The Milk of Human Kindness

by Lori L. Lake

  Two years later, at age eighteen, I left my dark world of grief in Canada for a fresh beginning in the United States. Adding to a devastating loss beyond all my imagining was a new distress—the suspicion that I was not like other young women my age, and in the most abhorrent possible way: I was attracted to my own gender.

  I would shed my skin and start all over again, I vowed, and this rebirth would not include falling in love with one's own gender. That person was anathema to me, just as she was to the world I knew.

  Crossing a border did not, of course, transform the fundamental me. I tried my damnedest to be heterosexual, but the homosexual world, whose existence I discovered in the pulp novels of Ann Bannon and Paula Christian, drew me irresistibly. In the seedy gay bars of Detroit I gained sanctuary of sorts; but there was limited comfort in a sixties' lesbian society whose rigid rules of behavior required declaring oneself as either butch or femme. Since I seemed to possess (or lack) aspects of both sexual types, I was a misfit even among my own kind, in what I knew to be my natural milieu.

  Out of the ink-black clouds that seemed permanently fixed over my life, lightning struck once more. A cousin, out "slumming" in Detroit's tawdry downtown bars, spotted me and sounded the alarm to my Catholic relatives. Called on the carpet, I was instructed by a white-lipped aunt that my presence in such loathsome places was beyond the pale and would turn me into a deviate and an outcast from all decent society.

  Again I fled, to another new beginning—this time in California. It was 1961. I was twenty-two. I was completely on my own. I hated myself.

  Within a few months I met a woman and established my first long term relationship. We hid, performing all the usual subterfuges and pretenses of the day, including paying for an apartment with an extra bedroom. We lived in isolation, revealing ourselves to no one, including my partner's family, retreating from any gay people who happened to pick us up on their gaydar. As our time together wended its way toward five years, my partner found more and more need to "relax" with her vodka gimlets. And I became ill, seriously, for a time.

  With my self-esteem free falling toward zero, I turned twenty-seven. I passed my days being inconspicuous, in full protective mode inside a fortress. No way lightning would ever strike me again—I had shut down my life to prevent it.

  Onto this arid landscape, like a mirage, Jeanie appeared.

  IT WAS 1966. I was working at Technicolor Corporation in Hollywood. Years earlier, up until the post-war era of World War Two, Jeanie had worked there as a switchboard operator-receptionist; she had left to raise her son. When Danny turned seventeen, Jeanie shed her marriage and returned to her old job, where she found me.

  Twenty years older than I, reveling in her newfound independence, Jeanie was confident and at ease with being a sexual woman in all the ways that I wasn't. She had found herself a male friend, Vern, who shared her fun-loving, adventuresome ways, and she was exuberantly exploring her expanded horizons. "What in the world are doing here?" she challenged me. "How come you're not out there doing something with your brains? How come you're not having fun?"

  In those days there was no way could I tell her I was a lesbian, but I did relate my tales of tragedy and tribulation which she listened to with the profound empathy of a mother. "Kathy, life is a schoolroom," she told me. "Everything changes, nothing stays the same." I shrugged at these platitudes. But over the next few years the reality of those words would sink into my marrow and alter my entire perspective so that the words would become a mantra.

  Jeanie did not judge her son's choices in life; her measurement of him was his own sense of personal well-being. She lavished on Danny her complete acceptance, belief, and pride. I was gratified to discover that I had somehow become another, very lucky beneficiary of the same maternal warmth and generosity of spirit. Daily she bathed my self-esteem in affirmation and praise and approval. My entire being seemed to respond—to strengthen. A new horizon became nebulously visible, one that seemed possible for me to reach.

  She became, unknown to herself, my teacher, my surrogate mother. The touchstone to my womanhood, my principal role model in a way that connected powerfully with my identity. Trusting her, and with no sense of pressure or coercion, I began a surreptitious checklist of my own femininity, embarking on an ever-so-cautious quest to lay claim to my individuality, not as a lesbian, but much more basically: as a female. In the mirror held up by this heterosexual woman, I began, for the first time in my life, to learn how to be comfortable in my own lesbian skin.

