by Ilana Masad
“But . . .” Maggie’s face feels very hot and very red. She blinks hard. “She was so straight.” She feels the tears coming to her eyes.
“I’m a man,” Liam says. “So yes, she was. Is. Was. Fuck.”
“No, I know—” Maggie realizes what she’s implied and she’s angry at herself, but she’s drunk, and she’s trying to convey something quite else, something that isn’t about Iris at all, or not really, no, yes, it’s about Iris, but not about Liam, really. It’s about this, this . . . This sudden entrance of her mother into this space Maggie didn’t know she could occupy. All these years, Maggie submerging herself in queer culture, hanging out in bars with other lesbians, with nonbinary pan folx and radical faeries, with trans men and women, queer bois and womyn, people in drag of all genders. These have been her people, their spaces welcoming to her, and she took them in like a drought-stricken land thirsting for a refreshing storm. Among them, she learned to be herself. To be entirely who she is, not only as a lesbian but also as a person with a dyke aesthetic and wandering eyes and a rowdy libido and a queer sense of humor and a love of camp.
All these years, this has also been a space that her mother couldn’t take from her, no matter how much she sneered at Maggie’s clothes, rolled her eyes at Maggie’s rants. Many of her friends’ parents don’t accept them, to different degrees—some, like Iris, just never really talk to their kids about any of it and pretend they’re straight; others kick their kids out and cut them off; some call only at Christmas and ask leading and disturbing questions about HIV and AIDS, not that they usually know the difference. Lucia, as far as Maggie knows, is one of the shockingly lucky ones, with parents who adore her and who want to meet Maggie. If she has the guts for it. The plan is for her and Lucia to take time off together at some point and visit Puerto Rico, where her parents moved a few years ago when they retired.
Maggie’s thoughts run together as she tries to explain again. “No, it’s not that she’s—it’s not that you’re not—I mean, what I’m saying is—me, she never accepted me.”
And this is the last thing that Maggie remembers that night.
She is lucky, in the morning, that she doesn’t remember how she sobbed loudly for a solid thirty minutes, using an entire roll of toilet paper of Liam’s—who tells her he isn’t the kind of guy who has tissues lying around, because he thinks it’s stupid to have two paper products that do the same thing, basically. She doesn’t remember telling him about coming out to Iris when she was seventeen, how Iris’s face had become cold, how Peter came in after to ask Maggie how it went and Maggie said she wished she were dead, and then said no, she wished Iris were dead. She’d known Peter would be supportive, and she’d known, instinctively, that Iris wouldn’t. She doesn’t remember telling Liam that it wasn’t fair, that her mother cared more about a man she wanted to fuck than about her own kid; that she should have told Maggie about him, about this; that she was a hypocrite, and that Maggie is glad she’s dead, she’s glad, she’s glad, she’s so, so, so sad. She doesn’t remember how she cried so long and so hard that she began coughing, which turned into serious gagging, which became full-on vomiting very soon, though luckily Liam managed to get her into the bathroom and over the toilet. She doesn’t remember how he made her drink three glasses of water, how she threw up again after the second, how he got her to take an aspirin with the third glass, just like Lucia does, just like Iris tried to do for him the night before they broke up, Liam told her, but she doesn’t remember that. Or how he got her into bed, and how she asked him, “Why, why, why couldn’t she give me one of the rings, why just this stupid necklace?” and how she tried to rip it off her neck, and how he pried open her hand and unclasped the necklace and told her it must have been very, very special to her mother because she gave it to Maggie. She doesn’t remember how she then began a barely intelligible tangent, though it was crystal clear in her mind at the time, about how she shouldn’t care about the rings because it implies that marriage is the only thing queers want when that’s the least of their troubles at this point and that the right to marry is an antiquated bourgeois and/or religious institution that doesn’t even matter and, and, and . . . But Maggie doesn’t remember any of this the next day, and never will.
