Apples & Oranges

by Jan Clausen

  Emma’s presence figured significantly in her mother’s and my decision, made in the winter following the summer of our courtship, to move in together. I’d begun to resent the amount of time I spent on their turf, an arrangement prompted by the difficulty of entertaining a child away from home. In truth, however, this spatial difficulty was only symptomatic: even though Les’s impressive adult credentials, from mommyhood to doctorate, were part of what had drawn me to her, I now fretted at the imbalance they created. I resented being the one to have to fit into her life, her schedule. I found it next to impossible to be a gracious third party to the difficult yet durable alliance of an only child and a single parent.

  In my first few months with Les, I’d vicariously sampled the mysteries of that setup, had observed how triage becomes a way of life. I knew how she rushed to get away from work and make it to day care by six o’clock; I’d watched her let herself be wheedled into a candy store treat to fuel the trek to Herzog’s Delicatessen, where she’d buy whatever seemed easy, cooked chicken or cold cuts, something for a five-year-old to pick at between hits of sugar. She’d get Emma settled while fixing her own dinner, some hasty combination of protein and vegetables. Eat it on the living room couch, off the wooden crate that served as a dining table, Emma seated cross-legged on the stylish, grimy rug, a remnant of brownstoning days. Wipe up spills. Tweeze splinters out of feet (“I told you not to go barefoot on this floor”). Supervise bath, toothbrushing, bedtime’s rituals of delay. Get waked up nearly every night to provide reassurance. Locate, every morning, socks and underpants for two amid formidable disorder (“I’m messy like my mommy,” Emma once told me proudly). Cope with evil dreams and stomach flu, fevers and rashes of unknown provenance. And how do you entertain an only child all day on Saturday, and still have time to be an editor and writer?

  Emma possessed a strength of character often lacking in more cheerful, accommodating children. A somber streak belied real resilience. I remember her as a fairly social girl, always with a couple of friends her own age and attention from a variety of adults, a number of whom, in that child-sparse environment, went out of their way to befriend her. Yet I see her hanging back, watching things, her blue eyes ringed by the worried shadows that grown-ups deem unchildlike.

  Leslie clearly wasn’t a gung ho nurturer, and Emma was temperamental, often sulking or exploding, but they clung to each other with a dogged loyalty that wasn’t to be challenged. As Les and I would say of our own connection later on, they’d “been through thin and thin together”; I couldn’t compete with that. Still, I felt I would count for more with Emma, and consequently feel less resentful (less—let’s face it—like the pouting sibling rival to my own lover’s daughter), the more I developed an independent relationship with her. And that, I thought, would come more easily if Leslie and I merged our households.

  These stated reasons for our move—for, in effect, our marriage—were sensible enough, but only part of the story. My motives were many, inconsistent. Did I fear that my lover and her daughter would get away from me if I didn’t bind them to me? I know that the hardships of their situation made me yearn to shelter them. I had wildly mixed feelings about family life, yet I wanted to get inside, to feel included. I was drawn to mothers, to being a mother’s suitor-savior (three of my four female lovers had been mothers of young daughters), and also drawn to mothering a child. I thought of it as a chore, a sacrifice, and an experience I couldn’t afford to pass up. It seemed like a gauntlet thrown down before my claim to womanhood, a gender challenge I couldn’t dismiss with quite the casualness of my stance toward sexual conventions.

  Viewed from another angle, my plunge into family was only one of several large changes I made at twenty-five. Not only did I become an instant flommy—the word Les and I coined for my relationship to Emma—but I self-published my first book. After Touch appeared in the fall; in late winter the three of us moved to the ground floor of a limestone on Sixth Street, the first of three apartments we’d share over the next dozen years. In those same months, Les and I and another couple founded an ambitious literary magazine. From the energy with which I abruptly tackled my own transgressive version of all the adult commitments, you’d almost think I was trying to compensate for my years of preferring not to.

  It’s a strange thing to grow into life with a child, to start out defended and wary and win your way nearer to the feelings of belonging that biological families supposedly inherit as a mystery of blood. I wish I could have known from the beginning how much I’d love Emma later—that we, too, would stick together through thin and thin. Maybe that would have helped me relax into the job. As it was, home often seemed like a place of madly competing needs—Emma’s need for attention and physical care, my need for solitude and adult time with Leslie, Les’s need for me, for relief from parenting chores, for time to do her work. Her frankness about feeling trapped by motherhood was a boon to me insofar as it justified my own ambivalence. Ambivalent or not, we still had to cope with Emma’s tantrums and tension headaches, with getting her to school and home from day care afterward, with making breakfast and lunch and dinner, with setting limits, rationing sugar, chaperoning sleepovers, buying clothes, arranging trips to the beach, the zoo, the movies, seeing that homework got done, attending parent-teacher night (the teachers coped tactfully with the anomaly of my presence).

