Originally mailed on September 5, 1994
So ask me why I came back to Michigan. Say, "OK, Harriet Mageehan, why did you come back to Michigan?" I don't know. Maybe just because the shape of it is familiar, the feel of the air. I missed the dampness and the mosquitoes. I missed the miles and miles of cornfields. I remember when I was in school in Pennsylvania, how the hills would make me feel smothered, and I would have to walk to the top of one so I couldn't feel them all around me, boxing me in. I felt like anything could be coming over those hills, and I wouldn't know it until it was right on top of me. No dust cloud against the horizon warning me that trouble was coming -- no horizon. Used to scare the bejeezus out of me.
And then, this one time I was on my way from Pennsylvania to visit my folks. My car didn't have air conditioning, so I was cruising along the Ohio turnpike with all the windows open, and maybe it had just rained or something but all of a sudden I could smell the cornfields all around me, and I had to pull over to the shoulder and cry. I hadn't even known I missed the cornfields, couldn't have told you what the smell of them was like, but when I smelled the corn in Ohio my brain went wild with memories. We kids used to play hide and seek in the corn, eat the young ears raw, make forts with the stalks as walls. When I was really young I'd watch the even rows go by out the window of the school bus, and imagine that the rows took the shape of a long-legged boy running along beside the bus, keeping exactly even with me. I suppose the long-legged boy in the corn was the last of my imaginary friends.
That can't be true. I still have imaginary friends. They've been keeping me company lately -- I come home from work and tell them all about my day. All my new town enthusiasm has given way to a kind of loneliness that is only made worse by me getting to know some women a little. You know, I've met a few women, so now when I go places, like to the bar or something, they say, "Hi, Harriet," and I say, "Hi," and it's almost worse than not knowing anybody to know a few women a little and nobody very well.
Like the other night, I go to the bar, and run into a woman I'd met at a meeting for lesbians interested in having children (no, I'm not interested in having children. I just go to all the meetings for lesbians.) and she asks me to sit and have a drink with her and her friends, so there I am sitting uncomfortably with these strangers trying to think of something to say, and what I finally came up with was, "This is a pretty nice bar." So I say it to the woman on my left, but she can't hear me over the Pet Shop Boys, and she says, "What?" and I say, louder, "Pretty nice bar!" "WHAT?" "PRETTY NICE BAR!" "WHAT?" "PRETTY NICE BAR!" And she gestures helplessly at her ear and shrugs, and I mouth "never mind" and smile at her in a dopey way and she smiles back at me and we both go back to drawing double-woman-symbols and stuff in the frost on our beer mugs. Actually, that was kind of fun, but we kept needing new mugs because we'd used up all the frost on the ones we had, so I ended up getting way too drunk and pretty much blowing my budget. I thought she and I were cooking up some positive energy but it turns out the woman on my right is her lover. Sigh.
I did get asked on a date, though. I went to a meeting of this group for lesbians interested in forming an investment group to buy stocks, and ended up giving one of the women a ride home, and she called me up a couple of days later and asked me to have dinner with her. I was pretty excited, got all spiffed up, left too early like I always do so I had to drive around her block a few times, and then I knock on her door and a man answers, but I thought, OK, this is cool, she lives with some gay boy or something. Turns out to be her husband, and all the way to the restaurant she's talking about how outrageous it is that some women think she's not a lesbian just because she's married to a man, still sleeps with him, and has a child with him. I'm saying, "Hm," every few seconds because I just don't know what to say, and somehow, "Well, I agree with those women," just isn't conducive to a positive dating atmosphere.
Now, don't get me wrong. What she's living is not radical bisexuality, and she's not a married woman on the way out of the closet and her marriage. This is a woman who identifies as a lesbian but is married to a man (she told me this in so many words) and plans to continue living (and sleeping) with him. I had kind of a problem with that, even though she said he knew she was a lesbian when he married her. They seem to have an explicit sex-for-money exchange going -- he supports her and lets her date women as long as she keeps up appearances with his family and employers, and as long as she meets his sexual needs. I give her some credit for being honest with me about all this, but I can't see myself as the number-three point on that triangle. Oh, well. At least I'm out there trying.
