Into The Light
By: CNJ
PG-13
3: Games of Politics
Liza:
"...Oh, that...yeah, I'm all right...we're settled in..." I told my mom over the phone late that afternoon the day we moved in.
We'd just completed a full day of hauling stuff into the house.
I paced a little between the living room and kitchen, which had a window with a nice view of the field and background trees.
I noticed a few of the trees were already turning yellow and the green on the rest was getting pale.
It's going to look beautiful in the fall, I realized.
"So you all can afford it?" Mom asked.
"Yeah, we made sure," I reassured Mom.
I'd e-mailed my parents and brothers and sisters to tell them about my move last night.
I hadn't wanted them to worry, so I didn't tell them about this move until we'd clinched the place. Boy, was I relieved and I knew the others were too.
"Have pen and paper?" I asked.
"Hold on..." I could hear Mom calling my thirteen-year-old sister, Alicia to see if she had a pen.
She apparently did, because Mom came back on.
"Okay, go ahead and shoot..."
I slowly gave the number to her.
"Thank you...I'll pass this on to the rest of the family."
We chatted a little more about how the rest of the family was doing.
My older sister, Brittany, who lives in New Haven, Connecticut and has a four-year old daughter, Marla, got promoted in her job as a paralegal.
My younger brother, Todd, was leaving for college in two weeks, heading to Harrison U. in Baltimore, Maryland.
Alicia's in eighth grade at Wakeman Middle School this year and is in the yearbook there.
My older brother, Brian started a new job as the manager of a Home Builder store.
He lives in Stamford. I told Mom about what else was going on around here and how Claudia and Aya were doing and that my Five R Us friends were doing all right as well.
"...and Mom, the view from the kitchen is just fantastic," I finished.
"That's good, honey, I'm so glad to hear that," Mom told me. "Hold on, Alicia wants to say hello..."
"Hiii, Liza!" Alicia chirped.
"Hi, Alicia..." I smiled. "How've you been? Looking forward to being the oldest in middle school?"
"Yeah..."
We talked a while longer. Hard to believe Alicia's a teenager now. Next year, she'll be a freshman at Burkeview High.
I wondered if Mr. Brooke was still the principal there.
Well, hopefully, Alicia won't have a bad time with any BIG clique there.
Back when I was in high school, a BIG clique had dominated Burkeview High and I'm still ashamed to admit that I'd run around with that group for most of tenth grade.
Finally, I wised up and found the courage to break away from them.
Then in the fall of eleventh grade, there were a lot of new kids and someone from Claudia's high school, Stoneybrook High, spearheaded Operation Equality.
It was a movement which involved tens of thousands of kids from several New England high schools writing to all the Northeastern newspapers to protest the inequality of access to resources as a result of parental income.
We even built a website on it and it's still up today. The campaign worked and it also weakened the BIG clique.
At the end of that year, the kids in that clique got into serious trouble after causing a riot at a baseball game at Stoneybrook High...an incident we call the Storm.
The perpetrators blamed each other, so that broke up the clique for good.
"Oh, I almost forgot to give you my new number and address!" I gasped. "Got something to write with?"
"Yeah...fire away..." she told me.
I gave her the number and address and told her to pass it on to the others.
After I hung up, I let out my breath and surveyed the place. Of course, there were a million boxes and things scattered all over the place, but already it was beginning to feel like home here.
"I think I'm really going to like it here," Claudia came downstairs and started going over the boxes to dig out her stuff.
"Me too," I stooped beside her to dig out my things.
We'd packed so fast that some of our stuff was mixed up, so our next task was digging out what was ours and taking it up to each of our rooms.
Wow. My own room. In my own place, where I'd pay rent. This was terrific!
I'd felt adult when I first moved here from my parents' home to campus.
I'm here on a full scholarship, so I didn't have tuition to worry about.
My main expenses were books, food, my part of the phone bill, an occasional movie, dinner out or fun stuff and rent.
But now I really was an adult taking on responsibility for my bills and making my own home. What a great feeling it was!
Claudia:
Good thing we had almost all of our stuff unpacked by the time classes started.
The first day of classes was cool and crisp and had a definite feeling of early fall as I hiked up to the coffee house between classes to meet Aya for lunch.
As I got there, I saw she was already there and waved. She waved me over and I joined her. I saw that she had a letter.
"It's my friend, Iyra in Iraq," she told me, showing it to me. She seemed a bit preoccupied.
