The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (51 page)

“Is that all?”

He could see she was serious and because she was not going to let go he thought for a minute and said at last, “Nobody wants to die alone.”

Down the street, June Goodall’s husband, Vic, had called every hospital in the county without results. The police had no reports of middle-aged housewives losing their memory in Sears or getting raped, robbed or poleaxed anywhere within the city limits. The police sergeant said, “Mr. Goodall, we’ve got more serious things on our minds. These bombings, for one thing, and the leaflets and the ripoffs. Do you know that women have been walking out of supermarkets with full shopping carts without paying a cent?” There seemed to be a thousand cases like June’s, and if the department ever got a minute for them it would have to be first come first served.

So Vic languished in his darkening house. He had managed to get the kids off to school by himself the past couple of days. He gave them money for hot lunches but they were running out of clean clothes and he could not bring himself to sort through those disgusting smelly things in the clothes hamper to run a load of wash. They had run through June’s casseroles and they were going to have to start eating out; they would probably go to the Big Beef Plaza tonight, and have pizza tomorrow and chicken the next night and Chinese the
next, and if June wasn’t back by that time he didn’t know what he was going to do because he was at his wits’ end. The dishes were piling up in the kitchen and he couldn’t understand why everything looked so grimy; he couldn’t quite figure out why, but the toilet had begun to smell. One of these days he was going to have to try and get his mother over to clean things up a little. It was annoying, not having any clean underwear. He wished June would come back.

For the fifth straight day, Richard Thompson, Glenda’s husband, opened
The French Chef
to a new recipe and prepared himself an exquisite dinner. Once it was finished he relaxed in the blissful silence. Now that Glenda was gone he was able to keep things the way he liked them; he didn’t break his neck on Matchbox racers every time he went to put a little Vivaldi on the record player. It was refreshing not to have to meet Glenda’s eyes, where, to his growing dissatisfaction, he perpetually measured himself. Without her demands, without the kids around to distract him, he would be able to finish his monograph on Lyly’s
Euphues
. He might even begin to write his book. Setting aside Glenda’s half-finished manuscript with a certain satisfaction, he cleared a space for himself at the desk and tried to begin.

Castrated
, he thought half an hour later.
Her and her damned career, she has castrated me.

He went to the phone and began calling names on his secret list. For some reason most of them weren’t home, but on the fifth call he came up with Jennifer, the biology major who wanted to write poetry, and within minutes the two of them were reaffirming his masculinity on the living room rug, and if a few pages of Glenda’s half-finished manuscript got mislaid in the tussle, who was there to protest? If she was going to be off there, farting around in the woods with all those women, she never would get it finished.

In the hills, the number of women had swelled, and it was apparent to Sheena, Ellen and Rap that it was time to stop hit-and-run terrorism and operate on a larger scale. They would mount a final recruiting campaign. Once that was completed, they would be ready to take their first objective. Sheena had decided the Sunnydell Shopping Center would be their base for a sweep of the entire country. They were fairly sure retaliation would be slow, and to impede it further, they had prepared an advertising campaign built on the slogan:
YOU WOULDN’T SHOOT YOUR MOTHER, WOULD YOU
? As soon as they could they would co-opt some television equipment and make their first nationwide telecast from Sunnydell. Volunteers would flock in from fifty states and in time the country would be theirs.

There was some difference of opinion as to what they were going to do with it. Rap was advocating a scorched-earth policy; the women would rise like phoenixes from the ashes and build a new nation from the rubble, more or less alone. Sheena raised the idea of an auxiliary made up of male sympathizers. The women would rule, but with men at hand. Margy secretly felt that both Rap and Sheena were too militant; she didn’t want things to be completely different, only a little better. Ellen Ferguson wanted to annex all the land surrounding her place. She envisioned it as the capitol city of the new world. The butch sisters wanted special legislation that would outlaw contact, social or sexual, with men, with, perhaps, special provisions for social meetings with their gay brethren. Certain of the straight sisters were made uncomfortable by their association with the butch sisters and wished there were some way the battle could progress without them. At least half of these women wanted their men back, once victory was assured, and the other half were looking into ways of perpetuating the race by means of parthenogenesis, or, at worst, sperm banks and
AI
techniques. One highly vocal splinter group wanted mandatory sterilization for everybody, and certain extremists were demanding transsexual operations. Because nobody could agree, the women decided for the time being to skip over the issues and concentrate on the war effort itself.

By this time word had spread and the volunteers were coming in, so it was easy to ignore issues because logistics were more pressing. It was still warm enough for the extras to bunk in the fields, but winter was coming on and the women were going to have to manage food, shelters, and uniforms for an unpredictable number. There had been a temporary windfall when Rap’s bunch hijacked a couple of semis filled with frozen dinners and surplus clothes, but Rap and Sheena and the others could sense the hounds of hunger and need not far away and so they worked feverishly to prepare for the invasion. Unless they could take the town by the end of the month, they were lost.

“We won’t have to hurt our
fathers
, will we?” Although she was now an expert marksman and had been placed in charge of a platoon, Patsy was still not at ease with the cause.

Rap avoided her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I just couldn’t do that to anybody I
loved
,” Patsy said. She reassembled her rifle, driving the bolt into place with a click.

“Don’t you worry about it,” Rap said. “All you have to worry about is looking good when you lead that recruiting detail.”

“Okay.” Patsy tossed her hair. She knew how she and her platoon looked, charging into the wind; she could feel the whole wild group around her, on the
run with their heads high and their bright hair streaming.
I wish the boys at school could see
, she thought, and turned away hastily before Rap could guess what she was thinking.

