Zami

by Audre Lorde

  I had wanted it to be different. Muriel had wanted it to be different. Lynn had wanted it to be different. At least in all the places we consciously touched. Somehow, it never was, but neither Muriel nor I wanted to notice that, nor how unfair such a stacked deck was. She and I had each other; Lynn had only a piece of each of us, and was here on sufferance.

  We never saw nor articulated this until much later, despite our endless examinations and theme-writing about communal living. And by then it was too late, at least for this experiment in living out our visions.

  Muriel and I talked about love as a voluntary commitment, while we each struggled through the steps of an old dance, not consciously learned, but desperately followed. We had learned well in the kitchens of our mothers, both powerful women who did not let go easily. In those warm places of survival, love was another name for control, however openly given.

  One Sunday night in the beginning of August, Muriel and I came home from Laurel’s to find that Lynn had left. Her knapsack and the boxes in which she kept her assortment of mementos from different lives were gone. In the middle of the kitchen table was Muriel’s Cassell’s german dictionary, the book in which we kept our savings, ninety dollars to date. It was open, and the pages were empty.

  That ninety dollars was all the money we had, and it represented a huge loss to us. Our roommate was gone, our house-keys were gone, our savings were gone. The loss of the dream was even greater.

  Even many years afterward, Lynn was never able to say to us why she had done it.

  28

  That fall, Muriel and I took a course at the New School in contemporary american poetry, and I went into therapy. There were things I did not understand, and things I felt that I did not want to feel, particularly the blinding headaches that came in waves sometimes.

  And I seldom spoke. I wrote and I dreamed, but almost never talked, except in answer to a direct question, or to give a direction of some sort. I became more and more aware of this the longer Muriel and I lived together.

  With Rhea, as with most of the other people I knew, my primary function in conversations was to listen. Most people never get a chance to talk as much as they want to, and I was an attentive listener, being really interested in what made other people tick. (Maybe I could squirrel it off and examine their lives in private and find out something about myself.)

  Muriel and I communicated pretty much by intuition and unfinished sentences. Libraries are supposed to be quiet, so at work I didn’t have to talk, except to point out where books were, and tell stories to the children. I was very good at that, and I loved to do it. It felt like reciting the endless poems I used to memorize as a child, and which I would retell to myself and anybody else who would listen. They were my way of talking. To express a feeling, I would recite a poem. When the poems I memorized fell short of the occasion, I started to write my own.

  I also wanted to go back to college. The course we were taking at the New School didn’t make too much sense to me, and the idea of studying was not a familiar one to me. I had managed high school without it, and nobody had bothered to notice. I entered college believing one learned by osmosis, and by concentrating intently on what everybody said. That had meant survival in my family’s house.

  When I left college, I said to myself at the time that one year of college was more than most Black women had and so I was already ahead of the game. But when Muriel came to New York, I knew I was not going back to Mexico any time soon, and I wanted a degree. I had had tastes of what job-hunting was like for unskilled Black women. Even though I had a job which I enjoyed, I wanted someday not to have to take orders from everybody else. Most of all, I wanted to be free enough to know and do what I wanted to do. I wanted not to shake when I got angry or cry when I got mad. And the city colleges were still free.

  I started therapy on the anniversary of the first day Muriel and I met the year before.

  On Thanksgiving Day, we fixed a great feast in celebration and invited Suzy and Sis for dinner. Since even at student rates therapy was a luxury, and we had only one income between us, money became even tighter. The day before Thanksgiving, I took my mail-pouch pocketbook and Muriel put on her loosest fitting jacket, and we went across town to the A&P next to Jim Atkins’s, the all-night diner in the Village. We came back with a little capon, two pounds of mushrooms, a box of rice, and asparagus. The asparagus was the hardest of all to get, and some of the tips were broken from being tucked so quickly into Muriel’s waistband. But we managed without mishap or detection, and walked home whistling and pleased.

  About stealing food from supermarkets – I felt that if we needed it badly enough, we would not get caught. And truth to tell, I stopped doing it when I no longer had to, and I never did get caught.

