Riding Fury Home

by Chana Wilson

  From the couch facing the closed control-room door, I watched the red light attached to the doorframe light up, the signal that someone was live on the air. Her voice came over the alcove speakers: “This is KPFA and KPFB in Berkeley. Up next: Lesbian Air.” The light went off as she started the tape. And a buzzing began in my chest.

  A friend of mine sat next to me on the couch, but I barely felt her presence. I was conscious of being excited and proud of the final product, the first full hour-length show I had ever produced, edited, and mixed with music. But a state of agitation had taken over my body. I gripped the couch’s arm as if it were the mane of a bucking bronco, in order to ride out the broadcast.

  First there was the oddity of hearing my own voice as my introduction went out across Northern California, from the Pacific ocean to the Sierra mountains: “My mother and I are both lesbians; she’s fifty two and I’m twenty three. A lot of my friends have asked me what it’s like to have a mother who’s a dyke, and I tell them it’s made an incredible bond between us . . . ”

  Then, there was my mother’s voice, telling her story, “ . . . 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 I’ve been in so many hospitals, I can hardly remember how many. So many different kinds of places, some of them so expensive, and some of them very nice—you know, comfortable. But they were really just to keep you off the streets!”

  I had thought I was over the shame, now that I had a political analysis to explain what had happened in my childhood. When I read Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness, with its in-depth critique of the psychiatric treatment of American women, I felt enraged and affirmed. I knew others would relate to my mother’s story, that it had relevance beyond one woman’s experience.

  But as I listened to the broadcast, shaking came over me, rising in waves from my belly. The silence in my childhood was embedded deeply in my body, and each act of asking a forbidden question and voicing what had been taboo beat against my sinews. It left me raw, breathless, and pulsing with fear and exhilaration.

  “YOU KAREN, THE RADIO PRODUCER?” A woman driving a VW van had pulled up to the airport curb and leaned across the passenger seat, yelling out the open window.

  It was May 1975, a year after the broadcast of my interview with my mother had aired on KPFA. I’d emerged from Los Angeles International Airport into a hot, smoggy Friday afternoon. The organizers of the weekend conference, called Lesbian History Exploration, had told me to look for a blue van.

  I grinned and nodded, and the driver leapt out, slamming her door and coming around to the sidewalk. She was wearing cutoff jeans and a handmade silk-screened T-shirt with AMAZON in purple letters. She slid open the van door and heaved my bag inside.

  The van proceeded to the next terminal to pick up another passenger, a slender woman in her late seventies, whose head was wrapped with silver braids, giving her a kind of halo. She looked like someone from another time and place. When I saw her waiting on the curb, I thought of a French countrywoman stirring a big black pot over an open hearth, not a presenter at a lesbian conference. She turned out to be Elsa Gidlow, a lesbian poet. I’d never heard of her, but during the conference, I learned a surprising fact: This woman, born in 1898, had, in 1923, been the first in America to publish an openly lesbian book of poetry.

  Elsa was given the deference of the front passenger seat, and as we roared off, I was left to my own thoughts, since it was impossible to hear much over the rev of the VW engine. I was nervously anticipating my own presentation. The conference organizers had discovered my interview in the catalog of the Feminist Radio Network and tracked me down.

  The VW made its way north along the coast, heading for the Jewish summer camp that had been rented for the occasion. We pulled up in front of the main building, a large, rustic wood meeting hall. We were among the last of the 150 or so women to arrive. Most were milling around the hall, hugging old friends, gathering in clusters. Shyly, I stood there, uncertain what to do. It was a great relief when one of the organizers took me aside to look over the sound equipment they had arranged for my presentation.

  The next morning, I found myself picking at my breakfast, my stomach queasy. I decided to go directly to the meeting hall to double-check the equipment. The large, vacant room echoed my footsteps as I walked over to the portable tape machine resting on a wood table. I threaded the tape and played a brief snippet, checking the volume.

