Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  It wasn’t what I’d expected—that she’d make the first move, yet put herself, as it seemed, in my hands. To me she was still the teacher, the older woman (she was thirty, I was twenty-five), the proud possessor of lesbian seniority. She was the one with the doctorate (in American Studies), the child (Emma, just shy of five), the automobile (a scruffy Dodge Dart). She was a New Yorker born and bred, and though she couldn’t technically call herself a red diaper baby, her family had traveled in left-leaning circles. While I did alienated labor for my paycheck from Scholastic, she threw herself into a movement job as assistant director of the Women’s Center of Brooklyn College. Her work made concrete changes in real women’s lives: she organized coming-out workshops and reproductive health panels, she counseled battered women, she accepted invitations to speak to psychology classes so that straight college students could see for themselves that a lesbian wasn’t a mythical beast.

  After my move to Brooklyn, we’d renewed the acquaintance begun in her Women’s School class so many months ago. She’d been enthusiastic about my new work, poems composed since joining Seven Women Poets. I’d slipped them into her mailbox in the hope of getting published in the anthology of contemporary lesbian poetry that she and Marge were co-editing. I was overjoyed that she deemed me enough of a peer to discuss this project with me, and to ask for my opinion on drafts of the poetry reviews she’d been writing for the Manhattan women’s paper, Majority Report. There was talk of a cooperative self-publishing scheme whereby Marge, Les, and I, together with Mara from the poetry group, would issue our poetry books under a common imprint. This plan would give each writer or editor control of her own project while averting the stigma of vanity publication; we would share distribution and publicity efforts.

  What with Emma’s early bedtime and other constraints of motherhood, discussions of these matters usually meant my dropping by Les’s humid top-floor apartment on Third Street. I remember only snatches of those crepuscular interviews: a Bonnie Raitt record low on the stereo, a naked girl-child’s skinny sprint from bath to television, a dish of Breyer’s peach ice cream, an ambiguous hug good-bye. (I was still nursing my crush on the teacher, but after a winter of romantic disappointments didn’t dare to get my hopes up.) Wanting to display my sensitivity, but also truly curious, I’d inquired into the mysteries of single parenthood. “It can be hard,” was the answer I got, “but Emma sort of takes care of me too sometimes.”

  I pieced together a picture of Les’s origins. A child of lower-middle-class parents with recent roots in Eastern Europe, she’d grown up in the Bronx, a member of the upwardly mobile, white ethnic masses that the city university system routinely subjected to speech instruction meant to reform the despised New York accent. She wore her ethnicity with the diffidence of those secular New Yorkers who, far from the Christian heartland, grow up regarding their Jewishness as rather ordinary, as no more remarkable, say, than the local tradition of suspending alternate side of the street parking rules for Purim and Sukkot. She spoke of her academic training, her dissertation on Malcolm Cowley, and what sounded like a singularly bloodless marriage to Emma’s father, Artie Kaplow, a chemistry professor, in much the same tone I took toward my own prelesbian years: with a touch of cynicism, but really as something too remote, too little relevant to her feminist activist present, to occasion deep regret or lasting anger. It was common wisdom among lesbian feminists that we so-called “man-hating dykes” were really far less enraged at men than were a lot of straight women. After all, we didn’t have to sleep with them, and even those of us who weren’t explicit separatists usually managed to transact a major portion of life’s business in woman-friendly settings.

  Now she lay with her head in my lap, and the admission this implied, after weeks of indirection, felt stunningly intimate—the great rejoicing, I’d written, of finding something that seemed lost, of touching something that seemed forbidden, removed forever. That night we held hands while waiting on line to get into the theater performance, and I felt the old twinge of self-consciousness, mingled with shy pride, at the public display. It seemed like an announcement, committing me to something. The all-female audience, which contained familiar faces, including former members of our Women’s School class, gave me my first taste of being an official item in the fishbowl we were getting used to dignifying with the monolithic title of the Women’s Community.

