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D R A M A++Q U E E N

Did your best friend steal your boyfriend? Send your tale to Drama Queen for a Day

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T A B L E++T A L K

A frustrated non-parent asks: Do parents deserve special treatment? Join the debate in Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Are you a crystal vase?
By Joyce Millman
If you can answer these 20 questions, you've watched way too much of the Olympics
(02/18/98)

Addicted to day care
By Phaedra Hise
If it takes a village and you don't have one, a good child-care provider may be just what you need
(02/17/98)

Losing it
By Lori Liebowich
No lover but the first will ever know me as both a child and a woman
(02/13/98)

A Few Good Men
By Dawn MacKeen
Banking on poor women
(02/12/98)

Time for One Thing
By Beth Wolfensberger Singer
The jigsaw puzzle as marital aid
(02/11/98)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

THE WILDERNESS | PAGE 2 OF 2

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Women are tribal people; throughout history, women have lived and worked together. Now we are dispersed one from the other like seeds blown apart and carried on the wind. I listen to the disembodied voices of my friends more than I see their faces -- messages, written in the sand hours and days before, or broken by the clicks of call waiting and the tinny voices of children -- "Honey, I'm on the phone," like a ritual chant to punctuate the exchange.

This is how I see my friends: Carol and I exchange phone messages for a month, make two dates, each of which falls through, and finally spend an evening together. Kristi and I meet for dinner, arriving separately from two different parts of the city, splitting up at the restaurant door to go our solitary ways. Megan and I share popcorn in the dim receptivity of a movie theater once or twice a month. Anita and I go for a walk together every four or five months. Laura and I meet at a beach hotel 2,000 miles away, spend a few days together looking for good sushi, then fly away again.

I used to believe that my friends who lived in committed relationships with women had a different -- and qualitatively deeper -- experience of that kind of intimacy than I did. Some of my friends live with women, some with men, some alone, and the tales are all the same. I believe now that the nuclear unit, the couple in its own bounded territory, is a part of what keeps us locked apart. Not family, but nuclear families, and everything in the tide of culture that says we must attach, make love, share money and houses, support each other's daily lives and raise children in couples -- and if we can't do these things by twos, we must do them alone.

This belief means we separate: by ones and twos, into houses and apartments and lives, with duplicated floor plans and tool boxes and pantries, duplicated chores and lists and troubles. Duplicated cubicles and deadlines and cars. Duplicated, intersecting, nonintersecting sets of paperwork and messages and dreams. Days and weeks go by very quickly. Details pile up. The world batters at the door, with a mad rush of reducing time, driving us on into the vanishing point of data, through our own confused hopes and silent, guilty wishes. It drives us on, and apart.

And I am not complaining. It is awfully easy to start complaining, but Donna and I are among the luckiest people on earth. That's why we're so busy, so separated. In this twisted, nanosecond-driven world, it is a privilege to be cloven into pieces and overrun by possibility. Too many choices, too many people, opportunities, suggestions and doorways. Not having enough time to do what needs to be done is not a new experience for women. Being able to do all kinds of things, go almost anywhere, live almost anywhere, is. It is supposed to be a piece of luck.

So as I mull my own options, gently grieving lives unled and looking sideways at the ones I could still choose, I nurture a conceit. One thing I grieve for and expect to grieve for in the time to come is this distance between women in my life. So I cultivate the image of the plains. We are pioneer women and the city is a windy plain, a dust bowl hard to cross -- daunting, sometimes dangerous. Today, standing on the porch, watching the rain come down, I know I have errands still to run, I must pick up a child across town, I have a deadline, I am looking forward to supper with a friend I haven't seen since Christmas. How many women have stood alone on the porches of their homes over the years, wondering at their choices while the sun went down and supper waited to be fixed? How often were they lonesome, just as we often are, wishing for a cup of tea with a long-lost friend?

Like all people who live far from each other, women now come together only now and then -- usually at ritual events planned in advance, requiring careful arrangements and precious time away from the work of the day. We come to each other, in our wagons through the wild places, like I did to see Donna -- dashing here and there from traffic light to parking place, school to bank to office. For an hour we talked about our fragmented lives, our puzzle of who and what and where and why, and I kept glancing at the clock, aware of all there was yet to do.
SALON | Feb. 19, 1998