The Love Children (27 page)

 

We found Marty Teasdale in a house in South Hadley, where she lived with three other women. They had all attended colleges in the area and found each other through the lesbian networks that
exist everywhere. For lesbians, the Connecticut River Valley was a paradise where they were accepted and could live without harassment. Marty had been a friend of Rhoda's at Smith, and Rhoda had told Sandy to look her up. Marty worked for a new feminist newspaper, a journal I found absolutely thrilling because it treated women and the things they did seriously, as though they mattered. It had a fairly wide circulation, and the group who had founded it were now beginning to publish feminist books too.

When Sandy had read Rhoda's letter a few weeks ago (she had been thinking of leaving for a long time, I saw now), she told me about this with some surprise: neither of us had ever imagined a feminist newspaper or publishing house. A new world had opened. And without telling me, Sandy had written Marty, who invited her down and promised to find someplace for her to live.

We rang Marty's doorbell at two thirty on Sunday afternoon. Marty was tall and very beautiful, with black hair and blue eyes. Two of her housemates were home that day, and they joined us for cocoa and cookies. Sandy described Brad's behavior, and they listened attentively. They had had similar experiences, they said; they knew how it felt to be pursued by an insistent male who would not accept polite refusal.

They said they had friends in a commune in Mount Tom that took in women in need of help. The members were involved in half a dozen different enterprises, and Sandy possibly could work in one of their projects. She would need a car. It was not possible to live there without one.

“I have a car,” she said anxiously. “I can get my car.”

“Good. I thought we'd go over today and introduce you,” Marty said. “Then you can join them whenever you're ready.”

We took Marty's car and drove a few miles to a small settlement of old houses, stopping in front of a tall, narrow Victorian, complete with a turret, peaked roofs, and a gallery. The front door was unlocked like ours at Pax, but this house could not have
been more different from where we'd been living. It was formal and immaculate, furnished with Victorian pieces—curved-back chairs with red velvet or striped red-and-silver seats, lace curtains, a red turkey rug, a round table covered with a lace cloth, and a red globe lamp. We stood in the foyer, near a staircase, and peered in at the living room.

“Wow!” Sandy breathed.

“Laura!” Marty called, and someone responded from upstairs, then came running down the dark wood staircase. The woman was heavyset and was wearing jeans and an embroidered shirt; she had short hair and a clean, open face. She greeted us boisterously.

“Hi, Marty, how're ya doin'? Sandy?” She moved toward me. I smiled and pointed to Sandy, and she changed direction. “I'm Laura. Hear you want to join us.”

“If you'll have me.”

“We will! At least for a time. I can't promise permanent membership—we have to have room, and we have to vote on you. But you can stay with us temporarily. We take any woman in need. And you certainly sound in need.” She turned to Marty. “Sexual harassment, right?”

What was sexual harassment?

“Yes,” Marty said, grimacing.

“Oh,” Sandy said falteringly and I thought she was going to cry. “I'm so tired. It's been so exhausting. I hoped I could settle somewhere for good. Is there someplace else I can go?”

She
was
a different person, I thought, since her father died. As if she had all these years been standing on a platform called Daddy, and it had suddenly splintered under her feet, and she was flailing in the air, falling. Where was my calm, confident, dignified, cool-headed friend?

“Don't fret,” Laura said in a motherly way. “You can settle with us for a while and if we don't take you permanently we'll find someplace else for you. When did you want to join us?”

Sandy gave a tiny smile of relief. “Really? Oh! Oh, as soon as I can! I'm living at Pax, a commune near Becket. I went up there with Jess”—Sandy nodded her head in my direction—“on New Year's Day. I have to go back there today to settle up. Otherwise I'd just stay here. I can't wait to get out of there. But I put in three thousand dollars to join, and I have to at least try to get something back. Will I need to put money in here?”

