Scissors, Paper, Stone

by Martha K. Davis

  Between my thumb and forefinger I grip a few strands at the side of her head, sliding down them until they escape, much too soon, to rest against her cheek. Large gold crescent earrings sway against her neck in the strange new space where her hair used to be. She steps forward into the building, pushing against me and turning me with her. Gone is the gentle, shy way she approaches me, from the side fitting her hand to a curve of my body, slowly, like a sculptor. She’s dressed differently too. Instead of her usual khakis or jeans, she’s wearing a black scoop-necked sweater tucked into a red and brown printed floral skirt. The truth is she looks really great. She bends down to place the covered bowl of fruit salad she’s carrying on the ratty carpet of the hallway. Leaning me back against the wall with her arms around my waist, she guides the door closed with one bunchy black suede boot. I suddenly feel scruffy in my bare feet, baggy pants, and the loose, faded sweatshirt that has fallen down over one shoulder. I’ve never cared before about how I look. Least of all with Laura.

  I can’t stop staring at her haircut, fascinated and horrified. My hand is at her head again, taking the hairband off. I run my palm down the short length of her hair, then hold it up to the newly chopped edges at her neck, pushing against their prickly bristles.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks, taking my hand from her hair and cradling it inside her own. “Don’t you like it?”

  “Why do you think something’s wrong?”

  “You look like you’re about to cry.”

  “I do?”

  She nods, her eyebrows drawn together.

  We are silent a moment. We both watch my hand in hers turning in her grasp, my uncurling fingers opening her own, slipping between them, my thumb gently massaging her palm. Inside, I am whirling. Why do I feel so disappointed?

  Then something catches, slowing me down. All the women I have slept with before Laura, I realize, have been androgynous and wiry and a little dangerous-looking, their faces not beautiful but unusual. I am drawn to women’s faces that hint at something hidden behind them, some experience or knowledge I can’t presume to know about. It finally occurs to me that what I was attracted to in those women was their acceptance of themselves as lesbians. Their identification as dykes showed in their faces. With each of them, I was drawn to my own kind.

  Laura, on the other hand, looks even more like what she is—a straight woman—than she did before. She looks like someone I would never be with, like someone I wouldn’t even know. It doesn’t matter that she’s sleeping with a woman. She will never be like me. She will never love me the way I loved her in high school, when what I felt was something I couldn’t come back from. I know Laura will return to men one day. When she gets married and has kids with one of them, I’ll take her children out on weekends and be their mother’s wacky friend. It’s not that scenario I mind. But I resent her assumption that in the meantime she can cultivate her straight look and still walk with me out into the world.

  “Min,” she says almost sharply, and I stop my hand’s motion.

  I can’t look at her. I begin pulling Laura’s black sweater from the waist of her skirt. I want to push it up to her neck, take her nipples in my mouth, one then the other, here at the foot of the stairs.

  “Don’t,” she says, stopping my hand with her own. She pulls my body tight against hers. We stand unmoving, holding on, while my heart beats, and my breath expands and contracts in my ribcage, and a cool draft of air from beneath the door nips at my ankles.

  “It looks . . .” I don’t know what to say to her. “I liked the way you were before.”

  She drags my arms from around her, pulls the hairband from my hand and settles it back on her head. “Jesus, Min. These last few months being with you, it’s like I finally got a chance to discover who I really am. I like my body now. I finally feel attractive. Are you saying I made a mistake by cutting my hair? I did it for me. I thought you’d appreciate that.” Then she stoops to retrieve her fruit salad and runs up the stairs, her skirt fluttering behind her.

  In the kitchen, my mother is putting her tuna casserole into the oven. She closes the oven door and turns around. “Laura, you look wonderful. When did you have your hair cut?”

  “Yesterday,” Laura answers, not looking at me as I come in to the room. She puts the fruit salad on the table and moves into my mother’s embrace. My mother’s hands around Laura’s back are swathed in my roommate’s large oven mitts, one that looks like the green head of an alligator, the other like a sheep with little cloth ears and button eyes sewn on. Of course my mother likes Laura’s haircut. Was I supposed to lie to her? I start taking food from the refrigerator to the table. I’ve completely lost the feeling of satisfaction I had earlier. Their embrace goes on a long time.

