In Her Day (18 page)

“Jesus, what are you, campaigning for reactionary of the year?”

“I don’t know. I want out of the shadow of the guillotine.”

“Very cute. And I’m not suggesting we all wear uniforms although it’d give me a certain thrill to see Seventh Avenue fall to pieces. I’m saying we have to have some communality. And we have to have discipline. That’s not the same as saying everyone has to look alike, act alike, think alike. Without community and discipline we’ll stay ineffective fragments or worse, we’ll be obliterated.”

“I’m not a political person. All I want is to be left alone to do my work.”

“You damn sight better become a political person. Things are so bad no one can afford to sit on the sidelines.”

“Ilse, I’ve had about enough of this. Now this is my last word on the subject. First of all, there are no
organizations which represent my interests. Nobody wants their queers. Not Blacks, whites, rich, poor, women or men. We’re outcasts. So you’ve organized lesbians. Fine and good except they’re all under thirty. At least all the ones I’ve seen are young. If they’re not under thirty then they’re as downwardly mobile as the postwar generation was upwardly mobile. I’m not going to trade in my Ph. D. for a workshirt and tie-dye jeans. I’m forty-four years old. My interests are different. So you all may be doing something useful. I mean, I know you’re doing something useful but it’s not anything I can participate in. And even if there were a group close to my interests, I might give money but I don’t know if I’d give time. I’m not a joiner. I don’t like being subject to human limitation and when you’ve thrown in your lot with a group that’s exactly what happens. You move at the pace of the slowest instead of the fastest. I’ve got this one fragile life and I have to fight enough things without spending the next three years explaining policy to someone who can’t or doesn’t want to understand it.”

“Our entire society’s falling apart. I can’t understand that you don’t give a shit.”

“Society isn’t falling apart. It never was together.”

“You’re impossible!” Ilse stormed out and slammed the door.

Louisa May rushed to the door but she was late. Carole picked the cat up and kissed her forehead. The buzzer rang.

“It’s me. I forgot my bag.”

Ilse ran up the stairs and Carole handed the gas mask bag to her. She said, “Thank you,” and looked as though she wanted to say more, then gave up on it. Carole quietly closed the door as Ilse walked back down the carpeted stairs. She resisted the impulse to
open the street side windows and watch Ilse disappear in the direction of Park Avenue.

Well, it had to happen, she thought to herself. We were two right people who met at the wrong time, that’s all. Or maybe we were two right people who were born at the wrong times. It isn’t that I disavow her cause. I can’t make the same choice she’s made. I don’t know. She allows for no compromises. Surely, there’s such a thing as an honest compromise of thought. Maybe that’s her years. The young are notoriously intolerant although it’s the old that are blamed for it. She doesn’t seem to understand or care that there’s a difference between ideology and the truth. Well, her logic is compelling even if it isn’t always based on reality. No, that’s not fair. I’m not being fair at all. Much of what she says is true. But she jumps off from simple discrimination into an interlocking system of sexism, racism, capitalism, and god knows what else. Maybe it’s all connected but right now I find much of her thinking impermissibly vague. Maybe it’s me. But I can’t take her say-so on faith. If all these things are connected then I need to see those connections. That’s not too much to ask. Any thinking person who isn’t overly political would ask the same question. Just because a woman says something doesn’t mean I’m bound to believe her. I want proof. I’m a rational being. Head before heart. Thank god. If there’s one thing I despise it’s irrationality. That’s really what’s wrong between Ilse and me. She says the same thing over and over again thinking repetition will substitute for proof. Dammit, I’m not taking anything on faith. And I know the women’s movement is young and Ilse is young but they’d both better do their intellectual homework.

Fortified by what she thought was the compelling purity of her own logic, Carole set about straightening
up her desk, ignoring the loneliness creeping up on her. Bobby Short’s records were followed by Cris Williamson. The sound of a woman’s voice filling the background increased her loneliness although she was unaware of it.

She marched into her bedroom followed by the two fat cats. Turning down the covers she noticed a pale yellow pubic hair on the white sheet, a reminder of lovemaking past. Christ, how can anyone get sentimental over a pubic hair? She picked it up and went into the bathroom where she threw it in the wastebasket. She washed her face and hands. Dried them and looked into her small three-way mirror as she put on her night cream. She paused, momentarily captured by her own image.

