Her Mother's Daughter (115 page)

The cost accrued. Spontaneous sex was fun until one day it was no longer worth the trouble, when I could take one look at a man and know which form of injury he would do me.

I hadn't always put my career first; I had never treated my children as given, the way men do, ignoring them yet expecting them to love me. I hadn't. But had that helped? Worrying about the kids, feeling guilty at leaving them, missing them, being as concerned about them as about my career only helped to age me. And they turned against me anyway. Except for Franny—so far.

I'd escaped nothing.

And now, here were these women. The men I knew would scoff at these women, would howl in derision at their impracticality, their delusion. I'd heard them belittle even
men
who talked about hope; and any woman was fair game for mockery—“present company excluded, of course,” with a laughing nod in my direction. They didn't think of me as a woman, but as one of them. And so did I.

Lying there on the lumpy hotel pillow staring at the carefully-chosen-to-be-inoffensive wallpaper and drapes which nevertheless offended me, my insides completely turned over. As if I had, from youth, been looking at life through a pair of bifocals and just now discovered there were two ways of seeing through bifocals: you could look up—or down—and things looked somewhat different. Suddenly it seemed that the occupations of my mother's days, the meat loaf, the lemon pie, the smocked pink silk dress she made me when I was eleven, were as important, more important, than all the dams and hydroelectric plants, the oil rigs, the highways, the articles, the photographs, the magazines that occupied the other world, the world I was part of. And that she was as heroic, more heroic than the men who built cars and planes, paved roads, shot bullets at each other, dropped bombs. Because what were they doing and what did it cost them? The highest price extracted from such men was their lives; they never had to pay the higher price, the price she'd paid—daily sacrifice, slow torture, day by day by day, the hard way.

Even forget sacrifice: I never worshiped sacrifice, never wanted to sacrifice, I wanted to
live,
to experience everything. And I had—everything that seriously mattered to me. No, we shouldn't judge according to sacrifice but according to what a person gives, what contribution they make to the huge intricate organism that is the world, and what is worth what. And there was no contest. To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons or certainly, to take photographs for a magazine.

Oh, I know the world would say I'm crazy. But I have been thinking about all this ever since I came back from Houston. Here I am, nearly fifty years old, looking back at my past and feeling as if I'm reviewing the biography of a dead person, yet I'm unable to say here or here is where I went wrong, this was my mistake. I don't feel I made mistakes: but if I didn't make mistakes, how come I ended up dead while I'm still breathing? I approve of what I had and how I lived given the information I started with. It was that information that was flawed. Because I was taught that life was split into two parts, one for women, the other for men. If you were an extraordinary woman, you could take the man's role. And I was and I could and I did. Veni, vidi, vici.

But somehow, even though I was extraordinary and filled the man's role, I still had to be a woman. And even if I hadn't had kids, I still would have had to be a woman, because how many men are willing to be housewives for women? I had to be a housewife, somebody in the house has to, and even though for some years I had a man who did it, I had to do it too. And when I was being a housewife, I always felt resentful about it. I felt I was doing menial work, the damned laundry, the boring marketing, the dismal cooking. I was too intelligent, too talented, to do such stuff. That wasn't the part I'd chosen, I just had it dumped on me.

But seeing those women has changed the way I think about all this. Maybe it wasn't just seeing those women. It has taken me years, but now that there is only Franny and me and the kitchen sink, I enjoy cooking dinner with her. I won't say I can sew, but I do sew on a button for her once in a while, or iron a blouse. It's no more tedious than cleaning all my lenses. Franny and I grow herbs in window boxes. We love watching them get taller. It's taken me fifty years to realize that domestic things, women's work, can be fun and has its own dignity. I'd not seen that when I was a child because it wasn't fun for my mother. And it wasn't fun for my mother because she wasn't doing it by choice.

That's the secret. Men choose what they do, or feel they choose what they do. And I guess lots of men's work isn't fun. But the kind I did, do, is fun, is wonderful. So how come it turned me into a zombie? That's what Clara calls me, Stacey the zombie-woman.

These women weren't zombies. They were alive, the short fat women in sweatshirts, the slender Asian women in brocades and satin, the leggy young women in shirts and jeans, the middle-aged, middle-class women with permed hair and neat wool suits and mid-heeled shoes shouting for Reproductive Freedom and aid to battered wives, the sixty-year-old women in wheelchairs, wearing baseball caps with huge pins proclaiming
YES! SEXUAL PREFERENCE FOR WOMEN!
were unafraid to appear naive, were not worrying about their image, not even caring if people saw their emotions. Dreamers, imagining that what they did there would matter a damn to Carter or any president; idealists, imagining that the world of felicity and harmony they envisioned was possible; fools full of love and energy and hope. I loved them.

I wished I could be like them. Because it was better to stand with the women, better to rise and cheer believing in hope, faith, and charity, than to slump on a barstool or banter over golf with the guys with a heart full of despair, knowing The Great Game for what it is, unable to bear it, unable to change it, unable to go on looking at it and unable to look away: feeling noble and self-righteous in one's cynicism. Better to be a fool for god, whatever god might be—ourselves, maybe, the future, the children….Better. But how can I change now? I'm so old.

DECEMBER
2, 1977. The women at
Woman
are upset about my Houston photographs, and asked me to come down and talk to them. I went today. What a difference from
World
!
World
occupied most of a building: fifteen floors identical to each other, miles of corridors with hundreds of doors leading to neat anonymous cubicles, all the floors and walls the same color grey, you could never be sure where you were. This magazine is housed in a loft that has been haphazardly divided into small offices, erratic in shape and very crowded, with three or four desks jammed into each one. At
World,
you could always tell someone's status by their office, by its size, by whether it had a window or not, whether it was a corner office—the premium space. At
Woman,
the biggest office houses the four secretaries, who need more space than the editors because they have a wall full of file cabinets and the only large electric typewriter.

