Greetings From Janeland

by Candace Walsh

  I had worked with Kelly for years hanging drywall and did so again, but this time in Florida, he accused me of checking out other women working on the sites, or stopping to watch women sunbathing in the backyards of the houses. One time, we were walking through Wal-Mart and a particularly pretty woman walked by. I did look. Twice. He turned and looked at the woman and said at the top of his lungs, “You want me to ask her out for you?” The woman and I were both very embarrassed.

  By the end of the first year back in Florida, Kelly decided he wanted to move back to Kentucky with his cousins. I was pretty much done with our marriage and seriously considering going to Texas to stay with my sister, but something told me to go to Kentucky with him. At first, I was really sorry I did. I didn’t think it was possible, but he became even more abusive, especially sexually. I immediately found a well-paying job in a factory and started making plans to leave him.

  I wasn’t sure if I could get away from him, but I was determined to try. What made it even more important for me: my daughters. We’d moved so many times that our oldest daughter had been in seven different schools, and they were both having behavioral problems.

  Kelly seemed to have picked up on my feelings, and started showing up at home early or not going to work. I also started suspecting he was using hard drugs. He’d always smoked pot and drank some, but there were radical changes in his behavior. I started finding clues around the house. A mirror that looked like it had smudge lines across it. Sandwich bags with white residue in the bathroom trash. Plus he rarely worked but always seemed to have money, which made me suspect he might be dealing. I had to find some relief from his presence, so I signed up to bowl with the local women’s league.

  One of the women’s teams needed a full-time player and I was happy to join them. Kelly insisted I take our two preteen daughters with me when we played.

  The first night, I noticed a cute redhead bowling on one of the other teams. My eyes sought her out often. I highly doubted I would meet any gay woman in the small city in which we were living and chastised myself for staring at her. But I found I couldn’t stop. I noticed that she had started watching me too.

  The night finally came when we were to bowl against the redhead’s team. I couldn’t believe how nervous I was about meeting her. I assumed my attraction to her was one-sided, but that didn’t decrease my anxiety. Her name was Rosa.

  She gave me a warm smile when we started bowling. She was strong and confident, and I tried to resist sneaking peeks at her, but it was hard. When she made her first strike, everyone from both teams gave her high fives. I reached out to shake her hand, and was shocked by the electricity I felt pass between us. I looked into her light blue-green eyes and saw she’d felt it too.

  We talked a little that night and I introduced her to my two daughters. Everyone on her team was friendly, except the woman who she came in with, who gave me dirty looks. I didn’t think much of it at the time, because she had always seemed to be in a sour mood.

  Weeks went by, and Rosa and I spoke as we’d pass each other, occasionally running into each other in the restroom (which I timed, perfectly). Finally there came a night when I didn’t have my girls and she wasn’t with her friend. We were bowling in neighboring lanes and spent the night talking. She told me she was in charge of the tool room at the local woodworking factory, and that she had grown sons. She invited me to McDonald’s next to the bowling alley for coffee after we finished. I thought I would lose my mind, because I knew my husband would be pissed off and suspicious if I came home late, but I couldn’t pass up this chance to be alone with her.

  We sat across from each other and talked even more. She explained that the woman she came with was her girlfriend. Now her dirty looks made sense. She told me that things were bad between them and they fought about her two sons, one who lived with Rosa’s mother, and one who lived with Rosa’s ex-husband. I told her that I thought my abusive husband was using hard drugs. Before the night was over, she took my hand. We acknowledged our attraction to each other, both of us realizing that there was nothing we could do about it.

  Rosa and I talked every chance we got after that, which wasn’t as often as I would’ve liked. I gave her my phone number, and she started calling me at home. I tried to make sure we timed it so my husband wouldn’t be home. One time I was on the phone with her when he came in. I knew he was suspicious about our friendship.

