Saturday's Child (75 page)

⁷
Of course we do. Gloria has made it a practice for years to show me raw copy and ask whether I think some phrase or political position is “too radical”—knowing full well I'll answer, “Not by half.” This now falls somewhere between a ritual and a running joke.

⁸
In her later incarnation as a book author, Suzanne has most recently published
Father Courage: What Happens When Men Put Family First
(Harcourt, 2000).

⁹
I called on old and new friends and brought them into our pages, some returning after years of refusing to publish in
Ms
., others appearing for the first time. The list includes Margaret Atwood, Sandra Cisneros, Rita Dove, Andrea Dworkin, Louise Erdrich, Marilyn French, Marilyn Hacker, Joy Harjo, Bell Hooks, June Jordan, Maxine Kumin, Ursula K. LeGuin, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, Ninotchka Rosca, and Jane Wagner—and that was just in the
first
few issues.

¹⁰
The guide was, as Mary Thorn wrote in
Inside Ms
., “the most comprehensive national survey of female candidates [and their positions on issues] ever compiled, listing nearly twenty-five hundred candidates for Congress, state legislatures, statewide office, or mayor of major cities.” Perhaps coincidentally, 1992 was the year that a record number of women won public office in the United States.

¹¹
In seventeenth-century England and much of Europe only men were permitted to be gardeners and planters; women were stuck with the work of weeding. There's an effigy of a weeder woman in the gardens of Woburn Abbey. Although not an old woman, she's bent almost double from her labor.

¹²
During the 1980s, when Doubleday had been my publisher, there was a plan afoot to publish
The Mer Child
with Judy Chicago as illustrator. Judy and I were enthusiastic at the idea of collaborating, and for a while it looked as if we might pull it off. She wanted to illumine the text rather than simply illustrate it: to draw or etch, then paint, directly onto the plates from which the book pages would be photographed. This meant that each copy of the book would in effect be an original work of art—a lovely idea. Unfortunately, it also meant that each clothbound copy would retail for about $250, and each lowly paperback for a mere $175. Understandably, Judy saw no problem with
The Mer Child
being an art book. Understandably, I wanted to reach average people, who couldn't afford such prices. The deal fell through.

¹³
Helen went on to write
Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000).

¹⁴
From “The Ghost of a Garden,” in A
Hot January: Poems, 1966-1999
.

¹⁵
Gloria and Lois, for example, later said they felt I'd turned into more of a traditional “wife” with Marilyn than I'd ever been in my marriage. They were correct—although they'd stood by me throughout. Gloria had even written, at my request, the introduction to Marilyn's book, loyally hauling in
her
old friend John Kenneth Galbraith to give the book a blurb.

¹⁶
Maybe I'm just a sucker for the symmetry of form. After all, consider the following. Years after the end of the relationship and the despair in its wake, when passion has withered to pity and finally indifference—late one night, the phone rings. It's the student lover, who's secretly pilfered my number from Marilyn's address book. She's hoping that I, a writer she's read for years, won't hang up on a desperate woman. Their relationship has been a disaster for some time—therapy abandoned, wine, grass, and silence increased, Marilyn claiming such problems are brand-new and the lover's fault, the lover exhausted by attempts to help but unable to breach that emotional citadel.
Is this my doing
, she asks,
am I crazy?
I say
No, you're not crazy, it's not your fault, protect yourself, Marilyn needs help but only she can change her life
. Decades of listening to women and learning from them how to be of use have clicked me onto automatic pilot, and I'm able to be helpful yet not trash my former lover. Moreover, I find I'm actually capable of doing this without relishing the moment. That amazes me. It's one of those rare occasions when validation comes in the form of an opportunity for grace. I am so grateful to existence for its profound wit that I stay awake sipping peppermint tea for hours. Art dare not invent such a pattern. Only life can get away with it. And did.

¹⁷
A
Woman's Creed
was written for and at the Women's Global Strategy Meeting, sponsored by the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), November 1994. Bella had organized the meeting and asked me for “a universal, inspirational, visionary” statement women could take to the upcoming UN conference in Beijing. The meeting was attended by 148 women from fifty countries, which is hard enough when hammering out platforms—but as for “inspirational vision,” forget it.

