“Shit. People are stupid They’ll believe what’s on tv.” Olive ridiculed her.

Ilse rose to her feet. The months of enduring Olive had taken their toll. Her temper flew out the window. “People are stupid. If you think people are stupid then why are you in this group? Why do you even bother with the movement? What makes you so much better than anyone else? And who is going to listen to you or any of us if we look down on the people we’re trying to talk to? Nixon operated on the premise that people are stupid. Do you want to operate that way? You have no respect for anyone because you don’t respect yourself. Why don’t you take your hang-ups and just get the hell out of here!”

Olive charged over to Ilse and took a swing at her. Annie and Sue trailed right behind her. Alice, Harriet, and Brenda formed a wall between them and Ilse.

“Sit down, sit down and cool off, goddammit,” Harriet yelled.

Olive collapsed in a lump and began her famous crying routine. Annie mothered her and the chains on her jacket and pants almost rattled out Olive’s sobs. The other women, not ready for such a sulphurous reaction, sat in stunned silence.

Alice finally spoke. “I think the needs of this group and your needs aren’t the same, Olive. I can’t speak for anyone else but as far as I’m concerned I can’t work with you.”

It hadn’t dawned on Olive that she might be thrown out. If she felt sorrowful she covered it in another outburst. “Elitist snobs. You all suck up to Ilse. You talk about ideology. S’all crap. We’re supposed to love each other.”

“No,” Ilse stepped in. “We’re supposed to pull our weight. It’s unrealistic to expect we’ll all love each other. The most we can ask for is to respect each other and to work for a common goal. If we’re going to love each other it’ll come out of working side by side not because somebody put it down on paper.”

“Well, I’m going to go to the Rag and give them a real article. And anyone who wants to can get away from these pigs and join me.”

Sue Betsychild and Annie Amazon followed her out the door. Annie snuck a look back to see if anyone was coming but no one budged. They heard Annie’s chains jingling all the way to the front door.

“What decayed ego structures those people must have, like rotting persimmons.” Brenda shook her head.

“That’s poetic, Brendie.” Alice put her arm around her.

“This had to happen sometime. If we’re going to talk about this group and its direction we ought to examine why we let this drag on so long. That may not be our first priority of discussion but why are women such setups for emotions? Damn.” Harriet sat back down again shaking her head.

“Because we’re the peacemakers, the ones responsible for soothing ruffled feathers,” Brenda said.

“Partly, but I also think it’s because we’re unsure of ourselves.” The women stared at Ilse. “We’re trying to pull an ideology together; we’ve got a lot of it but we’re shaky in parts. We haven’t been in political struggle that long. We’re not taken seriously so that doesn’t help one bit. And look at us. Look how young we are—we’re still getting our own lives together. It’s pretty easy for someone to run us around, you know, especially with tears. Christ, if there’s one thing women respond to it’s tears.”

“Ilse, you wouldn’t by any chance be saying we should be unemotional, pseudo-rational, shut off emotions the way men do, would you?” Harriet questioned her in an even tone.

“I don’t know, Harriet. Remember when we first formed this group and people talked about getting in touch with their emotions? We thought if we could reach some emotional core that revolution would magically follow. I’m not saying we should shut off feelings or anything like that but more and more I’m favoring hard intellectual labor. We’ve had enough time organizing to sit down and figure out what went right and what went wrong. I know somewhere I’m beginning to doubt emotion. I mean we’ve all been raised in a system hostile to our needs, a system that thinks of us as functions not persons. How can we fully trust our responses, you know? For all we know compassion could be a conditioned response and one that continues to keep us oppressed by putting other people’s troubles ahead of our own. Isn’t that what good women always do, sacrifice? We could be making a virtue out of oppression.”

“This still isn’t media policy but it’s fascinating,” Brenda responded.

Alice followed, “I have the same questions, Ilse, questions that would have seemed dangerous to me even three months ago. But one thing still seems dangerous to me and that’s withdrawing to do hard intellectual labor. I can’t see how that won’t just isolate us from others. We have to keep organizing and try to draw our conclusions at the same time.”

“Yes and no,” Ilse said. “We could have dances for the gay community for the next five years and I don’t think we’d learn anything more by it. We’ve exhausted it as a learning process. Other people who haven’t been around the movement as long as we have could take it over and learn from it the same way we did. I mean there’s got to be some organized chain of experience. Here we’ve learned something. Now if we sit down and write it out that’s fine. Women in Wisconsin can read and learn. Women in New York could also learn by performing that function we’ve begun and then move on when they’ve learned by doing. It’s incredible how we haven’t been able to transmit our knowledge—and one of the reasons is that we don’t have large organizations to provide shared ways for people to learn. A position paper isn’t enough. It’s time to recognize that some of us know more by virtue of years in the movement and some by virtue of special skills.”

“I hate the way that sounds.” Brenda grinned. “But I know it’s true. We always put the niceties of theory before the realities of practice. Time to get our feet back on the ground.”

“I’m not sure we can make decisions yet. Do we have enough evidence?” Judy Avery—who’d been silent all evening—piped up.

Ilse turned to her. “All decisions are made on insufficient evidence.”

“Yeah, but do we have the right to make decisions for other people?” Alice wanted to know.

“Alice, what other people? It’s a question of responsibility. Parents have to make decisions for their children. You can’t let an infant wander around. You make decisions when the child is fed, cleaned, exercised. That’s responsibility—and hopefully you teach the child to be responsible for herself. Well, little girls who are now one year old will be affected by whether we make decisions or whether we default. And what about adults? Look at all the women who flood women’s centers trying to find a way out of the maze. You know what we used to do with them? We’d throw them right in with us, in the thick of whatever program we were working on or whatever political battle we were fighting. What a fucked-up thing to do. That’s like dumping someone who doesn’t know how to swim in a river with a fast current. No wonder the attrition rate was so high. We’ve got to take responsibility for people who come to us. Where are they coming from? What do they want? Do they even know what they want? Can we help them? Can they help us? We have to develop an organization that various people can participate in according to their various needs, skills, desires, you know? We can’t level everyone. And under the guise of sisterhood that’s what we’ve been doing. Really, listen to me. We’ve acted on the assumption that everyone has to be a fulltime political person, an organizer, a theoretician. That’s fucked. We’ve done to women what men have done to us. We’ve taken their identities away by expecting them all to perform the same functions.”

“Give me time to sort this out, it’s been an exhausting meeting. I want to go on with this when we’re fresh. Now that the obstruction is off the road we can all search for the answers with more trust.” Harriet sighed.

“Wait, before we break up for the night I want to read off three criteria I picked out of a pamphlet I read the other night. You might want to write them down and we can get to them at the next meeting or one by one,” Alice called out. “This is to measure a program or an activity. Okay? Number one: Does it meet material and/or emotional needs? Number two: Does it bring women together? Teach us how to win? Number three: Does it weaken the current power structure? That’s it.”

Catching the bus on East Ninth Street, Alice and Ilse rode over to Hudson Street together.

“Ilse, isn’t it funny how we can criticize each other face to face—and that’s a breakthrough—but it’s still hard to praise each other?”

“Never thought of it.”

“I’d like to tell you to your face that I think you have a fine mind. Who knows if we’ll find all the answers but you ask the deep questions, the questions that are underneath so many of our unconsidered actions or beliefs. I’m really glad we’re together. Whenever women like Olive bum me out I remind myself if it weren’t for the movement I’d never have met people like you.”

Ilse held her hand, “Thank you. I—I’m glad you’re here too.”

“Maybe it’s because I turned twenty-five last month, a quarter of a century. Sounds so old. I’ve been alive for that long? But I’m realizing this is a life’s work, this movement. I will fight this fight for as long as I live. That hadn’t dawned on me before. I feel a new seriousness. I feel that my life is measurable. I don’t know if that makes sense but when I was in high school and even college I had a vague notion that my life was infinite. Thought I could paint and travel and sing and read and do anything. I don’t feel that way anymore. My life is now definite and finite. I’ve chosen the thing I’m going to do and suddenly all the muddle cleared away. It’s peaceful. Now there’s a contradiction: here I’ve decided to spend my life fighting and it’s given me peace.”

“No, it sounds right. I know what you’re saying. I don’t think I have as clear a sense of my job yet as you do. I mean, I know I’ll be in the movement for the rest of my life too but you’re so talented. You could organize anything from building a battleship to a tea party on the White House lawn—for lesbians. You amaze me how you can pull people and materials together. I can organize but not as good as you.”

“That’s because you don’t suffer fools gladly.”

“Well, if you mean Olive, no.”

“No. Olive is malignant. I mean you expect every one to be as intelligent as you are. You’re not patient. When you work with people you have to accept their limitations as well as their gifts.”

“Now I feel guilty.”

“Don’t feel guilty. Wasn’t it you tonight who said we can’t level people, we have to use our talents where they do the most good? So you’re a fair organizer. There are better people than you at that. But you’ve got a fearless questioning mind. So think. Anyway, you don’t have to make a decision on the bus.”

“Better not. Here’s our stop. I’ll walk you home.”

“Thanks. Hey, are you still seeing Carole?”

“Yeah, I was supposed to go up there tonight but the meeting ran so late. I forgot to call her too.”

“Want to call from my place?”

“No thanks. I’m only two minutes away from you anyway. I’ll call her when I get home and give her a full report.”

“I thought you said she wasn’t interested in politics.”

“Not the way we are. Like you said, I judged her by my standards but compared to other nonmovement people she’s pretty aware.”

“She’s striking. If she went out speaking people would join the movement just to get to know her.” Alice laughed.

“I’ll have to tell her that.”

“Sounds as though things are good between you.”

“I guess. She pisses me off sometimes. I mean, I guess I do want her in the movement. Her attitude of being above it all bothers me but she does give me emotional support. Age makes a difference. Things that upset me don’t phase her. Flat, you know? Her perspective is different. She’s seen more, at least more of the everyday world.”

“We need that. A lot of the older women are reformists which doesn’t do us a hell of a lot of good.”

“Yeah, I know. Too bad those older lesbians are still in that goddamned closet.”

“You’d think they’d choke on the hangers by now.” Alice laughed.

“Mind if I borrow that line?”

“Nah, what’s mine is yours. Thanks for walking me home.”

Ilse walked the short two blocks to her house. Worn by the meeting, she walked slower than usual even though she wanted to call Carole.

The narcotic media, it desensitizes people to violence. Why didn’t I say that at the meeting? We’re surrounded by crime, violence, and nostalgia. For some reason she couldn’t discover, some lost connection, she remembered a conversation she had with Adele the last time the four of them were together. She wanted to know why Adele studied such cruel people as the Aztecs. Adele told her that she wasn’t an Aztec scholar, her field was the classic age of the Maya, but she had a passing knowledge of Aztec life.

“Why do you think they were so cruel?” Adele asked her back.

“Because they practiced human sacrifice. Not just one a year but lots of sacrifice.”

Adele answered her, “And you think we don’t?”

What stood out in her mind was Adele’s explanation about why they had such rituals. It wasn’t that the Aztec gods were especially hateful. They were hungry. All life is hungry. The destruction of living things is the drum beat of life. Death fed life. If there wasn’t constant death then the life of the gods grew weak and how can a culture stand when its gods die? They fed their gods and then they communed to take some of the gods’ strength into themselves.

Vito’s hungry meows erased the Aztecs from her mind. She fed the cat and called Carole.

“Hello.”

“Hi, I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier.”

“Ilse, where are you?”

“I’m home. The meeting ran late and I’m wiped out. We finally had the blow-out with Olive. She wanted the Village Rag to do an article on us. Can you imagine?”

“Sure,” Carole said. “They could title it, ‘Orphans of the Norm.’ ”

“Jesus Christ, Carole, after tonight that’s not funny. She was screeching at me that I’m an elitist and why do we need a media policy. Alice and I thought we needed more than a media policy …” Ilse’s voice wobbled a bit. She’d used herself up tonight. She couldn’t string her thoughts together any more. She wanted sympathy from Carole, some recognition that she’d fought the good fight. Carole’s crack was far from supplying the balm she was looking for. Now she was angry, bone weary, and babbling.

“Ilse, spare me your stream of consciousness and get to the point. Are you coming up or staying home?”

“Everything is stream of consciousness including the Post Office!” Ilse hung up.

The next day Carole called Ilse from her office and apologized. Ilse apologized in return.

Thursday morning at eight-fifteen Dutton was out with his dog, as usual, prancing. As Carole walked behind the pair for a few moments she noticed the dog had a piece of string hanging out of its ass. Getting side by side with the misogynist Carole awarded him her most dazzling smile.

“Mr. Dutton there’s a foreign object protruding from your dog’s anus.”

Dutton’s eyes popped then zoomed down to his dog’s behind where sure enough a grimy string dangled. Carole left him doubled over his ageing companion trying to lovingly extract the string. Each time he’d give it a pull the dog would yelp and turn a circle. She laughed all the way down to 57th Street where she caught the bus each morning she taught classes. This is going to be a good day, she thought.

Riley, cheery as usual, jerked and jolted her up to the seventh floor. As the door opened she noticed Fred wasn’t peering from behind his desk. She reached into her mail box, pulled out all the junk mail and her phone messages. BonBon called. Important, read the scrawl. Adele called. Return call immediately. Ilse called. Urgent.

“Adele, what’s wrong?”

“Have you seen the Village Rag?”

“Of course not. I refuse to read that drivel.”

“Well, there’s a vicious article in it signed by Olive Holloway. Most of the article smears Ilse from one side of Manhattan to another.”

