Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  I monitor my dreams and sexual fantasies, hoping to reassure myself that I haven’t really “gone straight.” What does it mean that in life I still find women so attractive (viewed as possible bed partners, most men continue to strike me as faintly ridiculous if not downright repulsive) but favor heterosexual scenarios for masturbation fantasies? Erotic dreams about women don’t prove a thing, not as long as I’m with a man and liking it.

  A colleague (lesbian) reads a portion of this memoir: “But your early life just sounds pretty heterosexual. I don’t understand how you got to be this public dyke.” Immediately, I crumple, unable to hear that her comments are about the writing, about a need for more depth and detail. It seems to me she’s criticizing my feelings, leveling the one charge I’m most vulnerable to: certain marks of authenticity are missing from my story. “You say you had a crush on a woman teacher, fantasies about a close friend in college. But lots of women have those kinds of feelings. Did you ever worry about your sexuality? It all sounds so easy.” We’re talking on the phone and I begin to weep uncontrollably, struggling to hide my disproportionate reaction.

  What she seems to be suggesting is all the harder to take because it recalls an uneasiness familiar to me from the period between when I was first consciously attracted to women and when I declared myself a lesbian. I never believed in my right to my desires unless they overwhelmed me—and when they did, still I was afraid that I’d only “worked myself up,” as people sometimes say of children. (The peculiarity of this fear, with its suggestion that sexuality itself is something I do not feel clearly entitled to, points to what I believe to be a major dilemma for many women, no matter what their partners’ gender.) I’d had similar thoughts about attractions to men, but it mattered less because those relationships were considered, by society at large, real enough until proven otherwise. When it came to loving women, the burden of proof shifted radically.

  I accept an invitation to speak to a group of junior high school students on the topic “What is sexual orientation?” The young gay Black man who’s sharing the bill with me agrees that we should speak mostly from our own experiences. The kids, who when we arrive are playing volleyball in the gym of the Catholic school that houses their recreational program, turn out to be curious, friendly, full of guileless stereotypes. We sprint through our erotic biographies; then, realizing we need lots of interaction to hold a squirmy audience, we hastily open the floor to questions. “Which do you like better, men or women?” a blunt little girl demands. I try to insist that that’s not the point, I laugh about it afterward, but I can’t deny her question’s power when it’s precisely the one the entire culture poses. I’ve voted with my cunt, haven’t I? Isn’t that the implication?

  I exited my lesbian life with the brute efficiency of an animal gnawing its flesh to get free of the trap; with the dispatch of someone leaping from a building on fire. Instead of risking life and limb, I risked losing who I was. And I did lose some of it.

  We are marked by the exiles we choose for ourselves, in subtle, daily ways, as someone who changes continents and countries is marked by the shift of language. A telltale accent, light scars on the flesh of speech.

  Sometimes, when I walk the streets of Park Slope, one train stop away from the house I share with Benjamin, I fade back into the old life. In that past we love so obsessively because it is our only total secret and will never come again, I am fresh off the plane from the state of Oregon, defiantly solitary, full of skeptical hope. Dreaming of a women’s revolution I already guess will be mostly metaphor, I have come all the way from Flushing on the G train to walk the shabby, as yet ungentrified park blocks, looking for my future in poems and politics. The darkened streets facilitate my drift, letting me be the looker into lighted houses. Aloft, in apartments carved from servants’ quarters of splendid, crumbling brownstones, women I might love, mothers with tired, imperfect bodies and heavy breasts I’ll solace with my mouth, are tucking daughters into bed.

  TWO

  The Clausen Way

  THERE WAS NO SEX in my childhood, which began in 1950 in Coos Bay, Oregon, and wavered into consciousness in Eureka, California, a timber industry outpost where my father was employed in forest products research. No dirty jokes, no playing doctor or even spin the bottle, no MTV, no R-rated or X-rated movies. Thank God no brothers sticking a hand under one’s dress, no boozy dads creeping into darkened bedrooms to say a lingering good-night, no too familiar uncles after Thanksgiving dinner, no hit-and-run sex ed in vacant lots.

