Hard Love

by Ellen Wittlinger

  “… Bitsy or Pinky or some such name.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Anyway, Mr. Otto told me your mother is thinking of … probably will be … getting married again.” A look of gravity came onto his face, just in case I hadn’t been aware that we were now discussing something important.

  I thought it over while I teased a big wad of caramelized onions off a cheesy slice and stuck it into my mouth. Wouldn’t Mom be pleased to know her personal business had been discussed by her ex-husband and some guy she once made a pork roast for? Probably over a pale ale at some brew pub or something. The news interspersed with a few slightly nasty, man-to-man type jokes.

  “I assume she’s discussed this with you, John.”

  “None of my business, really,” I said, freeing another slice from its brethren.

  “Well, it’s certainly of interest to you. I mean, you’ve met the man, I take it?”

  “I know him,” I admitted.

  “And do you approve of him? Does he seem … appropriate?”

  What the hell was he talking about? This was putting a crimp in my chewing. “What do you care? You’re not her father.”

  “John, I’m trying to speak to you man-to-man here. I thought you were old enough to engage in this conversation. But if it’s too painful for you …”

  It was like a great energy, the anger that blew up out of my chest and exploded from my mouth. I hadn’t seen it coming, didn’t even know it was in there. “Old enough?” I screamed so loud he dropped a forkful of vegetables and a little piece of tomato splatted on his tie. “Since when did it matter how old I was? You expected me to understand you when I was ten years old! One minute you were bossing me around like your miniature slave, and the next minute you wanted to dish the dirt with me, discuss your manly problems, how my mother had let you down. I was ten! I don’t think I was quite old enough to listen to that bullshit.”

  I hadn’t let him get to me that way in years. I tried to cool down. What the hell did I care about any of them? It was ancient history. But I couldn’t seem to cap the geyser. “It’s not the least bit painful for me to see my mother finally act a little bit happy, after watching her sit around in the dark for five years. I don’t care who the hell she marries. So what if I’m not in love with the guy? Her taste in husbands never was too terrific.”

  That felt so good. I’ve been places before when somebody’s throwing a tantrum and you feel like you shouldn’t stare at them, like they’re embarrassed enough already that they blew up in public. But I wasn’t embarrassed at all. I was glad there was a roomful of people there to sneak peeks at my father, whose blotchy face was surely an admission of guilt.

  He was a pro though. Probably he’d had a few temperamental writers holler at him in public before. He motioned to the waiter, who came hopping over like the White Rabbit. Signed the credit card slip and got the food in take-out boxes before you could say “public humiliation.”

  I walked ahead of him the six blocks back to his place on Marlborough Street, but I had to wait for him at the door because I’d left my key inside.

  Without looking at me, he clicked open the door. “I’m going out,” he said, handing me the greasy boxes. “I’ll be late.”

  “Thank you,” was the only response I could come up with.

  Chapter Four

  Dad usually slept late on Saturday mornings, but just in case he decided to get up to deliver a comeback to my Bertucci’s outburst, I figured I ought to disappear as early as possible. Since I had several hours to kill before I had to meet Marisol, I took along the second issue of Escape Velocity, which I’d already read several times, and the copy of No Regrets I’d picked up last Saturday and skimmed while waiting at Tower Records. And of course the copy of Factsheet 5 I’d gone back for at Marisol’s insistence. (I’d read it already, picked up a few tips, and sent a copy of Bananafish to the reviewer, but in case I needed brownie points with Marisol, I could always pull it out to show how obedient I am.) These, a notebook and pen, and Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs I put into a small backpack, planning to stay gone as long as possible.

  There was a bagel place a few blocks away from Dad’s town house, usually full of Emerson College students displaying multitudinous piercings and tattoos, but it was relatively empty at 8:30 on a Saturday morning. I figured they wouldn’t mind if I sat in a corner for a couple of hours as long as I nibbled an onion bagel and nursed a cup of tea. The first thing I did was reread Marisol’s best new piece.

