Movement Read online

  Movement

  A Novel

  Valerie Miner

  This book is dedicated to Carol Flotlin, who has been my friend for twenty-five years, since we met on the playground of Sacred Heart School in Bellevue, Washington.

  Contents

  Introduction by Susan Griffin

  Foreword

  Movement

  Joan Crawford Revival

  Maple Leaf or Beaver

  The Common Stinkweed

  In the Company of Long-Distance Peace Marchers

  Dark Midnight

  The Right Hand on the Day of Judgment

  Newsworthy

  Stray

  Someone Else’s Baby

  Single Exposure

  Cultured Green

  Cooperative

  Love/Love

  Other Voices

  Aunt Victoria

  Aerogramme

  One of Them

  Feel No Evil

  Mrs. Delaney’s Dollar

  Side/Stroke

  Well Past the Weird Hour

  Novena

  The Green Loudspeaker

  Afterlife

  Sisterhood

  Rondo

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Introduction

  by

  Susan Griffin

  Movement is a book about change. In these pages Valerie Miner depicts movements within movements, public and private turns of heart, the permutations of consciousness in an innovative form which shifts from story to novel, and from past to present. The hero of this book, whose name is Susan, is a political activist and a writer. Her life is deeply enmeshed in the social events shared by a generation committed to ending injustice. She is part of the movement against the Vietnam War. Because she marries a draft resister, she moves with him to Canada. There she becomes part of a socialist movement, and gradually turns toward feminism.

  Movement is also a book about consequence. Continually, Susan must live out, in her own body and soul, the implications of her political insights. And just as often, she is forced by experience to reconsider her commitments. Thus along with the same generation that questioned the causes of war and poverty, Susan moves past the traditional ways of living, and sharing lives. She looks for some center of meaning in sex and love, because along with freedom she seeks and finds a deepening knowledge of the world.

  Each of the chapters of this book stands alone. Each can be read as a story, the way certain periods of one’s life seem to have a definition and sense unto themselves. And in between these chapters, Valerie Miner has threaded a series of very short stories about others, strangers to Susan, not directly involved in any of the events of the narrative, peripheral. And yet, like the slight movements one captures at the edges of vision, these peripheral characters and their tales partake of the meanings which ring through Susan’s life. For as much as this is a book about one fictional being, it is also a book about all our lives. We have all been touched by the social crises described here; we have all lived through the times which have inspired the questions Susan asks of life.

  Like the work of Doris Lessing, or Marge Piercy, Movement preserves for us not only history, but more significant to the particular skill of a story teller, sensibility. The decades of the 1960’s and 1970’s were phenomenal not only for the happenings which journalists or newscasters might record, but also for the tone, the mood, the gestures, the configurations of people and remarks and styles, and above all a range of feeling. How often I have wished that someone tell these stories from our times. In one of the chapters Susan’s editor, who is suffering the first symptoms of a nervous breakdown, deftly saves himself by taking credit for her work. That they both work for a radical magazine dedicated to equality and justice hardly affects his choices: she is not quite human to him. (It was this ironic juxtaposition of act and ideal that caused many women in this decade to sever themselves completely from men on the left.) In the character of Susan’s husband we meet another archetype. The upper middle class young man who has the habit of calling his wife, whose mother is a waitress and father a seaman, “bourgeois.” Predictably, his holier than thou radicalism fades with time. And Miner’s reflection of our generation does not blur when she depicts women, either. She gives us a portrait of the young student, idealistic, eager, ignorant, full of vitality, love and naïveté. She presents us with the perpetually radical Wina wearing a “pink ‘Frau Offensive’ t-shirt … and declassé roach clip around her neck.” And she captures the atmosphere through which these characters move, through which I myself remember moving. The politically correct, downwardly mobile pile of clutter left in a hallway. Exhaustion. Cold. Meetings. Personal rivalries described as philosophical differences. The ubiquitous Volkswagon Van. Cheap wine. Mattresses on the floor. The language of hope, despair, of charade.

  Yet recognizable as these landscapes and the people in them are, they are not stereotypes bent on the wheel of polemic. Rather, the book draws a sharp and poignant outline around the dilemma we have all faced by confronting us always with the feeling of reality. No one here is idealized, not even the hero, and no one is villainized.

  I was especially moved by a scene between Susan and a young Moroccan man as they discuss their life choices. Susan, instilled with a twentieth century North American sense of the self as sacred, cautions the young man not to live for others, not to be bound up in the expectations of his family. But of course. This is axiomatic for a character like Susan, even though she was born in the working class, as if her parents’ very struggles were aimed to make her free of parental limitation. But when Susan tells the young man she does make choices for herself, he asks her, “Is this enough for you?” And she must agree that it is not. There is no resolution to this discussion between the two. They move on to another topic, and eventually into separate lives. Throughout the book, as in this scene, Miner does not leap to solve a question which is significant to our time for its irresolution.

  And what a relief! The book is so witty. Spun throughout the extreme seriousness of a decade facing the devastations of the planet, the technological cruelties of modern warfare, the blistering conditions of racism, are movements of great humor in which sanity demands that those of us trying to take political responsibility for the future of the world laugh at ourselves.

