The Fixed Stars

by Molly Wizenberg

  I don’t know how to say this, I tried, but I’m really attracted to you. I couldn’t read her face, so I kept going. I’ve never been attracted to a woman before, I said. I’ve always thought I was straight.

  She must have said something in response, but what I saw was her watching me. Everything else went blank. She must have told me she couldn’t, or she wouldn’t. She didn’t touch me. Nothing happened, and I went home.

  If it was a date, and it seemed like one, why hadn’t Laura wanted to kiss me? I’d done something wrong, though I wasn’t sure what or to whom. I’d been stupid. Even if it was a date, of course she didn’t want me once I’d admitted my inexperience, my confusion. She was on the rebound, didn’t need a project: a brand-new, straight-off-the-lot baby dyke. She’d shut me down accordingly.

  Still I liked the idea of Laura wanting me, though I wasn’t sure if I liked that I liked it. This was harder to parse. I couldn’t imagine dating her, or any sort of ongoing thing, a relationship. It had been a leap to imagine anything, to sit at the bar next to her and understand that I wanted to kiss her. In that moment I’d been there and also not there: a version of me had hovered near the ceiling, watching, wondering which was the “real” me. Was I the person in the chair down there, or was I this one, up here? How would I know? Then the minute had passed, and I’d floated back down to my seat. I’d stayed. I rode in Laura’s car, I sat on her sofa, I told her what I wanted. I became someone who surprised me, someone interesting. And then nothing happened.

  Nothing happened, but I felt bigger somehow. That I could be attracted to a woman, this woman, the way I was to men—the knowledge of this made me feel larger, my body capable of pulling in more air. I had imagined it would feel different to want a woman, different from wanting a man, but it didn’t. It felt expansive. Expansive, a word I couldn’t remember ever using, now instinctively in my mouth.

  But alongside this feeling came another: I was relieved. I was relieved that nothing had happened, that the decision had been made for me. The thing was out of my hands. At least I won’t have to tell my parents I’m a lesbian.

  Summer dwindled into fall, and I moved back to campus. I thought about Laura for a few weeks. Thanksgiving came, and I spent the long weekend at Tina’s house. I went to the store, but Laura was gone, had taken a new job elsewhere. I didn’t reach out, though sometimes I wanted to. I was taking a medical anthropology class that quarter, and there was a boy who usually sat in the row ahead of me, with auburn hair and cheekbones like twin mesas. I had a crush. It was fun, like it always was.

  The next summer I worked again at Whole Foods, this time in the cheese department, Laura’s old domain. The manager now was a soft-spoken man who’d spent some years living in Spain. He taught me how to pronounce the Basque cheese Idiazábal, letting my tongue glance off my front teeth, turning the z into a th. It was a different summer, less fraught. I didn’t look at a woman again the way I’d looked at Laura. I didn’t even think to look at a woman that way for fifteen years, until the morning I walked into the courtroom.

  So what was it? Was I gay all along, or bi, and I’d just looked the other way? After nothing happened with Laura, hadn’t I been a little glad? Of course: that must have been when I went into the closet. People don’t just become gay. I must have repressed it, buried it so deep that even I couldn’t find it. As a child, I’d never believed what I heard other kids say about gay people going to hell. But the fact that people said it left a mark. It raised a fear, a prickly, painful thing, a splinter for other fears to snag on. I didn’t want to be gay. I thought, Who on earth would want to be gay? Though I knew that other people’s hatred was wrong, the splinter must have dug in fast, so deep I couldn’t see it. I felt a low humming relief, when I understood what it was to be gay, that I was not that.

  Early on in dating Brandon, when we swapped dating histories and have-you-evers, I’d told him about Laura, about how confusing and exciting it was, how sad and strange. It was no big deal for either of us: People are complicated, ha-ha! Now we’d been married for nearly a decade. Now I wanted Nora. All that time, had this been under the surface, waiting to surge up like magma, frothy and fast, solidifying where it met the air? If sexual orientation is something you’re born with, I must have always been gay, or bi, or whatever I was.

