Winter 1985
“HOW ABOUT ‘JOYFUL, JOYFUL, WE adore thee . . . under a sheet,’” I say, switching from musicals to Christmas carols. Holiday songs have been playing for weeks in every store in the financial district. For the past three days, whenever I take a latte break from my temp job at Crocker Bank, there’s a group of women singing in the lobby, trying to sound like angels.
“That’s a good one,” Min says, grinning. She pushes a ripple of bubbles toward me. I gather them in my dripping hands and place them carefully on my nipples, like pasties. She says, “How about ‘We three kings of Orient are . . . under a sheet.’”
We both laugh. The bubbles slide off my breasts. Seeing that, Min can’t stop laughing. We’re actually having fun. I want it to last forever.
The bathtub is narrow and barely fits us both, but I like her legs on either side of me and her hands clasping my knees. Min is great at coming up with song titles. My favorite so far is “What do the simple folk do (under a sheet)?” The game itself was her idea. I remember that she was the one who thought up all the best code words in seventh grade too.
“Do you remember kissing me in junior high?” I ask.
“Of course,” she answers, dribbling handfuls of hot water on my shoulders. I lean toward her so she can reach my back.
“I do too.” I remember her long hair falling around me as she bent over to kiss me the first time. “It was nice. I think we were already having a relationship then. We just didn’t know it.” It’s strange to me that the girl with long hair in my memory is the same person I’m sharing a bath with. Min starts to rub my shoulders where I’m sore from sitting in front of a computer all day. “I think we got imprinted on each other,” I add.
“I don’t. I think we were twelve years old and finding out what our bodies did. You have a romantic view of everything.”
I feel stung. What’s wrong with that? “You don’t think our being together now has anything to do with what happened then?”
She shrugs. “We were fooling around. I know I was interested in finding out what it was like to be female and sexual.” She leans back, her arms on either side of the tub rim.
Sometimes what I love about Min is exactly the thing that makes me nuts. I’ve never met anyone who’s so stubbornly herself. “But didn’t you like kissing me?” I ask. I miss her warm hands on my skin. I’d like to lean back too but the faucet’s behind me.
She looks at me oddly, like I’ve forgotten something obvious. “Of course I did. Don’t start reinterpreting the past, Laura.”
“What do you mean? What’s wrong?”
She shakes her head. “Nothing. I’m getting out, I’ve had enough.” She stands and steps out of the deep, old-fashioned tub. I wish she would turn around and look at me. I wish she was always turned in my direction, that every look was for me alone. Is that so terrible a thing to want?
“Thanks for the neck rub,” I say. “It really helped.”
“Sure.”
Min towels herself dry. I turn around, fill the tub with more hot water, and sink back down until only my head and knees are sticking out. I imagine slipping completely under, disappearing below the surface. Sometimes I feel like Min and I never became lovers at all and I’m still waiting for the moment when she will make a move.
I lift my hand from the water and catch hers, bringing it to my lips to kiss. She opens her palm against my cheek. I want her to tell me everything will work out. I want her to say anything. When she leaves the bathroom, the opened door lets in a cold rush of air.
The bubbles are almost all gone. Before getting out, I hold my breath and slide down along the length of the tub, dunking my whole head beneath the hot water. I stay down for several seconds, shutting off all outside distractions. I never used to feel lonely with Min. The closer we get, the less I am sure where she is. I put my hands up and scrub at my scalp, my short hair floating against my fingers like seaweed. I can hear only one thing down here, amplified through the water. It is the insistent, rhythmic call of my own heart.
When I pull the covers down and get into bed beside her, naked and sweaty from the bath, Min is reading, her book propped up on her stomach. It’s a faded hardback with brittle pages, probably something from Catherine’s bookstore. When I’m settled against her, she rests her hand on my thigh without looking up.
“What are you reading?” I ask sleepily. It’s her cue to put the book aside and roll toward me or let me climb on top of her.
