Vida (18 page)

Just in the middle of the group Lohania and Kevin walked, holding hands and talking intently in low voices. Lohania had to take two steps to his every one. Kevin was the tallest and most athletic-looking of the men. Without flab and tightly muscled, he had an alert springy walk, looking from side to side in automatic wariness, his chin leading. Lohania was the darkest of them all, her hair black while Natalie’s was dark brown. Her Cuban exile family had made her suffer for her dark skin. Lohania was always in rapid motion, bright, nervous as a butterfly. Lohania and Vida wore the same dress, scoop-necked velour shifts that ended halfway up the thigh. They had bought them at Alexander’s on the way back from the last Steering Committee meeting. Vida’s was moss green; Lohania’s, plum.

They had loved buying the same dress. Lohania was pear-shaped, her waist curving in sensuously and then her ass slinging out a baroque balcony over her short, slightly bowed legs. They were both wearing flats and fishnet stockings, while Lohania had pinned chrysanthemums to her dress and into her wild curly hair. Lohania and Vida both loved the air of scandal that attended them, that they shared Leigh, that they were such tight friends. They were given to dropping hints about being lovers, which wasn’t true but almost true, for they did love each other and besides it was fun to tease people. Wearing the same dress amplified that air of scandal. Vida decided they had to get Natalie the very same dress. Alexander’s had had the dress in a beautiful dark gold velour that would look gorgeous on Natalie. Vida giggled aloud, but she would not yet tell Natalie why. Epating the bourgeois was fun, but shocking their own movement more to the point in daily life. It was so fine to walk attended by that buzz of naughtiness, such a powerful aphrodisiac that sometimes Vida thought she had only to smile in the right way and she could try on just about any man she wanted in New York.

“All these people!” she gloated as they approached the Sheep Meadow.

“Looks like a frigging Be-In,” Daniel said shortly. “I thought this was supposed to be a political-education project.”

So much dope was in the air she felt high just breathing. A person covered with body paint was playing the flute, sitting cross-legged surrounded by a circle of stoned music lovers nodding and swaying. Nearby, a Russian wolfhound was mating vigorously with a malamute. Mopsy slunk close behind Vida, tail low, cowering. People with shaven heads wearing orange caftans surrounded them chanting Hare Krishna, to which Leigh replied as always, “And a Harry Kirschner to you too! Have a fine three-piece suit” Harry Kirschner being an uncle on his mother’s side who had been a skilled tailor as well as a good communist.

“We aren’t near our people yet” Vida said shortly. “You ought to be pleased the hippies are around. Don’t we want to reach them?”

“Reach?” Daniel snorted. “They sit in my classes glassy-eyed and all they say if you poke them hard is
Wow”

This year the earnest idealists and organizers of SAW had cross-fertilized with the gypsy hoards, and no one knew yet what the hybrid armies in the parks would turn out to mean. The organizers were smoking dope and growing their hair, and the flower children, weary of being beaten by the police, were beginning to talk about the war, but mistrust between the tribes remained. The Fair had been a proposal of Vida and Oscar’s, to attract the crowds that milled around the continual Be-In that was the Sheep Meadow. Daniel was too staid to see that a great thick fog had lifted from the American landscape and people in the new sunlight were mixing colors and sounds and cultures and life styles, always perhaps with an eye cocked to the mirror, but the mirror was singing like Crow Dog its own authentic magic chants.

“There’s our people,” Vida said. One of their street-theater groups was performing Search and Destroy in a crowd. Several actors mimed cooking in their huts, sewing, rocking babies; the army came through, dragged them out to be shot and set their huts on fire. Oscar, his dark hair bunched under a red sweat rag, was drumming for them. Oscar was not a good drummer, but he was a happy one. Oscar, the ideologue who had not gone to the beach all summer (“We’re making a revolution, Vida, let’s be serious!”), was sitting cross-legged in the October sun smiling beatifically as he pounded away in the midst of the crude agonies of the playlet. If Oscar had realized, he would have been ashamed to be seen.

