“None, but…”
“None that you know of,” I said, and paused while he let that sink in.
“What does that mean?” he demanded.
“It means what I said. None that you know of.”
“You think one of my friends is gay?”
“Bruce, I didn’t even know my own mother was gay. How do you expect me to have any kind of insight about your friends’ sexuality?”
“Oh,” he said, mollified.
“But my point is that you don’t really know any gay people. So how can you assume it’s such a terrific thing for my mom? That I should be happy about it?”
“She’s in love. How can that be a bad thing?”
“What about this other person? What if she’s awful? What if…” I was starting to cry as the horrible images piled up in my head. “What if, I don’t know, they’re walking somewhere and someone sees them and, and, throws a beer bottle at their heads or something…”
“Oh, Cannie…”
“People are mean! That’s my point! It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, but people are mean… and judgmental… and rotten… and, and you know what my neighborhood’s like! People won’t let their kids trick or treat at our house” Of course, the truth was that nobody’d let their kids trick or treat at our house since 1985 when my father began his downhill slide by neglecting the yardwork and getting in touch with his inner artiste. He’d brought a scalpel home from the hospital and turned half a dozen pumpkins into unflatteringly accurate renditions of members of my mother’s immediate family, including a truly hideous pumpkin Aunt Linda that he’d perched on our porch, topped with a platinum blond wig that he’d swiped from the hospital’s lost and found. But the truth was also that Avondale wasn’t an especially integrated community. No blacks, few Jews, and no openly gay people that I could recall.
“So who cares what people think?”
“I do,” I sobbed. “I mean, it’s nice to have ideals and hope that things will change, but we have to live in the world the way it is, and the world is… is…”
“Why are you crying?” Bruce asked. “Are you worried about your mother, or yourself?” Of course, by that time, I was crying too hard to answer, and there was also a mucus situation that needed immediate attention. I swiped my sleeve across my face and blew my nose noisily. When I looked up, Bruce was still talking. “Your mother’s made her choice, Cannie, and if you’re a good daughter, what you’ll do is support it.”
Well. Easy for him to say. It wasn’t as if the Ever Tasteful Audrey had announced over one of her four-course kosher dinners that she’d decided to park on the other side of the street, as it were. I would bet a week’s pay that the Ever Tasteful Audrey had never even seen another woman’s vagina. She’d probably never even seen her own.
The thought of Bruce’s mother in her whirlpool bathtub for two, discreetly dabbing at her own privates from beneath an Egyptian cotton washcloth with a high thread count, made me laugh a little.
“See?” said Bruce. “You just have to roll with it, Cannie.”
I laughed even harder. Having discharged his boyfriendly duty, Bruce switched gears. His voice dropped from his concerned-guidance-counselor tenor to a more intimate tone. “Come here, girl,” he murmured, sounding for all the world like Lionel Richie as he beckoned me beside him, tenderly kissing my forehead and not so tenderly tossing Nifkin off the bed. “I want you,” he said, and placed my hand on his crotch to remove any doubt.
And so it went.
Bruce left at midnight. I fell into an uneasy sleep and woke up the morning after with the telephone shrilling on my pillow. I unglued one eyelid. 5:15. I picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Cannie? It’s Tanya.”
Tanya?
“Your mother’s friend.”
Oh, God. Tanya.
“Hi,” I said weakly. Nifkin stared at me as if to say, what is this about? Then he gave a dismissive sniff and resettled himself on the pillow. Meanwhile, Tanya was talking a blue streak.
“… knew the first time I saw her that she could have feelings for me…”
I struggled to sit up, and groped for a reporter’s notebook. This was too bizarre not to be recording for posterity. By the time our conversation ended, I’d filled nine pages, made myself late for work, and learned every detail about Tanya’s life. I heard how she was molested by her piano teacher, how her mother died of breast cancer when she was young (“I coped with my pain with alcohol”), and how her father had remarried a not-nice book editor who refused to pay Tanya’s tuition to Green Mountain Valley Community College (“they’ve got the third-best program in New England for art therapy”). I learned the name of Tanya’s first love (Marjorie), how she wound up in Pennsylvania (job), and how she’d been in the process of ending a seven-year relationship with a woman named Janet. “She’s very co-dependent,” Tanya confided. “Maybe obsessive-compulsive, too.” At this point I had retreated into full reporter mode and wasn’t saying anything but “Uh-huh,” or, “I see.”
