Spring 1982
THE ENVELOPE WAS LIGHT BLUE and smelled faintly of honeysuckle. I put it up to my nose, inhaling. It was addressed to me in a woman’s round, loopy handwriting. I flipped the metal door in the bank of mailboxes closed and ran up the stairs to my apartment. As far as I could remember, I didn’t know anyone who used scents. For a moment I wondered if it could be a card from one of the women I’d been flirting with during the last few months. I thought I could guess which one.
Inside, I threw my keys and knapsack on the kitchen table. As soon as I turned the envelope over and saw my father’s name on the back, still in the woman’s handwriting, I knew exactly what it contained: an invitation to his wedding. The sweet odor of honeysuckle was nauseating. I said “Shit” out loud and threw the envelope down on the floor as though it had burned my hand.
Trembling, I leafed through the rest of the mail. There was only one other thing for me, a flyer from an Asian-American women’s group that kept sending me notices about upcoming events because I had called once to ask about their meetings. I balled it up and threw it at the trash can. I had been trying to work up the nerve to go for weeks, but right then, looking for a sense of community felt beside the point. The crushed paper hit the side and fell onto the floor.
I knew I had to open it eventually. I left the bills and Henry’s mail on the kitchen table. Picking up the blue envelope from the floor, I went out to the back porch where I sat on the rickety stairs overlooking the yard two flights down. I pulled a pack of Benson & Hedges and my lighter from my denim jacket and lit a cigarette. I’d been telling myself I would stop smoking by the time I turned eighteen, but my birthday had been half a year before. Now the deadline was when I became a certified massage practitioner. I had a little more than a month left, and I was down to half a pack a day.
As I pulled the smoke down into my lungs and then let it escape through my open mouth, a calm spread over me. I could feel my heart slow in my chest and a tranquility similar to a warm, comforting hand on my shoulder. Of course, I would have preferred someone’s actual arm around me. I thought of Laura, out of habit, and then I thought of Jane, a woman I had met one night a couple of months before at Clementina’s and slept with sometimes. It was nice to have a night of friendly sex occasionally with someone who didn’t need anything from me the next morning. I inhaled another luscious lungful of smoke and wondered why I had wanted to quit. In the fenced-off yard below me, Clara, one of the dykes living on the first floor, was kneeling over the small patch of vegetable garden she was trying to get going. Since she’d moved in the month before, I’d been coming onto her whenever possible, with minimal success. We had taken a walk together, but she hadn’t accepted my suggestion afterwards that we go up to my apartment for something to drink. While I smoked, I admired the curve of her ass in her fuschia drawstring pants and hoped she wouldn’t notice me. I was in no mood to talk, much less flirt. I was imagining untying her pants and tugging them down past her hips when she looked up and waved, calling my name. I waved back briefly, looked away, took another drag.
My gaze wandered over to our next-door neighbors’ backyard. Strung between two posts, clean laundry hung limply in the windless air. The city, or what I could see of it—rooftops, telephone poles and electric wires, laurel and fir trees, glimpses into open windows—struck me as more hushed than usual under the gray sky, as if waiting for something to happen: the wail of a police siren, a ground tremor, causing everything to set off again at some slightly different, unknown pace. I blew my last comforting lungful of smoke into the air, watching it drift and disappear, then stubbed the butt out in the tuna can I kept by the door. The invitation lay next to me on the chipped white paint of the top step. I stared at it for a few seconds and then, telling myself I was being stupid, I grabbed it and tore open the side of the envelope.
The invitation itself was simple, a card with raised lettering setting out the date, time, and place, and an RSVP card and envelope. I stared at the embossed words, my father’s name paired with that of a woman I had met twice. Angela was his boss at the environmental non-profit where he was Director of Development. She wore dark suits in an office where everyone else was in khakis or jeans. She was thirty-one, closer to my age than to his. She could have once been my babysitter. At the bottom of the invitation my father had scrawled, “We hope you’ll celebrate with us.”
We. The word reverberated oddly inside me, a harsh clanging. I wanted another cigarette. Fingering the pack in my jacket pocket, I reread his sentence several times. Who was this “we”? Why didn’t he just say “Angela and I” to avoid confusion? When he’d lived at home he had said “we” and meant him and my mother, or the three of us. In his occasional letters since he had left, five years before, I was used to reading “we” as me and him. I knew I could unfold my father’s letters and trace the evolution of his relationship with this woman, but those scant pages couldn’t help me make the leap to this other, outside “we.” He had kicked open the battered circle in which I still imagined the three of us and walked out, collapsing it. Staring down at the card and his short, simple sentence, I saw for the first time that what he and my mother and I had been together was nothing. It was over and done with. Our family was simply the easily assembled pieces of a toy: the orphan daughter brought over from another country, the parents making vows they wouldn’t keep—everyone fitting into their assigned slot until someone decided he wanted to try something new and broke the cheap plastic toy apart.
I had lit another cigarette without even noticing. I sat hunched over, my forearms on my knees, puffing away. What made him my father? Or my mother my mother? The adoption papers they had signed a few months after I was born? My childhood memories? Our relationship now? I didn’t remember my birth parents; as far as I was concerned, they had never existed. If I went back to Korea, I would know no one there. Nothing would be recognizable. These were the parents I had lived with my whole life, the parents I loved. But if they could get divorced, if he could remarry, what made my bond with either of them permanent? Documents were useless. My mother kept her divorce decree in a safe deposit box right next to my adoption papers and the revoked marriage license. If my parents’ feelings for each other could change, they could also stop loving me. How else could he have moved so far away, to San Diego? Why else would he work so much that I hardly ever saw him face to face? Sitting on the porch steps, watching Clara in the darkening yard below brush the dirt off her hands, gather her tools, and head inside, I tried to list the ways he had remained my father. He had paid child support. He was paying for massage school. He called me a couple of times a year. I couldn’t think of anything more.
I smashed my cigarette out in the bottom of the tuna can. I wanted to grind it into my own flesh, feel its searing heat. I breathed out abruptly, breathed in again. At the massage school we had been learning to use our breath as a way to ground ourselves, sinking our energy down into the center of our pelvis where it could take root and keep us from getting carried away by negative feelings. When we were first asked to do this, I thought it was bullshit. Yet I was already breathing deeply, my body softening as it did only when I was in bed with someone else.
Now I breathed the late afternoon air slowly, drawing in from the backyard trees a tangy scent like rust. I couldn’t get that grounded feeling. Maybe I was trying too hard. Somewhere in the street out front I heard a car honking. A light went on in the house next door and a man crossed from one side of the window to the other. He was home. Where was I? Even if I admitted to wanting it, there was no home to go to. Not my first home. Not my second. Now I shared an apartment with a Chinese-American man who was a bass player in a local band when he wasn’t studying medicine. Answering his ad looking for a student, preferably someone neat, responsible, and Asian, I had felt like a fraud on every count. Before my interview, I had been most afraid he’d make references to Asian culture I wouldn’t pick up on. As it turned out, Henry was easy to live with, but we had almost nothing in common.
How would I even recognize home now?
