Oh, what was she doing here?
“What you having a conversation with your own self back there about, Comrade Gabi?” Cinque sounded mellow enough. He tilted back a pint bottle of blackberry brandy as he drove, his left hand laid atop the steering wheel.
She responded forthrightly. “I was just thinking it was funny, how we’ve come so far together in such a short time. This is never what I’d have imagined for myself just a year ago, but here we are.”
“Funny?”
Cinque still sounded even-toned, but in Gelina’s quick response Gabi read that she’d provoked him somehow:
“I think she means it like we came together so well that it’s hard to believe it’s only been, what, eight months?”
“Well, that’s not ‘funny.’ That’s a vision. On behalf the People.”
“I don’t mean ha-ha funny—”
“Watch you say, bitch. Enough trouble without you calling the SLA funny. You be the only thing funny here. Not funny we separated from our comrades, who may’ve fallen into enemy hands. Not funny we out in the open right now. Damn.”
“I don’t think she meant it that way, Cin.” But Cinque shook Gelina’s hand off his right arm, raising the pint bottle to his mouth.
“Then she ought to watch she says.”
Gabi sighed; she was done talking. She was very tired anyway. Leaning her head against the cold window, she looked out at the dark houses they passed. Inside each was a blossom of life as complex as a flower, beautiful and strange and triumphant for as long as it continued. Her father had taught her that anyone else’s life was unimaginable, that you needed patience, that it was the utmost arrogance to draw assumptions from the disheveled flesh that encased the spirit. Flowers she had taught herself about, drawing and painting them in compulsive detail from a bee’s-eye view, in order to learn something about beauty’s working parts. She looked at Cin, recalling “A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another,” the divine injunction that had brought her family first to Africa, and then to South America. What she’d seen there had roused the gentleness in her. She was the most surprised of anyone to find herself holding a gun in her hands. She imagined herself explaining her life to her father, sitting opposite him before a fireplace, describing how similar her work was to his. They each had mugs full of some hot comfort, and her father nodded, nodded, though his eyes displayed the faltering of his understanding. Gabi slept.
ANGELA DEANGELIS ATWOOD — General Gelina
Make memory into a postcard and mail it off and it doesn’t come back to get you.
Postcard one shows a high ranch house in North Haledon, NJ. A picture window to one side of the front door looks out on the house’s twin, opposite. A pair of knotted-together sneakers swings from the power line overhead: the modern-day equivalent of heads on pikes, a form of expression imported from the nightmare crater of Paterson, scant blocks distant. But it loses something in translation. Here it signals boyish exuberance, the Norman Rockwell touch.
Today the driveway is full of cars. There are balloons taped to the English plane tree that shades the front yard. A hand-printed sign that says “Denise & Barry,” with two entwined hearts, is stapled to the trunk. More hand-printed signs, arrows, guide arrivals around the house to the backyard, from which music can be heard, the sound of a Fender Rhodes keyboard that bangs out “Happy Together” from the muzzy depths of its sonic register.
It’s Angel’s sister’s wedding. Angel’s home from the land of the nuts. You seen Angel? What a mouth she’s got on her. Beautiful wedding, yeah, but so what’s up with Angel?
Gelina is stewing in her polyester floral sheath, counting the covered dishes being brought out from the kitchen, where the caterer is working, and laid on the white tablecloths clamped to the three long folding tables near the pool. She catches one of the waiters staring at her unshaved legs, and she gives him the finger.
She’s got a real fuckin attitude today.
You know how many people all this shit could feed? She gestures toward the table, laden with trays and tureens and platters and chaf ing dishes abubble over cans of flaming Sterno. You know how many people are dying so you can eat this shit? Gestures with a lit cigarette, ash tumbling into some macaroni salad. Plus she’s just a little pissed off she’s not maid of honor.
Take it easy, Angel.
That’s Angela.
Her sister: Cries. Cries and cries, how could you?
Her father: You know this is your sister’s day, blah blah blah.
Her sister’s privileged status notwithstanding, Gelina has no intention of just silently taking it. Soon she and her father are toe to toe, arguing intensely. There is a dusky blush to his face as he attempts to preserve decorum. The last time most of these people, the guests, were together was at her mother’s wake. They look on through their crushed recollection of the saintly young daughter in mourning. She ruins the day.
You’ve ruined my special day, says Denise.
How dare you lecture me … as long as you’re in my house … She doesn’t need to hear the end of a single one of these sentences.
The next day she calls Pan Am to change her ticket. She takes a New Jersey Transit bus to the airport and pointedly stuffs the bridesmaid’s dress in the garbage as she walks to the corner.
Postcard two shows the Great Electric Underground. A fake “mod” cocktail lounge on the ground floor of the B of A building, a place for horny businessmen and their pet toupees. About the hippest spot you’ll ever find in a building named after a huge commercial bank. A month after participating in the assassination of the Oakland superintendent of schools, Gelina is finally ready to quit her day job.
Susan Rorvik, a friend she met while in the cast of a Company Theater production of Hedda Gabler, is quitting with her. She was Thea, Susan Hedda. They both are sick of being exploited in order to earn money, and neither of them is willing any longer to work for “agents of the ruling class,” as their five-page parting letter describes their employers, much less in the revealing dresses that accompany the job’s compulsory flirtatiousness. They quit flamboyantly, dropping copies of the letter on the tables of their customers. Who look up in sleepy confusion, seeking the source of these unwanted gifts. Whatzis? Before leaving, Gelina turns around to survey the room. A bunch of affluent white men working on an afternoon buzz amid the weekday torpor of the gray holiday season. Composed. Serene, even. She raises a fist.
“Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the People!”
Hey—’sChristmastime. Take it easy. A self-congratulatory laugh circulates softly throughout the carpeted room, like a shared secret, or the punch line to a dirty joke at her expense.
She and Susan send copies of the letter to KPFA and to the Bay Guardian. The one never airs it and the other never prints it. Angela moves in with her friends from Indiana, Drew and Diane Shepard, to cut costs and prepare for life underground. She stays in their closet-size spare bedroom, listening every night as they fight. She and Susan fall out of touch.
Cin was funny today, Gelina thought. She watched him, wondering what could be bothering him, as he sort of pitched and yawed behind the steering wheel, peering out into the night as if they were surrounded by a thick fog, turning to see that the other van still followed them, sighing and muttering inaudibly to himself. She sensed an approaching decision, a big one, judging from his behavior. Actually, she’d spent most of her life thinking about what could be bothering men, what it was that would please them. She wanted to hate her father, but as much as she tried to politicize all the “discoveries” she’d made about her banal upbringing, he was just another dumb daddy aching for the little girl he’d loved. The agitator’s role didn’t come naturally. She was a born conciliator, felt the memory of her sister’s wedding as a bayonet.