Community of Women

20

When the city-dweller thinks of the country, he thinks of good weather. He imagines summers with a hot sun in a clear sky and a steady breeze blowing, all in contrast to the sooty horror of summer in New York, where the heat is never relieved by breezes and where the tall buildings hold the heat in close and mix it with smoke and sweat. When he thinks of spring in the country he imagines green things coming into bloom, and when he thinks of winter his mind conjures up images of placid unbroken fields of powdery snow. Fall brings images of colored leaves to his mind, and football weather, and brisk air. Winter in New York, on the other hand, means slush; spring means the melting of the slush, and autumn barely exists.

The country-dweller has a somewhat more accurate understanding of these seasonal images of bucolic serenity. He knows that the summer may bring temperatures of 98 in the shade, and that there may well be no shade. He knows that winter can be more than dismal, that snow is wet and cold and needs to be shoveled, that tires skid in it and cars get stuck, and that you can have a coronary shoveling out your driveway. He knows that spring is when the crab grass begins to flourish, and that snow melts in the country in just as revolting a manner as slush melts in city streets, except that it takes longer in the country and that there is more of it.

He knows too that fall, the most nearly acceptable season, can be rainy. He knows that when it rains it pours, and that there are many autumn days in the country that might better be dispensed with.

Friday in Cheshire Point might better have been dispensed with.

The rain had started coming down before dawn would have broken. But dawn didn’t really break that day anyway. The sun never really rose; there were too many clouds in the way, all of them black, all of them spilling wetness upon Cheshire Point. There was thunder, and there was lightning, but above all there was rain.

It rained cats and dogs. It rained buckets and barrels and pitchforks. But what it rained most of all was water, and it rained an inordinate quantity of it. It rained and it rained and it rained.

No one really liked the rain. There were a few look-on-the-better-side and every-cold-has-a-cardboard-lining types who told one another that the rain was at least good for the farmers, while the poor farmers sat in their leaky farmhouses and watched their crops get washed out of the ground. Because it was that kind of rain. It was not good for anybody.

The multicolored autumn leaves were picked up and carried along by the rain. They blocked the multicolored autumn sewers, and the rain backed up and filled the multicolored autumn streets of the multicolored autumn towns. Cars plowed through deep water and splashed any poor souls unfortunate and/or stupid enough to be out for a walk.

And it went on raining.

Elly Carr sat by her front window and looked at the rain. There was no poetic ritual of listening to the pitter-patter of tiny raindrops on the window pane. In the first place, the raindrops were not tiny. They were huge, monstrous and montizorous, and there is nothing particularly romantic in a montizorous raindrop. In the second place, montizorous raindrops do not go pitter-patter. They go whoosh, sort of, and they don’t fall on a window but lash at it. So Elly Carr sat looking at the rain, and listening to the whoosh of montizorous raindrops against the window pane, and not liking it at all.

She made up a little song and sang it to herself. It went to the tune of Let’s go Barmy, We’re in the Army from the Three-Penny Opera. She sang quietly, enjoying herself:

She broke off in the middle of the parody, leaving the window, finding a cigarette and putting a match to it. She smoked silently, trying to get her mind organized. She had not seen Maggie since Tuesday morning, when they had first made love quite magnificently and then had ridden back to the Point on the train. She had talked twice to the redheaded girl on the telephone, but she had not yet been to see her.

The thing was that she had to make a decision, and whichever way she made it, she had a hard life staring her in the face. She was certain now that her lesbianism was a genuine thing, that her only chance for sexual happiness and emotional satisfaction lay in the arms of women, not men. So she was more than willing to continue her homosexual relationship with Maggie Whitcomb.

That was not the problem.

The problem was along those lines of course. The problem lay in the fact that, for the first time, Maggie Whitcomb was wholeheartedly in love. And the type of relationship which Maggie had previously found to be ideal now would not do at all.

“I’m in love with you,” Maggie had told her on the phone. “I don’t want to share you, Ell. Not with anybody.”

That meant no marriage. According to Maggie, she had two choices. They could break up, in which event she would remain with Ted and hide her lesbianism under a nymphomaniacal bushel. Or she could go off with Maggie, divorcing her husband while Maggie divorced Dave, sharing an apartment in Greenwich Village or some similar place, and leading the gay life all the way.

She could not, Maggie had explained, both have and eat her cake. Love would not permit such a relationship. She could be Ted’s or Maggie’s, but not both.

Which, of course, was a problem.

Because she would have liked to have her cake and eat it as well. She wanted the respectability of marriage to Ted; the idea of leaving mate and child and becoming a sexual pariah did not particularly appeal. But the thought of giving up Maggie and all that Maggie meant was no more appealing. She was caught in a neat little bind, and either way out seemed to be a pitfall, and on top of everything else it was raining.

Hell.

Hell and damnation.

Hell!

“Look at it this way,” Maggie had explained, her voice persuasively logical. “We’ll be hiding, Ell. Hiding everything, worrying about exposure, playing secret little games. And eventually some prying snooping long-eared nosy son-of a bitch will find out, and then we’ll be in the worst possible kind of mess. That’s no good, Ell.”

True enough. That was distinctly no good.

“And we don’t have each other, not as well as we should. I don’t want to make love to you while I’m looking at my watch. I want you around all the time. I want to go to bed with you at night and wake up with you in the morning. I don’t want to share you, not sexually or emotionally. I want you for more than sex, Ell. I’m in love with you.”

And, naturally, she was in love with Maggie. She knew how Maggie felt and felt the same way herself. But was she ready to commit herself that completely? Was she ready to toss everything overboard and become a full-time lesbian? Maybe what she was going through was a passing phase, maybe some morning she would open her eyes and discover that lesbianism was less than absurd, that she wanted to sleep with men rather than women.

Maybe—

Hell.

The rain was not letting up. It was getting worse, if that were possible, and Elly thought hysterically that it was going to go on like this for forty days and forty nights. The thing to do, she told herself, was to get busy building an ark. She would make it forty cubits long and thirty cubits deep and twenty cubits wide, and into it she would put two members of each species of every living thing. But she would put in two women of each species. It would be the first lesbian ark in history.

She laughed. Outside the rain kept coming down.