I also see the volunteer Paulette allowed into the kitchen, Arturo. Twice, he’s mopping the floor when I pass.
I’m still working hard on not quarreling with Paulette, even though she’s been terrific at times. One day, she’s talking to a bag lady who comes often but never sits down or eats. The woman stands in the empty space between the tables and the door, her bags around her, like a 1950s Irish grandmother, waiting for her bus with the week’s marketing at her side. I’ve heard her speak only once, just answering someone’s greeting with a clipped “Good, thanks.”
It’s Mel’s or Tommy’s or Jason’s job to make friends with her, and they’ve found out that she’s more willing to talk to men. If Tommy’s around, he stops to chat, standing next to her as if he too is waiting for the bus. Once, I saw her pick up her bags one at a time, then make her way out the door. I trust that if she’s hungry and afraid to eat, Tommy will persuade her. The day I see her leave, he comes over to where I’m surveying the room and stands companionably next to me, silently, for a few minutes. I know he’s upset. Then he says, “She sleeps in a dumpster.”
“How do you know?”
“I followed her.”
“She’s so clean. How does she stay clean?”
“A Chinese takeout downtown—they let her wash up. She’s not that clean close up.”
One day when I glance into the dining room, Paulette is talking to the old woman. I tell myself to keep going, but I walk in. The woman begins to step away from Paulette, and then she shouts, “So? So?” She crouches and gathers her bags together on the floor. She seems to be looking at the floor—her brown coat spread around her—so Paulette can’t see her face. Then she stands with her arms around her assorted canvas tote bags and white plastic garbage bags with red drawstrings. Usually she hangs the tote bags by their handles on her arms, then picks up the others in one big bundle. But Paulette has startled her. The woman shuffles toward the door and out, her bags in disarray. I am afraid she may never come back.
Paulette is on her way back to the kitchen. I call to her, and she turns. Several people eating lunch look up, and I walk over to her, since she hasn’t come to me. “Do you know her name?” I ask, tilting my head in the direction of the door.
“That’s Craig.”
“Craig? She looks like a Mary.”
“Craig. Maybe Mary Craig, I couldn’t tell you. You want to know what I said, right?”
“Yes, if you don’t mind telling me.”
“You think I have no sense, but you don’t know me,” she says. “I mentioned to her that I know her. She used to come into the clinic where I worked. Diabetes. She’d come in for her feet.”
Paulette had been the assistant director of the social services department of a health clinic—that was the credential that impressed our board. I put aside the thought that she has violated confidentiality, telling me Ms. Craig’s problem. “I’m afraid you upset her,” I say. “What if she doesn’t come back? I was hoping she’d calm down enough to eat.”
“She doesn’t like our food,” Paulette says.
“Neither do I,” I say.
“But she’ll come back,” Paulette says. “Don’t worry.”
“How do you know? You should have left her to Tommy.”
“Tommy’s not here. This way, she knows two of us—Tommy, Paulette.” She counts the names on two outstretched fingers, as if I might not be able to do the arithmetic. “It’s like you and me,” she continues. “You don’t trust me, am I right? But I can get you to do something. How? I ask in just the right way, at just the right time, and I get you when you aren’t grabbing all the bags so hard. That’s what I have to learn: when. All a question of when.”
She walks away into the kitchen without saying more, hastening as if I’ve rudely disrupted her routine. As so often with Paulette, I try not to think about this incident. The next two times I look into the dining room, I don’t see the old woman. The third time, there she is, standing, her bags at her feet again.
So now I have to read Bright Morning of Pain. I remember the beginning only vaguely, so I decide to start over, but that will be boring. Also, I’m working so hard on the third-floor project that it’s hard to settle down and read when I get home. I fix a quick supper and pace, holding the plate, listening to the radio or glancing at the TV. Or I sit down at the computer, going from website to website, never reading all of anything, and eat late at night.