  I suppose there are people who grow up with no wish to escape, but they aren’t people I know. Is this a legacy passed on to me by my father, an escapee from Cuba who’s now thoroughly entangled in the kudzu of American life? Or from my white mother, who felt she had to rip herself away from her aristocratic background and marry a refugee with an accent in order to be taken seriously as a social worker for the needy poor, but who now counsels mostly the needy rich in her carpeted offices in Cambridge? Or does it come from my birth parents, about whom I know only that they were Puerto Rican, and that they escaped from me?

  And now I have to run too. To escape from them, of course, as all children have to do, to escape from their understanding, their always tolerant love. I have to test myself against the world without the buffer, and I have to give them a break from dealing with their outlandish lesbian daughter. When I opened the closet door my mother assured me I could always count on her support, but she cried for days with the bathroom door locked. She was mourning expectations, I think: dresses and a wedding, boyfriends and babies, things she was looking forward to. (One of those things even I had been looking forward to. I still am.)

  My father didn’t say anything to me for several days, but I heard the two of them talking at night in their bedroom. She was trying to convince him that it would be all right, that it was not perverse, that I was still their beloved child. It’s been more than a year now, and my father has never discussed my lesbianism with me, but he speaks to me again and pretends nothing has changed.

  My mother, within a week, had joined PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and announced to me that the two of us would march together in the Gay Pride parade. I know this makes me lucky. I know there are parents who would rage and scream and throw their children out of the house after an admission like mine. And still I resent them. One denies and one embraces. My father wears a blindfold, and my mother wants to out-gay me! I barely know what it means to be homosexual myself, and she’s racing ahead of me, reading all the literature, consulting experts, wanting to “explore my feelings.” I don’t want to explore lesbianism with my mother, at least not now.

  I need to figure out what it all means by myself. I need to have a world that is not open to my mother. I need to cross barriers by myself, not holding her hand. I am not her baby anymore. I am not her best friend. I want to be her daughter, but later, after I’ve figured out who Marisol is by herself. After I’ve escaped.

  I kept thinking, how could anybody know so much about themselves? And about their parents! (And I wondered which of those four things she was still looking forward to.)

  Not that I don’t think about things, but I don’t usually end up coming to any conclusions—I just get frustrated that everything seems so complicated: my mother’s depression, my father’s swinging-bachelor lifestyle, my own stalled life, stuck in neutral while everybody else my age is accelerating like mad.

  I wondered what my mother’s reaction would be if I announced I was gay. I could imagine: She’d give a little snort through her nose and say, “Just my luck. I should have known something else would go wrong.” Then she’d turn out the living room lights for a few more years.

  Dad would probably swallow his bite of broccoli and say calmly, “When you’re older, John, we’ll engage in this conversation again. Man-to-man. It’s of no interest to me now.”

  I got out my notebook and started to write a little bit about escape too, sort of an answer to Marisol’s article.

  How long w
ould it take my parents to notice if I escaped? It’s possible they never would. Mom would be happy I’m staying in my room, periodically calling up the stairs to tell me she’d left a few bananas in the kitchen for me, some cheese. Or she’d decide I was eating out somewhere, which was fine as long as I hadn’t taken the car. She likes the car to stay home, just in case she wants to drive it herself and have that accident she’s always waiting for.

  When Dad showed up Friday after work Mom would shout through the keyhole, “Go home. He wants to be alone!” Happy that I’d come over to her side at last. (The lonesome crackpot side.) Dad himself would be delirious with joy. No more slogging through Friday night dinners with Junior. No more hiding the babe parade. No more public humiliation. Hallelujah!

  Somehow writing this was getting me down. I couldn’t wait until it was time to go see Marisol, but there was a good half hour before she’d be there, so I picked up the Berryman book and turned to the poems Marisol had quoted from last week. Most of the poems went right past me; I felt like I couldn’t get a starting point with them, though the language was so strange I kind of liked being inside their world.

