Over and Under Read Online Free PDF Page B

Kate Millett and Betty Friedan to the unsuspecting, and she confused cashiers everywhere with Susan B. Anthony dollars. Let it be said, however, that in Borden, Indiana, in 1979, her feminism was too bizarre to seem threatening. Down Old Township Road, Red Vogel liked to paint welcoming messages to UFOs on the roof of his mobile home; my mom’s behavior was regarded similarly. It was strange, but more or less harmless. My mother was beautiful, well-liked, and active in church and at my school. Cricket Gray was just somewhat unknowable to my neighbors, as she was to me.
    My father, on the other hand, was an open book, born and raised in Borden, but educated at Purdue where hereceived a degree in aeronautical engineering—he used to say that he was too dumb at the time to realize it was a smart guy’s degree. I had heard repeatedly all the mild escapades of his youth, not just from him, but from all of our neighbors who had grown up with him and witnessed it all: the time he tripped on the stage at junior high school graduation, the time he’d gotten his car stuck in the mud on prom night, the successful carpet cleaning business he’d run during summers home from Purdue. Neil Armstrong had been a classmate of his in West Lafayette. Everybody in Borden knew it.
    Although my father had employed his degree for twenty years making wooden coffins instead of rocket ships, he still liked to pepper his speech with space-age terminology. When people asked him why he had gotten a good education like that only to return to Borden, he would say that he had “failed to achieve escape velocity.”
    He spied me on the steps. “What’s going on, my man?” Mom didn’t turn around from the cabinets she was furiously organizing.
    “Nothin’,” I said. He could tell I was happy to see him, hours before he usually got home, and this in turn made him happy. He grabbed my arms and pulled me closer in a kind of half-hug. “What’s going on?” I knew my dad had a tendency to be pathologically honest under direct questioning.
    “I’ve got a little meeting here tonight,” he said. “No big deal.”
    “Here?” I said. I knew it had to have something to do with the strike. “Who with?”
    My father suddenly noticed my orange hue, and took the opportunity to change the subject. “Good Lord, youare filthy,” he said with real admiration in his voice. “What have you been doing all day?”
    I tried to think of what I had done that day that would alarm my parents the least. “Tom and I saw them burn up a car down at the picket line.”
    “You watched?” His grip on my arms tightened. Mom turned around, real concern in her eyes.
    “Whose car did they burn? Don’s?” she asked.
    “It was a junk car,” my father said dismissively, over-compensating in his attempt to sound casual about the whole thing. “I heard it didn’t even have an engine in it.”
    “Did Sheriff Kohl come?” my mother asked me.
    “Of course not,” Dad said sourly, “they could burn that plant to the ground and Kohl wouldn’t risk losing a vote by turning his siren on.” His comment seemed designed to piss off Mom.
    “I guess you think he should go down there and crack some heads,” my mother snapped. “You want him to break out the clubs? Beat some people up to save a junk car?”
    “I want him to keep the peace,” my father said. “I think I heard him say he’d do that in one of the eight hundred campaign speeches I had to sit through.”
    The whole exchange had confused the hell out of me. “Don’t we want the strikers to win?” I asked. “Tom’s dad says they work their butts off and the owners make all the money.”
    There was an extended tense silence. I could tell I had said something wrong. In a spastic kid’s errant strategy, I decided it was best just to keep talking. “Tom’s dad says they deserve doctor cards, and that they have to do something now if they ever want to get ahead.”
    My mother put her hands on her hips and