I wonder if any woman academic can be happy
. Glenda was on latrine detail and this always made her reflective.
Maybe if they marry garage mechanics
. In the old days there had been academic types: single, tweedy, sturdy in orthopedic shoes, but somewhere along the way these types had been supplanted by married women of every conceivable type, who pressed forward in wildly varied disciplines, having in common only the singular harried look which marked them all. The rubric was more or less set: if you were good, you always had to worry about whether you were shortchanging your family; if you weren’t as good as she was, you would always have to wonder whether it was because of all the other duties: babies, meals, the house; if despite everything you turned out to be better than he was, then you had to decide whether to try and minimize it, or prepare yourself for the wise looks on the one side, on the other, his look of uncomprehending reproach. If you
were
better than he was, then why should you be wasting your time with
him?
She felt light years removed from the time when girls used to be advised to let
him
win the tennis match; everybody played to win now, but she had the uncomfortable feeling that there might never be any real victories. Whether or not you won there were too many impediments; if he had a job and you didn’t, then tough; if you both had jobs but he didn’t get tenure, then you had to quit and move with him to a new place. She poured Lysol into the last toilet and turned her back on it, thinking:
Maybe that’s why those Hollywood marriages are always breaking up.

Sally finished putting the children to bed and came back into the living room, where Zack was waiting for her on the couch. By this time she had heard the women’s broadcasts, she was well aware of what was going on at Ellen Ferguson’s place and knew as well that this was where June was, and June was so inept, so soft and incapable that she really ought to be up there helping June, helping
them;
it was a job that ought to be done, on what scale she could not be sure, but the fire was warm and Zack was waiting; he and the children, her career, were all more important than that abstraction in the hills; she had negotiated her own peace—let them take care of theirs. Settling in next to Zack, she thought:
I don’t love my little pink dish mop. I don’t, but everybody has to shovel
some
shit
. Then:
God help the sailors and poor fishermen who have to be abroad on a night like this.

June had requisitioned a Jeep and was on her way into town to knock over the corner market, because food was already in short supply. She had on the housedress she had worn when she enlisted, and she would carry somebody’s old pink coat over her arm to hide the pistol and the grenade she would use to hold her hostages at bay while the grocery boys filled up the Jeep. She had meant to go directly to her own corner market, thinking, among other things, that the manager might recognize her and tell Vic, after which, of course, he would track her back to the camp and force her to come home to him and the children. Somehow or other she went right by the market and ended up at the corner of her street.

She knew she was making a mistake but she parked and began to prowl the neighborhood. The curtains in Sally’s window were drawn but the light behind them gave out a rosy glow, which called up in her longings that she could not have identified; they had very little to do with her own home, or her life with Vic; they dated, rather, from her childhood, when she had imagined marriage, had prepared herself for it with an amorphous but unshakeable idea of what it would be like.

Vic had forgotten to put out the garbage; overflowing cans crowded the back porch and one of them was overturned. Walking on self-conscious cat feet, June made her way up on the porch and peered into the kitchen: just as she had suspected, a mess. A portion of her was tempted to go in and do a swift, secret cleaning—
the phantom housewife strikes
—but the risk of being discovered was too great. Well, let him clean up his own damn messes from now on. She tiptoed back down the steps and went around the house, crunching through bushes to look into the living room. She had hoped to get a glimpse of the children, but they were already in bed. She thought about waking Juney with pebbles on her window, whispering: Don’t worry, mother’s all right, but she wasn’t strong enough; if she saw the children she would never be able to walk away and return to camp. She assuaged herself by thinking she would come back for Juney and Victor Junior just as soon as victory was assured. The living room had an abandoned look, with dust visible and papers strewn, a chair overturned and Vic himself asleep on the couch, just another neglected object in this neglected house. Surprised at how little she felt, she shrugged and turned away. On her way back to the Jeep she did stop to right the garbage can.

The holdup went off all right; she could hear distant sirens building behind her, but so far as she knew, she wasn’t followed.

The worst thing turned out to be finding Rap, Sheena, and Ellen Ferguson gathered around the stove in the main cabin; they didn’t hear her come in.

“ … so damn fat and soft,” Rap was saying.

Sheena said, “You have to take your soldiers where you can find them.”

Ellen said, “An army travels on its stomach.”

“As soon as it’s over we dump the housewives,” Rap said. “Every single one.”

June cleared her throat. “I’ve brought the food.”

“Politics may make strange bedfellows,” Glenda said, “but this is ridiculous.”

“Have it your way,” she said huffily—whoever she was—and left the way she had come in.

Patsy was in charge of the recruiting platoon, which visited the high school, and she thought the principal was really impressed when he saw that it was her. Her girls bound and gagged the faculty and held the boys at bay with M-1s while she made her pitch. She was successful but drained when she finished, pale and exhausted, and while her girls were processing the recruits (all but one percent of the girl students, as it turned out) and waiting for the bus to take them all to camp, Patsy put Marva in charge and simply drifted away, surprised to find herself in front of the sweetie ship two blocks from school. The place was empty except for Andy Ellis, who had just begun work as a counter boy.

He brought her a double dip milkshake and lingered.

She tried to wave him away with her rifle. “We don’t have to pay.”

“That isn’t it.” He yearned, drawn to her.

She couldn’t help seeing how beautiful he was. “Bug off.”

Andy said, “Beautiful.”

She lifted her head, aglow. “Really?”