The Fixed Stars Read online

  We don’t always look at each other when we talk, as though our words were for the room and not the other. We’ve learned to be kind rather than exacting. Sometimes I think he might hate me. On better days, I’m glad for the plasticity of his heart. Our marriage transcended us, and it lives on in this weird, complicated family we make.

  I’m reaching now, but I try it: “Divorce is hard, but divorce is also transcendent.” If marriage defines a certain set of limitations, is there something transcendent about its end? Is there something out here I couldn’t have imagined, past the breach in the perimeter? Out where we are now, beyond the old checkpoints, in the space at the margin?

  I am optimistic. But there is freedom too in a degree of pessimism. Brandon and I will do things differently, like we always have. We will disagree in ways that drive each other batshit—and not funny-batshit, just regular. I used to want him to change; I always expected him to change. He might never, but I might not either. I teeter sometimes on the edge of disliking him, let myself sway there a while. It passes, because now I can get up and leave. I can’t fix or control everything, but I can also stop trying to. There’s freedom in giving up some hope.

  I can commit to being a “good-enough” co-parent. I don’t know what Winnicott would say, but I like it. I can commit to trying to weather the hiccups and disappointments. Aiming to be good-enough might actually give us a shot at being decent. I can try to loosen my grip on all of us—not just on Brandon, but on Ash and June. Let each of us slip into our places, be what we are. Not because I’m so generous, but because I want them to do the same for me.

  Brandon, Ash, and I have gone to family counseling, to keep working at it. Ash and I work at it too. There are days when I wish I could have a brand-new life with Ash, shiny and unblemished—our own family, uninformed by exes and the gymnastics of co-parenting. I don’t like that Ash is haunted by my ghosts. It wasn’t what they imagined for themself. But this wasn’t what I imagined for myself either.

  I am starting to believe that the particular queerness of our family suits us. Brandon and I have gone from being two people in love—one version of “family”—to two divorced people with a child in common. This is family too: people bound together by history, even if they don’t always like each other a lot. How bleak, and how great.

  34

  In the opening pages of Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg draws up a list of five ways by which we humans know what we know about the world around us. The first is clear enough: we are taught. Then there’s a subtler kind of teaching: what others say, if we hear it enough, will come to sound like truth. Emotion also educates us; feelings tell us about our surroundings and ourselves. And we learn by doing, in the gauntlet of experience. But one of his categories always catches me up. It is difficult to intuit, because it runs directly against intuition: “What you don’t know,” he writes, “and why you don’t know it, are information too.”61

  In grad school for anthropology, I got very into Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. I thought it was so sexy, how he shot clean like an arrow through concepts that I, in lessons overt and subtle, had learned as truth. Our understandings of bodies, of sexuality, of sex, writes Foucault, are shaped through the ways we talk (or don’t talk) about them. Such concepts are not solid at all, but fluid, like clay slip in a plaster mold.

  Like most of us—I venture to guess—who are into Foucault in grad school, I read his theories as an invitation to interrogate the world around me, but not so much myself. Principles are sexy when you can use them against someone or something; applied to oneself, the effect is less appetizing. I’m the same pliant substance as everyone else.

  But this is a slipperiness I find I want to study now, and study gently: observe it as it moves, start to put language to it. There’s relief here, in admitting how little I know about myself. I want to believe that there’s value in even the attempt to understand. An answer is, in a sense, the result of repeated attempts to seek it, even when those attempts are mistaken; astronomers and mathematicians call this a theory of errors. Determining the position of a moving object like a star or a comet takes repeated observations over time, and each observation will yield slightly different results. Multiple observations tend to conform to a bell-shaped curve, distributing themselves more or less symmetrically around a mean: the likeliest position of the star in question.62 To ignore my inconsistencies, my pliancy, my “errors,” would be a mistake, because at their center is me.

