“The music hasn’t even started.” I drank again, concentrating on feeling angry rather than self-conscious or ashamed. The last of the audience was milling past us while a piano chord sounded from the front of the hall. A little group of men and women passed us, the women defiant in silky skirts and the men holding the women close to them. One of the women stared at Billy and giggled when Billy grinned at her. The man with her looked nervous and impatient, but the woman didn’t seem to want to head for her seat. Like a pigeon transfixed by a snake, she was pinned to the far wall by Billy’s green-eyed stare. I almost laughed out loud.
“I don’t care who they sleep with,” I whispered to Cass, “I just wish they wouldn’t tell so many lies about it.”
“Mean bitch,” Cass quipped, not meaning it at all.
Roxanne looked over at me strangely, her face working as if she were making up her mind about something. She looked up at Billy, who was still watching the woman against the far wall. “Hell,” Roxanne said, “these days I can’t tell who’s lying and who is just passing time.”
“Passing time,” I repeated. I ignored Cass’s offer of another drink. Instead I turned and put my arm around Roxanne’s shoulders, watching with her as the audience settled down and Cass and Billy whispered behind us. I watched the way the women moved, the muscles that stood out in their necks, the way their eyes went from dark to light in the changing light. My teeth clenched, but I just held on to Roxanne, and kept my hip pressed close to Cass’s long legs.
Most mornings when I woke there in the early dawn, I would lie still and think about the stories Anna told me. She didn’t really talk much to the other women in the house, not even the ones who came to sit on her water bed and smoke her dope—none of them knew she was arrested ten years ago. “Hell, they’d put me on posters and platforms if they did.” She laughed softly at the stories they told her, telling about her childhood now and then, but mostly getting them to talk. When I joined them to sit on the floor and drink a beer, Anna started teasing me about whether I’ve been over playing pool.
“Just to watch,” I told her, and we both laughed.
“I hate that pool hall.” Mona was embroidering a red-and-gold labrys on the back of her jacket. She bit off red yarn and spit it into her palm. “All those drunken punks out on the sidewalk all the time, pushing those big motorbikes around, and the women in there hanging on them. Makes me sick.”
“They don’t all hang on the men, you know.” Lenore didn’t even look in my direction. “Twenty tables in there and never less than five of them have women playing each other—some pretty tough-looking women. The men stay out of their way, and that’s nice to see.”
“If you ask me there’s no difference between those women and the men in there anyway.” Judy took the bowl of sunflower seeds out of her lap and pushed it at Mona. Her face was twisted in disgust. “There’s always a couple of them punching each other in the arm, arms all ugly with ink tattoos, and their girlfriends in tight skirts sitting up on stools behind them, not daring to say a word. That’s what people think we are when we say we’re dykes, and that’s not what we are at all.”
“I like tattoos,” I said, “and I like women who can really play pool, play it well enough to make all those men bite their tongues. They play for money, you know. Some of them pay their way out of what they earn off those boys, and I like that, too.”
“Well, I don’t like it.” Judy looked like she was going to spit. “Competition games, swinging those sticks like they were holding swords, carrying knives—they do, you know—it’s a cesspit of violence in there, and they all get off on it. People are always getting beaten up in that parking lot and women get hassled on the sidewalk all the time. I think it should be closed down.”
“I think it must be different for you, all of you,” Anna said after a while, carefully not looking in my direction. “When I was your age, places like that were the only way you could find other lesbians. I used to go in there and nod at women I would see nowhere else. There’s a lot of women work down in the paper mills come all the way up here to sit on those stools and watch other women play pool.”
“Exactly.” I took another deep breath, trying not to get too angry. “You always talking about class, Judy, the working classes supposed to make the revolution. They’re the ones over there in that parking lot, leaning on tailgates, holding their own meetings.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“But maybe we ought to go over there and pass out leaflets some time, invite those women to a dance or something.” Mona put her embroidery down. Her face was flushed and excited. Anna looked uncomfortable. Judy stared directly at me, and I could feel my neck getting hot. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t think what.
