Murder in the Collective (2 page)

It wasn’t that I didn’t like her. In fact, I found her, beneath the sometimes nervous behavior, fairly agreeable. She’d had a rough time the last couple of years. Becoming the media’s favorite scapegoat for a whole movement just after you’d come out—with the consequent trashing in the movement itself for being a star—it couldn’t have been any picnic. I could also understand why Elena, after the rigors of the custody case and the shock of being fired from a job she loved, would find the print shop a little dull. Printing is, for the most part, very routine work: a lot of measuring, adjusting, measuring again. There’s not much intellectual stimulation to it, other than in the sense of being involved with words and images, and realizing the effect they can have.

Yet I still thought that Elena, if she continued working here, would probably be good for us in the long run. She’d already opened my mind to a whole section of the community I’d never known very well before…

With a start I realized Elena was talking to me. “Are you asleep or what, Pam? This is the second time I’ve asked you.”

“What? No, I was just thinking…what is it?”

“I want to add another item to the agenda if we’re finished with the other stuff. A proposal.”

I looked around blankly at everyone’s face, forgetting how intensely and strangely I’d been staring. Now they just seemed like the people I’d known and worked with for months or years: my little family, my collective. Too bad what they’d been talking about had passed me by.

“I guess I haven’t been doing such a good job facilitating tonight,” I apologized. “I’ll try to do better. Any objections to Elena moving on to a new topic?”

Zee and June shook their heads; Ray shrugged; Jeremy scuffed his feet—he hadn’t ever really taken to Elena. And Penny said, with the forced cheerfulness that comes from a long career of meetings, “Let’s hear it.”

Elena cleared her throat. She was very nervous suddenly, as if she were steeling herself for something unpleasant. A flush of red surged into her fair cheeks with their long creases around her mouth; she ran her fingers through her fluffy yellow hair, and I thought, with a start, how much she looked like Jeremy for an instant. With their coloring and blond ringlets they were certainly more twin-like than Penny and I.

“Let’s hear it,” said Penny again, with some impatience.

So Elena let us. “I’ve been talking to the women at B. Violet Typesetting and….” She looked around at us quickly, almost challengingly. “I want to propose we merge collectives.”

B
. VIOLET TYPESETTING WAS
a lesbian owned and run typesetting and design business that had once been part of, as Penny liked to put t, a “co-ed” printing collective. It had been five or six years ago that the original women of Mobi-Print (named in honor of some anticipated mobilization of the Left back in 1970) had seceded. They claimed that since the men insisted on ghettoizing them in the typesetting room while they ran the presses, they might as well have their own business and make their own decisions.

The Moby Dicks, as the men inevitably and rather regrettably came to be called, fought it for a while (some of the women were their girlfriends, or had been), but eventually gave in and the collective split in two. It was a common story in the seventies. Mixed collectives started out having women’s caucuses, then “women’s spaces,” then the women would either get the men to leave or leave themselves.

There were a lot of hard feelings in this case, especially since the new all-male Mobi-Print soon dropped like a great white whale into the unfathomable seas of bankruptcy. The women, who had regrouped and gained new lesbian members (or come out themselves), resurfaced as B. Violet Typesetting. They had wanted to call themselves Lavender typesetting but were afraid they wouldn’t get enough business. Violet was practically the same thing as lavender, someone reasoned, with the added advantage of sounding kindly and respectable, at least in the phone book. The story went that, later on, when customers asked to speak to “Miss B. Violet,” the women would variously call out, “Barbarella, it’s for you,” or apologize, “Boadicea isn’t here right now, but can I help you?”

To the disgruntled Moby Dicks, however, the women’s collective was always known as “Be Violent,” and through the years they had spread rumors about having been driven out forcefully by a bunch of man-hating, T-square-wielding Amazons.

While I’d never believed
those
tales I had been somehow negatively affected by the idea of a group of politically correct separatists trying to make it in the business world. We’d dealt with them on occasion, but it had never been particularly comfortable. Ray, who was usually the one to mark up the copy with instructions for the typesetter, complained that they pretended not to understand his handwriting, or ignored him at the counter if there were women waiting too.

