The Love Children Read online

  One person I was always happy to entertain in my room at night was Sandy, who started coming in to visit the first night we arrived. Much of what occupied us in our first months there was figuring out the sexual and social psychodynamics: how people felt about each other, what the buried lusts and resentments were, and most important, who was sleeping with whom. After the first week, we’d get together in her room or mine a couple times a week for an hour or two—not too long, we were beat at night—to smoke and talk things over.

  We knew that Brad and Bernice were a couple but had no idea how they felt about each other. They treated each other so offhandedly. After a month, I decided that they slept together for comfort more than for sex, that they were old friends who were easy with each other but didn’t have much desire for each other. Sometimes they didn’t seem to like each other very much. Contempt would at times slide out of Brad’s voice when he spoke to Bernice, and Bernice, who had told us she was still in love with Gregory, often seemed vacant and distracted around Brad. Sandy read them differently. She thought Bernice was shallow and foolish, whereas Brad was intelligent and responsible. She thought Brad’s irritation with Bernice was a response to her denseness and that Bernice deserved some contempt for being stupid. But I said Bernice was a good-hearted woman, the most generous person there. And I felt that since Bernice was never hostile to Brad, as he was to her, his animosity made you dislike Brad, not Bernice.

  On the other hand, Brad was very fond of Bishop. And Bishop admired Brad, which also made us like Brad. About Bishop, there was no question. He was adorable and sweet and lovely, just as he’d always been, and everyone at Pax loved him too.

  Stepan and Cynthia spent their nights together, but rarely spoke during the day. She seemed almost supercilious toward him, her aristocratic manner and clipped speech more cutting around him than around anyone else. And he could be surly toward her.

  The big surprise was Bishop and Rebecca. Bishop had never shown signs of sexuality in high school, but was clearly in love with Rebecca, who was obviously in love with him. They were the one proper couple: it was sweet to watch them together; he was tender and playful with her, she adoring and mothering to him. They were each others’ babies, constantly making sure that the other was fed, warm, content. Bishop and Rebecca, or Bec, as he called her, were cute together, he very tall, she very short, both of them pale and smart. When they walked out toward the farm together, they held hands.

  Lysanne stayed out of all this, seemingly unfazed by being without a partner, the odd woman out in the sexual game. She was a hearty, hard working woman with a loud, explosive laugh. She was the soul of the farm. Sandy thought she was gay, but Sandy thought that about almost every woman.

  When the group sat together in the evenings, especially if we had a jug of wine or, better, a little pot, it was in a loving and harmonious atmosphere. Everybody mellowed out, gazed at each other with affection, and discussed commune business with interest and energy. Certain subjects did trigger arguments, such as cleaning up the kitchen. The men, particularly Brad and Stepan, wanted the women to do all the housework. They hated to do it and slid out of or forgot their kitchen chores frequently. Brad insisted that men did most of the repair work on the house, so women should do the housework. But Sandy and I had painted the house by ourselves and Rebecca reminded them that she had hammered tiles on the roof right along with Brad and Bishop. Bernice did carpentry alongside Stepan to repair the chicken coops and Lysanne helped Brad install fence posts. The women refused to relent, and the conflict ended in an impasse, always.

  I decided to improve our food, and cooking turned me toward farming. The food at Pax was pretty awful, bland and tasteless. Since we could not afford things like butter, cream, meat, or fish, I wanted to brighten our diet of grains and vegetables with herbs. We did not have much to do over the winter and I could spend hours in the library reading about herbs and spices and researching books I could borrow through the interlibrary system. The librarians became my pals; we searched together through Books in Print and other reference works, a laborious project in those days, before the Internet. The librarians, all local people, knew the farmers in the area, and knew which men and women were knowledgeable about herbs and vegetables. They often called people to ask if I could visit sometime to learn what they knew.

