When the Way Was Lost
By: Camille Cusumano
Tags: Childbirth, 1970s, Womens Day, Fiction, Midwife

When the Way Was Lost

A 1970s story about women with a bellyful of institutionalized motherhood

I wore heavy boots crushing metal, tossing glass and plastic, at a pioneer recycling facility in Golden Gate Park for a living in 1974. I was about to make a course correction and become another kind of earth protectorate. Like my two roommates, Julia and Sharon, I wanted something more than just the material world of our parents. Perhaps we had desire in common with the Zebra killer and Patty Hearst’s kidnappers, all still at large. By some uncanny turn of events those news items would enter stage left and right this evening.

News: On April 3, 1974, two months after she was abducted, Hearst announced on an audiotape that she had joined the Symbionese Liberation Army and taken the name “Tania.

While I was washing off newborn blood, Julia was riding in the back seat of a cop car, picked up as a suspect connected to the kidnapping. Unaware of her tribulations, I had left our flat in the dark hours of the morning and returned another person. The change in myself mirrored the change from city fog to Mendocino sun. A blast of defining aromas, the sage, grass, hay, and animals, and the hum of crickets and the penetrating silence of hills uninhabited for miles, embraced me. There were four of us women — three experienced midwives and me, their protégée. I had met them through an old woman, Hana, at La Leche League in Berkeley.

We arrived in Mendocino at a sprawling ranch by way of a dry dirt road. The sun was strong by ten a.m. We stopped to rest the overheating car. A jeep with four cowboys pulled up and they asked, “You ladies need help?” The air was crackling dry and sound carried like an electrical current. Three of the men had rifles pointed to the sky. One had his rifle on his lap pointed carelessly at my head where I sat on the tree stump. I drank in the scene: The hanging lips of the cowboys, the dirt ground under foot, dust flying in their faces. I thought how odd California was — so different from the face it presented to outsiders in those days. The cowboys looked scarier than they knew, but wanted nothing more than to satisfy their curiosity about us women. They said they were hunting wild boar somewhere in the surrounding forest, pushed their hats up and down and drove on to the kill. We drove on to the birth.

After we met at La Leche League in Berkeley, Hana had invited me to assist at a home delivery. I watched the woman’s vagina pulse, swell, tear, and blossom, more dilated than I imagined possible. The tiny blood-smudged head with its matted dark hair popped out slowly, a bundle of simmering pulses. As it turned into a baby human, warm and breathing the same air as I, I felt a presence in the room. Something no less forceful than a tidal wave washed over me. Something was being revealed. How can anyone who has experienced this, a newborn’s first heartbeat and first breath, not appreciate how precious and miraculous life is? The cutting of the umbilical cord, the bathing, the first tiny but powerful wail, and the mother-child bonding sealed my fate. I made up my mind a week later, with the ritual taste of the afterbirth served up with sweet shallots in my mouth. I had been headed for work in a burgeoning field, as an ecologist — but now Hana had taken me under her wing as an apprentice.

Hana was a self-described riches-to-rags Pacific Heights privileged woman, who had to escape to Mexico during the HUAC witch hunts. A card-carrying Communist through the fifties and sixties she lived in Valle de Bravo until 1969. Now mellow, repatriated, and living as a Buddhist, she was our role model.

The three of us, refugees from cold, dried up eastern burbopolises, escaping from too much restraint and discipline, gathered around her trying to plumb the secret to the mosaic of her life. To touch the Holy Grail of her free spirit. To find the trajectory that would make our lives’ arcs elegant and continuous as hers had been despite losses, maybe because of the right losses. Julia sought inspiration from her Marxist group on ways to revolutionize the system. But ultimately it was old women like Hana who inflamed us. She said to us, “I know you want some wisdom from me. I don’t know what to give you. Find your own one question and wait for the answer.”

The feminist movement adopted International Women’s Day (March 8) in 1967. The United Nations began celebrating the day in 1975.

The Stone Faith Ranch facilities were primitive and the commune wanted them that way. One house was open air on two sides, made of wooden boards. It had some glass windows, and was furnished with old handmade chairs. It had a crude floor. The wooden counter was spread with fresh turnips and carrots, dirt still clinging to roots. There was dark, organic honey. Spices, jams, teas.

