24
It seemed preordained that Muriel and I should meet.
When Ginger and I had been getting to know each other over the cutting-room X-ray machines in the heat and stink and noise of Keystone Electronics, she was constantly telling me about this crazy kid called Mo who had worked at my machine a year or so before. (It was her way of letting me know that she knew I was gay and it was all right with her.)
‘Yeah, she sure was a lot like you.’
‘How do you mean; did she look like me?’
‘Very funny.’ Ginger cut her doll-baby-round eyes at me. ‘She’s white. Italian. But both you-all have that easy way about you, and that soft way of talking. ’Cept you’re this slick kitty from the city and she’s a strictly local product. Used to say her father never let her smell the night air ’til she was eighteen.
‘She wrote poetry, too. All-a-time, even on lunch hour.’
‘Oh.’ Somehow I knew there was more. What Ginger couldn’t bring herself to tell me was that Muriel liked girls.
I saw Ginger one last time before I left for Mexico. She told me that her friend Mo had come back to live in Stamford because she had had a nervous breakdown in New York.
During the time I was in Mexico, Muriel was slowly crawling out from under the basket of shock treatments she had been thrust into. When she began seeing her friends again in Stamford, Ginger made sure she told her about ‘this crazy kid from New York City who worked your old machine a year before and who wrote poetry, too.’
When I returned to New York from Mexico, I returned full of sun and great determination to re-order my life and someday get back to Mexico and, of course, Eudora. I moved back into my old Seventh Street walk-up and started the discouraging work of job-hunting.
One Sunday evening, the telephone rang, and Rhea answered.
‘One of your cool-voiced young women,’ she said, handing me the phone with a smile. It was Ginger, whose smoky tones sounded anything but cool to me.
‘H’ya doin’, kiddo?’ she began. ‘I have somebody here who wants to meet you.’ There was a short pause and then a little chuckle, and then a high, nervous voice saying, ‘Hello? Audre?’
We made a date.
As I opened the door into the malty dusk of the Page Three, it was still early, and Muriel was the only person standing at the bar. She looked like no one I had ever seen living in Stamford while I was there. Her mid-brown eyes were large and almond-shaped, with thick lashes that outlined each eye with darkness. They peered from a high and flat-cheeked face whose paleness was intensified by the almost straight dark hair that framed her head like a monk’s cut, or an inverted bowl. Thick black eyebrows drew together like a scowl.
As usual, I was a little bit late, and she was waiting. Muriel always seemed shorter to me because of the way she stood, shoulders hunched and all folded in upon herself. She held a bottle of beer and a cigarette in her left hand, the pinky of which sported a wide silver band, and was perched archly upon its neighbor. I came to think of this typical stance of hers as Muriel’s fetal-finger pose.
Her black turtleneck sweater fell low over her slightly rounded tummy, clad in a pair of well-creased woolen slacks, black with a fine white pinstripe. A soft black beret was pulled slightly to one side of her head, and just beneath her straight thick hair, tiny gold dots sparkled from the lobes of her barely visible ears.
On the bar beside her lay a worn suede jacket, and on top of that a pair of black leather fur-lined gloves. There was something romantically archaic about her sharp contrasts, and the neat polish on her black-laced oxford shoes made her seem vulnerable and schoolgirlish.
I thought she looked quite odd. Then, recalling the days that Gennie and I had wandered the streets together in our adventurous scenarios, I suddenly realized that Muriel had dressed for being a gambler.
What looked like a malocclusion was only a gap between her front teeth. It became visible as Muriel slowly smiled, charging her face with a great sweetness. The tight scowl disappeared. Her hand was dry and warm as I shook it, and I saw how very beautiful her eyes were when they came alive.
I bought a beer and we moved to the front and sat at a table.
‘Those look like gambling pants,’ I said.
She smiled shyly, pleased. ‘Yeah, that’s right. How’d you know? Not many people notice things like that.’
I smiled back. ‘Well, I had a friend once and we used to get dressed up a lot, all the time.’ I surprised myself; usually I never talked about Gennie.