  Kelly tried to sabotage my success during this time. He hid my keys from me so I would be late to work. He kept me up late. He blew up the motor in my car. I had a couple of coworkers who lived out that way who said they’d give me a ride, but then help came from an unexpected source. My brother-in-law Russell let me borrow his van until I could get another car.

  We hadn’t been in Kentucky six months when Kelly started talking about moving back to Colorado. He must have sensed I wasn’t going with him, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. His drug use was becoming more evident, his moods more volatile. He left right after Thanksgiving to go to Colorado to work and I was so relieved. Life was much more peaceful for my girls and me when he wasn’t around. I’d continued putting money away and packing clothes for the girls and me in case we had to leave in a hurry. With him gone, I started packing what I wanted and preparing for the time when the girls and I would leave.

  Rosa called more frequently and we talked longer. I knew her girlfriend had to be suspicious. Rosa and I tried to stay in the platonic friendship zone, even though I knew I was falling in love with her.

  My husband came back a few days before Christmas and the next two weeks were the worst of my life. We fought constantly. He didn’t accuse me of fooling around (without his consent), because he knew I didn’t believe in that, but he forbade me to talk to Rosa. But I still did—just not when he was around.

  He left to go back to Colorado on New Year’s Day, and I kissed him good-bye, knowing it would be the last time I did so. I was done. I wasn’t going to continue living this vagabond life, dragging my girls from school to school, and I wasn’t going to give up another good job, especially when I didn’t want to be with him anymore. I wanted to be with Rosa, but that wasn’t the only reason why I was going to end my marriage. I was ending it because I’d had forty-five addresses in fifteen years. Because I was tired of “Bitch” being my pet name, and of being used and degraded. I didn’t know at this point if Rosa would even leave her girlfriend. Yes, our bond was strong, but they’d been together for a long time.

  A few days after my husband left, Rosa called me and said she needed to see me. I asked her to come out to my house. I was a nervous wreck. I got out a bottle of wine, fed the girls, and made sure they would be ready to go watch TV so Rosa and I could talk.

  When she arrived, I greeted her on the back porch of the house. She gave me a long, lingering hug. We went inside and visited with the girls and my dog before sending the girls upstairs to their rooms. The energy between us was palpable. She told me that she’d broken up with her girlfriend and moved to her mother’s house. We talked for a few minutes longer, and then I told her I had something to show her in my bedroom. I wanted to show her my new earrings—and get her alone so I could kiss her, which is what I did.

  The kiss was amazing. For the first time in my life I actually felt my knees go weak. We continued to kiss and touch each other until we came to our senses and realized that I had kids in the house. I was still married, and I wasn’t a cheater. Rosa spent the night. As much as we both wanted each other, we did nothing more than sleep curled up together.

  My husband called just about every night wanting to have phone sex. It was hard to keep up pretenses. By the middle of January I couldn’t continue, so I told him I wanted a divorce. He was furious. We had a huge fight over the phone. He accused me of leaving him for someone else, and I denied it. For several months, he’d call repeatedly, accusing me over and over again until finally I screamed, “This is all your fault! If you hadn’t wanted me to have sex with another woman, I would never hav
e known that I was gay!” I went off about several other reasons why I was leaving that were his fault, like his drug use and talking to me like a dog. Afterwards, I felt . . . good.

  The day after I told Kelly I wanted a divorce, Russell sat me down and told me about everything Kelly had been doing behind my back for years. He told me about the women and the drugs. I’d never felt so foolish.

  Now it’s been more than eighteen years since Rosa and I first met, and we are still together.

  I have no doubts about my sexuality. I believe I have always been gay and just didn’t understand why I always wanted to hang out with the girl basketball star or the married friend who wanted to take me to the movies. Or the complete infatuation I had with my best friend all through high school. But I’m glad I didn’t know I was gay before I did. If I had, I probably would never have found my soul mate and the love of my life.

