We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?

Falling in love is an obsession driven in part by anger. That’s what gives it its urgency. It’s an endorphin rush, the kind that helps mothers lift runaway two-ton trucks off their helpless babies. It’s why we’re here, loving the wrong people over and over and over.

I’m a lesbian activist. Part of my job is to fall in love, over and over and over. Part of my job is to be seen happily communicating, cohabitating, being a woman-loving-woman in the face of danger as well as boredom. Part of my job is to role model, preserving just enough of the threatening stereotypes to remain fashionably on the edge, and yet defying the stereotypes that keep some of us from being invited to our lovers’ family homes for the holidays.

I work for a lesbian and gay newspaper, one of those by-the-skin-of-our-asses enterprises that amazes and embarrasses us weekly. I write a political column—political in the sense of elections, not in terms of creating the matriarchy. I make up for it later, not by volunteering at a women’s shelter or lobbying for women-only space but by wearing skirts and lipstick and sometimes, in summer, shaved legs. Women aren’t so different from any other gender: we like thighs and sighs as much as anyone. I know.

Personally, I like lovers with tempers, women who know that when a junkie is being beaten up by her pimp on the corner of Leland and Magnolia, curled up like a fetus in the middle of the intersection while he repeatedly kicks her, the right thing to do is not go to the fire station down the block and tell the uniformed guys relaxing on lawn chairs, but to get out there and hurl ourselves at the prick who would dare do something so vicious.

I’m thirty-four years old. I come from a good Puerto Rican family which actually stayed together. My father never beat me. I’ve never been raped. I had an abortion at sixteen that only my mother knows about and a baby boy at seventeen whom I gave up for adoption. I have no money, never have, probably never will. All of this is important.

I’m lying out on a boat with my lover, the early morning sun still rising and glimmering over Lake Michigan. The boat, a tall and elegant sailboat named Artemis, is owned by two white women who work in real estate and dream about sailing to Greece. My lover, who’s also white, improbably twenty-two, and an art student, resents their innocence. I know this from the look she gives me as she tosses off one-liners that go way over their heads. The sun, still waxing, gives me a headache.

When I go down to the cabin to get some aspirin and refresh my drink—pulpy tomato juice that sticks to my tongue and makes me feel thick—my lover follows. She pushes me flat against the wall so I have to turn my head in order to avoid crushing my nose. She traps me there with her knees pinning the backs of my knees, expertly moving both of her hands under my shirt then down into my shorts, where she presses her thumbs so hard I’m sure she leaves bruises. She moves her left hand down; I’m so wet so quickly she just slides in. Her right hand snakes up under my top, grazing my breasts with her nails, and emerges from my collar. She puts her fingers in my mouth, not delicately but as if she were going to extract a tooth. She makes no sound.

Later, my lover decides to charm our hosts by telling them stories about life in poverty. She talks with a mix of pathos and satire, the ends of her sentences like prickly little daggers. I feel them under my skin and watch our hosts fidgeting in their chairs. I’m never sure what to say at these moments. I know my lover wants support and solidarity; she wants me to side with her—whatever that means—against the easy privilege of sailing on Lake Michigan. She wants our hosts, and me, to feel just a little miserable, but I can’t work it up. Instead, I watch them watching her, knowing that they see the chip on her shoulder as well as her luminous white skin and the sharp outline of her clavicles. They look knowingly at each other and laugh, but not at her. They keep enough distance to let her keep her dignity. I’m grateful to all of them. I love her more than ever.

When we get in bed that night, her body is musty and cold. I run my hands on her belly, her shoulders, her long arms. I listen for the rhythm of her breathing. Then her head falls in the space between my chin and chest, her coarse hair lightly scratching my skin. Suddenly, she kisses me with her eyes wide open, almost desperate. And I know immediately: this will not—cannot—last.

I go to counseling on Mondays. Sometimes it’s an individual session, sometimes it’s with my ex-lover, a woman I was with for seven years. She’s an actor with a neofuturist group in town, so she’s never at a loss for drama or a brand new perspective. We’re good lesbians: we’ve been painfully breaking up for two years. These days I grovel at our joint sessions, having lost all sense of possibilities. Even the therapist turns away, perhaps embarrassed or disgusted, and tells me to please stop.

