The Fixed Stars Page 6

  In French class, we learned that adjectives follow the noun they modify. Un sac bleu. A blue bag. Des gâteaux délicieux. Delicious cakes. The only exceptions to this rule are adjectives for beauty, age, goodness, or size, all of which precede their noun. There’s a mnemonic device for this, the acronym BAGS. Beauty, Age, Goodness, Size. This is how I learned to understand women, too: in terms of beauty, age, goodness, and size. A pretty woman, a young woman, a good woman, a slender woman.

  Lesbians were woman-minus. Lesbians were function over form, the Ford Taurus of women. They didn’t seem to care about things that motivated the girls and women I knew: about being liked, about approval, about men. They were motivated by something I couldn’t understand.

  The summer we were sixteen, my cousin Katie and I went to a pre-college program at what was then15 California College of Arts and Crafts. My mother flew to California with me, and she and her twin sister, Tina, got us settled in the dorms on the school’s small Oakland campus. Katie and I were there for three weeks, our first time living on our own like that, without parents. We stocked the fridge with fruited yogurts from Safeway, made peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, and walked down College Avenue to eat black bean soup at a vegetarian place near the Rockridge BART station. I was thrilled by all this freedom, but I didn’t feel like testing it. I liked being the kind of kid you could trust to not go off the deep end. We were disciplined, turned in our work on time, didn’t drink or smoke. Some afternoons between classes, we’d walk to the Starbucks a few doors down from Safeway and order Frappuccinos. Coming from Oklahoma City, this was the big time.

  Each day we had three-hour studio classes in drawing and painting. We drew from live models for the first time. I tried not to giggle or wince as I studied each day’s flaccid penis, whorl of pubic hair, or breasts in a variety of shapes. It was much more fun, Katie and I agreed, to draw the female models than the male ones. The male models were hard to look at, all angles or droop, and hairy. The women were softer, more familiar, more beautiful. Katie and I had grown up analyzing, appraising, and envying women’s bodies in movies and on the covers of magazines. To study them felt natural.

  That summer was the first time I saw a fat woman naked. Our instructor had hired models of all ages and sizes. A couple of the women had thick legs and round, rolling bellies, and I was stunned by how beautiful they were. I had thought they would be ugly. I’d grown up believing that the human body should be—and could be, with sufficient rigor—molded into thinness. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, the saying went. But these women’s bodies, fat and thin and in between, seemed to exist on their own terms—good the way a tree or a flower is good, molecules declaring their presence with the neutrality of fact.

  That summer I spent hours lying crosswise on my plastic-coated twin bed, bare feet on the wall, reading Michael Chabon’s first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I’d picked it up for its cover, the title written in loose jewel-toned cursive against a white backdrop, and for the author photo on the back flap, in which beautiful young Chabon appears in pensive black-and-white. His dark hair was gelled swoopily back, and his deep-set eyes were hawklike in their intensity, a sexy hawk. I didn’t really understand the book, but I loved it. Like me, I noticed, the narrator watched the world around him from a safe remove. But for one summer, the summer of the story, he somehow managed to get outside himself, to do dumb and impulsive and vitally important things. It was summer where I was too, and I could have done anything, but I didn’t know where to start.

  That summer I met my first lesbian. Catherine worked for a catering company that my parents sometimes hired for parties. They’d gotten to know the owner of the company, and because I was interested in food, she let me work for a few months in her catering kitchen, doing prep work. The kitchen was out Wilshire Boulevard, one of the main roads through Nichols Hills. But the kitchen was east of all the money, on the part of Wilshire where the mansions gave way to empty shopping strips, warehouses, and arid fields. By mid-June, it got so hot out there that the air above the road trembled like oil in a pan. The lanes were crisscrossed with tar, repairs where the concrete had cracked. When I got out of the car, the hum of cicadas was as loud as the thunderstorms had been in spring.