  In the world of my childhood, there was no graffiti. No cocks and balls decorating toilet stalls, no “Ashley gives great head,” no “Pull out, Lyndon, like your father should have.” Certainly no “Sistahs are doin’ it for themselves.” No songs about sugar in bowls and organ grinders and candy men and wagons breaking down. Nobody who couldn’t get no satisfaction. No “Yo, bitch, suck my dick” rap pounding out of neighbors’ windows. No T-shirts reading UNBUTTON MY FLY. No unwed motherhood, no irresponsible paternity.

  What there was was love and marriage, yoked together as in the Frank Sinatra song that I listened to on the neighbors’ hi-fi. Marriage was what rendered you a couple, like Fred and Wilma Flintstone, or Dagwood and Blondie, or Cinderella and Prince What’s-his-name. It was the trick that made the story be over in such a way that it never quite had to end. But above all it was what was on display in my parents’ wedding album, each black-and-white print taking up a whole page and protected by a transparent plastic sleeve, my mother’s elegant white suit the only unconventional touch (why hadn’t she wanted the doll’s dress and crinkly, stiff veil that adorned the dolly bride you saw on wedding cakes in bakeries?); my father that funny thing, a “groom,” but looking handsome, the two of them stagily cutting the cake together, his hand guiding hers on the knife, she holding a fluffy morsel to his lips. Flowers and flowers.

  Their wedding was our family’s founding event, I knew, and I pored over those pictures, not reverently but with a glib interest that took everything for granted, the way a child of privilege might romp on the grounds of a patriarchal estate. Though given to philosophical pondering, I was undetained by the thought that I might have missed being summoned to existence. (My sisters, of course, would have missed being summoned too, but I was the oldest and naturally supposed my own existence counted more.)

  My early knowledge of weddings included this information: following the “giving away” of the bride, the vows and rings and the permitted public kiss, the sweet white cake with the very sweet, slightly brittle frosting, and a trip with the sugary name of honeymoon, the man puts his penis in the woman’s vagina and plants the seed of a baby in her stomach. It occurred to me that the seeding operation would be embarrassing and awkward, but I understood that babies were de rigueur and bodily functions often less than elegant.

  In the world of my childhood, there was no public foreplay, no mama and papa getting high and rowdy, or just impatient for bedtime and eagerly nuzzling. There were no passionate kisses hello or goodbye. Love was wholesome family entertainment. Doors stood open at all hours (or that’s what I remember), and I never heard anything unusual. No creaking beds, no sighs, no orgasmic whimpering. (It never occurred to me that there might be anything to hear.)

  In effect, there was no divorce—that is, it wasn’t talked about, any more than cancer was, except hurriedly, obliquely. Among my father’s siblings, there’d been “broken marriages,” but back then we didn’t hear much about his side of the family. I can’t remember knowing that any children of my acquaintance had separated parents, though surely there were people who’d divorced in the Humboldt Unitarian Fellowship, which my parents belonged to instead of a real church and which seemed to be a kind of catchment basin for all the local oddballs—atheistic biology professors from the state college in Arcata, housewives who aspired to the stage, a raffish woman who’d attempted suicide. There was definitely no homosexuality (though kids at school said Thursday was Queers’ Day and snickered tediously
at anyone caught wearing green, and Edith Pierce, our gray-haired baby-sitter, who walked with a cane because she’d had polio, had lived forever with a woman friend named Opal).

  Was anything said about where not to touch oneself? Perhaps that a certain area wasn’t “sanitary,” like a toilet seat at the filling station, where you had to use the disposable paper cover. There was no objectionable language in my house, except what was intimated by stars and zigzags and exclamation points in the comics. My parents never swore, wouldn’t even say “damn.” Mother said “darn” and “my gosh” instead of “god.” Even certain commonplace vulgarisms, for instance “I’m pooped” or “butt,” were declared off limits to the Clausen children.

