“I’m sorry I never told you before, Min. I couldn’t begin to talk about it with you, let alone think about it, because of his death.” I am rushing my words, relieved at how easy telling her is after all. “I wanted to make it all come out okay somehow, make him not be dead, make him not feel the way he did. I wanted him to love you. I wish you had known him. He was dedicated, fun to be with, very affectionate. He would have loved you, I know he would have.”
I am hopeful. Everything is changing again. There will be nothing held back between Min and me now. I should have done this a long time ago. I look at her, full of my passion and faith. She is frowning.
“You’re full of shit, Mom. I’m sorry he died, but your brother was a fucking bigot.”
For a moment I am stunned. This was not the reaction I was expecting. Then my old instincts rush in. “No. He wasn’t, Min. That’s the point. I guess I haven’t conveyed who he was. He wasn’t usually like that at all.” Even after twenty-one years, I still protect him.
“He was that day. He didn’t like me because I have yellow skin and slanted eyes. Right?”
I wince at her choice of words. Her anger burns away all decorum, and her willingness to hurt—to be hurt—makes me go on the defense. “He didn’t know you. He was not a bigot. Not usually. I think he felt threatened by how much I loved you.”
“And you’re as bad as he was. Why are you defending him?”
“What? Of course I defend him. I don’t condone how he felt. I was infuriated. I was screaming at him I was so angry.”
“Why did you bother? Why didn’t you just walk away?”
I am shocked into silence, made as stupid and speechless as I was on the beach with Andy. Finally I manage, “I couldn’t, Min. He was my brother.” It is the only explanation I have.
She stares at me, her face slowly turning a dusky rose. “Yeah? Well, then I guess he was right, wasn’t he? Family is what you’re born into.” She says it with barely controlled fury, then scrapes her chair back and stands up, turning and striding toward the living room all in one motion. This time I know that if she leaves, she won’t come back.
“Min.” I say it sternly, a mother reprimanding her child, and she stops, blinking at me with a child’s surprise. I soften my voice. “You’re right.” She watches me, her jaw hard. I am trying to tell the truth, but I am afraid that I might not say the right thing. I cannot count on the familial bond between us. “You’re right. I thought I was defending you. I thought if he changed his mind, it would be all right. I am as bad as he was.”
Min stands in the doorway half-poised to flee, her head down. I can tell she is hesitating, uncertain. For the first time, I see how much she relies on the immediacy of her feelings. She wants to act on her fury. She can’t come back into the kitchen with me, not so soon. I watch her all the way across the room, and suddenly, I don’t know why, I feel how deeply I have hurt her, not in telling her, but in the ways I have tried to shield her from him all her life. As though he was the only person who could wound her because of who she is. As though ignoring her race could make her white.
Min says, not moving from the doorway, “You know, you admit you’re racist, and you assume that’s enough. Mom, do you realize . . .?” She hesitates, then plunges on, rage fueling her. “I remember the first time other kids called me ‘slant-eyes.’ That was the day I came home from kindergarten and figured out that you and Dad didn’t look like me either. You sat with me and told me the facts about my adoption, but you never said anything about why those kids were mean to me or whether I had a right to want them to stop. I thought you were scared of me. I thought I had done something wrong when you got pissed off at people on the street who were curious about me. For the longest time I tried . . .” She closes her eyes and turns her head away from me. I want to go to her, but I know she won’t let me touch her.
“Min, I’m sorry. I really, really am. I never meant to hurt you. I didn’t realize what I was doing. All I wanted was to protect you.”
She is still facing away. “You think it’s not obvious how much you and Laura get off on pretending to be mother and daughter?”
My breath catches. I had no idea I was so transparent. “Min.” I try not to sound like I’m begging or demanding. “Please come back and sit down.”
“No.”
“Then listen to me. This is important. And I’m not trying to make excuses for myself. What happened with Andy was not a contest between the two of you. I was not rejecting you because I couldn’t cut him off. I loved him.” I’m crying again, something I’ve never done in front of her before today, but I simply wipe my face and keep talking, letting the tears come. “I can’t defend how I acted, who I was. Who I am. If I had to do it over again, I couldn’t do anything differently, even now. I can only tell you what I told Andy. I chose you for my daughter. I do it every day.”
She is looking at me now. I wipe away more tears with the heel of my hand and look back at her steadily.
“I have to go,” she says. She retreats into the living room, laces up her sneakers, pulls on her knapsack.
I stand in the kitchen doorway where she just was. She does not look at me. It’s a very lonely feeling, having her leave like this. I don’t know, in fact, if we will ever speak again. But I do know that I have to let her go, for the first time, really, and trust who we are to each other. That she is my daughter is the least of it.
She bends to put the carrying case strap over her shoulder and grabs the handle, then straightens, hauling the table off the floor. I slide open the door for her. “Bye,” she says as if it just slipped out, and she steps out into a windy, sunlit day.
CHAPTER 12
Laura
Winter 1985
“HOW ABOUT ‘JOYFUL, JOYFUL, WE adore thee . . . under a sheet,’” I say, switching from musicals to Christmas carols. Holiday songs have been playing for weeks in every store in the financial district. For the past three days, whenever I take a latte break from my temp job at Crocker Bank, there’s a group of women singing in the lobby, trying to sound like angels.
