Vida (50 page)

When Belinda had heard his response, she had gone into a depression. She stared at her baby. “It’s all a mistake,” she said.

“No, it’s a baby,” Marti said. “A healthy one. A good baby”

Belinda loved her baby, but almost surreptitiously. She would run into the nursery and seize Roz up and hug her and then run off.

Vida had been to only two meetings of the Board, and they still made her nervous: to be on the Board was a big responsibility.

“Why the
two
of you driving down?” Kevin asked. “What for?”

“If we take alternate shifts, we can drive without stopping. We leave in the morning” Lark cracked his knuckles. He would never admit he couldn’t drive that many hours.

“Man, you could walk there and back by Sunday.”

“We have fund raising to do. The doc to see.”

What was Lark doing? Something was up. Kevin pulled at his chin where the beard used to be. “Real chummy, the two of you in the truck”

“We’ll take the blue Saab.”

“That don’t start half the mornings,” Tequila chimed in amiably.

“I had it worked on today. A deserter down in Tunbridge can make anything run. Calls himself Terry. Kiley told me about him …”

”I know him” Jimmy said resentfully—jealousy? “He’s my friend. Kiley just met him when she was here last month.”

“Faggot,” Kevin said softly and almost fondly to Jimmy.

“He said it had the wrong spark plugs and the ignition cable was frayed. He tuned it, and it’s perky now.” Lark spoke in his flat Midwestern voice, casual and almost without affect, but his bright blue eyes never left Kevin’s face. “I think you ought to take the black Dodge over to him. The cars are Network property, not your high school hot rods. Don’t touch the engines, guys, if you can’t do better than you’ve been doing.”

“Who said it was the wrong spark plugs?” Bill boomed. “He don’t know his ass.”

“Then why is it running so good? He’s a real mechanic. You ought to be glad we’ve got one.”

“How the hell would you know?” Bill watched Kevin to see if he should attack Lark further. “You never tried once to work on those cars.”

“I’m not into proving anything on a car. Only interested in getting it into shape to be used. I’m surprised how you guys have lost political steam up here. You need to refocus. Where’s Alice tonight?”

Tequila and Marti, husband and wife, exchanged a guarded glance at the question, and both became very occupied with their plates. Jimmy stopped eating and stared at his knuckles. He looked pinched with worry.

She was sure the question was not as innocent as it sounded, Lark’s thin face waiting blandly. Anyhow, she was going to answer truthfully.

“Upstairs having all-day morning sickness.”

“Morning sickness?” Lark repeated. “What from?”

Kevin guffawed. “If you don’t know by now, it’s too late to give you a description.”

“Why hasn’t it been taken care of?” Lark asked gently. “Has no one volunteered to go with her to arrange it?”

“I have,” Eva said. “I’m useless with my arm broken anyhow.”

“Eva, with both arms off, you wouldn’t be useless,” Lark said.

Jimmy made a noise of assent, glad of a friendly word at the table. A bit of blame and a bit of praise, Vida noticed: Lark took his leadership role seriously, one reason he had been on the Board since it had been organized out of panic and early chaos. When Kiley and Lark had chosen to go underground in the fall of 1970, Vida told Jimmy she thought they were crazy: imagining doing voluntarily what the three of them had been forced to. Kiley and Lark had expected an imminent revolution and were preparing. So much for that guess, she thought, but what a relief to have him in the house. Such a different kind of man. She had matured these last years, and she had no female masochism left. Lark was asking, “Some kind of problem with the clinic? How good is Alice’s I.D.?”

“Good” Jimmy started to say, when Kevin cut in.

“Why should she have it out? We’re doing fine with Marti’s two kids and Belinda’s baby.”

“Marti’s not a fugitive” Lark said softly. “We agreed last year fugitives have no right to bear children. Nothing has changed.”

“Aw, dig yourself, man, a lot has changed. They’re not on our tails night and day. They got their own troubles. Hey, when are we getting that fucking TV fixed so we can see them impeach him?”

