The Fixed Stars Read online

  We had flashes of understanding, moments of seeing our patterns and bad habits. I instated a rule: the words crazy and irrational were never to be used in our house. I could see him sometimes fighting to keep them off his lips. The life we’d built seemed to depend, at least in part, on positions we’d assumed long before, and it seemed impossible, and often inadvisable, to break them.

  In early 2011, the New York Times Book Review published a rant called “The Problem with Memoirs.”4 I was in the thick of writing Delancey, a memoir. The article could be summed up by its snide illustration: the word Memoir typed in bold black lettering, marked up by an unseen editor’s red pen so that the last four letters were deleted and a period fell after the e. The first sentence of the piece was, “A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.” I shouldn’t have read the rest, but I did, and to demonstrate how unfazed—indeed, how inspired, how totally nondefensive—I was, I printed it out and pinned it to the wall of my office.

  There was one line that I highlighted, and I remember it verbatim: “If you still must write a memoir, consider making yourself the least important character in it.” I could do that, and I would. I did. I made Brandon the hero of the story and myself the small, miserly villain. If it’s bad form to be the center of my story, then I should be cast out. I must be punished, and I will do it myself.

  We were not a natural team. We were solo artists: he a chef trained as a composer, and me a writer. But we both loved to make things with our brains and our hands, and we learned how to make things together. We got pretty good at it. We made Delancey, and then we decided to have a baby. We bought a house. I wrote books. We created out of ourselves, him and me, things that will outlive us.

  We wanted to be kind. We each wanted the other to be happy. We were good at encouraging each other, whether or not we really wanted the outcome in question. I’d vowed to support his dreams, and I never thought it would be simple. His dreams seemed to require so much money, so much risk, such leaps of prophet-like faith, that they excited in me not anticipation but panic, left me grabbing at walls and furniture as though Admiral Boom were about to fire the hourly cannon.

  The guy who cuts my hair keeps a note on his mirror: “Those who do too much somewhere do too little elsewhere.” I don’t know if Brandon does too much, per se. It’s not too much for him. But it was frequently too much for me. He’s zooming into some grand future, pinballing from idea to idea and plan to plan. Meanwhile, I’m quietly reveling in making an excellent pot of soup, getting high on the ecstasy of clean sheets. This made us a good match, I thought: his strength fit my weakness, and his weakness fit my strength. We were good at good intentions.

  Now we lay on our bed that July night, the summer of jury duty, and I told him about Nora. He listened, and he was kind, and we cried. I saw that it had been a long time since we’d been a we this way.

  I had not brought him this information as an offering, the way a cat comes in with a dead bird, a tribute in blood. I did not tell him because I hoped to stoke the home fires. I saw in myself the power to burn us down, and I hoped he could stop me, pull me out.

  The danger of extramarital relationships, I once read, is that we take them too seriously. I had expected him to be furious. I expected disbelief. Instead he held fast. He accepted what I brought. It’s normal to burn sometimes, he said, and he was right. He could soothe me if I let him, and this would pass. I had the power to raze us and the power to choose not to.

  The Romantic idea of love—that a person exists who can meet our every need and want—has made much of what we experience in marriage seem horrific and wrong. Philosopher Alain de Botton wrote a much-clicked article about this for the New York Times, explaining that most of us “end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not ‘normal.’”5 Brandon and I had fought plenty over what things we would, and should, consider normal in our marriage. But that July night he didn’t fight. He stayed with me, asked me to stay too. I didn’t understand what had happened to me in the courtroom, and he didn’t either. But he wanted to understand, and I wanted to be understood. Here was something we both wanted. Our secret kept us warm.

  In the dark, I pressed the length of my body to his. I had missed him, and here he was.

  3

  It was a habit now, looking for her. I looked for her on street corners, in the driver’s seats of cars as I pulled up alongside. I searched online, cleared my browser history every day, each time swearing I was done. I was a story I’d already heard, tiring even to myself. I could make this go away. Like the welt of a mosquito bite, this itch could only get worse with scratching.

