Authors: Jodi Picoult
When I finish speaking, I find Zoe staring at me. She glances at the door of the room, which is still closed, and then she hugs me. “I think he was probably a pretty lucky guy.”
I look at her dubiously. “To drop dead? On Amtrak? The day before Thanksgiving?”
“No,” Zoe says. “To have you sitting next to him, on the last ride of his life.”
I duck my head. I’m not a praying woman, but I pray at that moment that, when it’s my turn, Zoe and I will still be traveling together.
The day after I told my mother that I was a lesbian, the shock had worn off and she was full of questions. She asked me if this was some phase I was going through, like the time I’d been hell-bent on dyeing my hair purple and getting an eyebrow ring. When I told her I was convinced of my attraction to women, she burst into tears and asked me how she had failed me as a mother. She told me she’d pray for me. Every night, when I went to bed, she slipped a new pamphlet under the door. Many trees have died so that the Catholic Church can preach against homosexuality.
I started to wage a counterattack. On every pamphlet, I took a thick marker and wrote the name of someone famous who had an LGBT child: Cher. Barbra Streisand. Dick Gephardt. Michael Landon. I’d slip these under
her
bedroom door.
Finally, at a stalemate, I agreed to meet with her priest. He asked me how I could do this to the woman who’d raised me, as if my sexuality was a personal attack on her. He asked if I’d considered becoming a nun instead. Not once was I asked if I was afraid, or lonely, or worried about my future.
On the way home from the church, I asked my mother if she still loved me.
“I’m trying,” she said.
It took my first long-term girlfriend (whose own mother, when she came out to her, shrugged and said,
Tell me something I
don’t
know
) to make me understand why
my
mother was the complete opposite. “You’re dead to her,” my girlfriend had told me. “Everything she’s dreamed of for you, everything she figured you’d be and have, it’s not going to happen. She’s been seeing you in suburbia with a cookie cutter husband and your two point four kids and a dog, and now you’ve gone and ruined that by being with me.”
So I gave my mother time to grieve. I never flaunted my girlfriends in front of her, or brought one home to a holiday meal, or signed her name on a Christmas card. Not because I was ashamed but simply because I loved my mother, and I knew that was what she needed from me. When my mother got sick and went into the hospital, I took care of her. I like to think that, before the morphine took over her mind—before she died—she realized that my being a lesbian mattered far less than the fact that I was a good daughter.
I’m telling you this as a means of explaining that I have been through the coming-out ringer, and wish to repeat it about as much as a person wants a second root canal. But when Zoe begs me to come with her when she tells Dara about us, I know I will. Because it’s the first proof I have that—maybe—Zoe isn’t just trying this new gay persona on for size, and planning to return it and go back to her old, straight self.
“Are you nervous?” I ask, as we stand side by side in front of Zoe’s mother’s front door.
“No. Well, yeah. A little.” She looks at me. “It feels big. It’s big, right?”
“Your mother is one of the most open-minded people I’ve ever met.”
“But she considers herself an expert on me,” Zoe says. “It was just the two of us, when I was growing up.”
“Well, I grew up with a single mom, too.”
“This is different, Vanessa. On my birthday, my mother still calls me at 10:03
A.M
. and screams and pants into the phone to relive the birth experience.”
I blink at her. “That’s just plain strange.”
Zoe smiles. “I know. She’s one in a million. It’s a blessing and a curse all at once.” With a deep breath, she rings the doorbell.
Dara opens it with a mangled coat hanger in her hands. “Zoe!” she says, delighted to see her daughter. “I didn’t know you were coming out here!”
Zoe’s laugh is strangled. “You have no idea . . .”
Dara wraps her arms around me for a quick hug, too. “How are you, Vanessa?”
“Great,” I say. “I’ve never been better.”
In the background there is a man’s voice, deep and soothing.
Sense the water. Sense it rising beneath you . . .
“Oh,” Dara says. “Let me go shut that off. Come in, you two.” She hustles toward the stereo and turns off the CD player, taking the disc out of the machine and slipping it into its plastic sleeve. “It’s my homework for my dowsing class. That’s what the coat hanger’s for.”
“You’re looking for water?”
“Yes,” Dara says. “When I find it, the rods will move by themselves and cross in my hands.”
