The Women's Room (85 page)
She pulled her feet up onto the seat of the chair and wrapped the blanket around them and her legs. She was sipping her brandy, and rocking in the chair, rocking her body back and forth, wrapped in the blanket from neck down. It will get you in the end: wasn’t that what she had said? Mira was smiling, but it was a grim hard smile, it had no mirth. The phone rang. She jumped up, checking her watch. Past one. One of the boys, probably. But it was Iso.
‘Mira. I just heard. Val’s dead.’
1
Yes. That was what happened: everything opened up, anything seemed possible, and then everything closed up, dilation, constriction. It will get you in the end. But she also said: Why does every order have to be a permanent order? It was all that led me to this beach. I see I have dandelion greens in my hand. How did they get there, do you suppose?
If there is dilation and constriction, then there has to be dilation again. Either that or death. Law of nature. If it isn’t it ought to be.
Val was dead. It happened right under our eyes, but we didn’t even notice it. Mira thought about Val only when she needed to talk to her. No, that’s not fair. Val mattered to her, to all of them. Just not as much as she would perhaps have liked to matter, not as much as any of us would like to matter.
What happened took some piecing together. Roughly, it ran like this. A young black woman, Anita Morrow, who worked as a domestic during the day, attended classes at Northeastern at night. She wanted to be an English teacher. (The prosecutor held this up to ridicule during her trial, claiming Anita was nearly illiterate.) Anita had been walking from her class to the MTA one night when a man attacked her. He came up behind her and put his arm across her throat and dragged her into an alley. He threw her down and pulled her skirt up, but Anita had grown up on the streets and she had a knife in her pocket. She kicked him in the chin, and got up fast, and when he grabbed her again, she stabbed him. She kept stabbing him, blood and fear pounding in her ears, but the noises, her cries and his, had attracted some people. They saw her stabbing him after he had fallen, and they ran to stop her. They held on to her until the police arrived.
She was charged with murder. The man was from a respectable white family, he had a wife and six kids. The knife was Anita’s. The prosecutor claimed she was a prostitute, she had lured him into the alley, and when
he backed out, stabbed him in order to rob him. The major issue in the trial was whether or not Anita was educable. If she was attending school simply to find more trade, then she was a prostitute, and prostitutes can’t be raped. These things were not stated, but implied.
Anita was interviewed by the Boston
Phoenix
. Claims were made that in the
Phoenix
interview, her grammar and syntax were cleaned up to make her look literate. The
Phoenix
quoted her: ‘I want to go back to where I went to school. They couldn’t help it, the teachers there – we was wild, we wouldn’t listen. But we didn’t learn, you know? But I know I could talk to them kids because I know them, I am one of them, and I know I could make them see what I see. Like there’s this Blake poem, it goes “My mother groan’d! my father wept./Into the dangerous world I leapt.” Now you know babies don’t leap. That man was telling us about it, he was saying life springs out, even into danger, even into what’s terrible like it was terrible there, in my neighborhood. Then it says: “Helpless, naked, piping loud” – just as if a baby’s crying was a kind of music, like whistling down a dark street. I know the feeling, but I carry my knife too. And then “Like a fiend hid in a cloud.” Wow! He’s saying a baby’s a fiend! Well you know as well as me that’s true. That’s true!’ She laughed, her eyes glowing, the reporter claimed, and went on talking about poetry.
The state brought expert witnesses to judge Anita’s grammar, syntax, and spelling. She was found sadly wanting: she would never, they insisted, be able to achieve teacher certification. Anita Morrow was found guilty of murder on grounds of illiteracy. Her trial had been attended, all the way through, by a group of militant feminists. The day of her sentencing, they picketed the courthouse. Only the
Phoenix
covered that, but they had a picture of the women shouting and waving their signs. Val was among them. Anita was sentenced to twenty years to life for first-degree murder. There was a picture of her being led from the courthouse, her face a child’s, full of bewilderment and terror. ‘He tried to rape me, so I stabbed him,’ she said incredulously to the group of women before they led her back into the armed car.
Val’s group was small and did not have many resources, but apparently they were large enough to warrant federal attention, because an FBI informant infiltrated them. It was only because of her that anyone found out anything afterward. The group was outraged by what had happened to Morrow, and they planned to rescue her. They had elaborate arrangements for after the rescue. She would be sent from group to group of sympathetic women until the case died down, then
shipped to Cuba or Mexico, until they could find contacts who would forge the papers for her to teach school someplace. It was a crazy plan, born out of utter desperation. Perhaps they did not expect it to work. Perhaps subconsciously they foresaw what would happen, and were willing for it to happen to bring the thing to public notice.
On the day when Anita was to be transferred to the state prison (because she was deemed unreliable and dangerous to society, she was not released pending her appeal), the women arrived singly, dressed in jeans or skirts, disguised as just women, and hung around the street until Morrow was brought out to the van. Then suddenly, they mobilized in a circle, pulling guns out of skirts and coats.
But the authorities expected them. Behind the brick wall was a policeman, two, three: they stepped out with machine guns – the women had only handguns – and mowed them down. Four, five, six, seven, eight policemen came out with machine guns. Two pedestrians were wounded, the six women were all dead. Morrow was thrust into the van, and it sped off. That was all. But the police had sent so many bullets into two of the bodies that as they were lying there dead, they exploded, wounding some of the approaching cops. Later it was claimed the women had been carrying grenades that did not, for some odd reason, explode before. Val’s was one of the exploded bodies. One of the cops died, and was given a ceremonial funeral: the mayor even attended. The other lived, but his face and his thighs were scarred.
