The Women's Room (75 page)

We didn’t know then that it was only a beginning. It was the time when the nightmare broke out into public vision, when you could really see, put your finger on, those subtle and tenuous currents that a lot of people besides Duke had been feeling but couldn’t see clear enough to shoot. Sometimes, when I walk the beach, and everything seems so quiet, so settled, I wonder what happened to that nightmare. I think nightmares are like the heat bubbling inside the earth: always there but only occasionally erupting to show the gaps, the murderous breaches.

Val got her wits back eventually. She stopped screaming, although she was still sobbing, tears were streaming down her face as she got down on her hands and knees to wipe up the spaghetti sauce she’d spilled all over the floor, and to stay there, crouched down, crying in her hands, unable to believe it, unable to disbelieve it, crying out, ‘We’re killing our children! We’re killing our children!’

There were telephone calls, meetings. Those days are all jumbled in my brain. But suddenly the tiny peace groups sprinkled around town were one group; suddenly their numbers expanded, tripled, quadrupled, passed count. A few days later – it
was a
few days, wasn’t it? – they killed children at Jackson State, unwilling, damned, in fact, if they were going to kill off white kids without killing off some black ones too.

Everyone walked around in a daze. Some felt the hour of the wolf had arrived. Something worse than 1984 had happened. The government,
a government elected into office just as Adolf Hitler had been, had suddenly shown itself to be a gang of murderers. The thing was a
fait accompli
, we had not even noticed. Some of the younger students were close to hysteria: who was next? If they could kill them why not us? Older people walked with the step of survivors, wondering what next. Mothers walked with the knowledge that those killed kids could have been theirs. Just an accident, the telegram reads, so sorry. The three years you wiped up shit and poured in string beans, the fifteen years you developed more elaborate techniques for same are declared null and void, along with the product, one nineteen-year-old male or female with –– eyes and –– hair, weighing one hundred and –– pounds more than it did when it pounded its way out of your uterus. A breathing person has been transformed into an unbreathing person: that’s all.

Letters were written, telegrams sent. The group set up tables in the Square and offered telegrams for a dollar: all you had to do was fill out a form. People who two years ago, a year ago, had been muttering knowingly about arms caches and revolution went silent now, peering over their shoulders. There was a march; we gathered on the Cambridge Common and listened to speeches shouted through loudspeakers, unable to hear what was being said. It didn’t matter. The older people, expecting truth in the traditions they had been taught, stood erect, marched with firm heads. The younger ones, expecting betrayal at every corner, cowered and watched warily what was going on; it cost them more. They ducked when suddenly small boxes were thrown into the crowd from somewhere out on the perimeter. Small groups gathered as someone courageous opened what was a used cigarette box resealed with Scotch tape: each one contained three or four joints. The receivers lighted up, but still warily. Can marijuana be mixed with gunpowder? Would the FBI be that clever? The march began, down to Mount Auburn Street, up Mass Ave and across the bridge into Boston, down Commonwealth to the Common. All along the way, people stood watching, people in business suits with cameras, men in work clothes and hard faces. The whole world had been transformed into FBI agents and hardhats. They were equally dangerous. People marched, talked, joked, but the young shivered every time a helicopter hovered overhead. Some of us had been at People’s Park at Berkeley when the crowd was teargassed; all of us knew about it.

