Stages (26 page)

Kathy did want to stay politically active, though, so when she saw in the
Village Voice
a notice of a meeting of a women’s group, she decided to go. The meeting was being held on a Tuesday night, and even though Aaron would be left home alone, he was wonderfully supportive and encouraged Kathy to do her thing.

“You know I want you to be your own person as well as my wife,” he said.

Thus reassured, on the appointed Tuesday evening, Kathy set out enthusiastically for the newly opened art gallery where the women’s group was to gather. When she arrived, at about ten minutes after eight, there was already a crowd of perhaps thirty women. For New Yorkers, they were unusually prompt. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. Feeling a bit awkward, Kathy decided to look at the pictures on the walls until things got under way. All of the paintings were by women artists. Some of them appeared to be attempts to deal with feminist issues. There was one of a woman in a suburban backyard surrounded by a white picket fence that also could have been a set of canine teeth. Near her was a husband in a lawn chair who was a fat hamburger with arms, legs, shoes with spats, and a cigar. A second canvas by the same artist showed a housewife in her kitchen. A pack of children with foaming mouths was dragging her down by her apron, and she was struggling under the weight of an ironing board like Jesus with his cross. Kathy felt uplifted remembering that Aaron had always made a point of buying permanent-press shirts.

There was another group of paintings that evidently were trying to do to women’s bodies what Georgia O’Keeffe did with the landscape of the southwest. Everything was purple and red, and suggested that layers of meaning could be found in the labia.

Around eight-thirty they got down to business. Sitting in the back, Kathy listened intently. The group’s chairperson was a woman of about forty. Her hair was cut like a bathing cap, and she looked as though she’d probably had eyeglasses when she was six, and had looked at life through them very seriously ever since. She introduced someone who spoke on changing perspectives in the movement since the Women’s Strike for Peace. This presentation was followed by a poetry reading—six love sonnets addressed to an anonymous
you
“who know me, who, myself, I am.”

The women all listened raptly, some of them with their arms around the shoulder of a friend, and one poor soul—probably exhausted from a long day’s work for which she wasn’t paid as much as a man doing the same thing—was resting her head on a sympathetic companion. Kathy loved the atmosphere here. Even though she was a stranger, she could feel the warmth, the sense of community and shared purpose. Listening to the sonnets, she was thinking, yes, this is the way it should be. This is really, truly
sisterhood.
She closed her eyes to take it all into her heart.

When she opened them again, she saw that the poor worn-out creature was awake—and nibbling on the friend’s ear.

Kathy blinked.
Why, they’re all lesbians,
she thought.
Oh, my God. I should have known.

If she hadn’t figured it out by now, she would have after she’d heard the next speaker. This one—a Ph.D candidate or a young witch, maybe both—was wearing a black dress and black panty hose and wicked little black dancing shoes, and was reading a paper on the etymology of the word
dyke.

“So it’s come from having negative connotations to the very positive ones it has today,” she pointed out, her tight little fists waving demonstratively in the air.

Her observation was greeted by loud applause and hoots.

Meanwhile Kathy was shrinking in her chair. She was the furthest thing in the world from antigay, but she couldn’t help recalling something her mother had once said, when lesbianism had been mentioned in the conversation.
Whatever else I
am. I’m all woman.
If this wasn’t Kathy’s attitude, it was her sexuality, and there was nothing you could do about that, your politics notwithstanding.

Kathy sat through the whole etymology lecture thinking,
I’ve got to get out of here.
But as soon as Little Witch finished her harangue she was sort of carried with the crowd up to the refreshments, which consisted of coffee and windmill cookies exactly like the ones Kathy used to eat during milk break in grammar school. She munched nervously while someone next to her talked about Jill Johnston taking her blouse off in public to prove a point.

“I haven’t seen you here before,” a woman said to Kathy. She looked to be in her midtwenties, and she had short brown hair and eyebrows like the pelts of small animals. She was wearing jeans and a Levi’s jacket, which on her looked softer than the same outfit did on some of the others.

“I’m Estelle,” the woman offered.

“Hi, I’m Kathy,” Kathy said.

“How’d you find out about the group?” Estelle asked.

“The
Voice,
” Kathy replied. “You can find some interesting things in a newspaper, I’ve found, when you’re not looking for recipes.”

“I don’t look for recipes either,” Estelle said, “but I’d subscribe to the
Ladies’ Home Journal
if I could meet a girl who can cook.”

“A
woman
who can cook,” Kathy said with a tentative smile.

Estelle screwed her face slightly to one side. “Say, are you
straight
by any chance?” she asked.

Swallowing her panic, Kathy said, “Um…ah, well, yes. I hope that’s not a problem or anything.”

“It’s not a problem,” Estelle said. “But you should be aware of the fact that gay women like
girls
the way gay men like
boys.
”

“Isn’t that kind of self-defeating?” Kathy said. “Politically, I mean. For women to think of themselves as girls…”

“Love is a defeat of the self, isn’t it?” Estelle replied. “Or at least a way of beating it back for a while.”

“I don’t know,” Kathy said. “I think of it as sharing.”

“When it comes to love, to their relationships, dykes don’t share,” Estelle said. “Gay men do. Straight men do. So do a lot of straight women. But dykes make an
each other
together and won’t let anyone else have one scrap of it. Have another cookie.”

“Thanks, I will,” said Kathy. Biting off the windmill’s roof, she said, “I don’t think we’re talking about the same kind of sharing. You seem to be saying that people in a relationship who are sharing are…sleeping around.”

