The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  “Listen, don’t hand me any of your lesbian chauvinism,” Emily requested.

  “I was just answering your question: If you want sympathy, you aren’t going to get it from a man. All I’ve ever had from them are long self-absorbed monologues, followed by short premature ejaculations.”

  Emily frowned. Justin and Raymond were two of the men she was referring to.

  “But isn’t that sexist, Maria?” asked Gail in a bewildered voice. Gail and Emily were the only women still living with husbands, and Gail was the only full-time housewife. She pinned labels on everyone’s remarks, like name tags on children’s camp clothing.

  “I’m simply stating a personal truth, derived from extensive experience. I spent my whole life until three years ago listening to little boys disguised as men and murmuring, ‘Oh-you-don’t-say-how-very-interesting.’ But I have flat out had it with that!”

  “It annoys you, doesn’t it?” asked Gail, looking concerned.

  “Yes,” said Maria, after a pause.

  “But are you getting anything different from women?” asked Sammie. Sammie, a tall thin black dancer, wore clanky jewelry and high boots with sharp heels. “Angela’s mom,” the other mothers sometimes referred to her. Angela was a café au lait product of the civil rights movement. Emily was “Matt’s mom,” and Matt was notable for being one of the few unpremeditated mistakes in this world of sexual politics and politicized sex. Justin and she were married one morning in a civil ceremony and had spent that afternoon chartering buses to an anti-draft march in Washington the next week. No one could ever accuse them of putting their personal preoccupations ahead of their political work.

  “Sure. Put two people together who’ve been trained to sympathize—and they spend most of their time fighting over who gets to be the Good Listener,” explained Maria.

  “You’d like someone who’d listen to you sometimes, wouldn’t you?” inquired Gail.

  Maria ground her teeth. Then she forced a sisterly smile. “Yes, I would. And I have it.” She glanced at Kate.

  “Something I’ve never had the nerve to ask you, Maria,” Emily said. “Why did you first get involved with a woman? Was it political?”

  Maria grinned. “Hell, no. It was lust.”

  When Emily got home, Justin’s men’s group was meeting in the living room. The women’s group referred to it as the Men’s Auxiliary. “It’s like rednecks meeting during civil rights years to discuss White Liberation,” Maria announced. “Or American soldiers meeting in Vietnam about Soldiers’ Liberation.”

  It smelled as though they were smoking hash. Emily puttered around hanging up stuff and clearing the table. As his first step toward men’s liberation, Justin had broken his promise to do the dishes. Emily could hear them reliving some demonstration at a draft board.

  “… oh man, it was so far fucking out! Don’t you remember? When I put on my football helmet with the face guard and grabbed up that lead pipe …”

  “No, listen, I was the one who brought the football helmet …”

  “Don’t hand me none of that shit, man. I still have that fucking helmet. You want to come over to my place and see it?”

  Emily sighed. They reminded her of the men her father’s age who hung around the Newland Moose Club and argued about which units had gone ashore first at Omaha Beach.

  When Justin and she made love that night, she had another hint that something was up. After he came, she lay still as his semen oozed out of her, seething with resentment that once again a man had succeeded in transferring his mess to a place where she would have to clean it up.

  One weekend she went to a women’s bar in the Village with Maria and Kate. The bouncer was a lady wrestler type. Women in armbands behind the bar mixed the drinks. A woman DJ in a white satin windbreaker picked the records. A stout woman in a green eyeshade and a cream three-piece suit with a red carnation in the buttonhole took on all corners at the pool table. Women were looking each other over with frank sexual intent and sending drinks to each other across the crowded dance floor, asking each other to dance.

  Dykes. Apart from her women’s group, Emily’s only experience with them had involved Miss Melrose in junior high. Yet here she was, trapped with a whole platoon. She was confused. With men she’d often felt like sexual prey. But women had been safe. They had had no ulterior motives. Here in this club with dozens of women whose bed partners were other women, she felt reduced to prey status. It was like being a virgin again, but different, in that she didn’t know the signaling system.