“Orlando,” she answers, turning a page. I hear the slow sound of the paper scraping against her fingers. Maybe she’s reading to the end of the paragraph. I wait a minute, then one more. It must be a long paragraph. I wish she would finish. I want her back. When I hear her turning another page, something lurches inside me. I reach up to take the book from her.
She holds it away from me, still reading. “Come on, I’m trying to read.”
“But I’m here. You can read any time.”
“This is really good. Give me a few more minutes.”
I sit up, my face suddenly burning. The sick feeling in my stomach that I often feel when I’m with Min now becomes hard, like a lump of dough I’ve swallowed without chewing. I want to throw it up.
“I can’t stand this anymore,” I tell her. “You want to read more than you want to be with me. I can’t believe I’m competing with a goddamn book.”
Min looks up at me for the first time since I came into the room. “No, Laura, I don’t care about the book more than you.” She sounds bored, like she’s tired of having to explain the same thing all over again. “Would you stop comparing yourself to everything you see? I can’t stand it either.” Then she puts the book down on the floor next to the futon. But it’s too late. I can’t stop myself.
“Before we were lovers, you never had a problem paying attention to me. Why are you so stingy with the time we’re together now?”
“Before we were lovers, you never needed so much attention.”
I can hear the fury in her voice. It makes me cringe. How can I change her anger into caring? How can I make her see what she’s doing to us? I look into her face, willing her to remember me. She looks back, her jaw set. We stare at each other.
My eyes fill with tears. I blink them back. “Why won’t you soften?” I ask. “Why won’t you let me in?” I am sitting cross-legged. She is leaning back against the pillows. I can feel my whole body angling in toward hers, yearning. If she were a guy, I would start to cry and he would instantly change, become concerned. But Min is more complicated. If I cry, she will see that vulnerable side of me, but it won’t make her love me more. It will only make her feel more burdened. It always does, sooner or later.
“Laura,” Min begins. I watch her eyebrows pull together like looking at me hurts her. “I don’t think this is going to work between us.”
“What?”
She doesn’t answer. She knows I heard her. I hold still, not breathing, hoping the moment will pass and when I move again there will not be this sharp, terrible pain and we will go on as before.
“Why now?” I ask, my voice barely audible. Now I am crying for real. It takes so little these days. Just a few angry words from Min and I lose it. “It was feeling so good to be with you. Why do you have to ruin it?”
She sits up and brings my face between her two hands to a few inches away from hers. The force of her fingers is hard against my cheeks. I imagine her crushing my skull between her hands. Yet her face has the same look of injury on it as before.
“Listen to me,” she says. “You know this isn’t working. We have to talk about it. Can we discuss this rationally, when we aren’t in the middle of a fight?”
“Rationally?” I ask. “Since when were you into being rational?”
I feel a slight tremor in her hands on either side of my face. “Stop it, Laura. You’re just making this harder. We have to talk. Otherwise we’re just going to keep sniping at each other until there isn’t anything left.”
I imagine us, two piles of dust scattered on the floor. “You want to break up,” I say. It comes out sounding like a question because there’s a wince in it, the fear she will agree. The idea alone is unbearable. I have to find a way to distract her, stop her from making this mistake. I bite the inside of my mouth, trying to keep the greater pain at bay.
Min closes her eyes, then opens them and looks into mine. “I want to consider it. I can’t keep going on like this. I’m not happy. Neither are you.”
I pull back, out of the grip of her hands. I used to envy the way she could take pleasure, and give it too, without hesitation. But the other side is that she wants only the moments of bliss. She depends on her submersion in it. She seeks it out.
“Relationships aren’t always about being happy, Min,” I tell her. I am saying it for her sake, not for mine. “It’s not about feeling good all the time. Sometimes it takes work.”
“Yeah, but what we’re doing isn’t work. It’s a war zone.”
