I. The Writer As Daughter

When my kids were living with their father I used to ride the Long Island Railroad every other Friday to pick them up, and on Sunday night I took them home the same way. On one of my solo trips back into the city, I found myself sitting across the aisle from an exasperated mother and her two toddlers. They were being normal kids, restless and bored on a train, and she kept slapping them around and threatening to abandon them. I cringed inwardly, as I imagine most people do at child abuse, and tried to figure out a way to intervene, to bring the woman to her senses without pissing her off. God knows, I’ve had enough people, including strangers on trains, criticize my mothering for far less, and I didn’t want to do the same to her. I obsessed for nearly an hour, until she and her kids got off the train, but I never came up with anything to say to her.

The Other Mother

The other mother, children by her side
wears an angry scowl, my earlier face
If I look at her she’ll be ashamed.
See the woman, or the mother?

Passers-by glare and frown as she slaps
half-heartedly and throws small bodies down.
If she catches my stare she’ll be ashamed.
I see the woman. I see the mother.

Slap slap slap
Sit still or I’ll leave you
Slap sit still slap shut up
I swear I swear I’ll leave you.

When she notices me I see what she sees:
a single woman, unburdened, free.
Quickly I look away, ashamed.
She sees the woman, not the mother.

Alone I watch as the train rushes on.
She doesn’t know we share this in common:
a secret silent bond of shame.
We are both women. We are both mothers.

Slap slap slap
Sit still or I’ll leave you
Slap sit still slap shut up
I swear I swear I’ll leave you.

In 1978, four years after I wrote this poem, a feminist journal called The Wild Iris accepted it for publication. I had just begun submitting my poems to literary journals, and this was the first to be published. At this point I had rarely shown my work to my mother—I’d let her read a satire on ski resorts, or a humorous riff about the dentist, but nothing that made me feel too vulnerable. I was so proud of Page 8 in The Wild Iris, though, that I presented it for her scrutiny.

I have an image of myself handing my mother The Wild Iris open to Page 8 like a ring-bearer presenting two gold bands on a pillow to a groom. In actuality, we were in my Aunt Roslyn’s house for a family gathering, dumping our coats on the bed, when I whipped the book out of my purse and shakily gave it to her. I stared at her blood-red fingernails against the purple cover, inwardly trembling as she read my portrait of a stranger on a train. She, apparently, read something quite different, for she handed the book to Janice, declaring in that tone of voice, “It isn’t even true!”

Isn’t true? But it’s my experience! How can it not be true? Omigod—she thinks it’s about her!

Janice reads the poem, then nods and smiles dumbly: she doesn’t have a clue what it’s about and is embarrassed. Walking a fine line between loyalty to her sister and caring for me, she throws a hesitant bone my way. “Very good,” she murmurs, casting a sidelong glance at Rhoda. But my mother has already forgotten the poem; she is steeling herself to face my father’s family, whom she despises.

My mother was ambivalent about my writing. An avid reader, she placed a high value on the literary craft, and I often wondered if she had any writing aspirations of her own. As far as I know, she never wrote anything other than personal correspondence, and not very much of that. She judged me harshly for my perennial poverty, for refusing to take alimony from my ex-husband (a big mistake), and for not sticking with any secretarial job more than a year or two. My financial situation frustrated and angered her, and interfered with her ability to wholeheartedly support me as a writer. She did enjoy telling people I wrote, saying “She’s papering her walls with rejection letters,” a joke I stopped laughing at early on.

Over time, her attitude changed. As I painstakingly climbed the rickety rungs of what passes for a ladder of success in the publishing field, her respect rose accordingly. She began saving my published work, along with my sister’s occasional stories and my brother’s letters of promotion, in a box she called “The Archives.” Most of my stuff was journalism, articles published in newspapers and magazines. Although I didn’t offer to let her read my fiction for a long time, she continued to lament—as I did and still do—my failure to get my novels and short stories published. Unlike me, though, she didn’t regard publication in poetry journals as worthy of pride, or even something to pursue. If I told her I was giving a poetry reading she’d ask, “And then what?” Hers was, I suppose, a typical view of the writing life: if you haven’t made the best-seller list or national magazines, you’re considered second-rate. No wonder I’ve had to work so hard to feel good about every small victory.

She made a great leap forward when my story about battered women was published in Mother Jones. She didn’t realize MJ was a lefty publication; it was enough that the pages were glossy, its reach was national, and it paid more than an honorarium. She still nagged me from time to time to get a full-time job—I don’t know when she thought that I, a single mother, would write—but at least she finally saw me as a professional writer.

As I said, my mother was an avid reader. Her favorite poet was Dorothy Parker, and she used to vehemently complain about the poems in The New Yorker. She’d call me up, in a state of high dudgeon, and ask if I’d read such-and-such on page so-and-so, ranting that it made no sense and was a ridiculous waste of space. Even if it was by a well-respected poet, if she couldn’t understand the poem, it sucked, period. Truth be told, I agreed with her much of the time. One day, unbeknownst to me until after the fact, she sent them my signature poem, I Write In The Laundromat, along with a note saying this was the kind of poetry they should be publishing, adding, “And I’m not just saying this because she’s my daughter.” I was simultaneously delighted and mortified: I could never submit anything to The New Yorker again. I have no idea what the editors thought of Rhoda’s “submission”–they never even sent a form rejection.

I Write in the Laundromat

I write in the laundromat.
I am a woman
and between wash & dry cycles
I write.

I write while the beans soak
and with children’s voices
in my ear. I spell out words
for scrabble while I am writing.

I write as I drive to the office
where I type a man’s letters
and when he goes to lunch
I write.

When the kids go out the door
on Saturday I write
and while the frozen dinners thaw
I write.

I write on the toilet
and in the bathtub
and when I appear
to be talking
I am often writing.

I write in the laundromat
while the kids soak
with scrabbled ears
and beans in the office
and frozen toilets
and in the car
between wash & dry.

And your words
and my words
and her words
and their words
and I am a woman
and I write in the laundromat.

