Riding Fury Home (15 page)

As the rally wound down, we wandered the city, turning a corner to find ourselves in the midst of riot police lobbing tear gas at protesters. We ran holding hands, eyes burning and half-closed, to sounds of screams and coughing. We ran blind until the gas fog thinned and we could pour water on handkerchiefs to blot our burning faces. “Bastards!” I said between coughing fits. “Bastard pigs!” Kate echoed.

On the bus home, we were a bedraggled crowd, many of us red-eyed and damp from dousing off tear gas. Between naps, Kate and I talked. She had a kindred passion for politics and guerrilla theater, even if her focus was different than mine. She told me about her women's group, where they talked about female oppression. “You should come,” she urged. I could sort of see her point about women's problems, but I felt it was trivial; I had much more important things to focus on, like militarism, imperialism, and colonialism. And finding another boyfriend.

 

 

HOMECOMING WEEK WAS the pinnacle of school boosterism. My guerilla-theater group scorned all that: the corny homecoming queen and king, who were paraded around the football field in a pickup truck throne before the game, the overeager cheerleaders who worked up their most elaborate routines, how everyone got oh so teary over “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

On game day, my gang gathered clandestinely in an empty field behind the football stadium. We could hear the crowds roar at a play, and then the
boom
of the marching band's bass drum signaling half-time. The tallest man among us carried the Vietcong flag while the other twelve of us marched in a scraggly V behind him. Our tactic: onto the field fast, out even faster. We scrambled across the football field, chanting:

The roar of boos, hisses, “Go back to Russia!” some scattered clapping and raised fists. A fair number of students were against the Vietnam War, but for many this went too far; we were trampling on sacred turf to disrupt the homecoming game.

My heart beat hard as we crossed the field. All my childhood, I had hated standing out as different. Now, my discomfort at being noticed mixed with an incredible exhilaration. This time, I was not alone but belonging to my group of renegades, and instead of shame, there was pride. My whole body felt electric, buzzing with the charge.

 

 

I WENT HOME OVER winter break to a new Mom. Gone was her slurred speech, the nightly sleeping pills. She had done an amazing thing after I left—checked herself into a hospital to go through drug detox. Mom told me the barbiturates and tranquilizers she'd been on were so powerful that withdrawal from them was worse than heroin. She'd had days of sweats and muscle cramps so unrelenting that the nurses had to inject her with muscle relaxants.

When I had left home, I had prayed that she would make it, but that possibility seemed so precarious. I held a belief deep in my bones:
If I am not there to watch over her, she'll die.
Ironically, it took my leaving for her to decide to get off psychiatric medication. Our enmeshment had been destroying us both.

All that first semester in Grinnell, I had repressed my anxiety about my mother so heavily in my consciousness that it had lodged in the pit of my belly, clamoring like a siren. I had taken to drinking
milk before and after every meal in a frantic attempt to quell an ulcerous stomach. When I came home to an alive mother, my stomach pains began to ease up. A part of me that had been clenched so tight began to breathe again.

Another part remained wary. How long could this last? Would she revert? It felt completely unnatural to me to let go of worry. And thrilled as I was, there was an underlying resentment, barely audible to my consciousness, like the voices of people in the next room when you can't quite make out their words. It was still too taboo to listen to those whispers: Why couldn't Mom have gotten it together when I lived with her as a child and taken care of me?

Mom had a new therapist, a leftist psychologist she was wild about. She couldn't stop talking about how wonderful this woman was, how much she was helping Mom. In addition to her individual sessions, Mom attended her therapist's group. They met every other week with the therapist and on alternate weeks on their own as a peer group. The leaderless weeks, they met at Mom's apartment.

The night they gathered in Mom's living room, she introduced me to everyone, beaming. Afterward I retreated to my bedroom. When the group ended, Mom came into the bedroom while I was smoking a joint. I didn't worry about her minding, as she rarely chastised me or played that kind of parental role. Anyway, she was such a bohemian I figured she'd be cool, but then she surprised me.

