by Lori L. Lake
“They know! Capisce?! Sua madre! Le lettere di amore!”
“My mother?! Oh God…”
“Si, si!”
Kate made some lame excuse at work and dashed home, but she knew the situation was unsalvageable the minute she stormed through the front door. Luisa’s mother was seated on the sofa and gave Kate a hateful stare before pointedly turning to face the other side of the room. Kate turned to her mother and barely registered the venomous glare on her face before launching into her self-righteous defense.
“How dare you go through my stuff! Those letters are private!”
“You shut your filthy mouth!” her mother hissed.
It was over, really, before it ever began. It was over, she later realized, before she’d even walked through that front door. Their mothers had put their heads together (no mean feat, considering how high the hair was piled up), and had decided on the only possible course of action. Luisa was sent back to Naples to live with cousins. And Kate was grounded, basically for life. Their fathers had not been consulted, of course. “For your sake,” her mother had ominously intoned. “You know what Andolino would do to her if he knew?” Kate’s father was a different story. She knew he’d laugh it off (which he eventually did – there was no such thing as a real secret in the Howard home), but he was also powerless to countermand an order by her mother.
To Kate, the strangest thing about the whole episode was how her parents and the Andolinos had remained friends. Although Luisa never returned to Baltimore, her parents kept the neighborhood apprised of her doings: her graduation, her eventual marriage (a development about which Maria Howard took great pains to inform Kate several years later, with a little sniff of satisfaction), and the birth of her first child seven months after that (the timing of which Kate took pains to point out to her mother,and thank goodness she was, by then, too old to slap). Her parents’ ongoing cordiality with the Andolinos shouldn’t have come as a surprise – although Mrs. Andolino had often voiced her conviction that it was Kate who had led Luisa into “that sin.” No, the fact that Kate’s mother prized her standing in the neighborhood over everything else, including loyalty to her daughter, was one of the sad truths of Kate’s childhood, and it was unrealistic to expect anything different.
THE CLATTERING OF the train over the bridge of the wide Susequehanna River reminded her that Baltimore was now only about half an hour away. Baltimore, where her mother lay helpless in a hospital bed. She couldn’t quite picture it. This giant, this tower of unspeakable will and fury, who was everywhere, at all times, monitoring and commenting on the slightest movements of every creature within her sphere—with scorn, derision, fear. It just wasn’t possible. She tried to visualize the scene, the quiet form in a hospital bed, but she couldn’t quite do it. Instead, another series of images crowded up against the picture she was trying to conjure. Images that had been lurking just under the surface of her consciousness, fleeting and disparate, from here and there over the years. Too numerous to singly identify, each too inconsequential to have been memorable, but all now tumbling feverishly through her too-weary mind, as if to spin a web that was as yet unrecognizable.
Her mother in the midst of a frenzy during Kate’s trip to Baltimore during the third year of law school. The firestorm could have been about anything—how “uppity” Kate was becoming now that she’d put herself through school and was almost a lawyer, perhaps—but the fight was not the focus of her attention right now. Instead, the image that flitted through Kate’s mind was the moment when, in the middle of ranting, her mother had opened the refrigerator and put a bottle of Clorox on the top shelf.
Fast-forward to the next freeze-frame: a few years later, several months after she and Ellen had moved in together, when they’d visited the old Baltimore neighborhood because Kate had a hankering for steamed crabs. Kate’s mother, like any Baltimore native, had been cracking crabs since the cradle, and yet at one point during the backyard feast, she’d picked up a spice-covered claw and quietly asked no one in particular, “Now what do I do with this?” The assembled neighbors and family members had joked that Maria had had too much to drink.
Next frame: in a visit a year or so later, her mother complimenting her on a necklace she was wearing, and laughing with a little bit of embarrassment when Kate pointed out that she’d given the necklace to Kate the previous Christmas. And the stoney look of confusion when, the very next morning, her mother had again complimented her on the necklace and asked where she’d gotten it.
There had been no defining blow-up, no single tantrum that marked Kate’s formal estrangement from her family. She’d just sort of drifted off. She kept in touch to varying degrees over the years—occasional emails with Janice, calls to her parents’ home every few weeks. But she hadn’t found the time to visit for three years now, and her invitations urging her parents to visit New York were concededly half-hearted. They’re busy being grandparents to Janice’s brood, she told herself. A trip to New York is too expensive, too much trouble for them. But the truth was that she had an ordered life—a good job where she was respected and well liked, a beautiful lover who was as devoted to her as her family was not—and the disruption that her family’s presence would entail just wasn’t worth it.
Even their telephonic connection had waned recently, she realized. When she called her parents these days, it was her father who almost always answered the phone. Retired now, he was no doubt sitting around the house watching soap operas and getting a head start on his Natty Bohs. But there was that one time she’d called a few months ago, when her mother had answered the phone. She’d picked it up on the fifth ring and yelled “Who is it?” as if holding the receiver far from her mouth. Kate had laughed and said, “Ma, it’s me, Kate.”
“Kate?”
“Kate. In New York. What are you doing?”
“New York?”
“Let me take it, Mare,” she heard her father say in the background. “Kate?”