Suddenly I’m pissed off. “That’s because you won’t commit to being in it with me for the long haul. You’re like a child, you’re only interested while it’s new. Then you get bored and go off to find somebody else to play with.”
“Who I sleep with is my business, Laura. We agreed on that.”
“How can you know how happy you would be with me when you’re sleeping with other women? I hate this non-monogamy shit. I only agreed to it because I thought you’d see how stupid it is and get over it.”
She’s silent, looking down. “Actually, I haven’t been sleeping with other women. Not recently. You’ve never understood, Laura. I don’t want to go out fucking everyone in sight. Mostly I am happy with you. But I can’t promise a commitment that I might not always want to keep.”
“Why not?”
“Why can’t you call yourself a lesbian?”
Silence again. It’s not the same. If she loved me like I love her . . . What hurts most is over and over bumping into the wall that she’s put up around her love.
“Besides,” she says, “you had a choice. You didn’t have to agree to an open relationship. You could have said no.”
“And you would have broken up with me. What kind of a choice is that?” I shout at her. I remember her roommate and lower my voice. “You gave me a choice between two things I didn’t want. All I could hope for was that you’d change. But you have to have everything your way.”
“That’s not true,” she counters. “You’re the one who wants too much.” I feel tears filling my eyes again as she goes on. “You want to direct my whole life, decide who I can see and for how long. You have to know where I am every second of the day. I don’t have the freedom to come back to you.” She shakes her head. I can’t tell if she’s near tears too. “You can’t stand that I might be close to anyone other than you.”
“You can’t be close to anyone, Min. You spread yourself too thin.” The realization grows bright inside me, like the shade pulled off a lamp. “And it’s me you’re the most scared of. I think you’re terrified that if we get too close, I’ll disappear. Like your father. Like your birth parents. Even like your mother, who you think can’t really love you because she loved her own brother first. If you love me too much, you might lose me. That’s your problem. The sad thing is, you’re willing to get rid of me this other way.” I take in a huge gulp of air, out of breath. I have never thought this through before, not so clearly. Min stares at me. She is breathing hard too.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her voice is low, furious. “You don’t know me half as well as you think you do. Don’t try to own me.” She starts to get up off the bed. I grab her hand.
“I have to pee,” she says coldly.
While she’s gone, exhaustion hits me, making me a little dizzy. I drag my open hand over my face, like a washcloth, but the tiredness doesn’t go away.
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” I tell Min when she returns. I lie down on my back. I reach for Min to pull her to me. “I’m cold.” She gets into the bed and covers us both with the blankets, tucking me in up to my neck. There is nothing playful about it tonight, or even tender, just matter of fact. The overhead light switch is on my side, but I don’t want to move.
“I think maybe we’re better off as friends,” she says quietly.
This time I don’t feel anything except a sense of futility. Maybe the end is inevitable. I say, “I don’t think I can go back to being friends with you again.”
“You don’t?” she asks. I turn my head to look at her. Her eyes seem very black, very wet. It’s the first time tonight I’ve been sure I have hurt her. I don’t feel proud of my accomplishment.
“There’s nothing in it for me, trying to be friends again. We’ve gone too far. I want to be your lover, Min. Don’t you understand that?” I want to shake her. Has she never understood the price of this relationship before now?
She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath and lets it go. I can tell she is holding herself back from crying. I watch her, worried for her and at the same time staggered that all this time she has taken me for granted. Something inside me loosens and is set free, and like a leaf it is swept downstream.
I drag myself out of the tightly wrapped covers and reach up along the wall for the light switch, then bundle myself back up. “Min,” I say in the dark, and I touch her arm. I feel her hand on my hip. We inch ourselves together. We hold each other until we fall asleep.
