Vida (42 page)

“Not that one, it’s too fancy” Tequila said as they walked along the mooring strip, looking at the tied-down planes.

“Here’s a good one. A Cessna 172” He took a stick and tested the gas in the wing tanks. “It’s a good size. Easy to drop things from because the wings are high. And I learned on it.” Before getting inside, he tested the wings, the propeller, pulling and hauling on the plane in a way that alarmed her, suggesting that the wings were only lightly attached and might at any moment fall off. Then he jimmied the door and hopped in to jump the ignition. Vida bundled the balloons and leaflets inside with Joel’s help and then Joel untied the plane and got in himself.

There was no reason for anyone to stop them, even if anyone had been around so early in the morning. The little strip had no tower and takeoff was a matter of Tequila’s craning his head to look around and then taxing into position. Vida loved small planes, and as they finally took off down the dark runway, which Tequila insisted he could see, she felt a surge of delight: a stolen plane, an action and a pearl gray dawn coming out of the gloom of the night.

“We’re really doing it,” Joel said over his shoulder. He was sitting up front beside Tequila. She was wedged in behind with the black condoms and the papers. “I didn’t think we’d just do it!”

She squeezed his shoulder through the pea jacket. “At our best, we act rather quickly. Hey, Tequila?”

He nodded, squinting into the gray twilight. “It’s a good thing today, to get out and play a little.”

They did act well and easily together: that was one of the best legacies they carried on from the ‘60s. Joel had come in on the tail end, so he didn’t know the wine-tart pleasure of believing you could act and change things and going ahead. The act as theater; the act as pure joy. The act as collective art, improvised and sensual. Yes, he had missed that, but he was getting a taste here and now. Simple but nice, she thought. The air was bumpy as the plane chopped on, droning busily across the fields, the woods where the snow lay thatching all, the fields where it had melted and the pastureland where it still spread. The sun was up now behind an overcast in swirling shades of gray on gray, and the land tilting below them was broad and beautiful. The mountains lay in ranks with plumes of cloud trailing along the ridges. Tequila banked, getting ready to come in low, as Vida began handing the propaganda up front to Joel. Joel had been good on the airstrip, helping to pull the plane out, nervous but together.

It was a gesture that she continued to find small but pleasant, flying low over New Hampshire and Vermont, circling the power plant to drop their load in small clumps. At ten thirty they landed at an abandoned fairground where there was a stretch of cement just long enough for Tequila to bring them in. The landing was jarring, the plane bounced hard, and for several moments she was scared. They bumped to a stop at the far edge, surrounded by weeds growing from the wide cracks. “We’ll call the airfield for the owner” Tequila said. “We might want to borrow it again sometime”

Kiley and Lark were waiting with the truck. Joel and she sat in back in the open bed, clattering toward Hardscrabble and their own Chevy waiting for them to set out for Chicago that afternoon.

15

The obvious route from Vermont to Chicago across Canada was too risky. They stayed off the turnpikes, in part to save money, because they had little left after buying the car. “But I’m glad we bought it. You were right” she said, driving. “It gives us the flexibility to make this trip and get back when I have to.”

“Why go back? You don’t believe in their position paper.”

“The place to say that is with them.”

“Let them write their stupid paper.” Joel was slouched in his seat with his feet up on the dash. He had put three days into working on the car, a two-door black Chevy sedan they called Mariah. In the Finger Lakes region of New York, from a roadside-table turnoff they watched the sunset, vast and roseate with grandiose bands of crimson clouds. They had a bag of apples from the Hardscrabble Hill orchard and the remains of a Hardscrabble chicken they had been eating all day. The eggs were good and plentiful by now, but eating the chicken required a lot of chewing. They were athletic chickens, lean, muscular, always in training for a flight to the trees.

She felt stretched, as if her feelings were forcing them selves open inside her, forcing the skin of her mind to expand like the walls of a balloon. She was wildly happy to be sitting in the car beside him, a small metal world encapsulating them. She was wildly happy to be allowed to love him. A license had been given her to lavish feelings and desires and all the riches of her soul on another person after years of measuring her reactions, of concealing, of declining, of pretending not to recognize signals, of turning aside and turning off and turning down the volume. Years and years of carefully dampened responses had alternated with periods of permitting herself severely limited connections. Now she was licensed to be in love.

