The Atomic Weight of Love (32 page)

The other thing I think you left out is the dehumanizing part of it all. You can’t think your enemy has feelings, a family, that he loves his kids or his wife, that a gook mother loves her baby as much as your mother loved you. They’re animals, man, GOOKS—and it’s ok to kill animals. It’s why I don’t eat meat anymore—I just don’t see life as expendable as I did when I was there. But when I was there, I had to do what I had to—we all did. And now we have to do what we have to, to end this fucked-up bullshit war.

You keep getting stronger. Don’t let them mess with your mind. Take no prisoners, Meridian.

You made me FEEL—and that’s the whole bag, isn’t it?

OK. That’s all that matters right now. Except this: I’M PROUD OF YOU. I LOVE YOU. KEEP ON KEEPING ON.

—Clay

LATE IN THE FALL
of 1970, once-gold aspen leaves lay brown and decaying on the forest floor. Although the mornings were prickly-sharp with frost, I huddled in a blanket on the back patio and watched dollops of sparrows scurrying beneath my feeders. The slightest thing sent them racing for cover in the bushes. It was amazing that they managed to consume any food, as skittish as they were. They were flighty—a word used so frequently to describe women.

Actually, I thought, the small birds’ behavior made perfect sense—they were so low in the pecking order, so vulnerable. Their predators were bountiful, between the roadrunners, crows, raptors, dogs, and cats. The entirety of a sparrow’s world was peopled with threats. Of course women are flighty, I thought. We have more predators than men; we have to operate constantly with greater wariness. Women alone in parking lots can be singled out, mugged, or worse. Our own mates can beat us, kill us.

I wanted to talk with Emma about it, make it the topic for my next essay. I was eager to begin.

IT WAS A SURPRISE,
when I arrived at Judy Nielson’s house, to learn that one of the discussion group members had invited June Jacobsen as a guest. I was leading the discussion that day, and I’d decided to stay away from any discussion of war crimes. Instead, I wanted to talk about the women’s strike held in New York a few months earlier. It was, in part, a commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment and women’s right to vote. Betty Friedan, the strike organizer, highlighted the problems women still faced: in some states they still could not make wills or own property, except through a husband.

“Women can have the same education, the same work experience as a man, and yet we’re paid only about half what a man is paid to do the same job,” I said.

“I’ve seen it at the Lab—exactly what Meri’s saying,” Barbara Malcolm added.

“But those women in the protest,” Judy began. “Why do they have to act so ridiculous? It turns me off of their cause. It embarrasses me.”

“It’s your cause, too—as a woman,” Barbara said but was ignored.

“And what they were saying, that women are sex objects? I, for one, like to have men look at me,” June interjected. “Bob likes for me to wear pretty things. He likes that I’m a woman, that I wear frilly things.” She tugged at her purple polyester skirt, which was short. On her right hand, she wore an oversized cocktail ring of rubellite, tourmaline, and diamonds. “I don’t see anything wrong with serving my husband breakfast in bed. He works hard!”

As June spoke, I tried to comprehend the fact that this woman was the same person who had once so expertly lectured me on organic soil additives.

“Those women look like men. Short hair, jack boots. And so angry,” Dawn Hendricks said. She was wearing a baby-blue polyester pantsuit with white topstitching and white leather pumps. She held up her frosted pink nails, as if to demonstrate. “What’s wrong with looking like a woman? I don’t want to be a man.”

“Bob says they’re dykes,” June smirked.

“Lesbians,” June whispered while Dawn tittered.

“Wanting to be treated equally, fairly, does not mean I want to be a man. Or that I’m a lesbian,” I said, feeling a blush growing across my chest.

“Well, not you, Meri,” June said, a saccharine smile on her face. “We know you’re a girl.” She stared meaningfully at my Levis and the comfortable suede desert boots I’d recently begun wearing. I’d reduced my makeup to a bare minimum—foundation and a light shade of lipstick—and I wore only Belle’s pearl studs, my wedding rings, and a turquoise and silver ring in the shape of a flower. The heavy squash blossom necklace felt more like one of those old-fashioned horse collars, and so it lived in a box on top of my dresser.

“What I think they’re saying is that we should have a choice,” Barbara said. “About how we want to dress, to be, as women. June can dress up, and Meri can wear her jeans.”

