Vida (30 page)

“That’s your problem, lady. I sell it by the cup.”

Therefore she had to pour the cups into the thermos, spilled about a quarter of the coffee on the counter and ordered two more before she had it filled.

“See” the guy said triumphantly. “Four cups’ worth”

“But I would have paid for four cups.” She had a mile to trudge. She wondered if she dared to take off the horrendous wig before she got back to the gas station, but she was afraid someone would notice her.

When she climbed over the crusted snow by the side of the road and walked into the station, Joel was deep in concentration over the engine of a modified high-slung car the mechanics were looking into. “I got the coffee” she called from the entrance.

They ignored her. Perhaps he had not heard. “Joel, I’m back with the coffee” she called. He looked up, nodded, turned away. She felt like a fool standing there. She got into the car thinking how sensitive men are to slights
from
women and how insensitive to slights
to
women. That’s just the way things are, take it and shut up, they say. Why should she feel qualms about seeing Leigh? After all, Joel knew about Leigh. He must have guessed they still met. She imagined Leigh’s presence, so much less prickly, less torturous than Joel’s.

She had a growing itch to catch a glimpse of Susannah, to paste a face and body to the name. She imagined trailing Susannah through a supermarket, sitting in the next booth in a restaurant overhearing a conversation between Susannah and her best friend, but even such fantasies were dangerous. She could not risk Susannah’s seeing her face.

Opening the thermos, she sipped the coffee. If he didn’t care, why I should she wait for him? She finished her small cup and poured another. Finally Joel was wiping his hands and strolling toward her, still chatting with one of the mechanics. No, he was stopping again. Laughing at something the guy was showing him from his pocket. Before he got in, coming to the driver’s side and motioning her to slide over, which after a moment she did sooner than start a fight in the gas station, she had refolded the map.

“It was a pin in the linkage of the steering column” he said buoyantly. “I hammered it straight. Good as new. Nice guys, real friendly there.”

“I didn’t notice that.”

“Listen, I got friends about an hour north. Let’s give them a call. We can hole up there and get fed and rested.”

She was scheming, trying to balance Kiley against Leigh against Joel “What do your friends know about you?”

“That I’m in some kind of trouble. Steve told me once he bet I had a wife and kids somewhere I’d run off on”

Finally she took off the wig, combing out her hair. “Give them a call. Don’t say much about me.”

He called from a drugstore and strolled back beaming. “It’s cool. They say come right over. I know the way.”

The antiques store and the gas station and repair shop run by the two brothers stood in the center of town, but their house was on the outskirts where streets faded into country, a towered yellow Victorian with a red barn behind. The huge paunchy patriarch, Steve, ran the antiques business and the family. Cal was as lean as Steve was gross, a younger brother with similar high coloring and hard gray eyes but perhaps half the flesh. The gas station was his. Steve’s pregnant wife, Ellen, was a tiny woman who talked constantly as if to herself with the conviction nobody was listening, saying as she smiled wanly, “Oh, Terry, it’s wonderful to see you, what a surprise, you could have warned us, and now a meal to fix. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Virginia. Now, what will I ever do about supper? I wonder if I can stretch that chicken”

“Ellen and one of the cows are both expecting, ha ha” Steve bellowed. “Took long enough with both of them, right?”

She waited until Joel was neatly inserted into the scene and then she announced with feigned casualness that she had errands to run and friends to visit and would be back at supper. She hoped for a clean escape, but Joel caught her at the car. “What’s up?”

She had to sacrifice something. “I’m off to arrange a meeting. I’ll be seeing Kiley this weekend. You can if you want … “

“She’s
here? Here?”

She nodded, using his confusion to get into the car and away.

By wayside phone she set up a rendezvous with Leigh for the next morning at eleven in Twin Mountain. Then she headed for Agnes’ farm where she found a message saying that the meeting with Kiley was now set for ten on Tuesday on a hiking trail.

“What is this?” she asked Agnes, a middle-aged Quaker who harbored fugitives regularly. “Isn’t Kiley here?”

