Riding Fury Home (25 page)

The next afternoon, Mom and I were sitting in the booth of a coffee shop, eating lunch. “Last night I remembered something,” she announced.

“What?” I put my half-eaten sandwich down on the white ceramic plate.

“The one and only time I ever went to a lesbian bar before all this—and how afraid I was.”

“Huh. You went to a
bar?
When was that?” Another startling detail. This had been happening on our journeys around town. I was getting bits and pieces of my mother's story. Even though I already knew the secret of Marian, other hidden events of my mother's life seemed to come in flashes of remembrance, as if she could only recall them one by one. Her memory of those days was blurry, from the electroshocks, the drugs, and the silence.

“When you were a child, but after the affair with Marian, and after having been in a lot of mental hospitals. I was with a woman psychiatrist. I'd always been with male doctors, and I thought maybe a woman would help more. But she had a man's head.”

“No kidding—don't they all!” I chimed in. My stomach was edging toward sour as I wondered: What had this one done to her?

“She told me, ‘Why don't you go to New York City and find out if you really are a homosexual?'”

“I told her I didn't know where to go in New York, so she found out the name of a bar for me, and I went. I was scared stiff. It was in the day of real butch-femme roles, and there were some tough-looking women in there, with their short hair slicked back into a duck's ass. I sat there a while, but I didn't say a word to a soul. I made one attempt, and it didn't work. So I went home and I just stayed very miserable, feeling very inadequate and sick, like there was something really wrong with me.”

I reached for her hand across the table, saddened, the weight of my mother's failure, shame, and humiliation lumped in my chest.

Mom held my hand a moment, squeezed it, and let go. Her expression shifted from pensive into a half smile. “Lucky that I got into the women's movement. It did more for me than all the damn hospitals and psychiatrists, and all the damn medication, ever did! It's given me a whole new life!” Her grin broadened. She had elf eyes, twinkling, irrepressible.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “we're both lucky, you and me, huh?” Oddly, a certain kind of joy was rising in me. I sat buoyed by my mother's reminder: I was part of this new era. Sure, I'd lost a lover, but I didn't have to face years of devastation, go an eternity without, my way barred to finding another love.

WE WERE DOING A WARM-UP exercise when I noticed Natalie. It was my first time attending the lesbian theater improvisation group, which met on Sundays in a huge loft in SoHo. One at a time, each woman took a turn standing in the center of the room and saying “no.” Some nos were whispered, some howls of anguish, others cries of defiance accompanied by a foot stomping the hardwood floor. When Natalie stood in the center, her dark eyes shimmered with intensity as she belted, “No!”

My turn. I stepped into the center of the studio, surrounded by the group of women. I closed my eyes and felt the “no” welling up in me. Arms at my sides, fists clenched, I was remembering the previous night. Kate and I had been discussing our shared belongings over the phone. We didn't have that much to divide, but we quibbled over who was to get Laura Nyro, who the copy of
Sisterhood Is Powerful.
As our bickering escalated, Kate suddenly screamed, “You penny-pinching Jew!” I held the phone away from my ear, stunned, knowing that Kate had just inherited over a hundred thousand dollars on her twenty-first birthday from a trust fund.

When I'd first arrived in New York, there'd been this crazy
never let go
part of me that, even after everything with Kate, had been clinging to the fantasy that I might go back and live with her. That kept hoping she'd love me again. But distance had helped me come to my senses. Distance, and being cocooned by my mother, being welcomed and loved by Stella, and finding a community to immerse myself in. Kate's spewing hateful words at me over the phone finalized my divorce from her. I hung up.

Eyes closed, breathing deeply, I felt a wind of fury swirling up my body. My mouth wide, my
“no!”
echoed off the walls of the SoHo studio. When I opened my eyes, I saw Natalie smiling and nodding her head, eyes alight.

 

 

I WAS SHY. What did I know about dating? Kate and I had just stumbled into being lovers. Thank God Natalie was bolder. She sauntered over to the studio corner, where I was gathering my things after my second meeting, and said, “Hey, would you be into going to see
La Dolce Vita
tonight?” The Fellini film was playing at a movie theatre that only showed foreign films.
A kindred spirit
, I thought.

