“Why can’t you be sure?” Margo demands.
I would be a fool to fall in love.
I’m afraid Margo might launch into a speech about heterosexual privilege when my mother says, “You know, I was wrong about making things difficult for yourselves.” She is pushing the remains of her helping of casserole around on her plate, absorbed. “I think your generation,” she nods toward Laura and me, “has a harder time now because you don’t have the rules we did. You don’t know how to proceed. I think people today are much more interested in themselves, what they think they need at the moment, than they were in my time. There’s a diminished sense of responsibility to others. Maybe you think you have more freedom, but it seems to me you flounder around a lot, reinventing the wheel.”
Margo nods. “I agree with you, Catherine. I think there’s been a real erosion of responsibility, even in the lesbian community. The women who are coming out now have no idea what a relationship looks like, what it requires.”
“What do you mean? Because I’ve had a lot of girlfriends?” I ask, incredulous.
Margo laughs. “No, honey, you’re not the first dyke who’s slept around.” Laura visibly flinches at the word “dyke.”
“Min,” my mother answers me, “I’m not talking about you personally. I see it everywhere, a confounding inability to think about consequences before acting.” I feel Laura’s gaze on me. When I turn to her, she has that sad-eyed yearning look on her face. I hate it.
Margo has unobtrusively gotten up to retrieve the coffee pot from where it’s warming. She pours us all fresh cups and pours orange juice for herself. I look up at her and smile.
She sits back down. “What I wanted to say earlier when you, Catherine, were saying lesbians have a complicated life, is that I think by being lesbians, we create our own kind of freedom. We’re forced to. Even now when being a lesbian is a little easier. Definitely back in the ’70s.”
“How do you mean?” Laura asks.
“How do I mean,” Margo muses. She takes a breath. “When I came out to my family, my father disowned me. I haven’t seen my parents in twelve years. That’s fucked up, but it’s very liberating too. I don’t have to worry about going home for the holidays. I’m free to make my own rituals that are meaningful to me. Being a lesbian means we can cut out lots of shit, like dealing with men and feeling pressured to get married and have children, because already what’s important has changed. Straight people think we’re being defensive, but we’re not. Coming out is such a terrifying and exhilarating step to take that all the other life decisions that follow are just not going to seem as huge.”
“Is it really so difficult?” my mother asks. “Min didn’t seem to have any trouble. I think I would have been more open if I’d seen she was having a hard time.”
“Uh huh,” Margo says. “You mean you would’ve been concerned because there was something wrong with her.”
“No! That’s not what I meant.” My mother looks at Margo, who’s smiling, enjoying teasing her. Mom softens. “Well, okay, yes. If she had struggled with accepting it, I wouldn’t have felt she had become almost another person.”
Margo leans back, satisfied. “Honey, it’s just as I thought. Mothers never change. They can’t understand why their daughters aren’t exactly like them.”
Margo and my mother gaze at each other appreciatively. I catch Laura’s eye. I raise my eyebrows twice briefly, suggestively. She laughs out loud.
“Does anyone want more to eat?” I ask. My mother shakes her head, drinks her coffee. I start to collect the empty plates.
“No, let me,” Laura says, pushing my hands away.
“I almost forgot.” Margo bends down to her knapsack on the floor beside her chair, unzips it, and brings out a package in gift wrapping. “Happy belated birthday.”
“I told you I didn’t want a present,” I say, pleased and, more than that, embarrassed. She slides it across the table to me in her impatient way. Beneath the blue and white paper is a book of poems, Judy Grahn’s The Work of a Common Woman. Laura comes back to the table, pulls her chair closer to mine, smoothes her skirt beneath her as she sits.
“Thank you,” I say, looking up at Margo, my hand on the book’s cover. I am moved. The summer we were lovers, she read me several of these poems, just read without commenting on them. I remember the lines, “my lover’s teeth are white geese flying above me, my lover’s muscles are rope ladders under my hands.” Margo always kept the book by her bed, within easy reach.