“Let me save you some trouble,” Zoe replies. “I’m pretty sure the water comes out of the faucets.”
“O ye of little faith. For your information, my practical girl, dowsing is a very lucrative skill. Say you’re going to invest in a piece of land. Don’t you want to know what’s under the surface?”
“I’d probably hire an artesian well company,” I say, “but that’s just me.”
“Maybe so, Vanessa, but who’s going to tell the well company where to dig, eh?” She smiles at me. “You two hungry? I’ve got a nice coffeecake in the fridge. One of my clients is trying to visualize becoming a pastry chef . . .”
“You know, Ma, actually, I came to tell you something really important,” Zoe says. “Something really good, I think.”
Dara’s eyes widen. “I had a dream about this, just last night. Let me guess—you’re going back to school!”
“What? No!” Zoe says. “What are you talking about? I have a master’s degree!”
“But you
could
have majored in classical voice. Vanessa, have you ever heard her sing . . .”
“Um, yes—”
“Mom,” Zoe interrupts. “I’m not going back to school for classical voice. I’m perfectly happy as a music therapist—”
Dara looks up at her. “For jazz piano, then?”
“For God’s sake, I’m not going back to school. I came here to tell you I’m a lesbian!”
The word cleaves the room in half.
“But,” Dara says after a moment. “But you were married.”
“I know. I was with Max. But now . . . now I’m with Vanessa.”
When Dara turns to me, her eyes seem wounded—as if I’ve betrayed her by pretending to be Zoe’s good friend when, in truth, that’s what I
have
been. “I know this is unexpected,” I say.
“This isn’t you, Zoe. I know you. I know who you are . . .”
“So do I. And if you think this means I’m going to start riding a Harley and wearing leather, you don’t know me at all. Believe me, I was surprised, too. This isn’t what I thought was going to happen to me.”
Dara starts to cry. She cups Zoe’s cheeks in her hands. “You could get married again.”
“I could, but I don’t want to, Ma.”
“What about grandchildren?”
“I couldn’t seem to make that happen even
with
a man,” Zoe points out. She reaches for her mother’s hand. “I found someone I want to be with. I’m happy. Can’t you be happy for me?”
Dara sits very still for a moment, looking down at their intertwined fingers. Then she pulls away. “I need a minute,” she says, and she picks up her dowsing rods and walks into the kitchen.
When she leaves, Zoe looks up at me, teary. “So much for her open-mindedness.”
I put my arm around her. “Give her a break. You’re still getting used to these feelings, and it’s been weeks. You can’t expect her to get over the shock in five seconds.”
“Do you think she’s okay?”
See, this is why I love Zoe. In the middle of her own freak-out moment, she’s worried about her mother. “I’ll go check,” I say, and I head into the kitchen.
Dara is leaning against the kitchen counter, the dowsing rods beside her on the granite. “Was it something I did?” she asks. “I should have gotten married again, maybe. Just so there was a man in the house—”
“I don’t think it makes a difference. You have been a wonderful mother. Which is why Zoe is so afraid you’ll want to disown her.”
“Disown her? Don’t be ridiculous. She said she was a lesbian, not a Republican.” Dara draws in her breath. “It’s just . . . I have to get used to it.”
“You should tell her that. She’ll understand.”
Dara looks at me, then nods. She pushes back through the swinging door into the living room. I think about following her, but I want to give Zoe a minute alone with her mother. I want them to have the shift and redistribution of their relationship that I never got to have with my own mom, that acrobatic feat of love where everything is turned upside down and yet they are both still able to keep their balance.
So instead, I eavesdrop. I push the door open a crack in time to hear Dara speaking. “I couldn’t love you any more if you told me right now that you were straight,” she says. “And I don’t love you any less because you told me you aren’t.”
I gently close the door. In the kitchen, I turn around, surveying the bowl of fruit on the counter, the cobalt blue toaster, the Cuisinart. Dara has left behind her dowsing rods. I pick them up, hold them lightly in my hands. In spite of the fact that the faucet and the pipes are less than a foot away, the rods do not jump in my hands or twitch or cross. I imagine having that sixth sense, the certainty that what I’m looking for is within reach, even if it’s still hidden.