It’s evening two days later, and I miss her. We don’t have a plan to get together until tomorrow. Even though we talk on the phone every day, I hate not being with Min this long. I start to feel jumpy, nervous. It’s no good trying to distract myself with my job or my few friends. I don’t care about them. I run five miles every day, but it doesn’t calm me down. Tonight I’m hanging out watching TV with my roommates, Sally and Denise. I know Min has massage appointments. While Denise and Sally laugh at the sitcom jokes, I can’t help wondering what she is doing right at this moment. Is she thinking of me? Does she miss me too?
I decide to go out for a walk to clear my head. I wrap a cotton scarf around my neck, pull on my field coat, and head out. The street is awash in fog. Stoplights loom, red and green, disembodied. I walk over the hill toward the Castro, taking unfamiliar streets. Off to my right, the lights of Sutro Tower flash, warning planes away. The damp of the fog wets my cheeks. I keep walking, down tiny streets with houses painted so elaborately they remind me of the animals on the merry-go-round in the park, and up streets so steep they have steps carved into the sidewalk. On a corner somewhere near upper Market, I stop and look down at the lights of the city glowing in the white mist. The fog is thinner here, trailing off as it descends the hill. Out over the bay, lights outline the bridge. I’m surprised by the number of windows in the office buildings downtown that are still lit up. I wonder how many people are working late tonight. It’s after nine.
From where I stand, the valley where Min lives looks far away. I can see the dark square of Dolores Park, three blocks from her house. I’ve tried to get her to play tennis there with me, offering to teach her. She says she’s not interested. When I sometimes walk to Min’s instead of taking the bus, I like to stop up here before the long trek down, measuring, in a way, the distance between her house and mine. I especially love looking out over San Francisco at night, when the city looks like a cluster of individual lights spread wide into a net. Their reassurance of civilization (other people, warm rooms) keeps away the encroaching darkness.
Min would love this view tonight. I push up the sleeve of my coat and hold my watch to the blaze of a streetlight. She should be finished with her last massage. It takes me some time to find a phone, several streets away. I’m excited now, thinking of Min trudging up the hill toward me, our standing together hand in hand with the city in a web of light at our feet.
Her phone rings once, again. A man passes me, muttering under his breath. The street is pretty deserted. I shift my weight from one foot to the other, willing her to pick up.
On the third ring, somebody answers. I hear laughter, then Min’s voice. “Hello?” I can imagine her, happy, the bright, warm walls of her kitchen behind her.
“Hey. It’s me.”
“Hey, you.” Her voice is low, intimate. That private tone always thrills me. “What’s up?”
“I can see your neighborhood. I was hoping you’d come up and look at the fog with me, it’s amazing.”
“Mmm, I can’t. I’m not finished here.”
“I could call you back in a while.”
“No, this isn’t a good time. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”
“Can’t I call you later tonight?” I ask, annoyed that she’s putting me off.
“I don’t know if I’ll be here. I’ll call you tomorrow.” I’m trying very hard not to jump to the conclusion that she wants to make love with somebody else tonight. The suspicion is so automatic, even I’m getting tired of it. She said she isn’t sleeping with other women. I have to believe her. If I can trust her, she might be able to give me what I want.
“I love you,” I say, wanting to hear it back.
“Me too,” she answers and hangs up.
As soon as I hear the dial tone, I’m pissed. She can’t treat me like this anymore. I’m sick of being pushed aside when it’s convenient for her. I’ve had it with running to see her when she wants me and waiting around when she doesn’t. I start walking down toward the Mission, my breath coming in short bursts. I have the feeling everything would still be in shades of gray even if there were no fog. I march down the streets, zigzagging diagonally, homing in on Min’s building.
I slow down a couple of blocks away, out of breath and sweating inside my lined coat. The streets are crowded now. There seems to be a bar on every corner. The fog has cleared too, sweeping back up the hill where it came from. What do I want to say to her, now that I’m here? Maybe she’ll be glad to see me, and my fury will have nowhere to turn. Or maybe she has already left the apartment, and I’ll have wasted my energy coming down here. I could go to the women’s clubs she hangs out at and look for her there. Somebody whistles at me as I pass him on the street. I glare at him. I could call Min’s friends, see if she’s with one of them. Her building is in the middle of the next street. I try to stay focused, calm. Upstairs in the building I am passing, a party is going full blast, the rhythm of salsa drifting down from the windows. I don’t know what I want from Min right now, what I can demand. I stay on the other side of the street, approaching slowly, stuck somewhere between anger and embarrassment.
