Riding Fury Home

by Chana Wilson

  A month after my birthday party, Sally and Jennifer bought a house, and we snatched their fairytale cottage. We were moving there with two other women. It was the realization of a dream: not just a beautiful place, but a collective household with women friends. We knew Dotty from jujitsu and Martha from our VW repair class, and had a budding friendship with each of them. The house had three bedrooms, so Kate and I would share a room, and Dotty and Martha would each have their own. In our premove planning meeting, they both said they didn’t mind living with a couple.

  Our fourth weekend in the house, Kate and I began painting our bedroom. We’d agreed easily on the colors: cream-yellow walls, like afternoon light in autumn, and rust trim to warm the room. I hummed as I painted, my overalls and bandana splattered with the colors of fall leaves and golden light.

  By the end of our first painting day, I went to bed completely beat, a contented exhaustion. I got under the covers before Kate and was asleep before she even made it to bed. In the morning, I woke to an empty bed.

  I was at the kitchen counter, puttering around with breakfast things, when Kate emerged from the adjoining living room, looking sleepy, still in her nightgown. Her straight hair was so mussed, it was in a tangle. Dotty, also in her pajamas, followed her out of the living room and into the kitchen.

  “Hi,” I grinned toward them. “I’m having granola. Want some?”

  Dotty mumbled something about going to the bathroom, and walked past me and down the hall.

  Kate said, “I need to talk with you.”

  As we walked down the hall to our bedroom, my body felt strange; my midsection was closing in on itself, but my mind was thinking, She’s changed her mind about the paint colors.

  We each sat on the bed’s edge, our bodies turned only partially toward each other. Kate began, “Last night, when you went to sleep early, I waited up for Dotty to come home. We stayed up talking, and, well, then we made love. We spent the night on the hide-a-bed in the living-room couch.”

  Now the contraction included my heart and my throat. I could barely breathe. My temples began to pound and my chest ached. “Kate . . . how could you!?” I burst out, and then managed to contain myself. I was on a knife’s edge, knew I had to handle this right. My breathing shallow, I started over, exercising all my willpower, trying to sound calm. “So, do you want to continue being lovers with her?”

  “Yes, this has been coming between Dotty and me for a while.”

  Memory flashed then—looks that had passed between Kate and Dotty, eyes holding each other across the dinner table, their dancing together at my birthday party. I tried to hold back my rising panic. “This is going to be really hard for me, Kate. I mean, jeez, we all live together. How do you think I’ll feel, not knowing if you will be sleeping with me or Dotty each night?”

  We’d talked about the idea of having other lovers. The ideology of nonmonogamy had dominated our Radicalesbians group. Kate and I had concluded that there might be room in our relationship for others, but we’d both asserted that doing so would not separate us or lessen our love for each other. But it had all been theory up until now.

  “Actually, Karen,” Kate went on, “I don’t want to be lovers with you anymore.”

  I could not speak. I found myself rising, my body moving out of the bedroom, there was the blur of the hall, the thud of the front door closing behind me. Then I was running across the driveway and into the thicket. I hurled myself belly down onto the dried grass, sobbing into the earth until I was spent.

  When I got back to the house, it was empty. Both Dotty’s car and Martha’s were gone. I figured the three of them had left for our karate class, the one we’d all joined because there was no jujitsu over the summer. But then, why had they taken two cars? My mind was swirling, and I couldn’t think clearly. A chilling quiet now filled the house, and I found its emptiness unbearable, so I jumped in our VW van and drove the twenty miles to the martial arts studio.

  No Kate or Dotty at class, just Martha. I joined the line of women moving into horse-stance position: wide legs, knees bent, pelvis tucked, elbows held into the ribs, fists hard and tight. We went through the moves in unison: jab, forward kick—traitors—backward kick—cowards, deserters, where could they be?—slash, upward block—why? why doesn’t she love me?—punch, downward block.

  Dotty’s car was still gone when we got home after class. Inside the quiet house, Martha asked, “What’s going on? Why are you so upset?” I told her what Kate had said to me, how now my chest wouldn’t quit aching. She put her arm around me and let me cry.

