Vida Read online

  “I was asking if you’d go out for me”

  “I’m tired. Go on, Vida, you can’t be scared to walk a couple of blocks!”

  “Why can’t I be? What do you want me to do with a rapist, show him my Wanted poster?”

  “If you can’t take care of yourself, who can?” He raised his eyebrows, shrugging with an exaggerated heaviness. Wasp imitating Jewish mannerisms. Sitting in the plush armchair, he raised his feet onto a matching hassock to demonstrate his rootedness.

  She made herself smile again, a smile like a large plaster ornament on her face, a cupidon, a wreath of grapes decorating the old cornice of this room. “Violence against women is a fact I have to take into account, just like any other woman. I don’t carry a gun, Hank.”

  “Why not? Armed and dangerous. What would you do if you saw a pig?”

  “What would I do with a gun?” She controlled her voice, talking to a spoiled child. All a televised drama to him, the blood wiped off and the body good as new. “Actually, I carry a bomb at all times in my purse. Plastique. Set to detonate if I scream. Like this” She opened her mouth.

  “Shhh! Don’t scream in here. The neighbors will call the police. There’s been a lot of break-ins … Really, I think it’s a riot. You playing the helpless female. Who’d ever believe Vida Asch is scared to walk to the corner drugstore by herself, scared of the dark?”

  She flinched at her name, never spoken now. “Every other woman fugitive I’ve ever known. Hank, if I’m raped, I can’t even go in the hospital”

  “What do you think the odds are you’ll be ravished between here and between the corner?”

  “Pretty good, I’d bet … Are you going to help me?”

  “If you’re so scared, wait till morning.”

  “I need tampons and I need hair coloring. My period won’t shut down for convenience and I can’t put off dyeing my hair. I have business to conduct tomorrow, and I need my hair a nice dull brown.”

  “You imagine I’m going to sashay into the drugstore and buy tampons and hair dye? I live in this neighborhood. I’ve lived on Columbia Heights for ten years. You imagine I’m walking into the drugstore where I buy the fucking Times every Sunday and my razor blades and tell them, Well, I want to dye my hair and stick a tampon up my ass?”

  “It’s after eleven. Come on. Hank. You have to help me. I need the damn stuff”‘

  “You sound like a creeping junkie!”

  “Look, please” Crawl a little; he wants you to crawl. “I’m dependent on you for help. For survival. I have nobody else I can turn to. I’m alone here. Please help me.”

  “Why do you want to turn your hair that dead color anyhow? You must be trying to make yourself ugly. Like that crazy dyke sister of yours”

  The sweet crisp pleasure of breaking a lamp on his head. “Are you meaning Natalie? I don’t think you know her.”

  “We were on Channel 13 together one time … You were really a beautiful girl, Vida, you know that? Sure you know it” He snapped his fingers. “Thought you were Queen of the May”

  Were beautiful. Tomorrow she had to see Leigh, and she could not afford to be someone who had been beautiful ten years ago. Hank was out to cut her, but she could not take offense. Ignore all references to Natalie, who at least could not hear them. “Look,” she said gently. “I need the dye for security reasons. Walk with me. Please. I’ll go in. You can wait outside.”

  “Suppose somebody recognizes you? Suppose they call the cops?”

  “I’d be happy to wait outside while you go in.”

  “But I don’t want to go in!” He writhed in his chair, petulant. “I worked all day while you were lying around here eating up my food. I’m tired. I cooked dinner.”

  “I’ll wash dishes the moment I finish my hair … What would you do if you were living with a woman?” Once he’d been married, she remembered. He had married an editor, an arrangement lasting six weeks. Maybe his wife had asked him to buy her a box of tampons.

  “Any woman I’d have around would do her own fetching and carrying” But he got up, making a sour face. “All right, all right, I’ll walk with you. But I’ll stay outside. And if anything happens, you don’t know me. I’m splitting”

  “Fine.”

  The night was cloudy and cool, a touch of rain in the wind. She wanted the next day to be sunny. She had not seen Leigh since early April when they had celebrated their birthdays together, meeting at the end of the subway in the Bronx. Leigh had given her two hundred dollars and a blue challis dress that fitted perfectly. She weighed only a few pounds less than she used to when she lived with Leigh on 103rd Street: 132 pounds, now maybe 127. She had the blue dress in her pack to wear tomorrow. She had not seen him since, the longest time they had gone without meeting after the first desperate months underground.

