We Had No Rules

by Corinne Manning

  Tracy threw the painting with such force it probably would have hit us if it weren’t so light. We watched it sail through the air, looking harmless, looking not half-bad, as it landed, miraculously, face up.

  seeing

  in the dark

  When you’re a mother there’s no point keeping track of the hurtful things your kids say to you. After a while they start to blend together, like the time my daughter told me that the worst part of her day was when she came home from school and I was home too, or that she wasn’t gay because I was gay and I repulsed her, or recently, when she told me that she was in a relationship with a woman, but it wasn’t part of her identity.

  “I’m not like you,” she said. “I’m in love.”

  If she could see how I love her, even though she speaks to me like this.

  This child is in her mid-twenties. She’s not sixteen.

  My friend Barbara once told me that kids get nice again around twenty-four. My baby is twenty-six, and though I’m relieved that she’s kind of coming out, finally, I don’t see her getting nicer anytime soon. For example, she hadn’t been answering her phone, so we set a time for our most recent talk, the one where she said she was in love. When I called her it was loud and she sounded distracted and it turned out she was food shopping. I heard the murmur of her voice as she spoke to someone in the store.

  I said, “You want me to call you later?”

  And she said, “No, I don’t have time later. This is the time we scheduled.”

  And I wanted to be like, Yeah, but you aren’t listening. You are not in a position to listen, and I know you—if you aren’t in a position to listen, which means sitting up on the couch with the TV off and the computer away and looking at me, then you won’t take anything in.

  Meanwhile, I had made myself a cup of tea and was sitting at the kitchen table for this call.

  My biggest heartache is that this manner of coming out is too late, that she’s already done so much damage to herself, that she’ll be bitter and mean and closed off for the rest of her life.

  But I know this isn’t the first time she’s been in love with a woman. It’s just the first time she’s telling me about it.

  “Can I meet her?” I asked.

  “Where can I find fish sauce?”

  “Probably with international groceries,” I said.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” she said.

  I pressed my tea mug to my cheek, which was hotter than any tangible feeling between us.

  “Well, I’m talking to you,” I said. “Can I meet her?”

  “I don’t know, maybe eventually. There’s a picture on Facebook.”

  “You haven’t accepted my friend request.”

  “Well, I haven’t accepted Dad’s either. Oh, he’s beeping in. Can I call you back?”

  —

  I used to feel bad for my husband. Privately, in the dark, when I was alone. This experience of feeling bad for him corresponded with missing him. Because I did love him, and I liked sleeping next to his warm, soft body, liked the way we would look at each other when we were laughing, the way he let me cheat at games, the way he always kept my wineglass full during dinner, liked how he knew to get me whisky with Advil when I had cramps, and how he, too, felt joy when they didn’t return after Jenna was born.

  Yes, I know that all the things I love about him serve me in some way. Jenna has pointed this out time and time again. That’s fine if it makes me a bad person, but I think sometimes that’s the way love works: one person appreciates the way they are loved, while the other person appreciates the way they get to love. I’ve been on both sides, so I think I have a fuller understanding. I don’t know if Sal will ever experience the other side, which breaks my heart, mostly because it means that he’ll never understand me fully and that our reason for splitting is not as simple “we got divorced because she’s gay.”

  He got remarried two years after our split and I’m still single, yet everyone still feels bad for him.

  I shouldn’t say that. It isn’t healing to say that. Anger should be dealt with clearly and directly. This is what I learned from meditation and yoga. I keep up with my spiritual practices because they help me when I wake up at night and I’m staring into the long tunnel of the dark, afraid that the way I see myself is not how the world will ever see me.

  Sal met a woman on Match.com: Jersey-Italian, too, but ferociously straight, defiantly feminine. Her gay husband left her around the same time that Sal asked me for a divorce. She was a high school English teacher, and she said teaching poems to her teenage students helped keep her faith in love alive. She never said this to me. I got it from her Match.com profile as soon as Sal mentioned he was talking to someone on there. The man is so predictable—I knew what he would use for a password (the city he grew up in and the last four digits of his childhood phone number)—and that predictability translated to this woman. She had one child, too, but her body looked younger than mine, and she had a face that cracked with the foundation that covered her smoker’s wrinkles. She was still dyeing her hair then, and it was black and curly and long, and she had one of those big-toothed white smiles, and all her pictures were of her in some kind of glittery cocktail dress, except for this one of her on vacation at Long Beach Island wearing a man’s sweatshirt and a pair of tight white capri pants with heels.

  I knew what their sex would be like: quick and athletic. She’s a legs-straight-up-in-the-air kind of woman, and Sal’s a woman’slegs-straight-up-in-the-air kind of man. We didn’t have sex that way—Sal and I weren’t really compatible in bed, and it wasn’t because I wanted women more in the end, but because I got bored when he went down on me. Jenna says I’m way too frank about this kind of stuff, and I know she’d be cringing right now.