  But I’d thought being closeted meant, at the very least, that you knew what you were. That made sense to me: you hid because you had something to hide. I’d never felt I had anything to hide. I had felt straight, with one strange exception that never went anywhere. Laura had confused me because she was an anomaly. But once the confusion and the wanting subsided, I didn’t feel not-straight. I felt like there was simply something about her, an isolated case. Even after Laura, I knew my story. My story made sense.

  Is there another universe where the story could have gone otherwise?

  How good is my imagination?

  The summer after college graduation, I went home. My dad gave me a job at his office, combing through old patient files and compiling data on colorectal cancer that I doubt he ever planned to use. I was glad for the cash and the time to figure out what to do next. One weekend my mother and I drove up to Tulsa to visit a friend. In a grocery store there I recognized the cashier’s face: it was Aaron, my first-grade classmate, the cute one who’d puked by the cubbies. He’d switched schools when we were eight, and I’d lost track of him. Now he too was a recent college grad and a music writer for the local newspaper, and he also worked a checkout line at Wild Oats Market. There was a tiny silver hoop in his nose, and his hair was dyed black, a shaggy halo around his face. But his eyes were still big and serious, and as he rang up my bag of bulk-bin granola, it somehow came out that we were both reading The Fountainhead. Emboldened by the coincidence, I called information and got his number.

  The first time we had sex, I hovered over his face and, with what I hoped was a seductive wink, said: What would our first-grade teacher think if she saw us now? I felt like I’d won a prize I’d trained years for. We fell in love fast and thought little of driving ninety miles of highway to be together. He lived in an apartment with a friend and two electric guitars in a building that backed up to a small, fragrant pond. We liked to sit out there and talk late into the night. We lay on the mattress on his bedroom floor, listening to Sleater-Kinney. Sometimes when we kissed, we’d pause by some silent agreement, our lips millimeters apart, and hover there, breathing in our shared heat.

  We were together for three years. For two of them, we lived in different cities. At first Aaron was in Tulsa, and I was in Oklahoma City. Then I packed up and went to Paris for nine months, to take a job teaching English conversation. While I was there, I applied to graduate schools, and Aaron applied to Teach for America. Then I moved to Seattle to start school, and he moved to Mississippi, where he’d been posted. He joined me in Seattle the following year, which turned out to be our last. It was difficult, for reasons mostly out of our control. My father had just died of cancer.

  The diagnosis came the week that I started graduate school, and my father would die ten weeks after. I took a leave of absence and went home for most of those weeks. I’d grown up around death: first my uncle Jerry died of AIDS, and then, fifteen months later, my mother’s younger sister died of cancer. Then my grandfather Joe passed away, and then an aunt by marriage. This was all before I was out of my teens. But my father’s death was the first time I felt grief inside my own skin. I didn’t know what to do with it, how to keep from bursting open as I watched my father’s body fail on a rented hospital bed in the living room. I remember going into the kitchen one afternoon and hoisting myself onto the counter. I sat there and stared out the window at his unused car in the driveway. I started to cry, and then I cried so hard that my hands went numb, and then my arms too. Family friends were supposed to be coming over for a visit. I heard the doorbell ring, but I couldn’t stop. The house echoed with my strange, croaking sobs. My mother appeared at some point, eased me off the counter, a
nd wrapped me in a coat. One of my cousins was with us that week, and my mother handed her the car keys and pointed us out the side door. My cousin drove me around, around and around the neighborhood, until I could breathe again. A few nights later we stood at my father’s bed, rubbing his knobby knees through the blankets, and watched him leave.

  Back in Seattle, I tried to stay the course. I reenrolled in school. Aaron moved in, and we were elated. But living together opened up cracks in our relationship. My grief was a third person in the bed. It was exhausting and sad.

  7

  When Brandon and I met a couple of years later, everything felt so good, so easy, so unlike anything that came before. Everything was possible. Can I be someone who can live with this? Yes, I can.

