Burning Questions: A Novel

by Alix Kates Shulman

Overview

A provocative coming-of-age chronicle of the Women’s Liberation Movement, as seen through the eyes of a young woman who flees midwestern suburban life to find her true self in 1950s New York City
Eighteen-year-old Zane IndiAnna feels trapped by life in her small midwestern town. So she sets out for New York, landing in Greenwich Village during the revolutionary days of Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac. Zane’s story of rebellious political awakening plays out over the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, mirroring the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement and bringing the evolution of American feminism to vivid life.  Stirring and unforgettable, Burning Questions is a timeless story filled with humor, passion, and revolutionary spirit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781453238394
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	04/03/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	374
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Alix Kates Shulman (b. 1932) is the celebrated author of fourteen books, including the bestselling novel Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen (1972), which established her as a primary figure in feminism’s second wave. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Shulman studied philosophy at Columbia University and received an MA at New York University. She became a political activist, joining the Congress of Racial Equality in 1961 and the Women’s Liberation Movement in 1967. Her other novels include Burning Questions (1978), On the Stroll (1981), In Every Woman’s Life . . . (1987), and Ménage (2012). She has also written the memoirs Drinking the Rain (1995), A Good Enough Daughter (1999), and To Love What Is (2008);a biography of Emma Goldman entitled To the Barricades (1971); and A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays: Four Decades of Feminist Writing (2012). Shulman lives in Manhattan and continues to speak frequently on issues such as writing, feminism, and reproductive choice.
Alix Kates Shulman (b. 1932) is the celebrated author of fourteen books, including the bestselling novel Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen (1972), which established her as a primary figure in feminism’s second wave. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Shulman studied philosophy at Columbia University and received an MA at New York University. She became a political activist, joining the Congress of Racial Equality in 1961 and the Women’s Liberation Movement in 1967. Her other novels include Burning Questions (1978), On the Stroll (1981), In Every Woman’s Life . . . (1987), and Ménage (2012). She has also written the memoirs Drinking the Rain (1995), A Good Enough Daughter (1999), and To Love What Is (2008);a biography of Emma Goldman entitled To the Barricades (1971); and A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays: Four Decades of Feminist Writing (2012). Shulman lives in Manhattan and continues to speak frequently on issues such as writing, feminism, and reproductive choice.

Read an Excerpt

Burning Questions

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By Alix Kates Shulman

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 1978 Alix Kates Shulman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4532-3839-4

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CHAPTER 1

DIGGING TO CHINA

What makes a rebel?

If you had seen the flags waving in front of each frame house set on its neat carpet of lawn on Endicott Road or any of the surrounding streets in Babylon, Indiana, on a Flag Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, V-J Day, or even a particularly fine Sunday after the War (World War II), you would never have guessed it possible that a fanatical radical was incubating there.

And yet, while the other kids were riding their tricycles and bicycles across the hills of Babylon, learning to spot the new models of every make of car that began appearing in 1946 and would come out once a year forever now that the War was over, I was out in our back yard sitting in a certain spot safe from the menacing bees in my mother's hollyhocks but within the magical scented circle of her yellow tea roses, digging to China.

China!—an inconceivably distant place where people walked around upside down, wrote in pictographs, ate with chopsticks, sang their words, sailed on junks, rode in rickshaws, and hid their treasures in caves guarded by terrifying silent dogs with eyes as big as saucers—accessible through my back yard. I'd begun digging as soon as I learned it was there, dreaming, longing, hungering to see, though after a while people laughed at me. I knew that getting through was a staggering task, China being some eight thousand miles away; but unlike the skeptics I lived among, who doubted the existence of other states, much less other worlds, I didn't think it impossible. Time, distance—my entire world was made up of unknown mysteries that gradually yielded to the accretions of steady effort and the slow erosion of experience. Learning when to take the long route to school around the treacherous snowdrifts on Silverbrook Boulevard; combining three completely different tunes into the glorious harmony of a single Christmas carol (walking slowly down the aisle in white dresses carrying lighted candles, every mouth a perfect O); mastering written language; knowing when to multiply and when to divide; diving through the surface of a pool into an entirely different medium and rising up again; the miraculous healing of a wound—digging to China. In Miss Peterson's "transportation unit" the other kids made locomotives and cabooses, hansoms and kayaks; but I made cardboard and toothpick models of a sedan chair, a rickshaw, and a junk, bringing China to life. After that I thought about it each night and dug a bit every day. Five whole summers I dug, half believing I would get there, a born fanatic.

