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Overview
Veteran editor Susan Fox Rogers brings together a collection of essays centered on the "ecstatic experience" (i.e. non-sexual) in lesbian life.
In this lively, eclectic collection, veteran anthologist Susan Fox Rogers explores the passionate experiences of lesbians that exist outside of sex and/or romance. From an essay on "being" Superman as a kid to ones on rafting and sky-diving; from being arrested for political activism to the overwhelming and complicated urge to procreate, these pieces seek to represent the unexplored territory in modern lesbian life. Including work from Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Marcia Munson, Karla Jay, Linnea Due, among many others, these personal essays and memoirs with their sharp insight and complexly rendered moments, pairing humor with serious political thought, make up a wholly original and utterly compelling anthology in Women on the Verge.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466876163 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/22/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 417,598 |
| File size: | 353 KB |
About the Author
Susan Fox Rogers, former editor at Plume responsible for much of its gay/lesbian fiction and non-fiction in the late 80s and early 90s, is the editor several very popular and groundbreaking anthologies on the modern lesbian experience, including Portraits of Love: Lesbians Writings About Love and the Lambda Literary Award-nominated Sportsdykes: Stories from on and Off the Field. She currently teaches writing and English at the University of Arizona.
Other Contributors: Kelly Barth, Robin Bernstein, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Theresa Carilli, Mary Beth Caschetta, Andrea Cohen, tatiana de la tierra, Linnea Due, Mary Hussmann, Karla Jay, Gretchen Legler, BK Loren, Meredith Maran, Franci McMahon, Marcia Munson, Eileen Myles, Judith Nichols, Su Penn, Germaine W. Shames, Donna Steiner, P. F. White
Read an Excerpt
Women on the Verge
Lesbian Tales of Power and Play
By Susan Fox Rogers
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1999 Susan Fox RogersAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7616-3
CHAPTER 1
Because I Was Born in America
P. F. Witte
Because I was born in America, I knew I could be Superman ... Superman ...
Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman!
Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound ... Every Saturday afternoon, the adventures of Superman on black-and-white TV. I was glued to the screen. There was Jimmy Olsen, who looked as if he'd make a good friend, and the Chief of the Daily Planet — I was sort of scared of him, he looked and acted just like my German grandmother. Then there was Lois Lane. Well, I can't say I had a crush on her, I hated that damn hat she always wore, but I figured she might make an interesting date.
... Who had powers far beyond those of mortal men ... disguised as the mild-mannered reporter ... Clark Kent ... and I, disguised as a mild-mannered young girl growing up in the simple borough of Queens, knew I, too, could be Superman. I, too, had powers far beyond those of mortal kids in my neighborhood — but I was also smart enough to know that I would not be a fool about Kryptonite. And so I set out to fight a never-ending battle to fulfill my dream — to have the chance to fly just like Superman.
First I needed a cape. None could be found in my house. My father, a truckdriver, wouldn't have use for one; I couldn't imagine him on the loading dock wearing chinos, a flannel shirt, and a bright red cape. And if my mother couldn't buy it at Mays or Lerner's department store, well, it just wasn't coming into the house.
And because I was raised in Queens, I had vision, inspiration, determination. It was when my mother asked me to put a new roll of toilet tissue in the bathroom that my creativity took hold. I had found my cape there, in the bathroom — one of my mother's Cannon cotton towels (a solid color — no stripes, thank God). With two safety pins, I fastened the towel to my shoulders, thus creating the perfect cape.
That afternoon I made a couple of practice runs through the house, without the cape, for a warm-up. When I finally felt the inspiration for flight, I knew I was ready. With my cape firmly fastened to my shoulders, I started my run from the front porch, through the living room, through the dining room, on through the kitchen, and out through the back porch: the back porch, which was not enclosed and stood six feet from the ground — a single simple metal bar enclosing the sides. I took a breath, raised my arms for flight toward the sky, and sang out, "Here I am, Superman!" I suppose my force as Superman sent me over the bar, flying straight to the ground.