“The news coverage was biased,” Emma said, trying to steer the conversation in another direction. “They belittled women’s legitimate concerns. Does anyone here honestly believe women shouldn’t serve on juries? And yet, in some states women can’t be jurors. How is that a jury of your peers, if you’re a woman sitting in the defendant’s chair?”

“Murder trials? Rapes?” June said. “Leave me out of it. We women don’t want that kind of responsibility, Emma. It’s too stressful, deciding someone’s fate.”

“Women decide the fate of their children every day!” I said.

“And women have an important, different perspective to lend to a jury’s decision,” Emma added. “What about female empathy?”

“I say let the men have it,” Judy said, standing. “Now, who wants carrot cake?”

“Only a tiny piece,” June said, joining Judy. “I have to watch my weight or Bob says he’ll divorce me,” she giggled.

I looked at Emma, who rolled her eyes.

NOVEMBER 11 WAS MY
forty-seventh birthday, and I told Alden that Emma and I were headed to Santa Fe. Instead, I met Clay at his apartment, where he’d made brunch, complete with champagne and a white sheet for a tablecloth, laid over a card table where he usually kept his bills and schoolwork. A huge cardboard box wrapped in the funny pages sat in the middle of his living room, with Jasper as its guardian. I knelt on the floor to open the box. Inside was a copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex
. Clay had underlined Chapter XXV, “The Independent Woman.”

“Oh my,” I said, looking up at him. “You have high expectations of me.”

I dug deeper in the box and found Janis Joplin’s
I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues
, the album cover a blurry picture of her head, hair whirling, the frenzy of her movements and her energy so perfectly captured. Next came a wide, floppy-brimmed black felt hat with a beaded hatband in pinks, greens, and blues. I set it on my head and wondered if I’d have the courage to wear it anywhere—other than canyons or isolated mountain trails.

“Beautiful,” he said. “Keep going.”

A photo postcard pictured the Campanile at the entrance to Berkeley, and on the back he’d written:

Picture yourself in the hat, walking arm in arm with me here. Happy BIRTHday, Meridian. You are reborn. You got NO time to waste. LOVE.

“THERE’S ONE MORE GIFT,”
he said when, mid-afternoon, I finally made myself rise from his bed and dress.

“It’s too much.” I turned to him while I fastened my skirt. “Don’t forget, I have to explain all of these things.”

“Jasper.” The dog lifted his head, ready to come if needed.

“Jasper?”

Clay helped me tug my sweater over my head, ran his fingers through my hair to smooth it.

“It was OK when I could take him to work at the site, but now that the weather’s changed and I’m stuck at a desk, writing reports, analyzing data—well, it’s not fair to leave him cooped up in this apartment all day.”

“You want me to take him home?”

“Until we head to Berkeley, yes. Can you do that? You know he loves you. And, there’s this, too,” he said, clearly reluctant to go on. “I’m going to Montana for a month. To spend Thanksgiving and the holidays with my folks.”

“Oh,” I said, smelling our lovemaking, the scent of us melded together. I would miss him so.

“Meridian?” He rubbed his thumb across my cheekbone. “You must have noticed the same thing I have,” he began. “My nightmares. I don’t have them as often, and they’re less intense when they happen. You did that. There’s no one else on the face of this earth who could have done that for me.”

“Oh,” I said, “I rather doubt that.”

“Just for today, give up on the self-deprecation, OK? You know it’s true,” he said, and I had to smile a tentative smile of agreement. “The peace you’ve given me is what’s going to let me spend time with my parents—without worrying that I’ll scream and yell in the middle of the night, scare them half to death.”

I put my forehead to his chest and held it there for several seconds. In that moment I felt such hope for Clay, for his future. I thought about what strength he possessed, to survive what he had seen and done. And I’d managed to give something meaningful to him; our relationship was a true exchange.

I stepped back at last and beckoned to Jasper. “Will you come live with me, boy?” I asked and felt Clay’s arm go about my shoulders.

THAT EVENING ALDEN PRESENTED
me with bakery cupcakes and a box wrapped in pink flowered paper. I’d left Clay’s gifts in the trunk of the Morris Minor.

