Beautiful Revolutionary Read online

  There’s probably more to Evergreen Valley than Evelyn sees that afternoon, but she’s worried if she drives too long she’ll somehow end up miles and hours away. She sees the Methodist church from afar, its snowy-steepled perfection. She sees the sign for a market with red-white-and-blue flapping in front. She parks and steps out to feel the heat soaking through her clothes like blood.

  Evelyn sweeps through the aisles with studied leisure, like an actress incognito. Chooses a loaf of bread. Fruit. Sponges. Soap flakes. Bleach. Tea-light candles. Toilet rolls. A box of sanitary napkins, and, in the local produce section, jugs of wine. Another woman, years older, is also browsing the wine and tuning out her kid as she does, a blond boy of five or six who gapes at Evelyn until she smiles.

  ‘Ma, is that one of the nigger-lovers?’ the kid whispers loudly.

  The words are a cold splash of water. ‘Kenny, that’s rude,’ the woman hushes, a flame of amusement in her voice. Of course, the kid is right. Evelyn’s father’s first parish was in a black township. Her first doctor, her first babysitter, her first Santa Claus. What hurts isn’t the label so much as the way it doesn’t hurt her at all, the way no words will ever mar the white skin she moves around the world in.

  But Evelyn isn’t one to be deterred by small-minded people. She won’t waste her hate on those who don’t know how to love. She turns to the mother and boy with a smile so lovely, it’s disarming.

  ‘What a beautiful child,’ she says, then whisks out of the aisle.

  Evelyn wants to believe in love, its power to dissolve boundaries and combat hate like an antivenom. She wants to, but she doesn’t know if she can. Make Love, Not War, she reads as she loads up the groceries, and she can’t resist slamming the trunk with all she’s got. The trouble is, she was born at the wrong time. Too late for the ballroom love of the films she grew up with and too early to swallow all the flower-child stuff. The world has a way of making her feel too young and too old at once, both impossibly naïve and impossibly cynical.

  She barrels the station wagon out of the parking lot and up Main Street, slowing outside Evergreen Methodist. Its clapboard whiteness is pretty in a trite, wistful way, which chafes against her cynicism. Why should she find white church buildings pretty? What’s so pretty about being white? ‘Jesus,’ she curses to herself, and jolts the car back into motion.

  The house is still there on Vine Street, placid in the sinking gold light. Maybe she was hoping to see it razed by the time she returned, the surrounding vineyards flattened and Lenny waiting for her in torn clothes. She makes do with parking. The silver music of the keys and brown rustle of grocery bags. This is the new life. This is the beautiful life. This is the time for loving.

  It’s there as soon as she walks in the door, a wafting garden funk. And then there’s Lenny, her beautiful boy-husband: barefoot, white shirt dirty with yard work, smoking a joint and tuning her old peach-pink radio.

  ‘I wasn’t sure when you were coming back …’ He looks sheepish. Then, signaling in smoke, ‘There wasn’t much to do.’

  Evelyn is about to say something about the fort of still-unpacked boxes but stops herself. Puts down the bags instead. ‘I bought wine.’

  ‘Righteous.’

  Lenny holds out the joint and smiles, an innocent glimmer that makes her heart wince. She loves him so much, or wants to. Does it really matter which?

  3.

  Lenny is bemused when Evelyn tells him she wants to go to church the next day, but a lot of things she does are bemusing to him. Talking back to cops, for instance, or dressing like an existentialist to buy groceries, or setting up a groovy little picnic on the living room floor, complete with tea-light candles in jars. They’ve got running water but no electricity until Monday — no phone, no television, only the barest bones of furniture. The portable radio runs on battery and they tune into the Kennedy-McCarthy debate for a while, but it only makes Evelyn roll her eyes.

  ‘They’re not talking about anything serious,’ she says. ‘And Bobby Kennedy looks better than he sounds.’

  So they turn it off and agree that Kennedy should win the primary regardless; he has more heart, he’s more dynamic, Evelyn says. Lenny doesn’t know why exactly he likes Bobby Kennedy — whether it’s his politics or just something about him, the way he always looks sort of alone and afraid. There’s so much in the world to fear, maybe the best thing they can do is show how scared they are, all the politicians and all the soldiers and all the students and everyone else.

