Dale M. Kushner

LONG TIME PASSING

1

           Ruth couldn’t get out of the car. Helene and Jack were expecting her hours ago, but she couldn’t make herself budge. She stared at the tinted lenses of her aviators perched like an overlarge blue butterfly on the dash. The mall lot was filling up. A rusted Valiant pulled in next to her, the driver a pimply kid in a John and Yoko T-shirt with a thick swatch of brown hair and sideburns the shape of Italy. Beside him sat a box-headed German Shepherd slobbering out the window. The boy turned off the ignition and checked himself in the rearview, ignoring the peace sign Ruth threw him. She wondered if he was too young to know what it was and then decided that was ridiculous and found herself treading in angry waters. “Arrogant creep,” she said as he sauntered off, his dog now behind the steering wheel, its muzzle out the window, sniffing the air. Ruth looked away. Birds no larger than fists flew in circles around the metal pole that marked the parking row, a mirage of puddles shining tinselly from the asphalt. Ruth bent forward, her hand searching under the floor mat for the Kodak film canister in which she hid her stash.

           The scent of marijuana filled the car—good stuff, given to her by a friend in exchange for a massage. Ruth wasn’t a professional, but she had a talent with bodies; she knew where people hurt, where their muscles were crying to be stretched or pounded or stroked. Even when she wasn’t stoned, she swore she could divine “trouble spots,” bundles of chaotic energy surging under a person’s skin. When she placed her hand on these areas, she visualized cool, blue light pouring from her palm, calming the muscles and nerves. She believed her touch had an effect. When they were younger Helene used to lie prone on the floor and beg Ruth to crack her back by walking up and down her spine, Ruth minutely adjusting her sister’s vertebrae with the pressure of her toes. Ruth smiled. Legendary times.

           The dope was heavy and sweet, a little rough, the way Ruth liked it; she held the smoke in her throat before sucking it down into her lungs and sensed her mind beginning to release. She’d been bartering her whole life, she supposed, a massage for some grass, a stroll down Helene’s spine in return for her older sister’s attention. Or a chance to walk around the house in Helene’s pink satin toe shoes. Helene had gotten the dance and piano lessons, while all Ruth got were drawing lessons in the basement of the YMCA. She was floating through the translucent layers of time—the teacher’s gleaming, white Keds, the woman’s arthritic voice, admonishing the class of third-graders to “put on your thinking caps” and concentrate. Ruth squinted, trying to get a closer view, filled with a longing to tell her younger self that everything would be okay. She took another drag. The grass was helping her fly back and forth between the sky of slow-moving clouds beyond the window, so flooded with light she had to look away, and the child with a heart-shaped face and serious, gray eyes, who stood alone at her bedroom window, watching snow endlessly fall. Had there always been money problems in their family? How old was she when their father was fired from the agency, Claire, their mother, at the kitchen table with her head in her hands? Did you, Tom? Did you do it? Had her father embezzled? There’d never been a trial, jail. But Ruth couldn’t remember a time when there hadn’t been money problems, by which she meant Claire and Tom were forever arguing about it. Forever arguing, period. But hadn’t there also been the glory years before their marriage collapsed, years when Ruth could walk into any room of their white colonial on Maple Avenue and smell Claire’s Evening in Paris and not the sad, sour smell of defeat? She thought now of her mother, who, with the obsessive quality that still defined her, had smoked exactly three Salems a day throughout Ruth’s childhood, making smoking seem an act of superlative grace and sophistication. Ruth took another hit and smiled in defiance at her own spontaneity and excessiveness, traits she knew were not necessarily commendable, but to which she felt an allegiance. Her mind was slowing down, the edges of her body disappearing. Soon she would step out of her skin completely and become an invisible wave rolling over the landscape. Here, at the edge of Madison, in the new suburbia, she was safe from the campus narcs and undercover cops that prowled her student neighborhood. Here, in the parking lot, the sun climbing toward noon, she was as safe as a prisoner in a cell. Not one of the shoppers looked her way; no one was going to rap on her car window and pull out a badge. A mother with joyless eyes in her obese face, trailing three kids, crossed diagonally in front of Ruth’s car, the youngest child, no more than two, on a leash like a dog. Several paces behind the two twig-skinny boys slapped at each other’s backs. Ruth curled her fingers in a wave. The thing she liked best about being stoned was the perspective it gave her on life. She was a gigantic Cyclopean eye, detached from emotion, one hundred percent perceptual apparatus.

