Riding Fury Home (26 page)

 

 

ONE SUNDAY, AT THE END of our improv group, several of us piled into one member's car. The driver, Florence, had offered to drop us all off on her way home. We got to my place first, and
as I untwined myself from the mesh of limbs in the back seat and stepped onto the sidewalk, I noticed that Natalie was still in the car. Someone pulled the door shut, and I saw Natalie smile and wave as the car took off. I stood there stunned. In the two months that we'd been seeing each other, we had always been together after the group, spending the night at one of our places. My legs felt wobbly, my throat lumped with rejection, and as I turned away, I held back tears. What the hell? Was she sleeping with someone else? We had no agreement between us, no words to define what we were to each other.

As I stumbled home, I thought about how Natalie was an admirer of Emma Goldman, the radical anarchist who believed in an open sexuality. She loved that Goldman espoused both revolution and the free giving of love and pleasure, beyond the strictures of marriage. Natalie, my free-love girlfriend. As it was, my relationship with her was way more independent than what I'd had with Kate. I liked that we didn't spend every minute together, but I was still raw from having been left for another woman. The terror of abandonment hovered, and the idea of Natalie with someone else filled me with jaw-clenching agony.

A couple days later, I called Natalie and said I needed to talk. We met on a wooden bench outside a church on Second Avenue, not far from her apartment. I wasn't sure if I would be able to say what I needed to say if we got together at one of our places and started kissing. We faced each other for what seemed a long while in silence, her face softly expectant, letting me find the words. I couldn't bear to ask her if she was having sex with anyone else. Instead, I said that I understood she believed in a totally open relationship, but I had realized that because I was still healing from the hurt of Kate leaving me, it was too hard for me. She raised her hand to my cheek,
touched my tears that were streaming down. “You're so open with your feelings, so beautiful.” She smiled at me with her big eyes. I waited, silently, for more, but she made no argument to bind me to her, just stroked my hair as I wept.

 

 

LATE ONE NIGHT, a few weeks after I broke up with Natalie, I came back to Camille's after a shift at Mother Courage in my usual after-work state of feeling both hyper and exhausted. I was fairly drunk from sipping wine all shift, and clumsily slammed the apartment door. Camille called out, “Hey, Karen, that you? We're hanging out—come join us!”

“Hang on, be there in a sec,” I called back.

Camille and one of the boyfriends were sitting on the couch. He was hunched over the coffee table, rolling a joint. She looked up and smiled, gesturing for me to sit in the overstuffed chair that faced the couch. Her two lovers looked so similar that I had trouble not mixing them up: Both had stringy, sandy brown hair tied back in a ponytail, placid faces, and gangly bodies. I believed this was Jim.

“You're just in time,” Camille said to me. “We're gonna trip. We have two hits of acid; Jim wants a whole hit, but I only want to do half, so why don't you join us? It'll be a blast.”

It
was
Jim, then. I was restless and bored, and the thought of just hanging out in my room didn't appeal.
What the hell.
“Sure, sounds great,” I answered.

Camille got out a scissors and cut our shared blotter paper in half. After we'd each swallowed our scrap, Jim lit the joint and took a toke, and we passed it around.

I sat there stoned, waiting for the acid to come on, staring out the window at the backyard. The sumacs had lost most of their leaves,
so I focused on the trunks, lit dimly by a spotlight that shone on them, waiting to see if they changed colors or started swirling around, as the bare earth had during my one other acid trip, back in Iowa.

This time, the effect didn't seem that intense. The tree trunk just wavered a bit and glowed a dull yellow. I was still staring at one of the sumacs, as if it would give me the secret of life, when Camille's voice called, “Let's go out.” The three of us put on our jackets. It had drizzled earlier, and the late-night air seemed thick with the aromas of wet asphalt, car exhaust, dog droppings, and soot. We turned from Eleventh Street onto Seventh Avenue. Outside the bars, taxis were swerving to the curbs to pick up the gay boys who were flagging them down. Many twosomes got in cabs.