We birthed Nellie’s baby in the Loom House, with its large weaving loom, no electricity, no lights. Its wood-burning stove roared and warmed water for tea and for bathing the newborn. Candles burned. I loved the baby-size waterbed that was ready for Nellie’s baby. Nellie’s water had broken that morning, even as we drove into the backcountry. Her labor was short. I, the initiate fully supported by the three midwives, had only to open my palms and let the baby come to them. All I had to do was be there amid the cooing and wooing and chanting to push, bear down, push, bear down. One midwife played a Tibetan bowl, another chanted om and Sanskrit verses. I knew from Hana it would not always be so smooth. I cut the umbilical cord and placed the infant on Nellie’s breast. Maya, Nellie called her. It was life giving and life changing.

The collective sat around a campfire eating corn on the cob, ambrosial fruit, bread, and cheese. Some played guitar, harmonica, and Jew’s harp. Others played bottle with knife, tambourine, spoons. Before we departed for the city, I took a mental snapshot of the sunflowers and marijuana plants bigger than Christmas trees, with purple mountains of majestic dusk with full silver moon in the background. It was all so precious. Life in its myriad forms. I wished I could have stayed amid that glow on their faces. But I had to return to my friends in the city. On the way out I saw that sign for Stone Faith. A hand-hewn board. When the way was lost, human kindness took over. I’ve since inverted it to When human kindness was lost, the way was lost.

At home in San Francisco, I wanted to wash away the blood. First thing. The dried splats stained my new T-shirt from Ms. Magazine, When God created Man she was only joking. I needed to immerse my whole body in the universal solvent. I turned on the hot faucet full force. The Tuolumne River was so low that year — the reservoirs it fed had chalky rings around their rims. Yellow’s mellow; brown goes down. Just three hot inches, maybe four, I started out. But soon I upped it to full submersion like an infant in amniotic fluid. I would recycle my bathwater over the purple passion and spider plants hanging in the living room.

With my femme fatale figure — from a long line of Facciamores — I looked more Greek goddess than Julia, who was a boyish waif. My hips filled the tub width and my thick flesh rode up the porcelain wall. My breasts bobbed like the Japanese glass floaters we found at Lost Coast beaches. My head reeled the way it did when I drank too much. I felt my own blood swishing through my veins. I was reluctant to wash First Blood of infant from my long hair.

“In the 1950s, nobody was allowed to say the word ‘pregnant’ on TV. . . Pregnant was . . . too strongly physical and too crudely sexual a word.” —Pregnancy and Power, Rickie Solinger

The sweet vibrations of the music that I had stacked on the turntable before getting in the tub wafted in. Midnight at the oasis. I’m sending my camel to bed. I sang over Maria Muldaur, whom I imagined had a fleshy body like mine. I had poured myself a mug of burgundy from the Cribari jug wine to sip as I soaked.

Mendocino, mind-altering Mendocino, I thought, seeing the water turning ashen gray. I drained some and refreshed. Holocausts, famines, and droughts. Malcolm. With him gone, all the doom-saying had drained out of my life. Gone, gone. I hadn’t cared to move any new “traffic” through our Victorian flat.

Unlike Julia, so gullible in her youth, I had never swallowed our Catholic propaganda. From first grade, I always thought of religion as a fairytale, “the hallucinogen of the masses,” as Julia now calls it. Prior to Hana, Malcolm was the first person to make me aware of a spiritual world that had little to do with religion. Karma. Chakras. Prana. Energy. Kundalini. I studied sun–moon yoga with him. He was younger, but those soliloquies of his were full of a new kind of wisdom. I was a sucker for secular prophets and anyone resembling them. Malcolm fascinated me with tales of Armageddon. Nostradamus. Places, people I never heard of back east in Podunk. He gave me Timothy Leary’s Starseed to read and my first and only acid, two tabs of clearlight (a. k. a., windowpane). He took me out every night to look for the comet Kahoutek. He was full of mysterious stories about the skies and heavens. He told me about black holes in space, and DNA, how it had traveled from another planet to Earth to live in this more hospitable environment — and one day would travel to another planet when we destroyed this one. He told me how the astronaut John Mitchell looked at Earth from the moon and said he knew there had to be more to life’s mysteries than what we expected, and he quit the space program to open a research center in Southern California. Malcolm told me how a holocaust was coming before 2000 and no more than three places, if any, would be spared. They were the highest mountains — the Alps, Andes, and Himalayas. Nowhere else. Hydrogen bombs would devastate all. To Malcolm, nothing of this civilization was worth saving, except the music.

