Vida (51 page)

“I think I can cut you some.”

He stood laughing, but he was not amused. He was scraped raw with desperation. “My reach is a foot longer. You need a lesson who’s who around here.”

There were no guns in the living section of the house; she had been responsible for that. She had argued at length against storing guns around the living quarters, but her real reason had been that she thought Kevin with a gun would shoot her. But she had not anticipated that a gun would make them physically equal, as a knife didn’t.

“Stop it!” Lark stood in the doorway zipping his pants. “Nobody gave you the right to threaten one of us”

”Keep out of this. This is between my girl and me”

“I’m not your ‘girl,’” Vida shouted. “I don’t want you!”

“The fuck you don’t!”

“Get out of her room! You can settle arguments between you with mediation. Things are going to pot here. We mean to intervene, and we’re going to get everything straightened out even if we have to break up this house to do it. “ He walked by Kevin, calmly.

“Let her alone,” Eva sang out. She blocked the doorway with an ax in her good hand.

Jimmy stood in the hallway blinking with sleep in his rumpled pajamas. Vida saw him as a child. Yes, she had played Mama and Kevin had played Daddy and he had made of them his family. The trauma in seeing them fight so viciously paralyzed him. He could only stand blinking, his hands clasped behind him as if tied.

“Who the fuck are you to tell me how to treat her?” Kevin said Lark, ignoring Eva, but he was watching the ax out of the corner of his eye. “She’s mine. You’d like to get your hands on her, wouldn’t you?”

“I won’t try it with a big jackknife, you better believe that” Lark walked over to her, still crouched by the bed with the knife hanging loosely in her hand, feeling ridiculous. “Are you all right?”

“My dignity’s bleeding. I don’t like scenes. I don’t like my door forced. And he’d better believe,
I
won’t be forced either. I’ll kill him”

“We aren’t in this to kill each other. You cool it too, Perry.”

She wanted to cry. Did he expect her to take it calmly? Reprimand Kevin mildly as he raped her? Eva pushed in past Kevin and knelt by Vida, still holding the ax. Marti crowded into the room too and for once took Vida’s side. “The kids are bawling. They’re terrified. What kind of shit is this? Jesse, don’t you wave that knife around here. I’ve told you not to bring sharp knives into the house and leave them around where the kids can hurt themselves. I cleaned and washed all day, and I’m bonetired. I won’t put up with this!”

Jimmy had not spoken a word. Silently he followed Kevin. Kevin retreated in a sulk to his room. Slowly the others dispersed. Vida spent the night in Eva’s room with the door locked and a chair wedged under the knob. In the morning she did not even see Kevin as she packed her knapsack to leave early with Lark.

“What’s our business in New York?” She was driving. With his artificial leg Larkin could drive, but it tired him. He would spell her one hour in four. Off to New York! That was her secret mecca, not Eva’s luscious sunbaked orange-grove California dreams. The fugitives had learned how dangerous New York could be; yet it remained The City to her, pulsating source of energy.

“You want a mediator to negotiate between you two?” Lark asked.

“I can’t stay in the same house with him. It wastes everybody. “

“Politically you don’t seem a compatible team any longer” he said tentatively. “But you’ve always worked together.”

“I’ve worked with a lot of people,” she said. “I used to work with Jimmy. I work well with Eva. You and I work well together.” Would he suggest she leave the Board to avoid fights with Kevin?

“Yes, that’s what I think” he said. “But you will admit things have been stagnating.”

“Absolutely,” she agreed fervently. “We’re holding each other back politically.”

“I have to fund-raise in the city,” he said. “And I wanted us to have time to discuss program for the coming year. Besides, I can’t drive alone to fetch Kiley.”

Leigh! She must see Leigh. She felt as if she had just been offered a vacation in the paradise of her choice. Three months had passed since their last meeting, and while things had been much improved between in the past year, she could only hope he wanted to see her as much as she wanted to see him.

