The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (50 page)

Love,

June

Then she went to join the women in the hills.

Glenda Thompson taught psychology at the university; it was the semester break and she thought she might go to the women’s encampment in an open spirit of inquiry. If she liked what they were doing she might chuck Richard, who was only an instructor while she was an assistant professor, and join them. To keep the appearance of objectivity, she would take notes.

Of course she was going to have to figure out what to do with the children while she was gone. No matter how many hours she and Richard taught, the children were her responsibility, and if they were both working in the house, she had to leave her typewriter and shush the children because of the way Richard got when he was disturbed. None of the sitters she called could come; Mrs. Birdsall, their regular sitter, had taken off without notice again, to see her son the freshman in Miami, and she exhausted the list of student sitters without any luck. She thought briefly of leaving them at Richard’s office, but she couldn’t trust him to remember them at the end of the day. She reflected bitterly that men who wanted to work just got up and went to the office, it had never seemed fair.

“Oh hell,” she said finally, and because it was easier, she packed Tommy and Bobby and took them along.

Marva and Patsy and Betts were sitting around in Marva’s room; it was two days before the junior prom and not one of them had a date, or even a nibble, there weren’t even any blind dates to be had.

“I know what let’s do,” Marva said, “let’s go up to Ferguson’s and join the women’s army.”

Betts said, “I didn’t know they had an
army
.”

“Nobody knows what they have up there,” Patsy said.

They left a note so Marva’s mother would be sure and call them in case somebody asked for a date at the last minute and they got invited to the prom after all.

Sally felt a twinge of guilt when she opened the flyer.

JOIN NOW

After she read it she went to the window and looked at the smoke column in open disappointment:
Oh, so that’s all it is
. Yearning after it in the early autumn twilight, she had thought it might represent something more: excitement, escape, but she supposed she should have guessed. There was no great getaway, just a bunch of people who needed more people to help. She knew she probably ought to go up and help out for a while, she could design posters and
ads they could never afford if they went to a regular graphics studio. Still, all those women … She couldn’t bring herself to make the first move.

“I’m not a joiner,” she said aloud, but that wasn’t really it; she had always worked at home, her studio took up one wing of the house and she made her own hours; when she tired of working she could pick at the breakfast dishes or take a nap on the lumpy couch at one end of the studio; when the kids came home she was always there and besides, she didn’t like going places without Zack.

At the camp, Dr. Ora Fessenden was leading an indoctrination program for new recruits. She herself was in the stirrups, lecturing coolly while everybody filed by.

One little girl, lifted up by her mother, began to whisper: “Ashphasphazzzzzz-pzz.”

The mother muttered, “Mumumumumummmmmm … “

Ellen Ferguson, who was holding the light, turned it on the child for a moment. “Well, what does
she
want?”

“She wants to know what a man’s looks like.”

Dr. Ora Fessenden took hold, barking from the stirrups, “With luck, she’ll never have to see.”

“Right on,” the butch sisters chorused, but the others began to look at one another in growing discomfiture, which as the weeks passed would ripen into alarm.

By the time she reached the camp, June was already worried about the casseroles she had left for Vic and the kids. Would the one she had left in the oven go bad at room temperature? Maybe she ought to call Vic and tell him to let it bubble for an extra half hour just in case. Would Vic really keep an eye on Sandy, and if she got worse would he get her to the doctor in time? What about Jimmy’s braces? She almost turned back.

But she was already at the gate to Ellen Ferguson’s farm, and she was surprised to see a hastily constructed guardhouse, with Ellen herself in khakis, standing with a carbine at the ready and she said, “Don’t shoot, Ellen, it’s me.”

“For God’s sake, June, I’m not going to shoot you.” Ellen pushed her glasses up on her forehead so she could look into June’s face. “I never thought you’d have the guts.”

“I guess I needed a change.”

“Isn’t it thrilling?”

“I feel funny without the children.” June was trying to remember when she
had last seen Ellen: over a bridge table? at Weight Watchers? “How did you get into this?”

“I needed something to live for,” Ellen said.

By that time two other women with rifles had impounded her car and then she was in a jeep bouncing up the dirt road to headquarters.

The women behind the table all had on khakis, but they looked not at all alike in them. One was tall and tawny and called herself Sheena; there was a tough, funny-looking one named Rap and the third was Margy, still redolent of the kitchen sink. Sheena made the welcoming speech, and then Rap took her particulars while Margy wrote everything down.

She lied a little about her weight, and was already on the defensive when Rap looked at her over her glasses, saying, “Occupation?”

“Uh, household manager.”

“Oh shit, another housewife. Skills?”

“Well, I used to paint a little, and …”

Rap snorted.

“I’m pretty good at conversational French.”

“Kitchen detail,” Rap said to Margy and Margy checked off a box and flipped over to the next sheet.

“But I’m tired of all that,” June said.

Rap said, “Next.”

Oh it was good sitting around the campfire, swapping stories about the men at work and the men at home; every woman had a horror story, because even the men who claimed to be behind them weren’t really behind them, they were playing lip service to avoid a higher price, and even the best among them would make those terrible verbal slips. It was good to talk to other women who were smarter than their husbands and having to pretend they weren’t. It was good to be able to sprawl in front of the fire without having to think about Richard and what time he would be home. The kids were safely stashed down at the day care compound, along with everybody else’s kids, and for the first time in at least eight years Glenda could relax and think about herself. She listened drowsily to that night’s speeches, three examples of wildly diverging cant, and she would have taken notes except that she was full, digesting a dinner she hadn’t had to cook, and for almost the first time in eight years she wasn’t going to have to go out in the kitchen and face the dishes.

