I AM SOMEBODY NOV 2010 NANORWRIMO VERSION
- Killing the Fish
She arrived late it was true but it still annoyed her, all the fuss. Martha one of the founders and coordinators immediately told her that her mother had called three times and she should call her back. We were getting worried, Martha told her.
It was mid-afternoon. She had missed lunch. The group was settling into the big front room for a meeting. A few hours late and Martha had to tell her in front of a dozen people that her mother had called. The first venture out into the world after graduation and the first thing she heard was – mommy called, call home, mommy’s worried.
She called. Stayed on for less than half a minute. Mommy she thought, got the message: she was safe, arrived and annoyed.
Everyone gathered in the front room where they tried to get comfortable on creaky old metal chairs or cross legged on the dusty old rug. The long row of windows that faced 10th Street let in little air, mostly the usual urban cacophony of kids, cars, music jumbles.
Martha sat next to Caleb, the other founder and, ashe frowned down at his clipboard, Martha introduced her to the group. Introduced her as Cassandra which no one ever called her, usually she was just plain old Cassie, but it seemed right, it seemed to fit, given that two days ago she had left high school formally, legally, and for good, for all time, so a new name was certainly in order.
The new Cassandra said nothing, feeling her face grow warm(er) under the attention of all those new people in the circle. She smiled and nodded, glanced around. Caleb had not yet looked up.
“We were expecting you for lunch, too,” said a young woman to her right, but not unkindly. She had long hair, tied up messily with a scarf and there were streaks of sunburn on her cheeks and forehead.
“Oh, sorry. I uh, got a bit lost,” she lied. Then, feeling the weight of all those eyes, along now with Caleb’s who had looked up as if noticing her for the first time. “You know I have the worst sense of direction in the entire world. Takes me forever to get anywhere – I always have to double back and circle and ask for help but you know, it’s fine because I meet the most interesting people that way. So. Uh. Don’t ever worry about me.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Caleb said flatly. “I told her-“inclining his narrow head in Martha’s direction – “teen age girls have a way of showing up when they’re ready.”
Cassandra figured that by now her face was the color of boiled beets but what could she do? So she straightened her back and thrust out her chin and smiled at him. She decided that he had an interesting look, stern and angular, like someone’s ancestor in an old photo. Martha seemed his physical opposite: short, padded, with an underlying sweetness to her faintly brown eyes that made you think you could hug her for no reason and she would hug you back.
The meeting began, as all Quaker events begin, with a few moments of silence. Cassandra remembered this and tried to avert her eyes and add her silence to the silence around her but the whirling city noise and the waves of heat rolling in through all those open windows, all these strange new people around her. She could not settle. Then the quiet was broken and she could look up again in earnest, without guilt.
It was a Monday. The purpose of the meeting seemed to be decisions about what to do for the next few weeks. Caleb led off, consulting his clipboard, nearly shouting at times over the outside noise, seeming to make a case for daily lobbying forays focused on legislation to help the poor, specifically surplus food distribution. Cassandra found it hard to pay attention. Not only was she hungry and thirsty but she badly needed a cigarette and on top of all that, she realized with horror as she continued to look around at the young pretty people around her how utterly wrong she was dressed. She was the only girl in a linen pants suit and Italian sandals. She was the only girl with earrings. All right, simple silver hoops, but still. She was the only girl who seemed even with all the heat and humidity, to have styled her hair recently. As much as she could, given the clunky bone straight, fine, thin horrible hair she had, but she had slept on foam rollers the night before in an almost futile effort at a bit of bounce.
Maybe the backpack saved her image slightly, she thought, she hoped. It was an army surplus that she’d bought the week before for this trip, and it was properly battered and faded, stuffed to the hilt with essential stuff. But offsetting that offset was her now obviously absurd Etienne fish basket purse, sitting at her sandaled feet like a well behaved pet. How was it that only now did she realize how stupid the whole idea was: a purse fashioned after a fish basket? With leather straps and a fake gold clasp. She, like the majority of girls at her high school, had carried the Etienne fish basket all year. How stupid could she have been? And the thing had been expensive to boot. She wished she could disown it instantly but there it sat, silent and accusatory, calling her a silly high school girl.
