9
Jesse
When Jesse gets to the parking lot behind the Town Hall on Sunday it’s ten minutes before noon, and Esther is there alone. She’s bent over, facing away from Jesse, and muttering to herself as she rummages through a messy heap of cardboard signs on sticks. By her feet is her lumpy black tote bag, a thermos, two folding chairs, and what looks like a giant, rolled-up fabric scroll on two two-by-fours. Jesse recognizes this as demo equipment—it’s familiar to her from years of accompanying her parents to marches, around town and in DC, for nuclear disarmament, women’s rights, various wars—whatever injustice was currently lighting a fire under Fran’s and Arthur’s asses.
One of Jesse’s earliest memories is of sitting on her father’s shoulders, both arms wrapped around his balding head, looking out over a sea of people all walking in the same direction and shouting in unison. It was a march to raise awareness about the genocide in Rwanda, and Jesse was three years old. She remembers having a peace symbol painted on her cheek by a beautiful lady with long, curly hair; she remembers when the big kid wearing a NO HITTING: USE YOUR WORDS T-shirt stole her box of raisins, just swiped it right out of her hand while they were stopped at a police blockade, waiting to cross an intersection. She remembers the nasty fight her mother got into with the boy’s hippie mom over the stolen raisins, remembers her father begging her mother to please stop fighting at the peace rally.
Now, watching Esther mutter and rummage by herself here in this deserted parking lot, Jesse suddenly wonders whether her description of the vigil as a fun, big-group affair was actually all in Esther’s mind. What if “Margaret” and “Charlie” are actually Esther’s imaginary friends, and this whole thing is some weird, loopy setup? Jesse stands, not moving, twenty feet away from Esther, and doesn’t say anything. It’s not too late to slip away before she’s seen. Esther would never even know Jesse was here.
But suddenly, Esther lets the armful of signs drop to the ground with a clatter and stands up, muttering, “Typical, typical, typical!” She turns, plants her balled fists on her hips, and surveys the parking lot critically, squinting as if looking for something lost. When her eyes light on Jesse, her glowering expression resolves into a look of sweet pleasure. She smiles so big her tiny teeth show, top and bottom.
“Hey!” Esther says.
“Hey.” Jesse can’t help but smile back at Esther. Then she blurts out, “I thought you said there would be other people here,” before she can stop herself.
Esther doesn’t seem perturbed by her concern. “Oh yeah, there will be. It’s only a few minutes to twelve, still—Margaret and Charlie come on Access-a-Ride so they’re always here right at noon. And the rest of the group, whatever. They’ll be here when they get here. A lot of them have kind of a loose relationship with time. Hold this.”
Esther hoists the rolled scroll with the two-by-fours off the ground and hands it gingerly to Jesse, who takes it and bobbles it—it’s way heavier than she expected.
“Careful with that, careful, careful!”
“Sorry.” Awkwardly, Jesse shifts the scroll around in her arms until she has a firm grip on it.
“It’s okay, it’s just, that banner is an artifact. Someday they’re gonna put it in the Smithsonian museum.”
“What’s so special about it?”
Esther gets her things together while she explains, stuffing the thermos into her already overstuffed tote, slipping her arm through the legs of the folding chairs, gathering the ungainly pile of signs up in her arms.
“Margaret and Charlie made it themselves in 1965, right at the beginning of the Vietnam War. They were some of the first people in America to protest Vietnam. It’s just a couple of bedsheets they sewed together and painted, but they carried it to peace marches in, like, forty-two states over the years. They took it to Woodstock; you can see it in one part of the documentary. Did you see that Woodstock documentary?”
Jesse shakes her head. Her father had wanted to Net-flix the documentary about the great rock-and-roll love-in of 1969, but her mother had insisted on putting an entire sixteen-hour miniseries of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations ahead of it on their queue, and somehow they hadn’t made it yet from Victorian London to the Summer of Love.
“It’s not that interesting a movie, but it’s very cool to see Margaret and Charlie in the background in that one shot, holding this very banner. This banner has been to Hungary, Germany, France, and Japan. It’s been everywhere.”