  ‘Ah!’ Evelyn cries out suddenly, a strange, small cry, more of surprise than fear. Lenny sees, as if in slow motion, the thing that has made her cry out — a large flying insect moving through the candlelight and then disappearing into the darkness with a thud. He sees her eyes, strangely dark and glistening, and feels an overwhelming powerlessness.

  ‘Should I … try to make it go outside?’ Lenny says after a while. It’s the best he can offer; he never kills insects. Evelyn shakes her head and takes a swallow of wine.

  Not long after that, Evelyn uncoils herself from the carpet and starts fussing with the boxes. He knows she is afraid of the insect; it can still be heard thudding against the walls and there’s something extra small about her movements. How strange his wife seems to him sometimes. There’s a mechanical trilling of cicadas that’s been going on for hours, but it seems louder now that it’s dark and she is afraid. He wishes he could help. He doesn’t want to kill.

  Lenny doesn’t know when exactly Evelyn slips out with one of the candles in the jars. He hears her rustling in another room. He hears her singing ‘John Riley’ very softly:

  Fair young maid, all in her garden

  Strange young man, passerby

  Said, fair maid, will you marry me?

  This then, sir, was her reply …

  How strange his wife seems, singing about marriage in another room while he stays glued to the carpet. He wants to move but doesn’t know how. The cicadas make him think of guns clicking in faraway jungles. There’s so much to be afraid of.

  ‘I want us to go to church tomorrow,’ Evelyn tells him, just like that, when she returns from singing in the other room. There must be some practical reason why she went there, but all Lenny knows is that she sang, and it seems as if she came to the decision that way. He says okay. Whatever she wants. Because although he knows she doesn’t believe in God and was never rigorous about attending her father’s services, if it makes her less afraid, he wants it too.

  After that, Evelyn holds out her candle and looks warily in the direction of the insect. ‘I put our sleeping bags in the bedroom,’ she says. So he takes up a candle just like hers, and they blow out the others and like children or mourners they go down the hall. Alone to the solitude he’s dreamed of — a man and woman living together and a garden of their own — yet how solemn it all seems, how small. As the movements of her hips walking in front of him are small, her beautiful body in its black clothes, everything that is and everything he loves.

  I am alone and she is with me. Lenny looks at the candle. We are alone.

  It occurs to Lenny that his wife is having fun, making enemies in the church parking lot like it’s her new favorite hobby. He’s given up trying to follow her conversations but from where he’s standing she looks almost playful, like a cat in tall grass hunting low-flying moths. His little hunting-cat wife, who was so afraid of that insect last night and this morning under the cold shower so pale and shivery. Sure, he doesn’t understand it, and kind of wishes they could leave already, but it’s good to see her having fun, and he likes the way she smiles at him, circling back every time she finds some new provincialism worth reporting.

  ‘That man—’ Evelyn’s pupils are twice their normal size, her lips as joyous as a bride’s, ‘—He says “negroes” are stealing jobs at the timber mill.’

  And then she’s gone again, back to the hunt, with movements so light and a
smile so lovely anyone would think she really was out to make friends. Just like a cat, dropping half-dead moths at his feet and disappearing on him. Lenny comes from a family of cat people. He knows the reality of owning-without-owning, warm purring sweetness one second and cold absence the next. He knows Evelyn is a ‘liberated woman’ as well as a wife, and not so much to be owned as accommodated. Yet he also likes to think she really does belong to him, deep down, and she seems to like reassuring him of this — breaking away from her latest plaything just a few minutes later and returning with lowered eyes.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she says, slinging her purse and letting herself into the station wagon.

  Lenny remembers that floral tapestry purse from when he and Evelyn first started dating. It was there the time they turned on together in the crowded house she shared with her girlfriends, a bright little reassurance of her presence, even as she drifted out on him. He’d enjoyed staring at it for a long time, the psychedelic swirl of its patterns, and was always happy to see it on later occasions. It was as if he and the purse had had a private conversation, which added to his knowledge of Evelyn-apart-from-Evelyn the way conversations with her parents did, or dreams in which she spoke to him, or certain isolated impressions he’d had of her before he knew her: a sophomore with bobbed hair, talking too loudly in a library; fast-walking on a spring day in a striped sweater and sunglasses; standing by a rosebush with her father, Reverend Burne, the cool and kindly campus minister.

