Part II/Chapter 7
Chanti owned seventeen dress shirts, all Polo Ralph Lauren. Sophie allows the armoire door to fall open and she lies on the bed and the shirts are a pastel prism, the Oxford cloth wrinkled. He was in the habit of ironing a shirt as he needed it, and she misses the odor of iron-hot cotton. Her parents have gone to the vet clinic to pick up Peggy Lee; the house is too quiet without them. But Sophie feels inert; she catalogues what is there and not there. His T-shirts folded in a drawer, his jeans where he left them, on a peg inside the shallow closet. His dress pants neatly clipped to cedar hangers. There is a slight gray-ish film – from not being worn – on the shoulders of his sports coats from high school and when he was at Wabash College. This past Sunday Arturo stopped by and she gave him Chanti’s black leather jacket. They are about the same size. The almost imperceptible squeak of the leather when Arturo hugged her goodbye was another sound of Chanti she did not even notice until then. Two nights ago she slipped her hand into his jeans pocket and found the key to his parents’ house and three copper pennies, brand-new.
People ask Sophie how she’s doing – sometimes people she doesn’t even know – and she says, “I have bad days and good days,” but she doesn’t have good days. Still, pity would make it all worse. She will never go back to tango. She has taken over Chanti’s art class, but tango – never.
When they come home with Peggy Lee, she doesn’t want to be there.
She drags her self up and walks to Chanti’s parents’ house. It is empty of an afternoon. Magda teaches her literacy class every afternoon at Casa Verde. Arturo is always the last to leave the tire store. There is a note from Magda on the table: Sophie, dear. Help yourself to treats. Come see us on Sunday. We miss you. Come to Mass and dinner after.
She can imagine it. Magda crying at the sink, skeins of tears on her bronze cheeks. “When I’m with you, I can’t help crying,” she’ll say. “It’s good for me.” Chanti’s sisters upstairs in their girlhood bedroom, gossiping, with ballads from Oaxaca streaming from the computer. Arturo coming into the kitchen and kissing the nape of Magda’s neck. She’s not ready for that.
At their house she comes prepared with a sketchbook and newly sharpened pencils. A soft gray kneaded eraser in her pocket. She does not turn on a light. Sitting in a kitchen chair, her feet on a stool, her knees become an easel, and she draws. Lines are somehow reassuring, predictable. She has always been able to render what is right in front of her. The green tomatoes in their papery husks. The molcajete fashioned from volcanic rock.
She has taken up her pencils. She has entered the art-making trance for half an hour, state of grace Chanti called it. She will leave before Magda comes, ashamed for Magda to know that she is drawing, that she is alive.
The telephone rings.
Sophie hesitates.
The light on the answering machine is dark. Still, she’s not responsible, is she? But it might be Magda. Or Dulcy. She sets aside her drawing pad, her pencils. She has a cramp in her hand and she leans on the sink, pressing her fingers against the porcelain. The woman who smokes on the back porch next door glances up at her. Only a screen separates them. The woman grins, lop-sided grin, her sundress bright – its print lime-green and red, party streamers. She’s wearing celebratory red shoes. A man comes around the corner of the house and takes her in his arms. He wears a brown UPS uniform. The woman’s body fits deliciously against him. Sophie is numb, watching them. The phone won’t stop ringing. She picks up the receiver and says, “Hola.”
“Oh! That’s Sophie, ain’t it?”
”Hi, Tony.”
“You know my voice, don’t you?”
She grips the phone. “Why wouldn’t I? You’re in my class.”
“Tony! Yeah, it’s me.”
“What’s up?”
“What’s up with you, girl?”
“Did you want to talk to Arturo?” She feels a need to lie, to place Arturo nearby, even if she might have to lie again if Tony says yes. And why does she need protection from Tony? He’s a boy, a neglected kid. She remembers him at the funeral – a pallbearer. His hair cut sharp. In a borrowed necktie and jacket. Chanti wouldn’t have wanted him to be left out. But now he’s pushy, gluttony she can’t quite decipher in his voice. Drunk or high. She is accustomed to having Chanti nearby – male protection she took for granted. “I think Arturo’s out back –“
“Why you lie to me? You need to go to confession?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Everything’s Tony’s business –“
She soundlessly places the receiver in its cradle. The urge to slam it down is superceded by her need to let him think she isn’t one bit ruffled. She struggles to shut the window above the sink – as if she can shut out the couple kissing, her dress bunched in his hand. She locks the deadbolt on the back door.
