Original Sins (65 page)

“Why don't you let us help, child?”

“I don't think anyone can help. It's just a major personality difference between Maria and me.”

“That's what I hear.”

“What's she been saying?” Maria was probably lining up the entire women's group on her side.

“We've spent the last couple of meetings arguing over whether or not you got the right to privatize your emotional life like you been doing.”

“What's the verdict?”

“Most says not. But I reckon it's cause we all miss you, girl, and want you to get your ass back to those meetings.”

“I'll be back. Soon as I can bear to see Maria again.”

“You love her a lot, don't you?”

“Yeah.”

“I can tell she loves you too. In her way.”

“But her way isn't my way.”

“And your way ain't her way, child.”

Sammie took Matt for the rest of the weekend. Emily stood smoking in the dark living room, watching the lights twinkle across the Hudson at Palisades Amusement Park. Tammy Wynette was singing “Stand by Your Man” on the stereo. Jesus, if only she had. Maria was right: What had started out as a succulent side order of female flesh had become a dinner-sized roast.

She drew on her cigarette, seeing her life laid out before her like a tarot deck. Justin with Shelby. Matt grown up and off on his own. Maria settled down in polygamous bliss, poaching her brain in some Malibu hot tub. Her parents dead. And Emily here alone in the night. All night, every night. Year after year. Watching the lights at Palisades Amusement Park. Sometimes she'd go visit them. They'd be kind, as though she were a maiden aunt, and impatient for her to leave so they could get on with their lives.

No one to bring you broth when you were sick. No one to eat Christmas dinner with. No one to file joint tax returns with.

She hadn't even spoken on the phone to Maria since their fight. She wasn't sure she could make the changes necessary to be involved with her—even if she wanted to. Maria: There was nothing she needed Emily for. She was earning her own living. She had other lovers. She could cook and clean as well as Emily. She had a full, complete life without Emily. Apparently she simply liked to be with her. Or used to. The Great Ear couldn't cope with this. The Great Ear was being loved for herself alone, and not for any services she could render?

If Maria didn't need her services, Emily had no hold over her. Maria was free to stay, or to leave as she chose. Emily couldn't bear it. If only she could cripple Maria and maintain custody of her crutches. If Maria were in an iron lung, she'd need Emily to feed her. She wanted Maria inert, inescapably dependent, unquestionably hers. So that Emily could begin to tire of having responsibility for her, and eventually start feeling contempt for her inability to care for herself. So that Emily's love could transmute into resentment, then hatred. So that Emily could finally free herself of this awful need to have Maria need her.

Emily put on her black leather jacket and went down to the Village. Next week she'd find a job. And tonight she'd get laid. She loved Maria. She wanted to be with her. She wanted not to be alone. She would try to play by Maria's rules.

Emily picked up an attractive young woman with curly red hair, who wore a blue and white football jersey. They danced, increasingly closely, and Emily bought her some drinks. Eventually, they secured a table. Emily gazed into the young woman's eyes, and pressed her knee with her own, and touched the woman's forearm with her fingertips as they talked.

By the end of the evening, the Great Ear had lent her twenty dollars and was giving her advice about how to deal with her difficult mother.

The Great Ear went home to bed alone. She couldn't fuck the youth of America—she had to take care of them. Emily realized what a talent Maria possessed—being able to assume that other people could take care of themselves and didn't need her to do it for them. She envied Maria her humility.

Emily devoted the next week to Meeting People. She searched underground newspapers for notices of meetings with compatible women. There was something for almost everyone—Bondage Support Group, Bisexual Biracials. But also, no Cuckolds Anonymous. Gail phoned to urge her to go on the retreat the women's group was staging at her parents' vacation house in upstate New York. By now she was so lonely that she would have joined Hitler in his bunker.

When Emily arrived at the retreat, Maria came over and kissed her. She felt the old desire unhinging her joints one by one. “How's it going?” asked Maria.

“Fine.”

They sat down by the pond, which shimmered in the heat. The others already lay naked in the sun, keeping their distance. Emily cleared her throat. “Look, I'm sorry I accused you of being a sultan in drag, Maria. I tried to join Cuckolds Anonymous this week, but I couldn't find one.”

