You picture Shirley and Betty giving you little presents every Christmas Eve, and letting you and your brother watch TV in their bedroom as you stayed up for the eleven o’clock service at church. They had cats and lots of books and a big garden. You remember Marty, who always made you feel like what you had to say was important, and who was always smiling. You don’t want your words used against them. You want to show the world how sweet and normal they were.
You remember them and all the other nice lesbian couples who weren’t weird or different or scary and how your stepmother’s mental illness drove them all away. You don’t blame them, but the problem with having a family made up of friends is that once they decided to leave, you didn’t run into them at weddings and funerals. Once they left, you never saw them again.
flying to new york
When Girl and Brother left Alaska at the end of the summer, they took the red-eye flight at midnight. Father took tongue depressors and a black pen out of the camera/medical bag he called his purse and made stick-puppets for the children to play with while they waited to board the plane. He pulled out rubber gloves and blew them up into balloons with fingers. He turned one into a chicken, the other into a weird head with only one ear. The children pushed and shoved each other to get closest to Father. Girl scratched her cheeks against his rough wool coat as she tried to fill her lungs with his scent.
Father walked the children onto the plane, just like Mother did back in New York, and let them take their balloon-hands on the plane with them, even though they were big and didn’t fit under the seat in front of them. When Father walked down the aisle and off the plane, the children started to cry. He never looked back.
Brother cried all the way to Seattle, and sometimes on the next flight, too. Sometimes he cried all the way back to Rochester. Off and on, of course. He’d cry himself to sleep, wake up and cry some more. Girl cried for the first hour, but after that she just sat quiet in her sadness, letting the sorrow fall down inside her chest like rain down a window.
When Girl was twelve, she stopped crying when Father walked off the plane. When she stopped crying, Brother started yelling.
“You don’t love him at all!” he raged.
“I do, too!” she answered. But she looked at her brother as a naïve boy who didn’t know the first thing about love and parents who didn’t look back when they walked off the plane. When she saw Rochester below the plane window, little houses down below like on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, she felt all mixed up: the warm, glowy love of her mother balanced by Stepmother who was always mad all the time, and the town where the kids at school mocked her and Girl never had a warm enough sweater.
a series of awkward conversations
phone call, 1985
Girl never understood why her father moved so far away. Juli lived in Seattle, and Girl and Brother lived in Rochester, New York. It was like Father was trying to get as far from all of his children as he possibly could. When Girl was twelve, in the seventh grade, he finally offered an explanation.
“Now that you are older, I thought you should know why I had to leave Rochester,” Father said when he called one day.
Girl had been practicing piano in the dining room, and now she sat straddling the dark wood bench. She twisted the yellow telephone cord around her fingers as they talked.
“Well, do you know the class ‘About Your Sexuality’ at church?”
“Yeah. Brother took it this year. I take it next year.” The sex-ed class was offered to eighth graders only and Girl was dying to take it, but she had to wait one more year. Brother got to do everything first.
“Well, I was teaching it back then. And this other doctor, Dr. Wu, had it out for me. He was from Japan, and for some reason he just hated me.”
“The one you said always called you Crinton Rirribridge?” Girl wiggled on the piano bench, rocking it back and forth like she was riding a horse, making it squeak.
“Girl!” Stepmother called from the living room. “Stop doing that to the bench! You are going to break it!”
Girl blew her bangs out of her eyes. Girl hated her perm. It was supposed to be cascading ringlets, but the end result was more poodle. She was trying to grow it out and her bangs were almost to her nose. Girl got off the bench and crawled under the dining room table where Stepmother couldn’t see her. She unwound the phone cord from her fingers so she could make circles with her hand on the pink rug to ball up the dog hair. Girl was supposed to refer to the rug as mauve, not pink. Stepmother hated pink, but a decorator had talked her into mauve—the “it”
