Murder in the Collective (3 page)

But déclassé or not, Penny and I were born and raised here and seem to have a continuity that most people we know lack. Take the house. Even though we both moved out independently when we were eighteen and nineteen and didn’t come back here to live until we were twenty-five, and even though the pink bedroom upstairs was now ivory and the bunkbeds were in the basement, the house was full of reminders of our youth. Scuffmarks, stains, broken things that had never gotten fully repaired; a door that hadn’t been the same on its hinges since Penny had tied one of my front teeth to a string and slammed it (the tooth stuck to its gums); cracked cups, glued back together and still holding twenty years later; books with scribbled covers, wallpaper with the design filled in with ink; drawers full of scorched potholders, faded Girl Scout badges, burst necklaces.

It wasn’t only our reminders either; our parents left their own—just not such violent ones. Our dad’s Sunday paintings of cows and barns were still on the walls and Mom’s collection of laughable and lovely cream pitchers still lined the dining room window sills.

People have asked us how we could want to live here after the accident. As if it were ghoulish or something. I think only those who were never close to their families at all could say that. Or maybe it’s the way it happened. It’s not like Mom or Dad grew into old age, became querulous and senile, or had a chance to take leave of their possessions and their memories. No, they simply vanished one day, smashed up in a head-on collision on the freeway, dead immediately.

I suppose our moving back into the house was one way of remembering them, living with them a little longer. Or letting them live. I don’t find that macabre in the least.

And there were definitely advantages. The house was paid for and in good condition, except for the aforementioned scuffs and stains. We didn’t have to buy a thing, and for two young women in the midst of disengaging themselves from scholarly pursuits in order to run a business, this was no mean relief.

We were happy there. At ease. It was obvious in the way we crossed and recrossed the kitchen, knowing the places of things, their history and meaning.

But I suppose the smoothness came from being twins too. I was working on sautéing the eggplant, just starting to think spices, when Penny swooped over with basil and oregano. “Let’s add red wine to the sauce,” she said, and then saw I’d already got the bottle out. It was always like that, but still we could marvel and laugh. We were different enough that outside our home we could sometimes forget our connection; inside, here, especially performing the familiar acts, there was something seamless, true.

“So does this mean the end of Elena or the beginning of a whole new chapter in the history of Best Printing?” Penny asked, tasting away and liberally adding more red wine to the spaghetti sauce.

She sounded more flippant than I suspected she felt. Elena’s departure had left a sour, embarrassed taste in my mouth, that I hadn’t been able to analyze yet.

“She seemed really upset, didn’t she?” I said tentatively. “Like we were going to trash her or something.”

“But Pam, if she’d just said that in the beginning, about being lovers with Fran…” Penny stirred the pot impatiently while I got out two glasses. As long as we were cooking with wine, we might as well drink it. I had a feeling that this discussion required a certain degree of inebriation.

“I don’t think she really wanted that to be known—at least not so we’d be influenced.”

“Of course we’d be influenced, now or later. It would have to come out. And we have a right to know.”

“But
how
are we being influenced, that’s definitely a question we have to ask ourselves.”

“It would be the same if Fran were a man,” Penny declared, draining her glass. “Worse, in fact. Because then you’d know for sure that he was using Elena to get into Best Printing.”

“Penny! Is that what you really think? That Elena’s being used?”

“Well.” She looked a little ashamed. “Maybe not. But the alternative is that Elena herself is trying to cause trouble.”

I poured us both more wine. “No, the alternative is that Elena thinks it’s a good idea, and only happens to be lovers with Fran.”

“Elena and her good ideas!” Penny burst out. “I’m sick of Elena and her good ideas. Ever since she came it’s been nothing but ‘let’s do it this way,’ or ‘I think we should do it that way.’ She doesn’t give us any credit for having made decisions in the past about the best way to do things—she acts like we just fell into this.”

“Well, didn’t we?” I couldn’t help laughing. Penny on her high horse was always inexpressibly funny to me. Her big purple glasses were steamed up from the water boiling in the spaghetti pot and her punk hair stood on end.