Maria laughed. “If you do, we'll all have to join.” She added, “But that's a male concept. Why don't you drop that term from your vocabulary?”

“Why?”

“If you drop the word, maybe you'll drop the emotions that go with it.”

“But presumably the word was invented to account for emotions that already existed.”

“But not every culture has an equivalent word. Look, maybe you and Kate and I should do a threesome tonight.”

“Huh?”

“To help you get over this jealousy trip.”

Emily said nothing.

“What, you've never done a threesome before?”

Emily nodded no. Apparently there was no end to the adaptations she'd have to make to stay with Maria.

“Well, think it over,” suggested Maria.

Emily watched her dive into the water, swim to the dock, and haul herself out. She stood there glistening in the sun, streaming with water. Why had she tried to tame Maria? Emily had resented it so much when Earl tried to do it to her.

As she and Kate and Maria walked toward the woods carrying sleeping bags, a lantern, a couple of bottles of wine, Emily felt not unlike Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine. But if this was what it would take to shed her feelings of possessiveness toward Maria—so that Maria would then want to be with her, and might even consider giving up Kate—by God, she'd do it.

They spread the sleeping bags on a floor of leaves and took off their clothes. Lying on the bags, they passed the wine, chatted, and touched each other. Kate and Emily, shy and wary. She'd just had a letter from Sally telling about a crafts course she was taking at the high school at night. What would she think about how her older sister spent her spare time? Being unfaithful to Justin would be bad enough in Sally's eyes. Making love with a woman would be unthinkable. But
two
women? What would her
parents
say? Nothing. They'd be speechless. At least no one could accuse her of thoughtlessly conforming to her conditioning.

Emily was in the middle, and Kate and Maria began stroking her and sucking her nipples. Emily lost track of who was doing what to whom. Although she was making love with Kate and Maria, she was locked into a private fantasy. It was more lonely than being alone. She watched Kate going down on Maria, waiting to be swamped with jealousy. But she felt nothing.

Once they had all experienced equal orgasms, they lay smoking cigarettes in the dark. Emily felt just as she had after being initiated into Ingenue. She walked back to the house alone. Once again the Great Ear had betrayed her into doing things to please other people. Shit.

The next morning as she lay by the pond in the sun, Emily contemplated her solitary old age, with no one to sit in the adjoining rocker on the porch of the old age home. At breakfast Maria had asked, “How do you feel about last night?”

Emily replied, “Well, it worked. I'm not jealous anymore.” Emily hadn't gone on to add she'd probably never make love again, not with Maria, not with anybody.

The others lay nearby tanning. Maria and Kate were discussing the shape of things to come. In place of isolated couples would be tribes of strong women living on the land, in possession of all the skills necessary for survival apart from the hostile patriarchal world. They'd be family for each other, but extended family voluntarily chosen. They'd guarantee each other's bank loans, pierce each other's ears, buy tampons in bulk.

Emily listened as she lay in the grip of revulsion against all flesh. Including or excluding people on the basis of whether or not they had some bizarre flap of tissue hanging between their legs was about as absurd as including or excluding them on the basis of skin color. The Ingenues had excluded Ina Sue Bascombe because she didn't shave her legs, for God's sake.

The next women's meeting was at Emily's. When Susannah came in, she had two black eyes and a stitched-up cut stretching out from the corner of her mouth.

“God, you look terrible. What happened?” Emily demanded.

Susannah smiled as much as her wound would let her. “I was raped this week.”

The room fell silent. Susannah sat on the sofa and told about walking down the street in early afternoon on her way to the Roosevelt in her nurse's uniform. A van pulled up, and two young black men hopped out, opened the back doors, and dragged her inside. Passers-by continued to pass by. As she struggled, one pointed to her thyroidectomy scar, flicked the blade of his knife on his thumb, and said, “Mama, you don't lie still you gon be one great
big
scar.”

They unloaded her at the foot of a condemned high rise and dragged her upstairs to a room with broken windows. On a moldy mattress they took turns.

