by Ginny Gilder
We talked about each other incessantly when we weren’t together, which raised some eyebrows. Our parents heard about our friendship and thought nothing of it: both our families had met their share of female rowers over the years and understood the close bonds that formed in training and racing. Strayer’s best friend, Barb, however, wasn’t so easily conned.
Their friendship went all the way back to their high school years at Exeter. They attended Princeton together, too, and Barb stroked their varsity eight with Strayer right behind her. Barb noticed her friend’s near-total preoccupation with our friendship at the start of their senior year. Strayer attempted to describe our closeness as a “special” friendship, but her explanations left Barb suspicious and unsatisfied.
Barb also moved to Boston in pursuit of her lightweight National Team aspirations and continued to push Strayer to define our relationship. Strayer described countless conversations peppered with Barb’s oblique but probing questions. But Barb never asked the one question that would force her best friend to lie outright.
Strayer had Barb to manage, and I had my friend, boss, and mentor, Paul. I first started working at my company in customer support, identifying problems with our mainframe software product and reporting the bugs to the programmers. Paul worked in the programming group, where I transferred after a couple of years. By then, we were friends outside of work.
“Ginny, how far does your friendship with Strayer go?” he asked me one day at lunch. We were eating pizza, one of his favorite foods. Strands of mozzarella cheese dangled from his mouth for a few seconds as he chomped them free from his pizza slice.
A hand reached into my gut and started squeezing. Suddenly, I wasn’t hungry anymore. I kept my eyes on his slice of pizza. “What do you mean?” I said.
“You’ve been talking about her for eons. You broke up with your boyfriend and moved in with her …”
I took the last bite of my slice, chewed precisely and swallowed. “I needed to live with someone. Besides, I like her. We’re good friends. We have a lot in common.”
“Well, is there more to it?”
I reached into the box for another slice. “Like what?”
“It just sounds like you’re really close.”
I dropped the slice back in the box and got up. “Yeah, I guess. I gotta get back to work. I’m leaving early for practice this afternoon.”
We kept our hands off each other in public, but we couldn’t hide our closeness from our friends in the rowing community. Everyone knew we adored each other, but no one pushed for details. Certainly we weren’t the only gays training for the US rowing team, but sexuality was not exactly an open topic of conversation, even among friends. Besides, many of the men training for the US team blithely assumed that most, if not all, their female counterparts were dykes. It was hard enough fighting the assumption that “athlete” and “femininity” were oxymora without providing any evidence that could be construed as proof of that. If lesbians populated the top echelons of women’s sports, that state of affairs would pretty much kill any mainstream embrace of female athletes as healthy and normal. Thus, even in our own small, aquatic world, we lived our own agonized version of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Of course, our epic arguments about rowing may have diffused questions. Demanding and picky, I was often dissatisfied with our rows in the double. We developed a reputation for our on-water yelling bouts and earned a platonic nickname, the Heater Sisters, which, in its own way, helped us hide in full view.
Living in secret proved tough: showcasing the acceptable me and shoving away the part that charcoaled my insides with the burn of shame. Held hands in private; scoffed at the idea of our relationship being more than “just friends” in public. Smooched in the dark; wrestled playfully in broad daylight. Melted by the secret caress of her hand between pieces during our workouts in the double; frozen on the steps of Harvard’s football stadium in icy weather, trying to kick her ass like she was just another training partner. Crept into her bedroom at night to fight off the loneliness of despising myself; yelled the girl in the mirror into silence during the day to distance the swell of self-hatred choking up my throat.
In rowing, we say fly and die. Start the race at an impossibly high cadence and don’t settle. Hang on for dear life, fight the oxygen debt, and row as if you can maintain that anaerobic intensity beyond the human body’s limit, even though it’s not possible.
Starting high and not settling is a recipe for disaster. You can’t fight your body’s limits. You will cave, against your will, perhaps, but your technique and your power will fail if you attempt to race above your capacities. And it will hurt. Ignore your limits and you will pay.
