by Celia Laskey
“Speaking of hypocrites,” she says, meeting my eyes in the mirror. “You hold a listening session but you don’t actually listen. You don’t care how we feel—it’s all for show. You act like you’re so much better than us, but you hate us, too, and for the same reasons you think we hate you.” She says all of this calmly, like it’s a matter of fact, then takes her time washing her hands. Harley is still in a stall, probably hiding until the altercation is over.
A flush of heat avalanches through my body. I try to come up with a retort, something to exonerate me, but my mouth is dry and empty.
Shirin picks me up and drives us home the back way, past pitch-black fields and the beef packing plant.
“You’re quiet,” she says. “I was ready to get an earful.”
“Braid lady said I’m a hypocrite. She said I hate them, too.”
“Wow, what an asshole.”
“No, she’s right. I hate them too much to even try to understand them. And if I’m asking them to do something that I’m not even willing to do, then maybe I’m not the right person for this job.” When I started out in nonprofits, I was hopeful about finding common ground with people whose beliefs opposed mine. I thought if I could just present them with all the information, they’d eventually have to see things my way. The right way. It didn’t occur to me that hate had absolutely nothing to do with information, or a lack thereof.
* * *
• • •
A FEW DAYS later, I turn in a resignation letter to Karen. She looks like she’s aged ten years in the last few months, a shock of gray hair sprouting next to her left temple and a deepening wrinkle between her eyebrows. She reads my letter as I sit across from her getting lost in the ocean art covering her office walls. An overhead photo of bold, striped umbrellas lining a beach. A vintage ad for the California coast. Now that I’ve quit, Shirin and I can fly directly to the beach for a vacation. Where’s the gayest place we could go? Provincetown? Fire Island? Miami?
“You’re just realizing this?” Karen says, folding up my letter. “That you hate them?” She lets out a single laugh, a literal Ha. “Of course you do! So does anyone in this field.”
“What?” I blink at her.
“If we loved them, we’d sit on our asses. We wouldn’t be here, doing this hard work. Hate gets a bad rap, but I think all activists are motivated by it, deep down.”
“I can’t tell if you’re joking.”
“I’m absolutely not.”
“So you don’t think I should quit?”
“You’re very good at your job, Tegan. And liking these people isn’t a necessary part of it. You have to understand them, but that’s different.” She crumples my letter into a ball and throws it into the trash can. “Now get back to work.”
* * *
• • •
I KEEP THINKING about what Karen said, that you don’t have to like someone to understand them, and I come up with a new kind of listening session, one that’s ongoing. Instead of asking the residents their feelings about us, I ask about themselves—one-on-one, kind of like therapy, but more guided. What did your parents teach you? What three words would you use to describe your childhood? What is your greatest fear? What is your idea of perfect happiness? What do you think is your best quality? What about your worst? What is your biggest regret? I answer the questions first, so it’s not a one-way street, hoping my brutal honesty will beget theirs.
Jean Cunningham is one of the first to show up. She says she came because she desperately needs to get something off her chest, but can’t be honest with anyone she knows. Then she tells me she’s been having an affair with Jeff Peterson, Christine’s husband. I struggle to keep my face composed. She says that finally telling the truth makes her feel like she’s on some new, undiscovered drug that’s “even better than mushrooms.” I never would have guessed that Jean Cunningham had done mushrooms.
One day her husband Gabe comes in. He doesn’t seem to have any idea that Jean has been coming, and vice versa. After a few sessions of kicking the can around, he tells me he’s pretty sure he’s gay and that I’m the first person he’s ever told. I practically have to clamp my hand over my mouth to stop myself from blurting out that Jean has already checked out of the marriage. Then we come up with a plan for how he’ll tell everyone in his life, and how he’ll cope if their reactions aren’t ideal.
When Christine Peterson shows up, I look out the window to see if pigs are flying.
“Could you please stop making that face?” she says as she sits down, smoothing her khakis.
“What face?”
“Like you’ve just won something.”
“I’m sorry, I’m just surprised,” I say, forcing my lips into a straight line. “Why did you come?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She scowls.
“Come on, Christine. The whole point of this is to open up. I promise I’m not going to tell anyone what you say.” I feel like I’m coaxing a small, scared animal out of a hole.
Using the thumb and pointer finger of her opposite hand, she twirls the diamond on her engagement band around her finger until it makes a full 360-degree turn. “The person who burned down the billboard, why do you think they did it?” she asks.
I shrug. “Probably because they were mad about us being here.”
She purses her lips. “That seems a little obvious, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know why else someone would do it. Do you?”
She keeps twisting the ring around her finger. “Maybe it had nothing to do with the billboard at all.”
I cock my head. “Then what did it have to do with?”
“Oh, probably their own life.”
“What about it?”
At this, she shuts down, her face hardening. “How should I know? Most people are very unhappy, but they don’t have a clue why.” She brings a hand to her neck, suddenly covered in red blotches, then stands up and leaves.
