The Unspeakable

by Meghan Daum

  All of this is arguable, of course2. You are no doubt at this moment silently quibbling with me over several of these examples. Either that or I lost you at “butch”—at least the idea of my being one. Again, please understand I’m not a butch in the conventional sense. I have long hair on which I spend too much money maintaining the blondness of my youth. I get manicures and pedicures like every other chick in the industrialized world, or at least I have since roughly 2001, when it suddenly became illegal to leave your house without painted toenails. As casual as my wedding was, I wore a real wedding gown with a veil. That veil turned out to be the single most delightful thing I have ever placed on my head and perhaps my entire body. I felt like if I began to skip down the sidewalk, the veil would form a sail and lift me into the air. I remember climbing into a taxi on my wedding night and thinking that I never wanted to take it off. I remember thinking, In less than twenty minutes I’m going to have to take this off and never wear it again. I remember—and will never stop remembering—the pangs of grief that accompanied this realization. In that moment, I was just like any other bride in the world. I was a little girl who didn’t want to take off her princess costume. I was, if only for a few fleeting moments, a willing and even ecstatic participant in womanhood’s most sentimental mien.

  Still, when I try to make sense of my honorary dykedom, especially as it manifests in my life at the moment, I can’t help but think it’s at least in part a reaction to the gaudy, petty horrors now endemic to what we’ve come to call “women’s culture.” By this I mean all the crap in the media that suggests that not only are women a special interest group, they’re a group whose primary interest is themselves. I mean the fetishistic attention paid to makeovers and diets and weddings and baby showers and enormous walk-in closets as proof of a husband’s love for his wife. I mean moms who are obsessed with their motherhood and single women who are obsessed with their singleness. I mean most romantic comedies and most novels with stiletto heels or martini glasses on the covers and every yogurt commercial ever made. I mean the girls’ toy aisles in stores that are an ocean of pink: pink Scrabble games, pink guitars, and pink guns. I mean the hair and eyelash extensions that have become commonplace. I mean the fact that there is nothing unusual about seeing businesswomen walking down the street in six-inch heels. Gone are the 1980s, when women tucked their pumps into their briefcases and commuted to work in power suits and running shoes. Gone are the 1970s, with their conspicuous body hair and unapologetic strands of gray pulled into unkempt buns held up with leather stick barrettes. Here in the era of bosomy, spray-tanned, baby-crazed bling, femininity has become a cartoon version of itself. It is at once exaggerated in its presentation and reductive in its implications. It’s enough to make a butch out of anyone who just wants a comfortable pair of shoes.

  Maybe this cartoonish femininity is the reason so many women’s clothing stores are such hideous funhouses. It’s certainly the reason that nearly all of my apparel purchasing is done on the computer. While it’s true that online shopping incurs all sorts of shipping costs and means constantly having to return things, I am not exaggerating when I say I would rather stand in line at the post office for forty-five minutes than at Banana Republic for fifteen seconds. Walking into a women’s clothing store makes me feel like I’m walking into a slumber party attended by my least favorite girls in the class (or in the case of Ann Taylor or Talbots, the mothers of those girls). But catalog shopping, online or in print, is quiet and personal. It’s inherently literary. It’s about designating ordinary-looking sweaters and jackets as “yacht-wear.” It’s about never using color names like yellow and green when there’s gamboge and malachite. And in the case of my favorite catalog, the Title Nine women’s sports apparel catalog, it’s about giving honorary dykedom an official handbook.

  Named for the history-making federal law allowing women equal access to sports in schools, the Title Nine company has a feminist bent and a prep-school-meets-Phish-concert aesthetic. Its models aren’t typical models but, rather, “real women” whose bodies are muscular rather than skeletal and whose faces, though endowed with well-above-average bone structure, are also endowed with the kinds of slightly crooked smiles and traces of crow’s-feet that would normally be Photoshopped into oblivion. They have strong shoulders and ripped abs and, best of all, brief biographical profiles perversely presented in the vein of Playboy playmate squibs. “Steph is a professional climber, base jumper and author.” How does she unwind? She “likes to clean things.” (Things on the order of antique auto parts, mind you; not kitchen floors.) Niko, pictured hula hooping in a flowered halter dress, is a mom whose special skills include “uphill battles.” Yhazi is a “business owner” who drives an ’84 Volkswagen bus and is an avid practitioner of the Brazilian martial art/dance/music hybrid capoeira.

