Girl on a Wire

by Libby Phelps

  “Wow,” she said. “That’s cool!” I sat down in the chair and explained that I still wanted long hair—just not THAT long. I figured maybe it wouldn’t be quite so blasphemous if I still kept my hair in more or less the same style. Maybe God wouldn’t mind quite so much about taking off a few inches. I rattled on about whatever I could think of while she got to work, talking a mile a minute like I always did when I was nervous. She ended up cutting off about a foot of the length, which lay all around me on the floor. I didn’t know back then that you could donate hair for wigs, so I just left it there.

  “This is crazy,” I kept saying as she worked away. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.” By the time she was done, my hair hung just below my shoulders, looking much fuller than I’d ever seen it before. I reached up and touched the ends. They felt so soft! I felt truly, terrifyingly free at that moment; there was really no going back now. I had been told my entire life that my hair was my “glory.” And I had just left a good part of it on a salon floor. My departure from the church was complete. Tears formed, but I managed not to break down. Meg, who’d been standing by me during the cut, smiled encouragingly. “It looks great!” she said. Before we left, I snapped a picture of the piles of brown hair I’d left around the chair.

  SHORTLY AFTER THAT, BRANDON AND I WERE SHOPPING ON Massachusetts Street, one of the main drags in Lawrence, and had just entered Urban Outfitters when I saw a familiar face. It was a strikingly handsome young guy with short dark hair, sitting on a bench inside with a friend. Our eyes met and I flashed back to why he looked familiar.

  The summer before, he had come into my physical therapy practice. My boss had seen him initially, but had assigned me to treat him when he came back in. Since I had just started practicing on my own—I was no longer a student with a clinical instructor to fall back on—I was a little nervous. I hadn’t seen many patients on my own at that point. I stood at the front desk looking over his chart, trying to make sense of my boss’s chicken-scratch writing. I could make out that something was wrong with his left pinky, and that was about it.

  The young man walked into the lobby, and I immediately noted how good-looking he was, so much so that I blushed in spite of myself. He had an easy, blinding-white smile and beautiful dark skin. He was dressed like a typical Kansas guy, in an athletic shirt and cargo shorts. “I’m Logan Alvarez,” he said. “I’m here for my two o’clock appointment.” I smiled back, introduced myself, and asked him to sit down. When I turned to the counter to get his chart, my eyes flicked to his date of birth: He was only seventeen, more than seven years younger than me! I couldn’t believe it; he seemed like he was my age, not at all like a teenager.

  I called Logan back to the tiny treatment room, the last door at the back of the small three-room office. I admitted that I couldn’t really read my boss’s writing, and asked what exactly was wrong, and what she’d done the last time he was there. He’d hurt his finger playing football, he told me, and she’d treated it initially with underwater ultrasound.

  Great—a treatment I’d never done before. Not only did I have to do something for the first time, but I was already flustered because he was so cute. Luckily, underwater ultrasound isn’t very tricky, so I managed to pull it off without looking too awkward.

  The next part was harder for me, though: I had to manually stretch all the joints and perform joint mobilizations to his left pinky because it was stuck in the flexed position. This amounted to holding his left hand in both of my hands. I tried to concentrate on being professional and not on looking into his gorgeous brown eyes. We joked around easily, and I felt myself relaxing. He told me about the college parties he went to with his older brothers, full of drinking and debauchery. I wasn’t impressed, and I told him so. He didn’t seem to mind. I concluded the treatment by dipping his hand in paraffin, and we chatted more during the ten minutes he had to let it set. He told me about his family, and I deliberately did not tell him about mine. I figured he probably knew who I was, though, given my last name.

  After a few weeks, he stopped coming for treatments, missing his last week altogether. I was disappointed not to see him anymore, but reasoned that this was just part of the PT business—meeting clients you liked and then having them drop out of your life again.

  So when I saw him outside the Urban Outfitters, my heart soared. I was surprised by how thrilled I was to see him. I had an easy conversation starter: I walked over to the benches and mock-scolded him, “You missed your last visit!” I worried for a second he might not recognize me with my new, shorter hair. But his eyes lit up. “I meant to come by!” he apologized. So I told him he could come in whenever he wanted.

