Carry the One (20 page)

She tried to explain to whoever would listen what was happening, how the Hutus were obedient, docile killers egged on by propaganda coming off the radio. How they learned to kill efficiently, practiced on those left for dead, then graduated to the fully alive. Some they killed by cutting off their hands and feet, leaving them to writhe to death. Tutsi victims willing to pay could ask for a bullet, the quickest way out. Babies, for the sake of ammunition economy, were just thrown against the wall. Carmen had photos, blown up and laminated. She taped these to the front of her card table. No one looked at them. No one wanted to see piles of hacked-up body parts, human junkyards.

She couldn’t talk with Rob about this, of course. Before she corrected him, he thought there were seven Supreme Court justices. He’d never heard of Mao’s Cultural Revolution or Rosa Parks. He was an extremely decent person within his limits, but these did not include Rwanda, which he had called—only a couple of times, but still—Rhonda.

And now the killing had ended, but there was all this aftermath, women degraded, ashamed of having been raped, now raising the children of their rapists. Carmen worried this period was only a lull. How would the Tutsis forgive neighbors who murdered their whole families? She used to think in terms of discrete issues, but now saw the worst problems as long narratives. She studied the mechanics of genocide, to try to understand. She lectured occasionally on the subject. Everyone, she thought, must keep a sharp eye out for another mass killing, to get in its way before it began. Her belief was waning, though, in the sort of enlightenment that would save history from repeating itself. When
she read lately that Mother Teresa had said she was unable any longer to hear or see God, Carmen thought: well, yes.

They brought Walter along. Carmen and Gabe had just read a book by some monks who raised German shepherds and the book said bring your dog along, wherever. It also said to sing him a song with his name in it. They were pulling together a tortured lyric that rhymed Walter with “never falter” and “not a hair would we alter.”

When they pulled up to Alice’s building, the converted laundry, she was waiting outside for them. Carmen had always loved her sister, but since the moment Alice rushed her out of the crowd at the abortion clinic, one hand on Carmen’s shoulder, the other holding her detached ear, Carmen had come to be—in a grave and profound way—in love with Alice.

“Let’s take the ragtop,” she said.

“Are you sure you’re up to driving?”

“I can drive. I just can’t kiss.”

Even sick she looked great. Wearing jeans and a worn green T-shirt, she was sitting on the hood of her new car, which was someone else’s old Mercedes convertible. The top was down; the car was ready for adventure. Alice looked, Carmen thought, like an ad for something, but not the car. A jazzy cologne, maybe. Some kind of tampon for women too active and important to be bothered with bleeding. A big part of Alice’s appeal was that she traveled with the slightly sheepish air of someone much plainer. Everything about the picture—the old car, the fragile, early summer day, the industrial decay of the neighborhood—set off a light envy in Carmen. Recently she figured out that she herself had put on about a pound for every year since she left grad school. These sneaky pounds had not made her fat so much as sturdy, also in possession of a butt to reckon with, to obscure with long jackets and pleated trousers. Alice hadn’t put on an ounce, not even when she finally quit smoking. She could still, in the middle of her thirties, sit on a car hood in a thrift shop T-shirt and jeans and look only a slightly
different kind of great than she did in her early twenties. Carmen considered re-approaching the stationary bike in the basement, which she had been using for some time as a rack to dry sweaters.

This was a good time for Alice. She won a Guggenheim last year, now had a Near North gallery representing her work. She had begun to make real money from her painting, something she said she never anticipated, and this left her in a slightly uncomfortable position, richer and more famous than her friends. She tried to obscure her success by staying on in the old loft, although with some new furniture, a real bathroom and kitchen, a thick mattress on her bed—something she special-ordered from Sweden. And her Mercedes was a very old one, well over the line into ironic. In the same way, she had an assistant she never mentioned, who spent a day a week replenishing Alice’s paints, stretching her canvases, cleaning her brushes. The way Carmen saw it, Alice was tiptoeing softly into her new life.