By the time I started selling sexually explicit fiction, aka pornography, my mother was so supportive of my writing that I didn’t keep it a secret from her—after all, I wanted to brag, to tell her I was finally making money with my scribbling. Besides, while Penthouse isn’t exactly a respectable household paper, it’s second only to Playboy in name recognition among men’s magazines. She was predictably impressed by the money, and thought it was something of a hoot. A few years later, when I put my real name on my stories and then on the cover of erotica collections, she wanted to see them, but, knowing she’d be turned off, I refused to send her any. I didn’t tell her she could get Herotica from the Quality Paperback Book Club, and was glad she managed to miss that page in the club newsletter.

When On Our Backs, the lesbian magazine I edited for a few years, was mentioned in a feature on women’s erotica in Time, Rhoda was sufficiently impressed. She began hounding me to send her an issue of On Our Backs “for the Archives.” I knew my mother’s view of lesbianism, and that she’d be repelled by the extremely explicit On Our Backs, so I kept putting her off; she was relentless, though, and finally wore me down. With Robin, the magazine’s graphic designer, I pored over back issues until we found one we deemed mild enough for Rhoda. Its cover, graced by two pretty femmes in flowing dresses, was as innocuous as Cosmopolitan.

A week later Rhoda called with her verdict: “I have never seen anything so disgusting in my whole life!”
“I knew you’d hate it,” I said, regretting having sent it.

Otherwise, I was unfazed by her judgment, and realized I’d come a long way, in that my mother no longer held power over my self-esteem. Still, I resolved I would never again let her see anything I wrote that had sexual content. Unfortunately, she managed to do so all by herself—boldly she marched into a Florida Barnes and Noble and ordered a copy of Herotica 4. Her verdict this time?

“It’s just like the catalogs we used to get at BBC,” she said offhandedly.

She wasn’t disgusted, but neither did she think much of Herotica. What she said was similar to something a friend from way back had said about it—that it was “just like the stuff we used to read in the Navy.”

I have to admit I was insulted. Herotica 4 was the first collection I edited, and to this day it remains my favorite. The majority of the stories I chose to include are decidedly not “just like” porno catalogs, or the stuff read by horny teenage sailors. Most would be classified as literature in a culture that didn’t automatically downgrade and isolate fiction containing sexual imagery.

In the late 90s I wrote my fifth (still unpublished) novel. I purposely attempted to write something commercial this time—my previous novels were populated with hippies, artists, pornographers and other social outcasts, living lives with which most Americans couldn’t identify. This time, aiming for the mainstream, I found myself, as I wrote, imagining my mother as my audience. Since she read absolutely everything, including a good deal of commercially successful novels, she was the right audience, so when I finished Some Things Never Change I sent it to her. This time her verdict was unequivocal: she adored it, noting that it was far superior to many books in the same genre that succeeded in the marketplace.

It saddens me to think my mother will never again serve as my audience. I suppose I could still pretend she’ll be reading what I write, but it wouldn’t be the same. On the other hand, her death signaled a new kind of creative freedom for me. I would not be writing this memoir were she still alive.

II. The Writer as Mother

I understand now, Stacy

I understand now, Stacy
why you are how you are
about things–
why you mourn the loss
of each toy, rock,
picture, plant
tossed to the wind
by your jaded mother.
Each object
is a gentle reminder
of where you’ve been
and who you are
while to me they shriek
“J’accuse!”

Shrinking from the future
I throw away the past
and stand astounded
as you leap—oh, Stacy!—
with all your precious possessions
into the present.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

The curtain rises on eleven women of all shapes and sizes, lined up across the stage, facing the audience. For a minute or two they are silent, allowing the audience to take them in. Finally one of the women speaks. “My name is Dorothy, daughter of Lucille, daughter of Elizabeth, daughter of Mary Rose.” After a pause, the next woman says, “My name is Amy, daughter of Harriet, daughter of Esther, daughter of Rachel, daughter of Millicent.” The women continue down the line, naming their maternal ancestors in a ritual known as The Motherline.

“My name is Marcy, daughter of Rhoda, daughter of Lily, daughter of Bema.” That’s as far back as I can trace my motherline, and while I now know that my great-grandmother’s surname was Rose, I prefer using the name I always knew her by—it came from Rhoda’s early attempts to say Grandma. I am not alone in my attachment to family monikers: “My name is Judith, daughter of Marjory, daughter of Bubbe, daughter of Hildy.”

Sometimes we’d vary the exercise, adding the names of sisters, aunts, even a beloved family “maid” (nannies weren’t integral to our class and generation), but onstage we stuck to the mother/daughter format. The Motherline opened and closed each performance of Daughters, Womanrite’s second full-length play. For the closing ritual we invited women from the audience to participate. They’d crowd onto the stage, eager to pay homage to their female ancestors. Some couldn’t go further back than their grandmothers, or even their mothers—but no matter how far back they traced their motherline, most of the women cried.

I did The Motherline exercise dozens of times, but I only performed it once in public, and then it was to make a statement, not about the women in my family, but about and to the women in the theater group. But that was later, at the end of a long strange trip.

Depending on how much fringe culture you’re aware of, you may have heard of a group called the Women’s Experimental Theater (W.E.T.), who ultimately claimed ownership of and performed the play called Daughters. The three women who formed W.E.T., however, no more own the play than I own the Taj Mahal.

I came to Womanrite via a classified ad in The Village Voice. The group’s philosophy and methods were influenced by a wider movement in experimental theater dating back to the late 50s, in full swing by 1974. It was led by people like Julian Beck and Judith Molina of The Living Theater; at least one Womanrite member had worked with Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater, an offshoot of the former group. This avant-garde movement injected political, artistic, and social issues into the creation of dramatic productions, and invented radical new forms and techniques, with an emphasis on exploring interior experience. Into this mix Womanrite added a hefty dose of feminist consciousness-raising and principles. Rather than impose a completed script on the actors, we worked on exercises that allowed drama to emerge from our lives and experiences. Each woman’s contribution was rarely replicated exactly, nor did it remain “her” material; it got mixed in with everyone else’s. The result was a rich gumbo of our history as women, intensely personal and profoundly political.

