ALMOST ENOUGH - Pt 1
by Jean Roberta ALMOST ENOUGH: The Story of Something that Almost Happened, and Something Else that Shouldn’t Have Copyright 1999 by Jean Roberta. Not to be reproduced without permission. --------------- As Charles Dickens once wrote: it was the best of times and the worst of times. As “gay pneumonia” came to be known as AIDS and feminists demonstrated in front of X-rated video stores, I was surviving lesbian adolescence in my thirties. I seemed likely to stay in graduate school until kicked out by the stern administrator who regularly threatened to do this to me. It was a time of living in the moment, and of the animal hunt for the means of survival. My ex-husband phoned whenever he could think of a fresh accusation to throw at me, but he threw me no money for the support of our daughter. My Legal Aid lawyer kept reminding me that I was entitled, as though Entitlement were legal currency. My early career as a clerk/typist/receptionist for various branches of government had ended in the late 1970s with the revolution in office technology which replaced a dozen women on clattering typewriters with one woman on a word processor. I was never chosen for that role. My later career as a call girl in the early ‘80s had almost ended with the arrest of my pimp and my questioning by police. I had squirmed in my seat, not because of the cop’s predictable questions, but because of the pinworms I had picked up in my own line of duty. Instead of redeeming myself by wasting away from a tragic disease like the Lady of the Camellias, I had been infected with worms in the ass. Writing a prescription to hide a smile, my doctor told me how common this problem was in the African port city she came from. I still entertained one of my regulars from time to time, without the thin protection of an employer. I also worked as a nude model for university art classes, a telemarketer, a free-lance typist and editor, and a door-to-door salesperson to supplement the crumbs of welfare I could get. Like a scavenging coyote who howls for the moon, I had a desperate crush on a woman who was not in my league, or vice versa. I lived in the extreme climate of the Canadian heartland, but my life seemed to reflect the screwed-up state of the whole world. On the day of my idol’s concert in 1985, I carefully ironed a shirt that I hoped would impress her. I thanked the Goddess for rayon, a poor woman’s silk. “Mom,” demanded Emma, my seven-year-old, “why can’t I come hear the music with you? I’m really good.” “I know, honey,” I assured her, “but there’s going to be alcohol there, so they can’t let kids in. It’s the law.” “That’s no fair!” Her expression showed me that she was wondering whether this injustice deserved a full-scale temper tantrum. I often pondered the same question. “I can bring the music home so you can hear it,” I comforted her. “Markie made a tape that people can buy.” Marceline, who preferred to be known as Markie or Mark, had been my college classmate in the 1970s, and I was proud that we had this one small thing in common. Markie had recently set aside enough money from her day jobs to launch herself as a recording artist by spending $3,000 (in Canadian money, but still a fortune to me) on studio time and back-up musicians to enhance her rich alto voice on her own songs. Markie had assured me that in the music biz, this type of self-investment was not considered parallel to the self-publication of wannabe authors (a description that made me flinch) via the vanity press. I believed her. I was planning to buy Markie’s tape, no matter how much it cost. If necessary, I told myself, I could send Emma to my parents’ house for meals for a week while I would just avoid eating. In any case, I was trying to cultivate my talent for living on less. “I wanna see Markie,” whined Emma. Me too, I thought. “She’s funny.” Mark the Star, I thought, could be all things to all people. Her presence in our life seemed to strengthen the bond between Emma and me. In one of her day jobs, Markie had run a daycare center, and this phase of her life had given rise to a rash of sing-along children’s songs. She had a special personality that she switched on whenever a child under the age of puberty entered her space, and children were drawn to her like moths to a lightbulb. Among adults, however, Markie always swore that she would never have a child of her own because she wasn’t the domestic type. At a time when every lesbian I knew strove to be androgynously cool, Markie seemed to achieve this style with no effort. She sometimes called herself “butch,” but with so much irony that any woman who took the word seriously was guaranteed to feel stupid. She was athletic but short, and her build was so womanly that she had had surgery to reduce her breasts to C-cup size; her irreducible hips still asserted themselves in tight jeans. Inside and out, Mark seemed nothing like the men I had known. But “woman” (or even “womon” or “womyn”) seemed too limiting to define her. “I’ll invite Markie to come visit us,” I promised Emma. “Markie and Elaine can come over for supper.” I couldn’t invite my idol without her mate of three years. “Goody.” Now that I had recklessly made Emma an offer, she would bug me about it until Markie the diva and Elaine the lawyer accepted my invitation. If they did, I would have to buy groceries, clean the apartment, and cook a meal fit for such guests. I knew that in a feminist consciousness, all women are created equal. I also knew that in our community, Mark and Elaine were so much more equal than I was that I could hardly expect a return invitation.
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