Lenore cleared her throat and cracked a few sunflower seeds. “I don’t know,” she giggled. “Don’t really feel like playing feminist evangelist to the pool hall set myself.”
Anna giggled with her, and then there was a wave of laughter. I smiled but didn’t laugh. After a little while Mona started explaining just what she meant at the last consciousness-raising session at the Women’s Center when she told Sharma she was antimonogamous. Someone else began to describe the sit-in at the student council that got us the funds for the rape crisis phone line. Then Mona tried to talk Anna into coming to a poetry reading the next weekend. Judy started going on and on about the article she had just read that explained why a women’s revolution was inevitable at this point in history.
I sat quietly, sipping at my beer. I was exhausted from typing up the budget requests for the day care center, and my stomach ached, but I didn’t want to go off to bed yet. If I did, I was pretty sure I would become the next topic of conversation. Worse, I was feeling the same way I did at the concert. Part of me wanted to disappear, to become just another version of Mona or Lenore, just like everyone else.
Cass wanted to take me to the stock car races the next night and I still didn’t know if I wanted to go. I used to go to the races with my mama when I was a teenager, rooting for Bobby Allison and Fireball Roberts, eating boiled peanuts and pissing into an open trough behind the bleachers, but I hadn’t done anything like that since I left home—never told anyone about it at all.
“You’ll love it,” Cass insisted. “Fast cars and lots of noise, and we can pinch and kiss each other when everybody jumps up to look at the crashes.”
I watched Judy’s face, the slim fingers that kept coming up to push her bangs over behind one ear, the white collar of her blouse startling against her tanned skin. Her eyes tracked past me when she turned her head, not stopping to risk catching my glance. I don’t like her, I thought, and it surprised me to realize that. We slept together once, when I had just moved in. It had been an awkward night. She’d made a point of stopping me when I’d slid down her body, telling me she really didn’t like oral sex, and she’d shrieked when I’d pushed one finger between her labia.
“Don’t do that,” she whispered, pulling up and planting her pubic mound firmly against my hip. What she wanted to do was climb on top of me and rock against me until she’d made herself come.
“Tribadism,” I’d named it, trying to position myself so that I could enjoy it as much as she did. I really wanted to taste her, to put my tongue between her thighs, into her armpits, under her chin and behind her ears. Her hipbone hurt me and she kept lifting her torso so that I couldn’t even feel the lush heat of her full breasts. I wrestled for a while, licking her salty neck, wanting to bite her and imagining that she was enjoying my tongue.
“Christ! You’re making me sticky,” Judy complained. She never stopping talking even while she was grinding her labia into my hipbone. “. . . I’m going to Gainesville on Wednesday. . . . Oh! Want to talk to Jackie about going with me . . . oh . . . you too maybe . . . oh . . . oh . . . horses . . . want to go riding . . . want to go riding with me . . . I love to ride . . . Oh!”
It made me crazy, as if sex were a set of calisthenics one did to trigger sleep. When she came, she went rigid and silent, her body rising up and off of me stiffly, her eyes unfocused. I wondered what she thought then, but didn’t ask. When she came back to herself, she rolled over as if it were now my turn to climb on top and do the same. I pretended to fall asleep instead just to get her to be quiet, to lie still beside me while I rested my hands on the soft swell of her hips and watched the streetlight flicker as the wind blew the leaves around on the trees outside. She was a lawyer’s daughter from Miami and not a bad person. Not a bad person at all, I told myself, just different from me, very different from me.
It wasn’t until I watched her sitting on Anna’s bed, waving the smoke out of her face and going on and on, that I realized I had been mad at Judy, was still mad at her, and that actually she was probably mad at me. I hadn’t really spoken much to her since we’d climbed out of bed that next morning. Watching her talking, not letting anyone say more than a sentence or two before starting to talk again, I realized her manners were like her lovemaking—imperious, self-centered, and oblivious. I preferred the women I brought home from the pool hall, the ones who liked me biting them, liked biting me, liked whispering dirty words, wrestling, and shoving their calloused fingers between my labia until I bit them harder and harder, my mouth full of the taste of them, the texture of their skin, their smoky, powerful smell, soaking them up, swallowing and swallowing. Making love with them I rise right up out of myself. I’m happy then in a way I never seem to be otherwise, sure of myself and not afraid. I lose all my self-consciousness, my fear of saying or doing the wrong thing. Their strength becomes my strength, and I love them for it. I hate the men who hassle me on the sidewalk outside the pool hall, the scary threats and the all-too-serious screams in the parking lot, but I love the hall itself, the women in there, the way they make me feel when they stand in that yellow light and rub their fingers together, looking me up and down.
