Given Up for You

by Erin O. White

  Nana gave the three of us her bedroom so that there would be enough space for Grace’s Pack ’n Play. I was too embarrassed to tell her that while the extra floor space would be helpful, Grace wouldn’t be sleeping in the Pack ’n Play for more than an hour or two. It was Nana’s California king bed that we needed, to accommodate our three-generation co-sleeping. As I snapped Grace into her pajamas and curled up on the bed to nurse her to sleep, I remembered a time when I was seven years old and sitting on that very bed in my swimming suit (we were always in our swimming suits in Florida), while Nana showed my mother her new shoes. She pulled the boxes down from a shelf from which later—when I was grown and Nana wore only white Mary Jane sneakers with mesh toes—I would pull shoeboxes full of old birthday cards for us to read. But when I was seven the shoeboxes were too high for me to reach and Nana had no trouble getting them herself. When I was seven the shoeboxes were filled with spectator pumps and a pair of pale-yellow heels with a thin ankle strap. I loved those shoes and knew that someday such things would be mine. I had already shifted my gaze away from my mother with her long, brown hair, her flared jeans and cork sandals. I had already set my sights on Nana in her high heels and coral lipstick, gold chains clasped around her tan neck.

  Several years before our Easter visit, when I was still living in Philadelphia and had just started dating Chris, I flew to Florida for the weekend. The trip was a last-minute one: on Tuesday I woke with a longing for Nana and early Thursday morning I boarded a plane. Nana was still driving then and she greeted me outside the baggage claim with open arms, her eyes shielded by enormous black sunglasses.

  When we arrived at Nana’s house, she poured iced tea for both of us in cut crystal glasses and motioned me into the living room. “So then,” she said, “tell me something.”

  I knew by this she meant tell me something true, tell me something real. Any topic was fine with Nana so long as it involved love, personal epiphany, or a childhood friend joining the priesthood. So I told her about St. Patrick’s, and how I had been going to Mass, that I had joined the confirmation class. I told her that I was happy but also nervous, worried that I would be asked to give up more than I want to. Nana converted to Catholicism before she married my grandfather, so I thought she might have some idea of what I was talking about. I didn’t tell her about Hector, or Chris.

  “It’s about giving over,” she said, “that’s true.” She was smiling, her voice warm. “And there are things you have to give up, there is”—she paused here, picked up her reading glasses from the table next to her, and tapped them gently down again—“renunciation.” She smiled at me. “But it was what I wanted.” For Nana the Church was about other people: a husband and children, a family life ordered by shared practice and observance. I often thought of Nana in those first weeks and months of visiting St. Patrick’s when I watched women herd their children into the pews, women not much older than me, and I wondered if maybe I would also do that someday. But those were fantasies I was trying hard not to entertain. The whole point of St. Patrick’s was that it was mine and mine alone. The whole point was that I needed to do what I had never done, which was to sit still and surrender my fantasies and plans.

  Later I would think about what Nana said, and the word she used: renunciation. I would realize that perhaps I was selling her short in thinking she didn’t have her own personal struggles with what God and the Church asked of her. I could only see then that the Church had not taken from her what I feared it would take from me.

  Nana rocked herself up and out of her recliner. She clapped her hands. “Let’s go to the beach.”

  We spent much of the next two days swimming together at the quiet beach near Nana’s house. In the late afternoons we rested on her sunporch, then went out for an early dinner in restaurants with views of shallow harbors, their docks lined with rows of clean, white boats. We went to the movies; we looked at old picture albums. We talked about the assisted living she visited a few months ago with my uncle when she was on a trip up north. “Hibernian Hall,” Nana said in a dramatic voice. “We were there for afternoon tea, which they served in Styrofoam cups.” She laughed. “I hate drinking tea in Styrofoam cups.” I swore to Nana that I would rescue her from Hibernian Hall, should she ever find herself there. “I’ll take you at your word,” she said, still laughing, and put her hand over mine. Then she told me a story. While visiting another of her sons during that same trip, she spent the afternoon with her daughter-in-law’s mother, a woman significantly older than Nana. “After lunch,” Nana said, “she told everyone that they could bring her home, she was ready to go, but I knew she wasn’t ready, not really. I knew she wanted to stay, but she didn’t want to be in the way.” Nana looked at me, more serious now. “When I say that, when I say you can take me home, don’t believe me.”