I look up at the second floor. She’s got the curtains pulled over her bedroom windows, but they are a light material. In the middle of the lit room, I can see a figure bending, straightening. Maybe Min is folding up her massage table now that her client has left. Adrenalin starts zipping around inside me again because I’m watching my lover up there, only a few dozen yards away. I always feel this rush of anticipation when I am about to see Min. I don’t think that will ever stop.
As I’m crossing the street, I see another figure come into her room and move toward the first. The two of them meld into one deformed shape. I stop and stare as it moves first to the left, then out of my sight to the right, where I know the bed is. I close my eyes. I’m afraid I might throw up. Then some tidal wave slams down inside me, and I am crushed beneath it and then rolled and dragged along with it, the roar of its fury in my ears. Deafened, I stumble into the street, half-aware of searching through the garbage by the curb. I find an empty beer bottle and bend down to pick it up. The headlights of a car blind me as I turn around, then the car slides past. Everything is moving slowly. I look up at the lighted windows. At my very center I am a thin, white-hot wire, vibrating and razor-sharp. I bring my arm back and then forward, hurling the bottle, and the roar in my ears sounds like a scream of outrage as the bottle shatters the glass of one of her windows and the curtain billows back into the room and then settles again, peaceful. Somebody comes to the other window to look out. She holds the curtain against her bare breasts. It’s Min. We stare at each other until I turn away. I think I hear her calling my name, but it’s faint, an echo of a sound, washed away by the rushing of the sea in my head.
I can’t stop crying. We haven’t talked to each other for almost two weeks. I leak onto the pizza my roommates had delivered, or as I stand in line waiting for an ATM. Whether I’m sitting in my room alone or out walking or on a crowded streetcar, the tears are always sudden. I feel like I’m going crazy. It’s worst lying awake at night, when the hours are the longest. I can’t stop thinking about Min, going over and over the details of every fight we ever had, revising them in my head, trying to make it all come out differently.
The temp agency fired me a week ago. At Crocker I couldn’t concentrate. Even stuff I already knew how to do flew out of my head as soon as I sat down at the computer. Then I didn’t show up at the bank at all one morning. I couldn’t even get out of bed to call in sick. I haven’t told anybody I lost my job except Sally and Denise. I can’t let my parents know. They’d go ballistic. I can’t even tell them why I’m so upset, because they never knew about Min and me in the first place.
I try to keep busy. On sunny days I take the N-Judah out to the ocean and count each of the times Min and I walked there, setting our footprints in the sand as the sun went down into the ocean or was hidden by clouds or shared the sky with the moon rising over the windmill in the park. I walk through the Arboretum, torturing myself with memories of picnics and naps on the grass with our heads resting in each other’s laps. Even the memories of our friendship are painful, because I can’t ever have it back. I’m afraid to go to the women’s clubs she took me to or anywhere near her house. On the streets sometimes in my neighborhood I think I see her. I start to follow, walking faster to catch up, calling out her name, but it’s never her. That’s when I feel my pathetic hope for even a glimpse of her, for the simple knowledge that she’s still somewhere out there, nearby. There might still be a chance. I never make it home before I start crying again.
It has rained for the past three days in a row, but I’ve gone out anyway with my umbrella, setting off in any direction except toward the Mission, letting the cogs of my brain spin while my legs carry me to every corner of the city. I won’t call her or go over to her house. She might refuse to speak to me. At the same time, I don’t want to see her. I finally accept that she didn’t want to share her life with me. She kept pulling herself away and going to other people. What that left between us would look to anybody else like friendship. Maybe that was enough for her. It’s worthless to me.
