Riding Fury Home (23 page)

 

 

OVER THE NEXT MONTH, I fled and returned several times.
Taking a break,
that's what I called it in my mind. When staying at the house became too unbearable, I would go visit friends in the city for a few days, then come back to the country.

I wasn't ready to let go. I kept hoping that Kate would come around, realize it was just the novelty that drew her, and resume as my lover. Each time I came back, my fantasy got more battered. Kate
and Dotty would disappear together for hours on end. When Kate and I were both at the house, if I expressed any sadness or anger, she would give me a fierce look and then walk out of the room. I tried hard to hold my emotions in, because I didn't want to drive her further away, but that suppression ate at me, made me feel crazy and lonelier than ever.

But one day I did manage to make a request of her. “Kate, I need to spend some time with you, just the two of us,” I stated. “It's too hard to go from our being together every day to this.”

She surprised me by conceding, “Sure, let's go do something on Saturday.”

We drove over to the Napa Valley and visited wineries, just like tourists, just as I had with my father. As Kate drove along the Valley, I found myself almost mute in the passenger seat.

After several wineries, the lump in my throat had only increased. It was too horribly familiar, this making myself invisible to hold the other's love. I had thought with Kate I could be myself, be loved for all of me. As we drove back toward the Valley of the Moon, my ability to be stoic weakened by wine, I started to cry quietly.

Kate glanced over at me. “There's no need to be sad,” she said simply. She didn't stop the car. “I still love you. I want you to stay and live with us as my friend.”

“I don't know if I can” was all I said, silencing my hurt.

But I didn't leave—although clinging against all odds was making me ill. It was shameful, part of me knew, to take such treatment. I lost my appetite, couldn't sleep, and took up a daily habit of smoking pot and drinking.

One night, just as the household was sitting down to dinner, the doorbell rang. It was a surprise visit from a couple from the city, Barbara and T.J. They had been up for my birthday party, but I hadn't
seen them on my recent stays in the city. We made room for them at the table, brought out extra plates. T.J. pulled out a joint, which we passed around before eating. Just as we were about to dig into our food, T.J. asked, smiling broadly, “So, what's up with y'all?”

There was a silent pause. Kate started to say something, but the room was closing in on me, and I couldn't hear her properly. Noise heaved itself out of me in one great sob, and then I was tumbling sideways toward Barbara's shoulder. My head hit her and then rolled back, and my chair tipped and rocked as I slumped onto the floor. I could hear, but it all seemed muffled and far-away: the scraping of everyone's chairs, Barbara asking, “What's wrong with her?” as she put her hand against my face, then Martha's voice fading in and out, “. . .
they broke up . . . not eating . . . too much booze . . . Let's get her some air…
”

Hands were holding my feet and shoulders, my body swung aloft, and I was deposited on the cool concrete patio outside the living room. “Karen?” A voice leaned over me, not Kate's. Something broke loose in me then: A keening wail echoed off the patio walls. When it ebbed away, sobs began, great gulps of air moving in and out of my lungs. My fingers curled tightly into my palms, and my body grew rigid. “She's hyperventilating,” Barbara said. “Breathe slowly, Karen, it's all right, just slow down.” After a while, the spasm lessened and I opened my eyes. T.J., Barbara, and Martha were gathered around me, crouching with their hands resting on me.

Kate and Dotty came outside then, standing at the far edge of the patio near the door. Kate peered over at me. For a moment, I thought she might be worried about me. “She's faking,” she said. “She just wants attention.” Then she and Dotty disappeared back inside the house.

Kate knew all my secrets; I had told her how I had exaggerated my injuries in childhood to get sympathy from my friends. In my
foggy state, I wondered if in a way she was right, if I hadn't used the moment to show these friends how hurt I was. The pain was real, though—that I knew. I lifted my head, looked at the three of them gathered close, and said the truth: “I can't stay here anymore.”

That night, Barbara and T.J. drove me back to the city with them.

The next day, I called my mother in her Greenwich Village apartment. I'd already told her about the breakup.

“I've been waiting for you, darling,” she said. “Come on home.”