The worst part of this is that I don’t want to go back to my ex-lover. In fact, I don’t grovel for love or attention but for explanation. I need to know why things happened, why they had to fall apart the way they did. Before I can go on, I need to understand. I’m getting desperate because I’m fast running out of time: someone, soon, is going to find out about this miserable existence; someone, soon, is going to understand what a lousy role model I really am.

Once, back when we were together, my ex-lover and I hosted my parents for dinner. My father, after too many glasses of wine, passed out on the couch. His snoring was deafening. His cheeks puffed up then shrunk as the noise came blowing out of him. We watched, my then lover, my mother, and me, as our dog licked my father’s hand dangling limp off the couch, my father so deadened by the alcohol that he never knew. I thought he was disgusting to have drunk himself into oblivion. But my mother, small and refined, a quiet little bird to his rhinoceros, wouldn’t have any of my contempt. “When I think of myself as an old woman, the only person I can picture rocking next to me on the porch is your father,” she told us.

My ex-lover and I laughed, in part amused, in part scornful, and in part terrified. We never said so aloud, but we both knew: we never saw ourselves together, wrinkled with age, on a porch or anywhere else.

In retrospect, I realize we were ashamed because we were caught in the trap of believing in the future—in believing we’d last long enough to have one. This hope, as evidenced by everyone I know, is false. Even my mother, who has visions, sees an imaginary future on that porch, not a real one. The truth is, she and my father are going to wind up living in my brother’s basement, converted into an apartment for their modest use, in a desolated old factory town just south of the city. There won’t be a porch or anything to look out at. The reward of staying together so long will be just that, a shared claustrophobia.

Personally, I’d prefer to evolve beyond the concept of lovers, of couples, of love. The future is moot then; the future has no choice but to be now. It strikes me as the most revolutionary lesbian-feminist thing to do. Forget hunger, equality, environmentally correct garbage bags; let’s work to eliminate heartbreak instead. Love, coupledom, the right person—they’re as anachronistic and elusive as Puerto Rican independence: everybody’s for it, but no one’s quite sure what it means or how to get it.

“Miss,” the voice whispers to me on the train. I don’t bother to look up. It could be anybody, and I’m not in any mood for polite conversation with someone who loved my last column, or for equally polite defenses against someone who hated it. I ignore the voice. Faces peer back from the train windows, reflections superimposed over the shadows rushing by.

I’m in a hurry, on deadline with this week’s column in my backpack. This one’s a real killer: I happened to have overheard an obnoxious AIDS administrator—who’s HIV negative—respond to the shenanigans of a local AIDS activist—who’s HIV positive—by saying, “Why doesn’t he just die already?” I’ve got notes. I’ve got witnesses. Deadlines don’t usually mean anything to me (especially if I know my editor’s going to lap up my column), but I’m in a hurry today because it’s payday at the newspaper. That means it’s imperative that I be on time. If I’m not, I won’t get my check right away. And if I’m not one of the first to dash to the bank with it, there’s always a chance I won’t be able to cash it. I can’t make the train go any faster, so I watch paper cups, scraps of paper and newsprint fly up, like ghosts, as the train thrashes on, its cargo pungent with summer sweat.

The train rattles on through the tunnel, tossing the passengers this way then that. The woman sitting next to me on the aisle seat is big and pink. She rolls forward with the train’s movement, then to the side. Sweat runs down her temples and chin, disappearing into a roll of flesh on her neck. Her shoulder bumps up against me, but I don’t move. She has no clue who I am.

“Miss,” the voice says again. The accent’s more pronounced now, as is its urgency. I stare up at the man who has suddenly appeared above my reflection in the train window. He’s brown-skinned and handsome in an absent-minded sort of way. His nose is straight, almost Roman. I consider that he might be Asian Indian or Pakistani. Maybe an exchange student or a visiting professor needing directions. Then I notice he’s holding out a piece of paper.

I turn my head, my eyes just catching his before they drop to the paper he holds between perfectly manicured fingers. I’m not actually looking at him, but I know that he’s nodding, encouraging me to take the paper.

The woman sitting next to me stands to leave and gives her seat to a young white man with a tie and a briefcase. When I look up again, the Asian man’s gone. I hold onto the paper and scan the shifting masses, but I can’t find him. The train stops, jostling the passengers. The doors fly open and lines of identically dressed white men with ties and briefcases empty out. The guy next to me stays put, eyes closed. His mouth’s slightly agape, but his neck’s still straight. I’m tempted to wake him, just to rattle him, but instead I unfold the paper in my lap, half expecting an advertisement for a pizza parlor or escort service.

