Riding Fury Home (21 page)

After dinner, I smoked a joint. The fog was just rolling over the hill in the last of the light; a few advancing white tendrils fingered their way into the meadow. In the twilight, shadows deepened and the bushes seemed to hunch, taking on ominous shapes. The wind picked up, and something moving caught the corner of my eye.
Christ!
I'd swear I saw a wolf lurking in the bushes.
Don't be absurd,
I told myself ,
the pot is making you paranoid! There are no wolves in California. Or are there?
I found myself creeping up to the bush in question, to reassure myself there was nothing there. Finally, I dove for the tent, seeking the enclosed space. Several times in the night, I woke with a start, alert from a cracking twig or wind whipping the tent flap, but then sleep would pull me back to the kaleidoscope of dreams.

On the fourth day, Kate returned. She arrived in the afternoon and found me sitting on the metal cooler, writing in my journal. We grinned wildly at each other. I closed my journal; we grabbed each other and kissed. How I had missed her, and now it felt good to have had enough separation to miss her. She seemed similarly renewed: more settled in herself, less tense and irritable, her love for me flowing again.

We spent two days on the land, telling each other of our experiences apart, making love, hiking in the woods and to the beach. After that, we hitched to the city to resume our political meetings and city life—dancing in lesbian bars, visiting with friends. For three weeks, we alternated three or four days in the city with the same on the land.

One day, just as we returned to the country, Frances's white Dodge Dart pulled around the bend and into the meadow, a dust trail pluming out behind it. She leaned her head out the window, not bothering to say hello. “The sheriff came by my place yesterday,” she told us. “Asked if you had permission to be on my land. After I said, ‘Yes, absolutely,' he told me no one had seen you two around for a while, so they got worried you were lost in the woods. So, he and a deputy came up to the land looking for you. I told him it was ridiculous that you were lost—where was there to go? Surely you had just gone to the city. And Karen, he said that he'd taken your wallet for identification purposes.”

My mouth was open, stupefied. I reached in my pocket and felt the soft leather of my billfold, “That can't be because I have my wallet in my pocket. Wait, let me look in the tent.” I ran to the tent and ducked inside. While we'd been gone in the city, they'd come and gone through my things. The clothes I'd left folded in a corner had been tossed around and lay in haphazard piles. Where was my
journal? I tore through everything, searching, muttering, “God, it's not here, it's not here!” Dread was closing in on me. My journal was gone. And so was my address book.

All we wanted to do was to get away, get the hell out of there. Luckily, we'd been all out of pot, so there was nothing they could arrest us for, but that didn't quell our alarm. Frances offered to drive us back to San Francisco. We stuffed our packs with our clothes and took down the tent. On the drive to the city, Frances told us more. The sheriff and his deputy hadn't just come by themselves. They had brought two bloodhounds, search-and-rescue dogs, to sniff through our belongings.

I thought about the things I had written in my journal: sexual experiences with men, an acid trip, my evolving leftist and feminist consciousness, coming out with Kate—all my most private inner ramblings. All now being read by the Inverness police. I could imagine them smirking, reading parts out loud to each other, “Hey, listen to this . . . ”

By now, my journal had probably been xeroxed and sent to FBI headquarters. It must have been the feds who had alerted the local sheriff to keep an eye on us. I figured it had all started with Bill. We must have been on a list ever since he had spied on us. And the jogger—was he one of them keeping tabs on us? It had been odd how he'd come by every day. I thought about Bill's scanning Donna's membership rolls, and it hit me: The Inverness police probably took my address book for the same reason, and now were comparing the names in my journal with names and phone numbers in my address book. I shuddered, horrified that I'd endangered others. That day, the budding writer in me got asphyxiated.

Later that week, when Frances went to the sheriff's office to retrieve my things, he changed his story. As the sheriff handed her
my journal and address book, he laughed and said, “Oh, I saw them hitching out of town.” He didn't seem worried that Frances would realize his previous story about our being lost in the woods was just a ruse. He knew there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it.

