You Can't Buy Love Like That Read online

  Our live-in housekeeper, Mrs. Powell, and I were left standing in the living room. “Everything is going to be all right,” she said as she put her arm around me and steered me back to my bed. I heard the words, but I didn’t believe them even then. “Oh, don’t worry, sweetie, they are going to fix him. Now go back to sleep.” But I couldn’t sleep; my heart was pounding and my tummy was turning over like it was filled with rotten food.

  My father was in a coma for weeks, and when he finally woke up, he could no longer see normally. He’d suffered brain damage from an allergic reaction to sulfa, the medication the doctor had given him earlier in the day. If God could do something like that to my father, the best person I knew, what would he do to me?

  My father’s explanation of his illness combined with direct threats from the minister were inconsistent with the more balanced views of my mother, who shared stories of loving to dance at the Greystone Ballroom or taking trips with her single girlfriends on local coed cruises around Lake Michigan. It was clear in her retelling of these tales that she enjoyed a few worldly pleasures without the threat of hell and damnation befalling her. But the constant hammering about sin won out and ignited an internal conflict that lasted through my adolescent years to the present. It was impossible to reconcile my evolving attraction to women with the Baptist church’s rigid thought forms about sexuality. If I was a lesbian, this choice would set me on the fast track to Hell. To agree with the church was to defy my soul. To trust myself was to let go of the only God I knew. Either choice was a bad one.

  The church, once so familiar as a child, had become foreign and disturbing. There was a new minister now that Reverend Mitchell had left, but many of the elders’ familiar messages of fire and brimstone and the need to be saved remained. After years away at college, and given my increased awareness of social issues, this religion began to seem quite lacking. Deeper doubts arose about Christianity and its legitimacy. It seemed man had created God in his image rather than the other way around, or the portrayal of him wouldn’t be so schizophrenic. How could any God be absolutely loving and hateful at the same time? How could such a being have his son die on the cross for your sins, but want to punish you for everything you did, rendering the offering of Christ invalid?

  The church’s narrow focus on its congregation’s sin and redemption left it mute on the upheaval spinning about the world: the implications of the Vietnam War, our role as Christians in supporting racial justice, or the meaning of loving our neighbors despite our differences, be it a black family or a gay couple. There were no visible members of either group in our sheltered church home.

  Mike came many weekends through the rest of the summer, and I was grateful for the familiarity of his steady presence. The Detroit Tigers were really hot that year, and my mom won the city lottery for a chance to purchase two tickets to the World Series, which she gave to Mike and me. Though it was the year Denny McLain won thirty-one games, we had the unfortunate experience of watching him lose one of only six that year.

  Nicky and I stayed in touch through the summer, occasionally visiting by train to see one another. Those times were bittersweet—filled with the joy of intimacy and emotional attachment yet fraught with the underlying nervousness of being caught and the sadness of each departure. I strived to transfer the feelings I had for Nicky to Mike, as though they were funds in a bank that could be moved from one account to another. My sense of loyalty to him—along with my fear of God’s retribution and my parents’ discovery—eventually scared me straight for awhile. The hardest thing to get over was the hatred I felt for myself—not for loving Nicky, but for being too cowardly to admit it in public when confronted.

  In September, Nicky transferred to Indiana University in South Bend so she could live with her parents and save money. As a result, we spoke less often and eventually grew apart— not because the love had faded, but because I couldn’t tolerate the pain. Being involved in activities that demanded little emotional effort were a relief, and I sought out experiences that required nothing of me—lost in the numbness I felt without Nicky in my life.

  Without the capacity to reconcile such profound feelings for a woman with the rigidity of Baptist theology, I was a captive prisoner to my own thoughts—a struggle I didn’t have the skill or knowledge to win. The Church was Goliath, and I had no David within me.

  The freedom I longed for in loving Nicky would remain out of reach.

  chapter

  8

  will you marry me?

  It was difficult to return to school alone. There was no telling who had started the rumors, making me skittish around everyone in the dorm. Then, there were the memories of Nicky, lingering like ghosts in the hallways, the cafeteria, and the rec room, at once a constant presence and an unabated emptiness.

  In most heterosexual love relationships there is a marked beginning and end, allowing you to first express the joy of falling in love and revel in your friends’ happiness that you have found someone. And, if you should break up with the guy of your dreams, these same friends come to grieve with you in the loss of this special connection. They know your heart is broken, and they are present to help you heal. Because my relationship with Nicky was secret, there was no acknowledged beginning, no shared recognition of the love we shared together, and then no understanding of or support in the immense loss of her leaving. Because the true nature of our relationship was invisible to others from the beginning, I was alone in my sorrow when it was gone.

  In an effort to ease the emptiness, I refocused my attention on a double major in sociology and business education with the intention of becoming a high school teacher. Though my original motivation in transferring to a four-year program was for social reasons, it seemed, with the proper focus, I could finish with a teaching degree. This would require an extra year, but I welcomed the space to revitalize my relationship with Mike as I worked toward graduating with a profession other than that of a secretary. I was assigned a new roommate, a transfer student from New York who knew nothing of my past. We got along well, though I spent much of my time at the library just to be away from the haunting memories.

