Vida (25 page)

The worst had been times they had lost their contacts and been cast on their own wispy resources, with no shelters, no I.D., no money. That was when Jimmy had tried selling his body on the streets of Chicago, with only modest success. That was when Kevin and she had robbed a liquor store at gunpoint. She had not told Joel, never told Natalie, because she considered the action politically dubious. She understood Rap Brown and the shootout on the roof of the bar, if that was what had really happened. Years of reading her exploits in the papers had made her aware the newspapers were slightly less reliable than Marvel Comix. But at a certain point with no money and no legal status, you did what you had to. You gave up or you survived. She had been there briefly. Life for white political fugitives was seldom that rugged. But she had been there and she knew it. Her terror standing in the store had been that something would go wrong and they would kill someone who was not their enemy.

“What’s wrong?” Joel asked, and Natalie stopped talking as they both stared at her.

“I shouldn’t drink at lunch. I’m not used to booze anymore.” The gin-and-tonic, cushioned by food, had not affected her. Only the memory. The middle-aged clerk had a bald freckled head that got very red and then paled, the anger in the blue eyes behind bifocals, the fear in the sweating palms sliding on the counter. She had remembered Sandy and his fear of being robbed at night in the drugstore and Ruby’s fears for him, and she felt wrong. It was one thing to bomb Whitehall Induction Center or Mobil Oil and quite another to scare a man working behind a counter late on a Tuesday night. “Lohania’s photo was in the
Times.
Natty. Standing just behind Kevin on the courthouse steps”

“Oh?” Natalie glanced at Joel, rubbing her snub nose till it shone. “Some people never learn.”

“Maybe she made him into a myth,” she said, forcing herself back to table, the present. “You can go on loving the idea of a man, like a religion. A saint’s picture in your bedroom. Something you can talk at when you’re low … The reality can be less encouraging” She tossed off the last gin-flavored ice water in the bottom of her glass. “Let’s get some coffee.”

“Don’t you do that with your ex-husband?” Joel asked conversationally, leaning back smiling broadly, invitingly.

“We’re all getting divorced.” Natalie waggled her fingers at the busy waitress. Her brown eyes sought Vida’s. “How upset are you about it?”

Joel sat up. “You mean you’re still married to that schmuck? You’re still
married
to him.?”

“Probably not by now.” She brazened it out with a shrug. “His lawyer must do something for his money.”

“Three coffees … “ Natalie turned to Joel. “The etiquette of the situation holds me back from asking all the questions I’d love to.”

“What, do I love your sister? Can I support her in the style to which she is accustomed? Are my intentions honorable? Are my prospects good?”

Natalie’s fat, happy giggle resounded. “This one has a sense of humor, for a change … No, I’m curious about you yourself. Where do you come from, originally?”

“Born in New Jersey. When I was in the fourth grade, my old man’s company moved him to North Carolina. I suffered down there till they fired him and we moved West.”

”Suffered how?” Natalie asked. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”“

“You
are
a sister,” he grinned. “The way I remember it is, I had trouble understanding how the teachers talked. Everybody made fun of me. It was wrong if I tried to talk the way they talked and wrong if I didn’t. Jewboy. Yankee, sure. I began to have what they called learning problems.”

“What about the rest of your family? Did they hate it too?”

“My younger brother grew up talking like them. I tried to make up for everything by eating. He never had weight problems, he always fitted right in … Today he’s probably minting money … I don’t know, maybe he’s pumping gas, who knows?”

“You don’t have a Southern accent,” Natalie said. “Maybe just a trace. Where West?”

“Sacramento … I liked it. I’d learned to work on cars. When we moved to Sacramento—my uncle was there—my brother moped but I was happy. I didn’t say a word to my parents. I didn’t let on, but I knew. That was my chance.”

“To get out of the South?” Natalie asked.

