The relationship I shared with Sawnie never really ironed itself out. But we had both crossed a threshold together, an unbreakable bond, even across time, distance, and silence. We moved on from one another, dated other women.
It’s thirty-five years later as I write this. I’ve been with the love of my life for almost thirty years. And because love is a fluid thing that blooms in different ways at different times in different people, Sawnie has been with the love of her life for decades, too: an artist, an outdoorsman, a good man I know and care for.
Sometime last month, Sawnie and I talked comfortably for the first time in decades. We didn’t pump our fists to Bruce Springsteen, but the bond we once had was still there. Because, yes, we had, in our own ways, shaken up the known world. Or at least, we’d shaken up our “known” world. We had made a difference. We had made the choice to live honestly.
Thirty years later, I finally understand that woman standing in the doorway in the “wife-beater” tank top, arching her body like a weapon and declaring to Sawnie that “I don’t even like women. I’m not a lesbian.” I understand, because I’m still her, with that kernel of self-hatred lodged in my bones, the anger that rises, the frustration that still, sometimes, blocks me from who I am. Because, in some way, we are all that woman. We live in a world that, like me three decades ago, hates women and does not even know why.
We, I, am also no longer that woman. Because one night, Sawnie had the guts to say what she felt, and because I finally had the courage to step out of the ring and into a fight worth fighting, one that would, eventually, give me peace.
A wild patience had truly taken me that far. In the book of poems refracted through broken glass on my bed so long ago, Adrienne Rich wrote of romanticizing language, of its power for disguise and mystification—the way words can “[translate] violence into patterns so powerful and pure we continually fail to ask are they true for us.”
What is true for me:
I wake in the mornings, and I see Lisa sleeping next to me, and I know I am home. This is not a privilege granted to me with ease. This is a hard-won right that has come to me over time, something I know more than I know even my own collective history, my own roots, which in the past, had become—even to me—a lie.
Don’t ask me to lie anymore. This is what I know. This is where I come from. This is where I belong.
Lisa and I walk our dogs in the saffron light of dawn. We plant tulips in autumn and watch them bloom in spring. The cycle repeats, and it is never repetitive. This love renews. This love stays. This love is not yours to name.
There is nothing I know more than this.
The Hemingway
BY ADA SCOTT
I WAS A JANE, THE COMIC-BOOK KIND. I WAS THAT WOMAN who clung to the man who clung to the vine. I kept my strongest opinions to myself. I took care of our child. I put my ambitions on hold. I allowed my husband his Tarzan position. And I pretended I liked it. When I was home cooking dinner. When I was sitting in the park with other mothers, watching my daughter run around the monkey bars and swings. When I was between the sheets. I’d always looked at other women, found them more beautiful than men, found their lines more appealing, but I didn’t move my thoughts to the place of fantasy, and, when I eventually did, I never moved my fantasies to the place of reality, not for a long, probably too-long, time.
Some thumbnail background may explain some things, not in an easy, pop-psychology A equals B way, but in why I waited. I was raised Catholic. I was one of three children, the youngest and only daughter in a family where my dad worked construction and my mom was, well, my mom. I was a rebellious kid, but my rebellion went to the smoking and drinking and sometimes drugging place. I made out with boys, not because I lusted after them but because that’s what high-school girls did and because I liked the company of boys more than girls. Girls backstabbed and gossiped and talked about boys incessantly. Sure, boys talked about girls, but not so much around me. I got a kick out of the boys I hung out with, kids with small-town dreams and grease under their fingernails from auto shop. I enjoyed their rough language and their rough play.
