In Her Day

by Rita Mae Brown

  “S-s-st, move to the left,” Ilse breathed.

  They took two tiny steps to the left. The feet in front of them jumped back. Ilse let out a jubilant laugh and stuck her head out to find another woman, closer to her own age, resplendent in patched pants.

  “Fooled you,”

  “Far out. Wow, are you stoned? I mean totaled?”

  “No,” Ilse replied. “We’re just goofing.”

  “That’s so far out.” The woman babbled, wandering off in the direction of Hudson Street.

  “Was she blasted, qualludes,” Ilse reported. “I hate to see sisters on any kind of shit. There is so much shit circulating in this city, I swear the Feds are hawking it.”

  “It’s either or,” Carole piped up.

  “Huh?”

  “My generation is juiced and yours kills itself on narcotics. I wish people would kill themselves quick and get it over with. I don’t see why I have to be imposed on by people destroying themselves and calling it sociable.”

  “You have to realize people do it to dull the pain.”

  “Bullshit.” Carole changed the subject. “I can’t see anything with my head stuck up in here. Let’s get out, we had our fun.”

  “Oh, a few minutes more, okay?”

  “Grumble,” was the reply. “Ouch!” Ilse pinched her ass.

  Heavy footsteps thundered in their direction. It felt like a two ton truck was barreling right for them. A mutt stuck its head under the make-up dresser. The dog was too surprised to bark. Tips of Murray’s Space shoes showed under the fabric, nearly touching Carole’s shoes. Ilse, inspired, leaned forward and seized the person by the ankles. A groan followed by a terrible thud worried Carole. “What’s going on out there?” Sticking her head out like a wary turtle Ilse gasped, “Christ, he’s fainted and he’s near to three hundred pounds! Bet he cracked his skull and died. Let’s split.” She wiggled onto the sidewalk and started walking away thinking Carole was right behind her. She turned around to discover she was alone in her escape. Running back to the dresser she picked up the fabric and beheld Carole’s head framed by the square space for the dresser drawer.

  “You look like Senor Wensclas,” she said. “Need help?”

  “I’m stuck, goddammit.”

  “This is no time to get stuck. We’d better get out of here before that hippopotamus comes to. We’d probably be better off if he had cracked his skull and died than if he finds us.”

  A man walking with his afghan far down the street pranced in their direction and there was someone else behind him.

  “Ilse, I’m stuck, I tell you.”

  “That’s impossible. Professors don’t get stuck under dressers in broad daylight on the streets of New York.”

  “This professor is wedged in at the shoulders and can’t get out of here.”

  “Well—then start moving. We’ve got to vanish before this guy lays eyes on us and all of Greenwich Village shows up.”

  “You’re crazy. How can I walk in this thing?”

  “Do you want him to look under there and find you by yourself because I’m not sticking around here. Start walking.”

  “Don’t you at least think you ought to take a closer look at him to see if he’s okay?”

  Ilse tiptoed over and peered at the victim, then tiptoed back. “He’s out cold. The guy is so round he couldn’t really fall down hard and hurt himself.”

  A sigh struggled out of the top drawer and the fabric swayed out with it. Carole mumbled, “You walk beside me and guide me. I feel like a blind crab.”

  “Okay, okay, keep moving to the left. We’re going up 12th now. Faster, Carole, faster, we have to get around the corner. I see him stirring.” The empty drawers rattled as Carole picked up speed.

  “Okay, now turn halfway around and start moving towards the right, then he can’t see us.”

  “Are we out of range yet?”

  “Yeah, now let me look at you again.”

  “Pull the cloth back and you can see me better.”

  “Say Sallright.”

  “S’not sallright. Now stop laughing and get me out of this thing.”

  Ilse got down on her hands and knees for a better view. “Damn, you are really wedged in there. Try lying on your back and maybe I can worm you out.”

  “I can’t lie on my back.”

  “Yes, you can. Sit down and then fall back. I’ll catch you. Careful, careful. There you go.”

  Carole’s legs twitched up in the air. “I’m half suspended in this thing and the wood is cutting into my back. Lift up, come on, this hurts.”

  “Well, then we’ll have to go a little farther down the street to the deli. Castellani’s bound to have a hammer or something I can use to knock you out or pry you out.”

  “How far is the deli?”

  “A block or so.”

  “For the love of god.”