Agnes shook her head no. “They’re gone for two days. They only stayed overnight.”

“Who’s
they,
Agnes?”

“Herself and Lark, nobody else this time”

She could not keep the car that long. She’d have to try to borrow one of the house cars from Hardscrabble Hill. Why had Kiley delayed the meeting? She wished she knew what was happening, but it was futile to try to pump Agnes. At Hardscrabble Hill she might get some information, but that was too far to go today. She picked up her winter clothes from Agnes and drove back.

She stood in the barn, where Joel had just milked two cows while she watched with queasiness. She wished Natalie were there to discuss her identification with the cows: all flesh and breasts. She felt sorry for the cows and she felt a shameful unity with them, warm milky creatures with melting eyes. Embarrassingly, those huge swollen udders hung pink and sore looking. Two of the cows had to have their udders sleeked with greasy bag balm. She felt her nipples rubbing against her sweater. Joel was full of schemes.

“Listen, Cal can get us a car. A ‘66 Chevy, and the engine’s sound”

“A car? What for?”

“Four hundred cash. It even has snow tires, put on last year.”

“Have you gone crazy? Let’s buy a pet dinosaur.”

“It wouldn’t cost much. Not if I keep it in good tune. Then we could travel easy, we could even sleep in it. It’d be like a base for us.”

“Honey, why in hell do you want a car?”

“Why don’t
you
want one?” Joel glared. “Don’t call me honey in that tone. Think how great it’s been having the little Subaru. The insurance is low up here. I could work on it and get it in great shape. When the weather’s nice, we can go camping.”

“Why not go camping now? It’s as practical as using up our money on some great gas-guzzling ogre that’ll die in the first mountain pass!” She tugged on her hair in annoyance.

“You don’t trust me. You don’t believe I’m a good mechanic. Listen, I could take that car apart and put it together in the dark. Blindfolded. With gloves on.”

She paced as the cows shuffled. “We have to figure out what we’re going to do.”

“I can work here awhile. I was talking to Steve. I’m better on the detail work than the couple he has now.”

“I can’t stay here. They’d drive me crazy.” Steve reminded her of a fat and fangless Kevin, lording it over his household.

“Just a few days. I asked Steve for five bucks an hour. No taxes out, no Social Security. If I put in a week, that’s two hundred right there”

“Have you made up your mind if you want to go with me Tuesday?”

“Yeah, why not? But what is all this? Are you still for real in the Net—”

She stepped hard on his foot. “What did you think? If we want to work on opposition to nuclear power plants, we have to hammer out some kind of proposal. It needn’t be solid till, say, late this month. Probably not till after Thanksgiving. But we need some preliminary flag to wave at Kiley to draw out her reaction.” A scheme began to come to her. “Listen, I’ll take the car and return it. Then I’ll stay at Hardscrabble. You buy the car, get it in shape and I’ll wait upstate. You can come up there Monday night for the Tuesday meeting, if you want to, or just come up when you work out the week.”

”Ah, stay with me. We could get separated.”

“Love, I’m going to push a plate into Steve’s face if I have to sit through another meal with him.”

“‘Cause he’s loud. You like refined types. University men”

“My dad was stone working-class and he never sat at the table like a pig in a high chair. Maybe he didn’t know what fork to use, but he knew how to treat people at his table” She stepped closer. “You’d never act like that. He treats Ellen worse than a cow.”

“I don’t want us to be separated. It scares me.”

She found it scared her too. “I’ll wait. Come to me.”

To drive off in the Subaru for New Hampshire exhilarated her—going to an assignation with her husband in style. Oh, she had certainly traveled enough on buses for nine lifetimes, in other people’s cars, handed from car to car; but she had not climbed into a vehicle alone and roared off sedately in too many years for her to locate the last time. By habit, she minimized contact between herself and strangers. She took along cold chicken and filled the thermos with Ellen’s perked coffee, boiled to viscosity but hot and full of caffeine. Natalie’s gift accompanied her. She wished it were time to talk to her again.