Did I mention I've got a job? I got a lead on a printing job from a woman I met at a meeting for lesbian organic gardeners. It pays pretty well, relative to working at McDonald's, and I'll get benefits after 90 days. I had to pretend to be better than I am at two-color printing, so I've ended up punching out and then staying to finish up my runs off the clock. I suppose I could get in trouble if they catch me, but I'm just not good enough yet to get a two-color job done in the time they expect it, so I'll spend, for instance, six hours printing and only put three on my time card, and smuggle the tons of waste paper out the door and into my trash at home. What can I say, I needed the job. I'm getting better; I don't expect to be sneaking the extra hours in forever. Not that I could. I'm pretty exhausted most of the time. Printing is hot, loud, smelly, back-breaking work, and since I'm putting in extra hours I don't get to relax and recover the way I need to.
I don't know. Printing is a good trade to know and I'm proud I can do it, but I'm turning thirty soon and, not to be ageist or anything, but it's got me thinking about turning forty, and whether I want to still be doing a job that's got me on my feet on a cement floor eight hours a day, and whether the noise of the press is going to take its toll on my hearing even though I always wear my earplugs, and what the chemicals and ink might be doing to me. So I'm thinking all over again about college and whether I might not want to get a degree that would let me work sitting on my butt behind a desk or something. Don't have the foggiest notion what I'd study. Just starting to think I don't want to be printing for another 30 years if I can help it. If anybody has a meeting for lesbians interested in returning to college, I'll definitely go.
I did have a good time at a party I got invited to by a woman I met at a meeting for lesbian Democrats. I didn't know anybody but it was a small party and the women there were inclined to be friendly to strangers. I got talking with these two women who are planning to adopt a racing greyhound, and it got me remembering some stuff from Florida. I don't know if I've ever talked to you about it before. It's really Pan's story, from medical school, and it's just been on my mind ever since I talked to these women. You know, it's a whole movement, because the dog-racing industry destroys so many healthy animals, so people are starting to adopt these dogs rather than let them be killed.
Probably you don't want to hear this, but sometimes when I know something awful, I need to tell it to other people, like I don't want to be the only one to know it, or it's too heavy for me to hold alone. My imaginary friends just won't do for things like this. This is from Pan's first year of medical school. She told me about it when we were first lovers. I was sort of in awe of Pan and the whole medical school thing. I visited her in the anatomy lab when we were first starting to get involved, during that fateful Florida vacation, and all that was left on these rows and rows of surgical steel tables were brains in buckets. They had started with whole cadavers and worked their way through every part of the body except the brain. At the back of the anatomy lab was a wall hung with tools, regular recognizable tools like saws and mallets, and Pan said she'd used every one of those tools on a human body. I know my eyes got big imagining that, and she laughed at me because she felt that way at first, too. She hadn't even had the nerve to pick out her own cadaver when she first started school, someone else had to do it for her, but she was pretty blase about the whole thing by the time I got to know her. She casually pushed up her sleeve and fished her brain out of its bucket for me to see. I didn't touch it. I could have, and I've been kind of sorry I didn't. It looked spongy, heavy, like mushrooms or something, and I don't know if it felt like it looked because I was too chicken to poke it with my finger.
I did look at these brain slices they had in plastic cases. That was pretty cool. And, helping her study for finals that spring I learned all about diseases like salmonella, and I learned to name the parts of my sternum. The xyphoid process is the only part I remember; it's the little poky thing at the bottom. "Process" is an official anatomy term for "little poky thing sticking out." I always thought "process" was an official lesbian term for "talking about stuff with your lover." Live and learn.