           For all her sister’s practicing at the barre that their dad had installed in her room, Helene had flunked ballet in her thirteenth year when her body had metamorphosed from its willowy, anorexic perfection to something more earthbound and solid. Madame saw fit to separate the wheat from the chaff and told their mother, “Your daughter will be happier in modern dance.” It was heartbreak hotel for a few days—Helene standing in front of the mirror, pulling her hair back into a bun, her prominent cheekbones glistening with tears, the slenderness of her neck still achingly beautiful—and then what had happened? Ruth tried to remember. Helene had given up dance completely. The first lie, perhaps the only big lie Ruth remembered Helene telling, was to her friends. “Why would I want to become a ballerina? They’re just a bunch of skinny puppets, with no minds or lives of their own.”

           The caravan of images broke apart, dispersing into the motes that poured through the windshield of her Dart. Ruth took off her sunglasses and rubbed her eyes. The tiny blood vessels felt huge. She did not know her sister anymore; they were separated by politics and by her marriage to Jack. Had she ever known Helene? Ruth put the saliva-soaked joint to her lips, aware now of the music coming over the radio. “All you need is love. Love is all you need.” She laughed, sapphires and rubies spilling from her mouth, and the sadness left for a moment. “All you need is love. Love is all you need.” When Madame dumped Helene, Ruth had felt the exquisite pleasure of revenge. Helene was the good one, the pretty one, incorruptible and kind, unlike herself, the complicated, sensitive one, who had somehow always felt ruined, overtaken alternatively by fear and despondency, astonished now to find herself still alive, still fighting to stay in the upright world. She sat for a while longer watching the breeze take each leaf of a maple in its hands and toss it up in the air while the tree shook with laughter. The mother she’d seen earlier came out of the dime store, and Ruth noticed a raw, ugly slap mark across the face of the toddler on the leash. She saw that the brothers were underfed and scabby, and that one had a deformed ear like a cauliflower. A white guy with a pseudo-Afro tied his mutt to the bike rack and went into the Dairy Queen. Ruth tried to hide from the landscape, but no matter where she looked, the thing she looked at entered her and hurt bad. Minute spiders had begun crawling up and down her legs, and she scratched at them viciously.

2

           She made herself sit up straight and put her hands in her lap. She could see Rose Song behind the cash register inside the Imperial Palace restaurant glancing her way. The knot in her stomach pulsed like a caffeinated heart. Dope made her hungry and she could practically taste the crispy fusion of a vegetarian egg roll. Helene had told Ruth that Rose Song and her husband Lui had been doctors in China before the revolution. Bad shit was going down in China, but bad shit was going down everywhere; it was a confusing world. And almost impossible to know who was telling the truth. Her pals in the movement were full of heroic tales about Ho and Fidel and Mao—the so-called good guys—but she was pretty sure a lot of these stories were bogus, mythic embellishments conjured to convince the innocent. The leader of their cell, Macon Duke, aka Abdul Brown, Jericho, Susan B—where did they get their information? How did any of them know Mao wasn’t a monster? Nixon, Kissinger, Hoover, the CIA—Amerikkka—she knew they were monsters, and if she had to choose sides—and she did have to choose—she chose the side of liberation; but, then again, the kid she’d just seen with the deformed ear, his mother or father probably beat him to hell and probably beat the baby too. Everywhere she looked she saw misery and bloodshed, and she didn’t understand how guerilla theater, marches, or protests would stop parents from smacking their kids. Or each other. Ever since her sister Helene had come home the second week of school—September 1963—crying over the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the deaths of the four little girls—Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, their ordinary names instantly inscribed as a permanent litany in her head—Ruth, age eleven, was awakened to the illusion of safety: anyone could do anything to anybody, and no one was safe from harm. Their father had said, “Because those white people down there think Negroes aren’t human,” but Ruth knew he was telling only half the truth. Meanness was in everyone; it came up in you like a flash of lightning, made you a giant in a paper world. Already she’d discovered the intense pleasure of hiding Helene’s dress shoes, the squeamish delight of tickling a neighbor kid till he cried. “We have laws to protect us,” her father had said. “We live in a civil society by the rule of law,” but Ruth didn’t see how the law had protected Addie Mae Collins or the rest. Helene had coped with the terrible news of the church bombing by being extra kind to Oretta Smith, the only Negro—actually, half Negro—in her class and by bestowing upon her, with great solemnity, numerous sorries and a succession of gifts. The embarrassed and humiliated Oretta accepted a few of them—Ruth remembered a tan diary with a tiny, gold key—then finally told Helene, “You didn’t do it, so stop apologizing. But you better believe that the Lord is watching white folks now, and if you all don’t look out, He’s going to send another flood, and it won’t be the Israelites who are saved this time.”

