by Audre Lorde
‘How’s Toni?’
Muriel chuckled. ‘Getting looser all the time. She didn’t even have her head-nurse’s cap with her tonight.’ Muriel reached over and took a puff from my cigarette. ‘How would you feel if Toni and I slept together?’
I looked at her deep brown eyes, shining and open for the first time in so long. So that was it. Her expectant half-smile helped cushion my surprise at how easily this whole question had arisen, again.
‘Well, have you?’
‘Not yet, of course not. You know I’d tell you.’
She spoke with such animation and lightness of spirit that I had to smile in spite of myself. Old Muriel had come back to town. I butted my cigarette and settled back into bed. ‘Well, I’m glad you asked. Come on to bed.’ Muriel was taking off her sneakers.
My stabs of jealousy were tempered by my lessening sense of guilt; for what, I could not say. I lay beside Muriel, listening to her gentle snoring, still not really sure of what I felt. I liked Toni, and what was even more important, I trusted her. Trusted her to take care of Muriel.
I loved to see Muriel’s eyes alight. I recalled the disruption Lynn had caused in our lives last year. But this felt very different. I had learned a lot. Muriel certainly needed something.
But another piece of myself turned over in the darkness, filled with a great sadness. I suddenly thought about my last year at home. One morning going into my parents’ bedroom to get the iron in the pre-dawn hours before I left for school. Turning in the dimness of the early-morning light, I was startled suddenly to find my mother’s open eyes silently regarding me as I crept around quietly. I sensed that she had been awake for a long while, listening to me going about my adolescent business in the quiet apartment. Our eyes met for a moment, and it was the only time that I felt the full weight of my mother’s pain at the hostilities forever between us.
That moment was short and sharp and incredibly poignant.
I stood there with my hand on the bedroom doorknob. No word passed between us, but I suddenly remembered the day I first menstruated, and I felt like I was about to cry. I tucked the iron under my arm and closed the door softly behind me.
In the dim glow from the Seventh Street streetlamps, I turned my head to regard Muriel’s sleeping face. What did my mother think about at night now that I had gone away?
More and more of my own energies were being focused elsewhere. I thought of life between Muriel and me, certainly not as idyllic, but as something precious to both of us that we were still committed to build. And besides, we had said forever.
Muriel seemed to gain a new lease on life. She began to sleep better, and she spent less and less time on the couch in the middle room.
Soon, big brusque Toni became a part of our lives, with her gymnastic jackets and her lacy RN cap perched incongruously on her aggressive head. She would come over on Sunday afternoon bringing homemade blintzes and charts from school, upon which we would try to diagram the interpersonal relationships possible in our future world of women.
School was going better for me than I had ever hoped. For the first time in my life, I began to know, really know, I was smart – smart as defined by being able to do the white man’s work, being able to study. I was finally learning german, and doing a fine job of it. Mostly, with the help of Muriel and my old therapist, I had learned to study. Muriel, who had studied german in school, also helped me with german conversation, and for a while I was more articulate in german than I was in english.
Sometimes Toni stayed over on Seventh Street. In the chilly exultations of middle spring, the three of us would wake at dawn, pick up Nicky and Joan, and go fishing in Sheepshead Bay on Saturday mornings. We returned in the afternoon, the boats heavy with flounder and blackfish.
And on Sundays, often there was Jill and her daddy’s typewriters.
Muriel, Jill, and I walked back to Seventh Street through the darkening Sunday city – the unmistakable smell of early May was on the warming air. It was late when we got home, and Jill stayed over. The next day was Monday, which meant work as usual. I went to bed and left them both still talking in the middle room.
Sometime between midnight and morning I woke with a start in horror and disbelief. The muffled sounds coming from the next room were unmistakable. Muriel. Muriel and Jill were making love on the middle-room couch. I lay rigid, trying not to hear, trying not to be awake or there at all, trapped like some wild animal between a seven-story drop out the front windows and the activity going on in the next room. NO EXIT.
