fanfiction: call it love or call it reason

[evewithanapple.livejournal.com]

Title: call it love or call it reason
Fandom: Hair
Summary: Woof and Jeanie's daughter contemplates a man she never met. [movieverse]
Rating: T

Her parents call her May, because that's the month she was born in. But they also call her Buttercup (because she has her dad's yellow hair) and Bean (for no reason she can figure, except maybe that she's small.) She has two parents, like most kids, but she also kind of has six of them, plus the dozens who drift in and out of the apartment at will. The six are the important ones, anyway. They teach her universal peace and love for her fellow man, and she gets it, she loves everybody- but the six of them are the ones who really count.

First there's her mom, who she calls "Mom" except when she calls her "Jeanie" instead, because that's what everyone else calls her, so why not? Mom/Jeanie approves of this, because she thinks kids should be allowed to call adults by their names instead of Mom or Dad or Mister or Misses. So she sometimes calls her dad- whose name is Woof or possibly "John" even though he makes a face whenever someone says that- by his first name too. Jeanie and Woof are her first parents, the ones who made her and the ones she lives with, and they tell her all the time that she's perfect, amazing, the best thing they ever did. "The government makes bombs," Woof says sometimes, "but we did the opposite. We made a person." And then he laughs, but he means it, she can tell. Jeanie smells like incense- patchouli, sandalwood, myrrh- so it always smells nice when she hugs May, and she makes her little dresses and rompers out of old pillowcases and sheets, because it's better for the environment that way- Sheila told her.

Then there's Sheila, who always seems more awake and more energetic than anyone else May knows. Whenever she comes by, which is often, her bag is covered in pins and she's carrying an armful of posters and pamphlets and she's always coming to or going from a protest for something. Sometimes she gets arrested, and comes back from a stint in jail telling May stories of how she chained herself to a building or threw pig's blood on a senator. Sheila takes May to her first protest, brings a custom-made sign that's just the right size for May's small, chubby hands. A journalist takes a picture of her, staring straight at the camera, with her sign- it says "War Is Not Healthy For Children Or Other Living Things-" and it ends up on the cover of a magazine, which in turn ends up framed on a wall in the apartment. It's the only thing on their walls that isn't either alive or crocheted. Everyone says they're so proud of her, especially Sheila. "My little rabble-rouser," she says. "When I was your age, I was going to private preschool and eating cheese sandwiches off the good china. Your generation, you're gonna change the world."

Then there's Lafayette Jr. (who mostly gets called "Junior") and his parents, who Jeanie says are basically her parents too, so they're around all the time. Junior's mom is kind of like Sheila, but a bit quieter, and Jeanie says she's the most square out of all of them. But she always laughs and kisses her after she says it, so May figures it's not a bad thing. The real squares, Hud says, are the ones in the government who are dropping the bombs. Hud is Junior's dad, and the reason he's called Junior, because sometimes his name is Lafayette too. Mostly that's his name when he gets arrested because a cop said something rude to him and he said something rude back and apparently it's against the law to say something rude if you're not a cop. Every time he gets arrested, Junior's mom shakes her head, except when she's right there next to him yelling at the cop to take those handcuffs off or she'll call the NAACP and they'll have his badge. Sometimes May and Junior are with them when they yell at the cops- sometimes they yell along, even if they don't know what they're yelling about- and sometimes they stay at the apartment with either Woof or Jeanie, and learn to crochet or paint or (rarely) do school stuff. Jeanie and Woof didn't even care whether or not she went to school ("she's learning all the important stuff right here" Woof said when someone asked) but eventually Junior's mom pointed out that the truant officer might make a fuss because May's not in school and her parents aren't married and are "political dissidents" (whatever that means) so she goes to school. The first few days, she gets in trouble for not saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and someone has to come and pick her up, but eventually her teacher just throws her hands in the air and says "fine, be a Communist!" Which is stupid because she's not a Communist, but she doesn't say that out loud. By then, Claude's told her that it's good to pick her battles.

When Claude comes by, he's always quiet, and when he does talk, there's a weird sort of drawl to his voice that May doesn't hear in anyone else's. He's not fun like the other grown-ups, but May doesn't mind- sometimes having fun makes her tired, and when that happens she goes over to Claude and sits next to him and doesn't say anything. Neither does he. But he likes her sitting there. She knows, because he always smiles, and he doesn't do that too often.

