Saturday's Child (69 page)

Around the World

There was a September journey to Japan to keynote a conference on international feminism (with a snuck-in side trip to Kyoto, where I crouched for three hours watching how light shifts across the stones of the greatest Zen garden in the world). Other high points were time spent with an old
friend, the writer-activist Keiko Higuchi, and our amusement at frontpage newspaper articles analyzing what “message” I, as a radical feminist, must have meant to project when I was spied knitting during a panel. (I've knitted during meetings for years, as did Marilyn when she was in Parliament. That way, if things degenerate into blather, when you go home you know you'll have accomplished
some
thing, even if it's only sixty more rows.) Japan was also memorable because the shiny new state-of-the-techno-art Tokyo-Yokohama Women's Conference Center was about to bar entry at the conference to
hibakusha
women—atomic-radiation survivors and their generational descendants—who are still discriminated against in Japan. There was quite a scene and the conference nearly lost its keynote speaker on the spot, but the women were admitted in the end and have been welcome at the center ever since.

A month later, in October, a group of Sisterhood Is Global Institute members—Keiko from Japan, Madhu Kishwar from India, Mahnaz Afkhami from Iran, Marilyn from New Zealand, and myself from the United States—went to the Philippines by invitation of the Philippine Women's Movement to participate in a three-week-long series of meetings, “The Sisterhood Is Global Dialogues in the Philippines,” with public and private assemblies throughout Manila, Negros, Mindanao, Olongapo, and the Cordillera region.
¹
The Dialogues, expertly organized by the longtime feminist leader Anna Leah Sarabia of the Women's Media Circle in Manila, were with Filipina activists, academics, journalists, and politicians, and focused on topics ranging from reproductive freedom to the sex-tourism industry, from lesbian rights to women's unpaid labor, from nuclear power to religious fundamentalism, and from multinational corporate
landownership to the (now departed) U.S. military bases. I arrived a week ahead of the group, arranging for Marilyn to be invited early as well, in order to spend time in the north with, among others, indigenous tribeswomen and women of the underground New People's Army. The story of this trip appears as an essay in
The Word of a Woman
.

Those frequent-flier miles were adding up. The following year, 1989, UNRWA would bring me back to the Middle East for a return stay in the refugee camps, this time during the
Intifada.
²
There would also be a sweep across the United States for
The Demon Lover
book tour, and a three-month stint as guest professor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, teaching feminist studies and American literature.

But that was by then my
third
trip to Aotearoa, which was beginning to feel like a second home.

Down on the Farm

It was back in 1988 that I'd visited Marilyn's farm for the first time. She'd then owned Atlantis, as she'd named it, for less than a year, and had poured most of her resources into the land, livestock, and farm buildings rather than the house. Consequently, that first stay of about ten weeks felt a bit like camping out indoors—but roughing it feels smooth enough when the beloved is finally waiting with open arms and a big grin and you're arriving in exultation at
last
into the relationship you feared never would stabilize. It was January, the height of antipodean summer. From that time on, I'd always be aware of the shimmer in time, a palpable shadowing of the seasons with their opposites. The Winter Solstice in New York meant in New Zealand beach picnics, foraging for oysters and mussels along rocky outcroppings, long desultory afternoons, and mornings dozing lightly beaded with fresh sweat from dawn lovemaking. But summer is a labor-intensive season on any farm, and Atlantis was no exception.

I cherished that farm, even when its farmer would drive me batty. Not that there were many problems that first stay. It was an idyll where we
could enjoy the never-before-experienced luxury of calm days and nights together for weeks on end, broken only by a little socializing: she wanted to show me off to family and friends, and I wanted to win their approval. Mostly, though, we reveled in the seclusion of our own company and in the exclusivity of our passion—that elite dimension reserved for lovers. She kept repeating that being with me this way created “a sense of infinite trust and resurrection,” and I felt we'd won through, on a love about which I'd all but given up hope. It was a validation of not having stopped. Shy at first, I soon nested busily in the house, which was large and drafty though brightly painted and glowing with pale wood window sashes, floors, and wainscoting. The kitchen that first year was barely worthy of the name, but eventually Marilyn put in a splendiferous kitchen—”the seductive kitchen,” she called it, since she hoped it would be an incentive for me to move full-time to the farm, which was as much a nonoption in my mind as permanently settling in New York was in hers. But in 1988 even the minimalism of the house and its pseudo-kitchen served as a challenge, and I proudly produced some memorable meals from fresh produce plucked twenty steps away: there's nothing like pesto you grind from just-picked basil you've grown yourself.

