In 1999, thanks to the persistence of a lesbian state assemblywoman, domestic partnership became available to same-sex couples in California. “DP” was a pale shadow of real marriage, but it was there to do, so of course we hurried up and did it.
For the next five years we kept the rings in their red velvet jeweler’s box in my underwear drawer. On our six-year anniversary we retrieved the box and went out for mani-pedis and cheap Chinese food, and came home and read the vows we’d written to each other, and slipped the wedding bands onto each other’s ring fingers, and poured two flutes of Veuve.
“My wife forever,” she toasted us.
“My wife forever,” I agreed.
Friends saw the rings and protested our elopement. They wanted to celebrate with us. One year after we married ourselves by ourselves, we were married again at a friend’s home in the calm, closed mouth of Tomales Bay. Everyone we loved was there. Everyone who loved us. My wife’s godson stood in for her father. It wasn’t my first wedding, but for the first and last time, my dad walked me down the aisle.
—
IN 2004, when gay marriage was suddenly legal in the City of San Francisco, I was midway through a month-long writers’ residency in upstate New York. My wife begged me to fly home and stand in the rain with her and thousands of grooms and grooms and brides and brides in the line that snaked around and around City Hall. I’d applied to this residency eleven times before I finally got in. I had a book deadline I’d miss if I took my eyes off the ball for even a day. Sadly, I told my wife I couldn’t come home.
A few days later, when the City of New Paltz, New York, started offering wedding licenses to same-sex couples, I asked my wife to fly east and marry me there. Laughing, we came up with a compromise plan. My wife went online and booked us a date to be legally married in the San Francisco City Hall Rotunda, the day after I got home.
But then an e-mail to every same-sex couple with a San Francisco wedding date.
By order of the California Supreme Court, the San Francisco County Clerk has been ordered to discontinue issuance of same-sex marriage licenses. Therefore, all previously scheduled same-sex appointments are now canceled.
“I wanted to really marry you,” my wife cried into the phone.
“I wanted to really marry you, too,” I cried.
—
ON MAY 15, 2008, the California Supreme Court ruled, “An individual’s sexual orientation—like a person’s race or gender—does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.”
Gay marriage was legal again in California. Gay people danced in the streets. My wife and I had plenty of time now to plan a real wedding. This time the Supreme Court had ruled. What could possibly go wrong? We raised a quick toast and returned to our posts at Obama campaign headquarters, conveniently located in a storefront two blocks from our house.
We’d spent many happy hours in that filled-to-bursting room, making calls and planning fundraisers and hearing the stories of our elderly African American neighbors, who’d paid the poll tax to vote in Texas or Mississippi decades ago, and now were about to elect the first black president of the United States.
“I never thought . . .” a white-haired, stooped-over woman said, shaking her church-hatted head.
“Not in our lifetimes,” the man next to her agreed.
I made the phone calls and ate the homemade mayonnaise cake and drank the Mr. Coffee with hazelnut creamer and divided up the call lists, swelling with love for my wife, our neighborhood, our country, and, for once, our president-to-be.
We were so excited about electing Obama, we weren’t paying attention when the backlash against gay marriage became a Catholic-and-Mormon-funded movement. We weren’t paying attention when the movement became Prop 8, a ballot measure to overturn the new law. It’ll never pass, we reassured each other as Election Day approached. We called it Prop H8. California would never let right-wing religious fanatics steal our shiny new right.
The week before Election Day, our inboxes were flooded with gay friends’ wedding invitations. “Just in case Prop 8 passes,” they explained. Several used the phrase shotgun wedding. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about civilians being deputized by the dozens as “Marriage Commissioners for a Day” to handle the load.
Two nights before Election Day, my wife and I were cleaning up after dinner, watching Rachel Maddow as usual, so we didn’t miss a bit of good Obama news. But the news that night wasn’t good. Thanks to organized homophobia’s gazillion-dollar ad campaign, and confusion about whether a yes vote meant yes to gay marriage or yes to abolishing gay marriage, Proposition 8 was predicted to win.
“Let’s get married,” my wife said. She put down her dish towel and put her arms around me. “Let’s get married right now.”
—
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, just before our twelfth anniversary and the day before the 2008 election, my wife and I put on our No on 8 T-shirts and our best jeans and favorite feather boas and put our witnesses, my mother and William and Armando, into my car and drove downtown to the Alameda County Clerk-Recorder’s Office. The lobby was a Gay Pride party, pulsating with ecstatic couples, male and female, pushing strollers and pushing walkers, wearing wedding dresses and dressed in drag, laughing and crying with joy. The beleaguered city clerks were signing specially issued licenses as fast as they could. The women got licenses with two spaces marked “Bride.” The men’s licenses had two spaces marked “Groom.”
Finally, finally. My wife and I stood beneath an arbor of grimy yellow plastic daisies and green plastic ivy in the county chapel in front of a hastily deputized marriage commissioner, who confided, before stepping behind the podium, that he’d volunteered for the job because his closeted gay brother had died twenty years ago of AIDS. We were his eleventh marriage of the day, he said, and it was only 10:30 a.m.
