At what point does ordinary rebellion become callous disregard? It would be years before I recognized this passage as anything but common, years before I realized, with solemn alarm, how close I had come to blowing it all in a dozen ways. My mother had given me the usual instructions on proper, ladylike behavior; my dad had lorded it over the boys in the ’hood when they came calling. We were in many ways a typical postwar nuclear family, my parents struggling for a better life in what to them was the big city of Amarillo. We had the common allotment of joys and boredom and failures, no trouble large enough to launch the projectile of peril I became. I can hear my dad raging at me that I was killing my mother; I see my mother’s stone-silent sadness—both memories from the summer I got arrested on a marijuana charge that was ultimately thrown out. But their condemnation only fueled my anger, made me haughty with self-righteousness and pawing at the ground to get out. Why didn’t I comprehend, even a little, the fragility of life? So when I look back now at that girl with her thumb out, zip-lining her way into trouble and then yelling her way out, I feel the way my mother must have felt: sad but helpless. Glad she lived, sorry she was confused enough to almost not.
* * *
—
I keep thinking of the old peach-colored Take Back the Night T-shirt, circa 1977, that I wore until it fell apart. That’s the tangible object here. A piece of the mosaic that goes from Danger Girl to feminist hipster to—let’s just save our own damn life. Maybe it was a matter of brain development, that prefrontal cortex finally learning how not to bungee-jump toward hell. But I think it was a societal evolution, too, from self-destruction to taking back the night to a reclamation of the soul.
I have a mental snapshot of a night in Austin during the early days of the women’s movement when a lot of us had congregated at a neighborhood house. We called the place Robinson Street, because that’s where it was, but it was code for boots off, feet up, beer in the fridge. “Meet you at Robinson Street.” “Everyone’s at Robinson Street.” Anti-war strategy in one corner, a poker game in the other. Why were things so much fun then? Some women were in love with each other, some not, all of us inhaling a freedom that we’d discovered in the overthrow of bourgeois expectations.
The phone rang. The woman who answered listened for a minute, raised an eyebrow, and called my name. It was a man I’d been sleeping with for a few months, wanting to know when I was coming home. I was standing in the kitchen holding a long-corded wall phone, listening to him complain, and looking out at the women in the other room. And I remember thinking, almost wistfully, If you were a lesbian you wouldn’t ever have to go home. Meaning that the party was here, that home was where I already was, that I wouldn’t have to report back to barracks, ever.
That was more than four decades ago, and even now I can feel the mix of confusion and intrigue I had, like a child figuring out a math problem. I had bumped up against an insight that would change things for me, alter the universe just a little: the realization that men were too often the arbiters of everything, the authority we answered to, or gave our cardboard swords at the end of the day.
This was not simply a sexual or romantic epiphany. It was wider than that, and the fact that I remember it—remember the evening summer glow from the next room, the yellow phone, the man’s voice—is evidence of its value in the course my life took. It was a moment when I began to recognize that I got to be in charge of my own freedom. Years passed while I fine-tuned that idea, made it something about independence and self-respect instead of merely rebellion. But the light that night—the laughter and autonomy and affection in that houseful of women—became the ideal notion of shelter and adventure, of what life ought to be.
* * *
—
There would be other such moments in the years to come, the start of a path taken or a door closed, an interior voice saying No, I won’t do that. No, not for me, don’t think so. It makes me sad to realize this now because part of aging is the rue and reach of the past. But also glad that I was looking out for myself, though as with most pieces of wisdom I didn’t know that for years, and it didn’t always feel so hot at the time.
The No-not-for-mes covered a lot of ground: men and women I left, graduate programs I didn’t finish, jobs and cities I fled. Was all of it running? Not at all, in retrospect, though sometimes it felt as though it was—so much of being young is living with liberation and fear entwined. I was always going toward, even when the toward was milky or unknown. Curiosity beat out fear by a millimeter, every time, and sometimes only by that. I left the man who shattered my happy autonomy that night at Robinson Street; I left the woman I had loved a few years later; I ran to and then abandoned the graduate program that honed my mind as sharply as feminism had honed my heart. Through it all I clung to whiskey to give me courage, which worked marvelously until it didn’t, and its failure was the size of a crevasse, monstrous and deep and the biggest danger of them all.
9
So yes, Tyler, there are so many things I do not tell you. Things I don’t really think about in full, not in linked-together sentences and years that constitute a narrative. But your easy, beautiful questions have made me consider them, the stories of a life, viewed differently from the treehouse that is aging.
