Zami

by Geraldine Audre Lorde

  “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 from 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.

  I got back from Detroit two days later. It was late afternoon as I dragged my valise back up the familiar flights of stairs and unlocked my front door. Open cans of dried-out paint stinking in the summer heat. The half-painted kitchen, brilliant yellow on one wall, pale cream on the others. And the kittens, who had gotten into the turpentine looking for something to eat. Little Crazy Lady and Scarey Lou were quite dead and rigid on the floor under the kitchen table.

  I packed their small bodies into a toolbox lined with an old pillowcase, and took them down Seventh Street to the East River Park in the beginning twilight. I left them there, in a scrambled grave, under a bush as close to the muddy river waters as I could get, piling stones and dirt around the heap to keep the dogs away. The ballplayers in the park opposite watched curiously.

  On my walk home through the late summer evening, I thought of the rapid transition from Detroit back to the same old New York. But something had given inside of me. I did not stop by Sixth Street to ask Muriel what had happened. No need; she’d loved the kittens, and she’d let them die. Suddenly, and curiously without drama, the two stiff little black bodies in the toolbox under the bush became tangible evidence I needed, the last sacrifice.

  When two women construct a relationship they enter together, the anticipated satisfactions are mutual if not similar. Sometimes that relationship becomes unsatisfactory, or ceases to fulfill those separate needs. When that happens, unless there is a mutual agreement to simultaneously dissolve the relationship, there must always be one person who decides to make the first move.

  The woman who moves first is not necessarily the most injured nor the most at fault.

  The first week in September. The Journal-American was predicting that Elvis Presley, whose voice decorated every jukebox and radio, would be only a flash-in-the-pan. Muriel’s clothes were still at the house, although I saw little of her.

  I stood on the corner of Second Avenue waiting for the bus. Already, even though the weather was still quite warm, the days were getting visibly shorter. The pain of the early summer had dulled. I had never before wanted a summer to end, but now, the bleakness of this year’s approaching winter seemed like a relief.

  The bus door opened and I placed my foot upon the step. Quite suddenly, there was music swelling up into my head, as if a choir of angels had boarded the Second Avenue bus directly in front of me. They were singing the last chorus of an old spiritual of hope:

  Gonna die this death

  on Cal—va—ryyyyy

  BUT AIN’T GONNA

  DIE

  NO MORE…!

  Their voices sweet and powerful over the din of Second Avenue traffic. I stood transfixed on the lower step of the bus.

  “Hey girlie, your fare!” I shook myself and dropped my two coins into the fare-box. The music was still so real I looked around me in amazement as I stumbled to a seat. Almost no one else was in the late-morning bus, and the few people who were there were quite ordinarily occupied and largely silent. Again the angelic orchestration swelled, filling my head with the sharpness and precision of the words; the music was like a surge of strength. It felt rich with hope and a promise of life-more importantly, a new way through or beyond pain.

  The physical realities of the dingy bus slid away from me. I suddenly stood upon a hill in the center of an unknown country, hearing the sky fill with a new spelling of my own name.

  Muriel moved out of Seventh Street the same way she had moved in, in trickles. She packed the last of her books just before Christmas. I came home from school one night and she was there, come to finish packing. Muriel had fallen asleep in her clothes on the couch. This was where she used to sit and write until dawn whenever she couldn’t sleep, that last winter we were together. Her arm was raised against the light. On the back of one of her hands she had doodled a little pattern of stick-figure daisies, the way children write upon themselves when they are bored or lonely.

  The lamplight shone down upon her form in a tight circle, illuminating her as vulnerable and untouched. Looking down at Muriel asleep in the light, even after all of the pain and anger, a remembered love at the core of me made my heart move. She opened her eyes, asked me what I was looking at. “Nothing,” I answered, turning away, not wanting another angry exchange. She was not my creation. She had never been my creation. Muriel was herself, and I had only aided that process, as she had mine. I had released her anger in much the same way as she had released my love, and we were precious to each other because of that. It was only the Muriel in my head I had to give up,
or keep forever; the Muriel peering up from the couch belonged to herself, whoever she wished to be.

  Alone, I began to drop by the bars during the week—the Bag, the Page Three, the Pony Stable, the Seven Steps… A few times that winter, after Joan had run away from her, I found Muriel sitting in a corner of some bar, crying. I had never seen her crying in public before. Her voice had lost its sweetness. Sometimes, she yelled or made a scene and got thrown out of a club. I had never seen her drunk before, either. I remembered the night in Cuernavaca when I listened to Eudora roaring in the compound gardens, sodden with tequila.

