I looked into her deceptively clear brown eyes and considered the question. I pushed my hair behind my ears. “I fell in love with a woman,” I said, matching her in tone and attitude. Her mouth quirked, one side twitching as if she wanted to grin but didn’t dare.
“Well,” she drawled, and looked away as if that would help her not to laugh, “that’ll do it, I suppose. Almost surely.”
I rescued her by letting myself giggle. She joined me. I reminded myself that there were just some things we never had talked about before, like sex, money, and broken bones. Certainly we had never discussed love. Sex was dangerous enough, and our family was proof that love was a disaster waiting to happen.
“The woman love you back?” Wanda asked me. “She treat you good?”
“No.” I said it again. “No. She was like that boy you wanted to marry. She treated me just about like he treated you. Took me a long time to grow up and stop falling in love with women who would treat me bad.” I said it as if it were accomplished, as if I were not at that moment in love with yet another hard-eyed bitter woman.
Wanda nodded but didn’t look at me, just sat there twisting the ring on her middle finger and staring into the parking lot across the street.
“Yeah,” she whispered. “Takes a damn long time to learn that, don’t it?”
Women talk about sex in such strange ways—carefully, obliquely, cautiously, almost shamefully. The art of flirting is an art of indirection. The dance is deliberately extended; eyes meet and slide away, limbs barely touch, erotic messages are communicated by the most subtle gestures. It brings out in me the most profound feelings of anxiety and exasperation. I was not raised to subtlety.
Why do people have to make such a fuss over something so simple?
I say, “Talk to me. Tell me who you are, what you want, what you’ve never had, the story you’ve always been afraid to tell.” Women stare at me, blush, squirm—and now and then, a few gather up their courage and flirt back.
But flirting is an art form, separate entirely from the risks and surprises of love, and to love I had thought myself immune. Because I did not turn silly at thirteen, start staying out late and sighing over boys at school, I thought myself too smart, too wise, too special to fall into the trap every other woman in my family knew too well. I watched my cousins mourn over their swollen bellies, wipe puffy eyes and talk bitterly about the boys who had used them so badly, and all I could think was how foolish the whole thing was.
Love was something I would not have to worry about—the whole mystery of love, heart-break songs, and family legends. Women who pined, men who went mad, people who forgot who they were and shamed themselves with need, wanting only to be loved by the one they loved. Love was a mystery. Love was a calamity. Love was a curse that had somehow skipped me, which was no doubt why I was so good at multiple-choice tests and memorizing poetry. Sex was the country I had been dragged into as an unwilling girl—sex, and the madness of the body. For all that it could terrify and confuse me, sex was something I had assimilated. Sex was a game or a weapon or an addiction. Sex was familiar. But love—love was another country.
“Lord!” I shouted. “There has got to be an easier way to get stoned.”
I was staying over at my friend Pat’s house, sitting on the floor leaning against the stereo speakers, which had been blasting rock and roll at maximum volume just moments before. We had been using a process a friend had suggested, a three-step method that began with smoking rabbit weed we’d harvested from the border of the Maynard Evans High School parking lot, then running in place very fast, and then putting our heads between two stereo speakers propped ten inches apart.
“Sure there is.” Pat leaned over and slapped my hip. “First we take a bus to New York City, find us Washington Square Park like in that book you got, flirt with some dangerous-looking people until they decide we an’t dogmeat, and maybe then we get them to sell us some real marijahootchi. That sound easier to you?”
“Less likely to cause nausea, anyway.”
“I don’t know. I like this.” Pat shook her head as if the roar were still echoing in her skull. “It’s like my head is swinging free from my neck. Maybe this is as good as it gets.”
“I don’t think so.” I sat up and watched her swing her head. Pat had cut her thick brown hair short again so that it just curved under her ears. Her neck looked remarkably smooth and sweet under the sweep of those curls. Some days Pat wanted to grow up to be the modern incarnation of T. E. Lawrence, others she dreamed of becoming a balladeer like Judy Collins or Joan Baez. To prepare, we drank bitter coffee and wrote lyrics together, long terrible poems about death.
“You know, I been thinking about going.” Pat looked at me from between the fringes of her bangs. “Thinking about dumping school completely and running off. Find me some real dope and people who an’t planning on working at the Winn Dixie the rest of their lives.”
It was a conversation we had had dozens of times. We’d talked about running off until we knew just how to go about it. We’d memorize the bus fares for all the cities we were considering, and played at making up false IDs. Sometimes it was only the game that kept us from actually buying that Trailways ticket out of town. This time should have been no different from any other. I should have chimed in with my own curses, said, “Damn yes, let’s go.”
But I did not. There was something in Pat’s voice, some edge of frustration. Her eyes were turned away, but I could see just how dark and bright they had become. She’s going to do it, I thought, and shocked myself with a wave of desperate longing. The rush of my need stunned me—not to go with her but to keep her with me. Suddenly I understood that more than anything in the world I did not want Pat to disappear out of my life into some strange Yankee city, some alien life where I could not follow. My mouth opened, and I barely stopped myself from begging her to stay.
