Susan

What first drew me to Susan was the obvious. She was beautiful. Soon enough I met her and learned she was also smart, literate and we shared interests. That first meeting took place on a warm spring day in the Indiana University campus, where we both graduate students. We were a small group sitting around with guitars and doing folk songs (hey, it was 1965 and Dylan had not even gone electric yet). The operative word here is “sitting.”

Susan, though born and raised in the Midwest, had done some traveling, and she knew foreign guys who looked like me were not, well, very tall. She liked me well enough but she was not about to date a guy she towered over. It was only a day or two after when we ran into each other on our way to and from classes that she saw I was taller than her. We started dating.

Dylan did go electric and we both shared an enthusiasm for his new music: it was the soundtrack to our courtship. That summer we got married.

Our ethnic differences had, to be pedantic and quote T.S.Eliot, an “objective correlative.” Neither of us cared much about race or nationality. What we were passionate about was literature. She was an English lit major. I was a Spanish lit major. She was ga-ga about Joyce and Faulkner. I loved the Spanish classics. We had a good-natured running argument. “How can you care about literature and you've never read Huckleberry Finn?”, she said. “You've never read Don Quixote”, I replied. And so we went, round and round. Had I not been such a stubborn ass and picked up Huckleberry Finn then, instead of a lifetime later, I could have won the argument, saying, “Mark Twain himself quotes Cervantes.” Now I can say it “I won, nah-nah-nah-nah/nah-nah.”

The times they were a-changing in many ways. Like many of my fellow grad students I immersed myself in the politics of change. Susan came about it in a curious way: maternity.

When she first learned she was pregnant she went to a local doctor. They guy was more than old school, the kind that looked as childbirth as surgery. He was a racist (from the comments Susan heard him make) and dismissive of women (the word “sexist” was not common yet). Susan was incensed. She educated herself on natural childbirth – something this doctor would not contemplate – and came here to Columbus to find a doctor who was sympathetic to her needs. She took Lamaze classes. She decided on breast feeding, an oddity at the time. And her experience with her first doctor’s male chauvinism left a mark.

It was only a few years later that she discovered the new feminism, in Spain of all places. We were living in Madrid, where I was in charge of a group of students as part of my first teaching job. One of our teachers, a very sophisticated woman who was totally fluent in English, lent her a copy of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. The fuse was lit.

When we came back to the States, the women’s liberation movement was taking off. Susan organized the first consciousness raising group in Middletown, CT, home of Wesleyan University, where I taught. Politely, I left my house for the evening to let the women do their thing.

It was a heady time. The counterculture, which we had first experienced on the IU campus in the late 60s, was in full bloom. We started a day care coop, we hung out with smart young people and talked incessantly about gender roles, radical education, communal living. We even lived one summer in something we called a commune, though in retrospect it was more of a party punctuated by stormy outbursts. And in the space of a couple of years practically every couple we knew, ourselves included, separated and eventually divorced.

In the midst of all this chaos, we did our best to be good parents. I'll let them say if we succeeded. Susan moved back to Indiana with our children and channeled her feminism into her work as a book editor. And she raised our children. Splendidly. Though we were no longer a couple, we never stopped being parents. And though we were no longer close, we remained friendly and goodnatured with each other.

Anyone who knows me knows I'm a sucker for wit. Yes, I was first attracted to Susan’s beauty, but right away I was attracted to her wit (and she to the fact that I was not a midget). I never tire of quoting her.

One night at a dinner party in our house (though dinner party is too formal a word for the raucous feast of earthy food and cheap wine and other condiments that always wound up with everyone dancing), that evening a psychology professor whose wife was a member of Susan’s women’s group responded to something Susan said apropos of women’s issues with the Freudian cliché “penis envy.” Without losing a beat, Susan quipped, “some penises I envy, some I don't.”

Everyone laughed their heads off and I, silently, told myself, “that's my girl.”