Bret sent me his recollections about her:
“Moira’s mother demeaned her all the time, and told her she was worthless, and a mistake, and things like that. There was a time when I just wished to sock her right in the jaw and knock her arse out because of it! She seemed like a broken record, as it was the same nonsense over and over again, as I recall.”
Eventually I learned that she would scream at me no matter what I did, and I quit letting it run my life. I had been commissioned to make a ballgown for another girl and it was a marvel in peach, apricot and pale brown satin. As before, I cut it out by eye with a ruler and a piece of tailor’s chalk. It was utterly exquisite with the girl’s dark hair and olive skin. When Mother started in on me about everything she decided was wrong with it, I knew that she was not telling the truth. I knew I had made a beautiful dress in beautiful colors, and I was being paid to make it. I was not about to keep on letting Mother run roughshod over my heart.
I took metal shop and learned how to work copper and brass, even to weld steel. I joked that I was the only girl in town who owned and used an anvil. I would bring a little box of rings to history class with two pairs of pliers, and make chain mail. This was very stupid of me. Making chain mail was engrossing, and kept the lectures from boring me to death, but I did not absorb enough of the material to do well in class. I also made a little double-edged knife, which I wore as an ornament, holding a feather in my homemade, crocheted, fuzzy blue tam o’ shanter.
I also fenced, which became my favorite thing ever. I loved fencing. At Berkeley High I took weight lifting along with fencing, and I was also required to run. Lifting weights was easy. Running and I have never been friends; it is by far the easiest way for me to get an asthma attack. I would carry Primatene Mist with me. The only medical intervention I had ever had for my asthma was the occasional emergency room visit if an asthma attack was too bad. I simply tried to cope with the running: run slow, hyperventilate, take breaks, self-treat the asthma attack, and move on with my life.
It was much the same with Irish dancing, which I was doing every week at the Starry Plough, an Irish pub in Berkeley, a few blocks from Greenwalls. An Irish dance would go on for a vigorous three minutes, and then there would be time for me to catch my breath.
Where I could manage a three-minute fencing bout, ferocious activity for a very brief stretch of time with a rest afterwards or a three-minute dance, I could not manage running for twenty minutes at a stretch. Running would invariably knock me out.
I was the intramural champion at Berkeley High that year. I cannot take total credit, though. I was much, much stronger than the other girls due to my broad shoulders, good upper body strength from weight training, and very long arms and legs that conferred reach, an advantage in fencing. I routinely beat everyone I fenced with in my class, both boys and girls. I was aggressive, even ferocious, in my basic approach to fencing. I routinely broke blades on people, which is a bit unusual. I was angry, and I had found a way to be angry and violent and win.
My final opponent in the championship was a little Asian girl with perfect form—and absolutely no way to cope with me. I would beat her sword out of her hand, simply because I was strong. A “beat” is a fencing move where you strike the base of their foil with the base of yours and if you are strong enough, it will disarm your opponent. It is as much an intimidation move as anything else. She lost and was very upset with me. So was the teacher, who gave me two warnings for excess violence on the strip before giving me the championship.
My opponent had another way of coping with me: Her boyfriend was a much more advanced fencer than I was, and he knew epee and saber. We had a bout where he used epee rules, and he beat the holy hell out of me with a maneuver called a “fleisch,” which involved running past me and sticking me in the back. I was so astonished that he ran past me that I didn’t know what to do. In foil fencing, we stay on our own side. These days, of course, I would do a reverse lunge, put my left hand on the floor, get my body below the place he was targeting, and hit him with a stop thrust as he ran by.
I did not like myself very much. My violent feelings terrified me, and my warlike attitude was not limited to fencing class. Perhaps relatedly, I carried my foil everywhere. One day I was on the bus going through Downtown Oakland, a man on the bus asked me if that was a real sword. I asked him if he would like me to run him through so that he could find out.
My father was furious at me for adopting such a warlike sport. I was supposed to be a boy or to be as masculine as I could manage, but I wasn’t supposed to be that kind of masculine. In our family, sports were derided, strength in males was derided, lifting weights was derided, and fighting? I might as well have told my father I was going to work for Anita Bryant or Operation Rescue!
For those of you who were not born back then, Anita Bryant was a pro-family advocate who virulently disagreed with homosexual conduct, and Operation Rescue was an anti-abortion group. In my family, homosexuality was “natural” to the exclusion of being straight, and abortion was a “right” that did not involve the murder of anything but a “clump of cells.” These days, Planned Parenthood is selling these clumps of cells to people who want specific clumps, like brains, kidneys, and eyes…
I know in retrospect that my father’s issue was with women being feminine and men being masculine. Masculinity and femininity are marks of adulthood, and his interest was in those who were not adult. When people have a secure identity, it is much harder to get them into bed. Keeping me from being feminine or masculine in an adult way meant I would remain dependent on him for my identity, and I would continue to let him tell me what to think. His continuing hope that I would become a willing sexual partner relied upon my lack of an adult identity, coupled with the faint hope that he would one day be able to convince me to use the kind of drugs which would incapacitate me. Or “raise my consciousness,” as he might have said.
