Sing You Home

5
VANESSA

When I was little, I became obsessed with the prizes offered on Bazooka Joe comics. A gold-plated ring with my initial, a chemical magic set, a telescope, a genuine compass. You remember those wax papers, wrapped around the nuggets of gum? A fine white dust coated the Bazooka and would rub off on your fingers as you read the joke, which was rarely if ever funny.

Each prize sounded more exotic than the last, and could be mine for a pittance and a ridiculous number of Bazooka comics. But nothing captured my fancy as much as the one I found on a gum wrapper in the spring of 1985. If I could just manage to amass $1.10 and sixty-five Bazooka comics, I could have my own pair of X-ray vision glasses.

For a full week I would go to sleep at night wondering what you could see with X-ray vision. I pictured people in their underwear, the skeletons of dogs walking in the street, the insides of jewelry boxes and violin cases. I wondered if I would be able to peer through walls, if I would know what was going on in the teachers’ lounge, if I could read through the manila folder on Ms. Watkins’s desk and see the answer key for the math test. There was a world of possibility in X-ray vision, and I knew I could not live another day without it.

So I began to save. It didn’t take long to scrape together $1.10, but the Bazooka comics were another story entirely. I bought twenty pieces of gum that week with my allowance. I traded my best Topps baseball card-a Roger Clemens Red Sox rookie-to Joey Palliazo for ten Bazooka comics (he had been saving up for the decoder rings). I let Adam Waldman touch my boob for another five (believe me, it didn’t do anything for either one of us). Eventually, within a few weeks, I had enough comics and change to mail off to the address listed. In four to six weeks, those X-ray vision glasses would be mine.

I spent the time imagining a world where I could see beneath the surface. Where I could eavesdrop on the conversations of my parents about my Christmas gifts, could see what leftovers were in the fridge before I opened it, could read my best friend’s diary to see if she felt about me the same way I felt about her. Then one day, a plain brown box arrived with my name on it. I ripped it open, unraveled the Bubble Wrap, and pulled out a pair of white plastic glasses.

They were too big for my face and slid down my nose. They had slightly opaque lenses with a fuzzy white bone etched in the center of each one. When I put them on, everything I looked at was printed with that stupid fake bone.

I couldn’t see through anything at all.

I tell you this as a cautionary tale: beware of getting what you want. It’s bound to disappoint you.

You would think, after that first kiss, there would have been some kind of apology, an awkward pause between us. And in fact the next day, after eight hours at school analyzing every moment of that kiss (Was Zoe drunk, or just a little buzzed? Did I encourage her, or was that entirely her own idea? Was it really as magical as I thought it had been, or was that twenty-twenty hindsight?), I met Zoe at the hospital where she was working with burn victims. She told the nurses she was taking a ten-minute break, and we walked down a long hallway, close enough to hold hands, except we didn’t.

“Listen,” I said, as soon as we were outside and out of earshot of anyone who happened to be eavesdropping.

That was as far as I got before Zoe launched herself at me. Her kiss was blistering. “God, yes,” she breathed against my lips, when we broke apart. “That’s exactly how I remembered it.” Then she looked up at me, her eyes bright. “Is it always like this?”

How was I supposed to answer that? The first time I’d kissed a woman, I felt like I had been shot into space. It was unfamiliar and exciting and felt so incredibly right that I couldn’t believe I’d never done it before. There was an evenness of the playing field that was different from the kisses I’d shared with guys-and yet somehow it wasn’t soft and delicate. It was surround-sound, earthshaking, intense.

But that said, it wasn’t always like this.

I wanted to tell Zoe that, yes, the reason it felt like her skin was on fire was because she was kissing a woman. But more than that, I wanted to tell Zoe that the reason it felt like her skin was on fire was because she was kissing me.

So I didn’t actually answer. I just reached for her, cradled her head in my hands, and kissed her again.

In the three days since then, we have spent hours in her car, on my couch, and in the supply room at the hospital making out like we are teenagers. I know every inch of her mouth. I know what spot on her jaw, when brushed, makes her shudder. I know that the hollow behind her ear smells of lemons and that she has a birthmark shaped like Massachusetts at the nape of her neck.