A commitment to the principles of feminism and collectivity meant that every member of the group was considered equal. No woman got higher billing than any other. No member was officially designated the director—instead, we rotated facilitation of workshops among individuals or pairs. Most of all, nobody in a production got star billing, and diva-like behavior was theoretically taboo. At the end of each work session we would gather together in a circle for what we called “The FA,” or Feminist Analysis, a discussion wherein we analyzed the dynamics of whatever went on during the work session from a feminist point of view.

If you’re laughing, or, more appropriately, shuddering, then you’re seeing what we failed to see: that actors need directors, that stardom inevitably comes to some and not to others, and that “The FA” was a recipe for disaster. I dreaded the Feminist Analysis: it made me so damned anxious that half my energy during the workshop was consumed with worry about what I ‘d say later. I worried my remarks wouldn’t be clever enough. I worried about being politically correct. I don’t know if the other women shared my concerns, but I suspect that each person probably had her own issues according to her particular personality and her situation within the group.

Like everyone’s relationship to the group, mine was unique. I was the only mother in a group working on a play about daughterhood. My life experiences were very different from everyone else’s—not that theirs were all alike, but they did share certain commonalities that I did not. Nearly all of them were college graduates who’d done some amount of travelling and had lived as single New Yorkers for a decade or more (we were in our late twenties or early thirties). I’d been married at eighteen and at nineteen was a mother; by the age of twenty-four I was a single mother, and now, four years later, I was a non-custodial parent, living alone for the first time in my life. These differences translated, in my mind, to a position of inferiority. The others, I thought, came from a higher class background, although this was not strictly the case. Class distinction in America is complicated and fuzzy, hard to nail down with precision. My lack of a college education and what I saw as narrower life experience made me less worldly than the other women—or so I thought.

It occurs to me now that a more secure person might have reacted quite differently in my position: I could have easily felt superior for having borne and raised children, for being the only one in the group with an inside track on the mother/daughter divide. I could have been proud of having shouldered so much responsibility while still managing to develop the discipline of daily writing. I might have adopted a reverse snobbishness toward these women, dilettantes who fell apart if the Chinese takeout place delivered chicken moo shu instead of shrimp. Not a one of them could have survived the life I’d been living before my brief respite from motherhood. This kind of attitude, however, would have gone against my entire psychological makeup.

This is the baggage I carried with me into Womanrite. While it made me feel lesser than the other women, it served me well in the creative realm: the work we did was deep and rigorous, at times emotionally exhausting, and my life had put me on intimate terms with heavy emotion. I was also no stranger to hard work.

If the life fed the work, it went the other way as well: sometimes theater work gave me clear, even astonishing, insights. For instance: in an exercise calledTableaus, one woman would set up a scene, directing others to fill specific roles in a silent portrayal of some situation. On one occasion I set up a tableau to represent my mother’s childhood. I seated four women close together on a blanket in an attitude of contentment; these represented my mother’s step-siblings. I placed two other women—representing Rhoda and Janice—a little apart from the others. I then directed someone to play their stepmother, and had her slowly circle the blanket, pausing to pet and hug the four contented children in turn, ignoring the other two, who sat by themselves and watched. When I looked at what I had created, I was floored. I felt—but really felt—Rhoda’s and Janice’s painful childhood, their terrible sense of being less valued in relation to the other children.

As if this wasn’t enough, the scene began to remind me of something even more devastating: as it evolved, Rhoda and Janice changed into Daryl and Stacy, my own children, with the four beloved step-siblings representing their father’s new family—his wife, her daughter, and the

two girls they’d had together. The pain I’d felt for Rhoda and Janice was a pinch in the arm compared to the searing blow this new picture delivered. I had set this up, not just in make-believe but in real life. With crystal vision I saw that I had subconsciously foisted my mother’s childhood onto my children. I could barely breathe—I was drowning in a swamp of guilt. Then and there I made my decision, a silent commitment to take my children back as soon as possible. It had been nagging at me for nearly two years, but now it felt like an emergency.

Ironically, to act on this decision I would have to leave Womanrite. By the time I did, events made it a little easier for me to go.

In the fall of 1975, fourteen women began a work-in-progress called The Daughters Project. By the winter of 1977, eleven of us were either gone, broken-hearted, or both. In the thirty years that have since transpired, I have, mysteriously, written not one word about what happened.

What happened : Three of the women in the group, two veterans and one of the newbie’s, secretly took the script-in-progress and had it legally copyrighted in their names. Understand, this was not a script written in the usual fashion. No individual writer had sat down and imagined these lines, invented these scenes. This collage of a script had been messily assembled during group workshops, to be polished and refined later on. It had emerged from every woman’s work—our skits and monologues and songs and poems. It thundered with the blood, rage and tears of each woman who’d contributed to it. These stories came straight from our lives. If the organized material could be said to belong to anyone, it was to all of us who had lived, processed and regurgitated it. For three individuals to claim it as theirs was a crime, legally and ethically. And it came out of nowhere—I for one had no clue or hint that such a plot was being hatched. It was an act of treason.

It was a huge shock, especially to us newer Womanrite members. When we’d first signed on, we knew next to nothing about the complex relationships among the group’s veterans. Occasionally I would sense what seemed to be unrelated issues popping up, or emotions simmering between various people, but for a long time I had no idea what was coming from where. Besides, I was too dazzled to see or care about anyone else’s sexual arrangements. I’d fallen in love, and my relatonship with Stephanie, my first with a woman, was played out against the backdrop of the theater group, with its tacit rule against overt romantic display. Between that and the intensity of the work, I was too overwhelmed to go looking for trouble. During the first few months I lived in a state of elation in which everyone and everything sparkled with hope and beauty. I thought every single one of these women was brilliant, beautiful, and hugely talented. I felt blessed and grateful to them for inviting me into the group.

