Kit Reed
Author: Songs of War [ss]
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00

Kit Reed - Songs of War

For some weeks now a fire had burned day and night on a hillside just beyond the town limits; standing at her kitchen sink, Sally Hall could see the smoke rising over the trees. It curled upward in promise, but she could not be sure what it promised, and despite the fact that she was contented with her work and her family, Sally found herself stirred by the bright autumn air, the smoke emblem.

Nobody seemed to want to talk much about the fire, or what it meant. Her husband, Zack, passed it off with a shrug, saying it was probably just another commune. June Goodall, her neighbor, said it was coming from Ellen Ferguson’s place; she owned the land and it was her business what she did with it. Sally said what if she had been taken prisoner. Vic Goodall said not to be ridiculous, if Ellen Ferguson wanted those people off her place, all she had to do was call the police and get them off, and in the meantime, it was nobody’s business.

Still there was something commanding about the presence of the fire; the smoke rose steadily and could be seen for miles, and Sally, working at her drawing board, and a number of other women, going about their daily business, found themselves yearning after the smoke column with complex feelings. Some may have been recalling a primal past in which men conked large animals and dragged them into camp, and the only housework involved was a little gutting before they roasted the bloody chunks over the fire.

The grease used to sink into the dirt and afterward the diners, smeared with blood and fat, would roll around in a happy tangle. Other women were stirred by all the adventure tales they had stored up from childhood; people would run away without even bothering to pack or leave a note, they always found food one way or another and they met new friends in the woods.

Together they would tell stories over a campfire, and when they had eaten they would walk away from the bones to some high excitement that had nothing to do with the business of living from day to day. A few women, thinking of Castro and his happy guerrilla band, in the carefree, glamorous days before he came to power, were closer to the truth. Thinking wistfully of campfire camaraderie, of everybody marching together in a common cause, they were already dreaming of revolution.

Despite the haircut and the cheap suit supplied by the Acme Vacuum Cleaner company, Andy Ellis was an under-achiever college dropout who could care less about vacuum cleaners. Until this week he had been a beautiful, carefree kid, and now, with a dying mother to support, with the wraiths of unpaid bills and unsold Marvelvacs trailing behind him like Marley’s chains, he was still beautiful, which is why the women opened their doors to him.

He was supposed to say, “Good morning, I’m from the Acme Vacuum Cleaner Company and I’m here to clean your living room, no obligation, absolutely free of charge.” Then, with the room clean and the Marvelsweep with twenty attachments and ten optional features spread all over the rug, he was supposed to make his pitch.

The first woman he called on said he did good work but her husband would have to decide, so Andy sighed and began collecting the Flutesnoot, the Miracle Whoosher and all the other attachments and putting them back into the patented Bomb Bay Door.

“Well thanks anyway …”

“Oh, thank you,” she said. He was astounded to discover that she was unbuttoning him here and there.

“Does this mean you want the vacuum after all?”

She covered him with hungry kisses. “Shut up and deal.”

At the next house, he began again. “Good morning, I’m from the Acme Vacuum Cleaner company …”

“Never mind that. Come in.”

At the third house, he and the lady of the house grappled in the midst of her unfinished novel, rolling here and there between the unfinished tapestry and the unfinished wire sculpture.

“If he would let me alone for a minute I would get some of these things done,” she said. “All he ever thinks about is sex.”

“If you don’t like it, why are we doing this?”

“To get even,” she said.

On his second day as a vacuum cleaner salesman, Andy changed his approach. Instead of going into his pitch, he would say, “Want to screw?” By the third day he had refined it to, “My place or yours?”

Friday his mother died so he was able to turn in his Marvelvac, which he thought was just as well, because he was exhausted and depressed, and, for all his efforts, he had made only one tentative sale, which was contingent upon his picking up the payments in person every week for the next twefve years.

Standing over his mother’s coffin, he could not for the life of him understand what had happened to women—not good old Mom, who had more or less liked her family and at any rate had died uncomplaining—but the others, all the women in every condition in all the houses he had gone to this week. Why weren’t any of them happy?

Up in the hills, sitting around the fire, the women in the vanguard were talking about just that: the vagaries of life, and woman’s condition. They had to think it was only that. If they were going to go on, they would have to be able to decide the problem was X, whatever X was. It had to be something they could name, so that, together, they could do something about it.

They were of a mind to free themselves. One of the things was to free themselves of the necessity of being thought of as sexual objects, which turned out to mean only that certain obvious concessions, like lipstick and pretty clothes, had by ukase been done away with. Still, there were those who wore their khakis and bandoliers with a difference.

Whether or not they shaved their legs and armpits, whether or not they smelled, the pretty ones were still pretty and the others were not; the ones with good bodies walked in an unconscious pride and the others tried to ignore the differences and settled into their flesh, saying: Now, we are all equal.

There were great disputes as to what they were going to do, and which things they would do first. It was fairly well agreed that although the law said that they were equal, nothing much was changed. There was still the monthly bleeding; Dr. Ora Fessenden, the noted gynecologist, had showed them a trick which was supposed to take care of all that, but nothing short of surgery or menopause would halt the process altogether; what man had to undergo such indignities?

There was still pregnancy, but the women all agreed they were on top of that problem. That left the rest: men still looked down on them, in part because in the main, women were shorter; they were more or less free to pursue their careers, assuming they could keep a baby-sitter, but there were still midafternoon depressions, dishes, the wash; despite all the changes, life was much the same. More drastic action was needed.

They decided to form an army.

At the time, nobody was agreed on what they were going to do or how they would go about it, but they were all agreed that it was time for a change. Things could not go on as they were; life was often boring, and too hard.

She wrote a note:

Dear Ralph,

I am running away to realize my full potential. I know you have always said I could do anything I want but what you meant was, I could do anything as long as it didn’t mess you up, which is not exactly the same thing now, is it? Don’t bother to look for me.

No longer yours,

Lory.

Then she went to join the women in the hills.

I would like to go, Suellen thought, but what if they wouldn’t let me have my baby?