“What? Poor Ilse, I’d better call her.”

“Wait, Carole. That’s not all. This Olive creature doesn’t name you by surname but she implies that Ilse is being kept by—and I quote—’A well-heeled art historian by the name of Carole who teaches in one of the city’s more prestigious universities.’ How many women art historians are there at Columbia, C.C.N.Y., and N.Y.U. who are named Carole? If I ever find this child I am going to hit her up side the head. Are you all right? Do you want me to cancel class and come down there? If there’s going to be a fight over your job I want to be there.”

“No, Adele, no. Fowler wouldn’t dare. I have tenure and I’d like to see him invoke a morals clause on me. I never gave Ilse anything other than dinner and cab fare. Christ, what kind of nut is this Olive?” Carole was more shaken than she sounded.

“A pure case of sour grapes, it sounds like. The people who ought to be punished are the Rag people for printing anything so irresponsible.”

“Listen, Adele. Let me come on over tonight or maybe Ilse and I will both come over if you think it’s all right with LaVerne. I want to call Ilse right now. She must be frantic.”

“Of course. You’re family, don’t ask permission, honey. And ring me if anything goes wrong, you hear?”

“Thanks, Adele. Dell—I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Carole put down the receiver, collected herself, and dialed Ilse.

“Sweetheart?”

“Oh, Carole, Carole, I’m so sorry. I hope you don’t think this had anything to do with me. I mean I mentioned you once or twice but never to this woman. She picked it up. Oh please, I hope you don’t think this is my fault. I mean, I want you to come out but not like this.”

“Ilse, it’s all right. It’ll take more than a snide implication in pulp to get me in serious trouble here. You’re the one. Adele told me most of the article is a broadside aimed at you.” Carole hoped what she said was true more than she believed it.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. We called the A.C.L.U. to find out if we have legal recourse. I’m going up there this afternoon to talk to the women in the women’s rights division. Olive Holloway is going to get smashed.”

“Would you like a bit of advice?”

“Now you sound like my mother.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that. Mothers have a habit of proving right except you don’t find that out until you’re the age your mother was when she gave you the advice.”

“Okay, you’re probably more rational now than I am anyway.”

“Forget this. Don’t even bother to sue.”

“Give up without a fight, never.”

“Let me finish. The world is full of Olives. You’ll frazzle yourself responding to them. And if you do want to get even with her remember revenge is a dish best served cold. So wait. Maybe by waiting you’ll come to understand she isn’t worth a reaction from you. Besides the ultimate revenge is your own success. Ignore her and set about your own business. That goes for your entire group.”

“Not the group. The least we can do is write a short, noninflammatory letter to the editor. And maybe get a few journalists on our side to call them.”

“Perhaps. That’s something for you and your group to decide but do listen to me about yourself.”

“Yes, ma’m.”

“Adele is concerned for you too. Want to go over there tonight with me and we can have supper together?”

“I’d love to. You know I dig Adele and LaVerne but the group will have to meet tonight to decide what we should do. If I get out before two in the morning I’ll call to see if you’re back home and maybe come on up. Okay?”

“Okay.”

As she hung up the phone she heard the elevator door slam and Freddie Fowler whistling. He walked down the corridor to her office, stuck his head in, and chirped, “May I come in?”

“Certainly.”

As he took a seat opposite her Carole noticed he had the Village Rag tucked under his arm.

“Allow me to close the door, Carole.” His voice dropped.

“Fred, I thought you were more subtle than that.”

Fred’s lips twitched. Carole threw him off balance no matter what he said or did. “Carole, I’ve read the most disturbing article in the Village Rag today and I came directly to you. I want you to know you can confide in me with your, ah, problem. After all, we are in the arts and we’re accustomed to this.”

“To what, Fred?”

He hedged. “Have you read the article?” God forbid the word should escape his lips.

“Let’s just say it’s been called to my attention.”

“I want you to know that, even if this malicious accusation is true, you and I can work things out. We value you here.”

“Value me? My reputation enhances a lackluster department. Lay it on the line, Chief.”

“Please, there’s no call to get hostile. I recognize you must be under a strain.”

“Why? Have I reached the age where roommates begin to look suspicious?”

“Now, Carole, I have suspected for some time now that you, that you, perhaps had a different lifestyle than most people.”

“Really, I have no idea how most people live. Too broad a subject for me.”

“Come on, we’ve known each other for years. You can tell me your secret. I’ve told you it won’t affect my regard for you—whether you’re keeping this girl or not.”

“Possession of a secret is no guarantee of its truth,” Carole snapped.

“Well, I didn’t mean to suggest that I doubt your word.”

“Fred, I am not keeping any ‘girl’ as you call her. Try woman next time.”

Confused, Fred blushed. He wasn’t exactly sure why that word was offensive but then he considered himself above such semantic trivia. “I’m terribly sorry. I should have known better.”

“What fascinates me is that you won’t use the word.”

“What word?”

“Lesbian.”

Fred’s whole body twitched this time. “Uh, it’s such an indelicate word. And as you pointed out I have no real reason to even think such a thing. Carole, I’m terribly sorry.”

“You should be. For thinking I’m keeping some woman without any evidence other than a slanderous article in a disreputable weekly.”

“I hope this little misunderstanding won’t affect your regard for me. We’ve always had such a good working relationship.”

“What makes you think I have any regard for you, you pompous ass? You twitter about the department, despotically improving our lot. You sit in your office like a fly rubbing its front feet together every time that elevator door opens and a woman walks out. You’ve tried to hit on me so many times if I had a nickel for each one I’d be rich by now. And furthermore, Fred Fowler, you’re so aggressively banal that any time spent with you is dreary—totally dreary.”

Immobilized by the torrent, Fred perched in his seat afraid to move even his eyeballs.

“Cat got your tongue, Freddie?”

“You, you’re a man-hater. I knew it. I always knew it. No warmth from you. Bitch Dyke.” He foamed at the mouth.

“Darling, I haven’t the energy to hate men. I’m neutral. You’re a minor irritation. Don’t let your foolish ego blow you up to anything more than what you are, a variety of winged irritant, a fly.”

“Castrator.”

“You have to be willing to get close to men in order to castrate them. I can’t be bothered.”

“I could have you fired. Homosexuality has yet to be condoned by this university.”

“Prove it, Fred. Prove I’m a homosexual.”

At this he faltered. “You are.”

“Yes, I am. I love women. I have always loved women and I always will and it has next to nothing to do with weaklings like you.”

“You said it. You said it. Now I’ve got you.”

“Try it. You lose me and you lose the only professor of international rank you’ve got. And what’s more, Fred, what does the name Sheila Dzuby mean to you? Or Nan Schonenfeld? Priss Berenson? Oh, the list could go on for ages. You have an unerring instinct for young women whose grade averages need a transfusion, you fastidious vulture. You’re in no-man’s land. Nan came to me in tears last semester over you. Sheila wanted to report you to the president. You push your luck and see what happens when the sweet young things you’ve seduced step forward and blow the whistle.”

Ashen-faced, Fred rose. His hands trembled and a thin bead of sweat shone on his upper lip. “Why don’t we forget this whole unfortunate incident?”

“Fine with me. But one small thing: if I ever hear of you pressuring a student again I’ll kick you so hard you’ll wear your balls for earrings.”

He gulped and slipped out the door. The confrontation shook her too but she didn’t know it until Fred left the room.

Even though that slimy creep has been put in his place doesn’t mean this thing is over. Who knows how many other people in the department read it? Well, I don’t have to worry about Roger; he and Bob Kenin are gay. That leaves four. I might as well be brave about this and get the whole damn thing over with. She went to the tiny office kitchen, took a coke out of the refrigerator, then walked back and knocked on Marcia Gahagan’s door. Besides Roger and Bob, Marcia was the only other professor in the department she cared about.

“Come on in.”

“Marcia …”

“Sit down, Carole. I heard the whole thing. You forget our offices are next to each other. I’m glad you finally nailed the bastard.”

Tears came into Carole’s eyes. She didn’t want to cry but Marcia’s hearty response was so needed and so unexpected. Marcia got out of her seat and gave Carole a kleenex.

“Thanks. Lord, I surprise myself. If anyone had told me I’d react the way I did to Fred then come in here and cry I’d have told her she was crazy. I don’t know. Something snapped.”

“Carole. For the record, I’ve known you were a lesbian for a long time and that’s your business. There were times when we’d give parties and when I’d ask you I wanted to say, ‘Bring your friend,’ but I didn’t and I’m sorry I didn’t. It’s silly to be awkward about these things when we’re adults. Please forgive me for not being a friend to you a long time ago.”

“Thank you.” Carole, stunned, reached out to shake her hand and Marcia took it and gave her a good hug.

“Fred won’t dare move. I think you’re safe.”

Carole laughed while wiping her eyes. “I know. I can’t bear the gossip that damn article will stir up so I thought I’d go to the other members of the department who don’t know and just lay the whole thing to rest.”

“Prof. Stowa is so old he’ll think you’re talking about translating Sappho so you can cross him off. I doubt if the others read that paper and if they do they’ll give out some hint and then you can say whatever it is you have to say.”

“Sage counsel. Is that clock on your desk on time?”

“Should be.”

“I’m five minutes late for class. Thank you again, Marcia.”

Carole ran out to the elevator and noticed that Fred had his door closed. The first fruits of victory, she thought.

“That’s amazing,” LaVerne gasped when Carole finished her story.

“I can’t get over Marcia,” Adele chimed in. “Familiarity breeds consent.”

“Are we keeping score tonight?” LaVerne questioned.

“Love is taking the good with the bad.” Carole lifted her palms to heaven.

“And that was a good one. Come on, you two, give me a little credit.”

“The funny thing is I feel as though a weight is lifted off my back. I have to give Ilse credit. She was right about coming out.”

“Ideally, that should be an individual decision. You had a little help,” LaVerne stated.

“You would have had all kinds of help if you’d wanted it. BonBon planned to march down there dressed to hold up traffic as well as a bank and accuse Fred of white slaving,” Adele chuckled.

Lester, on the word white, screamed, “Bwana, White Devil.”

“Telling me. It took me twenty minutes on the phone to calm her today. She turned out to be more upset than I was.”

“It’s too bad Ilse couldn’t be here. We could all celebrate your day together,” LaVerne mentioned.

“We can celebrate on the twenty-ninth when we pick her up from work.”

“Adele, you could give me one little hint.”

“Go on, give her a teaser.”

“Okay. September twenty-ninth is Cervantes’ birthday. He was born in 1547. That’s a big hint. I’m not telling you another thing.”

Huddled on the stoop sat Ilse, knees tucked under her chin.

“What are you doing out here?”

“Waiting for you. Anyway, it’s such a beautiful night I thought I’d sit out and try to remember what the stars look like.”

“How did the meeting go?”

“Terrific. We decided what had to be done and that was that. Then we got into bigger issues.”

“Well, what did you decide?”

“That’s our secret.”

Opening the door to her apartment freed Louisa May who padded down the steps and then bounded back up again.

“Will you sue?”

“Our lawyer talked to them today and they’re a little uptight. I’m pretty sure they’ll agree to either an apology or an article. But after that business we got into such exciting stuff. Now that Olive’s gone people are really talking to each other. We started out trying to define the group and then narrowed it down to the fact that maybe we’d better define ourselves first, you know?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, women have always been without an identity, without a self. We’ve only been functions, service functions, like a mother or a wife or a secretary. That kind of shit. So if the movement is going to get anywhere fast we have to help women become who it is that they are. See?”

“I always knew who I was. I think you’re confusing heterosexual women with women who know they have to earn their own living and who aren’t going to get status off of being Mrs. So and So.”

“Huh?”

“You can’t lump everyone together like that.”

“Well, but you have to admit the search for identity is a very real and painful search.”

“Bullshit. It’s all made up.”

Ilse got riled. “What do you mean bullshit? People have to find out who they are. Why do you think there’s so much misery in this country?”

“There’s misery in this country because most Americans haven’t bowed to the nonescapability of causality.”

“What?” Ilse squeaked in disbelief.

“People are like children. They don’t understand their actions have reactions.”

“That’s got nothing to do with identity!”

“Oh, yes, it does.”

“I’m missing a connection somewhere. I don’t see that at all.”

“Let me think a minute to see if I can explain it better.”

Ilse got up and went to the kitchen. “You want anything?”

“A Coke with ice. You know once in a giddy mood I thought ice was the past tense of water. I love that thought.”

Ilse didn’t see the humor in it if there was any. “Uh huh.”

“Let me try it this way, back to identity. Americans believe you can start all over again. That’s the whole idea behind upward mobility or downward mobility which is more to the point for your generation. People want to believe they can wipe their past off the books. Experience isn’t shared, it’s cut off at the roots. It’s lunacy to think your past doesn’t bear on your present. In a way that’s not accepting the consequences of your actions even if those actions, like where and what you were born, weren’t under your control. Does that make sense?”

“It makes sense but you see I think women have to forget the past. We have to be reborn and reject all the old values that kept us subservient.”

“So you’re advocating an ahistorical movement which means you’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Ilse, be reasonable. You can ask people to transform themselves but you can’t ask them to reject what they were without adding to their self-hatred.”

“No. Women have to make themselves new.”

“Well, honey, I just don’t see it that way.”

“How can you, you’re still stuck back in the Middle Ages? What the hell does the Middle Ages have to do with today?”

“A lot, my dear, a lot. Especially for women.”

“This I got to hear.”