For instance: Why did I never marry? More men than women have asked me this question over the years, and my answer is usually shorthand, a euphemistic shrug. Why did I leave him, and then her, why did I pray for a mate but run from the ones who presented themselves? “You’re the least desperate single woman I know,” a friend said to me thirty years ago, when we were both young and working in a newsroom. I didn’t understand her comment. What was there to be desperate about, particularly if you didn’t want kids and were financially solvent? More to her point: I had felt desperate inside of love, not when I was free of it. Free of it was like, Thank you God I survived that, oh look here is my sword and here’s my self-worth, right where I left them, never gonna do that again. I was not so great at love, not the big ones, anyway, and I was very good at being alone. Maybe it was bad luck or bad choices, or something broken inside of me. Some of it may have had to do with growing up on those empty plains, where days could be so uneventful that I used to lie in the grass and try to catch the flowers growing. A childhood like that teaches you the resources of your own company.
* * *
—
Shards of a journal, kept in the early 1970s, when I was living in Northern California and then wandering the southwestern coast of Mexico, below Guadalajara. It was just after the summer I had slept with a woman for the first time, a delicate, sensual affair that happened in a basement loft in San Francisco, and it had been revelatory: free of any kind of crazy, any insecurity or games or fraught psychic second-guessing. She was traveling through and we loved each other a little bit for just a little while, a firefly attachment, beautiful and blink it was gone.
But the journal is evidence of someone caught in an undertow. It tells another, darker kind of truth, much of it written through the veil of Scotch at night or the panicked regret of a hangover the next day. I left California and headed back to Texas via Mexico, and though I must have imagined myself some one-woman version of the Wild Bunch, thrilling and free, I was really just colliding with my own troubles on a beach in southern Mexico. I made it to a sleepy little fishing village on the Pacific, with tropical waters and a couple of beach shack restaurants and four-dollar-a-night hotels.
R. had flown to Guadalajara and met me there. What I remember now about those weeks has the layered Photoshop effect of nostalgia: perfect sunsets and midnight swims and the boundless dreams of youth. Memory can be a kind liar. The journal, difficult for me to read, is the scrawl of someone in peril. Someone waffling between adventure and chaotic despair, too young or maybe immature to grasp the sad emptiness of my drama. “This has to change,” I wrote. “I’m in southern Mexico and all I’m doing is crying and drinking and
taking Librium every day.”
A week later, the end of that section: “Sometimes the only thing that seems real to me is what I write.”
I got goosebumps when I read the sentence, decades later. So this beat-up black leather diary, filled with bad poetry and clichés, had been my anchor, more than any woman or man had proven to be. At the end of a fight on the beach one night, according to the journal, R. had yelled at me, “You’re so unsure of yourself that you can’t commit to anything,” which I don’t remember him saying but now explains a lot. Maybe that was true; I don’t know. But within a few months I had left R. and gone back to Austin, and taken up with a woman who I believed, for better or worse, had saved my life.
It’s always a crapshoot to give away that kind of power. Maybe some people do it naturally, or more easily than others, or pick wisely, or don’t lose themselves in love. I was not that someone, not then. I think now that M. provided me shelter from the storm, a place where I could be safe long enough to regain some stability. And for a time I found that, a sweet spot to land. It didn’t last; I spent most of my twenties growing up and out, which may be typical but is difficult to do within the straits of a relationship. But she believed in me, which was a vast gift and more than I was capable of at the time. One night, after too many Scotches or bottles of wine, she stopped me midsentence and said, “Why are you so intellectually downwardly mobile?” Why, in other words, was I so determined to crash and burn?
It shook me up, as though she knew something I couldn’t recognize or admit. I was bored and bumming around with dead-end jobs and being a pretend revolutionary, and she had seen through it all and asked the right question. And though we hurt each other terribly—betrayals on both sides, too much booze—and it ended badly, I was always grateful to her for naming my silent enemy that night, which was probably my own fear. And I was strong enough by then to begin to get purchase on my life.
For a while, though, after we broke up, I thought I would die. It felt like an oak tree had been cleaved with an ax. The pain was physical, and sometimes it was hard to breathe, and I treated the pain with whiskey and cigarettes and swam a lot of laps and bored a lot of friends with endless recounts of my saga. What I had discovered, to my idealistic sorrow, was that all the feminism in the world couldn’t protect you from psycho-love. By then I was living alone in a peaceful little garage apartment in Austin, and one spring night I was sitting on the porch eating dinner, which included (of course) a bottle of Soave Bolla and fettuccine with green peas. I have a fierce recollection of those peas, that cheap white wine, that view over the trees. I was lonely and sad, but I was finally all right, or knew that I would be. And the evening quiet, just me and the live oaks, felt laden with meaning, as though it were telling me something about the way my story would go.
I went far away, light-years and miles, to escape this period of my life, and for a long time I had nightmares about it—dreams of being in danger and trapped. And I blamed myself, thinking I was hopelessly heterosexual or just made bad choices. I also believed that some of my free fall had to do with relationships between women, who tend to get intimate faster and for whom an emotional connection can turn into a swan dive. But I loved like that twice in my life, once with a woman and years later with a man, once when I was drinking and then when I was sober, and eventually I had to face the notion that what those soul-shredder loves had in common was—me. Get thee to a therapist, Hamlet should have said to Ophelia. To hell with nunneries.
