The Off Season

by Amy Hoffman

  The Off Season

  Amy Hoffman

  The University of Wisconsin Press

  The University of Wisconsin Press

  1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor

  Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

  uwpress.wisc.edu

  3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden

  London WCE 8LU, United Kingdom

  eurospanbookstore.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Amy Hoffman

  All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to rights@uwpress.wisc.edu.

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book may be available in a digital edition.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hoffman, Amy, author.

  Title: The off season / Amy Hoffman.

  Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017010432 | ISBN 9780299314606 (cloth: alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Lesbians—Fiction. | Provincetown (Mass.)—Fiction. | LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.O47738 O34 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010432

  ISBN-13: 978-0-299-31468-2 (electronic)

  To

  Provincetown

  Contents

  The Vortex

  The Gravitron Starship 4000

  The Good Healer

  Trouble

  Superpowers

  Pink Towel

  My Heart

  Asparagus

  The Universe Comes to a Halt but Quickly Starts Up Again

  Miss Ruby

  Bitches

  The Green Teddy

  The White Pickup Truck

  Pulling Espresso

  When I Paint My Masterpiece

  Philosophy

  Public Education

  Vegan Pizza

  My Studio

  Wheat Paste

  Tagging

  Stop & Shop

  The Mural

  Miss Ruby Sits

  Dyke Drama

  Jellyfish

  Dreams R2B Realized

  The Shopping Cart Protest

  Roger Gets Over It

  Wet Suits

  The Ballad of Tony and Ruby

  Signatures

  Where Baby Comes From

  False Pretenses

  The Special Town Meeting

  All Other Boxes

  Margot and Marcus

  Triangles and Squares

  The Call

  The Swim

  Eyes Open

  A Little Rouge

  Open Studio

  L’Heure Bleue

  Janelle

  Present Tense

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  The Vortex

  The year Janelle and I moved to Provincetown—for her to heal and grow stronger, for me to paint my masterpiece, for the two of us to mend our bruised relationship—was the year I became a cad. Janelle, with her scientific mind, would tell you it was because I introduced an uncontrolled variable into our experiment—that is, Baby Harris—so of course it didn’t produce the anticipated results, as if anything does. Although I did do a lot of painting. But in Brooklyn, I had been a nice person. Or maybe I’m deluded. That would be Janelle’s interpretation. Maybe I always had it in me.

  Provincetown was always a crucial element in the Janelle-and-Nora story, even before we decided to move there. Picture Cape Cod: a raised arm, biceps pumped, elbow crooked, fingers curled under. The loose fist encircles Provincetown and its small, incongruous population of writers, visual artists, spiritual seekers, drag queens, regular queens, lesbians, Portuguese former fisherfolk (“former” because their livelihoods were largely destroyed by overfishing and climate change), Yankee drunks, miscellaneous nonconformists, and Margot, an extraordinary personage who embodied, busking on the street in a leather miniskirt with a handmade placard that read “70 Years Young, Living My Dream,” all of the above at once. If you drove out to the tip of the Cape on Route 6, which runs right down the middle of the long peninsula, the place felt like the end of the line. But if you could look down on it from above, like the gulls and pigeons do, you would see that it is, rather, the center of a vortex, the currents of ocean and bay swirling around it—concentrating the forces of imagination, desire, and precarious natural beauty.

  Janelle and I met there, in the eye of the vortex, cute. It was high summer, and I was on a bike, pumping up the hill on Bradford Street that runs alongside the high school parking lot, my hand out to signal a left onto Carver, when another cyclist plowed into me from behind. Fortunately, because of the crowds, none of the cars was moving very fast, and neither were those of us on bicycles. I went over in slow motion.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, oh my God!” the other cyclist cried out, jumping off her bike and gathering up the library books that had fallen off my rear rack. “I guess I got distracted!”

  At first I was less angry than terrified by being knocked into traffic. Struggling to guide the bike onto the sidewalk, I realized the handlebars were now facing one way and the front wheel another. The tire was flat. My knee was bleeding. “I hate the way people drive around here!” I shouted. “Shit! Fuck! Piss! Why can’t you watch where you’re going?”

  She handed me the books, so now I had to manage those with one arm while wheeling my crazy bike with the other. “I’m so sorry!” she repeated, trailing after me. “This has never happened to me before! Let me help you with your bike!”

  “It’s not my bike. It’s a rental,” I said. “Go away.”

  When I finally succeeded in dragging the bike back to the shop, the guys were amazingly unsympathetic, despite my bloody knee and all, and I had to have a big argument with them about returning my security deposit.

  That evening I saw her again, sitting on one of the benches outside Spiritus Pizza, eating a slice and watching the vacationing hoards charging up and down Commercial Street. She was short and stocky and dark skinned, her hair in short dreadlocks. “Hey!” Janelle waved me over. “It’s you! Are you okay?”

  I showed her the bandage I had wrapped around my knee.

  “Looks painful,” she said.

  “It is,” I said. “You idiot.”

