by Robbi McCoy
“Sue.”
“There are reporters asking me questions,” she said. “What am I supposed to tell them?” Her voice was quiet, shy.
“Say as little as possible,” I advised her. “Just say she’s a friend and keep it at that. You don’t have to answer anything.”
When Rosie came in, I told her about Sue’s call.
“How do they find these things out?” she asked, disgusted.
“I’ve already lost the election, so what’s the point? Why are they out there harassing my friends?” Rosie stood in the center of the 44
room, looking distraught, watching me. “I can’t imagine what’s going on in your mind,” she said, “what kind of picture you’re getting of my life. You’re probably wondering if droves of them are going to start oozing out of the woodwork.” She wanted to know if I was judging her. She didn’t wait for a reply. She walked toward her office, saying, “I think I’ll give Sue a call. She’s not very good at standing up to people.”
It intrigued me that Rosie had kept on good terms with her ex-lovers. They seemed to respect her, the two that I knew about, and she referred to them as her “friends.”
Thankfully, no story appeared about Sue. But there were other disturbing reactions.
Three days after Rosie’s press conference, I came home to find the banner in my front yard vandalized. In the hand that was raised into a wave, someone had drawn an oversized and finely-detailed dildo in red paint. Standing beside my car and without a thought in my head, I pushed my fist into the driver’s-side window.
It shattered in the frame into a spiderweb of broken glass. I stood in the driveway, shaking all over, pain shooting through my hand.
A moment later, Jerry drove up. He saw the banner and then the window. Rushing over to me, he said, “Are you okay?”
I moved my fingers tentatively and nodded to him. He went over to uproot the stakes of the desecrated banner. I walked into the house, then sat at the computer and wrote a letter to the editor of the Sentinel, the knuckles of my hand stinging. When Jerry came in, I kept writing and didn’t greet him.
“That was a stupid thing to do,” he muttered. “I’m surprised you didn’t break your hand.” He called a glass shop and arranged to have the window replaced the next day, Saturday.
“Thank you for taking care of that,” I said. “You’re right. It was a stupid thing to do.”
I called Gary at the Sentinel and told him I was sending him a letter and wanted to see it in tomorrow’s edition.
“I’ll see what I can do, Jean. Hey, sorry about…you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
Saturday morning Jerry brought the newspaper to the 45
breakfast table, having read my letter to the editor. “Who wrote this for you?” he asked. “Rosie?”
I took the paper from him. “Nobody wrote it for me. I wrote it myself.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Why do you ask?”
“It doesn’t sound like you. I guess I’ve never read anything you wrote before, except personal letters. It’s very articulate.”
“Your compliments are really backhanded,” I said.
“Don’t you think you’re getting a little carried away, Jeannie?
If this is a sincere appeal, you’re going to be very disappointed when she loses.”
I didn’t answer him. Instead, I read my letter to see how it sounded in print.
I’m writing out of appalling disbelief at the reaction of the citizens of my city to the rumor put out by the Kiester campaign that Rosie Monroe is gay. Before that rumor broke, she was leading in the mayoral race by twenty points, her lead climbing daily. And rightly so. Few people have done more for Weberstown than Rosie has. She’s worked hard to make this a better place to live for all of us. She’s worked largely without recognition or any thought of recompense. She entered politics reluctantly, pushed into it by those who know how much she can benefit this town.
We are all aware by now of some of Rosie’s accomplishments. She almost single-handedly saved the adult literacy program from shutting down last year. Her Women in Business directorship has allowed that organization to feed and clothe over one hundred homeless children this year alone. Her work with the Weberstown Arts Commission has contributed a renewed energy to the fine arts in our community, and the beautiful new portrait gallery of the museum wouldn’t exist without her efforts. I could go on and on, but why bother? Most of us already know Rosie as one of our most valuable citizens. Why have so many chosen to ignore all that now? Because some low-handed, desperate politician whose morals must certainly come into question has slandered her to get your vote? So, am I to conclude that the sleaziest of political shenanigans has worked?
46
Rosie is not an experienced politician. She’s a humanitarian and public servant by nature. She’s the kind of person I would be proud to have as mayor. I will be very much ashamed if we allow the despicable political machinery of this town to sway us from the right choice. Rosie deserves your support. As an ordinary, middle-class citizen, wife and mother of two, my vote goes unhesitatingly to Rosie.
“Not bad,” I said. “Looks even better in print.” Jerry was watching me, I saw, warily.
He finished his coffee and stood. “I’ve got to go get that window replaced.” He took hold of my hand and rubbed his thumb lightly over the most obvious bruise. “What are your plans?”
“I’ve called Faye. She’s giving me a lift to the office, so I won’t need your car.”
Faye and I arrived at the office before Rosie who, a few minutes later, came in grinning and holding a copy of the newspaper. “Jean, you clever girl,” she said. “What a beautiful letter. So sincere, so full of earnest appeal. And the part about being a wife and mother—brilliant!”
“Well, it’s true,” I pointed out.