  Drunk, with her dark hair disheveled and falling about her face, her crooked pinkie at half-mast, Muriel looked like a buttery angel, fallen from grace, become all too human. Nicky said she was finally recovering from the effects of electro-shock. Sometimes I took Muriel back to her apartment and put her to bed; sometimes I took her to my house. One night, as she slept at Seventh Street, I lay awake in the next room, listening to her crying out in her sleep for Joan to come play in the snow. Finally, one night I started downstairs into the Seven Steps and spotted Muriel, slumped over the far corner of the bar, her back towards me. I swung around, walking quickly out before she could turn around and see me. I was tired of playing keeper.

  The stolen, bastardized yet familiar rhythms of Presley drape like garlands over that winter.

  Now that my baby’s left me I’ve found a new place to dwell

  It’s down at the end of Lonely Street in Heartbreak Hotel

  Muriel went home to Stamford for Christmas. She did not come back, in any real sense. The following spring she signed herself into a state hospital insulin unit, where Toni was working in an experimental program for schizophrenics.

  The last thing Muriel did before she left Seventh Street for the last time was to burn all of her poetry and her journals in a galvanized tin bucket which she set on the floor in front of the green couch in the middle room. The bottom of the pail left a permanent burn in the shape of a ring upon the old flowered linoleum. Felicia and I cut out the old square and pieced in a remnant of the same pattern which we found on Delancey Street the following spring.

  31

  Gerri was young and Black and lived in Queens and had a powder-blue Ford that she nicknamed Bluefish. With her carefully waved hair and button-down shirts and grey-flannel slacks, she looked just this side of square, without being square at all, once you got to know her.

  By Gerri’s invitation and frequently by her wheels, Muriel and I had gone to parties on weekends in Brooklyn and Queens at different women’s houses.

  One of the women I had met at one of these parties was Kitty.

  When I saw Kitty again one night years later in the Swing Rendezvous or the Pony Stable or the Page Three—that tour of second-string gay-girl bars that I had taken to making alone that sad lonely spring of 1957—it was easy to recall the St. Alban’s smell of green Queens summer-night and plastic couch-covers and liquor and hair oil and women’s bodies at the party where we had first met.

  In that brick-faced frame house in Queens, the downstairs pine-paneled recreation room was alive and pulsing with loud music, good food, and beautiful Black women in all different combinations of dress.

  There were whip-cord summer suits with starch-shiny shirt collars open at the neck as a concession to the high summer heat, and white gabardine slacks with pleated fronts or slim ivy-league styling for the very slender. There were wheat-colored Cowden jeans, the fashion favorite that summer, with knife-edge creases, and even then, one or two back-buckled grey pants over well-chalked buckskin shoes. There were garrison belts galore, broad black leather belts with shiny thin buckles that originated in army-navy surplus stores, and oxford-styled shirts of the new, iron-free dacron, with its stiff, see-through crispness. These shirts, short-sleeved and man-tailored, were tucked neatly into belted pants or tight, skinny straight skirts. Only the one or two jersey knit shirts were allowed to fall freely outside.

  Bermuda shorts, and their shorter cousins, Jamaicas, were already making their appearance on the dyke-chic scene, the rules of which were every bit as cutthroat as the tyrannies of Seventh Avenue or Paris. These shorts were worn by butch and femme alike, and for this reason were slow to be incorporated into many fashionable gay-girl wardrobes, to keep the signals clear. Clothes were often the most important way of broadcasting one’s chosen sexual role.

  Here and there throughout the room the flash of brightly colored below-the-knee full skirts over low-necked tight bodices could be seen, along with tight sheath dresses and the shine of high thin heels next to bucks and sneakers and loafers.

  Femmes wore their hair in tightly curled pageboy bobs, or piled high on their heads in sculptured bunches of curls, or in feather cuts framing their faces. That sweetly clean fragrance of beauty-parlor that hung over all Black women’s gatherings in the fifties was present here also, adding its identifiable smell of hot comb and hair pomade to the other aromas in the room.

  Butches wore their hair cut shorter, in a D.A. shaped to a point in the back, or a short pageboy, or sometimes in a tightly curled poodle that predated the natural afro. But this was a rarity, and I can only remember one other Black woman at that party besides me whose hair was not straightened, and she was an acquaintance of ours from the Lower East Side named Ida.

