Rebels in White Gloves (50 page)

After three years of estrangement, Nancy also reconciled with her mother. When Peter won the lead in his high school production of
Bye Bye Birdie
, his grandmother very much wanted to come. “The women in her book group said, ‘You go home and call Nancy and tell her you’re coming to this play or you’re not welcome in this group anymore.’ They knew that the connection between a mother and daughter was more important than anything. She did it, and agreed to have lunch with me and Susan. I didn’t push her to stay at our house. But that was the beginning of the change.”

Nancy’s father died soon thereafter and Nancy went to stay with her mother for the first time since her marriage’s end. “We did everything that needed to be done. And we went together to see his body, which she wouldn’t have done alone. She told me a few months later that she felt like a dog who had spent its whole life in a fenced yard; she said, ‘Now
the gate is open and I’m scared to walk through.’ My father was a disappointment to her in many ways, but her mother had told her that she should not expect to come home if her marriage didn’t work out. My dad died with my mom still frustrated in her effort to get him to say ‘I love you.’ He was always paternalistic: ‘We don’t need any more dessert, Marge; we don’t need more talking.’ She’s enthusiastic, large-spirited; his job was to squelch those enthusiasms. When I told her I was going to law school, she asked, ‘Did you get your husband’s permission?’ I was enraged that she thought I needed to, but the fact is I did get his permission. I wasn’t so very different. I never would have thought I needed assertiveness training, but when I reflect on it, I wasn’t assertive at any critical juncture. We did
Father Knows Best
. But ultimately I made the decision not to be defined by my husband.”

Marge Wanderer explained the break with her daughter to
Frontline:
“We couldn’t understand it, we didn’t want to understand it, because it was just something that we just didn’t want. And so we didn’t go into it. It wasn’t so much what I thought, it’s what I thought that other people would think. But I don’t think I realized, I know I never realized, what it is to walk away from a child that you’ve had, and it took me a while, but I couldn’t walk away, and I think when I came back, I came back as a better mother. Her father never came back.”

Nancy: “She knows she has some finite number of years left, and wants to get the most out of them and doesn’t want to do that without me, and of course that means me and Susan also. I think we’ve got it now. I don’t think anything like this will ever happen again.”

Still, Marge keeps parts of the story at bay. “My mother likes Susan,” says Nancy, “because she fixes everything in her house, and she can certainly see how much happier I am. We visit her together. It’s absolutely clear what our relationship is. But people can take in just as much as they can take in. Right after my twenty-fifth Wellesley reunion, she said, ‘You’re a feminist, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ Then she said, ‘But you’re not a lesbian, are you?’ and I said, ‘Mom we’ve been through this. What do you think those three years were about?’ ”

Nancy’s brother, a retired career navy officer as conservative as her father, was initially unhappy about the radical change in his sister’s life. His wife, Nancy’s Wellesley classmate Kate Harding, had to serve as a bridge between the siblings. So did Andrew, who has been well looked
after by his uncle since moving to D.C. Relations with Thomas are also now “cordial,” Nancy says, “thanks to my mother paying half the kids’ college costs. Once money was not an issue, I was able to let go of my anger. I think he’s furious at me, and I don’t think he’s begun to touch it because he’s so controlled, but he did tell my mother he believed Susan was the love of my life. And after the
Frontline
thing, his mom wrote me to say that she was beginning to understand that the marriage wasn’t the right life for me.” When Thomas and his new wife had a yard sale in 1995, Susan and Nancy went. His wife gave them a tour of the redone kitchen, and Nancy bought a few of Peter’s old shirts and pants for herself.

Nancy’s classmates at Wellesley have had mixed responses. After her coming out on national television, Nancy became for a time a kind of public spokesperson on behalf of lesbians, speaking with her old Girl Scout’s enthusiasm to groups of young women—at tea talks at a bed and breakfast in Bluehill, Maine, and fund-raisers for the YWCA. Her sense of mission has irritated some of her classmates; they complain that she seems to expect their admiration. At her twentieth reunion, one of Nancy’s close college friends reacted coldly to news of Nancy’s divorce: “She said to me, ‘Well, you liked it all well enough then.’ And that’s right. I shared the mythology. I wanted a husband I could look up to; it’s not surprising he would expect his work and his judgment to take precedence. She and I had made similar choices, and now I was disavowing them. I think it left some people feeling that if it wasn’t enough for me, why should it be enough for them?

