by Marlene Lee
Agnes doodled in the margin, then added: “Yet we consider the nation inferior when it gained a republican form of government without shedding blood, something which never occurred before in the history of the world.”
She left the article on the table, returned to her room, and fell asleep with her coat over her. When she awoke it was dark.
“We’ve fixed you some dinner.” Thorberg stood over her, stroking her hair. In one hand she held the article.
“What time is it?”
“Seven-thirty.”
Agnes sat up. “Where’s Robert?” she asked.
“At the Socialist Radical Club.”
“How come you didn’t go with him?”
Thorberg yawned. “I’ve had enough meetings for one week.”
Agnes took her Chinatown article from Thorberg’s hand. “Don’t show him this,” she muttered.
“Robert gets excited,” Thorberg said, and dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “The important thing is that you’ve written a very long essay that is quite good. I congratulate you.” Some of Agnes’ old warmth for Thorberg returned.
Thorberg sat down on the edge of the bed. “What are your plans, Agnes? Do you mind my asking?”
Agnes tensed. She herself didn’t know what her plans were.
“You and Ernest are married now,” Thorberg said.
Agnes pretended to be still considering her essay. Without looking up she said, “Do you and your fiancé”—she spit out the word—“want me to leave?”
“No, Agnes.” Thorberg’s hair under the orange-ish light of the ceiling fixture looked like spun gold. Her skin was ceramic-smooth, except for a tiny network of lines, delicate tracery, around the cool blue eyes. With one pale, graceful hand she smoothed a wrinkle in her skirt. “Your husband is lonely.”
Agnes hated the word “husband.” She missed Thorberg’s radical opinions on the subject of marriage. Haberman had made her tame.
“Ernest’s my friend.”
“Don’t you miss him?”
Agnes crossed her arms, fixed her eye on one square of the quilt that covered the bed, and evaded the question. “We both want to study and work and get ahead,” she said.
“Do you want children?”
Agnes jumped to her feet and wedged herself between the foot of the bed and the straight chair in the corner. “I never want children.” She half-threw her Chinatown article on the small table. “Ernest knew that when he married me!” But Thorberg, instead of leaving the room as Agnes had expected, remained where she was.
“There are ways to prevent childbirth now,” she said in a low voice.
Agnes glared.
“Birth control,” Thorberg continued. “Robert and I use birth control. We have more choice than our mothers had. There is no need for a woman to have children unless she wants them.”
Agnes felt her face grow hot. She could not bear to talk of sex and pregnancy. She could not bear to think of Thorberg doing it with Haberman. She did not know the details of birth control; she did not want to know, and she did not want Thorberg, her fallen idealistic friend, to tell her. She didn’t like her woman’s body. She didn’t want to know anything about it
“It is very easy to use a pessary,” Thorberg said, and proceeded to explain as if Agnes had asked her how. “You insert it in”—even Thorberg hesitated. “You insert it in yourself, and then when—”
Agnes shoved her arms into the coat sleeves. “I don’t need birth control,” she stated, and stepped to the door.
“Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“Please, Agnes.” Thorberg ran her hand over her face. “I must talk to you.”
Agnes kept hold of the doorknob. “Did Ernest ask you to talk to me?”
Thorberg nodded her head miserably.
“Why can’t he speak for himself?”
“He’s tried. He doesn’t think you love him.”
Agnes reached over to the chest of drawers, took out a clean handkerchief, and began to polish the doorknob.
“Can’t you ever stop working?” cried Thorberg.
Agnes sank down on the edge of the bed.
“I don’t want children,” she whispered.
Thorberg turned sideways so that she could look directly at her sister-in-law. “Ernest wants a family,” she said. “He loves you. He wants you for his wife and for the mother of his children.”
“I told you, I’m not going to have children.”
“And I told you,” Thorberg said, flaring up, “that you can have sex without getting pregnant.” A long silence hung between them.
“It’s not just babies, is it?” Thorberg finally said. “You don’t want sex.”
