A Tyranny of Petticoats (41 page)

“Yeah, I’ve heard people talk about it down at the women’s collective,” Diane told me. “They call it
existential lesbian feminism.
It’s about teaching men a lesson. The only way they’ll learn we don’t need them is if we really don’t need them for
anything.
Get it?”

I nodded slowly.
Existential lesbian feminism.
A political philosophy based around women having sex with other women. And I’d thought regular feminism was extreme.

I wondered how women
did
have sex with other women. Maybe they’d . . . oh.
Oh.

I blushed harder with every passing minute. The political philosophy sounded crazy, but the women-being-with-other-women part didn’t sound like such a terrible thing.

“I think I get it,” I told Diane.

Two weeks later, Diane came over to listen to music again, and this time I definitely got it. We both did. It was amazing, actually.

I’d never felt about anyone the way I felt about Diane. I’d had boyfriends in high school, and I’d flirted with men at college parties, but what she and I had after just those first few weeks was something else altogether.

The problem was, by the time the spring semester started, Diane wanted to tell other people about it.

“The whole point of being a lesbian feminist is to prove a point to the man,” she said.

“Is this seriously just about politics to you?” I asked.

“Well, no. I mean, I also like you. A lot. But the personal is political, get it?”

“Not this time, it isn’t.”

Diane and I had started hanging out more with Floyd and the rest of the Students for a Democratic Society crowd by then. The men in SDS were cool, but, well, they were men. One night after a meeting we stayed up late writing a Students’ Bill of Rights. It started off serious, with things like “Ban the draft” and “Freedom of assembly” and “Respect all people.” Then everyone started trying to be funny. The longer the night went on, the longer the list got. By the end Floyd and Tom had added “Free booze for all,” “Free dope for all,” and “Free women for all.” Diane and I told them to cross the last one out, but they just laughed and said, “Girls never get jokes, man.”

After that, Diane wanted to tell them about us more than ever, but I wouldn’t let her. If men thought those sorts of things were funny, I figured that only proved they’d never understand about Diane and me. They’d never look at me the same. And their “jokes” would only get worse.

Diane and I slide into line with the other marchers gathered on Columbus Drive. A woman at the end of a row with dirty hair and a stoned-out expression smiles and makes the
V
sign at me. “Right on, sister.”

“Right on,” I reply, linking arms with her. Usually I stay away from the serious hippies — the ones who’ve been living on the streets so long they smell — but there are so few women here we’ve got to stick together.

Diane links onto my other arm. “Thank God we got rid of them. Floyd is driving me batty.”

I stop smiling. “Take it easy on him, would you?”

“Oh, give it a rest. If you seriously like him, you should at least tell him the truth. Unless you want me to do it for you.”

My heart thuds. “You wouldn’t really. Would you?”

“No.” Diane sticks her lower lip out in a pout. “Not unless you said it was all right. I need to know, though. Are you serious about him, or was this just a short-term thing while your dad was visiting? Because you know it isn’t right to string him along like that. Any more than it is me.”

The hippie woman next to me leans over. She’s watching our conversation, her lip quirked.

“I don’t know,” I say, trying to ignore the hippie’s breath on my neck. “It’s complicated.”

“You should’ve just lied to your dad,” Diane says. “Did you think he’d somehow suspect you were a lesbian unless you proved otherwise?”

The hippie’s jaw drops. I wish we’d found a different place to stand.

“You act like it’s so easy.” I try to keep my voice down so only Diane can hear. It’s hard in the crowd, though. “You know it’s not that simple. I care about Floyd, okay?”

Diane sighs. “Jill, I’m not asking you to break up with him. Just be honest. Tell him you’re a lesbian.”

I glance from side to side again. I wish she’d stop using that word. “Look, I don’t even know if I
am
a lesbian. I don’t believe in this whole philosophy the way you do. I don’t think being with a woman proves anything except that it can be fun to be with a woman.”

The hippie is gaping at us openly. Oh, well. It’s not like
she’s
going to tell anyone. Certainly not my dad.

“All right, then tell him
that.
” Diane pulls her arm free from mine and throws her hands up in the air. “You act as if it’s something to be ashamed of.”

