Sing You Home (13 page)

“It’s a good thing we ran into each other,” I hear myself say. “I was thinking of calling you.”

Really?
I think, wondering where I’m going with this.

“Really?” Zoe replies.

“There’s a kid who’s been suffering from depression,” I say. “She’s been in and out of hospitals, and she’s failing school. I was going to ask you to come in and work with her.” In truth, I haven’t really been thinking of Zoe and her music therapy, at least not in conjunction with Lucy DuBois. But now that I’ve said it, it makes sense. Nothing else has worked for the girl, who’s attempted suicide twice. Her parents—so conservative that they wouldn’t let Lucy talk to a shrink—would just need to be convinced that music therapy isn’t modern voodoo.

Zoe hesitates, but I can tell she’s considering the offer. “Vanessa, I already told you that I don’t need to be rescued.”

“I’m not saving you,” I say. “I’m asking you to save someone else.”

At the time, I think I mean Lucy. I don’t realize I’m talking about me.

When I was growing up in the southern suburbs of Boston, I used to ride my banana bike with glitter streamers up and down the streets of my neighborhood, silently marking the homes of the girls I thought were pretty. At age six, I fully believed that Katie Whittaker, with her sunshine hair and constellation of freckles, would one day marry me and we’d live happily ever after.

I can’t really remember when I realized that wasn’t what all the other girls were thinking, and so I started saying along with the rest of the female second graders that I had a crush on Jared Tischbaum, who was cool enough to play on the travel soccer team and who wore the same jean jacket to school every single day because, once, the actor Robin Williams had touched it in an airport baggage terminal.

I lost my virginity one night in the guest team’s baseball dugout on school grounds with my first boyfriend, Ike. He was sweet and tender and told me I was beautiful—in other words, he did everything right—and yet I remember going home afterward and wondering what all the fuss was about when it came to sex. It had been sweaty and mechanical, and, even though I really did love Ike, something had been missing.

My best friend, Molly, was the person I confided this to. I’d find myself on the phone with her after midnight, dissecting the sinew and skeleton of my relationship with Ike. I’d study with her for a history test and not want to leave. I would make plans to go shopping with her at the mall on Saturday and would breathlessly count down the school days until the weekend came. We’d criticize the shallow girls who started dating guys and no longer had time for their female friends. We vowed to be inseparable.

In October 1998, during my junior year of college, Matthew Shepard—a young, gay University of Wyoming student—was severely beaten and left for dead. I didn’t know Matthew Shepard. I wasn’t a political activist. But my boyfriend at the time and I got on a Greyhound bus and traveled to Laramie to participate in the candlelight vigil at the university. It was when I was surrounded by all those points of light that I could confess what I had been terrified to admit to myself: it could have been me. That I was, and always had been, gay.

And here’s the amazing thing: even after I said it out loud, the world did not stop turning.

I was still a college student majoring in education, with a 3.8 average. I still weighed 121 pounds and preferred chocolate to vanilla and sang with an a cappella group called Son of a Pitch. I swam at the school pool at least twice a week, and I was still much more likely to be found watching
Cheers
than getting wasted at a frat party. Admitting I was gay changed nothing about who I had been, or who I was going to be.

Part of me worried that I didn’t fit into either camp. I’d never
been
with a woman, and was afraid that it would be as uneventful for me as fooling around with a guy. What if I wasn’t
really
gay—just totally, functionally asexual? Plus, there was an added wrinkle to this new social world that I hadn’t considered: the default assumption, when you meet a woman, is that she’s heterosexual (unless you happen to be at an Indigo Girls concert . . . or a WNBA basketball game). It wasn’t like certain girls sported an
L
on the forehead, and my gaydar had not yet been finely tuned.

In the end, though, I shouldn’t have worried. The girl who was my lab partner in biochemistry invited me to her dorm room for a study session, and pretty soon we were spending all of our free time together. When I wasn’t with her, I wanted to be. When a professor said something ridiculous or sexist or hilarious, she was the first one I wanted to tell. One Saturday at a football game we shivered in the stands underneath a wool tartan blanket, passing a thermos of hot cocoa laced with Baileys back and forth. The score was close, and during one really important fourth down, she grabbed on to my hand, and even after the touchdown, she didn’t let go. The first time she kissed me, I truly thought I’d had an aneurysm—my pulse was thundering so loud and my senses were exploding.
This,
I remember thinking, the only word I could hold on to in a sea of feelings.