And I paid. The ecstasy of loving Strayer blurred with the agony of my shame. I had swallowed the world’s party line: being gay was sinful, criminal, and in my father’s eyes, unthinkable. My identity should have been mine to define and declare, but I didn’t dare. I traded my independence for social safety and my father’s love, a transaction that positioned me to live at odds with myself. A master of deception in training, I followed in my parents’ footsteps, living one way in private and acting another in public.
I couldn’t stay my own course. Try as I might, I could not step away from the familiar and the sure. Eighteen months of wildness was all I could take. The ups of being with Strayer in private couldn’t balance the downs of facing myself everywhere else. To make matters worse, we progressed in our on-water training into a competitive double. Our goals ran in parallel: National Teams, the Olympics, medals.
I fed myself many lines, many lies, to create some separation, mis-applying logic in my clumsy attempts to regain the control I had lost. I don’t want to be the only egg in her basket. I don’t want to be responsible for her. I want to race the single and she wants me to race the double. I want to have kids. I want a normal life.
I was starting to hate myself. When I looked in the mirror, even my bulging biceps couldn’t distract me from the lies I saw staring back at me.
I had buried myself before. Swallow hard and it will all disappear. Ignore the suffocating effects of the world’s judgment; no one cares. I’m comfortable with struggling to breathe.
The conversations took place over a series of weeks in April, always under cover of darkness, as we lay next to each other, entwined. They proceeded along the same course, as if we were practicing for the real thing, always starting with me.
“I can’t keep doing this.”
“Don’t you love me?”
“Yes, but this is too hard.”
No words in response, just passion. Whether to grab every last chance or to remind me of what I would lose, Strayer kept us going as long as she could.
If only I could have shaken out the desperation that bounced in my brain, like needless salt rubbing into my private wound. My shrill fear, mouthing the value of integrity, demanded I return to a life where I could walk with my head held high. My desperate heart begged just for once to be heard and considered, not stuffed down and forgotten. Just like old times, getting pulled between my parents, trying to determine right from wrong with limited information and my judgment skewed by fear.
Love does not thrive in hiding, or in bed with lying. It will turn on itself, devour its best facets, and leave a gaping hole to mark its absence.
We were in Strayer’s bed, in her room. The lights were off. I lay stiffly beside her, self-hatred poisoning me, spilling over into disgust with her. I sat up and hugged my knees, too itchy to remain lying down. Sleep was far away.
“I’m not doing this anymore.”
The moment had been approaching for a while, but Strayer said nothing. I heard her sniffling and steeled myself. There was no going back. This was tough enough as it was.
I got up, walked across the hall to my room, closed the door, and crept under the cold sheets.
I dumped my true love like she was a sack of nothing. Kicked her to the curb like she was an empty can. Walked away without looki
ng back. Ignored her tears, her begging, her protracted attempts to understand why I didn’t love her anymore, her long letters pleading for reconsideration that over many months petered out to a stream of Hallmark cards scrawled with a couple of lines wistfully hoping to remain friends, and ended with her bitter glances when we found ourselves together over the course of the next year as we both continued to pursue our Olympic dreams.
I stole back all the letters I’d written her over nearly two years, from the innocuous notes to the embarrassingly detailed declarations of love and lust, to the curt, clipped explanations of why we couldn’t continue as a secret couple. I lifted them out of the trunk of her car one afternoon, tucked them under my arm, and walked away. I found a covered garbage can on a faraway street corner in the middle of downtown Boston, tossed them in, and left them behind.
No more rocking the boat.
Through the emotional upheaval, I kept moving down my competitive life’s stream. Thank god for rowing. I needed something solid to rely on, something I knew how to do. Just because everything was going to hell inside didn’t mean I had to crumble. At least I didn’t feel shame when I stepped in my single.
