“You want my sandwich, not my love.” I tore off a strip of crust and tossed it to her. “At least you’re honest about it.”
I pierced the sleeve’s plastic membrane with my thumbnail and slit it along the edge, and the inky record slid smoothly out. I’d seen the Cold Shoulder play before, but I hadn’t paid close attention. It was one of those times when Flynn was acting slightly askew; she had sent me out for a night With My Own Friends, because it would be Good For Me, and the effort of shoving my unease to the back of my mind had clouded my ability to focus on much else, including the bands I stood watching without hearing.
The needle announced itself with a staticky thump as I set it down on the circling record, cut into a jagged guitar riff, and then the whole trio kicked in, lean and artfully ragged around the edges. It wasn’t the kind of music I usually listened to. I liked distortion, a girl holler or a voice with a rough edge, the blur and bleed of excess noise. Music that abraded in order to soothe. Music that wouldn’t sound good as background music, music you would never hear played in a store. The Cold Shoulder was tight and melodic, almost . . . professional. I paid attention to the drums. Ryan hit hard but eschewed excess—no bombast or wild fills or ringing crash, but a taut, puncturing beat. I turned up the volume and lay on the hard wooden floor on my back.
This was my favorite way to listen to music, and the only way to meet a brand-new record. On your back on the floor, you don’t just hear the music, you feel it. Your whole body listens.
The first time I experienced this it was accidental. It was back in central Nebraska, in the farmhouse where I grew up. My parents had left for a weekend tractor show in Lincoln with my brother, my older sister was at college, my little sister had gone to a friend’s house, and they had let me stay home alone; I was seventeen and a Good Kid.
I invited my best friend, Sarah, to spend the night, and Sarah brought along her cousin Zoe, who was a year older and visiting from Minneapolis. Zoe had dyed her choppily bobbed hair black but still had white-blond roots, eyebrows, and eyelashes, plus pale golden freckles; it was an unearthly effect. The words GIRL BOMB were written on her knuckles in Sharpie. To Sarah and me, Zoe seemed very cosmopolitan, so sure of herself. We lived in a world of sugar beet fields and hog farms, a town with two bars and five churches and one restaurant, called Restaurant; our junior class had thirty-two people in it. A few kids would parrot their parents’ grumbling about the new influx of migrant workers who came to work the fields and a nearby meatpacking plant, but if I protested they would assure me they didn’t mean people like my family (our last name, Morales, came from my Mexican-born grandfather, who’d died when my dad was twelve); occasionally someone would ask me how to say something in Spanish, which neither I nor my siblings knew after three generations of assimilation and a high school foreign-language curriculum that offered only beginning German. We all went to youth group on Wednesdays and church on Sundays, and the only thing to do on weekends was sit in our houses or stand around in the gas station parking lot or go get wasted at a gravel pit. Zoe, however, had a fake ID that got her into shows, she spent her free time in record stores and bookstores, she wrote a zine called Catfight. She wore boys’ boxers and a translucent ribbed tank top to sleep in, and she had brought with her a crate of records. Sarah conked out around midnight, but Zoe and I were still wide awake, so we took the crate to the living room for a listening party.
We settled into the gap between the sofa and the stereo, a passage two feet wide where the hardwood floor was bare.
“Have you heard this before?” said Zoe, pulling out the album Sister by Sonic Youth.
“All I’ve heard by them is Goo,” I said, feeling very young. I had not actually heard Goo either, just of it. I hoped that was enough. “Is that a new one?”
“Oh, no,” said Zoe with a knowing laugh. “This is from, like, five years ago. It’s way better than their new stuff.” She put it on and turned up the volume so that before the music even started the vinyl crackled like a distant storm. Then the drumbeat thundered in so loud and sure my breath caught, and Zoe smiled with approval. Boom-boom-BOOM-boom-boom-boom-BOOM, and then a knowing, insistent guitar stepped in, a nodding bass line followed it, and I closed my eyes. This music sounded dissonant and wrong but it sounded so right I could hardly believe it. Yet I did believe, totally, instantly.
I felt Zoe’s mouth on mine and we toppled to the floor.
