The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories Read online

  June whispered, “To be perfectly honest, I was beginning to have my doubts about the whole thing, but with you along …”

  They made Sally a member of the council.

  The next day the women took the Sunnydell Shopping Center, which included two supermarkets, a discount house, a fast-food place and a cinema; they selected it because it was close to camp and they could change guard details with a minimum of difficulty. The markets would solve the food problem for the time being, at least.

  In battle, they used M-1S, one submachine gun, and a variety of sidearms and grenades. They took the place without firing a shot.

  The truth was that until this moment, the men had not taken the revolution seriously.

  The men had thought: After all, it’s only women.

  They had thought: Let them have their fun. We can stop this thing whenever we like.

  They had thought: What difference does it make? They’ll come crawling back to us.

  In this first foray the men, who were, after all, unarmed, fled in surprise. Because the women had not been able to agree upon policy, they let their vanquished enemy go; for the time being, they would take no prisoners.

  They were sitting around the victory fire that night, already aware that it was chilly and when the flames burned down a bit they were going to have to go back inside. It was then, for the first time, that Sheena raised the question of allies.

  She said, “Sooner or later we have to face facts. We can’t make it alone.”

  Sally brightened, thinking of Zack. “I think you’re right.”

  Rap leaned forward. “Are you serious?”

  Sheena tossed her hair. “What’s the matter with sympathetic men?”

  “The only sympathetic man is a dead man,” Rap said.

  Sally rose. “Wait a minute.”

  Ellen Ferguson pulled her down. “Relax. All she means is, at this stage we can’t afford any risks. Infiltration. Spies.”

  Sheena said, “We could use a few men.”

  Sally heard herself, sotto voce. “You’re not kidding.”

  Dr. Ora Fessenden rose, in stages. She said, with force, “Look here, Sheena, if you are going to take a stance, you are going to have to take a stance.”

  If she had been there, Patsy would have risen to speak in favor of a men’s auxiliary. As it was, she had sneaked out to meet Andy. They were down in the shadow of the conquered shopping center, falling in love.

  In the command shack, much later, Sheena paced moodily. “They aren’t going to be satisfied with the shopping center for long.”

  Sally said, “I think things are going to get out of hand.”

  “They can’t.” Sheena kept on pacing. “We have too much to do.”

  “Your friend Rap and the doctor are out for blood. Lord knows how many of the others are going to go along.” Sally sat at the desk, doodling on the roll sheet. “Maybe you ought to dump them.”

  “We need muscle, Sally.”

  Margy, who seemed to be dusting, said, “I go along with Sally.”

  “No.” Lory was in the corner, transcribing Sheena’s remarks of the evening. “Sheena’s absolutely right.”

  It was morning, and Ellen Ferguson paced the perimeter of the camp. “We’re going to need fortifications here, and more over here.”

  Glenda, who followed with the clipboard, said, “What are you expecting?”

  “I don’t know, but I want to be ready for it.”

  “Shouldn’t we be concentrating on offense?”

  “Not me,” Ellen said, with her feet set wide in the dirt. “This is my place. This is where I make my stand.”

  “Allies. That woman is a marshmallow. Allies.” Rap was still seething. “I think we ought to go ahead and make our play.”

  “We still need them,” Dr. Ora Fessenden said. The two of them were squatting in the woods above the camp. “When we get strong enough, then …” She drew her finger across her throat. “Zzzzt.”

  “Dammit to hell, Ora.” Rap was on her feet, punching a tree trunk. “If you’re going to fight, you’re going to have to kill.”

  “You know it and I know it,” Dr. Ora Fessenden said. “Now try and tell that to the rest of the girls.”

  As she settled into the routine, Sally missed Zack more and more and, partly because she missed him so much, she began making a few inquiries. The consensus was that women had to free themselves from every kind of dependence, both emotional and physical; sexual demands would be treated on the level of other bodily functions, any old toilet would do.

  “Hello, Ralph?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s me, Lory. Listen, did you read about what we did?”

  “About what who did?”

  “Stop trying to pretend you don’t know. Listen, Ralph, that was us that took over out at Sunnydale. Me.”

  “You and what army?”

  “The women’s army. Oh, I see, you’re being sarcastic. Well listen, Ralph, I said I was going to realize myself as a person and I have. I’m a sub-lieutenant now. A sub-lieutenant, imagine.”

  “What about your novel you were going to write about your rotten marriage?”

  “Don’t pick nits. I’m Sheena’s secretary now. You were holding me back, Ralph, all those years you were dragging me down. Well now I’m a free agent. Free.”

  “Terrific.”

  “Look, I have to go; we have uniform 9 inspection now and worst luck, I drew KP.”

  “Listen,” Rap was saying to a group of intent women, “You’re going along minding your own business and wham, he swoops down like the wolf upon the fold. It’s the ultimate weapon.”

  Dr. Ora Fessenden said bitterly, “And you just try and rape him back.”

  Margy said, “I thought men were, you know, supposed to protect women from all that.”

  Annie Chandler, who had emerged as one of the militants, threw her knife into a tree. “Try and convince them it ever happened. The cops say you must have led him on.”

