Beautiful Revolutionary

by Laura Elizabeth Woollett

  ‘Do you want me to turn it off?’

  ‘No. I want to see the speech.’

  So Lenny keeps doing what he’s doing until Bobby Kennedy appears, at which point Evelyn scoots forward to turn up the volume, then joins him on the sofa, practically curling up in his lap. They listen to Bobby Kennedy. They laugh when Bobby Kennedy thanks his dog Freckles, and when he peaces the crowd before moving offstage. Evelyn says, ‘Isn’t he cute?’ and Lenny yawns, and this too seems funny. In not so many hours, he’ll be getting ready for work at the mental hospital and maybe still high, but for the present there’s just him and Evelyn and the sofa and all those happy people screaming on TV. Screaming and clutching their faces and standing on chairs like there’s a mouse scurrying under them, and wouldn’t that be funny? A mouse in that big crowd? Only Evelyn doesn’t think so.

  ‘Lenny,’ she says in a faraway voice. ‘They shot him.’

  5.

  Evelyn knows it isn’t Lenny’s fault that she has a hangover, yet in a way, she reasons, it is exactly his fault. Because if he wasn’t the kind of guy who liked getting high on weeknights, she wouldn’t have made the brownies, and if it wasn’t for the brownies, the wine wouldn’t have affected her so badly.

  She keeps her eyes closed as Lenny passes in and out of the bedroom like a ghost in his white uniform, doesn’t acknowledge the touch of his lips to her temple. When next she opens her eyes, she’s aware of a sore, clenched feeling deep inside her, and thinks: Of course. The brown spotting on the sheets confirms what she already knows, and wearily she strips the bed and then herself, and showers, and dresses, and pins her hair, and does everything she can to feel normal. On the front page of the paper, Bobby Kennedy is splayed out like a broken puppet, and the write-up says the man who shot him was a kitchen worker, Mexican or Arab.

  She turns on the TV. She makes herself a cup of chamomile tea. She lies down with her tea and a heat compress and feels herself shrink before the sweeping blood-tide of ugliness. On the screen, the students and blacks and Chicanos are mourning Bobby Kennedy who, though shot in the head, neck, and back, still isn’t dead. At least when JFK was shot, it happened quickly, skull and brains exploding like watermelon. Martin Luther King, just two months earlier, when she was completing her teaching credential. Never will she forget the way her students had cheered when the announcement came over the PA, nor how she had sat in the car and wept once school was out. But at least she didn’t have her period then, and at least she hadn’t been in Evergreen Valley.

  The blood gets heavier as the day progresses. Evelyn cleans the oven, the floors, the bathroom, until her fingers are puckered and she can think of nothing else to clean. She sits on the toilet and wipes herself and is shocked to see a clot of blood on the tissue, the exact shape and color of a leech.

  Evelyn turns the TV back on. She makes more tea. She takes up a picture of herself in bridal white standing with her parents and sisters, Vicky and Sally-Ann, both younger and prettier and fairer-haired than herself. She puts it down and hefts a pile of National Geographic from the shelf, occupies herself with the photographs of more beautiful places and people: sherpas in Nepal; Tongan children in flowers and beads; Czech peasant women cycling through yellow fields; Nuba tribesmen with scarified torsos and painted faces; red deserts; green lakes; turquoise icebergs; earth captured from orbit, just a milky blue marble in so much blackness. And that’s when she glimpses the insect on the wall.

  ‘Oh!’ she cries out — a feminine hobble of a cry, like an ankle twisted in high heels.

  Is it a cockroach? A beetle? A cicada? Evelyn can’t tell; only that it is large and winged and has been watching her from the wallpaper for hours, as far as she knows. Fear spikes within her. She rises from the sofa and creeps toward it with a rolled-up magazine; she manages to knock it off the wall without killing it, then shrieks as it comes sputtering across the carpet toward her. Then she’s striking at it blindly until she feels the crunch of its exoskeleton, sees the smeared brown proof in the carpet fibers, and it’s so ugly and so typical of everything, and the house so empty, and being married so lonely, she can’t even find the heart to weep.

