And the girl fell asleep.
10
You who are now reading this fable may have been warned that giving your heart, body or self to more than one other will cause you sorrow should your true and predestined sweetheart later appear. And if you never find your soul mate, the result of promiscuity will be a kind of numbness. These warners insist that if you accept love too lightly, your lover may go away; and the same goes for your own self, of which too free a giving resembles too free a taking. Thus counsel our virginity-wardens, monogamists, deacons and lifelong spouses, not to mention those dirtyminded busybody hotel clerks in lonely little towns where no other sleeping-places may be hired:—these I deem purity’s frog-eyed angels, who refuse to check potentially unconsecrated couples into a double room with a single bed, or at the very least demand deposits and identification from both parties, all the while exuding an unwinking disgust whose appropriate recompense is hatred. To them I say that whoever interferes with the giving and taking of love between adults should be damned. But I do admit that giving or taking love in excess may lead to sorrow. And since the same may be said of unrequited or miserly love-giving, why not let lovers follow each other’s inclinations? Nobody could say that the lesbian didn’t have a “choice.”
11
She awoke at dusk, feeling cold, with the entire coven sitting in a circle around her. Embarrassed, she sat up quickly.
The old lady drew a quilt around the girl’s shoulders and said: You’re prettier than ever, dearie. We all want to love you.
Thank you, the lesbian whispered.
But you don’t want to be a social worker. I really like sex. I have no problem with that. In high school we combed each other’s pussy. It’s just I don’t go off with people to fix them. What about you? I said, honey, what about you?
What do you mean?
The old lady smiled. Then everyone rose and went away, except for the beautiful young Jewish woman, whose name was Belle. She led the lesbian into a thicket of blueberry bushes and opened herself. The lesbian had never felt so desired. At first she imagined that Belle (who was only her fourth true lover) was particularly skilled and enthusiastic on her account, as well she might have been, but as soon as Belle had finished, here came Lucia, jealously anxious, and after her, all the other members one by one, but for the old lady, who sat at home behind the open door, spinning lamb’s wool thread while the cat purred between her ankles.
The lesbian finally had the gift now. When others first opened themselves to her, all the more exciting for being unknown, she flew from one to the next, like a petted child who flits from lap to lap at a party of tipsy adults whose indulgence she gladly mistakes for unconditional love. The brilliant pleasures of faces and forms, not to mention previously unimagined erotic habits, saved her (at least then) from commitments, and certainly from systematic categories. When she truly realized that she could make almost anybody love her—or rather, that she could hardly prevent anyone from loving her—then she became perfectly herself; in other words, she lost her freedom forever.
From her mother she had learned how to be strong in submission and endurance; from E-beth, how to suffer the loss of love. From the old lady there came no concealment; yet what the new witch, if that is what she was, got from her lessons is hidden from me. (I think of a Bible verse: She shall have no inheritance; I am their inheritance.) But aren’t so many first fruits unknown? And who but the straight man can see underground, knowing where roots reach? (My heart still hungers for her traces, even for the dirt in which she lies.) The retired policeman unfailingly pegged her as dull, neutral, almost less than human; while I believed the contrary; certainly no one ever taught her the queenliness which overawes others. So much else is dark to me!—not least the women’s mark, which as a man I can describe only by hearsay.
They taught her how to listen to any woman’s body in order to pleasure her. This was the gift, the gold, the shadow on the lily.
What it was that made us love her remained as inexplicable as the capacity of certain American flags to draw a tear from the retired policeman; it might have been biochemical; and when Judy Garland, drunk and bloated, wearily told posterity: I have a machine in my throat that gets into people’s ears and affects them, that must have been the same; whether Judy shouted in despair or sang in controlled commercial wistfulness, what she and the lesbian had, or what had them, could neither be aped by others, nor coaxed to stay. The adorable little girl who could have been a child star, the shining-eyed young man whom everybody loved to be around, the actress who could have really been something if she hadn’t drowned, or maybe stayed almost something because she had drowned, these cold cases make me wonder whether (as the television whispers) charisma most often incarnates itself in youth—but shamans are charismatic, as Tecumseh and Sitting Bull must also have been even as they aged; likewise top-ranking Japanese geishas and Noh actors; and that ancient island woman whom the lesbian once served is another instance, if an incomprehensible one.
It was dawn again. They grilled bread and fish over the campfire. The lesbian sat alone, with her head in her hands. The old lady laid by her spinning. The lesbian went to the outhouse. On her way back she heard Belle and Lucia in a thicket quarrelling.
The old lady stood in the doorway.—Come in, she said. They’re fighting over you.
What should I do?
That’s a mess, honey. I like Belle, and I don’t dislike Lucia, because she’s a good person.
I just want everyone to be happy . . . !
And what about you?
I’m happy; I really am, sobbed the lesbian.
