The Unspeakable

by Meghan Daum

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  I am nostalgic for my twenties (most of them, anyway; twenty and twenty-one were squandered at college; twenty-four was kind of a wash, too) but I can tell you for sure that they weren’t as great as I now crack them up to be. I was always broke, I was often lonely, and I had some really terrible clothes. But my life was shiny and unblemished. Everything was ahead of me. I walked around with an abiding feeling that, at any given time, anything could go in any direction. And it was often true. In the same way that, for the first few weeks of my first year of college, an errant stroll down the hall of any dormitory might lead to an invitation to come into someone’s room and talk about some indie band, after which my body almost seemed to convulse from the electrical surges of “making a real connection,” I found my twenties to be a time of continual surprise. I would leave a party in a brownstone apartment, hear another party behind the door of another apartment on the way down the narrow stairs, and decide I had enough wind left in my sails to walk on in. I didn’t want to miss anything. I wanted to stretch out over the city like a giant octopus. I wanted enough appendages to be able to ring every door buzzer simultaneously. There was some switch turned on in my brain that managed to make 90 percent of conversations feel interesting or useful or, if nothing else, worth referencing later if only by way of describing how boring this person was who I got stuck talking to.

  Or at least it’s easy to remember it that way. Probably I was far less of a bon vivant than all that. Probably the reason I ducked into strange parties was that I’d failed to meet anyone of potential romantic interest at the first one and thought there might be a few more stones to turn over at the second. Probably I actually barely crashed any parties at all. Probably the sum total over the entire decade was two or three. Probably the fact that they were such rare occurrences is the very thing that makes me remember them as a regular habit. Novelty has a way of intensifying memory. The less often you do something, the deeper the memory burrows in. I remember that at one of the parties I wandered into there were two Old English sheepdogs milling around the packed living room. I don’t recall if I talked to any people but I do know that I knelt down and hugged one of those dogs as if its softness and warm, drooly breath were the only things that would give me the strength to walk home. This was a time in my life when I was so filled with longing for so many things that were so far out of reach that at least once a day I thought my heart would implode from the sheer force of unrequited desire.

  By desire I am not referring to apartments I wanted to occupy or furniture I wanted to buy or even people I was attracted to (well, I’m referring to those things a little) but, rather, a sensation I can only describe as the ache of not being there yet. If my older self had descended upon my twenty-something self and informed her that she’d spend the next several decades reminiscing about this time in her life, the twenty-something self would have been more than a little disconcerted, possibly even devastated. I can imagine her looking at Older Self in horrified astonishment. “I’m going to be reminiscing about this?” she’d ask while the ATM spat out her card and flashed “insufficient funds” across the screen. “You’re telling me that when I’m forty-five I’ll be pining for the temp jobs and cheap shoes that now comprise my life? You’re telling me this is as good as it gets? You’re telling me, contrary to everything I tell myself, that it’s actually all downhill from here?”

  To which I’d hope that Older Self would have the good sense to assure Younger Self that that is not what she is saying, that indeed things will only go up from here. Maybe not right away and certainly not without some deep valleys to offset the peaks (as well as a few sharp left turns, as long as we’re speaking in euphemisms) but with enough steadiness to suggest that whatever she is doing now more or less constitutes being on the right track.

  “Listen,” Older Self might say. “The things that right now seem permanently out of reach, you’ll reach them eventually. You’ll have a career, a house, a partner in life. You will have much better shoes. You will reach a point where your funds will generally be sufficient—maybe not always plentiful, but sufficient.”

  But here’s what Older Self will not have the heart to say: some of the music you are now listening to—the CDs you play while you stare out the window and think about the five million different ways your life might go—will be unbearable to listen to in twenty years. They will be unbearable not because they will sound dated and trite but because they will sound like the lining of your soul. They will take you straight back to the place you were in when you felt that anything could happen at any time, that your life was a huge room with a thousand doors, that your future was not only infinite but also elastic. They will be unbearable because they will remind you that at least half of the things you once planned for your future are now in the past and others got reabsorbed into your imagination before you could even think about acting on them. It will be as though you’d never thought of them in the first place, as if they were never meant to be anything more than passing thoughts you had while playing your stereo at night.

