The Liberationist and the T-Girl

by Dawn Dewinter

  

The story is set in 1969 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a hotbed of feminism. At a student party a male sophomore makes the mistake of calling womyn "girls". A women?s liberationist then frees him from his existing life as a privileged male. The meaning of liberation for one American T-Girl becomes clear over the three decades covered by the story.

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So you think it's tough being an American male in the 21st century? Well, friend -- can I call you friend? -- it was much harder to be a guy in the early Nixon years when feminism was raging like a her-ricane, tossing around gender roles like roof shingles and eroding ancient sexual divides like so much beach sand. The young folks of today have no idea what it was like to be a guy at feminism's high tide. Can you believe it? -- a man even needed to know the words to "I am Woman, I am Strong" to get a date.

Most of all, a man had to be super-cautious about the words he used around womyn. The slightest verbal misstep could mire a guy in the sty of male chauvinist pig-dom. When the "oink oinks" started, his fate was sealed -- he'd be spending the night alone with Playboy and Miss September. As naive as I was (okay, I might as well admit it -- I was still a virgin at the end of my freshman year at Thoreau College), I knew there was one unforgivable sin in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the summer of 1969 -- and that was to call any female older than eight "a girl".

Incredibly I made that very mistake at a student party just four blocks from Harvard Square. It was 100 degrees that day, and my host didn't own an air conditioner. So we were all sweltering, which is my only possible excuse for drinking so much Miller beer that I got polluted enough to whisper to my good bud Greg, in a voice loud enough to be heard across the room, that "this party sure has a lot of pretty girls."

There was hell to pay for that remark. I know. I know. Some of you are less than sympathetic. Maybe you're feminists yourselves or you don't have much respect for anyone dense enough to call a Cambridge "woman" a girl in the summer of 1969. You may not even sympathize with me when I tell you that I go SO drunk at that very same party that I also confessed to a panty fetish. You may be thinking -- "Big deal! I've done a lot more revealing of myself than that when I've gotten high."

Maybe you once pulled down the pants of your pin-striped suit to model your rhumba panties at the office Christmas party. Or maybe you smoked so much weed when you were a teenager that you blissfully showed off your collection of spiked high-heeled shoes to your father. Or you shame-facedly confessed to your wife that you've been cheating on her with a leather-clad, whip-wielding dominatrix. Let's face it: some of you may even have got so drunk on a bottle of cheap wine at boy scout camp that you ended up being gangbanged in your teddy.

When you think of all the things that people do and say when they get shit-faced, and when you consider how aroused my friend Steve's dog gets whenever Steve drinks to excess, my two little mistakes -- first, the slip of the tongue that got Erika interested in "curing me of my male chauvinism" and then my little confession -- that I sometimes wore my sister's panties to masturbate when I was a kid -- shouldn't have gotten me into real trouble. And there wouldn't have been real trouble had Erika been at all normal. But she was far from normal, for the year was 1969 and Erika was a liberationist.

You may not know what a liberationist is, because most of them have morphed into Republicans, but take it from me, if you ever meet one of this dying breed, you had better run away from her as fast as your Nikes can take you. Otherwise, she will try to liberate you.

Be warned: liberationists can appear without warning. They?re like pod people. At first they seem normal. Sure, they may be liberals or feminists or gays, but they?re not evangelical about their calling. If they're women, they don?t picket beauty contests; if they're gays, they don't denounce marriage as "bourgeois"; and if they're T-girls, they don't burn their bras.

But there comes a star-crossed night -- possibly a transit of Venus or an eclipse of the Moon -- and one of your friends attends a consciousness-raising meeting. From it she (or he, for some liberationists are male) emerges, possessed by an alien mind. She has become a body-snatcher who seeks to transform everyone she encounters into a liberationist so that they too may be assimilated into the Borg.

Now, don't get me wrong. I believe in equal rights for all. Everyone has a contribution to make. Wouldn't it take forever to get an appointment with a hairstylist if there were no gay males? Would we have anywhere near enough long-distance truckers if lesbians didn't exist? And what would we do without women, bless them? Aren't they wonderfully decorative?

