‘I am not a squirt! Addie! Addie! Make him put it back! I have a right!’
Becca had only recently learned about rights. Negroes had a right to sit in restaurants with the white people! DC was having a major court case about segregation, it was on the TV news, a debate which she had followed as best she could. It was simple really, just a question of what was right and what was wrong. A matter of brown and white, Addie called it. Becca liked that.
Jake didn’t care. It was just fine with him, people eating what they liked where they liked, same as he did. But he wasn’t interested. He already had rights. He was bigger, and older. And a boy! He deserved more territory than Becca. He shifted his hip and pushed the stick slightly further towards her side.
In his very occasional spare time, Ben had helped the ACLU pursue the test case against Thompson’s Restaurant, a modest segregated establishment close to the White House. One Saturday he and Addie had taken the kids on a moral education trip to see the Negro student protesters, with their signs and angry faces, knowing themselves in the vanguard of a great and just cause. It was a bit frightening for the children, all that chanting and sitting down in front of the door. It wasn’t the sort of place they would eat themselves, though that didn’t matter. Becca was delighted by it all, everybody should be able to eat together, whenever they wanted. She was pleased when she found that the Supreme Court agreed with her. Negroes have rights! The idea made her feel morally replete. She was promiscuously keen on rights, especially as they applied to her.
In the car, Addie wouldn’t even turn round. Took a deep drag of her cigarette, her window only partially open, exhaled with a weary, prolonged sigh, the fug deepening.
‘What’d I tell you two! Button it!’
It was a script as predictably fraught as a play by Eugene O’Neill. She kept drifting off, shaking herself as her head slumped, kept awake by the purity of her spirit of opposition. This wasn’t what she’d wanted, what she’d planned for, there was nothing sustaining in it. Next to her Ben studied the unravelling road intently. She felt obscurely jealous as he did so, his eyes unwavering as if to avoid looking at her. He rarely did, these days, hardly noticed her at all.
When they’d met at Penn in the thirties, she doing her MA in Social Work, Ben at law school, they had bonded over what looked like common causes. They had passionate sympathy for the poor and the dispossessed, went on marches, picketed here and demonstrated there, made public avowal that things could change for the better, as they were palpably changing for the better in Russia. But it didn’t take her long to discover that their similarities were actually a form of differentness.
Ben had read widely on leftist subjects, could quote Marx and refer to Engels, was fascinated by the unwieldy super-structures that supported his new beliefs. But Addie, though mildly conversant with the terminology, eventually found she didn’t give a damn about all that verbiage, those fatuous, meaningless categories, all those beardy pontificating men. To generalise is to be an idiot, she’d maintain.
Ben counter-attacked, it was like a war between them. ‘You can’t run a state on the basis of fine particularities: you need politics, and laws, and a moral creed. You need ideas!’
Ideas? Phooey. What Addie wanted and needed was not the people, but people: breathing, suffering, in need of succour. The notion of the workers or the proletariat – the masses – only produced a foggy blob in her mind, whereas she could focus perfectly on a pregnant teenager, an alcoholic or drug addict, a family in need, a child who was being abused or neglected. To care about the people, you take care of people.
While Ben was studying his boring torts (whatever they were), Addie was ensconced in the relentlessly modern, Freudian-based School of Social Work, taking courses that touched her heart, real topics about real people. In Contemporary Love and Marriage, they did a case study on the relationship of D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Von Richthofen, which was a remarkable inclusion in the syllabus, given that he had only died a few years earlier.
‘See,’ the students were told, ‘this is what a working, highly passionate relationship can be,’ and by implication should be. Lawrence became a hero to this generation of young women: if only Billy or Joe, or indeed Ben, was burning with such an inward flame! If only Edna or Sheila, or indeed Addie, could respond to that flame, ignite, passionately embrace life in every manner and fashion. Be prompted by the loins, the blood, the bowels – any number of inward bits, the heart even, but not the head! They were bad, heads.
She read Lawrence’s poetry to Ben, in bed. Her favourite of his books was Look! We Have Come Through, which celebrates Lawrence and Frieda’s first years together. Addie would read with appropriate intensity the opening line of ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’: ‘Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!’
‘I feel like that sometimes, after I eat too many beans,’ he said.
She put down the book and turned her back. Passion was no laughing matter.
‘Anyway,’ he said, intending to provoke this disciple of the wrong kind of beardy prophet, ‘they may have come through, but I don’t see why I have to look.’
Yet it had been a wonderful period of a few years, in the sunny climes of passionate engagement. And then the rains came, and everything was washed away. The rains were first called Jacob and then Rebecca, like the names of those hurricanes that sweep up the East Coast, buffeting. The end of sleep, and peace, and happiness. That dopey DHL never knew fatherhood, even second-hand, or he could never have talked such tripe. Ben escaped every morning, he wasn’t an inmate, just a visitor. She thought, Well, that was us, wasn’t it, fellow travellers, and look at us now!
No social work jobs for the foreseeable future. Poppa Maurice helped send the children to private school – he regularly supplied brown paper bags stuffed with a surprising amount of money, held together with rubber bands, stacked randomly, ones, fives, tens, twenties, even some fifties, as if released from a cash register at the end of a working day, several working days. But it wasn’t enough to pay everyday expenses, it was extra. And so she took a part-time job, when Jake was at school and Becca in nursery, selling The World Book Encyclopaedia door-to-door.
She was bright and engaging and actually believed in her product, but her desperation was etched in heavy lines; people wanted to get away from her, sales were few.
‘If I had a soul,’ she said to Ben after a wasted four hours patrolling the streets of the neighbourhood, ‘this would have killed it.’
He was sympathetic. He would have hated that job, couldn’t have done it for a second. Please, Missus, may I have just a moment of your time? I have an offer that will transform the lives of you and your children . . .
‘Thank God for that,’ he said.
‘Not at all, this is worse. What I do have is a self, and it’s killed that instead.’
It was true. She didn’t remember who she’d been, in those hopeful spirited sexy days, could hardly recognise the person she now was, save for the clear recognition that she didn’t like her.
And as for her world, she detested it. It was intolerably sylvan in Alexandria, promiscuously treed and bushed, but it was just across the Potomac from DC and the smells wafted across the river. One Sunday, as they were crossing the bridge on the way to an enlightening children’s afternoon at the Smithsonian, Ben had looked down at the brown sluggish waters and remarked how polluted the river was.
‘Yeah!’ said Becca. ‘You can even see the pollute!’
You could see it in DC, too. The city landscape was polluted. Shit steamed in the streets. Shits walked the streets (they were called Republicans) and the faecal current swept across America, over the cities and the plains, polluted the rivers and the lakes, crossed the Rockies, stinking and malign. Everyone breathed it, everyone was infected. It was almost impossible to escape.
Ben had a variety of car activities for diverting the children, to get their minds off their struggle for dominance. There was the licence plate game,