  Brandon and I talked sometimes about having kids. He loved children, had grown up with two sisters and many cousins, and he’d always imagined himself as a father, maybe even a stay-at-home dad. I was undecided. I’d never been able to see myself as a mother, had never wanted it. He’d known where I stood from the beginning, and it had never been a sticking point. Nothing was decided. There was plenty of time, and there was so much else to our lives: I was a writer, and he was a chef, and we had a restaurant. Nothing was obviously missing.

  I was only a kid when I noticed that other girls and women seemed to love babies, couldn’t wait to get their hands on them. I envied what seemed like their natural desire to nurture, to love, to care for. I also scorned it. I didn’t want to be like that, to play the role women are expected to play. I wanted it even less when I thought about the physical reality of birthing a baby, of pushing a human out of the small hole between my legs. The prospect of doing that with my own body seemed as unlikely as growing a tail.

  This feeling was reinforced by the fact that my periods were irregular, sometimes nonexistent. My parents took me to a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, a naturopath, another endocrinologist. I didn’t ovulate consistently, they found. At nineteen, to regulate my cycle, I was put on the Pill, and because it worked, I stayed on it. I believed this all to be a sign, though I wasn’t sure from whom. I would not become a mother. My body was broken.

  Still, I did wonder: What would my mother’s life have looked like without me? My love for her was so natural, so clear, that I couldn’t imagine not having something like it in my own lifetime. I couldn’t imagine having children, and I couldn’t imagine life without them.

  The spring that I was thirty-two, a friend came to visit. She was pregnant with her first child. One night when Brandon didn’t have to cook at the restaurant, we made dinner for her. At some point, the topic came up, and we told her our qualms about parenthood.

  Surely you know, our friend said, looking pointedly at me, that your irregular period is not some sign from the universe. It doesn’t mean anything. Don’t let that be the deciding factor.

  I don’t know, I said. I’m scared I won’t like being a mother. I’m scared of giving birth.

  Of course you are, she said. Having a baby, becoming parents—these are totally reasonable things to be worried about.

  How did you decide to do it? I asked. It doesn’t seem like you’re worried.

  Of course I am, she said. Everybody’s scared.

  It just seems like the wrong time, Brandon said, and I nodded. We’d been married for four years, and Delancey had been open for not quite two.

  There’s never going to be a good time, our friend said.

  Something about it stuck. A couple of days later, Brandon and I rehashed the conversation. The terrain had shifted. The fear was still there, but it felt manageable, even reassuring. We were cautious because we were taking parenthood seriously.

  We decided to try. I assumed we’d have to go straight to a specialist, but I offered to call our regular doctor first, the family physician who saw both of us, and ask what to do.

  The doctor laughed merrily. Have you gone off the Pill? he asked. That’s the first step.

  But I don’t get a period without the Pill, I said. I don’t ovulate.

  Just try it, he said. Let’s not jump to conclusions. Give your body a few months off the Pill, and we’ll see what happens.

  My period arrived the next month. When I saw the bloody toilet paper, I yelped with surprise and scream-laughed. I wanted to run through the house waving it over my head. I was pregnant six months later. For all my difficulty imagining becoming a mother, pregnancy was easy on me. My abdomen stretched until it was round and tight, smooth as a ladybug. I couldn’t get over the fact that my skin could stretch like that, that far. Thinking about it gave me a deep, shivery kind of pleasure, like the first sip of a strong cocktail. I quietly cheered: my body was made for this. I’d had my doubts, but here we were.

  I was nine weeks pregnant when my mother called with news: my aunt Tina, my mother’s twin sister, had been admitted to the hospital. She’d been having stomach pain for a few weeks, and more recently nausea and vomiting. A couple of days later we’d learn what it was: late-stage pancreatic cancer. She was sixty-five and looking forward to retirement, had recently bought herself a new white bicycle with upright handlebars.

