Vida (34 page)

Natalie undid the door. “Hi. We’re just finishing. I didn’t want to let Daniel in. I swear he likes to walk into the middle of our women’s meetings. It bugs him that there’s anything in the whole universe he can’t control!”

“You don’t let him in when you’re meeting? Do you throw Sam out in the street too?”

“I would if Sam acted the way Daniel does. Oh, heh, heh, the ladies. You mean I can’t stay? I’m not welcome! You mean just because I’m a man … “

Why was she pretending she didn’t understand? Daniel patronized her too. He assumed nothing she could have to say politically could be as interesting as anything he had to say, and that if they disagreed, it was because she didn’t follow his fine reasoning. Yet that circle of women sitting on the old red couch, the rocking chairs and the floor disturbed her. Their eyes went over her and mostly, politely, they looked back to each other, but one or two stared longer.

What did Natalie say about her? Did they sit around discussing how she ought to be working with women instead of The Little Red Wagon? Suddenly she recognized that stocky woman still watching her as Jan, who had served on the New York Steering Committee of SAW as long as she had been Oscar’s girlfriend. After Oscar had broken with Jan, she had heard Jan was taking it badly. Since then Vida had seen Jan only at demonstrations. Now here was the girl Lohania had used to call along with Brenda the Bubble Gum Twins sitting cross-legged on the floor weighing fifteen pounds more than she had, with her hair growing out brown from the scalp, dressed in basic Army drab and looking grim enough to curdle milk. Oh, Jan’s going to try to talk to me about Oscar, she thought. Her anger at Oscar was strictly political, and she did not want to confuse her precise disgust at his Schactmanism with what must be Jan’s woman-scorned dreariness. Oscar had been forced out of the Steering Committee to lick his wounds at C. W. Post, where Daniel, who supported his opposition to the more militant tactics SAW was adopting, had got him a teaching appointment.

”I can come back” Vida offered nervously. “I just dropped by”“ She didn’t want to say in front of the women that she had come to borrow onions. They might think it was regressive that she did the cooking, whereas only Lohania and she knew how, and she hated to eat canned spaghetti.

“It’s four, Natalie said, “If we don’t keep to a deadline, we go on forever”

Jan stood, “Announcement! I’m running a printing workshop starting tomorrow evening for any woman who wants to learn. We have a press at the center now, just a small Multilith, but look at the rape pamphlet and you’d be surprised at what we can do …”

Just what the Movement needed: yet another printing press. SAW had a perfectly good printshop. Then she remembered there had been a fight between a women’s group and the printers about something the women wanted run off that the printers, all male, had refused to take.

“While we’re learning to print, we’ll do some fun things like run off our own stationery, so you can learn layout too … “

Here they were, facing off the cops every day, enduring tear gas and bayonets, and these nuts were designing fancy stationery. As Jan walked out in a knot of women, Vida turned her back and thumbed the pamphlet. It really was about rape. She felt embarrassed. What a weird subject! Next they’d be doing pamphlets on mugging or toothache. “What is this stuff?” she demanded of Natalie as the last visitor straggled out.

“We find in groups that half of us have been raped. You see, when women start to talk to each other, the old assumptions crumble.” Natalie gave her a hug, “Glad to see you!”

“Half the women in groups. You get the ones who are mad already”“

“Don’t you think rape is common?”

“Come on, Natty, what do you mean, common? Is murder common? It sure is in Vietnam.”

Natalie rubbed her eyes—a gesture of fatigue, “How about you? You’ve been raped.”

“What are you talking about?” She paced, but carefully. Natalie’s was not an apartment where she could pace restlessly or passionately: she’d end up on her ass with a plastic pull toy under her and two kids screaming she’d just broken Jeremy.

Natalie settled at the dining-room table with a deep sigh, “Don’t you remember Vasos? He used to force you regularly.”

