Love Rules

by Marilyn Reynolds

  When they first moved to our neighborhood, Kit’s dad, David, was a major alcoholic. He and Kit’s mom were always fighting about how much he drank. Jessie actually filed for divorce—told him she’d get sole custody of Kit and he’d pay hell to see her. No court would give visiting rights to a stumbling down drunk. I guess that scared him. He stopped cold. He told Kit he did it for her—he knew she deserved more in a father than one who could only think about the next drink.

  Now they’re like some TV family. Right after he quit drinking, David dragged his guitar out of storage and started playing again. Mostly country stuff, but not bad. Kit often sings with him and they sound pretty good together. She’s got a strong soprano voice, and his is low and rough, so it’s a good contrast. Anyway, things are different than when I first met them.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Finally, when we’ve run out of stupid, shallow stuff to talk about, and it’s so late the traffic noises from Main Street have dwindled, and no one else is stirring around in Kit’s house, we start talking, for real. Kit tells me more about how for a long time she’d suspected she had feelings for women and not for men. I tell her about my hopes that Conan will pay more attention to me.

  “If he does, like if the two of you got together, would it be a big deal that he’s black?”

  “To me it wouldn’t. We’re all just people is the way I see it.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “I don’t think so. She’s not prejudiced.”

  “Your dad?”

  “He’d be all twisted. But I hardly ever see him and when I do he hasn’t a clue about what’s going on with me . . . What about your mom and dad? What if you brought home a girl that you...”

  I can’t finish the sentence.

  “It worries me to think of telling Mom and Dad. They’re so . . . straight. They’ve been through so much . . . I don’t want to hurt them.”

  Kit goes to get us each a Coke and fix another batch of micro­wave popcorn. I stay on the couch, thinking.

  Kit returns with popcorn and drinks and puts them on the coffee table in front of where I’m sitting. Then she sits cross-legged on the floor, directly opposite me.

  “Lynn?”

  I look up from dipping my own individual bowl into the giant popcorn bowl.

  “What?”

  “I had to tell you. I couldn’t stand it any longer, keeping the real me a secret—letting you go on thinking I’m someone I’m not. As for telling anyone else—I’m not brave enough yet.”

  “Maybe you could meet a perfect guy and that would change things.”

  “Believe me. Okay??” she says, annoyed. “I’m as sure of where I stand on the sexuality scale as I am that I have black hair.”

  “But remember what you said earlier, about not being able to know how you’ll feel about things when you’re thirty?”

  “Dogs. We were talking about dogs. It’s not the same. Things won’t change for me. I’ve had a long string of secret crushes on girls—women. I never want anyone of the male persuasion touching me, kissing me. I’m a lesbian and nothing will change that.”

  This is the first time either of us has said the L word out loud.

  “Lesbian sounds so . . . so definite.”

  “That’s what I’m telling you! It’s definite! I am definitely a LESBIAN!”

  I go out to the kitchen. Kit doesn’t follow. I lean against the kitchen counter, my thoughts in a whirl. It’s too much to take in, too sudden. I always thought Kit and I would each find the boy in our senior year. We’d do that double date thing to the prom, and to grad night, and to all that senior stuff that’s supposed to be part of the best years of our lives.

  I get another bag of microwave popcorn and zap it. Then I melt butter in a small Pyrex pitcher. I’m stalling for time. It’s all too intense. I’m not wild about intense. I zip back into the family room and grab the popcorn bowl. Kit’s reading the notes on the “My Dog Skip” video case.

  “Be right back,” I say.

  I empty the bag of popcorn into the bowl, pour butter over it, salt it, and take my time mixing it up.

  Not that I want more to eat. I needed a break.

  Kit and I both pick at the hot, buttery popcorn. Then, without looking at me, she tells me how important I am to her, and how much she wants me to understand the way things are for her.

  “I want to understand. I’m trying,” I say.

