“I really don’t want to turn this into anything.”
It’s likely that I motioned towards her. She flicked her unlit cigarette at my chest.
“You think you can be a guy by acting like a guy?”
“No,” I said. I put out my cigarette in the sink. “I think I can be alone by acting like I want to be alone.”
“You could have other queers here in shipping containers. You could really transform this community.”
I thought of the plans Stacy and I used to talk about and replaced them with all these adult white queers in shipping containers, seeming much nicer when you get them still in the container than when you get them without the container.
“It’s a nice night,” I said. “Can I walk you home?”
If she were older, she might have told me to fuck off and walked herself home, but instead, she nodded and we walked quietly to her little shack—a trendy thing to get to live in when you don’t grow up in poverty. If you get them to go willingly into the shack, they’re less persnickety. We hugged good night and I held her close, even though her body tried to squirm away.
I headed over to Dandy. Inside his run I turned my headlamp off and he bounced over. Soon, he wouldn’t be alone and he’d settle into a nice monogamy—what does Dandy care if the babies go? He grabbed and bit at my hands, tentatively at first, and when I didn’t jerk away, he became more aggressive, more joyous. I did too, giving him pressure, giving him resistance. I wasn’t numb. I felt his fur against me, his teeth in my skin.
the only
pain you feel
“Stormy night tonight,” my father said.
We were seated at the card table—the one flat surface in his new one-bedroom apartment. He was the one who asked for the divorce, but with good reason: my mom was gay. And though she was content to stay married and carry on her affairs, as she had done for years, he was not.
“Stormy,” he said again.
I couldn’t speak, and the divorce wasn’t the reason. There were two—one was fairly practical, but the other was conceptual and beyond my father’s realm of easy understanding. I was sixteen and had started my period a month ago. That inaugural period had a strange thrill: my father bought me flowers when he found out, and my mother gave me a light smack on the cheek with the blessing May this be the only pain you feel as a woman, which, looking back, was a joke because I was cursed with a new kind of pain that rages through my body and leaves me dry-heaving in more dramatic moments and curled up shivering in more subtle ones. This is a kind of inheritance from my mother’s family.
“All the women on my side have it,” she said. She was wrapped in a series of robes, on her way out to a kirtan at the yoga studio she attended.
“Once you have a baby, it goes away. Finish packing for your father’s. I’m off to sing for the Lord!”
Now my father looked at me, nudged my plate of chicken nuggets closer.
“I have cramps,” I told him.
He reached over and took a bottle of ibuprofen from the silverware drawer, a strange place to keep it, but this was his home and he had a right to store things wherever he pleased.
“You get them like your mother?”
I nodded. He led me to the couch and with the pills gave me a cup of instant cocoa spiked with whisky.
“I don’t know if whisky fits into your mom’s lifestyle now, but it was the only thing that did the trick until she had you.”
My cramps weren’t as bad as they could be, but I wanted my dad to feel useful, and in fact, the whisky did me good for the second reason I felt unable to say. In the bathroom, where the wind shook the windowpane so hard I thought it might shatter towards me, I looked down at the pad, and in addition to the dried blood—I was not yet fastidious enough at changing this strange diaper—there was a layer of fresh, orange blood. A clot dropped into the toilet. Staring at both the blood that spread in the water and the evidence in my pad, I was struck: this blood belonged to me, and it would come out like this with the purpose of being discarded every month. It seemed like one should make use of it, like donate it or save it for when you needed it later. The female body was so wasteful—at least mine was—waiting for something that might never happen.
That was the actual reason. I realized that I might be in love, and I did not want my father to think I was anything like my mother.
—
She was two years older than me and I met her in an upstairs bookstore in a part of Asbury Park that was getting turned around, which meant that white gay men were moving into a predominately Black community and soon the rent would go up. I didn’t know it then, but she was watching me from the women’s studies section. When I glanced up, I thought she was a boy. This worked to both our advantages because if I had thought of her as a girl from the outset, I wouldn’t have been caught off guard and learned anything about myself.
“Look,” she said.
I looked into her face—which was tiny, even her ears were small—and I think it was at her mouth where I got confused, because her lips were soft and available despite the sharp line of her jaw, a physical attribute that will always mean handsome. She had a kind of Elvis do: her hair was thick and black, but in the glow of the fluorescent lights it looked almost navy. She narrowed her eyes at me, and then she realized that I was staring at her so intently because she’d told me to.
“No. Look behind you. It’s the Boss.”
I turned to see Springsteen, looking like he’d just walked out of a magazine, leaning against the counter and speaking with the bookstore owner. Though he was often sighted around town, especially since all the changes that had been taking place, it was strange to see him on the customer side of the counter. He was not meant to be an ordinary man. His eyes glanced over at me, not to see me but to keep watch over himself. I felt chastised because a real Shore girl knows that he is a man, just one that belongs to us.