Had it been anyone else on our couch with Muriel my pain and fury might have been less. There was so much unsettled history between Jill and me. The cruelest weapon at hand, or so it felt. In our own house. With me in the next room. A veil of red fury settled over my consciousness which I had not felt since those days in my mother’s house when I used to burst into nosebleeds instead of tears. I bit down on a mouthful of woolen blanket, feeling like I had to commit murder, only there was no one to kill. I fell asleep again immediately in desperate self-protection.
When I got up the house was quiet and empty. I could not even say, ‘How could you, you little bitch, with her of all people?’ We couldn’t even talk about it. Muriel wasn’t there.
I walked back and forth through the apartment wringing my hands until the fingers tingled and grew red. How was I going to manage this day? Where was she? I wanted to wring her neck. Slowly I got dressed, and engineered myself out onto the street.
The street and the sky and the people I passed were all covered with a veil of rage fastened to an iron ring that was anchored with a steel bolt through the middle of my chest.
I had to get to work, which was now at a library in the Bronx. I huddled against the back wall in the Astor Place Station, afraid I was going to push someone or myself under an approaching train.
I rode up to Morris Avenue, my eyes filmed in red, my hands shaking. I could not separate the pain of betrayal from the pain of raw fury. Fury at Muriel, fury at Jill, fury at myself for not killing them both. The train rocketed on, with a delay at 34th Street. If I could not let this poison out of me I would die. A blinding headache came and went, without increasing or lessening my agony. My nose started to bleed around Grand Central Station. Somebody gave me a tissue and a seat and I leaned my head back, closing my eyes. The pictures of mayhem that flashed across the screen of my eyelids were too terrifying. I kept my eyes open for the rest of the way.
That morning, there was a staff meeting at the library. On these days, the staff took turns preparing tea, an old library custom. This week it was my turn. In the sparsely furnished, immaculate staff kitchen, I lifted a large pot of boiling water from the stove to pour it into the teapot standing in the sink.
Out of the kitchen window I could see fuzzy buds on the acacia tree in the tiny backyard that separated the library from the row of tenements fronting on the next street. In the dampness of this overcast Monday morning, the brightness of the new green was startling. Spring was coming on inexorably and Muriel had slept with Jill on our middle-room couch a few hours ago.
My left hand closed around the open mouth of the teapot as the steaming pot of boiling water rested in my other hand against the edge of the sink. The snake ring that Muriel had given me for my birthday curled around my left index finger, silver against my brown skin. I considered the back of my hand and my wrist as it disappeared into the cuff of my shirt and sweater. Almost casually, I realized what was about to happen, as if all of this was a story in some book that I had read thoroughly some time before.
I felt the tension rising in my right arm, and my right hand began to shake. I watched as the pot slowly rose from the edge of the sink, and the boiling water poured over the lip of the pot in slow motion onto my left hand as it rested upon the teapot. The water cascaded down, bounced off the back of my hand and flowed down the drain. I watched the brown skin cloud with steam, then turn red and shiny, and the poison began to run out of me like water as I fumbled at the buttons
of my shirt cuff and peeled back the wet cloth from my scalded wrist. The steamed flesh had already started to blister.
Walking into the staff room next door where the rest of my colleagues sat discussing book orders. ‘I’ve burned myself by mistake.’ Then pain erupting into the space left empty by the draining away of the poison.
Someone took me home in a taxi from the doctor’s office. It was Muriel who opened the door for me, and helped me off with my clothes. She did not ask what had happened. Next to the pain in my hand and wrist, everything else felt like it had never been. I fell immediately asleep. The next day I went to St Vincent’s burn clinic, where the snake ring had to be cut away from the scalded swollen flesh.
During the next few days, when I felt anything at all other than pain, it was guilt and embarrassment, as if I’d done an unforgivable and unmentionable act. Self-mutilation. Displaying a rage that was neither cool nor hip. Otherwise, I was quite empty of passion.
