by Chana Wilson
That evening back in the cabin, Mom took me aside. “I’m attracted to Stephanie. Do you mind?” she asked simply.
My mouth hung open a moment. “Do I mind? Glor, she’s my friend, and she’s my age. God, are you kidding? No, don’t even think about it.”
Mom shrugged. “Okay, honey, it’s no big deal, really. I have plenty of other lovers back in New York. Just thought I’d enjoy myself.”
“How many lovers do you have?” I asked this with a mixture of awe and chagrin. I was shy, and couldn’t imagine finding multiple lovers, but I covered that envy with a self-righteous superiority: I thought my monogamous relationship with Kate trumped Mom’s affairs.
“Well, every week I go to the women’s bars in New York City and to my Daughters of Bilitis meetings, and I usually go home with a new woman every weekend. But I tell all the women how it is with me, how I was celibate for so many years and now I’m coming back to life. That I’m into pleasure and being close to a woman, but I’m just not serious right now. It’s sex, and it’s fun, and it’s good.”
ONE AFTERNOON, MOM and I were alone drinking peppermint tea in the cabin kitchen. My mother reached across the table and took my hand. “I want to ask you something. Do you remember Marian, my friend at University Heights?” Mom was staring at me with a most intense expression.
The question startled me. I reached back with my mind. University Heights was the married-student housing for ex-GIs where my parents and I had lived while Dad was getting his PhD. I remembered a big-boned woman, tall, with long black hair. “Sure, Gloria.”
Mom went on, “You and she and I spent every day together for two years, from the time you were two until you were four.” My mother hesitated. She let my hand go, looked back at me: “We were lovers,” she said.
A memory flashed: I am standing with my mother in the doorway to Marian’s bedroom. Marian has her back to us, and she is sitting at a white dressing table on a backless seat, facing a mirror. Her head is bent slightly to the right, and her long hair cascades down her neck and over her right shoulder as she brushes her hair. Mom leans against the doorsill, and I am pressed against Mom’s thigh. We are both spellbound, mesmerized by Marian as she strokes with the hairbrush over and over again. There is some feeling in the room I am too young to name. The room shimmers with it.
I realized I was gripping the tea mug midchest, and set it on the table.
“At first, we were just friends. But Marian had been in the WACs during the war, and she’d had women lovers there. After we became lovers, I was happier than I’d ever been. I was really happy, and I was really in love.”
Mom’s face had a faraway smile. Her hand drifted toward her teacup and she took a sip. Then she looked at me again, her smile fading. “We kept it a secret, never told our husbands. I longed to take you and just go away with Marian, but she wouldn’t hear of it, and I really couldn’t see a way to do that. So, during the day we were lovers, and at night the husbands would come home. Sometimes the four of us would have dinner together and play cards.”
I leaned forward in my chair, breathless.
“Then, Marian had a nervous breakdown. I didn’t understand what was happening to her. One day she was gone, off to a mental hospital. No one said a thing to me—I had to go ask her husband where she was. When she came back a few weeks later, she said to me, ‘Gloria, I’m cured. We can’t do this anymore.’ She told me, ‘Gloria, we just have to be good wives, spread our legs, and be faithful to our husbands.’”
“Oh God, Mom!” A great weight had gathered in me, rooting my body to the chair.
Mom nodded, her brow creased with remembering. “It got worse. When I begged Marian to be with me, she mocked me, called me a dyke, a sicko. I wanted to die, right then. I just wanted to die.”
Mom looked down and gripped one hand in the other. She sighed. “Not long afterward, we moved to the apartment in Millstone while your father and I were building the house. I was so depressed, I started seeing a psychiatrist. I thought he might help me. Of course, his whole goal was to get me to adjust to my marriage, and I went along with it because I thought there was something wrong with me.”
Mom shook her head, as if she could shake away regret. “But I just got more and more depressed. I can’t quite remember when I started getting so depressed that I wanted to kill myself, but it was sometime after the affair with Marian broke up. And then they took me away to the hospital for those shock treatments.”