I also felt protected by boys. To put it bluntly, my dad was a shit who hit my mom, my brothers, and sometimes me, and hated both his work and home life. He was basically a stranger who came home to eat dinner after work so his stomach would be full enough to drink heavy late into the night with friends. My most vivid childhood memory, one solidified by repetition, is packing a bologna sandwich for school lunch while my Dad snored on the kitchen floor. Scared to wake him, I’d step over his thick gut or between his sprawled legs to get the bread from the cupboard, the bologna and mustard from the fridge. School, not the academic side but the hanging-out side, became my refuge, and my small-town America school (especially as I moved through junior high and into high school) was about dating boys. I married the summer I graduated high school. Did I love the man? I loved some of him. He was kind, at least at first. Did I lust after the man? Sometimes. Did I want out of my home for good? Absolutely.
Fast forward seven years. I’m at the playground, watching my child dig holes in the sandbox. A woman sits down two benches away. I haven’t seen her in this park before. She doesn’t look like she’s from around here. We look at each other, smile. She gets up and walks to a nearby tree and smokes a cigarette. I watch my kid play. I watch her kid play—he’s a cute boy with the same curious brown eyes as his mother. She comes back.
“They need to make one of these for adults,” she says. “A playground for adults.”
“If only,” I say.
“If only we could be adults and play without adult supervision.”
I don’t have a comeback right away. This isn’t the usual polite back-and-forth between young mothers—no mention of the weather, no mention of how cute our kids looked—but I want to say something that would keep our conversation going. I want to find out what else this woman has to say, this woman with curious eyes, long brown hair pulled back over a beautifully symmetrical face, and a serene mouth that makes her words, full of daring, even more surprising.
“It’s a nice idea,” I finally say. “Without adult supervision. But think of the chaos. Without adult supervision even adults get in trouble. It probably wouldn’t turn out too well.”
“Maybe it would,” she says.
That was Claire, starting the first of many of her sentences with Maybe to challenge my more conservative take on things. As we talked that morning and the next and the next, we became close. I couldn’t wait to take my daughter to the park at ten every morning. Meeting Claire was the highlight of my day. Meeting Claire was the only thing I thought about, even as I made dinner or cleaned the house or weeded our small garden. And I thought about her body, moving from her forehead to her eyes to her lips to her neck and down.
Claire’s history was very different from my own. She was a single mom. She’d just moved to our small town from Greenwich Village in New York City. She’d been auditioning there for a while, was in the acting unions, but the parts weren’t coming to her, not the parts she wanted. When the pain of doing extra work in movies outweighed the joy of rehearsing for off-off Broadway shows that never advanced her career, she decided to quit. Her parents, New Yorkers who had moved south for retirement, wanted to be close to their only grandchild and had set Claire up in a nearby house with a yard. Claire said she was getting too old for the parts she wanted to play anyway. I didn’t think there was anything old about Claire. She was the best kind of beautiful, the most inter-esting kind of beautiful, breathless even when she was tired, when the circles under her eyes made me want to touch them.
One morning Claire came to the park alone. Her parents had taken her son to Disney World for the week. Claire said she wouldn’t have been able to stomach the trip, the greed of the place, expensive tickets, long lines, failed actors dressed up as Mickey and Minnie, and all those snot-nosed kids begging for one more ride. I’d been to Disney with my child once. My husband had enjoyed it. I hadn’t.
When we took a day to visit Epcot Center, the fake Eiffel Tower in “France” and the phony canals in “Italy” depressed me.
Claire wanted to know if we could maybe (there was that word again but with an intonation I hadn’t heard before) go out one night, to a bar instead of a playground. I got that sinking feeling, a roller-coaster drop different from the rides in Orlando. It felt familiar. I knew what it was, but I wasn’t sure from when.
My husband had so many boys’ nights out, he couldn’t refuse me a girls’ night.
