Vida (32 page)

She could feel something lurking under his words. “Then why do you have doubts?”

“A mass project like this, don’t you always have doubts? Whether I’m compromising my politics … I did an exciting program on a women’s clinic in Park Slope. Brought in a good response when we aired it … But they’re dealing with maybe fifty women a week. They demystify the process, but so what?”

“I suppose it means they lack resources to handle more women.”

“Naw, it’s just a case of the Movement making sure the Movement community has good health care. It doesn’t reach women in Red Hook or Bedford-Stuyvesant, who have shitty care or none” He kicked at a log, hard. “Half the people we used to know are nurses now. Male nurses, yet. God, are they superior! Or gone to medical school—all the ones who didn’t go back to school and become lawyers. Must be a lawyer, his own personal lawyer, for every damn radical left active in this country. Anyhow, at one hospital in Brooklyn there’s this war going on between the politicos active in the union they fought to get in there and the radicals who are active in the community, who want to take over the board that runs the hospital. At each other’s throats. Whatever I say, somebody’s going to wring my neck.”

“You have to set them into a perspective in which each kind of organizing has a place, Leigh.”

“Sure, everybody’s right and nobody’s wrong in our One Big Union.”

They climbed over a tree fallen across the path and continued down, crossing their own footprints climbing. Her gloves were not warm enough, and her fingers grew numb.

“Let me lay on you Mother’s Patented Blueprint for Struggle.”

“I wish somebody would lay a hot toddy on us.”

“The women’s self-help clinic has the function of providing space beyond the control of the AMA, the drug companies, the medical insurance companies. You discover things—that lots of what gynecologists learn in school are old husbands’ tales. Sometimes an alternative becomes main-stream—midwives might end up delivering most babies again. These alternative institutions are labor-intensive and capital-poor, right? Easily set up, easily wiped out. But you can’t ignore the mass institutions—”

“Exactly my point. So what real relevance have they, except as kindergartens?”

“Without them, you can only demand more of the same. More drugging, more hysterectomies. But the attack inside the institutions has to be two-pronged. Any strategy has to encompass the needs of the consumers— kids and parents in the schools, patients in the hospitals—and the workers in that institution—teachers and janitors in the schools, nurses, orderlies, kitchen help in the hospitals. Concentrating on workers alone or consumers alone leads the powerless to fight each other”

“Remember Ocean Hill-Brownsville?” They had come out on the level floor of the valley and were heading back to the highway where her car was parked. He took her arm. “Sometimes it hits me what a loss it is with you out of things politically. You have a kind of common sense that’s always in short supply.”

Out of things. That hurt somehow. “I see things clearer than I used to” How pleased she used to be when she spoke up in meetings if Leigh or Oscar approved. Always she had been a water bug skating over deep cold water. She mouthed the words that sounded right and she used her anger and her indignation, but she never understood the vast structures of analysis the men erected. Then some years after she had gone underground, she had realized she no longer depended on any man to tell her when she was correct. She could be argued with, she could change her mind, but she judged her own arguments. She knew the criteria by which she made political judgments, and others could influence her only on those agreed terms. She was no longer performing; she was only working.

When Leigh got into the car, he slid automatically into the passenger’s side. “Ocean Hill-Brownsville,” he repeated. “We’ve been through so many good fights. Hey, old pussycat? … I’m at that point of saturation with my material where bouncing my own ideas off a good brain helps to clarify what I’ve been thinking … Babes, it’ll be a blockbuster. Of course, I’ll get a lot of bozos mad at me, but what the hell?”

“I think it’ll be tremendous, Leigh. Will you show it to me as you go?”

“Sure … Don’t forget to burn those tapes.” He leaned back, drumming his fingers on the dash. “Slow down. That motel has a vacancy. How about it?”

