“I’m getting to see more of the city than I’d thought I would,” Ann says, with no detectable sarcasm. I apologize, she shakes her head and smiles, and we fall silent. Once we’ve left the city and are zooming up the right freeway in the right direction, I steal a surreptitious peek at her chest. Pay dirt! Her pale blue button-down shirt is gapped between the middle two buttons, providing me a clear view of her bra-less, petite, but undeniably female breasts. I allow myself a moment of disappointment—they’re not quite the voluptuous kind I’d dreamed of—before acknowledging that, like her body, her breasts are about the same size as mine.
We arrive at Fife’s. I park the car. Together, silently, we approach the registration desk. It is not just my heart and bladder that are pounding now. My fingernails are pounding. My eyelashes are pounding. I say my name to the man behind the desk.
“Ah, yes!” he exclaims loudly enough for all the real gay people in the fifty-acre resort to hear. “The ladies with the twin beds!”
Without looking at Ann, I snatch the keys from his hand and slink back to the car.
“I just thought . . . ” I mutter in Ann’s direction as we approach Cabin 7. “It’s okay, Meredith,” she says, her smile a bit stretched now. “Whatever you want to do is fine.”
What I want to do, I realize as we let ourselves into Cabin 7, is lie down. With Ann. I don’t care about the food I’ve left to spoil in the car or what my husband will think or all the years I’ve spent longing for sex with a woman, or even the resounding pain in my bladder. I don’t know what I want to do, once we’re lying down together. I just want to do it. Just like I wanted to with John Melnikoff in fourth grade. Just like I wanted to with Paul when I first saw him hawking his underground newspapers outside our high school. Just like I wanted to, at one time, with my clearly soon-to-be-ex-husband.
The most unexpected thing about this feeling is that it’s so utterly familiar. I always thought lust would feel different when it wasn’t heterosexual.
I really do want to have sex with this person, I realize to my own great surprise. I really do want to have sex with this woman.
But not just yet. Before I can cross the line that I have approached and avoided for thirty years or so, I must avoid it a while longer. I say I need a nap. Ann says she’ll go for a walk. I declare that I’m not really tired. I jump up and suggest a walk together. Ann and I walk along the narrow sandy path to the river, and there, on the rocky river bank, I am overwhelmed again by the magnetic pull of gravity, or lust. So I do. Lie down. On my back, with my too-small breasts and my fantasies pointed at the sky. Because I simply cannot stand up when I am this close to Ann, this close to my dream.
She stands with her left foot brushing my right thigh, skipping flat rocks across the slow-moving, muddy river. She places three sun-warmed stones carefully on my stomach. She might as well have reached down and caressed my clit. I’m sure she can hear the gathering and dripping of juices between my legs. I wonder if this is lesbian flirting. If she feels what I feel. If she would believe that I feel what she feels.
We go to a restaurant for dinner. She eats a burger; I toy with my tortellini. “I thought most lesbians were vegetarians,” I comment. She winces but says patiently, “I’m not.”
It’s getting dark out. Ann orders a beer. “Are you an alcoholic?” I ask. (I restrain myself from confiding that I’d read that many gay people are.) She asks why I’m asking. I ask how old she was when her father died. She asks if I’m nervous about going back to our cabin, about going to bed. I nod. She says, again, “Meredith, we don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.” We go to the cabin. What do I want to do?
I unpack the nightgown I’ve purchased for this occasion—a flannel one, to prove my intimate knowledge of lesbians’ affinity for flannel. I go into the bathroom to put it on, peeling the sopping, sticky underpants off my inflamed genitals. When I come out Ann is in one of the twin beds, wearing a white cotton T-shirt. I wonder if that means I won’t get any points for the flannel. I wonder what else, if anything, she’s wearing.
I climb into the empty twin bed. I’m shaking; my teeth are chattering. I think of my husband, my children. I close my eyes and see a movie of me getting up, getting into bed with Ann, her arms folding around me, her fingers doing things between my legs no man could ever know to do, my hands squeezing her breasts, her nipples against my nipples. If I ever had a bladder infection, I can’t remember it now. If I ever thought I was kidding about this lesbian thing, I was wrong.
