Scissors, Paper, Stone

by Martha K. Davis

  Now that she had lost the momentum of her indignation, I could listen to what she was saying. My dismay at being caught turned angry.

  I said, “I could have done to you? What you saw was between Alison and me. It wasn’t about you.”

  My mother looked up sharply. “In my house? Knowing I was coming home? I think that was a pretty clear message you were trying to send me.”

  I had to consider that. Why had we started kissing, knowing she could arrive home any moment? Confused, I wondered if my mother was right. Had I wanted to provoke her, upset her? Then I rejected the idea. Alison and I had just become lovers the night before. All I wanted to do was touch her. Even inside my own house, I had forgotten all about my mother. But the doubt lingered. I pushed it aside.

  “There’s no message, Mom. I’ll tell you when I have something to say to you.”

  She laughed joylessly, shaking her head at me. “You don’t even know what you feel. I think you’re angry at me, Min. Very angry. For adopting you. For divorcing your father. For being a mother who sets limits for your own good. You’re furious, and you’re getting back at me with the thing that will hurt me the most. And it’s working.”

  I moved closer to her chair, stood over her. I could feel the energy of my rage surge up in me, desperate for a way out. I yelled, “I wasn’t trying to hurt you, Mom. This has nothing to do with you. I like girls. That’s what we’re talking about. I like Alison. A lot.”

  My mother sat through my tirade looking fixedly ahead of her, as if she were trying to concentrate on something else so that she wouldn’t have to listen to me. “Are you finished?” she said.

  “No. If you want to get angry at me for lying to you or whatever you think I’ve been doing, go ahead. I invited Alison up here today so you could meet her. I thought you’d be glad to know I have a new friend.” She opened her mouth and started to respond. “Let me finish. I’m sorry you walked in on us, because I wanted to tell you that I’m a lesbian sometime soon, when we could have time to talk about it. I think you would have reacted differently if you had found out differently.” I backed up a step, as though releasing her from a spell I had cast over her. “That’s all I have to say for now.”

  She pushed herself out of her chair, and I was afraid for a second that she was going to come at me, maybe even hit me. Then I realized she wanted the advantage of height. She said, a hand on her hip, “How could you think I would be glad to meet a girl like that, who’s obviously such a bad influence on you?” I started to protest but she held up a hand. “Now let me finish. You are not a lesbian, Min. You probably think you’re in love with that girl, but let me tell you, you’re not. This is a phase you’re going through. You’ll get over it.”

  “I think all that therapy you’ve had is making you crazy,” I burst out.

  “Don’t talk back to me!” she lashed back. “Your anger is out of control. Partly it’s your age. You’re blindly acting out. Some day you’ll look back at your behavior with this girl, and with me, and you’ll be ashamed. I think you should consider seeing a therapist, Min. I really do.” She sat back down in her chair, apparently exhausted.

  “This is totally fucked up,” I said. I had started to pace the room, but there was too much furniture to take long strides. I stood behind the rocking chair and held on to its two posts. I could have thrown it across the room just then. “You’re not listening to me, Mom. This is not a phase. This is who I am. Of course I’m angry at you. You refuse to believe what I’m telling you.”

  “I refuse to believe it because it’s not true!” my mother yelled at me.

  “Yes it is!” I yelled back, ready to cry from frustration.

  “And I will not allow you to see that girl again,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard me.

  “How are you going to stop me?”

  The pins holding up her hair had loosened, and her hair was falling down to her shoulders. She reached up and impatiently pulled them all out. “You will not see that girl while you are living in this house, is that clear?” she asked, stressing each word.

  “Fine. Then I’m moving out.”

  “You are not moving out.”

  “You wanted me to learn to be more independent, remember?”

  “Min, you’re not going anywhere,” she said tiredly. She didn’t believe me.

  “Watch me.”

  I turned and walked out of the room, grabbed my bike from its place in the hall. My mother tried to catch up with me, calling my name. I let the door slam in her face.

