by Lisa Alther
He paused. “Are you getting this down, Maria?”
There was a long silence while Maria studied her fingernails. Finally she looked at Justin. “Why don’t you just take your Brotherhood of Man and shove it, Justin?”
Justin, laughing, turned to Morris. “She’s cute when she’s angry, isn’t she? So who is going to write this down?”
“I will,” offered Emily.
“Stay out of this, Emily,” snarled Maria. “Write it down yourself, you fucker. What was all this big talk about ‘training each other in our specialties so that we could become interchangeable and practice an equality lacking in society at large’? I haven’t seen you exhibit any interest in learning how to run the mimeo, Justin, or go for Chinese takeout.”
“Let’s face it: because of my ruling class privilege, I have skills and training it would take years to develop in someone else. We should think of the group more as an organism, each individual being an essential limb.”
“So you’re the prick, Justin. And what am I? The asshole?”
Raymond stood before the mirror in his bathroom and practiced: “Uh … hey, baby, how bout you and me …
“Maria, it’s come to my attention that, uh …
“Maria, I was just wondering if you’d like to …”
The strong silent approach: Alone in the loft he’d turn to her, put his hand on her thigh …
He’d shaved his beard, leaving the mustache. It definitely made him look less cuddly.
He should court her. Candy, flowers, singing telegrams. He’d ask her to dinner. He knew he was being childish. Certainly Justin never suffered from timidity like this. He marched to the phone, picked it up, and held it to his ear, as the dial tone switched to an angry whine, and then to nothing. She’d laugh at him, turn him down with a pat on the head. She might even mention it to the others.
He slammed down the phone, threw himself on his bed and masturbated. As he lay with his hand full of semen, he took satisfaction in the knowledge that he had no Kleenex to clean up with. He’d made an effort to reduce his life to the essentials. After a lifetime surrounded by his mother’s gewgaws—samplers, plastic teepees, family trees, mugs from Ruby Falls and Rock City and Gatlinburg—it was a relief to live in one small room with nothing in it except a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and a mattress salvaged from the incinerator room. He chose to live as Negroes in the South were forced to live, so that he would never become softened by creature comforts into settling for the status quo. His one indulgence was a trench coat like Justin’s, which he hung with care on a hanger on the back of his door.
Wind off the Hudson was gusting around his windows and fighting its way into his room. He felt grim satisfaction as goose bumps crept up his arms.
He jumped up and stalked to the phone. With his free hand, he dialed Maria’s number, clearing his throat. When she answered, he froze. After she’d said hello several times in an increasingly annoyed voice, she whistled through her fingers and nearly broke his eardrum.
He flopped onto his bed again and looked around the bare room. Cold terror began to creep over him. He recognized it from his first days in New York. He would die alone in this room, his corpse unfound and unmourned. He would simply cease to exist, missed by no one, having left no mark on the world. He breathed deeply, but the terror kept coming. He moved his arms, blinked his eyes, touched his tongue to his nose, to prove to himself that he still existed.
“Who still exists?” he asked himself.
There was only one cure. He searched among some books on the floor by the bed and found the photo from his room at home of the hanging elephant. He stared at it and felt the terror halt Maybe he didn’t know who he was, but he did know who he wasn’t: He wasn’t part of that howling mob of demented hillbillies.
As the terror slowly receded, Raymond began to remember who he was—FORWARD’S resident redneck, a regenerate Southerner who’d had enough brains to leave, a dedicated revolutionary who was devoting his life to the betterment of the lot of those dispossessed by the social system he’d grown up under. Maria, Justin, Morris, Ralph—they’d mourn his death, tend his corpse …
He laughed aloud. What a silly thing to be worrying about. He was nineteen years old, for Christ’s sake, and in perfect health. He blew a huge sigh of relief, put down the photo, and picked up Das Kapital.
Raymond stayed behind after the next meeting to stuff and address a mailing about the availability of his documentary. He folded, licked, and stamped with machine-like precision. Soon irritation was making his movements jerky and causing him to rip stamps in half. He stood up and lit a cigarette. Trying to let it hang from his lips, he paced the loft. The truth was, he was bored. The folding and addressing, frankly it was hard to see what it all had to do with restructuring the social system of the South. He drew deeply on his cigarette as he’d watched Maria do, and exhaled. And how come he was having to do this all alone anyhow? “It’s your ego trip, man,” snarled Morris when Raymond had asked for volunteers. Well, if it was, then he might just as well trash the whole thing. Ego trips weren’t what FORWARD was all about. If Emily or Maria had been there, he’d have taken the prints of the documentary and flung them from the window. As it was, he contented himself with kicking a metal waste can across the loft
The door opened and in walked Maria. “I got halfway home and felt guilty about you here slaving away in the night all alone,” she explained.
“Oh, no problem.” Raymond waved his Cigarette dismissingjy. “But I’m glad to have company.”
He worked for a long time with renewed efficiency. Maria addressed as he folded and stamped. He kept glancing at her. She knocked him out. A woman you could work shoulder to shoulder with. Of course they personally counted for nothing, but drop by drop their efforts would eat away the boulder of human misery.
