Shelter in Place (17 page)

I kept my mouth shut.

“I know you want to stay still. Keep things as they are. But you have to resist it, do you understand me? Don't get stuck, Joe.”

I leaned forward. “Whereas you,” I said, “
you
like to shake things up.”

She drew back as if I'd shoved her.

“Whatever the case. Whatever I've inherited from Dad, I have your instincts as well. There are the things I've inherited from you as well.”

“And what are those, Joey?”

“A temper, for one.”

We both smiled. We both relaxed.

“What else?”

“It's hard to say, exactly.”

“Why don't you try?”

“I will,” I said. “One day, I will.”

She looked at me with focus unusual even for her.

I imagined that she understood. That she saw it in me, this fundamental and frightening element. This thing, which was herself. I imagined I wouldn't have to say it, that it was simply understood. Through that long speechless exchange. But perhaps we were both just waiting for some explanation. Hoping for some understanding that didn't exist. And again, I wonder what difference it would have made.

She tapped her fingernails against the tabletop. They were painted red. Just like her lips.

“You know, Joey, Tess's mother died.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course I know that.”

“Of breast cancer.”

“Yes. Did you think I wouldn't know?”

I felt the anger surging again.

“Of course you know. And you know, too, that you're lucky. To have both of your parents alive. Parents who love you. Who care about your life, about the way you live.”

“Yes,” I said.

She was so strange, speaking in these platitudes. So inconsistent. Foreign and familiar, foreign and familiar.

I see her fingers, the way they wrapped around my hand, the varnished fingernails shining, reflecting four times that terrible fluorescent light.

“We love you, Joey. Your father and I.”

Her face had become flushed. Her eyes were shining as if she might cry.

“We love you very much,” she said. “We're fortunate to have what we do. And fortunate to have Tess. All of us are. This family of ours. And I want for us to give Tess.” She stopped. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her free hand. “I want for us to give her the family she's missing, the family we have. Can we do that, Joey?”

I don't know if I'd ever seen my mother cry out of sadness. Out of joy, yes. On some Christmas mornings, with all of us home, eating breakfast together. Yes, I'd seen her cry then. That way. Or in recounting some good story from the hospital, some life saved, or disaster averted. But not like this. Not with such pain and desperation. And yet beneath it all something was not quite right. I couldn't shake the sense I was being played. That this woman, at that moment wasn't her, wasn't the person I'd known as my mother.

Still I said, “Yes, Mom. I will do everything I can.”

“We all will,” she said. “All of us will.”

“Okay,” I said. “We all will.”

Even if I wasn't sure what she meant, I agreed and squeezed her hand until it was time to go. I held her tightly and kissed her cheek and watched as she was taken away, this time by a guard I didn't recognize, a heavyset woman with red hair who didn't look at me once as she walked my mother from the room.

E
merson College was named not for the Transcendentalist, but for and by Henry Emerson, a ruthless Presbyterian missionary responsible for delivering a measles epidemic to the White Pine Valley, which effectively eradicated the indigenous Chinook. Half the adult population died, and not a single child survived. The college, however, does. A former seminary, it is now a much expanded but still small campus of brick buildings and creeping ivy. At the entrance there are two large plaques, one in memory of Henry Emerson, the other of his wife, Lucy. There's a charming clock tower, and green lawns and sandy paths, which meander over the barrier dunes down to the ocean. In a struggling working-class town populated by farmers, fishermen, and prison guards, it is an oasis of liberalism and academic luxury twelve miles south of White Pine.

Between two pillars a long and well-paved road slopes down a gentle hill. One way in, one way out. It's something like The Pine—the drive, the suspense and drama of the long approach, the parking lot, the administrative buildings, the insular world.

It was there the women without patience were encamped. And so there we went to meet them. Even if it wasn't exactly clear to either of us why. We traveled on orders, emissaries of the cause. Whatever that was, whatever it would become, here we were crossing the great quad, passing kids not much younger than ourselves, who seemed to us so much like children. A cold day. Fog and sun. Everything just as you imagine it. Backpacks and hustling students. Leisure and panic. Frisbees. The theater of permanence and safety. Tess and I searching for some building. Asking directions from an out-of-breath boy, hacky sack in hand.

Somehow I'd expected one of those raked lecture halls, but it was instead an upper level seminar room. Pine chairs around a pine table. The door was open and when we arrived they all hushed. There was a lot of ceremony. Showing us where we should sit. Presenting us with Styrofoam cups of coffee. Thanking us for being there. They had us at one end, and they were all gathered at the other making jokes about which was the foot, and which was the head. Then an uncomfortable silence as Tess and I sipped our coffee, while the women looked on as if we'd arrived by helicopter from the Pentagon. The only black person in the room, the only person who wasn't white, cleared her throat and introduced herself. Marcy Harper. The only one I remember.

Marcy Harper who said to Tess, “We weren't expecting a man. Ms. March didn't say anything about a man in her letter.”

Tess nodded and smiled and both gestures were unfamiliar. The pace of the nod, the restraint of her smile. Now she was tolerant and wise. She'd changed. Without warning me, she had shifted just the way a great actor does. Transformation instantaneous and absolute.

I could never do it. Not on purpose. Not like that. I've never had the control. My transformations have so little to do with will. My changes originate elsewhere.

This was something she had been preparing for. All those weeks and here was a fleck of her secret life. This is what she saw out the windows at night. On the ceiling when she went vacant after sex. This is what she saw: herself in this room, her spine a little straighter, her hands interlaced, resting on the table.

“I understand,” she said turning and smiling at me, her colleague. “This is Joseph March. Anne-Marie March's son.”

