Rubyfruit Jungle (25 page)

I turned and nodded that I would. I couldn’t speak. The taxi pulled away and Carrie was leaning against the faded pink wall waving goodbye. I waved back.

Carrie, Carrie whose politics are to the right of Genghis Khan. Who believes that if the good Lord wanted us to live together he’d have made us all one color. Who believes a woman is only as good as the man she’s with. And I love her. Even when I hated her, I loved her. Maybe all kids love their mothers, and she’s the only mother I’ve ever known. Or maybe underneath her crabshell of prejudice and fear there’s a human being that’s loving. I don’t know but either way I love her.

Professor Walgren’s scrotum shriveled when I walked back in with the equipment. He raved on about how irresponsible I was to go off with all that hardware when other people needed to use it. He threatened to revoke my scholarships but had to back off from that idea since it was my last semester and the semester was nearly over. He sputtered, fumed, blew his nose, and eventually shut up.

Project night was a big event. All the other students had their “chicks” with them vying for who was best dressed in the downwardly-mobile category. They introduced their dates as “my chick” or “my old lady.” I came by myself. It freaked them out that I didn’t swish in with some bearded number sporting a tie-dyed tee shirt. And the projects began. The one that drew the most applause was a gang rape on an imaginary
Martian landscape with half the cast dressed as Martians, the other half, as humans. All the men mumbled about what a profound racial statement it was. The “chicks” gasped.

My film was last on the list and by the time we got to it some of the audience had already left. There was Carrie speeding away in her rocking chair looking straight at the camera and being herself. No quick cuts to steals from Kenneth Anger, no tinfoil balls dropping out of the sky to represent nuclear hail—just Carrie talking about her life, the world today, and the price of meat. I had edited it as best I could. It fluttered here and there but it was twenty minutes of her life, her life as she saw it and relived it for the camera. The last thing she said in the film was, “I’m gonna turn this house into a big gingerbread cake with icing on the corners. Then when those goddamn bill collectors come after me I just tell ’em to break off a piece of the house and leave me alone. In time they eat the whole house,” she chuckled, “then I’ll be sittin’ out in the sunshine that the good Lord made. I’ll be out in the lilies of the field that’s richer than all King Solomon’s gold. That ain’t a bad way to die when yer as old as I am.” She laughed a strong, certain laugh and as that laugh died so did the light.

No one clapped. No one made a sound. I began rewinding the film and they filed out by the projection table. I looked at these cohorts of mine through the last years and not one of them could look me in the face. They walked out of the room silently and the last one to go was Professor Walgren. He stopped at the door, turned to say something, thought the better of it; his eyes on the
floor, he slowly shut the door so that it didn’t make a sound.

I graduated
summa cum laude
and Phi Beta Kappa. I didn’t go to the ceremony, they sent me my diploma in the mail. I didn’t go back to the department to lord it over the undergraduates. After my showing I took my cans of film plus the Arriflex as reparations and tried to get a job. M-G-M asked me to start as a secretary. Warner Brothers Seven Arts was interested in my publishing skills and offered me one fifty a week to start if I’d work grinding out PR for their latest releases. My technical skills were very impressive to them. They were sure it would help when I wrote press copy for their latest Warren Beatty flick.

The underground filmmakers were more direct. One famous man asked me if I’d consider dressing as a hermaphrodite for his next film. He adored my face and thought I’d be too, too divine as the boy-girl, girl-boy in his next naked take-off of Shakespeare. Said he’d make me a star. Young and Rubicam told me that I’d have to start as a secretary but in a few years I’d get to shoot commercials. Wells, Rich, Green told me the same thing, but they offered me more money and a better office. The guy who made the Martian rape went right into CBS as an assistant director for a children’s program. CBS was full up, they told me.

No, I wasn’t surprised, but it still brought me down. I kept hoping against hope that I’d be the bright exception, the talented token that smashed sex and class barriers. Hurrah for her. After all, I was the best in my class, didn’t that count for something? I spent those bitter days (after
squandering my lunch hour on job interviews) sitting in the office while Stella came in with story after story of Mr. Cohen’s prostate problems, bitter days while I edited the
Compendium of Crafts
and thought I’d fracture along with the fifteen easy steps to facet glass. My bitterness was reflected in the news, full of stories about people my own age raging down the streets in protest. But somehow I knew my rage wasn’t their rage and they’d have run me out of their movement for being a lesbian anyway. I read somewhere too that women’s groups were starting but they’d trash me just the same. What the hell. I wished I could be that frog back at Ep’s old pond. I wished I could get up in the morning and look at the day the way I used to when I was a child. I wished I could walk down the streets and not hear those constant, abrasive sounds from the mouths of the opposite sex. Damn, I wished the world would let me be myself. But I knew better on all counts. I wish I could make my films. That wish I can work for. One way or another I’ll make those movies and I don’t feel like having to fight until I’m fifty. But if it does take that long then watch out world because I’m going to be the hottest fifty-year-old this side of the Mississippi.

Thank you to Charlotte Bunch for helping me win one year’s fellowship at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. The job allowed me the time to write this book. Thank you to Frances Chapman and Onka Dekkers who read an unpunctuated mess and untangled it. And thank you to Tasha Burd for sticking it out with me when I was alone.

Rita Mae Brown is the bestselling author of
Rubyfruit Jungle
,
In Her Day
,
Six of One
,
Southern Discomfort
,
Sudden Death
,
High Hearts
,
Bingo
,
Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers’ Manual
,
Venus Envy
,
Dolley: A Novel of Dolley Madison in Love and War
,
Riding Shotgun
,
Rita Will: Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser
,
Loose Lips
,
Outfoxed
,
Hotspur
, and
Full Cry
. An Emmy-nominated screenwriter and a poet, she lives in Afton, Virginia.