Last night when we stopped, flushed and breathing hard, Zoe said, “What happens next?”

Which is how I’ve ended up where I am right now: lying on my bed, fully clothed, with the curtain of Zoe’s hair covering my face as she kisses me. With her hands moving tentatively over the terrain of my body.

I think we both knew tonight would end up like this-in spite of its humble beginnings of an Italian dinner and a bad movie. How does sex ever happen between couples, except as an electrical storm that’s been gathering in the space between the two people, which finally combusts?

But this is different. Because even though it’s Zoe’s first time, I’m the one who has everything to lose if it’s not perfect. Namely, Zoe.

So I tell myself that I’m going to let her go at her own pace, which means the most incredible torture, as her hands move from my shoulders to my ribs to my waist. But then she stops. “What’s the matter?” I whisper, imagining the worst: she is disgusted by this; she is feeling nothing; she knows she has made a mistake.

“I think I’m scared,” Zoe confesses.

“We don’t have to do anything,” I say.

“I want to. I’m just afraid I’m going to do it wrong.”

“Zoe,” I tell her, “there is no wrong.”

I slip her hands beneath the hem of my shirt. Her palms brand my stomach; I am sure I will wake up with her initials seared into my skin. Slowly, her hands inch up, until they are touching the lace of my bra.

Here is the thing about lesbian sex: it doesn’t matter if your body isn’t perfect, because your partner feels the same way. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never touched a woman, because you are one, and you already know what you like. When Zoe finally takes off my blouse, I think I cry out, because she covers my mouth with hers and swallows the sound. And then her shirt comes off, too, and the rest. We are a tangle of smooth legs and peaks and valleys, of sighs and pleas. She grabs for me, and I try to slow us down, and somehow we meet in the glorious middle.

Afterward, we curl together on top of the covers. I can smell her skin and her sweat and her hair, and I love the thought that, even when she is gone, my sheets will still retain that memory. But things that are this perfect don’t last very long. I have been down this path before with a straight woman, so I know that having a fantasy come true doesn’t always mean it will be permanent. I can believe Zoe wanted this to happen between us. I just can’t believe she’ll want it to continue.

She shifts in her sleep and rolls over, so that she is facing me. Her leg slides between mine. I pull her closer, and wonder when the novelty of me will wear off.

Two weeks later, I am still waiting for the other proverbial shoe to drop. Zoe and I have spent every night together-it’s gotten to the point where I don’t even ask if she wants to come over after work, because I know she’ll already be there waiting with Chinese takeout or a DVD we had been talking about watching or a fresh-baked pie she insists she can’t eat by herself.

There are moments I cannot believe how happy I am. But there are just as many moments when I remember that, to Zoe, this is still just the bright, shiny new toy. In private, Zoe is so, so gay. She reads all my back issues of Curve. She calls her cable company and gets Logo. She starts talking to me about Provincetown: if I’ve ever been, if I’d ever go again. She acts the way I did when I first embraced who I really was-like I’d been let out of my cage for the first time in twenty years. However, she’s never told anyone-not even me-that she’s fallen for a woman. She’s never been in a relationship before that causes people on the street to whisper when she walks by. She’s never been called a dyke. This isn’t real yet, for her. And when it is, she will come back to me and tell me it’s all been a wonderful, fun mistake.

And yet… I’m too weak to turn her away now, when she wants me. When it just feels so damn good to be with her.

Which is why, when she asks me to observe her second session with Lucy, I immediately agree. I had asked to be there last time, but now I wonder if that was only so that I’d get to see Zoe working, and not because I was thinking of Lucy’s welfare. Zoe had refused anyway, and she was right-but she’s changed her tune this week, after Lucy’s abandonment. I think, frankly, she wants me there to bar the door if Lucy tries to run again.

Today I help her lug in a bunch of instruments from her car. “Lucy plays this?” I ask, as I set down a small marimba.

“No. She doesn’t play any musical instruments. But the thing about the ones I’ve brought today is that you don’t have to play an instrument to sound good. They’re all tuned to the pentatonic scale.”

“What’s that?”