“First we’ll have to drive into Manhattan while I see Dr. Manolli,” Lark said. “You wait. Then take me up to Co-op City. We have a shelter there … You want to see the doc?” Lark needed help from the doctor, and besides, he had all the fugitives’ problems to relate and prescriptions to collect.

“I’m fine! I’m wonderful … So you think it would be good if I left Hardscrabble?”

“What do you think of Eva?”

“Eva? I love her. She’s very just, Lark, sweet tempered day to day. But she’s not afraid to take action or stand up to anyone.”

“I’ve been quite impressed with her politically” he said gravely, cracking his gaunt knuckles. “You know, at first I think some of us looked down on her because she was framed. Most of us acted, as you did, or chose to come under because of our analysis. But Eva got pushed”

She wondered if she should say she thought some of them looked down on Eva because she was a lesbian; but she decided not to cross words with Lark. He was unprejudiced toward gay people as far as she could tell and opposed to taking political positions on gay rights at the same time, because he was always terrified of offending the Cubans, the Chinese, the Albanians. “Eva’s tremendously hardworking. And she’s bright. She reads everything.”

“She seems serious” he said. That was one of his key words—she remembered that. Why was he asking questions about Eva? “Maybe we didn’t respect her so much politically because she came in late, and because she’s a musician. You don’t think of musicians as cadre”

“But Eva’s really cadre,” she said nervously.

“I think so.” He nodded. “She must take a greater role.”

In what? Kevin and Eva were bitter enemies, and she had not helped them get along together, always running to Eva with complaints. At ten she stopped to call Natalie and set up a meeting for the next morning when all Natalie’s kids would be in school or day care. Obviously she would have the car, so she chose the Bronx Botanical Gardens and asked Natalie to contact Leigh and arrange a rendezvous out of Manhattan with him. Maybe a motel on the Island or near LaGuardia.

After the call she was flying. Feeling no fatigue, she drove on past the scheduled shift change. She was soaring, grateful to Lark, solicitous of his comfort. At the same time, she recognized that if he had been warmer to her the night before, more consoling, she might have ended up in his bed instead of chastely in Eva’s. Now she was glad she hadn’t. Really, Lark would be a tremendous improvement on Kevin, and she could feel his interest as a hum of suggestion between them. She wasn’t the best fund raiser in the group and knew few contacts to scatter big bucks on them. No, Lark had his reasons, both political and personal, which she would decipher with time.

February in New York felt almost tropical. She and Lark visited Dr. Manolli in Washington Heights. Then she dropped Lark in Co-op City, towers on reclaimed garbage, where they were to make their headquarters for the next couple of days. She parked near the Mosholu Parkway gate to the Botanical Garden. No snow lay on the ground except for granite-hard patches of ice beside the paths. Her feet touched pavement and bounced, springy. The temperature was a balmy 37 degrees, with a wan sun trying to burn its way through a yellowish haze.

At once she picked out Natalie’s old green VW bug. Natalie was sitting inside, reading a book of whose title Vida, leaning against the glass, could see only W
OMEN,
which made her smile. What else would Natalie be reading about but W
OMEN?
Women in World War II. Women in the Work Force. Women of Ethiopia. Women of Sixteenth-Century England. Women in the Construction Trades. Women Writers of Provence. Women Healers of the Upper Volta. Women in the French Commune. Natalie’s hunger was vast. She tapped on the glass. Natalie but down the book and hopped out to embrace her.

“Natalie!” Vida hugged her and then frowned. “Where are you?” Natalie felt slight like Lark.

“Great, huh? I weigh 115 exactly. I haven’t weighed this little since high school” Natalie unzipped her down jacket to show off. She was wearing a maroon warm-up suit striped along the side.

“But … you’re awfully thin.”

Natalie beamed. “Peezie wanted to learn karate. We’ve been going.”

“Isn’t she awfully young?”

“Six, and strong-minded. Er, what do I call you?”

“Peregrine at the moment. Stick to that.”

