“It’s not the same thing.”
“But maybe we ought to go over there and pass out leaflets some time, invite those women to a dance or something.” Mona put her embroidery down. Her face was flushed and excited. Anna looked uncomfortable. Judy stared directly at me, and I could feel my neck getting hot. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t think what.
Lenore cleared her throat and cracked a few sunflower seeds. “I don’t know,” she giggled. “Don’t really feel like playing feminist evangelist to the pool hall set myself.”
Anna giggled with her, and then there was a wave of laughter. I smiled but didn’t laugh. After a little while Mona started explaining just what she meant at the last consciousness-raising session at the Women’s Center when she told Sharma she was antimonogamous. Someone else began to describe the sit-in at the student council that got us the funds for the rape crisis phone line. Then Mona tried to talk Anna into coming to a poetry reading the next weekend. Judy started going on and on about the article she had just read that explained why a women’s revolution was inevitable at this point in history.
I sat quietly, sipping at my beer. I was exhausted from typing up the budget requests for the day care center, and my stomach ached, but I didn’t want to go off to bed yet. If I did, I was pretty sure I would become the next topic of conversation. Worse, I was feeling the same way I did at the concert. Part of me wanted to disappear, to become just another version of Mona or Lenore, just like everyone else.
Cass wanted to take me to the stock car races the next night and I still didn’t know if I wanted to go. I used to go to the races with my mama when I was a teenager, rooting for Bobby Allison and Fireball Roberts, eating boiled peanuts and pissing into an open trough behind the bleachers, but I hadn’t done anything like that since I left home—never told anyone about it at all.
“You’ll love it,” Cass insisted. “Fast cars and lots of noise, and we can pinch and kiss each other when everybody jumps up to look at the crashes.”
I watched Judy’s face, the slim fingers that kept coming up to push her bangs over behind one ear, the white collar of her blouse startling against her tanned skin. Her eyes tracked past me when she turned her head, not stopping to risk catching my glance. I don’t like her, I thought, and it surprised me to realize that. We slept together once, when I had just moved in. It had been an awkward night. She’d made a point of stopping me when I’d slid down her body, telling me she really didn’t like oral sex, and she’d shrieked when I’d pushed one finger between her labia.
“Don’t do that,” she whispered, pulling up and planting her pubic mound firmly against my hip. What she wanted to do was climb on top of me and rock against me until she’d made herself come.
“Tribadism,” I’d named it, trying to position myself so that I could enjoy it as much as she did. I really wanted to taste her, to put my tongue between her thighs, into her armpits, under her chin and behind her ears. Her hipbone hurt me and she kept lifting her torso so that I couldn’t even feel the lush heat of her full breasts. I wrestled for a while, licking her salty neck, wanting to bite her and imagining that she was enjoying my tongue.
“Christ! You’re making me sticky,” Judy complained. She never stopping talking even while she was grinding her labia into my hipbone. “. . . I’m going to Gainesville on Wednesday. . . . Oh! Want to talk to Jackie about going with me . . . oh . . . you too maybe . . . oh . . . oh . . . horses . . . want to go riding . . . want to go riding with me . . . I love to ride . . . Oh!”
It made me crazy, as if sex were a set of calisthenics one did to trigger sleep. When she came, she went rigid and silent, her body rising up and off of me stiffly, her eyes unfocused. I wondered what she thought then, but didn’t ask. When she came back to herself, she rolled over as if it were now my turn to climb on top and do the same. I pretended to fall asleep instead just to get her to be quiet, to lie still beside me while I rested my hands on the soft swell of her hips and watched the streetlight flicker as the wind blew the leaves around on the trees outside. She was a lawyer’s daughter from Miami and not a bad person. Not a bad person at all, I told myself, just different from me, very different from me.