“No. This is not a formal commune. A professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke owns the house—Annette Collier—she has a private practice here, in the annex. It's toward the back. A little two-story cottage attached to the main house. It was originally built as a dower house, for the mother-in-law, you know? Annette pays the upkeep on the house. The main house has eight bedrooms, and right now six women live here. We're self-governing, except that Annette decides about repairs and any changes in the structure of the house. We have chores, there's a schedule, we make it up ourselves, and we each pay something every month toward the upkeep and our food. It's not a lot. She's not in this to make a profit; she wants to help women. If you get a job, you should be able to cover it. We never ask for lump sums. When we need to make repairs or redecorate, we use the emergency fund. Our monthly maintenance fee includes a few dollars for the emergency fund. But people who come here for shelter, like you, don't have to pay anything. After a week, we ask you to contribute to the food kitty, but that's all. If you can get some money back from Pax, good for you. But the chances are you won't. Especially if it's run by the guys who are harassing you. And you don't need it to come here.”

“God. Money's all they talk about up there,” Sandy said. When she said that, I realized it was true. But I had been used to hearing my parents talk about money problems in the years before my father got famous, and it had never bothered me. Sandy's family probably never talked about money. “It's constant.” She laughed.

I felt that that wasn't entirely fair. Aside from politics, everything we talked about was mundane, because we worried about things that were broken or dirty, that needed attention. We worried about them because we could not afford to replace them, so talking about them was sensible, practical. We talked about what we would eat, when we would do the next baking, if the plumbing needed attention (as it regularly did with only one toilet and bathtub), how the horses were doing, the chickens, the land itself, and our bills, especially the one at the supermarket. But that was one of the things I liked about Pax: everything was practical, real. There was no time for fancifulness, daydreams, pretensions. No time for egos, preening, or psychology. Nothing superficial.

Sandy and Laura made their arrangements, then we drove back to Marty's place and picked up our car and I drove us back home. I was a little worried about how the group was going to react to hearing that I had helped Sandy plan her escape, and I was tense at dinner that night, when Sandy told them she was going to leave. They were stunned. At first no one said anything.

“Really?” Bernice said finally. She tried hard not to smile, but her mouth trembled. And I thought she liked Sandy!

“So soon?” Rebecca asked in dismay. “You just got here!” She looked hurt.

“Yes.” Sandy set her mouth. “I've had problems here. I'm a lesbian,” she said to the women, avoiding Brad, “and I'd be happier living without male harassment.” There was no kindness in her voice.

Instantly, the rest of them turned to me. I kept my face impassive.

“Why didn't you tell us?” Lysanne protested.

“I was sure the guy harassing me would just get worse,” Sandy said bitterly, not looking at Brad.

Brad glared at her. He stood up suddenly and thrust his chair
back so hard it hit the wall. “Do as you damned well please. Who cares!” he growled.

“Brad!” Rebecca cried. She turned to Sandy. “Sandy, I'm so sorry. Have we been insensitive to you?”

“
You
haven't,” Sandy said. “Some people have.”

No one moved. They all must have known, seen it going on. All but stupid me.

“We're sorry, Sandy,” Lysanne said.

Stepan looked hard at me. “You going too?”

“I'd rather stay,” I said. Would they let me?

“Of course you'll stay,” Bishop exploded. “Sandy too. Nobody will give you a hard time from now on, Sandy-andy! Anybody comes on to you, I'll beat 'em up for you, I'll take care of you!” That was the old Bishop. That Bishop always made us laugh. He did this time too—almost.

Sandy smiled at him. “Thanks, Bish. But I've made up my mind. I would like to get some of my three thousand dollars out, if I could.”

“How? How?” Brad came charging back into the room. He must have been standing on the other side of the doorway. “We've spent it! It's in the house. The new part of the foundation wall. The dehumidifier.”

“Is anything left?”

“We have a thousand in the bank.”

“Give her that,” Bishop said authoritatively.

“Eight hundred, actually,” Rebecca said. “Plus change.”

“Give it to her!”

“It'll break us! It's all we have,” Brad argued.

“Do it,” Bishop said in a low voice I had never heard before.