“I'd like to try it; can I have some?” she asked.

It weirded me out, the thought of getting high with my mother, but I passed her the joint, not able to say no. We sat side by side on the bed, taking hits. Then after a while, we were laughing at something someone had said in the group. I confessed that I could hear every word they said through the thin French doors.

We wandered into the kitchen, voracious. Sitting at the kitchen table over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, our pot-induced silliness escalated until we were howling, tears running down our faces.

“Want some milk, Mom?” I asked, going to the refrigerator. I poured us two glasses, just to unstick the peanut butter from my mouth. Not that my stomach needed it.

 

 

I MET MIKE ON A SCAFFOLD. At the beginning of my second semester, I'd seen a sign calling for assistants for a mural being painted in a drama department rehearsal room. When I found the room, there was just one small blond guy with a goatee, painting high on a wall with his legs dangling off the platform. He was engrossed, and it took a couple shouts of “Hi up there!” for him to look down.

I hadn't done any art since high school, where I had taken every art course I could elect. But I had decided with regret that I didn't get to be an artist, because it was too self-indulgent when the world was so messed up. I felt I had no choice but to devote myself to political action, to saving the world. Not that I was doing so much of that here in the middle of Iowa.

“Come to help?” the guy on the scaffold asked. I nodded and he climbed down to get me started. Mike explained that this mural was his homage to Dada. I had no idea what that meant, but when he said the point was to create nonsensical images, I figured I couldn't go too far wrong.

The smell of paint again, the feel of the brush, that familiar intoxication: lush colors moving beneath my hands. Mike and I both worked immersed and silent for several hours, then washed up and went to the cafeteria together for dinner.

There was no formal dating between us, just a moment after several days of painting sessions when we held hands leaving the mural room, and then we kept walking until we got to his room. Without preamble, we made out. Day by day over a week, our make-out sessions progressed: kissing, necking, petting. I explained to Mike that I was still technically a virgin. By now, my virginity felt like a
thing,
not exactly a disease, more like an impediment. I was tired of the tension of that line I had not yet crossed over.

When I mentioned my virginity to Mike, he said, “Don't worry, I would never go ahead without checking with you first. We should decide on this together.”

One evening, Mike and I were lying naked side by side on my bed, kissing and touching each other. He rolled on top of me as we kissed. Suddenly, I realized he was inside me. It was an odd moment mixed with relief and anger. Relief that the question was resolved, no going back. A flash of rage:
He didn't ask.
I couldn't linger on that thought, what that might mean. Then he was moving in and out of me. It was damn uncomfortable, because I had a tampon in, something Mike hadn't stopped to notice. I was mute, couldn't find my voice to stop him, but it wasn't that long until he pulled out and came into the sheet.

All I could say was, “That hurt. I had a tampon in!”

“Do you need to take it out?” Mike asked.

“It's a little late for that.”

Beyond my moment of inchoate rage, I couldn't or wouldn't name what had happened. After all, I was willingly having sex with him. I didn't want to think about it as a violation. But my fury curled inside me like a cougar in its den, and every now and then, it made brief hunting forays.

We never made any declarations to each other:
like you, love you
. We had sex and slept together in Mike's bed every night.

When we weren't having sex, we talked about Mike's art, or rather, Mike talked about his art. He was a freshman like me, but he was already clear on his purpose: He was majoring in art. One morning when Mike had left before me for an early class, I sat on his floor, twisting metal wire as he'd shown me to around the armature of a five-foot metal sculpture in progress, which was taking up most of the free floor space. I didn't have class that morning, so I spent a couple hours at this. And then an odd flash: I saw myself, as if I were standing outside my body, watching as I meticulously poured myself into Mike's work. Who was this woman, so eager to assist, like one of those housewives Kate's women's group mocked? In that moment, I saw that I had taken in more female role socialization than I cared to admit. And there something else I didn't yet understand: I had artist envy that I channeled into being Mike's assistant.