  The records I cannot listen to today without returning to that feeling of imminent heart implosion include Suzanne Vega’s 1985 eponymous debut album and Jeff Buckley’s 1994 debut (and final, it turned out) album, Grace. Specifically, the second track on the Suzanne Vega album, a slightly discordant, wintry song called “Freeze Tag,” and “So Real,” the fifth track on Grace, which was dark and loud and spoke of the smell of couch fabric and a “simple city dress” in a way that made me feel like New York City itself had backed me up against the wall of some dive bar after seducing me into a state of vertigo.

  It’s interesting that these records come nearly a decade apart. When I discovered Suzanne Vega I was a senior in high school. My parents’ marriage was in the early stages of disintegration. I had recently come into an understanding that New York City, which was a thirty-minute ride away by New Jersey Transit but might as well have been across the international date line, was a place where people actually lived. My adolescence was now split into a before and an after: the time before I knew I had to live in New York City and the time after. The combination of knowing this and not being able to do anything about it was excruciating. Life was now a way station between the constraints of childhood and the endless horizon of adulthood. I remember sitting in homeroom before the morning bell, listening to “Freeze Tag” on my Sony Walkman and nearly shaking with excitement at the thought of the day when I’d pay my own bills, secure my own meals, make mistakes without my parents watching.

  The lyrics bore no direct relationship to these thoughts. They painted a scene of a chilly playground where “the sun is fading fast upon the slides into the past.” They told of “swings of indecision” and of only being able to “say yes.” Maybe it was the song’s spirit of limitlessness that drew me in. Very soon, I told myself, I would embark on a life in which there was time for a hundred different versions of myself. I would go through countless phases, have more iterations and incarnations than I could possibly imagine. I would know everyone and live everywhere. I would use every crayon in the box. I would be the youngest person in the room for a very long time.

  The Jeff Buckley album came over my transom when I was twenty-five, one year after it was released. (Two years later, Buckley, at age thirty, would drown in an inlet of the Mississippi River near Memphis.) Twenty-five was a big year for me, a painful, wonderful, deeply necessary year. I ended a long relationship with a man who wanted to get married and have children. I bleached my hair white, dated some men I shouldn’t have, tried in vain to be a lesbian, and could feel the engines of my career quietly revving up beneath me. I took a bartending class. I tried waitressing at a jazz club. I took exactly four guitar lessons and one modern dance class. In all cases, I either proved myself hopelessly inept or simply lacking in the patience necessary to develop any level of proficiency, so I gave up and went back to writing and working temp jobs in offices. I couldn’t afford taxis but sometimes to
ok them anyway. I got deeply into debt but believed I would get out of it eventually. A time would come when I would stop believing this, but, at twenty-five, the debt was a fresh wound that still had the potential to heal without a scar. I lay on my bed and listened to “So Real” and thought that I was mere inches away from being the person I wanted to be. My fingertips could almost touch that person. That person was both very specific (respected essayist, resident of the 10025 zip code, lover of large, long-haired dogs) and someone who took multiple forms, who could go in any direction, who might be a bartender or a guitar player or a lesbian or a modern dancer or an office temp on Sixth Avenue. That person was still usually the youngest person in the room.

  Now that I am almost never the youngest person in any room I realize that what I miss most about those times is the very thing that drove me so mad back when I was living in them. What I miss is the feeling that nothing has started yet, that the future towers over the past, that the present is merely a planning phase for the gleaming architecture that will make up the skyline of the rest of my life. But what I forget is the loneliness of all that. If everything is ahead then nothing is behind. You have no ballast. You have no tailwinds either. You hardly ever know what to do, because you’ve hardly done anything. I guess this is why wisdom is supposed to be the consolation prize of aging. It’s supposed to give us better things to do than stand around and watch in disbelief as the past casts long shadows over the future.

