On Earth Day, Anne was born. She always knew she was a girl. Mom did not need to work her magic. Anne sprouted fiery hair, rekindled from two generations past on my mother’s side, which her green and yellow dresses complemented. She delighted my grandmother by actually taking the dolls she gave her out of the box. (There is a Christmas picture of me aiming my brother’s BB gun at a doll standing upright in its package.)
I was probably fifteen; I had written my name in my grandmother’s carpet, rubbing the fibers the wrong way with a yellow-green comb.
“Mother will have a fit,” Joan said.
“But I can fix it easily,” I said.
Joan sat on the organ bench. “Doesn’t matter. That shit drives her crazy—rubbing things the wrong way.”
My parents laughed in agreement.
And I felt compelled to comb the carpet to its submissive state. As I uncombed my name, I heard my father speak to Joan as if I weren’t there: “She looks up to you.” Leaning toward her, using his English-teacher voice, he added, “She identifies with you.”
Despite (or perhaps because of) dreams of sexual encounters with females that left me sick and terrified in the morning light, I married. Married my best male friend, whom I had dated for two years. College was over. He had a job and was renting a house. I walked right through those open doors.
I was at my parents’ house a few months before the wedding when Big Joan called to confirm the date with my mother prior to booking her flight. I picked up the phone in my sister’s room, lay on my back, my eyes settling on the closet I used to sleep in at night when I was scared—when the room was mine—and talked to Joan. My mother, who can never talk long to Joan, hung up her phone before I even flipped to my side and pulled at a thread coming loose from the comforter.
“Are you the only one on the phone now, Susan?” she asked.
“Hello? Yep, it appears so,” I said, breaking the thread and releasing it to the carpet.
“You know you don’t want to do this,” she said.
“Do what?” I asked, looking into the full-length mirror with butterfly stickers on the bottom.
“Marry a man.”
My heart snagged. “Of course I do,” I said, turning away from the mirror.
“You sure about that?”
“I love Wes,” I said.
Wes blames our divorce on the poison oak. Sure, let the plant take the fall. A natural disaster.
He warned me not to climb the rocky embankment. He was afraid I’d fall. But I grabbed onto plants that grew between the rocks when toeholds crumbled and tumbled. I reached the top, stood triumphant on the ledge. He looked up, sunlight bouncing off his glasses. He didn’t wave back.
The day before I flew to New Mexico for a six-week summer session of graduate school, Wes refused to touch my raised, red skin. Intimacy was not worth risking his future discomfort. He would not believe that poison oak is spread by leaf, not skin. After our divorce, he told me that he believed if he’d rubbed his body all over my poisoned skin that night we’d still be married. I find it amusing that in his mind’s plotline of our tragedy, the poison oak is the peripeteia.
In New Mexico I studied words, while Wes and I withheld ours from each other. Our phone calls and emails were sparser than the grass on the mesa—where I ran each morning pretending to be free.
My skin cleared, and I rubbed it against a woman’s. New Mexico, New Me. Grace is her name, and I am not making that up.
Grace and I ran together—in the promising mornings—and she spoke lapidary phrases polished by her stunning brain. Good god, I was electrified. I was alive. One night, we sat close to one another in a crowded hot tub as she spoke only to me, describing her recently published book. Here, next to me, was this brilliant woman I could hold, lick, bite, caress, kiss until I cried. I laid my hand on her smooth, bare thigh. The others could not see our contact beneath the warm, bubbling surface. They could not feel the tingling sensations that thrilled and pained me. We swam in the pool to cool. Raced each other the length of the pool. I think she won.
Our hair still damp, we lay on a blanket atop the mesa—stars pulsating all around us. Our shoulders touched. And as she laughed about the ledge being named for Dinty Moore—the beef stew cowboy—I kissed her neck that shone like bone. She rolled on top of me. Vanilla-scented lotion, cool skin, warm mouth. Waves and waves of heat. I brushed the back of my hand between her legs, and when she moaned, my fears of homosexuality melted away in a frothy lava rush.