“Pamela.” She looked severely at me. “There’s no need after four years to pretend we know nothing about what we’re doing. That’s what women always do, act modest and dumb, don’t take credit for what they’ve accomplished…”

“Oh, come off it. I read that book too. And besides, I happen to think that some of Elena’s ideas
have
been good ones. Like having someone do a thorough inventory every week. If we’re so smart, how come we never thought of that?—the way we’d run out of things and have to rush off and buy some more.”

“It’s not that easy always to anticipate what you’ll need,” Penny muttered defensively, dumping in the stalks of spaghetti. “Okay,” she said suddenly, turning to face me. “
That
was a good idea. But what about some of the others—the filing system that meant buying a whole new set-up that turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, and Elena wanting to go to all those conferences at our expense so she could supposedly make job contacts for us—money down the drain. And that’s what any association with B. Violet would be too—money down the drain, maybe even bankruptcy—” Penny flung out a hand dramatically, knocking over her wine. “But anyway, trouble,” she said more calmly, mopping it up. “Hell, those women can’t manage their own finances, they’d drag us down too.”

As often happened, the more Penny tried to convince me, an already sympathetic listener, the more I started to pick holes in her argument. There’s something graphic about someone who looks like you and who you’ve known all your life setting forth an idea so vehemently. You see how silly it looks. But then, I was always far less positive and self-assured than Penny. A carper from the word go. After Mom and Dad died I was completely set against the idea of working at the shop ourselves. All those boring weekends when we were kids, hanging around making paper dolls out of the scrap and sweeping up for a quarter—forget it, dump the business right away.

But Penny was against the idea too, and listening to her go on and on about what a mistake it would be to get involved, how much better it would be to hand it all over to other people, etc., I couldn’t help but become convinced that it would be the best thing in the world for us to take the shop over.

We were always haggling back and forth, convincing each other and occasionally ourselves. It was so routine usually that it was like talking to yourself in the bathtub. But tonight there was something else in the air, something more than Elena’s system of filing or her wanting to go to yet another feminist conference. Penny gave vent to it when we were halfway through our spaghetti and eggplant and more than halfway through our bottle of wine.

“Okay,” she said. “Much as I think Jeremy put it badly tonight, there’s truth to what he said. Why would the women from B. Violet, having left a mixed collective, want to join another one? What would that mean for us, and for Ray and Jeremy, or any other men who want to join?”

“We could have had an all-women’s collective,” I said. “Almost did. If I hadn’t gotten involved with Ray about then and Jeremy hadn’t walked in the door the day that Kay said she was quitting…”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Penny. “You know we didn’t think like that. About being a women’s collective. I mean, it’s not that we’re politically unsophisticated…”

She looked at me for confirmation. I shrugged.

“We’re feminists…” she went on. “We know all about women working together, creating their own spaces, taking control of their lives. I mean, we’re two women who’ve known each other all our lives…”

“It would have been difficult not to.”

“The point is, Pammy,” she said with dignity, the dignity of half a bottle of wine. “
We
think it’s necessary to struggle together—with men, not apart. We may get down on men occasionally, but we’re not man-haters.”

“That’s not what I heard you say last week. And
I
think that straight women hate men a lot more. They have more reason and more opportunity.”

“Doug and I are just having a cooling off period,” Penny said, staring vaguely at the dregs of the empty bottle. “In fact, I was thinking of calling him tonight.”

“You’re better off without him, Pen.”

“You would say that. But ever since Ray you just haven’t made the attempt anymore.”

“You make it sound like parachute jumping…Maybe you’re not so far wrong.”

“Seriously, Pam,” (Penny was always using judicious adverbs like that. I never knew where she got it from.) “It’s been almost a year now since you’ve been involved with anyone. You’re not still thinking about Ray, are you?”

“No…though I can’t help feeling a little dejected to see him with Zee now.”