            Ruth looked over into the Valiant and saw the German Shepherd watching her, its lucent, knowing eyes conveying a message she couldn’t quite hear. She opened her window and reached to pet the animal, but the dog drew back its lips in a snarl, and she retracted her hand. Her heart hurt. She glanced at her fingertips; the rainbow light was gone. When Ruth was in junior high, she’d worked at the local Humane Society, delousing strays and changing litter boxes, steadily growing into her role as defender against injustice and cruelty. Her virtue, she believed, was that her body acted before her brain, and she often used to throw herself between victim and bully, despite her slight build. Not anymore. Less and less was she inclined to involve herself in squabbles; she was tired, discouraged. More and more she noticed how her political buddies vied for power among themselves, Macon demanding almost cultish adulation from the women, most of the others assuming unlimited access to pussy too. Her one-time lover, Mark Stein, had told her she’d better get the hell out of her political diapers, and she’d answered, “Didn’t most of the guys want to get in them?” World peace, no more nukes, equal rights for blacks and workers and women—oh, God, of course she still believed in these ideals, but the real travails of the Vietnamese people seemed a long way away. She felt herself falling off Planet Dope into the pit of sentimentality. “Shit,” she said, scrubbing her face with her palms. The dog in the next car was barking. She watched the boy slide into his blue Valiant and merge with the traffic on Lester Avenue. Ruth popped a mint into her mouth, blew into her hands, sniffed, then got out of the car and walked into the mall.

3

           Birchwood Mall was a windowless tunnel, artificially lit. Down its corridors orange industrial carpet gave off the gas of its origins—petrochemicals saturated with the synthetic fragrance of pumpkin pie. Portals beckoned, their doors open, the static of conversations waftingfrom within. It was only May—but a hot May—and the air-conditioning was on; the coldness pricked Ruth’s skin and made her teeth ache. She stood inside the entrance rubbing her bare arms, talking herself out of retreating into the fierce sunshine where she could speed into the countryside, the protective shadows of trees crossed like lances over the road. She wanted to pass the meadow where she once saw the albino calf the tribes in the area thought sacred, wanted to marvel at the catbirds who flew at her car, then miraculously, at the last minute, like birds in an Escher print, changed direction. She wanted a sign from Jack, wanted to know what it meant when he touched the back of her wrist, the sensation sparking every nerve root in her arm. Beneath the anger at her politics, he felt something for her, she was sure of it. She heard her mother’s voice offering the usual platitude: Nothing plus nothing equals nothing, Ruth. Ruth glanced down the corridor at the atrium with its indoor fountain meant to suggest an oasis surrounded by benches, artificial palm trees and plastic ferns, shoppers strolling by in a blur. This world is nothing, she thought, these stores with their endless turnover of merchandise—in another year or two, new stores will replace them, new hungry consumers in the aisles. But under the surface of this world, under the horrible fluorescent lights and orange carpet and damp cement was another world, maybe a truer one. Maybe heaven was down there too, at the very center of the Earth—light and space, unspeakably beautiful birds and trees. There might just be such a place, and you don’t have to die to get there.

           A hand on her arm startled her. A burly guard in a dark-green gabardine uniform, his breath reeking of tobacco, was pulling her away from the restaurant’s entrance. For a second Ruth wondered if she’d stashed a baggie of grass in the pocket of her cut-offs, but before she had a chance to check, the guard was telling her she was not allowed in the mall without shoes. She glanced at her feet. “Hey, man. That’s cool, but I have to pick up some chow for my family.”

           The guard tightened his grip. A woman in a powder blue jogging outfit stopped to stare. “We’ve got rules,” he said.

           “Whose rules? The rules that say you should fly across the Pacific and aim your three-eighty automatic at a little brown man’s head?”

           He led her outside. Ruth let several minutes pass, then skipped into the Ben Franklin and bought a cheap pair of traveling slippers. In the Imperial Palace an Asian woman at the register in a burgundy cheongsam took her money and handed her the fragrant paper bag; Ruth did not chat with Rose Song, who was busy seating lunchtime customers, and who, Ruth thought, gazed at her disapprovingly when she waved.

           In the car she muttered the magic words to herself. “Chicken with peanuts, sweet and sour pork. Fried rice.”