She smiled sideways. A little victory. Immediately, she slammed on the brakes, steering into the motel and then neatly bringing them up in front of the office. “Your move”

“I don’t really have to be there when they get back. I can say I went for a walk. Wanted some air” Leigh went on talking himself into being late as he climbed out of the car to check in for them. She stayed behind the wheel, hugging herself with delight. Ah, she was getting him back, she was. Their intimacy was rebuilding.

It wasn’t until they had made love and he had taken a quick shower and was prowling to and fro drying himself when she realized by a tightness around his eyes, a false note in his voice that something was still wrong. “Did you not tell me the whole truth about Ruby?” she demanded, kneeling on the bed holding herself.

“I told you what I know.” He cleared his throat. “The Irishman is talking a lot.”

“Leigh! Be careful with saying things like that. That’s a serious charge. Why would you think so?”

“They’re only running him on an AFT charge—transporting illegal weapons across a state line, possession of weapons, that stuff. They’ve’ quietly dropped the old charges. And his bail was reduced. He’s out trotting around New York free as a bird.”

“I can’t imagine him and Randy in the same town. They’ll kill each other. Randy has to be scared of him”

”Guess again, kid. I think Lohania brought them together, and I think Randy’s making a deal. Our old pal Randy is in the D.A’s office, and he’s up and coming. I think maybe he just bought himself one tough lad formerly of the Hoboken docks.”

It was not till she was driving north that the depression hit her—not Kevin, for nothing was known yet, and she would put that in abeyance until she talked to Kiley, but about Leigh. What was she to him? Did it mean anything? A project that assumed Leigh would work with her at all was a fantasy. Somehow the sexual passage in the motel left her feeling handled rather than loved. Bits of their conversation caught in her like barbed hooks. He had still asked her nothing about herself. Nothing. She wanted to be with Joel. She wanted to run all the way back. But she had so arranged things that she would not see him until Monday night at the earliest. She knew she was stuck with that, regretting it bitterly. From the moment she headed north she began to miss him, and every mile it got worse, a louder, higher-pitched whine of missing.

PART IV

May 1970

12

At noon Vida spoke at a SAW demonstration on the Queens College campus, a thousand students standing in the midday sun. She could feel the anger, the outrage, the frustration simmering from the crowd. “We—we, they tell us—have invaded yet another country and are slaughtering ordinary people in their homes in the name of peace—the peace of death and decay, the peace of bodies rotting in the sun. Death turns us all the same color. And they are real people dying there, and you’re paying for it every time you make a phone call or work for an hour.” Her voice was husky and broken with the aftereffects of gas. “And this school is run to train you to pay more for more Vietnams and more Cambodias and never ask why. If you don’t make it in school, you can go and die there. Rich old men with bodyguards have democratically elected you the class of death!” She had to stay for the strike vote and help the chapter plan a strategy for taking over the administration building. Then she had a long subway ride back to the Upper West Side.

On the train she huddled, coming down from the adrenaline rush of her speech. She was late for a meeting of The Little Red Wagon, her own collective. She was always late now—running, running, but never arriving. She never went to bed before three in the morning, and she was seldom allowed to sleep past eight. From the time she crawled out till she collapsed in her clothes, she no longer had time to read a book, bake a cake, listen to music, talk idly—and everything was empty palaver that was not about liberation, not about imperialism or racism or Third World struggles, about the war, the war, the war. If she went to the country, it was for a secret meeting or for target practice. When she ran into an old friend, she could think only what skills or contacts they had that were needed, what kind of speaking or fund raising or organizing or liaison work they could do. Yet she had no feeling of accomplishment, because every morning in the fat
Times,
every evening on television, the war was stronger, and she was closer to exhaustion. They had not done enough, they had not risked enough, they had not tried everything, they had fought hard enough, they had not, because the proof was before her every morning and every evening the war went on. It was raining blood outside whether she looked out the window or not; the blood was splattering down, and the hot wind that blew across the city smelled of ashes, of burning flesh. Obviously they had not tried hard enough if the war still went on.

