Vida (36 page)

Lohania was wearing the midnight blue wrapper Vida had got her when they went to Puerto Rico. Randy had his shirt off and padded barefoot after her. Vida looked at the ceiling, the ragged smears of blood red paint annoying her. Then she sat up, dragging the sheet around her shoulder. She did not want to lie supine in front of Randy. Lohania said, “Your mother’s on the phone.”

She simply refused to walk naked past Randy. She tore the sheet off the bed, uncovering Kevin, who would not mind, and sidled past them into the hall. “Ruby? How are you?” She glanced at the clock. Ruby called as soon as the rates went down. That meant Leigh’s program was on. If she turned it on when she got off the phone, Kevin would be furious.

“Baby, are you all right?” Ruby asked in her fast thick voice.

“Fine, Ruby, fine. How are you?”

“Listen, I didn’t call to be social.”

“Why not? It’s okay.”

“The federal agents, they came around again. To the pharmacy. It’s not good for Sandy, you know? They tell me, Do you know your daughter is living in the hippie commune with four men besides her husband? She calls herself a communist. And so on. They try to scare me. They tell me, You know, Mother—imagine an FBI calling me Mother? That made me mad. They got their nerve. I’m not old enough to be his misfortunate mother, I told him so. They said, Oh, you was born in 1916 in Cleveland, Ohio, to emigrant parents who came here to the land of the free in 1907. So, I said, If that’s a crime, sue me”

“Ruby, you shouldn’t talk to them. Don’t confirm what they say. Don’t argue with them. Don’t say anything. Hear me?”

“Did I say anything? I wouldn’t say a word.”

“But you shouldn’t get into arguments with them through the screen door.”

“They’re going to give your father Sandy a heart attack coming into the pharmacy. It’s not right.” Ruby always called it a pharmacy instead of a drugstore. That was fancier to her. “They went to your sister’s too.”

It took her a moment to realize Ruby meant Sharon. She never thought of Sharon as related to her or even to Natalie, although Sharon was Natalie’s younger sister.

“She called me up spitting mad. Can’t you make Vida and Natalie stop this stuff? she said. They’re hurting my husband’s career. I’m quoting her exact.”

“So who else did they go to?” She amused herself by draping the sheet around her as a toga and admiring herself in the reflection off the glass door to the living room. A band of dirty sun lanced through the window and caught the ends of her hair.

“Paul. At the plant. It’s not good, what they do”

“It’s harassment. You call up your Congressman and complain. Tell them the FBI is telling you lies about your daughter and pestering you.”

“My Congressman! What does he care?”

“Nothing, but why not complain? So how is everybody otherwise?”

She listened with half an ear, interested and bored at the same time and enjoying Ruby’s voice and feeling a little guilty for enjoying it. Only Leigh had such a warm feeling for his parents as she and Natalie did.

“So when are you coming home?” Ruby was asking.

“Mama, my life isn’t my own right now.”

“So whose is it? Ho Chi Minh’s?”

“Ruby, he’s dead and don’t make jokes. I have duties here. Make Nixon stop the war and then I can take pleasure trips.”

“So at least I’m a pleasure to you”

“You are. I’d like to give you a great big hug.”

“Are you taking care of yourself? Natalie says you run yourself ragged. You don’t take vitamins, you stay up all night at meetings, you don’t eat right. Didn’t I teach you to eat right?

“Natalie’s a fussbudget. Don’t I sound fine?”

When she got off the phone, she walked into a tense argument. Quickly she picked her clothes off the floor and went into the adjacent bathroom to dress, leaving the door ajar so that she could hear.

“I’m just expressing my doubts,” Lohania said defensively.

“Well, step on them like roaches” Kevin said. “We got no time for doubt”

Vida waded into her pants and burst into the room still zipping them up. She had doubts too, secret snake pits full.

Lohania held the wrapper closed, frowning. “Maybe we’re giving up on trying to reach people. I know, I saw
The Battle of Algiers
as many times as you all did, but we aren’t in a colonial situation. It isn’t like we have a Party. We’re doing this on our own.”

