The Unspeakable

by Meghan Daum

  Not that my gun shyness didn’t belie some measure of sincere interest. For as long as I can remember, females held infinitely more fascination than males. Not in a sexual way but in a visceral way, in an existential way. This is common, of course, in young girls and even in adult women. Women are more colorful, more layered, more interesting to watch. But as a child I felt a need to study them almost like textbooks. Having no older sister (or younger one, for that matter), I looked to outside peers for clues on how to be female. Just about every year I made a point of picking out some other girl, usually a slightly older girl with whom I’d never exchanged a word, and labeling her “the mystery girl.” I would then proceed to observe her in a manner you might call opportunistic stalking. This did not mean approaching her or seeking any direct interaction but, rather, watching her intensely when I happened to spot her in the schoolyard or at the local pool. I would note the make and color of her bicycle, the type of book bag she carried, whether or not she wore socks with her tennis shoes.

  The mystery girls were never girly girls. They were almost always quietly tomboyish, or at least marked by a degree of gravitas and self-possession that separated them from the great, giggling masses. There was something to learn from all of them. From Gretchen, my first mystery girl, who was in fourth grade when I was in second, I got the idea of coveting a blue Raleigh three-speed and wearing tennis socks with pompoms on the backs. From Dawn, a delicate-featured flutist I targeted in junior high school, I learned that boat-neck shirts were ideal for showing off prominent collarbones, which I could see were very good things to have. In high school and even college, I kept multiple mystery girls in a steady rotation, though with the bulk of my observational energy now focused on males, I tended to appreciate these girls mostly in fleeting moments. There was the violinist Elizabeth and the beguiling manner in which she lifted her expensive instrument from its case and, as she arranged her music on the stand, held it casually in her left hand as though it were any old thing. There was the track star Julie with her tanned, coltish legs. In college there was Victoria, who mounted futuristic productions of Ibsen plays, wasn’t afraid to eat alone in the dining hall, and drove an old Peugeot with plates from a southern state (it was rumored that her mother was a United Daughter of the Confederacy; it was also rumored that Victoria was either bisexual or a lesbian).

  Though I had a friendly acquaintanceship with Victoria, the rest of the mystery girls were almost complete mysteries—people I barely knew. They weren’t major preoccupations, more like miniature hobbies, objects of passing intrigue that appeared in my line of vision from time to time. It’s probably worth mentioning that my mother was an early proponent of the mystery-girl concept. When, as an impressionable seven-year-old, I told her about Gretchen, whose name I didn’t even know at the time and who I must have brought up by way of expressing my desire to copy her in some fashion (via pompom socks or a Raleigh bike), my mother said I was too young for a three-speed but that I could instead amuse myself by thinking about “this person you so admire” and trying to learn more about her. I’m inclined to say my mother suggested we find out where Gretchen lived by following her home from the pool (an activity on which my mother would have had to accompany me, since I wasn’t allowed to cavort around the neighborhood alone), but that sounds crazy now. It sounds genuinely stalkerish, though some version of stalking was not necessarily out of my mother’s character. (She sometimes followed me to school for fear I’d be abducted; she took walks at night so she could see into neighbors’ lit windows.)

  Yet stalking had no place in the equation. It wasn’t that I wanted to get to know these girls. It wasn’t that I’d necessarily even have liked them if I had. It was that I wanted to be them. Blond, pale-skinned, seemingly comfortable in her own skin, Gretchen was essentially a better version of blond, pale-skinned, hyper-self-conscious me. As with the girls that followed, Gretchen was apt to be spotted alone. She came across to me as a free agent, a doer of her own thing. Never lodged in a bramble of tittering, whispering, terrifying girls, never wearing a uniform of any kind, never with her parents (and now that I think of it, I suspect I unconsciously assumed that Gretchen, like a Peanuts comic strip character, had no parents, that they were irrelevant to her existence), Gretchen was a series of portraits: girl with bicycle, girl with schoolbooks, girl with tanned legs and white pompom socks. Like Elizabeth and Julie and probably even Victoria, she was almost certainly less autonomous than I imagined her to be. Almost certainly she was just as social and cliquish as the girls I had deemed unworthy of mystery. Almost certainly this was true of all my mystery girls. For all I know, Gretchen went to college and joined an old-fashioned sorority and never ate a meal alone for the rest of her life. For all I know, Victoria placed her tray on the conveyor belt after those solitary dinners, reported directly to the nearest keg party, and spent the remainder of the evening doing beer bongs with the lacrosse team—though perhaps not the men’s lacrosse team.

  With the exception of Victoria, who attracted me just enough to petrify me, it never crossed my mind to do something like sleep with or even kiss one of my mystery girls. This would have ruined the mystery on countless levels, starting with the fact that I’d probably have to have a conversation with them first. But since honorary dykedom almost always requires a trial membership in legitimate dykedom, I knew I’d eventually have to give it the old college try.