“Oh my god, he ate it,” shrieks my twenty-two-year-old girlfriend as she searches the refrigerator. She leans on the door and laughs. “Can you believe it?” Her red hair stands on end, shocking and brilliant.

“Well, it was a perfectly innocent looking bowl of guacamole,” I say. “Why wouldn’t he eat it if he was hungry?” I’m sitting at the kitchen table, which is sticky from old spilled coffee.

“Should I tell him? Is there an ethical way to approach this?” she rattles on, amused and nervous. I shrug, peeling off some of the coffee with my neon red fingernail. She lets the refrigerator door close. “What is wrong with you? We just found out my roomie ate a bowl of guacamole seasoned with girl cum, and you’re all gloom. Don’t you think it’s funny?”

She runs her hand through my hair and down the back of my neck. I want her to stop immediately. I want to have no memory—none whatsoever—of last night, of how we started by saying we’d just have a snack in bed, and then, without thinking about it, started offering each other bits and pieces of soft bread with that delicious guacamole, then just our fingers dripping with the stuff. Then there was that moment when she took my hand and pushed it gently down between her legs, and the guacamole smeared against the mauve of her skin, and I was fascinated by the colors and the mix of smells. I needed no encouragement to lower my head. But all I did was look, and feel, and inhale. I never did enter her with my fingers or tongue. I never did make love to her in any recognizable way. Right now I can’t think of a single reason why we ever put that guacamole back in the refrigerator.

She looks at it. “It’s an advertisement for a Meg Christian album, only he’s about twenty years too late,” she says. She gives me back the note and makes herself busy by clearing the counter of the dirty dishes which have accumulated in the past week.

“He was really deliberate,” I tell her. “It wasn’t like he was just handing out little pieces of paper to everybody. He came right to me and gave it to me like it was a secret message from a tribal chieftain or something.”

She lets the hot water run in the sink, pulls the bowl of leftover guacamole from the refrigerator, and drops it on top of the dishes. Steam rises. “This is the city. Weird things happen all the time,” she says. “It’s not like there has to be a logical explanation for any of it. Most of the time, you know, there isn’t.”

I’m on another deadline—but without a check as reward—when I hear somebody calling my name. I’ve been taking a lot of heat lately for the column on the obnoxious AIDS administrator, and I really can’t deal with one more person telling me I shouldn’t be so hard on the guy—he’s done so much for the community, and anybody can slip up once—so I try to blend in with the crowd and pretend I don’t hear anything. This is particularly hard because, besides the tonnage in my backpack, I’m carrying a twenty-pound bag of special diet cat food that I just bought at the specialty pet store. I’m in the Dearborn-to-State train tunnel at rush hour. All the musicians who normally play here are pressed against the white walls by the commuter crunch. They look flat, wet, and exhausted. Everything smells of sweat. I can’t see a thing, can’t focus on a single face or outline. There are just too many people. The tunnel’s suffocating.

“Hey, soy yo,” I hear behind me and turn to see Miguel Colorado, a tall, robust-looking painter who lives in my neighborhood. His face is as flat and shiny as pie crust, his nostrils like slits for air. He wraps his fingers around my upper arm and pulls me away from the current. “Are you okay?”

“You looked pale, like you were going to pass out,” he says. His fingers, damp and calloused, are still around my arm. Standing only inches from him, I can smell his body—an acidic, almost bitter odor. I shift my backpack a little then move the cat food from one hip to the other. Finally, he drops his fingers from around my arm.

“Look what I bought,” he says, pulling up a yellow plastic bag. From it he yanks a carefully wrapped ceramic hand, its five fingers spread apart against an elaborate backdrop. To either side of each finger, there’s a small icon or deity, all garishly painted in primary colors. I recognize it right away as the siete potencias, the pantheon of gods revered in santeria. But these icons don’t look African; instead, they’re stereotypically Native American, with feathers and tomahawks.

He laughs, too, still holding his prize. “Isn’t it, though?” he asks, putting it back in the bag. “I found it at El Talisman, that little place on Lawrence. I wasn’t really looking for anything, you know, but I just about fell over when I saw a siete potencias with Indians. I mean, Indians!”