It wasn’t until I watched her sitting on Anna’s bed, waving the smoke out of her face and going on and on, that I realized I had been mad at Judy, was still mad at her, and that actually she was probably mad at me. I hadn’t really spoken much to her since we’d climbed out of bed that next morning. Watching her talking, not letting anyone say more than a sentence or two before starting to talk again, I realized her manners were like her lovemaking—imperious, self-centered, and oblivious. I preferred the women I brought home from the pool hall, the ones who liked me biting them, liked biting me, liked whispering dirty words, wrestling, and shoving their calloused fingers between my labia until I bit them harder and harder, my mouth full of the taste of them, the texture of their skin, their smoky, powerful smell, soaking them up, swallowing and swallowing. Making love with them I rise right up out of myself. I’m happy then in a way I never seem to be otherwise, sure of myself and not afraid. I lose all my self-consciousness, my fear of saying or doing the wrong thing. Their strength becomes my strength, and I love them for it. I hate the men who hassle me on the sidewalk outside the pool hall, the scary threats and the all-too-serious screams in the parking lot, but I love the hall itself, the women in there, the way they make me feel when they stand in that yellow light and rub their fingers together, looking me up and down.
In Consciousness Raising meetings, one after the other, everyone insisted they did not fantasize. I looked over at Lenore guiltily, afraid to risk saying anything. There are days I am not here at all. Two cups of coffee and I run away in my mind to eerie dreams of lovemaking, the dance, the swirling turn of bodies catching the slow glint of firelight. In the mountain clearing with the women’s army, I give up hatred in the arms of a demon who knows no rhetoric. If I turn my head I can see her, the Black Queen, the one with the knives, razor blade under her tongue, and a smile like the one on Cass’s face as she lifts her stick to clean out some redneck boy thinks he’s as fast as she is. The gloves on her hands are spiked. She teaches me to use them. She uses them on me, makes tattoos up my thighs for anyone to read. Under my clothes always, the feel of her hands on me, where no one can see. Men and women, women and men, the unguarded, the unsuspecting. Is she a man? Am I a woman?
I do not have fantasies. Fantasy opens me up; I become fantasy. I am the dangerous daughter, thigh-stroking, soft-tongued lover, the pit, the well, and the well of horniness, laughter rolling up out of me like gravy boiling over the edge of a pan. I become the romantic, the mystic, the one without shame, rocking myself on the hip of a rock, a woman as sharp as coral. I make in my mind the muscle that endures, tame rage and hunger to spirit and blood. I become the rock. I become the knife. I am myself the mystery. The me that will be waits for me. If I cannot dream myself new, how will I find my true self?
“What about you?” Judy leaned toward me with an intent expression. “Do you have fantasies?”
The roar in my ears was my heart, an ocean of shame and rage. My leg muscles pulled tight and cramped. My belly turned liquid and hot under my navel. I would throw up if I opened my mouth. I would throw up. My muscles failed me, failed me completely.
“Not much, not really.” Peter denied Christ three times before cockcrow. I cursed myself for being such a piece of shit, such a piece of chickenshit. “Not any more, not really.” I kept my eyes on my hands where they twisted in my lap. If I looked up I might say anything, anything.
Waking up and not being able to go back to sleep, I sit with a cup of coffee and my journal. I’ve kept one off and on since school, after the guidance counselor told me it was a way to keep control of your life, to look back and see your own changes. I don’t look back at it much, though, never seem to have the time, but it doesn’t matter. Sometimes writing in it is a way of smoothing things out inside me. The morning after the co
ncert, I didn’t write about the concert or Roxanne or even Cass. I wrote about the muscles of the mind, what my old sensei used to call the secret of all karate, the disciplined belief in yourself.
“We are under so many illusions about our powers,” I wrote, “illusions that vary with the moon, the mood, the moment. Waxing, we are all-powerful. We are the mother-destroyers, She-Who-Eats-Her-Young, devours her lover, her own heart; great-winged midnight creatures and the witches of legend. Waning, we are powerless. We are the outlaws of the earth, daughters of nightmare, victimized, raped, and abandoned in our own bodies. We tell ourselves lies and pretend not to know the difference. It takes all we have to know the truth, to believe in ourselves without reference to moon or magic.