  Sure enough, the very next day he stopped by the office to say hi. He also casually asked what I was up to that evening. My knees felt a little weak. I told him I was going to a Bikram yoga class, a practice I’d recently started. I liked it because it was so sweaty and intense it actually made me forget about my problems for an hour. “Can I come?” he asked with a grin. He said he’d never done yoga before but would be willing to try. He showed up at the appointed time outside the studio and rented a stinky communal yoga mat for the class. As we got settled, the heat rose. I felt sweat dripping down my back and class hadn’t even started yet. We were both lying on our backs when he turned toward me, catching me eyeing his muscular biceps.

  “So, how old are you?” he asked. I told him I was twenty-six. He grinned. I got worried. Did he think we were on a date? Were we on a date? “I’m way too old for you!” I whispered with a laugh. He whispered back that he didn’t care. I launched into the class, running through the same twenty-six postures I’d been doing for weeks. Beside me, Logan struggled valiantly through his first class, sweat pooling under him. I was impressed. And I was definitely interested.

  He showed up at my office again a week later and left a bouquet of yellow flowers for me with a note. That evening at my boss’s house I asked her if she thought he liked me. She laughed incredulously.

  “Libby,” she said. “Are you kidding? Yellow is the perfect, respectful color. Yellow means he wants to start out as friends, when you get pink that means he really likes you, and when he gives you red, he loves you!”

  BEFORE LOGAN AND I STARTED SERIOUSLY DATING, I ALSO continued to see Enrique, who had never really left the picture. He would invite me over to his house to watch TV, which was something I was free to do now that I wasn’t in the church. I was also free to wear short shorts, which I did deliberately when I went over there. I knew it wasn’t a good idea, any of it. Even though he had broken up with his girlfriend, I knew he wasn’t the type of guy who’d be good relationship material. But I couldn’t quite tear myself away, for one very basic reason: I couldn’t get enough of the kissing.

  We were making out on the couch one evening when he pulled back and looked at me.

  “You can’t have any feelings about this,” he told me.

  “But I like you,” I said. I was confused. He said he couldn’t get involved in anything serious with anyone right now. “I want to be your girlfriend,” I said against all my better instincts. Mostly I just wanted to be kissing again. “Why do I even come over here?” I demanded.

  “Because you can’t resist me!” I laughed and kissed him again. He played a lot of games. I knew I should be just friends with him.

  Finally, after I’d been out with Logan a few times, I decided I’d steer myself onto the right track and stop fooling around with Enrique. Logan treated me a lot better. When Enrique invited me over for dinner, I went—but I didn’t wear my shortest shorts anymore. He cooked steaks for dinner, and assigned me to make noodles, which I promptly screwed up by overfilling the small pot he had given me. We joked around and ate dinner, and then I jumped up from the table and gave him a hug good-bye. “I made this steak dinner for you, and now you’re just going to leave?” he asked, incredulous. “Yep,” I answered. I headed for the door. I felt a twinge of regret that I might never get to kiss him again, but I knew
this was the right decision. I gave him a big hug and left.

  Months later, I got word from Megan that my family had found out about my involvement with him. “They know about that guy from the library,” she told me. Apparently he’d told a judge in Lawrence about our little secret, and that guy was a friend of the family. I texted Enrique, scandalized. “A little bird told me you talked about us, and now my family knows!” I wrote. He wrote back that he didn’t know what I was talking about. Same old Enrique. Mysterious, and maddening.

  LOGAN WAS THE MAIN REASON I SHUT THE DOOR ON THAT part of my life. Part of me knew it was a bad idea to get involved with him, too, not only because of the age difference between us but because I had just gone through a huge, life-changing event. I was in no state to start a relationship with anyone—especially since I’d never been in one and had no idea how to navigate it. Despite knowing all of that, I said yes when he asked me to dinner.