No wonder I was so smitten by my sport. The surface calm distracts from the chaos of the deep. The beauty of what you see belies the pain quivering underneath. Repetition and the pursuit of consistency lie at its heart. Whatever happens, don’t stop. Keep on going. You can control the chaos within, if you train hard enough.
In rowing, dealing with the inevitable pain is a means to an end. Glory comes to those who not only deny it, but crush it. Focusing on it is deadly; the trick is not to acknowledge it or think about it. Learn to keep going no matter what.
Focus elsewhere. Ignore the signals. Keep your eyes on the prize. No matter if the ache was in my heart instead of my quads. Muscles are muscles. Pain is a matter of interpretation. It hurts if you say so. It’s a challenge if you think so. It’s a lesson if you see it that way.
13
Within weeks of spitting Strayer out of my bed, I rebounded into the arms of my future husband, the brother of my best friend Kathy Keeler. He was an out-of-towner, from Seattle, yet connected to my world; a warm body to help keep me from being alone with my truths and to show off to the world that I was fine.
I met him at Harry’s one afternoon when I came over to do my laundry. A red-flecked, bearded, brown-haired guy with broad shoulders, Kathy’s blue eyes, and a light sprinkling of freckles dancing from his wrists to his upper arms, he was sitting on the couch. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Josh.”
We got to know each other quickly because I spent a lot of time avoiding my own home base where Strayer moped and wept. He was gentle and unassuming, listened when I wanted to talk, and seemed content not to pry or prod. Maybe impressed by my accomplishments and aspirations, but not cowed. As we spent time together, I saw he was comfortable to stand in the background, not force himself to the front, and ready to be proud of me, not disappointed. A male who did not believe his opinion was the most important. That was novel, and welcome.
Josh offered me a return to normalcy, a path to secret redemption. He was just what I needed: a guy. A big, strapping, silent one, with long, sinewy muscles, a wing span that spread wider than his 6´4″ height, a rower’s build minus the heavyweight’s superiority complex. He was strong and physical, the perfect choice when it came to hoisting a couch and wedging it through a narrow doorway, digging a new garden from rock-hard, weed-infested soil, or tackling a construction project that involved both ungainly building materials and heavy equipment, even though he couldn’t stop his pale English skin from burning poison ivy red in the sun.
In those first few weeks with Josh, I mistook his devil-may-care approach for self-confidence: I only saw a man who didn’t care what the world thought of him. The hippie Birkenstocks, shaggy brown hair, full backwoods beard, torn jeans, and wrinkled polyester button-down shirt convinced me. I missed his lack of confidence because I was looking for something else. I looked into his blue eyes and thought I saw dreamy; only later did I discover I’d been staring into distance.
The first time Josh called to ask me on a date, less than a month after I had stopped sleeping with Strayer, he paused so long after “Hi, this is Josh,” that I thought the phone had gone dead. His breathing echoed across the line and stopped me from hanging up. I had to take over and ask him out, set up the logistics of our meeting, and direct him where to meet me. I had a zillion things to do; I had neither time for him to sort out what he wanted to say nor patience for him to muster his courage and get the hell going.
Our first date was fine, a meal at a nameless Mexican dive in Cambridge followed by a lovely walk around the Charles River between the Anderson and Eliot bridges. I could smell his strong animal scent as he nestled me under his arm. Tucked away for safekeeping, I walked with him along the dirt path that followed the river.
That evening I started convincing myself that this could be the man for me. Of course, I stepped over the divide from gay to straight without a thought or a word, just as I had slammed the door on the issue of my sexuality when I shoved Strayer away. Fear had forced out sound judgment weeks earlier, playing for survival, not success. Poor Josh was clueless as I rewrote my identity with stoic determination and forced my heart into compliance with the new status quo.
I deluded Josh about me, and I deluded myself about him. I mistook his physical size for the capacity to protect me, his silence for attentiveness and proof of good listening skills, his lack of traditional education as evidence of entrepreneurship. Okay, he was not a college graduate … yet. Okay, his prospects for high-level employment seemed shaky … remediable. He was a guy who would accept me fully without judging me or badgering me to be someone different than I was. He was kind, not full of himself, neither aggressive nor pushy, but patient and accepting.