  ‘Hey, Evelyn—’

  Like always, Lenny’s wife doesn’t answer when he calls her. Wouldn’t even if she was within earshot, and she isn’t. Where is she? Not in the bedroom or the living room, not in the kitchen cooking. The silence and cleanliness of the house unnerves him, as do the beads that clatter every time he enters another room. Mexican bead curtains from their honeymoon. Where is she? Evelyn?

  And then Lenny sees the sheets flapping outside on the clothesline, his wife stepping out from behind them. She is wearing something long and loose-fitting and looks, from that distance, like a woman from another century. Lenny feels a surge of tender relief and goes outside to meet her.

  ‘Oh,’ Evelyn says. ‘You’re home.’

  The whiteness of the sheets and the greenness of the yard shows him just how red her eyes are, and many other flaws: that her hair and skin are sort of greasy, her complexion too pale, her nose too sharp, the dress not one of his favorites, but one she only seems to wear when she’s sick or in a bad mood. He feels bad for thinking these things, and, as if she has read his mind, Evelyn sneers, making him suddenly embarrassed of his white uniform.

  ‘Did you hear?’ Her tone is harsh, almost accusing. ‘They say the gunman is an Arab.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Of course that’s what they would say.’ She unpegs a sheet corner and tugs it off the line. ‘The worst thing is, we’ll never know what really happened.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You know, it’s the blacks who’ll suffer most.’ She is dragging down the sheet like something caught at sea and showing him her witchy profile, the schoolmarmish knot at the back of her head. ‘Our grief doesn’t even come close.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I mean, we’re the lucky ones. We get to choose our battles. You got to choose your uniform. Have you seen any black men walking around that hospital wearing white?’

  ‘I don’t know, Evelyn.’

  ‘No.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘I guess you don’t.’

  Lenny watches his wife fold the sheets and bundle them in her arms, then squint at the distant hills and sunset. ‘God,’ she says, ‘I almost wish we were somewhere with sirens.’

  He thinks he understands what she means by this. He tries to think of what they’d be doing at this time of day in Davis: of the house they shared with their married friends, and music playing as the women cooked barefoot, and smoking grass at the kitchen table, or maybe Evelyn’s parents coming by with covered dishes and funny stories. Davis was fun. She wasn’t so uptight in Davis, was she? He catches sight of the Mary Jane across the yard and is hopeful.

  ‘Want to get high?’

  ‘No, I do not want to get high. Is that all you ever think of?’

  ‘Sorry. I just thought … if it makes you feel better …’

  Evelyn laughs, a snapping-cold sound. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that maybe I don’t want to feel better?’ Before he can say anything else, she’s pressing the sheets into his arms and slipping her hand into his trouser pocket, so sinuous he doesn’t know whether to be frightened or aroused. ‘Take these and give me the car keys. I want to go for a drive.’

  ‘I don’t know, Evelyn …’

  But she’s already jangling the keys in the air and giving him one of her dirty looks. ‘A week in this damn town and you already think women can’t drive? Salut, Leonard.’

  And with a flounce of her dress and a slam of the gate, she’s out of the yard, and he’s still holding the sheets, and then he’s hearing the thump of the car door and the rumbling of the engine and the screeching of the tires and nothing. He listens to the silence. He hears a mewling and looks around to see a white cat near the Mary Jane. ‘Here, kitty kitty,’ Lenny says, but the cat won’t come, so
he goes inside and takes off his shirt and pours a saucer of milk and scoffs two brownies without thinking, and by the time the milk is being lapped up he’s already feeling regret.

  How is it that things are always changing so quickly from good to bad? Has it always been this way or only since he’s had a woman in his life? Is it this way with all women or only his wife? Lenny drinks some milk. He thinks deep thoughts: how perfectly round and white the milk looks in the mug, how white that cat was, how he’s more truly himself when things are good with Evelyn, and less himself when things are bad.

  Lenny smokes. It’s a bad idea in the long run, he knows, but he also knows that it’ll make him feel better in the short term and more like himself. He switches on the TV. He feels his mind slide into that more comfortable place — detached, but wiser, more empathic. Bobby Kennedy isn’t dead yet. It’s sad and bewildering what happened, but not that surprising; similar things are happening all the time. Lenny remembers how when Martin Luther King was shot Evelyn came home from her TA job distraught. ‘There’s no hope,’ she had said dramatically. ‘I wish I was dead.’ And yet, she had let him hug her, and they had gone to a candlelit vigil where Reverend Burne spoke, and had sat in her parents’ kitchen until late, talking about the world and how there was still hope after all.

