Saturday's Child (63 page)

The next morning the two days of Hunter College panels began, sandwiching between them the dinner that Donna hosted at the Eleanor Roosevelt House for approximately three hundred guests. It poured an icy rain. Marilyn ran a fever and remained at the hotel that night, so Iliana felt more relaxed. Donna, Gloria, Margaritta, and I spoke, and each of the contributors present—now also co-founders of the Institute—were introduced to applause. De Beauvoir graciously sent yet another greeting; she was functioning like a daily pen pal, bless her, but she understood the impact of her support. Blake impressed everyone by adeptly pronouncing the names of Motlalepula Chabaku (South Africa) and Hema Goonatilake (Sri Lanka), the result of all those months of his hanging out at
SIG
. My former attorney Emily Goodman and I stole a private moment so she
could show me photographs of her daughter; Kate Millett had a bit too much wine and jovially tried to play kneesies with a radical nun; Karen and Toni went around with copies of the book for all contributors present to sign, for history's sake; and I smiled until my jaws hurt.

The following Monday saw the last of the ensemble events: a formal press conference preceding the Ford Foundation reception and seminar. The press conference went smoothly, but several contributors had to become invisible regarding it, since their governments would not have approved and it might have put their lives in danger. At Ford, my level of indigestion rose when, as we gathered around the polished conference table and Frank Thomas welcomed us, one of those eruptions euphemized by diplomats as “candid exchanges” burst out. Some of the women had decided to vent vociferously about the lack of attention funders give women internationally. Marilyn (who should have known better but who was still smarting from a reporter's having assumed she wasn't a radical, since she'd been an MP) joined them. Fortunately, the soothing presences of Margaritta and Devaki helped ameliorate the situation, in which the sole foundation that
was
paying any attention to women was being tongue-lashed for the sins of all the others.

The next day the departures began. But I was still booked into a week of radio and TV promotion for the anthology. Marilyn decided to stay another week, so I corralled her into doing some of the appearances with me. Iliana had managed to carry off the public events with dignity and a certain hauteur, admirable given the predicament. But it was now clear to all three of us that what had happened in New Zealand was not a passing fancy but a continuing fascination. When it was time to vacate the Tudor Hotel, I couldn't return to Iliana's.

Naturally I called Lois. Having just seen me exude smiling
bonfemie
at the Lincoln Center book party and her own soiree afterward, she was taken aback to learn, in one phone call, the whole sub rosa crisis: New Zealand, Marilyn, grand passion, Iliana, serial monogamy turned to granola, place to stay needed … but she was solid as Gibraltar. That night I was back in the Robin Morgan Memorial Den.

Marilyn had moved to stay with a friend who worked at the UN, but in a few days she joined me in the RMMD. By the time she left for home, we both knew we were in far deeper than anticipated. She was in love with
me, said so, and kept bursting into tears at the thought of leaving. Yet demonstrating a remarkable capacity for compartmentalization, she also felt compelled to pursue her long-planned scenario for the impending year: the (still in the dark) lover, the farm. That seemed odd. But I couldn't see myself as either a home wrecker (even if my own had been wrecked), or a “backstreet woman.” So I accepted her departure, assumed we were finished, and began the process of mourning. At least
Sisterhood Is Global
(the book) was a publication
accompli
. (It would remain in print with Doubleday/Anchor for twelve years. In 1996, The Feminist Press reissued it with a new preface, an updated overview I wrote for the occasion). The love affair had died, but the book had been born.

Dropping Anchor

I may have been grieving over Marilyn, but there was as always the solace of work: more anthology promotion, a
Ms
. roundtable on what feminist foreign policy might be, a gathering at the International Women's Tribune Center. And—surprisingly, as my datebook reminds me—by December 9 I'd finished the outline and sample chapters of
Dry Your Smile
, the novel, which went off to Loretta at Doubleday.

