“Your baby? I’m just a warehouse?”
He raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry, sorry, I mean a baby, that I contributed to.”
“My baby,” I said. “If you don’t want it.”
“Our baby. To be honest.”
“Fine.” I picked up a twisted stick, a severed root really, and flung it out into the water. Bullet bounded in after it. “You want this to be an our thing?”
“It’s not what I’d hoped for us, honestly.”
I looked up at the gray sky. It was the color of dirty sheets. “What happened to ‘no expectations’?”
“What’s no expectations?”
“That first night. At the Old Nickel. You said you had no expectations.”
He looked confused. “I don’t even remember that.”
“I guess that was, like, ten months ago,” I conceded.
“My god, the things you hold on to.”
Bullet dropped the stick at my feet and shook, spraying cold river water across our legs.
I threw the stick again, but Bullet abandoned it to the river and disappeared into the willows, nose to the ground. “I’m just saying. I fully expect you to walk away. And you can. You probably should.”
“This kills me about you.”
“What?”
“You refuse to need me for anything, even the thing that you would most obviously need me for.”
“But you hate needy. You like space. I thought that’s what you liked about me.”
“That’s the problem. You’re always just beyond me. And for some reason I keep going toward you. Because at a certain point I became determined to win you over to . . . I don’t know—”
“To win?”
“Just to prove I could. But I can’t. Andy, you realize that if you keep this thing, you’re connected to me for a really long time, right?”
Ryan looked as vulnerable as I’d ever seen him. Maybe I didn’t have to fight so much. Maybe I didn’t have to be so alone. Maybe another parent wouldn’t be the worst thing to have on my team. Maybe we could evolve into some kind of collaboration that could work, whatever that would look like.
“Do you want in?” I asked.
“Do you want me in?”
“If you want in.”
“Don’t shut me out.”
Ryan’s voice was plaintive, and I glimpsed the boy he had once been, previously incomprehensible to me. I rested a hand on my abdomen and felt unsettling gratitude for the embryo stealthily growing there, and for the mistake of its conception, and for Ryan, my inadvertent but crucial cocreator. I already loved this thing. I didn’t know you could love something that barely even existed, something you’d never seen or felt, undetectable yet unmistakably present—this must be a feeling like faith. With that hand on my abdomen I looked at his face, the face of a person who stared at me so directly now, and I wondered if the genetic blueprint of the mysterious being inside me would build eyes like those eyes, a face like this face, if worry would etch itself like this into the corners of his or her mouth.
“Hey,” I said, “come here,” and I reached out and pulled him to me, or myself to him. I rose up on my toes and met his rough mouth with mine. An image of field stubble, corn and wheat fields, flashed in my mind. A barn at the far end of it. When I pulled away, he looked at me with pleased disbelief.
I said, “You’re in. Me too.”
Bullet emerged from the willows with a wide triumphant grin, her head and shoulders slicked with some reeking gray-green death.
Meena showed up at the house Friday afternoon with a brown paper bag from Reading Frenzy. “If you’re seriously going to do this,” she said, “you need to be prepared. The straight world will try to eat your kid’s soul.”
“You would know, I guess,” I said. “Since you’re working for them now.”
“Shut up,” she said. “Wait until you need health insurance. Oh guess what, now you totally do.”
I emptied the bag onto the table. A couple of zines, Mother/Fucker #4 and This Baby Is a Pipe Bomb #1 (the author never made it to issue #2); a book called The Anarchist Baby: Strategies for Resisting Corporate Childhood; and The Lesbian Parenting Book.
“Thanks,” I said. This, I understood, was her olive branch.
“I’m here to help,” she warned. I suspected by “help” she meant supervise.
I flipped through the books, all of them brand-new, and worried aloud that they must have cost a lot.
“I have a real job now,” Meena said. “Which also means, I need pants.”
“Obviously.”
“What I’m trying to say is, will you go to the mall with me?”
“So that’s why you came over.”