That’s not even it. I can’t forgive her for being willing to let me go.
One afternoon I wander around North Beach in the rain, buying fresh ravioli and stopping in bookstores and postcard shops. I’m soaking wet from the waist down and sneezing, afraid that I might be catching a cold but not really caring that much. Finally, hungry, I shake out my umbrella and go into a café with a long pastry counter and tiny marble-topped tables. It’s crowded, but I find a table in the back, near the bathroom. The café is overheated, its wide windows opaque with condensation. I strip off the layers (my jacket and sweater and sweatshirt), leaving on my t-shirt, piling them on the chair across from me. As I am waiting for somebody to come and take my order, I look around at the tourist families and the writers scribbling in their notebooks and the carefully made-up women sitting with the grayer, older men they may be married to, and I wonder what I’m doing here. Not just here in this café but in San Francisco, where in eight months I have not made a dent. Then a waiter comes, and I order cappuccino and a slice of cake called chocolate raspberry decadence, and he leaves me alone again with myself.
I don’t know if I will ever talk to Min again. I don’t know if I will ever see her. It seems to me most likely we will let this two-week silence lengthen into months, and then into years, until we have the awkward, half-ashamed sense that something we should have figured out how to finish has instead been ended for us. I know that I’m capable of letting this happen. Already our not speaking has taken on a life of its own. I am small in comparison and much less sure of myself. I try to imagine my life here without Min in it, but it is much too painful to think about for more than a second or two. The best I can do is think of an alternate life, one at graduate school or in another city. There, as I did at Kenyon, I might be able to reinvent myself.
The waiter brings my order. I plow through the cake, afraid of tasting it because enjoying its excessive flavors would remind me of Min. Even so, I remember her sitting across from me at a Dairy Queen in Salt Lake City last summer, offering me hot fudge and a maraschino cherry from her spoon. The muscles in my thighs clench, and I cover my face with my hand and try as hard as I can not to cry. The summer seems so long ago, out of reach. How did this chasm open up, which neither of us will cross? I know she blames me. She says I’m too dependent on her, too demanding. I’m starting to think she’s right. I don’t know how to be myself without her.
Maybe, years from now, I could manage to forget her, or at least put somebody else in the place she holds in my heart. But I know this is impossible. She has been too great a presence for too many years. She has left her indelible mark. She has changed me in irreversible ways. If I ever love anybody else, it will be with the bittersweet awareness that everything I know about loving I learned from Min. She will always have her own corner inside me, whether or not I come to remember her with regret or affection or anger or a vague nostalgia.
Wishing I could pull off my wet sneakers and socks and dry my feet by the radiator along the wall, I push the empty plate away and take a sip of my cappuccino. Something has to shift, because I can’t go on living like this. I consider my options. There aren’t many that I can see. Sneezing, I pull my sweatshirt and sweater back on. The cappuccino has gotten cold in its cup. It’s mostly froth anyway. I leave money on the table, grab my jacket and dripping umbrella, and walk back out into the rain. As I trudge up another hill, a cable car goes clacking past, its bell ringing. I watch it pass me, only half full. In the back, a man sitting with two children takes a picture of the tip of the TransAmerica Pyramid. I always felt like a tourist in this city. Min is the one who lives here.
I find a bus and then wait a long time for another bus to take me back to the Haight. Sitting next to the window, I watch the rain slide down the glass in long streaks and listen to the exhausted hissing of the bus’s windshield wipers. It’s almost dark by the time I get off, stepping down into a large puddle on the street. It’s windier here, but the rain is starting to ease. I don’t bother opening my umbrella. I glance inside the Achilles Heel, a bar my ex-boyfriend Al took me to when I turned eighteen. A few couples are in there now. I wonder what Al is up to these days. I turn off Haight. I still have to climb about five blocks uphill. By the time I reach my building and take out my keys to open the wrought-iron security gate, I have made a decision. I feel relieved, almost hopeful. There is something I can do. I will move to Washington, DC, where my friend Nancy lives and has been urging me to come since graduation.
