Kinflicks (45 page)

Mother showed us to our rooms. ‘It's so nice to meet you, Edna. Ginny has written so many interesting things about you.'

‘Unh,' Eddie grunted.

Mother had placed me in my old room, and Eddie across the hall in Jim's old room. Eddie had briefed me on how to handle this situation in a morally upright fashion.

‘Mother,' I announced, blushing scarlet, “Eddie and I will be sleeping in my room.' There! I had done it! I had come out of the closet, and before my own mother!

Mother said gaily, ‘Fine, dear. Fine. You girls have a slumber party if you want to.'

I was content to let the topic drop, but Eddie kicked me with her Goliath sandal. ‘Ah, Mother, Eddie and I will be — ah — sleeping together in my bed.'

‘Yes, of course,' Mother said brightly. ‘That's fine, dear. Whatever suits you girls is fine with me.'

Eddie shrugged.

The next day Eddie and I made a couple of signs; they read ‘Workers Unite! All Power to the People!' and ‘Tennessee Westwood Corp.: Fascist Flunkies to the Imperialist Pigs!' We drove in the Major's Jeep across the river to the plant and stationed ourselves in front of the chain-link fence and began to march back and forth with the signs.

A security guard came out, studied the signs, and said, ‘I'm afraid you girls had better move along.'

Eddie bristled at being called a ‘girl.'

‘It's all right, I'm Major Babcock's daughter.'

‘Yeah. Sure you are,' he said.

I flashed a Shell credit card at him like an FBI plainclothesman and he said uncertainly, ‘Oh. Okay, Miss Babcock. Sorry.'

Just then the noon whistle blasted. We dropped our signs to cover our ears, then picked them up just as the night shift streamed out the gates, heading for the parking lots. Several workers in their green twill work clothes studied the signs; most didn't notice them. I recognized faces here and there, people I'd been in high school with, people I just knew from a lifetime in the same town together.

Two young men were studying Eddie's sign. We sauntered over to them.

‘F — A — S -,' one was saying. They blushed when we stopped in front of them and glanced around nervously to see if anyone was noticing or caring that they were about to be sucked into conversation with two weird young women in Power to the People T-shirts who bore incomprehensible placards.

‘Fascist,' Eddie said for them.

‘Fascist,' one repeated with a dopey grin. ‘Whas that mean, anyhow?'

Eddie looked at him in disbelief. ‘Fascist? Ah — well, it means, like Hitler.'

‘Shoot!' one said, spitting on the sidewalk.

‘How do you feel about what you're forced to make here?' Eddie asked diplomatically, as though the two men were dwarfs out of
Das Rheingold.
‘Explosives for Vietnam.'

‘Oh, is that what they're for?'

‘Yeh, dummy,' the other said, laughing and poking him in the side.

‘Shoot, I don't care,' the first one said. ‘I jes work here, thas all. They pay me an' I do like they says.'

‘Well,
I
care,' the second one said.

Eddie brightened. ‘Yes?'

‘I got me a brother fightin' over there, an' I aim to keep his guns loaded, I can tell you that!'

‘Oh,' said Eddie. ‘Well, do you know anyone who
doesn't
like making stuff for Vietnam?'

The two looked at each other questioningly. ‘If they is any such a one,' the second one said,
‘I'd
better not hear about him.'

We slunk off in search of more cooperative prey. We cornered a skinny, meek-looking middle-aged man. He was standing by the chain fence, which had several strands of barbed wire across the top. When he saw us bearing down upon him, he tried to sidle away, but we had him surrounded.

‘Look,' he whispered nervously, holding up his hands to fend us off, ‘I don't want no trouble. I got me five kids.'

With relief I spotted Harry from Building Maintenance, whom I hadn't seen since the summer I worked in the factory. He recognized me as well, in spite of my current disguise as savior of The People, and waved wildly. ‘Lord, I guess it's been two years since I seed you! I like to not knowed you.' He nodded at my wheat jeans and T-shirt and the braid down the middle of my back, Red Chinese-like.

‘Harry, tell me the truth now,' I said. ‘How do you feel about making bombs for the war?'