I looked down and saw my own body as a hated stranger might see it. I looked up and saw Pat’s eyes looking back at me—unafraid, dispassionate, curious. She had no way of knowing that without warning or preparation I had just become my mother’s daughter, my sisters’ counterpart—tender and fragile and hungry for something besides dispassionate curiosity. This was what everyone had known that I had not, this sudden onslaught of desire and terror.
“I got to go,” I told her, and headed for the door. I did not look back, afraid she might see what I knew was on my face.
Three months later Pat was gone, running north with a vanload of friends I didn’t know. It would be a decade before I saw her again on her mother’s porch, her hair cut shorter still, her mouth loose with Valium, both arms in casts acquired when she had thrown herself out of a moving car.
“You ever get to Washington Square Park?” she asked me.
“Yeah.”
“Wasn’t what I thought it would be. Ratty place full of ratty people.” Her words were slurred. Her eyes tracked away from me.
I curled my fingernails into my palms. I couldn’t think of anything to say, certainly not “I’m sorry” or “I think I loved you.”
“Well, hell!” For a moment I saw an old spark in Pat’s eyes. “You come back when I get these damn casts off. I been writing some poems will give you a headache just to be in the room with them.” She grinned, and I knew I loved her still.
At twenty-four I joined a karate class and learned for the first time how to run without fear pushing me. It was not what I had intended. I never expected to join the class at all. I showed up because I had been told there were no women allowed and my newfound feminist convictions insisted someone had to do something about that. Along with my friend Flo, I dressed in loose clothes and hitched a ride out to the university gardens very early one Monday morning.
On a rutted dirt lane a small group of peevish-looking young males were climbing out of rusty old cars and pulling off shoes.
“Where’s the sensei?” I demanded of one of those boys. He stared at me blankly. I stared right back and repeated my question
.
That boy just stood there, looking from me to Flo to his friends. Then somebody laughed. Flo and I glared fiercely. One of the boys stepped forward and gave me a nod.
“Down there,” he said. “A quarter mile down that path. The class is out there where the teacher’s waiting.” Then he nodded again and took off in an easy lope. The other boys stepped around us and followed.
I watched their bare feet pick up fine dust and kick it into the cool, moist grass along the path. Without thought, Flo and I fell in behind them. It was a long, winding run down into a hollow and then up around a wide grassy hill. My thighs and calves started to ache in the first thirty feet. Only stubbornness kept me moving, following those boys, who would occasionally look back and snicker. Later I would be grateful for their laughter. Without it, I would never have managed the full quarter mile, especially not the last curving uphill grade to where a soft-featured, blond young man was doing some kind of stylized kicking exercise.
The sensei stopped to watch us stagger up the hill. The boys were ahead of us, and I couldn’t hear what they told him, but his first words were as precise as his motions.
“You want to join the class, you’ll have to do better than that.”
“We will,” I announced emphatically, trying not to gasp for air. The sensei just nodded and started the class, putting Flo and me at the back as if suddenly adding two women to his all-male domain were something he had hoped to do all along—which it was, though we knew nothing of that.
The first weeks we kept coming just to hear the sensei tell us we could not come back. But every day he welcomed us as he welcomed the boys, requiring that we first complete that run, then stand silent, breathing as he breathed, deep and slow, trying to feel each muscle in hips and shoulders and neck. I barely heard him. For me those weeks were grim agony. I was making demands on muscles I had ignored most of my life, and only because I expected the ordeal to be over soon.
The boys helped. Every time they laughed, I would make myself stand taller or move faster. Every time they looked back over their shoulders at my stumbling attempts at running, I would grit my teeth and force my legs to pump higher. So long as they laughed, I would not quit. So long as they watched for tears, I would not let myself cry, though some days to cry was what I wanted most to do—to lie down in the damp grass and weep at the inept female body in which I was imprisoned.
Two, three, four weeks, we kept going. The laughter eased off, but not my desire to cry. Was it in the fourth week or the fifth that the teacher brought his wife to class? A ballet dancer with long, long legs, she easily outdistanced all of us on tight-muscled calves. Nothing daunted that woman, not the run or the kicking or even lifting one of those big pink-faced boys to her shoulders and showing us how to step in a gracefully wide stance while holding him easily. I watched her in confusion, understanding completely what was intended, the example of that astonishingly perfected female body taking over the class and showing us all what a woman could do. I watched the sensei watching her and understood that not only would he not ask us to leave his class but that the passion in his glance was something rare and unknown to me: love that yearned as much for the spirit as for the body.
I looked at her then as he looked at her, and somehow she became a story in my head, a memory of a woman I had seen once dancing on the balls of her feet, arms moving like scythes, face stern, eyes alive. Naked and powerful, deadly and utterly at peace with herself. She had a body that had never forgotten itself, and I knew at once that what I was seeing was magic. Watching, I fell in love—not with her but with the body itself, the hope of movement, the power of jumping and thrusting and being the creature that is not afraid to fall down but somehow doesn’t anyway.