  There were a lot of nettles growing on our place, down toward the stream. Brad tried to eradicate them, but they kept growing back. Stepan said they were useless, as did most of the Becket farmers I met. But I had a feeling about them; to me, they looked like plants, not weeds. Finally I met a farmer who had been stationed in Germany as a soldier in World War II, and had eaten them in soup. I found a traditional German cookbook—Stepan could read German—and found a recipe for nettle soup. So I cut some nettles and made a soup with mint and parsley, thickened with potatoes. The Pax gang loved it. Encouraged, I made flour dumplings stuffed with parsley, chive, thyme, and tiny chopped nettles, and everybody raved.

  That’s when I began to plan the herb garden.

  Stepan and Lysanne knew a lot about plants. Stepan knew mainly traditional lore, from Russia, ideas that involved things modern farmers had forgotten, or had never known. Lysanne had been to an agricultural college in Oklahoma for a few years, and she was up on newer stuff, a kind of farming that had no name then, which we called “natural.” Later, it was called “organic.”

  The Berkshire winter was long; the ground was frozen hard late into spring. For fear of frost, we couldn’t plant until May, but I started my herbs in April in shallow plastic boxes I’d found in the supermarket’s trash heap. I asked Stepan to dig up earth to fill them, then planted the seeds I’d collected over the winter. I set the boxes on sawhorse tables against the barn facing east. Lysanne built a lightweight wooden frame, to which we stapled a plastic sheet. I laid this over the herbs, tying the loose ends of the plastic to the sawhorse legs so the wind didn’t blow it away. Being against the barn protected the boxes from the wind, being up on tables protected them from frost, and the plastic protected them from cold. I had to raise the frame every day to water them, which was awkward, and as I tended them, I was building a permanent greenhouse in my mind. But this would do for now.

  In May, when my fear of frost lessened and the ground was soft enough, I persuaded Bishop and Stepan to till a bed for me in front of the house, where the sun shone all morning. Then I began transplanting the seedlings. I had planned the bed carefully, consulting Stepan and Lysanne as well as books I had borrowed from the library over the winter. I planted the herbs according to affinity. I made patterns of Italian basil, dill, tarragon, oregano, chive, rosemary, thyme, cilantro, purslane, sorrel, bergamot, sage, lovage, cumin, lemon thyme, and mustard. I thought they looked beautiful. Stepan shrugged; he saw no romance in farming. But Bishop raved over it. I could always count on him to make me feel good. I planted tomatoes among the basil and put a big pot of mint at one corner of the bed. I put low-growing edible flowers like nasturtiums along the edges, to brighten the bed. At that point, Bishop and the women at least were enthusiastic.

  It took me three days to plant all the seedlings, after which my entire body ached: my back, the backs of my thighs, my knees, my shoulders. I was one mass of pain. I’d worn a big floppy hat but my neck was sunburned anyway. I spent a night soaking in a tub with bath salts. I’d never been so tired or so achy. But I’d been ecstatic while doing it, and I was happier than I’d ever been in my life, whether people appreciated it or not.

  As I sat in the bath, smiling with joy, I was mulling over Sandy, who had acted sour that night at dinner. I wondered if I was so high that I was casting everyone else in shadow, but it now occurred to me that Sandy had been low for some time. She hadn’t been into my room to see me for over a week, but I’d been so engrossed in the garden that I hadn’t even thought about it. Her mood had been wavering ever since her father had died, and for months, I’d been writing it off as grief. But it seemed to me that night that she was getting wors
e over time, walking around with a sour expression and snapping at people, even me. So after my bath, refreshed by its luxury (we didn’t have enough hot water to bathe often), I went to her room with some chocolates I’d gotten at work. Sheila, our store manager, had been given a box of chocolates for her birthday a few days ago and had generously passed it around all day long. Each time it reached me, I took one, but I hid it in a tissue in my apron pocket instead of eating it. I had four chocolates, waiting for the right moment, and now I handed them to Sandy with a conspiratorial smile: “Look what I’ve got!”

  “Oh!” She pounced. She took one.

  “They’re all for you,” I said.

  “Oh, Jess!” She had tears in her eyes. She’d really been deprived since we’d been here. She took the others, but leaving them in the tissue I’d wrapped them in, she stowed them in her duffle bag. I watched her, laughing.

