Zami

by Audre Lorde

  There was a pain in Muriel to become herself that engaged my heart. I knew what it was like to be haunted by the ghost of a self one wished to be, but only half-sensed. Sometimes her words both thrilled me and made me weep.

  Snail-sped an up-hill day, but evening comes; I dream of you. This shepherd is a leper learning to make lovely things while waiting out my time of despair. I feel a new kind of sickness now, which I know is the fever of wanting to be whole.

  My hands shook a little as I put the letter down and poured myself another cup of coffee. Each day I would rush to my mailbox after work, looking for one of her thick blue envelopes.

  Slowly but surely, Muriel became more and more like a vulnerable piece of myself. I could cherish and protect this piece because it was outside of me. Hedging my emotional bets, inside safe and undisturbed. With each of Muriel’s letters there blossomed within me the need to do for her what I never really believed I could do for myself, even while I was in the midst of doing it.

  I could take care of Muriel. I could make the world work for her, if not for myself.

  With no intent and less insight, I fashioned this girl of wind and ravens into a symbol of surrogate survival, and fell into love like a stone off a cliff.

  I sent Muriel little scraps of paper with pieces of poems on them. Some were about her, some were not. Nobody could tell the difference. Muriel told me later she was convinced I was quite mad, also. I counted the days between her letters which brought me pieces of herself like special and anticipated gifts On December 21st, in answer to her entreaties and the solstice, I sent her a greeting card of a greek urn filled with stones which read, ‘I must have rocks in my head.’

  By that I meant I loved her.

  More than twenty years later I meet Muriel at a poetry reading at a women’s coffee-house in New York. Her voice is still soft, but her great brown eyes are not. I tell her, ‘I am writing an unfolding of my life and loves.’

  ‘Just make sure you tell the truth about me,’ she says.

  It was New Year’s Eve, the last day of 1954. Rhea was in love again, and had gone out for the evening and I imagined for the rest of the night. I had settled down to reading and writing and music when the phone rang.

  ‘Happy New Year!’ It was Muriel. ‘Are you going to be in this old evening?’

  My voice was jittery with anticipation and unexpected surprise. ‘Yes, some friends are coming over later. Can you come too? Where are you?’

  ‘At home, but I’m catching the next train.’ I heard her warm half-laugh and could almost see the trickle of smoke and the fold between her eyes. ‘I’ve got something to ask you.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, wondering.

  ‘Nope, have to do it in person. I gotta run now.’

  Two hours later in she walked, bereted and smoking. The apartment was bustling with laughter and the voice of Rosemary Clooney.

  Hey there,

  you with the stars

  in your eyes

  love never made

  a fool of you

  I ran to take her jacket. ‘It’s so good to see you,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah? That’s what I came down to find out, because I couldn’t understand that card. What did it mean?’

  Bea and Lynn and Gloria had dropped by with wine and reefer, and I introduced them to Muriel as I poured her a glass of Chianti. Bea and Lynn were dancing belt-to-belt in the middle room; Muriel, Gloria, and I munched over the cartons of savory chinese food which they had brought with them.

  At a few minutes to midnight, we switched off the tinny portable phono and turned on the radio to hear the cheer go up in Times Square to greet 1955, even while we were saying how square that all was. Muriel gave me a copy of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, an underground bestseller which she’d lifted, she said, from a Stamford bookstore. Then we all kissed each other, and had some more wine.

  We turned the music back on, and people told wild stories about other New Year’s Eves. I had to admit that this was my first New Year’s Eve party ever, but I managed to say it in a way that nobody believed me.

  By 3:00 A.M., everybody had decided to spend the night. I rolled out Rhea’s double bed in the front room, and opened up my couch in the middle room. There was a place for everyone. I finally had to slip Lynn a sleeping pill from my hoard of doctor’s samples, because she kept insisting she wasn’t sleepy, and I was determined to be the last one awake. It had been a heady evening for me, and even with amphetamine, I was getting sleepy.