  Sitting at an Italian restaurant in Lawrence with him, I knew I had to say something about my past, and the sooner the better. It hadn’t come up, and I had no idea if he knew. So I came out with it. “Do you know about my family?” I blurted out before the waiter had even brought our menus. Even though I had never been in a relationship, I knew it wasn’t a good idea to start a potential one with secrets. He said he didn’t, and that he didn’t care about where I came from—he just wanted to get to know me.

  That night, however, he Googled me. And, as he told me when we talked the next day, he was indeed shocked and disturbed at what he had found online. I had seen this coming, and I still felt sick. I told him he could call it quits if he wanted to, and lied that it wouldn’t hurt my feelings at all. If I was good at one thing, it was keeping a positive face on no matter what was happening inside. But Logan said he didn’t want to stop seeing me. He said he respected me for leaving and that he liked me for me. He persisted, taking me to movies, making me mix CDs, and bringing me more flowers. I began to fall in love, something I had grown up thinking I would never be allowed to do.

  WITHOUT THE CHURCH’S DISAPPROVAL LOOMING OVER everything I said and did, I was free to question some of my long-held beliefs. But it’s hard to jettison everything you grew up with overnight. My friendship with Blake, my volleyball buddy, had started when I was still in the church. In the early days after I’d left, he asked me what I thought about gay people now that I wasn’t required to picket them anymore. “I still think it’s wrong,” I told him. He looked sad, stared at the ground, and changed the subject. We left it at that for months, but continued on with our volleyball games and Starbucks runs. He had become one of my closest friends, despite the fact that I knew he was gay and he knew I knew. Why, exactly, is it so wrong? I asked myself frequently in the weeks and months that followed. Was it really my place to judge whether someone’s life was right or wrong? All my life I had been instructed to think they were awful, terrible people—but the more I thought about it, the less I could think of any examples of that being true. And here was an example of someone I loved, who didn’t think he could talk to me about it because I’d be judging him.

  Once, I was having a particularly hard day after having a terrible conversation with my sister, who I just learned had recently left the church. I called Blake and asked if we could meet up. He picked me up and we drove to Starbucks, with me sobbing in the passenger seat. As we parked, I turned to him.

  “Blake,” I blurted out, “I know you’re gay. Would you just tell me? I don’t care. I just want to know.”

  “Are you really sure you don’t care?” he asked, avoiding my eyes.

  “Yes!” I said with a weepy laugh. “I’ve never really cared. You’ve always treated me so well. I don’t think I’ve ever really cared.”

  Slowly he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I am. I just didn’t want you to hate me.”

  “I knew it!” I yelled. “And I don’t hate you!” We hugged and I pulled a Kleenex out of my pocket and blew my nose. “Do I look like I’ve been crying?” I asked, feeling like my eyes were nearly swollen shut by that point from weeping.

  “Uh,” he said. “No?” We laughed together—a genuine, cleansing laugh. Then we got out and went to get Frappuccinos.

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER LEAVING, I MANAGED TO GET MY finances in order enough to buy a house. I furnished it with items purchased at garage sales and clearance items from a local furniture store—and, of course, my beloved birthday present can opener. Logan was at the center of my life, helping me move and with any other thing I asked of him. I had a place to live now, and a boyfriend. I was really doing it—living in the world like a grownup. But I still felt like an imposter. Every day I discovered new experiences that made me feel like I was reliving my adolescence, just learning how to operate in the world.

  One of the most traumatic was going to church—regular church. The first time, it was a Catholic church, in the small town where Logan grew up, Eudora. I went with Logan at his mother’s insistence. It was Easter, and we had been dating for a little under a year. He comes from a somewhat religious family, so it was important to him to bring me there. Even though he wasn’t too religious by that point in his life. The church had been a cornerstone of his life growing up. I respected that about him—it was something we shared, in a way—and yet the thought of going to church anywhere at all made me feel sick to my stomach. “Let’s just go,” he cajoled gently. “We’ll sit at the back.” I decided I’d suck it up, for him, and give it a try.

  Midway through the service, Logan got up to get in line to take Communion, leaving me sitting in the pew with a few of his family members. I felt a mild panic attack coming on. Somehow, I thought, Gramps knew I was doing this. Sitting in a false church with a bunch of sinners. He could never forgive me now. And God could see me. There was no way I could get out of going to hell. I began to sweat uncontrollably.