Natalie both fascinated and terrified me. She was a black woman in my class at the massage school, one of three other minority people in a group of twenty-five. The other two were Japanese. In the beginning I had avoided speaking to all three of them. I had hardly been able to look the Japanese women in the eye. One day when the class split up to practice strokes for the neck and shoulders, Natalie looked at me expectantly. I couldn’t refuse. She lay on the table, and when I raised her head and rolled it slowly to the side, surprised at how much it weighed, she asked me, “Why do you hang out with white people all the time? Why don’t you talk to your sisters?”
At first I was pissed. What right did she have to tell me what to do? But as I slid my oiled palm down the length of her neck, working the sternocleidomastoid with my thumb, I also felt let in. She breathed deeply, and I could feel the muscle under my thumb soften just a little. It was a revelation to me: I could create change in another person’s body; I could help them to feel better. I had thought up to then I was learning bodywork for my own enjoyment. My realization gave me a rush of power and of something else. Gratitude. It softened me as well, let me think again about what she had said.
We exchanged a lot of information about ourselves that afternoon. She told me she was biracial: half white. I told her that I felt white, until somebody made a comment that reminded me I was not, and somebody always did. I told her that a couple of ex-lovers had said they considered me white, as though they were paying me the highest compliment. I felt hopeful, talking to her. I went home that evening and called the group she had told me about. Then I got freaked out and fell asleep for ten hours. After the day she questioned my alliances, I returned to avoiding Natalie. I was aware of her silent condemnation during our classes, only to be surprised when she caught my eye and grinned. She had a beautiful smile.
One night a couple of weeks after I received my father’s wedding invitation, I went to Maud’s with my ex-lover Alison and some of her friends, all white, and Natalie was there, playing pool with some of her friends, all black. I wasn’t surprised to see her; I’d been wondering since before she’d approached me in class if she was a dyke. We smiled and nodded to each other, and I followed my crowd further back into the large room. They all wanted to sit at the bar drinking and scoping out the girls. With Natalie there, I felt even more self-conscious than I usually did at the clubs. For a while, Alison and I stood together at the far end of the bar with our beers. The music was loud and the room was stuffy and hazy with smoke. Alison shouted the story of how she had met her current lover, who was sitting three stools down from us, and I grinned and asked increasingly personal questions. I kept lighting up cigarettes and looking over toward the pool game, wondering which of those women was Natalie’s lover. I assumed she had a lover. Once, while Alison was admitting out loud that she thought she was falling in love, I caught Natalie’s eye, and she lifted her brows at me. I knew exactly what she meant: why are you hanging out with those white girls? But she wasn’t making it any easier for me to cross the slowly filling dance floor between us to join her and her friends. Besides, I wasn’t white, but I wasn’t black either. What made her think her crowd was “my people” more than my friends were?
When Alison rejoined her girlfriend, I pushed my way through the women milling around and stood in line for the bathroom. After peeing, I looked at myself critically in the mirror as I washed my hands. Was I attractive? It wasn’t a question I had bothered with in a long time. When I looked at myself, the first thing I always focused on was my ears, which I thought stuck out too far, and the mole that had appeared a couple of years before on my temple. My hair was fairly short, cut to about the level of my chin. My face was flushed and slightly oily. I had never liked the soft roundness of my face much, but I was proud of my clear skin and wide, outgoing mouth. Many of the women I had slept with had told me they loved my mouth, which was so much fuller than their own. Natalie had full lips too, and tight, kinky hair, and large, liquid-brown eyes. She had probably never been in a white woman’s bed, whereas all my women lovers had been white. Studying myself in the mirror, I had no idea what, if anything, Natalie might be attracted to in me. I took a breath and turned to leave the cramped little room.
When I emerged, I pushed through to the pool table, where Natalie and her friends had just finished a second game and were ceding the cues to another group of women. The noise of people shouting over the thudding music disoriented me. I went to the clubs to meet women, but I disliked the crowds pressing in and the jarring motion of dancing separate from my partners. The booming, mindless songs often gave me headaches. I was much more suited to silence.
As I approached, Natalie, who was yelling into the ear of one of her friends, saw me and grinned. I noticed for the first time how endearingly she dipped her head before speaking, as though she were bashful, though I guessed it had more to do with being tall. I stood in front of them as she finished whatever she was saying.
Her friend turned to look at her, and they both burst out laughing. Then Natalie introduced me to Tracy, and we shook hands, and Natalie said she needed some air, would we walk with her? Tracy wanted a beer, but I said I’d go outside with her.
The cool night air was a relief. Behind the ivy-covered wall, the muffled music seemed a world away. Across the street, I could make out cans of paint arranged in pyramids in the window display of a darkened hardware store. I lit a cigarette. We started walking toward the Haight. I felt a little awkward, uncertain. I was extremely aware of her height, her arm near mine, of our steps gradually falling into synch. I realized I knew nothing at all about this woman.
We walked for a block in silence and then I said, “Can I ask you a question?”
Natalie looked at me and grinned as if she knew what it was going to be. “Sure.”
“Do you ever sleep with white women?” Only after I had asked did it occur to me that she might be offended by the suggestion.
Natalie laughed, and, fascinated, I watched her head tilt back. “Not if I can help it!”
“But you’re half white,” I said.
“So?”
“Aren’t you rejecting a part of yourself?”
“No, I’m rejecting white women.” She waited, and when I didn’t say anything, she said, “Do I have to explain it to you?”
“No.” But I was amazed that without white women she apparently had a large enough community of people in whom she found herself. “I went to that group you told me about,” I said.
“Finally.” She glanced down at me, and I saw from the sly, self-mocking curl of her smile that she was flirting with me. “And?” she prompted.
I grinned back, feeling more sure of myself, more at ease in my body as I strode beside her down Haight Street. We passed the Double Rainbow where I used to work with Alison.
“I didn’t make any great discovery,” I admitted, feeling I had failed somehow, as I had felt while I waited for the meeting to be over. I hadn’t passed this simple test of Asian-American identification. “I tried to. There were about ten women. They all seemed to have known each other for years. I tend to have a hard time with groups, being the outsider.”
We passed the free medical clinic and Reckless Records and the head shop where I had bought my bong that same summer I was scooping ice cream. “They seemed to be in the middle of a fight about whether to become more politically active or whether to continue to be a social group. I didn’t say a word the entire meeting. I wasn’t even that interested, to tell you the truth. Their concerns were foreign to me. I’m not into making a statement, and I’m not looking for a group to go on picnics with.” I saw Natalie’s frown. “No, they do other stuff, but that’s what it felt like.” One woman had talked about her parents’ continual insistence that she marry a man who was also Korean. Another woman complained that her favorite dim sum restaurant had closed, causing the whole room to burst out laughing. I sat, bewildered, looking at each of their faces in turn and feeling despair.
“Were there any lesbians?” Natalie asked.
“Two.” I couldn’t tell her that they had turned me off the most with their ridiculous multisyllabic rhetoric. One of them had asked me after the meeting if I’d like to go out with a few of them for a late snack. Though I was grateful for the invitation, I knew I would have to force myself to sit through it. I told her thanks, maybe next time, but I hadn’t gone back. “They didn’t impress me particularly.”
“You didn’t give them a chance.”
Natalie knew them, I realized then. Maybe she had even told her friends to expect me. I felt my face get hot. At least I hadn’t been rude.
“I guess I connect with people better individually.”
She looked thoughtful. “I wonder if there are any support groups for people adopted from other countries.”