She told me a little bit about herself and her life; how she had come to New York City two years ago shortly after her friend, Naomi, had died; how she had fallen in love here, gotten ‘sick’, and gone home again. She was twenty-three years old. She and Naomi had met in high school. I said I was thirty-five.
Then, I told her a little bit about Gennie. And on that first Sunday night in the Page Three on Seventh Avenue, Muriel and I put our heads forehead to forehead, over a small table in the front, and shed a few tears together over our dead girls.
We shyly exchanged the thin sheaf of poems we each had brought as an introductory offering. Once on the street, we promised to write to each other as we separated, Muriel going off to meet Ginger and catch the train back to Stamford.
‘Here, take my gloves,’ she’d said, impulsively, just as she ran into the subway. ‘Your hands are gonna get cold walking home.’ I hesitated as she tucked the suede gloves into my hands with an almost pleading smile. ‘Keep them for me till next time.’ Then she was gone.
Something in her face reminded me of Gennie giving me her notebooks.
The strongest and most lasting sense I had of Muriel after she was gone was of great sweetness hidden, and a vulnerability which surpassed even my own. Her gentle voice belying her dour appearance. I was intrigued by her combination of opposites, by her making no attempt to hide her weaknesses, nor even seeming to consider them shameful or suspect. Muriel radiated a quiet self-knowledge which I mistook for self-acceptance.
Her sense of humor was sudden and appealing, with only a trace of the gallows behind it, and her frequent joking asides were insightful and without malice.
From our very first meeting and without explanation, Muriel made me feel that she was understanding whatever I was saying, and, given the massive weight of my inarticulate pain, a great deal of all that I could not yet put into words.
Rhea was still up as I came back into the house, whistling.
‘What’s making you so happy all of a sudden?’ she asked jokingly, and I realized that for the first time since I’d come home from Mexico, I felt lighthearted and excited again.
Two weeks later on a Sunday night, Muriel and I met for dinner, and then went to the Bagatelle. Fast and crowded, it was a good place for cruising, but had always seemed a little too rich for my blood, or too threatening to face alone. Laurel’s and the Sea Colony and the Page Three and the Swing were called bars, but the Bag was always The Club.
The first room we entered was already smoky, although it was still early in the evening. It smelled like plastic and blue glass and beer and lots of good-looking young women.
Muriel ordered her inevitable bottle of beer so I did, too, pretending to drink it for the rest of the evening. Neither Muriel nor I danced, and the tiny dance floor at the rear of the club was already crowded. We stood in the archway between the tables and the dancers, talking to each other, and drinking in the feeling of the other women around us, some of whom, like us, were no doubt coming to love.
I soon adapted to Muriel’s fascination with gay bars. Whenever she came to the city, she explained to me, she came to go barring. She never felt truly alive except in gay bars, she said, and needed them like a shot in the arm.
What we both needed was the atmosphere of other lesbians, and in 1954, gay bars were the only meeting places we knew.
When Muriel and I weren’t talking, we stood feeling a little out of place, trying to look cool and a bit debonair. Every other woman in the Bag, it seemed, had a right to be there except us; we were pretenders, only appearing to be cool and hip and tough like all gay-girls were supposed to be. Totally unapproachable in our shyness, we were never approached, and besides, in those days gay-girls were usually not very sociable outside of their own little group.
You never could tell who was who, and the protective paranoia of the McCarthy years was still everywhere outside of the mainstream of blissed-out suburban middle america. Besides, there were always rumors of plainclothes women circulating among us, looking for gay-girls with fewer than three pieces of female attire. That was enough to get you arrested for transvestism, which was illegal. Or so the rumors went. Most of the women we knew were always careful to have on a bra, underpants, and some other feminine article. No sense playing with fire.
The evening ended all too quickly, and Muriel returned to her part-time job in a denture lab in Stamford, promising more of her ribald and creative letters.
