by Cat Cora
Jordan and I lasted all summer, and two months into the school year. In hindsight our association had summer romance written all over it, but I was as stubborn then as I am now, and was determined to make it last as long as I could. I leveraged my power as her chauffeur, picking her up in the mornings and delivering her to her front door at the end of the day. If cheerleading practice went longer than drill team practice, I waited.
Then one day I heard some gossip I pretended to ignore: Jordan had a crush on a guy whose name I can’t recall, who everyone agreed was superhot. To make matters more awkward, my brother Chris, who was also a cheerleader, told me one night after we did the dishes that he was thinking about asking Jordan out.
“She’s not really your type,” I said, stooping to put the Tupperware in a low cupboard, the better to hide my expression. “She doesn’t treat guys very well. I don’t think she’d be good for you.” I was a little proud of myself for telling him the truth without revealing anything.
The rumors about Jordan and the hot guy persisted, and one afternoon after school I confronted her. It was deep into fall. I remember the hazy bronze sky, the smoke smell from people burning their leaves.
“We’re just friends,” she said.
A lie, of course. In my heart I knew immediately.
I went home, threw myself onto my bed, and sobbed. I cried daily for what seemed like weeks on end. Chris was busy with his own life, and just assumed, I think, that I was one more inexplicable girl. Grandmom Alma thought a boy might be to blame. My dad was perplexed, but he was Greek, and understood in his DNA that even though he was soft-spoken, passionate outbursts were nothing to get too excited over. My friends at school were mystified, concerned, and finally just sort of thought I’d lost my mind.
In the South, people say “bless her heart” for a number of reasons, none of which has anything to do with praying that God bestows his grace upon your cardiovascular system. Bless her heart is the preamble when you’re about to say something disapproving about someone, and also when someone’s behavior is so peculiar that some form of undiagnosed mental illness is the only explanation. I have no doubt that a lot of bless your hearts were said behind my back the autumn of my senior year.
I threw myself back into my extracurriculars, and also tried out for Gayfer Girls. Gayfers was a department store across the South (it eventually was bought out by Dillard’s), and Gayfer Girls were the teen advisory board whose job it was to give advice to customers on the latest fashions, produce fashion shows, and serve as Gayfer ambassadors in various charity events around Mississippi. Because it is impossible to be a member of something in the Deep South without there being a special outfit involved, Gayfer Girls were issued a red blazer and hat, and a red, orange, gray, and cream–patterned scarf. I didn’t appreciate the rich aptness of the name Gayfer Girl at the time, which was just as well.
Like everyone else, Johnny had assumed Jordan was just my new best friend. What I’d always liked about him I liked even more now: he could tell something was different about me, but he didn’t pressure me to explain myself. I was grateful to him, but also miserable.
He was now a manager at Lowe’s, traveling around the South training staff how to be managers. After Jordan broke up with me, Johnny and I got back together. He suggested we meet at El Chico, a Mexican chain restaurant popular in the South that we both liked. When I arrived he was holding a sign and had a bouquet of balloons, as if I’d come home from a long trip abroad. Over dessert he gave me a promise ring, which I accepted without hesitation.
My relationship with Jordan had been so painful. She was my first love. I saw how trying to love a woman would be too hard for me, too fraught. With men I could play the role, well aware that I wasn’t being touched at my deepest level. With Johnny I could be the girlfriend and look happy. He was a sweet guy who would take care of me. I thought, Well, this is it. I was prepared to go quietly into that good night and accept my fate. I was ready to marry him, this sweet, honest guy who didn’t deserve any of this.
five
No matter how terrible I felt—and I assure you, these were difficult times—when I walked into the kitchen and started opening the cupboards, everything inside me settled. I learned that if I put my head down and paid attention only to the food, peace would follow. When I had a free evening I liked to cook for my godparents, Taki and Maria. Taki had long since sold the Continental, but he knew his recipe for herb, lemon, and garlic chicken by heart, and delighted in tossing on an apron and giving me a few pointers.
