in high school. Louise’s response was sensible. She put on her coat and quietly went out the door as if she were backing away from a barking, potentially dangerous, dog.
I put the scene out of my mind. Unless I wanted to walk out behind Louise—and to my eternal shame, I did not— I would have to, at all costs, avoid thinking about June’s assault. I put it out of my mind—and kept it in that overcrowded “out there” —until now: that is to say, their tyranny over me, and my cooperation in being tyrannized, survived their deaths. June has been dead, at this writing, for ten years; Parke died in February 1992, less than a year ago.
Beneath the fragile gift-wrap of her professed politics, June Arnold regarded herself, by virtue of her socialite Houston upbringing, as a singular aristocrat; as such, she tended either to patronize or lavish disdain on any woman (or man) without class characteristics she could honor. It was as simple as this: Louise had played basketball; June had grown up riding her family’s horses. Poverty irritated June; she understood that one might be born poor but to go on being poor into adulthood, she felt, demonstrated either an annoying weakness of intellect, or some pre embryonic poor judgment in not getting oneself born an heiress, or some perverse refusal to grab hold of the legendary bootstraps and give them a good yank.
It was, however, the “common” woman who was being canonized by radical and lesbian feminism in those days: the more victimized by sexism or by patriarchal institutions, the more, so to speak, sainted. There was an unspoken taboo against personal ambition. “Using” the movement to achieve individual goals was tantamount to committing the mortal sin of “betraying the revolution,” or betraying the women’s movement, or all women. It was also a time in feminism, coincidentally, when mothers, as opposed to fathers, could do no wrong—a response to the Freud-inspired years of blaming mothers for everything.
Daughters, to some extent, practiced the politics June preached, by publishing literature by women overwhelmingly trapped in circumstances beyond their control— Born to Struggle by May Hobbs, for example, and A True Story of a Drunken Mother by Nancy Lee Hall, and I Must Not Rock by Linda Marie.
But in real life, June was dealing with her feminist embarrassment (not guilt: good feminists had nothing to feel guilty about) over hiring a maid and having the money to pay her well, by tying a big pink ribbon around the new mop she’d bought her, as if it were a gift.
Without money, class, or horses, I could only assume that what separated me, in June’s view, from the common feminist herd was my small literary distinction. But it wasn’t enough. June wanted me cut out of the herd absolutely. June decided, and Parke went along with it, that it would be better all around if I came from a more socially acceptable background, one rather more like hers or Parke’s.
June’s politics were by and large for public consumption only. She swore, for example, by one of the most fundamental tenets of the women’s movement, the one on which consciousness-raising, the first step towards liberation, was based: that one woman will unquestionably believe what another woman discloses about her life and the nature of her background. Privately, however, June persisted in reverting to type. In one of my most memorable encounters with the partners, I learned that after close and careful consideration, June had decided that I must be lying about the circumstances of my birth and upbringing in order to gain movement credentials. Nobody, said June, could be as bright, as educated, as good a writer, as well spoken and well mannered (and so forth) as I was—yet come from the deprived circumstances and cruel mother I had only very slightly, and very casually, filled her and Parke in on. It’s impossible, said June, we do not believe you.
While I was profoundly moved and impressed by women such as Linda Marie, who could tell the story of her horrific childhood in clean, spare, glowing language (in I Must Not Rock, which I had the honor of editing), I was myself so ashamed of being my mother’s victim, and of my helplessness in her power, I made every attempt to conceal the facts of my early life even from intimates, even from myself: I had, for example, spent most of the first four years of my life in a crib which was, in effect, a cage; my mother had ordered a sixth side carpentered for it, a hinged “lid” that locked me inside for most of the day and all the nights. One day my father was moved to take me out of the cage and destroy it. Within the hour, he began teaching me his dance routines. I did not think of myself as a victim; I thought of myself as incredibly lucky. I’d escaped, I’d survived; I was therefore undamaged: wasn’t I? If anything, I had embellished my childhood for June and Parke to make it seem reasonably “normal” to them —more eccentric than awful.
I began very gradually re-entering the world three years ago in my own circuitous, aberrant fashion, through extremes of physical exercise. After a while, I remembered that the one thing during my childhood that I’d loved (beside beauty) was dancing with my father. So I added a dance class to the extremes of physical exercise. My teacher is the dancer and choreographer, Beth Easterly. There are more ways than one to exit a cage. In my case, it has taken more than one dancer to unlock the lid and help me out. I’m out; I am, for instance, writing this introduction to Lover and one of my novels-in-progress, You, is nearly complete.
When June declared that they did not believe me she was within her rights, but for the wrong reasons. I did not fight back, although I might have used the opportunity to tell Parke and June the unvarnished truth; but within the topsy-turvy context of June’s disbelief (that the earth’s disinherited cannot acquire manners and education, or be gifted), the truth would have worsened my position because the truth was much worse than the “eccentric” half-truths I’d told her. And when June was convinced that she was right nothing could persuade her that she was wrong. And under certain kinds of attack, if the attacks come from women, I become paralyzed. I was paralyzed. I felt that June, and Parke with her, had unscrewed my head and filled my body with buckets of melancholy. I felt as helpless as a beaten child. I had no words. I don’t recall how I replied to the charges. Apologetically, no doubt.
On the other hand, I couldn’t bring myself to commit a version of suicide on June’s behalf. I clung to the identity I had disclosed; it wasn’t much, but it was all mine. June never stopped disbelieving it.
Aside from the stunningly classist (and positively un-American) attitude built into June’s disbelief, there was the partners’ ongoing conviction that if they battered long enough and hard enough at what I had indeed come from, and still was (despite the renovations I’d done on myself) they might eventually erase my difference from them—my origins, my memories, my history, and my people.
Doing away with my difference, the stuff of my human individuality and of my art, would also serve another vital purpose. Separate a writer from her typewriter and she’ll find a pencil; separate her from her autobiography, through disbelief, and she will become silent: and June knew it. The patriarchy had been successfully employing the technique for a long time.
June and Parke had filled my days and nights with personal and professional crises; nonetheless, I was still writing. Furthermore, Lover was receiving the sort of critical attention June had craved for her second novel, The Cook and the Carpenter and for her third, Sister Gin. Worse, I was the second novelist published by Daughters who, June felt strongly, had gotten more attention than she deserved.
June and Parke became lovers in the late sixties. The first half of Daughters’ life was located in Plainfield, Vermont, where June owned a farm. Later, June and Parke moved into the top floor of June’s Manhattan loft building, but kept the farm. Parke bought the townhouse on Charles Street in Greenwich Village to serve as company headquarters; the Charles Street house also gave Parke a place absolutely hers to escape to when the fights with June, which were usually over June’s involvement with lesbian feminist politics and presses, began to escalate. Parke called sleeping at Charles Street “running away from home.” June had her own escape hatches. She would retreat to the farm or rent small apartments in the Village, where she wrote