Tuning back in to the discussion, she listened as a young man with pretty auburn hair down his back disagreed with Caleb about the lobbying idea. Cassandra felt confused. Somewhere in one of the zippered pockets of her new/old backpack, she had a flyer about this group, the flyer that had caught her eye in the office of the friends service committee and she was sure it said something about civil disobedience and direct action. Yes, it had to. Was that not the name of the group – the Quaker Direct Action Corps? It was. When she had done the phone interview with Martha, Martha had explained with a polite laugh how they called the group QUE-dack for short. The interview had consisted mainly of Martha quizzing Cassandra about her Quake background, her knowledge of non violence.
No, Cassandra told her, I have not had any actual training in non violence or civil disobedience, but well, I went to Quaker schools up through 8th grade and went to Quaker meeting and First Day school too every Sunday and – well, I come from old pacifist families on both sides, going back hundreds of years. So. Guess it’s sort of in my blood. Don’t you think?
She got into the group based on that little speech. Martha told her, okay, just show up after you’re done with school, 10th and L Streets, northwest section of DC, anytime, we’re here already and plan to stay the summer or as long as the SCLC campaign is going on. Martha had added to dress comfortably but bring one dress maybe since they might be going to congress or to black churches and well, you usually wore a dress for those things. Cassandra had packed a dress, the one dress she owned that she actually liked and thought she looked good in. Looked ok in.Or at least not horrible in.
Where was the direct action in stomping around the congressional office building begging congressmen to throw a few more crumbs at poor people in Appalachia? She had thought direct action would mean – what? Well. She had not really thought it out in any great detail but certainly something more exciting than lobbying. For months now she had been watching reports on educational TV about the poor peoples’ campaign this summer in DC. It had been gearing up for a long time, long before martin was murdered. There was the mule train from Atlanta that had made it to DC a few days late, but in time for the official beginning of the campaign. There was the construction of what they named resurrection city in Lafayette square just across from the white house. Rec City had been intended to house the young people from all across the country for the duration of the campaign, young people who, like herself, had pledged to work all summer to give witness for the poor. And what was all this for? Surely not lobbying.
Others had joined in the debate about lobbying versus something else and she decided if this was went on for much longer she would need a smoke so she bent down and slipped her pack of Parliaments from the now hated fish basket purse and glanced around for an ashtray. None in sight and no one else was smoking so she lowered the unlit cigarette to her lap and just then the sunburned girl to her right handed her a big glass jar, like a family sized mayo, half filled with a brownish sludge of butts and water. Cassandra smiled quietly, nodded and unscrewed the lid, the dank smell almost making her reconsider but she lit up and flicked, able now to concentrate.
Martha never did declare a position during that Monday afternoon meeting, lobby versus not lobby. It turned out that she was deeply depressed because she had been seized by a calling to go to Prague and give public witness against the soviet invasion but she had already committed to QUE-dack for the summer and Caleb wouldn’t release her from her contract, so to speak. Later, as Martha took her on a tour of the house, Cassandra agreed that Prague sounded pretty exciting, even without soviet tanks. What could a person do? Martha had made this commitment before Prague happened just as Cassandra had stupidly worn a linen pants suit with a striped shell to a Quaker social activist group. Bad decisions all around.
The house: downstairs, the big front room where they’d just met, not much furniture, huge windows and a boarded up fireplace at the far wall with what Cassandra thought looked like a genuine marble mantle piece, somehow miraculously not ripped out and stolen through all these years of remodeling and remaking.
The kitchen: big, square and stuffy room with an enormous evil looking stove that even in the light of midday crawled with roaches. Behind the kitchen: a small office shared by Martha and Caleb, Martha said, though Cassandra saw no signs of Martha in the windowless room, just Caleb’s old leather brief case, Caleb’s daily newspapers he read and a row of Caleb’s family photos, wife, two daughters and little son.
The two daughters, Martha explained, Sonya and Rachael, were here though they were not supposed to be. Their mom had fallen from a horse and broken both legs so the little boy had been farmed off to a relative and the girls, aged, Martha speculated vaguely, about maybe, 12, 13, in that range, had to come along though today, for the day, Caleb had managed to get them oninto church day camp.
