Vida (38 page)

”We aren’t his brothers and sisters anymore, we aren’t his comrades, we’re his fucking material,” she said as she burst from the elevator and raced across the lobby, waving to Julio, their friend who tipped them to surveillance, and then into the street. She felt like Wonder Woman streaking through the city. Fast, fast she went down the block, too fast for any man to give her trouble. Running lightly in her sneakers. Into the subway, she vaulted over the turnstile and bolted into a train. That was Movement style, perfectly executed. Show the people they can do it too. An example to other women.

Tomorrow she’d tear that dress up and make a rag of it. Tomorrow she’d be on the streets; they’d bring the city to a halt. They’d show the government what it meant to shoot down kids and try to terrorize the Movement. Then the day after that, The Little Red Wagon would roll. Leigh didn’t matter. She had wanted to break security to talk their action over with him, she had wanted to break the faith of their group for the sake of telling Leigh what she was about, but he had stopped her. She would show him. He didn’t have enough respect for her. He didn’t know how serious she was. So much the worse for him. He’d see.

13

The SAW demonstration took a day to mount, and all their plans got kicked over another day, while two Black students were shot in Mississippi and Randy fumed. When Vida stopped by the apartment to change for the streets, Randy and Kevin were head to head in the dormitory living room.

“Man, your priorities are screwed up” Kevin snapped. “Why does it matter exactly when we act? We can’t make a direct connection between that induction center and Kent State or Jackson State.”

“Suppose you get busted fighting cops? That ruins everything” Randy said, exuding sulkiness thick as cold gravy.

“What’s the difference? It’s all the same war.” Kevin slapped Randy on the back and strolled off. “We’ll see some fine action”

Randy slammed out of the apartment. Kevin grinned at her.
“It’s
here. Stored in Lulu’s room.”

“It?” Then she understood. It was as if he had shoved his fist into her abdomen. “Oh.”

Together they went in and looked at it, packed neatly in the box. Her hands were sweating. She could not find anything to say. They locked the door, locked the dynamite in. Then Vida had no more time to think. She ran from one meeting to another—the teachers’ group, the welfare mothers, the city planners, the taxi drivers. By the time the demonstration came, she could not whisper without pain. Her voice was entirely gone. Lohania, Jimmy and Kevin were in the streets, the Steering Committee of SAW, kids from the fifty-odd chapters, people from all the off-campus antiwar groups. She noticed Oscar, Natalie, Jan, Bob Rossi in a separate Maoist contingent, his ex-girlfriend Brenda with some bikers, Pelican. Everybody was out and running, while the police were rioting and breaking heads. She did not see Randy.

He disappeared completely until after the demonstration, whereas he was usually one of the busiest street fighters, always calling for a charge, the first to pick up a rock or toss garbage cans into windows, to rock a car over, to set a fire in a trash basket. Vida, who was always trying to keep action directed against political targets, did not miss him, but she was surprised he could stay away.

She could remember the peace parades down Fifth Avenue dressed in their respectable best, marching with agreed-upon placards along the negotiated route. Always they had been pleased how many old people turned out. Yet in such legal parades she had been beaten the first, the second, the third time. Always the newspapers reported half the numbers, and the war went on. Gradually the activists a grown tired of standing and being beaten on, and they had begun to run, to regroup, to taunt; gradually they had begun to fight back, to pick up the tear-gas canisters and return them, to come back at the police with clubs. Usually they got beaten anyhow. They were not often outnumbered, but they were outgunned, and the police tended to attack many on one.

Now when they went on the streets they expected to fight. Beforehand she was in terror, with an ache of fear growing stronger and stronger as the moment approached. It seemed to her that for years she had been forcing herself into the streets into more and more danger, and yet the war went on. First it had been a matter of moral courage, to pick up a sign and march against your own country’s war; but it had become a matter of brute physical courage.

The night after the demonstration, Randy came back, chastened and ready to make up. She sensed that he felt like an ass for missing the big action, and she put herself out to be nice to him. Brought him coffee and a plate of the chicken-and-barley soup she had made left-handed and even forced herself to smile at him.

