Escaping Long Island, 2000

It’s been ten years since I’ve ridden the Long Island Railroad. I’m heading to my friend John’s house in East Hampton. The Hamptons are about an hour further out on the island than Bellport – where in 1987 my ex-husband Russell and I bought a summer home. A decade later I lived in the house with Mary, my female ex-husband, and my two children before selling the house and moving to Northampton, Massachusetts in August 2000.

A lot and not so much changes in ten years. Mary was a train fanatic, a "rail fan." I think she had a touch of Asperger’s -- characterized by a fixation on trains, high intelligence, and social awkwardness; she had all those traits. When the diesel engine pulled into the station I could almost feel her presence. I sent a quick text to my dear friend Jenny to say, "on LIRR. Weird." She texted back, "Mary Burns."

The same conductor from when I commuted to NYU a decade ago just collected my ticket. She’s an unpleasant skinny woman with curling-ironed blonde hair and a down-turned mouth creased from years of pulling on cigarettes. I once saw her bowling at the Patchogue Lanes, a town over from Bellport. She had a crazy jerky skittish way of moving down the lane and releasing the ball. One of those things you never forget.

We’re coming up to Sayville now. This is where Mary and I would drive from Bellport to take the ferry over to Fire Island. The wealthy, super-fit and tan gay men take their ferry to the Pines and the dykes, femmes, butches, lezzies, drag queens and assorted marginal riff-raff take our ferry to Cherry Grove, a short walk down the beach, but economically a planet away from the architectural wonders and gourmet food stores of the Pines. I’m watching an older lesbian get off the train and look for a cab to the ferry. She has a telltale rash on her arm. The dunes are full of poison ivy.

Once when Mary and I took the kids to Cherry Grove, we ran into the principal of Theo’s elementary school. I had the hots for her; she was short, Italian, athletic and tough, but closeted because while Suffolk County is full of liberal weekenders from NYC, the locals are conservative and God-fearing, and an out queer principal would never fly. It freaked her out to be spotted by us on Cherry Grove. That’s what Long Island conservatism does to people. Another time Mary went to what we were told was a lesbian-owned barbershop in Sayville to get her usual butch buzz cut. There were four barbers, two male customers, and two empty chairs. We were told, sotto voce, that she had to come back on "Tuesday. Afterhours." When she protested, the woman barber took us outside and said they can’t let the men see them cutting a woman’s hair. Wow.

I’m so completely unable to be closeted. My appearance doesn’t relay much about my identity but my desire does. My attraction is for very masculine females. Not farm-wife masculinity and especially not suburban wife "because it’s easier" androgyny that reads as lesbian, e.g., super-short hair, khakis, no makeup, SUV-driving, punching-a-mother-on-the-opposing-soccer-team type which you see all over Long Island. (When I first moved to Long Island with Mary, I asked her in the Waldbaum’s parking lot, "what are all these lesbians doing here?!") My desire is specifically for queer butch masculinity.

We’re now at the Bellport station. Europeans are getting off the train. Bellport is characterized by extreme wealth and extreme poverty. It has the largest population of the poorest black people on Long Island. It’s really awful. They’re separated by railroad tracks from the middle-class, which is mostly locals and a few intrepid weekenders like I once was, and then the main street separates the middle-class from the wealthy, who live near the bay. Good god, everything is so familiar from the train window.

Mary, the kids, and I moved to Bellport in 1997. I had recently come out, was still living at Russell’s loft; we were unable to find a suitable apartment in the city that we could afford, and the kids had to start school somewhere. At first it was idyllic. I had a female partner who wanted me to be the wife that I always wanted to be, my kids were in well-funded schools, we lived near the ocean, there were good restaurants, fun people who breezed in from the city -- the city only an hour and twenty minutes away. My house was a lovely airy cape with a white picket fence and a half-acre backyard. I was in grad school at the time working on my PhD in Performance Studies at NYU and teaching at Hofstra University. When I’d get off the LIRR at Bellport I felt relaxed and happy to be home.

But not all was idyllic. My daughter, Rae, came out as a lesbian in middle school. She was tormented. Someone carved "fag" into her desk, she was pushed in the halls, taunted every single day, and her locker was defaced. I became an overnight activist. I joined a Long Island gay and lesbian youth organization as the parent spokesperson. I had conferences with the principal, teacher, counselors, school cop (another closeted dyke) and convinced them to go to a sensitivity training workshop for school administrators about gay and lesbian youth. Rae and I appeared on an HBO special called Middle School Confidential about the harassment she endured and the school district’s inability to handle it.