  As they model the fleece jackets, skorts, sports bras, and dresses that come with names like Tomboy Wrap dress, Dauntless dress, and Excellence dress, the phantom-dyke-centered narratives play out in charmingly allegorical fashion. There’s Allison (semipro cyclist and obsessive knitter) throwing her head back in laughter as she gathers wood with Katie (lawyer and kiteboarder), who sports pigtails and carries a chainsaw. A few pages later in the catalog, we see Lucy bundled up in wool leggings and a chunky sweater coat knocking on a cabin door. She carries a tasteful ceramic dish and a bottle of wine. Snow covers the ground, a holiday wreath hangs from the door. You can almost smell the chimney smoke. Could this be the home of Katie? Could that smoke be the vapor of her hard-earned firewood? Could Allison live there, too? Maybe Steph and Niko are in the kitchen, stirring up hot toddies and comparing notes about their uphill battles.

  Of course they are! Better yet, it’s a potluck! Lucy has brought her famous homemade lasagna. We are someplace like the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts. We are travelers across a wintry landscape dusted with fir trees and Subarus and dykes of the honorary and nonhonorary varieties alike (not to mention home of Kim Gordon, Smith College, and the farmhouse of Rachel Maddow and her partner of many years). We are caught in the cozy, sporty, always slightly sweaty embrace of Title Nine, a world where a fancy evening out means wearing your favorite Intrepid Hoodie dress with tights and a pair of Frye boots, a world where skinny jeans are forever supplanted by cargo pants, a world where, if Paris Hilton were standing on the corner of Main and King Streets in Northampton, you’d think a spaceship had landed nearby and off-loaded one of its more disposable life-forms. If such a starlet appeared in Title Nine’s pages, she would be incorporated into a two-page spread depicting a mountain rescue of dilettante Mount Everest climbers buried in an avalanche. She would be thrown over the shoulder of Katie, who carries an ice axe in one hand and a coffee thermos in the other as she ferries Paris out of harm’s way. Wearing the snowstopper pant with microfleece inner face ($119), Katie installs the poor nymph in her cabin, where she lays her by the fire and nurses her back to health on vegan stew, though not before flinging a Jeanette Winterson book at her and telling her not to come back until she’s manned up enough to qualify as a woman.

  I love the Title Nine catalog because it reminds me of the girl posse from my graduate school days. I love it because it reminds me of Gretchen and Dawn and Jodie Foster and Kristy McNichol and those sorority sisters on Oprah. It takes me back to my fascination with Victoria and my affection for Lynn and my eternal fondness for the Nebraska farm women. It makes me forgive myself a little for my sport fishing venture with the author who knew no one in town. And even though it traffics in its own special brand of sentimentalized womanhood, even though it’s engaged in that tyrannical “women can do it all!” messaging that makes female CEOs feel bad about themselves if they’re not also kiteboarders and mothers of three, it reminds me what the black lesbian poet Audre Lorde (who I know about courtesy of Lynn’s candle-wax-ravaged bookcase) said about the essence of feminism: “The true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.”

&n
bsp; Put another way: You don’t have to take communion to be a member of the church.