Vida walked arm in arm with Lohania, Kevin having gone off to argue with some guy in a turban. Lohania smelled of sandalwood, the only scent she ever used. Even the silk scarves she wore around her wild hair to keep it back were stored in a sandalwood box that Vida had given her. Leigh was off into the crowd bird-dogging with his Nagra recorder out, Mopsy close to his heels, sniffing, shy at the crowd, the firecrackers, the circle dancing. Natalie pushed the stroller over to the benches where the mothers who weren’t stoned were collected, watching the action near the booths SAW had set up and overseeing the kiddies and talking together. Vida felt a pang of dismay for Natalie’s being stuck there on the hinges as she plunged in with Lohania.

The ball-throwing booth with the faces of McNamara, Johnson, Westmoreland, Rusk was popular, and so was the game called Draft that the Steering Committee had enjoyed working out. But the rock band was out-drawing the political exhibits, and even their own people were mostly off dancing. Daniel strolled with a colleague, puffing on a water pipe they handed back and forth much as he usually puffed on his meerschaum. Obviously they got their pleasure from commenting on the lurid but curiously placid scene. A rainbow had spilled over the people, luminous, garish, whimsical, silly, starkly religious. She passed kids looking as if they were dressed in everything they had found in the attic of a Victorian transvestite. Balloons floated and popped. The day was almost hot. Musicians, beggars, vendors, dope dealers plied their trade. The Chamber of Horrors wasn’t working. Nobody would look at photographs from Vietnam. The booth with political pamphlets reported only modest sales. “We should sell pamphlets and popsicles at the same booth,” the kid behind the counter said. How could they educate the dancing children? She watched, she flirted, she talked to acquaintances and strangers, she wandered about. Every so often she looked for her family.

As Lohania and Kevin were dancing, no one watching them would doubt they were lovers. But Kevin speedily got bored and backed away. She could feel his boredom like an actual presence, like a big German shepherd that must be fed and restrained. It could not be locked up indefinitely or ignored. His physical presence was tiring to her, almost noisy. How did he manage to center scenes around himself just by standing there glaring?

“Hey there, it’s Ida Red!”

She turned. “Oh … “ In Washington, at the Pentagon, one of the marshals had called her that. A folksinger, in the SAW chapter in Louisville. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“Picking and politicking and pursuing sweet pussy.”

Oh, yes, she thought, he had been one of those. He had his banjo on his back. From under his fringed leather vest he took his stash and offered her a joint. It was a social thing, like a secret handshake. “You need a place to stay?” She asked because she felt obligated. What was one more on the floor? All the people she knew had the sense they could travel from city to city and always they would find Movement offices and people to put them up and feed them. She could go anyplace and be recognized by clothing, by catchwords, by hair and dress. Hospitality was a sacred obligation, like sharing your dope with anyone present.

“Yeah, I’m staying with a great chick in SoHo, but I wouldn’t mind … “

Leigh was at her elbow, Nagra on the ready. “Hey, I heard you blowing that banjo … Introduce me.”

Fortunately, she made out the words embossed on his much-decorated guitar and realized that was the name he went by. “Yellow Brick Road, this is Leigh Pfeiffer. Yellow writes some great songs”

She got them going together and then faded back. Lohania was dancing alone, absorbed. Every bit of her body shimmered and shivered and wriggled in its separate but conjoined ecstasy. Her eyes were half shut. Some kids were playing with long paper streamers, weaving patterns in and out. It was a scene of fantasy from the back of her head, a subversive musical comedy poured out of the closets of America, people dancing in the streets, bumping in huge good-natured crowds, peaceful as soap bubbles jostling. Never would the authorities be able to cram the genie back in the bottle: this was a permanent change of the American psyche. Daniel didn’t grasp how powerful beauty and energy were. When the music changes, the walls of the city tremble, she quoted to herself with a smile.

Back at the bench, Natalie was getting to her feet. “Sam’s cranky. I think it’s time to go.”

“I’ll see who I can round up.”

She took Lohania gently by the arm, bringing her back to the dusty afternoon. Kevin was lost, but Lohania did not seem worried. “He’s supposed to eat supper at his ma’s house in Newark, so he can make his own way.” Lohania spoke fast, as always. She had no accent but a standard New York one. “He’s gone off drinking with some old alkie he knows from the docks. You’d be surprised where he finds them … He’s standing in some dim Irish bar on Amsterdam getting them to tell him stories about the black-and-tans and the IRA … My feet hurt. Hey, Sammy, come to your tanta. Whoopsa, you giving your mama a hard time? … So, who’s he gonna look like this time?”

