We bought a tree and put it up and buried it with decorations, and she bristled at the notion of ever using a fake tree when
you could fill your house with the scent of pine and the perpetual threat of fire. Year after year my parents got into a fight
while testing and retesting and re-retesting the tree lights, and year after year they would end up hugging and smooching
in front of the tree when it was finally decorated.
Once the tree was decorated, it was our job, as children, to keep the cats from climbing the tree or batting off the decorations.
Virtually every Christmas photograph of our trees, from when we were small, features a cat of varying size, coat or age, either
in front of it, behind it, under it or in it. And virtually every Christmas photograph shows a tree with the bottom six inches
of branches bare and cat-stripped.
Our Grandmother Molby was a tireless seamstress and a strong believer in properly dressed children, so of course we were measured
and stitched and hemmed into new Christmas dresses every year. We celebrated Christmas twice during the day, and so there
were always two sets of Christmas pictures of us. Our morning celebratory One-Present-Only opening with just Mom and Dad,
where, lined up side by side (often holding dolls), we were dressed in ragged hair and our bottom-back-flap PJs, was one picture.
Later in the afternoon, after that interminable wait until the adults had FINALLY washed all of the dinner dishes and we could
indulge in our frenzy of greed, once again we were lined up under the tree (often surrounded by massive piles of loot) where
we were dressed in painfully exact curls and bows and all of our Christmas finery for photograph number two.
One year the UnWee got a fort set. One year my mother announced that if our father gave her one more small electrical kitchen
appliance she was going to find a way to use it on him. One year my Grandfather Molby gave me a desk he had built for me himself.
We were neither rich nor poor, but we were wise enough to realize, gradually, that the hunger for things is never fully cured
by mere things.
The heart of the celebration was a huge celebratory meal, turkey with all of the trimmings, dressing, mashed potatoes and
gravy, green beans, Mother’s favorite (a collection of various beans and onions she layered together and allowed to ferment
for several days before serving), pickles, olives, candied watermelon rinds, fresh rolls, real butter, milk, candied sweet
potatoes, and, as a nice chaser for the fudge, candy and cookies we had been pre-dining on, desserts. More than one dessert.
Christmas was—and is—a time of magic, a time of gathering together in our family. As adults we have retained some traditions
and modified others. We have sworn to cut back on the commercialism of the season, while still dashing out to buy this year’s
trendy equivalent to the Tickle Me Elmo doll (“Christmas,” we tell each other solemnly, “is
special
”). Because our generation involves more groups of children and needs to be scheduled around custody arrangements, and because
we gather now from farther away, we have switched around the gift-exchange portion of the day. While we still exchange gifts,
we exchange fewer gifts at one time, and the ceremony takes up less time than it did when we were children. It is, perhaps,
a less important part of the mass family gathering.
The dresses are gone. We girls waffle now between dress slacks and jeans.
A few of us have even gone to fake trees.
None of us dress the bottom foot of the tree, and when someone shows up limping, we automatically know we are seeing the results
of a cat-stolen-glass-ball-in-the-foot injury. You learn to take the good with the glass.
T
HE YEAR
I
CAME OUT
to myself—
Hi, my name is Cheryl. I think I may be a (
hic
) lesbian
—I went to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. I was twenty-seven going on nineteen and one of my friends who had spent her
summer listening to me said, “Go to Festival—you might meet some women you can talk to.” As luck would have it, that meant
she might have a weekend during which she could talk about something else, which would also have been a good thing.
The first year I went to Festival was about 1977. I met a woman who fell in love with me. I had trouble enough loving myself,
so I got drunk and fell into a ditch and wallowed a while in the bracken. I remember porta-janes, hauling trash from the kitchen
for my workshift, and being horribly, perpetually lost all weekend. I ate non-homogenized peanut butter and bananas (the only
food I recognized) and swore I would die before I would strip naked and take a public (cold) shower (although I did watch
a few). Alix Dobkin stood on stage and said it wouldn’t hurt little boys to learn there are places they can’t go either and
I thought self-righteously
, I will never become that bitter
. I had a good time, I guess. As usual, I had no sense of history taking place or anything new or radical being forged around
me; I was just worried about the nudity. And while I always had the best of plans, I did not go to Festival again for twenty-one
years.
My Beloved is a devout Festie-goer, so when I became involved in her life, I found myself packing my sleeping bags and tents
and trailing off to into the woods behind her. The Land is different, the food is better, the porta-janes are cleaner and
the bananas are just as good. Since I am not twenty-seven anymore and I gave up my job carrying fifty-pound bags up and down
a ladder in the factory, I cleverly failed to volunteer for garbage detail as my mandatory workshift this time. Garbage collecting
is hard work.
I volunteered for kitchen detail.
Almost everyone does.
The choices are pretty much presented as kitchen detail in the morning, kitchen detail in the afternoon, kitchen detail in
the evening or daycare for someone else’s kids. The first two years I was given plastic gloves, a sharp knife and a bus box
and shown to a huge table laden with never-ending stacks of vegetables.
This year I was promoted to go-get girl.
It seems simple enough. A go-get girl goes and gets. It is a subset of the serving division.
It is at about this point that the fog began to set in.
Before I sign up for my civic duties, I should probably always tell the people around me that I never actually got that little
T-shirt in kindergarten that says “Plays Well With Others.” I got the one that said “Throws Horrible Tantrums and Sometimes
Bites.” This is not my fault. I have leadership abilities; everyone has always told me so. My particular skill, all of my
life, has been to walk into a situation I know absolutely nothing about and begin organizing everyone around me. (For the
record, I dislike this characteristic in nearly everyone else I know. I feel it causes unnecessary conflict. They could just
do it my way.) I have no following abilities whatsoever and find them superfluous to my way of life. I should probably also
note that I do not always understand the way New Free Lesbians (NFLs) communicate with each other. I have assiduously avoided
“processing” for nearly thirty years now. Processing is the method by which six lesbians who fundamentally disagree with each
other sit down together and explore in great depth every conceivable nuance of every imaginable interpretation of every feeling
any of them have ever had until they come to a workable consensus. They keep telling me it works. It seems time-consuming
to me.