"How is she?" I asked when we ordered a lunch.
"Not sure..." Aya shrugged. "Her parents are arranging her marriage and want her to settle down with a neighbor. He's all right, but she doesn't really love him."
"Wow, that's awful about her being arranged like that," I gasped.
It's so amazing that they still have arranged marriages in some countries in the Middle East.
"It is," Aya nodded. "The women have little freedom there. Little say in what happens in their lives."
"God, that's terrible. So, maybe she can somehow leave her parents' house?" I asked, then realized it was probably a bogus question.
In a several of those countries, any woman being on their own is automatically suspect.
It still was almost as bad as the Taliban regime that had recently been overthrown in Afghanistan.
"No." Aya seemed to echo my thoughts. "Women don't have the freedom to travel and move out into their own homes over there, not the way we do in most of the world. It's part of why my family moved here when I was thirteen. It's still bad there."
We were quiet as we ate, thinking over the situation in Iraq.
God, how lucky we are. I couldn't imagine having to depend first on my parents, then a husband for a place to live.
In the old days, the bad old days here in the States and in Europe, a lot of women did just that...moved from their parents' home into a husband's house, never really having their own home and never being self-supporting.
Liza:
I'm sure they have another auditorium we can have the play in.
But what was bothering me was that something weird seemed to be going on here at Granite and it wasn't just the recession.
Was it because some of the people in the bursar's office reminded me of the current White House administration or was it my imagination?
On Friday evening, Louisa and Aya didn't get back until after Claudia and I had eaten, so we made nachos and cheese and with sodas, watched a movie in the living room.
Interestingly, we ended up watching Primary Colors. The main characters are sooo funny that we always end up cracking up when we watch it; John Travolta's character looks just like Bill Clinton. It's a riot.
"Oh, hey did I tell you all that Katie's seen Hillary?" I asked.
"I think you did," Louisa sipped her soda. "Did she ever get a chance to talk to her?"
"Not yet," I ran a hand through my spiky dark hair.
"Interesting and weird meeting somebody famous," Claudia put in.
I nodded. I remembered Taffy Sinclair, who used to be in our class at Wakeman Middle before she flew off to Hollywood to be in a TV series.
Since then, I'd seen her in a couple of movies and it was kind of odd seeing her and remembering knowing her personally as a classmate, then seeing her on-screen.
"Heard any more from Iyra?" I asked Aya the next week as we got ready for our Thursday morning classes.
"Not yet," Aya ran a brush through her black curly hair. "I wrote to her and I hope she gets my letter."
"I take it the mail's not very reliable there."
I loaded my books into my backpack and hoisted it over my shoulder.
"Not really," Aya told me as we left the house to head to campus.
It's about a half mile away; in good weather, we walk.
The weather was definitely getting a fall feel to it; here it gets cold as early as late September or early October and sometimes it snows in November.
"I wish I could help Iyra come here maybe. Her parents are really conservative about this and don't let her travel alone. I guess in a way, I can't blame them since it's dangerous for women there."
"But...nothing can really move forward if people give in to their fears," I put in. "I can see her folks might be afraid for her safety, but isn't that what keeps humanity from moving forward? It did take some risks for women here to shape things up."
"True..." Aya nodded, seeming deep in thought.
"I think maybe your friends could gather a group of women together and protest this unfair treatment. Maybe her parents will see the point. We could suggest that to her."
"I can try," Aya sounded doubtful. "But it's not a democracy like most of the world."
"Yeah, it is easier here for instance," I nodded. "But if you think back, the States wasn't always a democracy for everyone. Up until 1865, there was slavery and blacks couldn't vote. Neither could Native Americans. And up until 1920, women couldn't vote and they made up just over fifty percent of the population. It took a lot of risks, but a good band of them got together to overthrow the unfair policies. So, maybe the Iraqi women can band together and fight."
"You have good ideas," Aya told me. "There are some groups gathering to fight for justice there, just like they did in Afghanistan. I guess Iraq just started, so we have a long way to go."
"That's good. Do you think...?"
An idea was forming in my head, although it sounded a bit outlandish, even to me.
"Maybe we could pool our money and pay for her to come here?"
"Possibly. But it's not just the money. It's the government officials and her family."
"Wow, that stinks," I let out my breath.
We got to campus and parted, waving goodbye and heading to our classes, Aya for her visual design class and me for my class on Asian art history class.
