Living Among She-Demons:
A Love Story

copyright 1997
Pat Kight

the poems

The house stood on a dead-end created when the bridge across the power canal had been abandoned as unsafe to traffic. You could still walk across the bridge, but the only cars that came down the short street were ours, our friends', or lost, looking for a short-cut that no longer existed. There were no other houses on the block, just broken foundations in the lot next door, covered with enough sand to make a decent summer volleyball court.

When we first saw the house, in the thick of winter in 1974, it was a shack, filled with old toilets (three of them, sitting frozen in the dining room) and possibilities. The slumlord-professor who owned it said it wasn't really ready to rent, but we begged and wheedled and promised to make the place habitable, hardly dreaming what a chore that would be.

That first winter (after the landlord moved the toilets, installing one in the upstairs bathroom, and hooked up the meager gas heater in the living room), we lived with boarded windows and army blankets tacked over doorways to miser what little heat there was. Slowly, as spring approached, we glazed the windows and pulled off the boards to reveal frighteningly shabby 1940s wallpaper, peeling and streaked with mildew. We raided the landlord's garage for gypsum board, spackle and paint, and wound up with something like a tudor look - white, thickly textured walls, the not-quite-square joins covered by strips of 1x4 stained walnut brown. India-print bedspreads went up as curtains, and we painted the wierd, cardboard-textured walls of our upstairs bedrooms in Crayola colors: Mine purple, Robin's lime green, the bathroom sky-blue and a sunny (well, let's be honest, garish) yellow for the space at the top of the stairs, more than landing but less than room, where we stuck an old sofa for friends to crash on.

As spring came on, a household of women emerged, improbably different yet bound by something more than the roof over our head.

Robin was dashing, a gorgeous, woodsy creature whose eyes were already crinkling at the corners from long summers spent outdoors. Her smile was white and broad and generous. Elyse was our androgyne, lean and hard-muscled, a dyke before any of us knew the word. Short, blonde Jamie was loud, hard-drinking -- and an equally passionate friend or enemy. And I was ... the poet, the dreamer, already embarked on what I didn't then realize would be a 20-year newspaper career.

We'd met -- good grief, how on earth did we meet? In hindsight, it seems we'd always known each other, but when I search backward I recall a consciousness-raising group, pulled together by some mutal acquaintance more advanced in the burgeoning feminist movement than the rest of us. A group of relative strangers, meeting in some sunny, plant-filled apartment to take those first, tentative steps toward what we truly thought of as liberation. It was so easy to become fast friends under those circumstances, baring our hearts and souls to each other once a week, at first cautiously and then in torrents, the words tumbling out in equal parts laughter and tears as we recognized ourselves in each other and the sisterhood in all of us.

(And if I feel a little silly writing this down now, it's only because the world has moved so fast, so soon that it all seems a little ancient, a little passe. At the time, though, it was true revelation, true revolution -- astonishing and energizing and new).

Our male friends warmed our house with a sign, tempera and glitter on an old wooden shingle: Beware of She-Demons. We posted it proudly above the front door -- and then took them in when they were hungry or horny or just in need of company, and gave them sustenance. None of us saw much contradiction between nurturing these boy-men and the increasingly woman- centered life we were beginning to lead when they weren't there, sharing tampons and shampoo, driving each other's cars and cooking up great kettles full of beans and rice and whatever, feasts that were vegetarian by economics if not by conviction.

We tried to grow pot in the wedge-shaped closet under the stairs, covering the walls with aluminum foil, hanging a fluorescent light and pinching back the buds the way it said to in the underground magazines, hoping for a bumper crop but mostly realizing stems and seeds (it would have helped if any of us had been conscientious enough to water the things. Instead we forgot about them, letting them dry to near dessication and then -- omigod! the plants! - practically drowning them.) We smoked a lot of pot that year, but I don't think any of it came from our indoor garden. When we were high, we'd lie around the living room, heads in each other's laps, or go for long walks down by the Lake Superior shore, dreaming and talking and laughing like the wild women we truly believed we were.

I'd brought a cat to the household, a small Siamese named (it figures) Sappho. Jamie had brought her dog, a hulking yellow Lab whose name I can't remember (I never was good with dogs). The animals formed a querulous truce that divided the house into Cat Territory upstairs and Dog Territory downstairs, skirmishing occasionally on the stairs. Ultimately, it was a model we would adopt among ourselves. But not at first.

Because that spring and summer we were busily, happily, inevitably falling in love. With each other, as a household and in overlapping, intersecting pairs.

Elyse was the first one "out" -- or in, rather, to Robin's bed early in the morning, where they would giggle and chatter until the house woke up, and then holler for coffee, which I'd fetch, balancing two steaming cups and nudging open the door to find them all rosy-faced and shining, twined together beneath a thick white comforter like two girls at camp.

I'll never know if it was Robin alone I fell for, or the idea of Robin and Elyse together ... or just the sound of them, purring and murmuring through the paper bedroom wall, late at night and before dawn. They were so bold and brave and gorgeous and I was ... shy? or just chickenshit? So while they made love, I wrote love poems, and a letter to my mother in which I breathlessly announced: "I'm in love with a woman," half hoping she'd freak out. Which, being the person she was, she refused to do, writing back instead that she was happy if I was happy.

I wasn't, exactly, happy. I was tormented. I was moon-struck. I was Unrequited. I was the good friend upon whose shoulder Robin could cry if she and Elyse had an argument. I was the good friend upon whose shoulder Elyse could cry when Robin won the argument, as she most often did. I comforted both of them, lusted for both of them and couldn't bring myself to make a move, any move, that might suggest "What about me?" But oh, I relished every bit of it, thirsty for the sight of them as a parched voyeur, thrilling to my own role as the One Left Out. And -- there's no doubt about it -- writing some of my best poetry, then or since.

Jamie, meanwhile, opted for heterosexual excess, flaunting her own parade of men (and liquor) as if to say, "Hey, I'm the normal one around here." And at the same time complaining loudly that she'd known Robin first, that their agreement to room together hadn't included this whole, messily female package deal ... Her anger, always close to the surface, erupted in early morning tantrums when -- hearing Elyse creep into Robins' room -- she'd stomp downstairs and turn the stereo up loud enough to wake the dead, much less the house. "Gross," she'd mutter, watching Elyse kiss Robin goodbye as she left for class. But watching, nonetheless.

Meanwhile, the man I'd dated off and on for a year or two suddenly decided he wanted to get married, taking me entirely by surprise. The thought hadn't entered my mind, and I'm afraid I told him just that, blurting it out ungraciously when he attempted to propose. "It's those women," he said, bitterly, "it's those women you're living with, isn't it?" And while I protested that, no, it wasn't about them or him, it was that I was just getting started in a career and didn't yet know what I wanted out of life ... deep down, I wanted to say, "Yes, of course, it's those women."

I left not long after, drawn 400 miles away by that career. The household broke apart in stages, other women moving in, out, on.

Elyse wound up in Denver, living with a lesbian separatist collective, and eventually dying of cancer, much, much too young.

Robin married Dave, moved away with him, divorced. She married better, later, and lives in Minnesota with her husband and daughter, also named Elyse.

We don't know what happened to Jamie, but I like to hope it wasn't bad.

And I still dance the dance, woman-and-woman, man-and-woman, falling far too easily in love.

It doesn't hurt nearly as much as it used to. But I don't write poems about it, either.