The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt Page B

Jerene playing basketball; she had said it from the start.
    Behind her, Margaret dragged the vacuum cleaner like an unwilling beast of burden. "Why?" Jerene repeated. "Because blacks play basketball? You're worried someone might confuse me for one of them?"
    Her mother only shrugged. "That uniform," she said. "Really, Jerene, couldn't they give you something a little more feminine? And why do you always wear those ugly pants, when I've bought you so many pretty dresses?"
    "Pretty dresses look stupid on me," she said.
    "You never try," Margaret said. "You don't give yourself a chance to be pretty. Ah, there you are. Now I'm gonna get you." She was talking to the dust. She stuck the special vacuum-nozzle behind an antique mirrored table, and Jerene listened to the peculiar, pleasant sucking sound it made.
    She slept over at Jessica's all the time now. Jessica's mother, who was a magazine editor, was mild and abstracted and thought nothing of it. Jessica herself was Jerene's best friend, robust, big-breasted, a discus thrower, and had taught Jerene how to make love with her tongue and fingers and hips. They did this most nights when Jerene stayed over now but were only just beginning to gain a consciousness of what it meant—that they were lesbians—a realization to which Jerene's first reaction was, "Of course. That's how it is. I've known it all along." Of course there was more; she realized, distantly, that this kind of love couldn't be easy, that she must suffer more than she had. The word "abomination" kept creeping through her mind—from a church sermon, she supposed, or perhaps from under her mother's breath when they heard about Billie Jean King and her secretary on the radio. Were they lovers, girlfriends, in love? Certainly they had never spoken about the quiet passion that took up most of their nights together. And Jessica was too busy thinking about Harvard in the fall to worry about such things.
    Jerene, less ambitious and yearning for the city, went to N.Y.U. Separated, finally, from her parents, she started to attend meetings of the Afro-American Women's Caucus, the Lesbian Caucus, the Radical Women of Color Caucus. In imitation of Cornelia Patterson, a lesbian leader whose stage presence and nearly bald skull impressed her greatly, she shaved off most of her hair one day. "What have you done to yourself?" her mother shouted when she walked in the door at Christmas break. "My God, you've maimed yourself." She and Sam were so appalled they threatened to refuse to pay her tuition for the next term, and she only dissuaded them by promising to grow her hair back. At first that didn't satisfy them, until they realized it was the only choice they had. They relented.
    Over dinner she told them about her new politics, and her involvement in the Black Women's Movement. Margaret, spearing small curlicues of potato with her fork, looked at Jerene warily. "And do you really think," her father asked, staring her down across the table, "that such isolationism will do anyone any good?" It was an old argument, one they'd had many times before. "First the black movement," Sam muttered, gazing disconsolately into his plate. "Now the black women's movement. I know it's not a popular opinion, Jerene, but I just don't see the point of all this separatism."
    Then he told her again that you had to work through the system to change it from inside, etc. "We're all human," he concluded triumphantly. Margaret looked on in approval. Jerene recognized that tactic—wrapping his snobbery and defeat in the guise of Christian good will—and considered it beneath responding to. She went back to her dinner, and the next morning found a mysterious check for fifty dollars by her bedside table. "For a nice wig" was written on the line where it said "Memo."
    Six months later she made a special trip home to tell them that she was a lesbian. For years afterwards she would wonder why she did it—whether it was, as she told herself then, an act of