“The whole idea of courtly love gave women a kind of spiritual power they hadn’t known. Men believed the irresistable power of gentleness and beauty, woman, could tame even the most savage beasts. That’s why the last of the Unicorn tapestries is so lush. The unicorn was thought to be a ferocious beast—I think it was a symbol for male brutality even if they didn’t know it—and here is the unicorn in the lady’s lap. She tamed him. And then there’s the little problem of the Crusades. Men were away for years, if indeed they ever came back, so women often became lords of the castles and they performed many formerly masculine duties. The merchant class was beginning to stir. The women worked as hard as the men building the business up. In those days who could afford to stay home? The Church remained violently anti-woman and still is, but secular life was changing. It may not seem significant to you, but you’re the direct result of it, far away as it may seem.”

“So, it’s interesting. It’s not compelling. I want to get back to this reborn thing. Why should I reclaim my past? Why should I identify with my mother or my father? I reject everything about them. I’m a new person.”

“Are you? Isn’t your rigidness in denying them the identical rigidness they show to you and your ideas? You’re the other side of the same coin and you’d better come to terms with it or you’re going to destroy the very thing you care the most about, your movement.”

Now Ilse was worried. She feared some dark dragon was about to lumber out from the cave of her subconscious. “You have to be more specific.”

“Ilse, you can’t be what you aren’t. You’re not a poor woman. You weren’t raised in poverty. You can’t go around pretending. I’m not saying you should run back to your mother and play a quick set at Longwood Cricket Club, I’m saying you are more useful to your movement by embracing your background than by rejecting it. Believe me. I spent close to a decade trying to pretend I was an aristocrat. If you say to other women, ‘Look, this is what I came from and look how I changed,’ then women from that same background will listen to you. And other women might listen too because you’re being honest instead of playing poor. If you are reborn what good does it do any of us if we don’t know what you were before? You see, you’re denying the very power of your movement. You’re cutting off your roots and leaving out the eucharist.”

“Carole, I’m not too good at religious terms.”

“You aren’t transmitting to people what it is that changed you. You’re not sharing, not giving communion, not communicating that process. Without the process you look very one-sided and very easy to disbelieve.”

“I have to think about all this. I can’t trust you … I mean, I’m always afraid you’re trying to belittle my work because you’re not in the movement slugging it out and trying to organize. It’s hard for me to trust you.”

“Ah, so you can’t trust anyone who isn’t exactly like you are?”

“I … Carole, you get me backed into corners. I don’t know, maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s what I’m doing even though I say the opposite. But it’s hard to trust women who aren’t actively involved in the movement.”

“I’m getting involved but in my own way.”

“Yeah, but that’s what we keep coming back to. People can’t go off in their orgies of individualism saying, I’m making the revolution in my own way. For christ’s sake, Carole, that leaves the pigs in control of everything.”

“I grant you that, but right now there isn’t an organization or a project that speaks to me. Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been earning my own way for over twenty-five years now. If something touches me I’ll move. Look, I came out today at work because of that damn article.”

“You did?”

“Yes, I laid Fred Fowler out to whaleshit.”

“I never heard that before.”

Carole laughed. “Let’s say I’m being true to my roots. I put him over a barrel.”

“Will you lose your job?”

“No, I’m one of the lucky ones on that count.”

“Carole, I’m really impressed.”

“Me, too. People do hear what you say, Ilse, but it takes time and you can’t rob me of my individuality by saying, ‘Do it this way or you’re not one of us!’ ”

“Carole, I can’t buy that. I mistrust the individual thing so much. That’s how we’ve been kept from each other. Every oppressed group is told to bargain with the Man for it’s little tidbits. We’re told we’re individuals, we make it on our own. We have to band together or we’re weak.”

“I know that much but you can’t band people together by telling them to act alike. You know that. It’s the idea that has to be shared and certain agreement on projects or whatever. Then people will act on that according to who they are.”

“Dammit, that’s my point. Women don’t know who they are. We are the only oppressed group that has to give people an identity. We didn’t live in ghettos, we were kept in the oppressor’s house. We have to build those bonds between each other. Our community was destroyed ten thousand years ago.”

“And I insist you keep fuzzing the line between straight women and lesbians.”

“There are a lot of lesbians in the movement who don’t know who the hell they are either.”

“And they’re young. Let them go out and earn their living, they’ll find out a lot very fast.”

“It’s not that simple. We have to build an identity on women’s values not on men’s.”

“Jesus christ, Ilse, you can’t base salvation on a gene pool. Look at the trouble it brought the Jews.”

“Women are different from men and now we have to put each other first.”

“I agree. But don’t fall into a congenital trap and say we’re born different which really means better, right?”

“Right.”

“If you exclude men and give them no hope because there isn’t anything they can do about it, they’ll kill you—out of fear as much as out of hatred.”

“That I believe.”

“You have to appeal to the mind, to the heart. Don’t judge people by their bodies. You have to ask men to become woman-identified, to find and reclaim women’s values. I told you, there was a murmur in that direction in the Middle Ages. You can’t declare men irrelevant. And I’m not saying most of them aren’t complete assholes but you have to give them a chance. That’s a damn sight more than they ever gave us.”

“Well, I’m not working with them.”

“Don’t blame you. But twenty years from now or thirty years from now enough of them may be women-identified so there can be solidarity, as you say.”

“You’ve got a sharp mind, Carole. It’s too bad you’re not actively in the movement.”

“Ilse, I’ve told you a hundred times I hate politics. I’ll do what I can do in my field. Or maybe someday I can vote for you.”

“Great, that’s all I need: my revolutionary fervor dissipated in an electoral illusion.”

“I don’t understand the mechanics of all that, the difference between revolution and election. Maybe they aren’t as far apart as you think. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is someday if we women are called upon to act in unison, I’ll do it but I’m not going to organize it or write papers or whatever.”

“I am.”

“Good. I respect you for it.”

“And I can’t see a way around giving women new selves.”

“Maybe we’re purposefully missing each other.”

“I’m mad because you discount identity like some grand madam. Maybe it isn’t a problem for you because you’re forty-four, but it sure is for most of the women I know.

“Ilse, not you, not anybody can set out in search of themself. You can’t construct some psychological cathedral. If you do that, well, you ruin whatever it is that’s you. If you take cognizance of your identity then you detach yourself from you. You become a spectator to your own life. That’s insane. You trap yourself in words. If you sit around thinking about yourself, what you’re doing is talking to yourself in English. The language itself will alter you. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how this happened so fast. When I was a kid no one ever worried about who they were. You worried about what you were going to do—doctor, lawyer, Indian Chief, that kind of thing—but my god, we never called ourselves into question. And we didn’t listen that much to what people said. We watched what they did. Life was immediate. We didn’t have to filter everything through the interior mind at work. I can’t understand what’s wrong with people today. How can anyone possibly think they are going to solve their identity? I swear, self consciousness is original sin.”

“Like I said, I have to think about all this.”

“Me, too. I feel like we wandered all over the map. Ilse, I don’t want to fight with you. I care about you. I’d just like to enjoy the time we have together. Let go. You don’t have to carry the entire women’s movement every minute of every day.”

“I don’t know. I feel responsible. I feel I can make a difference and get us on the right track. I feel like I don’t even want to sleep. I want to go at it every second.”

“You have to relax or you’ll be like a vein reducing itself to capillaries. You’ll vanish. Besides, people need outside stimulus, relaxation; that’s what enriches our work.”

“I don’t know.”

“You won’t know until you stop working out of guilt.”

“Guilt! What have I got to feel guilty about?”

“Look, I’m sorry I said it. Can’t we fall into bed and make love any more without ranging off into some deep discussion?”

“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me about this guilt thing.”

“Okay. I think you do believe in this cause. And a big part of you is working for good reasons but a small nagging part of you is guilty, that’s why you don’t relax. Stop trying to even the score. You were born with money. That’s not your fault. Make use of it, don’t deny it. Anyone who puts you down for your birth is full of shit—whether they’re poor or rich themselves. It’s what you do with your life that’s important, not what you couldn’t help—your sex or your color or money. You deserve respect for what you’re doing, not condemnation because you were born with a lot of advantages. Look at all the rich people who do nothing with their lives. So be proud of yourself.”

“I think I have a lot to learn, Carole. And I’m sorry I seem to learn by fighting with you. I don’t know why I do that and I want to stop but I know I’ll do it again.”

“I did it too. I used to fight with my parents all the time and pick on my friends at school. We all do it. It’s easier to call the other person an idiot than to look at our own blunders. Don’t be so serious, honey; come on. Let’s go to bed.”

Carole put her hands on Ilse’s face and kissed her. The young woman threw her arms around her neck and held her for what seemed like ten minutes. Then they took a shower and quietly went to bed making love like dreamers in a river, borne by the current rather than simple desire.

LaVerne stood in front of the bird cage coaxing Lester with bits of dried apricot.

“Lester, come on now. Piss, shit. Say it.”

Unfurling his headdress he waddled back and forth on his branch clucking and turning his head nearly upside down to see if the other birds were noticing. The mynah, wildly interested in the fruit, said, “It’s the real thing,” and that set Lester off for fear he’d be overshadowed. LaVerne gave the mynah a piece of fruit and Lester practically molted on the spot.

“Come on, Lester, snap to it. Do it for Aunt LaVerne. Piss, shit …”

Lester puffed out his white breast, “Piss, shit, corruption, snot. Twenty-four dupers tied in a knot. Apeshit, batshit, fuckaroo. All you girls lay down and screw!”

“LaVerne, are you in there with that bird again?”

“We’re having a meaningful conversation.”

“Since when is ‘apeshit, batshit’ meaningful?”

Just then, Lester uttered quite distinctly, “Each against all.”

Adele exasperated, “What the hell is that?”

“That’s the Twelfth Commandment, sweetheart.”

Throwing her hands to heaven, Adele pleaded, “Why me, God, why me?”

LaVerne answered in a deep voice, “Because you piss me off.”

“That joke is so old it’s got gray hairs. You spend more energy teaching that damn Lester dirty things to say. We’ll never be able to give a party. Plus the mynah’s picking it up.”

“These birds learn faster than half the kids did in my third grade class,” LaVerne noted.

“Just goes to prove that we humans are highly overrated.”

“Do you need any help?”

“No, I’ve got most of it under control. The damn car rental place won’t let us use BonBon as a chauffeur. I can’t decide whether to rent someone’s private Rolls or whether to do without Bon as the driver.”

“Will she be upset if she doesn’t drive?” LaVerne asked.

“I don’t think so. As long as she’s in on some of the fun she doesn’t care in what capacity.”

“That’s good. Decided what you’re going to wear?”

“That clingy thing you gave me. I think it’s the soul of the 1930’s. What about you?”

“Give me five minutes and I’ll show you. Don’t follow me in the room. Let me surprise you and if you don’t like it then I can change to something else.”

LaVerne raced into the bedroom and closed the door. Lester was crawling up the side of the cage then swinging by his bill. Apricots brought out his athletic nature. Lester adored Adele and she fussed over him while waiting for LaVerne. He liked to stick his tongue out at her and she’d pretend to grab it. Then he’d say, “Pretty boy,” and nod his head up and down. LaVerne opened the bedroom door and appeared in a pale yellow chiffon dress with a broad brimmed hat. She walked right out of the twenties.

“Honey, where’d you come out?”

“The Cotton Bowl.”

“Gorgeous. Stunning. That is so gorgeous. Really, you look like a debutante on her way to the final bash. And that yellow makes your skin glow. Damn, now I don’t know what to wear.”

“Adele, I thought you were going to wear the blouse I gave you?”

“Well, I was but I’m outclassed. I have to think of something better.”

“Let’s go through the closet and use our imaginations.”

After an hour and a half of combinations Adele decided upon a blood red jumpsuit with wide legs and a wide black sash. She also decided to use the regular Rolls rental.

A shining highhat Rolls picked up Adele and LaVerne promptly at seven p.m. On the way over to Carole’s they fiddled with all the gadgets in the back then stared regally out the windows and enjoyed watching people crane their necks to see who could be in the car. As the car glided to a halt in front of Carole’s, Adele told the driver to honk the horn. What could be more perfect, she thought, than to have your date beep for you? She was sorry she hadn’t remembered to buy furry dice to hang on the rear view mirror. The door opened and Carole froze on the steps. Adele rolled down the window and yelled, “Get your ass in here, Mary, we’ve got a full itinerary.”

Carole dazzled in a floor length gown. Simply cut, it had a plain round neck, tight long sleeves, and a line that followed her body. The deep midnight blue was electrified by a half magenta sunburst that started at the collar on her right side and one ray ran in an ever thinning line down her right sleeve, the other rays beamed through the dark blue body. She carried no purse and when she bent her tall figure over to get into the car, Adele said, “See, LaVerne, I told you. Royalty never carries money.”

“I have it in my shoe along with my Virginia state driver’s license which I’ve faithfully renewed since I was sixteen.”

“Carole, that is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It’s perfect for you. Where did you ever buy it?” LaVerne stroked the fabric.

“One day I was looking through old costume books … I think the fashions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were so magnificent and I got the idea to design this dress. Since you and Adele have been after me to bedeck myself, I took it to a designer friend of mine at Vera’s and she did it. Her work is exquisite.”

“Driver, to McDonald’s on 70th and Second Avenue,” Adele directed.

“Adele?” LaVerne couln’t believe her ears.

“We’re going to load up on shit food and eat it on our way to the theater. I’ll bet you never ate a Big Mac in the back seat of a Rolls.”

