Movement (25 page)
Authors: Valerie Miner
“Good luck,” Susan said, holding back to protect Debbie from her sarcasm, to protect herself from her confusion. Should Susan explain that she still liked sleeping with men? That she hated waking next to them, hated the heavy emptiness of the mornings after? Still, she did wish Debbie luck. Perhaps this new generation of men would be different, perhaps.
Debbie grasped the silence anxiously, “You know what really bothers me about the writing is that I wonder if it's a substitute. Maybe I'm putting all my creative energies into literature when I should be having a family.”
Susan looked stunned. Debbie reached over and reassuringly patted her hand.
“Oh, I don't mean a patriarchal nuclear explosion family,” said Debbie. “I mean a growing relationship that offers personal affirmation. Sometimes I think about the writing, in comparison, as empty.”
Susan thought about how work had filled her life. She thought about the hours she stole from her paid job in order to finish the book. She shook her head in exhaustion, incomprehension. For the first time this afternoon, Debbie seemed to notice that Susan wasn't impermeable.
“Listen, friend,” Susan said, “I wish I had these answersâfor me as well as for you. But I don't know. I don't know if I have time for children. I don't know whether I'll be with a man or a woman. Choices. Freedom just leads to more damn choices.”
“Well, I think we can have both,” Debbie said encouragingly, “love and work.”
“I hope so,” Susan laughed, feeling relaxed now and quite certain of her fondness for this kid.
Debbie looked at her watch. “I should be going.” She sounded both relieved and sad.
Susan considered the time. No, Guy would not be coming today. Would they ever cross the border?
“Which way are you headed?” Susan brightened.
“Actually, I'm half-an-hour late to a class on Victorian prose in Le Conte Hall,” said Debbie.
“I'm walking that way, too,” said Susan, putting down the last coins from her purse as a tip.
The two women threaded their way through the stands and shoppers on Telegraph Avenue. Debbie pumped Susan with questions about the sixties, about People's Park, anti-war marches, the Panthers. Susan told Debbie that she was setting the revolution in the wrong decade.
“Maybe the choices were posed in the sixties,” said Susan. “But it was living through those choices, that was the sticky part. And that happened later on, in the seventies, in the eighties.”
“But you're working through them,” said Debbie, nervous that she had somehow made the older woman vulnerable, forcibly exposing her to her own past. “You survived.”
“Survived,” said Susan, thinking of Sandy Samone and Marya Terazinya. “Oh, I think so. More than survived.”
Debbie smiled and continued smiling as Susan talked about how Berkeley had survived. Telegraph carried the same seedy excitement, some of the same people. The blustering evangelist, old Hubert, had weathered the scorn of hippies and was now a venerable figure to the squads of clean kids who called themselves “just Christians.” The tall man whose face was long ago eaten in some tragic chemistry experiment looked at Susan skeptically when she smiled at him. She wondered if he had remembered her timid smiles from ten years before. The Bubble Lady Poet wore the same ragged pigtail and the same ragged black coat. Maybe she was afraid that without them, tourists wouldn't recognize her from the People's Park mural.
And it did not matter that some of her memories were lost to fiction, Susan told herself. The pursuit of art was more worthy than the pursuit of nostalgia. Whenever Susan visited the campus, she preferred to go as a ghost.
Debbie did not believe in ghosts. She believed in legend rather than timelessness. She was interested in Susan's past only in so far as it related to their present. How had Susan planned her life? Debbie wanted to know. When Susan was a student, what did she expect to become?
“You mean, what did I think I'd be doing now?” asked Susan.
“Yes,” said Debbie. “I mean did you think you would have traveled and done these things and then moved back here and that you would be a writer?”
Susan had to admit that the scenario had gone something like that. She had to admit that she was no longer the earnest student or the novice writer and that she had no right to many of her doubts, even if she wasn't comfortable with success. Susan did not want to materialize, but she remembered Debbie did not believe in ghosts. And for this, she resented Debbie a little. She felt like the native, who finding her home settled by immigrants, must ultimately admit that everyone is an immigrant. For Debbie, there was no past that was not history.
As they reached the edge of campus, Debbie said, “My house had a 1968 party last week.”
“A what?” Susan asked, incredulous, although she knew one day the sixties would be processed into nostalgia chic. “Why?”