I don’t agree with Margo that coming out is the hardest thing a lesbian will ever do. For me, by the time I knew I was a dyke, I knew there were people like me. I had other women to identify with almost from the beginning. I remember how much I admired Alison’s style, her assuredness, and I learned from her, and from all the others. My mother is right: it was easy to acknowledge my lesbianism. That was where I could recognize myself in the world around me.
A couple of weeks ago Laura showed me a newspaper article about white parents in Minnesota who send their adopted Korean children to culture camp for a week every summer. The reporter was beside herself with admiration for the American parents who pack off their foreign-born adopted kids to go experience their original culture. For one entire week a year. Seven whole days. Reading the article, I was disgusted. What can a child really take in over seven days when it is absent from her life the other fifty-one weeks of the year? How does it become “her” culture? If there had been a camp when I was little, and if both my parents had agreed it was important for me to go, a big if, what could I possibly have been able to take away with me that was mine?
I tried to imagine how straight parents might try to give their young lesbian daughter “her” culture, which no straight parent would consider doing in the first place. A rainbow flag and evenings at Sweet Honey in the Rock and Ferron concerts? It made me laugh, and Laura didn’t understand what I found so funny. Lesbian culture is being with other lesbians, acknowledging what is true for us, talking about things straight people don’t even think about and, as Margo said, not having to talk about the things they do. I watch Laura lean forward against the table, her arms cradled at her stomach. She is speaking intently. I wonder suddenly if maybe the real point of Korean culture camp isn’t learning the country’s history and eating the spicy foods but living for that one week a year among other adopted Korean children, forging their own culture. If I could have taken that week of being with others like me into the rest of the year, maybe I wouldn’t have felt so alone.
I look up, becoming aware again of the kitchen with its cold floor under my feet and its yellow walls and the weak shaft of sunlight like another presence in the room. “. . . is true,” Laura is saying. “My parents are pressuring me to go to grad school and become a professional. They don’t even care so much about a professional what. I love sports, but I’m not sure if I want to coach. Why do I have to decide right away? I really don’t know what I want to do.”
“What are you doing now?” Margo asks.
“Temping. Actually, I’m not working right now,” Laura answers apologetically.
Margo nods, her eyes on Laura. “You’re lucky you can do that,” she says. There’s no irony or judgment in her voice.
Mom shifts in her chair. “Margo, go back a minute. Don’t you think you’re being extreme not talking to your parents for so long? Do you actually think it’s better to be cut off from them?” I stare at her. What’s she talking about? She sees her parents maybe once every five years.
“They forbid me to set foot in the house.” Margo is silent a minute, the side of her hand sawing the edge of the table. “I do talk to my mother on the phone a few times a year,” she says quietly. I think of my father, then shake the thought off. “No,” Margo continues, “I’m not saying lesbians are better off without their parents.”
My mother smiles slightly.
“When I came out,” Margo goes on, “it was 1973, and the lesbians and gay men I knew were either closeted
or had been thrown out of the house. Frankly, I never imagined that one day I’d be sitting here with you and Min at the same table, a mother and her out lesbian daughter.”
My mother smiles at me, her face glowing, the way it does at the end of a massage, and for the moment I am proud of us. I say to Margo, “It wasn’t easy. It took a long time.”
“I know, babe,” Margo says gently. “And maybe your parents,” she nods at Laura, “will accept your choices and maybe they won’t.”
“They know about Min,” Laura says quickly, even though nobody has asked her.
“You told them?” I ask, surprised. She never mentioned it to me.
“Well, I think they know. It’s pretty obvious from what I say about you. We haven’t actually discussed it—”
“Why not?”
“There’s no need to. They know. If they haven’t figured it out, it’s because they don’t want to know.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?” I ask. “That your parents don’t want to know who you’re involved with?”