“Thanks, Bish,” Sandy said, “but I don't want to leave you flat broke. Give me five hundred and a note for fifteen hundred against when the house is sold. A thousand should cover my share of rent for the four months I've been here.”

“Is May,” Stepan argued. “You come New Year.”

“Four-plus months,” Sandy amended, gazing coldly at Stepan. So it was agreed.

Sandy left the next day, Monday. I had to work at the market all day, so Bishop drove her to Pittsfield in the truck. She took a bus for Boston. She would get a cab from the bus terminal to Belmont, stay a couple of nights at her mother's house, pick up her car, and drive out to Northampton. She felt no guilt about that, she said: her mother could afford to buy Naomi a car of her own. But I lay awake late that night, my cheeks wet, feeling more alone than I knew I should feel, and more alone than I have ever felt since.

 

I stayed at Pax. I had become a farmer.

When we planned our spring planting, I urged that we use untreated seeds, and fertilize our crops only with compost. Stepan kept the compost heap, filled with our food waste and ashes. We also had a mulch pile, made up of our hay and choppings of the hairy vetch that grew down near our pond. Because I provided an extra hand, we were able to expand our planting area, and we put in corn, green beans, peas, zucchini, beets, asparagus, lettuce, spinach, turnips, potatoes, and soy. We used natural pest controls and watered with hoses—quite a chore! But after I tasted our spinach and sugar snap peas that summer, I was converted to the natural method forever.

With three of us working, we had enough yield to sell some. Bishop and Brad slapped some boards together and built a farm stand out front facing the road, and we made almost two thousand dollars that fall, selling corn, tomatoes, spinach, green beans, and herbs, as well as apples from our orchard. For the first time in Pax's existence, we were able to pay off our bill at the market, which gained us respect in the community. We were
no longer dirty, long-haired hippies, but upstanding members of society who paid their debts.

I did a lot of cooking during the years I lived at Pax. I scorched dinners and skillets, I boiled soup away to a brown scum in the bottom of a huge pot, I overcooked and undercooked, overspiced and underspiced, and I learned. I can't say my cooking was great; our ingredients were too limited for that. But we had delectable fresh vegetables, and our eggs, always fresh and always fertilized, were scrumptious and plentiful. My vegetable omelets, soufflés, and scrambled eggs with herbs and potatoes were delicious; my soups were as good as soup can be when made without stock, which I did not often have. A couple of times a year on a special occasion, I would ask Bernice to kill a couple of chickens for dinner. She didn't mind doing it; she grabbed a chicken as if it were her former lover Gregory and wielded the ax with pleasure. Sometime that spring she had fallen out of love and into hate with Gregory; and whatever else Bernice was, she was steadfast in her feelings. Whenever we had chicken, I saved every bone and made a broth, and we'd have luscious soup based on it—for two nights at least.

Soon everyone in the house wanted me to cook every night because my cooking tasted better than anyone else's. And I wanted to do it, except when I was just too tired after planting or weeding all day. Then Bishop or Rebecca or Bernice would do it. That everyone groaned when I wasn't the cook gave me confidence, though I often enough found fault with my own cooking.

 

A few nights after Sandy left, Stepan came to my room, asking permission to enter. He was stiff and formal, sitting on the straight chair that functioned as my desk chair. I sat on the bed—there were no other chairs. He had his hands clasped between his legs, and he bent forward like a petitioner, which I suspected he
was. We both lit cigarettes, which at Pax were a luxury rather than a habit.

He said he'd been wanting to get to know me since I'd arrived, but because he hadn't been sure about my relationship with Sandy, he hadn't wanted to intrude. I didn't believe this. I didn't think any of the guys had any suspicion whatever that Sandy was gay, and once we asked for separate rooms, we were both fair game. But I did think that Sandy being automatically my ally intimidated him a little. Now that she was gone and I was alone, he felt stronger.

I deduced this from his demeanor, and as I did, it dawned on me that I couldn't have been coming on to Stepan the way Sandy had said. Wouldn't he have noticed if I had? If he was interested in me, why didn't he act sooner, if I was being so flirty?