Susan had tried everything to finish the book: taping the chapters; reading parts aloud to friends; breaking her routine. Last week she had gone to a Russian art exhibit at the de Young Museum over in Golden Gate Park.
The park had been shrouded in the mist of February, cold and deserted, except for a few winos biding time between open hours at the missions. And a mother with her little daughter. Twinges of loss. Familiar sensations, but no memories surely. The only walks she ever took with her own mother were around shopping centers. Once she had seen a television program (she must have been eight or nine) of a family hiking through dry birch leaves. She remembered vowing that she would take her children for walks in the park. Her daughter and son. She had married Guy for a daughter and a son.
(She woke up asking how long it would take.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Thompson, a D and C is a simple procedure.”
Did he say no muss, no fuss?
“We’ll have the tissue removed in twenty minutes. Good thing you didn’t wait longer.”
“Honest, I can’t have a baby now. Someday. But now there’s too much.…”
“Relax and count backwards with me now. Nine-eight-seven.…”
Rustling leaves. Little girl.
“That’s it dear, think pleasant thoughts. That’s natural.”
“I am a natural woman.”
“Don’t try to talk now, dear. Think about the girl rustling.”
“A girl, how can you tell?”
“About yourself, as a little girl, rustling.”
Rustling like the taffeta of nuns’ slips. Nuns don’t have children either. Everyone is their child. We are all God’s children. Thou shalt not kill.
“A simple procedure.”
Extreme unction by nitrous oxide.
“Susan, it was an operation, after all. You’re supposed to be resting. Put down the notebook for a while.”
“A simple procedure, Mrs. Thompson.”)
That day in the park became a blank. She returned to the same place. They called it bronchitis, an impossible love affair, a severe depression. But Susan knew what the problem was: her will had run down. Maybe she should start the biography all over again. She had thrown away parts of her life before.
KASM buzzed surrender to Saturday night. Two-thirty. How long had she been phased out, oblivious to the high-pitched seething of the radio? She had done this so often lately, lost concentration, consciousness. She would find herself frozen for minutes, asleep, numb, paralyzed. Euthanasia should be legalized for those without brainwaves. She swished the dial for company, for the speedy-dosey monologues of adolescent DJ’s who giggle to themselves through the night.
(“Ms. Campbell, the editors have discussed it and much as we respect your application, much as we acknowledge your talent, we don’t find your work acceptable. It’s a matter of, well, taking direction. Any magazine depends on cooperation. Perhaps we were wrong to try out a woman in this rather, uh, comradely ambience. And perhaps, ultimately, you are an individualist. Perhaps you should continue free-lance work. It’s a question of personality, really.”)
Susan welcomed the electronic scapeghosts. Inane pop music was a safe outlet for her anger. It was either them or her. Or her work. After all this struggling, passionate as it was in feminist terms, what did she have? A parable for her friends’ daughters? A reputation? What was that but a mortgage on future work?
The time she wasn’t writing, she should have been writing. Borrowed hollows of time. When she couldn’t write, she couldn’t edit and she couldn’t socialize. The integrated contemporary woman, disintegrated. Suffocated by other people’s respect. Tired, chilled and alone in a drafty old office with an expensive electric typewriter. She examined her incomplete sentences with the close cruelty of a middle-aged woman counting her wrinkles in a mirror. Maybe she should go back to magazine articles. They paid well and provided a comfortable competence. The articles were mediocre, perhaps, but at least they didn’t make her feel like an imposter.
No. No. She just wasn’t concentrating. She switched off the radio and lifted the top of her stereo, irritated to find she had forgotten to put away two records. The first one plopped down and the room was possessed by a loud, brassy voice. “Bill Bailey, wontya.…” How Susan hated that song. It was a pre-feminist objection, recalling those Ed Sullivan Sunday nights. The fat, blonde woman in a sequinned gown bellowed for forgiveness and then there would be “a really big hand for Sandy Samone.” Susan remembered her mother leaning heavier on the iron, looking from the flickering screen to her husband. “Right, I’ll pay the rent when we get a place. Just you get us to San Francisco, Andy.”