“It’s not a big deal,” Laura insists, her voice rising. “They haven’t known about most of my boyfriends. What difference does it make?”
“Well, for one thing, they’ve known me a long time. For another, you say you love me. It seems pretty deceptive for all of you to pretend we’re just friends.”
“We don’t pretend, Min, we just don’t talk about it.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“That’s not the same thing! How come when you’re telling me how you live your life, there are these subtle distinctions, all these ways that conflicting things are true at the same time, but when I tell you what I’m doing, you tell me I’m wrong?”
“Because—”
I fall silent. She’s right. I think she’s hiding, afraid to stand up to her parents. She’s justifying the fact that she cares more about what they’ll think if she tells them about me than what I’ll think if she doesn’t.
“You are so classic.” Margo draws out the word, grinning. “I’ve been watching lesbians argue about how to be out for years. Listening to the two of you, though, I realize how much the context has changed. Back in the ’70s, we thought the future of the gay community was at stake. And it was. Back then we had a movement; we had several movements. I miss those days. We worked damn hard.” My mother is watching Margo and nodding, smiling a little.
“Here in San Francisco?” I ask. I remember Alison’s outbursts of rage the summer we worked together scooping ice cream. The winter before, Dan White had shot and killed Mayor Moscone and another Supervisor, Harvey Milk, who, Alison informed me, had been San Francisco’s first openly gay elected official. I had vivid memories of my mother the next morning reading the paper at breakfast and freaking out that the mayor had been gunned down in City Hall. In May, White had gotten off with a lenient sentence because of his “twinkie” defense: he’d been on a sugar high. Furious, Alison had rioted with the rest of the gay community that night. I remember how her eyes gleamed when she described the police cars in front of City Hall going up in flames. That summer, I couldn’t have cared less about the city’s politics. In the middle of sleeping with Miguel and being in love with Laura, I didn’t see what it had to do with me.
“No,” Margo answers, “I was still in New York then. I tell you, it was an exciting time. It was scary too. I used to get handwritten notes in my mailbox that said, ‘Kill dykes not babies.’ My phone was tapped when I was involved in the gay rights bill rallies. Friends of mine were bashed. Some of them died. There were nights I was afraid to go home.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?” Laura asks.
Margo stares at her. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you? It was the cops we were most afraid of. They didn’t care that people stoned us for handing out leaflets. We were the troublemakers, the lawbreakers. You’ve never taken the streets and faced down a line of cops in full riot gear. They weren’t there to protect us.”
“But you put yourself in that situation,” Laura argues. “And then you make it sound like you were being heroic.”
“We were trying to claim our lives.”
In the sudden silence, Margo looks down. She swallows. I am mortified by Laura’s ignorance, her obtuseness. But I also understand it. As much as I admire Margo’s involvement in the gay rights movement, it seems removed from my own struggles, the choices I have made. Her head still lowered, Margo tells Laura, “You college types can be so arrogant.”
My mother has been rubbing the bridge of her nose, pushing up her glasses with the back of her hand. She removes her glasses entirely, folds them closed, and places them on the table. She lays her hand on Margo’s arm. I realize they could probably reminisce for hours about their political involvements. Without her glasses, my mother’s face is more vulnerable, the lines of worry and middle age etched more deeply.
I say to Margo, “It is different now. I’ve never had the sense of community you had.”
“Maybe you haven’t looked. It’s out there.” Margo smiles at my mother, who smiles back and takes her hand from Margo’s sleeve.
I want her to understand. “You’ve told me that when you came out, there were other lesbians who taught you how to be a lesbian, like how to talk to women in bars and who to watch out for. Where the bars were. The codes and the rules like keeping your fingernails trimmed. That’s pretty obvious, I could figure out a lot of that for myself. But nobody ever told me. They looked out for you and you for them. I never got that.”
My mother says, “That’s what I was saying, remember?”
I ignore her. “Now there are more dance clubs, there are even bars where mostly dykes of color go, but I don’t feel any more of a sense of belonging.”