I sit there for a few moments, wondering what the hell just happened. Some kind of confession? Nothing at all? For the rest of the sessions, every time I hear a knock on the door, there’s a part of me that hopes it’s her, returned to finish our conversation. But she never comes back. I tell myself she’s like one of those elusive flowers that only blooms once a century in the middle of the night, and even though I still kind of hate her, at least for a glimmer I think I understood her.
Henry
It’s in the middle of February, when winter feels like some demented Energizer Bunny that just keeps going and going and going, that my wife of twenty-five years leaves me. I’m walking through the mall in Dry Creek, on my way to inspect Panda Express and make sure there’s no longer a pile of dead mice stuck in the grease coagulated behind the deep fryer, when I pass by Victoria’s Secret and see my wife in the front window. Lacy bras spill out of her arms. A tall woman with long black hair and huge eyes stands beside her, holding up a pair of black panties. At first I think, dunce that I am, that my wife has asked a friend to help her pick out something special for our anniversary. But then the woman reaches a hand down to squeeze my wife’s ass and I realize she’s much more than a friend—she’s a lesbian. A carnal grin I’ve never witnessed before spreads across my wife’s face before she swats the lesbian’s hand away and looks around nervously.
I feel like I’m going to puke, and I can’t tell if it’s because of what I’ve just seen or the smell of the fruity tear gas being pumped out from Bath & Body Works next door. I stand there mouth-breathing, trying to decide between marching into Victoria’s Secret and confronting my wife or continuing on to Panda Express and never saying anything, when they emerge from the store carrying two pink-striped bags each. They turn toward the food court, and in a split-second decision I pull up the hood of my jacket, shove my sunglasses on, and follow them.
They walk close together, their heads tilted inward and their arms bare
ly touching. They stop at Orange Julius and order drinks. My wife pays for both. The cashier holds out her change but my wife walks off without noticing, laughing at something the lesbian said. The cashier shrugs and drops the bills into the tip jar. I could be standing right next to them, they’re so oblivious to everything but each other. Still, I keep a safe distance, trailing about twenty feet behind as they exit the mall. When they turn down a row of parked cars and get into my wife’s silver Subaru Outback, I curse that I’m parked in a different lot.
I open and close my mouth for two days, my nerve to confront my wife like a slippery fish in my hands. Then, on the third day, while I’m chopping an onion for dinner, she just walks in and says it. I’m in love with someone. I play dumb and ask who. A woman, she says, someone you don’t know. I tell her I’m not crying, it’s just the damn onion. She does her best to explain, saying it has nothing to do with me, she’s just a lesbian. Always has been, she sees now. Nothing to do with me at all.
* * *
• • •
I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS in the days after she leaves. Did she know when she married me? How long had she been cheating? Was this other woman the first? Had she ever actually desired me? I call her with each question, and at first she’s good about answering them, but then she starts to get fed up. She says that giving me more information will only feed my “fixation.” But there are so many things I still need to know. I call our son Peter instead.
“Yes?” he says, his usual amiable greeting. The clatter of silverware and the din of voices tells me he’s in the dining hall. He’s in his first year at CU Denver, majoring in psychology and driving me into debt.
“Hey, Petey boy,” I say. “How’s school? Hitting the books as hard as you’re hitting the kegs?” I cringe at my stock-dad attempt at conversation, but it’s the first time I’ve talked to Peter without his mom on the other phone. She usually did most of the conversational heavy lifting.
“I’m about to go to class,” he says. “Do you need something?”
“I just wanted to see how things were going, if you need any money for books or anything like that.”
“Nope, I got my books at the beginning of the semester. Which was over a month ago.” Peter is a passive-aggressive master. When he was a kid and we’d tell him he had to finish the food on his plate, he would pull his face into an exaggerated smile and say, “I’d be happy to.”
I drive my knuckles into my forehead. “All right, then. Everything’s good, though?”
“Everything is good.”
“And your mother . . .” She told me she called Peter to break the news about our separation, but I’m not sure how much detail she supplied.
“What about her?”
“You’ve talked to her recently?”
“I know she’s with that woman now, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“Oh, she told you about that.” I clear my throat. “What do you think about it?”
“I don’t know.” He finally sounds like he’s not about to hang up. “It’s kind of weird. Mom, a lesbian?”
“Tell me about it.”
“I guess I knew you guys weren’t happy, but I didn’t know that was why.”
“I didn’t, either,” I say.
“Really? You had no idea? That’s so Jungian.” Over the past year, this has become Peter’s catchphrase. I could sneeze or take out the trash or eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and it would all be so Jungian.
“Right,” I say. “So Jungian. So did Mom ever tell you anything about how she met this woman?”
“I didn’t really want to know the details.”
“Of course,” I say, wishing I didn’t want to know, either, wishing the urge to know wasn’t consuming me. “What about when they met?”
“Oh, I get it.” Peter lets out a short, bitter laugh.
“Get what?”
