by Lee Lynch
“Do you go to 23rd Street?” she asked the driver as she stepped onto the bus.
“Yes, ma’am, but you got to have exact change,” he answered, eying her dollar bill.
“Do you mean if I don’t have fifty cents I have to get off the bus even though I have a dollar? That’s ridiculous!”
The driver shrugged. Angry and embarrassed, Victoria grew desperate. “Here, then, take the whole thing. Will that do?” He took the bill and Victoria turned to walk the length of the bus under the scrutiny of more experienced riders. She scowled, tossed her hair back, and reached for the open flap of her coat to flick it angrily across her legs as she sat, then realized she was no longer wearing the clothing of an indignant rich girl. Shoving her fists into her pockets she turned to look out the window, afraid the other riders would notice she was near tears. If I can’t learn the rules of the bus company, she asked herself dejectedly, how will I learn to survive outside the world I know? I can dress like other people, but that doesn’t give me their experiences. It’s crazy, she thought fearfully. To let Rosemary tempt me out like this, to a part of the city I don’t know, to listen to a bunch of women in a converted loft—anything could happen. Perhaps my mother is right. Perhaps I don’t belong out here.
Crazy, she repeated, lifting her hair off the collar of the pea jacket and adjusting her glasses. Dennis must have thought I was in disguise, she laughed softly to herself, forgetting her confusion for a moment. He had never seen her with glasses on. Feeling better, she resolved to go on with her adventure and hope that nothing awful would happen. She concentrated on the paper she would write when she returned to school. She would title it “The Origins of Boccaccio’s Anti-Clerical Writing.” It would prove that the suppression of human needs began with the individual’s inability to deal with those needs. Only later would the suppression become institutionalized by church or state. Victoria withdrew into her subject until she stood on the windy corner where Rosemary and Claudia were to meet her.
She was faintly glad once more to see Rosemary’s sallow face and thin, dull brown braid ascending the subway stairs. Behind her, Claudia’s full, red-cheeked face beamed at Victoria. She smiled widely back, but when Claudia threw herself, puffing, at Victoria to hug her, Victoria shrugged her off, her hands again in the pockets of the magical pea jacket which, alas, was not magic enough to help her return such an outgoing hug. Victoria attributed Claudia’s seeming enthusiasm for everything to her midwestern background. “Have you enjoyed your visit to New York?” she asked politely.
Rosemary answered for Claudia who was bouncing up and down with the cold. “I believe I’ve managed to show her some of the more interesting parts of the city.”
“Here my mom thinks I’m safe and sound in Bronxville and Rosie has me in the evil city every night. I’ve learned more than I learned in three and a half years at Yale! And I don’t stop learning when we get home,” she said suggestively. Rosemary lifted her chin and tried to look aloof, but her eyes rested on Claudia warmly. “Tonight,” Claudia continued, lowering her voice and glancing around histrionically, “we’re going to a gay bar! Why don’t you come?”
Victoria looked at Rosemary disapprovingly. Gay bars were not a part of the lifestyle she had envisioned for Yale graduates. “How do you know where to even find one? And why would you want to take her there?”
“There is more to life than books, Victoria. Two good friends of my parents are homosexual and were more than glad to shake the foundations of the nuclear family by telling me where to find a women’s bar. Just in case our political friends upstairs,” she gestured with her pointed little chin to some windows above them with “Women’s Center” brightly painted on them, “don’t agree that lesbians are an integral part of the women’s movement.”
Victoria’s hair had blown across her face and she lifted it off, wondering if Rosemary was not going too far in her lesbianism. She did not have to become the type that cut their hair and looked like men. Surely she and Claudia could be lovers and still live the lives they had lived before, although, as she thought of it, Victoria wondered why they would want to. But Rosemary was still dressed in her long skirts and braid, and Claudia, though wearing blue jeans, had all that bouncy, curly hair and her awful flowered ski jacket. No, they did not look like lesbians. “Shall we?” Victoria finally asked, indicating a door painted like the loft windows. She was eager to discover what New York lesbians looked like now, but she said, “Though I’m not sure why I’m here.”