  I sat in the chair next to the table laden with equipment, and stared at the room, with its rough-hewn camp decor of unpainted wood walls and hardwood flooring, tension gripping my stomach. About ten minutes before the program time, women began wandering in. I smiled in their direction, and then bolted for the bathroom. When I got back, the room was nearly full. The chatter of one hundred or so women hummed through the meeting hall.

  Finally, it was time. The room quieted as I stood on rubbery legs and cleared my throat to give a brief introduction. Then I leaned toward the tape recorder and hit the play button. Our voices, my mother’s and mine, began reverberating through the room. This time, unlike radio, there was no hiding: I was in the same room with the listeners. A vibrating began in my body, and I lifted out of my skin, hovering over the crowd. I looked down at the women. I saw their faces—heads bent forward in absorbed concentration.

  Reassured, I sank back into my body just as my mother was describing her electroshocks: “ . . . they sent me to this place, and they gave me an electric shock. And it was terrible! After the first shock, I called up my parents. ‘Get me out of here!’ I used up all my change, called up all my friends, and pleaded, “Get me out of here!’ It wasn’t until eighteen shocks later they let me out of that place. When I got home, I didn’t remember where we lived or the streets of the town. People would come up to me and say, ‘Hello, Gloria,’ and some of them were probably old friends, but I wouldn’t know who they were . . . ”

  My mother’s words hit me in a new way. The numbness I’d felt when first hearing her words left me, and the pain of what had happened made my chest ache. I found myself quietly weeping. I wished I could hide in the back of the room. Instead, I raised my face and looked out to see that other women were crying, too. It was all right, all right to feel this, and to let others see.

  I stayed in this new state, connected and present, held there by the women in the audience, as my mother continued the story. By the time she got to quitting therapy, giving me her blessing, and her own coming out in the women’s movement, we were all smiling. There were hoots of laughter as she described her sexual blossoming and wild promiscuity that first year.

  Toward the end of the tape, I asked, “I’d like to know how you feel, identifying as a dyke. A couple months ago, I called you, and you sounded like you felt so tough and so good!”

  “Yeah. I feel absolutely wonderful being a dyke. A fifty-two-year-old political dyke. I feel strong; I feel good within myself. I still have a lot of pain, but I’m dealing with it. You know, living isn’t all fun. But I feel good about being a dyke—there’s no doubt about that. So . . . what more can I tell you?”

  “Well,” I responded, “all I can say is that we’ve been through a lot together, a lot of hard times, and pain and anger, and your being a lesbian is just so incredible for me. I mean, it’s made this bond between us that will always be there. It’s this bond—”

  My mother finished my thought: “I know it makes me feel closer. Once I was able to accept you as a lesbian and myself as a lesbian, you know, there were no secrets anymore.”

  After the tape ended, several women made their way up to me. They told me how moving the recording had been, how deeply it affected them. One woman said to me, “If you never do anything else in your life, you have done something by sharing this story.”

  Chapter 36. Woman Share

  COMPLAINING ABOUT OUR lovers was a bond my mother and I shared, because Gloria, like me, chose women who drove us nut
s with their wandering lust, the giddy push-pull of intimacy and then flight. They ran, we chased. One of those women was Giovanna, my neighbor on Clarke Street, whose ground-floor apartment faced mine across a narrow gap between our buildings. The Oakland block, with its cheap rent and fourplex apartments, had become a lesbian enclave, its own little bell jar of friendships, entanglements, and intrigues.

  Giovanna was an artist and a pothead. We started as friends. One afternoon, we lay on my bed very stoned, and somehow ended up exploring each other’s naked bodies and becoming lovers. Before our relationship, I had admired Giovanna’s relentless devotion to her art. She spent hours at her easel, painting on canvas. But now, need rose up in me like warm dough, and I began to sulk, feeling like a sidekick to her work. There’d be moments when she was attentive to me, when we’d gab nonstop on our hikes with our dogs in the hills, during sex, or when she taught me her mother’s recipe for calzone. Then I’d feel the sweetness of her attention, and be placated.

