Nature: I am a lesbian. Nurture: A lesbian growing up in a conservative, mostly-Catholic-but-also-a-little-bit-Baptist family in 1970s Texas is not going to find a lot of people like her to hang out with. I didn’t find them. Terrified of my sexuality, especially since I took the Catholicism thing seriously through my teen years, I kept to myself rather than risk revealing my true nature and getting laughed at/excommunicated/disowned/shot.
Nature: I was severely, chronically depressed for more than thirty years. Depression does not encourage one to run into the arms of people. It encourages one, at best, to find a nice cave or basement to hide in. Nurture: I was severely, chronically depressed for more than thirty years. It guided, if not controlled, every interaction I had with anyone, from family to schoolmates to teachers to coworkers.
None of the above sets up well for partnership, and, lo and behold, I am not partnered.
I never met that one special woman. Nothing ever came of the one-night stands of my twenties and thirties except the ability to claim I am not a virgin. I kept hoping, kept thinking someone would come along, but—no.
Fate? Karma? Bad choices? Bad luck? I don’t know. At this point, my life simply is what it is, and I can, simply, live with it. Honest! If true love hasn’t happened yet, there’s no reason to think it should. Let’s be logical here: I am an introvert who dislikes crowds, and I’m fifty-two years old. I don’t put myself in situations where that special woman might be found. Ergo, I won’t find her.
This is not as bad, to me, as it may sound to others. I’m not morose about it. I have a good life. I am a content, solitary woman.
When I return to Snyder I find, to my astonishment, no one home at Maggie’s. Even the dogs are asleep in the back yard. Opportunity has thrown two bricks this day, and I take advantage of the peace to write my latest blog.
I blog because, duh, I’m a published author and I want to keep myself in readers’ minds. This is especially important in my case since my literary output averages one book every three years. I don’t usually blog about literary stuff, unless I’m promoting my latest book, and today is no exception. I take advantage of the format to work through the deep thinking I did on the drive back from the cemetery, to puzzle out the emotional confusion meeting Jaye Stokes seems to have roiled up in me.
I review the finished product. It’s true, and fairly succinct, and it grounds me back into my normal existence. Pleased, I post the essay and fix myself a glass of iced tea, then settle in with an old Lori Lake classic, hoping to get a chapter or two read before the dogs wake up and start barking.
Six pages in I’m interrupted not by the dogs, but my iPhone. I glance at the caller ID, grimace a little, and hit the ‘accept’ button. “Hey.”
“Rachel.”
“Toni.”
“You’re in one of your moods, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
Antoinette Albaladejo is my closest friend. She’s my publisher as well. She is also no fool. “One, you’re in Texas,” she says. “Two, that’s the most personal blog you’ve written in three years.”
I’m not ready to talk to anyone about what happened at the graveyard today, so I avoid a direct answer. “Are you saying I write too much?”
Toni is also a master of the silent sigh, but I spent twenty-five years as an air traffic controller and still have Vulcan-quality hearing. I sense the slight change in her breathing, the exaggerated patience.
“No, Rachel, you do not write too much. Nobody who’s good ever writes too much.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s got you, doesn’t it?”
She doesn’t have to specify what “it” is. I’ve come a long way in dealing with my depression, but, like the ghost of a bad marriage, it’s never going to leave me. Toni knows this, and is ever-alert to nip my down times in the bud, before they can bloom into full flowers of suicidal devastation.
Today, though, “it” is not really the issue. “Actually, no. I was just pondering my life.”
“Why?”
I scramble to come up with an answer that will throw her off the scent. “Like you said, I’m in Texas, spending a few days with my close-knit and noisy family. Perhaps I needed to remind myself how good I have it.”
“Wouldn’t it be better if you were not in Snyder at all?”
“Aunt Theresa and Uncle Joe are having their sixtieth wedding anniversary celebration. I actually want to be here for them.”