And he wanted children; family was important to him. Me too! That one commonly held desire supplied me with enough substance on which to base an entire future. I had always dreamed of having a family. I was determined to prove that raising children didn’t have to end in a burned-out marriage and an abandoned family. I had left my girlfriend to search for happily-ever-after normal, and marriage and kids defined normal.
I wouldn’t let myself think about Strayer anymore. I wouldn’t think about how good she smelled even when she was sweaty, the fresh scent of hard work commingled with the salty taste of her skin. But the first time I drove in a car with Josh, when I breathed in the stink of his bare feet, a pungent mix of unwashed, musty sweat and the sweet acrid scent of onions, I should have noticed the difference. Instead, I pretended I was hot and rolled down the window.
I wouldn’t think about how in sync Strayer and I were, on the water or ashore. We could finish each other’s sentences, read each other’s moods. We spent so much time trading secrets that we knew each other’s fears, insecurities, and weaknesses. We knew when to pipe up with advice, when to offer comfort, and when to shut the fuck up. We knew how to help each other be strong when the going got tough. And when one of us caved into our respective sorrows about family matters that we could do nothing about, we knew how to stand by and respect the confused commingling of grief and fury without judging.
I didn’t think about the price tag on a relationship with Josh. I had already prepaid the biggest chunk when I left Strayer. I didn’t pause to consider whether I had enough emotional savings to see me through a lifelong dry spell of love. I sure as hell wasn’t going to admit I was in breakup mode, much less allow myself to ponder whether it was possible to fall for a guy when I’d just been head over heels for a woman. I knew something about love, but too little about life. I was barely twenty-five. I didn’t know how lucky I’d been to find Strayer. I didn’t know the havoc I could wreak on Josh, much less myself.
Meeting Josh was all just fine, an unexpected benefit, but no one and nothing would deter me from my goals: two months after I shredded my relationship with Strayer, and four weeks af
ter I met the guy I christened as the man of my dreams, I raced in the National Championships in Indianapolis. I won the women’s elite single. No one had trained harder, with more determination or spirit over the past year. No one could match my hunger for success, or my capacity to inflict and tolerate pain.
Then I teamed up with my ostensible best friend, my secretly shattered-hearted ex-girlfriend, to win the women’s elite double, in spite of the fact that we could barely talk to each other. I could not even look her in the eye. Strayer’s spunk had withered. Her sagging shoulders and downcast face made her look like a widow in active mourning. I didn’t recognize her murmured half-sentence replies to my determinedly lighthearted banter. But I felt her eyes on my back when I walked away, burning with longing for a return to our old times.
At least on the water, sitting behind her, I could freely give her what she wanted: a chance to click together and power into a gravity-defying dimension where mundane matters of identity and sexuality, or what our parents would think, or who we wanted to be were left behind. In the double, our still-mutual attraction worked its magic: a pair of well-synchronized butterflies winged down the course, skimming the water as we beat together in a perfect rhythm and crossed the finish line in first place.
The US Singles trials a month later to select the sculler for the World Championships were easier, at least with regard to Strayer. Racing solo, I could reconstitute her as an enemy, one of the many who positioned themselves on the starting line. I was justified to ignore her, to keep her at a distance as I girded myself to go it alone.
But driving down to the trials in Princeton, I knew I wasn’t really alone. As physically prepared as I was, as hungry and determined, fear still haunted me. It would not let me sleep in on race day. It would not let me eat: a few bites of rye bread, minus the caraway seeds, and a swipe at a banana had to suffice for breakfast. My fear would not shut up, could not leave me in peace, shoved confidence into the corner and took center stage in my head, turned my legs into jelly and my belly into butterflies. I’m so tired; I won’t be able to pull. What if I stop rowing a hundred meters into the race?