  “I’m usually so careful,” she said. “I’m truly sorry. I got distracted.”

  “Oh, forget it,” I said, noticing her dimples. “Maybe I’ll end up with an intriguing scar.”

  “Want a slice?” she asked. “I’m buying tonight. Greek or cheese?”

  “Greek,” I said. “So what distracted you, anyway?” On Commercial, I could have understood it—the crowds, the views of the harbor—but on Bradford it’s all traffic and straight couples dragging their kids up the hill.

  “You,” said Janelle, standing up from the bench.

  “First you nearly kill me,” I said. “Now you’re embarrassing me.”

  She went inside to the counter to order our pizza. When she returned, she continued, “You have very well-defined calf muscles.”

  “I do?” I said.

  “Don’t fish,” she said. “Yes, you do. I like that on a girl.” She handed me my slice. “Are you here by yourself? I am.”

  “I’m with friends. They’ve been inviting women over for dinner all week, but—”

  “Uh-huh. You do better on your own,” she said. “You caugh
t me, girl.”

  So that’s how it started.

  The way she came on to me, I thought she was looking for a simple vacation hookup—which I was excited to experience, since I had never been much good at keeping things casual. I was the serial monogamy type. With, I admit, lapses. But being lesbians—rather than gay men, such as, for example, Janelle’s friend Roger, who became my friend too, at least for a time, and who didn’t like to learn even the real names of his tricks, although he would tolerate a nom d’amour like Blake or Lancelot or Crusher—Janelle and I started talking: basic biographical information; first love; daring sexual practices and venues (frottage to orgasm on the lawn at Tanglewood; handcuff play in girlfriend’s sister’s apartment, with girlfriend’s sister banging on the door). When we got as far as exchanging addresses, we discovered we lived in the same neighborhood. So much for same-time-next-year. I was renting a one-bedroom I could no longer afford since she-who-shall-not-be-named had moved out six months before, while just a few blocks away, Janelle owned a huge renovated loft, with a spare room that she had always meant to make into a workshop but that was currently serving as storage for her exercise equipment.

  “You’re right,” I said when she showed me around. “This would make a great studio. South-facing, good light.” Janelle gave me a big wet kiss, and we made love on her yoga mat. It wasn’t quite a lesbian-second-date/U-Haul situation, but it was close.

  The Gravitron Starship 4000

  I hadn’t understood at first that my sweet Janelle was a genius, literally. In math, she had vacuumed up every prize her department had to offer. Since graduate school, though, she had moved away from abstraction. What she really loved was tinkering, figuring out how things worked. She once built herself a computer. From a kit, for fun. That’s what she told me, “fun.” It took her a couple of weekends; it would have taken me all my life and then some: around and around, chained to the everlasting karmic wheel, damned to finish my hardware. She had created a successful consulting practice developing software systems for small businesses, in which she tried to keep her relationships with her clients, as much as possible, virtual. “It’s neater that way,” she explained to me. “If I don’t know their stories, I don’t have to feel guilty about what I’m charging them.” Because when people met Janelle, they told her things. It was the way she listened, as though she had never before heard anything so fascinating. And in fact her interest was absolutely genuine, and once she learned what you were up to, she couldn’t stop herself from getting involved. From tinkering. Her clients adored her.

  My own unstable income was hacked together with scotch tape and string: adjunct gigs, a private student or two, some gallery sitting, occasionally a commission, once or twice a prize, and the rare, miraculous sale. But Janelle never minded that. “I’m a patron of the arts,” she would say, just really pleased about it.

  So I was kept, at least partly, and less than pleased about it, but I tried to repress all that. Because Janelle made me happy—and I made her happy, too; she’s never denied that. We had friends, we went out dancing and to movies and dinner parties and plays, and we were busy, busy, busy, like all New Yorkers, I with my art, she with her computers and whatnot—I never exactly understood what she did, as many times as she patiently tried to explain it.

  Even our racial difference didn’t seem to get in the way. At most, it was grist for illuminating comparisons and discussion, a little healthy friction—perhaps because despite it, our backgrounds were so similar: Both of us from the striving middle classes of the boroughs, Brooklyn for me, Queens for her. Parents who were teachers and social workers, uncles who were dentists, aunts who were their bookkeepers. Exam schools: Music and Art, Bronx Science. A decade after we first bashed into each other, we still had sex once or twice a week. Other couples told us we were their role models.

  We were so lucky, for so long.

  There has to be an “until . . . ,” right?

  Until Janelle got cancer.

  She always hated getting mammograms. I mean, no one likes it, but she had a near phobia. Still, she would take half a valium and go when it was time, and then it would be over for another year. Except once.

  “It hurt more than ever,” she told me when she got home. I would have made her a comforting cup of tea, because that’s what I would have wanted, but Janelle hated tea, which she said looked to her like dirty water, so I brewed her a shot of coffee in her special espresso machine. She liked to drink that night and day; she said it helped her think. And sleep—she maintained that a coffee at the right time at night knocked her right out. Go figure. I said her espresso wasn’t dirty water; it was mud. Good swamp mud! Janelle used to growl.