  Lenny wonders why Evelyn couldn’t have just called her parents this time.

  He tries not to think of Evelyn driving alone; of the scenic, winding roads in and out of the valley, and how the walls around him are getting darker. He lies back on the sofa. He thinks instead of the summer before, driving down to Mexico; giant rocks in the sea, her bright dresses and her hair still with the bangs, and how good the music was the whole time — ‘Incense and Peppermints’, ‘Somebody to Love’, ‘Happy Together’.

  There’s no hope. I wish I was dead.

  The white cat doesn’t come inside, though Lenny wishes it would. He closes his eyes and sees the white cat, white sheets, white sails, or are they black sails? He opens his eyes and the walls are black. He is trapped by the walls, and by knowing time has passed, but not how much time. Where is she? Evelyn?

  Lenny realizes he is hungry.

  Lenny is glad to be hungry, since it means time has passed since he ate the hash brownies, and Evelyn will probably be home soon. Lenny is terrified to be hungry, since it means time has passed, and Evelyn should be home already. Lenny imagines Evelyn buying them take-out somewhere, like a regular young wife who hasn’t figured things out yet. He imagines the keys jangling at the door, a smell of fried food.

  He is only imagining.

  If the phone were to ring, Lenny doesn’t think he’d be able to get up and answer it. If too much time were to pass, he doesn’t think he’d be able to get up and call the cops or Evelyn’s parents. His heart hurts, and his eyes. He tries in earnest to close his eyes, to concentrate only on the good feelings radiating through his body, and he does, and he sleeps, and when he awakes it’s to a sudden sense of weight and whiteness, like a ghost walking through him or that cat landing on his chest … But in fact, it’s Evelyn kneeling before him with folded arms and eager hands and her face close to his.

  ‘Oh, Lenny,’ she says. ‘I’ve just met the most wonderful group of people!’

  6.

  ‘I was unhappy in my marriage: young, isolated, lonely, oh so desperately lonely! Intimacy, communication, these were things I never knew. Never! My husband, he just didn’t love me. There was something so wrong between us, we were living a lie, I couldn’t understand it. If you saw him before, what a gentleman, dancing all night, flowers, you name it! I felt like the luckiest woman on earth. And then, wowee, it was like a different person! Wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t touch me, wouldn’t except, well, late at night, if he’d been drinking …’

  Officer Eugene Luce has heard this story many times, but it’s still hard to know how to take it. Hang his head in shame? Hold it high, for all to see? He settles for sitting up straight, hands clasped and shoulders squared. With the shooting of Martin Luther King and now that new Kennedy, attendance has boomed, more black folks and hippy-dippy youngsters than ever, and being the cause of Joya’s misery doesn’t feel so good with all those new eyes looking on.

  ‘We had children, one after another. Sons, two perfect sons! They shoulda been my happiness. But, Lord, I was so alone! Every time they cried, I blamed myself. I had … thoughts. They were so little, I thought, if I just put something in their food or, y’know, left the oven on. I thought, heck, it could be painless.’

  Luce’s sons, Roger and Danny, are nowhere to be seen; off flirting with girls from Oakland, no doubt. But his daughters are at his side: tomboy Bobbi and pretty Dot, both ash-blond with freckles on their noses, only Bobbi with his big nose instead of Joya’s cute pert one. He passes a hand over the nearest silky blond head, Dot’s, and she smiles at him placidly, then turns back to her mother’s histrionics. Daughters, they’re easier than sons.

  ‘Those were the thoughts I was having. I was pregnant again and those were my thoughts. I was so goshdarn miserable, I couldn’t see another way. Till you showed us, Father.’

  Through her tears, Joya is smiling radiantly, and, thirty-odd pounds aside, she hasn’t changed much from that fresh-faced, worshipful blonde who thought he was the man of her dreams. Did he ever dream of her, someone like her? Well … no. But she was small and soft and looked good in pink, knew how to waltz and jitterbug and flutter her lashes like she was having a pleasant seizure. A virgin, too. How was he to know it wouldn’t all work out in time?

