The Fixed Stars

by Molly Wizenberg

  She would be four soon. For nearly four years I had fed her and clothed her and read to her and bathed her and told her I loved her, and at bedtime I always sang “Twinkle, Twinkle” twice, the house rule. It took juggling to date Nora while being a mother and a wife. Was I doing it well enough? Was I a bad mother? My skull buzzed like a radio between stations. I find it difficult now to recall the individual days of that spring; their residue is mostly a feeling. I was happy.

  What does one “owe” to one’s children? What does it mean to have their best interests in mind? What does that look like? When I put my mouth on Nora’s mouth, I did not look like someone who had her child’s best interests in mind. I was not a parent in that particular moment. But when I put my mouth on Nora’s mouth, I felt like me, a fully fleshed me. When I went home to June, that’s the mother I brought to her.

  What is a mother? To a newborn baby, its primary caregiver—usually its mother—is everything. She is food, shelter, life. A mother is so fully adapted to her infant’s needs, explains British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, that the child imagines its mother’s breast to be a part of itself. This is an illusion, of course, and it can’t last. It also should not last, according to Winnicott. A child’s sense of self depends not upon it having a perfect mother but a “good-enough mother.”21 Winnicott’s good-enough mother is one who slowly retreats, who adapts less and less completely to her infant as the child matures and becomes able to handle frustration and disappointment. Our mothers’ failure to meet our every need teaches us a crucial lesson: that our mother is a separate, finite entity, and that there’s a difference between me and not-me. From her “failure,” Winnicott argues, we form our first sense of self.

  Winnicott articulated this idea more than half a century ago, but we’re still wrestling with the image of the perfect mother—as though she existed, as though she should exist. I want to be a perfect mother to June, though my sense of what that means changes almost constantly, as my child changes. If not a perfect mother, I want at least to be good. I want more than to do no harm; I want to know that I have been a good mother by some codified, seal-of-approval standard, even though I know that the good mother June needs almost certainly looks different from someone else’s. I want to be a good mother, though probably not even my child and I could agree on what that means.

  I keep coming back to one thing: June belongs to me, in the sense that her body came from my body, in the sense that her care is my responsibility. But I do not own her. She’s always been herself, only June, from her first cries and grunts. My work is to love her, guide her, and support her—no more and no less—as she becomes ever more real, more June. In this sense, I too belong to her. But she does not own me. I too am real. Surely I cannot be her mother if I am not also myself.

  The last day of May, Nora sends me a text. She’s in my part of town; how about she stops by? It’s such a nice day. I close the laptop. Brandon’s at the restaurant. Nora is on the stoop with a spray of tea roses. We drop onto the sofa and make out for a while. We’ve been dating for five weeks. Lying beneath her, I rub the collar of her white button-down between my thumb and index finger. I tell her I’m falling in love with her. She smiles, bashful. I can tell she isn’t ready to say it, but I know well enough how she feels. Over on the table my phone rings, and I let it. A few minutes later, it rings again. Maybe ten minutes and then it rings again, a third time. I should get it. Nora sits up, and I roll off the couch. The caller’s name is lit up: it’s the school. It’s 3:47. I was supposed to pick up June at three.

  I’ve been in a meeting, I stammer, choking back a sob. Oh god, I’m so sorry! I lost track of time.

  June is fine, says her teacher. No worries! She’s in the aftercare room. Come when you can.

  June is fine, but I am not. I’m so far from fine that I’ll lie to Brandon about it that night, tell him I was reading on the sofa and fell asleep, didn’t wake up until the phone rang.

  Before I spent a night at Nora’s, Brandon and I set parameters: what time I’d go, when I’d be back, what to tell June. I’d been away from her for work trips and a couple of family things, so we decided to keep it simple, tell her this was like that. I’d be back first thing in the morning. We consoled her with a special treat, something my parents had let me do when I was a kid and one of them was traveling: June could have a “slumber party” with Brandon in our bed.