  The two made their way down the street. A few passersby gaped but most looked straight ahead as though: if you’ve seen one walking dresser, you’ve seen them all.

  “Hold it, Carole. We’re at a corner. Let me scout in case that guy is hunting for us.”

  “Hunting for us? He probably woke up, thought he hallucinated, and sped for home as fast as possible.”

  “The coast is clear. Watch out now. Can you look down and see the curb?”

  “No! All I can see is this hideous fabric. That’s even worse than getting stuck under here.”

  “Okay, now step down. Try to gas it up so we can get across the street. Stop. Okay. Up you go.”

  “Shit, this thing is getting heavier than when I started out.”

  “Just a little further, Carole. You know what Mao says.”

  “What the hell has Mao got to do with getting stuck under a make-up dresser? Next you’re going to tell me he’s a drag queen.”

  “Perseverance furthers,” Ilse answered.

  “That’s hardly an original thought. Do Mao a favor and don’t hang that one on the good chairman.” Carole was tiring. The drawers were quieter now as she shuffled down the pavement.

  “Stop. We’re here. You stay outside while I go and see if Mr. Castellani has any tools.”

  “Where could I possibly go in this old thing?”

  “The Museum of Modern Art?” Ilse tried.

  “Boo. Hiss. Hurry up will you.”

  Carole squatted, collecting her breath.

  Bam! She was shaken. Wham! Another violent shake. Slowly she was being dragged down the street. She dug her heels to put on the brakes. That did no good.

  “This sonofobitch is heavy. I thought these things was supposed to be light?”

  “Yeah, maybe there’s stuff in the drawers.”

  Carole yelled, “Let me go!”

  “John, you hear somethin’?”

  In her best and loudest Miss Marple, Carole bellowed, “Unhand me!” The dresser came down with a thud.

  “What the fuck?” A hairy hand pulled back the fabric to see Carole’s angry face glaring back at him. “Lady, you’re nuts!”

  “You’re telling me. Now go away and leave me in peace. It’s not safe any more for a woman to walk the streets alone.”

  Ilse emerged from the deli just in time to see two large men clad in shirts with Wonderbread emblazoned across the back in script stomping off shaking their heads and gesturing.

  “Carole, are you all right?”

  “Ilse. Men have tried to pick me up before but this time they did it literally. Now will you please get me out of here!”

  “This might hurt a little.”

  “That’s secondary to the embarrassment.”

  Ilse on her back paddled under the dresser and started knocking the front leg off.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to do it from the outside?” Carole asked.

  “Yeah, but if the leg splinters, then it splinters in at you.”

  “Oh.”

  Two solid blows and the leg squeaked out of place.

  “Let me get the back leg and then I thi
nk I can get you out.” Ilse pounded the back leg as Carol winced.

  “It’s coming, come on, baby, give,” Ilse grunted.

  “Don’t talk dirty, dear, just get me out.”

  “Well, don’t make me laugh or I’ll get weak and it’ll take that much longer.”

  A choking laugh floated out through the empty drawer. Ilse pounded the back leg until it collapsed and the whole dresser sagged on both of them. She held the top half of the dresser with her right hand and pushed her left foot up against the drawer space which had been partly splintered.

  “Got it. Got it. Squeeze out.”

  Carole rubbed her shoulder and quipped, “I’m a liberated woman.”

  “Oh Carole, I’m sorry.” Ilse massaged her shoulder, rubbed the back of her neck. “I really am sorry.” But she couldn’t keep from laughing. “I am sorry but you looked so funny and if you could have only seen that fat dude!” Ilse, bent over with laughter, sat down next to the rubble dropping Mr. Castellani’s hammer.

  Carole, her legs aching, staggered a few steps and folded next to her on the sidewalk.

  “You’re a good sport.” Ilse threw her arms around her.

  Carole glanced at her sideways and broke up. Ilse was laughing so hard the tears came to her eyes. “Come here.” She pulled Carole to her and gave her a kiss.

  When was the last time I laughed this hard? Carole wondered. When was the last time something unexpected happened or that I let something unexpected happen? I’ve lost my sense of play. When I laugh it’s over words. Wit. Intellect. I remember—I remember when I was a kid we’d get into scrapes like this. Where did that go? When did it leave me? I want it back. I want it all back.

  A crash and loud curse made them jump apart. A man riding a bicycle wrapped himself around a No Parking sign. Groceries were all over the street but he was so mortified he wouldn’t even look at the cause of his crash and pedaled on with his rear wheel out of line, leaving his debris behind him.

