Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  When Emily first started going to the women’s group, Justin asked, “What do you girls do—swap recipes?” He chortled.

  Emily smiled, pinchedly. “No, we examine the ways in which this society has conditioned us to put up with remarks like that. I mean, really, Justin. Would you say to a Black Panther, ‘What do you do, eat watermelon?’”

  “The lady talks back! Well, my dear, you’re getting there.”

  “Don’t you patronize me, Justin Lawson.”

  “You’re quite right,” he said with a grin. “And I’m proud of you for not letting me get away with it.”

  The first meetings consisted of discussions of why they were meeting. Unable to come to a unanimous conclusion, they decided just to meet and not worry about it. For the next several months they discussed what the format should be, given that they all loathed the hierarchical pattern bequeathed them by the patriarchy. Should they rotate discussion leaders, or do without leaders altogether? Should they pick a topic for each week, read the same book? Or should topics just evolve? They could never make up their collective mind. They finally decided whoever was having the meeting in her apartment would be responsible for the structure of that meeting.

  Justin, meanwhile, was less than enchanted. “Next thing you know, you girls will be referring to yourselves as Third World. Colonized by male imperialists!” He crowed from where he lay with his parachutist boots on the couch.

  “The analogy’s been drawn,” said Emily.

  He gazed at her with amazement. “Counterrevolutionary,” he announced. “A bunch of spoiled middle-class white women coffee-klatching. When millions of nonwhites and workers across the world are being exploited.”

  “Two of us are black. And we’re all working—the housewives for room and board, and the rest of us for half what men are paid.”

  He gave her a look of such political contempt that she shriveled like a cock facing circumcision, scuttled over and kissed his forehead, a heretic slobbering over the ring of the Grand Inquisitor.

  “What I want to know,” Emily explained as they drank red wine in Maria’s cluttered living room, “is when I get sympathized with.”

  “When are you going to get yourself a good woman?” Maria asked with a grin. She drew on her cigarette, while everyone except Kate and Lou sputtered indignantly. Kate, a lover of Maria’s, was a small woman in bib overalls with lots of curly hair, who worked as an electrician’s apprentice. She spoke little but gave disdainful looks when anyone said something thoughtlessly heterosexual, referring to the rest of the group as the Het-Set.

  “Listen, don’t hand me any of your lesbian chauvinism,” Emily requested.

  “I was just answering your question: If you want sympathy, you aren’t going to get it from a man. All I’ve ever had from them are long self-absorbed monologues, followed by short premature ejaculations.”

  Emily frowned. Justin and Raymond were two of the men she was referring to.

  “But isn’t that sexist, Maria?” asked Gail in a bewildered voice. Gail and Emily were the only women still living with husbands, and Gail was the only full-time housewife. She pinned labels on everyone’s remarks, like name tags on children’s camp clothing.

  “I’m simply stating a personal truth, derived from extensive experience. I spent my whole life until three years ago listening to little boys disguised as men and murmuring, ‘Oh-you-don’t-say-how-very-interesting.’ But I have flat out had it with that!”

  “It annoys you, doesn’t it?” asked Gail, looking concerned.

  “Yes,” said Maria, after a pause.

  “But are you getting anything different from women?” asked Sammie. Sammie, a tall thin black dancer, wore clanky jewelry and high boots with sharp heels. “Angela’s mom,” the other mothers sometimes referred to her. Angela was a café au lait product of the civil rights movement. Emily was “Matt’s mom,” and Matt was notable for being one of the few unpremeditated mistakes in this world of sexual politics and politicized sex. Justin and she were married one morning in a civil ceremony and had spent that afternoon chartering buses to an anti-draft march in Washington the next week. No one could ever accuse them of putting their personal preoccupations ahead of their political work.

  “Sure. Put two people together who’ve been trained to sympathize—and they spend most of their time fighting over who gets to be the Good Listener,” explained Maria.

  “You’d like someone who’d listen to you sometimes, wouldn’t you?” inquired Gail.