“I hate to admit this,” Margo offers, “but AIDS is bringing the community back together again. The men and women both. That’s the only good to come out of this whole damn mess. It’s always when a crisis threatens us that we get mobilized.”
All I feel thinking about AIDS is bored. I don’t have any interest in working on a hotline or doing educational outreach or buying groceries for men who are bedridden. I am nothing like Margo. I can’t imagine a community ready-made, pulling me in to work with them. I can only create my own constellation, one by one, each star at some distance from the others, myself in the middle.
I turn to Laura and rub the fabric of her skirt, my hand closing around her muscled thigh underneath. I’m getting used to her haircut. She is gazing at me, her eyebrows pulled together. “I think you have a lot of community, Min. How can you say you don’t?”
“That’s what it looks like to you, you’re on the outside.”
Her mouth twitches. She looks away, then tries again. “But isn’t this community?” she asks, indicating the table with a sideways dip of her head, the four of us seated around it.
I have no idea why I suddenly want to cry.
My mother is the first to leave. We all huddle together in the hallway downstairs. Mom hugs us goodbye, even Margo. Laura stands beside me, her hand around my waist. I bend my head toward her and kiss her neck just behind her ear, where the skin is newly bare. I love the smell of her, clean and slightly sweet, like clover. I breathe in, my lips lingering there. Her dangling earring bumps against my cheek.
Laura pulls her head away slightly. She doesn’t want me to nuzzle her in front of my mother and Margo. After three months, she still won’t hold hands with me on the street. Even at Ocean Beach she walks fearfully, her fingers cupped stiffly around mine. She used to like holding my hand outside, back when we were “just friends.” Now, whenever someone approaches us on the damp sand, she disentangles quickly, pulling her warm skin from mine.
But she wants me to commit to her forever. Every day she gazes at me with her sad hope and a stubborn, growing resentment.
Finally Mom leaves, waving from the street as we crowd around the front door. Margo leads the way upstairs and back into the apartment. “Your mother’s so ac
cepting of you,” she says over her shoulder. “You’re lucky.”
I flip on the kitchen light. The yellow walls jump out, brighter than I remember them. I want to put on warm socks, but I’m too lazy to go find them.
“What do you mean? She was spouting homophobic comments the minute you guys showed up.”
Margo turns on me. “What do you want, Min? At least she lets you come home.”
We stare at each other. At least she lets me come home. Is that all I should hope for? I imagine Margo standing on the doorstep of her parents’ house, but the door is closed, the house is empty. I imagine Margo walking on a dark city street, and when someone approaches, she raises her arm to shield her face. My lover’s teeth are white geese flying above me. I accused her—her generation—of not looking out for me, of not being there to show the way. But I can ask of my mother much more than merely being willing to speak to me. And I can listen to Laura say she isn’t lesbian without turning away. My lover’s muscles are rope ladders under my hands.
I gather Margo into my arms like folds of cloth. “I’m sorry,” I say into the starched collar of her shirt. I rub her back, and she lets out a breath, leaning into me.
Over her shoulder, I see Laura walking out of the room. “Laura,” I call, and when she turns back, I hold out my arm to her, inviting her in.
CHAPTER 11
Catherine
Fall 1985
IN AN ALCOVE BETWEEN TWO bookcases near the front of the store, I sit on a low stool, hunched over a box of hardback books. I reach for the nearest one, its cover green with gold lettering, wipe it down with a damp rag, and put it into one of eight piles gathered like schoolchildren sitting for story time at my feet: fiction, history, poetry, art history, philosophy and religion, sociology, women’s issues, and drama. The dust makes me sneeze every so often. The stacks of history and sociology are growing tallest, mostly because I assign titles there for lack of a better choice. By now my back hurts, and my sweatshirt is smeared with my own dirty fingerprints. No one has come into the store for half an hour. On the radio, Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor keeps me company.
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