How delicious. Am I going to sit here and gaze at my forty-four-year-old face in an orgy of concern over my ageing equipment? Trite, trite and boring, the confrontation of woman with mirror. How many movies have I seen where the once great beauty goes into a fit looking at herself? For some reason a woman contemplating her face is the equivalent of a man frothing at the mouth about the state of the universe and his own soul. I don’t even think Katharine Hepburn pulled it off in “The Lion in Winter.”

Yet for all her sarcasm she stayed with the smooth reflection. It wasn’t vanity holding her there. A fear gripped her. She feared looking into her own eyes but, prompted by hidden voices, she slowly raised her head full upright and raised her eyes into her own stare. Silence. The pupil widened as though a stone had been thrown in the middle of her blackness. The ripples raced to the unseen. The self retreated under such scrutiny. But what retreat was there in a three-way mirror revealing an infinite regress of self? She couldn’t see the end of her image.
She no longer knew what she believed at this moment. And if she no longer knew, who was that in the mirror?

A bag of bones. Yes, a bag of bones. She congratulated herself on her own humor in the loss of self. Or was she so full of self that there was no self? Had she circled and circled her perimeter until she diminished to zero? The joke was short lived and the reflection grew tears. If she no longer knew what she believed or even if she had a self she could still feel. The reverberation of a heartbeat threatened to break her entire delicate structure. Her eyes left the engulfing pupil and followed a tear as it splintered around the corners of her mouth.

Here I am slipping into self doubt. I rarely allow myself to cry. I always wonder am I indulging myself in some exotic melancholy or is it weakness? I’ve always detested tears. How I wanted to strangle Mother when she’d break into those huge, titanic sobs that would shake the house. Tears are traitors. They rob me of my strength. If I hold them back I can hold together. And here I am bawling. I can stand the pain. I just can’t stand to see it. God, if only I could go back where I came from. Then I could haul off and belt Luke or Margaret, steal one of their bicycles, and ride until I couldn’t pedal anymore. The exhaustion purged me of whatever pain or hatred there was. That’s all gone now. I lost it somewhere between eighth grade and ninth, between grade school and high school. The world was lusty red and thunderous black. You knew where you stood. You knew how to fight back or lie and then go do it again. Sweet Jesus, how far have I wandered from my roots that I could be muffled like this? How much have I pushed back, choked, smoothed over in order to win? And I haven’t even won. I shouldn’t quibble with
Ilse. For all the petty disagreements, the real reason I fought her was because I don’t want to look at the span of years between eighth grade and now. I want myself back. I want to knock the shit out of someone I don’t like. I want to play kick the can at twilight. I want to laugh without knowing it’s going to stop. I’m so tired. I’m so tired of the people around me, except for Adele. I don’t want to explain anything to anyone. I don’t need a reason. I didn’t need a reason when I was a kid. Chocolate ice cream tasted good. Who cared about calories? We knew each other then. If I looked in a mirror it was to wash my face.

She pushed herself away from the mirror over the sink. And then she slowly crumpled underneath it and had a good cry.

The cold, unimaginative richness of Park Avenue in the seventies and sixties fired Ilse as much as the Rolls Royce. She walked faster then usual, scowling.

