I'll Take You There

by Wally Lamb

  “You want poetic lyrics, listen to Joni Mitchell,” I said. “In a Stones song, the lyrics are incidental.”

  “Not to me,” she countered. “He calls the woman a pet? A squirming dog? She has to keep her eyes to herself but he can look at someone else? It’s disgusting.”

  “Come on, chill, Mom. It’s a fucking song,” Aliza protested.

  “Written by whom? The Taliban?”

  “But you can’t just unplug it because you’re offended. You’re censoring art the same way as a repressive—”

  “If it oppresses women, it shouldn’t be considered art,” Kat snapped back.

  Molly took her on. “Look, I’m as much of a feminist as anyone,” she said. “Wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for the movement. But some of us go overboard with the diatribes and the PC bullshit.”

  “Some of us? Like me, for instance?”

  “Hey, I didn’t say that. But if the shoe fits.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I’m not about to let down my guard as long as sexual assault is epidemic, and working women make twenty-two cents less for every dollar their male counterparts take home. And if you’re picking and choosing which parts of the movement you support, then that makes you a cafeteria feminist.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?” Frances wanted to know.

  “What’s wrong with it? It weakens the movement, that’s what. United we stand, divided we fall.” She turns toward Aliza. “Are you listening?”

  “I’m listening, but I don’t necessarily agree. Give it a rest, Mom.”

  Kat shook her head, sighed, and went into the kitchen to cool off. When she came out again, she said, “Well, what do you say, Aliza? You’ve got a train to catch and I have an eight a.m. meeting in Glastonbury. Don’t you think we’d better get going?”

  Simone, Frances, and I saw them to the door. Kat said she was sorry if she’d spoiled everyone’s fun. Simone waved her hand dismissively. “I never liked the Stones that much anyway. I was a Beatles fan.” I kissed Kat on the cheek and said I was glad she still had the fire in her belly. “Damn right I do,” she said. “It’s not over till it’s over.”

  “Which it never will be,” Frances said. “Take it from me, Kat. You need to bend a little so that you don’t break. Because what use are you if you’re broken?” From what I could see, my daughter was listening more intently to Frances than her mother was.

  There were hugs, goodbyes, “drive safely”s. After they drove away and we went back to the living room, Molly said she appreciated Kat’s take-no-prisoners zeal, even if silencing Mick Jagger mid-song was damn near unforgivable. “And Aliza? My niece has really come into her own, huh? She’s a keeper, Felix.” I agreed and thanked her, pleased with her observation.

  Molly and I cleared the table and put away the leftovers while my sisters did the dishes. (The old pattern prevailed: Simone washed, Frances dried.) After everything was done, we went back to the old photo albums. Those old black-and-white pictures were like talismans that brought back the past. Molly got up from the table after a few minutes. “Well, good night, you guys. I think I’ll turn in. Have fun.” She kissed Frances and went off to bed.

  “Nothing more boring than other people’s family pictures,” I said.

  “Pfft. She’s going up there to catch the rest of the Red Sox game on her iPad,” Frances said. “Hey, Felix, remember that summer we went around with the Miss Rheingold box?”

  “Shit yeah. We rang so many doorbells on Shirley Shishmanian’s behalf, she should have put us on the payroll.”

  In my mind’s eye, I saw the two of us trudging around with that ballot box. And then, abruptly, I saw the bedraggled boy who had run up to the fence when Frances led me to that orphanage in order to scare me—to project onto her little brother the fear that lived inside of her. She had denied she’d done that once before, and I was curious to see if she would deny it again or, this time, admit to it. But she had been through a lot in her father’s final weeks. The next morning we would bury him—the uncle I once had such affection for who had seduced and abandoned Frances’s mother, and then participated in the ruse that Fran was his niece, not his daughter. Yet whether he’d deserved it or not, Frances had stepped up to the plate during his final days and had been, if not a loving daughter, then at least a dutiful one. So I kept my mouth shut.