The driver double parked between 70th and 69th right in front of McDonald’s and Adele, after taking everyone’s order, rushed in. People came out of the place to look at the car. Just as many stayed in to look at Adele. She came out and crawled in the car, calling out orders like a curb waitress. “Wait a minute. Just wait before you expose one of those burgers. LaVerne, reach back and give me the towels. There now, cover yourselves in the towels because I don’t want you to slop food all over yourselves. Okay, on to the theater.”

As they pulled up in front of an off-Broadway theater that must have been an old burlesque house, Adele warned the driver under no circumstances to throw away their McDonald’s litter.

“Man of La Mancha,” a big hit in the middle sixties, was being revived. Even the theater’s immediate past seemed a better risk than the present. Most producers had lost their courage. Regardless of the reason the play was preferable to the latest 1916 revival lighting up Broadway. As it was Cervantes’ birthday, Adele considered the play’s reappearance a stroke of good luck.

After the play, Adele ordered the driver to head for the Plaza.

“What are you up to now? The play was enough,” Carole exclaimed.

The great hotel loomed into view, an expensive relic, holding court at the southeast end of Central Park. As the gleaming car pulled around the white fountain, the doorman anticipated their stop, expecting perhaps baggage or at least the emergence of the occupants who would then disappear into one of the overpriced eateries. A Rolls has a magnetic quality: once again people waited on either side of the red carpet to see what celebrity would come forth and reveal some fatal flaw, a sagging bustline perhaps or an obvious toupee.

With the air of one who regularly deals with the rich, the doorman in his phony Prussian uniform opened the door.

Adele stuck her face out and said, “Hi, you all. We just dropped by,” and dumped all the McDonald’s Big Mac wrappers, french-fry holders, milkshake containers, and dirtied napkins right there at his feet. The fellow let go of the door in horror—this was as ghastly as the assassination at Sarajevo—and Adele unceremoniously stretched out a blood red arm and closed the door. The driver floored it and they barrelled down Fifth Avenue, the three women roaring from the spectacle.

“Adele, whatever possessed you to do this?”

She looked at Carole and LaVerne and said, wiping moisture from her eyes, “I came to the conclusion that most people give up their dreams by calling them fantasies. All that’s left of their lives is a dusty survival in old telephone directories. Once in a great while we have to let fly or we atrophy. So I’m making one evening the way I want it.”

“You know, you’re right, honey. If people have surrendered their dreams then they’re keeping up with the Joneses who can’t keep up with themselves.”

“Ah, so tonight is a night of destiny,” Carole laughed.

“Let’s hope we don’t meet our destiny on the road. Driver slow down up there,” Adele commanded.

“Where are we going now?” LaVerne questioned her.

“Wait and see. The unexpected keeps the human race from stagnation.”

“There she is laying down those heavy lines of life.” LaVerne squeezed Adele’s elbow.

Rumbling down the pitted streets of the Manhattan bridge, the car seemed to the riders to be able to keep them safe from the desolation of the lower East Side. They crossed over the bridge and the driver took a side street into Brooklyn Heights, depositing them as close to the Promenade as possible. From there they could view all of Manhattan, a dark honeycomb dotted with lights.

“The buildings look like a Titan’s dominos,” Carole remarked.

“I can never gaze at this city without a sense of awe. It’s the best and the worst,” followed LaVerne.

“I always think of it as the altar of corporate vision … the city that money built. I wonder, if an ancient Mayan could see it, what would she think?”

“Especially if she had to go to the bathroom. Ever notice how Americans build cities with absolutely no regard for how our bodies function?” LaVerne said.

“That’s because we live amid the remains of architectural imagination, Vern. This is the city of post-human reference.”

“That may be so but I think LaVerne is trying to tell us she has to relieve herself,” Adele noted.

“You mean the Rolls doesn’t have a built-in bathroom?”

“This is as good a time as any to head for our next stop where such matters can be attended to.”

The next stop was a gay bar on Sheridan Square, the Queen’s Drawers. As usual people stopped to see who would be getting out of the car. Adele led the procession like a secular cardinal. She didn’t especially like the bar but where else could they go? She hadn’t the money to rent Roseland. As it was she had to bribe the manager to put a few unusual records on the juke box. “The Blue Danube” was not often heard at places like this. BonBon and Creampuff held down a table near the dance floor. They applauded when the threesome approached like gradations of the rainbow.

“Where’s the Pope?” BonBon bellowed on seeing Adele.

“Punching holes in prophylactics so there’ll be more Catholics,” Adele answered.

They seated themselves, ordered drinks, and caught up on who did what, when, and to whom.

“Where’s Maryann?” LaVerne asked Bon.

“When last seen she was heading west on a tricycle with a flat.”

“Yeah,” Creampuff added, “she went to Chicago for an audition but she’ll return next weekend. She sends her love on Quixote’s birthday. Isn’t that what you’re celebrating?”

“Sort of,” Carole agreed.

“Jesus, listen to that music: Palm Beach mortuary style. After this dance they’ll have to take a body count,” BonBon grumbled.

“ ‘Ritual Fire Dance’ isn’t on the box. Think you’ll manage?” Adele teased.

“Better than ‘Camptown Races.’ ”

Creampuff stopped the conversation with, “Did you hear Pat Smith’s friend died today? She choked to death on a chicken bone.”

“Ha,” BonBon interjected, “that old dyke swallowed a fur ball.”

LaVerne, shocked, admonished her, “How can you say such a thing?”

“Because it’s true. That old broad did so much muff diving we should have bought her scuba equipment. Anyway, I hated her.”

“Whatever for?” Carole asked. “She run out of oxygen on you?”

“No, she sold us a fake early American painting and she did it on purpose. If she’d have asked for the money we’d have given it to her but she made a fool out of us, dammit.”

“Are we going to see the Rolls Royce?” Creampuff changed her own subject.

“Sure, when we leave,” Adele told her.

“Next thing I know, Dell, you’ll buy an estate on the Hudson River, you’re getting such expensive tastes—like the landed gentry,” Bon sniffed.

“I’m starting my own back-to-the-land movement,” Adele replied, “and buying cemetery plots.”

Carole laughed. “That’s right. My mother always told me, ‘Buy land; if there’s a war you can fill in the potholes.’ ”

BonBon, slightly out of joint, went back to the faults of the departed. “She used to masturbate on chairs. God knows how she did it. Maybe I’m dumb or missing something. Anyway, the first time I was ever in her house I had to ruthlessly stifle an urge to wiggle on all the chairs to see if it works. Besides that she wore prison matron shoes. I could never look down at her feet without thinking of the time Creampuff and I landed in the pokey for lewd conduct.”

Adele whispered to Carole, “I don’t know why but picking up pieces of Bon’s diatribe reminds me of the men who were arrested for exposing themselves in the snake cage at the Bronx Zoo. Remember when the papers carried that story?”

“Was your Big Mac laced with opium?”

Creampuff spiced Bon’s tale about the jail: “… even when she was parked she was a moving violation, that’s what the pigs said, the fuckers.

“Let’s dance.” Carole motioned for everyone to get up and shut up.

However, dancing produced a high-octane reaction in BonBon. She became Motor Mouth. “Did I ever tell you how we got out of the business?” And before waiting for a reply she launched away, “Creampuff and I were working at the King of Clubs down in D.C. Oh, D.C. was a hot strip-town back then—all covered by the cops, of course. All those government types used to come and jerk off as soon as they’d hear the first drum roll. Creampuff’s specialty was the slow peel.” Creampuff demonstrated to the applause of the onlookers. BonBon continued, “Drove the rednecks bananas. My big number was a take-off of Sally Rand and her fans. Top billing, and the costume …”

Creampuff interrupted. “You shoulda’ seen her. She wore a long black wig put up in a French twist. Elegance. Her costume, such as it was, was emerald green to accent her eyes and her spike heels made her as tall as Carole Hanratty.”

BonBon regained the floor by upping her volume. “That’s important now. Remember spike heels back in 1956? For a year or two there was a fad of steel high heels figuring they wouldn’t wear out as fast as that cardboard crap they passed off as shoes. Used to do my routine to the ‘Ritual Fire Dance.’ Drove them wild. Absolutely wild. Well, the King of Clubs had light sockets on the stage floor. Lots of old stages do, ya know. So it was twelve midnight. Creampuff slithered off the boards and I was shivering in the wings waiting for my cue. The music starts, you’ve all heard that beginning.”

In case they hadn’t, Creampuff hummed the tune and supplied the drum rolls. Adele fought valiantly to choke back an explosive laugh as her voice wiggled up and down on the high notes and Creampuff couldn’t resist a little hip action when she made a boom sound. Carole couldn’t look at Adele or they would have squealed like grade school kids looking at a picture of genitals.

“Beautiful, honey,” BonBon said in a firm voice.

Creampuff kept on adding more and more English to her drum rolls.

Her voice somewhat sharper, “Beautiful, honey. They all remember the song now. The footlights came up and the spot picked me up as my leg kicked out in front of the curtain. The boys dug that. Really dug it. Legs were important then. Now it’s all tits and teeth. Was I hot that night. Could do no wrong. Yes, I was the Jane Russell of strip. Well, honeys, right in the middle of my number I stepped in a light socket and the juice hits me so hard my wig flies off into the audience and I can’t move! Ya know electricity holds you. I hung there on that socket, my heel stuck in it, vibrating like I had St. Vitus’s dance. The boys went wild. Those asswipes thought it was part of the show. They’re whistling and throwing money and shouting ‘Hot Mama’ and who knows what else. I was so scared I didn’t know whether to shit, run, or go blind. I’d a died out there if Creampuff hadn’t run over to the board and thrown all the switches.”

“I saw my baby out there being electrocuted and I want to tell you I took off like a shot. Knocked down the stage manager, a greasy old fart who weighed three-fifty if he weighed a pound, charged to the switches right behind the curtain there, and hit everything at once. The house went dark and the guys musta’ been creaming in their supporters because they thought by now she was in the altogether. I ran out there on the stage and threw my silk sequined cape over BonBon who couldn’t speak, my god, she was half-fried. We’d been together for about four years then and I thought I was losing the only person in the world who made life worth living. I was bawling and sobbing and stroking her forehead, telling her I loved her and she’d pull through. I promised Jesus my G-string and Virgin Mary my pasties. Management kept the lights down, of course. Imagine if those sock jocks found out most of us chippies were queer? I don’t know when the ambulance came but I hit the attendant over the head when he tried to keep me out of the back and I crawled in, in full drag mind you, sparkles all through my hair to say nothing of the feathers, and I held Bon’s hand the whole way. I didn’t care who knew.” Creampuff finished out of breath with the violence of her recalled emotion. “That was that,” Bon picked up the thread. “I figured the Good Lord was trying to tell me something so I quit the business and opened my antique shop up on 62nd and Second. Business has been good to us and we have a lovely apartment and the house in the Pines.”

What BonBon didn’t tell was that even in the hospital after the shock she kept her nails long, teased her hair, and put on a full face by noon promptly. She began to see shadows in her mirror when putting on her Revlon nonsmear mascara. BonBon became convinced there were spirits in the room. Not hostile ghosts but spirits trying to tell her something about what to do with her life. Since that time she developed into a closet mystic. Only Creampuff knew how deeply she felt about astrology and the occult. Her friends had the faintest whiff of it when she asked their signs, rising and so forth. Carole told her she was a Sagittarius with temperatures rising but BonBon wheedled her birth date and place out of her and discovered Carole to be a Sagittarius with Libra rising. Adele was an Aries with Libra rising. Bon kept their charts yearly and silently nodded to herself whenever they confirmed her computation by some significant action like the purchase of a painting or catching the flu. But her own life remained a mystery to her and Bon could never quite be sure why she was put on earth. She decided her mission was to bring joy to her friends and quietly watch over their fortunes like an ancient Aztec scanning the stars.

Bon chattered on, punctuated by Creampuff’s laughter. They never tired of one another. The other inhabitants of the bar, while not exactly spring chickens, were a good deal younger than the dancing group. They stared at the dancers. Their manners and their elegant clothes gave the impression that the older women were slumming. Such women rarely visited the Queen’s Drawer where New Jersey meets the Bronx and lives happily ever after, where the toilets overflowed each night at midnight, and where Marijane Kerr, an old barfly known to all lesbians, had personally painted the plunger with the word Ladies in jungle-red nail polish.

How incongruous that they should be in here and after such a night. But then Adele believed in the sovereignty of the incongruous. Checking her watch hidden under her sleeve, she whispered to Carole that it was time to pick up Ilse from Mother Courage.

As they pulled up in front of the restaurant Ilse was in the doorway shouting at a persistent man. They rolled down the windows and the fragrance of cheap wine hit them in the face. He couldn’t walk too well either. There he stood lurching in the doorway while Jill Ward, in a purple undershirt that displayed well-developed arms, quietly moved over to back up Ilse. Two angry faces were too much for him but he managed to garble at full volume as he stumbled off, “Juss what do you women want, anyway?”

“Colorado,” Ilse barked. She noticed the car as he staggered away.

Adele called out, “Greetings, salutations, and all other forms of hello. Get in, we’ll take you both home.”

Jill, laughing, with her hands on her hips, answered, “No thanks. I’m waiting for Dolores to pick me up.”

Ilse, amazed, came over to the car and looked at Carole.

“What the hell is this?”

“Adele’s surprise. Surprised? We’ve been off tilting windmills. Come on.”

“I can’t be seen riding in this thing.”

“Then lie on the floor,” Adele told her flatly.

