When I got the invitation to Diana’s wedding—elegantly embossed, archaically formal (the ceremony, it stated, would take place at “twelve-thirty o’clock”)—the first thing I did was the TV Guide crossword puzzle. I was not so much surprised by Diana getting married as I was by her inviting me. What, I wondered, would motivate a person like Diana to ask her former lover, a woman she had lived with for a year and a month and whose heart she had suddenly and callously broken, to a celebration of her union with a man? It seems to me that that is asking for trouble.
I decided to call Leonore, who had been a close friend of Diana’s and mine during the days when we were together, and who always seemed to have answers. “Leonore, Diana’s getting married,” I said when she picked up the phone.
“If you ask me,” Leonore said, “she’s wanted a man since day one. Remember that gay guy she tried to make it with? He said he wanted to change, have kids and all?” She paused ominously. “It’s not him, is it?”
I looked at the invitation. “Mark Charles Cadwallader,” I said.
“Well, for his sake,” Leonore said, “I only hope he knows what he’s getting into. As for Miss Diana, her doings are of no interest to me.”
“But, Leonore,” I said, “the question is: Should I go to the wedding?” imagining myself, suddenly, in my red T-shirt that said BABY BUTCH (a present from Diana), reintroducing myself to her thin, severe, long-necked mother, Marjorie Winters.
“I think that would depend on the food,” Leonore said.
After I hung up, I poured myself some coffee and propped the invitation in front of me to look at. For the first few seconds it hadn’t even clicked who was getting married. I had read: “Mr. and Mrs. Humphrey Winters cordially invite you to celebrate the wedding of their daughter, Diana Helaine,” and thought: Who is Diana Helaine? Then it hit me, because for the whole year and a month, Diana had refused to tell me what her middle initial stood for—positively refused, she said, out of embarrassment, while I tried to imagine what horrors could lie behind that “H”—Hildegarde? Hester? Hulga? She was coyly, irritatingly insistent about not letting the secret out, like certain girls who would have nothing to do with me in eighth grade. Now she was making public to the world what she insisted on hiding from me, and it made perfect sense. Diana Helaine, not a different person, is getting married, I thought, and it was true, the fact in and of itself didn’t surprise me. During the year and a month, combing the ghost of her once knee-length hair, I couldn’t count how many times she’d said, very off-the-cuff, “You know, Ellen, sometimes I think this lesbian life is for the birds. Maybe I should just give it up, get married, and have two point four babies.” I’d smile and say, “If you do that, Diana, you can count on my coming to the wedding with a shotgun and shooting myself there in front of everybody.” To which, still strumming her hair like a guitar and staring into the mirror, she would respond only with a faint smile, as if she could think of nothing in the world she would enjoy more.
First things first: We were lovers, and I don’t mean schoolgirls touching each other in exploratory ways in dormitories after dark. I mean, we lived together, shared tampons and toothpaste, had one bed to sleep in, and for all the world (and ourselves) to see. Diana was in law school in San Francisco, and I had a job at Milpitas State Hospital (I still do). Each day I’d drive an hour and a half there and an hour and a half back, and when I got home Diana would be waiting for me in bed, a fat textbook propped on her lap. We had couple friends, Leonore and Callie, for instance, and were always invited to things together, and when she left me, we were even thinking about getting power of attorney over each other. I was Diana’s first woman lover, though she had had plenty of boyfriends. I had never slept with a boy, but had been making love with girls since early in high school. Which meant that for me, being a lesbian was just how things were. But for Diana—well, from day one it was adventure, event, and episode. For a while we just had long blushing talks over pizza, during which she confessed she was “curious.” It’s ridiculous how many supposedly straight girls come on to you that way—plopping themselves down on your lap and fully expecting you to go through all the hard work of initiating them into Sapphic love out of sheer lust for recruitment. No way, I said. The last thing I need is to play guinea pig, testing ground, only to be left when the fun’s over and a new boyfriend shows up on the horizon. But no, Diana said. I mean, yes. I think I do. I mean, I think I am. At which point she would always have just missed the last bus home and have to spend the night in my bed, where it was only a matter of time before I had no more defenses.
