Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  “It sounds as though you think he’s pretty special,” suggested Gail.

  “He sounds very nice,” Emily murmured. They could always tell a meeting was in trouble when Lou and Emily reverted to their best Southern manners.

  “Shit, I’m sorry, gang,” announced Maria, sitting up from where she lay on pillows. “But, like, I just can’t handle this group anymore. I think I need a group of lesbians. You straight women still need men—sexually, emotionally, and in some cases financially. But I don’t. And I need support for forming alternative structures. I don’t want to sit around listening to a bunch of heterosexual soap operas.”

  “I’m with you,” Kate grunted.

  Susannah collapsed in tears.

  “Aren’t you being elitist, Maria?” Gail inquired.

  Sammie jumped to her feet and struck a pose so graceful it could have been choreographed for this moment. “Well, that’s just fine with me. Cause, honey, I’ve had it with lying around listening to a bunch of white women moaning. Every black woman I know is earning a living, plus raising her kids, plus trying to prop up a man who’s been so fucked over by Whitey he can’t hardly get out of bed in the morning. You white women are just spoiled children, whimpering around about your O-pression. And whenever you get tired, you can go on back to Daddy or Hubby, and he’ll take care of you. But this stuff is real to black women, honey, and we got to live with it our whole life through …”

  “Now wait just a minute …,” snarled Maria.

  “Aren’t you being elitist?” asked Gail.

  “I got something to say!” Emily yelled. To her surprise, the room fell silent. She couldn’t remember what it was.

  Susannah started talking through her tears. “This group isn’t meeting my needs. This group has never yet met my needs. I’m sure none of you has a clue what I’m talking about. You’ve all been through college …”

  “I ain’t been through no college,” muttered Sammie.

  “… while you were studying all your fancy theories, I was working. Nothing new to me. I’ve been working since I was fourteen. It was me behind that counter at Woolworth’s when you were buying the pens and paper to write your theses. Gail over there whimpering about wanting to go out and work. Shit, go out and work. But I don’t see anything wrong, if I can find a man who wants this too, in me staying home and raising Levi and keeping house. You people are so out of touch with what life is really like for working people that it’s pointless for me even to be here!”

  “Ooh, that’s not fair,” complained Gail. “What we’re talking about here is the ways women have been trained to passivity.”

  Emily remembered what she wanted to say: “Actually, I’ve been thinking for a long time that I need to find me a group of Southern women. The thing that bothers me most, you all don’t even realize how different I am from you. You all go out to work and leave your kids and take lovers and all that—you’re just conforming to your conditioning, and imitating the women who’ve surrounded you all your life. Me, I’m having to fight my conditioning with every move I make …”

  “Aren’t you being elitist?” asked Gail.

  “Would you shut up?” Maria snapped.

  Kate snarled, “Shit, all this Matt’s mom crap. You all know it’s not cool to define yourself through your lovers, so you define yourself through your kids, just like society’s always done. Instead of being able to stand up and say, ‘Hey, I’m me.’ Well, I got no kids. Does that mean I’m not a woman?”

  Gail began talking about the importance of motherhood, her resentment at its being dumped on. She called the group a bunch of man-haters and complained that they were trying to force all men to conform to the same image, just as men did to women.

  “Now listen here, yall!” yelled Lou. “You talk about fucked over, you try being black and a woman and a dyke and Southern and a welfare mother all at once. I ain’t got no sympathy for none of you. But what I think is this: You confront a carrot with a potato, and it’ll probably insist, ‘Hell no, I ain’t no potato. Honey, look at me. Hell, I’m orange, and long and thin. And lookee here, I got me this lacy green top.’ Stops them seeing they’re all in that garden together, and all gonna get dug up come fall.”

  Everyone fell silent.

  “If we stick together, we’re something to be reckoned with. If we split up over our precious differences, we ain’t nothing. Look what happened during civil rights: You had CORE, NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, Urban League, Panthers, Muslims, Toms and Jemimas, Methodists against Baptists, men against women, Southerners against Yankees, college against non-college, militants against cultural nationalists, black capitalists against Marxists, all fighting among themselves. You even had poor whites saying, ‘Maybe I ain’t making it so good, but at least I’m better off than them niggers.’”