On the way over to the cemetery, Walter put his nose to the wind and Gabe leaned in from the backseat to tell Alice about the American Revolution, which they’d been studying at school. He had taken it upon himself to spruce up Alice’s education, which he thought was tragic. Carmen and Nick had gone to the Latin School where the basics were well covered. Alice, on account of her artistic promise, went to a free school in Old Town, one of those staples of the late seventies where the teachers went by their first names and field trips were to violent or naked performance-art presentations, and reading was not really stressed. The curriculum encouraged Alice’s painting, but left her with certain gaps, like most of history except for how it framed artistic periods.

“Okay, so while Washington was fighting the British,” Gabe told Alice, “Benjamin Franklin was over in France forming an alliance with them.”

“You mean we didn’t even have a country and we were already being diplomatic? Wasn’t that, I don’t know, kind of nervy?”

“The whole thing was nervy. Totally nervy,” he said.

“What about Thanksgiving?”

He looked at her for so long that she turned her head quickly to see the stare accompanying his silence.

“That was earlier, right?” she said, eyes back on the road.

“Uh, yeah.”

“I knew that,” she said. “Way earlier.”

“You did not. You thought Ben Franklin was having turkey with the Indians. And after dinner they all went out to fly the kite. I’m going to make up weekly pop quizzes for you. What if you’re around other adults and you make one of these horrible errors? I have to keep an eye on you. You and the twins. They’re even worse than you. Dad bought them a globe. And then it kind of came out that they thought we live on the inside of the ball.”

At the cemetery, he gave Alice a little rundown on the Haymarket riots, the information that several of the rioters were buried in this cemetery. From there, he moved on to the labor movement around the turn of the century, the fight for the eight-hour workday, the Wobblies, the bomb tossed into the crowd, the dead a mix of workers and policemen. Alice played dumb to humor him. Her academic gaps notwithstanding, she was, thanks to Carmen, well versed in the history of America’s progressive movement. Gabe was good on the facts, a boy thing. Carmen’s concern was that he also got the bigger picture. She had tried to show him that there’s always the history and the secret history. That there were always beneficiaries. To understand how things work, you had to follow the circuit all the way back—to who was getting something out of it. Follow the power or the money, or both.

With friends, more and more, Carmen found injustice talked about in some new abstract vocabulary of large and amorphous concepts, rather than in the old fired-up rhetoric of specific actions against the powers that be. Now the problems had become huge, systemic wrongs not approachable by the remedies of individuals. She hated this. And she didn’t want Gabe to grow up in this new, morally
lazy climate. So she brought him along to events like today’s, to see the left as a path.

She was surprised at the good turnout for the memorial. Maybe a hundred people had gathered. Carmen allowed herself the vanity of pulling her hair behind her ear, to show it off. The ear had made her a local hero.

Tom Ferris and Jean were already there, on guitars, banging out rousing union anthems, old songs like “The Springhill Mine Disaster,” and a few new ones they’d written together, like “Barred Doors and Blazes,” about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

Gabe and Walter loped off to play with a puppy they’d spotted. Carmen waved at Jean and Tom.

“He looks different,” Carmen said.

“He lost the sideburns,” Alice said. “He’s exposed some face no one has seen for years. He’s rejuvenated his career with ‘Black Earth Blues.’ Fuck him.”

Carmen said, “I know. I’ve heard it a couple of times on XRT.”

“Jean said it might be big. Moving up the charts or whatever.”

“I don’t know how he can do this. It’s invading the girl’s privacy, like claiming an intimate relationship with her.”

“Yeah. But really, how much closer to someone can you be than having killed them?”

“Alice.”

“Here’s what I hate. I hate that it doesn’t matter if we see each other. There’s still this connection, between me and him because we were both in the car. Like in arithmetic. Because of the accident, we’re not just separate numbers. When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.”

Carmen looked around to find Gabe and saw Walter peeing on a grave. She hoped it was not some historical figure’s plot. The music stopped, and an old Wobbly, glasses taped together, jacket lumpy with a sweater underneath in spite of the day being so mild, stood in front of Emma Goldman’s grave and started to read an earnest speech. Barely a
paragraph or two in, the anarchists showed up. They sprung onto the scene like jack-in-the-boxes.

Carmen flinched in the way she did now at sudden, peripheral movement, a change in the tone of a situation. Then saw this was just the usual harmless theater and unclenched her jaw. The anarchists hopped all over the grave; they sat on the headstone playing kazoos and tambourines and heckling the earnest speaker.

“This is so cool,” Gabe said.

