October 15, 1978...Another letter. She chides me. I have not been in touch. Did not tell her I was moving into the blue gingerbread Victorian. My phone disconnected. She is alarmed. But she calls the painter and his wife, and they give her the lowdown. So she writes.

My husband and I are semi-officially separated. This begins the period where I sleep in one bedroom, he sleeps in another, I have an affair with the guy in the back apartment, he has an affair with my (new) best friend from school, who is about 15 years younger than either of us. We all hang out together. The kids are with both of us. Strange days, indeed. No wonder I have no time to write.

8.28.78 - Still on my farm in Door County. Postcard from Mary in England. Shepherds and Sheep, Detain from Window XVII, King's college Cambridge. "Quite lovely and we even punted which was hysterical! Return today amid all the tight security at London." Don't remember - IRA stuff? Actually, not still on the farm. Postcard forwarded from farm to 426 S. Webster. A beautiful blue gingerbread Victorian house. My soon to be ex-husband and I moved in there with every intention of buying it and sharing it. There was a separate apartment in the back. The children could go back and forth. No money to do the place justice, however. And the farm did not sell in time to buy the house. It burned down a few years after we left there, and we were only there for a year or so, if that. There are stories, however.....

November 3, 1979 - I am in Seattle. With a new boyfriend. After riding from Green Bay, WI to Seattle on the back on his '69 Harley Sportster. I sent her a picture. "My dear, you look such a dyke" :) I think this is the letter that firmly decided me not to "experiment" with lesbianism. I had no real interest in it. My only interest was the possibility that I got along with my women friends so well, and my relationships with men seemed to go so wrong so quickly. But listening to Mary's adventures, I discovered that emotional relationships are emotional relationships, no matter who or where or what. I wouldn't be gaining anything. After a beautiful recital of the beginning of a love affair, and the disastrous end of same, she writes:

"Well, Barbara of the Big City, is that how it goes then? Or is it only in those old English/middle French medieval texts that such things happen and bound as we are by the realities of the time we live in, there is no place for such illusions. Seems like a lot of what therapy is about is giving up the illusions that we all carry about what we can/can't get from people - those primal desires which were never satisfied for us. However, I don't want to give All of them up. There has to be another level to reality other than reality itself. Maybe I'm just too much of a romantic to see/deal with things as shitty as they usually are. Well, we are both out of our time - you, my dear, are an Elizabethan through and through, definitely of Shakespeare's time methinks - me, well, I always see myself as around the time of Byron/Shelley surrounded by all those dying love poems...male though, not female, otherwise I'll end up sitting around being read too rather than doing the reading..."

Is it any wonder I miss her?

Looks like I'm going on a Mary kick for a few days. The next pile of things seems to be a pile of letters. Actually, I just found a woman with her name in Amherst, MA, and sent her a card by snail mail, with my phone number & stuff. Could be.....

Let's see - this one is dated September 3rd, and there are references to my being in school, so this must be 1978, since I graduated in 1979. I am apparently still on the farm, but I am thinking about leaving. My memory of that fall is a little hazy. I was probably disoriented, broke and confused. See below...

She has been gone for a year, going to school at Goddard in MA, separating from her husband, and just beginning to deal with being a lesbian. She is just back from visiting her parents and sister in England, very disoriented, broke, and confused about her future. Sounds like she's right on track for 1978!
I hope the woman in Amherst is her. I hope she answers me.

Wonder where tomorrow's letter will take me?

Just realized I wrote about the Sheriff's receipts already. Just picked up the same bits again, and at least got a little more story squeezed out of 'em. Rearranged my stack of stuff so that they are in two different places - onward into the flotsam...

2.21.81 - Amherst, MA - letter from Mary, addressed to me in Pittsburgh, where I am attending graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh on a teaching assistantship. I am, if memory serves me right, about a month away from my "on the bus" Dead show. Graduate school will go the way of the dinosaurs. Or was that me, going the way of the dinosaurs? Mary is thinking about going into business for herself (she's a therapist), leaving the feminist collective (CIRCA) she has been involved with. Reagan is in the White House. She's thinking of becoming a citizen (she's a Scot - technically, a Brit). "I have a fear I'll be deported some day."

06.06.84 - a little more than 19 years ago - two receipts from the Brown County Sheriff's Office for a total of 388.50 in payment of bond for the NGB. My only excuse is that he hadn't hit me yet. I think I was trying to prove what a great old lady I was. I mean, I had a degree in intellectual history - magna cum laude, in fact - but I guess I needed some kind of reassurance that I was a success as a human being as well, and that perhaps I deserved being treated well. I wanted him to consider himself very lucky that he had me. I think he did. So much so that he didn't want me to leave the following year, and tried to beat my head into the ground. I seem to remember another time when I tried to throw a knife out the window. It hung up in the windowsill on the screen, but that action in itself broke up his impulse that had considered using it, so it wasn't an entirely useless action. I'm not trying to make any excuses for him (we were pretty drunk both of these times, and these incidents were not the usual thing in my relationships), but I did know and perhaps he suspected that I had picked him out of the crowd because he had a nice bike and he was single. And he was a nice guy most of the time. Nobody deserves getting their heads banged into the ground or threatened with a knife. It's also true that no one deserves to be bamboozled into falling in love with someone who is only trying to prove herself as a worthy human being, and who likes your bike.