In Search of Mary (21 page)

Suddenly there’s another noise. Is it Will? It’s Will’s voice. He’s shouting and crying angrily. I rush back inside and down the hallway to him, I run to the door – it won’t open. I twist the handle as a strange feeling soaks through my guts. It’s locked. I shake the handle furiously. He’s crying, and I’ve locked him in. I run and knock on Maria Clara and Tim’s door. “Sorry – I’m really sorry – I’ve locked Will in the room, and he’s crying.” It’s not yet seven o’clock on a Sunday morning. They stagger out: they were up in the night with their non-sleeping boys, and now I’ve woken them again.

“What? I didn’t even know that door could lock,” says Tim. We rush to the door. Will is now roaring. We rattle and shake and twist and pull the handle. Maria Clara finds several bunches of keys, and we try them all out. We move on to unravelled coat hangers and hairpins. The boys get up, and they try to join in. “
No hay llave
?” one asks. “
Por qué está encerrado?
” Because his mother is an idiot, I say bitterly, an idiot mum who’s locked her baby in.

Will goes quiet. At least he’s in a cot and can’t escape. What about the bedroom window? I ask. It’s locked and inaccessible. Tim goes online and starts finding locksmiths. He calls several of them up, but no one’s answering at this hour on a Sunday. He calls some of his neighbours and one comes rushing over with a toolbox. I run to answer the door: “Hi! I’m the woman from England who’s imprisoned her baby.” The neighbour tries his best, but he can’t open it. It’s a very good lock indeed.

“Don’t you know any criminals?” I ask hopefully. They don’t. On the other side of the impossible door, Will sings and hums a bit of a tune to himself, and I love him so much. I try to press down the sickness feeling that’s rising. “Well, he’s not hungry or upset,” I say in a perfectly calm voice. “And he’s in his cot, so he can’t hurt himself in there.” Maria Clara gives me a hug, and tells me not to worry.

I burst into tears.

Tim is still calling up locksmiths, leaving messages in his American accent.

“We have a
situation
here, a
locked room
with a
one-year-old
inside.”

“He’s nineteen months,” I whisper, as though that makes it very much better. Tim sounds like CSI San Francisco. In my head the script proceeds: “No, the mother is right here, in fact the mother locked him in… That’s right. Yes, she locked him in because she, quote,
wanted to do some thinking
… Yes the mother is now being read her rights.”

“What about the fire department?” I ask.

“They could come,” says Maria Clara hesitantly. “But if they do, they will smash the door off its hinges.” Sounds OK to me,
I think, as Tim calls up yet another locksmith. But this time someone answers. YES. We all look expectantly at him while he describes the “situation”. Will hums another tune behind the door. Maria Clara’s sweet boys are still poking at the door with toy hammers and plastic fire engines.

“OK… he’ll be here in twenty minutes. But it won’t be cheap.”

We erupt into cheers, and I sit down and dig out all my dollars. A whole heap of them, sitting there ready. I will pay the man anything. I drink a glass of water and try to breathe in a normal way.

But Tim is still online, and he’s found a series of YouTube films on how to open a lock using a credit card. A twelve-year-old girl offers a flimsy disclaimer on a phone-filmed piece: “You all shouldn’t do this except for in an emergency, OK, but here’s how it’s done.” She wriggles the card, runs it round the doorframe, then pops the lock. Tim asks me for a card, runs it around the inside of the frame, wrestles with the lock, pushes harder, click, pushes again and the door sweeps open.

Everyone screams. I run and sweep Will up out of the cot in a single move and squeeze him hard. I press him into my body. He looks confused and fairly pleased with all the shouting. I kiss him repeatedly and only just manage not to crush him with too much hugging. I’m so grateful that my heart turns into fluid. Tim cancels the locksmith. Will is in my arms. Wonderful Sunday morning, we all agree, and Maria Clara makes
arepas
and coffee.

As a beginning to our Californian adventure, this episode lacks a certain dignity, and I feel we’ve started off on rather a Mr
Bean footing. Fortunately, our first encounter is to be one of proper social worthiness, and not in any way a “crock of shit”. We are heading to the famous San Francisco Women’s Building. It’s not hard to find. Its huge exterior is covered with dazzling murals, rainbow depictions of heroic women and wombs.