“Just get your coat, nerd.”
It was our shameful secret pleasure: Meena and I loved going to Lloyd Center. To Meena, it evoked the Houston suburbs of her youth. To me, living within ten minutes of a mall never ceased to feel exotic. Where I grew up, the mall was a two-hour drive, a special trip planned weeks in advance, while here in Portland it just was, whenever you wanted. In college we’d sneak away to it, circle the ice rink where Tonya Harding used to practice, settle into the rickety seats of the brown-carpeted, gold-foil-trimmed movie theater, meander through the hushed, low-lit department stores and try on clothes we’d never buy. It was our basest place, a site of no righteousness, where we both were humbled, guilty, pleased, American.
The salesman in the Nordstrom men’s department shot us a look of faint disappointment as we sauntered in: one shortish, stocky butch whom little would fit, and an even shorter one in thrift-store pants with the hems hand-scissored off. Commission unlikely.
“I think I got kicked out of the Lesbian Mafia,” I said with a dark, defensive laugh to Meena in the dressing room.
“The Lesbian Mafia? Please. They’re not everyone.”
I sat on the padded stool next to the mirror. “Maybe the lesbians, period.”
“It’s not like there’s an official membership.”
I snorted. “Get real. Of course there is.”
The salesman rapped on the dressing room door. “Can I get you ladies anything?”
“We’re good, sister.” Meena hated being called “lady.” She dropped her Dickies and stood there in her boys’ tighty-whities that bagged at the crotch. “People are going to freak out. But they’ll get over it. If I can get over it—which I haven’t yet, but I will—they can too. And if they don’t, fuck them.”
“You’re still not over it?”
“I’m not over that you didn’t trust me.”
“I do trust you,” I said.
“You don’t. We used to tell each other everything. And I still tell you stuff, but whenever I try to go deep with you, you close up so quickly. Even after Flynn. You’re just like, ‘I’m okay. Not much to report.’ Even though I’m supposedly your best friend.”
She was right. And I’d rather break a lover’s heart twenty times than a good friend’s once. But I hadn’t seen any other way. For months after Flynn and I broke up, I couldn’t even wear short sleeves—I had felt too exposed in them. “I’m sorry, Meena. I just needed to hole up inside myself for a while. Trust issues.”
Meena jammed her shirt into the waistband and turned to a new angle in the mirror. “I mean, in our six years of friendship you never ever indicated you would even consider a man. I can’t even imagine it.”
“I never did consider it! It was a total fluke.”
“So it’s over?”
“Those need a belt.”
She straightened up and glanced at herself in the pants, then me, in the mirror. “It’s over, right?”
“It’s changed.”
“Oh god, is he your boyfriend? Please say no.”
“He’s in it to help. That’s all.”
“People are going to ask you. And me. We need to know what to tell them.”
“Does it matter? I’m still me.” I pointed at my belly. “Me plus one.”
“Girl, n
o one’s going to buy that,” Meena said.
“I don’t care if they buy anything. I’m not selling.”
The attendant’s shadow darkened the slats. “How’s it going in there, ladies?”
Meena looked down at the excess fabric crumpling around her ankles. “Well, Mary, nothing quite fits.” We took them anyway.
When Meena dropped me off, I found Summer and Marcy sorting through the dishes while the Slits blasted from the boom box. The kitchen and living room were scattered with half-packed boxes.
I took the cordless phone to my room and called Annabel in Boston.
“What?” she shrieked. “How far along are you?”
I said about two months. “Andrea, you can’t tell people yet,” she said, alarmed. “You could still miscarry.” My little sister turned out to know an extraordinary amount about pregnancy. Several of her friends who had graduated last spring were married and cooking up firstborns already. And, she told me, our sister, Alissa, had a fourth on the way.
“Four?”
“Yep. There’s finally going to be a boy now. All under age six,” Annabel said. “I don’t think there’s much else for her to do in Sioux City.”
