Original Sins (59 page)

During the following week she first found Justin's little idiosyncrasies annoying rather than endearing. The way his jaw cracked when he chewed. She began handing him Kleenexes when he sniffed upon waking—which he would eye irritably and drop unused into the waste basket, still sniffing. She studied his drooping crew socks and bought him new ones with the elastic intact—which he shoved into the back of his drawer.

She found herself having consciously to itemize all the things she loved about him.
His courage:
Justin rolled into a ball on her dorm sitting room floor, practicing the nonviolent response to assault. Justin collecting draft cards on the steps to the induction center while policemen yelled into megaphones. Justin in his crash helmet hurling himself at the Pentagon.
His blinding generosity:
He'd become frantic knowing the government was spending one hundred million dollars a day in Vietnam, and here was this woman whose kid couldn't go to school because she didn't have eighteen dollars for a winter coat. Anyone who'd asked him for money for bail, rent, food, got it. He'd known that it occasionally went for liquor or a TV set, and that he had the reputation of being a guilt-ridden sucker, but he hadn't cared.
His intelligence:
The ease with which he'd manipulated words and concepts at FORWARD meetings. Emily had had through him a sense of participation in something she still regarded as important—the building of a just and humane world.

She thought of the afternoons they'd spent at art galleries and concerts and movies. He'd asked her opinions, then corrected them. He'd picked her up out of the dirt and turned her into the clod she was today.

Then she realized that, like all memories, these were in the past perfect tense.

At the next women's meeting everyone tried to drop out. Gail's plan was to have everyone mention something important that happened that week. The mass exodus began when they got to Susannah, a nurse at the Roosevelt, Levi's mom. She announced with great pleasure, “I met a man this week!”

“Oh, no, I don't want to hear it,” Kate moaned, burying her head in her arms.

“No, he's fantastic. He really is.” Maria sighed.

“Now come on, yall,” murmured Lou, removing her sunglasses to glare at them. “She listened to your crap.” “Tell us all about him, Susannah,” urged Gail. “Well, he's a social worker.” Emily reflected that in Newland the response to that request would have taken the form, “Well, he's so and so's cousin/uncle/son. And he lives in such-and-such a place.”

“… and, well, talking to him is almost like talking to a woman. I mean, he actually listens. And he doesn't quote Marx or anything. And he doesn't try to direct the conversation back to himself. Sometimes he has emotional reactions and stuff …”

“It sounds as though you think he's pretty special,” suggested Gail.

“He sounds very nice,” Emily murmured. They could always tell a meeting was in trouble when Lou and Emily reverted to their best Southern manners.

“Shit, I'm sorry, gang,” announced Maria, sitting up from where she lay on pillows. “But, like, I just can't handle this group anymore. I think I need a group of lesbians. You straight women still need men—sexually, emotionally, and in some cases financially. But I don't. And I need support for forming alternative structures. I don't want to sit around listening to a bunch of heterosexual soap operas.”

“I'm with you,” Kate grunted.

Susannah collapsed in tears.

“Aren't you being elitist, Maria?” Gail inquired.

Sammie jumped to her feet and struck a pose so graceful it could have been choreographed for this moment. “Well, that's just fine with me. Cause, honey, I've had it with lying around listening to a bunch of white women moaning. Every black woman I know is earning a living, plus raising her kids, plus trying to prop up a man who's been so fucked over by Whitey he can't hardly get out of bed in the morning. You white women are just spoiled children, whimpering around about your O-pression. And whenever you get tired, you can go on back to Daddy or Hubby, and he'll take care of you. But this stuff is
real
to black women, honey, and we got to live with it our whole life through …”

“Now wait just a minute …,” snarled Maria.

“Aren't you being elitist?” asked Gail.

“I got something to say!” Emily yelled. To her surprise, the room fell silent. She couldn't remember what it was.

Susannah started talking through her tears. “This group isn't meeting my needs. This group has never yet met my needs. I'm sure none of you has a clue what I'm talking about. You've all been through college …”

“I ain't been through no college,” muttered Sammie.

