In Her Day

by Rita Mae Brown

  “Thank you.” Carole, stunned, reached out to shake her hand and Marcia took it and gave her a good hug.

  “Fred won’t dare move. I think you’re safe.”

  Carole laughed while wiping her eyes. “I know. I can’t bear the gossip that damn article will stir up so I thought I’d go to the other members of the department who don’t know and just lay the whole thing to rest.”

  “Prof. Stowa is so old he’ll think you’re talking about translating Sappho so you can cross him off. I doubt if the others read that paper and if they do they’ll give out some hint and then you can say whatever it is you have to say.”

  “Sage counsel. Is that clock on your desk on time?”

  “Should be.”

  “I’m five minutes late for class. Thank you again, Marcia.”

  Carole ran out to the elevator and noticed that Fred had his door closed. The first fruits of victory, she thought.

  “That’s amazing,” LaVerne gasped when Carole finished her story.

  “I can’t get over Marcia,” Adele chimed in. “Familiarity breeds consent.”

  “Are we keeping score tonight?” LaVerne questioned.

  “Love is taking the good with the bad.” Carole lifted her palms to heaven.

  “And that was a good one. Come on, you two, give me a little credit.”

  “The funny thing is I feel as though a weight is lifted off my back. I have to give Ilse credit. She was right about coming out.”

  “Ideally, that should be an individual decision. You had a little help,” LaVerne stated.

  “You would have had all kinds of help if you’d wanted it. BonBon planned to march down there dressed to hold up traffic as well as a bank and accuse Fred of white slaving,” Adele chuckled.

  Lester, on the word white, screamed, “Bwana, White Devil.”

  “Telling me. It took me twenty minutes on the phone to calm her today. She turned out to be more upset than I was.”

  “It’s too bad Ilse couldn’t be here. We could all celebrate your day together,” LaVerne mentioned.

  “We can celebrate on the twenty-ninth when we pick her up from work.”

  “Adele, you could give me one little hint.”

  “Go on, give her a teaser.”

  “Okay. September twenty-ninth is Cervantes’ birthday. He was born in 1547. That’s a big hint. I’m not telling you another thing.”

  Huddled on the stoop sat Ilse, knees tucked under her chin.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “Waiting for you. Anyway, it’s such a beautiful night I thought I’d sit out and try to remember what the stars look like.”

  “How did the meeting go?”

  “Terrific. We decided what had to be done and that was that. Then we got into bigger issues.”

  “Well, what did you decide?”

  “That’s our secret.”

  Opening the door to her apartment freed Louisa May who padded down the steps and then bounded back up again.

  “Will you sue?”

  “Our lawyer talked to them today and they’re a little uptight. I’m pretty sure they’ll agree to either an apology or an article. But after that business we got into such exciting stuff. Now that Olive’s gone people are really talking to each other. We started out trying to define the group and then narrowed it down to the fact that maybe we’d better define ourselves first, you know?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well, women have always been without an identity, without a self. We’ve only been functions, service functions, like a mother or a wife or a secretary. That kind of shit. So if the movement is going to get anywhere fast we have to help women become who it is that they are. See?”

  “I always knew who I was. I think you’re confusing heterosexual women with women who know they have to earn their own living and who aren’t going to get status off of being Mrs. So and So.”

  “Huh?”

  “You can’t lump everyone together like that.”

  “Well, but you have to admit the search for identity is a very real and painful search.”

  “Bullshit. It’s all made up.”

  Ilse got riled. “What do you mean bullshit? People have to find out who they are. Why do you think there’s so much misery in this country?”

  “There’s misery in this country because most Americans haven’t bowed to the nonescapability of causality.”

  “What?” Ilse squeaked in disbelief.

  “People are like children. They don’t understand their actions have reactions.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with identity!”

  “Oh, yes, it does.”

  “I’m missing a connection somewhere. I don’t see that at all.”

  “Let me think a minute to see if I can explain it better.”

  Ilse got up and went to the kitchen. “You want anything?”

  “A Coke with ice. You know once in a giddy mood I thought ice was the past tense of water. I love that thought.”

  Ilse didn’t see the humor in it if there was any. “Uh huh.”

  “Let me try it this way, back to identity. Americans believe you can start all over again. That’s the whole idea behind upward mobility or downward mobility which is more to the point for your generation. People want to believe they can wipe their past off the books. Experience isn’t shared, it’s cut off at the roots. It’s lunacy to think your past doesn’t bear on your present. In a way that’s not accepting the consequences of your actions even if those actions, like where and what you were born, weren’t under your control. Does that make sense?”

  “It makes sense but you see I think women have to forget the past. We have to be reborn and reject all the old values that kept us subservient.”

  “So you’re advocating an ahistorical movement which means you’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Ilse, be reasonable. You can ask people to transform themselves but you can’t ask them to reject what they were without adding to their self-hatred.”

  “No. Women have to make themselves new.”

  “Well, honey, I just don’t see it that way.”