Wes picked me up from the airport. Though we could see each other’s faces, the distance remained. My brain remained on Grace. I relished long car drives when Wes read in the passenger seat and I could relive the feel and scent of her. The Internet brought me closer to my affair, until Wes discovered my notebook of printed infidelity. Before he confronted me, he plastered our apartment’s cinderblock walls with pieces of computer paper, each one proclaiming something about me he loved. Wes convinced me that I was in love with Grace’s writing accomplishments, not Grace. I tossed the notebook into the rusted Dumpster and pronounced all contact with Grace over. I believed that I could throw that part of me away.
He stopped crying. Sat at a desk in our cramped apartment and made a giant eye out of construction paper. The only other art project I had seen him undertake was when we painted bright, intricate designs on our plastic, thrift store headboard. We ditched that headboard when we moved to Georgia and bought a grownup bed. The eye, he told me, was to watch over us. The iris was green, and the lashes were thick, black, and rectangular. The pupil, dilated. He used double-sided tape to stick the eye to the wall above our cherry headboard. It wasn’t long before the tape dried out and the eye fell behind our bed. Within three months, our marriage dried out. Again.
But we traveled to Asheville, North Carolina, together. He had his master’s in accounting, and we both had the quixotic notion that a new setting would put the adhesion back on the eyeball of our commitment. I craved the mountains. Having grown up on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, I believe the elevation is good for the spirit. The Georgian humidity had worn me down into its red soil.
So I convinced two schools in Asheville that they wanted me to teach their students: one was a day school and the other was a boarding school. Wes had no trouble landing an accounting job, and he had definite ideas about which job I should accept. Though I wanted to teach at the day school, he insisted I take the job at the boarding school, as room and board would be free. Wes is the man, after all, who convinced me to sleep in our car on long trips rather than paying for a hotel room. The same man who stuck dated labels beneath light fixtures to prove that I had foolishly squandered money on light bulbs marketed to be longer-lasting. So we moved our mismatched furniture into the girls’ dormitory where I would have countless duties. I taught ninth-grade English and coached cross-country and track.
My first morning at the school, I ran the cross-country course and lost myself near the horse stables. I ran into a clearing and faced a huge, wooden throne. A man in blue jeans and a striped button-down shirt sat on it. He was completely still. He did not budge as I walked toward him to ask him for directions back to the school buildings. Blood soaked the wood behind his mangled head.
The newspaper article said he was found at a clearing on Asheville School campus; a clearing that Camp Hollymont uses in the summer. He had shot himself in the head the day before he was found. There was no mention of me, and the headmaster told me I was not to discuss the unfortunate man with any other faculty members, and certainly not with the students who would be arriving in a couple of weeks.
I learned the campus and neighboring trails well, thanks to other teachers who were distance runners. Four of us formed a running group. I did not discover any more dead bodies on these group runs, but I did discover Becky. Since she was married with two young kids and a baby, I was not too concerned that I found her sexy. Though I had thrown away the printed proof of my attraction to women, I ran behind Becky, watching her m
uscles move beneath her tight skin. I found reasons to touch her curly, blond hair. I lay awake at night thinking of ways I could amuse or impress her. I convinced myself that a crush was allowable, though it did make sex with Wes even less bearable.
One February night at dusk, I was at the track, counting out steps for my J-run to the high jump. Having been told that I would coach this event during track season, I had watched a couple of videos and a practice at the local college. Though I felt uncomfortable practicing this event on the wide-open track, I needed to be able to do what I would soon instruct others to do.
After I cleared the lowest height a few times, clapping and cheering startled me. I sat up on the blue landing cushion and saw her. Tall, lithe Becky. She had a way of finding me.
Though she wore jeans, I coaxed her to the blacktop before the high jump. I showed her how to run the J formation and marked off her steps with a little rock. She ran through the marks but stopped before the bar. Again and again, I showed her how to throw her body over the bar.