  On Thanksgiving, after we’d been together about eight months, the flu kept me from going down the block to our friends’ feast. Giovanna went alone. The next day, she brought me turkey leftovers and announced she was breaking up. She’d ended up taking a woman she’d met at the dinner party back to her apartment, and decided she was really into her. Later, through her thin curtains, I could see the shadows of her and her new girlfriend, and hear them making love. Furious, I wanted to hurl something across the gap. Instead, I called my mother and complained bitterly. She echoed my outrage, then added, “Darling, you’re better off without that shithead!”

  Several months later, Giovanna rang my bell. She told me how sorry she was, and began her love refrain: What a fool I’ve been. How special and wonderful you are! With that, some place inside me went warm and droopy. I wanted to believe. I forgave her.

  AFTER BEING REUNITED a couple months, Giovanna and I went away for the weekend to visit a collective of women living on land in the country. Giovanna knew one of them. At the end of dinner with the group in their farmhouse kitchen, Giovanna disappeared, along with her friend. The two of them had been sitting at one end of the table, their heads close together in an animated conversation.

  I tried to ignore my growing anxiety, but as sunset deepened into indigo, they still hadn’t returned. I stepped outside, into the fading light, the first stars blinking dimly. The crickets had started up. “Gio—vaaaaa—nna?!” I yelled out into the darkening meadow.

  Silence.

  I stepped back inside, shaking my head as the screen door thunked behind me. I turned to the two women I’d met that day still at the table. I tried to sound casual, but my tone came out strained. “Do you have any idea where Giovanna and Michelle went? It’s getting dark, and they’re not back.”

  They looked at each other, then back at me. Linda shrugged. Rena, a woman with curly red hair, coughed, then said, “Giovanna went off with Michelle? Well, then they probably went over the hill to the tepee on the other side of the land. Michelle often spends the night there.”

  No, damn it to hell, this couldn’t be happening. I must have had a stricken look, because Rena added, “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I stepped back outside. Surely, I’d see a flashlight and two bodies stumbling toward the house. Surely, Giovanna had just asked Michelle to show her around the land or get a peek at the tepee. There was no moon, just a black country sky thick with stars. A chorus of bullfrogs were croaking their low, forlorn refrain, “Ribbit. Ribbit.”

  That night, Linda and Rena were kind. They let me rant about how I couldn’t believe Giovanna was doing this again.

  “Come sleep with us,” Rena offered. In their double bed, Linda and Rena spooned while I perched at the edge, too jumpy to accept their offer to cuddle. Soon, their breathing slowed, and one began snoring lightly. There wasn’t much sleep in me. I lay there obsessing: How could she? How could she? I drifted between that state and anxious dreams.

  At dawn, I stumbled outside and sank into a battered metal lawn chair with flaking paint, staring at the hill as if I could will Giovanna’s return. I considered driving away. But then, how will she get home? I stared at the hill in the dim light, its weeds brittle and dry from the rainless California summer, my eyes burning.

  In midmorning, I saw them: two figures coming down the hill. They were holding hands. My stomach lurched and I stood up. When they got close enough to notice me, they dropped hands. Giovanna came up to me, while Michelle stood back a ways.

  “Hey,” she said, smiling.

  “What the hell, Giovanna?” I yelled. “How could you just go off, not a word?”

  When she shrugged and gave me another smile, I leapt. Grabbing her T-shirt collar with both hands, I intended to shake her, but the force of my leap knocked us both to the ground. I was partly on top of her, her face near mine. Michelle was yelling, “Goddamn it, knock it off!” Giovanna’s breath was heavy with the scent of marijuana. She’s stoned, I thought. There’s no talking to her. We untangled, got up, and dusted ourselves off.

  On the ride home, we were silent. My fury steamed around me, fueling my foot on the gas pedal. Go, go, get home. Giovanna sat in the passenger seat with her sketchbook in her lap, doodling furiously. When I pulled up on our block, we each unloaded our bags from the car, carried them into our separate apartments, and closed our doors without a goodbye.

