Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction

by A. M. Dellamonica

  Forsythe views the claims that men face potential extinction as empty fear-mongering. “Even the most virulent of STDs has never infected anywhere near one hundred percent of the population,” she says. “Heterosexual men and women are going to keep on breeding, just as they always have. What men are facing is not extinction, but a demographic shift into minority status. And like any historically powerful majority facing a demographic shift, they’re scared of being marginalized. So they’re over-reacting. These proposed laws are nothing more than an attempt to retain power.”

  But not all who advocate legislation to curb the spread of GDS cite the need to protect men. Some of them say that new laws are necessary to protect women, and motherhood itself. Representative Matthew Hock of Texas argues that motherhood draws its virtue from being an unconditional loving relationship with a genetically distinct child. Of women with GDS and the children born to them, he says, “It’s wrong to call it motherhood. Mothers are women who bring a new person into the world. But these aren’t new people, are they? Just younger versions of people we already have. This disease takes a mother’s love and turns it into the grandest narcissism.”

  Hock has sponsored legislation that would require known GDS carriers to register their movements with the government, in a manner similar to the National Sex Offender Registry. Women’s rights groups have already dubbed Hock’s proposal the Asexual Offender Registry, and say that he is attempting to criminalize having a medical condition. Hock counters that GDS carriers have been altered on such a fundamental level that simple prudence demands that they be watched. He notes that his legislation carries no requirements other than that those with GDS be monitored, with specifics of implementation and punishment for noncompliance left up to the states.

  Hock’s opinions — that GDS women aren’t real mothers, that people with GDS are fundamentally different than those without — are especially worth noting, as he is the representative for Texas’s 22nd congressional district, covering a significant chunk of the city of Houston. Hock makes plain that he does not consider the GDS community to be among his constituency, but the fact remains that Houston is home to some of his grand narcissists. Candace Montross is one of them. By now she should be used to the leaders of her community claiming that she is not really a mother, nor her children human beings. It certainly is not a first for her.

  MS. MONTROSS HAS no further statements for the media, and asks that her family’s privacy be respected.

  Candace’s attorney had finally written back, and that was the entirety of his message. Tess had read it a half dozen times, hopelessly revisiting it over and over in search of some ambiguity or hidden opening. But there was nothing. The short sentence was a barrier with no chinks or cracks. This was the final denial, an ultimate dead end. Still, she kept pulling it out and parsing it anew.

  Tess was looking at it outside the hotel lobby when her mother Layla pulled up. She rolled down the passenger-side window of her teal sedan, propped her sunglasses above her eyebrows, and called, “Is that my daughter I see?” She came around the car. “Look at you.” she gripped Tess’s shoulders and looked her up and down. “Let yourself go, huh?” She gave Tess a kiss on the cheek.

  “Yeah, I just keep eating and eating. No reason for it. Can’t help myself, I guess,” said Tess.

  “Well hop in, then,” Layla said. “Let’s enable you.”

  Tess stuffed her phone away, swung her suitcase up onto the back seat, and got in the car with her mother. They crept along the narrow street near the hotel, then out onto a wider avenue. Layla turned down the radio chatter and said,”So how are you? How’s your woman?”

  “I’m fine. Judy’s fine too. Going a little overboard about schools, but she’s always happiest when she’s going overboard about something.”

  It was quiet in the car for a moment. “Shopping first or food first?” asked Layla.

  “Food.”

  “I’m taking you to the new best Lebanese place for lunch. This one’s a hole in the wall, but the best restaurant kafta I’ve had in years. And their mujaddara.”

  “Funny how the best one is somewhere different every time I visit.”

  “They go through their ups and downs,” her mother said. “Plus, it’s not like you visit that often.”

  The row houses slid by like a flip book, whole blocks of fake stone and plaster in a dozen colors, masking the dull uniformity of identical facades that huddled behind perfunctory patches of lawn. There were grungy-looking convenience stores and liquor marts on the corners, and the sidewalks were populated with laconic dog walkers and midday stroller jockeys.

  “So,” Layla said, flicking the turn signal and swiveling to check her blind spot, “What are you all worked up about?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What’s pissing you off?”

  Tess felt an old, familiar empty space open in her chest. “I’m fine, Mom.”

  “You’re stiff as a plank and I can hear you grinding your teeth. Are you going to tell me what’s wrong, or are we going to spend the day cordial and bored?”

  Tess’s mother had always been like this. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in privacy, it was that she didn’t seem to think Tess specifically was entitled to any. Her brother Emilio got a long leash, but her whole childhood her mother had insisted on total access. She offered guidance for each grade school intrigue, opinions on every middle school disaster. By Tess’s teenage years, her mother’s ubiquitous advice had sparked a cold war between them. Or maybe lukewarm. “Cordial and bored” was new, but Layla had no shortage of ways to call her petulant. Her mother’s many disappointed dictums had been swirling in Tess’s head for months, a mental inventory of things to remember not to say when Decaf was older. “Do you think families are built on secrets?” was one she used to like. “I’m just trying to provide perspective,” was another.