  Muriel had gone to bed in the middle room with all her clothes on, because this was a strange house filled with strange people, she said, drolly, and she was very shy. The other three sacked out in the front room. I had assumed Rhea would stay over at her boyfriend’s house. Unfortunately, Rhea and Art had their big fight that night.

  At 4:00 A.M., just about the time everyone had finally settled down and I had crawled into my faded green studio couch beside Muriel, just about that time I heard Rhea’s key in the door.

  I jumped up, instantly awake. Oh shit. Pulling on my shirt, I tiptoed into the kitchen to find my roommate standing forlornly, her bright party dress wrinkled and sad. Rhea was addicted to having affairs with men who were only interested in shafting her, literally and figuratively. She was in tears. Art had told her, while they were in bed, that he was going to be married to the nineteen-year-old daughter of one of their progressive comrades. At thirty-one, Rhea was sure it was her age. On the other hand, I was sure it was because he was getting some from Rhea and not getting some from his teenager. But I couldn’t say that to Rhea in her condition.

  Half my mind, besides, was on the collection of people in the house and how was I going to explain them to Rhea? Not that I had to explain, really, but after all it was her bed that Bea and Lynn and Gloria were sharing.

  ‘That’s awful, Rhea,’ I said as I took her coat. ‘Let me heat up some coffee.’

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ Rhea said abstractedly, wiping her eyes and managing a brave little smile. Her long voluptuous black hair was all awry. ‘I just want to go to bed for now.’

  ‘Well,’ I hesitated only a moment, ‘there’re some people in your bed, honey; some friends came over and you said you didn’t think you’d be home …’

  Tears welled up in Rhea’s eyes again as she reached distractedly for her pocketbook and the shoes which she’d so gallantly dyed to match her dress, an electric-blue taffeta, just a few hours before.

  ‘But I’ll wake them right up,’ I said hurriedly, as I saw her heading for the front door. Her cousin lived two floors down, but I could never bear to see Rhea cry. ‘I’m getting them right up.’

  And that’s exactly what I did, posthaste.

  Sleepily, the three girls moved, and we all crawled back into bed, spoon-wise, in the middle room with Muriel. Rhea went to her troubled sleep in her own bed. By this time, it was almost dawn and too late for me to sleep any more. Anyway, I had gotten my second wind. And I loved being the first one up in the mornings. I took some obetrol and sat reading in the john until dawn.

  Tiptoeing past the sleeping women, I leaned out of the seventh-story front window, looking eastward through the still streets to the lightening sky. The air was mild for January, and I caught a faint whiff of malt from the Hartz Mountain birdseed factory across the East River. The January thaw. It reminded me with a start that spring was only three months away. Yet it seemed forever. I was tired of winter.

  I switched on the radio softly; on this holiday morning it was mostly stale news, except for the automobile fatalities and the results of the recent congressional censure of McCarthy. As I listened to the weather report, unseasonably warm, I cleaned my sneakers with a dash of dry Dutch Cleanser, rubbed in with an old toothbrush. Cleaned shoes was a New Year’s Day ritual that I carried over from my parents’ house without question or consideration.

  At 8:30 A.M. I woke everyone except Rhea. I was eager to start the day. ‘Who needs a toothbrush?’ I called, breaking out the litt
le store of them which I kept for such occasions. I was secretly pleased to have Muriel see how in charge I was of all situations. Always prepared, too. Just like the Marines’ motto.

  Everybody knew a thirty-five-year old woman could run any world, and I considered myself to be permanently in practice.

  I made coffee the way I used to do it in Mexico, using very little coffee and straining it through the little fabric net which I’d brought home with me. I turned off the radio and started the phonograph, putting on Roberta Sherwood’s ‘Cry Me a River’ real low, so as not to disturb Rhea’s fretful, sighing sleep. The rest of us sat around the table in the kitchen near the shaft window drinking coffee. Muriel’s sturdy feet stuck out beneath the cuffs of her jeans, her broad toes moving up and down in time to the music as her soft musical laugh moved through the smoke of her ever-present cigarette. Bea and Lynn in their dungarees and flannel shirts; and Gloria, her flamboyant spanish huaraches over woolen stockings and her baggy peasant pants made from handwoven magenta cotton. The click of Gloria’s fruitwood necklaces and bracelets was a contrapuntal echo behind the morning’s conversations of politics, gay-girl gossip, and the advent and use of the new tranquilizers in mental hospitals.