Maybe, and I’m using Claire’s word because Claire and I have been together for five years now, it’s a cliché, but we went out on a Wednesday and something that had always felt a little off, a little jagged, a small chip on the lip of a familiar glass, went away. That night we drank, we talked, we laughed. We went back to her empty house—so different from mine with art on the walls and furniture that looked sleek and a kitchen full of spices I’d never heard of—and we sat on her sleek couch, two glasses of red wine on her sleek coffee table, and then she moved closer and sleek became warm became warmer and we did what adults do without adult supervision. This was different. But again it was familiar, something about it. I knew what a woman’s skin would feel like. I knew what a woman’s mouth would taste like. I knew what a woman’s touch would feel like. And it wasn’t because I touched myself, more lately, more than my husband lately. It was because I had fantasized more than I’d known for many years, more than I’d admitted, and my fantasies had been about women. Now my fantasies about Claire had become reality. I loved making love with her. I loved talking with her. The roller-coaster drop didn’t stop. And I found myself. Or I found myself with her. I was the aggressor. She had started things, but I became the forward-moving one, which felt right, which felt me, making her cling to me, making her come first, then again and again. When we spoke afterward, when our bodies felt spent and we were resting, her head on my chest, the timbre of my voice was different, lower, comforting. I wanted to take care of her. Not like I took care of my husband in letting him take care of me. Not like I took care of my daughter. I wanted to take care of her, protect her, keep her beautifully serene mouth serene, remove some of the harsh dare in her words. And she wanted me, the new parts and the old parts under the new.
Claire was a reader. She started turning me on to books, real books, not comic books with one-dimensional Janes. What surprised me was that most of the authors Claire loved were men. She especially loved Hemingway. I’d read The Old Man and the Sea in high school, but didn’t remember much. I remembered there was a shark that ruined everything for the old man. I remembered our teacher saying Hemingway didn’t like women, didn’t treat them well. I asked Claire about that. She said maybe Hemingway got a bad rap when it came to women. She said maybe if my English teacher had read more Hemingway and read him more closely he wouldn’t have relied on what they said because they didn’t exist and they were idiots anyway. Maybe Hemingway didn’t treat women well in real life, but in his books, she said, he treated them as equals and better than equals because Heming-way’s women were usually more interesting than his men.
Interesting wasn’t an adjective I’d considered for men, not really. They were handsome or strong or stable or ambitious. Interesting was a rare color on the male spectrum that, blinded by the life I’d grown up in and by the life I’d led, I’d never noticed.
I thought about my husband. Was he interesting? Did he enlighten me? Did he make me see life differently or make me think ideas I’d never thought? Did he entertain me with his humor or some idiosyncrasy that made me smile? Had he surprised me in the last month? The last year? Ever?
In less than six months, after several girls’ nights where we spoke more and more about a possible future, our dreams solidified. The what-ifs became concrete plans. I would move in with Claire. I would get a job, something I’d wanted to do for a while. And if the scandal became too much, if the stares turned to more than stares in our small town, we’d pack up our things and move one or two towns over. Her parents would be fine with that. Claire would sell her house and we could start anew together. All I had to do was break the news to my husband.
“That should be easy,” I said, sarcastic.
“Maybe it will be,” Claire said.
Maybe not. When I told him, he went through most of the five stages of grief in about five minutes. Shock turned to denial turned to anger, and the anger didn’t abate. I flashed to my dad with my mom, his hand not just raised but lashing forward. Then I flashed to Claire and held my resolve. Finally, my husband’s accusations turned to that most basic question, Why?
“It isn’t fun anymore,” I said.
If that sounded like a line, it was. It was Hemingway’s lines and it was at the end of a story called The End of Something, which Claire had given me to read. The line was brutal in its simplicity, hurtful in its directness, but fit the moment so well: the lack of fun, the hum-drum of a routine that didn’t ever include a Friday night dinner in a restaurant or a trip somewhere besides the single one we’d taken to Disney World or even a good-night kiss that might signify a kind of connection that wasn’t totally taken for granted. My husband hadn’t become my father—he didn’t drink to the point of passing out on the kitchen floor, he never hit me—but if I had to write the story of our life together, there would be no climactic moments, nothing exciting, nothing fun. Hemingway would never have written our story, not if what Claire said was true. I, the woman in the relationship, wasn’t the most interesting character because I was a very minor character. The story was my husband’s. His job. His friends. The pressures he was under. The slights he felt. I was just there to support, a foil to whatever he was doing, feeling, thinking, which, as the years of our seven-year marriage passed, diminished because he shared less and less.
