by Lee Lynch
So, she continued the argument with herself as she broke up a piece of stale bread for the birds, I got something out of Shakespeare. What I got wasn’t anything I couldn’t have gotten reading it at home. The birds had begun to sing for their breakfast outside her window. She watched them hop, withholding the bread because she knew they would scatter when she opened the window. She leaned her head against its pane and a few of them jumped and flapped their wings. She would have gone back to school at night if she had thought it worthwhile. To what end? she had asked herself. I don’t want to be a doctor, a lawyer, a stockbroker, a teacher. Of course, I don’t want to be a cabdriver either, she sighed, back at the beginning of her circular argument. She raised the window quietly and threw the bread to the birds. They fled, but swooped back one by one to peck at the ground and fly away with their prizes. She watched two grackles dance. One held an oversized crumb and stared while the other approached. Then it would back away and eat a bit of the crumb. The other would approach. Finally the first dropped what was left of the bread, and flew away. The other bird watched it depart as if the crumb were an empty victory.
When Natalie changed, that’s when it all fell apart. If ever it was together, she thought. They were to finish school, get jobs and live happily ever after. “Hah,” Annie said aloud, frightening a sparrow bold enough to sit on her sill. She remembered to close the window to cut off the draft that had been chilling her. And now she was looking for a new lover. Was that only because she wanted to shape her life? Couldn’t she give her own life shape? But she had, and this was it: an endless circle. Annie Heaphy circled the city in her cab, driving, in the daytime, in and out of it bearing passengers like gifts that came to her and gifts she gave away. At night she made circles in and out of the bars and apartments of her friends. Dove in and swooped away as she found a lover and became drawn into someone else’s idea of the shape her life should take. She circled in and out of her days: waking, working, wallowing in subterranean places, then waking again. I’m getting dizzy, she thought, I may fall down if I haven’t already. The flight she was on only mellowed with alcohol. When she drank she forgot she was in flight or just enjoyed the purposeless drifts in the winds. Yet the next day she suffered this overwhelming depression. She could stop drinking, but then she wouldn’t even have the bars.
She turned to the refrigerator to get a beer. The idea of it was pleasant. She would walk to the beach with it cold in her hand, feeling its promised release. Her eyes stopped at the clock on her refrigerator. She had planned to go to work early as long as she was up and make extra money in the commuter hour if there was a cab turned in from the night shift. Now she hesitated, lured by her ambitions of cleaning. She could stay home and clean the house, the yard, drink some beer, do a lot of reading and maybe call Eleanor to come over after she got off work. She rinsed out her mug and set it on the chipped porcelain of the sink so hard it almost broke. “You stupid loser,” she cursed herself. “You can’t stand the sight of her, the touch of her except with some very hard prodding and now you’re ready to set up housekeeping with her just because she’s available. That’s really rotten. It’s better she knows you don’t really want her. Don’t go confusing the issue. Dusty’s what she wants and Eleanor’s not what you want.”
Mad at herself, Annie grabbed her cap from the desk and pulled it on her head snugly. She went looking for her shoes. Or am I taking the easy way out by going to work, she asked herself, suddenly not at all purposeful, but filled with self-doubt. Ah, I don’t know and I don’t care. She surrendered to the routine of the day and pulled on her workshoes. Walking to the kitchen window she silently said goodbye to the birds who seemed so busy and carefree. Why can’t I live like them, she wondered. Always I look for more. She watched them gather their food and wondered if all of them stayed through the winter. Would she, too, have to build a new home in the summer? Last summer she had been lucky, but now the landlord was talking about fixing the place up for summer rentals. She couldn’t stand the thought of some beachboy and his wife honeymooning in her home. She would not come back to it after the summer, although Peg and Turkey had offered their apartment if she needed a temporary place to stay. No, she thought. This either is my place or it isn’t. I don’t share with men. If only I could save enough to buy it, but on what I earn that could take forever.
“Coo-ah, coo, coo, coo,” she heard and realized she had been hearing the call for a few moments. Her anger subsided and she craned her neck to see which bird was crying. A beautiful pink and grey pigeon-like bird with a long tail sat on the ground, its neck swelling with each soft, somber note. “A mourning dove,” Annie Heaphy thought. She listened, calmed, for a while, then found another piece of bread to reward it for its song. Touched by the bird’s beauty and sad sound, she stayed a moment longer listening to it, wondering if it was a sign that it had chosen her home to mourn.
