A Body, Undone

  These days we have a lovely yellow DeWalt cordless drill with power to spare and a full set of standard and screw-driving bits, though it came into our household too late for me. It is a gift from Colin, who works as an engineer at Black & Decker, the company that makes DeWalt tools. They’re considered among the best—our contractor has exactly the same drill. When Colin mentioned that he was working on cordless drills, we developed a running joke about cordless drills and lesbian home life—no, not a sex joke, but rather a commentary on how household tasks are divvied up. Colin was game, even though joking happily about lesbians was new to him. We asserted that every proper lesbian household needs a cordless drill, and we were looking to him as a Black & Decker man to design a good one. It took him a while to “get” the joke, because it plays on the butchiness required of women living without men—somebody has to do the man’s work. Or perhaps “All jobs are butch jobs.” So says my high femme friend Lisa. The fabulous irony of this statement and its equally fabulous hyperbole are illegible unless you stop to reflect on butch-femme life. Lesbian households are not oppressed with a self-evident cultural norm that distributes beforehand domestic tasks into two and only two parts, the masculine ones and those left to the feminine side of the household. I know of a father so taken aback when his daughter told him she was in a lesbian relationship that he asked seriously, though supposedly in jest, “But who’s going to mow the lawn?” Well, Dad, whoever is more butch, and since in lesbian bar culture what makes a good butch is her desire to please a femme, why not make all jobs butch jobs? That’s Lisa’s point.

  As it happens, Janet is a butch-y femme and I’m a femme-y butch. She carries her wallet in the back pocket of her jeans and is comfortable in short skirts and four-inch heels. I’ve many times been told the women’s restroom is no place for a man (me), yet I have many earrings and scarves, but no suits and ties. Gender is thus no sure guide of our division of labor. Before a spinal cord injury disabled me, any job requiring strength, from opening a jar to heaving around the rocks to build a patio, was mine. I crawled under the car and used duct tape to temporarily fix the VW’s bumper when it got caught on something, pulled away from the frame of the car, and needed to be secured. I mounted the carrier for the kayaks on the roof of our car, and the bicycle carrier on the back. I always drove the motorcycle. I paid my bills and kept track of my money. I also enjoyed cooking and prepared all our meals, while Janet sat at the kitchen table and read to me. I shopped for groceries and almost always set the dining room table. I had a small KitchenAid mixer that had been decommissioned in the late 1950s from the Juniata College Home Economics Department, which allowed me to beat egg whites until they formed a stiff peak, before carefully folding them into sweetcorn stripped from cob. The result? Deliciously light corn fritters made by dropping the batter onto a hot griddle, as I had seen Mother make them. I also baked bread, made a light, flaky pie crust, and enjoyed cooking supper in the evening when Janet and I were together. I sewed on buttons, and did repair jobs on my clothing using a decommissioned sewing machine that came to me as the mixer had done, from the Home Ec. Department.

  I did those jobs because I valued what the work produced. When Janet and I started living together, I figured that we would divide the work evenly, fifty-fifty, but it turned out that I care more about homemaking then she does, and set a higher value on it. I liked sitting down to good food and a glass of wine at a candlelit table, even for an ordinary supper, and I fully appreciated Janet’s cleaning up afterward. Since she actually enjoyed doing the laundry, that job was hers, and I had folded underwear in my drawer for the first time in my life. We figured out that I liked having the surfaces in the living room clear, so she corralled papers that otherwise would have been strewn about. When I vacuumed her study, I would close the closet door—until I noticed that it was invariably open, so I asked if she preferred it that way. Remarkably, even incomprehensibly to me, the answer was yes. So I left it open, and would run the vacuum around piles of books on the floor. It took us about three years, but we had actually worked out a way to live together, intimately, in domestic space, with expectations and actions that mostly yielded happiness. If drifts of dog hair bothered me as they gathered in the corners, well, I could sweep them up while talking on the phone. If I noticed the shades were uneven and it bugged me, I could straighten them out. If I valued something more, noticed it more than Janet, why should I expect her to do the work? And vice versa. Of course there was friction. It’s not that we didn’t irritate or disappoint each other, but that such feelings were overbalanced by daily happiness and satisfaction, and leavened by unexpected delights.

