Read Online Dry Your Smile by Robin; Morgan - Free Book Online Page B

to see her grown children off now at college. Polly Esther, buckled into an aisle seat next to a Julian Travis who once would have deftly engaged her in conversation, moving from the casual through the personal to the political, so that by the time they landed in New York at least a flicker of feminist interest would have been kindled. Nor would it have been one-way, either. Polly Esther would have touched something in herself and Julian would have retouched something in herself—and retouched Hope.
    Was that old organizer now just a character, too? Julian wondered. Yet she could still get inside that character so deeply the adrenaline coursed in her veins as she and other women assembled for a march, or as the energy hit her fingertips in the parry-and-thrust of a question-answer period after a speech. She still loved to throw herself, an emotional ventriloquist, through the façades of other women, into motivations familiar, articulable, more moving than her own. Yet they were her own. Who, then, was the ventriloquist?
    Julian poured the second half of the miniature in-flight vodka bottle into the remains of her Bloody Mary, swirling it with a plastic stirrer and watching the clear liquor cloud and then vanish, absorbed by tomato juice. Her own motivations? What were they? Once, they had such clarity, such intoxicating certainty. Now everything felt muddled. Where had they gone, those convictions earned the hard way—by trying to question everything?
    She glanced surreptitiously at her seatmate again, then looked away, out the window. The certainty had been there a decade earlier, in the old group—one of the first consciousness-raising groups—when she and nine other women met once a week, to sit in a circle on the floor in one or another of their apartments. Those women had tried to question everything, had dared peel off each of their masks in turn, with exquisite care. The skins of an onion, yes, through to what core? But “sisters,” yes. It was in that group Julian finally had been able to whisper—bringing forth the sin with the mortification of one who had surely invented it—that she had at times faked orgasms with her husband. It was in that group Iliana had leaned across the circle and replied merrily, “Oh, you too?” It was there that Julian felt one whole fronted self crack like a plaster cast and drop from her body while the room broke into a laughter giddy with mutual relief. Recognition. Innocence. Freedom. Momentary, but a glimpse … Yet even there, in the halcyon days of honeymoon “sisterhood,” Julian had not spoken of her childhood or of Hope. Even there, when they delicately probed in that direction, she had stopped them. They needn’t know behind-the-scenes details. They needn’t further know she nursed a secret grievance that they hadn’t persisted, had settled instead for respecting her privacy.
    Privacy. Julian sipped her drink and smiled to herself. Such moments as these, she thought, in airplanes, motel rooms, taxi-cabs, were the only privacy she now knew, maybe had ever known, except for those few months in that tiny walk-up apartment of her own before moving in to live with Laurence. But hadn’t she chosen a mode of living-in-public through her writing? “The personal is political” had been a Julian Travis phrase, and she felt required to live by it, as if to prove its validity. “Living out loud” had been her phrase, too, a deliberately opted-for vulnerability to the women she wanted to reach, at no small costs to the Julian-self and to those close to her who might not have chosen quite such an on-stage existence had they been consulted first.
    â€œCelebrity Diet Tips” headlined an article in Polly Esther’s magazine. The hunger to be perceived. Wasn’t that a basic human hunger, not merely the neurotic tic of an ex-child star? But being perceived and being looked at weren’t necessarily