Teresa Mejía runs the place, and she is almost an hour late for our interview, by which time I’ve used up all my Will-distractions. As she appears, we’re in the reception area and he’s road-testing a tantrum innovation. He lies on his back making roaring noises while horizontally shuffling himself along with his feet. His scalp goes bright red. I let him do this for a few minutes while we stand around waiting.

Teresa doesn’t seem to mind and, unusually, I’m not embarrassed. If a baby can’t do the Shuffle of Rage here in the Women’s Building, then where? After a while his gaze swivels round and he catches my eye. I smile, and he gives up. I lift him into the buggy and we walk around the Women’s Building, while Teresa tells me its story.

“This is the country’s first women-owned and operated community centre. It was San Francisco’s first shelter for victims of domestic violence. Last year it was the building’s hundredth birthday, but we’ve been here for around thirty years. Everything you see here is what the community asked for. Even during the dot-com boom we’ve still been able to offer people space to develop their skills. We have a tech lab, and all services are free and bilingual. You can do job programmes or get referrals for housing or legal questions.”

Teresa is San Francisco’s Lucy. This is usefulness, happening all around. She continues:

“It’s all on word of mouth, and everyone knows us. People tend to be from low-income and immigrant backgrounds. Every Monday we have a free food pantry, and that’s something you see growing with the economic crisis. We serve around 950 families. We also house organizations around rape and violence against women. We are non-profit, but I don’t like the word ‘charity’, because it’s passive. They get something, those who come here – but we get a lot from them too: it’s not a passive experience. It’s not that we just sit here giving stuff away. In that sense I don’t use the word charity.”

“What about men – are they allowed in? Look, there’s one over there!” I point at a middle-aged man sitting unobtrusively at a screen.

“Yes, of course,” she laughs. “They’re part of the community, but the focus will always be on women. The people change: there was a time of mostly lesbians, and now it’s more a mix including queer and trans. There was a time of more Asians than Latinos – all these things change, but one thing doesn’t change: we will always need a Women’s Building.”

We get into the lift and come out on the third floor. She looks at her watch, she has more pressing concerns than a curious foreign woman with a grumpy child. The interior design is curvaceous. She points out oddities of the building: the extraordinary stairway, the giant glowing light fitting in the shape of a vagina. Teresa is a good tour guide, but it’s all a bit business-like. I’m hoping she’ll get more personal.

“Teresa, what does this place mean to you?”

“Everything. My history is connected to this place. I come from Puerto Rico, and before I came here in the Nineties I was
already involved in running women’s organizations. I worked with a shelter for battered women.”

Without pause she continues in the same tone:

“I lost all my family in a case of domestic violence. My sister’s husband killed my sister and my mother and my little nieces. I was twenty years old. And from that moment I made the commitment to work the rest of my life in issues of women.”

She’s talking from the heart now, her Latino accent animated:

“I came here and didn’t speak any English. I didn’t want to, because Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, and I was all ‘I won’t learn that language!’ A friend told me about this place, because I didn’t know how to get a job. I came here and I say: ‘Oh my God. This is the dream of all of us, in all the world, to have this building. Even now my friends come from Puerto Rico, they say: ‘Ay Teresa, we want something like this!’”

She started out as the receptionist and today Teresa is the executive director. “I love it here: I am a product of this place. My story is the story of many women that come to the Women’s Building.”

I thank Teresa for her time, and we leave. We head two blocks over to Mission Dolores Park, and I sit on the grass while Will potters around. The Women’s Building was a good starting point for our Californian mission, because it’s easy to get a clear sense of what the place is doing. It has that all-important, key Wollstonecraft ingredient: it’s useful.

What’s much less clear, though, is the onwards journey from here. Like all things that develop and grow, the original call for “
JUSTICE
for one half of the human race” has also splintered. Parts of it now don’t even recognize each other. It has
branched into individualistic identity politics, where people say: “I identify as this – I don’t identify as that.”

The First Wave was simple – votes. The Second and Third Waves added new voices and new layers, making it harder to see a clear path. This may be thanks to the huge gains that have been made since Wollstonecraft’s time. I was shocked when someone called my journey a “crock of shit”, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been. I wander around, baby- and baggage-laden, chasing answers and saying: “But what about me?” – and so does feminism. Have we both lost our focus?

