Small Changes (62 page)

“I’m not in the closet, Laura. I don’t have any sex life, and I don’t want one. I don’t feel gay, I don’t feel straight, I don’t feel anything.”

“Because you’re afraid of what you do feel. Don’t you
see, Beth, you’re still concealing, you’re still letting them make you ashamed of loving another woman. When you stop letting them make you ashamed and afraid, you’ll be stronger, you’ll feel good and beautiful in your love. Stand up with us and be counted!”

“But I don’t know if I count!” Beth turned her face to and fro. She felt pushed. She was angry with Laura for trying to make her do something she didn’t want to, and angry because Laura was succeeding in making her feel guilty.

“You’re afraid. Somebody might see you. You might lose your job or lose your friends. Because that’s what it means in this society. If nobody knows, cool. If somebody knows, they can treat you like a mad dog, they can lock you up and deny you a living. It’s you they mean, Beth, you with Karen.”

Beth turned her face in blind distress from side to side. She found it hard to look at Laura’s accusing bright face. “I went to bed with two men, I went to bed with one woman. I don’t think I wanted to go to bed with any of them! Maybe what I’d like to march for is the right not to have to. Ever!”

Laura leaned forward, speaking softly. “Was being with Karen like being with your husband?”

Beth shook her head no.

“Better? Was it different? Another woman loving you?”

Beth nodded. Added immediately, “But both men were different too. I want to stay as I am! I don’t want to be with anybody!”

“Sometimes you want to pretend you’re a child. Beth, Beth, you’re equivocating. You’re still in the closet and why? Are you still not able to love yourself, and therefore you can’t really love other women? Or are you simply scared of what the society can do to you if you stand up and say you love women?”

“Laura, are you so sure you love yourself better than I love myself? Maybe I wish people would just stop going to bed with each other for a year! Maybe we’d all get straight in our heads then. We’d see what really connects us.”

“Being turned on by that woman scared you. It scares you still, and so you want everybody to be afraid of each other the way you’re afraid. Beth, loving is nothing to fear!”

“Yes, I’m afraid.” Beth stood up. She felt pummeled and raw. Her hands and legs were shaking. Slowly she climbed the steps to her room to lie clutching her pillow, shaking.

24

Out of the Closet
and into the Frying Pan

Dorine marched in and sat on the side of Beth’s bed. “Come on, Bethie, it’s not like you to lie and sulk. Don’t let Laura get to you. You know, she feels very embattled. Besides, I’m going to march with her, so she won’t feel like nobody in the house is supporting her.”

Beth sat up on one elbow. “You’re marching with the radical lesbians? But you’ve never even … I mean, have you ever been involved with a woman?”

“Well, no. But I’ve thought about it.”

Beth began to giggle. “You’ve sinned in your thoughts.”

“I have thought about it. It makes sense to me. It just seems like somehow I can never do it, for real. Some deep awkward inhibition that makes it something heavier than it should be. But suppose I did meet a woman sometime I could love, who could love me? Besides, Beth, I kind of enjoy demonstrations. Long as I don’t think I’ll get my head bashed in or one of those blinding gases sprayed over me. I don’t think this is going to be rough. It’s just a march, with a lot of chanting and posters.”

“I feel so mixed up, Dorine. I feel she’s forcing me to decide something I don’t want.… When I saw Jim the last time, I felt … almost as if I could remember how I used to want him. I could remember loving him.… I don’t know, I’m more afraid of loving a woman now than before Karen. Then I didn’t know it was possible, I never worried about it. I don’t know! I don’t know! My life is hard already!”

“I haven’t slept with anybody in months, myself. Though I think about it.” Dorine sighed. “I have a lot of dreams about fucking, and sometimes I have an orgasm right in my sleep, and that’s really nice.… Do you masturbate?”

Beth shook her head, looking past Dorine.

“Beth, don’t curl up when I ask you a question. I do. Don’t you know how?”

“I don’t want to.”

“You aren’t into your body.”

“That isn’t the only way! I like to walk, I like to swim and work outside!”

“I’m sorry, Beth, I don’t mean to bait you. You’re right to insist on being you. Your own way.… Speaking of complications, did you talk to Miriam this week? No? Then guess what. Go on, guess the least useful thing that could happen to her.”

