He remembered his panic as he lay in bed that night after his first dinner in Moscow. That had been before he knew what would happen in Vietnam, and still he had felt his country shifting. He could see it all the way from the Soviet Union. We were not so fabulous now, were we, with JFK shot dead. But what was to come was even worse! Everyone died in Vietnam. Questioning the world around them would be instinctual to his children. Even though Dennis had sat at the dinner table listening to his father criticize government for years, he’d had to teach himself to constantly challenge it systemically. He could see it in Vanessa now, this fundamental mistrust of information. This was the difference and this, he could now see, was his generation’s gift to the next: welcome to a world you cannot have blind faith in.
Rumors now, from State, said Venona was being canceled. Would all those decrypted messages be made public? he wondered. Because these people were not bad people; in fact, their ideologies he might even call admirable. These people believed in something. Anything, he was told, could be useful information—the Landsat images were cited—although the Soviets were more excited for his close access to presidential advisers. He had not said anything. Why would he? But he had not been sure one day he would not.
Lending intelligence would be of little risk, he thought now, and it would have been Dennis’s own protest, much more a link to the family tradition than what his job had become, especially since the travel hiatus. Activism had been the hushed surface of the family business, but something violent lay beneath that call to change. Were he to walk away from his desk, the locked cabinet left open, just once, say, he too could protest against the idea—blaspheme—that food could be as viable as weapons. Weapons were what should be weapons, but he was against those too. Dennis had thought then, as he thought now, was starving a nation into compliance morally correct? Were they actually starving?
Picturing his son in the crowd at a rally annoyed Dennis; it lacked originality. He wished not for a passionate life for his son, as he’d often hoped in the days he’d watched him run back and forth and back again on some green field tromped brown, but for a livable one. Not even Jimmy Carter could have believed for one second that the effects of his embargo would remove a single Soviet soldier from Afghanistan. Be a fucking lawyer, Ben, he said to himself. Be free.
“Where is the student center, Arnold?” Sharon asked.
“I’ll take you over there. Do you want to stay with Michael?” Arnie asked Vanessa.
She pushed herself off the wall with her boot. “Naah, I’m coming,” she said quickly.
“Let’s go to the rally!” Sharon almost screamed.
Arnie muffled a giggle. “Follow the yellow brick road!” he said, marching down the flight of stairs and out the door onto the quad. Yakus Pond shimmered, whispering a secret. “I’m the cowardly lion.” Arnie turned to watch the Goldsteins in step behind him. He brought both of his hands out in front of him and bent his fingers into claws. “Grrrr,” he said, and turned back toward the hill.
Dennis kept his head down as they followed Arnie. Sharon oohed and aahed over buildings and fields, smiling, half deranged, at the students who passed by. More and more he couldn’t help thinking that the unbroken chain of events was a load of crap, and what was needed for success was impossible. Ally support was faltering: already Argentina and Canada were not abiding by the embargo. There was no way to gain complete control over the private sector either; that was capitalism for you. The less concrete, more psychic, need for the American farmers to think beyond their own farms, beyond their own needs, was hardly in effect, just as Dennis and his colleagues had warned. How were farmers supposed to view the greater good of the country when their lives were wrecked by it?
“And here is Chapels Field.” Arnie swung his arm broadly to his left. “Did you know that each place of worship was built to stand alone, none in the shadow of the other?”
“We’d heard that, yes,” Sharon said, following Arnie’s substantial arm. She turned to Vanessa. “It’s really remarkable the way they’ve done this so everyone can feel free to worship whatever and whenever they choose.”
So much had happened since they’d visited here last spring, she thought. The fire had altered Sharon, even just the actual moment of it, the heat crawling toward her chest. It had been reassuring. It was a new feeling of something big and warm and wonderful approaching her heart. She’d thought it could be God—God’s love!—or maybe, she’d thought, this is my changed, enriched self, turned over to happiness; this was what everyone in that huge Marriott conference room was gunning for. Perhaps it was only later when she had tried to make sense of what had happened that she had these comforting thoughts, because of course it had not been God at all, not even His verification: neither a burning bush nor her self leaving her body in order to return enriched, fulfilled, beautiful, reborn. It had not been a perfect her, but merely fire itself, fire from the liquor poured over her cherries, evidence only of her carelessness. She realized this was not an event for which she had always waited.
