Greetings From Janeland

by Candace Walsh

  The Dealer’s Gift

  BY LOUISE A. BLUM

  IT’S BEEN THIRTY YEARS SINCE I LAST SLEPT WITH A MAN, but I remember them all: the Palestinian in Germany with whom I lost my virginity—his inky curls and his liquid eyes, the undeniable pain of that first penetration, for which I was entirely unprepared. I remember the Arabic words he taught me, alone in the dark, as we learned each other’s bodies in a tongue that was foreign to us both. I remember biking through Ohio summer nights with the slacker stargazer in college, shedding our clothes and sliding into the lake with the ease of dolphins to swim beneath the stars. I remember the bartender in Omaha, how there was nothing attractive about him until he hit the dance floor, where his body took on the sudden grace of a heron striking water, morphed into a vehicle for song. I remember the organizer from Chicago, who’d spent the seventies with the Farm Workers, immersed in produce boycotts in a city so far removed from those California fields as to be nearly irrelevant. With his dark hair and beard and deep, long-suffering eyes, he resembled no one so much as Jesus. We’d listen to Simon and Garfunkel and make love on the same couch where I would later have sex with his roommate, the unemployed construction worker with the ponytail and way too much time on his hands. I remember eating falafel at a halal dive in Cleveland with the canvasser who’d remade himself through EST and had three other girlfriends. I remember the way his hair fell across his brow, how the skin crinkled around his eyes when he looked at me. I remember driving for hours through the midnight rain in his VW Rabbit, gazing at his profile in the darkness and thinking I would give up everything just to have him. I remember the legalaid lawyer in Pittsburgh with the shy eyes and the slow smile, whose wheelchair provided the opportunity for creative variations on what was by now a familiar theme. And then there was the drug dealer in Atlanta. That one was a low point, one that lasted three years. It was like kicking an addiction, getting out of the habit of him. I had to move to Iowa to escape him.

  All those experiences, all those men, they all have one thing in common: I can remember so many things about them, the way they spoke, the accents and the idioms, the particular tell of each one’s movements. I remember the longing I felt for the ones I couldn’t have, the emptiness I felt with the ones I could. But one thing I cannot recall is anything about their genitalia. Try as I might, I can’t conjure up a single penis. Not a testicle. I run my memory along their bodies until I reach—a blank space, as if a selective amnesia had descended like the night to shield my view.

  In those uncertain days of my early twenties, life was a thing that happened to me. Those encounters, those men, were incidental, products of the simple intersection between time and place. I was there, they were there; we went with the flow. My job as an organizer meant that I never stayed in one place too long. I slept on people’s floors, moved where the Organization sent me. I shifted cities mid-campaign, committed new streets and faces to the ever-expanding geography of my experience. I was a vessel for change, but it was someone else’s change. True, the goal was a revolution, but even at twenty-one I knew those chances were slim. A stop-light at a busy intersection in an inner-city neighborhood was a good day. An underfunded school stripped of asbestos was a great one. A hundred people at a sit-in was a rush like nothing else I’d ever experienced. My job was not to lead, but to move others to lead, not to instigate but to incite, to allure, to nag, to prod, to prompt: a kind of subtle balance between manipulation and empowerment. I existed to do this job: whether my needs were met, whether I ate or slept or made a friend or saw a film was irrelevant. Was, in fact, dangerous. To the cause, perhaps. To the Organization—certainly.

  I knew what the dealer was: he was my avenue for escape, my extraction from the constant interchange of politics and personality, a chance to lose myself in myself. The dealer lived next door; the convenience was a major attraction. The minute his door closed behind me, I was somewhere else. I was nowhere anyone could find me. And it lasted until I saw the light again. There was a kind of magic to it, a Wonderland experience: he played no part in the other aspects of my life, he never met my family, he had no interest in my job. Politics to him were an abstraction, as irrelevant to his life as he was to mine.

  I knew what the Organization was as well: a powerful, all-encompassing, arachnid mechanism for change. And being a part of that was an intoxication, a hallucinatory reenvisioning of the world we lived in. And the attraction of losing oneself to a cause: saints have known it. Monks. Nuns. The lure of the hair shirt, the submersion of the self in something greater than oneself. The role of the martyr is perhaps the ultimate form of egotism, nearly irresistible. A line of coke on a mirror.

  But martyrs die young, and nuns disappear into their cloisters. A vow of silence wears thin. Both the dealer and the Organization were drugs in themselves: satisfying at first, then less and less so. I developed a tolerance I had no desire to overcome. And I was useful to the Organization only so long as I knew my place within their apparatus.

  I suspected this went for the dealer as well.

  I crossed half the country to make my new life: a writer’s life. I was a settler heading west toward undiscovered territory: the ultimate American myth. Places are undiscovered only to those who have never been there. But as the hills gradually flattened out around me, as the wind rustled through the grasses on the prairie—it was all new to me. To look up into that biblical sky, dark and unending, flooded with stars, flush with clouds. To be in the presence of all that weather, absolute and unabridged, afternoons turning on a dime with the sudden descent of a silence so ominous it was almost holy. Every leaf stilled, paralyzed with expectation. The instantaneous golding of the air, the sucking blackening collapse of a funnel of clouds: this was indeed a brave new world, alive with portent, shivering with the approach of that which is unknown.