Three days later, I’m lying in bed with the flu feeling very sorry for myself. Everything aches, and my head feels stuffed full of wet cotton. There are Kleenexes all over the floor. Sally and Denise were sweet this morning, bringing me herbal tea and toast with jam before they left. But I wasn’t hungry. I’ve spent the day sleeping on and off, half-waking from weird dreams to roll over, looking for a more comfortable position, before I drop off again.
Now it’s early evening and already dark out. I’m trying to decide whether to get out of bed and look in the kitchen for something to eat when the doorbell rings, a long, insistent buzz. My first thought is that it’s Min. I can’t help hoping. I throw off the covers, pull my bathrobe over my nightgown, and kneel on the floor to reach for my slippers under the bed. The bell rings again as I go out the apartment door, remembering to leave it unlocked behind me. I realize I must be feeling a little better if I’m able to pay attention to those kinds of details.
At the bottom of the stairs, I can see Min looking up at me from the street through the bars of the gate. Her face is open, questioning. I walk through the lobby toward her, trying to control my facial muscles. I don’t even know myself if I want to laugh or cry or yell at her to go away. I really believed I would never see her again. Now that she is here in front of me, the moment seems unreal.
I open the heavy front door and stand there, looking down at her. Neither of us seems to know what to say.
“Can I talk to you?” she asks at last.
I feel a heaviness inside me, which I recognize as dread. I think I know why she is here, and I wish she had just stayed away. I don’t want to go through the motions of breaking up. The processing, the wishing each other well, the leave-taking. Min likes to know she has done the right thing. She hates feeling guilty. I don’t want everything to be tied up neatly for her, with no loose ends. But I nod. I prop the door open with a wedge of wood lying by the wall and come down the steps. Turning the knob and pushing open the gate, I say, “Let’s sit in here.” I don’t want her coming up to my room. She nods. She climbs the steps, and I let the gate clang shut.
We sit side by side on the cold stone steps. She touches the material of my bathrobe without creating any pressure against my leg. “Are you going to sleep early tonight?” she asks.
“I’m sick,” I say. I can’t quite manage to look at her fully. Two women walk by and peer at us. I pull my nightgown further down over my legs.
“Are you taking echinacea and goldenseal?”
“No.”
“I can recommend a good acupuncturist if you want.”
“Why did you come over?” My voice sounds raspy. I try to clear my clotted throat.
She doesn’t answer for a long time. I’m afraid that whatever she says, I won’t believe it. Either that or it will hurt too much.
I say, “Min, I’m moving to DC.” I hadn’t meant to tell her, but I don’t know how else to get to the point. Suddenly her face seems very close to mine. I can feel heat emanating from her body, but that might be my own fever.
“You are?” I see her literally swallow, a bulge in her throat moving up and then down, disappearing. I’ve always thought it was just an expression. “When are you leaving?” she asks.
I shrug. “As soon as I get better. By the end of the month.”
Nancy is thrilled and promises I can stay with her as long as I need to. She says she wants to fix me up with a couple of guys she thinks I’d really like, but I’ve told her I don’t want to start dating anyone right away. My parents think my decision is a great idea too. My father says there are terrific job opportunities in DC. All I want is to get out, start over.
Min nods, squinting. “So, you’re practically gone. I guess it’s pretty obvious why you’d want to leave.”
I stare at her. “God, you are so presumptuous.”
She looks down. “I don’t mean to be. I was trying to say I respect your decision.”
I can’t believe we are having this conversation. It really is true, she’s willing to let me go. For her, it’s the easiest thing to do. I look down at my hands, one clasped inside the other. I don’t want her to know I’m getting tearful. She’s seen too much of that.
