Contract with the World

by Jane Rule

  But I wasn’t trying to deal with sex. If this is to have any purpose, it should at least make me more aware of myself, of how I really feel and what I really want. When I admit the worst, I often don’t really believe it. When I try to sound as if I’m coming to terms with my life, writing becomes a substitute for doing anything about it. Even when I’m most discouraged, there’s satisfaction in the pages I have filled.

  If I were at all serious about this, I should at least try to write a story, even if it were about myself. It would be nothing to send to Chatelaine or Saturday Night, that’s for sure. And the sort of little magazine that might publish it would send me nothing but a subscription I wouldn’t want delivered to this house. Roxanne already takes them all, Branching Out, A Room of One’s Own, Body Politic, The Advocate, Christopher Street, Conditions, Sinister Wisdom. I read them the way I used to read Vogue and Redbook, trying to imagine myself glamorous or matronly, even occasionally the writer of one of the stories. Now I try to identify with Adrienne Rich, whose husband really did kill himself, leaving her with sons to raise. But the differences are enormous. She was an accomplished poet—even W H. Auden said so—when she was years younger than I am. And now she’s years older and talks about herself at my age as if it were another life. She lives in New York and knows all the important women in the movement, for whom sex is political.

  All of them, from Violette Leduc to Kate Millett, are artists and radicals first. There must be a lot more women like me than like them for whom loving another woman is nothing but that, with no redeeming politics or transforming art.

  I think Roxanne does feel like one of them. She doesn’t talk a lot about it, but occasionally she says something that makes me feel the world she actually lives in is the moon’s distance from mine. She calls people she’s never met—like Pauline Oliveros—sister. I didn’t even know she was a famous composer. My only sisters are my sisters, who are not my sisters at all in that sense. We don’t know each other either.

  No one would be interested in reading the self-doubt and moral dilemma of a woman living safely at home with her two children, protected by indulgent parents who even let her have slumber parties with her little friend and never come in without knocking and never look around when they do, so that this notebook is as safe from them as it would be locked in the vault of my heart. The only one I hide it from is Tony because he seems to look at me more and more often with my own eyes. A ten-year-old.

  We read about people who have already been heard of in places that already exist.

  I have a title for a novel—I suppose it could be a short story—“The Annals of War.” It’s out of a Hardy poem which isn’t about war at all but about a “maid and her wyte” plowing a field. But that is an eternal story. My wyte was a bouncer, and there wasn’t any field to plow. We lived in a world of concrete and other people’s flower beds. What’s ordinary isn’t eternal, not here and now for me.

  Two women in a ring of flesh, as if they were continually giving birth to each other, may go back as far as Sappho, but as a symbol they have more in common with war than with peace, fission rather than fusion, destructive of all holy clichés: motherhood, the family maple syrup, our bacon wrapper flag!

  Listen (as Mike would say), I want to record here how often I’m happy, simply happy. When Mike decided to go somewhere with us, I always dreaded it because having an audience increased his sense of responsibility. He shouted and cuffed so much I thought the boys would have permanently damaged eardrums. Now I really like the long summer days when we can go off together, just the three of us, today all day on the Gulf Island ferry. I didn’t take a picnic lunch, let them eat those bilious burgers and fries. Ferries are a marvelous way to travel with kids. There’s enough room for them to explore, two stories of decks and lounges and cafeterias. They play tag, hide-and-seek, race each other, occasionally rest and actually look at the landscape of islands, and they are as intent as the captain every time the ship docks at one.

  “Victor is enchanted by sea gulls, which seem to him beautiful flying into the light, hilarious hitching a ride on the deck rail. Tony dreams off into the shoreline, asking of every white beach, “Do you think that’s Indian, Mom? Do you think there might be petroglyphs?”