KATE AND I WERE ATTACKING the rusted iron bed frame with our paintbrushes. Bright blue paint spattered everywhere—on our clothes, on the parking lot gravel, and on our new puppy, Emma, who kept bringing us a stick to throw. We'd dragged the frame outside our one-room cabin into the parking area that ran along the row of Russian River cabins. Our new home, Pocket Canyon Cabins, was a group of flimsy wooden structures originally intended for summer vacationers from San Francisco. But the resort area's heyday had waned, and the cabins were now rented year-round to locals.

Even in its prime, the resort must have been a second-rate affair. Six one-room cabins, painted a stomach-wrenching mustard yellow, sat on the gravel lot cleared of all but a few redwoods. We'd spotted the cabins on our exploratory mission, when we'd driven up from the city in the used Datsun station wagon we'd bought.

The landlady, a stout woman in her fifties, had looked us over and asked, “Are you girls students?” When we said yes, we'd be going to SRJC in September, she nodded, brought us into the office,
and pushed a rental agreement across the counter. “Okay, then. We don't allow any trash here. We run a respectable place.” I wondered whether a couple of pot-smoking, radical lesbians fit her definition of trash. But we were getting desperate, so we both smiled politely and signed the papers.

Our new life: just the two of us, feeling lost and adrift, playing house. I worried about how we might be treated, knowing as I did how being “different” in a small town can be met with bigotry. Kate and I agreed to be in the closet unless we got a feel that someone was tolerant. Yet, strangely, we didn't think we were being obvious, painting the frame of our shared bed out in the middle of the yard for all to see. Later, when we became friendly with Valerie, she said our bed painting had clinched it among the cabin dwellers' gossip—they all knew we were gay. And according to Valerie, no one seemed to care.

 

 

IT WAS IFFY HOW WE WERE going to manage to pay the bills. In San Francisco, we'd gotten by on short-term odd jobs, food stamps, and savings. Now, Kate and I came up with a financial plan: keep getting food stamps, keep living as cheaply as possible, and beg our fathers for help.

How we were going to support ourselves long-term was a blurry unknown. Coming out as a lesbian had a disturbing consequence: It meant I could never rely on a man to support me, although our fathers were standing in for now. As independent and liberated as I felt myself to be, I'd grown up with the '50s paradigm that husbands support wives, and since I'd dropped out of school, I had no degree or training or any sense of a career path to sustain myself.

My school plan wasn't exactly academic. I wanted to explore art, and signed up at the free junior college for photography, pottery, and
life drawing. Kate asked her dad for his old 35 mm Leica camera, using the lie that she was the one taking the photography class.

The shape of our lives changed. No more meetings of Radicalesbians, collective house dinners, or consciousness-raising groups. Kate and I drove together four days a week on the half-hour trip to Santa Rosa Junior College. On campus, we parted, heading to our separate classes. She was taking several English lit and composition classes in her quest to be a writer, while I was happy leaning into the clay on the potter's wheel, sketching nude models, watching the black-and-white images appear in the chemical tray in the red light of the darkroom.

Even though no one was hostile to us, I never felt at home at Pocket Canyon Cabins. In the pressure cooker of the tiny cabin, tension simmered between us. When Kate was mad, she became silent and withdrew. But there was nowhere to withdraw to, so she would immerse herself in an activity, ignoring me. This drove me wild. The more closed down and unexpressive she became, the more frantic and demanding I found myself.

 

 

ONE NIGHT, KATE WAS sitting on the floor, leaning back against the side of our bed while sewing a pant hem, not uttering a word. I could feel her anger—or was it mine? I went over to her and squatted, facing her. “Kate, what's going on?! What's wrong?!”

“Nothing. Nothing's going on.” She didn't look at me, kept her head down, the needle moving in and out of the pant leg.

I reached for her, wanting to shake her out of her coldness, but instead of grabbing her, I pricked my finger on the needle. “Shit!” I was hopping around the little open space next to our bed, wagging my hand, feeling like a fool. But I couldn't stop myself. “Don't
give me that cold-shoulder crap,” I yelled. “Kate, I know you're upset about something!”