  The dealer pursued me, in that way that we suddenly desire the unattainable: with an abrupt and unsettling urgency. The sudden presence of him in my Iowa City apartment threw my life into sharp relief. The drugs had been good, the sex even better, but this brave new world I’d constructed for myself was best of all.

  I said good-bye in a coffee shop on an appropriately bitter Iowa December night. He took my hands and held them in his own, warmed them with his breath. It was the kind of detail he’d been good at. The small comfort gestures—the cut flower; the rolled joint; the proffered mug of coffee, black. It felt so good to break it off, a clean, solid break, the kind that renders the bone twice as strong as it was before. He kissed my hands, and then, with a single phrase, he determined the course of the rest of my life. If you don’t want me, he told me, softly, then you must be a lesbian. His breath on my palms chilled my skin. His reasoning was, to him, readily apparent: I’d have to be a lesbian not to want a guy as sensitive as him.

  I left him there, sauntered out under the starlit sky. I tried to laugh it off, but the black Midwestern winter wind stole the sound from my throat before it could leave my lips. I walked home alone in the pale light of a distant constellation, fighting the chill that settled in my bones, his words seeding themselves deep within my brain, where they lingered like a curse. Then you must be a lesbian. Somewhere deep inside, I had the nagging desire to prove him wrong. But if I had learned anything from that relationship, it was that I would rather be single for the rest of my life than settle for less than I deserved.

  I fell in love with being alone. I spent my celibacy dancing by myself in clubs, hiking alone through the red rock canyons of Utah, sleeping under the stars at the Lama Foundation outside Taos, New Mexico, riding my bike through the gentle rolling hills of Iowa, trekking through the Sonora Desert in 116-degree heat with nothing but a compass and a jug of water for company. I drove through the night in my pickup truck across a country that unrolled on either side of me like a promise—alone on the road, my windows open and my radio blasting, singing as loud as I wanted because there was no one there to hear. And at night, alone in my bed, I came to know my own body with my own hand
s, and there was nothing any of those men could have done that I couldn’t do better. If the curse he’d left me with ever crept into the forefront of my brain, I shrugged it off. I thought I could live the rest of my life just like this: needing nothing from anyone except myself.

  I’d been alone four years when I moved back east for a teaching gig in a nowhere town in a nowhere place in Pennsylvania, surrounded by a mountain range I hadn’t even known existed. I thought I was just passing through.

  I never left.

  I could blame it on those mountains, which enticed me into their midst, then closed me in. I could say it was all that green in all those trees, after so many years in prairie and desert. I could claim it was the water that held me fast, the way the mist rose from the river on autumn mornings to roll thigh-high through the streets, thick and moist and bodiless, a lingering presence marked by absence, a memory that couldn’t last. Or the winter light, piercing the spaces the fallen leaves had left.

  But the truth is, it was Connie.

  I fell in love with her over morning coffees at the diner, after-work beers at the bar, conversations that went on for hours, at every time of day or night. I fell in love with her laughter, her smile, her tendency toward argument, her passionate embrace of everything around her, and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t noticed her breasts. But when she tried to take the relationship further, I froze. The dealer’s refrain ran through the back of my mind on a constant loop, like a migraine that wouldn’t quit: you must be a lesbian. Connie says I told her I was straight, but in truth I have no idea what I might have actually said to explain myself; I could hardly hear anything through the static of the dealer’s curse.

  I moved to a cabin on an isolated mountain top so far out of town that grass grew down the center of the road. I thought I could live my life alone, that I would never tire of my own company. But she was persistent, and before too long she managed to drown out even the dealer’s monotonous prediction of doom. The first time she unbuttoned her sweater and unzipped her jeans unleashed in me a seismic wilding. I dove into her body as I would a gorge, heedless of the consequences, and when the water slammed shut above my head, I wasn’t entirely sure that I would ever surface again. But if this was what it was to drown, maybe that was all that I could ever hope for. Her body pooled before me, and there in all its curves and contours, both enticingly familiar and evocatively foreign, was a landscape I had never seen. And what I discovered there was the magnificence of agency.

  What I discovered as a lesbian was the joy of making love to someone. There were no rules and no predetermined roles, and I discovered in myself a mastery I never thought I had. It was like finding in oneself a sudden talent for art. There were a hundred different ways to make her happy. It was as if a canvas had been put before me, and I had only to touch my brush to it to make it sing. If there was anything in my life that resembled this in any way, it was my brief time with the lawyer in the wheelchair, whose physical limitations had proven unexpectedly erotic. But this body—these sultry lips, this crooked smile, the breasts and waist and belly and hips—it took me over. It inspired in me a passion that superseded any that had come before. The authority of giving and the utter abandon of her response surpassed anything I’d ever known.