“A scale with five pitches. It’s different from a heptatonic scale, which is seven notes, like the major scale-do re mi fa so la ti. You find them all over the world-in jazz, blues, Celtic folk music, Japanese folk music. The thing about it is that you just can’t play a wrong note-whatever key you hit, it’s going to sound good.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You know the song ‘My Girl’? By the Temptations?”

“Yeah.”

Zoe lifts the lap harp she’s holding and plays the instrumental intro, those six familiar rising notes that repeat. “That’s a pentatonic scale. So is the melody that the aliens understood in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And a blues scale is based on a minor pentatonic scale.” She puts down the harp and hands me a mallet. “Try it.”

“Thanks but no thanks. My last experience with an instrument was violin, when I was eight. The neighbors called the fire department because they thought an animal was dying inside my house.”

“Just try it.”

I take a mallet and tentatively strike a bar. And another. And a third. Then I hit the same pattern. Before I know it I’m striking different bars, making up a song as I go. “That,” I say, “is pretty cool.”

“I know, right? It takes all the stress out of music.”

Imagine if there was a pentatonic scale for life: if no matter what step you took, you could not strike a wrong note.

I hand her back the mallet just as Lucy sulks through the door. That’s really the only way to describe it-she takes a look at Zoe and then glances at me and realizes she is not going to escape as easily this time around. She throws herself into a chair and starts gnawing on her thumbnail.

“Hi, Lucy,” Zoe says. “It’s good to see you again.”

Lucy snaps her gum. I stand up, grab the trash can, and hold it under her jaw until she spits it out. Then I close the door of the special needs room, so that the noise in the hall doesn’t interrupt Zoe’s session.

“So, you can see that Ms. Shaw is with us today. That’s because we want to make sure you haven’t got a pressing appointment somewhere else again,” Zoe tells her.

“You mean you don’t want me to ditch,” Lucy says.

“That too,” I agree.

“I was thinking, Lucy, that maybe you could tell me one thing you liked about our last session, so that I could make sure we get to do it again…”

“That I cut it short,” Lucy replies.

If I were Zoe, I’d probably want to throttle the kid. But Zoe just smiles at her. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll make sure we keep things moving along then.” She takes the lap harp and puts it on the desk in front of Lucy. “Have you ever seen one of these?” When Lucy shakes her head, Zoe plucks a few strings. The notes are sporadic at first, and then rearrange themselves into a lullaby.

“Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,” Zoe sings softly, “Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird don’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.” She puts down the harp. “I never really understood those lyrics. I mean, wouldn’t you rather have a mockingbird that could say everything you taught it to say? That’s so much cooler than a piece of jewelry.” She strums the harp a few more times. “Maybe you’d like to try this?”

Lucy makes no move to touch it. “I’d rather have the diamond ring,” she says finally. “I’d pawn it and use the money for a bus ticket and get the hell out of here.”

In the year I’ve known Lucy, I have never heard her string so many words together in a response. Stunned-maybe music does work wonders-I lean forward to see what Zoe will do next.

“Really?” she says. “Where would you go?”

“Where wouldn’t I go?”

Zoe pulls the marimba closer. She begins to tap out a rhythm that feels vaguely African, or Caribbean. “I used to think of traveling around the world. I was going to do that after graduating from college. Work in one place, you know, waiting tables or something, until I got enough cash to travel somewhere else. I told myself I never wanted to be the kind of person who had more stuff than she could carry in a knapsack.”

For the first time, I see Lucy actively look at Zoe. “Why didn’t you do it?”

She shrugs. “Life got in the way.”

Where, I wonder, did she dream about going? A pristine beach? A blue glacier rising from the center of an ice field? The crowded bookstalls on the banks of the Seine?

Zoe begins to play another melody with the mallet. This one sounds like a polka. “One of the really cool things about these two instruments is that they’re tuned on a pentatonic scale. Lots of world folk music is based off that. I love the way you can hear a piece of music, and it brings a snapshot from another part of the world into your mind. Next best thing to being there, if you can’t hop a plane because you’ve got math next period, for example.” She taps the mallet, and the tune sounds Asian, the notes jumping up and down the scale. I close my eyes and see cherry blossoms, paper houses. “Here,” Zoe says, handing the mallet to Lucy. “How about if you play me a song that sounds like where you wish you were?”

