Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  “No. I’m not sore.” Vanessa sat up straight and crossed her arms, just as Anthony hit the campus road. They wound around the back of Ben’s dorm and along the quad, where, when Vanessa turned to the left, she could see several girls lying back in a straight row on the stone ledge of the pond. Their shirts were pulled up to reveal their flat white stomachs and their long hair fell over the narrow wall, their closed eyes facing the sun. The bus passed the art museum and the theater, then started down the hill, toward the highway that would bring her home.

  As Anthony pulled the bus off campus and onto South Street—thank the Lord, Vanessa thought, an end to the longest weekend ever!—Schaeffer leaned over the empty seat in front of him and tapped Sharon on the shoulder.

  “Hey, Mrs. G,” he said.

  Sharon turned to face him. “Call me Sharon, Schaeffer. Please.” She glanced over at Benjamin across the aisle and one seat ahead, his arm intertwined with Rachel’s.

  “Sharon then,” Schaeffer said. “You don’t mind if we smoke out a bit, do you, Sharon?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Vanessa said.

  Sharon smiled. “You should really be asking Vanessa. Do you mind if they smoke, honey?”

  Benji laughed.

  “What?” Sharon asked. “Vanessa is very committed to her Straight Edge movement.”

  “Oh my God, oh my God, make it stop!” Vanessa said. “No, Mom, I don’t mind, okay?”

  “We got her to loosen up a little bit last night,” Schaeffer said, hitting her on the shoulder.

  “Did you?” Sharon asked. “How so?”

  “Nothing big or anything,” he said.

  “Nah, nothing big at all, Schaeffer,” Benji said, pulling Rachel closer and looking straight ahead.

  “I see,” Sharon said, turning back around. Who knew what her kids were up to anymore. Who knew. But there were bigger things now. “Well, I don’t mind.” She sighed. “Go right ahead.”

  Schaeffer lit a joint and held it out to Vanessa.

  “No thanks,” she said.

  “Sharon?” Schaeffer asked, leaning over again and holding out the joint.

  “Thank you,” she said, taking it.

  “Mom!” Benji and Vanessa said at the same time.

  Sharon took a drag off the joint. “What?” she said, inhaling. She took another hit and passed it to Benji. “I’ve smoked pot before. How old do you think I am?” Then, as if every cell of her body had always held the memory, Sharon thought of smoking with Dennis after dinner on the porch in Skatesville, then making love beneath a swath of a million stars out back. She tried now to recall more than the image—a photograph of the trees swaying gently, silhouetted over the night sky they lay beneath—but she could not feel the two of them holding on to each other in the grass. The only true memories that Sharon held of her sexual life were of the several times she and Dennis had been interrupted—the time they had sneaked into a bathroom at a party at the Pearlsteins’ on New Year’s Eve 1967; the time Ben wandered in, teary from a nightmare, and Dennis had rushed to cover her with the quilt—it was only through the eyes of someone else that Sharon could see herself making love. With Elias there had been the fear that Dennis might, however unlikely, rush through the door at any moment, so it allowed her now to picture that first time with him from her husband’s perspective and so see it for herself.

  Telling Dennis had been stupid; it had been for no other reason than her own unburdening. All this talk of compulsive truth telling that had begun with consciousness-raising was a lot of bullshit, Sharon thought. It was far harder to hold on to a lie, a stone in one’s shoe one could not dislodge. They’d been walking around for so long with shoes filled with stones.

  Benji passed the joint on to Rachel without taking a hit, and she paused momentarily, uncharacteristically unsure what she should do. Then she merely shrugged and took a drag, then brought it over to Roy, up in front, where it got passed among the guys, including Anthony, Sharon noted, displeased that the driver would be smoking. Penelope, she was relieved to see, was not offered the joint.