  “It’s so good to see you, Catherine,” Laura tells my mother, still hugging her. They break it off, grin at each other. Mom, after her massage and shower, looks ruddy and a little blissed out, the way I imagine saints look. Beatific. Her frizzy hair is still damp. I notice she’s dressed up too, in tailored linen pants and a blouse.

  “I wish you would come up to Fairfax and visit me sometime,” she tells Laura, pulling off the oven mitts and pushing her glasses farther up on her nose. “With or without Min. I’d love to see you.” She says it as though they’re alone in the room.

  “Okay, great, I’d like that,” Laura answers. I can’t tell if the enthusiasm in her voice is meant for me, to tell me that at least my mother appreciates her. “I’m visiting my parents next week. I could drop by afterwards.”

  I step around the two of them as they continue talking. Laura’s neck is bare, beguiling. The haircut gives her face angles that I like. Cheekbones. I look away. What Laura doesn’t understand is that she thinks she’s in love with me only because we’re sleeping together. If she were a lesbian, that would be the beginning of it, not the end. Laura has no idea what it means to put another woman first. To want a woman without needing to look around and check out where the men are. I wish we could be alone together. I take orange juice and milk from the refrigerator and put them on the table beside the butter and jam and lemon curd. The doorbell rings.

  “Laura, could you start the coffee?” I ask as I leave the kitchen.

  Margo is looking worriedly down the street when I open the door. “I think I’m blocking someone’s driveway,” she says. “I can’t afford to get towed again.”

  “Why don’t you put a note on the windshield saying you’re here? Tell them you’ll move it if they need you to.”

  “Smart cookie. Here.” She hands me a warm paper bag full of fresh-baked crumpets from the shop on Irving. I use it to prop open the front door, then step onto the sidewalk in my bare feet. The bright autumn air is chilly, a relief from the stuffiness of my overheated apartment.

  Margo plops herself down on the doorstep and pulls her knapsack off her back to rummage for a pen and paper. Margo carries her knapsack with her everywhere. She dreads being caught without her address book or her journal or her mace. She scribbles a note and hurries down the street with it, listing slightly because of her limp. The sun glints off her silver hair. I notice she’s wearing the pinstriped vest I gave her with her usual jeans and Oxford shirt. I smile, watching her retreating back.

  When we were together, two years ago, Margo began to want a committed, long-term relationship, despite our age difference. With her I almost wanted one too, but not enough. I remember telling her as we got dressed one morning that I wished we could have met in ten years, when I might be ready to settle down. I loved her fierce opinions, her wisdom, her straightforwardness, her open heart. I loved her huge collection of lesbian novels and her three dogs she kept well cared for and was obviously devoted to. When we did break up, she told me she needed to be out of touch for a while. I was surprised by how much I missed her during those weeks. In her absence I felt an ache that had never been there before. So when we did talk again, I worked hard at establishing a friendship. I think we’re closer now than we would have been if we
’d only been lovers or only friends. Margo agrees with me. She says that for lesbians it’s often true. It was she who gave me the button I wear on my leather jacket: An army of ex-lovers cannot fail.

  When Margo returns, she is panting. “Hey, babe,” she says. Her embrace is vigorous and long. With my arms around her, I remember our bodies together: the force, the heat. I rub her back, feeling her spine beneath her clothes. There is still a spark of that desire between us now, a small reminder. I wonder what it will be like when Laura and I stop sleeping together. I know we won’t resume our old, childhood connection; we outgrew that as soon as I let her kiss me in her flimsy tent in Nevada. The truth is we started to drift apart when I came out in eleventh grade. Maybe becoming lovers was the only way for us to find the friendship again.