Let me now tell you about Erika's impact on my life so you'll know enough to flee for your life -- or at least, to shield your gonads -- if you too encounter a liberationist. When I met Erika for the first time at that fateful party, Cambridge was the epicenter of the counterculture, as the San Francisco scene had migrated eastward to the banks of the Charles. One could get high on pot just strolling, nostrils-flared, through Harvard Square, and on Sunday afternoons the Cambridge Common had the wildest rock n'roll scene in America as women in peasant garb and men in saffron robes frenetically danced for peace and love around the garbage-strewn memorial for the Civil War dead.

During my first year at Thoreau College, I became infected with the spirit of the age: my hair had grown longer until it covered my ears, and I had developed an unquenchable thirst for Miller High Life, the champagne of beers, and had foresworn all female companionship for evenings with Mary Jane, the aromatic love of my life. Despite being wrecked most of the time, I passed enough of my courses to be looking forward to a second year of imbibing and inhaling at the blues clubs of Somerville and Cambridge. In the meantime, 1969 being Boston's summer of love, I decided it was time to lose my virginity.

Naturally, I became totally promiscuous when it came to accepting party invitations. "Will there be any women?" I'd ask. And if the answer was yes, I'd go almost anywhere. Heck, I even went to parties in suburbs so far out that they were literally beyond the pale -- that is, outside the Route 128 ring road. But there was one place I avoided: Cambridge. I figured I'd be wasting my time at a Cambridge party because its girls would soon discover that I was attending a college on the wrong side of the Charles River and they'd accuse me of being an interloper.

But it was August and my summer project -- to get laid -- was going nowhere. Do you realize how humiliating it was to be a virgin in the summer of 1969 when every woman in Massachusetts was, it was rumored, hunting for her first orgasm? With the shadows lengthening and the leaves crinkling, I finally got desperate enough to go to a Cambridge party.

I was nervous, out of my element, and worried that I might accidentally hit on one of the guys, for some of them had longer hair and flashier clothes than the women. So I drank, and I drank, until I was so drunk that I made a fool of myself. Foolishly, I called the womyn of Cambridge ..."girls".

One of the "girls," Erika, introduced herself by jumping down my throat: "How dare you call us girls! You obviously do not respect women. If you did, you wouldn't be treating us like children. Words wound. Your heedless words deny me equality, a fair chance in life. I'm an adult woman, no more a girl than you are a boy. What do you have to say for yourself, boy?"

Five women crowded me awaiting my reply. The beefiest of them, I noted, was fingering the hammer in her white painter pants. Another was purple with rage.

At first, humiliation choked off my voice. I had been found out: My mission to blend into a Cambridge party had failed abysmally; I was exposed as a foul-mouthed hick. Worse, cruel Erika had been right to call me a "boy" for I was, at age nineteen, almost hairless. I hadn't a single hair on my chest or under my armpits, and only a scattered few at my crotch. I had more on my legs but they were so blond and wispy that I looked perpetually waxed. As for my beard, I did shave it once a week but only to keep the batteries in my Remington razor charged.

My torso was equally immature: I still had the height and musculature of a fifteen-year-old boy. Indeed, the only definition on my chest came from a lingering case of gynecomastia. My hormones had gotten out of kilter during early adolescence, leaving me (like many teenaged boys) with some unwanted breast tissue. Although my chest looked more flabby than feminine, I definitely hoped that the doctor was right when he said that my "breasts" would likely disappear the moment my beard appeared. In the meantime, I was taking testosterone to "butch" up my appearance.

So there I was -- easily the youngest-looking guy in the room -- and Erika was calling me a "boy". I could have died. When I finally found my voice, my words came out all wrong. I reckon my vocal chords were tight with tension, for I was squeaking like a Disney mouse. The women giggled.