  The afternoon passed in a blur. Martha went off to visit a friend, and I alternated between sitting stuporously on the couch and wandering about the house.

  When Martha got back, she took one look at me and said, “Let’s go out to dinner. You need to get out of here.” We drove to a local restaurant and bar, a popular place, one of the few restaurants on that strip of country highway, and on a Saturday night, there was an hour wait. No problem—we had nothing but time. We sat out on the wraparound porch with our drinks. My first was a Kahlua and cream, my favorite. After that, I switched to screwdrivers. I intended to drink.

  When we finished our meal, we sat back out on the porch, where I nursed my sixth screwdriver. The place was owned by a famous San Francisco madam, now retired, who had a menagerie of exotic animals that she kept in pens on the front lawn. In the twilight, I could just make out the shapes of three llamas and an ostrich. I didn’t know if I ever wanted to leave this surreal setting and return home. I dreaded facing either possibility: the deserted house or seeing Kate and Dotty there together. I ordered a seventh screwdriver.

  As we made our way to Martha’s VW bug in the parking lot, it was a miracle that I was still standing. After a winter of spartan eating alternating with cleansing fasts, I was the thinnest I would ever be in my adult life: 108 pounds of me, drenched in alcohol. My agitated nerves must have been keeping me erect.

  The house was black when we arrived, the darkness of the mountain looming behind it, set off by stars. No car in Dotty’s spot. The country quiet that just yesterday I had found so soothingly pastoral now grated: How horribly irritating, the buzz of crickets and the lusty croaking of frogs. After Martha went to sleep, I paced the hall that ran along the bedrooms, then through the kitchen and into the living room. Back and forth, like a zoo tiger in its cage. Finally, I took a bath to calm myself and got into bed. Sleep was impossible.

  At 2:00 AM, I heard car wheels crunching on the gravel driveway. I got out of bed and walked down the hall toward the front door. I heard the porch door open and close, the creak of the porch boards, then two voices talking in whispers, giggling. As Kate and Dotty came through the front door off the porch, they stopped short, seeing me standing there, a shadow in the dark. Kate said, “We’ve been out picking plums in the U-pick plum orchard today. We’ve got tons of them in the car . . . ” She was smiling and talking, talking about inanities.

  I leapt at Kate, fury catapulting me. I grabbed her by the shoulders, pinned her against the wall next to the door. I began to shake her as I yelled, “What are you talking about? Where were you? How could you tell me we are through and then just leave!”

  Hands were on me, and I was pulled to the floor. Dotty had jumped me, little Dotty with her tiny, small-boned body. She was on top of me, but a jujitsu move came through me—just like our teacher had promised one day in a pinch it would—and now she was under me. I had her long black hair wrapped in my hand, and I was banging her head against the floor, using her hair to pull her head. My own blood raced through me with each satisfying thud.

  Then I felt more hands on me, tugging. Martha and Kate pulled me off Dotty, who got up and moved close to Kate. They started to turn away, Kate taking Dotty’s hand as they moved in the direction of the living room. Then Kate stopped and turned back toward me. I was dusting myself off, but straightened and looked at Kate. Those icy green eyes of hers were narrowed at me. That mean voice said, “You w
ill not get me back this way, Karen.”

  OVER THE NEXT MONTH, I fled and returned several times. Taking a break, that’s what I called it in my mind. When staying at the house became too unbearable, I would go visit friends in the city for a few days, then come back to the country.

  I wasn’t ready to let go. I kept hoping that Kate would come around, realize it was just the novelty that drew her, and resume as my lover. Each time I came back, my fantasy got more battered. Kate and Dotty would disappear together for hours on end. When Kate and I were both at the house, if I expressed any sadness or anger, she would give me a fierce look and then walk out of the room. I tried hard to hold my emotions in, because I didn’t want to drive her further away, but that suppression ate at me, made me feel crazy and lonelier than ever.

  But one day I did manage to make a request of her. “Kate, I need to spend some time with you, just the two of us,” I stated. “It’s too hard to go from our being together every day to this.”

