Riding Fury Home (33 page)

As we made our way back to the tent, Dana said, “Uh, I don't think our sleeping bags will zip together, but maybe we could open one out flat. Put the other one on top. What do you think?”

I did not dance a jig, but silently thanked whatever gods a pagan atheist can revel in. “Yes,” I simply answered, “yes.”

 

 

FOR OUR FIRST SIX MONTHS, we dated and enjoyed ourselves. Dana traveled on business quite a bit, so we often met on weekends for sensuous reunions. But as delighted as I was, I was also fearful of ending up in another disastrous relationship.

There was certain sanity in my self-protection; it kept me from my usual diving in as soon as I'd slept with someone. For the first time, with Dana, there was the wonder of getting to know each other slowly in a way that felt real.

By seven months, the deepening of my feelings for her couldn't be denied. One evening when we were at my apartment, I nervously brought up the question I'd been scared to ask. Did she want to be monogamous?

“That's funny,” she said, “I've been meaning to bring this up myself. On my business trip to Boston next week, there's this old college friend I'm planning to visit. There was always some sexual energy between us, but we never did anything about it in college. So I thought maybe it would happen this time. Would that be okay with you?”

My stomach lurched and my heart started banging.Then numbness overcame me, and I heard myself say, “Hmmm . . . well, I guess that would be pretty safe.”

But my vision went blurry and I couldn't look at Dana. I imagined how I would feel seeing her right after she'd slept with someone else; rather than open and sexy, I'd be wary and angry.
Say it. Say the truth
. I looked up. “I'm sitting here trying to make it okay, but my stomach's in a knot, and, well, it just isn't.” My heart was pounding hard.

She already knew my history with Dee and my previous lovers, but what she said stunned me. “Chana, you have an absolute right to your feelings about this. You don't have to try to change how you feel. I'm probably okay with nixing the Boston thing, but let me think about it. I don't want to agree for the sole reason of taking care of you.”

We spent the night apart. I went and talked with my mother about the situation. “Even if she
says
she'll be monogamous, can I really believe her?” I was anxious. “I don't want to repeat my mistakes.”

“I can tell Dana has a good heart. She seems steady. I think you can trust her, Chana,” Gloria said.

The next morning, I took a walk with my sheltie dog, Naomi. As she sniffed the neighborhood yards, I was thinking hard. I was coming to love Dana. She was by far the most wonderful person I had ever been with. But if it came down to an open relationship, I knew in my bones I just couldn't do it. I'd have to leave. There was something oddly comforting in that.

That evening, we had our talk in Dana's bedroom, wanting privacy from her two housemates. Dana faced me on the bed. I could see her take a breath. I held mine.

“I've thought about it,” she said, slowly, as if she was pondering it right then. She gathered speed. “But having an affair seems so superficial, so trivial next to what I have with you. I want to be with you, Chana. I think of your being a monogamous person as a trait, like having brown hair. It's a part of you, and it's not up for change. I accept that.”

I sat perfectly still, taking in what Dana had just said. Then I reached for her, taking her face between my hands.

Inside me, everything was taut and quivering, just beneath my skin. We moved closer, and I kissed her cheeks, her neck. We tumbled down onto the bed and held each other. I stroked her face, unbuttoned her shirt. To be respected and cherished—that was the hottest aphrodisiac on Earth.

JUST A FEW WEEKS after we first became lovers, Dana and I were on a night out at Mama Bear's, a feminist bookstore and coffeehouse. We were munching on cookies and sipping herbal tea at a table in the room lined with bookshelves. The string of Indian bells hanging from the front door jingled, and I looked up to see Gloria. She spotted us, waved, and came up to our table. With a simple “hi,” she plopped in an empty chair, nodded at Dana, and launched into a conversation about her day.

Later that evening when we were alone, Dana asked, “Does your mother always do that, just assume she can join you wherever you are?”

“What do you mean?” It hadn't seemed that out of the ordinary to me.