  Anyway, the internet gave me little: Nora kept a low profile. I knew almost nothing about her. The more I thought about her, the more stupid I felt. Wanting her contradicted everything about my life, everything and everyone to whom I’d bound myself, and I didn’t even know her. She was my invention, a pencil sketch from a fever dream that I now pored over for hours, days, weeks. I colored her in with fantasies and fabrications. I made her up.

  That fall I enrolled in a fiction-writing class. The first assignment was to read a xeroxed short story whose plot unfolded around a dinner table. To warm up when we arrived for class, the instructor asked us to write for ten minutes about a fantasy meal.

  I knew immediately where I would go. I went to Nora’s house. I found her in a worn wool sweater at the kitchen table, peeling an apple with a paring knife. The fruit’s skin curled onto the table in a single spooling coil.

  I’m making pancakes, she said. Thought I might cook some apples in butter.

  When I sat down across from her, our knees knocked softly like gloved knuckles. That was as far as I got before time was up. I didn’t volunteer to read aloud. My hands had started to sweat.

  I don’t even like fruit with my pancakes, I thought. A relief.

  The instructor gave us a handout on character development. Your characters will have competing desires, she said. That’s where stories come from. What your character wants, her internal desires, will conflict with her external reality.

  Interview your character, she said, and I wrote it on the back of the handout. Ask her what she wants.

  To forget about her. That was what I wanted.

  We learn in elementary school that a star’s gravity keeps its planets in orbit. But planets too have gravity, and as they orbit their star, they tug it back and forth, making the star wobble gently. Our Earth does this to the sun, though weakly; Jupiter, which is bulkier, gives the sun a pretty good yank. The wobbling of stars is, in fact, what allows astronomers to discover and locate planets outside our solar system, planets that orbit other stars. As faraway planets tug their stars to and fro, the light from those stars changes color. As a star moves closer to us, the light waves it emits compress and look bluer; as a star swings away, its light waves stretch, looking redder. A shift in the light of a star points to the presence of an orbiting planet.6

  Nora exerted this type of gravity, a disorienting pull. I wobbled. But I didn’t want to; I wanted to stop. I knew where I was supposed to be, my location inside the constellation of my family. I had to quit thinking about her.

  There’s a trick for this in meditation: when you catch your mind drifting into thoughts rather than resting in the present, you silently say, “Thinking.” Gentle. Easy. No judgment. You recommit to the present.

  If I quit thinking about her, my internal desires would align with my external reality. If I quit thinking about her, everything would be like it was before.

  My mother moved from Oklahoma City to Seattle that summer, into a house a block from ours. Brandon and I helped her find it, and we couldn’t believe our luck, having her so close by. June started preschool that September.

  At the class orientation there were two lesbian families. The teacher waved us toward a brown rug at one end of the classroom and asked us to sit. Brandon was home with June, so I was alone, and I took a spot close to one pair of women. I
hoped they wouldn’t notice the way I planted myself among them. In the child-size space we lowered ourselves to the floor awkwardly, like foals do, the rug too small and our legs too long.

  This couple appealed to me. One of the women had floppy light-brown hair that fell across her eyes, tanned skin, glasses, and a gap between her front teeth. She gave a small wave when she said her name, and her fingers were long and slender. Her wife had dark eyes and wavy black hair cut short, tapering along the tendons at the nape of her neck. They wore loose, boxy jeans that frayed at the pockets, what clothing companies like to call “boyfriend jeans.” There was evidently no boyfriend.

  Brandon and I called them my crushes. He had a crush too, felt a fun little twinge when he saw a particular mom from the classroom across the hall. We joked about it, teased each other. I was euphoric, caffeine-jittery, when I ran into the lesbians at pickup or drop-off. I wanted them to take me in like a stray.