  As far as I know, this woman is the only person Sal dated after our divorce, and he married her. I wasn’t invited to their wedding, but once or twice we’ve had Christmas together—mostly when Jenna was in college, to make her trips home a bit easier—and I can tell that either they have some rare mutual love where they are both the beloved or they are intent on playing at it. They are the kind of people who put up one of those hand-painted signs you can get at flower shops that say “Once Upon a Time” or “They Lived Happily Ever After,” with a framed picture of the two of them at a beach house in LBI underneath it.

  I haven’t experienced love like that, especially since coming out. Sometimes when I’m talking to my older sister, or my cousin for whom the fact that she accepts me is a big deal, I accidentally say things like, “I would never have chosen this path” and “Only straight women know how to value each other.”

  I say these things and don’t know if I believe them.

  —

  When the phone rang again I picked it up on the first ring.

  “I can’t talk for much longer,” Jenna said. “I just wanted to call you back.”

  “Has there been anyone else besides—what’s her name?”

  “Drea,” she said. “No. It’s not a sexuality thing. We’re moving in together once my lease is up.”

  I heard her car turn on. I stood up and dumped my tea in the sink. The sun was going down and I needed to make sure I wasn’t drinking anything with even the tiniest bit of caffeine.

  “Are you sure you want to move in with her?”

  “It’s not like this is just happening,” she said. “We’ve been together for a while. It’s just this is the first I’m telling you about it.”

  “I know,” I said. I took a deep breath and made sure to feel my feet on the ground. My anxiety was starting to rise. “But you’re just discovering this part of yourself now. Do you really want to be monogamous? Don’t you want—”

  “Mom. Stop.”

  “—the opportunity to date other people,” I said. “Other women.”

  I remember when Jenna was a teenager I would talk to other parents about how dating seemed so geared towards monogamy. You didn’t go out on dates—you asked someone to go o
ut with you, like be monogamous with you right away, and there was no room to really decide if you even liked being around the person first. This is probably my generation’s fault, having something to do with the accessibility of sex. But I don’t know what I’m talking about. Yes, Sal asked me out on dates in high school, and there was another boy or two that I was going on dates with, but I wasn’t having sex with all of them, or even making out with them all. I ended up only really making out with Sal, and then only having sex with Sal.

  Jenna was so adamant. She was in love, and they were moving in together.

  “I waited to tell you until I knew we were going to be serious.” She was exasperated. I heard her breathing change the way it does before she cries. “I didn’t even want to tell you—”

  “Jenna, you’re not breathing. Calm down—”

  “—because I knew you were going to make this about you!” she screamed.

  I felt her voice slice into my heart. The wound children make there? It never heals.

  Finally, her voice calmed. “I’m not like you. I’m in love.”

  —

  I saw a picture of the two of them on Facebook: Drea is this really tall butch in a pinstriped suit who I wouldn’t have been able to tell was a woman right away, and I wondered if she even thought of herself as one. I prefer women who look like me, I guess. Jenna looked more feminine than ever sitting on Drea’s lap with her arms wrapped around her neck, and that made my heart so happy because I felt like maybe everything was going to be okay. Jenna was finally coming into herself.

  I saved the picture on my computer. I want Jenna to remember, or even notice, that she looked like that, full and available. From an energetic standpoint, I could see that all her chakras were open and spiralling into the universe, which I’d never seen in her before, at least not around me.

  There’s a picture of myself that I love.

  It was taken six months before the divorce. This was after I came out, when I had the romance with Tina, and Sal knew about her, we’d even all had dinner together. There was this one day when we all went to Jenna’s baseball game and I sat between my husband and my lover. The assistant coach was taking pictures of family members and he snapped one of the three of us. My arms are around both of them, and my smile is open and big. My hair looks good, too. Tina and Sal look happy and at ease. I look at that picture and try to come up with a different narrative—not that we are all together in one relationship, but that I am able to be with both of them, and we all respect and love each other. In this narrative I even imagine Sal’s wife somewhere in the background, waiting for him to meet her for a date after. Maybe she and I go to the movies. I’m not looking for a threesome—it just would have been nice if that day at the baseball diamond, the way I felt, the moment that was captured, could have been real.

  I barely date anymore. An astrologer in my women’s healing circle told me that there was a planetoid blocking Venus and it would take a few years for that to clear. She also said, “There isn’t one committed partner in your future,” looking sad when she told me, remorseful, like maybe she should have kept it a secret. I felt sad when I heard it, too, and that evening, as we made these chakra bowls ring out, I mourned that prophecy, and longed for Sal again. That feeling of partnership.

  I’ve been trying to rethink what the astrologer told me. Maybe by one committed partner she just meant that I wasn’t going to get everything from one person, the way that Sal and his wife seem to.

  I think that’s what I wish I could warn Jenna about.

  But maybe Jenna and Drea have that mutual kind of love.

  Maybe they have what Jenna and I once had, when she was a baby and I was her everything.