  Thankfully, Logan’s brother Vince farted. Silent but deadly. We all knew it was him, and it was awful, and I made a face, sliding out of the pew and darting out the door. I’ll always be grateful to Vince for that conveniently timed flatulence. I stood outside on the church steps, fuming, angry at Logan for putting me in this situation in the first place. How could he have been so thoughtless? Leaving me sitting there by myself! He knew what I’d been through! Logically I knew he hadn’t meant anything like that, and that I was being irrational. But logic didn’t have anything to do with this.

  Wiping away tears, I stormed off to a park down the road. I just wanted to get away. Actually, I wanted to go get a doughnut at Casey’s General Store. I wanted comfort food, something sugary, something that would remind me of the Little Debbie snacks we used to have during church intermission, in Gran’s kitchen. I would never be able to go to Gran’s kitchen again. The thought made me cry harder as I sat on a park bench.

  Logan had followed me out of the church and sat down next to me. He asked why I was so upset, and I was completely unable to explain. It was an instinctive reaction, almost impossible to put into words. He sat quietly holding my hand, and finally I managed to explain that I just didn’t want to be pushed into going to church before I was ready. He seemed to understand, but there were more challenges to come that afternoon.

  After church, we were expected to go to Logan’s grandmother’s house for an Easter brunch. Again, I really didn’t want to go. I had already violated one of my family’s taboos by going to a Catholic church, now I was expected to violate another by celebrating a pagan holiday. At lunch, the family all prayed and held hands beforehand. I was as uncomfortable as I had expected; their prayer was incredibly watered down compared to Westboro’s style.

  THE SECOND TIME I WENT TO A CATHOLIC CHURCH WAS FOR Logan’s cousin’s wedding. The part of the ceremony that most jarred me then was when you were supposed to shake hands with your neighbors. I felt as if I was being forced to be more a part of the church than I’d wanted, though I reluctantly participated. I felt I was being sucked into the Catholic religion, and I wanted no part of it. I left the bui
lding and quietly sat outside waiting for the wedding party to make their exit. Shortly after I walked out, Logan’s mom emerged.

  “Is everything all right? Why did you leave?” she asked.

  I pushed back tears. “I feel like you’re trying to push your religion onto me,” I blurted. “I can’t get over the whole pedophile priest scandal. I know by going in there it looks like I’m supporting it and I’m not. I just can’t do it.” I had shocked myself by saying that. I’d tried my hardest to steer away from any religious talk with anyone, but there was no escaping it here.

  “Well, you know, by saying that, you’re judging,” she told me. “Not all of the priests did it, and you can’t judge them based on the actions of some.”

  I stood my ground. “It’s fact,” I said. “All the news reports, all the lawsuits … it’s not right. I don’t approve of it and I’m not going to pretend it didn’t happen. I do not want to go to a Catholic church. Plus all the money received in any Catholic church is fungible, so I feel like everyone is supporting pedophiles, which is wrong.”

  The wedding party started coming out and I got up quickly, trying to find Logan. I was shaken by what I’d said, but also proud I’d stood up for myself.

  That spring, my friend Julie planned to baptize her baby—a practice I had been brought up to believe was sacrilegious. I longed to skip it, but I also didn’t want to offend her by saying I wouldn’t go. During the service, they received Communion, and that put me over the edge—I walked out while everyone else was lining up for the altar. The priest said something about “those who eat or drink unworthily,” and I figured I wasn’t worthy enough, so it seemed like a good opportunity to leave.

  Afterward, we all went to lunch. My friend’s mother-in-law raised an eyebrow at me. “If you hadn’t left,” she said, “you could have gotten your picture taken with everyone else.” She seemed mad at me. For someone who had just been to a church where you were supposed to have so much compassion for your fellow humans, she didn’t seem very compassionate. I tried to get away from her and sit by Julie, or our friend Lori, who both have always been understanding and compassionate, but she made it a priority to sit next to me, which made for an uncomfortable lunch.