  A few days after my uncle’s funeral, I received a 9 × 12 envelope that had been addressed to Iggy and forwarded to me. The return address said Ascension Roman Catholic Church, 7250 North Federal Highway, Boca Raton, Florida. The note inside explained that since my uncle had paid for the enclosed items but had never come by the chancery office to pick them up, they were mailing them to him. When I overturned the envelope, six Memorial Mass cards fell out, which indicated that Maryknoll priests would pray at six different Masses for the soul of the departed, Verna Hibbard. Too little, too late? Sure. But Simone and I interpreted his gesture as proof that Uncle Iggy must have read Verna’s diary and heard her voice after all.

  SEVENTEEN

  INVINCIBLE GRRRL

  Blogpost # 106: MOM & ME

  by Aliza Funicello

  The other day, walking along Madison Avenue with my feminist mother, we passed a store that caters to young women, sizes 0 through 6. “Women your age just don’t get it,” Mom huffed. “Either that, or you’re throwing back in our faces everything that women my age fought to give you.” Admittedly, the mannequins in the window were wearing outfits that looked pretty slutty.

  My mother was born in 1949. Four years earlier, Rosie the Riveter had hung up her coveralls, exited the factory, and retreated back to the kitchen or the secretarial pool—or to the back alley if she needed an abortion. In one of the biggest films of 1949, A Letter to Three Wives, a trio of virtuous married women each receives the same letter from a homewrecker named Addie, informing them that she has run away with one of their husbands. The movie keeps audiences guessing about which wife’s failure to please her man has resulted in her devastation. Arizona’s Jacque Mercer was crowned Miss America of 1949. Asked how she had won, she replied, “I just figured if you could learn how to be a brain, you could learn how to be a woman. Nobody figured I could do anything anyway.” Seriously?

  So I get it, Mom. You and your second-wave sisters had to work like hell to bust through those stereotypes, procure your reproductive rights, and begin to shatter corporate America’s miles-high glass ceiling without getting injured by all those falling shards. I’m neither ungrateful nor oblivious that women my age reap the benefits of your admirable, uphill struggle against a male-stacked status quo.

  But Mom, we’re not you. We inhabit a world dramatically changed by technology, globalization, and gender politics—a world your generation could not have imagined. Whereas you marched in the streets carrying placards that demanded “Equality NOW!” we take to the Internet where we Facebook, tweet, blog, and access the collective power of #hashtag feminism. One digital campaign convinced Amazon to stop selling T-shirts that promote violence against women. Another campaign cost rapper Rick Ross his lucrative Reebok spokesmanship after he released a single that boasted about date rape compliments of a molly-infused cocktail. Digitized feminist outrage pressured the Susan G. Komen Foundation to reverse its decision to defund Planned Parenthood a mere three days after it announced its decision to do so. When Chip Wilson, the fat-shaming CEO of Lululemon, blamed the flaws of his clothing line on plus-size women whose body shapes were “inconsistent” with his product, the resulting outrage of the feminist blogosphere cost Wilson his chairmanship. And online feminism has gone worldwide in its fight against gender inequality, Mom. Crowd-sourcing apps now track and expose sexual assaults, sex trafficking, and female genital mutilation in places like Syria, Senegal, and elsewhere around the globe. The Internet has removed the barriers of geography and distance, replacing isolation with solidarity. That’s grrrl power, right?

  Mom, you did your feminist best raising me, steering me away from storie
s about fairy-tale heroines whose happiness-ever-after was dependent on handsome, well-heeled princes. Instead, you exposed me to feisty female characters like the Paper Bag Princess, Pippi Longstocking, Madeline, and Rosie Revere, Engineer—all of whom I adored and wanted to be. When I was in middle school, you were ambivalent about my affinity for those Nancy Drew mysteries, maybe because Nancy was, at best, only a sort-of feminist and, like me, a daddy’s girl. To your credit, however, you didn’t tell me I couldn’t read them. And you wholeheartedly endorsed my reading of Judy Blume’s frank YA novels that took on subjects like menstruation, divorce, and masturbation—realities that Nancy never went near.