Movie theaters are wonderful places to be gay. Once the lights go down, there’s no one to stare at you if you hold your girlfriend’s hand or snuggle closer to her. Attention at the movies, by definition, is focused on the spectacle on the screen and not in the seats.
I’m not a PDA kind of person. I’ve never started kissing someone in public; I just don’t have the kind of selfless abandon that you see in teenage couples who are forever making out or walking down a street with their hands tucked halfway down each other’s pants. So I’m not saying that I’d necessarily walk down the street with my arm around the woman I love—but I’d sure like to know that, if I were so inclined, I wouldn’t attract a trail of shocked, uncomfortable stares. We’re conditioned to seeing men holding guns but not men holding hands.
When the movie credits roll, people begin to get out of their seats. As the lights come up, Zoe’s head is on my shoulder. Then I hear, “Zoe? Hey!”
She leaps up as if she’s been caught in the act of doing something wrong and pastes a huge smile on her face. “Wanda!” she says, to a woman who looks vaguely familiar. “Did you like the movie?”
“I’m not a big Tarantino fan, but actually, it wasn’t bad,” she says. She slips her arm through a man’s elbow. “Zoe, I don’t think you’ve ever met my husband, Stan? Zoe’s a music therapist who comes to the nursing home,” Wanda explains.
Zoe turns to me. “This is Vanessa,” she says. “My . . . my friend.”
Last night Zoe and I had celebrated a month together. We had champagne and strawberries, and she beat me at Scrabble. We made love, and when we woke up in the morning she was wrapped around me like a heliotrope vine.
Friend.
“We’ve met,” I say to Wanda, although I am not about to point out that it was at the baby shower for the baby who died.
We walk out of the movie theater with Wanda and her husband, making small talk about the plot and whether this will be an Oscar contender. Zoe is careful to keep a good foot of distance away from me. She doesn’t even make eye contact with me again until we’re in my car, driving back to my place.
Zoe fills the silence with a story about Wanda and Stan’s daughter, who wanted to join the army because she had a boyfriend who had already shipped out. I don’t think she notices that I haven’t said a word to her. When we reach the house, I unlock the door and walk inside and strip off my coat. “You want some tea?” Zoe asks, heading into the kitchen. “I’m going to put up the kettle.”
I don’t answer her. I am a thousand shades of hurt right now, and I don’t trust myself to speak.
Instead I sit down on the couch and pick up the newspaper I never got a chance to read today. I can hear Zoe in my kitchen, taking mugs out of the dishwasher, filling the kettle, turning on the stove. She knows where everything is, in which drawer to find the spoons, in which cabinet I keep the tea bags. She moves around my house as if she belongs here.
I am staring blankly at editorials when she comes into the living room, leans over the back of the couch, and wraps her arms around me. “Any more letters about the police chief scandal?”
I push her away. “Don’t.”
She backs off. “Guess the movie really got to you.”
“Not the movie.” I turn around to look at her.
“You.”
“Me? What did
I
do?”
“It’s what you didn’t do, Zoe,” I say. “What is it? You only want me when no one else is around? You’re more than happy to come on to me when nobody’s watching?”
“Okay.
Clearly you’re in a crappy mood—”
“You didn’t want Wanda to know we’re together. That was obvious . . .”
“My business associates don’t have to know the details of my personal life—”
“Oh, yeah? Did you tell her when you got pregnant last time?” I ask.
“Of course I did—”
“There you go.” I swallow, trying really hard to not cry. “You told her I was your friend.”
“You
are
my friend,” Zoe says, exasperated.
“Is that
all
I am?”
“What am I supposed to call you? My lover? That sounds like a bad seventies movie. My partner? I don’t even know if that’s what we are. But the difference between you and me is that I don’t care what it’s called. I don’t have to label it for everyone else. So why do
you?”
In the kitchen the teakettle starts to scream. “Look,” Zoe says, taking a deep breath. “You’re overreacting. I’m going to turn off the stove and just go home. We can talk about this tomorrow, when we’ve both slept on it.”
She walks into the kitchen, but instead of letting her go, I follow her. I watch her movements, efficient and graceful, as she takes the kettle off the burner. When she turns to me, her features are smooth, expressionless. “Good night.”