At the same time, she vibrated with fear for Ruby. She felt like her old spaniel Mopsy with one ear cocked toward Chicago (Worry, worry, is Ruby all right? What’s happening?). The other ear was cocked back toward New York. Strange squeaks of hidden gears grinding came to her as the apparatus of the State prepared to try to crush her and hers. She was afraid, she was worried, she was overjoyed. She felt like a cave of the winds where violent emotions were suddenly unleashed from heavy leather bags to blow in contradictory irresistible gusts in the sinuses of the mountains.

Her absorption in the orchestrating of her rich emotions ended abruptly when they got back into the car and it wouldn’t start.

“An old car, an old car, it’s trouble,” she fussed.

“Aw, shut up” he said, leaning into the engine. “You thought it was a great idea an hour ago.”

She had to stand holding a dim flashlight while he poked and prodded the battery. Finally he said, “The terminal connector is too corroded. It’s not making contact” He took the cable off the terminal and by the light of the flashlight carefully scraped the terminal and then the cable connector. When he finished and tightened the contact again, at length the car started.

“Why should you go work on some stupid paper you don’t care about?” Joel pursued his argument at the wheel. “Let them do it themselves”

“We’re bound by collective decisions.”

“What’s the use of the collective? You thought there was going to be a revolution. Too bad for you. Now you’re stuck out here—”

“Well, so are you,” she snapped, clutching herself. What did he know? He was just a kid, with no political perspective, no viable analysis, no long-term strategy. Just an impulsive kid who had been buffeted by moral qualms into bolting and running, and now he was stuck, as he put it.

“But we’re stuck together now!’ He beamed. “How’s that for a pun?”

He was light and she was serious about the discussion, a discrepancy that annoyed her. How could he imagine that telling her to sit out a decision of the Network was a joking matter? “I can’t just negate a decision.”

“What do you need them for, anyhow? I’m serious. It’s passé. You’re not doing anything that means shit to people.”

“Then we have to survive until things are moving again. In any revolutionary struggle, there are off periods, defeats, times of apparent inaction”

“Then why not sit it out for a while? We could pick some safe space. Some little town with a lot of ex-hippies. In Northern California. In Colorado. Oregon. Or back in Vermont. We could just settle. Find a house with some land. We could rent a house cheap and put in a garden. I could get an off-books job and so could you. Then you could think about politics and write your paper. But we’d be living like human beings for a change.”

She was astonished at the wave of, was it nostalgia that came over her? A couple in a little house with a view. Fruit trees, a garden, she could elaborate it endlessly, opening at once before her like a hobby, a piece of knitting, a daydream that could be carried on for months and even years: Add bees, slowly, add a couple of hives. A strawberry bed. A couple of simple chairs and a rough table out back. An asparagus bed. Dig it deep and shovel in aged manure. Mulch it well with dead leaves. Simple possessions from the secondhand store selected because they liked them. A country bureau, hefty but simple, with white shelf paper in the bottom of the drawers. Shelves put up for books they would accumulate.

“Why not?” he asked softly, turning to glance at her face.

“Because I didn’t go underground to hide, only. If I live in a little house with you and the two of us keep our noses clean and raise bees—”

“Oh, you want bees, my honey.” He was grinning.

“—then they’ve won, you see? They’ve forced us out politically. Made us innocuous. Taken us out of action”

“No, Vida. If we survive, we’ve won!”

“Survival is not enough!”

“Even together? That’s not enough?”

“It can’t be. We can’t let it be. We can’t settle”

He reached over in the dark to put his hand on her belly. “We’ll see about that.”

In the long November twilight of the late fall, the land was beautiful. Snow flowed over the hills, white under the blue-black sky. Around ten they slept at the side of the road for two hours. Then the car refused to start and once again Joel got it started finally. At the only all-night gas station they passed, he stopped and got the battery charged up, but it should not be running down in highway driving. “It could be the voltage regulator or it could be a dead cell in the battery,” he mumbled. “It’s not charging right” Fatigue burned behind her eyes, fatigue pushed on the thin membranes of her brain, fatigue sat in her stomach like an ill-digested meal; yet she could also enjoy the lightness it gave. It reminded her of an earlier life when she was always too busy. Fatigue was a drug she had used to be addicted to that rang on her nerves familiarly.

