Angela Sloan

by James Whorton

  “Will you and Ding come meet our friends?” Renee asked me.

  “Yes,” the man with the beard said.

  I asked her who her friends were.

  “Dirk and Wilhelmina.”

  Confused, I agreed. We climbed into a white van, all of us but the “You’re pretty” man. “I’m sorry you can’t come with us,” Renee told him.

  “Why can’t I come with you, pretty girl?”

  “Eeyore doesn’t want you to.”

  It caused Renee real pain to disappoint this fellow. He called, “Goodbye, goodbye!” and she blew him kisses out the front passenger window as Eeyore drove us away.

  It was a Ford cargo van. The interior had been furnished in the style of a hippie sitting room, with shell beads in the windows, a short daybed, and a fan-backed wicker garden chair that slid freely over the steel deck. It smelled like old laundry and leaf smoke in there.

  “Nice van,” I said.

  “It’s Dirk and Wilhelmina’s,” Renee said. “But Dirk doesn’t like to drive. He and Wilhelmina live an ascetic lifestyle.”

  “Is that right?”

  “You will like Wilhelmina. Everything she says is super gassy.”

  “Where am I going?” Betty said.

  That was the first she had spoken since we’d left the drugstore. Renee turned in her seat to look, and only then did the whole business come back to me about Ding not knowing English.

  “Bless you!” I said to Betty.

  Renee blinked at me.

  “Gesundheit,” Eeyore said.

  65

  Five or six miles out of town, Eeyore stopped to let Renee open a gate. We struggled another half mile in first gear along two uneven ruts between drooping hemlock branches. The track opened into a clearing with a funny cottage made of salvage in the middle of it.

  One end of the cottage was covered in clapboard with the bark still on, the other clad in roof metal. The covered porch was built of sticks. The whole thing had been painted red like a barn.

  The roof was tiled with overlapping squares of green and white linoleum. A porcelain bathtub had caught some rainwater under the gutterless eaves. In the yard a two-seater bicycle lay on its side with grass growing up through the spokes.

  Somewhere out of sight, a shrill male voice complained. A second voice answered, cool, sharp, and female. Renee popped her eyes at me. “Sometimes they get pretty cross with each other,” she whispered.

  As we came around the corner of the cottage we saw a woman in muddy fatigue pants and a muddy black turtleneck. She stood facing a bush. Perhaps it wasn’t so much a bush as a hump of leaves and brush, like when a fence post has grown over with honeysuckle. “Your elbows are sticking out,” she said to the bush or hump. She kicked it with her boot, and the hump of brush bounced before it was still again.

  Renee called out hello, and the woman turned suddenly. She looked hard at Betty, then at me.

  Renee had grabbed our hands. “Wilhelmina, this is Lucy! And this is Ding. We met them last week in Knoxville, and then we ran into them again! Isn’t it funny?”

  The woman’s dark hair was parted in the middle and combed down flat on either side of a very broad, hard-looking white forehead. Her eyes were like little sharp knuckles.

  After raking us with her eyes a good while, Wilhelmina strode into the red cottage, knocking aside a cloudy shower curtain that hung in the doorway in place of a door.

  The bush stood up on a pair of naked human legs. It followed Wilhelmina inside.

  “Wilhelmina doesn’t mean to be unkind,” Renee said. “She is following a narrow path.”

  But I felt that a load had been lifted off my mind. These people were too disorganized to be working for the Agency or FBI. My faith in accidents was restored.

  Eeyore began to come out of his shell. He asked me to translate a greeting for him, and I could not think how to say no.

  “Hello!” he said with a long grin.

  I made a noise at Betty, and she replied with something indescribable.

  “She says hello back.”

  “Tell her I ask, ‘Are you a Buddhist?’”

  More gobbledygook from me, and then Betty used a few phrases that I seemed to recognize from her previous angry soliloquies, like the one in the lake outside Baltimore.

  “‘My stomach hurts,’” I said.

  “Does she want a sandwich?” Renee said.