  How did we achieve such felicity? By fighting. I’ve learned that announcing forthrightly that you are angry when you are angry is the only way to love and happiness. The poet William Blake shows how it works.

  A POISON TREE

  I was angry with my friend;

  I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

  I was angry with my foe:

  I told it not, my wrath did grow.

  And I waterd it in fears,

  Night & morning with my tears:

  And I sunned it with smiles,

  And with soft deceitful wiles.

  And it grew both day and night,

  Till it bore an apple bright.

  And my foe beheld it shine,

  And he knew that it was mine.

  And into my garden stole,

  When the night had veiled the pole;

  In the morning glad I see;

  My foe outstretched beneath the tree.1

  I find it very difficult to directly announce my anger. Not that I’m not angry—far from it—but I fear the upset anger brings, and the almost certain fact that my anger will be repaid in kind. Harboring a grievance, however, is as fatal to happiness as Blake’s poem suggests. When I’m angry with Janet, of course I see her as a foe. Yet because of who I am, I find it easier to deflect my anger than to forthrightly declare myself annoyed or put out by some “little” thing, and that’s the perfect opening to deceit. The speaker of the poem may announce that he’s glad his foe lies dead, but we know better. Anger is fertile ground, and the apple of discord destroys delight. Surely this is true in the narrative of the poem, where the plot replicates the original Fall from Paradise, thrusting you ever further into discord and darkness.

  I think I’ll always remember one of the first fights Janet and I had soon after we were living in the same house. I have no memory of what we were fighting about, but I do know that I couldn’t stand it and walked away—I went upstairs to lie down on the bed. Subsequently, Janet appeared at the head of the stairs, asking, “What do you want?” The fight was still on, she was not solicitous, but rather pursuing the disagreement. I continued silent, and discovered that formulating what I wanted wasn’t easy. I doubt I knew what I wanted clearly enough to compose a sentence. Or perhaps I knew, but it seemed unreasonable, not a demand—or even a request or observation—that I could in good conscience make. No matter. The point is to tell your wrath so that it might end. You may laugh when I say that it’s turtles all the way down, but it’s true. You’d better have some way of representing what you think and feel, for your thinking and feeling are already representing the world to you. You must know what you want to get it. We worked hard on our fighting, because we figured out that neither one of us wanted conflict to be destructive. We both wanted to be capable of fighting productively. Conflict can only be truly over and done when there’s a negotiated outcome all parties find acceptable.

  Then came my accident and the crash of our home economy. If I were to satisfy my needs by turning to Janet, let alone my wants, I would run up a truly unsustainable, bankrupting debt. Spinal cord injury is imperious, and we had no choice but to accept what I believe will be an interminable regime of austerity. Janet told me, very truly and not in wrath, but with a terrible finality, “You can’t have what you want. You just can’t.” There’s no way that she can respond to every wish of
mine for this or for that—even if she has the skill, she may not have the inclination, and she certainly doesn’t have the time. And since one day leads into another, the demand is never ending.

  Perfect equilibrium of value is supposedly achieved in an imaginary economy when the supply curve (the goods offered by producers) meets precisely with the demand curve (consumer desire) for those commodities. In our case, we pay many, many thousands of dollars a year to those who help meet our needs and desires: an aide who helps with my personal care (twenty hours per week), another on weekends (sixteen hours per month), and workers who clean the house, deliver groceries, rake leaves, shovel snow, and walk the dog midday in the city (because I can’t pick up her poop)—all because I’m paralyzed. We buy the commodity these workers have for sale, so many hours of their labor power, because we can no longer do the work ourselves. There’s a broken lamp shade in our living room that I “repaired” with packing tape months ago. It’s been hanging askew ever since. I thought I could actually fix this problem by ordering another shade off the web, but the fitting of the lamp needs to be altered. The demand for labor far exceeds what we can supply in-house, and buying labor power is limited both by our ability to pay and what the job market offers. We have terrific helpers of all sorts, I can’t imagine better, yet we still haven’t found a skilled handyman, and not for want of trying. Moreover, purchasing the help we need is complicated by the intimacy of many of the jobs that need doing. After all, these workers are in our home for hours every day, supporting our supposedly private lives.