4

           On Highway 51, three miles from the Four-Way Tavern, the Dart ran out of gas. She cursed herself for not checking the gauge before starting. Hadn’t her sisters on the Left harangued her: You can’t depend on men. We’re building our own revolution. Jack thought they were full of bullshit rhetoric and had warned her: “What are you doing with those people? You’re not the martyr type. Those women will eat you alive.” She’d told him to fuck off but now was discovering just how right he had been. She felt the referred pain of her conversation with him—how the “bull sessions” organized by Macon were turning into character assassinations, the endless theorizing nothing more than intellectual one-upmanship. Among the women, jealousy and competition were intense; you could be accused of trashing feminist values if you appeared compliant to the men, but you’d be alpha women if Macon or Donovan chose you for a fuck. The hypocrisy drove Ruth crazy. Still, whenever she heard “We Shall Overcome” or “Amazing Grace,” she teared up. She cared, she wanted change, she wasn’t like her sister Helene, content to withdraw from the battle and dream of populating a personal kingdom with flowers and babies. Ruth couldn’t watch a single segment of the war news without pounding her thighs and remembering the Buddhist monks solemnly roasting themselves in protest. She needed to keep her hands in the dirt, needed to be used.

           The fumes of garlic and scallions were making her ravenous. Jack was right: Ruth was a soldier in the wrong army. But what other army was there? She jammed a couple of fortune cookies into her mouth, but not before putting on her aviators and tossing the white tongues of fortune into the wind. “Que sera, sera,” she said, and set out for the tavern.

* * *

           She walked into the dimness, the inner hush of the empty tavern like a vacant classroom. A cigarette was burning down in a glass ashtray on the counter next to three rinsed beer glasses. Ruth had stopped here once before on her way to Helene’s to buy a pack of Salems. Today there was no sign of the pizza-and-burger crowd, no locals or spring road crew, and the bartender seemed to have left. Ruth glanced at the framed sepia photograph of someone’s old football team and the crumpled dollar bill under a glass, the shelves of liquor bottles behind the bar, and went into the ladies’ room and ran cold water over her face. Her body felt sluggish in the slow, after-dope shuffle of time. She wet a paper towel from the stack and laid it on her nape. Her face, distorted by imperfections in the glass, loomed toward her in the mirror, scattering her thoughts. Was she pretty? And then she thought immediately, I shouldn’t even be thinking about pretty, and could hear Barbara L., aka Nikita, scold her for worrying about her looks when entire villages were being destroyed. She couldn’t help herself and bent forward into the granular light of the 40-watt above the sink and scrupulously examined her face. Helene was pretty, but what was she? Jack had said she could be pretty if she’d get some decent duds and stopped dressing like a waif. Seriously, he had said, did she think the women in Hanoi wore granny dresses? Or listened to Dylan? There was more to being a revolutionary than the right costume and the right music. By running with the herd, she had lost her individuality and now sounded like a cartoon character who pointed at fire hydrants and said, “Elitist capitalist pig.”

           Ruth should have told him to go to hell, but, instead, little by little, so it wasn’t obvious or so she could deceive herself, she’d let Jack influence her, trading her dangly earrings for a pair of small, silver studs, her gauzy dresses for cut-offs or jeans, her long hair barbered into a boy cut. But he’d noticed, as he always did, and praised her for each improvement, remarking that her face looked “cleaner” without all that wild hair.

           Ruth dried her hands on the pull-down towel; she hated that she couldn’t stop thinking about him. It was such a fine day; she was not going to let herself get obsessive over a conversation that happened a year ago. She took a deep breath and left the ladies’ room, hoping she would find a friendly face in the tavern that said, Have a beer, stay awhile, I’ll drive you to your car when you’re ready.

           It wasn’t a dream; she crossed the room and he looked up and smiled in all his Midwestern, blond handsomeness. Holding out a newly washed glass, he asked what he could get her—tap or Bud. She shrugged, her face deliberately blank, noncommittal. What was wrong with messing around? What was wrong with being desired? She told him she had run out of gas down the road and asked if he could sell her some. “Sure,” he told her and wiped his hands on a dish towel and came out from behind the bar. She followed him outside. He went into a shed and came out with a rusted, red can with a long nozzle and strolled to the gas pump to the left of the tavern. There were fresh geraniums in the flower boxes under the tavern’s long front window, a birdbath filled with water on the tiny lawn. She stood several feet from him in the blasting sunlight, wishing she hadn’t promised to bring the Chinese carryout to Helene, wishing she could go home to her apartment and sit on her fire escape and watch the stars appear. Ruth looked at the sky; the horizon was tinged a deep grayish-blue, though above the sun beat down. The air was heavy with moisture and manure. His name, he told her, was Erik Nordstem. “You run out of gas often?” he asked, his smile vapid and confident. Ruth didn’t answer. She thought, Let him flirt his way into embarrassment, and then she would walk away with a pure feminist heart. She watched his practiced fingers work the gas pump and consciously hated him for his ignorant innocence, his uncalculated malice. It was wrong to stereotype, but Ruth wondered if there was any substance beneath his clean-cut features. She wondered if Erik would be flirting with her if he knew her politics. What would he think about her if he had seen her the night she’d marched on the Capitol, shouting “Antiwar Bitches Resist!” or saw her high with the others the time they were all tripping and crazy with cheap wine, and Macon had raised his glass, pretending he was Charles Manson drinking Sharon Tate’s blood: “Whitey pigs have to di-eee.” She wondered if Erik had any politics at all, if he read the newspaper or watched the evening news, if he was one of the lucky ones who’d managed not to get drafted, and if he was sorry if he hadn’t served. She wanted to go up and ask him what he knew about war, if his father had been in Korea or the Battle of the Bulge, his grandfather shooting down Japanese over Guam. Who were his heroes? Paul Bunyan? Robin Hood?

