Native Country of the Heart

by Cherríe Moraga

  We both agreed.

  And I am alone.

  * * *

  Dr. Elizabeth Broome greets me with a solid handshake. She is an attractive and formidable figure, middle-aged, light makeup and modern; but there is some sense of old-country peasant stock in her bearing, which comforts me. We take our seats. After a short and seemingly endless silence, I realize it’s on me to speak first. I am afraid but I am more afraid of not speaking. I shove the words from my mouth for the second time in my life: “I think I might be homosexual.” I don’t know any other way to say it.

  Another pause.

  “And…?” Her eyes do not leave my face.

  What? I’m thinking, That’s the point. End of story. Life over.

  “If you are, what does that mean to you?”

  “Well, I guess it means I gotta go get a woman.”

  I remember Liz Broome smiling at my response. I, too, heard how silly it sounded, like there was a lineup of lesbians along Hollywood Boulevard, just waiting for me to come along and pick one out. She crosses her stockinged legs and takes a long drag from her cigarette. I was in love with Liz Broome ten minutes into our first meeting.

  She continued. “Do you have someone in mind?”

  Normal. She’s talking like this is normal.

  “No. But I have a boyfriend.”

  And that, of course, had been the problem, that heterosex had reopened the corral holding back my longing for women and the stallions were now running wild inside me.

  * * *

  I understand drinking. I understand just wanting to make yourself so fucking numb that all that comes at you—the neon whirlwind of 1971 Underground Atlanta nightlife, the boyfriend with his army naked buzz cut holding you tight as you both weave your teenaged bodies from bar to bar, the daiquiris like snow cones freezing your young grip—is of no real consequence or meaning. I understand drinking, falling into the motel bed and onto the wide plateau of flesh beneath you. Sex. Sex that someone else is having, and no amount of fucking can beat out the sad.

  Sitting in front of Elizabeth Broome in her professor’s skirt, crossed legs and ever-generous gaze, I am disarmed. There was no real body to be, no real “me” to love, and Liz Broome went right to that place. “That’s what we will work on,” she said, concluding our first session. My god, there is a “we” in this.

  In the short time I met with Broome she charged me exactly one dollar per session, “just to keep it professional.” That’s an eight-dollar psychotherapy bill for the last eight weeks of the semester (and a few freely offered phone sessions). I remember the phone sessions best. Each time, sneaking out to my father’s small office behind the garage. Each time, my heart hammering up into my throat, as I dialed Broome’s number, inserting my forefinger into the menacing face of the rotary phone.

  “I’m falling, I’m slipping away.” I had no other language to express my sense of entrapment; the recurrence of my preteen obsessions, the inability to fully inhabit the body I carried.

  Each time, her response was the same.

  “What do you see around you?” She would ask me to name the red geranium planted in a rusting Folgers coffee can; the climbing sweet pea flowers that Elvira had strung just outside the door’s window; the framed picture of the Navajo horseman in a Canyon de Chelly landscape. My eyes would fall upon the small pad of white paper with my father’s notes of scribbled numbers and his signature all-cap lettering, his nubby charcoal-brown cardigan hung over the back of a metal chair, and the browning water stain in the drop-ceiling tile just above my head.

  “Every time you start to go,” she’d say, “just stop. Come back by naming the things around you.”

  And it would, each time, bring me back to earth.

  Eight weeks that saved my life. She never asked me if I had thought of suicide or if I wanted meds—standard questions directed at queer youth today. I used to wonder about this later when I recall how desperately lonely I was. But survival was bred into the Mexican character of my life. And somehow Broome knew this. She knew how “ill” I was when nothing in my history could express it. The despairingly lonely out-of-body sensation of Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar, a book that so many young women were devouring at the time, was a kind of approximation, but I was a MexicanAmerican and the daughter of a woman who had unwittingly instructed me on the complex desire of women. I was not supposed to know and want what I knew.