“Sewer City,” I said. “Bet she’s glad now she took up with Jeb.”
“He’s a meatball.”
“What are the kids like?” Technically, they were my nieces. But they were abstractions to me. Names in a Christmas letter.
“Little meatballs,” Annabel said. “Cute but kind of nuts. Alissa dresses them in matching outfits and presents them at holidays as if they’re the stars of a Broadway show. They all start with A too.”
I said I wished I knew them now. What if one of them turned out to be gay? “They need to know about their lesbian aunt.”
“We need to talk about that part,” Annabel said. “What does this mean exactly?”
In some ways it was harder to come out as gay-with-one-exception than it was to come out as gay. I prepared to do a lot of explaining. But Annabel had different questions than my friends. Such as: “Are you in love with him?”
“No way,” I said. “But I like him. I feel . . . affection.”
Annabel made a dark hmm. “Is he in love with you?”
“I think he knows better,” I said.
She said she didn’t get it, but she wanted to come visit me when the baby was born. “When are you going to tell Mom and Dad?”
“Oh god, are you kidding? I can’t.” I wrapped my arms around myself.
“But they’ll be so happy you’re with a guy.”
“But I’m not with a guy. I’m still a lesbian.”
“Oh. Are you seeing someone else?”
“No.”
“And he’s the father of your kid?”
“Well, technically.”
“And he’s going to help you raise the baby?”
“That’s the plan so far.”
“Then you’re pretty much with him. At least in Mom’s eyes.”
I begged her not to tell our parents. “She’ll be so fucking happy,” I said. “I can’t take it.”
Annabel laughed. “She’ll just tell you to get married. And start sending you baby crap.”
I got serious. “It’s way more complicated than that,” I said.
Annabel still didn’t understand how the last five years of my life would be swiftly, tidily edited out of my mother’s story, negated—but never from mine. They were my life. They had made my life. And I loved my life. I said, “Please promise me you won’t tell. Promise, promise, promise.”
She promised.
“You told your family?” Summer said. She was sorting through a soft mountain of dresses on the table.
“Just my little sister. And she promised not to tell my parents.”
“You have to be careful with that,” Marcy said, wrapping plates in pages of the Willamette Week. “You know about Sharon Bottoms?”
“No,” I said. I picked up a mug with a little ceramic beaver sitting at the bottom that you didn’t know was there until your coffee level dropped and the face emerged. “Hey, this one’s mine.”
“She was that lesbian in Virginia? Her mom sued for custody of her kids and won. They took them away. Solely because she was gay.” Marcy shook her head. “That was only a few years ago.”
“Jesus. Would your parents do something like that?” Summer said.
The thought of my mother reaching out to pick up my baby stirred panic in me. I thought of the brochure on the priest’s table. I crinkled newspaper carefully around a wineglass that said We’ve Got Tonight: Prom 1986. I said, “I wouldn’t put it past them.”
“By the way,” Summer said, “have you found a roommate yet?”
Credit in the Straight World
WHO ELSE WOULD MOVE IN WITH ME?
He had so few things. Two trips with the Cold Shoulder van and his apartment was empty. Crates of LPs, a couple of boxes of leftover band merch and records, the slim Danish couch. The guitar. A real mattress. Ryan took up hardly any space, outnumbered by my sprawling archives.
We dropped the boxes in Summer’s empty room. On the floor was a scattering of dust bunnies and bobby pins; in the closet, wire hangers. She’d left in a hurry, impatient to get to her new life with Marcy.
“What’s with that cat?” he asked. Edith Head, who was nowhere to be seen while we carried in the boxes, had now emerged onto the porch and was mashing her head against his shin.
“She mostly lives under the porch. Summer’s allergic. Was.”
“Well, let her on in.”
“I guess we can.”
I held open the door and Edith swanned past, stopped in the entry, and took a look around the place, tail flicking back and forth in a slow question mark. Then she dove under the couch.
