Free Dry Your Smile by Robin; Morgan

the same. Julian suspected that she felt visible only when looked at. Didn’t that mean she couldn’t look back at, much less perceive, others accurately? “But Momma, how can I see who’s out there when the footlights are so bright?” she’d complained to Hope after her first appearance in proscenium theater. “They’re here to see you , darling; you don’t have to see them . Trust me.” Curiosity sacrificed to self-consciousness—but self-consciousness lacking a self, which in turn meant finding something external to reflect. Maybe, she shrugged to herself, that’s why I play witness, watching other women’s suffering and transformations to learn some of the shapes of my own—then putting it down in code, marks on paper. If so, then politics at least had reshaped pretense into an eerie Moebius strip—a consciousness curling back on itself, like Iliana’s “Oh, you too?”
    Julian tossed down the last of her Bloody Mary and crunched a chip of ice between her teeth in unconscious imitation of Hope. I’ve changed somewhere along the way, she realized, I’ve grown greedy about what privacy I do have, moments like this—so I’m not up to initiating a one-on-one mini-CR session with my seatmate. It didn’t occur to Julian that the woman beside her might also not feel like talking. She knew her Polly Esthers too well. Is this what they call burn-out, she wondered, this lack of energy, this floating anger—at whom? Hope? Larry? Myself for being so damned sure I know what the conversation with Polly Esther would involve that I just can’t begin it? If only she could sleep …
    But she knew the answer. The women’s movement had become a personal Hope Travis of her adulthood, the creature Julian felt had birthed her, saved her life, given her language. The women’s movement was the creature she loved passionately and seriously, believing it to be the last best nurturant hope for humanity. It was also the creature she served and sang and danced for, performed for, donated part of her earnings to, felt guilty about not doing enough for. It was the creature whose approval she desperately sought. It was the creature who had given her what Hope had never permitted: a mask of one’s own.
    The words she spoke and wrote this time might be forged in a million disparate experiences of other women, but when Julian spoke them, they were her own. The issues might be shared or alien, slack with imprecision, macrame in correct-line thinking or taut with insight, but when she wove them, they had a Travis stitch. So all the old skills she had come to regard as superficial and treacherously addictive, the ones employed whenever she mounted a podium or handled an interviewer or faced into a camera, were this time put to a purpose larger than her own—and through that crucible the skills themselves were somehow cleansed.
    Was that how it worked? she brooded: you started out thinking you were doing something for others, to find you were doing it for yourself—or the reverse? And was that a good thing or not? Certainly it had been a good thing in the old group, which she had joined claiming it was not for her own needs but to bring “those feminist women” some sobering political analysis from the Marxian New Left. Fortunately, “those feminist women” asked questions of themselves and of her that not only encompassed her missionary message but revealed it as puerile; they got to her before she got to them. Thank god for that, Julian almost muttered out loud, remembering the first time Maggie had asked her, “And, uh, where do housewives fit into your economic analysis, then?”
    If the women’s movement had come to function in her life as another stage mother, at least its early years had bathed her with support the way she remembered those other early years when Hope had been plain Momma. Never had Julian