“That’s a good one,” Min says, grinning. She pushes a ripple of bubbles toward me. I gather them in my dripping hands and place them carefully on my nipples, like pasties. She says, “How about ‘We three kings of Orient are . . . under a sheet.’”
We both laugh. The bubbles slide off my breasts. Seeing that, Min can’t stop laughing. We’re actually having fun. I want it to last forever.
The bathtub is narrow and barely fits us both, but I like her legs on either side of me and her hands clasping my knees. Min is great at coming up with song titles. My favorite so far is “What do the simple folk do (under a sheet)?” The game itself was her idea. I remember that she was the one who thought up all the best code words in seventh grade too.
“Do you remember kissing me in junior high?” I ask.
“Of course,” she answers, dribbling handfuls of hot water on my shoulders. I lean toward her so she can reach my back.
“I do too.” I remember her long hair falling around me as she bent over to kiss me the first time. “It was nice. I think we were already having a relationship then. We just didn’t know it.” It’s strange to me that the girl with long hair in my memory is the same person I’m sharing a bath with. Min starts to rub my shoulders where I’m sore from sitting in front of a computer all day. “I think we got imprinted on each other,” I add.
“I don’t. I think we were twelve years old and finding out what our bodies did. You have a romantic view of everything.”
I feel stung. What’s wrong with that? “You don’t think our being together now has anything to do with what happened then?”
She shrugs. “We were fooling around. I know I was interested in finding out what it was like to be female and sexual.” She leans back, her arms on either side of the tub rim.
Sometimes what I love about Min is exactly the thing that makes me nuts. I’ve never met anyone who’s so stubbornly herself. “But didn�
�t you like kissing me?” I ask. I miss her warm hands on my skin. I’d like to lean back too but the faucet’s behind me.
She looks at me oddly, like I’ve forgotten something obvious. “Of course I did. Don’t start reinterpreting the past, Laura.”
“What do you mean? What’s wrong?”
She shakes her head. “Nothing. I’m getting out, I’ve had enough.” She stands and steps out of the deep, old-fashioned tub. I wish she would turn around and look at me. I wish she was always turned in my direction, that every look was for me alone. Is that so terrible a thing to want?
“Thanks for the neck rub,” I say. “It really helped.”
“Sure.”
Min towels herself dry. I turn around, fill the tub with more hot water, and sink back down until only my head and knees are sticking out. I imagine slipping completely under, disappearing below the surface. Sometimes I feel like Min and I never became lovers at all and I’m still waiting for the moment when she will make a move.
I lift my hand from the water and catch hers, bringing it to my lips to kiss. She opens her palm against my cheek. I want her to tell me everything will work out. I want her to say anything. When she leaves the bathroom, the opened door lets in a cold rush of air.
The bubbles are almost all gone. Before getting out, I hold my breath and slide down along the length of the tub, dunking my whole head beneath the hot water. I stay down for several seconds, shutting off all outside distractions. I never used to feel lonely with Min. The closer we get, the less I am sure where she is. I put my hands up and scrub at my scalp, my short hair floating against my fingers like seaweed. I can hear only one thing down here, amplified through the water. It is the insistent, rhythmic call of my own heart.
When I pull the covers down and get into bed beside her, naked and sweaty from the bath, Min is reading, her book propped up on her stomach. It’s a faded hardback with brittle pages, probably something from Catherine’s bookstore. When I’m settled against her, she rests her hand on my thigh without looking up.
“What are you reading?” I ask sleepily. It’s her cue to put the book aside and roll toward me or let me climb on top of her.
“Orlando,” she answers, turning a page. I hear the slow sound of the paper scraping against her fingers. Maybe she’s reading to the end of the paragraph. I wait a minute, then one more. It must be a long paragraph. I wish she would finish. I want her back. When I hear her turning another page, something lurches inside me. I reach up to take the book from her.
She holds it away from me, still reading. “Come on, I’m trying to read.”
“But I’m here. You can read any time.”
“This is really good. Give me a few more minutes.”
I sit up, my face suddenly burning. The sick feeling in my stomach that I often feel when I’m with Min now becomes hard, like a lump of dough I’ve swallowed without chewing. I want to throw it up.
“I can’t stand this anymore,” I tell her. “You want to read more than you want to be with me. I can’t believe I’m competing with a goddamn book.”
Min looks up at me for the first time since I came into the room. “No, Laura, I don’t care about the book more than you.” She sounds bored, like she’s tired of having to explain the same thing all over again. “Would you stop comparing yourself to everything you see? I can’t stand it either.” Then she puts the book down on the floor next to the futon. But it’s too late. I can’t stop myself.
“Before we were lovers, you never had a problem paying attention to me. Why are you so stingy with the time we’re together now?”
“Before we were lovers, you never needed so much attention.”
I can hear the fury in her voice. It makes me cringe. How can I change her anger into caring? How can I make her see what she’s doing to us? I look into her face, willing her to remember me. She looks back, her jaw set. We stare at each other.
