Greetings From Janeland

by Candace Walsh

  We got married at San Francisco City Hall. Brides and grooms, brides and brides, and grooms and grooms spread out throughout the gorgeous Beaux-Arts building. A few weeks later, we celebrated again at my mom’s assisted-living facility. Residents asked a few questions about where the groom was, but most of them were at ease with the two of us.

  It seems so long ago that my son’s young classmate told him to leave his “two moms” stuff at home. And DADT has been history since 2010. But today I read an essay by a high school student whose family would not accept her attraction to other girls. And we all know that racism didn’t disappear with the striking down of the laws against interracial marriage.

  Raphael’s challenging journey growing up, often feeling he and his family didn’t fit in, has provided him with a unique blend of optimism and gritty reality that exceeds my own at times. And so my son is now able to embrace a far more expansive possibility of authentic love, unfettered by fear or intolerance.

  My son posted a family wedding photo of us on Facebook. He wrote, “I love these two beautiful ladies! I would only be so lucky to find love close to what you two share.”

  Wife

  BY AMELIA SAUTER

  LEAH HAS CANCER.

  I arrive at her hospital-room door the same time she does, her on a gurney, me on foot. She opens her eyes and looks at me as they wheel her in. How did it go? she asks me. Hey baby, I say.

  The two nurses, a man and woman who both look like teenagers, detangle her IV lines as they get ready to lift her to the bed. Tubes are coming out of her arm and drains are dangling and peeking out from under her gown. When can I get out of here? she whispers hoarsely. As soon as you can pee and walk, says the woman. I’ll walk to the bed now, says Leah. They help her sit up on the gurney, and she wobbles to the bed, almost tipping over from the lingering effects of the anesthesia. The nurses spot her, and she makes it. I continue to stand to the side like a shadow as the nurses help her lie down and put compression sleeves on her legs to prevent blood clots. I don’t like how that feels, says Leah. They ignore her.

  We have to ask you admission questions, they say. Leah is having a hard time holding her eyes open. Have you fallen recently? No. Do you have a religious affiliation? Definitely not. Are you being abused at home? She glances at me and we both giggle despite ourselves. She knows not to joke. No, she says. Do you have any open skin ulcers? No. They apologize for having to “check her bottom” and she moans as they roll her from side to side to look at her butt for bedsores. I think they should have thought of that while she was standing up and her gown was gaping open. What’s your pain on a scale of one to ten? Three. Do you want anything for pain or nausea? No. Here’s your call bell if you need anything, they say.

  We are alone. How did it go? Leah says again. I don’t speak. She puts her hand up to her chest and feels the bandaged flat spot where her left breast was a few hours earlier. She starts to cry. I take her hand. She says, What did the surgeon say?

  We both know what she is asking. I had no idea that I would be the one to have to tell her. But I am the only one here. I am her wife. They found cancer in your lymph nodes, I say. She cries harder. I can’t hold her without hurting her so I kiss every part of her face: her forehead, her cheeks, her chin, her nose, and I run my hand over her hair. I’m so sorry, I say. I love you so much. I’m so sorry. She says, I need to be alone.

  My mother is waiting for me in the hallway. She has become my best friend these past three weeks. She hugs me, and now it is my turn to cry.

  I spend the night with Leah in her hospital room. To my surprise, it is a huge, private room in a new wing. If this was a hotel room, I’d be thrilled: two big closets, a marble sink, recessed mood lighting, a flatscreen TV, and a newly tiled bathroom. But in the middle of the room, instead of a king-size bed with a puffy white comforter, there is a single hospital bed with its bars up and a pale and sleeping Leah lying on it alone. There is a long dark couch that pulls out into a bed for me. I feel lucky to be her wife so the nurses will allow me to spend the night in the room with her.

  I quickly realize how the nurses are the lucky ones. I get up over twenty times in the next seven hours, to help Leah to the bathroom, to respond to the alarm when her compression sleeve line gets pinched, to get her a ginger candy, to adjust her pillows, to request pain meds from the nurse, to help her to the bathroom again, to turn down the heat, to turn up the heat, to take off her socks, to get her another ginger candy, to adjust her pillows again, to let someone know the IV is beeping. The nurses come in every four hours to take her vitals. I sleep for a few minutes here and there.

