Dagny Versus Darlene

Dagny Versus Darlene

A Story by Evyn Rubin
"

fragment of a true story, set in 1973, in Santa Monica, California

"
Dagny sat opposite me at my kitchen table, a wooden breakfast nook,  painted green, with decoration around the table's edge.  
"Evyn, Why are you with Darlene?" she asked me.
I told her some of the story of how we started our relationship.
After Suzy and Ellen, and Harriet left for San Francisco, and I didn't go,  I knew I needed to make some new friends.  So I put myself out toward potential friends, including Elaine McHugh who was Suzy's friend from their dance department.   She had taken one of K.C.'s puppies.  She already had a dog -- named Reuben.  She joked that she was going to name the new dog Evan, so that she could go outside and call for them, "Evan! Reuben!"  She had made me laugh.
So I called her up and asked her if she would like to go to a movie with me.  She said, "Hmmm...  No, I don't think so.  But you know, who might be interested in going to a movie with you is Darlene Peoples."  So Elaine McHugh brought us together, actually, 
We went to a movie and we had to stand outside in line for half an hour. Well, we kept bumping into each other, in the line, while we were talking.  The one who bumped into the other would say, "Excuse me,"  then we'd continue talking, but it kept happening.  We both kept bumping into each other and saying "Excuse me," then it happened again, as if we both had magnets in our pockets. 
"But why are you with her?" Dagny asked again. 
I kept responding to this repetitive question,  naively and co-operatively.  I kept giving her anecdotal glimpses into our relationship, but she kept asserting her question. 
"But why are you in a relationship with her?" she asked  
I'd try again to explain or illustrate the benefits I got from the relationship.  With Darlene I had a pleasant, relaxed kind of fun.  I liked being lovers with her.  Three or four times a week we'd have dinner together, then we'd hang out, and we'd take our dogs for a walk, and then, at her house, we'd go upstairs to her bedroom, and our dogs would stay down stairs.  
Every time we went upstairs to her bedroom, on the way up the stairs I would think, before I fall asleep, I'm going to sneak downstairs to see how our dogs arrange themselves to sleep, if they share the couch, or what.  But then, after we'd finish our love making, and we'd be snuggled and dozing, I would feel so comfortable and settled in, that I would not remember my plan to check on the dogs, or I would decide to do that another time.  I never actually did check on them.  
It was not the most passionate relationship I'd had, but it had just tied for the longest I'd had up to that point.  I am writing about this decades later and I now think intensity in a relationship can come from a quest or longing to fix something painful.  I did not feel longing or intensity toward Darlene.  I felt well taken care of and pleased with myself.  But our relationship also had a fragility, apparently, because in a matter of weeks, it was going to fall apart entirely. 
"Evyn, tell me why you are in a relationship with her," Dagny said, for the fifth time in variation. 
"I like having a lover," I said to Dagny.  "And my relationship with Darlene is working in its own way.  I feel pleased with myself, for being lovers with her, and not worried about myself or lonely." 
Dagny looked at her watch.   "Evyn, do you know how long it took you to tell me that?"  And then she told me how long; I think  twenty minutes.  "You are with Darlene out of loneliness!"  she exclaimed, and continued, "and that is not a basis for a good relationship."  
I was flabbergasted.  She had ventriloquized me, or puppeteered me.  She had in mind something she wanted me to say, and she had kept questioning me until I said it.  I was stunned, in the bad sense.  There was nothing wrong with my relationship with Darlene, and now Dagny was going on and on, berating it, and then berating the circle of my friends, even though she didn't know any of them well. 
"Your friends are too small for you!" she said.  That she was talking to a slightly undersized person just added insult to injury, and I knew it.  "Now you finally have someone who is the right size for you," she said, as I tried to regain my composure through layers of wrongness.  
She told me that she had recently met Terry Shaw, whom I also knew,  and that Shaw, as she's called, is the kind of person that Dagny likes.  "She stands out in a crowd," Dagny said.  Shaw looks like she just  stepped out of a Radcliffe Hall novel, a British aristocrat lesbian from days gone by, with a Sherlock Holmes pipe, and tweeds.  She is definitely eye-catching, but that is not what makes some one  good as a friend.  My head was spinning from all of Dagny's faults that I was witnessing 
"Evyn, you need to create vacuums in your life," Dagny said.  "Your friends are all too small for you.  You don't need  relationships based on loneliness.  You need to create a vacuum, and that will be filled by friends who are the right size." 
All the little people inside my head had fallen over onto their floor.  They struggled to get up and I struggled to regain my composure.  
Dagny sat opposite me, and to her right was the backdoor,  and next to the door was my refrigerator.  On my refrigerator was a square poster of Judy Chicago, the artist,  cast as a boxer in a boxing ring.  She was wearing a tank top and trunks, her hands were in boxing gloves, held  up and ready to jab or to defend.  She appeared  light on her feet, ready to pivot on her toes, ready to fend off a punch, or deliver a punch.  That's how I needed to be with Dagny. 
I said to her, "I need to be on my toes with you." 
And she said, "Oh Evyn, I don't want you looking up to me." 
What!?  What a miscommunication!  I  had meant: ready to pivot, to fend off her blows.  I felt like my mind had been punched in its stomach.  I felt entirely overwhelmed. 
By "on my toes," I had meant alert, like a boxer in the ring, ready to block her blows.  Look at how she distorted me!  
Next to my refrigerator was the countertop, then my kitchen sink,  and then my stove.  I got up and went to the far end of the kitchen and began to make myself a cup of coffee.  I wanted to be alone, with a nice cup of coffee, to collect my thoughts.  
Now, as an elder, reporting on this moment in my youth, I want to change the story, so that I give Dagny her cup of coffee to go!  I send her home and that is that, the end of that dynamic.  But truth be told, we took our cups of coffee into the living room, and our problem dynamics continued, on and on.    

© 2021 Evyn Rubin


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Added on August 5, 2021
Last Updated on October 11, 2021
Tags: relationships, manipulation