After securing twenty minutes of abject apologies from me, four of the women headed back to the neutral corners of the room, leaving me to spar with Erika. I was still retreating before the intensity of her attack, my masculinity on the ropes.

To appease her, I desperately tried to convince her that I wasn't irredeemably macho. I even told her that I cherished my "feminine" side. It was an untruth, a lie, a whopper, probably the biggest b.s. that I've ever piled onto someone. Short, slight, and hairless, I despised the feminine hormones that had messed up my body. The only thing I cherished was my flat, bony ass, because it was my most masculine feature. For as long as I could remember nothing turned me on as much as the look of my own butt in tight, bikini underwear.

As I searched my memory for something to say about my "feminine" side, my right hand began to idly stroke my right buttocks, and suddenly I recalled the summer of my thirteenth year -- the summer that I discovered that my butt looked sexy while clothed in my sister's panties, especially her high-cut nylon panties. She had gone to camp, leaving her finest frillies at home, and once I had mastered the washer and dryer, I realized that I could mess up her panties at will -- by wearing them, perfumed, on my head; by using them like a towel to rub my penis, and by feeling up my panty-clad ass while I masturbated.

I even went outdoors in my sister's panties, fingering the lace under my shorts as I walked. However, the expeditions ceased when my mother noticed that I hadn't thrown any underwear into the clothes' hamper in more than a week; she accused me of being a filthy pig who never changed his underpants.

From then on -- for the remaining seven weeks of my sister's adventure at camp -- I always changed into my jockeys to go outside. For the rest of that summer I mainly played indoors, usually with my privates. When my sister returned, she took less than a week to notice that her favorite panties -- pink satin, with white lace trim and bows -- had briefly gone missing, and my panty-raiding ended at her insistence.

What did my sister make of my fetish? Not much, she figured my fascination with girls' underwear was a normal stage of turning into a "disgusting boy" -- like using a lingerie catalog to masturbate.

Since I hadn't worn panties in six years -- a third of my lifetime -- I figured it was safe to tell this story to Erika, as proof that I wasn?t afraid of my feminine side. If I were, I would not have worn panties for an entire summer. "Of course," I assured her, "these days I wear white cotton briefs, like all the regular guys."

"What's feminine about wearing satin panties?" Erika unexpectedly challenged. I was too shocked to answer, so she continued: "No Cambridge woman would be caught dead in satin. We wear sensible cotton. Satin and silk? They're for male panty fetishists. When I'm shopping for Christmas, I see the guys from the suburbs descend on the lingerie department. They always pick out something in satin and lace -- something they wished they could wear themselves -- and pretend their wives really want to dress like a French whore. It's the guys who want to dress like tarts. You're just being more honest than most of them by admitting to being a pantywaist. Don't raise your eyebrows at me! You know I'm right."

I had no idea whether she was right because I'd never met a guy who admitted to a panty fetish. Of course, Erika was the only one to whom I?ve ever confessed mine. I hadn't impressed her at all. Desperate to score some points for my "feminine" side, I outright lied: I told her that once or twice when I was going through puberty I had dressed up as a girl -- in a bra and panties, patent leather shoes, stockings, my sister?s best party dress, jewelry, lipstick, makeup, even a hair band.

"Did you look at yourself in the mirror?" Anyone would have, I figured, so I nodded.

"Did you like the way you looked?"

It was a trick question! What was the correct answer? If I said I didn't like the way I looked, would Erika interpret my comment as further evidence that I didn't respect women? So I played safe: "Yes, the clothes were cool. They made me look pretty."

Erika eyed me closely. "Hmm, you WOULD indeed look better as a woman. So why did you stop dressing in your sisters? clothes if you looked pretty in them? Did your sister lay down the law?"

"No, she never knew. But I couldn't continue playing with my sister's clothes. After all, I was a guy. I was thirteen-years-old. In my family, that made me a man. It was time to grow up." There, the lying was done. Surely, Erika could now see that I had nothing against women.