Her voice was matter-of-fact: “All I remember is their eyes. Bloodshot and dilated. Must have been on drugs. They kept up this patter: “Hey, hey, big mama, les you and me play.' The one with the knife kept flashing it around saying, ‘Gon carve me a big ole piece of this white man's meat.' And their cocks coming at me from every direction.

“I thought about you all, what you would have done.” She laughed. “I said I was a lesbian and please not to put me through any more. They giggled, and one said, ‘Hey mama, if you more of a man than us, les see your tool.' They pranced around comparing erections. ‘Poor ole Mama, she ain't got no tool, so how she gon fuck pussy?'

“Then I told them I was pregnant. They screamed with laughter: ‘You just said you was a mother-fucking bull dagger. Now you say you pregnant. We may be black, baby, but we ain't no
fools.
Then one took off my shirt and started handling my tits and saying, ‘All
right
, this here is one
big
mama.'

“I said, ‘Look, yes, you've been fucked over. You can't get jobs or money. But it's the white
man
who's running this show. White women are as much victims as you. We should be allies. Take it out on those fuckers, not on us.' ‘What she talking bout, man?' one asked another.”

Gail cried quietly. Kate clenched and unclenched her fists. Maria had a knuckle between her teeth. Emily made periodic attempts to relax her grinding molars.

“Honey, what happened to your mouth?” asked Sammie.

Susannah breathed deeply. “Well, they'd each had me a couple of times, front and back. I screamed a lot, but after a while I decided it was pointless. Anyway, they seemed to enjoy it. Then they decided I should blow them. I clamped my mouth shut, so they cut it open. Then they started knocking me around and I passed out. They dumped me in a vacant lot. When I came to, these two white teenagers were poking me with their tennis shoes. I said, ‘Help me please.' They looked at each other and grinned and unzipped their jeans and took their turns. After they'd left, some little kids saw me and went for the cops.”

The group sat silent for several minutes.

“You seem pretty together,” Lou finally said. “I'd be angry as hell.”

Susannah laughed. “Together? I'm just on Valium. When I pass a man in the street now, I start shaking so hard I have to sit down. I know only a tiny percentage of men have ever raped. But I can't even sleep in the same bed as John now.”

“You getting any help?” Kate asked.

“Yeah, my shrink has me exploring the body language I used to encourage them to pick me out of a whole streetful. When he found out about this group, he said I probably wanted to be raped in order to confirm my low opinion of men.” “Crap!” “Bullshit!” “That fucker!” they snarled.

Sammie gave them a nasty look. “I mean, Susannah child, I feel bad for you. But you got to look at it like this: You can't let yourself take it personal because those cats was driven to it….”

“I'm sick of all this liberal shit!” Emily found herself yelling.

“Yeah, you'd like to get out the bloodhounds, wouldn't you?” snapped Sammie.

“It's society's fault, it's the fault of Susannah's unconscious. Marx says this, Freud says that. Fuck it! It's the fault of five motherfucking dope heads with Swiss cheese for brains, who ought to be strung up!”

“Scratch any Southern white and you'll find a cracker,” drawled Lou.

“Fine,” growled Emily. “You all go right ahead and donate to charity. Give your cast-off clothes to the Salvation Army. Write your senator about job training programs.”

“Beats the hell out of a lynching,” suggested Lou.

“I'm not talking about lynchings. I'm talking about individual accountability. What about the men who grow up subjected to poverty and injustice and humiliation who
don't
rape? Are they just weak or cowardly or insensitive or what?”

“They don't need to rape,” explained Maria. “They got these cats keeping women down for them. Just like the Germans had their storm troopers, and the plantation owners had their overseers.”

Susannah sat silent. Suddenly they all felt ashamed, having shifted into theory so as to stave off their rage and grief. “I was victim number fourteen of those men in the van,” Susannah continued, “and the police actually caught one while they were picking up number fifteen. Shot him through the head while the other two drove off. John took me to the morgue to identify him. They rolled him out, and I looked at his face and the bullet hole in his forehead, and I …”—she began heaving and hiccoughing with sobs—”… and I was glad.
I was just so goddamn glad!”