I wasn’t sure it was. A year earlier, still in the throes of my high school infatuation with her, I’d seen Anais Nin speak in that same auditorium. From a distance, in her black dress and red shawl, with her raven hair and crimson lips, she looked as exotic and bold as I imagined her to be. But when she autographed my book—Volume 283 or so of her diaries—I was shocked. Her face crumbled beneath a crust of foundation and rouge, and her eyes darted around beneath lids that were like a child’s drawing of a peacock’s tail, grotesquely painted in thick strokes. She was an old lady who looked like a harlot. This wasn’t the face of a free woman.
Later in the fall of 1971, I’d catch glimpses of a philosophy professor who would provide a different look. Tall, with close-cropped hair and scholarly wire-rimmed glasses, Lois Harrison was a maverick, fashion and otherwise. Her academic studies had led her to Marxism, her politics and sexuality to lesbian separatism, and her admiration of how Czech citizens subverted the Russian invaders in 1968 through the clever use of ham radios led her to community college, where she studied television repair.
“There’s Lois,” one of the sophomores would announce in an excited whisper as she strode through the lobby of the Residential College in her navy blue mechanic’s jumpsuit. Materializing out of nowhere, her acolytes, the students in her women-only philosophy seminar, would fall in behind her like a military flotilla of ducklings. Most of them became lesbians, then reverted to liking boys the following year when Lois quit her teaching job and moved to Detroit with her partner. (There, in a sad and ironic twist on the usual story, she worked fixing televisions to put her partner through nursing school, only to have that woman leave her for a man a few years later.)
On this day in 1971, though the fashion was eclectic, the women in that auditorium all seemed to be expressing who they were, not who someone wanted them to be. Some looked almost glamorous with their high suede boots and geometric earrings, others frazzled and seething in the close, smoky air.
But other than my mother, none looked like my mother. Their hair was longer or shorter, straighter or blonder, and they lacked the density that the older women in my young life all seemed to have, the rootedness that let them sway and dip but never leave the ground.
They looked nothing like my grandmother, who belied her age with the furious vigor and muscle behind each pass of her yellow, rubber-gloved hands as she scrubbed and dusted and polished. She was small, my grandmother, and her high, rounded cheeks, silvery hair, and manicured nails made her look like one of the dainty china figurines from her curio cabinet come to life. But when she cleaned she looked as tough as the gum-popping Catholic School girls who stood at the bus stop in front of her building. And when she’d sent us off to another country on our last night in Montreal, a lonely widow in a world of couples, I looked back at her kitchen window and saw her silhouetted, sturdy and brave as our trusty Rambler.
These conference women in their leotards or their overalls, in their heels or their Earth Shoes, looked nothing like Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique and the woman who, I’d been led to believe, was the mother of the movement.
Ten years later, when I finally saw Betty Friedan at a writing seminar in Bennington, Vermont, she looked just like my mother, or her friend Babs, or her friend Nancy, or any of the dozens of women who, on the other side of menopause, had found gravity irresistible. From the bags under her dark eyes to the deep grooves on either side of her beak of a nose, from her drooping breasts to her fallen arches, her body was one yeasty, downward swoosh.
On that hot July morning in Vermont, I’d heard her give a lecture about the militancy required to be a writer, about how hard it was to carve out undisturbed time and space especially if you were a wife or mother. That afternoon, I watched her from behind as she stood thigh-high in the tiny town pond, side by side with Richard Ellman, one of the faculty members. Friedan—in her black bathing suit, with her sagging buttocks and mole-spattered, fleshy back—chattered with Ellman as they splashed their faces and chests and their rounded shoulders with water. Shmoozing and shvenking, I remember thinking, like New York snowbirds in a Sarasota swimming pool. They looked old to me, as warm and seasoned as my Aunt Lil or Uncle Abe.