“You’re skipping the Mass, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Thank goodness for small favors.” Neither Toni or I had good experiences with “the faith” growing up. “Family stuff doesn’t usually set you off. Why now?”
“I’m staying at Maggie’s.”
“Why?”
“There’s a soccer camp here this weekend, and the hotels are full.”
Oops—tactical error. Toni knows how much I like the Beautiful Game. “Women’s soccer?”
Drat. “Yep.”
“Are you going to that, too?”
“No.” Probably not. “It’s for kids. Twelve and under or something.”
“Geez, Rachel,” Toni says, exasperation clear in her voice. “Maybe you do spend too much time writing.”
“What?”
“You should get out more into real life. You love watching soccer. Go to the damn camp and spend two hours lusting after a hot coach.”
At least she knows better than to suggest I lust after some teenage girl. “You can’t have it both ways, O Publisher of Mine. I can write books for you, or I can get out into the world. Pick a side and stick to it.”
“I wish you could pick a good woman and stick to her.”
“You know how I feel about inflicting my depression on someone else.”
“The right woman wouldn’t give a shit about your depression. She’d go after it with a blowtorch.”
Okay, I’m done. “Not gonna happen, Toni.” Which is why I wrote the bloody blog—to remind me this is true.
“Because you’re a stubborn fool.” Now she sounds like my mother, West Texas drawl and all. Maybe she thought to be funny, but the words hit the limit of my irritation meter.
“No, because I am a sensible woman who knows her past and her limitations. I gotta go now.”
“Rachel, don’t go away mad.”
“I’m not mad. But I am going away. Catch you later.”
The next morning, the day of the big anniversary party, Maggie informs me she has to go help prepare the food, and would I take her girls, Jean and Becca, to soccer camp?
“Please?” she begs. “You’ll get to meet that Nickerson woman!”
At this point, I swear, I hear a sort of karmic giggle. Of course Maggie’s daughters would be signed up for this camp. They’ve been playing soccer since they were barely out of diapers. But since the alternative is me going to help prepare the food—perish the thought, and perish half my cousins if they’re exposed to my cooking—I agree.
“Take the mini-van,” my cousin says, tossing me the keys. “Later you can tell me what she’s like in person.”
Right. I pack my MacBook, camp chair, a cooler of sodas and snacks, then load Jean and Becca and all their gear into the family’s Honda Odyssey. We drive to the soccer field at Western Junior College. I get the girls signed in, they run off, and I set myself up far away from stray soccer balls, chatty parents and Gorgeous Blondes, to try and get some writing done.
The weather is, like yesterday, pleasantly warm. Less windy, but that makes it more perfect for soccer. Also, I discover, for musing idly about things which have nothing to do with my latest novel. I make an honest effort for the first half hour, but the writing just won’t flow, so eventually I give in, sit back in the camp chair, and let my mind wander where it will.
I remember the day, September 14, but not the year my father first took me to the cemetery in Dunn.
It was the early 1970s for sure; I was right around ten years old, a quiet, tremendously insecure little girl who preferred reading books to almost everything else, including being with other children. My father, an only child himself, could relate. My mother, born in the middle of a passel of kids in a huge Catholic family, never got it.
We went to Dunn that day to commemorate the placing of a new head-stone over the graves of my father’s parents. Me, Mother and Father, and a grim-faced Baptist preacher made the trip, stood over the newly-planted granite, and the three of us listened in silence while the preacher spoke some fire-and-brimstone words about eternal life and heaven and how to get there by forsaking all of life’s pleasures, simple and complicated.
Even at ten years old, or thereabouts, I was learning to tune out these kind of harangues, and soon I had stopped listening, and focused instead on the name of my grandmother.
Rachel E. Johnston. It was the first time I realized I had been named for her, and it shocked me. She had been born Rachel Elizabeth Lee in 1895. Yes, R.E. Lee. My family had strong Confederate roots and probably would have named her Roberta had that been in the Bible. She married Chess Johnston in 1919, bore my father William in 1921, and died in 1927 when she was thirty-two. For a long time afterwards, I thought I too would die at thirty-two (I was a weird kid), but as you can see I was wrong.