“So I moved out,” she told me.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“And I devoted myself to weaving.”
“I see.”
Then it was on to how she’d met my mother (passionate glances in the ladies’ locker room sauna— I’d almost been forced to put the phone down), where they’d gone on their first date (Thai food), and how Tanya had convinced my mother that her lesbian tendencies were more than a passing fancy.
“I kissed her,” Tanya announced proudly. “And she tried to walk away, and I held her by the shoulders and I looked her in the eyes and I said, ‘Ann, this is not going away.’ ”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “I see.”
Tanya then proceeded to the analysis and reflection portion of the speech.
“The way I see it,” she began, “your mother’s devoted her whole life to you kids.” She said “you kids” in precisely the same tone I would have used for “you infestation of cockroaches.”
“And she put up with that bastard…”
“Which bastard are we talking about here?” I inquired mildly.
“Your father,” said Tanya, who was obviously not going to tone things down for the benefit of the bastard’s offspring. “Like I was saying, she’s devoted her life to you guys… and not that it’s a bad thing. I know how much she wanted to be a mother, and have a family, and, of course, there weren’t other options for dykes back then…”
Dykes? I could barely handle “lesbian.” At what point did my mother get promoted to “dyke”?
“… but what I think,” Tanya continued, “is that now it’s time for your mother to do more of what she wants. To have a life of her own.”
“I see,” I said. “Uh-huh.”
“I’m really looking forward to meeting you,” she said.
“I have to go now,” I said, and hung up the phone. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I wound up doing both at the same time.
“Beyond awful,” I said to Samantha on the car phone.
“A freak like you wouldn’t believe,” I told Andy over lunch.
“Don’t judge,” Bruce warned me, before I’d even said a word.
“She’s… um. She’s into sharing. Lots of sharing.”
“That’s good,” he said, doing his squinchy-blinky thing. “You should do more sharing, Cannie.”
“Huh? Me?”
“You’re very closed with your emotions. You keep everything so tight inside you.”
“You know, you’re right,” I said. “Let’s find a total stranger so I can tell how my piano teacher groped me.”
“Huh?”
“She was molested,” I said. “And she told me all the gory details.”
Even Mr. Love Everyone seemed taken aback by this information. “Oh my.”
“Yeah. And her mother had breast cancer, and her stepmother convinced her father not to pay her community college loans.”
Bruce looked at me skeptically. “She told you all this?”
“What do you think, I drove home and read her diary? Of course she told me!” I paused to poach a few french fries off his plate. We were at the Tick Tock Diner, home of the enormous portion and the surliest waitresses south of New York. I never ordered fries there, but I used all my powers of persuasion to get Bruce to order them, so I could share. “She sounds seriously cracked.”
“You probably made her uncomfortable.”
“But I didn’t say anything! She’s never even met me! And she was the one who called me, so how could I make her uncomfortable?”
Bruce shrugged. “It’s just the way you are, I guess.”
I scowled at him. He reached for my hand. “Don’t get mad. It’s just that… you have this kind of judgmental thing going on.”
“Says who?”
“Well, my friends, I guess.”
“What, just because I think they should get jobs?”
“See, there you go. That’s judgmental.”
“Honey, they’re slackers. Accept it. It’s the truth.”
“They’re not slackers, Cannie. They do have jobs, you know.”
“Oh, come on. What does Eric Silverberg do for a living?”
Eric, as we both knew, had a full-time temporary job at an Internet startup, where, as best we could both figure, he spent his days trading Springsteen bootleg tapes, meeting girls on one of the three online dating services he subscribed to, and arranging drug buys.
“George has a real job.”
“George spends every weekend in a Civil War reenactment brigade. George owns his own musket.”
“You’re changing the subject,” Bruce said. I could tell he was trying to stay angry, but he was starting to smile.
“I know,” I said. “It’s just that a guy who has his own musket is such an easy punchline.”