  On Saturday afternoon we went to Mass. I sat close to Nana on the slippery wooden pew. I knelt and stood and sat with her; I waited in the pew when she joined the line for communion. She retreated from me during that hour. There were no whispered comments or explanations, no gestures other than a long embrace during the passing of the peace. We left the sanctuary in silence. She paused at the back door to dip her fingers in the stoup of holy water and cross herself, and for a moment I wondered if she would dip her fingers again and cross my forehead, the way she always had when I was young. But she kept walking out of the church and into the still air. “Well, that was lovely,” she said, putting on her sunglasses, and then, without waiting for me to comment, took my hand. “I feel like getting a new lipstick,” she said. “You?”

  When Nana and I hugged good-bye at the airport the next morning I couldn’t keep myself from crying. We were standing at the terminal drop-off, the sun already bright on our faces. Nana let go of my shoulders and took my hands in both of hers. I felt the familiar smooth surface of her thick wedding band on my palm. I wanted to say something, to explain the crying, but Nana spoke first. “Rosebud,” she said (she had called me Rosebud all through my childhood, although she hardly ever did now that I was grown), “you go home and find the good parts. There are so many good parts. Leave the hard things here with me. I can take care of them for you.” She shrugged as if to say my burdens would be no trouble for her. “You can think of me here and how much I love you. You can remember that it doesn’t have to be so hard.” She squeezed my hands, then let them go to smooth my hair, to touch my cheeks.

  I arrived home and called Chris at her office. She was an ambitious associate in a large law firm: she was at her office all the time, even on warm Sunday afternoons. As I waited for her to pick up the phone, I knew that I would ask her if she wanted to have dinner, and I knew she would say yes.

  On Monday afternoon I was in Hector’s office, telling him what Nana had said. “She said it doesn’t have to be so hard,” I told Hector. This is what I didn’t say: there is a different way to do this. There is a way to want God and also want, in the same breath, affection and companionship. I didn’t say these things because if I did I would not be able to hide that I was in love. I didn’t say these things because I knew Hector would not, on principle, disagree, but would still tell me that right now it is not possible for me to have both. I didn’t say these things because I was not certain he was wrong.

  “Maybe she means you don’t have to resist the process. You don’t have to continually engage in a battle of wills. You can surrender to a will that is not your own.”

  I deflated. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe she does.”

  Four years after that visit I wrote to Nana to tell her I was getting married, and that I was marrying a woman. I told her that I hoped she would know I was still the same granddaughter I had always been. A few days after I sent the note, I came home to a message from Nana on the answering machine telling me, in a voice broken with emotion, that she was happy for me and loved me dearly, and that would never change. And two days later I received a letter in which she apologized for that emotion in her voice, and assured me that she wa
s not sad but only worried that I thought marrying Chris would change the way she felt about me. “My love for you is everlasting,” she wrote.

  The week before our wedding a box arrived addressed to me in Nana’s beautiful script. Inside was a set of six Limoges dessert plates that had belonged to Nana’s own grandmother. They were rimmed in gold foil and painted with winding pink rosebuds.

  On Easter morning Nana decided she would rather eat dinner at home than at the restaurant where she made reservations weeks ago. “I’ll go to the store,” my mother said while we were getting dressed in Nana’s room. “Why don’t you stay home with Nana? Her Eucharistic minister is coming over in a few minutes.”

  I knelt down on the floor next to Grace and restacked her jingling foam blocks. I didn’t look at my mother. “Oh, that’s okay,” I said. “I’m happy to help you with the shopping.” I couldn’t tell my mother that I hadn’t received the Eucharist since I was pregnant with Grace, and that it no longer felt possible. I wish I could have seen then that communion was impossible for hopeful reasons, that I couldn’t receive because it still meant so much to me. I had faith! It was a simple fact about me, like my thick hair and bad eyesight. The trouble was I had tried to grow my faith like an annual plant in the garden, tending its showy blooms that had no chance of making it through the winter when I should have been trying for something a little hardier. I should have been trying for roots.