So I put on my apron, affixed my nametag and reported to my line. I was assigned to line one. I did not assign myself to line
one, some NFL assigned me to line one. She said, as she did so, that she had been wondering where her line one go-get girl
had gone, although—as far as I can tell—I had been there all along.
My job, as I understood it, was to go get things my servers were running out of. So I positioned myself to be available for
duty and waited for someone to run out of something.
I was standing in my position in line one when another NFL informed me that line three had run out of tomatoes. This confused
me because I was assigned to line one, but, ever-helpful, I said, “Okay,” and headed toward the food tent for tomatoes.
I was about halfway there when she called me and she said, “You’re not from line three, are you?”
I said, “No—I’m from line one.”
She said, “I’m sorry—apparently I’m confused—you don’t have to go get the tomatoes for line three.”
I said, “It’s okay—I’m halfway there.”
She said, “Still, I’m sorry you had to go all that way for nothing.” She appeared to be appeasing me.
I said, “Okay.” I went back to line one where my server informed me we were out of tomatoes; however, just as I headed back
to the food tent, the go-get girl from line three darted across the lines and delivered a bus box of sliced tomatoes to my
line.
This annoyed me, because I could have been going and getting for my own line, if she had paid attention to her line. Instead,
she seemed to be dashing all over the place, going and getting for everyone.
I had now walked halfway to the food tent twice and I had gone and gotten exactly nothing. However, I had little time to worry
about this because my line ran out of salad. Off I went to the table where the salads are kept, and I acquired one bus box
for my line, brought it back, dumped the last of the old salad on top of the new and now I had … an empty bus box.
I missed the part of the informational message that would have told me where the empty bus boxes go. This lecture, I presume,
occurred when I was right there but missing, just before I was assigned to line one.
So I carried my empty bus box to the beginning of the salad production line and gave it to the lettuce chopper, who took it
pleasantly enough, but then frowned and said, “But don’t you need a refill?” And she handed me a new bus box full of salad.
I thought to myself,
I will just carry this to line three
. Just as I thought this, the go-get girl from line three zoomed past like the Roadrunner on speed and dashed off again with
a bus box of salad.
I estimated about nine people had gone through line one since I had refilled the salad box, so it seemed safe to assume my
line was not out of salad yet. So I carried my refill to the table where I got the original salad, set it down, and strode
purposefully away as if I were Head Go-Get Girl and no one should question my behavior.
“What else do you need?” I greeted my servers as I returned to my line.
“We couldn’t find you, so we sent the go-get girl from line three to go get it,” my server replied.
“Lord knows what you’ll get,” I reflected as the line three goget girl screeched past, “that womyn has way too much energy
for food delivery.”
A camper materialized in front of us and set down a small, empty pail and said, “I need this full.”
We were informed, as we stood in line getting our serving instructions, that there would be possibly as many as 12,000 womyn
at the twenty-fifth Womyn’s Music Festival and that many of them—many of them—have issues about food. It was not our job,
as servers, to deal with food issues, it was merely our job to issue food. We were, therefore, to serve each camper what we
personally considered a “reasonable portion.” (Go to the line with fat servers.) If the camper requested more, we were to
halve that portion and serve it. If they asked for more, we were to halve it again. If they had questions about the ingredients
of the food, we were to direct them to the board in front of the tent that listed all of the ingredients in everything we
served. If they had any more complex questions about the food, we were to direct them to the kitchen staff. Very cheerfully
our kitchen staff womyn assured us, “We have as many as fifty people we can send them to where they will find out absolutely
nothing.” We all laughed pleasantly. “However,” our kitchen staff womyn assured us, “we have enough food. At no time should
you ever tell a womyn, ‘No, you can’t have more food.’”
So our camper set down her pail, said, “I need this filled.”
My server said, “I’m sorry, we’re not supposed to do that.”
I gasped with shock and horror.
“I’m getting food for several womyn,” the camper said. “I need this much food.” I could see food issues rising in her eyes:
she was ready to fight to death over a small pail of salad right there in the mess tent. No mere server person was going to
say “no” to her.
“Well, okay,” my server said doubtfully, “but we’re not supposed to …”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” I said reassuringly.
She glared at me and half-filled the pail. She waited.
The camper waited.
People began bumping into each other behind her, having expected the line to move ahead by now.
“I have several womyn I’m getting food for,” the camper said.
“Just give her the bus box,” I suggested, “there’s at least one more in the food tent …”
“We’re not supposed to give them this much food,” my server hissed at me and furiously filled the pail. “And besides,” she
said, looking around, “I’m sure we’re out of something …”
Of course, in no time we were out of salad. My server pointed this out to me as if it were personally my fault. As if I had
dashed down the line when she wasn’t looking and told each and every one of the craft womyn coming through line one to tell
her they could have more salad than she thought necessary and as a result, once again we were out of salad. I suspect this
womyn had been taught to eat what was on her plate and to believe if all 12,000 womyn at Festival had filed through our line,
they should have all eaten out of the same salad bus box. I suspected her of having food issues.
I collected the empty bus box and carried it back to the lettuce table for a refill.
The head of the lettuce table looked down at me, frowned— obviously I had gotten something in the wrong order again—but just
as she started to speak, the go-get girl from line three roared past with three bus boxes stacked in her arms.