  Late at night, I feel like there was some opportunity, some other way to be, and I missed it. It’s dark and I’m squinting down this long, spiralling tunnel, and I know there is something more out there than just wanting to sleep with women, something close to what exists in that picture, but I can’t quite see it.

  the wallaby

  My farmer neighbour asked me if I wanted to meet his wallaby. That summer, I’d moved to the land adjacent to his property and was working all day and into the night to get a sixteen-foot flatbed shipping container ready for me to live in by the fall. When I first started the work, I didn’t realize that some systems—the water main, the electrical grid—are just waiting for you. That you’re often building just to reach what’s already there. Not totally unlike when I got married—even though I didn’t believe in marriage; even though I ran away to the city to live with my sister in a community that was supposed to disrupt supremacist and normative thinking; even though, or maybe because, as an adult I spent my time submitting grant reports to foundations—because I still fell in love hard, and I wanted to marry her, couldn’t think of anything but marrying her, and having bookshelves and matching plates and a nice apartment together. It wasn’t until I moved to this land and plugged plumbing into the earth that I understood that my idea of love had tapped into the systems that were already waiting for me.

  My sister, Stacy, and I had bought these two acres of land outside Seattle from the farmer years before, with the intention of making it a retreat for activists, but retreat as in actual retreat. We went out there to camp and cook vegan food over a fire with the rule that we couldn’t talk about anything important, but because we were 501(c)3 addicts we talked compulsively about all the things we could turn this land into, like a camp for trans and queer youth. We thought we had time.

  “I want to die out there,” she told me.

  “You can’t die outside,” I replied. I wasn’t sure how to orchestrate that, how to keep her comfortable on rough land. And even though the Pacific Northwest weather was typically beautiful and predictable in the summer, it just seemed too cold a place to die. We had this conversation on a loop.

  “Who’s to say I can’t die outside?”

  My sister never listened to me, but in this one thing I had what felt like the world’s agreement, and I ran with the conviction of the doctors’ conclusion that she was not thinking clearly. Doctors would say things about how it seems good to die out in nature until you are actually dying and you are in pain and it’s already so hard. One nurse told me sternly, “Everything should be as comfortable as possible.”

  Our final conversation about it was at a lounge in Chelsea that had once been our favourite muffin shop—a previous gentrification outdone. We went there mostly as a joke, but when she ordered a hot toddy I got mad and told her to take it back, and she said, “You can’t tell me what the fuck I can do. You can’t tell me where I can die.”

  “You told me what the fuck I could do.”

  “That’s because you were a baby.”

  “Well, now you’re dying.” Though she said it plenty, I had never said it before.

  She pulled her drink close and the steam curled up around her chin, which looked weird because it was late May and everyone, except for Stacy, was in T-shirts. She was wearing thermals, and two sweaters. I’d helped her dress that morning.

  “Remember when you told me I couldn’t fuck your roommates and then I kissed Jill?”

  “You didn’t kiss Jill! I don’t remember that.”

  “I told you the next day.” I felt an old discomfort rise in me but tried to ignore it.

  “If that happened, I would have made us move. It seems like a good idea to kiss someone, but then you can’t stop kissing them.”

  “It seems like a good idea to die in nature,” I told her, “until you are in pain and it’s already so hard.”

  “It’s gonna be messy anywhere. Why is there a rule that I need to die inside?”

  “You told me sex was messy and you needed us to be comfortable. This is about being comfortable.”

  “Who cares about being comfortable?” she said a little loud for a lounge like this. I felt embarrassed, even though no one looked at us. “I’m already uncomfortable. This is about dying where I want to die.”

&nbs
p; “How am I gonna take care of you out there?”

  And maybe underneath that she finally heard the subtext of my words: How do I explain your body when you go, and what do I do with it after, and what happens when you move your bowels, and can’t someone else just take care of all that? Our eyes held each other’s gaze, and maybe my eyes were doing what hers once did to me when I was sixteen—agreed with me, lied to me, so we could pretend everything was okay. She heard all of this without my needing to say it and gave me the familiar look of compassion and disappointment that older siblings are so good at. She sipped her drink and didn’t say, Fine, but I heard her anyway.

  She looked like her flamboyant self until the beginning of June, when she was on hospice in me and my partner’s apartment. The Brooklyn summer was blazing outside and she was inside and pale and nothing would make her comfortable, and when her breath was grinding through her body, all I could think about was that land and how her time in her body should be ending there. I knew that after she was cremated I would spread some of her ashes there, but once I spread them I didn’t see how I could ever leave her, how I could ever come back to New York without her.

  —

  When the farmer asked me if I wanted to meet his wallaby—and I was certain this wasn’t a euphemism—I got a bit friendlier.

  “How many wallabies you got?” I asked. “You, like, milk them?”

  “That’s not what you keep them for!” the farmer said, laughing. “Their teats are in the pouch. Can you imagine reaching your hand in there and milking that? You’d have to get the tiniest bowl of milk of all time.”

  He pantomimed pulling a pouch back on himself and reaching a hand in, and someone driving by might have thought he was hitting on me. He must have realized the same thing because his hand went rigidly to his side.