“No,” I said, cutting her off. “I don’t need a support group.”
“But meeting other Asian adoptees—”
“No,” I repeated. The idea terrified me. What if I met them and I still couldn’t recognize myself?
“Hmmm. Well, when you’re ready, I could help you look.”
I glanced up at Natalie and was aware again of her height, her thick eyelashes, the scoop of her bent neck. Her hair, cut so short she was almost bald, made the shape of her head more prominent. I wanted to put my hand in her hair, feel her scalp beneath my fingers. I wasn’t used to her style of kindness.
“I’ll answer your earlier question, if you want,” she offered. I nodded. On the side of an apartment building someone had spray-painted, “Be the bomb you throw.” We walked down the hill toward Divisadero.
“I may be half white, but I was raised by a black mother. White women were raised white.” She said it flatly, her voice dismissive.
“I was raised white too,” I reminded her, bristling. “In a sense, I’m more white than you are.”
“Yeah, you definitely are.” She laughed. I wondered what she was thinking of and if I would recognize it in myself. I could feel my jealousy snaking through me: her parents, black and white, reflected who she was.
She went on, “I realized in college that I had to choose, one way or another. Not how I was perceived, because other people would take care of that for me. But how I lived inside that perception. And, more importantly, what the world looked like from where I stood.”
We were meandering toward Fillmore by then, passing bars with darkened windows lit only by neon beer signs and a café from which a surge of voices and the bitter odor of coffee emanated. Diagonally across from a corner health food store was a storefront with “Meat Market” on its awning. The gate that had been rolled down in front of its windows was covered with graffiti. A mix of people was out on the street—heading up to the clubs on Haight, out late buying food from the health food store, waiting around. It was an odd part of town, bordered by the projects on one side and peeling stately old Victorians on the other. We stopped in front of a display of fruit in baskets. I liked the energy and light on that block. It was a border, and it was coming into its own.
Natalie said she lived nearby. I walked with her to her building. Standing on the steps, she said, “You don’t have to choose anything. That’s a choice too. But you can’t reject your choices until you know what they are.” She bent down and kissed me lightly. I followed her upstairs.
I whipped out the long cord behind me to untangle it, taking the phone to my room and closing the door. Sitting on my bed, the pillows propping me up, I settled in for the conversation. I was ready to savor every brief minute.
“It was beautiful here today,” he said. “Not a cloud in the sky.”
I heard my father’s voice three, maybe four times a year, but I still knew it inside and out. Closing my eyes, it was possible to pretend that we were walking down a trail on Mount Tam and he was holding my hand, pointing out wildflowers and telling me their names. He’d always been proud of how quickly I learned. Sometimes I would make up silly pretend names just to tease him. Bananaberry bush. Skyhighflower. He’d giggle with me, squeezing my hand.
“So are you coming to the wedding?”
I opened my eyes. The small lamp by my bed cast a shadow against the far wall. I could hear Henry in the kitchen singing “Born in the USA” with the radio as he washed the dishes.
“I guess so,” I said. I had put the wedding out of my head since I’d received the invitation three weeks before. “Do you want me to be there?”
“Of course, Min. Didn’t we send an invitation? Aren’t I calling you?”
I flinched at the “we.” For a brief moment I felt stupid, as though I hadn’t remembered the name of a simple lupine. Then I was angry. How was I supposed to know what he wanted from me now, after all these years when he’d made no effort to see me? I didn’t count his money for the train to visit him a total of three times in five years as “effort.” I had initiated every trip, willing to give up days of school and to lie to my mother in order to work around his busy schedule.
“Maybe you feel you have to,” I answered.
“Min, sweetheart, what’s this all about? You’re my daughter. I love you. Of course I want you to be at my wedding. Angie and I want to see more of you from now on. I will admit it’s odd asking my grown-up child to watch me get married.” The idea seemed to strike him as amusing, but it only made me sad.
“I’m not technically your child,” I reminded him. I couldn’t keep myself from trying to hurt him.
“Yes, you are,” he responded angrily. “Don’t do that to yourself. Remember when you would tell me about what one or another of your classmates called you, when I gave you a backrub before you went to sleep? Remember what I said to you then?”
I remembered the clean smell of the sheets, the faint rustling of Bingo, my parakeet, beneath the cloth draping his cage in the corner, my father’s warm hand on my back. His touch had made the outside world shrink away to where it couldn’t hurt me. Those long backrubs had been my resting place, the only time I felt what it was to be myself. When being me was easy. Clasping my hands around my knees, listening to my father’s voice hundreds of miles away, I thought of my life now. I wondered for the first time if I was actually in search of just one thing: those murmured conferences, the comfort of his firm touch, my certainty of receiving such simple care again, the next night.
I couldn’t answer right away. “You said they were just repeating what they heard their parents say.”
“And?” he prompted.
“You knew who I was. I was your little girl.” I could hear him saying it, in memory.
Now he said nothing. I listened to the crackle of static on the phone line, that slight, tenuous thread of communication.
“Dad?” I asked. “Are you happy being with Angela?”
“Yes, I am. We’re very happy.”
“Why weren’t you happy with Mom?”
“Did she tell you that? I think she was the one who was unhappy with me.”
“But you left.”
Silence. “I had to, Min.” I wished he would say more. I hadn’t known they were fighting that much when he moved out. My mother still refused to talk about it.
“What about me?” I asked, hating myself for asking. “Why didn’t you take me?”
“Sweetheart, I wanted to, believe me.” He stopped speaking, and I thought for a second that the line had gone dead. “But you were settled at home, you had school, your whole life. Besides, it’s hard for fathers to get custody of their kids.”
“Did you even try?”
Again, the static between us crackled in my ear. I realized this would be my last opportunity to approach the subject with him. I wanted to understand what had gone wrong between them, and why he had allowed himself to drift out of my range. I knew what I wanted to hear—how he had tried to fight in court, how my mother had refused to let him visit me. Even before he spoke I knew my version wasn’t true.
“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” he said quietly. “I had to leave you behind. I had to make a new life for myself. I couldn’t be near you but not with you.”
“Why not?” It came out as a squeak. I closed my eyes, squeezing them tight. I didn’t want him to know I was crying. I heard him take a breath, like a hiccup. Now he wouldn’t even answer me.
“There’s a full moon tonight. Can you see it?” he asked after a while.
I looked up through my window, the receiver slipping. I caught it with one hand and brought it back up to my ear. Of course the sky was dark, the moon nowhere near that distorting square of glass.
“Yes,” I said, wiping my nose with the back of my hand. A few months before he had left, during my spring break in eighth grade, he’d found an old book about stars up high in the living room bookcase. We went outside every night for a week and learned the constellations, memorizing their shapes in the sky. I still remembered them all, but in the city I could never see them.
“Will you be there, Min?” he asked.
“Are you asking for my blessing?” I was only half joking.
“No. I’m asking for your presence at my wedding.”
I considered it seriously for the first time. I dreaded going, but I was afraid he might disappear entirely if I didn’t. “Can I bring someone?”
“You mean Beth?” I had told him about Beth during our last conversation in December, two girlfriends previous.
“I don’t know yet.”
His voice changed, became more decisive. “I’ll welcome anyone you choose to bring. So, can I count on you?”
What was the point of refusing? “Yes.”
