“Don’t go yet,” Laura said. She grabbed the horizontal metal pole at the top of the fence and walked her legs back, until she could lean into her stretch.
“Okay,” I agreed, surprised at how happy her request made me. The muscles in her legs stood out, shifting as she moved. I was mesmerized.
“When do you think you’ll get home tonight?” I asked her. I took a last drag from my cigarette and stamped it out on the pavement. Suddenly I couldn’t watch her anymore as she lunged and extended, loosening up. The way I felt was frightening me again. There was nowhere I could go with it, no one I trusted enough not to use it against me.
“About six-thirty, maybe seven. Don’t call till after eight. We should be finished eating by then.”
I kept my eyes on the coach out in the field, pacing in her deliberate way, making her points to the girl she was with. I wished I was that girl; I wished that I had someone to put her arm around me and help me see my way through. The coach was a woman I had developed a minor obsession with the year before while she taught me the back walkover, spotting me again and again until I could do it on my own. The touch of her hand on my back as I arched my body over gave me confidence and a feeling of excitement low in my stomach. Watching her now as she walked with her soccer student in their private conference, I wondered if the rumors were true that she was a lesbian.
As soon as I thought that word, everything seemed to get very still and silent around me, as though the world had gone into slow motion. All my senses were magnified: I felt my vision was sharper; I could hear from greater distances. I was a lesbian. There was a name for my feelings. Just knowing that changed my whole life in an instant. Everything would unfold differently now. I was surprised that I hadn’t figured it out before. Why hadn’t I understood something that was so obvious?
Then my heart started beating so hard I was afraid it would seize up. I didn’t want to be gay. I didn’t want to be even more different than I already was. Lesbians were ugly women with hair on their faces. They hated men. They were unhappy. So I wasn’t gay after all. I just had crushes sometimes on other girls. That seemed normal to me, nothing to jump to conclusions over. What about all the crushes on boys I’d had? From the time I became aware of sex, I’d thought about boys. What about the guys I still thought were cute? I even had a life-size poster of Mick Jagger up on my wall at home.
Trying to look calm, I took my cigarettes out of my pocket and lit another one. Laura finished her stretches. We stood together, heads down. Her new white socks were already dusty from our walk. I was too aware of her legs, the fresh green of the grass beyond the fence, my own body hardly able to stand still with everything inside me going off at once. Some of the girls on the team had seen us and called out to Laura.
“You’d better go practice,” I said, nodding sideways toward her friends. “Why don’t you call me when you’re through with dinner?”
Behind the hair fallen over her face, Laura nodded. “Okay. But call me if it’s getting late.” She swept her hair behind her ear, then looked up at me. Her inviting brown eyes, her face close to mine made me dizzy with the urge to kiss her. I stepped back.
“I just don’t want to piss off your mother if you’re still at the table.” Then I waved, some kind of dumb smile on my face, and walked away from her.
I bicycled home, pedaling fast, pushing myself. I wanted to feel the ache in my legs and nothing else. When I could be alone in my room I would let my discovery bubble up again, filling me. I would think it through, see what made sense. I arrived at the house sweaty and out of breath.
My mother was waiting for me in the kitchen. “I was just on the phone with your English teacher,” she said as soon as I came in, slamming the back door behind me. “And don’t slam the door, Min.”
“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” I called back, taking the stairs two at a time. What had he told her? How much had he actually heard?
“I don’t care what you want,” she said, following after me. “He told me you hit a boy in your class.”
“I threw books at him. There’s a difference.” In my room, I swung my knapsack off my shoulders and let it slide to the wood floor.
My mother caught up to me and turned me around, her hands on my shoulders startling me. “Don’t act smart with me. I want to know what happened.”
“Didn’t Mr. Connor tell you?”
“He seemed to think your classmate was aggravating you in some way. He wanted me to tell you that if there’s another incident, you’ll forfeit your chance for the English award. Min, he likes you very much and doesn’t want to see you go astray.” I shrugged. My mother’s hands rested heavier on my shoulders, as if they could cure me of shrugging. She had pulled back her hair with a barrette, but most of what used to be her bangs had escaped. She looked at me fixedly through her new reading glasses, which she had forgotten to take off. “I want to ask you up front. Was it about drugs?”
“What?” I pulled away from her, sat down on my bed, and started to pull off my high-tops. My mother made no sense to me sometimes. “Where did you get that idea?” Maybe she had found my nickel bag in one of my old rain-boots.
“Just answer me, Min.”
I was struggling with a knotted shoelace. “No, it had nothing to do with drugs. He called me some names.” I hadn’t meant to tell her that, but I was angry and wanted to show her how off the mark she was.
“What did he call you?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Because you tried to hurt him. Min, what did he call you?”
The knot refused to loosen, and I was sick of picking at it. I gave up, reached over to my desk for my scissors, and cut the lace of my sneaker. I kicked the shoe off; it landed with a thud. Looking at it lying forlornly on its side, I said, “He called me a gook.”