  Whenever Mike came over, I made sure we studied in the dining hall, so people could see us together. We double dated with my sorority sisters and went to parties where we were visible to others. We attended church and spent time with his older friends—all of this public display intended to broadcast that I was a happily partnered, heterosexual girl. But I felt afraid and abandoned—first by myself and then by the people I thought were my friends, but most significantly by the God I was taught to believe in. There was no comfort for me in that faith because there was no room for the person I feared myself to be. All the traits my father admired—love and kindness, compassion and determination—were still solidly a part of me, yet they seemed inconsequential in comparison to the sin of loving a woman.

  In spite of my guardedness, I made a new friend during the winter of 1969. Julie was also a sociology major, which made it natural for us to regularly hang out. She was smart and insightful, with short, brown, unruly hair that curled in multiple directions. She wore it closely cropped to her head just to keep it manageable. Her face was angular and youthful, with dimples that made her look even younger when she smiled. Her blue eyes were set beneath thin eyebrows, creating a soft yet strong presence. Introverted and observant, she surprised me with keen perceptions, often about what seemed a casual comment I made in conversation. I had found a way to have a new pal and stay focused on my commitment to Mike. Yet the fear I lived with moment to moment served as a constant reminder of the unintended consequences of letting my emotions overrun my rational thinking. I worked hard to construct a persona that projected confidence and comfort on the outside, while on the inside I was an unruly mess.

  When the school year was over, I returned to my job at Detroit Diesel, and Julie took a job at a tennis camp a half hour from Kalamazoo. Our friendship deepened through letters; with both of us loving to write, we were a
ble to carry on the same level of conversation in print as we had in person. She was thoughtful, poetic, and creative—always including magazine pictures or cartoons in her letters that illustrated her thoughts. She visited me once in Detroit for a weekend, and Mike and I went to see her at the tennis camp. We each desired depth in friendship and treasured our time together. Her capacity for closeness helped to ease the sadness I felt in Nicky’s absence.

  When I returned to school in September 1969, I got an apartment off campus with a couple of friends. I had saved enough money to purchase a used 1966 VW Bug for eleven hundred dollars, for transportation back and forth to class and to do my student teaching in a town thirty miles away. This was a new feeling of freedom on all fronts. I was actually on track to graduate in the spring of 1970. I breathed more easily outside the dorm, no longer wondering who thought I was gay. Of greatest relief was that Mike and I were moving closer to being engaged.

  Advice on marriage remained at the top of my mother’s letters, most of which involved suggestions on how to be decorous around men—with Mike, in particular, so he could feel good about himself. My mom was her own woman long before there was a feminist movement—a person who expected to be treated with respect by men and wasn’t shy about addressing their weak points. She often told a story about a guy she dated who complained to her that she gave him an inferiority complex. To this she boldly replied, “You had one long before I met you.”

  But when it came to giving me advice about the male gender, and about marriage in particular, I would receive letters like the following:

  It makes parents concerned about the type of husband you’ll have, hopefully he will be as full of zest for living as yourself and he will understand you completely . . .

  When I realize how God blessed me with a wonderful husband, in spite of myself, I feel sure you will fare well too. It means a lot when the man loves you completely, because their work comes first, but you’re important too. If you can appreciate a man and show it, doesn’t it do wonders for your relationship? Have you heard the record, Be Good to Your Man?

  I’m sure she meant the song “Stand by Your Man,” but either way, it wasn’t the melody she sang in her approach to dating, and I couldn’t understand why she thought it should be mine.

  I wondered, Who is this woman? The mother I lived with and after whom I modeled myself was fiercely independent, sassy, and sure of herself, someone who wouldn’t dream of being “less than” in any category, just to please a man. And the father I lived with loved her exactly that way and wouldn’t have married her if she was hanging all over him always trying to make him feel good about himself.

  The mother who showed up in letters like this was perplexing and annoying. She was in tune with the times of the sixties, in our working-class orbit where the majority of young girls in our church were marching toward wedded bliss without an afterthought. Even though the feminist movement had been launched with the publication of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan in 1963 and the founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966, no one in my social network was awakened by these early calls for the equal partnership of women in American society.

  For centuries women had been economically tied to men and rarely had the means to do anything but marry if they didn’t want to live in poverty. Even if women could find a way to support themselves, they risked social inferiority because of their singlehood past a certain age. It didn’t matter how smart they were; it mattered how beautiful they were—how adept at diminishing themselves to whatever degree necessary to succeed as wives, their most significant role.

