wrong and also that she was not going to take care of the children. She wouldn’t have to, he said; he would be the nurturer.
When the girls arrived in Amsterdam, one recently raped, the
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Heartbreak
other exceptionally nervous and upset by temperament or
contagion or molestation, the hippie man forgot his vows of
responsibility, as he had always forgotten al the vows he had
ever made, and let al the work, emotional and physical, devolve
on his woman friend. She wasn’t having any and simply
refused to take care of them. Eventually she left.
One night I got a cal from her: the hippie man had given
each kid 100 guilders, set them loose, and told them to take
care of themselves. He just could not be with them without
fucking them, he told her (and them). In a noble and compassionate alternative gesture, he put them out on the streets. His woman friend made clear to me that this was a mess she was
not going to clean up. I asked where they were.
They had taken shelter in the frame of an abandoned building, squatters without a room that had walls. They lived up toward the wooden frame for the ceiling. Their light came from
burning candles. I found them and took them home with me,
although “home” would be stretching it a bit. At that moment
I lived in an emptied apartment, the one I had lived in with
my husband, a batterer. I had married him after I left Bennington for the second time (the first was Crete, the second Amsterdam). After I had played hide-and-seek with the brute
for a number of months, he decided I could live in the apartment he had cleaned out. By then I was grateful even if it meant that he knew where I was. A woman’s life is ful of
such trade-offs. So when the girls came with me, it wasn’t to
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Suf er the Lit le Children
safety or luxury or even just enough. The apartment, however,
did have walls, and one does learn to be grateful.
The older girl thought that she was probably pregnant. Her
father, the hippie man, did light shows, many for rock bands;
he had the habit of sending musicians into the older girl’s bed
to have sex with her; the younger daughter slept next to the
older girl, both on a mattress on the floor. They were wonderful and delightful girls, scared to death; each put up the best front she could: I'm not afraid, I don’t care, none of it hurts me.
The first order of business, after get ing them down from
the wood rafters il uminated by the burning candles, was getting the older one a pregnancy test. If she was pregnant, she was going to have an abortion, I said. I’m not proud now of
using my authority that way, but she was a child, a real child;
anyway, for bet er or worse, I would have forced one on her.
In Amsterdam the procedure was not so clandestine nor so
stigmatized. It turned out that she wasn’t pregnant.
One day she was suddenly very happy. One of the adult
rockers sent into her bed by her father was going to Spain and
he wanted to take her. This was proof that he loved her. I knew
from the hippie father that he had paid the rocker to take the
girl. Finally I was the adult and someone else was the child.
I told her. I told her carefully and slowly and with love but
I told her the truth, al of it, about the rot en father and the
rot en rocker. Her mother now wanted her and her sister
back. I sent them back. Nothing would ever be simple for me
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Heartbreak
again. A strain of melancholy entered my life; it was the
fusion of responsibility with loss in a world of bruised and
bullied strangers.
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Theory
I went to Amsterdam to interview the Provos - not the blood-
soaked Irish Provos but the hashish-soaked Dutch ones. They
served as the prototype for the U. S. yippies, though their
theory was more sophisticated; as one said to me, “Make an
action that puts crowds of ordinary people in direct conflict
with the police, then disappear. This will undermine police
authority and politicize those they beat up. ” The man I eventually married said that he envisaged social change as circles on a canvas; the idea was to destabilize the circles by adding
ones that didn’t fit - the canvas would inevitably lose its
integrity and some circles would fal off, a paradigm for social
chaos that would topple social hierarchies.
What I found infinitely more valuable, however, were three
books: Sexual Politics by Kate Millet ; The Dialectic of Sex by
Shulamith Firestone; and Sisterhood Is Powerful, an anthology
edited by Robin Morgan. These were the classic, basic texts of
radical feminism; what happened when women moved to the
left of the left. I was hardheaded though; I defended Norman
Mailer even though his attacks on Mil et were philistine; I
stil liked D. H. Lawrence, though now I find him unbearable
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Heartbreak
to read, such a prissy and intolerant hee-haw; and I again
learned the power of listening, this time because of someone
who listened to me.
Her name was Dr. Frankel-Teitz. I had found out that when
you told people your husband was beating you, they turned
their backs on you. Mostly they blamed you. They said it
wouldn’t be happening if you didn’t want it and like it. You
could be, as I was, carrying al you could hold in an effort to
escape or you could be, as I was, badly hurt and bleeding, and
they stil told you that you wanted it. You could be running
away fast and furious, but it was still your will, not his, that
controlled the scenario of violence: you liked it. You could ask
for help and they’d deny you help and it was still your fault
and you liked it. I’d like to wipe out every person on earth
who ever said that to or about an abused woman.
I had a lot of physical problems from having been beaten
so much and from the tough months of running and hiding,
including terrible open sores on my breasts from where he
burned me with a cigarette. The sores would open up without
warning like stigmata and my breasts would bleed. Finally
women helping me found me a doctor. “Al the lesbians go to
her, ” they said, and in those days that was a damned good
recommendation. I went to her but was determined not to say
I had been beaten or I was running; I couldn’t bear one more
time of being told it was my fault. Stil , I said it; it fel out of
me when she saw the open sores. “That’s hor ible, ” she said -
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Theory
about the beatings, not the sores. I'l never forget it. “That’s
horrible. ” Was she on my side; did she believe me; was it
horrible? “No one’s ever said that, ” I told her. No one had.