Her Mother's Daughter (114 page)

Besides that, you must be careful to end your book in time, before terrible new things occur. I think I will end this one here. It seems right.

DECEMBER
1, 1977. I've started a new book: Book Eight. I decided not to risk finishing the other one. Besides, it is time for a new book since I seem to have been given a second chance. It arrived last month, on my birthday, actually. This magazine called me, a feminist magazine called
Woman,
and asked me to fly to Houston to photograph the women's convention that was being held there. Because they called me so late, I figured I was their second or third choice, and considered standing on my pride and refusing. But I was feeling so low I thought it might do me good to get out of the house and shoot something that wasn't machinery for a change. And besides, even if I am not a member of any organization, I am certainly a feminist at heart. So I went.

It was spectacular. Partly it was a war, involving strategy, alignments, and regrouping. First A struggled against B, then when A was defeated it decamped; leaving B against C, then BC against D, while X waited over the next hill, preparing a massacre. Men are probably used to things like that, but women aren't. And partly, it was a religious ceremony.

The beginning was bad. A convention of furniture manufacturers, all men of course, had been meeting at the hotel where most of the women had reservations. When the men heard who was coming next, hundreds of them decided to keep their rooms an extra day. So when the women arrived, there were not enough vacant rooms for them. The hotel didn't want to offend the furniture manufacturers, who might want to return, whereas the women certainly wouldn't, so they were gentle with the men who were overstaying. The result was that for two days there were huge lines of women winding several times around the lobby, with their baggage heaped in the center.

This confusion was complicated by the fact that many of these women had never traveled far before and didn't understand the system. They were delegates elected by local women's organizations, and their way was being paid by government agencies. Many of them were poor, black, old, impaired, and/or did not possess credit cards. No
CREDIT CARDS!
How can you expect to stay in a hotel without a credit card? the hotel clerks gasped. The women intended to pay in cash. That was unheard of, put a crimp in the system, and took hours.

Most of the women found beds. Only a few slept in the lobby, curled around their bags on the cold marble floor. The rest doubled up with friends or strangers, or took cabs to seedy motels on the other side of town. No room lacked a crowd, women slept on the floor without complaint. And they all stayed up all night talking, laughing, sipping wine. The next day, the women were incredibly bouncy—proud of their resourcefulness, joyous at sharing and from their talk sessions—tired as they were, and even though most of them had once again to stand on the endless lines in the lobby. They didn't get angry, they coped.

“Typical,” Clara said dryly.

Dialogue overheard: Standing in an elevator crowded with furniture manufacturers and their wives—the men wearing name tags on their lapels. Tom Brokaw gets in. The men recognize him.

“Hey, Tom Brokaw, nice to see you.”

“Yeah, we watch you all the time.”

He nods, agreeably.

“You here for this bunch of broads?”

“I'm covering the women's convention, if that's what you mean.”

“Oh you poor guy!” Guffaws.

“I don't know why you say that, I'm finding it fascinating,” he says stiffly, and gets off at the next floor.

Silence.

What are they thinking?

Fascinating it is. Thousands of women from all over the country, all ages, colors, sizes, shapes, classes, together in as democratic a spirit as I have ever seen in a large group, mixing, merging, talking, laughing, arguing about points in the document they are about to vote on, a document answering the age-old question,
What do women want?
This will be sent to President Carter to help him in making policy; it will be a public document, so anyone who really wants to know what women want can find out just by reading it. The women believe, utterly, that what they do there matters, that it will inform government policy-making for the decade. They meet in caucuses, they argue, debate, weep, scream, fight each other, fall into each other's arms. They gather in the great hall, hushed, awed by their own participation in the democratic process. I am moved, watching them. They have so much energy, so much faith.

The two most debated points are abortion and lesbianism. The deck has been stacked by the right, which started early to form local organizations, so that as many delegations as possible be made up of religious women—Mormons, and those Catholics and Protestants who could be trusted to vote against these issues. Some of the delegates want to yield these points, fearing a walkout, a ruinous split in the convention; others accuse them of cowardice, of selling out. Passions simmer, rise, boil over. For the delegates it is a struggle between life and death, good and evil.

