The Worst Thing I've Done (23 page)

Opal grimaces.

“Me too.” I laugh. “They were slimy all right, and I'd go outside while she'd cut them up and the black oozed out.”

“Like ink?”

“Like ink mixed with gray water. We'd go to a marina on East Lake Drive where we could rent fishing poles and boats by the half day. We had to stay in the harbor, and Lotte would row us about a thousand feet offshore and toss the anchor over the side. We'd fish for fluke.”

“What do fluke look like before they're—” She raises a flour-dusted fillet. “—like this?”

“Flat and almost round. Brownish-gray, with eyes on top.”

“On top?”

“On top. Their underside is white and soft because they lie in the sand. They're bottom fish. Your mother…she'd get so excited when she caught one.”
I see us in the boat, wearing shorts and sweatshirts. Lotte dips her fingers into the slime, hooks two pieces of squid. One for my fishing pole, one for hers. Then she bends across the side of the boat and rinses her hands in the salt water.

“Sometimes we pulled up other fish,” I tell Opal. “Lion fish—I don't know if it was their regular name—only that they were ugly. We threw them back in.”

I don't tell her how sorry I felt for the fish because the hooks would be through the sides of their mouths. Or how Lotte would pull out the hooks and toss the fish on the bottom of the boat, where they flopped around. I'd keep my feet away from them. Tried not to see their lips all cut open. One fish had swallowed the hook down into its stomach somewhere, and when Lotte tugged at it, the insides of the fish came out of its mouth, still attached to the hook.

But I can tell Opal this: “Your mother would do the messy work, not just the bait but also getting fish off the hooks and cleaning them. I was squeamish. I thought your mother was tough, but when I told her, she got mad at me and said I didn't know how hard it was for her.

“I fried up fluke the day your parents fell in love,” I tell Opal. “That's how your mother got your father—with my cooking. Lotte invited Phillip for dinner, and we pretended that she was doing the cooking.”

“Why?”

“She wasn't a confident cook. While I enjoyed it. We made Phillip stay in the living room, and then we'd run to and from the kitchen.”

Opal laughed.

“I told him I was helping Lotte. When I was done cooking, I went out to a movie, and she carried the food to the table.”

I only tell Opal about the dinner part, of course. Not how Phillip and Lotte made love on my couch and left a stain that Lotte couldn't get out. When she confessed how she'd ruined my couch, I was far more interested in what making love was like, because neither one of us had done it till then. Still, I accepted her offer to trade: her table for my couch.

It's Make Love, not War, Stupid.

We Need a Regime Change.

Listen to the World, George.

All around us, signs bob in the wind. It's freezing, and we're wearing triple layers of clothing. But it's exhilarating to be in New York for the protest, even if the city has barricaded the side streets. To reach the stage on First, where the speeches are held, we have to head north into the sixties and come down First from the north.

Grim-faced police. Everywhere.

Our crowd is moving as slowly as the line for the women's room at a matinee.

“Pete could keep up with this,” I tell Annie.

“But the crowds would jostle him.”

“You're right. Better for him and Opal to look after each other today.”

“The police look terrified.” Annie waves to several of them. “Is this where you have the coffee for the protesters?”

She gets them to laugh. To see us as individuals, perhaps—not a crowd of faceless enemies.

Annie and I wear our posters on string around our necks, covering the fronts of our coats. Annie's:
War is Terrorism.
Mine:
Early Dissent is essential for democracy.

Yesterday, when I made my poster, it took me hours to settle on this slogan, and it still doesn't express what I believe, that if my parents and teachers and their generation had spoken out against Hitler's regime—from the beginning—they would have stemmed the escalation of violence that led to Holocaust.

Way too long. Too formal. Like something that needs footnotes. Better to have just a few words in big letters that people can see all at once.

I wish I could talk with Lotte about how riskly dissent has become. Ever since 9/11, patriotism has been edging toward nationalism. Two of my friends from the vigil are being audited. Some protestors are detained at airports long enough to miss their flights. There are days I feel afraid of speaking out.
That's why I must speak out, Lotte.

I wish I could tell her about the flags that came up almost as quickly as the Trade Center came down; about the grieving that brought all of us, much of the world even, closer in the days following 9/11, until Bush twisted our grieving to go after oil.

Most of all I wish I could talk to Lotte about her daughters, who've been coming at me with their mother-longing. After Lotte's death, Annie was the one with the questions, wanting to have me fill in what she didn't know about her mother. And now the little one. I'm not enough for them. Can't be enough for them. Because I'm not Lotte.