“The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, and the sense of belief we create from nothing. I used to watch my mama hold off terror with only the edges of her own eyes for a shield, and I still don’t know how she did it. But I am her daughter and have as much muscle in me as she ever did. It’s just that some days I am not strong enough. I stretch myself out a little, and then my own fear pulls me back in. The shaking starts inside. Then I have to stretch myself again. Waxing and waning through my life, maybe I’m building up layers of strength inside. Maybe.”
Last night, late, Liz called, asked me to please go out with her for a beer—meet her at the Overpass and talk to her for a few hours. She needed someone to listen to her. Jackie never did anymore, she said. But when we sat down she acted like a stranger, like someone who had come in from out of town and really couldn’t stay long. She was smoking again, Pall Malls out of a hard pack, and lighting them with wooden kitchen matches from a small box. Her red hair looked faded, its dark shine had gone dull and even the blue of her eyes had faded to gray.
“It’s wearing me down,” she kept saying. “It’s just fucking wearing me down.”
I ordered her a beer and me a glass of wine. When she kept licking her lips and lighting cigarettes one after the other, I started telling her stories. I found myself describing Judy’s hip-grinding routine and the way my new girlfriend Cass would spit in her hand and slide her pool cue up and down while other women took their shots—making both acts equally hilarious and revealing.
“Bitches,” Liz pronounced them both.
“Like you and me, honey. We’re all pretty bitchy when it comes down to it.” I rubbed my hands in the wine that had trailed down the lip of my glass.
“Naw.” She’d downed her beer and signaled for another one. “You and me, we’re the ones they fuck with. We’re something else, taking their shit all the time, their goddamn shit all the time.”
I’d sipped my wine and rubbed my neck. “You and Jackie fighting then?”
“How’d you guess?” In the dim bar’s lighting, her pale eyes looked charcoal, and she had no smile at all. She was wearing the collar of her dark plaid shirt turned up high against the fringe of her short-cropped hair and she kept pushing up at the back of her head until the hair was standing up stiff and spiky. She looked like one of those desperate women sketched out on the cover of an old Ann Bannon novel, lips and eyes swollen and dark, features all raw and flushed.
“I should have known better, I really should have, you know?” She poured beer down her throat with a quick dramatic gesture, a Bette Davis move from a great thirties movie. So quick and sudden she moved, it seemed as if the beer never even touched her tongue, as if her thirst were all for the feel of it hitting her stomach, and not to ease the bitterness in her mouth.
“I an’t no kid. I got two kids of my own, after all. And hell, I went through all this with Richard, thinking that we were different, that we were special.” There were tears in her eyes, I saw, waiting there, not falling but shining. She kept moving her head, shaking her hair and pushing it up again. “Only special thing in the world is the lies we tell ourselves, make ourselves believe. Stupid, stupid bitches always thinking this time it’s different.”
Too much for me, I thought, sighed and tilted my glass to match the speed with which she threw back hers. I drank with her one for one, until dizziness made my hands loose on the glass, and I knew I had to slow it down. Liz didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes were turned in on herself and her sudden laughs never altered her expression. Liz knew things about me no one else did, and because of that had a right to call me up in the night and ask for help. We had never been lovers, but we had always been friends. She had known me when I was in college, when I was the only lesbian she’d ever met. She had given me enough help when I had needed it, even cleaned me up and asked no questions one night when I showed up on her doorstep, my nose running blood and my clothes all torn. I had introduced her to Jackie and helped her move when she decided to leave her husband, but I couldn’t think of what to say to her now.
“Everybody fights, lovers more than anyone else,” I tried to tell her. “It’s part of wanting so much from each other. Sometimes you crawl all over each other’s nerves without intending to. . . .” She didn’t seem to hear me. She was watching the men around us, and not looking at me at all.
“Richard says if I come back, we’ll move out to the land co-op and have our own house up by next spring,” she said finally. The wine in my mouth went sour with the thought of Richard, with his smug little smile and those copies of the Militant he always had tucked under one arm. The man was fatuous and self-congratulatory in a way that ate at my insides, going on and on about the laboring classes while living off the income of an apartment building his daddy had turned over to him after graduation.