  Poking around online, I find a paper by Daniel Dennett, a philosopher, called “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity.” That puzzling thing, the self, Dennett posits, is analogous to the center of gravity of an object. A center of gravity is an accepted concept in Newtonian physics, but it is not an atom or other physical item in the world. It has no mass or color or physical properties, except for its location in time and space. It is a purely abstract object, Dennett explains, a “theorist’s fiction.” So too is the self.

  When we read fiction, Dennett says, contradictions don’t feel like a big deal.63 We’re used to this in stories; we’ve gotten good at suspending disbelief. It’s just a fictional character. We find contradictory properties less tolerable, however, when we are trying to interpret real people and things. But contradictory properties are quite normal, something we can all locate in ourselves. Walt Whitman famously exalted in his multitudes.

  In the fiction of the self, the self is both author and character. We are constantly writing the novel of ourselves, inventing more and more of it on demand, in response to what the world asks of us. In this way, parts of us that are not exactly known or defined at one time become better defined as we go on creating. We can’t undo anything, but we can clarify and interpret. “The past and present wilt,” Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself.” “I have fill’d them, emptied them. / And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.”

  I’d wanted so much to have a story that behaved, but instead I have a self.

  35

  It’s easier to say what I am not than what I am. I’m not straight. I’m in-between. In a certain sense, maybe I’m not so different from Ash. I find desire where gender crimps to reveal the person underneath it, because that’s where I myself want to be found. I’m in-between other identities too: a mother, but only half-time, and a divorced woman who co-parents with her ex.

  It doesn’t surprise me anymore that Diamond found, among her sample of non-heterosexual women, that “unlabeled” was the sexual identity most frequently used. These women explained that they were increasingly skeptical of the rigid nature of any sexual categorization. Feeling “unlabelable” isn’t new, or unusual.

  “Fluidity conveys the capacity of women’s sexuality to fill an available space the way a body of water takes the form of its immediate boundaries,” writes Diamond. “Sometimes the available space is created by a particular environment, opportunity, or relationship, but sometimes it is created by the process of self-reflection. Either way, when the attractions develop, they may be experienced as an expansion and a blossoming rather than as a discovery of something that was always there but just repressed.”64

  In the checkout line at the grocery store I find myself behind a man and a woman with matching tattoos, till death do us part, on their forearms. I watched them ring up their ground beef, Pepsi, and corn on the cob, wondering, How do they do it—commit so deeply that they put it in their skin? I want to know how. I want to love differently this go-round—to not throw anybody, not even myself, away.

  What I want for my queer family is conventional. I want a partner who is home with me for dinner, who is an equal teammate in domesticity and parenting, who goes to bed at the same time I do. From the outside we may not look it, but we are the ordinary partnership I want. As gay artist and writer Joe Brainard said: “If I’m as normal as I think I am, we’re all a bunch of weirdos.”

  I don’t know that it’s what the rebels at Stonewall were going for. An early post-Stonewall gay
-rights organization called the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) had a more radical, revolutionary agenda, which they envisioned enacting through the common efforts of a variety of oppressed groups. The GLF, writes historian Martin Duberman, was “overtly anti-religious, anti-nuclear family, anti-capitalist, and antiwar,” as well as anti-racist and anti-patriarchal.65 But instead of upending these institutions, the broader LGBTQ+ movement has wound up trying to gain access to them. The movement has fought for marriage and military service because a majority of gay Americans have wanted it to do so.

  Public attitudes toward LGBTQ+ people, in the United States at least, appear to have shifted dramatically in the half-century since Stonewall, but the gains are not secure. As of this writing, Ash and I have the right to get married, but a baker in Colorado has the right to refuse to make us a wedding cake. Black transwomen face violence of epidemic proportions. According to the Trevor Project, LGBTQ+ youth contemplate suicide at almost three times the rate of heterosexual youth.66 Even in Seattle, our progressive West Coast home, my security as a non-straight person rests on my whiteness, my being cisgender, and on the fact that I am not poor.