  Did I come out to her? For a long time I did not and could not. Being around her was like having my soul warmed over a fire. Even as I gained confidence and consolidated my gains, I couldn't risk losing the approval and acceptance that were the healing force in my life. Did she guess? With Jeanie's concept of life as a schoolroom, to her I was simply a slow learner. One day my embryonic sexuality would blossom and I would pair up with someone like her fun-loving Vern and emerge into the fullness of my life.

  It would be seventeen years before I was far enough along on the continuum of my coming out process to reveal all my secrets to Jeanie. The publication of my first novel, Curious Wine, was a final step, a graduation ceremony, a formal coming out into a lesbian life I now lived openly, into a community I called my own and to which I had dedicated my professional life.

  If she ever wondered over the course I had set for myself, with characteristic consistency she did not worry over it. My path might not be anything she could imagine choosing for herself, but if it was right for me, then my happy and healthy life was all that mattered. She read each of my books as I wrote them, to discern my world and my life in it—expanding her politics as she expanded her understanding of my part in the battle for gay rights.

  THOUGH THESE ARE the historical facts of my relationship with Jeanie, to this day she still defies full definition. She was more than a sister, more than a friend. More than a mother in the non-judgmental way that she opened me to the entire interpretation of myself. When I met the woman with whom I would spend the next twenty years of my life, I would not have had the courage to reach out for that love had Jeanie not come into my life to begin the restoration of my self-esteem and to send me on my journey toward self-acceptance.

  Much of what is beautiful in my life today is composed of what the women in my life have given to me. Like Jeanie, I too have played the "nurturing mother" role in my personal life, I have helped in the healing of other women. I ask myself, was I simply lucky to have had Jeanie happen to me? Or do we motherless women look for mothers when we most need to find them? And does the need for a mother ever leave?

  What about that willingness of so many of us to bestow that gift of mothering within ourselves onto others? Do some of us bear within us a mothering template so that a hurting child of any age can be taken into us?

  Among women, our deeper friendships contain, along with love and warmth, elements of nurturing, protectiveness, guiding, mentorship, and wound-binding.

  As do our lesbian love relationships... Along with how much mothering? Sometimes, among the negatives involved with the necessity for stretching our wings, we move on from those who have loved and tended us well; yet it is a distinguishing characteristic of our lesbian relationships that more often than not we retain close ties with our former lovers. Perhaps it can only be safely said that somewhere amid our complex relationships, the definition of "motherhood" is satisfied in all but the biological sense.

  At every stage of our being, life is, as Jeanie says, a schoolroom. But it is other women who teach us to search for what we need, teach us to open ourselves to the healing they offer. Those of us who retreat behind fortresses of our own design are on a track toward self-obliteration. The irony of our often difficult lesbian lives is that in loving our own gender, women remain an everlasting strength and beauty in our lives, nurturing and healing and loving us.

  To this day I have never been able to adequately explain to Jeanie how essential she was to my survival and he
aling all those many years ago. I'm not sure that I have explained it even now. But perhaps when she reads this she will at long last understand something of what she did for me and why she means so very much to me today.

  ***

  ABOUT JENNIFER FULTON

  (also writing as Rose Beecham and Grace Lennox)

  Born and raised in New Zealand, Jennifer Fulton brings a unique worldview to her writing. She says, “The unspoiled world in which I grew up will always influence my writing. So, too, will my travels. In writing my lesbian novels, I owe a debt to the work of Djuna Barnes, Katherine V. Forrest, Claire Morgan (Patricia Highsmith) and those doyennes of pulp fiction, Ann Bannon and Valerie Taylor, just to name a few.” Jennifer parlayed that material and those influences into 19 lesbian novels including a mystery trilogy written under the penname Rose Beecham and other contemporary romances under the name Grace Lennox.