She came home from school one day when I was staying with her (this was after I'd gone home to New Jersey after my vacation, and we'd had all those long phone calls, and I'd quit my job and was back in Florida to visit her and get ready to move down to be with her), and she'd learned in lab how to use an ophthalmoscope. I can spell "ophthalmoscope" because just about everyone in her class got it wrong on a test, so it's burned into my brain. It's the P-H-T-H that confuses people. They usually leave out the first H. Anyway, she'd learned to use one to see the inside of someone's eye by looking in through the pupil, or had supposedly learned to, but she hadn't been able to get it right. So she sat me on the edge of her desk and shined that light in my eye for a long time, moving it all around, until suddenly she had it. Her face lit up like she'd just discovered a wonder. She showed me a picture in one of her textbooks, of what the inside of your eye looks like. Red, kind of. I was not amazed. I guess it's different when you see it live, though. Especially the first time.
This is the horrible story. Towards the end of her first year of medical school, students had the only lab they ever did on a live animal. One of the students in Pan's class protested and made the school provide an alternative for students who were morally opposed to working on animals, but Pan just wasn't sure what she should do. Her advisor told her things like, "This is the only time you'll be able to cut living flesh before you're in an actual operating room," and "These are retired racing greyhounds; they're going to be killed anyway, and this way we can learn something from them before they die," and "You need to know this stuff and you can't learn it from reading books." She let herself be persuaded. She did the lab.
This is what she and her lab partners had to do: Anesthetize the dog, open its chest, inject it with two different medications and observe the effects on its heart, and then give it a painless lethal injection. The dogs that were delivered to the school were young and healthy, "retired" from the tracks because of their temperament, because they weren't fast enough, because more dogs are always bred than the races require. Of course, they were trusting and friendly, and I imagine Pan feeling just awful as she and her partners put their dog under. They opened the dog's chest as instructed; they injected the two medications. Pan wrote her observations on her lab sheet. She wanted to be done and gone, but her lab partners wanted to dissect the living dog, look at its stomach, its liver, its kidneys. Over their objections, Pan went to the lab instructor to get the syringe with the stuff that would kill the dog. She injected the dog, and it didn't die. It was a strong young healthy dog and it held on until she gave it a second shot.
Pan was angry. She could have learned about those medications from a video or book, and she didn't learn to make incisions in living flesh, one of her three lab partners did. She was angry and sad that her lab partners wanted to take the dog apart, do more to it than the assignment required. She alone felt compassion for the dog and sorrow at its wasted life and needless death. People told her she was lucky; other medical schools require many more animal labs; the Army's medical school shoots hundreds of dogs to simulate battle conditions for the students. Pan did not feel lucky to have killed only one dog. She grieved its death.
You don't want to hear that story. I didn't, either. A lot of people wouldn't listen to Pan tell it. She needed to tell people, but instead friends cut her off with, "I love dogs, and I can't believe you killed one. I don't want to hear about it." I let her tell me, in bed late one night when we were very new to each other. I held her while she cried. Her sad story opened my heart wide with sympathy and affection and I fell right in. It was a mistake to fall in love with her, but I'm glad I was there when she needed to tell someone her story.
The cats are fine. A woman I met at a meeting for lesbians estranged from their birth families came over and helped me give them baths, so we've finally got rid of the fleas. Speedball still has big bald patches because she's so allergic, but I expect her hair will grow back in. I'm enjoying the cool weather as fall gets underway. Especially after being in Florida during the spring and summer. I'm looking forward to wearing long sleeves.
Oh, and here's a bummer: here I am, closer to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival that I've been since I came out, and do I get to go? No. My job started just a couple of days before the festival, so I couldn't get any time off (and didn't have the money for a ticket anyway). I'm kind of bummed to have missed it, but I figure I'll read all about it in Lesbian Connection. I've already started saving up for next year's ticket.
Hope you're doing well,
© Copyright 1994-1999 Su Penn. Design by David Dierauer.
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