Saturday's Child (59 page)

⁷
See
Going Too Far
.

⁸
“A Theory on Female Sexuality,” in
Sisterhood Is Powerful
.

⁹
In one of those spooky coincidences that trick you into thinking momentarily there's meaning in the universe, Iliana's apartment was in the now residential building that had formerly housed Grove Press's offices. Visiting her there was like returning in triumph to the place from which I'd been hauled out feet first.

SIXTEEN

Rights of Passage

Every day

the past gets revised …

You say

turn the page

see the bloody light prints

of your fingers …

take responsibility for your heart

—I
SEL
R
IVERO
, “M
EASURED
W
ORDS
”

If you've played chess, you've probably experienced a stalemate, that moment when nothing of significant value seems movable without too great a sacrifice to contemplate. So each player slides a pawn forward here and there, until some development—an opening on the board or a flash of insight (or guts) on the part of one of the players—inspires a meaningful move. At which point everything shifts: new risks, losses, and gains surface; pieces relocate and tumble rapidly across the board until the game is all but unrecognizable.

So with the period following my mother's death. Was it mere coincidence that she died never knowing my marriage, initiated and sustained in defiance of her, wasn't a perfect match after all? Was it coincidence that
now there was no necessity (or possibility) of proving anything to her, that I no longer had to prove (or tolerate) certain things for myself? Did her dying give me permission to burst out of the emotional bomb shelter where I'd been hunkering, and start trying to save my life?

I left the home I'd helped build for more than twenty years, and for which I'd been the financial support for more than thirteen, under (by now run-of-the-mill) melodramatic circumstances. I'd been reassured of Blake's security by both therapists—Ken's and mine—by Blake himself, and by my certainty of Kenneth's love for him. My own security seemed to be another question, in everyone's mind. In a sense, I could almost sympathize with Kenneth, who was trying his damnedest to get me to give
up
, to
stop
, in the only manner of which he apparently felt capable. I already had files, some books, and a few changes of clothes at the
SIG
offices. With little else, I encamped at Iliana's apartment.

She was more than glad to have me there, but my women friends were uniformly affronted. Why did
you
leave? Why aren't
you
getting that great triplex? Why don't you
fight
him—for the apartment, your home, your property? (Bella quipped, “Dahlink, you are the most spineless militant I've ever met.”) I would have counseled the same thing, and had, many times, because too many women take the high road to avoid further confrontation in such situations. Well, now I was one of them. But there are moments when the loftiest feminist rhetoric must be grounded in reality. That period gave me insight into what motivates women in abusive marriages, how and why they stay, and why and how they go. Kenneth was
not
physically abusive, but fear tastes acrid no matter what engenders it; in the months following Faith's death, I would tremble during phone conversations with him. He was deeply angry at what his life had become, and it must have seemed convenient to blame me for even more of his problems than those for which I was responsible. Karen, with whom I shared an office at
SIG
, would watch me lower the receiver, shaking, after he'd banged down the phone on his end, then wordlessly bring me a cup of tea or offer a backrub or Kleenex, let me talk if I needed to, let me not if I couldn't. But I'll say this for fear: it focuses you on what is and isn't crucial.

Finally realizing that you must get out is crucial. Finally feeling that you must save yourself and your child is crucial—as is finally understanding that you need to do the first
so that
you can do the second, like the order
in which adults with children should strap on oxygen masks in a depressurized airplane. Material goods? Less crucial. Besides, there are times simply to cut your losses and get on with living. For all these reasons, I walked away from another home I'd supported, taking with me little but the clothes on my back. It was the second time in my life I'd had to do this, reminiscent of the flight from my mother's co-op to my walk-up. This time, like a carrot-gnawing Scarlett O'Hara, I swore to myself, “as God is my witness,” it would never happen again.

I continued as sole financial support for my former household for almost nine more months, which also infuriated my well-meaning friends. But I had my reasons. First, for the time being, Blake was living there. Second, even if he weren't, I couldn't very well see Ken being put out in the street. Third—you guessed it—I couldn't see a way to stop. At last I built up the courage to tell Kenneth that I had to start putting money aside toward renting someplace of my own and, although I'd continue paying all of Blake's bills and tuitions, I couldn't manage everything else as well; Ken would have to find some sort of job. That went over rather badly. I gave eight weeks' more notification of when the partial financial shift would have to take place, then extended that another two weeks. Of course, once that safety net
was
finally withdrawn, Ken managed to find a job within three weeks—earning more than I did at the time. You have to laugh at these moments, or you'd slit your wrists over the nearest basin.

