In Her Day

by Rita Mae Brown

  Exhausted by this undisplayed emotion she fell asleep and did not awake until the conductor nudged her. “New York City, Miss.”

  When Carole drowsily collected her luggage and trudged out of the hissing train she saw, to her surprise, a waiting Adele, arms full of flowers, books and records. That was one of the happiest moments of her entire life.

  Bumped by a woman with frizzy hair and silver stars painted all over her face, Carole crashed back into the present, astonished at her journey. She put her arms around her body more to convince herself she really was here in 1976 in this scene of colliding costumes, than to keep them out of the way. Yes it was the present, vividly so. No time in the past could have ever looked like this. As her fingers grazed her rib cage she realized how finely made she was. For one second she could trade places with Ilse, sensing what it must be to touch these ribs, the muscled abdomen, the miracle of the flesh.

  “We’ve got to stop meeting this way.” Ilse kissed her.

  “You’ve been watching too many old movies,” Carole said, glad to see her.

  “No, I’m imitating you.”

  “Your dance is a huge success.”

  “It always is. We do it every other week. This was my turn to take it on; you know, rotation.”

  “Do you have to stay through the whole thing?”

  “No, I made all the preparations and womaned the door for a couple hours. Jean O’Leary will take care of the tail end.”

  “Will she be able to shoo them out?”

  “So many of these women have a crush on her they’ll hang around. Maybe I should go home and bring back my recorder so I can pipe them out. Do you want to go right away or can we dance a bit?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Okay. I’ve spent too much time here the last few weeks as it is.”

  Louisa May Allcat zoomed down the stairs and leisurely trotted back up again, satisfied with her routine of escape.

  “Louisa, don’t be slow about it. In the house.”

  Naturally, Carole’s urging produced the opposite effect and the animal sat down on the third step from the top, content in her ability to irritate.

  “Ilse, hold the door a second. Louisa May’s getting grand again. The later I come home the longer she sits out there.”

  Carole scooped up the rotund beast and put her down by her dish. Louisa May revelled in the attention and at the sound of a food dish rattling, a sleepy Pussblossom emerged from under the sofa. Ilse patted her vertical tail and looked around the apartment. As many times as she’d come here, Ilse couldn’t get used to it. The place was too thought out, too lush. Although far more imaginative than her parents’ home in Brookline, Massachusetts, there was something in the completeness of the apartment that bothered her. The front room looked out on 73rd Street, the windows had shutters on them from the original time of the building’s construction, which must have been around 1890. An oriental rug warmed the floor. A beige nineteen-thirties sofa with huge curling arms was flanked on either side by two beige Barcelona chairs. A glass and chrome coffee table positioned between the sofa and chairs had on it one pink chambered nautilus cut in half to reveal the flawless, pearly chambers. An upturned, polished tortoise shell served as an ashtray. The subtle color scheme drew her eyes to the wall, where color blazed. A magnificent feathered flag from Peru hung on one wall, the deep green and teal blue throbbing. Adele, who had one herself, had given it to Carole to remind her that the Incas were more civilized in the Middle Ages than the barbarous Westerners. Carole pointed out to Ilse the first time she visited the apartment that, of course, it was not an original. If it were its price would be a handful of rubies, she laughed. This breathtaking work rested between two medieval manuscript pages, the gold glittering and the Latin crisp even now after all these centuries. On the opposite wall hung three paintings by new artists Carole had discovered this year: Betsy Damon, Judy Chicago, and Byrd Swift. The works, startling in conception and execution, harmonized with her flag and manuscript pages.

  Ilse couldn’t figure how Carole put things together but clearly the older woman possessed an unusual visual imagination. Perhaps it was the naked sensuousness of the room that jarred Ilse.

  The apartment had a strange layout. You walked into a tiny hallway and faced an equally tiny kitchen. The front room was to the right and to the left was a wide workroom with a marble fireplace and off that was a small bedroom that also shared space with the bathroom. Ilse loved Carole’s workroom. Whenever she came into it she thought she could sit down and write shatterproof position papers for the movement. The fireplace was in the middle of the room and over it hung a huge carnival wheel of chance. The cats loved sitting on top of the fireplace spinning the wheel and listening to the little metal pins tick against the rubber stopper. All the walls, even the walls up to the fireplace, were floor to ceiling bookshelves crammed with books. A polished, simple campaign desk commanded the middle of the room opposite the fireplace. The brass handles shone and the wood seemed deep and rich with the years. Carole used to wonder who had it, Napoleon or Wellington? She wanted to know which side to be on. An impressive unabridged dictionary was left of the desk, on a small podium and within reach. A Smith Corona electric typewriter occupied the right side of the desk and the middle of the smooth surface held two neat piles of papers. A brass inkwell with two Montblanc pens glittered. Even with all the bookshelves, huge stacks of books silently waited on the floor for Carole to build bookshelves all over her bedroom. A big window behind the dictionary looked out into the garden of the apartment below.

