by Chana Wilson
We spent two days on the land, telling each other of our experiences apart, making love, hiking in the woods and to the beach. After that, we hitched to the city to resume our political meetings and city life—dancing in lesbian bars, visiting with friends. For three weeks, we alternated three or four days in the city with the same on the land.
One day, just as we returned to the country, Frances’s white Dodge Dart pulled around the bend and into the meadow, a dust trail pluming out behind it. She leaned her head out the window, not bothering to say hello. “The sheriff came by my place yesterday,” she told us. “Asked if you had permission to be on my land. After I said, ‘Yes, absolutely,’ he told me no one had seen you two around for a while, so they got worried you were lost in the woods. So, he and a deputy came up to the land looking for you. I told him it was ridiculous that you were lost—where was there to go? Surely you had just gone to the city. And Karen, he said that he’d taken your wallet for identification purposes.”
My mouth was open, stupefied. I reached in my pocket and felt the soft leather of my billfold, “That can’t be because I have my wallet in my pocket. Wait, let me look in the tent.” I ran to the tent and ducked inside. While we’d been gone in the city, they’d come and gone through my things. The clothes I’d left folded in a corner had been tossed around and lay in haphazard piles. Where was my journal? I tore through everything, searching, muttering, “God, it’s not here, it’s not here!” Dread was closing in on me. My journal was gone. And so was my address book.
All we wanted to do was to get away, get the hell out of there. Luckily, we’d been all out of pot, so there was nothing they could arrest us for, but that didn’t quell our alarm. Frances offered to drive us back to San Francisco. We stuffed our packs with our clothes and took down the tent. On the drive to the city, Frances told us more. The sheriff and his deputy hadn’t just come by themselves. They had brought two bloodhounds, search-and-rescue dogs, to sniff through our belongings.
I thought about the things I had written in my journal: sexual experiences with men, an acid trip, my evolving leftist and feminist consciousness, coming out with Kate—all my most private inner ramblings. All now being read by the Inverness police. I could imagine them smirking, reading parts out loud to each other, “Hey, listen to this . . . ”
By now, my journal had probably been xeroxed and sent to FBI headquarters. It must have been the feds who had alerted the local sheriff to keep an eye on us. I figured it had all started with Bill. We must have been on a list ever since he had spied on us. And the jogger—was he one of them keeping tabs on us? It had been odd how he’d come by every day. I thought about Bill’s scanning Donna’s membership rolls, and it hit me: The Inverness police probably took my address book for the same reason, and now were comparing the names in my journal with names and phone numbers in my address book. I shuddered, horrified that I’d endangered others. That day, the budding writer in me got asphyxiated.
Later that week, when Frances went to the sheriff’s office to retrieve my things, he changed his story. As the sheriff handed her my journal and address book, he laughed and said, “Oh, I saw them hitching out of town.” He didn’t seem worried that Frances would realize his previous story about our being lost in the woods was just a ruse. He knew there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it.
Chapter 30. Icebox Canyon
KATE AND I WERE ATTACKING the rusted iron bed frame with our paintbrushes. Bright blue paint spattered everywhere—on our clothes, on the parking lot gravel, and on our new puppy, Emma, who kept bringing us a stick to throw. We’d dragged the frame outside our one-room cabin into the parking area that ran along the row of Russian River cabins. Our new home, Pocket Canyon Cabins, was a group of flimsy wooden structures originally intended for summer vacationers from San Francisco. But the resort area’s heyday had waned, and the cabins were now rented year-round to locals.
Even in its prime, the resort must have been a second-rate affair. Six one-room cabins, painted a stomach-wrenching mustard yellow, sat on the gravel lot cleared of all but a few redwoods. We’d spotted the cabins on our exploratory mission, when we’d driven up from the city in the used Datsun station wagon we’d bought.
The landlady, a stout woman in her fifties, had looked us over and asked, “Are you girls students?” When we said yes, we’d be going to SRJC in September, she nodded, brought us into the office, and pushed a rental agreement across the counter. “Okay, then. We don’t allow any trash here. We run a respectable place.” I wondered whether a couple of pot-smoking, radical lesbians fit her definition of trash. But we were getting desperate, so we both smiled politely and signed the papers.
