Free Vida by Marge Piercy Page A

learned to the other fugitives. In their yard in L.A. they grew thyme, rosemary, sage, comfrey, basil, horehound, fennel, lovage, sweet cicely, various mints. Herbs were cheaper than medicine and didn’t require prescriptions. Mostly fugitives had to doctor each other. The Network had a couple of doctors they could trust—one in New York whom Vida had seen when her leg was infected, and another in Portland—but they could not overuse them. Mostly they learned what they could and practiced on one another.
    In Los Angeles the three women roommates had lived on a child-care job Eva had and what Vida picked up from an off-the-books job with a local food co-op. All through the summer Alice had been too sick to work. She had caught the flu in the spring, she was anemic and she could not shake a cough. They ate a lot of brown rice, backyard vegetables and co-op surplus for the week—fifteen pounds of potatoes one week, fifteen pounds of carrots the next. Vida found it frightening to watch Alice grow weaker without being able to help. When Bill, Alice’s boyfriend, came back from several months in Mexico, he had been shaken by her condition. The next day Bill and Vida broke a fugitive rule and shoplifted eight kinds of vitamin pills. After that Alice seemed to pick up and began spending part of the day sitting in the garden and sometimes felt well enough to weed or water.
    This was a cozy store. Some health-food stores tried to look like pharmacies; they wanted to be scientific and respectable. Others wanted to be country stores with bins, big old-fashioned glass jars and long wooden counters. That was the style of this one, packed into a narrow slot between a pizzeria, not yet open for the day, and a news dealer’s, where her picture was hidden in the piles of newspapers. A woman with a baby in a stroller was picking over the meager selection of organic vegetables, but once she had paid and left, Vida was alone in the store with the husky blond woman behind the counter.
    She wandered around looking at the grains in their bins, the oils and syrups, the vitamin pills and natural cosmetics. As she passed the cash register she set down her pack casually, partly so the shopkeeper would not think she meant to boost anything but mostly to get it off her shoulders. That felt better. She was dizzy with hunger. The fragrance of the breads and nuts filled her mouth with saliva. She glanced at the counter but did not see a newspaper anyplace. She hoped the shopkeeper did not bother to read the papers daily.
    The woman behind the counter dialed a number. Vida froze. Then she drifted closer, picking up a can of yeast as if to read the nutritional information.
    “Hi, yeah, it’s Rena. I thought you were going to come by last night … You did too say that … No, come on. I’m not guilt-tripping you, Sarah, I’m not. I just thought you said— … I did make cookies, the ones with the star anise, ‘cause I thought you said you were coming by, and I just wanted it to be nice again between us … Oh, never mind! … I didn’t say that! … Goodbye yourself.” Rena slammed the phone down.
    No hidden messages. A lover lost, by the sound of it. She felt a pang of empathy that frightened her. She had not lost Leigh, just let the strength of the connection weaken a little. That was all. A momentary weakness.
    “Are you looking for anything in particular?” Rena asked crossly.
    Smiling she came to the counter. Of course I am. She wondered for a moment whether to pretend she had been in the store before, to establish herself as local, to call Rena by name and thus make the storekeeper believe she knew Vida. But another idea impelled her. Rena sounded as if she lived alone. She could admit to being a stranger and try for a place to sleep. “Oh, I was just drawn into the store. I grow a lot of herbs myself. I’m from L.A…. What are these selenium tablets you have on the counter?”
    “Wonderful stuff. It’s a cancer preventative …