She sighed sympathetically, paused, and then, as if it had just occurred to her, jumped up. “I can probably get Doug now if I call. Before his class starts.”

I got up and started rinsing the plates. I should have known their separation was too good to last. Doug was one of those thin, athletic types just this side of sports-fanaticism. He biked, he skied, he ran, he sailed, he’d been down to the bottom of the ocean and up to the tallest mountain tops. He worked at REI, the recreational equipment co-op, and he really got on my nerves. Penny found him terribly sexy, if a little lightweight intellectually.

I stacked the dishes, decided to leave them for later and started reading the evening newspaper. The New Peoples Army continued fighting hard on the island of Mindanao and Marcos was getting ready for his trip to Washington, D.C., in the fall. There was a photo of him looking like a wax mannequin and a caption saying the Philippines might have to return to martial law if the bombings continued. That was a joke—as if he’d ever really lifted martial law. I thought about Zee’s uncle, imprisoned for ten years, since 1974, and about Zee. What would she do when her temporary visa ran out? I supposed she could always marry somebody in the States. Marry Ray, for instance.

Penny’s laughter trilled in the hallway. She and Doug seemed to be on great terms again. I wished it had been as easy for me and Ray to make up. But just as it had begun, so had it ended. With fireworks. We’d managed to keep working together and now I guessed we were friends. We were civil anyway and once or twice, before he started seeing Zee, we’d gone out for coffee and managed to have an ordinary conversation. But there was no way of ever going back. I didn’t really want to.

He was always too glamorous for me, too intense. He wanted to stay up all night talking art and revolution; I wanted to go to sleep. He wanted to travel to Central America and work with the peasants; I wanted to stay safely at home away from the right-wing firing squads. He liked a sniff of coke now and then, elaborate sexual positions, driving all night, experimental music, calling relatives long-distance. I liked gardening, silence, having people over for dinner, reading Ruth Rendell and E. X. Ferrars in bed with a cup of tea.

He liked my “stability,” the sense of home he had with me and Penny. I liked his looks, his background, the flair he brought to everyday life. We thought we could change each other, but I just got more stubborn, he got more exasperated. It was a mess in the end.

All the same, it had been a connection, an intimacy, that I now lacked. I hadn’t made a conscious choice to draw back from a new relationship. It had just happened. I didn’t seem to meet any new men; most of my friends were women, and the men I already knew didn’t attract me. I’d started out wanting to live a simpler life, on my own again, trusting my likes and dislikes, away from the heat of romance and anger, and had found it so natural somehow that I didn’t want to break the spell again.

And yet, I realized as Penny’s voice got lower in the hall and I strained to hear, I was lonely. Lonely when any of my women friends fell in love and went off into the sunset with their cowboys. I knew it was normal, but I found it depressing.

The receiver clicked back in place and Penny returned to the kitchen grinning cheerfully. “Well, we’re going to have a drink tomorrow night,” she said. “And then, we’ll see.” She sounded extremely optimistic.

We talked about other things then: whether this heavy rain was going to continue and what that would mean for the garden; whether we pickled too many cucumbers last year; whether the fence would fall down if we didn’t fix it this year. Homely household details. We didn’t go back to the subject of B. Violet and Elena’s merger proposal. I guess we just thought we’d wait and see what happened.

But something had already happened—to me, at least. In between the accusation of man-hating and the phone call to Doug, I’d begun to think I really did want to meet with B. Violet before completely dismissing the idea. I wouldn’t mind seeing that woman Hadley again and finding out what she thought about all this. She might be a member of B. Violet but I’d still liked her, and besides….

Actually, I suspect the most telling thing about my conversation with Penny that night, in retrospect, was that the word “lesbian” was never used.

Not once.

A
MEETING WITH B. VIOLET
was scheduled for the Tuesday evening of next week. I asked Elena if we could see their books in the meantime or at least a few quarterly statements. She called Fran and came back with the information that they didn’t want to make any figures available until they’d been assured of some definite interest on our part.

“Just for security reasons,” said Elena.