  I think how I’d like to take them around the world like this, though I don’t suppose a freighter crew and passengers would be as tolerant of their antics. For today going around this world was just fine. We counted twenty-eight sailboats, five tugs, twelve commercial fishing boats, eight other ferries, one carrying freight cars to Vancouver Island, and even saw a cruise ship coming back from Alaska. We followed it through Active Pass with a great sounding of ships’ horns. We spotted eagles, named trees: hemlock, Douglas fir, cedar, alder. Tony is very good at that. Victor likes shouting out “arbutus” over and over again until he is silly with repetition, and his spinny giggles seem to me as fine a hymn as any to those distinctively beautiful trees, red branches distributing weight in curious and graceful gestures to balance the tree on precarious rock. They all are in high white bloom this time of year, which will turn into Christmas clusters of red berries.

  On days like this I feel both more with the children and more detached from them, a special kind of companionship which is part of the long rehearsal for letting them go. I am proud of Tony’s absentminded tending of toddlers, stopping to set upright one diapered fellow, just capsized by Victor’s passing speed. I suppose, like his father, Victor has such a smile he can afford to make waves. I’ve stopped wondering why I can love him so simply, like him, when he reminds me a dozen times a day of Mike. I’m just glad I do.

  I suppose by the end of August I’ll be counting the days until school begins, thinking up places for them to go without me, but right now I feel rich with a summer to share with my children. My apprehensions and theirs, since Mike left, have made us nervously dependent on each other sometimes. Vic hurls himself into my lap as if the force of sitting on me would keep me where he needs me. Tony tells long stories he doesn’t want to come to an end so that he won’t have to get out of the car to go to school, so that I won’t turn out his light at night. Days like this give us back to each other. By the end of summer we should be healthily bored, longing to miss each other.

  Dad has bought me a house. He’s such an instinctively tactful man I’ve rarely seen him so nervous about being misunderstood in his intentions. The house is an investment, nothing I need to live in if I don’t like it. It was a foreclosure sale, and he already held the second mortgage. I’m always welcome to stay here. This will always be my home, and the boys’. On the other hand, parents shouldn’t be possessive. Children—grown children—need a life of their own.

  I finally had to stop him, telling him I couldn’t ask to move out and put the additional financial burden on him; it would seem too ungrateful when I’d been made to feel so welcome here. But if he was offering me a house, he was wonderfully generous, and I delighted.

  “Well, your sisters both have houses. It seems only fair …”

  It’s not the house I would have chosen. For one thing, it has no room to rent. There are only three bedrooms. And, of course, the boys will have to change schools in the fall. Tony is enthusiastic about that, Victor apprehensive with having to establish his territory all over again. The biggest drawback is that it’s lovely. It’s not really a question of not deserving it. Of course I don’t. I am still looking for some sort of punishment I could tolerate, and this house eliminates one more possibility. I don’t even have to share a bathroom with the boys. I have my own off the master bedroom, which has a view I like better than Mother and Dad’s, which disappears at night, except for the lights of an occasional ship, because they look out on the unpopulated mountains of Howe Sound. This house overlooks not only the sea and the mountains but the great spread of the city, which from this distance and angle looks real, even beautiful, not only all day but all night. It’s not a big house. The furniture I already have will look, for the first time, very mu
ch at home.

  There’s a garden. I’ve never learned to garden, except for snipping off dead heads, watering, raking a few leaves, but it’s something I’ve always imagined I’d do, like having children.

  We move next week.

  “Why don’t we take the boys back with us, and then you and Roxanne can work as late as you like?”

  I am getting used to Mother’s conspiring with me for my most nefarious pleasures, and I didn’t even feel guilty when Tony went silent with disappointment at not spending the first night in the new house and Vic said, “Oh, shit!” Because it came out only in a whisper, we all ignored it.

  Roxanne and I had to go on working for a while simply to have advanced the order enough to have earned the pleasure of being alone in this lovely space. And I did want the kitchen settled to get up to in the morning. I could fix the boys’ rooms after Roxanne went to work and before I picked them up.

