Plucked

In my married life in Palo Alto, in our new condo, with congenial neighbors and other friends who were all interested in the usual Boomer preoccupations—ethnic foods, excellent but cheap wines, places to travel to, movies--I kept pressing down cryptic feelings I couldn’t name or understand, was afraid to acknowledge but couldn’t ignore. One night my husband Dennis and I went with our friends Walter and Laurel to an art house movie, I don’t remember which one, that had a subplot where two women became more and more intimate until they ended up making love. I sat there in the dark, hugging my arms tighter and tighter around myself, trying to contain the incoherent feelings that now rose like a tide until tears oozed out and slid down my face. I thought I was holding it together, that none of the other three would notice how deeply I was pierced, how I wanted what those women were having, the tenderness, the smooth yielding flesh, the soft murmurs, the gasps of pleasure. I thought I was hiding the yearning, the desire that was late-arriving, only now permitted to arise because I had been in therapy patiently unearthing and reconciling the turbulent cross-currents of my emotional life. I had fallen in love and married and we had built a life together that would be destroyed if I leaned any further into my desire for women. I couldn’t blow it all up, could I? Ruin his life and maybe mine?

But there in the dark I understood. Those feelings couldn’t be tamped down any longer. They wouldn’t go away, no matter how I tried or wanted what I had always thought was a “normal” life. I felt like I was being pulled by a steady, unyielding attraction every bit as strong as a magnetic field. If I acted on my feelings, I would face the loss of everything familiar, everything I thought I was without any assurance that it would turn out well or even that it was not some fantasy but real. I would have to act, but I had no idea how or  with whom.

*

And then. I was in the kitchen when she called  on Christmas night a month or two later, loading the greasy dinner dishes from our elaborate holiday meal into the dishwasher. I could hear Walter and Laurel and Dennis in the adjoining living room laughing, pouring more wine, gossiping about some overheated real estate deal they were part of. At first I couldn’t recognize the voice on the phone, then she identified herself. I was surprised; S had never called before. But she came right to the point. “Do you want to have an affair?” I paused only a moment, smiled. “Yes.”

Thus began my jump down the steep chute leading from my suburban, married, condo-living life to an entirely new one as a woman-loving lover, a lesbian as the nomenclature went in those days (queer as a label, much less an identity, not being much in common use). I was juicy, ripe, low-hanging fruit, just waiting to be plucked, ready for her blunt-fingered, rough hands to tap me ever so gently. The ripening had been years in the making, slow, unsteady but relentless. Until that night in the movie, I had no name for what I was feeling, that wanting something else, someone else. I had married my first serious boyfriend five days after college graduation, happy to be out of the high anxiety and instability and insistently bad decision making of my college years. Dennis and I had been together six months when we drove to Reno in a Ford Econoline van and stopped off at the courthouse to have a short ceremony with the resident justice of the peace. We dressed up a little, me in my paisley print dress and he in his turtleneck and striped bell bottoms, our age and our attire making us stand out in the waiting room amid the wrinkly, middle-aged, polyester-clad brides and grooms undoubtedly not first-timers. At the time I thought that now my life as a grown up would begin, although I had no idea at the time who the “I” was who felt such relief.

I liked to say we got married because we both wanted out of the 1970s craziness, especially sexually, that neither of us were handling very well. We were both misfits, not the cool kind like Patti Smith or other counter-culture figures of the time. At least I wasn’t. I was a plump English major, a book-loving, needy escapee from the Mormonism of my younger years, uncertain about who I was or how to live on my own. He was a short, bearded wanna-be artist-painter, a fan of Andy Warhol, also an escapee, in his case from his conservative Southern Baptist family. We met as work study employees in the university’s chemistry department, he in the stockroom, I as a secretarial helper. We often encountered each other at the acrid departmental coffee urn and ended up chatting. I liked him and his quirky humor and sly smile before our romance developed, which was mainly at his initiative. This was a first time for me of being desired—unexpectedly—and the first time of horny steady sex. It wasn’t his first; he’d had a number of failed romances, always dumped by the woman, so maybe he liked the novelty of someone so infatuated with him. When graduation loomed, we looked at each other one night in bed and said why not get married. No one else we knew—in our gaggle of consciously bohemian friends—was doing it, but we both liked the idea, even though we rejected all the trappings our families expected. No wedding showers. No public ceremony. No reception. We would just stop on our way to California to see some of his friends who were living commune style in Berkeley. Now that I think about it, we had an astonishing nonchalance about the commitment. Maybe we didn’t think it was a big deal. Or maybe we didn’t think, like two oblivious fish swimming with the river current, snatching at what came our way.

*

I had met S as the partner of M, a woman I worked with, part of a somewhat unconventional household that included the two of them, her teenage son, and a single female friend. I liked her immediately, her knowing smile and flirty humor, long brown-blonde hair, tough Boston accent. Neither she nor M “looked like lesbians,” which made them intriguing. The household became even more unconventional a few months before the phone call, when  M fell in love with a male coworker and wanted to sleep with him. And she did, under the stipulation that it had to include all of them—M, the man, and S. That was the way, S decreed, to avoid the other two from breaking away and destroying their carefully calibrated life. The two women had at that point been together many years and their housemate almost as long. Now, it seemed, I would also be drawn me into their orbits.

Everyone at work, including me, knew and gossiped about this kinky arrangement and wondered how they made it work. It turns out it wasn’t working all that well, except for the two lovers. That call on Christmas night was an invitation for me to be a bit on the side for S, the fourth wheel to the threesome. She and I had flirted at parties a few times—I was charmed by her brash smiles and innuendos—because by this time I was pretty sure I was “that way,” that I yearned for more than simple friendship with women and had had a couple of fumbled encounters that confirmed my growing sense that I was lesbian. But still I was reluctant to leave the security of marriage, even as it felt increasingly hollow and false.