This morning, I read Friedan’s biography on Wikipedia, and realized that I am now the age she was then. Though my face isn’t as deeply lined, my body is even more rotund. And while I once dove into icy Laurentian lakes without hesitation, I now inch into the placid waters of Walden Pond before submerging with a gasp. I know that on those rare occasions when my daughter is with me there, she regards my receding form as I splash off to the opposite shore with a sort of protective amusement, seeing me not as a mature woman, not as someone known and respected in professional or political circles, but simply as a lovable, essential, and somewhat comical fixture in her life. She sees me as many of us see our mothers, as admirable and annoying, as well-intentioned and intrusive, as needy but hopefully, still buoyant.
The word “buoyant” doesn’t appear in Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, which may be the most highly promoted and read book about feminism since The Feminine Mystique. Neither does “resilient,” or “durable.” But “power?” Twenty-nine times. “Leadership?” Fifty-two.
Still, as I sit in my corner office, a senior vice president of a company with a female CEO and a predominantly female leadership team, I find myself unmoved by Sandberg’s book. I don’t question her sincerity, but can’t overcome my sense that this is essentially a book about how women can find and retain their place in the 1 percent.
And those in the 99 percent? I’ve been meeting a lot of them lately—mostly Haitian, Brazilian, and Jamaican women—as I interview home health aides for my mother. I see more and more of them in her Independent Living facility, where old white women and men are wheeled or led by the hand by younger women of color. They wipe traces of dinner off the residents’ faces, put on their clients’ shoes with the same oddly supplicatory competence that they show their own children. Some show the infantilized elderly the same sort of affection, too, placing a comforting arm around their shoulders or gracing their papery cheeks with warm kisses.
They are in the business of caregiving, these women, sharing leads and shifts among themselves, their in-laws, and their non-English-speaking mothers. And though they are leaning in as far as their tired frames and beat up cars will take them, there are no au pairs or corporate jets in their futures. Their confidence or willingness to be outspoken, their husbands’ readiness to be equal partners—none of this matters much as long as they’re still living hand to mouth, scrambling for day care and housing, taking two dollars less an hour for cash payments rather than checks. They are just the latest wave of immigrants to do the work that we value so much and pay so little for.
Looking back, it seems to me that the sexual liberation movement ended up being more dramatic and enduring than the women’s liberation movement so often confused with it. In her masculine clothes, with her masculine job, Lois Harrison was a complete anomaly in 1971. Now she’s married to her partner of sixteen years, lives on a farm in Ontario with her cats (Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, and Zami) and dogs (Pride and Morgaine de Fey). She grows vegetables, makes beer and wine, and shares these facts with the world via Germantown High School’s online alumni scrapbook, right next to the husband-and-three-wonderful-children life stories posted by the Class of 1957’s now ancient cheerleaders.
Once in the vanguard, Lois earned the right to live in folksy anonymity, while against her will, Betty Friedan, once a lightning rod, succumbed to the tides of age and growing obscurity. The feminist movement of my day opened some doors and reduced some risks for women seeking to express and manage the consequences of their own sexuality. But the work of bathing and cleaning, of making the food and sewing the clothes, of shepherding the old people and teaching the children—this remains largely women’s work. Essential, underpaid, and profound in its impact.
Mrs
. Faigenbaum, the underside of her arms plump but not loose as she skated the chalk across the board, wrote Government vs. Social Change.
“So what do you think,” she’d asked as blandly as if inquiring about the Tigers’ pennant chances. “Now, in 1968, does government promote social change or stand in the way of it?”
“Well duh,” Kenny had answered, without even waiting to be called on. “They stomp it out with their Nazi jackboots.”
“Can you give me an example?” Mrs. Faigenbaum asked.
“Vietnam,” Kenny said, leaving the “you moron” unspoken.
“How about in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957? What role was the Federal government playing then?” Her eyes were bright; she was clearly enjoying this.
I know what became of Kenny. He went on to become one of the country’s leading documentary film makers, chronicling American history with a passion and fascination that had at least some seeds in that classroom.