  “How can you, you’re still stuck back in the Middle Ages? What the hell does the Middle Ages have to do with today?”

  “A lot, my dear, a lot. Especially for women.”

  “This I got to hear.”

  “The whole idea of courtly love gave women a kind of spiritual power they hadn’t known. Men believed the irresistable power of gentleness and beauty, woman, could tame even the most savage beasts. That’s why the last of the Unicorn tapestries is so lush. The unicorn was thought to be a ferocious beast—I think it was a symbol for male brutality even if they didn’t know it—and here is the unicorn in the lady’s lap. She tamed him. And then there’s the little problem of the Crusades. Men were away for years, if indeed they ever came back, so women often became lords of the castles and they performed many formerly masculine duties. The merchant class was beginning to stir. The women worked as hard as the men building the business up. In those days who could afford to stay home? The Church remained violently anti-woman and still is, but secular life was changing. It may not seem significant to you, but you’re the direct result of it, far away as it may seem.”

  “So, it’s interesting. It’s not compelling. I want to get back to this reborn thing. Why should I reclaim my past? Why should I identify with my mother or my father? I reject everything about them. I’m a new person.”

  “Are you? Isn’t your rigidness in denying them the identical rigidness they show to you and your ideas? You’re the other side of the same coin and you’d better come to terms with it or you’re going to destroy the very thing you care the most about, your movement.”

  Now Ilse was worried. She feared some dark dragon was about to lumber out from the cave of her subconscious. “You have to be more specific.”

  “Ilse, you can’t be what you aren’t. You’re not a poor woman. You weren’t raised in poverty. You can’t go around pre
tending. I’m not saying you should run back to your mother and play a quick set at Longwood Cricket Club, I’m saying you are more useful to your movement by embracing your background than by rejecting it. Believe me. I spent close to a decade trying to pretend I was an aristocrat. If you say to other women, ‘Look, this is what I came from and look how I changed,’ then women from that same background will listen to you. And other women might listen too because you’re being honest instead of playing poor. If you are reborn what good does it do any of us if we don’t know what you were before? You see, you’re denying the very power of your movement. You’re cutting off your roots and leaving out the eucharist.”

  “Carole, I’m not too good at religious terms.”

  “You aren’t transmitting to people what it is that changed you. You’re not sharing, not giving communion, not communicating that process. Without the process you look very one-sided and very easy to disbelieve.”

  “I have to think about all this. I can’t trust you … I mean, I’m always afraid you’re trying to belittle my work because you’re not in the movement slugging it out and trying to organize. It’s hard for me to trust you.”

  “Ah, so you can’t trust anyone who isn’t exactly like you are?”

  “I … Carole, you get me backed into corners. I don’t know, maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s what I’m doing even though I say the opposite. But it’s hard to trust women who aren’t actively involved in the movement.”

  “I’m getting involved but in my own way.”

  “Yeah, but that’s what we keep coming back to. People can’t go off in their orgies of individualism saying, I’m making the revolution in my own way. For christ’s sake, Carole, that leaves the pigs in control of everything.”

  “I grant you that, but right now there isn’t an organization or a project that speaks to me. Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been earning my own way for over twenty-five years now. If something touches me I’ll move. Look, I came out today at work because of that damn article.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes, I laid Fred Fowler out to whaleshit.”

  “I never heard that before.”

  Carole laughed. “Let’s say I’m being true to my roots. I put him over a barrel.”

  “Will you lose your job?”

  “No, I’m one of the lucky ones on that count.”

  “Carole, I’m really impressed.”

  “Me, too. People do hear what you say, Ilse, but it takes time and you can’t rob me of my individuality by saying, ‘Do it this way or you’re not one of us!’ ”

  “Carole, I can’t buy that. I mistrust the individual thing so much. That’s how we’ve been kept from each other. Every oppressed group is told to bargain with the Man for it’s little tidbits. We’re told we’re individuals, we make it on our own. We have to band together or we’re weak.”

  “I know that much but you can’t band people together by telling them to act alike. You know that. It’s the idea that has to be shared and certain agreement on projects or whatever. Then people will act on that according to who they are.”

  “Dammit, that’s my point. Women don’t know who they are. We are the only oppressed group that has to give people an identity. We didn’t live in ghettos, we were kept in the oppressor’s house. We have to build those bonds between each other. Our community was destroyed ten thousand years ago.”

  “And I insist you keep fuzzing the line between straight women and lesbians.”

  “There are a lot of lesbians in the movement who don’t know who the hell they are either.”

  “And they’re young. Let them go out and earn their living, they’ll find out a lot very fast.”

  “It’s not that simple. We have to build an identity on women’s values not on men’s.”

  “Jesus christ, Ilse, you can’t base salvation on a gene pool. Look at the trouble it brought the Jews.”

  “Women are different from men and now we have to put each other first.”

  “I agree. But don’t fall into a congenital trap and say we’re born different which really means better, right?”

  “Right.”

  “If you exclude men and give them no hope because there isn’t anything they can do about it, they’ll kill you—out of fear as much as out of hatred.”