  When we finally got into the bed I had occasionally so fearfully and guiltily taken her to last summer, I felt like a woman warrior who had finally reconquered her own kingdom, a bed big enough for acrobatic celebration in a house that could be filled with the noise of victory.

  Later, standing naked at the window, looking down over a city I felt I owned, I wanted to propose to Roxanne, who stood beside me, her high small breasts like those of an Egyptian goddess, who is incongruously crowned by a bright aura of hair.

  “Live with me,” I said. “Really live with me.”

  For answer, she led me back to bed and made love so gently, so tenderly, with such reluctance to reach any climax that I could feel her wishing there were a way to go on and on at a pitch of sweetness that never had to end, but it grew higher and hotter until it ended for me in a crying joy, for her in a harsh noise in her throat.

  We said nothing about it at a hurried breakfast this morning. She refused to let me drive her to work. Has she really made up her mind that it won’t work? Or do we have to go through a new period of separation we choose before we can choose to be together? I don’t know.

  The boys are finally asleep in their own beds after a rackety day of overexcitement and testings, I too tired, too much in a daze of exhausted satisfaction, to be much help to either of them. I did tell Vic I’d warm the seat of his pants if he dared throw one thing out his window, which was his angry solution for being told to unpack and tidy instead of settling to play with every old toy he’d discovered. He knew I hadn’t either the energy or the investment, but he took my effort of attention in reluctant obedience. Tony simply asked, in a voice of almost adult weariness, how long moving took.

  There’s something absolutely satisfactory in the people you love who get put to bed, kissed, and left to sleep alone. For tonight this enormous bed feels magnificently christened and not one bit too big for me alone. I stretch in every direction, yawn, sigh, feel beautiful and beautifully alone.

  I’ve used every domestic excuse I could to avoid writing in this notebook, and with the move there have been enough of them to keep me silent for six weeks, long enough to make me wonder if scribbling here was one of the symptoms of my regressing into childhood. Last week I decided, if I were going to write, I should sit up properly at my desk and write something real. First I tried writing a story about Roxanne and me, but since part of taking myself seriously is trying to write something for sale, I changed Roxanne’s sex. She became Robert, still selling records and spending all his spare time documenting sound. To keep him from seeming effeminate, I had to make him restless with his job, as Roxanne rarely seems to be, and I had to make him take his real work not more seriously than Roxanne does but more … pretentiously, I suppose. He did think of himself as a composer. I didn’t have to write many pages before I saw that Robert was sounding more and more like Mike, and there would be absolutely no point in a woman’s choosing between a bouncer and a record clerk, between a closet sculptor and an unrecognized electronic music composer who, never having met John Cage, still called him “brother.” I tried to make Robert much better in bed, but a man to be as good as a woman in bed would have to be not only well instructed but impotent. The husband, page by page, became a paragon of manhood compared to Robert, and, though I suppose there are some women, not knowing any better, who would leave a Mike for a Robert, no one remotely like me would.

  So I tried turning myself into a man and Mike into a woman, and that was, surprisingly, a great deal easier. I called myself Alan and was a moderately successful businessman of some sort. Alan came out sounding more flippant than my father, less cynical than Allen, with a male kindness I like in them both. Mike, as a woman, was amazingly attractive, perhaps because tending a house and children is so much more human a job than beating people up night after night. As a woman she could sculpt without driving ambition, seem a little silly to herself sometimes but not to other people. I got so interested in what our marriage would have been like that I forgot Roxanne entirely. As a businessman with a wife who wanted evenings for her own work, I didn’t have time for Roxanne, to say nothing of avocations like writing. I was looking after the kids.

  I did not stumble on a way to write fiction, and here I am back in bed with my notebook. I think I feel about bed the way Mike does about the dining-room table; it shouldn’t be shut up for the day, reserved for nothing but sleeping and making love at strictly appointed times. Mike never liked the children in bed with us. The first time Victor climbed into bed with Roxanne and me and planted himself firmly between us, nearly comfortably jealous, Freud shuddered in my bones, but Roxanne laughed. Now, if she spends the night on the weekend, both kids bring everything from the Monopoly board to the soccer ball into bed with us in the morning. Colette wrote in bed.

