A Cup of Comfort for Couples

by Colleen Sell

  The person leading the ceremony quickly moved on to the next couple, not wanting the event to become memorable for the wrong reasons. Barbara, who insisted on attending the event over my weak objections, shook her head, none too pleased with my comments but not surprised.

  A few years before the cruise, we registered in New York City as domestic partners, with no hoopla. No announcements went out to friends and family, and needless to say, we didn’t register at Pottery Barn, Saks Fifth Avenue, or L.L.Bean. We certainly had cause to celebrate, having survived some very rough patches, the worst being when Barbara wanted a child and I didn’t.

  Why didn’t we celebrate our domestic partnership? Speaking for myself, I know that the constant battle to educate heterosexual people who trivialize our relationship takes its toll. How many times have I heard myself referred to as Barbara’s “friend” by individuals who knew we were a couple? Or had to respond to strangers asking if we are “sisters”?

  Internalized homophobia plays a part, too. Never mind that Barbara and I had worn matching silver rings and attended gay rights marches for many years. Never mind that it had been many years since we “came out” to straight friends, relatives, and colleagues. In the middle of the night, thoughts still popped into my mind that because we didn’t have the rights of a married couple, our relationship was inferior. If I died before Barbara, for instance, she wouldn’t get survivor Social Security benefits, and vice versa. So what was there to celebrate?

  These feelings surfaced when Barbara said to me one day, a couple of years after the cruise, “I’d like to have a party to celebrate our twenty years together. How about having it at the Cornelia Street Café?” We both enjoyed having dinner there, and the downstairs room could be rented.

  Not wanting to nix the idea outright, I countered with, “What if we took my cousin up on his offer to have a party at his house in Maine?”

  When we visited the previous summer, we mentioned our upcoming two-decade anniversary, and he and his wife enthusiastically invited us to celebrate with them. This option appealed to me because I figured only a few adventurous souls, if any, would schlep 400 miles north of New York to party in the middle of nowhere.

  “Do you want to have the woman who married us to officiate at your ceremony?” my cousin asked, when we called to discuss details.

  “No!” we both immediately answered.

  Since we couldn’t legally marry in Maine, what was the point? We decided there would be very little conventional about our celebration. No vows, no bridal bouquet toss, no exchange of rings. While the idea of publicly marking our partnership made me nervous, I desperately wanted the invitees’ support and good wishes — so much so that I challenged myself to convince as many as possible to spend their July 4 weekend with us up north. I worked the phones and e-mail, coaxing even the most diehard New Yorkers.

  Thirty-two friends, some from as far away as Utah, New Mexico, and Hawaii, joined us for what turned into a four-day event. The first night we dined with the early arrivals at a nearby restaurant. The second night we barbecued and karaoked. On the third night, we decided to have some sort of ritual involving, of all things, wedding dresses.

  Jeanie, my cousin’s wife, had four bridal gowns hanging in a closet that she’d bought for $10 a piece at a consignment shop. She intended to sell them on eBay but hadn’t gotten around to it. A formal pink taffeta gown and some Halloween costumes — including a man-size replica of the blue-and-white checkered jumper and puffy white blouse Dorothy wore in The Wizard of Oz — also took up space in that closet. I knew I would be wearing one of the wedding gowns because Jeanie said so. If you bring thirty-two friends to someone’s house for four days, you’d better agree to almost anything. Barbara, however, adamantly refused to don a gown and dressed up in white pants, a gold cummerbund she had had made for the occasion, and a ruffled white shirt and cufflinks.

  Thinking it would be a shame to leave the other gowns in the closet, I asked three female friends — including seventy-five-year-old Jackie, a manly looking woman who hadn’t worn a skirt in decades — to play dress up with me. They were more than happy to oblige, quickly getting into costume. Jackie looked positively regal in bridal attire, as it brought out her feminine side, which she literally had kept under wraps since the sixties.