  College tries, of course, are best suited for college. Ever the late bloomer, I waited a few years until graduate school. Entering the pleasantly dingy, ambition-stoked classrooms of a certain writing program at a certain university on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I found much of the expected fare: egotistical yet painfully thin-skinned young men obsessed with finding literary agents, socially awkward poets, and women seeming to want only to write about their early sexual experiences. But there was something else, too. There was a grand coterie of lesbians, a posse of women whose hybrid of urban grit and flinty Martha’s Vineyard–ishness (black leather jackets with plaid flannel shirts, ragg wool sweaters, Doc Marten boots, and silver jewelry) captivated me so thoroughly that I soon forgot there was anyone else in the program at all. “The whole place is lesbian!” I’d trumpet to friends on the outside. “Every damn one of them!”

  There was Debbie, a serious-minded former newspaper reporter. There was Annie, a tiny person who wore enormous Irish wool sweaters and had also worked as a reporter. Her girlfriend was a modern dancer. They were a major power couple as far as I was concerned. There was Lynn, a particularly cute one in my opinion, who wore a tough-looking motorcycle jacket but had a soft, floppy haircut and freckles that reminded me of Melissa Gilbert as Laura Ingalls on the Little House on the Prairie television series (I’d been a major fan, natch). There were plenty more in the posse: Karen and Katherine and Jessica and so on. But as a point of fact, they weren’t all gay. Their weekend gatherings included plenty of straight girls who, like me, were either unwilling or unable to get with the standard-issue feminine program—in other words, mystery girls demystified. On weekends we’d sit around someone’s apartment drinking cheap Merlot and listening to the gynocentric musical stylings of newcomers like Joan Osborne and Jewel.

  I never felt anything but totally at ease at these parties. I felt both appreciated and not particularly singled out, as if my presence were a bottle of average-tasting wine that would be unremarked upon but happily consumed nonetheless. One Saturday night, however, I arrived at the party and was met with looks that suggested amusement, concern, and vindication all at once.

  “So what’s up? How are you?” they all basically said in unison.

  I replied that I was fine. A little stressed with schoolwork, but whatever.

  “You doing okay with all of this?” asked Annie.

  “All of what?” I asked.

  I have historically prided myself on my powers of perception. Yet I’d apparently missed a whole series of signals emitted by a certain classmate, another lesbian who was only tange
ntially in our gang and whose real name happened to be the same as Lynn’s real name (I will call her Lynn B.).

  Earlier that week, Lynn B. had invited me on an outing, to a swim meet, specifically. She did not know any of the swimmers personally, she said, but was enough of a sports enthusiast to regard her recent enrollment in the university as an occasion to cheer on the Lady Lions as they hurled themselves through the tangy waters of the campus pool. Seeing the invitation as nothing more than a gesture of friendship, I’d accepted, though no set arrangements were made.

  But evidently the gesture was more than friendly. Arriving at the Saturday night meet-up, I was shocked to find myself at the center of a major piece of gossip.

  “We hear you and Lynn B. might be an item,” Debbie said, sounding like a worried mother but also a bit excited.

  “What?” I yelped. “What are you talking about?

  I was then informed that this was no innocent swim meet but a perilously spring-loaded tête-à-tête (“She asked you to a sporting event?” Annie bellowed. “Get a clue!”) and that going through with it was essentially tantamount to letting a man buy you dinner and then going back to his apartment to “borrow a book.” I would, in other words, be sending strong signals, if not downright asking for it.

  “Don’t worry,” Annie said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  From there, the gathering resumed its standard rhythms. Drinks were poured, smokes were lit, the door buzzer heralded a stream of friends and friends of friends and Indian food delivery. We talked about our writing projects and about how this new artist Jewel probably wouldn’t go anywhere. (So intense was my connoisseurship of girl singer-songwriters that within days of Jewel’s debut release I’d not only purchased and listened to the CD, I already hated it.)

  Lynn and I ended up leaving the party at the same time that night. Emerging from the steamy clutches of the overheated building and tiptoeing across the black ice and blown trash of upper Broadway, we returned to the subject of my would-be date. I said something about being an unintentional tease, about feeling bad about it, about feeling somewhat unmoored in my life lately and like someone had clipped off the ends of my antennae. I was missing signs, dialing things out. She told me not to sweat it too much. Then she gave me a nervous glance and said, “If you’re going to sleep with any of us, just promise it’ll be me.”

  Life, of course, is a process of elimination. To grow up and get to know yourself is primarily an exercise in taking things off the table. It’s not that I didn’t want to sleep with Lynn. I did—at least I didn’t not want to. But as our initial romp (terrifying, fascinating, somewhat performative on my part) faded into a string of more lackluster encounters, I found myself in a sped-up version of many of my previous, long-term relationships, my desire waning in predictable increments in just a few months’ time. First I was happy to skip the main stage activities. Then I just wanted to cuddle. Then I just wanted to sit on the couch and watch TV.