Running the quarter mile back from that class, I started to cry. I made no sound, no gesture, just kept moving and letting the teardrops sheet down my face. Everyone was way ahead of me. My hands were curled into fists, pumping at my sides. The tears became sobs, heartbroken and angry, and I stumbled, almost falling down before I caught my footing in a different gait. My hips shifted. Something in the bottom of my spine let go. Something disconnected from the coccyx that was shattered when I was a girl. Something loosened from the old bruised and torn flesh. Some piece of shame pulled free, some shame so ancient I had never known myself without it. I felt it lift, and with it my thighs lifted, suddenly loose and strong, pumping steadily beneath me as if nothing could hold me down.
I picked up speed and closed in on the boys ahead of me, Flo there among them like a female gazelle. I saw her head turn and discover me running just behind her. She ignored my wet face and produced a welcoming grin, then stepped aside so that we were running together, elbow to elbow, her legs setting a pace for mine. I breathed deep and felt the muscles in my neck open, something strong getting stronger. If there was love in the world, I thought, then there was no reason I should not have it in my life. I matched Flo’s pace and kept running.
I fell in love with karate though I remained a white belt, year after year of white belts—a legendary white belt, in fact. I was so bad, people would come to watch. Inflexible, nearsighted, without talent or aptitude, falling down, sweaty and miserable—sometimes I would even pass out halfway through the class. I learned to take a glass of bouillon like medicine before I put on my gi. But I kept going back, careless of injury or laughter. What I wanted from karate was some echo of love for my body and the spirit it houses—meat and bone and the liquid song of my own gasps, the liquor stink of stubborn sweat, the sweet burn of sinew, muscle, and lust.
I studied karate for eight years, going from school to school, city to city, always starting over. My first sensei was the best I ever found. That moment of perfect physical consciousness was more often memory than reality. I did not become suddenly coordinated, develop perfect vision in my near-blind right eye, or turn jock and take up half a dozen sports. All I gained was a sense of what I might do, could do if I worked at it, a sense of my body as my own. And that was miracle enough.
She kissed me gentle, kissed me slow, kissed me like Grace Kelly, a porcelair princess, a lace-curtain lesbian.
I told her, Don’t touch me that way. Don’t come at me with that sour-cream smile. Come at me as if I were worth your life—the life we make together. Take me like a turtle whose shell must be cracked, whose heart is ice, who needs your heat. Love me like a warrior, sweat up to your earlobes and all your hope between your teeth. Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted.
I am the woman who lost herself but now is found, the lesbian, outside the law of church and man, the one who has to love herself or die. If you are not as strong as I am, what will we make together? I am all muscle and wounded desire, and I need to know how strong we both can be.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is how long it takes to learn to love yourself, how long it took me, how much love I need now.
THE LAST TIME MY STEPFATHER BEAT ME, I was sixteen years old. It was my birthday, and he got away with it because he pretended that what he was doing was giving me a birthday spanking, a tradition in our family as in so many others. But two of my girlfriends were standing there, and even they could see he was hitting me harder than any birthday ritual could justify. I saw their faces go pink with embarrassment. I knew mine was hot with shame, but I could not stop him or pull free of him. The moment stretched out while his hand crashed down, counting off each year of my life. At sixteen, I jumped free and turned to face him.
“You can’t break me,” I told him. “And you’re never going to touch me again.”
It was a story to tell myself, a promise. Saying out loud, “You’re never going to touch me again”—that was a piece of magic, magic in the belly, the domed kingdom of sex, the terror place inside where rage and power live. Whiskey rush without whiskey, bravado and determination, this place where for the first time I knew no confusion, only outrage and pride. In the worst moments of my life, I have told myself that
story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster. Doing that, I make a piece of magic inside myself, magic to use against the meanness in the world.
I know. I am supposed to have shrunk down and died. I know. I am supposed to be deeply broken, incapable of love or trust or passion. But I am not, and part of why that is so is the nature of the stories I told myself to survive. Like the stories my mama told herself, and my aunt Dot and my cousin Billie, my stories shaped my life. Of all the stories I know, the meanest are the stories the women I loved told themselves in secret—the stories that sustained and broke them.
When I make love I take my whole life in my hands, the damage and the pride, the bad memories and the good, all that I am or might be, and I do indeed love myself, can indeed do any damn thing I please. I know the place where courage and desire come together, where pride and joy push lust through the bloodstream, right to the heart.
I go to bed like I used to go to karate. Want and need come together in a body that is only partly my own. Like my sisters, like my mama, I am and am not this thing the world sees—strong chin, hard eyes, a mouth too soft when it should be firm, a creature of lust who does not know how to feel what I feel. Biblical? Damned? Hopeful. What is lust when you have never known love?
I took my sex back, my body. I claimed myself and remade my life. Only when I knew I belonged to myself completely did I become capable of giving myself to another, of finding joy in desire, pleasure in our love, power in this body no one else owns.