  A tall woman with long dark hair, who looked part Indian, came up and began a conversation about the attractions of New York City over Des Moines. “I was the town dyke. Motorcycle jacket, boots, the works. But here I can finally concentrate on my painting, rather than spending all my energy being Superdyke.”

  “I know what you mean,” Emily lied.

  Emily could see Maria watching and smiling. They danced to a LaBelle song: “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?”

  Am I being flirtatious? Emily kept asking herself. Am I promising things I don’t intend to deliver? What do I intend to deliver? Two women next to her were dancing cheek-to-cheek. Periodically they kissed on the mouth.

  As the song crashed to a conclusion, Emily blurted. “Well, it’s sure been great talking to you, Althea. But I came with a friend, and I’ve got to get back to her.”

  Kate was fighting her way to the bar. Emily demanded of Maria as she sat down, “How do you know what’s going on—whether someone’s putting the make on you or just being friendly?”

  “You know.”

  “Shit, man I don’t know!”

  “You learn.”

  “I don’t have time to learn. I’ve got to know right now. I mean, it’s not really fair, my even being here. I don’t want to lead anyone on, when I’m straight and all. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What?”

  “That smile that didn’t happen.”

  “You’ve never been attracted to a woman?”

  Emily blushed, and Maria aborted another smile. “Well, all right, yes, of course. I mean, some of my best friends are women.”

  “All your best friends, if you’d just face up to it.”

  “Jesus Christ, Maria. Gail’s right about you. You’re so goddam sexist.” Sometimes Emily had difficulty thinking in categories—Blacks, Middle Class, Men, Southerners. She herself, she’d learned during her sojourn among Yankee politicos, was a Ruling Class Southern White Woman. These categories explained everything about her. But Maria was usually Maria for her—rather than a White Intellectual-Elite New York Jewish Lesbian. You couldn’t categorize her way of suppressing an ironical smile; the way she dragged with such greedy pleasure on her cigarettes; the belligerent way she sat in trousers, with her knees wide open, both inviting and defying invasion.

  “I mean, this club, for example. Not letting men in. Where I come from, it’s the blacks who can’t come in, and we call it segregation.”

  “Yeah, but this is different because it’s the exploited keeping out the exploiters. We’ve got to have some place to gather the strength and support to go away and face the fuckers every day. The sound of one male voice, insisting on being agreed with, would wreck the atmosphere. Besides, if it were open to men, they’d pack the place just to get their rocks off imagining what we do in bed.”

  “I’ve been wanting to ask you, Maria. What do you do in bed?”

  Maria grinned. “Why don’t you come to bed and find out?”

  “I couldn’t handle the crush of competition.” Maria was a notorious Dona Juana. In Emily’s current mood, she admired Maria’s ability to do what she wanted when she wanted, apparently free from that awful need of the Great Ear to fulfill the needs of other people.

  “Then you don’t deserve to find out why I draw such a crowd, do you?”

  Emily was trying to be as inept a secretary as possible. This actually took little special effort. She made so many typos that, by the time she c
orrected them with white fluid, a letter looked as though it had lined the bottom of a bird cage. She filed using her own whimsical system of free association. If Harold was in the men’s room and she answered the phone while distracted, she was likely to reply, “Sorry, he’s taking a leak.” Her plan was that she’d be kicked upstairs, rather than out on the street. There were women in big jobs in publishing, and they must have come from somewhere. Why not from among the typing pool rejects?

  Meanwhile, she was trying to establish an image of competence in matters other than Correcto-Tape dexterity. She asked Harold for extra work. Stunned, he asked her to read a manuscript that concerned the ways in which female roles in movies and books and plays by men counteracted what was going on in society. When women were faring well socially and economically, they were increasingly debased and assaulted in male fiction. Emily was impressed and spent a lot of time on a plan to rearrange the sections to enhance the argument. The author was a lively attractive woman named Maggie Something. Emily sat in while Harold outlined her plan. Maggie liked it.