Taki had learned his trade in Lyon, France, during World War II. Lyon, not Paris, was the true birthplace of French cuisine. So groundbreaking was Lyon, that in the sixteenth century the food of Lyonnais chefs was thought to rival that of their Florentine counterparts, and in the nineteenth century the female chefs of Lyon started opening their own restaurants (unheard of). Madame Brazier, a Lyon native, was the first woman to win three Michelin stars twice, and went on to train Lyon’s most famous chef, and one of the most revered chefs on earth, Paul Bocuse.
Taki made his way across Europe from his native Greece and put himself through university working in restaurants, starting out washing dishes, then moving up to prep work. Lyon’s white-tablecloth restaurants were not exempt from the postwar food shortages. Often he would come to work at dawn, only to find they had run out of salt or flour, and the chef would send him out to scrounge some up, using his own money. Even though he spent long hours in the kitchen, he often went hungry. Some days his meals consisted of a piece of bread and a small wedge of cheese.
Taki taught me how to cure salmon and how to make the best lyonnaise dressing, with chopped shallots, Dijon mustard, red wine vinegar, and olive oil. Together we made beautifully roasted chicken, golden brown and succulent, the way they did in the bistros in Paris I had read about. He patiently demonstrated how to season, sauté, and flambé. Sometimes my dad would get into the act and bust out his sensational shrimp pilaf or stuffed bell peppers. Or we’d all work elbow-to-elbow, happily chopping and slicing to prepare a Greek country salad and stuffed grape leaves.
As I was cooking with Taki and my dad, my mom was away at the University of Alabama. She was a teaching assistant and also a research fellow, which meant she was expected to devote herself to her studies and forgo a regular paycheck while she was earning her degree. We couldn’t afford such a luxury, so every other weekend when she drove back home from Birmingham, she picked up a few twelve-hour shifts at the rehab hospital. This remained her schedule for my entire high school career, and after the first bloom of having my dad and grandmom to myself, I found myself resenting her absence, which bled into resenting her in general for the sexual abuse I’d suffered at the hands of AH and how its aftermath was handled.
After the truth came to light on that humid summer afternoon not far from Texarkana, when I was perhaps ten or eleven, it was shoved into darkness again. Many of us who have been abused know this: even after the abuse ends, you remain stuck in that time, that place, with all that shame. Your loved ones, relieved that the abuse has been exposed, hope and assume that your psychic wound will heal, like any other injury. The passage of time, combined with my mom’s habit of always focusing on the positive and her determination to keep the peace at all costs, turned my abuse, which everyone had known about, talked about, and presumably accepted, back into a dark secret. My mom was a psychiatric nurse pursuing her PhD, and she never asked me whether I was still troubled by my experience. The irony was not lost on me.
By the time my mom finished her doctoral program, everyone was fed up with her absence. What had originally seemed like a good solution to the family’s financial problems had begun to annoy my dad. His mother-in-law had effectively replaced his beloved life partner—which is not to say my dad didn’t love and appreciate Alma, it just wasn’t what he signed up for.
If there was an issue, my dad and Alma had to figure it out, or he had to wait until my mom was free to talk on the phone. It was a good decade before cell ph
ones and computers were commonplace, and in any case my mom was in class much of the time. He dealt with teenagers all day long, then he had to come home and deal with us. No wonder he was losing his patience.
Sometimes when my mom was home I would hear them “having a discussion” in the next room, and it would evolve quickly into a full-blown argument. I never could hear enough to understand what exactly they were fighting about, but now that I have a spouse who stays home with the children while I spend a lot of time on the road, I understand what they must have been going through: they missed each other, and they were disconnected, and they were both depleted.
My inauspicious college career began under this domestic cloud. I was the living, breathing definition of clueless, and I had an incurable case of the fuck-its. My friend Sandy was going to nearby Hinds Community College and living in the dorms and asked me to be her roommate. I didn’t see why not. What else was I going to do? I had been a B student in high school. My college degree–crazed parents believed with dread and certainty that I would skip out on college, and going to Hinds was a good compromise.