  The show that night was good-natured, highly creative agitprop, all the more enjoyable for feeling homemade, openly defiant of the standards and methods of professional, male-dominated theater. I remember almost nothing of the substance, but I do recall a cranky. A common accessory to political street theater in those days, it was a sort of continuous mural, painted on butcher paper and scrolled around two long sticks. As helpers “cranked” the mural, slowly revealing successive frames, the actors would illustrate the contents. I also recall an opening song—“It’s all right to be woman . . . big belly, rough hands, sore back,” something like that. It sounds simple enough, even simpleminded, an easy mark for snickering putdowns of “seventies feminism” (I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar), but it didn’t come off that way. Instead it seemed that all of us there, actors and audience, were discovering something we couldn’t have known so deeply without this collective emotional experience. We were acknowledging, together, with humor and anger, how deeply un-all right being woman has always been. What might have come across as cant a couple of years later (and would likely have faced the apt criticism that “woman” exists in the heroic singular only in the minds of white, middle-class feminists) was hard-won truth in June 1975.

  Afterward, Leslie and I took the subway back to Brooklyn. We headed for Third Street, having agreed already—laughing self-consciously, wanting to have it settled—to spend the night together. Les put a record on her stereo, one of a group of female vocalists she fancied. In that era before the heyday of “wimmin’s music,” her favorites were on the country-and-western end of rock, protofeminist in their lyrics. She put her arms around me, and we danced, clumsy with uncertainty and longing. Soon she led me through Emma’s room, booby-trapped with playthings, to her own over-the-stairs cubbyhole with its window framing a nineteenth-century view of flat roots and a silhouetted steeple. Deep in the night, she turned to me, and said, “It’s been so long since I’ve had to use the second pillow.”

  I felt what I always feel when I’m in love, what I never get tired of feeling: that to be alone, so private, in the night with just this other is impossible good luck, a mysterious lapse in life’s austerity program, perhaps to be paid for later. Her body came to me then as recompense for deprivations that might have commenced prenatally, so familiar did they feel. Would I forego the comfort to be spared the need for it? I couldn’t say. Like being born, it strikes me as one of those things it’s just as well to have no choice about.

  Since my few-nights’ stand with Marge over six months ago, I’d been mucking around in a slough of frustration. My recent erotic adventures fell into two categories. On one hand, I hankered for women who didn’t want me. After Marge, I’d suffered humiliating tortures over Madeleine, a marvel of passive aggression, to whom I’d offered myself as bluntly as I dared, getting nothing for my pains but a sleepless night on her couch, one cynical kiss in her car while the engine ran, and some fevered lyrics for my new manuscript, which was called After Touch. Alternatively, I’d tried to make do with nice women I didn’t want.

  It was as though, now that I was acclimating to another gender, I had to review all over again the difference between finding people attractive in theory and actually lusting after them. My artist-poet friend Liz and I had fooled around one winter night, and I’d been dismayed by how badly that had gone. Touching her felt somehow incestuous, suffocating, much though I admired from afar her cropped hair and old-fashioned face, an Irish Catholic face on a militant anti-imperialist. I thought her fetching when, a little high, she enacted at parties a kinetic lip-synched version of the Supremes’ erotic agony, O, baby love, her
little mouth like a puncture wound. But she was, I decided, a sister, not a lover.

  For some weeks in spring I’d consorted with a pale-fleshed innocent named Tish, who was fresh off the boat from the heartland. We’d picked each other up at the Duchess. Barely a feminist, clingy and wistful, she had come to New York to be a lesbian, but seemed overwhelmed by the project, inclined to throw herself on my mercy. I found her boring “as a person,” as they say, but rather liked her in bed, a discovery that filled me with guilty, rakish glee. I imagined I was using her as a man might, or a butch. Once, drunk, I moaned I love you when I came; after that, I realized I’d better break it off. Next I started spending ambiguous time with yet another acquaintance from the Women’s School: Bea, with big brown eyes and overalls, a short upper lip like the little princess in War and Peace, and the sexless cuteness of a glossy, dark-furred mammal. She was very nice and had good politics, and I felt apologetic that we didn’t go to bed, though possibly she was as relieved as I when we stopped calling each other.

  So much for my brave notion, floated two years before, that my relationships to women might take a completely different shape from my exclusivity with men. I was after a “one and only,” and principles be damned—though when Leslie came along I tried to slow things down a little. We both did, we thought it was good for us, a sign of maturity to schedule nights apart, wryly referred to as “enforced celibacy.”