As the preacher droned on I shifted, eventually, from Grandmother’s name to her husband’s.
Chess Johnston was forty-two when he married Rachel. That’s old for a first marriage, which it was, in his case. But my own parents married in their mid-thirties, and what I wondered about instead was why a young woman like Rachel would marry someone so much older. I asked my father about it later, but all he ever said was “It was pretty common back then,” and I had to let it go.
I drift out of reverie long enough to ensure the day is still sunny and the soccer camp is in full swing. I rise from my chair and stretch, then stroll over to the stands and find the restroom. Back at my little out of the way spot, I pull a Diet Cherry Dr. Pepper out of my cooler, pop it open, and fall right back into the past.
This time I reflect on my father, William Stuart Johnston. If I was ten that long ago day in the 1970s, he would have been in his fifties, around the same age I am now.
Whoa.
Same age, but very different life paths. William, an orphan at six, was raised by Grandmother Rachel’s brother, Jefferson, a hardscrabble farmer who had no money in the heart of the Depression but somehow managed to feed his family and make sure his kids, including William, learned to read and write. My father worked the farm as hard as anyone, but he also loved the world books opened up to him. After Pearl Harbor, he jumped at the chance to go out and see some of it. His view, though, whatever wonder he may have anticipated, was skewed by trips to islands with strange names: Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima. While growing up I often wished William had never returned to Scurry County, but the older I got, the more I thought I understood why he did. My father came back to the comfort of the familiar. Here the dirt was red because of geology, not because of blood. He earned a degree at Texas Tech, became a teacher at Western Junior College, and never left again.
He found a contentment, I believe, a way to detach from what he’d seen. Like his father, he married late, like his parents had only one child. Unlike them, he lived to see her grow to adulthood and leave West Texas herself. I never told my parents I was a lesbian, the driving force behind my exit. I learned very young they preferred silence to detail, and if he imagined I was getting out into the world the way he had once wanted to, that worked for us both.
I raise my head at the all-too-familiar shouts of both Jean and Becca.
“Rachel! Rachel! Jaye says she knows you!”
The munchkins are bouncing along with a tall, smiling blonde between them. She does not bounce, but moves with a grace I could watch for hours. Could have been watching for hours. Ah, opportunity lost.
“Hi, cousin,” Jaye Stokes says cheerfully. “I thought you weren’t coming.”
I unfold myself from the camp chair, stand, and shrug. “I didn’t know they’d need a ride. Have they driven you crazy yet?”
“Is she our cousin, too?” Becca cries excitedly.
“Becca,” I say, “we’re right here. You don’t have to shout.”
Jean stage whispers, “Is she our cousin, too?”
I shake my head. “Nope. She’s from my father’s side of the family. She’s mine all mine.”
“I think I like that,” Jaye says.
Her sincerity brings back the same hint of confusion I felt yesterday, but I cover it up by turning back to the kids. “Why aren’t you guys out there? Did Nickerson kick you off?”
“It’s lunch time.” Becca announces. If not quite a shout, town criers would still be proud. “Come on. You have to eat with us!”
Lunch time? I check my watch. Sure enough, high noon has arrived.
“Parents and kids are supposed to eat together,” Jaye explains. “This is when Nickory will answer any questions.”
“But not about the hair,” the girls say in unison.
“Questions about soccer only,” Jaye says.
“Okay, got it.” The girls turn and sprint back toward the pitch. Jaye and I head back more slowly, walking side by side.
“Do you answer questions, too?” I ask her.
“If I’m asked. Nickory’s the star, though.”
I nod. This is certainly true. “I looked you up on Wikipedia last night.”