  My mother once commented that the black-haired one looked a bit like a boy. I nodded my agreement. I thought, That’s what I like about her, though I didn’t say it out loud.

  Not looking for Nora was not working. I noticed girls with short hair and delicate, angular faces, girls whose bodies could pin me down. I noticed butch women, women with graying buzz cuts, women who looked like mechanics, who might sling me over a shoulder. I saw every lesbian and queer couple everywhere. I envied what I imagined they had, their dynamic, their sex.

  Was I a lesbian, then? Was that it? Had I been this way all along, and I didn’t know it?

  Writer Minnie Bruce Pratt was married to a man and had two small sons when she first fell in love with a woman. “Everyone was shocked at the turn I was taking in my life, including me,” she writes. “Everyone . . . wanted to know: Had I ever had these feelings before? . . . When had I started to ‘change’? . . . I didn’t feel ‘different,’ but was I? (From whom?) Had I changed? (From what?)”7

  The way I looked at Nora, I’d also looked at Brandon. I remembered it. Was I bisexual? Was that the word for me? Queer? My birthday came in mid-September, and I turned thirty-seven. Had this always been in me, like the eggs in my ovaries?

  There’s a scene in Fun Home where Alison Bechdel, then a four- or five-year-old girl, sees a butch dyke walk into a diner wearing dungarees, boots, and a set of keys on her belt loop. It’s a powerful moment, young Bechdel seeing a glimpse of who she is and who she wants to be: “Like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home—someone they’ve never spoken to, but know by sight—I recognized her with a surge of joy.”8

  I had to have had a moment like this, surely: a flicker of the person I was now becoming. If the evidence was there, I would find it.

  4

  Early in our dating, Brandon and I sat looking at old photo albums, and a shot of me in college made him laugh out loud.

  You looked like a lesbian, he said.

  Shit, did I? My hair was now down to my shoulders, but seven years before, when I was nineteen, I’d torn out a magazine photo of a supermodel with a pixie cut and taken it to my hairdresser. There in his strip-mall salon in Oklahoma City, the guy gave it a go. I wore my hair short through college, slicked with pearly goop and mussed into soft spikes. For a while, I dyed swaths of it black or bleach-blond, which made a calico effect with my natural shade of red. I thought this was very punk. Instead, apparently, it looked gay.

  The first gay person I knew was my uncle Jerry, the second-oldest of my mother’s six siblings. Jerry lived with his partner, Tom, in Santa Rosa, California, in a sunlit single-story house on a property they called Know Creek Ranch. The house was set back from the road by a stand of trees, and at the end of its long gravel driveway sat a barn where Jerry bred Morgan horses and ran a mail-order business selling equine supplies. My mother told me that once, when one of Jerry’s horses bit him, he turned around, looked it in the eye, and bit it back. He was soft-spoken and fair, but when my cousins or I would start to whine, he could stop us with a single word. To want his validation was instinctive, obvious.

  Jerry had once been married to a woman, and they’d married young. He and his wife lived in Vermont, where she grew up, and had a young son, my cousin Jason. Jason once told me that his mother knew there was something secret in her husband’s life, but she was naive enough to not suspect what it was. She was a small-town girl. Jerry was worldly in comparison, having lived in both Vermont and his home state of Maryland. She was blindsided; he was less incredulous. He’d known since his early teens, but he’d hidden it. He figured that if he married a woman, and if he had enough sex with her, he’d grow out of it.

  I was born in 1978, four years after Jerry came out. By then he was divorced, and he’d fallen in love with Tom, and they’d moved to California, leaving Jason behind in Vermont. I only ever knew Jerry as one half of Jerry-and-Tom, as a compact man with a runner’s build; wavy, rust-colored hair; and a Magnum, P.I. mustache. In an album of photographs from Christmas 1979, Tom sits between my grandfather and my uncle Chris, his arms spread wide over the back of the sofa, smiling. In another photo, this one with wrapping paper and coffee mugs in the foreground, I sit on the same sofa, a year old, with my mother in a flannel nightgown on my right and Jerry on my left, my shoulder tucked under his arm. Tom is beside him, chest hair blooming from the open V of his bathrobe.

