Libera Me

Libera Me

by Judith Fetterley

I perfected the art of performing femininity quite early. By thirteen I knew to cross my legs at the ankle, not the knee. By thirteen I could dance in pumps. I could pass for normal. I never lacked for boyfriends.
        Still, each of my best boyfriends gave me the gift of a Requiem. In high school, John introduced me to Mozart. A violinist in our high school orchestra, he was enamored of Mozart, but why did he choose to introduce me to his passion through mourning?
        In college, Ross, a lover of opera, led me to Verdi. Why the Requiem? Why not Rigoletto or Traviata? We listened together on days when boys could visit girls in their dorms, both crying. I wondered what he was lamenting, what dream he was burying.
        Later, in graduate school but before we were married, Earl gave me Ein Deutsches Requiem, the majestic grieving of Brahms.
        Surely there was a message to this pattern. Despite the high heels and properly crossed legs, these boys must have known that something was wrong. Did they sense that part of the girl had died when she put the picture of Carol deep inside her Latin book? Did they sense that she was mourning a lost self? Did they sense that she was not capable of loving them as they loved her?
        When I was ten, my family moved from Toronto, Canada, to Franklin, Indiana.
        The American girls laughed at my English bike with its narrow tires, lightweight frame, and speed. They rode American Schwinns with fat tires and heavy frames that labored up hills and could not be lifted over obstacles without the help of some obliging and desired male.
        They laughed at me too. I had a Canadian accent and red curly hair that could not be tamed. I wore boys’ shorts and pants. I played football, not the kind with a flag where you didn’t get dirty or possibly hurt, but the kind with body contact, injuries, and lots of dirt. My classmates wanted to kiss boys. I wanted to tackle them.
        I was a baby dyke without knowing it. These girls knew it, and they shunned me.
        Until I changed. Put on a dress, gave up my bike, cut my hair, got a boyfriend. First with Gil, and then Jim beside me I kept my difference well-hidden behind the normalcy of Hoosier hayrides, Saturday night movies, and mixers.
        In my sophomore year of high school, however, I met a girl who threatened to blow my cover. Carol played the violin, wore pearls and coral sweater sets, read poetry, and planned to be a doctor. I couldn’t ignore the desire her thick dark hair stirred in me—not just to touch her hair but to touch her everywhere—a desire never stirred by crewcut on hayride or furtive grope in movie, nor even by John and Mozart.
        Carol worked summers at the Johnson County hospital. The summer between my sophomore and junior years she got me a job as a nurse’s aide as well. Each night at 11, our shift completed, all the bedpans emptied and the temps taken and the blood pressures recorded, we drove to the local Dairy Queen. There we ordered and shared a “Jack and Jill,” a gooey mound of soft vanilla ice cream with a stream of hot fudge sauce down one side and a stream of hot marshmallow sauce down the other. Sometimes our spoons touched.
        Finished, I always dashed into the restroom to change out of my starched white nurse’s uniform and into my shorts and shirt, regaining a bit of my baby-dyke self; Carol remained buttoned up. Most nights we simply drove the back roads of Johnson County, talking and listening to the radio. Carol drove an old 50s Ford purchased with money from her job. She loved to drive. I loved being able to turn slightly in my passenger seat and watch her lips move to Elvis or Anka.
        One night, however, Carol did not head toward the country. Instead, she headed toward town and the home of Dr. E., her mentor and model at the hospital. The “E” stood for Elizabeth, and she was the object of Carol’s adoration.
        “What are you doing,” I protested, as she nestled the car up to the curb. “What if she sees you out here?”
        “I hope she does,” Carol replied. “I have to let her know I adore her.”
        “She’s more likely to think you are stalking her,” I sputtered.
        But Carol was adamant.
        Leaning on the steering wheel, her dark eyes closed tight, Carol conjured Dr. E. while I, eyes wide open, fought my desire to run my fingers through the thick dark hair resting on the steering wheel.
        I lost. Carol raised her head.
         “Do you know how much I love you?” I choked out, reaching across the space that separated us on the bench seat of the 1950 Ford, taking her face between my hands, and kissing her eyes and then her lips, slowly, tenderly, slowly, tenderly.
        Just then, Dr. E. began flashing her outside lights.
        Carol jerked away.
        “We have to get out of here,” she cried. “What if she recognizes me?”
        She jammed the car into first gear and spun away from the curb.
We never mentioned the kiss again. We both pretended that it never happened.
