Florence Gordon (23 page)

Lately Justin had been pressuring her to visit him again, and when she tried to put him off, he’d started to sound like he was disintegrating.

He was still sending her little videos of toys he’d made, robots and Jedi and goblins. But now the videos were sadder. The robots were frightened of the goblins; the Jedi were wandering lost in the dark.

He’d also started sending videos of himself. One of them was funny: Justin accompanying himself on the dulcimer, singing about how he missed her. One of them made her uncomfortable: Justin singing about how he couldn’t live without her. And one of them scared her: toy robots carrying razor blades, which were almost as big as they were, and advancing toward a sleeping Justin. She didn’t know anything about making videos, so she didn’t know how he managed to make it look so real.

At the end of the video, a robot pushed the tip of his blade against Justin’s neck, and a spot of blood emerged. Then the robot’s head swiveled toward the camera, and, in a deep, creepy, mechanical voice, he said, “If you don’t visit us soon, the kid gets it.”

Since when did boys cut themselves? She hadn’t thought that that was something boys
do
.

When she talked to him that night, he said it was just a joke, but it didn’t feel like a joke.

She knew she was in over her head, and she didn’t know what to do.

And on top of all this, her parents had gotten strange. It was the worst possible time for that to happen. She needed them to be solid right now.

She couldn’t figure out what was going on with them, and she didn’t want to try. She just wanted them to go back to normal.

So when she went to her grandmother’s on Saturday morning, she went there in a needy frame of mind. But all she really needed was for her grandmother to be herself. She didn’t want her grandmother to offer her any particular kindness. She didn’t want her grandmother to listen to her talk about her problems. All she wanted was her normal presence—acerbic, impatient, semi-annoyed.

When she got to Florence’s apartment, Florence was standing at the open door.

“What are you doing here?” Florence said, which made Emily happy.

“I’m going to the conference with you.”

“Since when?”

“Since forever. Since last week. We talked about this.”

“We did? Well, all right. Come in.”

Florence was moving slowly. She didn’t seem like herself.

Not you too.

“I need to get myself together,” Florence said, and went into her bedroom, and closed the door. When she emerged, she was Florence again, brittle and curt.

“Make yourself some of that weak tea you like,” Florence said. “I’ll be ready to go in a few minutes.”

“Don’t insult my tea,” Emily said, smiling.

Florence was a rock star. When they got to the Skirball Center, women kept coming up to her to tell her how much her work had meant to them. Florence responded graciously to all of them, which Emily found surprising. It was easier to imagine her grandmother barking at them all, telling them they were praising her for the wrong reasons.

The conference was a daylong event on the topic “The Women’s Movement: Then and Now.” There were many panels, half of which had titles Emily didn’t understand. “Different Shades of
Différence:
French Feminism(s) in the Era(s) of Post-Subalternity,” for example, was one she thought she could skip.

Florence was scheduled to give a lecture in the early afternoon. The last talk of the day was to be given by Martha Nussbaum, the philosopher who’d feted Florence in the
Times;
it was going to be about Florence’s contribution to feminist thought.

One of the organizers of the conference, a woman named Elba, came lumbering up and gave Florence a hug; Emily could see Florence backing away while Elba’s arms were still around her. Elba even hugged Emily, who wondered if someone watching them might find her to be backing away too. The three of them proceeded toward the part of the building where the morning panels were taking place, and Elba kept stopping to make introductions. At first it seemed as if everyone was equally excited to meet Florence, but little by little, Emily could see that it wasn’t so. The oldest and the youngest women seemed to regard Florence with something like awe, but Emily noticed one or two women in the middle generation who seemed blasé, even rude, when they were introduced to her.

Emily started to try to construct a theory out of this, but then, remembering a statistics class she’d had to take in high school, she reasoned that this was too small a sample size to justify a theory.

Emily heard Florence saying, “That’s too bad.”

“What’s too bad?” Emily said, after Florence rejoined her.

“Martha Nussbaum isn’t coming. Supposedly she has the flu.”

“Supposedly?”