  There’s more than one way to be a person. Actually, there are more than two or three ways. You’d think that was obvious, but I find that often it is not. The world is essentially a collection of teams. Life is a process of deciding which ones we’re going to join. As a person who never liked teams, it makes sense that the one with which I’d feel the most camaraderie would be the one I could never authentically join. Still, like a die-hard sports fan, my devotion defines me. I will always, no matter how crowded the room, find the lesbians the way a golden retriever finds a tennis ball. I will always be this close to cutting my hair short again. I will be very sad if I never get to meet Fran Lebowitz. I still have the jewelry box Lynn gave me. I don’t have expensive jewelry, but this box, now slightly chipped and tarnished, is where I keep the pieces I like best. It holds gifts from my husband and maybe even from an old boyfriend or two. It holds some birthday presents from close friends. It holds a couple of pairs of my mother’s earrings and even more earrings that I bought myself. It holds the things that, when I put them on, don’t make me think, This is fancy or even, This is beautiful but, rather, This is me. It’s all so predictable. It’s all so transparent, such a cliché. It’s all such an honor.

  DIFFERENCE MAKER

  The first child whose life I tried to make a difference in was Maricela. She was twelve years old and in the sixth grade at a middle school in the San Gabriel Valley, about a half hour’s drive from my house near downtown Los Angeles. We’d been matched by the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. It had taken a while to get my assignment, as there were far more women volunteers than men and there often weren’t enough girls to go around. But when the volunteer coordinator finally called, he told me I’d be great for Maricela and that she was well worth the wait. Though I’d wanted to be in the “community-based program,” where kids went on excursions with volunteers and were allowed to visit their homes, there wasn’t sufficient need so I was put in the “school-based program.” This meant Maricela would be excused from class twice a month to meet with me in an empty classroom.

  On our first visit I brought art supplies—glue and glitter and stencils you could use to draw different types of horses. I hadn’t been told much about her, only that she had a lot of younger siblings and often got lost in the shuffle at home. Her family’s apartment was close enough to the school that she could walk. She explained to me that her route took her past an ice cream truck every day but that she never had money to buy anything from it. She suggested we go to the ice cream truck together but I explained we weren’t supposed to leave the school grounds. In fact, we were supposed to stay in the classroom. The classrooms were arranged around a courtyard, as is typical of California elementary and middle schools. Maricela spent most of our first meeting skulking around in the doorway, calling out to friends who were playing kickball in the courtyard. I sat at a desk tracing glittery horses, telling myself she’d come to me when she was ready.

  The second child I tried to make a difference with was Nikki. I met her when I was transferred from the school-based program into the community-based program after it was determined that Maricela was merely using me to get out of class and therefore needed “different kinds of supports.” Nikki was fifteen. She lived with her mother, brother, grandmother, and an indeterminate number of other relatives in a crowded apartment in South L.A. Her mother worked as a home health care aide. Another brother had left the household before he turned eighteen, though she didn’t go into much detail. Nikki had requested a Big Sister of her own volition, writing on her application that she needed “guidance in life.” We met for the first time in an office at Big Brothers Big Sisters’ Los Angeles headquarters. Her mother brought her to the meeting and they both sat quietly while an employee facilitated a rather halting conversation about what kinds of things Nikki liked to do and what particular strengths I might have as a mentor.

  I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I’m sure it was something about being available to help her with homework, especially English assignments. Though I would end up being Nikki’s Big Sister for more than three years, I never once helped her with homework. I did take her to an experimental theater production of Tosca that my neighbor had directed and which Nikki, to her enormous credit, sat through without complaint. But mostly she wanted to go to the mall. These were outings on which she examined handbags at the Hello Kitty store while I feigned enthusiasm and scraped the reaches of my mind for conversation topics that might lead to some form of bonding or a teachable moment. With the exception of one occasion when I tried to explain that President Bush most likely did not, as she put it (actually as Kanye West had suggested on live television), “hate black people” but, rather, had policies that were unfavorable toward all but the wealthiest Americans, such moments never arose. When she came over to my house, she spent much of the time on my computer sending instant messages to friends and taking self-portraits (the term “selfies” had not yet been coined) with the Photo Booth application. A few times I ducked into the frame and the computer snapped the two of us together making silly faces. This was such an inaccurate representation of our actual rapport that I was embarrassed. It was as if we were imitating a Big and Little Sister. Or at least one of us was.