Some days I search their faces for Lotte. Radiant and gutsy and lovely. Feel Lotte's skin against my fingers when I lift Annie's hair from her eyes, or when do I a tick search on Opal after she plays outside. Her sudden switches from bliss to rage worry Annie, but I've seen Lotte like that, have seen that mercurial side of hers. Like at that concert, held at a Masonic lodge. We were curious, left our seats to go exploring, whispering and laughing. In a dim upstairs hallway, a guard stepped into our way. Before he could say anything, Lotte demanded, “Where is the women's wash-room? We're missing the concert looking for a washroom.”
Lotte. Showing off.
Like Opal. Who can't balance her rage and bliss the way Lotte could.

Annie used to be gutsy like Lotte, but she no longer trusts herself to be gutsy. I see the change in how she acts with Opal, out of fear that she'll lose her too.

“How many, do you think, on this block?” Annie asks.

“Fifty thousand, easily…”

“No. Closer to a hundred thousand.”

“And all these other blocks filled with people.”

“Look at that—” She motions to a banner ahead of us.
Somewhere in Texas a Village is Missing its Idiot.

“Mason would have come up with something like that. In comparison ours are wimpy.”
Damn.
I've been so careful not to mention him unless Annie does.

She tries to smile but looks stricken. As if remembering his death all over.

“I'm sorry, Annie.”

“You're right. In comparison, ours are wimpy.”

“Nothing wimpy about peace.”

She's looking around as if expecting someone. Or avoiding someone? Maybe for one of the people who came in on the peace train with us, more than thirty people from the peace vigil, starting early in Southampton, adding protesters at stations along the way. When we arrived at Penn Station, our group had over two hundred, and we tried to stay together as we headed east, all along merging with additional groups that thickened into one tide of protest on Sixth Avenue, where we marched north, then east once again, in this city that wouldn't grant us the permit for a march.

By now, we've become separated from everyone we started out with, except Bill from Amnesty International, whose poster,
Shame on You, George
, we recognize far ahead of us. The energy of the protesters is incredible. Envelops us so we don't need to be with people we already know. There are no strangers here.

Annie turns up her collar. “Bet you twenty dollars that Mason would have put something outrageous on his sign.”

I play along. “Thirty dollars.”

“Better be careful if you start betting against me. It could get expensive. Mason lost thousands to me.”

“That's not all he lost.”
Damn.
“What a stupid thing to say. It's not even what I believe. Did your mother ever tell you that I can be quite tactless?”

“Yes,” Annie says and covers her mouth.

“Extremely tactless?”

“Brusque. That's the word she used for you.”

“I thought eventually I'd learn to not be…brusque, but so far it hasn't happened.”

“But she liked that about you.”

“Really now?” I smile. “Brusque, huh?”

“Look at that.” Annie points out a sign:
Let's Bomb Texas—They Have Oil Too.

“So far my favorite slogan was on the T-shirt of that large-breasted woman:
Weapons of Mass Seduction
.”

“I liked that one too.”

“What else did Lotte say about me?”

“That you're direct…rigorously truthful.”

“Also called tactless. I don't mean to be.”

“I want to get used to hearing or saying…Mason's name without crashing.” There's something else beneath her words, wanting to push itself out.

I tell her, “Nothing you have thought or done will ever shock me.”

She blinks, raises one hand to her throat, and for an instant it seems that she's weighing telling against not telling, and that telling is winning out. But all at once, protesters are pushing toward us, against the surge of our crowd. Coming back already?

“What happened?” Voices. From different directions.

“They've blocked Second.”

One voice. High. “Whose streets?”

“Our streets,” others chant.

“Whose streets?”

“Our streets!”

Standing on her toes, Annie is searching the crowd.

“Waiting for someone, Annie?”

“Not really…except for Jake…Maybe.”

I'm intrigued, of course.

Behind her, three people are dressed in duct tape, with duct tape across their mouths.
Say No to Duct Tape
.

“W
HOSE STREETS
?”

“Our streets!”

“What happened?” I ask a young man as he presses toward us.

“It's closed. Up ahead. Those fuckers—Oops, I'm sorry, madam.”

“Well, I'm fucking shocked that you'd use that kind of fucking language.”

He laughs aloud. Raises his poster.
Bush is a Fucking Idiot
.

“Don't go back,” a woman shouts.

“I'm not even sure Jake is here,” Annie says. “And if so, that he'll find us.”

Quite a buffer. A hundred thousand people to keep Jake apart from her.

But all I say is, “Where did you tell him to meet you?”

“We left it open.”

Suddenly, I'm separated from her.

The mass of bodies closes around me.

King George Rules Through Fear
.

I Don't Want Him Speaking on My Behalf
.

“Annie!”

“Whose streets?”

A roar: “Our streets!”

“Don't go back now!”

“We'll get through!”

A hand grabs mine. Annie. “Hold on.”

I hold on.

“Whose streets?”

“Our streets!” Louder yet, breaking through the chant.

All these different groups, bonding, the young and old, the radicals and the religious…