Agnes turned her back on Thorberg. She reached out and grasped the bedpost. “I don’t want children,” she said. “I don’t want sex.”
“Then why did you marry?”
Agnes did not answer.
“Did you marry my brother to be near me?” A hard edge came into Thorberg’s voice. “Or for money?”
Agnes stared hard at the bedpost. She had wanted to be near Thorberg. She had wanted some money. She did love both Ernest and Thorberg: they were her friends; they were more than friends; they were her family. She stood up, shaken.
“Because, temperamentally, the two of you are poorly matched.” Thorberg’s expression was icy.
“I can’t explain it to you.”
“Please try.”
“You’re from a different world,” was all she could think to say. She felt sick.
Thorberg took hold of Agnes’ arm. “Sit down,” she said, and pulled her to the bed. “You’re pale, Agnes. Sit down.”
Agnes did as she was told. She sat down and then she lay down. She turned onto her side, away from Thorberg, and drew her legs up into a curled position. It was too much for her. She could not do all she needed to do. She could not vindicate her mother’s and father’s failed lives. She could not save her sister and brothers. She could not get an education. She could not write. She could not be a wife to Ernest. She could not be a mother. The only thing she could do was lie on the bed. She could not even keep her hot tears from wetting the quilt. Thorberg covered her with the coat and left the room. Agnes lay watching a full moon that hung so low in the sky it might be just above Van Ness Avenue. She fixed her gaze on its bright face. It was like being in Colorado and looking up into Aunt Tillie’s beauty.
The moon was not Mother’s face. Mother’s face was never the bright side of the moon.
Agnes lay calm and passive while the light struggled with the dark. She hung between weakness and strength. When the night sky began to give way to dawn, when the moon was a pale chip somewhere else in the sky and she could no longer see it, Agnes got out of bed. She folded her few clothes and put them in the carpetbag. She had dispelled something dark in herself. The bright side of the moon had won. She fixed breakfast and told Thorberg good-bye, then went to her boss on Market Street and said she had a family emergency and must leave the city. He paid her a portion of her wages. She telegraphed Ernest, withdrew her savings from the bank, and climbed onto a streetcar that carried her to the foot of Market Street. There she caught the ferry to Oakland and purchased a one-way train fare for El Centro where Ernest was working. Her life was no longer in San Francisco. She did not know where she belonged, but it wasn’t with Thorberg and Haberman.
12
China 1937
“The Commander is not available today,” said Lily Wu, approaching Agnes along the frozen terrace outside her cave. “He suggests you interview Kang Keqing instead.”
Agnes looked out over the cold barrenness of Yan’an. It was the commander she wanted to talk to, not his wife. She and Lily Wu filed down the terrace, two bulky figures in layers of winter khaki, their breaths forming small clouds of steam as they walked,
“I haven’t prepared any questions for her,” Agnes said. So far the only question she had was an impolite one: why would an independent woman in the
Red Army want to be married? She did not want to meet this wife; she was disappointed in Zhu De for marrying. But she must write about him as he was, not as she wished him to be. Evidently he liked marriage. He had been married several times. His previous wife, she knew, had been tortured, then beheaded by the Nationalists. Soon after, he had married Kang Keqing.
Agnes followed Lily Wu past make-shift classrooms of Kangta, Anti-Japanese Resistance University, to the women’s dormitory where wives of the Red Army officers stayed. Most of the wives were suspicious of her. They didn’t like the western dances she taught their husbands, they didn’t like the Victrola and records she’d had shipped from America, and most of all, they didn’t like her public statement that China could not abolish feudalism until marriage, the most feudalistic of all institutions, was abolished.
Kang Keqing greeted them at the entrance to the dormitory, formerly a Catholic church. She was a young peasant woman, much younger than her husband. Small, grave, muscular, she invited them inside and led them back to the kitchen where she poured tea out of a plain tin pot into mismatched cups. Her face was heart-shaped and her eyes were intelligent. She, too, wore winter khaki in the cold dormitory. She invited them to sit at a table by the window.