“What happened to your arm?” he asked.

“A cop grabbed me.” She had an Ace bandage around her right wrist. “I got free, but my wrist is a little sore.” They were tending their injuries and feeling that deep mutual sense of relief. These rest periods after a demonstration were the most peaceful times she knew now. They had gone out and fought and they had all come back: no broken bones, no broken backs, no bashed-in heads, no blindness, no maiming, no one shot. They never guessed before they went on the streets a particular day or night what level of response would be dealt them: clubs and gas only, tear gas or Mace or the fancier chemicals, rubber bullets, shotgun pellets, lead bullets. Would the cops just bust, or would they bust and beat, or would they beat to maim?

She grew weary and sometimes disgusted with the efforts to prove herself again and again and again, as if they were all earning some sort of revolutionary merit badges. Now, at least, they had all tested their courage, they had all tested their commitment, and they had survived. The mood in the room was easy and loose; they were warmer together than at any other time—the bond of people who faced something and helped one another through. She loved frail Jimmy, who had slipped through unscathed; she loved Kevin, the brawler, the scrapper, the hero of every fray with his right hand bandaged and a Mace burn on his ankle from kicking a canister. She loved Lohania, her head in a bandage from a scalp wound, eating soup with a broad smile. Two of her beautiful green nails had been broken but she was carefully building them back with an ill-smelling chemical from a bottle, layer upon layer, to match the other daggers. She ate with her left hand only while the artificial nails dried on the right hand.

Vida loved even Randy, eating soup with a checklist on the table of everything they must remember, listed only by abbreviation or careful initials. If it were not for his dedication, they would probably have chucked the whole idea, she thought as she slowly ate her own soup, for their satisfaction had a lining of stupor and masked a craving just to let down and relax for a while. Lark had talked to Kevin just before the demonstration asking him to come to a factory in New Jersey where SAW was holding talks with the more militant workers. Kevin was not a member of SAW but Lark wanted to draw him into working-class organizing, He was sure Kevin could talk to the workers. Maybe he could. Vida would have liked to see Kevin drawn into regular organizing and made responsible for more than his big mouth.

Without Randy, no doubt they would have talked a lot but let the bombing die. They were overcommitted organizationally. She would have to steal the time tomorrow from hours supposed to be spent collating pamphlets and meeting with representatives from high school papers. Lohania and Jimmy would be defaulting on other obligations. For their common act of war.

Jimmy and Vida prepared the bomb except for attaching the clock and set it out next to the briefcase that would carry it. They could not attach the wires to the alarm, since clocks know only twelve-hour cycles. Then they all went for a brief walk in Riverside Park to review their plans. Randy left them there to head home. The whole family retired early, before Leigh came home. Kevin followed Lohania into her room to give her a back rub and change the dressing on her head and never came out. Jimmy went to sleep on the living-room floor.

Vida was glad Lohania and Kevin were together, sleeping in there with the dynamite. She hoped they would rise happy with each other. She did not undress, but lay on her bed with the light on going over the plan of the morning, hoping Leigh would come home. She wanted to talk to him. So many things could go wrong; she needed to feel close to him again, at least briefly, fleetingly.

When she awoke in the middle of the night, he had got past her. Standing outside his door, she could hear him snoring, but she did not know if he was alone. She pissed and returned to her room, undressed and got into bed properly, nudging Mopsy over. She did not sleep again. She watched the hands creep in their slow inevitable descent toward six and watched them begin to rise again, up to seven, when she shut off the alarm as it began to ring.

When she got to the kitchen, she put on coffee. Moments later, Kevin stumbled in groggy with Lohania behind him. “Go shave, my dearest,” Lohania said to him more tenderly than she had in months. “Show Vida your haircut that I laid on you. You got to look respectable today, if you can make a pass at it.”