Then she ran away from school. She didn’t get far before a parent called to say that Rae showed her daughter a small bag she packed to take the train to the city. In it she had a comb, a snack, the lunch she saved, and some change. She walked 5 miles to the station. She got on a train to Manhattan and the conductors let her ride for several stops, and then she got off the train because they wanted her to pay for a ticket. I still do not understand why no one called the police to report a child riding the train by herself with no money. Eventually a deli owner called the police to say my daughter was sitting for hours in his deli by herself. He convinced her to call me. I wept with relief. I had the police at my house earlier and there was an APB out for her. The policewoman told the station that we were, "an alternative family." I was petrified that social services would take my daughter from me. You’d think it was 1969, not 1999.

After that I told Mary I wanted to move. I was exhausted defending my daughter and she was miserable. I had given a talk about butch/femme gender at UMass Amherst and Mary drove me through Northampton. Like in the Waldbaum’s parking lot a couple years earlier, I asked, "what are all these lesbian’s doing here?!" only this time they were lesbians. We moved to Northampton the next year and my daughter still lives there. It was a terrific place to raise my children. Only three hours away but a world away from Long Island.

East Hampton, NY (photos)

Home came to visit

I'm writing a book about looking for home. What is home? Is home a person or a structure? More enlightened people than I have said to me that home is in myself. No. No no no. I am content with who I am in many circumstances. I like myself. But I am not my home. I am the dogs' home. I know that, because wherever I go, they are connected to me, not anything or anyone else. This is generally true of dogs. I was my childrens' home when they were small but I don't know how they conceive of home now.

My search for home is not the result of aging or aloneness or economics or any of that. It's not a negative. The need to find home is like background static in my psyche. It's always there. It's a drive. Home is what I've wanted since I was a child -- a desire for a place to rest my heart, my being, my body; to truly be at peace when I get there, and when flung out into the world of uncertainty to know home is waiting for my return.

I was born into mayhem. Elizabeth, New Jersey, 1957, I was the first baby of a teenaged mother running from an abusive family to a down-and-out dreamer, my father. She was with him briefly, then pulled back and forth between her parents and men, and by 19-years-old had two babies from two men. Me, she kept. She gave birth to a boy in a home for unwed mothers, and against her will gave him up for adoption. (He found her in 2004 and has a wife and children. My mother is close to them.)

My grandparents then did what I've done ever since -- when things got crazy they up and left. They took me and my mother and moved to Southern California. I spent a lot of time with my grandfather, which was not a good idea, but my mother was not equipped to protect me. My connection to him was a mix of love and confusion.

When I was 5 my mother married a sexual abuser like her father and had another child, a daughter. I endured a lot and got out as soon as I could -- 15, 16 years old. There was neither a home nor a person I could trust. I was a tough girl and offered up my body to get by, because it was easy for me to disconnect. That was a lifetime ago.

Now I am back in NYC. I came here first in 1984, running from California, then left 10 years ago for Massachusetts and raised my children against a backdrop of tumoil that I tried to control. It's very hard not to repeat patterns from past generations. You think you have the patterns all figured out and then you learn you're submitting to the same disasters, under different wraps, that plagued your early life, and the lives of your people. That's the legacy of abuse.

I have to stay put here. NYC is my home and if I leave it will not be to escape. I've softened. I don't want to wander anymore. I want to understand who and what is home because each time I've run there have been sacrifices, just like my mother. I have to deal with this itching in my psyche and know what it is to feel peace in a place and in a person.

I hadn't seen my mother in many years. That's how it is. We go for years without talking or visits and then something breaks. She is still married to my perpetrator in California and that has caused a lot of tension and logistical problems. I won't let him near me or my children. My mother has visited by herself but I've always had to pay a price for not faking it and keeping her family intact, like she did. Earlier this year she was adamant about visiting me this summer. Her husband is now old and sickly and maybe that had something to do with it.

Last week my mother came from California and stayed with me in my Brooklyn apartment. My cousin joined us, also from California, for the first 3 days, staying at a nearby inn, then my daughter visited from Massachusetts for a couple days, and then my son and his girlfriend came over, and then it was just my mother and I.

Before my mother arrived last week, I'd been working on my book about finding home, and it occurred to me that while I am on a search for home, my mother is on a search for family. In essence, we both want to know where and to whom we belong. We go about these quests in very different ways. I sit on my ass and wax philosophical and analyze what home means and she shleps to destinations near and far looking at gravesites, Ellis Island logbooks, tenement museums. She's also comforted by the myth of family lore while I am a complete skeptic and believe none of it.

When she arrived with plans to go to the Jewish enclaves of Brighton Beach and Boro Park and the cemetery of her grandparents from Russia, instead of feeling my usual annoyance I felt something akin to empathy. I went with an open mind to places where she wanted to find her roots. I didn't feel moved emotionally but I had a lot of fun. I felt very relaxed around her. I'm wondering if maybe in our dual need to find what we never had, we can be both family and home to one another.

At Sammy's Roumanian on the Lower East Side. On the left is my mother's son's family. She met this family in 2004.