  Maria ground her teeth. Then she forced a sisterly smile. “Yes, I would. And I have it.” She glanced at Kate.

  “Something I’ve never had the nerve to ask you, Maria,” Emily said. “Why did you first get involved with a woman? Was it political?”

  Maria grinned. “Hell, no. It was lust.”

  When Emily got home, Justin’s men’s group was meeting in the living room. The women’s group referred to it as the Men’s Auxiliary. “It’s like rednecks meeting during civil rights years to discuss White Liberation,” Maria announced. “Or American soldiers meeting in Vietnam about Soldiers’ Liberation.”

  It smelled as though they were smoking hash. Emily puttered around hanging up stuff and clearing the table. As his first step toward men’s liberation, Justin had broken his promise to do the dishes. Emily could hear them reliving some demonstration at a draft board.

  “… oh man, it was so far fucking out! Don’t you remember? When I put on my football helmet with the face guard and grabbed up that lead pipe …”

  “No, listen, I was the one who brought the football helmet …”

  “Don’t hand me none of that shit, man. I still have that fucking helmet. You want to come over to my place and see it?”

  Emily sighed. They reminded her of the men her father’s age who hung around the Newland Moose Club and argued about which units had gone ashore first at Omaha Beach.

  When Justin and she made love that night, she had another hint that something was up. After he came, she lay still as his semen oozed out of her, seething with resentment that once again a man had succeeded in transferring his mess to a place where she would have to clean it up.

  One weekend she went to a women’s bar in the Village with Maria and Kate. The bouncer was a lady wrestler type. Women in armbands behind the bar mixed the drinks. A woman DJ in a white satin windbreaker picked the records. A stout woman in a green eyeshade and a cream three-piece suit with a red carnation in the buttonhole took on all corners at the pool table. Women were looking each other over with frank sexual intent and sending drinks to each other across the crowded dance floor, asking each other to dance.

  Dykes. Apart from her women’s group, Emily’s only experience with them had involved Miss Melrose in junior high. Yet here she was, trapped with a whole platoon. She was confused. With men she’d often felt like sexual prey. But women had been safe. They had had no ulterior motives. Here in this club with dozens of women whose bed partners were other women, she felt reduced to prey status. It was like being a virgin again, but different, in that she didn’t know the signaling system.

  A tall woman with long dark hair, who looked part Indian, came up and began a conversation about the attractions of New York City over Des Moines. “I was the town dyke. Motorcycle jacket, boots, the works. But here I can finally concentrate on my painting, rather than spending all my energy being Superdyke.”

  “I know what you mean,” Emily lied.

  Emily could see Maria watching and smiling. They danced to a LaBelle song: “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?”

  Am I being flirtatious? Emily kept asking herself. Am I promising things I don’t intend to deliver? What do I intend to deliver? Two women next to her were dancing cheek-to-cheek. Periodically they kissed on the mouth.

  As the song crashed to a conclusion, Emily blurted. “Well, it’s sure been great talking to you, Althea. But I came with a friend, and I’ve got to get back to her.”

  Kate was fighting her way to the
bar. Emily demanded of Maria as she sat down, “How do you know what’s going on—whether someone’s putting the make on you or just being friendly?”

  “You know.”

  “Shit, man I don’t know!”

  “You learn.”

  “I don’t have time to learn. I’ve got to know right now. I mean, it’s not really fair, my even being here. I don’t want to lead anyone on, when I’m straight and all. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What?”

  “That smile that didn’t happen.”

  “You’ve never been attracted to a woman?”

  Emily blushed, and Maria aborted another smile. “Well, all right, yes, of course. I mean, some of my best friends are women.”

  “All your best friends, if you’d just face up to it.”