"Are you wearing panties right now?" Erika asked. I looked around frantically. She was making no attempt to lower her voice. I answered hurriedly, and truthfully: "No, of course not. I told you I haven't worn women's undergarments since I was thirteen."

"Oh, you poor baby," Erika said. "Now, tell me: What's your name?"

"Todd," I whispered.

"Well, Todd, it's not surprising that you've got a poor attitude towards women. And it's no wonder that you're still a VIRGIN," the last word being said after she'd seen my tell-tale, downcast look.

"It's time we liberated the poor soul," piped in Sandra. Three women nodded in vigorous agreement. Erika spoke for them all: "Todd, you're never going to rid yourself of male chauvinism until you've explored your feminine side as an adult. You've got to discover whether you made the right decision at thirteen. Maybe, you were destined to be a woman -- like that marine, Christine Jorgensen -- which explains why you put down women. You know, so you don't have to face your deepest desires."

"B...b...but I don't put down women," I stammered, "Why would I? I love women."

"If you really loved women," Sandra said, "then you wouldn't belittle them as girls."

"True, true," murmured the assembled Cambridge women.

"Todd," Erika continued, "Maybe it's not a question of your loving women, but rather that you'd love to be a woman." Everyone nodded, and I do mean everyone at the party -- including, I noticed, to my intense mortification, the guys.

"You see, Todd, to deny your true nature is fascist. You're in danger of becoming a baby-killer in Vietnam or a crazed gunman in Boston unless you recognize yourself for what you really are -- a guy who wants to change his sex, just like Christine Jorgensen did."

"Right on, Erika! You tell him like it is!" shouted Patricia, pumping her hand in a mock fascist salute.

"Todd, we've got to save you, or else you'll soon be voting for Nixon," added Sandra, edging towards me, violating my personal space. They were all crowding me. I started to panic. I could scarcely breathe. So when Sandra lifted her peasant dress, and pulled off her white satin panties, and urged me to put them on "in order to get in touch with my inner woman," I quickly agreed so that I could escape to the bathroom to catch my breath. Fortunately, none of the women was wearing a bra, or else I would have to snap it on too.

I should've put up more of a fight because everyone was now convinced that I'd been longing to get back into panties. They all had me pegged as a transsexual, though none of them knew the word then. They didn't think me a a transvestite, mind you, but a TRANSSEXUAL! My self-image as a guy was taking a real beating, especially after they forced me to model my new underwear (and nothing but!) by prancing several times through the kitchen. What really got me were the comments from the guys: To a man, they agreed I had a sexy female ass.

"After you get your Jorgensen cut off," one of them, Mark, laughed, "I'll be happy to complete the job of making you a woman."

That wasn't a politically correct thing to say. So the women turned on him, leaving me alone with Erika. She wouldn't let me put my own clothes back on, but gradually I got used to sitting around half-naked in Sandra's panties. I even relaxed enough to join in the chastisement of Mark, who had to apologize to me for assuming that I would be jumping in and out of guys' beds when I became a woman. "Modern women have lots of options," I found myself saying, after much prompting; "we don't have to sell our souls to get a man. We can live without cock. I may even be a lesbian, whether you men like it or not."

The lesbian comment brought a big grin from Erika, who hugged me, then kissed me smack on the lips. I melted in her arms. I was thereafter in such a daze that I scarcely remember the rest of the night. I do know that I collected another pair of panties as well as a peasant blouse from an exhibitionist, and that Erika took me home with her. I don't recall her putting makeup and perfume on me, and I haven't the faintest idea of how my finger- and toenails got painted bright red. When I awoke in the middle of the night, I realized I was wearing a pink, see-through, nylon nightdress, but for the life of me I couldn't remember putting it on.

Despite these memory gaps, there is one thing I am quite definite about: I am no longer a virgin. Does that mean we had intercourse? Yes, more times than I can remember. Did I shoot my wad inside her? No, I don't think so. Leastwise, I don't remember actually mounting her. Instead, she did me several times with a strap-on dildo. At first, it hurt, but gradually I relaxed, and as I did, it turned me on to be treated "like a woman." Erika even made me hyper-aware of my breasts. I wanted to touch hers, but she kept fending me off, saying "that can wait," and then she'd suck on my nipples until I -- I swear it actually happened -- my body shook with the best orgasm of my young life.