Jolene’s uncle in the country always had a liver-colored setter named Fido. The name remained the same and the dogs were more or less interchangeable. Jolene called all her lovers Mike, and because they were more or less interchangeable, eventually she tired of them and went to join the women in the hills.

“You’re not going,” Herb Chandler said. Annie said, “I am.”

He grabbed her as she reached the door. ‘The hell you are, I need you.”

“You don’t need me, you need a maid.” She slapped the side of his head. “Now let me go.”

“You’re mine,” he said, aiming a karate chop at her neck. She wriggled and he missed.

“Just like your ox and your ass, huh.” She had gotten hold of a lamp and she let him have it on top of the head.

“Ow,” he said, and crumpled to the floor.

“Nobody owns me,” she said, throwing the vase of flowers she kept on the side table, just for good measure. “I’ll be back when it’s over.” Stepping over him, she went out the door.

After everybody left that morning, June mooned around the living room, picking up the scattered newspapers, collecting her and Vic’s empty coffee cups and marching out to face the kitchen table, which looked the same way every morning at this time, glossy with spilled milk and clotted cereal, which meant that she had to go through the same motions every morning at this time, feeling more and more like that jerk, whatever his name was, who for eternity kept on pushing the same recalcitrant stone up the hill; he was never going to get it to the top because it kept falling back on him and she was never going to get to the top, wherever that was, because there would always be the kitchen table, and the wash, and the crumbs on the rug, and besides she didn’t know where the top was because she had gotten married right after Sweetbriar and the next minute, bang, there was the kitchen table and, give or take a few babies, give or take a few stabs at night classes in something or other, that seemed to be her life.

There it was in the morning, there it was again at noon, there it was at night; when people said, at parties, “What do you do?” she could only move her hands helplessly because there was no answer she could give that would please either herself or them.

I clean the kitchen table, she thought, because there was no other way to describe it. Occasionally she thought about running away, but where would she go, and how would she live? Besides, she would miss Vic and the kids and her favorite chair in the television room. Sometimes she thought she might grab the milkman or the next delivery boy, but she knew she would be too embarrassed, either that or she would start laughing, or the delivery boy would, and even if they didn’t, she would never be able to face Vic.

She thought she had begun to disappear, like the television or the washing machine; after a while nobody would see her at all. They might complain if she wasn’t working properly, but in the main she was just another household appliance, and so she mooned, wondering if this was all there was ever going to be: herself in the house, the kitchen table.

Then the notice came.

JOIN NOW

It was in the morning mail, hastily mimeographed and addressed to her by name. If she had been in a different mood she might have tossed it out with the rest of the junk mail, or called a few of her friends to see if they had gotten it too. As it was, she read it through, chewing over certain catchy phrases in this call to arms, surprised to find her blood quickening. Then she packed and wrote her note:

Dear Vic,

There are clean sheets on all the beds and three casseroles in the freezer and one in the oven. The veal one should do for two meals. I have done all the wash and a thorough vacuuming. If Sandy’s cough doesn’t get any better you should take him in to see Dr. Weixelbaum, and don’t forget Jimmy is supposed to have his braces tightened on the 12th. Don’t look for me.

Love,

June

Then she went to join the women in the hills.

Glenda Thompson taught psychology at the university; it was the semester break and she thought she might go to the women’s encampment in an open spirit of inquiry. If she liked what they were doing she might chuck Richard, who was only an instructor while she was an assistant professor, and join them. To keep the appearance of objectivity, she would take notes.

Of course she was going to have to figure out what to do with the children while she was gone. No matter how many hours she and Richard taught, the children were her responsibility, and if they were both working in the house, she had to leave her typewriter and shush the children because of the way Richard got when he was disturbed.

None of the sitters she called could come; Mrs. Birdsall, their regular sitter, had taken off without notice again, to see her son the freshman in Miami, and she exhausted the list of student sitters without any luck. She thought briefly of leaving them at Richard’s office, but she couldn’t trust him to remember them at the end of the day. She reflected bitterly that men who wanted to work just got up and went to the office. It had never seemed fair.

“Oh hell,” she said finally, and because it was easier, she packed Tommy and Bobby and took them along.

Marva and Patsy and Betts were sitting around in Marva’s room; it was two days before the junior prom and not one of them had a date, or even a nibble; there weren’t even any blind dates to be had.

“I know what let’s do,” Marva said, “let’s go up to Ferguson’s and join the women’s army.”

Betts said, “I didn’t know they had an army!”

“Nobody knows what they have up there,” Patsy said.

They left a note so Marva’s mother would be sure and call them \n case somebody asked for a date at the last minute and they got invited to the prom after all.

Sally felt a twinge of guilt when she opened the flier:

JOIN NOW

After she read it she went to the window and looked at the smoke column in open disappointment: Oh, so that’s all it is. Yearning after it in the early autumn twilight, she had thought it might represent something more: excitement, escape, but she supposed she should have guessed.

There was no great getaway, just a bunch of people who needed more people to help. She knew she probably ought to go up and help but for a while, she could design posters and ads they could never afford if they went to a regular graphics studio. Still, all those women … She couldn’t bring herself to make the first move.

“I’m not a joiner,” she said aloud, but that wasn’t really it; she had always worked at home, her studio took up one wing of the house and she made her own hours; when she tired of working she could pick at the breakfast dishes or take a nap on the lumpy couch at one end of the studio; when the kids came home she was always there and besides, she didn’t like going places without Zack.

Instead she used the flier to test her colors, dabbing blues here, greens there, until she had more or less forgotten the message and all the mimeographing was obscured by color.

At the camp, Dr. Ora Fessenden was leading an indoctrination program for new recruits. She herself was in the stirrups, lecturing coolly while everybody filed by.

One little girl, lifted up by her mother, began to whisper: “Ashphasphazzzzz-pzz.”

The mother muttered, “Mumumumummmmmmm… .”

Ellen Ferguson, who was holding the light, turned it on the child for a moment. “Well, what does she want?”

“She wants to know what a man’s looks like.”

