by Lori L. Lake
Her words lighter now, Iris teased, “Hey, you know you should be delighted that Dani fell for the girl next door, and not some woman half a continent away. Now you can count on keeping her at home from now on.”
With a small grin, Meredith retorted, “Unless Dani convinces Adrienne to travel the world with her.” She broke out laughing at how her best friend’s face instantly fell. “I’m just pulling your leg, Iris. Dani seems very content to have settled back home again. I’m sure our girls will live here happily every after.”
And as she said that, Meredith realized she was starting to believe it. She had a long way to go before she looked at Dani and Addy as matter-of-factly as she regarded her sons and their wives, but she thought now that she would eventually get to that place...if she could secure her daughter’s forgiveness.
Iris reached out and swatted her arm. “Don’t scare me like that, woman! I’d lose my best flea marketing partner if that daughter of mine ever moved away.” Then, glancing at her watch, she said, “Oops, I gotta go.” Standing, she eyed Meredith seriously. “Are you gonna be all right?”
Meredith considered the question, then slowly nodded. “I think so. I have some pretty big fences to mend with Dani, however I do think we can eventually get past this morning. I’m going to give her some time to cool off before I call her though.”
“Good,” Iris said with satisfaction. Then winking, she added, “I’m guessing you’ll see Dani sooner than you expect.”
Meredith stood and rounded the table. “Oh, what - you’re a soothsayer now?”
“No, let’s just say I read the tea leaves.” Iris grinned and opened her arms to her friend. Meredith gratefully took the comfort her friend offered and squeezed the other woman tightly.
Arm in arm, they walked to the back door. As they parted, Iris took Meredith’s hands and held her gaze for a long moment. “Just remember, Merry, this is a beginning, not an ending. Addy and Dani have been friends for almost as long as you and I have, and if we’ve done anything for them, we’ve shown them how important friendship is. I think that bodes very well for the strength of their union.”
Meredith nodded, silently grateful for the steadfastness of the woman she had called her best friend all these years. She held the screen door open as she watched Iris walk along the path towards her house. Then, startled, she saw Dani come around the corner of the hedge, and she wondered if her daughter had been waiting at Iris’ house while the two older women talked.
Dani and Iris stopped to exchange hugs as they passed, and Meredith heard Iris’ words clearly.
“You’re perfect for each other, sweetie. I always knew it, and I’m so glad you do now, too. You’ve always been like a second daughter to me, and I’m thrilled to see our families united.”
Meredith saw Dani glance uneasily at her at those words, but Iris just shook her head. “Don’t you worry, Dani-girl. You just go on and talk to your mother. Everything’s going to be all right.”
After another hug, Iris went the last few steps into her house, leaving Dani walking slowly towards the screen door where Meredith stood watching her.
She stopped a few feet away and said sheepishly, “I heard Satan is issuing ice skates to the denizens of hell.”
For all the tea in China, Meredith couldn’t have stopped the smile that crossed her face, nor did she want to. She simply stood aside and held the door open for her daughter to enter. Her words were soft as Dani brushed by her. “I wasn’t sure you’d come back—certainly not so soon.”
“Addy made me,” Dani admitted as she stood awkwardly just inside the door. Her eyes fell on the dustpan, still sitting in the middle of the floor. Spinning around to face Meredith, worried eyes searched her mother’s face. Without preliminaries, she blurted, “I’m sorry for the things I said, and I’m so sorry that I broke grandmother’s cup.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Meredith said, “but none of our words are etched in stone, and there’s still one cup left to pass on to you.”
Dani choked, and her eyes glistened. “You still want me to have the cup?”
Her own eyes suspiciously damp, Meredith nodded. “Of course. Who else should it go to? Besides, who knows? You and Adrienne may have a little girl to pass it on to one day.”
And as she held her sobbing daughter tightly, Meredith decided it really was that simple. Her daughter had chosen a mate, and whether it was the one she’d have chosen for her was irrelevant. It was never her choice to make, and that was fine. It was her choice to support her daughter, and that was right. Iris was correct. She could no more have cut Dani out of her life than she could’ve cut her own heart out.
And that was love.
***
ABOUT KARIN KALLMAKER
Californian Karin Kallmaker is a person with real staying power. When she met her current partner, Maria, at the ripe old age of 17, she knew they were a forever thing. Over three decades later, they’re still together and raising two children, Kelson and Eleanor. She’s also had staying power in the literary world. Since the mid-Eighties, when she first began exploring the writing realm, she has published 23 works of lesbian fiction with many more in the works.
In college, Karin took all the English and Humanities courses she could while still earning a practical business degree. Then for many years she was an accountant in the non-profit sector. She was finally able to quit full-time employment to become a part-time writer and full-time mom.
Karin and her alter ego, Laura Adams, have won multiple awards from both the Golden Crown Literary Awards and Lambda Literary Awards in Romance, Erotica, and Science-Fiction/Fantasy. She was selected for an Alice B. Reader’s Appreciation Award as well. In 2011, she became the seventh Golden Crown Trailblazer, joining the ranks of some of her literary heroines including Katherine V. Forrest about whom she says, “I was deeply influenced by Katherine Forrest’s Curious Wine. It set for me the standard of what I hoped to write. Someday, I might write something that fine.” Readers around the world seem to think she has met that standard. Some consider her the most widely read lesbian author writing today, and at the rate she is going, she may well end up being the most prolific. She does seem to have the staying power.