Of all the pleasures of her old life that she had not properly appreciated, the simple ability to pick up a phone and call someone when she wanted to know how they were, what they were doing, when she ached to hear their voice was surely one of the most precious abilities she had lost.

“The first euphoria is over. We rub on each other. Traveling together is hard. Yet the connection holds—isn’t that a surprise?” She talked to Natalie as she drove. “Just desperation? Somebody to love after so long? Not that I don’t love you and Leigh. There are people who never stop missing the ones they love. I never get used to it: you’re there and I’m here, and why? You know, you go underground with a set of people and you’re condemned to them. If you can’t love one of them, find a mate, you’re out of luck. Eva was consolation but not passion. Every woman not you always strikes me they aren’t you. Except Lohania. She was herself. Yet even Lohania got jealous of you”

Lohania and she had exhausted evenings in discussions about whether they should be lovers. They agreed it was a terrible inhibition that they could relate only to men, and they were warmly attracted to each other. But they seemed more comfortable talking about their attraction than acting on it. Half the people who knew them thought they were lovers, an assumption they encouraged, but the myth satisfied them for months. They could hold each other, they could cuddle, but below the waist stayed out of bounds. They drank wine, they got stoned, they finally dropped acid together, but they had affection rather than sex. Finally Lohania insisted they had gone too far to back down. It was a politically necessary step.

Lohania thought they ought to go off to a motel, but Vida objected. Instead, they kicked out Kevin and Leigh for the weekend; took the phone off the hook (a preliminary to sex, whose accompaniment was always the mechanical protests of a telephone uncoupled) and marched off to bed to get on with it. Actually she had enjoyed making love with Lohania. At first they were clumsy, but the unease passed. They discovered they could experience multiple orgasms with each other and made love until they were both sore and feeling a little piggish, passing a whole weekend in sensual experimentation while the war burned and all their brothers and sisters rushed about their business.

Brothers and sisters, lord! We did call each other that. She squinted to read the road signs. Please don’t snow! Amazing, but we did. From Black religious influence, civil rights days? Whenever it was, it passed in the conflagration, and nobody says it any longer. It would be too sentimental, too warm for the ‘70s; but I liked it. You just can’t say, brothers and sisters, you are a bunch of yellow-dog running lackeys of imperialism, guilty alternatively of right opportunism and left-wing infantilism. It said we wanted to be each other’s families. Not that it didn’t foster its own flatulent style. The male leader pretending folksiness in a Harvard accent crossed with a drawl borrowed from Bob Dylan records or movies about hoods, “Gee, brothers and sisters, I kind of tink we ought to maybe do this here ting … “But it left more room for paying attention to each other. We did trust each other, amazingly. We were wide open. Anybody could come in, and many did. We coupled off, but we tried to stay open; we did try to care. We were big on Love. A lot of the time it meant nothing but a buzz in the head and an idiot grin, but sometimes it meant trying a bit harder to be close, to listen, to understand.

Lohania and she had not continued as lovers. Why? It took too much effort. It was easier to fit into the men’s schedules, easier to focus on the men’s demands. To bring them together required disrupting everybody’s patterns. Lohania said Vida was really in love with her own sister, Natalie. One day they had a fight about their relationship. Lohania insisted that Vida couldn’t put more effort into loving women because she was hung up on Natalie and Natalie was the one she really wanted.

It was that burning cold year. Everybody spun crazy with desperation to stop the war. She had run downstairs to Natalie, who was having a shouting match with Sam because he had knocked baby Peezie on the head with a plastic dump truck.

Peezie had been named Phyllis Ziporah, after Daniel’s and Natalie’s dead mothers, but after Sam had renamed her she was never called anything but Peezie again. Her name had represented an unsuccessful compromise between Daniel’s claims and Natalie’s, for Daniel had disliked the name Ziporah as much as Natalie had disliked the name Phyllis.