Muriel and I never spoke of Jill nor of the accident. We were very guarded and tender with each other, and a little bit mournful, as if we were both acknowledging with our silence what was irretrievable.
Jill had gone, to appear again some other time when one least expected her. She was not really important here, only what she represented. Now, most of all, when we needed the words between us, Muriel and I were both silent. What was lying between us had moved beyond our old speech, and we were both too lost and too frightened to attempt a new language.
We went out with Joan and Nicky to celebrate Nicky’s birthday. My burns were healing. Luckily, there was no infection, and I had returned to work, wearing a white glove to hide the ugly scarring around my wrist and the back of my hand, oddly intertwined with new high-pink flesh. My mother had told me that cotton gloves and daily rubs with cocoa butter would keep the heavy keloid scars from forming, and she was right.
Muriel and I made love for the last time on May 20th. It was the night before my final exams at college.
The house was empty when I got home the next day. I’d come home early to study. It was empty when I left in the late twilight to catch the subway up to Hunter, and it was empty when I came home that night and finally went to bed. No one to exult with, no one to worry with, my first term back at school. It felt very lonely.
When we realized Muriel and Joan were having an affair, Nicky and I both predicted it would come to no good in the end. Neither Joan nor Muriel was working.
Summer became a nightmare of separation and endings. Muriel was going and I could not let her go, even though so much of me wanted to. An old dream of us together forever in a landscape blinded me.
Nightly, the floor around my lonely bed was carpeted and pitted with volcanoes through which Muriel wandered with great bravado and little caution. I tried to warn her, but my tongue was mute. My bed was safety, but my life, too, was bound up in where she put her feet. Molten fire flowed across the linoleum. If only she would do it my way, if only she could hear me, walk where I could see paths shining dully through the flames, then we would both be safe, forever. Dear god, make her listen to me before it’s too late!
But we were unknowing partners in an intimate and complicated minuet. Neither one of us could break out. Neither one of us had the tools to recognize nor to alter the steps and the tone of our tight little dance. We could destroy each other, but we could not move beyond our pain. Our living together now was no longer even a matter of convenience, but neither of us would let go, nor admit to needing the devastating contact. If we did, we would have to ask the question, why; obviously, love was no longer enough of an answer.
Muriel spent most of her time now over at Nicky and Joan’s in their new street-level apartment on Sixth Street and Avenue B. Whenever we were alone together, venom and recriminations leaped out of my mouth like wild frogs, raining down upon her sullen, unresponsive head.
Before the summer solstice, Muriel was wildly in love again. I used to lie awake nights wondering how I could have lost my girl to thin willowy Joan, with the indecisive smile and the air of permanent potential.
The day I got my final marks from Hunter, there were riots in Poland. We lived in a Polish neighborhood, and the neighboring stoops were buzzing with excitement and apprehension as I took my grade cards from the mailbox. I had received a C in math and an A in german. This was the first A I had ever gotten in any subject other than english.
Of course, I was convinced that I had nothing to do with that grade. As soon as a challenge was overcome, it ceased to be a challenge, becoming the expected and ordinary rather than something I had achieved with difficulty, and could, therefore, be justly proud of. I could not own my own triumphs, nor give myself credit for them. Getting the A became not an achievement won by my hard work and study, but only something that had happened – probably, german must be getting easier to understand than it used to be. And besides, if Muriel was leaving me, obviously I couldn’t be a person who did anything right, certainly not get an A in german under her own steam.
Some nights I couldn’t sleep. Dawn found me walking up and down in front of the building where Joan and Nicky lived, the sharp edge of a fingered butcher knife up my sleeve. Muriel was in there, and most likely not asleep. I had no idea what I was planning to do. I felt like an actor in some badly written melodrama.