The fact is, they were brilliant, and I was blessed, and I was right to feel grateful. The work I did with Womanrite was life-changing. Some of our creations fit into a category we called awful/wonderful, a category exemplified by, for instance, Tillie Olsen’s stories, or Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Like any art that delves into darker realms, the results frequently transcended the pain of the raw material.

The Birth Story

Close your eyes.
Spread your legs.
Feel the heat
between your legs.
Imagine yourself
becoming wet
and the muscles
of your legs
and pelvis
pulling back
becoming tighter
as you open.

There is a great pressure
bearing down
bearing down
inside your pelvis.
All your muscles are pulling back.

You are splitting open.

You look down
and see
and feel
a hard

round head

Emerging
Emerging from your body.
Do you wonder why you feel
so connected to your mother?

I’ll never forget watching R. as she stood in front of us, softly presenting these lines. She was a short, squat woman who could have passed for one of the indigenous peoples of the world: a Mexican peasant, a Russian farmwife, a goatherd in the hills of Peru. Everything about her was dark: her psyche; her slow, almost ominous delivery; her pitch black hair, deep brown eyes, ruddy skin, and ample body hair. Although the words she used were profound, it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d recited the dictionary: her impact was always intense.

She apparently came up with The Birth Story right there on the spot, inspired by some exercise we’d just done. That’s the way we worked—whoever was facilitating would direct the others in an exercise, usually on some kind of theme, perhaps with a vague goal in mind. The key word is vague: nothing was prescribed, but discovered. After an exercise we’d spend a while just hanging out; eventually someone would jump up, take center stage, and present something that had popped into her head and/or her body—much of the work was purely physical. If her presentation resonated with others, they might join her to riff on the original, or take it to a new place. That’s how The Motherline came into being. The Birth Story went into the script verbatim, with not a single word altered, and in performance it was sung in rounds by the whole group.

In time I became immersed in the process of getting my kids away from their father and the wicked stepmother, and moving them back upstate, to the town where we’d previously lived. This was no quick fix; from decision to execution took a full year, weekly therapy sessions, and a nine-to-five-or-later secretarial job so I could amass enough money to set up house. By the time the Gang of Three revealed their act of treason, I had already distanced myself emotionally, and I didn’t have the bandwidth, energy or desire to attend workshops.

Even if I hadn’t been moving, though, and even if the betrayal hadn’t occurred, there were other reasons for me to leave Womanrite. I saw that I wasn’t going to have much of a role in the production; the (unofficial) director’s lover seemed to get all the best parts, with the rest of us being relegated to playing her supporting cast. Nor did much of my work find its way into the script. At one point I’d been so frustrated by the lack of any mother perspective that I wrote a ten-minute script, a sequence of scenes between a mother and toddler showing the barrage of criticism aimed at mothers in our culture. We played with the script in a couple of workshops, but eventually it vanished from the repertoire.

I was already upstate by the time the other women decided to take the Gang of Three to court. They sent me the papers, and I signed on the dotted line. Legnthy legal documents arrived in the mail, and I did whatever Stephanie told me to—but the truth was, I was too precoccupied readjusting to motherhood to care all that much about Womanrite. I was working yet another secretarial job, shoveling snow from the driveway, carting the kids around to school, music lessons, occupational therapy. Becoming Mommy once more took every ounce of my brain and blood. Compared to what I was going through, the machinations of Womanrite seemed trivial.

Meanwhile, the Gang of Three put together a new theater group and, under a new name, began performing their script around New York. I went once to picket outside the theater, distributing flyers that detailed the history of the script. Stephanie and the others mounted a vigorous campaign, organizing benefits to raise money for our defense. I’ve forgotten how it ended, but many months later–and I cannot tell you how this came about–both plaintiffs and defendants put on a series of performances together.

It was at one of these performances that I did The Motherline in public. At the end of the play, when the cast invited the audience to participate, I got up on stage to join my former colleagues. My kids were in the audience; only they and Stephanie knew what I was about to do. When it was my turn to name my foremothers, I took a deep breath, and, staring at a point somewhere across the room, announced, “My name is Marcy, daughter of Rhoda, sister of Helen…” and I proceeded to name as my sisters each and every woman who had left Womanrite over the years for whatever reason, even those who’d preceded me. Stacy later told me that R’s jaw dropped and her mouth hung open. After the performance, while I stood chatting with someone, S came over, put her hands on her hips and spat out, “That was a really shitty thing you did.” Then she stomped off.

I wonder: Did she honestly believe that what I did was shittier than copyrighting scenes from my life in her name?

Coda: In the process of writing this chapter, I Googled Womanrite Theater Ensemble and found several books on women’s theater that, predictably, quote the Gang of Three as the founders of Womanrite and creators of The Daughters Project. The rest of us—Stephanie and the other founders; newbies and other contributors—have been erased from history. A familiar female story.

This isn’t part of the memoir, but I’m posting it here because it’s a similar kind of writing and it just feels like it belongs here.

On Friday I ran and saw SEX AND THE CITY the minute it opened, and it was the best two-and-a-half hours I’ve spent since I rented the TV show’s DVDs. Fashion, beauty, love, sex, laughter, The Big Apple…plus, it’s a very secure feeling to know, when everything falls apart, it’ll all be made right at the end. The movie was panned, mercilessly and unfairly, in the NY Times. Hey, nobody’s saying this is high art: for what SATC is, it was well done. A lot of scenes had me tearing up, especially the tender way Carrie’s friends take care of her, and I realized that a big appeal of the show lies in its romantic view of friendship. In an age when we’re not supposed to romanticize romance, the romantic impulse in SATC is superimposed onto friendship instead. Maybe that’s what I always liked about the series.

Friendship is a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot this century, almost as much as I think about aging. Last century I had dozens of friendships, ranging in longevity from three to forty-five years. I’m talking close friends, not mere acquaintances, mostly women, some in California, some in New York. Today I have almost none. I lost a few people to death; the others either drifted away, intentionally dumped me, or I dumped them. Some of the dumpings were as dramatic and painful as the deaths. I’ve spent much of this century so far trying to figure out what happened.