  It’s not until they’re both in the station wagon and rolling onto Main Street that Lenny suspects there might be something wrong. They’ve got chores at home and in town, and he’s asking her what she wants to do next, but she isn’t answering. Not answering, just sitting there playing her thumbnail over the chain of her purse as he calls her name. ‘Hey, Evelyn? Do you want me to drive home or …? Evelyn?’

  She’s upset. He sees it now. The set of her shoulders and uncharacteristic silence and that chain she keeps playing with. It dawns on him that what was going on back there wasn’t fun for her at all but an obscure form of social self-mortification. And he didn’t see it. Though he has communed with the patterns of her purse and cherished those stray memories of her talking and walking and standing by the rosebush, he doesn’t know enough.

  ‘Hey … it can be one of those stories we tell people …’

  Lenny tries to sound upbeat, but even as he’s saying it, he knows it’s the wrong thing. Because Evelyn’s eyes are flashing and the patches on her cheeks are darker than before, and of course they don’t have a working phone, let alone any friends in town to talk to.

  ‘Who am I going to tell, Lenny?’ Evelyn snaps. ‘The only other person here is you.’

  4.

  It is better with electricity, a telephone connection. Her father’s voice on the other end telling her she will find her people soon, like she always does. She doesn’t want to confide in her father, yet somehow, in not so many words, that’s what happens, and she is comforted by his voice, thin and resonant and intelligent. He reminds her of all the places she has spent time in her short life: the black towns in South Carolina; the suburbs of Sacramento; dry Salinas; big-skied Davis; beautiful Bordeaux, France. Of the importance of not being isolated. Of her ability to make a home, wherever she is. By the time Evelyn puts down the receiver, she is ready to believe that Evergreen Valley is an essential stage of her development, as much as her year on exchange in Bordeaux was.

  She will make a home for them. She is more than a homemaker — fluent in French, on the dean’s list all through college, still dreams of someday working for the UN — yet her present challenge is to make a home here, and to make it beautiful. Beautiful, and also rich with their shared history; for they have history, she and Lenny, have been through so much already, though not even a year married. There was a day not long before Lenny proposed to her when they stood and watched some guys Lenny’s age burning draft cards, watched the flames and held hands. If that isn’t history, she doesn’t know what is.

  In the doorways, Evelyn hangs the Mexican bead curtains, bought on their honeymoon the year before. She hangs landscapes by Matisse and Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo with a necklace of thorns, pictures of herself with her parents and sisters and girlfriends and Lenny. She even hangs a psychedelic poster of Lenny’s, though she finds it ugly, and puts his bong with the glassware. She spends a long time sorting through their records, arranging them in his ’n’ hers piles on either side of the player: his Fifth Dimension, his Odessey and Oracle, his Electric Music for the Mind and Body; her Odetta Sings Folk, her Joan Baez in Concert, her Chansons Populaires de France.

  When Lenny returns from the mental hospital early that evening, there’s a casserole in the oven, Joan Baez warbling in Spanish on the record player. Barefoot and gypsy-skirted, Evelyn rushes to meet him through the beads, like some kind of housebroken gitana. Loops her arms around his neck and kisses him, though he smells of antiseptic and doesn’t look all that appealing to her in his all-white, tight-fitting uniform.

  ‘Evelyn … you’ve done so much,’ he says, holding her by the waist. ‘This is beautiful.’

  And though she knows he has probably had a strange day, seen frightening things in those waxed hallways, his eyes are so wide and blue, and his smile so innocent, that everything in her wants to cry out in protest. No, it isn’t. None of this is beautiful.