  She surprised me by conceding, “Sure, let’s go do something on Saturday.”

  We drove over to the Napa Valley and visited wineries, just like tourists, just as I had with my father. As Kate drove along the Valley, I found myself almost mute in the passenger seat.

  After several wineries, the lump in my throat had only increased. It was too horribly familiar, this making myself invisible to hold the other’s love. I had thought with Kate I could be myself, be loved for all of me. As we drove back toward the Valley of the Moon, my ability to be stoic weakened by wine, I started to cry quietly.

  Kate glanced over at me. “There’s no need to be sad,” she said simply. She didn’t stop the car. “I still love you. I want you to stay and live with us as my friend.”

  “I don’t know if I can” was all I said, silencing my hurt.

  But I didn’t leave—although clinging against all odds was making me ill. It was shameful, part of me knew, to take such treatment. I lost my appetite, couldn’t sleep, and took up a daily habit of smoking pot and drinking.

  One night, just as the household was sitting down to dinner, the doorbell rang. It was a surprise visit from a couple from the city, Barbara and T.J. They had been up for my birthday party, but I hadn’t seen them on my recent stays in the city. We made room for them at the table, brought out extra plates. T.J. pulled out a joint, which we passed around before eating. Just as we were about to dig into our food, T.J. asked, smiling broadly, “So, what’s up with y’all?”

  There was a silent pause. Kate started to say something, but the room was closing in on me, and I couldn’t hear her properly. Noise heaved itself out of me in one great sob, and then I was tumbling sideways toward Barbara’s shoulder. My head hit her and then rolled back, and my chair tipped and rocked as I slumped onto the floor. I could hear, but it all seemed muffled and far-away: the scraping of everyone’s chairs, Barbara asking, “What’s wrong with her?” as she put her hand against my face, then Martha’s voice fading in and out, “. . . they broke up . . . not eating . . . too much booze . . . Let’s get her some air…”

  Hands were holding my feet and shoulders, my body swung aloft, and I was deposited on the cool concrete patio outside the living room. “Karen?” A voice leaned over me, not Kate’s. Something broke loose in me then: A keening wail echoed off the patio walls. When it ebbed away, sobs began, great gulps of air moving in and out of my lungs. My fingers curled tightly into my palms, and my body grew rigid. “She’s hyperventilating,” Barbara said. “Breathe slowly, Karen, it’s all right, just slow down.” After a while, the spasm lessened and I opened my eyes. T.J., Barbara, and Martha were gathered around me, crouching with their hands resting on me.

  Kate and Dotty came outside then, standing at the far edge of the patio near the door. Kate peered over at me. For a moment, I thought she might be worried about me. “She’s faking,” she said. “She just wants attention.” Then she and Dotty disappeared back inside the house.

  Kate knew all my secrets; I had told her how I had exaggerated my injuries in childhood to get sympathy from my friends. In my foggy state, I wondered if in a way she was right, if I hadn’t used the moment to show these friends how hurt I was. The pain was real, though—that I knew. I lifted my head, looked at the three of them gathered close, and said the truth: “I can’t stay here anymore.”

  That night, Barbara and T.J. drove me back to the city with them.

  The next day, I called my mother in her Greenwich Village apartment. I’d already told her about the breakup.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, darling,” she said. “Come on home.”

  Chapter 31. Fire Escape

  I’D ALMOST FORGOTTEN, AFTER two years in California, how humid New York could be. The sticky summer evening hit me as I stepped out of the air-conditioned JFK Airport to board the shuttle bus to Manhattan. Outside the Midtown bus station, I hailed a cab, and felt slightly nauseous as the cabby careened in and out of traffic heading downtown. I’d had a couple of cocktails on the plane.

  Mom greeted me over the intercom at her apartment: “You’ll have to walk up; the elevator’s busted.” As I lugged my two suitcases up the five flights to Mom’s studio, I felt the sweat gathering in my armpits and the small of my back. Gloria’s place was a home I’d never seen.