* * * * *
Victoria escaped from the iron gate of her college courtyard into the New Haven street. All she could see were other Yale students. The heavy grey Yale buildings dwarfed her and she felt chilly between their cold stone walls, though the sun was bright. She walked quickly away from them wondering if she would ever think affectionately of her alma mater. She scorned the old men who came teetering to their reunions every year, boasting in their self-congratulatory speeches of their school, their class, their careers. Victoria was in the first class which had allowed women to enter the hallowed halls and she had not been ready for the highly competitive atmosphere of an all-male school. She had watched the other women become hardened by it. Victoria had wanted badly to stay at Hunter where the student body was still primarily female and the years of tradition had not yet been spoiled by the greediness of men. Her father, however, did not have a son to graduate from Yale as he had done. He was determined to carry on the family tradition by keeping his daughter imprisoned there. It was not that Victoria could not handle it, for she could best any man, she felt, but that she feared for her inner softness, a quality Yale taught her to scorn, but which survived, a cherished part of herself, the part that yearned for excitement now.
As she walked along the shop-lined street, Victoria looked at the other women and wondered if this was not, as she had assumed, a personal trait, this softness, but if it had something to do with being a woman. Since she came to Yale she had been denying a difference between men and women, keeping her grades up at all costs to prove that she could. She had never felt a kinship with the other women because they, like the men, covered up whatever was inside them to achieve by Yale standards, success. Now she had seen an underside, a softness to one of the most competitive women she knew, Rosemary. And who had found it but another woman, one who, in her own childish way, had refused to join in the competitive game. Claudia was generally thought rather stupid and suspected of being passed in courses due more to the midwestern money the college wanted to unearth than her own ability. Victoria had found her to be fun. Now she wondered if Claudia was simply a woman who was able to act out her desires. Instead of covering her feelings over with layers of intellectualism, she expressed them. Victoria realized it would be impossible to know who she herself was and what she wanted from life if she continued to add layers. She would have to scratch through them someday to find herself unless she stopped now and let them out.
Perhaps Claudia has saved Rosemary—and me, while she was at it—a lot of work later in life, Victoria thought. We won’t need expensive psychoanalysis if we find out who we are and what we want right now. Victoria drifted into one of those boutiques that had sprung up everywhere to sell postcards, woven pillows, pottery and generally useless paraphernalia on which the middle class could spend its excess income. She wished for the bookstalls of Paris or the shops on King’s Road in London. She left and wandered into a shop which sold Indian clothing. The proprietor was pushy and Victoria not interested in buying so she moved on, feeling a little bouncy, a little free. Today, for almost the first time in her life, she felt that som
ething had changed, that she had been given a glimmer of lightness, a hint that her path would not be totally circumscribed.
She stood outside the store watching the people pass. Women from Yale, women from the town went by, their hair flowing, their movements graceful. Victoria found herself watching and enjoying them. She went into an ice cream store and bought a soft ice cream. Licking it made her want to giggle. She crossed the street to the Green smiling. Now, she thought, if men are good at this academic business and women aren’t really, or at least, haven’t acquired the skills to as high degree as yet, isn’t this because men invented academia? We are playing by their rules. We are playing with a handicap. They already have the hard crust, or are more inclined by their previous socialization to develop it, and we must make do with the equipment that we have. Then we’re taught to use feminine pretenses: cosmetics to cover the physical evidence of, for example, staying up all night preparing for an exam; and we’re closer to our emotions so that, although we may be more easily drained, we can very quickly draw on our reserves. Those of us who survive, that is.
As she ignored the comments made by male loiterers who were sitting on the benches she was passing, she remembered two classmates who had dropped out of sight. One had attempted suicide after her failure to pass a required pre-med course. Another had been expelled for sleeping with one too many professors to get good grades. Victoria wondered how many other dropouts had been a result of the pressure to succeed in a game designed for men. In survival of the fittest, who defined the fittest? She sat on a bench, crunching the last of her cone as she thought. Does brute strength really make one most fit? No, supposedly intelligence helped. Perhaps with women doing some of the planning, humans could evolve in a way that they could resolve conflict without war. She began to see what the feminists went on and on about. Women, the natural protectors of home and growing humans, would find a way to fight without killing, to succeed without risking extinction, to achieve gracefully, without stepping on other people to do so. She rose and walked again to escape a teenage boy who had sat on her bench and was inching toward her.
Victoria realized that Rosemary’s confession had stirred up a lot of things in her mind which must have been formulating for quite a while. She never thought like this. She had thought she wanted to be a recluse, a cloistered unworldly being, and most of her fantasies were of the life she would lead when she did not have to be bothered with the world as it was. The fact that her parents did not have much money did not bother her as she could always teach at a university. Her grandparents had what she thought of as “comfort” money in trust for her. It would be so easy to hide forever, but suddenly, today, she wanted to be part of the real world and to keep being stirred by women. Two women passed her in blue jeans and pea jackets. Their faces were excited and they moved fast, almost breathless as they interrupted each other talking and laughing. One skipped suddenly in happiness and the other clapped her hands at her friend’s pleasure. Beautiful, Victoria said in wonder, feeling herself melt even more. If only I could reach out to a woman. An older woman passed, hair gray under a flat-topped, round hat, purse clasped in front of her, hands pulling her coat shut against the wind that swept through the open space of the Lower Green. Why do we wear all this stuff, Victoria asked herself. Why is she wearing nylons that make her legs cold and a stylish coat that’s so thin she can’t protect the top of her body? She felt revelations peeling blinder after blinder off her eyes until she grew tired with everything new.
