My job was finishing the next day, my rent was up, I was recently divorced and without a new set of friends; generally I was at loose ends without plans for myself, and when Tove suggested I move into the house with her and Diane, I accepted. This was a primary mistake for the relationship that would develop, based on my dependency on Tove rather than on a fiftyfifty, independent female to independent female friendship of love and respect.
Tove and I were lying in the back room on her bed, watching the morning sky brighten through the Petaluma fog. Our covers were thrown back and we lay like our comfy cats, Foggy and Luce, in each other’s arms. It was the time before ambition to rise and start the coffee, the sweet time when bird songs are heard, the time when light on the wall is noticed, the time before the busy activity of the day dulls the child’s perception in us. Tove would get up in a minute, her crumpled brown hair matted, and groggily stomp into the kitchen to plug in the coffeepot. She’d dress, eat, leave a warm note for me, and be off to school. There was a knock near the open door. I saw Diane.
“May I come in? I want to talk with you Tove. Privately.”
“Hurry then, ’cause its getting late for me.”
I left for my room. I could hear them through the unclosed doorways.
“Why wouldn’t you fuck me last night?” Diane screamed.
“Because I didn’t feel like it,” Tove answered.
“Well it was the least you could do for an old friend.”
“I can’t do it when I don’t feel like it.”
“You masturbate Foggy, why not me? I was horny.”
There was a long pause and I didn’t hear anymore. I peered into the room. There was Tove standing naked, back tense, looking in her stiffness like Napoleon. Diane was sitting on the bedsheets. She looked desperate. As Tove turned, I stepped back into my room and watched her march as if she were wearing stomping boots out of the room and down the hall.
There was a lot of screaming and tenseness those first few weeks before Diane left. I kept out of it, although I thought I had something to do with precipitating the quarrels. Tove said that resentments had built up between them for the last two years. Problems from Diane’s dependency on her, and her allowing it. I was embarrassed by quarreling, a fact that grew out of my girlhood. When my parents had outrageous arguments I would listen at the door with a mixture of curiosity and terror. I would promise some unknown God he could do anything he wanted with me if he would only stop my mother and father from fighting. It was a mistake. Praying to a man never did any good.
The worms were another problem. Diane and Tove had purchased together ten wooden bins of red earthworms. These sat in our front yard behind the goat’s pen. The business never got started, as the women were too busy arguing how to advertise the bait. What to do with the worms now that Diane was moving out became the central issue replacing sex. Finally a man came and bought the worms. Diane moved out. Tove and I were alone in the house. Alone in the house. Alone in the house. It sounded so ominous. And it was. As a married woman, I found the house to be the cage of my oppressor. Lesbians, womenidentified women, could and would not, in my mind, become oppressors of each other. How wrong and foolish I was. How capable I was of falling into the victim role again. She went off to work in the morning after her coffee, leaving me notes under the iron, behind the dish soap, stuffed in the cavity of a sponge. Little love notes, sweet words printed on hard-boiled eggs. Words of endearment, letters of enchantment: she let me know I was on her mind. How wonderful and how beautiful she was! Still she was engaged in the community, her teaching job providing her with the external feedback outside the nuclei household an individual needs. I struggled along, the supported artist, writing poems to her each day, sometimes performing enormously angry and frantic artistic gestures of proof and power. One day I put on a doctor’s white cloak and moved all the furniture away from one of the walls in the living room. I stapled plastic Visqueen from one end of the room to the other. I spelled out the words “Let’s Make It Tonight, Baby!” in masking tape. I placed a wire cage next to the writing. I sat down on the floor, leaned back and became part of the work. I had my picture taken. I was being as freaky as needed to make my statement. I was acting out my urges in the male-defined art movement style of abstract expressionism, gesture painting, gesture. I spent no time analyzing or objectively criticizing my work. It existed and therefore it was. This blind faith in imagination before all led to obscurity and incoherence. Eventually it led to my doubting myself and then doubting my doubts. Women’s criticism—the advice given me in small group meetings—helped change that.
“We can’t understand you when you speak abstractly.”
“Describe what you mean using personal experience.”
“Talk simply.”
Tove would come home from work and we would take turns providing each other with Safeway steaks or boot-legged wine ripped off in the latest fashion. Foolhardy, headstrong days of invincibility, when I would come out from the store with two bottles of expensive wine down my jeans held by my waistband and a bottle of brandy tight under my coat beneath my arm. How I dreaded the crash of a slip! We ate and dined well and continued our guerilla actions clandestinely. Sexist billboards using women’s bodies for commercial purposes were Xed out with red spray paint; “Pretty Bodies Buy Milk” was smudged so that it was unreadable. One night we parked my VW down a side street and walked to the highway, where we hoisted one of us up to the billboard runner. Then between headlight flashes we zipped on the spray. Another night we got back at the round aluminum milk trucks with their offensive advertising by rapidly running with the paint cans along the truck, then ducking between tanks when cars came by. With our motorcycle trip to Washington and these small acts of protest our feelings of strength, health, vitality, and right-on-ness developed through action.
THE MOTORCYCLE TRIP CEMENTED OUR TOGETHERNESS. We found we could operate in and on the outside world effectively. We could drive, we could camp, we could tune up our bikes. We slept at night by rivers or in pasturelands. Once we were refused service in an Oregon restaurant that had a sign posted on the door, WE DO NOT SERVE HIPPIES; another time I was issued directions at a service station by a grouchy male attendant. The world was peripherally hostile but we held our own, hugging and snuggling like great blue caterpillars in our sleeping bags as the sun went down evening come evening. It was wonderful, and we were big and brave and capable women. So when I left for Europe soon after, in what I thought to be the same spirit of adventure, I didn’t know I was running away from lesbianism and Tove.
Six weeks of solitary travel in the British Isles; six weeks alone, more alone than the equal amount of time I’d spent in Mexico as a married woman the year before. Six weeks of youth hostels, of bedding down with all the lovely bodies stripping and giggling in the washroom of the dormitory. Six weeks of long letters to Tove, and too, of exhilarated times when solitude heightens emotional intensity. Most vividly, the ten-mile walk I took around the Northern tip of Ireland, the Giant’s Causeway of dolomite octagonal pillars that stretched into the sea, and finding natural geographical earthworks in every ravine. Walking, alone with the wind-whipped rush of blood to my cheeks, I felt the thrill of discovery as if I were the first woman to come upon such scope and wonder. At times, alone in bed at night, I was able to admit I was avoiding Tove and our deepening relationship by taking off alone.
Then she was there; she was walking through the glass door of the London Youth Hostel. Her hair was shorter than I remembered, her walk jauntier. The red parka set off her cheeks and I had a womanfriend again! A gesture, a hug, a kiss that covered centuries, a Cognac-influenced talk that became less coherent and more warm as we made one bed out of two mattresses. The shock of the hostel matron when she found us an hour later smooching lustily! The obscenity of her orders returning us to assigned beds and places! Our junking