“We were on a
date,
” Dana said. “And she pretty much ignored me, and just gabbed with you.”

“Yeah, I guess that was pretty rude.” Actually, I hadn't really noticed my mother's exclusive focus on me until Dana pointed it
out. Now I felt pulled in two directions: toward the familiar intensity of my connection with Gloria mixed with guilt at the thought of excluding her, and at the same time intrigued by this new possibility of carving out some private space.

I continued spending time with my mother, eating meals, watching TV, taking walks together in the park, but we'd lost one bonding activity: kvetching about my current rotten girlfriend. Sometimes Dana joined us after work for dinner at my mom's, and the three of us came to an easy camaraderie. Once, over a meal, my mother said, “That's terrible, Dana, how your boss didn't tell you about the big meeting!”

Later, Dana asked, “Do you tell your mother
everything?”

“Well, yeah, I suppose I do! Does that bother you?”

“I guess it's okay, but it just feels a bit funny.”

“It's just how it is between us.” My tell-all habit had deepened since my mother had moved to the West Coast. She adored me, was always willing to listen to my anxious complaints and worries, and was my biggest booster. Why would I give that up?

“Listen, I'll try to rein in talking about you, but you know Glor loves you. Nosing in is just her way of caring.”

 

 

TOWARD THE END of our first year together, Dana and I decided that I would move in with her.

I was buzzing with excitement and some apprehension as I walked over to my mother's to tell her my news. We sat in her living room. Gloria was stretched out lengthwise on her couch, with her cat, Sean, on her lap. She was crazy about that cat.

I sat in an armchair, facing the couch. I plunged in, “Guess what! I'm going to be moving into Dana's place in a couple months.”

For a moment, a look crossed my mother's face, almost a wince. “Are you sure? That's a big decision.”

“Well, it's kinda scary, but yes, I really want to try this.” I felt a bit queasy. Was she really upset?

My mother looked down, petting Sean. When she looked up, she smiled at me. I could see she was trying. “Well, you know how I feel about Dana. I think she's marvelous. But it's not so easy, living together. You remember what a disaster it was with me and Sarah?”

“That was different. You two never seemed able to talk things through. Dana and I really talk to each other.”

She clutched Sean as he was about to jump off her lap. “Settle down,” she scolded him. He curled back against her.

“You know, I haven't lived with a lover since Kate. It feels like time to take a risk. And it's so different with Dana. For one, I'm older, and two, I've had a hell of a lot of therapy.”

Gloria raised an eyebrow. “Okay, darling, maybe you're right.”

But the unspoken hovered between us, the tectonic shift in our relationship. All these years, no matter whom I had been with, what lovers either of us had had, my mother and I had been each other's mainstay.

I took a small, inadequate stab at soothing her. “I know it'll be different, not living on the same block, but I'll still be over a lot. And you can come hang with us, too.”

“Of course, sweetheart.”

The day the moving van came, Gloria came down the block to see me off. I deposited the cardboard carrying case with my outraged gray cat in the back of my Toyota station wagon. Machick was meowing nonstop. Naomi waited on the curb, wagging her tail furiously, ready to leap in.

In addition to the full van, boxes with fragile items filled every free space in the car, crowding the passenger seat and the back seat. I started up the car, rolled down the window, and waved at my mother. She stood on the curb, smiling and waving, but her mouth was a brave, tight line, as if clamped against the outburst of a cry.

 

 

WHAT SCARED ME MOST about living with Dana was the thought that up close my foibles would be revealed, that she'd realize what a terrible mistake she'd made. Instead, she loved me anyway, bumping up against me with equal force when I got controlling, not letting me push her around. When I flung up my posters on the walls, decorating without consulting her, she came home, looked around, and said, “What're you doing? This is something we have to agree on.”

At first, Dana's protestations startled me—often I barely noticed how I was acting until she confronted me. My mother had let me be irritable and crabby around her for years. Now, hard and embarrassing as it was, I experienced an odd relief in knowing Dana would stand up for herself. Little by little, we became amused by our head-butting, and by our equally fierce need to be right.