After we became lovers, Diana cut her hair off, and bought me the BABY BUTCH T-shirt. She joined all sorts of groups and organizations, dragged me to unsavory bars, insisted, fiercely, on telling her parents everything. (They did not respond well.) Only in private did she muse over her other options. I think she thought she was rich enough not to have to take any vow or promise all that seriously. Rich people are like that, I have noticed. They think a love affair is like a shared real estate venture they can just buy out of when they get tired of it.
Diana had always said the one reason she definitely wanted to get married was for the presents, so the day before the wedding I took my credit card and went to Nordstrom’s, where I found her name in the bridal registry and was handed a computer printout with her china pattern, silver, stainless, and other assorted requirements. I was already over my spending limit, so I bought her the ultimate—a Cuisinart—which I had wrapped to carry in white crêpe paper with a huge yellow bow. Next came the equally important matter of buying myself a dress for the wedding. It had been maybe five, six years since I’d owned a dress. But buying clothes is like riding a bicycle—it comes back—and soon, remembering age-old advice from my mother on hems and necklines, I had picked out a pretty yellow sundress with a spattering of daisies, and a big, wide-brimmed hat.
The invitation had been addressed to Miss Ellen Britchkey and guest, and afterwards, in the parking lot, that made me think about my life—how there was no one in it. And then, as I was driving home from Nordstrom’s, for the first time in years I had a seizure of accident panic. I couldn’t believe I was traveling sixty miles an hour, part of a herd of speeding cars which passed and raced each other, coming within five or six inches of collision and death every ten seconds. It astonished me to realize that I drove every day of my life, that every day of my life I risked ending my life, that all I had to do was swerve the wrong way, or look only in the front and not the side mirror, and I might hit another car, or hit a child on the way to a wedding, and have to live for the rest of my life with the guilt, or die. Horrified, I headed right, into the slow lane. The slow lane was full of scared women, crawling home alone. It was no surprise to me. I was one with the scared women crawling home alone. After Diana left me, I moved down the peninsula to a miniature house—that is the only way to describe it—two rooms with a roof, and shingles, and big pretty windows. It was my solitude house, my self-indulgence house, my remorse-and-secret-pleasure house. There I ate take-out Chinese food, read and reread Little House on the Prairie, stayed up late watching reruns of Star Trek and The Honeymooners. I lived by my wits, by survival measures. The television was one of those tiny ones, the screen smaller than a human face.
Diana—I only have one picture of her, and it is not a good likeness. In it she wears glasses and has long, long hair, sweeping below the white fringe of the picture, to her behind. She cut all her hair off as an offering to me the day after the first night we made love, and presented it that evening in a box—two neat braids, clipped easily as toenail parings, offered like a dozen roses. I stared at them, the hair still braided, still fresh with the smell of shampoo, and joked that I had bought her a comb, like in “The Gift of the Magi.” “Don’t you see?” she said. “I did it for you—I changed myself for you, as an act of love.” I looked at her, her new boyish bangs, her face suddenly so thin-seeming without its frame of yellow hair. She was used to big gestures, to gifts that made an impact.
“Diana,” I lied (for I had loved her long hair), “it’s the most generous thing anyone’s ever done for me.” To say she’d done it for me—well, it was a little bit like a mean trick my sister pulled on me one Christmas when we were kids. She had this thing about getting a little tiny tree to put on top of the piano. And I, of course, wanted a great big one, like the Wagner family down the block. And then, about ten days before Christmas, she said, “Ellen, I have an early Christmas present for you,” and she handed me a box, inside which were about a hundred miniature Christmas-tree ornaments.
I can recognize a present with its own motive.
If I’ve learned one thing from Diana, it’s that there’s more to a gift than just giving.