  Everyone began nodding in reluctant agreement. And by the end of the evening they were embracing each other, swept with feelings of solidarity with all the women of the world. But as Maria hugged her, Emily felt a sensation shoot through her body that was much more specific. She pulled away, and Maria glanced at her, surprised.

  That weekend Emily went with Maria and Kate to a women’s music festival. The college amphitheater, with its elaborate polished oak woodwork, was packed with women of every size and shape and color, dressed mostly in jeans or overalls, flannel shirts or sweat shirts, boots or tennis shoes. A woman in jeans and suspenders and a flannel shirt, with close-cropped hair, played a guitar and sang love songs to a woman in her backup band. From the corner of her eye Emily saw Maria and Kate were touching fingertips, trying to be unobtrusive so that Emily wouldn’t feel left out. But she did anyway. All around her, women had their arms across each other’s shoulders, were holding hands or pressing thighs. Emily felt titillated. Women making love to women. It was unheard of in Newland, and Emily had always been drawn to anything Newland forbade. If Newland forbade it, it couldn’t be all bad. She decided she adored these tough defiant women lounging all over each other. Her shoulder pressed against Maria’s, and she increased the pressure. Maria smiled and pressed back, and Emily felt a stab of electricity down her arm so intense that her delight transmuted into alarm. She shifted in her seat.

  Meanwhile, on stage women plucked dulcimers about strip mining in Appalachia, shook tambourines over torture in Chilean jails. Women in Frye boots and plaid lumberjack shirts twanged Jews’ harps for the lettuce harvesters in the Imperial Valley. Castanets clattered on behalf of Cuban (pronounced Coo-ban) sugarcane harvesters. Four women in red flannel shirts and bib overalls stood with raised fists, shouting “Puerto Rico libre!” while a flamenco guitar hemorrhaged offstage.

  Emily found herself scowling. She’d just recalled whom she was exiled among: descendants of the Puritans, who arrived in the New World determined to civilize the savages. Their heirs had been pursuing missions ever since. They’d persuaded African tribesmen to cover their loins. They carried the concept of land ownership to the American Indians. They invaded Virginia. They rode Greyhounds through Alabama. They brought Coca-Cola to Cairo, and peace to Pleiku. Like malignant cells from a tumor, they’d colonized the entire world. They couldn’t help themselves. It was in their genes. Out the back door of this building was Harlem, which had gone up in flames eight years earlier. Yet these women had the gall to warble on about injustice in Latin America?

  Emily clenched her teeth. Maria looked at her questioningly. Emily tried to smile politely, but ended up grimacing. The woman who’d opened the concert was now singing about her surprise at first realizing that she was in love with a woman. On one side of the stage was a woman interpreting the song in sign language for the deaf. On the other side a woman did a karate demonstration. Women were passing cardboard buckets through the audience for donations to a lesbian mothers’ legal defense fund. Emily sighed. Civil rights, Appalachia, Vietnam, American Indians, migrant workers, Chile, Puerto Rico. Emily, under Justin’s tutelage, had done them all. Now it was Women. And next week the sisters would be stacked
in someone’s attic like cast-off hula hoops. Political consumerism. Fuck it, she’d been taken in too many times by this Cause-of-the-Month mentality.

  Maria put her arm around Emily in the crush moving toward the exit, murmuring, “One of the nicest things about women is that half the babies they give birth to aren’t male.”

  Emily moved irritably out from under her arm, eyeing Maria’s Badge-for-the-Day with annoyance: “When God created man, she was only joking.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Bunch of self-righteous consumers,” Emily muttered.

  “So what? Why not just relax and enjoy it?”

  “Because next week all you career lesbians will have moved on to the next fad.”

  Maria said curtly, “I doubt it. Many of us have burnt certain bridges. It’d be very difficult for me to go back to men.”