Second floor: mostly taken up by what they called the theater and it was a crude sort of theater with a wooden stage and a few overhead lights. The building had been a Christian mission of some kind years ago and the Christians had done many of the renovations such as this theater room, complete with an old upright piano and stadium seating. The walls on both sides were covered with faded murals depicting old testament stories and in the days and weeks to come, during long and often tedious meetings, Cassandra would find herself melding into some of those familiar stories, find herself far more in synch with those crudely drawn faces in their ecstasy or pain than with all the supposedly real people sitting around her.
A few extra rooms on floor number two were taken by Caleb, Martha and the girls andeveryone else slept on the third floor.
The common floor, Martha called it, possibly Cassandra thought, with a hint of irony, as she puffed and labored to lead Cassandra up that last stairwell. Cassandra hoisted her overstuffed pack and the now detested fish basket and everywhere they went she kept an eye out for a garbage can big enough to hold the vile fish thing but so far, none. Anyway, she was afraid it might look very odd to Martha if out of nowhere she chucked a perfectly good meaning not broken, purse into the garbage. So for now she was stuck with the horrid thing. On the top floor there was one huge room on the left with lots of windows and even the hint of a breeze. Martha told her that most everyone crashed here, just on mattresses on the floor since there really weren’t beds except for the one, a youth sized iron bed with a thin mattress and a bare pillow. After catching her breath, Martha smiled bravely and told Cassandra that spaces here were first come, but why didn’t she take the bed in honor of her very first night with the group?
Out of gratitude Cassandra agreed and dropped her pack onto the bed which responded with a series of shudders and creaks. Really she would have preferred the floor or possibly the medium sized room across the hall that was all girls. There was, Martha had explained, one all girl room and one all boy room, the boy room way down at the end. In between were two shower rooms, one for girls, one for boys. Glancing around at the dusty floors and streaked walls, Martha told her that she and Caleb and a few others had arrived early to get the house ready but were unprepared for the mess. They’d done the best they could, she added and it wasn’t getting much better than this – mattresses on the floor, mildewed shower curtains. And so on.
Though Cassandra didn’t manage to actually dispose of the fish basket until later that week for now she got out her wallet and cigarettes, slipped them into her army pack, then deflated the pack and, while Martha was using the bathroom, kicked the absurd fish basket under the iron bed.
The dejected and shamefully expensive Etienne Aigner fish basket that she’d carried for most of high school hit the wall. It now resided amid dust and smootz under an ancient iron bed on the third floor of a sagging and soon to be condemned old house in a crowded and dirty DC neighborhood. What a come down for a purse that had been carted to and from St. Angela’s Academy day after day, had been to dances at all the boys academies, had been to New York for school outings (accompanied by Nuns who carried no purses since they had no possessions), had been to museums and department stores, restaurants and parites.
Perhaps it felt a bit cruel even to Cassandra that day as she followed Martha back downstairs for the rest of the meeting, cruel to just dispatch the poor purse like that, the purse that her mother had paid an exorbitant price for, discard it in favor of a three dollar used army pack that had been used by who knew who and for what purposes. But life could be cruel, she thought, cruel and final. Things ended, other things began. And a used khaki pack was far more Quaker than an Etienne. It was plain and practical, ancient and well worn.
She had done it or almost, she decided, as she struggled to pay attention for the second half of the meeting, nearly ripped herself away from the catholic and gone back to the Quaker, something she wished she had done long ago. First the purse, next the clothes, next everything else, meaning her very brain, her mind, her very life. That night in the mildew ridden girls shower room she rolled up the three piece linen pants suit and shoved it down into the plastic lined garbage bag as far as she could, so no one would ever notice it there. Here in Quaker land it was ripped jeans or peasant dresses for girls, with long unruly hair (no foam rollers to be sure, and luckily she had not brought them).
The next morning she appeared in the steamy kitchen for oatmeal with powdered milk with her hair now straight down her back, wearing her one dress since it was too hot for jeans and carrying her olive drab pack on her shoulder.
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