  Janet and I have largely recovered our equilibrium. She does so much to aid my “activities of daily living” that surely I can see a cockeyed lamp or window shade in the living room without distress. I can wait patiently while she does household tasks that I used to do. I can learn not to want. Yet at the same time, I know that my visceral wanting was, in part, what attracted Janet to me. She was drawn to my desire for daily pleasures and my readiness to act so as to realize that desire, so not-wanting is hardly what I want to do. I must do just that, nonetheless, if we are to live sustainably. We are unspeakably fortunate. We both have good, secure jobs, and a joint income that frees us from the nagging daily worry about money that is so enervating. In a world where so many live truly precarious lives, I would be a fool not to value what I have, and realize the real abundance I enjoy with Janet. I’m no fool. But I won’t say it’s easy.

  14

  Shameless Hussy,

  Babe D., Moxie Doxie

  Shameless Hussy came to me as airline freight I received at the airport that serves Providence, Rhode Island. I was twenty-two, starting graduate school without support from Brown University, using money I had earned the year before, my first out of college. I didn’t have a car, and had only been in Providence three weeks, but I found an acquaintance who drove me out and back. It didn’t take long to collect the animal-shipping crate that was waiting for me and return to Elmwood, a once grand but now poor neighborhood. I got dropped off in front of the three-story house where I rented a two-room apartment, learned to live with cockroaches, and shared the bathroom down the hall with the man who lived across from me. The place was about two miles across the city from Brown, over the dividing line of the interstate. I carried my burden up the three flights to my two rooms. When at last I opened the crate, a little bundle of rust-colored fur stepped out, having lived but eight weeks in the world, squatted, peed on the linoleum floor, and we began our life together.

  Her tail had no hair in the middle, just a tuft at the end, so she looked like a little lion—she was the runt, and the other puppies had gnawed off everything but that little bit. She was the only one of the litter left when Teresa (my lover from Swarthmore days) drove out of D.C. to McLean, Virginia, to get her. Teresa knew I wanted a mixed-breed retriever, having lost my heart to one on a cold winter day in Rock Creek Park, and she had followed with me the classified ads in the Washington Post for months. I wanted to have the warmer weather for housebreaking my puppy and begin obedience training before I had to leave to start graduate school. “You know I can’t get one now,” I said when she called me in mid-September about the ad for Irish setter–golden retriever puppies, $25 each. “I don’t know anyone around here who could take her out when I have to go to school! I live on the third floor, and I’m absolutely broke—I can’t pay anyone to help me. I only have a bicycle to get to school and back . . . How the hell am I going to housebreak a puppy?” I knew perfectly well that I couldn’t get a dog, and three days later called to say, “See if there’s one left.” Now I had a little creature with burnished red hair, floppy ears, and a lion’s tail. She needed a name.

