The Fixed Stars

by Molly Wizenberg

  Molly, the doctor said, I know you don’t believe me. But someday you will feel better. And when you feel better, you might even be glad this happened. You’ll have a new kind of empathy. You’ll be a different person, a person you might like.

  17

  I’ve been a Stevie Nicks fan since I was a kid, but it wasn’t until June was born that I heard Fleetwood Mac’s Mirage. Brandon bought it for me on vinyl, and I remember listening with June on my chest in the Ergo. When “That’s Alright” came on, I cried until her hair was wet. I heard it as a sad song about love and letting go, about setting a person free and wishing them well. I thought about my new baby, about all I wanted for her, the love I hoped she would go out and find.

  Now when I listen, it’s obviously a breakup song. Our singer has decided to leave the person she loved. She’s been thinking about it for a while, she says; this ending shouldn’t surprise him.

  Brandon and I are arguing again. We’re arguing because we cannot stop. I wish for a megaphone. I want a way of saying I need this that will force him to listen. This time I will say something new.

  I think I might be gay, I say.

  YOU ARE NOT GAY, Brandon howls.

  Even as I say it, I don’t know if it’s true. To say “I’m not straight” would be more accurate. But sometimes lately I feel gay. When Nora fucks me, I feel gay. On the bus, I look around at men, trying to find one I want. There are never any.

  Did you not hear me? I ask. I think I might be gay.

  He jerks his hands to his ears, sputtering.

  You don’t get to tell me who I am, I say, and I feel it all the way down, everything about me hot and bristling.

  There’s a tension between how a character sees herself and how others see her. I wrote that in my notes from the fiction workshop the fall after jury duty. I knew that tension. It powered me like a battery.

  Now I am screaming: You don’t get to tell me who I am.

  We’re fighting over the gristle of our marriage, and it twists and buckles in our jaws, an odd substance that won’t snap. I’m tired of pleading.

  For as long as we’ve been married, the idea of us not being married has seemed to me an almost physical impossibility, like walking off the edge of the earth. I couldn’t imagine our marriage ending—not because of religion, not because of money, not because of children, but because of the pain. This is a good thing, I’ve always thought: the rupture of love should be unimaginable. Let’s do whatever work it takes to keep it that way, to avoid an ending.

  We did the work. We worked on it separately, together, and with therapists. All fights come from nonacceptance; I read this in a book, a snippet of wisdom from a Zen master. We should accept each other 100 percent. But, I want to retort, what if accepting the other person leaves you not getting what you need?

  We wound up here, in this scene. Brandon stands in front of the fireplace, hands at his temples, pacing like he does when he talks on the phone. I sit at one end of the sofa, cross-legged. It takes effort to look this relaxed, to keep my voice level. I begin to explain again. I need him to hear me. I want him to understand. This time I don’t want to give in.

  I need you to hear me, I say, when I tell you: This is me now.

  He screams something, but I can’t hear it. He is far away. The effort to convince him has wrung me out. This part I do not say aloud: lately, when we argue, I wish the earth were flat, that it were really that easy to leave.

  June 15, 2016. This date too will be marked on the calendar. The night before, my mother had come over after June was asleep, and we’d stayed up late talking. I told her about the arguments, about the things Brandon and I were saying to each other. My mother loves him, adores June, would never want us to fall apart. But she listened and nodded, echoed my frustration.

  Am I crazy? I asked.

  You’re not crazy, she said. You’re not crazy.

  I decided that night. I had to ask for a separation. I would do it in therapy the next day, June 15. In therapy, there’d be someone to protect us from each other.

  Here is how I say it: I cannot stay in our marriage. Not the way it is.

  When I say it, I know immediately that I have broken something and that I won’t be able to fix it, not even if I change my mind. I have asked my husband for a separation. This is part of me now. In the chair opposite, Brandon blinks and stares.

  I’m the one I have to live with for the rest of my life, I say. Only me.

  His face flattens, a mask.

  I have to do right by me, I say.

  Usually when we leave therapy, no matter how much we’ve fought, we walk out together. We stand on the balcony outside the office door and put our arms around each other. Today we will leave separately.

  “I must try to get some experience,” says the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House. A young wife and mother in late-nineteenth-century Norway, she is fed up with the narrow constraints of her life, with the feeling of being little more than a pretty doll to her husband.

  “But to leave your home—your husband and your children,” her husband replies. “You haven’t thought of what people will say.”

  “I can’t consider that,” she says. “All I know is that this is necessary for me.” She leaves their apartment as the curtain falls, slamming the door behind her.

  The play raised a furor when it premiered in Copenhagen in 1879. Under protest, Ibsen rewrote the ending the following year for a production in Germany. In the altered version, the husband insists that his wife look in on their sleeping children before she leaves. He drags her to the bedroom doorway and says, “Look—there they are, sleeping peacefully and without a care,” he says. “Tomorrow, when they wake and call for their mother, they will be . . . motherless!”

  The young wife trembles.

  “Ah, though it is a sin against myself,” she cries, “I cannot leave them!” Then she collapses, and the play is over.