Our new life: just the two of us, feeling lost and adrift, playing house. I worried about how we might be treated, knowing as I did how being “different” in a small town can be met with bigotry. Kate and I agreed to be in the closet unless we got a feel that someone was tolerant. Yet, strangely, we didn’t think we were being obvious, painting the frame of our shared bed out in the middle of the yard for all to see. Later, when we became friendly with Valerie, she said our bed painting had clinched it among the cabin dwellers’ gossip—they all knew we were gay. And according to Valerie, no one seemed to care.
IT WAS IFFY HOW WE WERE going to manage to pay the bills. In San Francisco, we’d gotten by on short-term odd jobs, food stamps, and savings. Now, Kate and I came up with a financial plan: keep getting food stamps, keep living as cheaply as possible, and beg our fathers for help.
How we were going to support ourselves long-term was a blurry unknown. Coming out as a lesbian had a disturbing consequence: It meant I could never rely on a man to support me, although our fathers were standing in for now. As independent and liberated as I felt myself to be, I’d grown up with the ’50s paradigm that husbands support wives, and since I’d dropped out of school, I had no degree or training or any sense of a career path to sustain myself.
My school plan wasn’t exactly academic. I wanted to explore art, and signed up at the free junior college for photography, pottery, and life drawing. Kate asked her dad for his old 35 mm Leica camera, using the lie that she was the one taking the photography class.
The shape of our lives changed. No more meetings of Radicalesbians, collective house dinners, or consciousness-raising groups. Kate and I drove together four days a week on the half-hour trip to Santa Rosa Junior College. On campus, we parted, heading to our separate classes. She was taking several English lit and composition classes in her quest to be a writer, while I was happy leaning into the clay on the potter’s wheel, sketching nude models, watching the black-and-white images appear in the chemical tray in the red light of the darkroom.
Even though no one was hostile to us, I never felt at home at Pocket Canyon Cabins. In the pressure cooker of the tiny cabin, tension simmered between us. When Kate was mad, she became silent and withdrew. But there was nowhere to withdraw to, so she would immerse herself in an activity, ignoring me. This drove me wild. The more closed down and unexpressive she became, the more frantic and demanding I found myself.
ONE NIGHT, KATE WAS sitting on the floor, leaning back against the side of our bed while sewing a pant hem, not uttering a word. I could feel her anger—or was it mine? I went over to her and squatted, facing her. “Kate, what’s going on?! What’s wrong?!”
“Nothing. Nothing’s going on.” She didn’t look at me, kept her head down, the needle moving in and out of the pant leg.
I reached for her, wanting to shake her out of her coldness, but instead of grabbing her, I pricked my finger on the needle. “Shit!” I was hopping around the little open space next to our bed, wagging my hand, feeling like a fool. But I couldn’t stop myself. “Don’t give me that cold-shoulder crap,” I yelled. “Kate, I know you’re upset about something!”
I stopped hopping and stared at Kate. Her small green eyes were narrowed beneath her tightly furrowed brow. Not a peep from her. She set the needle in the pincushion, folded the p
ants, put them next to her on the floor, and reached for a huge tome, The Golden Notebook, which she had planted on her other side. Unbelievable! There she sat, coolly skimming the pages. She can’t really be seeing the words, can she? I grabbed the book and flung it across the room. “Stop it! Talk to me!”
Kate disappeared into the bathroom. She came out in her nightgown. “I’m going to bed,” she told me. And she climbed into our bed, pulled up the covers, and became a silent lump.
Burning with fury, I grabbed my jacket and went out into the night, Emma at my heels. My breath came short and shallow in the cold air. I wanted to murder Kate. Yet the quiet, the glittering stars, the pine smell held me as my breath slowed. I bent over and petted Emma, stroking her long, soft fur as she leaned into me. I sighed and straightened up. “Come on, girl, let’s go.” I turned back, heading for bed.