  Have I ever properly thanked you for your guidance during my high school years? “Politics is personal,” you used to say. “Don’t wait for someone to hand you power. Just take it.” Your advice came in handy when my creepy algebra teacher began teasing me in that flirty way during class. When I finally told him to fuck off in front of everybody, it earned me a detention, but it also got him to back off and leave me alone. I felt as powerful as Wonder Woman. Do you recall when I started becoming preoccupied about my weight and you pulled Naomi Wolf’s book The Beauty Myth off your shelf? “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience,” she wrote. I copied that quote onto an index card, thumbtacked it onto my bulletin board, and read it every time I had the urge to get back on the bathroom scale. In college? When I decided to major in feminist studies? That was because of you, Mom—and maybe a little because of Naomi Wolf and some of the other feminist thinkers you exposed me to. But Daddy’s influence is probably what led me to become what I am: a writer.

  You no doubt would have preferred it if I had landed a job with more feminist cred than my gig as a fashion and shopping reporter at New York magazine. But do you realize that New York was the parent publication from which Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes launched Ms. as an insert way back in 1971? Anyway, a while back, I was assigned my first feature: a nostalgia piece about an East Coast beauty contest that was wildly popular from the 1940s through the early sixties. Each year, the makers of Rheingold beer invited the public to choose Miss Rheingold by voting for one of six pretty women whose pictures appeared on cardboard ballot boxes in stores and taverns. I balked at being dealt such a lame assignment. My generation tends to dismiss beauty contests as silly and inconsequential but not particularly dangerous. Now I’m not so sure.

  Aunt Frances, your ex-sister-in-law, may be a successful dentist whose wife is an equally successful veterinarian. But did you know that, as an impressionable girl nearing puberty during the late 1950s, she was both heavy and heavily invested in the Miss Rheingold contest—so much so that she would borrow the ballot box from a local liquor store and ring doorbells to get out the vote? Given who she became, Aunt Fran seemed an unlikely adherent to the ethos that touted beauty queens as the feminine ideal. But when I interviewed her for my piece, she reminded me how few options were open to her and other girls during the 1950s, before the movement. “Mother, teacher, nurse, secretary, librarian, fashion model: that was about it. I didn’t want to be any of those things, or a Rheingold girl either,” she said. “But at least Miss Rheingold got a title, public recognition, and a hefty paycheck.” In retrospect, Aunt Fran told me, she realizes that imagining herself as an icon of femininity seemed like a great way to cover up who she really was: a chubby, brainy, insecure little girl who was already attracted to other girls. With a laugh, she adds, “Still, turning myself into a beauty queen would have been like trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole.”

  Yet for a while, Aunt Fran did just that. In her teen years, she dieted so aggressively and exercised so obsessively that she became dangerously anorexic and had to be hospitalized and then institutionalized at a facility for the mentally ill. This unrealistic standard that so many women measure themselves against could have killed her. Sadly, idealized femininity and body weight are as interconnected as ever.

  Mom, when you and your sisters were young feminists, you had your copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and your consciousness-raising groups that convened in living rooms and coffee shops, where it dawned on you that the anti-war slogan “Women say yes to men who say no to the draft” was a kind of pimping out of your gender for the sake of the cause. You had access to the enlightened political writing of Betty Friedan, Nikki Giovanni, Susan Brownmiller, and the Village Voice’s Jill Johnston. What you did not have is the power to convene a flash mob with a few taps on your iPhone or to reach an audience of thousands, or millions, by merely hitting Send. At my day job as a writer for New York, I write pieces that are assigned, edited for balance, and fact-checked for accuracy. But the feminist blog posts that I send floating into cyberspace are more casual, more personal, and often more fervent and furious.

  Our bodies, ourselves, Mom. Whereas you went braless, and, for a while, stopped shaving your legs and underarms as a political statement, some of us shave our pussies, insert “chicken cutlets” in our bras when we go clubbing, and ink our bodies with symbols and statements that may or may not be political. Which brings me back full circle to those “slutty” size 0 dresses in that shopwindow on Madison Avenue.

