Free Dry Your Smile by Robin; Morgan Page A

laughed so hard as in the old group: the night Judy mimicked each of the male bosses at the architecture firm where she worked as a secretary, taking them on one by one with devastatingly vivid gestures and in different accents of pomposity; or the night Ivy demanded to know why scientists able to send ships up into space were unable to invent a diaphragm that could be inserted without making a woman engage in a solitary bathroom game of (greased) frisbee; or the night Andrea wondered why she had to be born female and Jewish and a Scorpio and be right in the middle of her Saturn cycle, and aware of all those burdens—only to have Miki top her, chuckling, “Try being all of that—well, at least half Jewish— and black and a lesbian. That’s me, kiddo. Isn’t that cheery?”
    We came to love each other, it was that simple, Julian thought. And somewhere in the process, we came to like ourselves a little. Never had she cried so unselfconsciously as in the old group. Never, before or since, had she looked forward to a meeting. Never had she been so happily exhausted before, during, and after demonstrations: up straight through the previous night at the mimeograph machine cranking out leaflets, or arguing hoarsely over slogans to be magic-markered on pieces of cardboard strewn around the floor in a tangle of blue-jeaned sprawling women, or consuming cup after cup of black coffee in order to stay awake and do more of the same. Never, in the earlier years of the anti-war movement or the civil-rights movement, had she so felt as if she had a real people of her own.
    The seatmate finished Good Housekeeping , neatly slid it into the seat-pocket in front of her, and immediately opened a copy of Family Circle .
    But the old group did even more. They taught Julian new dimensions of intimacy. She learned that sometimes disloyalty wasn’t even disloyal, as when she confessed that she must be a prude because her husband’s unabashed belches and farts dismayed her—only to hear the reliable chorus of “Oh, you too?” from five other women in the group. She learned that she didn’t need to prefix an insight with “I must be crazy, but I wonder …” She learned that exposing a long-dead self could lure that self up into existence. And like every new convert to a belief in resurrection, she had longed to pass that message on. The irony was that in the passing-on process, a public self—a new one—got reconstructed.
    She rubbed her eyelids, thinking dully that she should take out her contact lenses; the recirculating cabin air always dried out your eyes. I never should have given in to them about the media, she thought, resting her head against the seatback and closing her eyes. As the movement began to surface in the press, she had refused to be any kind of spokeswoman. Yet her whole group knew about her childhood even if no one spoke of it, and finally they tactfully admitted their awe of someone who wouldn’t be intimidated by a microphone. She countered by setting up women’s media workshops:
    â€œLook, it’s really just building a repertoire of gimmicks. Afraid of speaking to a group of people? Well, imagine them all sitting out there not on chairs but on rows and rows of toilets, their pants down around their ankles. Who could be intimidated by that? Afraid an interviewer might lead you astray with a tricky question? Well, just side-step it, say something like ‘Interesting you should ask that, and I’ll get back to it in a minute, but what I really think is relevant is …’ Afraid of a camera? Well, look right into the lens and through it, to the woman who’s watching the program while doing her ironing or the woman seeing the picture in her morning newspaper on the bus as she rides to work, that’s who you’re really looking at.”
    But it hadn’t succeeded. Her protegées still trembled with stage-fright, fell silent