  Catherine was one of two full-time employees, along with a man named Jay. Catherine and Jay bantered like teen siblings. Jay was clever, dry, and quick, but Catherine was truly funny. She was sarcastic and kind. She had smokers’ teeth, sinewy arms, and wavy blackish-brown hair cut into a haphazard shag. Her voice sounded like she had a cold. She worked hard and made cooking look easy. She heaved a case of green beans onto the counter and showed me how to snap off their stems and tails. I took it very seriously, as though I could be scolded at any moment, and she laughed at me. It was a pain in her ass to have me in the kitchen, a newbie and a kid, but Catherine was patient. She knew I was clueless, and she seemed to like me anyway. Catherine and Jay held, among other things, a firm belief that the ice cream in a Klondike bar was better than the ice cream in any other frozen confection, and I still find myself repeating that assertion, though I’ve never formally tested it. They made sure there was always a stash in the walk-in freezer, a treat at the end of the day. I got paid seven dollars an hour and I got a Klondike bar.

  The fact that Catherine was gay didn’t come up much, but she didn’t hide it. She never mentioned a partner, and I knew she had no children. I didn’t think a lot about it, except to note that her being gay was one more part of her—like her imperfect teeth and her raunchy puns—that made her different from other adult women I knew. Catherine wasn’t like my mother or my mother’s friends, and she didn’t seem to care. I cared, a lot.

  It wasn’t that I thought my mother lived only for beauty, or for men, or for any prescribed checklist of womanly attributes. But I did think my mother was everything. To me she was an ideal woman: an independent person with her own wants and drives plus a devoted mother and wife, and she was beautiful. I could see that other women envied her self-possession, her sophistication, that braid-bun hairstyle she made look so easy. It was right that they should envy her. She contained the best possibilities, all possibilities, of womanhood. My mother was what life as a woman would, and should, look like.

  No one in high school asked me out, and I was afraid to do the asking. It didn’t seem valid if I did the work; to mean anything, it had to be the other way around. But I got the feeling that the clock was ticking, that there was an expiration date on my viability as a potential girlfriend. If I didn’t get kissed soon, and get my virginity out of the way, then I’d be too old. I liked to read “Dear Abby” and “Ann Landers,” and once I came upon a letter that filled me with dread. It was from an anguished thirty-four-year-old virgin. Holding the sheet of newspaper, I had the sense of peering into a crystal ball at my future self.

  All my best friends were guys, the best of them being Bobby. He drove a hunter-green convertible with camel-colored interior and wore seersucker suits in the spring. We spent Friday nights drinking chocolate malts from Braum’s Ice Cream and Dairy Store and walking the aisles of the Barnes & Noble one parking lot over. When we were eighteen, we drove to Dallas together, six hours round-trip, to buy fake IDs from a guy he’d heard about. I don’t think I ever used mine. One day that spring, about a month before graduation, we were hanging out in his bedroom when Bobby said he had a crush on me. I was taken aback. Bobby was my best friend, and the line between friendship and romantic attraction was fuzzy to me. I’d never crossed it before, but I wanted to try. I told him I liked him too, and sitting there at the end of his bed, discussing the idea of us like it was a theorem, we decided to give it a try.

  We were a stated item for three weeks, but he must have sensed that my heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t try to hold my hand, and I didn’t try to hold his either. Whenever we sat beside each other, alone or with our friends, the many inches of space between our bodies was impossible to miss. The air between us glowed, radiant with discomfort. I f
elt awful about it, but I didn’t know how to fix it. I asked if we could go back to being friends.

  One afternoon not long after graduation, one of our mutual friends came to my house to hang out. It was unusual that it was just this friend and me; normally, there were a lot of us. This guy was suave in the way of the stubbled seventeen-year-old poet. He had an acoustic guitar. I had a feeling that afternoon that we were going to kiss, and we did, in the front hall. I was so excited, so thoroughly adrenalized, that my jaw quivered and I bit down hard on his lip. We laughed and kissed again, and then he had to go. Dizzy, half-blind, I reached for the doorknob and missed it by nearly a foot.

  That fall I went off to Stanford. Everybody was supposed to fool around in college. I knew this in the abstract, the way you know the earth is round, but I didn’t fool around, because I didn’t want to. I wanted a boyfriend.