Maybe it was a little weird, like jumping off the garage roof with an umbrella hoping to fly, but so what? It was worth it to see the hole get deeper every day. If my parents fretted, they didn't let on. Even after my Aunt Louise used psychology, trying to "inject the Reality Principle" with children's books about the Chinese people and play-by-plays of the struggle of the courageous peasants against the terrible Chiang Kai-shek, I wouldn't give up. My goal was audacious enough to sweep away the difficulties: imagine tunneling straight through the earth to the very opposite of everything you started from. China! Limitless difference: men in pigtails, hats like lampshades, mincing steps, emperors! Each day (which was naturally night in China) as I dug a little deeper into the earth with the hand cultivator that had replaced my sandbox shovel, I saw a bit more clearly where I was going. My dreams and desires fed each other. If it was possible for my friend Eleanor (with her mother) to sit on the opposite side of the front row of the vast Movie Palace from me (with my mother) and both of us somehow still manage to see the same amazing pictures flashing across a single centered screen, then if I dug diligently long enough I might emerge in China. No expert in the possible had ruled it out; indeed, no one even discouraged me: "Else, would you please call Zane to wash up for dinner? She's out in back, digging to China."

Maybe my grandiose ambitions were my parents' fault, naming me Zane, marking me for life as "different." They probably didn't realize what they were starting. A combination of Zeke and Anna (Daddy and Mama), Zane meant "God's gracious gift." Plain and special at once, a version of John and Jane, it was a distinctive name (there were Zane Grey and me), promising, a name to live up to, announcing my specialness in a single syllable. Even as a small child I'd recognized its value as I chalked fancy Z's up and down the sidewalks of Babylon. The last letter of the alphabet, my initial occupied the place of treasures, like dessert, like night-time, like the final wish that could reverse all others, like the tastiest morsel one saved up for the end, like China at the end of the tunnel. "Zane: What an unusual name," teachers would say. "Is it short for something?" And I would swell with pride replying no. As certain parents bought their children growth stocks, my parents, smart but not rich, gave me a special name, probably unique in Indiana, knowing it would distinguish me before I raised a finger.

Distinction, however, was not the best thing to have in Babylon. God's gracious gift: a blessing, but a mixed one. The Best was less acceptable than the Same. My parents had considered withholding their permission for the school to skip me over 3A and afterward often wondered if they hadn't harmed me by granting it, making me younger than the rest. Even if you excelled, you'd better not be different. Daddy almost said as much, trying to prepare me for life, arming me with accomplishments and cunning but warning me not to use them, perhaps already uneasy about my name: My Uncle Herman learned the hard way that Different was wrong. The wrong attitude, the wrong amount of hair (like that contradiction in terms, Grace Gross, whose legs hung with hair and whose eyebrows met between her eyes as indelicately as a boy's), the wrong color skin ("God made the little niggers,/Made them in the night,/Made them in a hurry,/And forgot to paint them white," wrote Barbie Pratt in my autograph book), the wrong clothes from the wrong stores, made you unfit for Babylon—a place which, of all the places in the world, was right: by definition.

True, an outsider driving through our town might think Babylon indistinguishable from a thousand other postwar residential communities with houses sporting windows and gables like smiling faces, two-car garages, neatly tended flower borders, and uniform treelawns within a twenty-mile radius of a manufacturing center of approx 80,000 pop. The same winding roads, grandly named boulevards but as yet imperfectly drained; the same scattering of vacant lots; the same bowling alley, dry cleaner, gift shop, chop suey house, record store clustered at Tompkins Corners; the same lending library with its Thursday night Great Literature discussion group; the same two-story high school with its regular Friday night basketball game and Tuesday night samba lessons to paying couples in the gym. But anyone born there knew immediately that Babylon, though seemingly insignificant, was quite simply the standard by which the rest of the world was to be judged and by which "different" was to be defined. Not only did the poorer suburbs stand condemned by comparison, but even the reputedly richer ones, with their higher per capita income and teacher-to-pupil ratios, were despised (though less so) for their difference from us.

