Riding Fury Home

by Chana Wilson

  He laughed. I didn’t know what else to say, so I started for his door.

  “So, how about checking out the campus movie tomorrow?” Dan asked.

  I turned back toward him and smiled. “Okay,” I said.

  IN OUR SECOND WEEK of hanging out together, Dan introduced me to pot. He sat at his desk rolling a joint, his hands working the Zig-Zag cigarette paper back and forth. I stared nervously as he brought the joint to his mouth, licked the glue strip, sealed the paper, and twisted the ends. “How ’bout it?” He smiled over at me where I was perched on his twin bed.

  Drugs scared me, but everyone said grass was different; it was cool, not like the older generation’s horrible alcohol or tranquilizers. I was wound tight and hated to lose control, but some part of me longed to. I hesitated, then answered, “Sure.”

  Dan joined me on the bed and we passed the joint back and forth. I coughed after the first inhalation, but persisted. We lay down on our backs, giggling, and then we turned face-to-face. Dan stroked my hair. I looked into his smiling face and saw an expression both sweet and gentle; he no longer seemed quite so homely. After an interlude of kissing, we both sat up and stripped. We lay back down naked, again face-to-face, stroking each other’s backs. It was the most delicious sensation, feeling his fingers trailing down my spine, my fingertips following the arc of his shoulder blade. I sighed deeply, skin tingling, amazed at such intimacy. It was wildly exciting that someone wanted me, wanted to feel my body. I thought touching someone was knowing someone, and marveled that we had flung aside superficialities along with our clothes.

  I remember writing to my father that Dan and I were cutting right through the mundane, going for deep connection. He wrote back a cautionary note: Dan sounds nice, but take your time, you could get hurt.

  I wrote Mom about Dan, too. I rarely called her—it was too expensive—but during one phone conversation, my mother casually asked, “What kind of birth control are you using?” I was outraged at her assumption. As if she knew me so exactly that she had no need for asking details, as if she knew my life as it now was.

  The truth was, Dan and I were both inexperienced. He’d had a girlfriend or two but was still a virgin also. So we stroked each other’s bodies and dry-humped with a sheet between us, and did little else. I thought I was knowledgeable from junior-high sex education, but no one had ever told me I had a clitoris or that women could have orgasms, and I had never discovered it myself.

  DAN AND I HAD BEEN together a couple of months when we finally discussed birth control. Dan was adamant that I not use the Pill. He thought it was not natural and potentially harmful to take a bunch of hormones. That was one of the moments I edged closer to loving him, moved that he showed concern for me. Condoms didn’t occur to either of us. We settled on a diaphragm.

  In 1969, there was only one way for a Grinnell coed to get birth control, and that was to go to Planned Parenthood in Des Moines, a ninety-minute bus ride away. I made a Saturday appointment and Dan agreed to go with me. But on Thursday, he bounded into my room, jubilant. “Kathy’s visiting this weekend!” Kathy had been his best friend at Grinnell through their freshman and sophomore years—a platonic relationship, Dan told me. She’d transferred to another school to complete her junior and senior years. Every time he spoke of her and how amazing she was, his eyes would wander off and he’d grin to himself. “Feel free to go to Des Moines,” Dan added, “but I want to hang out with Kathy. She’s just here for the weekend, and I need to spend all the time I can with her.”

  I canceled my Planned Parenthood appointment, peeved at Dan and damned if I was going to go without him. We were apart all weekend. Once, from a distance, I saw him and Kathy crossing campus, their blond heads down, immersed in conversation. On Monday, he came by my room after class. He didn’t sit down, just stood awkwardly in my doorway. “Listen,” he said, “Kathy’s visit made me wonder about some things. About you and me. Whether we work. I need some time to think. I’ll see you in a couple days, okay?” And he was gone.

  When Dan showed up at my room three days later, he sat on the far end of my bed and told me that he’d concluded from Kathy’s visit, from how much they had in common, that he couldn’t keep on with me. It just wasn’t working.