Before I could analyze the breakups I had to look clearly at the relationships as they were. One reason I’m so moved by the friendships in SATC is that I’ve never in my life had friends who treated me the way these women treat each other. Charlotte sat on the bed and spoon-fed Carrie during her meltdown. Miranda the attorney saved her apartment, and wheeler-dealer Samantha arranged to get all her belongings back into it—all accomplished while sitting on a veranda in Mexico, where they’d gone to nurse Carrie back into a reasonable semblance of human. Who has friends like these, much less three of them? I wish!

I used to say that the women in SATC were like no women I’ve ever known, that the show was a gay man’s fairy tale…but I suspended disbelief because I love fairy tales. What I was talking about then was the clothing, the clubbing, the easy pickups, the money. Let’s be real: no New York columnist at Carrie Bradshaw’s level, writing three times a week, makes enough bucks to pay New York City rent, much less buy Manolo Blahnik shoes with regularity and eat out every meal. Now I realize it’s the actual friendship, the heart of SATC, that’s the real fairy tale. Contemporary women are beyond the myth of Happily Ever After with the Prince—but we still believe it can happen with friends.

I used to consciously and seriously believe in friendship. It was one of my core values. Back in the 70s, when I got into consciousness-raising and the women’s movement, one of the first illusions that got tossed along with the bras and razors was romantic love—from my head, if not my heart. We actually held seminars and workshops on the subject. You’d be ridiculed if you believed that coupledom, as we sneeringly called it, could save you. It wasn’t just theoretical, either—I’d been married, I’d done the whole husband-kids-picket fence routine, and found it wanting.

We believed in forms of group living as a Solution, an antidote to the nuclear family, a phrase as loathsome to us as coupledom. We were vague on the details—maybe a variation of the Israeli kibbutz would save us, maybe Chinese style socialism. We read up on these systems, studied them. The hippie commune has become a media joke, but many of them were conscious efforts to forge a better way of life and raise healthier kids. I lived in two or three group situations, all disastrous in one way or another. Still, though I came to the conclusion that communal living was my own worst nightmare, I didn’t stop believing in friendship as the key to a good life. I put a lot of time and energy into my friendships, as much as I put into my kids and my serially monogamous relationships—maybe even more, to my everlasting regret. As an investment in the future…better stick with blood, it really is thicker than water—though I couldn’t swear to that either.

You’d think by now I’d be done idealizing friendship, but, while I may be disillusioned, I’m not completely cynical. If I were, I wouldn’t be so enamored of Carrie and Company. Somewhere deep inside, I still believe that do-or-die friendships exist. I imagine that lots of people, or at least women, have them; I know for a fact this is so. I’m always reading stories by older women who say it’s their friends who pull them through. Just this year I read a memoir by Isabel Allende and another by Lillian Rubin, both extolling their glorious friendships. I know a San Francisco woman whose birthday parties I used to go to—the last one I attended was her 70th—where dozens of devoted women come to honor her year after year bearing gifts and poetry. These aren’t casual acquaintances, either, but intimate friends, nurtured during four decades of living, working, and political activism in San Francisco.

In my forties—a relatively late age for starting new friendships—I formed one that was far healthier and more positive than previous relationships. Andrea’s chief mission in life was collecting people, and when we met, through a mutual friend’s death, she signed me on for life. (People in New York tend to be that way—whoever you happen to stumble into can end up a lifetime connection from which you can’t opt out without major drama. Californians, I’ve found, are more transient, drifting in and out of each other’s lives with little fanfare). During the eighteen years I knew Andrea, I learned what had been missing in my friendships. I also faced up to my own failings as a friend, and learned to do it better. When she told me she had lung cancer, I confess that my first selfish reaction was self-pity: I’d finally found a real friend, so of course she was going to die. (She did, last February.)

My longest lasting friendship began in high school. Over the years and decades, she and I gave a lot of lip service to the depth of our love and loyalty—but the truth is, our friendship came nowhere near SATC quality. She never spoon-fed me when I was depressed, or helped me with any of my relocations. Not that I needed that—but she didn’t even keep me company during the long days and nights in the hospital when my son had his operations–and that I did need. Worse than what she didn’t do was what she did: she criticized my decisions, mocked my ideas and values, and ridiculed me whenever I made some major change. She was the stable housewife and mother, and, like so many Americans, assumed that hers was the normal life, mine was aberrant. I moved around a lot, let my kids live with their father for awhile, and embraced one social movement after another–all of which made me, in her eyes, flighty and irresponsible. After our kids were grown, she said it was a miracle that mine turned out so well despite our lifestyle. I wanted to say, maybe it’s because of our lifestyle–but my inability to defend myself was a central part of our dynamics. She was convinced her choices were superior to mine, and made no secret of it; I can’t count how many times she dismissed me with, “Oh, it’s just another one of your phases.”

You might ask why I remained in such a relationship for 45 years. Actually, I tried to break away from her early on, when my divorce took me in a very different direction from her, but somehow it was far easier to dump my husband than her. Every time I managed to put some distance between us, something would throw us together again, like her daughter’s brain tumor or, years later, resulting seizures. Despite our vast differences, we shared an emotional bond, a gut-level connection that was, at certain times and under certain circumstances, deeply satisfying. Our conversations could be profound, often spiritual. The odd thing was, while on one level she knew me deeply, in some fundamental ways I was invisible to her. I always loved her and still do—but sometimes love is not enough.

I broke off the friendship once and for all in 2002, during a health crisis that put me into the hospital seven times in one year. For more than two years I was sick, poor, and profoundly dissatisfied with my life, and she got tired, she said, of my “negativity.” Here is what my alleged best friend of 45 years had to say in an email to me at that time: “Yes, it’s true that my life is a lot better than yours—tough!”

It was during this time that other friendships also collapsed. To my astonishment, none of my friends helped me when I got sick. Hell, they couldn’t even tolerate me, much less help. Yes, I was whiny; yes, I cried and complained a lot—but I don’t care how negative or insufferable I might have been at that time…what the fuck are friends for?