“That’s my girl. We can talk more when you arrive. Listen, Angie’s got dinner almost ready. I’ll talk to you soon. Bear hug.”
“Elephant hug,” I answered without thinking.
“Whale hug.”
How could whales hug without arms? It was a stupid game we had played. Into the lingering silence, he said, “Goodnight, Min.” I waited. I listened to the dial tone for at least a minute before hanging up. Then I realized what his hiccups were. He had been crying too.
The next weekend I ate lunch with my mother at Café Picaro, surrounded by students loudly arguing Marxist theory and men and women drinking red wine together and blowing clouds of smoke into the air above their heads. I had managed to grab a table by the window. Across the street, a matinee was letting out at the Roxie; people wandered into the sunlight, put their hands up or pulled sunglasses from their pockets, and set off down the street. Three plump, white-haired women walked by carrying heavy shopping bags. This was my neighborhood, the land of family-owned taquerias, used appliance stores, and a few dyke-owned businesses: the Artemis Café, Old Wives Tales Bookstore, Amelia’s.
I turned my attention back to my mother, who was picking at her spinach salad. She was telling me about the NOW meeting she’d just come from. We were having our monthly lunch out. We’d agreed to do this when I found a place to live, even though I still came home with my dirty laundry and let her feed me once in a while. Often, being in each other’s company was still difficult for both of us. I felt sometimes as though we had known each other in some long-past, dimly remembered life. BC: Before I Came Out. It didn’t matter that we had continued to live in the same house while I finished high school. It did help a little that she had been glad to have me home, and I had been relieved to be home. We had learned not to ask too much of each other. Our conversations had settled into a safe exchange of selected information. Since I’d moved out, talking to my mother was both easier and harder.
“How’s your job?” she asked, pushing her frizzy hair back from her face with one hand as she fed herself a bite of spinach leaves with the other. I had often wondered why she didn’t either wear her hair tied back or cut it short. It always seemed to be getting in her way.
I shrugged, looked down at my lasagna. “It’s okay. I got a raise.” I was a stocker at a natural foods wholesaler.
“That’s great.”
“It’s not big,” I added. I didn’t want her to stop helping me with the rent.
“And massage school?”
“I’m almost through. I gave my first full-body massage two nights ago. I was nervous at first, but really the only hard part was getting from one area of the body to the next. You don’t want to do it suddenly. The massage itself was like painting. You have all these colors to work with in whatever combination you want. The guy I worked on loved it.”
We had set up tables all over the room, half of us working on the other half, then switching. Receiving first, I’d been surprised by the extent to which I was aware of my partner’s fear as I lay listening to the hum of other people’s conversations. He would touch one area briefly, then lift his hands away from my body, dropping them down again suddenly in a completely different place to try a new stroke. He moved tentatively around the table, uncertain where to go next. He splashed dribbles of oil on me without noticing. With my eyes closed, I listened to him breathing, fast, through his mouth. I was confused by his discomfort, bewildered by why he would pursue massage if he was so ill at ease being in physical contact with another person’s body. I loved the slide of my oiled palms over warm skin, pressing deep with my thumbs along the length of the trapezius or gastrocnemius. On him there wasn’t much muscle to get hold of, so I concentrated on simple relaxation. I was careful about draping him, and conscious of watching his face and his hands for any reaction to the depth or quality of my touch. Ultimately, I lost track of time. By the end, when I quietly told him that I was done, I was exhilarated. I had never worked at anything before that made me feel such satisfaction. The sound of my voice startled him; he was so relaxed he had fallen asleep.
My mother was looking at me with the hint of a smile on her face. I noticed the fine lines of exhaustion around her eyes and the huddle of her shoulders. “Maybe you’d like a massage sometime,” I offered. “It’s a nice way to take time out for an hour. And I could use the practice.”
“Oh, no.” She pushed her glasses further up her nose with one finger. “I don’t think I could take off all my clothes and lie down naked like that.”
“You’re covered with a sheet. And you could leave on your underwear if you wanted.”
“No, no. It seems like such a vulnerable thing to do.”
“It is.” I was smiling. Massage, I was discovering, was a way for me to connect with another person in a way that I most likely never could have in the context of our daily life. It brought our interaction immediately to the level of the body, where everyone was the same, and everyone was unique. “Maybe it would be easier if you went to a stranger.”
“I don’t know, I think that would be worse.” She looked slightly apologetic.
When I had scraped up the last of the tomato sauce, I pushed my plate away. “Mom, there’s something you should know.”
She looked up. “You have a new girlfriend.” She said it resignedly, as though she were only confirming the inevitable. A few months before, she had complained that it seemed like every time we spoke I was seeing someone new. I made it a point to inform her about most of my girlfriends, those that lasted for more than a few nights. That was all; I just let her know, as part of the conversation. She never asked for any details, or even a name. But I refused to allow her to completely ignore how my sexuality shaped my day-to-day life.
“Well, actually, I am kind of seeing someone new, but that’s not what I was going to tell you.”
“What, then?”
I hesitated, not sure how to phrase it. I didn’t know what my mother would feel, but I wasn’t eager to make it worse by rubbing it in somehow. “Dad’s getting remarried.”
There was another long silence. I watched my mother’s face carefully, but she kept her eyes lowered as she picked up her sweating glass of Diet Coke with lemon and drank from it. I was aware of the ceaseless clink of silverware. A man’s voice laughed and boomed out, “That’s Gerald for you.” A bead of condensation ran down the side of my mother’s glass, colliding with her index finger. She put her drink down on the table carefully. She said, “When’s the wedding?”
“Next month.” I wasn’t going to tell her anything she hadn’t asked. I’d already decided that.
“Have you met her?”
“Yes.”
“Do you like her?” My mother looked up, her eyes meeting mine.
I hadn’t expected that question. “Not really,” I answered. My mother smiled. “She’s a lot younger than him, which is weird. Very serious about her work. Uptight. I don’t get why he likes her.”
“Well,” she said, and she let out air as if she had been holding her breath. “Are you going?”
I looked down, traced a scratch in the table with my fingernail. “I don’t know. He says he wants me to.”
“Oh, I think you should go. You’ll be sorry later not to have been part of it if you don’t. It’s an important event.”
“Why? They’re already living together.”
She leaned forward, her arms folded on the table, and for a moment I thought she was going to answer, give me a lecture about my duty as a daughter and all that shit. Instead she repeated, “I think you should go. A wedding is a time of promise, of committing to one’s best intentions. I wish I were going to see you get married one day.”
“Mom,” I warned. Why couldn’t she get over it? She’d been a member of PFLAG for more than a year, talking to other parents of gay children. As much as I considered her a meeting junkie, I had been relieved that she was going somewhere else to educate herself and get support for her feelings about my lesbianism. It had been a big step for her at the time, and it helped lift some of the tension between us. But not all.
She put up a hand. “Wait. I wouldn’t care if it were to a woman. I think marriage is an important institution.”
“That is not what you meant. Gay people can’t marry. You want me to end up with a man.”
“No, Min. But I do want to see you in a committed and happy long-term relationship.”
“Why? Who says I’m not happy the way I am?”
“Are you?”