In the spring, Kate and I enrolled in a women’s jujitsu class on campus. We began to make some friends among our classmates, which eased the tension between us. Our teacher was a cop, and ran the class in a militaristic fashion. He had us do sit-ups and push-ups while yelling, “Come on, you sissies!” at our weak-armed, wobbly push-ups. Yet there was something amazing about facing the lineup of the entire class, grabbing the lapels of the white gi of the woman facing you, swiveling around to spoon into her while thrusting your hip just so, and flinging her over your shoulder, until you had thrown twenty women as if they were lightly stuffed duffel bags. To be thrown was to feel your body fly in the air, to land with a resounding smack of your arm against the mat, body rolling with the momentum, not fighting it, and to rise to your feet in the exhilaration of being completely uninjured!
WHEN MY FATHER ANNOUNCED in early May that he was coming for a visit, my first thought was He’s gonna know. I hadn’t officially come out to him, although I figured that after our earlier, “I hope this phase won’t last too long” conversation, he had his suspicions. I knew his first look at our one-room cabin with its double bed taking up most of the space, would settle any doubts he had.
I was determined to tell him on our drive north from the San Francisco airport. As I drove, my throat felt jammed and each choked minute ticked against my nerves. By the time I turned off the freeway in Santa Rosa ninety minutes later, I was still voiceless. When we entered the redwoods, Dad beat me to it, as I was focused on rounding a curve. “Ah, what sort of . . . ” He paused, cleared his throat. “Hrrrum, what sort of relationship do you and Kate have?”
We now had a used VW van, since our Datsun had died. The boxy vans are lousy curve huggers, so we careened a bit rounding the bend. “If you mean are we lovers, the answer is yes.” The edge in my voice startled me. My assertion came out more defiantly than I’d intended.
I glanced over at Dad. He had his face in his hands and was crying. I pulled over onto the weedy shoulder and shut off the engine. Silence. As a child, I’d seen my father cry before, often rushing to comfort him—“It’s okay, Daddy, it’s okay”—but now his crying made me angry. It felt like I had spent a lifetime feeling sorry for my father.
He lifted his face up, took a handkerchief from his back pocket, and blew his nose. “When your mother . . . ” he began, faltered, tried again. “ . . . Early in our marriage, your mother was involved with another woman . . . ”
“With Marian, you mean,” I interjected vehemently. I wanted him to know my mother had told me first. That I understood the story differently now. My mother had not been some pitiful, mysteriously depressed woman, but a woman with a grief-filled heart, a lesbian trapped in a marriage, a woman electroshocked and drugged and therapized by a homophobic psychiatric system.
“Well, I just knew something had happened between her and another woman. It wasn’t until some years later that I found out it was Marian,” Dad said.
My father, the scientist. He could be so literal at times, missing the point I was trying to make, the emotional implications. I couldn’t find my breath.
“But what I’m trying to say,” Dad continued, “is you have to understand: When I found out your mother was a lesbian, I thought about leaving her. But then I realized if she had tuberculosis, I wouldn’t leave her, so I’d stay with her through this disease, too. That’s how we thought of it then—as an illness. So, it’s going to take me some time with you.”
Dad and I stared at each other, eyes moist, torsos turned in our bucket seats.
With Dad, I had swallowed my own pain to bind him to me. I had been desperate to buoy him up as the strong parent. It had all been a sham. Now that my mother had told me the secret, I saw that homophobia had shattered us all.
My chest and throat ached with that familiar but unspeakable pairing: How I love you; how I hate you. He was admitting why it was hard for him, I had to give him that. “Okay, Dad, I can understand that” was all I could manage. I started the car, and we headed for Pocket Canyon.
When we got to the cabin, Kate had dinner ready: our standard cooked veggies with rice, a salad topped with sunflower seeds and tahini dressing, and freshly made carrot juice. Dad shook Kate’s hand in the doorway, and we sat down at the dinette set. He raised his glass of juice as if to make a toast, but then simply took a sip, leaving his mustache tipped with orange foam. Dad gamely dug into his food, but both his and Kate’s faces were a bit grim. I so wanted him to like her, and her to get to know him, but it was a competitive war from the beginning. When they started their verbal sparring, I felt caught in between, as I had at meals with my parents.