“Well, when you’re an anarchist,” Carmen said as they watched the Wobbly shrug and finally give up on his speech, “I think you have to expect a little dancing on your grave.”

Gabe went over to join the fun.

A refreshment table. Lunchmeat roll-ups, carrot sticks, onion dip. Terrible punch the color of melted cotton candy. Alice drank three cups straight down. Part of her mono was a constant sore throat.

Carmen wanted to say something to Tom about his song, about using tragedy for personal gain. But she didn’t want to make Jean uncomfortable. Jean, who for some inscrutable reason, was still with him. Now the two of them were heading Carmen’s and Alice’s way.

“Jean still thinks he’s something,” Alice said before they came into earshot. “She’s stuck on his fifteen minutes of fame.” Then she put on what she hoped was an extremely insincere smile and greeted Tom. “Looks like you’ve found a way to take those old lemons of ours and make lemonade.”

Tom didn’t flinch. Years onstage had thickened his persona. “I’m just singing out of my own experience, Alice. It’s all we really have in the end to make art with. Like Clapton—” He looked over toward where Jean had been standing, but she had walked off a ways, into the crowd, probably smelling an attack coming. This freed Carmen up.

“Interesting comparison,” Carmen said. “Only with Clapton, it was his kid who died. Somebody else’s victim. I don’t think we can bend logic to the point where the accident was our tragedy.”

Alice added, “Like the Menendez brothers crying because they were orphans.”

“Oh boy. The Kenney sisters are out in force today. Moral Mighty Mouses. But hey, sorry, I’m just here to play some songs.” He flipped his guitar over his shoulder, and walked away.

Carmen said, “What kind of humans are we if we forgive ourselves? That’s what he’s done, just forgiven himself.”

Back in front of Alice’s loft, she asked them up.

“You’re too tired,” Carmen said.

“I’ll lie down. You can take care of me a little.”

They all got into the enormous, groaning freight elevator. Walter stood stock-still. Elevators bewildered him. He didn’t seem to get why they had to go into the box, then out of the box. In the studio, Carmen set out a bowl of water for him, and Gabe propped up a painting he had been working on. The subject was a set of steps leading down to a darkened basement. He loved painting at Alice’s, in a serious studio. They watched him set up in his fussy way. Everything needed to be exactly here, or right there.

“Sometimes I worry he’s too easy,” Alice said once he was out of earshot. “I mean, what did we do to deserve him?”

“But you know he’s going to have to hate us for a while, probably soon. He almost hated me over the Heather thing. He’s going to get to that place a few more times.”

“I know. So he won’t be living with you when he’s thirty-five,” Alice said. “Like in some Tennessee Williams play.”

“Right,” Carmen said. “So he’s not hanging around doing my hair.”

“Washing out your dress shields,” Alice said. “By hand.” She was clearly happy to be home, perched on her sofa—the old ruby red velvet monster she’d hung on to, from the co-op. In her new prosperity she had had it recovered and refinished back to the lurid glory of its youth. It was more than a sofa; it had the authority of a davenport. Perching turned out to be too strenuous and Alice let herself fall back
on the bed pillows propped against one arm. They gossiped a little. Carmen told Alice that Jean had inadvertently got knocked up. That Tom had behaved badly. Now Jean said she was doing some serious thinking.

“Is she going to keep the baby?”

“I don’t think that is the direction of the serious thinking.”

Alice said, “I have to tell you something about Horace and Loretta. They asked me to dinner last week. They had some good news and, blahblahblah, could I meet them at Geja’s?”

Carmen nods. “They love Geja’s.” To show solidarity with Nick, Carmen had seen very little of their parents since the birthday party debacle. Which was a little ironic since Nick himself still saw them. (At least it was the last of those hideous birthday parties; at least it killed that tradition.) Alice saw Horace as the ticket price to Loretta, whom she still—for reasons Carmen couldn’t fathom—cared about.

“I know. Give them their long forks and their bubbling cheese and they’re happy. Anyway, when I got there, I told them I wasn’t hungry. On account of the mono. The mono is great that way. I can get away with anything I don’t want to do. And I really can’t eat fondue with them. There’s just something, don’t you think, queasy-making about plunging bread into the same cheese bucket as your parents?