  My head felt suddenly heavy. How could I fight what he’d said? I didn’t feel he even knew me, but I had no idea how to show myself to him. I could find no words, just looked at the floor.

  After a while, Dan asked, “Are you in love with me?”

  I had no clue what that meant, to be in love. But strangely, I found myself nodding yes, shrugging as if to take it back, then bursting into tears.

  We just both sat there awhile. Then Dan, suddenly the worldly older brother, said, “The first breakup is hard. I remember: It hurts like hell. But you’ll see, you’ll get over it.”

  MY JUDGMENT ABOUT my college classes was swift: It seemed the same old conservative drivel as high school, and thus irrelevant. I wanted to roll my eyes when our first assignment in English class was The Odyssey; I had read that in ninth grade! Who needed any more Greek tales? I had so hoped for thought-provoking stimulation, but I gave up easily. I reverted to my bad habits of skipping classes and doing papers at the last minute.

  I gravitated to the more radical students. My roommate Debbie was lovers with David, a Maoist who was in charge of ordering the films shown on campus. That meant we got to watch the movies before their campus screening. Our leftist group piled into David’s living room to watch The Battle of Algiers and the films of Godard, Fellini, and Ingmar Bergman. I was gripped by whole new worlds of cultures, characters, and artistic visions.

  One day on the spur of the moment, five of us movie fanatics piled into a VW Bug and roared off to the University of Minnesota to go to a reception for Godard. When we arrived five hours later, there Jean-Luc was, sitting on a couch sipping wine and discussing his movies. I worked my way close with my camera, focused the lens on the famous director, and started snapping wildly, pressing the shutter over and over. Godard turned, stared, and chastised me, “Don’t waste film; it’s a precious thing!” The Great One had spoken to me, and I glowed, unfazed that the words were critical. I nodded assent, echoing to myself, Yes, what a great truth: film is precious!

  I learned to drive stick shift on the way home. Everyone else was pretty wasted, having downed many glasses of free wine while I was snapping photos. David gave me a quick lesson in a parking lot, then everyone crashed asleep while I lurched through the darkened two-stoplight Minnesota towns, stripping gears.

  IN MID-NOVEMBER, a caravan of several busses took Grinnell students to Washington, D.C., for the Moratorium, a huge demonstration against the Vietnam War. I sat next to a woman named Kate on the many-hour ride. I had first noticed her in the campus cafeteria, a short blond woman dressed in a pink satin Playboy Bunny suit. Behind her, other women from her feminist street-theater group held up signs protesting the exploitation of women. I couldn’t help staring at her large, pale breasts spilling over the low-cut suit.

  Kate and I agreed to stick together as buddies as we marched and chanted with the crowd thronging to the Washington Monument. At the rally, we sat jammed elbow to elbow as we half-listened to the speeches muffled by the loudspeakers, both perking up to the songs of Arlo Guthrie and the cast of Hair. We sang along with Pete Seeger to “Give Peace a Chance,” swaying with the crowd. Here I was, among hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, a long way from my first protests with my mother and the handful of her Women Strike for Peace activists.

  As the rally wound down, we wandered the city, turning a corner to find ourselves in the midst of riot police lobbing tear gas at protesters. We ran holding hands, eyes burning and half-closed, to sounds of screams and coughing. We ran blind until the gas fog thinned and we could pour water on handkerchiefs to blot our burning faces. “Bastards!” I said between coughing fits. “Bastard pigs!” Kate echoed.

  On the bus home, we were a bedraggled crowd, many of us red-eyed and d
amp from dousing off tear gas. Between naps, Kate and I talked. She had a kindred passion for politics and guerrilla theater, even if her focus was different than mine. She told me about her women’s group, where they talked about female oppression. “You should come,” she urged. I could sort of see her point about women’s problems, but I felt it was trivial; I had much more important things to focus on, like militarism, imperialism, and colonialism. And finding another boyfriend.