  The surgeon arrives at seven a.m. to reiterate for Leah what he told me over the phone from the operating room at seven p.m. the night before: the cancer is invasive. We are home before noon.

  We find the best doctors we can in our region. Who is your surgeon? other breast cancer survivors ask Leah. Dr. Yellin, she says. Good, they say, and nod knowingly. We start daily walks per Dr. Yellin’s orders. Because nothing is wrong with your legs, he tells Leah. Every day becomes consumed with cancer: Leah healing, and me doing all the planning and execution of appointments and daily life. We are driving an hour and a half to the “big city” where my parents live to avoid our country bumpkin hospital (where Leah says she wouldn’t get a sliver removed). We drive back and forth to the city two or three times a week for pretests and posttests and bloodwork and complications and follow-ups. We see breast specialists, surgeons, oncologists, radiologists, a geneticist, a cardiologist. We have to come out as gay to all of them.

  Which one of you is Leah? the doctors say as they walk in the room. Some of them shake my hand and ask who I am. The rest of them don’t greet me or make eye contact with me. It is assumed I am Leah’s sister or her friend or a random person who gave her a ride to the appointment and is tagging along into the exam room.

  If Leah was at the doctor’s office for a flu shot or a strep test, being ignored might not bother me so much. But the words out of these doctors’ mouths include things like, You’ll need six weeks of daily radiation and You have to have chemotherapy for eighteen weeks followed by eight more months of targeted therapy and You’re going to have no immune system and lose all of your hair and The side effects include DEATH. Now sign the consent form at the bottom. Leah starts introducing me as her wife before the doctors open their mouths.

  Wife. A label I never thought I’d choose, a wedding I never imagined wanting. But falling for Leah changed everything. When I was twenty-six and gallivanting around the country in my camper truck like a hippie wannabe, I met Leah. She was sweet, soft, outspoken, and daring, everything that the men I had slept with were not. Like the flash of a lightning bolt, I went from A, a hopelessly straight girl who vowed to never marry, to Z, hopelessly in love with a woman that I wanted to be with forever.

  It was the 1990s. I was in love and scared and often lonely. We were quietly out of the closet when we could be or when we had to be. We moved in together, vacationed in Provincetown where we could hold hands in public, and dared to ride our motorcycles in pride parades enveloped by the cheering crowds even when it meant our photo could end up on the front page of the newspaper before I was out to my parents (which yes, it did, and no, they didn’t see it). We patiently settled into our relationship and impatiently waited for the world to change. When same-sex marriage finally became legal in New York, we got married on a beautiful fall day in the company of our friends and family. We would grow old together, through sickness and in health, and live happily ever after until death do us part.

  And bam. Here we are. I have become the caregiver. Death is in the room.

  Nothing changed when we first became wives, but now, everything is different. We figured we would have decades before one of us would have to worry about getting out of an armchair without assistance. We are having new conversations. Good job peeing, Leah! I say, and The fluid in your drainage balls is looking pretty good today and Don’t worry, Honey, I don’
t mind doing the dishes all the time. I watch Leah sleep at night to make sure she’s breathing and I worry about rolling into her. We try sleeping on opposite sides of the bed so I am not near the wound and the drains, but after over twenty years together, it is like trying to sign your name with the opposite hand: illegible, disorienting, and just plain silly. I give her meds to her with a glass of water when the clock tells me to. I cook three meals a day and obsess about her eating, even if it’s just chicken broth. I help her take off the bandage for the first time when she confronts the red, angry scar where her beautiful breast was. I yell at people who hug her when her immune system is flatlined. I jump up to let the elderly dog out so she doesn’t have to. I don’t sleep enough and I drink way too much coffee. I Google her blood-work results. I do not Google cancer. We do not talk about Death.