  What pompousness, what self-aggrandizement, what blustery romantic notions have characterized our struggles! When Susan muses about the Rock group, who pledged to lead a revolution, that they could not even hold their own band together, one feels along with the laughter, a heady breath of fresh air. Sometimes Miner’s humor is gentle and tender, as in her description of a sixties costume party. And at other times, one feels this wit is close to the weeping of frustration, as for instance, when one character says of another, “She spoke English instead of rhetoric.”

  Miner’s cameo portrait of the woman who spoke English and not rhetoric, is in a way a model for a commitment to social change toward which Miner’s hero, Susan, moves. She is a “small grey-haired Montreal nurse who had worked in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive.” (Between the lines I can almost hear the author say: she derived her rage from experience and not dogma.) “She delivered sense and feeling,” Miner writes and, “She was more interested in peace than rubric and thus performed an intricate balance before this scrupulous congregation.”

  Throughout the rest of the book, Susan sorts out hollow rhetoric and performance from the daily passion of genuine caring. She asks the same questions of the Feminist movement that she asks of the anti-war and socialist movements. In a moment of tiredness, she asks, “Where was sisterhood now?” She had “given her loneliness to group consciousness, her anger to organized protest, her oppression to revolutionary retribution.” But what does this
mean? Even if she were free from oppression, what does this mean if there is no “afterlife”?

  A heady, abstract, holier-than-life revolution can be, after all, only another excuse to avoid life. And yet, this is not a book to argue against movement. Rather it is from her deep passion for social justice which is the same as her passion for life that the hero, and the author, poses her questions. She turns back to her work with that tenaciousness of spirit that belongs only to the mature—for one must have been tried to possess it—and with the steadfast courage that belongs to those who, from years of small failures, know that we who are born of this troubled world, and would wish to end suffering, are not perfect, but we are beautiful.

  Berkeley, California

  Fall, 1981

  Postscript:

  One last note. It is entirely fitting that The Crossing Press should publish this book. Its publishers possess the virtues of Movement’s hero. This press has been with us for more than a decade (a long life for an alternative press) and shown all along a great courage and insight. They were very early publishers of feminist writing, before feminists became fashionable. (They were one of the first presses to publish any of my work.) Now, in these difficult times, when we have witnessed the closing down of, for instance, Diana Press, they have taken over the publication of several books we so need to have. And they continue to publish and distribute writing from those protest movements Susan might have belonged to: the antiwar movement, the prison rights movement, the movement for gay liberation. In these days when to work together seems so essential and yet so impossible, this press has quietly worked to print books from many different dissident movements and helped us all to understand perhaps, better, that in the end, we share a vision, and that none of our visions is complete without the insights of our sisters and brothers. I thank them for this.

  Foreword

  Movement is about a woman named Susan. It is a novel and a collection of short stories, exploring the territory between and beyond these forms. Most “chapters” follow a chronological sequence but also stand as stories on their own. I prefer such tales to longer narrative. The traditional novel has become an endurance test in which both the writer and the reader begin at the beginning and pursue the end without pause, in form, for reflection. Our lives are more flexible in time and space than most novels express. Life, or movement, is fantasy, memory, premonition, and the descriptions of this life should be layered.

  Susan’s stories are interwoven with short-short stories about completely different women who are experiencing other kinds of movement. I write these stories to break through the isolation and the individualism of the Bildungsroman, the conventional novel of development. Susan does not know, and may never meet, any of these women. Their stories are told as shadows and illuminations of our mutual momentum.

  I

  Movement

  Susan slid the romaine leaf around the faded parquet bowl. It was too heavy with oil to curl through her fork. Larry Blake’s special salad had more garlic than she remembered and the Coke tasted oversweet. Still, everything had a certain pungency compared to the stewed tea on which she had been surviving in London for years. A jock sat down in the opposite booth. Varsity most likely. He wore a pin-striped shirt under the Vaughn maroon sweater. Fraternities were popular again, she had heard, and everybody went to football games.

  Susan felt personally offended, as if the last ten years hadn’t happened. What did the 70’s reap but an excuse for apathy? They hadn’t “overcome” anything except their own idealism. Not completely true. But Berkeley seemed the same as before the Revolution—right down to these sunset scapes of San Francisco Bay on the restaurant walls. Her first year at Berkeley, she thought this was what you called an art exhibit. Some things had changed. She used to like Larry Blake’s restaurant for the art exhibits.

  Larry Blake’s. What could you expect? Of course Guy would insist on meeting here, where they used to come for salads after studying. His conscience was a compass, always drawing them back around. Guy, her ex-husband, her first lover. None of the labels were either indelible or ephemeral enough. He was a ghost in her life; he would always be there, somewhere in the shadow of her former self. She looked at her watch and worried. It wasn’t like Guy to be late.

