March 25, 2007

• The Long Walk

  A phone call from an old high school classmate, and an
  article in the most recent issue of Time Magazine: two threads that evoke
  memories forming a complex tapestry of gain and loss.

  The classmate, the older sister of my "main squeeze" in high school, is eagerly anticipating her 40^th high school
  reunion.  She and I hadn’t spoken in
  probably 30 years.  It was one of those
  lovely conversations where two aging people, without hidden agendas, reminisce
  and reprise their lives.

  The article, in the April
  2, 2007 issue of Time Magazine, is entitled “What Women Have Done
  to Art”.  It chronicles the impact of the
  feminist movement on the world of art, focusing on a 1979 tour de force called
  “The Dinner Party” by Judy Chicago. 
  Parenthetically, I learn from the article that until the mid-1980s, the
  standard college textbook on the history of art included not a single woman
  among the 2,300 artists mentioned in its pages. 
  In 1986 nineteen female artists were added.

  But what’s the connection? you ask.  Where is the tapestry?  It is this, as best as I can explain it:

  In my final two years of high school I dated a slightly
  younger girl – let’s call her Sandra – who wooed me initially with an anonymous
  home-made Valentine containing clever clues that led me to her identity.  We dated steadily, went to parties and dances
  and the prom, took a high school trip to Washington
  D.C. and New York City
  together, “made out” extensively but rather chastely, got arrested for
  violating Chicago’s curfew
  laws.  As a seventeenth birthday gift she
  gave me a leather-bound dictionary which I still have, almost 40 years later.  It is chastely inscribed “To my friend John,
  with my friendship forever.”  I love
  words just as much now as I did back then.

  Sandra was overly pretty, wore too much makeup and hair
  spray, spoke in a high squeaky little-girl voice.  I was tall and gawky, with wild red hair, a
  giraffe neck, pants that were several inches too short, and a deep bass voice
  that didn’t fit my nerdy appearance.  We
  thought we were in love, I guess. 
  Talking to her sister yesterday, I realized how little I really knew back
  in high school who Sandra actually was as a person.

  I went away to college, but Sandra and I remained in
  touch.  She sent me cookies once, I
  think.  When she informed me that she had
  become “sexually liberated”, I invited her to come and visit me in
  college.  The plan was that she was going
  to relieve me of my virginity. 

  But as soon as she arrived, I realized that I wasn’t quite as
  excited to see her as I thought I would be. 
  She must have sensed it too. 
  While I was taking an exam the following day, she screwed my best
  friend.  Later in the day he confessed
  his indiscretion to me.  When I
  confronted Sandra with it, she denied the accusation.  I believed him, since it seemed that he had
  risked our friendship by telling the truth, while she had every reason to
  lie.  Hurt and confused, I kicked her out
  of my dorm room and out of my life.  She
  spent the rest of the week with a third guy in my dorm whom she had never met
  before her visit.  They slept
  together.  I have a photo to prove
  it.  Don’t ask.

  Time passed.  I became
  a born-again Christian, and graduated from college.  Stumbling across Sandra’s older sister in the
  Chicago phone book, I called her to
  see how Sandra was.  She told me that
  Sandra was just at that moment getting ready to leave for England,
  where she would marry a British doctor and live happily ever after.  The sister invited me to the going-away
  party.  I accepted, with the thought that
  I would test by fire, as it were, whether or not I had truly forgiven
  Sandra.  At the party I found that I had
  no residual hard feelings.  We had a nice
  chat, and I wished Sandra well in her new life.

  More time passed.  I got
  married, but the marriage foundered. 
  Somehow I learned that Sandra too had gotten divorced and was back in Chicago.  I looked her up.

  As friends we got along famously for a brief time.  I have two salient memories of that
  period.  Sandra took me to an art exhibit
  entitled “The Dinner Party”.  I had never
  heard of it, and had no idea that it was the seminal (please pardon the pun)
  feminist art exhibit of its time – indeed of all time.  But I was intrigued by the panorama of
  women’s history as depicted on the long hand-made tablecloth, and by the brightly-painted
  flowers on the ceramic dinner plates that looked for all the world like vaginas,
  as indeed they were supposed to.  As the
  Time article suggests, it was the AIDS quilt of the feminist movement.

  Sandra also persisted in her denial that anything
  inappropriate had transpired during her visit to me in college.  I was dumbfounded, since to my mind she no
  longer had any reason to conceal the truth of what had happened.

  More time passed.  She
  and I lost touch again.  Then I heard
  that Sandra (a psych nurse) was marrying a radio DJ, and they were moving to a
  small town in Iowa where they
  would buy and run a general store. 
  Several letters to Sandra in Iowa
  went unanswered, and I basically forgot about her for 25 years.  Meanwhile in the decade of my thirties, as
  many of you already know, I lost two wives, my child, my health, my career, and
  my house. 

  Fast forward to the present. 
  The Invisible Man, I sit now in a basement apartment with little
  external light, living for Thursday afternoons when I do a world music show on
  community radio.  The rest of the week is
  a slow, steady descent into physical and mental oblivion.

  Enter the phone call. 
  “How is Sandra?” I finally asked her sister.  “What’s she up to these days?”

  Well, it appears that she’s no longer the overly pretty girl
  I knew in high school.  She’s long divorced
  and out of the general store business, but she still lives in the same
  small town in Iowa, raising her
  only child, a son who is a senior in high school.  She weighs even more than I do, it sounds
  like, and has lost most of her hearing. 
  Disenchanted with men, she has become for all intents and purposes a
  lesbian.  She too stands at the abyss,
  free to reinvent herself when her son goes to college, if she can muster the
  courage and the energy and the vision to do so.

  “The Dinner Party” by Judy Chicago, I learn in Time
  Magazine, has after a controversial 30-year peregrination now been enshrined as
  a permanent exhibit within the new Elizabeth
  A. Sackler Center
  for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.  Having finally found a home, it is, as the
  Time writer puts it, “the Liberty Bell of women’s history.”  The feminist movement has matured, and left
  its permanent mark on history.  And I was
  a very brief, peripheral, essentially invisible part of it.

  Sandra and I also have a history, in part a shared one, and
  we too are slowly but inexorably heading home. 
  But we are limping badly, and the final destination is uncertain.  The tears of memory and longing evaporate as
  quickly as they strike the scorching sands of our own pilgrimage, and leave no
  trace of our passing.

  • 8:35 am
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