Material Girls (34 page)

“Recreation hour,” the guard announced as she unlocked the door at the end of the corridor. She held it open and we passed through.

I understood why the cells were empty. The prisoners were all in this large room. A few of the women stood around a foosball table. Some played cards. Some attempted to get exercise by performing basic calisthenics like sit-ups. The large windows dripped with rain.

I scanned the room. Near the window, I saw a solitary figure with black hair turned away from us, sitting in front of an easel.

“There she is,” I whispered to Felix.

“Fifteen minutes,” the guard ordered. I thanked her.

As we approached, I drew in my breath. On a sheet of paper clipped to the easel, painted with watercolors in a narrow plastic tray, the scene through the window had been brought to life. The painting captured the cornflower-colored fountain in the middle of the grounds, the green lawn, and the hedges on the perimeter. Best of all, from the way the colors ran and dripped, it was clear the scene was being viewed through a rainy window.

“It's beautiful, Vivienne,” I said gently.

Vivienne stiffened but didn't turn to face us until she had finished adding some orange highlights to the fountain's base. Still holding the brush, she glanced over her shoulder. “Hello, you two.” A yellow bruise above her right eyebrow made me wince.

“How're you doing, Viv?” Felix asked, pulling up two nearby chairs and sitting down. I joined him.

Vivienne again touched the paper with her brush. “I get to paint landscapes. Life could be worse.” She gave a little shrug.

“Your head,” I said.

She touched the spot with her knuckle. “It's nothing. Doesn't even hurt anymore.”

Without a word, Felix ran his finger from his ear to his lips.

“Ah,” Vivienne said, nodding.

I couldn't help myself. “What's it like in here? Being in jail, I mean?”

Vivienne dipped the paintbrush in a cup of water, swirled it clean, and turned to us. To my surprise, a smile danced around her lips. “Look around. I finally got my wish.” She swept her arm around the room. “A dress code. One single look for work, sleep, weekend,
and
formal.” I looked. Every inmate was clad in a matching light blue short-sleeve jumpsuit.

Vivienne pinched a bit of the fabric from her pant leg between her fingers and rubbed it. “Comfortable, durable material, like I always wanted.” She laughed and shook her head. “I had to go to jail to find my heaven. I should have figured this out a lot sooner.”

I glanced at Felix. Had she cracked up? “I'm so sorry this happened. We tried to come help you, but they started arresting people . . .” I trailed off, waiting for her to say something.

“I'm glad you two got away.” Her voice was calm. She again flashed a smile at me as she dabbed some black and then blue paint on her brush.

“Kev's in the hospital,” said Felix. “Someone hit him on the head. He has a concussion, but he'll be okay.”

Vivienne nodded and added some gray to the sky. “And Randall?”

Felix and I looked at each other.

“He went back,” I said. “Jeri stays home with the kids, so they need the money. He called afterward . . .” I looked at Felix again. “He feels terrible.”

Felix frowned and shook his head. He thought we should stay angry with Randall. I'd been arguing that a person could take only so many risks, especially where his children were concerned.

“They've released most of the people they arrested by now,” said Felix. “Gwen and a bunch of patternmakers are out. Blackballed by the corporations, and under surveillance, same as us.” He nestled one fist in the opposite palm. “If only your officer hadn't sustained injuries—”

Vivienne waved her free hand. “It's all right.”

“We're trying to raise enough for your bail,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “I have savings from being a judge, but the bail's steep. My parents won't help, and between us—”

“I won't take a dime,” Vivienne said, cutting me off. “You should keep any money you have. There are better things you can do with it.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“For the first time in your life, you're free,” she said slowly. She put down the brush and took my hand in both of hers, looking at me hard. “For the first time, you can do anything you want.”

Free. I had gold wires in my cheeks. I couldn't work. Now that the strike was over, though I kept telling myself I'd be okay, I knew I wasn't. It felt like a gray fog had settled over my life. To have gone from having so much hope, so much purpose, to . . . nothing. It was worse because I still felt this incredible anger at what had happened, to me and to everyone Torro-LeBlanc screwed over. But I couldn't do anything about it. So it festered, and the gray fog grew thicker.

