Given Up for You

by Erin O. White

  Lynne left me to continue on her rounds, and I sat down in the row of plush chairs against the wall to watch the action around me. Everyone was talking loudly; everyone, it seemed, had a pressing story to tell. The women had well-styled hair and wore lots of gold jewelry and bracelets that chimed when they moved their arms. They spoke with their heads close, their hands over their mouths. The men were clean-shaven and handsome in their suits, and they charmed me with their firm handshakes, their smiles, the way they crossed their arms over their chests and leaned in as they laughed. My own parents’ friends were scientists and academics, social workers and textile artists. The men were wiry and mostly bearded, the women wore linen skirts and expensive scarves and let their hair go gray and wore it cut close to their heads. They tended toward thoughtful introversion. They were marvelous people, they were my people, but now, sitting here in O’Connor Brother’s funeral home, I wanted to be one of these people too, to claim their exuberance, their shine, and, more than anything, their belief.

  I also watched Chris, watched how she was laughing, listening intently to people’s long answers to her questions, gasping with excitement at the sight of old friends and their babies. I had never seen her so enthusiastic, and I couldn’t tell if it was an act. Later, after many years together, I would come to understand that it was not an act, that she adored these people, cherished her past with them. But I would also come to understand that when the retirement or first communion or graduation party was over and the time came for us to go home, she would need to sleep for hours, sit in silence at the table with the newspaper, or go for a run with her iPod blasting so that she could return to the world where she lived without them, the only world in which she could truly be herself.

  That evening after the wake we went to Chris’s parents’ house. “Where are we sleeping?” I asked Chris. The last time Chris and I had spent the night at her parents’ house (which had also been the first time), her mother put us in separate bedrooms. It seemed odd to me that she would still enforce their house rule of no shared beds until marriage despite our being already in significant violation of their more essential rules, but I didn’t protest. And neither did Chris. She had shared a bed with high school girlfriends, but only because her parents had no idea what they were doing or who they were to each other. And after high school she didn’t bring many girlfriends home with her.

  “My mom said to share a room,” she said. “There’s not enough space to split us up.”

  “Lucky us,” I said in a not particularly nice tone. Chris didn’t say anything. After this visit her mother wouldn’t try to separate us again, and I would begin to understand that this is how I would become part of the family, crossing one unmarked and unspoken boundary at a time.

  In the morning, Chris and her cousins went to the church to prepare for the funeral, and I stayed behind. Her cousin Terri was going to read from Corinthians during the service; Lynne and Jen, Chris’s youngest sister, who was twenty-five years old and still referred to as “the baby,” would carry the wine and wafers to the altar for communion. Chris and her older cousins were pallbearers, she the only woman among them. No one, not even Chris’s parents, mentioned anything about this distinction. No one seemed to notice. When Chris was eight years old, she was the first girl in all of Worcester to play Ty Cobb little league. This was five years before Title IX, and the story ran in national newspapers. Her strength and physical ambition were a source of confusion and discomfort to her parents; her father was an extraordinary athlete, and in all fairness so was her mother, although she never played team sports. But her father had been a baseball star, a natural. And he had no son. But he had Chris, who was also a natural, and he struggled to make his peace with his unconventional daughter. Her mother discouraged her from playing sports. She punished Chris when she spit through her teeth; she implored her to do the things the other girls liked to do. Chris told me this made her more determined to play, and to excel. I suspected that it also made her sad, and lonely.

  Many years later, when our own daughters were old enough to play team sports, Chris’s mother gave us a scrapbook into which she had pasted every clipping, every team photo, every sports section listing of Chris’s remarkable stats. She had underlined Chris’s name whenever it appeared, put a star next to her quotes. In one team photo, a blurry shot taken from some distance, she had drawn a heart around Chris’s face.