My mother, who had caught a glimpse of me flying through the kitchen — she had been at the sink washing dishes — heard the thud. She ran to the back porch. But I was already on my feet, shaking off the dirt. I hadn't hurt a bone in my body. I had the wind knocked out of me a bit, but that was all, and my cape was still securely fastened to my shoulders. I looked up at her with a smile. I had done it. For a split second, I had flown as Superman had. I thought she'd be happy. Instead I received, "What the hell are you doing? Do you want to end up a cripple? All I need is a cripple for a daughter. Not getting polio wasn't good enough for you? Girlie, I don't need any more doctor bills."
Her response didn't matter. I did it. She'd never understand. Of course I wasn't allowed to take a bathroom towel out of the bathroom again. And standing there in front of the bathroom mirror admiring my cape just wasn't the same thing. But just like Clark Kent, I knew, I really knew I was Superman, disguised as a mild-mannered kid from Queens, of course ... and so I fought my never-ending battle for my truth, and the American way.
Ship of Fools
Linnea Due
It all began when we got a letter in the mail asking us to take part in a day-long white-water rafting trip to benefit Friends of the River. This sounded good to me, because I had decided, in my recent yet already dissipated middle age, that I wanted something more than a good conscience from my charity dollar.
Joining Strybing Arboretum had signaled the new trend: For only $25, I received four issues of Pacific Horticulture and 10 percent off everything I bought at local nurseries, plus the opportunity to spend hundreds more at the annual May plant sale, which resembled the Grand National Steeplechase. Last year we arrived five minutes after the starting gun, which meant all the orchids had already been snatched and placed under guard in the "hold" area. With the divas socked away, members stood for a moment sniffing like bird dogs — rare passionflower vines? Late-blooming azaleas? Tree peonies? Species geraniums? The race was on. Nothing near so much fun happened with the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force, the Nature Conservancy, or the World Wildlife Fund, so the rafting trip looked right up — well, my alley.
I was a little worried about Elisabeth. I'm a water person, and she's a mountain person. She has a lot of photographs of herself on cliffs in Nepal and Peru that make me dizzy to look at them. Much of our trip to the Italian Alps consisted of me crouching lightheaded behind the guard rail, croaking, "Come back, come back," as she hopped the fence and strolled merrily up to sheer drops of several thousand feet. "Come and see the view," she would coax. "It's really magnificent." Sick-making.
She did get sick on our world-famous whale-watching trip. She spent nine-tenths of the journey either hanging over the rail or lying on the single bunk inside, announcing at more and more frequent intervals that she wanted to die. That's why I was worried about the river rafting, but she assured me that the whale-watching debacle was because she, being Swiss, was unused to oceans. She was, she insisted, completely at home on lakes. I told her I didn't think white-water rafting on the American River had much in common with rowing on the Lake Zug, but she ignored me.
* * *
The big day dawned gray and gloomy. This didn't bother me — I was ready for high seas and high adventure. Elisabeth wasn't so sure. She had images of basking in the sun as we drifted down the river, trailing her foot over the side. We packed for our own fantasies: I brought heavy sweaters and my survival knife, while Elisabeth trucked along sunglasses, sunscreen, and a Doris Lessing novel.
The drive up to the staging area in the Sierra foothills took a good two hours. We arrived ten minutes late, and saw that groups had already formed. It took us a few moments to realize that these groups had coalesced perhaps weeks before; the rafters and their leaders had planned their trips far in advance. The people like us — the dopes who had just sent in their money — were standing aimlessly in knots of twos and threes. Finally we dregs were herded together and given a choice: We could go down the river on the paddleboat with the supplies and two elderly ladies, or we could all crowd on the one remaining raft. East Bay types — which we all were — are nothing if not intrepid. Everyone chose the latter alternative.
There were ten of us, not counting our fearless leaders, one blond and Aryan — clearly the top banana — and the other darker and squatter — second banana. Top Banana introduced himself as Dave, which, judging by his heavy accent, wasn't his given name, and then said Second Banana's name was Jürgen, but we should call him George. Elisabeth poked me in the ribs triumphantly: Central Europeans über alles. I wondered what Germans knew about white-water rafting. Did they have rafting rivers in Germany? I was about to ask Elisabeth, but she had leaped into the fray by suggesting we introduce ourselves and add where we were from. This was a coy way of letting the Germans know she was Swiss; she has no accent.