  The problem, I now know, is that no one ever really feels wise, least of all those who actually have it in themselves to be so. The Older Self of our imagination never quite folds itself into the older self we actually become. Instead, it hovers in the perpetual distance like a highway mirage. It’s the destination that never gets any closer even as our life histories pile up behind us in the rearview mirror. It is the reason that I got to forty-something without ever feeling thirty-something. It is why I hope that if I make it to eighty-something I have the good sense not to pull out those old CDs. My heart, by then, surely would not be able to keep from imploding. My heart, back then, stayed in one piece only because, as bursting with anticipation as it was, it had not yet been strained by nostalgia. It had not yet figured out that life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally—and sometimes maddeningly—who we are.

  HONORARY DYKE

  There was a period in my life, roughly between the ages of thirty-two and thirty-five, when pretty much anyone who saw me would have assumed I was a lesbian. I had very short, almost spiky hair, owned three pairs of Chuck Taylor tennis shoes, and wore lots of cargo pants with tank tops and silver jewelry. (That was my casual wear; for dressier occasions I’d taken to almost exclusively wearing cheongsams with ballet flats.) I had a toe ring. I drove a Subaru station wagon—mint green, manual transmission, metal dog gate behind the backseat. (That’s not to imply that there’s anything especially lesbionic about mint green, though stick shifts and dog gates do emit a certain undeniable Sapphic energy.) As for the dog himself, I took him to coffee shops with outdoor seating and to independent bookstores, which always seem to allow dogs. At night, he slept in my bed, his 85 pounds of fur and flesh and drool crowding me to the edge. He was effectively my boyfriend, but I probably would have been better off with a real boyfriend. For instance, someone who would take me out to dinner and do boyfriendy things like tell me that my car needed a new timing belt. But I attracted no suitable candidates. I was essentially a soft butch. The only man likely to approach me would have been one who needed directions to the Dinah Shore Weekend in Palm Springs.

  The weird part was that I knew what I was doing. I had a distinct look in mind. My desired vibe was androgynous yet enticing; earthy yet sporty with a hint of punk rock; Smith College meets East Village circa 1985. I was going for a chick singer-songwriter kind of thing. I wanted the sharp, angular haircut of Shawn Colvin on the cover of her 1989 debut album, Steady On. I wanted to look like one of my all-time musical heroes, the gifted and underrecognized Jonatha Brooke, who had supershort hair for much of her career but managed to offset any overtly butch undertones by wearing things like velvet pants and halter tops with about five different necklaces.

  The problem was that I didn’t really have the raw materials. Lacking a guitar and sufficiently chiseled bone structure, I looked more like Watts, the blond, drum-playing tomboy (not a lesbian) played by Mary Stuart Masterson in the 1987 teen angst drama Some Kind of Wonderful. As a fan of Mary Stuart Masterson, I will emphasize that this is not in and of itself a bad thing. But I had just moved to a new town and just about everyone who met me was meeting me for the first time and had little else to go on. Moreover, that town was Los Angeles, a place with major holdings in the business of exaggerated femininity. If I’d been in a city with a more unisex fashion sensibility, if I’d been in some flannel-shirted, polar-fleeced place like Missoula or Portland or Boulder, my habiliment might have coded entirely differently. But as it was, my all-wheel-drive sport-utility wagon, Tweety Bird hair, and makeup arsenal composed of tinted sunscreen and eight different flavors of Chapstick drew little in the way of male attention. I did, however, catch women checking me out all the time. Instead of taking this as constructive feedback, I felt flattered and triumphant.

  I was flattered in the way a famous or otherwise accomplished person is flattered when he receives an honorary degree from a university that would never have let him in if he’d actually applied. I was flattered because I believed I belonged to a special category of women for whom many of the conventional rules of hotness (long hair, long fingernails, a skilled and thought-out approach to cosmetics) are rendered irrelevant. This is to say I counted myself among the ranks of straight woman who are ever-so-slightly unstraight. I’m not talking about being bisexual. I mean something more like “biologically straight, culturally lesbian.” Think of it as another version of the gentile who has no interest in converting to Judaism but nonetheless celebrates most Jewish holidays and occasionally uses Yiddish expressions (as it happens, I am in this category as well). The writer and scholar Terry Castle coined the term “apparitional lesbian,” which she described as the ghostlike presence of love between women throughout much of history and literature. In homage to Castle (of whom I am a fan, unsurprisingly), I have dabbled with my own coinage, the “aspirational lesbian,” otherwise known as the basically hetero broad for whom the more glamorous expressions of dykery hold a distinct if perpetually enigmatic allure.

