MY CHIN WAS STILL RAW THE NEXT MORNING, ROSY AND TENDER as if I’d come in from the bitter cold. At the bathroom mirror I wiped away the shower’s blur and leaned in to close the vision gap. My black hair—naturally dark brown, but I dyed it black when I thought to—was toweled into floppy spikes, my brown eyes bleary, my skin winter-pale, and then here on my chin, this red badge of false courage. What had I been thinking? I hadn’t been. Not-thinking had seemed like a good idea at the time. I sneaked into Summer’s makeup and managed to powder over the scraped patch enough to mute the lurid glow, but it still stung to the touch.
The dog and I took a round through the neighborhood while Summer slept late. Bullet had started seeking me out first in the morning. I loved watching her ears bob, her broad muscled haunches ripple, as she trotted out in front of me. She was gentle as a kitten but people still crossed the street when they saw her anvil head coming. Queers and pit bulls have a certain species affinity: both feared and misunderstood, discarded by families, used for bait. Bullet was a rescue and she had her issues, but didn’t we all.
Summer was still asleep when I mounted my bike to head to work. The June sky was gray with patches of blue hope. The Broadway Bridge took me up and over the river and coasted me into downtown, where gutter punks and junkies fringed the nineteenth-century buildings of Old Town. Outside Artifacts I locked my bike to a telephone pole studded with staples and wet layers of flyers. I was late, but the store was still dark. I unlocked the front door and flipped on the lights. Paintings hung all the way to the ceiling in a tall, boxy space full of vintage furniture. Living rooms and dining rooms and bedrooms with no walls. Former lives arranged to sell. I wound through the store, turning on every lamp.
“Hey, kid.”
My surprise sent me fumbling into a gaunt Swedish vase that I barely caught in time. “Ted! You’re here,” I said stupidly.
My boss stood in the doorway to the back room, tall and rumpled in his zip-up fleece and Levi’s. He popped a tablet of nicotine gum out of its foil backing. “I had to get the van. Early estate sale.” He tapped the top of his head. “Forget something?”
I peered at his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. “Did you get a haircut?”
“Jesus. Maybe you should keep that thing on for your own safety.”
“Oh.” I lifted off my bike helmet and ran a hand through my smashed hair. “Whoops. Not enough coffee. I was up late.”
He raised a predatory eyebrow. “Oh, really.” Ted loved vicarious thrills. Especially lesbian ones. I had learned to uphold a solid firewall and mete out just enough personal information to allow for both collegial bond and professional distance. “And what were you up to?” he asked hopefully.
“Can’t tell you.” My standard fallback: “Gay secret.” And how, I thought.
He cackled. “Go get us coffee,” he said, slapping two dollars down on the counter. “And watch the breakables on the way out.”
At seven bucks an hour, I couldn’t afford the stuff I helped sell, even with the employee discount. Even with the record-store job on weekdays and the letterpress gigs. But it was steady work, the part-time stability all of us sought or settled for. The Artifacts job paid for my house rent and my share of the letterpress studio. The record-store job covered utilities and first crack at the incoming used CDs—we all considered music a necessary expense then. The letterpress gigs varied month to month and determined the quality of my groceries and whether I could order PBR or well whiskey. One cracked plate on the job could wipe six hours out of my paycheck, as I knew all too well.
At the coffee shop around the corner, I ordered two coffees from the girl with the deer eyes and cropped hair and Joan of Arc tattoo. As usual, she paid me little notice. Meena had intel that the coffee girl was straight—one of those girls who affects andro queer chic and looks heartbreakingly good in it but actually only dates men. We resented this kind of girl. It was hard enough as it was without these decoys jacking up false hope, jamming the gaydar.
Back at work I moved slowly, tried not to break things. I busied myself dusting everything like a hungover housewife. A couple of customers came in, stroked the arms of Eames chairs, expressed desire without conviction, imagined their lives with this sofa or that table, and left. I couldn’t fault them—I did it too. I would love a credenza, a painting, a lamp, and watch it for weeks and plan where it could go in my house, a luminous beautiful thing among the battered street finds and left-behind furniture, until a real person with real money came and took it home.
Summer shouldered through the door with a jingle at three that afternoon. Her cherry-red hair was pulled into a high knot and she wore a gray jacket with a huge fluffy faux-fur collar, like a giant squirrel tail pillowing her neck. She threw her sacklike purse down on a couch and curled up next to it. “What’d I miss?” Summer had grown up in Tennessee and Boston and her speech was curiously inflected by both accents—part drawl, part bark.
“No feet on the couch,” I said. “It’s a Knoll.”
She moved her boots to the Conant Ball coffee table. I started to chide and she said, “Just kidding!” and put them on the floor.
