Her Mother's Daughter (116 page)

“Always talking about me,” said a dour voice from the doorway. I turned. A tall, rangy, large-eyed woman in her forties stood there leaning against the frame in shabby jeans and an old leather jacket. Lu grinned, stood up, and hugged her.

“Just the person we need in this argument.”

Margot groaned and put her head in her hand.

Lu said to me, “This is Clara Traumer, who runs
Outsiders.
Why don't we all have lunch? We can discuss this further.”

Clara Traumer publishes a small feminist journal that takes its name from Virginia Woolf's suggestion that women constitute themselves a Society of Outsiders. Because women are excluded from the male world, they can see it in perspective, and, Clara said, because women are excluded, they have different values from men. They are outsiders in the world.

“Ah,” I laughed, “now I understand.”

“You've always felt like one, huh?” Lu smiled.

“As we all do,” said Margot in her high delicate voice.

With such a name, it is understandable that Clara's journal does not have a huge circulation: people don't like to think of themselves as outsiders. It is a small tabloid paper that comes out once a month and seriously tries to work out feminist theory.

“It does what we cannot do,” Margot lilted.

Lu treated Clara with great admiration. Margot seemed to admire and resent her equally. It was obvious that Lu expected Clara to support her in the argument, and she did. I felt it was a little unfair to bring in an outsider as her second. Margot did not complain about that, but she set her mouth stubbornly, she wouldn't give in. I was uncomfortable, and wanted to leave, except that I was fascinated by this Clara, she was so unusual. And it was Clara who came up with a solution.

“Look, you only have room for six-seven pictures tops, right? So why not show the image Margot wants to show, women working together in harmony—all that. But, Lu, you know Alison Tate, don't you? She's always looking for new stuff. Why don't you cosponsor a show with her? You can afford that. ‘Stacey Stevens: The Women at Houston.' All of them—the Eagle Forum women, the convention women, all their expressions, all the diversity—I mean, you seem to think these pictures are great.”

“I think they're magnificent,” Lu said. “I think they show women as they really are in a way no other set of photographs has ever done.”

Clara turned to me. “Would that satisfy you?”

I turned up my palms. “I'm not a contender here.”

“Sure you are,” she insisted breezily, and turned to Margot. “What do you think?”

Margot rewarded her with a brilliant smile. “I think you're a genius.”

I was interested enough in
Outsiders
—and Clara—that after lunch I walked for thirty blocks looking for a shop that carried it. I had to walk all the way to Womanbooks on Ninety-second. They had back copies as well as the present issue, and I bought all they had. And went home and fixed myself a drink and curled up on the couch and read them.

I felt all over again the way I felt in Houston. I had to revise my entire view of things, of profound things, the most essential things, like what were women really like, and men, and life. This journal of Clara's dealt with real things that other journals shun, uncomfortable things like the reasons some women have for denying they are feminists, or the pros
and
cons of socialism or separatism. There was a gritty article about white feminist prejudice against blacks; in another issue there was a series of short pieces by women of color exploring their prejudice against other women of color. It even on occasion gave houseroom to rightist ideas. It is open, even if Clara isn't, as she said, laughing, over the lunch table.

“I even deal with them,” she tossed her head at Lu and Margot, “the commercially successful insiders.”

Lu hooted. “Have you seen our last statement?”

“Have you seen mine?” Clara countered, and they all laughed.

Outsiders,
Clara said, is always on the verge of failure, saved so far by niggling grants from foundations with unusual levels of tolerance. “Everyone hates us because sooner or later, we print things they don't agree with. We'd be in trouble if we maintained a straight leftish position, but we even offend the left.”

All the women seemed to find this hilarious. It didn't seem funny to me. I could imagine it: how many people did she have helping her? Two? Three? Working in dark cramped quarters, late into the night every night, drinking coffee from stained chipped cups, yoghurt for lunch, maybe for dinner too; days spent tramping city streets to find shops to agree to carry the journal, arguing with printers over late bills: all for a magazine so maligned that even I had heard of it. Yes, living in a fifth-floor walk-up, dark little room with a closet of a bath, falling in bed every night too exhausted to look through the mail. No life other than the magazine, nothing else….