“What are you going to do with it? I mean, you’re not actually going to set it somewhere in your house, are you?” I ask, getting some breathing room as the traffic in the tunnel eases. A couple of people nod at me as they go by, like they know me, but I ignore them. I really can’t take anymore feedback on my column.

“Well, I was thinking of bringing it to my Indian support group, but I don’t know yet,” he says. “I just started going to it, you know, and I don’t really know everybody that well yet. I don’t want them to think I’m making fun of them or anything. I just thought it was funny.”

He shrugs his shoulders, trying to keep it light, but I can see he’s serious and even embarrassed now. “Well, I’m both, really,” he says. “I mean, I’m too indio to be Mexican, and too Spanish to be Indian. I’m fucked, that’s what I am. I’m completely fucked up.”

I’m trying to muster some sympathy here. I want to put his hand back on my arm, to tell him he’s brave for admitting his confusion, for taking this journey. I’m juggling my backpack and the giant bag of diet cat food when I look up and see the Asian man, with his perfect Roman nose, standing across the tunnel and staring at us.

My twenty-two-year-old girlfriend and I are lying on my futon. My cat, who was napping on the bed until we came in, is now perched on the window sill. When my lover and I make love during the day, we usually do it at my house. I’m busy with my column and really can’t afford the forty minutes on the train to get to her house. Besides, the incident with the guacamole has really made us nervous about her roommate. He didn’t say anything, but it just feels weird, that’s all.

There is a problem, however. We haven’t talked about it, but it’s fairly clear to me that I’m not really interested anymore. It’s not that she doesn’t turn me on—she does—it’s just that I don’t want her to touch me. And I don’t really want to touch her. So now, instead of having sex in the usual way, we just jerk off together.

Since we’re both right-handed, I try to lie on the right side. That way, by putting my arm around her, I can keep her from going any further than I want. I don’t care if she kisses my breasts or strokes me. But I’m keenly aware that if our positions were reversed, it’d be very obvious I could do without her. I’m sure I wouldn’t kiss her breasts or stroke her, and that would probably force us to talk.

Not that she’s silent during sex. She’s not. She has this remarkable ability to let go, usually in escalating moans. By the time she reaches orgasm, the moans have become full-blown screams. It really is amazing. In all my years of sexual activity, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

I admit I envy that release and exhaustion. Although I can come—and come hard, I might add—the experience is often frustrating. My girlfriend, it seems, can reach a crescendo and explode, but me, I just stay there, coming eternally, one time after another, over and over. I realize it sounds enviable, but eventually it just feels suffocating, with my shoulders aching, my fingers splayed and stiff (I sometimes have to use my other hand to unlock them), and this sense that I’ve been skinned alive.

Recently, as if to bring me out of my coming coma (I know she knows it’s not about her), my girlfriend’s taken to screaming my name. It startled me at first because she never did that when I used to actually make love to her. My cat, who usually just watches from the window sill when there’s sex going on, now comes running, tossing her head, bumping her wet nose against my girlfriend’s burning brow.

The first is that my editor’s incensed because I just lost her an ad account. It seems that the obnoxious AIDS administrator whom I wrote about in last week’s column—the one who wanted the street activist dead—is actually part-owner of The Stallion, one of the sleaziest pick-up bars in town and, until now, one of the paper’s steadiest ad clients. Neither my editor nor I knew about this when I brought in the column; it would have made no difference to me, but apparently it would have to her.

“Do you realize this man pays your salary with his ads?” my editor screams. She’s a bulldagger who drives a Lincoln Continental sporting a license plate which reads, “WMN PWR.” Right now she’s standing over me, waving my check in the air, knowing that as long as it’s flapping up there, I’m going to go along with her like a trained seal.

The second problem is that my ex-lover is on the phone, telling me she’s reconciled herself to not being able to tell me exactly why things happened and that perhaps I should consider accepting this as a resolution to our eternal codependency. She wants to stop going to couple counseling.

“We don’t have to know everything, do we?” she asks. “You see, I barely remember what happened anymore. You’d have to put me under hypnosis to get the details out of me, and even then I don’t know if I could make them make sense.”

The third problem is that the twenty-two-year-old is on the other line, asking me if we can have dinner next Monday (which, as she well knows, conflicts with my Monday counseling appointments—a deliberate power play on her part, I assume). She says it’s our one-year anniversary. She wants to go to this incredibly expensive Italian restaurant that she, on her puny little art student work-study check, can’t afford. I am not dazed by what she expects me to spend—after all, I’m the one with the job and the notoriety—but somehow this thing between us has gotten away from me. How the hell did a year go by already?