My idea of hell is an endless meeting where you have to write collectively. There are two different levels of this hell. One is where the collaborators are all writers; the other is where they're not. Yet a caucus was assembled, and we discussed the subject for hours. Everyone was clear on what we were
against
, but no one could imagine what we'd want to
replace
that with—other than abstractions (peace, justice, equality) and definition by negation (an end to war, an end to violence). Not one woman could tell me what, to her, peace would
taste
like, winning would
sound
like, safety would
smell
like—and if it can't be imagined concretely, how can it be created? Finally, my old friend Perdita Huston, herself a writer, urged everyone to leave me alone, and I stayed up all night and wrote the
Creed
. It has since been reprinted widely around the world and been translated into twelve languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Sanskrit, all available from the Sisterhood Is Global Institute.

¹⁸
“The UN Conference: Out of the Holy Brackets and into the Policy Mainstream” and “The NGO Forum: Good News and Bad,” both in
Women's Studies Quarterly
24, nos. 1-2 (Spring-Summer 1996).

¹⁹
One of the unanticipated aspects of attending conferences post-Marilyn was discovering I had so much extra
time
, even during the days. At first I couldn't work out where it was coming from. Then it struck me. I wasn't having to play diplomat and mend her fences, explaining to others that she really hadn't
meant
to be short-tempered, cold, or dismissive, that she was just jet-lagged/having a period/ill with a cold/under the weather, so “please don't take it personally.” It was a nose-on-my-face revelation about my previous role as wife-translator-facilitator.

²⁰
After a year and a lawsuit, some papers were found in a FedEx warehouse and returned, having suffered major water damage.

EPILOGUE

Six Memoirs in Search of an Author

If I could stand beside my body

and really see the woman I am
,

then I would understand at last how envy feels
.

—A
NNA
A
KHMATOVA
,

“E
LEGIES OF THE
N
ORTH
,”
SEC
. 3
¹

1. From the Cutting-Room Floor

“Long Shots, Two-shots, Close-ups, and Dissolves.”

On safari in South Africa: blessed with sighting a herd of female elephants surrounding a calf less than twenty feet away; their primal, warm, dusky, curry-mustard scent.

The sculptural beauty of Kenneth's forearms in candlelight as we sit reading each other's Tarot cards.

Holding a copy of the first book of mine translated into Chinese.

The Golden Oldies—Bella, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Gloria—grooving to a performance of Blake's band, and leaving the club owner speechless with bewilderment.

Hiking in the shadow of the Himalayas.

Sitting upright on the Dead Sea.

Lying in Marilyn's arms on our hotel-room bed in Canterbury, England, while we listen for hours to the bell ringer at the medieval church across the street make a full-peal attempt.

The twelfth hour of childbirth labor, scraped down to a never-felt energy waiting beneath the exhaustion for precisely this moment.

Sitting up all night arguing with Mary Daly over a bottle of Irish Mist: Mary claims there's no need to read
The Divine Comedy
when Aquinas's theology more purely makes the point; I claim there's no need for any damned theology when the poetry is the point.

Spying the first hummingbird to visit the Perry Street roof garden.

The Xhosa activist in Cape Town, South Africa, who points to a wall poster, saying, “I don't know who wrote them, but those words know what's in my heart”; peering closer and realizing it's
A Woman's Creed
.

A naughty afternoon with Iliana on the beach in Miami, making love in the cabana as sun worshipers stroll by beyond the flimsy curtain.

Blake at age seven, sitting by the fire wide-eyed, begging for one more chapter while Kenny and I take turns reading aloud from a prose translation of the Welsh epic poem
The Mabinogion
.

Noticing Friedan across the aisle from me in the audience for a panel at the Beijing conference—asleep, her head lolling on her chest, a tiny drop of spittle drooling from the slack lips—and feeling gratefully betrayed into tenderness for this ill, tired, crochety old adversary who'd denounced me as too radical for so long, never having grasped we were on the same side.