I stood up, crossed the table, and sat down next to him on his side of the booth, squeezing his thigh and resting my head against his shoulder. “You know the only reason I’m judgmental is because I’m jealous,” I said. “I wish I could have that kind of life. No college loans to pay, rent taken care of, nice, stable, married heterosexual parents who’d set me up with their slightly used furniture every time they redecorate and buy me a car for Chanukah…” My voice trailed off. Bruce was staring at me hard. I realized that, in addition to describing most of his friends, I’d just described him, too.
“I’m sorry,” I said gently. “It’s just that sometimes it feels like everybody’s got things easier than I do, and that every time I get close to having things be kind of okay… something like this happens.”
“Did you ever think that maybe these things happen to you because you’re strong enough to take them?” Bruce asked. He reached down, grabbed my hand, and moved it up on his thigh. Way up. “You’re so strong, Cannie,” he whispered.
“I just,” I said, “I wish…” And then he was kissing me. I could taste ketchup and salt on his lips. Then his tongue was in my mouth. I shut my eyes and let myself forget.
I spent the weekend at Bruce’s apartment. It was one of those times where we got it just right: good sex, a nice meal out, lazy afternoons trading sections of the Sunday Times, and then I was on my way home before we started grating on each other. We talked about my mother a little bit, but mostly I got to just lose myself with him. And he gave me his favorite flannel shirt to wear home. It smelled like him, like us: like dope and sex, his skin and my shampoo. It was too tight across my chest— all of his things were— but the sleeves fell to my finger-tips, and I felt enclosed, comforted, as if he was there hugging me tight, holding my hands.
Be brave, I thought back home in my bed. I pulled Bruce’s shirt tight around me, tilted my cheek toward Nifkin so he could give me an encouraging lick, and phoned home.
Thankfully, my mother answered. “Cannie!” she said, sounding relieved. “Where have you been? I’ve been calling and calling…”
“I went to Bruce’s,” I told her. “We had theater tickets,” I lied. Bruce didn’t do well in theaters. Short attention span.
“Well,” she said. “Well. Um, I want to tell you that I’m sorry for springing things on you like that. I guess I should have… well, I know I should have waited and maybe told you in person…”
“Or at least not at the office,” I said.
She laughed. “Right. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“So…” I could almost hear her testing half a dozen opening remarks in her head. “Do you have any questions?” she finally asked.
I took a deep breath. “Are you happy?”
“I feel like I’m in high school!” my mother said jubilantly. “I feel… oh, I can’t even describe it.”
Please, don’t try, I thought.
“Tanya’s really terrific. You’ll see.”
“How old is she?” I asked.
“Thirty-six,” said my fifty-six-year-old mother.
“A younger woman,” I observed. My mother giggled. You have no idea how disturbing that was. My mother has never been the giggling type.
“She does seem to have a little problem with… boundaries,” I ventured.
My mother’s voice got very serious. “What do you mean?”
“Well, she called me Friday morning… I guess you weren’t there”
A quick intake of breath. “What did she say?”
“It might take me less time to cover what she didn’t say.”
“Oh, God. Oh, Cannie.”
“I mean, I’m sorry she was, you know, molested…”
“Oh, Cannie, she didn’t!” But underneath the shocked, horrified tone, my mother sounded… almost proud. As if underneath the anger, she was indulging a favored child in the child’s favorite prank.
“Yup,” I said grimly. “I got the whole saga, from the piano teacher who tickled her ivories…”
“… Cannie!”
“… and the wicked stepmother, to the obsessive-compulsive co-dependent ex-girlfriend.”
“Ack,” said my mother. “Jeez.”
“She might want to consider some therapy,” I said.
“She goes. Believe me, she goes. She’s been going for years.”
“And she still hasn’t figured out that you don’t go blurting your whole life story to a complete stranger the first time you speak to them?”
My mother sighed. “I guess not,” she said.
I waited. I waited for an apology, an explanation, something that could make sense of this. Nothing came. After a moment of awkward silence, my mother changed the subject, and I went along, hoping this was a phase, a fling, a bad dream, even. No such luck. Tanya had arrived for good.
What does a lesbian bring on a second date? goes the joke. A U-Haul. What does a gay guy bring on a second date? What second date?
An old joke, true, but there’s a certain amount of truth to it. After they started dating, Tanya did in fact move out of the basement of her codependent obsessive-compulsive ex-girlfriend’s condominium and into an apartment of her own.