Riding Fury Home (30 page)

In the realm of career, I was lost. Producing the radio show involved lots of work—hours of absorbing, exciting work—but no pay. Since I'd dropped out of Grinnell in 1970, I'd spent seven years scraping along in my counterculture lifestyle with odd jobs and occasional help from one or the other parent. I had worked as a telephone operator and an assistant chef, stuffed envelopes in an art museum, done housecleaning and childcare, been hired to promote a self-published book I didn't like, run an office coffee shop, sold filigree jewelry on the street outside Macy's, and flipped hamburgers. I was currently working overnight shifts in a battered-women's shelter, where I watched the women come in with their children in tow, hauling their own beleaguered bodies as well.

The classes I'd been taking for several years at Laney junior college were getting me nowhere. My father had called me a dilettante, and though I had protested, I feared he was right.

I was elated to get the KPFA production job, and I plunged full-time into a world of progressive media. My world had been a world of lesbians, but now I was working with a great diversity of men and women: musicians, political activists and analysts, writers, actors, and community groups.

The bulk of my time was spent in the control room of the recording studio, with its four-track reel-to-reel Ampex machines, equalizers, turntables, cassettes, mixing board, and adjacent studio large enough to mike a band. We did both live music broadcasts and recorded sessions with musicians, taped interviews, and mixed radio shows. KPFA was that rare place in the media that was a home to the Left, and its luminaries lumbered up the stairs to our second-floor offices: Angela Davis, Malvina Reynolds, Joan Baez, and many others. Enthralled, I recorded them or acted as their live on-air engineer. But shyness made me hold back; I did my job, but hardly introduced myself. And among my coworkers, I stayed withdrawn. I didn't socialize or share much about myself.

One weekend, I was invited by two women who produced
Living on Indian Time
to go with them to a Native American powwow. I had been Barbara and Pamela's on-air control board operator for several months. Before the show, we'd gab a bit, but it was mostly idle chatter, so I was surprised and touched when they invited me. On the drive home on Sunday, we were in the midst of telling each other stories from our lives, when Barbara said to me, “Chana, you don't have to make yourself such an outsider.”

I was offended. What did she, a straight woman, know about being a lesbian? How on the outside of society we were! Then I felt embarrassed: What had she seen, how had I acted, that had revealed how withdrawn I could be? Within my indignation, some part of me knew she'd touched on something, but I couldn't yet see that I was living as if I carried Millstone with me, as if I was still the girl with the crazy mom, the Jew amid the descendents of the Dutch Reformed, marking me forever as an outsider.

But then the irony hit me: Here was an urban Indian, someone from the most marginalized and oppressed group in the country, as
outsider as you can get, telling me not to be an outsider. Her words lodged in me, buried a glimmer of hope that there might be more of a place for me, if only I would let myself have it.

 

 

I HAD MY DREAM JOB, but discontent rumbled in me, and I was becoming more and more irritable. I was assisting everyone else with their radio projects, but not doing creative work of my own. I'd given up producing
Radio Free Lesbian,
in part because of the demands of the job, in part because it was a relief to let go of something with such painful associations.

One day I was given a shift as control-board operator for a brand-new music program. This meant I would be the technical disc jockey, spinning the records selected by the host while she introduced them. But when showtime arrived, the host hadn't appeared. I played some public service announcements to kill time, then threw on a record and ran to the record library, furiously grabbed an assortment, and raced back to the on-air room. The programmer never arrived, and I winged the show. The next week, the same thing happened, but this time I had prepared my backup show. Listeners called the station: great new show!

As a result, the program director asked me to take on being host of the show. That was the beginning of the program I named
A World Wind
. At first, it was exclusively a music show, featuring recordings from around the world, with an emphasis on female musicians. Over time, I expanded the program to include women guests reading poetry and prose, and interviews with local and international women artists, musicians, and activists.