  When I arrived at Our Lady of the Angels, I went in through the side door then took a wrong turn, so instead of entering the sanctuary I went into the priests’ quarters. Nine priests were serving at this funeral mass, in homage to Chris’s grandmother, who had devoted herself to the Church. All nine of them were dressing, throwing white robes over their dark suits so that the robes caught the air for a moment, and the priests appeared as birds whose wings were puffed against a cold rain. I turned away before they saw me, or at least I hoped it was before. What I had seen seemed a secret, the way they had gone from being men to something else entirely.

  I didn’t sit with Chris at the funeral. I found a seat near the back with her cousin’s wife, who was trying valiantly to keep her toddler quiet. A few minutes after the processional, the little girl started making too much noise and they left the sanctuary for the crying room, and left me alone in the pew. When the Mass ended, Chris and the other pallbearers walked out of the church with the coffin. I could see that Chris was weeping, and because she was carrying the coffin she could not wipe the tears from her face so they were falling onto the lapels of her suit jacket. I began to cry, because it was so sad to see her that way, and because she was not mine just then. She was her Nana’s. And Chris could not belong to both of us, not in this life. She had told her Nana nothing of her gayness. And I knew that, consciously or not, Chris was allowing me to enter her family only as her grandmother was leaving because she didn’t know if she could have us both, and she was scared to try.

  After the funeral, Chris’s parents’ house swelled with people, and I tried to keep busy (and out of the way) in the kitchen. I sat for a little while with Chris’s grandfather, who seemed to have aged a decade since yesterday’s wake, and I chatted with him about baseball and the weather, two things I knew little about. He talked slowly, his eyes downcast. He didn’t ask me who I was.

  By four o’clock most of the guests had gone home. The mothers and aunts were in the kitchen drinking wine; the fathers and uncles were in the garage inspecting Chris’s father’s drag racing car. The grandchildren were in the basement, playing restaurant at the wet bar and goofing around on exercise equipment. We—Chris and I, her sisters and her cousins—were in the living room. Chris’s sisters and cousins were adamant about their love and acceptance of Chris and had known many of her old girlfriends. But still I had the sense that they were a little uncertain about me. Chris had not brought many girlfriends home, and now here I was, not only in their house but at their grandmother’s funeral, lazing around on the couch with them after all the other guests were long gone and only family remained.

  After we had finished a few bottles of wine, Lynne started rummaging in her parents’ entertainment center for old home movies. “Oh, let’s watch this one!” she said, pushing a VHS tape into the player, shushing everyone by waving the remote control at us. In an instant the snowy screen became a vision of their nana in a pink sweatshirt, standing over the stove and talking to the camera about whatever it was she was making. Everyone in the room got quiet. “She’s making blinis,” Lynne said to me, then turned back to the screen.

  “Like for caviar?” I asked. No one answered me; they were too busy watching, and crying, and laughing. They were, with the exception of Lynne, a little drunk.

  “Oh, let’s do it now,” Chris’s cousin Terri cried, tears running down her cheeks. “Let’s make blinis!”

  And then they were all saying, yes, yes, let’s make blinis! Terri called into the kitchen, “Auntie Judi! We’re making blinis!”

  Chris’s mother called back, “Not in m
y kitchen you’re not!”

  It was then decided, with murmurs and laughter, that in the morning, after Chris’s mother left for her seven-to-three shift at the hospital where she worked as a cardiology LPN, we would make blinis.

  “Wait until you taste them, hon,” Chris said, putting her arm around me for the first time all day. “Just wait.”

  From what I could discern from the video, blinis were potato pancakes with a little extra flour. I was slightly awed by the fact that these people seemed to believe there was something distinctly Lithuanian about shredded potatoes fried in oil.

  “Aren’t blinis just latkes?” I said.

  “No,” Chris said, shaking her head. “They’re different.”

