“The armed services people we dealt with were the same kind of skeptical,” I said, pointing to the door as if Emii and Duncan-Michaels were standing in the hall. “But you steer into the skid. You put images of suffragettes, Rosa Parks, Jo Hogan, and yeah, you put the image of Brandy Squires testifying before Congress.”
The ad’s music and voice-over swelled pleasantly in memory. Progress has never been easy. That’s why the story of history is the story of women who fought. For their rights, for their families, for their humanity, for their country.
“If you’re the army, you’re not admitting guilt, you’re not admitting to the cover-up. You’re saying, Yeah, ladies, we’re with you. And by the way, we’re looking for tough-as-nails bitches to go fight for our freedom around the world.”
Wimpel swirled his drink. Moisture beaded on the glass, and a drop broke free and fell to the carpet.
“So what’s the equivalent with A Fierce Blue Fire?”
“First, attack Morris from the left. I assume you’ll be bringing much of this fight to the shadows? Stir up dust with her allies first. Any hard-left movement is susceptible to purity attacks. If you spend a handful of dollars creating the sense that she is not pure, that she’s ignoring queer Latinx voices or silencing frontline communities or marginalizing this group or that group, they’ll turn on her. Stoke proxies that call her a sellout doing the bidding of the nuclear industry. That’s a huge wedge in their movement. Find a way to discredit her in the eyes of her fans and turn her greatest asset into a liability.”
“Nobody can destroy a lefty movement like lefties themselves.”
“They can’t help it. They love eating their own. Next, get into her personal life, but be careful. It has to reach the public eye by accident. You can’t slime her outright, but she proudly talks about her open relationship. There are opportunities in that.”
He nodded. “No, I know, but that’s been tough. She’s been bulletproof. You and I should stay away from talking about this, but whatever can be dredged up about her allies in Congress will be dredged. Although,” he smirked, “from what I hear, Joy LaFray has some serious kompromat lying around, and her ego won’t let her not put the name LaFray on this bill…”
“Well, all of that takes a back seat to the most vital element anyway.”
“Which is?”
“The word ‘terrorism’ is the most powerful marketing tool of the twenty-first century. It doesn’t matter that Morris keeps disavowing these people blowing up oil pipelines and gas pads, you have to make her do it again and again and again every time she’s near a microphone. See if she can swim with that shackle on her ankle.”
“You have a lot of swagger.”
I gave one shoulder a twitch of an uncaring shrug. “Maybe. Female recruitment reached record levels by the time I was done with the Pentagon’s ad campaign. But who knows?”
I liked drunk bragging. I didn’t do it enough when I was sober. The sounds of New York traffic penetrated the hotel walls and called to mind a river of whispers. “Dim lights.” The room responded by lowering the lights. I reclined, arching my back to stretch. “Was that too cheesy, too forward, or both?”
He twisted his wedding ring. “You should know my wife and I are separated right now.”
“I don’t really care about that.” And I didn’t. “We’re all adults.”
He let out a troubled, excited breath and set the drink on the desk. As he walked over, I slid my hands up my skirt and pulled my underwear off. I put one foot on his chest and the other on his belt and guided him down to his knees. We didn’t fall asleep until dawn, and I had to reschedule my flight.
My father never went to the doctor; he distrusted the entire profession. It was an untreated kidney infection, a pain in his lower back he refused to believe was anything, which in turn led to sepsis. By the time I got to the hospital in Anamosa, he was in a coma, unresponsive to antibiotics. And then gone. Allie and her husband, Burt, were already there, Burt doing his doctor routine, nodding gravely and knowingly at the diagnoses of the brothers of his medical fraternity.
My dad had been allergic to cats. Even though we had dogs my entire childhood, only once, when I was ten, did he allow me to adopt a stray mama cat. “As long as she’s an outdoor cat,” he’d said. I found her later under the chicken coop where she’d given birth to about ten kittens. For the two weeks we had all of them, I thought life couldn’t get any better. Then he made me give away all but one, and I told him I’d never forgive him. Each night I sat sullen and refused to speak to him. He just ate his dinner. A few days into this act, he called me into the kitchen.
“Jackie-O!” I thought about ignoring him but there was too much excitement in his voice. He hoisted me up to the kitchen window above the sink. “Look at this.” Outside in the mist, there was a doe no bigger than a Labrador sniffing around my new kitten, who I’d named Britney. Britney batted her paws around the young doe’s face, and the doe seemed to love it. We watched them circle each other in a bed of ocher leaves. Finally, Britney’s mama cat came darting out from under the house, and the doe took off, back to her own mother, galloping through our ghostly autumn field.
“That was something, huh?” said my dad. “I couldn’t tell if Britney wanted to be a deer or the deer was hoping to become a kitten.” He had a mole where the bridge of his nose met the bone of his eye socket. He called it “Little Mike” and it looked like a head of broccoli in Mom’s garden.
“Maybe a little of both,” I said, and I knew our fight was over when he laughed at this. I loved when he laughed. He didn’t do it very often, and, I liked to think, only at my quips. The sound made me love him.
When I returned to Amber that Friday evening, I found my mom sitting in the living room with the family photo albums spread on the coffee table in front of her. They ran from my parents’ wedding all the way to Allie’s graduation and then abruptly stopped, demarcating the cultural moment when most photography moved online. There were fast-food bags crumpled around the room. I’d never before known my mother to eat fast food.
“She’s depressed,” Allie said when I’d called her on the drive. “She needs people around.”
“Aren’t you and Burt the ones who live in the state?” I shot back. “It’s a four-hour drive for me, and you know, I sort of have a career I’d like to not toilet.”
“Jackie. I’m so sick of that argument. You know how much time I spend going up there? I’m doing it all. Who arranged everything for the funeral and the will?”
She was right, and she also wasn’t. Erik was as absent as he could manage. He’d flown back for the funeral and once more to stay with Mom for a weekend, but it was the most he’d been home in three years. Since Dad’s death, Mom wouldn’t shop for herself. She wouldn’t see a doctor. She wouldn’t leave the house except for church, which she was attending four or five days a week.
I regarded Mom now. She’d been gaining weight for a few years, becoming more sedentary with each passing trauma. She had a swollen look to her eyes and the skin of her face was pale and loose. She moved like every step shot daggers into her hip. I asked if maybe she’d like to get back to gardening this summer.
She hummed and watched a fly trapped between the windowpane and the screen. “I suppose I will. I’ll have to go get some supplies. Haven’t given much thought to it since Daddy got sick.”
She was in the habit of repeating stories I obviously knew. The fly buzzed its panic.
“Why don’t we go now?” I suggested. “The Walmart will still be open.”