The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (52 page)

“No kidding. Give me a minute. I’m going to fall in love with you.”

“You can’t,” she said, remembering her part in the eleventh-grade production of
Romeo and Juliet
. “I’m some kind of Montague.”

“
OK
, then, I’ll be the Capulet.”

“I …” Patsy leaned forward over the counter so they could kiss. She drew back at the sound of a distant shot. “I have to go.”

“When can I see you?”

Patsy said, “I’ll sneak out tonight.”

Sheena was in charge of the recruiting detail that visited Sally’s neighborhood. Although she had been an obscure first-year medical student when the upheaval started, she was emerging as the heroine of the revolution. The newspapers and television newscasters all knew who she was and so Sally knew, and was undeniably flattered that she had come in person.

She and Sally met on a high level; if there is an aristocracy of achievement, then they spoke aristocrat to aristocrat. Sheena spoke of talent and obligation;
she spoke of need and duty; she spoke of service. She said the women needed Sally’s help, and when Sally said, Let them help themselves, she said, They can’t. They were still arguing when the kids came home from school, they were still arguing when Zack came home. Sheena spoke of the common cause and a better world. She spoke once more of the relationship between gifts and service. Sally turned to Zack, murmuring, and he said:

“If you think you have to do it, then I guess you’d better do it.”

She said: “The sooner I go the sooner this thing will be over.”

Zack said, “I hope you’re right.”

Sheena stood aside so they could make their goodbyes. Sally hugged the children, and when they begged to go with her she said, “It’s no place for kids.”

Climbing into the truck, she looked back at Zack and thought:
I could not love thee half so much loved I not honor more
. What she said was, “I must be out of my mind.”

Zack stood in the street with his arms around the kids, saying, “She’ll be back soon. Some day they’ll come marching down our street.”

In the truck, Sheena said, “Don’t worry. When we occupy, we’ll see that he gets a break.”

They were going so fast now that there was no jumping off the truck; the other women at the camp seemed to be so grateful to see her that she knew there would be no jumping off the truck until it was over.

June whispered, “To be perfectly honest, I was beginning to have my doubts about the whole thing, but with
you
along …”

They made Sally a member of the council.

The next day the women took the Sunnydell Shopping Center, which included two supermarkets, a discount house, a fast-food place and a cinema; they selected it because it was close to camp and they could change guard details with a minimum of difficulty. The markets would solve the food problem for the time being, at least.

In battle, they used M-
1S
, one submachine gun, and a variety of sidearms and grenades. They took the place without firing a shot.

The truth was that until this moment, the men had not taken the revolution seriously.

The men had thought:
After all, it’s only women.

They had thought:
Let them have their fun. We can stop this thing whenever we like.

They had thought:
What difference does it make? They’ll come crawling back to us.

In this first foray the men, who were, after all, unarmed, fled in surprise. Because the women had not been able to agree upon policy, they let their vanquished enemy go; for the time being, they would take no prisoners.

They were sitting around the victory fire that night, already aware that it was chilly and when the flames burned down a bit they were going to have to go back inside. It was then, for the first time, that Sheena raised the question of allies.

She said, “Sooner or later we have to face facts. We can’t make it alone.”

Sally brightened, thinking of Zack. “I think you’re right.”

Rap leaned forward. “Are you
serious?
”

Sheena tossed her hair. “What’s the matter with sympathetic men?”

“The only sympathetic man is a dead man,” Rap said.

Sally rose. “Wait a minute.”

Ellen Ferguson pulled her down. “Relax. All she means is, at this stage we can’t afford any risks. Infiltration. Spies.”

Sheena said, “We could use a few men.”

Sally heard herself,
sotto voce
. “You’re not kidding.”

Dr. Ora Fessenden rose, in stages. She said, with force, “Look here, Sheena, if you are going to take a stance, you are going to have to take a stance.”

If she had been there, Patsy would have risen to speak in favor of a men’s auxiliary. As it was, she had sneaked out to meet Andy. They were down in the shadow of the conquered shopping center, falling in love.

In the command shack, much later, Sheena paced moodily. “They aren’t going to be satisfied with the shopping center for long.”

Sally said, “I think things are going to get out of hand.”

“They can’t.” Sheena kept on pacing. “We have too much to do.”

“Your friend Rap and the doctor are out for blood. Lord knows how many of the others are going to go along.” Sally sat at the desk, doodling on the roll sheet. “Maybe you ought to dump them.”

“We need muscle, Sally.”

Margy, who seemed to be dusting, said, “I go along with Sally.”

“No.” Lory was in the corner, transcribing Sheena’s remarks of the evening. “Sheena’s absolutely right.”

It was morning, and Ellen Ferguson paced the perimeter of the camp. “We’re going to need fortifications here, and more over here.”

Glenda, who followed with the clipboard, said, “What are you expecting?”

“I don’t know, but I want to be ready for it.”

“Shouldn’t we be concentrating on
offense?
”

“Not me,” Ellen said, with her feet set wide in the dirt. “This is my place. This is where I make my stand.”

“Allies. That woman is a marshmallow.
Allies
.” Rap was still seething. “I think we ought to go ahead and make our play.”

“We still need them,” Dr. Ora Fessenden said. The two of them were squatting in the woods above the camp. “When we get strong enough, then …” She drew her finger across her throat. “Zzzzt.”

“Dammit to hell, Ora.” Rap was on her feet, punching a tree trunk. “If you’re going to fight, you’re going to have to kill.”

