Sisters of the Road

by Barbara Wilson

  I looked. It was definitely Chloe—or Loie, as she was usually called—Marsh. Ten years ago she’d been the putative head of the women against violence against women contingent here in Seattle. I remembered going to a slide show she gave right before a Women Take Back the Night march—it was the famous presentation, with the slide from Hustler of the woman going into the meatgrinder and coming out as hamburger. Loie had roused us all to fury.

  Soon after, it had been eight or nine years ago now, she’d left Seattle for Boston, where she wrote a famous book against pornography, The Silenced Heart, and organized a number of conferences, panels and speak-outs. Since then she’d been a featured speaker on TV talk shows and the college circuit, an anti-porn celebrity.

  “She apparently came back to Seattle to write another book,” Miranda, an old friend, said, overhearing us. “She’s been telling people she’s broke and exhausted. She’s staying with her cousin Hanna Sandbakker, the actress.”

  Hanna Sandbakker had been with Penny and Ray in Nicaragua—that must be why they’d invited her and Loie. I didn’t really know Hanna myself, though I’d seen her a number of times on Seattle stages. She was a willowy woman with a mane of ash-blond hair, known for her tragic roles in Ibsen and Strindberg. Her trademark was a velvety voice with a slight catch that could make even the most banal words sound remarkable. I especially remembered her as Hedda Gabler, with her pistols.

  “Loie’s not just sitting around though,” Miranda went on. “She’s one of the main speakers at the porn conference next week. I already know what she’s going to say—she’s telling everyone around her now. She thinks the women’s movement has been invaded and betrayed by a bunch of sexual liberals, ‘so-called feminists’ and sadomasochists.”

  “Surely she makes some distinction?” Hadley asked ironically. She had come up and was holding a tray of champagne and Calistoga.

  “There isn’t one to people like Loie,” Miranda said. “Saying you’re against censorship is practically like saying you like to tie people up and whip them until they bleed.”

  Everyone laughed nervously, and I looked over at Loie. She was a tall woman, five ten or eleven, with large bones, big hands and feet. Her face was interesting, but not particularly attractive; there was something smooth and slightly convex about it, like the lid of an enamel saucepan. Her short curly blond hair was brushed back tightly over her shiny forehead. Like her cousin she had a particularly distinctive voice; I couldn’t catch the words from here, but I heard the cadence, rhetorical and seductive.

  She had gathered around her a small eager group of our guests. Hanna was off holding baby Antonia and chatting with Penny, but there were six or seven others listening to Loie speak. With some discomfort I noticed that Elizabeth Ketteridge had turned up at the reception and was standing next to Loie Marsh, apparently drinking in her words. A small woman with big eyes, very little hair and enormous hoop earrings, she was a counselor who dealt with survivors of rape and sexual abuse. I had gotten to know her earlier this year.

  “Well, if that’s the case, let’s hope that Miko and Loie don’t run into each other then,” someone laughed.

  Kimiko Lewis was a local video artist who had recently taken up the cause of lesbian sexual explicitness. She was forever attempting to show her videos at local film festivals and bookstores.

  “Is Miko here?”

  “No,” I said. “I hope not anyway. That woman really gets on my nerves.”

  “That’s ’cause she asked me to be in one of her sex movies,” said Hadley, preening.

  “You said no, I hope, Hadley,” Beth smiled.

  “Of course,” Hadley sighed. “She didn’t offer me near enough money.”

  “Well, we’ll all have a chance to see Miko and Loie square off soon. They’re both on one of the panels at the porn conference,” Miranda said.

  “Is that really what it’s called?” someone passing by asked. “I’ve seen posters around, but I thought the conference was the ‘Seattle Conference on Sexuality.’ ”

  Miranda laughed. “Right. So for some people it’s the sex conference. For others it’s the porn conference. Watch the fireworks!”

