Boarded Windows (8 page)

At some point in my antememorial days my mother Marleen must have sat me down for a bowdlerized version of the following story, beginning, it may have been, with a tenderizing plate of runner-up brand cream-sandwich cookies and a gentle yet distinctly portentous prelude. I don’t remember these cookies or this prelude, but neither do I remember a time when I didn’t know something of my spectral biological mother. I do remember two times on which she, Marleen, told a more or less complete version of the story: (1) on a road trip to the Grand Canyon during my twelfth summer, and (2) in the kitchen while she made a taco salad during my sixteenth spring. Fragmental-anecdotal parts of the story came or were drawn out on several other occasions. Certain fragments came out with relative frequency, such as the part about Martha’s homemade embroidered blouses, how ineptly they were sewn, or the part about her copy of Van Morrison’s
Astral Weeks,
how and where it skipped. (No doubt Marleen repeatedly recalled this skip as a reflective joke, and would be pleased to know I finally got it.) As I grew up, the story and its fragments got darker, more specific, less euphemistic, and maybe Marleen altered, added, or subtracted some of the particulars along the way, just as I’ve done with the benefit of scattered research.

Marleen Deskin first met Martha Dickson on February 7, 1969, when they, along with two other Northern Illinois University students and one alumnus, got in a beaten brown Buick and drove from an imperfectly cooperative five-bedroom Victorian in DeKalb to a sit-in at the University of Chicago’s administration building. The sit-in had started after the University announced it wouldn’t rehire Marlene Dixon (again, I apologize for the similarity of all these names), a young, fairly popular assistant sociology professor and Marxist-feminist-activist whose three-year appointment would end the coming September. Dixon’s work, argued the sociology department’s tenured faculty, failed to meet the intellectual standards required for reappointment. The demonstrators attributed the dismissal to sexism and revanchism, said the administration overvalued research and publication, undervalued teaching; they demanded an equal student voice in the hiring and firing of professors. In the first days of the sit-in, about four hundred students occupied the administration building, whose everyday occupants were temporarily relocated. As the sit-in went on, student leadership changed and more demands were added, many of them unrelated to issues of hiring and firing or to Dixon, who visited her supporters a few times but generally kept out of the way. The administration’s response was hard and cool: they didn’t meet with the rebels, they didn’t call the police; they handed out suspensions, they waited for spirits to sink.

Since mid-January of that year (so for about three weeks), Marleen had been dating an NIU graduate named Barry Morton, a former SDS member and a friend of one of the U of C sit-in’s organizers. Barry was a Marxian, self-described, though others (at least one other) described him as a moneyed liberal who’d learned to use New Left rhetoric with moderate facility but incomplete conviction. Barry wasn’t all talk, though, and in fact he preferred spear-carrying to, say, speaking at demos, writing for underground newspapers, or drawing attention by other means. (Barry and I are now friends on Facebook.) He had delivered sandwiches and some other provisions to the sit-in on its third day, when the administration building was still bustling, triumphant kids talking all night, laughing, swaying, poster-making. “Welcome to the Winter Palace,” read one of the posters, and Barry was among those outside cheering when it was first unfurled, descending like a tingle down a spine, from a second-story window. He’d only planned to stay for a short while, but the mood was so exhilarating, he hung around for ten hours, had to call Marleen to postpone an informal date. Each day, however, the numbers dwindled and spirits indeed sank, so Barry recruited Marleen, Martha, and the two others to offer further support to the flagging protest. Marleen, who would graduate that spring, only had an early morning French class on Fridays and didn’t have to miss any school to make the trip. Martha, an unserious junior, played hooky.

The car was huge and cold. The men sat in front, Barry in the middle. The driver, whose name my mother had long forgotten by the time she told me the story, wore an unseasonable porkpie hat and smelled in some inexplicably bad way like pancakes. The other young man, his name also forgotten (Barry remembers: John), was possibly hoping to usurp Barry as the co-op’s de facto leader. He was the one who’d accused Barry of being only rhetorically radical. He rarely challenged Barry directly, however, even when given semiformal opportunities. A few miles from the house, Barry, turning around to look at the women, said, “If any reporters try to talk to you, don’t give them your name.”

“What about a fake name?” Martha said from the back.

“A fake name’s okay, but nothing clever, no anagrams,” Barry said.

“So not
too
fakey?” Martha said with what my mother Marleen called her “Saharan sarcasm.”