“Don’t call my baby
he.
I don’t want a boy, and I wish people wouldn’t assume I do.” Natalie sounded cross.

“Want a girl? Or something else?” Lohania stuck out her tongue. “Mama, we’re going to take you right home and fix you up. A nice meal. A back rub right where it gets you in the small of your back. Tonight I cook!”

Vida found Daniel deep in conversation. Proprietarily he put his arm around her and gave her waist a squeeze, without interrupting the flow of his argument: “… and force heavier and heavier demands on welfare until the whole system buckles.”

How dare he act so patronizing? “Natalie’s tired. She’d like to leave.”

“Fine,” Daniel said. They were both always saying that when nothing was fine; it was a habit of their coupledom. You could say to them, I have pneumonia, and they’d say, Fine, I’ll call a doctor. “I’ll see her later. You girls run along.”

Really, she thought as she dodged through the crowd, he acted superior just because he had a university job.
Girls!
Leigh was the only man she knew who did not diminish the woman he was with, who did not think because they fucked that he owned her or she was his little garbage bag. Daniel treated Natalie just like … a wife. She was fiercely grateful to Leigh, dodging a circle dancing around a couple of conga drummers, for their way of being open, trusting and above all respectful. She could love other men briefly, affectionately, as friends, as lovers, but only Leigh could be trusted in the center of her life. No other man could ever love her and let her survive intact, her appetites, her abilities, her will, her intellect not diminished or pruned but encouraged. She peered into openings in the throng as she slid through, hoping to see him.

Lohania pushed the stroller and sweet-talked Sammy, as Natalie and Vida strolled home arm in arm up Broadway. Broadway was a paler continuation of the park, with Sunday-afternoon crowds milling from shop to shop and old people sitting on benches between the uptown and downtown streams of traffic, a puddle of strutting pigeons at their feet. “Sorry I got crabby,” Natalie said. “I just want to go home and get our strategy together for the staff meeting”

Cool shadows crept across Broadway, the sun slanting down over New Jersey. Vida caught sight of herself in a mirror in a shop window and grinned. Her minidresses sometimes looked like a little girl’s frock, sometimes like uniforms from
Star Trek,
the costumes of a future where the dull grim problems of racism, poverty, starvation had all been worked out. “Natalie, Lohania, do you ever, ever feel like this is just the center of the universe.?”

“A real New Yorker talking”‘ Natalie patted Vida’s behind. “Who’d ever know she came from the Midwest?”

“I mean here and now. When I was in high school, remember. Natty, I had this idea of history concentrating in moments of decision. Like 1890 was the time to be in Paris and 1917 in St. Petersburg. It feels that way now—as if things are happening faster than we can understand. As if we’re pushing on some corner about to turn the whole thing over! We’re
making
history—”

“You’re a romantic”‘ Lohania snapped. “History is a science”‘

“I don’t believe that.” Interest lit up Natalie’s face, making her look all of eighteen, digging her hand into her brown curls, wrinkling her nose. Natalie loved to argue about ideas, now as when they had first met, when Natalie was twelve-and-a-half and Vida twelve. “History’s a myth. A million things happen in every moment. Each historian selects certain to stress. The stock market. A cholera epidemic. Wars. The changing status of women. The baby boom. The inflation rate. The rise of soybean production. The thawing of the Antarctic ice cap. The extinction of species. A strain of bacillus resistant to penicillin … The War in Vietnam obsesses us, and for good reason, but a historian in the superpower of Togoland in 2067 might ignore the affairs of the backwaters of North America altogether”‘

“Pluralist nonsense,” Lohania said. When she talked Marxism, she looked different. Her mouth drew thinner, her eyes narrowed and shone, she stood with her small shoulders thrown back. Lohania nursed a raw sore anger toward her parents because they had taken the family from Cuba, because they had punished her for being dark, because they doted on her brothers and scorned her. “When you comprehend the economic base, when you master the dialectical process, when you analyze the stage of imperialism we’re entering upon, then you know what moves history and how best to throw your forces into the struggle”‘