Agnes took out her notebook. “When did you marry your husband?” she asked in English. Lily Wu translated and Agnes wrote down the answers.
“I married my husband in 1929,” Kang Keqing answered politely.
Her lips curve like a ribbon bow, Agnes wrote. “Do you see him often?”
Kang Keqing shook her head. Zhu De taught military students, she added. She herself attended political classes and organized women into the new Women’s Associations. They were too busy to see each other often. “I was a young farm girl, a farm worker on a landlord’s estate,” she continued, “until I fought with the peasant army under Zhu De.” She picked up a notebook, several sheets of paper stitched together with thread, lying at one end of the table.
“Do you read and write?” Agnes asked.
“Now that I am a cadet in the Anti-Japanese Resistance University, I read and write.”
Kang Keqing looked at the column on the first page: “Number one, primitive communism,” she began slowly, her voice growing stronger as she progressed down the list. “Number two, slave society. Three, feudal society. Four, capitalist society. Last, socialist society.” She looked up from the sheet. “Yes, I can read.”
Stages of social development, Agnes jotted down. “Did you make the Long March?”
“Yes, of course. It is our life.” Faint sounds of troops drilling on the parade ground carried through the cold, bright air. Kang Keqing pointed to the pagoda looking down on them from the cliff. “The temple watches over us.” Agnes’ gaze followed Kang Kequing’s to the ancient tower ringed with balconies, nine rough stone ridges. Privately Agnes disagreed. She thought the pagoda looked down without interest, as it had for centuries.
“Tell me about your husband,” she said quietly.
Kang Keqing’s eyes narrowed. Agnes was aware that this woman—all the women at Yan’an—resented the time she spent with their husbands, socializing and talking politics. She’d been told by a friend of Zhu De’s that Kang Keqing, especially, disliked her for interviewing her husband day after day. “The women are jealous and suspicious of you,” he’d said. “And they don’t like the sound of your typewriter when you’re in your cave working.”
“But I’m writing a book about her husband,” Agnes had objected. “She’s being petty. I refuse to acknowledge these wives’ jealousy. I’m proof that men and women can be friends and comrades.”
“He is a loyal man,” Kang Keqing was saying, no longer looking at Agnes. “Much integrity. He is without political ambition.” Seriously, methodically, Kang Keqing listed her husband’s traits, It was as if she spoke of a distant figure she admired greatly. Agnes liked the woman’s assessment of the man. “He submits to civilian authority. He is kind and even-tempered. He loves his troops and his troops love him.”
“And children?” Agnes asked. “Do you want children?” In the margin of her notebook she wrote, “Why marry at all?” But the earlier fierceness had left her. Kang Keqing’s words, Lily Wu’s presence, the simple table where they sat, the temple on the cliff, all quieted her.
“I like babies as an institution,” the young woman answered matter-of-factly, “but I don’t want any myself. I have to keep fit for my work in the army.”
“And why did you decide to marry?”
Kang Keqing looked at Agnes thoughtfully. After a long silence she answered. “I am a woman. My husband is a man.”
Lily Wu spoke in Chinese, too fast for Agnes to understand clearly. Something about a mother, a grandmother.
“Is your mother living?”
Kang Keqing nodded vigorously and smiled for the first time. “Very old woman,” she said with pride. Watching her face, Agnes suffered sharply. Her own mother was dead. The word she remembered still stung: malnutrition. But worse than grief was the guilt tightly coiled inside her always ready to spring. She had not loved her mother enough. She had not helped her mother enough. She had not cared for her brothers and sister enough. Watching the pretty, unassuming face of Kang Keqing as she spoke of her husband, Agnes knew she had not loved Ernest Brundin enough. For all of her life, she thought, she had not loved enough or done enough.