“If Ted sees you he’ll kill you,” I said. “I take it back, he’ll kill me. Actually, you’re in a different kind of trouble if Ted sees you. I’m afraid you’re his type.”
She waved it away. “I dance for Ted every night.”
I pictured the money Ted wasn’t paying me landing at Summer’s feet. “Seriously?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know. Close enough. How was the show? I am so mad I missed it.”
“Loud,” I said. “Good turnout.” I felt my chin throb.
“You have a funny look on your face.”
My pulse sped up. I couldn’t tell her, not here. “I’m sort of breaking out on my chin?”
“I meant you’ve got this weird expression.”
I picked up a spray bottle and started to wipe at an invisible spot on the counter, chin tilted as far into my neck as it could go. “Oh. Well. Flynn was there.”
“Ah. Did you talk to her?”
“I only saw her from afar.” I rolled my eyes. “Leather pants? Really?”
Summer laughed agreeably and studied my face, which I instantly lowered. “Seriously, are you okay?” she said. “You look kind of flushed.”
“Hangover,” I mumbled.
Summer excavated a vial of ibuprofen and half a bottle of Diet Coke from the depths of her bag and graciously set them before me. “Buck up before family dinner. You look like hell.”
I froze. “Family dinner!”
“You forgot.”
“I didn’t forget. I just forgot it was tonight.”
“Uh-huh. I’m headed to Nature’s. Need anything?”
“No, I’m on it.”
I was totally not.
Family dinner happened once a month and rotated from house to house. A half dozen of us pulled together a big meal and cleared a whole evening for it. Flynn used to come, but in the breakup, I got to keep family dinner. Clearly I needed it more. Or maybe Flynn had started a new family dinner crew. There was a lot I didn’t know.
Like what, and how, I was going to pull together for tonight.
When Ted came back an hour before closing, I told him I wasn’t feeling well. He looked at my face and believed me. “Get on home, kid,” he said, and with guilty relief, I did.
On the way home, I stopped by the record store. I’d forgotten to sign my time sheet and I couldn’t afford to delay my two-figure paycheck. It was a minor shop, a modest closet compared to Jackpot or Music Millennium or Crocodile, but it was a solid little neighborhood joint with an equal mix of vinyl and CDs, and where a clerk didn’t have to be an encyclopedia, just an enthusiast.
The new guy in his black knit beanie was slitting open long boxes of new CDs and paid me no attention at all—off duty, I was a girl in a record store, the ignorable class—until I said hello. Still, I glanced over at him twice before I surreptitiously pulled the Cold Shoulder record out of the C section.
On the back cover was a snapshot of the band’s practice space, some basement walled with a grid of mattresses, cluttered with gear. The singer-guitarist stood in the foreground, of course, looking directly at the lens even as he played; the bassist slouched behind him. Ryan sat at his drum kit, on whose bass head he had traced a two-headed calf, with one stick raised, the other a pale blur. His hair was shorter in this picture, falling forward over his eyes, and his head was turned slightly to the side. He had a good mouth. I drew the cover closer to peer at the grainy shadow of his jaw. The skin looked rougher there.
My fingers were sweating, slippery on the shrink-wrap. I rang myself up and slid the record into a flat brown paper bag, plain and anonymous as an envelope addressed to no one.
The house was quiet and dim, the last of the afternoon light slanting low across the dusty floor. I made myself a tahini and banana sandwich and took it to my bedroom, where the record player squatted atop a scratched teak dresser. The dog followed me in and sat down unprompted, tail wagging, ears perked. When I reached to pet her she ducked.
“You want my sandwich, not my love.” I tore off a strip of crust and tossed it to her. “At least you’re honest about it.”
I pierced the sleeve’s plastic membrane with my thumbnail and slit it along the edge, and the inky record slid smoothly out. I’d seen the Cold Shoulder play before, but I hadn’t paid close attention. It was one of those times when Flynn was acting slightly askew; she had sent me out for a night With My Own Friends, because it would be Good For Me, and the effort of shoving my unease to the back of my mind had clouded my ability to focus on much else, including the bands I stood watching without hearing.
The needle announced itself with a staticky thump as I set it down on the circling record, cut into a jagged guitar riff, and then the whole trio kicked in, lean and artfully ragged around the edges. It wasn’t the kind of music I usually listened to. I liked distortion, a girl holler or a voice with a rough edge, the blur and bleed of excess noise. Music that abraded in order to soothe. Music that wouldn’t sound good as background music, music you would never hear played in a store. The Cold Shoulder was tight and melodic, almost . . . professional. I paid attention to the drums. Ryan hit hard but eschewed excess—no bombast or wild fills or ringing crash, but a taut, puncturing beat. I turned up the volume and lay on the hard wooden floor on my back.
