THE CURTAINS WERE DRAWN ON TOPHER AND ROBIN AND Marisol’s house when I biked there the next morning to rescue my car. I was lucky: the battery had recalibrated enough to nudge the engine to sputtering life, so I wrangled my bike into the hatchback and drove to the studio, where I worked most of the day in eerie solitude. Summer stopped by our place that evening to swap out clothes, and the Gold Stars had band practice. I drowsily watched High Art on the couch with Bullet, growing more and more depressed in the process, and reminded myself it was just a movie, just one of those Saturday nights when everyone was busy. Tomorrow I’d be back in the thick of things. The Unrest Auxiliary of the Lesbian Mafia had a meeting to plan some direct action—since the art show had closed, we’d been working on pranks to mess with the downtown stronghold of the Church of Scientology.
When I arrived at the house at noon sharp, Jade, the lead organizer, was the only one waiting for me in the red-painted living room. A housemate was cooking something with cumin back in the kitchen.
“Is it true?”
I stopped unbuttoning my coat. “Is what true?”
Family dinner, it turned out, was not the verbal sanctuary we alleged it was.
“Who told you?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Jade looked at my stomach and asked what the plan was. I said that wasn’t her problem to worry about. What was my relationship to the biological father? We’re friendly, I said.
“Is he straight?”
“Yes.”
“And you had . . . a relationship with him?”
“I don’t know if I’d call it that.”
“You slept with him? Multiple times?”
“It sounds weird when you put it like that.”
“It does, doesn’t it,” she said pointedly. Then she adopted the self-care voice, a tone of firm, mannered earnestness. “Look. Andy, why don’t you go on home. Rest up and do”—she gestured toward my abdomen—“whatever it is you need to do.”
“But I’m here to work.”
Jade gritted her teeth. Clearly I was being uncooperative. She said, “We have plenty of actual lesbians to carry on the Lesbian Mafia’s work.”
“I’m still a lesbian,” I said. “And every lesbian is in the Lesbian Mafia.”
Jade pressed her nail-bitten fingers into her temples and said if the Lesbian Mafia weren’t clearly lesbians, then who could you count on to be one? Words had to mean something. And I said, Well, I’m definitely queer, and she said, Come on, “queer” can be anything, married suburbanites with a leash and a pair of nipple clamps claim they’re queer. I said, Can’t someone be culturally lesbian?, and she said it was a matter of practice, and I said, What about all those young girls stuck at home who know they’re lesbians but haven’t met any others yet, do they not count?, and she said, They get a pass, and I said, Like babies in purgatory?, and she said, I don’t know that Catholic shit, don’t confuse the issue: you’re with a dude. I said, I’m not with him, I just did things with him, and she said, So you’re totally done with him? and I said, Yeah. She said, Never again? I said, Who cares?
She gave me a look.
“I’m a card-carrying member,” I said. “I literally printed the cards.”
She threw up her palms. “Thank you for your service?”
“Fine,” I said. “I’m out. Good luck.”
Jade sighed with relief. “Thank you, Andy. Good luck to you too. I really mean it.”
“I’m sure you do,” I said. She gave me a stiff, sympathetic hug at the door.
I realized I had traded one small town for another.
I thought about some of the most dogmatic anarchist punks I’d known, whose parents turned out to be bankers and oilmen. I thought of the class-discussion radicalism police who leaped to call out everyone else on their shit, desperate to cover their own. How even I had thrown myself deeper into the Lesbian Mafia as soon as I started sleeping with Ryan. It seemed in our urgency to redefine ourselves against the norm, we’d formed a church of our own, as doctrinaire as any, and we too abhorred a heretic.
By the time I got home my whole body felt like it was aflame with anger and shame—a cold fire, a numbing burn. The only place I could bear to be was outside. I summoned Bullet and grabbed some treats and her leash. Ryan called while I was pulling on my rain boots. I said I was going to the river and he could come along if he wanted. I didn’t think he would, but he said sure.
Bullet paced in the back seat. When Ryan got in, she licked his face.
“How are you?” he said gently as I ramped onto Highway 84.
“I honestly don’t know,” I said.
“Let me come with you to the clinic on Tuesday. Please.”
I checked my blind spot and accelerated to merge. When I was settled into the flow of traffic, I said, “I’m not going.”
“Not going Tuesday or not going at all?”
I shook my head. “At all. I think.”
“That would mean . . .”
I nodded.
“Andrea, that’s crazy.”
“Totally.”
“I mean it’s really fucking crazy.”
“I know,” I said.
“Aren’t you a lesbian?”
I shot him a look. “What does that mean?”