  The next morning blini-making began right after breakfast. Lynne arrived with her little boy and her husband, Jim, a large and genial red-haired Scot. Jim was the son of a butcher, and a fantastic cook. The next year he would talk me through a standing rib roast over the phone, rescuing my near-botched Christmas dinner for the in-laws we would soon share. On this morning he had an electric skillet under one arm and a bag of potatoes under the other.

  They all got to work washing and peeling, admonishing each other for deviating from Nana’s technique, crying and laughing over their growing piles of potato peels. I offered to grate. “Okay,” Lynne said, “but be careful. No fingernails in the blinis.” I looked at Chris, wanting to share a horrified glance, but she had her back to me at the sink, scrubbing potatoes. “I think I can manage,” I said.

  Soon the skillets were warm, and Jim dropped alarmingly generous spoonfuls of Crisco into them. The snowy mounds began to melt into clear and smoking lakes of oil. Lynne squeezed the starchy liquid from the potatoes with her hands, then mixed them with egg and flour and dropped the mixture into the oil. Soon the house smelled like a McDonald’s.

  The smell brought in the uncles and aunts—who had been keeping their distance on the patio—for a plate of their childhoods, fed to them by their grown children. And the kids came in from the yard, calling, I smell blinis! I was the plate filler then, putting two and three blinis on each paper plate, spooning applesauce for the children, sour cream for the adults, fielding requests for more. Chris and her cousins ate them without plates, standing up, with their fingers. For the first time since we arrived, everyone was quiet.

  When it seemed that everyone was sated, I filled the sink with water and soap. Chris’s mother would be home from work in a few hours, and the kitchen was a mess of dishes and potato peels. Jim came over and, wordlessly, took over the rinsing.

  “Well,” Lynne asked me. “How were your first blinis?”

  “Oh, I loved them!” I said, hoping I was enthusiastic enough.

  Jim turned and looked at me. He winked. “Give it time,” he whispered. “Give it time.”

  Chris was twenty-five years old when she came out to her parents. It didn’t go well. They were a working-class Catholic family, first-generation Americans, who still lived in the house they had moved into on their wedding day in the town where they were born. In our house we have a picture of Chris’s mother, six years old, on Santa’s lap. Chris’s sister has a picture of their father, also six years old, with the same Santa. Their world was small, and while this fact alone doesn’t explain their struggle to accept Chris’s gayness, it did make them—would make any of us—more susceptible to the gaze of others, to the watchful eye of authority and its insistence that we do not get to do what we want just because it feels good. And it made it difficult to know when exactly—how exactly—you became an adult, became the one who gets to make the rules. To change them. Made it difficult for them to see the possibility of reinvention, of a life off script.

  So when Chris came out, her parents were angry, and they were frightened, and they said hurtful things. She forgave them, bit by bit. By the time Chris and I met she had reached a fragile peace with them, a peace that was in large part dependent on Chris’s discretion, and her undivided attention when they asked for it. She kept her romantic life private and her loyalty to them clear. She kept the peace. What I don’t think any of them realized was that Chris had done it for her grandparents’ sake. It was their approval she could not bear to lose, their affection she could not live without.

  Chris’s grandfather died three months after her grandmother. He wasn’t sick, or even taking any medications when he died. He was tired, and he missed his wife too much. Chris and I sat together at his funeral, and after the service she introduced me to people as her girlfriend. At the luncheon following the service, I sat next to a priest wearing a large onyx ring and a cashmere blazer who told me stories of his years at the Vatican. Chris’s grandmother’s favorite priest was absent from the lunch. When Chris asked her father about him, he told her that last month there had been accusations of sexual abuse, a harrowing number of boys over a harrowing number of years. Now he was gone. To jail? Chris asked. Her father wasn’t sure where he was. Well, thank God Nana didn’t know, Chris said. It would have destroyed her. Chris’s father nodded in agreement. Yes, thank God she died when she did. That she was spared the heartache. As I listened I couldn’t help but think of the heartache Nana’s death had spared me, and how secretly grateful I was to both Chris’s grandparents for going when they did, and for giving me the chance to stay.