  36

  In the last years of her life, Ursula K. Le Guin published an essay in which she contemplated the formation of social institutions and their relationship to the sexes. Male solidarity, she wrote, has been the shaper of government, army, priesthood, and the thing we call the corporation. But as for female solidarity, she notes, “without it human society, I think, would not exist. Female solidarity might better be called fluidity—a stream or river rather than a structure. . . . Instead of rising from the rigorous control of aggression in the pursuit of power, the energy of female solidarity comes from the wish and need for mutual aid and, often, the search for freedom from oppression. Elusiveness is the essence of fluidity.”67

  I wonder about this elusiveness in relation to my non-binary partner, who was assigned female at birth, raised as a girl, and identifies more with women than with men, but is both and neither. Ash’s power comes from someplace else.

  Androgyny is not gender’s absence; it’s the negotiation made visible. The word trans is convenient shorthand for anyone living as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, but a person may not be “transitioning”—may not be, as the artist Harry Dodge puts it, on their way anywhere.68 This is where Ash lives—as sturdy a shelter as any, though frequently pummeled by the elements.

  Ash spends more time grooming than I do, and early on it puzzled me. Ash tweezes, blow-dries, gels. It makes sense, because they’re more meticulous than I am. They like to look neater than I do. But I think there’s also this: as a cisgender woman, I have more wiggle room than Ash does in how we “put on” our genders. Even with the standards that Western culture imposes on cis women, there is more forgiveness for me. Ash has got to stick the landing.

  A trans friend says that the period of his transition—between living as a woman and “passing” as a man—was almost too difficult to withstand. When you don’t look the way we expect a man to look or the way we expect a woman to look, your gender becomes glaring. It was like I was on display, he said; people always asked me to explain. When he started to pass, to blend in among other men, he got his privacy back. The soft marrow of his gender was once again hidden away, like we keep the parts between our legs.

  Every few months, I check in with Ash about their pronouns. Does it still feel right when I say they/them? It was awkward at first, to raise this conversation; I was afraid of pushing on a sensitive spot. But Ash says they like it when I ask, that it feels like care. It makes us feel close. Now years out from top surgery, Ash’s body looks so right on Ash, so beautiful and so handsome; it’s hard to think of them having ever looked any other way.

  All of us, Ash included, have messed up Ash’s pronouns. June is usually the one to correct us. I’m grateful to Ash for their grace, for allowing us to falter and figure it out. When I fuck up Ash’s pronouns, or anyone else’s, I’ve learned not to make a big deal of it, to just fix it and move on. We each hold up the mirror for the other.

  “Why would you be critical of an actual loving human phenomenon, one who lived in the world, always, on her own terms?” wrote Hilton Als of the late Stormé DeLarverie, a butch performer in 1960s and ’70s Harlem. “Back in the day, Stormé was the sexiest man I ever met, and what is sex appeal but another quality you can’t name, and shouldn’t name, especially if you don’t want to be fixed by sexual or racial categories? Stormé was herself, which is to say a male self who knew the deal: life will try to limit you if you give in and let it.”69

  Everybody loves that old saw from Heraclitus, that we never step in the same river twice. I prefer its elaboration, by historian of philosophy Daniel W. Graham: The meaning of the river flowing is not that things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice, but that some things stay the same only by changing.70

  The same could be said for stars. They’re distributed in space in three dimensions, all at different distances from Earth, all with their own independent motions. Their movement is intrinsic to their being; not a single one holds still. Because of this, the constellations we know today will someday be unrecognizable—it will take tens to hundreds of thousands of years, but still. The rate at which a constellation appears to change depends on its distance from us; the closer the stars, the faster they appear to move. Orion is very far away, which means it will still be discernable long after constellations made by closer stars have distorted beyond recognition.

  I watched an animation of this on the website for Popular Mechanics: the old hunter starts to nod his head until it tumbles between his shoulders, his bow bending and going wonky. There’s something comforting to me about this certainty, the undeniability of this change, however unnerving it is to see him go.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Jamison Stoltz, for his curiosity, his brilliant eye and ear, and his willingness to walk with me through each phase of this project, from reading source material to joining me in the muck of early drafts. Working with him was the kind of editorial experience that people say doesn’t exist anymore.

