Scissors, Paper, Stone

by Martha K. Davis

  “Did you even try?”

  Again, the static between us crackled in my ear. I realized this would be my last opportunity to approach the subject with him. I wanted to understand what had gone wrong between them, and why he had allowed himself to drift out of my range. I knew what I wanted to hear—how he had tried to fight in court, how my mother had refused to let him visit me. Even before he spoke I knew my version wasn’t true.

  “It wouldn’t have made a difference,” he said quietly. “I had to leave you behind. I had to make a new life for myself. I couldn’t be near you but not with you.”

  “Why not?” It came out as a squeak. I closed my eyes, squeezing them tight. I didn’t want him to know I was crying. I heard him take a breath, like a hiccup. Now he wouldn’t even answer me.

  “There’s a full moon tonight. Can you see it?” he asked after a while.

  I looked up through my window, the receiver slipping. I caught it with one hand and brought it back up to my ear. Of course the sky was dark, the moon nowhere near that distorting square of glass.

  “Yes,” I said, wiping my nose with the back of my hand. A few months before he had left, during my spring break in eighth grade, he’d found an old book about stars up high in the living room bookcase. We went outside every night for a week and learned the constellations, memorizing their shapes in the sky. I still remembered them all, but in the city I could never see them.

  “Will you be there, Min?” he asked.

  “Are you asking for my blessing?” I was only half joking.

  “No. I’m asking for your presence at my wedding.”

  I considered it seriously for the first time. I dreaded going, but I was afraid he might disappear entirely if I didn’t. “Can I bring someone?”

  “You mean Beth?” I had told him about Beth during our last conversation in December, two girlfriends previous.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  His voice changed, became more decisive. “I’ll welcome anyone you choose to bring. So, can I count on you?”

  What was the point of refusing? “Yes.”

  “That’s my girl. We can talk more when you arrive. Listen, Angie’s got dinner almost ready. I’ll talk to you soon. Bear hug.”

  “Elephant hug,” I answered without thinking.

  “Whale hug.”

  How could whales hug without arms? It was a stupid game we had played. Into the lingering silence, he said, “Goodnight, Min.” I waited. I listened to the dial tone for at least a minute before hanging up. Then I realized what his hiccups were. He had been crying too.

  The next weekend I ate lunch with my mother at Café Picaro, surrounded by students loudly arguing Marxist theory and men and women drinking red wine together and blowing clouds of smoke into the air above their heads. I had managed to grab a table by the window. Across the street, a matinee was letting out at the Roxie; people wandered into the sunlight, put their hands up or pulled sunglasses from their pockets, and set off down the street. Three plump, white-haired women walked by carrying heavy shopping bags. This was my neighborhood, the land of family-owned taquerias, used appliance stores, and a few dyke-owned businesses: the Artemis Café, Old Wives Tales Bookstore, Amelia’s.

  I turned my attention back to my mother, who was picking at her spinach salad. She was telling me about the NOW meeting she’d just come from. We were having our monthly lunch out. We’d agreed to do this when I found a place to live, even though I still came home with my dirty laundry and let her feed me once in a while. Often, being in each other’s company was still difficult for both of us. I felt sometimes as though we had known each other in some long-past, dimly remembered life. BC: Before I Came Out. It didn’t matter that we had continued to live in the same house while I finished high school. It did help a little that she had been glad to have me home, and I had been relieved to be home. We had learned not to ask too much of each other. Our conversations had settled into a safe exchange of selected information. Since I’d moved out, talking to my mother was both easier and harder.

  “How’s your job?” she asked, pushing her frizzy hair back from her face with one hand as she fed herself a bite of spinach leaves with the other. I had often wondered why she didn’t either wear her hair tied back or cut it short. It always seemed to be getting in her way.

  I shrugged, looked down at my lasagna. “It’s okay. I got a raise.” I was a stocker at a natural foods wholesaler.

  “That’s great.”

  “It’s not big,” I added. I didn’t want her to stop helping me with the rent.

