Sisters of the Road (27 page)

The houseboat was small and very shipshape, a rectangle divided ingeniously into different spaces for eating and sleeping and entertaining. Hadley’s problem was her height; she kept knocking into the bedroom ceiling the first week. I had trouble with the rocking of the boat in the beginning; my legs felt wobbly on land and I had also been awakened on more than one occasion in the first two weeks by waves that made the center beam of the houseboat crack like a whip. I didn’t like strange noises at night, and would often wake up with my heart in my mouth, hearing the creaking of the dock alongside the boat and imagining that someone was coming to get me.

It was a comfort to have Hadley; yet even she had to put up with a lot. All summer I’d been taking self-defense classes; I took them so seriously that they entered into my dreams. I felt constantly prepared for attack. Once when we first moved into the houseboat and I’d gone to bed early, Hadley got quietly into bed, casually threw an arm over my shoulder, and nestled close to me. Almost without waking I threw her off on to the floor.

Now we sat cuddling on the deck, watching how the lights reddened the water so festively. I loved the Portage Bay side of Lake Union—it was more relaxed and informal. Lake Union was a working lake, full of tugs and barges, views obscured by masts and sails. Portage Bay seemed quieter, a place where kayakers, canoeists and windsurfers could play. And sometimes, surprisingly, it was utterly calm, like tonight. Not a boat in sight; it was as if we sat by the side of a lake in the mountains.

“It was funny to see Loie,” Hadley said eventually. “So much of that porn debate seems to happen on the east coast. You tend to feel that out here people don’t get so involved, so caught up in it all.”

“That’s true,” I said, taking off my glasses and resting my head on her shoulder. “I hardly even know what I think about the whole thing. Do you?”

“No,” she said. “Not really. It’s been years since I’ve been certain. I mean, I’ve read on both sides of the issue, but it’s as if the passion of each position negates the other—so when I’m reading someone like Dworkin I sometimes think, yes, she’s absolutely right: pornography is about male power, it’s a strategy of subordination. But when I read someone else on the other side I think, no, pornographic imagery and sexism aren’t always the same thing. We need to keep them distinct, and as women, especially as women, we need to keep our options open to explore our sexuality.”

She sighed and looked out across the water. “Maybe after the conference next week I’ll have a better grasp of the current thinking. Maybe there’s some way to hold both views—some way to understand the contradictions….”

“Yeah,” I said and stared at the black waves outlined in silver that came towards us steadily. “You know, though, Hadley, I really
wish
she hadn’t gotten married.”

I
WOKE UP EARLY
the next morning and went out on the floating dock. The bay was like a mirror trying to come awake. There were hardly any individual ripples or waves; instead the whole body of water seemed to be in movement, a shivery, massive kind of movement, as if it were stirring from the bottom. It was a gray morning, but it didn’t matter by the water, where everything was so luminescent. This morning the sky was like torn bits of very absorbent watercolor paper, with dark gray seeping or branching onto the silver-white color.

It was Sunday and it was bound to get busier on the lake. Now there were only a few solitary scullers from the university speeding along the surface of the water like dragonflies. Later the pleasure boats would come out, the big cruisers full of festive rich people who would steer dangerously close to the docks and would look in the windows. If caught, they’d remark sheepishly, “Nice weather we’re having!”

But Hadley and I had learned to ignore them, and to go about our business openly—or to close the curtains when we couldn’t. Houseboat life was different than other sorts of life. In part you felt far from Seattle with no traffic, no people in the street; out here on the end of the dock the nearest neighbor was the houseboat in back, the one over to the side. Yet it was also a strangely active, peopled world: imagine living in a regular house, on the second floor, and looking out your window to see people flying past, silent and smiling.

I was feeling good this morning, good about myself, good about Hadley. Since she’d come back into my life, meaning had returned to everyday events, and it looked like she was here to stay, after finally getting her father into a nursing home in Texas. For one thing she was in business now, no longer working in the graphic trades like me, but the owner of a thriving, if odd, little concern.