All night one or the other reached out in a passing caress. Constantly she wanted to make love, but they could not. It was too cold to simply pull off the road and go into a field or even to remain in the car with the engine off, and would it start again? They were nervous at the idea of pulling over and letting the engine run. “Lovers found dead of carbon monoxide,” Joel intoned. Whenever they saw a patrol car in the rearview mirror, whenever they saw a police car approaching, whenever they passed the state troopers parked on the margin of the highway, they fell silent and watched. They drove cautiously, crawling along. The car had a hole where a radio had once been. When they got tired of talking, they sang.

She remembered childhood trips. Vacations had freed Ruby and Tom from the press of daily quarrels and troubles and let them enjoy each other. Tom was never in as good a mood as when he was at the wheel of a big old American car like this sailing down a highway with all the windows down and Ruby rattling the maps in the front seat and Paul in back with her eating, nervously cramming into his mouth some kind of candy. In childhood Paul had been overweight. Of course, he was big-boned too, like his father, and when he hit sixteen he shot up and filled out. But earlier Paul was fat and pimpled, and if he was not eating malted-milk balls or Good & Plenty or Raisinets or peanuts, he was chewing gum. She had grown up without a sweet tooth because the sight of Paul endlessly chewing and sucking on candy had spoiled sugar for her. She loved her brother, but she didn’t want to be like him.

From a fairly early age she had been convinced she was the only one in her family with any hard sense, any intellect to spare. Tom ricocheted from catastrophe to disaster. His temper got him fired; his impulsiveness kept him in debt. Ruby had more practical sense day to day. She could be trusted to budget the available cash and put supper on the table; but she had no long-run strategy for getting them out of trouble. Vida was her mother’s conspirator. Paul was always in hot water with his father and often with school as well. When she was furious, she told herself she did not belong to them. She was a foundling. Her real mother was a lady doctor like the one who came to school and tested their tonsils and their hearing. Her real father was a war hero who had gone on to be something great like a movie actor or a politician.

As she drove with Joel snoring beside her across the snow-encrusted fields under the rising moon, its light coming over her shoulder like mild headlights from behind, she mused on her mother. Never had she really been able to persuade herself she was not Ruby’s daughter, not for long. She had her father’s red hair but her mother’s body: a good one for both of them, trim but lush at the same time. Why was it letting Ruby down now? Ruby the romantic, ran off with a tall red-haired stranger with whom she had nothing in common but intense sexual attraction and a hot temper and a working-class background.

Ruby had fallen in love other times; Vida had always known. Ruby couldn’t keep anything from her. While Tom was off in the Army of Occupation in Japan, Ruby had fallen in love with her foreman at the shipyards, Gene Cornutti, but had resisted. They went bowling with chums from the yard, they had a few drinks and made eyes at each other and once they necked in the car. Ruby was being faithful. Then she got laid off, with the other women. Gene got married. That was that.

Then in Chicago Ruby fell in love with the man behind the counter at the drugstore. Sanford Asch. A nice widower with two daughters. Jewish, doesn’t drink except for a little wine with dinner, a good man and steady and what heart he has. Vida had known every step of the way what was happening, even what Ruby did not tell herself. Ruby fabricated excuses—and stories to make it look good to herself. Vida felt as if she was slipping and sliding in the mud, but she kept her mama’s secret and she abetted her. She chose her mama. Her mother wanted what was good for her and Paul, and her dad didn’t. She knew that. He could win her, he could turn the house upside down with his fury, he could turn the house right side up with his good humor coming in with a turkey he had won, coming in with a half gallon of maple-nut ice cream, coming in with a bottle of Four Roses somebody had given him for a favor he’d done and a bouquet of yellow roses picked down the street. She chose her mama, and Ruby became Ruby Asch and she became Vida Asch. Natalie chose her. Natalie had been trapped playing little mother. She was tired of being so very good. She wanted to run off with Vida and play.