        Back in school, however, I began taking a framed photo of Carol in her nurse’s uniform to each of my classes and setting it up on my desk. I knew I was asking for trouble. I could not help myself.
        Soon, however, Miss Kelly, the school librarian, took me aside. Teachers and students alike were beginning to talk.
        “People don’t do this,” she warned. “Keep the picture hidden.”
        I adored Miss Kelly, the giver of books, the one who helped me edit the school newspaper, the one who lived with Miss Van Lieu, the English teacher. I got her message and stashed my photo of Carol deep inside my Latin book.
        Carol, a year ahead of me but graduating in December, had latched onto Mike and was busily performing heterosexuality. I followed. I had John. I never lacked for boyfriends.
                                                                
~~~

If I could have loved boys the way I was supposed to, I might not have needed the Requiem Earl gave me to celebrate my passing of the German language requirement for my Ph.D. degree.
        Earl and I were dating, but I was attracted again to a girl, each of us in a delicate dance of trying to pretend we were just friends, each of us talking madly about our boyfriends. I certainly did my best to make the pretense real, travelling every week in my gray-green Volkswagen to Chicago to see a psychiatrist.
        The psychiatrist whom I drove so far to see came highly recommended by one of my mother’s friends whose son had struggled with similar issues. Of course, the word “homosexual” was never used by my mother, her friend, or myself. We communicated through euphemisms like “not quite right” or “needs some help adjusting” or “boy/girl issues.” I remember very little of the sessions I had with this most kindly and gentle of men.
        What I do remember is our last meeting.
        I had read Goethe’s Faust while studying German, and I had told the good doctor of my success in passing the language exam. That night, as our session was ending, he looked straight at me and began quoting the words Faust spoke to Mephistopheles as he lamented the limits of his human condition:
        “Renounce, renounce, thou must renounce. This is the endless song that sounds forever in our ears, that our whole life long each hour hoarsely sings.”
        From my first reading of Faust, these lines had pierced my heart. I heard them speaking my fate, the particular fate of the girl who wanted to kiss girls. I had already renounced Carol, the girl I had loved so deeply in high school. I was in the process of renouncing another. Must I now renounce that self completely?
        I had started therapy hoping to find an alternative to renunciation. If quoting these lines of Faust was the best my psychiatrist could do, I realized there was no alternative.
        I quit therapy, told Earl I was cured, and we got married. In May by the fishpond in my mother’s garden. My dad and I walked to the pond from the side porch, and Earl emerged from the garage. While the fish swam and the flowers bloomed and our friends and family and the girl I wanted to marry looked on, we were joined together in vows of lifelong fidelity.
        We celebrated our wedding with a catered supper for our guests in my parents’ backyard, not far from the fishpond. Amidst toasts and stories, plans and prophecies, we did not go inside until the sun set and the mosquitoes came out. The party continued inside as Earl sat in my dad’s favorite chair and I sat beside him, and we opened gifts and talked of the future in which we would use the steak knives and champagne flutes.
        I was not interested in that future. I wanted the here and now, my friends, my parents, my love, the party. But I renounced. Earl and I changed our clothes and left that night for our new home in the town of St. Davids on Philadelphia’s Main Line.
        We had chosen the house in part because of the two American elms that grew in the front yard. I had adored the elm tree ever since my dad pointed it out to me along the roadsides of his childhood home in upstate New York where we visited my grandfather. Hot summer afternoons, driving along the back roads of Herkimer, saturated in the blue and gold of wild chicory and goldenrod, my dad showed me how to recognize the elm.
        “It’s just a feather duster turned upside down,” he said.
        Every day on my way home from work that first fall and winter we lived in St. Davids I had the thrill of seeing these elms, first leaved and then bare, then leaved again, their branches moving in the wind, swaying, dancing. I gloried in their state, imagining that perhaps I could someday be like them, joyous in St. Davids.
        As naïve horticulturally as we were emotionally, Earl and I knew nothing of the Dutch elm disease that had rotted one tree to the core and weakened the other beyond saving.
        When summer came and the trees showed signs of distress, we too began to face our issues. Earl struggled with depression and with his grief that something was not right with me. For I could see no way out of my own despair at what I saw as my future: married, with children, but without a career, unable to leave financially or emotionally, condemned to mourn a self that could never be given life, no thick dark hair, no sweater set beneath my hand, ever.