  “What next,” Carole exclaimed and they fell all over themselves.

  Ilse wiped her nose and eyes, helped Carole up, then took the hammer back to Mr. Castellani. She brushed off Carole’s backside. “Are you all right now?”

  “That isn’t where it hurts. I’m okay. Listen, I have to get home to work on that paper.”

  “Okay. I ought to go over to the workspace and help collate some stuff.”

  “Workspace?”

  “Yeah, a bunch of women have a loft floor over on Waverly and Mercer, right by N.Y.U. in fact, and we all pay a low rent and have a place to work.”

  “What a good idea.”

  “Will I ever see you again? I seem to make one mistake after another.”

  “Come up tonight after work if you like. You can rub my shoulders.”

  Ilse, relieved and happy, asked, “Where do you live?”

  “114 East 73rd between Park and Lex. It’s a brownstone and I’m on the top floor. Ring the bell.”

  “Terrific, I’ll be there.”

  Carole added, “I know, unless the revolution starts today.”

  When the tiny elevator stopped at the ninth floor the door into the workspace was locked. Ilse pulled her keys on the long chain out of her pocket and unlocked it while the elevator door banged into her rhythmically. As she opened the door a small knot of women looked up and greeted her. Piles of papers lay in neat stacks and people sat on the floor in a miniature assembly line putting the pamphlets together. Ilse volunteered to be an additional stapler and soon she was crunching away.

  Olive Holloway started in on her. “Who was that we saw you with last night, your mother?”

  Alice Reardon, who couldn’t stand Olive, cut her off. “Shove it, Holloway. We don’t need that ageist crap around here.”

  Olive, usually able to guilt trip her way out of anything, was stuck for once and went back to her chores. Skilled in emotional blackmail, Olive constantly gummed up meetings with her Esalen techniques. If that failed she could always cry since her eyes were connected to her bladder. She’d sob, “You all are oppressing me.” Most of the women in the group by this time cordially detested her but no one was quite sure how to get rid of her. It didn’t seem sisterly to bounce her so they sacrificed the welfare of their group instead. Ilse was beginning to realize that their inability to eject someone who was a thorn in their side was part and parcel of white middle-class women’s conditioning. Be nice. It was burnt into their brains at an early age. And here they all were being nice to a viper. For a time Ilse thought maybe Olive was an agent. Her friends in the peace movement supplied her with the characteristics of every conceivable type of agent: the provacateur, the disrupter, the obstructionist, the shrinking violet, the efficient worker—an endless list. She suffered from information overload on agents. That whole concept initially paralyzed her with paranoia but Ilse was maturing fast through the hard knocks of politics. Agents were an occupational hazard. But she still couldn’t come to grips with poisonous women like Olive. Olive was forever trying to sleep with her. Devious to a fault, the unpleasant creature had devised the perfect method for getting ‘nice’ women to go to bed with her. She declared all attraction was based on socially conditioned values. Partially true, Ilse conceded, but more so for heterosexuals than lesbians. Olive would either coo or storm depending on the nature of the woman she was about to ensnare. The rap had an ugly familiarity about it. If a woman didn’t find Olive sexually attractive, an easy conclusion to arrive at, then Olive declared that the woman was responding out of male values. How could she be a sister? All sisters were to love each other. Therefore, hit the hay. When Olive bore down on Ilse months ago, Ilse cooly avoided her until the rat took up an entire meeting of their political group of twenty women, ranting and raving about how she couldn’t work with someone she couldn’t trust and how could she work with Ilse because she didn’t trust Ilse. And she didn’t trust Ilse because she wouldn’t sleep with her. Sex predicates trust. Ilse called her a sexual fascist, and the whole room nearly blew up. Back in those days the group divided its loyalties. Half of the women were so gullible or so well trained in niceness they actually sympathized with Olive. As the months wore on even the nicest of women came to understand that Olive was one fucked-up woman. Now all she had left were two devoted followers who were born to be go-fors anyway. People like Olive made Ilse sometimes think in her more bitter moments that the women’s movement ought to be called Neurotics Anonymous. But she knew any movement for social change will draw malcontents as well as dedicated women. What puzzled her when she thought about the people she knew in the various feminist groups was that they fell into two camps: the Olives of the world and the women who were gifted, driving, smart. There were no mediocre women. Maybe that was an answer in itself but Ilse, true to her own upper-middle-class Boston background, wanted an analytical jewel. No one she knew listened to you unless you could prove everything you said. Not only did she have an emotional need to explain, she was forced to. Ilse was taught at such an early age to justify she didn’t know anything else. She was lively, far more spontaneous than most women her age out of her background, but still she was bound by linear thought. Her message was Dionysian. Her method Apollonian. Curious that she had attracted Carole who seemed on the surface so one-sided, so disciplined, so urbane, all reason. But, Ilse reminded herself, Carole’s not repressed or controlled in bed. The older woman fascinated her partly because she was older. Here people vomited forth their entire emotional histories within fifteen minutes of being introduced to you. She’d spent some intense time with Carole and the woman hadn’t uttered one word about heavy changes. And all she knew about her past was that she graduated from Vassar in 1951. Curious. Ilse was looking forward to seeing Carole tonight. She wondered what her apartment looked like. Would it be hopelessly bourgeois? Olive Holloway reached over for a finished pamphlet and managed to conveniently linger in Ilse’s lap.