I was still looking for work, any work, and the bleakness of prospects was discouraging. I had survived McCarthy and the Korean War, and the Supreme Court had declared desegregated schools illegal. But racism and recession were still realities between me and a job, as I crisscrossed the city day after day, answering ads.
Wherever I went, I was told that I was either overqualified – who wants to hire a Black girl with one year of college? – or underexperienced – what do you mean, dear, you don’t type?
Jobs were scarce for everyone in New York that autumn, and for Black women, they were scarcer still.
I knew I could not afford the luxury of hating to work in another factory or at a typewriter. I applied for a practical nursing program, but was told that I was too nearsighted. Whether this was concern for me or another excuse for racist choices, I never knew.
Through an employment agency, I finally got a job at a hospital in the accounting department, by lying about my bookkeeping skills. But that didn’t matter too much because they had lied about what I was supposed to do. I was not to be a bookkeeper at all, but girl-friday-step-n-fetch-it for the head of the accounting department.
Mrs Goodrich was an overbearing and awe-inspiring woman, who was the first woman ever to head the accounting department of a major hospital in the state. She had fought hard to achieve her position and the wars had left her with a harsh cold manner and little tact. In my spare time, when I wasn’t delivering her messages or buying her coffee or sharpening her pencils, I sat at a separate desk near the door of the typists’ pool, and typed insurance company letters while I waited to be buzzed for another errand. I answered Mrs Goodrich’s telephone when her secretary was at lunch, and she ranted and raved at me until I learned to remember those people to whom she would speak and those to whom she would not.
Mrs Goodrich was a tartar, a woman who had fought long and hard to make herself a place in a world hostile to her as a woman accountant. She had won by the same terms as the men whom she had fought. Now she was wedded to those terms, particularly in dealing with other women. For some unstated reason, we took immediate and deep exception to each other. Whatever the recognition was that passed between us, it did not serve to make us allies. Yet our positions were clearly unequal. As my boss, she had the power, and I would not retreat. It was much more complex than simple aversion. I was outraged by her attitude towards me, and despite the fact that she found me clearly unsatisfactory, Mrs Goodrich would not release me to the clerical pool, nor would she leave me alone.
Mrs Goodrich told me I walked like a lumberjack, and made too much noise in the halls. I was too uppity for my own good and would never get ahead. I would have to learn to be prompt, even though my ‘people’ were never on time. Anyway, I didn’t belong in the hospital, and should quit work and go back to school. In one of our few civil conversations, I told her I couldn’t afford to.
‘Well, then, you’d better straighten out around here or you’ll be out on the street in short order.’
I cringed secretly as she bawled me out for typing errors, in front of the whole typing pool, then called me across the hall into her private office to pick up a pencil she’d dropped.
I dreamed of stepping on her face with an ice pick between my toes. I felt trapped and furious. I had gotten the job a week before Thanksgiving, and the last weeks of the year were agony for me. Mrs Goodrich became the symbol of a job which I hated (I had never really learned to type) and I came to hate her with the same passion.
I was hungry for the sun in my days. I walked west through Union Square and up through Stuyvesant Park to work. Coming across 14th Street, some mornings I could catch a glimpse of it over near the river, but the sun was never really up past the buildings before I went into the grey stone building. It had gone down by the time I left work. We were given free lunch in the hospital cafeteria, so I couldn’t go out at noon. It was a recurring sadness to me as I walked home in the winter evenings, cars’ rear lights along Second Avenue flickering like those on a Christmas tree. I thought if I had to spend the rest of my life working in places like Keystone Electronics and Manhattan Hospital I would surely go mad. I couldn’t figure it out, but I knew there had to be some other way.
At work, my only weapon was retreat, and I used it with the indiscriminateness of any adolescent rebel. I fell asleep at my desk at every opportunity, and upon the slightest provocation, usually in the middle of typing Mrs Goodrich’s letters. In these mini-sleeps, I would type snatches of poems or nonsense phrases into the middle of straight formal sentences. I never bothered to proofread my letters, but only checked them as a work of art, brushing my eye over the paper for correct margins and no strike-overs. Letters would arrive upon Mrs Goodrich’s desk for her signature neatly and correctly typed, but with appalling sentences tucked into them.
