Free Silent Retreats by Philip F. Deaver Page B

yourselves—you two boys, no help from Mom. That's the rule. And you go camping a lot. He's growing up. You have to be with him more. He loves you. He needs your example."
    So I joined the Chiefs, to Scott's delight, and received in the mail days later patterns for father- and son-sized vests. There were no directions at all on how to sew the infernal things, but there was a notice enclosed that the first Chiefs outing, a camping trip to the Blue Ridge, would be two weeks from that very day.
    "They don't allow drinking on these trips either," my wife advised me one afternoon. "It's another rule." She was repotting some coleus and her favorite weeping fig and a lot of flowers I'd never bothered to learn the names of.
    "It's for the boys, after all," she said.
    "Where are all these rules written down?" I asked her.
    And while all this was going on, I suddenly realized there were a few things that I'd been meaning to explain to Martha, this lady at the office, if there were only time. She was just back from Houston, having served as squad leader or something at the women's convention—International Women's Year, remember? When she got back she was talking about having actually shaken the hand of Gloria Steinem.
    "A real preternatural experience, right, Martha?" one of the mail clerks joked.
    "Laugh it up, Anthony," she said to him. "It's a hell of a revolution you're missing." And she toasted him with her coffee cup and all the guys in the office laughed, circling the coffee pot, fingering the donuts, elbowing each other and interjecting last night's scores.
    Martha kept going. She said she guessed that in the end it was the most really fantastic and relevant and meaningful event she'd ever been part of, something to change a person's life—all those girls down there caucusing and going out to dinner and drinking in their rooms and storming Houston's string of male strip joints and shouting "Bullshit" at Phyllis Schlafly while she was delivering a dissenting report; and everyone was taking sides on important mainstream issues like lesbianism and so on.
    What I wanted to try to explain to her, if I could only get the chance, was that, well, Martha, let's face it, a convention on five million dollars borrowed from the government, held down in some bastion of male domination and capitalistic boyish fun like Houston, with all the accoutrements of conventions, such as soporific speeches by quasi-representatives from endless significant minority elements and "keynotes" from people with "clout"—well, Martha, I hate to tell you but that ain't no way to have a revolution.
    I wanted to explain to her that Freud was exactly right when he alleged that anatomy is destiny. (Where would we be without our anatomies, right? Ho, ho.) I wanted to explain to her that the government wouldn't have given the girls money for the convention if it thought for a second that they might be serious about someday making the men secretaries and the women boss. I wanted to tell her that her big binge on the ERA was a waste of time and breath because, as we learned in the cases of equal opportunity and civil rights legislation, change on paper ain't change, Martha.
    But the point I really wanted to make to Martha was that the women's movement was a chic, elitist, fad-laden, bejargoned, prepackaged media event and not a movement at all, and you could tell that by all the designer T-shirts and cutesy, campy ass-wagging that was going on in the suburbs in the name of equal rights for women. The radicals at the head of it, I wanted to tell her, were probably pretty serious, but let's face it, it was fun in the sun for the others, professionals and wives of professionals who were able to line up a babysitter while they went out to "network" or "get involved" or "demonstrate."
    And here's a question for you, Martha: what's the women's movement to some lady who drives a school bus and takes in ironing and slumps through the housework and bathing the