I loved making things and learning things, and I worked day and night. Working obsessively was much easier than thinking about my life or my family. I lived out of my backpack and I stayed with anyone who would allow me a couch.
Serpent and Cathy took me in as much as they could, and that was a huge blessing. Cathy would make dinner, let me help with the dishes, and help me with my homework. At 10:00, she would make sure I went to bed. She would put Classical Barbra on the stereo, tuck me in and tell me: “You are A Sleep!” I would tell her that she was the big sleep and I was the little sleep. Those were blissful days, while they lasted.
Then Serpent got malignant melanoma and died, very suddenly. He went from being fine to being wasted and horribly sick within a few weeks. Cathy couldn’t endure having me around anymore because of her grief. She moved to Newfoundland, half a world away.
At the same time, because nobody could take me all the time I stayed with my director, Sue Honor, and with a few other Faire directors. I also spent a lot of time with my wonderful friend and Faire sister Kat Krischild.
As I mentioned before, Kat and I met at Clan Colin at the Faire, and played Scottish Faire sisters. She was in her early twenties, and I was thirteen. She would let me stay at her tiny one-room apartment and even let me sleep on the floor with her while never, ever taking advantage of me. She made me tuna sandwiches in the morning when I went to school in Berkeley, and shared her rice and beans with me in the evenings.
When Kat got a boyfriend, she moved and couldn’t have me over anymore. I was very sad about it, and I missed her terribly. We still hung out sometimes: her new SCA household, “House Ostrov,” had meetings. House Ostrov’s coat of arms was a heraldic joke, meaning “A turn for the worse.” The shield was black and red, divided lengthwise up the middle. A white tern was flying left, toward the black half.
Armchair Psychology
I coped with a preposterous situation at home by becoming a workaholic. Although I am expected to uncritically accept the nonsense going on at home, the “crimes” I am openly punished for amount to putting the wrong ri
bbon on a ballgown or staying up too late. My father is disappointed with me for becoming “warlike.”
The actual reason my mother is angry with me is probably a combination of my emotional withdrawal from her, my attitude of contempt toward her and Lisa which is probably visible even though I am polite, and my increasing absence.
After all, here she is presenting herself as such a kind mother willing to care even for the children of strangers, but I would rather sleep anywhere than home. I have voted with my feet. Even if we ever discussed it—and we never did—I have rejected her.
Chapter 28: Hunting Girl (1980–1984)
“The long restless rustle of high-heel boots call…
And I’m probably bound to deceive you after all.”
—Ian Anderson, Jethro Tull, One White Duck
When I started having boyfriends, my mother was furious. One might imagine that a normal mother would want her daughter to focus on school and not dating, but that was not her concern. Not in the least. My mother thought that sexual preference should reflect politics, and so if I was ever to be a feminist of the least merit, I had to be a lesbian.
Naturally, my father agreed. After all, if I was a lesbian, all his problems with me would be over. My father would scream irrationally at me for allegedly stealing his boyfriends. In practice, this meant that any time a boy he liked looked at me, I had “stolen” them even if they had come over to see me in the first place. In my father’s imagination, if I didn’t like boys they would all want to be with him, rather than out looking for other girls.
My mother insisted that she would be such a good mother to a lesbian, and was furious and hurt when I told her I was straight. She shouted at me about this, demanding to know how I could possibly know I was straight? She insisted that I had to try it the other way before I could call myself straight.
In a 1988 video interview, Marion talked about not believing me when I told her I was straight. She thought I was making it up. She viewed me as a sellout to the male establishment, and therefore no better than a breeder or a whore.
Oh yes. A breeder. “Breeders” were those mindless straight people who existed only to have children, and who never thought deeply like she did. In retrospect, it seems so idiotic. What does that mean? The second you get married and have children, your brain retroactively turns off?
I don’t know why she was saying those things to me. “Try it the other way,” as though she had not been sticking her tongue in my ear not long before? Had she forgotten everything she had done to me? Was I supposed to have become a lesbian because of her early efforts with me? Was I supposed to conclude that forcing me to tell her she was sexy and do the things she demanded meant I would be sentenced to a life of wanting her? Was I to seek out her nauseating hobbies voluntarily?
Maybe she really believed that since I, as a child, “didn’t have erogenous zones,” none of the stuff she did to me counted as sex. Maybe she and my father did not anticipate that sex with children does not always twist them in the way you want them twisted.
To me, the idea of being a lesbian sounded about as appealing as chocolate-covered oysters.
Besides, I liked boys. They looked nice. They smelled nice. It felt wonderful when they talked to me. Smiley made me suspect that men might like me. The men at the Faire dispelled all doubt. Once I had grown out of my coltish self and gotten a figure, the male attention began in earnest. I had a tiny waist and I was busty, and my hair was very long. They told me I was beautiful, and oh, how I wanted to believe it.
Long before I ever had a boyfriend, my mother told me that if ever I decided to sleep with someone, I should bring them home so that I wouldn’t “fall into the hands of a sadist.” I thought that that was very compassionate and kind and reasonable of her, and I believed her.