  Formal education in Library Studies and English Literature prepared Jennifer for the 'real job' her parents thought she should have, and she spent many years in the rat race as a communications consultant in the public and private sector. She segued into writing in 1991 and, after taking some time out for family and health reasons in 2010, she has recommenced work on multiple projects, including a historical novel and a long-awaited addition to her Moon Island series. Jennifer divides her time between the USA and New Zealand, where her daughter is in college.

  Color Blind

  Fiction by Jennifer Fulton

  IT’S IMPORTANT TO repaint rooms. You never know when décor could matter. Joan Turner thought visitors should enter her home and be struck immediately by the color scheme and those special touches that stamp a room with the owner’s personality—her genuine black forest cuckoo clock, the porcelain slave-girl head with the turban and earrings, once her mother’s. And her alligator jaw collection, compellingly displayed along mantel and walls, the jagged yellow teeth a reminder that evil lurks in the shallows.

  Joan thought this was a lesson youngsters should learn early. She had made it her business to show her three children the swamp where her Daddy had trapped Solomon, the ’gator that hung over the fire when she was little. Locals gave him that name because he was smart. You never saw him until it was too late. No one knew how many children he’d eaten for breakfast, God have mercy on them. To illustrate her point she had plunged a long stick into the murky water and watched her children leap back as a thrashing tail responded.

  Even after his head was mounted on cherry wood, Solomon’s all-seeing eyes were unsettling. Joan could understand why Danny, her husband, had rigged up a pair of sunglasses over them. Nowadays Solomon hung in the living room she’d just finished painting. Walls that had been Orange Grove were now Navajo Sky, a turquoise color like that necklace Danny had brought back with him from a car dealers’ convention in Albuquerque a few years ago.

  There was still a quart of that orange paint sitting in the garage. Maybe she would use it to brighten up the hallway. Only a slob needed neutral tones to make their entryway look clean. There was nothing wrong with Joan Turner’s housekeeping. You could eat off her floors.

  The cuckoo chimed four o’clock just as Joan stepped back to inspect the walls for uneven patches. There was nothing worse than show-through when the paint dries. The kids would be home from school soon. She could imagine their startled faces. It must be like magic, she thought, to leave the house in the morning and come back in the afternoon to find it transformed. To maximize the impact, she cleared away the dropcloths and newspaper and straightened up the room.

  As always, the children tried to feign nonchalance.

  “It’s blue,” Danny, Jr. remarked.

  “Be careful. It’s still wet,” Joan said.

  “It’s better than the orange,” Frank commented.

  Paulette, her youngest, studied the room with sullen disinterest.

  “Well?” Joan demanded. She was not going to allow a twelve year old to spoil the moment.

  Paulette did not even look at her. “I’m going to Linda’s.”

  “Oh, no, you’re not.”

  “But Mrs. O’Hara says I can. Linda asked her.”

  “Well your father says you can’t,” Joan said. “Tonight you’re staying home for a change.”

  For a moment Joan had the ridiculous idea that her daughter was going to punch her. She took an automatic step back and caught her heel on the hearth rug. Next thing she knew, her hand was wet with paint, and her perfect wall was ruined.

  “Now look what you did!” she yelled.

  Paulette was already halfway up the stairs. Her retreating feet paused, and she hung over the banister, hollering, “How come you never paint the sewing room?”

  Joan marched to the bottom of the staircase. “Don’t you get fresh with me. You can stay in your room ’til you’re ready to say sorry.”

  “Me apologize to you! That’s a joke, right?”

  “Don’t make me tell your father,” Joan warned.

  This was met with a brazen peal of laughter. “What’s he gonna do, Mom? Wanna tell me? Come on—the sewing machine isn’t that noisy!”

  It was always the sewing machine with that girl. Was it Joan’s fault they couldn’t afford store bought clothes for all their children? It was easier to make for a girl than for boys. Paulette always had nice new dresses. Joan would probably make another one tonight. Her daughter was better dressed than she was.