The next day was the day of the wedding, and somehow, without hitting any children, I drove to the hotel in Hillsborough where the ceremony and reception were taking place. A doorman escorted me to a private drawing room where, nervous about being recognized, I kept the Cuisinart in front of my face as long as I could, until finally an older woman with a carnation over her breast, apparently an aunt or something, said, “May I take that, dear?” and I had to surrender the Cuisinart to a table full of presents, some of which were hugely and awkwardly wrapped and looked like human heads. I thanked her, suddenly naked in my shame, and sturdied myself to brave the drawing room, where the guests milled. I recognized two or three faces from college, all part of Diana’s set—rich, straight, preppy, not the sort I had hung around with at all. And in the distance I saw her very prepared parents, her mother thin and severe-looking as ever in a sleeveless black dress, her streaked hair cut short, like Diana’s, her neck and throat nakedly displaying a brilliant jade necklace, while her father, in his tuxedo, talked with some other men and puffed at a cigar. Turning to avoid them, I almost walked right into Walter Bevins, who was Diana’s gay best friend, or “hag fag,” in college, and we were so relieved to see each other we grabbed a couple of whiskey sours and headed to as secluded a corner as we could find. “Boy, am I glad to see a familiar face,” Walter said. “Can you believe this? Though I must say, I never doubted Diana would get married in anything less than splendor.”
“Me neither,” I admitted. “I was just a little surprised that Diana was getting married at all.”
“Weren’t we all!” Walter said. “But he seems like a nice guy. A lawyer, of course. Very cute, a real shame that he’s heterosexual, if you ask me. But apparently she loves him and he loves her, and that’s just fine. Look, there he is.”
Walter pointed to a tall, dark man with a mustache and beard who stood in the middle of a circle of elderly women. To my horror, his eye caught ours, and he disentangled himself from the old women and walked over to where we were sitting. “Walter,” he said. Then he looked at me and said, “Ellen?”
I nodded and smiled.
“Ellen, Ellen,” he said, and reached out a hand which, when I took it, lifted me from the safety of my sofa onto my feet. “It is such a pleasure to meet you,” he said. “Come with me for a second. I’ve wanted a chance to talk with you for so long, and once the wedding takes place—who knows?”
I smiled nervously at Walter, who raised a hand in comradeship, and was led by the groom through a door to an antechamber, empty except for a card table piled high with bridesmaids’ bouquets. “I just want you to know,” he said, “how happy Diana and I are that you could make it. She speaks so warmly of you. And I also want you to know, just so there’s no tension, Diana’s told me everything, and I’m fully accepting of her past.”
“Thank you, Mark,” I said, horrified that at my age I could already be part of someone’s “past.” It sounded fake to me, as if lesbianism was just a stage Diana had passed through, and I was some sort of perpetual adolescent, never seeing the adult light of heterosexuality.
“Charlie,” Mark said. “I’m called Charlie.”
He opened the door, and as we were heading back out into the drawing room, he said, “Oh, by the way, we’ve seated you next to the schizophrenic girl. Your being a social worker and all, we figured you wouldn’t mind.”
“Me?” I said. “Mind? Not at all.”
“Thanks. Boy, is Diana going to be thrilled to see you.”
Then he was gone into the crowd.
Once back in the drawing room I searched for Walter, but couldn’t seem to find him. I was surrounded on all sides by elderly women with elaborate, peroxided hairdos. Their purses fascinated me. Some were hard as shell and shaped like kidneys, others made out of punctured leather that reminded me of birth control pill dispensers. Suddenly I found myself face to nose with Marjorie Winters, whose eyes visibly bulged upon recognizing me. We had met once, when Diana had brought me home for a weekend, but that was before she had told her mother the nature of our relationship. After Diana came out—well, I believe the exact words were, “I never want that woman in my house again.”
“Ellen,” Marjorie said now, just as I had imagined she might. “What a surprise.” She smiled, whether with contempt or triumph I couldn’t tell.
