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: Cod 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."