“To get out of myself. The fat stupid blubbering creep … I started running and swimming. I ran in circles in the backyard at first. So my mother, who’d been carrying on for years I was too fat, kept trying to push food at me”“

“I remember the dieting” Natalie said. “I’m always plump, I just accept myself that way.”

“I like you plump, Natty,” Vida said. “Everybody doesn’t have to look like a boy.” Were they getting on? She thought so; she hoped so. Joel was certainly opening up. Were they liking each other? She wanted to kneel on the floor and beg them.

“So, did your life change in Sacramento?” Natalie asked.

“Being into cars was mainstream there. I got into dope, I got into the Movement. I came in there doing my con job and I discovered I could even get laid … But I never believed in it. I knew I was putting it over on them. Inside, I was still back in Roanoke Rapids, the fat turd who picked last for every team.”

He was bonding with Natalie around the weight, she thought. Telling her that in his mind he was still fat. She smiled.

Natalie was confiding now. “ … so you got to understand my father and her mother fell clandestinely in love. Unlikely as it seems. Oh, Ruby has style, even flamboyance—”

“For years that was all she had” Vida said. “Grit, persistence. And a conviction just from daydreams that things could be different for us”

”You like your parents,” Joel said wonderingly.

“Oh, within limits.” Natalie laughed. “My own mother died when I was eight, and I didn’t resent Ruby. I was glad to be done trying to run the household with occasional cleaning women. It was like I could go back to being a kid again and stop being so damn responsible … A stepmother, you’re supposed to hate her. But Ruby was warm. I felt a little patronizing, I imagine: she’d been poor; my own mother had gone to college”

“But suddenly we had each other. Given, perfect. The sister you fantasize”

“So you aren’t real sisters” Joel said, picking the last crumbs from all their plates.

“Yes, we are!” she said. “Nothing’s more real than that” Eyes. The prickly feeling of eyes. As if casually, she turned, playing with the ends of her hair, and found the gaze. A man at a table of men, wearing a business suit, not expensive. She let her gaze drift past him, smiling. In a softer voice she went on, “Someone’s looking at me. I’m going to get up to go to the john. You sit on awhile and then pay the check. Bring my coat. Watch that he doesn’t follow. I’ll meet you back at Lingerie in twenty minutes … If he does follow, Terry, shake him and we meet as previously set up … okay?”

Casually she rose, stood over the table talking for a moment, then sauntered toward the bathroom. She went in and then came out a moment later and strolled out of the restaurant. An elevator was just loading, and she hurried to squeeze in.

Natalie had arranged housing for them from the list available for the conference in a house in Dorchester. They shared watery zucchini soup and heavy wheat bread, a salad too generously filled with inadequately washed, sour sprouts. The food was free and they ate it. She tried to be grateful, cursing her food snobbery that after seven years of exile and often hunger had never deserted her. Finally the many children were put to bed and the adults vanished, leaving Vida and Joel the dining-room floor to spread their sleeping bags on.

She asked, “What did you think of Natalie?”

“She didn’t like me.”

“How can you say that?” She was astonished. She could see Natalie at the table eagerly swapping childhoods. “She hardly ever opens up with men that way. She told me she liked you a lot.”

“Really? What did she say?”

“What I said. That she liked you a lot.”

He scowled. “You made that up.”

”I did not! She told me that when she was saying goodbye.”

“How much did she slip you?”

“Two hundred.” She tasted guilt. Natalie had little extra. She had a parttime teaching job and a minor stipend from the battered women’s I shelter where she worked for over forty hours a week.

“Wow, with the dough for running that woman to safety, we’ll have it made. Think she could give us these jobs pretty often?”

“Mostly the shelter works fine and they don’t move women. But Natalie knows everything going on. She does liaison a lot with other political groups. She’s an incredible organizer, Terry—”

“Why do you got to call me that? Nobody’s listening.”

“We’re in somebody’s house. We have to use the legal names.”

“We’re alone in the fucking sleeping bag. You think they got the sleeping bag bugged?”

