Yolanda opens a beer. “Once I dreamed that a robot was walking down the street. So I jump onto his back and try to tear his nose off. I’m screaming how I want it for myself. Then suddenly I’m like not on his back, so I break into this building to get away. The robot tries to come in after me, and I look and now there’s this old lady hanging on, a grandma really, and I run up the stairs and there’s this girl, she’s really high, and she’s carrying a silver tray of grapes.”
“I dreamed I was walking in the rain,” says Susan. “I meet a nun, and I ask her why I can’t forget my ex-boyfriend. She says I have to be more romantic. Then she’s like gone. So I keep going and I hear this whimpering sound. And there’s this duckling crying, trying to get out of the mud. It’s black with soot and soaking wet. I pick it up, and I’m carrying it home, and when I get there it’s turned into a golden retriever puppy.”
Joan says, “I’m taking a bath with a strange lady. I see a oven. There’s a strange feeling. The lady goes, ‘Dissatisfaction is the partner of loss.’”
“That’s just goofy,” says Tania.
“I’m in a church with a doctor. He says, ‘Serenity is the partner of confusion.’ I see a washing machine. I feel ashamed.”
“Don’t make fun.”
“Who’s making fun?” Joan is making notes on a sheet of paper headed “OUR BODIES: WE’VE NEVER REALLY OWNED THEM.” She wears a slight smirk.
Joan’s been edgy lately, moody. Tania often senses that she’s bullshitting them, playing up the Far Eastern angle, toying with whatever stereotypifying residue may linger here. It has to be boring. At each stage in the discussion, as they struggle toward their feminist critique, they literally turn to her, as if she were the natural arbiter of how oppressed they are.
But it isn’t just that. Everything changed after Myrna. Joan’s ragged patience finally wore out, and she announced that she was ready to take her chances, to return to the East Coast, free of them all. Tania begged her to come to San Francisco.
“Aren’t you cured yet?” Joan had asked, with annoyance. But in the end she came.
Actually, Tania feels as restless as Joan: bored with the SLA, eager to leave, troubled by Myrna Opsahl’s murder, anxious about getting caught. The standard gamut. But she doesn’t have a lot of options. The SLA’s talent for getting attention is coming back to haunt them. Each month brings a new opportunity for the press to resuscitate the story of her celebrated absence, brings renewed calls for the FBI to solve the case, and she has to lay low.
Everything changed. She wants to say, if only she’d known — but the guns had always been there; they’d fetishized them, carried them, fired them, spoken of their mystical, liberating power. You aim one at somebody, you better intend to fire it at him. What other possible use could a gun have? Teko and Yolanda didn’t see it that way. Actually, they didn’t see it any way at all. At first, Teko had exulted in the murder, but he soon realized that his wife was not in an exultant mood. It became a closed subject, occulted, taboo. They moved to San Francisco to form the women’s collective. That’s the offi — cial reason. The money that funded this undertaking might as well have materialized out of thin air.
Also, to commence a bombing campaign. Teko insists. No more fucking around! They must have action! Let Yolanda, Tania, Susan, and Joan puzzle out the solution to anatomical supremacy, build their little ship in a bottle, but Teko’s still General Field Marshal.
Though some things have changed. The feminism thing may be total bullshit in theory, but in practice Teko hasn’t tried to hurt Tania in months.
She’d taken a leaf from Joan’s book: pointed a.38 at his head one day when he raised a fist to her and threatened to pop him in the skull. They were alone together, and she bore the full weight of his pedantry. It had been the usual argument. Tania why did you leave the dishes in the sink. Tania what is this mess here. Tania didn’t I tell you to. Her response — insolent contempt — was well within the boundaries they’d established for dealing with each other after the incident in the creamery, but for some reason she managed that day to infuriate him and he’d grabbed a belt from where it was hanging over the back of a chair and made for her. And automatically, without a single moment’s deliberation that she could trace afterward, she lifted her revolver out of her purse and aimed it at his head. He froze, an astonished expression on his face, the belt in his hand swinging limply.
“Better put that down now,” he said.
She just smiled at him.
“I mean it, Tania. That’s an order.”
“Kiss my cunt, Adolf.”
“You couldn’t kill me. What’ll you tell the others?”
“You’ll never know, will you?”
He breathed heavily, looked irate — then backed off. It felt good.
She thinks she’d like to try Boston. Joan’s mentioned it, repeatedly, as the place she’s most likely to go, and Tania would be happy to accompany her.
She talks to Roger; she holds his hand. She wants to plant a seed, put him where he can see the change that’s coming. She’s familiar enough with the routine; she’s always been pretty direct when it comes to breaking up with a boy. But she feels a little guilty in this case: She wants to get rid of him, but she wants to keep him in reserve too. He’s getting all funny over her though. Brings her little gifts, arrives bearing flowers or whatever wearing his paint-spattered overalls. Flecks of paint in his hair, his eyelashes. In Sacramento it was sweet; he was the bright spot to her days in that lonely burg. Here, home, he’s just another person looking to her to heat up the soup.
Boston. She has a stash of two thousand dollars wrapped in aluminum foil in the freezer. She has a stolen BankAmericard and a valid California driver’s license. Anywhere she wants, she can go. For now, that’s enough.
WHEN YOUR BROTHER CONTACTS law enforcement authorities and suggests to them that you have been involved in the commission of a federal crime, elect to smoke a joint.
When your father, in a near — apopleptic rage, begins breaking the camera equipment of hardworking members of the press, though not enough of it to prevent the nationally syndicated appearance of a photograph of the old man, wearing a torn pair of cutoff shorts and an old oxford shirt with holes in the armpits, attacking a tiny woman reporter, combine the over — the— counter analgesic of your choice with the sort of opiate informally offered for sale on a nearby street corner.
When your mother’s blood pressure consistently rises to levels at which her physician feels it prudent to utter diagnoses like “You really should be dead,” prior to placing her on a medication that has hair sprouting from her chest and has her darting through her home at 11 p.m. vacuuming, washing, and waxing the floors, drink a bottle of fortified wine and gently rest your head on a curbstone. (What’s the word? Thunderbird! How’s it sold? Good and cold! What’s the jive? Bird’s alive! What’s the price? Thirty twice!)
When your wife refuses to have intercourse with you, to touch your penis, to let you stroke her breasts, to kiss you on the mouth, to put her arms around you, to meet your eyes when she speaks to you, to speak to you at all unless absolutely necessary, to be in the same room with you except when socially requisite, to spend time in the same state with you, the oft — feared occasion has arrived for you to publish a depraved novena to St. Jayne Mansfield in the back pages of a magazine and then hire a scantily clad woman found walking in the vicinity of Taylor and Pine streets to serve as a “surrogate.”