In Consciousness Raising meetings, one after the other, everyone insisted they did not fantasize. I looked over at Lenore guiltily, afraid to risk saying anything. There are days I am not here at all. Two cups of coffee and I run away in my mind to eerie dreams of lovemaking, the dance, the swirling turn of bodies catching the slow glint of firelight. In the mountain clearing with the women’s army, I give up hatred in the arms of a demon who knows no rhetoric. If I turn my head I can see her, the Black Queen, the one with the knives, razor blade under her tongue, and a smile like the one on Cass’s face as she lifts her stick to clean out some redneck boy thinks he’s as fast as she is. The gloves on her hands are spiked. She teaches me to use them. She uses them on me, makes tattoos up my thighs for anyone to read. Under my clothes always, the feel of her hands on me, where no one can see. Men and women, women and men, the unguarded, the unsuspecting. Is she a man? Am I a woman?
I do not have fantasies. Fantasy opens me up; I become fantasy. I am the dangerous daughter, thigh-stroking, soft-tongued lover, the pit, the well, and the well of horniness, laughter rolling up out of me like gravy boiling over the edge of a pan. I become the romantic, the mystic, the one without shame, rocking myself on the hip of a rock, a woman as sharp as coral. I make in my mind the muscle that endures, tame rage and hunger to spirit and blood. I become the rock. I become the knife. I am myself the mystery. The me that will be waits for me. If I cannot dream myself new, how will I find my true self?
“What about you?” Judy leaned toward me with an intent expression. “Do you have fantasies?”
The roar in my ears was my heart, an ocean of shame and rage. My leg muscles pulled tight and cramped. My belly turned liquid and hot under my navel. I would throw up if I opened my mouth. I would throw up. My muscles failed me, failed me completely.
“Not much, not really.” Peter denied Christ three times before cockcrow. I cursed myself for being such a piece of shit, such a piece of chickenshit. “Not any more, not really.” I kept my eyes on my hands where they twisted in my lap. If I looked up I might say anything, anything.
Waking up and not being able to go back to sleep, I sit with a cup of coffee and my journal. I’ve kept one off and on since school, after the guidance counselor told me it was a way to keep control of your life, to look back and see your own changes. I don’t look back at it much, though, never seem to have the time, but it doesn’t matter. Sometimes writing in it is a way of smoothing things out inside me. The morning after the concert, I didn’t write about the concert or Roxanne or even Cass. I wrote about the muscles of the mind, what my old sensei used to call the secret of all karate, the disciplined belief in yourself.
“We are under so many illusions about our powers,” I wrote, “illusions that vary with the moon, the mood, the moment. Waxing, we are all-powerful. We are the mother-destroyers, She-Who-Eats-Her-Young, devours her lover, her own heart; great-winged midnight creatures and the witches of legend. Waning, we are powerless. We are the outlaws of the earth, daughters of nightmare, victimized, raped, and abandoned in our own bodies. We tell ourselves lies and pretend not to know the difference. It takes all we have to know the truth, to believe in ourselves without reference to moon or magic.
“The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, and the sense of belief we create from nothing. I used to watch my mama hold off terror with only the edges of her own eyes for a shield, and I still don’t know how she did it. But I am her daughter and have as much muscle in me as she ever did. It’s just that some days I am not strong enough. I stretch myself out a little, and then my own fear pulls me back in. The shaking starts inside. Then I have to stretch myself again. Waxing and waning through my life, maybe I’m building up layers of strength inside. Maybe.”