  “Jesus Christ, Maria. Gail’s right about you. You’re so goddam sexist.” Sometimes Emily had difficulty thinking in categories—Blacks, Middle Class, Men, Southerners. She herself, she’d learned during her sojourn among Yankee politicos, was a Ruling Class Southern White Woman. These categories explained everything about her. But Maria was usually Maria for her—rather than a White Intellectual-Elite New York Jewish Lesbian. You couldn’t categorize her way of suppressing an ironical smile; the way she dragged with such greedy pleasure on her cigarettes; the belligerent way she sat in trousers, with her knees wide open, both inviting and defying invasion.

  “I mean, this club, for example. Not letting men in. Where I come from, it’s the blacks who can’t come in, and we call it segregation.”

  “Yeah, but this is different because it’s the exploited keeping out the exploiters. We’ve got to have some place to gather the strength and support to go away and face the fuckers every day. The sound of one male voice, insisting on being agreed with, would wreck the atmosphere. Besides, if it were open to men, they’d pack the place just to get their rocks off imagining what we do in bed.”

  “I’ve been wanting to ask you, Maria. What do you do in bed?”

  Maria grinned. “Why don’t you come to bed and find out?”

  “I couldn’t handle the crush of competition.” Maria was a notorious Dona Juana. In Emily’s current mood, she admired Maria’s ability to do what she wanted when she wanted, apparently free from that awful need of the Great Ear to fulfill the needs of other people.

  “Then you don’t deserve to find out why I draw such a crowd, do you?”

  Emily was trying to be as inept a secretary as possible. This actually took little special effort. She made so many typos that, by the time she corrected them with white fluid, a letter looked as though it had lined the bottom of a bird cage. She filed using her own whimsical system of free association. If Harold was in the men’s room and she answered the phone while distracted, she was likely to reply, “Sorry, he’s taking a leak.” Her plan was that she’d be kicked upstairs, rather than out on the street. There were women in big jobs in publishing, and they must have come from somewhere. Why not from among the typing pool rejects?

  Meanwhile, she was trying to establish an image of competence in matters other than Correcto-Tape dexterity. She asked Harold for extra work. Stunned, he asked her to read a manuscript that concerned the ways in which female roles in movies and books and plays by men counteracted what was going on in society. When women were faring well socially and economically, they were increasingly debased and assaulted in male fiction. Emily was impressed and spent a lot of time on a plan to rearrange the sections to enhance the argument. The author was a lively attractive woman named Maggie Something. Emily sat in while Harold outlined her plan. Maggie liked it.

  Pleased, Emily said, “I think it’s a wonderful book. But I thought if …”

  “Emily, could you please get us some coffee.” She stared at Harold. “Cream for me. No sugar. Maggie?”

  As Emily stomped to the coffee wagon, she reflected that in the Movement (she could never use that word without associating it with Matt’s infancy and toilet bowls full of soiled diapers) this situation had become a cliché. Most political women had spent years typing and mimeoing and fixing coffee, while the male heavies led the demos, made the decisions and the speeches. Why, then, was she so surprised? Harold’s consciousness wasn’t even in the basement, it was in the crypt—but he’d never claimed it was elsewhere. Maybe he was a pig, but he was no hypocrite, unlike certain other pigs, who would go unspecified.

  Once in Cincinnati she’d been walking down the street toward the community center with a black man from Chicago, Duane. They passed a woman who sat on the sidewalk in an armchair, holding an infant and weeping. Furniture and boxes of clothes and dishes were piled around her. She’d been evicted for not paying her rent because her welfare check had been stolen. Duane and Emily went to the welfare office. He got nowhere, probably because he was both black and belligerent. Emily took over, and through some complicated maneuvers got the woman an emergency rent check. Duane was impressed since he’d never seen Emily do much except make instant coffee and handle the push broom. Back at the office, he said, “Hey, baby, how bout you and me getting something going here?”

  Apart from the fact that Emily liked his woman friend Mary and was aware of how insulted many black women were that black men were going after white women, she was uninterested in Duane. She said with a laugh, “Oh come on, Duane. You don’t want me any more than I want you.”

  His back stiffened, and he said, “Oh yeah, I know all about you Southerners.” He walked out. Leaving Emily crawling with anxiety.