“Well, you know I wouldn’t miss Diana’s wedding, Mrs. Winters,” I said, smiling. “And this certainly is a lovely hotel.”
She smiled. “Yes, isn’t it? Red, look who’s here,” she said, and motioned over her husband, who for no particular reason except that his name was Humphrey was called Red. He was an amiable, absent-minded man, and he stared at me in earnest, trying to figure out who I was.
“You remember Diana’s friend Ellen, from college, don’t you?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “Of course.” Clearly he knew nothing. I believe his wife liked to keep him in a perpetual dark like that, so that he wouldn’t be distracted from earning money.
“Ellen’s a social worker,” Marjorie said, “at the state hospital at Milpitas. So Diana and I thought it would be a good idea to seat her next to the schizophrenic girl, don’t you think?”
“Oh yes,” Red said. “Definitely. I imagine they’ll have a lot of things to talk about.”
A little tinkling bell rang, and Marjorie said, “Oh goodness, that’s my cue. Be a dear, and do take care of Natalie.” Squeezing my hand, she was gone. She had won, and she was glorying in her victory. And not for the first time that day, I wondered: Why is it that the people who always win always win?
The guests were beginning to move outdoors, to the garden, where the ceremony was taking place. Lost in the crowd, I spied Walter and maneuvered my way next to him. “How’s it going, little one?” he said.
“I feel like a piece of shit,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood to make small talk.
“That’s what weddings are for,” he said cheerfully. We headed through a pair of French doors into a small, beautiful garden, full of blooming roses and wreaths and huge baskets of wisteria and lilies. Handsome, uniformed men—mostly brothers of the groom, I presumed—were helping everyone to their seats. Thinking we were a couple, one of them escorted Walter and me to one of the back rows, along with several other young couples, who had brought their babies and might have to run out to change a diaper or something in the middle of the ceremony.
As soon as everyone was seated the string quartet in the corner began to play something sweet and Chopin-like, and then the procession started—first Diana’s sister, who was matron of honor; then the bridesmaids, each arm in arm with an usher, each dressed in a different pastel dress which was coordinated perfectly with her bouquet; and then, finally, Diana herself, looking resplendent in her white dress. Everyone gave out little oohs and aahs as she entered, locked tight between her parents. It had been two years since we’d seen each other, and looking at her, I thought I’d cry. I felt like such a piece of nothing, such a worthless piece of garbage without her—she was really that beautiful. Her hair was growing back, which was the worst thing. She had it braided and piled on her head and woven with wildflowers. Her skin was flawless, smooth—skin I’d touched hundreds, thousands of times—and there was an astonishing brightness about her eyes, as if she could see right through everything to its very heart. From the altar, the groom looked on, grinning like an idiot, a proud possessor who seemed to be saying, with his teary grin, see, look what I’ve got, look what chose me. And Diana too, approaching him at the altar, was all bright smiles, no doubt, no regret or hesitation registering in her face, and I wondered what she was thinking now: if she was thinking about her other life, her long committed days and nights as a lesbian.
The music stopped. They stood, backs to us, the audience, before the reverent reverend. He began to lecture them solemnly. And then I saw it. I saw myself stand up, run to the front of the garden, and before anyone could say anything, do anything, pull out the gun and consummate, all over the grass, my own splendid marriage to vengeance.
But of course I didn’t do anything like that. Instead I just sat there with Walter and listened as Diana, love of my life, my lover, my life, repeated the marriage vows, her voice a little trembly, as if to suggest she was just barely holding in her tears. They said their “I do”s. They exchanged rings. They kissed, and everyone cheered.
At my table in the dining room were seated Walter; the Winterses’ maid, Juanita; her son; the schizophrenic girl; and the schizophrenic girl’s mother. It was in the darkest, most invisible corner of the room, and I could see it was no accident that Marjorie Winters had gathered us all here—all the misfits and minorities, the kooks and oddities of the wedding. For a minute, sitting down and gazing out at the other tables, which were full of beautiful women and men in tuxedos, I was so mad at Diana I wanted to run back to the presents table and reclaim my Cuisinart, which I really couldn’t afford to be giving her anyway, and which she certainly didn’t deserve. But then I realized that people would probably think I was a thief and call the hotel detective or the police, and I decided not to.