  The summer after my freshman year, I stayed on campus and worked in a corn genetics lab in the biology building. I mixed tubes of chemicals to isolate DNA from corn kernels, pipetted liquids into plastic tubes the size of pinky fingers, and whirled them in a centrifuge. The lab had a plot of land at one end of campus where we grew corn for our research and a few other vegetables for fun. We’d have cookouts there each Friday and invite other labs to join us. At one of the cookouts toward the end of summer, I looked up from my plate and accidentally made eye contact with a guy from the visiting lab. Then, because I could feel him watching, I started looking his way on purpose. I liked catching his eyes on me. He introduced himself: he was a grad student, twenty-six, seven years older than me. The next week we met at the table on the concrete balcony outside my lab and ate our sack lunches together. I was flying to Oklahoma for a visit before classes started again, but I promised to call when I got back.

  He was nice-looking, but I wouldn’t normally have noticed him. That was no reason not to date him, I reasoned. I’d never “dated” anyone—just that awkward thing with Bobby, and then that kiss with the acoustic-guitar poet—but I figured uncertainty was normal in the early stages of getting to know a guy. Anyway, we can’t always be with the most gorgeous person in the room, can we? I thought of adult couples I knew when I was growing up, friends of my mother’s and father’s. The men often seemed to be sort of mildewing into middle age, while their wives remained taut and youthful. Did those women want their husbands? At some point? Now? Maybe desire was more about personality than looks? I had no idea. But this grad student liked me, and he was kind, attentive, and intelligent. I liked feeling wanted by him.

  I emailed from Oklahoma, and the night I got back to campus, he took me to dinner. It was four days after my twentieth birthday. He kissed me, my second-ever kiss. After the next date, we went back to his apartment a few blocks from campus, and I lost my virginity in his twin bed. It hurt less than I’d heard it would—so little, actually, that I asked him: Are you in yet? Afterward, he got up to use the bathroom, and when he came back, his hands smelled like Lubriderm, like my grandmother.

  Going on dates, I’d ask myself: Can I be someone who can live with this? A ruggedly handsome ecology major who consistently arrives forty-five minutes late and whose sheets are scratchy with soil and dog hair? A blond fitness trainer I met outside a gym who spent our first date talking about his ex and the dreamy daylong bike rides they took together?

  I wanted to be fun and low-maintenance, flexible and light on my feet. I wanted to be sleek as a dolphin, able to glide through any situation. I wanted to give everyone a chance. How else would I know what love felt like, if I didn’t try?

  6

  The first time I ate rabbit was with Laura. The meat was shredded and served warm, sauced with olive oil and flecks of cilantro. She’d done the ordering. I’d never eaten rabbit, but I didn’t tell her. As I raised my fork to spear a piece, there was a funny beat of wings in my stomach. Next to me, Laura was already chewing, small-talking with the bartender, holding her wineglass by the stem, like someone who knew how to do things.

  I was twenty-one, on the cusp of twenty-two. It was the summer after my junior year of college, and I was living at my aunt Tina’s house, an hour or so north of Stanford. I worked at Whole Foods in Mill Valley, at the prepared-foods counter, making sandwiches to order and scooping deli salads. Adjacent to prepared foods was the bakery, where I had a crush on a surfer guy who worked behind the pastry case. He had a lean body and hair that fell into his eyes like a horse’s forelock. I dreamed about him once: he was in a swimming pool, and he burst through the surface of the water in slow motion, tossing his hair like Sebastian Bach in a Skid Row video.

  Across the aisle was the cheese department. Laura was its manager. Her hair was dirty-blond and boy-short, and when she rolled up the sleeves of her white T-shirt, she was River Phoenix in Stand by Me. Here was a lesbian. No one said it, but you knew it, the same way you knew she was the boss. Laura was a half-dozen years older than me, not a lot, but she seemed a half-dozen years older than that. She had a way of striding past the cheese case that terrified me. Tough but elegant, stern-faced as an eagle, she surveyed the territory.

