Riding Fury Home (22 page)

Dad and I stared at each other, eyes moist, torsos turned in our bucket seats.

With Dad, I had swallowed my own pain to bind him to me. I had been desperate to buoy him up as the strong parent. It had all been a sham. Now that my mother had told me the secret, I saw that homophobia had shattered us all.

My chest and throat ached with that familiar but unspeakable pairing:
How I love you; how I hate you.
He was admitting why it was
hard for him, I had to give him that. “Okay, Dad, I can understand that” was all I could manage. I started the car, and we headed for Pocket Canyon.

When we got to the cabin, Kate had dinner ready: our standard cooked veggies with rice, a salad topped with sunflower seeds and tahini dressing, and freshly made carrot juice. Dad shook Kate's hand in the doorway, and we sat down at the dinette set. He raised his glass of juice as if to make a toast, but then simply took a sip, leaving his mustache tipped with orange foam. Dad gamely dug into his food, but both his and Kate's faces were a bit grim. I so wanted him to like her, and her to get to know him, but it was a competitive war from the beginning. When they started their verbal sparring, I felt caught in between, as I had at meals with my parents.

As their conversation veered through the women's movement, politics in general, and existential issues, whatever the subject, they took opposing stances. “Life is great! Things are changing, full of possibility! We're on the edge of a great revolution in sex roles and culture,” Kate declared, while my father held to “Life is tough and terrible! Disaster is around the bend. It won't work out.”

My father, with his sad eyes. It hit me then: My father was depressed, had been depressed my whole life. I had only thought of my mother that way, that my father's sadness was simply in reaction to his troubled wife, the sick one. But now I realized something in him was defeated, while Gloria had reclaimed herself.

And Kate. I looked at her face, hardened with its stubborn, tight jaw as she argued with my father. She was immersed in her argument, and never looked my way. I thought she might reach out more, for my sake. In that moment, her insistence bordered on meanness; I saw no kindness there. Sure, I agreed with her that
there was lots of cause for hope, but did she get it at all how excruciating life could be? Did she have a clue how much pain my father and I had survived?

As soon as the meal ended, I burst out, “You must be tired, Abe, still on East Coast time. How 'bout I drive you to your motel?”

The next morning, I picked my father up at his motel in Guerneville. I had taken the day off from classes while Kate went to school. Sightseeing seemed the thing to occupy the time. We headed over to the Napa Valley.

Somewhere along the road, after stops for tastings at a couple of wineries, Dad blurted out, “Your mother—I hope she has made peace with her predilection.”

Oh, Dad. Can't you even say the word?
Silly that I hadn't expected this question. Something in me clenched, and I found I couldn't say the word either.

“She
has
,” I replied, then went silent. I felt protective of my mother, didn't want to reveal the details of her life to my father, her wild year of sleeping with every woman in sight.

It was at the third winery's deli, where we bought French bread, cheese, and fruit, and were eating at an outside picnic table, that Dad said, “I'm glad your mother has come to peace with herself. Once, I met with her psychiatrist. He was a specialist they brought in just for Gloria. Um . . . ” Dad hesitated, cleared his throat.

“Yes?” My stomach was knotting up.

“Well, what he specialized in was treating homosexuals. He told me to have faith, that there was hope for her. That he had helped other homosexual patients. He gave me an article about a gay man he had successfully treated to become heterosexual.”

“Jesus, that bastard! They treated Mom as if she was sick and perverted and to be cured when she was brokenhearted for Marian.
And how twisted for you, to be given false hope. God, what an awful mess.”

Dad sighed, “Yeah, what he said gave me a glimmer of hope, but it was a false hope. It was a terrible time.”

I heaved a big sigh, too.

As I drove us back into the redwoods, Dad announced, “Karen, I've changed my plane reservation. I'm sorry, but I'm going to leave tomorrow. My flight leaves at noon.”

“Oh. Okay.” Relief mixed with a sudden sense of defeat. His five-day visit, shortened to two. My father just couldn't take it. But then, I was used to that—wasn't he always leaving me?