  I rode away as fast as I could, mindless and seething with fury. After a while I began to notice I was on a road leading out of town, and I kept going. I thought I would eventually find a phone by the side of the road or in the next town, and I would call Alison and ask if I could stay with her. Then I remembered that Alison was probably still driving back to the city and wouldn’t be home yet. I thought of Laura next and made a U-turn. But at her house no one answered my knock, and when I tried the back door, it was locked. “Where the fuck are you, Laura?” I shouted at the house. There was no response, only the whispering of the leaves in the surrounding trees. I looked around the deck and saw the covered hot tub in the corner. I was tired, sweaty, on the edge of tears. It would be so easy to lift off the cover and slip into the warm water inside. It would be like wrapping the water around me like a blanket or the embrace of human arms. I could think of nothing I’d rather do. But I knew that in the end Laura’s whole family would come home and find me there, and they’d make a scene, and I’d have to explain what had happened, and her parents would send me back home to work out my problems. I wasn’t willing to bear anymore alone. I needed Laura to get into that tub.

  I picked up my bike from the driveway and pedaled slowly back toward the square, hoping Alison had reached her dorm by now.

  That night in Alison’s single bed, with only the soft light of a candle on her desk, we finished what we had started earlier in my mother’s living room. I wouldn’t let her try to make me come; I knew it would be useless. All I really wanted was to be touched and held. I had recounted word for word what my mother and I had said to each other. Alison had agreed that I should stay with her in her dorm room until we could figure out what to do next. I didn’t want to think about that yet.

  Alison rolled onto her side facing me and propped her head up on her arm. She passed her hand lightly over my sweating body, feeling my ribs and hipbones through the skin, shaping her fingers to the curve of my shoulder. I loved the way hands could travel the planes of the body, covering it, stimulating or soothing it. I loved how the merest brush of Alison’s fingertips against my face felt like communion. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. I moved my head slightly, nestling my cheek into her warm palm. When I exhaled, I could feel the tightness in my chest creak loose and settle, like sand spilling to the bottom of a dune.

  Alison said, “I love the texture of your skin. It’s so soft. Do all Asian women have such soft skin?”

  I looked up at her, thinking she was joking. She was waiting for my answer. I caught her hand, held it away from me.

  “No, just the adopted ones,” I said.

  She shot me a bewildered look. I ignored it and pushed her onto her back, not gently. Holding her down, I straddled her thighs, leaned over, and bit her pink nipple, scraping my teeth over its hard, wrinkled skin.

  When Alison and I woke up the next morning, we both realized I should go back. At least until I had a plan. But as the bus crossed the bridge and I sat looking out at the parched brown grasses of the Marin Headlands, I knew I would stay once I got home. I wasn’t ready to find my own place, or transfer to another school, or live in another city from my friends. How would I pay rent? My mother wouldn’t help me; she didn’t want me to leave. As for seeing Alison, I would work it out.

  I was late getting to school. I smoked a cigarette sitting on the terrace wall by the entrance while I waited for the bell to ring for the mid-morning break. The day was overcast and windy. A
few cars passed by. Nobody was out on the street.

  Inside, as the hall flooded with students, I pushed through to my locker to get rid of my knapsack. Laura was there, waiting for me. She looked extremely pretty, her long blonde hair French braided and hanging in a thick rope behind her head. She also looked upset.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, walking up to her.

  She turned towards me and grabbed my arm. “Min! God, I was so worried. I went over to your house yesterday afternoon.”

  “Shit. Let’s go outside and talk.”

  We went back out and sat on the wide tiled steps. A few other kids were standing around. One guy started pushing another, trying to start a fight. We had fifteen minutes until the next class started.

  “Okay,” I said, turning to Laura. “What happened?”

  “Well, I went over to see if you were home. Your mother—”

  “Wait. What time was this?”