Early on I discovered I had an aptitude for drinking. I started with the easy stuff—beer. Eventually I would discover Crown Royal and Diet Coke, and later still, the virtues of a good wine. But back then, a Mississippi girl looking for a buzz had three options: Miller Lite, Coors Lite, and Bud Lite. Without much effort, Sandy and I were able to find a party to get drunk at most nights of the week.
The yard helper/house helper/kitchen helper rules my mom had enforced when my brothers and I were in grade school had long since been dropped, and the other basic chores I used to do before my mom went off to get her PhD were a dim memory. I’d become used to being waited on, living in a house with miraculously dust-free surfaces, and wearing clothing that magically washed and folded itself and appeared in a neat pile in the center of my apparently self-making bed. I’d become soft, spoiled, and petulant. And a picnic to be around, I’m sure.
Without Alma on duty to provide nourishing meals, I gained weight. Cooking in our dorm room consisted of heating up soup and making Top Ramen in an electric hot pot Sandy and I had bought. One night I came home late, drunk, and hungry. Sandy was still out with her friends. I found a can of ravioli, opened it, dumped it into the hot pot, cranked that sucker up to high, then decided I was in desperate need of a shower. After the shower, I was exhausted and fell into bed.
In the morning, I awoke to the smell of burned tomato paste and the sound of Sandy swearing. The hot pot was ruined. Overnight the ravioli had been transformed from something marginally edible to a concrete slab you might employ in building a prison. The incident was a metaphor for everything that was wrong with my life, and my parents, who were busy but not completely oblivious, insisted I move home. I’m sure they were worried I’d wind up like many wayward Mississippi girls, pregnant and without direction.
By my nineteenth birthday I was out of the closet, at least in my head. My family and high school friends knew nothing about my personal life, and I didn’t have any gay friends. But I’d started working at a bodybuilding gym—not a health club, but a serious, no-frills gymnasium, complete with clanking weight plates, booming music, and the tangy smell of sweat. There I met some gay people. Some gay women. I had found my tribe, sort of. At least I didn’t have to focus on keeping my desires a secret around them. They introduced me to the lone lesbian bar in Jackson, a hole-in-the-wall within walking distance of the capitol building, and one weekend we drove to New Orleans after work and I had a torrid one-night stand with a smokin’ hot girl named Holly.
The night I officially came out was nothing I’d planned. It was a typical humid Mississippi summer night. The air smelled of dying grass. Frogs hopped around on our back patio. They appeared every evening just after sunset, attracted to who knows what. I’d gotten myself gussied up, and my mom and dad thought I was going to meet a bunch of girls from school for a drink. In reality, I was going on a blind date with Holly. I’ve always liked girly girls, an uncommon preference back in the dyke era of the old lesbian South. Her name was Holly, and it turned out she was the cousin of a woman in Jackson known around town as the Queen of the Lesbians. She was a full-blooded southern eccentric who’d opened an oyster bar with family money.
When I met Holly in Jackson, I knew immediately it wasn’t going to happen. Maybe what we’d felt before had been the sexy buzz of being in New Orleans, mingled with the cheap drinks. Back in Jackson, things between us were comically awkward. She might as well have been straight.
I came home miserable and steeped in self-pity. The house was dark, the hum of the central air-conditioning the loneliest sound on earth. My situation crashed down upon me. This was what it was going to be like for the rest of my life. Lying about where I went and with whom. Lying about whom I loved. Lying about who I was.
My parents and Grandmom Alma were at a dinner party down the street. My mom and I had been butting heads of late. Some of it was the usual stuff: I had a few too many ear piercings for her taste, and also sported a silver ear cuff that she despised. My brothers, even with Mike’s behavior problems and Chris’s occasional surliness, were simple southern boys she could handle. They were buttoned up and she was buttoned up and I wanted to express myself. Plus, I was holding her secretly responsible for everything in my life that was going wrong.
Still, when everything felt the most bleak I wanted my mom. I knew they would be home in a few hours, but I was bursting. This could not wait another minute. Without giving it a thought I picked up the phone and called her.