Dr. Ora Fessenden took hold, barking from the stirrups. “With luck, she’ll never have to see.”

“Right on,” the butch sisters chorused, but the others began to look at one another in growing discomfiture, which as the weeks passed would ripen into alarm.

By the time she reached the camp, June was already worried about the casseroles she had left for Vic and the kids. Would the one she had left in the oven go bad at room temperature? Maybe she ought to call Vic and tell him to let it bubble for an extra half hour just in case. Would Vic really keep an eye on Sandy, and if she got worse, would he get her to the doctor \n time? What about Jimmy’s braces? She almost turned back.

But she was already at the gate to Ellen Ferguson’s farm, and she was surprised to see a hastily constructed guardhouse, with Ellen herself in khakis, standing with a carbine at the ready, and she said, “Don’t shoot, Ellen, it’s me.”

“For God’s sake, June, I’m not going to shoot you.” Ellen pushed her glasses up on her forehead so she could look into June’s face. “I never thought you’d have the guts.”

“I guess I needed a change.”

“Isn’t it thrilling?”

“I feel funny without the children.” June was trying to remember when she had last seen Ellen: over a bridge table? at Weight Watchers? “How did you get into this?”

“I needed something to live for,” Ellen said.

By that time two other women with rifles had impounded her car and then she was in a jeep bouncing up the dirt road to headquarters. The women behind the table all had on khakis, but they looked not at all alike in them. One was tall and tawny and called herself Sheena; there was a tough, funny-looking one named Rap and the third was Margy, still redolent of the kitchen sink. Sheena made the welcoming speech, and then Rap took her particulars while Margy wrote everything down.

She lied a little about her weight, and was already on the defensive when Rap looked at her over her glasses, saying, “Occupation?”

“Uh, household manager.”

“Oh shit, another housewife. Skills?”

“Well, I used to paint a little, and …”

Rap snorted. “I’m pretty good at conversational French.”

“Kitchen detail,” Rap said to Margy and Margy checked off a box and flipped over to the next sheet.

“But I’m tired of all that,” June said.

Rap said, “Next.”

Oh it was good sitting around the campfire, swapping stories about the men at work and the men at home; every woman had a horror story, because even the men who claimed to be behind them weren’t really behind them, they were paying lip service to avoid a higher price, and even the best among them would make those terrible verbal slips. It was good to talk to other women who were smarter than their husbands and having to pretend they weren’t.

It was good to be able to sprawl in front of the fire without having to think about Richard and what time he would be home. The kids were safely stashed down at the day care compound, along with everybody else’s kids, and for the first time in at least eight years Clenda could relax and think about herself. She listened drowsily to that night’s speeches, three examples of wildly diverging cant, and she would have taken notes except that she was full, digesting a dinner she hadn’t had to cook, and for almost the first time in eight years she wasn’t going to have to go out to the kitchen and face the dishes.

Marva, Patsy and Betts took turns admiring each other in their new uniforms and they sat at the edge of the group, hugging their knees and listening in growing excitement. Why, they didn’t have to worry about what they looked like, that wasn’t going to matter in the new scheme of things.

It didn’t matter whether or not they had dates. By the time the new order was established, they weren’t even going to want dates. Although they would rather die than admit it, they all felt a little pang at this. Goodbye hope chest, goodbye wedding trip to Nassau and picture in the papers in the long white veil. Patsy, who wanted to be a corporation lawyer, thought: Why can’t I have it all.

Now that his mother was dead and he didn’t need to sell vacuum cleaners any more, Andy Ellis was thrown back on his own resources. He spent three hours in the shower and three days sleeping, and on the fourth day he emerged to find out his girl had left him for the koto player from across the hall. “Well shit,” he said, and wandered into the street.

He had only been asleep for three days but everything was subtly different. The people in the corner market were mostly men, stocking up on TV dinners and chunky soups or else buying cooking wines and herbs, kidneys, beef liver and tripe. The usual girl was gone from the checkout counter, the butcher was running the register instead, and when Andy asked about it, Freddy the manager said, “She joined up.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Some girl scout camp up at Ferguson’s. The tails revolt.”

Just then a jeep sped by in the street outside; there was a crash and they both hit the floor, rising to their elbows after the object that had shattered the front window did not explode. It was a rock with a note attached. Andy picked his way through the glass to retrieve it. It read:

WE WILL BURY YOU

“See?” Freddy said, ugly and vindictive. “See? See?”

The local hospital admitted several cases of temporary blindness in men who had been attacked by night with women’s deodorant spray.

All over town the men whose wives remained lay next to them in growing unease. Although they all feigned sleep, they were aware that the stillness was too profound: the women were thinking.

The women trashed a porn movie house. Among them was the wife of the manager, who said, as she threw an open can of film over the balcony, watching it unroll, “I’m doing this for us.”

So it had begun. For the time being, Rap and her cadre, who were in charge of the military operation, intended to satisfy themselves with guerrilla tactics; so far, nobody had been able to link the sniping and materiel bombing with the women on the hill, but they all knew it was only a matter of time before the first police cruiser came up to Ellen Ferguson’s gate with a search warrant, and they were going to have to wage open war.

By this time one of the back pastures had been converted to a rifle range, and even poor June had to spend at least one hour of every day in practice. She began to take an embarrassing pleasure in it, thinking, as she potted away:

Aha, Vic,
there’s a nick in your scalp. Maybe you’ll remember what I look like next time you leave the house for the day.

Okay, kids, I am not the maid.

All right, Sally, you and your damn career. You’re still only the maid.

Then, surprisingly:

This is for you, Sheena. How dare you go around looking like that, when I have to look like this.

This is for every rapist on the block.

By the time she fired her last shot her vision was blurred by tears. June, you are stupid, stupid, you always have been and you know perfectly well nothing is going to make any difference.

Two places away, Clenda saw Richard’s outline in the target. She made a bulls’-eye. All right, damn you, pick up that toilet brush.