As my mother talked, a fury built in me. My body blazed with it. All those years that Mom and I suffered, all those suicide attempts—the rifle, the river, the rat poison, the overdoses—all the times when I found her half-dead, all those pills tranquilizing her into droopy-eyed sedation . . . all that was now made clear as the aftermath of her love for a woman, forbidden and punished by society.
Another thought hit me: It hadn’t been her fault. Relief mixed with my rage: There was a reason. My God, it wasn’t our fault!
Chapter 29. FBI
OUR ACTIVIST HOUSEHOLD SET amid the mansions of conservative and wealthy Pacific Heights stood out like a colorful sore thumb. All the comings and goings of braless women in overalls and the occasional long-haired, scruffy man must have alarmed the neighbors, although I never spoke to any of them. Strange occurrences were going on outside our house, and we began to suspect that we were being watched.
One evening, we noticed a Pacific Bell telephone repair truck set up right over the manhole in the middle of our intersection just prior to a Gay Women’s Liberation meeting. Every Friday, sixty to eighty women gathered in our living room for those raucous meetings. The first time, none of us paid much attention to the truck. But then it happened the next week. By the third Friday, we started to worry. We’d heard rumors that the government was using utility trucks for spying on people. The bay windows of our living room faced the center of the intersection. I pictured a camera and a shotgun microphone pointed straight at us from inside the van. Creepy.
None of us was completely sure about the truck, and no one wanted to be overly paranoid, so we went about our business in the various groups that met throughout the house: feminist consciousness-raising, gay rights, the anti–Vietnam War movement, my guerilla-theater group, which rehearsed in the attic. What could they do to us anyway?
I was leaving the house early one morning, when I noticed a smaller-than-usual garbage truck stop in front of our house. What was strange was that it only stopped at our house, not at any others on the block. From then on we paid attention, and sure enough, every week we had our very own exclusive garbage pickup. At a house meeting, we talked about being careful not to put marijuana seeds or anything too personal in our garbage.
I WAS LEARNING TO DRAW from Frances. Our landlady offered a drawing class for anyone in the house and she taught us how to see, to really look, to feel shape with the eyes and let the hands move from that knowing. I loved my not very realistic but expressive drawings, and hung them proudly on the walls of my turret.
I started carrying around a sketchpad again, as I had in high school. Frances and I made trips to the beach, where she and I sat on the dunes, drawing birds, waves, passersby. In those moments, I was swept up, totally immersed. At last, I was being the artist rather than the artist’s assistant, the role I had so easily and resentfully fallen into with Mike. Frances showed me the way, and I adored her for it.
One afternoon, Frances and I returned to the house from a sketching outing to Baker Beach. As we came in the front door, one of Frances’s daughters, eleven-year-old Jenny, rushed up to tell us she had seen Bill rifling through papers in Donna’s room in the area where she kept membership lists.
Bill had moved in about the same time as Kate and I. He was tall with a long ponytail, living on unemployment benefits. Even though Frances was trying to fill the house with feminists, her first priority was getting renters, so her backup choice was leftist men. I’d been enthralled with Bill’s tales of a journey to Cuba. Now, I wondered, who was he
, really?
ONE AFTERNOON, TWO different unknown women rang our bell and asked if we had any pot for sale. Frances turned them away, saying firmly, “No one sells drugs here.” We noticed that police cars kept passing by. Housemates gathered in the living room and wondered—were we about to get busted? We decided to take everyone’s personal stashes and sneak them out of the house.
Bill had been away for several days; we didn’t know where, so Kate and I went into his room to check for dope. His stash was beyond easy to find—over two pounds sitting in a large clear plastic bag on his nightstand. What the hell? He had never tried to sell any of us anything. We gathered his baggie along with everyone else’s stash, and Paul, the straightest-looking among us, secreted it out of the house.
The next day, when Bill returned and was confronted about his dealer-size stash, he said. “Man, my unemployment’s running out, and I just needed some dough. I heard about this great deal, so I went for it. Listen, I’m sorry about that—I’ll keep the shit in my car from now on.”
