“Queer,” I said.
She rolled her eyes, and I had to prompt her a few times before she’d say anything more.
“I shouldn’t get annoyed when you say it. Men can’t understand feminist liberation.”
I didn’t like that she called me a man, but I didn’t have the language then and don’t quite still.
“So you’re a—” and I waved my hand in the air a few times, waiting for the reveal.
“You can’t even say it,” she said, her voice trembling with hurt. “I’m a lesbian. You can’t even say it.”
I slipped my arm over her shoulders and she surprised me by wrapping her arms around my waist. I kissed her lesbian head, and my friends excused themselves to the buffet, plentiful now with baked ziti and meatballs.
“Where’s Dale?”
“Couldn’t make it,” I said.
I offered my plate to her, but she shook her head. So I took a bite of cheese and then offered the cheese to her and she took it. I took a bite of artichoke and then offered the artichoke to her and she took it. Certain rules, long established, stay the same. One or two of Miriam’s family members came over to say hello, but they didn’t ask about Dale. While I made small talk with them, I continued to feed my daughter until all that was left was an olive, which I popped in my mouth because she doesn’t like them.
When my daughter stepped away to speak with Sal’s daughter—“Closeted,” she whispered to me, “I know it”—I was alone in the middle of the room, but I felt like I could pass through the people around me, that I didn’t look small and swimmy, as Sal had near the altar. Sal wasn’t there yet. I tossed my plate away and decided to make a fairly quiet exit through the back door. I hugged my friends goodbye, the oil from the salami and the olives fresh on all of our lips. I blew a kiss to my daughter.
In the parking lot I noticed the sun, and that my hand made contact with the stair railing but didn’t pass through it. Sal was leaning against the back of his SUV. He saw me, and I wasn’t certain whether I was supposed to see him, but I walked towards him anyway.
I’d had a fantasy on the drive to the funeral that a moment like this would happen. That we would be alone, and somehow we would end up in his car, which I had imagined was much like the car he leaned on now. Miriam and I had always been about the same size and I was curious to feel my body in that passenger seat, taking up her shape. And then something sexual would happen that neither Sal nor I would claim to understand but that both of us needed, as if we could swim through the fluids of our own bodies towards Miriam.
We shook hands, and I was surprised that my grip was much stronger than his. We each stated the other’s name. Murray often needed to be reminded of himself when I came home from work, and the shock of my hand on his ears or head always caused him to pee on the floor, as if through this explosion of fluid he could claim once again that he existed. Sal and I stood silently for a few moments, in our mutual existence.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said—a line from a script—uncertain what I meant by it, or what it meant, the words sounding like another language in my mouth.
“Thanks,” he said.
We stood there like people who have something in common that neither really wants to bring up, until he tried. “My ex-wife is gay, too.”
“Okay,” I said.
Sal put his hand out again, and I waited until it was fully extended before I reached for it. Just before the building door creaked, I imagined his body, slick like a seal, in a tiny bar’s bathroom late at night, and I saw my body, split open and opening more than I could ever imagine, on a ruined bed.
And just before Sal pulled his hand away and trotted over to whoever was coming outside, I heard Miriam inhale, the smoke filling my lungs, and his lungs, and lucky for me, Dale’s lungs. He would exhale into my mouth when I came home and offer me the appropriate weight when I collapsed into his arms.
ninety days
“Were you having trouble breathing last night or something?”
It was early. Denise and I were still in bed. I gave a little half shrug that I often thought was adorable, but there was no indication that it was received that way. I tried to stop looking cute and speak in an adult-sounding voice—not the childlike voice I habitually used with Denise.
“Not that I noticed. Why?”
Denise sat up and pulled on a T-shirt. I watched breasts disappear and was disappointed, even though those breasts had become like strangers to me. For the past year, in addition to avoiding pronouns, or using “they” instead of “he” or “she,” Denise had asked me to pretend they—the breasts in this case—didn’t exist, to not touch them anymore, to not sexualize them, because they were confusing. I obeyed because I loved and respected Denise, and also because it felt sexy to have something that I couldn’t do. But by putting that shirt on, Denise had shut the door to sex.
“You were doing that thing where you kind of chortle and breathe through your mouth again. It sounds like you’re choking.”
They slammed the covers to the side and roughly got out of bed, and in the process their fist sort of hit my hip bone. It hurt a little, but I decided not to feel it since Denise hadn’t noticed they’d done anything.
“Sorry about that,” I said. I put on a T-shirt and covered my own breasts, aware that no one was sad to see them go.
At the end of the bed, Denise stopped moving abruptly. “I can’t imagine living with that sound for the rest of my life.”
There was no sense of remorse in that face, probably because it was so full of truth. I do make a weird sound at night, and what I wasn’t brave enough to ask Denise was: Isn’t it worse during the day when my nose makes a fairly regular whistle on my exhale? When I came out at twenty-one, my mom—overcome by shock or rage or what she thought she was supposed to do—popped me quickly in the nose. A snap of the wrist. And I remember that as I covered my face, her hands went to her mouth. She let out one sob, then said, “I don’t know why I did that. I’m totally fine with this.”