During the six years I hosted
A World Wind,
my sense of myself shifted. Good interviews require engagement, curiosity, and a
willingness to have empathy. I discovered an aptitude for listening, for drawing people out. Letters arrived at the station, thanking me for this show or that, for something that touched someone. I gained confidence. I was still shy, but not so guarded. Some part of me always felt like an outsider, but over time there were moments where it felt as if the world had opened to me, widened to include me more.

 

 

IN 1973, ABOUT the same time I started with the
Lesbian Air
radio collective, Gloria began volunteering as a peer counselor at Identity House, located in a church basement not far from her Greenwich Village apartment. Identity House was founded in 1971—two years after the Stonewall riots—with the radical idea of gay people offering support and affirmative counseling to other gay people.

From across the continent, I imagined a young woman approaching the door to Identity House's basement office, and hesitating. Dare she go in? Inside, in a tiny room, two dilapidated padded armchairs face each other. The door opens, and Gloria is bringing in the young woman. They sit opposite each other, and my mother encourages the young woman to speak. My mother's face is soft and welcoming; she understands how much fear there can be in exploring sexual identity. She listens intently. There is such triumph in her helping other gay people, supporting them so they will never have to endure the psychiatric horrors she had survived.

Each of us, my mother and I, was in therapy, but not the old Freudian, hierarchical style. I was seeing a feminist therapist. Gloria was seeing a Gestalt therapist, participating in a group doing primal therapy, and went on weeklong encounter groups at the Jersey shore.

At Identity House, she began training as a Gestalt therapist. She wrote me that she was coleading groups, as well as counseling clients one on one. Once, she called me, almost breathless. “I met Laura Perls at this meeting of therapists. People think it's just Fritz Perls, but they
cocreated
Gestalt. She asked if I'd like to be in her advanced training group. My God, the mother of Gestalt therapy is asking
me!
”

I'd never heard her so happy.

GLORIA AND I ARRIVED AT Kennedy International in the thick of New York's summer humidity, already stinking with sweat, and dragged our bags into the muggy airport,whose air-conditioning had been shut off in one of the metropolitan area's energy brownouts. But we were both too excited to be bothered much: We were embarking on a monthlong trip to Israel, our first adventure in a foreign land.

In the El Al terminal, we took the escalator up to the departures level, and as we rose we were greeted by a huge silver Jewish star. My eyes teared up at the sight. I was slightly embarrassed—I was by far no Zionist, and such a reaction seemed corny. And yet the star felt like a marker for the trip, for some longing to experience a place where, for the first time in my life, I would not be a minority, at least as a Jew.

My friend Eliana, an American Jew who had lived for years in Israel, had encouraged this visit, saying she could connect us with plenty of Israeli feminists who would give us an insider experience.
We were planning a big trip to mark transitions for both of us: By the upcoming summer, Gloria would have completed her master's in social work, and I would be at the end of the two-year grant that had funded my job at KPFA.

At the gate, we were surrounded by Jews of all sorts: Israelis returning home, speaking to each other emphatically in Hebrew, American Jewish tourists, Hasidic men in their long black wool coats and hats, even though it was broiling hot. Looking over at a group of Hasids, Gloria muttered, “Patriarchal bastards!”

Before we could board the plane, a uniformed security agent took us together into an enclosed booth. He stared at our tickets and then asked a long list of questions, beginning with the inevitable “Were you given any packages on the way to the airport?” and ending with “Are you Jewish?” When we nodded yes, he let us go.
What if we weren't Jewish?
I wondered
, What then—a body search?

It was evening when we landed. We took the bus into Tel Aviv in a jet-lagged daze, past concrete apartment buildings with solar panels on their roofs. We registered at our hotel, dropped off our luggage, and staggered out to a restaurant.

I stared at the menu, not knowing what to ask for. My stomach clenched with anxiety at feeling not in control. I looked up at my mother, head down in her menu. “Glor, would you make up your goddamn mind; otherwise we'll be here all night!” She didn't defend herself, and that made me even crabbier. I was embarrassed that I had regressed into a ten-year-old brat who was yelling at her mother for no good reason. But I couldn't stop myself.