* * *
• • •
SHE HAS A headache when she wakes up, but it isn’t as bad as it could be, for which she’s grateful, but her mouth does feel like a sock. The last thing Maggie remembers is beginning to cry. When she got to Liam’s apartment yesterday, she started snooping. And there in the medicine cabinet she found the patches, and she stared at them for a long moment, and thought, Surely not, and then, though she knew she really shouldn’t because it was an incredible invasion of privacy, the kind that she would have railed against if she’d heard of anyone else doing it, she went into his room. The door was open, the bed was unmade and messy. There was an empty beer bottle on the nightstand and a big TV across from it. And below the TV, right on the dresser, was a pinkish-beige thing. At first, Maggie didn’t register it as what it was—she thought, oh, rolled-up pantyhose? But no, it was one of Liam’s penises. She found a few others, in varying shapes and sizes, in the bottom drawer of the dresser, but the one that was out seemed to match his skin tone and was, she supposed, his garden-variety dick.
A person Maggie had dated briefly in college wasn’t actually a woman though he hadn’t known how to articulate this at the time, and when Gavin had come out as trans the year after they graduated, Maggie had reached out to him. They’d rekindled a friendship until he moved to upstate New York for graduate school, but for a while they were close, and Maggie had learned far more from him than she ever could from the various articles online that he’d sent her. Not because he’d explained things to her, but just being around him and listening to his daily concerns had illuminated his world for her. The ways he wanted to pass and yet felt conflicted about this desire. The way he cried after wrangling with bureaucracy where he was constantly being misgendered, the exhaustion of correcting or deciding not to. The anger he felt at still getting his period, impatient at how slowly hormone replacement therapy was working, and how his skin kept getting ashy though his doctors said that wasn’t a usual side effect. She helped him rub shea butter on his elbows and knees some days. It was one of those intimate, extremely intense friendships that fizzled out when they were no longer in the same space. She misses Gavin, she realizes, staring at Liam’s ceiling and trying to muster the courage to get up. He sent her a message after her announcement about Iris but she hasn’t opened it yet. She should.
A metallic clatter alerts her that Liam must be awake. She pulls her head up from the pillow to see.
“Coffee?” he asks, picking up the top half of a French press from the floor.
“Yes, please,” Maggie says, and her voice is so scratchy she doesn’t recognize it. “Whoa.”
“Yeah. You gave your throat a workout last night,” he says. After a pause in which Maggie is momentarily horrified he adds, “Fuck, that sounded awful. I meant you puked. A lot.”
“Oh.” Maggie gets into a seated position on the bed and that’s when the real headache kicks in, like a horse has just hoofed her. “Oooh,” she moans.
“Here.” Liam gives her a glass of water. “Maybe you should nap a little more.”
“Okay,” Maggie says, and she falls back into the pillow.
* * *
• • •
A COUPLE OF hours later, she wakes up again, this time starving. The first thing she registers is a lingering smell of toast. It’s one of her favorite scents—like bread baking, but with a hint of bonfire.
She gets up, and this time she has the sense to feel ashamed of her behavior. She’s not sure precisely what she said or did last night but she knows that she confronted Liam, and she knows that he took it well enough that he didn’t kick her out of his apartment. Which he was fully within his rights to do.
; He’s sitting at the kitchen table, immersed in something on his phone. He has reading glasses perched on his nose that make him look older, and kindly.
“Thank you,” Maggie says.
“Yeah,” he says. “Want that coffee now? Eggs?”
“Sure, thanks.”
They’re silent for a while as he pours the cold coffee into a mug and puts it in the microwave to reheat, and then quickly cooks her some scrambled eggs and puts in another two slices of bread to toast. Maggie tries to picture her mother here, if Liam lived here back when they were involved. She realizes that Iris may well have been penetrated with the cock she saw last night. The idea is icky, because she doesn’t want to think of Iris in the throes of passion—does anyone want to think of their parents that way?—but at the same time, there’s something sweet about it. A bridge, a place where her mother experienced something that Maggie has too—even if that thing is a silicone dildo.