Constant honking jarred the night. My nerves twitched with each horn bleat. I noticed a skinny drag queen wearing a sleeveless minidress and heels standing on the sidewalk outside a bar.
He must be freezing,
I thought. His face was turned toward the exiting patrons, a middle-aged face, and his blond bouffant wig was slightly askew.
So pitiful, he can't get anyone to take him home.
Something about the way his eyes beseeched each patron made me think he was one of the most pathetic people I had ever seen. Then, it was as if his loneliness found a home in me and echoed throughout my chest cavity. I felt consumed by sadness, and suddenly, the Village that I had found so vibrant had become sordid and dismal. It was unbearable. I tore my eyes from his face and stared down at the filthy curb. “Let's go back! I need to go back to the apartment,” I said.

When we got inside the front hall, I lagged behind Camille and Jim, fumbling in my jean pocket for my room key. I called to their backs, “You two go ahead; I'm gonna hang in my room.”

Camille turned around, walked up close to me. “Come on,” she said softly, “let's all hang out together.”

Something in the intense way Camille was staring at me felt creepy and cloying.
Get away from me, leave me alone.
Camille reached her hand toward me, but I backed up. “No, really, just need to be by myself.” I escaped into my room and locked the door.

I opened the wooden shutters on the two windows that faced the street, and pulled the room's one bentwood chair up close to the window nearest my bed. The street was deserted. I stared at the darkened windows of the small corner restaurant across the street, the only business on our residential block. The restaurant sat on the bottom floor of a nineteenth-century apartment building, five stories tall, with ornamental cornices, its brick facade painted white. I had thought the building beautiful, but now it loomed like an unfriendly hulk. Probably no one spoke to each other in its halls. The traffic light on the corner was turning the street shadows red, yellow, green, red, yellow, green—a silent urban metronome. Emptiness ticking.

The street colors beat in the rhythm of my loneliness. Alone, all alone; alone, all alone. Hadn't this forlornness gripping me lived in my body forever? For a brief time, it had crouched hidden in some crevice—abated by the camaraderie of Freedom School, the euphoria of coming out in a feminist community—but now it pounced, rising through my heart into my throat, spreading down my limbs. Paralyzed with its weight, I stayed in the chair, staring, leaden.

Camille was pounding on my door. “Karen, are you all right? Karen?”

I managed to get up, go to the door, but I kept it locked. I leaned against the wood, found words.
Focus on my mouth. Move the jaw, the lips.
“Yeah, Camille, I'm cool.”

“Come on, Karen, you don't have to be alone! Come sleep with us.”

For a moment, longing rushed through me. I imagined cuddling with Camille in her loft. Being held against her softness. But, of course, he would be there, too. Would Camille be in the middle, or would I have to sleep between them? Then hands were stroking, reaching for me, hands and a penis and lips . . . was that what she meant? It was arousing and repulsive at the same time. “No, just want to be alone!” I found myself shouting through the door. Did I? The biggest lie on Earth. I heard her footsteps fading in the hall.

Back in the chair, staring. Night had deepened to predawn, and the stoplight colors no longer seemed to fill the street. Coming down. The loneliness percussed its litany, but more slowly:
No Natalie, no Kate, no one loves you.
I was tearless, pupils dilated. At first light, I willed myself: Leave the chair. Go.

My wobbly legs knew their way along Eleventh. By now, the doorman at Stella's recognized me, and just nodded as I made my bleary-eyed way to the elevator.

It was Mom, wearing a long T-shirt and nothing else, who opened the door. “Shhh, Stella's asleep,” she whispered. Then she looked at me, swaying in the doorway, reached out her arm, took my hand, brought her face close. “What happened?”

“I'm tripping on acid, been up all night, Mom.” Mom—the name just slipped out. I hadn't called her that since the end of high school.

She pulled me closer, into the room, closed the door with one hand while holding on to me, then turned her body next to mine and guided me by the elbow to the couch, as if I were a disabled person, or a toddler. She helped me lower myself, then stood nearby, looking down at me. “I'm thirsty,” I managed to croak in a whisper.

Mom went to the kitchenette in the corner of the studio and returned with a glass of orange juice. Cool, sweet acidity; I could feel its progress down my throat.

