Riding Fury Home (14 page)

Later, when Mom told Ruth what had happened, almost making a joke of it like it was a silly mistake, Ruth said to me, “You should have called me to come help.”

I looked at her, flabbergasted
. She has no idea what Mom is really like, how bad things can get
. No way could I subject Mom or me to such scrutiny—it was just too shameful. The idea of getting help was foreign, but also intriguing
,
a new idea tickling the back of my mind.
Really? You mean you would come?
some part of me wanted to ask Ruth. Instead, I just stared at her a moment, and then looked down, picking at my thumbnail.

 

 

BY THE END OF HIGH school, some part of me knew that I needed to get far away from my mother. I had two viable college choices: a full scholarship to Douglass, the sister school to Dad's alma mater Rutgers, or a pretty good scholarship from a school I'd applied to on a whim: Grinnell, a small liberal arts college in Iowa. I'd heard of it when a recruiter had come to our school, declaring it the Harvard of the Midwest. The thought of staying in New Jersey gave me shivers of claustrophobia. I chose Grinnell, in the middle of nowhere. Just where I needed to be.

I remember the day I left my mother. Dad was waiting at the curb in his car to take me to Newark Airport. Mom helped me drag
my things to the elevator. As we stood there, waiting for it to come up, she repeated what she'd said the night before: “Have a wonderful time, darling!” I knew she meant it. I reached for her, and we hugged as the elevator dinged. She threw her arm across the elevator door to keep it from shutting while I shoved my bags in. We stared at each other as the doors closed, my throat tight.

Out on the street, Dad and I hoisted my bags into the trunk. I looked back up at the windows of our apartment. Mom was looking down on me. Even from the distance, it seemed to me her eyes had a look of sorrow and longing that made my heart feel like it was being squeezed. I knew I was never coming back, would never live with my mother again. Would she survive? What if she took another overdose? There'd be no one to come home and find her and call the ambulance. But I knew I had to go, no matter what. I took a long, slow breath, exhaled, and waved Mom a farewell.

DAN AND I HAD CLIMBED naked out of his basement dorm window and were lying on our backs on the grass of the campus lawn, looking up at the vast blaze of stars. The early autumn night was still warm enough for us to lie bare-skinned without shivering, as the smell of dewy grass wafted around us. We had just finished making love in his room in our virginal way, with him moving on top of me, a sheet barring penetration. My first boyfriend ever. I felt almost dizzy with the freedom: so
here and now
—my mother pushed far into the back of my mind. I felt very avant-garde.

I had met Dan a few weeks into the first semester, at a student guerilla-theater group. I'd been intrigued by the idea of political street theater, but nervous at the first meeting. After brief introductions, we stood in a circle and did voice warm-ups and a few stretches. Next, we played a game where one person started a repetitive movement accompanied by a sound that the rest of the circle imitated, then the next person did their version that the group followed. It was so goofy and mindless that my body relaxed.
God, this is fun!
After that, someone played director and gave us situations to act out in improvisations. The improv skit's demand to
just do it, don't hold back
pushed me past my shy reluctance into exhilaration. Afterward, Dan walked out with me, and we strolled across the campus. My excitement allowed me an even rarer unself-conscious animation with him. I talked and talked, my hands moving in expressive arcs. Dan asked if I wanted to take a bike ride with him the next day.

We'd ridden to a park off campus for what turned out to be our first date of sorts. I was laying down in the grass, looking up at the sky, clouds scudding high overhead, when suddenly Dan was leaning over me, pressing his lips against mine. I raised my hand against his chest, pushed him off me, and mumbled something semicoherent about not trusting people too fast. I didn't understand his urge to kiss me—I didn't even know him—but dating rituals were a complete unknown to me, so perhaps one kissed first and felt something later. In an out-of-body way, I was buzzing with excitement, a kind of generic charge not particular to any feelings for Dan, but for this moment: first kiss, first boyfriend.

Lying back in the grass after our aborted kiss, Dan said, “You're amazing. So bright—I could just tell at the group last night—and so beautiful.” Now
that
got me turned on.