In answer, Rosemary lifted her chin and adopted her best lecture-hall tone of voice. “Victoria,” she began, as they climbed a long flight of stairs, “I don’t know what you’ll be doing after graduation, but I’m hoping you’ll have enough of a commitment to feminism to lend your name, if nothing else, to it.”
As they stopped outside a door, Rosemary faced Victoria, her eyes small and intense. “I hope you’ll at least consider it,” she ended, turning away to open the door. Claudia, smiling encouragingly, followed her lover inside. Victoria weighed once more her option to turn back, to go home before she was stuck and too embarrassed to leave, but she did not want to be alone any longer on this holiday. She went in the door.
The room was small and held about thirty women. Aside from posters on the walls, some cardboard boxes and empty burlap bags, it was bare. One sign read “Women’s Food Co-op” and Victoria imagined these women doing their weekly shopping here in front of sacks of flour and crates of vegetables. Folding chairs had been opened and were arranged in loose concentric half-circles around a knot of three women who seemed to be doing most of the talking. Rosemary led them to some chairs in the back by a window.
Victoria was startled to hear that the three central women were raising their voices at one another. She sat aside, drifting in and out of the ideas that passed through her mind. There were a lot of shouts as the argument went on. “Lesbians are women too!” “Straight women won’t join the movement if they’re afraid to come to meetings here where they know lesbians will be.” Victoria decided there was really no such thing as a straight woman. Weren’t all people sexual beings and therefore capable of “coming out” as Rosemary would say? That made sense to her. Lesbianism might startle women who had not considered it, but, unless they had some real problems with their own sexuality, they wouldn’t run too far. And anyway, how could the straight women in the meeting want to cut so many committed feminists out of their ranks? Victoria listened to the argument that lesbians in the movement forced straight women out, but she could not agree. If straight women did get turned off, how could they be feminists? Aren’t women lesbians because they’re women first? Surely feminists wouldn’t exclude a woman for her sexuality.
Victoria watched a straight woman talk. Her fists pounded the air as she spoke of how her friends would never come to meetings or to consciousness-raising sessions with her because they were afraid of the “bulldykes.” Victoria chuckled to herself. She tried without success to picture Rosemary and Claudia menacing the ladies sexually. Then she watched a short woman, a lesbian, go red in the face with rage at being oppressed by her own sisters. “We don’t ask you what you do in bed with your men, do we? We don’t exclude women who aren’t married to men, we don’t exclude women who like older or younger men. Why should you exclude women who love women!” Some of the lesbians cheered. A straight woman got up and proclaimed herself to be on the lesbian side. “Sexual expression is another choice women make about their bodies and their lives just as abortion is a choice. How can we embrace the concept of women’s choices without also embracing all the choices?” she concluded.
“Do you mean we’ve got to champion women who like cadavers?” someone yelled out. There was general laughter and Victoria found herself staring at a very attractive woman. She, too, wore a pea jacket and jeans and glasses, though her brown hair was short. With a shock Victoria realized that she was admiring a woman who looked much like herself. Could she be the daughter of that strange woman on the train? The
woman lounged, standing, against the wall, hands in her coat pockets. Once in a while she looked toward Victoria who lowered her eyes each time. Avoiding her gaze, she stared at the other woman. Was her twin a gay or a straight? She wanted very much to know, afraid that she was a lesbian, afraid of the implications of that for herself. If someone looked just like her and that person was a lesbian, then she herself might be a lesbian too. Not that she minded. She might like being a lesbian. But the world was already frightening, and so much more frightening for the different.