“Yeah. Sure” Yawning, Kevin shuffled off to the other bathroom to use Leigh’s razor. His pants hung loose around his hips. With scissors Lohania had cut not only the hair of his head but his beard down to the stubble ready for the razor. Vida hoped he would curse and make a lot of noise while he shaved off his beard to rouse Leigh. She still wanted desperately to see him before she left. Suppose she were killed this morning? Suppose she were busted or shot down on the spot? Suppose they really didn’t know what they were doing and the bomb exploded in the briefcase, and that was the end of them?

She felt distant from Leigh as if a deep rift valley had grown between them, as if an earthquake had opened a fissure and their continents were shoving apart. She could not go and wake him. She did not know who might be with him, and the others would be upset. But if he woke and came out, she could snatch a moment. After the water boiled and she started the coffee dripping through, she ran back to dress, slamming the door intentionally.

A beige linen dress just three inches above the knees, demure and proper, that she had not worn since she had been fired from her job. Gold nonhippy earrings. She piled her hair into an expert French twist. Her hands remembered, for she had worn her hair that way in Greece. She put in the amber comb that had belonged to Grandma, to hold the twist in place. Ruby had always worn her hair short. Shoulder bag. Panty hose. Passable sandals with a little heel, almost matching the bag. She eyed herself. Put on makeup carefully, not to stain the dress. She had forgotten to put on makeup first. To protect her dress she had to borrow a towel from the bathroom where Kevin was with fierce concentration and some blood shaving off the remains of his wiry golden beard.

On a final inspiration she fumbled in the back of her vanity drawer, among lipsticks and curlers of past styles, for a small jar of eye shadow. Lavender eye shadow. A few Movement women used eyebrow pencils or eyeliners but nobody in the Movement ever wore eye shadow. It was one of those magic lines of demarcation. Eye shadow was what her sister Sharon wore in suburbia. Married ladies with Black maids wore eye shadow. There! She finished by applying makeup to her hands, covering chemical burns that might attract attention.

Seeing one another in their bourgeois finery was disquieting. Jimmy looked as if he were about to graduate high school or attend his mother’s funeral. He had a narrow maroon tie tucked into the neck of his navy suit and striped shirt. “Oh, Jimmy, you cut your hair!” He had. A mortal sacrifice. Without it his ears stuck out, red and naked, making him appear seventeen.

Kevin did not look successfully bourgeois. He emerged a working-class hustler. The madras plaid sports jacket he had borrowed did not quite fit, tight in the back for his musculature. The shirt was open at the throat. He had held up his khaki pants with a leather belt, borrowed at some point from Leigh probably without permission, because Leigh hated to lend his clothes. He had combed his hair neatly and slicked it back with water.

“Lohania cut my hair” Jimmy said. “But wow, Kevin, you look different without the beard.”

Actually, she had had a moment of fantasizing that perhaps he would have no chin at all, but Kevin was handsome without the beard, although less interesting-looking. Almost blandly handsome. A young man who’d sell you a can opener in a hardware store. Lohania looked every inch the secretary on her way to work, in a blue-and-white print dress the same length as Vida’s with a straw bag and little heels. As a last touch she had put on a wedding ring. “Natalie says this makes every woman invisible,” Lohania said giddily. “We haven’t seen you looking like the New York Career Girl on the Go since you worked at Kyriaki, Vida. Like that you could walk into the Pentagon.”

Randy was the surprise. He had just arrived, in time for breakfast. He too had his hair cut short, like Jimmy. “Did Lohania cut your hair too? Last night before you left?”

“I got it done at a barber. Thought I might as well do it right. There’s one open till late on Columbus.”

He looked so straight she could not get over it. He wore a lightweight brown wash-and-wear suit, a striped shirt, a square-cut tie with a print of towel tiny anchors, polished dark brown shoes. He even had a crisp white handkerchief in his jacket pocket. In these clothes, suddenly class is with us, she thought: he looks like he could be Kevin’s cousin who’s the striver and strainer. He had in fact gone to some little Catholic college in prelaw.