“Well, you know. Martha Nussbaum. She must’ve had an idea for a new book while she was brushing her teeth. She’s putting the finishing touches on it now.”

Emily spaced out through the morning session. She attended two panels and didn’t take in a word. Instead, she was thinking about Justin. She was worried about him, and she was worried about herself.

There was a luncheon, during which many women competed for Florence’s attention.

At lunch, Elba leaned over toward Florence and said, “We’re in luck! You’ll never guess who we got to step in for Nussbaum.”

“Who?”

“Willa Ruth Stone.”

“Really?” Emily said.

“Who?” Florence said.

“She’s a famous blogger,” Emily said.

Florence raised an eyebrow at this, but didn’t say anything.

Emily had read Willa Ruth Stone all through high school, in places like
Jezebel
and
The Awl.
In the last year or two she’d gone on to other venues, and Emily had stopped following her work. She didn’t seem like the obvious person to give a talk here—she was sort of a snark artist—but if someone as hip as that was a fan of Florence’s, Florence was even more of a rock star than Emily had realized.

“She said she’s really excited,” Elba said. “She said she’s always wanted to get the chance to honor you.”

After lunch, Florence gave her talk: “Mary Datchet at Ninety,” a meditation on the state of feminism today in the light of its early-twentieth-century aspirations.

Florence read from her notes without looking up. Emily had seen her grandmother speak in public several times now, and this was the only performance she would have described as uninspired.

Emily recognized traces of some of the research she’d done: Florence quoted from the letters of Mary Gawthorpe to Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis—letters that Emily had copied out by hand, because the paper they’d been written on was now too fragile to be pressed against a photocopier. Emily kept wondering if Florence was going to mention her by name, and then kept telling herself that her wish to be acknowledged showed how childish she was. But that didn’t stop her from feeling disappointed when Florence finished without acknowledging her.

After the talk, there was more milling around, more sitting through panel discussions, more worrying about Justin, and then there was the last event of the day.

The auditorium was packed—entirely with women; Emily hadn’t seen more than a couple of men all day. Looking over the audience, Emily guessed that a lot of the women there had come just to hear Willa Ruth Stone. They looked stylish and fresh, not like people who’d been listening to lectures all day.

Amazing how fast word gets around. Emily had grown up in the age of social media, but it still felt amazing to her.

Elba reminded everyone that they’d rented a room in the Kronstadt Bar on Thompson Street, that it would be open as soon as the symposium ended, and that drinks would be half price. Then she made way for the keynote speaker.

Willa Ruth Stone was lithe, blond, beautiful—not movie-star beautiful, but beautiful for a writer. Everyone else who’d spoken that day had sat behind a microphone, but she had a wireless mike clipped to her shirt, so she could glide around the stage.

Florence was seated behind her. The lighting on the stage made her look ghostly.

The first twenty minutes of Willa’s talk was a sort of tour of the cultural landscape. After this part was finished, she turned and bowed to Florence, and then she turned back to the audience.

“It’s an honor to be here today to celebrate Florence Gordon, a woman I respect deeply,” Willa said. “Who could fail to respect Florence Gordon? Our lives would be inconceivable without her. She’s as indispensable as the Pill. She’s as indispensable as Tampax.”

Emily was shocked by this. It was disrespectful. It was vulgar. But no one else seemed shocked. It got a laugh.

She tried to read her grandmother’s reaction, but from this distance Florence was unreadable.

“When the women of the New Left were being exploited by their boyfriends, Florence Gordon was there, to blow the whistle on it. When the media was ignoring sex discrimination in the workplace, Florence Gordon was there, with eloquence and statistics, to prove that it was a national disgrace. When women’s studies and women’s history departments were being strangled in their cradles during the Reagan years, Florence Gordon was there to press our claims. Florence Gordon and her sisters created the world we’re living in today, and we thank them.”

Everyone applauded, and Florence nodded regally.