I glanced out the window. From the opposite sidewalk, a woman wearing a leather jacket ran across the street. As she approached the door of the café, our eyes met. We both smiled, then looked away. I loved the possibility inherent in that smile. I loved walking around the city constantly aware of the women around me, feeling my own appeal to other lesbians. I loved being free to act on my desire every time. I didn’t think my mother wanted to know this. I said, “I can’t see Dad’s marriage lasting very long.”
She brought her hands up under her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Behind her, a line had formed at the door. “Let’s go,” I urged. “There are people waiting for tables.” As we squeezed out the door past the standing line, I saw the woman in the leather jacket, who shot me another little smile.
Outside, we stood in the busy street. I took my sunglasses from where they hung at the front of my t-shirt and put them on. My mother squinted, holding her hand over her glasses to shade her eyes. It seemed to me that every time we had these lunches there was this moment, at the end, of emerging into the too-bright daylight, as though we had spent the last hour or two tunneling through the rocky earth, digging our separate paths in each other’s direction. I had no idea if we were getting any nearer, if we would ever meet in the middle.
“Well,” she said, “I wish your father all the luck in the world. I have to admit I’m curious about this woman he’s marrying,” she added. “But I won’t ask you anything you don’t want to talk about.”
I shrugged. “I don’t mind. I don’t know that much. We’re not in touch that often.”
“Oh.” She bit her lip, released it. “I didn’t know that.”
What did she think, I saw him every weekend? What had she imagined would happen once they divorced?
The day I saw Laura on her spring vacation, she wanted to spend the afternoon by the ocean, which she had missed while stuck all winter in the middle of Ohio. We walked barefoot near the water, the chilly waves lapping at our feet, leaving small pools in our footprints behind us. In the wind, wisps of Laura’s long hair pulled free of her braid and blew in her face. We watched people throw sticks into the frigid water for their dogs and the dogs happily crash into the waves to retrieve them. We walked down toward the Cliff House, hoping to see the seals on their rock sunning themselves. Since she’d started at Kenyon the fall before, I had seen Laura only a couple of times, on her Christmas break, before her parents had whisked her off for a vacation on St. John. After all those months apart, we seemed to have everything to say to each other and yet nothing. Our friendship was intact, but it had suffered some kind of stroke in the interim, resulting in a barely noticeable paralysis. I wondered, not for the first time, if we had anything in common anymore.
I told her about massage school and my father’s remarriage. I didn’t say much about the women I’d slept with that year, knowing she would accuse me of being promiscuous. Turning back, with the Pacific coast stretching south as far as we could see, Laura informed me that she had finally lost her virginity. I was relieved by this news, and then I wondered why she hadn’t told me earlier. How long had it been since we had shared the physical details of our sex lives? I missed that side of our friendship. So I asked for a description of her first time, just as she had prompted me so long ago. But the truth was I wasn’t much interested, especially after she described how he left his Jockey shorts on until the last minute, pulling them back up again as soon as he was finished. “Do you think that’s strange?” she asked me. I said I thought it was, but on the other hand, how would I know since I’d only gone to bed with one guy? Then she changed the subject, and I let her.
Now it was late afternoon and we were in Golden Gate Park, slowly making our way back toward the center of the city. The sun was at our backs, sending our shadows shooting out ahead of us over the grassy field we were walking through. On either side of us the fir trees let diagonal shafts of golden light pour between them like streams of water through the spread fingers of a cupped hand. I hardly ever came out to the ocean or the park. I wondered why not; it was so beautiful. Laura and I walked through a grove of redwoods, and I inhaled their piney scent mixed with the rich odor of damp earth and was glad for the first time that day that I was with her. I turned to Laura and asked if she’d come to my father’s wedding with me.
“Me?” she asked. I wondered who else she expected me to invite.
“Yeah, you. He always liked you, Laura. And it would be a lot easier for me if you were there with me.”
“Are you nervous about going?” she asked.
“I just can’t imagine it at all,” I said. “I don’t know what to expect. I need some moral support.”
Laura turned her face toward me and grinned. Suddenly it was the two of us again, best friends, inseparable.
“When is it?” she asked.
I named the date in May.
She thought, then shook her head. “I can’t. I’ve still got exams then.”
I was surprised by how hurt I was. Somehow I had assumed she would go without thinking about it. I hadn’t considered that she might have other commitments.
“Can’t you take them earlier?” I asked anyway.
She looked at me skeptically.
“Okay,” I said. The breeze off the ocean had picked up. The sun was going down. I saw the square pink dome of the De Young Museum among the trees in the distance.
It was almost dark when, on Irving Street looking for a Japanese restaurant I’d heard about, we ran into Natalie coming out of a lingerie store with a shopping bag. Since the night at Maud’s that I’d gone home with her, we had slept together only a few times, always during the day. Ana, the woman she had been living with for seven years, had gotten home from visiting her parents to learn that Natalie had started up with me, and it had pissed her off. This wasn’t the first time she’d cheated, Natalie told me. I didn’t want to get in the middle, but Natalie insisted it would be okay if we kept it light and discreet. I never called her at home. I was glad of the limitations. I knew I could fall hard for her, and not in a good way. When we talked, I always found myself in the position of disciple, and I was uncomfortable with how completely she relished her role as my teacher. I wasn’t willing to get attached to someone who assumed she knew me better than I knew myself.
On Irving Street, lit by the bright neon colors of early evening, Natalie seemed taller than ever. When she moved, she chimed with long silver earrings and bracelets on both arms. Seeing her out of context, in a neighborhood neither of us ever went, I was incredibly aroused.
“Min!” Natalie walked up to me and stopped inches away, her arm almost touching mine, her face glowing with her wonderful smile. I was suddenly acutely conscious of Laura beside me. I hadn’t mentioned Natalie to her, and I had only spoken briefly of Laura to Natalie. I stood back slightly and gestured to Laura, trying to create a circle for the three of us. I said, “Natalie, I want you to meet my friend Laura. Laura, this is Natalie.”
Laura smiled and said, “Hi,” raising her hand from her side to shake Natalie’s.
Natalie glanced at her and then away. “Min, I gave my first paid massage today!” she said, touching my arm. “Forty bucks. I’m celebrating.” She dipped her head down at the bag she was carrying.
I saw how Laura’s face moved from discomfort to curiosity and warmth at being introduced to a kind of bewildered shock. Natalie kept talking as though we were in a room alone. I didn’t know what to do. So I did the easiest thing. I let Natalie tell me about her massage while Laura stood by. Finally I mentioned that Laura and I needed to get something to eat.
“Yeah, all right,” she said. Then she bent down and kissed me, tongue and all. I meant to stop her, uncomfortable with Laura right there, but my body responded without my thinking about it. I felt the pulse in her neck under my hand. Then I pulled away.
“I’ll call you,” Natalie said and sauntered away down the street, her earrings swinging. I watched two men and a woman stare at her as they passed. She had not acknowledged Laura’s presence once. I was furious with her. And I wanted to be walking down the street beside her.
“I’m sorry,” I said, turning to Laura.
Laura kept her gaze trained down the street. “Well, I don’t appreciate having to watch you make out. It seems like I’m always being reminded how easy it is for you.”
I was mystified. “How easy what is for me? Kissing?”
She turned her face toward me; her eyes were accusing. “Being sexual. Finding someone to sleep with.”
I could feel my head move back, away from her. “Wait a minute, Laura. Where is this coming from?”