  On our way home we splurged on a pint of cherry-vanilla ice cream for dessert, and Suzy and Sis brought the wine. Muriel made an italian pepper and egg pie, and we had a wonderful feast. I brought out all my Mexican rugs and rebozos, and decorated the walls and the chairs and the couch with bright colors. The house looked and smelled holiday happy.

  That night, I announced that I had made up my mind to register for college at night in the spring term.

  Muriel and I kept Christmas on Christmas Eve, such keeping as we did. We exchanged our presents, grumbled a lot, and prepared to go our separate families’ ways the next day. We wrapped their presents, and worried about what we could wear home that would not be too uncomfortable, yet appropriate enough to forestall questions and comments.

  On Christmas Day, with many kisses and long goodbyes, Muriel went to Stamford and I went up to the Bronx to my sister Phyllis’s home to have dinner with her and Henry and the children, along with my mother and Helen. Phyllis had a family and a real house, not an apartment, so it was tacitly agreed that she keep Christmas. It relieved me of another direct confrontation with my mother’s house, and gave me a chance to enjoy my two nieces, whom I loved but did not often see. I made a big project of inviting them down to Seventh Street afterward, but they never came.

  Christmas we gave to our families; New Year’s we kept for ourselves. They were two separate worlds. My family knew that I had a roommate named Muriel. That was about all. My mother had met Muriel, and as usual, since I had left her house, knew it was wise to make no comment about my personal life. But my mother could make ‘no comment’ more loudly and with more hostility than anyone else I knew. Muriel and I had been to Phyllis’s house for dinner once, and whatever Phyllis and Henry thought about our relationship, they kept it to themselves. In general, my family only allowed themselves to know whatever it was they cared to know, and I did not push them as long as they left me alone.

  On New Year’s Eve, Muriel and I went to a party at Nicky and Joan’s house. They lived in a brownstone in the eighties near Broadway. Nicky was a writer who worked on a fashion newspaper and Joan was a secretary at Metropolitan Life. Nicky was tiny and tight; Joan was lean and beautiful, with dark spaniel eyes. Unlike Muriel and I, they looked very proper and elegant in their straight clothes, and for that reason, and because they lived so far uptown, it felt like they lived a far more conventional life than we did. In some ways, this was true, for Nicky in particular. Joan was talking about quitting her job and becoming a bum for a while. I envied her the freedom of choice that allowed her to consider this, knowing she could get another job whenever she wanted one. That was what being white and knowing how to type meant.

  This was to be a holiday fete, not simply a wash-your-foot-and-come. I never enjoyed parties much if Muriel and I weren’t giving them, although I had started to really enjoy the parties out in Queens that we went to with Vida and Pet and Gerri. Those parties given by Black women were always full of food and dancing and reefer and laughter and high-jinks. Vida with her dramatic voice and sense of the absurd, and Pet with her dancing feet that were never still, made it easy not to be shy, to move with the music and laughter. It was at those parties that I finally learned how to dance.

 
Joan and Nicky’s parties were different. Usually there wasn’t much music, and when there was, it was not for dancing. There was always lots of wine around, both red and white, because Nicky and Joan were more Bermuda shorts than dungarees. One of the noticeable differences between the two sets was wine versus hard liquor. But more than one glass of any kind of wine gave me heartburn, and besides it was all too dry for my taste. It was not sophisticated to like sweet wine, and that became another one of my secret vices, like soft ice cream, to be indulged only around tried and true friends.

  And there was never enough food. Tonight, for the holidays, a beautifully laid table graced the corner of Nicky and Joan’s great, high-ceilinged parlor. Upon an old linen tablecloth that had belonged to Nicky’s mother, and bright red poinsettia mats cut from felt, sat little plates of potato chips and pretzels and crackers and cheeses, a bowl of sour cream and onion dip made from Lipton’s onion soup mix, and tiny little jars of red caviar with bright green bibs around them. There were saucers of olives and celery and pickles on the edges of the table, and in various corners of the room, baskets of mixed nuts. I kept thinking of the pigs-in-a-blanket and fried chicken wings and potato salad and hot corn bread at Gerri and them’s last ‘do’, knowing it wasn’t a question of money, because red caviar cost a lot more than chicken wings.