  “Next,” cousin Jeanie said, as she directed the members of the procession down the stairs and into the sunroom, where whatever was going to happen would take place. Waiting below, the guests whistled and clapped as the three women in bridal gowns majestically descended, trailed by the “flower woman” in the pink gown. Next came me, with a veil doubling as a mosquito net, escorted by cousin Binky, a bald man in a peach-colored, floor-length cocktail dress, looking like Gandhi or maybe Ben Kingsley playing Gandhi. Unlike the great pacifist, though, Binky chose this moment to bicker with me about why I had set him up on a date fifteen years ago with a friend who was now a lesbian.

  “Because she was dating men back then,” I kept telling him, close to losing it as we entered the room.

  Barbara followed on the arm of her boss, a leaner, taller Sigmund Freud-type, wearing the replica of Dorothy’s Wizard of Oz costume. Bringing up the rear was cousin Jeanie in a sexy black cocktail dress.

  Completely inappropriately, yet oddly apropos, my sister played the syrupy theme from Love Story on her saxophone at full blast as we assembled in the sunroom. While poking fun at conventions, the ceremony had touching moments that moved more than one guest to tears amidst all the laughter.

  Barbara sang Violeta Parras “Gracias a la Vida,” a hymn in praise of life and love that expressed her gratitude for having me in her life. I recited “Love’s Passage,” by poet Robert Spector, which is full of sea imagery, perfect for a summer evening in Maine, even though we were inland. “Nothing compares with the joy / Of making a landing / In that special harbor / The heart has been heading for” — evoked for me the sense of security I feel with Barbara. I also shared the text of the recent birthday card from Barbara: “The two of us have been through it all — passion and heartbreak, laughter and tears, fighting and making up, ups and downs.” The punch line was on the inside: “And that was all since yesterday.”

  The guests urged us to kiss, which we did, several times. Photos were taken, food from the local Thai restaurant appeared, a friend gave an impromptu mini guitar concert, and the two of us emceed a roast of ourselves equal to a Friars Club affair. Part street theater, part schmaltz, the ceremony and post-ceremony were just the way Barbara and I liked it. Apparently others did, too.

  “Central Maine has never seen anything like this before or since,” quipped one of my cousin’s friends, a local.

  Would my partner and I have had such a wacky fun-filled celebration if we had been a straight couple? Most likely not, which is one of the things I like about being a lesbian. Yes, we would like the same legal rights that heterosexual married couples have. But rather than sitting around waiting for that day to come and feeling inferior for what we don’t have, we’ve decided to celebrate milestones as they occur, sprinkling our relationship with affirming occasions like our twentieth anniversary. That’s quantity with quality, folks.

  — Michele Forsten

  The Romance of Ordinary Days

  I’m in the kitchen chopping celery, dicing onions, quick-frying chicken, and adding broth and finally noodles, for the quintessential cold remedy. When I look out my kitchen window on the thirteenth floor of our condominium building, the exhaust from the shorter building chimneys and houses hangs close to the rooftops. On this Tuesday in February it’s so cold that the pigeons are huddled over the hotel roof vents.

  Honey’s doubled over in his favorite chair. His face is red and perspiring. My heart goes out to him. It’s got to hurt to cough so hard.

  “Honey, can I get anything for you?”

  He’s gasping for air. He shakes his head. Waves his hand in the now familiar “I’ll be okay” gesture.

  I sit on the couch, “Come
and sit over here. I’ll rub your back.”

  His eyes are glassy. His brown dressing gown is open and his grey chest hair spirals over the edges.

  “The soup will be ready soon. Will you have a small bowl before you go to bed?”

  He shakes his head. “Maybe later.”

  “It’ll be ready when you need it. We’ll just pop it into the microwave.”

  When he sits beside me, I hear the rattle in his throat. My hand begins its familiar roam over the dips between his vertebrae and across the smooth muscles and around the moles.

  “That feels good. Thanks. I’d kiss you but I have this cold. I don’t want to give it to you,” he says.

  Honey sleeps beside me in our bed and the germs won’t recognize the difference between his side and mine, but he has my best interests at heart. I kiss his forehead.