  My parents liked to joke that I was their reward for surviving the adolescence of my half brother. He was the youngest child of my father’s first marriage and older than me by fifteen years. By the time I learned to walk, he’d driven a car into a drainage ditch and had been kicked out of high school for an unrelated offense. I came out of the womb eager to please. I got good grades, liked to read and write book reports for fun. I learned to believe that boys are mean when they like you, learned to watch what I ate. I was not discouraged from rocking the boat, but I also was not inclined to rock it more than gently.

  When I did act up, my mother’s stock warning was mild and even-keeled, and it terrified me: There will be consequences, she said. That was enough, and I would right the ship. I don’t remember a time when I got far enough to test her warning; the articulation of it was plenty. Once, at the age of twelve, while playing mini-golf on a vacation somewhere in Colorado, I impishly kicked a family friend’s ball off its tee. The adults whooped and applauded because I’d acted my age.

  The women of my childhood came in two varieties: doctors’ wives and fitness instructors. The doctors’ wives wore silk designer blouses and a quantity of makeup that never exceeded “tasteful.” The fitness instructors were not their opposite, but close. They were early adopters of Spandex and tanning beds, glowing under halos of body-waved hair.

  My mother was both. She code-switched like it was her job, and it was. In aerobics class, she wore a thick brown ponytail that bounced from shoulder to shoulder and an elastic belt that matched her leg warmers. Back home, fresh from a shower, she draped loops of chunky gold Chanel chains around her neck. She’d French-braid her hair while it was still wet, weaving a sleek braid down the back of her head that she’d tuck under itself and secure with bobby pins at her nape. She got her nails done every week, rounded talons coated in red polish, and her lipstick gleamed like fire engines do. She commanded her womanness, shaped it like an arrowhead, sharpened it to a point. She was not just a woman, but woman-plus. On a good day, she could have been in a Robert Palmer video. On an average day, she was beautiful, my radiantly eighties upper-middle-class mom.

  She stood out in the Bible Belt. My parents were from the East Coast, and they’d met in Baltimore, her hometown. When my father took a job in Oklahoma City in the mid-seventies, they didn’t intend the move to be permanent. My mother says she was depressed for the first two years. But they stayed. Eventually they bought a house in Nichols Hills, the ritziest part of town, and sent me to the private prep school nearby. They scoffed at the flat horizon of Oklahoma City, but they also learned how to live with it, how to make the most of it.

  O
klahoma is known best for being, in the nineteenth century, the place where the US government put Native Americans it had cruelly expelled from other parts of the country. It is also known for its bizarro Land Rush of 1889, when white settlers raced to grab up parcels of Native land; for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical of the same (exclamation-pointed) name; and perhaps less so, for having an oil well on the lawn of the state capitol. In the 1980s, if you told someone from somewhere else that you lived in Oklahoma, they’d ask if you rode a cow to school, and this would seem hilarious to everyone but you. But Oklahoma was also a place of new and flashy wealth, and this was especially true in Nichols Hills, a manicured enclave of oil and gas money and gated mansions that people casually called “houses.” My father was a radiation oncologist in private practice, and I had a childhood of privilege. My mother stayed home until I was twelve, then made her aerobics habit a job. She became a certified personal fitness trainer. My parents clung to vestiges of their old coastal life: progressive politics and a subscription to the Sunday New York Times. We didn’t go to church on Sundays. My father instead spent weekend mornings combing estate sales for silver saltcellars, etched crystal glasses, and glazed ceramics from England and France with lobsters and serpents on the lid. He’d hit up the Chinese supermarket, bring home a haul of slender eggplants and crisp-skinned lacquered duck. My parents bought plane tickets and got me out, took me to see other cities and countries.