That Christmas I was still in the den. Marilyn was spending the holidays with her lover in Australia, having fights and sneaking away to phone me while I urged her not to, or else to tell the truth and clear the air. Iliana and I met frequently for long, painful, brave, and loving talks about how we might rebuild our relationship as close friends. Since Lois had gone abroad, I had her apartment to myself, so Blake came to stay over. He and I made dinners, took walks, saw movies, and talked for hours. But for the moment he was still living with Kenneth. He'd handled the excruciatingly overlong breakup with extraordinary grace, even humor. Well, at least nobody had lied to him. When people are tearing their hair out but pretending, “It's nothing, really,” for the so-called sake of the children, that's when the children are driven batty, since they
know
something's happening anyway. If the truth is admitted, at least that's one less source of pain. My real concern during these months was that Blake was becoming a classic prematurely caregiving child, taking the place I'd just vacated in codependent hell—but I was happy to be proven wrong. He sought his
comforts with friends, at school, and mostly in his music, for and in which he already lived with the certainty of a life's vocation—and in that I knew he'd always find his own safety and sanity.

On New Year's Eve I wrote a long letter to Marilyn telling her that it was truly
over
, that the phone calls had to
cease
, and that I wished her joy in her plans. Then I sat cross-legged on the fold-out sofa bed in the den, surveyed the latest ruins of my life, and rearranged priorities.

For the next three months, I focused on apartment-hunting, pounding pavements all over Manhattan but always returning to Greenwich Village, where I'd yearned to live for years. At last I found a two-bedroom apartment (reassuringly well to the west of the Iliana-Grove Press building) at the corner of Perry and Bleecker streets. It was small, and two flights up—but it had a working fireplace, an eat-in kitchen, lots of light, and access to a roof that I knew I could transform into a container garden. With the just-arrived advance for the novel from Doubleday, I paid off my debts, rented the apartment, and in March of 1985 moved in, heaving my books out of storage, where they'd been languishing. I had no furniture, but was so desperate to
be
there that I slept on the floor until the bed I'd ordered arrived. In Blake's room I had a loft bed built for him above his desk, as he'd wanted. Kenneth and I felt the living arrangements should be Blake's decision, and he chose to alternate staying in the Village and at 109 Third Avenue for each school semester. But the following year, 109 was sold and Ken had to leave, so Blake moved to Perry Street full-time.

Eager as I was to settle in and start writing, the Institute loomed. Karen, when she returned from a long-overdue vacation, would begin the work of incorporating it as a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization, and I'd be back at the fundraising stand to garner its start-up money. Marie Wilson at the Ms. Foundation for Women had kindly given us a cut-rate rent on tiny space in its offices, so the Institute had a mini-home.

It was over with Iliana, though we knew now we'd always be friends. It was over with Marilyn (I thought), though we also would be friends. I had no lover, but I had a
home
—for myself and my kid. To hell with sex, anyway, I thought. Like a shipwreck survivor, I paced the apartment in a state of delirium at just being there—touching walls, opening and closing windows, building my first fire and sitting in front of it, weeping with relief.

My mother's estate was now out of probate. Almost all the proceeds
from the sale of her apartment had been swallowed by her medical and nursing-home bills. With the remainder—the only money left of my childhood earnings—I bought Blake a Steinway. Once the piano movers had angled it gingerly up the Perry Street stairs, his expression told me all I needed to know. He understood it as an instrument of confidence in his choices, as well as an instrument of music. It was a gift of triumph, across time, from one child to another.

¹
Some people tried to fake the rebellion without the acts. There were a few women in the 1970s who declared themselves “political lesbians” without having once loved or felt attraction for another woman, and in certain cases without even
liking
other women much. Atkinson was one, wielding the label (in a way that naturally incensed lesbians) to demonstrate that she was more purely feminist than anyone else—including lesbian women.

²
See “Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?” in
Going Too Far
.

³
When cornered, my writer-editor persona can turn on my political one. I remember my frustration on learning that a progressive new law in the family code had been enacted in Greece, and that the Argentinian military junta had fallen—both coming too late for inclusion, thus making those country entries out of date even before publication. “How
could
they!” I kept muttering, feeling undercut by such inconveniently wonderful news.