(When she heard that Sandy Samone was playing live at Denny man’s Piano Bar, Susan drove thirty miles to San Jose to hear her. Sandy Samone was older now. Blonder. But the voice was the same, the same mellow mediocrity, despite the fifth screwdriver. Susan sent her a drink and asked the barman to say it was from “an admirer.”
Of course Sandy Samone wouldn’t know Marya Terazinya. Not to be elitist, but there was a difference between Marya’s art and Sandy’s entertainment. Well, who survived, tell me that?
Who survived? Not on obscure discs between thin blue Soviet cardboard, but in real, voluptuous flesh and blood. “I know I done you wrong.” Sandy made no precious attempt to transcend the suffering. She just kept pouring on the peroxide and singing. That’s it, honey, swing it. “Mea culpa.” Tell me who’s laughing now. And what’s the difference between crying and laughing? Maybe “ni kulturni,” baby, but who survived?
And who has guys driving all the way from Stockton to see her? So what if the sets weren’t as elaborate as they used to be—Marya Terazinya forgive her—she still had body and soul. Anyway, who noticed after six screwdrivers? What a treat. Admirers after all these years.)
Susan was not concentrating. A red light said the records she had not heard were over. OK, she knew it was ridiculous to romanticize Marya, the isolated artist, and Sandy, the passionate hack. It was even more ridiculous to have delusions of her grandeur or despair, to believe she had to become one or the other. Something was certain. Susan was a coward compared to Sandy Samone. Susan knew she would have swallowed the peroxide.
She could maintain no distance from the naked typewriter and the ream of blank bond paper. Susan felt she was tottering from adolescence to menopause, in a coma of glandular fever. Weren’t there ages of relative sanity inbetween? The book was too long. Too didactic. Her friends in the CP would hate it. A lot of feminists would say it was too socialist. And, finally, she knew, it was too badly written.
(“Tell our listeners, Susan Campbell, to what do you attribute your drive? How did you survive female socialization?”
“Survive?” asked Susan.
“Yes, how did you survive the stereotyped conditioning?” said the DJ. “Many of the women in our audience are undoubtedly wondering how you did it.”
“Georges Sand decided at 27 that she was either going to be sane or crazy,” said Susan.
“Perhaps we should go to a more specific question.”
“Don’t you see, it’s all a choice?” said Susan. “To be mediocre or to take the risk.”
“Yes, hmmmm, well, if we could return to your writing,” he suggested patiently. “How did you determine your political, aesthetic and personal priorities?”
“You don’t get it,” she was growing more desperate. “It’s all a choice, not to separate thought and feeling and action. That’s what aesthetics and survival mean. You don’t get it, do you, Mr. Interviewer?”
“Susan, let’s get off the stage now,” a friend materialized. “You really do need a rest. Let’s get away for a while. Don’t worry. It’s only a taped show. Only a few women in the audience. Only a few women.”)
“Damn telephone,” Susan turned off the typewriter and walked over to answer it. “Damn telephone at four o’clock in the bloody morning. You’re never completely free.”
“Susan Campbell. Yes, this is
Susan Campbell. Rape Crisis? Yes. Yes. Put her through now.”
“When did it happen and are you OK?”
“How do you feel now?”
“No, it’s not your fault. Get that idea out of your head right away.”
“So you’re going to believe someone who assaulted you in the street? He does have an interest in telling you it’s your fault.”
“That’s it, cry if you want.”
“And get angry if you want.”
“Do you have any friends you can call?”
“Of course she’ll understand.”
“Not the end, yes, that’s right.”
“You can’t undo it, no, but you don’t have to continue being a victim.”
“Sure, sure, cry if you want.”
“Yes?”
“Of course I w.ant to come to the police station with you.”
“Don’t apologize. We’ve all got to stop apologizing.”