So what did I have?

I picked up the phone and called Clara Traumer just to tell her how much I admire her.

DECEMBER
7, 1977. I can never write December 7 without thinking: 1941. It was a Sunday, we had an outing, we went to visit some people Mommy knew who used to run a delicatessen but had retired to a farm. In the car after we left, Mommy said, “Now they work nineteen hours a day in the country instead of in a town.” We had Sunday dinner with them—twenty-six people at a long trestle table heaped with bowls of steaming mashed potatoes, creamed turnips, carrots, peas, stuffing (it wasn't as good as Mommy's), gravy, and chickens, many roasted chickens, I'd never seen so many on one table. It all looked delicious but none of it was as good as Mommy's, there was grease in it, and lumps.

And on the way home we stopped at Jean and Eric's and they opened the front door, their mouths were, usually only Jean came to the door, but this day they both crowded together at the door, their mouths were Os, their eyes too. “We are at war!” Eric announced, his voice was, he sounded frightened and that was the first time that I understood that grown-ups were frightened too, and that even they did not know what was going to happen, that things made them upset and unhappy, even Eric, who was so smart and strong and big and who intimidated Mommy and Daddy…. This day shall be marked in infamy, Roosevelt said, the President, and I believed him.

Had dinner with Clara last night at a cheap little Indian place in the Village. She is extraordinary! I found it exciting to talk to her, she has something fresh to say about everything. She went into a brilliant rap in which she proved that all our problems with the water table, and groundwater shortage are caused by the adoption of the flush toilet; and another in which she proves conclusively that all the great media stars have been androgynous. And she seemed interested in me, her eyes sparkle at me and she asks me questions about my personal life, something people in New York rarely do.

She talked about herself too. She is a lesbian, has always been one. She's alone, and lonely when she has time to be. She comes from a well-to-do family, received a small inheritance, and blew it all starting
Outsiders.
But she doesn't know how long she can keep it going, the last five years have been a terrible struggle and she's running out of sources of help. Still, she's full of courage and heart and hope and enthusiasm. She makes me tired just listening to her. She makes me terribly aware that I have none of those things.

DECEMBER
10, 1977. Lu called yesterday. She is trying to set up the show at the Alison Tate Gallery. But she also asked if I'd be willing to do a set of photographs of American women to be run serially in essay form over a period of six months. I am to go across country by bus, stopping wherever the spirit moves me, for six weeks. They can't pay a great deal but enough—they have a grant for this project. They want to show farm and factory women, executives and students, poor women, very rich women, middle-class women who work and who don't, women who head families in the inner city, itinerant workers, declassed refugees. Beneath this diversity they think there is a similarity of concern, an essential unity among women which will be developed in a written essay.

I said I'd think about it. Then I made a big salade niçoise and put it in an aluminum bowl with a plastic cover, went out and bought some French bread and a bottle of wine, and took the subway downtown to Lafayette Street, where the
Outsiders'
office is. It's small but light, on the fourth floor of an old loft building, and as I expected, Clara was there alone, working.

“Time out!” I announced as she let me in, a little stunned. But she was delighted, and we ate right out of the bowl—I'd remembered forks but forgotten plates—and drank the wine and talked. I told her about the new series.

She shrugged. “It's a good idea, but it's sure to come out fake.” Her speech is punctuated by her broad black eyebrows that almost meet, that rise and fall and arch in question, in disapproval, in delight.

“What do you mean?”