“… while you were studying all your fancy theories, I was
working.
Nothing new to me. I've been working since I was fourteen. It was me behind that counter at Woolworth's when you were buying the pens and paper to write your theses. Gail over there whimpering about wanting to go out and work. Shit, go out and work. But I don't see anything wrong, if I can find a man who wants this too, in me staying home and raising Levi and keeping house. You people are so out of touch with what life is really like for working people that it's pointless for me even to be here!”

“Ooh, that's not fair,” complained Gail. “What we're talking about here is the ways women have been trained to passivity.”

Emily remembered what she wanted to say: “Actually, I've been thinking for a long time that I need to find me a group of Southern women. The thing that bothers me most, you all don't even realize how different I am from you. You all go out to work and leave your kids and take lovers and all that—you're just conforming to your conditioning, and imitating the women who've surrounded you all your life. Me, I'm having to fight my conditioning with every move I make …”

“Aren't you being elitist?” asked Gail.

“Would you shut up?” Maria snapped.

Kate snarled, “Shit, all this Matt's mom crap. You all know it's not cool to define yourself through your lovers, so you define yourself through your kids, just like society's always done. Instead of being able to stand up and say, ‘Hey, I'm me.' Well, I got no kids. Does that mean I'm not a woman?”

Gail began talking about the importance of motherhood, her resentment at its being dumped on. She called the group a bunch of man-haters and complained that they were trying to force all men to conform to the same image, just as men did to women.

“Now listen here, yall!” yelled Lou. “You talk about fucked over, you try being black and a woman and a dyke and Southern and a welfare mother all at once. I ain't got no sympathy for none of you. But what I think is this: You confront a carrot with a potato, and it'll probably insist, ‘Hell no, I ain't no potato. Honey, look at me. Hell, I'm orange, and long and thin. And lookee here, I got me this lacy green top.' Stops them seeing they're all in that garden together, and all gonna get dug up come fall.”

Everyone fell silent.

“If we stick together, we're something to be reckoned with. If we split up over our precious differences, we ain't nothing. Look what happened during civil rights: You had CORE, NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, Urban League, Panthers, Muslims, Toms and Jemimas, Methodists against Baptists, men against women, Southerners against Yankees, college against non-college, militants against cultural nationalists, black capitalists against Marxists, all fighting among themselves. You even had poor whites saying, ‘Maybe I ain't making it so good, but at least I'm better off than them niggers.'”

Everyone began nodding in reluctant agreement. And by the end of the evening they were embracing each other, swept with feelings of solidarity with all the women of the world. But as Maria hugged her, Emily felt a sensation shoot through her body that was much more specific. She pulled away, and Maria glanced at her, surprised.

That weekend Emily went with Maria and Kate to a women's music festival. The college amphitheater, with its elaborate polished oak woodwork, was packed with women of every size and shape and color, dressed mostly in jeans or overalls, flannel shirts or sweat shirts, boots or tennis shoes. A woman in jeans and suspenders and a flannel shirt, with close-cropped hair, played a guitar and sang love songs to a woman in her backup band. From the corner of her eye Emily saw Maria and Kate were touching fingertips, trying to be unobtrusive so that Emily wouldn't feel left out. But she did anyway. All around her, women had their arms across each other's shoulders, were holding hands or pressing thighs. Emily felt titillated. Women making love to women. It was unheard of in Newland, and Emily had always been drawn to anything Newland forbade. If Newland forbade it, it couldn't be all bad. She decided she adored these tough defiant women lounging all over each other. Her shoulder pressed against Maria's, and she increased the pressure. Maria smiled and pressed back, and Emily felt a stab of electricity down her arm so intense that her delight transmuted into alarm. She shifted in her seat.