  I, too, was indoctrinated this way, despite living in a family that had shifted the paradigm in response to my father’s illness. Popular television shows like Father Knows Best, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and Leave It to Beaver drove home the one acceptable role for women. The wives in all these shows were incessantly cheerful, immaculately groomed, wore pearls and heels while doing household chores, and lived in spotless houses where young children (mostly boys) never messed things up and where a four-course meal was served at five every evening. The fathers were the source of all wisdom, dispensing moral lessons for their children at the dinner table, and the mothers were endless wellsprings of love and support for everyone in the family. At the end of the day, the parents would have meaningful conversations as they sat up in their twin beds across from each other with pajamas buttoned up to their necks. It was a kind of hypnotic trance that lulled girls into a false sense of reality. And, even though my family wasn’t like that, I somehow imagined during the fifties and sixties that every other family on my street was, that ours was only different because my father was ill and my mother had to work. I didn’t realize that almost no one had a family like that.

  My mother reinforced that television model, constantly encouraging me to meet the right guy. The second year of our relationship Mike accepted Christ as his savior. Now that he was “saved,” he was the benefactor of my mother’s counsel because he had become the perfect catch. Not a week went by during my college years that she didn’t tell me about some girl my age in our church who was either having a shower, getting married, or having a baby. And the emphasis was always on the wedding itself—bridesmaids, color choices, the site of the reception. Little consideration was given to the marriage, to shared values, or a desire to have children or understanding how to care for them.

  My mother’s letters, the social mores of the time, and my deep yearning to not be a lesbian all pushed me toward a wedded path upon graduation. The day I finally made up my mind, Mike and I were sitting in his blue Volkswagen Bug out in front of my apartment. It was a bright, chilly November afternoon in 1969. We were discussing the future of our relationship, now that I would graduate in April. While I can recall the image of us scrunched together in the small space, it seems odd that I don’t remember any of the specific details of such an important discussion, except for one: By the time I got out of the car, I had agreed to marry him. I don’t remember how he asked me, nor do I remember feelings of joy and excitement. It seemed he was part of my destiny and that graduation from college meant it was time to grow up. I was in a constant internal battle with myself over the compelling draw I felt for women friends, though I had not acted on any other feelings after the catastrophic experience of being with Nicky, even though I felt an occasional wave of desire—especially with Julie. It seemed the only way out of that recurring temptation was to make a commitment to a guy and to stick with it.

  I designed my own ring and spent hours drawing different pictures of the ideal symbol reflecting our love. I settled on a tear-shaped design in gold that looked like a peace symbol going one way with the diamond nestled in the lower portion of the ring. Then if you turned it upside down, it looked like a rose with the diamond becoming the bloom of the flower. Certainly one of a kind, it achieved the desired oohs and aahs from friends. My time might have been better spent trying to understand what we had in common and why we wanted to marry. I had no idea how to create an adult relationship. In that era, people frequently talked about girls going to college to get their “MRS degree,” an accomplishment that was viewed with greater admiration than the BA or BS. My mother had taught me the characteristics to look for in a husband. Was he handsome? Check. Was he respectful? Check. Was he kind? Check. Was he a Christian? Check. Mike was all those things and more. I was good to go. All I wanted—dared to want—was to feel normal.

  We would marry in June, two months after my graduation, and I would look for a teaching job in Kalamazoo. My pending degree was a monumental accomplishment—an achievement that far exceeded the associate’s degree I originally hoped to obtain. This was more than a backup plan for me; I wanted to be a teacher, and I had worked hard for that opportunity. And, through feedback from my student teaching mentors, I had developed the confidence that I would be great at it.

  In April a few of my pals threw me a bridal shower and, in addition to my friends, invited my mother, Mike’s
mom, and two of his sisters. I awoke that morning feeling nauseous and unable to take a deep breath. With effort, I made my way out of bed and started to run a bath in the giant claw-foot tub. As I stood and watched the bubbles expand across the top of the water, I thought about my life at school coming to a close. The thought of graduating was scary—the thought of getting married scarier still. Then there were the fears about who I might actually be that I tried to conceal, even from myself.

  My mind turned to memories of Nicky. There had been no final goodbye, just a drifting away, like taffy pulling in opposite directions, stretching until it separated completely. I thought about all the time we spent together—the walks, the late nights in my room talking, watching the matches burn, our bus ride to Benton Harbor, swimming in the dark at the Howard Johnson pool, and the day she left school. Was it even possible that someone would ever know me like she did? I wondered if she was engaged by now, too.

  Julie and I had also grown much closer in the last year, and I felt enlivened by the time we spent together. Her intellect and curiosity were enticing—something I missed in my relationship with Mike. The richness of my conversations with girlfriends was always more stimulating and emotionally exciting than discussions I had had with any man. The women more often made me think about my purpose in life and question what I really wanted. They made me dig deeper for the truth.

  It wasn’t that I wasn’t attracted to men. I knew I had been in love with Charlie, and my love for Mike was genuine. But with women, I felt most understood, and my craving for emotional intimacy was most satisfied. The men of my era were trapped in their own social paradigms, where John Wayne served as the model and any gesture toward vulnerability was perceived as weakness. There was not yet a corresponding men’s movement that encouraged their emotional development or any desire on their part to acknowledge women’s equality.