All through Watergate, everyone except Jimmy and Vida had been mesmerized by the set. They watched the action, they watched reruns, they watched the nightly recapitulation of what they had watched during the day. Since the TV had broken, tempers were booby-trapped among the fugitives and friends. She could not share their obsessive satisfaction. For her it was Eichmann punished not for mass murder but for being caught with his hand in the till, and sentenced to exile from the Elks and having his American Express card cancelled. Jimmy agreed and hated the spectacle. He accused the rest of the snowbound house of believing in the ultimate justice of the system and expecting to see it on TV like the shoot out in a Western.

“I’ll talk to Alice after supper” Lark said, laying down his knife and fork. He ate a third of what Kevin, Tequila and Bill put away. Often he fasted. He did eat fish; perhaps, she thought, because the Vietnamese ate a great deal of seafood. He was partial to a fermented fish sauce called nuoc mam that nobody else could tolerate when he produced it—except Jimmy, who never tasted his food anyhow and ate it as politically correct and to please Lark. She had the feeling that the sight of others wolfing down hunks of chicken made Lark squeamish. Eva too was a vegetarian. If Kevin could have made it happen, they would have had meat every night as much to affront Eva as because he liked it. Since they could rarely afford meat they had not raised, that possibility for discord was muted.

“Alice knows what she wants: to have that baby,” Kevin said.

“I didn’t actually think so” Vida said mildly, aping Lark’s approach because it seemed to work better than her own of bluntly screaming at Kevin.

“Me, I’m the father” Bill said. “You got to talk to me”

“If you’re the father, I’ll talk to you. About contraception,” Lark went on without raising his voice. “Do you think a woman who may go to prison at any moment has a right to bear a child? Do you realize what it’s like giving birth in prison? Did you pay any attention to what they did to Erica Huggins? Giving birth in chains.? And then what? You want ‘our’ child raised by an orphanage? Adopted by rich jerks?”

“What kind of cowards and defeatist creeps are we to live thinking they’re going to catch us?” Kevin wiped his mouth, sneering.

“Where other lives are concerned, we have to assume that. As was decided in council. Who are you to set yourself up to change rules on impulse?” Eva cried, her voice hard. “You think rules are for us, but not for you”

Jimmy looked in mute appeal to Kevin, who stomped into the living room. She could almost feel Jimmy crushing his doubts as he followed. Lark went up to talk to Alice, who cried in his arms awkwardly, because she was a long and lanky woman four inches taller than frail Lark, complaining about the long winter and Bill and feeling politically lost and useless and pushed around, caught between the two factions that had polarized in the house. Kevin, Bill, Belinda, Jimmy and Tequila sat around the busted TV drinking local moonshine, a form of vodka from potatoes distilled in the next township by some freak ex-chemists who were doing a roaring business. She went upstairs and locked herself in, going quietly past the room where Alice lay weeping in Lark’s arms.

She looked around at the room she had labored to fix up and she wanted to scream, to shut her eyes hard and wake back in her own room in New York: her room where as far as she knew her clothes, her jewelry, her books and art objects were still stored. She wanted to return to her life. Enough of this already, enough! She was weary of it. She wanted to give up. She wanted to cry and collapse and give up and go home. She wanted to be Vida Asch again. She missed everyone she really loved. Oh, she’d take Eva with her, the one close friend she’d made underground.

Despair crushed her until she lay on her stomach and wept and wept until her eyes were swollen and the quilt soaked and her head ached and she could not breathe except through gasping mouth. Then she lay panting, and still she was trapped in that cold room she had painted white, not understanding how much white she would see in Vermont in the long winter, that room with old-fashioned sheer white curtains and white shades. The wedding-ring quilt she had found in the attic—worn and washed out, with some patches tearing loose—every month or so she took a needle to repair. On the walls were paintings, acrylic on paper, Eva had made during last winter and this one: views of another world. They showed a blazing cobalt-and-gold landscape where women walked in threes and fours with small children and sturdy animals. Fountains, stone arches, mountains, but not these beautiful low green mountains. Red stone. Volcanic rock. Eva’s painting had gotten much better in the last year. The earliest paintings Vida had put up because they broke the agony of the too-white walls and because Eva was her best friend here. Of course, Eva should have been working on her music; she had been a serious musician until she had been set up by an agent in a bust on the G.I. coffeehouse where she played and sang. But what can a serious musician do as a fugitive?