Claim forms may be obtained strange gods worship the evening hours by writing the Main Office at …
I had nightmares of the sound of Mrs Goodrich’s buzzer, followed by her deep bellow from across the hall, summoning me into her office.
In the meantime, Muriel and I corresponded. To be more exact, Muriel wrote long and beautiful letters and I read and cherished them in silence.
Muriel’s lyrical and revealing letters held a hunger and an isolation that matched my own, and a precious unfolding of her humorous and prismatic vision. I came to marvel and delight in the new view she afforded me of simple and unexpected things. Re-seeing the world through her unique scrutinies was like re-seeing the world through my first pair of glasses when I was a child. Endless and wonderful re-discoveries of the ordinary.
There was a pain in Muriel to become herself that engaged my heart. I knew what it was like to be haunted by the ghost of a self one wished to be, but only half-sensed. Sometimes her words both thrilled me and made me weep.
Snail-sped an up-hill day, but evening comes; I dream of you. This shepherd is a leper learning to make lovely things while waiting out my time of despair. I feel a new kind of sickness now, which I know is the fever of wanting to be whole.
My hands shook a little as I put the letter down and poured myself another cup of coffee. Each day I would rush to my mailbox after work, looking for one of her thick blue envelopes.
Slowly but surely, Muriel became more and more like a vulnerable piece of myself. I could cherish and protect this piece because it was outside of me. Hedging my emotional bets, inside safe and undisturbed. With each of Muriel’s letters there blossomed within me the need to do for her what I never really believed I could do for myself, even while I was in the midst of doing it.
I could take care of Muriel. I could make the world work for her, if not for myself.
With no intent and less insight, I fashioned this girl of wind and ravens into a symbol of surrogate survival, and fell into love like a stone off a cliff.
I sent Muriel little scraps of paper with pieces of poems on them. Some were about her, some were not. Nobody could tell the difference. Muriel told me later she was convinced I was quite mad, also. I counted the days between her letters which brought me pieces of herself like special and anticipated gifts On December 21st, in answer to her entreaties and the solstice, I sent her a greeting card of a greek urn filled with stones which read, ‘I must have rocks in my head.’
By that I meant I loved her.
More than twenty years later I meet Muriel at a poetry reading at a women’s coffee-house in New York. Her voice is still soft, but her great brown eyes are not. I tell her, ‘I am writing an unfolding of my life and loves.’
‘Just make sure you tell the truth about me,’ she says.
It was New Year’s Eve, the last day of 1954. Rhea was in love again, and had gone out for the evening and I imagined for the rest of the night. I had settled down to reading and writing and music when the phone rang.
‘Happy New Year!’ It was Muriel. ‘Are you going to be in this old evening?’
My voice was jittery with anticipation and unexpected surprise. ‘Yes, some friends are coming over later. Can you come too? Where are you?’
‘At home, but I’m catching the next train.’ I heard her warm half-laugh and could almost see the trickle of smoke and the fold between her eyes. ‘I’ve got something to ask you.’
‘What is it?’ I asked, wondering.
‘Nope, have to do it in person. I gotta run now.’
Two hours later in she walked, bereted and smoking. The apartment was bustling with laughter and the voice of Rosemary Clooney.
you with the stars
in your eyes
love never made
a fool of you
I ran to take her jacket. ‘It’s so good to see you,’ I said.
‘Yeah? That’s what I came down to find out, because I couldn’t understand that card. What did it mean?’
Bea and Lynn and Gloria had dropped by with wine and reefer, and I introduced them to Muriel as I poured her a glass of Chianti. Bea and Lynn were dancing belt-to-belt in the middle room; Muriel, Gloria, and I munched over the cartons of savory chinese food which they had brought with them.