The antifeminist forces have massed themselves across town, at the Astrodome, where Phyllis Schlafly is a puppet for the men. Man after man—low-level politicians, military men, born-again homosexuals—strides up to the podium to shout horror of sex, abortion, sex, homosexuality, sex, the devil. Families have been bused in by their churches from all over the Southwest, from the West as far north as Utah, from the East as far as Georgia. They fill the Astrodome, they rise to their feet, stamping, cheering with ferocity. A woman alone, I feel frightened there, people are looking at me, where are my husband, my children? Why am I carrying a camera? Taking pictures? I am afraid they will mob me. I try to work my way out, slowly, no sudden moves or sharp gestures. But even as I walk safely, breathing slowly, deeply, down the last staircase, I hear their fervor. No positive chords here, no agenda for the future, only terror, knowledge of the anti-Christ. What constitutes life, the good, is not made explicit, perhaps it does not need to be spoken, presumably they all know, for they rise, thousands of them at once, screaming death to the devils on the other side of town.

Back to the Coliseum. Voting has begun. It is hard now to keep this hall in order. Calls for votes, gavel rapping, requests for silence, a chair who refuses to respond if she is addressed as “Madame Chairman,” insisting on “Chairwoman.” Women line up in front of microphones to speak for or against each issue.

The abortion problem has been eased by renaming it so it does not come up first in the alphabetized list of resolutions and split the convention on the very first vote. Now it is called Reproductive Freedom. The vote is for, the hall explodes, everyone looks around to see who will leave, and women do, rows of them, how many? Will this destroy the convention? It takes twenty minutes for things to settle down. About a hundred women have left, a handful in that hall, there is more cheering, silent sighs of relief.

The next stumbling block is Sexual Preference—lesbianism. The hall falls as still as such a hall can be. The arguments begin. Betty Friedan, who in the past, fearing loss of mainstream women, opposed it as a plank, gets up to urge it. The explosion cannot be contained, it goes on and on, the chairwoman cannot stop it, women are jumping on their seats, whistling through their fingers. The resolution in favor passes and thousands of balloons are released, thousands of voices raised in cheers, no one leaves this time, the convention as a body has chosen to be courageous, to risk opprobrium, to support all women, even those traitors to the system who do not desire men.

I am very busy. I shoot fifty rolls of film that afternoon. I would like to feel superior to what is going on; I know how the men I know would see it, I know their thinking: they admire men with power, and adopt the way those men think. They call it being realistic. I want to be realistic, which in this case means having contempt for the naïveté and simplicity of these women. But I can't. Something is blocking my “reason,” something odd is happening inside of me. It feels like an unborn baby turning itself completely over in my uterus, I am dizzy but I keep my hands steady, my eye focused. I go back to the hotel exhausted, eat a sandwich alone in my room, lie back on the bed still dizzy. There is a sharp pain low in my gut like a baby wanting to be born.

I think about my origins as a photographer and the hundreds of pictures I took of babies and their mothers, of women caught, trapped, bewildered by motherhood, impaled forever on their ambivalence—love and resentment in almost equal proportions. How I did that coolly, with the eye of an outsider, as if I weren't one of them, caught in the same knot. As if I were
objective.

And before that, when I was young, unmarried, a girl. I didn't want to be a woman, no, not at all. In the first place, I knew how men looked at women, talked about them, had contempt for them, preyed upon them. But more important, I didn't want a woman's life. And I tried not to have one, fool that I was, as if you could renounce your body, as if a woman who was drawn to men could escape. Even women not drawn to men can't escape—if you are a woman, you are treated like one. I had a woman's life in the end, no matter what Mother says.