The next morning, we went downstairs in the hotel to an Israeli breakfast buffet, a spread of olives, tomatoes, yogurt, hard-boiled eggs, herring, challah, and fruit. When Gloria finished eating, she got herself more coffee, returned to our table, lit up a cigarette, and
inhaled deeply. I had hated her chain-smoking my whole life. I hated the smell, and the way the smoke choked me.

A waiter rushed over to our table and exclaimed, “No smoking in public on Shabbat!” Gloria rolled her eyes at me, smashed out the cigarette, and muttered, “You finish eating. I'll take my coffee to the room.”

Before leaving, she breezed by the buffet table, grabbed some hard-boiled eggs, and wrapped them in a napkin—provisions for our lunch. The same waiter intercepted her and yelled, “All food must be eaten here! You
cannot
take food!” Other patrons turned their heads to stare. Mortified, I wanted to sink under the table. My skin flared, hot and burning, as the old shame of my mom swept over my body, so familiar.

Later that day, back in our hotel room after we ventured to the beach, I complained, “I
hate
Tel Aviv! It's ugly! It's so hot! So muggy! And crowded! Jeez, the rest of Israel better not be like this!”

My mother soothed, “It'll be all right, sweetheart, you'll see. Let's make our calls so we can move on.”

We called the women on our list, the friends of friends we had sent notes to in advance, hoping to be invited to stay, although no one had answered. Our primary contact, Sonia in Haifa, offered to rent us her ex-husband's apartment on the cheap, but it wouldn't be available for a few days yet. In the meantime, we discovered there were campgrounds throughout Israel that had cabins with cots, but only one had any openings.

Gloria and I arrived at Camp Lehman, just a few miles from the border of Lebanon, in the afternoon, patting ourselves on the back that we had navigated the local buses. The farther north we went, the more soldiers got on the bus, wearing their army green uniforms and berets, Uzi submachine guns slung over their shoulders.

We ate at the campground restaurant, a screened-in bare-bones room. Schnitzel again. How sick I was already becoming of this bland, breaded, overcooked chicken. As we left, Gloria “borrowed” two glasses from the table by sticking them in her purse. There were none in our cabin, since most Israelis arrived at camp in cars loaded with food, plates, and utensils. As we sauntered away, we were followed outside by the mâitre d', who yelled at us in Hebrew. We kept walking, as if deaf. Then he repeated, even louder, in French, “
Madame! Ou sont les tasses d'eau?
”

Once again, I was mortified by my mother. Shame overshadowed my pleasure that he took us for French, not Americans. Our pursuer was now right next to my mother, holding out his hand. She turned around, faced him, and emptied her purse of the glasses, which he reached for as he glowered at us.

As we made our way back to our little wood bungalow, neither of us said a word about the incident. The heat had drained us. We rested on our canvas cots, each glued to our paperback. A tense, resigned silence vibrated in the tiny space between our cots. During the night, we heard the
boom
of gunfire in the distance.

 

 

THE SHRILL RING OF the phone startled me awake. It was early morning, and as I sat up in bed, it took me a moment to orient:
Haifa, I'm in Haifa
. After I hung up, my mother called out, “Who is it?”

“Just someone calling Sonia's ex.”

Neither of us could get back to sleep. Instead, we lounged together in my mother's bed. She told me about a new therapy group she was in that was an experiential training group. “The group lets the person express her upset, grief, and anger as the group witnesses it.” She gave me an example, “Like for me with your grandma,” she
said. “You know how cold she can be. Always complaining about Grandpa. She never even held or kissed me. She made me feel so unlovable.”

Anger rose in my throat and was held there, suspended. The feeling was the knot of taboo. I was now sharply, fully awake. I sat up in the bed. I hesitated, then I croaked, “Um . . . Mom . . . ” the anger clotting my throat. “Look, Glor, I've got anger, too, anger toward you from childhood.”

Here we were, perched on the Haifa hillside, and I could not look at her. And then I did. She had sat up and turned toward me. Her soft face greeted me, her skin browned from the sun, her silver hair curling over her forehead. “Yes?” she encouraged.