  Ibsen would shortly declare this revised ending a “barbaric outrage,” and he refused to allow its use in subsequent performances. But there it is anyway, still there, in the notes at the back of the edition at my local library: a woman talked down from the ledge of who she is.

  18

  A friend tells me after the fact that she was jealous of me. She’s a mother of two, married to a man. I want to blow up my life and have a lover, she texts. Lol?

  Lol. Nora and I are in bed, and I have asked again to go down on her. She says she doesn’t come that way. Maybe I can just make you feel good, I say.

  She assents. I slide down the bed, my lips tracing a line along her belly. I take my time; after all this, I’m as unsure of me as she is. I’ve never been here before, and I want to look at her. Her pubic hair is thick and shiny black, its borders tidy as a putting green. The skin beneath it is purplish-brown, smooth as the inside of a cheek. I want to kiss her there like a mouth, gently, a first kiss. But I know I shouldn’t press my luck. So instead I begin in earnest, make my tongue flat and wide, and lap her like she’s an ice-cream cone. She sighs, a small moan, and I am levitating. She permits me a half-dozen passes, maybe ten seconds, and then she starts to giggle. She swats at my head.

  Not like that! She pants, her palm against my forehead. It’s too ticklish! She scoots up the bed, snaps her thighs back together. She’s adorable when she’s got the giggles, and I hate it. I’d had my mouth on her, and she’d laughed.

  I don’t know how to have sex with you, I say. And I feel like you won’t let me learn.

  Another way of putting it, which I did not say: I am learning who you are, and this isn’t working.

  I wanted to touch her, move my body over hers. I wanted to play, to be allowed to play, to be pulled along, to be pushed. I wanted to take and be taken. I wanted permission to try. Instead we sat on opposite ends of the bed, not touching.

  Nora leans back against the headboard. She stares at the dresser. We take turns sending out words to probe the space between us, measuring its depths.
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br />   I don’t know if we’re a good match, Molly, says Nora. She says my name like a threat.

  I don’t know what to do about this, I say. I want to say her name back to her, but it feels perilous to say it aloud, as though I’ve forgotten how to pronounce it.

  There are a lot of ways to have sex, she says. I’ve had sex plenty of times without even taking my clothes off.

  My head empties like a drain.

  But I don’t want that, I choke. I threw off all the rules to be here. I don’t want a whole new set of them.

  “Axiom 1: People are different from each other,” writes queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. I imagine Sedgwick rolling her eyes at the typewriter, poking tiredly at the keys, lamenting that this should require explanation. “Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people.”29

  Being with Nora feels like a homecoming, I wrote that summer. But to a place I’ve never lived, and I can’t figure out which room is mine.

  Why are there so many rules? I once asked Nora. I mean, in lots of places it’s against the law for two women to have sex with each other at all. If we’ve already decided to break those rules, why create even more?

  I had made my way to her bed because something in me had shifted. I did not choose that shift, but it had happened, and what it looked like was desire. I wanted to love and be loved by a woman. Here is the part I did choose: I followed what I wanted. Against social constraints, against my marriage, against my own instinct, against anxiety, against rules, I chose desire.

  Isn’t that queer sex? I wanted to ask. What is queer sex, if not a throwing-off of everything that isn’t desire?

  In casual conversation, one of Nora’s friends referred to me as femme. Not in the French sense, meaning woman or, depending on the context, wife. Nora’s friend called me femme as in the opposite of butch, as in a queer person who presents as conventionally feminine.

  I remember my shock the first time I met a femme lesbian. It was at a potluck in grad school. This woman was the most mainstream-pretty of all of us, with wavy blond hair and lipstick, but that night she said something about her girlfriend, that their anniversary was coming up. It was so casual, the way she mentioned it, but she had to have known what it would signal. We’d had no clue.

  Oh my god! I’d blurted. You’re gay? Really? She smiled and gave a shrug. It was like witnessing a Martian landing. The year was 2002, and I was twenty-four years old. It had never occurred to me that a lesbian could look like the rest of us, that lesbians could be more than one thing, that anyone could.

  Now Nora’s friend called me femme. She did it in a chummy way: she was femme herself, and she was proud to claim it. I knew she meant to make me feel included, to welcome me to the club. But it didn’t make me feel included. I was and have been a lot of things, none of them settled: a straight woman, a not-straight woman, a mother, a daughter, a wife in a white lace dress, a woman separated from her husband, a woman dating a woman whom some might mistake for a man. Nora’s friend tried to give me language for myself, to make both of us more comfortable, but instead I felt like I’d been calf-roped.

  “The mistake,” writes theorist McKenzie Wark in a letter to writer Kathy Acker, “is to make a fetish of what differentiation produces: gay/straight; butch/femme; top/bottom, etc. Whenever these get hardened into something ‘natural,’ into the law, I get suspicious.”30

  Harden, like the electric-blue curing light that a dentist uses to set a newly filled cavity.