  It wasn’t exactly that I was having a bad time. If it had just been a social reunion I would have enjoyed myself immensely. But it was a wedding reception, one of the important markers society uses to separate the socially acceptable from the socially unacceptable. Penny and I had been arguing about it for weeks.

  “What’s wrong with just living together the way you’ve been doing?” I’d said. “You can make legal and financial arrangements just the same—better even, because then you can be conscious of what you’re doing.”

  “I’m through living with people. I want this to be different, to show I’m really committed to the relationship.”

  “Great. How do you think that makes me feel? I’m in a relationship too. If marriage is the only way to show commitment where does that leave us?”

  “Well, you could get married if you wanted—I mean, they have ceremonies, don’t they?… You, I mean.”

  “You know goddamn well a ritual for lesbians or gay men isn’t the same thing as a wedding. If Hadley and I got married, I wouldn’t automatically become Mrs. Pam Nilsen-Harper, respectable supporter of the status quo.”

  She got defensive. “We’re only doing it because of the baby…”

  “The baby’s got nothing to do with it. You’re only doing it because you want to and because you want to be like everyone else. You’re just like the rest of those feminists who go to Nicaragua and come back idealizing marriage and the family.”

  “Everybody’s not a lesbian, you know,” Penny snarled, falling into the kind of jargon she would have eschewed a year ago. “How could a population like Nicaragua replace itself if everyone were? Sexual preference is the product of an advanced capitalist consumer society.”

  “Oh give me a break, you Sandinista robot,” I’d said and stormed out of the house. And then I’d sat in my car and sobbed like a fool. Ever since Antonia had been born, on the second of August, I’d been an emotional wreck. Up to then it had all been interesting. I’d gone with Penny to the doctor and the birth clinic. I’d learned to do the breathing exercises with her so I could be the back-up coach during the birth. I’d sat around with Penny and Ray, tossing names back and forth. I’d finally moved all my stuff out of my old room into the basement and helped paint it yellow and white. And when Penny had called me at three in the morning I’d told her how much I loved her and had raced over to Group Health to be there with her. My twin sister was having a baby!

  Ray and I were with her the whole time; we laughed and wept and breathed and struggled with her. And after it was over I held Antonia in my arms and thought she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen.

  I don’t know what happened after that. It was as if I had post-partum blues instead of Penny. While she learned to change diapers and bathe the baby, while she and Ray discussed the color and consistency of Antonia’s stools and what position it was best to burp her from, I felt increasingly miserable and left out. And when they started talking about marriage I began to freak out.

  “I don’t understand why you’re so upset,” Hadley tried to reason with me.

  “She wants to get married, Hadley! She’s going to do the whole thing—a husband and a baby!”

  “Think of it as having more relatives,” she offered, but that just made me cry. For some reason I had begun to miss my parents very badly again this year, even though they had been gone for almost five years.

  Hadley tried again, “You’re just different people, Pam. You want different things.”

  “It’s the principle, Hadley,” I said. “Society’s going to reward her now. I’ll never be rewarded. I’m going to be punished my whole life. She should have stuck with me—out of solidarity.”

  Hadley signed. “If you’d been a lesbian as long as I had, Pam honey, you would have given up wanting to be acceptable a long time ago. You
need to work on accepting yourself.”

  But Hadley didn’t have a twin sister.

  Late in the evening, after helping Penny and Ray clear up, Hadley and I returned to the houseboat on Portage Bay that we’d been subletting for the past two months. We put on our sweaters and down vests, for it was quite cool, and sat out on the floating dock, drinking jasmine scented tea and watching the lights of the bridge and the university opposite us on the dark water.

  It was a way we’d had of being together for weeks now; a day didn’t feel complete until we’d gone out and surveyed the evening colors and discussed the weather and the temperature. We sat there now, companionably, not talking, just drinking tea and looking.