“Do you want to help pay for a surgery to fix it?” I asked. “I got my own body to worry about,” Denise said sharply, and it was so early in the morning, it sounded like a shout.
I slipped out of bed and stood on my tiptoes. I was expecting a long fight, and I wanted us to be on equal footing. I wanted Denise to look into my eyes, which didn’t happen.
In an instant, Denise broke up with me.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a while,” they said.
“But I haven’t.”
We let that statement in its powerlessness hang in the air before it dissolved under the high-pitched hiss that escaped my nose, which I wished I could tear off and throw at Denise, who wouldn’t even talk to me. They said I was being petty—wanting closure, wanting an explanation. It was capitalist, they said, of me to want a reason. Denise had this ability to be so stoic no matter how upset I got.
I screamed, “What do I need to do to get you to respond to me? Do I need to, like, shit right here in front of you? Right on the rug? Like an animal?”
I moved like I was going to pull my pants down, and even though Denise was looking at me, it wasn’t like they were seeing me.
Obviously, I didn’t do it.
Denise’s best friend, Del, came by with a truck and by the evening had carted them and all their things away.
The last bit of communication I received was a postcard (a picture of our town’s waterfront) asking me not to reach out. Denise said we needed to take ninety days of no contact. The only soft thing written on this card was that they thought the ninety days would help me let go and heal.
The pronoun thing wasn’t that hard for me. But what’s hard about telling this story, with using “they” right now, is that it puts Denise even further away from me. That sense of plurality, that singular they, asserts that Denise doesn’t belong to me anymore and never did. This is capitalist. I know this.
—
I’m sensitive about being recognized as
queer or radical. As someone assigned female at birth who presents as femme I have to make a series of conscious decisions to be visible as queer, and I still have to come out, multiple times a day. So I don’t just wear the barrette, I attach the turquoise giraffe-shaped fascinator and smudge my mascara. Once, just to go to the coffee shop, I spent hours working my hair into a beehive. I wrap fur around my shoulders in the grocery store. I flirt with all the butches and the studs and the ones who prefer to be called masculine-of-centre, even when I don’t really want them, because there is little that is more satisfying than watching another queer’s shoulders soften as they smile at me excitedly in that open-mouthed way once they know.
I’ve always dressed this way, though, even before realizing I was queer. It wasn’t until I came out that I denied myself in any way. I tried to look moody, morose, and wore little-boy clothes to parties where I scowled and tried not to say much unless it was to concur with some judgment of a person under the guise of condemning a system. No to marriage, yes to labour rights, no to makeup, yes to thrift stores. Yes to smelling a little dusty. Yes to looking mostly male.
The party where I met Denise was where all my stoic butch stuff began to fall apart. I don’t even remember what Denise said—and it’s possible that I was so starved for my own personality and so desperate to express something that it was really only mildly funny—but I let out a squeal after the joke, and everyone looked at me.
“Oh Lord,” I said, folding over to prevent all of me from spilling out. My voice was loud; my nose whistled.
No one else was laughing—most were eyeing me suspiciously—but I remember Denise smiled. It was playful, exposing, and extended out into the room like an offering of friendship, which I snatched before they could decide otherwise.
Our relationship began subtly. We planned to ride bikes together to the next party and Denise showed up with two masquerade masks, both hot pink with a wild display of feathers. But one mask was also covered with sequins, and this was the one that Denise thought I should wear. I remembered a pair of hot-pink tights I’d abandoned that my mom bought me for a Halloween costume and pulled them on under a pair of torn-up jeans. At some point over the course of the night, I removed the jeans and wore the tights as pants, and though many of the faces at the party remained stoic, quite a few turned to grins.
Then, on a trip to the thrift bins, I found a leopard-print bustier, the wiring a bit warped but otherwise in good condition.
“Look at this,” I said to Denise. “It’s disgusting what women have trapped themselves with.”
I held it up with a finger and felt proud that I had come up with something to say that had a clear critique, and that I thought I kind of agreed with. Denise looked at the bustier, then at me, and just like that first revealing smile, their eyes now also showed what they imagined. And it was me. I knew it was me.
“Yeah, but I think it’s kind of sexy.”
I added it to my bag, and that night, I biked to Denise’s house. By the time the door opened, I’d pulled off my jeans and was standing there in the bustier, the pink tights, and the mask. My hair was teased like eighties metal. Denise didn’t smile, but those eyes were the same as they had been that afternoon. From that night on, I externalized desire for Denise. But if they didn’t want it anymore, what was I doing?
—
It’s hard enough to do ninety days of no contact in a big city—I’d read novels set in New York where lovelorn characters split up Manhattan—but how do you split up a small town? I didn’t understand what belonged to either of us here. There was a downtown strip with bars for hunters, and some gems in the strip malls—the Asian grocery, a pet shop window with puppies in it, an antique shop with quirky records—but not enough to divide and claim.