Dangling Earrings
Memoir by Karin Kallmaker
MY MOTHER WOULDN’T let me pierce my ears until I was sixteen. She wore clip earrings, very nice ones. They were gold, mostly, and might have a faux stone of some sort, and they always looked elegant. They were the earrings of a suburban married woman.
For many years I was, by all outward appearances, a suburban married woman. Funny, huh?
I think she was hoping I’d chicken out when she insisted the piercing be done by the family doctor – not at one of those places with a piercing gun. She made it sound like my lifetime health was at stake. At the time I thought she wanted to brand me tragically uncool forever. But I accepted the terms as not piercing my ears was simply not an option.
All the other girls had pierced ears. They wore pearl or gold studs, very sophisticated. Some of them even wore hoops. And we had all heard the story of the girl who wore hoops, and while she was playing basketball someone’s finger got caught in one and tore her entire ear off. So a girl who wore hoops was flirting with disfiguration, really walking on the wild side.
When the doctor pierced my ears, I nearly fainted at the sight of my own blood. That might be why the left is slightly lower than the right. My mother was very concerned about infection. My best friend of course knew of a girl whose piercing had become so infected that her entire ear had fallen off. For a long time my mother had me wear gold posts to ensure everything was okay.
After about six months of gold posts, I found out my mother’s unspoken motivations in regards to pierced earrings. Clip-on earrings were dainty, small, discreet. Anything heavy would have to clasp the ear too tightly for comfort.
Not so with pierced earrings! Pierced earrings could dangle. They came in all colors of the rainbow. They included stones and feathers and figures in mi
niature. Beads, wire, hoops – there was no limit to self-expression with pierced earrings.
Nice girls, my mother told me after I asked about using my allowance to buy really big silver hoops (they were so cool, nearly touched my shoulders!), didn’t wear jewelry like that. It wasn’t a safety issue. It was a matter of good judgment. There was no telling, you see, what anyone would think of me if I wore “flashy” jewelry.
And so I learned how important what other people thought was, and how highly influenced other people could be by something as simple as earrings.
MY RELATIONSHIP WITH my mother is not one where I can ask if she was afraid even then that other people would know I wasn’t … normal. Did she fear that if I wore those big silver hoops, or dangling feathers, other people would cluck their tongues and whisper, “baby dyke in the making” to each other? It’s probably more likely that she feared they would whisper “tramp” or “trash.” Or, even worse, “hippie.”
The following year I fell in love with my best friend. She didn’t have pierced ears, and not only that, she didn’t want them. She was a non-conformist, something my parents didn’t realize until it was far too late. It took me several years to talk her into getting them pierced. We went to a place with a gun. She wore gold studs for a really long time because I was very concerned about infection. I loved her and didn’t want her entire ear to fall off.
EVEN AFTER FALLING in love (and having lesbian sex) my earrings were still small, still discreet. The price of gold was off the scale, so I couldn’t indulge that much. I got pearl studs on my eighteenth birthday, which I still have. The earrings never were a good predictor of who I really was, though. And if I had the kind of relationship with my mother where we talked about such things, I’d tell her that.
TODAY, MY JEWELRY box has many drawers. I like to buy earrings when I travel so I don’t just pick out a fashion statement but a memory or association as well. Today I needed something green—ah, the New Zealand greenstone was perfect for mood and fashion. The dangling, unfurling carved koru frond stands for growth and new life. It doesn’t really matter if nobody knows that but me.
My partner (the same girl I fell in love on the edge of 17) gives me at least one pair of earrings a year. Many of them dangle. Recently, a friend gave me a pair of dangling purple books, exactly the sort of thing a nice girl in the 1970s didn’t wear. Exactly the sort of thing a 40+ femme lesbian author would, especially if they matched her shoes.
Now I sport an extra hole in my left ear. I didn’t go to a doctor’s office. This time it was a tattoo and piercing parlor. I did not faint, but then there was no blood that I saw. So in my left ear there is a permanent gold hoop. It doesn’t dangle much, and it is discreet in its own way. Elegant, even.
But it’s not the earring of a suburban married woman. However, much of me resembles a suburban married woman, and because fashion and times have changed, that small discreet hoop I hope tells others, even friends and family, that I am not quite what they think I am. Look closer, and I’ll surprise you.
I do know that my mother did not plan on being the mother of a prominent lesbian romance writer. She has had to come out to her friends about it. If I had the kind of relationship with my mother where we discussed such things, I’d suggest a piercing so she, too, can announce “not quite normal and danged proud of it” status to the world.
But we don’t discuss such things. Sometimes I wonder, having never come to a meeting of the minds about the importance of earrings, if we lost the ability to really converse about more important things. I mean, if you can’t discuss the politics of earrings, how do you discuss the politics of being a dyke?