“Eat, but not too fast. Chew your food,” he says, and Maggie laughs. “What?” he asks.
“Nothing, you just . . .” She reaches for the fork he hands her and touches the tines with her fingers for a moment. “You sounded like a Jewish mother there.”
“Like your mom,” he says, sitting. Maggie nods. “Okay. So. What do you want to know?” Liam’s butt slides down his seat and he interlaces his fingers behind his head and puts his bare feet up on the side of the kitchen table farthest from Maggie, like Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. “I’m an open book now. Ask me anything, as you kids say on Reddit.” He raises his eyebrows. He’s so dashing, Maggie thinks, and can easily see her mother liking him. Iris always loved being in control, after all, and when someone questioned her sense of it or poked a hole in it, she’d bristle, unless there was enough roguish charm involved—at least, this is the dynamic Maggie remembers watching as a child, when her mother still occasionally took her to work. She loved watching her mother in that professional space, where she stopped being Mom and became a person to whom men in suits said, You must be Iris Krause, you come highly recommended. It was clear to Maggie who was setting the terms in those meetings—unless, that is, something about the client surprised Iris or charmed her, which seemed to happen rarely.
Liam clearly has the gruff charm thing in spades. Maggie herself has always tried to have that same swagger—maybe for more Freudian reasons than she’s realized—but she was never able to turn it on Iris. She always got too angry, too hurt, when she and Iris disagreed.
She lets this thought sit as she piles her eggs on the buttered toast, and then asks, “What changed between when you blew me off and when you invited me to stay?”
“Duh,” he says. “I read the letter.”
“And?”
“And . . . And Iris put to bed, no innuendo intended, a few concerns that I had when we stopped seeing one another.” He doesn’t explain further, and Maggie isn’t sure how far she should push, despite his earlier claim.
“Okay,” she says. “So what happened between you? I mean, really.”
“What, you want a play-by-play?”
“No, just like, how did you meet? How did you start . . . dating, or whatever it was? How did she explain the fact that she was cheating on my dad and us? See,” she says, before he can start, “this is what I don’t get. I don’t get how she could have done all this and still claimed to love my dad, to love me and my brother. It just . . .”
Liam takes a deep breath. “Hey,” he says. “She loved you all. I know she did, because she left me. She left so that she could be in your lives, not leave yours for mine.” And then he tells her the rest. How they met at a casino when she was in Vegas for work. Of course, Maggie thinks. And he tells her how he winked at her, because she had a certain something to her. “A classiness,” he says, and shakes his head. “No, I don’t know what that fucking means, that’s a set of ambiguous and probably classist fucking abstracts.” Anyway, something drew him to her, maybe just plain old chemistry, and he slipped her his card when he dealt her a hand. She didn’t call, but she came back again the next night, and they talked. They went to a bar after Liam finished his shift, and they talked all night, arguing mostly.
He pauses. “What was the next question?”
“What did she say about us?” Maggie asks, and she realizes that yes, this is what she really wants to know most.
“Not much.” Liam shrugs. “I’m sorry, kid, but she said she didn’t want to talk about her family. She told me she was married, but that I shouldn’t take that into consideration, and she said that she had two children, that they were grown-ups, basically. Once we started getting serious, I told her that I felt that things were uneven. That if she was going to have such a private part of her life, then I was going to have to be allowed to as well.”
“So you slept around,” Maggie interprets.
He shrugs again. “Look, it was a long-distance relationship. It was complicated. And she had another life, so I got back to mine too.”
“Jesus . . . Are all old people horndogs?”
Liam laughs, a bit grimly. “Old,” he says. “I’m considered old.”
They’re silent again, until Maggie asks what she’s been wanting to ask since last night but hasn’t been able to put into words yet. “So did . . . did my mom end up liking pussy?” This is the closest she can come to what she actually wants to ask, which is, Why didn’t she understand me?