“Getting pregnant again?”

“Never mind, you don’t have to guess. Phil is back.”

“Oh.” Beth sat up, putting her feet over the side of the bed. “Will that matter to Miriam? I mean, she’s married now.”

“But when an old friend arrives dirty, hungry, broke, and just altogether half destroyed, you don’t say, ‘Sorry, honey, I’m married.’ I wouldn’t exactly say he’s pleased to find her domestic in Brookline with a baby.… But you know, they were more friends than lovers in the years I knew them.”

“You’ve spoken to him?”

“Yeah, he called me. So I let her know and said, ‘Do you want me to give him your number?’ She started whooping with joy. Some people don’t know when they’re well off, Beth—including me.”

“Why do you say it that way?”

Dorine made that funny bittersweet smile. “Beth, I told you a lie. I said I hadn’t gone to bed with anybody in months? I went to bed with Phil this afternoon.”

“But why? Oh, Dorine, you’ve been so strong lately. What did you go and do that for?”

“He asked me to come and see him and I said I’d stop by on the way back from my afternoon lab. He’s staying at Jackson’s. Bethie, it’s funny—there they are, back together again. That marriage will outlast any we know. Anyhow, Jackson was at school, which was fine with me.”

“I wouldn’t … mind … seeing Jackson again. It’s been a long time.”

“That would be easy to arrange. Just stop by with me. Anyhow, Phil was there and we had a couple of beers together and we talked and talked and talked. I don’t know, I felt good talking to him. I felt I was different and he could
see that and liked it and I could feel differences in him, though I don’t know what they mean yet. He’s been through bad things.”

“You mean you felt sorry for him?”

“No, I didn’t. I don’t know why I didn’t. He kept telling me how great I was looking. Then he said, ‘Hey, do you want to talk in bed?’ ”

“But why?” Beth’s voice trailed upward.

“Well, if a man occasionally asked so outright and friendly about it, no pressure, just ‘Do you want to?’ right in the middle of a good talk when I’m feeling close, I might have a lot more sex. I felt right about touching him and I could give some clues to what would please me—that’s new for me, Beth. I felt pretty mellow when we got up, good through my body and on top of things. I think I was still up on that when I got home and found Laura fighting everybody else in the house.”

“So maybe you’re marching because you feel funny about what you did with Phil.”

“Not so, Beth. This time I feel I can like Phil and it won’t hurt me. I can go to bed with him and he won’t use me. Look, I’m not there available and defenseless. My life has its own structure now. I have to make so much money, I have to spend so much time in the lab, I have duties here in the house.”

“So what do you want with him then?”

“Beth, Beth.” Dorine put her hands on her shoulders. “Don’t do that to me! Make me feel guilty for something I did that I wanted. Don’t.”

“But you’ve been so strong.”

“But I can’t be strong
for
you. We can be strong together.” Dorine buried her hands in her curly ruff of brown hair. “All heterosexuality isn’t necessarily a woman servicing a man. It’s as if we can be friends now, real friends. I know he’s still hung up on Miriam and that she means a whole lot to him. He’s been broken and he’s mending. And I can’t give him much—not much time, not much energy.”

“What can he give you?”

“Communication. A sense of play. The feeling mellow in my body.… I don’t know about Jackson, about dealing with him. That’s a test of strength. Being around Jackson used to make me feel like a piece of nothing.”

“I wonder if I’d still feel attracted to him. The way I used
to.” Beth felt fierce with courage saying it out loud. “I don’t think so. Besides, he’s older now.”

“So are you, ninny. So is supper. Come on downstairs and eat with the rest of us. There won’t be anything left for us.”

Beth paused in the doorway. “Why did Phil have to come back? Why couldn’t he stay where he was! All he ever means is trouble.”

“When you look at him, you won’t ask why he came back.”

On Saturday, Beth marched with Laura and Dorine. Her uneasy conscience made her go: what Miriam called her Puritan, the voice that made her feel that the more it cost to do something—the less she wanted to and the keener her fears—the more needful it was that she perform that act. But she did not enjoy the chants and the songs. Oh, part of her could watch Laura striding arm in arm with Lynn and another woman under the banner
GAY IS BEAUTIFUL
and see how happy Laura looked. Her face was flushed, her hair tumbled, her eyes bright with excitement as she marched, almost dancing along. Dorine was having a good time too, shouting and waving a poster and singing in her strong soprano with the other women. Beth’s conscience could make her march, but her conscience could not make her feel truly a part of what she did not want to be doing. Her body felt tight and hard. She wished herself visible only to the women around her. She felt awkward around the men from Gay Liberation and was glad they were marching separately: they made her feel as if she were all elbows.