  Despite her passion for Carole, Ilse always lingered in the workroom before plunging into the small bedroom. Somehow Carole put lights behind a narrow floorboard so light swept across your feet and you felt as though you were floating or walking in mist. A simple double bed was in the center with a deep maroon, crushed-velvet bedspread. Two campaign chests on either side held some clothes and the rest hung in the small closet. Although the walls were bare the floor wasn’t. A few curvaceous pieces of sculpture loomed up out of the clouds.

  Although exhausted, the responsibility and frenzy of the dance had Ilse speeding. Carole brought her a sandwich and a cold beer. They sat in the living room.

  “Every time I come here this place blows my mind.”

  “Coming from you I don’t know whether that’s a compliment or an insult.”

  “Well, it’s beyond bourgeois. I mean there’s so much easiness and class here.”

  Carole sighed. Ilse was terrified of being comfortable.

  “What’s wrong with that? I thought that’s what people fought revolutions for, to gain some comfort and advantage.”

  Ilse wiggled out to the edge of her chair. “Not exactly. Freedom is as important, maybe more important.”

  “That’s an elusive concept. Are the Russians free?”

  “You can’t compare what we want to do with other revolutions. They were male supremacists, remember? We’ll go beyond that.”

  “I remember, but I still don’t know what freedom means when anyone says it. In the Middle Ages it meant irresponsibility. Society was a chain of limited privilege that worked to the disadvantage of all but a few. Political freedom meant exemption from the law. In Russia in 1917 it meant the dictatorship of the proletariat and today in America freedom is debased to mean consumer choice. So you tell me what you mean.”

  Ilse swallowed some beer, cocked her head, and stared at Carole. Did she want to fight or did she want to talk?

  “Freedom means the right to choose how you want to live and it means the right to participate in governmental and economic decisions. You’re right, there is a confusion between political freedom and material benefits. But, to me, freedom means being able to shape your environment, working with others. We’re all responsible to each other in my concept of freedom.”

  “That’s close enough to my view. I don’t know how we go about it but if that’s what the movement stands for, how could anyone be against it?”

&n
bsp; “The pigs on top are against it. They smear the women’s movement as being anti-male so people will be afraid of us, so they won’t listen to what we have to say. I’m not letting men off the hook. But holding a man responsible for his part in woman oppression and being anti-male are two different things.”

  Carole moved forward. “It seems to me you all are strong on analysis of what’s wrong and weak on program.”

  Ilse twitched and put her sandwich on the plate; her voice shot up a bit. “Carole, we’re new. I mean we’ve only existed as a political idea since about 1968. Give us time.”

  “What do you mean? What do you think the suffragists were doing back at the turn of the century? Even I know that much.”

  “It’s not the same. They wanted to participate in the government. They got screwed up on the vote, you know. I mean they thought the vote was really doing something. They finally got it in 1920 and then the party split. Most of the women said, we have what we want; the smarter ones said, no we don’t, we need equal rights. Shit, the damn Equal Rights Amendment still isn’t on the Constitution.” Ilse was getting impassioned. She couldn’t think about the past, even though she wasn’t part of it, without seething. “Anyway, that’s old stuff. I don’t want to participate in this rotten government. I don’t want stock in General Motors. I don’t want to get rich off the suffering in Viet Nam. The war’s over. What a crummy joke. I want a new government, a democracy, a real government of the people.”

  Carole touched Ilse on the shoulder to try and soothe her. “Honey, I believe you. I just don’t know how it’s done.”

  “Well, it’s not done by shutting ourselves off from one another, that old American individualism crap. Maybe that’s why this place blows my mind. I mean it’s so individual. And why should you pay this much rent? I bet you pay four hundred dollars or more for this place.” Frustration at not having an instant plan flushed Ilse’s face and she turned on Carole. “And what good does an art historian do anybody, really?”

  Stunned by the vehemence of the outburst, Carole dropped her hand. Her impulse was to lash right back but she tried to keep in mind that Ilse was overwrought by a week of strain, that she was twenty years younger, and that she respected the younger woman’s commitment even if she didn’t always agree with her. Besides, maybe this had been coming on for some time now.

  “Ilse, what good am I to anyone if I go back to the slums? Be reasonable.”

  “What do you mean go back to the slums?” Ilse doubted her.

  “I worked for everything I have. I didn’t come from money. Honey, I grew up in the Depression in Richmond, Virginia—one of three kids. We lived in the Fan. It was a slum pretty much, although we didn’t call it that ourselves. In the last ten years, since I was thirty-four, I’ve been able to get things for myself. Up to that time I was paying off loans and helping with my parents’ hospital bills until they died. You walk into someone’s life and assume their life is static. I worked for this. I’ve hurt no one in the process and I’ve helped those closest to me. Why should I be made to feel guilty?”

  “You’re too sophisticated to come from the slums. Adele maybe but not you,” Ilse said in a somewhat softer voice.

  “Keep it up and you’re going to be a radical celibate.”

  “Come on, Carole, poor people don’t act the way you do.”