Sit down. I think you’re on the road to perdition. Sweetie, being absolutely unloved is pretty darned bad. But being absolutely loved, well, that’s not necessarily . . .
The lesbian hung her head and said: What am I supposed to do?
You have to love them back.
Why?
Because that’s how you were made. But you think you’re gonna take care of everybody. You’d better cut back on that. If you can’t, well, but I know you can’t.
Belle asked me to be her girlfriend.
What did you say?
I said okay. But then Lucia was just as in love with me, so I—
You should have been really straight with Belle from the beginning.
I didn’t know how—
Oh, I can see that, said the old lady very sadly. She got up and chopsticked three fish heads into the cat’s bowl. The lesbian wished to die. Returning to the rocking chair, her hostess said: Your name is Neva, okay? I wanted to give you the loveliest name.
Okay.
Say it.
Neva.
Now I’ve named you, we won’t touch you anymore today. And remember: Don’t be a social worker.
Isn’t that what you are?
Well, well. Where would I be if I took my own advice? Cheer up, honey; give me a kiss. So you’re breaking hearts already, just like E-beth! That’s . . . But you have more power and more pain, so more people will love you. And you’ll never be unkind like her. So nobody will understand you. It’s going to get worse and worse. Our mouths will praise you. Would you kindly fetch me my knitting bag? Thank you. And one more thing, dearie: You’re not necessarily a . . . No, don’t be anxious; this isn’t as bad as the rest. Let me hear your heart. Breathe in my mouth. No, you’re not a lesbian. Do you know why? Because you’re a social worker, like me, so you can’t turn anyone away. Neva, you’re going to be the best social worker ever. Give me another kiss. Oh, that’s wonderful. Go into the house and sleep. I’ll keep the members away.
When she woke up it was noon, and the old lady sent her over the hill and down the road to buy sugar.
The store owner burst into tears. The lesbian asked her if there were anything she could do, and the woman said: I want to marry you.
Presently the store was closed
and locked, and the other woman was opening herself with both hands for the lesbian’s tongue, sighing: This feels so relaxing.
The woman’s pussy was as salty as tears.
12
The old lady said: Neva, did you want to?
She wouldn’t even take money for the sugar. I felt so sorry for her.
That was why you wanted to?
Yes.
That’s right, dearie. We’re all proud of you. But when we pray, how often do our prayers get answered?
I don’t know. Not all the time.
So you don’t have to say yes all the time.
But I want to.
That’s why you’re a goddess. Now you know. They’re going to come to you with offerings. And the very best they give you is, oh, my. Well, sweetie . . .
Defiantly, the lesbian told her: I remember what you said. You said: If somebody calls me and needs me, I always try to come.
That makes me a social worker. Now, dearie, what about your mother?
Maybe now she—
Silly girl, she couldn’t keep her hands off you before! How can she resist you now? So what will you do?
With her?
It’s up to you. You rest now. Go sleep in my bed. Tomorrow I’m sending you to her. Then come home to us.
13
So she made that turn after the tenth brick step, with seven more to go; the blind in the big grey window stirred, and then the door opened by itself. Once more she embraced the mother, the stone Etruscan woman who contains human ashes within herself. (Karen, where have you been? What’s happened to you? I just don’t understand why you reject my love. What have I ever done to you?—Nothing, Mom.)
When she returned to the island, her sisters led her up the hill. They stripped her and made her lie down upon the white and glowing gold of a bobcat skin. For a moment she believed that this had never happened to anyone but her. They penetrated her slowly and carefully, in much the same way when the tide goes out, unseen clams begin to squirt from under the mud; sometimes their jets go waist-high, sometimes only inch-high. This time the lesbian understood what they were doing to her. And it seems to me that what she must have learned was how to stop letting anything simply happen to her or be done to her, and start believing that she was meant to live a certain way, which was exactly the way she would ever after be living.
Belle and Lucia were holding hands.
14
The old woman, who had already given herself, even to the point of allowing herself to go frail, arthritic and dependent, now expected the lesbian to live with her. The lesbian promised to do this. There were shifting reddish-brown branch-shadows on the green moss. She led the old woman up the trail, while the others sang behind them. The old woman was palsied and trembling. They undressed each other. Wearily the old woman lay down and opened her legs. The lesbian began kissing and touching her. The old woman cried out in joy. Then she slept. No longer was she Neva’s healer and shaper, but a mere worshipper. After the others had carried her home, the lesbian remained alone, reclining on top of the mountain in a rocky hollow of dry moss, gazing alone at the pale sky and milky-green sound and the many low hazy islands—yes, there at the top, waiting for something to be borne in that steady wind far below.
A day later the old woman, who was now more wife than mother, summoned another daughter of hers, a poet named Reba; and Reba, her white hair tied tightly back, squinted down at the lesbian, with the necklace of wooden beads barely rising and falling over her heart. Reba taught her a song of names to sing, so that she could always be again with every woman she had loved. And the question of what to do went peacefully away.