She put down her fork. “Look, poor women and laboring women might be willing to say out loud to a reporter that they're worried about their children or about money, and middle-class women might be willing to say that they're having trouble managing a job and a family, or that they don't know whether to give up the job to have a family, or abandon the family for a job. But none of those women, none of them, is going to talk about the real ground of women's unity, is going to say that what upsets her most is men. But the truth is that it
is
men—his not working, his drinking, his abandonment of her, his refusal to take responsibility for daily living, for the child, for child-care payments, his resentment of her success, his self-hatred at her independence, her not being able to find a lover, not being able to find a husband, not being able to keep one….” She picked up her fork again and waved it around. “Mark my words,” she said.

Or not being able to find one you want, I thought.

D
ECEMBER
14, 1977. I have decided to do the pictures anyway. It's just too interesting an assignment to pass up. They can do what they want with them: I'll do what I want. Even though it's true, what Clara says: So you take pictures of things the way you feel they should be taken, of the things you believe should be photographed. And they sit in an editor's discard file. Or in your own files. What good do they do there? No one sees them. No one understands what it is you are saying.

No one does. That's true. But I have to survive. And survival means taking assignments and earning money, even though my work will be censored; but it also means taking the pictures they will censor. Taking them. Not refusing to see. Nor turning away. I'll take some just for myself, the way I did years ago. Just to take them.

What in hell else can I do?

D
ECEMBER
16, 1977. I have a great plan. I'll leave the day after Christmas—I can't not spend Christmas with Mother—and I'll take Franny with me. Her school is closed for the month of January, so she can travel with me for five weeks and come back and stay with Jillian while I finish the assignment. She will miss a New Year's Eve party, but she's so excited at the prospect of seeing the country's backyards that she doesn't mind. I will miss nothing.

She asked me to buy her a camera for Christmas. I bought her a simple Canon. The thought of going on this trip with her makes me feel good, as if I maybe once am being a good mother. I'm almost excited. I'm happy I was able to work things out so well.

J
ANUARY
7, 1978. Portland. We stopped in Los Angeles to see Toni. He may think he's broke, but he lives in a beautiful little beach house in Malibu and he drives a red Porsche. He has changed so much—he's older, of course—he's forty, he kept mentioning that, bringing it up as if it were something terrible he had suffered that the rest of us knew nothing about. After the third or fourth time, I said, “Yes, Toni, I know what it feels like to be forty and alone, you left me a month before my fortieth birthday.” He didn't bring up his age again.

Anyway, it's more than age. There are small fine lines around his mouth and eyes—the kind of lines you see on aging actors and male ballet dancers and models, men who often smile when they don't feel like smiling, men who have to pretend because they have not completely obliterated their emotions. He embraced me and hugged Franny hard for a long time, but within an hour he was drinking and complaining about money. I had written him beforehand to ask if we might visit—I knew Franny would love to see him—and he'd asked if Franny could stay with him for a few days while I came up here to northern California, Oregon, and Washington.

I have left her there with trepidation. I hope he sticks around a little, does things with her. I don't trust him.

J
ANUARY
15, 1978. Laredo. God, it's hot! We spent the day standing out in a dusty dry farm under a sun that beat down, it must have been 110 degrees out there. Great shots, though, a great face on that woman—angry, twisted in physical pain, but strong, not worn down.

I'm worried about Franny. She's been silent ever since I picked her up. Toni wasn't there the day I arrived, he'd gone to the studio, and when she closed and locked his door and slid the key under a stone, she did it in mechanical ritualistic gestures, holding herself stiffly, like a child burying her dead pet. And her mouth was thin and stiff, it still looks that way at moments. But she says nothing in response to my questions: everything was fine, is fine, according to her.

We are moving east this coming week, to Louisiana, Georgia and Florida. I'm giving Mom and Dad a trip to Florida with the money I'm earning on this assignment, for Mom's birthday really—flying them down and putting us all up in Palm Beach for five days. I'll use Palm Beach as home base for forays into the poor areas around Glades. Then they'll drive over to the west coast, and we'll fly home. I'll get Franny settled at Jillian's, make sure she has notebooks and pens and whatnot for school, then I'll bus up to New England to finish the job. Oh, I'm glad all this worked out so well.