Movement by Valerie Miner Read Free Book Online

red-faced man was talking about Belfast bombings with a young woman. As Susan moved closer to listen, the women stared at her suspiciously. She warned the man to lower his voice, mumbling something about CIA agents. So much for solidarity.
    The procession was approaching the American Consulate. Their litany grew louder. “One point peace plan; U.S. out now.” The signs rocked above their heads. “End Canadian Complicity.” “Stop Phallic Imperialism.”
    The big, white Consulate building was guarded by fifteen pallid policemen. Four cops in a row with regulation small moustaches. Susan thought of her brother Bill’s toy soldiers in their slim, dashing patriotism. A small crowd, including Emily, marched in a circle between the toy soldiers and the TV cameras. They all raised their fists each time they passed the cameras. The rest of the demonstrators waited. (Later, Susan recalled a man watching from an upstairs window in the Consulate. Perhaps that was another time, another place. Her memory for marches wasn’t as clear as Emily’s.) The sound truck arrived with giant amplifiers. The MC explained that the march had been a cooperative effort and that representatives of ten different groups would be speaking.
    Susan checked her watch and decided to leave quietly. She didn’t seek out Emily or her other feminist friends to say goodbye. She might have to explain that she was going home to cook supper. She walked briskly to the subway as the Evangelical for Social Action was shouting, “Nixon may have postponed the bombing of North Vietnam, but the South is experiencing more bombing.…” Susan knew, everybody knew, that the fires in Cambodia and Laos would rage long after any Vietnam treaty. This was just like the last march and the one before that.
    Meanwhile, in the faraway land of power, Richard Nixon prepared for his million dollar inaugural ball. And in the faraway land of bombings, Indochinese women watched their children being ripped to shreds. Here in the land of official observers, Susan pretended to serve in the last peace march.
    Dark Midnight
    Damn organization won’t pay your expenses to rent a car, so you have to wait 20 minutes in the drizzling dark for the Greyhound, penniless because the ticket clerk won’t accept personal checks. Besides which, you have lost your tape recorder and you are surrounded in line by crew cuts on their way back to Fort Lewis. It will take hours to get to Olympia. It will take all the patience you have. You scramble for a seat up front, pull out your book and discover that the front seat has no reading lamp.
    â€œSo as not to blind the driver,” says the woman next to you who is herself actually blind. Can you complain to a blind woman that you can’t read in the dark? Learn braille, gringa.
    â€œTravelling is such an opportunity,” she is saying. “You can learn something from everyone.” A business student, married to another blind business student.
    You are listening.
    â€œIt’s an apprenticeship program for IBM with almost guaranteed job placement. You don’t know what that means for a blind person.”
    How does she know you are listening?
    â€œIt pays well, and we have a nice little apartment. Maybe we’ll be able to have kids in a few years.”
    You want to ask her how she opens cans and fixes soup, let alone how she plans to raise children.
    She reads your mind, skilled without lamps as she is. “Go ahead, ask questions if you like.”
    But you have run out of questions, even for the Governor tomorrow. Dreadful, leachy job, this lobbying.
    â€œA lobbyist, how interesting,” she says with polite curiosity as though she were talking to someone as fascinating as a repossessor of television sets.
    â€œFor what are you lobbying? That is the correct term, ‘lobbying,’ isn’t it?”
    You are silent, paralyzed by her voice. High-pitched. The key of a