  “And massage school?”

  “I’m almost through. I gave my first full-body massage two nights ago. I was nervous at first, but really the only hard part was getting from one area of the body to the next. You don’t want to do it suddenly. The massage itself was like painting. You have all these colors to work with in whatever combination you want. The guy I worked on loved it.”

  We had set up tables all over the room, half of us working on the other half, then switching. Receiving first, I’d been surprised by the extent to which I was aware of my partner’s fear as I lay listening to the hum of other people’s conversations. He would touch one area briefly, then lift his hands away from my body, dropping them down again suddenly in a completely different place to try a new stroke. He moved tentatively around the table, uncertain where to go next. He splashed dribbles of oil on me without noticing. With my eyes closed, I listened to him breathing, fast, through his mouth. I was confused by his discomfort, bewildered by why he would pursue massage if he was so ill at ease being in physical contact with another person’s body. I loved the slide of my oiled palms over warm skin, pressing deep with my thumbs along the length of the trapezius or gastrocnemius. On him there wasn’t much muscle to get hold of, so I concentrated on simple relaxation. I was careful about draping him, and conscious of watching his face and his hands for any reaction to the depth or quality of my touch. Ultimately, I lost track of time. By the end, when I quietly told him that I was done, I was exhilarated. I had never worked at anything before that made me feel such satisfaction. The sound of my voice startled him; he was so relaxed he had fallen asleep.

  My mother was looking at me with the hint of a smile on her face. I noticed the fine lines of exhaustion around her eyes and the huddle of her shoulders. “Maybe you’d like a massage sometime,” I offered. “It’s a nice way to take time out for an hour. And I could use the practice.”

  “Oh, no.” She pushed her glasses further up her nose with one finger. “I don’t think I could take off all my clothes and lie down naked like that.”

  “You’re covered with a sheet. And you could leave on your underwear if you wanted.”

  “No, no. It seems like such a vulnerable thing to do.”

  “It is.” I was smiling. Massage, I was discovering, was a way for me to connect with another person in a way that I most likely never could have in the context of our daily life. It brought our interaction immediately to the level of the body, where everyone was the same, and everyone was unique. “Maybe it would be easier if you went to a stranger.”

  “I don’t know, I think that would be worse.” She looked slightly apologetic.

  When I had scraped up the last of the tomato sauce, I pushed my plate away. “Mom, there’s something you should know.”

  She looked up. “You have a new girlfriend.” She said it resignedly, as though she were only confirming the inevitable. A few months before, she had complained that it seemed like every time we spoke I was seeing someone new. I made it a point to inform her about most of my girlfriends, those that lasted for more than a few nights. That was all; I just let her know, as part of the conversation. She never asked for any details, or even a name. But I refused to allow her to completely ignore how my sexuality shaped my day-to-day life.

  “Well, actually, I am kind of seeing someone new, but that’s not what I was going to tell you.”

  “What, then?”

  I hesi
tated, not sure how to phrase it. I didn’t know what my mother would feel, but I wasn’t eager to make it worse by rubbing it in somehow. “Dad’s getting remarried.”

  There was another long silence. I watched my mother’s face carefully, but she kept her eyes lowered as she picked up her sweating glass of Diet Coke with lemon and drank from it. I was aware of the ceaseless clink of silverware. A man’s voice laughed and boomed out, “That’s Gerald for you.” A bead of condensation ran down the side of my mother’s glass, colliding with her index finger. She put her drink down on the table carefully. She said, “When’s the wedding?”

  “Next month.” I wasn’t going to tell her anything she hadn’t asked. I’d already decided that.

  “Have you met her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you like her?” My mother looked up, her eyes meeting mine.

  I hadn’t expected that question. “Not really,” I answered. My mother smiled. “She’s a lot younger than him, which is weird. Very serious about her work. Uptight. I don’t get why he likes her.”

  “Well,” she said, and she let out air as if she had been holding her breath. “Are you going?”