  We sat down next to each other on the living room couch, where we reconnoitered each evening, and where we had our most important conversations. We called it our Honesty Couch—which is just so sweet, isn’t it? “I’m still aching,” she said.

  “Aw, baby,” I said, putting my arm around her and pulling her toward me. “Come here and let me kiss it and make it better.”

  “No, don’t,” she said, pushing me away. “You don’t understand. I have a bad feeling.”

  After that, every step of the way, when they called her back for another scan, for an ultrasound, for a biopsy—when we made the appointment with the fucking surgeon!—I became more and more resistant. “You don’t know, honey. They make mistakes all the time. It’s probably just a cyst, like I always get, remember?” My doctor had told me I had a condition called “dense breast tissue,” which I thought didn’t sound like a condition at all, just normal human breasts, but the doctor claimed it made my tests difficult to read, and I often had to return for multiple sessions. “Wait until we really understand what’s going on.”

  At first, Janelle actually found my nonsense reassuring. “You’re right, you’re right,” she would say. “I’ll try to calm down.”

  “That’s right, honey. Breathe.”

  She would have been better off buttonholing the mail carrier or some other random person on the street. I don’t like to admit this, but basically, I’m not the woman you want by your side in an emergency. It’s not simply denial: I get stupid. I’ve actually felt my thought processes slowing down, until whatever’s just happened can’t penetrate my seized-up brain, and I’m running in circles, flapping my arms around. Not effective. You’re much better off with someone like Janelle, who gets revved up and superenergized in times of trouble and starts doing ten things at once. All of them splendidly.

  “Black women have a much worse prognosis than whites,” she told me one evening. “Did you know that? Even us well-educated, well-paid sisters with health insurance. I’ve been researching this.”

  Of course she had. “I told you to stop it!” I yelled, displaying yet again my wondrous powers of denial. “Prognosis. Why are you jumping to that already? You don’t even have a diagnosis.”

  “Why are you yelling at me?”

  “I don’t know. I—because maybe it’s nothing, Janelle!”

  She bristled. “Nothing to you. Even if it’s just some idiot’s fingerprint on the X-ray, it’s not nothing. It’s the environment. Look at where we live! Brooklyn! The Gowanus Canal is practically a Superfund site. People have been dumping shit into it since, I don’t know, 1800 or something. Cancer’s probably in the air, in the dust—in the dirt! And we wanted a vegetable garden—how stupid can you get?”

  “Don’t say cancer,” I said.

  “Don’t be superstitious. It’s a word.”

  The trick of the Gravitron Starship 4000 carnival ride is to whirl around so fast that revelers find themselves stuck to the walls by centrifugal force. Then the floor folds away. I was sitting next to Janelle in her doctor’s office when he told her the results of her biopsy, and I felt a Gravitron-like vertigo as we were slammed into a new space-time governed by wacko physical rules. He was referring her to an oncologist, the carpeted floor dropping away beneath our feet. That night, we held each other in bed
, and looking back, it seems to me that all we said to each other in the darkness was “Cancer.”

  “Cancer.”

  “Cancer.”

  “Cancer.”

  Later, after that night, she was, most of all, angry. Not grief-stricken or immobilized or frightened, as I was, but simply furious. She couldn’t sit still; she kept jumping up and stomping around the apartment. “I don’t know what to do with myself, Nora! Lump-ectomy! It’s the stupidest term for a surgery I ever heard in my life; it’s not even Latin!”

  “It’s not even pig-Latin!” I said, and that made her laugh at herself, for a moment.

  “It’s an embarrassment, to have an operation like that.”

  The Good Healer

  Nevertheless, Janelle’s lumpectomy went well, if such a thing can be said of such a surgery: she was, the oncologist said, a “good healer.”

  I was not a good healer. That was Roger. It’s not like Janelle would have died without him, even if I sometimes felt that way. After all, she was only—that’s what the doctors always said, only—stage one. Very treatable: they said that too. But Roger taught me how to care for her. He showed me what to do with the bandages and drains, and he encouraged her to eat and go for walks. He told me to go with her to her doctor appointments, to make a list of questions, to bring a pad and pen, to take notes. He knew the importance of an extra blanket in the late afternoon, a new pair of pajamas, a glass of water, a gentle touch. He could read Janelle’s mood—when she was up for a visit from a friend, when she would rather have that person stay out of her way.

  More and more, the person she would rather have stay out of her way was me. As much as Roger tried to teach me, I couldn’t seem to develop the touch. I brought Janelle dinner on a tray, and she said the food was tasteless. I put a vase of flowers by her bed, and the scent made her choke. When I gave her a book, she said she was too exhausted to read anything but Essence. When I tried giving her a massage, she complained that I was poking her.

  I was standing at the kitchen sink rinsing off a bunch of kale for a healthy new recipe Roger was showing me, and I asked him. “You’re an elementary school teacher, not a nurse. How’d you learn to do all this?”