by Hilary Zaid
“Just because we’re queer, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have sparkly, sparkly rocks,” Francine opined, reminding me, again, why she and June were friends. And there was a certain appeal to it. With a big rock on your finger, you didn’t have to make announcements; you just slashed your shining finger through the air and people understood you were engaged.
I started totting up figures on my fingers. “There are two of us, so, it’s not two months’ salary. It’s four months’,” I pointed out. “But, you know, I think it’s four months of that guy’s salary.”
“What? Who?”
“The guy in the diamond ad. ‘Isn’t two months’ salary worth something that will last forever?’” I parroted. “He’s probably a stock broker, or a corporate lawyer. Even if you take both of our salaries together—” I did some more calculations on my fingers—“we’d probably have to multiply our salaries by a factor of seven or eight.”
Francine shrugged. “Ok. So we’ll get diamonds later.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “Let’s get rings.” But then something else occurred to me. “But we can’t just get rings.” When Sam and I were in college, Melissa and Diti, the sweetest couple we all knew, had sat down at the long, Formica breakfast table in matching pajamas and, with a sly smile, lifted their clasped, newly ringed hands and announced, “We’re married.” They had gone out into the moonlit garden and promised to love each other forever. I could see them, two nymphs glowing in the pagan moonlight like a tableau by Maxfield Parrish. And who better suited? But, even at the time, I’d wondered: Couldn’t something so simply and privately done be just as simply undone? They wouldn’t be the first couple in the GLBSA to announce “We’re married,” and then split up. No one really expected them to stay together; they didn’t have to get divorced.
Francine hadn’t let go of my hand, as if she might not let it go until she had actually slipped a ring on it. But now she let it drop. “Right.” Francine had come out in college, too. She knew that, without community property behind it, a couple of rings and “We’re married” didn’t sound real. She glanced back at her parents’ door, which had closed behind us long before, as if the answers might be in there. The fact was, we were making this up on the fly.
“I’ll talk to Debbie,” I offered. Debbie, my college friend and former roommate, the person who had introduced me to Fran-cine, had been the biggest campus activist I knew and was now a civil rights lawyer. Queer Nation East Bay had started up in our living room. “If anyone will know how to make a lesbian wedding a wedding, she will.” Francine agreed. I picked up Francine’s hand and held it. “But you still want rings, right?” I smiled what I hoped was a Fiona-wattage smile, bright enough in the dark driveway to convince her that we were going to figure it out.
“Are you kidding?” She winked lasciviously, as if she were talking about sex or chocolate. “I want the most fabulous ring you can buy.”
I laughed out loud, partly out of relief and partly out of guilt, because I planned to ask Debbie to meet me at SFMOMA, where I’d confirmed with an anonymous phone call Anya Kamenets still worked part-time as a docent.
( )
Debbie readily agreed to meet me under the shining quartz oculus of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Debbie was a style hound who wore crushed velvet dresses to Whole Foods, a former law student who had once spent our first weekend in the apartment alphabetizing the spice rack. Debbie was as eager to see the frowning Kahlos, as I was to spot Anya and her black-ribboned hair, her stylish shoes. I wanted to know if Anya really was a chronic, like Sam thought, or if there was something more to it. I was curious. Who wouldn’t be? And if I happened to spot her there at the museum, who could say it was any more than a coincidence?
Debbie and I met in the lobby. High above, hung from an invisible wire, a toaster flew in lazy circles through the vaulted air. I’d forgotten how large the museum was, how honeycombed with darkened galleries. Debbie buzzed toward the paintings, a cloud of cucumber and cinnamon, telling me all about the women she’d had over to watch Ellen, while I glanced toward the hidden alcoves, the doors that nearly melted into the walls, marked “Staff.” I might push through one of them and find Anya behind it. But then what would I say? Frida Kahlo stared down from the walls with heavy-browed disapproval.