  Hadley and I had now been a couple for almost eight months; the first six we’d lived apart but spent increasing amounts of time together. We’d been happy and hadn’t ever talked about living together. But when Peggy and Denise asked if we’d be interested in subletting the houseboat while they took advantage of Peggy’s grant for traveling in South America, both Hadley and I eagerly said yes.

  It was living together without really living together. It’s just for three months, we said. Still, we’d each given up our apartments and so far hadn’t made any plans for what to do when Peggy and Denise came back at the end of October. The problem was that living together had raised more questions than it had answered for us: how close did we want to be; were we strictly monogamous; was this a relationship made in heaven that would last forever or just your usual two year lesbian romance?

  The houseboat was small and very shipshape, a rectangle divided ingeniously into different spaces for eating and sleeping and entertaining. Hadley’s problem was her height; she kept knocking into the bedroom ceiling the first week. I had trouble with the rocking of the boat in the beginning; my legs felt wobbly on land and I had also been awakened on more than one occasion in the first two weeks by waves that made the center beam of the houseboat crack like a whip. I didn’t like strange noises at night, and would often wake up with my heart in my mouth, hearing the creaking of the dock alongside the boat and imagining that someone was coming to get me.

  It was a comfort to have Hadley; yet even she had to put up with a lot. All summer I’d been taking self-defense classes; I took them so seriously that they entered into my dreams. I felt constantly prepared for attack. Once when we first moved into the houseboat and I’d gone to bed early, Hadley got quietly into bed, casually threw an arm over my shoulder, and nestled close to me. Almost without waking I threw her off on to the floor.

  Now we sat cuddling on the deck, watching how the lights reddened the water so festively. I loved the Portage Bay side of Lake Union—it was more relaxed and informal. Lake Union was a working lake, full of tugs and barges, views obscured by masts and sails. Portage Bay seemed quieter, a place where kayakers, canoeists and windsurfers could play. And sometimes, surprisingly, it was utterly calm, like tonight. Not a boat in sight; it was as if we sat by the side of a lake in the mountains.

  “It was funny to see Loie,” Hadley said eventually. “So much of that porn debate seems to happen on the east coast. You tend to feel that out here people don’t get so involved, so caught up in it all.”

  “That’s true,” I said, taking off my glasses and resting my head on her shoulder. “I hardly even know what I think about the whole thing. Do you?”

  “No,” she said. “Not really. It’s been years since I’ve been certain. I mean, I’ve read on both sides of the issue, but it’s as if the passion of each position negates the other—so when I’m reading someone like Dworkin I sometimes think, yes, she’s absolutely right: pornography is about male power, it’s a strategy of subordination. But when I read someone else on the other side I think, no, pornographic imagery and sexism aren’t always the same thing. We need to keep them distinct, and as women, especially as women, we need to keep our options open to explore our sexuality.”

  She sighed and looked out across the water. “Maybe after the conference next week I’ll have a better grasp of the current thinking. Maybe there’s some way to hold both views—some way to understand the contradictions….”

  “Yeah,” I said and stared at the black waves outlined in silver that came towards us steadily. “You know, though, Hadley, I really wish she hadn’t gotten married.”

  2

  I WOKE UP EARLY the next morning and went out on the floating dock. The bay was like a mirror trying to come awake. There were hardly any individual ripples or waves; instead the whole body of water seemed to be in movement, a shivery, massive kind of movement, as if it were stirring from the bottom. It was a gray morning, but it didn’t matter by the water, where everything was so luminescent. This morning the sky was like torn bits of very absorbent watercolor paper, with dark gray seeping or branching onto the silver-white color.

  It was Sunday and it was bound to get busier on the lake. Now there were only a few solitary scullers from the university speeding along the surface of the water like dragonflies. Later the pleasure boats would come out, the big cruisers full of festive rich people who would steer dangerously close to the docks and would look in the windows. If caught, they’d remark sheepishly, “Nice weather we’re having!”