When they’d finished, he took a breath, cleared his throat and croaked, “Maria?”
“Yes?” She looked up.
“Uh. I have to discuss something with you.”
“Yes?”
“Uh …” Jesus, how could he get out of this? “What’s going on with you and Justin and Morris?”
She looked at him with surprise. “Why do you ask?”
“Uh, yes, well … Maria, I feel like my political work is suffering.”
“You do? How come?”
“Well, because of … you know, tension, and all like that.”
“Sexual tension?”
“Uh …well …”
“Between you and me?”
“Uh …”
“Well, so do I. But that’s easy enough to deal with, isn’t it?”
“It is? Yes, it is.” He felt almost disappointed that she was so willing to descend from her pedestal. In a way, he’d hoped she might get angry with him for injecting the personal into the collective, for debasing ideology with common physical hunger. He’d hoped he might have to duel ideologically with Justin for her favors, that she might require proof of his worth and suitability.
“Well?” She put down her pen.
“What? You mean here? Now?” If she could accept him like this, without hesitation, who was so undereducated and inexperienced politically, maybe she wasn’t so neat after all?
“Why not? I mean, we don’t want our political work to suffer, do we?”
“No, I guess we don’t.” With a trembling hand he took her arm and pretended he was leading her to the cushions. He was so terrified he couldn’t even joke about his inexperience. Foreplay he could handle; after all, he’d had maybe six years of it. And eventually the rest began to seem remotely possible.
“I’m afraid I’m not very good at this,” he murmured.
“That’s what you all say,” she moaned, her hips rising to meet his.
“We do?” Who was this “all”? Was he merely the most recent in a cast of hundreds? Was she comparing him to all those others? He started feeling like a fool. Then he realized that among those others were Justin and Morris.
He smiled. “You make me sound so heroic, Maria. But I’m just a plain working man.”
She bought him new sheets, and poison for the cockroaches. He watched as she scrubbed his walls, maintaining that he preferred it as it had been.
“God, this place is revolting!” she insisted. He accused her of being middle class. “I bet your mother didn’t grow penicillin on her walls,” Maria replied.
Raymond laughed. “She sure as hell didn’t. Her kitchen was as clean as an operating room.”
“What was she like with you? Bossy, I bet.”
“Yeah, pretty overwhelming. But what makes you say that?”
“Well, there’s something so remote about you, Raymond. As though you’re protecting this secret inner chamber from assault. You’re not going to let any woman near it.”
“Me? Remote?” He slid his hands under her sweatshirt and squeezed her breasts.
She laughed. “Go ahead. Change the subject”
Raymond felt Maria was a softening influence. He became more gentle and kind when he was with her. He whistled when he was alone in his room after she’d been there. He felt she was tempering the steel that formed his core. But he drew the line one afternoon when she brought him a bouquet of tulips. “I don’t want to have to sit here and watch them die.”
“But Raymond …”
“That’s final, Maria.” She nodded. They went out on the roof and tossed them one by one over the edge. Passers-by on the sidewalk looked startled as tulips fell at their feet.
Raymond and Emily were eating curry in a small Indian restaurant off Times Square.
“Well, I finally did it.”
“Did what?”
“It. With a girl.”
“Yeah? Well, good for you.”
“Guess I’d better not say who with.”
“Probably not. It wouldn’t be very chivalrous. It isn’t Maria, is it?”
He looked at her. “How did you know?”
“How could any of us not know?”
“It’s been that obvious, huh?”
“Um.”
“I recommend it highly.”
“Thanks. I’ll remember.”
“Or did you make it with that fraternity creep last year?”
“God, Raymond, that’s none of your business, is it?”
“It isn’t? But I just told you about Maria.”
“What is this—the Swap Shop?”
“You and Justin are certainly getting along well. He thinks you’re fantastic. He told me so.”
“Well, he’s right, of course.”
“He only thinks so because you listen to him endlessly, pretending to be enthralled.”
“But I am enthralled. I can’t understand anything he says, but I’m enthralled. I think he’s a beautiful person. The way he’s devoted his life to the dispossessed.”
“Yeah, I agree. Are you sleeping with him?” He felt jealousy and couldn’t imagine why. He was besotted with Maria, was convinced she was the most wonderful woman in existence. He just didn’t like Emily doing things without first seeking his blessing. In a way it was a good thing, though. A time or two he’d noticed Justin studying him at meetings with scarcely concealed belligerence. But Justin’s claiming Emily maybe compensated for Raymond’s taking up with Maria. Though as far as Raymond could see there was no contest. But let Justin think what he liked.
“God, Raymond, why do I let you talk to me like this? It’s really no concern of yours.” “Yeah, but I need to know.”
“You’re obsessed, is what you are. Like a kid with a new toy. Hey, you heard about our new niece, didn’t you? Laura?”
“Yeah.”
“Sally phoned last night. Seven pounds, six ounces. Twenty-one inches long. Sally said the birth was much more difficult than Joey’s. Her water broke about 4 a.m., and …”
“So the kid got born and has all her fingers and toes. That’s all I’m interested in.” “Huh?”