Debbie nodded at the picture on the wall, one of the few self-portraits in which Frida had let her dark hair down. “How’s Sam?” A thousand years before, Debbie had introduced me and Sam in the busy portico of Sever Hall, where we realized that we both sat in the third row of Beauties & Beasts: Medieval Bestiaries. For the rest of the semester, Sam scribbled satyrs in the margins of my notebook. For a second, I looked at Debbie, elegant in her linen dress and leather purse, and flashed on the college girl in Doc Martens and cutoffs, pink triangle and “Silence = Death” buttons stuck like scales to her ratty black messenger bag. Though Debbie had congratulated me and Sam on not pretending we were going to stay together as a couple after we left for separate coasts, she still had a soft spot for our love. “She’s seeing someone new.”
Debbie’s eyebrows tilted with appreciation. “I can’t say I’m surprised.” As soon as Sam had moved to Toronto, she had hooked up with someone new. It was how she kept the demons at bay. Even though we weren’t together anymore, it had upset me at the time. But that was ancient history. Sam was my ex. Francine and I were getting married—whatever that meant. “What do you think about gay marriage?” We wandered below the shadows of the people passing overhead on the translucent bridge.
Debbie shook her head, knowingly. “With a woman for five minutes, and this is where it goes?” The urge to merge, she meant. It was the oldest joke in the book: What do lesbians do on the second date? Rent a U-haul.
I was going to say, “Not Sam. Me and Francine.” And that might have made a difference. But I’d never been the kind to say something straight out, especially if I could sense disapproval brewing. My mother had taught me that. Instead I said, “No. Seriously. If you were with the right person, would you get married?” Along with Sam, Debbie was the person who had drawn me into a bold, forward, public life out of the closet. We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it! Long-closeted professors had come out in our wake. Debbie was the person who had introduced me first to Sam, then to Francine. She was practically single-handedly responsible for my entire adult romantic life, and she was an adult, a person whose opinion mattered to me. More than her political opinion, I really wanted her blessing. But that’s not what I’d asked for.
“Married?” Debbie shrugged toward a strange portrait of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. The two of them were holding hands, but Kahlo stood behind him, and, in the perspective of the painting, she appeared weirdly small, almost doll-like. “I wouldn’t get married to a man if I couldn’t get married to a woman.” The security guard, a burly woman in polyester pants, glanced over, her face to the side, as if she weren’t listening. “And I wouldn’t get married to a woman if I couldn’t do it legally.” Debbie’s tone grew clipped, the same quick, hyper-articulate tongue that reminded me she’d grown up in New York, went to Hunter High and then to Harvard and Boalt Law, the same cadence in which she’d demanded an anti-homophobia resolution from the Undergraduate Council. Biracial, Jewish, bisexual, Debbie was not a person who trucked in half-truths. “Marriage is a civil institution. Without the framework of law behind it, a wedding is just a pantomime played out at our own expense.” All around us, couples pressed closer to the paintings, serious-looking, comfortable, older men and women holding onto each other’s arms. People who had the support of the law. “You can tell yourself you have a right to something,” Debbie picked up a fat coffee table book of Degas dancers, flipping through the pages. To her, this was just a hypothetical conversation, a talk about politics. She didn’t know that, to me, it was personal. If she did, would she have gone on? I’m pretty sure that she would have. “If you don’t have that right and you convince yourself that you do, you’re just abetting the enemy.”
Abetting the enemy? A chunk of my heart broke off right then and plunged straight through the floor, like a modern art exhibit called, “Girl, Falling Through Space.” Just as it did, I spotted an elegant figure with blond hair and a black ribbon. Had she heard what I was saying? It seemed to me, as I raised my head in alarm, that the parenthetical eyes caught my eyes and smiled, a slow, knowing smile, before she melted into the crowd.
( )
Anya had a knack for making me feel like she was the cat and I was the mouse, and I was too eager to be wanted by someone like her to realize it had quickly turned the other way around. Seeing her at the museum made up a little bit for my stinging conversation with Debbie, and I tried to hold onto that feeling by steeping myself in my work: the world of old ladies with their secrets to tell. I was at my desk, late, when Fiona called with big news.
“Well, hello!” Typical Fiona. It was part of her claim on me that she didn’t even need to say her name. “What are you doing?”