  Dr. Ora Fessenden drew a picture of the woman as a ruined city, with gestures.

  “I don’t know what I would do if one of them tried to …” Betts said to Patsy. “What would you do?”

  Oh, Andy. Patsy said, “I don’t know.”

  “There’s only one thing to do,” Rap said, with force. “Shoot on sight.”

  It was hard to say what their expectations had been after this first victory. There were probably almost as many expectations as there were women. A certain segment of the group was disappointed because Vic/Richard/Tom-Dick-Harry had not come crawling up the hill crying, My God how I have missed you, come home and everything will be different. Rap and the others would have wished for more carnage, and as the days passed the thirst for blood heaped dust in their mouths. Sheena was secretly disappointed that there had not been wider coverage of the battle in the press and on nationwide TV. The mood in the camp after that first victory was one of anticlimax, indefinable but growing discontent.

  Petty fights broke out in the rank and file.

  There arose, around this time, some differences between the rank-and-file women, some of whom had children, and the Mothers’ Escadrille, an elite corps of women who saw themselves as professional mothers. As a group, they looked down on people like Glenda, who sent their children off to the day care compound. The Mothers’ Escadrille would admit, when pressed, that their goal in banding together was the eventual elimination of the role of the man in the family, for man, with his incessant demands, interfered with the primary function of the mother. Still, they had to admit that, since they had no other profession, they were going to have to be assured some kind of financial support in the ultimate scheme of things. They also wanted more respect from the other women, who seemed to look down on them because they lacked technical or professional skills, and so they conducted their allotted duties in a growing atmosphere of hostility.

  It was after a heated discussion with one of the mothers that Glenda, suffering guilt pangs and feelings
of inadequacy, went down to the day care compound to see her own children. She picked them out at once, playing in the middle of a tangle of preschoolers, but she saw with a pang that Bobby was reluctant to leave the group to come and talk to her, and even after she said, “It’s Mommy,” it took Tommy a measurable number of seconds before he recognized her.

  The price, she thought in some bitterness. I hope in the end it turns out to be worth the price.

  Betts had tried running across the field both with and without her bra, and except for the time when she wrapped herself in the Ace bandage, she definitely bounced. At the moment nobody in the camp was agreed as to whether it was a good or a bad thing to bounce; it was either another one of those things the world at large was going to have to, by God, learn to ignore, or else it was a sign of weakness. Either way, it was uncomfortable, but so was the Ace bandage uncomfortable.

  Sally was drawn toward home but at the same time, looking around at the disparate women and their growing discontent, she knew she ought to stay on until the revolution had put itself in order. The women were unable to agree what the next step would be, or to consolidate their gains, and so she met late into the night with Sheena, and walked around among the others. She had the feeling that she could help, that whatever her own circumstance, the others were so patently miserable that she must help.

  “Listen,” said Zack, when Sally called him to explain, “it’s no picnic being a guy, either.”

  The fear of rape had become epidemic. Perhaps because there had been no overt assault on the women’s camp, no army battalions, not even any police cruisers, the women expected more subtle and more brutal retaliation. The older women were outraged because some of the younger women said what difference did it make? If you were going to make it, what did the circumstances matter? Still, the women talked about it around the campfire and at last it was agreed that regardless of individual reactions, for ideological reasons it was important that it be made impossible; the propaganda value to the enemy would be too great, and so, at Rap’s suggestion, each woman was instructed to carry her hand weapon at all times and to shoot first and ask questions later.

  Patsy and Andy Ellis were finding more and more ways to be together, but no matter how much they were together it didn’t seem to be enough. Since Andy’s hair was long, they thought briefly of disguising him as a woman and getting him into camp, but a number of things: whiskers, figure, musculature, would give him away and Patsy decided it would be too dangerous.

  “Look, I’m in love with you,” Andy said. “Why don’t you run away?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that,” Patsy said, trying to hide herself in his arms. “And besides …”

  He hid his face in her hair. “Besides nothing.”

  “No, really. Besides. Everybody has guns now, everybody has different feelings, but they all hate deserters. We have a new policy.”

  “They’d never find us.”

  She looked into Andy’s face. “Don’t you want to hear about the new policy?”

  “OK, what?”

  “About deserters.” She spelled it out, more than a little surprised at how far she had come. “It’s hunt down and shave and kill.”

  “They wouldn’t really do that.”

  “We had the first one last night, this poor old lady about forty. She got homesick for her family and tried to run away.”

  Andy was still amused. “They shaved all her hair off?”

  “That wasn’t all,” Patsy said. “When they got finished they really did it. Firing squad, the works.”

  Although June would not have been sensitive to it, there were diverging feelings in the camp about who did what, and what there was to do. All she knew was she was sick and tired of working in the day care compound and when she went to Sheena and complained, Sheena, with exquisite sensitivity, put her in charge of the detail that guarded the shopping center. It was a temporary assignment but it gave June a chance to put on a cartridge belt and all the other paraphernalia of victory, so she cut an impressive figure for Vic, when he came along.

  “It’s me, honey, don’t you know me?”

  “Go away,” she said with some satisfaction. “No civilians allowed.”