"We can go through the Hebrew Aid Society," I spoke in my role of Lorena Hickock, Eleanor's closest friend as we rehearsed for the play.
This week, I got the part in the play as Lorena Hickock after all and we'd started rehearsing three times a week.
It always felt so good being on stage. Once we were finished our rehearsal, the faculty of the drama department applauded and we bowed, but out of sync.
Oh, well, when the big night is here, we'll have our bow down. The main thing was to get the lines and acting in order.
Where were we rehearsing? The Lizbran arena which would be our auditorium for now.
It was Friday afternoon and once we got ready to leave, the bathrooms were a regular madhouse.
I was meeting Claudia, Aya, and Louisa for dinner tonight and maybe we'd stroll parts of Minneapolis tonight.
"Kristy e-mailed me this afternoon," Claudia told us as we drove up to Minneapolis a few hours later.
The sun was setting and the air was chilly.
"Yeah...how is she?" I asked.
"Better than last year," she told me. "I think she and Mary Anne are just about healed from Uharu's death."
"That's good," Louisa added.
Last February, Claudia's friend Kristy's roommate, Uharu Jakarta died of a heart condition and Kristy took it really hard.
Mona and Mary Anne had been close to Uharu also and had been crushed too.
It had taken that entire spring for them to heal from that traumatic loss.
"Another girl, who's a friend of theirs, Rowena is rooming with Kristy now," Claudia added. "Everybody calls her Ran and she has spiky black hair."
"Like me?" I stroked my straight spiky dark brown bangs.
"Yeah..." Claudia smiled. "Kristy says that Ran reminds her a little of Stacey in that she wears black a lot and grew up in New York City."
"It's good that they're doing better," Aya put in.
"Mona and Mary Anne are thinking of renting a house near Staten U. next year like us," Claudia went on.
"I say they should go for it." I nodded.
It's great when you can do it with good friends.
I like having an all-woman household where we can socialize, borrow each others' brushes and tampaxes and have in-house sleepovers with other female friends.
"I got a letter from Iyra," Aya announced late the next morning at brunch.
All of us were lounging in the kitchen Saturday morning, sipping tea and having the last of hash browns and sausage.
"How is she?" Claudia asked.
"I guess...getting by," Aya sat slowly and I could see that she was troubled by something in the letter.
"Are her parents still arranging her marriage?" I asked.
"Yes," Aya nodded. "They've set a tentative date for January. She really wanted to continue in school, but her parents discouraged her from going back this year. Anyway, the laws don't support higher education for females."
"That is ridiculous," I fumed. "I say we need to get some way, somehow figure out a way to get her here to the States."
"Why don't we write a government official?" Claudia asked.
"Let's try the embassy, the Iraqi embassy," Louisa put in. "I bet they could give her political asylum or something. They do that with refugees all the time. She could flee the country and head to an American embassy someplace there. She'd be a refugee fleeing political oppression."
"That'd be right," I added. "What's happening with the women there is political oppression. The people there know that."
I stood up and dug the yellow pages out from under the phone by the door and flipped it open.
We pulled our chairs close and scanned through the pages; there were sooo many embassies.
"There..." Aya pointed. "Iraq."
I hastily wrote down the address of the place, the e-mail, and the number.
"Should we call, ee, or write snail?" Claudia asked as we stood up and started loading our dishes in the sink.
"I think we should write snail mail first," I washed my teacup and plate. "That way, we have something written. We need to keep a copy of each thing we send and put all of our signatures on there."
"Do you think it'll really work?" Aya worried.
"I hope so," I rinsed my dishes and started to dry them. "I think other countries realize the plight of the women there."
"True." Claudia rinsed and dried her dishes.
"So...what wants to do the actual writing of the letter?" Louisa asked.
"Me," I volunteered. "Hey, maybe we could write to several different government agencies, the ones that deal with international affairs."
"Good idea." Aya nodded.
"I bet there're organizations helping out too," Louisa put in. "Isn't your friend Katie in NOW?"
"Yeah!" I nodded. "Fantastic idea; I'll ee her. I bet with her being in Washington and politically active, she'll know of several organizations."
"We can have some kind of fundraiser to raise money for her passage here," Claudia suggested.
"I have the feeling that raising the money will be the easy part," I added.
"Cutting through the red tape will be harder."
"You have that right," Aya agreed.
I had to get ready for work that afternoon and so did Louisa, so we headed off our separate ways.