  The feeling in the room was subdued. Mostly, women sat around in little groups and talked quietly, the sound of moderation – thick and heavy as smoke in the air. I noticed the absence of laughter only because I always thought parties were supposed to be fun, even though I didn’t find them particularly so, never knowing what to say. I busied myself looking through the bookshelves lining the room.

  Muriel circulated with ease. She seemed in her element, her soft voice and fall-away chuckle moving from group to group, cigarette and bottle of beer in hand. I studied the books, uncomfortable and acutely aware of being alone. Pat, a friend of Nicky’s from the paper, came over and started to talk. I listened appreciatively, greatly relieved.

  Muriel and I left shortly after midnight, walking over to the subway on Central Park West arm in arm. It was good to be out in the sharp cold air, even good to be a little tired. We frolicked through the almost empty streets, talking and laughing about nonsensical things, joking about our uptown friends who drank dry wine. Occasional blasts from party horns were still erupting from gaily lit windows, holiday open.

  In the freshness and nip of the winter’s late night, alone now with Muriel, something powerful and promising inside of me stretched, excited and joyful. I thought of other New Year’s Eves that I had spent, alone, or wandering through Times Square. I was very lucky, very blessed.

  I squeezed Muriel’s hand, and felt her tight squeeze back. I was in love, a new year was beginning, and the shape of the future was a widening star. It was one year to the day that Muriel and I had locked the door of Seventh Street behind Rhea and turned off the fire under the coffee on the stove and laid down together with our hearts against each other. This was our first anniversary.

  We went home and ushered it in quite properly, until dawn sang with the rhythms of our bodies, our heat.

  Later, we got up, and Muriel cooked a huge pot of hoppin’ john, black-eyed peas and rice, which Suzy’s friend Lion from Philly had taught her how to do, and of which she was very proud. I laughed to see her strutting around the kitchen rosy-cheeked, waving her wooden spoon aloft in triumph as the food reached exactly the right consistency without becoming mushy.

  Evening moved upon us, and as our friends dropped by, we wished each other good times and ate and ate. Some of the women were hung-over, and some were depressed, and some were just plain sleepy from being out all night and thinking of work tomorrow. But we all agreed that Muriel’s pot was the best hoppin’ john we’d ever tasted, and that it was going to be a super year for us all.

  Nicky and Joan were the last to leave. After they had gone, Muriel and I put the dishes and pots to soak in the covered part of the sink, and we climbed back into bed with our notebooks and wrote New Year themes. Muriel chose a subject – A Man from the Land Where Nobody Lives. When we finished, we exchanged our notebooks and read each other’s work before moving on to the next theme.

  Muriel had written:

  The Year 1955

  Audi Me

  got a new job

  started therapy

  sent out some poems NOTHING!

  is going back to school

  I stared at the notebook page in silence, feeling like cold water had been thrown at me. I reached over and took her hand. It lay cool and still beneath my fingers, without movement. I did not know what to say to Muriel. The idea that anyone could measure herself against me and find that self wanting was truly shocking. The fact that it was my beloved Muriel who was doing it was nothing less than terrifying.

  I thought of our life as a mutual exploration, a progress through the strength of our loving. But as I read and re-read the stark outline in her notebook, I realized that Muriel saw that joint becoming in terms of achievements of mine which somehow defined her inabilities. They were not mutual triumphs, the notebook said in inescapable terms, and there was nothing either I or our loving could do to shield her from the implications of that truth, as she saw it.

  29

  I walked down those three little steps into the Bagatelle on a weekend night in 1956. There was an inner door, guarded by a male bouncer, ostensibly to keep out the straight male intruders come to gawk at the ‘lezzies’, but in reality to keep out those women deemed ‘undesirable’. All too frequently, undesirable meant Black.