        It was clear that I would lose my job at the university where I was teaching. I had been told the first day at work—this was well before affirmative action policies were in place—that I would never get tenure at Penn, for no woman had and no woman would. Earl, on the other hand, would most certainly get tenure at the college where he taught. He would keep his job while I cooked and cleaned and did diaper duty; greater Philadelphia had an excess of faculty wives with doctoral degrees looking for jobs they wouldn’t get.
        I saw myself, dinner made and left on the table, kitchen swept, laundry folded, farewell note written, climbing the stairs to the attic and the rope that would serve to usher in the final occasion for the performance of a Requiem.
                                                                
~~~

Three years into my marriage, and shortly after taking down the elm trees, despairing both at their loss and the promise they had given me of peace, I accepted an invitation from a colleague to attend a “consciousness-raising” session. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, including the words of my department chair as to my future at Penn, I was, like so many of my generation, not sure that feminism had anything to offer me.
        I was desperate, though, so I went. Perhaps it would help me avoid the rope.
        On a warm spring evening, Cynthia and I drove to a rough neighborhood of Philadelphia and parked before a rundown church. I was nervous. The street was littered with beer cans and cigarette butts; folks were lounging in doorways soaking up the last bits of daylight-savings sunshine. The door to the church looked fragile; scraps of wood covered broken windows and holes in the roof.
        We kicked a few cans aside, then entered the church through the fragile-looking door. The first floor was home to a prayer meeting. It was filled with chairs and a stage for choir and preacher, but that night only a few worshippers were present.
        We climbed the stairs to the second floor where a far different scene confronted us. The large room was filled with women, all kinds of women, all sitting on the floor—the chairs had been stacked and pushed to the side. There were women of color, white women, self-identified working-class women, college-educated women, and women who had not finished high school. Some looked uneasy in their space; others claimed their space. It was hot. There was no leader, only a convener who simply invited us to speak about the conditions we faced as women.
        At first nervously, then angrily, women began to talk about how it felt to be a second-class citizen in a male-dominated world.
        “I do the same job as a man and am paid half as much.”
        “I am tired of catcalls and being labelled a ‘girl.’”
        “My husband beats me, and the police do nothing.”
        As the conversation progressed, a woman began to speak about how it felt to be a second-class citizen among second-class citizens. I thought she was talking about being black. In fact, she was coming out. It took me a moment to get it.
        Other women began to speak. They, too, were lesbians. I found it hard to breathe. My exhilaration at finding a name for myself tangled with my anxiety at what it meant. In this crowded room, heated almost to suffocation by the bodies of so many women, bodies that I began to look at more closely, especially the bodies in jeans and leather jackets with cigarettes held in lips that, given half a chance, I might be able to kiss, I felt a door open, one that I had glimpsed briefly so many years ago in a parked car with Carol.
        Did I dare walk through it?
        Earl was my friend as well as my husband. We played soccer together, kicking the ball back and forth and talking, talking, talking. We stuck our fingers in the store-bought grasshopper pie that looked composed of chemicals, set it out on the kitchen counter, and waited for it to get moldy. It never did. We created our own meal plan—six regular meals, each of us cooking three times a week, repeated every week, with Sunday a free day “on your own” or dinner out—and Earl, a man ahead of his time, did the shopping. We watched The Forsyte Saga on what would eventually become TV’s Masterpiece Theater, and we watched a man land on the moon. We mourned the loss of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and loathed the violence of Kent State.
        Leaving Earl meant leaving a person I loved, children I wanted, and the normalcy I had craved ever since the girls in Franklin had laughed at me. Not leaving Earl meant death. Was normalcy worth the purchase price? Was coming out worth the pain it would cause? Would I be better off dead, the subject of one Requiem or another?
        Some weeks after my trip to the meeting in the rundown church, I mustered the courage to speak to Earl. I now knew the word for what I was.
        “I think I may be a lesbian,” I stammered. “I love you dearly. I am bitterly sorry. Can we stay married if I have affairs with a woman?”
        Earl scrunched up his eyes in a way that I loved.
        “Adultery is adultery,” he said. “And I want no part of it.” And he began to cry.
        We temporized, separating just for a summer. I rented an apartment in Boston to give me some distance and a chance to explore who I might be if I “came out.” Shortly after I arrived, I joined a group driving to New York City and the annual late June Gay Pride March. Needing a bite to eat before heading home after the march, we stopped in a restaurant. Our waitress asked us if we were in town to see the sights.
        “Lady,” I quipped, “we are the sights.”