Jaye Stokes’ career pales compared to her friend’s. She and Nickerson are both thirty-one, but she grew up in Iowa, while Nickerson hails from New Hampshire. Jaye had been a regular on U.S. Soccer’s Youth National Teams, the Under-17, Under-18, and Under-20 squads and had attended soccer powerhouse North Carolina on scholarship. Respectable, for sure. But, while always in the pool of players from which the main National Team is chosen, she’s never been named to the big squad itself.
She also appears to be single, but that’s neither here nor there.
Jaye lets out a kind of half-laugh. “Checking me out? Why?”
Deciding “Because I’m trying to figure out if you’re a lesbian” is not a viable reply, I improvise. “Family matters.”
This rates a sideways glance. “Does this mean I can find out all about you?”
“Not on Wikipedia.” This is strictly true. The Fyrequeene, lesbian novelist, has a Wikipedia entry. Rachel Johnston, semi-recluse, does not.
“So I’ll have to ask you directly.”
She doesn’t get the chance, though, because we have reached the lunch grouping.
Or rather, the lunch horde. One hundred camp participants, plus at least one parent or guardian for each, plus the players and coaches running things, makes for a crowd I’m not prepared for.
I stop short. My demon depression roars out of its dark corner in the form of sudden panic (a favorite tactic). I have never liked too many people around me at once, and despite years of therapy, deep breaths, and forced trips to sporting events, my loathing of crowds has gradually shifted to fear.
I tighten my jaw, take some slow deep breaths, and mentally remind myself that it’s only lunch. A simple, perfectly innocuous, noisy lunch with a lot of other people.
I feel a gentle touch on my arm. “You okay?” Jaye asks.
I smile at her, because it builds up my confidence, and because I’m determined to win this inner battle. “I’m not much of a crowd person.”
She seems to gauge my concern. “How about we sit on the edges somewhere, then?”
We? “Uh, sure.”
“Okay. Wait here.”
Four long rows of picnic tables, ends pushed together, have been set up to handle the lunch offerings, while a fifth set of tables nearby holds massive quantities of Texas barbecue, with all the fixings. The dishes are laid out buffet style, every one to serve herself. How the kids will
be able to move after this meal is beyond me but hey, I’m not playing soccer and don’t have to worry about it. I watch Jaye wade into the crowd, find Nickerson, who’s about the tallest person here today, talk and gesture for a moment, then wade back out. Along the way she spots and snags Becca and Jean.
“Last row, far end,” she announces, and off we go to the designated spot. Jaye settles me and Jean in to hold our places, then takes Becca with her to get food for us four. When they get back, she makes sure I’m at the very end of the row, then anchors herself in the middle while several girls and their adults gather around us.
This works for me. I can jump up and run off screaming if I have to. Having the escape option allows me to sit and eat in relative comfort while getting caught up in observing Jaye, sitting there like she’s the head of her own little picnic island. She happily takes questions from the kids sitting around her, compliments them on how they’ve done so far, asks them and their parents stuff about their own lives.
She’s good at this. Every girl gets a little attention, and the parents can chat, too, but Jaye subtly keeps things focused on the children and soccer. She parries questions about her friend “Nickory” by saying the woman herself will be over in a minute, and soon I see that yes, indeed, the goalkeeper is working her way through the horde, spending a few minutes with each “island,” then moving on to the next.
I know a fair amount about Nickerson. She’s been a mainstay on the Women’s National Team since 2002 and the best goalkeeper in the world since 2008. She and super striker Wendy Allerton are a big part of the reason why the U.S. Women are top-ranked internationally and always World Cup favorites. Because they are both six feet tall, reporters call them “The Twin Towers.” They have anchored the U.S. Team for almost ten years.
Allerton is an extroverted chatterbox, bouncing from party to party and lover to lover (both sexes included) with gleeful abandon. Nickerson has been linked to the same woman since college, never talks to reporters except to say “no comment,” and would be a complete dud media-wise except for the legend of “Nickerson’s Hair.”
Game Changers Page 2
