Stray City

by Chelsey Johnson

  He was always gentle to the living. So I let these things go.

  I began to see billboards and advertisements in a new way. A family frolicked on an afternoon-gilded lawn, a woman threw her arms around a man’s shoulders and they gazed at a screen together, everyone grinning and buying, grinning and selling. Insurance, restaurants, real estate, cleaning products. It played out everywhere, this smiling and selling—selling to us. To what we were supposed to be.

  It’s the gays who say, We are everywhere, but straightness really was everywhere. The world was sodden with it. Versions of the relationship I was now in played out in everything ever written, acted, sung, sold, declared. The abundance of representation dizzied me. There was so much written and sold about the love and trouble between men and women that if you lined it all up end to end the whole world would be wrapped as thickly and totally as a rubber-band ball.

  The unsolicited validation was stunning, and it kindled a new rage in me—rage that I could find almost no evidence of what I’d had with Flynn, or Vivian, or even living with Summer. Our worlds hardly even existed on record, while this one played publicly in endless permutations.

  The billboards beamed down at me, Yes, you. The magazine covers flaunted answers to questions I’d never thought to have. What does he mean? How to excite him? How to placate her? Who wants to talk? Who doesn’t? Who drives better? Who cares?

  The traffic roared by, oblivious.

  To think that doing it with a man had once felt illicit or subversive, when it was just . . . normal. It was a straight world after all. We all lived in it, but I had tuned it out for years, and now I could not.

  But how do you tell this to the person you sleep beside each night when they ask why you’re being so quiet, is something wrong? You don’t. You say, “I’m just so tired all the time now.”

  When Ryan was around, Lawrence liked to talk music gear with him, and her conversation would even become animated; Meena widened her stance and narrowed her eyes, either half ignored him or listened intently to everything he said, scanning for an offense. She preferred to come by while he was out, and I was okay with that. Summer never came back—unlike me, she was in love jail, all Marcy all the time, and besides, she felt guilty about Bullet. When my turn came to host family dinner, Robin offered to hold it at the Spawn instead, due to my condition. Whether my condition was pregnancy or Ryan I didn’t ask, but I let them have it. I invited Ryan but he said he had rehearsal, and we all let it rest at that. And what a relief it was to join my friends for dinner, even to dive into full gossip, with no need to moderate or explain. When I came home that night, he asked, determinedly casual, “They say anything about me? Was it a bloodbath?” I said, “No bloodbath. They asked how you were and that was that.” True, but I wondered if their restraint was less decorum than avoidance or bewilderment. The family stayed in our comfort zone this time. We needed it.

  I met some of Ryan’s people too. He took me to a barbecue on an unseasonably warm May Day. Men drank PBR from cans. Girls in sundresses and little vintage cardigans clustered by the back door and perched like herons on the deck and the arms of chairs. They fingered each other’s hems and sleeves with murmured admiration and gazed at me with a curious, distant serenity. I didn’t know what to say to them. My jeans were partly unbuttoned, which I tried to mask with a belt, and my untucked thrift-store T-shirt was a little too snug on my soft, barely swollen gut. I smiled and kept walking as if I had a purpose.

  Out in the yard by the grill I found a couple of women who were rugged and funny and crass, who had tattoos and played in bands or did photography or wrote. They were in their late twenties and early thirties, a little older than me. They pried open bottles with their lighters and smoked while I sipped my ginger ale. I wanted to say something that would make me real to them, more than a background girl, but couldn’t find the words. One of them had a black shepherd mix who leaned into my legs and gave me something to do with my hands. And there were a couple of gay men, one long and bald, one bearded and inked—

  All these little signifiers seemed to mean so much at the time, when I was twenty-four and everything meant everything. Any space I entered, I looked for people I could feel safe with.

  I liked some of these people. They weren’t the billboard heteros. We overlapped in music and clothing choices, in art and vintage furniture taste, in electoral politics. We’d read the same books. But I never stopped being aware of my hands or the sound of my own voice. I missed my friends and the relief of being unexplained and understood.