The march had been called partly because of recent police harassment but also, Laura told her, to influence the women’s conference going on that weekend to give more space to gay women’s political demands. After the demonstration they went off to the conference, at Boston University. Laura went to the gay women’s meeting, but after looking through the nine workshops, Dorine and Beth decided they wanted to attend the one on women’s theater. “Wanda Rosario. Haven’t
I
heard of her? Does she write stuff?”

“I don’t think so.…” Dorine frowned over the name.
“I
have a feeling it’s Joe you’re thinking of. Used to be a big
macher
in the Radical Alliance. Proponent of the student-worker line. Phil used to hang around with him. Remember Joe Rosario who got fired from Northeastern and there was a student strike? He used to drop by Going-to-the-Sun.”

“Maybe she isn’t his wife, then.”

“He had a wife. I met her when we were bailing Phil out. What she’d have to do with women’s theater I sure don’t know. Anyhow, maybe we can find a group that you’ll like.” Dorine gave her hand a squeeze.

“Well, is that her?” Beth asked softly as they came in and sat down on the floor. They were late and the workshop was under way. A woman was setting everybody in groups to doing exercises with their voices and bodies.

“I’m not sure.… It could be her. No, it couldn’t be.”

For three hours they kept at it. It was exhausting and great. This woman knew what she was doing, she did not so much direct and instruct them as set them going together. They did some exercises with the group all at once, some things in small groups, some in twos and threes. They roared and bellowed. They sang. They drew air into their lungs and let it out in long, long groans and ululations. They beat time on the floor and on their thighs and they clapped in counter-rhythms. They danced and leapt and did slow circles. They became one another. They became parts of their own bodies and parts of their pasts. They were what they most wanted to be. They were animals. Then they were one big animal together. Then they were a machine. They were a cow together, they were a big snake, they were a wolf. They were a typewriter and a car.

The woman Wanda Rosario was small, almost as small as Beth, but heavier. She had a chunky body and wild dark hair, coarse and short and streaked with gray. She had huge dark eyes, a swarthy complexion, a sharp nose. She had blunt large spatulate hands that became totally other when she used them. They became birds, they became fish, they became flowers: they had no bones but were water flowing; they became knives and boxes and armor plating. They were weapons. They were puppets.

Her hair stood on end, her eyes blazed, her voice bellowed. Then it sank to a weird carrying whisper. She crackled with energy. She talked about women’s music, the songs women sang, the dancing women had done together, the rituals of women’s lives handed down from mothers to daughters for thousands of years from Paleolithic times and now destroyed. Women had had their culture stolen, suppressed. Women imagined they had never been poets or composers because their music had been anonymous and collective.

She talked about the need for women’s rituals, for making each other strong, for giving each other power, for feeling each one her own beauty with each other. They must make their own strong clean rituals of giving birth and puberty and fighting and growing and sharing and dying.

She illustrated with a ritual from the Santería, explaining how the forbidden African goddesses and gods had been disguised under the names of Christian saints, had entered the bodies of women dancing, and had thus manifested themselves. In this dance she was the goddess of the sea. One of the women who was in her company beat on a drum. Both Wanda and the woman began to sing something back and forth between them, and then Wanda began to dance, swishing back and forth rhythmically an invisible skirt as she stomped and turned and moved her hips. And Wanda dancing became beautiful.

Watching her, Beth caught her breath. She could almost believe on the spot in possession, in the mystery of the Santería, because dancing Wanda was radiant with power and strength, Wanda was beautiful. A wanting touched her nerves. Did she want to be Wanda? She tried to imagine that. She was in the presence of a woman who could make hidden things real, who could make inchoate emotions leap into the flesh. She wanted—what?—to know Wanda? To be near her? To be part of what she did. Right then she knew what she wanted to do in the world. She knew. She wanted to work with Wanda, she wanted to be part of that theater group.