June - The Liars 9 страница

"But that's Jason, for you. He always says maybe, probably, and sort of instead of real answers. I'm sure when he enlisted he was saying the same things on his forms. But he's happy about it, I can tell," Jasmine assured me. Other than her biological brother and father, who had both been long out of her life, Jasmine had no other family to tell. We went back to work on our research, having now settled our outside support systems.

We were unsure of what we wanted to find in our searches. We were both so voracious that sometimes people would ask what we were after, but we stared up blankly. We just wanted to know things, and to try and shape our worlds from a different point of view. It felt like we were getting close to something much larger than we could imagine, which was why we couldn't articulate it. Jasmine had begun to tell me about the history of feminism as we both poured over her zines; it was a story that I had never heard her tell me fully, only in bits and pieces here and there. This was how she anchored herself in the larger world, and she hoped to help anchor us both in this overwhelming future we were bracing ourselves for.

"It came in waves," she began. She pointed to a design of never ending spirals, forming waves, as the border of this one particular zine. "First there were the suffragettes. This was in the early 1900s, and they were mostly known for getting women the vote. They wanted women to be seen as people, too, and to be respected on paper as men and participating members of communities. I always think of this as the paper revolution. I never liked the wave analogy, actually." She turned a page in the zine, scrunching up her nose a bit. "According to the wave metaphor, there have only been three waves. They have been huge, and I suppose, like a monsoon or a flood, have taken over in a way. And like waves, they double back and keep going. But I never liked how waves also drown people and leave people behind on the shore. I don't use them, but for history's sake, and so you know what I'm talking about, I'll keep this going."

I nodded, letting her direct the session. It was the most that Jasmine had ever spoken out loud to me with this type of authority to her voice. Anytime she usually voiced her opinions, she would be shaky and try to back peddle and downplay her role. She spoke her essays out loud, but those thoughts were never fully formed. When she told stories to me of her past, those were different, too. They were narrative, and she was much better with stories - or so I had thought. I listened to her as she wove me in and out of this feminist take on history, and then inside that history, analyzed its presence from varying lenses of thought. She went from radical, to eco-critical, to post-structural and psychoanalytical, and then back to the original suffragettes as she told me about the waves. They flowed in and out of her mouth; she told me what was written, but she also told me what was left out. She told me her own analysis on what had happened in history. I sat there, drinking up this version that had been completely in the dark to me until this night in Lydia's birthing center.

"So this was the paper revolution, and I call it this because this was women becoming real people on paper. They had the right to vote, they could divorce and not be destitute; they were shifting their property rights and all sorts of stuff like that. Paper freedom, but when people actually intermingled with one another, the freedoms on paper didn't make sense anymore. That was what the second wave wanted to fix. People like Sojourner Truth were writing papers and giving speeches wondering why they were left out in this promise to freedom that feminism claimed. There was a lot of work done in this era: we're talking around the 1950s and 1960s here, mostly. The second wave, or as I like to think of it as the people revolution, did a lot to balance out the inequality amongst women before. The feminism of before, like Betty Freidan, was mainly aimed at middleclass white women. That was being fixed, and aside from race taking a larger role, there was a lot of emphasis on sexuality, too. Some people considered it the sexual revolution because of the invention of the pill and the freedom that happened in the 1960s, but I still like to call it The People Revolution. We were still learning how to treat people based on a basic human integrity and not leave them out because of what their bodies may have looked like or what they liked to do with them. We were working on acting out the freedom that had apparently been granted on paper."

"Most of this is still going on," I said, and Jasmine nodded with a small unfortunate smile.

"It's still trickling into debate, and it went beyond the sex-fest of the 1960s. The abortion debates over Roe V Wade and the porn wars. All of this is still happening now, and these arguments are still going on, more or less. But the watershed moments have already past. As far as I'm concerned, some of these things need not to be debated anymore. The conclusion is obvious."

I nodded, still baffled that the debate over sexuality was still going on. Jasmine attested to me that it was still going, even before the lesbian separatists and the radical movement decided to make it a bigger deal. "Who, by the way, I think are ridiculous. Lesbian separatism is pretty much gone now, but issues around lesbianism are still going on. It's a historical debate. It always has been, and unfortunately, I think always will be."

We were both slightly despondent at that point, now that we had both had our own sexual indiscretions, in spite of our apparent and obvious heterosexuality. I asked her, "What's next?"