The Germans went first. "Dave" was from Stuttgart, and Jürgen (no one called him George) from Munich. Dave was full of himself, while Jürgen was shy and retiring, leaving Dave to do all the flirting and huffing and puffing. Both were around twenty-three — awfully young, I thought critically, for the awesome responsibility of leading a rafting trip. The rest of us were older, some a lot. One man had to be in his late fifties, and his girlfriend (that's what he called her) was on the far side of fifty as well. He was originally from Ohio but had lived in Oakland for years. She was from Texas and had a twang to prove it. There were two other women, who were wearing shorts, Annapurna T-shirts, and grim faces; they had, they confided to Elisabeth midway in the trip, hoped to meet some interesting men. The only single men on our raft, Dave and Jürgen, were a good twelve years their juniors.
I said I was born in Berkeley, which got the usual gasp (natives are as rare as hot summers), and then Elisabeth introduced herself, and indeed, the Germans were astounded at how well she'd mastered her v's and w's. The three had a rapid conversation in German while everybody else looked at an eagle that was perched on a tree across the river. The eagle seemed bored; not half as much as we. Dave suggested we complete the introductions en route, so we all piled in the raft. It immediately became obvious that there wasn't enough room for all twelve of us to sit around the edges. Two people had to sit in the middle, hands wrapped around their knees. The raft, meanwhile, wallowed low in the water, and was sluggish to come to and fro as Dave yelled his commands at us in guttural English: "LEFT! NOW RIGHT!" The other group leaders, I saw, weren't having quite so much trouble, but then they had far fewer people in their rafts to teach how to use the paddles — nine was the second largest number, including leaders.
In the middle of our practicing, almost as comic relief, we continued getting to know each other. One man, tall and thin, said he was fourteenth-generation Californian. Elisabeth blurted: "But there weren't even people here then!" which was undeniably ignorant but not ill-meant. He drew himself up to his full height, which is hard to do when you're sitting in a bobbing rubber raft, and huffed: "There were Indians and Spaniards. I am Californiano." I had never heard this term, nor had the others; everyone glanced at everyone else wide-eyed — good God, another ethnic group to keep straight and not offend. The Californiano's friend seemed embarrassed and said she was from Illinois in a low voice we could hardly hear.
Last but not least was a couple who reminded me of our next-door neighbors: the man sweet and gentle, the woman the toughest and strongest mother-of-a-beehive you'd ever run across. My next-door neighbor, in fact, had often amazed me: chainsawing an entire tree that had fallen across the road, for instance. That may not sound like much, but she did it at three in the morning during a near hurricane — as near a hurricane as we get in the East Bay. Or the time she offered to take an old cast-iron bathtub of mine to the dump. Great — except it meant we had to lift it onto her truck, which was a high-bed half-tonner, not a cute little pickup like most Berkeley women drive. We got it up maybe a foot before it (and I) collapsed to the ground. "I think," I suggested, "we should wait for some men to come by."
"What for?" she snarled, and lifted with a will, startling me so much I actually joined in as she hollered, "Higher!" and we made one last massive shove and got enough of its end in that we could, by resting its weight on our shoulders, wiggle it onto the truck bit by bit. I went to bed even though it was barely eleven in the morning. She went to the dump, offloaded the tub, returned with two flats of ground cover, dug up her whole parking strip, and planted the flats that afternoon. And get this — she was five and a half months pregnant at the time! Straight women have a lot more to prove. Remember that the next time you wonder why the over-forty straight women you know are going to law school in their spare time while the lesbians are about to move on to a happy retirement carving duck decoys. "Aren't we skipping a stage?" a friend of mine asked recently, stabbing her knife with an excess of energy into her mallard replica. "Like midlife?"
* * *
So this was our ship of fools: The next-door-neighbor types were called June and Jordan, and they sat directly behind us. Behind them, with his hand on the rudder at the aft end of the raft, sat Dave, shouting commands as we swirled onto the river itself, and at the front crouched Jürgen, quietly keeping an eye out for any problems. The older man and his Texas-twang maiden were taking the first turn at the bottom of the raft, which was rapidly getting swamped, since we kept taking in water at every trough. "FASTER!" Dave shouted, and we flailed our stubby paddles with a vengeance, but our craft barely increased its sluggish pace, and we swooped down into another trough and shipped more water. The Texan began bailing with a foam cup; you could see right away it was a losing proposition. Dave, cool as a cucumber and given more to preening than to paying attention, was losing his composure as we veered drunkenly down the river, crashing into rocks and nearly overturning once in a vicious upswell. With shouted commands, he steered us to a quiet area near shore. It was time for our first lecture.