My back hit the boards and at once everything sounded and felt different. Through the wood that was once alive and whose internal structure remembered it, the waves of the sound traveled through my shoulder blades and torso and bare feet, through Zoe’s knees straddling me and her palms flat on the floor beside my shoulders, and through, it seemed, Zoe’s mouth moving in time with mine. I felt the sound with my whole body, discordant and delicate and harsh and beautiful, pulsing with a trapped urgency I recognized in myself—a sound like chasing and being chased, never catching nor being caught.
Jesus had a twin who knew nothing about sin, the voice chant-sang. She was laughing like crazy at the trouble I’m in.
We kissed and kissed, and as the needle circled the fading feedback of side one, Zoe ran a finger along my drawstring waistband. I ached with want, but I worried that if I traversed that border I would never be able to cross back. “Not yet,” I whispered.
“Are you sure?”
“Next time.”
The player’s arm lifted and swung back to rest. “Okay,” Zoe said, “next time,” and got up to flip the record. We made out until the second side ended, and then, dazed and high on each other, went to my bedroom. Zoe got into the bed with her cousin and I slid into the sleeping bag on the floor. She hung her arm over the side and we held hands until we fell asleep.
In the morning when we woke, my hand was resting on the floor and Zoe’s was folded up near her chest.
We never told Sarah. Or anyone.
After Zoe and Sarah left the next day, I went back into the living room. The sunlight poured through the windows and I couldn’t believe it was the same sunlight as before, the same home. The whole house looked different.
I carried the sweet ache of my secret for months. I would write letters to Zoe, but not too often, and managed to stop myself from spilling forth Come back here, come over, please kiss me again; I didn’t want to sound desperate. I pored over each new issue of Zoe’s zine, searching for clues about myself, or other girls, but it was mostly Riot Grrrl politics and show reviews and critiques of punk boys and pro-girl manifestos; Zoe wrote about girls in general, but not any girl in particular, no anecdote of listening to Sonic Youth with a girl she’d discovered stranded in a tiny nothing town three hours from Lincoln. How desperately I wanted to see that story written. Next time never came; I had blown it, forever, I worried, and now I was trapped on the wrong side of that border, all alone.
The more I fell in love with Zoe—or the idea of Zoe, Zoe in print—the more I realized that the feeling was not a new arrival but a part of me awakened, like sap stirring under bark. And that in all the miles and miles of green fields stretching toward the horizon as far as I could see from the end of our driveway, there was not a single place for that feeling to exist, except inside me.
So I kept it locked safely within, while on the outside I made myself so good it hurt. While my classmates fought with their parents and defied their curfews and drank and smoked and had sex, I dared not join them. The rebellion inside me was far worse. My friends would eventually get it out of their systems and settle down, maybe even here, but I would never do the one thing my parents unequivocally expected of me from the moment I was born: replicate them. No boyfriends brought home to dinner. No giddy phone call of I’ve got good news. No showers, no dance at the VFW, no headlines for the family Christmas letter. They would never give me away at the end of an aisle; I was not theirs for the giving.
Theirs was not the kind of God who was flexible about such things.
My strategy: to bide my time an
d stockpile as much favor as I could, to make up for or brace for the life to come. I attended youth group and Sunday school, scored straight A’s, joined every plausible extracurricular, won scholarships to every school I applied to, babysat and saved the growing pile of cash in my underwear drawer, went to prom with a boy named Sam, cleaned my plate, fed the chickens and collected their eggs at dawn without complaint. My room was always spotless so my mother would never have cause to clean it and turn up something she might question. Behind my bedroom door, I read Catfight and other zines Zoe sent me. I mail-ordered the albums they wrote about, and then more from the photocopied catalogs that came tucked inside those records’ sleeves, a world of ever-branching underground tunnels. In a decoy journal at my bedside I sketched brief descriptions of my day, petty social squabbles and funny accidents and idle musings; but deep in my bookshelves I hid my real journal, which I nonetheless wrote in a coded diction, changing or avoiding pronouns, shifting into third person as if I were making up stories about someone else. I listened to my music on my Discman with headphones so the raucous noise was mine alone, and at night when I couldn’t sleep I crept down behind the couch, plugged my headphones into the stereo system, and lay on my back on the floor.