  Tina couldn’t go back to her house, where there was no one to care for her, so my mother helped her fly to Oklahoma. Tina’s daughters and I rotated through town to help care for her. We had been through this before, too many times. We knew how to talk to doctors and nurses and how to speak the language of palliative care. But there was something about those weeks with Tina that I couldn’t penetrate. It felt wrong to be making life while Tina was leaving it. She couldn’t eat, and I was hungry. I kept a jar of peanut butter in my tote bag with a loaf of bread whose plastic wrapper crinkled as I walked down the hospital corridors. In a bathroom with fluorescent lights and a folding seat in the shower, I took photos of my pregnant belly.

  Tina died at my mother’s house, in a rented hospital bed like my father. The night before she died, my cousins slept on the floor beside her bed. It was early morning when her breathing changed, when they called for my mother and me. I stroked her hair, streaked silver at the temples, long and wiry like my mother’s. Their hair had always reminded me of horses’ manes, the strands coarse and distinct. I was twenty-five weeks pregnant that morning. As I leaned over Tina’s body, the aluminum rails of her bed left pink stripes across my tightening belly.

  I was supposed to be writing. I got pregnant in the early stages of writing my second book, Delancey. Then Tina got sick. Then the shop next door to Delancey moved out, and Brandon leapt at the chance to take over its lease and build a bar there. I did not leap with him. I didn’t want another business. But I also knew that, poor timing aside, the bar would probably turn out to be a smart business decision. I let him leap. He worked at Delancey by night and on plans for the bar, to be called Essex, during the day. With six weeks until my due date, I finished the manuscript. Three weeks later, he opened Essex. Three weeks after that, on September 9, 2012, I gave birth to our daughter, June. We closed Delancey and Essex for two weeks, so that Brandon could stay home with us. Then we reopened, as if nothing had happened.

  Sometimes I hear myself tell people that our marriage was pretty ordinary. It was happy and unhappy in ordinary ways. Ours is the story of a set of circumstances that were tolerable in isolation, that felt normal and reasonable as we encountered them. It was only with time, and accumulation, that they became intolerable. It was okay until it wasn’t.

  I don’t remember much about opening Essex. I remember that the Japanese anemones in our yard had started to bloom, pink and droopily cheerful, their heads swaying on thin necks in the breeze. That was the year that I learned their name. I’d never cared about flowers, but this was different. Here was a flower that bloomed in time with our baby.

  No, I don’t remember much about opening Essex. The opportunity arose and was taken. A business-owner friend who already had children gave Brandon some advice: Open Essex before the baby comes, he said, even if you’ve got to rush. The idea was that after the b
aby was born, we wouldn’t be able to get anything done for months, and then we’d be paying rent on unused space. So Brandon rushed. The whole process happened in four months, start to finish. Then we had two businesses and a baby. There are ways of living that you can live with, until you can’t.

  Can I be someone who can live with this?

  A quieter corollary: Who is that someone?

  Who was I, to ask for something other than everything I’d been given?

  Sometimes I hear myself say that Brandon and I always had the same big-picture vision for our lives, the same end goal. We just had different ideas about how to get there. We had different maps to the same destination. But, writes Annie Dillard, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”16 Did we really want the same thing at all?

  In the final pages of Delancey, I wrote, “I see now that Delancey was the beginning of a process that will continue to shape, stretch, and reshape us. I don’t know what we would be without it, that process, that constant growing, but it doesn’t mean that I crave it the way Brandon does, or that I always like it. But I’ve learned now that we can withstand it, and that I can withstand it. I consider it a great personal victory that I could be eight months pregnant, helping to pick out crown molding for a bar that, for all I knew, could open on the same day that I went into labor, and not have to breathe into a paper bag.”

  I would not revise this assessment. But I would add something now: that one cannot live at one’s limits for long. One cannot stay there indefinitely, not even for love.

  8

  On Fresh Air, I listened to Terry Gross interview therapist Esther Perel.17

  Gross: So you say sometimes when we seek the gaze of another it isn’t our partner we’re turning away from, but the person we’ve become. We’re looking for another version of ourselves. Can you expand on that for us?