I’d decided that I’d give God another ten minutes, when I heard something.
“Cannie?”
Ugh. That most definitely was not the voice of the divine. I felt the table tilt as Tanya hoisted herself on top of it, but I kept my eyes closed, hoping that maybe, for once, if I ignored her she’d go away.
“Is something wrong?”
Silly me. I was forever forgetting that Tanya was a participant in a clutch of self-help groups: one for families of alcoholics, another for sexual-abuse survivors, a third called Codependent No More!, with an exclamation point as part of its name. Leaving well enough alone wasn’t even a possibility. Tanya was all about intervention.
“It might help if you talk about it,” she rumbled, lighting a cigarette.
“Mm,” I said. Even with my eyes shut I could feel her watching me.
“You got fired,” she suddenly announced.
My eyes flew open in spite of myself. “What?”
Tanya looked inordinately pleased with herself. “I figured it out, didn’t I? Hah! Your mother owes me ten bucks.”
I lay on my back, waving her smoke away from me, feeling a growing annoyance. “No, I did not get fired.”
“Was it Bruce? Did something else happen?”
“Tanya, I really don’t feel like discussing it right now.”
“Bruce, huh?” Tanya said mournfully. “Shit.”
I sat up again. “Why does that bother you?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, your mother figured it was something with Bruce, so if she’s right, I’ve got to pay her.”
Great, I thought. My poor life reduced to a series of ten-dollar bets. Easy tears sprang to my eyes. It seemed these days I was crying about everything, starting with my situation and continuing relentlessly to human-interest stories that ran in the Examiner’s Lifestyle section and Campbell ’s soup commercials.
“I guess you saw that last article he wrote, huh?” said Tanya.
I’d seen it. “Love, Again,” it was called, in the December issue, which had hit stands just in time to ruin my Thanksgiving. “I know I should be focusing on E. by herself,” he’d written.
I know that it’s wrong to compare. But there’s no way to avoid it. After The First, it seems that the next woman is, necessarily, The Second. At least in the beginning, at least for a little while. And E. is in every way different from my first love: short where she was tall, fine and delicate where she was broad and solid, sweet where she was bitterly, mordantly funny.
“Rebound,” my friends tell me, nodding their heads like ancient rabbis instead of twenty-nine-year-old full-time temps and graduate students. “She’s your rebound girl.” But what’s wrong with rebound, I wonder? If there was a first and it didn’t work out, then there has to be a second, a next. Eventually, you have to move on.
If first love was like exploring a new continent, I think that second love is like moving to a new neighborhood. You already know there will be streets and houses. Now you have the pleasure of learning what the houses look like inside, how the streets feel beneath your feet. You know the rules, the basic vocabulary: phone calls, Valentine’s Day chocolates, how to comfort a woman when she tells you what’s gone wrong in her day, in her life. Now you can fine-tune. You find her nickname, how she likes her hand held, the sweet spot just beneath the curve of her jaw…
And that was as far as I’d made it before running to the toilet for my second hurl of the day. Just the idea of Bruce kissing someone else on the sweet spot just beneath the curve of her jaw – even the thought of him noticing such a thing – was enough to send my already queasy stomach into revolt. He doesn’t love me anymore. I had to keep reminding myself of that, and every time I thought those words, it was like hearing them for the first time, in all-capital italic letters, being boomed out by the guy who did voice-overs for movie previews: HE DOESN’T LOVE ME ANYMORE.
“It must be tough,” mused Tanya.
“It’s ridiculous,” I snapped. And really, the whole situation was pretty ridiculous. After three years of resisting his pleas, his offers, his desperate importunings, and biweekly proclamations that I was the only woman he’d ever want, we were apart, I was pregnant, and he’d found somebody else, and I would, most likely, never see him again. (Never was another word I’d hear in my head a lot, as in: You’ll never wake up next to him again, or, You’ll never talk to him on the telephone.)
“So what are you going to do?” she asked.