“My sister, the falcon. Endangered species. It’s fun galloping around the gym at the junior high Monday and Wednesday nights. Really, it all started because I confronted Daniel. I said, Okay, you just broke up with your girlfriend. What would it take to get you to pay that kind of attention to me? He said, Lose weight.”

“He’s stupid. If I was a man, I’d like fleshy women”

Natalie squeezed her shoulder. “I don’t notice he’s any more interested, but my instructor’s an angel. Speaking of husbands” She rummaged in her shoulder bag. “I guess you read this and then eat it or it self-destructs, right? Honeymoon in Queens for you!”

“Oh, Natty, when?” She grabbed the paper to read off the motel. “Did he seem glad to hear from me?”

“Glad is no word for it. He got so excited he dropped a coffee cup all over my shoes.”

“Really? He wants to see me?” She hugged Natalie. “Let’s walk. It’s so gorgeous here.”

“Gorgeous?” Natalie looked around puzzled. “Tonight. At seven. He’s coming straight from work.”

“How can I wait that long? I’m sorry. Of course I can wait. I’m just as happy to see you, really and truly.”

“How’re you doing in your life? You look a little tired.”

“I’ve given up on Kevin. How could I have ever have loved that bag of wind?” They passed the white metal-and-glass conservatory.

Natalie nodded toward the building. “Want to go in?”

“No, let’s stay outside. It’s so springlike.”

”Springlike?” Natalie shook the curly hair out of her eyes. “Kevin isn’t only wind. He’s a man of action and you were into action, shvesterlein. You were the action-faction. Kevin’s a street fighter. Like falling in love with a police dog, but then, I don’t see much in most men besides privilege and arrogance, or privilege and self-pity.”

“Natalie …” She licked at the ice. “Do I have lousy taste in men?”

“Yep. Oh, wow, yes!” Natalie giggled “I suppose a Freudian would say your own daddy was a real bummer so you think real men are real bummers”

“Well, Leigh isn’t. Was that just blind luck?”

“He and I are on the outs. He’s a smirking sexist. Listen … Peregrine, long after the truck drivers an construction workers are working side by side with women, male journalists and male writers of all types will be clinging to their contempt for women. They need that contempt. What else would most of them write about?”

They climbed a short neat hill with pines planted on the slope but not the broad plateau which offered them a view of distant Bronx towers. “Maybe I shouldn’t have relationships with men at all?”

“The one with Kevin might well give you cause to say that” Natalie wrinkled her nose. “Are you considering women? Or is it just that you lack suitors today?”

“I got one. I’m considering him.”

“I should have guessed! I can’t remember a day from the time we met that you didn’t have a man on tap.”

“He isn’t exactly on tap” She did not understand what compelled her to choose one man rather than another: to love Kevin more than Oscar; to run off with Vasos; to run off from him as vigorously and a whole lot more sensibly; to reject Pelican as a lover and relish Kevin. “Natty, be serious. Tell me what to do with my life. I’ve made such a mess I’m ashamed.”

“You mean, the bombing?”

“No, the sex and love part” Vida bridled. “We’ve done okay down under. Survived and learned to strike hard and to communicate—”

“I think you could use a few lessons in basic conversational English for those doughy communiqués, actually”‘

“Actually, yes. I don’t write them. I’m not allowed to. I don’t grind out dense enough M.L. jargon.”

“Peregrine … hold off. Don’t jump into bed. Why leap from one man to another? Try to feel more complete in yourself. Try to draw some strength from the women around you. There are women, aren’t there?”

“More than half of us are women …” She mistrusted what commanded her love, what triggered her sexuality. Kevin had proved such a baldly bad choice, such a lingering foul mistake that she doubted herself through and through. Maybe Natalie was right. “I don’t mean to break off with Leigh, I love him, but maybe I should try not to get into anything new and serious with a man …”

“Why not stay clear altogether?”

Within reason she thought, because her life was not exactly Natalie’s. She thought of Lark and she did not know.

“Try” Natalie put a kiss on her finger and pressed it to Vida’s nose. “You have the world’s classiest nose.”