“Probably there won’t be any reporters left,” Barry said. He was wearing a Donegal tweed overcoat, its frayed collar partly covered by the hooklike ends of his blond hair. He had agreed to pay a disproportionate share of the co-op’s expenses for seven more months; then new arrangements would have to be made. He had a straight job as a copywriter and rumored inherited wealth, including some obviously hypocritical investments.

“We’re not going to give them our names,” Marleen said.

“Sociology’s a rinky-dink field, anyway,” the driver said.

“This isn’t just about Dixon,” Barry said.

“I just don’t think it’s a serious field,” the driver said.

“Well, you’re the expert,” Marleen said, and Martha stanched a laugh.

“Regardless,” Barry said, “it’s in our interest to have anti-Establishment thinkers in sociology departments, if only to act as foils to those who dreamed up Muzak.”

The co-op housed six to eight people, depending on whom you asked, and was supposed to and sometimes did run on Marxist principles, to which its residents, in the normal way of things, were divergently committed. Martha was an ideological jumble, here radical, there conservative. Her short residency at the co-op might be called situational communism (not situationist, though there was some of that too, probably coincidental). Marleen had already been invited to join the co-op, but, somewhat cautious by nature, chose to stay in her dormitory. She too had a temporizing interest in Marxism, though she didn’t pretend to more than a passing familiarity with its texts. Two women lived in the co-op, or so Marleen had heard from Barry, but before the drive to Chicago, she’d met neither one. The other woman, Martha explained to Marleen in the backseat, had moved out a few months earlier. “She’s coming back,” Barry said. “She’s just taking care of some family shit.” Martha turned to Marleen and shook her head with ironic affirmation. John snored, the driver turned on the radio.

For all I know the tension between Barry and Martha was romantic in origin, but if so, Marleen never learned about these origins, and it’s just as possible that they simply disliked each other, or liked goading each other. “Unlike certain people in this bucket,” Martha slipped in when she and Marleen’s conversation returned to politics, “I actually come from the prolefuckingtariat.” Profane tmesis, Marleen led me to believe, was one of Martha’s trendy tics:
fanfuckingtastic, bullfuckingshit,
on and on like that. Barry moved his long legs from one apparently uncomfortable position to another. Martha’s grandfather, his granddaughter added, joined the Socialist Party during its North Dakota heyday in the teens and never lost faith. “So all this stuff is old hat for me,” she said, tapping the driver’s porkpie. “What kind of work did your grandfather do?” Barry asked. “He was just a poor farmer,” Martha said, “trying to set up farmer-owned grain elevators and whatnot.” “Then he was a peasant, not a proletarian,” Barry said. Martha held her middle finger behind Barry’s head for several seconds. As she saw it, she said after collecting herself to some degree, there was no real revolutionary potential in the U.S., not for the foreseeable future, not in the way Marx imagined it, and certainly not from the proletariat. But widespread, ever-growing spiritual-erotic hunger, hunger for the stuff American capitalism trivialized, coarsened, and suppressed, that kind of hunger could lead to a bigger cultural transformation than
anyone
had imagined. She was showing off with her speech, but also her voice was shaking. The future’s great works of art, she said, wouldn’t look like art at all, would be mistaken for noneveryday life.

Martha took a pastrami sandwich out of her coat pocket, brushed it off, ripped it in half, cutting the meat with her fingernails, and offered the bigger half to Marleen. The unpainted nails on Martha’s right fingers were long, but her left fingernails were short, because she played the gimbri. They also shared an apple, which picked up linty red spots from a cut on Martha’s lower lip, the spots mirroring the red slubs on Barry’s coat. They talked about poetry and a friend they had in common. Marleen, urged by Martha to speak a bit of French, quoted a few lines of Baudelaire’s
L’ideal,
impressing Martha. “He’s so repugnant, but I love him,” Martha said, and a moment later, “That’s something I want to do, learn a foreign language.” Barry turned his head partway toward the backseat: “I’ve heard college is a good place for that,” he said. The driver laughed, Martha shrugged. Emboldened, Barry added that it was dumb to define the proletariat on nineteenth-century lines, as if we weren’t living under a vastly transformed capitalism. A very much still possible revolution, he said, would be led mostly by enlightened members of the middle and intellectual classes, and he tossed in a few more points while Martha imitated a puppeteer with her right hand. “Barry’s a perfectly enlightened member of the intellectual class,” Martha stage-whispered when he’d finished, “until it’s time to scrub the brown streaks off the toilet bowl. That seems to be where I come in.”

