The Fixed Stars Read online

So what if you don’t “cohere,” or not all the time? Imagine the perspective of someone who meets you at a party. They see you dancing. It seems like you’re outgoing and fun. But a different person, let’s say someone who meets you at a coffee shop, might describe you as reserved or shy. You’re focused on your work; you don’t make eye contact. Both people can be right. Sometimes you’re this; sometimes you’re that.

  But that’s just mood, I said. That’s not my self.

  I know you want to think there’s a firm thing that’s “Molly.” Some core that you can understand and count on. But if there is a core to you, what exactly is it? This is more uncomfortable to think about. What part of you is stable, if you’re actually changing all the time? You didn’t used to be a mother, or a wife, or a restaurant owner. Now you are. That’s a lot of change. What if the one constant thing about you is that you’re changeable?

  Problem: Even I do not believe that my experience is possible. Unless.

  Theory A: I was born gay, or bi, but I did not understand it until now.

  Or, Theory B: I changed, almost beyond my own recognition.

  Theory A fits the common understanding of sexual orientation. I saw a glimpse when I was twenty, with Laura, but I have been closeted for most of my life. I have deceived even myself. I clothed myself in layers of self-deception. (How on earth did I do it?) Even while telling myself that I loved Brandon to the exclusion of all others, loved him enough to marry him, somewhere deep within me lived this person who would give anything to fuck a woman. She’d stowed away inside my psyche for years, hiding belowdecks without making a sound.

  Theory B is of course simpler. I changed.

  I read in Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts that Nelson’s mother once sent her a card to celebrate a poetry publication, and on the card was that famous Joan Didion line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Nelson was unsettled by it.

  “I became a poet in part because I didn’t want to tell stories,” she writes. “As far as I could tell, stories may enable us to live, but they also trap us, bring us spectacular pain. In their scramble to make sense of nonsensical things, they distort, codify, blame, aggrandize, restrict, omit, betray, mythologize, you name it. This has always struck me as cause for lament, not celebration.”19

  It looks like I’m having a midlife crisis, I thought. That’s what this is.

  But it didn’t feel like I’d imagined a midlife crisis would feel. Yes, I’d asked for an open marriage. I’d had a panic attack on the bathroom floor. But under the panic, I knew why I did what I was doing: because I couldn’t not do it. I had changed.

  Nora met me like an enzyme, and she catalyzed a reaction. And I couldn’t undo it, because it was not other from me. It was me.

  12

  Hi, Nora, I wrote. I found your email address online, and I hope it’s okay to contact you. I was a juror on the trial last summer, and you mentioned that you were a writer. What are you working on these days? Would you be up for coffee sometime?

  I sent the email before I could decide not to. I held my breath. The time stamp read 9:28 P.M., April 20, 2016. I imagined her struggling to place my name, to even remember our having met ten months ago.

  Her reply came at 9:49: Hi, I was recently thinking I wanted to catch up with you!

  She’d been thinking of me. Exclamation point!

  I don’t remember the days between sending the email and seeing Nora again. We agreed to meet that Sunday afternoon at a coffee shop across town. I got there first. Nerves chattered my teeth. I ordered a beer, found a table facing the window, and took out my laptop as though I planned to work. Out on the sidewalk I saw her reaching for the door handle. I stared at the laptop screen. She was wearing jeans, a button-down shirt, and a thin sweater in dark green. I’d never seen her out of a suit. From the corner of my eye, I watched her walk to another table, stop to greet and hug someone there, then notice me. I forced my eyes up. She smiled, striding toward my table. Her smile was exactly as I remembered it: quick, wide, white as whole milk. I stood to hug her, as though it were easy.

  We talked about the trial. It felt natural, or we both worked hard to create the illusion that it was. I asked about her work, her writing. She asked about my work, and I told her about the restaurants, about Brandon and June. I said lots of things to avoid saying anything, or everything. Then she said it: Are you queer?

  I must have been plain as a sheet of glass. How long had she been thinking of asking this? I thought I’d hidden myself so well.