“It’s a big day,” he said solemnly. “Everyone’s worried about what might happen tomorrow.”
He turned to my wife and me. “Are you ready?” he asked.
Holding each other’s hands, we nodded.
“Will you take this woman to be your wedded wife, to live together in the state of matrimony? Will you love, honor, and keep her, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, keep yourself only unto her, as long as you both shall live?”
“I will,” my wife said, beaming at me with tears running down her face.
“I will,” I said, beaming at her.
—
THE NEXT NIGHT, my wife and I stood in the Oakland Convention Center, shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of other Obama volunteers, watching on the Jumbotron as our Obama dream came true.
When Barack and Michelle Obama lifted their clasped hands above their heads and beamed down at us from the huge screen, we cheered and cried and danced with our fellow volunteers. For the first time in my life, my country actually seemed sane to me, in sync with reality, in sync with my beliefs.
A few hours later, the headline on the Jumbotron read “Proposition 8 Passes in California.” My wife and I clutched each other, devastated, as many of the people around us cheered. We knew our fellow campaigners were churchgoers, and we knew their churches had been proselytizing about “saving marriage,” but still. How could we share such passion for Obama and be at war about love?
At midnight my wife and I drove home through Oakland streets exploding in celebration. The amazingly good news: we had a new president, the first one either of us had ever wanted. The not-so-good news: the people who had elected our new president had also changed our marital status from “married” to “unknown.”
—
ALSO UNKNOWN: why, two months after the happiest day of our lives, the happiest day of our twelve years together, I looked into my wife’s eyes and found a stranger’s cold disinterest where my wife’s bright, loving gaze used to be. Why should legal marriage turn two p
eople who have been in love with each other for more than a decade, two people who have already married each other in every way they could, into enemy combatants?
In my desperation I scoured the Internet and discovered a string of studies conducted after the passage of Prop 8. One concluded that “the mental health outcomes of gays and lesbians would improve if laws such as Proposition 8 did not exist because . . . laws that say to gay people ‘you are not welcome here, your relationships are not valued,’ have ‘significant power.’” Another found that gay people in states where same-sex marriage had been outlawed “had the highest reports of ‘minority stress’—the chronic social stress that results from minority-group stigmatization—as well as general psychological distress.”
Gay bodies suffer, too. A study by Emory University economists found increased rates of HIV infection in states that had banned same-sex marriage—and a decrease in doctor visits among Massachusetts gay men after that state lifted the ban.
The studies didn’t help me understand where my wife and I went wrong. I knew only that our trouble started shortly after the happiest day of both of our lives. And it never stopped.
—
SO NOW, DIVORCE.
I put all the papers back into the folder and I take the folder to the nearest Starbucks. I know I’ll never want to go back to the place where I fill out these forms, and Starbucks isn’t a place I’ll miss.
PETITION FOR
_x_Dissolution ___Legal Separation ___Nullify.
LEGAL RELATIONSHIP (Check all that apply)
_x_We are married.
_x_We are domestic partners.
LEGAL GROUNDS based on (Check one)
_x_Irreconcilable differences.
___Permanent legal incapacity.
___Incest.
___Bigamy.
SPOUSAL OR DOMESIC PARTNER SUPPORT
___Spousal or domestic partner support payable to
___Petitioner
___Respondent
For the first time since my wife and I met, I’m earning more money than she does. So I got the right to be married just in time to get divorced, and now I’m going to have to pay alimony? I step outside Starbucks to call my lawyer.
“Did you hear the great news?” he answers.
“What great news?”
“The U.S. Supreme Court just overturned DOMA!”
“What?”
“Gay marriage is now legal in every one of the United States! We finally get all the federal benefits of marriage! This is true marriage equality!”
I turn this over in my mind. “So . . . just when I started getting divorced, the Supreme Court made me more married?”
My lawyer, who happens to be happily gay-married, sighs into the phone. “I guess it’s not such great news for you personally,” he says. “Actually, your divorce is probably going to cost you more because of this decision.” He pauses. “It might take longer, too, because no one understands the legal implications yet.”
I imagine my lawyer and his husband, and all the suddenly federally married couples, celebrating their great news. Never have I fought so hard for a change that hurt me so much.
“At least we won,” I say, feeling like the opposite of a winner.
ELEVEN
Your dad fell.” Lina is crying into my phone. “I couldn’t pick him up.”
It’s rush hour on a Friday. It’ll be faster to drive. I jump into my car and go. I’ve got the drill down: heavy foot on gas pedal; eyes darting between the asphalt unspooling in front of me, the rearview mirror for cop-watching, and the sky, to which I address my prayers.
Lina calls as I’m summiting the Grapevine. “False alarm,” she says. “He’s okay. I didn’t even have to take him to the hospital. Are you already on your way?”
Thanks, God. “I’ll be there in four hours.” I don’t have to explain why I’m not turning around. Lina hasn’t left my dad’s side in weeks.