  I first encountered the word fuck when I was thirteen and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was a national sensation. Realizing that a novel of the gulag promised to combine two of my favorite literary themes—survival against grim odds (Jane Eyre at Lowood, Fletcher Christian on the Bounty) and the tormented soul of Russia (for a year or two I’d been gnawing my way through Dostoevsky, much to the dismay of my neighborhood librarian)—I opened it eagerly. After reading for a while, I marked my place, got up and stretched, and wandered into the next room to inquire, “Mother, what does ‘motherfucker’ mean?”

  She was ironing. She gave me a stricken look, set the iron on end, and said something like: It means a man who sleeps with his own mother, where did you come across it? Probably she added that it was obscene, as though I couldn’t have gathered as much from her disconcerted gloss. I was as sorry as could be that the early warning system that usually aided me in avoiding inquiry about anything she’d consider “off-color” had failed me this time, but couldn’t help wondering why a term had been invented for such a bizarre and surely uncommon recreation.

  Admittedly, my young life’s remoteness from even the most juvenile rumors of sexual indecorum says a lot about what an aloof child I was generally, sunk in a world of books and bookish thoughts, much more diligent in earning the approval of adults than I was prone to enjoy the rude and joyous company of peers. Still, the very possibility of my remaining so uninformed may suggest that the world I inhabited before 1965 was some version of the garden of sexual purity that so many people today claim to wish to restore for the sake of “allowing children to be children again.”

  Looking back on that world, I would like to point out that blandness is no guarantee of safety, deniability hardly the same as innocence. My lack of information didn’t keep me pure. After all, the standard news of “sex,” the dirty words and clumsy pictures, the so-called facts of who does what and which goes where, often remain at the level of superficial gossip. Deprived of these, I quietly acquired an indelible knowledge of bodily excitation, elaborated an economy of shame, and absorbed without its ever being spoken the awareness that some secret having to do with bodies threatened our world (the grown-ups’ world, hence mine) with spectacular collapse.

  Sex was like race in the world of my childhood: not there, not there, not there. It was a kind of negative space implied by the positive, or an elusive subatomic particle whose presence is inferred from events inexplicable in its absence. How else to account for the fact that, though these things were barely acknowledged, the moment they were put on the agenda, it appeared I already knew so much about them?

  When I was quite small, I was often constipated. My mother tried to correct this condition with prunes, suppositories, close vigilance, and I think perhaps an enema or two, though here my memory is hazy. The glycerine suppositories I remember distinctly: the glass jar they came in; their cool, slightly oily feel when I was briefly allowed to touch one (you couldn’t hold them, the whole point was that they melted); the exposed position, lying on one’s stomach, waiting for the intrusion that couldn’t be called painful yet provoked distinct unease; the wait; the promising pressure; the instruction to hold back. All of it done gently and for my own good, undoubtedly on advice from either Dr. Spock or our family pediatrician, Dr. Fleischer.

  It’s hard to make out, through layers of later feeling (my adult aversion to discussing bowel habits far surpassing any sexual reticence), how I initially responded to this treatment. I imagine, though, that it must have deeply impressed me that a body I didn’t experience as a problem was so clearly problematic to my mother. Later, I would be an eager superintendent of the flesh, unhealthily obsessed through most of my adolescence with eating and not eating. An eventual devotee of aerobic exercise, someone who never diets but weighs herself each morning, exquisitely attuned to the shift in self-image that comes with half a pound gained or lost. Who dislikes to be observed putting things in her mouth, dislikes even more the commonplace conversation that intimates a morality of food, ubiquitous vulgar talk like her own nagging thoughts about what was or will or should or might or shouldn’t be eaten.

  The truth is that my mother’s reaction to my stubborn digestive tract, her worried yet carefully rational intervention, was characteristic of her entire mothering style. Her vigilant concern extended far beyond the physical, to the intellectual and psychological development of her children—and for that very reason, being a modern mother, she understood that her anxieties, too, required management, lest they rub off on tender minds.

  It seems to me that this effort was in vain, that they did indeed rub off. And yet not in vain, because her worries meant that she loved me. At any rate, these efforts to get me to move my bowels provided me a vivid early education in the painful pleasures of exposure, of feeling another’s will worked upon one’s protesting body. The sensations of obedient if resentful surrender—their accompaniment the awareness of being observed in a discreditable condition, and the resultant fusion of shame and excitement—became the stuff of my earliest homemade erotic narratives.