 

 

AT THE END OF MAY, Kate went all out for my twenty-first birthday. Our friends, Sally and Jennifer, let us use their cottage, as our space was too cramped. Kate invited women from the city and our new friends from our jujitsu and VW repair classes. Sally and Jennifer lived in a fairytale cottage: They were renting a former caretaker's home on a three-hundred-acre horse ranch in the Valley of the Moon. We gathered in their living room, with its stone fireplace and big picture window, looking out on a huge meadow with solitary live oak trees amid grazing horses. To me it was a beautiful, wondrous place: sheltered by pines, but facing light-filled open country, so unlike the frigid redwood forest.

Kate had festooned the living room with crepe paper garlands and balloons. We all donned paper party hats, passed joints around, ate a potluck meal, and succumbed to great gales of laughter. I was giddy with being loved by Kate and celebrated by my friends. It seemed to me we were commemorating more than this marker into adulthood. There was the triumph of our relationship. We'd come
out together and been lovers a year and a half, bonded by our shared life in the women's movement; had suffered surveillance and disillusionment; and been through a hard winter in the woods. Now, we'd made it to the other side.

A month after my birthday party, Sally and Jennifer bought a house, and we snatched their fairytale cottage. We were moving there with two other women. It was the realization of a dream: not just a beautiful place, but a collective household with women friends. We knew Dotty from jujitsu and Martha from our VW repair class, and had a budding friendship with each of them. The house had three bedrooms, so Kate and I would share a room, and Dotty and Martha would each have their own. In our premove planning meeting, they both said they didn't mind living with a couple.

Our fourth weekend in the house, Kate and I began painting our bedroom. We'd agreed easily on the colors: cream-yellow walls, like afternoon light in autumn, and rust trim to warm the room. I hummed as I painted, my overalls and bandana splattered with the colors of fall leaves and golden light.

By the end of our first painting day, I went to bed completely beat, a contented exhaustion. I got under the covers before Kate and was asleep before she even made it to bed. In the morning, I woke to an empty bed.

I was at the kitchen counter, puttering around with breakfast things, when Kate emerged from the adjoining living room, looking sleepy, still in her nightgown. Her straight hair was so mussed, it was in a tangle. Dotty, also in her pajamas, followed her out of the living room and into the kitchen.

“Hi,” I grinned toward them. “I'm having granola. Want some?”

Dotty mumbled something about going to the bathroom, and walked past me and down the hall.

Kate said, “I need to talk with you.”

As we walked down the hall to our bedroom, my body felt strange; my midsection was closing in on itself, but my mind was thinking,
She's changed her mind about the paint colors.

We each sat on the bed's edge, our bodies turned only partially toward each other. Kate began, “Last night, when you went to sleep early, I waited up for Dotty to come home. We stayed up talking, and, well, then we made love. We spent the night on the hide-a-bed in the living-room couch.”

Now the contraction included my heart and my throat. I could barely breathe. My temples began to pound and my chest ached. “Kate . . . how could you!?” I burst out, and then managed to contain myself. I was on a knife's edge, knew I had to handle this right. My breathing shallow, I started over, exercising all my willpower, trying to sound calm. “So, do you want to continue being lovers with her?”

“Yes, this has been coming between Dotty and me for a while.”

Memory flashed then—looks that had passed between Kate and Dotty, eyes holding each other across the dinner table, their dancing together at my birthday party. I tried to hold back my rising panic. “This is going to be really hard for me, Kate. I mean, jeez, we all
live
together. How do you think I'll feel, not knowing if you will be sleeping with me or Dotty each night?”

We'd talked about the idea of having other lovers. The ideology of nonmonogamy had dominated our Radicalesbians group. Kate and I had concluded that there might be room in our relationship for others, but we'd both asserted that doing so would not separate us or lessen our love for each other. But it had all been theory up until now.

“Actually, Karen,” Kate went on, “I don't want to be lovers with you anymore.”

I could not speak. I found myself rising, my body moving out of the bedroom, there was the blur of the hall, the
thud
of the front door closing behind me. Then I was running across the driveway and into the thicket. I hurled myself belly down onto the dried grass, sobbing into the earth until I was spent.

