Saturday's Child (49 page)

I resign from the
Rat
collective. I stop calling myself a women's liberationist. I start calling myself a feminist. A radical feminist, of course.

Blake and I are caught in a summer rainstorm. Impetuously, we decide to walk home singing, not avoiding the puddles but splashing directly through them, skipping and holding hands. I am in my early thirties and have never done this before.

With the zeal of a convert, I seize the torch and loft it high for those sisters still standing where I stood five minutes earlier.

Having already required universities to have signers, wheelchair access, and free childcare at my lectures (greatly resisted at first but later standard procedure at feminist speeches), I now stop taking questions from men. I carefully explain that this is not meant as anti-male but as pro-female, to correct the imbalance in a discourse men tend to dominate. I explain that women's questions should be the priority because we must be the agents of change over our own lives, and that clever men will see this as a chance to listen in on what women ask and answer each other. A few men understand, come up quietly afterward or pass notes of support, but most are offended at this challenge to what they feel is their entitlement. So it's just as well that I offer the above reasons instead of admitting that I cannot bear
one more time
a man's question so moronic it could have been posed by an inebriated gnat.

My mother actually
marries!
All through my adolescence I'd longed for this, thinking it might take the heat off me; I'd laughed aloud in recognition when I first heard the song “If Momma Were Married” from
Gypsy
. Now finally resigned to the fact
I'm
married, and expectably ecstatic about her grandchild,
she
finds herself a husband. Hallelujah.

But. I don't want to carp, yet I find myself loathing her choice. Archie Thurman, a wealthy businessman “in textiles” is a widower with grown children of his own, who in turn loathe my mother.
¹⁸
This is the kind of man who is incapable of commenting on anything without revealing or inquiring about its price.

Me (trying to be nice): Nifty tie, Archie.

Him: Nifty?
Nifty?
You wanna know nifty? This tie cost eighty-five bucks!

Or
:

Me: I'm excited. My book of poems has been accepted for publication.

Him: Pomes. How much d'ya get paid for a book like that?

But my mother is a surprisingly attentive, even obedient wife to him. She joins his temple and goes regularly to services. It occurs to me that I disapprove of her marriage as much as she disapproves of mine. I wonder if that makes us even.

For the first time, Gloria Steinem registers on my consciousness as someone worth knowing. Until now, in different ways, she and Betty Friedan have been driving us radicals batty. Friedan too vociferously denounces us, exaggerating our message toward androcide; Steinem too helpfully explains us, blanding our message toward insipidity. On the few occasions I find myself stuck with them, doing a radio or TV show, Friedan is downright rude (not just to me but to everyone, especially Steinem, which is oddly comforting). Steinem is always warm, yet she strikes me as being
largely irrelevant to serious feminism at this point. She's written sympathetically about us for
New York
magazine, and she's fine on liberal causes—against the war and for the Farmworkers—but she's one of the Beautiful People, she's chic, dates powerful men, and actually campaigns for Norman Mailer in his short-lived attempt to become mayor of New York. I don't
dis
like her but, being a bit of a literary and political snob, regard her as a well-meaning but glitzy jet-set journalist, not an activist.

Then we're scheduled to appear together at PS 41 in Manhattan, discussing violence, women, and women's liberation. The panel will also include Ti-Grace, Kate Millett, and Anselma Dell'Olio, a filmmaker active in NOW. We assemble on stage in the auditorium. While the audience is still filing in, Gloria slides a manila envelope in my direction.

“I, um, thought you might like to have these. Anyway, I thought you'd prefer them not floating around,” she murmurs, rather shyly.

I peek into the envelope. Glossy photos of me as a child star—publicity photos, photos
from Juvenile Jury
, from the
Mama
show, from
Kiss and Tell
… I stare at her.

“I have friends who work in the photo morgues at some of the newspapers, so I just thought …” she smiles.