  Occasionally, Susan still wondered if she should have stayed with him. She might have been saner, safer in their academic coterie, drinking more gin and less tonic, serving cottage cheese and mandarin oranges on Centura unbreakable side plates. But the whole marriage stretched between “what-ifs” and “might-have-beens.” And Susan was getting too old for abstractions.

  She used to fantasize about what image she would bring back for him—successful critic, laid back vagabond, mad politico, artiste—and she used to worry about what he would choose to see. The six years since their divorce had spun as dizzily as a projector on rewind: Liberation, reel one. Now she wanted to tell him all she had learned about their marriage, him and herself. All that she had discovered about being a woman, about coming from an immigrant, unschooled, working class family. Although they had been married for seven years they had, like most proper Americans, ignored the delicate issues of class. She wanted to tell him about her failed contributions to the Mozambican revolution. About how she learned over and over that America was not the center of the world. And there was so much that was hard to speak in anecdotes. How she had moved from being a good Catholic girl to being a radical feminist. She wanted to tell him how she discovered she had a decent mind and then that she had deep feelings and fervent commitments and how she was just beginning to believe again that she had a soul. Even this morning she debated about wearing her Zanzibarian dress or her jeans and workshirt. Now, realizing how loud was the sameness around her, she understood that she didn’t have to project any image. It didn’t matter what he thought. It didn’t matter if he showed up. And knowing this, she could wait a while longer.

  Of course he would come back to the States when Carter pardoned the draft dodgers. Although it should have been amnesty rather than pardon, although deserters should have been included, although Guy and Susan had both sworn futures to Canada, the land of the possible, they would each come back. Guy had written to her: “Life is not a moral gymnasium.” Susan had been able to appreciate Shaw only after the divorce. Yes, she had long known they would come back in different ways to different places in Berkeley.

  The waiter deposited thick, bloody steaks in front of the jock and his girlfriend. Extra rare. She and Guy would have had just enough money now to order sirloin, to buy an el toro and paddle around the Bay. As it was, she could barely afford this salad. If nothing else, money marked the solid distinction between what might have been and what actually was.

  Susan looked down at her notebook, pretending to read. The proposal for her next book. Had she brought it to save time or to show Guy or to hide behind at a solitary lunch?

  They had been the ideal couple, much admired, often envied. Young, dedicated, vigorous. With a certain stylish earnestness. A handsome intelligence—they were the kind of couple who would be photographed for marijuana magazine ads in a few years. Political, unneurotic, talented, professional without being careerist. Comfortable in the funky apartment they shared with another couple above an Italian grocery in a West Indian district of Toronto. Even Guy’s mother—after she had made her way through the neighbors—had to admit that the giant paisley cushions and the macrographics were “kind of cute and so resourceful.” Guy was doing well in graduate school and Susan was making enough money from the magazine to buy a new sound system. Everything that might have been was happening.

  So why was she unhappy? Her therapist told her she wasn’t ready to grow up. Her Marx teacher told her she was tied to bourgeois gratifications. Her CR group told her she was confined by the patriarchal family. And everybody, despite their caveat, thought she and Guy had an open or healthy or growing relationship. Their friends were surprised when they split up: “Of all people.” Susan was surprised that t
hey were surprised.

  She reached deep into her scarred leather purse and pulled out Guy’s note. One o’clock. He said one o’clock. Now it was nearly 2:00 p.m.

  In college, she would daydream about meeting her lover at an Italian restaurant with red-checked tablecloths and with Chianti bottles hanging from the ceiling. He would be a rather 50’s Jack Lemmon lover. She never dreamed about her lover arriving, just about the waiting, about savoring his arrival. Now, she returned to her notebook, absently spooning the ice from her water glass to dilute the sweetness of the Coke. She used to do this with rum.

  She remembered one stunning Bacardi afternoon during the last month of their marriage. She sat on the giant paisley cushion with page proofs strewn around her. Appalachian Spring was spinning on the Gerrard. She nibbled from a plate of carrots and raisins, sipping her third rum and Coke. For half an hour she had sat, staring blankly. There was something she had to figure out. Something about Guy’s motivation for … now, what was it? Guy’s motivation for.…

  She had sat for another twenty minutes groping for the idea and releasing it just as it filed back into her head. Maybe she didn’t want to settle the “marriage thing” after all. Maybe she had always known it would break down. No, the scary part was that there was nothing she had always known. This marriage was her fault, she realized, adding the rest of the rum to her Coke. When they were at Berkeley, she wanted to get married; he just wanted to live together. He said he needed a lot more backpacking, a lot more political work and, to be up front, a lot more screwing around before he settled into anything. But she won. They were married because, if nothing else, it was necessary for crossing borders.

  The whole summer before the divorce had continued like that—phasing in and out, days sunk to the bottom of her glass. She switched to sherry, because it was cheaper, more convenient—for some reason. Everything was paced to possible depressions. Could she rationalize a drink for this? A little extra sleep for that? What the hell had happened to her? To them? It wasn’t his fault. He was faithful. Now he was talking about kids and a communal house. Just what she had asked for. Why did she get herself into the labyrinth of drinking and sleeping that desultory summer?