixties, Port Huron, the Grateful Dead: how could he have missed so much? And Brandeis! History had already come and gone here. He’d been mistaken about the architecture; the newness was no more a blank slate he could write his own future upon than a blackboard, gauzy with layers of erased chalk. Effaced or not, everything had already come to pass; these buildings had previously been overtaken by angry students. Bombs had exploded; all the one-legged soldiers had come home. The
sixties were finished and he’d missed it here, as he’d missed it everywhere. Watching footage of Woodstock, even if it wasn’t exactly the Dead’s best performance, was unbearable. He should have been there! He was meant to have been there. At Brandeis he had this unshakable feeling he’d been born too late, and now he was relegated to learning about his missed opportunities in a college classroom.

  “You haven’t heard?” one of the kids with the number 12 on his chest said, jogging in place. “Carter just announced an Olympic boycott.”

  Ben looked at them blankly. “The Olympics?”

  “Yeah, man, the Olympics, in Moscow. The Americans aren’t going this summer!”

  Moscow. His father with a tin can on the other end of a long string. Hello, Bennie? It was as if he were asking his name. Greetings from Moscow! His grandfather sat across from him, repeating, Do you know how expensive this is? What’s this I hear about you having a new baby sister! his father had said. But Benji couldn’t have remembered this. And yet he had the enamel box—a winter troika scene—that his father had brought back for him from that trip. He remembered that, hadn’t he? His father handing him the golden lacquer box, red horses braying across the painted top, before his father went to the hospital to bring Vanessa home. To store anything you want, his father had said. Or nothing at all. So many times he had looked at the box as a kid, the old man about to beat his horses, a woman sitting back, waiting for her journey to begin.

  “Wow,” Ben said to the athletes.

  “Can you believe it? My brother is a long jumper.” The guy, number 8, shook his head. “He’s been training for this his entire life. I can’t fucking believe it.”

  “No way,” Benji said. “God, I’m so sorry.” What would it have been like, he wondered, to be cut from the play-offs because of politics? It was unthinkable, and that had only been high school soccer. For a moment his heart fluttered at the thought: winning. So many people in the stands, cheering for him. Victory. But this way of thinking—that some win and some lose—it’s useless. More than useless; it’s negative.