by Audre Lorde
The bars on weekends were a ritual of togetherness that I only came to fully understand years later when I was tired of being alone. Every Friday night, it was the same.
‘Hurry up, Audi, let’s try to get a table tonight.’ In Laurel’s, like in most of the other bars, the tiny tables lining the dance area were first come, first served. Sometimes we’d run into Vida and Pet, two of the few Black gay-girls we knew. They preferred the word ‘dyke’, and it seemed much more in charge of their lives to be dykes rather than gay-girls, but we were still a little scared of the way the word was used to badmouth someone. Vida and Pet shared a house with another dyke named Gerri, and we went to parties at their house out in Queens. Vida and Pet were older than most of our friends, and more settled. They were both very kind to Muriel and me, sometimes even buying us food when we had no money, and mothering us in a way that I both resented and appreciated, like making sure after their parties that we had a ride back to the city or somewhere to stay over for the night.
One warm Saturday evening, Muriel and I stood eyeing the ripe melons piled high on the sidewalk stands in front of Balducci’s. Cartons and crates of beautiful and expensive fruits and vegetables extended out onto the sidewalks of Greenwich Avenue. Across the Village street in the early summer dusk, a handful of impatient husbands and lovers stood, calling up back and forth to unseen but well-heard inmates within the grated windows of the Women’s House of Detention on the west side of Greenwich Avenue. Information and endearments flew up and down, the conversants apparently oblivious to the ears of the passersby as they discussed the availability of lawyers, the length of stay, family, conditions, and the undying quality of true love. The Women’s House of Detention, right smack in the middle of the Village, always felt like one up for our side – a defiant pocket of female resistance, ever-present as a reminder of possibility, as well as punishment.
‘Think we can cop a honeydew?’ My mouth was watering for the fresh sweet fruit. I looked up Greenwich, which was growing more crowded with evening strollers. I made up my mind, more daring than scared.
‘I don’t know, but let’s try. I’ll get one from the side and go down Sixth. If he comes after me, yell “Cheeko!” then meet me around the corner on Waverly.’
We separated with elaborate casualness and Muriel walked over to the oranges, feeling them in deep consideration. The fruit vendor approached her expectantly. I sidled around the other side of the crates behind his back, snatched the ripest golden green melon that caught my eye, then took off. First rule of snatching anything outdoors: try to do it on one-way streets and always run against the flow of traffic. I sprinted down Sixth Avenue, avoiding startled pedestrians, turning into Waverly Place a block away only slightly winded. Pleased with my feat, I leaned against a railing to observe the luscious spoils and wait for Muriel.
Suddenly, a hand grabbed my arm from behind. My heart in my mouth, I tried to wrench free without even looking, still clutching our melon. Oh shit!
‘Take it easy, girl, you’re lucky it’s just me!’ I recognized Vida’s rough kindly voice with a wave of relief. I sagged against the railing, unable to talk. ‘I thought that was you. I’m driving up Sixth and I see you tear-assing along, said to myself, lemme park this car and see what my buddy’s doin’.’
Muriel sauntered around the corner, stopping short with surprise at the sight of Vida. She and I exchanged quick glances. This was not exactly what we’d have preferred Vida find us doing. Uncool, definitely, stealing fruit on Saturday night. Vida laughed a broad laugh.
‘Scared you good, didn’t I?’ Her voice changed, earnestly. ‘Well, I’m glad. You-all better stop this jiveass shit before next time it isn’t me. Come on, Pet’s in the car, let’s go for a ride.’
Muriel and I talked endlessly. I knew who I was going to spend the rest of my life with, yet it seemed as if there was never enough time to talk and share and catch up with all the pieces of each other that had existed before we met. As our newness became more known to each other, I marveled at how very dear Muriel’s face was becoming to me. The fact of us was a most wonderful and novel idea, one that I pondered over, examining and savoring every aspect of what it meant to be permanently connected to another human being.
