So Angela became General Gelina, and Susan got herself another job.
“Well,” Uncle Jerry is saying, “lots of interesting events unfold when somebody gets wind of a friend’s demise. Maybe particularly if they feel like they were standing on the sidelines? Look at the death of Patroclus. Just don’t let your wrath get the better of you.”
“All I did was I offered moral support. A way of publicly stating, Do we wait till the police kill the rest of them or do we provide principled assistance now?”
“Principled assistance.” He utters the phrase as if he were pronouncing the name of a particularly interesting little wine.
Here comes Mom again.
“Susan, would you help me in the kitchen for a sec?”
On the long butcher-block island are stacks of dirty plates and glasses, the remains of a glazed ham on a platter, and half-empty serving dishes of macaroni salad, coleslaw, and string bean, onion, and bacon casserole.
“What are you two talking so intently about now?”
“Mom, he’s doing the talking. You said it yourself, he’s a little drunk.”
“He’s a big drunk. But that’s beside the point. He’s just trying to amuse himself.”
“So?”
“I don’t want him amusing himself at our expense. Everybody here thinks they know all about you, thanks to your star turn on the six o’clock news. Whatever you do, don’t give him any ammunition.” She lifts the lid of a covered dish and puts her cigarette out in something with bright paprika sprinkled over it. Aunt Nancy comes in with her granddaughter, who is crying.
“I think what we need is a Band-Aid,” she says.
“And then how about some chocolate ice cream?” asks Rose, bending and placing her hands on her knees to address the child.
Where are my grandchildren?
Outside, her father calls her over. “You eat?”
“Not yet, Dad.”
“Lose any more weight, I’ll have to give you a brick to carry, keep you from blowing away.”
Actually, Susan is feeling bloated; her period has been crawling in her direction for like two weeks, it feels like. But she accepts a plate from her father and holds it out for him to pile chicken and ribs on it. A cousin walks by, holding a weeping two-year-old awkwardly in her arms, saying, “No no no no no no.” The kids are dropping like flies. The strap of the cousin’s pocketbook slips off her shoulder, and her father rushes to help.
Fresh drink in Uncle Jerry’s hand.
“Have to admit, when you were growing up I never pegged you as the type who’d go in for radicalism. But then, I bet you never thought your filthy rich uncle in Shallow Alto would turn out to be an old lefty. Thing is, usually what you figure you know about someone is what the person decides you ought to know. But you’d be familiar with that.”
“Me?”
“Not you personally, necessarily. Your generation. The ones who distill entire schools of philosophy into what you can fit on a T-shirt or a bumper sticker. I see them whizzing around here. Sloganeering. One flat smart-ass sentence fragment, then another, and another, and another.”
Here we go. Not only does he want to put on his old Mao jacket and get into the act, but the real problem is with her generation.
“No depth, no meaning. A pretty kind of symmetry. Nincompoop aphorisms, zipping past on the bumper of an old beater, telling me everything they figure I need to know about them and about everything else for all time. Or until they junk the car.”
“Well hey. Dad there is wearing a WIN button.” She gestures behind her.
“He is?” Uncle Jerry rears back and laughs. “My God. Well, your father has always wanted to do his part, God love him. I’m fairly certain Howard wouldn’t try to foist an unwelcome point of view on anybody. Of course all that damned button is going to get him is a hole in his lapel.”
What it must have been like growing up with this sententious prick. Her father’s told her tales of an awkward and myopic boy, not nearly as popular as the athletic younger brother who served good-naturedly as a friend pimp, lay analyst, and punching bag.
“Because the WIN button has a purely talismanic function. It’s a direct conduit to, communion with, the wishful thinking, the cerebral processes of, the power elite. That’s why there’s only one damned word on it, Christ’s sake. They’d like for us to know that they too want inflation to disappear. A bolt from Olympus. After ten years of Vietnam, at last here’s an enemy we all can root against.”
“I don’t actually think about it all that much.”
“Personally I’d be disappointed if you did. Pocketbook issues are for people like your father and me, who supposedly remember when everything was hunky-dory. Yes, when we were growing up, all the mothers would wheel us around in our carriages, going from the butcher to the baker and so on and exclaiming to one another the whole time, ‘My goodness! Everything costs exactly the right amount!’”
At this Susan laughs, and Jerry takes a slug of his drink and then rattles the ice cubes in his glass.
“Besides,” he continues, “you have a different enemy to root against.”
“Who?”
“People like your dad and me. Look at this place. What do I represent, strictly objectively? Funny thing, you think you know all about the sort of man who owns a place like this. If you really knew about it, you’d blow the whole town up tomorrow.”
One day, after Angela had disappeared, an FBI agent came to Susan’s apartment to talk to her. She spoke to him long enough to let him know what she thought of him and then shut the door, vaguely aware that in her attempt to sound confident she had come off sounding more like a bratty kid. She stood by the door for ten minutes, convinced the knock would come again. But when she worked up the courage to open the door, no one waited on the threshold.
In February she and Jeff were watching Newsroom one evening when Angela was identified as a member of the group that had taken an heiress from her off-campus apartment, the SLA. Susan was a little surprised to hear it. She hated those bastards, not just for the stupidity of the Foster murder, but because they’d allowed millions to put a finger, once again, on what it was that bugged them, really pissed them off, about Berkeley. Why, it was a drug-saturated cesspool of free love and women’s lib and black militancy and miscegenation and homosexuality and Communist thought, that’s what. Commentators thundered away. It was the Day of the Commentator. Oh, they loved to thunder, Old Testament voices booming from under shaped haircuts and poly-blend suits. Every opportunity was taken to use the past as a bludgeon, as an indictment against the present. And tourists had started coming over, coming down from the hills, from Piedmont, Walnut Creek, Orinda, straights milling around like drunks in North Beach, boorish and judgmental, snapping photographs of houses and storefronts and making everybody uptight.