  The afternoon dimmed to evening and drunkenness settled in. Everyone but me got looser, louder. Ryan moved among them effortlessly. He paused and joked, he introduced me, he had a comment for everyone. I couldn’t tell whom he was closest to, or if there were any he didn’t already know. At parties, I always clung to familiar social rafts, jumped from one and latched on to the next as quickly as I could. But Ryan sauntered through, equally close to everyone. Or to no one at all.

  Coming Soon

  I HAD SWORN TO MY FRIENDS THAT PREGNANCY WOULDN’T change me, but my body didn’t listen. Nausea never set in—I must have inherited my mother’s gift for gestation—but I had never been so hungry in my life. I worked harder than ever, begged to pick up shifts again at the record store, asked Ted for a dollar raise and settled for fifty cents. I needed to start saving money but I was eating it all. And falling asleep behind the counter.

  The pregnancy mystified Ryan, tangible to him only in the form of my newly B-cup breasts, which were too tender to touch. I’d stopped talking about my symptoms after he said, with an unhappy glance at my still-ambiguous belly, “I don’t like that it’s doing that to you.” But I liked that it was drawing on my strength; I thought I had plenty of strength to give. Even though I was tired and hungry, I felt superpowered with my increased blood flow and lion-sized metabolism.

  But pregnancy was a lonely place sometimes. No more late, long, confessional conversations in dark bars. No more shows in clubs. No more queer dance nights. No more house parties, where bands played in dank magical basements that felt like a true underground in every sense, or where friends DJed while we crammed into emptied living and dining rooms to dance in the haze, loosened and drunk on cheap booze, escaping to porches and stairwells to make out. No more of certain coffee shops, even, where ashtrays brimmed on tables. The air of queer space was blue with smoke, and I couldn’t breathe it anymore.

  Up until this point, my lesbian universe had steadily expanded. The more people who moved to Portland, the more people I met, the larger and fuller my world became. Once word got out about me—and it spread fast—that universe seemed to contract. There were no more Lesbian Mafia official emails. I learned about parties second- or thirdhand, or after the fact. When I did run into people I knew, out at a reading or a barbecue or an all-ages early show or coffee shop, I often sensed a transparent membrane between us, a certain remove in their smiles and hey. Maybe it was all in my head, but I imagined they were ready to turn away to talk to someone else, someone real, someone with prospects.

  This stung, but not in the same way it would have a month ago. The real separation I sensed opening between them and me had little to do with Ryan and everything to do with pregnancy. I had another life to manage. My survival instincts had shifted focus.

  “How are things?” Meena said when she picked me up for my first actual ultrasound appointment at eighteen weeks. She had insisted. I had told Ryan it wasn’t anything big, just a routine checkup, he shouldn’t change his work schedule, and he’d looked relieved. He said okay and headed to the barbershop. But Meena was keeping an eye on me, always ready to take charge of my situation.

  “Good enough,” I said. “Busy.”

  “How are things really.”

  “Good enough. Busy.”

  “Where’s your boyfriend?”

  I didn’t rise to the bait. “Ryan’s at work,” I said.

  “A little weird he didn’t come for this.”
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br />   “I didn’t ask him,” I said. “It’s too . . . coupley.”

  A man-faced, mom-haired nurse named Donna settled onto a stool next to me and rubbed the ultrasound wand back and forth over my belly like a giant eraser. The screen was dim and vague, the snowy static of my interior, and then a black cave opened and a silvery humanoid shape swam into view with a single kick. Meena and I both gasped. She grabbed my hand. I’d seen other people’s grainy ultrasound pictures before, but this was live, moving, inside me. With its oversize head and limbs curled up like that, it reminded me of Bullet nestling in to sleep, a large-headed pup. My eyes started to fill, but I could hardly bear to blink. I squeezed Meena’s hand tight.

  The nurse measured and clicked around. “Everything looks good.” She held a Doppler wand to my belly and I heard a fast buzzy thump, 164 beats per minute.

  I looked up at Meena. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Don’t tell,” she said. I promised her I wouldn’t.

  She composed herself in the parking lot. “That just got real,” she said. “I can’t believe there’s a baby inside you.”

  “It’s a fetus. Not a baby yet.”

