Then things started to get worse. They stepped up the bombing. Tried to burn off the jungle, too. And the pictures… Dammit, I wish I could forget the one of that little girl running down the road with no clothes on screaming in pain. Sometimes at night, it gets messed up in my mind with that thing from Kent, with the girl kneeling and crying over that boy’s body. Damn things leap out at you from the newspaper or the news, but I can’t just stick my head in the sand.
Maybe the kids… maybe this McGovern… I’ve been under attack, and I tell you, there comes a time when you just want it to stop. Never mind what it costs you. You’ve already paid enough. I think the whole country’s reached that point, and so McGovern’s moving way up in the polls.
ELECTION DAY STARTED out really well. The day before, letters had come from Barry. One for me. One for his mother. And even one for Stephanie. I suppose she’d told him she was going to be home, and APO delivery to the Embassy in Saigon is pretty regular. We all sort of went off by ourselves to read our letters. Then Margaret and I traded. I hoped Stephanie would offer to show us hers, too, but she didn’t. So we didn’t push.
You don’t push, not if you want your kids to trust you. Besides, my son and daughter have always had something special between them. He’s a good foot taller than she is, but she always looked out for her “baby brother” in school. He never minded that she was the bright one, the leader. Not till he decided not to go to college, and he overheard one of the family saying that Stephanie should have been the boy. So our Bear joined up, not waiting for the draft or anything. I expected Stephanie to throw a fit—Margaret certainly did, but all my girl said was, “He needs to win at something of his own.”
I wouldn’t have expected her to understand what that means to a boy. Maybe she’s growing up.
But it’s still all I can do to keep a decent tongue in my head toward my brother-in-law with the big fat mouth.
Election Day, it’s a family tradition that everyone comes over to watch the returns on TV. There were going to be some hot words over the cold cuts, if things ran true to speed. And I couldn’t see Steff sitting in the kitchen putting things on trays and talking girl talk with her aunts. Steff calls that sort of thing sexist. That’s a new word she’s got. Don’t see why it bothers her. It’s not like sometimes the women aren’t talking the most interesting things.
For a while, I really thought we were going to make it through the evening without a fight. Stephanie came in, all rosy-faced and glowing from voting, then marching outside the poll all day. She’d left her protest signs in the garage, and she was wearing one of the good skirts and coats she took to school. When everyone said so, she laughed and went up to change into a workshirt and jeans.
“But you looked so pretty, just like a real college girl,” her aunt told her.
“That was just window dressing,” Stephanie said. “Can I help set the food out now? I’m famished.”
She’d wolfed down about half a corned beef sandwich when the phone rang, and she flew up the stairs. “You’re kidding. Massachusetts already? Oh wow! How’s it look for Pennsylvania? I’m telling you, I think we’re going to be lucky here, but I’m worried about the South…”
“You want another beer, Ron?” I asked my brother-in-law, who was turning red, pretending like he had swallowed something the wrong way and would choke if he didn’t drink real fast. Personally, I think he voted for Wallace in the last election, but you can’t pry the truth out of him about that with a crowbar.
We settled down to watch TV. Margaret and my sister Nance turned on the portable in the kitchen. I kind of hoped Stephanie would go in there, but she helped clear the table, then came in and sat beside me.
You could have knocked me over with a feather. Maybe the kids were right and people were sick of the bombings, the deaths, the feeling that Vietnam was going to hang around our necks till we choked on it. But state after state went to McGovern… “There goes Ohio! Straight on!” Stephanie shouted, raising a fist.
I don’t know when all hell broke loose. One moment we were sitting watching John Chancellor cut to President Nixon’s headquarters (and my daughter was doing this routine, like a Chatty Cathy doll, about Tri-cia Nixon). The next moment, she’d jumped up and was stamping one foot as she glared at her uncle.
“How dare you use that word?” she was saying to Ron, my brother-in-law. “They’re not gooks. They’re Asians. And it’s their country, not ours, but we’re destroying it for them. We’ve turned the kids into fugitives, the women into bar girls… and they all had fathers, too, till we killed them! What kind of a racist pig…”
“Who you calling a racist, little Miss Steff & Nonsense?” asked Ron. By then, he’d probably had at least two beers too many and way too many of my daughter’s yells of “straight on.” “Why, when I was in the war, there was this Nee-grow sergeant…”
“It’s ‘black’!” she snapped. “You call them black! How can you expect me to stay in the same house as this…”
She was out of the living room, and the front door slammed behind her before I could stop her.
“That little girl of yours is out of control,” Ron told me. “That’s what you get, sending her off to that snob school. OSU wasn’t good enough, oh no. So what happens? She meets a bunch of radicals there and picks up all sorts of crazy ideas. Tell you, Joey, you better put a leash on that kid, or she’ll get into real trouble.”
I got up, and he shut up. Margaret came in from the kitchen. I shook my head at her: everything under control. I wanted to get a jacket or something. Stephanie had run out without her coat, and the evening was chilly.
“I’d teach her a good lesson, that’s what I’d do,” said Ron.
Damn! Hadn’t I warned her, “I know you think it’s funny calling your uncle Ronnie the Racist. But one of these days, it’s going to slip out, and then there’ll be hell to pay.” But she’d said what I should have said. And that made me ashamed.
“She shouldn’t have been rude to you,” I said. “I’m going to tell her that. But you know how she feels about words like that. I don’t much like them either. Besides, this is her house, too.”
Ron was grumbling behind my back like an approaching thunderstorm, when I went into the front hall, took out a jacket from the closet, and went outside. Steffie was on the stoop, her face pressed against the cold brick. I put the jacket over her and closed my hands on hers. They were trembling. “Don’t rub your face against the brick, baby. You could cut yourself.”
She turned around and hugged me. I could feel she was crying with anger and trying hard not to. “I’m not going in there and apologizing,” she told me.
“Not even for me?” I coaxed her. There’d been a time she’d do anything in the world for her old dad.
She tried to laugh and cry together, and sounded like the way she used to gurgle when she was a baby.
“I’ll promise not to start any fights,” she said. “But I won’t promise to keep quiet if…”
“I told him you shouldn’t have been rude to an elder and a guest…”
She hissed like the teenager she wasn’t. Not anymore.
“I also told him this was your house and you had a right to have your wishes respected, too. Now, will you come in and behave like a lady?”
“It’s woman, Daddy,” she told me.
I hugged her. “You know what I mean. Lady or woman, you’re still my little girl. You’re supposed to be for peace. Can you try to keep it in your own home?”