“I wouldn’t wish to change anything—not the twenty years of marriage or the years since. It wasn’t a sham that we were a close, connected family. Thomas was a rock. But in the end, security wasn’t enough. I couldn’t get him angry, sad, joyous, no matter how I tried. I couldn’t get him to fight, and I needed him to fight with me. I felt myself dying daily. It was placid; when you’re dead, what could be more peaceful? I don’t mean that to slam Thomas, but he didn’t love anything I did. He was so solitary in his study. I’d be casting about, but accountable to him for my time. With Susan, we’re either ecstatic or wrestling something to the ground. I’ve cried more since I met her than I did in the previous twenty years, so I must be happy. I feel like since I’ve been on my own and sharing a home with Susan that I’m an adult for the first time. I look forward
to growing old with her, which I couldn’t imagine with Thomas. How could any of it have been otherwise? If you’re already married, the only way of coming out is falling in love with someone. You don’t come out in the abstract, you only know you’re a lesbian when you discover that love.

“I know other friends who live with women who are their life partners but find a way not to say that. They say they’re single mothers; they say they’re divorced. None of that felt right to me. I’ve never been very good at not telling the truth. Lesbianism is not, for me, a sexual orientation, but something broader. Though I think sexuality is a life spring, a great source of power, the sexual part was not leading—that could have gone either way. The main thing was wanting to have unity between my sexual life and my emotional life. I always wanted to be in communities of women. As I look back over my whole life, it has been women who have sustained me and energized me and appreciated me and collaborated with me. Except for my kids, who are in a class by themselves, men have been a disappointment, including my father. I didn’t need men except to get married and have children, so at first sex went with that, but ultimately I wanted a relationship where could I put everything together. It was a question of where could I have a more fully integrated life, where could I feel whole? I kept hoping Thomas would be that person. But I discovered that the kind of connection I was seeking wasn’t possible with him, which is not to say it isn’t possible between women and men. My whole life I was looking for a partner with whom I could re-create the intimacy I had with my mother. She gave me a tremendous gift in that way.”

The summer before she met Susan, while vacationing at a country motel with her children, Nancy had read Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening
. Thomas wasn’t with them; he’d had too much work to come along. Nancy read the book in a single night, sitting alone on the porch amid Maine’s pointed firs, listening to the sighs of the sea and her sons asleep in the room. She was moved by the heroine’s decision to leave her wealthy husband’s mansion and move alone into a small “pigeon house,” animated by her recognition that “she must free herself of that fictitious self which we assume like a garment to appear before the world” and claim “that which her newly awakened being demanded … all life’s delirium.”

Simone de Beauvoir deplored the fact that women were relieved of the existential struggle; a woman did not find herself or forge herself but gave over that responsibility to a man, who defined her by making her his wife. “Man … will undertake the moral justification of her existence; thus she can evade … the metaphysical risk of a liberty in which aims must be contrived without assistance.… It is an easy road; on it one avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence.” Though nearly all the women in the class of ’69 would balk at that surrender, for a few, the quest to discover or build an authentic identity and life would entail truly radical risks and change.

As a girl, Nancy Young dreamed of joining a convent. She took her Catholicism deeply to heart and suffered that no one else in her family seemed to. “My parents went through the motions. They went to church every Sunday and didn’t eat meat on Friday, but it was just a way of keeping on the right side of the debit-and-credit ledger. The church they raised me in was a collection of laws you had to obey; I didn’t learn for a very long time that I could turn to God for help.” At Wellesley’s church, she found the same rigid stance. “Sometime in my first year, I was struggling and went to confession at St. Theresa’s in town. I told the priest I could not find meaning in the mass. He reprimanded me and told me that attending mass was a law of the Church. Being strong-minded, I stopped going to mass and no longer considered myself a Catholic.”