She pictures Tony’s drawings. The kitchen where he works. And comic-bookish, adolescent fantasies of revenge and sex. Tony resembles Chanti, except that he took those family good looks and turned them sour. Or his life experience did it for him. He is on probation for working as a runner for what he calls the CEOs of a crystal meth lab. They went to prison, but Tony’s lawyer convincingly argued that Tony was a peon. In the shadows of the crime. He has promised to work at Wendy’s for three years; he must do some sort of volunteer work; and he must stay squeaky clean. His mouth is chiseled, his eyes lidded wolfishly. The day Sophie took over the art class, Tony pulled back his T-shirt sleeve to reveal his bicep and said, “You like this?”
Tony is a problem. He’s a problem Chanti would have taken care of.
Part II/ Chapter 8
The fur around Peggy Lee’s eyes has been shaved away, the flesh around her eyes swollen and veiny like the newborn backs of baby birds. She wears a plastic Elizabethan collar to keep her from rubbing the stitches. The stitches are black, rough. When Joe sets her down inside the flat, she maneuvers along the baseboard to the bedroom. He follows wonderingly, with Emma right behind. Peggy Lee appears to gird her loins, to gather strength, and hops up on the bed, and for the briefest moment, Joe thinks that Peggy Lee will curl up and go to sleep. That all will be well. But no. Their little invalid squats to piss on Emma’s favorite patchwork quilt. The light blue patches darken to gray; the navy to black.
Joe’s pulse lurches into high-gear. He expects the worst. Emma rankled. A traumatized cat.
“Poor baby,” Emma drawls, scooping her up. And briskly: “But we can’t have that. We’ll have to keep her in the kitchen, on the linoleum.”
Joe gathers the quilt and in the laundry alcove at the washer he sprays it with an odor-neutralizing enzyme from the pet store. He works diligently, eyes averted, and crams the quilt into the washer to steep in the enzyme. Emma has shut off all escape routes, the swinging doors into the hall and living room usually kept open with conch shell doorstops. Peggy Lee tilts a little drunkenly around the kitchen, her balance shaken. The radio is on: international news. The telephone rings; the machine picks up; a recorded voice says, “Congratulations! You have been selected at random --” Emma pops to the phone. “Turn that off, off, off.” She presses the volume down with each off. Joe recalls a phrase his mother used to use – the chaos of family life. This is just a little bit of the chaos of family life. Welcome chaos. When Peggy Lee begins to whine, Emma picks her up and holds her and Peggy Lee grabs on like a baby might, her paws against Emma’s breasts.
“She’s disoriented,” Joe says.
“Bless her little heart.”
“What’ll we do?”
“We’ll make a bed,” Emma decides. “Let’s sleep out here with her.”
“Are you sure?”
“We can’t have her ruining the carpets. Or the bedding.”
“But you have to teach tomorrow.”
“I think she needs us. Don’t you?”
Later Joe will dig into the hall closet; it smells piney, like Christmas candles. There are lumpy sleeping bags and foam pads left over from when the girls were young. He’ll lay these out on the kitchen floor. He’ll fetch pillows from their bed, a box of tissues, Emma’s nighttime magazines. They’ll sleep in T-shirts and underwear inside the sleeping bags. Peggy Lee will lie in a trough between their thighs, secure. Her purr like a deal she makes with them.
For now, Peggy Lee is figuring out how to eat cat kibbles with the plastic collar impeding her. Emma has set a snack on the table, side by side plates of smoked salmon and cream cheese and crackers. A pear cut up to share. A glass of wine for her, a Japanese beer for Joe. He will slip flakes of salmon to the cat, to make her happy. Rain pings against the windows; wind blows up. The sky darkens. But the kitchen glows with the beer, the pale gold pear skin. It glows with Emma, Joe thinks. The way Peggy Lee brings out the maternal in her.
