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whether we pickled too many cucumbers last year; whether the fence would fall down if we didn’t fix it this year. Homely household details. We didn’t go back to the subject of B. Violet and Elena’s merger proposal. I guess we just thought we’d wait and see what happened.
    But something had already happened—to me, at least. In between the accusation of man-hating and the phone call to Doug, I’d begun to think I really did want to meet with B. Violet before completely dismissing the idea. I wouldn’t mind seeing that woman Hadley again and finding out what she thought about all this. She might be a member of B. Violet but I’d still liked her, and besides….
    Actually, I suspect the most telling thing about my conversation with Penny that night, in retrospect, was that the word “lesbian” was never used.
    Not once.

4
    A MEETING WITH B. VIOLET was scheduled for the Tuesday evening of next week. I asked Elena if we could see their books in the meantime or at least a few quarterly statements. She called Fran and came back with the information that they didn’t want to make any figures available until they’d been assured of some definite interest on our part.
    “Just for security reasons,” said Elena.
    “Bullshit,” said Penny, who’d arrived in the interim. “What do they think we are, the IRS?”
    Elena only shrugged. “Maybe after the meeting, if everything goes well.”
    There was a tension in the shop that hadn’t been there before. A new feeling of suspicion and uncertainty. I came across Jeremy and Ray muttering together and discovered June and Penny huddled in the same way.
    Only Zee seemed to be outside it all; she was absorbed in her Filipino action group. They were getting ready to protest the Marcos visit to the States in September and were putting out a newsletter as well. Zee was responsible for its production, along with two men, Benny and Carlos. Some days all three of them were underfoot, acting like Best was the office of the Manila Times , talking in Tagalog, gesturing fiercely. All right I thought, so Marcos was a fascist megalomaniac who had ruined the economy and tortured everybody, but this was still a printing business, wasn’t it? In America.
    I remembered when Zee had first come to work with us last year how fascinated I’d been with her stories of the Philippines, its seven thousand islands, its blend of peoples, its history of struggle. She’d shown Penny and me slides one evening of Manila: Roxas Boulevard, Makati, the Wall Street of the city, Rizal Park on a Sunday with families everywhere, free concerts and picnics…and then, without warning, a series of horrible, falling-down slums full of swollen-bellied children, diseased beggars, child prostitutes—garbage and suffering flooding through the sewerless streets.
    I’d been horrified and moved, and I’d admired Zee intensely; she was political but beautiful with her chic clothes and fine jewelry. American feminists were so deliberately tacky and utilitarian; I knew—I was one myself, in my overalls or jeans and tee-shirts, my sensible shoes and total lack of ornamentation.
    Zee was like a tropical bird bringing news from another world, and I had liked her and been interested in her until the moment she became lovers with Ray. Then all of a sudden her jewelry was a symbol of upper class oppressiveness; her clothes were disgustingly feminine—look at those high heels and how could she work in a print shop without getting dirty?—and even her political enthusiasm was cause for suspicion. I told myself that Zee was a privileged woman from a highly connected, though currently out-of-favor family in the Philippines. If Marcos didn’t knock off any more of her relatives, someday when he was overthrown or dead of natural causes, Zee and the rest of the Oberons would be riding high again. They were lawyers, weren’t they, not peasants or workers, and they owned a couple of sugar plantations in Luzon and real estate in