I don’t know what became of Mrs. Faigenbaum, but I suspect that unlike Lois Harrison, her life didn’t end up violating her expectations. As with all of the adults who populated my adolescence, she is frozen in time. I picture her home in her high-waisted jeans in 1971, or out doing something—shopping for wallpaper, maybe, or Aaron’s first pair of ice skates. Did she feel abandoned during those years, stuck back in the kitchen reading about sexual adventures while a generation of women eight or ten years her junior was having them, maybe while her husband was having them? Or did she feel relieved?
For all I know, she was at the Women’s Liberation conference in 1971 too. And if she was, I don’t think that her eyes would have widened in shock at the lurid language and raging slogans flying around Rackham Auditorium. I picture them glinting behind her glasses as her Bahama Coral-glazed lips formed the words that caused the women around her to pause, to question what they thought they knew, and want to know more.
In one of my imagined lives for her, she leaves her husband in 1972, moves into a commune with other single mothers and their kids, raises Aaron and Elliott to become a chef and feminist historian respectively, becomes Secretary of Education for the State of Michigan, and to this day, writes impassioned letters to the editor about the stupidity of standardized testing. In another scenario, perhaps the more likely one, she simply keeps on. Marty, mellowed by two heart attacks and chastened by a series of professional demotions, drops dead at their rented condominium just outside Tampa. Mrs. Faigenbaum, having become Chair of the Social Studies department, retires two years later, moves to Florida full-time, and devotes more time to quilting. Aaron has stayed in Michigan, Elliott has left, but both are dutiful and kind to their mother. She also volunteers at the library, where she recommends books, shelves them, and—driven by a curiosity both eclectic and unashamed—devours them.
Power Lines (1969-1972)
In the summer of 1969, men walked on the moon, Charles Manson and his band of followers went on a killing spree in Hollywood, Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in Ted Kennedy’s car, and, to my everlasting chagrin, Woodstock happened without me.
It was also the summer that I met Ian, a fellow Counselor in Training at a camp in Michigan called Circle Pines. He was tall and rangy, barely kempt and badly shaven, masculine without a hint of machismo. He had blue-gray eyes that always seemed to look just beyond whomever he was talking to. I was smitten with his bow-legged gait, his tan cut-off corduroy shorts and purple paisley shirts, with his frizzy brown ponytail and his artistic aspirations.
After a month of almost constant companionship, my tenacity paid off. Ian had become my boyfriend, my first romance to last more than a few weeks. (“My boyfriend,” I’d casually and inappropriately drop into conversations, as in “Oh, you’re from Chicago? So is my boyfriend!” or “My boyfriend likes orange juice, too”). We revived our romance each summer, and exchanged long, moony letters between them. Ian’s came in envelopes that he’d psychedelically illustrated with precise and goofy cartoons of himself squatting in a bubble, his guitar on his shoulder, floating through streets, classrooms, and the L train.
The front of my envelopes were unadorned, the letters inside dense monologues comparing the My Lai massacre to the Holocaust, reveling in the size and solidarity of the anti-war moratorium in Washington D.C. (“My first major protest,” I’d actually written, as though I had just lost my virginity, “and I’ll never be the same....”) But on the back of every envelope I’d write song lyrics as if they were a secret code, as if the words of Joni Mitchell or the Jefferson Airplane carried some veiled meaning known only to us. Oh, won’t you stay, we’ll put on the day, and we’ll talk in present tenses, I wrote one damp February night after the summer of 1969.
Over time, my choice of lyrics got more pointed. We are all outlaws in the eyes of America, I wrote after the following summer, not sure what Gracie Slick had meant but sure she was right. But Ian’s dispatches from the University of Illinois changed little. “I’ve made my first record,” one said. “It’s in a capella choir. We sing early temperance music. What a goof.”