  I answered no for Betty. Betty took a seat away from us, cross-legged on the ground, while at a picnic table Renee made sandwiches of white bread and margarine. She had some sugar packets, too, and for each sandwich she tore a couple open and emptied them on top of the margarine.

  “I have never seen this kind of sandwich before,” I said.

  Dirk and Wilhelmina must have been watching from behind the shower curtain. Like a couple of housecats at the sound of the can opener, they reemerged as the sandwiches were being laid out. Dirk was out of his shrubbery now and had put on some pin-striped trousers and nothing else. He was a lean, pale fellow about five and a half feet tall, compact and nearly hairless except for his head. He ate like a hungry child, staring. Wilhelmina tore off half her sandwich at one bite. When it was gone, she whispered something to Renee, who whispered something to Eeyore, who went to the van and brought back his brown sack from the drugstore. Wilhelmina took the sack and she and Dirk were gone again.

  Eeyore produced a set of dominoes. Betty brightened up very slightly at the sight of these and helped to turn them facedown on the picnic table. I was bored out of my skull. A deer poked its head out of the woods. Renee and I went for a walk.

  There was something special about Renee and Eeyore that allowed them to accept just about anything they were told. When Renee asked where Ding and I were staying, I told her the truth, that we’d been sleeping in the woods. She said that was beautiful, and that ended it. She had a way of wondering at things without quite managing to form a pertinent question, such as “Why are you sleeping in the woods?” In her world, kids did not need reasons. She told me how she and Eeyore had come upon Dirk and Wilhelmina as the latter were being chased from a fruit stand. Renee gave them some Funyuns, and Dirk showed Eeyore how to build a pigeon trap.

  “So you’re living in this doorless cottage now,” I said.

  “We didn’t mean to come this far,” Renee said. “School’s out, and Eeyore likes to drive. I’m sure you and Ding are welcome to stay. You can join our study group.”

  “What are you studying?”

  “It depends who is leading the group. We take turns.”

  “It is kind of you to offer, and I think we will take you up on that,” I said.

  66

  Dirk piled wood for a campfire, but it wouldn’t burn. When he’d gone through one book of matches Wilhelmina sent him into the cottage for his “gilly suit.” That was what they called his outfit made of brush. He arranged it under some logs, and it went up in a smoky and noisy display. Renee made supper. There we all were, a bunch of soiled hippies by the campfire eating butter and sugar sandwiches.

  “Time for study group,” Eeyore said.

  It was Wilhelmina’s turn to lead. “First let’s hear from the new people,” she said, turning to Betty. “What is your name, sister?”

  “That is Ding,” I said.

  “Where are you from, Ding?”

  “Ding is from Taiwan.”

  Wilhelmina glared at me with her knuckle eyes. “I don’t like to see white people speaking for brown people.”

  “That brown person does not know English,” I said.

  “Lucy is her translator,” Eeyore said. “Ding only knows Formosan.”

  “I can speak a little English,” Ding said.

  Her saying this was a serious jolt to everyone, including me, but especially Eeyore, who had played dominoes with Ding for two hours silently. Renee consoled him with a punch in the arm.

  “What brings you to North Carolina, Ding?” Wilhelmina said.

  “She brings me,” Ding s
aid, nodding at me. “I go where she goes, and she will maybe just drift around and go wherever. We live a hippie lifestyle anytime.”

  “Thank you for speaking to us in your words,” Wilhelmina said. Now she turned to me. Except for Wilhelmina, we all sat cross-legged on the ground. Wilhelmina had a pail to sit on. The daylight had dropped, and the campfire flashed on her broad, bare forehead. “Lucy, you look like jailbait,” she said. “What’s your story?”

  “Jailbait about sums it up,” I said.

  “You’re a runaway?”

  “I suppose.”

  “In that case you’ll be interested in what I’ve got to tell you,” she said. “Tonight we are going to study about killing our parents.”

  “Heavy,” Dirk said.

  Eeyore said, “You don’t mean really killing them, do you?”

  “No, I mean something harder,” Wilhelmina said. “I’m talking about killing them in your brain.”

  “Why would we do that?” Eeyore wanted to know.