  When Tess came out at sixteen, her mother’s response was that she was too young for those kinds of labels. That she wouldn’t really know what she liked until she was older. In the face of Tess’s self-righteous fury, she’d invoked it again and again: the perspective of age. The words still rang sharp in Tess’s ears a decade and a half later.

  She thought about Judy’s advice, her key to interacting with her own parents: don’t let their presence turn you back into a child. Hold on to the knowledge that the hurts are old, while you’ve become something new. Tess breathed deep and let her jaw fall slack in her mouth.

  Her mother wasn’t wrong. She was upset. And it wasn’t because of anything between them. “I just got some bad news,” she said. “Work news. For the GDS story I’m writing.”

  “That’s the same one you’ve written about before? The disease that lets women have babies without a man?”

  “Don’t say it like that.”

  “What?”

  “It’s nothing new to have a baby without a man. I’m having a baby without a man.”

  “Come on, Tess. Don’t be difficult.”

  “It’s the same subject,” said Tess. “But I’m writing for American Moment now. They read my earlier work. I’m making a name for myself in STDs.”

  “That’s repulsive,” her mother said, smiling. “What’s the bad news?”

  “I’m not going to get to interview someone important. Have you heard about Candace Montross?”

  Layla thought, and shook her head. “Not ringing for me.”

  It was oddly pleasurable, her mother’s ignorance. A reminder, despite how they had swallowed her life, of how fringe the issues still were. “Well. She’s kind of the heart of the story. But I just heard from her lawyer that I can’t talk to her.”

  “You’ve started taking ‘no’ for an answer now?”

  “I’ve been at it for a while, Mom. After a certain point, the line between tenacity and harassment starts to blur.” Tess put her forehead against the window, then pulled back, wiped at the face-print with her sleeve. She tucked her head into the hollow of her elbow instead. “I
don’t know. It’s getting to me more than it should. I’ll be happy when the hormone flood is over.”

  Her mother just laughed.

  They went past an old building with a new sign that read Mashawi Lebanese, and Layla announced “Here we are.” She turned up a side street and looked for a spot to parallel park, passing up two that Tess thought were manageable before finding one to her liking. They walked back around the block and up to the flaking green door of the restaurant. Inside the tables were all four-tops with plastic tablecloths and silverware rolls in paper napkins. There were no customers, but there was a man in an apron standing near the door, with half-receded hair and a lined face. He smiled when they came in.

  “Back again?” the man said.

  “I brought my daughter Intessar with me this time.”

  “A pleasure,” the man told Tess. “Your mother is one of our best customers. She comes here all the time.”

  “She knows what she likes,” Tess said.

  He led them to a table, poured two cups of water, and handed them a pair of laminated menus. Layla gave hers right back without a glance. She ordered kafta and labneh and said that they both wanted bowls of adas bis silq. “And tea for me, and I’ll bet my daughter wants coffee.”

  “We only have instant,” the man said.

  “That’s okay, Mom,” Tess declined.

  “What, it’s good enough for you to hide in your room, but no good now?” her mother said, and turned to the server. “Instant will be fine.”

  When Tess was fourteen years old, her burgeoning coffee addiction had been a scandal between them. Her mother thought it some kind of unconscionable toxin, one that would ruin her complexion, her attitude, her entire life. She’d reacted to finding a stash of red canisters under Tess’s bed as though they’d been packed with drugs.

  Sitting across a table, watching her mother be so forcefully considerate, Tess wondered how much it was Layla’s disapproval that fueled her earliest affections for the stuff.

  “You know we’re calling the baby Decaf, right? I’m not supposed to drink coffee.”

  “Aren’t you in the second trimester now?” her mother asked. Tess nodded. “Then you’re out of the danger zone. Don’t let them push you around. Drink what you want.”

  Tess recognized the the olive branch hidden in her mother’s thorny insistence. And Judy wasn’t around to judge. She conceded and handed over her menu. “Mother knows best.”

  Layla grinned and ordered for them both. The man withdrew to the kitchen and returned with a teapot and teacup for Layla and crazed brown mug of coffee for Tess. She took a sip, and felt every cell in her body pucker to attention, welcoming a long-absent friend. Not just four months absent; it had been years since she’d last had instant coffee. Judy hated the taste of it. At home they had a fancy German coffee robot that ground beans individually for every cup. But to Tess it was the flavor of sneaking out her second-floor window and staying up until sunrise. The flavor of road trips and finals week and late internship nights. It was being alert and capable in a way she always used to feel, but now never did. Even Decaf seemed thrilled, kicking an enthusiastic tattoo as the warmth from the drink suffused her. It was too fast to be a reaction caffeine. Had to just be that when Mommy’s happy, Baby’s happy.

  Tess downed the rest in two gulps and handed the mug back for more when the man arrived with their soups. “Well? Still with us?” her mother said.

  “Yeah. I think I should have enough time left for a last meal, at least.”

  “It’s a good one,” she said, and picked up her spoon.