“Seems like this would really mess with your whole identity.” He said identity with dental precision.
“Do you want to get out right here?” I said, swerving toward the shoulder. Bullet stumbled across the back seat.
“Jesus,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
I wanted to tell him about getting kicked out of the Lesbian Mafia, but to do so would disclose the existence of the Lesbian Mafia. I couldn’t break the code like that. I said, “I’ve had a bad fucking day.”
We parked in the muddy potholed clearing that was the lot and Bullet scrambled over Ryan to get out. A dirt trail led through dead corrals to a vast winter field, brown and gold, a gray path curving through it, power lines overhead. Bullet opened up and ran for no reason other than to run, legs like pistons, ears streaming backward. She galloped in huge elliptical laps as if she were pursued by happy demons. It was impossible not to laugh.
“Joy,” I said with relief. “There it is.”
“Hers or yours?”
“Both.” I realized Bullet was my dog now, my animal family. I’d protect her. She’d protect us.
The path turned sandy and wound through scrubby willows toward the half-flooded river. Bullet thundered past us as if she were on a racetrack.
The river was swollen and slow, dark blue in the afternoon light, with only a small high strip of beach to stand on. Bullet rooted around in the willows and came up with an abandoned flip-flop. Ryan took it from her and hung it on a high branch.
“I’m trying to get my head around this.” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and paused to light one. I shielded the flame for him, felt its brief warmth on my palms. “I never wanted kids. Never.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. The same reason I don’t want a horse?”
I had always wanted a horse, but I held that back. “It’s not really the same,” I said.
“Yeah, you can sell a horse,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought you wanted a kid either.”
When I was growing up I’d always thought I’d have kids, because everyone had kids, and I preferred making blanket forts and playing Legos with my younger siblings and cousins to sitting in the living room with the tedious adults, but when I moved to Portland and grew older and smarter I wrote off that feeling as gender conditioning and compulsory hetero et cetera, and besides, I didn’t want kids then, I didn’t want to be pinned into a Good Housekeeping life like my older sister and my high school friends, I wanted to stay up all night working in the studio and to sleep around and to go to shows with my friends. Queers got to live young for as long as they wanted, forever even.
“I didn’t,” I said. “I don’t. Except maybe this one.”
“I should have guessed,” he said. “You keep everything. One more for the archive.”
“Fuck off.”
“You think you can really do this?” he said.
“You don’t think I can?”
“I’m not saying you can’t. I just know that I’m not cut out to be a parent. I’m not very patient.”
“You’ve been patient with me,” I said.
“That’s what you think.”
I wished I had one of his cigarettes. I jammed my hands into my pockets. “I know I wasn’t easy.” I kicked at the ground, sending sharp little pebbles scattering. “I thought I would be, but I wasn’t. I’ll try to be now. I’m not asking you to be a parent, Ryan. I don’t need money or a custody deal or whatever. You’re off the hook. You can have your life.”
“I don’t know how that’s really possible.”
I asked what he meant and he said, “I don’t know how to go about my ordinary life while you’re having my baby.”
“Your baby? I’m just a warehouse?”
He raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry, sorry, I mean a baby, that I contributed to.”
“My baby,” I said. “If you don’t want it.”
“Our baby. To be honest.”
“Fine.” I picked up a twisted stick, a severed root really, and flung it out into the water. Bullet bounded in after it. “You want this to be an our thing?”
“It’s not what I’d hoped for us, honestly.”
I looked up at the gray sky. It was the color of dirty sheets. “What happened to ‘no expectations’?”
“What’s no expectations?”
“That first night. At the Old Nickel. You said you had no expectations.”
He looked confused. “I don’t even remember that.”
“I guess that was, like, ten months ago,” I conceded.
“My god, the things you hold on to.”
Bullet dropped the stick at my feet and shook, spraying cold river water across our legs.
I threw the stick again, but Bullet abandoned it to the river and disappeared into the willows, nose to the ground. “I’m just saying. I fully expect you to walk away. And you can. You probably should.”
“This kills me about you.”
“What?”
“You refuse to need me for anything, even the thing that you would most obviously need me for.”
“But you hate needy. You like space. I thought that’s what you liked about me.”
“That’s the problem. You’re always just beyond me. And for some reason I keep going toward you. Because at a certain point I became determined to win you over to . . . I don’t know—”
“To win?”
“Just to prove I could. But I can’t. Andy, you realize that if you keep this thing, you’re connected to me for a really long time, right?”