⁴
Margaritta—born Margaret Chant in Oak Park, Illinois—had spent most of her adult life in the service of her adopted country, including having been jailed and exiled by the junta before it fell and before her husband, Andreas, became prime minister. She lives there still, regarded by the Greeks with an affection they no longer bestow on her late husband, who divorced her to marry a younger woman and then fell from power. The blunt American side of her still surfaces now and then, as when, during an interview some years ago, a reporter simpered, “As a little girl growing up in Illinois, did you ever dream that one day you'd actually be
married
to a
prime minister?
” “No,” Margaritta replied tartly, “I dreamed I'd
be
a prime minister.”

⁵
This was my period of daily audacities. Karen says she will never forget one incident when we needed to get our stored
SIG
boxes out of the Alliance office on a Saturday but were forbidden access by the building guard. I insisted he call his superior, but the superior backed him up and wouldn't speak with me. Little did the hapless guard know he was dealing with someone who'd been told “you can be anything anyone wants you to be.” I took the phone to call again, but covertly held down the receiver button as I dialed. Then I faked an entire conversation in which I listened attentively to and answered a dial tone, otherwise known as “the superior”—who heard my appeal, changed his mind, granted permission to move the boxes, instructed me to tell the guard (standing there wide-eyed) that it
was
okay after all, and added that the guard needn't bother to ring him back because he was about to go on a break. It worked. We moved at the speed of light to get the boxes out before we'd be discovered. Then Karen and I, dumbfounded, celebrated with Howard Johnson's fried clams while recovering from the fact that we'd gotten away with it.

⁶
On first seeing a photograph of Marilyn, my friend Lois, who is capable of one-liners approaching aphoristic pith, snorted, “Definitely not a vegetarian.”

⁷
This was easy enough to organize for Margaritta, as First Lady of Greece, and for Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, as former Prime Minister of Portugal. What was fun was managing to pull off the same courtesies for the others: for example, Carmen Lugo (who worked with indigenous women in Mexico) or Manjula Giri (a grassroots activist from Nepal) or Fawzia Hassouna, a stateless Palestinian with no papers other than a Jordanian passbook.

SEVENTEEN

Gaining the World

“
You have to help us,” she said
. “
You have to help us. They are shooting us down in the street.” By “us” she meant women who wrote against the grain. “What can I do?” I asked her. She said “I don't know. But you have to try. There isn't anybody else
.”

—T
ONI
M
ORRISON
, T
HE
D
ANCING
M
IND

Crisis can be an addiction as powerful as any other, one to which romantics like myself are especially prone, and one in which the universe will play a willing enabler at the slightest invitation. It takes time to wean yourself from dependence on this particular high, because going cold turkey merely serves to induce another crisis. I count March of 1985 at Perry Street as the beginning of what would be a lengthy, uneven process of self-induced detox. At least it was the beginning of discernment between provoked imbroglios and unavoidable urgencies, external demands and internal imperatives.

I spent that year writing the novel
Dry Your Smile
and functioning more as a contributing editor to
Ms
., as I had at first, than as an in-house editor. I'd pulled out of debt for the moment and was living off my book advance, augmented by a reduced lecture schedule and a little freelance journalism.
Politics went on as usual: meetings, actions, organizing, and that activity I loathe only a little less than collective writing but more than being teargassed: fundraising, in this case, for the Institute. Blake was in his junior year of Tutorial House (high school) at UNIS, aiming for the International Baccalaureate, and he reveled in living in the Village as much as I did. Bran, the beloved black cat, moved to Perry Street, surveyed the surroundings, approved, and took ownership immediately. The roof garden came alive that spring in containers bright with jonquil and tulip bulbs, and the summer was resplendent with boxes of herbs, lettuce, peppers, and tomatoes (grown from seed), vats of roses, tubs of wisteria and lilac, and an expanding collection of potted succulents. There was no shade, so fuchsia languished until I got the point and gave up on it, but rich blue clematis climbed rapidly, splashing the whitewashed chimney with velvet flowers, and the lacy dwarf Japanese maple in its half-barrel container flourished into a gorgeous maroon flecked with burnt orange.