“Yes, certainly you should report it—for your own peace and for other women. You don’t want him to do it again. A lot of us.…”
“To more of us that you imagine.”
“Look, why don’t I just come over and we can have some coffee?”
“No, no, love, I can’t make you go. I don’t want to make you.”
“Why don’t you just give me your number and I’ll ring you later to see how you’re feeling.…”
“Sure, it’s your decision. It’s up to.…”
Click. Nothing to do but wait now. People panic and think everyone is their enemy. Nothing to do but wait.
Susan went back to work. You know, perhaps it wasn’t so thoroughly bad. Maybe it was her critique that was too cognitive rather than the writing itself. She had evaluated each word until she no longer saw a book or a chapter, but a chart of detailed decisions, one complicating the other. It was like being trapped in an algebra exam, having forgotten how to add minus numbers. Maybe she should have faith in the first idea; maybe she should just get on with it.
The introduction to this last chapter was right. And she had all the material. It was a matter of what came next. Of continuing. She turned on the typewriter and continued the paragraph. (Will. Incentive. Momentum. She was fond of litanies. Faith. She recalled the conversations with Sara on the train and on their wonderful visits since then. Faith.) The book would not resist change. It moved to the skill in her fingers. What mattered was the doing, not the planning or the worrying or the stupid apologizing. It didn’t all have to be such a struggle.
Struggle. Where was the sisterhood now? Susan wondered sometimes if feminism was the ultimate in female masochism because there seemed to be nothing beyond the struggle. She had been retained as a good fighter, a prolific petitioner. Now, brittle with fatigue, she contemplated how she gave her loneliness to group consciousness, her anger to organized protest, her oppression to revolutionary retribution. So what if she were free from sexist family, teachers, husband, boss, critics? What was salvation if there was no afterlife?
She was free from all that, free for.…
She continued to type. For a moment, she did not know why. The book would not be perfect. It might not be very good. And it didn’t keep her warm at night. This humming hulk slept under a different sheet. No, writing was not like making love or giving birth. The work, alone, was not enough. But it was the largest part of her whole. Her breathing eased with this understanding. Writing sustained her like nothing else. And accepting that, there was no possible conclusion except to continue.
“Telephone. Finally.” The low pitched ring continued as she lifted the receiver. She reached over and flicked off her travel alarm clock. Seven o’clock.
Susan drew the curtains and she was disappointed that the city was fogged in even more than the night before. There was usually some break at sunrise. The temperature must have dropped ten degrees because frost edged the window panes. Susan switched on the kettle and turned back to work.
Sisterhood
Pat walked along the sidewalk, looking up. Only one cell of Montreal Police Station Numéro Cinq seemed to be occupied. She saw the figure of a bulky young man, straight brown hair straggling to the collar of the beige sports jacket. It could have been an alcoholic hard-hat or a thug, maybe a plainclothes policeman off duty. But Pat knew it was her sister Rosemary. Rosemary, hunched and tense, trying to ignore the smell of the horseshit from the stable and the rattling of the poker chips upstairs. Rosemary reading or writing one of her Marxist texts.
Pat remembered Rosemary running up these slippery grey steps when they were kids, playing tag on the way home from St. Paul’s. No one dared follow. She had warned Rosemary, twenty-five years ago, that she would get locked up if she kept behaving like that.
“Ms. Jordan, please.”
“Upstairs, lady, in the Bridal Suite.”
Pat winced, less irritated by the sergeant’s sarcasm than by what it predicted about Rosemary’s mood. By now she should be used to the effect of her sister’s tempers on the rest of humanity. She had defended Rosemary’s right to play football. Gradually she, too, became keen on sports and followed Rosemary’s progress with a fine track record of her own. Pat had explained to their parents why Rosemary wanted to divorce the American draft resister three years after she had explained why Rosemary wanted to marry him. And that had decided Pat, herself, against wifery.