That’s why I said a simple yes to S’s invitation. We made a date to go on a hike together a few days later. Of course, I didn’t mention any of this to Dennis. I have no idea what I thought I was doing, except that it was very exciting. I didn’t think about him. Or the rest of S’s household, including M and the teenage son. Or anything else. As a juicy fruit that had been picked, I selfishly just wanted to see where I would be carried, what would happen.

What happened was that I became madly infatuated even though our hike yielded only a chaste, bashful kiss. I obsessed about S, sought any opportunity to be with her, engineered a night with her in a hotel and other stolen hours where we ended up wrapped around each other and making out at a women’s bar in downtown San Francisco. It all came to a screeching halt one night when she came to my apartment, had too much to drink, passed out (or pretended to), and was tracked down by M, who insisted she return home. I had apparently served the manifest purpose of waking up their relationship, creating a little necessary jealousy, frisson, awareness of what was in jeopardy.

And so our affair ended only a few months after it had started. But I had had my first lesbian relationship, disjointed and distracted as it was, and it broke my marriage when it was discovered. I moved out of the condo into an apartment in San Francisco, at the height of its most free-spirited gay pride era, before AIDs, and survived the breakup with S, if you can call it that, since it was always barely anything more than a few stolen hours soaked with her ambivalence and my neediness and obsessiveness. As the lesbian cliché of the time dictated, we—and the rest of their household—became friends again after our feelings cooled. She looked fondly on me ever after as a feather in her jaunty cap and the source of a little pleasure. I was grateful to be plucked, because it propelled me forward to a future where I began to live into who I really was (and am).

*

The summer I left my marriage and moved to a one-bedroom apartment on Noe Street in San Francisco, I flung myself headlong into figuring out what it might mean for me to be a lesbian. Unlike so many more adventurous people in their twenties, I had not adventured. After my marriage, I’d settled right down, gotten a job, then another, and eventually acquired most of the trappings of a prosperous domestic life. Now I’d blown up all that carefully acquired stability by having an affair with a woman. But it was feeling so worth it.

Right away I attached myself to a group of other women—friends of friends--who had also just moved to San Francisco. One was finishing her masters thesis, one was starting a new job at UCSF, one was teaching at City College. They were friendly with several other lesbians, some also new to the City, some not.  We were all  refugees from the placid suburban life in Palo Alto and San Jose, ready for a wilder, more authentic gay life. I liked them all, hung around them as often as I could, paid close attention to what they wore and how they acted. I was delighted to be part of the tribe and to be easing finally into this new life that was so different from the one I had left. We played softball and volleyball, went out often to the thriving bar scene at Clementina’s, danced maniacally on the crowded dance floor, went to the Pride Parade and to women’s music and comedy events. Finally, I thought, I was living the authentic life I was meant to live.

And of course I was looking to connect sexually. Wasn’t that the point? No one in the group seemed available or interested. One told me, sorry, I don’t date women who are just coming out—they don’t know what they’re doing and I’m not interested in helping them figure things out. The quiet one finishing her thesis was, I learned, in a long-distance relationship with a woman in Portland. She was too reserved for me anyway, not my type. The others in the group weren’t right either. I eventually got involved with a magnificently butch blonde mail carrier who taught me the ropes—in bed, out of bed, about town. She was fun but possessive and verging on domineering. I was looking for a long-term relationship at some point, and I knew she wouldn’t be that.

Then the woman who was working on her thesis finished it and got a job. She also, I heard, broke up with her long-distance girlfriend; it was an ugly, heartbreaking parting, whispered to be because the woman now wanted to be with men. The worst kind of double rejection. I felt sorry for her and next time the group went out to Clementina’s I made a point of talking to her. It wasn’t easy. She was shy, self-conscious. And sad. But I liked her kindness, her lack of pretension, her interesting work with foster children. I thought maybe we could be friends. So every couple of weeks one of us would call the other, and we would go for a walk in Golden Gate Park or go out for Chinese food. Then one warm August afternoon she and one of her roommates showed up to help me steam sagging maroon wallpaper off the bedroom walls of my new apartment. She was  wearing tiny running shorts and a tank top and brought a six-pack of Heineken. I noticed it all. From then on, I sensed something was changing between us. Was she attracted to me? Was I to her? The letter carrier was behaving badly, and we were breaking up. I wondered if J wanted more, but it was far from clear. She was hard to read, and I was never sure if our outings were even “dates.”

One night we went with one of her roommates to a show at Clementina’s. It was entertaining and sexy and ended with an hour or so of frenzied dancing. All three of us felt pretty bold and adventurous—real San Francisco lesbians--and congratulated ourselves as we drove home from the bar. They dropped me off at my apartment. A half hour or so later I was in bed eating peanut butter and crackers and reading a Margaret Atwood novel when there was a knock at the door. It was J, who said she wanted to talk. About us. Of course I let her in and of course all kinds of conversation ensued.

Now, forty years later, we are still steadfastly together. It turned out she has a delightful sense of humor and was quite talkative once we got to know each other. I could list a million things I love about her, this woman the universe delivered to me despite my—and her—hesitations. We have been to hell and back a few times. We’ve also traveled and marveled and navigated our way through challenging careers. Together. Just what I’d hoped for sitting in the dark at that movie in Palo Alto, waiting for my real life to begin.

-Sheryl Fullerton

Sheryl Fullerton is a retired acquiring/development editor who spent her career helping authors get their work into the world. Now she is focused on her own writing, primarily memoir and essay, and serves as an advisor and contributor to the journal, ONEING. She lives in Portland, Oregon.