  I fumbled. I talked obliquely about a recent crush on a woman, said my husband and I had opened our marriage, were trying it out. Words came from my mouth like they were someone else’s.

  I’ve dated people in open relationships, she said.

  A thought: If this were fiction, a good editor would scratch this scene out.

  She continued. I’ve had a crush on you since the trial, she said. I’d love to date you.

  We went out the next Saturday, the last day of April. I parked on the street outside the city park where we’d agreed to meet. Nora waited for me on a bench by the reflecting pool. She had a fresh haircut. It was tidy around her ears, trimmed close along the back of her head. I thought about dragging my fingers up, nape to crown, against the prickle of her hair. I could do that now, if I wanted to. She wanted me to touch her, didn’t she? She was here.

  She sat at one end of the bench, and I sat down at the other. We were too far apart, weirdly far apart. Nausea swam around my gut like a strange fish.

  I brought something for you, she said. It’s my favorite book about writing. Do you have it?

  She handed me a package wrapped in twine. It was a paperback copy of On Writing Well, by William Zinsser. I didn’t have it. On the title page, she’d written the date and an inscription. Her handwriting was even and relaxed, the M of my name a cheerful zigzag, the o flowing into looping ls, a neat up-and-down y.

  She had written my name! I goggled at it, like a preteen running into her school crush in the toothpaste aisle at Target: Whoa, he brushes his teeth, just like me. Nora had written my name. This is what it looks like when her hand forms my name! I couldn’t look directly at her, or the web of muscle at the corner of my eye would seize.

  For a while we talked about the weather, which was unseasonably warm. Nora had rolled her jeans once at the hem, where they rested on the creased cowboy boots she’d worn in court. I stared at a hedge in front of me, noticed that its leaves were the size and shape of almonds. We set off for a bar. Walking beside her, I saw that she wasn’t as tall as I’d thought. I realized I’d never done this before: I’d never walked beside her. It felt different from walking beside anyone else. I was walking beside Nora. I was walking beside a woman who was gay, and who looked gay, and I was not walking beside this woman because she was my friend. I was walking beside her because we wanted to put our tongues in each other’s mouths.

  I took her to a bar owned by a friend. I wanted to make it all seem ordinary. I needed this to be ordinary. I’d texted the friend ahead of time with a forcefully matter-of-fact heads-up, told her I’d figured out that I wasn’t straight, la la la, that Brandon and I had opened our relationship, that if she saw me at the bar, looking datey with a woman, that was why. Our friend must have told the bartender, who was an acquaintance. When he saw me with Nora, he smiled and introduced himself to her, and then he bought us a round. He unfurled a semblance of normalcy over us, light as a blanket on sand.

  We ate tacos on the same side of the banquette. I put my feet up on a chair, and so did she. By unspoken agreement, we did not allow them to touch. We could have gone up in flames.

  Are you sure your husband is okay with this? she said. How does he feel about it?

  I reassured her. I said he’d gone out one night this week and had let himself flirt a bit. I didn’t want to talk about him.

  The street was empty as we walked to my car. We stopped on the sidewalk beside a brick house with expensively pruned hedges. Somethin
g wobbled in my stomach, went zinging up between my ears. Can I kiss you? I asked, and then I did.

  Her mouth was open just enough. My lips found her upper lip just right of center, and I kissed the ridge where it met the skin above. Her tongue moved gently, a polite suggestion. I felt her mouth close around my lower lip, and I drove myself against her, linked my hands at the small of her back. Her breasts pressed against my chest. They were bigger than mine, pliant the way a waterbed is, and they made a peculiar spacer between us. I’d never collided this way with familiar and foreign, like-me and not-me. I’d never been this close to another woman, not since I was an infant with my mother. Nora and I were not the same person, but she knew what it felt like to have breasts, to have a vagina, to live in a body like this, to move it through the world, to move it against another body. This was a new intimacy: the pleasure of sameness. Her thigh slid between my legs and offered itself to me. I pressed my pelvis against the firm pad of her muscle and gave her my own thigh in return. We fit, because she was made like me. She whispered into my mouth and I pulled in her words like air.