  I remembered a phone conversation Nana and I had many Easters ago. “I’m not having a good Easter,” I told her. “I don’t think it’s my holiday. I might not even celebrate it anymore.”

  “Oh sure,” she said. “Why not?” (“Why not?” is something we liked to say to each other in what we called our Mary Tyler Moore Days, those years in my early twenties and her late seventies when we were both living alone, figuring out how to pay the bills and make baked potatoes in the toaster oven.) “You can choose your holidays,” she said. “But you know, if it’s really Easter, then it can’t be anything but good.”

  But it can. Look at us now, Nana, I thought as my mother pulled out of the driveway with me next to her and Grace fussing in the back seat. You are waning and I am turning away. How exactly, I wanted to ask Nana, do I love both you and this baby? And how in the world do I also love God? I used to hope that having a baby would increase my capacity for compassion, my understanding of the mysteries of love. And Grace had done just that. The only problem was, she alone filled my new capacity. I might have had more to give, but I gave it all to her. I was a distant wife, a self-absorbed daughter, and an absent friend. And I could live with all that. Or I should say I did live with that, in the same way I lived with my dizzying and unwieldy love for Grace. But I was maxed out. I knew that I could not bear the fragile beauty of Nana and Jesus on the sunporch. Would I ever be able to stop crying?

  As I write this I think of how lovely it would have been to stay home with Nana that Easter morning, although I have long since forgiven myself for choosing instead to push Grace around Publix in a shopping cart. In the years since that Easter morning I have often imagined that I made the other choice, and in my mind’s eye I can see myself sitting next to a weakened Nana; I can feel Grace on my lap. I can see myself crying and crying, but I can also see the moment when I stop. This imagining is a sort of prayer, really, and when I pray it I am reminded of something Andre Dubus wrote, about how he believed that prayer was not beholden to time, and so it was possible to pray for people and events of the past, and for those prayers to ease the way of those long gone. Dubus wrote that he sometimes still prayed for Jack Kennedy. I know my prayer is not the same, I know there is no moment on the sunporch to revisit and nothing can change that, but I still pray for both of us then. And I ask God to ease Nana’s loneliness, and my fear.

  We went back to the house with a turkey breast and sweet potatoes for roasting, a bunch of thick asparagus stalks, and a box of butter cookies. My mother made dinner and we ate together on the sunporch. Everything was just how Nana liked it and she said so, which, I could see, pleased my mother. After dinner Nana took a nap in her recliner while my mother cleaned up and I entertained Grace.

  The next morning we packed our things. “What should I do with this?” I asked my mother, pointing to the travel high chair we bought for Grace at Target. “Maybe I’ll put it in the Love Shack,” she said, using Nana’s moniker for the shed where she kept her washer and dryer and her three-wheel bicycle. I finished packing while my mother talked with Nana. Nana didn’t want her to leave. My mother promised that she would come back right away, as soon as she took care of a few things at home. And she would make good on that promise; she would return to Florida in two weeks, and four weeks later Nana would be living in a convent-turned-assisted-living in Pennsylvania, a few miles down the road from Hibernian Hall. I would not be called to rescue her; Nana would enjoy many good years in assisted living. But the other promise, the one about not believing her when she says she wants to go home, I broke that one. Because what Nana was really asking then was for me to conspire with her against the solitude of old age, against the expectation that she would want to fade politely into the background. But that Easter I began to let her fade.

  We took the suitcases to the car. Nana sat in her recliner, her back to the door. I went in to say good-bye. I put Grace on Nana’s lap one more time and told her I loved her. She kissed Grace, cradled her small head. I took Grace to the car, and a few moments later my mother came out of the house. She got into the driver’s seat and backed the car out of the driveway. Just before we made the turn onto the street, Nana came to the door. She waved and blew us a kiss. “Oh, good for her,” my mother said. “Good for her for saying good-bye.” And Nana stood there at the door, waving, until we turned the corner and she disappeared from view.