  Standing in the stacks of the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library as I searched for books on John Dryden for my course on eighteenth-century British literature, I suddenly thought “Shameless Hussy.” It is the name of a small feminist press that was one of the very first. I clearly needed a powerful antidote to the concatenation of wealthy, white, patriarchal social, cultural, and economic power that was the Rock, as the library is called. Brown was named to honor the family who over the eighteenth century dedicated themselves to building the institution. They were rich merchants who participated in the slave trade, as did many in Providence—60% of the slave ships that were part of the North American triangle trade sailed from its port, some years more than 90%. Brown was perforce enriched by donations and bequests of wealth amassed in that lucrative trade. As for the university library, it was named to honor its wealthy benefactor. A Brown graduate, Rockefeller Jr. became in his later years known for his philanthropy—but he also infamously owned a controlling interest in the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company when it was responsible for the 1914 Ludlow massacre, the torching of a tent camp of striking workers that killed twenty, mostly women and children. I understood perfectly well that no university is endowed with “clean money,” because there’s none in the world to be had. I was having a hard time anyway. I needed to imaginatively distance myself from the institution of which I was now a part, if I were to have any hope of succeeding there. I had left behind a flourishing lesbian-feminist community in D.C. Teresa worked at First Names First, a feminist bookstore the very title of which protests patriarchal naming traditions—she would approve of Shameless Hussy’s name, for sure. What better than an uncontrollable, powerful, sexed-up virago to keep me connected to my lover and the community I had just left?

  I had the great advantage of having gotten, simply by chance, a puppy who was disposed to please me. As for myself, I was alone and lonely, and glad of her company. I couldn’t study all the time, so Hussy and I went over the basic commands again and again. When it came time to train her off lead, we walked a block over to a big weedy graveyard that had a waist-high chain-link fence around it, where I lifted her over, then climbed over myself. It was a big graveyard, but completely fenced in—if she disobeyed me, she couldn’t run away and get lost. I hid behind the gravestones when teaching her to stay, a lesson she learned very, very well. We were each other’s sole companions for more than a month until I began making friends. Of course she destroyed things—she was a puppy! I had taped to the wall one of the only mementos I had of the world I had left behind, a photo of the softball team on which I had played catcher, and when it fell, she tore it up and doubtless ingested some of the pieces. Shameless Hussy also ate a rubber plant, the covers of my Virginia Woolf and Henry James paperbacks, and half of my Swarthmore diploma. I didn’t mind much—she was good company, and by the second semester was old enough to run on the sidewalk alongside my bicycle, stopping at the curbs until I released her, waiting for me as I labored up College Hill, and then patiently lying by my bicycle as I did my work at Brown. Some days she ran the four-mile round-trip to Brown, and would go another four miles with me if I took a run in the evening, which I sometimes did. She was lean, muscular, and handsome, and people would stop me on the street to tell me so.

  I had gotten admitted to the Ph.D. program of Brown University’s
Department of English, but since they offered me no support, I clearly hadn’t been one of their first choices. There were a number of classmates in the same fix, who had decided to shelter in graduate school against a deep recession that made finding a job seem impossible, and we were all trying to prove our worth. Perhaps that underdog position bonded me even more with the little puppy who stepped out of the crate. She grew into a handsome and well-trained dog, and I turned out to be a stronger student than my initial position foretold. I was awarded the support of teaching assistantships after that first year, and when it came time to write my dissertation, I applied to Wellesley College for—and won—a year-long Alice Freeman Palmer grant established to support the higher education of women. The grant is “for study or research abroad or in the United States. The holder must be no more than twenty-six years of age at the time of her appointment and unmarried throughout the whole of her tenure.” I knew that would not be a burdensome requirement, and was glad not only for the money, but for the connection to a nineteenth-century feminist. I wrote a dissertation. Carried on the great wave of “poststructuralism,” I got a great job at Wesleyan as an assistant professor. Hussy saw me through the six years of work leading up to my successful review for promotion with tenure, which decided whether I would keep or lose my job. A year after that climactic event, she got sick. She had lived fifteen years, but now a tumor in her spleen was growing and unstoppable. “See here,” the veterinarian said, gesturing to the sonogram, “you can see how it’s pushing the organs out of place. But she’s not in pain. She probably has two or three months, you’ll just have to care for her as she gets weak.” Oh God, nothing to do? Nothing at all? I cried hard for a long time in the car in the parking lot, petting Hussy as she lay quietly on the seat beside me, before I turned the key and drove home.