MY MOTHER’S EARLY lessons in the importance of worrying about what others think have stood me in good stead. Without them, I doubt I would have gotten that extra earring. Had I not known to what degree others view and judge me from appearance only, I wouldn’t have decided I needed to control the message as carefully as I had.
Think of the relief of the grocer, the cleric, the hair dresser. I did something that affirmed to myself who I am, and, if my mother’s theory is correct that total strangers are obsessed with judging by appearances, then I have done a public service for thousands of people I will never meet.
All things considered, that’s a lot of mileage for a gold hoop that dangles a bit. Even if, just before a haircut, it can hardly be seen. But I know it’s there. And I hope to have the kind of relationship with my children that will let me tell them that how they feel about themselves, on the inside, is more important than the opinions of strangers.
However, because one of the vexing experiences of being a parent is learning that your mother was right about some things, I will also impress upon them, as my mother did me, that my opinion of them is the most important thing of all. With luck, that will last until they are sixteen. I’d settle for fifteen, and it might really work as my kids have two moms, and they both tell them the same thing.
I KNOW MY mother spotted the new earring the first moment she saw me after I’d had it done. She didn’t bring it up though. I wonder sometimes if she thinks that it’s a shame we don’t have the kind of relationship where she could say, “What did you do to your ear?” I know that I think it’s a shame, sometimes. But she still wears the same kind of clip-on earrings, and I still hanker for earrings that dangle. We are who we are, and I don’t think that will change.
I suppose some people would think that was sad, but as a parent myself, I have to admire my mother’s consistency. That same consistency of outlook about what dangling earrings might convey to other people is the same consistency that has provided unwavering, albeit undemonstrative, support of my relationship for these many long years. It is the same consistency of character that provides tasty treats for grandchildren, always, and thoughtful evaluation of coloring projects.
It is, after all, the same thoughtful evaluation of my writing projects that I brought home from an early age. We don’t talk about my writing in terms of anything but what I do for a living, but that fault is largely mine. I sometimes write about sex, and I’m pretty sure she knows that. It’s just too intimate. I don’t want to explain about, well, anything to do with sex. She didn’t explain much to me, and I’m returning the favor. So, like dangly earrings, we avoid the topic and preserve harmony.
There’s a lot to be said for harmony. We preserve it by not discussing touchy topics. We can talk about gay rights—my mother believes my partner and I ought to be able to marry. Voucher programs for public schools is safe. Certainly the pros and cons of presidential candidates can be aired.
But we don’t talk about earrings, and it’s better that way. We are who we are, and that’s not going to change.
I don't think I'll tell her about the tattoo.
***
ABOUT LORI L. LAKE
Lori L. Lake is the author of Snow Moon Rising, a novel of survival set during World War II, which received a Golden Crown Literary Award in the General Fiction category as well as the 2007 Ann Bannon Popular Choice Award. So far, nothing Lori has experienced in the literary world has been as thrilling as receiving the award, a hug, and a kiss from Ann Bannon herself.
Lori is also the creator of the “Public Eye” Series with the first book, Buyer’s Remorse, set to debut in November, 2011. She has also written the “Gun” series, which is a trilogy consisting of romance/police procedurals Gun Shy and Under The Gun and the adventure/thriller Have Gun We’ll Travel. A fourth book, Jump The Gun, will be published in 2012. Her first novel, Ricochet In Time, was about a hate crime. She has written two books of short stories, Shimmer and Stepping Out, two standalone romances, Different Dress and Like Lovers Do, and edited two story anthologies, Romance For Life, and the Lambda Literary Awards Finalist The Milk of Human Kindness: Lesbian Authors Write about Mothers & Daughters.
Lori edits, coaches aspiring writers, and teaches fiction writing courses, most recently at The Loft Literary Center, the largest independent writing community in the nati
on. After a breakup in 2008, she moved from Minneapolis where she had lived for 26 years and is now located in Portland, Oregon. Lori is currently at work on a romance, a mainstream mystery series, a post-apocalyptic saga, and a How-To Book about the craft of writing.
The Bright Side
Fiction by Lori L. Lake
IN THE DAZZLING light pouring from the noon time sun, the front of Mel’s parents’ gray two-story house looked shabby and washed out. The cedar shake siding showed cracks, and as she drew closer to the cement stairs, Mel noticed the trim also needed scraping and painting. She shifted her mini-daypack to her left hand and opened the screen door. After a quick tap with the rusting knocker, she turned the doorknob, stepped into the cool front room, and shut the door behind her.
From down the hall she heard the TV. “Mom?” she called out. “Dad?” She glanced around the house, wondering where her parents’ scruffy little poodle was.
She set her bag on the rocking chair near the window and stood marveling at how a visit home was like stepping into the past, into a museum of family antiquities and new acquisitions. The living room was an odd mix of new and old. Long gone was the old couch, kept for over fifteen years, that Mel, her twin sister Izzy, and their older brother Nate had bounced on, entertained friends from, and laid all over when they were sick. Ten years ago, the same month Mel and Izzy turned 20, her parents bought something new. Overstuffed, pale rose in color, and covered in a satiny material, it sat, resplendent, and entirely unused. When it was first delivered, Mel sat on it and found it comfortable, but she’d never touched it again.