  I’m guessing you might not approve of the global phenom known as the SlutWalk, Mom—or the fact that, not long ago, your daughter dressed herself in a bikini, fishnet stockings, and fire-engine-red stilettos and marched not down a runway in some beauty pageant but down Broadway in solidarity with other feminists of my stripe. (Full disclosure: I put on a hoodie for part of it; I was fucking freezing.) In case you’re not up on the history of the SlutWalk, it originated when a Toronto cop advised women that if they didn’t want to become rape victims, they should stop dressing like sluts. In response, outraged activists rallied the troops via social media to protest in the streets by dressing provocatively in order to call for an end to rape culture, slut-shaming, and victim-blaming. The point was: women enjoy sex the same as men, and we have the right to signal that in what we wear without having to be afraid that we might be sexually violated. Keep in mind, Mom, that you once advised me not to wait around for someone—a rapist, say—to hand me some power. You told me to just take it, or in this case, to take it back.

  Think about it, Mom. Isn’t that what Gloria Steinem, the patron saint of your feminist movement, did when she stuffed herself into a Playboy bunny costume so that she could expose the pigs and fanny-pinchers at these puerile men’s playgrounds? Those Playboy Club key holders might not have been rapists, but weren’t they propagating a kind of socially acceptable foreplay by taking from women what they weren’t necessarily willing to give? Case in point: that frequent guest at the Playboy mansion, Bill Cosby.

  Mom, you and your generation took to the streets to demand fair treatment for women in sports, equal pay for equal work, subsidized child care, safe and legal abortion, and an end to domestic violence and discrimination against minority women. My generation supports all the above and, in addition, stands against discrimination and violence toward the LGBTQ community. Born female, I happen to live comfortably as a monogamous heterosexual woman. In the new terminology, that makes me both cisgender and cissexual. But take my boyfriend Jason’s younger sibling, Morgan, who he still thinks of as his little sister, even though she identifies herself as “genderqueer”—meaning gender-nonspecific—and prefers pronouns like “hir” and “ze” to “her” and “she.” Jason’s parents assume this is a rebellious phase their daughter is passing through, aided and abetted by the pricey New England liberal arts college Morgan attends. Maybe so. But maybe in our gender binary society, in which LGBTQ kids are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide as their straight peers, it’s something bigger—something positive and life-affirming, even life-saving.

  So yes, Mom, we may differ in terms of our feminist coming-of-age and our focus. Nevertheless, we find common ground in fair treatment for all. We rally around nonviolent problem solving. And we
join forces against the immoral abuse of power. So maybe we feminists of today do get it, even if we go into that boutique on Madison Avenue, credit card in hand, and walk out with one of those dresses from the front window.

  And speaking of power, Mom, wouldn’t you agree that, when we laugh, we feel more powerful? That laughter is liberating? So let me leave you with this observation from the Taiwanese-American stand-up comic Sheng Wang, who asks, “Why do people say ‘grow some balls’? Balls are weak and sensitive. If you wanna be tough, grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.”

  EIGHTEEN

  The new semester will be starting soon, so I’ve been working on the syllabus for my Introduction to Film Studies course at Hunter. I’ll be screening several of the usual suspects for my undergraduates: The Grapes of Wrath, Citizen Kane, The Bicycle Thief, The Last Picture Show. But I’ll also be mixing it up a little, adding a few new films to the roster: that Disney-Pixar movie Up, Lois Weber’s silent film Hypocrites, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Most of my young scholars will probably dislike the Malick film, which will confound them and force them to think about the profundity of life and death, the mystery and meaning of family, and the passage of time. But some might watch it a second time, think a little more deeply about it, or catch it again when they’re older and wiser and maybe not as sure that they’ve got life all figured out the way they assumed they did when they were eighteen or nineteen or twenty.

  I’ve had no more direct contact with ghosts at the Garde since Verna Hibbard’s translucent image smiled and faded away. I still run the Monday night movie club there and sometimes, although I can no longer see Lois’s spirit, I frequently feel that she is among us. Kenneth dropped out of the club after I convinced him, once and for all, that I would not be screening any of the films of Russ Meyer for us to study, not even Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, which Kenneth considered Meyer’s masterpiece. So we were down by one movie club member until Aliza’s boyfriend, Jason, joined us. He drives up from the city every Monday, sleeps overnight on my couch, and sets his alarm for 5:30 a.m. so that he can get back in time for work—proof positive that, as Aliza once told me, Jason is “almost as big a film nerd as you are, Daddy.”