  As they walked. Hank would not talk to her. He strode very fast, making her hasten to keep up, but he got out of breath before she did. The hole in her boot was getting bigger. The cold pavement nosed her as she stepped. She would have liked to walk on the promenade and stare at the lights of Manhattan, where she longed to be, to watch the freighters on the East River, to take in the Brooklyn Bridge, but she was always wary in New York and must stay inside as much as she could. This walk had sharp edges enough, that sense of danger in things. With brown hair and glasses she did not need, any friend, any old acquaintance could still recognize her. It had happened. It must not happen tonight.

  “That’s the drugstore” He stepped into a doorway, actually turning from the street to conceal his face. “I’ll stay here. If you aren’t out in five minutes, I’m leaving.”

  “Do give me ten, Hank. They might be waiting on somebody else.” She went in. What had she been using? Warm chestnut it was called. If only she dared auburn. Anything but mouse brown. Ruby dyed her hair auburn and looked wonderful. Ruby’s hair hadn’t begun to turn gray till Vida and Natalie were in college, but when Ruby started coloring it, she didn’t stick with her own rich brown. Ruby said, My daughter has red hair, why not me? Oh, Mama. She was staring at the Clairol boxes, with the same woman’s face repeated forty times on the shelves and they all swam. Ruby was much harder to meet than Leigh or Natalie, for she was no political activist and it was next door to impossible for Ruby to learn to follow instructions exactly and evade surveillance. Vida breathed haltingly, controlling tears as the packages swam. Missing never diminished, not a bit.

  She bought only one package. She had no spare money, and she hated carrying dye among her clothes, where the bottle might break. Further, she did not want anyone who didn’t know who she was asking her why she dyed her hair. This evening had gone so badly she wasn’t going to be able to put the bite on Hank for money. Too bad. His liberal guilt was wearing thin. Waiting at the register, she remembered the first time she had made contact with him the year after becoming a fugitive. Then he had felt flattered. He had wanted to have a party for her, and only with difficulty had she persuaded him that showing her off to people he wanted to impress was not worth twenty years in stir to her or a lot of legal trouble to him.

  When she came out, looking around for Hank, she noticed the sign in the window, “all transactions in this pharmacy are videotaped” A jolt to the brain like an electric prod. Sweat broke out on her palms, under her arms, along her back. Come on, probably a lie. Probably they just said that to scare would-be burglars. Probably nobody scanned the tape. Probably. She made herself continue to walk slowly toward the doorway where Hank was skulking. “Hi, there” she said brightly. “Thanks ever so much … Say, do you have a hair dryer?”

  2

  Putting her pack on her back and her glasses on her nose, Vida set out for the BMT, keeping to the blocks of the trim row houses and away from Montague itself. An unclean filmy rain flattened her new brown curls. She wore the blue challis dress, her last pantyhose and her boots, with a Peruvian poncho over it all. Warily she walked the neat tree-lined streets, wishing she had an umbrella, to keep her dry and partially c
onceal her face. From 1965 to 1971 she had lived in New York and lived publicly. A dozen lovers, two hundred friends, thousands who had heard Vida Asch speak at rallies, millions who had seen her photograph in the newspapers or on television were spread in an invisible web. She felt the tingle of casual danger brushing her elbows and finger ends as she walked.

  Saturday morning shoppers. Her foot was soaked, and as she climbed down the subway stairs, her boot squished. She had a fifteen-minute wait for a train. When it arrived, she walked back several cars to the end, sat down, watched. Was anyone coming after her? Leigh had told her he need not be back until Monday morning, for he had invented a cover story about an interview in Chicago. Whenever she was going to meet somebody from the old life, one of her own people, she felt helpless. She was utterly dependent on their caution, their honed paranoia, their will to be vigilant, but with Leigh it was heresy to suspect he would not be on guard. After all, in 1974 when she had been living in Philadelphia, he had commuted back and forth sharing her life until she had been recognized and had to run.