Randy was red in the face, shouting, “How long do you want to run around in the streets shoving each other? What do you think you are, a road-company West Side Story? You say you’re at war. Well, start fighting. And I don’t mean with slogans.”

Vida said, “Slogans are ways of getting across what we have to say. They stand for solid analysis.”

”They stand for solid crap. Ideology is a social disease. If you’re not hurting the state, you’re not doing shit.”

“Without a sense of why they’re doing things, people get confused” Vida said. “I want a movement that changes how people think.”

Kevin sat up in bed naked, princely, with a calm smile listening to them haggle. He’d listen and then browbeat them to his way of thinking.

“Sure, Westmoreland’s scared at night about how you think. Thought’s cheap. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. All you chicks want is to crank out lousy pamphlets nobody reads but other college kids,” Randy said.

“Without politics, all you got is adventurism,” Lohania said. “Without politics, what’s the difference between us and a demolition crew?”

The outer door slammed, and they all froze. Kevin rolled out of bed and in one fluid motion grabbed his shirt, reached for his dope and got ready to swallow it. Jimmy burst into the room, and they all relaxed.

“K-K-Kevin!” Jimmy stuttered only when he was extremely upset.

She was glad she was dressed. She did not like to rub Jimmy’s nose in her lovemaking with Kevin. “Are you all right?”

“The radio. We were listening to Leigh—”

“A thrill a minute.” Kevin turned his back.

“Leigh said the National Guard shot a bunch of students at Kent State. Shot them dead. Fired into a crowd.”

“Where’s Kent State?” Lohania asked.

“Ohio,” Vida said. “We have a SAW chapter there. It’s just an ordinary school.”

“White?” Lohania asked incredulously.

Jimmy said, “They killed students, I’m telling you. Two men and two women. At a demonstration right on the campus.”

“Jesus.” Kevin stood up slowly. “They’re killing us out in public now.” They had friends who died mysteriously in prison: She hanged herself with this piece of rope she got somewhere. Sure, he tried to escape in broad daylight right in the prison yard and was shot forty-eight times. Friends had died in automobile accidents coming back from Canada, on the underground railway that ran draft resisters and deserters out of the country: died in accidents where tire tracks showed they had been forced off the road. Nonetheless, this was the first time she could think of when white kids had been shot for protesting. She was horrified, and yet she had the feeling, underneath, of inevitability. What they had been saying about the repressive fury of the government was true.

The war brought home. Tears ran down her face as she clutched herself. “The war’s starting here” she said numbly. Randy stared from one of them to the next, shaking his head in annoyance. “You look like zombies. You didn’t know the kids. Besides, we’re fighting back—right?”

Kevin crashed his fist into the wall, and plaster cascaded. Lohania put her arm around Jimmy’s shoulders. He was shaking. Vida came to stand with them, and all three held one another. Official murder. The government shot unarmed kids and felt righteous about it. Maybe they enjoyed it.

Kevin lurched from the wall, his face bright, his eyes burning. “We’ll show them a TDA! We’ll blow them a TDA that hurts” TDA was Movement slang for The Day After: the demonstrations that immediately protested some new atrocity, a new escalation, new arrest, new entrapment, new weapon.

She hoped Leigh would come home for supper so they could find out more information. “Everybody’s staying to eat,” she declared with assumed matter-of-factness. “I’ll get it on the table”

“No,” Randy said. “I got to split.”

“How come, man?” Kevin socked him in the biceps. “Thought we’re running up to the Bronx, where they’re picketing the hospital for a little action.”

“Man, if we’re going to move on this day after tomorrow, I got some hustling to do. Right?”

“You don’t want company?”

“No, man, not for this. In fact, you’d be in the way”“ Grinning, Randy scooped up his pack from the hall and left. Kevin trailed Lohania back to the room where she put on her clothes. Jimmy began setting the table as Vida put together a vegetable plate from some frozen packages.

Kevin leaned on the doorjamb to Lohania’s small neat room painted an almost blinding white with dark blue enamel trim. “Well, Lulu, did you fuck him?”

“Why ask?” Lohania examined her nails. As the copper paint was chipped on one, she repaired it, unerringly seizing the right bottle from the forest on her bureau.