  “When’s Dad coming home?” Danny, Jr. asked.

  “Do I look like a psychic?” Joan snapped. “He’s at the club.”

  A groan. “He said I could use the car.”

  Joan shrugged. It was not her problem, not when there was a palm print that wanted painting over. “If you’re in that big of a hurry, why don’t you go find him?”

  Without another word about the new décor, Danny, Jr. stalked off.

  “I can fix the wall, Mom,” Frank offered, the paint roller in his hand.

  “You’re a good boy,” Joan said. At least one of her brood appreciated her. She could only imagine what their home might look like if she let things slide.

  IN HER ROOM, Paulette sat on the bed. Her walls were onto their twelfth color in four years. Barely had the paint dried over one when her mom would be painting the next—Paulette had no choice what color. Her mom said that way it would be a surprise. As if new paint could ever be a surprise in the shifting canvas of their house.

  Only the sewing room was spared. Fancy new colors were for others to enjoy. Her mom laid it on about making do with faded peach.

  Paulette wished she could stand in there just for a moment and be transported back in time to the drab comfort of the house they’d moved into when she was eight. But the room was always locked except for the evenings when her mom shut herself in there, radio blaring hit songs from the seventies over the mechanical whir of the sewing machine.

  Danny, Jr. said you could murder someone and she wouldn’t hear a thing.

  DANNY TURNER, SR. liked his steak rare and his women hot. That’s what he told friends who came over. Joan always giggled when he said it. When a man tells a joke, his wife should laugh. That was a valuable lesson her Momma had passed on. Joan told Paulette the same thing over and over, but she was one of those girls who asked for trouble instead of avoiding it.

  Tonight, in front of Uncle Wolf—not a blood relation but an old family friend—Paulette waited ’til everyone had finished laughing, then said, “Oh, I get it. He likes women. Yeah. That is funny,” and laughed like a hyena, all by herself.

  “Eat your dinner,” Joan said. It was just like Paulette to embarrass her in front of company.

  “I’m all done.” She picked up her plate. “Can I go to Linda’s now? Please. We’re doing a homework project together.”

  “We’ve got company,” Joan protested.

  “She can go.” Danny, Sr. spoke with his mouth full. “Be back by nine. I want those golf clubs cleaned before you go to bed.”

  Looking to cash in on this r
are benevolence, Danny, Jr. piped up. “Can I use the car, Dad?”

  Danny reached in his pocket and tossed the keys over. “You’re not insured. Remember that, son.”

  “Yes. Thank you, sir.” Danny crammed the rest of his meal down his throat and excused himself, leaving his dirty dishes on the table.

  Joan had given up trying to teach her oldest to clean up after himself. He had his father’s genes. She and Frank cleared up after dinner and washed the dishes. Danny and Uncle Wolf relocated to the den, where they would play cards, drink beer and watch cable for the rest of the evening.

  “I’ve got sewing to do,” she told Frank once all the wet dishes were stacked.

  “Okay, Mom. I’ll finish up here if you want.”

  Joan kissed him on the top of his head. Frank was small for thirteen, much smaller than his sister. Paulette took after Danny’s side, big boned and big mouthed.

  “You’re a good boy,” she said.

  Frank picked up the dish towel. “’Night, Mom.”

  IN THE DARK, Paulette listened for the sound of Uncle Wolf’s car changing gears at the stop sign half a block away, then got out of bed. She stuffed two pillows under the bedclothes and piled her quilt high over the lump they created. Then she stood behind her door.

  Along the hallway, a toilet flushed and in the sewing room her mother turned up the radio. Paulette’s palms slithered around the cold steel shaft of a Callaway 7 iron. One at a time she wiped her hands on her pajamas. The door swung open and her father shoved one foot behind him to close it. Stepping out of his shoes and pants, he shuffled over to the bed.

  As usual he stood there for a moment in his shorts, waiting for her to lift her head. In the dim glow of her Cinderella nightlight, he bent over the lump. “Wakey, wakey.”