The next few weeks were a blur. I was living with Erika, smoking a lot of weed, dropping some acid, and drinking a lot of Miller's. The sex was great, even if I never got to play the male lead, and I was madly in love with Erika. Or thought I was. She was determined to liberate the girl inside me, and I, thinking it a lark, put up little or no resistance as she fed me female hormones by the bucket and kept me in a tight corset to narrow my waist. Looking back on that summer, I think the combination of drugs and hormones must have befuddled my mind. How else can I explain why I agreed to have breast and butt implants in the first week of September?

By then Erika had almost convinced me that my lifelong dream was to become a total woman. I even made the preliminary booking for surgery in Sweden. And yet I didn't feel comfortable with showing my feminine side -- not at all. I felt like a freak, and wouldn't go outside. So Erika started throwing parties and by the time I came home from the hospital with my B-cup breasts, there were ten times as many people in Cambridge who knew Christine -- for that was my female name -- as had ever known Todd. Everyone was very accepting of Christine in a patronizing sort of way.

Even so, I would leave Erika's apartment. With classes starting in a couple of weeks, Erika decided it was time for "shock therapy". So, without telling me, she invited my parents to drop by to see my new digs. The vixen made certain that I was wearing my tightest dress and tallest heels and reddest lipstick when my parents rang the bell. Without the slightest warning to any of us, I confronted my parents in full drag.

Erika later said that she was simply trying to liberate the three of us -- that it would be a lot easier for me to face the world as a woman once I had "come out" to my parents. As for my parents, when they saw Erika and I living together, she figured they'd be liberated from the gnawing fear that their son was a homosexual. Erika opined that fear of homosexuality best explained the rock-ribbed conservatism of my parents: "If they weren?t so uptight about gender," she held, "then they wouldn't be right-wing Republican, religious fanatics."

Erika did liberate me that day... from my parents, who swore never to talk to me again (a promise they kept), and from my college education. My parents immediately stopped paying for college, and after a summer of getting in touch with my inner woman, I hadn't earned any money for tuition. Erika regretted that she couldn't even loan me the money because she had gone into debt to pay for my implants and hormone therapy.

My academic future shot, I had no choice -- said Erika -- but to go out to work. "That's what a liberated woman does," she declared. "She earns her own way in life. She depends on no one." And in case I didn't get the message, she told me that I'd have to move out if I didn't start helping with expenses.

The honeymoon over, I got a job waitressing at $3.00 an hour in a greasy spoon back of M.I.T. It wasn't a bad place to work, though the tips were bad -- students are cheap S.O.B.'s! -- and every so often I?d get poked by a slide rule. Or that's what the dirty little bastards said. Even though it brought in much-needed money, Erika despised me for taking the job because it required a uniform, and the candle of our love began to flicker. Certainly, I didn't appreciate getting harangued about my "soul-destroying" uniform after twelve hours of standing on my feet.

One day a gaunt little man ordered a slice of chocolate cake. For some reason -- I'm still not sure why -- I gave him two slices, saying "The second is on me, honey, you need to put on some pounds. It looks like no one is at home feeding you." For the next few months, I fattened him up as he came by daily to chat ... and, in time, to flirt. It turned out that Siggy was a world-famous professor of engineering desperately looking for a woman to replace his wife, deceased for six months when first I met him.

He proposed, and as I was now fighting with Erika on a daily basis, I was quite disposed to accept -- except that he didn't know I was actually a man. One day, at Anthony's Pier 4 restaurant, while nervously looking around to ensure that no one Italian was listening in, I told Siggy all about myself. After a few seconds of thoughtful silence, he replied, "No one is perfect." So he was willing to take me, and soon thereafter we wed at the Unitarian Meetinghouse.