Going back to camp in the truck they all sang “Up Women” and “The Internacionale,” and June began to feel a little better. It reminded her of the good old days at camp in middle childhood, when girls and boys played together as if there wasn’t any difference.

She longed for that old androgynous body, the time before sexual responsibility. Sitting next to her on the bench, Glenda sang along but her mind was at the university; she didn’t know what she was going to do if she got the Guggenheim because Richard had applied without success for so long that he had given up trying. What should she do, lie about it? It would be in all the papers.

She wondered how convincing she would be, saying, Shit, honey, it doesn’t mean anything. She would have to give up the revolution and get back to her work; her book was only half-written; she would have to go back to juggling kids and house and worrit was going to be hard, hard. She decided finally that she would let the Guggenheim Foundation make the decision for her. She would wait until late February and then write and tell Richard where to forward her mail.

Leading the song, Rap looked at her group. Even the softest ones had callouses now, but it was going to be some time before she made real fighters out of them. She wondered why women had all buried the instinct to kill. It was those damn babies, she decided: grunt, strain, pain, Baby. Hand a mother a gun and tell her to kill and she will say, After I went to all that trouble? Well if you are going to make sacrifices you are going to have to make sacrifices, she thought, and led them in a chorus of the battle anthem, watching to see just who did and who didn’t throw herself into the last chorus, which ended: kill, kill, kill.

Sally was watching the smoke again. Zack said, “I wish you would come away from that window.”

She kept looking for longer than he would have liked her to, and when she turned, she said, “Zack, why did you marry me?”

“Couldn’t live without you.”

“No, really.”

“Because I wanted to love you and decorate you and take care of you for the rest of your life.”

“Why me?”

“I thought we could be friends for a long time.”

“I guess”

“I didn’t mean why did you marry me, I meant, why did you marry me.”

He looked into his palms. “I wanted you to take care of me too.”

“Is that all?”

He could see she was serious and because she was not going to let go he thought for a minute and said at last, “Nobody wants to die alone.”

Down the street, June Goodall’s husband, Vic, had called every hospital in the county without results. The police had no reports of middle-aged housewives losing their memory in Sears or getting raped, robbed or poleaxed anywhere within the city limits.

The police sergeant said, “Mr. Goodall, we’ve got more serious things on our minds. These bombings, for one thing, and the leaflets and the rip-offs. Do you know that women have been walking out of supermarkets with full shopping carts without paying a cent?” There seemed to be a thousand cases like June’s, and if the department ever got a minute for them it would have to be first come first served.

So Vic languished in his darkening house. He had managed to get the kids off to school by himself the past couple of days. He gave them money for hot lunches, but they were running out of clean clothes and he could not bring himself to sort through those disgusting smelly things in the clothes hamper to run a load of wash.

They had run through June’s casseroles and they were going to have to start eating out; they would probably go to the Big Beef Plaza tonight, and have pizza tomorrow and chicken the next night and Chinese the next, and if June wasn’t back by that time he didn’t know what he was going to do because he was at his wits end.

The dishes were piling up in the kitchen and he couldn’t understand why everything looked so grimy; he couldn’t quite figure out why, but the toilet had begun to smell. One of these days he was going to have to try and get his mother over to clean things up a little. It was annoying, not having any clean underwear. He wished June would come back.

For the fifth straight day, Richard Thompson, Glenda’s husband, opened The French Chef to a new recipe and prepared himself an exquisite dinner. Once it was finished he relaxed in the blissful silence. Now that Glenda was gone he was able to keep things the way he liked them; he didn’t break his neck on Matchbox racers every time he went to put a little Vivaldi on the record player.

It was refreshing not to have to meet Glenda’s eyes, where, to his growing dissatisfaction, he perpetually measured himself. Without her demands, without the kids around to distract him, he would be able to finish his monograph on Lyly’s Euphues. He might even begin to write his book. Setting aside Glenda’s half-finished manuscript with a certain satisfaction, he cleared a space for himself at the desk and tried to begin.

Castrated, he thought half an hour later. Her and her damned career, she has castrated me.

He went to the phone and began calling names on his secret list. For some reason most of them weren’t home, but on the fifth call he came up with Jennifer, the biology major who wanted to write poetry, and within minutes the two of them were reaffirming his masculinity on the living room rug, and if a few pages of Glenda’s half-finished manuscript got mislaid in the tussle, who was there to protest? If she was going to be off there, farting around in the woods with all those women, she never would get it finished.

In the hills, the number of women had swelled, and it was apparent to Sheena, Ellen and Rap that it was time to stop hit-and-run terrorism and operate on a larger scale. They would mount a final recruiting campaign. Once that was completed, they would be ready to take their first objective. Sheena had decided the Sunnydell Shopping Center would be their base for a sweep of the entire country.

They were fairly sure retaliation would be slow, and to impede it further, they had prepared an advertising campaign built on the slogan: you wouldn’t shoot your mother, would you? As soon as they could, they would co-opt some television equipment and make their first nationwide telecast from Sunnydell. Volunteers would flock in from fifty states and in time the country would be theirs.

There was some difference of opinion as to what they were going to do with it. Rap was advocating a scorched-earth policy; the women would rise like phoenixes from the ashes and build a new nation from the rubble, more or less alone. Sheena raised the idea of an auxiliary made up of male sympathizers. The women would rule, but with men at hand. Margy secretly felt that borh Rap and Sheena were too militant; she didn’t want things to be completely different, only a little better.

Ellen Ferguson wanted to annex all the land surrounding her place. She envisioned it as the capitol city of the new world. The butch sisters wanted special legislation that would outlaw contact, social or sexual, with men, with, perhaps, special provisions for social meetings with their gay brethren. Certain of the straight sisters were made uncomfortable by their association with the butch sisters and wished there were some way the battle could progress without them.

At least half of these women wanted their men back, once victory was assured, and the other half were looking into ways of perpetuating the race by means of parthenogenesis, or, at worst, sperm banks and Al techniques. One highly vocal splinter group wanted mandatory sterilization for everybody, and a portion of the lunatic fringe was demanding transsexual operations. Because nobody could agree, the women decided for the time being to skip over the issues and concentrate on the war effort itself.