  “Not going to eat them?”

  “No, I’ll save them for nights when I’m especially down. Chocolate cheers me up.”

  “Any special reason? Why you’re down, I mean?”

  She looked at me under heavy brows. “You mean you’ve looked up long enough to notice?”

  “What?”

  “You’re so busy coming on to Stepan, I didn’t think you could see anything else.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, come on, Jess. Don’t play innocent with me.”

  “I haven’t been coming on to Stepan. He’s involved with Cynthia.”

  “Who practically spits when she looks at you.”

  I was shocked. “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not kidding. Don’t you see what you’re doing?”

  “I haven’t tried to come on to Stepan! I’ve just been so happy about the herb garden.”

  “Oh, Stepan, you big strong man, dig up a plot for me, please, pretty please?” she mimicked in a little-girl voice.

  Blood rushed to my head. “I never said anything like that!” I cried.

  “Your smile said it, your posture, your voice,” she said, her face hard.

  I burst into tears. She was making fun of me. She hated me. Sandy. Sandy!

  She gasped. “Oh, Jess, I’m sorry. I’m feeling so hateful! I hate it here! I hate it! But I don’t want to go back home with my tail between my legs. Forgive me! I’m sorry!”

  “Why? Why do you hate me?”

  “No, I don’t hate you! I’m sorry! I love you. Really! But you have been flirty, maybe you don’t realize it. You’ve got Stepan all excited. He’s ready to leap on you, don’t you see that? What I hate is being here. Especially Brad!”

  “Brad! I thought you liked Brad. The last time we talked, you liked him!”

  “That was before he started driving me crazy by hitting on me,” she moaned.

  I wiped my nose with my handkerchief. We had to use hankies here, we couldn’t afford to buy tissues. I’d had Mom send me my hankies from home along with the flannel pajamas and woolen bathrobe and slippers I’d neglected to bring.

  “You’re kidding! What does he do?”

  “Oh, don’t you see him? Don’t you hear him? Are you deaf? He’s constantly pressuring me, all the time, whenever we’re in the same room. I don’t know why you don’t see it, except you’re too busy coming on to Stepan!” Then she burst into tears.

  What a pair.

  I let her cry, waiting until she blew her nose and calmed down.

  “He comes on to you,” I prompted.

  “Hard. At the beginning, I said, ‘No way, you’re involved with Bernice.’ And he said, ‘Oh, she doesn’t matter.’ And I said, ‘She does to me. I like her.’ So he started treating her even worse than usual. You could see how hurt she was—she was stunned.”

  “I did notice that. How nasty he was to her.”

  “Well, she figured it out fast and essentially stopped talking to me. She thought I was coming on to him,” she said bitterly.

  “Oh, God,” I lamented.

  “I have to get out of here. I can’t stand it.”

  “Why don’t you just tell him you’re gay?”

  “Can you imagine how he’ll react to that? Brad! I’ll never have a peaceful moment in this place again. And Stepan would join in. And Cynthia, too.”

  “I thought you thought Cynthia was gay.”

  “Well, I’ve changed my mind. She’s a man in disguise. She’ll spew at me, just like them.”

  “Ummm.” I could picture it.

  “But how can I leave? I’m stuck here because of you!”

  I started to cry again and she reached out and grabbed my arm. “Oh, Jess, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded! I’m just so ugly because I’m so unhappy! What I mean is, I feel guilty. You came up here for my sake and I can’t just abandon you here. I don’t know what to do.”

  “What do you want to do? If I weren’t here, what would you do?”

  “I want to get out of here. It’s too awful here. I’m uncomfortable in my skin. I want to scream. But I don’t want to go home. I can’t stand the thought of my mother. Maybe in Northampton or South Hadley or someplace else around Smith I’d find some women who would be sympathetic. I’ve heard there are a lot of lesbians there now because of all the girls’ colleges. A lot of the girls my sister went to school with were so happy there they never left. They teach there now or work in administration at Smith or Mount Holyoke or UMass or Amherst. Maybe I could find a group to live with. I can’t go back home . . .”