At a few minutes to midnight, we switched off the tinny portable phono and turned on the radio to hear the cheer go up in Times Square to greet 1955, even while we were saying how square that all was. Muriel gave me a copy of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, an underground bestseller which she’d lifted, she said, from a Stamford bookstore. Then we all kissed each other, and had some more wine.
We turned the music back on, and people told wild stories about other New Year’s Eves. I had to admit that this was my first New Year’s Eve party ever, but I managed to say it in a way that nobody believed me.
By 3:00 A.M., everybody had decided to spend the night. I rolled out Rhea’s double bed in the front room, and opened up my couch in the middle room. There was a place for everyone. I finally had to slip Lynn a sleeping pill from my hoard of doctor’s samples, because she kept insisting she wasn’t sleepy, and I was determined to be the last one awake. It had been a heady evening for me, and even with amphetamine, I was getting sleepy.
Muriel had gone to bed in the middle room with all her clothes on, because this was a strange house filled with strange people, she said, drolly, and she was very shy. The other three sacked out in the front room. I had assumed Rhea would stay over at her boyfriend’s house. Unfortunately, Rhea and Art had their big fight that night.
At 4:00 A.M., just about the time everyone had finally settled down and I had crawled into my faded green studio couch beside Muriel, just about that time I heard Rhea’s key in the door.
I jumped up, instantly awake. Oh shit. Pulling on my shirt, I tiptoed into the kitchen to find my roommate standing forlornly, her bright party dress wrinkled and sad. Rhea was addicted to having affairs with men who were only interested in shafting her, literally and figuratively. She was in tears. Art had told her, while they were in bed, that he was going to be married to the nineteen-year-old daughter of one of their progressive comrades. At thirty-one, Rhea was sure it was her age. On the other hand, I was sure it was because he was getting some from Rhea and not getting some from his teenager. But I couldn’t say that to Rhea in her condition.
Half my mind, besides, was on the collection of people in the house and how was I going to explain them to Rhea? Not that I had to explain, really, but after all it was her bed that Bea and Lynn and Gloria were sharing.
‘That’s awful, Rhea,’ I said as I took her coat. ‘Let me heat up some coffee.’
‘It’ll be all right,’ Rhea said abstractedly, wiping her eyes and managing a brave little smile. Her long voluptuous black hair was all awry. ‘I just want to go to bed for now.’
‘Well,’ I hesitated only a moment, ‘there’re some people in your bed, honey; some friends came over and you said you didn’t think you’d be home …’
Tears welled up in Rhea’s eyes again as she reached distractedly for her pocketbook and the shoes which she’d so gallantly dyed to match her dress, an electric-blue taffeta, just a few hours before.
‘But I’ll wake them right up,’ I said hurriedly, as I saw her heading for the front door. Her cousin lived two floors down, but I could never bear to see Rhea cry. ‘I’m getting them right up.’
And that’s exactly what I did, posthaste.
Sleepily, the three girls moved, and we all crawled back into bed, spoon-wise, in the middle room with Muriel. Rhea went to her troubled sleep in her own bed. By this time, it was almost dawn and too late for me to sleep any more. Anyway, I had gotten my second wind. And I loved being the first one up in the mornings. I took some obetrol and sat reading in the john until dawn.
Tiptoeing past the sleeping women, I leaned out of the seventh-story front window, looking eastward through the still streets to the lightening sky. The air was mild for January, and I caught a faint whiff of malt from the Hartz Mountain birdseed factory across the East River. The January thaw. It reminded me with a start that spring was only three months away. Yet it seemed forever. I was tired of winter.
I switched on the radio softly; on this holiday morning it was mostly stale news, except for the automobile fatalities and the results of the recent congressional censure of McCarthy. As I listened to the weather report, unseasonably warm, I cleaned my sneakers with a dash of dry Dutch Cleanser, rubbed in with an old toothbrush. Cleaned shoes was a New Year’s Day ritual that I carried over from my parents’ house without question or consideration.