Siggy didn't marry me out of unnatural tolerance. He never tolerated imperfection. But he appreciated that my imperfections were operable, and he saw the final transformation of Christine into a total woman as an engineering project. So he put me through a battery of operations in Scandinavia -- to eliminate my Adam's apple, to raise the pitch of my voice, to round off my face, to turn up my noise, to widen my pelvis, and, of course, to replace my penis with a vagina.

After six months, god-like Siggy rested. He declared me a perfect woman. Or rather he declared me perfect for housekeeping. The sixties had never happened, so far as Siggy was concerned, for he wanted his wife to tend to his house and to his every whim and desire. To my surprise, I loved being a conventional, un-liberated housewife. I found that I could complete my daily chores by two o'clock, leaving me hours of daytime TV to watch. I became hooked on soap operas and The "Newlywed Game", so reddening my eyes from bawling that Siggy thought I had allergies.

A distracted professor, Siggy didn't ask for much attention. His mind full of abstract fractions, he scarcely noticed his food, and he worked most evenings. So he didn't mind that I had my girlfriends frequently over to play cards, as long as I kept his tea kettle boiling. As Siggy kept the household accounts, I had no idea of how much I was costing him, but I figure my wardrobe consumed most of his income from the second trimester.

It was a good life; I was a very contented, fifties housewife -- until Erika came back into my life. We didn't meet by accident in the Star Market; she deliberately bumped into me with a cartload of organic vegetables because, as she explained later, she was determined to liberate me from my "oppressive marriage" to "that troglodytic professor".

No, she wasn't pushing a divorce. Or at least that what's she told me. Rather, she insisted that I demand that our marriage be one of equals: "He has no right keeping you at home and fattening you up like a sow," Erika indelicately commented, poking the cellulite on my right hip. "As a liberated woman, you have as much right to a career as he does."

"Career?" I asked. "Is that what you call waitressing? Why would any woman do that if she can stay at home taking care of a good man?"

"Because no truly liberated woman wants to be a parasite, that's why!" Erika heatedly replied. Every time we met she'd make this same speech about my "duty to womanhood". I couldn't seem to avoid her; she was everywhere. And finally, to silence her, I agreed to ask Siggy if I could look for a part-time job to earn some "pin money".

Siggy was furious. "No wife of mine will ever work!" he exclaimed. "Not for one hour. Not for one minute. A woman's place is in the home. Don't I provide for you? Heaven knows you've been spending a fortune on clothes and jewelry. I hope you're not one of those damn feminists, because if you are, our marriage is doomed." And then he stormed off.

Our marriage was never the same after that. Siggy no longer saw me as his soul mate,and I resented being told that I couldn't look for work. It was the oddest thing: I was quite content to stay at home eating bonbons and watching three-tissue dramas, but I couldn't abide knowing that I didn't have a choice in the matter. So we drifted apart, Siggy and I, until the day came that he announced that one of his female graduate students was taking my place in his bed and kitchen. And that's how I came to be liberated from my fifties-style marriage.

I didn't come out of the marriage with much money because Siggy's main asset was his university pension and I didn't have any claim on it in those days. So I had to go back to waitressing. This time the cafe was in the low-rent part of Cambridge near Central Square and there was no longer any doubt in my mind that I wasn't being accidentally pinched in the butt. As I was working for a national chain, the pay was especially poor, but I got by -- that is, until Erika found me.

She was appalled by my working conditions, as she kept telling me over cups of coffee. She kept ordering them, and I serving them until the owner, either because he was tired of her harangues or because Erika was taking up valuable space, simply fired me. I got three days notice.

"The real challenge for women's liberation," Erika now announced, "is the working woman. Unions are the only answer." Well, unions turned out to be a negative answer so far as my waitressing career was concerned. A couple of times she actually talked me into trying to organize a union, and so there was some fairness to my dismissal. But on five other occasions I lost my job simply because I knew Erika, who was getting quite a reputation as a trade-union militant. After a while, I had been liberated entirely from waitressing -- at least in Boston; I was blacklisted as a labor agitator.