By the end of August, 1972, in what would be my last summer at Circle Pines, my infatuation was waning. The humidity was oppressive. Earlier that week we’d seen a tornado in the distance, swooping down on a distant farm, and on the second-to-last day of camp, that same heavy stillness was in the air. Finally, just before dinner, it broke. Thunder roared, lightning cackled, and the rain pounded down, turning trails through meadows and woods into small rushing rivers. Kids and counselors alike hooted with joy. We were about to be released—from the heat, from bells and dining halls and bugs, from each other. We ran and slid barefoot in the soaked grass. Kids painted each other’s faces with mud, giving them all the same tear-streaked gutter snipe look. We—the alleged grown-ups—looked on at this wet childfest. Matted hair, filthy clothes, none of it mattered. They were going home tomorrow.
As the downpour tapered off into a drizzle, we began to gather up the kids for dinner. They sloshed into the dining hall, looking forward to their half-frozen chicken parmesan patties, powdered mashed potatoes, and corn niblets with renewed gusto. I did a couple of head counts, but kept coming up one kid short. Chevonne was missing.
A ten-year-old from Cabrini Green, which was even then notorious as one of the most dangerous and abandoned of Chicago’s housing projects, Chevonne was one of the many campers attending Circle Pines on scholarship. She had never been out in the country before and was terrified of insects, especially spiders. The dark silence of the woods made her shudder, and on nights when the sky was a bowl of stars hanging luminous over the big meadow, she crossed her arms and gripped them in a terror so deep she left gouge marks in her skin. But indoors, in fights, on top of roofs, and when playing Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, Chevonne was fearless. Wiry and strong, her processed hair flaring around her face, she scampered and jumped, laughed and yelled, and when I intervened to say you have to stop this, you have to do that, she looked at me with a fixed smile and opaque gaze.
Chevonne did what she wanted. When it was time to set up the dining room for dinner, she hid behind the barn and made miniature campfires of dry grass, or sauntered back to the cabin for a little pre-dinner nap. If she didn’t want to go swimming, she’d sneak off the path en route to the lake, double back through the dreaded woods, and melt into some other unit’s game of soccer or Capture the Flag. I spent anxious, exasperated time almost every day tracking her down. She was indifferent and uncontrollable as the wind.
While Ian shepherded the kids to their tables, I went outside and called her name. No answer, only a heavy dripping from the trees and a few tentative chirps from the stunned birds. Walking toward the Rec Hall, I bellowed her name again. And this time, I heard an answer, a faint, jolly “Here I am!”
I stopped and looked up, first at the roof of the office, then at the roof of the Rec Hall, and then at the stand of trees between them. Chevonne sat straddling one of the highest boughs, h
alfway out from trunk to tip and clutching a small branch.
“Are you all right?” I asked stupidly.
“Yeah, I’m all right.” Her voice was thin—not trembling, but flat and hollow as a movie set facade. “I want to get down now.”
“Now wait a second, Chevonne,” I yelled. “Don’t move yet. Let me go get a ladder and some help.” The bough she sat on was wet and sodden and bent under her modest weight. The trunk of the giant elm was black, slick, and bare for its first fifteen linear feet. I had no idea of how Chevonne got up there, on that bough that grew higher than the power lines and Rec Hall roof.
“I don’t really want to wait for no ladder.” Her tone was saucy, but her voice, filtering out between the thick clumps of leaves, seemed separate from the small figure in the yellow slicker, green shorts, and red sneakers.
“It’ll take me just a few seconds. Now please, sweetie, I know you don’t want to stay up there but I just want to get you down safely. Can you hang on for a just a little while longer?” I pleaded. “I’ll be right back. I promise you. Just hang on.”
I ran back to the dining hall for help. When I returned, Chevonne was lying on her stomach, her arms and legs wrapped around the bough.
“I’m back, and Fred’s coming with a ladder. Just hang on.”
I heard a lazy rustle and saw one red sneaker drop a few feet, and get stuck in a tangle of branches lower down the tree. I looked frantically around the base of the tree, trying to find a toe hold or rock to stand on that would put me within reach of the first climbing branch. How the hell had she gotten up there?
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