LIVING OUT
Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies
David Bergman, Joan Larkin, and Raphael Kadushin
FOUNDING EDITORS
Given Up for You
A Memoir of Love, Belonging, and Belief
Erin O. White
The University of Wisconsin Press
The University of Wisconsin Press
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Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059
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Copyright © 2018
The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: White, Erin O., author.
Title: Given up for you: a memoir of love, belonging, and belief / Erin O. White.
Other titles: Living out.
Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2018] | Series: Living out: gay and lesbian autobiographies
Identifiers: LCCN 2017042903 | ISBN 9780299318208 (cloth: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: White, Erin O. | Lesbian authors—United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC PS3623.H5747 Z46 2018 | DDC 813/.6 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042903
This book is a work of memory. I have tried to re-create events and conversations as they occurred, but surely have not done so with complete accuracy. The names of some individuals have been changed to protect their privacy.
ISBN-13: 978-0-299-31828-4 (electronic)
For CMC
Contents
1. The Dinner Party
2. Basement Chapels
3. The Long Loneliness
4. Let a Joy Keep You
5. Ordinary Beds
6. Wake
7. Rules of Engagement
8. A Harmonious Match
9. Trust
10. Grace
11. The Church on the Hill
12. Milk Dud
13. Florida
14. Family Week
15. Eleanor’s Desk
16. Remodel or Divorce
17. Today I Saw God in the Face of a Kitten
18. The Memory of Hunger
19. Easter
20. Sisters of Wisdom
21. Between God and Me There Is No Me
22. School Days
23. A Nest on the Altar
Epilogue: Carol
Acknowledgments
1
The Dinner Party
It was eight o’clock and everyone at the party wanted to know where she was. “She’s running,” Jen said when one person and then another came into the kitchen to ask for Chris, who was, I quickly gathered, the guest of honor. Chris was always running in those days, although I didn’t know that then; I didn’t yet know anything about her. Later I would learn she often ran for two or three hours, and on hot nights like the one of the party she set out in the cooling dusk and ran until long after dark.
She finally arrived just before nine, wearing cutoff jeans and a white T-shirt, her short blonde hair still wet from the shower. From the kitchen I heard a loud welcome and then a chorus of teasing for her lateness, and even from where I stood at the counter, slicing baguettes and trying to appear as though I belonged, I could see the teasing was a beloved ritual; they had been waiting on her for years and—running or no running—they would wait again.
“She’s been in New York,” Jen said, motioning to the porch with her paring knife, “but she joined a Philly firm last month, and she’s back in the neighborhood.” She reached for a beer bottle and took off the cap. “Let’s bring her a beer,” she said, “and I’ll introduce you.” I followed Jen out to the porch. She held open her arms, then stepped back. “Is that shower or sweat?” Jen asked. Chris didn’t answer, only took the beer bottle and walked into the embrace.
“I’m Chris,” she said as she pulled away from Jen and turned toward me. She put out her hand and smiled at me in a way that seemed to turn her eyes into small suns, the skin around them folding into thin rays. She was taller than me and her hand was strong; I could see the muscles in her tan arms, in her shoulders. She wore a red string around her wrist, and when I looked down I saw that she wasn’t wearing any shoes. I didn’t understand how it was possible for someone who looked like her to be a lawyer.
I had been invited to the party to meet a man. The man was a poet, and he was quick-witted and wiry in the way of many poets I would later meet. The introduction was a kind gesture on Jen’s part, the sort of thing a married woman did for a friend who had, at the tender age of twenty-three, broken up with her live-in boyfriend and moved to a downtown studio apartment. I was lonely in those days, although I didn’t recognize what I felt as loneliness. I thought I was just becoming an adult.
Eventually we all made our way to the table. I sat next to the poet and across from Chris. There was a toast to her return and she inadvertently drank from my wineglass. I toasted her with water, and when she turned away I took back my wineglass and emptied it in one long swallow.
Later Jen would tell me if she had known about me she wouldn’t have bothered with the poet. I told her not to worry. What I didn’t say was how could you have known when I barely knew myself? I only dated men, only sought men. But I noticed women. Occasionally I would meet a woman and her hand would linger against my palm when we were introduced, her gaze would seek mine at the table. I came to understand the wordless, daring question she was asking me: Am I right? I learned to answer with my own lingering hand, my own glance away and back again: Yes, yes, you are. And although I learned to not be afraid of my wanting, I also did not act on it. I turned away, I took back my hand; I waved my good-byes from the door. I wasn’t interested in what came next. My desire was simply too quick to cool. It was moody and adolescent, but because I was not an adolescent I didn’t let myself begin something I couldn’t keep aloft.
