Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Dennis looked at her in the rearview mirror, and Sharon turned around in her seat.

  “That would be great, honey,” Sharon said, twisting with so much enthusiasm that Vanessa thought of those cartoons where Wile E. Coyote’s body twirls into a spiral, then spins back to himself. Her mother was like that, all fast, tense movements, coiled to spring. “Explain your music to us.”

  “You need to be listening for me to talk about it,” Vanessa said. PMA is a little like Mom’s stuff, she was going to say, with empathy. She would not be against her mother, she promised herself, as she had been on so many occasions.

  “Put it back in, Dennis,” Sharon said, her arms still gripping the headrest, her body turned to the backseat. “We want to hear about Vanessa’s new music!”

  “Oh, God. Forget it. It’s not my new music.” Vanessa should have just had them play the Tom Waits and be done with it. How could she really convey how exciting and frightening that first Bad Brains show had been. The building had nearly collapsed! From people responding to music, retaliating against it. It had felt completely life-altering. And yet it had seemed to have nothing to do with her.

  “I’m sorry; I can’t,” Dennis said. “I’m the driver here and it’s a hell of a long way to Boston.”

  “Well, tell us anyway!” Sharon said.

  “It’s not such a big deal, will you please stop making such a big deal about everything? Jesus.” Vanessa felt her goodwill toward her parents dissipating in quick, receding waves.

  “I’m not,” Sharon said, finally facing forward. “I just wanted to know a little more about you.”

  “Believe me, there’s nothing to know.”

  But of course that had been a lie, and she knew her mother recognized it as such. Would she like to know that Sean had toilet-papered their house because she’d had sex with him six months ago? Or perhaps her parents might want to hear how she could feel her body growing beneath her, right now even, that she could not escape her fat and muscle and hard bone, not ever, even her skin felt wrong and foreign to her. Can someone be in the wrong skin? She was wrong, a sausage that didn’t fit in its own casing. How, she wanted to ask her mother, though she never would, not in a million years, how does one escape her body? It was ruining everything, and everything Vanessa tried to make it go away—sex, music, television—only made her more aware of it.

  Inside that skin wasn’t a whole lot better. Inside was a pit of black; she was hateful and mean and worthless and stupid. It was far easier to worry over the outside.

  Had her mother felt freed? In that fire, that awful fire, her mother had ascended from the table like a paper doll burning, rising into the air.

  What, Vanessa wondered, did freedom feel like? Perhaps it was like those few passing moments when she did not think of food. Because her thoughts of food were not like those of her brother, who ate for nourishment, when he was hungry, stopping when he was full. Or of her mother, who went over recipes and drove out to rural Maryland and Virginia, over rolling hills and into farms, cooking to bring happiness. Nor was she like her father, who worried over what the lack of food would do to entire countries. Vanessa thought only of herself, of getting food and stuffing herself with it. When she gave in to this constancy, the deepest thought she had was where the food would reveal itself—on her enormous hips and thighs, in her cheeks—and how she could rid herself of it, what types of food she could eat to make the ridding easier. It was such a weak and shallow conceit.

  “I know there’s lots to know about you, but if not today, that’s okay,” Sharon said. She gave Dennis a knowing look that was not quite a roll of the eyes, but nearly so. “I know! Let’s play I Spy!”

  “Mom,” Vanessa said.

  “Come on. I’ll start.” Sharon closed her eyes. “I spy with my little eye . . . something . . .”

  “I don’t want to play.” Vanessa looked out the window at the cars driving parallel to the Goldsteins’, an old, mustard-colored Volare filled with poodles dropping behind.

  “Well, I do,” Dennis said, which felt like more of a statement against Vanessa than support of the game they’d played on every road trip. I spy with my little eye! Anything. A multicolored Super Ball. Daddy’s newspaper. Mom’s sunglasses, two rose-colored lenses the size of their tires. Vanessa and Ben would go wild to see who would be the first to find the object, but most of the time it was Vanessa who could rut nearly anything out. Dennis would always turn in the driver’s seat, his hands gripping and releasing the steering wheel. You’re a great spy, Van. Turning toward the road again, and looking out at the flat horizon of 95, he’d say, We should all be very careful.