  Teaching Out

  BY SUSAN WHITE

  THE YEAR 1999 MEANS MORE TO ME THAN PRINCE’S ICONIC party song. This was the year that my three fundamentals of life—marriage, job, and home—exploded.

  In early October 1999, I lived in a dormitory on a boarding-school campus in North Carolina with my rescue dog, Zora. I was teaching English, coaching cross-country, serving as dorm mother, and having an affair with Leslie, my running partner—who happened to be married to our Admissions Director, who was good friends with Headmaster Parsons. My husband of seven years had moved out the previous spring after my second affair with a woman. My one-week fling with a sexy, female academic two years earlier he had chalked up to my being “curious” or “intellectually smitten,” which I went along with because, quite frankly, I’d hoped he was right. But now it was clear. I was gay.

  Leslie, a mother of three, had managed to hide the affair. But as the air chilled, our infatuation announced itself like the red maple leaves on the quaint, hilly campus.

  My fall went down like this: Leslie’s husband told the headmaster about our affair, and he gave me four hours to get off the campus after calling me a sinner and homewrecker and telling me I was sick—with the caveat that after counseling, I could perhaps teach again; Zora and I moved into a house inhabited by three other queer adults (two females and a male); I called my parents to tell them that I was not only separated from James, but that I had been fired, and I was gay. “Oh thank God,” my father said. “I thought you were going to tell us you were an alcoholic.”

  I am fortunate, unlike some others. A gay friend of mine from graduate school had been chased out of his home by his gunwielding mother. But my parents’ love for me was not shaken. Still, even with family support, I reeled through the days—concussed from the fall from my previous life. How was I, a thirty year old with a masters in English, who had been fired a few months into a school year, going to find a job? And now I was a lesbian, too. Anytime I left my new house, I feared contact with someone who knew the dirty details of my scandal.

  I was not a victim; I had lied to and betrayed a man who was once my best friend, and I had watched Leslie’s husband cry for himself and his children. Leslie and I clung to each other in the center of fiery judgment.

  After I was fired, I threw as much as I could away. I should have returned the headmaster’s card praising my work and skills, which he’d written a month before he fired and damned me. But I didn’t. Instead, I chose to believe him: that I would never teach again without counseling, and I heaved my file cabinet full of teaching materials and lesson plans to the bottom of a deep, metal receptacle at the dump.

  I paid a lawyer to procure a letter of recommendation from the Dean of Faculty that honestly reflected my performance as a teacher and coach. And, in exchange for my signed agreement not to sue, the school agreed to respond to all inquiries that I had resigned for personal reasons.

  By the end of October, I was tutoring at the Sylvan Learning Center. I did not actually teach; in this factory of daycare tutoring, I followed prescribed lessons attached to color-coded, numbered texts. As instructed, I doled out prizes for participation and completion. I was not a teacher; I was a Pez dispenser. At first, I felt relieved to not have to prepare motivating, substantial lessons and grade a mountain of writing. But within a few weeks, I longed to be responsible for designing ways to help young people grow as people, readers, writers, and communicators—as navigators of life and relationships. But I didn’t see how I could do that from the camp of the ostracized literary characters I had studied with students: Hawthorne’s Hester Prynn, Baldwin’s David, Woolf’s Rhonda, McCullers’s Miss Amelia.

  Before long, I was promoted to administering and scoring IQ tests, and I found the process mildly interesting. One day I sat in the testing center, waiting to test a recruit for the police force, and in walked my former headmaster’s wife. She didn’t see me as she asked the receptionist what time her husband’s test would be over. The man who called me sinful and sick was taking a theology test.

  As she settled into one of the brown, plastic chairs, our eyes met. She looked down, fiddled with her bracelet, then exited the room. After I administered the IQ test, I left for my lunch break and saw her hiding in her car, talking on her cell phone.

  When I crossed paths with ex-colleagues, we either pretended not to see each other, or we spoke in choppy generalities with flushed faces. I wrote letters to the teachers I considered to be friends, but they did not respond. I had to let those people go.