But generally such indelicacies as poverty or dark skin didn't apply to us. To start with, you didn't move to Babylon unless you were white and rich enough for a down payment on a house. Then once safely up there you could easily prove the rest of the world didn't count. Rest of the world? We ignored even Middletown, that belching metropolis in the valley below of which we were supposedly only a small suburb, referring to it disparagingly as "the city," tarnished by industry and grime. The #32 express bus that took Babylon fathers downtown to their offices whizzed past the streets that housed the poor so fast that nothing could be seen. (Later, in high school, we sometimes cut classes and went down to Middletown to shop or sit in Walgreen's and flirt with soldiers—by then we had the Korean War; but we knew what would happen to us if our parents ever found out.) It was as impolite to notice the black or poor as it was to notice a harelip. "Don't stare." If you did happen to see, you were to hold in your observations like a belch until you were safely back in the privacy of Babylon, where you could once again breathe easily and then promptly forget.

But some people, the bane of their teachers, noticed the worst and couldn't forget; I, it seemed, was one of them. Long before I ever ventured down to Middletown I had evidence of God's grand scheme of injustice. "Whenever I am asked," wrote Angelica Balabanoff, Lenin's sometime collaborator, "how I came to turn my back upon my family, upon the comfort and luxury of my home in southern Russia, and to become a revolutionist, I am at a loss for an answer. All the years of my childhood, as far back as I can remember, seem to have been years of rebellion.... Once when I saw some peasant on our estate kiss the border of my father's coat when he returned from a long journey, I cringed with shame. My first realization of inequality and injustice grew out of these experiences in my early childhood." We saw no peasants flogged, knew no poor. The daily humiliation we witnessed at school of the queer, fat, slow, orphaned, and small by the big and loud was the worst cruelty we could imagine. Unlike the fabled Old Country schoolmasters whose abuses inspired rebellion, our teachers were not permitted to hit us, and in fact the best endeared themselves by permitting us to paint murals on the walls of the cafeteria. Still, somehow, I knew.

It wasn't that I doubted that ours was the best place on earth; it was just that now and then the curtains parted for a minute to reveal a world beyond. China lay buried deep under our house, though most people weren't interested. Just so, behind Mama's lovely smile were the anxious questions I overheard her ask my Aunt Louise when I was supposedly asleep. Behind the starched shirts of the charity kids delivered to our school each morning in a panel station wagon were the sad hearts of orphans. And there on the third floor of our own white colonial on Endicott Road I sometimes heard our Polish maid Else cry her poor self to sleep.

As Sleeping Beauty, doomed to prick her finger on a spindle, found the fateful needle in the tower of her very own castle though her parents had banished all spindles from the land, I found all the injustice of the world lurking on our property.

CHAPTER 2

ELSE

There were maids before Else and at least one more after, for Mama worked in an office till sometime after the War. But Else is the one I remember with her sad blue eyes and silver cross and two limp blond braids she wore wrapped around her head like the maidens in distress pictured in my giant illustrated Grimm. She lived in the attic under our very roof, breathing the same air and eating the same food as the rest of us; but like the family of raccoons who nested in our chimney one winter, whining an unnerving song that kept us all awake until Daddy found them and smoked them out, she lived with us but not among us.

Once I stole up the steep stairs to the attic on my hands and knees to find her kneeling at the foot of her narrow bed, praying to Jesus. She held her silver cross in her hand and murmured words in a foreign tongue, with her sad eyes rolled toward the ceiling till all that showed were the whites. I was uneasy to be witness to such an intimate scene, but I was afraid to withdraw, knowing the stairs might creak. Mama had always insisted I be polite and considerate to Else. "No, darling," she said sternly, "don't go up there now, that's Else's private room, she needs her privacy too." I remembered the interview in which Mama had promised Else two hours each afternoon to rest up before beginning dinner, besides Sundays and Thursday nights off, a cash retainer, and four white uniforms. But still, it disturbed me to think of her up there all alone; I always knew it was wicked to keep a maid in the attic. As I sat on the stairs listening to her pray in words I couldn't understand, I had no doubt she was praying for release from some onerous burden—possibly me.