  The agency in this new geography was not limited to sex; it extended to other parts of our lives as well. There was no path in this terrain, no steps to follow. It was a blind stumbling forward, feeling with our hands for whatever was to come.

  And if at times I wonder what it would be to go back, to embrace again the sexuality that marked my first steps into adult-hood, I think of those forgotten spaces, that disconnect between heart and genitalia, the dissociative nature of my memory. I think of my dealer, of what he gave and what he took away, and of how the space between a curse and a blessing is measured only by perspective and by choice. And then I envision Connie’s body, in all its silken radiance, so familiar and yet so undiscovered. I think of how I know the pitch and beat of her: the folds of her labia, the swell of her clitoris, the texture of her hair, the variegated shades of her vulva. I think that there is no separation in our union between the emotional and the physical, that what I know is chiseled forever in my memory, and that a lifetime will never be enough to discover everything about her.

  And I think that undiscovered territory can be a place we live in all our lives.

  On the Track

  BY KATE ARCHIBALD-CROSS

  I STOOD QUIVERING ON THE LINE, BALANCING PRECARIOUSLY on my toe-stops, waiting for the whistle to blow so that I could launch myself forward. I knew that once I started skating, muscle memory would kick in, and for two short minutes everything would be clear. My world would feel familiar, predictable, and safe.

  Odd, perhaps, that my place of comfort was skating at top speed around a concrete roller derby track, anticipating full body blows at any moment, while dekeing around other skaters and watching for my own teammates to knock people out of the way to clear a path for me. But the comfort, freedom, and bliss I felt playing roller derby was a welcome respite from the rest of my life, which had become a foreign land to me.

  It made no sense at all that I was here, squeezed tightly into a pack of ten women, playing like my life depended on it, when really, what was happening off the track would seem more worthy of my attention. I had recently told my partner and closest friend of fourteen years, the father of my kids, that I was sure that our relationship was over.

  In the past few months, I had assured my partner that I wasn’t changing, nothing was different; now it was clear I was wrong. It wasn’t that I was lying when I said those things to him—I honestly believed they were true. It’s kind of my thing, being the stable, predictable, reliable one, in any situation, and while I had some inner turmoil, I was confident my staid self would plod on, comfortable in the life I had made for myself and my family.

  It was an exhilarating time—our derby league was large for a small city, and we had been around for just under a year. But over that short time, our group of sixty-six women had become incredibly close, and we lapped each other up: at practice, over postpractice beers, on road trips to watch other teams play. Our discussion boards sizzled with ardent conversations. We were obsessed with this, at-the-time emerging sport, its uniquely colorful culture, and each other.

  It’s not as common now, but when I was playing, it was the norm to choose an alter ego, a “derby name.” Often, people’s names would be clever puns based on their real names or interests. Names were frequently mashups involving the full-contact nature of the sport and/or sexuality.

  The sport also provided a forum to reclaim a ton of language around the female body. It was not uncommon to walk into a practice and hear drills yelled out like “ass to vag” or “paint her pelvis.” This felt risqué and empowering at the same time. Many of us weren’t used to using or hearing language like this, nor were we used to consistently putting our bodies so close to other people’s, but it felt okay—even good—here with these women. And we were learning how to use our bodies to move other people around or stop them from getting past us. As someone who grew up terrified of walking alone at night, learning to use my body to stop someone else from doing something I didn’t want them to do was huge, and as my body became stronger and stronger, my confidence soared.

  Our league was busy; we were in parades, we went to weekend-long training camps, we did pub crawls to promote our games, we booked high-end off-skate training to increase our fitness, we had karaoke nights, we brought in guest skaters to teach us more, we traveled to tournaments. After being home with kids for almost ten years, the opportunities to get out of the house to train, learn, and do new things were exciting, and as president of our league, I genuinely felt it was my responsibility to be part of all league events. And it was a fun responsibility, compared to the responsibilities of home, managing finances, never-ending renovations, and, despite my general comfort and contentment in my relationship, my complete lack of libido. />
  I met her on the track, of course, the woman who would alter the course of my life forever. We were thrown together into this heady mix of people and were drawn to each other instantly. Two seemingly very different people—me, straight, quiet, reserved, left-leaning, and historically sedentary; her, lesbian, brash, centrist, and very athletic—who shared a mutual love of derby. We became very close friends, having coffee, texting regularly, and simply loving each other’s company, both on our own and with the league. She became my go-to person, and I was hers; from questions about training strategies to raising kids, we talked all the time, about everything.

  Slowly, slowly, slowly, as we talked about all the things we loved and wanted out of life, I started to wonder if I was, actually, happy enough at home. I cared deeply for my partner—we had a good time together, shared a ton of experiences and memories, and were amazing co-parents to our two young sons. But maybe something was missing. Things I’d swept under the carpet in the past began to seem like clear signs that something wasn’t right. I started to imagine my life outside of that relationship, and that vision, rather than the terrifying leap it seemed when I began the thought experiment, felt like a sigh of relief as I played it out. I wanted my kids to grow up seeing their parents do things that brought them joy—and I began to wonder if I had enough joy in my own life to model that for them.