Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

This is the home of the women’s collective, that perplexing splinter. Men Welcome, kind of. On the table are piled yellow pads, covered with writing, a dog-eared and marginally notated copy of The Dialectic of Sex , and pamphlets with titles like Mother Right: A New Feminist Theory, The Bitch Manifesto, and What Is the Rev — olutionary Potential of Women’s Liberation? All this literature, all these pamphlets coming from places like New York, Cambridge, Chicago, Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh?). Typed, Xeroxed, stapled, illustrated with rough line drawings, each booklet is sufficiently crude to lend it power and a labored gravity. Yea, sister! A space has been cleared away for the Royal portable with its jumpy ribbon and sticky keys.

An uncharacteristic late-spring rain drums on the windows. Tania goes to study the street below. She sees a woman walking briskly, bare-headed, staring straight ahead. She’s trailed by a man in a slicker who stops and shouts after her, then trots to get up ahead, where he turns to face her, walking backward, gesturing placatively with his hands and looking over his shoulder to avoid running into anyone. The woman keeps walking, eyes front, stepping nimbly out of the man’s way. They follow this pattern, continuing on toward the corner, where two men stand under a pool hall awning, sipping from drinks in brown paper bags. They are loudly amused, and the man in the slicker responds angrily. The woman keeps going, crosses Mission and heads up the hill on Geneva. The man in the slicker knocks the brown-bagged drink out of the hand of one of the men standing under the awning. Fists come up, the circling, the shouts, foamy liquid from the spilled container pooling on the shiny sidewalk. The other man under the awning serenely sips from his drink. The woman keeps right on going up the hill. Rainy midnight at the edge of San Francisco.

Yolanda wanted to segregate them here, get them working on something that would define them categorically and undeniably, edge them away from random destruction. But as an analysis gradually emerges, Tania finds herself unconvinced by the latest Truth. She lifts the limp sheet of paper rolled into the machine and reads the passage typed on it:

Middle class women are most positively situated, due to their education and sophistication, to see the inherent contradiction between the promises of society and what is actually offered to women, to see the extent and placement of the fault lines in our “democratic” Amerikkka beyond simple questions of racism and imperialism. Moreover, as Marcuse explains, the “prosperity” of a given society DOES NOT DIMINISH THE NECESSITY OF LIBERATING ONE’S SELF FROM IT.

In this sense FEMINISM IS THE MOST COMPLEX AND VALID ISSUE OF THE DAY for you have ONE HALF OF THE POPULATION HELD IN SUBJUGATION BY THE OTHER HALF. Though we are conscious of women’s oppression per se, we must not lack in our consciousness of most women’s class oppression!!! We CAN discuss the oppression of the black man, but NOT without addressing the shocking sexual exploitation of black women. To us, the primary issue remains male supremacy. Once this has been overcome, we can truly and comprehensively address the problems of an unjust society.

Her time in the closet, this hot air is its ultimate lesson? Everything she’s experienced over the past year stems from such social and historical “circumstances”? All the reading, the talking, the takeout; the stolen cars, the graffiti, the threats; the calisthenics, target practice, and drills; the shit-stained toilets and scummy shower stalls, the inflammatory rhetoric, the guns and bombs, the robberies, the cold-blooded homicide? This is their penance for Myrna Opsahl’s murder? Does it make her feel better about Myrna Opsahl and her motherless children to conclude that what happened was necessary in order to free them all? The passage is from an essay provisionally entitled “Women in the Vanguard: Toward a Revolutionary Theory,” but it might as well be “Why We Need to Move into Our Own Place.” In their eagerness to get out from under Teko, they have talked themselves into a new reality.

She’s been having these dreams that make her eyes snap open hours before sunup. Tonight she’s dreamed that she was standing in a kitchen talking to a Chinese man. The kitchen appeared to be that of a restaurant, with lots of pots and pans hanging overhead, chrome racks, tall worktables, etc. She and the man spoke while he cleaned and gutted fish, reaching for them and then slicing them up the length of their bellies and removing the entrails. Finally, he reached, and instead of a fish he picked up a cat. Tania protested — That’s not a fish, you can’t do that, and so forth — but the man simply held the limp and passive cat in position, looking amused. Tania averted her eyes. But when she looked again, she found that the man had been waiting for her. He slit the cat open.

Sometimes when they’re sitting here, halfheartedly hacking out an “analysis,” Tania asks the others what they think of such dreams. They readily set aside their work.

Yolanda opens a beer. “Once I dreamed that a robot was walking down the street. So I jump onto his back and try to tear his nose off. I’m screaming how I want it for myself. Then suddenly I’m like not on his back, so I break into this building to get away. The robot tries to come in after me, and I look and now there’s this old lady hanging on, a grandma really, and I run up the stairs and there’s this girl, she’s really high, and she’s carrying a silver tray of grapes.”

“I dreamed I was walking in the rain,” says Susan. “I meet a nun, and I ask her why I can’t forget my ex-boyfriend. She says I have to be more romantic. Then she’s like gone. So I keep going and I hear this whimpering sound. And there’s this duckling crying, trying to get out of the mud. It’s black with soot and soaking wet. I pick it up, and I’m carrying it home, and when I get there it’s turned into a golden retriever puppy.”

Joan says, “I’m taking a bath with a strange lady. I see a oven. There’s a strange feeling. The lady goes, ‘Dissatisfaction is the partner of loss.’”

“That’s just goofy,” says Tania.

“I’m in a church with a doctor. He says, ‘Serenity is the partner of confusion.’ I see a washing machine. I feel ashamed.”

“Don’t make fun.”

“Who’s making fun?” Joan is making notes on a sheet of paper headed “OUR BODIES: WE’VE NEVER REALLY OWNED THEM.” She wears a slight smirk.

Joan’s been edgy lately, moody. Tania often senses that she’s bullshitting them, playing up the Far Eastern angle, toying with whatever stereotypifying residue may linger here. It has to be boring. At each stage in the discussion, as they struggle toward their feminist critique, they literally turn to her, as if she were the natural arbiter of how oppressed they are.

But it isn’t just that. Everything changed after Myrna. Joan’s ragged patience finally wore out, and she announced that she was ready to take her chances, to return to the East Coast, free of them all. Tania begged her to come to San Francisco.

“Aren’t you cured yet?” Joan had asked, with annoyance. But in the end she came.

Actually, Tania feels as restless as Joan: bored with the SLA, eager to leave, troubled by Myrna Opsahl’s murder, anxious about getting caught. The standard gamut. But she doesn’t have a lot of options. The SLA’s talent for getting attention is coming back to haunt them. Each month brings a new opportunity for the press to resuscitate the story of her celebrated absence, brings renewed calls for the FBI to solve the case, and she has to lay low.

Everything changed. She wants to say, if only she’d known — but the guns had always been there; they’d fetishized them, carried them, fired them, spoken of their mystical, liberating power. You aim one at somebody, you better intend to fire it at him. What other possible use could a gun have? Teko and Yolanda didn’t see it that way. Actually, they didn’t see it any way at all. At first, Teko had exulted in the murder, but he soon realized that his wife was not in an exultant mood. It became a closed subject, occulted, taboo. They moved to San Francisco to form the women’s collective. That’s the offi — cial reason. The money that funded this undertaking might as well have materialized out of thin air.