Nancy found a new spiritual path in the commune in Cambridge where she lived while working on a master’s in drama at Tufts. “We were all in a women’s group and belonged to a food co-op. This seemed like real life. We had our own drug dealer right in the house, and we all smoked up a storm. People were dropping Owsley acid [LSD made by the man who supplied psychedelics to the Grateful Dead], though I backed off: I was a little scared of acid after one of my close friends had a breakdown and was hospitalized. But we’d drop Quaaludes and run around naked and have sex with everyone in sight. I was completely into sexual freedom. I did everything my father never wanted me to do.”

Though she continued acting in repertory companies, Nancy finally had to quit when she fell seriously ill. She had long struggled with her body. While at Wellesley, she never had periods; she was always too thin and stressed to have normal cycles. Senior year, doctors had put her on
massive doses of hormones, birth control pills ten times the potency they are now. They left her sick every morning, and scared, in retrospect, that she had soaked her body in such hormone baths. Now, in graduate school, she began developing ovarian cysts, which twice burst and sent her rushing to the emergency room with life-threatening peritonitis. “I was so frightened. My body seemed out of control. And my whole thing with acting got derailed.”

Nancy’s spiritual teacher arrived a month later, in an unlikely guise. “I was in a fragile, confused place. And none of the fellows I was meeting really captivated me. They were all too privileged—Harvard and Yale types. Then one day, when I was working on a hot line for street people, this wasted-looking guy showed up, with long hair and a beard and almost no teeth: He’d lost them because of all the speed he’d done. He was divorced and had never graduated from high school, a tough kind of guy. He’d been going to Canada, armed and transporting drugs, until he got deported as an undesirable after selling to the Canadian police. When I brought him home to meet my parents, my father hated him on sight. I’d known him for six weeks, decided he was perfect, and married him. Really, it was Barry’s idea; he didn’t want a flaky relationship. He was a Jewish guy from the Brooklyn projects. These people weren’t hippies. They didn’t march for peace; they were into the hard-core drug thing.

“We got married in a church in Harvard Square, with witnesses we pulled off the street. I was wearing a ridiculously short Mexican Indian dress with a red woven belt. The minister was dour and told us the marriage wouldn’t last, but he did go with us to a deli afterward for beers and sandwiches—that was our reception. We’d packed up my Volkswagen and after the wedding we headed for Colorado, doing our Kerouac thing. I called my dad from a Howard Johnson’s along the way to say we’d gotten married. It was the perfect revenge.

“At the time, I didn’t see it that way. I was drawn to Barry because he was working-class and I identified with him and, even more, because he seemed to have figured out how to leave an unhappy past behind him and find his way into a spiritual life. He’d given up drugs after years and years because he’d gotten into Meher Baba, who was a Sufi teacher from Puna, India, and called himself the avatar. Meher Baba’s followers believed he was a realized soul; they would pass out cards to strangers that
said, ‘Don’t worry, be happy.’ He had taken a vow of silence; for most of his life he would spell out what he wanted to say on an alphabet board, and a close disciple would speak for him. He had washed lepers and was beloved in India. I still consider him the real thing, a genuine teacher, a genuinely advanced soul. And I admired that Barry so much loved this person that he had gone to India and changed his whole life. Meher Baba was completely opposed to drugs. People were taking psychedelics and having mystical experiences; we all got way deluded that because we could have these experiences, we had arrived on some different plane. Meher Baba was one of the few saying drugs are not the way to satisfy this craving; the soul does not evolve that way; you’re doing damage because you’re going someplace you haven’t earned. Drugs had been alluring to me, and I was drawn to Barry because he’d worked through it, investigated, and came out the other side. After we got married, he took the Owsley acid I’d tucked away for later and put it down the toilet. He also dumped all my medicine. He said, ‘Your problems are because of your head.’ Remarkably, my health got much better, in spite of our rugged lifestyle. I was initiated into transcendental meditation, read about Hindu masters, did yoga. In Colorado we were planning to live at the Naropa Institute in Boulder and become Buddhists.”