Vida (31 page)

“Natalie, stop this and listen to me!”

“You stop it!” Natalie sat down thump in a chair. “Take over. Make order from chaos. I quit!”

She could hardly hear her sister over the din. “Shut up, you brats!” she roared at her nephew and niece. “Let’s have some discipline. Do you think the children of Chinese cadre stand around screaming and beating each other on the head with toys? You shouldn’t get them those department-store toys anyhow, Natty, it trains them into consumption patterns.”

“Fine, fine” Natalie brayed. “Go ahead. Take their toys away from them!”

They were screaming louder. Vida climbed on a chair and addressed them sternly. “Stop it. Quiet!” But they did not become quiet. She thought about belting them, but she did not think that Vietnamese hit their kids and she knew that Native Americans didn’t; it must be incorrect. But how the hell did you shut them up? “Okay, march,” she said. “Into your room.” She picked up Peezie, who promptly kicked her in the ribs with her fat little legs, and dumped the kid into her crib. Then she went back and hauled in the flailing Sam and stuffed him into bed too.

“Now you stay in here until you’re quiet.” She slammed the door.

They were screaming but more dimly, through the shut door. She sank into a chair with a big sigh. “Better?”

“If you like misery. How’d you like someone three times your size to pick you up and shut you in a closet? Imagine a cop fifteen feet tall”

“Oh, come on, there has to be discipline. You spoil them,”

“I recall you liked being spoiled as a child.” Natalie picked sand from the corners of her soft brown eyes.

“Come on, Natty, stop listening to them scream. Listen to me. I have something serious to talk to you about.”

“And kids are basically frivolous. Sure.” Natalie folded her arms. They were not getting on well lately. They had political differences.

“You know that Lohania and I have become lovers.”

“That’s supposed to be serious? Davida! Spare me.”

“You don’t think relationships between women can be serious?”

”I have more serious relationships with the women in my consciousness-raising group than you do with any woman. Including Lohania. You’re serious about Leigh and she’s serious about Kevin and you’re both serious about Kevin and Leigh, but you are not serious about each other. An orgasm or two doesn’t mean you put each other first” Natalie turned the ring on her finger round and round, more in annoyance than nervousness.

“Do you deny the importance of orgasm? Do you disagree with Reich? Oh, Natty, Lohania says you and I have a basically incestuous relationship but we’re scared to consummate it. We love each other but we shy off from expressing it.”

“Sweetie, we express it all the time. We’re not doing so hot lately. But you’re my best woman friend. You’re my sister. We need to talk more. You need to stop trying to feed me the correct line of the week and we need to just talk the way we always did. You need a women’s group of your own”

“Do you deny the nature of our relationship? Don’t you want to force through the taboo that divides us?”

“Not particularly, Vida. I think we have enough trouble both being involved, if you want to call it that, with Jimmy. And he’s just like … a dependent, a grown-up child we share.”

“It’s a bourgeois hang-up. Lohania thinks you’re obsessed with minor contradictions, such as the woman question, because of those hang-ups.”

Natalie’s face drew together in a scowl. “What hang-ups?”

“Look at your life. Husband, babies, toys, dinners. Are you so far beyond Ruby and Sandy? We can’t make a new society in the shell of the old if we’re living a middle-class existence.”

“I’m involved in women’s politics because I am a woman. I am a woman with children. I’m not about to throw them in the garbage because Lohania doesn’t think it’s revolutionary to have kids this year.”

“Natalie, are you unwilling to try to get to the bedrock of our relationship?”

“Vida! The bedrock is love. I do have taboos about getting into bed with you. So we make it together. So tomorrow you have to break taboos and make it with the kids. The next week it’s the dog. No, we have to draw the line someplace. No dog shit in the kitchen and no fucking the dog. No fucking children. No fucking sisters, sweetie” Natalie sat back, giggling, beaming at her. “You’re silly, sometimes, but I love you anyhow.”