  The ur-fantasy that, at this very young age, probably between five and seven, I began to spin out for myself in bed at night, and that I guarded as my most sordid and thrilling secret: I am the only daughter of a kindly but distant father. My mother is dead. My father engages the services of a young and attractive woman—she seems to combine the skills of a trained nurse and teacher—to care for me and be my constant companion. Because I have severe difficulty moving my bowels properly, her first act as my guardian is to make me undress and subject me to a careful examination. In the following days, she experiments with various measures designed to relieve my symptoms. Of course this treatment involves a good deal of nudity (sometimes she strips to keep me company, we spend a lot of time unclothed together in the woods) and requires that I be closely observed in the most intimate, meltingly erotic moment of all—when, my bodily need at last more exigent than my shame, trembling, I expel my excrement.

  Having to go. Having to come.

  Somewhere around this time I began to believe in a God of hellfire (much against the grain of anything I was hearing from the Humboldt Unitarians), and because I felt that this all-knowing authority could hardly approve of my self-excitation, I tried to think holier thoughts before falling asleep, but met with only limited success. There was another fantasy I tried to stifle as well, one I remember less distinctly, involving tiny naked people, male and female, who were in my power to humiliate and whip (I, who had been spanked with judicious restraint, and only at the rarest intervals).

  So it transpired that on the one hand, swayed by Christian schoolmates and the nuns who got to me in the lobby of the Catholic hospital where my mother, for once insufficiently vigilant, parked me while she visited a friend who’d had a baby, I was worrying about eternal damnation because I hadn’t been baptized and trying to decide whether dolls were included in the commandment forbidding graven images. On the other hand, all on my own, I was cooking up tales that even in a far later, libertine age would cause a red alert on the V-chip. Because I have no memory of masturbating, and the fantasies themselves weren’t precisely “genital,” I can plausibly claim that this wasn’t official sex, that entity in which my childhood was lacki
ng. It was only the raw stuff that sex is made of, as potent as uncut heroin.

  It would appear that at the time, just past my third birthday, when I had to come to terms with the arrival of a sister, I expressed my outrage by renouncing further childhood, forthwith annexing myself to adult society. There I could aspire to be another sort of “only” and did indeed succeed to a considerable degree, basking in compliments on my verbal precocity, enjoying the favor of neighbors and teachers, serving as Father’s little helper out at the building site where he was sawing and hammering up our new home from scratch. Thus I maintained myself at a precarious remove from infant stupidity and its custodian, my mother.

  But wasn’t it also the flesh itself that I was so eager to escape? The nursery world of shit and piss and senseless screams. Of “innocent” nakedness that uneasily recalled my own concurrent experience of self-aware exposure. A world of incessant, voracious feeding. Of human reproduction’s indiscreet physicality, which I witnessed twice in quick succession (a second, even more superfluous sibling trailing the first by eighteen months): my mother’s stomach expanding beneath a maternity smock, understood as the uniform of a mild and dowdy martyrdom; her complaints of varicose veins. The birth itself, of course, was tucked away in the hospital, and infant formula rendered obsolete the queasy miracle of breast milk.

  I was only to have sisters. This world of the body, its dangerous caprices, its pleasures bought at the price of sharp humiliation, was ineluctably female. It was I. But then, in my family it always has felt somehow as though masculinity were recessive.

  So much for the secrets I kept from my adults. Now I come back to their secret, the thing about bodies that seemed to agitate them in much the way that a bucket of quite ordinary water could terrify the Wicked Witch of the West.

  A Jewish woman relates a parable of woman’s modesty, taught to her in religious school: during a dire episode of anti-Semitic persecution, a virtuous Jewish woman was to be tortured for her faith, made an example of, dragged through the streets behind horses. To ensure that her private parts would not be exposed, she took her needle and sewed her skirts to her own flesh. This was female heroism.