Since we had both returned to school, Dana and I shared a room with two desks, where we studied companionably. Dana was doing prerequisites for a master's in computer science, while I was finishing my undergraduate credits before attending grad school in clinical psychology. It had come to me that what I'd so loved about my radio program was eliciting people's stories, and that I wanted to go deeper into those stories by becoming a psychotherapist. It would be a long haul: one year to finish up my bachelor's degree, three years of graduate school, three thousand hours as an intern seeing clients
under supervision before I could sit for my written exam and then stand for my orals, but I was determined.

 

 

ABOUT SIX MONTHS after I moved, my mother enrolled in a beginners'tennis class. “It's terrific fun!” she exclaimed to me.

“Wonderful, Glor!” I was delighted that she had a new interest. It eased my guilt at being less involved with her.

A few weeks into her class, she was swinging her racket when she felt a sharp stab in her shoulder. If only her pain had stopped there, but soon all of her joints were inflamed and aching: her knees, wrists, elbows, and hips. She was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Its onset was swift and relentless.

One night, the ringing telephone pierced my dreams. When I opened my eyes, the radio alarm glowed a red 2:47. Terror froze me a moment, and then I mobilized, bolting upright, rushing from the bedroom into the kitchen, where the phone rested on the table.

My heart beat hard. “Yes?” I asked, breathless.

The sound of sobbing. My mother's sobs.

“What is it?!” By now, my stomach was clenched.

“It just . . . ” She stopped to gasp for air. “Goddamn it!” Another sob. “It just hurts so damn much. I can't stand it!”

“Oh, Mom, I'm so sorry. It's awful.”

“I can't sleep! It hurts so much.”

“I don't know what to do, Gloria.”

“There's nothing. Nothing to do. I don't know what to do!”

“Oh, Gloria, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, I wish I could help.”

As I hung up the phone, I looked up. Dana had trailed after me and was standing near me in her pajamas, but I hadn't noticed her. She held out her arms, and I walked in, weeping.

The calls came once or twice a week, ripping me from sleep, my breath quick and shallow, fear constricting my chest. Dana and I talked about it: These middle-of-the-night calls couldn't go on like this. It was too traumatic, too reminiscent of my childhood. I had to set a limit, even though it tore me up. It seemed easier to do over the phone.

“Glor, I gotta talk to you about these midnight calls.”

“Yes, what is it?”

“Listen, being woken up like that scares the hell out of me. If there's something you need, like being driven to the emergency room, of course, call and I'll be there. But, if you just need to talk, I can't do it. I hate that you're in pain, but there's nothing I can do. If you have to talk to someone, call suicide prevention. Please, just don't call me before eight AM.”

“Okay. I get it.” She sounded glum but resigned.

The next morning, I had just gotten out of the shower, when the phone rang. I wrapped a towel around me and made it to the phone, which was ringing insistently.

“Hello?” My hair was dripping into the handset.

“Chana.” My mother's voice quavered. “I hurt all over. I barely slept. This is horrible!”

I glanced over at the wall clock above the kitchen table. It was 8:01 AM.

 

 

OVER THE NEXT YEAR, my mother tried all kinds of treatments: a diet with no nightshades, acupuncture, Chinese herbs, and then the stronger guns, steroids and painkillers, but nothing stopped the disease's relentless progression. She honored my request not to call at night, and the morning calls eased up after she found other
support from a disabled-women's group. She stayed as active as she could by swimming in a city pool kept extra warm for seniors, but pain and disability plagued her.

Once, I drove my mother down the coast to one of my favorite beaches. When we arrived, we parked the car, got out, and stood together staring at the steep path sloping down to it. “I can't,” Gloria said, shaking her head, and burst into tears. I felt awful. “Don't worry,” I tried to comfort her, “we'll find another beach.” Sorrow hung between us.