The food, Leonore would have been pleased to know, was mediocre. Next to me, the schizophrenic girl stabbed with her knife at a pathetic-looking little bowl of melon balls and greenish strawberries, while her mother looked out exhaustedly, impatiently, at the expanse of the hotel dining room. Seeing that the schizophrenic girl had started, Juanita’s son, who must have been seven feet tall, began eating as well, but she slapped his hand. Not wanting to embarrass him by staring, I looked at the schizophrenic girl. I knew she was the schizophrenic girl by her glasses—big, ugly, red ones from the seventies, the kind where the temples start at the bottom of the frames—and the way she slumped over her fruit salad, as if she was afraid someone might steal it.
“Hello,” I said to her.
She didn’t say anything. Her mother, dragged back into focus, looked down at her and said, “Oh now, Natalie.”
“Hello,” Natalie said.
The mother smiled. “Are you with the bride or the groom?” she asked.
“The bride.”
“Relation?”
“Friend from college.”
“How nice,” the mother said. “We’re with the groom. Old neighbors. Natalie and Charlie were born the same day in the same hospital, isn’t that right, Nat?”
“Yes,” Natalie said.
“She’s very shy,” the mother said to me, and winked.
Across the table Walter was asking Juanita’s son if he played basketball. Shyly, in a Jamaican accent, he admitted that he did. His face was as arch and stern as that of his mother, a fat brown woman with the eyes of a prison guard. She smelled very clean, almost antiseptic.
“Natalie, are you in school?” I asked.
She continued to stab at her fruit salad, not really eating it as much as trying to decimate the pieces of melon.
“Tell the lady, Natalie,” said her mother.
“Yes.”
“Natalie’s in a very special school,” the mother said.
“I’m a social worker,” I said. “I understand about Natalie.”
“Oh really, you are?” the mother said, and relief flushed her face. “I’m so glad. It’s so painful, having to explain—you know—”
Walter was trying to get Juanita to reveal the secret location of the honeymoon. “I’m not saying,” Juanita said. “Not one word.”
“Come on,” said Walter. “I won’t tell a soul, I swear.”
“I’m on TV,” Natalie said.
“Oh now,” said her mother.
“I am. I’m on The Facts of Life. I’m Tuti.”
“Now, Natalie, you know you’re not.”
“And I’m also on All My Children during the day. It’s a tough life, but I manage.”
“Natalie, you know you’re not to tell these stories.”
“Did someone mention All My Children?” asked Juanita’s son. Walter, too, looked interested.
“My lips are forever sealed,” Juanita said to no one in particular. “There’s no chance no way no one’s going to get me to say one word.”
Diana and Ellen. Ellen and Diana. When we were together, everything about us seethed. We lived from seizure to seizure. Our fights were glorious, manic, our need to fight like an allergy, something that reddens and irritates the edges of everything and demands release. Once Diana broke the air conditioner and I wouldn’t forgive her. “Leave me alone,” I screamed.
“No,” she said. “I want to talk about it. Now.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Why are you punishing me?” Diana said. “It’s not my fault.”
“You are. You’re shutting me up when I have something I want to say.”
“Damn it, won’t you just leave me alone? Can’t you leave anything alone?”
“Let me say what I have to say, damn it!”
“What?”
“I didn’t break it on purpose! I broke it by accident!”
“Damn it, Diana, leave me the fuck alone! Why don’t you just go away?”
“You are so hard!” Diana said, tears in her eyes, and slammed out the door into the bedroom.
After we fought, consumed, crazed, we made love like animals, then crawled about the house for days, cats in a cage, lost in a torpor of lazy carnality. It helped that the air conditioner was broken. It kept us slick. There was always, between us, heat and itch.