She was with Leigh on a trail in Crawford Notch, an easy climb on an old carriage road through the snow. They sat on a bare ledge at the top of a small mountain overlooking the notch, with the sheer walls of Frankenstein Cliffs before them. She had taken off her left glove and he had taken off his right so they could hold hands, looking at the V of the valley below. Traffic was light on the twisting highway, and they had met no one else on the trail. “I can almost imagine we’re taking one of our normal little vacations— when we’d suddenly steal three days and run off to Assateague in Virginia, Shenandoah, the Berkshires, the Adirondacks. We’d run away together and get marvelously restored. I’ve never enjoyed traveling with anybody in my life the way I love traveling with you,” she said.

“I hardly ever get to do that anymore. This weekend is an exception. I can’t take off much”

“But you’re reaching people. There isn’t another radical has your access to radio time in New York, and you know it.” Besides, she did not want him going off on lovely jaunts to all their old oases with Susannah.

“Truer words” Leigh rubbed his beard. “Even Harvey got the ax. I’m the last of the redskins riding the airwaves. The corporate word reigns supreme, except for my two cents plain.”

She envied his ability to use his talents doing political work every day and come home with a feeling of accomplishment. He had brought tapes to play, and she had enjoyed a couple but finally persuaded him to let her take the rest away. She did not want to use up their time together, however interesting she found his broadcast journalism. He had made it clear at once that they were not to go off to a motel. He was afraid to be seen, and he was probably, she thought sourly but with resignation, saving himself for Susannah later. Nothing had been said like that. Rather, he’d strongly suggested they take a modest hike together, something they hadn’t been able to do in a long time.

“We should start down.” She did not want to, but she was getting cold sitting on the rock.

“Yeah” He made as if to get up, but didn’t. Something was coming. She waited. Something he didn’t want to tell her.

“The divorce?” she said.

“Oh, it’s coming along. Listen. I talked to your sister this week.”

“Is anything wrong with Natalie?”

“A lot of surveillance. But that’s not it … Your mother isn’t feeling too well.”

“Ruby? But she’s tough as a mule.” Why, when Vida was a baby, Ruby had received an award from the shipyard for never missing a day. Oh, she got colds and sore throats—she smoked incessantly, a cigarette always in her mouth or dangling from her fingers, often one lit in the ashtray burning down while she had struck her lighter for another, that little snap of the wrist and flick of the chin—but never did she go to bed sick. When Joel talked about his mother lying down with her headaches, her backaches, her muted hangovers, her devastating periods, her ennui, when he spoke of his mother stretched out beneath an ice pack or taking antidepressants, her Elavil, her Tofranil, Vida thought of Ruby, who didn’t much believe in aspirin. She had grown up thinking of women as hardier than men. Tom got sick; Ruby, never. Tom went to bed moaning. Sandy wanted to be waited on. Ruby did the waiting. “What could be wrong with mother?”

“I don’t know exactly. It’s not … very serious.”

He was holding something back, she could smell it, and she felt a rush of anger. Handling her again. Always he hid problems and attempted to manage her reactions. “Tell me directly. What is it?”

“Now, don’t get excited.”

“I’m angry because you won’t tell me. Give me Natalie’s exact words. Exact.”

“How the hell would I remember?”

“You have a damned good memory. Journalist!”

He snorted. “Ruby had a mild aneurism.”

“Aneurism? What in hell is that?”

“I think it’s in the blood vessels. A constriction.”

“Aneurism … Is that a heart attack?”

“It was a mild one.”

“How mild?”

“She’s in the hospital, but they expect her to be home in a week or two”

“What hospital?”

He took her hand. “Hold on, now. You can’t do a thing about it. She’s in Mount Sinai, in the heart unit.”

“Sandy must be crazed with worry … A heart attack. Why did she have a heart attack?”

“Apparently she had a mild one before, but she didn’t tell anybody.”