My heart knew what my head refused to understand. Our life together was over. If not Joan, then someone else. Another piece of me insisted this could not possibly be happening, while images of murder, death, earthquake harrowed my dreams. The psychic discord was ripping my brain apart. There must be something I could do differently that would take care of everything, end my agonies of bereavement, return Muriel to reason. If only I could figure out how to convince her this was all ridiculous behavior, unnecessary. We could start from there.
Other times, fury, cold as dry ice, strummed behind my eyes. When she did not come home for days, I stalked the streets of the Village, hunted and hunting her and Joan, at the mercy of emotional typhoons over which there was no control. Hate. I blew through summer pre-dawn streets like a winter wind, surrounded by a cloud of pain and rage so intense that no sane person would dare to intrude upon it. No body approached me on those journeys. I was sometimes sorry about that; I longed for an excuse to kill. My piercing headaches went away.
I called my mother to see how she was doing. Out of a clear blue sky, she inquired as to how Muriel was doing. ‘How’s your friend? She’s all right?’ My mother was nothing if not psychic.
‘Oh, she’s fine,’ I said hurriedly. ‘Everything’s fine.’ Desperate that my mother not know of my failure. Determined to hide this shame.
Summer school started and I registered for english and german. I was dropped in the first two weeks because I never attended classes. I was now working half-day at the library, which meant less money but more time.
I mourned Muriel in a wildness of grief with which I had never mourned Gennie. This was the second time in my life that something intolerable was happening; I could do nothing to affect it, nothing to help myself in it. I could do nothing to encompass it, nor to alter it. I was too beside myself to consider altering me.
For if knowing what we knew, and sharing all that we shared, Muriel and I could not make it together, then what two women on earth could? For that matter, what two people on earth could possibly make it together? The heartbreak of holding on seemed preferable to the heartbreak of ever having to try again, of ever again attempting to connect with another human being.
All the pains in my life that I had lived and never felt flew around my head like grey bats; they pecked at my eyes and built nests in my throat and under the center of my breastbone.
Eudora, Eudora, what was it you used to say to me?
Waste nothing, Chica, not even pain. Particularly not pain.
I rubbed cocoa butter onto the keloid scars on the back of my wrist and hand, and they gradually grew smaller. I started to wear the West Indian bangles my mother had brought back fro
m Grenada for me. They covered up the scars and the discolored skin, and I no longer had to give explanations of what had happened.
Most of our friends had been through the trauma of the breakup of an affair. But this one was different, I thought. Muriel and I had actually lived together, for almost two years, and we had said forever.
‘You’ll get over it,’ Toni said, the day she taught me to swim underwater at Huntington Station. ‘Open your eyes, goddammit, open your eyes!’ Toni was yelling at me through the chill water. ‘It’s always easier with your eyes open.’ I dipped under again. Coming up. ‘Anyway, you know Muriel’s crazy. She’s not worth all this.’
But to me, she was.
One steamy August midnight a voice from the past came over the telephone. Marie called quite suddenly after a year’s absence. She was in Detroit. She had been in hiding, eluding police across country with her husband Jim, the white-slaver from Texas. Marie had finally run away from him and was now living under an assumed name in Detroit. Our giggled confidences on the daybed in her mother’s living room seemed centuries ago.
I borrowed money from Toni and went to Detroit for a week, by bus.
The trip was a welcome change. Marie’s problems were external, and solvable on some manageable plane: evading Jim’s search for her, finding a new job, fending off inquisitive family and friends. We had a good time in Detroit.
Back in New York, Muriel stayed at the apartment to feed the cats and to straighten out her messes in the kitchen, which over the summer, through both of our lacks of concern, had become an archeological dig of remains from other people’s lives. She tidied up our collections of tools and nails and old wood, and the potentially lovely results of our once idyllic Sunday scavenging through the city. She also refinished the wooden cabinet which we had been building to store the stuff.
To top it all off, as a surprise, she decided to paint the whole kitchen. But Muriel had difficulty in finishing any project.