Reluctantly Ilse climbed in and hunched on the floor. Not much was said on the way home. Carole embraced Adele and LaVerne as she and Ilse arrived at the well-kept brownstone apartment building.

“Thank you for the unexpected.”

“My pleasure.” Adele kissed her.

As they drove off LaVerne said, “Looks like a fight.”

“Yep.”

Adele pulled her favorite wing chair over to the glass doors in front of the garden. She often liked to sit up late reading, writing, or puzzling in the rare silence of the night. LaVerne woke up each day at seven whether she had to go to work or not. They adjusted over-time to each others internal time clock. Adele would wake up somewhere between ten and eleven and, if it was Saturday or Sunday, LaVerne greeted her with a hot cup of tea as she padded out of the bathroom.

Adele thought, it’s the little things that keep you together. My mother told me that when I used to ask her how she got along with Daddy. I didn’t listen to Mother. Well, I always was a smartass. What was my rallying cry at T.J. High? ‘Yeast in the drain traps. Cherry bomb the toilets.’ Smartass. Should of listened to Mom—would have saved me the heartbreak of my divorce. Funny word, but papers or no papers, divorce is the same. LaVerne taught me the small kindnesses of everyday life that gradually overwhelm a grandiose act of generosity. The tea in the morning, paying attention to my clothes, fussing over me if I put on a pound. Sometimes I think I don’t do as much for Verne as she does for me. I forget sometimes. I do take her out to dinner once a week at least, and movies whenever there’s one we like. I massage her feet when she’s had a hard day. I wonder how I lived before LaVerne? I can’t even remember. Seems like some dim, uncertain fog. She taught me that each day is the only day. I must find beauty in the day, correct a wrong if I can, fulfill my obligations to my friends, my people, even my country. I can never treat a day as cheap or expect there will be another one. LaVerne calls me “the brain” but she’s the one who taught me what’s most important to know. Carole has that but doesn’t transmit it. No, that’s not fair. I’ve never lived with her or perhaps I’d have picked it up. LaVerne’s background isn’t all that far from Carole’s, a little higher up with money. Maybe that knowledge, that gift is something all poor or near-poor people have: the ability to savor the moment, to laugh out loud.

Mom gave me good advice but for a long time I couldn’t listen. Their battle for whiteness, for respectability is almost heroic if it weren’t so sad. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t listen. There they are sitting in St. Louis in that goddamned mansion on that private street. Every two years without fail, Dad buys a Cadillac. To this day I can’t look at a Cadillac without embarrassment. How vulgar. Couldn’t he buy something less gigantic, less Midwestern? And every two years he buys Mother what he calls “a little runabout for my sugar,” usually a small-model Buick. Even the runabout can’t fall into the low-priced three. There they sit surrounded by color televisions in the upstairs and downstairs, a small black and white one in the bathroom, electric can openers, electric carving knives, electric face moisturizers, hot combs, blenders, automatic ice crushers. If it’s new and it’s got a button they buy it. And Daddy’s expensive golf clubs. Mom’s a golf widow. She retaliated by taking up tennis. And what astounds me, what knocks me out is that they’re happy. Or maybe they only think they’re happy. Don’t they know they’re supposed to be miserable? I feel waste amid all the appliances. I have yet to meet two more perversely cheerful people. They’ve made it. They sit among all the things that prove they’ve won. I don’t think they’ve won but they do. I guess that’s what’s important. The crowning blow is they’re Republicans. The next thing I know they’ll throw a sit-down dinner for two hundred: tents and music to honor Sammy Davis, Jr. Well, I guess I’m the snob. They didn’t teach me what I wanted to learn but they gave me my chance. I wouldn’t be where I am now if they hadn’t wanted me to make something out of myself. To go farther than they did. They worship money and I turned to the lost beauties of another time. Verne’s right, I don’t give them enough credit. I developed my so-called refined sensibility even if in reaction because of them. Who the hell am I to sit in judgment of my parents, anyway? Dad buys a Cadillac and I rent a Rolls. How’d I get on this jag?

Is that what fascinates me about the Mayas? We see exquisite temples but how did they feel about their parents? Did a woman bring her friend a drink in the morning? I never felt how pressing was the presence of the dead until I went up eighty-four hundred feet and saw Machu Picchu. There wrapped in clouds sat the fortress city guarded by the Andes standing like sentinels. What a sight! Up to that time my work was the usual blend of curiosity stiffened by pedantry. But after that I was humbled before our ancestors. They’re all our ancestors. And the Mayas were the Inca’s ancestors prefiguring Machu Picchu. I know it’s a cliche but I can’t help falling back on it: we’re a human chain. The dead give to the living and the living must give to each other and we must secure the future for the unborn. The thought comforts me. If I get torn apart in my own time or confused, I at least know I have my place in time. I’m part of this chain. We have a few scraps of Mayan thought. I think the most beautiful is, “Life is a conversation between all living things.” I amend that for myself to include those who went before me and those who come after. Perhaps I was drawn to study these people to learn this. I’m not sure I could have learned it if I remained bound to my own century. I’m an incredibly lucky woman.

She got up with tears in her eyes and tiptoed to the bedroom so she wouldn’t wake up LaVerne.

“A Rolls Royce!”

“Ilse, I had nothing to do with it but if I had I wouldn’t be ashamed of it.”

“For chrissake, a Rolls is the symbol of class oppression. I can’t believe you ignore things like that.”

“A symbol doesn’t equal oppression. My riding in a Rolls Royce doesn’t make me one of the four hundred.”

“Just because you’re not one of them doesn’t mean you don’t identify with them. Don’t you know that’s the secret of American control? The rich get the nonrich to identify with them.”

“You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”

“No, I’m not. The symbols of the rich have no place in my life. I don’t identify with rich people and I don’t want other people to identify with them or to lump me with them either. Gucci or Rolls or whatever, it’s all the same to me: disgusting. How can I ride around in a car like that or wear Tiffany earrings? I can’t believe you can’t see it.”

“I don’t give a damn what other people think.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re above all that. Above the struggle and beside the point.”

“Oh, come on now. This is all out of proportion to the incident. I ride in a fancy car one night and you’ve got me owning all of South America.”

“It’s not trivial. Don’t act so consciously reasonable. That infuriates me almost as much as you riding around in that damn car. It’s patronizing. I’m trying to make you understand that you can’t take these things for granted. It’s a new time. People who ride in big cars are objects of hate these days in a way they never were before. Well, I don’t know about the Depression, I mean how people were emotionally. But from what I can see these things like cars and alligator shoes are no longer neutral things. What you do affects other people in a way you don’t seem to understand.”

“One night in that ludicrous car is hardly going to affect anyone, except you.”

“Well, I’m important. But you’re trying to trivialize again. More people than myself saw you in that car.”

“Ilse …”

“Let me finish. What did Jill Ward think? I can just see this dumb story circulating all through the movement.”

“If your getting in the car is so gossip worthy then the movement sounds to me like a disguised kaffee-klatch.”

Ilse paused and sighed. “Unfortunately, sometimes it leans in that direction. I console myself with the fact that gossip seems to oil the machinery of any political group whether it’s on the Hill or us. Not much consolation though. I guess I want people to act like they should instead of how they do.”

Carole turned on the stereo and Bobby Short sang “So Near Yet So Far.”

“Look, I’ve told you a thousand times, I don’t give a damn what other people think. I want to live my life as I see fit.”

“And I keep telling you that you confuse individualism with independence.”

“Whenever you get on my case I have the distinct impression you want us all in uniform. Hell, I’m beginning to think individuality went out with the French Revolution.”

“Jesus, what are you, campaigning for reactionary of the year?”

“I don’t know. I want out of the shadow of the guillotine.”

“Very cute. And I’m not suggesting we all wear uniforms although it’d give me a certain thrill to see Seventh Avenue fall to pieces. I’m saying we have to have some communality. And we have to have discipline. That’s not the same as saying everyone has to look alike, act alike, think alike. Without community and discipline we’ll stay ineffective fragments or worse, we’ll be obliterated.”

“I’m not a political person. All I want is to be left alone to do my work.”

“You damn sight better become a political person. Things are so bad no one can afford to sit on the sidelines.”

“Ilse, I’ve had about enough of this. Now this is my last word on the subject. First of all, there are no organizations which represent my interests. Nobody wants their queers. Not Blacks, whites, rich, poor, women or men. We’re outcasts. So you’ve organized lesbians. Fine and good except they’re all under thirty. At least all the ones I’ve seen are young. If they’re not under thirty then they’re as downwardly mobile as the postwar generation was upwardly mobile. I’m not going to trade in my Ph. D. for a workshirt and tie-dye jeans. I’m forty-four years old. My interests are different. So you all may be doing something useful. I mean, I know you’re doing something useful but it’s not anything I can participate in. And even if there were a group close to my interests, I might give money but I don’t know if I’d give time. I’m not a joiner. I don’t like being subject to human limitation and when you’ve thrown in your lot with a group that’s exactly what happens. You move at the pace of the slowest instead of the fastest. I’ve got this one fragile life and I have to fight enough things without spending the next three years explaining policy to someone who can’t or doesn’t want to understand it.”

“Our entire society’s falling apart. I can’t understand that you don’t give a shit.”

“Society isn’t falling apart. It never was together.”

“You’re impossible!” Ilse stormed out and slammed the door.

Louisa May rushed to the door but she was late. Carole picked the cat up and kissed her forehead. The buzzer rang.

“It’s me. I forgot my bag.”

Ilse ran up the stairs and Carole handed the gas mask bag to her. She said, “Thank you,” and looked as though she wanted to say more, then gave up on it. Carole quietly closed the door as Ilse walked back down the carpeted stairs. She resisted the impulse to open the street side windows and watch Ilse disappear in the direction of Park Avenue.

Well, it had to happen, she thought to herself. We were two right people who met at the wrong time, that’s all. Or maybe we were two right people who were born at the wrong times. It isn’t that I disavow her cause. I can’t make the same choice she’s made. I don’t know. She allows for no compromises. Surely, there’s such a thing as an honest compromise of thought. Maybe that’s her years. The young are notoriously intolerant although it’s the old that are blamed for it. She doesn’t seem to understand or care that there’s a difference between ideology and the truth. Well, her logic is compelling even if it isn’t always based on reality. No, that’s not fair. I’m not being fair at all. Much of what she says is true. But she jumps off from simple discrimination into an interlocking system of sexism, racism, capitalism, and god knows what else. Maybe it’s all connected but right now I find much of her thinking impermissibly vague. Maybe it’s me. But I can’t take her say-so on faith. If all these things are connected then I need to see those connections. That’s not too much to ask. Any thinking person who isn’t overly political would ask the same question. Just because a woman says something doesn’t mean I’m bound to believe her. I want proof. I’m a rational being. Head before heart. Thank god. If there’s one thing I despise it’s irrationality. That’s really what’s wrong between Ilse and me. She says the same thing over and over again thinking repetition will substitute for proof. Dammit, I’m not taking anything on faith. And I know the women’s movement is young and Ilse is young but they’d both better do their intellectual homework.

Fortified by what she thought was the compelling purity of her own logic, Carole set about straightening up her desk, ignoring the loneliness creeping up on her. Bobby Short’s records were followed by Cris Williamson. The sound of a woman’s voice filling the background increased her loneliness although she was unaware of it.

She marched into her bedroom followed by the two fat cats. Turning down the covers she noticed a pale yellow pubic hair on the white sheet, a reminder of lovemaking past. Christ, how can anyone get sentimental over a pubic hair? She picked it up and went into the bathroom where she threw it in the wastebasket. She washed her face and hands. Dried them and looked into her small three-way mirror as she put on her night cream. She paused, momentarily captured by her own image.

How delicious. Am I going to sit here and gaze at my forty-four-year-old face in an orgy of concern over my ageing equipment? Trite, trite and boring, the confrontation of woman with mirror. How many movies have I seen where the once great beauty goes into a fit looking at herself? For some reason a woman contemplating her face is the equivalent of a man frothing at the mouth about the state of the universe and his own soul. I don’t even think Katharine Hepburn pulled it off in “The Lion in Winter.”

Yet for all her sarcasm she stayed with the smooth reflection. It wasn’t vanity holding her there. A fear gripped her. She feared looking into her own eyes but, prompted by hidden voices, she slowly raised her head full upright and raised her eyes into her own stare. Silence. The pupil widened as though a stone had been thrown in the middle of her blackness. The ripples raced to the unseen. The self retreated under such scrutiny. But what retreat was there in a three-way mirror revealing an infinite regress of self? She couldn’t see the end of her image. She no longer knew what she believed at this moment. And if she no longer knew, who was that in the mirror?

A bag of bones. Yes, a bag of bones. She congratulated herself on her own humor in the loss of self. Or was she so full of self that there was no self? Had she circled and circled her perimeter until she diminished to zero? The joke was short lived and the reflection grew tears. If she no longer knew what she believed or even if she had a self she could still feel. The reverberation of a heartbeat threatened to break her entire delicate structure. Her eyes left the engulfing pupil and followed a tear as it splintered around the corners of her mouth.