A few days before Joshua Griffin’s dinner, I make up my mind to behave like the kind of person who might read a book. It’s a warm, almost hot, day in April. I come home at a reasonable time, picking up ingredients for a salad, including smoked turkey and cheese. I carry my aunt’s lamp table out to the back porch, where I put it in front of a wide, slanting wooden seat she used in summer. I make a salad and bring it—with a wineglass, an open bottle of cabernet, and Bright Morning of Pain—to the back porch. I pull the little table up to the wooden seat and begin to read, drink, and eat.
I drip salad dressing on the paperback. The sun goes down, and the air turns cold. I keep reading by a dim overhead light, drawn up sideways on the wooden seat. I drink wine.
Finally, I can’t stand the cold—and my need to pee—any longer. I forget the lamp table and that night rain pocks the finish forever. I carry in my plate and the empty glass, with the bottle, nearly empty, wedged under one arm and the book under the other. I put down the plate and glass and bottle. I carry the book to the bathroom, where I gratefully empty my bladder. Then I go upstairs, still freezing, and get under the blankets as the fastest way to warm up. I continue reading.
The woman and her best friend, the one who loves the same man, remain friends while arguing. The narrator is studious; her friend neglects her college classes. The narrator is cautious; the friend takes risks and is arrested at protests. Then someone called Harry—who believes in violent protests—appears. The last fifty pages move quickly. The women still compete over men. Harry persuades the scary friend to carry a gun, and the man they both love joins in the crime. Then comes the violent ending.
I can’t stop thinking not about the narrator or the dangerous friend—who is really the main character—but about this Harry, who is from a family of black clergymen from Hartford. I fall asleep late at night in my clothes, not looking at the clock because I know I have to get up for work in the morning, no matter what it says.
Olive Grossman
In 1968, Patrick and I handed out leaflets on street corners for the peace candidate, Eugene McCarthy. And we marched. A group would meet on a subway platform; for a demonstration outside the city, we crammed into somebody’s car. Someone brought a bag of bagels, and we passed around a thermos of coffee. Having my thighs scalded through denim seemed like part of ending war.
I liked walking down the middle of streets at first, and then it got boring. People screamed at us—well, a few. Hungry, cold, and dirty, we became unself-conscious, falling against one another’s bodies when we had a reason to laugh or cry, without caring whose body it was—male or female, friend or stranger. There was frequent sex in odd places. Brooklyn College is a commuter school, and most of us went home to our parents after these events, if we didn’t crash on someone’s living room floor—or someone’s parents’ living room floor. Home in the middle of the night, abruptly parted from the group, we didn’t recognize our families’ safe, upholstered lives. Home was a place to watch the news—screaming at its inaccuracies and calmly reported horrors—to shower and get ready for the next march or rally.
Sometimes, as we shouted and waved banners, I thought of Helen’s friends saying, “We tried that.” I was sure it was important to keep protesting; if the antiwar movement vanished, nothing would stop our government from unlimited ferocity, maybe nuclear war. And electing a peace candidate was surely a good idea. At times, I accused myself of doing what I did only to make myself feel better—and to be part of a group of friends. I felt more justified when cops showed up, cops with visible nightsticks, and whe
n some of us began getting arrested. Helen was constantly being arrested. For a while, I couldn’t quite bring myself to let that happen to me.
Patrick and I still slept together, though not often. Later I learned he was gay. The rare times we were alone, he preferred to work on our singing, and though I hoped there would be sex as well, I too took singing seriously. Our friends were tickled when we were introduced at a rally. It was a kind of fame. Often, we’d listen to the speeches from behind the platform, where you couldn’t hear the miked voices clearly—but there might be coffee. I’d be so cold I wouldn’t know how I could sing, but the crowd’s cheers made it easier. The protest songs we’d practiced—songs by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Weavers, Malvina Reynolds—seemed profound.