  As a teenager, I wrote a lot of poetry. My father’s best friend was a writer, and he gave me a couple of collections by Adrienne Rich. I don’t know if I knew then that Rich was a lesbian, or if I did, it didn’t mean much. But on the cusp of my thirty-seventh birthday, I took down one of the volumes and thumbed it open to “Splittings”:

  I refuse these givens the splitting

  between love and action I am choosing

  not to suffer uselessly and not to use her

  I choose to love this time for once

  with all my intelligence.

  I had tried to quarantine a part of my life that frightened me. For nearly a year after jury duty, I had tried to push it away. This time I would do something different. I wouldn’t leave me behind.

  19

  Brandon and I lived together for six weeks after I asked for a separation. We slept in the same bed, the way we’d done for a decade. We stopped fighting at home. I wouldn’t do it anymore, wouldn’t fight where June could hear us. We continued to fight, but in therapy.

  I thought of those parachute games children play—the one where you raise your arms to lift the parachute high, as high as it’ll go, and then you quickly step under it and plop down along the edge, trapping the air inside. For a moment the parachute billows above your head like a circus tent. It feels like magic, like time stops. And then, of course, the parachute starts to deflate. Our marriage was like that: the way it was built, we couldn’t inhabit it. It was a structure that didn’t give shelter. This sky falls if we stop holding it up.

  I don’t think we’ve been happy for a while now, I said. This isn’t only about my sexuality.

  I watched a wall go up in front of his face.

  That’s not true, he said.

  I know what is true for me, I said.

  We marched around and around the parachute, sizing it up.

  You’re trying to rewrite history, he said.

  No, I’m not saying our marriage has been bad, I said. On the whole, it’s been good. Our truths can be different and still valid, I said. I don’t think we want the same things. I want what matters to me to matter to you, and you’re allowed to want the same for yourself. We haven’t been able to do that for each other.

  Now you’re just being mean, he said. Why are you so mean?

  I wanted to feel that he was present. I wanted a partner in the everyday muck of domestic life, of parenting, of being a family. It was never about whether he worked nights or whether he remembered to take out the garbage; it was about feeling that he was with me, no matter where he was.

  I think I’ve been lonely for a long time, I said. Have you been lonely too?

  I would have done anything for you, he said. I would have given up anything. I would have sold the businesses, moved anywhere, bought a vacation house, anything. I would have done anything to make you happy.

  Do you really think I could have taken you up on that? I asked. That I could have asked you to leave the restaurants, to choose a new career? Those were offers I could never cash in.

  Why not?

  Because you love your work. Your work is you. Maybe you would have given it up for me, but I would never have asked you for it.

  But I would have! His voice was tight. I would have done it!

  I don’t want to argue anymore, I said. My eyes stung. Please stop trying to make me stay. Please stop trying to work it out. Please—just let me go.

  He watched me cry.

  Maybe this is dumb, he said, but do you want me to let you go in, like, two months, or do you want me to let you go right now?

  I sob-laughed: I want you to let me go right now.

  I got an email from the writer acquaintance whose class I’d spoken to that spring, the day I had the panic attack. She knew nothing about the intervening months. We went out for coffee to catch up. When I finished talking, she said: I don’t know if this is anything, but I noticed the wording you used to describe watching the lawyer in the courtroom. You said, “I wanted to know what it was like to live in her world.”

  Yeah, I said, that sounds right. I’d heard myself say it before, when I told people about jury duty.

  I think it’s interesting, my friend said, that you put it that way. I remember when you wrote about opening Delancey, you said that you had never imagined being a part of “the restaurant world.” That Brandon had chosen to enter into that world, but it wasn’t really yours.

  I remember that, I said. I always thought about it that way: not just as
Delancey, as his restaurant or our restaurant, but as this whole world that we went into, like a separate universe with its own people and its own calendar and its own climate.

  And it was never really yours, said my friend.

  I did come to like it, and to be glad for it, but no.

  Maybe who you are, each of you, was sort of clarified by Delancey, she said. It’s like the restaurant revealed you.

  Brandon moved out in the first days of August. He’d found an apartment across town, near Dino’s, a large one-bedroom with a spacious walk-in closet that could be June’s room. He took me to see it after he’d signed the lease. It was in a handsome brick building, with a wide spiral staircase from the lobby to the landing on the second floor, his floor. I was happy for him that he’d found a nice place. I was happy for June.

  Our friends wanted to know: What had we told her? We told June that our family would now have two houses. We’d have a “Delancey house,” where I lived, not far from Delancey, and a “Dino’s house,” Brandon’s apartment. We presented this as a normal thing, a thing some families do. We said it wasn’t a good thing or a bad thing, though it might be hard sometimes.

  I ordered a stack of books online about separation and divorce, some for parents and some for children. The first one that came was about a family of dinosaurs who get divorced. On page five there was a drawing of a dinosaur in a pink dress and pearls, standing beside a vial of pills and tossing back a martini in one toothy gulp. The caption read, “Sometimes parents who are upset with each other behave in ways that hurt themselves and the rest of the family.” I shoved the book in a bag of recycling.