“Well it
is,
kind of,” I say.

Diane turns to me, her forehead creased. “You’re ashamed of me?”

“Not
of
you, just
—”
I shake my head. “You don’t want your parents to know either. That’s because they’d think it’s wrong, isn’t it?”

She shrugs and looks away.

“Even in New York, even
here,
lots of people think it’s wrong,” I say. “You really want to shout it out to the whole world?”

“No,” she says. “Just to your boyfriend.”

I sigh. “You really think he’d keep it to himself? The whole school will hear about it the next time he gets stoned at a party.”

“And that would be so terrible?”

I shake my head. I don’t know what to say.

“I just hate lying to our friends,” Diane says. “Especially your so-called
boyfriend.
God, even that word,
boyfriend.
It sounds like such a lie. It’s so
conventional,
and you’re so
not.
”

I want to argue with her. I was as conventional as they came before I left home.

Everything about life in New York felt so radical compared to what I’d known before. In New York, you can hear three or four different languages just walking down the block. Women wear pants every day. Black people and white people sit next to each other on the subway like it’s nothing. There are student demonstrations every week for peace, for poverty, for civil rights.

I’ve only been there for a year, but that’s enough to know it’s where I belong. After Christmas break, I swore I’d never go back to Tennessee. I stuck around at Barnard for the summer session even though my father sent three letters pleading for me to come back. He’s been terribly lonely since my mother died three years ago.

But I couldn’t face that house again. My little brother, counting down the days until he’s old enough to enlist. My grandmother, nagging me to get my hair done and to hurry up and find a husband so I can come back home.

The sky is so dim it’s nearly dark. A new chant starts up at the front of the line. It echoes to the back so slowly we can’t even tell what they’re saying at first.

“Having a boyfriend isn’t automatically
conventional,
” I tell Diane. “I like Floyd.”

“Do you really?” Diane says. “Do you love him?”

I laugh. “Now who’s the conventional one?”

That’s one of the things that’s always frustrated me about Diane. She takes this all so seriously. Everything has to be a profound statement on something. If it isn’t politics, it’s love.

Floyd is a lot of things, but profound isn’t one of them. Floyd’s feet are flat on the ground.
Flat
is a good word for Floyd, generally. He’s been pretty good about taking me out on dates and being nice to me at parties, but I can’t shake the feeling that he likes the idea of dating the black freshman girl with the natural hair more than he likes the actual me.

I thought Daddy would be glad to see I had a boyfriend. A man to take care of me in the big city. It turned out I was wrong.

My father found some cheap hotel in Harlem, but he could only stay for two days before he had to get back to work at the factory. We went on the Staten Island Ferry and baked in the heat while my father looked at the city skyline and shook his head as though he didn’t see what all the fuss was about. I ordered takeout from my favorite Chinese restaurant and we ate it on the floor of my dorm room, my father fumbling with unfamiliar chopsticks. His eyes darted across the rows of thick textbooks with complicated titles, the ashtrays scattered around the room, the stacks of albums with long-haired white men on their covers. He was trying, I knew, but he didn’t understand why I’d chosen this world over the only one he’d ever known.

When I introduced them, Floyd was polite, respectful, friendly. He went to prep school in Massachusetts, so he knew to wear a tie and call my father “sir.” But he didn’t know not to put his hand on the small of my back as we crossed the street to the fancy restaurant he’d picked out for dinner. When he touched me, I swear I saw Daddy’s heart break right in front of me.

“STREETS BELONG TO THE PEOPLE!” The new chant has finally reached us. “STREETS BELONG TO THE PEOPLE!”

I join in, shouting along with the others. The hippie girl does too, her voice low and gravelly.

Diane leans in to talk into my ear. I wish I couldn’t hear her over the chanting, but I can. I could probably pick out Diane’s voice in the middle of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

“Tell me the truth,” she says. “Tell me the real reason you picked him instead of me.”

I sigh again, trying come up with some explanation about how much I like Floyd. Then I see Diane’s face out of the corner of my eye. Her eyes are wide and pleading.

She wants the truth. She
deserves
the truth.