  Leah takes steroids before each chemotherapy treatment. The steroids keep her from sleeping and make her angry and aggressive. We wonder why the hell athletes would want to take this stuff. She gets a lot done in the three days when she takes the steroids before the subsequent chemo crash. My wife with cancer, with no breast, no hair, working like a maniac. She stacks wood. She tiles the floor in the kitchen for our new restaurant that was supposed to be open by now. She builds a twelve-foot-long dining-room table. She hangs drywall. I call her my huzwife. On an afternoon when the steroids are making her particularly edgy, she helps me decorate cupcakes for the one wholesale account that remains since we closed our previous business. Leah pains-takingly places hundreds of sliced almonds on dozens of owl cupcakes, one almond for each feather. Fuck this bullshit! she yells as she works. Fuck! she is muttering and swearing and gently placing almonds on the buttercream owls. Fuck! It would be funny if she didn’t have cancer. She will sleep and sleep when the steroids wear off.

  Even with the steroids and a hefty dose of Benadryl, she has a severe reaction to the chemo one time while we are at the treatment center. A spasm takes hold in her spine as the chemical infusion drips in through the port in her chest, and she doubles over in pain and can’t speak. A flurry of nurses surrounds her immediately. They have seen this before. I am pushed to the side. One takes her blood pressure, another yanks the curtains shut, someone temporarily stops the chemo and increases her fluids, and somebody hooks her up to oxygen. The nurse practitioner is in the room in under two minutes. A minute after that, Leah gets a shot of hydrocortisone, and soon she is sitting up and breathing easily again. I watch it all from the sidelines, helpless and amazed.

  I hold it together until I have to go to a store, any store. Leah’s forty-eighth birthday is coming up, and even though we don’t feel like celebrating, I go to Target to get her a a pair of slippers. I’m fine until I get to the women’s clothing section. I see a pair of button up pajamas and think, I should buy these for Leah since she can’t put her arm up over her head after the mastectomy.

  Cancer. The reality strikes my emotions like a dagger. I take a pair off the rack as my eyes well up with tears. I look around. Cancer surrounds me. A robe. She needs a robe since she’s is in her pajamas so much. I choose a soft grey one for her as I start to cry. A pillow, one of those body-support pillows—ironically called ‘husbands’—that she can lean back on while she’s in bed. It’s the same color gray as the robe. I am compelled to buy it. As I pile each gift into my arms—I hadn’t thought to take a shopping cart on the way in—I realize I am not birthday shopping, I am cancer shopping. Cancer is taking over everything. By the time I remember the slippers I have come in for, I am sobbing and dragging my cancer purchases to the register like Steve Martin in The Jerk. (All I need is this ashtray. And this paddleball game. And this lamp. And this thermos. And this chair.)

  Every shopping list is loaded: Zantac for Leah’s stomach, vegetables to sneak into her chicken broth, bottled water because they are working on our water main again and I don’t know what’s in that brown water that could infect Leah. Paint from Lowes for the commercial kitchen? I worry that we’ll never open the new restaurant. Batteries for the lights in the gingerbread house that I entered in a contest? We won’t be able to go to the artist reception because the crowd will be a breeding ground for the flu. Warm hats? Cancer. Sorbet? Cancer. Christmas cards? Cancer. I don’t remember what it feels like to feel normal.

  You’re so lucky you’re both unemployed right now, people say to us. We don’t feel lucky. You’re so lucky they caught it early.

  The doctors do not tell us they caught it early. The visits to them are painfully empty of the reassurances we seek. It could be worse is the only reassurance they give us. We ask for numbers and percentages and survival rates, but the big-city doctors won’t give them to us. Those numbers are statistics, they tell us. We don’t know how they apply to an individual. Leah asks everyone and they all avoid answering. One doctor finally tells Leah he thinks as many as eight or even nine out of ten women with her type of cancer could remain cancer-free after treatment. But what if I’m the one it comes back for? Leah asks. What if it’s already in my brain and I don’t know it? The doctors don’t do any scans. If you have symptoms, we’ll talk, they say. Leah says her joints hurt. When she squats down, she can’t get up. Her nose bleeds frequently. She has floaters in her eyes now. She sleeps more than she used to. She wonders if she is still anemic and asks for more blood work. You worry too much, they tell her. So does your wife.