The fire was taking with it all the layers of her. She imagined herself the anatomy model in her high school science class, the diffused desert light illuminating the classroom and the insides of the plastic dummy, the skin on the right section pulled back, arteries and veins and layers of muscles revealed in red and blue plastic, the organs and sex parts removable and interchangeable. She had thought her skin was gone from the fire, and she’d wondered, before Felix jumped upon her to put out the flames, and before she’d passed out, what she would be, and how she would exist, without her coverings.
“It really is about freedom,” Arnie said, Chapels Field behind them, as he herded the Goldsteins up the hill. “That’s just so true.”
Dennis looked up and faced Arnie. “Did you read that in a brochure? Not to be rude, but we had a tour guide tell us the exact same thing last year. Verbatim actually.”
Arnie laughed. “You sound like Benji!”
Dennis smiled.
“I know, I know, you can always count on me to drink the Kool-Aid, as they say,” Arnie said.
Dennis looked hard at Arnold Lefkowitz. Was this kid for real? Was he talking about Ken Kesey’s LSD or Jim Jones’s grape-flavored cyanide? Certainly these kids could not have slept through news of the genocide at Jonestown, barely a year ago. And surely they couldn’t be so insensitive . . . It occurred to Dennis that Arnie might not be referring to either, that he might not even be aware of the reference, that the phrase had already come to mean something so different and benign it was now rendered meaningless. Why even say it then?
Dennis thought, with a strange longing, of Len Ford, seeing him now on that first day at Hartley, blowing in with Sissy and her teased blond hair, her whole being strangely arousing to Dennis as she touched his warm, dry hand; even the way she ruffled her son’s hair seemed languidly sexual. He and Len would never have been friends now, not here, thought Dennis, not on this campus, where, in all its talk of freedom from religious prejudice and ethnic shackles, it felt more pious or holy or Semitic really than anything he had previously experienced. Lenny Ford, and anyone like him, would never have come to Brandeis, which made Dennis realize the diversity his son would miss out on.
“Not me,” Dennis said to Arnold about the Kool-Aid.
“Oh, I don’t know, D,” Sharon said. “We all drink the Kool-Aid sometime or other, don’t we?”
Dennis started to respond, but stopped when Sharon slipped her hand in his. “I hear the rally!” she said.
“We’re approaching!” Arnie said. “It’s so exciting, I would have totally been here earlier, but my parents, you know. They’re not big protesters.” He laughed. “Anyway, it’s kind of about the athletes. I’m more theater.”
Dennis could see a crowd, and he heard someone speaking over a bullhorn or a loudspeaker. “Athletes? How bizarre.”
“This is to protest the boycott,” Arnie said. “It was actually Benji’s idea!”
They were at the st
udent center now, and the crowd had spilled out onto the main walking road, where they stood.
“Look!” Vanessa pointed into the pack of people.
“Wait, this is a protest against the Olympic boycott?” Dennis felt his fingers digging into his palms. “In Moscow?”
“Wonderful!” Sharon said.
Dennis looked at her. “Not much of something to rally over, is it?”
“People love their Olympics,” she said. She looked away from Dennis and Vanessa, still smarting from watching this year’s winter Olympics all alone.
“It’s true, we all love the Olympics,” Arnie said. “Everyone does.”
“There’s Ben!” Vanessa couldn’t mask her excitement, though her brother seemed so far away.