“Yes, so it is.” She looked momentarily sheepish. “Doesn’t quite capture you, though, does it? Well, it’s a strong hit at the conscience of the voters, and I thank you, but I don’t think it’s worth throwing the punch.”
“I’m just so angry,” I said.
“I know you are. Get over it. It won’t help. But I appreciate the effort.”
“We need to find a way to deal with this issue, put it behind us and move on,” I said. “Your refusal to answer questions about it may be keeping it alive.”
“What do you suggest?”
“I don’t know. I’ll try to think of something.”
Monday morning, we got a call from a representative of the National Gay and Lesbian Alliance. Rosie agreed to take it and was on the phone about fifteen minutes.
“What did they want?” I asked when she emerged from her 4
office.
“They wanted to take up my cause. They wanted to launch a media blitz, put my story in newspapers, magazines, that sort of thing, put a face to the problem. You know, isn’t it a travesty that this kindly old grandmother couldn’t get elected as her hometown mayor because she’s a lesbian.”
“Kindly old grandmother?” I asked.
“Okay, I’m exaggerating. But you get the idea.”
“What did you say?”
“I said no, thank you.” Rosie sat at the empty desk next to mine. “I know that such stories need to be printed, and I considered it, but that sort of publicity wouldn’t be good for this town. I don’t want our city to be portrayed in the media as a symbol of homophobia.”
“I don’t understand why you’re so concerned about a city that’s treating you this way.”
“I know you’re angry right now, but the town’s been good to me, Jean. I’ve always known that this wasn’t San Francisco, or even Sacramento. This town is having its share of growing pains these days. Sexual orientation is not the only issue that these people are struggling with. Sometimes we’ve had a tough challenge to convince people that the town needs things like an arts commission, for instance, or that it should pay for a museum exhibit when crime and unemployment rates are h
igh. They don’t understand the connection. I thought I could really do something for this city as mayor.”
She was more forgiving than I was in the light of all of the insults we were encountering, but it occurred to me that Rosie, having been gay all her life, had a lot more experience with homophobia than I did and had probably learned a little bit about how to let it roll off. That was not an easy life, I imagined. It was certainly not the path of least resistance. Nothing like mine, in fact. I had followed the easiest possible path. I had married my last boyfriend out of high school and had easily flowed through twenty years of normalcy without anyone ever challenging or questioning me, least of all myself.
4
Rosie’s next scheduled interview was on a local cable TV talk show hosted by David Foster. She asked me to cancel it.
“Why?” I asked.
“I’m tired of evading the issue of my sexual orientation.
Foster is bound to ask me about it. He’s not a particularly kind interviewer.”
“Maybe you should quit evading the issue,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Answer his questions.”
She said nothing, appearing unsure.
“What have we got to lose?” I asked.
“Let me think about it. There’s not much fight left in me, Jean. I’m tired. A couple more weeks and we can get on with our lives. After this, I’m going to try to rest up for a while. How about you?”
I stuttered. “Uh, I don’t know.” Soon it would all be over.
The idea panicked me. I’d have to find something else to do.
“My daughter gave me a copy of the course catalog from her college,” I said. “I’ve been looking through it, trying to decide on a practical, job-oriented class. I’m just not sure what would make sense.” I produced the catalog and handed it to Rosie.
“Something to do with business, I guess.” Rosie flipped through the pages. “How about beginning economics? That’s a practical, useful starting point.”
“I don’t know. I think money matters are beyond me.”
Rosie stared. “Jean!” She picked up the ledger on the edge of my desk. “What do you call this? For a month, you’ve been keeping the books for my campaign. This is money matters.”
“But all you need to know to do that is how to add and subtract.”
She frowned and put the ledger down. “I wish you’d quit underestimating yourself. It’s getting on my nerves.” Rosie, irritated with me, went into her office and shut the door.
Was I underestimating myself? I opened the ledger and looked at the columns of handwritten figures. We should be doing this on a computer, I thought. And then I remembered that 4
I didn’t know how. That evening I sat in the den at our computer with one of Jerry’s Excel books and Rosie’s campaign ledger and began to teach myself how to build a spreadsheet.
Amy came and looked over my shoulder. “What are you doing, Mom?”
“Teaching myself Excel.”
“They’ve got a class at school.”
“I can’t wait that long. Do you know this, Amy?”
“Nope. Don’t know it, don’t want to know it and don’t care.”
When Jerry got home, he answered a couple of questions for me, but became almost immediately impatient. “Now look what you’ve done,” he said, pointing to a cell on the grid. “You’ve got a circular reference. It won’t work that way.”
“Instead of trying to make me feel stupid,” I said, “why don’t you help me?”
“I wasn’t trying to make you feel stupid.”
“Well, you are.”
“Fine. Do it yourself.” He left me alone, for which, I realized, I was grateful. His help was tinged with criticism. So I looked up “circular reference” in the online help to see what kind of sin I had committed. After a couple hours, I was beginning to understand how the thing worked. It wasn’t so complicated after all. In fact, it worked almost exactly the same as it did on paper.