“But I know that Florence Gordon would want me to speak frankly today. To do anything less would be to fail to honor her. And, speaking frankly, we have to admit that for most of us here, Florence Gordon’s world is the world of our grandmothers. We love our grandmothers, and we’re thankful to them, but we don’t want to be them. When I look around this room, at the faces of the women of my generation, I see women who want to express all the different sides of themselves. There are times when we want to speak out against the injustices of the world. And there are times when we want to put on stilettos and a little black dress and find a party.

“When we do want to stage a protest, our grandmothers are right by our side. They’re proud of us. But when we go out to party, our grandmothers get very upset. They call to us from the doorway: ‘What are you partying for! Men are still oppressing us! Capitalism is still evil! The Republicans still want to repeal
Roe versus Wade
! You can’t go out and party! There’s work to be done!’

“And when we hear our grandmothers calling to us like this, we have to respond honestly. We have to say: Yes, and yes—but no. Yes, women are often still victimized. Yes, capitalism still leaves us in a world of risk and constant change. But no. We don’t identify this world as evil. Unlike you, we embrace the risk. Unlike you, we see this imperfect world not as a world of wall-to-wall oppression, but a world of opportunity. In today’s world, women are in the boardroom, asserting themselves; and women are in the bedroom, enjoying themselves. It’s not the black-and-white world that you saw. It’s a world with many colors, and some of them are amazing.

“Sometimes I think this intergenerational argument comes down to pleasure. Our grandmothers seemed to believe that pleasure is a sin. We believe we need pleasure, just like we need fresh air and clean water and light. They believed you can’t do good in the world if you keep stopping to refresh yourself; we believe you can’t do good in the world if you don’t.

“We honor you, Florence Gordon. We honor you and your generation. We wouldn’t be here if not for you. To you and your sisters, I say thank you. We’ve learned so much from you. And one of the things we’ve learned is strength of mind, the strength of mind that now gives us the courage to say that your way is not our way.

“And now, at the end of this glorious day of conferring and confabbing, I turn to my sisters, and I say (cover your ears, Florence): Bitches, let’s party!”

Willa Ruth Stone left the stage without so much as a glance at Florence. The applause didn’t diminish until she’d left the auditorium, surrounded by friends and admirers. Florence was left by herself on the back of the stage.

Florence looked unhappy, but above all she looked tired.

Almost everyone was leaving, but several older women were striding toward a microphone near the foot of the stage. One of them was Vanessa. She looked furious. She planted her feet in front of the microphone and started to speak, but the sound had already been cut. She kept speaking into it, for some reason, as if she didn’t realize that no one could hear.

The talk made Emily angry, not just because it was unkind, but because it was untrue. From all those weeks in the archives she knew that although many women in her movement had been puritanical, Florence and her friends had never been. They’d been cheerleaders for sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll; above all else, they’d been cheerleaders for freedom. Every kind of freedom, from radical democratic politics to radically unconventional living arrangements.

And none of this was a secret. All of it could be found in the pages of Florence’s first two books—essay collections from the seventies that were on sale in the lobby. “Against Propriety”; “Notes on What Just Happened”; “A Few Late Thoughts on Oscar Wilde”; “Opportunities for Heroism in Everyday Life”: in her best-known early essays she’d spelled out a vision of personal liberation that might look cheesy today but was nothing like the caricature that Willa Ruth Stone had sketched.

A published writer who’d given a talk without checking her facts. Who’d based her talk on ideas she thought clever, not ideas she knew to be true. Emily was young enough to be stunned by this.

Florence’s friends were surrounding her, making a lot of noise, as if to drown out the memory of what had just happened.

They all went to a restaurant across the street and commandeered a long table. Emily came with. Six of Florence’s friends were there, including Vanessa and Alexandra. All of them seemed to have known one another for many, many years.

They kept up a steady flow of talk. For a while they talked about the idiocy of Willa Ruth Stone and everything she stood for, and then they moved on to other things. They were outraged about some new threat to second-trimester abortion rights in New York; they were outraged about some new threat to affirmative action. They were outraged about the Tea Party; they were outraged about the Supreme Court. They were outraged about Obama’s lassitude in pushing his health-care agenda; they were outraged about Obama’s zealousness in prosecuting whistleblowers.