  “Go right ahead,” Vanessa said. “By all means, play all you want.” She thought of riding with Helen in Los Angeles on some endless sunny highway. Out there they were always driving somewhere. Where had they been going? Somewhere silly like Grauman’s Chinese or the Santa Monica Pier. Or to Canter’s Deli, the one place that wasn’t the Polo Lounge where Helen would eat breakfast. Canter’s was so dark, a sharp contrast to the constant sunlight. The smell of smoke permeated the plastic-covered banquettes and the waitresses wore drooping false eyelashes; they pinched Vanessa’s cheeks and called her toots.

  Ben had also been in the car, in the backseat, Vanessa’s turn to sit in front, yet another special treat not allowed at home. That day Vanessa had said, as she always did on long car rides at that time, I Spy! She’d turned to her brother to see if he was up for the game, and as she’d twisted back around, she saw a Mercedes in front of them, its blue plates with yellow writing: California! What a strange and lovely place. The lettering of the plate was hazy behind the exhaust, and she looked up from it to see Nana Helen turning from the road to stare at her, wide-eyed. Vanessa saw her grandmother look momentarily unhinged, wild, and then, before she could ask her what the matter was, Helen grabbed her arm. Her nails dug into the meat of her biceps.

  “What?” Vanessa said, rubbing her arm when her grandmother let go. “What did I do?”

  Helen said nothing, just gripped the faux-shearling-wrapped wheel and looked ahead, continuing to drive. Toward the hills, Vanessa remembered now, because she was going to I Spy the Hollywood sign, and she had known that Ben and Helen would be able to guess it while they drove because it would be staying with them for the drive the way the moon did.

  Helen had shaken her yellow, spray-netted helmet of hair and sniffed loudly. “That’s not a nice game. Not nice at all. Did your father teach you that? Anyway”—she’d turned gaily to Vanessa and then to Ben, via the rearview—“should we get ice cream?”

  “Yes!” Ben had screamed. “Yes! Yes! Ice cream, Nana.”

  Helen had then started singing, How much is that doggy in the window, and not ten minutes later Vanessa was happily licking her strawberry cone.

  “Something red!” Sharon said, her hand on the handle of her door.

  That was usually for the newspaper—black and white and read all over—but Vanessa was willfully not getting involved.

  “Is it in this car?” Dennis asked.

  A little boy in a blue knit sweater played in the backseat of a yellow Datsun, his face intense with concentration, his tongue dangling from his mouth. Were Vanessa and Ben ever that young? Her memories were images: her father imitating Rodin in the Hirschhorn Sculpture Garden; sitting at her father’s desk, her legs kicking the air as she typed on her father’s letterhead on the electric typewriter with two fingers—tap tap tap—pretending she was typing Daddy’s documents while their father talked on the phone and wagged his finger at her in warning; lying in bed with Nana Tatti, her long arms wrapped around her as she told the story of the Snow Maiden, her skinny fingers jabbing the air, as if that were where the story had been written. Now Vanessa had a crippling sense of her own aging along with the prescience that she was also impossibly young and incapable of handling the process.

  “Yes!” Sharon said.

  Dennis grinned at Sharon. “I know. It’s your underwear!” He look
ed down at Sharon’s waist.

  Sharon clapped. “It is; it is! How did you know, I thought you’d never get it and you got it on the first go!”

  As quick as a shot, Dennis snapped the elastic of Sharon’s panties. “I got it!”

  Vanessa threw herself back in the seat. “That’s disgusting!” She crossed her arms. “And anyway, it’s supposed to be something you can see. That’s the point; it’s spying. Do you have X-ray vision or something?” She knew she sounded childish.

  Dennis shook his head. “Uh-huh.” He nodded in the direction of Sharon’s lap again. Reluctantly Vanessa looked over to see a hint of red lace peeking up from the waistband of her jeans in the back.

  “That’s ridiculous.” Vanessa folded her arms.