“It’s a habit. All we need to do is slip once in public and not say Terry or Vinnie—”

“I hate it! I hate for you to call me that name.”

“Love, keep your voice down. I understand—”

“Call me by my name!” He lay rigid, his fists clenched.

“It’s dangerous”

“We didn’t get here by playing it safe. Call me by my name!”

“Why are you coming down so hard on me about this?”

He turned onto his belly, pushing his head into the sleeping bag. “I’m lost! Who am I, anyhow? Where are we going? Just running. From who? Do they give a fuck anymore? Just running in sand. I want to remember who I am. Call me by my name when we’re alone. Call me by my name!”

She sat up beside him, hands twisting in her lap. She could not do it. Years of security habits; years of taking care; years of never knowing when she was bugged, watched, photographed, filmed; years of having to break dear old habits seized her tongue. It’s so hard for us, she thought, staring around at the dingy but cheerful room with its hanging plants and combination of political and travel posters on the walls. Why was she with this creature? How had she ever thought life with him was going to be a bowl of nonchauvinist cherries? She could be in a hundred rooms in a hundred houses kneeling on more comfortable beds with saner and stronger men— or better yet, alone! Why didn’t she just bolt and run?

He raised his head and looked at her with accusing brown eyes that reminded her for a moment of Natalie’s. “You’ll get bored struggling with me. You want to leave me for some guy who’s got it all together.”

”I never met a guy who had it all together.” She could not leave him for anybody. He was a lot of trouble, but he was in touch with her, and she had been lonely for a long, long time. She knelt to put her arms around him and into his ear she whispered, “Joel. Joel. My love”

10

She had expected to call Leigh from a roadside booth Wednesday morning, long after Joel and she had picked up the battered woman, Tara, and started north, but Tuesday night the pickup was put off until Thursday morning. She and Joel ended up in the cheapest motel they could find in Hempstead, waiting. She had to call Leigh Wednesday from a pay phone three blocks from the motel.

“Are you coming out of New York soon?” she asked him. “I’m nervous about going there right now.” She was too close for comfort.

“Reasonable enough.” Even over the phone Leigh’s voice was caramel. “Not clear if old Kevin’s going to be tried for gunrunning or old stuff or all of it”

“You haven’t talked to him?”

“He gave a press conference with his Mafia lawyer last week—a surprise in itself—sounding blustery and martyred. I went and he looked right through me. Wouldn’t recognize me when I tried to ask a question.”

“Not good.” Jealousy? Contempt? Kevin had always detested Leigh, but arrested politicos usually wanted his attention. “A
Mafia
lawyer?”

“A good one. Pricey.”

She speculated glumly, but she could not protract the phone call. “What’s your travel schedule?”

“Let’s see. Got my calendar handy … At Thanksgiving I’m going down to Miami to see my mother.”

“How would I get to Florida? Besides, it’s dangerous. Too many Cuban exiles, too many Feds.”

“Well, this coming weekend we’re visiting friends of Susannah’s who have a ski lodge near Twin Mountain—that’s up in New Hampshire.”

“You’re a skier now? I don’t believe it.”

“Nah, I just watch the idiots risk their bones while I toast at the fire”

This weekend … Leigh, I can make it. I can meet you nearby … Are they political?”

“They’re musicians. Classical. You know, resonance up where brains ought to be. Fine mahogany heads … But good-hearted. Both first-class cooks. He cooks Roman and she cooks Indian and Mexican. He is Italian, she’s a Wasp. So it goes. You could call in on their phone. Pretend you’re my fucking station. They always hector me.” He cleared his throat. “But we won’t have much time. I can’t disappear on them for hours. Brief meet—if you think it’s worth the bother.”

“Of course it’s worth it” she said hotly. “To me, anyhow.” She had been gone from him altogether too much already. Should she break her own rules and meet Susannah? Their involvement seemed to have thickened to the point where it would be more useful if she made the woman take her into account; yet Leigh had gone through fifteen women in the last few years.