Something Red Read online

  ALSO BY JENNIFER GILMORE

  Golden Country

  SOMETHING RED

  A NOVEL

  JENNIFER GILMORE

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  Copyright © 2010 by Jennifer Gilmore

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2009040482

  ISBN 978-1-4165-7170-4

  ISBN 978-1-4165-7594-8 (ebook)

  For my parents, the Washingtonians

  As for you, fellow independent thinker of the Western Bloc, if you have something sensible to say, don’t wait. Shout it out loud right this minute. In twenty years, give or take a spring, your grandchildren will be lying in sandboxes all over the world, their ears to the ground, listening for signals from long ago.

  —Grace Paley, “Faith in the Afternoon”

  SOMETHING RED

  CHAPTER 1

  Not Everyone Carried Marbles

  August 25, 1979

  It was hot as hell and Sharon Goldstein knew everyone had to be positively sweltering out back. Her mother was especially intolerant of humidity and boastful that Los Angeles, the paradise that she and her husband had been wrested away from to come here, to Washington, did not make its inhabitants bear such humiliating conditions. (What about earthquakes, Nana? Vanessa had said yesterday, but Helen had waved her away.) It was only six o’clock and already the cicadas were screaming.

  As Sharon made her way around the kitchen, she pictured each one piling paper-thin sheets of prosciutto (well, not her father, whose newly kosher regime she refused to acknowledge) on melon wedges, and spreading runny Brie on the baguette she’d baked yesterday. Imagining her family eating in the yard bordered by the lit tiki lights pleased her. More, she had to admit, than actually sitting there with them.

  The neighborhood sounds of skateboards scraping asphalt and kids playing kick-the-can drifted in through the open doors, and she could see the Farrell girls across the street waving their thin arms in the air so the gnats would go to the highest point, far away from their tanned, freckled faces. As Sharon diced cucumbers and apples for her gazpacho—what made hers special was a garnish of peeled green apples and long slivers of tender basil—she wondered if her idea of an outdoor dinner had been misguided.

  “To see Ben off !” she’d told Dennis last month. They’d been lying in bed watching President Carter talk about the energy crisis, and she’d opened her night-table drawer, taken out an emery board, and begun to saw at her nails. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America, Carter had said, and Sharon had turned to her husband. “Let’s have a family dinner for Ben,” she’d said. “We’ll have your parents and mine, and we’ll eat in the backyard. The night before he goes.”

  “Shh,” Dennis said. “I’m listening to this.”

  Sharon hadn’t been able to focus on the speech, perhaps because her son’s impending departure had caused alarm, or was it a symptom of the general malaise of the country that the president was speaking about ? Apathy was not like her; once Sharon had been a woman who had cared about politics deeply. Too deeply, perhaps, and this had led her to flee conservative Los Angeles, her parents’ Los Angeles, the one with her father’s balding B-movie cronies chewing cigars on the back deck and discussing the HUAC hearings. I don’t give one goddamn who goes down, they’d said. Communists? Just ask me. They’d spit names up at the sky, toward the fuzzy line of the San Gabriels. That Los Angeles. Sharon had come east to George Washington University, even though Helen said no one smart went to GW, ever, and at the end of her junior year Sharon had found herself sitting at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee meeting planning the Freedom Riders’ trip from Washington to New Orleans, to register voters and fight Jim Crow in each city along the way.

  By summer, Sharon and her roommate, Louise Stein, decided they wanted to accompany the hundreds of other kids, black and white, all ready to sit together at luncheonettes across the South. The Klan was rumored to be waiting in Birmingham to beat Riders, but Sharon and Louise ignored these reports, believing that being together and doing what was right would somehow arm them against terrible violence.

  The night before they were to get on that Trailways bus to Mississippi, however, Sharon’s father forbade it. Don’t you so much as set foot on that bus, he’d phoned to tell her. And Sharon had listened. The next day, she stood at the door gathering her robe at her throat and watched Louise go out into the foggy Georgetown morning alone. She returned not a week later, after a night in jail in Jackson, Mississippi. Sharon had been nearly feral with envy as she’d run her hands along the white insides of Louise’s wrists, where the handcuffs had been locked too tight, the blue-black bruises flowering where the metal had pinched her skin.

  But Sharon had listened to her father, and instead of fighting for civil rights, she’d dated two doctors, a lawyer, and one potter before settling on Dennis, marrying, and having children.

  The night of Carter’s speech, though, she thought instead of Benjamin throwing his jockstraps and Merriweather Post concert T-shirts into a green duffel bag and heading north.

  “Don’t you think a dinner will be nice, D?” Sharon had asked.

  Our people are losing faith, Carter had said. The phrase had momentarily stopped her menu planning—an elegant barbecue, steak and grilled corn and cold soup and some kind of a summer cobbler. She looked up at the screen and wondered if the president had just read her mind. Lost faith. She had thought then of her father, finding God as if He were a shiny penny he’d come upon along a crowded city street.