She told me, “This is outside my comfort zone.”
My sweat drying in the coolness of the approaching evening, I felt charged—like I did on the mesa with Grace. Becky didn’t jump that night.
I was off duty that Friday. The two of us went to a bar—a cheesy bar where two guys who brought their own pool sticks tried to pick us up. We were there because it was across the street from the campus. We both wanted to drink. I ripped the cardboard coaster into pieces as I confessed my attraction to her. She told me she wanted me too, but she was a mother. We had made the J-run together. Before she took me to my dorm, she parked her car by the stables—not far from the throne where I had seen the dead man. We kissed. I thought nothing could make me stop kissing Becky. I kissed her with a three-year hunger, and she opened. So soft, so lovely. So illicit.
Our affair blazed. We reached for each other whenever we could. Made love in my apartment between classes, on the wrestling mat late at night, in the woods mid-run, and in the headmaster’s bathroom during a spring faculty party. Her back against the door. My hands pushing up her blue dress. Her mouth on my neck. My fingers in her warmth. One night, we drove to the new soccer complex. I lay on top of her in the back seat of her minivan. Police lights discovered us. We sat up. The policeman asked us where our boyfriends were. Had they run off into the woods? He would not believe that no men had been with us. That we could be there in the back seat together. Alone.
Wes found a blond, curly hair on our sheet. A CD player was plugged into the wall next to the bed. Shaking, he asked. I told. Everything. I asked him to leave me. He was gone within the week. The dean of faculty asked me if our small apartment contributed to our separation. Just the small space I had tried to exist in since puberty, I thought.
I adopted Zora from the pound after Wes moved out. Becky and her daughter helped me pick out a medium-size female with about three breeds in her. She has tweed-looking fur covered with big black spots on her back to match her black head and her right hind leg. The employees were calling her Beatrice, so the first thing I did was upgrade her name to Zora. When the volunteer rubbed Zora’s belly, he showed me a woman-symbol tattoo beneath her fur. I thought she was a feminist miracle dog, but he explained veterinarians often make this tattoo to eliminate the guessing game of whether or not pets have been fixed. Since she’d already been spayed, I got to take her that day.
I was in love with Becky and she with me, but the little shoes by her front door broke my heart. Wes was hurt. Angry. We didn’t talk much by phone. Only once in person. He did not tell Becky’s husband, Pete, anything. He did tell me to think about her family. I told Becky it was over because of the little shoes. She disagreed. Yes, she had a family—was a mother and a wife—but she would decide what was right for her. She came to me at night. Crawled into my bed. We agreed we could not leave each other.
She told Pete. Then she called me to tell me she told Pete. Pete, the assistant headmaster, told the headmaster. The headmaster told me I had four hours to get off campus. Called me a sinner. A homewrecker. Told me I was sick and could possibly teach again once I got help. I still had a handwritten note he put in my box a week earlier in which he expressed how thankful he was for my teaching and coaching. That parents and students had nothing but positive reports. In closing, he’d written that he hoped I would stay with the school a long, long time. I left that note in his school mailbox along with the keys he told me to return. I was the corpse in the woods who needed to disappear to keep the campus from being tainted.
I loaded all I could fit into my Jeep. Zora sat in the passenger seat. And we drove to Becky’s friend’s house because I had nowhere else to go. Becky was fired, too. Pete begged her to stay with him, but she rented a house. They told their kids they were separating. I called my parents and siblings. Told them I was fired and gay. And I was as out as out can be. I was an outcast. My family offered nothing but love, but I lost every friend I had in Asheville, except Becky. I was not just out, I was inside out. Raw. I was a scandal. But I was still in love, and Becky and I played pool with Big Joan at a dive near my parents’ house the day after Christmas. The next semester, I got a job at the rival school—the day school that I had applied to before I moved to Asheville.