Lucy takes the mallet in her fist and stares at it. She strikes the highest bar, just once. It sounds like a high-pitched cry. Lucy strikes it one more time, and then lets the mallet roll from her fingers. “This is so unbelievably gay,” she says.

I can’t help it, I flinch.

Zoe doesn’t even look in my direction. “If by ‘gay’ you mean happy, which you must, because I can’t imagine you’d find anything about playing a marimba that points to sexual orientation-well, then, I would have to disagree. I think Japanese folk songs are pretty melancholy, actually.”

“What if that’s not what I meant?” Lucy challenges.

“Then I suppose I’d ask myself why a kid who hates being labeled by everyone else, including therapists, is so willing to label other people.”

At that, Lucy folds back into herself. Gone is the girl willing to talk about running away. In her place is the familiar drawstring purse of a mouth, the angry eyes, the folded arms. One step forward, two steps back. “Would you like to try the marimba?” Zoe asks again.

She is met by a stony wall of silence.

“How about the harp?”

When Lucy ignores her again, Zoe pulls the instruments aside. “Every songwriter uses music to express something she can’t have. Maybe that’s a place, and maybe that’s a feeling. You know how sometimes you feel like if you don’t let go of some of the pressure that’s inside you, you’re going to explode? A song can be that release. How about you pick a song, and we talk about the place it takes us when we listen to it?”

Lucy closes her eyes.

“I’ll give you some choices,” Zoe says. “‘Amazing Grace.’ ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends.’ Or, ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.’”

She could not have picked three more diverse options: a spiritual, a Green Day song, and an Elton John oldie.

“Okay, then,” Zoe says, when Lucy doesn’t respond. “I’ll pick.” She begins to play the lap harp. Her voice starts out on a husky low note, and swings upward:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now I’m found.

Was blind, but now I see.

There is a richness to Zoe’s singing that feels like tea on a rainy day, like a blanket over your shoulders while you’re shivering. Lots of women have pretty voices, but hers has a soul. I love how, when she wakes up in the morning, it sounds as if her throat is coated in sand. I love how, when she gets frustrated, she doesn’t yell but instead belts one high, operatic note of anger.

When I look over at Lucy, she has tears in her eyes. She furtively glances at me, and wipes them away as Zoe finishes the song with a few strokes plucked on the harp. “Every time I hear that hymn I imagine a girl in a white dress, standing barefoot on a swing,” Zoe says. “And the swing’s on a big old elm tree.” She laughs, shaking her head. “I have no idea why. It’s actually about a slave trader who was struggling with his life, and how some divine power got him to see the person he was meant to be instead. How about you? What does the song make you think of?”

“Lies.”

“Really!” Zoe says. “That’s interesting. What sorts of lies?”

Suddenly Lucy stands so abruptly that she knocks over her chair. “I hate that song. I hate it!”

Zoe moves quickly so that she is only inches away from the girl. “That’s great. The music made you feel something. What did you hate about it?”

Lucy narrows her eyes. “That you were singing it,” she says, and she shoves Zoe out of the way. “I’m fucking done.” She kicks the marimba as she passes. It sounds a low good-bye.

Zoe turns to me as the door slams behind Lucy. “Well,” Zoe says, beaming. “At least this time, she stayed twice as long.”

“The dead man on the train,” I say.

“I beg your pardon?”

“That’s what the song makes me think of,” I say. “I was in college and I was going home for Thanksgiving. The trains were full, and I wound up sitting next to an old man who asked me what my name was. Vanessa, I told him, and he said Vanessa What? I didn’t know him, and I was afraid to give out my last name in case he was a serial killer or something, so I told him my middle name instead: Vanessa Grace. And he started singing to me, substituting my name for Amazing grace. He had a really beautiful, deep voice, and people clapped. I was embarrassed, and he wouldn’t quit talking, so I pretended to fall asleep. When we got to South Station, the last stop, he was leaning against the window with his eyes closed. I shook him, to tell him that it was time to get off the train, but he didn’t wake up. I got a conductor, and the police and ambulance came, and I had to tell them everything I knew-which was almost nothing.” I hesitate. “His name was Murray Wasserman, and he was a stranger, and I was the last person he sang to before he died.”