Sophie unlocks the kitchen door; she’s wet all over, her jeans sodden. Her courier bag soaked. A desperate look in her eyes he can’t quite read. He hasn’t been good at reading his girls since they were ten. Sophie, his lamb, his love. Joe shoves back his chair, opens his arms. “Where’ve you been, Soph?”
“Benny’s.” Her bag falls to the floor; she steps back, frowns, as if to say, Don’t make me hug you. I’m not capable of hugging. She briskly rubs her arms and peers out the window.
Emma re-arranges her food on the plate. Tight gestures. “How’s Benny?”
“Not so good. His sister’s there.”
“Join us,” Emma says.
“I can’t,” Sophie says. She puts up her hands like stop signs. “Don’t ask me for anything right now. Please.”
Part II/Chapter 9
Benny’s studio is in a warren of studios, one mile east of central Pilsen. Whimsical cards in the windows announce digital media and urban primitive, fiberglass sculpture and etchings. This is what my sabbatical has become: living at the Dominican priory where the friars have offered me a space to write, having drinks with Benny in his studio of a late afternoon, and dinner there, too. It is the simplest life one can have in the city. Sometimes I watch “The X-Files” late at night with Uncle Leo in the priory TV room.
I hope you haven’t forgotten about Uncle Leo going to prison.
When Benny was a boy he rode on the back of a Buick convertible in a parade to celebrate President Eisenhower’s second victory. A tyke, in a little blazer and tie, he waves like the local beauty queen with horse’s teeth who sits beside him. Our grandfather – a Republican precinct committeeman, quintessential self-made man, who dropped out of school in second grade and eventually owned half the block he lived on – is in the driver’s seat, wearing a two-tone sports coat and a wide tie Benny says was the color of a warbler’s belly. The Buick festooned with crepe paper. The black-and-white photo is framed and on the wall in Benny’s studio, next to a quote from Eisenhower that goes like this:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not
fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not
spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius
of its scientists, the hopes of its children . . . this is not a way of
life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity
hanging from a cross of iron.” April 16, 1953
So all this time, when I was irritated at my (then) editor and wondering if my professional dreams were going to come true and grading student stories and trying to decide whether to re-marry husband #1 and giving readings and going to the gym to show husband #1 that I’m in better shape now than then and anticipating sabbatical and then going on sabbatical and fretting about the depth of Benny’s down after Chanti died and moving into the Dominican priory to be near Benny, we (the United States government) were bombing Afghanistan and running up to the war in Iraq. Running up to it like a long lost lover. Running up to it like a long lost seductive lover, grinning bony head of death. We couldn’t wait to strike.
One Sunday afternoon (post 9/11) I learned about the White Rose Movement, a brother and sister and their friend in Nazi Germany who were be-headed for treason because they were pacifists. Matt Gwynn, a facilitator from the Church of the Brethern, told us their story during a training in non-violence held in a church basement across from campus. (Contrary to Pat Robertson and the hawkish evangelicals, there are plenty of anti-war Christians who haven’t been brainwashed, people who realize as Coretta Scott King said, “We must remember that we serve the Prince of Peace.”) Matt Gwynn displayed a photo of the White Rose Movement, beautiful young people who should have been out hiking or dancing or falling in love, instead of traveling on trains with satchels full of illegal pacifist leaflets. Matt said that they had been arrested and be-headed the next day. He said, “What does this tell you about pacifism?” “You’ll be silenced,” I said, “one way or the other.”
It was a silencing of sorts, a little like opening The New Yorker to your own obit, to read Hendrik Hertzberg’s Talk of the Town piece in the December 3, 2001 issue. He wrote: “One way in which this conflict is indeed different is that there is no anti-war movement to speak of.”
You could have fooled me.