Which is why I did not expect what happened at the dinner party. I did not expect that the flicker of wanting I felt at the sight of Chris on the porch would not fade, and that I would, again and again over the hours of the party, meet her gaze and seek her attention, pass her bowls of food and keep my hand on them too long, waiting for her hand to press against mine. That night I felt my desire bloom heavier than it ever had before, which had the mysterious and miraculous effect of allowing me to see her desire, to see her watch me and speak to me in a way she was not watching or speaking to anyone else.
When it was late and I had clearly missed the last train back to the city, someone at the table said something to Chris about a girl and Chris smiled and took a long drink from her beer bottle. And I knew then what I could do—what I could make happen—and I knew it with a novel and heady certainty.
I stood from the table and went upstairs to the bathroom, went upstairs to look at myself in the mirror. I wanted to see my face; I wanted for a moment to be alone with the truth of what I knew was coming. And when I came down the stairs again and stopped on the landing to see Chris’s laughing face, to see the light around the table in a house th
at was otherwise entirely dark, I couldn’t catch my breath. Not because I was afraid, but because I was—finally, fully, hopelessly—lit.
This was what I forgot that night, that warm night in late August when I began to fall in love with Chris: I was already in love. I had begun, in the months before the dinner party, to slip into the basement chapel of the Catholic Church down the street from my apartment, to kneel and stand and kneel again, to make the sign of the cross against what I had always thought to be a secular heart. I had fallen into belief, and into the consuming magic of the Catholic Church. I read the books of Thomas Merton on the subway; I worried a strand of rosary beads each morning before I left for work, reciting the prayers from an index card until I committed them to memory. I was both a stranger and my truest self in those days: I didn’t fully understand how my life had taken this unexpected turn, and I also didn’t know how I had not taken it sooner. I thought about God nearly all the time, although I did not speak about my belief to any of my friends. My silence—my absences, my lies of omission—separated me in a way that only I could see, and while at times I regretted the distance, I did not seek to close it.
Until that night. I lingered at the table; I let the last R5 train to Center City leave without me, knowing perfectly well that all the bedrooms in Jen’s Main Line house were filled with sleeping children and out-of-town guests. And when Chris said—to Jen, not to me—“She can sleep at my apartment, if she wants to,” I did not want anything but her.
It was nearly 2:00 a.m. when Chris and I left Jen’s house and walked the three dark blocks to her apartment. She told me it was a relief to be back in Philly, that Jen was like a sister to her, and she had moved to the Main Line because she needed trees and quiet after her years in Manhattan. I didn’t tell her I had moved downtown to escape the trees and the quiet. Instead I told her I knew her law firm, that it was a few blocks from my apartment.
“You’ll have to excuse the mess,” she said as I followed her up the stairs of her building, a stairway far brighter and grander than mine. “I was in Boston last weekend, my cousin’s wedding. I was the maid of honor,” she said, “if you can believe it.” She spoke with an intoxicating mix of arrogance and intimacy, as though I knew her far better than I did. “I embarrassed my mother,” she continued, “because the dress didn’t cover my tattoo.” We were in the hallway then, walking toward her door, and she stopped walking and turned toward me. “The straps went like this,” she said as she leaned in to trace a long, slow line down my back with her finger.
2
Basement Chapels
I saw Chris again the next weekend, when she took me to dinner at the White Dog Café in West Philly, a restaurant I had only ever been to with parents—mine and my ex-boyfriend’s—because no one I knew could pay the bill in a restaurant like that. Chris and I sat at a corner table lit only by a small lamp with a velvet-tasseled shade. All the food in the restaurant came from the farms around Philadelphia, which was a novel concept in 1997. We ate urban-garden lettuce topped with bright-yolked eggs and Lancaster County lamb chops. And we drank wine. I was twenty-three years old and I could not remember being happier. After dinner we went home together, and I stayed with her until late Sunday evening when I rode the train back to my apartment, and on Monday morning I didn’t take a shower because I did not want to wash the smell of her from my body.
I didn’t tell any of my friends about Chris. She was still too private, too unexpected. They wouldn’t disapprove, I was certain of that, but still I didn’t want to hear questions I had no answers for. There was only one person I knew I would tell, despite the fact that he was the one person who I knew would disapprove. It was my therapist, and in those days I told him everything.
But not right away. I gave myself a week, and then two, and then one more. Three weeks after that dinner at the White Dog Café, and a month after I had first gone home with Chris, I finally told him. “I met someone,” I said. “A woman, actually.” I tried to seem nonchalant on this point, although I failed. “I went home with her.”
He looked at me for a moment. His face was expressionless. “You’re not ready for a relationship,” he said. “She’s a distraction, and it won’t last. But you know that already, don’t you?”