“Dad? What’s up with Mama?”
“Oh, nothing. She just gets confused, you know.”
Kate had let it drop. If he didn’t think it worth going into, neither did she. But looking back on it now, she realized that bizarre exchange had been the last time she’d actually spoken to her mother.
And then there was the comment by Janice in one of their rare phone calls last month. She’d mentioned she wasn’t going to drop the kids off at their grandparents’ house until Dad got home from the Orioles game. “Oh, it’s too much for Mama to handle them alone,” she’d said. Kate hadn’t thought anything of it. Three kids were very likely too much for any one adult to handle alone. Then again, maybe it was something more.
AS SHE WATCHED the conductor walk through the car, it occurred to Kate that they must be very near Baltimore, and she was suddenly seized in a vise-grip of undefined panic. Forcing herself to remain calm, she brought all of her highly-paid problem-solving skills to bear and ran through the likely culprits. Her mother might be dying – no, as much as that was certainly a possibility, it wasn’t the immediate cause of the suffocating dread that swept her. The fact that their peculiar phone call a few months back might be their last conversation, that was closer to the mark, but still not quite there. And then it hit her, a swelling realization that engulfed her in a black pit of desperate, aching motherlessness: her mother might not really be her mother anymore. She might live on—if one thing was certain, Maria Bertucci could never be felled by a simple broken hip—but she might, for all intents and purposes, be irretrievably lost. And with her, all of the chances that Kate had thoughtlessly squandered over the years, opportunities to have a conversation without fighting, to resolve any of their innumerable differences. To find acceptance.
It was absurd, truly ridiculous, to imagine any real connection with the woman who, for Kate’s entire life, had been a relentless grinding force hell-bent on molding her into a shape that simply would not fit. But as the thoughts and feelings continued their free-fall through the dark, a glim
mer of something new found its way through the despair. A fleeting glimpse, really, no more than gossamer that melted as soon as she touched it, but which left something real in its wake. Not a thought so much as a sensation: elusive, undefined, but something to dwell on later. She couldn’t quite capture it, it was gone before she could even really see it, but it left her with the mystifying notion that maybe, just maybe, in the twisted world of all that was her mother, that relentless grinding had been a sort of gift. As if her mother had been the grain of sand that formed a pearl.
“Baltimore! Next stop, Baltimore Maryland.”
“ELLEN?”
“Honey? How is she?”
Kate tried to shield her tear-streaked face from the people passing through the hospital corridor.
“I don’t know. They say it’s too soon to tell.”
“Well what is she like? Is she conscious?”
“Yeah, she’s sitting up. She held my hand and kept kissing it and telling me I was beautiful.”
“You’re kidding.”
“But then she asked me who I was.”
***
ABOUT GEORGIA BEERS
Born and raised in Upstate New York, on the coast of Lake Ontario and just a short drive from the wine country of the Finger Lakes, Georgia Beers is the eldest of five daughters and has been writing since she was old enough to hold a pen. Her fourth novel, Fresh Tracks, was presented with the Lambda Literary Award, as well as a Golden Crown Literary Society Award, for Best Lesbian Romance of 2006. Her sixth novel, Finding Home, was a finalist in both the Lammies and the Goldies in 2009.
Georgia lives with her partner of nearly seventeen years, along with a dog and a cat. Her eighth novel, 96 Hours, will be released by Bywater Books in October, 2011. You can find out more at www.bywaterbooks.com.
The Tuesday Before Thanksgiving
Fiction by Georgia Beers
I LOOK IN the mirror. Again. That’s got to be the fifth time in the last fifteen minutes. My hair is still neat, albeit much grayer than I’d prefer. It’s cut a little shorter than usual, but I’ve found it’s much easier to deal with this way. I fluff it with my fingers and wonder what Devon will think of it. I push it behind my ears, fiddle with my necklace. Then I roll my eyes at myself, heading for the living room to check the pillows on the couch and straighten the stack of coasters on the coffee table for the third time.
I’m nervous. And I hate that I’m nervous. I shouldn’t be nervous; there’s no reason. This is my house. She’s my daughter. I’m not the one who has to be impressive. I have all the power here. Don’t I?
My daughter is a lesbian.
God, I hate that sentence. It shows up, unannounced and unwelcome in my head every so often, tearing my attention away from whatever I’m doing at the time, taunting me. It’s been appearing for almost five years now, and I’m only just beginning to realize it isn’t a lie and it’s not going away.
My daughter is a lesbian.
I return to the mirror, finger-comb my hair once more, and think back to the telephone conversation with my daughter the previous week.
“We’ll get there some time on Tuesday. We’d like to be able to spend some time with Aunt Ce, too. Then we can help you Wednesday night with the turkey and stuff so there won’t be so much to do on Thursday.”
“We?”
An uneasy silence. Then, “Yeah. I’m bringing Holly with me. I’d really like you to meet her. That’s okay, right?”
Of course it’s okay, my head screams at me. Tell her of course it’s okay, that her friends are always welcome here. But this Holly…she isn’t just a ‘friend.’ That fact makes the words stick in my throat longer than they should.
“Mom?” Devon’s voice is worried, unsure.