  “Because our parents made us who we are, and we don’t want to be who we are anymore. Eeyore, tell this group about your parents.”

  “Okay. Well, my dad is a funny old gentleman. He’s pretty elderly. He was forty-nine already when I was born. He knows everything about the ocean and all things maritime. Mom likes to tinkle the ivories.”

  “Now it’s your turn, Renee,” Wilhelmina said.

  “He made a ship in a bottle, like with strings all over it? He’s really sweet. I call him Dad, and I call Eeyore’s mother Mom.”

  “I mean tell us about your parents.”

  “Oh. My dad is deceased, and my mom is a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital. I don’t want to kill my mom.”

  “You don’t see the need for it?”

  “Not really! Do you need to kill yours?”

  “No, because I already killed her, and my father, too.”

  “Who were they?”

  “My father was an executive with the Xerox Corporation, and my mother was a schoolteacher in an all-white suburb of Rochester, New York. Both were pigs, unfortunately.”

  Around this point, I stood up. I couldn’t take it anymore. “I see where this is going,” I said, “and I would rather sleep in the woods. Come on, Ding.”

  I held out a hand to help Ding up and also urge her to follow, but she wouldn’t look at my hand. She had her arms crossed over her chest.

  “I said let’s scoot, Ding! This lady is a total meathead.”

  Nobody spoke. Everybody was waiting to see what Ding would do. She perceived this, and it was as though I could see her slipping out from under discipline.

  “That girl has oppressed me,” Ding said.

  “Dig it!” Dirk said.

  “She will always tell me how to do something,” Ding said. “Tell me how to eat. What sauce to put on food. Don’t put ketchup sauce on tomato! That is so wrong! Ding, why are you so stupid? Oh, Ding, why will you ever put ketchup sauce on that kind of food? Also you must never eat this kind of food with this utensil! Only very stupid will ever do that! Now sit this way! Ding, don’t talk! Don’t play radio! Now don’t make hand clap! But if that girl will almost die, probably who will take care of her? Aunt will not take care of her. Father will not take care of her! Only some stupid Chinese will ever take care so that this girl will not die. Girl, you are alive because of Chinese! Now I have said this. I want this girl to respond to my criticism.”

  They all looked at me.

  “Look here,” I said. “All of you hippies can go jump in the lake.”

  “Why don’t you respond to that sister’s criticism?” Wilhelmina said.

  “Ding has exaggerated. I do not always tell her what to do. I did certainly tell her not to steal tuna when she could just as easily pay for it. No—excuse me. It is even easier to pay for the tuna.”

  “Why shouldn’t Ding steal some tuna?” Wilhelmina said. “I steal tuna! Everybody should steal some tuna. Who is helped, when we pay for tuna?”

  “The grocery store is helped,” I said.

  “Wrong! The pig who owns the grocery store is helped.”

  “All right. If you want to say it that way.”

  “Do you love bloody imperialism, Lucy?” Wilhelmina said.

  “What can that possibly mean?”

  Wilhelmina smiled a narrow smile at me. She wriggled her bottom against the pail seat, settling in. “Tonight we will be probing deep inside your brain, Lucy. We’re going to pull some ugly things out of there and display them to you. Why don’t you sit back down? Are you being made uncomfortable?”

  “No.”

  “Anybody who needs to pee, go pee now,” Dirk said. “Once we start the criticism, we won’t want to pause.”

  Eeyore and Renee ran off in different directions.

  “Is this really happening?” I said.

  Nobody answered. Ding stared at the fire with her jaw stuck way out, inscrutable again.

  Dirk pulled a dry cedar branch out of the woods and threw it on the fire. The flash burned some hair off his arm. When all the hippies were back in their places, Wilhelmina suggested that I respond to Ding’s criticism with a self-criticism.

  “All I ever did to Ding was give her money, drive her around, and feed her in restaurants,” I said.

  “Don’t talk to us about Ding,” Wilhelmina said. “We want to hear you talk about your own problem, sister.”

  “I’m not perfect,” I said.

  “Keep going.”