  I still have my calendar from 2016. In the square for that Saturday, the day of my first date with Nora, I wrote only a reminder to follow up on a freelance check I was waiting for and, at the bottom, the word Nora. Where was June while I was out? I have no record of it.

  For our second date, Nora suggested a karaoke bar with private rooms. This was bold, and I liked it. Walking from my car, I caught her silhouette against a streetlamp at the end of the block, her hands shoved in the hip pockets of her jeans. She looked like a man, like a woman who looks like a man. She held her back straight, her stance wide. Her shoulders were square above the sloping dunes of her chest. I liked the contradictions of her body. A thought came like an elbow to the ribs, or a wink: She’s waiting for you, kid. I wanted to run to her.

  She’d reserved a room for us, closet-size and dim, at the end of a corridor. We sat down on a leather bench along one wall, close enough that our legs touched. I couldn’t believe I was with her. Would I ever get used to this? Did I want to? I slid my arm along the bench behind her, and we pulled at our beers and queued up songs before we could chicken out: “9 to 5,” “Edge of Seventeen,” and “You Belong with Me”—a duet, so on-the-nose it smarted. I couldn’t look at her when we sang. When would we kiss? The knowledge that we would, of course we would, rose steadily along my spine like an airplane gaining altitude. I climbed onto her lap and took her face in my hands. When I touched her, her skin was smooth, a woman’s.

  Can we go to your house? I said.

  I don’t know, she said shyly.

  Why not? I bit her lip. I thought she was teasing.

  I don’t think we should sleep together yet, she said.

  I ran my hand over her hair, as spiny as cut grass, and bit her again.

  No, really, she said. I don’t want to be the first pancake. You know how people always throw out the first pancake?

  I laughed. I never do that! I said. I love the first pancake. Then I leaned in closer and said: I wouldn’t do that to you.

  She led the way to her house. There was a sectional in the front room, and we climbed onto it. I felt beneath her shoulder blades for the band of her bra. It was a sports bra, racer-back, tight as a bandage. She smelled like Dove soap and, up close, Old Spice deodorant. I wanted her skin on my skin. I peeled off my shirt, tugged at the hem of hers. She took my hand and squeezed it, then pressed it away.

  Not yet, she said.

  Hadn’t we both dreamed of this moment for months? Why would she want to stop? But to question her seemed pushy, insensitive. She was right to take it slow. We should be careful not to hurt each other.

  We stretched out on our sides, and she wriggled her hand into the back pocket of my jeans. We stared at each other, grinning.

  You don’t have your ears pierced, she said. She had two empty holes in each ear.

  No, I never wanted it, I said. It never felt like me.

  That’s amazing, she said, that you’ve always known yourself so well. She squeezed my ass.

  I smiled, pleased, and didn’t correct her.

  So you’re dating a woman, a friend said to me over lunch. Can I ask you something? I don’t know how to phrase this, but I think it’s interesting that you’re dating a woman who looks so—masculine.

  You can phrase it like that, I said. I think I like the juxtaposition of it, you know? The presence of both.

  I was learning what I wanted, and I applied myself to it like a student. Nora and I had the same chromosomes and the same parts. But we had different relationships to our gender. She queered the notion of woman, keeping her hair in a conservative businessman’s cut and standing with her legs set wide as a bouncer. She wore suits to court and, to see me, tucked-in oxfords with a modest two buttons undone. She had breasts, but she kept them pressed tight to her chest. She walked the line between man and woman, smudged it under her foot.