I wound my way through the maze to what I was told was the editor's office, a cluttered cubicle with two desks and a filing cabinet in which a woman was typing on an old-fashioned machine. I said hello, and introduced myself; she turned and gave me a broad smile, leaped up, and shook my hand, “Oh, I just loved your photographs!” She is Lu Marcus, in her fifties, a little plump, a little grey, dowdy, but with brilliantly clear, intelligent grey eyes.

She put her head out her door and cried “Margot!” and waved me to the other chair as she fished around on top of the filing cabinet and brought out a folder with several contact sheets. Then she sat and, leaning toward me, repeated herself.

“We love your pictures. There is so much humanity, such compassion in them. And the composition is superb!”

I could not help comparing this with my awed introduction to
World,
to the murmured understated praise, the barely polite smiles Russ and Lou gave me. Humanity and compassion were words rarely uttered there, and the need to impress was far greater than the desire to be agreeable. In this different atmosphere, I tried to act like a human being, pleased with praise, responsive. But I am too imbued with the
World
style. I smiled, it was the best I could do.

“But…” she paused, looked at me sharply, “some of them are disturbing to some of the editors.” She put on a pair of eyeglasses and examined the contact sheets. “This one,” she pointed. “And this, and this.” She picked out about a dozen shots. A few showed women arguing angrily, there were a couple of the chairwoman looking fierce and grim, and several showed a small group of well-known political figures talking privately, their faces as hard and dark as any man's. Four showed women walking with their arms around each other.

I was confused. I understood of course why they didn't like these pictures. But why consult me? The pictures were their property, and they would do, magazines always do, exactly as they chose with their property.
World
never complained if I showed men looking silly: they just didn't use the shots. I often shot men grimacing in anger or strain, or looking hard and mean—
World
rather liked shots like that. They just didn't like to see men appearing foolish. I raised my eyes to Lu in question.

A tall, slender young woman with oriental eyes and pitch black hair entered the office. Lu introduced her—Margot Wong, one of the editors. She slipped past us and perched on Lu's desk. She regarded me with cool dark eyes and suddenly I saw what was going on—there was a quarrel within the magazine about these pictures.

“I've been telling Stacey that some of us are upset by some of the pictures,” Lu said.

Margot nodded. “The pictures as a group are very fine—the best of their kind that we have seen.” She had a high delicate voice and an almost singsong delivery, as if she had been raised speaking an oriental language. Her speech was extraordinarily precise in sound and diction.

“I wish you to know that we do not object in principle to the portrayal of women in the full gamut of emotional expression. But for this piece, we feel it is important to emphasize the anger and hatred of the Eagle Forum women”—she pointed to the contacts from the Astrodome—“and the harmony and happiness among those at the conference. At the same time, we do not wish to impose our desires upon you, nor distort your intentions.”

WHAT?
I didn't believe what I was hearing. A magazine that would not dictate to a photographer? Unheard of! They were both studying me. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do.

“The photographs are your property. You can do what you like with them,” I said, surprised at the coolness of my voice.

“Yes.” Lu leaned forward even farther. “But we—I—wondered what you were thinking when you took these.”

A spurt of rage pumped into my forehead. And I spoke. But all the while I was talking, I was wondering what was wrong with me. For years I had sat in silence while
World
selected from my pictures those that would suggest the image of America, of manhood, that they were instructed to sell, to foster, to create. And I never said a word, I never complained, I simply accepted. And here these women were
asking
me what I was doing, giving me a chance to talk about my vision, and I was angry with them. Why?

“I admired the women at the convention, I thought they were great! And the most marvelous thing about them was their diversity. When you go into men's groups, whatever group you're in, the men look and act all the same: every male group is a club, whether they're all truck drivers or all Harvard lawyers. But these women were every color, size, shape, age; they showed every style and every emotion, and I wanted to capture that. And I did!”

I could feel heat in my face, as I swung around to Margot Wong. “Your idea of showing the Eagle Forum women as angry and full of hate is fine. They were, and I shot them that way. But the convention women were not, you have to know this, totally harmonious and happy. There were serious arguments in that group. It's because there were serious arguments that the final unity was so extraordinary, so moving. And there was power brokering going on among some of those women. To deny these things is just as bad as
World's
showing an image of America with everybody happy and healthy except a few unfortunates who were going to be helped immediately! It's a lie just like men's lies.

“And readers know when you lie! They recognize truth! I'd like to show you the pictures I took the first few years I was photographing, all women with babies. Sweet smiling motherhood? Hah! The truth is deeper and richer and harder and not so pretty,” I wound down.

Then I stood up, and picked up my handbag. “If you censor the truth about women in that way you might as well be putting out
Lady's Day,
or
Godey's Lady's Book.
You're not doing women a favor when you present them with a false image of themselves. That's all they've gotten all these years. I thought your intention was to be different.” My voice sounded tired. “But do what you want. The pictures are yours.” I turned to leave, but Lu put her hand on my arm. I glanced at her: she was looking intently at Margot, who was frowning, staring at the floor. It was an argument they'd already had, obviously.

Margot looked at Lu. “We have so many enemies,” she pleaded. “If we give them ammunition, if we show our own when they are not their best selves, we defeat our own purposes.”

“If we act exactly the same way they do, how are we better?” Lu pleaded back.

Margot's head went up like a shot. “Our
vision
is better! The world we want to build is better!”

“We can't build a better world on deceit,” Lu countered firmly.

“We can't build anything!—consider what we're up against!—without getting women's support! And we lose their support if we show them images of angry, unhappy, hard, grim women. Or images of lesbians!”