I’d never quite admitted it to anyone, but I was glad B. Violet was on the other side of town. Obviously it was so much more convenient to go to the typesetters three blocks away from us, even if they were male capitalists.

Elena joining our collective made a difference, however. As soon as she found out what typesetting was and that there was actually a lesbian typesetting business in town, she was astonished that we didn’t take all of our work there. She didn’t go for the excuse that they were too far away, and as for Ray’s difficulties, Elena shrugged them aside, saying that she was sure he was just imagining it, but if it
bothered
him so much to deal with women, then he should just send
her
or
Pam
instead.

All the same, there was something about Elena that both cowed us and appealed to our better instincts, as when she added seriously, “I think collectives have a moral and political obligation to help each other survive.”

Who could argue with that? So I arranged that B. Violet should do our next typesetting job and took the copy over there myself.

The collective now had only four women, down from the six or seven they’d started out with, and some different faces. The thing that most surprised me the first time I went there was the neatness. All the typesetters and layout artists I knew worked in a rubble of sticky paper and tiny, lethal objects. But B. Violet was laid out as nicely as a piece of camera-ready copy. There were two modern photo-typesetting machines, two beautiful light tables, a small darkroom, lots of labeled shelves and even an area in front like a doctor’s waiting room, with graphics magazines and women’s newspapers on the table.

I didn’t know the woman at the counter, but she was brisk and thorough and even friendly when she found out I was from Best Printing. She was a slowspeaking Texan, with a wad of gum, a pair of very long legs ending in scalloped boots, and movements as ropey as a cowgirl’s. Hadley was her name. We went over the type specifications together, and I was impressed that she seemed to grasp immediately what was wanted. She said she’d have it by the next day, and I went away very confident, pleased that Elena had pushed the issue.

But Hadley wasn’t there the next day. Fran was; Fran, the oldest member of the collective and the one Ray had always complained about. If Hadley was the cowgirl out on the range, then Fran was the cactus she hitched her horse to: a tall thick barrel with a thatch of skunk-like black and white hair and a hidefull of stickers, all pointing straight at me.

“It’s not done,” Fran said immediately. “I don’t know how you can expect it to be done so soon.”

She looked harassed. But she also looked like the kind of person who enjoys looking harassed—just so you’ll be sure to know how busy and important she is, and what an interruption your standing there and breathing is.

“But Hadley told me it would be done today.”

“Well, it’s Hadley’s day off. I could have done it this morning but your instructions just weren’t clear and I didn’t have the time to call you.”

She had a low, gravelly voice that in some circumstances might have been pleasant enough, and a strongly featured face that would have been handsome if it hadn’t been so twisted with bad temper.

I could tell I was getting mad by the way my voice came out. Penny calls it the “robot-teacher voice”: slow, overly well-enunciated, unemotional. “Bring out the copy,” I said. “My instructions were perfectly clear and I’ll show you.”

And they were perfectly clear—as I had written them. But someone else, Hadley, I was afraid, had re-marked them so my meaning was confusing.

“If you’d used a red pen in the first place and hadn’t changed your mind so much this wouldn’t have happened,” Fran growled, unwilling to take any blame at all.

The robot-teacher voice said, “I’m going now. I will be back at four o’clock to pick it up.”

It got done, but with no love lost on either side. And these were the people, the incompetent, unpleasant women of B. Violet, that Elena was suggesting join our collective?

Penny spoke for me. “What? Are you out of your mind?”

“Are you going to let me explain or not?” Elena asked, over her nervousness now and seemingly imperturbable. It wasn’t for nothing she’d been a high school teacher. She was used to getting around outright rejection and ridicule: “What? Me write an essay on Emily Dickinson, you gotta be kidding.”

Everyone looked at her. I noticed that, unconsciously, arms had crossed and faces had set.

“Now, I know you all think I know nothing about printing and it’s true, in a way, that I’m new and ignorant. But maybe, being new, I see some things that those of you who’ve been here longer don’t see.”

Stony silence. I wanted to tell Elena to drop it, at least for tonight. There were times when we could all stand a bit of lecturing, but now wasn’t one of them.