  “Dream Song #14” cracked me up. This guy was definitely cool, talking about how life was boring, but you weren’t supposed to admit it. The funny thing was, the part Marisol liked about having inner resources was something the guy’s mother kept telling him over and over, which he obviously ignored. I mean, I guess everybody just hears poetry the way they want to, the way it fits them the best.

  With twenty minutes still to kill, I started thumbing through No Regrets again, past the poetry in the front to a kind of stream-of-consciousness autobiography piece in the back. The type was surrounded by tiny hand-drawn stars and moons and musical notes and teddy bears and arrows, all kinds of things raining down like confetti around the words.

  At the bottom of the page was a thick tree trunk that branched out around the last sentences so that the leaves puffed through the article too, like clouds.

  Just so you know my name Diana Tree is my real name but not the name I was born with which is Diana Crabtree which is not the sort of name I want to have and I don’t see why we can’t just pick our own names the Diana part is all right I can live with it it means huntress and it’s a strong woman’s kind of name but no way on the Crab part because that is just the opposite of everything I believe in which is that we need to be open to new experiences not complain about things or look for the bad side so I’ve cut out the Crab part and that’s not me anymore only the Tree part is me a good part of me a tall and wavy and always growing part of me which reflects the real person inside me and not just a patriarchal handle that relates me to lots of dead persons who probably wouldn’t like me anyway.

  When you live on Cape Cod like I do the natural elements like trees and sand and wind and water become important to you they become almost the most important things they help you to forgive people for hurting you because you realize that people including yourself can never be as trustworthy as nature because people don’t live long enough they don’t understand how much they need each other except maybe for those people who have been on earth before and have some little memory of it and maybe I am one of those people because I truly want to be trustworthy and hurt no one if only I could live longer than eighty or ninety years but anyway I feel it can only help me to jettison my Crab and become a Tree with roots holding me deeply to earth and branches shading all those close to me don’t be afraid to come under.

  I’d never read anything written like that before, all piled together, and it was sort of fun to figure it out. But this Diana was a tad odd. Maybe she’d been on earth before? What was that, Buddhist or something? New Age or just old hippie? I had to admit I liked the stuff about taking the part of her name that worked for her and cutting off the rest. That was sort of what I’d done too, wasn’t it? Not really a lie, just rearranging the truth a little bit. Of course Diana had come right out and admitted it.

  When I looked at my watch it was almost eleven! Damn, I’d gotten so wrapped up reading No Regrets I hadn’t kept track of the time. I only had half a dozen blocks to cover, but I sprinted the first few anyway, then slowed down so I wouldn’t get there out of breath and sweaty. It was warm for the second week of March, and I’d worn my winter coat.

  I could see her from a block away standing in front of the Trident, all in black again. She seemed to be talking to the blond guy standing next to her, some muscley dude who was wearing a tight T-shirt, as if his protruding biceps couldn’t bear to be restricted by long sleeves. I could just imagine how thrilled Marisol was that he’d stopped to chat.

  But as I got closer I could see they were laughing; Marisol had her hand resting on one of those iron arms.

  “Gio!” she called when she saw me. “There you are! Birdie and I got here early and got coffee to take out. It’s so nice I thought we could walk down and sit in the park.”

  “Sure.” Birdie? More like Hawk, I would have said. His long nose pointed to a very toothy smile.

  “So, you’re Gio. I’m Birdie Gates, Marisol’s most trusted confidante,” the blond chirped at me, and I realized my initial assumption about those muscles was wrong. Birdie’s speech was quite precise, almost prissy, and he inflected certain words with an odd emphasis as if he wanted to make sure I knew he was gay.

  “I didn’t think you’d mind if Birdie came along. He was at loose ends. Dumped by his latest beau,” Marisol explained.

  “Dumped? I dumped his sorry butt, if you please.”

