Turned out one of the trucks was taking extra furnishings directly to a storage facility in San Mateo. The new apartment on Nob Hill couldn’t hold what the house had.
The canopy was faded and weather-beaten, torn and repaired in places. The grass beneath it had died. Some had been there under it almost every day. Theirs was the subtle side of the story. A family in shock. A family coming to terms. A family moving on. They stood, they ate sandwiches. After Lydia had complained about the driveway’s being full each day, they’d parked their cars and vans at the side of the road below, at the slight risk of bodily injury, not to mention parking tickets. Their ranks thinned over time, but some stayed. When the daily buffet stopped appearing, they formed groups and began breaking for lunch. After Inge and Maria stopped setting out the urn, they took turns riding down the hill to Burlingame for cof — fee each afternoon. Under the canopy an etiquette evolved. A pecking order. They dropped their cigarette butts into a standing ashtray Hernando provided that looked as if it had been looted from an of — fice building in Mesopotamia (“Probably priceless,” went the rumor). Someone began remembering to save the brown paper bags the delicatessen packed their sandwiches and coleslaw in, and they used them to collect trash. They were scrupulous about such practices. They wanted to be good guests. They wanted so much to be the one gleaming, exemplary facet of the whole sad story.
By late afternoon it was clear that the trucks would not be loaded by the end of the workday, that despite having spent more than a year under the canopy, the press was to be deprived of the privilege of closing the door on the story. The last truck would leave, and there’d be no witness to write, “The last truckload of furniture and the accumulation of decades of privilege rolled slowly down the driveway leading from Galton Mansion today, leaving behind an empty house with more than its share of ghosts.” The day took on a elegiac cast. People said their goodbyes. Tomorrow the assignment would be over, and the greater world would once again take its measure of them.
TANIA AWAKENS ON THE sofa in the middle of the night. Light enters the apartment through the big windows overlooking the street. She gets up, feels around on the table with her fingers, finds cigarettes, though her throat is raw and the first drag tastes like yarn.
The place is on Geneva Avenue, charitably described as the ass end of town, an apartment over a dry cleaner’s with dropped ceilings, guttering fluorescent lights, and Armstrong tile covering the floors. When they moved in, they sat around groping for comparisons. Like a Lion’s Club in an ebbing industrial city? Like an abortionist’s office? It was a perfect spot for them, transient, impersonal, a place to sit in a folding chair and eat out of a Styrofoam tray, your mind somewhere else.
This is the home of the women’s collective, that perplexing splinter. Men Welcome, kind of. On the table are piled yellow pads, covered with writing, a dog-eared and marginally notated copy of The Dialectic of Sex, and pamphlets with titles like Mother Right: A New Feminist Theory, The Bitch Manifesto, and What Is the Rev — olutionary Potential of Women’s Liberation? All this literature, all these pamphlets coming from places like New York, Cambridge, Chicago, Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh?). Typed, Xeroxed, stapled, illustrated with rough line drawings, each booklet is sufficiently crude to lend it power and a labored gravity. Yea, sister! A space has been cleared away for the Royal portable with its jumpy ribbon and sticky keys.
An uncharacteristic late-spring rain drums on the windows. Tania goes to study the street below. She sees a woman walking briskly, bare-headed, staring straight ahead. She’s trailed by a man in a slicker who stops and shouts after her, then trots to get up ahead, where he turns to face her, walking backward, gesturing placatively with his hands and looking over his shoulder to avoid running into anyone. The woman keeps walking, eyes front, stepping nimbly out of the man’s way. They follow this pattern, continuing on toward the corner, where two men stand under a pool hall awning, sipping from drinks in brown paper bags. They are loudly amused, and the man in the slicker responds angrily. The woman keeps going, crosses Mission and heads up the hill on Geneva. The man in the slicker knocks the brown-bagged drink out of the hand of one of the men standing under the awning. Fists come up, the circling, the shouts, foamy liquid from the spilled container pooling on the shiny sidewalk. The other man under the awning serenely sips from his drink. The woman keeps right on going up the hill. Rainy midnight at the edge of San Francisco.
Yolanda wanted to segregate them here, get them working on something that would define them categorically and undeniably, edge them away from random destruction. But as an analysis gradually emerges, Tania finds herself unconvinced by the latest Truth. She lifts the limp sheet of paper rolled into the machine and reads the passage typed on it:
Middle class women are most positively situated, due to their education and sophistication, to see the inherent contradiction between the promises of society and what is actually offered to women, to see the extent and placement of the fault lines in our “democratic” Amerikkka beyond simple questions of racism and imperialism. Moreover, as Marcuse explains, the “prosperity” of a given society DOES NOT DIMINISH THE NECESSITY OF LIBERATING ONE’S SELF FROM IT.
In this sense FEMINISM IS THE MOST COMPLEX AND VALID ISSUE OF THE DAY for you have ONE HALF OF THE POPULATION HELD IN SUBJUGATION BY THE OTHER HALF. Though we are conscious of women’s oppression per se, we must not lack in our consciousness of most women’s class oppression!!! We CAN discuss the oppression of the black man, but NOT without addressing the shocking sexual exploitation of black women. To us, the primary issue remains male supremacy. Once this has been overcome, we can truly and comprehensively address the problems of an unjust society.
Her time in the closet, this hot air is its ultimate lesson? Everything she’s experienced over the past year stems from such social and historical “circumstances”? All the reading, the talking, the takeout; the stolen cars, the graffiti, the threats; the calisthenics, target practice, and drills; the shit-stained toilets and scummy shower stalls, the inflammatory rhetoric, the guns and bombs, the robberies, the cold-blooded homicide? This is their penance for Myrna Opsahl’s murder? Does it make her feel better about Myrna Opsahl and her motherless children to conclude that what happened was necessary in order to free them all? The passage is from an essay provisionally entitled “Women in the Vanguard: Toward a Revolutionary Theory,” but it might as well be “Why We Need to Move into Our Own Place.” In their eagerness to get out from under Teko, they have talked themselves into a new reality.
She’s been having these dreams that make her eyes snap open hours before sunup. Tonight she’s dreamed that she was standing in a kitchen talking to a Chinese man. The kitchen appeared to be that of a restaurant, with lots of pots and pans hanging overhead, chrome racks, tall worktables, etc. She and the man spoke while he cleaned and gutted fish, reaching for them and then slicing them up the length of their bellies and removing the entrails. Finally, he reached, and instead of a fish he picked up a cat. Tania protested — That’s not a fish, you can’t do that, and so forth — but the man simply held the limp and passive cat in position, looking amused. Tania averted her eyes. But when she looked again, she found that the man had been waiting for her. He slit the cat open.
Sometimes when they’re sitting here, halfheartedly hacking out an “analysis,” Tania asks the others what they think of such dreams. They readily set aside their work.