The family fortunes in Houston had declined for the last few years to a frightening degree. Hadley told stories of whole neighborhoods in the city with FOR SALE signs out in front. She didn’t suffer as much as some of her family or their friends—for a long while she’d had her money invested in a variety of socially responsible causes and businesses—but with the recent fluctuations in the stock market, she noted a definite drop in income. She decided at that point to put her remaining capital into a business idea she’d had for a while.

She opened what she called the Espressomat, a combination laundromat and espresso cafe, on Capitol Hill. Not the most likely—or genteel, as some of her family might have said—of ventures, but it was a lot safer than the stock market these days, and from its opening a month ago it had been a great success.

You had to admit it was a new concept: that people who couldn’t afford or didn’t have room for washers and dryers had a right to get their clothes clean in surroundings that weren’t completely disgusting and filthy.

“I’ve never understood,” Hadley had said to the newspaper reporter who interviewed her for a big feature story in
The Post-Intelligencer
(“Coffee and Clean Clothes Spell Success for Houston Heiress”), “why laundromats in general and those in the inner cities in particular have to be so downbeat and humiliating. At any one time a quarter to a third of the machines aren’t working, the dryers either don’t dry or they turn your clothes into potato chips. And if you don’t have a car and can’t just drop the clothes off, you’re stuck either sitting there trying to read in one of those plastic molded chairs with gum stuck all over it and forced to listen to a pop station turned up as loud as it will go, or you’re driven out in search of some store to browse in or a cafe to sit in. So I thought—why not make it easy for people? Why not make it nice? Everybody’s got to wash clothes. So why not make it fun?”

So Hadley had. The Espressomat had become two businesses, really; to cut down on the noise and to conform with licensing laws, she’d created two separate spaces with separate entrances and a door between them. The cafe part resounded to the hiss of the elaborate copper espresso machine and the buzz of animated conversations, while the washers and dryers next door chugged along purposefully (being too new to have begun to break down yet). The combined smell of French Roast and Tide was a little unusual and, I thought, a little too strong. Still, I was getting used to it.

Good thing too, since I was spending quite a lot of my free time there.

Hadley had gotten up and she came out on deck with a cup of coffee. She was dressed in Levis and an inarticulate blue tee-shirt. Her shoulder-length silvery hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her blue-green eyes were awake and glad.

“Brrr—you can feel it’s starting to get to be fall now in the mornings, can’t you?”

The sun had come out now and the weathered gray wood of the deck was warming slightly. Where the sun shone on the water there was a pattern of diamonds, small, flashing bits of light.

Hadley went on, “You know, we really
are
going to have to decide soon what to do in November.”

“November!” I said, even though I knew she was right. “It’s still September, for godssakes. According to the calendar it’s still summer.”

“Next week is October 1st,” she said inexorably. “And there are so many things we haven’t talked about.”

“I know, I know,” I said, to head her off from spoiling this beautiful morning with talk of househunting, boundaries, other women, and the future in general. “And I
want
to talk, of
course
I want to talk—but I think we should set aside some
real
time for it.” I had learned this strategy in collective meetings.

“Okay,” said Hadley equably, but she sighed. “Only let’s not leave it too long… I have some ideas….”

“Next week!” I said. “Next week, I promise.”

“All right,” she said. “Next week.”

Later in the morning we “stopped by” the Espressomat. Even though Hadley had three full- and two part-time employees, she was putting in long hours herself. The Espressomat was open from seven in the morning to eleven at night, seven days a week.

Today both sections of the place were full and the steady hum of the washers and dryers underlay the rattling of cups and saucers.

I picked up part of
The New York Times
, Hadley made me a frothy decaf mocha and I sat down in a corner, underneath a poster from
The Threepenny Opera.
After a while, two women I knew came in, Debi and Sarah. They weren’t washing their clothes; it was purely social.

We chatted generally for a while and then the conversation turned, as it had the day before at the reception, to the sexuality/pornography conference next week.

“I’m really looking forward to hearing Loie Marsh speak,” said Debi. “She’s been one of my heroes for years.”