  I’d grown up watching “It’s Pat” on Saturday Night Live, a series of sketches about an androgynous, socially awkward character played by Julia Sweeney. SNL’s “Pat” sketches were a runaway success; they recurred from 1990 to 1994 and were even made into a movie. Pat was thick and short, with a lumpy torso under a blue Western shirt and tan belted pants. Pat was oblivious to the confused tittering that erupted when they walked into a room. The other characters in the sketch were always trying (and failing) to determine Pat’s gender, and if Pat mentioned dating, others reacted with revulsion. We kids thought this was hilarious, and we liked to do Pat imitations at recess. Androgyny: none of us knew the word, but we understood it as a pitiable mistake, a glitch in the system. We understood that there was a real thing—a real woman, a real man—that Pat was failing to be.

  What I had understood of woman stood in contrast to what I understood of man. They gestured at each other across a divide, defined themselves in contrast, made themselves solid. There were two natural and essential sexes: a woman and a man. Binary sexes appear so real, so normal, as to seem inevitable. I remember reading Judith Butler in graduate school and sort of getting it, but also not getting it at all: “Gender appears to the popular imagination as a substantial core . . . the spiritual or psychological correlate of biological sex,” she wrote. “Performing one’s gender wrong”—like SNL’s Pat—“initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all.”20

  I had scoffed at the scripts of womanhood that my childhood in Oklahoma City had offered me, but I’d believed all the same that there were right ways to do it, right and wrong ways to be a woman. My mother was a right way. I had always wanted to be good. I had stood by my husband, even as he made choices that I didn’t want. I’d raged, but I had recommitted again and again. I’d panted to do it all right. Can I be someone who can live with this? I’d contorted like an acrobat.

  When I saw Nora in the courtroom, I knew only that she was a woman in a suit. But I think she looked like something more than that, something I didn’t have: the will to stand apart, to crumple up the script. She seemed to define herself against no one, yet she was as real as anyone else. She was both and neither, somewhere in between, someone else entirely. She was her own invention, and I wanted her. There was no mistake or glitch about Nora. The friction between her body and the strictures of the world—that friction didn’t read as failure. Instead, it gave off heat.

  We had sex for the first time in her bed, early one afternoon. We’d been dating for three weeks. I drove to her house with Beyoncé’s Lemonade on the stereo, turned up until the dash vibrated. I knew what we were going to do.

  I was nervous when I walked in the door. I didn’t want to be shy with her, but I couldn’t shake it. She must have felt it, too. We lumbered through a greeting, small-talked.

  It was daylight, and her sheets were patterned in beige and white. There are no men here, I remember thinking. We could be anything.
When she lifted her T-shirt over her head, there were three freckles along the ridge of her collarbone, dark as ink and evenly spaced. Orion’s Belt. We would find our way.

  I’d set an alarm on my phone so I wouldn’t be late to pick up June, after. I wondered if anyone at school would notice that I was different. Was I different? Was I the same person I’d been all along, before that afternoon, before that spring, before jury duty?

  June and I stopped for eggs at the grocery store. She wanted cherries too, and I let her pick out a bag of them. At home we made dinner, put unicorn Band-Aids on each other for fun, waited for Brandon. He didn’t have to work that night, so he’d be home to eat with us. What did I tell him about Nora? He knew where I’d been that afternoon, but I don’t remember the conversation. What I remember is how proud I was of us, him and me, for pulling it off.

  June helped set the table, as she was learning how to do. Brandon made a salad. I warmed beans and boiled seven-minute eggs, rinsed the cherries and piled them in a bowl. We sat together around our table with its stack of bills at one end and mail-in ballots for the 2016 primaries. June spat cherry pits onto her plate, gleeful, her face and hands splotched with hot-pink juice.

  13

  I have a photo of us, June and me, taken that week. We’re at the dining counter in Delancey, and June sits on my lap in a blue dress, her body perpendicular to mine. I think Brandon took the picture: he would have been working the pizza oven that night. I’ve got a fork in one hand and a plate of asparagus in front of me, and my other arm wraps around June’s narrow back. It must be close to bedtime. Her eyes are a little glazed, focused somewhere below the camera, and she sucks her thumb, holding a hank of her hair in the same hand. She’s done that since she was an infant. You can’t see my face because I’m looking down, and my bangs have fallen in the way, my chin tucked against her forehead. You can see that I am her mother.