  To my agent, Michael Bourret, for his unwavering belief and support, now thirteen years and counting.

  For the gift of time, space, and quiet, Deborah Harkness and the Next Chapter, where much of this book was written. Deb, your generosity is staggering, a gorgeous thing. To Sarah Searle and Ben Sedlins, for the cabin at Quartzwood and a week of your care. To Jim Henkens, for a weekend at Lummi and crab in the fridge. And to Amy Wheeler of Hedgebrook, for connecting me with Deb.

  To Jean Hindle, for moving me. To Kate Wallich and Dance Church, for returning me to my body, again and again.

  To the Thursday Night Dinner Crew, a steadfast chosen family. To Brian Ferry, for always getting it. To friends who’ve taken walks with me, sent articles and stories, talked shop with me, and buoyed my spirits. To my students, whose guts and smarts teach me so much. To my therapist, Joe.

  To the teachers, babysitters, and family friends whose devotion to and love for June enabled me to write this book. Especially to the entire Burmeister-Steinman family; Heidi Rogers, Shawn Muller, and Julian Muller-Rogers; Deb Olson; Annie Noonan; and Allison Winzenried.

  For insight, tough and vital questions, and encouragement on the first full draft: Laurie Amster-Burton, Sam Schick, and Angela Garbes.

  This book would not exist—not in anything resembling this form, and probably not at all—without Matthew Amster-Burton. First reader, colleague and companion, midwife of words and chapters, my best friend.

  For trusting me and being a wonderful father, Brandon.

  For being a remarkable parent, grandmother, and human being, my mother, Toni. I’m lucky beyond language to be your daughter.

  To Alice, for turning me into the kind of person who thanks her dog in the acknowledgments.

  To Ash, for learning with me; for loving me and loving June; for creating space for this story; for show
ing me every day what partnership can be.

  And to June, for making me a mother, for making me brave.

  Notes

  1. Wisława Szymborska, Poems: New and Collected, 1957–1997 (New York: Harcourt, 1998), 111.

  2. Calvin Trillin, About Alice (New York: Random House, 2006), 6.

  3. Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (New York: Scribner, 1982), 26.

  4. Neil Genzlinger, “The Problem with Memoirs,” New York Times, January 28, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/books/review/Genzlinger-t.html.

  5. Alain de Botton, “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,” New York Times, May 28, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-will-marry-the-wrong-person.html.

  6. Paul M. Sutter, “The Power of the Wobble: Finding Exoplanets in the Shifting of Starlight,” Universe Today, November 20, 2018, https://www.universetoday.com/140581/the-power-of-the-wobble-finding-exoplanets-in-the-shifting-of-starlight.

  7. Minnie Bruce Pratt, S/HE (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2005), 11.

  8. Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (New York: Mariner Books, 2007), 118.

  9. Bill Kenkelen, “Losing Son to AIDS Causes Couple to Reach Out,” National Catholic Reporter (May 25, 1990).

  10. Rebecca Solnit, “A Short History of Silence,” The Mother of All Questions: Further Reports from the Feminist Revolutions (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 29.

  11. This was the statistic often cited at the time, though of course no poll will ever determine precisely what percentage of the human population is non-straight; countless factors encourage underreporting.

  12. It is worth noting that, at least through the early 2000s, studies of sexual orientation rarely mentioned bisexuality or other identities falling outside the categories of “gay” and “straight,” and individuals whose experiences didn’t fit into these binary categories were regularly excluded from such studies. Such identities were considered anomalies: cop-outs, confusions, or way stations between gay and straight. For further discussion of this, see Lisa Diamond’s Sexual Fluidity, as well as Movement Advancement Project (MAP)’s 2016 report “Invisible Majority: The Disparities Facing Bisexual People and How to Remedy Them.”