“You look good up there,” Harry said, watching her, but Faith quickly slipped from the stage.
In the days that followed she would sit at a table in the crowded club and wait for him, and then they would head to his apartment and go to bed together as the sky got pink above the clusters of neon. One morning, when she was in bed with Harry in his hotel room, he tapped Faith lightly on the nose and said, “You’ve got a big honker, don’t you. But you’re so sexy, you can carry it.”
She said nothing. It hurt her, not because it was untrue—she did have a strong nose, and it did look pretty good on her. It hurt her because she had been lying relaxed with him, similar to the way her childhood dog Lucky would sometimes lie in deep sleep on her back, paws up and dipped at the wrist. Her dog, lying like that, was happy in her doggish openness. Which, Faith thought, was all she herself really wanted when she went to bed with someone. To lie exposed and free and unself-conscious.
Yet her nose was too big, and a man had pointed it out. In bed, no less. She would never forget it.
But what she would mostly never forget from those six months in Las Vegas was what happened there to her friend and roommate Annie Silvestri. Annie had been dating Hokey Briggs, a comedian who opened for Bobby Darin, and one night when both women were home in the barracks and had just turned out the lights to go to sleep, Faith heard crying coming from the next bed.
“Annie, what is it?”
Annie switched on the small lamp and sat up. Somberly she confessed, “I skipped a period, Faith. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
The next day, Hokey Briggs tensely drove the two women around from doctor to doctor, in search of someone who would perform an abortion. But it was hard to find anyone, and the one doctor who agreed wanted way too much money. Finally Annie got a name from a friend of a friend. She begged Faith to go with her, and though Faith was afraid, she said she would. At the given hour, the two women climbed into an unwashed blue Ford Galaxie that idled in front of the barracks.
Once they were in the car, an older woman in a head scarf and sunglasses told them, “Get down,” and then started to blindfold them both.
“No one said you were going to do this,” Annie protested as the cloth went around her face.
“Do you want to meet the doctor or not? Come on, hold still.”
They were driven around for a long time, and finally they were brusquely taken out of the car and helped into the back door of a building, where the blindfolds were removed. Annie was told to follow a nurse—or someone posing as one—into a treatment room.
“Can my friend come with me?” Annie asked.
“Sorry, honey,” said the nurse.
Faith was actually relieved, because she was afraid of what she might see in there. She stayed in the waiting room for a long time; at one point, crying came from deep in the office. Eventually the nurse appeared and said, “Get her home and put her to bed. Take care, dear,” she added to Annie.
The serious bleeding began in the middle of the night, accompanied by strong, stuttering cramps. In the barracks, the cocktail waitresses gathered around Annie (the rest of them thought it was just a very heavy period) but no one really knew what to do. Finally, after everyone else had gone back to sleep, Faith decided Annie had to go to the hospital. Near dawn, she walk-carried Annie into the landlord’s borrowed car, and they made their way there. In the ER, one nurse in particular gave Annie the leper treatment. “You’re going to ruin my very nice floor, Mrs. Silvestri,” she said sarcastically.
“Is there something I can take for the cramps?” Annie asked, gasping.
“You’ll have to ask Doctor for that,” she said. “It’s not my department.” And then, leaning closer, the nurse added, “I could have you thrown in the slammer, did you know that? I could call the police right this minute, you little harlot.” Then another nurse came into the room, and the first nurse straightened up and fussed innocently with paperwork.
Two days later, having been transfused three times, Annie was sent home with a box of off-brand sanitary pads—“Fotex”—and a warning from an extremely young male gynecologist about “not giving it up so easily. Though of course,” he’d added, “it’s a little late in the day for that, wouldn’t you say?”
That night, back in the barracks, Annie said to Faith, “I was thinking that he’s right.”
“Who?”
“The doctor. It is late in the day. Late to be here.”
“What are you saying? I don’t understand.”
“Let’s go home, Faith,” said Annie. “Please. It’s time.”
* * *
? ? ?
What made you become the person you are today?” interviewers sometimes wanted to know over the years, asking the question as if they were the very first person to have asked it. “Was it a single thing? Was there an aha moment?”
“Well, no, there wasn’t one in particular,” Faith always said. But she thought that maybe there had been a series of moments, and that this was the way it was for most people: the small realizations leading you first toward an important understanding and then toward doing something about it. Along the way, too, there would be people you would meet who would affect you and turn you ever so slightly in a different direction. Suddenly you knew what you were working for, and you didn’t feel as if you were wasting your time.
Faith was living in Manhattan in 1966, sharing the tiniest of apartments with Annie on Morton Street in Greenwich Village. She and Annie were like two audience members who had arrived in the middle of a show; so much was already going on. The political protests were loud and urgent, although they had been sealed away from all that, trapped in a time tunnel when they worked in the casino, and now they had to catch up. The two women stayed roommates through different temp jobs, and through voter registration in Harlem and volunteer jobs at an antiwar organization that operated out of a storefront on Sullivan Street, where Faith typed the weekly mimeographed newsletter, A Peace of Our Mind. She attended meetings and lectures and teachins. The war dominated conversations, and everything was punctuated by the best music she’d ever heard. Various friends crammed into the apartment on weekends, and the place was filled with marijuana smoke. “Mary Jane, I love you so,” a boy sang as he sprawled across the shag rug of her living room. Faith was often high on grass on weekends, but never during the week, because it interfered with political strategizing, as she and Annie called it when they sat together at their tiny kitchen table and discussed how best to organize. It wasn’t that Faith had become political in some sort of moment of epiphany; it was more that the world had moved and she had moved too.
While this was happening, the high hair of the first half of the decade precipitously came down. Faith intentionally dropped a full can of Aqua Net hairspray into the bathroom garbage pail, where it began to hiss and unload its pressurized contents. For years her hair was full and floaty. By 1968 she and Annie Silvestri, still roommates, wore jeans and Indian-print shirts instead of the modified stewardess dresses they’d been wearing for so long.
At the antiwar meetings Faith attended, at first she had mostly sat and listened. Some of the men who spoke were unusually articulate. Faith, when she spoke, was perceived as smart and articulate too, but the men felt free to cut in and interrupt her. She tried to talk about abortion reform, but they weren’t interested. “You can’t compare it with Vietnam, where people are actually dying,” someone said one night, cutting her off.
“Women are dying here,” said Faith, and people started shouting at her.
Another woman cried out, in Faith’s defense, “Let her talk!” but Faith was shut down anyway, and finally she stopped trying.
As Faith was walking out of the meeting, the woman who had yelled out on her behalf came over and said, “Doesn’t this make you so furious sometimes?”