  Early on, Emma and I had a dramatic power struggle. I recall in particular one dreadful session where I forcibly bathed her, holding her down and removing her clothes when she refused to do it herself, slapping her on her pale bony bottom, my crime confirmed by the lingering crimson palm print. I learned an important lesson: don’t hit. But I still hadn’t a clue about how to manage her, or my own rage when one of her tantrums descended, inexorable as some outsize meteorological event, effectively disrupting all surrounding activity for the unpredictable duration. Often her child’s emotions humbled me, bringing me face to face with my own childishness, with feelings that mocked my cherished pretensions to maturity and control.

  Although Les and I had agreed on separate bedrooms (they doubled as offices), I felt I had too little space. Dismayed at the way in which my life now revolved around other people’s schedules and emotions, I was also ashamed of my self-centeredness, my reluctance to embrace the common woman’s lot of devotion to others. I consulted a therapist, told her I thought of leaving, used the sessions as a way to convince myself to stay. I’d already said enough goodbyes to last a lifetime. I hoped things would get easier.

  Our life as three certainly did improve with practice, yet I can’t help thinking now that Les and I sometimes cheated our daughter (and ourselves) by treating daily life as a resented obligation. We took turns with Emma, trying to give her what she needed, but we didn’t have a lot of fun at it. What Leslie and I enjoyed were the adult activities of subverting the social order, honing language, theorizing. Domesticity was bread and water, what you got through so you could go out and play with the big feminists.

  Sometimes I thought that there was something wrong with our attitude, but I never did anything about it. I was too guilty about my own less than inspired mothering, too invested in my role of rescuer, too used to viewing life as an endurance contest. Nor was I eager to go against Les’s clear reluctance to have large areas of her feeling-life questioned. Why was she so bitterly rebellious against the mother role, why could she find no joy in it? Why did she go to such lengths to avoid any but the most formal, bureaucratic dealings with her ex-husband, disdaining even the minimal show of cooperation that might have eased things for Emma? Why did she refuse to interact with relatives who looked harmless enough to me? These attitudes weren’t to be discussed, it was not to be suggested that they were based on mutable, highly subjective reactions to real difficulties. It was as though to press the point would violate Les’s emotional rights.

  My discomfort with her touchiness developed gradually, as I grew to recognize the defects of her virtues. Anger at men, estrangement from biological
family, a resentful sense that caring for others demanded too much sacrifice of self—all were common among the lesbians we knew and familiar in my own life. I prized the courage of Les’s survivor stance, the clarity of her judgments. I defended her against people who thought her judgmental, went along with her division of the world into the trusted few to whom she displayed passionate loyalty and the many she had no time for. Being with her, on her side, made me feel clear and righteous, too; being first in her intimate circle made me feel special. The fact that her determined competence coincided with an air of brave beleaguerment made living with her strenuous but exciting. The starkness of it struck me as completely plausible.

  It wasn’t just my sense of familial duty that often wore me out in those years. There was also my duty to the world at large. I steeped myself in effortful good works, interviewing lesbian writers by mail for an article on “The Politics of Publishing and the Lesbian Community,” joining other Brooklyn members of CARASA (Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse) in an attempt to move the citywide group in an anti-racist direction, attending marathon meetings of women from different groups like Wages for Housework and the Socialist Workers Party, who wanted to organize a Mother’s Day demonstration but couldn’t agree on “principles of unity.” I accompanied Liz and the anti-imperialists to Philadelphia for a day of protest against the Bicentennial celebration. Les and I and Emma rose at dawn and piled onto a chartered bus to D.C. for a demonstration at the Supreme Court at the time of the Bakke affirmative action case. (We won’t go back, send Bakke back. Famous last words.) “Life is hard,” I told Emma when she kvetched; it gave me pause when I heard her repeat this maxim to her cat, Willa, the cranky tabby who acted out her angst by caroming around the apartment, her rough gray fur standing up as though she’d been petted against the grain.

  I wasn’t the only one rushing into stability. Despite Liz’s scruples about monogamy, this was a closely coupled time, at least in the lesbian literary circles that increasingly shaped my sense of “the women’s community.” Many influential cultural institutions—presses, bookstores, magazines, including those that aspired to a collective structure—ran largely on the energies of women in pairs. (“Stability” was, however, far from an absolute state: breakups often severely stressed community-building efforts; even in cases that confirmed the happy legend of lesbian ex-lovers turning into friends, the transition was rarely completely frictionless.) Of course I don’t mean that we thought of it this way, any more than heterosexuals tend to think of marriage as a means to cheaper health insurance. We simply took it for granted that a literary couple enjoyed extra clout.

  In letters as in life, Les and I and our friends saw ourselves as unprecedented, our identities ever under arduous construction. A critical mass of women-loving feminist literati simply hadn’t existed before us, let alone a group like ours that combined a passion for art with a passion for social justice. Despite our contempt for the separatist fantasy that women could jettison “the prick in our heads” and start from scratch, we enjoyed a heady sense of being present at the creation—if not of a brand-new world, then of a radical new way of living in the old one. Thus anointed and burdened, we managed to reconcile our keen ambitions with the sobering knowledge that our chutzpadik dissent from both standard sex and standard politics virtually guaranteed our exile from official culture. (Fish without bicycles can kiss the mainstream good-bye.) At a time in which being an open lesbian was tantamount to renouncing all hope of having one’s writing taken seriously by anyone but other lesbians, we trained to be secret leaders, guerrilla poets, public intellectuals whom the public had never heard of.