  All my friends said, “Don’t let her back! She’s never going to change.” I concurred, “Never again with that shithead!” My mother sent me a note: “Hi, love, I just put another hex on Giovanna and her house—I hope you will not be too troubled by her being next door.”

  And for a while, I held out. But then, she began her Siren song—you are so beautiful; you are so wonderful—and I did not stop up my ears with wax. I clung to the driftwood of our relationship, terrified of drowning if I let go. The only thing that saved me was Giovanna’s move to New Mexico, to paint in that high desert light.

  AT FIRST, MY MOTHER dated women her age who had been only with men—single or divorced older women now active in Women’s Liberation. She was supported by the prevailing belief in feminist circles: Any woman can be a lesbian, and should be, instead of being oppressed in a relationship with a man.

  One summer when I was between jobs, I went East for two months. Gloria was living with Sarah, a woman also in her fifties. It was Sarah’s first lesbian relationship. My mother had found them an apartment within milliseconds of their becoming lovers, but now Sarah had backpedaled to a rarely sexual, almost-roommates stance. Sarah and I made small talk over meals, but there was little room to ease into knowing each other. My mother simmered with disappointment and resentment, and the tension between them was palpable.

  We all suffocated through July in the reduced oxygen of the humid, tense apartment. In August, my mother and I headed for the Jersey shore. She had the summer off from her teaching job, but Sarah had to remain in the city and work. We stayed in a bungalow that Sarah and her brother had inherited when their father died. Gloria had bought out the brother’s half, which I thought was a disastrous mistake. But there was no stopping Gloria when she had an impulse; she was a leaper.

  During the week, my mother and I lay on beach towels on the white sand, slathering ourselves with Coppertone, reading junky paperbacks, jumping in the gentle Atlantic surf. The salty air felt like home, like the best part of home. I sunbathed in the proximity of my mother’s love, trying to bake out my hurt from my latest busted relationship. With my mother, I was not just loved, but adored.

  Toward the end of each week, I could feel my mother disappearing into anxiety. She always hoped for a good weekend with Sarah, but feared otherwise. Friday night, we’d go to pick Sarah up at the bus station, and she’d descend the bus stairs, smiling somewhat grimly. Oh, shit, here we go! I’d sigh to myself. We’d go back to the cottage and have the dinner Gloria had prepared, but conversation soon lagged. I tried to fill in the gaps, telling them tales from my California life, a
s desperate as I had been as a child trying to entertain my parents to distract them from their bitterness.

  I WAS BACK IN CALIFORNIA in early fall when my mother called to tell me she and Sarah had broken up.

  After that, my mother switched to younger lovers. While she was recovering from her breakup, she told me, “You know, I dig young women; we’re in sync. I can’t relate to those old-style butch-femme women, those bar dykes who aren’t political. And the other women my age, those divorcées into women’s lib—they can be uptight bloody bores!”

  On my visit the following summer, I discovered my mother had a lover who, at twenty-five, not only was a year younger than I was, but also shared my name. When I met her, something in me went cold and hard, a feeling that I did not want to examine. Instead, I covered it over with a strained warmth. Luckily, the year before I’d started using Chana, my Hebrew name. Nonetheless, it was eerie to hear my mother saying “Karen” to her lover. Weird and a bit creepy. I actually liked Karen, and we got along well, but in my body there was a tidal undercurrent—crash: I’m jealous, I hate you; whoosh: mustn’t feel that. Around the two of them, I would find myself with a tightened throat, queasy stomach, or tearing eyes. That was the price of pretending everything was cool.

  Again in the fall, back in California, I heard from my mother that things weren’t going well. Karen had gotten involved with someone else, but wanted to keep seeing my mother. Gloria wavered, and they were on and off. Then, one night she saw Karen and her other lover dancing at the Duchess. “I was a bit drunk,” Gloria told me over the phone, “and something came over me and I just went up and socked Karen’s girlfriend. I got thrown out of the bar. Of course, I feel bad, but I must say, in the moment it sure the hell felt satisfying.”