“That’s the big question,” I said, and hopped off the table and onto my bike, heading back home. Except it didn’t feel like home any-more and, thanks to Tanya’s invasion, I wasn’t sure it ever would again.
The less you know about your parents’ sex lives, the better. Sure, you figure, they had to have done it at least once, to get you, and then maybe a few more times, if you had brothers and sisters, but that was procreation; that was duty, and the thought of them using their various openings and attachments for fun, for pleasure – in short, in the manner you, their child, would like to be using yours – was nothing short of sick-making. Particularly if they were having the kind of trendy, cutting-edge love life that was all the rage in the late 1990s. You don’t need to know about your parents having sex, and you especially don’t need to know about them having hipper sex than you are.
Unfortunately, thanks to Tanya’s self-help training, and my mother’s being rendered senseless by love, I got the whole story.
It started when my brother, Josh, came home from college and was rummaging in my mother’s bathroom for the toenail clippers, when he came across a small stack of Hallmark greeting cards – the kind with abstract watercolors of birds and trees on the front, and florid calligraphy’d sentiments inside. “Thinking of you,” read the front of one, and inside, beneath the rhymed Hallmark couplet, someone had written, “Annie, after three months, the fire still burns strong.” No signature.
“I think they’re from this woman,” said Josh.
“What woman?” I asked.
“The one who’s living here,” said Josh. “Mom says she’s her swim coach.”
A live-in swim coach? This was the first I’d heard of it.
“It’s probably nothing,” I told Josh.
“It’s probably nothing,” Bruce told me, when I’d talked to him that night.
And that was how I started my conversation with my mother when she called at work two days later: “This is probably nothing, but…”
“Yes?” asked my mother.
“Is there, um, someone else… living there?”
“My swim coach,” she said.
“You know, the Olympics were last year,” I said, playing along.
“Tanya’s a friend of mine from the Jewish Community Center. She’s between apartments, and she’s staying in Josh’s room for a few days.”
This sounded slightly suspect. My mother didn’t have friends who lived in apartments, let alone who slept over because they were between them. Her friends all lived in the houses their ex-husbands had left, just like she did. But I let it go until the next time I called home and an unfamiliar voice answered the telephone.
“H’lo?” the strange voice growled. It was, at first, impossible to tell whether I was talking to a woman or a man. But whoever it was sounded as if they’d just gotten out of bed, even though it was almost eight o’clock on a Friday night.
“I’m sorry,” I said politely, “I think I have the wrong number.” “Is this Cannie?” demanded the voice.
“Yes. Who’s this, please?”
“Tanya,” she said proudly. “I’m a friend of your mother’s.” “Oh,” I said. “Oh. Hi.” “Your mother’s told me a lot about you.” “Well, that’s… that’s good,” I said. My mind was churning. Who was this person, and what was she doing answering our telephone?
“But she’s not here right now,” Tanya continued. “She’s playing bridge. With her bridge group.” “Right.” “Do you want me to have her call you?” “No,” I said
, “no, that’s okay.” That was Friday. I didn’t speak to my mother again until she called on Monday afternoon at work.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” I asked her, expecting her to say some variation of “No.” Instead, she took a deep breath.
“Well, you know, Tanya… my friend? She’s… well. We’re in love and we’re living together.”
What can I say? Subtlety and discretion run in the family.
“I’ve got to go,” I said, and hung up the phone.
I spent the whole rest of the afternoon staring blankly into space, which, believe me, did nothing to add to the quality of my article about the MTV Video Music Awards. At home, there were three messages on my machine: one from my mother (“Cannie, call me, we need to discuss this”); one from Lucy (“Mom said I have to call you and she didn’t say why”); and one from Josh (“I TOLD you so!”).
I ignored all of them, instead rounding up Samantha for an emergency dessert and strategy session. We went to the bar around the corner, where I ordered a shot of tequila and a slab of chocolate cake with raspberry sauce. Thus fortified, I told her what my mother had told me.