  But Hadley and I had learned to ignore them, and to go about our business openly—or to close the curtains when we couldn’t. Houseboat life was different than other sorts of life. In part you felt far from Seattle with no traffic, no people in the street; out here on the end of the dock the nearest neighbor was the houseboat in back, the one over to the side. Yet it was also a strangely active, peopled world: imagine living in a regular house, on the second floor, and looking out your window to see people flying past, silent and smiling.

  I was feeling good this morning, good about myself, good about Hadley. Since she’d come back into my life, meaning had returned to everyday events, and it looked like she was here to stay, after finally getting her father into a nursing home in Texas. For one thing she was in business now, no longer working in the graphic trades like me, but the owner of a thriving, if odd, little concern.

  The family fortunes in Houston had declined for the last few years to a frightening degree. Hadley told stories of whole neighborhoods in the city with FOR SALE signs out in front. She didn’t suffer as much as some of her family or their friends—for a long while she’d had her money invested in a variety of socially responsible causes and businesses—but with the recent fluctuations in the stock market, she noted a definite drop in income. She decided at that point to put her remaining capital into a business idea she’d had for a while.

  She opened what she called the Espressomat, a combination laundromat and espresso cafe, on Capitol Hill. Not the most likely—or genteel, as some of her family might have said—of ventures, but it was a lot safer than the stock market these days, and from its opening a month ago it had been a great success.

  You had to admit it was a new concept: that people who couldn’t afford or didn’t have room for washers and dryers had a right to get their clothes clean in surroundings that weren’t completely disgusting and filthy.

  “I’ve never understood,” Hadley had said to the newspaper reporter who interviewed her for a big feature story in The Post-Intelligencer (“Coffee and Clean Clothes Spell Success for Houston Heiress”), “why laundromats in general and those in the inner cities in particular have to be so downbeat and humiliating. At any one time a quarter to a third of the machines aren’t working, the dryers either don’t dry or they turn your clothes into potato chips. And if you don’t have a car and can’t just drop the clothes off, you’re stuck either sitting there trying to read in one of those plastic molded chairs with gum stuck all over it and forced to listen to a pop station turned up as loud as it will go, or you’re driven out in search of some store to browse in or a cafe to sit in. So I thought—why not make it easy for people? Why not make it nice? Everybody’s got to wash clothes. So why not make it fun?”

  So Hadley had. The Espress
omat had become two businesses, really; to cut down on the noise and to conform with licensing laws, she’d created two separate spaces with separate entrances and a door between them. The cafe part resounded to the hiss of the elaborate copper espresso machine and the buzz of animated conversations, while the washers and dryers next door chugged along purposefully (being too new to have begun to break down yet). The combined smell of French Roast and Tide was a little unusual and, I thought, a little too strong. Still, I was getting used to it.

  Good thing too, since I was spending quite a lot of my free time there.

  Hadley had gotten up and she came out on deck with a cup of coffee. She was dressed in Levis and an inarticulate blue tee-shirt. Her shoulder-length silvery hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her blue-green eyes were awake and glad.

  “Brrr—you can feel it’s starting to get to be fall now in the mornings, can’t you?”

  The sun had come out now and the weathered gray wood of the deck was warming slightly. Where the sun shone on the water there was a pattern of diamonds, small, flashing bits of light.

  Hadley went on, “You know, we really are going to have to decide soon what to do in November.”

  “November!” I said, even though I knew she was right. “It’s still September, for godssakes. According to the calendar it’s still summer.”

  “Next week is October 1st,” she said inexorably. “And there are so many things we haven’t talked about.”

  “I know, I know,” I said, to head her off from spoiling this beautiful morning with talk of househunting, boundaries, other women, and the future in general. “And I want to talk, of course I want to talk—but I think we should set aside some real time for it.” I had learned this strategy in collective meetings.

  “Okay,” said Hadley equably, but she sighed. “Only let’s not leave it too long… I have some ideas….”