“You saying it’s none of my business? Because you don’t fuck me anymore?”

“Shut up, Kevin.” She turned her back on him, zipping her pants. “It was your bloody idea I should service him. Wasn’t it?”

“That’s what he wanted. Nobody made you do it.”

“You made her do it and so did he” Vida yelled. “Get off her back”

”I didn’t fuck him, if that’s all you want to know.” Lohania squirmed into her tank top, keeping her back to him.

“Oh? What were you doing? Playing doctor? You had your clothes off”‘

Quickly she raked her Afro comb through her hair, “I sucked him off”‘

“Oh?” Kevin drummed on the doorjamb. “And what did he do to you?”

Jimmy walked in and backed out immediately with an embarrassed grimace. She wanted to flee too. Hide in her room until they were done lacerating each other. If only Lohania would come out of her withdrawal; Kevin could not endure it and got meaner with each week.

“Nothing. I wasn’t interested.” Lohania marched past him into the kitchen. As she squeezed through the doorway, he seized her upper arm. They glared at each other, and then he let her go. “You made it happen! You let him make those demands!”

“He’s crazy about you.” Recovering his smiling mask, Kevin lounged against the refrigerator in Vida’s way.

“I’m not ‘crazy’ about him. I used to be ‘crazy’ about you, but I get saner every day.”

“Frigid! Your cunt is turning into concrete.”

“My concrete. We got any bread? I mean bread to eat. I like bread with pot roast” Lohania came and stood close to Vida, smiling deliberately at her.

She heard the outer door open. “Leigh?” she called.

“Why, it knows its hubby’s key in the lock scratching,” Kevin drawled. “Hope it is Micro. We can get some use out of him for once”

When Leigh came strolling in wearing a new polka-dot shirt, he had a woman with him who looked and dressed as Vida and Lohania had a couple of years before, in sandals and textured stockings and a dark blue minidress with a fitted bodice covered with embroidery. Over her flaxen straight hair she had a hat wound with a scarf that dipped over her shoulder, in filmy blue, and she carried an oversized satchel that Vida recognized as a Peloponnesian saddlebag: not cheap. Standing in the kitchen, barefoot in jeans and T-shirt, Vida was offended. That’s what he wants, she thought: the way I was before. I haven’t bought myself a dress in eighteen months. I should take the food money from the kitty and buy a dress?

“And Leigh, oh, Leigh, it was truly marvelous. I mean I’m just tremendously impressed by what all of you do with so little. You have absolutely fierce esprit de corps. But are all the engineers that rude and grumpy?”

“All of them,” Leigh said heartily, guiding her through the apartment with his hand in the small of her back. “I’m afraid you’re going to meet a lot of surly types in New York. Including here”

Kevin lounged now in the door to the dining room, blocking it, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and his shirt buttoned halfway down to where his pants would usually have been. He had not put them back on. Casually Kevin scratched his balls with his left hand as he extended his right to shake. “We wouldn’t be rude, now. We like visitors too much. Females we like. We throw the men out the window. That’s a long drop, and no one’s bounced yet.”

Uneasily the woman laughed, standing close to Leigh and carefully staring into Kevin’s blue eyes so that she could not be thought to be looking any lower. Lohania shoved Kevin out of the way to give Leigh a quick perfunctory kiss. “Hi, baby. Listen, you had about forty-two phone calls. But this one cat, he made half of them his own self. Name of Angio, calling from Cleveland, Ohio, every five minutes, collect”

“I hope he calls back.” He turned to the woman. “This is Karen. She’s in the Washington bureau of
New Day,
down here on a story. Angio’s our man at Kent State, so he ought to have something.”

Karen was giving Lohania a careful once-over, deciding she must be Leigh’s girlfriend. She paid no attention to Vida, which Vida found infuriating. Vida and Leigh exchanged no word, no greeting, but glanced obliquely at each other. Couldn’t he come home for once without dragging along some media jerk? It was as if he was afraid to walk into the apartment and confront her without a prop, a crony, an admirer. “How many do we have at table tonight?” Leigh asked airily of the whole hall. “One hundred, two hundred, many hundred?”