There were a lot of people at Val’s funeral. Iso said probably half of them were FBI agents, but I don’t think so, I think Val had a lot of secret friends, people she’d spoken to once and said something real to. I’ll bet that minister who was a rapist at heart was there. Howard Perkins was there, and Neil Truax, Val’s onetime husband. Chris brought him over and introduced him to us. Chris looked pale and blank and helpless. Her father was handsome and elegant, nicely gray at the temples, nicely tanned for December, nicely tight across the stomach (tennis or squash). He shook his head as he shook our hands, kept shaking his head, glancing at Chris, put his hand on her head and smiled at her and tousled her hair. She just looked at him.
‘It was irresponsible, simply irresponsible! She had a daughter to care for … she was always irresponsible …’ He gazed off into the clouds. We looked at him. He turned back to Chris and put his arm around her shoulders. ‘Come on, honey, you come home with Daddy,’ he smiled, and said good-bye, gracefully, to us.
Chris glanced at us with blank eyes. Mira started, she put out her
hand, but they had turned, they were walking away. Chris looked tiny and helpless, weighed down by a large hand on her shoulder.
Howard Perkins came up to us blinking. ‘She was great, you know, really great. Once. My theory is she went nuts in menopause. Women do, you know? She was getting old, she was no longer attractive to men, and her basic hostility to them took over …’
‘Fuck off, Howard,’ Mira said, and everyone turned and looked at her. Howard looked at her offended, then his ectoplasm drifted off into the crowd.
The friends waited until the crowd had left. Ben was there, with his arm around Mira, and Harley was there and Iso and Clarissa and Kyla and Tad, looking gangly and lost, and Grant, looking fierce, and Bart, who watched as Chris went off with her father. He turned to Mira, he shrugged, he spread his arms. ‘Nothing really changes,’ he said with a full throat. She took his hand. ‘It does, it does. It just takes longer than we do.’
The group walked slowly toward their cars. They did not speak. Then Ben and Tad and Grant got into Harley’s car, and Iso and Kyla and Clarissa got into Mira’s car, and the two cars drove back, dropping people at their homes, each of them returning alone, separate.
Mira got out her brandy and sat by the telephone, her head in her hands. The phone didn’t ring. Ben’s arm around her at the funeral had brought it all back, the warmth of love, the consolation that love brought to the terribleness of life. She picked up the receiver and dialed Ben’s number. It rang and rang. She put it down. She felt frantic. She tried to remember all the arguments, the reasoning she had brought to bear on their split, the words, words, words she had said to herself to explain, to break, to cut in half. They seemed ridiculous now, with that mass of exploded flesh piled into a grave and labeled Val. Val of the dashiki and the glass of wine lifted in air, the sudden loud laugh, the lifted eyebrow, Val who could not be put down but who was now put out, and that was in store for her too, for Mira, and for Ben, Ben who was so vivid, his thick dark-haired arms, his hair streaming uncontrollably out of his scalp like grass, his eyes, brown and alive, his laughter … She picked up the phone and dialed again. No answer. Life was too short and too cold to give up love. Even if it meant giving up everything else. She poured another brandy and dialed again. No answer.
So what if it ended the same way her first marriage had? So what if she had a child at forty-one or -two and never wrote her dissertation, or wrote it and got the degree and then sat in Africa fanning herself,
watching her child play with the strange flowers that grew in the compound? And it might not end. It might stay vital and warm, their love, they might continue to excite each other forever, they might get in bed every night for the next thirty years and reach out to each other with the same desire, they might wait to see each other every day for the next thirty years with the same interest and eagerness …
That was ridiculous. Ridiculous. That was the thing of all things most unlikely. That was why it had been turned into the ideal. From the ideal it got turned into a norm that somehow never materialized. She felt unbearably alone. She got up, put on her coat, picked up her brandy bottle, and drove to Iso’s. Kyla and Clarissa were already there. They were all sitting in silence. She passed the bottle around. They poured brandy into glasses and held them up: ‘To Val,’ they said, and drank.
‘There’s just nothing to say. There are no words,’ someone said.
No words to wrap her body in like a shroud, like clean white sanitized bandages, around and around and around until she was all clean and white and sanitized and pure, her blood dried, her mass of exploded flesh covered, her stink deodorized, and she sanitary, polite, acceptable for public notice, a mummy propped on a table for public ceremony, its very presence a promise, a guarantee that she will no longer disturb or threaten, that she will not rise up in rage with hair wild on her head, a knife in her hand, screaming, ‘No! No! Kill before you accept!’
‘Yes. But she did accept. She consented to her eradication just as if she had been Stella Dallas.’
‘But there’s no way not to do that, is there? I mean, whether you fight or submit, climb on a crag or creep in a cave, you’re participating in it, in your destiny, you’re creating it, you’re responsible, aren’t you?’
‘But shit, man, we don’t have to contribute to that, we don’t have to help slide her into the deep freeze by labeling her, by defining her, she was this, she was that – neat as an obituary.’
Words soaking up her juices like the brown paper the fishmonger wraps around an eviscerated, decapitated, scaled fish.
‘But saying nothing obliterates her too. You know, the Greek word for truth –
al
theia
– doesn’t mean the opposite of falsehood. It means the opposite of
lth, oblivion. Truth is what is remembered.’