In August, 1974, eight women crowded around a wooden picnic table in a log cabin in a remote area of the Adirondacks while one of them negotiated with the voice on the other end. For some time, Malia had talked about creating a permanent retreat for women in the area. She and Diane, along with some other women who were interested in participating, had looked at a couple of properties.
During my second week at the women’s retreat, I joined the group going to the small town of Athol, NY, outside of Warrensburg, to look at a failed business, Moose Mountain Lodge. The owner had purchased the lodge as a project for her son, but he hadn’t been able to make it work as a traditional mountain resort. The property consisted of a main house with a large dining room, a kitchen, a living room, and a two room apartment on the second floor. The annex had four rooms on the first floor along a screened porch and three rooms upstairs. There was also a large barn finished, complete with moose’s head, as a bar and four or five cabins separate from the main house, each with a bathroom. Two of the cabins were fairly large with two rooms and a series of bunk beds, one was tiny, and one had space on two sides, each with its own porch. All of this was set on twenty-three acres of land, some of it on the other side of the dirt road where the swimming area was.
Malia wanted me to commit to joining the group, but I was hesitant. I’d just gotten out of a marriage and wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I wasn’t even sure who I was. I knew the women who would make up the collective, as it was called – Malia, Diane, Wendy, Elizabeth, and Marta. Eventually, I agreed to join. Life at Yale and New Haven seemed very far away as those August days passed.
Our prime negotiator was Wendy’s friend Ruth. I was never clear on exactly what her credentials were, but Malia viewed her as a savvy businesswoman. The phone conversation went on for a long time as Elsie, the owner, pressed for more considerations given that as a group we didn’t have credit or a history of running a business.
Malia was divorced with two girls and had recently graduated from Duchess County Community College. Diane, single, had plenty of work experience, but nothing in the area of business management. Wendy was still married but sort of separated, had two children, and had managed her house and children. Elizabeth was single and I think had a college degree. I still don’t know much about her. Marta was divorced with three children, was active in the Brunswick, NJ, women’s political scene.
I had a college degree and worked at Yale in the Publications Office, not very good qualifications for running a business. Personally, I thought Malia was impressed with my connection to Yale and thought I was smarter and more capable than I thought I was.
Malia also wanted Sara to join the group. She was more than a little hesitant. She was married and had an 18 month old daughter. I know, I know. What was I thinking? I wasn’t. I officially ended things with Wendy and was completely taken with Sara who also liked me and wanted to be with me. It was a big change from my experience with Wendy. Sara agreed to join us, but was not committed to living there full time. Unlike Ruth, however, she was considered a member of the collective.
The deal we finally struck with Elsie certainly favored her, but it’s hard to place blame. We would pay her an amount each month which would go toward an agreed upon purchase price. If we missed two consecutive months of payment, we would forfeit everything. We could never have equity; Elsie would maintain that. And yet, as we sat around the table listening to Ruth go back and forth with Elsie, we thought it was an incredible opportunity.
Oddly enough, I don’t remember much about moving day. I had picked out my room – second floor of the annex, the room at the end. Sara took the room next to mine which had bunk beds in it. The night we moved in, she and I sat on the sofa in the living room talking while the activity buzzed around us. Malia, passing by, stopped and asked me if I couldn’t make Sara, scheduled to return to her home outside Poughkeepsie, stay. This memory is clear as a bell.
I looked at Sara, half smiled and took her hand. “I can’t make her do anything she doesn’t want to do,” I told Malia. I wasn’t happy that she was leaving, although said she’d be back in about a week with her daughter. I remembered how my husband and I had talked the entire night when I told him I was leaving the marriage. It was one of the most horrible nights of my life. He cried, I cried, but I never budged about leaving. I didn’t know what kind of relationship Sara had with her husband and if she was strong enough to withstand the tsunami of guilt I’d experienced.
She did return that time, but there were numerous trips back to her husband over the first few months. Every time I felt my heart contract with fear and pain as she drove off. I didn’t think I had the right to tell her what to do, because that was what the women’s movement was about. We wanted women to be free to make their own choices, to be themselves whatever that was.
Malia told me she didn’t know how I could let her go, and I didn’t understand why she thought I was letting Sara leave. I cared about her, but she wasn’t mine. I had no claim on her. Her husband certainly had more of a claim than I did. The first time she came back she told me she had slept with him, and I was devastated. It wasn’t my place to be hurt or angry, but I was.
There were so many crazy things that happened during that first year in the Adirondacks that Malia once told me she’d make me sorry if I ever wrote about them. I believed her then and am a little worried now. I shall call the place Athol Women’s Retreat in the hope that will suffice to protect me from her delayed wrath.
Those first weeks, however, I looked at the other six women I’d be spending the winter with and dubbed us the Magnificent Seven. There were also eight children. I just call them the eight children. Regardless of what came after, it took great courage to abandon the safety of what we knew to adopt a lifestyle that was not accepted very many places, certainly not in rural New York in 1974. We broke new ground by the choices we made, and each of us paid a heavy price. I know we affected the lives of the many, many women who found shelter with us, some running from abusive husbands, others afraid of being lesbians, and a few looking for a reason to live. Some, of course, just wanted to have fun, and we provided that, too.
©2009 jgschenck
No comments:
Post a Comment