  Lenny likes coming home to the white house on Vine Street, surrounded on all sides by greenery. He likes the way the hallway has smelled of Evelyn’s cooking two days in a row, and the way she has kissed him, tugged at his clothes, melting away the craziness of the hours before. Crazy hours with crazy men. He is frightened of the men at the mental hospital, even the ones who don’t seem so crazy; maybe especially those ones. Through the day, as he draws baths and lathers faces, sets down meals and changes channels, it occurs to Lenny that there’s a line that separates ‘normal’ from ‘crazy’, and that it’s possible for a normal person to trip over this line. He wonders what it would take to make him go crazy and thinks maybe it wouldn’t be much, maybe just some bad acid or seeing some lights in the sky or a week in a Vietnamese jungle. But Evelyn is sane. The very definition of sane, with her sleek hair and nice cooking and lovely frisking hands, and she would never marry a crazy man.

  They’ve been alone and afraid in the Vine Street house, but those days are over now and the house is a home, filled with their things and also some new things Evelyn has conjured in his absence: a velvety green sofa, a small black-and-white TV, a double bed that looks as wide and luxurious as an ocean liner. He likes the bed, being pushed back onto it by Evelyn, and later watching her pull on a turtleneck and smile her crooked-sexy smile and tell him, ‘The coq au vin will be ready now,’ as if the melting joy of the past half-hour was just a way of killing time.

  It’s nights like these that being married is all about, Lenny thinks, lounging on the green sofa and listening to Evelyn clatter through the bead curtains. Eating the coq au vin she spoons out of a heavy cast-iron pot and drinking the Pinot Noir, and afterward there are brownies for dessert. ‘I figured I should learn to cook this stuff, if we’re going to have our own crop.’ She looks skeptical. ‘Honestly, I don’t know if I got the measurements right, so don’t eat too much.’

  ‘These are really good, Evelyn.’

  She nibbles a corner thoughtfully. ‘You know, the man who delivered the bed today? I think he was coming on to me.’

  Evelyn talks for a while about the man, the good deals she got on the furniture, her plans for their new home. He forgets to answer a couple of times, and she says, ‘Oh, sorry. Am I boring you,’ in a flat voice, then starts cleaning up. Lenny thinks she looks cute playing maid in her turtleneck and underwear, watches her butt, her legs, her bare feet. He wonders if he should help in the kitchen, but it’s been a long day and his stomach is full and he’s had hash and wine and sex. He decides he’ll just tell her she looks cute when she
returns, only it’s a long time before she does, and by then she’s got a new glass of wine and wants to bitch about their college friends.

  ‘I just phoned Joan. She and Peter are flying to Europe on Friday. Can you imagine?’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Yes, but can you imagine? Leaving the country at a time like this? And with Peter a 1-A now? It’s even worse than running off to Canada.’ She takes a swallow of wine. ‘It’s so much braver what you’re doing. Anyone who truly cares about changing this country would stay.’

  Lenny doesn’t feel especially brave, just lucky. He knows that Evelyn has spent time in Europe, was even engaged to and ‘practically living with’ some guy in France, and that they wouldn’t be married if she hadn’t decided such a life wasn’t for her. They wouldn’t be sitting on the soft green sofa and watching the polls together, and she wouldn’t be grabbing his arm suddenly and saying, ‘Oh, Lenny,’ because the final count is in. She gives a surprised little laugh, and he laughs too, though he knows nothing has really changed yet. He laughs and puts his arm around Evelyn, and she says, ‘Oh, Lenny,’ again and snuggles into him. ‘This is good news.’

  After that, they’re both feeling the effects of the brownies and it’s nice; she’s in a warm, purring mood; says her shoulders feel funny, wants them rubbed. She sits on the floor in front of him as he kneads her shoulders and tosses back her sleek head and says, ‘Don’t you feel it in your shoulders? A tense feeling?’ and he tells her, No, just relax. It’s funny, Lenny thinks, how drugs always affect Evelyn differently than him, how he’s never seen her fully relaxed in all the times they’ve turned on together, though she’s often giddy and touchy-feely. He stops rubbing her shoulders for a moment, and she says urgently, ‘Don’t stop,’ and he likes this urgency. Then she points at the TV where people are celebrating and says, ‘It’s making my head buzz. Isn’t your head buzzing?’