After that, I could look back with twenty-twenty vision and see that I never had boundaries with my female friends. I wanted to see their baby pictures and listen to their favorite songs and fix my hair the same way they fixed theirs. I would hang up the phone and think of one more thing I had to say. I wouldn’t have defined it as a physical attraction—it was more of an emotional attachment. I could never quite get enough, but I never let myself ask what “enough” really was.

Believe me, being gay is not a choice. No one would choose to make life harder than it has to be, and no matter how confident and comfortable a gay person is, he or she can’t control the thoughts of others. I’ve had people move out of my row in a movie theater if they see me holding hands with a woman—apparently disgusted by our public display of affection when, one row behind us, a teenage couple is practically undressing each other. I’ve had the word
DYKE
written on my car in spray paint. I’ve had parents request that their child be moved to a different school counselor’s jurisdiction, parents who, when asked for a reason why, say that my “educational philosophy” doesn’t match theirs.

You can argue that it’s a different world now than the one when Matthew Shepard was killed, but there is a subtle difference between tolerance and acceptance. It’s the distance between moving into the cul-de-sac and having your next-door neighbor trust you to keep an eye on her preschool daughter for a few minutes while she runs out to the post office. It’s the chasm between being invited to a colleague’s wedding with your same-sex partner and being able to slow-dance without the other guests whispering.

I remember my mother telling me that, when she was a little girl in Catholic school, the nuns used to hit her left hand every time she wrote with it. Nowadays, if a teacher did that, she’d probably be arrested for child abuse. The optimist in me wants to believe sexuality will eventually become like handwriting: there’s no right way and wrong way to do it. We’re all just wired differently.

It’s also worth noting that, when you meet someone, you never bother to ask if he’s right- or left-handed.

After all: Does it really matter to anyone other than the person holding the pen?

The longest relationship I’ve ever had with a woman is with Rajasi, my hairdresser. Every four weeks I go to her to get my roots dyed blond and my hair trimmed into its shaggy pixie cut. But today Rajasi is furious and punctuating her sentences with angry snips of the scissors. “Um,” I say, squinting at my bangs in the mirror. “Isn’t that a little short?”

“An arranged marriage!” Rajasi says. “Can you believe it? We came here from India twenty years ago. We’re as American as it comes. My parents eat at McDonald’s once a week, for God’s sake.”

“Maybe if you told them—”

A hunk of hair flies past my eyes. “They had my
boyfriend
over for dinner last Friday,” Rajasi huffs. “Did they honestly think I’d ditch the guy I’ve been dating for three years because some decrepit old Punjabi is willing to give them a bunch of chickens for a dowry?”

“Chickens?” I say. “Really?”

“I don’t know. That’s not the point.” She is still cutting, lost in her rant. “Is it or is it not 2011?” Rajasi says. “Shouldn’t I be allowed to marry whomever I want?”

“Honey,” I reply, “you are preaching to the choir.”

I live in Rhode Island, one of the only states in New England to
not
have recognized same-sex marriage. For this reason, couples who want to get hitched cross the border into Fall River, Massachusetts. It seems simple enough, but it actually creates a thicket of issues. I have friends, two gay men, who tied the knot in Massachusetts and then, five years later, split up. Their property and assets were all in Rhode Island, where they lived. But because their marriage was never legal in the state, they couldn’t actually
get
divorced.

Rajasi stops. “And?” she says.

“And what?”

“Here I am going on about my love life when you haven’t mentioned a single thing about yours . . .”

I laugh. “Rajasi, I have a better chance of hooking up with your Punjabi than anyone else right now. I think my romantic pool has gone bone-dry.”

“You make it sound like you’re sixty,” Rajasi says. “Like you’re going to sit home all weekend crocheting with a hundred cats.”

“Don’t be silly. Cats are much better at cross-stitching. Besides, I have big plans for the weekend. I’m headed to Boston to see a ballet.”

“Isn’t it supposed to snow?”