I stood at the dining room table and started to open the package carefully, so that I could save and reuse the paper. Then I remembered we were millionaires and that I was supposed to be intensely alive, so I ripped the paper with a dramatic flourish, and Alden applauded. I felt how heavy the box was when I lifted it to remove the wrapping paper stuck beneath it.

“You have me guessing,” I said, smiling at him.

He grinned. “It is exciting. Really, at this point, a prototype—they won’t come out officially until next year, but I knew someone who knew someone . . . Well, you’ll see.”

It was good to see him eager about something. I muscled open the top of the box and found a heavy glass lid. I reached around the sides of what appeared to be crockery—the old brown crockery similar to what Mother had used to make pickles. I lifted the entire thing from the box. It was orange, with a single black dial and an electric cord.

Alden was irrepressible. “It’s called a Crock-Pot. You use it to slow-cook food. In the morning, you put a meal in it—say chicken or ribs or something—and then you go about your day, check on your crows, write your essays, even go to class in the evenings—and the meal will be ready when you get home.”

I crossed to his side of the table and kissed his cheek. “It’s very thoughtful,” I said and tried with all my heart to mean it.

ON THE AFTERNOON BEFORE
Clay was to fly to Montana, we made love one last time, as if our touch were prayer. He used his fingertips to tap out secret messages along the soft, inviolate skin of my inner thighs.

“I never used to cry.” He ran a hand along the outside of my thigh, thoughtful. “It’s not manly. You do anything not to cry. You laugh. You fight. But you don’t cry, man.”

I ran my knuckle along his jaw.

“You get brainwashed in boot camp. Hell, you get brainwashed from the moment you take your first breath. Be a man. A
man
,” he spat.

I reached behind his neck, put my hot hand to the atlas that crowned his backbone.

“Roger. He was my brother, dig? I couldn’t cry for Roger or for any of the pieces of Roger that got blown into me. He was black. I don’t think I said that before. He had my back, and I was supposed to have his.” He rolled onto his back, stared at the ceiling. “He turned me on to grass, Deeeetroit, the Temptations. The Four Tops, for Christ’s sake.” He laughed halfheartedly. “Fucking bullshit.” He wiped tears from the wells of his eyes.

After some time I went to the kitchen to get us a glass of water, and I pulled the small jewelry box from the depths of my purse. I handed it to him.

“What’s this?”

I’d found it in Santa Fe—a slim lace of supple brown leather. Onto it, I’d threaded milagros I’d found in a shop off of the Plaza.

“You know about milagros, right?” He shook his head. “They’re religious folk charms, for healing. The legs are to cure your war wounds.” I motioned to the charms as he moved them along the length of the necklace. “The bird is for my crows. The sun is for New Mexico, and the heart is for obvious reasons.”

“A guy’s version of a charm bracelet,” he said, pulling the love beads from around his neck and laying them aside. He lifted the hair from the back of his neck. The milagros fell in the center of his chest.

“I have something for you, too.” He reached beneath the mattress and handed me a similar jewelry box. Inside was a key.

“The key to your heart?”

“I rented a post office box in my name. So we can write to each other while I’m away. Your name’s not associated with it in any way. I’ll address letters to myself; you go pick them up.”

“You’re about ninety steps ahead of me, you know.”

He tapped the side of his head. “Always thinking, baby, especially when it comes to you.”

“Devious,” I said and reached to tickle him.

“Oh, no you don’t.” He pinned me to the mattress and locked eyes with me.

“And you’re taking Jasper home tonight. I have his box packed.”

“Something I’ve been meaning to ask forever. Why
Jasper
?”

“It’s a common stone, but mythology—I forget whose—says that jasper has the power to protect from fears in the night.”

“Oh.”

“He’s a good talisman, but I prefer you.”

Now it was getting hard. He saw it in my face.

“It’s not forever,” he said, stroking my temples as if soothing a fevered child.

“I know,” I said and closed my eyes to it all.

JASPER BOUNDED
TO THE
door to meet Alden when he came home from work.

“Meri?”

“His name’s Jasper. A friend of mine at the pool was moving, and she needed a home for him at the last minute.”

Surprisingly, Alden knelt and let Jasper lick his chin. I stood there, amazed. “You don’t mind?”