  HOMECOMING WEEK WAS the pinnacle of school boosterism. My guerilla-theater group scorned all that: the corny homecoming queen and king, who were paraded around the football field in a pickup truck throne before the game, the overeager cheerleaders who worked up their most elaborate routines, how everyone got oh so teary over “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  On game day, my gang gathered clandestinely in an empty field behind the football stadium. We could hear the crowds roar at a play, and then the boom of the marching band’s bass drum signaling half-time. The tallest man among us carried the Vietcong flag while the other twelve of us marched in a scraggly V behind him. Our tactic: onto the field fast, out even faster. We scrambled across the football field, chanting: Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh

  NLF is gonna win!

  The roar of boos, hisses, “Go back to Russia!” some scattered clapping and raised fists. A fair number of students were against the Vietnam War, but for many this went too far; we were trampling on sacred turf to disrupt the homecoming game.

  My heart beat hard as we crossed the field. All my childhood, I had hated standing out as different. Now, my discomfort at being noticed mixed with an incredible exhilaration. This time, I was not alone but belonging to my group of renegades, and instead of shame, there was pride. My whole body felt electric, buzzing with the charge.

  I WENT HOME OVER winter break to a new Mom. Gone was her slurred speech, the nightly sleeping pills. She had done an amazing thing after I left—checked herself into a hospital to go through drug detox. Mom told me the barbiturates and tranquilizers she’d been on were so powerful that withdrawal from them was worse than heroin. She’d had days of sweats and muscle cramps so unrelenting that the nurses had to inject her with muscle relaxants.

  When I had left home, I had prayed that she would make it, but that possibility seemed so precarious. I held a belief deep in my bones: If I am not there to watch over her, she’ll die. Ironically, it took my leaving for her to decide to get off psychiatric medication. Our enmeshment had been destroying us both.

  All that first semester in Grinnell, I had repressed my anxiety about my mother so heavily in my consciousness that it had lodged in the pit of my belly, clamoring like a siren. I had taken to drinking milk before and after every meal in a frantic attempt to quell an ulcerous stomach. When I came home to an alive mother, my stomach pains began to ease up. A part of me that had been clenched so tight began to breathe again.

  Another part remained wary. How long could this last? Would she revert? It felt completely unnatural to me to let go of worry. And thrilled as I was, there was an underlying resentment, barely audible to my consciousness, like the voices of people in the next room when you can’t quite make out their words. It was still too taboo to listen to those whispers: Why couldn’t Mom have gotten it together when I lived with her as a child and taken care of me?

  Mom had a new therapist, a leftist psychologist she was wild about. She couldn’t stop talking about how wonderful this woman was, how much she was helping Mom. In addition to her individual sessions, Mom attended her therapist’s group. They met every other week with the therapist and on alternate weeks on their own as a peer group. The leaderless weeks, they met at Mom’s apartment.

  The night they gathered in Mom’s living room, she introduced me to everyone, beaming. Afterward I retreated to my bedroom. When the group ended, Mom came into the bedroom while I was smoking a joint. I didn’t worry about her minding, as she rarely chastised me or played that kind of parental role. Anyway, she was such a bohemian I figured she’d be cool, but then she surprised me.

  “I’d like to try it; can I have some?” she asked.

  It weirded me out, the thought of getting high with my mother, but I passed her the joint, not able to say no. We sat side by side on the bed, taking hits. Then after a while, we were laughing at something someone had said in the group. I confessed that I could hear every word they said through the thin French doors.

  We wandered into the kitchen, voracious. Sitting at the kitchen table over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, our pot-induced silliness escalated until we were howling, tears running down our faces.

  “Want some milk, Mom?” I asked, going to the refrigerator. I poured us two glasses, just to unstick the peanut butter from my mouth. Not that my stomach needed it.

  I MET MIKE ON A SCAFFOLD. At the beginning of my second semester, I’d seen a sign calling for assistants for a mural being painted in a drama department rehearsal room. When I found the room, there was just one small blond guy with a goatee, painting high on a wall with his legs dangling off the platform. He was engrossed, and it took a couple shouts of “Hi up there!” for him to look down.