“Pond scum” I’d called him once, a line Jackie had repeated to him with great relish. I stared at the foam in Liz’s glass as it went flat. I couldn’t think of anything to say to her about Richard.
“I could put in a garden out there,” Liz told me, keeping her eyes on her glass, “be with Mikey and Janine all the time, not have to go back to that damn office every damned day.”
I’d thumped my glass against hers, forcing her to look up at me. “Yeah, and Richard could tell all his buddies how patience had been the secret—you know that line—how all he had to do was wait for you to get it out of your system. You and Jackie . . .”
“JACKIE!” Her wet glass slapped the table. “Hell, I never even see her anymore. She’s always at work, or the Women’s Center, or I’m at work, or Mikey’s sick, or Janine’s crying and Jackie has to go off for a walk to clear her head, or Jackie’s goddamned aunt is there going on about how hard she used to work. . . .” Liz stopped, wiped her eyes and her mouth and then looked directly into my face. “It’s not what I wanted, not anything near what I thought it would be. It’s just not.”
“It’s no worse than anybody else has.”
“It’s worse. It’s me.” She looked sideways at the men at the bar. “If I was living out at the co-op, Jackie and I could still see each other now and then. Richard wouldn’t have to know, and I wouldn’t be so tired, so damned tired all the time. You know, you know how it is, I hate being poor. I never intended to be poor again, and Christ! We’re just above starving.” Her face was too fierce for argument. The wine rose up in my throat, bitter and embarrassing. I didn’t know what to say. I just didn’t know what to say.
Waking up at dawn, I push myself out of bed, head for the bathroom, piss, rinse my mouth, and pull on shorts and a sweat-shirt. It’s seven steps down to the sidewalk from the side porch, and I take them at a run, pushing myself to get the momentum for running all the way up the hill to the campus. My head pounds and my throat hurts, and I have to grit my teeth to make myself run. I hate waking up after drinking wine, with that sick taste in my mouth. Cass says that wine is worse than whiskey, that it stays in your body longer and is harder on your kidneys. Cass talks a lot about her kidneys. She rolled her truck a few years ago—“bounced off that steering wheel, till I wished I’d’ve died”—and did herself some serious damage. Her kidneys are the worst of it, so that sometimes when she leans over to ta
ke a shot at the pool hall, her face will screw up and she’ll stand back quickly, and curse.
“Hurts like a motherfucker,” she says. But she won’t stop drinking. “Got to drink to ease the pain,” she laughs. I don’t argue with her, not about her drinking anyway. We got enough to argue about without that.
“You been seeing Cass awhile,” Anna said to me the other night.
“Must be time she got fed up with me, then.” I kept my face turned away, picked up Ghost Dance and hugged her to my neck.
“Well, if you going to go on the way you been, I expect it is.” Anna’s voice was low and sad. I watched her eyes track over to the pictures on her wall—old lovers and lost friends, she’d called it one night, her wall of grief. “I expect it is.”
On the hill above the science building, the dogwood trees are in bloom. My legs shake when I stop and bend over. I hold my balance and stretch out slowly, feeling the sweat running down my back. My thighs tremble and my throat still aches. When I look over at the science building’s huge mirrored front, I can see myself reflected in the glass, my hair swinging in the sunlight, the wet grass shining under my shoes. I look tiny and hard, like a nail sticking up out of the ground.
“Tena-kata-sho,” I say out loud and face punch up into my reflected image. The adrenaline comes even though all I have to trigger it is my own frustration. The sensei at the school I’ve been going to these past few months is a returned vet and a part-time cop who keeps switching back and forth, talking now in fortune-cookie Confucianism and then with macho insistence. Once every few weeks he loses control and really pops one of the boys. He doesn’t know how to deal with the women at all, and we all know he’d be happier if we weren’t in the class. The six of us who have remained ignore everything except the skills he has to teach us. For all of us, it is the discipline that matters, making ourselves over into what we most want to be, becoming strong for ourselves. We strip off our sex with our jewelry, sometimes so thoroughly that he forgets to treat us like the fragile incompetents he believes us to be. Last week he lost patience with me the way he does with the boys, grabbed me by the arm and shook me.