“Oy vey,” Liam says. He laughs. “Iris used to say that a lot. ‘Oy vey.’”
Maggie murmurs her assent and waits. Her eyes feel odd in her head, dry and too large, staring intently at Liam’s face. She can imagine them popping out and hovering right in front of his, trying to read something in his expression that probably isn’t there.
Liam sighs and takes his feet off the table. He scratches the sides of his head and mutters, “Should get a haircut . . .” And when he looks up at her, his eyes are moist. “No,” he says. “At least, not as far as I know. And I was okay with that. I liked pussy enough for the both of us. Look, Maggie . . .” He leans forward, and something sizzles in the air between them, something Maggie recognizes from the spaces that have always welcomed her, from the people who have always felt like her people. Something like understanding, like empathy. “I don’t feel comfortable telling you intimacies of our sex life, frankly. It’s too weird. But your mother saw me as a man. She knew I was trans, but she didn’t ask me a lot about it. She thought I didn’t want to talk about it, that I wanted to be cis. She thought that by barely acknowledging that I wasn’t, she was letting me be who I truly was without . . . What was it?” He reaches back toward the counter. Maggie hasn’t noticed that the letter has been there all this time. He grabs it by the corner, then unfolds the crumpled pages and skims them. “Here it is. ‘I thought that my silence on the topic allowed you to be who you were without interrogation.’” He keeps reading to himself for a moment and then appears to remember that Maggie is still there. “It’s a nice sentiment,” he says. “Shame she never voiced it. Maybe we wouldn’t have ended at all.”
“Really?” Maggie is taken aback. Was there an alternate universe in which Iris was living a carefree lifestyle as the partner of a Vegas blackjack dealer?
“No, she would have left me anyway,” Liam says. He shakes his body like a dog drying itself from a plunge in brackish waters. “I shouldn’t dwell. She says in the letter that she couldn’t risk her home life any more than she already had.”
So she knew, Maggie thinks, and something in her loosens a bit, just enough to be able to keep bearing this. Iris knew that she was risking something here. She cared enough to say that.
Liam tosses the letter back to the table. “So. Like I said—she loved all of you. Anyway,” he smiles, not entirely convincingly. “Any other questions?”
Maggie thinks. She wants to ask him what Iris was like, as if they’ve never met before. But would she recognize the w
oman Liam might describe or would it only make her feel farther away, more unknowable? But no, there’s one more thing. “Wait, when did you say you started getting serious?”
“Hmm. We met in the spring of 2014 . . . So probably the fall of that year?”
That sounds about right. In recent years, Maggie has to admit that Iris had let go of some of her overt judgment. She seemed to have been trying harder with Maggie—she asked about her dating life and refrained from asking about whether Maggie might still find the right man one day. Gender and sexuality aren’t the same thing, and aren’t always tied together, Maggie knows. But Iris might not have understood this, and it makes sense to Maggie that being with Liam could have broadened Iris’s outlook a bit.
It wasn’t enough, though, and what loosened in Maggie just moments ago becomes heavy, a sinking stone of sadness. Iris being less homophobic didn’t mean Iris being supportive. Like Liam said, if Iris had voiced her understanding, or trying to, if she had told Maggie this directly, maybe things would have been different. And now it’s too late, Maggie thinks. Iris had never told her about the men, so she couldn’t have told her about Liam, so she couldn’t have told Maggie why she was having a change of heart, so she just didn’t. She tried, Maggie supposes, to be subtle about it. But after years of unsubtle dislike of Maggie’s gayness, it didn’t register, not enough for Maggie to open up.
“Thanks,” she finally says. “I guess I should get going, then.” Her eggs are only half-eaten, since she lost her appetite sometime during their conversation and forgot all about them.
“Are you sure?” Liam asks, and she nods. “For what it’s worth,” he says, and hesitates. “Look, she didn’t talk about you often, but she’d occasionally tell me something she learned from you. So whether or not it seemed that way, I think she was listening, at least sometimes.”