On the right are the people I know. From R to L: Back row: my cousin Sue, my mother, me; Front: Theo, my son, far right and his girlfriend, Kayla.

Chopped liver.

This is my mother, cousin, and me en route to Brighton Beach where the Russian Jews live.

Posing with a babushka in a babushka because I drew the line at taking photos of ethnic people just because.

My great-grandparents. I was named after Rose.

Mom and my daughter, Rae, playing Crazy Gin at my place.

Serious business.

Cadillac of competition

I am competitive and I’m not competitive. For instance, I wouldn’t walk into a party and scan the room to see who has the best outfit and then hate her. Nor do I size-up attractive women with a sideways glance and a pursed-lipped sourpuss and then draw all the attention to myself by speaking with loud and false gaiety. This is common behavior in women who are in competition for the few non-Neanderthals left in the cave.

I’m not covetous and don’t need stuff. I especially don’t need the Cadillac of something. I don’t need the Cadillac of food processors or coffee makers or the Cadillac of dog beds or electric toothbrushes. I come from Cadillacs. That is, a Cadillac-owning working-class Jewish neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley in which owning a Cadillac was more socially, culturally and religiously important than what work you did or even a good zip code. I spent my childhood riding my bike around Cadillac de Ville fins and oversized Eldorados longer than their driveways – constructed, no doubt, by people who figured if you can’t afford a luxury house, you can’t afford a luxury car and have no need for a long driveway. They did not know the post-WWII Jewish mentality. By the 70s, the boringly boxy Seville really put an end to the Cadillac as the Cadillac of cars.

I’m also not competitive about what I know. I’m not a know-it-all and I feel a little sorry for people who are. I didn’t care if my children were earlier walkers or better in school than the next kid, and I don’t care that my poodles aren’t as perfectly groomed as other fancy breeds in my neighborhood. That’s the kind of non-competitive person I am. I also don’t play team sports or work in offices. I’m not a team player, so I compromise the salary, pension, and benefits of long-term employment for the unpredictable, but free, life as a freelance author and editor.

As a child I was not competitive academically; I played volleyball with skill but a lack of concern for the outcome; and I did not get a nose job like many of the other Jewish girls in the Valley. I did not have the Cadillac of grades, noses, or breasts -- I’ve been a lifelong 34AAA and didn’t bother stuffing my bra in high school or adding silicon later on.

I was competitive as a groupie. In the early 70s as a young teenager, I hitchhiked into Hollywood from the Valley enclave of North Hollywood (glamorously, but misleadingly named since it is as far from Hollywood as you can get) and discovered that winning the attention of a rock star over another groupie was powerful. I later figured out the feeling of power was linked to childhood sexual abuse. Every groupie I met had endured sexual trauma. In both cases – groupie, sexually abused child -- sex was a commodity, it’s what was valued, got a girl attention, made her feel needed and cared for and important.

But as a groupie, instead of being an unwitting and unwilling sexual object at an age when you didn’t understand what the value of sex was even about, you thought you were in control because you chose whom to pursue. Rock stars were the objects and groupies the pursuers -- the flip of sexual abuse in which the girl is the target. This is not really true because groupies were underage teenagers but it felt like that from our standpoint.

Being prized for my girl body rather than my skills or talents or sense of humor or simply as a child is what shaped my sense of competition as a sexual object then rather than, say, as an athlete or a good student. *

Now I am competitive with myself. Sometimes I use other people as props. What I mean is this, for instance: I look for other runners who I can outrun when I run the loop around Prospect Park. Granted, they may be 68-years-old, wearing tights and a long t-shirt from a vacation resort; holding a water bottle and a radio with an antennae – but they’re fair game. There are also plenty of young men who don’t really run but start out as if they do it everyday and they tire quickly. If I can keep outrunning people, I can make it around the park. I do the same on the treadmill at the gym and a guy might try for a short time to outrun me and then he’ll give up and pretend he meant to stop. I don’t always need someone to compete with but it motivates me if it’s an ad hoc, unplanned competition.

The other day I was on the F train coming back to Brooklyn from Manhattan. I got in the first car so when we stopped I was near the exit closest to where I live. I stood at the door as we pulled into the station, hand on the pole, when a man in business clothes got right next to me, in front of other men getting off at the stop. Before the door opened I knew he was going to cut me off and be the first out of the station. I was wearing a dress and heels, which made me want to race him out of there even more. I wanted to mess up his strategy because he made the assumption that I was not competition. The door opened and he hustled to the far staircase. I took the first staircase in twos, holding my dress in my hand. I beat him to the top. He noticed. I got to the turnstile before him and walked through s l o w l y with him aggravated behind me. He hit the next staircase. I was close behind. We made it to the top together. We were neck-in-neck. Then he dramatically pulled out his cell phone and slowed down in defeat. I won.
**************

*I’m collecting data and interview subjects for a book about groupies. If you know anyone who has been or is a groupie (groupies who pursue actors, sport or music stars) please contact me at robin.maltz@gmail.com.