My mother didn’t say anything. Then she sat down on the bed next to me. She seemed to be feeling something very strongly, struggling with it. Seeing her upset, I was instantly back in the shock and sting I had felt with Nick in the hallway, like being hit with pebbles and spattered with mud. But this time I wasn’t completely alone. I was glad I had told her.
“Kids call each other names, Min,” she said after a while. I stared at her, stunned, but she wasn’t looking at me. “It’s normal. My classmates called me Four-Eyes when I was in school. You just have to ignore them. It happens to everybody.” My chest felt emptied out, hollow. I’d been stupid to think she had changed.
When I was growing up, she and my father had made a point of teaching me to be aware of the struggles of blacks in the US. She used to tell me that their fight for civil rights was different from the fight for recognition of any other minority group. She said none of us could understand the experience of being black no matter how closely we identified or worked with black people. Maybe it was true that no one could know what it was like for people different from themselves. But I thought she knew something of what I went through. She was my mother. She had raised me. Not only that, she had chosen to adopt me. Not from down the street, from Korea. Why wouldn’t she admit what my life had been like here?
At least my father had never blurted out “No, no,” and left the room when I told him how some kids had teased me at school. He had never gone off on some stranger on the street when they asked if I was related. The nights my father put me to bed, he couldn’t tell me whether it would have been easier if I’d had Korean parents, if I’d grown up with them in Korea. But he had helped me feel better, just by listening, just by being there. Sitting with my mother, I missed my father sharply. After two years, I had almost gotten used to him not living with us anymore.
I looked down at my mother’s lap, where one of her hands gripped the other. They were pale and useless hands. She said, “What that boy called you was wrong. But you shouldn’t have struck out at him, Min. Violence won’t solve anything.”
I didn’t agree, but I kept quiet.
“I want you to think about what you did,” she
went on. “I’m grounding you for the weekend.”
“You’re grounding me? But I was defending myself!”
“It doesn’t matter. You know better.”
“This is completely unfair!” I shouted at her. She flinched, but she didn’t move. I stood, wanting to push her off my bed, kick her onto the floor. “Get out of here. Get the fuck out of my room!” I didn’t understand anything anymore. The world was insane.
“Min, watch your mouth or I’ll ground you next weekend too.” I could barely restrain myself. How could she be so unfair? My mother stood up and smoothed down the back of her wraparound skirt. “I’m sorry, Min. It’s for your own good.”
“Get out!” I screamed.
After she had closed the door behind her, I cried for a long time, soaking my pillow. When it was over, I lay crumpled on my bed, feeling like something very small, something thrown away and worthless.
Every summer Laura went away for two months with her family. They went to Michigan to stay with her aunt and uncle who had a summerhouse on Mackinac Island. During these months we wrote long letters to each other in which we described the activities of each day, interlacing these meticulous descriptions with full paragraphs on how much we missed each other and wished we were in the same place. During that summer, I had to acknowledge that mine, at least, had become love letters of a sort: to my eyes there was no mistaking how full of my longing for her they were.
I was also becoming aware that part of my longing was for everything she had: a family, a place to go, the freedom to spend the day sailing or swimming or reading a book. Over that summer I wrote to Laura during my breaks while I sat smoking a cigarette on the back steps of the ice cream store in San Francisco where I worked. My mother, who had a job as the bookkeeper at the local animal hospital, had informed me when summer began that because her boss had to cut her salary, she couldn’t afford to give me an allowance anymore. I’d have to find a job if I wanted to have any pocket money. When I asked her why she couldn’t stop going to therapy instead, she snapped that her therapy wasn’t up for discussion. She said money was tight and I would have to start contributing something of my own. It felt unfair, like every rule she made that summer. I yelled at her that she was selfish, slammed the door behind me, and rode my bike around in the rain, not really having anywhere to go.
I wrote Laura that after work I liked to walk around the city, climbing the hills and catching my breath at the top. Sometimes I explored alone and sometimes with Alison, who was in college at San Francisco State and worked with me behind the ice cream counter. I didn’t tell Laura that Alison had a girlfriend who sometimes stopped by the store, and that they left me in charge while they went out back to make out. I told Laura about the customers who came in to buy a cone or use the bathroom: the tourists underdressed in shorts and t-shirts, the hippies walking around barefoot, the groups of college students with the munchies, the men reeking of alcohol who panhandled for change. I didn’t tell her I had begun looking for lesbians on the street, or that I liked the confident way they walked and how they cut their hair. I didn’t tell her I was afraid to tell Alison about me because I’d never had a girlfriend. If I was a lesbian, it was purely theoretical; I didn’t have the experience of sleeping with another girl to know for sure.
Laura wrote back long, chatty letters full of complaints about her parents, who fought nonstop when they were away from home, and about being grouped with her younger cousins while her sister and brother were treated like adults. Almost three weeks into her vacation, Laura wrote that she had started going out with a boy who was the brother of a cousin’s friend.
“He’s got curly light brown hair and freckles on his face and all over his arms,” she wrote. “He’s a year younger than us, so, you know, he’s kind of awkward. He’s really thoughtful and polite, though. He’s the exact same height as me. I met him playing tennis. He’s good. We play tennis almost every day. Oh, and I almost forgot! His name is Dave.”