We rode our bikes back and stored them in the campus bike shed. As we were walking toward the dorms, Dan asked, “Do you want to come to my room?”

“Do you think I should call my mother first and ask her?” I found myself saying, tossing it off as a joke by adding with a laugh, “Do you think she'd approve?” Pause.
Stupid idiot,
I chided myself. “Okay, just for a bit,” I said.

Being an upperclassman, Dan lived in a single. His tiny room was dark with filtered basement light from the one aboveground
window. I flopped on my stomach on the twin bed, the only furniture in the room other than a desk and wood chair. I was trying to act nonchalant but was instinctively protecting myself, unable to be face-to-face with Dan. I thought he was exceptionally unattractive: a big hulking guy who moved clumsily, with pasty white skin and straight blond hair.

I could feel the warmth of Dan's hand resting in the small of my back, the sag of the bed as he sat down next to my hips. “Want a back massage?” he asked.

“Mmmph,” I muttered into the bedspread.

He took that as a yes. His hands began moving against my T-shirt, kneading me lightly. I tried to will myself to relax, but there was a jangly buzzing throughout my body that coalesced into a painful knot in my stomach. Suddenly, I found myself leaping up. “Uh, it was fun, Dan” was all I could come up with.

He laughed. I didn't know what else to say, so I started for his door.

“So, how about checking out the campus movie tomorrow?” Dan asked.

I turned back toward him and smiled. “Okay,” I said.

 

 

IN OUR SECOND WEEK of hanging out together, Dan introduced me to pot. He sat at his desk rolling a joint, his hands working the Zig-Zag cigarette paper back and forth. I stared nervously as he brought the joint to his mouth, licked the glue strip, sealed the paper, and twisted the ends. “How 'bout it?” He smiled over at me where I was perched on his twin bed.

Drugs scared me, but everyone said grass was different; it was cool, not like the older generation's horrible alcohol or tranquilizers.
I was wound tight and hated to lose control, but some part of me longed to. I hesitated, then answered, “Sure.”

Dan joined me on the bed and we passed the joint back and forth. I coughed after the first inhalation, but persisted. We lay down on our backs, giggling, and then we turned face-to-face. Dan stroked my hair. I looked into his smiling face and saw an expression both sweet and gentle; he no longer seemed quite so homely. After an interlude of kissing, we both sat up and stripped. We lay back down naked, again face-to-face, stroking each other's backs. It was the most delicious sensation, feeling his fingers trailing down my spine, my fingertips following the arc of his shoulder blade. I sighed deeply, skin tingling, amazed at such intimacy. It was wildly exciting that someone wanted me, wanted to feel my body. I thought touching someone was knowing someone, and marveled that we had flung aside superficialities along with our clothes.

I remember writing to my father that Dan and I were cutting right through the mundane, going for deep connection. He wrote back a cautionary note:
Dan sounds nice, but take your time, you could get hurt.

I wrote Mom about Dan, too. I rarely called her—it was too expensive—but during one phone conversation, my mother casually asked, “What kind of birth control are you using?” I was outraged at her assumption. As if she knew me so exactly that she had no need for asking details, as if she knew my life as it now was.

The truth was, Dan and I were both inexperienced. He'd had a girlfriend or two but was still a virgin also. So we stroked each other's bodies and dry-humped with a sheet between us, and did little else. I thought I was knowledgeable from junior-high sex education, but no one had ever told me I had a clitoris or that women could have orgasms, and I had never discovered it myself.

 

 

DAN AND I HAD BEEN together a couple of months when we finally discussed birth control. Dan was adamant that I not use the Pill. He thought it was not natural and potentially harmful to take a bunch of hormones. That was one of the moments I edged closer to loving him, moved that he showed concern for me. Condoms didn't occur to either of us. We settled on a diaphragm.