  Margo loosens her hold. Opening my eyes, I see a man and woman scowling at us as they pass by arm in arm on the sidewalk. I want to laugh at their disapproving faces. The sky is beginning to cloud over. Then the man says to the woman, “That’s disgusting.” Margo stiffens. I turn away and steer Margo inside the building, grabbing her knapsack and the crumpets. Without speaking, we climb the stairs to my apartment side by side.

  Laura and my mother are leaning against the counter in the kitchen, deep into a conversation we have interrupted. They both look startled seeing us with our arms around each other’s shoulders.

  “Mom, this is Margo. Margo, Catherine.” My mother holds out her hand a little uncertainly. Margo takes her arm from around me and shakes my mother’s hand emphatically. “I’m so glad to finally meet you, Catherine.”

  I feel Laura’s gaze on me, but when I look at her she glances away. I go to stand beside her, slide my arm around her waist. Her haircut gives her face more precision in profile, erasing the soft, fuzzy edges. She’s more feminine now. No, that’s not it. She was right: she’s more aware of her attractiveness. I can’t stop staring at her, drawn yet disturbed, trying to comprehend the transformation.

  Laura bends her head toward me. “Why do you have to touch everybody so much?” she demands in a low voice, crossing her arms across her chest.

  “Laura . . .”

  We’ve been through this before. Now that we’re lovers, she can’t accept things about me that she took for granted when we were friends. After spending a night together, Laura will complain I don’t have enough time for her, or she’ll try to pull me back to bed when I have to go because I’ve got a massage client scheduled. She’ll leave bewildered messages on the machine wondering where I am when I don’t call her back for a few hours or a day, even though she knows I am working or with a friend. We argue a lot over what she sees as my inability to discriminate between clients and friends, between friends and lovers. She says these crossings-over of boundaries are confusing and in the end someone is bound to get hurt. We don’t discuss non-monogamy anymore since I told her about a one-night stand, the only sexual encounter with another woman I’ve actually had since we got involved. Except for saying goodbye to Madeleine, of course. All along, I’ve made it clear that I’m not interested in a committed relationship. I’ve been completely open with Laura. But I feel her resentment, insistent, hovering over me, as if she is owed something. It infuriates me.

  “Laura,” I say, keeping my voice down, “when I’m with you, I’m with you. But I can’t be with you all the time. Margo is a close friend.”

  “Would you ever sleep with her again?”

  “Hey, Laura,” Margo greets her, moving over to us. They’ve met only twice, once when Laura was home from college and wanted to meet my current girlfriend, and once this fall when Margo came for a massage and Laura was still in bed, refusing to leave.

  Laura looks up and smiles. “Hi, Margo,” she answers as though she is happy to see her.

  They don’t shake hands or touch in any way. Suddenly I am nervous that this gathering is going to bomb. I should never have brought Margo into the flux. She is too different from my mother and Laura, too provocative. That’s of course one of the reasons I love her. I wanted the company of another lesbian at my brunch, someone who understands that need and accepts me utterly. I don’t know if we will ever sleep together again. But I won’t let Laura close down the possibility.

  “Okay, we’re all here,” I say abruptly. “Let’s eat. I can’t wait any longer.”

  My mother shoos us toward the table so she can re-don the oven mitts and rescue her baking casserole. I think she wants to assert her role as my mom in front of my friends, even though I haven’t lived in her home for four years. When she calls me now and then to offer me a meal or a day shopping for clothes, I realize she misses me. Thankfully, she is never as bad as the first month I moved out, right after graduation, when she called me every night checking that I had turned off the stove or locked the front door. The truth is sometimes I miss her too. At the table, she sets down the steaming dish in front of Margo and Laura with a small flourish. We all laugh.

  I bring the crumpets and the coffee pot. We pour our drinks, pass food to one another, spread butter and lemon curd, and start eating. A feeble ray of sunshine falls on a corner of the table from the window behind Margo. I look at the three women sitting at my table. Now that we are eating, I realize what I’ve done. This is the first time I’ve deliberately brought people from different parts of my life together. It’s terrifying. And it’s exhilarating.

  Margo, sitting across from me, looks up as she brings a spoonful of fruit salad to her mouth. “What?”