“Working,” I told her, glancing over at Wendy’s empty desk and massaging the back of my neck. I’d just spent the past four hours going over microfiche articles on the Piaski Ravine, preparation for an interview with Mrs. Hannah Weiner, a survivor of Janowska, the final endpoint of Lvov’s few surviving Jews.
“Are you sitting down?”
“Practically prostrate,” I assured her.
“I met someone.”
Growing up, Fiona and I had been tomboys together, until just like the dandelions that appeared overnight in their big, badly mowed lawn, Fiona had sprouted huge breasts and the magnetic attraction of every boy in West Los Angeles. It’s no wonder so many of the transformation myths involve young women. Briar Rose, kitsune, seal-into-selkie, Fiona was all of them. Her straight black hair, which used to fly wildly behind her on her bike like October wind, now swayed seductively around her shoulders, a spring breeze; her cat-like green eyes had gone glinty. I had always been her sidekick.
“Mmmm.” I rooted around in my desk drawer.
“Someone different.”
Three loose peanut M&M’s rolled out from behind a pile of paperclips. They tasted stale, fragrant with pencil shavings. I loved Fiona. But, having heard these phrases for most of my life, I’d lost some of my itch to inquire. “So?” I prompted Fiona, “Nu?”
“So . . .” Fiona started hesitatingly. “I think you’ll really like her.” Excitement shimmered at the edges of Fiona’s silence. She went on quickly. “I’ve decided that I just can’t limit myself, you know?” This was a test.
“Like an omnivore?” I suggested.
“Right.” Suddenly, I saw Fiona walking down the streets of Manhattan, every pair of eyes on her, the delivery boys and the young, bleach-blond dyke bike messengers, the preppy lesbians with their briefcases under their arms. I reminded myself: Fiona was impulsive. She liked to do things just to see what would happen next. But she didn’t always follow through.
“Mazel tov.”
Across the line, I could hear Fiona break into a smile. “Ooohhh. I knew you’d be happy for me,” she thrilled. I could hear her clap. “I’m breaking up with Chris,” she told me. “And David.”
“Wow.” Breaking up with both boyfriends. That sounded serious.
“Chandra and I have so much in common,” Fiona effused. “She gets the whole Irish mother thing.”
“Excuse me.” I had practically grown up under Cait Collins’s roof. “I think I know a thing or two about the whole Irish mother thing.”
“Wow.” Fiona paused dramatically. “I can’t believe it. I mean, I expected it, but I can not believe it. You’re actually jealous.” I should have asked her if that was the point. She didn’t sound mad, though. In fact, she sounded mildly pleased.
“I’m not jealous,” I objected. Despite my best friend’s radiant sexuality, I’d never been in love with Fiona. I’d known her too long. At least, I wasn’t jealous of Fiona’s girlfriend. I was mildly jealous that Fiona got to fall in love with brand-new women. After eight years with the same person, who wouldn’t be?
“You’re the one who’s getting married,” she felt the need to remind me, as if she’d just discovered the joys of eating meat, right when I had decided to become a vegetarian. “Who knows,” she mooned, “I might even end up getting married before you!”
That was too much. Francine and I had been together for years. Our relationship was serious, and we were taking the whole idea of what it meant to get married seriously, too. “Oh, please!” The words leaked past my lips without thinking, fueled by my misplaced anger at Debbie. I never criticized Fiona. Supporting her no matter what crazy thing she did had always been my job. Until now. “You’ve only known this person five minutes!”
Fiona answered slowly, thoughtfully, like this was something she’d been considering for a while. “You’ve never been in love at first sight, have you?” That was low. Francine and I hadn’t fallen in love at first sight. At least, she hadn’t fallen in love at first sight with me. And Fiona knew it.
Ages ago, after Francine had my knees knocking with her liquid dance moves, we had gone on a half-dozen discouragingly platonic dates. Finally, I invited myself over to Francine’s East Oakland cottage; Francine and I were together, alone in her little house. It did not go as planned.