  “Why?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why? Your poor mother . . .”

  “The hell with her,” Sandy said brusquely.

  “Sandy!”

  Her mouth hardened and she stared out the window. “Everybody had to be so nice in our house. So polite. When all the while . . . who knows what he was feeling? Why couldn’t he tell her? Why didn’t she see? It’s her fault! She insisted we all be civilized, she used that word all the time, she forced us . . . She killed him!”

  I gasped. “You’re being awfully hard on her, San,” I said quietly after a while. “He was a psychoanalyst. He was a doctor. He must’ve known he was depressed, or whatever it was. He must have had some idea what was wrong with him. He was a quiet, polite man too, it wasn’t just her. He could have said something . . .”

  “He didn’t want to upset her! It would have upset her too much!” Sandy practically screamed. “You know how she gets!”

  I shut my mouth. I let her cry again, just stroked her arm. When she calmed down a bit, I said, “Tomorrow’s Sunday. I have to make breakfast but I have no chores after seven thirty, and I work at the store from eight to noon. I can drive you to Northampton after that and help you find the people you’re looking for. See what’s happening. I have practically the whole day off.”

  “Oh, Jess!” She threw her arms around me. I was feeling some resentment, and my body was stiff, unyielding. She didn’t seem to notice, though. She let me go with a sudden smile, a wicked look. She opened her duffle bag, removed the tissue, and handed me a chocolate. “We’ll share them. Tomorrow, a new start!”

  We found Marty Teasdale in a house in South Hadley, where she lived with three other women. They had all attended colleges in the area and found each other through the lesbian networks that exist everywhere. For lesbians, the Connecticut River Valley was a paradise where they were accepted and could live without harassment. Marty had been a friend of Rhoda’s at Smith, and Rhoda had told Sandy to look her up. Marty worked for a new feminist newspaper, a journal I found absolutely thrilling because it treated women and the things they did seriously, as though they mattered. It had a fairly wide circulation, and the group who had founded it were now beginning to publish feminist books too.

  When Sandy had read Rhoda’s letter a few weeks ago (she had been thinking of leaving for a long time, I saw now), she told me about this with some surprise: neither of us had ever imagined a feminist newspaper or publishing house. A new world had opened. And without telling me, Sandy had written Marty, who i
nvited her down and promised to find someplace for her to live.

  We rang Marty’s doorbell at two thirty on Sunday afternoon. Marty was tall and very beautiful, with black hair and blue eyes. Two of her housemates were home that day, and they joined us for cocoa and cookies. Sandy described Brad’s behavior, and they listened attentively. They had had similar experiences, they said; they knew how it felt to be pursued by an insistent male who would not accept polite refusal.

  They said they had friends in a commune in Mount Tom that took in women in need of help. The members were involved in half a dozen different enterprises, and Sandy possibly could work in one of their projects. She would need a car. It was not possible to live there without one.

  “I have a car,” she said anxiously. “I can get my car.”

  “Good. I thought we’d go over today and introduce you,” Marty said. “Then you can join them whenever you’re ready.”

  We took Marty’s car and drove a few miles to a small settlement of old houses, stopping in front of a tall, narrow Victorian, complete with a turret, peaked roofs, and a gallery. The front door was unlocked like ours at Pax, but this house could not have been more different from where we’d been living. It was formal and immaculate, furnished with Victorian pieces—curved-back chairs with red velvet or striped red-and-silver seats, lace curtains, a red turkey rug, a round table covered with a lace cloth, and a red globe lamp. We stood in the foyer, near a staircase, and peered in at the living room.

  “Wow!” Sandy breathed.

  “Laura!” Marty called, and someone responded from upstairs, then came running down the dark wood staircase. The woman was heavyset and was wearing jeans and an embroidered shirt; she had short hair and a clean, open face. She greeted us boisterously.

  “Hi, Marty, how’re ya doin’? Sandy?” She moved toward me. I smiled and pointed to Sandy, and she changed direction. “I’m Laura. Hear you want to join us.”