  14

  Family Week

  Provincetown, the fishing village at Cape Cod’s easternmost tip, is a shifting land. Water swallows marsh and harbor and then recedes; the sky is the color of melancholy and then optimism, and then a color you simply can’t name, which is why the painters love it there. Provincetown is also the land of queer tourists and our festivals, our weeks. In summer there is Carnival, in fall Spooky Bear Weekend and Women’s Week. And in winter, Snowbound Leather. When Grace was two years old we took her to Family Week. It was Gaby and Kelly’s idea: they had a favorite rental in the quiet East End, a butter-yellow Victorian with tumbles of wisteria over the gate and trompe l’oeil doors. We made the plans in early February, when the arrival of summer had seemed as improbable as Grace sleeping through the night. But now we were here. (Although Grace was still not sleeping through the night.)

  I loved Provincetown. Chris preferred the wildness of Truro, the quiet of Wellfleet, but I loved the people in Provincetown; I loved the harbor and the gleaming library, the dress shops, the beautiful, beautiful men. It was in Provincetown, many years before, that a gay man had explained his theory of why gay men weren’t always so kind to lesbians. The man, a charming and talkative psychologist from Atlanta, was a fellow guest at the inn where Chris and I were spending New Year’s, and where we were one of only two lesbian couples. (Chris had a crush on one of the women. She kept saying, “Doesn’t Helen look just like Christiane Amanpour?”)

  “Gay men admire the feminine, and lesbians reject it,” the psychologist from Atlanta explained to me over breakfast. “They have what we want, and don’t do much with it.” Then he winked at me and said, “A rule to which you are an exception.”

  I laughed and thanked him, delighted that this stranger could see exactly who I was. Of course, I was really delighted because he could see exactly who I wanted to be: a lesbian who didn’t look like a lesbian. I had very little understanding then of femme culture and identity, and that I was not an exception but a type. I knew about femmes, but I thought of them only in the past tense, as highly costumed women on the arms of stone butches in lesbian bars. I could only see them in black and white. Where I lived, most of the lesbians—
really most of the women in general—fell somewhere between femme and butch, right around Teva sandals and Title Nine running shorts. And because these were the first days of the new millennium and the internet was still in its infancy, I didn’t have the chance to view—daily, hourly—a varied and multitudinous array of lesbian lives. I couldn’t have imagined doing what I now do several times a day: scrolling through the Instagram feeds of lesbian writers and ministers, politicians and journalists, artists and designers. I look at their glasses and their girlfriends, their tote bags and cocktails, their book piles and vacation photos. Their Easter dresses.

  But these women and their worlds weren’t visible to me in those days. All I had were my outdated assumptions, and my fierce refusal to admit that my sexual identity had a lot more to do with my monogamous three-year-long relationship with a woman than it did with how many pairs of shoes I owned.

  During Family Week all the gay men were fathers. At restaurants, at the playground and the beach, I saw them with their babies and toddlers and kids. I saw them talking on cell phones, I saw them flirting with each other, and I even saw them chatting with the lesbian moms. I saw them looking really, really good. I admired their ability to parent and remain self-centered.

  “That’s sort of homophobic,” Kelly pointed out when I told her I had far lower parenting expectations for gay men than I did for just about anyone else. And then, before I could defend myself, she laughed and said, “But so do I.”

  Her laughter emboldened me. “I also think they’re having more sex than we are,” I said.

  “You think?” she said, rolling her eyes.

  Provincetown was a refuge, a wonderland for so many gay people, and when we were there I was reminded that the ease with which we lived in western Massachusetts was a luxury. All these other LGBT parents came to Provincetown for the chance to be themselves, to rest in the glorious gayness of the place. But I didn’t need that rest in the same way. Not that I surrounded myself with queer people. Quite the opposite, really. Even though we lived in the lesbian capital of America, most of my friends—aside from Gaby and Kelly—were straight. My straight friend Heather was always telling me about a lesbian she had just met, how I should become friends with her. “You need some lesbian friends,” she would say. I knew she was right, but I was happy with the friends I already had. They were more familiar to me than the lesbians I knew.