  Besides, I was sensitive to public opinion. Liz, for instance, apprised of developments, looked dubious and indicated that it was all very well if what one wanted was monogamy. She was getting more politically serious, hanging out with the heavies at the New York Women’s School, women from Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, as stern as Jacobins, who’d staged a coup and now ran the place. In the time-honored fashion of sectarians everywhere, they’d made short work of anyone whose program differed by a comma from theirs (Live like her, Madame Binh, A luta continua, Support the Republic of New Afrika). Unwilling to argue with them, Les sensibly steered clear. I found it harder to keep my distance, in part because I agreed with much of PFOC’s analysis and couldn’t resist (though I feared) their purity. They were clearly prepared to sacrifice more than I, a credential that lures me time and time again, no matter how I bridle at the self-righteousness and rigidity of vision that tend to accompany it. It’s always the same story with me and absolutist politics. I’m the cautious moth that hangs around the candle, gets lightly scorched but declines to be immolated.

  From Liz I gathered they saw monogamy as a disease of capitalism, a view hardly original with them, and one I thought had its merits but was far too greedy for happiness to heed.

  Memories of those first months. The sensation of being in a lover’s body: I don’t mean only literally, but as though her flesh and bone were my horizon, my total environment. Lying down and having hours disappear, time stretched, compressed, in unaccustomed ways. Always, afterward, a quaint surprise to check the clock.

  Losing the sense of an ending. “I can’t stop.” Or: “Is it all right if we stop?” Because (she showed me) we could go on and on, pleasure becoming other than pleasure, the way, when I saw the mountains in Alaska, I had to ask myself if this was really beauty, if beauty wasn’t rather beside the point.

  Her generous breasts, resented by their owner (not for her my insouciant bralessness), I found glorious. Her gesture, dressing, tucking them away (“the girls,” we called them, both hers and mine), shrugging impatiently to settle them in their places—so little self-tenderness she had. Then slipping on a pastel cotton print top, an Indian import purchased on the Lower East Side, where she taught me to shop on the Sundays of our freedom, precious days when Emma’s father picked her up at nine and we’d take the train to the city, as we say in the outer boroughs. There was a Sunday half fare then; you paid on the trip out, receiving a transfer that let you return for free. We’d both reached adulthood with basically Depression-era values and relished the minuscule savings.

  She wore those cotton tops over faded Wrangler jeans. I can see her in one the color of orange sherbet, soft from many washings. Her hair too, then, was soft, a femmy touch, allowed the length to curl mildly over ears and neck, presenting a contrast to her sturdy features—decisive nose, imposing forehead, unmistakably hers even in baby pictures, which show her absurdly, endearingly posed like a bald future statesman in a pinafore—that seemed more in line with her “masculine” body language. (How to describe these attributes as I saw them, attractive womanly combinations? Is the scandal of “mannishness”—as the gender police would have it—simply that of a woman unwomanned by dress and carriage? Isn’t it, rather, that she remains a woman, despite her defiance of all-important rules that delimit the category?) Of course she didn’t wear makeup; none of us did then, ever. She didn’t shave her legs, but they were elegantly smooth. A few stray hairs below the knee could be easily overlooked. I was the one with the shockingly hairy calves, which throughout my adult life I’ve maintained in an unimproved state that I never cease to feel panicky about when the gender police are looking.

  What did it signify that, in later years, she cut her hair severely shorter, adopted a more consistently butch wardrobe of T-shirts, turtlenecks, solid-color tank tops? as though the abundant hair, the shirt with its gathered yoke, smacked impermissibly of prettiness. Does the change, a subtle one, hint at increased disdain for any concession to “femininity,” to the openness, the luxuriant side of her that could flower, too, in sex? It suggests to me a mistrust of contradiction, a will to shape and discipline the world, starting with her own body. But maybe she’d argue that the softness I recall was itself a concession to gender policing—via the world’s opinions, the mirror’s tyranny, a conventional mother’s early panic at a daughter’s boyishness. Internalized oppression is a complicated business. Maybe it just took that long to say fuck it, ditch the last trappings of Park Slope housewifery, cut her hair short enough that the ladies in their pumps, clutching their purses, fussing with tinted curls, would do a double take when she entered a public rest room.