“Of course it’s okay,” I manage to grind out.
“Great.” She sighs with relief as she says it. It occurs to me that part of her must have been worried I’d actually say no. The realization shames me. “Give a call if you need us to bring anything or pick anything up along the way, okay?”
“Okay. Drive safely. Don’t speed.”
“I’ll be careful. I love you, Mom. And thanks.”
“I love you, too, Devon.”
I suddenly wonder if it’s because she’s got a boy’s name. Is that the first mistake I made? Starting her off confused, right from the beginning? My fault, not hers.
I sigh, peering out the window and letting my thoughts drift to my expectations of this Holly. Definitely not a boy’s name. At least her mother doesn’t worry about that. I conjure up a picture of what I’m anticipating, and cringe as my brain tosses me an image of a large, manly woman with many piercings and tattoos. The crew cut, black motorcycle boots, and pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of her t-shirt round out the entire portrait and I shudder involuntarily.
I remember back to when Devon first told me. She was just about to leave for college. My sister Celia says I shouldn’t have been surprised, that all the signs were there during Devon’s childhood. She hated wearing dresses, she loved to play in the dirt with trucks, and she wouldn’t touch any of the dolls I kept buying for her. In school, she excelled in sports, playing softball, basketball, and volleyball and was voted to All State in all three. She did date a nice young boy named Chad for a short time. They went to the prom together. I thought he was very sweet, but he stopped coming around one day, and Devon never really went into detail. She’d get mad when I’d pry, so after a while, I stopped asking questions. She seemed so angry so often, and I tried not to make it worse.
“I’m a lesbian, Mom.” One day, she blurted it out. Just like that. “I’m a lesbian, Mom.” And then she went to meet up with her friends. The little brat dropped a bomb on me and ran off. Then she avoided me like the plague as best she could. I knew we should talk about it, but I honestly was in such a state of shock that I had no idea what to say. I dropped her off at her dorm, gave her a hug, and told her to call if she needed anything. Each of us cleanly avoided the subject all together. Then I cried the entire ride home.
Each time she came home for a holiday or a long weekend, there was something new about her. First, there was the hair dye. She bleached a blonde streak into her beautiful dark hair right in the front. I could have killed her. She resembled a skunk. A month later, she came home with a hoop in her eyebrow and a nose ring. I tried hard to keep my comments to a minimum, but I made it clear I didn’t approve of the look. She thought I was constantly on her back, but she had no idea how much I was keeping inside. I’m surprised my head didn’t explode. She glared at me for the entire weekend and I glared back.
Then the biggest blow came, right after graduation. She was offered a job in Chicago and she took it. My heart broke. Yes, she could have gone much further away from our little hometown in Upstate New York, but it’s still far. About ten hours by car or a couple by plane, and I’m not a big fan of flying. Or driving. Needless to say, I’ve often wondered if she took the job to get away from me. I think all mothers wonder that at one time or another. I was devastated for weeks after she left, and I still get melancholy when I remember that time in my life. Her father left us when she was a toddler, so it had always been just me and Devon, just the two of us. The idea of her leaving me alone nearly destroyed me. I’m still not sure how I managed to survive without her here.
I’m suddenly snapped out of my reverie by the ringing of my phone. “Hello?”
“Hey.” It’s my sister, Celia. We talk on the phone at least half a dozen times a day; it’s ridiculous. It’s also a huge comfort. Celia’s support is a big part of the reason I was able to keep my sanity after Devon left for Chicago. “What time are the girls arriving?”
The girls? She obviously knows Devon is bringing that Holly with her. Devon keeps in better touch with her aunt than with me, and I often find that it gets under my skin. “They should be here any time,” I say evenly.
“Are you nervous?”
“Nervous?” I fiddle with the fringe on a toss pillow.
“About what? Why should I be nervous? What’s there to be nervous about?”
I can almost hear Cece roll her eyes. My big sister always could see right through me. I hate that. “About meeting her.”
“Why should I be nervous? She’s the one who should be nervous.” I wonder if my sister is buying any of this false bravado of mine. I’m sure she’s not.
“She sounds like a nice girl.”
“You’ve talked to her?”
“A couple times when I’ve called Devon. She seems very bright.”
I try to ignore the jealousy that wells up. How come I’ve never spoken with this Holly? Is it because I tend to call my daughter at work? “That’s nice.”
“Oh, come on, Marti. Lighten up. This is important to Devon. She really wants you to like Holly.”
I grind my teeth against the fact that Celia knows so much more than I do about my own daughter. “Mm.” It’s all I can manage to say.
“Marti.” Celia’s voice becomes firm, what I call her Big Sister Voice. “This trip is extremely important, do you understand that? Stop being so old-fashioned. Your daughter being gay isn’t that big a deal, you know.” I can hear the sudden smile in her voice. “It’s actually kind of hip. You should watch Will & Grace once in a while.”
I do watch Will & Grace, I think, pouting.
“Holly could be The One.” She says it quickly, almost as if she wants to get it out before she changes her mind. I can somehow feel the capital letters.
“What?”
“All I’m saying is, Devon really loves this girl. She might be it. Give her a chance.”