By this time, word had spread and the volunteers were coming in, so it was easy to ignore issues because logistics were more pressing. It was still warm enough for the extras to bunk in the fields, but winter was coming on and the women were going to have to manage food, shelters and uniforms for an unpredictable number. There had been a temporary windfall when Rap’s bunch hijacked a couple of semis filled with frozen dinners and surplus clothes, but Rap and Sheena and the others could sense the hounds of hunger and need not far away and so they worked feverishly to prepare for the invasion. Unless they could take the town by the end of the month, they were lost.

“We won’t have to hurt our fathers, will we?” Although she was now an expert marksman and had been placed in charge of a platoon, Patsy was still not at ease with the cause.

Rap avoided her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I just couldn’t do that to anybody I loved.” Patsy said. She reassembled her rifle, driving the bolt into place with a click:

“Don’t you worry about it,” Rap said. “All you have to worry about is looking good when you lead that recruiting detail.”

“Okay.” Patsy tossed her hair. She knew how she and her platoon looked, charging into the wind; she could feel the whole wild group around her, on the run with their heads high and their bright hair streaming. I wish the boys at school could see, she thought, and turned away hastily before Rap could guess what she was thinking.

I wonder if any woman academic can be happy. Clenda was on latrine detail and this always made her reflective. Maybe if they marry garage mechanics. In the old days there had been academic types: single, tweedy, sturdy in orthopedic shoes, but somewhere along the way these types had been supplanted by married women of every conceivable type, who pressed forward in wildly varied disciplines, having in common only the singular harried look which marked them all.

The rubric was more or less set: if you were good, you always had to worry about whether you were shortchanging your family; if you weren’t as good as he was, you would always have to wonder whether it was because of all the other duties: babies, meals, the house; if despite everything you turned out to be better than he was, then you had to decide whether to try and minimize it, or prepare yourself for the wise looks on the one side, on the other, his look of uncomprehending reproach. If you were better than he was, then why should you be wasting your time with him?

She felt light years removed from the time when girls used to be advised to let him win the tennis match; everybody played to win now, but she had the uncomfortable feeling that there might never be any real victories. Whether or not you won, there were too many impediments: if he had a job and you didn’t, then tough; if you both had jobs but he didn’t get tenure, then you had to quit and move with him to a new place. She poured Lysol into the last toilet and turned her back on it, thinking: Maybe that’s why those Hollywood marriages are always breaking up.

Sally finished putting the children to bed and came back into the living room, where Zack was waiting for her on the couch. By this time she had heard the women’s broadcasts, she was well aware of what was going on at Ellen Ferguson’s place and knew as well that this was where June was, and June was so inept, so soft and incapable that she really ought to be up there helping June, helping them; it was a job that ought to be done, on what scale she could not be sure, but the fire was warm and Zack was waiting; he and the children, her career, were all more important than that abstraction in the hills; she had negotiated her own peace—let them take care of theirs.

Settling in next to Zack, she thought: I don’t love my little pink dishmop, I don’t, but everybody has to shovel some shit. Then: God help the sailors and poor fishermen who have to be abroad on a night like this.

June had requisitioned a jeep and was on her way into town to knock over the corner market, because food was already in short supply. She had on the housedress she had worn when she enlisted, and she would carry somebody’s old pink coat over her arm to hide the pistol and the grenade she would use to hold her hostages at bay while the grocery boys filled up the jeep.

She had meant to go directly to her own corner market, thinking, among other things, that the manager might recognize her and tell Vic, after which, of course, he would track her back to the camp and force her to come home to him and the children. Somehow or other she went right by the market and ended up at the corner of her street.

She knew she was making a mistake but she parked and began to prowl the neighborhood. The curtains in Sally’s window were drawn but the light behind them gave out a rosy glow, which called up in her longings that she could not have identified; they had very little to do with her own home, or her life with Vic; they dated, rather, from her childhood, when she had imagined marriage, had prepared herself for it with an amorphous but unshakeable idea of what it would be like.

Vic had forgotten to put out the garbage; overflowing cans crowded the back porch and one of them was overturned. Walking on self-conscious cat feet, June made her way up on the porch and peered into the kitchen: just as she had suspected, a mess. A portion of her was tempted to go in and do a swift, secret cleaning—the phantom housewife strikes— but the risk of being discovered was too great. Well, let him clean up his own damn messes from now on.

She tiptoed back down the steps and went around the house, crunching through bushes to look into the living room. She had hoped to get a glimpse of the children, but they were already in bed. She thought about waking Juney with pebbles on her window, whispering: Don’t worry, mother’s all right, but she wasn’t strong enough; if she saw the children she would never be able to walk away and return to camp.

She assuaged herself by thinking she would come back for Juney and Victor Junior just as soon as victory was assured. The living room had an abandoned look, with dust visible and papers strewn, a chair overturned and Vic himself asleep on the couch, just another neglected object in’this neglected house. Surprised at how little she felt, she shrugged and turned away. On her way back to the jeep she did stop to right the garbage can,

The holdup went off all right; she could hear distant sirens building behind her, but so far as she knew, she wasn’t followed.

The worst thing turned out to be finding Rap, Sheena and Ellen Ferguson gathered around the stove in the main cabin; they didn’t hear her come in.

“… so damn fat and soft,” Rap was saying.

Sheena said, “You have to take your soldiers where you can find them.”

Ellen said, “An army travels on its stomach.”

“As soon as it’s over we dump the housewives,” Rap said. “Every single one.”

June cleared her throat. “I’ve brought the food.”

“Politics may make strange bedfellows,” Glenda said, “but this is ridiculous.”

“Have it your way,” she said huffily—whoever she was —and left the way she had come in.

Patsy was in charge of the recruiting platoon, which visited the high school, and she thought the principal was really impressed when he saw that it was her. Her girls bound and gagged the faculty and held the boys at bay with M-1 s, while she made her pitch.