We reached the Common and wandered, threaded through. It looked as if millions of people were there. We found a place to sit and rested on the grass. The sun was warm, the air was soft, the grass and trees
smelled green. People on a podium we could not see were singing songs and giving speeches we could not hear. We sat there, barely looking at each other. There were only a few possibilities: they would destroy us here, now, with whatever means they chose; they would pay no attention to us at all; or we would manage, through our gathering together, to tell them to stop, stop, stop, stop, stop! None of us really believed the last. All of us wanted to believe the last. We sat watching the new arrivals, some bearing Vietcong flags, some pictures of Mao, some obscene condemnations of Washington, of Nixon, of that old devil, the military-industrial complex. Yes. Devils have a way of surviving. We were mostly silent. Slaves do not have much respect for each other, and the young among us felt like slaves that day – people alive and wanting to live whose government would as soon murder them as not, and would much rather murder them than listen to them. Voiceless, impotent, frightened, the young people sat on; the older people sat on, developing arthritic cramps and rheumatic aches, and then it was over, nobody had even tried to sell anything, and thousands, thousands of us walked toward the MTA. No one rushed: there was no point. People were walking as if they had been to church, really been to church. In time, we got on the subway. I remember wondering how the subway system managed. The train was crowded, but nobody was pushing, no one shouted. We all got off in a group and walked to a sub shop and picked up sandwiches. Then everybody went back to Val’s place – Mira, Ben, Iso, Clarissa, Kyla, and Bart too, whom they’d met along the way and Grant was there too, and some others – and they sat around Val’s kitchen watching TV, watching the same news shots on channel after channel, drinking coffee and eating sandwiches and every once in a while someone would say, ‘They’ll have to listen, there were so many of us,’ and then silence would fall again. I am afraid we felt a little virtuous. It was they who were killing the children, the yellow, the black, the red, the white children. It was they, not us. We had set ourselves against them. We had proven our purity. If we, poor as we were, lived well, it was not because we held with exploiting the folk of Africa or Asia; our fellowships had nothing directly to do with Mobil’s holdings in Angola, or Ford’s profits on arms. At least we hoped not. It is easy to scoff at our morals. I can do it myself. But what else could we do? Storm the Pentagon? Do you think that would have helped? We were willing to be poorer if that would help stop the killing. Poor as we were.

There are no answers for this bleak mess. None that I know, anyway.
Some days later, the governor of Ohio, who had sent the National Guard out armed that day, was defeated in a primary, and Mira turned to Ben, who had his arms around her as they watched TV, and cried out, ‘See! See! The whole country feels the way we do.’

Quietly, grimly, Ben said, ‘He was slated to lose that primary by more percentage points than he did. He gained popularity by doing what he did.’

Mira turned back to the TV set with a staring white face.

But that was later. Then they were all sitting in Val’s kitchen, talking about the size of the crowd, the spectacle of the aerial shots, trying to estimate numbers. They were really all sitting around waiting for the eleven o’clock news, and just killing time between. Most of all they wanted to feel – not good, that wasn’t possible, or even powerful, no, that wasn’t possible either – but just as if they had at least enough power to make a statement; they wanted to feel that they had been tiny parts of a communicative and therefore significant act. They had sent up their burnt offering and were waiting for a small rain of reply.

In the midst of this tension, the phone rang, and everyone froze. We were silent as Val stepped across bodies to the wall where the phone hung, silent as she picked it up. So we all heard it, the voice on the other end. Because it screamed, it shrieked, it was a high, little girl voice, and it cried out: ‘MOMMY! MOMMY!’

‘What is it, Chris?’ Val said, her whole body taut. Her fingers, Mira noticed, were twisted together and white. But her voice was calm.

‘MOMMY!’ Chris’s voice screamed. ‘I’ve been raped!’

17

It seems incredible now, looking back, that all of that could have been jumbled together the way it was. I am amazed that any of us survived it. But I guess the human race has survived worse. I know it has. The question is, at what cost? Because wounds do leave scars, and scar tissue has no feeling. That’s what people forget when they train their sons to be ‘men’ by injuring them. There is a price for survival.

Val spoke calmly to Chris. Quickly she got details, told her to lock her door, to hang up and call the police, and she, Val, would be waiting, would be standing by the phone, and Chris was to call her as soon as the police came, or before, as soon as she had stopped talking to them.
Quickly, briskly, she spoke and Chris kept saying, ‘Yes. Okay. Yes, Mommy. I will.’ She sounded twelve.

Val hung up the phone. She was standing beside the wall, and she turned and laid her head against it. She just stood there. Everyone had heard; no one knew what to do. At last, Kyla went up and touched her arm.

‘You want us to stay with you? Or do you want us to get out of here?’

‘There’s no reason for you to stay,’ Val said, still facing the wall.