  It was disorienting at Nora’s, sleeping in my city but in someone else’s bed. Sleep was halting. It couldn’t possibly be okay to be here. I was sure I’d be in trouble somehow. I wanted to be in Nora’s bed, wanted to be drunk on her, wanted to feel the way I had in the coffee shop, when she told me she’d had a crush on me too and I almost passed out at the sound of it. Instead I lay in her bed, across town from our bed, where June sleepwalked her small, meaty, sweet-smelling feet across Brandon’s back, and I felt like I was cleaving in two.

  Brandon and I had committed ourselves to empathy and clear communication. But our efforts at talking often devolved into yelling. The arrangement was still new, but these didn’t feel like growing pains. It felt like we were falling apart.

  Brandon had been on some dates. He’d kissed someone. I knew he loved me and I loved him, and I wanted him to have a good time. But he was more conflicted, caught up in how odd it felt to be with someone else. We’d told a handful of friends about our open relationship, but we both fretted about being seen. The restaurant industry is small and close-knit: Where could we go in this town without running into someone? I wished I felt proud, maybe even indignant—this is normal, what’s the fuss, etc.—but mostly I felt sheepish.

  Taking a stab at transparency, we told the manager at Delancey what we were up to, in case she heard whispers. A couple of weeks later, having fielded a torrent of gossip, she advised us to tell the entire staff. In a surreal scene, we assembled our employees in the Delancey dining room and, after outlining a new policy on paid leave, I formally announced our open marriage.

  We’d tried to convince ourselves that our marriage was strong enough, loving enough, flexible enough to accommodate the stretch we asked of it. Something about me had changed, but people are always changing, aren’t they? Just look at Brandon: when we met, he was going to be a music professor, and now he was a chef with three restaurants. We’d changed. So what? What we were doing was natural, no more ill-considered than monogamy. But it almost never felt that way. Most days I wanted to puke. I watched Brandon try not to worry as I set off to see Nora. We were terrified. He could admit it before I could, because I was busy falling in love.

  I remember sitting next to him on the sofa in our living room, the sofa where I’d made out with Nora. He’d come home for lunch, and we had a date to talk. Outside the window the sky was clear and unflinching, the color of a blue raspberry popsicle.

  I think I’m falling in love with her, I said. The refrigerator motor gurgled. I didn’t mean to, I added. I know that doesn’t help, but it’s true.

  He was silent. A couch spring squeaked. I wanted to see what his face looked like, but I was afraid to turn my head.

  It doesn’t have to change anything, I said, not sure if I believed it.

  We’d always been ourselves, hadn’t we? We’d been like this for a long time. We were discrete bodies, separate stars, but from the right vantage point, we’d aligned. We were a shape that made sense. We’d made a home for ourselves next to each other. But we’d never stood still, not really. We were always gliding, gradually, steadily, on our own trajectories.

  “It is curious to me that people take straight lines for granted,” writes Anne Truitt. “We never see them unless we make them ourselves; even the apparently straight horizon of the ocean against the sky curves if we see it from the air.”22

  Truitt had been contemplating Orion’s Belt, three stars that appear, from our planet, to form a straight line. The configuration we call Orion is arbitrary, an artifact of our observation, as man-made as myth. When we speak its nam
e, we point to a story. The ancient Greeks say he was one of Poseidon’s sons, a great hunter, placed in the celestial sphere opposite the scorpion that killed him. In the winter Orion stalks the sky, massive and bright. When Scorpius rises in summer, he flees.

  Outside of our minds, the stars we assign to a constellation bear no particular relationship to each other. Each star has the potential to be connect-the-dotted to any number of other stars. We may not see those shapes from here, but they are no less real.

  I had lived in our constellation for some time, within the shape of the family we made. Three stars connected like fact: me, Brandon, our child. I navigated by the light of our hunter. Now I couldn’t say what was more important: Orion’s steadfast presence in our sky, or to speak the shape for what it is—a formation we made from our own stories, both true and subject to revision.