  Sharon giggled. “Good one, D.” She slapped his leg. She kept her hand high on his thigh. “Okay, your turn.”

  “Let’s see,” he said. “I spy with my little eye . . .” Dennis was smiling, looking ahead, both eyes on the road. “Something beautiful.”

  Benjamin was not in his room when the Goldstein family arrived at the dorm.

  “Hello?” Sharon called, banging on his door. “Ben!”

  Dennis paced back and forth. “For God’s sake!” he said, mostly to himself.

  “Ben, come on!” Sharon said, still banging, and then she set her cheek to the door, listening for life inside. “Let us in,” she said quietly.

  “He’s not there.” Vanessa kicked at the floor and her boot squeaked on the linoleum. “You’re making a scene. Can we not make a scene, please?”

  “Hello!” Sharon smiled cheerfully as two boys who looked exactly alike—plump, tall, broad noses—came ambling down the hallway.

  “I’m Arnie. Ben’s roommate? And this is my brother, Michael.”

  “Do you know where Ben is?” Dennis asked. “We don’t exactly live down the street here.”

  “I think he’s at the rally. There’s been a protest all morning at the student center,” Arnie said.

  “A rally!” Sharon clapped and had a vision of her son holding a placard that read We Demand Freedom Now! A rally. She would not be like her mother, she had thought as they’d marched on Washington sixteen years ago—more walked, really, stood even; it was fucking crammed with protesters. Dennis’s gold ring had glinted even in the gray morning light. Her son was at a rally. Perhaps he would choose the road that she had wanted to choose then. Sharon had thought she would better the world; she would not always take and take, never to be satisfied. Her father, working through the hearings. It was a constant crossed picket line as far as she was concerned. Benjamin had been asleep on Dennis’s chest, his tiny head exposed, and Sharon had resisted the urge to protect his ears from the noise so she could watch her husband run his hand over his downy hair and know that her choices had been good ones. The Lincoln Memorial was packed with people but for that perfect rectangle of the Reflecting Pool, shimmering silver, miraculously still, untouched in the middle of such chaos.

  “A rally,” Sharon repeated. “How wonderful.”

  What if Ben, her athletic son whose biggest passions mere months ago had been the play-offs and cheerleaders and Maggie’s Pizza, carried it all on? What if something about that day when he was just an infant had gotten in and formed him into a committed person?

  Vanessa groaned. “Jesus!”

  “Your brother has obviously become very involved in politics, Van, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing.” Sharon remembered at the March to End the War, when Ben was seven, and how he had turned to sit on Dennis’s shoulders. He had clapped his hands and cheered wildly as people around him chanted, lifting their fists. She had wanted to reach up and still his applauding hands. Who celebrates a bloodbath? Ben had seen the first images on television as she and Dennis had seen them. A reporter in a Vietnamese field commenting as marines flicked the tops of their Zippos and torched the thatched roofs of the village to his back. The reporter did not try to stop it. Ben had gone up to the television and pressed his face up close, and Sharon had run to her son and swept him up, as if his close proximity to the screen placed him in that field and that village and that war.

  That 1969 march had been relatively peaceful, with a glorious blue sky. The morning had had a nearly implausible clearness, the trees so striking against it, but she did remember that day as one without hope.

  “He was one of the organizers.” Arnie looked at his watch. “It should be winding down soon.”

  “See?” Sharon turned to Dennis. “One of the organizers!”

  “I’m not going,” Vanessa said. “It’s going to be a bunch of hippies smoking pot.”

  “And so what if it is,” Sharon said. “So what.”

  She hadn’t been able to cauterize the memory, so there it was, there he was, so suddenly, Elias, naked, lying back on the bed in the hotel room, his tanned arms behind his head, the dark hair of his armpits and crotch exposed, passing her a joint, the end wet with his saliva. She pictured his penis, finished, flung at his thigh, shrinking before her. She had straddled him, reaching for the joint. Her hand was beautiful then. She was told she had been quite lucky that she still had use of her hand. A very lucky lady you are, the nurse had said, and Sharon had momentarily felt young and new and fortunate.