  Kit concentrates on eating popcorn. I go to the bathroom. When I come back she says, “Being at Aunt Bernie’s last summer gave me a chance to figure some things out. Like maybe I’m not a freaky pervert after all. Maybe it’s okay to be a lesbian.”

  Then she starts talking about her Aunt Bernie.

  “She’s totally different from my mom—more relaxed or something. You know how Mom always worries about what other people think.”

  “That’s just being a mom,” I say.

  “I guess. But Bernie isn’t into all that stuff about how people should act, and look, and think. She says she’s a free spirit. My dad says she’s a nutcase whacko. He smiles when he says it, but he’s only half kidding.”

  “Why did he let you spend the summer with her, if he thinks she’s a whacko?”

  “He only half thinks she’s a whacko. She wanted me to work in her bookstore. One thing my dad really wants me to know is the value of hard work. You know him, ‘By the time I was sixteen I was working a forty-hour week.’” She stands, imitating her father, thumbs hooked through her belt loops, rocking back on her heels. ‘“I helped support my family, kept up with my schoolwork, rode my bicycle twenty miles a day between home and school and work. Not one of those fancy high tech bikes, either. Mine had one gear—muscle gear. Kids today don’t realize how easy they have it . . .’”

  Kit’s imitation is perfect.

  “Your dad’s pretty nice, though.”

  “Yeah. He’s cool. I get tired of the old hardship story is all.”

  “My dad does the hardship thing, too, but he doesn’t have all the redeeming qualities your dad does.”

  “Twenty miles a day on his bicycle? Work, supporting the family . . .”

  “No, but he tells me ‘you don’t know how lucky you are to have this computer. When I was in high school I had to do all my work by hand. Term papers? I didn’t even have a typewriter, much less a computer.’”

  We laugh.

  “So anyway, Aunt Bernie promised she would work my fingers to the bone, keep my nose to the grindstone, my shoulder to the wheel, every work cliché you can think of. So she convinced Dad I should go. Mom goes along with whatever Dad says. It’s like she has no opinions of her own.”

  “She sure used to have opinions,” I say, thinking about the time she changed the locks on their doors.

  “She had opinions when Dad was drinking. Now that he’s quit, they never, ever argue. Aunt Bernie says my mom’s whipped.”

  “Whipped?”

  “You know. Not physically, but like she’s totally ruled by my dad. I think she’s afraid to ever upset him.”

  After more popcorn munching, and the distraction of Jay Leno, Kit gets back to the subject of her summer away.

  “Aunt Bernie’s world is so not Hamilton Heights.”

  “In what way?”

  “Lots of ways.”

  “For instance.”

  “Okay. For instance. The first Sunday I was there, Aunt Bernie took me to church. I was expecting dull. Instead, the place was alive with people of all shapes, sizes and colors, singing and swaying and dancing in the aisle. There was a big celebration of the wisdom of Native Americans, and the sacredness of earth and sky. There were dances and drums and chants, and a lot of stuff I didn’t understand, but it was awesome. The Cherokee part of me liked it a lot.”

  “Did they have any of the regular stuff, like a sermon and choir and that little wafer and grape juice thing?”

  “It’s hard to compare. Everyone sang. There was bread and wine out in a big patio area,
and I guess there was a sermon, sort of.”

  “What did he talk about?”

  “She.”

  “Okay. She.”

  “Liberty and justice for all.”

  “She talked about the Pledge of Allegiance?”

  “Just the liberty and justice part of it. She said it was a far off goal, not a reality. Then she went on about all of the people in this country who don’t have liberty and don’t get justice. So I guess it was a sermon.”

  “But we have more liberty and justice here than anywhere else.”

  “Maybe,” she says. “But now that I’m thinking about it, I’m not so sure.”

  I can feel my mind wanting to take a little trip out of here about now. I try to focus.

  “What does this have to do with . . . you know . . . liking girls?”

  “Nothing. But spending the summer with Bernie, going to her church, working in her bookstore, meeting so many different kinds of people—I started thinking maybe my own differences weren’t so bad. Maybe I’m not scum.”