  “I’m going to go to bed and read my History magazine for a bit,” he says.

  Going to bed and reading is Honey’s signal for a nap even when he’s well. I’m not saying that he doesn’t read, but it doesn’t take long for the magazine to fall to the comforter.

  When his mother passed on, we found a few items from Honey’s childhood in a trunk. On our entertainment center now are two green metal army tanks and one cannon with a trigger that can still shoot toothpicks at the soldiers standing with rifles raised or lying on bellies aiming at the distant enemy. Sometime during the 1950s, these Dinky Toys appeared in his Christmas stocking. When he and his childhood buddies get together, they always tell stories about the summer when they were nine and curious about the strength of the powder hidden in red paper with a fuse and matches that slid across a rough surface and flared. They blew up miniature Chevy Bel Air convertibles, Ford wood-paneled Country Squire station wagons, and Chrysler Windsor sedans with firecrackers. Honey’s few cars that remained char-free were passed on to our sons when they raced along imaginary roads carved into the sand while they visited their grandmother.

  This past summer, one son married on the beach against the blue ocean in Waikiki, where we were introduced to the lei tradition, the endless circle of love. The second son will marry next summer with the Canadian prairie sunset as the background.

  Today, there are brochures on the counter for a planned cruise to Alaska. Another item on life’s bucket list will be completed this September, even though I’m concerned about motion sickness.

  “They’ve got pills for that,” Honey says. “Think of the icebergs, the gold rush towns, the plants that survive in that climate, and the people we’ll meet. Perhaps we’ll see whales.”

  I’ll buy the pills, and we’ll share another adventure. During forty years with Honey, I’ve learned to hug a mountain cliff with my snowmobile, tilted my pelvis during an approach golf swing to the green, and basked in his support while I studied the craft of writing.

  Before I go to bed, I spoon four measures of coffee into the filter and fill the water cavity to the seven-cup mark. It’s ready for him when he gets up at 5:30 a.m. All he’ll have to do is press the “on” button. When I check in on him, his light is out and he’s breathing regularly because he’s wearing his mask for his CPAP machine. Many years ago, there were nights when I would lie awake counting until he resumed breathing. He didn’t realize that he stopped, but when he gulped for air, I relaxed. The snoring that rumbled the rafters was comforting, until once again he became silent. After his diagnosed sleep apnea, the first time Honey put on the gear that would keep his throat open at night, the boys and I laughed at the funny coiled hose and plastic nasal mask that looked like an apparatus out of Star Wars. With the laughter out of the way, he slept.

  When I snuggle into bed, I put a pillow between us to block the overflow of pressured air from the mask and sleep without counting between his gasps for breath.

  It’s a dark morning when I get out of bed after him. The welcoming coffee aroma lulls me for a moment, until I notice Honey on the balcony in his robe and slippers, smoking a cigarette. When he steps through the door and he is out of the minus twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit winter, I ask, “How did you sleep?”

  “I slept great,” he replies.

  He sits on the sofa and watches the business channel, switching to the weather channel and over to the local news. He coughs through another spasm, and the sound, I’m sure, breaks the safe decibels for both our ears.

  I take two deep breaths. “How’s your coffee? Do you need a refill?”

  “You have a cup, and if there’s some left, I’ll have a warm-up.”

  I’m cautious but I need to ask. “Are you well enough to go to the office today?”

  “Yes, I’ll go, and if I feel worse, I’ll come home early. Why don’t you phone a friend and use our tickets to the theater tonight?”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  He’s handsome in his charcoal suit, crisp white shirt, and blue diamond tie.

  “Have you got your Fisherman’s Friend lozenges?” I lift his overcoat from the hanger and find his gloves in the basket.

  He pats his coat pocket, “Right here.”

  I see him tap his other pocket, where he keeps his cigarettes and matches.

  I step into his arms, and he wraps me tight. His touch, his shape, the smell of his cologne are so much a part of me, of us.

  He kisses me quickly. “Sorry about the germs.”

  “I’d rather have a cold than not have a hug and a kiss.”