Another Wollstonecraft echo resonating in the Women’s Building is that she, like Teresa, shuns the notion of charity, describing it as the “condescending distribution of alms”. It’s a recurring theme: “It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in this world!” She calls more for people “to act conformably to the rules of justice”. The veneer of charity, she points out, makes it possible for us to “do what is called a noble action, give away a large sum… weep at a tragedy” while still “neglecting the foundation of all virtue: justice.”

Still percolating away, we wander back down through the Mission District. Its quirky wooden houses recall Norway, but this has added edge. Right on cue, a large group of solemn people cycles past us and on up the hill. They are all stark bollock naked. Each house is painted in crazier colours than the last. I think back to pushing Will up the hill in Tønsberg to the place that Wollstonecraft loved. This place has a similar atmosphere, but somehow it goes beyond wholesomeness.

The hippies’ counter-culture gave way to another revolution: a technological one. The creative rebels of Silicon Valley
transcended agriculture and automobiles, and founded the most valuable company on earth: Apple. Looking around, San Francisco is the counter-culture gone mainstream. As Norway has its vast oil trust fund, this place too is now awash with money. Money and power: Google, Twitter and Facebook all live just down the road. Does this cushion of wealth encourage more of Wollstonecraft’s justice? Or does it just allow people to forget?

Lost in my justice-bothering thoughts, pushing Will’s buggy along, we wander into a road crossing and get honked at by a man in a car. I wave charmingly and smile. He angrily honks some more. I stop the next person we meet; he’s wearing tight jeans and carrying a dog. I ask:

“Excuse me please, how should I cross the road without making people very cross?” Then to make my question more American, I add: “I’m a bit unsure of my pedestrian rights.”

“Oh honey, you sure do have rights,” the man squeaks. His road-crossing advice is unlikely, yet pleasing. He assures me that once I’ve stepped into the road then the priority is mine.

“If you’re on it, keep going.”

“So if I’m on it, I just keep going?” I repeat uncertainly.

“That’s right: if you’re on it, keep going.”

We laugh and say goodbye. I repeat his mantra, walking to its rhythm – “If I’m on it, keep going”, “If I’m on it, keep going” – all the way down the street. I’m on it! Follow the yellow-brick road, my mind sings back. We walk past another dazzling mural, two more men carrying dogs and a house decked out from top to bottom with Christmas baubles. In March.

“Toto,” I say to Will. “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kentish Town any more.”

Chapter Fourteen

The Rainbow-Brick Road from Interconnectedness to Juicy Nubs

It has been pointed out, by my nearest and dearest I might add, that I’m an amateur, a shallow-end paddler in Wiki-feminism, and have based my voyage of discovery thus far on a few beloved books, my own life and Grazia magazine. Maybe they have a point. I need an authority, an old-school rad-fem with all the trappings, to raise my consciousness. Someone like Professor Bettina Aptheker at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This woman raises consciousness for a living and has done so for generations of Californians.

I know this because decades ago my student room-mate was an impressive Californian woman called Kellie. She seemed to come from the future. She spoke in a manner now commonplace among Tory MPs. Back then it was breathtakingly exotic: “Dude I’m so stoked, oh my God, it’s like totally
awe
some.”

One night Kellie took it upon herself to explain, at length, to a room full of Glaswegian boys who were doing their innocent best to get vomitingly drunk, that rape was not about sex but about power. It’s this memory that made me track Kellie down all these years later. I wonder if the boys remember it too.

“All of that was thanks to Professor Bettina Aptheker,” says Kellie. “She’s a legend. You have to meet her. She pretty much
is
the Second Wave: she’s been at the heart of it the whole time.”

Awesome. Even better, the professor is right here, still doing the same thing, on the same campus. Reading up on the wise and mighty Professor Bettina, something stops me in my tracks. Not the fact that she’s on a “most dangerous academics” list. Nothing original there. It’s the revelation that her father, a renowned left-wing scholar, sexually abused her throughout her childhood. Like certain male revolutionaries of the Wollstone-craft tribe, this was a person dedicated to the defence of the unrepresented and the vulnerable. “The spectre of the radical dad,” I murmur to myself. But this is gone to such dark levels I scarcely know whether and how to raise it with her.