This was my favorite way to listen to music, and the only way to meet a brand-new record. On your back on the floor, you don’t just hear the music, you feel it. Your whole body listens.
The first time I experienced this it was accidental. It was back in central Nebraska, in the farmhouse where I grew up. My parents had left for a weekend tractor show in Lincoln with my brother, my older sister was at college, my little sister had gone to a friend’s house, and they had let me stay home alone; I was seventeen and a Good Kid.
I invited my best friend, Sarah, to spend the night, and Sarah brought along her cousin Zoe, who was a year older and visiting from Minneapolis. Zoe had dyed her choppily bobbed hair black but still had white-blond roots, eyebrows, and eyelashes, plus pale golden freckles; it was an unearthly effect. The words GIRL BOMB were written on her knuckles in Sharpie. To Sarah and me, Zoe seemed very cosmopolitan, so sure of herself. We lived in a world of sugar beet fields and hog farms, a town with two bars and five churches and one restaurant, called Restaurant; our junior class had thirty-two people in it. A few kids would parrot their parents’ grumbling about the new influx of migrant workers who came to work the fields and a nearby meatpacking plant, but if I protested they would assure me they didn’t mean people like my family (our last name, Morales, came from my Mexican-born grandfather, who’d died when my dad was twelve); occasionally someone would ask me how to say something in Spanish, which neither I nor my siblings knew after three generations of assimilation and a high school foreign-language curriculum that offered only beginning German. We all went to youth group on Wednesdays and church on Sundays, and the only thing to do on weekends was sit in our houses or stand around in the gas station parking lot or go get wasted at a gravel pit. Zoe, however, had a fake ID that got her into shows, she spent her free time in record stores and bookstores, she wrote a zine called Catfight. She wore boys’ boxers and a translucent ribbed tank top to sleep in, and she had brought with her a crate of records. Sarah conked out around midnight, but Zoe and I were still wide awake, so we took the crate to the living room for a listening party.
We settled into the gap between the sofa and the stereo, a passage two feet wide where the hardwood floor was bare.
“Have you heard this before?” said Zoe, pulling out the album Sister by Sonic Youth.
“All I’ve heard by them is Goo,” I said, feeling very young. I had not actually heard Goo either, just of it. I hoped that was enough. “Is that a new one?”
“Oh, no,” said Zoe with a knowing laugh. “This is from, like, five years ago. It’s way better than their new stuff.” She put it on and turned up the volume so that before the music even started the vinyl crackled like a distant storm. Then the drumbeat thundered in so loud and sure my breath caught, and Zoe smiled with approval. Boom-boom-BOOM-boom-boom-boom-BOOM, and then a knowing, insistent guitar stepped in, a nodding bass line followed it, and I closed my eyes. This music sounded dissonant and wrong but it sounded so right I could hardly believe it. Yet I did believe, totally, instantly.
I felt Zoe’s mouth on mine and we toppled to the floor.
My back hit the boards and at once everything sounded and felt different. Through the wood that was once alive and whose internal structure remembered it, the waves of the sound traveled through my shoulder blades and torso and bare feet, through Zoe’s knees straddling me and her palms flat on the floor beside my shoulders, and through, it seemed, Zoe’s mouth moving in time with mine. I felt the sound with my whole body, discordant and delicate and harsh and beautiful, pulsing with a trapped urgency I recognized in myself—a sound like chasing and being chased, never catching nor being caught.
Jesus had a twin who knew nothing about sin, the voice chant-sang. She was laughing like crazy at the trouble I’m in.
We kissed and kissed, and as the needle circled the fading feedback of side one, Zoe ran a finger along my drawstring waistband. I ached with want, but I worried that if I traversed that border I would never be able to cross back. “Not yet,” I whispered.
“Are you sure?”
“Next time.”
The player’s arm lifted and swung back to rest. “Okay,” Zoe said, “next time,” and got up to flip the record. We made out until the second side ended, and then, dazed and high on each other, went to my bedroom. Zoe got into the bed with her cousin and I slid into the sleeping bag on the floor. She hung her arm over the side and we held hands until we fell asleep.
In the morning when we woke, my hand was resting on the floor and Zoe’s was folded up near her chest.
We never told Sarah. Or anyone.
After Zoe and Sarah left the next day, I went back into the living room. The sunlight poured through the windows and I couldn’t believe it was the same sunlight as before, the same home. The whole house looked different.