She gestured with her head down the street, and we started walking. When I looked over at her, she seemed to be concentrating, her face angry and intent. “It’s always been that way, Min. It’s just not usually so obvious.” I could hear how she was struggling for the words. I waited, biting down on my need to defend myself. “You assume that if you’re attracted to someone, you’ll have sex with them. And you usually do. You don’t worry about whether the other person’s attracted to you or whether it’s a good idea in the long run or whether you have anything in common.”
It was true; when I felt attracted to another woman, I was helpless to it. I loved the sexual force that brought two people so intimately into each other’s orbit, even briefly. It was impossible to resist, like gravity.
Laura went on, “Maybe that person isn’t available. I never expect that anything will happen just because I’m interested. I think it’s kind of presumptuous, actually.”
I was listening to Laura carefully. I didn’t disagree with anything she had said. But I felt strangely removed from her emotion. What did she want me to do? We were different; I attracted lovers more easily than she did. I didn’t feel as rejected when we broke up. I didn’t need as much from other people as she seemed to. For a moment I felt guilty, but there was nothing I could do.
“What about this guy you’re with now, Ethan?” I asked. “What about Nick and Devin and Al?” I added, referring to guys she’d gone out with when we were in school. I knew I had to be careful with her, but I kept going. “Guys have always liked you, Laura. You’re pretty and you’re fun to be with and you’re sexy too. I was jealous of you all the way back in junior high because you had boobs and I didn’t.” She smiled, looking down at the sidewalk. We stopped at a corner to wait for the light. I took a breath. “But you don’t let guys in. You keep yourself hidden. You don’t put out the energy that you’re available. Sexually, and emotionally too.” I wanted her to understand what I meant, but at the same time I knew there was a point beyond which she would stop hearing what I was telling her.
The stoplight changed, and I started to cross. Laura didn’t follow. I went back to where she stood, her hands in the pockets of her painters pants, staring at the white pedestrian lines on the street.
I stood in front of her, trying to coax her to look up. “Have I hurt your feelings?”
“Not exactly.”
Right then, I felt how much I loved Laura—not in the passionate, hungry way I had three years before, just loved her, pure and simple. I didn’t often feel this forceful welling up of affection for another person. It was almost painful.
I pulled her arm, freeing her hand, took it in my own and led her across the street. “I’m sorry,” I said. “The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But I thought you needed to hear it.”
She shifted her hand in mine for a better fit, and I thought that in tenth grade I would have been ecstatic if she’d held my hand. Back then I would have misinterpreted the gesture, wanting so much for our intertwined fingers to mean more than they actually did.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” she told me. “I don’t know how to be any more open than I am.”
I squeezed her hand. It wasn’t as though I could teach her any technique. On the street, people passing glanced down at our linked hands and looked away. I smiled at them anyway.
I said, “I think you’re very open, at least with me. But I’ve known you for a long time. It’s hard for you to trust that a stranger could really like you. Especially when you’re attracted and want to establish something that might last. Am I right?” I wasn’t sure; she had already accused me of being presumptuous.
“Yes,” Laura said reluctantly. She stopped, pulling my hand, in front of a restaurant. “This is it.”
It was impossible to see inside. Paper screens were set in all the windows. Behind them a warm yellow light invited us in. I was ravenous. I said to Laura, who was studying the menu, “You have a lot of integrity, Laura. And a good heart. Someone will recognize that.”
“You think so?”
I took my hand from hers and put both my arms around her shoulders, holding her close. She held me too, swaying slightly from side to side. My cheek against her hair, I realized I was smiling. “I know so,” I said.
Surely there was one other person in the world who would love Laura the way I did.
Natalie brought her head up to mine and kissed me, her mouth tasting of my own wetness.
“Mmm, you taste good,” I said.
“I thought so too.”
Her breath was warm and slightly sweet. The fingers of one hand still inside me, she held me while another shudder rippled up my spine. I could feel the lazy grin on my face. My entire body was in a state of suspended animation. I was glad I hadn’t let my annoyance with Natalie’s behavior on the street stop me from sleeping with her again. Laura, in my position, probably would have refused to speak to her. Maybe if Laura let go of her scruples once in a while, she’d have better luck with guys. I immediately regretted the thought, knowing it was unfair.
“Do you need to go home soon?” I asked. I craned my neck around to look at the clock. 10:07 p.m. Natalie had told Ana she was going to the movies with a friend. I wondered if Ana had believed her. Through the wall, in the other bedroom, I could hear Henry and his girlfriend Karen giggling.
“Yeah, but not right away.” Slowly, Natalie eased her hand out, pressing a sweaty thigh between my legs. I shivered, though I wasn’t cold. She was good at keeping contact, at not leaving a part of the body where she had been without warning. She would do well as a massage practitioner. She licked each finger, closing her eyes as she did it.
“So tell me something,” she said. “You’ve been talking about your dad’s wedding every time we get together. How come you didn’t ask me to go along?”
“Would you have gone?” I asked, astonished. It seemed pretty clear to me that our relationship didn’t extend to weekends away together. But I hadn’t even considered asking her.
She ignored my question. “I’m your lover, right?” she asked.
I nodded.
“The only one you’ve got at the moment, hmmm?”
Again I nodded. Jane didn’t count.
“Are you afraid to show up with a woman lover? A black woman?” She was looking down at me searchingly, waiting to see what I would say.
I took her sticky hand in mine, clutching it against the pillow above my head. “Do you want me to ask you just because you’re my black lesbian lover? Do you want to go so you can make a statement? I don’t.” I released her hand and rolled us both over onto our sides.
“No,” she said, frowning, which made me want to kiss the rumpled furrow between her brows. “I’m not interested in whether your father and all his white friends can deal with me, I’m interested in whether you can deal with me. How are you going to present yourself in that world? Why do you want to play it safe?”
I propped my head up on one hand. Why did she think she knew what was best for me? “I can’t play it safe, Natalie. Most of those people won’t even know who I am or why I’m there. I asked Laura to go because she’s my best friend.”
Natalie rolled her eyes and lay on her back, pulling a pillow under her head.
I was tired of this bullshit. “Fuck it, Natalie, what’s the problem? You don’t like Laura because she’s white?”
She looked at me hard. She didn’t move, but I could see the shrug in her shoulders. “I have no reason to like her.”
“You didn’t give her a chance! She’s my closest friend. Did you think that would change?”
Her gaze suddenly became remote, guarded, her eyes half hooded by her lids. She looked almost as disinterested as when she had met Laura.
I sat up, scrambling to the edge of the bed. “It’s getting late. You should leave.” I stood up, opened the creaky door, and left the room. Naked, I felt my way down the hall in the dark to the bathroom.
When I came back, Natalie was gone. I switched off my bedside lamp and lay in the dark, wide awake, still furious. Outside the window, the orange slice of the waning moon hovered behind a drift of clouds. I looked down at my body stretched out on the bed, silvered by moonlight. My legs were long and sturdy, my chest almost flat with two button nipples, my stomach taut above the bush of black curly hair. In the room next door, Karen moaned, then moaned again. There was a bump against the wall, then Henry said something I couldn’t hear. Then, after a long silence, Karen’s voice rose and called out in inarticulate syllables, wafting on a breeze of pleasure. Smiling, I touched myself, and soon I was calling out, quietly, too. Listening to another woman come always made me happy.
