When Muriel came into the city on weekends that spring, she stayed at the YWCA over on Hudson Street in the West Village, which is now a nursing home. We spent the weekend in her tiny room making love, in between barring and trips back to Seventh Street for something to eat. Sometimes, we didn’t have the money to rent a room at the Y, because I was not working again and she only had a part-time job in Stamford. Then, we braved Rhea’s bewildered and questioning glances and stayed at the apartment. After Muriel left one Sunday, Rhea and I talked.
“Muriel’s around a lot, isn’t she?” I could see Rhea remembering the weeping Bea in the stairwell.
“I love Muriel very much, Rhea.”
“I can see that.” Rhea laughed. “But how do you love her?”
“In every way I know how!” And Rhea turned back to the dishes, shaking her head, trying to find some correlation between my loving Muriel and her own painful love affairs. She did not dare to see the similarities and so she could not see the differences. And the words were never spoken. I was too chicken to come right out and say, “Hey, look, Rhea, Muriel and I are lovers.”
Rhea could not bear the heartbreak of her affair with Art, and began to make plans to move to Chicago later in the spring. The idea that I would soon have the apartment all to myself delighted me. I made up my mind that I would never live with anyone else again, unless we were lovers.
Muriel and I were beginning to envision the world together. I didn’t know how I was going to bring my personal and political visions together, but I knew it had to be possible because I felt them both too strongly, and knew how much I needed them both to survive. I did not agree with Rhea and her progressive friends when they said that this was not what the revolution was about. Any world which did not have a place for me loving women was not a world in which I wanted to live, nor one which I could fight for.
One Friday night, Muriel and I spent the evening making love on my studio couch in the middle room of the apartment. Dusk crept away from the window on the air shaft and night came in. We were just resting briefly when we heard Rhea’s key in the front door in the kitchen. Muriel and I lay curled into each other’s arms on the now-familiar single couch. Without moving much, we simply pulled the covers up over us, closed our eyes, and pretended to be asleep.
We heard Rhea come into the kitchen and turn on the light. I could feel the glow of the sudden brightness from the room next door as it shined through the arched doorway and along the floor of my room, parallel to where the two of us lay. Rhea entered, proceeding across my room to hers at the front of the house. Her footsteps stopped beside the bed where Muriel and I were, our eyes squeezed shut like children. She stood there for a moment looking down at our supposedly sleeping figures under the covers entwined within the narrow space, lit by the dim reflected light from the kitchen.
And then, without warning, Rhea burst into tears. She stood over us sobbing wildly as if her heart was being broken by what she saw. She wept over us for at least two minutes while we both lay there, our arms around each other and our eyes closed tightly. There was nothing else we could do; I felt it would just be too embarrassing to Rhea for me to look up and say, “Hey, what’s going on here?” Besides, I thought I knew. Our obvious happiness in our “incorrect” love was so great besides her obvious unhappiness in her “correct” ones, that the only response to such cosmic unfairness was tears.
Finally, Rhea turned and ran into her own room, closing the door. We could hear her sobbing through the closed door until we both fell asleep.
I never discussed that night with Rhea, nor whether those furious tears had been for her own loneliness or for the joy that Muriel and I were finding in each other. Perhaps, if I had, both of our lives might have been different. Rhea left New York City one week later, and I did not see her again for many years.
Much later, I discovered the real reason why Rhea left New York that spring to take a job in Chicago, on what seemed at the time to be such short notice. A visiting higher-up in progressive circles had come to the house one evening while I was there. She later returned to headquarters in New Jersey with the shocking report that Rhea shared a house with a homosexual, and a Black one, at that. In other words, Rhea had been denounced for her association with me. A progressive in good standing could not afford such questionable company in 1955. I had become an embarrassment.
I was totally oblivious to all this, immersed as I was in the fact of Muriel and me. I only knew that Rhea was becoming more and more troubled, culminating in the scene over my couch. But the word had come down to her; get rid of me or give up her work. Rhea loved me, and valued our friendship, but her work was more important and she had to protect herself. Her last affair was a perfect excuse. Rather than ask me to leave or let me know what was going on, Rhea decided to give me the apartment and move to Chicago.
The Last of My
Childhood Nightmares
My Mother’s House,
July 5, 1954
Hickory-skinned demons with long white hair and handsome demonical eyes stretch out arms wide as all tomorrow, across the doorway exit from a room through which I run, screaming, shrieking for exit. But I cannot stop running. If I collide with those long arms barring my pathway out, I will die of electrocution. As I run I start to shout in despair, “Our father who art in heaven…” and the arms start to dissolve and drip down the walls and the air between the door and me.
I then pass into another room of my parents’ home—their bedroom, the room in which I am now asleep. It is dark and silent. There is a watermelon shaped like an egg on the bureau. I lift the fruit up and it drops down upon the linoleum floor. The melon splits open, and at the core is a brilliant hunk of turquoise, glowing. I see it as a promise of help coming for me.
Rhea is asleep, still, in my parents’ large bed. She is in great danger. I must save her from the great and nameless evil in this house, left here by the hickory-faced devils. I take her hand. It is white and milky in the half-dark.