  This was the same time period that I had my “lesbian” haircut, and it was probably because of that haircut that Laura invited me to a party. We weren’t friends, not that I had registered. We’d talked in passing, the way coworkers do, and I always felt afterward like I’d had a run-in with a celebrity: I was honored but incidental. Then one day by the olive bar, Laura turned to me and said, Some friends of mine are having a barbecue this weekend in Tennessee Valley. Wanna come?

  The house was off a street I’d driven dozens of times. When I was a kid visiting Tina with my parents, we’d have brunch around the corner at the Dipsea Cafe, drinking our orange juice as we looked over the bay to Tiburon. This time, I hung a left onto Tennessee Valley Road and turned into the driveway of a worn wood-frame house with an overgrown yard that swung toward the street. Inside the house was a small crowd of women in blue jeans and untucked T-shirts, with unmade-up faces that asserted themselves matter-of-factly. They held brown bottles of beer and leaned against the counters. I wondered if anyone there knew that I was not gay. I was at a lesbian barbecue.

  Laura’s friends welcomed me, and together we set a splintery picnic table in the yard. One of the women was a restaurant cook, and this was her house. They called her Sin, which I later learned was spelled Cyn. Someone told me that Laura was newly out of a long-term relationship. She and her ex had essentially been married, had even had a commitment ceremony on a cliff somewhere, but now Laura’s ex was seeing a man. Cyn grilled flank steak and served a corn salad from the latest issue of Martha Stewart Living. The salad was so good that I went out and bought the magazine after.

  Now it felt like Laura was my friend. We chatted at work. A couple of weeks later, she invited me out to dinner. She chose the restaurant, a new tapas place in Berkeley that I read about in the newspaper. I must have driven to meet Laura at her apartment and then she drove us to dinner, because I remember being in the passenger seat of somebody else’s car. The brand-new Sade album Lovers Rock spun in the CD player. I wondered if this was a date.

  It was still daylight when we got to the restaurant. Laura knew someone there, and they put us at the bar. We must have talked, had things to talk about. I pushed my shins against the patchwork tile in front of our chairs. My palm was sticky on the lip of the bar, and I pressed my sternum into my knuckles.

  I watched Laura as she talked to the bartender. Her voice was gentle but gravelly, like extra-fine sandpaper. She had a late-summer tan, and her eyes were opaque as a pot of brown shoe polish. She didn’t seem to care that she looked like a boy, like a lesbian. Her mouth smirked a little, even when it was relaxed. It was a good smirk.

  Who is she? A weird feeling rose in me. I wanted to put my face close to her, close enough to smell her. I wasn’t sure if I thought she was cute or hot or any word I could find, but I wanted to touch my cheek to her cheek, graze the fine blond hairs on her earlobe. I wanted to gl
ide my nose like a cat along the line where her T-shirt met her neck.

  I was aware that Laura was a woman, and that this made her different to me, in that moment, from a man. I was aware enough to be scared of what I felt. I was aware that I wanted to kiss her and that I could not imagine getting involved with her vagina.

  What kept me from imagining sex with her? I had never cringed at the word vagina. But I was still a product of a world where what’s between a woman’s legs was only fathomable in its relation to a penis. Did I think Laura would feel lumpy or slimy, gross? Did I think I’d find something alien inside her, like one of Carolee Schneemann’s paper scrolls? Or was it something else? Did I shy away for the same reasons that I felt unsure of myself with men? I’d had sex for the first time at twenty, an age that seemed embarrassingly old. I was still getting my footing as a bona fide Sexually Active Person. I was timid, must have been spastic as a filly. But at least with men there was a script to be had. I knew what it looked like, what it felt like, what it was to be a woman wanting a man. I had no script for wanting a woman.

  Laura drove us back to her apartment and showed me around. The kitchen looked like a grown-up’s, with handmade ceramic bowls and tall mullioned windows that wrapped around a corner. She’d lived there with her ex. In the living room, we sat down—me on the sofa, Laura on a chair. I still didn’t know what this was, but I wanted to kiss her. I felt suddenly brave, like someone else.