Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (7 page)

When I finally let someone into my narrow bed, the first thing I told her was what I could not do. I said, “I can’t fix it, girl. I can’t fix anything. If you don’t ask me to fix it, you can ask anything else. If you can say what you need, I’ll try to give it to you.”

I remember the stories I was told as a girl, stories like soap operas, stories that went on for generations—how she loved him and left him and loved him still, how he hurt her and hurt her and never loved her at all, how that child they made told lies to get them to look at her, how no one knows the things done in that home, no one but her and she don’t tell.

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told. Oh, I could tell you stories that would darken the sky and stop the blood. The stories I could tell no one would believe. I would have to pour blood on the floor to convince anyone that every word I say is true. And then? Whose blood would speak for me?

Let me tell you a story. I tell stories to prove I was meant to survive, knowing it is not true. My stories are no parables, no
Reader’s Digest
Unforgettable Characters, no women’s movement polemics, no Queer Nation broadsides. I am not here to make anyone happy. What I am here for is to claim my life, my mama’s death, our losses and our triumphs, to name them for myself I am here to claim everything I know, and there are only two or three things I know for sure.

 

 

“How’d you know you were a lesbian?”

My sister Wanda was eighteen when she finally asked me that question. We were sitting on the steps of the feminist collective where I was living in Tallahassee, Florida. It was her matter-of-fact tone that surprised me, that and the direct way she put the question. From the moment she climbed off the bus with her hair tied back in braids, I had been talking to her about feminism, the women’s center, and the child-care center where I was a volunteer every Sunday afternoon. I wondered what had prompted the question—maybe one of our posters or the way my house-mates congregated around the pool table that dominated what was supposed to be our dining room. I wondered if I should give her the stock answer, right out of the radical women’s newsletters on my nightstand: that I became a lesbian because of my commitment to a women’s revolution.

I looked into her deceptively clear brown eyes and considered the question. I pushed my hair behind my ears. “I fell in love with a woman,” I said, matching her in tone and attitude. Her mouth quirked, one side twitching as if she wanted to grin but didn’t dare.

“Well,” she drawled, and looked away as if that would help her not to laugh, “that’ll do it, I suppose. Almost surely.”

I rescued her by letting myself giggle. She joined me. I reminded myself that there were just some things we never had talked about before, like sex, money, and broken bones. Certainly we had never discussed love. Sex was dangerous enough, and our family was proof that love was a disaster waiting to happen.

“The woman love you back?” Wanda asked me. “She treat you good?”

“No.” I said it again. “No. She was like that boy you wanted to marry. She treated me just about like he treated you. Took me a long time to grow up and stop falling in love with women who would treat me bad.” I said it as if it were accomplished, as if I were not at that moment in love with yet another hard-eyed bitter woman.

Wanda nodded but didn’t look at me, just sat there twisting the ring on her middle finger and staring into the parking lot across the street.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “Takes a damn long time to learn that, don’t it?”

 

 

Women talk about sex in such strange ways—carefully, obliquely, cautiously, almost shamefully. The art of flirting is an art of indirection. The dance is deliberately extended; eyes meet and slide away, limbs barely touch, erotic messages are communicated by the most subtle gestures. It brings out in me the most profound feelings of anxiety and exasperation. I was not raised to subtlety.

Why do people have to make such a fuss over something so simple?

I say, “Talk to me. Tell me who you are, what you want, what you’ve never had, the story you’ve always been afraid to tell.” Women stare at me, blush, squirm—and now and then, a few gather up their courage and flirt back.

But flirting is an art form, separate entirely from the risks and surprises of love, and to love I had thought myself immune. Because I did not turn silly at thirteen, start staying out late and sighing over boys at school, I thought myself too smart, too wise, too special to fall into the trap every other woman in my family knew too well. I watched my cousins mourn over their swollen bellies, wipe puffy eyes and talk bitterly about the boys who had used them so badly, and all I could think was how foolish the whole thing was.

Love was something I would not have to worry about—the whole mystery of love, heart-break songs, and family legends. Women who pined, men who went mad, people who forgot who they were and shamed themselves with need, wanting only to be loved by the one they loved. Love was a mystery. Love was a calamity. Love was a curse that had somehow skipped me, which was no doubt why I was so good at multiple-choice tests and memorizing poetry. Sex was the country I had been dragged into as an unwilling girl—sex, and the madness of the body. For all that it could terrify and confuse me, sex was something I had assimilated. Sex was a game or a weapon or an addiction. Sex was familiar. But love—love was another country.