“Oh” She saw herself pinned on the bed under Vasos, unable to cry out because there was nothing but humiliation in screaming when your own lawfully wedded husband exercised his conjugal rights. When he thrust into her, it hurt. She would feel torn. If she was lucky, he would come quickly, but if she was unlucky, he would go on pounding in her, each stroke burning her raw. Afterward when she pissed, it would hurt all night. Vida sat down at the table across from Natalie. “But it isn’t rape if you know the guy”“

“If you murder somebody you know, it’s murder. If you rob somebody you know, it’s robbery.”

“But … he didn’t have a gun or a knife.”

“Did he need one?”

“I could have fought harder, I used to fight him as long as I could and then I’d give up.”

“Why? Why didn’t you try to kill him?”

She twisted on the chair. Something she did not want to remember, those months before she had succeeded in running away, “It was his right— he kept saying that. He was stronger than me, and his weight alone would push me down. And it was his house, his family, his mother and father in the next room, his brothers down the hall, his country, his language his courts, his law.”

“Isn’t it usually?” Natalie poured some peppermint tea, nudging the cup across, “Remember, I was raped at college.”

“Raped? Oh” She remembered Natalie coming in with her blouse torn, carefully not opening her coat until she was in the room they shared in the dormitory, then sitting numbly on the bed’s edge. For the first few hours Natalie could not cry. “That guy.”

“Because he was Black and I was white, I thought it was my fault, It was our first date” Natalie tweaked her snub nose, squeezing. “In those days, we didn’t expect trouble from men on the first date, if we were supposed to be nice girls,”

“But isn’t it like a racist cliche? Black man rapes white woman?”

“Most rapes are in the same race. Mostly white men rape white women—”

“My god, Natty, I hope you don’t go around saying in your women’s group that a Black man raped you! He was probably incredibly oppressed. That’s like putting down Blacks because there’s a high crime rate in the ghetto.”

“When a man rapes a women, he doesn’t do it to feed his hungry family … He said, What does a white woman go out with a Black man for if she doesn’t want sex? I said, I liked the way you talked in the meeting”

“Natalie, you’ve got to cool this. You want to sound like some Southern-belle racist?”

”Now, you listen, Davida!” Natalie clutched her hand hard. Her eyes were burning, and she looked close to tears. “I spent as much time getting my ass kicked in civil rights as you did. And I am not a racist! But I’m not going to lie about my experiences anymore, I’m not!”

If Kevin heard Natalie, he’d call her a fascist. She vibrated with anxiety imagining her sister running around New York telling everybody she’d been raped by a Black man. “That was years and years ago. It’s ancient history. . “

“But you and I never let me talk about it.” Natalie let go of Vida’s hand finally. Her own hands sought each other, and again she twisted her ring, round and round.

Natalie was really angry, she finally noticed. Maybe she hadn’t let her sister talk about it. If so, she was sure going to pay for it now. She could see herself explaining Natalie all over the Movement, and how could she rationalize something so … gauche? “That really scared you a lot” she said slowly. “You’ve been cautious with men ever since. You don’t take the chances I do”

“No,” Natalie said, calming down. “Why should I? It’s not worth it.”

“To be close to someone?”

“I have enough people to love, in my own way.”

She wondered briefly if Natalie would include Jimmy among those. She noticed his striped engineer’s cap lying on the radiator. Jimmy liked to dress in what he saw as working-class clothes, such as white painter’s pants and flannel shirts. Jimmy had been in love with her all through 1969, when twice they had attempted to make love, but he could not. Now he was more happily in love with Natalie. If at first you don’t succeed, try the other sister. She did not think Natalie slept with Jimmy, because, after all, she had been faithful to Daniel for years and years, but that very fidelity might spare him the worry over whether he could or couldn’t. Ordinarily she could have asked Natalie outright what was going on, but they had been getting on worse than they ever had in their lives. Besides, it was a little beneath Vida’s dignity to inquire over a strayed lover or admit she did not know everything about everybody in her collective. She should gladly donate Jimmy to Natalie. After all, she did not love him except as a friend or as a pet, almost. Poor Jimmy. He adored too easily to be valued as he deserved. She tore her mind off Jimmy. “If you don’t take chances on people, you don’t get close to anyone. You don’t learn new things.”