  Later I found out Nikki actually had several different mentors from several different volunteer organizations. They came with different areas of expertise: help with college applications and financial aid, help finding a summer job, help with “girl empowerment,” whatever that meant. This partly explained why nearly every time I asked her if she’d been to a particular place—to the science center or the art museum or the Staples Center to see an L.A. Sparks women’s basketball game—she told me, yes, some other mentor had taken her.

  I was thirty-five years old when I worked with Maricela and thirty-six when I met Nikki. These were years I would later come to see as the beginning of the second act of my adult life. If the first act, which is to say college through age thirty-two, had been mostly taken up by delirious career ambition and almost compulsive moving between houses and apartments and regions of the country, the second act seemed mostly to be about appreciating the value of staying put. I’d bought a house that I wasn’t planning on moving out of anytime soon. I was in a city that was feeling more and more like home. And though I could well imagine being talked out of my single life and getting married if the right person and circumstances came along, one thing that seemed increasingly unlikely to budge was my lack of desire to have children. After more than a decade of being told that I’d wake up one morning at age thirty or thirty-three or, God forbid, forty, to the ear-splitting peals of my biological clock, I’d failed to capitulate in any significant way. I would still look at a woman pushing a baby stroller and feel more pity than envy. In fact, I felt no envy at all, only relief that I wasn’t her. It was like looking at someone with an amputated limb or terrible scar. I almost had to look away.

  I recognized that my reaction was extreme. I was also willing to concede that I was possibly in denial. All the things people say to people like me were things I’d said to myself countless times. If I met the right partner, maybe I’d want a child because I’d want it with him. If I went to therapy to deal with whatever neuroses could plausibly be blamed on my own childhood, maybe I’d get over myself and trust in my ability not to repeat its more negative aspects. If I only understood that you don’t have to like other children in order to be hopelessly smitten with and devoted to your own (as it happens, this was my parents’ stock phrase: “We don’t like other children, we just like you”), I would stop taking my aversion to kids kicking airplane seats and shrieking in restaurants as a sign that I should never, ever have any myself. After all, it’s such a tiny percentage of women—5 or 6 percent, according to the tiny handful of entities studying such things—that genuinely feel that motherhood isn’t for them. This is the most minor of minorities. Was I really that exceptional? A
nd if I was, why did I have names picked out for the children I didn’t want?

  For all of this I had reasons. I had reasons springing forth from reasons. They ran the gamut from “don’t want to be pregnant” to “don’t want to make someone deal with me when I’m dying.” (And, for the record, I’ve never met a woman of any age and any level of inclination to have children who doesn’t have names picked out.) Chief among them, though, was my belief that I’d be a bad mother. Not in the Joan Crawford mode but in the mode of parents you sometimes see who obviously love their kids but pretty clearly do not love their own lives. For every way I could imagine being a good mother, for all the upper-middle-class embellishments I’d offer in the form of artful children’s books and educational toys and decent schools—magnet, private, or otherwise—I could imagine ten ways that I’d botch the job irredeemably.

  More than that, though, I simply felt no calling to be a parent. As a role, as my role, it felt inauthentic and inorganic. It felt unnecessary. It felt like not what I was supposed to be doing with my life. What I was supposed to be doing was writing and reading and teaching and giving talks at colleges. What I was supposed to be was a mentor, not a mom. My contribution to society was all about not contributing more people to it but, rather, doing something (and I felt this in a genuine way, not in an aphoristic or guilt-ridden one) for the ones that were already here. Ones like Maricela and Nikki.

  Except Maricela and Nikki didn’t really need me all that much. Or at least they didn’t need me specifically. They each might have benefited from a real big sister, someone who shared their DNA and/or at least a common interest or two. But there wasn’t anything about my particular skill set that was likely to improve their quality of life in any measurable way. After Nikki graduated from high school and aged out of Big Brothers Big Sisters (and went to college, I should add), I took a break from kid-related do-gooderism for a few years. During that time, I married my boyfriend, a man who seemed only slightly more interested in potential parenthood than I was, which is to say not enough to explore the issue in any depth. When I decided to return to volunteerism, I was determined to up the ante. So I became a court-appointed advocate for children in the foster care system.