Finished, we sat on the top step of the porch. It was newly April. Pink and white cherry blossoms soft as kitten ears carpeted the gutters, smelling like fleshy candy, sweet decay. The afternoon and evening lay ahead of us with nothing planned. I hadn’t thought we’d be done so early. What were we going to do?
Edith emerged from the house, rolled onto her back, and stretched her paws over her head. I reached out and rubbed her downy belly. According to the neighborhood, she’d had a litter of kittens before she shacked up with us. What was it like to have so many? I tried to picture ten babies squirming in her belly, packed in like sticky gummy bears, a tangle of umbilical cords like the cables behind the television. How extravagant that humans have only one, with all that space to itself. No wonder we turned out so entitled.
Ryan opened a beer and tipped the bottle my way. I hesitated with the rim at my lips. “I don’t think I should,” I said.
“Not even a sip?”
I handed it back to him. “From here on out, I want to fuck up as little as possible.”
He sighed. “Good policy.”
Ryan stayed up late. I woke early. We shared the same bed for a few overlapping hours in between. How strange now to wake up beside him, with no sense of alarm, nor any devious thrill. Back when every minute with Ryan felt forbidden, stolen, my senses had stayed keen. Now the urgency was gone, and with it, my desire. We had sex a few times—lights off, I tried to project a fantasy—but neither darkness nor surging pregnancy hormones could summon my lust. Our bodies slammed methodically, a rehearsal of mating. He sensed it and asked me if it was the pregnancy. I said yes. We stopped. We went with that, for now.
Ryan rehearsed or went out in the evenings and I worked days at Artifacts and as long as I could at the studio, trying to earn as much money as I could while I was still mobile and responsible only for myself. Sometimes we wouldn’t see each other until ten or eleven at night. Sometimes, if I could stay awake for more than ten minutes after I got home, we made big late-night snacks, a mountain of nachos or popcorn or spaghetti, and I sat on the counter eating as he drank a beer and we talked. Sometimes one of us would eat leftovers while the other read on the couch, or I would get ready for bed while he showere
d to go out. Sometimes we would pass each other in the short hallway between the bedrooms and smile awkwardly like strangers in a supermarket aisle. A certain companionable rhythm set in, our lives like two instruments playing at different speeds, falling in sync for brief regular overlaps.
With Flynn I had merged. We yoked together our routines, shared our friendships; even our cycles synced. The intensity gave the illusion of a life impossibly full. Living with Ryan was like living with open space. There were times when I’d come home and hear him drumming in the basement, and I wouldn’t announce my arrival. I’d go about my routine, walking carefully so as not to alert him. The steady beats beneath the floor were like a sense of purpose, spare but persistent. I would catch myself moving or breathing in time with it. This incomplete music.
“I’m a scab,” Ryan said. This was a few weeks into our cohabitation and he was lying on his couch—now our couch—with a pillow over his face, already ten minutes late for practice. As if to prove something, he had joined another band almost immediately. But it turned out the megalomaniac singer, a trust-funder who preferred things tailored to his liking, had fired his entire original band and then thrown together a new session lineup, instructing them to play exactly like his former band members.
“So quit.”
“We just got booked to play the Craig Kilborn show in May.”
“So quit after that.”
“If I can make it to North by Northwest that should be enough money to hold me for a while.”
“The singer’s an asshole to you.”
His hands fluttered up and his voice rose to a womanly pitch. “I just have to let it flow around me. I have to be the pebble in the water,” he said, as if quoting someone. His hands and pitch dropped again. “Whatever.” He sat up and rolled his shoulders and I saw once again how he could slip detachment over himself like a loose shirt. He sent this ripple through his body and then turned to look at me with a calm sweetness. Those creek-colored eyes.
Yet evidence started to surface that Ryan was no quasi-Buddhist pebble. I found a smashed plate in the bottom of the trash can. A split drumstick in the basement. I remembered that boot-level dent I’d noticed in the wall of his emptied apartment. And the guitar, a thing he had loved.
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