And then suddenly I realize that in this house of my childhood I am no longer welcome. Everything is hostile to me. The doors refuse to open. The glass cracks when I touch it. Even the bureau drawers creak and stick when I try to close them. The light bulbs blow out when I switch on the light. The can-opener won’t turn; the eggbeater jams mysteriously.
This is no longer my home; it is only of a past time.
Once I realize this, I am suddenly free to go, and to take Rhea with me.
26
In March, I got a job as a library clerk in the New York Public Library Children’s Services, and I was truly delighted. Not only was I relieved to be making money again, but I loved libraries and books, and was so pleased to be able to do work which I enjoyed. Muriel and I saw each other as often as we could now, and we began to discuss her coming back to New York to live.
When she was animated, with her tousled dark hair and her round monkish head, Muriel reminded me of a chrysanthemum, always slightly bent over upon itself. She talked incessantly about her “sickness” of the years before, and about what being schizophrenic meant. I listened but did not know enough to realize that, out of her love, she was also warning me.
On the few occasions that we smoked reefer together, she waxed most eloquent and I was most open.
“Electric shock treatments are like little deaths,” Muriel said, reaching across me for the ashtray. “They broke into my head like thieves with official sanction and robbed me of something precious that feels like it’s gone forever.”
Sometimes she sounded angry, and sometimes she sounded curiously flat, but however she sounded it made my arms ache to hold her. Pieces of her memory had gone too, she told me, and that made Suzy, her old New York lover, keeper of that piece of her past.
It was the equinox, and we lay smoking in bed in the evenness of springtime, with summer already coming.
“Did it make anything better?” I asked.
“Well, before shock, I used to feel this deep depression covering
me like a huge bushel basket, but somewhere inside at the very core of it all, there was a little feeble light shining, and I knew it existed, and it helped illuminate chaos.” She shuddered and lay silent for a moment, her lips tight and pale over her front teeth.
“But the thing I can never forgive the doctors for, is that after shock, the bushel only lifted a little; you know what I mean? But that little light had gone out, and it just wasn’t worth it. I never wanted to trade my own little flame, I don’t care however crazy it was, for any of their casual light from outside.”
All this made me very sad. The only answer I had was to hold her tight. I swore to myself that I would never let that happen to her again. I would do anything in the world to protect Muriel.
That night, lying in the front room on Rhea’s bed, Muriel warned, “If I give up my job in Stamford to come down here, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to get another one. I just can’t ask someone to hire me and run the risk of their saying no. I don’t know why, but I know I can’t take that. It will break me.”
Having gone through the horrors of looking for work just recently myself, I thought I knew what she was talking about. But I did not, for the depths of her shaky reality were alien to me, although I never considered that possibility. I felt confident that eventually, out of our love, Muriel would find the strength to face that hurdle, too. So I did not heed her words as a warning, the only kind she could give me.
Rhea left, and in the beginning of April, Muriel returned to New York City to live. I painted the kitchen and bathroom and put up new bookshelves in anticipation.
Once Muriel quit work in Stamford, the physical transition to New York began in trickles. For months, every time she went back home for a visit, Muriel would reappear on Sunday afternoon with a stool or a box of tools or some wood or a shopping bag of books. Sometimes her friend Rupert would drive her down in his Volkswagen beetle with a load of books and papers.
Although the change from “staying over” to “living together” was a gradual one, I knew I had made a major decision. And I knew that decision would affect the rest of my life, although exactly how was not really clear to me then. When I had moved into the apartment with Rhea, I had merely scratched my name beside hers on the slip of paper stuck into the slot of our mailbox in the hall.
But one blustery day in the first week of April, on my lunch hour, I walked around to Hite’s Hardware on East Broadway and ordered a proper metal mailbox tag, with Muriel’s and my names upon it. I stood watching as the machine stamped the two names into the shiny brass rectangle, feeling proud, excited, and a little bit scared. It felt like a ritual joining, a symbolic marriage.
Afterward, I bought an egg cream on Chatham Square to celebrate, and stood looking at the little shiny plate with our two names side by side, separated only by a little dash. This would be my surprise for Muriel when she came down to New York on her birthday, the following week.
No more playing house.
For me, this was the real thing, a step from which there was no turning back. I wasn’t just playing around any more, gay-girl. I was living with a woman and we were lovers. I had done, silently and easily, what I had longed and feared to do, I had made a commitment which was irrevocable. Without conscious articulation of why, I knew together meant forever for me, even though there was no troth plighted, no wedding ceremony, no paper signed. Muriel and I were united together by our loving and our wills, for good or ill.
Through the spring, I had thought long and hard about whether or not I could live that closely with anyone, and for the rest of my life, as I felt this was going to be—without question. Once I decided I could make that commitment, I never doubted for a minute that Muriel was the person I wanted to make it with.
We made our own vows of love and forever. As the spring evenings turned warmer, Muriel met me at the Chatham Square Library. Sometimes we went wandering through the back streets of Chinatown, buying strange succulent vegetables and peculiar fragrant pieces of dried meat to experiment with, along with hard wrinkled mushrooms by the piece. Each of us knew a different New York, and we explored together, showing each other secret treasured places in the middle of the alleyways south of Canal Street.