When they got to the administration building, there were no more signs hanging from the windows and at most twenty students inside. Barry’s friend, a grad student and a member of the New University Conference, was sitting on a slatted wooden bench at the end of a dim hallway, playing an unamplified bass guitar. Barry brought his two bags of groceries to the food station and introduced Marleen, Martha, and the others to the grad student, who, after some small talk and updates, offered to take the group on a partial tour of the campus-abutting Woodlawn neighborhood, some of whose poor, mostly black residents were about to be displaced by a U of C construction project. Momentum never built for this walk. A short while later a new group of students rotated in, and Barry’s friend went home to take a nap.

Martha and Marleen sat against a wall, talking and smoking. It felt good to be away from the others. Martha was originally from Wheeler, North Dakota, she told Marleen, a town of six hundred people where she’d lost her virginity in a giant mound of hard red spring wheat. Later the family moved to Enswell, where Martha had been Enswell High’s third prettiest cheerleader. Martha wasn’t really half Marleen’s size, but it seemed to the bigger party as if two Marthas could squeeze into one hollow Marleen. Soon Barry brought the group back together, suggested they all go out to a pizzeria he knew of and then catch the Sonny Stitt Trio at the Plugged Nickel. Porkpie had already assented this plan. “What kind of music is that?” Martha said.

“Jazz,” Barry said.

Martha snatched the folded newspaper from under Barry’s arm and scanned the concert listings. “Why don’t we see Vanilla Fudge?” she said.

Barry shook his head no.

“I sorta know the drummer in one of the warm-up bands,” Martha said.

“That’s not what we’re doing,” Barry said.

“Don’t be such a snob,” Martha said.

“Taste and snobbism aren’t synonymous,” Barry said.

“We could see Baby Huey,” Martha said.

“Yeah, let’s see Baby Huey,” John said.

“Let’s see Sonny Stitt,” Barry said.

“Baby Huey!”

“Sonny Stitt!”

“I just don’t really feel like jazz,” Martha said.

“I’m treating,” Barry said.

Marleen rubbed Martha’s arm and said, “You
sort
of feel like jazz.”

At the Plugged Nickel, the four students and one alumnus pushed two tables together, but before long the conversation split up again along gender lines. The club was loud and warm. One of Martha’s boots formed a puddle in which a fringed end of Marleen’s scarf soaked all night. Martha had brown hair and a dimply smile and was wearing a clearly homemade embroidered blouse, one of her earliest attempts—the flowers wilted, one sleeve too tight, the other too loose. To Marleen she seemed a blend of restless confidence and twitchy vulnerability, completely assured and completely uncertain, and somehow these combined energies made Marleen feel at ease in ways she knew with no one else in DeKalb.

Between sets, Barry pulled his chair next to Martha’s and said, “That toilet gibe—if you have a problem—I’m not saying the housework has been equitably divided—but if you have a problem, it’d be better to bring it up at a self-critique session.”

“Why don’t you?” Martha said. “I’m talking to my new friend.”

On Monday, Martha moved into Marleen’s dorm room, over the drizzly mumbles of Marleen’s preceding roommate. “Why do you still live in this baby dormitory?” Martha asked Marleen, who shrugged toward inertia. Martha showered in the middle of the night and kept her hallway appearances brief (the floor supervisor never hassled her); she used her yellow Samsonite as a dresser, kept it under the single bed she and Marleen shared. Their relationship was more sororal than sexual, Marleen told me: mostly Martha was a cuddler; she’d nestle her head under Marleen’s chin, and her hair would tickle and irritate Marleen’s face. In the dorm room’s cramped quarters Martha’s charms began to wane. One night Marleen, statuesque and a restless sleeper, unwittingly pushed Martha off the bed, waking everyone up. Martha recovered and was soon chuckling over the accident, trying to steer the chuckling toward a discussion of chance and the unconscious. For about a week, Marleen had been discouraging the pair’s carouselling small-hours conversations, mostly out of pretended courtesy for the now third-wheel roommate, who to all appearances seemed to be a contented eavesdropper. On the night of Martha’s fall from the bed, Marleen let the talking go on for ten minutes or so and then said, “I’m sorry, but I’m really tired. I’ve got this paper to write. I can’t sleep through more classes. Most of this stuff can’t be resolved anyway, even by people who know what they’re talking about.” Martha, though sharp with comebacks, just turned away from Marleen. “I didn’t mean that as a put-down,” Marleen said. “I meant both of us, all of us.” Marleen was sorry but didn’t say so.