When I got back to the house, it was empty. Both Dotty's car and Martha's were gone. I figured the three of them had left for our karate class, the one we'd all joined because there was no jujitsu over the summer. But then, why had they taken two cars? My mind was swirling, and I couldn't think clearly. A chilling quiet now filled the house, and I found its emptiness unbearable, so I jumped in our VW van and drove the twenty miles to the martial arts studio.

No Kate or Dotty at class, just Martha. I joined the line of women moving into horse-stance position: wide legs, knees bent, pelvis tucked, elbows held into the ribs, fists hard and tight. We went through the moves in unison: jab, forward kick—
traitors
—backward kick—
cowards, deserters, where could they be?
—slash, upward block—
why? why doesn't she love me?
—punch, downward block.

Dotty's car was still gone when we got home after class. Inside the quiet house, Martha asked, “What's going on? Why are you so upset?” I told her what Kate had said to me, how now my chest wouldn't quit aching. She put her arm around me and let me cry.

The afternoon passed in a blur. Martha went off to visit a friend, and I alternated between sitting stuporously on the couch and wandering about the house.

When Martha got back, she took one look at me and said, “Let's go out to dinner. You need to get out of here.” We drove to a local restaurant and bar, a popular place, one of the few restaurants on that strip of country highway, and on a Saturday night, there was an hour wait. No problem—we had nothing but time. We sat out on
the wraparound porch with our drinks. My first was a Kahlua and cream, my favorite. After that, I switched to screwdrivers. I intended to drink.

When we finished our meal, we sat back out on the porch, where I nursed my sixth screwdriver. The place was owned by a famous San Francisco madam, now retired, who had a menagerie of exotic animals that she kept in pens on the front lawn. In the twilight, I could just make out the shapes of three llamas and an ostrich. I didn't know if I ever wanted to leave this surreal setting and return home. I dreaded facing either possibility: the deserted house or seeing Kate and Dotty there together. I ordered a seventh screwdriver.

As we made our way to Martha's VW bug in the parking lot, it was a miracle that I was still standing. After a winter of spartan eating alternating with cleansing fasts, I was the thinnest I would ever be in my adult life: 108 pounds of me, drenched in alcohol. My agitated nerves must have been keeping me erect.

The house was black when we arrived, the darkness of the mountain looming behind it, set off by stars. No car in Dotty's spot. The country quiet that just yesterday I had found so soothingly pastoral now grated: How horribly irritating, the buzz of crickets and the lusty croaking of frogs. After Martha went to sleep, I paced the hall that ran along the bedrooms, then through the kitchen and into the living room. Back and forth, like a zoo tiger in its cage. Finally, I took a bath to calm myself and got into bed. Sleep was impossible.

At 2:00 AM, I heard car wheels crunching on the gravel driveway. I got out of bed and walked down the hall toward the front door. I heard the porch door open and close, the creak of the porch boards, then two voices talking in whispers, giggling. As Kate and Dotty came through the front door off the porch, they stopped short, seeing me standing there, a shadow in the dark. Kate said,
“We've been out picking plums in the U-pick plum orchard today. We've got tons of them in the car . . . ” She was smiling and talking, talking about inanities.

I leapt at Kate, fury catapulting me. I grabbed her by the shoulders, pinned her against the wall next to the door. I began to shake her as I yelled, “What are you talking about? Where were you? How could you tell me we are through and then just leave!”

Hands were on me, and I was pulled to the floor. Dotty had jumped me, little Dotty with her tiny, small-boned body. She was on top of me, but a jujitsu move came through me—just like our teacher had promised one day in a pinch it would—and now she was under me. I had her long black hair wrapped in my hand, and I was banging her head against the floor, using her hair to pull her head. My own blood raced through me with each satisfying
thud.

Then I felt more hands on me, tugging. Martha and Kate pulled me off Dotty, who got up and moved close to Kate. They started to turn away, Kate taking Dotty's hand as they moved in the direction of the living room. Then Kate stopped and turned back toward me. I was dusting myself off, but straightened and looked at Kate. Those icy green eyes of hers were narrowed at me. That mean voice said, “You will not get me back this way, Karen.”