“Everyone would look at us,” I say slowly. Diane blinks. For a second I think she didn’t understand me, but then she starts to draw back, pulling her arm away from where it’s linked with mine, and I know she heard. “If we were together for real. They’d stare at me everywhere I went. I’d know they were talking about me, and I’d know what they were saying.”

Diane looks straight into my eyes for a long moment.

“That’s what matters to you?” she finally says. “What people you don’t even know say behind your back? What about what
I
think? Don’t I count more than whoever walks by you on Riverside Drive?”

“Of course.” I don’t know what she wants me to say. I gaze down, which only reminds me of how disheveled I look. The sleeves of my blue button-down are wrinkled and stained. I fell in the dirt back at the band shell when the cops first charged. Diane stayed behind to help me up and got kicked in the leg by a cop for her trouble. “It’s just — I don’t know. It’s complicated.”

Diane pulls back again, like she’s about to leave. I want to reach out and take her hand. I don’t.

“WHOSE STREET? OUR STREET! WHOSE STREET? OUR STREET!”

The chant is getting louder. Angrier. Fists are waving in the air above us.

“They didn’t get the permit for the march!” the hippie girl shouts next to us. “It’s over!”

It looks like she’s right. There’s fury roiling in the front of the line, filtering its way to the back along with the chant. One of the marshals shouts into his bullhorn for people to stay calm.

“We should go!” I shout to Diane. At first she ignores me, but then she glances my way and nods.

I let go of the hippie’s arm. Diane and I slip out of the line and into the trees with some of the other marchers.

“Let’s try to find the others,” Diane says. “I think they’re up at —”

Behind her comes what sounds like a bomb going off. Then the screaming starts.

“Shit!” Diane yells. We both scrabble into the back pockets of our jeans for our bandannas. “Damn pigs! Nobody’s even doing anything!”

This has happened at least a dozen times this week, but it’s always just as scary as it was the first night. And it always, always hurts.

I tie my bandanna around my nose and mouth and swivel my head from one end of the park to the other. A white cloud of tear gas wafts toward us from the north. We can already smell the thick chemical odor. That means the pain is only a few seconds away. Behind the cloud there’s a row of National Guardsmen wearing gas masks. They’re advancing toward us. Gas spews into the air in long streams.

A man near us picks up a gas canister that’s fallen to the ground and chucks it back toward the Guardsmen. Then a coughing fit overtakes him and he collapses to his knees.

Diane grabs my arm. We run together through the park, trying to outrace the white cloud, even though we both know that never works. Where there’s one cloud of gas, more will follow.

Around us people are shouting, running, clutching cloths to their faces. The gas creeps into my eyes, my nostrils, down my throat. My lungs twist in on themselves. My cheeks burn. Tears roll down my face, leaving streaks behind them that scald my skin.

This isn’t the same gas I’ve been breathing all week in Lincoln Park. This has to be stronger. Military-grade.

We run south, deeper into the park, but the gas only gets thicker. Diane is coughing so hard I don’t know if she can run much farther. I blink against the pain in my eyes and scan the park for a safe place to wait it out, but the Guardsmen keep moving, their faces invisible behind their gas masks as they get closer and closer to us.

Whenever there are too many of us in one place, even if all we’re doing is standing around, the pigs spray tear gas. They have their masks, but all we have are bandannas and handkerchiefs and Vaseline to spread on our cheeks, and even that barely makes a dent against the pain.

Diane stops running. She bends at her waist, coughing harder. Her eyes are squeezed shut. Her hand is pounding against her chest.

Oh, no. She’s panicking.

“Move!” I yell, grabbing her arm and pulling her forward so hard she has no choice but to follow. She stumbles at first, but then we’re running together, back toward what’s left of the line of marchers. I cough harder, resisting the urge to wipe my eyes. I learned the hard way that it only heightens the pain.

The whole park is covered in the white haze. Our only choice is to take one of the bridges across Michigan Avenue toward the hotels.

My cheeks are on fire. I shift my bandanna higher and grab Diane’s hand. She takes mine, still bent over, coughing, as I lead her to the closest bridge.