I went to my father’s wedding alone. I took the train down the coast to San Diego and arrived the night before in time for the rehearsal dinner at the bride’s parents’ house. Most of the guests were my father’s and Angela’s friends or from Angela’s family; the only person I knew, vaguely, was a friend of my father’s from his old job in San Francisco who now worked in LA. I didn’t recognize him when he said my name and shook my hand. After he identified himself, he said, “Isn’t this wonderful? I’ve never seen your father looking so happy.” I merely stared at him. Didn’t I want him to be happy? At that moment I wished I hadn’t come. It could only get worse. My father’s friend asked me a few questions about myself which I answered in monosyllables. When he saw I wasn’t going to help him out, he wandered away in search of a drink. Even though I had stopped smoking, I bummed a cigarette from a woman sitting on a couch petting the dog.
That night Dad never left Angela’s side. I barely got a chance to hug him hello before his attention was pulled away by someone else, and Angela and I were left standing together, face to face. She still wore suits, but perhaps in honor of the occasion this one was a peach color. Her pearls nicely set off the tone of her skin around her clavicle.
“Well,” she said brightly. I looked up at her face. Why would my father want to marry someone like her? I couldn’t figure it out. “I’m so glad you could come, Min. I hope you’ll visit us more in the future. I really want to get to know you better. You know, you’re always welcome in our house.”
“You could come visit me,” I suggested, thinking that maybe with her influence I could finally get Dad up to San Francisco.
“That’s nice of you, Min, but we’re awfully busy. We’re not taking our honeymoon until the fall, when things at work ease up a little.” She seemed proud of this. She gulped from her drink, something that smelled like floor wax. “Oh God, do you think anyone’s enjoying this party? How’s the massage business going?”
“I graduated a few weeks ago, so I’m certified now.”
“It sounds like a fun thing to do, taking a course for a few months. You’ll probably make tons.”
“I really don’t care about the money,” I said.
“Listen,” Angela said, laying a hand on my shoulder confidingly, “if you decide you want to go to college after all, I have some very well-placed connections. You’ll have no trouble getting in.” I realized as she spoke that her working for a non-profit had nothing to do with wanting to save the environment. I remembered one of my father’s letters in which he wrote that Angela had gotten her MBA from Harvard immediately after college. She looked around the room appraisingly. She turned to my father to whisper quickly into his ear, and then she hustled him off to take care of some problem that needed fixing. The woman he had been speaking with and I smiled helplessly at each other, and she shook her head and turned away.
It was worse the next morning, when the caterers had to be directed and the putting up of the decorations overseen. I tried to ask my father if we’d have any time to talk alone, and, distracted, he smoothed down his moustache with one knuckle while watching the serving tables being unfolded and said maybe the next day, before I left. Then he excused himself and walked off to supervise where the tables were supposed to go. I kept telling myself I couldn’t expect his full attention today of all days.
The wedding was held outside, in the afternoon, in a huge garden behind an old mansion of a hotel that overlooked the ocean. The ceremony itself took place at a corner bower where the trellises were woven with white silk ribbons and two huge palm trees presided overhead. My father looked spare and nervous and surprisingly handsome in his tux. Angela carried baby’s breath and wore a simple, long white dress. Over her newly wavy hair she had a headdress with a train. She let it trail behind her on the grass, and, at the altar, turned to gather it up, letting it fall in a heap beside her. Seeing her face as she turned, her wide-set eyes and delicate, pointed chin, I found myself thinking that if she weren’t marrying my father I might have asked her out myself. She turned back to the minister, and I tried to concentrate on the ceremony. All around me people were smiling. I heard a woman whisper to her husband, “They wrote the vows themselves. Isn’t it moving?” I realized there were very few single people there, and no children. Just a lot of straight couples, mostly married, all white, there to welcome the happy couple into the fold. I missed Laura, wishing she had been able to come with me. Then I realized that some day I’d have to go to her wedding. She wanted this particular brand of acceptance, this social approval. She thought being married sealed the commitment. I was boiling hot in the silk tunic and loose pants my father’s check had allowed me to buy. A man in front of me shifted and blocked my view. I stood on tiptoe, craning to see over his shoulder. I couldn’t even hear my father and Angela exchange their vows. The light wind from the ocean blew away their words.
The reception was a complete farce. I stood waiting a long time in line to be received by the wedding party, which was only my father and Angela and his best man and her bridesmaid. My father had tears in his eyes after he hugged me, but I didn’t know what they meant. Was he glad, in the end, that I was there? Was he that happy to be married again, to someone other than my mother? He introduced me as his daughter to the couple in front of me and the man behind me. They all looked at me, astonished, and the woman said she didn’t know he had a daughter. Angela hugged me too, an exuberant embrace during which I felt her breasts through her wedding dress, soft and ample. Afterwards, I went directly to the drinks table and asked the sandy-haired surfer boy in a suit standing behind it for a Scotch on the rocks. I’d never had Scotch before—I’d discovered long ago that I didn’t react well to hard liquor—but it was a drink I remembered all the adults having at my grandparents’ house in Rhinebeck.
The garden had a series of walks, and down every one vases had been placed, full of fresh-cut gladioli and lilies. Tables with white linen cloths and table settings were arranged every few yards so that people could move around and eat where they wanted. In the center of the garden a band had set up in front of a large area inlaid with blue and green tiles. I walked around for a while, testing myself on the names of the shrubbery while gulping the stinging scotch. Then the first notes of a big band tune started up. I went back to the drinks table to get another Scotch before helping myself to food.
I found a seat at a table with two older couples. One of the men I was sitting next to, portly with long steel-gray hair, turned out to be Angela’s uncle. His name was Morris, his wife’s was Jill. I was surprised when he turned his full attention to me, ignoring the conversation Jill was in the middle of with the other couple, who hadn’t bothered to introduce themselves.
“This must be kind of tough for you,” he said. “Your parents got divorced five years ago, didn’t they?”
“Yeah. Sometimes I still can’t believe it.”
“I can imagine. On our side of the family, we’re happy for Angie. She’s over thirty already, and Jonathan’s a terrific guy. But it’s more complicated for you.”
“Yeah, well. I don’t know Angela. Maybe she’s great for him. I hardly see him since he left. I don’t know much about his life. The truth is I feel like I’ve lost him completely.” I felt tears brim over. I wiped my cheeks with my fist, furious with myself. The Scotch was already affecting me.
Morris watched me, his bushy gray eyebrows pulled together. “I don’t know if this will help you. I’ve gotten to know Jonathan a bit over the last two years. When we get together, he always talks about you. He misses you, very much. It sounds like you were extremely close. He told me once that when your mother and he agreed the marriage was over, he realized he couldn’t face living nearby. It would have been too painful to be a part-time father, picking you up every other weekend, hoping all the gifts he gave you might make up for his not being at home. For him it was all or nothing. Don’t think less of him for that.” He paused. My tears kept spilling over. “I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.” He pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and handed it to me.
I took it, dabbing my face. I saw Jill glance at me worriedly. I smiled at her, folding the handkerchief.
“We were just talking about Acapulco,” she said to Morris and me. Unwillingly, I let myself be pulled into this stream of conversation. I had no appetite, but I kept drinking.