  “Oh for God’s sake.”

  To their mutual astonishment, she raised her rifle. “Bug off, fella.”

  “You don’t really think you can get away with this.”

  “Bug off or I’ll shoot.”

  “We’re just letting you do this, to get it out of your system.” Vic moved as if to relieve her of the rifle. “If it makes you feel a little better …”

  “This is your last warning.”

  “Listen,” Vic said, a study in male outrage, “one step too far and, tschoom, federal troops.”

  She fired a warning shot so he left.

  Glenda was a little sensitive about the fact that various husbands had found ways to smuggle in messages, some had even come looking for their wives, but not Richard. One poor bastard had been shot when he came in too close to the fire; they heard an outcry and a thrashing in the bushes but when they looked for him the next morning there was no body, so he must have dragged himself away. There had been notes in food consignments and one husband had hired a skywriter, but so far she had neither word nor sign from Richard, and she wasn’t altogether convinced she cared. He seemed to have drifted off into time past along with her job, her students, and her book. Once her greatest hope had been to read her first chapter at the national psychological conference; now she wondered whether there would even be any more conferences. If she and the others were successful, that would break down, along with a number of other things. Still, in the end she would have had her definitive work on the women’s revolution, but so far the day-to-day talk had been so engrossing that she hadn’t had a minute to begin. Right now, there was too much to do.

  They made their first nationwide telecast from a specifically erected podium in front of the captured shopping center. For various complicated reasons the leaders made Sally speak first, and, as they had anticipated, she espoused the moderate view: this was a matter of service, women were going to have to give up a few things to help better the lot of their sisters. Once the job was done everything would be improved, but not really different.

  Sheena came next, throwing back her bright hair and issuing the call to arms. The mail she drew would include several spirited letters from male volunteers who were already in love with her and would follow her anywhere; because the women had pledged never to take allies, these letters would be destroyed before they ever reached her.

  Dr. Ora Fessenden was all threats, fire and brimstone. Rap took up where she left off.

  “We’re going to fight until there’s not a man left standing …”

  Annie Chandler yelled, “Right on.”

  Margy was trying to speak. “ … just a few concessions.”

  Rap’s eyes glittered. “Only sisters, and you guys …”

  Ellen Ferguson said, “Up, women, out of slavery.”

  Rap’s voice rose. “ … you guys are going to burn.”

  Sally was saying, “ … reason with you.”

  Rap hissed, “Bury you.”

  It was hard to say which parts of these messages reached the viewing public, as the women all interrupted and overrode each other and the cameramen concentrated on Sheena, who was to become the sign and symbol of the revolution. None of the women on the platform seemed to be listening to any of the others, which may have been just as well; the only reason they had been able to come this far together was because nobody ever did.

  The letters began to come.

  “Dear Sheena, I would like to join, but I already have nine children and now I am pregnant again …”

  “Dear Sheena, I am a wife and mother but I will throw it all over in an instant if you will only glance my way …”

  “Dear Sheena, our group has occupied the town hall in Gillespie, Indiana, but we are running out of ammo and the water supply is low. Several o
f the women have been stricken with plague, and we are running out of food …”

  “First I made him lick my boots and then I killed him but now I have this terrible problem with the body, the kids don’t want me to get rid of him …”

  “Who do you think you are, running this war when you don’t even know what you are doing, what you have to do is kill every last damn one of them and the ones you don’t kill you had better cut off their Things …”

  “Sheena, baby, if you will only give up this half-assed revolution you and I can make beautiful music together. I have signed this letter Maud to escape the censors but if you look underneath the stamp you can see who I really am.”

  The volunteers were arriving in dozens. The first thing was that there was not housing for all of them; there was not equipment, and so the woman in charge had to cut off enlistments at a certain point and send the others back to make war in their own hometowns.

  The second thing was that, with the increase in numbers, there was an increasing bitterness about the chores. Nobody wanted to do them; in secret truth nobody ever had, but so far the volunteers had all borne it, up to a point, because they sincerely believed that in the new order there would be no chores. Now they understood that the more people there were banded together, the more chores there would be. Laundry and garbage were piling up. At some point around the time of the occupation of the shopping center, the women had begun to understand that no matter what they accomplished, there would always be ugly things to do: the chores, and now, because there seemed to be so much work, there were terrible disagreements as to who was supposed to do what, and as a consequence they had all more or less stopped doing any of it.

  Meals around the camp were catch as catch can.

  The time was approaching when nobody in the camp would have clean underwear.

  The latrines were unspeakable.

  The children were getting out of hand; some of them were forming packs and making raids of their own, so that the quartermaster never had any clear idea of what she would find in the storehouse. Most of the women in the detail that had been put in charge of the day care compound were fed up.

  By this time Sheena was a national figure; her picture was on the cover of both newsmagazines in the same week and there were nationally distributed lines of sweatshirts and tooth glasses bearing her picture and her name. She received love mail and hate mail in such quantity that Lory, who had joined the women to realize her potential as an individual, had to give up her other duties to concentrate on Sheena’s mail. She would have to admit that it was better than KP, and besides, if Sheena went on to better things, maybe she would get to go along.