Afterward, we went out for a late dinner at one of the Cuban Chinese restaurants that line Eighth Avenue in Hell's Kitchen. I was enthralled that Natalie was so city-savvy, turning me on to this exotic cuisine. When I told her about Kate's “penny-pinching Jew” epithet that had fueled my “no,” she exclaimed, “Jeez! Stereotypes of us Jews—does it never end?”

We talked intensely for a couple hours while I savored the spicy, rich flavors of our dish of finely minced squid in black bean sauce with rice and fried sweet plantains. At the end of dinner, Natalie leaned toward me across the table. “Come to my place?”

Excitement and fear held me wordless. I nodded yes.

As we stepped out onto the street, I spotted a phone booth. “Gotta call my mother,” I told her. “I don't want her to worry.” I got Mom on the first ring. When I told her I'd be spending the night at Natalie's, she said, “Good for you, sweetie. That's great. Have fun!” I smiled . . . my new mother, cheering me on.

The entrance to Natalie's apartment building on Avenue A was a narrow door next to a pawn shop. The dim hallway was empty, and we couldn't wait until we'd climbed the stairs. We leaned against the wall, kissing furiously. I was learning the anxious thrill of the semipublic lesbian kiss:
My god, what if someone opens their door?

She took my hand as we jogged up the four flights to her three-room railroad flat with its shared toilet in the hall, and made straight for her bedroom. Natalie was a student of modern dance, versed in the body. She showed me how two bodies can move together, two naked bodies, as we rolled from her mattress on the floor onto the carpet. We rose one over the other, limbs twining, torsos arching and contracting, our bodies connecting and separating. I had never imagined this pas de deux, never known such fluidity between two bodies.

Natalie's touch on my flesh was leisurely in its exploration, as if to say,
No hurry, all this for you.
Natalie showed me the savoring of the body, how a body can sing. Then her touch became insistent in its urging:
Open to me, open.
And I did.

The scary awkwardness I had anticipated became the wonder of learning a new lover's body, the sense of power in giving pleasure.

When I woke, darkness. The pitch black of a moonless night. I fell back to sleep and woke hours later to the same inky air. Natalie stirred beside me, reached over to her nightstand, and turned on a lamp. She scooted close and kissed me. “Time for breakfast!”

“It's still night,” I mumbled, confused and woozy.

“No, it's ten AM, sleepyhead.” She kissed me again. “I'll make us something to eat.”

Natalie got up and headed for the kitchen, turning on lights as she went. As I fumbled into my pants and T-shirt, I noticed something I hadn't the night before, when my eyes had been only for Natalie: There were no windows in her bedroom. As I made my way through her rooms to the kitchen, I saw that the only window was in the middle room, her study, which looked out on an airshaft. Her desk was stationed in front of this window, with a view of a concrete wall. The faint smell of rotting garbage came in through the partially open window. The dimmest of light filtered down from the rooftop one story up. I had never known of such a thing: an apartment that never saw daylight.

In the kitchen, Natalie was pondering the contents of her refrigerator. She put two plates on the table, each holding two slices of whole wheat bread. A jar of peanut butter sat between the plates, its lid off, the end of a kitchen knife jutting out. The table itself was actually a claw-foot bathtub set against one wall of the kitchen, over which Natalie had a plywood board.

“Peppermint tea okay?” she asked, lifting a kettle from the stove.

“Uh-huh,” I nodded, distracted by my surroundings. It had struck me, staring at that bathtub table: These were rooms where immigrants began life in this country. How odd to think of my grandparents' generation, the Jewish migrants, passing through this tenement. I could imagine the women, dress sleeves rolled up, wet arms glistening as they bathed their children amidst the hubbub of this kitchen, could almost smell the incense of rendered chickenfat, could almost see the jar of
shmalts
resting on the stove. Here we were, full circle, in the place where that generation had toiled, the
majority laboring in the sweatshops of the garment district, in the hopes of moving to somewhere better. Years ago, they had gone on to the outer boroughs. The next generation had moved to the suburbs. Now, Natalie was back here, living alone—unthinkable for a woman in that culture. We were our own immigrants, women apart from families and men, journeying back to ourselves.