“Lord!” I shouted. “There has got to be an easier way to get stoned.”

I was staying over at my friend Pat’s house, sitting on the floor leaning against the stereo speakers, which had been blasting rock and roll at maximum volume just moments before. We had been using a process a friend had suggested, a three-step method that began with smoking rabbit weed we’d harvested from the border of the Maynard Evans High School parking lot, then running in place very fast, and then putting our heads between two stereo speakers propped ten inches apart.

“Sure there is.” Pat leaned over and slapped my hip. “First we take a bus to New York City, find us Washington Square Park like in that book you got, flirt with some dangerous-looking people until they decide we an’t dogmeat, and maybe then we get them to sell us some real marijahootchi. That sound easier to you?”

“Less likely to cause nausea, anyway.”

“I don’t know. I like this.” Pat shook her head as if the roar were still echoing in her skull. “It’s like my head is swinging free from my neck. Maybe this is as good as it gets.”

“I don’t think so.” I sat up and watched her swing her head. Pat had cut her thick brown hair short again so that it just curved under her ears. Her neck looked remarkably smooth and sweet under the sweep of those curls. Some days Pat wanted to grow up to be the modern incarnation of T. E. Lawrence, others she dreamed of becoming a balladeer like Judy Collins or Joan Baez. To prepare, we drank bitter coffee and wrote lyrics together, long terrible poems about death.

“You know, I been thinking about going.” Pat looked at me from between the fringes of her bangs. “Thinking about dumping school completely and running off. Find me some real dope and people who an’t planning on working at the Winn Dixie the rest of their lives.”

It was a conversation we had had dozens of times. We’d talked about running off until we knew just how to go about it. We’d memorize the bus fares for all the cities we were considering, and played at making up false IDs. Sometimes it was only the game that kept us from actually buying that Trailways ticket out of town. This time should have been no different from any other. I should have chimed in with my own curses, said, “Damn yes, let’s go.”

But I did not. There was something in Pat’s voice, some edge of frustration. Her eyes were turned away, but I could see just how dark and bright they had become. She’s going to do it, I thought, and shocked myself with a wave of desperate longing. The rush of my need stunned me—not to go with her but to keep her with me. Suddenly I understood that more than anything in the world I did not want Pat to disappear out of my life into some strange Yankee city, some alien life where I could not follow. My mouth opened, and I barely stopped myself from begging her to stay.

I looked down and saw my own body as a hated stranger might see it. I looked up and saw Pat’s eyes looking back at me—unafraid, dispassionate, curious. She had no way of knowing that without warning or preparation I had just become my mother’s daughter, my sisters’ counterpart—tender and fragile and hungry for something besides dispassionate curiosity. This was what everyone had known that I had not, this sudden onslaught of desire and terror.

“I got to go,” I told her, and headed for the door. I did not look back, afraid she might see what I knew was on my face.

Three months later Pat was gone, running north with a vanload of friends I didn’t know. It would be a decade before I saw her again on her mother’s porch, her hair cut shorter still, her mouth loose with Valium, both arms in casts acquired when she had thrown herself out of a moving car.

“You ever get to Washington Square Park?” she asked me.

“Yeah.”

“Wasn’t what I thought it would be. Ratty place full of ratty people.” Her words were slurred. Her eyes tracked away from me.

I curled my fingernails into my palms. I couldn’t think of anything to say, certainly not “I’m sorry” or “I think I loved you.”

“Well, hell!” For a moment I saw an old spark in Pat’s eyes. “You come back when I get these damn casts off. I been writing some poems will give you a headache just to be in the room with them.” She grinned, and I knew I loved her still.

 

 

At twenty-four I joined a karate class and learned for the first time how to run without fear pushing me. It was not what I had intended. I never expected to join the class at all. I showed up because I had been told there were no women allowed and my newfound feminist convictions insisted someone had to do something about that. Along with my friend Flo, I dressed in loose clothes and hitched a ride out to the university gardens very early one Monday morning.

On a rutted dirt lane a small group of peevish-looking young males were climbing out of rusty old cars and pulling off shoes.

“Where’s the sensei?” I demanded of one of those boys. He stared at me blankly. I stared right back and repeated my question.

That boy just stood there, looking from me to Flo to his friends. Then somebody laughed. Flo and I glared fiercely. One of the boys stepped forward and gave me a nod.

“Down there,” he said. “A quarter mile down that path. The class is out there where the teacher’s waiting.” Then he nodded again and took off in an easy lope. The other boys stepped around us and followed.