  “Sweetie!” There Mom was, grinning at me as she held her door open. She ignored my sweating and panting from the stairs, and embraced me in a big hug as I dropped my suitcases in her narrow hall. I started crying. “I know, baby, it’s tough, I know,” Mom soothed. “Didn’t get to tell you, Stella just broke up with me last week. Left me for my friend Joanna. Some goddamn friend! Hell with them. Come on in and see my place.”

  The tiny studio apartment was filled with the furniture I had grown up with, only pruned down to the essentials. The mahogany coffee table my father had built to Frank Lloyd Wright’s design was covered with feminist magazines—Ms., Off Our Backs—an amethyst crystal, a conch shell, and two blue ceramic ashtrays. The old brown couch I used to lounge on while reading books and drinking Cokes faced the fireplace. Fire was my mother’s element. She’d told me how ecstatic she was to have found a working fireplace in a New York City apartment.

  Mom’s recent black-and-white photographs lined the mantel: still-life patterns of sand dunes and fences, rows of battered New York garbage cans. I remembered the time Mom came home from the mental hospital, gathered all her cameras, and sold them. In the years since, I had often wondered why; now I understood that her passions had been a dangerous and forbidden territory.

  “Come on, let me show you my porch,” Mom took my hand with a gentle tug. I was a bit dizzy. I almost tripped over the two steps up to her raised sleeping area. “Careful,” Mom warned as I stumbled. We circled the bed, and she opened the sliding glass door.

  “Ta da!” Mom beamed proudly as we stepped outside.

  “But, Gloria,” I giggled, “this isn’t a porch, it’s a fire escape!”

  “Yeah, but it’s my bit of outdoors in New York City. And look how I fixed it up.” Mom had put boards down over the open metal flooring. A row of brilliant red geraniums in individual pots circled the edge of the railing. A rocking canvas recliner took up all but the little standing space where Mom and I leaned close together, looking down. We could see below us the soot-blackened buildings with their ornate concrete scrollwork and the signs for the antique dealers who lined her street. The shops were closed, leaving her block quiet by Manhattan standards. For a moment, the Sonoma landscape I’d left gathered behind my eyelids: the meadow with its live oak trees, the woods around our cottage, Kate with her new lover. Pain seared my chest. And then I was back with Mom in Greenwich Village, Mom pulling me inside. “Come on, let’s have a drink.”

  “I’m fixing you and me each a martini!” Mom declared. We were standing in her kitchenette, a corner of the studio space crammed with miniature kitchen appliances. I braced myself for the martini, in its own way an initiation into adulthood, or at least my mother’s nod to
my achieving that status. I watched Mom open a cabinet, put two cocktail glasses on the counter, take out gin and vermouth and a shaker, get ice and olives from the fridge, mix, shake, and pour our drinks.

  We moved to the couch. I sank into its familiar softness. The martini burned my throat as I took a large gulp, but then I quickly felt the sharp edges of things softening, an inner tension releasing. “How are you, sweetie?” Mom asked, reaching her arm around my shoulder.

  “It’s been awful.” My throat constricted and the words came out in a whisper. A few tears leaked. I imagined sobbing in my mother’s arms, but I couldn’t quite let go to this new mother who could now offer solace. My fierce longing was overpowered by the longtime reflex of pulling back. Besides, right now I wanted to forget, not remember. I brushed my tears with the back of my hand and changed the subject. “What happened with Stella? I thought you two were doing so well.”

  “After I moved from Jersey, we spent day and night together. It was great. Now that we could be at my place, we didn’t have to worry about running into her husband in the elevator of her apartment.”

  “Her husband? She’s got a husband? Gloria, can’t you find a real dyke, not a married woman?”

  “Don’t get all righteous on me! They don’t live together anymore. He lives one floor up in her apartment building, though, and he still pays her rent. She doesn’t want a hassle from him.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “I took Stella with me to my consciousness-raising group at Gay Older Women’s Liberation. I thought she might really get into it. She got into it, all right, but not like I thought. We went out to a bar afterward with my friend Joanna and a few others. And then, the next thing I hear, a couple weeks later she tells me she and Joanna have started seeing each other, and it’s over between us. So much for sisterhood! I could kill that Joanna!”