  “I don’t know. About three.” I nodded and she continued. “Your mother was in the kitchen. She was on the phone. When she saw it was me, she hung up and invited me in and asked if I had seen you. She made a pot of coffee and we sat at the kitchen table and talked for a long time.”

  “About me? What did she tell you?”

  “Well, not much. She said you’d been arguing, but she didn’t say what about. I didn’t want to pry or anything. We talked about how hard it is between mothers and daughters sometimes. I told her about the problems I’ve been having with my mom. She seemed really interested, and she helped me look at some of it from my mother’s point of view. You know, your mom is really cool.”

  I snorted and shook my head. “Yeah, well, she’s not that cool. She can’t handle reality.”

  “You’re so hard on her, Min.”

  I knew her talk with my mother was important to Laura. The whole time we had been friends, my mother had acted as a kind of second mother to her, almost a sister. Often while she was over at my house, Laura would wander into whatever room my mother was in and hang out with her for a while. I could hear them laughing. Sometimes I got angry because Laura was my friend.

  “She deserves it,” I said, and the frustration I had felt with my mother the day before rose up in me, catching in my throat. “I’ll tell you the reason we fought yesterday. I’ve started seeing someone. My mother found out about it.”

  Laura’s face changed, and I remembered why we had stopped talking about sex. She looked away as if that could hide what she was feeling. “So soon?” she said.

  “Well, it’s not that quick. I think it’s been building up for a while.”

  She nodded, then she was silent. Then, “Who is he? Do I know him?”

  “That’s the part my mother didn’t like. It’s not a guy. It’s Alison.”

  “Alison,” she repeated, dully. “Your friend at work.”

  “Right.”

  Laura still wouldn’t look at me. She seemed to have stopped breathing. “You never—” she began, then stopped. I was afraid she wouldn’t accept it either, just like my mother. She looked down at her hands, which were clasped very tightly together. “Have you made love yet?”

  I almost smiled at her choice of words but inside me something was twisting around like a towel being wrung dry. I finally understood what she had meant about having to keep up with me. Even the language we each used about sex was different. “Yes, we’re sleeping together. It only started about a week ago,” I added.

  She looked up at me, her head cocked, squinting as though I was casting a bright light. “Does this mean you’re a lesbian?” The bell in the clock tower started its hourly chime: we had five minutes before the beginning of class.

  I nodded.

  A long silence. “I guess you’ll spend a lot of time with Alison now.”

  “Probably.”

  “When will I ever see you?” she asked.

  I realized in that moment just how much my life had changed. I would never again be able to have everything the way it had been for so long. I felt afraid. Unlike two nights before, when I had anticipated sex with Alison with excitement as well as fear, I saw now there would be losses. They had already begun.

  Laura and I stared at each other. The future loomed ahead, completely unknown. I could see in her face that she was thinking the same thing. I looked around. No one else was still outside but us.

  CHAPTER 6

  Min

  Spring 1982

  THE ENVELOPE WAS LIGHT BLUE and smelled faintly of honeysuckle. I put it up to my nose, inhaling. It was addressed to me in a woman’s round, loopy handwriting. I flipped the metal door in the bank of mailboxes closed and ran up the stairs to my apartment. As far as I could remember, I didn’t know anyone who used scents. For a moment I wondered if it could be a card from one of the women I’d been flirting with during the last few months. I thought I could guess which one.

  Inside, I threw my keys and knapsack on the kitchen table. As soon as I turned the envelope over and saw my father’s name on the back, still in the woman’s handwriting, I knew exactly what it contained: an invitation to his wedding. The sweet odor of honeysuckle was nauseating. I said “Shit” out loud and threw the envelope down on the floor as though it had burned my hand.

  Trembling, I leafed through the rest of the mail. There was only one other thing for me, a flyer from an Asian-American women’s group that kept sending me notices about upcoming events because I had called once to ask about their meetings. I balled it up and threw it at the trash can. I had been trying to work up the nerve to go for weeks, but right then, looking for a sense of community felt beside the point. The crushed paper hit the side and fell onto the floor.