Once, in those most desperate, most remorse-filled days after Diana left, before I moved down the peninsula to my escape-hatch dream house, I made a list which was titled “Reasons I love her.”
1. Her hair.
2. Her eyes.
3. Her skin. (Actually, most of her body except maybe her elbows.)
4. The way she does voices for the plants when she waters them, saying things like “Boy was I thirsty, thanks for the drink.” [This one was a lie. That habit actually infuriated me.]
5. Her advantages: smart and nice.
6. Her devotion to me, to us as a couple.
7. How much she loved me.
8. Her love for me.
9. How she loves me.
There was less to that list than met the eye. When Diana left me—and it must be stated, here and now, she did so cruelly, callously, and suddenly—she said that the one thing she wanted me to know was that she still considered herself a lesbian. It was only me she was leaving. “Don’t think I’m just another straight girl who used you,” she insisted, as she gathered all her things into monogrammed suitcases. “I just don’t feel we’re right for each other. You’re a social worker. I’m not good enough for you. Our lives, our ideas about the world—they’re just never going to mesh.”
Outside, I knew, her mother’s station wagon waited in ambush. Still I pleaded. “Diana,” I said, “you got me into this thing. You lured me in, pulled me in against my will. You can’t leave just like that.”
But she was already at the door. “I want you to know,” she said, “because of you, I’ll be able to say, loud and clear, for the rest of my life, I am a lesbian,” and kissed me on the cheek.
In tears I stared at her, astonished that this late in the game she still thought my misery at her departure might be quelled by abstract gestures to sisterhood. Also that she could think me that stupid. I saw through her quaking, frightened face, her little-boy locks.
“You’re a liar,” I said, and, grateful for the anger, she crumpled up her face, screamed, “Damn you, Ellen,” and ran out the door.
As I said, our fights were glorious.
All she left behind were her braids.
Across the dining room, Diana stood with Charlie, holding a big knife over the wedding cake. Everyone was cheering. The knife sank into the soft white flesh of the cake, came out again clung with silken frosting and crumbs. Diana cut two pieces. Their arms intertwined, she and Charlie fed each other.
Then they danced. A high-hipped young woman in sequins got up on the bandstand and sang, “Graduation’s almost here, my love, teach me tonight.”
After the bride and groom had been given their five minutes of single glory on the dance floor, and the parents and grandparents had joined them, I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Care to tango avec moi, my dear?” Walter said.
“Walter,” I said, “I’d be delighted.”
We got up from the table and moved out onto the floor. I was extremely nervous, sweating through my dress. I hadn’t actually spoken to Diana yet, doubted she’d even seen me. Now, not three feet away, she stood, dancing and laughing, Mrs. Mark Charles Cadwallader.
I kept my eyes on Walter’s lapel. The song ended. The couples broke up. And then, there she was, approaching me, all smiles, all bright eyes. “Ellen,” she said, embracing me, and her mother shot us a wrathful glance. “Ellen. Let me look at you.”
She looked at me. I looked at her. Close up, she looked slightly unraveled, her make-up smeared, her eyes red and a little tense. “Come with me to the ladies’ room,” she said. “My contacts are killing me.”
She took my hand and swept me out of the ballroom into the main hotel lobby. Everyone in the lobby stared at us frankly, presuming, I suppose, that she was a runaway bride, and I her maid. But we were only running away to the ladies’ room.
“These contacts!” she said once we got there, and opening one eye wide peeled off a small sheath of plastic. “I’m glad you came,” she said, placing the lens on the end of her tongue and licking it. “I was worried that you wouldn’t. I’ve felt so bad about you, Ellen, worried about you so much, since—well, since things ended between us. I was hoping this wedding could be a reconciliation for us. That now we could start again. As friends.”
She turned away from the lamplit mirror and flashed me a big smile. I just looked up at her.