  Sharon leaned back in her seat and felt a swell of goodwill. The campus receded behind them, and Sharon thought of the last time she’d departed Brandeis, with Dennis, when they’d dropped Ben off at school last September. The drive back home then had been loaded with dread, but despite what she was returning to now, she was filled with hope. Because now everything was split open, wasn’t it? Or perhaps she could slip into this world as if she were still that girl fleeing her hometown, that nineteen-year-old student swinging her crossed legs in class at George Washington, smack in the middle of this American century. Jesus Christ, she had friends who douched with Pepsi then. It was 1958; one month after she arrived, Pasternak had refused the Nobel Prize. Out of fear. He wrote Doctor Zhivago and then refused the Nobel, so worried was he over being stripped of his Soviet citizenship. Would Tatiana, she wondered, be able to get home?

  Out of the dizzy froth, the malt shop of her college years, the fifties closing around her, was this notion that she would break free. She’d had her chance, she thought, and she had not totally blown it. There had once been a war she had stood up against. Really she was a child of war; she’d been born just before the bombs had started dropping in Europe; she had come of age during Korea; her young adulthood was formed by Vietnam. The Cold War? This was nothing. Sharon’s heart was beating quickly now; she thought of Dennis and wondered where he was right this minute.

  “My mother,” he’d said, “has been taken in for spying.”

  “For what?” Sharon had said. Of all the things she thought he might tell her when he hung up that phone, of all the tragedies he might have reported, this was not one she’d ever thought of.

  “Spying,” Dennis had said. “My mother has been stealing information and giving it to the Soviets.”

  Now Sharon began to breathe heavily and struggled to sit up straight in her seat.

  Up front the boys played guitar and sang, Take up your china doll, take up your china doll, it’s only fractured and just a little nervous from the fall.

  Once more Sharon felt a rush of panic.

  “Information,” Sharon had said. It had not been a question. Only now did she wonder what that might have meant.

  “Names,” Dennis had said. “A talent scout, if you will.” He’d almost laughed.

  Now Sharon remembered Tatiana holding that little green beauty case so tightly, in both hands, beneath her chin. What the hell was in that thing? She had stolen a look once when Tatti had gone into town with Dennis and the kids, and it was just lipstick and face cream and vitamins, tablets of two and three set in a long plastic strip, compartmentalized for each day of the week.

  What, Sharon wondered, what had Tatiana given over? Dennis said it had been names. Just people, he’d said, as if this made it some kind of human act. She had heard Dennis this morning: that CHORD Tatiana had worked for, that record company her husband had been so proud of, the one that published “Chattanooga Choo Choo” when no other company would accept the ridiculous name, he’d told her, it was a front. It was all a front.

  Now Sharon wished she had asked what information and why and to whom she was giving it and also how. How had she sent on these names?

  “You thirsty, Mom?” Ben stood over her. “You want some water?”

  Penelope called up from the front, “We also have aloe vera juice that I mixed up myself if you would like, Mrs. G.”

  “That would be great,” she said, momentarily happy about the prospect of nutritional healing as she tried to tamp down, to tamp down, this fear.

  She could just drop out and go upstate with these kids and grow healthful things; she could sell her half of the business to Marlene with her gold watch and her slow hands and fat ass and her rich corporate tool of a husband, and she could channel Richard Olney and reject this unending governmental use of food as a weapon. But would these kids take her in? She, who had gotten a diaphragm in 1958? She, who came East when she should have s
tayed out West? She, whose mother-in-law was about to go down in infamy?

  “Thanks.” She smiled crookedly.

  The music was so sweet, so hopeful, impossibly so, she thought, remembering Elias, naked on the bed, his calloused fingertips picking at the strings. She imagined Dennis getting out of the Volvo and walking into the house, head bent toward the ground. She looked out the window as the trees went whipping by along the highway.

  Her father might have liked it here, Vanessa thought, surveying the scene on the bus. She blushed a little at the thought of him trying to whittle with Roy up front, singing along, or talking about when he headed out West in a jalopy, with his college roommate. She wondered what Len had been like then, because he was not now the kind of man she imagined doing any of those things. He wore a suit and a tie and ignored his children. I’m the man in the moon, he’d say when she asked what his job was. And his hair was so short! Where had this other Len, the cool one, gone?

  Take up your china doll, take up your china doll, it’s only fractured and just a little nervous from the fall, they all sang up front.