To go to bed and to wake up again day after day besides a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other – not as a quick stolen pleasure, nor as a wild treat – but like sunlight, day after day in the regular course of our lives.
I was discovering all the ways that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely, when two women meet. Like the smell of Muriel on my sweatshirt, and the straight black hairs caught in my glove. One night, I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner which we understood it. We both agreed ours was a union made in heaven, for which each of us had already paid several hells.
For our close friends, we were Audi and Muriel without definition. For our other friends, we were just another young gay couple in love, maybe a little more peculiar than most, traipsing around with notebooks under our arms, all the time. For the regulars at the Colony and the Swing we were Ky-Ky girls because we didn’t play roles. And for the fast set at the Bag we were weirdos who deserved each other because Muriel was crazy and I was Black.
Meanwhile, Muriel and I built bookcases and had writing bees and adopted two little scrawny Black kittens which we named Crazy Lady and Scarey Lou.
Muriel was very much the dandy about her clothes. Like everything else about her, what she wore had to be precisely so, according to some secret guide in her own head, or Muriel would not go out. As long as something was not touched by her inner rules, it didn’t matter, but Muriel’s rules were inflexible and unmoving and once you came up against one of them, it was unmistakable. What those various rules were, I only found out slowly.
When I lived in Stamford, I had worn old dungarees and men’s shirts to work. Just before Thanksgiving, I bought some corduroy and Ginger’s mother helped me make a skirt for the holidays. When I lived in Mexico, I wore the full peasant skirts and blouses so readily available in the marketplaces of Cuernavaca. Now I had my straight clothes for working at the library – two interchangeable outfits of skirts, sweaters, and a warm-weather blouse or two. I had a pair of shoes for work, and a flamboyantly cut woolen suit which I had made out of the old coat my sister had given me to wear at my father’s funeral. Since I never wore stockings, I stood waiting for the bus some days in the icy winds blowing down East Broadway and prayed for the warm protection of my dungarees or riding pants.
I had very few clothes for my real life, but with the addition of Muriel’s quixotic wardrobe, we developed quite a tidy store of what the young gay-girl could be seen in. Mostly I wore blue or black dungarees which were increasingly being called jeans. I fell in love with a pair of riding pants which Muriel gave me, and they became my favorite attire. They became my uniform, along with cotton shirts, usually striped.
Muriel had her gambler’s pants for winter, and in the warmer weather she preferred Bermuda shorts and knee-socks, usually black. Winter chic demanded our navy surplus turtleneck sweaters, and we pressed the point, often wearing them into the late spring on any air-conditioned occasion. I loved the deep dark secure feel of wool against my body, and the freedom of casual clothes. I always fancied that they made my large breasts look smaller.
Other than army-navy stores, for which both of us had an absolute passion, we did most of our other clothes shopping at John’s Bargain Store. For each of us, there was a positive virtue in being able to live poor and well at the same time, and this took effort and ingenuity and a sharp eye for real bargains. When John’s failed us, there were always the little open shops along Rivington and Orchard Streets on Sunday mornings. In these side streets near the Public Market on Essex, men in yarmulkes hawked their wares. A sale on
sneakers for $1.98, or solid-color sweatshirts selling for ninety-nine cents were finds to boast about.
We were reinventing the world together. Muriel opened me to a world of possibilities that felt like a legacy left me by Eudora’s sad funny eyes and patient laugh. I had learned from Eudora how to take care of business, be dyke-proud, how to love and live to tell the story, and with flair. Muriel and I were making the lessons become real together.
When I recall the time Muriel and I spent together, I remember the assurances we gave each other, the sense of a shared niche out of the storm, and the wonder grounded in magic and hard work. I remember always the feeling that it could continue forever, this morning, this life. I remember the curl of Muriel’s finger and her deep eyes and the smell of her buttery skin. The smell of basil. I remember the openness of our loving that was a measurement against which I held up whatever was called love; and which I came to recognize as a legitimate demand between all lovers.