  * * *

  Most of what I now remember of my time with Boyfriend, which would last for a full four years, was fog. A coastal fog that would not lift, that sank to sea level, that hung like a great gauzy cloud of hopelessness down to the kneecaps. Months into our relationship, as the Vietnam War was winding down but the lottery draft remained in operation, Boyfriend was drafted and, after a short stint in Augusta, Georgia, he was transferred to Fort Ord army base in the mist-soaked town of Seaside, California.

  The benefit, for me, was that my active-duty heterosexuality was pretty much reduced to occasional clandestine weekends in nearby Monterey. But sex was not so much the issue as my heart. I had sequestered its feeling inside an inconstant body whose sexual longing erupted at the site of my own cleavaged breast and the look of young lust in Boyfriend’s eyes.

  I wanted to be him.

  Driving past military stockpiles on Fort Ord’s beachfront properties, I studied the handful of draftees keeping guard, rifles over their indifferent shoulders. They were the picture of my own lonesomeness. I was trapped like them, waiting out my time between the sheets with a kind and simple-hearted working-class boy who carried an inherited South Dakotan don’t-rock-the-boat acceptance (not too unlike my father).

  During that time, JoAnn and I had afforded ourselves a brief hiatus from living at home when we moved into a studio apartment on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood. Our excuse: a closer commute to college. Upon my return from those Monterey trips, I would sit on the floor, press my spine up against the closet bureau, cup my ears with my stereo headphones, and play Carole King’s Tapestry album over and over again. “When you’re down and troubled and you need some loving care,” she sang. And in that private place, I made love to Carole King’s voice. This was my freedom road. And although it looked like nothing but a dead end at the time, marriage was worse. And impossible.

  To say this was one of the most miserable times of my life would have done little to assuage my mother’s grief, had she fully known about my sex life. What she had worked so hard to preserve as a teenager, working the casinos of Tijuana, I squandered in rebellion and despair.

  * * *

  By the end of that fall semester, JoAnn graduated early, and we ended up returning home upon her engagement to a “nice Jewish boy” from the west side. She wanted to do it “the right way,” she told me, to leave her mother’s home and move directly into married life.

  I didn’t really want my sister to get married and had hoped, against all evidence to the contrary, that she might accompany me on my freedom road. Sadly, I never made that road look very enticing—or free.

  * * *

  For my sister and me, whose worldview bounded itself firmly in the working-class culture of the east side of Los Angeles, JoAnn’s engagement to the young Jewish man with a college degree from the west side held its own promise of change. JoAnn had already drifted from the Church by then, having witnessed, during her years as an office clerk for the mission rectory, the hypocrisies of its male clergy—the drunkenness, the sexual and financial improprieties.

  I only knew that the rules of the Church were rules I could no longer live by. We had both said as much to our worldly mother, for her faith had already shown us that “God” had very little to do with Church rules or rafters. So there was little surprise when, upon JoAnn’s announcement that hers was to be a Jewish wedding, my mother responded, “You do what you want, mi’ja; there is only one God.”

  Once we moved back home, I began to plot my escape, not out of the Valley (not yet), but out of my parents’ house and before JoAnn mar
ried. Afterwards, there would be no way out except to follow in JoAnn’s marital footsteps or remain the perennial soltera viviendo con sus padres, living her sexual life on the sly.

  I had a relative who did it: got herself a job in the factory and then got herself the girlfriend, whom she met at la fábrica, and moved her in con la mamá. It was a life: a perfectly acceptable MexicanAmerican life that has been going on at least since World War II and “Rosita la Riveter.” Except for one detallito—it had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Nobody was out of the closet.

  This is as if to suggest that at the age of twenty, I could realistically imagine a lesbian life at home or anywhere. I didn’t want to be a lesbian. But equally, I didn’t want to live in the prison of what today academics call “heteronormativity.” Which brings me to the question of class privilege and Mexicanism. I don’t remember meeting a bona fide educated middle-class MexicanAmerican (with the exception of the nuns) until long after I had graduated from college. Ours was the first generation to benefit from affirmative action (brief as it was), but it takes more than a generation to secure class ascendancy.