In 1969, there was only one way for a Grinnell coed to get birth control, and that was to go to Planned Parenthood in Des Moines, a ninety-minute bus ride away. I made a Saturday appointment and Dan agreed to go with me. But on Thursday, he bounded into my room, jubilant. “Kathy's visiting this weekend!” Kathy had been his best friend at Grinnell through their freshman and sophomore years—a platonic relationship, Dan told me. She'd transferred to another school to complete her junior and senior years. Every time he spoke of her and how amazing she was, his eyes would wander off and he'd grin to himself. “Feel free to go to Des Moines,” Dan added, “but I want to hang out with Kathy. She's just here for the weekend, and I need to spend all the time I can with her.”

I canceled my Planned Parenthood appointment, peeved at Dan and damned if I was going to go without him. We were apart all weekend. Once, from a distance, I saw him and Kathy crossing campus, their blond heads down, immersed in conversation. On Monday, he came by my room after class. He didn't sit down, just stood awkwardly in my doorway. “Listen,” he said, “Kathy's visit made me wonder about some things. About you and me. Whether we work. I need some time to think. I'll see you in a couple days, okay?” And he was gone.

When Dan showed up at my room three days later, he sat on the far end of my bed and told me that he'd concluded from Kathy's visit, from how much they had in common, that he couldn't keep on with me. It just wasn't working.

My head felt suddenly heavy. How could I fight what he'd said? I didn't feel he even knew me, but I had no idea how to show myself to him. I could find no words, just looked at the floor.

After a while, Dan asked, “Are you in love with me?”

I had no clue what that meant, to be in love. But strangely, I found myself nodding yes, shrugging as if to take it back, then bursting into tears.

We just both sat there awhile. Then Dan, suddenly the worldly older brother, said, “The first breakup is hard. I remember: It hurts like hell. But you'll see, you'll get over it.”

 

 

MY JUDGMENT ABOUT my college classes was swift: It seemed the same old conservative drivel as high school, and thus irrelevant. I wanted to roll my eyes when our first assignment in English class was
The Odyssey
; I had read that in ninth grade! Who needed any more Greek tales? I had so hoped for thought-provoking stimulation, but I gave up easily. I reverted to my bad habits of skipping classes and doing papers at the last minute.

I gravitated to the more radical students. My roommate Debbie was lovers with David, a Maoist who was in charge of ordering the films shown on campus. That meant we got to watch the movies before their campus screening. Our leftist group piled into David's living room to watch
The Battle of Algiers
and the films of Godard, Fellini, and Ingmar Bergman. I was gripped by whole new worlds of cultures, characters, and artistic visions.

One day on the spur of the moment, five of us movie fanatics piled into a VW Bug and roared off to the University of Minnesota to go to a reception for Godard. When we arrived five hours later, there Jean-Luc was, sitting on a couch sipping wine and discussing
his movies. I worked my way close with my camera, focused the lens on the famous director, and started snapping wildly, pressing the shutter over and over. Godard turned, stared, and chastised me, “Don't waste film; it's a precious thing!” The Great One had spoken to
me,
and I glowed, unfazed that the words were critical. I nodded assent, echoing to myself,
Yes, what a great truth: film is precious!

I learned to drive stick shift on the way home. Everyone else was pretty wasted, having downed many glasses of free wine while I was snapping photos. David gave me a quick lesson in a parking lot, then everyone crashed asleep while I lurched through the darkened two-stoplight Minnesota towns, stripping gears.

 

 

IN MID-NOVEMBER, a caravan of several busses took Grinnell students to Washington, D.C., for the Moratorium, a huge demonstration against the Vietnam War. I sat next to a woman named Kate on the many-hour ride. I had first noticed her in the campus cafeteria, a short blond woman dressed in a pink satin Playboy Bunny suit. Behind her, other women from her feminist street-theater group held up signs protesting the exploitation of women. I couldn't help staring at her large, pale breasts spilling over the low-cut suit.

Kate and I agreed to stick together as buddies as we marched and chanted with the crowd thronging to the Washington Monument. At the rally, we sat jammed elbow to elbow as we half-listened to the speeches muffled by the loudspeakers, both perking up to the songs of Arlo Guthrie and the cast of
Hair
. We sang along with Pete Seeger to “Give Peace a Chance,” swaying with the crowd. Here I was, among hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, a long way from my first protests with my mother and the handful of her Women Strike for Peace activists.