I saw Helen about a month after the day we spent with Daniel. We talked about President Johnson, who had not yet announced that he wasn’t running for reelection. He pulled out on March 31, after McCarthy did well in the New Hampshire primary and Robert Kennedy announced he was running, so it was probably early in March that I phoned her and we met. I wanted to tell her about our most exciting invitation, from a stranger who asked Patrick and me to sing at a big rally north of the city. I was excited to be chosen for our skill, not because we knew the organizers. And I wanted to hear about Daniel and the roommates. In retrospect, the day we’d spent together seemed like one to replicate, though it hadn’t been easy. I told myself I should be more involved in what I thought of as the grown-up antiwar effort, and seeing Helen would lead to that, would make me smarter and clearer. She’d had a birthday, and I had a present for her, a long string of bright blue wooden beads I’d found at a shop in the Village.
When I phoned, she said I could come along on an errand on Saturday. She had borrowed a book from someone downtown, and he wanted it back. I obediently agreed to meet her on a subway platform near her apartment, all the way up at the top end of Manhattan, and express our friendship by accompanying her on a noisy subway ride through geography I had just traversed. But maybe there would be a walk through the downtown neighborhood at least, before a meeting with yet another stranger.
Helen cried out with pleasure when she saw the beads as we waited for the train. She opened her jean jacket to put them on over her flannel shirt. Maybe she hadn’t even told her new friends about her birthday. Maybe birthdays were too frivolous for her present life. She leaned over to kiss my cheek. We got on the train, Helen clutching the book.
The friend, Eli, didn’t answer the door when we eventually reached his apartment on Bleecker Street. I didn’t know whether he had told Helen he would be home, and it felt intrusive to ask; she wouldn’t want me to know she was being treated badly.
“We shouldn’t leave it on his doorstep,” Helen said. I reached to see what it was: The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, a book I’d never heard of.
“Did you read it?” I asked.
“It blew my mind.”
“How did you find time?” With everything else, I had time only for assigned books, except that sometimes I shoved the whole pile to the end of my bed and got under the blanket with Cheaper by the Dozen or some other book I’d read many times as a child.
Helen shrugged. “Homework isn’t the essence of life, Olivia,” she said. We’d both been scrupulous about it in high school, and I still was.
We had to do something while we waited for Eli. “Let’s take the Staten Island ferry,” I said. It was a short subway ride downtown, but I was a little worried. Would Helen regard taking the ferry as somehow bourgeois or establishment? We had done it often in high school: it cost a nickel and felt like travel. I loved the smell of the harbor, the sound of the gulls, the bumping and sloshing of the boats. The day was cold and windy. Helen would have scorned the ferry if the weather had been perfect, but if we suffered a little, she might consider it fun. I quickly talked her into it.
“How’s Daniel?” I said, as we started back toward the subway.
“He has moved on,” she said, with a lofty indifference that tried unsuccessfully to make it a joke. She lowered her face and stuffed her hands into her pockets. Her jacket seemed light for the weather.
I put my hand on her arm. “Moved on?” I trudged beside her in my heavy winter coat with its coffee stains. It had that late-winter dullness.
“He’s going with someone else,” she said in her ordinary voice.
I was astonished. “Are you upset?”
Helen was silent. We made our way along the crowded street. Then she stopped and faced me. “I loved him.” She became, again, the girl I went to high school with—something about the shoulders, or the ungloved hands, which she took from her pockets and raised, palms open.
“Oh dear,” I said. “Oh dear.”
“I wouldn’t have slept with him if I weren’t in love with him. I thought he loved me.”
“So did I,” I said. “When did this happen?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“Oh, I was busy.” Once more, she was above heartbreak.
“You mean politics?”
“Of course.”
I’d have skipped all that and stayed home to nurse my broken heart. I’d have called Helen, I told myself.
The ferry wasn’t crowded, and the passengers were mostly inside. We sat silently on wooden benches on the deck, Helen with the book on her lap, and I listened to the bumping and crashing as the boat scraped itself away from the dock. I watched the choppy gray water. I was freezing, even in my winter coat. I told her about the invitation Patrick and I had. We would open the rally before a line of speakers—the only singers.