  “That I believe.”

  “You have to appeal to the mind, to the heart. Don’t judge people by their bodies. You have to ask men to become woman-identified, to find and reclaim women’s values. I told you, there was a murmur in that direction in the Middle Ages. You can’t declare men irrelevant. And I’m not saying most of them aren’t complete assholes but you have to give them a chance. That’s a damn sight more than they ever gave us.”

  “Well, I’m not working with them.”

  “Don’t blame you. But twenty years from now or thirty years from now enough of them may be women-identified so there can be solidarity, as you say.”

  “You’ve got a sharp mind, Carole. It’s too bad you’re not actively in the movement.”

  “Ilse, I’ve told you a hundred times I hate politics. I’ll do what I can do in my field. Or maybe someday I can vote for you.”

  “Great, that’s all I need: my revolutionary fervor dissipated in an electoral illusion.”

  “I don’t understand the mechanics of all that, the difference between revolution and election. Maybe they aren’t as far apart as you think. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is someday if we women are called upon to act in unison, I’ll do it but I’m not going to organize it or write papers or whatever.”

  “I am.”

  “Good. I respect you for it.”

  “And I can’t see a way around giving women new selves.”

  “Maybe we’re purposefully missing each other.”

  “I’m mad because you discount identity like some grand madam. Maybe it isn’t a problem for you because you’re forty-four, but it sure is for most of the women I know.

  “Ilse, not you, not anybody can set out in search of themself. You can’t construct some psychological cathedral. If you do that, well, you ruin whatever it is that’s you. If you take cognizance of your identity then you detach yourself from you. You become a spectator to your own life. That’s insane. You trap yourself in words. If you sit around thinking about yourself, what you’re doing is talking to yourself in English. The language itself will alter you. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how this happened so fast. When I was a kid no one ever worried about who they were. You worried about what you were going to do—doctor, lawyer, Indian Chief, that kind of thing—but my god, we never called ourselves into question. And we didn’t listen that much to what people said. We watched what they did. Life was immediate. We didn’t have to filter everything through the interior mind at work. I can’t understand what’s wrong with people today. How can anyone possibly think they are going to solve their identity? I swear, self consciousness is original sin.”

  “Like I said, I have to think about all this.”

  “Me, too. I feel like we wandered all over the map. Ilse, I don’t want to fight with you. I care about you. I’d just like to enjoy the time we have together. Let go. You don’t have to carry the entire women’s movement every minute of every day.”

  “I don’t know. I feel responsible. I feel I can make a difference and get us on the right track. I feel like I don’t even want to sleep. I want to go at it every second.”

  “You have to relax or you’ll be like a vein reducing itself to capillaries. You’ll vanish. Besides, people need outside stimulus, relaxation; that’s what enriches our work.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You won’t know until you stop working out of guilt.”

  “Guilt! What have I got to feel guilty about?”

  “Look, I’m sorry I said it. Can’t we fall into bed and make love any more without ranging off into some deep discussion?”

  “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me a
bout this guilt thing.”

  “Okay. I think you do believe in this cause. And a big part of you is working for good reasons but a small nagging part of you is guilty, that’s why you don’t relax. Stop trying to even the score. You were born with money. That’s not your fault. Make use of it, don’t deny it. Anyone who puts you down for your birth is full of shit—whether they’re poor or rich themselves. It’s what you do with your life that’s important, not what you couldn’t help—your sex or your color or money. You deserve respect for what you’re doing, not condemnation because you were born with a lot of advantages. Look at all the rich people who do nothing with their lives. So be proud of yourself.”

  “I think I have a lot to learn, Carole. And I’m sorry I seem to learn by fighting with you. I don’t know why I do that and I want to stop but I know I’ll do it again.”

  “I did it too. I used to fight with my parents all the time and pick on my friends at school. We all do it. It’s easier to call the other person an idiot than to look at our own blunders. Don’t be so serious, honey; come on. Let’s go to bed.”

  Carole put her hands on Ilse’s face and kissed her. The young woman threw her arms around her neck and held her for what seemed like ten minutes. Then they took a shower and quietly went to bed making love like dreamers in a river, borne by the current rather than simple desire.

  LaVerne stood in front of the bird cage coaxing Lester with bits of dried apricot.

  “Lester, come on now. Piss, shit. Say it.”

  Unfurling his headdress he waddled back and forth on his branch clucking and turning his head nearly upside down to see if the other birds were noticing. The mynah, wildly interested in the fruit, said, “It’s the real thing,” and that set Lester off for fear he’d be overshadowed. LaVerne gave the mynah a piece of fruit and Lester practically molted on the spot.

  “Come on, Lester, snap to it. Do it for Aunt LaVerne. Piss, shit …”

  Lester puffed out his white breast, “Piss, shit, corruption, snot. Twenty-four dupers tied in a knot. Apeshit, batshit, fuckaroo. All you girls lay down and screw!”

  “LaVerne, are you in there with that bird again?”

  “We’re having a meaningful conversation.”