She smiled again, clearly moving onto her favorite point in history. It was one section she had actually been alive during, and while still too young to participate in most of the Riot Grrrl movement, she remembered the commotion when it was happening. She touched the zine we had been looking at, flipped it over so we could see the date. I was astonished that it read in the early 1990s. "This is what's next. This is the third wave now and these zines are artifacts of its history."

She told me that she could remember being very young, before high school, turning on the television and seeing Kathleen Hanna for the first time. "Who was I to know that there was a world outside of what I knew? It was the first time I had ever really realized there was more beyond this. That was what the Riot Grrrl movement was like, I think, even if I was too young to do anything real about it. I dreamed up what it could have been, and that was as true as anything else to me." She laughed a bit, and went on to give me the more integral details of this point in history. Even though I had been alive at this point as well, I had no clue. Growing up without any siblings, and being immune to that type of presence on a television screen, I had no idea. When we were in high school, the era had pretty much run its course, but as I could tell from the zines we were still looking through with modern dates on them, the impact of this wave was still rolling on.

"I'm trying to think of what I would call this wave instead. It's more than a paper or a people revolution: those forces actually came together this time around. Most of these zines were done by young people, whose status had changed immensely during that time. We weren't quite adults, nor were we children anymore. This lead to so much boredom, and you could feel it in the punk songs from the 1980s. But instead of breaking shit, people created things that had not been seen before. People tried to talk about things that had not been discussed before. It sounds so trite to call it the boredom or teenage revolution, but that's what it felt like to me. That's what I could anticipate as I got older and it had been what I was waiting for. Hilda tells me it was not as awesome as I'm imagining or remembering. But she went to those concerts! Even if it was too many bitchy white middle class girls again, talking about their periods and screaming while not being able to play their instruments, she still got to bear witness to that. She completely discounts the affect that this had on her life, but I don't think she'd be giving the type of lectures she's giving now if she had not gone."

Jasmine sighed, tossing the zine away now entirely. She sat with her arms crossed over her chest and twisted her face, still thinking and trying to figure out how to summarize her point. We had gotten through nearly a hundred years history of the waves and now we were rolling up to the conclusion. Except that, nothing like this ever did have a conclusion. History would always keep on going.

"Are we still the third wave now?" I asked Jasmine and she laughed, telling me she was thinking about that herself.

"Most people still call it that. But I don't know. I don't like the waves and to me, this revolution, if I can see one forming in the zines we have now, is something completely different."

I thought over the past week and all the trips we had been doing, and I agreed with her. Now with Jasmine's summation and interpretation of feminist thought through our century, I was beginning to see this type of alterative history form a distinct path in my mind. What I had been reading, even if it was just the posters on the alternative library at Lydia's birthing center, were not boredom induced or teenage angst ridden. They were something completely new forming, detaching from the old revolutions, but still building on it. What was still very clear, however, was that we were just at the beginning. We were building up, ready to fall, but not quite descending yet.

"Let me get back to you on that one, Frank," she eventually told me. She got up and kissed me on my forehead, and we both conceded. It had been a long night, and I was willing to wait for that answer.

We were both wearing out fast, though. The overwhelming amount of energy that I had put into The Professor and my pursuit of knowledge left me critical and skeptical of everything when I didn't want to be, and her own news binge for the magazine left her sad most of the time. Not to mention it was hot, and she had been pregnant half a year. We needed to find our own voices again in all of this, and we figured that Food Not Bombs, the place where we had produced our first story together, was the place we needed to go next. When we showed up in the memorial park, the feast had just begun and the mass of bodies in multi-colors formed a line to the tables, I knew we were in the right place.

I was not used to seeing it this busy, considering the last time I had ventured here was in the winter. Instead of there being one prominent group (usually the cookers and servers), there were now several large clusters of people together and an additional table set up to catch all of the food. A tent had been erected with nothing underneath it but blankets and a pitcher of water and was there as a resting point. The sun was still high in the sky for the evening, and the heat of the day was not relenting. We were back to the downtown center of the city, and the smog from the cars and factories made the air thick to merely stand in. Jasmine and I headed to the rest station first, and waited our turns at the tables.

