Vida (60 page)

“Like you used to” She watched him carefully. No, he would never agree to an action. He could not be an ally. He would favor another comfortably rhetorical position paper.

“Yeah, but she’s a better teacher than I was” he said, chuckling, “Jamie’s at day care and Jane’s in school. About four everybody hits the house, but we have a little time. This is Rudolph. Named by the kids for the reindeer.”

“What about that chili?” Joel asked. “I’m starving. He looks half spaniel and half elephant.”

“Yeah, look at his paws,” Roger said. He and Joel were awkward with each other. At the doorway to the kitchen both stopped and each stood waiting for the other to proceed. “I figured out last night, they say a dog will grow up in proportion to his feet. Rudy’s going to be six feet tall lying down”

They were still not looking at each other, but some silent agreement to get along had been reached between the two former rivals for Kiley’s favors. They both roughed up the puppy, who fell on his back, shaggy belly up, and had puppy giggles of wriggling and yelping between them. Vida looked at Eva, who winked. They all squeezed into the kitchen around the Formica table, eating chili out of blue plastic bowls. Joel tasted his and then began adding pepper and chili powder from the rack over the stove. Vida took the spices from him. They were bland too, the strength cooked out of them by the heat of the stove. Could she advise Gwen when she arrived not to keep her spices and herbs over the stove?

Jane got home first, pouting as Rudolph barreled into her. “There’s dirty old black car in the drive,” she announced sulkily.

“These are friends of mine, Jane. They’re going to stay with us for a couple of days”

”Oh” She stared at them briefly, a lanky brown-haired eight-year-old who could have been Roger’s daughter: tall for her age, skinny, long-boned as he was. For a moment she thought, could it be? Then she remembered that Roger’s daughter had been seven when he went underground. She would be fourteen now. “Daddy … don’t you want to see what I did today? You didn’t ask. Look Daddy.”

Crayon drawings of snowflakes—red snowflakes, purple, green, drawn with a fussy detail Vida found a little scary in a child. How had she made each snowflake precisely symmetrical? “Why, they’re beautiful, Janey, beautiful!” he crowed. “I’m going to put them right up … Where should we put them?” A good question. The refrigerator and the cupboard doors were plastered with drawings of houses and trees. “How about we take down a couple of the old ones?”

“No! You don’t like them anymore?”

“I love them, Janey. They’re beautiful houses.”

“I made them for you! ‘Cause you didn’t live in a house for a long, long time.”

“I love them, Janey. But I’m not going to throw them away. I’m going to take your old drawings and put them away in my desk … When you take off your red dress and put it away you don’t throw it out, do you? It’s like clothes. It’s more fun if you change them. Then sometimes we can take out the old ones, when you’ve almost forgotten you made them, and we’ll put them back up and say, Hey, look what pretty houses Janey made.”

“Okay”“ she said slowly. “But in your desk. In a drawer, like putting clothes away.”

In rapid explanation he said to the rest of them, “I told Janey I’d been traveling a lot in recent years.”

“But now you’re tired and you’re going to live with us forever and ever and ever. That’s what you promised.”

Again he glanced at them over Janey’s head. “I’m Janey’s daddy now”“ he said in a furry voice. “Come on, Janey, we’ll put the snowflakes up”

Jamie came into the house first, trotting. “Daddy! Rudy! Daddy!” He was a chubby six-year-old with a big voice who stumbled awkwardly across the kitchen to fling himself against Roger. “Daddy!” he bellowed, paying no attention to them.

“Jamie goes to a facility for special children,” Roger said quietly, and swung Jamie into the air. Jamie grabbed him and held on, squeaking with a pleasure. “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”

Gwen came into the kitchen still wearing her coat and carrying her purse and attaché case before her as if to ward off being bumped into. She was plump and freckled, her face pinched with worry. She glanced at them all and looked immediately away, as if frightened. Did Gwen think they would attack her? Or take Roger away? Vida could not believe what he had gotten himself into: a wife, a house, a family with a retarded child. Gwen took off her woolen gloves and put her hand on Roger’s arm. Over the squealing Jamie and the leaping puppy they looked at each other.