  What do I know? I’ve lived differently with my so different gender sorrows, my thirty years’ war with what I’m supposed to look like, inveterate delight in a clean summer tonsure, scalp shining through the stubble and on the street the other day a woman stopped and asked was I a Buddhist? (Yet always the dangly earrings insist I’m a girl.) I know my own contempt of cosmetics and frills, time and money squandered on mere appearance, the aggression I nurse behind the implicit challenge: this is my body, take it or leave it. (But still I extract, with tweezers, behind closed doors, eight stubborn beard hairs and portions of a mustache; I step on the scale each morning upon arising.) I can only say I liked that early softness.

  Leslie planned to take a week’s vacation in August, when Emma would be staying with her father, and asked if I’d like to go camping in New England. That’s when I found out about the psychic complications that lurked beneath her businesslike, highly competent demeanor. A few days before the trip she panicked, confessed she wasn’t sure she could handle a week away from work and her daily routines, a week in the woods with me. I had to rush to Third Street late at night to reassure her. I was unprepared for what I managed to pry out of her: she feared the emotional chaos she thought might descend if she ceased to function (even for a week!) at top efficiency in the highly structured setting afforded by her job and life with Emma.

  I was alarmed but secretly not entirely displeased. Here was a challenge suited to my talents. All I had to do was convince her to relax, not go rigid at the prospect of letting me in a little. All I had to do was show her she could trust me. And I sensed she could be persuaded. (Of course I had no qualms about my own trustworthiness.) It gratified me—more than that, fulfilled a long-standing fantasy—to imagine myself in the role of rescuer of this woman I perceived as both admirably strong and achingly vulnerable.

  We left for points north, I sporting the radical stubble of my shortest haircut to date. Somewhere
on the New England Thruway we had a scary blowout, the tire reduced to what looked like the shreds of a burst balloon scattered up and down the highway. The state trooper who pulled up while Les was putting on the spare (a simple skill I disproportionately admired) cheered me by mistaking me for a boy. At the campsite in New Hampshire we had a major fight, partly about why she wouldn’t say “I love you,” and stayed in the tent for hours the following morning making up wordlessly. We then showed up at a rural diner at some impossibly late hour, requiring eggs and home fries, I with one eye swelled shut from an insect bite. We swam in tidy lakes and fought again because we had to stop in Maine so she could go to May Sarton’s on an academic errand involving someone’s dissertation. (I moaned about feeling like a poor relation, a dropout, a humble prole among the profs.) By the time we returned to Brooklyn, certain things had gotten settled. Most importantly, we’d dispensed with the taboo against talking as though our romance might possibly have a future.

  In August, I flew west and came out to my mother, who seemed, as I’d expected, toughened against the shock by all the sexual slings and arrows I’d flung her way in years gone by. I left it up to her to tell my father.

  I wrote to Leslie as often as I could manage and still appear, as we said jokingly, “mature and independent.” On the Oregon coast, I bought her a beautiful silver ring and mailed her a funny postcard—a photograph of a heap of half-opened razor clams, a dead ringer for pussy-in-a-shell.

  “What will Emma think about my being here?” I’d asked, maybe the second time I slept over at the Third Street apartment. I already had my eye on the long haul. Les, who’d recently been in several brief relationships with triangular complications, answered blithely, “Oh, probably nothing much. She’ll probably just want you to read a story to her or something.” In later years we often reminisced about the laughable inadequacy of our planning for the overwhelming task of coparenting, a project that combined the well-advertised pitfalls of stepfamilies with the murky challenge of raising a child in a lesbian feminist partnership. As if it wasn’t bad enough that I could have no legal guarantee for my connection to Emma, our relationship was constantly undermined by the lack of social support for it. Within “the community,” kids were still something of an exotic item; outside it, our family was either invisible or a scandal. This was long before Heather acquired two mommies; we lacked even the language to describe who Emma and I were to each other. As she and I grew closer, it rankled that her father, who took a minimal hand in her routine care, was seen by the world as crucial in her life, while my role went unacknowledged.