  I didn’t try to write when I was married to Mike. I must have had at least as much time to myself as I do now. I didn’t use it. I went to bed soon after the children did because I had to be up so early to feed Mike. Then half the time I’d have to barricade the kids into their rooms to go back to bed with Mike, get up twenty minutes later, occasionally stimulated enough to be frustrated, usually dry and sore and angry. All day long he was a sleeping presence, and, if the children’s noise woke him early, there would be hours of his irritation to get through before he went off to work.

  I sleep much less now. I don’t seem to need it. I spend at least as much time in bed.

  I wonder if most women who love each other don’t live together. The only ones we really know about are probably just the tip of the iceberg. Roxanne and I may be part of a vast majority of underwater women, making love in the back seat of a car on the way home from PTA meetings, in the morning after babies have been nursed and put down to nap. Why is illicit sex always a man on his lunch hour or on a business trip? Or a woman with the Fuller brush man. There are jokes about steam baths and public toilets as well, but there’s never an arched eyebrow about bridge games or meetings of Brownie leaders. Even with the women’s movement characterized as a bunch of bra-burning dykes, people still don’t believe women have sex with women except when they can’t get men or are man haters.

  I wasn’t honest about turning myself into a man. I simply made up the sort of man I like and depend on. Mike made a perfectly good woman because he stayed heterosexual. As a man I would have been a guilt-ridden fairy, and I would have met Robert in a public toilet at the Bay and never even known his name.

  In general I feel horribly sorry for men. In particular I either resent or admire them. I don’t even feel sorry for Joseph, though I think I probably should. I would feel terribly sorry for him if he were a woman. I understand what drives women crazy. Men aren’t supposed to go.

  In this notebook, I touch my imagination as I do Roxanne’s body. Here? Here? Is this the beginning of something? Or this? Changing the sexes of everyone I know could be a device for seeing something more clearly, but I’m using it as a cover-up, not simply to hide my being lesbian but to keep my general attitudes and my specific feelings and behavior as far from meeting as possible since they c
an’t meet; they don’t even speak the same language.

  That last entry seemed to me so silly at the time I haven’t written here for a month, but I have written. Now that Tony and Victor are back at school and can walk to school, I get them breakfast and come back to bed and work until lunchtime five days a week. I haven’t finished a story yet, but I’m beginning to see why even the beginnings that feel alive start to dissolve five or six pages in. I’m tightening characters into what they ought to feel for some point I’m trying to make, when most people live as far out of the tent of their ideas as I do. I asked Roxanne the other night if ideas got in her way. She said, yes, when she didn’t listen well enough or couldn’t hear. An idea should come like a bloom on a plant, a song out of a bird.

  I’ve been toying with the idea of taking a writing class at UBC. Then I remembered a cooking class I took when I was ten. I couldn’t eat most of the group-concocted messes, but I was enchanted with something called candlestick salad—half a banana standing in a ring of pineapple, a curved slice of apple for a handle, a maraschino cherry on top for a flame, and mayonnaise dribbling down for melting wax. I’d only sliced the apple at school, but I decided to make the whole thing, five times over, for the family. The bananas I bought were too big for the holes in the pineapple. I had to squeeze and shove, and even then the much-handled bananas tilted uncertainly and looked gray from all my effort. Everyone did eat them, and I was fortunate to have a reticent and kindly father and no brothers to make obvious remarks. Mike would have been graphic! My mother said, “If you want to learn to cook, go into this kitchen and cook.”

  So that’s what I’m doing now, hoping to get beyond the stage of candlestick salad sooner alone.

  If Carlotta hadn’t written a note on her show invitation, I wouldn’t have gone. I’ve broken so many patterns, faiths, expectations in the last year, some even in the hope of consequences, that not turning up at her opening would have been an easy enough first, perhaps easier than going.