  At Fulton, she changed to the Flatbush line and once again walked through the cars, on guard. Then she sat in the second-to-last car in the last seat and finally permitted herself to space out for the long journey to Sheepshead Bay. How much time she wasted traveling to and from meetings, trekking the long way around, taking buses to the ends of lines, standing on random corners in the cold wind. If there was anything her life demanded, it was endless patience. She could never rush but must ooze circumspectly toward the rendezvous, as Leigh was tediously maneuvering toward her.

  She imagined his face, the nose sharp as an urgent question, the brows bristling like shaggy exclamation points, turned toward her. Yawning, showing his purple tongue, he was waking in the queen-size bed in their apartment. Did he still have the featherbed from his grandmother.? She had dragged it on the subway down to Orchard Street to have it repaired and covered with new ticking. Over the bed she saw the Cretan wall hanging embroidered on coarse red wool that was one of the few mementos from her first, her Greek marriage. Leigh had never minded its origins: the embroidery was beautiful work and never had hung in the house of Vasos’ family.

  The Kalakopouloses disdained peasant work. They had a Degas ballet dancer from an Athens furniture store in their living room across from the icon of Agios Giorgos. She shook her head angrily: why was she drifting off to Vasos? Little pleasure in remembering that mess. Her romantic marriage: she had married Greece; she had married the dark stranger; she had married classical studies, the famous Mediterranean light, three thousand years of culture. Unfortunately for everybody, she had also married Vasos Kalakopoulos, civil engineer whose parents ran a Honda dealership on the edge of Heraclion, on the road toward Agios Nicolaos.

  Okay, she was nervous about seeing Leigh after much too long. Why hadn’t he managed to come West since she had been here in April? During their scheduled phone calls the first Tuesday of every month, pay phone to pay phone, always he had said “Soon. Soon.” Her busy husband. When she had escaped from the dead end with Vasos, she had told her sister Natalie she would never marry again, never! Then Natalie had married Daniel Brooks, and six months later Vida married Leigh Pfeiffer … Leigh had worn an embroidered white shirt open at the throat, a deep V down to his curly chest. Around his head he had bound a red scarf. His pants, loose and flowing, tied at the waist. Purple, she thought. Many things were purple that year: purple tights, purple dresses, purple lights, purple walls, even purple boots. Had she worn one of her crotch-length minis? No, she had been married in a leaf-green Mexican wedding dress, tiers of floating puckered cotton separated by bands of open lace. Nothing under it but a green bikini. She stared at herself across the years, amazed. Of course, she no longer dressed with that flash and dazzle—she could not afford on any level to call attention to herself—but she would not have walked a block in a minidress now. What such clothing proclaimed was availability. Yet she had not felt that then. She had loved the glory and speed of miniskirts; she had felt like an emissary from a saner, jollier future, one of the crew from Star Trek beamed down to a primitive troubled world for a brief bumpy mission.

  Natalie had found the green dress for her in the Village at Fred Leighton’s. “If you’re going through with this, why not wear something special?” Natalie didn’t like minis as much as Vida did. “You look smashing in them. I look dumpy. I’m bowlegged” Only a little. Natalie had worn a red Mexican dress cut low, with her breasts swelling out of it like rising bread. What had Daniel worn? Natalie’s husband was missing from the wedding pictures in her head. Vida could not remember her brother-in-law.

  Leigh and Vida had a June wedding on a farm some antiwar activists had rented in New Jersey, a ramshackle white house inundated by ivy on the north and a rambling rose on the south. The mole-tunneled lawn sloped down to a stream lined with weeping willows. Torches were planted in the lawn. The Holy Rollers, a band who played all the Movement bashes that year, made raucous sound. And food! Anything Leigh was connected with featured splendid food. A whole roast suckling pig. Had Lohania cooked that.? No, they had not met her until the year after. It was an old Puerto Rican girlfriend of Leigh’s who had married a friend. Mrs. Pfeiffer, Leigh’s mother, whom Vida had never been able to call “Stella” or “Mama” without translating that from an originally thought “Mrs. Pfeiffer” had cooked stuffed cabbage, a spicy pot roast, stuffed derma. Natalie had come through with a pâté en croute and a two-foot-high chocolate cake with a red flag and a black flag on top.