  I knew I had to open it eventually. I left the bills and Henry’s mail on the kitchen table. Picking up the blue envelope from the floor, I went out to the back porch where I sat on the rickety stairs overlooking the yard two flights down. I pulled a pack of Benson & Hedges and my lighter from my denim jacket and lit a cigarette. I’d been telling myself I would stop smoking by the time I turned eighteen, but my birthday had been half a year before. Now the deadline was when I became a certified massage practitioner. I had a little more than a month left, and I was down to half a pack a day.

  As I pulled the smoke down into my lungs and then let it escape through my open mouth, a calm spread over me. I could feel my heart slow in my chest and a tranquility similar to a warm, comforting hand on my shoulder. Of course, I would have preferred someone’s actual arm around me. I thought of Laura, out of habit, and then I thought of Jane, a woman I had met one night a couple of months before at Clementina’s and slept with sometimes. It was nice to have a night of friendly sex occasionally with someone who didn’t need anything from me the next morning. I inhaled another luscious lungful of smoke and wondered why I had wanted to quit. In the fenced-off yard below me, Clara, one of the dykes living on the first floor, was kneeling over the small patch of vegetable garden she was trying to get going. Since she’d moved in the month before, I’d been coming onto her whenever possible, with minimal success. We had taken a walk together, but she hadn’t accepted my suggestion afterwards that we go up to my apartment for something to drink. While I smoked, I admired the curve of her ass in her fuschia drawstring pants and hoped she wouldn’t notice me. I was in no mood to talk, much less flirt. I was imagining untying her pants and tugging them down past her hips when she looked up and waved, calling my name. I waved back briefly, looked away, took another drag.

  My gaze wandered over to our next-door neighbors’ backyard. Strung between two posts, clean laundry hung limply in the windless air. The city, or what I could see of it—rooftops, telephone poles and electric wires, laurel and fir trees, glimpses into open windows—struck me as more hushed than usual under the gray sky, as if waiting for something to happen: the wail of a police siren, a ground tremor, causing everything to set off again at some slightly different, unknown pace. I blew my last comforting lungful of smoke into the air, watching it drift and disappear,
then stubbed the butt out in the tuna can I kept by the door. The invitation lay next to me on the chipped white paint of the top step. I stared at it for a few seconds and then, telling myself I was being stupid, I grabbed it and tore open the side of the envelope.

  The invitation itself was simple, a card with raised lettering setting out the date, time, and place, and an RSVP card and envelope. I stared at the embossed words, my father’s name paired with that of a woman I had met twice. Angela was his boss at the environmental non-profit where he was Director of Development. She wore dark suits in an office where everyone else was in khakis or jeans. She was thirty-one, closer to my age than to his. She could have once been my babysitter. At the bottom of the invitation my father had scrawled, “We hope you’ll celebrate with us.”

  We. The word reverberated oddly inside me, a harsh clanging. I wanted another cigarette. Fingering the pack in my jacket pocket, I reread his sentence several times. Who was this “we”? Why didn’t he just say “Angela and I” to avoid confusion? When he’d lived at home he had said “we” and meant him and my mother, or the three of us. In his occasional letters since he had left, five years before, I was used to reading “we” as me and him. I knew I could unfold my father’s letters and trace the evolution of his relationship with this woman, but those scant pages couldn’t help me make the leap to this other, outside “we.” He had kicked open the battered circle in which I still imagined the three of us and walked out, collapsing it. Staring down at the card and his short, simple sentence, I saw for the first time that what he and my mother and I had been together was nothing. It was over and done with. Our family was simply the easily assembled pieces of a toy: the orphan daughter brought over from another country, the parents making vows they wouldn’t keep—everyone fitting into their assigned slot until someone decided he wanted to try something new and broke the cheap plastic toy apart.