When I finish speaking, I find Zoe staring at me. She glances at the door of the room, which is still closed, and then she hugs me. “I think he was probably a pretty lucky guy.”

I look at her dubiously. “To drop dead? On Amtrak? The day before Thanksgiving?”

“No,” Zoe says. “To have you sitting next to him, on the last ride of his life.”

I duck my head. I’m not a praying woman, but I pray at that moment that, when it’s my turn, Zoe and I will still be traveling together.

The day after I told my mother that I was a lesbian, the shock had worn off and she was full of questions. She asked me if this was some phase I was going through, like the time I’d been hell-bent on dyeing my hair purple and getting an eyebrow ring. When I told her I was convinced of my attraction to women, she burst into tears and asked me how she had failed me as a mother. She told me she’d pray for me. Every night, when I went to bed, she slipped a new pamphlet under the door. Many trees have died so that the Catholic Church can preach against homosexuality.

I started to wage a counterattack. On every pamphlet, I took a thick marker and wrote the name of someone famous who had an LGBT child: Cher. Barbra Streisand. Dick Gephardt. Michael Landon. I’d slip these under her bedroom door.

Finally, at a stalemate, I agreed to meet with her priest. He asked me how I could do this to the woman who’d raised me, as if my sexuality was a personal attack on her. He asked if I’d considered becoming a nun instead. Not once was I asked if I was afraid, or lonely, or worried about my future.

On the way home from the church, I asked my mother if she still loved me.

“I’m trying,” she said.

It took my first long-term girlfriend (whose own mother, when she came out to her, shrugged and said, Tell me something I don’t know) to make me understand why my mother was the complete opposite. “You’re dead to her,” my girlfriend had told me. “Everything she’s dreamed of for you, everything she figured you’d be and have, it’s not going to happen. She’s been seeing you in suburbia with a cookie cutter husband and your two point four kids and a dog, and now you’ve gone and ruined that by being with me.”

So I gave my mother time to grieve. I never flaunted my girlfriends in front of her, or brought one home to a holiday meal, or signed her name on a Christmas card. Not because I was ashamed but simply because I loved my mother, and I knew that was what she needed from me. When my mother got sick and went into the hospital, I took care of her. I like to think that, before the morphine took over her mind-before she died-she realized that my being a lesbian mattered far less than the fact that I was a good daughter.

I’m telling you this as a means of explaining that I have been through the coming-out ringer, and wish to repeat it about as much as a person wants a second root canal. But when Zoe begs me to come with her when she tells Dara about us, I know I will. Because it’s the first proof I have that-maybe-Zoe isn’t just trying this new gay persona on for size, and planning to return it and go back to her old, straight self.

“Are you nervous?” I ask, as we stand side by side in front of Zoe’s mother’s front door.

“No. Well, yeah. A little.” She looks at me. “It feels big. It’s big, right?”

“Your mother is one of the most open-minded people I’ve ever met.”

“But she considers herself an expert on me,” Zoe says. “It was just the two of us, when I was growing up.”

“Well, I grew up with a single mom, too.”

“This is different, Vanessa. On my birthday, my mother still calls me at 10:03 A.M. and screams and pants into the phone to relive the birth experience.”

I blink at her. “That’s just plain strange.”

Zoe smiles. “I know. She’s one in a million. It’s a blessing and a curse all at once.” With a deep breath, she rings the doorbell.

Dara opens it with a mangled coat hanger in her hands. “Zoe!” she says, delighted to see her daughter. “I didn’t know you were coming out here!”

Zoe’s laugh is strangled. “You have no idea…”

Dara wraps her arms around me for a quick hug, too. “How are you, Vanessa?”

“Great,” I say. “I’ve never been better.”

In the background there is a man’s voice, deep and soothing. Sense the water. Sense it rising beneath you…

“Oh,” Dara says. “Let me go shut that off. Come in, you two.” She hustles toward the stereo and turns off the CD player, taking the disc out of the machine and slipping it into its plastic sleeve. “It’s my homework for my dowsing class. That’s what the coat hanger’s for.”

