“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.