  Pleased, Emily said, “I think it’s a wonderful book. But I thought if …”

  “Emily, could you please get us some coffee.” She stared at Harold. “Cream for me. No sugar. Maggie?”

  As Emily stomped to the coffee wagon, she reflected that in the Movement (she could never use that word without associating it with Matt’s infancy and toilet bowls full of soiled diapers) this situation had become a cliché. Most political women had spent years typing and mimeoing and fixing coffee, while the male heavies led the demos, made the decisions and the speeches. Why, then, was she so surprised? Harold’s consciousness wasn’t even in the basement, it was in the crypt—but he’d never claimed it was elsewhere. Maybe he was a pig, but he was no hypocrite, unlike certain other pigs, who would go unspecified.

  Once in Cincinnati she’d been walking down the street toward the community center with a black man from Chicago, Duane. They passed a woman who sat on the sidewalk in an armchair, holding an infant and weeping. Furniture and boxes of clothes and dishes were piled around her. She’d been evicted for not paying her rent because her welfare check had been stolen. Duane and Emily went to the welfare office. He got nowhere, probably because he was both black and belligerent. Emily took over, and through some complicated maneuvers got the woman an emergency rent check. Duane was impressed since he’d never seen Emily do much except make instant coffee and handle the push broom. Back at the office, he said, “Hey, baby, how bout you and me getting something going here?”

  Apart from the fact that Emily liked his woman friend Mary and was aware of how insulted many black women were that black men were going after white women, she was uninterested in Duane. She said with a laugh, “Oh come on, Duane. You don’t want me any more than I want you.”

  His back stiffened, and he said, “Oh yeah, I know all about you Southerners.” He walked out. Leaving Emily crawling with anxiety.

  She’d worked hard trying to uncover her racial prejudices from both a Southern and an American upbringing. It had been like chasing minnows in a stream with bare hands. You thought you had something, then it would slip through your fingers. When you weren’t looking, it would turn into the Loch Ness monster. She was uninterested in sleeping with Duane. Should she sleep with him anyway to prove she was unprejudiced? On the other hand, she hadn’t slept with any white man she was uninterested in. To single Duane out from all the men she was uninterested in, just because of his skin color, seemed prejudiced. The only solution appeared to be to sleep with several men she was uninterested in, white and black, including Duane.

  Then she realized that not only was she uninterested in Duane, she disliked him. But could this be because of his skin color? But there were white men she disliked as much. Also, there were black men she disliked less. She concluded with relief that she wasn’t necessarily prejudiced in this instance.

  Opening the door, she yelled down the street toward some startled winos, “I wouldn’t sleep with you if you were white either!”

  Standing in line at the coffee wagon, she understood that what Harold had just pulled was parallel. In both cases, she’d displayed competence. She’d been assertive. She had to be put in her place: She was “just” a cunt, she was “just” a secretary. It was unconscious on their parts, which made it worse.

  Emily was trembling with such uncontrollable anger that she splashed coffee all over the hallway.

  As she sat typing labels for review copies of the latest novel Harold had edited and listening to the rumble of his and Maggie’s voices, Emily concluded she was hanging out with the wrong crowd. Maria and Kate were good company, but what if lesbianism was communicable? Was this irritation toward men a symptom? Christ, what a horrible thought …

  During the following week she first found Justin’s little idiosyncrasies annoying rather than endearing. The way his jaw cracked when he chewed. She began handing him Kleenexes when he sniffed upon waking—which he would eye irritably and drop unused into the waste basket, still sniffing. She studied his drooping crew socks and bought him new ones with the elastic intact—which he shoved into the back of his drawer.