“Yes,” I said. “I’d like that.”
Diana removed the other lens and licked it. It seemed to me a highly unorthodox method of cleaning. Then, nervously, she replaced the lens and looked at herself in the mirror. She had let down her guard. Her face looked haggard, and red blush was streaming off her cheeks.
“I didn’t invite Leonore for a reason,” she said. “I knew she’d do something to embarrass me, come all dyked out or something. I’m not trying to deny my past, you know. Charlie knows everything. Have you met him?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And isn’t he a wonderful guy?”
“Yes.”
“I have nothing against Leonore. I just believe in subtlety these days. You, I knew I could count on you for some subtlety, some class. Leonore definitely lacks class.”
It astonished me, all that wasn’t being said. I wanted to mention it all—her promise on the doorstep, the gun, the schizophrenic girl. But there was so much. Too much. Nowhere to begin.
When she’d finished with her ablutions, we sat down in parallel toilets. “It is nearly impossible to pee in this damned dress,” she said to me through the divider. “I can’t wait to get out of it.”
“I can imagine,” I said.
Then there was a loud spilling noise, and Diana gave out a little sigh of relief. “I’ve got a terrible bladder infection,” she said. “Remember in college how it was such a big status symbol to have a bladder infection because it meant you were having sex? Girls used to come into the dining hall clutching big jars of cranberry juice and moaning, and the rest of us would look at them a little jealously.” She faltered. “Or some of us did,” she added. “I guess not you, huh, Ellen?”
“No, I was a lesbian,” I said, “and still am, and will be until the day I die.” I don’t know why I said that, but it shut her up.
For about thirty seconds there was not a sound from the other side of the divider, and then I heard Diana sniffling. I didn’t know what to say.
“Christ,” Diana said, after a few seconds, and blew her nose. “Christ. Why’d I get married?”
I hesitated. “I’m not sure I’m the person to ask,” I said. “Did your mother have anything to do with it?”
“Oh, Ellen,” Diana said, “please!” I heard her spinning the toilet paper roll. “Look,” she said, “you probably resent me incredibly. You probably think I’m a sellout and a fool and that I was a royal bitch to you. You probably think when Charlie does it to me I lie there and pretend I’m feeling something when I’m not. Well, it’s not true. Not in the least.” She paused. “I was just not prepared to go through my life as a social freak, Ellen. I want a normal life, just like everybody. I want to go to parties and not have to die inside trying to explain who it is I’m with. Charlie’s very good for me in that way, he’s very understanding and generous.” She blew her nose again. “I’m not denying you were part of my life, that our relationship was a big thing for me. I’m just saying it’s finished. That part’s finished.”
Defiantly she flushed.
We stood up, pulled up our underpants, and stepped out of the toilet booths to face each other. I looked Diana right in the eye, and I noticed her weaken. I saw it. I could have kissed her or something, I knew, and made her even more unhappy. But I didn’t really see the point.
Afterwards, we walked together out of the ladies’ room, back into the ballroom, where we were accosted by huge crowds of elderly women with purses that looked to me like the shellacked sushi in certain Japanese restaurant windows.
“Was it okay?” Walter asked me, taking my arm and leading me back to our table for cake.
“Yes,” I said. “Okay.” But he could see from my face how utterly miserable I was.
“Don’t even try,” Juanita said, giggling hysterically to herself as we got back to the table. “You’re not getting a word out of me, so don’t even begin to ask me questions.”