  What was clear almost immediately about this little adventure was that I was in it less for the sex than for the sociology. The thing I really loved to do with Lynn was talk to her—about lots of subjects, but about lesbian stuff in particular. I wanted to break down the different levels of femmeness and butchery: femme, high femme, stone femme, soft butch, stone butch, sport dyke, and so on. I wanted to discuss the fact that Jodie Foster and Kristy McNichol both grew up to be big-time “members of the church.” On a couple of occasions, Lynn took me on field trips to lesbian bars, one of which was tucked away improbably on the ground floor of some generic midtown office building. It was not a place for dabblers. Its clientele covered a cultural and socioeconomic spectrum I had never before seen in one room. There were working-class butches with unironic mullets, femmes who looked like mafia wives, and full-bore trannies. The whole scene freaked me out enough to make me realize that I was not a lesbian so much as someone who appreciated a good haircut. And contrary to my preconceptions, these could in no way be counted upon as a standard feature of the gay female population.

  Lynn humored me for a while, allowing our relationship to remain inside my comfort zone of mix-tape exchanges and mostly platonic sleepovers bathed in the glow of scented candles that, by two a.m., had burned themselves into lavender puddles on the top of her bookshelf. In the end, though, I just didn’t have it in me to play for the other team. I was twenty-five. There was a lot in the world I was still trying on for size. Lynn was thirty-four and had never had sex with a man. She was the real deal, a “gold star lesbian.” For my birthday, she gave me a jewelry box made of beveled glass and silver. It was exquisite, at once delicate and sturdy. I loved it. I knew I had to end things.

  Lynn wasn’t surprised but she cried anyway. This irritated me. It also gave me a new appreciation for men, who are expected to deal with emotional women in much the same way they’re expected to help lift heavy objects. They have to sit there with the blubbering and pretend it isn’t making them horribly uncomfortable. They have to try to not let on that they’re doing a furious calculation in their heads as to how long they have to stay before they can walk away without looking like an asshole.

  But Lynn’s emotionalism pulled the veil off something else, too. It revealed something thorny and discomfiting, something that felt at once flattering and insulting, something that I’d probably known subconsciously throughout our entire affair but swatted away whenever it crept into my awareness. And that was that even though Lynn was the senior executive in the relationship and I was the intern, even though she was the veteran dyke and I was the honorary dyke, even though she wore a full-fledged classic black leather biker jacket and I wore a vintage suede coat and miniskirts with tights and chunky Italian loafers, she was playing the girl part and I was playing the guy part. She was the crier and I was the instigator of the tears. She was leaving phone messages and I was taking a little too long to call back. She was the clinger and I was the puller away. She was the femme and I was the butch. I didn’t like it one bit.

  Among the men I dated over the next several years were an airline pilot and a guy who chopped his own wood.

  * * *

  Almost two decades later, I now know that it wasn’t Lynn who was making me the butch. I was one already. I had always been one. And even today, when I have long hair and a husband and have resigned myself to dusting on a little makeup if I’m going somewhere fancy, I’m still a butch. I’m a particular kind of butch you find in straight women, a butch not defined by clothes or hair or physicality but by something more essential, something perhaps identifiable only to other butches of this genre. You could call us secret butches but that wouldn’t be quite right, since whatever it is that makes us this way is the dominant chord of our character. Indeed, this butchness hides in plain sight. It’s more like a shadow, an aura, a phantom. It’s not that we don’t want to play traditional women’s roles. It’s not that we don’t want to take care of our families or have beautiful, meticulously kept homes or that we can’t have strong opinions about furniture upholstery or cake decoration or attachment parenting. It’s that we’re going to express these opinions and carry out these practices with a certain anti-girliness, a certain lack of bullshit. We do not, for instance, elevate our vocal pitch at the end of declarative sentences as though asking a question. We do not apply makeup in public. We do not wear enormous diamond rings to yoga class with the intention of sticking them in our neighbor’s face while holding the Warrior II position. Being a phantom butch should not be confused with being a tomboy. Tomboyhood is a childlike state. Butch, phantom or otherwise, is an adult-woman state. The tomboy may be the precursor to the butch but sometimes it’s just the precursor to being good at sports, which leads to popularity in school and is just as likely to result in getting elected homecoming queen as getting mistaken for Martina Navratilova.

  Some women who seem to aspire to phantom butchery don’t actually have the goods. Meanwhile, some who you’d never consciously think of in such terms are bathing in it. Madonna,
for instance, has always been too invested in her fuckability to be a butch, though Beyoncé most certainly qualifies. Many actual lesbians don’t even make the cut. Portia de Rossi, partner of Ellen DeGeneres, is not a phantom butch. However, Ellen’s former partner Anne Heche, who is now married to a man and therefore a “hasbian,” most definitely is.

  Patti Smith, the indisputable queen mother of honorary dykedom, and her protégée Chrissie Hynde are both so butch that phantom doesn’t even enter into the equation (ditto Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, even more so postdivorce). Sarah McLaughlin may be the face of the Lilith Fair and a de facto honorary dyke, but she’s no butch. Her vibe is too much like the Anthropologie1 store, floral and curlicue and bursting with too many ambient layers (necklaces atop necklaces, fur-lined collars, bejeweled bustiers worn with jeans; a look, admittedly, that I aspired to incorporate into my toe-ring-and-Subaru look before accepting that I just didn’t have the energy for it).