“You’re looking for water?”

“Yes,” Dara says. “When I find it, the rods will move by themselves and cross in my hands.”

“Let me save you some trouble,” Zoe replies. “I’m pretty sure the water comes out of the faucets.”

“O ye of little faith. For your information, my practical girl, dowsing is a very lucrative skill. Say you’re going to invest in a piece of land. Don’t you want to know what’s under the surface?”

“I’d probably hire an artesian well company,” I say, “but that’s just me.”

“Maybe so, Vanessa, but who’s going to tell the well company where to dig, eh?” She smiles at me. “You two hungry? I’ve got a nice coffeecake in the fridge. One of my clients is trying to visualize becoming a pastry chef…”

“You know, Ma, actually, I came to tell you something really important,” Zoe says. “Something really good, I think.”

Dara’s eyes widen. “I had a dream about this, just last night. Let me guess-you’re going back to school!”

“What? No!” Zoe says. “What are you talking about? I have a master’s degree!”

“But you could have majored in classical voice. Vanessa, have you ever heard her sing…”

“Um, yes-”

“Mom,” Zoe interrupts. “I’m not going back to school for classical voice. I’m perfectly happy as a music therapist-”

Dara looks up at her. “For jazz piano, then?”

“For God’s sake, I’m not going back to school. I came here to tell you I’m a lesbian!”

The word cleaves the room in half.

“But,” Dara says after a moment. “But you were married.”

“I know. I was with Max. But now… now I’m with Vanessa.”

When Dara turns to me, her eyes seem wounded-as if I’ve betrayed her by pretending to be Zoe’s good friend when, in truth, that’s what I have been. “I know this is unexpected,” I say.

“This isn’t you, Zoe. I know you. I know who you are…”

“So do I. And if you think this means I’m going to start riding a Harley and wearing leather, you don’t know me at all. Believe me, I was surprised, too. This isn’t what I thought was going to happen to me.”

Dara starts to cry. She cups Zoe’s cheeks in her hands. “You could get married again.”

“I could, but I don’t want to, Ma.”

“What about grandchildren?”

“I couldn’t seem to make that happen even with a man,” Zoe points out. She reaches for her mother’s hand. “I found someone I want to be with. I’m happy. Can’t you be happy for me?”

Dara sits very still for a moment, looking down at their intertwined fingers. Then she pulls away. “I need a minute,” she says, and she picks up her dowsing rods and walks into the kitchen.

When she leaves, Zoe looks up at me, teary. “So much for her open-mindedness.”

I put my arm around her. “Give her a break. You’re still getting used to these feelings, and it’s been weeks. You can’t expect her to get over the shock in five seconds.”

“Do you think she’s okay?”

See, this is why I love Zoe. In the middle of her own freak-out moment, she’s worried about her mother. “I’ll go check,” I say, and I head into the kitchen.

Dara is leaning against the kitchen counter, the dowsing rods beside her on the granite. “Was it something I did?” she asks. “I should have gotten married again, maybe. Just so there was a man in the house-”

“I don’t think it makes a difference. You have been a wonderful mother. Which is why Zoe is so afraid you’ll want to disown her.”

“Disown her? Don’t be ridiculous. She said she was a lesbian, not a Republican.” Dara draws in her breath. “It’s just… I have to get used to it.”

“You should tell her that. She’ll understand.”

Dara looks at me, then nods. She pushes back through the swinging door into the living room. I think about following her, but I want to give Zoe a minute alone with her mother. I want them to have the shift and redistribution of their relationship that I never got to have with my own mom, that acrobatic feat of love where everything is turned upside down and yet they are both still able to keep their balance.

So instead, I eavesdrop. I push the door open a crack in time to hear Dara speaking. “I couldn’t love you any more if you told me right now that you were straight,” she says. “And I don’t love you any less because you told me you aren’t.”

I gently close the door. In the kitchen, I turn around, surveying the bowl of fruit on the counter, the cobalt blue toaster, the Cuisinart. Dara has left behind her dowsing rods. I pick them up, hold them lightly in my hands. In spite of the fact that the faucet and the pipes are less than a foot away, the rods do not jump in my hands or twitch or cross. I imagine having that sixth sense, the certainty that what I’m looking for is within reach, even if it’s still hidden.