Rosemary stood and Victoria automatically began to rise with her, until she realized that Rosemary planned to speak. She folded into her seat and sank even lower, embarrassed by her friend’s verbosity. What has she to say to these politically sophisticated New Yorkers? They would laugh at her. “A few of us are here from Yale today, expecting to return to New York after graduation next spring.” Rosemary paused; there was some giggling and whispering and a low, “Screw Yale,” before she went on. “At Yale we have a tender young women’s group. Nowhere as large as even this gathering here, but we have been struggling to understand what brings us all together and to gain from it.” Victoria looked around to see if the women were bored. Claudia was smiling widely. “We had no lesbians in our group at Yale. No ‘bulldykes’ as I have heard some of you describe lesbians. No one to frighten away the straight women. Lesbianism was not even an issue for us. Yet I and one other woman came out together. It was a natural evolution, something we politically felt was the right thing to do.” The whispering had stopped and Victoria realized that Rosemary did have something important to say. “Now there are two lesbians in the women’s group. I urge the straight women here to think about two things. First, that lesbianism is not a disease and is therefore not, as some of you seem to think, contagious. It can happen spontaneously, isolated from any influence but reason and need. Second, that it is a desirable state for some feminists to achieve. It is the ultimate feminism. Women who commit themselves to one another politically, emotionally and sexually are not only pariahs, but are the vanguard of this women’s movement.” Rosemary sat down, patting her Indian skirt around her and smiling quickly at Claudia. She took Claudia’s hand very purposefully and turned to the front of the loft still holding it. The room seemed to exhale all at once.
“Heavy,” someone said. Then the straight woman with the fists jumped up out of her seat. “That’s the sort of fucked-up thinking that we are trying to avoid.” As she spoke her voice rose in pitch. “There will be no women’s movement if all women don’t feel welcome. Newer women are afraid of lesbians!”
A lesbian cried out, “We’re afraid of straights who want us to disappear!”
A few other women shouted in agreement.
Fists accelerating, the straight woman went on shrilly. “There has to be a place for us all in the women’s liberation movement. We have to welcome more and more women and we won’t do that by scaring them off with the threat of changing their lives too radically!”
“Women’s lives must change!” another lesbian called out.
“You’re creating a schism with your radicalism!” yelled another straight woman.
“Then let’s stop yelling and start mending the schism,” someone suggested quietly.
Victoria felt taut with the tension in the room and the violence of the emotions. Her eyes rested on the woman who looked like her and she remembered again the witch-like woman on the train. Was she her daughter, she wondered. The face not so full as the college picture, but the mother had implied that she had lost weight. Could this woman actually have been married, had children, been beaten by her husband? Now, slouching against the wall, looking strong and experienced, was this the woman who had rejected all that? Victoria realized how much she did find the woman attractive. Not only because she looked like her, but because she looked like she could handle herself, as if she was in control. She smiled toward the woman, glad when she did not see the smile. She was scared that the woman would talk to her and she would be lost to her spell. What if the woman had inherited some of her mother’s witch-like qualities and showed Victoria even more of herself than her mother had on the train? She was afraid of this much more dangerous exposure here, as an equal.
The woman, still not aware how Victoria’s eyes followed her, reached her hand across the chair of a woman sitting in front of her and laid it on her shoulder. She bent and whispered into her ear. The seated woman rose, took the hand of Victoria’s twin, and the two left. Moving to the window, Victoria looked down to see them walk off with their arms around one another.
Victoria sat very still. More women got up to leave. The passion had drained from the discussion. A work group formed to develop recommendations about how to help lesbian and straight women understand each other and work together. She is a lesbian, Victoria thought, stunned despite herself. Is someone marking a trail for me? Did that mother curse or bless me in some way, trying to transfer her daughter’s rebellions onto me? “What?” she asked, jumping as Claudia shook her shoulder.
“Wasn’t she great? She just floored them!”
“Who?” Victoria asked.
“Rosemary, silly! Weren’t you listening?”