When I took her at her word and brought someone home, she went out of her mind, calling me a slut and a whore.
One kindness my friend Kat did for me very early on: when she found out I was being chased by boys and was considering becoming voluntarily sexually active, she took me to Planned Parenthood and helped me get me on the Pill. I did not ask my mother take me to the doctor if I needed birth control because of her inconsistency. She might have taken me to the doctor, and she might have gone out of her mind with screaming.
Initially, I absolutely did not want to give in to sexual pressure from a boy, no matter how much they liked me. At the Faire after hours, I would wear a pair of jeans which were so tight that they were impossible to remove unless I decided to help. That way if I did something stupid, like drink from someone’s hip flask, I would be impossible to rape without a discouraging level of effort.
I would often wear too many clothes, which is a classic symptom of sexual abuse. It probably seems absurd that while I was considering becoming sexually active I was also wearing way too much clothing. I was also perpetually cold, though. I know now what I didn’t know then: Being cold is my most frequent kind of flashback, bringing horrible images. Avoiding being cold has often required much of my attention because it is so distressing.
I wanted my first chosen sexual experience to have love and romance and all that stuff that young women normally want, but the first time I had sex voluntarily I had gotten scared and said no, four days before my fourteenth birthday. The boy, who was sixteen, did not care about my having said no, and he forced me. It hurt physically and then it hurt emotionally, and it made me feel helpless and worthless and stupid. I had been in love, and now that was over too. I would never see him the same way again. No doubt the boy felt he had the right, since I had agreed to “go all the way” in advance. I never went to the police or thought of it as anything but simply my own fault. I should have figured out a way to say no in advance.
I wondered why anyone would ever have sex at all, if it felt like that.
I never wanted to feel that helpless ever again. I decided that rather than me being at the mercy of a predatory man, I would be the predator. I thought maybe sex would be less terrifying and painful with someone else. I tried. Several times. And it wasn’t . And it was a disaster. All I could be at 14 was an older man’s dirty little secret with “no strings attached.”
I was already emotionally stronger than most of the men I interacted with, and I became a complete and total bitch. In response to the old joke: “Will you respect me in the morning?” I would say “Did I respect you in the first place?”
There were plenty of men who liked swaggering strong women who wanted to be in charge. Sadly, the kind of man who wants a strong child of fourteen is not the kind of man who wants to protect her—or feels he can. In a way, by trying to act the part of a man, I set myself up to find unsuitable men. I thought I was protecting myself with my strength and my swords. I was wrong.
After a few disasters, I had a string of boyfriends coming from the Faire. I was involved with a very nice young man who worked at a chocolate shop in Berkeley, and drove us around on a scooter. His mother was a darling, and she let me make a pair of blue jeans with her Viking sewing machine. Sherman would make us a drink which was lovely: blueberry juice and Perrier, which he called “Berrier.” I made a pale blue plaid soft wool tailored suit at his house, and it was gorgeous… until someone at my house threw the skirt in the wash, which turned it into a pot holder.
When I was almost 15, I met Ole. He was tall and blond, with a beard and hair to his waist. He looked like a painting from an Irish historical book. He was 23 and very romantic, at least initially. My strength appealed to him. He saw me leading a parade, and was smitten. We had a lot in common, both interested in Irish history and Irish dance, folk music and the Faire. I moved in with him in San Francisco. I was in love.
My mother had no objection whatsoever to my moving in with a man eight years older than I was when I was barely fifteen. She spoke of it as “marrying me off” and immediately began to pressure me to give her grandchildren. She told me, again and again, that I should have children young, while I could still enjoy them
. I was aghast. I told her unequivocally that I thought I would be a terrible mother and I was not going to have children ever. Considering my experiences, how could she think for one moment that I would have any idea how to be a good mother to anyone?
Ole worked as a tax collector, and I would come to meet him for lunch at City Hall in San Francisco sometimes. One day, I was walking through the plaza in front of City Hall wearing a floor-length circle cloak I had made: black wool and lined with grey fake fur. It was raining, and the darned thing probably weighed over ten pounds. A panhandler came up to me and started harassing me for money, very aggressively. I whacked him in the face with a corner of my very wet cloak, and he ran away.
I continued to attend high school in Berkeley while I was living with Ole in San Francisco. The commute involved a bus from the far end of San Francisco, then BART from downtown San Francisco, under the bridge and the Bay all the way to Berkeley High. The trip took a very long time and it ended up seeming rather ridiculous.I got thrown out of my last English class for correcting the teacher’s spelling, took the equivalency and left high school in the middle of eleventh grade.
I was working full-time on my costuming business, which I called “Choose Your Century,” and as soon as I was out of high school, I started thinking about going to college.
Ole was aware that our relationship was illegal, and over time this began to make him uneasy. He made me buy an adult bus pass so that it would be less obvious that he was running around with a child. He also stopped sleeping with me not too long after we moved in together; we were more like roommates. Maybe he thought that he could not be arrested if he was not currently committing statutory rape. I felt very rejected and hurt, though.
The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon Page 26