  “I’ve seen it happen time after time. People seize on a cause, devote their lives to it, get bored, and cast it off like last summer’s Top Ten records. Besides, anything this many Yankees agree on can’t be right.”

  “You see it as a series of fads. But I see it as a progression.”

  “Yeah, but you Yankees always equate change with progress. You’ve obviously never lost a war.”

  Maria laughed. “But in this case I think it really is progress.”

  “How?”

  “Well, during civil rights, women found themselves cleaning the Freedom House while the brothers were off being interviewed for the evening news. And then Stokely Carmichael came out with that bit about the only position for women in the struggle being prone. Then Cleaver described how he raped white women to get even with white men, practicing up first on black women. And then during Vietnam, the women were trying to find ways to pay the phone bills, while the men were out dumping blood on draft records. But some of us began realizing it was men who were dropping napalm, men who were making fortunes manufacturing war materials. Men who lynched blacks, men who wouldn’t pay them decent wages. Government, business, churches, the military—all run by men. They’d set up this shitty world and were benefiting from it … Sorry, I didn’t mean to lecture.”

  “It’s OK. I’m used to it.”

  Maria stuck out her tongue. “But anyway, Emily, even if I agreed with you about it’s being nothing but fads, so what?”

  “I like serious people.” Two women were kissing passionately by the doorway. Emily glared at them. Bunch of goddam fly-by-night Yankees.

  “But we are serious while we’re embracing whatever it is. And we’re equally serious about whatever we move on to. You’re saying you have to be eternally devoted to the same things? The one true love that lasts a lifetime? Honestly, you poor saps and your Lost Causes. This continuity and stability Raymond used to carry on about—it’s all a big joke. People die, houses burn down, rivers dry up, mountains crumble. Why not just accept flux?”

  “Accepting it is one thing, seeking it is something else. You people are constantly changing jobs, apartments, lovers, ideologies, cars. As though by changing the surface appearance of your life you’ve accomplished something. Where I come from nothing changes from one decade to the next.”

  “Where’s it gotten you?”

  “Where’s there to get?”

  “So why are you living here?”

  Ignoring Maria’s last question, Emily reached home determined to make her marriage and the verities on which it was founded endure. She often felt scorn reading Sally’s boring letters about teething and new slipcovers and Bake-off recipes, but Sally had had the right idea all along: She considered it a privilege to make life easier and more pleasant for the people she loved. Emily defrosted the refrigerator, vacuumed under the couch, even paired and rolled the socks in Justin’s drawer.

  But Justin failed to notice because he’d taken to lying on the hall floor full time. The last straw was when a large paper company accepted his proposal regarding a public service announcement for television on their anti-pollution program. “I mean, I can see it all spread out before me, man,” he said. “Like, I’ll do it, and they’ll love it. They’ll hire me to do more. On their recommendation, other firms will hire me. I’ll start, like, renting offices, buying equipment, hiring employees. Eventually I’ll, you know, go public. Sell shares, get bought up by a conglomerate. Retire to the Bahamas, spend my days fishing and lying in the sun. Man, it’s just too awful.” He buried his face in the crook of his arm. “I’m so depressed.”

  Emily was kneeling by his side trying to think how to comfort him. “I know what’s bugging you, Justin. It’s that party last week at Morris’s, isn’t it?”

  He nodded miserably.

  Most of FORWARD had been there. Ralph, a doctor now, had insisted on wearing his green operating clothes all evening, with an electronic pager at his waist. Morris, a lawyer, kept working Latin phrases into his conversation: Sub rosa, de jure, habeas corpus. Bud, a stock analyst, would whip out his pocket calculator to prove his points. Morris and his wife Susan served daiquiris made in a Waring blender. They barbecued steaks on a hibachi on the iron landing outside their Brooklyn Heights apartment

  “Emily, Morris boiled ears of corn.”

  “There, there, it’s all right, dear.” Emily scratched his back gently.