  Marisol handed me a large styrofoam cup as we started down Newbury Street toward the public garden. I’d never be able to drink that much. “Did you put cream in it?” I asked.

  “I put half a cow in just like you did last week.” She reached in her jacket pocket. “I brought sugar too. It didn’t seem like unadulterated brew was your specialty.”

  I took the little white packages and stuffed them in my pocket. “Thanks. Maybe next week it’ll be warm enough for ice cream.”

  “Next week?” Birdie shrieked. “What, do you two have a regular appointment or something?”

  “I just meant, next time, whenever that might—”

  Marisol interrupted me. “He’s just jealous. I told you, Birdie, Gio is a writer. I need to talk to other writers sometimes. We’ll find you another boyfriend, and you won’t want to spend all your Saturdays with me.”

  Birdie looked grumpy. “Well, it won’t be him,” he said, thrusting his head in my direction.

  Marisol glanced at me. “You’re sure? Already?”

  “He’s not gay! It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure it out.”

  “Am I missing something?” I inquired.

  “Well, you said you didn’t like girls, and you didn’t seem too sure about being straight. I figured Birdie would know …”

  “I always know,” Birdie assured me. “I can always tell right away.”

  “And then if you were gay … since Birdie’s between guys …”

  “You were fixing me up?” I was amazed.

  Marisol shrugged. “Not necessarily. I was just seeing what would happen. It didn’t seem so unlikely. Since I like you both.”

  She said it very offhandedly like that. “Since I like you (both).” Honest to God a shiver ran through my body. A big one. Like an earthquake tremor. Nobody ever said they liked me. Ever. Not even Brian, who probably actually doesn’t.

  “Well, ix-nay on the fix-up. He’s not. The way he walks. And talks. And laughs …” Birdie was explaining to Marisol.

  “Come on. You’re stereotyping! I can’t believe you!”

  “Sweetheart, it’s not stereotyping when I do it. I read the subtleties. And besides, I can tell by the way he looks at you.”

  I stopped in my tracks. Well, that ought to send Marisol running. “What do you mean? I’m not even sure myself if I’m gay or not. I mean, I’ve been thinking maybe I am.”

  “You have? Are you attracted to men?” Birdie asked.

&nb
sp; “Well, no. But I’m not attracted to women either.” “Oh, well, that’s just dysfunctional, not gay,” Birdie announced confidently. I was lost for a comeback.

  The park was practically empty, only a few early lunchers perched on benches near the path, a couple of twelve-year-olds on roller blades racing for the bridge. “Down by the pond. In the sun,” Marisol directed, and Birdie and I followed her. We settled ourselves on the edge of the empty pool and opened our steaming cups.

  “Are you disappointed?” Marisol asked me.

  “Disappointed?”

  “Not to be gay?”

  I shrugged. “It’s just Birdie’s opinion. Besides, I don’t get disappointed. I don’t feel emotions like that.”

  “What a crock!” Birdie said.

  Marisol gave me that lopsided grin. “I’ve been there. It’s self-protective. But it’s no good for you in the long run.”

  “John Berryman says life is boring,” I said. I guess I thought Marisol would be proud of me for going out and finding the poem, or something, for being so cool. Instead, she turned on me.

  “For God’s sake, Gio, don’t emulate Berryman. The poems are wonderful, of course, but the guy killed himself. His mother was right; his sensibility led him to a high bridge.”

  I didn’t know what to say, but I didn’t want to seem too surprised by the news. “Great artists often live on the edge,” I said, my voice tinged, I thought, with mystery.

  Birdie leaned across Marisol and laid a thick fist over one of my wrists. “Well, pardon my bluntness, Gio, but you are so self-consciously odd, I just have to ask: What the fuck is up with you?”

  Marisol had been taking a big slurp from her cup and she almost choked, spilling blistering coffee all over my leg. “Birdie! For God’s sake! You know how I feel about that word!”