  “Ding fed me stolen tuna and dressed me in stolen clothes. I admit I have been short-tempered with her sometimes. I get cross. That’s one flaw I have.”

  This was something in the direction Wilhelmina had in mind, but it did not go nearly far enough. What followed was a long session during which each hippie took a turn describing what was wrong with me. When I say long I do not mean minutes. I mean hours.

  I will summarize.

  Dirk said I had consciously or unconsciously participated in the oppression of a nonwhite sister and poisoned the air of the red cottage collective with a racist white anti-working-class mindset.

  Wilhelmina said I was the property of male white America and needed to steal myself from the same. “Steal tuna, steal your body, steal the future,” she said.

  Renee began her turn by explaining to me the concept of revolutionary consciousness, which was the thing that was expanded when we allowed ourselves to confront one another with criticism while sitting in a circle. “Before I understood it, I felt so reluctant to confront people with my criticism!” she explained. But then she had been helped to understand it during her own criticism/self-criticism session two nights ago, after assisting Dirk and Wilhelmina in their escape from an angry farmer whose fruit they had stolen. “Isn’t fruit fruit, even when it’s for sale? And just like we say, ‘This fruit is good,’ we should also say whether this friendis good. So my criticism of you, Lucy, is that you really can be a little cross with Ding sometimes.”

  Eeyore’s criticism was that he had seen me eating a meat sandwich in the drugstore, and we should not eat meat at drugstore lunch counters because it supports the meat economy. He allowed that eating stolen meat (such as stolen tuna) is all right, though, because it does not support the meat economy.

  In fact, as I have already made clear, there was no meat on my sandwich, only cheese and onions. The ham was Betty’s. But I did intend to eat ham and pay for it soon, so I let his criticism stand.

  I let them all stand. When the session was over I thanked everyone for their observations and went off by myself to think.

  67

  I could have strangled Betty. Why? I would not blame a rabid dog for frothing, nor a cyclone for turning houses over. And yet I felt surprised and hurt because the Communist whom I had been feeding and putting up in motels had suddenly begun to act like a Communist.

  I recalled that hard brown ankle and how it had felt inside my fists when I was trying to pull her out of the back seat of my Scamp that time in Baltimore. How much
better off I would have been, had I simply walked away from her and the Scamp both! Now I wanted nothing so much as to knock Betty down and put my elbow in her chest.

  Renee found me hiding out by the well pump. The moon was bright. “I’m sorry you are sad,” she said.

  “I have a question for you, Renee. When I first met you and Eeyore, you were going door to door returning change. But now, according to the new line, kids don’t have to pay for food anymore. Help me square it up.”

  She gasped and began to cry while smiling. “I never stole before we met Dirk and Wilhelmina. They talk, and nothing I say seems to make any sense! Oh, Lucy. I want there to be a new world, where all colors of people can have fun together.”

  “Tell me about the sleeping arrangements in this place,” I said.

  By the light of a candle stub she led me inside the red cottage. The floor was springy, and the air smelled like a box of old crayons. I jumped when I saw a figure sit up on the couch. It was Eeyore. He didn’t speak as the candlelight slid over him.

  “There is only the one sofa,” Renee said. “This room is Dirk and Wilhelmina’s”—she showed me a shut door—“but they don’t like for others to go in.”

  “I guess I’ll flop outside,” I said.

  “I wish I had a blanket to give you. I gave the towel to Ding.”

  We said good night.

  Out by what was left of the fire, Betty had spread her towel on the ground. She slept on her side, knees and arms pulled in close. I scrutinized her face in the moonlight. The eyebrows were lifted slightly. Perhaps in her dream she was raising a pair of sticks to her mouth with a bit of pungent food pinched between the tips.

  I sat staring at her from Wilhelmina’s pail. At one point I touched her arm to make sure she was breathing. She shuddered and gave a long sigh.

  It drove me nuts to see her lying there asleep like that. In my mind I went through twenty different ways that I might put my complaint to her in simple, clear English. You’re unfair! If only I could speak Chinese, so I could tell her how wrong she was in words that would pierce her heart.