I kick the blanket off my legs, leap up, and slide into bed with Ann. She puts her arms around me and breathes deeply. I am quaking inside and outside. She says, even now, “It’s okay, Meredith. We can just hold each other.”
My body has a need that’s burning a hole through the mattress. My brain is hanging on for dear life to what remains of my heterosexuality. Ann strokes my arms with her soft, small, hairless hands. I think of the night, just a few short weeks ago, when Richard and I told our sons we were separating. I think of how Peter asks every day when Daddy and I are going to live together again. Ann’s hand brushes past my breast. My cunt clutches. I pull away slightly.
Eventually Ann falls asleep. I listen to her kitty snores and think of the nights I’ve spent kicking Richard so he’ll stop snoring, snores that shook the bed and made sleeping together intolerable and finally impossible. Snores that made me wake up angrier even than when I’d fallen asleep.
Ann’s digital watch beeps on the hour. After the fourth beep I slip out from between her arms, pull on my clothes, and walk into the dark night. The air is scented with jasmine, like the jasmine Richard planted along the fence of our home in San Jose. There’s a phone booth outside the hotel office, with a night light that guides me to it. I dial my home number, where my husband and children sleep.
Before it rings, I hang up. What will I say? “This is your last chance to save me from this,” I imagine myself saying to Richard. “Please . . . save me from this.”
I know he can’t. I know I can’t. I know that lesbian isn’t really the right word, that my need to separate my life from Richard’s and my need to feel Ann’s hands and mouth on me are two different needs with two different sources. I know that I have lusted after men, and that I now lust after a woman who sleeps just a few yards from where I stand. I go to where she is.
Living the Authentic Life
Micki Grimland
My daughter Haley came in half-undressed from ice hockey practice. She was sobbing, a very rare experience, as she is my stoic child. I would have expected my daughters Taylor or Cami to come in crying about all kinds of things, but not Haley.
“Honey, what in the world is wrong?” I asked.
Between tears streaming down her face and sobs she said, “Mom, I just found out my two ice hockey coaches are lesbians, and they are a couple!”
This was something I had known but had never uttered to anyone because they coached kids. We lived in the very white, very Republican, very conservative Bible Belt suburbs of Houston, a place where too many people think “gay” is synonymous with “child molester.”
“Oh, honey,” I said.
She replied, “I’m not crying because they’re gay, Mom. I am totally okay with that. I am crying because they are living a lie.”
A thunderbolt of lightning raced through my body. My world stood still. My heart pounded and blood began pulsating through my system. She caught it in my eyes.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?”
“Haley, I struggle with the same thing that your coaches do.”
She immediately stopped crying.
“Are you coming out to me, Mom?”
I said, “Haley, you’ve teased me for years about being a lesbian.” At that moment, Taylor walked in.
“Mom’s coming out to me,” Haley said. “I need some therapy.”
Because I am a therapist, this was a common joke between the kids when something heavy needed some lightness. Taylor’s eyes flew wide open.<
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“What?”
“Haley’s hockey coaches are closeted lesbians, and I struggle with the same thing they do.” At the time, I had been married for twenty-three years to my college sweetheart, the son of a very conservative Southern Baptist family.
“Mom, it is one thing for us to tell you that you’re a lesbian. It’s a completely other thing for you to tell us!”
Once, doing a homework assignment, we were unable to get onto Taylor’s Internet account, so we used my account. She said, “I know your password; it’s ‘lesbian.’”
I said, “Why would you say that? That’s not my password.”
She pulled me eyeball to eyeball and said, “Because if it weren’t for Haley and Cami and I, you would be a lesbian.”
Many comments similar to this were uttered over the years before I came out.
To step into the authenticity of who you are when you are a closeted gay woman—a mother to three girls whom you worship—married to a man you love and respect (and have great sex with), is a complicated web of paradoxes.