He sighed wearily. ‘Well, honey, how I feel is that hit beats the hell out of them coal pits up at Sow Gap.'

‘But
Harry!'

‘But I ain't
makin' ‘
em, honey! I'm jes maintenance. Anyhow, if your daddy says hit's right, then hit's right by me, too.'

‘Speak
of the devil,' Eddie drawled.

The Major in his pinstriped suit came marching toward us at an incredible clip. I automatically flinched.

‘What
are
you girls
doing?'

I blushed and shrugged sheepishly.

‘Virginia! If you and your friend don't dispose of those signs and get out of here immediately…I'll cut off your dividend checks!'

‘You
can't
! They're in
my
name now!'

‘I can do whatever I please. You seem to forget that I run this place.'

‘Then you can make something else besides bombs?' I asked hopefully, not knowing that I had punched his button.

‘What I am doing here
happens
to be essential to national security, my dear child. A strong offense is the best defense. I know that
some
people' — he glanced contemptuously at Eddie -'would like to bring this nation to its knees and hand the keys to its portals over to the Communists, but I am not one of them.'

I decided that this was not the time to point out that he was mixing his metaphors.

‘I fought too long and too hard against Hider not to have learned that you can't allow tyranny of any political stripe to get a toe hold. Besides, what's manufactured in this plant isn't my decision. Those decisions are made at headquarters in Boston. So why don't you two hop the next plane back to where you came from with your idiot signs and your half-baked political opinions?'

‘Bastard!' Eddie hissed as we slunk over to the Jeep. ‘Christ, what a bastard!'

Back in Boston, Eddie and I concluded that the best thing for my political development would be to sever all ties with my reactionary family. They were obviously the source of all my neuroses and bourgeois political attitudes. It was best never to get in touch with them again, thereby liberating myself with one deft hack from the net of capitalist hang-ups they had cast over me.

‘You can't allow your roots to become ruts,' Eddie announced. ‘Or routs.'

I got a Standard & Poor's sheet on Westwood Chemical Corporation and calculated the percentage of profits stemming from the Hullsport plant. Then I deducted that amount from our spending money as the quarterly dividend checks wandered in, and sent donations to free schools and people's clinics and minority liberation groups throughout Boston. Let admirable ends justify nefarious means, we decided. Eddie took further comfort in the fact that we were boycotting one aspect of the corrupt death-dealing male power structure that was perpetrating all the misery in the world by seeking our sexual fulfillment elsewhere.

One April evening Eddie came galloping up the stairs. She stood in the doorway panting, distress spread over her expressive face.

‘What's wrong?' I asked nervously from the desk where I sat writing a check to a struggling head shop.

“The coffee house is being torn down to build a bank!' She lowered herself gingerly onto the sagging couch.

‘You're kidding? That's awful!'

‘But I'm afraid there's more.'

‘What?'

‘This dump we call home has been condemned. We have to get out by next month.'

‘What?
Where are we supposed to go?'

We sat staring at each other, perplexed. Our cozy world was tumbling down.

When the initial shock had worn off, we huddled over my checkbook and the Apartments for Rent section of the
Globe.
According to our calculations, either we would have to cut off our blood money donations to the Day-Glo poster shops and related enterprises and spend it for rent, or one of us would have to find a job.

We both looked around halfheartedly for work for a couple of weeks. Singers of protest songs weren't in demand by that time, acid rock having taken over. And without a college degree, I could find only a waitress job at Waldorf's Cafeteria in Harvard Square, where I had eaten Thanksgiving dinner my freshman year. Eddie was trying to persuade me that the job was a worthy one, would expose me to contact with The People, would perhaps correct some of the unfortunate petit bourgeois prejudices I'd inherited from my impossible parents, would inestimably enhance my political education. I resisted because I felt incapable any longer of keeping to a schedule. And what had Eddie been teaching me if not to honor my feelings?

With two weeks to go before we would be evicted, we decided to ignore this impasse and visit two friends of Eddie's in Vermont. They had been seniors at Worthley when she was a sophomore and had been editors on the paper when Eddie had been a reporter. Eddie credited them with having ‘politicized' her. She bore them the same sentimental affection that I did Clem Cloyd for having deflowered me. Both women, having been social workers in Newark, were now living with some other people on a farm near a town called Stark's Bog.