We weren't formally divorced for another seven years. Today, that strikes me as ridiculous, but at the time there seemed no urgent need to legalize the situation, since neither of us was about to remarry, and I had other financial priorities—survival, relocation, pulling out of debt—so attorney's fees fell low on the list. I finally divorced Kenneth in October of 1990. At this writing, I will soon have lived apart from him as long as I lived with him. In the subsequent decades, freed from me and from being “the candy groom” on the movement cake, Kenneth has been able to pull his life together and live it honorably, always continuing to write and to be there for Blake in the special ways only he can.

On my side, I've been “happily divorced” although, ironically, I might now even argue that for much of the relationship I was “happily married.” Considering the hurt we caused each other, that could sound bizarre. Yet just because the marriage ended doesn't mean it failed. In fact, given what
I've seen of certain other marriages, I might actually count it a (qualified) success. For more than two decades, we helped each other write some fine poetry, contribute to social progress, and birth and raise a wise, good-hearted, talented human being; we parented fairly well, to judge from the result—which is more than can be said of many marriages. A mismatched pair from the start, we were nothing if not creative in trying to make the best of it. I was already a senior citizen as a child, and I attained my womanhood before I had a chance to grow into my adolescence, a living example of Bob Dylan's line “I was so much older then, I'm so much younger now.” As for Kenneth, he tried on various masculinities like cloaks, none ever quite fitting, but at least he was
open
to different ways, which is more than can be said of most men of his—or, sadly, any so far—generation. It's for him to say what I gave him of value in our relationship. For me, he was integral in the three mainstays of my life: a vital early influence on my poetry; a support of (as well as a cause for) my feminism; and most of all the father of Blake, chief joy for us both. I'm grateful to him for this triple benefaction. For the rest, I can best describe Kenneth by paraphrasing his own beloved Walt Whitman: “He was the man, he suffered, he was there.”

So Much for Labels

Now, regarding all this about my being “hopelessly heterosexual.”

I flatter myself that I'm an intelligent human being, but some of the gaps in self-insight are whoppers. It literally had not occurred to me that my previous attempts at encounters with another woman had failed because they had either been at Ken's behest (obviously
not
a turn-on) or, once, because of caving in to movement pressure (also a decided turn-
off
). It never struck me that if I wasn't
attracted
to the women in question, much less in love, the result was doomed to be dreary. When, with Iliana, I found myself drawn to a woman who clearly desired and loved me, and was someone I already cherished as a friend, the eroticism was an epiphany.

I've often hypothesized that in a sane culture we might see a bell-shaped curve of human sexuality. At one extreme would be people who are totally heterosexual, at the other people who are totally same-sex attracted (both extremes being “born that way” folks). The great bulge in the middle
would contain
most
people, who—unless socially conditioned otherwise, as is the case today—would probably be variations in the mix, and who might change the expression of their sexuality a number of times at different stages during their lives. At the very least, I credit human sexuality with far more fluidity than we're taught to believe. Colette, that great crone of sexual wisdom, offered the entertaining opinion that men (plural) might be best for a woman when she was young and reproduction was at issue, but that only another woman (or women) could equal her as she matured. I'm not at all sure I agree, but I do think that affectionate, varying, erotic relationships will be more the common state of affairs when our culture eventually outgrows its narrowness.

As things now stand, such relations become acts of rebellion.
¹
I didn't become involved with a woman for the sake of rebelling. Yet it's true that I'd rebelled enough about other issues so that when love actually beckoned in a shape unanticipated (in fact already relinquished), I at least knew how to exercise the emotional muscles of rebellion. I still believe that the more people acquire a taste for rebellion, the more that behavioral curve will emerge—about all sorts of differing behavior, not just sexuality—once and for all exposing the concept of a single standard for “natural” as the preposterous idea it is.