  Then, as November ended, a family friend who had moved to Asheville told me something that would reroute my life: The rival day school needed a qualified, experienced person to teach eighth-grade English for a semester. She urged me to apply.

  Even though I knew serious barriers lay between me and the teaching job at the renowned day school, something inside me said to leap from deadening stability toward my calling. I declined my boss’s promotion at the learning center and desperately hoped my application to the day school would put me back in a classroom—even if it was just for a semester. I knew the boarding-school over-seers had signed an agreement to never discuss the details of my departure, but gossip is a raging fire in small towns, and a scant forest separated these two schools. The red-faced theologian-to-be headmaster haunted me.

  I was in the shower when one of my housemates ran into the bathroom with the portable phone because Brenda Bock, the middle-school principal, was on the line. As I sat on the closed toilet lid, shampoo running into my eyes, Brenda told me I was one of the three applicants she would like to interview. My whole body buzzed with gratitude as she mentioned over fifty people had applied for the position.

  I have only been as nervous as I was during that interview a few times in my life. Though I was convinced I offered what they needed, each time Principal Bock paused, I was positive she was about to ask me if it was true I was gay and had had an affair with a mother of three. After our tour of the school, she brought me back to her office and said, “I do not need all the details, but I am wondering why you chose to leave your last teaching job in the fall.” My adrenaline surged as I explained, “I had a major personal conflict.” Then I said too much. “My leaving was due to an affair; it had nothing to do with the quality of my teaching or coaching.”

  When I got home, I grabbed Zora and ran up and down the hills of our neighborhood, replaying the explanation I gave for leaving my last school. I stopped. Gasped. Held my hands up to my mouth. Did I make it sound like I had an affair with a student? Oh my God. What had I done? I couldn’t run home fast enough to call the principal.

  I was breathing hard when I asked the secretary to connect me to the principal. She told me Brenda Bock was in a meeting, so she put me through to her voicemail. Because I could not wait another second to tell her I had not had an affair with a student, I left a rambling, emotional message telling her what I worried she might have thought—and that I had, in fact, had an affair with an adult on the campus. Though my message was raw and inarticulate, I was relieved to have blurted out the clarification.

  The
next day, the principal called me and offered me the job. She laughed about my message and hinted that she had heard the gist of my personal conflict from her friends who worked at my old school. And then she struck a serious tone: “I want you to know you are starting with a blank slate here. But this is a conservative school, and you should not share the details of your personal life.”

  So when Leslie and her three children popped in to visit me in my classroom, I was horrified and shooed them away as fast as possible. A couple days later, I heard a male science teacher gravely telling Brenda the rumor he heard about me. That night, I barely slept, and for weeks I shied away from my colleagues. At music concerts, I rebuffed Leslie’s open signs of affection for fear students’ parents were near.

  But in the classroom I was on fire. The students were shocked by their increased work and my high expectations after enjoying the previous teacher’s easy-going disposition and less rigorous curriculum.

  We tackled short stories by Chekhov, Baldwin, Hemingway, Cisneros, Updike, O’Connor, and Alexie. We read novels, poems, and essays that zinged questions and opinions of war, love, family, and identity around our discussion circle. We pushed back the tables and performed Shakespeare’s satirical play of the asses we become under the spell of love. We grabbed onto the thin branches of truth and protest; we swung in philosophical loops, shouting expressive proclamations with newfound words, then landed on solid grammatical ground. Oh, but when we wrote! We picked, smelled, and tasted our words. We relished our combinations and proudly presented our masterpieces.

  Then Leslie left me. And I can’t help but think that my closeted state contributed to our split. During a class activity with our vocabulary words, I burst into tears. The students were uncomfortable and worried, so I gathered myself and said, “I’m so sorry. I’m dealing with a tragic loss.” I dragged myself through April and May, alive in the classroom and a locust shell outside of it.