My eyes fill with tears. I blink them back. “Why won’t you soften?” I ask. “Why won’t you let me in?” I am sitting cross-legged. She is leaning back against the pillows. I can feel my whole body angling in toward hers, yearning. If she were a guy, I would start to cry and he would instantly change, become concerned. But Min is more complicated. If I cry, she will see that vulnerable side of me, but it won’t make her love me more. It will only make her feel more burdened. It always does, sooner or later.
“Laura,” Min begins. I watch her eyebrows pull together like looking at me hurts her. “I don’t think this is going to work between us.”
“What?”
She doesn’t answer. She knows I heard her. I hold still, not breathing, hoping the moment will pass and when I move again there will not be this sharp, terrible pain and we will go on as before.
“Why now?” I ask, my voice barely audible. Now I am crying for real. It takes so little these days. Just a few angry words from Min and I lose it. “It was feeling so good to be with you. Why do you have to ruin it?”
She sits up and brings my face between her two hands to a few inches away from hers. The force of her fingers is hard against my cheeks. I imagine her crushing my skull between her hands. Yet her face has the same look of injury on it as before.
“Listen to me,” she says. “You know this isn’t working. We have to talk about it. Can we discuss this rationally, when we aren’t in the middle of a fight?”
“Rationally?” I ask. “Since when were you into being rational?”
I feel a slight tremor in her hands on either side of my face. “Stop it, Laura. You’re just making this harder. We have to talk. Otherwise we’re just going to keep sniping at each other until there isn’t anything left.”
I imagine us, two piles of dust scattered on the floor. “You want to break up,” I say. It comes out sounding like a question because there’s a wince in it, the fear she will agree. The idea alone is unbearable. I have to find a way to distract her, stop her from making this mistake. I bite the inside of my mouth, trying to keep the greater pain at bay.
Min closes her eyes, then opens them and looks into mine. “I want to consider it. I can’t keep going on like this. I’m not happy. Neither are you.”
I pull back, out of the grip of her hands. I used to envy the way she could take pleasure, and give it too, without hesitation. But the other side is that she wants only the moments of bliss. She depends on her submersion in it. She seeks it out.
“Relationships aren’t always about being happy, Min,” I tell her. I am saying it for her sake, not for mine. “It’s not about feeling good all the time. Sometimes it takes work.”
“Yeah, but what we’re doing isn’t work. It’s a war zone.”
Suddenly I’m pissed off. “That’s because you won’t commit to being in it with me for the long haul. You’re like a child, you’re only interested while it’s new. Then you get bored and go off to find somebody else to play with.”
“Who I sleep with is my business, Laura. We agreed on that.”
“How can you know how happy you would be with me when you’re sleeping with other women? I hate this non-monogamy shit. I only agreed to it because I thought you’d see how stupid it is and get over it.”
She’s silent, looking down. “Actually, I haven’t been sleeping with other women. Not recently. You’ve never understood, Laura. I don’t want to go out fucking everyone in sight. Mostly I am happy with you. But I can’t promise a commitment that I might not always want to keep.”
“Why not?”
“Why can’t you call yourself a lesbian?”
Silence again. It’s not the same. If she loved me like I love her . . . What hurts most is over and over bumping into the wall that she’s put up around her love.
“Besides,” she says, “you had a choice. You didn’t have to agree to an open relationship. You could have said no.”
“And you would have broken up with me. What kind of a choice is that?” I shout at her. I remember her roommate and lower my voice. “You gave me a choice between t
wo things I didn’t want. All I could hope for was that you’d change. But you have to have everything your way.”
“That’s not true,” she counters. “You’re the one who wants too much.” I feel tears filling my eyes again as she goes on. “You want to direct my whole life, decide who I can see and for how long. You have to know where I am every second of the day. I don’t have the freedom to come back to you.” She shakes her head. I can’t tell if she’s near tears too. “You can’t stand that I might be close to anyone other than you.”
“You can’t be close to anyone, Min. You spread yourself too thin.” The realization grows bright inside me, like the shade pulled off a lamp. “And it’s me you’re the most scared of. I think you’re terrified that if we get too close, I’ll disappear. Like your father. Like your birth parents. Even like your mother, who you think can’t really love you because she loved her own brother first. If you love me too much, you might lose me. That’s your problem. The sad thing is, you’re willing to get rid of me this other way.” I take in a huge gulp of air, out of breath. I have never thought this through before, not so clearly. Min stares at me. She is breathing hard too.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her voice is low, furious. “You don’t know me half as well as you think you do. Don’t try to own me.” She starts to get up off the bed. I grab her hand.
“I have to pee,” she says coldly.
While she’s gone, exhaustion hits me, making me a little dizzy. I drag my open hand over my face, like a washcloth, but the tiredness doesn’t go away.
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” I tell Min when she returns. I lie down on my back. I reach for Min to pull her to me. “I’m cold.” She gets into the bed and covers us both with the blankets, tucking me in up to my neck. There is nothing playful about it tonight, or even tender, just matter of fact. The overhead light switch is on my side, but I don’t want to move.
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