Ryan looked as vulnerable as I’d ever seen him. Maybe I didn’t have to fight so much. Maybe I didn’t have to be so alone. Maybe another parent wouldn’t be the worst thing to have on my team. Maybe we could evolve into some kind of collaboration that could work, whatever that would look like.
“Do you want in?” I asked.
“Do you want me in?”
“If you want in.”
“Don’t shut me out.”
Ryan’s voice was plaintive, and I glimpsed the boy he had once been, previously incomprehensible to me. I rested a hand on my abdomen and felt unsettling gratitude for the embryo stealthily growing there, and for the mistake of its conception, and for Ryan, my inadvertent but crucial cocreator. I already loved this thing. I didn’t know you could love something that barely even existed, something you’d never seen or felt, undetectable yet unmistakably present—this must be a feeling like faith. With that hand on my abdomen I looked at his face, the face of a person who stared at me so directly now, and I wondered if the genetic blueprint of the mysterious being inside me would build eyes like those eyes, a face like this face, if worry would etch itself like this into the corners of his or her mouth.
“Hey,” I said, “come here,” and I reached out and pulled him to me, or myself to him. I rose up on my toes and met his rough mouth with mine. An image of field stubble, corn and wheat fields, flashed in my mind. A barn at the far end of it. When I pulled away, he looked at me with pleased disbelief.
I said, “You’re in. Me too.”
Bullet emerged from the willows with a wide triumphant grin, her head and shoulders slicked with some reeking gray-green death.
Meena showed up at the house Friday afternoon with a brown paper bag from Reading Frenzy. “If you’re seriously going to do this,” she said, “you need to be prepared. The straight world will try to eat your kid’s soul.”
“You would know, I guess,” I said. “Since you’re working for them now.”
“Shut up,” she said. “Wait until you need health insurance. Oh guess what, now you totally do.”
I emptied the bag onto the table. A couple of zines, Mother/Fucker #4 and This Baby Is a Pipe Bomb #1 (the author never made it to issue #2); a book called The Anarchist Baby: Strategies for Resisting Corporate Childhood; and The Lesbian Parenting Book.
“Thanks,” I said. This, I understood, was her olive branch.
“I’m here to help,” she warned. I suspected by “help” she meant supervise.
I flipped through the books, all of them brand-new, and worried aloud that they must have cost a lot.
“I have a real job now,” Meena said. “Which also means, I need pants.”
“Obviously.”
“What I’m trying to say is, will you go to the mall with me?”
“So that’s why you came over.”
“Just get your coat, nerd.”
It was our shameful secret pleasure: Meena and I loved going to Lloyd Center. To Meena, it evoked the Houston suburbs of her youth. To me, living within ten minutes of a mall never ceased to feel exotic. Where I grew up, the mall was a two-hour drive, a special trip planned weeks in advance, while here in Portland it just was, whenever you wanted. In college we’d sneak away to it, circle the ice rink where Tonya Harding used to practice, settle into the rickety seats of the brown-carpeted, gold-foil-trimmed movie theater, meander through the hushed, low-lit department stores and try on clothes we’d never buy. It was our basest place, a site of no righteousness, where we both were humbled, guilty, pleased, American.
The salesman in the Nordstrom men’s department shot us a look of faint disappointment as we sauntered in: one shortish, stocky butch whom little would fit, and an even shorter one in thrift-store pants with the hems hand-scissored off. Commission unlikely.
“I think I got kicked out of the Lesbian Mafia,” I said with a dark, defensive laugh to Meena in the dressing room.
“The Lesbian Mafia? Please. They’re not everyone.”
I sat on the padded stool next to the mirror. “Maybe the lesbians, period.”
“It’s not like there’s an official membership.”
I snorted. “Get real. Of course there is.”
The salesman rapped on the dressing room door. “Can I get you ladies anything?”
“We’re good, sister.” Meena hated being called “lady.” She dropped her Dickies and stood there in her boys’ tighty-whities that bagged at the crotch. “People are going to freak out. But they’ll get over it. If I can get over it—which I haven’t yet, but I will—they can too. And if they don’t, fuck them.”
“You’re still not over it?”
“I’m not over that you didn’t trust me.”
“I do trust you,” I said.
“You don’t. We used to tell each other everything. And I still tell you stuff, but whenever I try to go deep with you, you close up so quickly. Even after Flynn. You’re just like, ‘I’m okay. Not much to report.’ Even though I’m supposedly your best friend.”
She was right. And I’d rather break a lover’s heart twenty times than a good friend’s once. But I hadn’t seen any other way. For months after Flynn and I broke up, I couldn’t even wear short sleeves—I had felt too exposed in them. “I’m sorry, Meena. I just needed to hole up inside myself for a while. Trust issues.”