  We keep driving back and forth to the big city. It never snows on a Wednesday for the whole winter that Leah gets weekly chemotherapy. For Christmas, my mother buys us a fresh wreath with a big gold bow for our door. I give Leah a chef’s knife, and she gives me a rolling pin. Both of these are for the restaurant that we aren’t sure we will ever open. We don’t say that out loud. We spend New Year’s Eve at home, sleeping.

  The seasons pass through the windows of the car. Spring flashes by with green landscapes. We have the hottest summer on record and the air conditioning in the car breaks. We can’t afford to fix it so we start driving the truck instead. Suddenly the leaves are changing and Facebook tells me it’s our wedding anniversary. A year has already passed since Leah’s diagnosis. You’ve been together for four years, Facebook says. It makes me angry. I want to post, Hey, Facebook! You idiot, it’s actually twenty-one years! But it doesn’t matter. Everyone is wishing us a happy anniversary on our Facebook walls and posting happy pictures from our wedding. Two days later it is the anniversary of Leah’s mastectomy. The doctors tell her she will be done with chemotherapy next month. They say, We think the cancer is gone but we can’t say for certain. The targeted therapy is still too new. If Leah had been diagnosed fifteen years ago, her type of aggressive breast cancer would be a death sentence. Today the doctors are hopeful.

  But Death has entered the room. He gets closer with every passing season. Leah is going to die. Will she die from cancer? Will she die before me? I don’t want to think about that now, about losing my wife, or my wife losing me. We should be celebrating our twenty-one years together, our four years married, but we are exhausted. The invincible dykes on bikes who led the pride parade have become a distant memory. We have become old. Death has entered the room, and once he’s here, he doesn’t leave again. So we pull up a chair for him, open a bottle of wine, and ask, Where do we go from here?

  Author’s note: Leah’s breast cancer was discovered during a routine mammogram in 2015 when she was forty-seven years old. She would like you to please pick up the phone and schedule your annual mammogram right now.

  The “Duh” Diaries

  BY JOEY SCHULTZ-EZELL

  IT WAS THE SPRING OF 2005. WITH CONSIDERABLE EFFORT, I’d spent the previous nine months getting sober. A key part of the twelve-step recovery program I was following insisted that we convince our innermost selves that we are alcoholics.

  Small problem. My innermost self and I had never been introduced. And if we had at some point in the past, we certainly were not on speaking terms now. I was forty-one, ending a twenty-five-year relationship—and eighteen-ye
ar marriage—with my highschool sweetheart, Robby. I was suddenly a single mother to our two kids, Jessy, twelve, and Jason, eight, and hopelessly addicted to my drug of choice: Miller Lite. (I know. At least it could have been a good beer. But that is my truth.)

  So the short version of my story: I got single. I got sober. I got gay.

  Of course, there’s more to it than that. A lot more. And I’ll be honest, my journey has predominantly been wonderful—filled mostly with humor, love, self-acceptance, and, now, capped with a happy ending that is really just an amazing beginning.

  I’m also very aware that my story is unlike that of the many women who have fought, struggled, screamed, marched, and cried to bring themselves where they are today. So many who have been subjected to so much hate, abuse, rejection, and unspeakable pain. And I am deeply and sincerely indebted to those brave women and men.

  In May of 2004, Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to legally recognize same-sex marriage. I figured out I was gay almost exactly one year after that historic milestone in New England. And while the path from then to last summer’s glorious Supreme Court ruling was not always direct and has included hate-fueled setbacks and too-long stretches of inertia, I confess and admit to riding a wave that I had nothing to do with setting in motion.

  After being sober for nine months, for the first time in my life, I was focused on trying to figure out what I wanted. What I liked. What I needed—in work, in life, in relationships. And I had no idea. I was completely clueless.

  But clearly something was changing, awakening. Suddenly, women whom I deemed “obviously gay” were paying attention to me. Flirting? Even more surprising, with me? I liked it. A lot.