Reba, kiss her, said the old woman, and soon Reba’s hand was entering her like a blue dragonfly darting through mossy darkness. Reba began weeping, astonished at the lesbian’s power.
Although the fires of the 1960s and 1970s were ashes, and Neva met with no group which would have illuminated its members’ common political interests, her sisters sometimes brought up what could be described as ideology; they explained that as the black lesbian poet Audre Lorde once said, if we failed to define ourselves for ourselves, then others would define us to suit their ends. But although Neva’s power possessed its own intelligence, she was not one who thought in sociological or even moral terms. Does a goddess in fact define herself, or simply endure whichever misdefinitions our passionate lonelinesses project upon her? To never be alone again . . . ! and never be unloved! To make others happy, to love and be loved as all of us are meant to do . . . !—Such was now her state: the loneliness of being loved. And when she began to think on why, the darkening sea splashed against tongues of volcanic rock.
She stayed faithfully with the old lady until the end, meanwhile loving all the rest. It took not much longer than a summer. (Never forget your feelings, the old lady had warned.) Now the mourners were coming out onto a rock-walled promenade of dark moss, shaded by logs and Pacific madrones whose peeling-barked, reddish-brown skeletal arms clicked and rustled as the lesbian looked out at the blue-green sea and hump-backed forest hills. Swaying, she wept a trifle—because she could never help getting attached. Perhaps she should have wept more, but how could any goddess emote in proportion to her powers? (With a smile that might have been a grimace, E-beth had said: You’ll never cry over anyone else the way you’re torturing yourself over me. You know why? I was your first; that’s all. —And Karen tried to remember how much she had cried over her mother.) The other women held her up and drew forward so that they all kept walking steadily to the edge of the grave. Reba led them in singing the song of names as they stripped the old woman’s corpse. Each of them kissed it. Then they gently lowered it into the mucky wormy hole.
And then Neva had to go her own way. Most of them entreated her to stay; Lucia and Belle were already quarrelling over her again. Reba wanted her even more, but said what was right: We have each other. She didn’t make you for us. Go where you’re needed.
Oh, yes; the lesbian felt attached! If Reba hadn’t sent her away, she would have stayed—especially because she loved Belle and Lucia so much—but then, come to think of it, didn’t we love her?
Reba was the question-knower. She asked: Neva, are you still prepared to suffer?
And Neva nodded—wondering that she felt less about that than Reba seemed to. Thus the spending of a life, and the losses that could never be made good.—As for any other spending, the old woman had left her a sealskin pouch full of hundred-dollar bills. Belle said: Don’t worry; it will outlast you.
Reba said: The more they love you, the more they’ll take, until you’re hollowed out. But that’s what you were born for, to love and be loved.
The lesbian smiled at her. She had heard this many times before. She said: When I’m tired to death, I’ll come back.
Please don’t, said Reba, walking down the path. Probably she was crying. Neva’s heart ached. Then she wondered what else to feel. The other members came to kiss her; they were likewise sad, but had not been born to suffer.
Now they had all gone away. Charged with the power of the one who is loved, she set out in late morning, ascending above the oak-shade and spruce-gloom until at last she was sitting on a wide pubis of yellow grass, with below her a great tranquility of islands in the calm sound. She was looking all the way to snowy-peaked Canada, the piney cool wind blowing up from the trail, and she was wishing to die.
15
In those days the lesbian had shoulder-length brown hair with blonde stripes in it. She appeared very fresh and young, especially when she smiled. Her teeth were perfect. Some women claimed to find her brown eyes a trifle small, but they used her just the same.
It’s All Been Wonderful
It’s all been wonderful.
JUDY GARLAND, 1945
There is no law prohibiting a person from being a sex deviate, or queer. Perverts may roam at large pro
viding they do not practice certain prohibited acts.
JOHN P. KENNEY, PH.D., and JOHN B. WILLIAMS, LL.M., M.S. in P.A., 1968
1
C onsider by contrast the transwoman’s namesake. Born Frances Ethel Gumm, in place of the hoped-for son who would have been called Frank, she first opened her eyes in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, but transferred that event to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the latter birthplace being more glamorous. Presently she also changed what they called her: It occurred to Frances that Judy was an interesting name, and she promptly adopted it. You see, Frances was not yet interesting. How could this anxious child star get ahead? She needed attention. Hence she thrust herself forward, learning how to look pretty and when to fawn. What matters “truth” once the makeup goes on? When she was almost eighteen they called her sixteen. By then she might have believed it. And so she dressed herself in sincerity. “I meant every word of that song I sang to Clark Gable in my first picture,” Judy seriously confided to me as she slipped off a little blue wool dress with the white lace petticoat trim showing two inches below the hem.
The Lucky Star Page 9