  The house grew even warmer as the steam came up, and I got up to fix us a beautiful New Year’s breakfast. I mixed our last two eggs, well-beaten, into the leftover chinese food, added a drizzle of the foo yong gravy and some powdered milk, and scrambled it all together with a healthy amount of chopped onions quailed in margarine with lots of paprika and a dash of dill for color. It was a dish reminiscent of the Sunday-morning concoction of eggs, onions, and scraped chicken livers which my father called entre and which he used to cook for us each weekend while my mother and the three of us were at Sunday Mass.

  After breakfast, we exchanged long goodbyes and Happy New Years, and the other three left. Muriel and I sat talking in the kitchen over cups of black coffee, because all the powdered milk was used up.

  Rhea woke up about noon, and I introduced her to Muriel. We made Rhea some coffee, and she and Muriel argued the pros and cons of Marxism (although Muriel insisted she was apolitical, which I translated as naïve) for about an hour while I took a bath. Rhea dressed and went off to her parents’ house for dinner, only a little sodden around the eyes.

  I turned off the record player and double-locked the door. Then Muriel and I, with no more to-do about it, went to bed with each other in the New Year’s watery sunlight in Rhea’s front room double bed. The afternoon unfolded into a blossom of loving from which she rose to me like a flame.

  I had not been close to a woman since those nights with Eudora in Cuernavaca more than six months before.

  We lay entwined and exhausted afterward, laughing and talking excitedly. The camaraderie and warmth between us breached places within me that had been closed off and permanently sealed, I thought, when Genevieve died.

  When Muriel and I talked, as we did, about Naomi and Genevieve, each dead at fifteen, the spirit of those two dead girls seemed to rise up from the earth, bless us, and then depart. A particular and terrible loneliness seemed at last about to give way.

  We made love over and over and over again, pausing only to turn on the lights in the early dusk and to feed the cat. The sun went down and the steam came up, and the whole room seemed alight with the fragrance of our bodies.

  For every secret hurt of Muriel’s, there was one of mine to match, and the similarities of our lonelinesses, as well as of our dreams, convinced us that we were made for each other.

  January 2, 1955.

  I rolled over and raised myself up on one arm, regarded the sleep-sweet cheek and tousled hair of the woman curled away from me, one arm under her head. I bent to kiss the curl that swept over her ear, and ran my tongue slowly down the nape of her dark hair to where the covers draped her shoulders.

  With a sigh and a slow smile, Muriel opened one eye as I advanced, whispering, toward her ear. ‘In the West Indies, they call this raising your zandalee.’

  Later, I called Mrs Goodrich from bed, Muriel drowsing beside me. I explained that I was sick and could not come in to work. The whole department had been warned by Mrs Goodrich the last day before the holidays to make sure that such ‘sicknesses’ did not occur, under any circumstances.

  Mrs Goodrich fired me on the spot.

  25

  Rhea had all the cues she needed about my relationships with women. She had witnessed the melodrama with Bea. But on the surface, Rhea did not know I was gay, and I did not tell her. Homosexuality was outside the party line at that time; therefore, Rhea defined it as ‘bad’, and her approval was important to me. Without words, we both more or less agreed never to allude to what was obviously the guiding passion of my life, my involvement with those female friends to whom Rhea always referred as ‘your cool-voiced young women’.

  Rhea and I loved each other, yet she would have professed horror had she been forced to imagine an extension of our love into the physical.