She was successful but drained when she finished, pale and exhausted, and while her girls were processing the recruits (all but one per cent of the girl students, as it turned out) and waiting for the bus to take them all to camp, Patsy put Marva in charge and simply drifted away, surprised to find herself in front of the sweetie shop two blocks from school. The place was empty except for Andy Wis, who had just begun work as a counter boy.

He brought her a double dip milkshake and lingered.

She tried to wave him away with her rifle. “We don’t have to pay.”

“That isn’t it.” He yearned, drawn to her.

She couldn’t help seeing how beautiful he was. “Bug off.”

Andy said, “Beautiful.”

She lifted her head, aglow. “Really?”

“No kidding. Give me a minute, I’m going to fall in love with you.”

“You can’t,” she said, remembering her part in the eleventh grade production of Romeo and Juliet. “I’m some kind of Montague.”

“Okay, then, I’ll be the Capulet.”

“I …” Patsy leaned forward over the counter so they could kiss. She drew back at the sound of a distant shot. “I have to go.”

“When can I see you?”

Patsy said, “I’ll sneak out tonight.”

Sheena was in charge of the recruiting detail that visited Sally’s neighborhood. Although she had been an obscure first-year medical student when the upheaval started, she was emerging as the heroine of the revolution. The newspapers and television newscasters all knew who she was, and so Sally knew, and was undeniably flattered that she had come in person.

She and Sally met on a high level: if there was an aristocracy of achievement, then they spoke aristocrat to aristocrat. Sheena spoke of talent and obligation; she spoke of need and duty; she spoke of service. She said the women needed Sally’s help, and when Sally said, Let them help themselves, she said: They can’t. They were still arguing when the kids came home from school; they were still arguing when Zack came home. Sheena spoke of the common cause and a better world; she spoke once more of the relationship between gifts and service. Sally turned to Zack, murmuring, and he said:

“If you think you have to do it, then I guess you’d better.”

She said: “The sooner I go the sooner this thing will be over.”

Zack said, “I hope you’re right.”

Sheena stood aside so they could make their goodbyes. Sally hugged the children, and when they begged to go with her she said, “It’s no place for kids.”

Climbing into the truck, she looked back at Zack and thought: I could not love the half so much loved I not honor more. What she said was, “I must be out of my mind.”

Zack stood in the street with his arms around the kids, saying, “She’ll be back soon. Some day they’ll come marching down our street.”

In the truck, Sheena said, “Don’t worry. When we occupy, we’ll see that he gets a break.”

They were going so fast now that there was no jumping off the truck; the other women at the camp seemed to be so grateful to see her that she knew there would be no jumping off the truck until it was over.

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 subLieutenant now. A subLieutenant, 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 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 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 misused 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 Clenda, 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 oi 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 discontentment, 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 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 handweapon 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?”

“Okay, 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 her definitive work on the women’s revolution, but so far the day-to-day talks 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 specially 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 of 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 harassed 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 women in charge had to cut off enlistments at a certain point and send the others back to make war in their own home towns.

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.

Meais 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.

The air of dissatisfaction grew. Nobody agreed any more, not even all those who had agreed to agree for the sake of the cause. Fights broke out like flash fires; some women were given to sulks and inexplicable silences, others to blows and helpless tears quickly forgotten. On advice from Sally, Sheena called a council to try and bring everybody together, but it got off on the wrong foot.

Dr. Ora Fessenden said, “Are we going to sit around on our butts, or what?”

Sheena said, “National opinion is running in our favor, We have to consolidate our gains.”

Rap said, “Gains hell. What kind of war is this? Where are the scalps?”

Sheena drew herself up. “We are not Amazons.”

Rap said, “That’s a crock of shit,” and she and Dr. Ora Fessenden stamped out.

“Rape,” Rap screamed, running from the far left to the far right and then making a complete circuit of the clearing.

“Rape,” she shouted, taking careful note of who came running and who didn’t. “Raaaaaaaape.”

Dr. Ora Fessenden rushed to her side, the figure of outraged womanhood. They both watched until a suitable number of women had assembled, and then she said, in stentorian tones, “We cannot let this go unavenged.”

“My God,” Sheena said, looking at the blackened object in Rap’s hand. “What are you doing with that thing?”

Blood-smeared and grinning, Rap said, “When you’re trying to make a point, you have to go ahead and make your point.” She thrust her trophy into Sheena’s face.

Sheena averted her eyes quickly; she thought it was an ear. “That’s supposed to be a rhetorical point.”

“Listen, baby, this world doesn’t give marks for good conduct.”

Sheena stiffened. “You keep your girls in line or you’re finished.”

Rap was smoldering; she pushed her face up to Sheena’s, saying, “You can’t do without us and you know it.”

“If we have to, we’ll learn.”

“Aieee.” One of Rap’s cadre had taken the trophy from her and tied it on a string; now she ran through the camp, swinging it around her head, and dozens of throats opened to echo her shout. “Aiiiieeeee …”

Patsy and Andy were together in the bushes near the camp; proximity to danger made their pleasure more intense. Andy said: “Leave with me.”

She said, “I can’t. I told you what they do to deserters.”

“They’ll never catch us.”

“You don’t know these women,” Patsy said. “Look, Andy, you’d better go.”

“Just a minute more.” Andy buried his face in her hair. “lust a little minute more.”

“Rape,” Rap shouted again, running through the clearing with her voice raised like a trumpet. “Raaaaaaaape.”

Although she knew it was a mistake, Sally had sneaked away to see Zack and the children. The camp seemed strangely deserted, and nobody was there to sign out the jeep she took. She had an uncanny intimation of trouble at a great distance, but she shook it off and drove to her house. She would have expected barricades and guards: state of war, but the streets were virtually empty and she reached her neighborhood without trouble.

Zack and the children embraced her and wanted to know when she was coming home.

“Soon, I think. They’re all frightened of us now.”

Zack said, “I’m not so sure.”

“There doesn’t seem to be any resistance.”

“Oh,” he said, “they’ve decided to let you have the town.”