* * *
—
I’m older now, and smarter, and my heart no longer looks in the wrong place for the right thing. I’ve seen the exception too many times to make sweeping statements about gender and love. But I still believe that relationships with women, from my vantage point, have been different in fundamental ways. Women shared a preexisting mutual regard, a tender dignity, that wasn’t a foregone conclusion with men. We recognized each other, knew where we’d been. And it wasn’t a threat or an ego battle to open up emotionally; it was something we’d always been good for. We had long been the water carriers for the human heart.
I believed this for years, wanted to believe it, even when the data didn’t always confirm the hope, or when the lonely crazies could make you think you’d never love or take that risk again. Then I met a writer whose work I admired, who seemed like a southern-made outrageous version of myself, and she made me laugh like I hadn’t laughed in a long time. We were like puppies playing together on the beach. I thought, This is the way it’s supposed to feel, happy and free and completely easy. And it was indeed all those things, for a while. It healed my heart, that romance. To say it didn’t last is to somehow suggest that it failed, or we did, when in fact I think the opposite was true—I think we succeeded. We both got precisely what we needed right then, and part of what we needed was a restorative love, without any casualties when it was done.
I can’t tell anymore if this is a sad story, desultory periods of love and quiet, love and crazy, finally, different kinds of platonic love, creature love, and solitude. Sometimes it feels frightful, an introvert’s life sentence; other nights, eccentric and bold or simply what is. But I suspect it’s common to a lot of women who came of age the way I did, under the canopy of the women’s movement. We walked away from traditional male-female relationships we couldn’t tolerate anymore, acted on options other than marriage and motherhood and toeing the line of the status quo. We made choices that were based utterly on love and strength and want, and the very notion of that freedom felt like a superpower. The fact that some of us wound up alone, for better or worse—that’s a by-product of our triumphs. The law of unintended, sometimes poignant, consequences.
I know, too, that everyone’s a little broken, and that love’s mission, every kind of love, is to reach into the hard places and heal some of the breaks. You learn how to love in spite of the wounds, carry duct tape and prayer and just keep loving.
10
Austin, the late 1970s. I’ve gone back to graduate school to save my life. I drive a pickup truck, argue with my male professors, have a reputation as an uppity Marxist who will cause trouble in seminars. Being uppity is easy in a department run by several white males from Harvard and Yale, all of them smug with their self-perceptions of liberalism. I am appalled at the competitive, stifling nature of academe, and am also finding out that I am easily as competitive as everyone else.
I am living with a woman, having an affair with a male professor, sick of both romances and champing at the bit to get out of it all—out of Texas, out of love, out of scholarly pursuits. When the time comes to pick a subject for a master’s thesis, I unearth a number of women writers from the 1930s, a group called proletarian writers. I write a long, fiery, critically flimsy thesis on these women (Tess Slesinger, Meridel Le Sueur, and Tillie Olsen being the most memorable) and realize (a) how dull it is and (b) that I want to be a working critic, not a campus-bound one.
But first I have to get off the train of higher learning, and I show a draft of the paper to the four members of my committee—all of them men who are rooting for me but also demanding my allegiance. At the end of the day I have crossed campus twice, one office after another, excited and quaking over a range of opinions, and all I can think is how much I need a drink. I am whiplashed from other people’s feedback. And then something stops me cold as I stand on that grand, Texas-huge famous forty acres, near the Main Building, near the Tower that Charles Whitman scaled a decade earlier, near the entrance emblazoned with scripture from the book of John: “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” When I was a girl of about ten, I saw the building, and the quote gave me goosebumps. Now I’m not just seeking truth, I’m chasing it, hoping for a pat on the head to go along with veritas. I’ve spent months writing about the forgotten voices of women writers, and now I’m desperate for a stamp of approval from four powerful men.
Then I think of something one o
f the men told me a year or two earlier, the first time we met: “You should get out of here before we ruin you.”
And so I do.
11
Boston, 1981
It’s dark in here, which I will forever think has to do with it being a real psychiatrist’s office. I’ve seen therapists before—both women, friendly, supportive psychologists in Texas who sided with me in the drama of life and sent me on my way. But this is my first M.D., an honest-to-God psychiatrist, which to my thirty-year-old naïve mind means some serious shit, no smiles or Milano cookies like the last one offered. So here we are, in a hospital, even, a famous Boston hospital, nothing funny about it.
She is young, reserved. After I’ve made a lame effort at being charming, she asks me why I am here. I shrug, slouch in the chair. I am in love with my own sense of tragedy. Everything is fine, really, I say. I just need to figure out how to stop being so self-destructive.
She doesn’t flinch, lean forward, give any reaction. She just says, “How many times have you tried?”
At first I am flummoxed, then aghast. She thinks I have attempted suicide. The basic definition of self-destruct. “Oh no!” I say. “I just meant—I’m smoking and drinking myself to death.”
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