  Fortunately, or maybe because of her attitudes, I was never physically attracted to Rhea. She was a beautiful, strong, and vivacious woman, but I have never found straight women physically appealing. Self-protective as this mechanism is, it also has served me as a sixth sense. In those days, whenever two or more lesbians got together, the most frequent topic of conversation was ‘Do you think she’s gay?’ It was a constant question about any women we happened to be interested in. Nine times out of ten, if I felt a strong physical pull toward a woman, whatever her protective coloration might be, she would usually turn out to be either gay, or so strongly women-oriented that being gay became only a question of time or opportunity.

  Always before, the few lesbians I had known were women whom I had met within other existing contexts of my life. We shared some part of a world common to us both – school or work or poetry or some other interest beyond our sexual identity. Our love for women was a fact that became known only after we were already acquainted and connected through some other reason.

  In the bars, we met women with whom we would have had no other contact, had we not all been gay. There, Muriel and I were pretty well out of whatever was considered important. That was namely drinking, softball, dyke-chic fashion, dancing, and who was sleeping with whom at whose expense. All other questions of survival were considered a very private affair.

  When Muriel came into the city on weekends that spring, she stayed at the YWCA over on Hudson Street in the West Village, which is now a nursing home. We spent the weekend in her tiny room making love, in between barring and trips back to Seventh Street for something to eat. Sometimes, we didn’t have the money to rent a room at the Y, because I was not working again and she only had a part-time job in Stamford. Then, we braved Rhea’s bewildered and questioning glances and stayed at the apartment. After Muriel left one Sunday, Rhea and I talked.

  ‘Muriel’s around a lot, isn’t she?’ I could see Rhea remembering the weeping Bea in the stairwell.

  ‘I love Muriel very much, Rhea.’

  ‘I can see that.’ Rhea laughed. ‘But how do you love her?’

  ‘In every way I know how!’ And Rhea turned back to the dishes, shaking her head, trying to find some correlation between my loving Muriel and her own painful love affairs. She did not dare to see the similarities and so she could not see the differences. And the words were never spoken. I was too chicken to come right out and say, ‘Hey, look, Rhea, Muriel and I are lovers.’

  Rhea could not bear the heartbreak of her affair with Art, and began to make plans to move to Chicago later in the spring. The idea that I would soon have the apartment all to myself delighted me. I made up my mind that I would never live with anyone else again, unless we were lovers.

  Muriel and I were beginning to envision the world together. I didn’t know how I was going to bring my personal and political visions together, but I knew it had to be possible because I felt them both too strongly, and knew how much I needed them both to survive. I did not agree w
ith Rhea and her progressive friends when they said that this was not what the revolution was about. Any world which did not have a place for me loving women was not a world in which I wanted to live, nor one which I could fight for.

  One Friday night, Muriel and I spent the evening making love on my studio couch in the middle room of the apartment. Dusk crept away from the window on the air shaft and night came in. We were just resting briefly when we heard Rhea’s key in the front door in the kitchen. Muriel and I lay curled into each other’s arms on the now-familiar single couch. Without moving much, we simply pulled the covers up over us, closed our eyes, and pretended to be asleep.

  We heard Rhea come into the kitchen and turn on the light. I could feel the glow of the sudden brightness from the room next door as it shined through the arched doorway and along the floor of my room, parallel to where the two of us lay. Rhea entered, proceeding across my room to hers at the front of the house. Her footsteps stopped beside the bed where Muriel and I were, our eyes squeezed shut like children. She stood there for a moment looking down at our supposedly sleeping figures under the covers entwined within the narrow space, lit by the dim reflected light from the kitchen.

  And then, without warning, Rhea burst into tears. She stood over us sobbing wildly as if her heart was being broken by what she saw. She wept over us for at least two minutes while we both lay there, our arms around each other and our eyes closed tightly. There was nothing else we could do; I felt it would just be too embarrassing to Rhea for me to look up and say, ‘Hey, what’s going on here?’ Besides, I thought I knew. Our obvious happiness in our ‘incorrect’ love was so great besides her obvious unhappiness in her ‘correct’ ones, that the only response to such cosmic unfairness was tears.