  “Do you think being in San Francisco turned you into a lesbian?”

  “Nothing turned me into a lesbian. I just am a lesbian!”

  “You don’t have to get all hostile about it!”

  “I’m not hostile! I’m trying to tell you this is me! Your lifetime spirit sister! I didn’t just turn into a lesbian, any more than you just turned straight. You are straight. I am lesbian. That’s how it is! Believe it!”

  “Calm down,” I say. “You’ll wake up your parents.”

  “It’s you I’m trying to wake up! Wake up, Lynn,” she says in a sing-songy voice, like she’s waking a child. “Look at the pretty rainbow. It takes all kinds to make the world.”

  I take a deep breath and count to ten. What I want to do is grab my backpack and run home, where things are safe and predictable. Where I don’t have to be taunted about waking up.

  “Sorry,” Kit says, probably doing that mind reading thing again. I run my index finger across the bottom of the emptied popcorn bowl, collecting butter and salt, licking my finger, then repeat the action, making finger designs in broad curves.

  “I’ve felt like such a poser, trying to fit in but knowing in my heart that I was way different. I had a million questions, and I didn’t know where to turn for answers. I could hardly raise my hand in class and ask ‘What if I’m only turned on by women?’. . . And that phony little sex ed class we had in the ninth grade—it was like there was no such thing as homosexuality. Male penis into female vagina—that’s it.”

  I move my greasy finger patterns up the sides of the bowl. Maybe I’m an artist, a popcorn bowl artist. I’ll set the completed project with a quick drying clear plastic spray. When I get my designs in thirty bowls of different sizes and shapes. I’ll have a gallery showing. Lynn Wright, Popcorn Bowl Artist . . .

  “Are you even listening?” Kit asks.

  I drag my finger slowly from one side of the bowl to the other, intersecting my first designs.

  “Every word,” I say. “Male penis into female vagina. That’s how we all got here, right? What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with that, for you, and the hetero majority. But what about the rest of us?”

  Halfway through another swipe across the bowl, Kit grabs it from me and sets it out of reach.

  “Lynn. Listen. What about the rest of us?”

  I lick the remaining butter and salt from my finger.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’re left in the dark, trying to figure it all out, each in our own lonely way. It’s so hard.”

  I look at my friend, her sad eyes, her somber demeanor. Why have I never given much thought to Kit’s frequent times of quiet withdrawal? Kit’s in one of her moods, I would think, irritated, and wait for the mood to pass, rather than try to understand.

  “Remember those two women who were camping at Triple Pines when we were up there for volleyball camp?”

  I shake my head.

  “Sophomores. Volleyball camp,” she prompts.

  “I remember the camp.”

  “Those two women. They were on the other side of the lake. They brought some fish over to us. Coach Terry fried it over the campfire. You remember them.”

  “I remember frying the fish over the campfire. I don’t remember the women.”

  “Both blondes. One was short and heavy and the other one was kind of wiry.”

  “Uh, uh.”

  She gives me a look, like I’ve forgotten the President of the United States stopped by camp.

  “I’m supposed to remember two women I saw for five minutes more than two years ago?”

  Kit sighs. “Well, anyway . . . I watched them row back across the lake. They were side by side on the seat, each with one of the oars. And they moved their oars in perfect unison. They were laughing. Something about them made me think . . .”

  “Think what?”

  “I’m not sure. I just was . . . I don’t know . . . drawn to them. Later, while you had kitchen duty, I took the path around the lake. About halfway around, I saw smoke from a campfire. I walked closer, then stopped at a place where I was partly hidden by trees. I hadn’t planned to spy, but . . . They were sitting close in front of the campfire with their arms around each other. One of them said something and the other laughed. They began kissing, lightly at first and then more intensely. The shorter one unbuttoned her shirt, and the other leaned down and . . .”

  Pause.

  “And what?”