I'D ALMOST FORGOTTEN, AFTER two years in California, how humid New York could be. The sticky summer evening hit me as I stepped out of the air-conditioned JFK Airport to board the shuttle bus to Manhattan. Outside the Midtown bus station, I hailed a cab, and felt slightly nauseous as the cabby careened in and out of traffic heading downtown. I'd had a couple of cocktails on the plane.

Mom greeted me over the intercom at her apartment: “You'll have to walk up; the elevator's busted.” As I lugged my two suitcases up the five flights to Mom's studio, I felt the sweat gathering in my armpits and the small of my back. Gloria's place was a home I'd never seen.

“Sweetie!” There Mom was, grinning at me as she held her door open. She ignored my sweating and panting from the stairs, and embraced me in a big hug as I dropped my suitcases in her narrow hall. I started crying. “I know, baby, it's tough, I know,” Mom soothed. “Didn't get to tell you, Stella just broke up with me last week. Left
me for my friend Joanna. Some goddamn friend! Hell with them. Come on in and see my place.”

The tiny studio apartment was filled with the furniture I had grown up with, only pruned down to the essentials. The mahogany coffee table my father had built to Frank Lloyd Wright's design was covered with feminist magazines—
Ms., Off Our Backs
—an amethyst crystal, a conch shell, and two blue ceramic ashtrays. The old brown couch I used to lounge on while reading books and drinking Cokes faced the fireplace. Fire was my mother's element. She'd told me how ecstatic she was to have found a working fireplace in a New York City apartment.

Mom's recent black-and-white photographs lined the mantel: still-life patterns of sand dunes and fences, rows of battered New York garbage cans. I remembered the time Mom came home from the mental hospital, gathered all her cameras, and sold them. In the years since, I had often wondered why; now I understood that her passions had been a dangerous and forbidden territory.

“Come on, let me show you my porch,” Mom took my hand with a gentle tug. I was a bit dizzy. I almost tripped over the two steps up to her raised sleeping area. “Careful,” Mom warned as I stumbled. We circled the bed, and she opened the sliding glass door.

“Ta
da!
” Mom beamed proudly as we stepped outside.

“But, Gloria,” I giggled, “this isn't a porch, it's a fire escape!”

“Yeah, but it's my bit of outdoors in New York City. And look how I fixed it up.” Mom had put boards down over the open metal flooring. A row of brilliant red geraniums in individual pots circled the edge of the railing. A rocking canvas recliner took up all but the little standing space where Mom and I leaned close together, looking down. We could see below us the soot-blackened buildings with their ornate concrete scrollwork and the signs for the antique dealers
who lined her street. The shops were closed, leaving her block quiet by Manhattan standards. For a moment, the Sonoma landscape I'd left gathered behind my eyelids: the meadow with its live oak trees, the woods around our cottage, Kate with her new lover. Pain seared my chest. And then I was back with Mom in Greenwich Village, Mom pulling me inside. “Come on, let's have a drink.”

“I'm fixing you and me each a martini!” Mom declared. We were standing in her kitchenette, a corner of the studio space crammed with miniature kitchen appliances. I braced myself for the martini, in its own way an initiation into adulthood, or at least my mother's nod to my achieving that status. I watched Mom open a cabinet, put two cocktail glasses on the counter, take out gin and vermouth and a shaker, get ice and olives from the fridge, mix, shake, and pour our drinks.

We moved to the couch. I sank into its familiar softness. The martini burned my throat as I took a large gulp, but then I quickly felt the sharp edges of things softening, an inner tension releasing. “How are you, sweetie?” Mom asked, reaching her arm around my shoulder.

“It's been awful.” My throat constricted and the words came out in a whisper. A few tears leaked. I imagined sobbing in my mother's arms, but I couldn't quite let go to this new mother who could now offer solace. My fierce longing was overpowered by the longtime reflex of pulling back. Besides, right now I wanted to forget, not remember. I brushed my tears with the back of my hand and changed the subject. “What happened with Stella? I thought you two were doing so well.”

“After I moved from Jersey, we spent day and night together. It was great. Now that we could be at my place, we didn't have to worry about running into her husband in the elevator of her apartment.”