After breakfast, we performed our own unorthodox
mikvah
—the Jewish ritual bath. We piled our plates in the sink, leaned the plywood against a kitchen wall, and filled the tub. An immersion not to purify the body, but to go on celebrating it. Natalie got in first, and I leaned back against her. She soaped her hands and ran them over my neck, along the hollow of my clavicle, across my breasts and belly, thighs and vulva. I sank against her liquid skin, sighing, giving over to her stroking. My breath deepened into the moans of release. Then I turned my body around, kneeling, and kissed her, caressing her body, pressing my slippery front to hers, reaching my hand inside her. Natalie's cries echoed through the tenement apartment.

LIFE WAS DEVELOPING for me in Manhattan. Natalie and I saw each other a few times a week. Mom and Stella and I hung out together, cooking meals at one of their apartments or going out dancing or attending feminist events. In my theater improv group, I made some friends and started spending time with them. The pull to stay in New York was strong. Why return to a California bereft of love? But if I was going to stay, I couldn't keep crashing at my mother's tiny place, or depending on her to support me. I needed a place to live, and that meant I needed a job.

One afternoon, Natalie and I were strolling down Eighth Street toward her East Village apartment, when we ran into her friend Leslie. We clustered on the sidewalk, next to one of the boutiques that sold ratty antique mink coats and used bell-bottom jeans.

“Just quit my job at Mother Courage,” Leslie told us. “Know anyone who wants it?”

Mother Courage was a lesbian-owned restaurant that was a hangout for the feminist community. Gloria and Stella and I had
eaten there a couple times. “I'm looking,” I piped up. “What's the job? I'd love to work at a place like that.”

“I was one of the assistant chefs. Just call over there for Barbara or Dorothy, and you can tell them I recommend you.”

“Yeah, but I don't know how to cook.”

“Don't worry about it. That didn't stop me!” Leslie waved her hand in the air, as if to shoo away doubt. “Hey, I'm off, see ya.” She turned and started down the street.

“Thanks!” I called after her.

After I got the job at Mother Courage, Gloria put out the word and found me a place to rent. It was a room in the apartment of a woman she knew from the old days of Women Strike for Peace. Camille had left her husband and two teenage sons in New Jersey and moved into Greenwich Village. At forty-five, she was among those middle-aged women who'd gone wild with the women's movement—the ones like my mother, who astonished us young, know-it-all feminists with their hipness and their radical politics.

Camille had two lovers, young men in the early twenties, not much older than her sons. I was mildly disgusted and a bit intrigued. She was out of town with one of them the weekend I moved in. Natalie and I took turns lugging my one suitcase from my mother's studio the few blocks over to Camille's. The apartment was on the ground floor of a three-story old brick townhouse, originally a single-family dwelling that was now divided up.

My apartment was at the juncture of Eleventh and Fourth—two streets that would never have met uptown. I loved that the Greenwich Village streets ran askew, eccentric like its inhabitants, in contrast with Manhattan's orderly grid up above Fourteenth Street. Eleventh Street became the main artery of my days: I would walk west of Camille's to Mother Courage, close to the Hudson River,
or head east to Stella's apartment, just a block and a half away from Camille's, at Sixth Avenue, or to my mother's, a few blocks beyond Stella's. As I strolled along the mostly residential street with its neat townhouses, most of them divided up into apartments, I'd peek in windows, wondering if I'd spot any of the famous artists, musicians, or poets who lived in the Village. I'd cross the busy avenues, with their madly honking cars and yellow cabs, reveling that I was part of an urban quarter with such a bohemian legacy. A contentment filled me as I made my way, sometimes humming to myself, a sense that this neighborhood was the place where I belonged.

A couple of blocks from Camille's lay a gaping hole between two brownstones, all that was left of the townhouse that had blown up two years before, in 1970, when members of the Weathermen had been attempting to manufacture bombs. Walking past the site, Natalie and I had a heated discussion about feminism, the Left, what revolution meant. We both agreed that the Weather Underground had gone off the deep end, but she was still working within the Left, while I had abandoned it for the women's movement. Natalie was intensely committed to a Marxist group. The group sounded homophobic to me, and I worried that she had to suppress too much of herself to be in the group. “How can you work with people who don't respect all of who you are?!” I demanded. Really, I was fighting not to lose Natalie, because she was considering going off to work full-time with this group in their Chicago cadre. What I didn't say was,
Don't leave me!