  I looked down, traced a scratch in the table with my fingernail. “I don’t know. He says he wants me to.”

  “Oh, I think you should go. You’ll be sorry later not to have been part of it if you don’t. It’s an important event.”

  “Why? They’re already living together.”

  She leaned forward, her arms folded on the table, and for a moment I thought she was going to answer, give me a lecture about my duty as a daughter and all that shit. Instead she repeated, “I think you should go. A wedding is a time of promise, of committing to one’s best intentions. I wish I were going to see you get married one day.”

  “Mom,” I warned. Why couldn’t she get over it? She’d been a member of PFLAG for more than a year, talking to other parents of gay children. As much as I considered her a meeting junkie, I had been relieved that she was going somewhere else to educate herself and get support for her feelings about my lesbianism. It had been a big step for her at the time, and it helped lift some of the tension between us. But not all.

  She put up a hand. “Wait. I wouldn’t care if it were to a woman. I think marriage is an important institution.”

  “That is not what you meant. Gay people can’t marry. You want me to end up with a man.”

  “No, Min. But I do want to see you in a committed and happy long-term relationship.”

  “Why? Who says I’m not happy the way I am?”

  “Are you?”

  I glanced out the window. From the opposite sidewalk, a woman wearing a leather jacket ran across the street. As she approached the door of the café, our eyes met. We both smiled, then looked away. I loved the possibility inherent in that smile. I loved walking around the city constantly aware of the women around me, feeling my own appeal to other lesbians. I loved being free to act on my desire every time. I didn’t think my mother wanted to know this. I said, “I can’t see Dad’s marriage lasting very long.”

  She brought her hands up under her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Behind her, a line had formed at the door. “Let’s go,” I urged. “There are people waiting for tables.” As we squeezed out the door past the standing line, I saw the woman in the leather jacket, who shot me another little smile.

  Outside, we stood in the busy street. I took my sunglasses from where they hung at the front of my t-shirt and put them on. My mother squinted, holding her hand over her glasses to shade her eyes. It seemed to me that every time we had these lunches there was this moment, at the end, of emerging into the too-bright daylight, as though we had spent the last hour or two tunneling through the rocky earth, digging our separate paths in each other’s direction. I had no idea if we were getting any nearer, if we would ever meet in the middle.

  “Well,” she said, “I wish your father all the luck in the world. I have to admit I’m curious about this woman he’s marrying,” she added. “But I won’t ask you anything you don’t want to talk about.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t mind. I don’t know that much. We’re not in touch that often.”

  “Oh.” She bit her lip, released it. “I didn’t know that.”

  What did she think, I saw him every weekend? What had she imagined would happen once they divorced?

  The day I saw Laura on her spring vacation, she wanted to spend the afternoon by the ocean, which she had missed while stuck all winter in the middle of Ohio. We walked barefoot near the water, the chilly waves lapping at our feet, leaving small pools in our footprints behind us. In the wind, wisps of Laura’s long hair pulled free of her braid and blew in her face. We watched people throw sticks into the frigid water for their dogs and the dogs happily crash into the waves to retrieve them. We walked down toward the Cliff House, hoping to see the seals on their rock sunning themselves. Since she’d started at Kenyon the fall before, I had seen Laura only a couple of times, on her Christmas break, before her parents had whisked her off for a vacation on St. John. After all those months apart, we seemed to have everything to say to each other and yet nothing. Our friendship was intact, but it had suffered some kind of stroke in the interim, resulting in a barely noticeable paralysis. I wondered, not for the first time, if we had anything in common anymore.