Here I am slipping into self doubt. I rarely allow myself to cry. I always wonder am I indulging myself in some exotic melancholy or is it weakness? I’ve always detested tears. How I wanted to strangle Mother when she’d break into those huge, titanic sobs that would shake the house. Tears are traitors. They rob me of my strength. If I hold them back I can hold together. And here I am bawling. I can stand the pain. I just can’t stand to see it. God, if only I could go back where I came from. Then I could haul off and belt Luke or Margaret, steal one of their bicycles, and ride until I couldn’t pedal anymore. The exhaustion purged me of whatever pain or hatred there was. That’s all gone now. I lost it somewhere between eighth grade and ninth, between grade school and high school. The world was lusty red and thunderous black. You knew where you stood. You knew how to fight back or lie and then go do it again. Sweet Jesus, how far have I wandered from my roots that I could be muffled like this? How much have I pushed back, choked, smoothed over in order to win? And I haven’t even won. I shouldn’t quibble with Ilse. For all the petty disagreements, the real reason I fought her was because I don’t want to look at the span of years between eighth grade and now. I want myself back. I want to knock the shit out of someone I don’t like. I want to play kick the can at twilight. I want to laugh without knowing it’s going to stop. I’m so tired. I’m so tired of the people around me, except for Adele. I don’t want to explain anything to anyone. I don’t need a reason. I didn’t need a reason when I was a kid. Chocolate ice cream tasted good. Who cared about calories? We knew each other then. If I looked in a mirror it was to wash my face.

She pushed herself away from the mirror over the sink. And then she slowly crumpled underneath it and had a good cry.

The cold, unimaginative richness of Park Avenue in the seventies and sixties fired Ilse as much as the Rolls Royce. She walked faster then usual, scowling.

I learned my lesson. I repeat the same mistake over and over. It doesn’t work out with a woman who’s not a feminist yet. I keep hoping that it will but the change is too great and the challenge too much for them. The only way they can defend their ego, that piece of them built to survive all the shit, is to disagree with me. This always happens. I keep thinking some woman out there will make the transition without such a hassle. They turn into feminists but first they have to resist you. It’s exhausting. I really don’t want to ever go through it again. Carole will get it together. I know she will. Off my back. I wonder if that’s what happened in other places. You can read all you want but the books never tell how a Chinese peasant changed into a soldier. What happened inside? By this time there are hundreds of thousands of us and we can tell each other what happened but we can’t seem to tell people not with us yet. We try or at least I try and all I get is no. I’m not patient. I just lay it on the line. I’m no good at it. I’ve seen Alice go through this same resistance from people but she’s calm. She holds their hand practically while they cling to their outworn beliefs. Well, I haven’t got that one-to-one talent. And I’m not very attentive. I only want to bother with people when I feel like it even when I love them. When I watch lovers together I always feel like they’re playing hostess to each other. I could never give anyone that suffocating attention. Carole never asked for that. Come to think of it she never asked for much of anything. She has a funny kind of reserve. At first I thought she was some kind of aristocrat. But now I think I like that in her. I could use some of that distance myself. She taught me some valuable things, really. Maybe in time we can be friends or something. There’s too much friction to be lovers but who knows? I did learn from her. What is it she used to tell me when I’d start speed rapping? Oh yeah, “Words are the oil slick on the waters. Integrity holds truth to be more complex than language.” She’s a brilliant woman. Maybe the Buddhists are right. When you’re ready your teacher comes. I think I taught her too. She just doesn’t know it yet.

God, I hate these fucking buildings. They’re inhabited by moral lepers. How can anyone miss the rot here? The few who live off the many. I hate these people. I hate everything they stand for and I hate their Mercedes-Benzes and Rolls Royces. I hate their suntanned cadavers and the sickening smile on their faces. And the women who live here. They’re worse than the pigs they married. Maybe because I expect more of them. Diamonds. They actually wear diamonds on their fingers and ears and over their breasts. If we had all the diamonds located on Park Avenue between 79th and 60th Streets, we could finance rape crisis centers in every major city in this country and probably still have money left over. We’ve got to end their hold on this country. What good are civil rights when they run everything? These people are the enemy. Here and on Fifth Avenue and Grosse Pointe and Brookline and Bel Air and Beverly Hills and wherever they congregate with their fat cars loitering in the driveways like shiny cockroaches.

What few women there were on the streets when Ilse emerged from the subway at Sheridan Square blurred into replicas of Carole. All voices became her voice. She thought maybe Carole hurried down here to apologize. She crossed Grove Street and opened the first door leading into the Queen’s Drawers and nearly got squashed as a party of five barreled out of the second inner door. When she walked inside the place all heads at the bar turned, then resumed conversation. The coat attendant, eager for the small sum each checked coat brought the house, grabbed at Ilse’s light jacket.

“No, I don’t want to check my coat. I’m looking for someone.”

“That’s what they all say but okay, honey.”

The dance floor was occupied but not crammed. After ten minutes of searching Ilse walked back out into Sheridan Square.

It was a dumb idea. If she’s looking for me she wouldn’t go into the bar, she’d go to my house. Hurrying down West Fourth to Twelfth Street she saw a tall woman in front of her. At a slow trot Ilse finally overtook the woman. A fleeting look confirmed her sorrow. She wasn’t Carole.

Embarrassed, she muttered, “Excuse me,” and walked the rest of the way home. No one lurked in front of the building. No one was in the hallway and the courtyard was equally bare. Lucia’s don’t-bother-me banner hung over the balcony. Opening the door to her small cottage revealed that no one had crawled through the window. Ilse closed the door on the last vestige she had of romantic illusion and shuddered. What is it that Alice quotes or did I read it? Scratch a fascist and uncover a romantic. I wonder if it’s true?

The shower lifted her a bit but her stomach was firmly tied in a knot. A dank anger pulled at her. She was mad because Carole didn’t chase after her and she was even more furious at herself for secretly wishing to be chased. Slowly a sense of release untied the knot. She felt low but she felt free—not of Carole but of something, that remaining sliver of romanticism that clouds the truth and softens those hard edges of reality that should push us into action. Ilse fell asleep wondering if she was growing up in spite of herself.

The door flew open and Martin Twanger, a fat sorry looking son-of-a-bitch if ever there was one, jumped under his desk, terrified by the three furious feminists bearing down on him. Twanger, the Village Rag’s hatchet columnist, prided himself on shocking the public. His most famous expose to date was an article “proving” over seventy-five percent of all New York City’s employees had smoked marijuana, and of that number, twenty percent admitted to oral copulation. Twanger thought he was big time. Now he looked more surprised than surprising.

“All right, Twanger, get your fat ass out from under the desk,” Ilse barked.

The white walls covered with push pins, copy, and fingerprints seemed to shudder as much as New York’s fearless boy reporter.

“What are you going to do,” whined a high-pitched voice.

“Cut your balls off, what do you think,” Alice Reardon snarled.

“You’re sick,” Martin managed.

“Right—of you, you hothouse phony. Now get your ass out from beneath that desk.” Ilse landed a furious kick smack on his can.

“I’ll sue, I’ll sue.” The voice was climbing into the soprano register.

“What makes you think you’ll live that long?” Ilse laughed.

According to their scouting, the Village Rag emptied out Thursday at four. People were exhausted by copy deadlines, layouts squeaking in just on time, and the usual chaos of that weekly red-letter day when the Rag made it to press or else. Martin Twanger usually stayed on and the women counted on his solitary vigil with a blue pencil behind his ear for effect.

What they didn’t count on was a noise behind a closed door which opened narrowly then tried to close again. Harriet, along for the fun, grabbed it and pulled it open. Hanging on the door knob was none other than Olive Holloway and a middle-aged man smoking a pipe.

“Join the party.” Ilse motioned them to come in.

“Olive, what an unexpected displeasure,” Alice crooned.

Olive, looking stricken, slunk out, followed by the puffing pipe. As Harriet closed the door she noticed an Emmy standing conspicuously on a cluttered desk. So that’s who it is, she thought, Joshua Chernakov, who did the script for that television special on instant nostalgia: “Where is the Left?” So much for political journalism.

As color returned to Olive’s face, her tongue warmed up as well. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Flushing out a rat,” Harriet answered.

“Now see here, young women, I don’t know what all this is about but can’t you act a little more discreetly? You aren’t going to really beat up Martin, are you?” Joshua spoke.

“Not with my hands, I don’t want to get them dirty.” Ilse glared at the pipe.

Still squeezed under his desk, Martin babbled something inaudible.

“Martin, come out from under there,” Joshua commanded.

“And let these harpies tear me limb from limb? Fat chance.”

“Don’t come out, Martin. I know these women. They’re capable of anything,” Olive warned.

“Really, Olive, this is ridiculous.” Joshua’s voice lowered to give him a more commanding tone.

“Why don’t you both shut up and sit down,” Ilse ordered.

“Young lady, I don’t take orders from the United States government, I won’t take them from you. I was on Nixon’s shit list, you know.”

Ilse walked over and cracked him in the chest. Joshua Chernakov sat down with new respect in his eyes. “Well, now you’re on my shit list, mister.”

“See, see, I told you they’re violent,” Martin moaned, the desk giving his words a mystical reverberation.

“Get out from under there, Twanger,” Alice softly called to him.

“I won’t, I won’t. You can’t make me.”

“Wanna bet?” Alice grabbed one chubby leg. Martin’s white socks flashed like a surrender signal. “Christ, this pig really is a pig. Give me a hand.”

Harriet grabbed the other, equally chubby leg, and they pulled mightily.

Martin held onto the desk legs, tears streaming down his cheeks. At this point he bordered on hysteria and said something garbled but that sounded like, “I’m too young to die, I’m too young to die.”

Ilse, tiring of the intrepid reporter’s melodrama, brought her booted foot down on his left hand with a swift crunch. As he let go, Alice and Harriet pulled as hard as they could and out he came collecting most of the floor’s filth as he slid.

“Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me,” Martin wailed.

Neither Joshua nor Olive made a move to help the stricken man, either out of cowardice or scarcely concealed loathing for a creature both had come to depend on.

“Now sit down and shut up.” Alice threw him in a seat.

“We’re all going to sit here and have a polite conversation. Since Mr. Twanger needs some time to collect himself, let’s start with you, Olive. You here to pick up a payoff for that rotten story you helped write about our group?”

“I don’t have to answer to you.”

“I’d advise it.” Ilse’s anger, cool, was frightening but Olive perhaps thought her female hormones would save her and missed Ilse’s purpose entirely.

“Don’t try to push me around, little Lenin. I’ll get a lawyer as soon as I get out of here.”

“You do that.” Ilse backhanded her with such force Joshua’s left eye began to twitch uncontrollably. “Now what are you doing here?”

With tears in her eyes, Olive whispered in a small voice, “Joshua and I were working out arrangements for me to do a monthly column on the women’s movement.”

“Getting smart aren’t you, Olive?” Alice stared at her. “You’ve learned not to take things in money but in kind. I’m real impressed. How about you, Harriet?”

“Yeah, I’m real impressed.” Harriet moved to get closer to Alice and she reached for Joshua’s arm. Disgusted he picked her hand off his sleeve as though she were a cockroach.

“You too good for her now, Mr. Big?” Ilse sneered at him.

“I don’t have anything to do with your movement battles.”

“That’s not quite true,” Alice stated.

As he was not the center of attention, Martin Twanger made for the door. With two graceful strides Ilse was behind him and darted her right foot around his ankle. Down he went.

“Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me.”

“Shut up, creep.”

As if walking on eggshells he made his way back to his chair.

“Martin, move over here so you can be next to your colleagues.” Alice pulled up a chair next to Olive so she could enjoy his overpowering aroma.

“So you’re above all this, Mr. Chernakov?”

“I didn’t say that. I simply said I have nothing to do with your movement battles. You’re angry at Olive for cooperating with Martin on that unfortunate article. That has nothing to do with me, really.”

“Unfortunate! That was one of my best pieces,” Twanger wailed.

Joshua’s left eye twitched again.

“Well, Mr. Chernakov, I don’t see it your way at all.” Ilse started in on him. “You’ve made a career sucking off the male left, the Black movement, and now you’re going to draw some blood from us. You just sit back in your chair while other people take all the risks and then you pass judgment on it. Yeah, I’ve been checking up on you. My favorite part is that then you go to cocktail parties and parade as a genuine intellectual member of the radical left. Bet the women in Valentino clothing dig it.”

Chernakov sputtered, his face blotched, but Ilse, unable or unwilling to check her contempt, chopped him square in the throat and he gasped, eyes bulging. “That’s a small payment for everyone you’ve ripped off. I wish to hell I could kill you and get away with it.”

Alice put her arm through Ilse’s left elbow and pulled her back gently. “Easy, Ilse, we’ve got work to do here.”

Alice took over. “I do have to hand it to you, Chernakov, you get a flunky like Twanger to write the smear story, you hire so-called reporters to cover each of the movements, preferably everything negative they can lay their hands on, then you write the big picture piece on what’s really wrong with America and the movements and your prose just sings, doesn’t it? Must be quite a strain putting out an essay every two weeks. But you must get quite a nice salary for it, don’t you? Just to show your heart’s in the right place, wouldn’t you like to contribute two thousand dollars to the rape crisis center? You could get your name on the patron’s list. That’d look real good to the cocktail crowd now, wouldn’t it? Show the world what a big guy you are, Joshua, you’re going to take women’s issues seriously, especially this issue.”

Joshua’s eye twitched wildly. Sweat poured over his forehead. He was a man afraid but he was afraid of something more than physical violence. “Yes, yes, I’ll do that.” What was left of his voice after Ilse’s chop cracked over every word.

“Just to make sure you won’t have a change of heart, we’ll check the center next Thursday to see if they’ve received your generous gift,” Ilse added.

He nodded his head painfully. Chernakov’s eyes never met theirs. He seemed to have found oneness with the floor.