As of December, 2001, according to The War-Resisters League, there were 70 on-going peace actions – vigils, demonstrations, leafleting, teach-ins – taking place from Kaunakalai, Hawaii, to Bangor, Maine. Since 9/11 the hits on The War Resisters League website have increased tenfold, to between 6000 and 8000 per day. In October, 2001, Nobel Peace Prize recipient Mairead Corrigan MacGuire joined with several other Nobel Peace and Literature Laureates to call on the United Nations General Assembly to implement a cease-fire in Afghanistan. According to National Catholic Reporter (November 16, 2001) MacGuire and other Nobel Laureates condemned the U.S. bombing campaign as immoral and counterproductive. MacGuire came to the United States to lead, along with Jesuits Dan Berrigan and John Dear, the October 7 Not in Our Name peace march in New York City in which an estimated 12,000 people marched to declare their support for non-violence rather than war in the wake of 9/11. Five days before the New York march, MacGuire had marched with 30,000 activists in India. Over 250, 000 pacifists marched in Assisi on October 14. And then there are all the huddles of five or seven or twelve people, standing in cold drizzle or glaring sunlight or wind every Friday afternoon outside their courthouses all over America, holding homemade signs that say, simply, Peace. I could go on, but I think you get the picture. There was and is a peace movement. The response to 9/11 from peace and justice activists all over the world was immediate, disciplined, and continues to this day.
Once at a peace vigil in Columbus, Georgia – bright fall day – I watched a nun in a gray habit dancing in the fallen red leaves with a young woman who wore silver rings on her toes and a gold stud in her upper lip, Indian print skirt swaying. It’s the young people I appreciate. How they’ve made the movement their own. Lickety Split and Memphis Dirty Southern Belles. With stomping good energy, all night partying craziness, they turned the wholesome American Cheerleader icon upside down. Radical cheerleaders carry pom-poms made of trash bags and wear fishnet stockings and sexy cheerleader pants and wiggle their butts and shimmy while chanting anti-Bush, anti-authority, slogans. Check this out, from their website.
hey y'all! welcome to the official website for the Radical cheerleaders!
Radical Cheerleading is Protest+Performance. It's activism with pom poms and middle fingers extended. It's screaming FUCK CAPITALISM while doing a split. The Radical Cheerleaders started when once upon a time, two magical sisters from the land of Florida named Cara and Aimee decided that regular old protests on street corners holding signs and waving at oncoming traffic was just not RADICAL enough.They made pom-poms out of plastic bags and passed their cheers out in zine form.Soon enough,Radical Cheerleading spread like blue bonnet margarine on vegan biscuits.Squads are popping up at an alarmingly bad ass rate, from us here in Memphis, to Austin, New York, Atlanta, New Orleans.. The list gets longer and STRONGER daily!!! This page is only a bit of the revolution, it should INSPIRE you to either get involved with a squad near you, or START YOUR OWN!!!
If anyone has anything to add to this page, feel free to get in touch. I'm still trying to move onto an ad-free site so any help with that would be glorious.
xo
Tricky
You won’t forget them, if once you see them.
WWW.(nyc rc mary xmas)
dubya dubya dubya DOT
who the fuck do you think you are?
you've taken this game a little too far
seized control like a thief in the night
BUSH, it's YOU we'll fight fight fight!!
dubya dubya dubya DOT
won't stand no patriarchal sleaze
my body my choice i'll do as i please
bush you better run, you better run fast
cause the cheerleaders are comin to KICK YOUR ASS!!!
Okay. So I love extremism, in-your-face girl power. I love to watch the way the cops have to work to ignore them.