I headed for the bathroom while Francine filled two water glasses. On the wall opposite her bed hung a small corkboard on which she’d tacked up a handwritten copy of the Emily Dickinson poem, “Wild Nights,” which I found too suggestive to look at. In the bathroom, bright sunlight flooded the walls and white enamel fixtures like an overexposure on Francine’s most intimate stuff: a loofah sponge, a hair scrunchie and a thread of copper hair, a pyramidal bottle filled with clear, olive-colored liquid. All along the edge of the tub thick white candles stood sentry in thick glass votives, their wicks black with use. For whom—or with whom?—had Francine lit them?
When I came back to the living room, a woman’s voice sang a haunting melody, a medieval sound Sam would have liked. Francine was sitting on the futon. “I brought you a book,” I said. Maybe it was admitting too much. But Francine didn’t show it.
Francine glanced at the cover just long enough to read the title: I Never Saw Another Butterfly. Then she tucked her legs up under her and looked intently into my eyes. “Tell me.”
I had to look down before I told her about the camp outside of Prague called Terezin, a model camp set up by the Nazis to prove to the Red Cross that the Jews were being treated humanely. Francine nodded, biting her thumb and narrowing her eyes. “They brought in Jewish artists and intellectuals to create the impression that it was a cultural haven; one of them decided to give secret art lessons to the children, and someone else had the foresight to smuggle a bunch of the drawings and poems out.”
“Did the children . . .?” Francine began.
“All of them.” I squinched my lips to the side. “Just about.” Suddenly I wondered why I thought it was a good idea to court a woman with the most horrific story ever.
But Francine didn’t seem repulsed. She studied the drawing on the front cover, a paper collage of red-roofed buildings held in the grip of twin scissor blades, the sky behind them black. She leafed through the pages slowly. “This reminds me of something else.” Then she got up and returned with a slim, hardcover book. I recognized the sailboat docked in choppy water, the huge sleeping beast with its human feet, from childhood: Where the Wild Things Are. Francine held it toward me so I could see the pictures. “The night Max wore his wolf suit . . .” As she turned the pages, I fell rapt at the melody Francine’s voice made, and when she read, “And Max, the king of all wild things was lonely, and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all,” I felt the old longing at Max’s table set with soup and milk and cake, and at the mother who forgave him his wildness, and knew what he wanted.
Francine turned back and began flipping through the pages. “I always notice that the first picture is quite small.” She touched the re
ctangle framed by inches of white, in which Max nails a bedsheet to the wall. “But, gradually,” she flipped slowly to the next page, and the next, “the pictures get larger and larger, and the white parts start to disappear, and the forest grows and grows,” Francine paged ahead, “until the ocean spills over and there are no words at all.” Max, eyes pressed shut with joy, swung from the trees; Max, eyes closed in regal contentment, rode through the leafy forest on the backs of his beasts.
“I start thinking,” Francine murmured, closing her own eyes for a long moment, “about how the pictures grow and shrink, and I wonder about the order we impose on kids, the limits, and about how big the world of imagination is, inside us.” Francine opened her eyes and blinked.
I took the book from her hands and turned through the first pages, stopping at the picture of Max, banished in his room, a forest canopy beginning to bloom above his bed. The way the children at Terezin had made worlds bloom inside their barbed-wire cage. She was right. It was like I Never Saw Another Butterfly. At least as Francine saw it: the closed world opening up.
My gaze dropped to her mouth.
That’s when Francine shot up from the futon. “I forgot all about your drink!” In three steps she was in the kitchen, pouring lemon water from a pitcher. I studied Francine’s pale, smooth cheek, the line of her jaw, taut above her pale throat. I couldn’t read her at all. The opening world suddenly closing inside of me.
Fiona was the one I had called when I got home, the one who’d said, “I’m sorry, honey.”
But that was the point. What a person felt at the beginning wasn’t necessarily the same as what a person felt later. I tapped my pencil against my desk. “I believe in love after many, many sights,” I told Fiona, the love-struck baby dyke. Let’s see how Fiona feels about this woman Chandra six months from now, I thought.
