A little overwhelmed by all this energy, Susan signaled the waiter to bring two coffees, hoping desperately that Debbie had enough money to pay for her own. Or perhaps Guy would show up and loan her money to pay for both of them.
She was pretty, Susan noticed, with those coils of red black hair curled around her clear, moon face. She had that innocent, natural chic which Revlon was selling now. However, Debbie was the genuine article. She had saved herself so much time not using mascara. She had saved herself whole days, perhaps weeks, in her freedom from buying and applying and removing make-up. But then, Susan couldn’t blame herself for the eye shadow in her own history. Everyone used it then. Maybelline made you visible. Guy might not have noticed her otherwise. Susan had stopped wearing it in England, not out of ideology, but for vanity. The mascara had made grey dabs on her cheeks (worse with midnight blue), scars from this new, damp climate. When she first looked in the mirror with naked eyes, she seemed younger. But Susan doubted that she had ever looked as young as her present companion. Forgetting fatigue, Susan wondered what she might learn from this younger person.
Debbie was talking rapidly, nervously. “I’ve always admired your work. And from what I could discern, your whole approach to life.”
Susan nodded uneasily.
“You see, I want to write,” said Debbie. “I do write. I have fourteen notebooks of journal. I think the journal is becoming a genre in its own right. Don’t you think so?”
Embarrassed by such admiration, Susan was also scared that if she accepted it, she would be caught in a charade. She had had these chats with younger women before and they left her uncomfortable for hours afterward.
“Well, I liked Journal of A Solitude,” said Susan simply. Maybe if she sounded dull enough, Debbie would just go away. Then, ashamed of her coldness, Susan realized how disappointed and angry she was that Guy had not shown up. Just another element of the familiar suspense that played between them. Would they cross the border? Would that fucker ever get to Phoenix? Susan smiled at the memory of their escape to Canada, at the other borders they had crossed. How many were left?
Debbie smiled. “Journal of A Solitude, oh yes,” she agreed and followed with a rapturous critique of May Sarton. Then Debbie told her breathlessly that she was in her last term at Berkeley, majoring in English literature, caught between graduate school and just getting on with her writing. Did Susan ever have to make that choice?
Susan remembered how she used to give oral resumes like this, detailing what she presumed to be her accomplishments as well as her current insights and questions, so the other person would think her worthy of attention. At that time, life seemed to be a set of necessary hurdles, the passing of which granted you some kind of wisdom.
“I’ve done OK in the writing classes here,” Debbie continued. “But what does that tell me? All the professors are men. I’m really committed to the development of matriarchal language. Like what Mary Daly’s doing.”
Susan felt a twinge of rivalry when Debbie mentioned Mary Daly. This dissolved as she continued listening.
She was listening not so much to content as to pattern. Lately this had happened to her often: she was claimed by students, asked for advice, and then presented with their autobiographies.
“This may sound stupid,” Debbie began to say as she twisted the long chain of seed beads which hung from her neck. (Weren’t they out of style now, these three-foot strands? Susan thought about her own Brazilian beads and wondered whether students were still as careful to get their jewelry from the correct political groups. Well, at least Debbie wasn’t one of these punk rockers with safety pins in her cheeks.) “Don’t worry about sounding stupid,” Susan said kindly.
Debbie still looked concerned. Susan wanted to reach out and say, “It’s OK, love.” But she didn’t know what “it” was. She could not figure out what the other woman wanted from her.
“Well,” said Debbie, “do you like writing? I mean last week you described it as painful. So why do you do it?”
“There is no why,” said Susan, surprised at the swift sureness of her answer. “How was always the problem. How was I going to pay the rent? How was I going to afford the beans? How was I going to find the courage and perseverance to keep writing when people weren’t publishing my books?”
This all sounded rather grand, Susan recognized, a bit abstract. But she had never asked herself why. Now she felt like a phony, playing Jane Fonda, playing Lillian Hellman. Was it a mortal sin to impersonate a writer?
“Yes, I do like writing,” she finally answered the question.
Debbie was astonishingly familiar with Susan’s work. She asked questions about articles Susan had forgotten. Almost forgotten. Debbie was full of questions. Do you work early in the morning? A set number of hours a day? Debbie wasn’t so much interested in how to find the courage to write as she was in how to publish any or all of her fourteen journals. This made sense to Susan.
“But you’ll need a job to support yourself,” said Susan. “Something to pay the rent.”
“There’s family money,” said Debbie. “I’m sure I could get a loan from my parents.”
Family money, thought Susan, staring down at the empty Coke glass to hide her—what was it—her anger, jealousy, sense of unfairness. How much easier it would have been for her if she had had money or encouragement or even interest from her family. Was it fair? Ridiculous question, Susan realized, swallowing the resentment. Debbie did not determine her own pedigree. Fairness was a belief she should have left behind in Catholic school. Was it fair that Mohammed had to stay in Agadir to support his family? Was it fair that Alexander died of bronchitis in a damp London flat so far from the warmth of Zimbabwe? Was it fair that her own mother still worked at age seventy in a downtown diner? No, life was not fair. Life was making the most of what you had—persuading envy into generosity and guilt into compassion. There was enough of the world to go around.