One friend in New York who did come through happened to call me just as I arrived home after four days in hospital. I’d just walked into an empty apartment, frightened about taking care of myself, and was trying to figure out the medication instructions the nurse had given me. Unable to make head or tail of them, feeling lost and alone, I answered the phone crying.

From 3000 miles away, Joani called the hospital and got the information, then called me back to deliver it. At this time I had friends in San Francisco who told me, “Gee, I wish I could help you, but I’m all the way on the other side of the bridge.” It’s not like this was the first time Joani had come through for me—we have a 30-year history, our kids have remained friends since kindergarten, and her husband’s been a good friend to me too. It’s just that at this time, when I was so sensitive and needy, I was looking at my friendships in a new way. I knew then, if I hadn’t before, that Joani was a keeper.

Unlike four or five others.

For almost 30 years I’d been helping S. with her health crises—taking her to doctors, writing bureaucratic letters for her, giving her a television when hers broke, always bringing her musical compilations and other gifts. I never expected too much from her because of her health problems, but she did manage to go out to a movie or to see friends from time to time…so why couldn’t she visit me just once? Another friend stuck it out for a few months, once even drove me home from hospital…but then she decided we were “going in different directions.” She was trying to be spiritual and kind, she explained, while I was becoming bitter and negative. After fifteen years of friendship, she walked out the door for good.

With this litany of complaints I’m leaving myself wide open to judgment and suspicion: when we hear stories like mine, we automatically wonder what we’re not hearing—the other side of the story. We read between the lines trying to imagine the horrible deeds this person must have done to deserve so much bad treatment. It’s true that all these people have their stories, and that I’m no angel. But as clearly as I can make out, what I’m describing is what happened. I’ve become someone I never in a million years thought I would become: a statistic: a lonely, isolated senior with no support system.

It’s all such a cliché, isn’t it—the notion of fair weather friends, the old saw that in times of need you find out who your real friends are. The thing is, I should have found it out long ago. As the single mother of a son who had seizures and surgical procedures, I already had a life full of crises. I felt quite alone with all that, which wasn’t just a feeling. I see now that I couldn’t bear to face the truth: I’d already given up on romantic love and the nuclear family; if I gave up on friendship, what would be left?

My mother used to tell me, “You can never count on anyone but yourself.” I scoffed at her cynicism. My generation was different. We’d care for one another. All you need is love and so forth. But as it turns out, to employ another cliché, my mother was right. Life has taught me that all I can count on is myself. I loved Sex and the City because it offered momentary escape from that harsh reality, a few minutes or hours of pretending that life can be the way I used to think it should be.

Now, whenever my son or daughter does something especially kind or helpful for me (and they do) it makes me happy…but I don’t expect it. I try hard not to expect anything from anyone. My next lesson is to learn how not to be bitter about it.

In my late twenties, when I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan just twenty city blocks from my parents, I joined Womanrite, an avant-garde feminist theater group. For several years, the five original members of the troupe had been performing their send-up of Cinderella; I was one of a dozen women invited to join for the purpose of developing a new play.

My kids were living with their father. Despite doing battle daily with a corrosive, nagging guilt, this was one of the most exciting periods of my life. In between part-time jobs ranging from secretarial to, ironically, babysitting, I was writing my first novel, taking classes at the New School, and performing street theater on the back of pickup trucks. I was also in a romantic relationship, for the first time in my life, with a woman. I felt so thrillingly alive that I barely slept; when I lay down at night, either Stephanie was with me, or the words and scenes from that day’s workshop swirled through my head, propelling me out of bed to work on my novel or write new material for the group.

Looking back, I am struck by my age at the time—twenty-eight. I am now in my sixties and have had many opportunities to observe twenty-eight through the lives of younger friends. I’ve watched young women do the same things I was doing in my years with Womanrite—exploring sexual identity, creating art, turning that art into political activism, all within a community of like-minded women. During the 90s I edited a lesbian magazine, and saw my young co-workers scraping together money for the rent, moving from one apartment or city to another at the drop of a hat, trading and borrowing each others’ broken down cars, taking the band on the road, the cameras to a shoot, the truck for a week at Burning Man. The difference between these women and myself at their age was, of course, that I had children. But my hunger for freedom had been just as great, so overwhelming that it led me to do the unthinkable as a mother. These young women have given me a great gift: perspective. Leaving my kids, I’ve finally come to see, was not the act of a callous monster, but an act of survival. I knew I was living on borrowed time, and I crammed as much into those four years as I possibly could.

I was as crazy about The Cinderella Project as I was for Stephanie, who’d written the bare-bones script, and I became understudy for one of the stepsister roles. I got to do the part three times; otherwise I operated the rudimentary lighting. When we scheduled a series of performances in the Manhattan loft where we held our workshops, I jumped at the chance for my mother to see the play. Although the prospect of integrating her into this part of my life was scary, I suspected that, as a closet feminist, she would love the play as much as I did. I wanted her to see what was really going on in the women’s movement, instead of the superficial distortions she read in Time magazine.

As we rode the downtown bus to the loft that evening, I became increasingly anxious. Would Rhoda like my friends? Would she disapprove? Worse, would she embarrass me with her unpredictable behavior? If she disapproved of the play, or went into hateful mode and expressed it, I stood a good chance of being humiliated.

My mother was oblivious to my concerns: from her point of view we were going to see a play, something we’d done many times. All at once I realized that my mother had no way of knowing what this was like for me: She had never been an adult daughter. This revelation struck me with such force, it was as if my mother suddenly stepped out of shadows and into light. I had never thought about the affect of her loss in quite this way: for the first time I really got why this otherwise intelligent woman was clueless about her daughters. I was glad I’d decided to let her glimpse a sliver of my life—or at least what I thought would be a sliver. What she actually saw was the last thing I’d expected or intended.