  I hadn’t done any art since high school, where I had taken every art course I could elect. But I had decided with regret that I didn’t get to be an artist, because it was too self-indulgent when the world was so messed up. I felt I had no choice but to devote myself to political action, to saving the world. Not that I was doing so much of that here in the middle of Iowa.

  “Come to help?” the guy on the scaffold asked. I nodded and he climbed down to get me started. Mike explained that this mural was his homage to Dada. I had no idea what that meant, but when he said the point was to create nonsensical images, I figured I couldn’t go too far wrong.

  The smell of paint again, the feel of the brush, that familiar intoxication: lush colors moving beneath my hands. Mike and I both worked immersed and silent for several hours, then washed up and went to the cafeteria together for dinner.

  There was no formal dating between us, just a moment after several days of painting sessions when we held hands leaving the mural room, and then we kept walking until we got to his room. Without preamble, we made out. Day by day over a week, our make-out sessions progressed: kissing, necking, petting. I explained to Mike that I was still technically a virgin. By now, my virginity felt like a thing, not exactly a disease, more like an impediment. I was tired of the tension of that line I had not yet crossed over.

  When I mentioned my virginity to Mike, he said, “Don’t worry, I would never go ahead without checking with you first. We should decide on this together.”

  One evening, Mike and I were lying naked side by side on my bed, kissing and touching each other. He rolled on top of me as we kissed. Suddenly, I realized he was inside me. It was an odd moment mixed with relief and anger. Relief that the question was resolved, no going back. A flash of rage: He didn’t ask. I couldn’t linger on that thought, what that might mean. Then he was moving in and out of me. It was damn uncomfortable, because I had a tampon in, something Mike hadn’t stopped to notice. I was mute, couldn’t find my voice to stop him, but it wasn’t that long until he pulled out and came into the sheet.

  All I could say was, “That hurt. I had a tampon in!”

  “Do you need to take it out?” Mike asked.

  “It’s a little late for that.”

  Beyond my moment of inchoate rage, I couldn’t or wouldn’t name what had happened. After all, I was willingly having sex with him. I didn’t want to think about it as a violation. But my fury curled inside me like a cougar in its den, and every now and then, it made brief hunting forays.

  We never made any declarations to each other: like you, love you. We had sex and slept together in Mike’s bed every night.

  When we weren’t having sex, we talked about Mike’s art, or rather, Mike talked about his art. He was a freshman like me, but he was already clear on his purpose: He was majoring in art. One morning when Mike had left before me for a
n early class, I sat on his floor, twisting metal wire as he’d shown me to around the armature of a five-foot metal sculpture in progress, which was taking up most of the free floor space. I didn’t have class that morning, so I spent a couple hours at this. And then an odd flash: I saw myself, as if I were standing outside my body, watching as I meticulously poured myself into Mike’s work. Who was this woman, so eager to assist, like one of those housewives Kate’s women’s group mocked? In that moment, I saw that I had taken in more female role socialization than I cared to admit. And there something else I didn’t yet understand: I had artist envy that I channeled into being Mike’s assistant.

  SEX AFTER THE FIRST TIME, which had hurt as I expected, stunned me with disappointment. That’s it? I asked myself. That’s all? What a letdown! Foreplay had been fun, sometimes intensely exciting, but now that I was Doing It, there was less of that. In high school, I had drunk in what the girls in my art club had said about intercourse. They claimed the whole world shook, that it was the most profound experience ever. I had held on to that promise as my beacon guiding me toward the shore of yes.

  I considered myself liberated because sometimes I was the one on top, but whatever the position, neither the earth nor my body quaked. I started to feel like a fuck machine, just there for Mike’s pleasure, servicing him. But I said nothing.

  I had never made the trip to Planned Parenthood for birth control, so we were using the pull-out method. Mike seemed to manage every time, and I didn’t worry much. Then my period was late. After a week, I told Mike. His face blanched. “How late are you?” he asked. Mike borrowed a car, and we drove to the clinic in Des Moines. I left him in the waiting room, thumbing through magazines.