At least I'd made a sort of shaky peace with Karen in the past few days. The marriage talk had been tabled. I knew she was doing her best to cheer me up, telling me how great I looked in the designer clothes and offering to make all my favorite foods. I tried not to make cracks—even to myself—about her obsessive cooking. I'd realized a couple of nights ago, after a particularly delicious cassoulet, that if you looked at it a certain way, designing complicated meals was sort of like designing clothes. It took creativity—it even went through trends. Only, in our house, nobody paid you for it.

The days dragged, the hours empty. Even Felix didn't serve as a distraction. We'd make out to pass the time—quietly, aware that the floss was capturing every smack, rustle, and whisper. Things had happened pretty fast with Braxton, but Felix and I had sort of leveled off during our monitoring period. I was self-conscious, and he didn't want “to give those perverts any more satisfaction.” Afterward, he would lie back and stare at the ceiling, and my restlessness would return.

I pulled my hand away. “I don't know how you can be so calm,” I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice. “Actually, we
can't
do anything we want. And in here, you definitely can't do what you want. We're not free.” I stopped, wondering if what I'd said would make the surveillance people suspicious.

Vivienne picked up the brush and twirled it between her fingertips. “You think we lost, don't you?” she said, still smiling.

I looked at Felix again. He was studying Vivienne curiously.

Suddenly, she leaned toward me and spoke in a whisper. “Change doesn't happen overnight, Marla. Sometimes it takes a hundred years, sometimes more. Believe me, people saw what we did. For three days, the whole world stopped and paid attention. So they shut us down—so what? I'll do my time, but they can't lock me up forever for giving an agent a couple of broken bones. And if they do, then there will be someone else to pick up the fight, and that person will make another small dent. And so on. We pound and we pound until everything comes crashing down.”

She scanned the room. “In the meantime, I'm here—surrounded by lawless women with a bunch of time on their hands. It presents . . .” She drummed her fingers on her lips. “Interesting possibilities.” She grinned, then leaned in so close to my cheek I thought she was going to kiss it. “You get all that?” she said loudly.

I stared back into her triumphant face. Maybe she was crazy—but right now, I felt nothing but awe for her. She was Vivienne, and she'd always be. Nothing, not even jail, could break her.

Still, I didn't know what to say, now that she'd basically incriminated us. If that didn't qualify as a discussion of “potentially subversive activity,” I didn't know what did. Before either Felix or I could find our voice, though, Vivienne twirled the brush between her fingers, dipped it in the green paint, and quickly painted the word
disavow
on the bottom of her landscape. I didn't get it right away, but Felix did.

“You're nuts, Vivienne,” he said. “The strike is over, and we accept that. If you're going to keep talking like this, we can't have anything more to do with you.” He gave her a quick wink.

Both of them looked to me, and I raced to think of the right words. “I agree. Stop saying those things. I want to cooperate. Sorry you're in jail, but maybe it's the best place for you.”

“Eh, get out of here, both of you,” Vivienne said, her face full of mock disgust. “You make me sick. Your hearts were never in the movement.” She took her hand and blew us both a silent kiss.

“Bye, then.” I watched Felix rise and give her a quick squeeze on her shoulder. I did the same.

Before we left, we watched Vivienne turn back to her painting and blur out the word she had written.

Vivienne's words in prison, about finally being free and about the strike having mattered, rolled around in my head for two months. They sustained me in the grayest moments of my CSS monitoring period. Through the slow days at home with my mother. Through knowing someone was listening to every word I said. By the end, I didn't say much.

But through the long and silent hours, my ideas kept growing. One day, I wandered into my local branch of the La Reina Public Library. I didn't get a card or check anything out, fearful that CSS would monitor it. I passed the kids gathered around the public Tabulas and ignored them—the CSS guy had told me not to use any Tabula but my own. I didn't know how they'd be able to trace a library Tabula, but I wasn't going to take the risk. So I did a search and got actual books from two sections of the library: self-employment and sustainable clothing. I sat and read them behind
Prime
magazines just to be safe. I was still nervous.