  On a table behind the built-in bar stood opened bottles of gin, bourbon, scotch, soda and other various mixers. The bar itself was covered with little delicacies of all descriptions; chips and dips and little crackers and squares of bread laced with the usual dabs of egg-salad and sardine paste. There was also a platter of delicious fried chicken wings, and a pan of potato-and-egg salad dressed with vinegar. Bowls of olives and pickles surrounded the main dishes, with trays of red crab apples and little sweet onions on toothpicks.

  But the centerpiece of the whole table was a huge platter of succulent and thinly sliced roast beef, set into an underpan of cracked ice. Upon the beige platter, each slice of rare meat had been lovingly laid out and individually folded up into a vulval pattern, with a tiny dab of mayonnaise at the crucial apex. The pink-brown folded meat around the pale cream-yellow dot formed suggestive sculptures that made a great hit with all the women present, and Pet, at whose house the party was being given and whose idea the meat sculptures were, smilingly acknowledged the many compliments on her platter with a long-necked graceful nod of her elegant dancer’s head.

  The room’s particular mix of heat-smells and music gives way in my mind to the high-cheeked, dark young woman with the silky voice and appraising eyes (something about her mouth reminded me of Ann, the nurse I’d worked with when I’d first left home).

  Perching on the edge of the low bench where I was sitting, Kitty absently wiped specks of lipstick from each corner of her mouth with the downward flick of a delicate forefinger.

  “Audre… that’s a nice name. What’s it short for?”

  My damp arm hairs bristled in the Ruth Brown music, and the heat. I could not stand anybody messing around with my name, not even with nicknames.

  “Nothing. It’s just Audre. What’s Kitty short for?”

  “Afrekete,” she said, snapping her fingers in time to the rhythm of it and giving a long laugh. “That’s me. The Black pussycat.” She laughed again. “I like your hairdo. Are you a singer?”

  “No.” She continued to stare at me with her large direct eyes.

  I was suddenly too embarrassed at not knowing what else to say to meet her calmly erotic gaze, so I stood up abruptly and said, in my best Laurel’s-terse tone, “Let’s dance.”

  Her face was broad and smooth under too-light make-up, but as we danced a foxtrot she started to sweat, and her skin took on a deep shiny richness. Kitty closed her eyes part way when she danced, and her one gold-rimmed front tooth flashed as she smiled and occasionally caught her lower lip in time to the music.

  Her yellow poplin shirt, cut in the style of an Eisenhower jacket, had a zipper that was half open in the s
ummer heat, showing collarbones that stood out like brown wings from her long neck. Garments with zippers were highly prized among the more liberal set of gay-girls, because these could be worn by butch or femme alike on certain occasions, without causing any adverse or troublesome comments. Kitty’s narrow, well-pressed khaki skirt was topped by a black belt that matched my own except in its newness, and her natty trimness made me feel almost shabby in my well-worn riding pants.

  I thought she was very pretty, and I wished I could dance with as much ease as she did, and as effortlessly. Her hair had been straightened into short feathery curls, and in that room of well-set marcels and D.A.’s and pageboys, it was the closest cut to my own.

  Kitty smelled of soap and Jean Naté, and I kept thinking she was bigger than she actually was, because there was a comfortable smell about her that I always associated with large women. I caught another spicy herb-like odor, that I later identified as a combination of coconut oil and Yardley’s lavender hair pomade. Her mouth was full, and her lipstick was dark and shiny, a new Max Factor shade called “WARPAINT.”

  The next dance was a slow fish that suited me fine. I never knew whether to lead or to follow in most other dances, and even the effort to decide which was which was as difficult for me as having to decide all the time the difference between left and right. Somehow that simple distinction had never become automatic for me, and all that deciding usually left me very little energy with which to enjoy the movement and the music.

  But “fishing” was different. A forerunner of the later one-step, it was, in reality, your basic slow bump and grind. The low red lamp and the crowded St. Alban’s parlor floor left us just enough room to hold each other frankly, arms around neck and waist, and the slow intimate music moved our bodies much more than our feet.

  That had been in St. Alban’s, Queens, nearly two years before, when Muriel had seemed to be the certainty in my life. Now in the spring of this new year I had my own apartment all to myself again, but I was mourning. I avoided visiting pairs of friends, or inviting even numbers of people over to my house, because the happiness of couples, or their mere togetherness, hurt me too much in its absence from my own life, whose blankest hole was named Muriel. I had not been back to Queens, nor to any party, since Muriel and I had broken up, and the only people I saw outside of work and school were those friends who lived in the Village and who sought me out or whom I ran into at the bars. Most of them were white.