Read Online Vida by Marge Piercy - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Marge Piercy
Tags: General Fiction
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us.”
He chuckled. “You could do some real interesting things that way”“
“We did. We even wrote comedy routines on local politicians.”
He dropped her on South Street in Oyster Bay. Over the years she had hung around every town within a radius of twenty miles of East Norwich, where Natalie lived, except, of course, East Norwich itself. Thus at 7:30 she was wandering around with time to kill until 10 A .M., when the call with Natalie was set up. Early morning was an awkward time. She marched along the streets of old clapboard houses behind front-yard fences overrun with the last roses of fall. Big cavernous trees whose leaves were streaked red and yellow loomed over her. This was how the landscape was supposed to be, bare to the bone in winter and brimming lush in summer, not the reclaimed desert of L.A. with its dry rivers. Finally she headed into the business district and settled in a laundromat. She could do wash from her pack and read a paper looking for the latest on Kevin.
She found it: a recap of his capture and a big feature on all of them, with that old picture of her taken in 1970 with a smirk and her eyes wide at the camera that embarrassed her, as if she were coming on forever to all and sundry. Ugh. Photos of Kevin, Jimmy and her. No photo of Lohania. No picture of Randy, whose name was not even mentioned.
No, there Randy was, not as a member of the Little Red Wagon, not as the agent who had entrapped them, but as an expert on fugitives: Randolph Gibney, on the staff of the Kings County D.A. She had heard he had finished law school. Did it make life hard for Lohania when something on them suddenly blew up in the media? Lohania Hernández y Isnaga, whom the paper called simply Lohania Hernandez, might have changed her name, might even be married. She had forgotten to ask Leigh for news of her, if he had any. Lohania had been the only one of the five members of the Little Red Wagon who had ended up serving time—so far. The usual paragraph about Jimmy’s death, the shoot-out and explosion. But nothing on what was happening to Kevin, nothing at all. It made her nervous. He could go up for thirty years, she thought, clenching her hands in her lap, fighting the bite of nausea. Whenever she had to think of prison, she told herself she could do it if she had to. People did. Her people did. But always she felt as if she were suffocating and gasped for breath.
Oh, she knew Kevin well, very well, as you know a man you were with for years. Even after they had stopped loving each other or whatever it was, even after they had begun fighting incessantly, they had had to deal with each other intimately. She was not even sure when they had really stopped sleeping together. Like pulling a burr out of a dog’s coat, cutting a shiny burr from Mopsy’s silky fur when Leigh and Vida had taken her to the country for a day: except that her disentangling from Kevin had been deeper, more painful. Cutting a barbed arrow from the thigh muscles. Something that ate deep and could not be uprooted from the flesh without ripping open a deep bloody wound.
They had certainly been close. At the height of their political unity they had been a single person. They had spoken the same words, screamed the same slogans; on tapes she had heard they even sounded strangely alike, speaking the harsh rhetoric of those times with the same jagged passion, the same desperate anger. Yet she did not know him intimately as she knew Leigh. They had never had a domestic life. They had faced death together, but they could not live side by side; they were not suited.
She knew what Leigh was capable of, she thought, putting down the paper and surveying the laundromat: what generosity or meanness, what he would do and what he could not do; she could have small surprises but not large ones. She had not the same conviction of having mapped Kevin. His bottomless anger made him unknowable. She could not be intimate with a volcano, or finally, with Kevin.
He chuckled. “You could do some real interesting things that way”“
“We did. We even wrote comedy routines on local politicians.”
He dropped her on South Street in Oyster Bay. Over the years she had hung around every town within a radius of twenty miles of East Norwich, where Natalie lived, except, of course, East Norwich itself. Thus at 7:30 she was wandering around with time to kill until 10 A .M., when the call with Natalie was set up. Early morning was an awkward time. She marched along the streets of old clapboard houses behind front-yard fences overrun with the last roses of fall. Big cavernous trees whose leaves were streaked red and yellow loomed over her. This was how the landscape was supposed to be, bare to the bone in winter and brimming lush in summer, not the reclaimed desert of L.A. with its dry rivers. Finally she headed into the business district and settled in a laundromat. She could do wash from her pack and read a paper looking for the latest on Kevin.
She found it: a recap of his capture and a big feature on all of them, with that old picture of her taken in 1970 with a smirk and her eyes wide at the camera that embarrassed her, as if she were coming on forever to all and sundry. Ugh. Photos of Kevin, Jimmy and her. No photo of Lohania. No picture of Randy, whose name was not even mentioned.
No, there Randy was, not as a member of the Little Red Wagon, not as the agent who had entrapped them, but as an expert on fugitives: Randolph Gibney, on the staff of the Kings County D.A. She had heard he had finished law school. Did it make life hard for Lohania when something on them suddenly blew up in the media? Lohania Hernández y Isnaga, whom the paper called simply Lohania Hernandez, might have changed her name, might even be married. She had forgotten to ask Leigh for news of her, if he had any. Lohania had been the only one of the five members of the Little Red Wagon who had ended up serving time—so far. The usual paragraph about Jimmy’s death, the shoot-out and explosion. But nothing on what was happening to Kevin, nothing at all. It made her nervous. He could go up for thirty years, she thought, clenching her hands in her lap, fighting the bite of nausea. Whenever she had to think of prison, she told herself she could do it if she had to. People did. Her people did. But always she felt as if she were suffocating and gasped for breath.
Oh, she knew Kevin well, very well, as you know a man you were with for years. Even after they had stopped loving each other or whatever it was, even after they had begun fighting incessantly, they had had to deal with each other intimately. She was not even sure when they had really stopped sleeping together. Like pulling a burr out of a dog’s coat, cutting a shiny burr from Mopsy’s silky fur when Leigh and Vida had taken her to the country for a day: except that her disentangling from Kevin had been deeper, more painful. Cutting a barbed arrow from the thigh muscles. Something that ate deep and could not be uprooted from the flesh without ripping open a deep bloody wound.
They had certainly been close. At the height of their political unity they had been a single person. They had spoken the same words, screamed the same slogans; on tapes she had heard they even sounded strangely alike, speaking the harsh rhetoric of those times with the same jagged passion, the same desperate anger. Yet she did not know him intimately as she knew Leigh. They had never had a domestic life. They had faced death together, but they could not live side by side; they were not suited.
She knew what Leigh was capable of, she thought, putting down the paper and surveying the laundromat: what generosity or meanness, what he would do and what he could not do; she could have small surprises but not large ones. She had not the same conviction of having mapped Kevin. His bottomless anger made him unknowable. She could not be intimate with a volcano, or finally, with Kevin.
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