I stayed too long with Malcolm because he made love tenderly, made me come like crazy, like I didn’t know I could, with his tongue. And because after each time I sent him away for his serious flaws, he came back with a puppy dog’s expression, so vulnerable. And more so-called wisdom.

I barely noticed that the doorbell had been ringing for maybe ten minutes. I thought Sharon was home in her bedroom and would get it. And Julia should have been home by then. We all had plans to go out to a fern bar and, who knew, maybe bring home some prospects.

It was too bad I couldn’t have kept Malcolm’s baby. I had no regrets. I learned my lesson and would not make a mistake again. Just as I did not wonder about the first would-be child, Lennie’s, back in high school. I put it out of my mind. I cried alone at first for that one, not understanding. I just wanted it all to go away, to be unreal, a dream. To take back my screwing of Lennie Schatz in his room that afternoon when his parents were gone. Take back the month at home with my mother, agonizingly deferring to me, my father gone off to rest in the Veterans’ hospital. The waiting, the sewing of clothes, the sickness. The abortion, a new word in my vocabulary. The abortion parlor, with its plush royal blue carpet. The anger at Lennie, not for forcing me to screw — I was the one who had wanted to explore — but for not being worth it. For not being like James Dean in Rebel without a Cause, or Gary Cooper in High Noon, or Marlon Brando in Streetcar. Not being like Malcolm. Lennie was gentle, then suddenly hard, then crazed, then done and silent and still as ice, all in a matter of minutes.

I wished I could call my mother and talk about everything, from delivering babies to the men I had screwed that first year in San Francisco. But my mother was part of that overly civilized set. Like Sharon and Julia, I was a daughter of discipline and restraint, the very things of which we wanted so much for Hana to dictate how to unburden ourselves. Perhaps we were going about it scattershot.

Someone was hell-bent on leaning on the bell, going on twenty minutes. Maybe Sharon or Julia forgot their keys. I wrapped towels around my hair and my middle and headed down the hall, the bell sounding nervous, twitchy, and anxious.

It was Francis, the guy from the top floor in of our Vic. He always wore a black cape and a felt cap. When he took off the cap, he looked weak and ailing. But as he stood there he looked like a French Zorro — handsome, thin mustachioed, tall, baby blue eyes, soft white skin.

“Hello, Francis.”

“Can I talk to you a bit?”

My maternal instinct was still aflame from the afternoon, and before I could say after my bath, he stepped in and whisked me down the hall to the parlor to have a short conversation. Which was all it should have been. Which it wasn’t.

He sat at one end of the sofa facing me and began, “Laura, my lady, when someone does something destructive to my head, I can’t function. I walk around for days, gloomy.”

I gave a tug to tighten my towel wrap and waited. After what I had done that day, I could help him, be human kindness to anyone. I am a midwife. Francis proceeded to tell a long story of how a week ago I had led him and then zap! Just fled. He was stoned and sensitive.

“Now, when you lead me to believe you want to ball me and then turn off, it fucks up my head.”

Deep into the feeling of accomplishment and otherworldliness, I was speechless. I listened. Francis explained how he knew what I wanted to do last Monday night just by looking in my eyes, and even if I didn’t want to admit to it, his gifted sense never failed.

Was Zorro this righteous? Francis mistook my equanimity for sincere interest. Francis, crazy as a loon, as the song goes, and sad as a gypsy serenading the moon. What was it with the men who were drawn to San Francisco? Continental tilt’s what you got there in California is what Uncle Joe had said. He expected me to laugh. Everything loose slides to California. He might have been right. But I wouldn’t give him or any of my dead-end relatives back east the satisfaction.

“You mind if I finish my bath, Francis? You sit here, relax, I’m going to finish. OK?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“You mind if I put some music on?”

“Nah.”

I stacked three albums, wondering whose madness was more threatening, Malcolm’s or Francis’, and slipped away quietly. Francis focused on his banana-flavored papers, trying not to get too many of those explosive seeds. Doomed to immortality, I thought, no matter what, the femme fatale.