"NOW LOOK!" he began, but then he lowered his voice since we were all listening like eager little mice, "when I say fast, I mean fast! Very fast. You must put your backs, your shoulders, your hearts" — he thumped his chest — "into it. Great effort is needed here. Understand? We have to work hard to get down the river. And when I shout right, you must respond instantly! Not three seconds later. Not after you look at the pine tree. Right then! Instantly!"
We all nodded soberly. We would try to do better. We paddled back out to the middle of the river, slipped into a downswell, and took on more water. The older man was soaked to the skin, and he'd begun to shiver. His girlfriend was hurling more water; now she'd found another foam cup, so she was holding on to a rope with one hand, scooping up water in her twin cups and tossing it in the general direction of the river with the other. Unfortunately the Annapurna types were in her way, and they looked to be getting as much of the surplus water as the river. Their lips were set in straight lines, and I thought maybe they were wishing they'd gone in the paddle boat, never mind "A Woman's Place Is on Top."
All of us, however, were trying to maintain the fiction that we were having lots of fun. We waved gaily at the other rafts as they sped past us, traveling in straight lines down the river. We pointed out several hawks. We all paused, at one point, to watch deer at the river's edge, only to scrape past a rock and nearly turn over again. "PAY ATTENTION" Dave screamed. Then he sighed and directed us back to shore. Lecture two: "I know that Americans are not a lazy people," he started, using a confident and winning tone. "Just last weekend, my group responded instantly to my commands, and we had a wonderful journey down the river." He smiled, and the sun came out, glinting off his blond hair. "So what we must do is to work a little harder and listen a little closer. Then we'll be fine."
I was beginning to doubt it. I was, in fact, comparing the number of people in our raft to the other less-burdened boats.
"What was your group last weekend?" the Californiano asked.
"Six members of the Cal rowing team. Remember, George?"
Jürgen nodded his head. "They were very strong," he said dolefully. He seemed to think we were not so strong.
Dave nodded. "Of course. But we'll be just as strong! We must try, and when we try, we will succeed!" He got a dreamy look on his face. "They were wonderfully in shape. We had a great time."
I was beginning to entertain a horrible suspicion. "How many groups have you led, Dave?"
"Just that one," he said. "This is my fourth time down the river, though," he added defensively. "We had two training runs."
Terrific, I thought. Then I computed the probable weights of the six men on the Cal rowing team, which I estimated at about a thousand pounds. Our ten, not counting Dave and Jürgen, probably topped fourteen hundred. I thought four hundred pounds might make a difference in how quickly our craft could respond to our — I readily admit it — slower paddling. Plus, we had two people sitting in the middle of the raft, not only not paddling, but weighing down the center. That would make it more likely that the raft would simply spin in circles — which is what we were now doing, as Dave shouted desperately at us to paddle out of it. We finally managed to escape the spin cycle only to ground out seconds later on a submerged rock in the center of the river. We splashed water dramatically with our paddles and got nowhere; we were truly stuck.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Women on the Verge by Susan Fox Rogers. Copyright © 1999 Susan Fox Rogers. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
P. F. White: Because I was Born in America
Linnea Due: Ship of Fools
BK Loren: Eye of the Storm
Eileen Myles: The Big Island
Judith Nichols: Naming and Other Tricks of Learning
Meredith Maran: Throw Like a Girl
Robin Bernstein: Trick: An Absolutely True Story with Complete Details
Donna Steiner: Connect the Dots
Su Penn: Air, Gravity, Earth
Gretchen Legler: Lake One, Lake Two, Lake Three, Lake Four
Mary Beth Caschetta: The Rest of the Party
Andrea Cohen: A Pool Supreme
tatiana de la tierra: Jail Time for Beginners
Mary Hussmann: North
Karla Jay: The Cave of the Flying Vagina
Germaine W. Shames: World's Highest Bungee Jump
Theresa Carilli: Aftershocks
Susan Fox Rogers: Traverses
Marcia Munson: Burger King Baby
Lucy Jane Bledsoe: On Being at Sea
Kelly Barth: Step-side-together
Franci McMahon: The Wind in My Mane