It was tough making a living, and like a lot of women who lose hope of a better life, I began to settle for any man I could find to keep me off welfare and out of prostitution. I went through several men before I finally realized that no matter how poorly I was being paid, no matter how little money I had, that it was always me who had to pay the bills.

There was one exception: Roy wouldn't let me pay for anything. A pipefitter, he was even a good provider thanks to Boston's building boom. And he said he loved me. But he couldn't hold his liquor. And he was a mean drunk. He'd pick a fight and try to hit me. Usually he missed and the swing would throw him off-balance, and then he'd collapse to the ground in a drunken stupor. The next morning he'd be really apologetic and buy me something pretty to make amends. I was prepared to settle for this life, as a lot of women do, but Erika insisted that I sic the cops on Roy.

Quite by accident, for I generally avoided her, Erika saw me with a black eye, the result of Roy's "lucky" punch. I tried to make excuses for him. He wouldnt have hit me, I explained, if I hadn't bobbed when I should have ducked. Appalled, Erika insisted that no liberated woman should put up with a batterer. "Call the police," she said; "your husband belongs in jail." And that is where she put him. She phoned the cops the moment my back was turned. Roy served only thirty days in the Concord jail. When he got out, he gave me one final clout, and then ordered me to get out of his life. And so I was liberated from another marriage.

As I nursed my second black eye in a month, I decided it was high time to liberate myself from Erika. So I borrowed money from every one of my girlfriends, whom I swore to secrecy, and lit out for Los Angeles without leaving a forwarding address.

I didn't see Erika for thirty years. In the meantime, I made a new, better life for myself. About ten years back I found myself a widower, Hank, a trucker with three kids to raise, and the four of them have been the joy of my life. As for work, the move to Los Angeles left my rabble-rousing reputation behind, and so I have been able to make a career in the hospitality industry. Just last week I was hired as a "waiter" by Chez Cochons, one of the most exclusive restaurants in Beverly Hills.

Today I found myself serving lunch to Erika and three matrons. I'm sure she didn't recognize me, for I have changed a lot. Time hasn't been especially kind to a woman who's had to make her living standing ten-twelve hours a day for decades. A lot of me has drooped. I also think that Erika didn't recognize me because it seems she's not in the habit anymore of paying attention to "the help."

But I sure recognized her. She's scarcely changed in thirty years. Through eavesdropping, I learned that she's kept herself looking "young" by spending a fortune on facelifts and botox. She even has a personal trainer at her Bel Air mansion. Naturally I wondered how she could afford her lifestyle, and listening really attentively now, I heard her say that she was married to an investment banker who'd made "a killing" on IPO's of dot.com companies, most of them now bankrupt. "Yes", she replied to one of her companions, apparently a Republican national committeewoman, "it was a close call when my husband was accused of insider trading, but," Erika boasted, "the fine had been less than ten percent of his profits, so no harm done."

"Don't you wish you saw more of Etherington? Isn't he a bit of a workaholic?" the committeewoman asked.

"Too true, too true," replied Erika. "I do wish I saw more of him, but our life together surely fits God's divine plan, for Etherington is doing man's work -- which consists of liberating women from the need to make a living so that they can devote themselves full-time to the improvement of society. And ladies, as you know, at the top of my agenda is the liberation of the rich from their unfair tax burden."

I snapped. I couldn't help myself: I liberated the contents of a Robert Mondavi Reserve Chardonnay by pouring the entire bottle over Erika?s head and shoulders. She had me fired without bothering to learn either my identity or my motive; to Erika, I was beneath contempt. I didn't plead for my job or beg Erika to forgive me for old time's sake, because there was no way I wanted to owe a debt to that rich bitch.

As I left the restaurant, I lost the stoop in my shoulders. My legs moved more briskly than in years. For the first time in my life I was a liberated woman. If you too want to be trulyliberated, run, run far away from anyone who seeks to liberate you.

 

-- THE END --

  

  

  

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