Victoria looked at where Rosemary was surrounded by lesbians who were thanking her for what she had said. She still felt stunned by her twin’s lesbianism, as if it were a sure sign of her own. “Yes, of course I was listening.”
“But you didn’t see the light. I can tell. Oh, it was so important that she said it, don’t you think? I’m so glad we came. Now they’re going to work on it instead of just arguing about it and glaring at each other forever.”
“Yes, yes,” Victoria said, emerging from her thoughts. “Yes, she spoke well. And I did see the light,” she added, but Claudia had turned away to stand proudly with her lover. Victoria was left on the brink of the world of love and women, feeling more alone than she ever had before.
* * * * *
Annie Heaphy, Turkey, Peg and Eleanor crowded around the surly bouncer who demanded $3.00 each from them. “Boy, she’s tough,” Turkey whispered to Annie, admiringly. “Maybe I should forget about college, move to New York and get a job as a bouncer, huh Annie?”
“You got your taste in your ass, Turkey. She’s a class A dumb bulldyke who probably makes peanuts here because no one else will hire her she looks so much the part.”
“Shh,” Turkey answered as she went to pay the bouncer. “Hey, uh,” Turkey asked, laughing nervously between each word, “How’d you get this job?”
“Friend a my girl’s part owner, why?”
“Oh, thanks,” poor Turkey giggled, obviously disappointed. She patted her chest nervously and brushed off her rust-colored, baggy overalls and a voluminous black and light-blue striped shirt.
“So that’s why I should get a job as a bouncer,” she said as Annie joined them.
“Why?”
“She ain’t a bit uglier than me,” Turkey laughed loudly.
Annie Heaphy shook her head, rearranging her cap. “But you’re nice. Besides, you couldn’t stop laughing long enough to throw someone out.”
“She’s got to throw people out?”
“You turkey,” Eleanor laughed, her light southern accent exaggerated in New York. “Why do you think they call them bouncers?”
Turkey hung her head. “You got a point,” she admitted, then looked up and laughed again. “Oh well,” she said, “sociology majors probably make lousy bouncers anyway! I’d be too busy lecturing people on why they acted in a way that attracted attention to them in a group of their peers.”
“Come on, guys,” Peg urged. “There’s a table we can grab.”
Annie kept her head down as she walked across the half-full dance floor. It was still early, too early to be anonymous, and Annie sensed that she would feel more self-conscious here than at Marcy’s. When she had a few drinks she would feel less conspicuous. Even show off a little, probably. She sat with her back to the floor.
“Ain
’t this a shame,” Turkey laughed as she settled her wide bottom on a tiny chair done in ice-cream parlor style.
“I think it’s awful cute,” Eleanor said. “Whoever decorated this place had good taste.” She crossed her legs in their purple denim jeans and slipped her imitation fur jacket onto the back of her chair. She was wearing a silky white blouse splashed with chartreuse and violet and her hair was up in a way that made her look vaguely like a model for shampoo. She kept removing bobby pins and replacing them through the evening. Tapping a long cigarette on the table, she held it out to be lit. As usual, all three of her friends scrambled to light it in the old game of who’s butchiest. Eleanor loved it. “You all are getting slow,” she laughed after Turkey dropped her lighter on the short cable spool that served as a table. Eleanor sighed with regret, trying to look seductively at both Peg and Annie. “Anybody cute here yet?” she asked as always to start the evening off.
“Just let’s get a waitress over here, cute or not, and I’ll be happy,” Annie said.
“I think you both got your wishes, ladies,” Peg said as she waved toward a waitress.
Annie’s courage disappeared and she stuttered when she ordered from the good-looking woman in jeans and an Indian shirt open halfway down her chest.
“A Coke,” Peg ordered, smiling graciously at the waitress. She shot her light blue cuffs out from under her navy sport jacket and smoothed her cream colored slacks. She met the others’ looks when the waitress left. “I’m driving. Besides, I’m not in the mood for drinking. I’d like to meet a girl. Hey, El, you like our server?”