  China doll, Russian doll. Vanessa thought of the hours of her youth spent unscrewing each part, then pushing each one back together again, the squeak and thwop of the two ends sealing. Next to Vanessa, Schaeffer slapped his fingers on his thighs and moved his head around in no particular direction. He was an idiot. And yet, Vanessa thought now, and yet. It had not been a bad experience; he had been sweet and he had held her from behind as she’d had her negative thoughts—thoughts of Sean and Jason, her bloated belly, kids throwing each other at Ian MacKaye at a Teen Idles show, all cast by the acid in a frightening and unforgettable light—Schaeffer had not budged from his hold.

  In front of her Benjamin sat intertwined with his girlfriend, and Vanessa watched him tip his head onto Rachel’s shoulder. He ran her hand through his tangled hair. Normally this would have caused Vanessa untold annoyance, yet today it seemed sweet to her that her brother was in love. One day it will be me, Vanessa thought, just as she had each time her brother had biked ahead or driven away or swum farther out to sea. The feeling never left her, and just now as she felt that nuanced pain at the tip of her heart that told her, let him go on ahead, it’s okay, one day it will be you who gets to the center of the ocean first, she knew that her brother wasn’t going back. He would stay on this bus for as long as it, like Rachel, would hold him.

  She tapped Schaeffer on the shoulder and he turned to her.

  “Hey,” he said, tilting his head.

  “Hi,” she said, smiling at him, her mouth closed. She put her hand on his knee, then, seeing her bitten fingernails and bloody cuticles, she shrank back. “Maybe I will smoke a bit after all.”

  “Sure. No problem, Sister Goldstein.”

  She leaned back in her seat. “I mean, it is going to be a fucking long ride.”

  Sharon could smell her daughter smoking pot. She felt her body tensing, and as she looked out the window, she massaged her left shoulder, thinking how only yesterday she had been climbing steadily north in her powder blue Volvo. What would she have thought to see this bus rambling alongside her? She would have thought it was a bus full of youth.

  This is what she’d meant, this, this crazy bus, this journey was what she’d intended when she’d gone in for LEAP! training. It’s why she’d had the prescience to understand that synagogue was not the place for her just then, because what, in the end, had not been written there? It was age-old, like grief, and Sharon wanted everything new: new trails, new politics, a new man. But she’d come out with what? Some discarded mantras as soothing as these songs. Awakened desire. She missed then the slow wail of the shofar blowing, and the thought of a congregation rapt in prayer gripped her.

  Still, after over two months, her arm felt like a wound scraped open. But there was comfort in the steady hum of the wheels along the asphalt of the road and in Anthony’s occasional yelps of joy. In watching Benjamin nod off in the smooth curve of his girlfriend’s neck. She was glad he’d found someone. Someone real. Was it possible for the heart to relax? Because she felt hers let go, the mad thumping easing to a tolerable beat. She ran her tongue over her teeth, her jaw loosening, the muscles in her neck going slack. Opening her hands wide and extending her fingers, she could see the half-moon imprints of her fingernails stamped inside her palms.

  She stretched loudly. “Anybody hungry?” she yelled out.

  Benji jumped, and Rachel gently pressed his head back down.

  Gerald and Anthony screamed “Yes!” at the exact same time.

  Sharon slid out of her seat, and touching the backs of the ripped leather seats for balance, she walked to the front of the bus, behind the driver’s seat, where several of the seats had been pulled out and a sink and a stove and a few cabinets for storage beneath had been fashioned in their place.

  She opened the latched cabinet above the sink, where the dried goods were stored, and, contemplating the plastic jars of dried beans and peanut butter, she took out the jar of whole-wheat spaghetti, placed it on the counter, and held it steady as she knelt down. She touched the containers in the cabinet below: flour, sugar, a large plastic bucket filled with vegetables. These must be from their farm, Sharon thought, examining the zucchini, the skin a beautiful striated light green, not spongy like supermarket squash. The carrots and leeks and turnips and radishes still had dirt in their fine, extensive, delicate roots.