  14

  When my father died, a family friend gave me a copy of Donald Hall’s Without, a collection of poems written after the death of his wife of twenty-three years, the poet Jane Kenyon. “Letter in Autumn” flattened me: the image of Hall cleaning out Kenyon’s car to sell it, making an inventory of his grief in the form of her hair ties, cassette tapes, and a tin of saved fortune-cookie fortunes. I wanted to know more about old love. I wanted to know how people become lodestars to one another. I wanted to feel the slow burn of it.

  The summer of Nora, I read somewhere about Our World, a book of photographs by the late Molly Malone Cook, with prose and poems by Cook’s longtime partner, the poet Mary Oliver. I ordered it online and read it in one go, and when I looked up, I was crying. In all the years that Oliver and Cook were a couple, they were rarely apart, not even when Oliver traveled to teach. Cook would come along, and they’d make a home wherever they were.

  “We were talkers—about our work, our pasts, our friends, our ideas ordinary and far-fetched,” writes Oliver. “We would often wake before there was light in the sky and make coffee and let our minds rattle our tongues. . . . It was a forty-year conversation.”23

  My own longtime partnership looked nothing like this. Brandon and I were frequently apart, and the hours we were together were mostly spent sleeping. On the face of it, I knew this wasn’t unusual: it’s the experience of many couples who work full-time. But Brandon and I rarely woke at the same hour, and I was often asleep when he got home. Because of the restaurant schedule, we’d never had it any different, not since our earliest weeks of marriage. I’d had wild newlywed fantasies of nights at home, watching Jeopardy!, but that wasn’t us. We didn’t sit still much. We didn’t get into bed early and read. We rarely talked beyond the businesses, and later, beyond June. It mostly worked, in that neither of us was suffering. I thought I was fine. I thought, Well, these are the realities of adulthood, and I wasn’t wrong.

  That summer I started to keep a journal. I want a simpler life, I wrote. I want to wake up with someone and drink coffee together. I want to take June to school and come home to my desk. I want to write again. I want to cook and eat a meal every night with the person I love. I want to lie around and read the Sunday Times. I want to climb the ladder to the roof and watch the sun go down. I want to live as a family.

  For weeks, all we do is argue. In this new iteration of our marriage, an inverse proportion has been established: the happier I am, the worse off he is.

  He can’t get over my falling in love. At first, I am contrite: I know I did exactly what neither of us wanted me to do. He is allowed to dislike this situation, even to refuse to live with it. I’ve scared us both.

  But as I struggle to reassure him, I am also thinking this: that my falling in love with another person has no real bearing, not forcibly, on our marriage. Remember, I say, we can write the rules here! It’s complicated, I know, but my love is not a fixed quantity. I have enough to go around. Please believe me.

  15

  I liked my body with Nora’s body. I had liked my body with a man’s body too. But a flinty confidence radiated from the fact of her being a woman: I know what it’s like to have these parts, her body said, and how it feels.

  “When I am with her,” writes Minnie Bruce Pratt, “I have no idea what sex I am or what gender, whose body I have or the meaning of my gestures.”24 I looked at my body as though I’d never seen it before. When Nora told me I was beautiful, I took it in and kept it close, like a picture in a locket. Had I not believed this when others had said it? The syntax seemed different. It made more sense.

  The first time we’d had sex I circled the date in my calendar, then starred it for emphasis. Has anyone ever been so eager? I had a new range of motion, and I wanted every inch of it. Nora wore cotton boxer briefs, and I eased my fingers into the waistband. She batted my arm away, giggling. That tickles! she said. I wanted to make her feel good, but I would have to be taught.

  Help me learn, I said. I kissed the ledge of her collarbone, slid my lips toward the arc of her breast. I wanted to get my whole body around her, like an amoeba.

  Well, she said, I don’t like to be penetrated. I don’t like the feeling of it.

  That’s okay, I said. There’s so much else we can do.

  She took my hand and put it on the outside of her briefs. Here, she said, guiding my hand under her own. Press here, like this.