“You know it and I know it,” Dr. Ora Fessenden said. “Now try and tell that to the rest of the girls.”

As she settled into the routine, Sally missed Zack more and more and, partly because she missed him so much, she began making a few inquiries. The consensus was that women had to free themselves from every kind of dependence, both emotional and physical; sexual demands would be treated on the level of other bodily functions, any old toilet would do.

“Hello, Ralph?”

“Yes?”

“It’s me, Lory. Listen, did you read about what we did?”

“About what
who
did?”

“Stop trying to pretend you don’t know. Listen, Ralph, that was us that took over out at Sunnydale.
Me
.”

“You and what army?”

“The women’s army. Oh, I see, you’re being sarcastic. Well listen, Ralph, I said I was going to realize myself as a person and I have. I’m a sub-lieutenant now. A sub-lieutenant, imagine.”

“What about your novel you were going to write about your rotten marriage?”

“Don’t pick nits. I’m Sheena’s secretary now. You were holding me back, Ralph, all those years you were dragging me down. Well now I’m a free agent. Free.”

“Terrific.”

“Look, I have to go; we have uniform 9 inspection now and worst luck, I drew
KP
.”

“Listen,” Rap was saying to a group of intent women, “You’re going along minding your own business and wham, he swoops down like the wolf upon the fold. It’s the ultimate weapon.”

Dr. Ora Fessenden said bitterly, “And you just try and rape him back.”

Margy said, “I thought men were, you know, supposed to protect women from all that.”

Annie Chandler, who had emerged as one of the militants, threw her knife into a tree. “Try and convince them it ever happened. The cops say you must have led him on.”

Dr. Ora Fessenden drew a picture of the woman as a ruined city, with gestures.

“I don’t know what I would do if one of them tried to …” Betts said to Patsy. “What would you do?”

Oh, Andy
. Patsy said, “I don’t know.”

“There’s only one thing
to
do,” Rap said, with force. “Shoot on sight.”

It was hard to say what their expectations had been after this first victory. There were probably almost as many expectations as there were women. A certain segment of the group was disappointed because Vic/Richard/Tom-Dick-Harry had not come crawling up the hill crying, My God how I have missed you, come home and everything will be different. Rap and the others would have wished for more carnage, and as the days passed the thirst for blood heaped dust in their mouths. Sheena was secretly disappointed that there had not been wider coverage of the battle in the press and on nationwide
TV
. The mood in the camp after that first victory was one of anticlimax, indefinable but growing discontent.

Petty fights broke out in the rank and file.

There arose, around this time, some differences between the rank-and-file women, some of whom had children, and the Mothers’ Escadrille, an elite corps of women who saw themselves as professional mothers. As a group, they looked down on people like Glenda, who sent their children off to the day care compound. The Mothers’ Escadrille would admit, when pressed, that their goal in banding together was the eventual elimination of the role of the man in the family, for man, with his incessant demands, interfered with the primary function of the mother. Still, they had to admit that, since they had no other profession, they were going to have to be assured some kind of financial
support in the ultimate scheme of things. They also wanted more respect from the other women, who seemed to look down on them because they lacked technical or professional skills, and so they conducted their allotted duties in a growing atmosphere of hostility.

It was after a heated discussion with one of the mothers that Glenda, suffering guilt pangs and feelings of inadequacy, went down to the day care compound to see her own children. She picked them out at once, playing in the middle of a tangle of preschoolers, but she saw with a pang that Bobby was reluctant to leave the group to come and talk to her, and even after she said, “It’s Mommy,” it took Tommy a measurable number of seconds before he recognized her.

The price
, she thought in some bitterness.
I hope in the end it turns out to be worth the price.

Betts had tried running across the field both with and without her bra, and except for the time when she wrapped herself in the Ace bandage, she definitely bounced. At the moment nobody in the camp was agreed as to whether it was a good or a bad thing to bounce; it was either another one of those things the world at large was going to have to, by God, learn to ignore, or else it was a sign of weakness. Either way, it was uncomfortable, but so was the Ace bandage uncomfortable.

Sally was drawn toward home but at the same time, looking around at the disparate women and their growing discontent, she knew she ought to stay on until the revolution had put itself in order. The women were unable to agree what the next step would be, or to consolidate their gains, and so she met late into the night with Sheena, and walked around among the others. She had the feeling that she could help, that whatever her own circumstance, the others were so patently miserable that she must help.

“Listen,” said Zack, when Sally called him to explain, “it’s no picnic being a guy, either.”

The fear of rape had become epidemic. Perhaps because there had been no overt assault on the women’s camp, no army battalions, not even any police cruisers, the women expected more subtle and more brutal retaliation. The older women were outraged because some of the younger women said what difference did it make? If you were going to make it, what did the circumstances matter? Still, the women talked about it around the campfire and at last it was agreed that regardless of individual reactions, for ideological reasons it
was important that it be made impossible; the propaganda value to the enemy would be too great, and so, at Rap’s suggestion, each woman was instructed to carry her hand weapon at all times and to shoot first and ask questions later.

Patsy and Andy Ellis were finding more and more ways to be together, but no matter how much they were together it didn’t seem to be enough. Since Andy’s hair was long, they thought briefly of disguising him as a woman and getting him into camp, but a number of things: whiskers, figure, musculature, would give him away and Patsy decided it would be too dangerous.

“Look, I’m in love with you,” Andy said. “Why don’t you run away?”