The gardener in me was ecstatic. I stayed outdoors from early morning until dark, even in the light summer rain, because something always needed tending. There was a row of lush indigo-blue hydrangea bushes, three cutting gardens, and a variety of roses. There was a kitchen garden of herbs and lots of vegetables, including zucchini that endlessly proliferated like the Great God Pan crossed with the sorcerer's apprentice. A sandy asparagus bed produced delicate, crisp shoots. There were passion-fruit vines climbing the garage wall and an orchard—with apple, pear, olive, apricot, and lemon trees—down by the pond, where Canada geese had taken up residence along with visiting ducks and the periodic specter of a white heron. Blackberry bushes ripened around the property, and peppery watercress grew wild along one of the paths. That first stay—and, it must be admitted, every stay thereafter—I spent far too much money buying plants, trees, and bushes as gifts for the farm. It was such glee to roam through garden centers and take advantage of the exchange rate running heavily in my favor, so I became the kid in a candy store: I'll have a golden
willow sapling and a claret ash and oh wow look at those mauve prunus trees … and then we'd drive home, kiss, and dig them in.

The farm had approximately forty acres of pasture, dotted with outbuildings and sheds. Dwelling thereon were three stately fat black sheep, whom I promptly named Winken, Blinken, and Nod individually, but collectively the Shearelles, since they tended to move as one, posture themselves in a cluster, and then swivel their heads in unison as if on the lookout for a Motown talent scout. There was a henhouse (with a lopsided roost I built in a fit of atrocious carpentry), home to four fussy chickens striped black and white—designer hens—producing fresh eggs each morning. In later years, Marilyn would also pasture cattle for other farmers, violating her own rule that she would never raise animals intended for slaughter. But her dream for Atlantis centered on Angora goats: breeding them, providing stud service for other goat farmers, and selling the wool—mohair and cashgora—at market. Since New Zealand is primarily an agrarian country and many of its politicians and writers are also farmers, she saw farming as no contradiction to her now-nonelectoral political activities and the writing she hoped to do, thinking rather it would provide an income to help her pursue her other work. The reverse turned out to be true: she needed to do other work to keep the farm and its three hundred animals in the style to which they were accustomed.

In 1988 she was still learning about farming and goats, and I was meeting all this for the first time. Over the years, I became quite a handy goatherd, adept at chasing them, lunging, grasping their horns and wrestling them down for inoculations; at clipping their hooves, and at luring them into zinc-medicated footbaths for the chronic foot-rot to which domesticated goats are prone. I knew how to sort sheared fleece for baling (watching for crimp, texture, and luster); when to apply fly-strike powder, how to rescue a buck who's trapped himself in the brambles, how to mix formula to bottle-feed a kid abandoned by its mother, and a hundred other skills of questionable value in downtown Manhattan.

The goats enchanted me. They get a bad press, so I can set the record straight here: they do
not
smell awful. During “tupping time” (mating), the bucks do give off, well … whiffs of raunchiness. But to sniff a doe or a kid is to inhale a milky fragrance accented with sweet clover. The does have
enormous golden eyes with long eyelashes in dainty triangular faces that make them all look like Audrey Hepburn. The babies are exquisite: pearl frisks of affection who, once past the rubber-leg wobble stage, bleat demandingly, follow you around, and munch rose petals from your hand; if you obligingly sit down in the paddock, they will flatter you by vaulting onto your shoulders and standing on your head. Goats are quite intelligent; in this they are unlike sheep, who are modest with cause and skittish without it; and very unlike cattle, whose brains, secreted behind those glazed brown eyes moist with sincerity, seem never to have been contaminated by a single thought. Goats, like cats, find ways of going precisely where they shouldn't and of
not
being where anyone dares tell them to be. Fences are studied as provocations, gates as tests of tactical game theory. Pecking orders are won by virtue of intellect and seniority, not size or brawn, and cooperation in problem solving is not uncommon. Furthermore, a sense of humor is truly evident, especially in getting their own back at the taller two-legged goats who can open and close gates and think they own the place, but who at least dutifully deliver hay bales to the paddock in winter or in times of drought, and helpfully turn spigots to fill the water troughs.