  “You know that I won’t always have a cold.” He kisses my forehead. “What are you working on today?”

  “I’m writing about love.”

  “Oh, chocolates, unexpected roses, and walks on the beach.”

  “Yes, but I want my story to be about the love that’s there every day, between the bouquets, evening strolls, and dinners for two.”

  “It sounds like us.”

  “Yes, it does.” I nudge against him.

  A small smile plays on his lips. “I’ll call you later.”

  I step away. He has his work to do and I have mine. “Later, honey.”

  — Annette M. Bower

  Love, Italian Style

  I fell in love when I was eighteen and visiting family in my mother’s hometown in Italy.

  “Do you remember this young man?” a relative asked me as a motorcycle roared to a stop behind us on the cobblestone road.

  I turned around shyly, self-consciously tugging at my miniskirt as the young man took off his helmet and beads of perspiration tickled my chest.

  “Yes,” my voice cracked as I forced a smile. How could I forget? “Ludovico, right?”

  “Sylvia,” he said, looking at me intently, his eyes filled with passion. “The last time I saw you, you were ten years old.”

  And I’d had the hugest crush on you, I wanted to scream, but instead licked my dry lips. “And you were thirteen.”

  He broke into a dazzling grin, and my heart melted.

  I felt his gaze rake over me with silent appreciation, and my body tingled.

  “You’ve changed,” he said.

  The last time I’d stood before him, I was a gawky child. My appearance had improved somewhat, my body having filled out in the right places, contact lenses replacing my thick glasses, and a bad haircut grown into long, flowing red tresses. I wasn’t a super-model, but I certainly had changed.

  “Yes. So have you,” I said.

  He was just as beautiful as the last time I had seen him, only now his dark features were more refined and mature, his boyish body now muscular and lean. He was gorgeous.

  “How long are you staying?” he asked.

  “Um, only a few more days.”

  “Do you want to go for a ride later?”

  “Sure.” I swallowed nervously. “I’m staying at my aunt’s place. Up on the hill?”

  “I know where it is.”

  “I’ll be there around five o’clock then?” Ludovico asked.

  I nodded.

  “Great!” He smiled and put on his helmet. “See you then!”
/>   Five o’clock couldn’t come soon enough!

  I was very nervous as I waited for Ludovico in the front hall of my aunt’s house. Right on time, a motorcycle revved its way up the drive.

  “Hello.” He smiled as I walked toward him.

  “Hi,” I breathed.

  “Have you ever been on a bike?”

  I shook my head no. “I’m a bit nervous.” At least that gave me an excuse for my chattering teeth.

  “Don’t be,” he reassured me. “I’ve been riding for years; you’re in good hands.”

  “Okay,” I gulped.

  “Let’s put this on you.”

  He gently placed a small helmet over my head, his fingers brushing against my chin as he fastened the clasp. I felt tingles down my spine as his skin touched mine.

  “Now, hop on.”

  I quickly realized that riding on the back of his motorcycle meant sitting quite close to his beautiful form. I tried not to think about how good it felt. It’s only a ride, I told myself. He’s just being nice.

  Then, before I could think about it any more, we took off like a bolt of lightning — or at least that’s how it felt to me — and were zipping along antique streets and weaving up the steepest road I had ever seen in my life. We stopped atop a mountain over-looking the town.

  “Wow!” I gasped. “This is so beautiful!”

  “Yes.” His voice was full of emotion. “Beautiful.”

  It took a moment for me to register that he wasn’t looking at the view; he was looking at me!

  The breath caught in my throat as Ludovico leaned toward me, his energy encompassing me like a cocoon. I felt frozen to the spot. I could barely pull air into my lungs. He leaned closer, then our lips touched. From then on, I was completely love struck.

  Ludovico spent every spare minute with me in the remaining days of my trip. He even accompanied me to the obligatory visits to my many older relatives, suffering through endless espressos at quaint kitchen tables while the summer sun continued to blaze outside.

  “Wouldn’t you rather be at the beach with your friends?” I asked him as we left yet another boring visit.