  Meena gave me a look and I said, “I’m trying to fight eighteen years of Catholic indoctrination. It’s not easy.”

  Meena turned the key. “Whatever it is, you have two hearts now. Holy fuck.”

  Annabel’s voice was slightly breathless on the line. The phone had rung at seven on a rare morning when Ryan and I were both still in bed. “They’re coming to see you.”

  I yawned and Ryan pulled a pillow over his head. I said, “Who?”

  “Mom and Dad. I’m so sorry.”

  I couldn’t breathe. “What?” I choked.

  It had slipped. Annabel couldn’t lie, never could. After I fled Nebraska that final Christmas, my parents barred me from talking to her for this reason. They’d said it wasn’t fair for me to put my little sister in that position, asking her to keep my confidence. I’d had to agree, for her sake, and—although Annabel and I broke that barrier as soon as she escaped to college—that concession confirmed that the family’s fracture was all my fault. My choices, not theirs, had broken us. That old cruel thought struck me again now in a deep tender place I’d forgotten.

  I had to put my anger in reserve. I sat up and shoved my glasses on my face. “When are they leaving?”

  We calculated that it would take them two and a half days, even with their road stamina. “I’ll call them and find out,” she said.

  But there was no answer at the house in Nebraska. “Oh god,” Annabel said when she called me back. “I think they’re on their way.”

  I ran around the house, straightening cushions, pulling books like Stone Butch Blues and The New Fuck You and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers off the shelves.

  “And you said I’d never meet your mother,” Ryan said.

  “I was pretty sure of it at the time.”

  “Will they still be here when I get back?”

  I dropped the questionable books in a box. I had forgotten the new band had been invited to play Craig Kilborn. The taping was in two days. They were leaving for L.A. tomorrow.

  “Oh god, I’ll be alone with them.” I wrapped my arms around my waist. “Ryan, what if they’re planning to take the baby?”

  “They can’t take the baby. It’s not born yet.”

  “I’m serious. They could try.”

  “On what grounds?”

  I paused. I had been about to say, That I’m a lesbian. But there stood Ryan. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m unfit?”

  “I’ll cancel. I’ll cancel right now if you want,” he said.

  I pictured my mother looking him up and down, appraising the father of her future grandchild. Her satisfaction would kill me. I told him to go, or he’d get kicked out of the band.

  He said he’d love to get kicked out, and it wasn’t like he was getting paid for it.

  “But my parents don’t know that, and they’ll like that you’re doing something that looks like a moneymaker—” I recoiled at the sentence, sat down hard. “That is the most capitalist, heteronormative thing I’ve ever said.” Was pregnancy ruining me? Meena would feel so righteously vindicated by this. My inner Lesbian Mafia shook their heads knowingly.

  A bandmate pulled up in front of the house at nine A.M. and honked. I was in the middle of my second breakfast, carrying around a bowl of oatmeal while I picked up stray shoes and magazines. I set down the bowl and followed Ryan to the doorway. His hair was wet from the shower. I was still in the T-shirt and boxers I’d slept in, uncombed and bespectacled, teeth unbrushed, and when I hugged him I apologized for sullying his cleanliness.

  “No,” he said, “you smell like sleep. You smell like our bed.”

  “Do I smell like fear?”

  He inhaled my bedhead. “You smell like a sweet little animal who’s just emerged from the den.”

  I grabbed his jacket with both hands. “I want to turn off all the lights and lock the doors until they give up and turn back.”

  He wrapped his arms around me and held me unusually tight. “You’ll be okay.”

  “I don’t know if I will.” I burrowed my head into his chest and closed my eyes. I hadn’t wanted him to stay but suddenly I was afraid to be alone.

  “You will. You’re the toughest person I know,” he said. “It’s one of the reasons I love you.”

  My eyes flew open. All I could see was T-shirt black as night. “You what?”

  “Sorry. I guess that breaks the rules.”

  “The rules? I think they’re suspended at this point.” My body flushed with warmth, the kind where you can’t tell if it’s longing or sickness. I inhaled, I exhaled, I burned. There was only one response I could give. I said, “I love you too.” It came out flat and plain as a recited fact.