“Vida, I do get close to people. Come on! I’m close to most of the women in my group. In a brand-new way, in fact.”

She flashed on that tight circle of women on the floor. “When you work with a group, it’s always like that. Struggling together, feeling a sense of
we.”
Just like her with The Little Red Wagon. “It’s just that with two kids, you haven’t been able to get thick with the people you work alongside.”

“It’s not the same. They don’t punish me for having kids. They don’t stare at my breasts when I talk. They don’t come on to me and then walk off when they notice the ring on my hand and find out I have two children. When I express feelings, they don’t call me hysterical.”

Hysterical. “But Natty, okay, rape is something that happens to some of us—”

“Remember when Brenda got raped at knifepoint in her hallway? They only had to prove in court she’s in SAW and lovers with Bob Rossi …”

“Natty, that doesn’t make it political.”

“Terror exercised by half the population over the other half isn’t political? What’s more political than coercion?” Sitting back tilted in her chair, Natalie looked at her. Vida had the sense that Natalie was suddenly tired of the conversation. Natalie, who had just spent an intense afternoon with her group, didn’t feel like arguing any longer. “You’ve lost weight. What is all this crazy hush-hush stuff? We never eat together any longer. I hardly see you.”

“That reminds me, I have to borrow onions and start supper.”

“Onions are hanging in a mesh bag in the kitchen … Are you and Leigh getting along? I never see you with him. Always with Kevin. And I hardly ever get to sit down with Lohania. She’s cold to me.”

“Political differences” Vida said. “You know. Between Leigh and me. Between you and me. Between you and Lohania.”

“But not between you and Lohania and you and Kevin.”

“We’re Marxist-Leninists.”

“Since when? And what for, sweetie? What’s the point being a Leninist in the U.S. of A. in 1970? Everybody who made a revolution broke the rules by being entirely of their own time and place”

“Exceptionalism. That the U.S. is so different, so special, we can’t stoop to learn from what worked in China and Cuba.”

“Lenin wasn’t what worked in China or Cuba!”

“The Cubans wouldn’t say that. The Chinese wouldn’t. They say study Marx and Lenin.” She found herself getting angry. Natty was becoming frivolous.

“A revolution here has to come out of our situation, right? It isn’t going to look like one anyplace else. You used to laugh at all those factionalists quoting their little red books. Bob Rossi looking for the peasants to lead into battle—”

”I’m more serious than I was then—”

“No! You’re just more desperate” Natalie leaned forward, catching Vida’s hand. “Come on, don’t let’s fight. So what’s wrong with you and Leigh?”

“Look, Natty, we’re not a couple like you and Daniel. When Leigh and I are close, it’s because we feel close. Right now we don’t agree politically.” She detached her hand. “To me it’s not a job in itself to have a relationship with him. It’s not the center of my life. As a woman you ought to understand that. Making Leigh feel like he’s in love with me and making him feel good isn’t my big job in the world—right?”

“Right, Vida. You’re absolutely right. I’m too traditional in my pat-terns—everybody says it. It’s just that Leigh really loves you and you really love him. You’re not happy when you’re at odds. You look wrung out. You’re not taking care of yourself. You sleep two hours a night”

“I’m stronger than I’ve ever been. I think that what women need to do about rape is not sit around with each other moaning and groaning but make ourselves strong. If we arm ourselves, nobody can rape us”

Natalie sat back, grimacing. “Sure, walk down Broadway with an automatic weapon. Take a grenade to bed.”

“If we act strong, men won’t try to bully us. We have to make ourselves strong.” She jumped up and marched into the kitchen to take the onions.

“Black people always were strong, Vida, strong physically. Black women labored in the fields for fifteen hours—and were raped”

“But they didn’t have guns!” She grabbed the onions and went out the kitchen door. “No slaves have guns.” As she ran up the service steps, she met Jimmy with a bouquet of daffodils. Seeing her, he froze, embarrassed, on one foot.