The Cinderella Project was what we called woman-identified. In Womanrite’s version of the fairy tale, The Man arrogantly reigns over a metaphorical space in which women compete for dubious prizes. While most of our audiences discerned a lesbian subtext, I knew my mother’s mind didn’t operate that way, that while she might think our brand of feminism a bit radical, The L Word wouldn’t once cross her mind. And that is exactly what happened.

The minute the house lights dimmed, Rhoda was riveted. The performance captivated her just as it did the younger women around her. She was even smitten by one of the actors, S, a voluptuous woman and charismatic performer whose dry delivery garnered much audience laughter. In real life, like a lot of lesbians back then, S had left her husband for a woman. She was now the central figure in a lesbian triad. I could see that S’s monologues affected Rhoda more than the others, and afterwards she whispered that S was by far the most talented of the actors.

It was Womanrite’s practice to invite the audience to stay for a post-performance discussion. I loved these feedback sessions, where women almost always praised the play and talked about how it affected them, often sharing intimate stories and deep feelings. With naïve enthusiasm I pulled my mothers’ chair into the circle next to mine.

I hadn’t noticed before, but in attendance that night was the well-known feminist writer Andrea Dworkin. In addition to promoting lesbian separatism, Dworkin was almost single-handedly responsible for rousing a virulent anti-pornography movement among feminists. Large and imposing in her trademark denim overalls, she sat cross-legged on the floor, looking as if she couldn’t wait for a chance to speak. R. usually began these sessions with a short introduction, but before she could say a word, Dworkin pounced.

“I saw the play the first time around, some four years ago,” she began. Slowly she rose to her feet so she towered above us. Hooking her thumbs through her overall straps like some Midwestern farmer, she continued, “At that time I was critical of some aspects of the play, but I have to hand it to you—I think you made some excellent changes to the narrative. It really moves now.” Womanrite members basked in the famous writer’s approval—and then Dworkin dropped her bomb. “It has a distinct lesbian sensibility now–so I can’t help wondering, now that all of you have actually become lesbians, did the changes evolve parallel to your sexual identity? Or vice versa?”

Almost in unison, everyone’s eyes darted towards my mother. I myself could not look in her direction. The next day S. showed me, in word and gesture, the way Rhoda seemed to recede further and further back in her chair. I, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction, as if ready to keel over. My anguished lover, Stephanie, sat on the floor tying her shoelaces with great concentration. This all took a matter of seconds—until R. recovered enough to lurch into action.

“First of all,” she said, her voice unnaturally tranquil, in contrast to her beet-red face, “you’re making an assumption that may or may not be true of all the members of this group.”

Anyone with an ounce of sense could see the situation plain. My mother was the only older woman in the room, and it was obvious from the way we were sitting, not to mention our reactions, that she was my mother (though everyone in the theater group later said they felt she was standing in for all their mothers). Anyone with an ounce of sensitivity would have noticed the Womanrite women’s faces, imploring her to shut up. But Andrea Dworkin (who died in 2005) never shut up for anyone. She was either oblivious to the situation or being purposely confrontational—knowing now what I didn’t know then about Dworkin, I’d bet on the latter.

I don’t know what else she or the others said—I was too freaked out to listen. My brain was busy clicking away: should I tell my mother I was a lesbian? That I wasn’t? That I was having a fling? My first instinct is always honesty—but at this point I really wasn’t sure what to call myself. I hadn’t yet put my relationship with Stephanie into context. Some days I thought I was a lesbian…but I was still attracted to men. Should I tell my mother I was bisexual? And then it dawned on me: I could lie. Everyone lies about sex; it’s almost expected in polite society. Who could blame me, after all, if three months into my first lesbian affair I wasn’t ready to come out to my mother? Not only would I lie, I decided, I’d cut to the chase as soon as possible, confront the issue head on. Silently I rehearsed my little speech, and as soon as it seemed politic to leave, I directed my mother to follow me out the door. The minute we were alone in the elevator I blurted, “I know you’re probably wondering if I’m a lesbian–well, I’m not.”

Her face visibly relaxed. “Oh, I know that,” she said off-handedly. Without pausing she launched into a stream of enthusiastic chatter about the play. She was still chattering madly after we got on the bus, praising the actors, especially S., who she thought was wickedly funny. Suddenly she grew quiet and seemed to be thinking; then, with uncharacteristic timidity she asked, “Was S. ever married?” Halleluliah! I could truthfully, triumphantly, tell my mother that S. had indeed been married! Never mind she’d been divorced for some ten years—the fact of marriage was heterosexual credential enough for my mother. It was the reason she believed that I was straight. The wording of her question, I knew, had been in code. I thanked the gods she hadn’t asked about R., a dyed-in-the-wool dyke, or, goddess forbid, Stephanie. But then, she’d hardly noticed them, so taken had she been by S. I had to wonder: was Rhoda a closet lesbian?

In fact, Rhoda was no stranger to homosexuality. Her uncle Yernie, Lily’s brother, had been gay, and until his death he was her closest friend on the planet. He was the only person other than Janice that I ever saw my mother confide in, or who she seemed truly happy to be around. They discussed books, theater, The New Yorker; Yernie was a kind of mentor to his niece. Their age difference wasn’t that great: when she was a teenager he was in his early twenties, and he used to take her out with his friends on weekends. Yernie traveled in upscale, sophisticated, mixed gender circles. In later years my mother told me about lavish parties in luxurious Fifth Avenue apartments, where butch lesbians wore tuxedoes and femmes dressed to kill.

As a child I adored Yernie. I didn’t know he was gay until after he died, at 57, of emphysema. I knew he was different, though—he was the only unmarried adult in the family, he went out all the time with male friends, and he spoke fluent Italian. He worked an ordinary civil servant job, but off hours was always creating something. He made lamps and vases adorned with delicate pictures of animals, each paw and tail cut with precision; sometimes he let me cut out one or two, but mine looked nothing like his, and I’m sure he threw them away. In my childish Nancy Drew mentality I sensed something suspicious about Uncle Yernie, but I wasn’t yet savvy enough to figure it out. A year or two after he died I asked Janice about his sexual proclivities. “It was never talked about,” she said, “but it was understood.”