Swiftly, silently, people stood to leave. It was not that they did not care. It was a sense of delicacy, of intrusion on some part of Val’s life that was more private even than her sexual adventures, or an account of her menstrual cycle. They went over to her, they touched her lightly, they said good night.

‘If there is anything I can do …’ everyone said.

But of course, there wasn’t. What can you do with grief but respect it? Only Bart and Ben and Mira stayed. Val stood by the wall. Mira made drinks for all of them. Val smoked. Bart got her a chair and sat her in it, and when the phone rang again, he picked it up, and Val gasped, as if she thought he was going to take the call, but he handed it to her, and then he brought her an ashtray. The voice on the other end was softer now, and they could not hear it. Eventually, Val hung up. The police had come to Chris’s apartment. The boy who had raped her was gone. He had raped her a few doors away from her house, and she had somehow gotten home and called the only person she could think to call, who happened, Val said grimly, to be a thousand miles away. The police were taking her to the hospital. Val had the name written on the wall. She dialed Chicago information and got the number of the hospital.

‘It’s crazy, but I have to do something,’ she said, smoking nervously. ‘Someone has to look after her, even if it’s at a distance.’

They sat there until three. Val kept calling. She called the hospital, where they left her dangling so long that she hung up and called again. And again, and again. Finally they told her Chris was no longer there. The police had taken her down to the station. Val called the Chicago police. It took some time and many calls to find out what precinct Chris had been taken to, but she found it finally, and got through, and asked what was happening to her child. They were not sure. They kept her dangling, but she held on. Eventually Chris came to the phone. Her voice sounded, Val said later, hysterical but controlled.

‘Don’t press charges,’ Val said.

Chris argued. The police wanted her to do it. She knew the name and address of the boy who had raped her. They had other charges against him and they wanted, as they put it, to nail him.

‘Don’t do it,’ Val kept saying. ‘You don’t know what it will cost you.’

But Chris was oblivious. ‘They want me to, and I’m going to,’ she said and hung up.

Val sat stunned. ‘She doesn’t know what she’s doing,’ she said, still holding the receiver in her hand. The dial tone buzzed through the room. She stood up and dialed again, got the station again. The man who answered was annoyed now: Val was becoming an irritation. He told her to hang on. He did not return. She waited ten minutes, then hung up and dialed again. In time, someone answered. He did not seem to know what she was talking about.

‘I’ll see,’ he said. ‘Hold on.’

She held on for a long time, and eventually he returned.

‘Sorry, ma’am, but she’s gone. They took her home.’

Val thanked him, hung up, and sank back into her chair. Then she started up, fished in a cabinet for the phone book, and riffled through the Yellow Pages. She dialed an airline and made a reservation for the following morning. She turned to Mira.

‘Do you think you could drive me to the airport?’

Of course, Mira and Ben would drive her.

Val waited, smoking. After twenty minutes, she dialed Chris’s apartment. There was no answer. She waited ten more minutes and dialed again. No answer. The group sat there with her for another hour. There was no answer, although she dialed six times. Bart’s knuckles were pale pink.

Val sighed and slumped, ‘She’s gone someplace else. Sensible. Probably staying with a friend.’ She stood and reached to a shelf for a small notebook, riffled through it, and dialed another number. It was four in the morning. Someone answered, because Val was talking. Her voice was subdued, but tremulous. She was telling someone about the rape. ‘Yes, I’m flying out in the morning.’ There was a silence, then she said ‘Yes,’ again, and hung up. She turned to her friends.

‘That was Chris’s father. I thought he ought to know. I thought he’d want to know. She has spent holidays with him for the last fourteen years. She’s not a stranger to him.’ Her tone was odd.

‘What did he say?’ Mira asked.

‘He said it was good I was going to her.’

She went to the counter and poured a drink. She sipped it, and tried to smile at them. The smile looked as if it were cracking her face, so strained were its lines.

‘Go on home and get some sleep. And thanks for staying. Thanks for feeling that you would stay whether I wanted you or not. Because I didn’t want you to stay and I’m grateful that you did, and I realize the only people I wanted to stay were those who didn’t give a shit whether I wanted them to or not.’