The drawing had got better, as had the use of color. All around Vida’s room the box-sized paintings marched (nothing too big to be moved fast), windows on someplace else. Lately Eva had been painting a series called “We’ll Go to California” 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Eva came from the West Coast. Eva was saying, We’ll leave this loud house and go to California together. Imagine, the paintings sang, a tree full of oranges like miniature suns, a sea the color of a blue jay, palm-tree lollipops.

Vida recognized in herself no California dreams, but she was at a dead end. What point was there living in this broken-down farmhouse chopping up cabbages and banging heads with Kevin, as if the puttering and maintenance and bickering were political acts? She had to get out of here, and without Kevin. What she had seen in him was a bad joke. She did not know whether he had changed or whether she had or whether she merely saw more clearly. Perhaps fugitive life had brought out the worst in Kevin. She knew she could have marched back and forth across his fresh grave with no other emotion than relief and a lingering hostility.

Why could she not persuade Lark to argue in the Board that for two of the leadership to occupy one isolated house was absurd and she would be ten times as useful anywhere else? That would be her humble approach: send me where I’m needed. Let me organize an action in Toledo, in Houston, in San Diego. Let us open a new front. But save me from rotting in this house in a rotting bond with someone I have grown to loathe. On the trip to New York she would work on Lark. He was stationed in Buffalo now.

She felt exhausted with weeping but too lethargic to do more than undress and creep under the covers. The sheets were so cold they felt wet. What she ought to do was get up and put on that ugly flannel nightgown from the Thrift Shop, but she sprawled flipped on her back like something fallen, unable to sleep, unwilling to get up. She had run out of willpower. She wanted someone to call her Vida; she wanted someone to hold her and love her and coddle her; she wanted to be herself again! Voices rose through the floorboards, harsh laughter that jarred her as if it had been twice as loud. Anyone else’s voices would not have scraped her raw.

Yet she must have dozed, because she woke when someone banged on her door. “What is it?” She hopped up instantly, stepping into her pants. Rammed her feet into boots without bothering with socks.

“Damn cunt! Open up.” Kevin was hitting the door with his fists.

Bastard. She had thought it was an emergency, a raid, but it was just nincompoop Kevin pounding her door as if he wanted to break in. “Lay off the door! I’m asleep!” she yelled.

“Open up, you hear me? Come on, cunt, open up!”

She pulled off her pants and boots and put on the flannel nightgown to climb back into bed. Warm this time.

“Go to bed, you shithead. I’m asleep. I’m not opening the door”

“Damn you, open it!” He gave it a terrifying whack and the door shuddered but did not break. She heard him cursing and hoped he had broken his hand. Probably he was kicking it; the worst he would get was a sore toe. She could hear Marti’s voice saying. “ Cool it, Jesse. You’re scaring the kids!” The baby Dylan and Tamara and Roz were crying down the corridor.

“All right, I’m coming in” he bellowed. The blade of his hunting knife thrust into a crack in the old jamb and forced the bolt of the lock inside. In the drawer of the old nightstand by her bed she had a knife too. She reached for it and sat up, switching on the reading lamp clamped to the headboard.

“This is my—my room!” She sputtered with anger. “I don’t want you in it! I never want you in it! I locked the door to keep you out!”

He slammed the door back against the wall to the trickle of falling plaster.

“I’m coming in. We’re getting things straightened out, Davey. You’re mine and you’re going to start acting like it.”

“You don’t own me. Get the hell out!” She felt too exposed in the bed and leaped out on the far side, flashing the knife. “Get out!”

“You think you know how to knife-fight, little punk?”