I still remember my mother at Yernie’s funeral, turning back to the grave while everyone else was leaving, standing there alone for a moment. For the rest of her life she kept her affinity for gay men and culture. She loved The Boys in The Band and The Killing of Sister George, read James Baldwin and Edward Albee, and she always knew when an iconic new diva like Barbra or Bette came along. Given all this, it now seems odd that she didn’t detect the lesbian subtext in Cinderella; that she believed a married woman couldn’t be gay; that she accepted the lies I told to assuage her fears. I suppose we see and believe only what we want to see and believe. Then too, she was more in sync with gay men than lesbians. In any case, it wasn’t hard for me to keep my love for Stephanie from Rhoda’s judging eyes. I simply told her I wasn’t a lesbian, and that was the end of that.

Or so I thought–until, nearly ten years later, drunk in a Parisian café, Rhoda turned to my sister and began telling her the story of Our Evening With Womanrite. Had she been mulling it over all these years? Did she harbor suspicions about me? By then I was involved with a man, and she knew it. I was also further along in my sexual identity process; I thought of myself, without doubt or conflict, as bisexual. Thus, when Rhoda got to the part of the story in which Andrea Dworkin outed a roomful of women, I said , “Ma, there’s something I have to tell you.”

May 12, 2008

Womanrite. I have never written about Womanrite—not one poem, short story, essay or memory. Not a word. I wondered about it through the years, wondered why I was never moved to write about what was a significant experience in my life, one that lasted almost two years, but I just figured I was waiting for the perspective of time. Now it’s been 35 years—my god, I can hardly believe it! And I still haven’t written a word. You’d think there’d be enough distance by now.

When I first put Womanrite into my outline, I thought it would be a good opportunity to finally and fully explore it, and was actually eager to sit down and write the story, starting from the night I entered the church on the Upper West Side, relishing the rare opportunity to present myself in any way I chose to a group of unknown women, and ending in a lawsuit between two factions of the collective. Now that the time to write it has arrived, I find myself filled with fear. My solar plexus is shaking, swimming with that sick sense of terror. Of what? I suppose it’s fear of the unknown, since it’s a place I’ve never been. I know there has to be a lot of sadness here: for one thing, Womanrite and my relationship with Stephanie coincided. For another, WR disappointed me bitterly. When I talk about my disappointment in the women’s movement, the theater group is a large part of it.

Then there are practical, or structural, considerations: I began the chapter some time ago, with the night I took Rhoda to see The Cinderella Project. I wrote about the bus ride downtown and my fear of integrating her into this part my life, but then the writing veered off into my realization that Rhoda had never been an adult daughter—a revelation I had that night, way before the really juicy stuff happened. I ended up writing about the issue of motherless daughters and how it affected Rhoda as a mother, not about Womanrite.

It’s a good opening for a chapter—visual, immediate, connected to the main themes of the memoir—but there’s no need to use it the way I did; I’ve gone into the subject of motherless daughters in other places, and even if I hadn’t, there are a million doors into that terrain. Better to use the bus ride as the way into Womanrite—but…? I’ve also envisioned just beginning at the beginning, and writing what it was like to be the only mother working on a play about daughterhood with 20 women who did not have children, not to mention at a time when my kids didn’t live with me. Any mother reading this will know instinctively what I’m talking about.

So I’m faced with a conundrum, one of structure—my, how convenient! I can use this structural problem to avoid getting into painful material. How odd, though, that I should be so frightened to face the pain of WR when I’ve faced much deeper, older, more personal situations in the course of writing the memoir, in the course of my life as a writer actually. Certainly Womanrite cannot carry more pain than my situation with Daryl, my relationship with my mother and sister, or the one with Stacy (which I haven’t explored much yet either, oy vey!)

How strange that I’ve never written about Womanrite. Is it less important, in the long view, than my family situations? Well, of course it must be. And yet…whenever I see Stephanie I end up on the verge of tears, ostensibly about my present life situation. It’s no secret, we both acknowledge what’s happening, but attribute it to being close, i.e., we’re so close that I feel safe feeling my feelings around her. But maybe that’s not all there is to it…maybe it’s the pain I feel about Stephanie, period. Once, sitting across from Karen, the woman she’s shared her life with for some quarter of a century, I saw how much alike Karen and I are, and thought, Why not me?

I know why not me: timing, all timing. When I was with Stephanie I had to resolve the situation of my kids, on my own, with her support but without her. Years later she resolved her intense desire to have children by adopting two of them. She was already with Karen, and at that time I thought, Better you than me, kiddo. I never would have agreed to take on two small kids just as my own were getting ready to leave. Ironically, Karen, who has one daughter, felt the same—but somehow they worked it out. I would not have even tried. So there you go: the better woman won.

Jesus. The things that happen to us in life. The way circumstances conspire to bring us all this pain and loss.

My fear of approaching this material isn’t just about Stephanie, though: her I have written about; that is a pain I have faced. Womanrite itself—the pain of the betrayal that came, following the pain I’d hidden the whole time I’d worked with them: that’s new territory. That’s where I need to go. Again, this cannot possibly be more difficult than other parts of my life. I need to stop procrastinating…or maybe not. Stephanie—who is still creating and performing original theater in New York—once said, laughingly, that we should just expect and plan time for this little dance we have to do before we can get down to creative work.

Full Moon in August
(for Stephanie, c. 1977)

The moon and I had syncopated rhythm:
monthly in her fullness I bled.
You arrived on my doorstep
a wild mare traveling west
in your camper with your dog
and your cocktail party music.

Women aren’t supposed to live like this
I thought, my eyes widening
to encompass your vision.

It was a full moon in August.
You were on your way somewhere
coming from somewhere else.
When I saw you in your camper
I thought
Women do not live like this.

The night waxed and waned
and we drank of the moon.
Remember, you coaxed,
delving into hidden spaces.

Yes, I had forgotten
the tales that fingers tell
forgotten to remember
and forgot that I forgot
that women do live
like this.