“There’s a time to be open and a time to be closed,” Estelle said. “When you’re in a relationship, that’s one of the times to be closed.”

“Well, my husband and I definitely do
not
have what they call an open relationship,” Kathy said.

“That’s good,” Estelle said. “That’s very positive. I’ll be the first to admit that you
can
do things with a man. I really do read the
Ladies’ Home Journal
once in a while, and I know what you can do with a
chicken.
”

Between talking with Estelle and meeting some of the other members of the group, Kathy stayed longer than she’d planned. She left feeling that she’d learned a great deal from the experience, and also feeling that she still had a lot to learn.

When she got home, a little after eleven, she found her husband still working on a brief.

“How’d it go?” he asked her.

Kathy hesitated. Walking all the way up Varick Street had left her somewhat out of breath.

“It was…okay,” she said after a moment. “Different.”

“How so?” Aaron asked.

“Well, for one thing, they were all lesbians.”

“Really?” said Aaron. He adjusted his glasses, which was his lawyer’s way of assimilating information.

“But on the whole I had a good time,” Kathy said. “I didn’t think I would at first.”

“Did any of them come on to you?” Aaron asked.

“Women don’t
come on to
women. They’re more sensitive than that.”

“Even the bull dykes?”

“They’re the
most
sensitive,” Kathy said. She
had
learned a lot. Certainly enough so she knew she didn’t have to feel defensive talking about what she’d experienced. And why was Aaron asking if any of them had come on to her—to get a little titillation (hadn’t Melanie once said that every porno movie had to have a lesbian love scene because men got off on watching what they wanted to eat cook itself)?

“I knew someone in college who knew a dyke who became a truck driver,” Aaron was saying. “A sixteen-wheeler. Driving a truck takes more sensitivity than you might think. Backing one up is a real art. And while I’m on the subject of art. We’ve got an invitation out to the Island for next Saturday night. Boris and his wife want us to come to dinner. We’ll get to see their art collection. It’s supposed to be unbelievable.”

“Saturday night,” Kathy said. “Oh, dear. We’ll miss the ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ show. Unless the Borises watch it.”

“I don’t think they’re the type,” Aaron said. “But I wouldn’t want to miss the chance to see their art collection. Besides, it’s important for me politically to go. Boris
is
one of the senior partners.”

Kathy looked at the French-line poster that she had hung on the wall using special blue-headed nails.

“Isn’t it funny,” she said, “how our politics get localized as we get older? First we were part of a movement that seemed
to be sweeping the country…and then McGovern only
carried Massachusetts…and now Nixon is out…but I’m down to a lesbian social club, and you’re worrying about
office
politics.”

“That’s the way it goes,” Aaron said, shrugging.

“Mrs. Boris is one of those women who has to be seen somewhere eating lunch every day, isn’t she?” Kathy asked.

“She does a lot of committee work for charity balls, that kind of thing,” Aaron replied.

“She eats lunch,” Kathy said.

Sitting down on the corduroy day bed that they used for overnight guests and that Aaron said was upholstered in the same material that Pat Nixon’s cloth coat was made of, Kathy made a vow.

“I’m going to get a job,” she said. “I’ve got to. I should be doing something…besides taking care of this place.”

“That isn’t a job?”

“Of course it is. Housework is more of a job than I ever dreamed it could be, if you do it right. But it’s not a career. It’s not fulfilling.”

“What job is? Unless you’re an artist or a musician…”

“Or an actor… Oh boy. You know, I really did want to be on the stage. Once. If it hadn’t been for the war…”

“It would have been something else.”

“Probably. But look at Paula. Making a movie, for God’s sake. And David Whitman who I used to know is becoming this big high-powered agent.”

“And your friend Melanie is a drugged-out groupie.”

“She is
not.
She keeps a lid on the drugs, if anything.”

“But where is she?”

“Who knows? The last postcard I got from her, they were going to be doing a gig in Cleveland, I think.”

“I’d rather be in New York than doing one-night stands in Ohio.”

“Mm. If only we could have our druthers, I mean what we’d really rather do—if we could do anything. I suppose we’d all be in Hollywood, like Paula. I mean, Veronica. Even the bull dykes.”

“Well, I for one have no interest in being in California,” Aaron said. Kathy recognized in his tone the same mixture of reproach and dread that she remembered hearing in her mother’s voice that time when she saw in
Life
magazine a picture of naked hippies wallowing in mud.

“It might not be so bad,” Kathy said. “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it…eh, I suppose it is stupid, though, to be wondering what if.”

“Of course it is,” Aaron said. “If you want to daydream, think of
possible
dreams.”

“That’s the basic me,” Kathy agreed. “The practical dreamer.”

That night she dreamed she was a Jewish Joan of Arc being interrogated by a tribunal of lesbian lawyers in men’s business suits. She kept looking in her pocketbook for something to justify her existence, but all she could find in it was a can of Pledge. She went down on her knees before her inquisitors, and started cleaning the tub. Then her conscious mind said,
Wait a minute, you use Ajax to clean a bathtub, not Pledge,
and up she went in the psychic elevator to wakefulness. Aaron was sleeping peacefully beside her, and the Panasonic clock radio flicked to five-ten. Reality had not been disturbed. When was it, ever? And why, Kathy wondered, if you lived in the real world, couldn’t you be undisturbed too?

The disturbing dream proved to be prophetic in a roundabout way, for the very next evening Aaron came home with a new three-piece suit from Paul Stuart.

“I got this to wear Saturday night,” he said.

He’d also gotten his hair cut, Kathy noticed. There was only a remnant left of his once-spectacular curls.