I learned my lesson. I repeat the same mistake over and over. It doesn’t work out with a woman who’s not a feminist yet. I keep hoping that it will but the change is too great and the challenge too much for them. The only way they can defend their ego, that piece of them built to survive all the shit, is to disagree with me. This always happens. I keep thinking some woman out there will make the transition without such a hassle. They turn into feminists but first they have to resist you. It’s exhausting. I really don’t want to ever go through it again. Carole will get it together. I know she will. Off my back. I wonder if that’s what happened in other places. You can read all you want but the books never tell how a Chinese peasant changed into a soldier. What happened inside? By this time there are hundreds of thousands of us and we can tell each other what happened but we can’t seem to tell people not with us yet. We try or at
least I try and all I get is no. I’m not patient. I just lay it on the line. I’m no good at it. I’ve seen Alice go through this same resistance from people but she’s calm. She holds their hand practically while they cling to their outworn beliefs. Well, I haven’t got that one-to-one talent. And I’m not very attentive. I only want to bother with people when I feel like it even when I love them. When I watch lovers together I always feel like they’re playing hostess to each other. I could never give anyone that suffocating attention. Carole never asked for that. Come to think of it she never asked for much of anything. She has a funny kind of reserve. At first I thought she was some kind of aristocrat. But now I think I like that in her. I could use some of that distance myself. She taught me some valuable things, really. Maybe in time we can be friends or something. There’s too much friction to be lovers but who knows? I did learn from her. What is it she used to tell me when I’d start speed rapping? Oh yeah, “Words are the oil slick on the waters. Integrity holds truth to be more complex than language.” She’s a brilliant woman. Maybe the Buddhists are right. When you’re ready your teacher comes. I think I taught her too. She just doesn’t know it yet.

God, I hate these fucking buildings. They’re inhabited by moral lepers. How can anyone miss the rot here? The few who live off the many. I hate these people. I hate everything they stand for and I hate their Mercedes-Benzes and Rolls Royces. I hate their suntanned cadavers and the sickening smile on their faces. And the women who live here. They’re worse than the pigs they married. Maybe because I expect more of them. Diamonds. They actually wear diamonds on their fingers and ears and over their breasts. If we had all the diamonds located on Park Avenue
between 79th and 60th Streets, we could finance rape crisis centers in every major city in this country and probably still have money left over. We’ve got to end their hold on this country. What good are civil rights when they run everything? These people are the enemy. Here and on Fifth Avenue and Grosse Pointe and Brookline and Bel Air and Beverly Hills and wherever they congregate with their fat cars loitering in the driveways like shiny cockroaches.

What few women there were on the streets when Ilse emerged from the subway at Sheridan Square blurred into replicas of Carole. All voices became her voice. She thought maybe Carole hurried down here to apologize. She crossed Grove Street and opened the first door leading into the Queen’s Drawers and nearly got squashed as a party of five barreled out of the second inner door. When she walked inside the place all heads at the bar turned, then resumed conversation. The coat attendant, eager for the small sum each checked coat brought the house, grabbed at Ilse’s light jacket.

“No, I don’t want to check my coat. I’m looking for someone.”

“That’s what they all say but okay, honey.”

The dance floor was occupied but not crammed. After ten minutes of searching Ilse walked back out into Sheridan Square.

It was a dumb idea. If she’s looking for me she wouldn’t go into the bar, she’d go to my house. Hurrying down West Fourth to Twelfth Street she saw a tall woman in front of her. At a slow trot Ilse finally overtook the woman. A fleeting look confirmed her sorrow. She wasn’t Carole.

Embarrassed, she muttered, “Excuse me,” and walked the rest of the way home. No one lurked in
front of the building. No one was in the hallway and the courtyard was equally bare. Lucia’s don’t-bother-me banner hung over the balcony. Opening the door to her small cottage revealed that no one had crawled through the window. Ilse closed the door on the last vestige she had of romantic illusion and shuddered. What is it that Alice quotes or did I read it? Scratch a fascist and uncover a romantic. I wonder if it’s true?

The shower lifted her a bit but her stomach was firmly tied in a knot. A dank anger pulled at her. She was mad because Carole didn’t chase after her and she was even more furious at herself for secretly wishing to be chased. Slowly a sense of release untied the knot. She felt low but she felt free—not of Carole but of something, that remaining sliver of romanticism that clouds the truth and softens those hard edges of reality that should push us into action. Ilse fell asleep wondering if she was growing up in spite of herself.

The door flew open and Martin Twanger, a fat sorry looking son-of-a-bitch if ever there was one, jumped under his desk, terrified by the three furious feminists bearing down on him. Twanger, the
Village Rag
’s hatchet columnist, prided himself on shocking the public. His most famous expose to date was an article “proving” over seventy-five percent of all New York City’s employees had smoked marijuana, and of that number, twenty percent admitted to oral copulation. Twanger thought he was big time. Now he looked more surprised than surprising.