Assault Talks

She thought she was somewhere underneath the Brooklyn Bridge near Montague St.; she was on Wall Street. Every time she tried to cross the street she had to pause while strangers took photographs of their family members in front of important buildings, statues, and flags. When she finally caught on to her location, she made her way to Liberty Square, deciding with a sigh that there was no way she’d make it on time to her first class.

There was little semblance of revolution left over from years past. She remembered being seventeen, and sneaking out of her house after a fight with her mother, catching the 9:04 11A Southbound, and finding her way to Zuccotti Park. Zuccotti Park had smelled like incense at the time, like incense and protest. She remembered the musicians and the makeshift library and the Jewish boy she’d kissed at midnight between Pablo Neruda poems, between two other activists’ sleeping bags.

There were still rallies every now and again, but they were disorganized and roisterous; there was so much to protest one could not help but protest all things, once one got started.

Besides, there were few people left to protest. These days everyone seemed to enlist in the army, to help President Romney create “an army so overwhelmingly powerful, no one would think of challenging it.” Well, here she was, anyway, thinking of challenging it.

She continued past the banks and the would-be photographers to catch the downtown 4 train, and as she filed down the steps and into the subway station, a pair of green eyes on a lanky body crossed her without recognizing her, and continued up the stairs. 

What was Asher doing on Wall Street?

He pulled his pad and pen from his pocket and started down the street. Leah noted this and determined at once that he had not changed a wink since high school; that he was still that same punctilious, misguided fellow he’d been when they were young.  She cleared her throat quietly, and prepared to greet him warmly:

“What the hell are you doing on Wall Street, Asher? I thought you were a Socialist, or is it the other pedantic green-eyed radical I’m thinking of?”

He flung around at the sound of his name and appraised her.

“No that’s me.” He responded brusquely. After all, he was used to seeing Leah  materialize in unlikely places, without solicitation.  He was not astonished and he would not so much as blink. He continued his business.

“Journalism? Or are you looking for work here?” She pressed.

“If you must know,” he said, strained, “I’m writing an expose for my school’s newspaper, about the Capitalist agenda, how it works and who it affects.”

He didn’t look up from his notes to see if she remained there. He knew how to deal with radical feminists like Leah. Radical feminists like Leah were just like bees; if you stood still and minded your own business, soon enough they would leave you in peace.

He planned to begin his expose with a tasteful description of what it felt like to be a Marxist on Wall Street; he was hoping to catch a glimpse of well-dressed suit or two, to which he would humorously compare himself. That would nab his audience’s attention; from there he’d talk politics. 

He lamented the failure of the Occupy Movement and he was certain he knew the root of it. People were impatient, that was it. People couldn’t protest one issue at a time; people couldn’t prioritize. So you’d end up with hippies and hipsters and whatnot painting their bodies and coming down to Zuccotti Park as though it were Woodstock. These people had to go and destroy an economic revolution, simply because they couldn’t strategize Simply because they-

“Well, I do hope the female half of the population has finally earned a place in your anti-Capitalist agenda. Maybe you could include a paragraph on the Equal Rights Amendment.”

And Asher thought, just stand still and mind your own business... and the feminist will go away.

And Leah thought, here’s another prodigy this nation’s betrayed. Another upright citizen who’s lost his brigade.

...

A grey rain came. Leah and Asher looked up to see the low clouds pressing together, vying for the sky.

Could they not coexist in the stratosphere? Their quarrels seemed to leak down to the earth by way of water.

Asher turned and glanced at Leah who offered her face to the winds.

“I’ve thought long and hard about this,” he told her. “We need to achieve economic equality before we attack social injustice. If we don’t take it one issue at a time, we’ll make no progress.”

She wanted to laugh, but she wanted him to take her seriously. So she would have to take him seriously. Or pretend to.

“Doesn’t social injustice engender economic inequality? Aren’t they inseverable?”

“No,” he told her, “social justice is a broad and long-term goal. In the short-term we need to equalize means and then the rest will follow.”

His pad was getting wet. He scowled. She had sabotaged his afternoon.

Through chattering teeth she said, “What about wages? What about men earning more than their female counterparts for the same work? What about unequal access to education and therefore opportunity? What about John Adams?”

“What about John Adams?”

“What about John Adams denying women the right to vote because few women owned property? Is that not an economic issue?”

“You know, Leah,” he spat through his teeth, “first wave feminists were mostly upper-class white Christian women who advocated temperance.”

“They advocated temperance because they lacked economic rights and what could they do if their husbands were drunkards and wasted their income on booze?”

He noted the cover-up and lipstick and mascara that the rain had streaked across her face.

“And what about you, with your thick makeup and long dresses? Haven’t you been fighting for years for pants?”

 “Femininity is feminist,” she asserted. “And it’s so tiresome to hear privileged white men like you judge women on their sartorial choices.”

He stifled a scoff. Her vocabulary did not intimidate him. He could define “sartorial” better than any dictionary.

“That’s how men try to get away with rape,” she continued. They blame a woman for her dress, they say, ‘she was asking for it.’”

He stopped a moment, brushed his eyes across her bare shoulder, and asked her, “Don’t you think there’s something to be said for modesty? For not imposing your body on someone else?”

“I went to SlutWalkNYC our senior year of high school and what moved me most was a conservatively dressed woman who held up a sign that read THIS IS THE OUTFIT I WAS RAPED IN.”

They stood, eye to eye, shivering in time with the precipitation. The sky held its breath. The raindrops stopped in their tracks because they wanted to hear his reply before they acquiesced to gravity.