I stopped hopping and stared at Kate. Her small green eyes were narrowed beneath her tightly furrowed brow. Not a peep from her. She set the needle in the pincushion, folded the pants, put them next to her on the floor, and reached for a huge tome,
The Golden Notebook,
which she had planted on her other side.
Unbelievable!
There she sat, coolly skimming the pages.
She can't really be seeing the words, can she?
I grabbed the book and flung it across the room. “Stop it! Talk to me!”

Kate disappeared into the bathroom. She came out in her nightgown. “I'm going to bed,” she told me. And she climbed into our bed, pulled up the covers, and became a silent lump.

Burning with fury, I grabbed my jacket and went out into the night, Emma at my heels. My breath came short and shallow in the cold air. I wanted to murder Kate. Yet the quiet, the glittering stars, the pine smell held me as my breath slowed. I bent over and petted Emma, stroking her long, soft fur as she leaned into me. I sighed and straightened up. “Come on, girl, let's go.” I turned back, heading for bed.

In the spring, Kate and I enrolled in a women's jujitsu class on campus. We began to make some friends among our classmates, which eased the tension between us. Our teacher was a cop, and ran the class in a militaristic fashion. He had us do sit-ups and push-ups while yelling, “Come on, you sissies!” at our weak-armed, wobbly push-ups. Yet there was something amazing about facing the lineup of the entire class, grabbing the lapels of the white
gi
of the woman facing you, swiveling around to spoon into her while thrusting your hip just so, and flinging her over your shoulder, until you had thrown twenty women as if they were lightly stuffed duffel bags.
To
be
thrown was to feel your body fly in the air, to land with a resounding
smack
of your arm against the mat, body rolling with the momentum, not fighting it, and to rise to your feet in the exhilaration of being completely uninjured!

 

 

WHEN MY FATHER ANNOUNCED in early May that he was coming for a visit, my first thought was
He's gonna know.
I hadn't officially come out to him, although I figured that after our earlier, “I hope this phase won't last too long” conversation, he had his suspicions. I knew his first look at our one-room cabin with its double bed taking up most of the space, would settle any doubts he had.

I was determined to tell him on our drive north from the San Francisco airport. As I drove, my throat felt jammed and each choked minute ticked against my nerves. By the time I turned off the freeway in Santa Rosa ninety minutes later, I was still voiceless. When we entered the redwoods, Dad beat me to it, as I was focused on rounding a curve. “Ah, what sort of . . . ” He paused, cleared his throat. “
Hrrrum
, what sort of relationship do you and Kate have?”

We now had a used VW van, since our Datsun had died. The boxy vans are lousy curve huggers, so we careened a bit rounding the bend. “If you mean are we lovers, the answer is yes.” The edge in my voice startled me. My assertion came out more defiantly than I'd intended.

I glanced over at Dad. He had his face in his hands and was crying. I pulled over onto the weedy shoulder and shut off the engine. Silence. As a child, I'd seen my father cry before, often rushing to comfort him—“It's okay, Daddy, it's okay”—but now his crying made me angry. It felt like I had spent a lifetime feeling sorry for my father.

He lifted his face up, took a handkerchief from his back pocket, and blew his nose. “When your mother . . . ” he began, faltered, tried again. “ . . . Early in our marriage, your mother was involved with another woman . . . ”

“With
Marian,
you mean,” I interjected vehemently. I wanted him to know my mother had told me first. That I understood the story differently now. My mother had not been some pitiful, mysteriously depressed woman, but a woman with a grief-filled heart, a lesbian trapped in a marriage, a woman electroshocked and drugged and therapized by a homophobic psychiatric system.

“Well, I just knew something had happened between her and another woman. It wasn't until some years later that I found out it was Marian,” Dad said.

My father, the scientist. He could be so literal at times, missing the point I was trying to make, the emotional implications. I couldn't find my breath.

“But what I'm trying to say,” Dad continued, “is you have to understand: When I found out your mother was a lesbian, I thought about leaving her. But then I realized if she had tuberculosis, I wouldn't leave her, so I'd stay with her through this disease, too. That's how we thought of it then—as an illness. So, it's going to take me some time with you.”