When Marilyn began a teaching job at the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, it required her being away for three days and two nights a week, and the truth is I reveled in holding the farm on my own. This wasn't only because I could then write for hours undisturbed or scrub the house from top to bottom or indulge in an orgy of cooking and baking (
some
thing had to be done with all those lewd zucchini). It was also because I didn't have to wait for her proprietary permission to clean rusted junk out of a paddock or hose down the pigsty. Last, it was because I took pride in getting every creature to safe shelter when a cyclone warning was broadcast; in managing to rescue kids from the holes, thickets, and other inaccessible places where they'd wedge themselves; in striding out with a flashlight, slickered and gumbooted, into a windy rainstorm at 3:00
A.M.
to find that lost kid I could hear bleating from two paddocks away. I loved the animals, naming many of them as they were born—Sibyl, her daughter Maya, and the twins Lillith and Eve being my special pets—and I relished their acceptance of me. My New York friends were incredulous that their urbanite pal could adapt so well. Unable to picture it, they kept blurring
the facts, referring to my stays on a sheep farm in Australia. But I was a happy woman that first hot January—my skin tanned from the sun that had bleached my hair back to near blond, my legs scratched and bruised from butting goat-horns, my muscles aching, my hands scarred from gathering blackberries for jam, my heart at peace.

In February, politics descended on us. Sisterhood Is Global Institute members who currently or previously held public office in Iran, the Philippines, Tanzania, and the United States convened in Auckland for a series Marilyn was producing for New Zealand television called “What If Women Ruled the World?” Bella Abzug had come for the taping, so then we rented a car, took her on a tour of the geothermal area geysers, and brought her back to the farm for a visit. (I enjoyed having the rental car since I couldn't drive the farm truck, and Bella and I toodled around in it when Marilyn was busy. When I drove her to a shearing demonstration at a tourist mecca called Sheep World, I overheard the North American accents of a U.S. or Canadian couple in heated “t'is/t'ain't” argument, until the husband triumphantly demanded, “Then just
tell
me, Hazel, what in
God's
name would Bella Abzug be doing at Sheep World!” We validated Hazel, making her husband look—forgive me—sheepish.) Bella relaxed at the farm, declared she was addicted to my alliterative soup (cold curried cream of carrot), and even helped with the goats; the older does sensed someone of consequence and paid her serious attention. There were long dinnertime conversations and much laughter, and then Marilyn and I would nestle in bed together, giggling and whispering our postmortems about the day.

Life seemed good. Still, there was a hole in my heart from missing Blake. We spoke frequently by phone, and he came and went from college in Boston as usual, having the Village “pad” to himself when in New York, and beginning to assemble his first serious band. He also kept an eye on Bran, who was being fed and cat-sat by kind friends and neighbors on a revolving schedule, and who made his displeasure at my absence known by ignoring me for a full week after my return.

It was a period of discovery with Marilyn. Although ten years my junior, she'd been aged by her three Parliament terms into an intellectually cynical, elderly thirty-six. Both of us were old enough to be refreshed by doing new things, or doing favorite old things but this time together. The cry
“
That's
a first!” became a refrain, from her try at writing a sonnet to my attempt to back up a tractor, abysmal failures both. She was working at her book on economics and women's unpaid labor, and I was working on it with her, the in-house editor/lover, frequently wrestling with a combination of abstruse economics terminology plus Marilyn's tone, which tended to leak contempt at any reader who might not instantly grasp what she'd intended. Having more experience as a politician than as a writer, Marilyn regarded the act of writing as if it were speech delivery, political platform, or fiat, whereas for me writing has always been an assumed interactive communication, my way of being a social animal. Nevertheless, I'd found her a literary agent, helped her write the proposal, and helped locate a U.S. publisher, so now she had a contract and delivery date.
³
It seemed a satisfactory exchange: my bookish skills for hers in farming, for her expert knowledge of her country, and for her political advice. It felt nice to be useful on subjects I knew well, and nice
not
to have to be the capable one in every other area. In fact, it felt delicious to
follow
directions for a change—up to a point. Aware that we were both irascible, competitive women, I thought we deserved congratulations for equalizing things so well.