“
Thank
you,” I say, and mean it from the heart. I do an emotional double take, thinking
That's an interesting woman
—someone who understands certain subtleties about the uses and abuses of celebrity and public perception, as well as about power and access … and how rare that a stranger should want to protect
me
, the one used to doing the protecting.

This night will be memorable for other reasons, too. Ti-Grace, barefoot and wearing flowing Vietnamese pajamas, strides to the stage microphone to announce that her friend the recently gunned-down Mafia boss “Sister Joseph Colombo” was a
real
feminist since he was an outlaw, as opposed to the rest of us, “who refuse to challenge the system.” Since the Colombo family controls drugs and prostitution in New York, the audience responds with an appalled silence before breaking into boos. (I must be slow, but this is actually the first time it occurs to me that movements for social change attract all
sorts
of people, for all sorts of personal and not necessarily healthy reasons, who carry with them all sorts of pain and serious imbalances, and that just
maybe
not
every
body is
automatically
my sister.) Gloria, in a trembling voice, admits as a pacifist to having dreams about
doing violence to violent men. Then, since the subject is violence, I decide to use my panel time to offer the first public reading of a poem I've just finished. It begins, “Listen, I'm slowly dying inside myself tonight …” The poem is called “Monster.”
¹⁹

Blake grows, rapidly, beautifully, precociously. He has walked early, talked early, and adores music. This will be his eventual vocation—both escape from and loving revenge against his logorrheic wordsmith parents.

Every detail about his raising
matters
to us, passionately. We don't lie to him, ever. (This is hard sometimes, and will be harder when the marriage eventually ends, but it's the complicated
lies
that have scarred most people's childhoods; for us, truth is a form of respect for him and each other.) We only promise what we know we can actually deliver, and the result is trust. We tell him bedtime stories about strong women and gentle men, making the stories up ourselves
²⁰
or basing them on historical characters, since virtually no antisexist children's books are yet available. We talk politics with him, explaining whatever we can, admitting where we've been wrong, saying what we've learned. (Like any kid, he wants to do what the grown-ups are doing—so by age six he has paper cuts on his tongue, from having begged to help lick envelopes during Bella Abzug's campaign mailings.) He knows about and is proud of Kenneth's being gay. We proscribe nothing—no television shows, books, or movies are forbidden—but we do Talk About It afterward, at length (
endlessly
, he will tease us as an adult). We construct alternatives to patriarchal holidays, like Wiccan sabbats—and wind up celebrating both traditional
and
alternative (like mother, like daughter). He plays with dolls
and
trucks. Later, war toys are unwelcome in the house, but to combat peer pressure we devise a substitute: medieval legend, the Round Table. At least then battle will be distanced from reality: maces and lances aren't standard issue in Vietnam. The hope is that
he'll turn out less accepting of the idea that contemporary weapons are toys and vice versa (which works, by the way)—and there's a bonus in his affection for
Morte d'Arthur
and poetry relating to Arthur, Guinevere, and their crew.
Every
detail matters to us, passionately.
²¹

Sisterhood Is Powerful
is selling out, reprinting after reprinting. I decide that all the money from the anthology must go to set up a fund to support women's projects. This upsets Kenneth, since I'm already tithing or halving my speaking fees with the movement as well as doing a lot of benefits for women's groups (ah, the revenge of my mother and aunt). He's right. There are months when we barely make the bills and are late with the rent. I'm still taking in freelance editing, but can do less because of speaking dates and travel, and Blake-care at home. Ken's still taking in freelance, too, but can do less because of caring for Blake half-time when I'm home and full-time when I'm on the road. We both realize I'm becoming the breadwinner, which is all the more reason for
not
setting up a fund.

Kate Millett lectures me that I should provide for myself, and put the money “into land” as she's doing; the success of
Sexual Politics
is buying her a farm she'll enjoy and eventually share as a women's arts colony. But I say women need the cash for projects
now
. Emily helps me incorporate the Sisterhood Is Powerful Fund. It is the first feminist grant-giving foundation in the United States.