“To celebrate the anniversary of the Open Speech Movement,” Debbie said.
“You mean the Free Speech Movement,” said Susan.
“The sad thing was,” Debbie continued deadpan, “no one knew what to wear.”
“What to wear?” Susan repeated numbly.
“You know,” said Debbie, “what gear you guys wore in those days. None of the kids are much into politics. I think I looked pretty realistic. I found some heavy boots and a black armband.⦠You wouldn't like to meet them?” Debbie asked tentatively. “The people in my house, I mean.”
Susan nodded.
“Supper sometime?”
“I'd be delighted,” said Susan.
At Ludwig's Fountain, they both laughed at the three dogs chasing each other's tails. They stopped at several of the propaganda tables which were lined all the way to Sather Gate. A young man in a yarmulke was arguing furiously with two Jews for Jesus. A fiddler was getting the excess attention playing some West Virginia song that, strangely, half the crowd seemed to know.
“Were Fridays like this in your day?” asked Debbie.
“Well, give or take a few bayonets and billy clubs. Yes, I guess when the tear gas settled, some Fridays were very much like this, especially in the early spring. Now look at that pink in the petals there. You know, it was Professor Riley's Victorian prose class that made me want to go to England.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Debbie. “He was driving people away even then?”
Susan smiled at the younger woman and thought it was a very perfect Friday, past and present.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank all the Susans who conspired to make my life a better place: Susan Griffin in Berkeley, Susan Feldman in Toronto, Susan Faust in San Francisco, Suzan Donleavy in New York and Susan Addinell in London. Also inextricably part of this book were the women in my writing groups: Jana Harris, Kim Chernin, Mary Mackey, Eve Pell, Zoë Fairbairns, Michelene Wandor, Sara Maitland, Michele Roberts, Myrna Kostash, Charlene Spretnak. For their continuing faith and encouragement, I am grateful to Peggy Webb, Deborah Johnson, Carol Flotlin, Charlotte Sheedy, Leslie Gardner, Helen Longino and my mother, Mary Miner. Many thanks to Nancy K. Bereano who inspires but does not meddle in her good editing. We all owe to each other and to Jane and George and Virginia, the right to keep our writing on top of the blotter, in our own names, our sanity maintained, indeed, proclaimed, by our sisters.
A number of the stories first appeared in magazines or anthologies. “Novena,”
Sinister Wisdom;
“Other Voices,”
The Berkeley Monthly;
“Side/Stroke,”
Womanblood
(Continuing Saga Press); “Sisterhood,”
The Wild Iris;
“In The Company of Long Distance Peace Marchers,”
Saturday Night,
Canada; “Maple Leaf or Beaver,”
Prisma;
“The Right Hand on the Day of Judgment,”
Spare Rib,
England. That story and “Afterlife” appear in
Tales I Tell My Mother
(South End Press, Boston). Three of the short-short stories were published togetherâ“Aunt Victoria,” “Cultured Green” and “Joan Crawford Revival”âin the
Boston Monthly
and
The Berkeley Monthly.
About the Author
Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of fourteen books, including novels, short fiction collections, and nonfiction. Miner's work has appeared in the
Georgia Review
,
TriQuarterly
,
Salmagundi
,
New Letters
,
Ploughshares
, the
Village Voice
,
Prairie Schooner
, the
Gettysburg Review
, the
Times Literary Supplement
, the
Women's Review of Books
, the
Nation
, and other journals. Her stories and essays have been published in more than sixty anthologies. A number of her pieces have been dramatized on BBC Radio 4. Her work has been translated into German, Turkish, Danish, Italian, Spanish, French, Swedish, and Dutch. She has won fellowships and awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Heinz Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, Fundación Valparaiso, the Australia Council Literary Arts Board, and numerous other organizations. She has received Fulbright fellowships to Tunisia, India, and Indonesia. Winner of a Distinguished Teaching Award, she has taught for over twenty-five years and is now a professor and artist in residence at Stanford University. She travels internationally giving readings, lectures, and workshops. Her website is
www.valerieminer.com.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1982 by Valerie Miner
Cover design by Julianna Lee
ISBN: 978-1-4976-1231-0
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
EBOOKS BY VALERIE MINER
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