As the sun went down, bathing the tall palm trees in an orange-pink glow, floodlights came on and the catering staff went from table to table lighting candles in clear glass lanterns. The ocean breeze felt good against my clammy skin. It seemed as if the approaching night made the salt air more pungent, and I breathed it in deeply, relaxing in spite of myself. I liked the luxury of this setting. I might never be in a place this nice again. I wondered how much the evening had cost and who had paid for it. When the bandleader made an announcement, we all turned to watch my father dance with his new bride. It was a slow song, maybe a waltz. He took her hand and put his other hand around her waist, looking into her face tenderly. I stood up and went to refill my drink.
When I came back, the other couple sat at the table by themselves, bickering. I looked for Morris and Jill and saw them on the dance floor. The woman at the table was fussing with her husband’s lapels. He seemed to be explaining to her how she should have ironed his suit at the hotel. I sat down across from them, sipping my Scotch and watching Jill and Morris do what I imagined to be the foxtrot, though I wasn’t sure where this impression came from. They didn’t have much style, but they were enjoying themselves enormously. I grinned. The woman stood and tried to pull her husband up with her. “Come along, darling, I want to dance,” she coaxed. They disappeared into the throng.
I had lost sight of Morris and his wife, as well as of my father and Angela. At the other tables that I could see, people chatted in groups, some angled excitedly toward each other, others leaning expansively back in their chairs, holding forth. No one else was alone. The candles on the tables had an odd halo. I was getting drunk.
I sat back and gulped the last of my drink and wished I had gotten someone in San Francisco to come with me. Natalie would have been an excellent choice, if I hadn’t driven her away. We could have walked around holding hands and made out in the arbor where my father had kissed his new wife. We could have made out on the dance floor. These straight white people all needed a little shaking up. I looked around at the women at the other tables, considering which one I would ask to dance. I would take her hand and lead her to the dance floor. The night wasn’t over yet. I stood up to get myself another drink.
I turned over, and the late sun woke me up. I moved my head and groaned. I had a massive headache. I could hardly open my eyes; they felt dry and swollen. My mouth was parched too. My empty stomach roiled uneasily. I tried to go back to sleep but after a while gave up and opened my eyes. I didn’t recognize the room I was in. It was a hotel room but not mine. Underneath the light blanket, I discovered I was wearing a man’s undershirt. My silk tunic and pants were draped over a chair near the bathroom, ruined by large water stains. I realized I must have thrown up on myself, at least once. I wondered who had tried to soak it out.
I couldn’t remember anything about the night before. I had a vague memory—or had it been a dream?—of my father yelling at me, his face red with anger, while I shivered in the wind. I was sure about having sat with Morris and Jill at dinner. After that there was nothing; I couldn’t bring it back. Concentrating only made my headache worse.
I was splashing water on my face in the bathroom when the hotel room door opened and Morris looked in. He entered the room when he saw the empty bed and then stopped when he noticed me standing, my hands and face dripping, in front of the sink.
“Oops, sorry. I wanted to check on you. Jill has gone out for a little while and left me in charge.” He shrugged and grinned, as though no one should attempt such a reckless act. I liked him.
“Is this your shirt?” I asked, plucking at the front of my makeshift nightwear.
“Yes,” he said, averting his eyes. I couldn’t tell if he was embarrassed to have lent me his undershirt or to see me wearing it. I crossed the room and sat back in bed, pulling the covers up. He relaxed visibly and sat down on the edge of the chair where my ruined tunic was draped.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Like someone ran over me with a convoy of trucks. Do you have any aspirin?”
He looked confused for a moment, then put up his index finger. “Jill does. It may take me a moment to find it. I’ll be back.” He hefted himself up and left the room, leaving the door ajar behind him.
I lay back against the pillows, trying to ignore the slow heaving in my stomach and instead concentrate the pain in my head into one small area. There was a knock at the door. “Still here,” I called, expecting Morris.
It was my father. He was wearing shorts and a polo shirt and sandals, and his eyes had large circles under them. He didn’t look particularly happy for a newlywed.
“Hi,” he said from the open door. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” I said, sweeping my arm before me, indicating that he should make himself at home. He approached and sat at the edge of the bed beside me. Briefly, I wondered how long it had been since he last did that, when he would come in to say goodnight and give me my backrub before I went to sleep. The truth was he had stopped some time before he actually left, somewhere around sixth or seventh grade. My father sat hunched over, his arms crossed. He appeared to be thinking hard. Maybe he had a hangover too.
Finally he looked up at me. “You don’t feel so hot, do you?”
I shook my head, and pain shot through my skull.
“Well,” he said, “Angie would probably be pleased.”
I sat up straighter. “What do you mean? Why? Did I say something offensive to her last night?” Angela seemed like the type who got easily upset.
“You don’t remember what you did?” He looked disbelieving.
I was careful not to shake my head again. “No. After about seven or eight o’clock last night, I draw a complete blank.”
He looked away from me. I realized his unhappy expression was a look of disapproval, almost distaste. I began to be alarmed.
“Dad, what happened?” I asked.
He put one hand up to his moustache, tracing each side with his thumb and forefinger. This was difficult for him, I could tell. “You made a pass at Angie.”
“I did?” A part of me was pleased. What shocking behavior of mine had they interpreted as a come-on? “What, you mean I asked her to dance and she couldn’t take it?”
He frowned. “No, Min, she was flattered that you asked her to dance. I mean after the dance you invited her up to your hotel room. Then you tried to kiss her. In front of everyone.”
Could I have done that? The thudding in my head wouldn’t stop. I knew the answer was yes.
He still wouldn’t look at me. “Min, I’m sorry to have to say this, but you brought it on yourself. I don’t think you should come down to see us for a while. Angie doesn’t forgive easily once someone’s on her shit list.”
“But, Dad, I was drunk. I didn’t know what I was doing.” I winced. Where the fuck was Morris with the aspirin? I couldn’t have this conversation while my head was splitting apart.
He sighed and put his hands flat on his knees, hoisting himself up to a standing position. He was like a boss firing an employee, not like a father who supposedly adored his only child. “There’s nothing else to say.” He was looking at me now, his hands casually stuffed into his shorts pockets. “You embarrassed me and you hurt me. Not to mention Angie.”
I couldn’t stand the way he was gazing at me, as though I was some foreign object like a large insect he had found among the clothes in his suitcase. I put my hands up to the sides of my head, trying to hold it together. I was almost in tears from the pain. “I can’t defend myself, Dad.”
“You’re right. It’s indefensible.” I remembered the times I’d gotten in trouble as a kid by dumping out and hiding the contents of his wallet, or demanding more candy, more time to play on the swings, more stories at bedtime, testing the limits of his love. It was in his saying yes or no, consistently and constantly defining the boundaries of our relationship, that I knew he wouldn’t disappear. All or nothing, Morris had said. He almost looked like the father I remembered, but not quite. He turned and left the room.
I thought I might be sick again. Beneath my skull the pain was relentless. I had blown it. I had gone and fucked it all up. I had lost him in one single night. We would never be close, we wouldn’t even be comfortable in each other’s presence again, and it was my fault. If it hadn’t been for the steady drumming inside my head, I would have screamed as loud as I could until somebody came running to shut me up.