  Through the thin cotton I could feel the contours of her, the place where one fold slipped against another. Her eyes closed, and I heard her breath hitch in her throat, like a door latching. Then her hand closed hard around my fingers, and she opened her eyes.

  I’d rather make you come instead, she said, rolling to face me. She gave a small grin and shrugged. Can I put my mouth on you?

  I nodded. Had I done something wrong? Why won’t she let me touch her? The air above us felt thick, pressurized. I couldn’t speak.

  This was how it went for a while: she let me touch her for only a moment, on the outside of her briefs. She said she couldn’t explain it; she just wanted to touch me instead. And she was good at it. I wanted her to touch me.

  But I also wanted to touch her. I had never touched anyone’s vulva, anyone’s vagina, but my own. I wanted Nora so much, but I was also nervous: What would she feel like? Would she like it? Would I like it? What would she smell like, taste like? I wanted to touch her skin, not the fabric covering it.

  I wanted to earn her trust. I loved the way she fucked me, loved the firm efficiency of her fingers, loved to look at her long eyelashes as she moved her mouth between my legs. I wanted to fuck her like that. I wanted to earn her trust. When the definition of sex is not a set thing, how do you hash it out? You talk. You talk before anything else. We talked and we talked.

  One night she said I could touch her. I worked my hand slowly down the silk of her belly until I found the place where she was wet. A quiet flare of recognition behind my eyes: the body under my fingers felt like my own. This didn’t happen with a man, with a man’s body, because it couldn’t. She was a heat I wanted to be inside, a hot bath. Her pelvis rose under my hand, pressure meeting pressure. Her thighs shook as she came. In the dark I beamed, phosphorescent with her pleasure.

  I never entered her, and I never tried. She was naked with me only once, the first time we had sex. On that occasion I’d cupped my hand around her breast, felt her flinch.

  Do you like this? I asked. Should I not?

  No, no—it’s fine.

  No, but do you like having your breasts touched? I want to know what you like.

  Yeah, she said. I do.

  But there was something here. Did she not feel safe? Had I done something, had something happened to her? Was there something about her body—her breasts, her vagina, the womanly costume of her skin? I tried to ask.

  Queer sex isn’t like straight sex, she said. You can’t just rip each other’s clothes off.

  Y-You can’t? I stammered.

  Could this be right? I know some queer people, I thought. I’ve read books, watched shows, seen movies. I’m pretty sure queer people do rip each other’s clothes off sometime
s. Why make some broad claim about queerness? That can’t be true, can it? Irritation prickled at the back of my throat. If she needs sex to be a certain way, why doesn’t she just say it?

  Or maybe she is saying it. Yes. She is saying what she wants. She is telling me about herself to the best of her ability.

  I felt the irritation give way to shame, hard as a lozenge. I didn’t know how to be queer. I didn’t know anything.

  What do you mean exactly, I asked, about not ripping each other’s clothes off? I don’t understand. Are you talking about consent?

  Queer sex just doesn’t work this way, she said.

  I wanted our sex to be a conversation, but we talked more than we fucked.

  Kind of gross, even dangerous, isn’t it, to bitch about a woman who won’t have sex with you?

  I felt gross for wanting anything. Nora could do, or not do, whatever she pleased with her body. She was a person, not my fantasy. Surely she’d be happier with a person who knew the rules. But I wanted to be her person, and she seemed to want me to be. I wasn’t good, but she could make me good. I should hurry to catch up, to get it right.

  I’d pried myself out of a frame that didn’t fit, and now Nora and I would fit me for a new one. We worked to make the facts of me—a mother, a wife, someone who had lived her whole life in the straight world—square up alongside her. Could I be polyamorous? Could I be someone’s lover? Could I be queer? Who would decide? I wanted to put my ear to her body like a shell, let her echo tell me who I was.

  Can I go down on you? I asked. It had taken weeks to work up the guts.

  She seemed to consider.

  I’m usually a top, she said. Not a stone top, not entirely. But a top.

  What do you mean by “stone top”? I said.