I carried the sweet ache of my secret for months. I would write letters to Zoe, but not too often, and managed to stop myself from spilling forth Come back here, come over, please kiss me again; I didn’t want to sound desperate. I pored over each new issue of Zoe’s zine, searching for clues about myself, or other girls, but it was mostly Riot Grrrl politics and show reviews and critiques of punk boys and pro-girl manifestos; Zoe wrote about girls in general, but not any girl in particular, no anecdote of listening to Sonic Youth with a girl she’d discovered stranded in a tiny nothing town three hours from Lincoln. How desperately I wanted to see that story written. Next time never came; I had blown it, forever, I worried, and now I was trapped on the wrong side of that border, all alone.
The more I fell in love with Zoe—or the idea of Zoe, Zoe in print—the more I realized that the feeling was not a new arrival but a part of me awakened, like sap stirring under bark. And that in all the miles and miles of green fields stretching toward the horizon as far as I could see from the end of our driveway, there was not a single place for that feeling to exist, except inside me.
So I kept it locked safely within, while on the outside I made myself so good it hurt. While my classmates fought with their parents and defied their curfews and drank and smoked and had sex, I dared not join them. The rebellion inside me was far worse. My friends would eventually get it out of their systems and settle down, maybe even here, but I would never do the one thing my parents unequivocally expected of me from the moment I was born: replicate them. No boyfriends brought home to dinner. No giddy phone call of I’ve got good news. No showers, no dance at the VFW, no headlines for the family Christmas letter. They would never give me away at the end of an aisle; I was not theirs for the giving.
Theirs was not the kind of God who was flexible about such things.
My strategy: to bide my time and stockpile as much favor as I could, to make up for or brace for the life to come. I attended youth group and Sunday school, scored straight A’s, joined every plausible extracurricular, won scholarships to every school I applied to, babysat and saved the growing pile of cash in my underwear drawer, went to prom with a boy named Sam, cleaned my plate, fed the chickens and collected their eggs at dawn without complaint. My room was always spotless so my mother would never have cause to clean it and turn up something she might question. Behind my bedroom door, I read Catfight and other zines Zoe sent me. I mail-ordered the albums they wrote about, and then more from the photocopied catalogs that came tucked inside those records’ sleeves, a world of ever-branching underground tunnels. In a decoy journal at my bedside I sketched brief descriptions of my day, petty social squabbles and funny accidents and idle musings; but deep in my bookshelves I hid my real journal, which I nonetheless wrote in a coded diction, changing or avoiding pronouns, shifting into third person as if I were making up stories about someone else. I listened to my music on my Discman with headphones so the raucous noise was mine alone, and at night when I couldn’t sleep I crept down behind the couch, plugged my headphones into the stereo system, and lay on my back on the floor.
My parents never heard a note.
On my last night in Nebraska, I stood at the end of the driveway, where the mailbox nodded toward the dark, dark country roads. The tall house stood alone in a cluster of trees, an island in an ocean of sugar beets, lit like a ship.
Good-bye, Nebraska. Good-bye, wide black sky. Good-bye, velvet humidity of the summer night air. Good-bye, pulsing cricket drone. Good-bye, fireflies.
Hello, moss, rain, towering firs, bridges, fickle skies, girls, life.
The Cold Shoulder song hit the bridge and it was a predictable but good one—it did exactly what a bridge can do, take a step sideways and shamelessly yank the listener’s heart with it, and I let it yank mine for a moment. The feeling was familiar but I couldn’t tell if it was the bridge or the song itself. Surely they had played it that night when I had half listened to them perform. I imagined if someone had tapped me on the shoulder and leaned in to whisper, Guess who in this room you’ll kiss in six months, and pointed out . . . the drummer? of the Cold Shoulder? I would have guffawed or thrown a drink in that person’s face, depending on their gender.
Actually, I would have said, You have the wrong person. I’m with Flynn.
And this prescient person might have looked around and said, But is Flynn with you?
Not at this moment she isn’t.
Exactly.
At that point, I might have cut out and gone home; I might have found the house dark and locked, Flynn out for the night; I might have found the house lighted and locked, and Flynn tangling with someone in our bed. Vivian?
But I had stayed through the show, stubbornly clung to my illusion of a life partner, gotten thoroughly drunk, and come home with whiskey on my tongue and a lump in my throat to a girlfriend who was sound asleep, flat on her stomach on the far side of the bed, unrousable.
The third Cold Shoulder song was under way when I lifted the needle and the record slowed to a stop. They were a fine band, solid, good, unlikely to become huge but who knew these days? Forgettable local bands had become national hits. You never know what other people will love.
I got up off the floor, a little wobbly still, and dusted off my back. Dinner was at Meena’s in two hours and I hadn’t even gone to the store yet. The last thing I wanted to do was let the family down.