But Becky’s mom sent her Christian pamphlets about the sinfulness of homosexuality and told her she was ruining her and her family’s lives. Pete often called her and cried. He is Catholic—one of the reasons for their three kids. And though I got along well with her kids, her daughter wasn’t sleeping well.
One night after I timed her kids running the indoor obstacle course I made out of chairs, toys, balls, and canned food, she told me she was going to try to make things work with Pete. I ran seven miles down murky streets and never felt tired—just the pain that I was still alive.
I ran and ran and ran and ran and ran. And running is magical. Eventually I get somewhere. Six years ago, I got to Lucy. We met training for the Boston Marathon.
One night when the snow came down like feathers, I opened a beer because I knew school would be canceled the next day. Lucy, who never misses opportunities, called me and asked if I wanted company. We sat on the couch I had impulsively bought the day before. I drank a second beer as she sipped wine I worried had sat too long since I’d opened it. Her face flushed, and she explained that always happens when she drinks because she is half-Japanese. I had no excuse for my flushed face. I excused myself. Went to the bathroom. I washed my hands and then brushed my teeth. When I joined her on the sofa, she held my face and said, “Do you want to do this?” Yes, I did. Despite a broken marriage, despite the Christian pamphlets, despite losing a job, despite scandals, despite abandonment, despite Becky’s relationship with a woman other than me after leaving Pete a second and final time, despite the laws, despite gossip. I wanted Lucy. I wanted me. As we moved on the new couch together, I did not feel the fiery rush of the forbidden. I felt certain. As certain of us as I was that I would have the next day off to remember every detail of our first evening together.
Lucy and I live together, and I’m thankful each night she presses her breasts and belly against my curled back, rests her tiny toes on my calves. We have three dogs. One of those dogs has a female symbol tattooed on her belly. Zora and I appreciate living cage-free. Each Easter, Lucy and I put chicken and ham inside plastic eggs and hide them around the yard. Our dogs sniff them out. Roll them with their noses. Crack them open with their teeth. Eat the meat and lick the plastic. And as we laugh at their discovery, I feel like a child who has found a way to set characters free.
The Right Fit
Kami Day
One summer when I was about nine, my mother, brother, sister, and I spent a few months in Seattle with my maternal grandparents. My mother asked me to walk to a nearby store to buy her some Tampax, so I did and then carried the box home in full view rather than asking the store clerk for a bag. My mother was mortified—and maybe realizing I had no idea what Tampax were motivated her to
have the sex talk with me. I remember we were lying on my grandparents’ living room rug as she used all the technically correct terms to describe how sex works. She then told me Heavenly Father had made one man whose penis would fit just perfectly inside my vagina. She wanted me to believe the only man I could have sex with was my husband. I was too young to think about the logistics of making sure every man met the woman he was designed for, and vice versa. And later when I learned what rape was, I thought it must be painful because the rapist was not the man Heavenly Father had designed for the victim. A few years passed before I began to have disturbing questions about women who married more than once, and I remember feeling nauseated when I finally realized people who were not married were having sex, and not always with just one partner. Yes, we were told that when you love someone and are married in the temple, sex is wonderful, but we were also told that sex before marriage is terrible.
What my mother told me about this perfect fit seems extreme, but she was only doing her best to inculcate the teachings of the Mormon Church. She and my father are Mormons, and their parents and grandparents were also Mormons. For almost forty-four years, the church controlled my life. It was part of nearly every decision I made, every breath I took. I had been taught from infancy that the Mormon Church was the only true church, and that being a member was the one way to salvation, to returning to live with Heavenly Father. I was told that I would grow up, fall in love with a worthy Mormon man, get married in the Mormon temple for time (earth time) and all eternity (afterlife time), and have many children. I would find joy in devoting my life to serving my family and the church. I would find motherhood fulfilling and meaningful, and in my old age, I would revel in my grandchildren and look forward to being reunited in the Celestial Kingdom with Jesus Christ, Heavenly Father, and my deceased relatives.
Dear John, I Love Jane Page 3