  On the riverbank, the hippest rabbi in New York, Meyer who went to jail for ten days in ‘69, married them in a double-ring ceremony by the splashing waters. She remembered his severe face and her own twinge of guilt, for he had made a fuss that he married only people he knew, and they had persuaded him. She had never told him she was only half Jewish; that her real father was Tom Whippletree and she had taken the name of her mother Ruby’s second husband, Sanford Asch, because—because—it sounded better and she hated her own name, Davida Whippletree, because— because—she was unfaithful, just like her mother, and she preferred Sandy to her own dad. Her mother had married Sandy, and she had taken Natalie to be her own flesh-and-blood sister out of daydream. Now Natalie walked ahead of her, married herself and already pregnant, her belly not yet overreaching her breasts, but growing, growing with Sam.

  This time it’s got to work, she had thought, gripping the roses cut from the rambler and then Leigh’s hand. I want him so bad! He was perfect for her, her own sweet-and-sour. How he had danced that afternoon, leaping and prancing. “I picked you out of that first meeting for spring mobilization” Leigh said. “You were the best of the crop”

  ”Like cabbages? What crop?”

  “Girls new in the Movement that spring. You were the best looking, and when you opened your mouth, real words came out. You spoke up loud and clear.”

  With her hands shaking so hard she had to clasp them behind her. She had felt a failure at twenty-three: a botched marriage, not even a degree, a false start, older than the college students around her. She had set out to succeed in the Movement in New York, and she was going to succeed with Leigh. “We won’t box each other,” Leigh said. “I don’t expect to own you.” And don’t you expect to own me! She didn’t. It was right: they would give each other room to grow, to change, and they would grow wiser and more wonderful together.

  Yet the night of their wedding Leigh had angered her. They sat at a big table inside with the friends still left who had not yet gone back to the city after a full day of eating, drinking, getting stoned, dancing and more eating. Mrs. Pfeiffer was presiding. Leigh’s father had died of a heart attack the year before, down in the garment district where he was a cutter. One of the things Vida trusted in Leigh was that unlike many of their friends, he loved and respected his mother. He didn’t see a lot of her, but they talked to each other as friends, the way she and Ruby did. Vida put faith in that. That his parents were both Communists, althoug
h they had left the party years before, fascinated her too. It seemed glamorous, clandestine. Vida asked Mrs. Pfeiffer how the wedding party differed from the Communist festivities of her youth, and Mrs. Pfeiffer answered that nowadays the kids didn’t listen to as many speeches and there was a lot more rock-and-roll.

  Leigh shouted down the table, “We’ll do this again next month, when Vida and I get divorced!”

  Although Leigh was four years older than Vida, he had never before married, and he’d been surprised how angry his joke made her. Mrs. Pfeiffer pursed her lips. “Is that why you’re keeping your name, Davida? Because you’re getting divorced next month?”

  “I’m keeping my name because it’s my name. Leigh can have it if he wants.” She wasn’t changing her name any more times.

  Coming back to the train clattering above Brooklyn, she snorted. Never change her name, huh? She’d had six identities since she’d become a fugitive, beyond her political nom de guerre. Peregrine. Her current I.D. was in the name Vinnie Rappaport, a dead baby from 1946, four years younger than Vida; but she knew objectively, as she had to, that she looked in her twenties still and could have passed for younger than Vinnie’s age of thirty-two. Eyes. She felt eyes. A man staring, he was holding up a newspaper and staring from it to her. Why? Her spine gave her an electrical shock. The train stood in the Kings Highway station. At once she rose and bolted from the car, jamming the doors open enough to hop out. She ran along the platform, then swung back. No one else had got out of her car. The train pulled away. She stood trembling, embarrassed. Should she run for it? But she had acted on blind impulse. After all, men frequently stared at women on the subway. Why would he look at the newspaper and then stare at her? She sat down nervously to wait for the next train. She’d be a little late.

  At last she reached the stop. Paused to see who else got off, then lowly descended the steps. Green here, leafy. Gradually she circled around past small shops and apartment houses to Emmons and the block-sized tan stucco mass of Lundy’s. Its red-striped awnings spanked smartly as sails in the brisk wind off the narrow bay, where sportfishing boats were huddled.