  The fury of being, in essence, called a liar propelled Carole. “Who the hell are you to doubt my word? Who the hell are you to set up standards of behavior for people you don’t even know about? How dare you assume poor people are stupid, insensitive, inarticulate!”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to. That’s what you implied. Talk about stereotypes. That’s as bad as what men do to women. Just because we didn’t have anything doesn’t mean we spoke fractured English, lived in filth, and fought with regularity every Saturday night. And even if I had lived that way give me, give all people a little credit—we can change, you know. You’ve complained to me a hundred times how white and middle-class your movement is. Well, no wonder. You’ve insulted other women. Don’t you ever tell me how to act, my dear. Don’t you ever revise my past. Leave the revisionists to Russia. There are more differences between poor people than between middle-class people. Don’t you know that? I’m different from a poor white woman raised in the fields of South Carolina. You’ve got one stereotype to fit all of us and when you meet someone who grew up in poverty you can’t even recognize her. When you start asking people to justify their past to you, you set it up so they hate you.”

  “I, uh, didn’t know you knew much about Russia.”

  “For christ’s sake, Ilse, I was in my twenties at the height of the Red scare. I made it my business to try and learn a little something. Your generation isn’t the only one who’s read Marx.”

  “Oh.”

  The room vibrated like a lightening rod after it’s been struck. Slowly the tension was grounding.

  “During the fifties I read stuff about Russian history. To tell you the truth I didn’t read Marx until four years ago. The story’s actually funny. It was my fortieth birthday, a big day. Adele threw a party for me and afterwards we sat and wound down in her living room. LaVerne started the whole thing. She’d bought some damn stock—software which looked good because of the computer boom. It skyrocketed up and just as quickly fell back to earth with a fat splat. LaVerne nearly died and she was bitching about the economy. I voiced my ignorance about economic matters and Adele said she didn’t really know what goes on either. LaVerne is the sharpest of us all and she briefly explained the stock market so it made some sense to me but she said she didn’t know how goods go from country to country or what gold had to do with all of it. We sat there and looked at each other, three adult women sitting in the economic dark. So LaVerne suggested we each read a book and tell the others what was in it, like high school book reports. She grabbed Keynes, Adele took Galbraith, and I took Marx. Whizzed through the Communist Manifesto and got overconfident. That’s when I had a head-on collision with Das Kapital. Have you ever read it?”

  “No, but I’ve read interpretations and stuff.”

  “You mean I’ve read Kapital and you haven’t?” Carole brushed Ilse’s cheek.

  “Don’t tease me.” She kissed Carole’s hand. “Did you three come to any conclusions?”

  “Yes. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and my mother told me that.” Carole laughed.

  “You can’t resist a good line.”

  “Ilse, don’t be so serious. I absorbed a little about labor, value, utility, accumulation, but economics isn’t my field. We read our books. We informed ourselves and each other. I watch what goes on but as I said it’s not my field. I’m an alert amateur.”

  “Are you a Marxist?”

  “Who knows. I think Marxists need their own ecumenical council to realign the faithful.”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  “The shades of Marxism confuse me. I certainly don’t swallow it all. I forget what you call the old line Marxists. I like to think of them as secular Jesuits. Marx did give us a new way to look at the world and I’ve certainly been taught by him. But he wrote that stuff over a hundred years ago, some of it. We have to take what’s useful for us today. You should know me well enough by now, Ilse, to know I don’t uncritically accept anything. And as I told you, I’m not an economist. All I know is that when Marx exhorted the workers of the world to lose their chains, I thought, right, so the United States can sell them for junk.”

  In spite of herself, Ilse laughed. The fight took out her last ounce of energy and she was ebbing just as Carole was picking up.

  “Another thing that strikes me when I read is that all political organization seems based on the notion of an outside enemy,” Carole bubbled.

  “Yeah …”

  “Not that the Czar wasn’t the enemy or even that Dupont isn’t now an enemy, I guess, but there’s something about that conception that bothers me. It�
�s naive. There’s something worse than an outside enemy: an inside enemy.”

  “Carole, I’m not sure I follow. I’m getting fuzzy.”

  “Let’s go to bed then. Come on.” She put her arm around Ilse’s waist as they walked into the bedroom. “While I’m thinking about it, let me run this out quickly. We think in these set ways. A Brazilian has a Brazilian way of doing something and a French person has something peculiarly Gallic about him.”

  “Her,” Ilse corrected.

  “Her. We operate on ideas that are unquestioned, you see. That’s why revolutions fail. Russia still has a czar, of sorts. It might even be possible, and here’s where most of your friends will disagree with me, but it might even be possible that some of the unquestioned woman ways aren’t good ways. While we’re women we’re also Americans, aren’t we? I’ll bet you dollars to donuts your ideas of feminism and how to achieve democracy are very different from your Japanese counterpart.”

  “It’s not all that clear to me but what I’m getting sounds right. I don’t know how we find out what’s unquestioned.”

  “Travel.” Carole slipped into bed and Ilse, her eyes half closed, put her head on the tall woman’s shoulder.

  “One more thing,” Carole continued.

  “Huh?”

  “Adele comes from one of St. Louis’s best families. Her father’s a lawyer and the last thing they were was poor.”