Two weeks later, John, Frances’s grown son from her previous marriage, was over at the house. Some of us were hanging around the living room, including Bill, when John announced, “Man, I just scored some great smoke, so let me know if any of you guys want to buy weed.” The next day, cops showed up at his apartment, searched the place, and arrested him.
Kate and I decided to search Bill’s room. He’d been spending more and more time away from the house, and we had no idea what he did during his absences. This time his pot stash was only a little more hidden. In spite of his promise, we found enough pot in his closet to incriminate the whole household.
Furious, Kate and I flushed it bit by bit down the toilet. Then we searched Bill’s room further and found a picture of him with short hair and utility bills to another San Francisco address. This supposedly unemployed hippie was maintaining a separate apartment.
Now, Kate and I were completely convinced that we were living with an FBI agent. When Bill showed up the following Monday for our communal dinner, one of the housemates blurted out, “Some people here think you’re an agent, Bill. Are you?” I was aghast that she’d blown it like that. Bill laughed. “Oh, come on!” he said.
The next morning, I passed Bill’s room as I headed downstairs for breakfast. His door was ajar and I glanced inside. Sometime in the middle of the night, Bill had cleaned out his room and vanished.
NOT LONG AFTER BILL disappeared, the house was put up for sale as part of Frances and Paul’s divorce. As a stopgap, Kate and I crashed in our friend Stephanie’s commune, where five women were living in an upper flat of a Mission district Victorian. What should have been a dining room and a living room were being used as bedrooms, so the only communal space was the kitchen at the end of the long central hall, where the household gathered for meals and interminable meetings. Kate and I slept in the tiny guest room, actually a walk-in closet off the hall.
We didn’t want to commit to a city rental because we were considering moving to the country, saddened by the infighting in our women’s groups and wanting respite after the trauma of FBI surveillance. The heady idealism of the women’s movement had given way to disappointment. In the lesbian-feminist movement, we’d believed we were creating a new community, one where we could totally trust each other, never be oppressed again. Our personal stories had poured out, each woman’s tale its own wondrous revelation, resonating with our experiences in a patriarchal society. But as we went on, this togetherness grew cracks, stresses, and fissures. Our yearning was so intense that there was little room for differences. Each difference, over time, felt like betrayal. Amid the fractures, our hearts sank.
Kate and I began to take periodic breaks from the city, sometimes hitching down the coast and camping at the beach, or taking the bus due east to the Sierra mountains.
We knew we couldn’t keep crashing at the crowded commune, so we called Frances and asked if we could camp on land she owned near Point Reyes National Seashore. It would give us time in the country to feel it out, and a base. Frances agreed, so we loaded up our backpacks and hitched over the Golden Gate Bridge and through Marin County, beyond its wealthy suburbs to where the land opened to rolling hills dotted with solitary live oak trees, through valleys with ranches and small towns. Our ride dropped us off on the one main block of Inverness, with a single market, gas station, and post office.
Kate and I said little to each other as we hiked the two miles to Frances’s land. Things had become strained between us. Since moving to California, we’d been with each other constantly, and our togetherness had intensified after we’d become lovers. It was difficult to admit that I clung to Kate. Since childhood, I had thought of myself as so independent, but once I was touched by Kate, need rose in me like an oil geyser from a Texas well.
There had been one evening when Kate and I had been alone in the tiny guest room of the flat and she had blurted, “We have to spend some time apart, or I’m going to go crazy!” Her outburst shocked me, scared me, God, don’t let me lose her, but I saw the truth of it. “Okay,” I agreed. But this was something we hadn’t yet managed to do.
Kate was a determined hiker, while I was a meanderer, but, loaded with my pack, I had no desire to dawdle as we marched side by side in step. Yet, even burdened by the weight, I felt something of the green forest began to seep in, the scents of pine and bay laurel rising up as we crunched tree droppings underfoot. Something held tight in me began to ease. Moving my body through such beauty gave me my breath back.