Sometimes she met me for lunch and we munched Musli apples leaning up against the Catherine Slip tenements in the strengthening sunlight, watching the sparks fly as workmen continued the complex task of dismantling the last great piece of the Third Avenue El, the Chatham Square Station. Sometimes we walked home together on the nights I worked late.
We talked about leaving New York, about homesteading somewhere in the west where a Black woman and a white woman could live together in peace. Muriel’s dream was to live on a farm and it felt like a good life to me. I borrowed pamphlets from the library, and we wrote to all the appropriate government offices to find out if there were any homestead lands still available anywhere in the continental United States.
Sadly enough for us, the word came back that there was not, except in some of the more desolate northern reaches of Alaska, which was not yet a state. Neither Muriel nor I could stand the thought of living in a cold climate, and that far away from the sun. Besides, since we would not be able to support ourselves by farming, northern Alaska was definitely out.
When I came home from work with my arms full of the latest books and my mouth full of stories, sometimes there was food cooked, and sometimes there was not. Sometimes there was a poem, and sometimes there was not. And always, on weekends, there were the bars.
Early Saturday and Sunday mornings, Muriel and I wandered the streets of the Lower East Side and the more affluent West Village, scavenging the garbage heaps for treasures of old furniture, wonders that the unimaginative had discarded. We evaluated their future possibilities and dragged our finds back up six flights of stairs, to add them to the growing pile in the kitchen of things we were one day going to repair. There were wooden radio cabinets, gutted, that could be fitted with shelves for a fine record-holder. Old dresser drawers supplied stout wood for bookcase shelves, supported by scavenged bricks. There were brass lamps and rococo fixtures to be rewired, and a magnificent old dentist’s chair with only one arm support missing. Occasionally we found something that needed no repair (my bed-lamp still sits on a Victorian lampstool that we dug out of a junkheap in Chelsea on our way home from the Grapevine one Sunday morning).
Ordering and re-ordering our world, Muriel and I sat up into the small hours reading the books I would sneak out of the cataloguing bins at the library, and eating pasta with margarine and oregano when we were poor. Other times we had wondrous meals concocted from our adventurous buys in Chinatown, together with a scrap of meat or a few chicken feet or a piece of fish or whatever we could afford and took a fancy to in the First Avenue Public Market. Around the corner from us, we did most of our food shopping there in the many stalls of busy hawkers.
I met the few of Muriel’s friends that she could remember from the old days, and she met mine. There were Mick and Cordelia whom I had met in high school. Nicky and Joan, friends of Suzy, Muriel’s old lover. We were poor and always hungry, and always being invited to dinner. Going to Suzy’s house for dinner was always chancy. Suzy had once heard that pork fat was nutritious, so she kept a skillet of bacon drippings permanently on the back of her stove and cooked everything in it.
There were Dottie and Pauli, two skinny blonde artists from our neighborhood whom we met at Laurel’s; Bea and Lynn, her new girl; Phyllis, who wanted to be an architect, but only talked about it when she was drunk; and, of course, there was Felicia, my adopted little sister, as I called her, and the only other Black woman in our group. Together, we formed a loosely knit, emotionally and socially interdependent set, sharing many different interests, some overlapping. On the periphery there existed another larger group of downtown gay-girls, made up of congenial acquaintances and drinking buddies and other people’s past lovers, known by sight and friendly enough, but not to be called upon except in emergencies, when o
f course everybody knew everybody else’s business anyway.
But the fact of our Blackness was an issue that Felicia and I talked about only between ourselves. Even Muriel seemed to believe that as lesbians, we were all outsiders and all equal in our outsiderhood. “We’re all niggers,” she used to say, and I hated to hear her say it. It was wishful thinking based on little fact; the ways in which it was true languished in the shadow of those many ways in which it would always be false.
When Muriel and I received stares and titters on the streets of the West Village, or in the Lower East Side market, it was a toss-up as to whether it was because we were a Black woman and a white woman together, or because we were gay. Whenever that happened, I half-agreed with Muriel. But I also knew that Felicia and I shared both a battle and a strength that was unavailable to our other friends. We acknowledged it in private, and it set us apart, in a world that was closed to our white friends. It was even closed to Muriel, as much as I would have liked to include her. And because that world was closed to them, it was easy for even lovers to ignore it, dismiss it, pretend it didn’t exist, believe the fallacy that there was no difference between us at all.
But that difference was real and important, even if nobody else seemed to feel that way, sometimes not even Flee herself, tired as she was of explaining why she didn’t go swimming without a bathing cap, or like to get caught in the rain.
Between Muriel and me, then, there was one way in which I would always be separate, and it was going to be my own secret knowledge, if it was going to be my own secret pain. I was Black and she was not, and that was a difference between us that had nothing to do with better or worse, or the outside world’s craziness. Over time I came to realize that it colored our perceptions and made a difference in the ways I saw pieces of the worlds we shared, and I was going to have to deal with that difference outside of our relationship.
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