She didn’t answer, but when I persisted, she said, “Olivia, come on.”
“What?”
“Isn’t that a little childish?”
“What do you mean?” I’d allowed myself to think she’d be pleased.
“You think singing is going to accomplish anything?”
“Well, no,” I said, my voice breaking a little. Despite the long argument in Helen’s apartment, I continued to assume that no antiwar act was much different from any other—assumptions reassert themselves—and that Helen would approve of mine. I’d imagined her inviting Patrick and me to sing at Columbia. Now I saw I’d been foolish.
I said, “Singing won’t end the war. But getting people to rallies might. The demonstrations are getting bigger. They have to pay attention sometime.”
“What signs have you seen that they’re paying attention?”
“What are we doing this for, if we don’t believe in it?”
Helen was silent for so long I thought she’d change the subject. Then she said, “Precisely.”
I was furious, not at the political analysis, which I was used to, but at the slight to my singing. I stood and felt the wind in my face. I was wearing a green woolen hat, and I pulled it off so it wouldn’t blow away. Now the wind blew through my hair and made my ears ache. I stuffed the hat into a pocket and put my hands over my ears; I must have looked like someone saying she would not listen. When the ferry docked, we didn’t linger in Staten Island, just took the next one back, and this time we rode in the stuffy indoor compartment all the way.
Helen seemed to have forgotten our quarrel when we got off the boat. “I like sex,” she said, and laughed.
“Me too,” I said. She put her arm around my shoulders for a moment. “Are you sleeping with anybody now?” I asked, hoping she wasn’t, not out of concern for her but because I wasn’t—or was, but so rarely that it didn’t count.
“Eli,” she said. “He makes the rounds—I know that. It’s fine.” She held up the book—Eli’s representative.
I was startled. “Who is he?”
“He’s older,” she said as we walked back to the subway. She said he was a screenwriter who’d been blacklisted during the McCarthy years and now edited a magazine for a union. When we rang his bell again, he came to the door, a loose-limbed man in a sweater with a gray curly beard. Putting his hands on both
our shoulders, he drew us into his apartment—lamplit, littered with newspapers and mail, with a record player on which an opera recording played. I stepped out from under his hand.
There was something stealthy about the way Eli walked, maybe because he was in socks. Two black shoes, laces flung wide, were in widely separated spots in his dim living room, with its cones of warm light under lamps. A cat rubbed our legs, and tufts of her orange hair floated to the carpet, which was already full of it.
Eli led us to the kitchen and offered us a drink, nodding without interest at hearing my name—Olivia, of course—and Helen accepted for both of us. She opened her jacket, and the blue beads looked odd and sweet over her brown plaid flannel shirt—a combination that a little girl might choose. As we drank Scotch at Eli’s kitchen table out of chipped teacups (I added extra water to mine), he left the room and returned with a plastic bag of marijuana and cigarette papers. He was good at rolling joints. I’d mostly smoked lumpy joints Patrick rolled, with crumbs dropping. This was better grass, and more deftly handled. Eli talked about an article he was writing, something about the economics of the war, its effect on business. He moved his arms wide and leaned back in his chair. At first he seemed like a show-off, but then I saw why Helen might want to sleep with him. His earnestness was attractive.
He began to talk about someone called Rhoda, who, I realized, was a woman he’d slept with, probably in this very apartment, earlier that day, and not a student. So he hadn’t been out when we’d come by earlier. He wanted to engage Helen in a discussion of Rhoda’s political naïveté, and Helen complied.
Helen had spoken casually of Eli’s women, but I was sure she was hurt when she too pieced together the story of his afternoon. It was so soon after Daniel had hurt her; I was angry with Eli on Helen’s behalf and even Rhoda’s, whoever she was. Soon, we stood to leave, C. Wright Mills on the table, the drinks partly drunk.
Conscience Page 9