Marva, Patsy and Betts took turns admiring each other in their new uniforms and they sat at the edge of the group, hugging their knees and listening in
growing excitement. Why, they didn’t
have
to worry about what they looked like, what wasn’t going to matter in the new scheme of things. It didn’t
matter
whether or not they had dates. By the time the new order was established, they weren’t even going to
want
dates. Although they would rather die than admit it, they all felt a little pang at this. Goodbye hope chest, goodbye wedding trip to Nassau and picture in the papers in the long white veil. Patsy, who wanted to be a corporation lawyer, thought:
Why can’t I have it
all.

Now that his mother was dead and he didn’t need to sell vacuum cleaners any more, Andy Ellis was thrown back on his own resources. He spent three hours in the shower and three days sleeping, and on the fourth day he emerged to find out his girl had left him for the koto player across the hall. “Well shit,” he said, and wandered into the street.

He had only been asleep for three days but everything was subtly different. The people in the corner market were mostly men, stocking up on
TV
dinners and chunky soups or else buying cooking wines and herbs, kidneys, beef liver and tripe. The usual girl was gone from the checkout counter, the butcher was running the register instead, and when Andy asked about it Freddy the manager said, “She joined up.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Some girl scout camp up at Ferguson’s. The tails revolt.”

Just then a Jeep sped by in the street outside, there was a crash and they both hit the floor, rising to their elbows after the object that had shattered the front window did not explode. It was a rock with a note attached. Andy picked his way through the glass to retrieve it. It read:

WE WILL BURY YOU

“See?” Freddy said, ugly and vindictive. “See? See?”

The local hospital admitted several cases of temporary blindness in men who had been attacked by night with women’s deodorant spray.

All over town the men whose wives remained lay next to them in growing unease. Although they all feigned sleep, they were aware that the stillness was too profound: the women were thinking.

The women trashed a porn movie house. Among them was the wife of the manager, who said, as she threw an open can of film over the balcony, watching it unroll, “I’m doing this for us.”

So it had begun. For the time being, Rap and her cadre, who were in charge of the military operation, intended to satisfy themselves with guerrilla tactics; so far, nobody had been able to link the sniping and materiel bombing with the women on the hill, but they all knew it was only a matter of time before the first police cruiser came up to Ellen Ferguson’s gate with a search warrant, and they were going to have to wage open war.

By this time one of the back pastures had been converted to a rifle range, and even poor June had to spend at least one hour of every day in practice. She began to take an embarrassing pleasure in it, thinking, as she potted away:

Aha, Vic, there’s a nick in your scalp. Maybe you’ll remember what I look like next time you leave the house for the day.

OK
, kids, I am not the maid.

All right, Sally, you and your damn career. You’re still only the maid.

Then, surprisingly,
This is for you, Sheena. How dare you go around looking like that, when I have to look like this.

This is for every rapist on the block.

By the time she fired her last shot her vision was blurred by tears.
June, you are stupid, stupid, you always have been and you know perfectly well nothing is going to make any difference.

Two places away, Glenda saw Richard’s outline in the target. She made a bullseye.
All right, damn you, pick up that toilet brush.

Going back to camp in the truck they all sang “Up Women” and “The Internationale,” and June began to feel a little better. It reminded her of the good old days at camp in middle childhood, when girls and boys played together as if there wasn’t any difference. She longed for that old androgynous body, the time before sexual responsibility. Sitting next to her on the bench, Glenda sang along but her mind was at the university; she didn’t know what she was going to do if she got the Guggenheim because Richard had applied without success for so long that he had given up trying. What should she do, lie about it? It would be in all the papers. She wondered how convincing she would be, saying, Shit, honey, it doesn’t mean anything. She would have to give up the revolution and get back to her work; her book was only half-written, she would have to go back to juggling kids and house and work, it was going to be hard, hard. She decided finally that she would let the Guggenheim Foundation make the decision for her. She would wait until late February and then write and tell Richard where to forward her mail.

Leading the song, Rap looked at her group. Even the softest ones had calluses now, but it was going to be some time before she made real fighters out of them. She wondered why women had all buried the instinct to kill. It was those
damn babies, she decided, grunt, strain, pain,
Baby
. Hand a mother a gun and tell her to kill and she will say,
After I went to all that trouble? Well, if you are going to make sacrifices you are going to have to make sacrifices
, she thought, and led them in a chorus of the battle anthem, watching to see just who did and who didn’t throw herself into the last chorus, which ended: kill, kill,
kill.

Sally was watching the smoke again. Zack said, “I wish you would come away from that window.”

She kept looking for longer than he would have liked her to, and when she turned she said, “Zack, why did you marry me?”

“Couldn’t live without you.”

“No, really.”

“Because I wanted to love you and decorate you and take care of you for the rest of your life.”

“Why me?”

“I thought we could be friends for a long time.”

“I guess I didn’t mean why did you marry
me
, I meant, why did you
marry
me.”

He looked into his palms. “I wanted you to take care of me too.”