“We used your Celtic book in my ethnic relations course,” Debbie said. “I would love to go to Ireland and write journals. That’s where my grandmother is from. How do you feel about the Celtic work now?”
Susan was torn between talking about her research and just making an excuse to leave. But the damn waiter hadn’t even brought the coffee yet. So she told Debbie about the Cornish work, about that dreadful winter afternoon on the cliffs, about Ronald’s death, about the dwindling correspondence from Andre and Colin.
“Why did you go to London?” Debbie demanded abruptly. The urgency held Susan closely, as if Debbie were trying to photograph some illusive self image. In focusing the camera, however, Debbie would have to notice that the background was a mirror which would reflect both of them. Whatever came out of this talk wouldn’t be a portrait of a role model but a photo of the two of them together. And Susan doubted that Debbie’s depth of field was large enough to get them both in focus.
Susan answered that she had hoped moving to England would end the boredom and guilt and pain of her marriage. It was the beginning for which she wasn’t prepared. The mitosis. One cannot control growth. (If she couldn’t control her own, how could she help Debbie, she wondered. No, she stopped herself. Debbie hadn’t asked for help.)
Debbie said she often thought about giving up men altogether, but right now she was relating to a good, non-sexist guy. “I’ll stay as long as it’s not oppressive.”
“Good luck,” Susan said, holding back to protect Debbie from her sarcasm, to protect herself from her confusion. Should Susan explain that she still liked sleeping with men? That she hated waking next to them, hated the heavy emptiness of the mornings after? Still, she did wish Debbie luck. Perhaps this new generation of men would be different, perhaps.
Debbie grasped the silence anxiously, “You know what really bothers me about the writing is that I wonder if it’s a substitute. Maybe I’m putting all my creative energies into literature when I should be having a family.”
Susan looked stunned. Debbie reached over and reassur
ingly patted her hand.
“Oh, I don’t mean a patriarchal nuclear explosion family,” said Debbie. “I mean a growing relationship that offers personal affirmation. Sometimes I think about the writing, in comparison, as empty.”
Susan thought about how work had filled her life. She thought about the hours she stole from her paid job in order to finish the book. She shook her head in exhaustion, incomprehension. For the first time this afternoon, Debbie seemed to notice that Susan wasn’t impermeable.
“Listen, friend,” Susan said, “I wish I had these answers—for me as well as for you. But I don’t know. I don’t know if I have time for children. I don’t know whether I’ll be with a man or a woman. Choices. Freedom just leads to more damn choices.”
“Well, I think we can have both,” Debbie said encouragingly, “love and work.”
“I hope so,” Susan laughed, feeling relaxed now and quite certain of her fondness for this kid.
Debbie looked at her watch. “I should be going.” She sounded both relieved and sad.
Susan considered the time. No, Guy would not be coming today. Would they ever cross the border?
“Which way are you headed?” Susan brightened.
“Actually, I’m half-an-hour late to a class on Victorian prose in Le Conte Hall,” said Debbie.
“I’m walking that way, too,” said Susan, putting down the last coins from her purse as a tip.
The two women threaded their way through the stands and shoppers on Telegraph Avenue. Debbie pumped Susan with questions about the sixties, about People’s Park, anti-war marches, the Panthers. Susan told Debbie that she was setting the revolution in the wrong decade.
“Maybe the choices were posed in the sixties,” said Susan. “But it was living through those choices, that was the sticky part. And that happened later on, in the seventies, in the eighties.”
“But you’re working through them,” said Debbie, nervous that she had somehow made the older woman vulnerable, forcibly exposing her to her own past. “You survived.”
“Survived,” said Susan, thinking of Sandy Samone and Marya Terazinya. “Oh, I think so. More than survived.”
Debbie smiled and continued smiling as Susan talked about how Berkeley had survived. Telegraph carried the same seedy excitement, some of the same people. The blustering evangelist, old Hubert, had weathered the scorn of hippies and was now a venerable figure to the squads of clean kids who called themselves “just Christians.” The tall man whose face was long ago eaten in some tragic chemistry experiment looked at Susan skeptically when she smiled at him. She wondered if he had remembered her timid smiles from ten years before. The Bubble Lady Poet wore the same ragged pigtail and the same ragged black coat. Maybe she was afraid that without them, tourists wouldn’t recognize her from the People’s Park mural.
And it did not matter that some of her memories were lost to fiction, Susan told herself. The pursuit of art was more worthy than the pursuit of nostalgia. Whenever Susan visited the campus, she preferred to go as a ghost.
Debbie did not believe in ghosts. She believed in legend rather than timelessness. She was interested in Susan’s past only in so far as it related to their present. How had Susan planned her life? Debbie wanted to know. When Susan was a student, what did she expect to become?