There was a shift then. Those women turning their attention to me with a new focus, relaxing, their expressions altered. No longer cold, they looked on in anticipation. My turn to speak.

“
Mrs.
March,” I said.

They squinted. They soured.

“She's married to my father.”

And then someone said, “
Ms
.”

This person, who once appeared so sharply defined, exists now only as part of that blurry mass of memory, like the waitresses at The Owl, like those friends on the beach in Big Sur, those friends I loved so much, who I could never leave, who I would never lose. Like so many people who've been taken by death, or by distance, or by time. Even those you're not ever meant to forget, those you're expected to keep forever clear and definite, even they blur.

She said, “
Ms
. We use the neutral
Ms
. Regardless of marital status.”

And another person said, or something like it, “We choose not to be defined by our partners.”

“Well—” I said quietly.

Quietly, though what I wanted was to chuck my chair through a window.

“Anne-Marie March is my mother. I am her son. I am here because she asked me to be.”

“And we are pleased to be here,” Tess said in her new politician's voice.

“We are all very happy to have you,” Marcy Harper said, smiling at me.

All of us just children.

There was a small scar. That's when I first noticed it. Right then when she smiled. A small scar running up and around the outside of her eye, a soft C turned inward.

“We're certainly not here to lecture you,” she said glancing about the room.

The others chastened.

Her eyes were deadly. She was like Tess. She was like my mother. An intelligence and confidence to kill.

I smiled at her.

Someone asked politely, with caution, “Why does she want you to meet with us? Why are you here?”

Tess, who had been sitting quietly, looked up. “We are here because Ms. March cannot be. Because you wrote to her. Because she asked us to see what can be done. What this small group might do. We came to listen.”

Marcy leaned back in her chair, while the rest of them began to speak.

You can imagine, no? Maybe you've been in those undergraduate classrooms with the freshly politicized. You've known the thrill of having outrage articulated. The thrill of finding others smarter, and angrier, than you are. Of believing, however briefly, that you might change
things
. That you might—and here phrases like corpses—
make a difference, change the world
. With knowledge, with awareness, with letter-writing, with discussion, with art, with marching, and placards, and editorials, and leaflets. With pure fury. You remember the way that felt. Whatever the injustice. The energy you had to fight it, the ways you would take back the night. What you'd do before you had to work, before you had to pay your rent, chip away at your debt, take care of other people, before the exhaustion came, and all that lovely fury turned bitter and cold.

You remember the way that new language sounded, the repeated phrases, how you adopted them, and briefly believed they were your own. The novelty of that rage.

And later how you ran up against its limits.

They said, We are tired of the way women are treated. We are angry. We want to effect change. We want to act. They said, culture of violence and objectifying and sexualizing and demeaning. The rape. The abuse. They said, traditions, hypocrisy, double standards. Systemic, they said, and patriarchy. We must exit the patriarchy.

They said,
We admire your mother. Because your mother fought back. Because your mother refused to walk away. Because she did what we wish we had the courage to do. We will no longer grant permission. We too will fight back
, they said.

They talked until they ran out of language.

Marcy spoke then. “I think the question finally is this: What are we willing to do about it?”

She met my eyes.

“Yes,” Tess said. “That's right. That's certainly the question.”

“When you say you want to fight back, does that mean you believe in what my mother has done? Do you believe in fighting with hammers?” I asked.

I carried the gravity of my mother's violence. It was unearned.

And then, “Your mother acted in self-defense.”

“No, she was defending someone else,” I said.

“And in that case, she's justified. Self-defense or the defense of someone else,” someone said.

“Why then is she in prison?”

“The patriarchy,” they said.

“No,” I said. “No, it's the seven blows. She wouldn't be there if it had been one, or even two. But there were seven. So the question is whether or not you believe in what she did. Do you believe Dustin Strauss deserved to die for his sins?”

I don't know where all that talking had come from. Or the affect, the courtroom register. The new momentum, the enthusiasm for my vague position. Tess made some move to speak. A breath or a cough. I knew she'd imagined the meeting otherwise, that she was to be the leader, but I went on anyway.

“My question is real,” I said. “Not rhetorical. I wonder what you think. Does violence call for violence? Does a man deserve to die for beating a woman?”

“No,” someone said, of course not. And someone else, “No one deserves to die. No.”

“And yet, you have made my mother your hero.”

“It wasn't intentional. She lost control. She couldn't take it any longer. It was the last straw. She snapped. It could have been any of us. Any of us could snap. There is always a limit.”

“Yes,” I said. “It could have been any of us.”

Marcy spoke again. “Could it have been you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But you are not as angry as we are, Mr. March.”

“No?”

“No. That would be impossible.”

“Why is that?”

“Because you're not a woman,” she said. “And no matter whose son you are, you can't know the anger, because you can't know the fear.”

“I don't claim to.”

“And yet you're here. Another man at the front of another room. Self-satisfied and superior. Another man illuminating the world for us silly girls.”

And even as arrogant and as stupid as I was in those days, I knew enough to keep my mouth shut. Because she was right. Because I was precisely what she described.

“Another man running the room, while a woman sits at his side with her mouth shut.” Marcy flashed her eyes at Tess, a look that contained no sympathy, and then she turned back to me. “You are here as a guest, Mr. March. You can spare us the lectures.”

“Yes,” I said. “Okay.”

And because I was humiliated, because I was a graceless fool, I stood up and left the room without apologizing. I walked out onto that wide lawn and bought a cup of coffee from a cart and sat with it on a bench.

My shame made me angry.

Tess would be furious.

And yet I was surprised to find that I hadn't been deadened by the experience. The wounds were superficial. In the fresh air, my adrenaline diluting, I felt oddly energized, thrilled by what had happened, surprised by a sense of pleasure.