The apartment has the sour stench of a hospital room. I kiss my stepmother and my brother and say hello to my dad’s hospice nurse. My father is sleeping, flat on his back on his gray leather recliner, up to his chin in a blue plaid wool blanket I remember from our family’s early days in New York. How did that blanket make it here through everything that’s happened in between: my parents’ divorce in the early seventies, my father’s second marriage and divorce, his marriage to Lina, their moves from New York to London to Bermuda to this final address?
The blanket looks exactly the same. Not so my dad. The silver stubble of his beard, gently shaved each morning by Lina, glints against his pale gray face. I sink onto the carpet, back against his chair.
“Hello, sweetheart,” my dad says.
I scramble onto my knees, which puts us at eye level. “Hello, Pops.”
My dad smiles at me, and the whole six-decade story of us is in that smile. We’ve been best friends and worst enemies; we’ve walked away from each other, screaming accusations; we’ve returned to each other again and again.
My dad was the tyrant who ruined my teenage life. He forbade me to travel below Fourteenth Street or above Ninety-sixth, to watch TV or talk on the phone or see my friends. He threatened to have my first, English boyfriend deported and forbade me to see every boyfriend after that until I ran away to Taos with the first one I really loved. When I was thirty-three, joyously in love with my first girlfriend, my father banned her from family gatherings, called our relationship “illegitimate,” and advised me to see a psychiatrist to cure my “homosexual infatuation.” I yelled at him. He yelled at me. I hung up on him. He hung up on me. For the next eight years, we didn’t speak.
And then somehow, during the death-knell years of my marriage, that guy and his wife became my trusted confidants. Their apartment became my refuge, the place I went to be listened to and fed and understood.
All the painful bumping around my dad and I did for our first sixty years is over now. There will be no more arguing about whose version of our story is true. We know how the story ends, and we know when: very, very soon. All that’s left for my dad and me now is pure, uncomplicated love.
My dad reaches over the arm of the recliner and takes my hand. My heart soars. My father has slapped me and patted me but he’s never touched me affectionately, ever. I shuffle a bit closer to his chair so he won’t let go.
I feel my dad’s discomfort about holding his daughter’s hand, and I feel that he wants to hold it. I wonder if he has ever wanted to hold my hand before, or hug me, or kiss me. I wonder what stopped him then. I know what’s making it possible for him to do it now.
—
MY DAD IS DYING, and my dad is holding my hand. My dad has been far from a perfect dad, and right now he’s holding my hand.
My dad puts my hand palm down on his chest, not far from his heart. He starts tapping the top of my hand with the palm of his. I think he’ll stop, but he doesn’t. He starts talking to me, not in his usual booming New York Jewish voice, but quietly. So quietly I have to lean in to hear him.
“I was a terrible father,” he says.
My eyes burn. How long have I waited for this apology? All my life. I don’t want it now.
“I’ve been a terrible daughter,” I say.
Pat, pat, pat. “You had your moments,” my father says.
We regard each other warily, poised for ancient battle. His brown eyes have gone milky blue, the color of my babies’ eyes when they were born. How could a father of mine have blue eyes? The same way my kids could, I guess: one foot in this world, one foot in another. No wonder he’s speaking in the past tense.
My dad’s eyes crinkle. A familiar spark lights them. He laughs.
“You had your moments,” he repeats, and we laugh together. There’s no one else I laugh with this way. When you go, I tell my dad silently, part of me goes, too.
Pat, pat, pa
t. “You need to let people come to you,” my dad says, suddenly serious.
“What do you mean?”
“You underestimate yourself. You think you have to fight to get people’s attention, but you don’t. You’re a remarkable person, Meredith. Stop fighting. Just be yourself. People will come to you.”
My father dispensing advice like this—loving, calm, generous—is as rare a gift from him as touch. It makes me nervous. It’s so not him. It’s something he’d do only if he knew he’d never have to do it again, or be reminded that he’d done it once.
“Are you going all Wise Dad on me all of a sudden?” I say, trying to drag him back into our usual banter.
My father’s expression doesn’t change. “I’m sure my deficiencies as a father have a lot to do with your problems. I’m sorry for that.”
What a time to find out what my father thinks my problems are. “Problems?” I say.
Pat, pat, pat. “I wish you saw yourself the way I see you,” he says. “And I wish I’d told you before now.”
“Told me what?”
“How wonderful you are.” Pat, pat, pat. “You’re smart and funny and you’re a hard worker and you’re kind. You’re a good writer. Anyone would be lucky to know you.”
I swallow hard, choking back tears.
“Being a parent is such a hard job,” my dad goes on. “No one tells you what to do. It’s the most important thing I ever did. I didn’t know that until it was too late.”
“You gave me so much, Dad,” I say. “I’m a writer because of you. And—”
“I should have paid more attention to you and your brother. In my day, that’s not what fathers did. But that’s no excuse.”
The New Old Me Page 11