  What had happened was not so tragic when you considered all the people who were suffering on that burn unit; when you considered those villagers, or the soldiers burned by napalm, the people who survived that bomb, that bomb, that bomb, Sharon told herself. None of this was lost on her, but pain can make a person selfish. And vain. Now she wanted to duck from the image of leaning into Elias, feeling his stomach and chest first with the very tips of her nipples as she slid up him, reaching for the joint. She wanted to shirk the embarrassment of a moment when she had thought she was someone she was not. The fire had taught her this: she was not Carole King, or a girl who had bedded the boy who played acoustic guitar at the coffeehouse; she was not Judy fucking Chicago liberating vaginas by serving them for dinner. She had never been any of these people, and now she was a middle-aged woman, married she might add, who had bedded an out-of-work, middle-aged man she’d met at an empowerment conference in a hotel lobby. And not a terribly nice lobby either. It was a little, well, run-down. She still heard him playing guitar with his long, tapered fingers, and she could feel them at the same time on her body, the calloused tips brushing over her as he strummed: After changes upon changes, we are more or less the same. Sharon was not who she once was, or whom she had the potential to be, and she was acutely aware of this. She knew who she was not. How embarrassed she was! Now Sharon Goldstein was only—merely—whom she had become.

  Dennis said nothing, even as Arnold looked at him, expecting him to add to the discourse about the rally and how wonderful Ben was to have organized it. But Dennis merely shot his chin outward, as if to ask the kid, Where is the damn thing? Because he was tired of rallies; how many times could he protest? Sometimes one doth protest too much! And looking back, he could see it had accomplished nothing. Not until people grew violent. The prospect of watching his son go through it all the way he had, the ignorant hope, then the futile knowledge! The light! The sad, unshakable belief, the sanctimony, the morality, then the realization it would all come to nothing, and so the anger, the grief, the subsequent inaction, well, it made him weary. It was what he felt about Sharon and her cult, her pyramid scheme, her foray into self-improvement; he felt sorry for her and was simply waiting for the moment when she would come to him and ask him, What the fuck was I thinking? Then he would welcome her back. Dennis wondered what was left of any kind of a movement now, if anything true lay beneath the unending fashion of radicalism, and if his son would find something real there. Because Dennis couldn’t picture what the movement was anymore. Perhaps it was a function of his own age that he was no longer clear on what his kids’ generation was fighting for exactly.

  He remembered that first day of work at USDA, the squeak of the shiny linoleum against his new shoes,
brand-new Florsheim loafers, bought for work in an office, and the feeling—no, the knowing—that government service was a worthy continuation of a tradition his father had begun. His tenement neighbors were dealing in diamonds or shoes or, God forbid, braziers, even pickles, while the Goldstein family business had been activism. Had Dennis ever viewed his work as protest? Because really that’s what the family business dealt in. His mother also. He had heard she’d campaigned for Roosevelt until he was born, and he imagined her cinching her coat and going out into the cold, knocking on people’s doors to canvass. Sign this, take a look at that, here are the many letters that make up the names of agencies, this is the new utopia. This, he imagined her saying with her thick accent, is the true New Deal.

  Twenty-five years later when Dennis had first set up shop in that windowless office at the end of that long corridor, he’d thought, And here I am too. He’d thought how his son—Vanessa was not yet born—would soon see by example the importance of working from within, the tradition of the New Left. His mother had practically begged him to take a job in Washington. He had been surprised; when had his mother wanted him out of her area code? This is what the revolution looks like, he’d thought, looking at the scratched-up bookcase, the beaten file cabinet, then placing on his desk a framed black-and-white photo of Sharon in profile, her face in Ben’s cheek, her long hair cascading over her slim shoulders.

  There had been other opportunities for change, openings brought to his attention in the private sector, but even in government he had many options. He was not surprised when he was approached, both in the USSR and here. The requests were simple: to make intelligence available for a few hours so it might be copied and returned to him hours later, this sort of thing. He was asked by the Soviets to merely turn away, and also by a few surprising Americans he preferred not to think about so as not to remember them should he ever be called to. By saying nothing was he saying something?