So that’s why I said what I said. It isn’t fun anymore. I didn’t want to hurt him. But I wanted him to know that I too needed something, that what he’d become—absent—made him the uninteresting one, the unexciting one, the not fun one, not me. This was the end of something. A marriage. A lie I’d been living, or at least a half-lie.
My husband threatened to take the kid, but I knew he wouldn’t. He’d changed a dozen diapers, maybe. He’d cooked a dozen meals, if pouring a bowl of Cheerios counted, maybe. He’d spend an hour with our daughter, coloring or playing house, but he’d be distracted after the first five minutes, checking his phone, watching TV, and when the hour was done—and it was always an hour, almost to the minute, as if he’d been timing the sessions—he’d hand her off to me and do whatever he did. He complained about work, but I knew, as soon as his pickup pulled out of the driveway every morning, he was relieved to be gone. So when he made his threats about custody, I didn’t say anything. I just started packing. He yelled for a while. He didn’t yell for a longer while. The funny thing was, my husband had asked why, but he hadn’t asked who.
It was only when he heard me make the call to Claire, asking her to come and get me, that he asked the question I’d most been dreading. I told him the truth. I’d met a woman. I’d fallen in love.
If there’s a PG sheen to what I’ve written, it’s a conscious choice. Even Hemingway didn’t write the f-bomb. But when my husband found out I was leaving him for a woman, he went from pissed to red-faced furious. He called me a dyke. He called me a cunt-eating whore. He called me rug-munching bitch. He said I was worthless, a nothing, a nobody. He came as close to hitting me as he’d ever come. His hand was raised and I waited, waited. Then he kicked the wall, grabbed his keys, slammed the door, got in his truck, and drove off.
His vulgar accusations didn’t touch me, but calling me a nothing, a nobody, opened something I’d known for too long about the back-moving me, the me I’d become too easily, more easily year after disconnected year.
When Claire picked me up, I could hardly open the door. I felt too tired, slow-motion tired. She picked up the bags I’d packed—one bag for myself, clothes only, two bags for my daught
er, one for clothes and one for toys—dropped them in the trunk, joked with my daughter as she put her in the car seat, then came to me and held me for a long time.
“Maybe it didn’t go so well,” I said.
“Maybe not. But from here it will.”
“Maybe it won’t,” I said.
“Maybe it will,” she said and smiled.
Fast-forward five years. Claire and I are still together. She still makes me laugh, never takes me for granted, and is always curious. We read and we talk. We raise our children together. My ex-husband ended up moving to another state. He found someone new and has a daughter with her. My daughter visits him once a year. My life feels more honest now, more alive, and, while I cringe at some of the word’s connotations, more blessed.
Which brings me to this summer. Claire had a surprise for me. I grilled her but she wouldn’t cave. She said it was literary. She said it was Hemingwayesque. Hemingway had become our word for inclusion, not exclusion. The proverbial they said Papa disliked women, but in his work, and his work is all we really knew, he admired them. Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises is more than just a pretty face. Maria is more than just a doting sidekick in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Marjorie in The End of Something is more observant, maybe even wiser than Nick. When someone excluded someone else based on sex, when someone diminished someone else based on sex, when someone assumed something about someone else based on sex, we called that someone a Hemingway Hater. When someone did the opposite, when their eyes were gender blind, we called them a Hemingway. That was our code.
I figured our Hemingway surprise would be a trip to Hemingway’s home in Key West, Florida. It was an open-minded island, after all, where stares wouldn’t linger and where everyone was a Hemingway, or so I’d heard. But I was wrong about the itinerary. Claire had bought us tickets to Pamplona, Spain, and we’d be celebrating at the festival of San Fermin.
Greetings From Janeland Page 3