        Back in Boston, my humor at being out was short lived for I realized I could not go back in. I was sick with guilt and fear. Would my dad ever speak to me again if I told him I was a lesbian? What would happen to Earl? It did not matter that when I agreed to marry him, I felt I had no alternative. It did not matter that I could now understand how compulsory heterosexuality supported the system of patriarchy. Leaving Earl seemed, to me and certainly to others, selfish and cruel. How could I ever justify it?
         I listened compulsively to Verdi’s Requiem, gift from Ross so long ago, an RCA Victor recording of a performance at Carnegie Hall, January 27, 1951, conducted by Toscanini. I pled with tenor Giuseppe Di Stefano as he begged for a place at the right hand of God, my voice breaking along with his. With soprano Herva Nelli and mezzo-soprano Fedora Barbieri, I prayed to the Lamb who takes away our sins to forgive me, my cries an octave lower than theirs. I pointed out to Jesus, just as they did, that I was the reason for his journey and so deserved his mercy. I asked, along with the Robert Shaw Chorale, my voice rising along with theirs, to be delivered from wrathful judgment and to be saved by the fountain of mercy that the chorus made me believe was close at hand.
        For I knew what I must do.
        For years I had voiced the Requiem’s final lines, the “Libera Me,” as my own plea to be delivered from the damnation of craving to touch a woman’s breast. When no cure seemed forthcoming, I prayed to be delivered from my reluctance to renounce. As suicide seemed ever more likely, I prayed to be delivered from the sin of self-slaughter.
        In Boston, however, having tasted the freedom of being out, even so briefly, I heard a different possibility in the Requiem’s final line. As the soprano, done with soaring above the chorus and its warnings of god’s wrath, concludes, I heard a different possibility in her words. I heard determination, even defiance in the dark colors of her lowest voice. I heard, Deliver me, not to life eternal but to life now. I heard, Deliver me, not from the wrath to come but from the fear of that wrath.
        For over the hours against the beat of the music and my imploring had come a pulse even stronger than the pounding of the “Dies Irae”: desire, the desire I had felt in every fiber of my being since that long-ago August night, lounging in Carol’s car in front of Dr. E.’s house. I wanted to be that girl again, the girl who, ice cream eaten, and lips cleaned of marshmallow sauce, had pulled Carol close and kissed her. I wanted to feel again what that girl had felt that night—that all she might ever be or do was gathered in the fingertips that touched her beloved’s face, and that all she might ever want to know or have lay in the delicacy of a cheek bone.
        I wrote the letter I knew I must write.
                                                                
~~~

I still have the photo of Carol. It is upstairs nestled in the pages of my high school yearbook.
        I keep a different photo on my desk. In this photo Sara, my partner of some twenty years now, stands outside the library she went to every Saturday morning with her grandmother to get books for the week. She is perhaps four years old. She wears a white dress, her socks and shoes are white, and in her right hand she holds a little white purse in which she carries her precious library card. Her hair is held in place by bows, and she has a big smile on her face.
        I look at this photo and think, “I would have loved you if we had met when we were four.”
        In my office I keep another photo, taken at the birthday party of one of my classmates when she turned eight. Her wealthy father belonged to the fanciest club in Toronto. It was so fancy it had its own movie theater, and watching a movie was the highlight of the party.
        In this large and staged photo, I sit in the front row, feet crossed at the ankles, knees wide out. I am wearing a dark brown long-sleeved crew-neck sweater and a brown and white plaid skirt, brown knee socks and sturdy brown tie shoes. I am surrounded by little girls in fancy, mostly white dresses, their knees held tightly together. Behind me sits another row of properly dressed, properly arranged little girls. I am neither properly dressed nor properly arranged, but I have a big smile on my face. And I am the only one to have another girl’s arm around her.
        I look at this photo and think, “No need of a Requiem for you after all, baby dyke.”
        Sara’s arm is around me now, often literally, always metaphorically. She still looks great in white; I still favor the dark and the bold. The edges of my gardens curve and turn; they are filled with plants that bob and weave, tumbling into and over each other. Sara’s vegetables arise in neat rows of perfectly spaced plants. Tending them, she wears a straw hat, a crispy clean shirt, and garden gloves.
        Heading back to the house from my morning’s work, I pass the vegetable garden. As I stop to wipe my mud-caked hands on the yellow sweatshirt that proudly proclaims, “Nobody knows I’m a lesbian,” I catch sight of her, carefully staking a tomato plant. I blow her a kiss and think, “I will always love you.”