  Dessert had been apple pie and Neapolitan ice cream. Everyone fondled new babies, and discussed vacation homes in Vermont, sailboats, and auto loans. These were the people with whom Justin had once plotted the Revolution.

  Justin’s major problem, as Emily saw it, was that he had planned on either Utopia or Armageddon. He had made no arrangements for dealing with the same tired old world he’d grown up in. Once you’d been a hero, how did you revert to being an ordinary mortal? Besides, it was in his genes to fight the sabre-toothed tiger.

  “I feel used,” he moaned. “Devoured. Like an empty cereal box. Like Miss January for Fruit-of-the-Month Club.”

  “But you achieved important things,” Emily insisted, trying on Maria’s point of view. “Like what?”

  “Well … uh … I mean you can’t list things just like that. But a lot of learning went on.”

  “Like what?”

  Like about the limitations of collective human endeavor. “Hell, I don’t know, Justin. That’s your department.” Emily was feeling guilty. She for one had used Justin—to gain acceptance in FORWARD. Then she’d called it “love,” but recently she’d begun to wonder.

  In the old days Justin’s spirits would sometimes sag, but Emily was always able to cheer him up by telling him how important his projects were, assuring him how intelligent and competent and irresistibly sexy he was. Her words alone could make him puff up like a bullfrog about to croak. But the Great Ear was losing her touch. His strategy sessions and teachins and rallies and marches and committee meetings and phone trees and leaflet writing—they now seemed like designs children make against the night sky with a sparkler. The sparkler goes out, and you’re left with only the empty black night. Emily was just beginning to realize how lucky the women had had it. All along they’d been cleaning and getting food on the table and tending the children. The Utopian expectations had collapsed, dragging some of the men down into a nightmare of the soul. But the women were just grooving along on the same old survival trip.

  Emily wanted to help. Justin had helped her when she was an intimidated Tennessee hick. Besides, it was her role as Wife in this marriage she was determined to make work. She tried and she tried, but none of the Great Ear’s old tricks got him up off the floor.

  He decided to go for a few weeks to a meditation center upstate, which someone in his Advanced Massage course had recommended, to try to “get my head together.” At first Emily panicked and tried to persuade him that she was all he needed. But gradually the Great Ear conceded defeat.

  Joe from the art department brought Harold the jacket design for Maggie’s book. Harold exclaimed over it, then called Emily to see it. The title was Making the Second Sex Suck: Women in Male Fiction. The illustration was
of Marilyn Monroe, her neckline plunging almost to her nipples. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth, pursed, looked remarkably vaginal, and in readiness for the insertion of a large cock.

  “What do you think, Emily? Isn’t it great?”

  “Very nice.”

  “Fantastic,” he assured her, walking back to his desk. “She thinks it’s fantastic,” he said to Joe.

  Suddenly Emily saw herself as Stepin Fetchit: “Yassuh, that noose is mighty fine. Law, it fits so good and snug! Why, boss, you just the smartest thing!”

  She crept back into Harold’s office. “Actually, Harold, I think it’s awful,” she whispered.

  Harold and Joe stared at her.

  “You’re doing just what Maggie’s book says—degrading a serious achievement”

  Harold gave a short laugh. “But I like women,” he protested. “Some of my best bunnies are women.” He and Joe killed themselves laughing. The corners of Emily’s mouth twitched: She had to smile at her bosses’ bad jokes. It was her job. By burning at least three hundred calories in her facial muscles alone, she managed not to.

  “The trouble with you women’s libbers,” said Harold, “is that you have no sense of humor.”

  She looked at him. She hadn’t known she came across as a “women’s libber.” She’d thought she was well-established as the Great Ear, at least here if no longer at home. “… apart from exploiting female sexuality to sell your product,” she added, amazed at her daring.

  “That’s what we’re all here for—to sell books. I’m sure Maggie wants as many people as possible to read it.”

  “But the people who buy it on the basis of that jacket will be disappointed by the content. And people who’d be interested in the content won’t buy it because of that repulsive jacket.”

  “So who asked you?”

  She decided not to point out that he had.