“Oh, that’s just like her! Don’t talk about it and it’ll go away. That’s Ruby. What caused it?”

She was trying to dig out the car—they had an early snowstorm and she was late to Sharon’s. Anyhow, Natalie’s flown out to Chicago—”

“Then it’s serious.”

“Don’t exaggerate! Don’t get worked up! Natalie expects to be back by Monday—she just went for the weekend. She gave me some new numbers for you to call Tuesday in East Norwich.”

“Tuesday. How can I wait that long?”

”Cool it, kid. Ruby had the heart attack Wednesday. You’ve waited four days to hear about it. You can wait three more days for an update. It isn’t that critical. Ruby’s going to have to lose some weight and stop smoking and watch her diet and behave herself.”

“But she’s not fat!” Vida said, rushing to Ruby’s defense.

“She’s not exactly svelte. You know she and Sandy have been putting it on year after year” He stood now, pulling her up. “Let’s go. Vida, don’t worry about it. Natalie’ll have a full report for you at ten on Tuesday.”

“Could you please remember my name is Vinnie?”

He laughed with relief. “When you start lecturing on security, I know you’re okay. Think the hibernating chipmunks will turn you in?”

“Habit saves. Or habit betrays” They could not walk arm in arm through the uneven terrain covered with snow. Because of the snow the ground seemed to radiate light under the lowering sky.

“Well, how’s your life? Your private life first” she asked.

“Oh. Susannah. She kind of wants to get married”

“Oh, she kind of does?” She made herself laugh. “Kind of married is okay. It was the legal kind we were sorry enough we got into, but probably she has no practice.”

“No, she’s never been married. I tell her it turns into a nuisance after the first year, but she doesn’t understand”

“Remember how hard it was for us to break out of that box? Everybody treating us as a couple. People constantly called you ‘a married man’ and me ‘a married woman’ till we felt like we’d turned into our parents”

“That was the first time I ever felt like an older man. A dirty old man. I couldn’t go anyplace without people asking me where you were. Accusingly. Complacently.”

She slid on a tilted granite block slicked with ice till he caught her by the armpits and eased her down. She went on, “And all the men suddenly feeling they could use me as instant mother. Sympathy, meals, endless support, and if I asked anything back they’d say, But you’re a married woman. I was supposed to be a public resource for everybody else, and you were supposed to be the only one responsible for meeting my needs.”

“And the first time people found out I was making it with somebody else …”

“Marcie. The tall one with the curly hair she straightened and it looked weird.”

“She used to iron it” he said. “Everybody was supposed to have straight hair then.”

”Every
woman.
Men could have any kind of hair so long as there was a lot of it”

“When I started fucking Marcie, everybody was going around, all our friends, whispering that we were breaking up.”

“So, love, why do it again?” She realized she had called him “love”—a word she used with Joel. Leigh and she did not address each other with endearments, considering it reeking of togetherness, banning “dear” and “honey” and “sweetheart.” “Kid,” “babes,” the tough poke in the ribs—that was Leigh’s style.

Leigh did not notice. “I don’t want to! Susannah thinks it’d be meaningful. I tell her, Damn right, and the meaning is a first-rate nuisance. It’s a bore to involve the government in your private life. They charge you and then proceed to fuck up your records and charge you higher taxes and make everything complicated.”

“Hold out. You haven’t been a bachelor in thirteen years!”

“She’ll forget it. I consider it a passing folly.” He grimaced. “I wish my book was as simple.”

“What book?”

“I played you those tapes on health stuff—don’t you remember? I’m doing an article for
New York
magazine and one for the
Voice,
but it’s part of a projected book. An analysis of what health care is really like in a city—in this case dear, dirty old Brooklyn.”

“You’re writing a book? Honestly? I don’t mean to sound—”

“My agent talked to a couple of editors and there’s interest. Everybody’s pissed off at the cost of getting sick. Every contact with a hospital rubs the wrong way. So she figures my book has potential”