Meanwhile, on stage women plucked dulcimers about strip mining in Appalachia, shook tambourines over torture in Chilean jails. Women in Frye boots and plaid lumberjack shirts twanged Jews' harps for the lettuce harvesters in the Imperial Valley. Castanets clattered on behalf of Cuban (pronounced Coo-ban) sugarcane harvesters. Four women in red flannel shirts and bib overalls stood with raised fists, shouting “Puerto Rico libre!” while a flamenco guitar hemorrhaged offstage.

Emily found herself scowling. She'd just recalled whom she was exiled among: descendants of the Puritans, who arrived in the New World determined to civilize the savages. Their heirs had been pursuing missions ever since. They'd persuaded African tribesmen to cover their loins. They carried the concept of land ownership to the American Indians. They invaded Virginia. They rode Greyhounds through Alabama. They brought Coca-Cola to Cairo, and peace to Pleiku. Like malignant cells from a tumor, they'd colonized the entire world. They couldn't help themselves. It was in their genes. Out the back door of this building was Harlem, which had gone up in flames eight years earlier. Yet these women had the gall to warble on about injustice in Latin America?

Emily clenched her teeth. Maria looked at her questioningly. Emily tried to smile politely, but ended up grimacing. The woman who'd opened the concert was now singing about her surprise at first realizing that she was in love with a woman. On one side of the stage was a woman interpreting the song in sign language for the deaf. On the other side a woman did a karate demonstration. Women were passing cardboard buckets through the audience for donations to a lesbian mothers' legal defense fund. Emily sighed. Civil rights, Appalachia, Vietnam, American Indians, migrant workers, Chile, Puerto Rico. Emily, under Justin's tutelage, had done them all. Now it was Women. And next week the sisters would be stacked in someone's attic like cast-off hula hoops. Political consumerism. Fuck it, she'd been taken in too many times by this Cause-of-the-Month mentality.

Maria put her arm around Emily in the crush moving toward the exit, murmuring, “One of the nicest things about women is that half the babies they give birth to aren't male.”

Emily moved irritably out from under her arm, eyeing Maria's Badge-for-the-Day with annoyance: “When God created man, she was only joking.”

“What's wrong?”

“Bunch of self-righteous consumers,” Emily muttered.

“So what? Why not just relax and enjoy it?”

“Because next week all you career lesbians will have moved on to the next fad.”

Maria said curtly, “I doubt it. Many of us have burnt certain bridges. It'd be very difficult for me to go back to men.”

“I've seen it happen time after time. People seize on a cause, devote their lives to it, get bored, and cast it off like last summer's Top Ten records. Besides, anything this many Yankees agree on can't be right.”

“You see it as a series of fads. But I see it as a progression.”

“Yeah, but you Yankees always equate change with progress. You've obviously never lost a war.”

Maria laughed. “But in this case I think it really is progress.”

“How?”

“Well, during civil rights, women found themselves cleaning the Freedom House while the brothers were off being interviewed for the evening news. And then Stokely Carmichael came out with that bit about the only position for women in the struggle being prone. Then Cleaver described how he raped white women to get even with white men, practicing up first on black women. And then during Vietnam, the women were trying to find ways to pay the phone bills, while the men were out dumping blood on draft records. But some of us began realizing it was
men
who were dropping napalm,
men
who were making fortunes manufacturing war materials.
Men
who lynched blacks,
men
who wouldn't pay them decent wages. Government, business, churches, the military—all run by men. They'd set up this shitty world and were benefiting from it … Sorry, I didn't mean to lecture.”

“It's OK. I'm used to it.”

Maria stuck out her tongue. “But anyway, Emily, even if I agreed with you about it's being nothing but fads, so what?”

“I like serious people.” Two women were kissing passionately by the doorway. Emily glared at them. Bunch of goddam fly-by-night Yankees.

“But we
are
serious while we're embracing whatever it is. And we're equally serious about whatever we move on to. You're saying you have to be eternally devoted to the same things? The one true love that lasts a lifetime? Honestly, you poor saps and your Lost Causes. This continuity and stability Raymond used to carry on about—it's all a big joke. People die, houses burn down, rivers dry up, mountains crumble. Why not just accept flux?”