  Ever the striver, I approach lesbians as though I’ve been preapproved for their company. I approach them as though I’m their future best friend, the one person at the party they’re really going to be glad they met. Walking into a room of strangers, I’ll make a beeline for the women with the smart haircuts and “statement” eyewear, and if they seem less than interested in talking to me I’ll be hurt and slightly taken aback. I am, after all, one of them—or as close as I can get without actually being one of them. My hairdresser of the last ten years is a lesbian, as was the one for five years before that. When I feel low I watch YouTube videos of Fran Lebowitz holding forth on topics like Jane Austen and the irrelevance of algebra and I feel instantly better. My preferred scent for soaps and lotions is—you guessed it—lavender. I’m an honest-to-goodness fan of Willa Cather. As a kid, I worshipped the child movie actress Jodie Foster and the teen television actress Kristy McNichol. At twenty-nine, I decided to move from New York City to Nebraska in part because I’d met a couple of middle-aged lesbians who lived on a farm, and somehow their existence signified a rightness with the world that I had never encountered elsewhere. At fifteen, I turned on the television and stumbled on Oprah Winfrey interviewing members of a lesbian sorority (a revolutionary enterprise at the time) and thought these were the coolest, most impressive, articulate, and poised women I’d ever seen. They wore businesslike blazers and spoke in precise, unapologetic tones that defied everything I’d ever associated with sororities. They were the kind of women I w
anted to be. Even if I didn’t want to be in their beds, I wanted to be in their club.

  Over the years, I believe I’ve gotten as close to the lesbian inner sanctum as a straight girl can get. Even if I don’t officially belong to the club, I am a de facto member. I am an honorary dyke. (I am so thoroughly one that I’m allowed to use the word dyke in the transgressive, reappropriative manner that real lesbians often do.)

  Still, the getup of my early thirties pushed the boundaries of de facto. I was not shaving my legs with regularity. I once, in what I now realize was a cruel, self-serving gesture that I’d construed as hospitality, asked a stone butch out on a date. (“Stone butch” being the official term for lesbians on the most masculine end of the spectrum.) I did not admit it was a date, of course. The woman was an author visiting from out of town. I’d recorded a radio interview with her about her latest book and, after doing so, asked if she knew anyone in Los Angeles. When she said no, I invited her to dinner. I told myself I did this out of empathy for the loneliness of being in a strange city with nothing to do. But this was more than a little disingenuous. I encountered out-of-towners all the time and almost never worried about their loneliness. I also knew from firsthand experience that there’s nothing most traveling authors would rather do than order hotel room service, watch crappy TV for a few hours, and fall asleep by nine.

  The truth was I wanted this woman to like me. More precisely, I wanted my honors to be recognized. I fetched her at her hotel in the Subaru and took her to a cozy spot in Laurel Canyon. We split a bottle of wine and ordered lavishly on her publisher’s (also at the time technically my publisher’s) dime. About halfway through the meal I got nervous and let it drop that I was straight. I made reference to an old boyfriend. Fearing that wasn’t enough, I made reference to the challenges of finding a new boyfriend. She gave me a look that suggested she could see not only right through me but also through the insulting fraud of all honorary distinctions everywhere. Shame radiated off my body like a sunburn. The author’s hotel was in West Hollywood. That is to say, it was within walking distance of any number of bars where she could have picked up any number of women who wouldn’t have wasted her time with this pitiful sport fishing. (“Sport fishing,” according to the gay lexicon, is when a straight girl flirts with a lesbian but has no intention of following through. This fishing is just for “sport” because no one eats any fish. Get it?)