  She’d worked hard trying to uncover her racial prejudices from both a Southern and an American upbringing. It had been like chasing minnows in a stream with bare hands. You thought you had something, then it would slip through your fingers. When you weren’t looking, it would turn into the Loch Ness monster. She was uninterested in sleeping with Duane. Should she sleep with him anyway to prove she was unprejudiced? On the other hand, she hadn’t slept with any white man she was uninterested in. To single Duane out from all the men she was uninterested in, just because of his skin color, seemed prejudiced. The only solution appeared to be to sleep with several men she was uninterested in, white and black, including Duane.

  Then she realized that not only was she uninterested in Duane, she disliked him. But could this be because of his skin color? But there were white men she disliked as much. Also, there were black men she disliked less. She concluded with relief that she wasn’t necessarily prejudiced in this instance.

  Opening the door, she yelled down the street toward some startled winos, “I wouldn’t sleep with you if you were white either!”

  Standing in line at the coffee wagon, she understood that what Harold had just pulled was parallel. In both cases, she’d displayed competence. She’d been assertive. She had to be put in her place: She was “just” a cunt, she was “just” a secretary. It was unconscious on their parts, which made it worse.

  Emily was trembling with such uncontrollable anger that she splashed coffee all over the hallway.

  As she sat typing labels for review copies of the latest novel Harold had edited and listening to the rumble of his and Maggie’s voices, Emily concluded she was hanging out with the wrong crowd. Maria and Kate were good company, but what if lesbianism was communicable? Was this irritation toward men a symptom? Christ, what a horrible thought …

  During the following week she first found Justin’s little idiosyncrasies annoying rather than endearing. The way his jaw cracked when he chewed. She began handing him Kleenexes when he sniffed upon waking—which he would eye irritably and drop unused into the waste basket, still sniffing. She studied his drooping crew socks and bought him new ones with the elastic intact—which he shoved into the back of his drawer.

  She found herself having consciously to itemize all the things she loved about him. His courage: Justin rolled into a ball on her dorm sitting room floor, practicing the nonviolent response to assault. Justin collecting draft cards on the steps to the induction center while poli
cemen yelled into megaphones. Justin in his crash helmet hurling himself at the Pentagon. His blinding generosity: He’d become frantic knowing the government was spending one hundred million dollars a day in Vietnam, and here was this woman whose kid couldn’t go to school because she didn’t have eighteen dollars for a winter coat. Anyone who’d asked him for money for bail, rent, food, got it. He’d known that it occasionally went for liquor or a TV set, and that he had the reputation of being a guilt-ridden sucker, but he hadn’t cared. His intelligence: The ease with which he’d manipulated words and concepts at FORWARD meetings. Emily had had through him a sense of participation in something she still regarded as important—the building of a just and humane world.

  She thought of the afternoons they’d spent at art galleries and concerts and movies. He’d asked her opinions, then corrected them. He’d picked her up out of the dirt and turned her into the clod she was today.

  Then she realized that, like all memories, these were in the past perfect tense.

  At the next women’s meeting everyone tried to drop out. Gail’s plan was to have everyone mention something important that happened that week. The mass exodus began when they got to Susannah, a nurse at the Roosevelt, Levi’s mom. She announced with great pleasure, “I met a man this week!”

  “Oh, no, I don’t want to hear it,” Kate moaned, burying her head in her arms.

  “No, he’s fantastic. He really is.” Maria sighed.

  “Now come on, yall,” murmured Lou, removing her sunglasses to glare at them. “She listened to your crap.” “Tell us all about him, Susannah,” urged Gail. “Well, he’s a social worker.” Emily reflected that in Newland the response to that request would have taken the form, “Well, he’s so and so’s cousin/uncle/son. And he lives in such-and-such a place.”

  “… and, well, talking to him is almost like talking to a woman. I mean, he actually listens. And he doesn’t quote Marx or anything. And he doesn’t try to direct the conversation back to himself. Sometimes he has emotional reactions and stuff …”