At ten o’ clock, Jerry came in, saying, “Are you going to be playing with that thing all night?”
“I might,” I said coldly. He came up and looked over my shoulder. I was filling in figures now, having completed the formulas.
“That’s not bad,” he said, “for a first attempt.” How gracious he was. “May I make a suggestion?”
“Yes.”
“Change this formula from a simple addition to a sum. If you need to add another row later, you won’t have to recreate the formula.”
It was a good piece of advice. I made the change. I’d apparently 50
gained enough of his respect to be worthy of legitimate help.
“And here,” he said, “instead of putting the percent into the formula, put it off in a single cell somewhere and reference it as an absolute. That way, you can change the percent in the one cell and it will automatically change in all these formulas.”
We continued refining my design until about eleven when Jerry persuaded me to stop and come to bed. I had reached the point where I was satisfied, more than satisfied, with my accomplishment. I’d always assumed such things as spreadsheets were incredibly dense and mysterious. But if you took it a step at a time, patiently, it was pretty straightforward.
“Not to everyone,” Jerry said, undressing. “We’ve got people at work who can only use a spreadsheet that somebody else designed. And that’s after months or years. In one evening, you’ve gone far beyond them. I’m very impressed.”
I fell asleep with a great sense of urgency, anxious for tomorrow to come, as though I had been wasting my time, wasting my life. I wanted to do things. I didn’t know what, but something, something new, something that mattered. I was only just beginning to understand how much a single individual could accomplish. I had so much time to make up for.
51
Chapter Five
Faye and I were working out on side-by-side elliptical trainers at the gym, which we only occasionally managed to do together because of schedule conflicts. After a good forty minutes, we had both had enough.
“We may as well face facts,” Faye said, as we walked to the locker room. “Rosie’s gonna lose.”
“It seems so unfair,” I said.
“It makes you feel differently about her, doesn’t it?” Faye asked. “Knowing about this. I mean, it shouldn’t matter. But it does.”
“Yes,” I said, not really agreeing with Faye in the way she would assume. “How do you feel different?”
We changed into our street clothes while we talked.
Faye pulled off her tank top and wiped her face off with a towel. “I don’t know. I mean, I like Rosie. I think she’d make a first-rate mayor, even president of the country if such things were possible, but I am always aware of…I mean, just knowing that she has sex with women…”
52
“She doesn’t do it in front of you,” I said. “She doesn’t talk about it.”
“I know. But you just know it. It makes a difference.”
After we left the gym, I said good-bye to Faye at her car.
Knowing about Rosie did make a difference. To me too. But I didn’t know how, exactly. Rosie didn’t make me uncomfortable.
For me, she had become more vulnerable, and perhaps because of that, more approachable emotionally. I felt closer to Rosie.
She was no longer super-human. Her Achilles’ heel, it seemed, had been exposed. To what instinct of mine did she appeal, I wondered. Maternal? I wanted to take care of her, protect her from harm like I did my children. How peculiar, I thought, that I should think of myself as potential champion to such a powerful woman. Especially since I had no means of protecting her against the wave of hostility washing over her.
Ever since the news of Rosie’s association with Catherine Gardiner had been revealed, I’d been looking for some of her poetry. The bookstores in town reported a run on the two volumes which were currently in print. I ended up driving into Sacramento to find them, and, after getting them h
ome, sat alone in the family room reading, searching for something, I didn’t know what, some essence of Rosie, perhaps. Most of the poems were unapproachable, too difficult for me, full of social criticism, subtle irony, harsh imagery. There was nothing sentimental about Gardiner’s work. There was one poem, though, I read several times. It was called, simply, “Love Poem.”
Come home, ogress, claws bared
brown curls bouncing
rage in your veins
your blue-green veins
arms and legs thrashing crashing through walls Come home,
scratch out my eyes
like a demon like a cat
I’ll drive a stake through your heart, vampire girl 53
while you suck away my blood, my life
I’ll drink it in again from your punctured breast.
A curious sort of love poem, I thought. No, not a sentimental woman. Could this be about Rosie? A younger Rosie with “brown curls”? I tried to imagine Rosie in a rage and thought, yes, she could probably be ferocious “like a demon like a cat.”
When Jerry got home and found me reading poetry, he seemed uneasy. “Since when have you been interested in poetry?”
he asked. He read the author’s name. “Catherine Gardiner?
Where have I heard that name before?”
“She’s Rosie’s ex-lover.”
He balked. “Oh, that crazy woman who wants to teach high school girls how to masturbate? Why are you reading her?”
“I’m curious,” I said. “Just curious.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” I examined my motives privately. I wanted to know more about Rosie, probably. She was still an enigma.
I thought her poet lover would have some insight. Maybe I expected a poem entitled “What Rosie’s Really Like,” written just for me.
“What kind of poems does she write?” Jerry asked suspiciously.
“See for yourself.” I handed him the books and went to the kitchen to make dinner, irritated by his questions.