  “Fuck!” Olive screamed.

  Ilse shot her in the breast with the power stapler.


  Louisa May Allcat and The Great Pussblossom rushed out to rub against Carole as soon as she opened the door to her apartment. Louisa May thumped down the carpeted stairs of the brownstone to the next floor and then raced back up again. Pussblossom had torn all the toilet paper off the roll and carried half of it onto Carole’s prized campaign desk. Carole fed them, picked up the t.p., read her mail, and then opened her folder, eager to pick up her work on “Pagan Images in Tres Riches Heures du Duc du Berry.” She lost herself in the voluptuous blues, turbulent reds, the purity of color in the Middle Ages. Even the Latin was refreshing after the tough prose of Tacitus or the monotony of Virgil. Some people paid analysts. Carole read Latin and it calmed her. She didn’t start out to be a medievalist. Initially, the Renaissance attracted her—once she got into college with the help of a rare scholarship from Vassar plus gifts of money from Richmond’s Daughters of the Confederacy, Catholic women, and others she forgot. But she didn’t forget the Fan during the Depression and the hot Richmond Septembers when she’d trudge back to school and concentrate on her studies because she knew it was her only hope. Her mother used to tell her she’d be a movie star because she was so beautiful. But even if it weren’t the pitiable dream of an impoverished woman saddled with a husband crippled in World War I, even if it could have happened, Carole would have never become an actress. She was going to use her head. She told herself that over and over again, every time she looked at the desolate houses that comprised the poor white district. After that, Vassar and the Renaissance flashed before her like a dream come true. Here intellect was respected. Here women came to learn, to seriously apply their minds, and didn’t the Renaissance symbolize that great burst in Western life? So she thought. But as she entered her senior year and began the agonizing process of filling out applications for graduate school, form after form for fellowships, grants, scholarships, any kind of money, a wizened professor, Miss McPherson, told her to forget the Renaissance as a field. Women couldn’t advance there, she said. Try antiquity or the Middle Ages. It was a matter-of-fact statement, a weather report with no explanation and Carole, respectful of the old woman, wouldn’t have dreamed of asking for one. At first she thought Professor McPherson wanted her to get into the Middle Ages because the old lady spent her career trying to rehabilitate the reputation of a tenth century nun, Hrotsvitha of Gandershiem. And Miss McPherson was a classicist not an art historian. But as fellowships were the heart of the matter the professor who liked her so much was honestly trying to help. Carole changed her field and it paid off. She hated the other medievalists at graduate school. What a dry lot. At least the people laboring under the shadow of Athens or Rome possessed a sense of humor, a glimmer of life. But she stuck it out and gradually another vision of lusty, violent, pious, contradictory people emerged and she found herself entranced by them. Adele had once explained the reason she got into the pre-Columbian period: “I became fascinated with those ancient stone faces peering enigmatically from the past.” So it was for her—a vivid, piercing recognition that once, seven hundred years ago, the dead were flesh and her flesh depended on their prior existence. Over the years she shied from departmental politics and withdrew more and more to contemplation of this other time. Her articles were incisive, revealing. She made a name for herself, was recognized as an authority. And she knew, thanks to old Professor McPherson, that one of the reasons was that men didn’t invade the field in huge numbers.