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  You should never ask someone if they’re sure—you’re looking for reassurance but you only introduce doubt. A knot formed in my gut and I made myself look him in the eyes. “Yes.”

  His hands slid over my shoulder blades. My muscles tensed, and to lessen the pressure, I leaned into him. A smile sweetly distorted his good-bye kiss, and then the bandmate honked again and Ryan cursed and left.

  I stood in the middle of my living room and looked around at the mess I still had to clean up. What did I know about love? I had loved Zoe, a fledgling love, love of the idea of love. I’d loved Vivian, a love that was a passage to the more lasting love of friendship. I’d loved Flynn, a huge love that filled and then gutted me. I loved this fetal creature with a disorienting new kind of love, inexplicably self-sacrificing and self-oriented at the same time. My feeling for Ryan wasn’t like any of those kinds of love. There was no wilderness in it, no desperation. But there was undeniable affection. There was a person who still turned toward instead of away from my touch. There was a person who, however he defined it, however improbable it seemed to me, loved me. I thought I could call what I felt for him love. Love was what I wanted more than anything to surround and scaffold this kid. I couldn’t afford to take such a thing for granted.

  If you have to convince yourself it’s truth, it’s a lie.

  Parents

  THE PHONE RANG. THEY WERE AT THE CORNER OF Fremont and MLK, at the convenience store where Summer and I used to walk to buy orange juice and corn chips when we were hungover. My dad: “Andrea, we’re in town.” A huff of desperate joviality in his tone.

  “So I hear,” I said. “I’ll meet you.”

  “No, no, we’ll come there,” he said, as if this were a concession to me.

  I brought Bullet out to the porch and shut the door behind us. We sat on the top step and waited. The sun was warm and the kids across the street were drawing with pink and yellow chalk on the cracked sidewalk. Edith Head slunk out from under the steps, spotted Bullet, bristled, and bolted. Bullet, fearfully monitoring a fly circling overhead, didn’t even notice. I str
oked the dog’s velvety back to dry my palms. My thumping pulse filled my ears.

  A beige Honda Accord with Nebraska plates pulled up across the street.

  They got out, stood, looked around.

  I raised a hand. Here I am.

  There they were, coming up the walk. Their jawlines had softened. My father’s eyes seemed to have changed shape, the lids heavier. My mother’s light hair was thinner and silkier. Still familiar was her glance of concern as she noted my scruffy hair and unmade-up face, but it converted to delight at the subtle swell of my abdomen. “Oh, Andrea,” she said, reaching forward to touch my stomach. Bullet saved me by thrusting her muzzle between us to sniff. My mother jerked her hands back.

  “Is that a pit bull?”

  “Yes,” I said, without the usual disclaimer of how harmless she was. “Welcome to Portland. I can’t quite believe you’re here.”

  My mother looked around. I saw her register the pit bull, the mossy roof, the weedy front yard next door, the neighbor kids, the nice house on one side of us and the less-nice house on the other. We should hug, I thought. But I couldn’t yet. Instead we all acted as if they were just stopping by.

  My mother asked about Ryan and I told them he was in Los Angeles taping a TV show with his band.

  “Television,” my mother said, impressed.

  “Is this the kind of man who’s always going to be on the road?” my dad said.

  My mom elbowed him and smiled. “When will he be back?”

  I said I wasn’t sure, he was recording while they were down there—a lie—and it depended on how many tracks they’d need him for. “The upside is that the longer he works, the more he gets paid.” I thought they’d like to hear that. I hated myself for saying it, for saying all of it.

  They wanted me to show them the house but I suggested we go out for dinner first. My mother said she needed the restroom and excused herself. “Don’t worry, I’ll find it,” she sang out as she disappeared into the entry. “Take a left from the living room,” I called after her. My father took a look at the orange velour easy chair genially deteriorating on the porch and sat down on the top step. I asked how the grocery store was doing. He said fine, but a Wal-Mart was coming to the town half an hour away and he was a little worried. I asked about Alex and Alissa. He said they were great, named the children and their boilerplate developmental accomplishments. I wondered how he would report back about me. My mother had been inside for several minutes. I said, “Let me go check on Mom.”