Dress up femme

I’m a dress-up femme. My closet is full of pretty frocks and high heels ranging from the practical 2-3" pumps -- the sneakers of my heels -- to full on stiletto 4-5" heels in leopard peep-toe, candy-apple patent, and retro gold from Frederick’s of Hollywood. I have a closet for summer dresses and skirts, and another for winter. Jeans are folded and stacked on an upper closet shelf since they don’t look aesthetically pleasing like summer frocks do.

Dresses are organized according to occasion. Summer shifts, dog-walking dresses, dinner-out dresses, and fancy party dresses are in that order. Same with skirts, though I keep the dog-walking skirts front and center since I’m more likely to wear them, over the dog-walking dresses. With the dog-walking dresses, you can see down the top when I bend over to pick up dog poo, which in my case means you can see straight down to my panties. Still it’s so easy to slip into a dress and a pair of sandals, grab the poodles, and go. The dog-walking dresses double as errand-running dresses, especially if I’m riding my bicycle, because I can tuck them under my legs. My bike is not the bend-over kind.

In the summer I go bare-legged and in the winter I don’t, obviously, or I’d freeze. I hate tights and so I often resort to pants, which can be cute, but with pants one has to wear socks. My socks, other than the thin, petite runner’s version, I find hideous. There’s just nothing sexy about socks. Even writing "my socks" embarrasses me. It’s bad enough, in the throes of a hot winter romance, to be hopping around the floor stumbling out of the jeans you pray makes your ass look great, without having to discreetly take off your socks first to hide in your boots, or worse, have them stay on when your jeans come off. Ugh. It’s like being at the gynecologist; "you can keep your socks on," as if you don’t feel abject enough having someone you’re not intimate with talking to you from between your legs.

The Socks share a drawer with les bas ("the stockings" in French, which I don’t speak but know the important words). The best invention ever are stay-up stockings with lace-elastic tops. These days you can get them at Sears they’re so common. While garter belts are uber-sexy, and I keep them handy just in case the mood strikes someone who I may be dating one day in the future, stockings needing a garter belt really don’t make sense in everyday life. They’re hard to find, expensive, and wind up bagging at the knees if you do more than go from front door to taxi cab to bar stool or banquet.

Stay-up stockings were not intended to replace garter belt stockings, but pantyhose. Pantyhose were invented by a woman-hater. They are a chastity belt in nylon. Why does a woman need a concealed, waist-high, smothering girdle of thick itchy nylon (to wear over cotton-crotch panties yet, because everyone knows that nylon gives you a yeast infection) in order to have legs enhanced by material that is barely visible? Every woman takes off pantyhose with a sigh of relief. They are punishment for wanting sexy legs.

The 1970s was a time of great stress over VPL (visible panty line). Pants were thin, skintight, high-waisted, and underwear was completely wrong. G-strings were for strippers, and thongs -- rubber footwear for the pool. After suffering through the high school trauma years of VPL and pantyhose, I was one of the first onboard for panties the size of a slingshot. Ass liberation! Burn those granny underpants!

My panty collection takes up so little room in their drawer, that the rest of the drawer is a collection of stuff that just seems to belong there. To the right are the panties: unadorned gym panties, lace tap pants, the cute everyday assortment, a couple strange panty gifts from exes (zippered; edible; sequined...), and the small section of ridiculously expensive panties purchased for me by the only rich woman I ever dated and, because of my fear of scarcity coupled with the knowledge that I will never buy $40 panties for myself, I wear them only if I have a promising date or expect to be hit by a car. On the left side of the drawer are boxes from my perfume so in the event I ever take a vacation, I can dust off the cobwebs and the perfume won't break on the transcontinental flight. Alongside the boxes are a pair of completely sheer black pants, a few bras that have not increased in size since the "training bras" of my youth and that I almost never wear, hot pants and a sequin halter bra that were once part of a Purim costume, lipstick cases, and a signature turquoise box from a Tiffany’s ring.

In terms of other accoutrement, I have five different perfumes on top of my dresser that I rotate depending on whether I want to be reminded of either ex, my son, or my newly independent and unemployed self.

Lipstick, eye makeup, and nail polish all have separate drawers in my bathroom. I have many lipsticks. A little basket containing lipstick brushes and gloss divide the reds and darker winter colors from the pinks and oranges of summer. When Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, was asked what a woman without a fashion budget should do she replied, buy a lipstick. I agree with you, Anna. If it’s a choice between $23 worth of groceries and a Chanel lipstick, by god, get that lipstick, girl! You can always eat tomorrow.