By the time I met Iliana, I'd had a long, complex political history with lesbian issues. I'd been straight-baited by some separatist women (“You
can't
be a radical feminist unless you're a lesbian”) and gay-baited by right-wingers (“You're a radical feminist, so you
must
be a lesbian”). As early as 1968, when the
New York Times
inquired about our “open marriage”—which really should have been called an ajar marriage—and asked if I defined myself accordingly as heterosexual or bisexual, I hesitated. I
had
after all been to bed with women (albeit unhappily at that point), and I didn't want to disown that. So I replied that in the circumstances I'd choose to identify myself with the people suffering the heaviest discrimination,
and that since a woman could lose her job or custody of her child for being a lesbian,
that
was the label I'd wear, if labels there had to be. In 1973, I'd been asked to keynote the West Coast Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles, and had accepted—to the later consternation of several lesbian-feminist women who felt that my living with a man, albeit their gay brother, disqualified me. In retrospect, I agree with them—not so much because of my living situation but because of my sexual reality at that time. (The speech was one of my better ones, though, and fairly prescient.)
²
From the early Seventies, I remember a lively conversation that went on for some months with Adrienne Rich about the desirability of “androgyny.” Adrienne, at the time new to the Women's Movement, considered it a feminist ideal. I didn't. I was worried that in such trendy attempts to “blend” femaleness and maleness, somehow the Frankenresult would again be a male generic with femaleness as appendage, the female subsumed into the male the way women were “meant to be” included in the concept of “mankind” but somehow never actually got there. Although at that point neither Adrienne nor I had ever been in love with another woman, our androgyny discussion ranged over same-sex attraction, both of us wondering how much social conditioning had really formed our sexuality and whether either of us would ever really know. (This is another one of those moments when you'd like to travel back in time and smile, “Awww, girls, don't worry. Have some more tea. Give yourselves time. Will
you
be surprised!”)

All told, specifics of sexual preference and lesbian oppression—from discriminatory health-care issues to homophobic violence to workplace and housing discrimination—had been fixtures in every speech I'd given or article I'd written for almost twenty-five years before Iliana rhumbaed into my life. But it's another thing altogether, and rather bracing, to find that you yourself have become one of the people you've been defending. This “learning it in your bones” had happened more than once before. After years of pushing for decent, community-controlled, childcare centers, it was only when I had a young child that I fully realized, “Omi
god
. This
is
a major issue!” Now, as I bustle toward decrepitude, with each increasing year my consciousness is forcibly boosted on issues of ageism.
The lesson is, you
are
“the Other”—or at least you may well become it. Disability activists wryly refer to nondisabled persons as “temporarily abled.” Given my years of international work, I've joked that one of these days I may wake up to find myself grinding sorghum in Ouagadougou.

Nevertheless, I would never compare the minor inconveniences of discrimination I've experienced regarding same-sex love with that suffered by women who've been lesbians lifelong. On the contrary, I brought with me a sense of experienced heterosexual entitlement that startled my lesbian friends; after all, since I'd been allowed to kiss a
man
in public how
dare
anyone suddenly tell me that now I couldn't, just because the lover was a woman! Lesbian friends and colleagues received me with genial responses ranging from “I always
knew
you had potential!” to “I would have
sworn
I'd never see the day!” (So much for those invisible vibes of recognition.) Some were concerned this was one of those notorious flings in which the straight woman uses the lesbian for “experimentation” and then returns, re-energized, to her marriage—not bloody likely in my case. Others were apprehensive that I was a babe in the Sapphic woods and might be taken advantage of—until they met Iliana. My heterosexual women friends and colleagues made a point of being effusively supportive (“Do you feel
loved?
Really
loved?
That's the main thing. Then I'm so
glad
for you”). Meanwhile, they unconsciously shifted the posture of their embraces from the former relaxed variety to the contorted shape of a number seven—that peculiar upper-body clasp/lower-body arch away that heterosexual women use to hug their lesbian sisters. There were a few feminist colleagues who actually seemed dismayed at my new situation, which confused me since I knew they weren't homophobic. Then I realized that a monosexual pattern—that is, a lifelong heterosexual
or
lesbian pattern—didn't alarm them, but blurring fixed borders made them feel unsafe. If I, long married as they were, could discover another component in myself, what might that imply about them?