My therapist’s name was Hector, and he was nothing if not predictable. I had been seeing him for nearly a year by the time I met Chris, a year of Tuesday afternoons when I would knock on his door and a few seconds later he would open it, always dressed in a dark shirt and black pants. He had gray, curly hair and a short, gray beard, and he was not much taller than me. With a cool hello he stood back for me to enter, to walk past him and into his office, which was actually a small apartment. In the beginning I would steal glances of the spartan kitchen and the formal living room, but I quickly lost interest in both. Clearly Hector did not live in this apartment; there were no clues about him to uncover in those rooms. After a few weeks I just went straight into his office. The room was big enough for a red leather couch and two red leather chairs, an oriental rug, and a small polished mahogany desk, where he stood to answer phone calls during my sessions, something he did—always to my surprise—a handful of times during the years I knew him.
Hector would then sit down across from me, put his feet up on an ottoman, take a sip from his glass teacup, and wait for me to speak. At our first session I filled the air with backstory and anecdotes, all of which I believed to be highly insightful and revelatory. I paused near the end of the session, having run out of things to say. Hector put down his teacup, leaned back slightly in his chair, and said, “I don’t have any idea who you are.” He looked right at me and I looked back. I wanted to be insulted, but I could only be astounded that I had found my way to this person, this one person in all the world who could see me. To everyone else I was the confident young woman with the job she had been told she was too young for, the woman who got a phone call from the saleswoman at Saks when the dress she wanted went on sale, the woman who swam a fast mile every night after work. But in Hector’s office those details did not a person make. According to Hector, my center—if I even had one—did not hold. I wasn’t certain how he knew this, and that he did gave me a sense of anxious exhilaration.
I was steeped in unhappiness when I first came to Hector. I was in a failing relationship and didn’t know how to end it. I had become a person so unrecognizable to myself that I avoided my eyes in the mirror; I cringed at the sound of my falsely cheerful voice on the outgoing message of the answering machine I shared with the boyfriend I was afraid to leave.
But after my first few sessions, Hector and I didn’t talk about my boyfriend much. We talked about God. In the nearly twenty years since I met Hector I have tried to remember how our first theological discussion began, but I simply can’t remember which one of us first mentioned God. I suppose I did; Hector didn’t initiate conversation. What I do remember was how fragile I felt in his office after that first visit, how quickly it became clear that if I wanted to keep Hector’s attention, if I wanted to please him, then I would have to dive deep and unearth some nugget of truth about myself that had nothing to do with my boyfriend, or my job. One thing I had begun to suspect about myself was that I was a believer, although I didn’t know in what. But I did know that faith might be one true thing about me, and if that was what Hector was after, we could start there.
At one session, early in the time I knew him, I talked for a few minutes about work, about my friends, until—for the first time—Hector interrupted me. “Do you know the story of the virgins and their lamps?” he asked.
I was startled by his interruption. “No,” I said.
“I don’t remember it well, but it’s something about ten women waiting for the midnight arrival of a man, and the man is really God. The women all have lamps, but only some of the women were wise enough to take oil for their lamps so when the man, the bridegroom I think he’s called, arrives, the women with the oil can go in to him, but the others can’t.”
Hector paused and looked at me. I didn’t say anything.
He continued. “The story is about doing the work. It’s about being prepared, knowing what you’ll need to get what you want. I think you want to know yourself, and I think,” he said with emphasis, “that you want to know God.” He reached over for his teacup. “You can’t waste any more time with someone else’s God, someone else’s idea of a good life. You have got to stop looking for the shortcut.”
Later, when I was no longer seeing Hector, I would wonder why it hadn’t seemed strange for him to use a Bible story to elucidate his point. He was not, after all, a priest or a spiritual advisor. Hector was a therapist, and I knew almost nothing about him or what he believed. But that imbalance didn’t concern me then. I had come to depend on his astute comprehension of me, and on his reliably undivided attention. And he was right: I did want to know God.
When young women like me were curious about God there were a few things we were expected to do: trek through India and Nepal; spend the winter washing dishes in a Benedictine monastery in Minnesota; volunteer at Mother Theresa’s hospital in Nairobi; or, if we were really serious, enroll for a nondenominational Master’s of Divinity at Harvard. But I wasn’t doing any of these things. I was going to therapy on the eleventh floor of an upscale apartment building in downtown Philadelphia with a man whose own beliefs were a total mystery to me.
I have often wondered if Hector bellowed the fire of belief in all his young and drifting patients, if an entire cast of us came into his office so he could nudge us toward something larger than ourselves because our selves were too nascent, too nebulous to plumb with any success. But at the time this did not occur to me. At the time what Hector and I said to each other in that office had surely never been said before.
It’s time to move out,” Hector said on a February afternoon, six months after I had started seeing him. I had told him, yet again, that I wanted to leave my boyfriend. “Clearly you’re not committed, and it’s time to move out. Forget about the lease and the rent, forget about the inconvenience. He’ll manage. You’re not a piece of furniture.”
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