Meena jammed her shirt into the waistband and turned to a new angle in the mirror. “I mean, in our six years of friendship you never ever indicated you would even consider a man. I can’t even imagine it.”
“I never did consider it! It was a total fluke.”
“So it’s over?”
“Those need a belt.”
She straightened up and glanced at herself in the pants, then me, in the mirror. “It’s over, right?”
“It’s changed.”
“Oh god, is he your boyfriend? Please say no.”
“He’s in it to help. That’s all.”
“People are going to ask you. And me. We need to know what to tell them.”
“Does it matter? I’m still me.” I pointed at my belly. “Me plus one.”
“Girl, no one’s going to buy that,” Meena said.
“I don’t care if they buy anything. I’m not selling.”
The attendant’s shadow darkened the slats. “How’s it going in there, ladies?”
Meena looked down at the excess fabric crumpling around her ankles. “Well, Mary, nothing quite fits.” We took them anyway.
When Meena dropped me off, I found Summer and Marcy sorting through the dishes while the Slits blasted from the boom box. The kitchen and living room were scattered with half-packed boxes.
I took the cordless phone to my room and called Annabel in Boston.
“What?” she shrieked. “How far along are you?”
I said about two months. “Andrea, you can’t tell people yet,” she said, alarmed. “You could still miscarry.” My little sister turned out to know an extraordinary amount about pregnancy. Several of her friends who had graduated last spring were married and cooking up firstborns already. And, she told me, our sister, Alissa, had a fourth on the way.
“Four?”
“Yep. There’s finally going to be a boy now. All under age six,” Annabel said. “I don’t think there’s much else for her to do in Sioux City.”
“Sewer City,” I said. “Bet she’s glad now she took up with Jeb.”
“He’s a meatball.”
“What are the kids like?” Technically, they were my nieces. But they were abstractions to me. Names in a Christmas letter.
“Little meatballs,” Annabel said. “Cute but kind of nuts. Alissa dresses them in matching outfits and presents them at holidays as if they’re the stars of a Broadway show. They all start with A too.”
I said I wished I knew them now. What if one of them turned out to be gay? “They need to know about their lesbian aunt.”
“We need to talk about that part,” Annabel said. “What does this mean exactly?”
In some ways it was harder to come out as gay-with-one-exception than it was to come out as gay. I prepared to do a lot of explaining. But Annabel had different questions than my friends. Such as: “Are you in love with him?”
“No way,” I said. “But I like him. I feel . . . affection.”
Annabel made a dark hmm. “Is he in love with you?”
“I think he knows better,” I said.
She said she didn’t get it, but she wanted to come visit me when the baby was born. “When are you going to tell Mom and Dad?”
“Oh god, are you kidding? I can’t.” I wrapped my arms around myself.
“But they’ll be so happy you’re with a guy.”
“But I’m not with a guy. I’m still a lesbian.”
“Oh. Are you seeing someone else?”
“No.”
“And he’s the father of your kid?”
“Well, technically.”
“And he’s going to help you raise the baby?”
“That’s the plan so far.”
“Then you’re pretty much with him. At least in Mom’s eyes.”
I begged her not to tell our parents. “She’ll be so fucking happy,” I said. “I can’t take it.”
Annabel laughed. “She’ll just tell you to get married. And start sending you baby crap.”
I got serious. “It’s way more complicated than that,” I said.
Annabel still didn’t understand how the last five years of my life would be swiftly, tidily edited out of my mother’s story, negated—but never from mine. They were my life. They had made my life. And I loved my life. I said, “Please promise me you won’t tell. Promise, promise, promise.”
She promised.
“You told your family?” Summer said. She was sorting through a soft mountain of dresses on the table.
“Just my little sister. And she promised not to tell my parents.”
“You have to be careful with that,” Marcy said, wrapping plates in pages of the Willamette Week. “You know about Sharon Bottoms?”
“No,” I said. I picked up a mug with a little ceramic beaver sitting at the bottom that you didn’t know was there until your coffee level dropped and the face emerged. “Hey, this one’s mine.”
“She was that lesbian in Virginia? Her mom sued for custody of her kids and won. They took them away. Solely because she was gay.” Marcy shook her head. “That was only a few years ago.”
“Jesus. Would your parents do something like that?” Summer said.
The thought of my mother reaching out to pick up my baby stirred panic in me. I thought of the brochure on the priest’s table. I crinkled newspaper carefully around a wineglass that said We’ve Got Tonight: Prom 1986. I said, “I wouldn’t put it past them.”
“By the way,” Summer said, “have you found a roommate yet?”