She crossed a street and sat on the library steps, looking down at her own thin slacks. What I need is a pair of blue jeans, she thought, excited by the idea. Mother would never approve, but she doesn’t approve of much I do. She remembered her two weeks alone in New York. Am I about to have an affair with a pair of blue jeans? Me and them alone in New York? She laughed and jumped up to stride toward an army-navy store on Elm Street. She was anxious about size, but decided not to worry about a thing with which thousands of people dealt every day without falling apart. As she passed the campus’ small brick buildings and more massive stone walls, she tried not to be intimidated, but walked swiftly and assertively. It seemed as if she normally walked like a ghost, trying to float above it all. Would she be able to keep this new spirit close enough to her to feel it all the time? Or was it only something to let out on special occasions, like when you learned that your only friends might become lesbians.
Unsure if it would last, she hugged her excitement to herself and savored it. I feel like carrying a flag proclaiming that I’ve come out, she thought. I’ve come out of my shell a bit. I’ve let out a lot of festering thoughts. I’ve emerged from some confused thinking about who I am to take a peek at who I want to be. Around her people, mostly young, went in and out of stores that catered to their tastes. They all looked excited and fresh and as if they were buying clothing to go out on a Saturday night. Victoria had not done that since her last attempt at dating Yale men when she was a sophomore. She shuddered at the memory of the cheering, drunken crowd at the Yale football game to which her last date had taken her. She had supposed at the time that her aversion to the game came from the pointlessness of chasing a ball over a field. Now she wondered whether it wasn’t instead the way the crowd shouted things like, “Kill them!” and “Murder them!” as if they were in a Roman colisseum.
She smiled at the long-haired woman on the corner leafletting against the war, then went into the army-navy store and gazed around her. There was a great pile of blue jeans stacked along the walls. Undaunted, she walked up to a salesman and asked what brand he recommended. When he explained that different brands fit people differently, Victoria refused to be confused and took one of each in sizes she guessed. Another man stopped her as she went into a fitting booth.
“Three at a time, lady.”
“Oh,” she said, suddenly deflated, weak, afraid. “Can I leave the rest right out here?” she asked, indicating a corner.
“No.”
“Oh.” She walked back with the jeans, incredulous that the man should suspect her of trying to steal. She felt anger rise in her at the atmosphere of paranoid oppressiveness in the store. Abandoning all the jeans on a wrong counter, she walked out. Afraid the man would follow and chastise her, she went quickly down the street. Before her courage dissipated, she turned into another shop, bought the first pair of reasonably fitting jeans she tried on, a pea jacket and a workshirt. Almost out of the door she turned back and bought a pair of laced work shoes.
Bearing her packages like victory spoils, Victoria marched back to her dormitory and laid them on her narrow bed. Just their presence in the tall-ceilinged, perfectly neat room changed it. She was afraid, though, that someone would walk in and did not put them on. “That’s enough for one day,” she thought. “I’m me, no matter what I’m wearing.” She would wear the new clothes when she needed to say who she was to someone else.
Though tired now, she did not want to stay in her room on a Saturday night. She walked restlessly through the dormitory, then wandered on to the dining room with a book. She read Sappho with her franks and beans, imagining herself in Sappho’s school on Lesbos. Now there’s an idea, she thought. If I’d gone to a school like Sappho’s, how different I would have been. She stared dreamily over her book at the students who laughed and talked among themselves, almost human outside the Yale classrooms.
Lingering after her dinner she read: “Whom shall I make love you, Sappho,/ who is turning her back on you?/ Let her run away, soon she’ll chase you;/ refuse your gifts, soon she’ll give them./ She will love you, though unwillingly./ Then come to me now and free me from fearful agony. Labor/ for my mad heart, and be my ally.” Victoria put her head on her hand and stared at nothing, wondering if she had fallen in love with an idea. Am I a lesbian, she wondered? Is that what I felt for Heidi and, in high school, for Etta? I may never know, she told herself sadly.
Later, in bed, gazing toward the streetlamp-lighted sky outside her window, Victoria smiled again. Ro
semary had swung open her door about 10:00. “You asked me to let you know our decision,” she said, eyes on the floor.
Victoria smiled from under the pool of light her study lamp made. She was relaxed in her long, elegant blue robe as she fingered a carved letter opener her parents had brought back from North Africa. When Rosemary didn’t continue she asked, “Do you want to come in? Is there something wrong?”
Rosemary stepped through the door and Victoria saw that her face was pink right back to where her tightly pulled hair started. “We’ve decided to go ahead with it,” she said, her voice quavering slightly, her hand playing with the end of her braid.