Once I knew a schizophrenic girl. Her name was Holly Reardon and she was my best friend from age five to eight. We played house a lot, and sometimes we played spaceship, crawling together into a cubbyhole behind my parents’ sofa bed, then turning off the lights and pretending the living room was some fantastic planet. We did well with our limited resources. But then money started disappearing, and my mother sat me down one day and asked me if I had noticed the money always disappeared when Holly came to visit. I shook my head vigorously no, refusing to believe her. And then one day my favorite stuffed animal, a dog called Rufus, disappeared, and I didn’t tell my mother, and didn’t tell my mother, until one day she said to me, “Ellen, what happened to Rufus?” and I started to cry. We never found Rufus. Holly had done something with him. And it wasn’t because of me that she went away, my parents assured me, it wasn’t because of me that her parents closed up the house and had to move into an apartment. Holly was not well. Years later, when I went to work at the state hospital, I think somewhere, secretly, I hoped Holly might be there, a patient there, that we might play house and spaceship in the linen closets. But of course she wasn’t. Who knows where she is now?
After the wedding I felt so depressed I had ice cream for dinner. I did several acrostic puzzles. I watched The Honeymooners and I watched Star Trek. I watched Sally Jessy Raphael. I watched The Twilight Zone. Fortunately, it was not one of the boring Western ones, but an episode I like particularly, about a little girl with a doll that says things like, “My name is Talking Tina and I’m going to kill you.” I wished I’d had a doll like that when I was growing up. Next was Night Gallery. I almost never watch Night Gallery, but when I do, it seems I always see the same episode, the one about two people who meet on a road and are filled with a mysterious sense of déjà vu, of having met before. It turns out they live in the mind of a writer who has been rewriting the same scene a thousand times. Near the end they rail at their creator to stop tormenting them by summoning them into existence over and over, to suffer over and over. At the risk of mysticism, it seems to me significant that every time I have tuned into Night Gallery in my life it is this episode I have seen.
Then there was nothing more good to watch.
I got up, paced around the house, tried not to think about any of it: Holly Reardon, or Natalie, or Diana, or those poor people living in the mind of a writer and getting rewritten over and over again. I tried not to think about all the Chinese dinners I wasn’t going to be able to have because I’d spent so much money on that Cuisinart for Diana, who probably could afford to buy herself a hundred Cuisinarts if she wanted. I tried not to think about their honeymoon, about what secret, glorious place they were bound for. It was too late for it to still make me mad that the whole world, fired up to stop me and Diana, was in a conspiracy to protect the privacy of the angelic married couple she had leapt into to save herself, to make sure their perfect honeymoon wasn’t invaded by crazy lesbian ex-lovers with shotguns and a whole lot of unfinished business on their minds. Unfortunately, any anger I felt, which might have saved me, was counteracted by how incredibly sorry I felt for Diana, how sad she had seemed, weeping in the ladies’ room on her wedding day.
I went to the closet and took out Diana’s braids. God knows I hadn’t opened the box for ages. There they were, the braids, only a little faded, a little tangled, and of course, no longer smelling of shampoo. I lifted one up. I was surprised at how silky the hair felt, even this old. Carefully, to protect myself, I rubbed just a little of it against my face. I shuddered. It could have been her.
I went to the bed, carrying the braids with me. I laid them along my chest. I have never had long hair. Now I tried to imagine what it felt like, tried to imagine I was Diana imagining me, a woman she had loved, a woman she had given her hair, a woman who now lay on a bed somewhere, crying, using all the strength she could muster just to not force the braids down her throat. But I knew Diana was on a plane somewhere in the sky, or in a car, or more likely than that, lying in a heart-shaped bed while a man hovered over her, his hands running through her new hair, and that probably all she was thinking was how much better off she was than me, how much richer, and how lucky to have escaped before she was sucked so far in, like me, that it would be too late to ever get out. Was I so pathetic? Possibly. And possibly Diana was going to be happier for the choice she had made. But I think, more likely, lying on that mysterious bed, she was contemplating a whole life of mistakes spinning out from one act of compromise, and realizing she preferred a life of easy mistakes to one that was harder but better. Who was I to criticize? Diana had her tricks, and so did Juanita, and so, for that matter, did that schizophrenic girl stabbing at her melon balls. We all had our little tricks.
I took the braids off myself. I stood up. A few hairs broke loose from the gathered ropes, fell lightly to the floor. They didn’t even look like anything; they might have been pieces of straw.