“What did I tell you?”

“Sop,” he said. “You can have anything you want. Up to a point.”

Sally was thinking of Rap and Dr. Ora Fessenden. “What if we take more?”

“Wipeout,” Zack said. “You’ll see.”

“Oh Lord,” she said, vaulting into the jeep. “Maybe it’ll be over sooner than I thought.”

She was already too late. She saw the flames shooting skyward as she came out the drive.

“It’s Flowermont.”

Because she had to make sure, she wrenched the jeep in that direction and rode to the garden apartments; smoke filled the streets for blocks around.

Looking at the devastation, Sally was reminded of Indian massacres in the movies of her childhood: the smoking ruins, the carnage, the moans of the single survivor who would bub-‘ ble out his story in her arms. She could not be sure about the bodies: whether there were any, whether there were as many as she thought, but she was sure those were charred corpses in the rubble.

Rap and Dr. Ora Fessenden had devised a flag and hoisted it from a tree: the symbol of the women’s movement, altered to suit their mood—the crudely executed fist reduced to clenched bones and surrounded by flames. The single survivor died before he could bubble out his story in her arms.

In the camp, Rap and Dr. Ora Fessenden had a victory celebration around the fire. They had taken unspeakable trophies in their raid and could not understand why many of the women refused to wear them.

Patsy and Andy, in the bushes, watched with growing alarm. Even from their safe distance, Andy was fairly sure he saw what he thought he saw, and he whispered, “Look, we’ve got to get out of here.”

“Not now,” Patsy said, pulling him closer. “Tonight. The patrols.”

By now the little girls had been brought up from the day care compound and they had joined the dance, their fat cheeks smeared with blood. Rap’s women were in heated discussion with the Mothers’ Escadrille about the disposition of the boy children: would they be destroyed or reared as slaves?

While they were talking, one of the mothers who had never felt at home in any faction sneaked down to the compound and freed the lot of them. Now she was running around in helpless tears, flapping her arms and sobbing broken messages, but no matter what she said to the children, she couldn’t seem to get any of them to flee.

Sheena and her Lieutenant, Margy, and Lory, her secretary, came out of the command shack at the same moment Sally arrived in camp; she rushed to join them, and together they extracted Rap and Dr. Ora Fessenden from the dance for a meeting of the council.

When they entered the shack, Ellen Ferguson hung up the phone in clattering haste and turned to confront them with a confusing mixture of expressions; Sally thought the foremost one was probably guilt.

Sally waited until they were all silent and then said, “The place is surrounded. They let me throughto bring the message. They have tanks.”

Ellen Ferguson said, “They just delivered their ultimatum. Stop the raids and pull back to camp or they’ll have bombers level this place.”

“Pull back hell,” Rap said.

Dr. Ora Fessenden shook a bloody fist. “We’ll show them.”

“We’ll fight to the death.”

Ellen said, quietly, “I’ve already agreed.”

Down at the main gate, Marva, who was on guard duty, leaned across the barbed wire to talk to the Captain of the tank detail. She thought he was kind of cute.

“Don’t anybody panic,” Rap was saying. “We can handle this thing. We can fight them off.”

“We can fight them in the hedgerows,” Dr. Ora Fessenden said in rising tones. “We can fight them in the ditches, we can hit them with everything we’ve got …”

“Not from here you can’t.”

“We can burn and bomb and kill and … What did you say?”

“I said, not from here.” Because they were all staring, Ellen Ferguson covered quickly, saying, “I mean, if I’m going to be of any value to the movement, I have to have this place in good condition.”

Sheena said, quietly, “That’s not what you mean.”

Ellen was near tears. “All right, dammit, this place is all I have.”

"My God," Annie Chandler shrieked. “Rape.” She parted the bushes to reveal Patsy and Andy, who hugged each other in silence. “Rape,” Annie screamed, and everybody who could hear above the din came running. “Kill the bastard, rape, rape, rape.”

Patsy rose to her feet and drew Andy up with her, shouting to make herself heard. “I said, it isn’t rape.”

Rap and Dr. Ora Fessenden were advancing on Ellen Ferguson. “You’re not going to compromise us. We’ll kill you first.”

“Oh,” Ellen said, backing away. “That’s another thing. They wanted the two of you. I had to promise we’d send you out.”

The two women plunged, and then retreated, mute with fury. Ellen had produced a gun from her desk drawer and now she had them covered.

“Son of a bitch,” Rap said. “Son of a bitch.”

“Kill them.”

“Burn them.”

“Hurt them.”

“Make an example of them.”

“I love you, Patsy.”

“Oh, Andy, I love you.”

Sally said, softly, “So it’s all over.”

“Only parts of it,” Ellen said. “It will never really be over as long as there are women left to fight. We’ll be better off without these two and their cannibals; we can retrench and make a new start.”

“I guess this is as good a time as any.” Sheena got to her feet. “I might as well tell you, I’m splitting.”

They turned to face her, Ellen being careful to keep the gun on Dr. Ora Fessenden and Rap.

“You’re what?”

“I can do a hell of a lot more good on my new show. Prime time, nightly, nationwide TV.”

Rap snarled. “The hell you say.”

“Look, Rap, I'll interview you.”

“Stuff it.”

“Think what I can do for the movement, I can reach sixty million people, you’ll see.”

Ellen Ferguson said, with some satisfaction, “That’s not really what you mean.”

“Maybe it isn’t. It’s been you, you, you all this time.” Sheena picked up her clipboard, her notebooks and papers; Lory and Margy both moved as if to follow her but she rebuffed them with a single sweep of her arm. “Well it’s high time I started thinking about me.”

Outside, the women had raised a stake and now Patsy and Andy were lashed to it, standing back to back.

In the shack, Rap and Dr. Ora Fessenden had turned as one and advanced on Ellen Ferguson, pushing the gun aside.

The good doctor said, “I knew you wouldn’t have the guts to shoot. You never had any guts.”

Ellen cried out. “Sheena, help me.”