  The soup was all soft lentils and onions glowing against dark green wilted leaves, garnished with a wedge of lemon. Tess squeezed in the lemon juice, stirred, and tasted. It was good beyond all reasonable measure. If the coffee had been an overdue reconciliation, then the soup was an epiphany. Tess thought, not for the first time, that her pregnancy had turned eating into something she felt like she shouldn’t be allowed to do in public.

  “It’s impossible to describe how good this is.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be the writer?”

  “The words for this don’t exist.”

  The kafta and labneh were just as good, and the entrees when they arrived. Over dinner they talked about their work, Tess about her meetings with politicians and Layla about the internal bureaucracies at Samplemetrics. Layla described the software she’d just bought to try to resuscitate her Arabic. Tess catalogued all the new things she’d gotten at her baby shower.

  “Oh, Judy told me that a car seat arrived from you. She said it was nice. Thank you.”

  “It’s green. I didn’t know if I was buying for a boy or a girl, so I just got one to match your car. You still have the green car?”

  “For now. Might need something bigger soon. But green’s still fine. The whole point of having the shower before we learned the sex was so we wouldn’t get gendered gifts.”

  “It was the earliest shower I ever heard of.”

  “We missed you there, Mom. Why didn’t you come down?” They’d invited her. Judy had even offered to buy her ticket and put her up in a hotel if she liked. But Layla had declined.

  “I work, Tess. A regular nine to five. We don’t all get to make our own hours. And not everyone is as comfortable living off generosity as you are.”

  Tess’s food went down wrong and she went into a fit of coughing. She had to duck her face into her napkin, then swallowed half her water in one go.

  “Are you okay?” her mother asked.

  Finally Tess was able to choke out, “What does that mean?”

  “What? Just that I don’t need your girlfriend buying me plane tickets.”

  “No, the living off Judy thing. I don’t live off her. I work too. That’s the whole reason I’m here.”

  “But who bought your plane ticket?”

  “American Moment bought my plane ticket. I’m writing for one of the biggest news magazines in the country. I have an expense budget.”

  “Well that’s very convenient. But I’m sure she would have flown you out if the magazine had made you pay your own way.”

  “Why is that a bad thing, Mom? Judy supports my career. We’ve been together for years. We’re having a baby.”

  “You’re having a baby, not her. Why do you think that is?”

  “Because she’s ten years older than I am.”

  Layla shook her head. “It’s because she holds the purse strings. I’m sure Judy supports your career, but she’s sharp. People don’t get where she is without being smart. She knows what she’s buying with her money.”

  Tess’s eyes already burned from the coughing. Now her focus wavered and started to slip. Echoes bounced around the hollow place in her chest, sending tremors through her body.

  “Give me the car keys,” she said.

  “Oh, come on Tess.”

  “Give me the keys!” She held a trembling hand across the table, and her mother sighed, and dropped the keys into her palm.

  Tess went outside and walked back around the block to the car. When she was a child, this is when she would have run away entirely. Out the front door or, if that wasn’t possible, through her window. And back then she wouldn’t have been crying, just too furious to speak. The crying was a new thing, one that seemed to draw energy from reflection. Thinking about it made the tears come more strongly, which made her angrier still.

  It was several minutes before her mother joined her. Layla slid into the driver’s seat, but didn’t say anything, just listened to Tess’s bitter sniffling and reached behind Tess’s seat for a packet of tissues to offer.

  Tess took the package and said, “I’ll reimburse you for the food.”

  But her mother didn’t take the bait. Instead, she said, “I cried all the time when I was pregnant with you.”

  “Why? Did someone tell you your spouse was a conniving manipulator?”

  “No one had to tell me. It was obvious.”

  Tess barely remembered th
e divorce, but knew it hadn’t been amicable.

  “Still,” Layla continued, “that’s not why I cried. Not the only reason, anyway. I never cried with your brother, but with you. There’s something awful about carrying a daughter. With a son it’s not so hard to pretend that the world will stand aside and let him through. But with a daughter it’s impossible. Sometimes I would think, what right do I have, when I know what it will be like? So I cried.” She put a hand on Tess’s knee. “I was crying when I picked your name. Strongest one I knew. Your father hated it, but I’d let him name your brother after himself, so it was my turn.”

  Tess’s name meant “victory.” Her mother’s meant “dark-haired beauty,” though her hair had gone mostly white. The name had fit her when she was young. And the laugh lines cracking her face suited now. She’d been born with an acid jocularity that finally showed on the surface.

  “Judy’s not like you think,” Tess said, blinking her eyes dry against a tissue. “And our daughter wouldn’t need the world to stand aside. She’d knock it out of the way.”

  “Maybe. And if you have a son?”

  “Shouldn’t make any difference,” Tess said. But she thought of her brother.

  Emilio had anxiety issues that far exceeded her own. As a child he reacted so poorly to conflict that in grade school he got permission to stay inside during recess. He always preferred solitude to company; the two of them spent the summer Tess was seven communicating entirely through long letters slipped under bedroom doors, the start of her writing career. These days he worked for the national forestry service, living on a park, checking in with the family a few times a year.