“Christ, Emily, what does any of that garbage have to do with me?”
“But she’s my sister, Raymond. Your sister-in-law. Your brother’s wife. You’ve known her all your life.”
“My boring bigoted baby brother and his boring brainless bouffanted wife are leading their bland boring blighted lives in Newland, Tennessee. If you know that much, you can fill in the blanks.” He stood up and shrugged on his dirty trench coat. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, stop looking at me like that. You don’t care about that scene any more than I do.”
“That’s not true.”
As he walked into the street, he glanced in both directions for the FBI tail he was sure would one day be there. Maria was waiting for him by a streetlight near the IRT entrance. It was Berlin. During the war. He’d sidle up to her. She’d offer him a cigarette. He’d take it, pocket it; the paper, unrolled and heated over a flame, would reveal information that would save hundreds of lives …
Maria, smiling, buttoned his trench coat and fastened the belt. “You’ll freeze to death, you silly Southern boy.”
He looked at her and didn’t respond when she kissed him. “Now what?” she asked with a smile.
“Come on,” he said, grabbing her hand and descending into the subway.
Back at his room, he phoned Emily. “Look, I’m sorry about what I said about Sally.”
Emily sounded disappointed. “No, after you left, Raymond, I decided you were right. It’s ludicrous talking about Sally’s labor pains when half the world is going to bed hungry tonight. Sally was lucky not to have to drop her baby in a furrow, get up, and keep picking cotton.”
Raymond was irritated. He wanted Emily to be annoyed with him, threaten never to speak to him again. Then he could say to her what she’d just said to him.
Justin and Morris, Maria and Raymond, were going to training sessions in a church basement, for their trip to Tennessee. A Negro in overalls instructed the two dozen volunteers on how to roll into a ball to protect the head and vital organs during a beating. A night stick, a cattle prod, a piece of hose, brass knuckles, were brought out—their uses described and demonstrated. How to behave when attacked by police dogs. Raymond felt pleasure to be preparing to do something real at last. Sending out mailings, sitting in on ideological disputes, weren’t what he had in mind. He wanted to be in on making change happen. Frankly, as amusing as it was, he was even getting weary of lying around in bed all weekend with Maria. He was ready for some action.
The man described having been beaten in jail by fellow prisoners, on instructions from the sheriff. He pointed out scars on his face. He warned about cars without license plates, cops without badges. They did role-playing, practicing how to avoid responding to taunts, how to answer state troopers, how to approach potential voters.
As a woman sociology professor lectured on the folkways of the Negro and white communities of his home state, Raymond scarcely recognized the place. He’d been brutalized down there, conditioned not to question the status quo, to accept that status quo as the only possible reality. Well, there were alternatives, and he’d devote his life to bringing them to fruition.
The car hurtled down the valley of Virginia, the vagina of the South. As Raymond watched the greening pastures, he reflected on how many groups had penetrated the South via this route—wave after wave of warring Indian tribes, German and Scotch-Irish settlers from Pennsylvania, Yankee troops. The atmos
phere in the car was that of a kamikaze plane. They all knew they might die down here in the struggle for justice for all the people. Until now people spoke about Brotherhood and Equality, and everyone agreed. But there were people out there who would just as soon kill them as look at them. This knowledge permeated them, making them feel deep kinship with each other. Raymond told himself that once you realized that death wasn’t something that happened only to strangers, you were an adult.
“So where are the shacks?” asked Morris.
“They’d tear them down along main roads,” Justin assured him. “P.R.”
Hour by hour the fields got greener. Buds on trees became tiny chartreuse leaves. It was like a Walt Disney time-lapse movie. Maria and he sat in the back seat pressing their thighs together. He had his hands folded over his hard-on, and Maria kept looking down and grinning. As they crossed into Tennessee, small white crosses by the roadside marked traffic deaths. Raymond knew he was home.
Passing through Newland, Raymond didn’t mention that it was his hometown. He looked out of the corner of his eye at the stoplight and saw his fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Moody, stooped and walking with a cane. She’d had a portable organ in her room, and they’d sung “Heaven Is Closer Cause Mother Is There.” He’d loved her as she sat at her organ warbling and pumping the pedals. But no, he wouldn’t allow petty personal affections to taint his awareness that the world she inhabited, and had tried to train him to inhabit, had to go.
Wilbur sat in the same valley that contained Newland, but Raymond had never been there. Newlanders, like iron filings in a magnetic field, oriented themselves northward, since their economic survival depended on it. Raymond knew Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland. He did not know Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, or the southern part of his own state. Yet this was the South of legend, the rural South. His own South, the New South of the industrialists, was too mountainous for large farms. There’d been few slaves, were now few Negroes. In the War between the States, East Tennessee had tried to secede from Tennessee when Tennessee seceded from the Union. Cherokee County in turn planned to secede from East Tennessee. Life wasn’t as simple as people imagined. It’d seemed much simpler sitting in that loft on the Lower East Side of New York than now, confronted with actual earth and trees, skin and bones. He was surprised to find himself gazing at the others, his chin jutting out defiantly.