Mona was tall and emaciated, with wide feverish eyes that she shielded behind purple-tinted goggle lenses that made her eye sockets look bruised. She wore her black hair in a Prince Valiant cut with long bangs. She had a way of hunching her back and tucking in her chin and gazing through her purple lenses that made her look a little like a vulture.

Atheliah was also tall, but was broad and muscled as well, with frizzy red hair that shot out like solar flares during an eclipse. She was jovial, laughing and smiling almost constantly in a way that narrowed her eyes to slits. They both embraced Eddie — Mona gravely and Atheliah boisterously. They lived with five men and one other woman in a crumbling white farm house which was attached by a sagging ell to a huge barn. In the barn, when our tour took us there, along with several decades' worth of trampled manure were a couple of Holsteins and some scavenging hens.

The inside of the house looked like Coney Island the day after the Fourth of July. Clothes and bedding and books and papers and dishes and sleeping bodies were strewn everywhere. The damp interior walls were coated with a bright green mold.

It was planting season, and Eddie and I spent most of our first afternoon helping the brothers and sisters plant the seeds in carefree lines across the freshly tilled garden soil. The sun was hot, and clouds of moisture steamed up from the soggy, thawing fields. Sluggish flies buzzed languidly in the grass; and in the distance, treed foothills tinged with the chartreuse of new leaves rose up in layer upon layer.

Dinner was a murky soup, filled with dark sodden clumps that looked like leaves from the bottom of a compost pile and that tasted like decomposing seaweed, and whole grain bread which you needed diamond-tipped teeth to chew. Afterward seven of us lay around on the living room debris passing joints as two mangy barn cats climbed up on the dining table and licked our dishes clean for us.

‘What's
happened
to you?' Eddie demanded of Mona and Atheliah. “You two used to be the most socially concerned people I knew. I modeled myself after you. After you left Worthley, I tried to run the paper the same way you had. Articles about world affairs and stuff and not just coming-out-party portraits. And fasts for Roxbury busing and stuff. I don't get this earth trip you're on.'

‘I got tired,' Mona said languidly, holding the last quarter inch of the most recent joint between her thumb and index fingernails and sucking the smoke into her lungs through clenched teeth with a hiss. Holding her breath until her face turned a distressing purple, she squashed the glowing tip on her boot sole and leaned back and closed her alarming dark dilated eyes.

‘So it's a cop-out, then? A sort of rural rest home for fucked-over radicals?' Eddie asked.

‘No, not at all,' Atheliah corrected her, in a brisk voice like Julia Child's on ‘The French Chef just after she's dropped a roast on the floor and tossed it back on the platter. ‘We're trying to live our theories. Do you know who paid my salary when I was organizing in Newark? HEW, that's who! You can't work to overthrow a system, and live off it at the same time. When the host dies, so do its parasites. First earn an honest living side by side with The People. Then talk to me about death-dealing societies and inequity and injustice! Anything else is schizy.'

Mona nodded in agreement, letting out her smoke in a great gush of breathlessness. She wove into the kitchen and fumbled around in the freezer and returned with a plastic container of frozen Magic Mushrooms. ‘“Teonanacd,” the Aztecs called them,' Mona muttered, litany-like, as she passed them. ‘“God's flesh,” the key to communion with the Deity.'

Hesitantly I took one of the icy chunks and pondered the topic of eating God, turning the mushroom in my fingers and staring at it with distaste.

‘What's the matter? Don't you do drugs?' Mona asked incredulously, poised to cross me off their Christmas card list.

‘Of course she does,' Eddie assured them.

My upbringing won out over my eagerness to please Eddie: I didn't trust pushers. I'd read that Magic Mushrooms were often regular mushrooms dipped in hog tranquilizer. If I ate this thing, I would die a horrible death on the floor of this remote Vermont farmhouse. Feigning a bite, I held it down by my side and offered it to the cats, who sniffed it and then wanted nothing to do with it either.