            He had offered to drive her to her car, but she refused, paid him for the gas, and walked the three miles back. She wasn’t sorry, just exhausted. She wondered if Erik had ever gone down on a woman. Probably not. Probably he was a hundred percent missionary. He was like American cheese, tantalizingly colored and dull.

* * *

            At three the news came on the car radio. Ruth was only half listening. Nixon was escalating the war, mining the North Vietnamese harbors. It was the fact that every boy from Ruth’s high school class of 1968 who’d been drafted had gone to ’Nam, every single one, not a dodger or card burner among them. They had no real choice but to go down to the induction center, stand in line in their Jockeys, and wait for the doctor to pull down their eyelids and feel around under their balls; no choice but to say “Yes, sir!” when asked if they supported the Constitution of the United States and “No, sir!” when asked if they had ever been a member of the Communist Party; no choice but to go home to the shingled house on a 50-by-50 lot, walk into the kitchen, and say, “I done it. I’m going,” or say, with maybe a half-dozen beers under their belts, “Hey, old lady. Your son’s a soldier now.” No choice except by turning traitor, Pinko, resister, dodger, refugee. They went, they were still going; they had no choice.

           Nixon was ordering the mining of the North’s ports and river systems, increased bombing of the North’s rail lines and roads to interdict communist supply lines. He would stop at nothing, he said, to bring the enemy to his knees.

5

           A few miles from Helene’s, Ruth hit a dog running across the country road between fields. She saw it dash from the high grass, swift and low to the ground, and swerved in a screeching turn to miss it, her foot seemingly leaden moving from gas to brakes. She felt the impact of the animal’s body hit the fender, heard a muffled thump before she was able to pull over onto the shoulder. There were no other cars on the road. She sat in the car, trembling, then got out and looked up and down the road for houses, a possible owner; there were none. She felt immobilized but made herself run to the dog.

            It was lying on its side, its legs straight out, as if it were sleeping with its eyes open. Then she noticed the blood, the red-black ooze pooling under its ear. She crouched by the dog’s mouth and put her fingers under its nose to see if it was breathing; if there was breath, it was the faintest thread of air. She ran her thin, shaking fingers over its muzzle and down its back, the dog’s fur surprisingly thick and luxurious—someone’s pet, the collar and tags lost somewhere. Her heart was swollen and cold. She wanted to dip her fingers into its blood and mark streaks down her cheeks and howl till nightfall, until the scavenger birds came for them both. It was her fault, absolutely her fault, her reflexes slowed by dope.

            Still crouching, Ruth slid her arms under the dog’s narrow rib cage and held it against her chest, rocking on her heels, crying for God to forgive her. She shut her eyes and saw the black earth dotted with the incandescent green of alfalfa, angels wheeling in tiny starbursts above the fields.

           She was still crouching when a truck came by and stopped. The trucker got out and asked if she needed some help, and Ruth struggled to find words, but the shapes of sentences eluded her. She shook her head. The trucker introduced himself as Joe, squatted beside her, and put an arm around her shoulders, the heat of his body entering her flesh. In profile he was a sharp-featured man, probably of Native blood.

           “Thanks,” she whispered.

           He squeezed her shoulder and sat with her for a few minutes while the wind whipped up around them, the tall grasses of the field now dancing, as if to an invisible piper. After a while Joe said, “We outlive our animals and that’s the truth.”

           Ruth nodded. The dog was dead.

           Joe got up and walked to his semi and drove away. Ruth carried the dog to the side of the road and laid it between some trees at the edge of a field and covered it with branches and leaves, then got into her car and watched the sky darken, the heavy, purple thunderheads up from Des Moines and Galena racing across the horizon.

THE END