I’m either a little bit psychic or ruled by fear, and it was difficult to determine which was speaking the first morning I felt emotionally capable of getting out of bed and going to the grocery. But I couldn’t get the car to head in that direction. It was almost as if I could feel this presence that was Denise—the force halted my car, and even though I pressed my foot on the gas, I couldn’t really move. I performed actions I’d learned from other white queers who had appropriated them from cultures they knew no one in: burned herbs around myself and my car, made a little altar with bird bones and feathers on the dash. But maybe that’s when fear stepped in, because even as I was waving that bundle of sage in front of me, it didn’t clear a thing.
I wasn’t certain which friends were still mine during that time, but I tried calling different people to test it out, mostly out of desperation that I not starve to death. I’d try, “Hey, would you mind picking me up milk and a bag of rice?”
“No problem. Do you need anything else?”
“Well,” I’d say, glancing into my refrigerator, “since you asked.”
This was how I wanted the interaction to go, but typically no one answered, or if they did, I got off the phone angry, wondering why, for instance, Jasper answered just to say nothing, which drove me to ask in a kind of panicked way, “Could you pick something up from the grocery for me?”
“I can’t,” Jasper said, voice husky, pretending not to be awake yet. “I have band practice.”
“Maybe you could take me after band practice?”
“Meeting with that prison reform group.”
“What about after that?”
“I don’t know when after will be.”
What was the point of being in community if you could be so easily thrust from it?
I didn’t want to mention any of this to my mom, so for a month I ate what was left in the apartment—lentils, chickpeas, oats, and dry cereal—and in the garden, Denise’s garden. I’d watched from the kitchen as Denise lifted each plant out of the earth like nothing had kept them rooted there, as if they had just chosen to be there and now chose otherwise. All that was left were salad greens—probably because they were too difficult for Denise to take with them—and a few varieties of edible flower: borage, violets, and bitter calendula.
I ate these things and looked at myself in the mirror, in sweats, my hair loose. I didn’t feel like a femme, or a she, or a he, or a they—I was no gender. I put my hand on my jaw while I chewed and felt it rise and fall as I watched the reflection opposite.
“Can I exist if I’m only in relation to myself?” I asked out loud. My voice sounded hollow and I didn’t have an answer.
—
At around thirty-five days I felt something clear. It was like what I knew of Denise had disappeared—picture a body, like in a cartoon, giving a slight pop as it evaporates in a puff of smoke. I was so overwhelmed by grief that I went out to the garden and pushed my hands in the dirt, just to feel something give and yield. It wasn’t that the ache I felt for Denise was gone but as though my experience of them was totally gone from the world, or cut off from me.
I got in my car and there was no force or presence. Nothing kept me from anything and I walked right into the grocery store, a bit stunned, and purchased chocolate milk. I felt a kind of empty power course through me as I sipped it, staring at the slow-moving puppies in the pet store window. The Asian grocery had closed since Denise left and a hipster record shop had replaced it. I felt complicit in gentrification as I walked in, but that didn’t stop me from listening on headphones to Del’s new album and using the reflective back of the CD case to apply more eyeliner. I strolled into the coffee shop, a space I thought I wouldn’t walk into again, and familiar faces looked at me and sort of saluted. I felt a surge in my existence. In that moment, my hand shaking as I paid for my coffee, I couldn’t even remember the name of the person I mourned. I shook my head, and the barista, whom I knew peripherally, looked startled and maybe a little afraid, so I smiled and turned away. And I would have left if a group of folks I knew hadn’t waved me over.
“How are you?” one asked.
I bit the lip of the coffee cup, then looked at the imprint my lipstick left. I wasn’t sure if I could say
anything without sobbing. I felt so strange.
“How’s Denise?” another one asked, and I swear, for a very brief moment, I paused at the name. Someone elbowed that person, who kind of snickered.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re not talking.”
Someone snorted and they all returned to their original conversation, so I left without saying goodbye. This was how the town had been divided. There had been nothing keeping me from the grocery store—which I nearly developed scurvy from lack of visiting. I could move anywhere I wished, but the friends wouldn’t be mine for a while.
When the ninety days were over, I tried calling Denise once. The voice mail greeting had changed—there’d always been sort of a cute and fun recording: “Tell me what it means to be Denise.” I loved that recording and always took advantage of it to say it meant being sexy and strong and kind, it meant having great thighs and an incredible tongue. Now there was just an automated voice stating the phone number. I felt panic rise—I didn’t know if I should leave a message and thought maybe the sound of my voice would be too upsetting, so I spoke in what I considered to be a British accent.
“G’day! This is your old friend Ana. Been a bloody long time. Miss talking to you, chum.”
Then I paused because I wanted to say “I love you” in a normal voice and still didn’t know how to say goodbye without it. So I just hung up.
I didn’t hear back and I didn’t call again.
—
I think the ninety days thing is mostly so the community can reset itself and get used to having two once-partnered people re-enter the group with a somewhat clean slate. It’s kind of like using an outdated web browser on an old, slow computer that you don’t have the money to upgrade, but the page always refreshes, eventually, and maybe the relief in the end outweighs the frustration.
We Had No Rules Page 7