Before I could get back in the tub the doorbell rang again, this time even more desperately than before. I glanced wistfully at my bathwater, a cold brew. Still decked in towel and turban, I took my time down the long hall to the door. Whoever it was, was leaning on the bell like another madman.

I opened the door to see a man and woman I did not know standing in the dark. The woman was trembling.

“Please,” she said with an urgency that I had not heard since I lived with Psycho-Nora, the bad-seed roommate. “We’re so sorry to bother you but a man, a black man, driving a black Cadillac parked and got out and was walking toward us. Can we come in just until the coast is clear? Please?” The woman was shaking with fear. I pulled her in. I knew instantly they were afraid the black man was the Zebra killer. Everyone was on edge.

“Come on back into the living room,” I said. “And join the party.”

“Party?” said the man calmly. “Oh, so sorry.”

“Thank you, thank you,” said the woman. They were only halfway down the corridor when the doorbell rang again.

“What the fu…?” I turned to open the door.

“You… should look before you open,” said the shrill woman.

As I opened the door, the woman saw the black man staring in, and before anyone could say a word, she sputtered, “Oh, my God!” she looked weak and as her knees buckled she spoke something in a coarse whisper that sounded like We believe in black power! Her boyfriend dragged her back onto the coral sofa in the living room where Francis sat stoned.

I looked with astonishment at the visitor. “Hey, Al. Come on in.”

He took off his bowler hat. Even though men in his family did not remove hats indoors, he knew that the white folks did.

“C’mon back, Al. We’re having an impromptu party.”

“Listen, um, Laura. Julia…” he began.

“She’ll be home soon. She’s late. Probably got waylaid at some happy hour.”

Al was about to speak again when we heard a key in the door. It opened and there stood Julia. Her face was blank, mute, and ashen. Like my bathwater.

“Julia?”

She thrust her wrists out in front of her to expose her injuries. As if that explained all.

“Look, they’re going to be purple tomorrow.” Her forearms were red and bruised. “You won’t believe the day I’ve had.”

I was starting to get chilly. “Well, come on back, pour yourself some wine, and you can tell me — and the rest of the crew. Looks like we’re having one hell of a happy hour here tonight.”

Julia was shaken up. Al saw her and nearly cried.

“Julia, they let you out already? Sweet Jesus.”

“Yeah, case of mistaken identity, but took them hours to figure it out.” She and Al explained how they were standing on Haight Street when the flashing cop car stopped and they both assumed Al was their target even as he had tried to think, What now did I do. Instead two fat cops without warning, brutally whisked off Julia, conversing with each other about the lunch they would have at Little Joe’s in North Beach.

Julia took in my garb as the key turned in the door again and our third roommate, Sharon, walked in.

“Why are you dressed like we’re on some tropical isle?” she asked.

“You won’t believe the day I had.” We all shuffled to the back room to trade dreadful and delightful news. Sharon had been passed over in favor of a less-qualified man that day for a travel editor job, as would be Julia a month later for a photo editor position.

As for Julia’s chilling hours in a windowless cell, we never knew for sure but we gathered that the G-men who sat in their cars around the Haight had seen Julia attending meetings on Page Street with the Marxist-Leninist reading group. Julia had just left the group after she was told that she might have to disown her family. Greeks, like my Italian clan, can fight like the Furies, throw punches, verbal hatchets, nasty names, and more. But no one tells them to forsake blood.

“Never until this very historical moment have women rebelled as many are now doing against the very way we institutionalize motherhood,” — feminist Jesse Bernard, 1974.

I never knew what became of Stone Faith Ranch. Julia, Sharon, and I disillusioned with work and love headed south of the border for many months, thinking ourselves bold to imagine getting pregnant by Latin lovers. Deliberate single motherhood was bordering on bold in 1974. Unlike our guiding goddess, old Hana, we had no big fights on the home front at which to direct our raging hormones. War was winding down. Civil rights were (ostensibly, deceptively) won. The threat of nuclear holocaust was offshore. (In a few years there would be a president in favor of nuclear arms reduction.) The Cold War was becoming a distant breeze. Sex was (ostensibly, deceptively) safe and free. Women had the pill, ready access to free or cheap abortion, carte blanche control over reproduction. The word pregnant could, after years of censorship, be said on TV.

Not one of us knew how briefly this window would be open.