As Vida rushed into the tiny dim room Kevin had rented under the name Joseph Blow in a Single Room Occupancy welfare hotel on Amsterdam, the rest of her collective glared at her: Kevin from his seat on the open window, Lohania where she lay on the cot, Randy where he was pacing, Jimmy where he crouched watching Randy. Their anger felt familiar. Lately it seemed as if the closer you were to people, the harder they came down on you.

“And just where have you been?” Kevin spoke from the side of his mouth, tugging at his beard.

“SAW demonstration in Queens. They needed a speaker. They’re taking a strike vote to go out in protest of Cambodia”

Lohania lay on the cot, her eyes staring at the falling plaster. “This is an important meeting today.”

“We been waiting almost two hours!” Randy bellowed. “Are you with us or not?” The Little Red Wagon never met in their apartments or in Movement offices, being convinced they were all bugged.

“Mass work is important too” Vida said loudly. Neither Kevin nor Randy was involved in SAW. Lohania and Jimmy ought to support her. She wasn’t about to drop organizing altogether for the clandestine work of The Little Red Wagon.

Her political statement went right over Randy’s head. “No more of this shit.” He was a chunky man with wild straw-colored hair. He tied a red bandana around his head to keep the silky strands out of his eyes, blue and bland in a square-jawed face. He had blunt hands, stained with nicotine because he chain-smoked, often drawing so hard he puffed till the filter started to smolder. When for some reason he could not smoke—he smoked in movies, at rock concerts, on the subway—he chewed gum. “We got to work fast.”

“Why fast?” She perched on the cot near Lohania. “The war’s been going on since I grew up. We ought to take the time to do our action right.”

Kevin, balanced on the sill of the open window as if he might decide to leap out, swung around at that comment. “Davey, you little punk, we are doing it right. Wait till you see what Dolpho got us.” Kevin disliked calling people by name and gave them names of his own. Lohania was Lulu, Randy was Dolpho. The first time they slept together, Kevin asked her, “How come you got such a weird crummy name like Vida?”

“My father’s name was Tom, but his father was David. He named me for his dad. Christians do things like that.”

“Don’t Jews?”

“Not for the living.”

“So your real handle is Davida. Okay: Davey it is”

That first time had been in Washington, under a table where they were sleeping—under the table to keep from being stepped on. Nixon’s Counterinaugural. They had both been heavily gassed, and ill from it. Lohania and Jimmy had been separated from them, and Kevin and Vida did not find them until the following day. In the meantime they sought refuge in a house where people knew who they were but did not know them personally. Under a table, sore, bruised from vomiting, worried about their friends, they sought weary consolation, and the sex exploded.

“You’re not listening to me’” Randy accused her.

“I’m listening.”

Randy was one of the newer people coming into the Movement—not the serve-the-people type or a pacifist or a red-diaper baby or a thoughtful anarchocommunist or a Trot or a Catholic leftie, but someone with a huge rage against the war and the government. Randy was a walking bomb, a characteristic Kevin liked, Jimmy worshiped, and Vida pondered, sometimes with approval and sometimes with disdain.

Today Randy was proud of himself, strutting past Kevin. Randy’s beefy well-muscled arms under his T-shirt pumped at his sides, elbows jabbing the air. “Did I say I’d get us plans? Did I say that? Don’t tell me bullshit when I say what I’m going to do. I never shoot my face off when I can’t deliver—right, guys?”

“Floor plans?” Lohania sat up, wide awake at once like a cat, raking her hand back through her curly black hair.

“You heard me right.” Randy ran his hand over her bare shoulder. As the day was unseasonably warm, she was wearing a striped tank top. “Gather round and feast your eyes” From his knapsack he pulled out a pile of Xeroxed architect’s plans.

Jimmy—skinny, bony baby of hers and Natalie’s, who would not eat if somebody did not remind him—was imbecilically taken with Randy and doted on him like a gawky puppy. Now he ran circles around Randy in excitement. “You got us the plans—you really did! How did you do it?”