As their conversation veered through the women’s movement, politics in general, and existential issues, whatever the subject, they took opposing stances. “Life is great! Things are changing, full of possibility! We’re on the edge of a great revolution in sex roles and culture,” Kate declared, while my father held to “Life is tough and terrible! Disaster is around the bend. It won’t work out.”
My father, with his sad eyes. It hit me then: My father was depressed, had been depressed my whole life. I had only thought of my mother that way, that my father’s sadness was simply in reaction to his troubled wife, the sick one. But now I realized something in him was defeated, while Gloria had reclaimed herself.
And Kate. I looked at her face, hardened with its stubborn, tight jaw as she argued with my father. She was immersed in her argument, and never looked my way. I thought she might reach out more, for my sake. In that moment, her insistence bordered on meanness; I saw no kindness there. Sure, I agreed with her that there was lots of cause for hope, but did she get it at all how excruciating life could be? Did she have a clue how much pain my father and I had survived?
As soon as the meal ended, I burst out, “You must be tired, Abe, still on East Coast time. How ’bout I drive you to your motel?”
The next morning, I picked my father up at his motel in Guerneville. I had taken the day off from classes while Kate went to school. Sightseeing seemed the thing to occupy the time. We headed over to the Napa Valley.
Somewhere along the road, after stops for tastings at a couple of wineries, Dad blurted out, “Your mother—I hope she has made peace with her predilection.”
Oh, Dad. Can’t you even say the word? Silly that I hadn’t expected this question. Something in me clenched, and I found I couldn’t say the word either.
“She has,” I replied, then went silent. I felt protective of my mother, didn’t want to reveal the details of her life to my father, her wild year of sleeping with every woman in sight.
It was at the third winery’s deli, where we bought French bread, cheese, and fruit, and were eating at an outside picnic table, that Dad said, “I’m glad your mother has come to peace with herself. Once, I met with her psychiatrist. He was a specialist they brought in just for Gloria. Um . . . ” Dad hesitated, cleared his throat.
“Yes?” My stomach was knotting up.
“Well, what he specialized in was treating homosexuals. He told me to have faith, that there was hope for her. That he had helped other homosexual patients. He gave me an articl
e about a gay man he had successfully treated to become heterosexual.”
“Jesus, that bastard! They treated Mom as if she was sick and perverted and to be cured when she was brokenhearted for Marian. And how twisted for you, to be given false hope. God, what an awful mess.”
Dad sighed, “Yeah, what he said gave me a glimmer of hope, but it was a false hope. It was a terrible time.”
I heaved a big sigh, too.
As I drove us back into the redwoods, Dad announced, “Karen, I’ve changed my plane reservation. I’m sorry, but I’m going to leave tomorrow. My flight leaves at noon.”
“Oh. Okay.” Relief mixed with a sudden sense of defeat. His five-day visit, shortened to two. My father just couldn’t take it. But then, I was used to that—wasn’t he always leaving me?
AT THE END OF MAY, Kate went all out for my twenty-first birthday. Our friends, Sally and Jennifer, let us use their cottage, as our space was too cramped. Kate invited women from the city and our new friends from our jujitsu and VW repair classes. Sally and Jennifer lived in a fairytale cottage: They were renting a former caretaker’s home on a three-hundred-acre horse ranch in the Valley of the Moon. We gathered in their living room, with its stone fireplace and big picture window, looking out on a huge meadow with solitary live oak trees amid grazing horses. To me it was a beautiful, wondrous place: sheltered by pines, but facing light-filled open country, so unlike the frigid redwood forest.
Kate had festooned the living room with crepe paper garlands and balloons. We all donned paper party hats, passed joints around, ate a potluck meal, and succumbed to great gales of laughter. I was giddy with being loved by Kate and celebrated by my friends. It seemed to me we were commemorating more than this marker into adulthood. There was the triumph of our relationship. We’d come out together and been lovers a year and a half, bonded by our shared life in the women’s movement; had suffered surveillance and disillusionment; and been through a hard winter in the woods. Now, we’d made it to the other side.