Twanger yelped in disbelief, “Josh, what’s wrong with you? So what if they beat us up, we’ll take them to court.”

Head down, Chernakov said, slowly but distinctly, “No, I think there’s already been enough damage. Maybe they’re right. I haven’t taken any risks.”

“Come on!” Twanger exploded. “What do you care what they think? You run the Rag, man. You can blow them out of the water. I mean this is America. We’re the free press.”

“This is America all right and no one is free from your kind of freedom of the press.” Ilse looked at him.

Realizing he overstepped his bounds on two counts, Twanger shrank back in his chair, thoroughly dumbfounded. He was confused which frightened him more than ever.

“I get paid a lot less than Josh, you know. You’re not going to hit me up for money, are you?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Martin Twanger. I think you could make a small contribution to the women’s press collective.”

His face shriveled. “How much?”

“We’ll let you off the hook for five hundred dollars.” Alice nailed it home.

“Five hundred dollars?”

“Be a sport, Twanger, you spend that on grass.”

“Yeah, well so does everyone else in this city.”

“Did I say anything moral about it? But how would you feel if your contact went public, assuming someone muscled him and he had to, you know? New York has some strange drug laws these days and that poor guy could get salted away for years. I bet he’d be real mad at you, Martin.”

“Christ, you all are like the Mafia.”

“Not quite, Martin, not quite. They’ve got money and political power. Right now we’re a little short on both counts but we’re learning, we’re really learning,” Harriet joined in.

“Now about your contribution? Would you like to make it in your name or remain anonymous?” Ilse pressed.

“Uh, anonymous.”

“One other little thing you need to do for us, Martin. You’ll print a retraction of last week’s slam on all counts particularly about my rich ‘keeper,’ ” Ilse quietly requested.

Twanger’s face went beet red. This hurt more than the money. Glancing at Joshua who now had his head in his hands, he thought the better of protest. “All right.”

Olive, last on the list, peered apprehensively at her foes. Harriet continued on the track, “Olive, since you can’t write and since you won’t have access to the women’s movement in the future it doesn’t make much sense for you to put out a column, does it?”

“I’ll do as I please, you haven’t got anything on me.”

Ilse started for her but Alice restrained her.

Harriet faced her down and with something approaching kindness in her voice said, “Olive, no one is going to talk to you and I doubt if Mr. Chernakov can afford to print your inner thoughts on a monthly basis.”

“What do you mean, no one is going to talk to me?”

“Just that,” Harriet countered.

“You don’t run this movement, you can’t muzzle it.”

Ilse, fed up, spat at her. “It’s people like you with the help of the Twangers and Chernakovs of the world that set us against one another. No one is going to talk to you, Olive. Word’s out. No responsible, street-organizing feminist will give you any information or let you in her group. Sure you can talk to the other crazies like yourself but that’s not news unless you want to print it in Psychology Today.”

“You’ll pay for this, Ilse—you, all of you, will pay.”

“What are you going to do? Write a long piece showing how I was trained to be a C.I.A. agent while in junior high school? That’s about your speed.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Good, Olive. You just run up the flag and see who salutes. That will save us all a lot of time in this movement discovering who’s nuts and who isn’t.” Alice sighed, completely disgusted. “I think it’s time we leave these people to their just desserts—after all it is suppertime.”

“Right,” Harriet replied.

As the women left the office, Olive flew off her chair and made for the telephone. Twanger and Chernakov looked dazed.

“You two hungry?” Harriet asked.

“Why don’t we go over to Mother Courage? Since word will get out fast we ought to be where people can find us, calm, you know?” Alice thought out loud.

“Oh, Alice, it’s my night off. I’m there all the time.”

“Discipline, Ilse. Come on, we’ll buy you a pizza and you can eat it in the corner in shame and pray Dolores doesn’t sniff it out. We really ought to be on solid territory and public.”

“You’re right, Alice. You’re always right,” Ilse laughed.

“You are something when you are pissed. I thought you’d kill all three of them.” Harriet laughed as much out of tension as anything else.

Her anger drained her and Ilse felt nothing but exhaustion right then. “H-m-m, well, I’d have killed them if I could.”

“Better not say that publicly in case any of them ever winds up dead, m’dear,” cautioned Alice.

“Didn’t Twanger and Olive make a pair though. Those two just go together,” Harriet smirked.

“Yeah, like gin and seconal.”

“Alice, you have a sharp tongue in your head. I never would have known.”

“Well, usually I think it, I don’t say it. Now Carole, she says it, that’s why I like her.”

Ilse winced.

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I. What an asshole I was. I think half my fury back there at the Village Rag was over Carole and everything. The whole damned world!”

“Maybe you’ll get back together.” Harriet tried to be helpful.

“Naw, I doubt it. In ten years maybe.”

“Wonder where we’ll all be in ten years?” Alice asked.

“Funny, I don’t have much personal sense of that. I’ve got ideas of where I want feminism to be in ten years, but I’m not so clear on me,” Ilse replied.

“Me too,” said Harriet.

“Well, I hope we’re farther along than we were tonight,” Ilse half laughed.

“Just think, if the Olives of the world turned all that destructive energy toward Exxon instead of other women,” Alice mused.

“Maybe one thing we have to realize is that not all sisters are sisters.” Harriet kicked a stone across Eleventh Street.

“Olive taught me something and I’m grateful for that,” Alice said.

“What?” Ilse turned toward her.

“That sometimes you have to play rough. We can’t go on acting like ladies and expect to win, you know?”

“I’m beginning to know.” Ilse leaned over to see Harriet, who was on the other side of Alice.

“Don’t look at me, Ilse James.”

“Wasn’t it you who said or borrowed from some stale poster, ‘We have to replace the love of power with the power of love.’ ”

“Unfair, unfair. I do believe that. I guess I’m learning how far love goes and how far it doesn’t go.”

“Some people learn through love and some you just have to punch in the gut.” Alice now kicked the stone Harriet had sent down the road.

“Tell that to our sweet sisters.”

“Sarcasm, sarcasm and cynicism from Ilse James, young fountain of feminist thought!” Harriet teased her right back.

“Laugh, go ahead and laugh but I wonder how long it will take the ostriches to pull their heads out of the sand? Everyone thinks this struggle is going to be easy, all you have to do is think good, clean thoughts, brush three times daily and chant om in the presence of the Great Mother. Christ, women will still be brutalized in Bolivia and Appalachia and if the President wants an undeclared war in Cambodia we may well have one. What does it take to teach women to wake up, to grow up, to stop acting like ladies!”

“Patience?” Alice offered.

“Patience, and how long do I work with patience as my reward? How much longer can any of us work for nothing? Shit, if we don’t get money we could at least get a little respect. That’s one thing Carole taught me, speaking of learning, that this movement operates out of the Lady Bountiful attitude and we drive out lower-class women who can’t keep up because they don’t have the time or the money or the babysitters.”

“I’m kind of sorry Carole never came and talked to our group,” Harriet mumbled.

“So am I. She’s been around longer than we have. If nothing else she could give us a longer perspective.” Alice quickened her pace as her hunger set in.

“Oh, if she could hear us now. She’d wither me with ‘All this has been said before. Don’t you read history?’ Carole sees centuries not days.” Ilse bordered on the wistful.

“No, no it hasn’t all been said before. We are adding something new to consciousness. I read history. I know what in this movement is right out of 1789 and what is ours. But what scares me is that it’s all talk. Do you realize that tonight for the first time we did not put out a little bulletin, we did not stage a feminist version of a craft fair, the proceeds to go to our favorite project which might as well be called a charity. Do you know what we did? We went out and fought ugly. Given those particular people nothing else would have worked but the important thing is we walked off with something. The rape crisis center will go on for three months because of tonight and the press collective will get out another mailing. We actually did something and we inspired a little fear. Seems like in America you got to prove you can hurt someone before you’re taken seriously. And you want to know something else?” Alice paused, her eyes grew larger. “I liked it. I loved it. I want to win. I don’t care how it sounds. I want real power. I want to say: U.S. out of Bolivia, out of Cambodia, out of people’s bedrooms with your goddamned listening devices. I want to say: Pay up your fair share of taxes, U.S. Steel; build railroads instead of cars, Detroit. I want to say all that and have it stick.”

Ilse put her arms around Alice’s shoulders and Harriet reached up and put her arm around Alice as well. “Me, too,” they both replied.

“Guess this means we don’t remain pure as the driven snow,” Harriet breathed out.

“Guess not. I think that ‘be perfect’ business that gets thrown at us all the time is really a subtle way to say ‘fail.’ ” Ilse hopped to keep up with Alice.

At Mother Courage Alice ordered a carafe of white wine. A splurge for Alice who didn’t have much money.

“A toast, sisters. Here’s to growing up and discovering the world isn’t a rose garden but we have to live in it anyway.”

They clinked glasses and then Ilse started to laugh. “Leave it to you, Reardon, to find the right thorn at the right time.”

Howling they drank another toast.

Alice, with the thoroughness characteristic of her, researched Joshua Chernakov’s past and discovered he graduated from Northwestern in 1947. One of Alice’s old lovers worked there as an administrator and plowed through the records as much out of curiosity as a favor to Alice. She found something a bit peculiar in Joshua’s record. He was called before the Dean on unspecified charges and forced to seek outside help. The name of the doctor was not on the document but the name of the dean was. The dean, an old man, retired to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived on the west side of town amid other relics. Alice hopped a New Jersey Transit bus out to Princeton and conned her way into the old man’s presence. He recalled the case vaguely but wouldn’t give out any details. Alice tried every bribe she knew—decently of course. She noticed lovely illuminated manuscripts on his wall. Desperate but determined she raced back to Carole Hanratty at N.Y.U., spilled out her plight and Ilse’s intention of beating them all to a pulp if they couldn’t get anything on any of the Rag people. Carole, full of her childhood devils, swooped into Fred’s office while he was out and brazenly stole one of the department’s illuminated manuscripts off the wall. Before Carole would hand over the prize she made Alice swear never to tell anyone including Ilse. Alice solemnly swore, tore out of the building, back to Port Authority, ran up to platform 122, and headed back to Princeton where she arrived in time for afternoon tea. Weakened by Alice’s booty, the old fellow told his tale: Joshua Chernakov was a promising young student. His professors were quite glad he was too young to enlist or had been found unsuitable for service, no one was quite clear. A bright journalistic career loomed on Joshua’s horizon. A man of social ambition, Joshua dated an icy Chicago meat-packing heiress. One weekend at a particularly rowdy college party Joshua could no longer contain his ardor. He slipped the young beauty a drugged drink and when she passed out gallantly carried her to a nearby room where he had, as grandmothers used to say, his way with her. The heiress on being driven back home, slowly awoke and, formerly a virgin, felt some pain. She also noticed a telltale stream of sperm oozing down her thigh. A brave person, considering the times, she told her parents. Horrified, they called the president of the university, told him the scandal in strictest confidence and he in turn, told the dean, whose job it is to see boys in trouble. Joshua Chernakov was in a great deal of trouble. Because he had such a good record, was so intellectually capable, the dean pleaded for him. And so a deal was struck between the meat-packer midas and the dean. Joshua could finish out his senior year but upon graduation he must leave the area and he would never work for any of the big paper chains anywhere since Midas was in tight with the publishing giants. And so Joshua Chernakov wandered to New York City and happened to be around when the Village Rag, a new concept in journalism, got started. He had good skills, was young and personable, could turn a neat phrase and that was the beginning of his career. No one was ever the wiser for his past. Naturally, the young woman’s parents never told anyone. Rape is not a word used in polite society.

A literary calender at the left edge of Carole’s desk showed the day was October fourth. Written in the square was the notation, “St. Francis of Assisi died 1226.” Francis was Carole’s favorite saint in her Catholic girlhood and though she left the Church she never quite turned away from this gentle man who practiced what he preached. She wrote next to the saint’s name, “The Clares,” the female order of Franciscans. She sat there making the capital C a darker red by retracing it absent-mindedly. Five days passed and Ilse hadn’t called her and she hadn’t called Ilse. She picked up the phone as though to dial the number and then dialed Adele.

“Whatcha doing?”

“Trying to teach Lester ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’ ”

“How’s he doing?”

“So far he’s a whizz at ‘Into the valley of death rode the squawch.’ ”

“Would it disturb his study if I came over for tea?”

“No, might be good for him. All this blood, guts, and gore is straining the little fellow. I’ll make a pot of Twinings English Breakfast or would you like Russian Caravan?”

“Uh, Russian Caravan, a good flavor for the late morning, don’t you think?”

“Hurry up, it’ll be brewed by the time you get here.”

Indian summer warmed the sidewalks. Briskly Carole walked to Adele’s. Window boxes offered up their last crop of the year, late blooming roses, marigolds, and sturdy zinnias. A twinge of regret for summer tugged at her although fall was the most exciting season. The beginning of the academic semester filled her with new students and new ideas. Friends came back from abroad or wherever and the city’s pulse quickened. The only trouble with fall was that she knew winter followed. A bakery shop’s smells enticed her to buy croissants and fresh butter.

When Carole rang the bell Adele, in her eagerness to see her friend, forgot to close the door to the bird cage which she had been cleaning. She ran over to unlock the front door. Lester unfurled his crown and craned his neck to see if this was too good to be true.

“Pot’s ready.” Adele gave Carole a big bear hug as she walked in the door. “What’s in there?”

“Goodies. What’s Lester doing flying through the living room, Adele?”

“Lester!”