As the mixture of people showed up and then began to descend through the tables of food, I scanned the crowd searching for Fred. When I didn't see him right away, I found myself getting worried about him. I actually wanted him to show up this time; I wanted to make sure he was okay and that he was fed just like everyone else. He had scared me so much before because I thought he represented poverty, and the failing of age and a broken body. His vomit and shabby clothing made him hide in plain sight, and that made my skin crawl and my mind spin off into circles. But that had been a long, long time ago. I had been that poor now for a little bit. I had lost my apartment and then I had felt the new one threatened. I realized that the soucouyant that was stalking us, not only stalked Gerard for memories, but it was an economic drain, too. This half-vampire witch woman manifested in the forgetting disease, but also in the disorder of the disappearing money. This was another one of those artistic plagues, like syphilis and tuberculosis, depression and suicide, which the artist resided in. This was the starving artist, who could never hold onto money and spent it recklessly. They would eventually die from this too. I had the words now to understand why Gerard's story of The Hunger Artist had scared me so much. I told myself so many stories to try and contextualize and rational this fear that plagued me with dollar bills and credit cards. But in the end, there were no stories that made it better. I could interpret the death and malady from so many ways, but all of these stories were just that. In the end, they would provide comfort, but I would still have to get on with things.

I felt like I had been able to do that. I had had a lot of help, and I wanted to return the favour. I didn't know what I had planned to do if I saw Fred, but I didn't want to turn away repulsed. I wanted to talk to him, maybe, and show that I cared in some way. He deserved to know that he was important. I had also been afraid of his breaking body, that plague of age, which I had tried to rationalize away, too. Only to realize later that age did not always affect the body, but it attacked the mind as well. And how did you rationalize away a mind? How did you write someone off as having an empty life by just judging what was around them or how they died? You couldn't do that, because that was only one side of the story, only one interpretation. I knew this now. I felt better as Jasmine and I joined the line up to get food, and better still being in the presence of the community of Food Not Bombs, because while I had been taking in so much knowledge recently, I knew I could separate myself from that and try to see the bigger picture.

There were arguments, even in this type of open community. There were always going to be arguments, and people too stuck in their ways and always wanting to know what was right. But maybe because people here had already come from arguing with the outside world for so long, they let it drop quicker. They moved on more. They still held their own view, but at a certain point in the debate you began to realize you were doing more harm than good. You stopped, you backed away, and you carried on with something else. The debate I was most familiar with through Jasmine, and one I had heard come up in line, was that veganism should not include honey.

"It's from an animal, and therefore, not vegan."

"But the bees don't die," was the counter argument, but from here, the underlying ethic of veganism was stressed once again: "No one should feel as if they own an animal and therefore have a right to its labors and products."

I was taken aback at this point, but only because I realized that these two people, like Socrates and many others, were having a dialogue. I watched intently as these two people as fired off their arguments.

"It has heath benefits," came from the skinny girl with dark hair and dread locks.

And then, the woman who was dressed in tight black jeans spouted off a statistic about how many bees it actually took to make a jar of honey, since one single bee only produced a tablespoon in its lifetime. The two of them ended up getting out of the line up at this point, their plates only half piled with food, and continued their discussion back and forth, while Jasmine and I passed right by. I knew it all before, and I had learned it on my own accord this week.

As the two women's debate faded out of my range, I began to see others crop up about many other loopholes or intricacies of veganism or other political affiliations. Gay marriage was something that I heard thrown around a lot, though I disengaged and didn't want to be a part of it. I tried not to look at the contents of each individual dialogue that I now saw happening around me, but focused on the structure that it was occurring in. I began to realize, that though many of these people argued their points beautifully, it was still impossible to change the other person's mind. They had to do that for themselves. Arguments were not about changing minds at all. It was reflecting your own opinion, explaining your point of view the best you could, and then backing away. It was trying to understand what the other person's experience was, and then letting it be.

I looked at Jasmine, then, just after the second honey debate I heard. She was on the other side of the table, holding her pale colored plate out as she plopped down what looked to be a green bean and beet mix onto it. She was also grabbing some of the French bread that was there, but instinctively looked up for me when she grabbed it to ask if I wanted some. When she realized I was already staring at her, she smiled, but then looked away shyly. I had been smirking at her a lot lately, anytime she would come into my view.

"Stop it, Giggles. You're making me feel funny," she told me with a smile.