Sharon saw Benjamin standing at the podium, so tall he had to stoop down to speak into the mike. His long fingers gripped the sides of the lectern, and his dirty-blond curls bounced across his face. My son’s bones, she thought, remembering him unscrolling the Torah by its wooden handles with the rabbi at the bimah, his voice high and then low, just breaking, his face so tiny but for the wide nose, a suit too broad for his narrow shoulders, room to grow. Even then she’d thought, He’s so grown up! Soon I will lose him. No more room to grow, she thought now.
Just then she connected her son’s voice with the words being broadcast over the crowd.
We need to know that in this country, what we work for will be appreciated. That if we spend our lives training—which, let’s not forget, is serving our country—and then we are told we can’t compete, well, what does that tell young people?
Lies! the crowd responded.
That our voice doesn’t matter?
All lies! they said.
It was the call and response of synagogue, Vanessa thought. And so did Sharon.
Well, today we have made our voices heard!
There was applause, and some whistling, and cheering.
Vanessa and Arnie clapped wildly.
“Ben!” Sharon screamed out suddenly just as the crowd had started to quiet. “Ben! We’re here!” She waved her arms dissolutely and started to charge into the mass of people.
Dennis got hold of her arm. “Sharon, don’t. We’ll embarrass him.”
Vanessa just shook her head and covered her eyes with the fingers of her right hand.
Benjamin looked over to the sound of his mother calling his name, and he nodded in their direction.
This has been a wonderful day! her son said. I want to thank everyone for their participation . . . Ben began to tick off a list of all the people who had helped make the day possible.
Dennis thought of his father; any corner, anytime he saw a group of people, he just stood up and began. This is the way it is, Sigmund would say. Let me steal you away from what you think you believe. Why must you eat your heart out? There are other ways, Dennis thought. Talking isn’t everything. In fact, it’s nothing.
Sharon was grinning maniacally. “That’s my son.” She turned to a clutch of students passing a bowl between them. They were dressed for winter in wool hats with flaps over their ears or with long tips that folded back and swept across their shoulders like old-fashioned nightcaps, and crassly knitted mittens, parkas hugging them tight. They turned and smiled.
He was mobilizing for the Olympics, which Sharon knew was a rally for them both. In an instant, she forgave him for last month when night after night she watched alone as Eric Heiden took gold. Nothing had made her miss Ben more than when the United States won the hockey. Sharon didn’t even like the sport; she had a crazed fear of what those kids would do to one another with each play, the multitude of injuries they had to have endured. And the fear of the Soviets winning never left her.
Benjamin didn’t even call when the Americans won! Here it was, the miracle on ice, and when she’d given in and called him two days later, she’d been distraught to find that he hadn’t even watched the game.
“Or maybe I did,” he’d told her distractedly. “I mean, it might have been on in the background.”
Sharon had resisted the urge to cry into the phone. She wanted to cry for everything: for the fire, for Dennis, who was always leaving, for Elias, and for Elias’s absence. For Benjamin, who would never be the all-over presence she hadn’t known life would be unbearable without, and for Vanessa, who was so clearly suffering. She had wanted to cry for her youth, and for the way she had never enjoyed it and now it had slipped away, first so slowly and then with about as much warning as her first fall on the ice. Was her son still young, or was he now old? Suddenly, there was no in-between, and she’d tried to tell Ben this when she’d called him after the game. He had not been responsive, and she had felt her insides draining, like when her water broke. She’d been at the stove when it happened, frying up steaks Diane, Dennis’s favorite.
There he is, Sharon thought now. When did I ever cook steaks Diane? she wondered, reorganizing the unhealthy menu in her head. She found her body unburdening, relieved that after so many months, finally she could set her eyes upon him, and soon—soon!—her arms around him.
There he is. He leaned into the podium and brushed his hair from his face with those long, attenuated fingers. Those are his bones. People cheered. Sharon took everything in. He is here.