 

 

SEX AFTER THE FIRST TIME, which had hurt as I expected, stunned me with disappointment.
That's it?
I asked myself.
That's all?
What a letdown! Foreplay had been fun, sometimes intensely exciting, but now that I was Doing It, there was less of that. In high school, I had drunk in what the girls in my art club had said about intercourse. They claimed the whole world shook, that it was the most profound experience ever. I had held on to that promise as my beacon guiding me toward the shore of
yes
.

I considered myself liberated because sometimes I was the one on top, but whatever the position, neither the earth nor my body quaked. I started to feel like a fuck machine, just there for Mike's pleasure, servicing him. But I said nothing.

I had never made the trip to Planned Parenthood for birth control, so we were using the pull-out method. Mike seemed to
manage every time, and I didn't worry much. Then my period was late. After a week, I told Mike. His face blanched. “How late are you?” he asked. Mike borrowed a car, and we drove to the clinic in Des Moines. I left him in the waiting room, thumbing through magazines.

I waited for my first gynecological exam lying on the narrow exam table in a thin paper gown, chilled. The friendly male doctor seemed quite chipper when he informed me, “It's too soon to test you for pregnancy. But let's get you fitted for that diaphragm!” He plunged into the job while I contemplated a plan: I would leave school and fly to New York, which had just liberalized its abortion laws. Mom and Ruth, who worked at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, would find me a willing doctor.

I didn't know if I said “abortion” to this doctor, even at liberal Planned Parenthood, whether he would have to throw me out of the clinic or not.
Roe v. Wade
was still three years away. After he handed me my diaphragm and spermicidal jelly, all I managed was a coded plea, “But I need to find out
soon.
”

“Don't worry,” the doctor replied breezily, “you have plenty of time.”

Mike looked up when I came into the waiting room, “Well?” he asked.

I shrugged. “It's too soon to test me.” We drove back to school, tense and silent.

Frantic, I went to my resident advisor, a senior who lived across the hall from me. I stood in her doorway, telling her my plight. “Wait,” she told me, “I've got something for that.” She disappeared into her room. When she came back, she dropped two pills into my hand. “It's progesterone,” she explained. “Take them, then wait three days. If you're not pregnant, it'll bring on your period.”

Classes blurred. What took prominence were my forays to the bathroom to check myself. Day three: nothing. Day four: nothing. An agony of hours until day five: nothing. On the evening of day five: red spots on my white underwear. Such relief, the ecstasy of blood.

 

 

ONE MORNING IN LATE winter, I woke ill with flu. I tromped across campus through the snow from Mike's room to my dormitory, went into the bathroom, and wrestled my diaphragm out. Then I got in my bed, shivering with fever, queasy with nausea. I stayed there three days. My roommates Debbie and Anne took care of me, brought me soup, and went to the school nurse for pills and advice. Mike showed up on the third day. He was excited, in the midst of a new art project. He stood near the foot of my bed so as not to catch my germs, talking and talking about his latest sculpture.

Through my haze of nausea, I saw something clearly in that moment: his complete self-absorption. I sat up partway. “Mike, would you hand me the wastebasket?” I asked.

He handed me the plastic bag–lined container, and I sat all the way up, vomiting into it. When I looked up, he was gone.

My moment of clarity brought no relief. Leaving the relationship didn't occur to me. I endured, my hatred simmering, my suffering a silent accusation. That familiar state: hating the one you love, the one you're most connected to.

A few days after I more or less recovered from the flu, Mike informed me we were having Sunday dinner with his roommate John, John's girlfriend, Cindy, and his friend Peter. He had signed us up for one of the private dining rooms with an attached kitchen that students could reserve on campus. All us two women had to do was broil up the Sunday steaks, a campus tradition, and reheat the baked
potatoes provided by the cafeteria. We didn't have to bother with dessert, because we'd all make our own ice cream sundaes. “Oh, and wear a dress!” Mike added to his monologue.