Movie theaters are wonderful places to be gay. Once the lights go down, there’s no one to stare at you if you hold your girlfriend’s hand or snuggle closer to her. Attention at the movies, by definition, is focused on the spectacle on the screen and not in the seats.

I’m not a PDA kind of person. I’ve never started kissing someone in public; I just don’t have the kind of selfless abandon that you see in teenage couples who are forever making out or walking down a street with their hands tucked halfway down each other’s pants. So I’m not saying that I’d necessarily walk down the street with my arm around the woman I love-but I’d sure like to know that, if I were so inclined, I wouldn’t attract a trail of shocked, uncomfortable stares. We’re conditioned to seeing men holding guns but not men holding hands.

When the movie credits roll, people begin to get out of their seats. As the lights come up, Zoe’s head is on my shoulder. Then I hear, “Zoe? Hey!”

She leaps up as if she’s been caught in the act of doing something wrong and pastes a huge smile on her face. “Wanda!” she says, to a woman who looks vaguely familiar. “Did you like the movie?”

“I’m not a big Tarantino fan, but actually, it wasn’t bad,” she says. She slips her arm through a man’s elbow. “Zoe, I don’t think you’ve ever met my husband, Stan? Zoe’s a music therapist who comes to the nursing home,” Wanda explains.

Zoe turns to me. “This is Vanessa,” she says. “My… my friend.”

Last night Zoe and I had celebrated a month together. We had champagne and strawberries, and she beat me at Scrabble. We made love, and when we woke up in the morning she was wrapped around me like a heliotrope vine.

Friend.

“We’ve met,” I say to Wanda, although I am not about to point out that it was at the baby shower for the baby who died.

We walk out of the movie theater with Wanda and her husband, making small talk about the plot and whether this will be an Oscar contender. Zoe is careful to keep a good foot of distance away from me. She doesn’t even make eye contact with me again until we’re in my car, driving back to my place.

Zoe fills the silence with a story about Wanda and Stan’s daughter, who wanted to join the army because she had a boyfriend who had already shipped out. I don’t think she notices that I haven’t said a word to her. When we reach the house, I unlock the door and walk inside and strip off my coat. “You want some tea?” Zoe asks, heading into the kitchen. “I’m going to put up the kettle.”

I don’t answer her. I am a thousand shades of hurt right now, and I don’t trust myself to speak.

Instead I sit down on the couch and pick up the newspaper I never got a chance to read today. I can hear Zoe in my kitchen, taking mugs out of the dishwasher, filling the kettle, turning on the stove. She knows where everything is, in which drawer to find the spoons, in which cabinet I keep the tea bags. She moves around my house as if she belongs here.

I am staring blankly at editorials when she comes into the living room, leans over the back of the couch, and wraps her arms around me. “Any more letters about the police chief scandal?”

I push her away. “Don’t.”

She backs off. “Guess the movie really got to you.”

“Not the movie.” I turn around to look at her. “You.”

“Me? What did I do?”

“It’s what you didn’t do, Zoe,” I say. “What is it? You only want me when no one else is around? You’re more than happy to come on to me when nobody’s watching?”

“Okay. Clearly you’re in a crappy mood-”

“You didn’t want Wanda to know we’re together. That was obvious…”

“My business associates don’t have to know the details of my personal life-”

“Oh, yeah? Did you tell her when you got pregnant last time?” I ask.

“Of course I did-”

“There you go.” I swallow, trying really hard to not cry. “You told her I was your friend.”

“You are my friend,” Zoe says, exasperated.

“Is that all I am?”

“What am I supposed to call you? My lover? That sounds like a bad seventies movie. My partner? I don’t even know if that’s what we are. But the difference between you and me is that I don’t care what it’s called. I don’t have to label it for everyone else. So why do you?” In the kitchen the teakettle starts to scream. “Look,” Zoe says, taking a deep breath. “You’re overreacting. I’m going to turn off the stove and just go home. We can talk about this tomorrow, when we’ve both slept on it.”