At 8:30 A.M. I woke everyone except Rhea. I was eager to start the day. ‘Who needs a toothbrush?’ I called, breaking out the little store of them which I kept for such occasions. I was secretly pleased to have Muriel see how in charge I was of all situations. Always prepared, too. Just like the Marines’ motto.
Everybody knew a thirty-five-year old woman could run any world, and I considered myself to be permanently in practice.
I made coffee the way I used to do it in Mexico, using very little coffee and straining it through the little fabric net which I’d brought home with me. I turned off the radio and started the phonograph, putting on Roberta Sherwood’s ‘Cry Me a River’ real low, so as not to disturb Rhea’s fretful, sighing sleep. The rest of us sat around the table in the kitchen near the shaft window drinking coffee. Muriel’s sturdy feet stuck out beneath the cuffs of her jeans, her broad toes moving up and down in time to the music as her soft musical laugh moved through the smoke of her ever-present cigarette. Bea and Lynn in their dungarees and flannel shirts; and Gloria, her flamboyant spanish huaraches over woolen stockings and her baggy peasant pants made from handwoven magenta cotton. The click of Gloria’s fruitwood necklaces and bracelets was a contrapuntal echo behind the morning’s conversations of politics, gay-girl gossip, and the advent and use of the new tranquilizers in mental hospitals.
The house grew even warmer as the steam came up, and I got up to fix us a beautiful New Year’s breakfast. I mixed our last two eggs, well-beaten, into the leftover chinese food, added a drizzle of the foo yong gravy and some powdered milk, and scrambled it all together with a healthy amount of chopped onions quailed in margarine with lots of paprika and a dash of dill for color. It was a dish reminiscent of the Sunday-morning concoction of eggs, onions, and scraped chicken livers which my father called entre and which he used to cook for us each weekend while my mother and the three of us were at Sunday Mass.
After breakfast, we exchanged long goodbyes and Happy New Years, and the other three left. Muriel and I sat talking in the kitchen over cups of black coffee, because all the powdered milk was used up.
Rhea woke up about noon, and I introduced her to Muriel. We made Rhea some coffee, and she and Muriel argued the pros and cons of Marxism (although Muriel insisted she was apolitical, which I translated as naïve) for about an hour while I took a bath. Rhea dressed and went off to her parents’ house for dinner, only a little sodden around the eyes.
I turned off the record player and double-locked the door. Then Muriel and I, with no more to-do about it, went to bed with each other in the New Year’s watery sunlight in Rhea’s front room double bed. The afternoon unfolded into a blossom of loving from which she rose to me like a flame.
I had not been close to a woman since those nights with Eudora in Cuernavaca more than six months before.
We lay entwined and exhausted afterward, laughing and talking excitedly. The camaraderie and warmth between us breached places within me that had been closed off and permanently sealed, I thought, when Genevieve died.
When Muriel and I talked, as we did, about Naomi and Genevieve, each dead at fifteen, the spirit of those two dead girls seemed to rise up from the earth, bless us, and then depart. A particular and terrible loneliness seemed at last about to give way.
We made love over and over and over again, pausing only to turn on the lights in the early dusk and to feed the cat. The sun went down and the steam came up, and the whole room seemed alight with the fragrance of our bodies.
For every secret hurt of Muriel’s, there was one of mine to match, and the similarities of our lonelinesses, as well as of our dreams, convinced us that we were made for each other.
January 2, 1955.
I rolled over and raised myself up on one arm, regarded the sleep-sweet cheek and tousled hair of the woman curled away from me, one arm under her head. I bent to kiss the curl that swept over her ear, and ran my tongue slowly down the nape of her dark hair to where the covers draped her shoulders.
With a sigh and a slow smile, Muriel opened one eye as I advanced, whispering, toward her ear. ‘In the West Indies, they call this raising your zandalee.’
Later, I called Mrs Goodrich from bed, Muriel drowsing beside me. I explained that I was sick and could not come in to work. The whole department had been warned by Mrs Goodrich the last day before the holidays to make sure that such ‘sicknesses’ did not occur, under any circumstances.
Mrs Goodrich fired me on the spot.