“Her
husband?
She's got a
husband?
Gloria, can't you find a real dyke, not a married woman?”

“Don't get all righteous on me! They don't live together anymore. He lives one floor up in her apartment building, though, and he still pays her rent. She doesn't want a hassle from him.”

“So, what happened?”

“I took Stella with me to my consciousness-raising group at Gay Older Women's Liberation. I thought she might really get into it. She got into it, all right, but not like I thought. We went out to a bar afterward with my friend Joanna and a few others. And then, the next thing I hear, a couple weeks later she tells me she and Joanna have started seeing each other, and it's over between us. So much for sisterhood! I could kill that Joanna!”

“Man, that's as bad as Kate sleeping with Dotty and then dumping me.”

Mom shook her head, her round face pulled down in a frown, her eyes watery. “Damn! Hey, let's go to a café, have a bite to eat, and I'll show you some poems I've written about Stella.”

Mom stuck a manila folder under her arm, and we went out into Greenwich Village. Her street, with its closed shops, had few pedestrians, but when we turned the corner onto Fifth Avenue, we joined a throng of walkers, swept along in the energy and pace of Manhattan. We walked through Washington Square as dusk gathered, its park benches filled with old people, teenagers, and couples of all ages, and found an outdoor café.

My mother bent her head over her poems as she read them to me. They were bitter, filled with longing and betrayal and regret. I stared at her. Although her short cut was curlier than my long hair, we looked alike. Those poems—how they made me sad for my mom, outraged for both of us—but I just took Mom's hand, squeezed it for
a moment, and let go. She looked up at me, startled, as if she'd almost forgotten I was there. I knew Kate, my pain, was the furthest thing from her thoughts.

“These just poured out of me this last week, since Stella said it was over. She and Joanna took off to Provincetown. Fuck them!”

Mom grew silent and rested her head in her palms, eyes distant, not looking at me. Then she raised her head and slapped her hand on the table, “Hey, that's what you and I need—to get away. Provincetown's a big enough place. You know what, let's go take our own vacation there for a few days. Maybe a whole week. What do you say?”

 

 

THE SIDE STREETS OF Provincetown were narrow, lined with New England clapboard cottages, some weathered to a faded gray, others painted white with green or black shutters. We rented a second-story one-bedroom apartment from an old-style butch with short, slicked-back hair who lived downstairs. We'd found the listing in a New York gay weekly. She greeted us gruffly, and I wondered if that was just her style, or if she thought we were lovers and disapproved of our age difference.

We spent the first day at a beach outside of town. This was not the warm-watered Jersey shore of my childhood, but the frigid New England Atlantic, the beach buttressed by huge sand dunes sparsely covered with long, dry grass. We put down our towels and sat looking out at the waves. For me, moments of stillness brought an ache, Kate's absence pounding in my heart like the surf. It seemed inconceivable that I could go on without her.

Our second day in Cape Cod, we walked along the main street of Provincetown, filled with ambling lesbian couples and gay men,
as well as straight tourists, until we found a lesbian bar called the Pied Piper in full swing, jammed with women on its dance floor. We ordered drinks at the bar and found a small table to sit at along one wall of the large dance floor.

“Come on, let's dance!” Mom declared. She grabbed my hand, and we found a spot amidst all the flailing elbows. Mom threw back her head as she danced and snapped her fingers, singing along with Aretha's “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me!” Something in me loosened, a knot held in my chest and belly for the last month. I found myself stamping my feet as I danced and sang with Mom, “ . . . Ooh, I want a little respect!”

As we left the dance floor, someone called out, “Hey, Gloria!” Mom turned and waved. “Hey, Arlene!” Mom introduced me to a group of six women she knew from the city. I was a novelty, their lesbian friend's lesbian daughter, and they welcomed me with enthusiasm.

In a pause between dances, I looked around the room at all the women: tanned from the beach, sweaty from dancing, many braless, their nipples showing through their T-shirts. The thought of starting over terrified me, but in that moment, my fear ebbed, and I was buoyed by the throng of women flirting, dancing, and laughing. They were sexy, yes, but reassuring, too. There was life beyond Kate, though I couldn't quite imagine it yet.