“You mean, what did I think I’d be doing now?” asked Susan.
“Yes,” said Debbie. “I mean did you think you would have traveled and done these things and then moved back here and that you would be a writer?”
Susan had to admit that the scenario had gone something like that. She had to admit that she was no longer the earnest student or the novice writer and that she had no right to many of her doubts, even if she wasn’t comfortable with success. Susan did not want to materialize, but she remembered Debbie did not believe in ghosts. And for this, she resented Debbie a little. She felt like the native, who finding her home settled by immigrants, must ultimately admit that everyone is an immigrant. For Debbie, there was no past that was not history.
As they reached the edge of campus, Debbie said, “My house had a 1968 party last week.”
“A what?” Susan asked, incredulous, although she knew one day the sixties would be processed into nostalgia chic. “Why?”
“To celebrate the anniversary of the Open Speech Movement,” Debbie said.
“You mean the Free Speech Movement,” said Susan.
“The sad thing was,” Debbie continued deadpan, “no one knew what to wear.”
“What to wear?” Susan repeated numbly.
“You know,” said Debbie, “what gear you guys wore in those days. None of the kids are much into politics. I think I looked pretty realistic. I found some heavy boots and a black armband.… You wouldn’t like to meet them?” Debbie asked tentatively. “The people in my house, I mean.”
Susan nodded.
“Supper sometime?”
“I’d be delighted,” said Susan.
At Ludwig’s Fountain, they both laughed at the three dogs chasing each other’s tails. They stopped at several of the propaganda tables which were lined all the way to Sather Gate. A young man in a yarmulke was arguing furiously with two Jews for Jesus. A fiddler was getting the excess attention playing some West Virginia song that, strangely, half the crowd seemed to know.
“Were Fridays like this in your day?” asked Debbie.
“Well, give or take a few bayonets and billy clubs. Yes, I guess when the tear gas settled, some Fridays were very much like this, especially in the early spring. Now look at that pink in the petals there. You know, it was Professor Riley’s Victorian prose class that made me want to go to England.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Debbie. “He was driving people away even then?”
Susan smiled at the younger woman and thought it was a very perfect Friday, past and present.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank all the Susans who conspired to make my life a better place: Susan Griffin in Berkeley, Susan Feldman in Toronto, Susan Faust in San Francisco, Suzan Donleavy in New York and Susan Addinell in London. Also inextricably part of this book were the women in my writing groups: Jana Harris, Kim Chernin, Mary Mackey, Eve Pell, Zoë Fairbairns, Michelene Wandor, Sara Maitland, Michele Roberts, Myrna Kostash, Charlene Spretnak. For their continuing faith and encouragement, I am grateful to Peggy Webb, Deborah Johnson, Carol Flotlin, Charlotte Sheedy, Leslie Gardner, Helen Longino and my mother, Mary Miner. Many thanks to Nancy K. Bereano who inspires but does not meddle in her good editing. We all owe to each other and to Jane and George and Virginia, the right to keep our writing on top of the blotter, in our own names, our sanity maintained, indeed, proclaimed, by our sisters.
A number of the stories first appeared in magazines or anthologies. “Novena,” Sinister Wisdom; “Other Voices,” The Berkeley Monthly; “Side/Stroke,” Womanblood (Continuing Saga Press); “Sisterhood,” The Wild Iris; “In The Company of Long Distance Peace Marchers,” Saturday Night, Canada; “Maple Leaf or Beaver,” Prisma; “The Right Hand on the Day of Judgment,” Spare Rib, England. That story and “Afterlife” appear in Tales I Tell My Mother (South End Press, Boston). Three of the short-short stories were published together—“Aunt Victoria,” “Cultured Green” and “Joan Crawford Revival”—in the Boston Monthly and The Berkeley Monthly.
About the Author
Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of fourteen books, including novels, short fiction collections, and nonfiction. Miner’s work has appeared in the Georgia Review, TriQuarterly, Salmagundi, New Letters, Ploughshares, the Village Voice, Prairie Schooner, the Gettysburg Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Women’s Review of Books, the Nation, and other journals. Her stories and essays have been published in more than sixty anthologies. A number of her pieces have been dramatized on BBC Radio 4. Her work has been translated into German, Turkish, Danish, Italian, Spanish, French, Swedish, and Dutch. She has won fellowships and awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the N
ational Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Heinz Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, Fundación Valparaiso, the Australia Council Literary Arts Board, and numerous other organizations. She has received Fulbright fellowships to Tunisia, India, and Indonesia. Winner of a Distinguished Teaching Award, she has taught for over twenty-five years and is now a professor and artist in residence at Stanford University. She travels internationally giving readings, lectures, and workshops. Her website is www.valerieminer.com.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1982 by Valerie Miner
Cover design by Julianna Lee
ISBN: 978-1-4976-1231-0
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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