Min starts to speak, stops, is silent again. A guy from the building appears on the street in front of us, unlocking the gate. “Hi,” he says, skirting around us as he climbs the stairs. Neither of us answers him.
“I wanted to tell you I miss you,” Min says. I close my eyes as my heart squeezes tight. I wait for her to go on. “I’ve done very little these last couple of weeks but think of you, you know. No, I guess you wouldn’t know.” She laughs a little, nervously. Then she swallows again. I can hear it this time. “I’ve been a mess. Margo finally came over to yell at me. She made me step back and get a little perspective. You were right, what you said that night about my being afraid of losing you if we got too close. It’s true. Of course understanding it doesn’t make it go away.”
I smile in spite of myself. My eyes are still closed. I am holding my breath.
She goes on, “I realized something else. There are consequences to loving someone, to her loving you. I mean responsibility, I think. Margo helped me see that it wasn’t fair of me to tell you that I wanted to be with you and at the same time that I wanted to be able to see other women.”
I am so grateful to be hearing this at last. At the same time, a small voice inside me flares up, accusingly. (That’s what I was telling you all along.) I reach into the pocket of my bathrobe and take out a tissue. I blow my stuffed-up nose into it.
I say, “Margo had to tell you what you wanted?”
“I didn’t know what I wanted, Laura. I’m still not positive. I’ve always trusted my feelings in the moment to guide me. I’m impulsive. That’s not something I feel I need to apologize for.” I look at her, then away. I’m still waiting. Then I feel ashamed of myself. I’m acting like I deserve her apology. When did I stop receiving her love as a gift?
Min says, “What I realize is that I have to make a decision one way or the other. To commit or to get out. Something that takes you into consideration too. Otherwise you’ll do something like move to Washington.”
She hasn’t said what her decision is, and her missing me isn’t enough for me to jump to a conclusion. I turn, shifting my whole body toward her. I feel calm. In a strange way, it doesn’t matter what happens now.
“Laura,” Min says abruptly, and I can tell that she’s holding herself back from touching me, which would be the easy answer, the one she has always used. “I really miss you. I don’t want you to move to Washington. I want you to stay here. With me.”
I have no immediate response, for her or for myself. A lot has happened between us, maybe more than we know what to do with. She’s not the only one who’s scared.
I reach out and cover her hand that is lying in a loose fist on her leg with my own hand. “Do you remember when I met you the first day of fifth grade and we played Scissors, Paper, Stone?”
“Yeah, you hit me!”
“I didn’t know any better. Those were the rules I’d learned.”
Sitting with her now on the steps of my building, I hold her fist firmly, paper covering stone. Then I slide my fingers lightly over her knuckles, her fingers, feeling the smoothness of the skin and the shape of the bones underneath. It’s hard, but I hold her gaze as my hand moves along hers. Her fingers open and spread, and mine slip along their sides. I touch her very lightly. Now I couldn’t look away from her eyes if I tried. Then she turns her hand over, unhurriedly, never losing contact with mine. We rub our palms together, lightly. My fingers slide between hers. We clasp hands. I want to spend the rest of my life memorizing her face, knowing she could someday turn away.
Then I close my eyes and sneeze, and sneeze again.
“It’s chilly out here,” Min says. “You should be in bed.” We let our hands pull apart, and we stand up. I brush off the back of my bathrobe. I am giddy, though I have no idea how much is exhilaration and how much is being sick. When I run up the last steps to the door and turn around, Min is standing where I left her.
“Aren’t you coming up?” I ask, afraid I have misunderstood everything.
“Wait,” she says. “I want to know something. If I hadn’t come over and you had moved to Washington, would you at least have said goodbye?”
I panic, not sure what to tell her. Her slight smile drains away. She can see from my face what the answer is.
“Well,” she says, bounding up the steps and putting her hand on my back. “That was close.”
I push open the door, kicking the wedge out of the way. We go inside.