  Vanessa watched her mother catch herself with her hands, the plastic pasta jar bouncing on the floor as the bus changed lanes. She reluctantly got out of her seat, slapping Schaeffer on the leg as she moved to help. “You okay, Mom?” she asked as she made her way toward the front of the bus, picking up the jar on her way.

  “I’m good!” Sharon said, standing. She began to wash the zucchini and the carrots. “Want to find a big pot, hon?”

  Vanessa stood next to her mother.

  “It’s below,” Penelope said, rising from her seat. She hooked her hand to her hip so it fanned out at the small of her back.

  “Sit!” Vanessa said, retrieving the pot. “I got it.”

  Her mother filled the pot with water and placed it on a burner.

  “It’s all right,” Penelope said, joining them at the already crowded sink. “I like to cook.”

  “Me too,” Sharon said.

  “She has a catering business,” Vanessa told Penelope.

  Sharon was caught off guard by the pride in her daughter’s tone.

  “Really! Cool.” Penelope laid out a hand towel for Sharon to place the vegetables on as she finished washing them, then set down a cutting board. “There’s another one here.” Penelope pointed below again, and Vanessa retrieved it. “I sometimes take this board”—she reached behind the closest seat—“and place it over the seats.”

  “How do you want these chopped, Mom?” Vanessa asked, taking several zucchini and onions from Penelope. It had been a while since Vanessa had sat on those orange kitchen stools as her mother chopped and hummed. It had been many years.

  “Everything diced,” Sharon said, violently smashing garlic cloves. “Penelope, onions first for the sauce. Vanessa, the carrots. I’ll add the zucchini in a bit.”

  Benji woke from his nap to the sound of his mother hurling instructions over the drum space of a Dead bootleg and to the smell of sizzling onions.

  Benji unstuck himself from Rachel and wiped a bit of spittle from the curve of her neck. “Where are we?” he called up front.

  “Just north of New York City,” Anthony screamed back.

  “Smells yummy,” Rachel said, straightening.

  Benji imagined himself alone with her in the far reaches of her unknowable body. He leaned over. “I just want to say,” he said into her ear, “that nothing happened with Alice.” He wiped the hair off his forehead. “It was spiteful, I know, leaving the party that way. I mean, I was angry about you not showing yesterday, but it was cold, and nothing happened. I mean, I stopped myself.”

  R
achel was smiling disingenuously. “Oh, I know. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here with you.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “Hm hmmm.”

  He’d seen Rachel’s face as he was leaving the party, and though he had been pleased at the time to have made her feel as badly as she’d made him feel, he wished he could take it back now. “So you totally trusted me the whole time?”

  “Sure.”

  “You are amazing. One of the many reasons I love you.” He kissed her on the cheek.

  “Sure.”

  Benji pulled back and cocked his head. “Sure? Sure what?”

  “Sure I trust you,” she said, still grinning.

  “Well, good. You know you really could have come to the rally. It was totally fucked that you didn’t come.”

  “Besides”—she turned away to look at the window, ignoring him—“Alice already told me.”

  “You talked to Alice?” Benji remembered her giggling at his desk, her ass hitting the play button on the answering machine. He couldn’t really say what would have happened had Rachel’s voice not been piped into the room.

  “Of course I did!” Rachel turned back to face Benji. “Something wrong with that?”

  Benji took Rachel’s hand on his lap and leaned back in his seat. “Of course not.” He braced himself for a lecture on female solidarity. He paused, but thankfully that lecture didn’t come.

  He would never leave her, would never let her go, and now he pictured her out West somewhere, dancing barefoot in the desert or beneath a forest canopy. She wore a flowing dress, a garland of flowers wrapped around her head, not unlike the woman in the commercial for her shampoo, not unlike, he remembered now, that woman on the Mall so many years ago, wrapped up in leaves and flowers, everything about her a flowing tribute to peace but for her angry red mouth.

  Penelope scooped the pasta onto paper plates, and Sharon expertly ladled her sauce and vegetables over each portion. Carefully walking through the aisle, Vanessa passed the plates, and Gerald took a six-pack of Pabst from the minifridge and began throwing cans of beer to waving hands.