“Wow,” murmured Samantha.
“Good God!” said Bruce, when I told him later that night. But it wasn’t long before his initial shock turned into… well, call it shocked amusement. With a heavy helping of condescension. By the time he arrived at my door he was in full-blown good liberal mode. “You should be glad she’s found someone to love,” he lectured.
“I am,” I said slowly. “I mean, I guess I am. It’s just that…”
“Glad,” Bruce repeated. He could get a little insufferable when it came to toeing the P.C. party line, and to mouthing the beliefs that were practically mandatory among graduate students in the northeast in the nineties. Most of the time I let him get away with it. But this time I wasn’t going to let him make me feel like a bigot, or like I was less open-minded and accepting than he was. This time it was personal.
“How many gay friends do you have?” I asked, knowing what the answer was.
“None, but…”
“None that you know of,” I said, and paused while he let that sink in.
“What does that mean?” he demanded.
“It means what I said. None that you know of.”
“You think one of my friends is gay?”
“Bruce, I didn’t even know my own mother was gay. How do you expect me to have any kind of insight about your friends’ sexuality?”
“Oh,” he said, mollified.
“But my point is that you don’t really know any gay people. So how can you assume it’s such a terrific thing for my mom? That I should be happy about it?”
“She’s in love. How can that be a bad thing?”
“What about this other person? What if she’s awful? What if…” I was starting to cry as the horrible images piled up in my head. “What if, I don’t know, they’re walking somewhere and someone sees them and, and, throws a beer bottle at their heads or something…”
“Oh, Cannie…”
“People are mean! That’s my point! It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, but people are mean… and judgmental… and rotten… and, and you know what my neighborhood’s like! People won’t let their kids trick or treat at our house” Of course, the truth was that nobody’d let their kids trick or treat at our house since 1985 when my father began his downhill slide by neglecting the yardwork and getting in touch with his inner artiste. He’d brought a scalpel home from the hospital and turned half a dozen pumpkins into unflatteringly accurate renditions of members of my mother’s immediate family, including a truly hideous pumpkin Aunt Linda that he’d perched on our porch, topped with a platinum blond wig that he’d swiped from the hospital’s lost and found. But the truth was also that Avondale wasn’t an especially integrated community. No blacks, few Jews, and no openly gay people that I could recall.
“So who cares what people think?”
“I do,” I sobbed. “I mean, it’s nice to have ideals and hope that things will change, but we have to live in the world the way it is, and the world is… is…”
“Why are you crying?” Bruce asked. “Are you worried about your mother, or yourself?” Of course, by that time, I was crying too hard to answer, and there was also a mucus situation that needed immediate attention. I swiped my sleeve across my face and blew my nose noisily. When I looked up, Bruce was still talking. “Your mother’s made her choice, Cannie, and if you’re a good daughter, what you’ll do is support it.”
Well. Easy for him to say. It wasn’t as if the Ever Tasteful Audrey had announced over one of her four-course kosher dinners that she’d decided to park on the other side of the street, as it were. I would bet a week’s pay that the Ever Tasteful Audrey had never even seen another woman’s vagina. She’d probably never even seen her own.
The thought of Bruce’s mother in her whirlpool bathtub for two, discreetly dabbing at her own privates from beneath an Egyptian cotton washcloth with a high thread count, made me laugh a little.
“See?” said Bruce. “You just have to roll with it, Cannie.”
I laughed even harder. Having discharged his boyfriendly duty, Bruce switched gears. His voice dropped from his concerned-guidance-counselor tenor to a more intimate tone. “Come here, girl,” he murmured, sounding for all the world like Lionel Richie as he beckoned me beside him, tenderly kissing my forehead and not so tenderly tossing Nifkin off the bed. “I want you,” he said, and placed my hand on his crotch to remove any doubt.
And so it went.
Bruce left at midnight. I fell into an uneasy sleep and woke up the morning after with the telephone shrilling on my pillow. I unglued one eyelid. 5:15. I picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Cannie? It’s Tanya.”