I didn't want to be a woman because I didn't want to have a life like hers. I knew somehow, even very young, that lives like hers were built in for women, they had no choice about it. How old was I? when I set my teeth and swore to myself that I
would
have a choice, I would not live like her. I had watched too carefully her endless labor, the tedium of her days, the insufficiency for anyone's life of the tasks and worries that filled her days, day after day after day. Even her satisfactions—stretching a few dollars far enough to put good dinners on the table for her children and Ed, or to buy a cheap remnant of a good-quality fabric to make new dresses for the girls for the first day of school or a coat for Easter Sunday; or saving dimes and nickels for months to take them on a week's vacation in the Catskills (and it rains), to pay for a small present at Christmas—oh, the farmwoman's joy at half a cup of milk saved, an extra egg, to bake a cake for her child's birthday, all the scraping and worry, all the labor, the painstaking work done by hand, all the planning and foresight, so pathetic, it makes me even now want to scream, to hurl something across the room: it is unbearable!

I leap up and run to the toilet. I have diarrhea. My head aches. I walk back, drained, and fall onto the itchy bedspread.

Oh god my heart aches thinking about it, about her. When in her there was a mind that needed something other, a body that needed…something. How she suffered the pain of something thrusting, like grass, that has to be pressed back day by day. I remember. I did it too when I was first married, when the children were small. It makes you tired all the time—constantly pressing back tiny shoots of impulse and desire, fixing your face, guarding your gestures, so they don't show, so you won't recognize them.

I wanted to avoid that but I didn't. I just didn't suffer from it as long as my mother. Mommy. Oh, Mommy, I slipped and slid, I evaded, and in the end, I escaped. But into what? I spent ten years of my life in a man's world, meeting, speaking to, dealing with men only. The only women I met were girlfriends and secretaries. It was a rich time, I saw the world, I learned how to behave in it. I learned utter self-control—not to cry, not to lose my temper hotly, only coldly, not to show I was hurt, and in time, not to feel hurt, and in more time, not to feel anything. I learned to deal with the Orson Sonderses, the Woody Hedgecocks, the Russ Farrells of the world, with whom it is fatal to betray the slightest tremor of feeling. I mastered my feelings so completely that they disappeared and now I cannot find them myself.

I learned to function superbly in the system; I would never find myself ignorant and bewildered, humiliated, insulted, like the women who stood all night on a line in the hotel lobby, the women who were turned away. The knowledge made me firm and hard and I do not regret it. It also left me depleted, abject, alone….

I took my pleasure—warmth and closeness and fun—where I found it. I don't regret that either but it had a cost. After how many? countless men, some sweet, some sexy, some fun, but some who raked my soul like the young man, Michael his name was, strange I remember that name, a man I met in a small town in upstate New York when I was shooting Lake Erie for a story about pollution. He flirted with me all night, then after we'd made love, said, “How do you know I won't leave here and tell everybody about you?”

“What?”

“Sure. I mean, it's a coup for me, fucking the great Stacey Stevens. How do you know I won't tell the world?”

I looked at him in disbelief. Who was he, anyhow. “You won't,” I said. What was he telling me? that he had fucked me not out of desire but in order to score? Was he telling me he hated me? Hated women? Hated easy women? What was he? Oh, I didn't care what he was, I cared that he left me with a problem, because the next time, and the time after, ever after that I would wonder when a strange man flirted with me,
is he doing this because he desires me? or because he wants to brag about a coup?

Or the man I invited up for a drink, it wasn't late, I didn't want to go to bed, I was high after photographing all day, where was I? Bologna, I think. There was no bar in the place I was staying. And I gave him a drink and we talked and I realized I didn't like him and I said I was tired and asked him to leave and he wouldn't. He said my inviting him for a drink was tantamount to inviting him to bed, and he wasn't going to put up with my being a cock-tease. He was six feet five and weighed over two hundred pounds, and he stood, head down like an animal, threatening me. I put on the cold contemptuous act, and bullied him into leaving, but the memory of him didn't leave me.

Or the contained young Swiss, very stiff and formal when I met him, the representative of a company whose works I was shooting, who after dinner got a little high and stumbled speaking English and became charming, mixing German and English without realizing it, became funny, so I took him home with me. Who after we'd made love, sat up stiffly, suddenly, and announced in perfect English that he was married and expected me not to make trouble for him. Or the sweet Norwegian, who ran out the next day to buy me a piece of jewelry, as if I expected payment for my services.