I did not know and I did not care, but I was told I should know, I should care. So I did.
I listened to my parents. I let my grandfather pick me up after school when everyone else rode the bus. I let my mother call me from work to see that I was home, caring for my sisters like I said I would. I let my father lecture to me about good people, honest people, trustworthy people.
A week before Christmas, Summer and her family moved as mysteriously as they had appeared. By January, another family had moved in, a more conventional one, with a mother and a father and two children, a boy and a girl, both of whom did not want to play with me or my sisters, even after my father said it was okay. ‘They go to our church, be nice to them,’ my father reasoned. But they kept to themselves as much as we did.
Only once did my father speak of Summer’s departure, and when he did, he dramatized it as if it were a made-for-TV movie. ‘They left in the middle of the night. They had something to hide and did not want to get caught. They didn’t have a moving van. Just a truck. They piled up furniture and left the place a mess. The owners had to paint and re-carpet and replace doors and the stove. They left trash everywhere. And they never paid rent. Not once.’
I missed Summer. I missed the escape into a world where time did not matter, where tasks could be forgotten, where it was just fine to be. I wanted stories like Nina’s to tell my children someday.
Years passed. I forgot about Nina and Summer-for a time. When I was nineteen, I moved 110 miles from home and lived with my boyfriend. A year later, I married. Three years later, I had a son. For five years, I did not own a TV. I listened to whatever my husband played on the stereo. I walked barefoot and naked in the house. I have stories to tell. Of my wedding reception: how the best man had broken his toe and was downing vodka to numb the pain and when the time came for his elegant speech, he wavered with his glass and said, ‘Get a life!’ We laughed. Guests and relatives cowered with shame. It is a tale I tell strangers when they want to get to know me.
I still have problems trusting others and myself. I keep secrets. I exaggerate. Sometimes I lie. When others berate me and demand perfection, I forget to open my heart and offer them forgiveness and love. Many nights, even with my family home, I feel alone.
I’m still looking for that freedom. Sometimes I see it when I grow out my hair, wear clothes that are no longer in style, disregard consequences. I see Summer in the man I married, a man who is proud of his body, relishes his talents, doesn’t weigh the opinions of others more than his own, a man who has seen my body change from a back injury, a pregnancy, an abortion, and who loves me more each day for the woman I was, the woman I am, the woman I will someday become. I hear Nina’s voice in the stories I telclass="underline" delivering an unapproved valedictory speech at my high school graduation, leaving my boyfriend to date his best friend, having sex at a construction site high above the city lights, writing love letters to a writer whose work I fell in love with long before I fell in love with him, taking my three-month-old son with me to work, nursing him during my ten-minute breaks, nourishing him with my milk, my presence, my poetry, my love.
Each day is full of discovery. I give myself permission to be whoever I am, a spirit of fire and water, a daughter of the moon, a brave soul, a hunter, a wife, a mother, a writer, a woman.
Elizabeth Shé
We wore robes everywhere, and flowers in our hair. We made sand castles on Venice Beach. We painted our house bright orange and yellow and red and named it Rainbow Flower. Our bathroom featured a mural of giant mushrooms and fairies with glow-in-the-dark stars and a crescent moon. We skinny-dipped on Oregon beaches. We drank alcohol, smoked pot. My brother surfed before he could walk. And Jimi Hendrix played with agonizing consistency in our house, driving me to a seven-year-old’s distraction. I still can’t listen to ‘Foxy Lady’ without cringing. And the smell of marijuana makes me ill.
My mother was raised Catholic. When my parents divorced (I was six), she ran hell-bent for leather in the opposite direction. Suddenly realizing that being a good girl nets you nothing, she tried the other extreme: sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. My good little Catholic mom drank and fucked like a sailor. For her birthday, we made her a macrame bell system over her bed that she rang with her toe when she orgasmed.
Sexual innuendos came fast and furious in our house. The randier a joke, the funnier it was. No matter that neither my baby brother (six years younger) nor I knew what the hell we were laughing at. For my tenth birthday, my mom organized a striptease for me and my friends, with bawdy music from The Stingand racy nightgowns. I learned to masturbate with my Chatty Cathy. Sex is fun.
Sex is a game. Sex is sport.
The free love movement was a wonderful theory. My parents and their friends were reacting to war, to violence, to governmental betrayal. They wanted a better world, and thought free love was a way to achieve it. Make Love Not War. All You Need Is Love.
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines free love as ‘sexual relations without any commitments by either partner.’ But let’s break it down.
Free. Definition number fifteen states: ‘open to all comers.’ Oh, yeah, baby. That was definitely how my parents’ circle of friends was operating in the sixties and seventies. The good dictionary goes on to say, ‘Free stresses the complete absence of external rule’-yep-‘and the full right to make all of one’s own decisions.’ Kids too?
Love. Definition number seven: ‘copulation.’ That’s it-no need to read further.
Free love meant sex, and lots of it. Free love meant you did it anywhere and everywhere to prove you were hip, unencumbered by society’s rules. Countering her strict religious upbringing, my mother was born again, as a twentieth-century fox. She slept with a fifteen-year-old, a twenty-year-old, a musician or three, a forty-year-old accountant. I heard her sexual ecstasies from my bedroom. The bells over her bed rang frequently.
I was a wild child of a newly minted wild child.
Hippies were outside of society, better than society. I still remember a family friend saying I was too good to like a certain black-humored movie. My mother chirped right up. ‘She’s not good. She’s bad.’ Good is bad and bad is good. No wonder I’m in therapy.
I have an immediate negative response to people who smoke pot and wear bell-bottoms. Unfortunately for me, my college campus is full of people who nostalgically look at the sixties as the pinnacle of our century. But they weren’t there. They weren’t even born. They didn’t see the day after the wild orgy, when my four-year-old brother wandered into the kitchen for a snack, and had to dodge the flying wine bottle my mother was throwing at her drummer boyfriend. Yeah, we were free. Free to fuck our siblings, or drink screwdrivers until we puked.
But not free to say no.
The free love movement, in practice, set me up for a lifetime of sexual, emotional and physical abuse. I learned that sex is a should. If someone wanted to sleep with me, I let him. It didn’t matter-never mattered-if I didn’t want to. Free only went one way. And love meant sex.