Mad with power and being the center of attention, Lester bellowed, “Bwana, White Devil, Bwana. Ack, Ack.”

The other birds squealed and clicked their tongues. Adele raced for the cage and closed the door before the other creatures got big ideas.

Carole laughed. “Sounds like a goddamned Dolores Del Rio movie.”

“Maybe if we advance slowly he’ll retreat and I can back him into the cage. You hold the door ready.”

“We can’t back him up. He’s flying over our heads. Maybe you should try the broom.”

“Good idea, then I can break his little neck.” At the sight of the broom waving in the air Lester became bolder. “Not the sofa, Lester, not the sofa.” Naturally he passed over the sofa and shat with amazing accuracy. “LaVerne is going to kill me.”

“I feel like Doolittle bombing Tokyo.”

“No, dear, you feel like the Japanese. Lester’s doing all the bombing around here.” Adele put her hands on her hips.

“Let’s try another approach,” Carole suggested. She raised her voice and smiled. “Lester, pretty Lester. Come on, birdie, come on, time to go back to your nice home.”

“Balls said the queen. Ack, ack.”

“Whoever said ‘birdbrain’ is a derogatory term didn’t know much about birds.” Adele by this time was laughing at Lester’s outrageous behavior which only made him do it more.

“If I had two I’d be king. Bwana, White Devil.”

“Racist.”

Lester headed for the feathered flag on the wall. He attacked it vigorously which made Adele scream at the top of her lungs. Carole threw her hands over her head like a referee signaling the kick is wide. She rushed him. He gained altitude and circled coming back at the flag with his feet this time.

“Lester, anything, just leave my flag alone,” Adele moaned.

Secure in his victory he got fresh and zoomed close to Adele’s head, the brightly colored feathered bits in his talons brushing her nose. He circled again, nearly hit the ceiling and made for Carole. It was all systems go. Lester was having the time of his life.

“I may kill that bird before LaVerne gets the chance,” Carole threatened, brushing off her sleeve.

“We’re both so damn dumb. I know what’ll get him. You stay here and keep him occupied while I sneak into the kitchen.”

“Keep him occupied. I’ll be a target.”

“The price of eternal friendship.”

“What are you getting in the kitchen?”

“Potato chips.”

Lester heard her crinkling the bag and rested on the chair. He screwed his head around until it was close to upside down. Hopping from foot to foot he opened his mouth and croaked. He threw his head back and chattered a whole row.

“Look what Mommy has, you home wrecker. Lookie, lookie.” She held up a large potato chip and continued to crinkle the bag with her other hand. “Now if you want this delicious Wise’s potato chip you’re going into your cage.”

Slowly Adele moved toward the cage. The temptation of that huge, golden potato chip was too much. Lester followed. Adele sprinkled a shower of chips in the cage and Lester, tired from all his flying, waddled in the cage like a tiny Jemima Puddleduck. Triumphant, Adele slammed the cage. “Gotcha!”

Carole went over to the cage and put her arm around Adele’s shoulder. The two of them shook with laughter. Lester devoured the chips, looking at them from time to time. The turtle down in the water stuck her head out to get a better view and to steal a chip. She got one before Lester could stop her. Lester would never mess with the turtle. The mynah let out a wolf whistle and Lester muttered, “Piss.”

“Hey, bird, Momma’s gonna cram bee-bees down your gullet so you can’t fly,” Adele purred. “Devil.”

“That’s his line.”

“Now that the commotion has died down let me bring a knife and two small plates so we can eat ourselves.”

“Can I do anything?”

“No, you’ve already suffered enough. Speaking of suffering, has Ilse called since the fight?”

“No and I haven’t called her either.” Carole buttered the buns while Adele fussed over the tea in the kitchen.

“Too bad you didn’t stop by a Chinese bakery. You could have bought fortune cookies and all our guessing would be over.”

“With my luck the little white strips would be mottos written by Mary Baker Eddy.”

“You don’t look devastated although you sound a touch sarcastic, my dear.”

“You know me, Dell. My only regret is that I never dipped Ilse’s breasts in champagne. How could I? Beer might have met her qualifications but it’s hardly the same.”

Adele laughed. “Someone ought to tell that child the reason for revolution is so the good things in life circulate.”

“Oh, well.”

“Why don’t you call her?”

“No, we’re both too raw. It wouldn’t do any good. Maybe I’ll write her a short note. I don’t know. Can’t make up my mind.”

“Mmm.”

“I never did put much faith in love relationships. I mean it always seemed to me that an element of lying is necessary to keep them going.”

“Probably, for most people. Games and all. There’s nothing wrong with not wanting that. It’s just that the world we live in is in couples whether they’re straight or whether they’re gay. The world goes by twos.”

“The idea of having someone say my name linked with someone else’s never did sit well with me. Noah would have left me off the ark.”

“Honey, he’d have left us all off the ark.” Adele’s eyes twinkled.

“God knows.”

“Look at it this way. Now you won’t have to spend your time sparring and you won’t have to look at those messy women you used to complain about.”

“I guess I did.”

“Can’t say as I blame you.”

“The first time I saw that crew it was like someone hit me in the face with a wet fish. I’ll never understand why a woman would want to make herself purposefully ugly. Ilse said men made us sex objects and those women reacted against that. But there must be some middle grown between Godzilla and Miss America?”

“Queen Kong?”

“There’s a thought.”

“The time we were in Mother Courage and a few of them straggled in …” Adele paused.

“Yes?”

“What struck me was their appearance, of course, but I sat there and thought to myself—now that is truly stupid. By making themselves as ugly as …”

“Homemade dogshit.”

“Carole!”

“You forget, we said it too down in Richmond.”

“Where was I? Oh, by making themselves so unattractive they are still allowing themselves to be defined by men. A negative reaction is just as limiting as a positive one. If they really had themselves together they’d do whatever made them feel good, the hell with men one way or the other. I always dress for myself and we all know how Miss Adele loves flashy threads.”

“And you look terrific. You’re right, I never thought of appearance that way—definition. I just figured they were walking around with a fatal dose of self hate.”

“Same difference, maybe.”

“Maybe.”

“I am so glad to see you’re not way down. I know you liked that girl.”

“Woman.”

“Oh hell, she’s a girl to me. She’s twenty-two years younger than I am.”

“Can’t say as I’ve figured out the line between girlhood and womanhood myself. I did like her. I do like her. Ah! the tea cup is hot.” Carole put the cup back down.

“Sorry, I should’ve warned you those extra big cups keep the heat.”

“All this did bring a few threads together for me. Things I overlooked or ignored.”

“Oh?”

“Adele, this may sound crazy but I’m longing for my childhood. Remember that time when things were pure?”

“Yes, yes, I know what you mean.”

“I’ve lost some of me and I want it back. An idea keeps going around in my head to go back to my roots. Don’t look surprised. I want to go back to Richmond or outside Winchester where Grams had the farm. I don’t know how or when. There are universities and colleges around. I ought to be able to get some kind of job.”

“Leave the city?”

“I love the city even when it’s awful but it’s not my home. I want to go home. I want roots.”

“But, Carole, you’ve got roots here, all your friends.”

“I know, I know, but it’s not the same. I know this sounds silly but somehow it’s hitting me that I want to go back where I came from. Not in time and not back to the slums but back to the area, the land.”

“If ever there was a Southern philosophy, that’s it. The land. I can’t say that I haven’t felt that way myself. I don’t exactly long for the folk’s mansion in St. Louis but I wonder sometimes if I haven’t run away and called it opportunity? I often wonder should I go teach at a small Black college if they can make room for me. It does run through my head. I don’t do anything about it because of Verne. Her chance is right here. Maybe in time she’ll want to go and then we’ll do it. But until that time, if it ever comes, I’ll stay here unless I get the call.”

“I think I’ve got the call. I’m going—I just don’t know when or where. Richmond, Winchester, University of Virginia?”

“It’s not the whole answer. It isn’t like you’re an urban vagabond. We do have some community here.”

“I know, Adele, I do know. But what impact can we have on this city? Our jobs give us some chance to do something but it’s not enough any more. I’m tired of professionalism in that narrow sense. I want more. I want to go somewhere where my voice isn’t so small. Back to my roots. Maybe that’s part of what’s wrong with America. We’ve been running away from our roots since World War I and now we’re all lost. Opportunity turned out to be not enough. Job status isn’t the same thing as being valued in your community. Do you know what I mean?”

“I feel the frustration, I know, but I figure the city is the women’s frontier. Besides, who’s going to listen to a lesbian? At least here you can be open to an extent.”

“Well, if we all keep hiding in the giant cities we’re cheating ourselves … but the women’s movement has made a difference. There’s more room now. I’m not saying it’s easy but maybe that’s just what we have to do, Adele, go back where we came from and fight this out.”

“Carole?”

“No, I haven’t turned into a revolutionary, not yet anyway. But I’m beginning to see there’s more to my life than just me. And part of what can help me find some peace—going back home—may turn out to help women there—and men too if they care to learn.”

“If that doesn’t give you inner peace then you’ve got nothing left but evangelism and brandy,” joked Adele.

“Or worse, I’ll be condemned to reflection.”

“Before you sentence yourself let me bring some chocolate chip cookies. We can dip them in our tea.”

“If we’d bought stock in Coca Cola and Nabisco when we started teaching we’d be rich by now.”

Adele sailed back in with the cookies on a plate. “Carole, I can’t imagine being without you.” Her voice was soft. “I know you wouldn’t go for at least a year or two but we’ve been together all these years. It doesn’t seem possible.”

“I … whenever I start thinking about my roots I remind myself that you’re part of those roots, the best part.”

“Thank you.”

“Maybe by the time I’m ready you two will feel like moving.”

“Verne and I never really talked about it but I’ll bring it up. She might surprise both of us. Bloomies isn’t the center of the earth. Maybe she’ll set off in a spirit of enterprise and start her own little store or something. If we’re near colleges there will be a market for clothes and the clever things she picks up.”

“Ask her. You know she might see it as an adventure. And there’s no reason we couldn’t all move back to New York if things didn’t work out.” She paused. “Adele, have you ever wondered why we never became lovers?”

“Now there’s a bolt out of the blue. What brought that on?”

“This last fling and thoughts of moving. It suddenly became clear to me I love you more than anyone on earth.”

“Dammit.” Adele spilled her tea.

“Stay there and I’ll get a paper towel.” Carole came back from the kitchen and mopped up the tea. “Clutz.”

“No. Surprised.”

“I’ve thought of it thousands of times—I mean that you’re dear to me. I guess I never thought it had to be said. Where I come from you don’t have to say things like that, people know.”

“I know, I knew, I … it’s fine. God, I sound like I’m conjugating.”

Carole laughed. “Amo, amas, amat.”

“Amamus, amantis, amant. Did I get it right?”

“How the hell do I know? I just read the stuff, I never hear it.”

“While we’re at this, I want a turn. Why do you think we never went to bed?”

“You never asked me.”

“Carole Hanratty, that’s obscene. Me ask you?”

“What did you think? I was going to ask you?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“What’s he got to do with this?”

“I figured you weren’t turned on by Black women.”

“Adele, are you serious?”

“Of course I’m serious. Would I say a dumb thing like that if I didn’t mean it?”

“Well, when we met it was volatile. But once we became friends that sort of thing faded. In fact, color became rather silly. How could anyone take it seriously?”

“Yeah, I know, but the only way we found out was to spend time together. Ilse’s generation has a better chance on that than we did. I always thought you were beautiful, spectacular. You know that?”

“No, I knew you liked me but …”

“You’re still beautiful, Carole, inside and out.”

“You too, Dell. When you walk into the room I smile. Even when I’m depressed as hell your presence makes me smile. Makes me glad I’m breathing. I don’t know, somehow we missed our sexual connection. When I met you, you were going with whoozits. By the time I was attempting my forever relationship, well, that was just the time you broke up. Then, boom, you met LaVerne. So now how will we ever make love?”

“Ha.”

“We can’t sneak around on LaVerne. I adore her. I couldn’t do anything like that, neither could you. Dell, we screwed up.”

“Oh, we’re not dead yet. Anyway, maybe that’s one of the reasons we’re so tight, the possibility of making love was always there underneath. We never acted on it. Maybe we will. Maybe we won’t but if we don’t it won’t be tragic. I have to say I don’t know if I could handle it. I’ve always been, what’s that awful word, monogamous?”

“We’d be almost incestuous, wouldn’t we?”

“Sisters?”

“Sisters.” Carole leaned over and kissed Adele on the cheek. “You know what else I’ve been thinking?”

“My dear, at this point I couldn’t possibly imagine.”

“Ilse did show me some things. I was thinking I ought to write a book about outstanding women in the Middle Ages. Not much has been done about women back then.”

“Back then? Any time.”

“You take the Mayan women and I’ll take European women in the Middle Ages. With my background it wouldn’t be too difficult to put together a book of heroines, women like Eleanor de Montfort in the thirteenth century and Queen Margaret who won the battle of St. Albans. There’s so much material that ought to be brought to light. That’s not the same as organizing a child care center but it’s something I can do. And I think it’s important to know what our ancestors did.”

“I think it’s a glorious idea. You know I think all the dead are our ancestors. We should pay attention to them.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

“It’s a beautiful day. Come on, let’s walk in the park. Want to?”

“Sure.”

As they walked out the front door into the early afternoon sun, Adele turned to Carole. “You know what I think?”

“My dear, I couldn’t begin to guess.”

“I think the secret of life is there is no secret.” Adele threw her hand to the sun with a flourish.

“I think you’re right.”