I realized I hadn't read a whole book since I was twelve. It was slow going at first. It helped that I didn't have anything better to do. I came back every few days or so until I'd finished.

By the time the sixty days were up and the woman in the white lab coat returned to extract the subdermal floss, Vivienne's words had bloomed into something ferocious. The woman congratulated me on an incident-free monitoring period. She also complimented me on the firm condition of my collagen-enhanced cheeks. The man in uniform removed the plate from my mirror. He claimed the surveillance on my Unum and Tabula had ended as well. I listened to their condescending praise. They had only silenced my tongue. They had no idea what had taken root in my head.

Ivy's eye caught something
on the Wildefan Chatlist. She was scrolling through the hundreds of notes left since the Torro-LeBlanc strike, the notes of inquiry, of confusion, of support. Among them was a different comment.

Hi, Ivy. You left your handbag with me by mistake, and it has your Unum in it. If you need it back, let me know.
The message poster was YourFlowerFriend
.
Ivy checked the date—it had been left a few weeks ago.

Whom had she left her handbag with? What handbag? She reread the message and paused on
YourFlowerFriend
.
In her head, she saw Marla's earnest face and the flower pin glittering on her shoulder. Ivy remembered she had gotten a new Unum after the visit to Miles Jackson's office. Because she'd dropped her bag at the rally. Marla must have picked it up.

Marla. Ivy liked her too much to hate her—but still. They weren't “FlowerFriends” any more. After a few seconds of indecision, she tapped the button to reply directly to the poster.

Saw your note. Keep the Unum. I got a new one.

Within a minute, she received a response.

In the bag there were also some photos I thought you might want.

Photos? Ivy wasn't sure what she was talking about. They were probably old signed publicity photos.

Ivy's fingers hovered over her Tabula screen, but a knock on the doorjamb made her look up. Her boyfriend poked his head into the room.

“Ready?” he asked. “Wait—you're not even dressed yet!”

Late, late, late, late.
I tried to take deep breaths and control my frustration. This day, of all days, for the stupid trains to be fussy . . .

Mine was the last stop, all the way out in Blackburn. When the train finally wheezed into the station and I got off, I gripped my briefcase and ran through the gravelly alley. I found my brick building and turned the knob of the heavy front door. It stuck, as usual, and I yanked it open with both hands. Heading down the cement staircase, I passed a sculptor, Milo, who kept his studio on an upper floor. We exchanged a quick hello. The temperature dropped as I finished my descent. Even in midsummer, it stayed cool in the basement.

The gray door in front of me had an index card taped to it, on which, weeks ago, I'd written “U.G.” in blue pen. I grabbed the key dangling from a cord around my neck, fit it into the eye-level lock, and let myself in.

“I'm here! The trains were awful this morning,” I announced.

Four faces briefly looked my way. Each person nodded or smiled, then returned to work.

It was dim in the basement, as usual. The narrow rectangular windows close to the ceiling let in a stingy amount of daylight. We had brought in standing lamps and workstation lights, but it was just one of those rooms that seemed to resist artificial brightening.

My coworkers sat on metal stools at their own folding tables. Kevin was working on a Tabula, Gwen was talking on her Unum, and Neely was sewing a jacket together on a dress form. Georgia, the former finance and accounting Adequate from Torro, was sketching. Felix's table was unoccupied.

Around the room, I'd taped the photographs from Ivy Wilde's bag to the cinderblock walls. Ivy had never asked for them back. I remembered her in the Torro-LeBlanc bathroom, miserable and tossing her trends into the garbage. I wondered how she was doing these days.

Other photographs and images torn from magazines decorated the walls of the room as well: a river, wildflower fields, three trees gnarled together. I had even glued dried leaves and petals to one wall in a giant
UG
pattern.