  It was 1979; only a decade and a half previously, Sharon had been pregnant with Vanessa when Louise had come to D.C. to march for jobs and freedom. As they’d entered the Mall, she handed Sharon a fistful of marbles. So horses will slip and fall and the pigs will be crushed, Louise hissed. Things could get violent, she’d said. Dennis had looked askance as he held Ben high, so he could see just how many people were standing against inequality, and Sharon remembered fingering the marbles, the feel of them pinging against one another along her hips when she moved. They’d given her a sense of reckless power, but she did not let them fall. Sharon was no revolutionary, she knew that now, but she had tried and she had cared profoundly, and she had been so furious at her father that she had fled for
the East Coast, but in the end she had not defied him. Yet, she had thought that glorious day, it was not every girl who could say she carried marbles.

  Now her faith in the power to make changes in the world felt like a fluid that had been drained from her.

  “Okay!” Dennis said. “Please, Sharon.” His hand hovered over her wrist to stop her from filing her nails, and Sharon settled back and decided right then: gazpacho.

  Now Sharon opened the fridge and lifted the large serving bowl, hugging it to her chest. As she headed out back, she thought that though the outdoor dinner may have been a flawed idea, she had known it would be perfect to have the family sitting together in the backyard, all along the large communal table, the scuffed wood illuminated by lit candles and flickering torches, before Ben became a dot on the horizon and left them all behind.

  Benjamin absentmindedly carved at the wooden table with his steak knife until he saw his mother emerge from the porch with a colossal glass bowl of red soup, the screen door slapping behind her. She carried it with the same beaming pride with which she brought out her impeccably browned turkey at Thanksgiving and her tender brisket at Passover, with an air that made it impossible—and unnecessary—to compliment her.

  “Borscht!” Tatiana, Dennis’s mother, threw her delicate white hands up in delight.

  Sharon nudged in between Ben and her father to place the bowl on the table. “Gazpacho,” she said. She swished her long hair to one side. “Andalusian gazpacho.”

  “Well, it looks delicious,” Tatti said, nearly wicked, like Natasha on Bullwinkle, her Russian accent so intense it always sounded bogus to Ben. She seemed to him to be the very embodiment of Russia; when she rose from her seat, he’d half expect her ass to leave an imprint of a hammer and sickle.

  Sharon looked for a moment at the bowl, then shot up and sprinted back into the house, the porch door smacking again behind her.

  “From Andalusia,” Helen said, leaning into Vanessa. “Fancy-pants.” She giggled, poking her granddaughter in the side with two of the pearly daggers she called fingernails.

  Vanessa bristled, holding her stomach.

  Sharon returned with a small bowl of cubed apple, and sliding in next to Benjamin, she began ladling out the deep red soup.

  “Here, Dad,” she said, sprinkling the tiny cubes of apple and cucumber on the smooth surface, then a few strands of basil.

  “Looks lovely, sweetheart,” Herbert said.

  “It sure does,” Dennis’s father, Sigmund, said. “You won’t be eating this well in college, that’s for sure, Ben.”

  Everyone laughed except Vanessa, who looked around the yard as if she were waiting for someone to pop out of the hedges that separated their property from that of Mrs. Krandle, a thick-ankled woman who lived alone and once caught an eight-year-old Vanessa picking her lilies of the valley. She’d stomped over to the house to complain. I’m sure she’ll turn into a fine young woman, Mrs. Krandle had said, but right now, she’s stealing and I can’t say that bodes well for the future. Soon after, her bushes went up, which, Dennis pointed out, didn’t bother him one bit, even if he was opposed on principle to folks being portioned off from one another. When they’d moved in, almost twelve years ago now, Sharon had wanted a fence. Dennis had argued against it first for the expense, and then against the concept altogether. We as people should not be closed off from each other, he’d argued. But now that the hedges were there, the privacy was appreciated.

  “You’ll have plenty of bagels to eat, that’s for sure,” Vanessa said, taking the bowl from her mother in both hands. The hedges had concealed much over the years: her sunbathing, Ben squirming around on the hammock with some cheerleader or lacrosse player, two bodies caught in a net, and the parties her parents used to have when she and Ben were young and had to come downstairs to say good night to the red-faced, slurring guests. This summer Vanessa was grateful that her awkward first embraces had been obscured. “How much oil is in here, Mom?” she asked, looking into the bowl.

  “Hardly any,” Sharon said. “It’s mostly just vegetables.” Vanessa had started a diet in early July, and at first her constant questions about nutrition had cheered Sharon, a champion of any kind of interest in vitamins, minerals, and general nourishment. She believed in the power of wheat germ; she had been thinking for years about how to extract nutrients from one food, say, sardines, and placing them in an altogether different food, say, her famous scones, to see if the nutritional benefits could be transferred. She wondered now if Vanessa’s attention to food had not become a bit obsessive. She had lost a good deal of weight, which looked lovely, as if she were hatching from the egg of her adolescence, her features now fully formed, cheekbones high, eyes pronounced in their wide sockets, the muscles in her arms and legs long and defined. But Sharon wanted it to stop now with Vanessa fixed right here in her emergent state of about-to-be-womanhood.