  Women stood three-deep around the bar and between the tables, and in the doorway to the postage-stamp-sized dance floor. By 9:00 P.M., the floor was packed solid with women’s bodies moving slowly to the jukebox beat of Ruth Brown’s

  When your friends have left you all alone

  and you have no one to call your own

  or Frank Sinatra’s

  Set ’em up, Joe

  I got a little story …

  When I moved through the bunches of women cruising each other in the front room, or doing a slow fish on the dance floor in the back, with the smells of cigarette smoke and the music and the hair pomade whirling together like incense through charged air, it was hard for me to believe that my being an outsider had anything to do with being a lesbian.

  But when I, a Black woman, saw no reflection in any of the faces there week after week, I knew perfectly well that being an outsider in the Bagatelle had everything to do with being Black.

  The society within the confines of the Bagatelle reflected the ripples and eddies of the larger society that had spawned it, and which allowed the Bagatelle to survive as long as it did, selling watered-down drinks at inflated prices to lonely dykes who had no other social outlet or community gathering place.

  Rather than the idyllic picture created by false nostalgia, the fifties were really straight white america’s cooling-off period of ‘let’s pretend we’re happy and that this is the best of all possible worlds and we’ll blow those nasty commies to hell if they dare to say otherwise.’

  The Rosenbergs had been executed, the transistor radio had been invented, and frontal lobotomy was the standard solution for persistent deviation. For some, Elvis Presley and his stolen Black rhythms became arch-symbols of the antichrist.

  Young america’s growing pains, within the Bagatelle, were represented by the fashion conflicts between the blue-jeans set and the bermuda-shorts set. Then, of course, there were those who fell in between, either by virtue of our art or our craziness or our color.

  The breakdown into the mommies and the daddies was an important part of lesbian relationships in the Bagatelle. If you asked the wrong woman to dance, you could get your nose broken in the alley down the street by her butch, who had followed you out of the Bag for exactly that purpose. It was safer to keep to yourself. And you were never supposed to ask who was who, which is why there was such heavy emphasis upon correct garb.
The well-dressed gay-girl was supposed to give you enough cues for you to know.

  For some of us, however, role-playing reflected all the depreciating attitudes toward women which we loathed in straight society. It was a rejection of these roles that had drawn us to ‘the life’ in the first place. Instinctively, without particular theory or political position or dialectic, we recognized oppression as oppression, no matter where it came from.

  But those lesbians who had carved some niche in the pretend world of dominance/subordination, rejected what they called our ‘confused’ life style, and they were in the majority.

  Felicia was so late one Sunday afternoon for our photography lesson, that Muriel and I went off to Laurel’s without her, because you had to be early on Sundays to get something to eat. The Swing Rendezvous had closed its table, but at Laurel’s on Sunday afternoons there was free brunch with any drink, and that meant all you could eat. Many of the gay bars used this to get Sunday afternoon business at a traditionally slow time, but Laurel’s had the best food. There was a Chinese cook there of no mean talent, who cooked back and kept it coming. After the word got around, every Sunday afternoon at four o’clock, there would be a line of gay-girls in front of Laurel’s smoking and talking and trying to pretend we had all arrived there at that time by accident.

  When the doors opened, there was a discreet but determined stampede, first to the bar and then to the food table, set up in the rear of the lounge. We tried to keep our cool, pretending that we couldn’t care less for barbecued spareribs with peach and apricot sweet sauce, or succulent pink shrimp swimming in thick golden lobster sauce, dotted with bits of green scallion and bright yellow eggdrops, tiny pieces of pork and onion afloat on top. There were stacked piles of crispy brown eggrolls filled with shredded ham and chicken and celery, rolled together and fried with a touch of sesame paste. There were fried chicken bits, and every once in a great while, a special delicacy such as lobster or fresh crab. Only the first lucky few got to taste those special dishes, so it was worthwhile being first in line and pushing your cool image a little bit askew.