The dirt road ended at Frances’s plot. We set up our pup tent, crammed in our sleeping bags. By the time we got our camp organized, it was early evening. We used Kate’s backpacking stove and cooked up macaroni and cheese mix from a box. Kate withdrew into a sullen silence. I had the urge to shake her and yell, Talk to me! But instead, after our strained dinner, I got out my flashlight and a paperback, crawled into the tent, and read. That would show her I could give her space.
The next morning, there were no morning kisses. After a mostly silent breakfast, we walked into town.
That evening Kate announced she would be going back to the city the next day, by herself. She wanted to attend a Radicalesbians meeting and would probably stay for a couple days beyond that.
My eyes burned and my heart banged in my chest. I’d hoped that the country would let us relax back into ease with each other. Now, through the knot in my throat, I managed to force out, “Sure, of course. I hope you have a great time.”
I WOKE DISORIENTED, no Kate there beside me. She had left just after dawn. Then I remembered: I’m alone. Kate has left. A rush of panic made my skin sweat.
When I stumbled out of the tent, I saw that it was late morning; the fog that had poured over the ridge the prior evening had burned off. The details and rhythms of California nature were new to me: the rainless summertime, the chilly coastal fog. I shivered, though it was not especially cold, and made my way to the nearby stream. I crouched among the ferns, splashing water on my face, shocking myself into the present. In my stomach, there was just a dull ache where I’d clamped down against my terror at Kate’s departure, closing my ears to its whisper: She doesn’t love you, she’ll leave you. While that mantra beat in the nether regions of my psyche, I assured myself: We’re together; she just needs space.
After a breakfast of granola and powdered milk, I pulled my sketchpad, pencils, and Cray-Pas from my pack. My anxiety eased a bit with the awakening of something else—a flicker of curiosity. How would I do by myself? I wanted to learn this land, take in its foreign beauty until it became familiar, became my new home. I spent several hours sketching the landscape around me: the meadow bordered by a hillside thick with trees, a close-up of a manzanita bush with its maroon bark, the ferns and foliage along the stream, rocks in the stream bed, my own legs and feet resting on a tree root hanging into the stream. I settled into a trance of solitude, a state so familiar from my solitary play as a child, honed from loneliness.
I did s
ee one person that day—a tall white man in late middle age with gray hair, jogging in a T-shirt and shorts past the meadow. I nodded at him, but he gave only the slightest tip of his head. I tried not to think about being a woman, alone, out in the woods in a flimsy tent, and now some man knew I was here.
I turned back to my journal, a bound, college-ruled notebook with a green and white mottled cover. It was the first journal I had ever kept, begun almost two years before at Grinnell. I wrote in it erratically, but that afternoon I poured my thoughts into its pages. I pondered the current state of sisterhood: There had been the rush of feminist consciousness, the euphoria of coming out, the feeling of belonging, and the hope that we could change the world. Then there began to be struggles and bitter fights. How disappointed and confused I now felt. How hard it is to live in this fascist world! I lamented to my journal. The writing both stirred things up and calmed me down.
After dinner, I smoked a joint. The fog was just rolling over the hill in the last of the light; a few advancing white tendrils fingered their way into the meadow. In the twilight, shadows deepened and the bushes seemed to hunch, taking on ominous shapes. The wind picked up, and something moving caught the corner of my eye. Christ! I’d swear I saw a wolf lurking in the bushes. Don’t be absurd, I told myself , the pot is making you paranoid! There are no wolves in California. Or are there? I found myself creeping up to the bush in question, to reassure myself there was nothing there. Finally, I dove for the tent, seeking the enclosed space. Several times in the night, I woke with a start, alert from a cracking twig or wind whipping the tent flap, but then sleep would pull me back to the kaleidoscope of dreams.
On the fourth day, Kate returned. She arrived in the afternoon and found me sitting on the metal cooler, writing in my journal. We grinned wildly at each other. I closed my journal; we grabbed each other and kissed. How I had missed her, and now it felt good to have had enough separation to miss her. She seemed similarly renewed: more settled in herself, less tense and irritable, her love for me flowing again.