“Why you called,” he says, the words daggering through the phone. “For a minute there, I thought you actually cared how I was doing.”
“Listen, Peter,” I begin, but he hangs up. I squeeze the phone in my hand. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might be having a hard time, too. I call him back, prepared to ask lots of questions and to listen, but he doesn’t pick up.
I sit on the couch, taking stock of the house. Peter’s backpack no longer sits on the chair next to the door, the kitchen countertops aren’t flecked with flour from my wife’s baking, and a sloping pile of unopened mail colonizes one side of the coffee table. I pick up the most recent Big Burr Herald from the top of the stack and half-heartedly flip past an article about layoffs at the beef plant and a feature on an exhibit of patriotic quilts at the library before pausing on a half-page ad for a winter social at the convention center tomorrow. Different activities are advertised inside giant illustrated snowflakes: a performance by the high school jazz band, pin the nose on the snowman, a pie-eating contest, an indoor obstacle course, and a raffle. Then I see the Acceptance Across America logo at the bottom of the ad, and it dawns on me. There weren’t any gay people in this town before Acceptance Across America showed up, so the lesbian my wife left me for must be with the task force. If I go to this stupid winter social, maybe I can figure out who she is. See what it is about her that made her worth leaving me for.
* * *
• • •
BUT ONCE I’M THERE I don’t see her or my wife anywhere. It’s mainly a bunch of young kids running around shrieking like gremlins, clutching half-eaten sugar cookies in their sweaty little hands. The guy who just won the pie-eating contest is hunched over in a chair, taking deep breaths. As I’m putting my name into the raffle box for a chance to win a new iPod preloaded with music by LGBT artists (which I plan on deleting if I win), I see Gabe Cunningham, one of my poker buddies, at the refreshments table. I haven’t gone to poker night since my wife’s confession. I’m thinking about ducking behind the pin-the-nose-on-the-snowman cutout when Gabe looks over and we make eye contact. Dammit. I reluctantly wave, and he gives me a quick nod—he doesn’t seem overeager to say hello, either, but it would be weird not to, so I walk over. “Hey, man,” I say. “What the hell are you doing here?”
He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “I could ask you the same thing.”
I rummage around my brain for a plausible excuse, then think, Screw it, why the hell not be honest? At this point, what do I have to lose? Besides, it might be nice to talk to someone about it. As you get older and more barricaded by family life, the amount you talk to friends about real things seems to decrease bit by bit until one day it’s all work and the weather and vacations. When my wife and I hadn’t slept together in weeks, then months, when I thought the problem was sex in general and not sex with me specifically, I wondered if any of my male friends were going through the same thing. But if they weren’t, it would be too mortifying to bring up. Sometimes I looked around the table at poker night and wondered what we were all hiding from one another—why we were hiding it. “I haven’t told anyone this yet,” I say. “But my wife recently left me.”
“Oh, man,” Gabe says. “I’m sorry to hear that.” He gives me two rough pats on the shoulder.
“For a woman.”
His eyes widen and he coughs up a piece of the cookie he’s eating.
“Yeah. This is going to sound pathetic, but I thought maybe the woman she left me for would be here and I could ask her all the questions my wife refuses to answer. But neither of them are here, so now I’m just an idiot at a gay winter social.”
He chuckles nervously. “I’m really sorry. You want to, uh, talk about it?”
I shrug. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Did you have any idea?”
“That’s the worst part. Wasn’t on my radar at all. I don’t even know if it was on her radar until recently. Do you think she knew when she married me?”
&
nbsp; “Did you ask her that?”
“Yeah, but she couldn’t really give me a straight answer. Haha, a straight answer.” I make the drum noise that usually follows a bad joke: bud um bum chhhhhhh.
“Well, maybe she doesn’t know the answer, either. Maybe she had an inkling but thought if she married you it’d go away and she could be happy. There’s a lot of denial with these things.” He coughs again. “I mean, that’s what I hear.”
The jazz band starts to warm up, trombones making long downward-sliding notes like farts and the drummer whacking the snare a mile a minute, so we step outside.
“Are you doing okay?” Gabe asks.
“I don’t really know how I’m doing. I was surprised, but now that that’s worn off, I can’t land on a word that feels right. How do you think you’d feel if Jean told you she was in love with a woman?”
“Relieved,” he says, then grimaces. “It would be a relief if she ended it and not me.”
“Oh? I didn’t know things weren’t good between you two.”
“They’re fine,” he says, scowling the word. “I just think we could both be a lot happier if we were with other people.”
* * *
• • •
ON THE WAY home from the social, I drive past the Cinephile and I swear my wife and the lesbian are standing outside, but then a big rig goes by and once it passes they’ve disappeared. Maybe that was how they met. It was pretty much the only place my wife used to go without me, other than work. Ironic name for a theater that gets maybe five movies a month. But for some reason, my wife loved it there. She’d see a movie a week, no matter the plot or the ratings. I’d tell her to have fun, and I’d stay home and watch something on the History Channel.