I turned back to Jess—who I didn’t know was Jess yet—and she gave me a knowing smile, then returned to her book. I went into her aisle and flipped a book open, just so I could stand next to her. I didn’t read the title, so I was surprised to open to a picture of one woman holding a mirror up to another woman’s vagina. I turned the page quickly, nearly tearing it, and looked over at Jess to make sure she hadn’t seen. But she was looking at me now, and she had seen.
“I’m Jess,” she whispered.
The Boss might have been a man, but he was still the Boss, and it didn’t seem right to speak too loudly in his presence.
“I’ve been here when he’s come in before. He loves Steinbeck. They’re always negotiating for some first edition somewhere.”
“Wouldn’t he have them all by now?” I asked.
“There’s more to books than being a first edition that make them special. He wouldn’t want just any first edition. He’d want the one that belonged to Steinbeck’s sister, or maybe an ex-lover who was also an ex-writer.”
Jess turned back to her book and the cover flashed at me. It was silver with hot-pink lettering.
“My mom got me that book here. It’s signed.”
She grunted.
“Mine must be a newer edition or something,” I said. “It doesn’t have a cover like that. I tried to read it, but it seemed kind of whiny and gay.”
Bruce stepped into another room, so even though her voice could return to normal, Jess kept a tight rein on it.
“You mean, like stupid or like it’s about gay people?”
She’s gay, I thought, and looked down. I shrugged. I was sixteen, so I used my sixteenness to get out of it.
“My mom is gay,” I said. “Like actually gay.”
“I am too,” she said. She closed the book and moved away to buy it.
“I can give you my copy,” I said.
“Don’t give away what your mom gave you. It’s signed and you might want to read it now. Anyway, this is for a friend.”
What did that mean, I might want to read it now? I wondered what kind of fri
end. I followed her to the counter. The owner seemed unmoved by Springsteen’s visit and I resented him for it, that he was able to be more advanced so as to not be affected by him.
“I have that book,” she said, motioning to the one with the picture of the giant vagina, still in my hands. “Great purchase.”
Before I could say anything, the owner snatched it and rang it up. It wasn’t expensive, I had enough for it, but I felt like I had done a terrible thing—my dad said it was dangerous to spend money when you didn’t intend to. Jess didn’t need a bag, but I took one, and we walked down the flights of stairs together.
“You had a coffee at the renovated Howard Johnson’s yet? All the new artists in town hang out there.”
I shook my head.
“Let me take you,” she said.
Even though I was with someone, and even though a white guy in tight orange pants shuffled past us, I wasn’t certain we were supposed to be walking in this part of town. My parents always ran red lights here and the cops had never pulled them over for it.
“They have more important things to take care of,” my dad said each time we cruised through a light and past a police car’s passionless grille.
Once we passed the initial row of new shops, we hit a long stretch of abandoned, crumbling buildings extending all the way to the beach. Up ahead at the corner, two Black men in construction clothes and boots were in conversation. The shorter man had his hard hat on and was using his work gloves to imitate someone talking, and the other man, who had his hat off, was taller, even though he stooped, his arms wrapped around his middle, laughing, until he saw us.
“Lost?” he asked.
I looked down.
“Nah, we’re just up ahead,” Jess said.
I was surprised that she spoke, that she didn’t apologize, that she didn’t sound nervous. I stole a look at Jess, whose boyishness I thought glowed with vulnerability as she moved to walk around them, but the taller man took a large exaggerated step to the side.
“Pardon me,” he said.
I looked up and nodded, and he didn’t nod back. He wore wire-frame glasses, the arms wrapped around his ears. His face was set still and communicating something, but no one had ever told me that I should try to read it, so I didn’t. I looked down again, a direction I’d come into the world to look, and didn’t raise my eyes until we reached the boardwalk.
We got a seat by the window. The Atlantic crashed plaintively on the sand where I’d once found a pen shaped like a hypodermic needle. My mom screamed as she slapped it out of my hand. She gave no explanation when we started going to the beach at Avon, where mostly everyone was white and visibly sunburned, just like the customers standing around in the Howard Johnson’s. I ordered what Jess ordered: a latte, and the hot milk mixed with the bitter coffee was a kind of revelation.
“How old are you?” I asked. I liked the way she held her cup in front of her face at all times, and I tried to imitate that look without seeming like I was imitating her at all.
“Eighteen,” she said, and I couldn’t help it, I smiled real big. My mom told me there was a world of difference between my age and eighteen, but two years wasn’t too old. For what? I asked myself.
She looked nervous. “Why, how old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“I thought you were older,” she said, and I knew I should have lied.
“I bought that book you got today when I was sixteen. It was really important for me getting to know my body and stuff.” She blushed, and then I did, too. “So your mom’s gay. Did she come out later?”
“Yeah, my parents are divorced. My dad is pretty sad.”
She nodded, and I memorized the way she took a sip of her coffee, thoughtfully, as if the next phrase was hidden in the liquid suspended in her mouth.