Emily and I, the sole officers, keep the bureaucracy to a minimum. No office, no staff; she and I do all the paperwork. No proposals are required, only a letter about the project. The sole stipulations are that it's first-come-first-serve, that the recipient group has to be all women and autonomous (that is, not a caucus of or auxiliary in a male-led organization), and that grants will go to groups, not individuals. Twice a year the royalty checks come in, and twice a year the Sisterhood Fund checks go out. Simple, clean, direct. The process gladdens my heart because so little money—a few hundred dollars here, a few thousand dollars there—goes so far. The fund gives seed-money grants to what will become a
massive alternative feminist media: newspapers, magazines, publishers. We help establish the first-ever rape crisis center (in Washington, D.C.), the first shelters for battered wives and incest survivors, many of the first constituency-focused organizations: African-American, Latina, Asian-American, Native-American, lesbian, disabled, welfare women's groups.

On one occasion, I sit at our oak table signing fund checks to the movement by candlelight because Con Edison has turned off our electricity due to failure of payment. It doesn't occur to me that I've now positioned myself to support movement women in sacrificial ways not so dissimilar from those in which I supported my mother and aunt. Kenneth says I'm nuts. Kate says
Don't do this
—and pretty much everyone, including Adrienne Rich, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Mary Daly, Phyllis Chesler, Susan Brownmiller, and Rita Mae Brown, concurs. But Emily, my legal buddy, understands. In our nonexistent spare time, she and I have founded the New York Women's Law Center, and she's taking on so many pro bono cases she can barely make
her
rent.

Meantime, while I write checks, Blake sings songs he's invented and makes shadow pictures with his fingers in the candlelight, to keep me company.

The crises keep coming. They provoke me. I provoke them. Am I confusing stress with excitement, or even fun? Am I becoming addicted to adrenaline? Stopping is unthinkable. I might not be able to start up again.

Random House is about to publish my first book of poems,
Monster
, including the title poem I read at the violence panel—which has now taken off, prepublication, in taped and mimeo'd form, and become an underground rallying cry for women. But there's another poem in the book, called “Arraignment,” in which I flatly accuse Ted Hughes of the murder of his wife, the poet Sylvia Plath.
²²
The poem is deliberately hyperbolic and symbolic, but I also do intend to imply that Hughes's well-known womanizing and his physical, mental, and economic cruelty, before
and after their separation, drove Plath to suicide. I rest my arguments on the testimony of her own words—her accusations of betrayal, rape, battery, and poverty—in her last poems, letters, and journals. My book is in galleys when it's stopped cold.

Random House lawyers have read the galleys and on their recommendation, the house threatens to kill the book unless I cut the poem. I'm a young poet about to have her longed-for first book, and the news lands like a punch in the stomach. A six-month nightmare ensues: endless meetings with Random House lawyers—grey-faced, grey-haired, grey-suited men versus me and trusty Emily, who bases her defense of my poem bravely if unsuccessfully on free speech, poetic license, and Plath's own testimony. We try to subpoena Plath's last journal—but Hughes announces that he has deliberately destroyed it, claiming he has done so for the sake of their children. We suggest that Random House publish my book with a blank, black-bordered page where the poem
would
have run, stamped simply
CENSORED,
but the house refuses. I feel censored for acknowledging that I'm being censored. The RH lawyers and executives tell us candidly that a lawsuit doesn't scare them, that sometimes they even welcome one, because it can help sales—but only for a book that might
sell
—which would mean
prose
, fiction or nonfiction, certainly never
poems
. I am having difficulty comprehending why Hugh Hefner, Al Goldstein, and other pornographers can have a field day traducing feminist spokeswomen by name as sluts, whores, and bestialists in the pages of their newspapers and magazines, and calling the smears “fact,”
²³
and
that
, somehow, is free speech, but my poem—a
poem
—is unprotected by the First Amendment. All Emily's arguments get us nowhere. I foresee my life as a published poet ending before it begins.