Millions of people all over the world work for peace. With lives much like yours and mine. They dance. They cook. They kiss and fight and make-up. They walk the dog. They go to class. They have jobs and kids and parents to care for; they are sometimes sick; they check their e-mail; pay their bills or put off paying them; pray; vote; do yoga or wish they did; love their coffee in the morning; wonder why they lost their hair; buy new clothes; devise science projects with six-graders; drive their kids to soccer; have sex; wish they were loved; hold hands; rejoice in a sunset; curse the cold; set off fireworks in July; watch football games. But on top of all that, they work for peace. They go to meetings and actions. They write letters. They write cheers. They write editorials. They start websites for peace. They know how many of your tax dollars go to Lockheed Martin. They can recite the CIA’s greatest hits. All the democratic elections corrupted. All the dictators given aid. They can quote Leo Tolstoy and Martin Luther King and Dave Dellinger and Thomas Merton and the Dalai Lama and Emma Goldman. They sit-in, stand-in, ride-in, mill-in, pray-in. They boycott, they strike. They sky-write. They give public speeches and they make rude gestures. They set themselves afire for peace. They write books and sing songs and lobby and hold mock elections. They heckle. They hold mock funerals. They walk out. They renounce honors. They give sanctuary. They blog for peace. They sneak onto military bases and take sledgehammers to fighter planes. At farmers’ markets they solicit signatures on petitions, asking people whether they believe the United States should establish a Truth Commission to examine all the ways the United States has contributed to the rise of terrorism since World War II. Before that moment, they get up in the middle of the night to write the petition. They meet with friends to hone the language. They send the petition off to State Senators, who won’t touch the paper it’s printed on for fear of being burned politically by it. They drive to Washington and meet with legislators. They walk across the country. They walk or bicycle for peace. They fast for peace. They sit in humble circles outside the United Nations and refuse to eat for thirty days. Think of that. You know that extra morning sausage you scarf up? That mid-morning snack, the buttered bagel with a dab of jam? The shrimp on your salad? The candy bar you buy from the machine as a mid-afternoon pick-me-up? The lattes, cappuchinos, café mochas, red-eyes, chais? The scones and cinnamon rolls? The bread dipped in olive oil? The ravioli? The peace and justice people who fast for peace forego all that for as long as they can bear it. Their bodies are never the same. They go to jail or prison for civil disobedience. They don’t wish the world were different and wring their hands. They get up and do something. Like Tom Fox, Quaker peace activist, found dead yesterday by Baghdad children. They’re not ashamed or embarrassed to say what’s right and wrong. They are legion; they refuse cynicism, a mental habit you must remind yourself of every day you’re on the planet. Rumi wrote: “The grief armies are assembling, but I will not go with them.”
Those rad cheerleaders. Tom Fox. The St. Patrick’s Day Four in Ithaca, serving prison time for throwing their own blood on a recruiting station. Remember: they do this work. The real work, as poet Gary Snyder calls it. They resist the armies of grief.
It is for them that Uncle Leo decided to get on board this story. If the bird flu takes millions of us; if terrorists hits keep on coming; if there are daily oil spills and chemical spills; if commerce comes to a standstill; if the borders are closed; if we are reduced to eating stockpiled Top Ramen; if government officials hide out in the mountains; if earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes signal us to no avail; still, perhaps, on some rickety shelf in a tree house, in a library, under a bed, at a flea market, this book will be there, and someone will read it and know: there were people who spoke out.
When she stopped by the studio, Sophie stood before that quote from Eisenhower and said, “Uncle Leo would like that.”
A hammer in his hand, Benny in a leather apron leaned over a metal quilt made of flattened pop cans. He said, “You know that runs in your family.”
“What does?”
“You should ask your Uncle Leo. You come from a radical line.”
Benny laid down his hammer, wiped his hands on a rag, and said, “How about a g & t? First of the summer, such as it is.”
We sat there drinking, watching the rain begin. Wind blew the dogwood blossoms outside the studio window.
Sophie said, “Chanti wanted to move here. He always said, ‘Imagine your own sign in the window – Sophie March, Oils.’”
We were on the sofa. Benny slumped in a butterfly chair, his drink on the floor. Traffic hissed on the Dan Ryan. Sophie didn’t know me well at all, but I reached out and took her hand. She said, “I sleep in the living room. On the sofa. But I go up to our room sometimes. His cigarettes are still on the bedside table. He never smoked indoors and he had this little metal box – it’s a little spice box with a sailing ship on it, he bought it at the flea market for a quarter – and he put his cigarette butts in that box. He was going to quit, he was. Everything’s still there in our room. His dance shoes. His boots. He always wiped his boots with mink oil. He didn’t mind loading the dishwasher, but he didn’t like unloading it. Isn’t that funny?” She wept. She took her hand back. She hugged herself as if she were cold and curled up like a fist. She said, “I don’t mean funny.”
“I know,” Benny said. He drank from his g & t and pursed his lips. “It’s the shits.”