by Julia Watts
Epilogue
Me and Bo made that trip to Florida 18 months ago, but I still remember coming home like it was last night. Memaw came running out on the porch in her housecoat and slippers, and let me tell you, for an old lady, she can flat run. I thought she was going to say, “Why did you lie to me?” or “I ought to tan your hide,” but instead she took both my hands in hers and said, “Did you see her?”
My eyes filled up. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Well,” she said, “I reckon you’re satisfied now.”
“Yes, ma’am.” As awful as meeting my mother had been, I was satisfied. My questions about her had been answered.
“All right, then. Let’s not say another word about her. I’ll send her a little money from time to time on accounta her bein’ my daughter, but I don’t want to know what kind of sin that girl’s livin’ in.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
I know Memaw and me have different ideas of sin. Memaw would think it’s a sin that my mother is shacked up with a man ten years younger than her and that they’ve got a refrigerator full of beer. I don’t care about either of them things, though.
The way I see it, my mother’s personal life is her business. The thing that bothers me about my mother is that she’s spent every day of her dadblamed life thinking about nobody but herself. To me, that’s a sin.
It’s hard to understand how a person like my mother could come from somebody like Memaw, who’s spent her whole life thinking about what she can do for other people. When her and me went in the house that night, she went right into the kitchen and started heating up the pan of macaroni and cheese she’d made for me as soon as she heard I was coming home.
The next Friday, I stayed all night with Wendy. We had the whole house to ourselves, and for the longest time, we just talked. Wendy said how sorry she was for pushing me away, but she was scared of her feelings, scared of what it might mean to be something other than a straight girl. “I mean,” she said, “it’s not like I’m not a big enough freak in this town already.”
I told her I had something to apologize for too. I had loved her so worshipfully that I had turned her into a perfect goddess instead of a regular person, with doubts and fears. I told her that I promised to love her as a person—a wonderful, beautiful person, but a person just the same.
We’re still together, Wendy and me, but we save all our touching and kissing for private. Memaw don’t suspect a thing, and right now I want to protect her from what she can’t understand—maybe because that’s the best way to protect Wendy and me too. I like to think that someday, when I’m grown and out of her house, I can make her understand about the way I am, but I don’t know if I can. The only person Memaw loves more than me is God, and since she don’t go to the Metropolitan Community Church, the God she worships says all gay people are going to hell.
Wendy’s parents have been around the block a few more times than Memaw, and I think that Wendy’s mom might have at least a clue. She left this book called Patience and Sarah out where Wendy could read it. She lent it to me, and I read it too. It was good—kind of like Little Dykes on the Prairie.
Wendy says her mom and dad keep mentioning friends of theirs from back in Pennsylvania who are gay. After school’s out, Wendy’s going to write a coming-out speech and practice it so she can say it to her parents. It’s funny she’s so nervous, since they’ve already showed her that things are going to be the same between them. Besides, she’s not gonna be telling them anything they don’t already know. I figure if it ain’t against your religion, it ain’t so bad to have a dyke for a daughter. At least you don’t have to worry about her turning up pregnant.
At school, it’s always Wendy and Bo and me, just like it used to be—eating lunch together, taking all the classes we can together, going to Deer Creek after school when it’s pretty. For a while me and Bo talked about going to the doctor and getting blood tests run to see if we’re brother and sister. But finally we decided it wouldn’t be worth the trouble—we’re brother and sister no matter what some test might say. There’s more to family than just blood.
Bo and Preacher Dave write each other every week. Dave told Bo that Dee and Chantal are doing real good. Dee’s working full-time at that restaurant now, making salads and desserts and pretty good money. Chantal just got her G.E.D. She’s got a job at a store that sells hip-hop clothes, and she’s applying for night classes at community college. The last time anybody saw Laney was four months ago. Wherever she is, I hope she’s OK. And if she’s not, it’s her parents’ fault as sure as if they’d picked up a gun and shot her.
I guess Preacher Dave decided to make Bo one of his little do-gooder projects, because two months ago Bo got a letter from Atlanta State University telling him he’d just won the Desmond Reed Memorial Scholarship, which is given every year to a student with exceptional abilities and who is also openly gay. All Preacher Dave would say about the scholarship was that Bo got a little help from a good fairy.
Bo has begged Wendy and me to come with him to Atlanta after we graduate. It’s tempting, but Memaw’s not getting any younger, and I don’t want to be too far away in case she needs me. She’s always done right by me, so I ought to do right by her.
Besides, Wendy got a full scholarship to the University of Kentucky and is gonna be in this honors program they’ve got for extra-smart people. She told me I ought to apply to UK too, so I filled out an application in study hall one day, halfway as a joke.
I thought I was going to die when I got the letter saying I got in, and Memaw broke down and cried because a member of the Simms family was going to college. Of course, I didn’t get put in with the real smarties like Wendy did, and I didn’t get a scholarship, but I did get enough financial aid that, with a little help from Uncle Bobby, I can afford to go.
Me and Wendy have asked to share a dorm room. Ain’t that a kick in the pants? Straight college boys and girls are always trying to sneak into each other’s dorms, but if you’re gay, you can live with your lover in your own private bedroom.
This year Bo and Wendy and me have learned the meaning of the word senioritis. We’ve always hated Morgan High anyhow, and now when we’re in school, we don’t hardly pay any attention to where we are because we’re too busy thinking about where we’re going.
We’ve just about got all our required classes out of the way, so we’re taking the easiest classes we can. I’m taking art, and we’re working on these projects that Wendy’s mom is going to put on display in the Randall College Art Gallery. The idea is that young people in the community collaborate with old people to make art, so one day a week a bunch of old people—some from town and some from the nursing home—come in and work with us.
I’m collaborating with Memaw. For my part, I’m making a big batik wall hanging with rainbow stripes on it just like the rainbow sign at Out Loud Bookshop in Atlanta. For Memaw’s part, she’s making a quilted Noah’s Ark and all these little quilted animals that are just perfect—you ought to see them. We’re going to stitch the ark and the animals onto the big batik rainbow.
I know Memaw takes the story of Noah’s Ark and the sign of the rainbow at face value—that it was God’s way of saying he wouldn’t flood the world again. But I think of it another way. It makes me think of the trip me and Bo made together.
See, the way I think of it, for me and Bo, the world was getting mean, just like it was for Noah, so we climbed into Bo’s Ford Escort just like Noah did in his ark, and we took a little trip. Of course, Noah packed his ark full of good people and animals so they’d stay safe from the flood and the mean people. Here’s where we’re different: me and Bo gathered up our good people along the way. Preacher Dave and Bill, Dee and Chantal, and Wendy, who helped us when we really needed it. We learned that the world isn’t just flooded with meanness—that there are people like us loving each other, living happy lives out in the open. Their lives together may be harder because there’s plenty of meanness in the world, no doubt about it, but their h
appiness is probably greater because they can never take their love for granted.
Memaw would say I was blaspheming if she knew I was comparing something in the Bible with my own experience of being queer. But I think the way I do because of who I am: a teenage dyke from small-town Kentucky, raised by my memaw on Bible stories and old-timey hymns. And to me, the rainbow sign God put up in the sky for Noah said pretty much the same thing as the sign I saw at the gay bookstore, at the church, and in the faces and hearts of the rainbow of people who are my gay family: “Here you were, thinking it was the end of the world, when it turns out it was only the beginning.”
Publications from
Bella Books, Inc.
Women. Books. Even Better Together.
P.O. Box 10543
Tallahassee, FL 32302
Phone: 800-729-4992
www.bellabooks.com
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