As the after-school snacking got launched, Joel and Vida shut themselves in the bathroom. “He’ll never agree,” she whispered, sitting on the closed toilet seat. “An action is the last thing in the world he’ll want. He’s got instant family”‘

“You’re off, again. Jesus, Vida, you can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys without a scorecard, can you.? He has to prove himself. To show he can have family and still be just as revolutionary. He’s happy, and he doesn’t think he ought to be, so he feels guilty. He’ll be for anything chancy.’

Someone knocked on the door. “Hey”‘ Joel called. “We’re almost done”

“It’s me,” Eva said. “Can I come in for a minute?”

Joel opened the door. “Want to watch me piss?”

“I didn’t figure that’s what you were doing” Eva carefully shut the door, taking a joint from her cuff. “Toke time”

“How the hell are we going to have a meeting in this house?” Vida asked.

“We’ll go for a walk after supper” Eva lit up and drew, passing.

Vida opened the bathroom window a crack, automatically. “It’s ridiculous, hiding in the john … But we got to make our nuke presentation to you and R … Tim.”

“I want to be persuaded” Eva sat on the edge of the tub next to Joel, who took the toke, dragged and passed it along. “This document: I couldn’t stand to read it, let alone write it.”

He said, “Another document—wow, it’ll fall on the world like a mouse’s fart. How come Kiley and Larkin are sold on it?”

“How come you’re discussing Board business?” Eva waggled a finger at him. “If you keep giving me dirty looks, your face could freeze that way. That’s what my mother used to say to me when I’d throw tantrums. Peregrine-ace, I can see you invented this, a, to get us moving again, and b, you want an issue you can work on with him. Am I right?”

Feeling silly sitting on the closed toilet in the position of shitting, Vida nodded.

“In that order.”

”You,” Eva said to Joel. “Did you leave Kiley or did she dump you?”

“She dumped me. She froze me out,” Joel said sullenly, refusing to look at either of them and hogging the joint.

“What will you do if she changes her mind?”

“Yawn,” he said.

“How come? I hear you were crazy about her.”

“Crazy is the word” Joel finally released the dope to Eva. “She”—he pointed with a nudge of his shoulder at Vida—”she likes sex, she likes me. Think I’m stupid enough to risk that for the Ice Queen?” He actually looked at Eva. “What do you care?”

“You think I don’t care about her?”

“I don’t know what to make of all this honesty. I think it’s a bad idea all the way round. Why don’t we go back in the other room and try to manipulate each other the way real people do?”

“Actually, we can’t hide in here, the three of us, smoking dope till supper,” Vida said. “We’ll freak them out. I’m going to volunteer to set the table or something.”

“I’ll volunteer to get a little hot sauce,” Joel said. “Her chili tastes like cornflakes”

“Be good,” she said. “How would you like to be her with us arriving? She’s probably terrified for her kids”

“Aw, shit” Eva said, ruffling Vida’s hair and sauntering toward the door. “We haven’t eaten kids in years.”

Supper passed, mercifully. Then Gwen took the kids to visit a friend. “It’s good I should go and see her” Gwen said earnestly into the air. She would not look at them individually. “I used to see her all the time before, you know, and now I hardly ever drop in.”

“Of course I trust Gwen” Roger said after she had gone. “She’d do anything for me.”

“But if you leave, what will she do to you, to us?” Vida asked.

“She knows what could happen. She says any time we have together is better than none. Every day is one more for us. She means it. A woman like her, Perry, she knows how to love.”

“Is the kids’ father around?” Joel asked.

“Her husband walked out on her when Jamie was two. He wanted to put Jamie in an institution and try again. Can you imagine, wanting to throw your kid away and pretend he didn’t happen? Gwen’s a good woman … I’ve never been so happy. Is that awful? I’m ready to leave whenever I’m needed. She’s behind what I do, one hundred percent.”

Roger rubbed his pipe against his chin. I wouldn’t let this house get shot up. I’d surrender and take a prison term. I don’t think they could hang anything on her. No way they could prove she knows who I am—she doesn’t even know my real name.”