  “ . . . and kissed her breast. I turned away, desperately wanting to watch but at the same time, afraid. My whole body was warm and trembly. My breasts felt full and there was a sort of feverish feeling . . . you know . . .”

  Pause.

  “Downstairs?” I ask.

  We laugh. Really, we cackle.

  “Yeah!” Kit says, gasping for air. “Downstairs!”

  We howl, wiping tears from our eyes. I laugh so hard I have to make a mad dash for the bathroom, my laughter-strained bladder about to betray me.

  When I come back out, Kit is sitting quietly, that look of sad contemplation again showing through her dark Cherokee eyes.

  “I took my time walking back to camp that night, breathing the cool air, willing my body to calm down. But with each step I took, I thought, I want that someday. I want what those two women have. That’s what I want for me.”

  Kit tells me how glad she was to finally know what she wanted, but it scared her, too. She started spending a lot of time at the public library, for information about homosexuality and lesbianism.

  “I was hungry for information. At the market checkout stands there’s all this boy-girl teen magazine stuff. How to act, what to wear, what to say, pictures of all kinds of couples, except boy-boy, or girl-girl. How could I find out about freaks like me?”

  “Don’t say freak,” I tell her. “It’s worse than weird.”

  “That’s how it felt, though, inside. Like I was a stranger than fiction freak . . . Like something out of your mom’s pile of old World Weekly News. Or worse.

  “It didn’t help that I was always hearing ‘Oh, he’s such a fag,’ or ‘She’s a lesbo,’ like that was the worst thing anyone could say about another person.”

  “When did you hear that?”

  “All the time. You can’t walk down the halls, or sit in a classroom, without hearing stuff like that. Or, ‘That’s so gay.”’

  “Really? I don’t hear that.”

  “You’re not listening. It doesn’t affect you, so it’s like it’s not even happening.”

  “You hear it all the time?” I say.

  “All the time,” Kit says. “But anyway, I hung out in libraries, hoping to read something about people like me. I couldn’t find anything in our school library. Besides, with you working there

  after school, I didn’t want you to see me looking for homo stuff.”

  “You could have said you were working on a report.”

  “Right.
And lie. I was sick of living a lie—get it?”

  I reach for the popcorn bowl, wanting to add a few finishing touches to my work of art. Kit gives me a look, but keeps talking.

  “There wasn’t much in the Hamilton Heights Public Library, either, and there was one librarian who seemed always to be watching as I browsed through the sex section. I decided to try a bigger library, in a place where no one would know me. Remember how I was always taking the bus to the Pasadena Library?”

  “I thought you had a lot of homework is all.”

  Kit laughs. “I had homework, all right—the most important assignment of my life, trying to learn about others like me, trying to figure out if life as a lesbian was even worth it.”

  I look at her hard, trying to read her expression. What if she’d read something that made her think life as a lesbian was not worth it? She turns her head away, avoiding my eyes.

  “I stumbled onto a few things, a couple of novels with lesbian main characters, and a book titled Our Bodies, Ourselves, which included stuff about lesbians like it was a normal thing.”

  “Normal?”

  “Well, you know, like an everyday thing anyway. Besides, who decides what’s normal? I think that’s why I’ve always been so interested in psychology. I was afraid I was some kind of freak, and I wanted to understand about all that normal/abnormal stuff.”

  A close look at the popcorn bowl reveals it’s not such a work of art after all. I take it to the kitchen and rinse it out. Kit follows, still talking.

  It’s as if now that she’s started talking about knowing she’s a lesbian, and now that I’ve started listening, she can’t stop. The flood gates have opened, and the previously hidden part of her life comes pouring out.

  “This summer, in my aunt’s bookstore, I found lots and lots of books of the kind I’d been wanting to read. She has a whole section devoted to lesbian literature, and another whole non-fiction section devoted to homosexuality. When I started reading them, I wasn’t quite so lonely anymore. There are lots of us in the world, living good, loving lives, doing important work. And the other thing about the bookstore—I had the chance to see people who came in and bought books from my sections.”