Mom sat down on the couch. She moved her body right up against mine and put her arm around my shoulder. The couch sat along a wall opposite a curtainless bank of windows that looked down Sixth Avenue. I could feel the warmth of Mom's arm on the back of my neck, the calming sensation of her hand stroking my shoulder, as we stared toward the apricot dawn lighting the skyscrapers. She sat with me in blessed quiet, no questions.

I leaned my head onto her shoulder, letting myself close my eyes. Mom was murmuring, “Shusssh, shussh,” as she stroked my hair. My hair follicles were sending pings of current along my scalp. For a moment, my reflexes gathered themselves to fight her—
I don't need you
—and then something in me gave way, letting go to an exquisite consolation. I could have wept, but I simply rested there, as if it were forever.

I HAD BEEN FOOLING MYSELF, I had to admit, wanting to be so urbane, so cool. Although I loved New York, it was too much for me. When I was growing up, nature had embedded itself as a primary solace, and I just couldn't go on in this absence of green. It wasn't that I wanted to return to the country; I needed urban, but softer. Time to go back to California, to the city by the bay.

I hated to leave my mother. It tore me up, but I believed if I stayed, my roots would grow too deep and I would be stuck in New York City for the rest of my life. Besides, it didn't seem fair that Kate should inherit California in our breakup. I'd be damned if I'd let her. My San Francisco friend Stephanie had called and offered to do the legwork to find us an apartment, since she'd just been dumped by her lover. Her offer made it easier to return—at least I'd have a companion.

I remembered that other leaving, the day I left Mom after high school. Then, I had fled, trying not to feel terrible about abandoning my depressed mother.

Now, she and Stella walked with me the block and a half from Mom's to Fifth Avenue to hail a cab. They flanked me, my two mothers. Standing waiting for a taxi, Mom gave me the fiercest hug, her eyes full and sad. As the taxi pulled to the curb, Stella and Mom added a flurry of kisses and hugs as the driver put my two suitcases in the trunk. There was the taxi door closing, the blur of movement. I glimpsed them, holding hands on the sidewalk as the taxi shot away, waving their free hands furiously. My mother—there was so much more life in her now. That helped me go, and gave me something to hold on to.

 

 

MY FRIEND STEPHANIE had found us an apartment in an Oakland neighborhood composed of stucco cottages and two-story wood-frame houses, their tiny front lawns varying from neat to disheveled. As I walked to the co-op supermarket on Telegraph Avenue and returned with my arms loaded with groceries, the nearly deserted streets seemed a suburban wasteland, devoid of the vibrancy of New York, the quirky Victorian urbaneness of San Francisco, just across the bay, or the beauty of my longed-for California countryside.

At night, I did not feel safe roaming the streets, as I had in Manhattan. The Big Apple rocked twenty-four hours a day, and I had felt relatively free to walk its avenues in the postmidnight hours. Now, Stephanie and I spent the evenings in our living room, drinking screwdrivers made from cheap vodka and frozen orange juice, and smoking pot when we had it, while we played Joni Mitchell's new album,
Blue,
over and over. The empty vodka bottles piled up in our trash.

The loss of Kate and our house in the Sonoma countryside haunted my dreams. Night after night, I dreamed of the cottage nestled in pines, with the scrub-covered hills I'd loved to hike rising
behind it. Inside the cottage, Kate laughed with Dotty while their backs were turned to me. Nightly, my gut felt lanced with betrayal and rejection, and I woke with a pounding headache.

I got a part-time job working the lunch shift at the Red Barn hamburger chain. Workers had to wear hideous orange smocks and orange caps. Hungover, I could barely keep up with the frenetic pace, and I quit after a few weeks to avoid the embarrassment of being fired. My next job was running a luncheonette in an office building: restocking vending machines, making coffee, and ringing up purchases. In slow times, I sat doodling in a notebook and writing mournful poems. The hours blurred. One night, my boss called to say I was fired because I had left one of the vending machines with its door open, its cash accessible.

Being far away from my mother and Stella left me hollow and disoriented, as if there were no ground under my feet. Neither my mother nor I could afford frequent long-distance calls, so we wrote letters, both declaring how we missed each other terribly. I longed to run back to her comfort, but stubbornly refused to cede California to Kate. I sensed only vaguely that something in me needed to find myself outside the shelter of my mother.