Muriel and I loved tenderly and long and well, but there was no one around to suggest that perhaps our intensity was not always too wisely focused.
Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable Muriel to face the world and get a job; that it could free our writings, cure racism, end homophobia and adolescent acne. We were like starving women who come to believe that food will cure all present pains, as well as heal all the deficiency sores of long standing.
27
In that golden summer of 1955 we were very busy and full of light. During the week I worked at the library and Muriel built beds across town for Mick and Cordelia. On the weekends, we wrote and read and studied Chinese calligraphy and went to the beach and the bars.
Jonas Salk announced his new vaccine for polio at my sister Helen’s graduation from City College, and since so many of the girls I knew from Hunter High School had varying degrees of disabilities from polio, this news had a personal meaning.
Life had so many different pieces. Jet was a girlie magazine trying to be a Black newsmagazine which I borrowed from my brother-in-law Henry on my infrequent visits to the Bronx, read avidly on the long subway ride downtown, and then surreptitiously dropped onto the next seat as I got off. When I mentioned at the library that I wrote poetry, somebody was bound to mention Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea, the runaway bestseller that year. It had no more to do with my work than a scallop to a whale. Spurred on by Muriel, I sent some of my poems to The Ladder, a magazine for lesbians published by the Daughters of Bilitis. Their prompt and unaccompanied return crushed me.
I supplemented our reading from the library with a steady trade in the used bookstores over on Fourth Avenue. Muriel spent a lot of her time over there too, where used copies of Byron and Gertrude Stein could be bought at the Strand one week and traded in for a little less at the Pine down the street a week later. Books were not so much in excess then; I remember trading a birthday copy of Lindbergh for a handful of used paperbacks, two hardcover volumes of minor poets, and a first issue of MAD magazine, which cost ten cents.
In June, Lynn came to live with us. We hadn’t planned it that way, that’s just the way it worked out. Muriel and I had re-established a guarded communication with Bea, and Lynn was her ex-lover whom we had first met on that infamous New Year’s Eve.
She came to call unexpectedly from Philadelphia one Sunday evening in early summer, her long blonde hair streaming around her short sturdy neck, and an overstuffed duffle bag slung across one shoulder. Rumpled army fatigues covered her ample hips. Lynn had a sly smile and screwed up her face whenever she laughed. She was broad, and squat, and very sexy, and in terrible emotional shape. She was the same age I was, twenty-one, but had lived a very hectic life.
Lynn’s young husband, on army leave, had died three months before, burned in a truck accident from which he had thrown her clear. They had been moving Lynn’s belongings to her new lover’s house in Philly.
Lynn arrived on our doorstep with no place to go. She and Bea had broken up for reasons I knew only too well, and Lynn had followed the gay lorelei to New York. Jittery with dexedrine and crazed with exhaustion, she was afraid to go to sleep because of her nightmares of death and dying and the burning wreck from which arose billows of guilt over Ralph’s death.
Nobody I knew could have remained immune to this game little girl-woman’s piteous story. This was a chance to put into practice the kind of sisterhood that we talked and dreamed about for the future.
Muriel and I took Lynn into our home to live with us. For a while that summer, we had a vision and possibility of women living together collectively and sharing each other’s lives and work and love. It almost worked. But none of us knew quite enough about ourselves; we had no patterns to follow, except our own needs and our own unthought-out dreams. Those dreams did not steer us wrong, but sometimes they were not enough.
I found myself day-dreaming over the library catalogue, imaging Lynn’s malocclusion, and I had to finally admit to myself how physically attracted to her I was. I was frightened and embarrassed as well as perplexed by this strange and unexpected turn of events. I loved Muriel like my own life; we were pledged to each other. How could I desire another woman physically? But I did. Naturally, the thing to do was to examine this new state of affairs in all of its endless ramifications, and to discuss each one of them in detail.
