Sutterwriters

LINNE GRAVESTOCK Linne Gravestock was born in Bell, California and at 5 was sent to live with relatives on a pig farm in New Mexico. At 9 she was given back to her birth mother and stepfather and planned her escape. At 17 she did escape to Berkeley and was never the same after being tear-gassed at her own wedding. She has lived in Canada and Mexico and is now working on family stories and tracking down her elusive Cherokee and Choctaw ancestors. She doesn't remember when she wasn't going to be a writer.

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Edward

I had a friend named Edward. I don't know why, of all of them, that he and I became friends. Maybe it was our love of roaming in the woods, the enjoyment of turning over small rocks or rooting through the leaves. He was usually quiet, but when I discovered something beneath a log and would squeal at the joy of discovery, he would look up from his meanderings and look at what I'd found, and I knew that he was glad for me. We went for a lot of walks together.

He was the only pig on the farm who let me hold onto his tail to pull me up the mountain behind our house. He was bent on getting up to the top, not in stopping to argue with me to let go.

He would find acorns and chew them open-mouthed, flecks of foam and specks of dirt smearing his snout. I sat on a log near him and ate my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He wasn't one to call me on my table manners, so I joined him in chewing with my mouth open, enjoying being pigs together.

He wasn't at all like Suzie Belle, she of the enormous heft and girth who would run me out of the barn or the pigpen to nail me against a fence post. Suzie Belle had a hell of a temper, but she was a four-star employee, producing 16 piglets at once.

Edward, in contrast, was gentle and slightly distracted as he foraged and meandered, living like Ferdinand the Bull, smelling the flowers beneath the trees.

But came the day when practicality demanded its due, and Teddy placed the rifle between Edward's eyes and pulled the trigger. I ran screaming back to the house, hid behind the wood stove and spent the day crying.

Edward was partitioned into pieces small enough to pack into coffee cans, where his remains were placed in a neat row beside the house, under the eaves, preserved in the high winter snow. Teddy would go outside to fetch another coffee can, and Fancy would fry up the bacon on the old wood stove. To their credit, they never teased me about my affection for him nor tried to convince me that the taste of bacon was better than loyalty to an old friend.

100

On the book of my body lies the dust of a hundred lovers. I lost count at a hundred, couldn't remember them all. I want to be the one who stands up and shouts, Yes! A hundred! Because one woman somewhere, at some time, has to say it, has to brave the thoughts of scorn that she knows are all around her.

And yet, who will speak for the lost woman, the lost woman-child? How I wish someone, some wise old woman, had taken me aside during those years and asked me in loving tones, "Honey, what are you doing? Why so many? What are you trying to find?"

I would have told her the answers that came easily to mind: Everyone does it. After all, this is Berkeley in the '60s, after the pill and before AIDS. Berkeley is one big bedroom. Instead of trying out for soccer or singing, we took up an evening sport.

It was an amazing thing for me to have such power, to have any power at all. I evolved from one who was so shy that I was tongue-tied with terror, unable to say my own name in a small seminar, to one who eventually could go into a room, scout the territory and with one knowing look say silently, "You!" and know I had him.

I was looking for the man who could challenge me back, who could enjoy that power with me.

Sometimes I was looking for a distraction from the boredom of the endless declensions of German verbs.

Many times I was looking to please. Those were often the men who I felt had more facets to them, and I wanted to get sex out of the way so we could talk.

And didn't my stepfather tell me, "Every man is out to make you!" I knew that he meant it as a caution, a warning to watch out for (as he called them) "sharp operators." But I threw down the gauntlet to this super-possessive child molester and went out and mowed down any man standing before me. Only two of them ever turned me down. I wanted to call my stepfather and tell him, "You were wrong. There are some exceptions."

There was no discussion, in those days, of boundaries. It took me a long time to understand what that meant. I'd been relentlessly trained not to have any. My mother was sternly unambiguous, telling me, "You'll do what I want you to do, and you'll say what I want you to say." She saw me as a thing, and an inconvenient thing at that. I was a useless piece of furniture unless she wanted to see a shine in someone's eye by bragging about how well I did at school. My stepfather probably married her to gain access to me. How would I have learned boundaries from them?

Was it any wonder that my mind and body were going to stage a revolution?

When I went to Berkeley, I was out of jail. "Act as if we're always with you, always looking at you," they told me in parting. "Screw you," I thought. I wanted to do everything I'd never done, walk on new soil and fly circles in the sky.

I wanted to run through Berkeley's large libraries and gather huge baskets of books, reading everything that had been forbidden to me. In the library where students went to read for pleasure in overstuffed chairs, making selections from the latest novels, I saw some large calligraphed letters circling a support pole. The letters made their way in a spiral up and around the pole, no space and no punctuation between them. "The penis mightier than the sword," I read. When I later came back and saw it again, I was glad that I hadn't read it out loud as it really read, of course, "The pen is mightier than the sword." But with my background, how else would I have read it?

I've Never Been Old Before

I've never been old before. This frozen shoulder has thawed out all the denial that I've been storing up for 30 years.

Who could say I was old-with my playful, buoyant outlook? And we know that all bodies are different-some big, some chunky, some small and thin. But there's no one I've known since earliest childhood who would help me carry the memory that I was called "Skinny Linnie" in high school. Now I look like a prehistoric fertility symbol. Or grey hair. I could always minimize the importance of that. I had grey hair when my fine baby hair left, and my brown hair came in with a grey stripe in the front.

Someone said that one's children are time machines, measuring the quick passage of life. But I never had children, so what measures the passage of my life?

This sore shoulder has forced me to spend a lot of time exercising it with ropes and pulleys and big rubber bands, and now with one-pound soup cans.

I signed up for Social Security this week; a perky 12-year-old filled out my papers. I feel lucky to have had a grandmother who took me with her when she went on dates, ballroom dancing. And I was lucky to have the sight of her running up a mountainside faster than anyone I ever knew.

But I remember when her hair grew white, but was still thick and plush, that she was dismayed. "Mah hayer," she said, "is jus' laik wahr. Ah caint do nuthin' with it."

I wonder if my hair will become just like "wahr," or whether I'll have been who I am long enough to have a sense of humor about it.