“I need to talk to you right now!” I said. Hearing the urgency in my own voice caused me to start crying.
“Right now?” she said. “It can’t wait?”
“No!” I said.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m not hurt. I’m okay. But no, I’m not okay.” As the words left my mouth I knew they made no sense.
I went into my bedroom and threw myself facedown on my bed, waiting to hear the sound of the front door. I didn’t have to wait long.
“What’s going on?” my mom said. She sat down on the edge of my bed.
“I think I’m gay!” I cried. I had no doubt that I was gay, but I impulsively added I think to soften the blow, both for my mom and for me. I’d never said anything remotely like this aloud, not even to Jordan.
“Well . . .” she said, buying herself a little time, putting on her psychiatric nurse bedside manner. “How do you know?”
“I went on a date with a girl tonight. And I wanted it to be so good and it was so bad! What am I going to do?”
“You’re not going to worry about it at all,” said my mom.
I cried until my eyes were swollen shut, so relieved to be no longer alone in my secret. I didn’t have to hide whom I was attracted to; whom I liked a little; whom I loved; who, one day, would be my soul mate. After years of hiding I was out, but also worried what Dad and Grandmom would say. Both of them were more traditional than my mom, and this was the Deep South. Mississippi is one of the least progressive states when it comes to gay people. The state doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages, same-sex couples are not allowed to adopt, there are no laws against discrimination against gay people, and there is no hate-crime legislation. On the night I came out to my mom, same-sex sexual activity was illegal, and would remain so until 2003. I could have been arrested and tossed in jail for having dated Jordan.
My mom rubbed my back until I stopped hiccupping, then called my dad to say she would see them at home. She sat on the edge of my bed and we talked until I fell asleep, relieved that after holding in my secret, the truth was out. Somewhere between then and the next day she broke the news to each of them, separately, and the response was weirdly identical: “It doesn’t matter. She’s still our girl.”
Confessing to my mom had brought me some relief, but I remained depressed by my options. Most of the women I came across in Jackson who were fully out were pretty butch and not what I was attra
cted to at all. I started dating Deborah, who lived in Biloxi. She was a good twenty years older than me, and still closeted. She had long blond hair and a strong bone structure, handsome without being masculine, the way some women are. Her sister was the only person who knew she was gay, and once Deborah had come out to her the subject was never mentioned again, to the point where it was as if she’d never come out at all.
I’d drive down on the weekends to see her. The highway south was as dark as any wilderness at night. I felt lonely and crazy, tooling south in my little red Fiat. I’d arrive and we’d go to a bar with her straight friends, play footsie under the table, then sneak off to some crazy-ass apartment—I never knew whom it belonged to—so we could fumble around. It was all so tawdry and sad. I yearned to fall in love, to find my soul mate.
My mom became increasingly concerned about AIDS. Since she worked in the health field, she was more aware than most people I knew, but still, in 1986, little was known about the disease, especially in Mississippi. It was thought only gay men and intravenous drug users contracted it, but my mom worried. If gay men got it, couldn’t gay women get it, too? We started having arguments every time I got dressed up to go out. She feared that I was sleeping with every lesbian who would have me. This was so far from the truth it drove me crazy, and I would lose my temper. I was as picky as a fairy-tale princess, and despite all the making out and groping, practically still a virgin.
She’d also read somewhere that lesbians often resorted to wearing lavender to signal they were free and wanting to hook up. The Gap and the Limited and all the stores I frequented were showing purple that year. I came home with a lavender pantsuit and my mom let out a shriek like she just heard someone had died. Her face turned the color people associate with heart attack or stroke. She was bouncing on her toes, practically levitating. “Oh my God, what on earth are you doing? When you go out in . . . in . . . that, every girl you come across is going to think what you’re saying is ‘I want sex! I want a lover!’ ” She babbled on about Lesbos and the Greek goddesses. I had no idea what this lady was talking about. The cool, liberal psychiatric nurse I knew as my mom had been replaced by a wild-eyed wacko.