She walks into the kitchen, but instead of letting her go, I follow her. I watch her movements, efficient and graceful, as she takes the kettle off the burner. When she turns to me, her features are smooth, expressionless. “Good night.”

She walks past me, but just as she reaches the kitchen doorway, I speak. “I’m afraid.”

Zoe hesitates, her hands framing the door, as if she is caught between two moments.

“I’m afraid that you’re going to get sick of me,” I admit. “That you’re going to get tired of living a life that still isn’t a hundred percent accepted by society. I’m afraid that, if I let myself feel ecstatic about being with you, then when you leave me, I won’t be able to pull myself back together.”

In one move, Zoe is across the kitchen again, facing me. “Why do you think I’d leave?”

“My track record,” I say. “That, and the fact that you have no idea how hard it is. I still worry every day that some parent is going to out me, and convince the school board I should lose my job. I listen to the news and hear politicians who know nothing about me making decisions about what I should and shouldn’t be allowed to do. I don’t understand why the most intriguing thing about my identity is always that I’m gay-not that I’m a Leo or know how to tap dance or that I majored in zoology.”

“You can tap dance?” Zoe asks.

“The point is,” I say, “you spent forty years straight. Why wouldn’t you return to the path of least resistance?”

Zoe looks at me as if I am incredibly thick-headed. “Because, Vanessa. You’re not a guy.”

That night, we don’t make love. We drink the tea Zoe brews, and we talk about the first time I was called a dyke, how I came home and cried. We talk about how I hate when the mechanic always assumes that I know what he’s talking about when he works on my car, just because I’m a lesbian. I even do a little tap routine for her: step-ball-change, step-ball-change. We spoon on the couch.

The last thing I remember thinking before I fall asleep in her arms is This is good, too.

In spite of my disappointment over the X-ray vision glasses from the Bazooka comics prize cache, I wound up saving up for one more item that I simply had to have. It was a whale’s tooth good-luck charm, on a key chain. What intrigued me was the description of the item:

Guaranteed to bring the owner a lifetime of good fortune.

I knew better, after my X-ray glasses, than to expect the whale’s tooth to be either real whale or real tooth. Probably it would be plastic, with a hole punched through the top for the metal key ring attached to it. But I still found myself saving up my allowance again to buy Bazooka gum. I hunted on the floor of my mother’s car for spare change, so that I could gather the $1.10 for shipping and handling.

Three months later, I had my sixty-five Bazooka comics and sent off my envelope for my prize. When the charm arrived, I was a little surprised to see that the tooth seemed to be legitimate (although I couldn’t really tell you if it came from a whale) and that the silver key ring attached to it was heavy, shiny. I slipped it into the front pocket of my backpack and started wishing.

The next day was Valentine’s Day in school. We had each made little “mailboxes” out of shoe boxes and construction paper. This was in the era of transactional analysis, when no one was allowed to feel left out, so the teacher had a foolproof plan: every girl in the class would send a card to every boy, and vice versa. I was guaranteed, this way, to receive fourteen Valentines in return for the fourteen Tweety and Sylvester cards I had addressed to the boys in class-even Luke, unfortunately, who picked his nose and ate it. At the end of the school day, I carried home my shoe box and sat on my bed and sorted the cards. To my surprise, there was one extra. Yes, every boy had given me a Valentine, as expected. But the fifteenth came from Eileen Connelly, who had sparkly blue eyes and hair as black as night and who once, in gym class, had put her arms around me to show me how to properly hold a bat. HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY, the card said, FROM, EILEEN. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t signed with “Love.” It didn’t matter that she might have given a card to every girl in the class in addition to me. All I knew at that moment-all I cared about-was that she had been thinking of me, however briefly. I was convinced that the only reason I’d gotten this bonus Valentine was that whale’s tooth charm-which was fast acting indeed.

Over the years, every time I moved-from my home to my college dorm, from my college dorm to my apartment in the city, from my apartment to this house-I have gone through my belongings and sorted the wheat from the chaff. And every time, in my nightstand, I have come across that whale’s tooth good-luck charm. I can never quite bear the thought of getting rid of it.

Apparently, it’s still working.