“Me too,” said Sarah. “I remember when I read
The Silenced Heart.
It just blew me away. It expressed so many things about men and living in a male world that I had just taken for granted.”

“They don’t write books like that anymore,” agreed Debi. “Really groundbreaking books like that.”

I hadn’t read it, just like I had never managed to read
The Female Eunuch
,
Future Shock
and Carlos Castenada. No good reason—I just happened to be reading something else at the time and then the historical moment passed. I said, “I wonder why Loie hasn’t written anything else since then?”

“She’s probably too busy going around speaking. I saw her on Phil Donahue once. She was fabulous. It must have been—five years ago?”

“What else is going on at the conference?” I asked. I still hadn’t decided if I wanted to go. From the corner of my eye I watched Hadley pouring a stream of hot milk into a row of cups. She was concentrating hard, a furrow between her brows. She’d once told me that waitressing was the hardest job in the world.

Debi pulled out a flyer. “There are some really interesting workshops: here’s one on the Green River murders, another on legal aspects of censorship, something on sexist images of women in the media, Elizabeth Ketteridge talking about use of pornography by rapists and child molesters, lots of others. And in the evening there’s going to be a panel discussion: Loie Marsh, Gracie London, Elizabeth Ketteridge, Kimiko Lewis and some woman named Sonya Gustafson from Christians Against Pornography. What a line-up.”

“I heard,” said Sarah, lowering her voice, “that some S/M women wanted to present a workshop. But the organizers refused.” She nodded over in the direction of two women who were sitting quietly reading
The Seattle Times
in an alcove under a poster of Marlene Dietrich in
The Blue Angel.
“Those are two of the main ones, the main S/Mers—Nicky Kay and Oak on the left.”

My gaze covertly followed hers. The women looked perfectly ordinary. The one called Nicky Kay was small, with a rather athletic body and a pleasant, nondescript face; glasses, brown curly hair. She was wearing a crisp striped shirt and jeans. Oak, if that was really her name, was taller, with a head that seemed slightly too big for her body. It made her look a little wobbly somehow. She was wearing a leather vest over a white tee-shirt and heavy boots. Otherwise, she didn’t look too threatening.

But Debi and Sarah obviously found them both very threatening. They began to whisper: “orgy chambers… dog collars with spikes… Mary said… hot dripping wax… and
nipple
clamps!”

I knew, of course, that there were lesbian sadomasochists around, but I had never paid them much attention. A few years ago, in Seattle, as in San Francisco and a few other cities, there’d been something of an uproar, but it had died down and even radical feminists seemed to have resigned themselves to its presence in the community. I’d heard it said that Seattle was an S/M mecca of sorts, but it didn’t intersect much with my world.

“I heard that Nicky Kay supports herself and Oak by dancing downtown at the Fun Palace.”

“Really?” I couldn’t quite picture it. She looked so… well, quiet.

But Debi and Sarah’s attention had been diverted by the entrance of someone else into the cafe. “Now, there’s a character! At least Nicky and Oak keep a low profile.”

Miko Lewis had never kept a low profile in her life. She bounced in wearing tight black stretch pants calligraphed with neon pink, a black bustier underneath a flowing, pink silk shirt. Her spikey black hair had been bleached white on the tips and her rough complected face exuded joyous energy.

“Hadley! How’s my favorite Texan today?” She hopped on to one of the chairs at the counter and leaned over so (I imagined) Hadley could get a good look at her thrusting cleavage. “Steam me up a double, darling. I’ve got a heavy day of editing sex scenes ahead.”

Hadley laughed good-naturedly. “So when are we going to get to see some of these famous lesbian sex videos?”

“At the moment I’m only giving private screenings,” she drawled in a low voice that was nonetheless audible to everyone in the room.

Debi and Sarah looked at me sympathetically, and I flushed. But just as I was thinking about going over and pushing her off her stool, Miko (who had certainly been aware of my presence all along), turned casually and said, “Oh hi, Pam. You come along too. A week from this Thursday night, my studio.”

She downed the espresso in one gulp, slapped a dollar on the counter and, with a wave, flung herself out the door. Someone applauded.