But Sheena was already in the doorway, and she hesitated for only a moment, saying, “Listen, it’s sauve quipeut in this day and time, sweetie, and the sooner you realize it the better.”

Rap finished pushing Ellen down and took the gun. She stood over her victim for a minute, grinning. “In the battle of the sexes, there are no allies.” Then she put a bullet through Ellen’s favorite moosehead so Ellen would have something to remember her by.

The women had collected twigs and they were just about to set fire to Patsy and Andy when Sheena came out, closely followed by Dr. Ora Fessenden and a warlike Rap.

Everybody started shouting at once and in the imbroglio that followed, Patsy and Andy escaped. They would surface years later, in a small town in Minnesota, with an ecologically alarming number of children; they would both be able to pursue their chosen careers in the law because they worked hand in hand to take care of all the children and the house, and they would love each other until they died.

Ellen Ferguson sat with her elbows on her knees and her head drooping, saying, “I can’t believe it’s all over, after I worked so hard, I gave so much… .”

Sally said, “It isn’t over. Remember what you said, as long as there are women, there will be a fight.”

“But we’ve lost our leaders.”

“You could...”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“Don’t worry, there are plenty of others.”

As Sally spoke, the door opened and Glenda stepped in to take Sheena’s place.

When the melee in the clearing was over, Dr. Ora Fessenden and Rap had escaped with their followers. They knew the lay of the land and so they were able to elude the troop concentration, which surrounded the camp, and began to lay plans to regroup and fight another day.

A number of women, disgusted by the orgy of violence, chose to pack their things and go. The Mothers’ Escadrille deserted en masse, taking their children and a few children who didn’t even belong to them.

Ellen said, “You’re going to have to go down there and parley. I’m not used to talking to men.”

And so Sally found herself going down to the gate to conduct negotiations.

She said, “The two you wanted got away. The rest of them—I mean us—are acting in good faith.” She lifted her chin. “If you want to go ahead and bomb anyway, you’H have to go ahead and bomb.”

The Captain lifted her and set her on the hood of the jeep. He was grinning. “Shit, little lady, we just wanted to throw a scare into you.”

“You don’t understand.” She wanted to get down off the hood but he had propped his arms on either side of her. She knew she ought to be furious, but instead she kept thinking how much she missed Zack. Speaking with as much dignity as she could under the circumstances, she outlined the women’s complaints; she already knew it was hopeless to list them as demands.

“Don’t you worry about a thing, honey.” He lifted her down and gave her a slap on the rump to speed her on her way. “Everything is going to be real different from now on.”

“I bet.”

Coming back up the hill to camp, she saw how sad everything looked, and she could not for the life of her decide whether it was because the women who had been gathered here had been inadequate to the cause or whether it was, rather, that the cause itself had been insufficiently identified; she suspected that they had come up against the human condition, failed to recognize it and so tried to attack a single part, which seemed to involve attacking the only allies they would ever have.

As for the specific campaign, as far as she could tell, it was possible to change some of the surface or superficial details but once that was done things were still going to be more or less the way they were, and all the best will in the world would not make any real difference.

In the clearing, Lory stood at Clenda’s elbow. “Of course you’re going to need a Lieutenant.” Glenda said, “I guess so.”

Ellen Ferguson was brooding over a row of birches that had been trashed during the struggle. If she could stake them back up in time, they might reroot.

June said, “Okay, I’m going to be mess sergeant.” Margy said, “The hell you will,” and pushed her in the face.

Clenda said, thoughtfully, “Maybe we could mount a Lysistrata campaign.”

Lory snorted. “If their wives won’t do it, there are plenty of girls who will.”

Zack sent a message:WE HAVE TO HELP EACH OTHER.

Sally sent back:I KNOW.

Before she went home, Sally had to say goodbye to Ellen Ferguson.

Ellen’s huge, homely face sagged. “Not you too.”

Sally looked at the desultory groups policing the wreckage, at the separate councils convening in every corner. “I don’t know why I came. I guess I thought we could really do something.”

Ellen made a half-turn, taking in the command shack, the compound, the women who remained. “Isn’t this enough?”

“I have to get on with my life.”

Ellen said, “This is mine.”

“Oh, Vic, I’ve been so stupid.” June was sobbing in Vic’s arms. She was also lying in her teeth but she didn’t care, she was sick of the revolution and she was going to have to go through this formula before Vic would allow her to resume her place at his kitchen sink.

The work was still boring and stupid but at least there was less of it than there had been at camp; her bed was softer, and since it was coming on winter, she was grateful for the storm sashes, which Vic put up every November, and the warmth of the oil burner, which he took apart and cleaned with his own hands every fall.

Sally found her house in good order, thanks to Zack, but there was several weeks work piled up in her studio, and she had lost a couple of commissions. She opened her drawer to discover, with a smile, that Zack had washed at least one load of underwear with something red.

“I think we do better together,” Zack said.

Sally said, “We always have.”

In the wake of fraternization with the military guard detail, Marva discovered she was pregnant. She knew what Dr. Ora Fessenden said she was supposed to do, but she didn’t think she wanted to.

As weeks passed, the women continued to drift away. “It’s nice here and all,” Betts said apologetically, “but there’s a certain je ne sais quoi missing; I don’t know what it is, but I’m going back in there and see if I can find it.”

Glenda said, “Yeah, well. So long as there is a yang, I guess there is going to have to be a yin.”

“Don’t you mean, so long as there is a yin, there is going to have to be a yang?”

Glenda looked in the general direction of town, knowing there was nothing there for her to go back to. “I don’t know what 1 mean anymore.”

Activity and numbers at the camp had decreased to the point where federal troops could be withdrawn. They were needed, as it turned out, to deal with wildcat raids in another part of the state. Those who had been on the scene came back with reports of incredible viciousness.

Standing at their windows in the town, the women could look up to the hills and see the camp fire still burning, but as the months wore on, fewer and fewer of them looked and the column of smoke diminished in size because the remaining women were running out of volunteers whose turn it was to feed the fire.

Now that it was over, things went on more or less as they had before.