Late that night at the small table she reworked her notes from the day. “Kang Keqing and Zhu De were peasants,” she wrote, “as strong and elemental as the soil that had given them birth … . She had clearly learned a great amount from him and had depended upon his guidance, yet there was about her the tremendous independence of the new revolutionary women of China. At the age of forty-three he had found a life companion, a woman able to accompany him and share every aspect of his life for better or for worse. What they meant to each other, neither said—they took each other for granted, as well-adjusted married people do. And marriage, in China, is taken for granted.”
13
El Centro, California 1913
Seeing Ernest at the El Centro train station was like seeing a stranger. For most of the night she’d sat open-eyed, neither dreading nor looking forward to being reunited with him. Her deadened feelings had matched the monotony of the clicking wheels and swaying car. Yet once, in the middle of the night near Santa Barbara, her feelings had flared, like sparks from the locomotive wheels. Thorberg had violated her. What was the quiz about sex and birth control, the two subjects Agnes could least talk about, if not a violation? Ernest may have prompted his sister to ask Agnes about their marriage, but surely not to bring up pessaries, surely not to describe how she and her Rumanian practiced birth control.
She turned toward the window and stared into the darkness. It was Thorberg who had opened her eyes to a way of life she could never have imagined on her own. It was Thorberg who had mouthed the fine ideas about equality for all people through socialism and the education of women. Yet Thorberg was allying herself with her brother. Thorberg wanted her to have sex with Ernest, have his children, make him happy. And Agnes didn’t know how. Furthermore, she didn’t want to know how. She didn’t want to end up drained, dependent, mired in marriage and motherhood.
She shouldn’t have gotten married. Ernest was a very good man, but she shouldn’t have gotten married.
It was a relief to leave San Francisco, that wet, pasty place where she’d been forced to listen to Haberman and ended up doing the housework for beautiful, langorous Thorberg. It was a relief to return to the dry Southwest. She was, she realized, a Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona kind of person. Hard, dry, honest land suited her. She looked forward to El Centro and tried not to think about the marital bed waiting for her in the desert.
The train leaned into a curve. Agnes returned to the monotony of the train’s movement; to the relief of no thought, no feeling.
She saw him as soon as she stepped down from the train. The straw hat didn’t suit him. His face
was tan again, the way it had been in Arizona, but when he gave Agnes a hug, their bodies felt large and sluggish in the heat and she pulled away. But she liked the automobile he’d borrowed for the occasion. It rolled over the wooden main street with a rhythmic “thunk” at each plank.
Ernest parked the car in front of the El Centro Restaurant. Agnes stepped up onto the boardwalk. Wiping her face and neck with a handkerchief, she looked around at stores with false fronts and unfinished frame buildings crowding the main street and unpaved side streets.
“Looks like a boom town,” she said.
Ernest held the door for her. “They build around the clock. Houses for canal workers and hotels for the speculators.”
Agnes preceded him into the restaurant. The din of horse-clopping, of wagon-wheel and automobile-tire bumping, subsided. Ernest hung his hat on the hat tree by the window and they sat at a table under the ceiling fan. Agnes set a white box on the table beside the salt and pepper shakers.
“Thorberg sent you this.”
Ernest eyed the pale blue ribbon but made no move to open it.
“Don’t you want to know what’s inside?”
He opened the box of cookies and offered one to Agnes.
“She made them on quick notice. The kind your mother makes. Swedish cookies.”
Ernest nodded and closed the box. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said in his plain and accurate way. Agnes tried to reacquaint herself with the voice and the man. “I’ve missed you.”
Embarrassed, she reached for a menu lying on the corner of the table. “You didn’t come back and visit much.”
“It costs money,” he said. “And I wanted you to come here.”
Agnes ordered fried chicken and mashed potatoes. “Where are you staying?”
“At the canal site. I’ve rented a room for you at a boarding house in town.”
No matter where they were—here, Octavia Street, Timbuktoo—sleeping arrangements was the question between them. The waitress passed their table with three plates of fried chicken lined up along one arm. The dinners looked greasy. Agnes had been hungry when she ordered, but now she didn’t feel like eating. The fan above them squeaked at each revolution.