My parents never heard a note.
On my last night in Nebraska, I stood at the end of the driveway, where the mailbox nodded toward the dark, dark country roads. The tall house stood alone in a cluster of trees, an island in an ocean of sugar beets, lit like a ship.
Good-bye, Nebraska. Good-bye, wide black sky. Good-bye, velvet humidity of the summer night air. Good-bye, pulsing cricket drone. Good-bye, fireflies.
Hello, moss, rain, towering firs, bridges, fickle skies, girls, life.
The Cold Shoulder song hit the bridge and it was a predictable but good one—it did exactly what a bridge can do, take a step sideways and shamelessly yank the listener’s heart with it, and I let it yank mine for a moment. The feeling was familiar but I couldn’t tell if it was the bridge or the song itself. Surely they had played it that night when I had half listened to them perform. I imagined if someone had tapped me on the shoulder and leaned in to whisper, Guess who in this room you’ll kiss in six months, and pointed out . . . the drummer? of the Cold Shoulder? I would have guffawed or thrown a drink in that person’s face, depending on their gender.
Actually, I would have said, You have the wrong person. I’m with Flynn.
And this prescient person might have looked around and said, But is Flynn with you?
Not at this moment she isn’t.
Exactly.
At that point, I might have cut out and gone home; I might have found the house dark and locked, Flynn out for the night; I might have found the house lighted and locked, and Flynn tangling with someone in our bed. Vivian?
But I had stayed through the show, stubbornly clung to my illusion of a life partner, gotten thoroughly drunk, and come home with whiskey on my tongue and a lump in my throat to a girlfriend who was sound asleep, flat on her stomach on the far side of the bed, unrousable.
The third Cold Shoulder song was under way when I lifted the needle and the record slowed to a stop. They were a fine band, solid, good, unlikely to become huge but who knew these days? Forgettable local bands had become national hits. You never know what other people will love.
I got up off the floor, a little wobbly still, and dusted off my back. Dinner was at Meena’s in two hours and I hadn’t even gone to the store yet. The last thing I wanted to do was let the family down.
Family Dinner
BECAUSE MOST OF THE TIME WE LIVED ON BROCCOLI AND TOFU, beans and rice, grilled cheese and spaghetti, the point of family dinner was complex recipes, a luxurious if temporary abundance, and a what’s-told-here-stays-here policy. There was also a no-lentils policy, unless we were cooking Indian. Call it a potluck and you would be banished to a purple bungalow on Hawthorne Boulevard for an infinite drum circle—we were not potluck wimmin.
Lawrence held up her offering: “This is a three-dollar bottle of wine but it tastes like a five-dollar bottle of wine.” We cheered. Tonight there were six of us: Meena, Lawrence, Summer, and me, plus our friends Robin and Topher. Robin, an ex-girlfriend of Meena’s who had long ago transitioned to inner-circle friend, wore her dark hair in a high pony atop her head and drew her eyebrows on with a black kohl pencil every morning. She regularly hit the Goodwill bins and reconstituted secondhand rejects into dresses that slunk over her lush fat curves like couture. Topher, our token gay male friend, was slight and fair and clever, with an easy rapid-fire laugh that made him terrific fun to watch movies with. He and Lawrence swapped thrifted sweaters and experimental novels.
We assembled at the Manor, Meena’s house on Southeast Yamhill. With the settlement from a car accident in high school that left Meena’s right temple flecked with glass scars, she’d bought a half-wrecked 1910 duplex and taught herself how to renovate it. We’d all spread grout or pried up carpet or patched drywall there at some point. She rented out the first side she finished and moved into the other side, where one room or another was always skeletal and piled with construction materials. She had nearly finished the kitchen—all but the floor, which was still screwed-down plywood boards—and tonight was its close-enough christening.
I’d been assigned salad but remembered this only when I showed up with three apologetic pints of ice cream, my fingerprints denting their frosty sides.
“Where is your brain?” said Summer. “I thought I was the irresponsible one.”
“Under the bar at La Luna,” I said. My hand flew to my abraded chin.