Jeanie says that Claude's still busted up about their friend Berger, who May never met. There are pictures of him around the house, and he has a huge smile in all of them, but May still feels sad whenever Jeanie or the others talk about him. She's sad she doesn't know him- he sounds like he was a good person to know. Junior tells her once that an airplane ate him, but she tells him that she's five, not stupid. Woof tells her that Berger got on a plane to Vietnam and never came back, which makes a lot more sense. Sheila says he had an infectious laugh, but she's always sad too when she says it. It doesn't make sense to May how someone who seems like he was so happy can make everyone so sad when they think about him. Especially Claude.

Once, late at night when May was supposed to be asleep, she heard Claude come over and sit in the living room for hours talking to Jeanie and Woof. He cried on and off the whole time, and slurred his words when he wasn't crying. "It should have been me," he keeps saying. "That fucking plane, it was supposed to be me." May's parents tell her that sadness is the ying to the yang of happiness and it's okay to feel but she's never heard sadness like Claude's, all mixed up with anger and regret and bitterness and self-loathing. He even swears, which is something he almost never does. She's starting to understand- partly from school but mostly from life in general, because her dad is right about her learning all the important stuff at home- that even when she goes to protests and even when her mom makes her environmentally friendly clothes and even when she does everything she's supposed to, everything that's meant to keep the universe in balance and harmony, horrible things happen anyway because the world isn't fair. And that's why her parents and Sheila and Hud and Junior's mom do what they do, because it's not going to get better if they don't do anything- but there are people like Claude too, who are just all used up. And there are people like Berger, who maybe changed the world just by being alive but still died- if they can die anyway, then maybe the world really isn't fair, because it seems to May that the really good people, the ones like Berger had to be, like her parents remember him as- shouldn't they live the longest?

Claude goes to visit him, she knows- once every month. She waits and considers (because she doesn't want to make him sadder) and then one day when he's at the apartment and she's sitting next to him, she looks up and asks "When you go see Berger again, can I go with you?"

She can.

They drive for what seems like hours, even though it's probably not actually that long, and then they get out at a giant field with little white stones standing up everywhere she looks. Claude takes her by the hand and leads her out, dodging and weaving through the stones- they all have writing on them, but she can't stop to look- until they stop at one stone in particular. Claude just stands there, arms behind his back, saying nothing. May peers at the stone, but it doesn't tell her anything- just that Berger's first name was George, and he was born in October and died in April. April 6- almost a whole month before her birthday. The same year, too. She wonders if her parents were happy or sad when she was born, if they were still remembering their friend or if they were too busy getting to know her. She wonders why he didn't live just a little bit longer, and then maybe she could have met him. She wonders why there are so many stones.

"Claude?" she says.

He leans down and ruffles her hair with one hand. "Yeah, Buttercup?"

She chews on her lip, considering her question. There's a lot of questions she wants to ask all of a sudden, but she doesn't think Claude will be able to answer most of them. "Does a new person get born every time an old one dies?"

He looks thoughtful. "I dunno." He scratches his chin. "I guess so, yeah. Otherwise we'd run out of people."

She looks at the numbers on the stone. 1945 and 1968. She counts back. He lived for twenty-three years. "But the new ones don't replace the old ones, right? Unless they get reincarnated and they're the same person?"

He looks sad again. "Nobody really replaces anybody, kiddo. That's not how it works."

May looks out over the field, which is covered all over with tiny stones. Probably all of them say the same thing- just the name and the dates. It doesn't seem very fair that so many people can be summed up with a bunch of stones and names and dates. It doesn't seem fair that Claude's sad. It doesn't seem fair that Berger never came back.

Sheila said her generation was going to change the world. The world seems really big to May, even the world just as she knows it, which is mostly just Manhattan. But she wants to change it, she thinks. Her parents and their friends tried to change it- are trying, never ever gave up trying- but she's going to be even better. She's going to do it.

"I'm gonna be President," she announces. Then she reconsiders. "Or I'm gonna make it so there aren't any presidents anymore. If there aren't any presidents, there can't be any war, right?" It seems a bit too simple, even to May, but it also makes sense. Presidents declare war. No presidents, no war. The rest is details; that's what her mom says.

Claude still looks sad, and May feels bad for making him look like that. She thinks maybe she shouldn't have said anything. But then he reaches down and takes her hand. "Let me know how that goes," he said, and he doesn't sound happy, exactly, but he doesn't sound miserable either. "I'd like to see you pull it off."

"I will," she says. She is seven years old and utterly convinced. She's going to change the world.

He squeezes her hand, and they walk back to the car together, leaving the field of tiny stones and names behind.