Tanya?
“Your mother’s friend.”
Oh, God. Tanya.
“Hi,” I said weakly. Nifkin stared at me as if to say, what is this about? Then he gave a dismissive sniff and resettled himself on the pillow. Meanwhile, Tanya was talking a blue streak.
“… knew the first time I saw her that she could have feelings for me…”
I struggled to sit up, and groped for a reporter’s notebook. This was too bizarre not to be recording for posterity. By the time our conversation ended, I’d filled nine pages, made myself late for work, and learned every detail about Tanya’s life. I heard how she was molested by her piano teacher, how her mother died of breast cancer when she was young (“I coped with my pain with alcohol”), and how her father had remarried a not-nice book editor who refused to pay Tanya’s tuition to Green Mountain Valley Community College (“they’ve got the third-best program in New England for art therapy”). I learned the name of Tanya’s first love (Marjorie), how she wound up in Pennsylvania (job), and how she’d been in the process of ending a seven-year relationship with a woman named Janet. “She’s very co-dependent,” Tanya confided. “Maybe obsessive-compulsive, too.” At this point I had retreated into full reporter mode and wasn’t saying anything but “Uh-huh,” or, “I see.”
“So I moved out,” she told me.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“And I devoted myself to weaving.”
“I see.”
Then it was on to how she’d met my mother (passionate glances in the ladies’ locker room sauna – I’d almost been forced to put the phone down), where they’d gone on their first date (Thai food), and how Tanya had convinced my mother that her lesbian tendencies were more than a passing fancy.
“I kissed her,” Tanya announced proudly. “And she tried to walk away, and I held her by the shoulders and I looked her in the eyes and I said, ‘Ann, this is not going away.’ ”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “I see.”
Tanya then proceeded to the analysis and reflection portion of the speech.
“The way I see it,” she began, “your mother’s devoted her whole life to you kids.” She said “you kids” in precisely t
he same tone I would have used for “you infestation of cockroaches.”
“And she put up with that bastard…”
“Which bastard are we talking about here?” I inquired mildly.
“Your father,” said Tanya, who was obviously not going to tone things down for the benefit of the bastard’s offspring. “Like I was saying, she’s devoted her life to you guys… and not that it’s a bad thing. I know how much she wanted to be a mother, and have a family, and, of course, there weren’t other options for dykes back then…”
Dykes? I could barely handle “lesbian.” At what point did my mother get promoted to “dyke”?
“… but what I think,” Tanya continued, “is that now it’s time for your mother to do more of what she wants. To have a life of her own.”
“I see,” I said. “Uh-huh.”
“I’m really looking forward to meeting you,” she said.
“I have to go now,” I said, and hung up the phone. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I wound up doing both at the same time.
“Beyond awful,” I said to Samantha on the car phone.
“A freak like you wouldn’t believe,” I told Andy over lunch.
“Don’t judge,” Bruce warned me, before I’d even said a word.
“She’s… um. She’s into sharing. Lots of sharing.”
“That’s good,” he said, doing his squinchy-blinky thing. “You should do more sharing, Cannie.”
“Huh? Me?”
“You’re very closed with your emotions. You keep everything so tight inside you.”
“You know, you’re right,” I said. “Let’s find a total stranger so I can tell how my piano teacher groped me.”
“Huh?”
“She was molested,” I said. “And she told me all the gory details.”
Even Mr. Love Everyone seemed taken aback by this information. “Oh my.”
“Yeah. And her mother had breast cancer, and her stepmother convinced her father not to pay her community college loans.”
Bruce looked at me skeptically. “She told you all this?”
“What do you think, I drove home and read her diary? Of course she told me!” I paused to poach a few french fries off his plate. We were at the Tick Tock Diner, home of the enormous portion and the surliest waitresses south of New York. I never ordered fries there, but I used all my powers of persuasion to get Bruce to order them, so I could share. “She sounds seriously cracked.”
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