“Or maybe,” she says. “We should just break up. I mean, relationships never last. I don’t know any that do. We’re going to break up sooner or later, and the longer we stay in it, the harder it’s going to be, the more hurt we’re going to be. Maybe we should just call it quits and celebrate the rational side of ourselves. We could toast to a new beginning as friends.”

The train is out of control, swinging drastically on the elevated tracks. I’m trying to hold onto the bar above my head, but I’m convinced that every time the car takes a curve, I’m going to throw up. Even though it’s the middle of the day, we’re squeezed together in this furnace on wheels. There are strangers’ faces within inches of my face, strangers’ thighs vibrating next to my thighs. I close my eyes, trying to still the rumble in my stomach, until I’m sure I can feel someone’s breathing on my breast. But when I open my eyes, there’s no one there, just the same sweaty faces all around me. I need some air.

“Excuse me,” I say, trying to make my way to the space between the cars. I reach out and grab things, but I don’t always know what. I’m drenched, rivulets running down from my armpits. I feel the bodies shifting around me, hesitantly making a way. I can feel their hands passing me around as if I were a dirty postcard at a pervert’s party. For a moment it feels reassuring—I know I’m not going to fall with all this soft support—but in an instant I’m embarrassed and disgusted and hope no one’s recognized me.

“Jesus fucking Christ, let me out,” I say to someone—a conductor maybe, or perhaps a teenager carrying a pale blue beach bag. I don’t know. They all look at me blankly. All that happens is that the train takes another manic turn and tosses me against a window, my face smeared against the glass. I hold my jaw because it hurts, but no one, not even the little Eastern European widow standing next to me, says anything.

I manage anyway to get my hands on the door handle, to wiggle it a little so that for one glorious instant I can hear the rush of air and the crazy clattering of metal between the cars. Then the door slams shut again, and I have to pull hard, using my legs against the door frame to pry it open. When I get outside, holding precariously to the link chain running from car to car, it feels like a shrieking wind tunnel. My hair is swept back hard, and I feel sand and dirt hitting my face like tiny needles. All I can think is that I want to hold my heart—that whimpering beast in my chest—but I don’t dare let go of the little link chain.

When the train stops, I breathe in and out like a cardiac patient. I can’t see because my hair has fallen in front of my face in clumps. But I don’t move. My hands are forged around the chain that runs from car to car, and no matter what I tell myself, I can’t peel my fingers from it. I can’t seem to generate commands from my brain to my limbs.

“What the fuck do you want from me?” I whisper, furious. My hands—which are suddenly barely recognizable as my own—leave the link chain and open, each finger aimed at him like some terrible claw. He’s surprised, but he catches my wrists, and we begin to struggle, bouncing each other off the link chain.

“Miss,” he says in a panic, but his voice gets lost in the noise. The train starts to pull out of the station, and we’re trapped between cars. I see him opening his mouth to say something, but I can’t hear him. The train bangs one car against the other, the rails hiss beneath us, and all around the wind is howling.

We wrestle like this until we reach the next stop—the last before the train dives underground to Clark and Division. As soon as we come to a halt at the station, the man, terrified, jumps over the link chain, losing a shoe as he catches the edge of the platform. “You bitch,” he shouts, disappearing into the train station. His face is twisted and pained. “I thought you knew!” he screams at me, tears running down his cheeks. I’m trying to figure out how he got away from me so quickly and what the hell’s going on when I feel the train door behind me pop open.

“Hey, are you okay?” asks a voice. I turn around and see a tall, pink-cheeked public transit policeman. “What happened?” he asks, leading me gently inside the car. “Are you okay? What happened?” he asks over and over.

I sit down and without explanation immediately start crying. The transit cop sits next to me, his meaty arm around my shoulders. When I go to wipe my nose with my hand, I realize I’m still holding the Asian man’s mysterious white paper.

In an aquamarine CTA office, fresh off the train, I sit and drink water from a Styrofoam cup. When I try to explain the situation to the transit police officer and the official Chicago cop sent to take my report, I fully expect them to be assholes, to dismiss me as some self-important dyke radical with a wacko sense of the world. As I look at the three officials in front of me—the transit cop, the real cop, and a woman I think is some kind of sex assault counselor—I’m ready to tell them to go fuck themselves. All I can think of, though, is the twenty-two-year-old, waiting for me outside my apartment. I can’t even call her.