  “I’m just glad you’re here,” I tell her. “All of you. It’s nice.” I know they’re not so sure, but I don’t care. Laura’s smiling at me. I lean forward, reaching past the leg of the table, and put my hand over hers in her lap. She curls her fingers around mine.

  “This is nice, Min,” my mother says. “My generation doesn’t seem to have potlucks anymore.” She turns to Margo. “Do you know you’re the first friend of Min’s I’ve met? Besides Laura, who’s an old friend of the family.” She turns back to me. “You could have invited Margo up to Fairfax any time, you know. Or to one of our lunches here in the city. I would like to meet your friends. I always have.”

  As though a switch has been flipped, I am immediately irritated. I breathe in, then out. “Mom, don’t forget you haven’t been very happy about my ‘friends.’” I squeeze Laura’s hand and let it go.

  My mother looks startled. “I didn’t mean your girlfriends. Don’t you have any plain and simple friends? What about heterosexual women? Or men?”

  Men. I hardly ever think of men.

  Laura says, “Of course Min has friends. I’m one.” We all stare at her. Her face flares scarlet. “I mean, I’ve been her friend for a long time. I think I still am.” She looks at me for help.

  “You are,” I say. “You’re the one who insists that you’re not.”

  My mother glances from Laura to me and shakes her head. “I think you lesbians make everything so complicated for yourselves.” She raises her coffee cup, sips.

  “Well, wait a minute, Catherine,” Laura protests. “We’re not all lesbians here.”

  She puts her coffee cup down. “I’m sorry, Laura. I just assumed, because you and Min . . .” She trails off. I hate the change in her tone, the sudden solicitousness.

  “It’s okay,” Laura assures her, smiling. Margo and I exchange glances, looking away quickly. The sad thing is, compared to most of my friends’ parents, my mother is a paragon of acceptance. At least she talks about it.

  “So what are you?” Margo asks Laura, sounding curious. I smile a little. Margo is never merely curious.

  “I don’t know,” Laura says simply. She sits back, spreading her hands on her lap. “Maybe bisexual? I don’t really want to label myself.”

  Margo gazes at Laura impassively. “Uh huh.” Margo has little tolerance for women who sleep with women but won’t call themselves lesbians. Normally neither do I, but at the moment I’m more concerned that Margo might jump all over Laura about it. “Well,” Margo continues,
“when I came out in the ’70s, we didn’t have the luxury of tinkering with the definition of our sexuality. Either you were a lesbian or you weren’t. I don’t believe in bisexuality.”

  “I don’t think it matters what you believe,” Laura says, her voice shaking. She glances at me, then brings her attention back to Margo. “I just don’t feel comfortable calling myself a lesbian. It doesn’t feel true.” She looks back at me. I wish I could feel more sympathetic.

  “Look, it’s actually very simple,” Margo forges on, gesturing with the side of her flattened palm on the table, like she’s cutting into it. “Lesbians are women who love other women. Do you love Min?”

  Laura hesitates, darting a look at my mother, who keeps on eating with her eyes lowered. “Yes,” Laura tells Margo. “I’m in love with Min.”

  Margo grins, shaking her head as if everything is resolved. But I stare at Laura, who’s feeling so brave for declaring her love in public, and I think, Now you decide you’re in love with me? I will always remember how completely alone I was when I fell in love with her back in high school. All she cared about then was boys. It was agony, and no one knew. No one will ever know.

  “But I’ve never loved any other woman,” Laura adds. “I don’t think I ever will.”

  “Why not?” I ask, pushing my plate away from me and leaning my forearms on the table.

  “Because I’m with you.”

  “What about when we break up?”

  Laura stares at me.

  “If we break up,” I correct myself.

  Laura shrugs.

  “Okay, what about men?” Margo asks.

  Laura turns to her, sitting up straighter. Her golden earrings sway back and forth below her small, exposed ears. I’d like to nibble on her earlobe. Whatever she says she feels about me, I am not in love with Laura. The risk is even greater now. What about men?

  “I don’t know,” she answers Margo. “I’ve never had much luck with men. I don’t know.”