“Not enough to stop us from going,” I say.

“Us,”
Rajasi repeats. “Do tell . . .”

“She’s just a friend. We’re celebrating her anniversary.”

“Without her husband?”

“It’s a divorce thing,” I say. “I’m trying to get her through a rough spot.”

Zoe and I had become pretty good friends in the weeks since our encounter at the Y. I must have called her first, since I was the one who had her home number. I was going to be picking up a painting from a frame shop near her house, and did she want to meet for lunch? Over deli sandwiches, we talked about the research she was doing on depression and music therapy; I told her about broaching the topic with Lucy’s parents. The next weekend, she won two tickets to a movie preview on a radio giveaway, and asked me if I wanted to go. We began spending time together, and in that bizarre exponential way that new friendships seem to snowball, it grew hard to imagine a time when I didn’t know her.

We’ve talked about how she found out about music therapy (as a kid, she broke her arm and needed a pin put in surgically, and there was a music therapist in the pediatrics wing of the hospital). We’ve talked about her mother (who calls Zoe three times a day, often to discuss something completely unnecessary, like last night’s Anderson Cooper report or what day Christmas falls on three years from now). We’ve talked about Max, his drinking, and the rumor mill that now puts him at the right hand of the pastor of the Eternal Glory Church.

Here’s what I hadn’t expected about Zoe: she was funny. She had a way of looking at the world that was just off-kilter enough to surprise me into laughing:

If someone with multiple personality disorder tries to kill himself, is it attempted homicide?

Isn’t it a little upsetting that doctors call what they do “practice”?

Why are you in a movie but on TV?

Isn’t a smoking section in a restaurant a little like a peeing section in a pool?

We had a lot in common. We’d grown up in households with single parents (her father deceased, mine running off with his secretary); we had always wanted to travel and never had enough money to do it; we both were freaked out by clowns. We had a secret fascination with reality TV. We loved the smell of gasoline, hated the smell of bleach, and wished we knew how to use fondant, like pastry chefs. We preferred white wine to red, extreme cold to extreme heat, and Goobers to Raisinets. We both had no problem using a men’s room at a public venue if the line for the ladies’ room was too long.

Tomorrow would have been her tenth wedding anniversary, and I could tell she was dreading it. Zoe’s mom, Dara, was away in San Diego this weekend at a life coaching conference, so I suggested that we do something Max would never in a million years have wanted to do. Immediately, Zoe picked the ballet at the Wang Theatre in Boston. It was
Romeo and Juliet,
Prokofiev. Max, she had told me, never could handle classical dance. If he wasn’t remarking on the men’s tights, he was fast asleep.

“Maybe that’s what I should do,” Rajasi muses. “Take this fool my parents are flying in to a place he’ll absolutely detest.” She glances up. “What would a Brahmin hate the most?”

“All-you-can-eat barbecue?” I suggest.

“A heavy metal rave.”

Then we look at each other. “NASCAR,” we say at the same time.

“Well, I’d better go,” I say. “I’m supposed to pick Zoe up in fifteen minutes.”

Rajasi pivots the hairdressing chair toward the mirror again and winces.

When your hairdresser winces, it’s never good. My hair is so short that it sticks up in small, grasslike clumps on the top of my head. Rajasi opens her mouth, and I shoot a dagger look in her direction. “Don’t you dare tell me it’ll grow out . . .”

“I was going to say the good news is that the military look is in this spring . . .”

I rub my hands through my hair, trying to mess it up a little, not that it helps. “I would kill you,” I say, “but I actually think you’ll suffer more by being alive to meet the Punjabi guy.”

“See? You’re already starting to like this look. If you didn’t, you’d be too busy crying to make jokes.” She takes the money I hold out to her. “Be careful driving,” Rajasi warns. “It’s already starting to snow.”

“A dusting,” I say, waving good-bye. “No worries.”

Another thing, it turns out, that we have in common:
Romeo and Juliet.
“It’s always been my favorite Shakespeare play,” Zoe says, once the company has taken its bows and she rejoins me in the sumptuous renovated lobby of the Wang Theatre after a trip to the restroom. “I always wanted a guy to walk up to me and start a conversation that naturally became a sonnet.”