“Him?” I say, remembering the note in my hand. “No, I don’t know him. But I see him all the time. He keeps giving me notes.” I hand the white paper, still folded, to her. The official Chicago police officer takes it from her and unfolds it very carefully, as if he were defusing a bomb. The beefy transit cop looks over his shoulder, awed. Then the three of them read the note together, their eyes darting from left to right.

He grins, the grin pushing his fat cheeks up so that they almost make his eyes close. “God, I’m so glad to meet you,” he says, offering me his hand. “I read your column all the time.”

“Dear Maria, I read your column every week because I know you know what’s it like to be gay and a minority. Very few people understand that when we, who are gay and a minority, enter the gay community we are really exchanging one series of expectations for another, one set of stereotypes for another. The worst part is that the gay community doesn’t really accept us if we’re a minority, but because we want so much to prove to everybody that we made the right decision, we don’t always tell the truth. I’m glad you’re not like that. Thanks for representing us so well. Your faithful reader, Rajeesh.”

“Camila, I need to ask you a favor,” I say. I’m standing on the L platform, waiting for a Howard train and talking on a public phone to my ex-girlfriend. I have an unspoiled view of the back porches of a half dozen townhouses, all spilling over with piles of newspapers for recycling, Weber grills, and potted plants. Everything looks cozy, settled. There’s not another soul at this train station.

“Listen, Maria, I want to talk to you, but I have rehearsals in twenty minutes,” Camila says. “Can we continue this later? I mean, before Monday, because I wasn’t kidding, I really want to stop couple counseling.”

I tell her everything in an instant: that I couldn’t care less about couple counseling at this point, that Sally’s waiting for me in front of my building, our whole relationship up in the air, that I’m running really late because I was nearly assaulted on the train, and that I can’t find Sally anywhere.

“I just tried her house,” I say. “I was hoping she was still hanging around—although I can’t imagine it because it’s been forty minutes—and I’m kind of freaked out, and I was wondering—I mean, Camila, you’re only a block from my apartment—if you could—please!—just go down there and see if she’s still there and tell her I’m on my way, really, and explain what happened.”

Camila, to whom I’ve been confiding all of my ambivalence about Sally, sighs. “I thought you weren’t that interested in her anymore,” she says. “It sounds like if she’s mad and wants to break it off, you’re getting what you’ve wanted all along.”

“Look, that’s not what I want,” I say, suddenly adamant. In the distance I see the blinking lights of a train headed toward the station. The rest of its body is blurry, a mirage in this terrible heat.

She’s enjoying this more than she should, but I’m at her mercy, so I let it all go. I tell her the train’s nearing, and soon I’ll be headed home where, with her help, I’ll hopefully find Sally, all arms and legs like a tangle of Pick-up Sticks, sitting on my step pouting and angry but, yes, forgiving—forgiving of me.

I stop and try to form the picture—Sally and me rocking on a rustic old porch in some fantasy future—but all I can see is an image of Sally on the train, wearing an engineer’s cap and waving at me through a mist. I’m waving back, but I’m choked up and scared. Is the train going to stop? Is she going to jump off? Am I supposed to hop on? And what if I miss?

“Sally passed the test, didn’t she?” Camila asks again, but she’s not laughing now. There’s something almost tender about her tone, something that tells me she’s going to find Sally no matter where she is, and tell her where I’ve been and why, and all that she knows to be true about how I feel.

“Listen, Camila, I love you,” I tell her as the train pulls up. It’s one of the newer ones, with less of a rattle and more of a hiss, but I can’t hear anything at all. I hang up the phone and climb into an empty car, where it’s cool with air conditioning, and the metal on the bars offer my reflection back to me, long and carnival-like.

I throw myself in a seat, lean my head back, and close my eyes. I try and I try, but I can’t picture Sally much older than twenty-two, not even at thirty-four, and I think, there is no right person, we will all love the wrong people, over and over and over. Then, as the train yanks itself around a corner, I suddenly see us—me all gray, her with her red hair white-streaked, her arms sinewy under rice paper skin, straddling my rocker with her long legs, telling me I’m not going anywhere.