Carl Jung said it best: “Soul is made in the tension of a paradox.” I held that tension secretly for years. In college, I was acutely aware of being attracted to a friend of mine, but I chalked it up to her making me nervous because she was so beautiful. Then, as a young professional, I was at a conference on marital therapy in New Orleans. Late one night, some friends and I went to a nightclub. Walking behind my friends, my eyes fixed on this beautiful woman in white pants. I was transfixed. Her boyfriend leaned down and whispered, “What are you, a lesbian, or what?” His words still sting in my ears. It was my first awareness that I didn’t look at women the way my other girlfriends did.
On my fortieth birthday, my husband threw me a surprise party. As the night went on, a friend pointed out, “You are so connected to your women friends. You’re the most like a lesbian without being a lesbian of anyone I’ve ever known.”
My good friend Sarah had been openly gay since she was a teenager. She and I began spending more and more time together. I was intrigued by her—mesmerized by her, in fact. I told myself it was her spirituality and interest in in-depth psychology that drew me to her. As a therapist who had done a lot of my own interpersonal work, I was not prepared for the lessons my unconscious was preparing to teach me.
One day on the phone, Sarah said to me: “You know, Micki, you are the most touchy-feely person I know. You touch everyone: people you love, acquaintances, even strangers. But you never touch me!” I began to shake and sweat. I said, “That’s not true!” She was right, I hug everyone. I was totally unaware that I had never touched or hugged her.
She said, “I’m coming over tonight and you’re going to give me a hug.” I laughed it off, but became very nervous and my heart began to palpitate. She did come over that night. Being the control freak that I am, I turned her around to hug her from behind so that I could be in charge of the hug. She turned to hug me face-to-face, and to my shock and surprise, I kissed her. When I did, something deep inside me shifted with an almost audible click . . . as if I’d found that one puzzle piece that had been lost under the sofa for years . . . the one that completes the picture. After that kiss, my world began to shake and quiver. An emotional earthquake was imminent.
I fell deeply in love with her. I call her “the pathmaker of my becoming.” As a Southern Baptist, deeply devoted mother, and believer in the vows of marriage, I also fell into a deep depression. I was totally split. To quote my analyst: “What kept me alive the first half of my life was keeping me from living the second half of my life.”
I was forty years old, married to a man who I didn’t want to hurt, and I was mama bear to three children. I believed that my calling in life was to protect them from pain. And I was madly in love with a woman. In her depth of love for me in return, Sarah moved out of state because the split was killing me. I was living a total lie. I lost twenty pounds, my hair was falling out, and I was taking antidepressants. My analyst, whose devoted compass kept me afloat during this time, kept telling me he didn’t think I was gay. He thought I was breaking free from the “good girl, adult-child-of-an-alcoholic-home, driven-to-perfection, OCD, control freak paradigm” from which I operated. I convinced myself that he was right, put Sarah in a sacred locked box in my heart, cut off all contact with her, and tried to squeeze back into my old self. However, nothing felt right anymore.
I lost interest in sex with my husband, poured myself into the girls, and tried not to be gay, convincing myself it was just Sarah. I did pretty well until two years later, when I went to my daughter’s ice hockey tournament in Canada and was smitten by a woman there. She said to me at one point, “You’ve been with a woman, haven’t you?”
“Only one,” I declared, “and I’m not going down that path again—I’m married.”
We became email buddies and she would periodically ask, “Are you single, yet?”
I began open discussions with my husband, who would say, “You’re not gay, Micki. You’re just ecumenical. Your mind is open—you just can wrap your arms around more things than most people.” However, I began to think about it, and came to the conclusion that we have sex based on our identity. If we’re crazy, we have crazy sex. If we’re passionate in life, we’re passionate in bed. If we’re shut down inside, we’re usually shut down sexually. If we’re gay, we’re most fulfilled in same-sex relationships. Being gay is about identity more than sexuality. Sexuality is a by-product of your identity. I began to accept my identity as a gay woman. It wasn’t Sarah, it was me.