  She found herself having consciously to itemize all the things she loved about him. His courage: Justin rolled into a ball on her dorm sitting room floor, practicing the nonviolent response to assault. Justin collecting draft cards on the steps to the induction center while policemen yelled into megaphones. Justin in his crash helmet hurling himself at the Pentagon. His blinding generosity: He’d become frantic knowing the government was spending one hundred million dollars a day in Vietnam, and here was this woman whose kid couldn’t go to school because she didn’t have eighteen dollars for a winter coat. Anyone who’d asked him for money for bail, rent, food, got it. He’d known that it occasionally went for liquor or a TV set, and that he had the reputation of being a guilt-ridden sucker, but he hadn’t cared. His intelligence: The ease with which he’d manipulated words and concepts at FORWARD meetings. Emily had had through him a sense of participation in something she still regarded as important—the building of a just and humane world.

  She thought of the afternoons they’d spent at art galleries and concerts and movies. He’d asked her opinions, then corrected them. He’d picked her up out of the dirt and turned her into the clod she was today.

  Then she realized that, like all memories, these were in the past perfect tense.

  At the next women’s meeting everyone tried to drop out. Gail’s plan was to have everyone mention something important that happened that week. The mass exodus began when they got to Susannah, a nurse at the Roosevelt, Levi’s mom. She announced with great pleasure, “I met a man this week!”

  “Oh, no, I don’t want to hear it,” Kate moaned, burying her head in her arms.

  “No, he’s fantastic. He really is.” Maria sighed.

  “Now come on, yall,” murmured Lou, removing her sunglasses to glare at them. “She listened to your crap.” “Tell us all about him, Susannah,” urged Gail. “Well, he’s a social worker.” Emily reflected that in Newland the response to that request would have taken the form, “Well, he’s so and so’s cousin/uncle/son. And he lives in such-and-such a place.”

  “… and, well, talking to him is almost like talking to a woman. I mean, he actually listens. And he doesn’t quote Marx or anything. And he doesn’t try to direct the conversation back to himself. Sometimes he has emotional reactions and stuff …”

  “It sounds as though you think he’s pretty special,” suggested Gail.

  “He sounds very nice,” Emily murmured. They could always tell a meeting was in trouble when Lou and Emily reverted to their best Southern manners.

  “Shit, I’m sorry, gang,” announced Maria, sitting up from where she lay on pillows. “But, like, I just can’t handle this group anymore. I think I need a group of lesbians. You straight women still need men—sexually, emotionally, and in some cases financially. But I don’t. And I need support for forming
alternative structures. I don’t want to sit around listening to a bunch of heterosexual soap operas.”

  “I’m with you,” Kate grunted.

  Susannah collapsed in tears.

  “Aren’t you being elitist, Maria?” Gail inquired.

  Sammie jumped to her feet and struck a pose so graceful it could have been choreographed for this moment. “Well, that’s just fine with me. Cause, honey, I’ve had it with lying around listening to a bunch of white women moaning. Every black woman I know is earning a living, plus raising her kids, plus trying to prop up a man who’s been so fucked over by Whitey he can’t hardly get out of bed in the morning. You white women are just spoiled children, whimpering around about your O-pression. And whenever you get tired, you can go on back to Daddy or Hubby, and he’ll take care of you. But this stuff is real to black women, honey, and we got to live with it our whole life through …”

  “Now wait just a minute …,” snarled Maria.

  “Aren’t you being elitist?” asked Gail.

  “I got something to say!” Emily yelled. To her surprise, the room fell silent. She couldn’t remember what it was.

  Susannah started talking through her tears. “This group isn’t meeting my needs. This group has never yet met my needs. I’m sure none of you has a clue what I’m talking about. You’ve all been through college …”

  “I ain’t been through no college,” muttered Sammie.

  “… while you were studying all your fancy theories, I was working. Nothing new to me. I’ve been working since I was fourteen. It was me behind that counter at Woolworth’s when you were buying the pens and paper to write your theses. Gail over there whimpering about wanting to go out and work. Shit, go out and work. But I don’t see anything wrong, if I can find a man who wants this too, in me staying home and raising Levi and keeping house. You people are so out of touch with what life is really like for working people that it’s pointless for me even to be here!”