  Leslie’s and my involvement in editing, reviewing, writing, and the feminist small press movement played a part in creating the new lesbian literary culture, a culture that in turn shaped our family on both symbolic and material levels. With so many of our friends also involved in “lit biz” and organizing, there was never a clear-cut boundary between work and play, between the haven of home and the noisy arena of lesbian lefty politicking. The fact that we both did freelance work from the apartment (after leaving her Women’s Center job, Les consulted on special programs for the New York City Board of Education) increased our shabby lair’s resemblance to the type of eighteenth-century household that served as the center of a family’s economic life. Whole rooms were given over to warehousing boxes of books and magazines. Emma grew up helping out with mailings, counting among her surrogate aunts lesbians whose writings would later be standard fare on the syllabi of her college women’s studies courses. The feedback loop got increasingly convoluted as I wrote poems, stories, novels, and essays that drew on my home life, in part as a way of infusing families like ours with a social “realness” they’d hitherto lacked—then saw some of that writing become a lightning rod for the storms that raged among lesbian cultural politicians.

  It was a life full of the tedious, repetitive tasks essential to small-press publishing and grassroots organizing, weirdly enlivened by intermittent ideological mayhem. Yet the frequent drudgery needs to be recalled in the context of the intellectual thrills that made the hardships bearable. Les and I, alongside the brilliant, plucky women who became our friends and colleagues, enjoyed in those years an enormous collective sense of possibilities.

  That is not to say that we marched in lockstep. We were often competitive, sometimes quarrelsome, always ourselves. We came from many different backgrounds, and part of our idea was to work constructively with the implications of racial and other differences, and that is never a painless or uncontentious process. I simply mean we knew we were part of something that mattered. We felt it in our bones, in the excitement of our newness; we didn’t have to see our names on a best-seller list (not that we wouldn’t have loved it) to know what we were worth. We were often weary but had more energy back when we thought the enemies were external. Before the feminist sex wars, the return of butch and femme, before the Brinks robbery and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Meese Commission pornography hearings. Before so many lovers parted, so many identities were claimed, before so many trashings and splits. Before the recovery movement and codependency, HIV and the Reagan revolution.

  It was a time for starting all sorts of things. (It felt, in fact, like the early stages of a novel: options proliferate, characters abound, plotting yields an embarrassment of riches; only later will the author perceive the limitations imposed by decisions made at this euphoric moment.) The feminist small-press movement was going strong with Daughters in Vermont and the Women’s Press Collective in California among the most influential new outfits. Many excellent writers were self-publishing. In those days before desktop, books didn’t have to look so slick. I had prepared camera-ready copy for After Touch on an IBM Executive typewriter and created a simple cover using transfer lettering. Distribution, always the bugaboo of small presses, was labor-intensive but comparatively simple. It was possible to reach a core feminist audience through a finite number of women’s and independent bookstores, plus mailings and appearances at conferences and book fairs.

  In response to the success of our book publishing experiment, Les and I and Mara of Seven Women Poets, along with Mara’s lover Leba, had decided to start our own “magazine of women’s writing with an emphasis on writing by lesbians.” We’d formed a casual couple friendship, and it seemed like a good idea over food and wine in Mara’s plant-filled fourth-floor walk-up (on the stoop of which, many months later, heavy boxes filled with copies of our first issue would be deposited by a trucker who seemed very much put out not to find a loading dock). Mara and Leba (a student of Russian literature, soon to write her dissertation on the copy clerk in nineteenth-century fiction) were both excellent writers who shared Les’s and my view that lesbian letters needed to develop a tradition of intelligent, responsible criticism. This project wasn’t, as we saw it, about tearing women down, but about encouraging what was strongest in our nascent literature. We were tired of the anti-intellect
ual bias that equated close analysis and attention to craft with “patriarchal criticism.” And we wanted no part of the separatist fantasies that were taking hold in certain quarters, one version of which surfaced in a vociferous campaign by June Arnold and Parke Bowman, co-proprietors of Daughters, to keep lesbians from publishing their books with “the boys.” Bowman had come up with the appalling if catchy slogan “The Male Left is the same as the Male Right.”

  Les and I hoped that the magazine would serve not only as a showcase for good writing but as a counterweight to much fuzzy thinking we found reflected in the rising tide of so-called cultural feminism. We were adamant that “vision” could never replace organizing, that the actual circumstances of existing women’s lives were more worthy of our attention than apocryphal tales of pre-historic matriarchies or blueprints for dyke utopias-to-be. The story of our clash with the infamous “seps” of western Massachusetts indicates something of the atmosphere in which we launched our publishing efforts.

  When After Touch and its sister titles appeared, Leslie and Mara and Marge and I arranged to do a reading at the Lesbian Gardens Coffeehouse in Northampton. We snickered among ourselves when we received publicity flyers setting forth a strict lesbians-only policy. How can they tell who’s who? we quipped.