CHAPTER 12
A Sealed Box
The party at Larry and Andy’s suite in the Usen Castle had been in full swing for hours by the time Benji and Vanessa arrived. The delays had been many. For one, Benji was in charge of the cleanup after the rally, and though the area had been left surprisingly clear of trash, he and Peter had picked up the few paper plates, the hamburger wrappers and beer cans and Coke bottles left behind, piling them into huge black trash bags. As Benji had thrown one of the bags into the Dumpster behind the building, exactly the way the permit had instructed, he thought with more than a little spite, What is the point here? Is a protest a protest if it’s sanctioned?
It made him think of Professor Schwartz, surveying the scene from the edges of the rally. There was something patronizing in the blasé way he held his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. As he’d milled around during the rally, Benji had caught Schwartz’s eye and had gotten no wink of encouragement, not even a nod of the head, just an empty stare back with the glassy and condescending expression of a generation that had dropped to the ground and was pulled out of courthouses by their hair, the same people who now had houses in the suburbs and listened to Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan on their turntables and hoped their kids would become doctors and lawyers. It was such a lie! Benji thought. That American Protest! class was a crock of shit and so was the rest of it. Who could learn anything worth a shit in the sealed box of a classroom?
On his way back to the student center, Benji thought of Schwartz’s newsreels: kids being dragged down the stone steps of city buildings in flowered dresses and thick black eyeglasses, their bodies limp, and he felt soiled, as if he’d said yes when he had meant no, and he began to relate to the way his sister opposed everything. She was anti-corporate-branding so much so that you couldn’t refer to a tissue as a Kleenex or gelatin as Jell-O. She was anti-animal-testing and anti-leather and had begun to wear an array of Chuck Taylors, the plastic at the toe and around the soles of the sneaker filled in with blue-penned doodles and colored markers. She was anti-nuclear-testing, anti-drugs, anti–South Africa, and anti-caffeine. That summer before he’d left for school, each day she’d come home with some new thing to rail against, and only now, stomping back inside, did he get it: you had to go all out. There was a war on. He imagined wearing big black combat boots (leather) and brass knuckles, his exterior finally a testament to his inner grievances about the many ways the government disregarded its committed youth.
The last of the buses was pulling out of Usdan, driving off in a cloud of black diesel, kids hanging out the windows, some with pom-poms shaking in the wind, when Benji came around in front of the building with Peter to help Alice and Gwen take down their registration b
ooth. As they pushed in the table legs and pulled thumbtacks out of the banners, Benji couldn’t help but again picture Alice on all fours, her ass pitched high in the air, her back arched. She had one of those curved backs, he knew she did, and he imagined that divine space where her waist met her bottom and fanned out. Rachel was shaped that way as well, and as he watched Alice bend to take down the banner taped across the front of the table, he realized it was Rachel’s figure he was in fact picturing, Alice’s blue-white skin somehow slipped over his girlfriend’s body like the fabric of a newly upholstered couch.
How could she not have come today? Benji scanned the room at the party, now jam-packed with people who had been at the rally, and he spotted two of her suitemates. They waved to Benji and he nodded back to them. Matty Schlangel sat perched over a bong, next to a starstruck girl on the ratty burgundy couch, his guitar still strapped to him as if at any moment he might just burst into song. Several people danced in the middle of the room to Zeppelin’s “All My Love,” which played achingly loud; they threw their bodies toward one another in no particular rhythm, arms swinging in slow motion above their heads, hips swiveling so slowly they seemed geriatric. But he didn’t see Rachel.
Benji felt bad about ditching his parents tonight, and now he thought about today, how when he was done speaking, his mother had come at him, hugging him and sobbing a little on his shoulder. Ben, she’d said. Ben. He had hugged his father, then had gone to ruffle Vanessa’s thin, brittle hair, but stopped himself, wondering if it could take such playful abuse.
“Your hair is so long!” Sharon exclaimed, stroking it with appreciation. “It’s too long, Ben, but it’s so thick!”
Benji shook her hands out of his hair as if his scalp had been invaded by large insects. “Your arm looks so much better, Mom,” he eked out. He pictured her in bed, her dry mouth reaching for the straw stuck in her milky drink.
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