Sneaking into my bookbag the roller skates I'm only supposed to wear indoors and skating the whole five blocks from Miss Wetter's to Aunt Sophie's, all by myself; the sense of speed and balance, the sting of wind-rush in my eyes, the blur of houses passing, one particular gold-leafed October afternoon.

Meeting Iliana at the airport wearing only a raincoat and a chuckle, carrying a paper bag containing an open split of champagne for the taxi ride into Manhattan. Discovering this works so lasciviously well that, shameless, I later repeat it with Marilyn.

Scrawling, “Paid in Protest to a Vicious Monopoly,” on the back of checks I write to the phone and utilities companies all through the 1970s.

Swimming with dolphins in the Florida Keys: their warm skin brushing mine; their obvious approval when I hum Bach.

A fireworks burst of happiness inside me at seeing Blake's face, aglow with love, when he gazes at the young woman in his life.

Commiserating with Nawal El Saadawi about writing and husbands as we circle the Great Sphinx in Giza.

Opening a bucketful of just-gathered oysters and a bottle of champagne at Atlantis, in our spontaneous celebration of the news that Toni Morrison has won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Hunched over, learning which is the circuit wire, which is the battery, how to set the timer. Trembling with this knowledge, wanting it, needing it, loathing it.

Standing hand in hand with Blake at my mother's grave, to unveil the pink marble headstone reading simply her name, dates, and the legend “There is nothing you cannot be.”

A flight of startled white herons at dawn in the Everglades.

Wolfing down instant noodle soups and cans of Mexicorn with Karen at 5:00
A.M.
in our
Sisterhood Is Global
office.

Sharing a carousel horse with Father Joe.

The touch of a newborn kid just rescued from drowning: wet, chilled, shuddering against the warmth of my bare breasts under my shirt.

Eating order-in lobster with black-bean sauce in Lois's kitchen, each of us weepy about respective lovers not appreciating our magnificence.

My end-of-the-day ritual before leaving the office when editing
Ms
., usually around ten at night: putting my feet up and enjoying the day's reward: mail from readers.

Staying indoors with Marilyn on three different vacations where we sit glued to the TV set, watching the People's Revolution overthrow Marcos in the Philippines, the Tiananmen Square rebellion, and the house arrest of Gorbachev in the former USSR—our contrary sort of vacation.

Walking the beaches of the world—at Big Sur and Staten Island with Kenneth; in Florida, Maine, Crete, and the Hamptons with Iliana; in Bali, Te Henga, Rio, Galveston, San Francisco, and Boracay with Marilyn; alone in more places than I can count, from Dover to the Cape of Good Hope; with Blake when he's six and I wake him, bundle him up, and bring him out to the beach at Amagansett for his very first sunrise.

My mother's face, as she sings Brahms's “Lullaby”—in a soft voice the color of old rose—to me as I drift to sleep.

2. Acting as if It's Worth It

“The Story of an Actor Who Becomes Politically Involved.”

(Note: Watch it. The models are an unsavory lot. Eva Peron. Ronald Reagan. Jiang Qing. Sonny Bono.)

When my mother lay dying I thought:

(a) I'll outlive her and be free.

(b) I'll outlive her but never be free.

(c) If it were true or even possible that, as she'd claimed, I'd loved acting—
really
loved acting—that would mean her absolution. Her absolution would in turn mean she'd have no need to haunt my consciousness. It might be worth such an admission, which could even be true—after all, look at my life!—if that would buy her freedom from me, and mine from her.

But would it?

Well, if it
weren't
true, couldn't I just pretend it was?

Unforeseen influences: I started working so young that although I could portray mainstream normality, I never believed it existed. That disbelief helped forge a vision for radical change. When you've seen behind the curtain where the wizard hides pulling the levers, you learn that no single way of living is foreordained or “natural,” and you discover that people are capable of profound metamorphosis, though unfortunately they rarely avail themselves of this genius, force of habit being an even greater enemy of change than cowardice. You also come to recognize how in our most secret hearts we each star in the performance of existence, with everyone else playing supporting roles, character parts, cameos, bits, walk-ons, and
extras. There is no girl or boy next door. Each one of us lives in The House; everyone else is relegated to next door.