  7

  Rules of Engagement

  I proposed to Chris on a Saturday morning, just a few weeks after her nana’s funeral. “I think we should get married,” I said. “I think we should have a wedding.” I was lying on the bed in our guest room and she was vacuuming ladybugs from the walls. I had been grading papers until she interrupted me with her daily ritual of ladybug extermination. Our house was infested with ladybugs; they seemed to hatch on particularly sunny days and congregate in the guest room. At first I liked them, and tried to convince Chris they were a sign of good luck. But soon enough they were in the shower and in the sheets and I came to accept the necessity of the vacuuming.

  Chris turned off the vacuum. “Are you proposing?” she asked.

  “I am,” I said, “but you can still feel free to get me a ring.”

  Chris and I had talked about getting married long before I proposed. There would be no legal significance to the wedding; this was 2001 and federally recognized same-sex marriage was still fifteen years away. At the time we couldn’t have imagined the speed with which states would begin to legalize gay marriage (our state being the first, no less), or that the Supreme Court would rule on the matter in just fifteen years. We couldn’t have imagined that one day we would buy a new stove and name it after Edith Windsor, whom we had to thank for the federal tax return we bought it with.

  But all that was still to come. It was 2001 and people still rallied for civil unions, still planned commitment ceremonies. I hated the idea of both. They were accommodations; to have either would suggest that the state—and the Church—could tell me what sort of life I was allowed to have. I wanted a wedding; I wanted to be married.

  Looking back I admire my orthodoxy, delusional as it was. Delusional because whether I liked it or not, the state could tell me what sort of life I was allowed to have. Marrying Chris—and not a man—meant losing a whole host of rights and safeties. I was engaged in some serious magical thinking then, having decided I would marry Chris but still hold tight to my straight privilege. I might be marrying a woman, I silently announced to the world, but I’m the same as I ever was. I’m the same as all of you.

  This delusion was made possible by a range of circumstances: I had lived as a straight person my whole life, and still easily passed. I looked like an Irish girl-next-door: long brown hair, manicured hands, lipsticked lips. My closet was filled with dresses and heels, my drawers with lace underwear and nightgowns. My only significant personal experience of homophobia—Hector—was one I had not yet reckoned with. And perhaps most essentially, we lived in western Massachusetts, a place where lesbians had so fully permeated the culture that even the sixty-year-old farmer who
came to deliver our firewood didn’t flinch at the sight of two women’s names on the check. For these reasons, my delusion went on for longer—much longer—than it should have.

  Chris, on the other hand, having known that she was gay from the time she was a young girl, knew exactly how the world saw her. She was okay with civil unions and had no interest in a church wedding. But she was still deeply pleased by the idea of our wedding, despite her constant insistence that she did not see herself as a bride. “You don’t have to,” I said every time she said it. And I meant it. I certainly saw myself as a bride and was happy to have the role to myself.

  Chris got me a ring. It was an art deco sapphire, and we bought it together in an estate jewelry store in Provincetown a few weeks after my proposal. By then I was already planning our wedding, trying to decide when and where we might have it, who we would invite. I found a book about lesbian weddings, a guide to creating meaningful rituals. The book had poorly reproduced black-and-white photos along with narratives about a dozen or so ceremonies. Many of the rituals were pagan; several included creative ways of involving pets and former lovers. The book made Chris laugh, but it made me crazy. All these years later I can see that the book is a treasure, a marvelous document of revolution and bravery. I can feel a tenderness and camaraderie with those marrying women. But in the months before my own wedding they frightened me. They were so far afield, so removed from straight culture. I couldn’t see myself or even my desires in those pictures. So I put away the book and instead studied Martha Stewart Weddings. I ripped pictures of flower arrangements from magazines, compared tent-rental prices, and weighed the relative merits of fig and nasturtium salad garnishes.