  ‘Father, you showed us another way. You showed us our piddly little selfish lives. I was so selfish, Father. So caught up in my petty misery, I didn’t spare a thought for the suffering of my brothers and sisters. I deserved every scrap of loneliness in my life. But you forgave me. You forgave us! You showed us, Father, how to open our hearts to love.’

  Here, Luce’s wife looks around the tent, white and peaked as the hoods of Luce men who came before him. Uncle Hugh, his mother’s brother, had kept a photograph on proud display of himself atop a horse in full Klan regalia, looking like a cross between a ghost and a fairytale knight. ‘Love of fellow man,’ Joya continues. ‘Nobody embodies this so completely as you, Father. No people were ever so loving as these people here. We are so thankful, Father, to be here today with our beautiful brothers and sisters!’

  It’s true, they are indeed loving people, applauding Joya with a loud cracking like Midwestern thunder. Applauding Luce as he rises from his fold-out chair to meet her. There is still a target on his back. He is a tall body and a short haircut and years of emotional neglect, but he’s a changed man, surely they can see that. He holds out a large hand and Joya slips her smaller one into it, steps down from the stage with a smile to rival Doris Day: gum-pellet teeth, orange chipmunk cheeks, hat like a dollop of strawberry ice cream.

  All eyes on him, Luce takes his wife in his arms, kisses her long and deep.

  Lenny didn’t think his first week in Evergreen Valley could get much weirder, but trippy things are always happening in tents. Grown men and women crying into microphones, hugging each other, clapping and bopping along to songs not at all like church songs — ‘Glory of Love’, ‘Oh, Freedom!’, ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’. There are teenagers in blue singing onstage, white and black teenagers, which is another weird thing for Lenny, who hasn’t mixed with black people the way Evelyn’s family has. But trippiest of all is the man who bursts on the scene as suddenly as an A-bomb, a handsome black-haired man with a voice like moonshine.

  ‘That’s him,’ Evelyn whispers, touching Lenny’s arm.

  After that, Evelyn doesn’t say anything, and neither does Lenny, since listening to the black-haired man is like listening to rock music turned way up. Lenny feels alive listening to the black-haired man, and also like there’s a bomb ticking somewhere on his body. The black-haired man is talking about Vietnam. He’s talking about the Bible,
‘thou shalt not kill’ and young men taught to murder by the US government, Bobby Kennedy murdered, napalm, fear, all the things that make Lenny’s heart beat rabbit-like. He’s talking fast and croony-slow and up and down and all around, and yeah, a bit like a black person, Lenny can’t help noticing, though he isn’t black. And now and then someone in the crowd hollers in agreement, warlike cries that make the back of Lenny’s neck prickle.

  ‘Mmm-hmm!’

  ‘Damn right!’

  ‘Amen, Father!’

  It’s a trip to be in this place on a Sunday morning, but whether it’s a good trip or a bad trip, Lenny doesn’t know. He looks at Evelyn, as if he might find the answer in her face: eyes glazed, skin dewy and flushed. Her white hands are clasped over the tapestry purse in her lap, yet its swirly patterns aren’t speaking to Lenny today, for after all he’s completely sober, sitting in the uncomfortable chair in his uncomfortable church clothes and listening to the black-haired man preaching.

  ‘Father loves you! I love you! And, in this spirit of love, I want you to close your eyes and open your minds. Open yourself to receive this loving remedy!’

  Again, Lenny looks to Evelyn. She purses her lips and flutters her eyelashes down, so pretty and peaceful he’d rather keep looking at her than receive the loving remedy. But he closes his eyes.

  ‘You must open yourself to love. You must not be afraid. Brothers and sisters, nothing can harm you here. I won’t let it.’

  And it’s funny, but without even trying, Lenny already feels less afraid. Not a bad trip. Not a bad man, this black-haired man, speaking as if from the depths of Lenny’s consciousness a name he doesn’t know, but a musical name, a woman’s name, ‘Phyllis’.

  ‘Sister Phyllis … You been suffering. An enormous stiffness in your joints, so that even the smallest movement brings you agony. Can’t even bend your knees, sweetheart? Phyllis, do you dare — will you rise for us? Stretch out your limbs?’