  In the 1970s, my sense of class ascendancy was integrally tied to education. My siblings and I and a handful of first and second cousins were the first in our family to finish college. Education was freedom. My mother had instilled this drive for education in her three children, but by freedom, I imagine she meant economic access and the lifestyle privileges it affords. What she wasn’t aware of was the type of freedom the gringo schools had taught us.

  * * *

  “Go wipe the streets with it” had been my mother’s refrain to us in her most desperate moments, when the world we inhabited as emerging women in the social-change era of the early seventies meant to her the abnegation of every value of sexual self-preservation she had striven to teach us.

  Once, after JoAnn’s engagement, she had wanted to take a drive out to West Los Angeles to visit her fiancé. My mother wouldn’t allow it.

  “No,” she said, and that was the final word.

  There was no real logic behind my mother’s decision. As I saw it, overhearing this transaction from my bedroom, my mother’s no was arbitrary and unjust. JoAnn was already twenty-two, had finished college, worked full-time, and had finished any and all house chores that my mother had required of her for the day. But my vantage point was that of an “American” twenty-year-old of the early 1970s; not one where the betrothed daughters of nineteenth-century SpanishAmérica sat patiently among las aunties y la abuelita idly embroidering their days up to their wedding (a scenario my urban-based sole-income-provider mother was, herself, never able to fully enact).

  Still, as the saying goes, and one to which my mother absolutely subscribed, “As long as you live in my house, you follow my rules.” And, “If you don’t like it, there’s the door, señorita.” Elvira was holding out for what she still hoped was my sister’s virginity, or at least the pretext thereof, her wedding barely a few months away. The stakes were that high. “Pack your bags,” she says. “Cuz if you leave the house right now, don’t bother coming home.” And with that, JoAnn returns to our bedroom, leaving the door slightly ajar. We were not allowed to close it. Not completely.

  I think now, as a parent, about how my own kids by middle school insisted on a closed bedroom door, asserting their right to privacy; a word not only unmentioned in the Elvira-headed household, but virtually unimagined. To my mother, a closed door was a direct insult. Nothing good could happen behind a closed door, where daughters kept secrets from the mother.

  It was an impasse. My sister all dressed up and nowhere to go, and my mother slamming pots and pans in the kitchen within earshot through the half-closed door.

  I urge my sister, “She’s bluffing. You gotta stand up to her.”

  So JoAnn, not fully convinced, begins to pack a small overnight case. The quiet draws my mother back into the room, ready for round two. Elvira catches her in the act.

  “Wipe the streets with it, if that’s what you want. Is that what you want?”

  “No.”

  “Go ’head, sinvergüenza. I’ll tell the boy’s mother about the kind of girl you are. And you’re not taking the car, me oyes?”

  And then I insert, “That’s okay, JoAnn. I’ll drive you.”

  This is the breaking point. We are just too big to belt. Elvira’s hands land like claws onto the bedspreads of the twin beds, tearing at the blankets and stripping the sheets beneath them. In a frenzy, she tosses pillows, pulls books from their shelves and knickknacks off the bureau, cussing up a tempest of fury. JoAnn and I stand by in disbelief.

  Then we look over to each other.

  I mouth to JoAnn, “Go.”

  She picks up the overnight case, slowly starts toward the front room, a dreaded mission to which she has been assigned. As she begins to open the door, my mother rushes down the hallway after her and pushes her way into its threshold, throwing her arms out to block JoAnn’s exit.

  It is a standoff, but Elvira is already weakening, in a flood of tears.

  JoAnn carefully squeezes by her.

  I follow.

  And the two sisters get into the car.

  The older one cries like it is the end of her life. The younger one starts up the engine, sensing it is a beginning.

  DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL

  “You’re leaving with a secret.”

  My mother’s words grab me by the throat. The phone falls to my chest. I am twenty-three years old. And this is what I know of a black hole. Her statement foretells my exile. She is losing me. She knows it. And into the dark firmament of that silence Elvira, the braver of us, has ventured.

  I can lie and continue on without her or tell her the truth and … and what?

  * * *

  My Echo Park apartment had been thoroughly vacated, except for an overnight bag. It was my father’s birthday and I called my mother to let her know that I would be arriving in the late afternoon for the family barbecue. For nearly three years, I had been spending less and less time with my family and more and more time in the lesbian life of Los Angeles: Silver Lake, Hollywood, Venice Beach, Echo Park …

  “I … I can’t tell you, Mom. You won’t accept it.”

  I immediately detect the rising bitterness in her voice, which I understand as fear. “What could it be? I’ve been through everything with you already.”

  And she had. We both could run through the list of my transgressions since I started college: at eighteen, my refusal to keep going to church; my preference for pants over any kind of skirt; the announcement, with Boyfriend standing oh-so-brave and six-foot-small in the kitchen of my mother’s resistance—“Cherríe and I are planning to move in together.” She slams out of the room, unable to face the verdict of such scandal before the Moraga family jury. And then came the long cross-country trips with questionable female company.

  “No, Mom,” I say, the phone cord a shrinking connection between us. “This one is just too hard.”

  And that’s all I have to say when a great wail erupts from her throat. “No, mi’jita!” she cries. “No me digas esto. Not that. No puede ser.”

  She is dying. This is how it sounds to me over the telephone line. Her grief rips open my chest when I suddenly realize, No, it is me. I am the one who is dying. My mother’s llanto tells me so. This is what La Llorona sounds like. There is no mistaking it. It is the cry of a mother mourning the loss of her child. But how is it I can be standing with the phone in my hand and be dying at the same time? I stare at the parquet floor. This is what I feared as a child, bolting doors and nodding off to an endless stream of useless prayers; that who I was would mean the end to all I knew as familia.

  I mourn the loss, not for myself, but for her.

  “I’m sorry, Mamá,” I cry back. “I’m so sorry to hurt you.”

  Suddenly there is a shift in her. It feels strategic. As my mother, she will try every tactic in her arsenal to protect her daughter from this path of heartbreak, to
protect her daughter from abuse, from loneliness, from drug and alcohol addiction, from the sorrow she imagines such a life will bring me.

  She accuses others of influencing me.

  She accuses me of running around with the wrong kind of people.

  She calls me weak, when she knows me strong.

  A follower, when she knows I am a leader.

  Until finally, she draws out the last weapon of her defense. “How can you get satisfaction from a woman?”

  She throws the word at me—satisfaction—a switchblade nastier than any pelvis-thrusting Mick Jagger could conjure. And it is the best thing she could’ve said. Because I had suffered too long and too hard for the right to love, and not even my mother was going to make me feel dirty for it.

  I would not abandon myself.

  “That’s none of your business,” I say.

  She is silent. And into the aperture of that silence, I insert the truest thing I can think to add.

  “Don’t make me choose, Mamá. Because if I have to choose between this life and my family, I have to choose my life.”

  And then … that’s it. There is no more fight. I hear it through the quiet of the phone receiver.

  I wait.

  Until she speaks, all the fury in her voice gone …

  “How could you think that there is anything in this life you could do that you wouldn’t be my daughter?”

  And that’s it.

  My mother would continue to suffer my often poor choice in girlfriends; my unreliable interstate car trips and backpack adventures; my solo sojourns to México; my sometimes precarious inner-city dwellings in New York, Boston, Oakland, San Francisco; my too many months away from her without a visit or too many weeks without a phone call; my political activism where in every evening news protest, she anxiously looked for my hollering face among the crowd. But we did not lose each other by pretending we were other than who we were.