  I told her about massage school and my father’s remarriage. I didn’t say much about the women I’d slept with that year, knowing she would accuse me of being promiscuous. Turning back, with the Pacific coast stretching south as far as we could see, Laura informed me that she had finally lost her virginity. I was relieved by this news, and then I wondered why she hadn’t told me earlier. How long had it been since we had shared the physical details of our sex lives? I missed that side of our friendship. So I asked for a description of her first time, just as she had prompted me so long ago. But the truth was I wasn’t much interested, especially after she described how he left his Jockey shorts on until the last minute, pulling them back up again as soon as he was finished. “Do you think that’s strange?” she asked me. I said I thought it was, but on the other hand, how would I know since I’d only gone to bed with one guy? Then she changed the subject, and I let her.

  Now it was late afternoon and we were in Golden Gate Park, slowly making our way back toward the center of the city. The sun was at our backs, sending our shadows shooting out ahead of us over the grassy field we were walking through. On either side of us the fir trees let diagonal shafts of golden light pour between them like streams of water through the spread fingers of a cupped hand. I hardly ever came out to the ocean or the park. I wondered why not; it was so beautiful. Laura and I walked through a grove of redwoods, and I inhaled their piney scent mixed with the rich odor of damp earth and was glad for the first time that day that I was with her. I turned to Laura and asked if she’d come to my father’s wedding with me.

  “Me?” she asked. I wondered who else she expected me to invite.

  “Yeah, you. He always liked you, Laura. And it would be a lot easier for me if you were there with me.”

  “Are you nervous about going?” she asked.

  “I just can’t imagine it at all,” I said. “I don’t know what to expect. I need some moral support.”

  Laura turned her face toward me and grinned. Suddenly it was the two of us again, best friends, inseparable.

  “When is it?” she asked.

  I named the date in May.

  She thought, then shook her head. “I can’t. I’ve still got exams then.”

  I was surprised by how hurt I was. Somehow I had assumed she would go without thinking about it. I hadn’t considered that she might have other commitments.

  “Can’t you take them earlier?” I asked anyway.

  She looked at me skeptically.

  “Okay,” I said. The breeze off the ocean had picked up. The sun was going down. I saw the square pink dome of the De Young Museum among the trees in the distance.

 
It was almost dark when, on Irving Street looking for a Japanese restaurant I’d heard about, we ran into Natalie coming out of a lingerie store with a shopping bag. Since the night at Maud’s that I’d gone home with her, we had slept together only a few times, always during the day. Ana, the woman she had been living with for seven years, had gotten home from visiting her parents to learn that Natalie had started up with me, and it had pissed her off. This wasn’t the first time she’d cheated, Natalie told me. I didn’t want to get in the middle, but Natalie insisted it would be okay if we kept it light and discreet. I never called her at home. I was glad of the limitations. I knew I could fall hard for her, and not in a good way. When we talked, I always found myself in the position of disciple, and I was uncomfortable with how completely she relished her role as my teacher. I wasn’t willing to get attached to someone who assumed she knew me better than I knew myself.

  On Irving Street, lit by the bright neon colors of early evening, Natalie seemed taller than ever. When she moved, she chimed with long silver earrings and bracelets on both arms. Seeing her out of context, in a neighborhood neither of us ever went, I was incredibly aroused.

  “Min!” Natalie walked up to me and stopped inches away, her arm almost touching mine, her face glowing with her wonderful smile. I was suddenly acutely conscious of Laura beside me. I hadn’t mentioned Natalie to her, and I had only spoken briefly of Laura to Natalie. I stood back slightly and gestured to Laura, trying to create a circle for the three of us. I said, “Natalie, I want you to meet my friend Laura. Laura, this is Natalie.”

  Laura smiled and said, “Hi,” raising her hand from her side to shake Natalie’s.

  Natalie glanced at her and then away. “Min, I gave my first paid massage today!” she said, touching my arm. “Forty bucks. I’m celebrating.” She dipped her head down at the bag she was carrying.

  I saw how Laura’s face moved from discomfort to curiosity and warmth at being introduced to a kind of bewildered shock. Natalie kept talking as though we were in a room alone. I didn’t know what to do. So I did the easiest thing. I let Natalie tell me about her massage while Laura stood by. Finally I mentioned that Laura and I needed to get something to eat.