Sing You Home

grounded, good-head-on-her-shoulders daughter she never had-the one who can talk about IRAs and retirement planning and who keeps a birthday book so she never forgets to send a card. I think my mother truly believes Vanessa will take care of me forever; whereas with Max, she had her doubts.

But I’m itchy, in this place that’s full of other brides who have weddings without complications. I feel like I’m being smothered by tulle and lace and satin, and I haven’t even tried on a single dress yet.

When the salesclerk approaches us and asks if she can help, my mother steps forward with a bright smile. “My gay daughter’s getting married,” she announces.

I can feel my cheeks burn. “Why am I suddenly your gay daughter?”

“Well, I’d think, of all people, you’d know the answer to that.”

“You never introduced me before as your straight daughter.”

My mother’s face falls. “I thought you wanted me to be proud of you.”

“Don’t make this my fault,” I say.

The salesclerk looks from me to my mother. “Why don’t I give you a few more minutes?” she asks, and she slinks away.

“Now look at what you’ve done. You’ve made her uncomfortable,” my mother sighs.

“Are you kidding?” I grab a sequined pump from a rack. “‘Hi,’” I mimic. “‘Do you have this shoe for my mother the sadomasochist? She wears a seven and a half.’”

“First of all, I’m not into S and M. And second of all, that shoe is absolutely hideous.” She looks at me. “You know, not everyone is out to attack you. Just because you’re a new member of a minority group doesn’t mean you have to assume the worst about everyone else.”

I sit down on the white couch, in the middle of a mountain of tulle. “That’s easy for you to say. You aren’t getting pamphlets, daily, from the Eternal Glory Church. ‘Ten Tiny Steps to Jesus.’ ‘Straight? Hate.’” I look up at her. “You may feel like trumpeting my relationship status, but I don’t. It’s not worth making someone squirm.” I glance at the salesclerk, who is wrapping a gown in plastic. “For all we know, she sings in the Eternal Glory Church choir.”

“For all we know,” my mother counters, “she’s gay, too.” She sits down next to me, and the dresses pouf up around us, a tiny explosion. “Honey… what’s wrong?”

To my great embarrassment, my eyes well up with tears. “I don’t know what to wear to my own wedding,” I admit.

My mother takes one look at me, then grabs my hand and pulls me up from the couch and downstairs onto Boylston Street. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“The bride’s supposed to be the focus of all the attention,” I sob. “But what happens when there are two brides?”

“Well, what’s Vanessa wearing?”

“A suit.” A beautiful white suit she found at Marshalls that fits like it was tailored to her. But I have never worn a suit in my life.

“Then I’d think you can wear anything you want…”

“Not white,” I blurt out.

My mother purses her lips. “Because you were already married?”

“No. Because-” Before I can say what has been lying smooth and heavy on my heart, like a fresh layer of asphalt, I snap my mouth shut.

“Because what?” my mother urges.

“Because it’s a gay wedding,” I whisper.

When Vanessa proposed, I never even thought twice about saying yes. But I would have been entirely happy to get married at a courthouse in Massachusetts, instead of having a big ceremony and reception. “Come on, Zo,” she had said. “There are two times in your life everyone you love comes together-your wedding and your funeral-and I know I won’t have nearly as much fun at the second one.” But even as I sat down every night with Vanessa at the computer to research bands and venues for the reception, I kept thinking I would find the escape hatch, the way to convince Vanessa to just take a vacation to Turks and Caicos instead.

And yet.

Unlike me, she’d never walked down an aisle. She’d never been fed wedding cake or danced until there were blisters on her feet. If that was what she wanted, then I wasn’t going to deny her the experience.

I wanted everyone to know how happy I was with Vanessa, but I didn’t need a wedding to do it. I just wasn’t sure if that was because this was still new to me or because I had heard loud and clear what Max thought-that a gay marriage isn’t a real one.

I cannot explain why this even mattered. We weren’t going to be asking Pastor Clive to officiate, after all. The people who would be invited to our wedding loved us and wouldn’t be judging the fact that there were two tiny brides on the cake, instead of a bride and a groom.

But to get married, we had to cross the Rhode Island border. We had to find a minister who was supportive of gay marriage. Eventually we would have to hire a lawyer to draw up papers to give each other power of attorney for medical decisions, to become beneficiaries on each other’s life insurance policies. I wasn’t ashamed of wanting a lifetime with Vanessa. But I was ashamed that the steps I had to take in order to do it made me feel like a second-class citizen.

“I’m happy,” I tell my mother, although I am bawling.

My mother looks at me. “What you need,” she says, waving her hand dismissively at the bridal salon behind us, “is none of this. What you need is elegant and understated. Just like you and Vanessa.”

We try three stores before we find it-a simple ivory, knee-length sheath that doesn’t make me look like Cinderella. “I fell in love with your father during a fire drill,” my mother says idly, as she fastens the buttons on the back. “We were both working at a law firm-he was an accountant and I was a secretary-and they evacuated the building. We met next to a chain-link fence, and he offered me half a Twinkie. When the building got the all clear, we didn’t go back inside.” She shrugs. “At his funeral, a lot of my friends said it was just bad luck that I fell for a guy who died in his forties, but you know, I never saw it that way. I thought it was good luck. I mean, what if there hadn’t been a fire drill? Then we never would have met. And I’d much rather have had a few great years with him than none at all.” She turns me so that I am facing her. “Don’t let anyone tell you who you should and shouldn’t love, Zoe. Yes, it’s a gay wedding… but it’s your wedding.”

She turns me again so that I can see myself in the mirror. From the front, this could be any pretty, simple dress. But from the back, everything is different. A row of satin buttons gives way, at the waist, to a fan of pleats. It’s as if the dress is opening like a rose.

As if someone watching me walk away might think, That’s not what I expected.

I stare at myself. “What do you think?”

Maybe my mother is talking about the dress, and maybe she’s talking about my future. “I think,” she says, “you’ve found the perfect one.”

When Lucy walks into our conference room, I am already picking out a melody on my guitar and humming along. “Hey there,” I say, glancing up at her. Today her red hair is matted and twisted. “Trying for dreadlocks?”

She shrugs.

“I had a roommate in college who wanted dreads. She chickened out at the last minute because the only way to get rid of dreadlocks is to cut them all off.”

“Well, maybe I’ll just shave my head,” Lucy says.

“You could do that,” I agree, delighted that we are having what could almost be called a conversation. “You could be the next Sinead O’Connor.”

“Who?”

I realize that, when the bald musician ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live in 1992, Lucy wasn’t even alive yet. “Or Melissa Etheridge. Did you see her perform at the Grammys when she was bald from chemo? She sang Janis Joplin.”

I take out my pick and begin the chord progressions for “Piece of My Heart.” From the corner of my eye, I watch Lucy staring at my fingers as they move up and down the frets. “I remember hearing that performance and thinking how brave she was, as a cancer survivor… and how it was the perfect song. Suddenly it wasn’t about a woman standing up to a guy-it was about beating anything that thought it could take you down.” I play a thread of