Eva crossed to the window and peered out through two bent Venetian blinds to the street. “It’s snowing … Alice and Bill turned themselves In this week. Roger heard today.”

“What?” Vida rose out of her chair. “They got caught?”

“No. They got a lawyer in L.A. and turned themselves in.” Eva met her in the middle of the floor and they looked at each other. Roger sucked hard on his pipe. “Why?” he asked. “Why?”

“Alice has been sick a lot. She needs an operation on her sinuses. They are always infected and she gets a 103-degree fever every couple of weeks … “ Eva’s voice trailed off.

“If we don’t develop political momentum soon, we’ll lose more. The ones who don’t have heavy sentences hanging over them,” Roger said.

Vida glanced at Joel. “After all these years … We’ll never see Alice again. Never. She just went and left us, like that. I trusted her. And Bill. I got close to him in L.A. In Cincinnati in September he seemed in good shape.”

“No use dwelling on it and getting depressed,” Eva said. “Let’s get on with our business. Why should we mess around with nuke stuff? Basically it’s an ecology issue, middle-class, quality-of-life.”

Gathering her energy, Vida stood. For a moment she remembered the old excitement of addressing a crowd, her words bouncing back at her in waves of energy. Never again. “Basically, power is power. The same folks that gave us the military-industrial complex, utilities that charge more and more for less and less, dirty air and rotten cities, a fifty-percent unemployment rate in the ghettos, agribusiness where the price of grain sold goes down and the price of meat goes up are pushing nukes.” As she spoke, she paced. Her familiar style of oratory gave her confidence. “Nuclear power involves public safety: What happens to people who live nearby? To their kids? Downstream? Why does it make power cost more? What happens to wastes nobody knows what to do with? How does the government interlock with industry and the same families who own banks? If the plants always cost more to build and more to run and produce less than they say beforehand, who gets rich off building more and more?”

“Jimmy walks again.” Roger wore a sad smile. “He always said, Keep naming the enemies. Put faces on where the money goes. But where’s the anti-imperialist base to your project? Clamshell doesn’t have any class politics. A lot of antinuke stuff comes out saying Save the rivers and fuck the cities and too bad if you need a job”

“Look, it’s like sitting back with a good Marxist analysis in New York in 1957 and saying, What’s all this busing stuff? What does it have to do with the means of production? All this Black religion, phooey. When what happens doesn’t match our preconceptions, we get annoyed. Annoyed we aren’t leading. The E.R.A., abortion, tax revolt, gay rights and corruption and nukes are causing more heat than anything, and we keep out.”

“Don’t you see?” Joel burst out. “It could wipe us out. Wipe out our ability to have kids and a place for kids to have kids. It’s too dangerous to leave to those schmucks. We have to stop them.”

Roger turned to Eva. “Kiley was trying to chase you off the Board. Did you know?”

“Basically dyke-baiting. She can’t swing it. She’s been testing the support behind everybody,” Eva said. “Including Perry. Including you”

He sucked on his unlit pipe. “Including me. That was her next logical step.”

“Why?” Vida asked. “Can’t she expect you to support her position?”

“Kiley knows how my mind works. She’s extremely bright. I’ve never been sure which has the better mind, Kiley or myself. If she spent less time manipulating and more time in serious work, I might know. Kiley is afraid I might support you.”

Eva asked, “Will you?”

“I haven’t decided,” Roger said mildly. “I have questions still. Besides, she may have got rid of me” He was looking at Joel.

“Sometimes I think if she could press a button she’d get rid of me” Joel said. “Some people like their ex-lovers, like our sassy friend here. She’d keep every last one. She’d live with them all in a big house, right? Then there’s people like Kiley who’d like to have your head off the morning it’s over. She’s done with you and she’d just as soon never see your face. You’re a mistake that reminds her she ain’t perfect.”

Eva cocked her heat at Vida. “I’m going to make coffee”

After a moment, she followed Eva into the kitchen. For the first time they had a chance to hold each other. “I missed you,” she said. She had.