“He won’t be for long. He’ll end up just fine.”
“You don’t know that. He’s really sad.”
“You doing okay with it?”
I shrugged, and then remembering that she was gay, I became concerned that she would interpret it wrong. So I tried out taking a thoughtful sip of my coffee, but it was just cold and bitter now and lacking whatever inspiration it might have once held.
“I worry about them. My mom has all these new hobbies and has gone through two breakups already that she took really hard. Actually, can I run something by you?”
She nodded, but now, I can see that she didn’t want me to.
“She took the first breakup a lot harder than she took the divorce with my dad, and she told me that’s because the intensity of time is different, so for example, if you are in a relationship with a woman for a year it equals four years with a man. Is that how it is?”
“Hoo!” Her face turned red and she gasped for breath, and then again, “Hoo! Hoo!”
Soon I realized that this sound was her laughter. Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! It was so loud and so resonant that the artists looked at us, and I wondered, when they looked at me, across from her, whether they thought I was gay, too.
“That’s like, I’m sorry, but I feel like from now on I’m going to ask people how long they’ve been together in gay years.”
“It isn’t true?”
Jess wiped her eyes and the hoos restrained within her sent her body into rhythmic shakes.
“Well, I’ve never been with a man but—”
“You haven’t?” I asked, and then covered my mouth.
“Have you?” she asked sharply.
I shook my head.
“Well, there’s hope for you yet.” She was no longer in a laughing mood. She ran her hands through her hair and I watched the pouf wilt flat, like a mood indicator.
“I think there is a different kind of intensity, but that’s just a result of oppression. It’s weird to be a community when all you have in common is how you feel about gender and who you want to have sex with. But you need it—I need it. I know that whenever I’ve fallen in love, I knew it the first time we slept together. Plus, there are no rules telling you to play any kind of game, no rule that you have to meet each other’s parents first, or wait a year to move in together. With my first girlfriend, after the first night, I never went home again.”
I wondered if she’d had many girlfriends, and I felt jealous of the person who was going to get that book.
“I just don’t want to ever be sad the way that my dad is sad, and I don’t want to ever do things the way my mom did them,” I said.
Jess’s face softened and I saw what my mom meant, about the difference between sixteen and eighteen: you still knew something about the pain of parents, but you were starting to be free of them.
“Most likely you won’t,” she said. “They already did all of that for you.”
At my dad’s house, I lay on the couch in some pain, mildly drunk, thinking about that conversation and how I already knew then that I was in love with her.
—
Before my mom came out, she was always asking me if I was gay. Sometimes she wouldn’t ask, she would just say so, especially on the phone to strangers I would later figure were my mom’s secret lovers.
“I don’t know. Jenna just doesn’t seem to like boys.”
The asking started early, in elementary school: “Got any little boyfriends, girlfriends?” Always with a nervous laugh.
I thought it was my fault, because of the time I was four and tried to kiss her like they do on TV, and she let me, my tongue slipping into her mouth, until she pulled me away and screamed: “You don’t kiss me like that!”
A few months before she came out, she walked into the den where I was watching TV and stood there, waiting until I looked at her. She was wearing a T-shirt and her breasts were loose, and she had the usual mysterious wet spot on the belly of her shirt from the ice cubes she chewed incessantly. She was a small woman, all torso, with a large round middle, and from the angle where I lay on the couch, her thighs looked like tiny triangles.
“Do you think you might be gay?” she asked me.
I was annoyed. It was the middle of the day and I was trying to watch TV. What had I done that was gay? I realize now that she was really asking me if I thought she was gay.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Because you’re very pretty, you know, and you could have some boyfriends. I’ve seen how boys look at you.”
“Boys don’t look at me,” I said.
“Yes, they do.”
We were quiet for a few minutes after this, so I turned the TV up. Another episode of the same show I’d been watching for hours came on, a sleepaway-camp comedy where boxers were raised up the flagpole in the opening credits.
“Doesn’t it repulse you, the thought of two women or two men together?” she asked.
I turned the TV down again, but I didn’t look at her. There was this one time, just as my breasts came in, when she had her arm around me on this same couch and started rubbing my breast. I froze and we watched TV like that for a while, until I finally asked her what she was doing and she pulled her hand away and said: “I thought it was your shoulder.”
On the TV now a boy played a bugle as the shorts went up the flagpole, and I felt relieved that I found him cute.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“See, it repulses me,” she said. “I asked your father and he said, yeah, it repulses him, too.”
“I don’t know what it looks like, so how can I say it’s repulsive,” I said.
“And you’re sure you aren’t gay?”
“I don’t think regular sex is repulsive either.”
“What do you know about regular sex?” she asked, her voice rising.
“From TV.” And I turned it up again.
—
When my mom came out she acted timid at first. In a strange reversal, one day at the kitchen table I asked her if she was bisexual. It was after she told a long story about how she thought she might have been in love with a friend with whom she’d recently had a falling out.
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