Elena went right ahead, however, flicking back a curly blond lock from her forehead. “I think we waste a lot of time, and money too, not having a typesetting machine. Look at all those trips to the typesetters. And they make mistakes and you have to go back and get corrections. Or you suddenly need to add something else—one tiny word—and have to wait a day and a half for it. Isn’t that right?” She looked at Ray and smiled. “Isn’t it?”

Reluctantly he had to nod his head. No use pretending that he didn’t sound off about the slowness or inaccuracy of our typesetters once or twice a week.

“It’s a question of simple efficiency,” said Elena smoothly. “Now I happen to know that B. Violet is in the opposite fix.”

“What fix?” muttered Penny, but she didn’t interrupt.

“They’ve got the equipment—two machines, a whole darkroom setup with stat camera and everything—but not enough business. So you see, it’s perfect!”

“Why don’t they have enough business?” June asked.

“Hah,” said Ray. “Go visit them sometime. You’ll see.”

Elena glared at him and said seriously to June, “The economy’s failing and you have to ask why they don’t have enough business?”

“Yeah,” said June stubbornly.

“Yeah,” repeated Penny. “Let’s at least be business-like about this proposal. I’d want to see quarterly statements, a balance sheet, net worth, a bunch of stuff before I even consider the idea.”

“Now, wait a minute,” I said, remembering my duties as facilitator all of a sudden. “Elena has just brought up the idea. There are two questions to consider: would Best Printing be improved by having typesetting facilities is one of them. Can we discuss that?”

Elena looked at me with surprised brown eyes. I could see she hadn’t expected to find an easy ally.

“No! We wouldn’t be improved,” said Zee energetically, shaking her smooth black head like a bell. “Definitely not. We have too many people around here already, too many problems just doing our own work. What do we need another business for? It’s just another headache. That’s what I think.”

“I agree,” said Ray. “You start getting people in here wanting typesetting and who knows where it will end? You can’t do everything under one roof. Are we going to start binding next? And don’t forget, Optimum Typesetters is just down the block. It’d be crazy to compete with them.”

“That’s a good point,” I said.

“What do we care about Optimum?” snapped Elena. “It’s just some man who owns it and pays his workers peanuts.”

“That’s true,” I said.

“Stop trying to be so fair, Pamela,” Penny said.

“I can’t help it, I’m facilitating.”

“Facilitating nothing. This is a pointless discussion.”

Jeremy spoke for the first time, leaning forward with a narrowing, puzzled expression in his blue eyes. He forgot to look cute and spaced out and seemed almost angry. “Well, I’m against it. I mean, I’m a guy, right? I mean, and no offense, Elena, but what’s to prevent these women from taking over and getting rid of me and Ray?”

“Oh Christ,” said Elena, tense and suddenly close to tears. “What
is
your problem, Jeremy? Look, I never would have brought this up if they hadn’t asked me to.”

Penny was up in arms. “Why you? Why didn’t they arrange a meeting with us, write a formal letter or something?”

“Yeah,” said June, “how’d you get involved in all this?”

“Because I…because,” Elena paused, unable to stop herself from turning bright red. “Because Fran is my lover now, that’s why! Satisfied?” She jumped up and ran out of the shop, slamming the door.

We were all silent. I heard the rain pour down violently outside and said, “Well, I guess that means the meeting’s over.”

“Huh,” said June. “You can bet we haven’t heard the last of this.”

A
FTER THE MEETING PENNY
and I went home to make dinner. We had a couple of roommates, Sam and Jude, but they were gone that night, and so it was just us, moving around the kitchen the way we had as kids.

No wonder.

It was the same kitchen.

It’s funny—Seattle has become one of those trendy West Coast cities where every other person is from somewhere else. It’s a little déclassé, in fact, to admit that you were born here. I mean, what do you have to talk about then? You can’t be like the New Yorkers who miss the theater but love the slow pace, or like the Californians who bemoan the rain but admire the bus system. Sometimes it seems like every party you go to there are these little enclaves of expatriates: “Everybody from Manhattan take a seat; you from Pittsburgh, over there with the rest of them. Chicago, down front; Boston, upstairs. Seattle? No, nobody from Seattle here. Try the bowling alley.”