I often thought about her up there by herself. During the days, with Mama and Daddy away at work, everything seemed happy enough. After school I trailed her up and down the stairs through her daily chores—cleaning, ironing, mending, telephoning for the groceries, cooking, doing the laundry, and "thorough cleaning" once a week—and sometimes heard her sing strange songs in her high, thin voice. But when my parents were home, speaking to her in their special voice, she was morose and obedient. When I sat on the porch learning chess openings from Daddy on Saturdays, she slipped around the house pretending to be invisible. And at night I sometimes thought I heard her cry.

Living alone in an attic like serving girls in fairy tales—what was it like? Into Else's room went furniture no one wanted. Her bathtub was rusty. The lightbulb in her ceiling had a chain instead of a neat switch like all of ours.

Not that anyone mistreated her. Daddy called her "Miss Else" and Mama, assuring me that Else was grateful to have a clean room and bath in a nice place like Babylon, took pains to see that she was comfortable. "Now, Else," she would say, "you be sure to order whatever brand of tea you like best." "Yes, Mrs. Bentwood." But I still knew it was wrong. While we used any door we chose, she used only the back door; and while we ate together every night exchanging mind-stumping riddles and intimate stories, she ate alone in the kitchen. First she served us, emerging through the swinging door in her fresh uniform to refill our glasses with ice water or pass the serving dishes a second time (serve from the left, clear from the right) whenever my mother sat up tall, smiled, and rang the little silver dinner bell; then, after the dishes were cleared away and the dining table reduced to its minimum size, restoring the dining area to its original living room state, Else would assemble a meal from among the leftovers and serve herself in the kitchen.

Wrong. My Aunt Louise, who'd awakened my compassion when I was very young by weeping beside our radio while the war news blared, had taught me about injustice. And though I ignored it when I could, after a certain winter night I knew Else's situation precisely fit the description.

The dinner dishes had been cleared away and my parents were settled before the fire in the living room. I was in my Daddy's lap waiting to hear the next installment of one of his long, fanciful stories that eventually wound up to bed like a circular staircase, when he handed me his coffee cup and sent me off to the kitchen for a refill. I slid down from his lap and pushed through the swinging door, cup in hand—to find Else seated at the kitchen table eating by herself, her eyes red from crying.

Though I'd suspected often enough that she cried, I'd never before caught her at it.

"What's the matter, Else?" I asked.

"It's nothing, darling, nothing."

Nevertheless, tears fell from her eyes.

"Don't cry, Else," I said. "Please don't." Then, applying Mama's comforting remedy, I walked over to Else, patted her arm, and said in Mama's voice, "There, there."

Suddenly Else grabbed my waist with one arm, and pulling me to her, pressed me violently to her white starched breast. I heard her heart thumping amid muffled sobs, felt the silver cross pressing against my cheek. Quickly my own heart thumped back.

From the living room I distinctly heard my parents' voices, knew they'd be sitting in the facing green wing chairs beside the fire, my father's feet up on the hassock, my lovely mother, knees crossed, sipping her coffee, both waiting for me to return with Daddy's cup in time to have my story before their evening radio programs began. My mother's melodious voice drifted across the air sweet as a lullaby.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Burning Questions by Alix Kates Shulman. Copyright © 1978 Alix Kates Shulman. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,
PART I: BABYLON,
1. Digging to China,
2. Else,
3. Uncle Herman,
4. The Rummage Sale,
5. Middletown,
6. Preparation and Departure,
PART II: MACDOUGAL STREET,
1. Arrival,
2. A Woman,
3. At Kappy's,
4. Marshalls Place,
5. Nina,
6. The Trotsky Test,
7. The Cafe Lucia,
8. A Kiss,
9. Indiana Dance,
10. The Facts of Life,
PART III: BEHIND THE WINDOW,
1. Ricky,
2. The Secret,
3. Changes,
4. The Raffle,
5. Washington,
6. Three Documents,
7. A New Sitter,
8. The Junk,
9. The Cool Lady,
10. The Real Moore,
11. Dee-Dee,
12. Whitehall Street,
13. Adultery,
14. Trash Cans,
PART IV: THE THIRD STREET CIRCLE,
1. First Meeting,
2. Miss America,
3. Leo Stern,
4. Trashing,
5. Faith,
6. The Women's March,
PART V: NEW SPACE,
1. New Beginnings,
2. The Happiness Question,
3. The Student,
4. New Space Cafe,
5. Men,
6. China,
7. The Dossier,
8. Winner's Luck,
Dialectical Epilogue,
Selected Bibliography,