That is what the three of us did, endlessly, over and over until all hours of the morning. Muriel thought it was an exciting idea, possible in a new world of women. Lynn wanted to sleep with us both and no more to-do about it. I knew what I wanted, which was everybody one at a time, and since my wants felt contradictory, I had to figure out some way I could have everything that I wanted and still be safe. That was very difficult, because we were in uncharted territory.
What we were trying to build was dangerous, and could have enormous consequences for Muriel and me. But our love was strong enough to be tested, strong enough to provide a base for loving and extended relationships. I always used to say that I believed in sleeping with my friends. Well, here was a chance to put theory into practice. Besides, every time Lynn laughed her slightly hysterical laugh or wrinkled her nose, my knees turned to pudding. I could smell her like wilted fall flowers throughout the house as soon as I opened the door of the apartment from work.
Our conversations went on all night. Sometimes I arrived at the library without having slept at all, looking like something the cat dragged in and the kittens wouldn’t eat. I said that my boyfriend Oliver had a fatal disease and had been sick all night and his sister Muriel and I had stayed up to nurse him. Mrs Johnson, head of the children’s room, looked at me with a very funny eye, but never said a word. I think she was gay too.
So all in all, I was rather relieved one day when I opened the door after work to find Muriel and Lynn just getting out of bed together. A piece of me was furious (What, another woman’s hands on Muriel’s body?), and another piece of me was afraid (Well! Now I’d really have to fish or cut bait). But a large piece of me was just relieved that we had moved beyond talking, and that the direction of that movement was out of my hands.
The three of us kissed and held hands and had dinner, which Lynn cooked for the first time. Then Muriel went to Laurel’s for a beer, and I found out that Lynn was every bit as delicious as I had fantasized her to be.
Our new living arrangement called for a celebration, so I took the next two days off from work. I called the library and told Mrs Johnson that Muriel and I were taking Oliver to a nursing home in Connecticut because we couldn’t care for him any longer.
Muriel and I decided that nothing could break the bonds between us, certainly not the sharing of our bodies and our joys with another woman whom we had come to love, also. Our taking Lynn to our bed became, not merely a fact to be integrated into our living, but a test for each one of us of our love and our open
ness.
It was a beautiful vision but a difficult experiment. At first Lynn seemed to be having the best of it. She had both of us totally focused upon her and her problems, as well as upon her little horsewoman’s body and her ribald lovemaking.
I helped Lynn get a job at the library, in another branch. She rented a basement space over on West Bleecker Street to store her furniture, but mostly she lived at Seventh Street.
We were certainly the first to have tried to work out this unique way of living for women, communal sex without rancor. After all, nobody else ever talked about it. None of the gay-girl books we read so avidly ever suggested our vision was not new, nor our joy in each other. Certainly Beebo Brinker didn’t; nor Olga, of The Scorpion. Our much-fingered copies of Ann Bannon’s Women in the Shadows and Odd Girl Out never so much as suggested that the perils and tragedies connected with loving women could possibly involve more than two at a time. And of course none of those books even mentioned the joys. So we knew there was a world of our experience as gay-girls that they left out, but that meant we had to write it ourselves, learn by living it out.
We tried to make it all work out gracefully and with a certain finesse.
Muriel, Lynn, and I made spoken and unspoken rules of courtesy for ourselves that we hoped would both allow for and help allay hurt feelings: ‘I thought you were staying with me tonight.’ The pressures of close quarters: ‘Hush, she’s not asleep yet.’ And of course, guilt-provoking gallantry: ‘I’ll go on ahead and the two of you meet me later; but don’t be too long, now.’
Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t. Muriel and I attempted to examine why, endlessly. For all her manipulative coolness, Lynn was seldom alone with either of us for any length of time. Increasingly, she got the message that, try as we might to make it otherwise, this space on Seventh Street was Muriel’s and my space, and she, Lynn, was a desired and sought-after visitor, but a visitor forever.