This had been a standard response to my sudden glances at her. I would usually obey and look way, but then coyly raise my vision back and just look at her. These instances would happen the most when we were browsing through shelves at the alternative libraries, and I could see her profile perfectly. Her nose, her mouth, neck, and bigger breasts, and then this full stomach would be perfectly displayed. She was getting larger and larger, and though it was making her more uncomfortable and harder to move around, she was beautiful. I would tell her just how gorgeous I thought she looked now, no matter what she was wearing or what she was doing, and that this was why I was looking at her so much. She would always bat me away with a response of, "You only think that because you're proud that this is part of your heritage now. It's your typical biological imperative, and you're just being a good testament to evolution right now. So stop smiling." Though she tried to keep her face serious, she would be smiling too. I asked her if the biological imperative worked both ways now, and if she was smirking at me when I wasn't looking. She blushed then, and I definitely had my answer. Pregnancy was giving her good hormones, she was saying, that made her "glow" in the typical manner and made her equally susceptible to the evolutionary imperative, too. In between the bursts of information and researching we were doing, we would have these moments where whatever we had learned seemed to regress back, and we would just be our bodies and whatever imperatives and hormones that were pushing us forward. It was more than a simple drive, though, or at least, I told myself. I loved her not because she was carrying my daughter, but the other way around. But the baby mattered, too. I learned about the stages of growth the infant was going through, how her lungs and brain and hormones had developed and made her into what she was then, and what she still needed to do before she came out. Lydia had warned us both about the dangers of viewing the baby right now as a baby, a living and breathing thing. She had watched couples have still births and miscarriages before, and then became obsessed with the child that they never had. Though it was unlikely for us (Jasmine was healthy in almost every regard), she had wanted to emphasize that it was never the child people mourned, but potential. It was an idea, then, not anything real. We both understood that, but we would let our minds entertain the idea for long periods of time. We would talk about Paloma as if she was already here. When I read the facts about her gestation, I was disappointed I had to wait for another three months. I didn't like how sentimental I was getting over it some days, because I knew this was going to be hard. I knew the economic strain and the risks involved, but when I would catch a glace of Jasmine, I'd be okay again.

She kept piling more food on her plate, and I followed close behind with my own. I began stacking it up and I thought about how my diet was changing. Because her nausea had gotten worse (pregnancy wasn't all good hormones and her looking beautiful; sometimes she did look awful after a bad night's sleep and throwing up after eating), she had changed things in the house a lot more. She was trying to eat gluten-free and that was helping a little, but that was a hard thing to do. It meant a lot of the normal foods that I ate I would have to go and get myself, and I had been lazy on that front. I had been eating vegan, more or less, since June had started and I was beginning to wonder if I should just make the commitment. I resisted, though. I still did not know why, because I had heard enough debates going on around me. Jasmine had never tried to start one with me. She knew the same thing I knew: that you could not change someone's mind. She was merely providing an example. That was it. But I also knew that I could not change her mind, and though we had not discussed it explicitly outside of baby food, the kid would be raised vegan. She could choose when she was older, but even I had decided that cooking vegan for her was the best route right now.

When we got to the end of the table, we moved away, and went looking for another spot in the shade where Jasmine could rest. As we crossed over to the other side of the park, Braden emerged from one of the trucks that was bringing food out. Though he saw Jasmine and waved, his demeanor was different than I had remembered him.

"Damn," Jasmine said, and then grabbed my hand. "Let's move to a different part."

She had never tried to avoid him before, so I was somewhat confused, but I went with her. Once we were away from him, she began to explain. "Remember how I said I didn't like his politics?"

I nodded, taking bit of food.

"He doesn't believe in reproduction. He thinks the whole world should be sterilized and we should all go extinct eventually," she rolled her eyes. She had been balancing her plate of food on her stomach and made an uncomfortable joke about how if she hadn't gotten pregnant, then she wouldn't have this awesome place to store stuff now. I waited for her to continue, because I could tell she was in that nervous chatty stage when she was still trying to figure out her emotions.

"I used to agree with him," she went on, and this did not surprise me. "I told you all of that, though, and how I changed my mind. I'm allowed to re-evaluate my choices. If any of us weren't allowed to do that, then we'd all be living in our parents' basements. He's allowed to keep his opinion on overpopulation, but he does not have to tell it to my face anymore. He does not have to say that I'm going against the revolution, or whatever other slogan he has memorized. Even when I told him that half the overpopulation myth is that government and people are steeped in racist ideologies about too many non-white people in the earth, he didn't listen. He used it against me." Jasmine shook her head and I began to rub her back. I didn't feel like I could say anything that would make it be all right. This was one of those debates that had no real right answer, just two different sides, and people needed to respect that. All I really knew for sure was that I was happy there was going to be a baby in September, and it hurt to think that I was somehow doing something wrong because of it. I understood the shitty nature of the world, more so than ever, but I also knew that we were going to provide that kid with so much more. I just rubbed Jasmine's back, and I hoped that she worked things out her own way.