  “Now come on,” Sigmund said, leaning over his soup. “I’d say Brandeis has a lot to offer besides bagels.”

  “That’s true,” Vanessa said. “They probably have chopped liver and kugel too.”

  “Where does she get this?” Herbert shook his head.

  Sharon sent Dennis a sharp look.

  “You really shouldn’t talk that way,” Herbert said to Vanessa, who also looked over at her father for support.

  “It’s a school with a very strong history,” Sigmund said. “Benjamin is going somewhere with a history of protest. This is extremely important.”

  Avoiding his wife’s and his daughter’s pointed looks, Dennis put down his spoon. “Thanks, Dad. We’re aware.” He willed his father not to start up tonight, to stay silent about the Bolsheviks, Joe Hill, and all the dead labor icons, the shit conditions of the workers, the way the corporate pigs were draining them for every goddamn penny. He knew. He knew: the workers’ bodies were not machines; they were giving out! Just like John Henry hammering down the railway spikes; industry will beat you or it will beat you. Dennis knew this, but tonight was not the night.

  Dennis looked at his father, his home, framed by the hydrangea and the azalea bushes, behind him. Dennis was unable to shake his father’s look of disappointment the first time he and Tatiana had come here, when they’d just purchased the place. He’d driven his parents from the train station, Sigmund turning in the passenger seat and clicking his tongue as he watched the District recede in their wake as they headed up Sixteenth Street, toward Military Road, toward the suburbs. His mother had sat up straight in the back, her lime green beauty case in her lap. Didn’t his father realize Washington was nothing like Manhattan? Here, there were the rich neighborhoods, hardly urban hubs, on the streets above Dupont, and Foxhill and Georgetown Park—unaffordable all, Dennis worked for the government—and then there was ghetto, and it was black ghetto, not a bunch of Jewish socialists buying chickens and herring and potatoes like his old neighborhood on the Lower East Side. He remembered taking the stairs two at a time, racing his sister up to the third floor and into that railroad apartment. Outside the closed windows of the flat, shut against the cold and then the dust and the stink, Orchard Street screamed. It hollered with rage and it shit and it breathed its halitosis breath and it urinated on its own stones. It would have been one thing if there’d been no choice, but his father had decided to live where the workers lived. They could have gone west into the Village or to Stuyvesant Town like so many of their neighbors had. But not Sigmund Goldstein.

  His father seemed oblivious to the way cities had changed. The public pool on Pitt Street turned overnight from Jewish and Italian girls in red lipstick and white bathing suits cutting into protuberant thighs to the lithe bodies of the Puerto Rican and Dominican women. Dennis didn’t even know who sat on those lounge chairs now. The Cantonese? Sigmund’s friends had gone, but he wouldn’t move, insisting he wanted no more—nor less—than what anyone else had.

  “Absolutely,” Sharon said. “Brandeis has a history to be proud of.” She was relieved Ben had not chosen one of those
schools so far south, with their emphasis on fraternities and sports.

  “The spell of revolution is powerful.” Sigmund wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Right, Tatiana?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose it is in this family, isn’t it?” she said.

  Sharon nodded and Dennis bent his head and resumed eating.

  “Hmmm,” Dennis said. “You didn’t seem to think that during Vietnam.”

  “That’s simply not true,” Sigmund said. “You know I was as against the war as you were. Our methods of protest were different, absolutely. But what I’m saying here has nothing to do with Vietnam. Nothing at all. Clearly you don’t understand.”

  Dennis nodded. “Well, to my generation, Vietnam defined us. But while we were rioting in the streets, your friends were inside, writing about it. It is a lot more relevant than the Bolsheviks, that’s for sure.”

  “Every movement can be traced back to the Bolsheviks,” Sigmund said. “You cannot turn your back on history.”

  “Well, I think I have a better understanding of Vietnam. And let me tell you something. You can’t turn away from the future either, Dad. It’s going to happen again. Because we’re giving the Soviets their Vietnam now, aren’t we? This is what will happen if—or I should say when—there’s an invasion in Afghanistan. The country will be ripped to bits. And it will never end! You know we’ve authorized funding for arming the mujahideen there, don’t you?”

  “Of course this doesn’t surprise me.” Sigmund scratched his throat. “Because they are anti-communists. It doesn’t surprise me at all.”

  “Well, it’s true,” Dennis said. “And I’m telling you, it will be just the same as Vietnam.”

  “Dennis,” Sigmund said, leaning toward his son, “why is it always this way? We are on the same side.”

  Vanessa groaned. “Enough about politics!” As a child she’d wondered if little kids growing up in other cities were also stuck listening only to discussions about affairs of state or if her unfortunate proximity to the White House was to blame for the constancy of these arguments.