Talking to the kids and going through the divorce was a deeply emotional, painful process. We were able to get a “collaborative divorce” with no battle. Even though that made it very civil, it was still very hard for all of us. The deep hurt my sexuality has caused my ex-husband and his family and my kids is my only regret. To walk into the fire of this transformation is hard, but holding steady to the truth makes it doable. Like the coal burning the diamond into freedom, so is the coming-out practice.
Today, I am happier, more fulfilled, more complete than I could have ever imagined. Sarah and I remain friends and I treasure her deep gift to my becoming. I have been married to a woman, Sharon, for three years now. I never could have imagined a relationship this intimate, this honest, this deep, this fun, in all my days. She is my rock, my resting place, my exhale, my lover, and my best friend. I shall age and die with this woman by my side. We married in a chapel in Texas in front of 250 guests.
I am now fifty-two; my children are twenty-two, twenty, and fifteen. They are happily adjusted and love my partner. We recently had the joy of telling our story on Oprah. It is our desire to help people see us as their neighbors, their friends, and to see that our sexuality and identity are nothing to fear. We are spiritual, we are mothers and fathers, workers, shoppers, devoted family members, much more similar to heterosexuals than different. We’re not here to destroy families, seduce straight people, or scare anyone. We are here to live our lives and love the people we love. One of the unfortunate aspects of being gay in our culture is that while I had so many rights as a married straight woman, I do not have the same rights as a married gay woman. I still pay taxes and support my country in many ways. It is unfortunate that my rights are not equal because of my sexuality. We are here to be Americans, to claim the truth of “All people are created equal,” and to receive equal access to the constitutional pursuit of our happiness. It will be a beautiful day when that happiness—alongside our rights—will be recognized for all Americans.
A Door Opening Out
Susan Grier
“I magine a door in your mind,” Ray instructs, our pens poised to begin the first exercise of the morning. My graduate writing workshop is gathered around a picnic table on the back deck of a sprawling stone mansion, home to our program’s ten-day summer residency.
“Describe the door,” he continues. “Then imagine walking through the door and describe what is on the other side. Now imagine that someone
approaches you. Describe the encounter you have with this person.”
The words flow from my hand—an old, rustic door opening out to a lush, exotic garden that draws me into its shelter; the gentle rustling of someone approaching to tell me I have entered a new dimension of my life; the awe I feel at the beauty and richness of this place; the sense of peace enveloping me as the door closes forever behind me.
Afterward, when we share our responses, Ray has a comment about mine. “Hmmm,” he muses. “I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone write about a door opening to the outside.”
The scene I’d conjured intrigued me on that warm July morning, but the residency’s packed schedule left little time to ponder its meaning. At age fifty, maternal obligations fulfilled, I had gathered my courage and applied to the program to find out what I was made of as a writer. The work infused me with excitement and possibility, a certainty that I was doing the thing I was meant to do, finally, and it was taking me—the me who had crouched, insignificant, in the shadows of my own life—to a place I’d never been before, a place that felt good and right.
Months later, back at home in Maryland and well into my third-semester work and teaching, I returned to Ray’s comment with a mix of disbelief and amazement, seeing in my words a truth I couldn’t have fathomed before summer turned to fall, before seemingly random forces and events fell into place.
That fall, as I will always think of it, the chair of the English department asked me, via last-minute email, to mentor a new adjunct. I’d met Trish briefly at the pre-semester faculty meeting, taking her in with one glance. In contrast to my summery outfit of striped capri pants and matching sandals, she wore thick jeans and brown lug-soled shoes in a way that read butch, a look and manner that usually set off a vague internal alarm—careful, watch yourself, not too close—even as it fascinated me. But the yellow of her shirt brought out the softness of her blond cropped hair and the pink of her cheeks, and her eyes held a kind of earnestness, an unexpected vulnerability that drew me in. When she sat down beside me, I felt a secret thrill.
Dear John, I Love Jane Page 20