“Nothing wrong with two desserts,” Topher said, ladling a thin, pale batter into a pan. “My virgin dosa voyage might be a shipwreck.” Meena stepped over to seize the ladle. Summer was sinking shards of lacy caramel brittle into the frosting of a layer cake. We were always telling her to just go be a chef, but the money and hours were so miserable that she always ended up back on the pole, where the cash was abundant and forthright. “Either way I’m dancing for someone,” she once said. “Might as well get paid for it.”
We crowded in elbow-cozy around Meena’s candlelit table with our tattered but golden dosas. Topher bemoaned his ever-slim romantic luck, and we offered the usual sympathy and affirmations. Gay Portland was inexplicably and deeply gender-segregated and Topher’s immersion in womankind didn’t earn him any points at the Silverado. Summer was working on a new issue of her zine, Boner Killer, about egregious strip club patrons. Robin had started an apprenticeship at a tattoo studio and offered to practice on us. (Me: “Sharpie only.” Summer: “Sure, I’ll take another.”) Lawrence was suffering a male colleague who wanted to go “cruising for chicks” together. Team Dresch was on the verge of breaking up and Meena was taking it hard. The Gold Stars were supposed to tour with them.
“Do you ever get the feeling you’re a year too late?” Meena said.
“Homocore is over,” Lawrence said.
“It is not,” Meena said, and manufactured three reasons it was not, one of which was the Gold Stars themselves. She ought to have been a lawyer. But Lawrence was right—it was 1998 and the movement was aging out, the way Riot Grrrl had already been on the wane by the time I made it to Portland, only stragglers and a few half bottles left at the party. You wanted to be part of something, and we were—we just weren’t sure what. Our own time had an end-of-the-decade, end-of-the-century melancholy. The electric feeling of being on the cusp—we wanted to know that again.
I aired my own problems with the Lesbian Mafia and the art show a committee of us were attempting to stage. Depending on which committee member you talked to, it was either a lesbian art show or an art show of lesbian artists. Or was it a queer art show or an art show of queer artists? The distinctions had caused hour-long arguments, tears and yelling, accusations of hegemony, and an e-mail chain hundreds deep.
We kept the conversation respectable through dinner, but with dessert came our favorite dish: gossip, that deceptively d
elicious idle viciousness that, like any intoxicant, you wake up ruing the next day. We were our own TV channel, our own weekly drama. We were a secret handshake, an extended family, a common enemy. The plots were thick.
Tonight, Summer offhandedly mentioned her concerns about our acquaintance M. Why? we asked, all friendly worry. Summer strongly self-identified as a Trusted Confidante, but she could not resist the call to tell a good story, whether it was her own or not. The story’s benefit to our collective wisdom always won out over individual privacy. Her trademark gossip style was to bring up something she’d learned in confidence, minus a couple of identifying details, under the guise of important processing, a community problem to be solved, a case study that could enrich our collective self-knowledge.
“She just seems to be having sort of an intense time recently,” Summer said, lingering on the N’s. What did she know, what did she know? We each called up whatever meager intelligence we had about M, and Summer nodded knowingly, distantly. We had clearly failed to give her anything new. “Never mind,” she said. “That’s all.” But we knew there was more. She was fat with it. We egged her on, she resisted obligingly, and then she set her elbows on the table and locked her fingers under her chin. “I can’t really give any details,” she began. But M had been on the left-behind end of a middle-of-the-night bed-hop with someone who was also sleeping with her own housemate’s girlfriend. Instantly we set to guessing like jackals upon a fresh carcass, ripping away fur until we found the wound and gorged ourselves on thrilled outrage.
This mark would stay on the girl’s record for years. The way we gossiped, there was no statute of limitations. The fucked-up thing you said at a Riot Grrrl meeting in 1992 could be revived as evidence in 1998. Our institutional memory was indelible—perhaps in the absence of any official institutional record of queer girl lives. We archived each other through an endless oral history, telling and retelling, anecdote into history into lore. And yet: you couldn’t write anyone off, or out of the story, because our numbers were not all that huge. If no one ever slept with anyone’s ex, if missteps and bad behavior disqualified people for life, we would all soon be single and sexless. So we condemned, censured, and kept on coupling in new and used configurations.
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