“Ms. Jordan,” she said, slurring the “Ms.” and hating herself for lacking Rosemary’s strength. “Ms.” was simple enough: why did she pretend to be slurring “Miss” or “Mrs.”? The West Indian guard considered her with remote curiosity. Not the usual sort of visitor, she supposed he was thinking, not like Rosemary’s ragged radical friends in their $50 hiking boots. She looked like a “proper doc,” still in her respectable clothes. She knew Rosemary would hate the pantyhose. They always got into a godalmighty row about them causing yeast infections. Rosemary giving her medical advice.
But then, they had always been collaborators. At least she had always collaborated in Rosemary’s schemes. In some ways, Rosemary had been the classic older sister. All Pat had to do was follow the red-splattered road. When Pat played Saint Joan in high school, she just played Rosemary. However, their parents always recognized that Pat was the sensible one, the accomplished one. Graduating at the top of her medical class. Even Rosemary accepted her bourgeois credentials when Pat started teaching a self-examination course for women.
Pat could smell the horseshit as she approached the south corridor. She recalled her panic, years ago, when Rosemary said she was going to steal one of the horses. They were on their way home from a novena. She dared Rosemary to go ahead and promised to come along for the ride if she smuggled the mare.
“Bitch.” The guard’s voice carried down the corridor. “Just watchit, bitch.”
Pat tried to ignore the shouting by listening to the quick clacking of her platform heels on the linoleum floor.
“I’m Dr. Jordan.” She heard herself assuming the propriety that Rosemary detested. And she saw it disarm the guard.
“I would like to see my sister.”
XIV
Rondo
The waiter carried a piece of Larry Blake’s special angel food cake to the next table and placed it in front of the jock in the pin-striped shirt. Susan regarded her own diluted Coke and wondered how much longer she would wait for Guy. She wanted to order a coffee, but then she wouldn’t have enough money for bus fare home. It was true that she was going to get an advance for the book. She would only have to wait a while longer. So here she was, ten years out of college and still counting her pennies for coffee while the varsity champ was swallowing the restaurant whole.
“Hello, excuse me, but are you Susan Campbell?”
Susan regarded a girl in jeans and a Mexican flowered blouse. Of course she wasn’t a girl; she was a college student, a young woman. Susan would be offended if some man were to call her a girl. But in looking at her and in looking at herself, this stranger seemed a girl. Susan realized th
at the girl must be paging her for Guy. At least, she thought, he was courteous enough to try and reach me.
“Yes,” she said at last. “I’m Susan Campbell.”
“I’m very pleased to meet you,” said the girl shyly. “I’m Debbie Guthrie and I wanted to thank you for that talk you gave about Marya Terazinya and your book last week.”
Susan tried to hide her disappointment with a late and crooked smile.
The young woman considered her closely, as if she were inspecting for forgery. “When you spoke at Dwindle Hall last Friday,” she said and then looked embarrassed at having to remind Susan of her own lecture. “I was particularly struck by what you said about fiction overlapping with biography, about art and politics.”
“Won’t you sit down?” asked Susan, hoping that the stranger (Now she had a name. What was it? Debbie, of course. But it was too late to say, “Won’t you sit down, Debbie?”) would leave so she could save her coffee money. Susan realized she was too tired to walk home. Where the hell was Guy?
“Well, I wouldn’t want to impose,” said Debbie, as she slid nimbly into the booth. “But when I first noticed you over here, the waiter said you were expecting someone. When they didn’t show up after all this time, I thought you might like the company.”
Silence.
Debbie was frowning now. She seemed to be recalling just what she had said, checking that all the words came out in order.
“Who knows,” said Susan, truly confused, herself, about whether she was being polite or masochistic or maternal. “Maybe I was waiting for you.”
Debbie stuttered, “I, I, I mean I just wanted to pay my respects.”
At this they both laughed. The younger woman looked more comfortable.
“If you really don’t mind the company,” said Debbie, “I’ll join you for a cup of coffee.”
Movement Page 18