She wrote me in the usual detail about their dates, describing how his braces cut her lip the first time they made out, how he asked permission before he unclasped her bra and felt her up, and fully setting the scene the night his parents came home to find them in the dark, semi-clothed and wedged together on the living room couch. All his mother said was, “We’re off to sleep. You just go on doing what you were doing” as they walked through to their bedroom, clicking off the light again before leaving the room.
I couldn’t stand reading those letters. At each mention of Dave, my stomach would curdle. Every time Laura began an enthusiastic portrayal of an evening spent fooling around with her new boyfriend, I dreaded what I might stumble across, as though I had inadvertently entered a field planted with land mines. The scenery was pretty, but every step could mean getting blown to bits. It didn’t help that all I was doing was scooping ice cream and walking a lot. Even if I had wanted to sleep with a boy, I wasn’t meeting any that I considered mature and interesting enough to spend any time with. And I would probably never meet a girl who liked other girls who wasn’t already involved. I kept waiting for the letter in which Laura would tell me that they had had sex. That would, I knew, send me over the edge. I didn’t know if I’d be able to forgive her. It would hurt too much. For weeks my stomach roiled. I lost my appetite completely. It was turning out to be the worst summer of my entire life.
At night sometimes, when we were getting along, I hung out talking with my mother in the kitchen. She’d make us a pot of decaf coffee and we’d share work stories. When she asked if I’d heard from Laura I didn’t tell her much. On the days I didn’t work in San Francisco, I liked to take the long bike ride down to Muir Beach, zipping around the hairpin turns as the road descended through the redwoods and emerged into the sunlight again. On the damp beach I’d walk away from the dog walkers and picnicking families down to a more deserted area, then sit on top of a rock formation jutting out into the sea and, out of the wind, light up a joint. I preferred sitting on rocks where the spray of the crashing waves against the battered stone showered me lightly. I pretended I was a captain at sea valiantly standing at the wheel, calling orders to the crew as a storm raged around our great wooden sailing ship.
Toward the end of July, I had just arrived at the beach and was locking up my bike when I heard my name being called. It was Miguel from school. I didn’t know him very well. Through Laura I knew he had had sex with several girls in our class, though I had never seen him with any of them in the halls or hanging out after school in the parking lot. Once, I’d overheard a girl in an adjacent bathroom stall tell her friend, “Well, he’s not so bad for a wetback. You should try him once or twice.” At the beach, he was standing with three other guys, none of whom I recognized, but he broke away from them and came over to talk. After a while he invited me to get high with them. The five of us walked down the beach and passed around a couple of joints. I didn’t like his friends, who seemed mostly interested in comparing the improvements they’d made on their cars. I didn’t get the sense that Miguel liked them much either. But I liked Miguel, who made me laugh and who made me feel sharp-witted. At school he played the strong, silent type, but I saw that wasn’t him at all. Later that afternoon, he stored my bike in the trunk of his parents’ car and drove me home.
We started hanging out together after that. We’d meet at the beach and climb out onto the rocks and get high, then sometimes drive to my house while my mother was still at work. In my room we’d listen to music and crack up at the lyrics, or have heavy talks about school, or fall asleep. I tried to recount our stuporous, hilarious conversations in my letters to Laura. She was disapproving in her return letters, upset that I was getting stoned so much and that Miguel and I drove around while high. In one, she reminded me that I was breaking the law. A page later she told me that she had given Dave her first hand job. She said the underside of his erect penis felt silky and warm, but basically the whole thing was weird. In my next letter, I ignored everything she had written and av
oided mentioning Miguel altogether. It was a short letter.
The day Miguel and I had sex, neither of us expected it. We were lying on my bed listening to my new Supertramp record. We were too stoned to move, much less haul ourselves up and go anywhere. The music was turned up loud and seemed to emanate from everything: the furniture, the pines outside my window, Miguel himself. For a while I got very focused on watching his Adam’s apple jump up and down in his throat, fascinated that it did this all on its own. Then I looked up at his face and realized it was because he was singing “Goodbye Stranger” in falsetto. I had the distinct sensation that someone was pushing my head up and forward, trying to get it to come off. I didn’t know if I liked this.
The day was hot, and Miguel had taken off his shirt. I looked at his flat nipples on his bony chest, thinking there was something missing. When I realized what it was, I told him to turn over and began to draw letters on his back, making him guess what I had written. Other than my father’s, I had never touched a male back before. Miguel’s was hard where he had muscles, and soft everywhere else. I drew slowly, fascinated by the texture of his skin, the way it sank under my finger and yet didn’t give way.
“B, R, E, A . . . Bread. Breath. Breakfast!”
“No!” I giggled. I wrote the next letter. A yeasty smell came from his skin. I bent my head over him to breathe it in. I was starting to feel excited touching him.
“S. Breas . . .”
“Let me finish,” I said, and completed my word on his warm back. Watching my hand move over his body, I saw that his skin was only slightly darker than my own. For some reason this fact struck me as incredibly funny.
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