Eventually, we wandered back over to the original rest stop we were in before, some people moved around for us, and we sat down in the shade. Jasmine needed my arms as she got down on the ground, but once there, she was satisfied. We began to eat in silence. I was looking around at everyone that was there, clustered off into their own little groups. I thought hard and listened to see if I could hear the same roaring that The Professor did when he was around the books in the library, and I did. I really heard it this time, there was no pretending, there was no strained listening. I heard the murmur of people, but I also heard the laughter, the gleeful shouting, and the returns of praises. I heard the cascading of plates and dishes, and of flailed arms in greetings. I didn't see dust jackets or covers; I saw arms and legs and bodies, in addition to open minds and numerous dialogues being exchanged. Each person was themselves a book and contained this wealth of information and experience. The fact that Braden had been trying to devour and destroy Jasmine's made me extremely upset. The food was here to devour, not one another. "Take care of one another," Lydia would always say to us at the end of a class, or if she ran into us at the grocery store. I had seen people use "take care" at the end of their emails, not even really thinking about it. Gerard would have never put something like that there because it was an inanity, similar to his feelings on how are you and asking about someone's day. People never really read it; it was purely part of the scripted dialogues that we were forced to play with one another. You were a liar if you put it there, not understanding it. So I had never bothered. Lydia's use of it always made me stop, because she was using it differently. She was saying all of the words, not shortening, but lengthening, it and actually extending it to us. She wanted us to practice what we claimed to sign at the end of emails, not just use it for window dressing.

"This is ridiculous," Jasmine said. She pushed one of her hands at her face and wiped a tear away. We had been quiet for some time, and I had left her alone with her thoughts. I instantly put down my plate, and my arm went around her again. "I should not even be upset by this, but I am. This is ridiculous. I thought I learned this shit in school."

"What did you learn in school?" I asked, realizing that Jasmine had somehow survived through the halls of The Professors. It had not really occurred to me before when she was telling me the history of feminism. I was so used to my main knowledge source being self-taught, like Gerard, and therefore never really had to suffer through any heavy criticism. Jasmine did not do philosophy, but she did do the humanities, where there was never one right answer. While I knew that professors from Women's Studies department were different and that the history it contained would have probably coddled her against criticism more than anything, there were still the English ones to contend with. "How did you survive school?"

She laughed at my use of the word survive, but then she really thought about it. She needed to face criticism here at Food Not Bombs, in very much the same way she had gotten an MA and sat through a thesis defense. While she had done her degree with a double influence, she had focused those two points into one project for her MA. She looked into feminist publishers for her thesis, but it had been a predominantly English Literature basis, which yielded her with even more convoluted professors. She had been super-dedicated and though it tore her apart some days, she still did it. She had been in school for more than six years, give or take a few months, and she knew how to at that point. I cracked after three meetings with a professor. Maybe he had been a bad teacher, or maybe I was seeing things wrong. I began to have doubts again.

"I don't know, exactly, but I think it comes down to not taking any shit. Not dealing with people telling you you're wrong. Everyone is going to say you're wrong, especially in the humanities. The humanities is really just a pumped up version of real life, so people are going to tell you you're wrong there, too. You will find one person, at least, who thinks you're an idiot. Trying to change what's wrong is tiring, especially if you really don't believe it's wrong. I know things like that get really muddy in terms of ethics, but do you know what I mean? Some days at school, I would be completely turned off by what was said, by what everyone was saying was right."

"Like what?"

She thought for a moment. "Did I mention Judith Butler when I told you about the waves before?" I shook my head, and she rolled her eyes as she went on. She began to explain some of the theories surrounding the social constructionist point of view on gender, and I wanted to hug her. She was taking the same 'refusing to be powerless' stance that I had told The Professor about in my one email. "I mean, I understand what she was trying argue in her book. I'm not an idiot. But her view on gender being purely made out of language, and therefore rendered not a 'real' identity just doesn't make sense in the real world. I still have a body, you still have a body, and while some of what makes us men and women is fake, we are still real, and people are going to treat us a specific way on what they perceive about us. I have to believe that I am still real or I start to doubt the existence of everything."

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14