BECAUSE MOST OF THE TIME WE LIVED ON BROCCOLI AND TOFU, beans and rice, grilled cheese and spaghetti, the point of family dinner was complex recipes, a luxurious if temporary abundance, and a what’s-told-here-stays-here policy. There was also a no-lentils policy, unless we were cooking Indian. Call it a potluck and you would be banished to a purple bungalow on Hawthorne Boulevard for an infinite drum circle—we were not potluck wimmin.
Lawrence held up her offering: “This is a three-dollar bottle of wine but it tastes like a five-dollar bottle of wine.” We cheered. Tonight there were six of us: Meena, Lawrence, Summer, and me, plus our friends Robin and Topher. Robin, an ex-girlfriend of Meena’s who had long ago transitioned to inner-circle friend, wore her dark hair in a high pony atop her head and drew her eyebrows on with a black kohl pencil every morning. She regularly hit the Goodwill bins and reconstituted secondhand rejects into dresses that slunk over her lush fat curves like couture. Topher, our token gay male friend, was slight and fair and clever, with an easy rapid-fire laugh that made him terrific fun to watch movies with. He and Lawrence swapped thrifted sweaters and experimental novels.
We assembled at the Manor, Meena’s house on Southeast Yamhill. With the settlement from a car accident in high school that left Meena’s right temple flecked with glass scars, she’d bought a half-wrecked 1910 duplex and taught herself how to renovate it. We’d all spread grout or pried up carpet or patched drywall there at some point. She rented out the first side she finished and moved into the other side, where one room or another was always skeletal and piled with construction materials. She had nearly finished the kitchen—all but the floor, which was still screwed-down plywood boards—and tonight was its close-enough christening.
I’d been assigned salad but remembered this only when I showed up with three apologetic pints of ice cream, my fingerprints denting their frosty sides.
“Where is your brain?” said Summer. “I thought I was the irresponsible one.”
“Under the bar at La Luna,” I said. My hand flew to my abraded chin.
“Nothing wrong with two desserts,” Topher said, ladling a thin, pale batter into a pan. “My virgin dosa voyage might be a shipwreck.” Meena stepped over to seize the ladle. Summer was sinking shards of lacy caramel brittle into the frosting of a layer cake. We were always telling her to just go be a chef, but the money and hours were so miserable that she always ended up back on the pole, where the cash was abundant and forthright. “Either way I’m dancing for someone,” she once said. “Might as well get paid for it.”
We crowded in elbow-cozy around Meena’s candlelit table with our tattered but golden dosas. Topher bemoaned his ever-slim romantic luck, and we offered the usual sympathy and affirmations. Gay Portland was inexplicably and deeply gender-segregated and Topher’s immersion in womankind didn’t earn him any points at the Silverado. Summer was working on a new issue of her zine, Boner Killer, about egregious strip club patrons. Robin had started an apprenticeship at a tattoo studio and offered to practice on us. (Me: “Sharpie only.” Summer: “Sure, I’ll take another.”) Lawrence was suffering a male colleague who wanted to go “cruising for chicks” together. Team Dresch was on the verge of breaking up and Meena was taking it hard. The Gold Stars were supposed to tour with them.
“Do you ever get the feeling you’re a year too late?” Meena said.
“Homocore is over,” Lawrence said.
“It is not,” Meena said, and manufactured three reasons it was not, one of which was the Gold Stars themselves. She ought to have been a lawyer. But Lawrence was right—it was 1998 and the movement was aging out, the way Riot Grrrl had already been on the wane by the time I made it to Portland, only stragglers and a few half bottles left at the party. You wanted to be part of something, and we were—we just weren’t sure what. Our own time had an end-of-the-decade, end-of-the-century melancholy. The electric feeling of being on the cusp—we wanted to know that again.
I aired my own problems with the Lesbian Mafia and the art show a committee of us were attempting to stage. Depending on which committee member you talked to, it was either a lesbian art show or an art show of lesbian artists. Or was it a queer art show or an art show of queer artists? The distinctions had caused hour-long arguments, tears and yelling, accusations of hegemony, and an e-mail chain hundreds deep.
We kept the conversation respectable through dinner, but with dessert came our favorite dish: gossip, that deceptively delicious idle viciousness that, like any intoxicant, you wake up ruing the next day. We were our own TV channel, our own weekly drama. We were a secret handshake, an extended family, a common enemy. The plots were thick.
Tonight, Summer offhandedly mentioned her concerns about our acquaintance M. Why? we asked, all friendly worry. Summer strongly self-identified as a Trusted Confidante, but she could not resist the call to tell a good story, whether it was her own or not. The story’s benefit to our collective wisdom always won out over individual privacy. Her trademark gossip style was to bring up something she’d learned in confidence, minus a couple of identifying details, under the guise of important processing, a community problem to be solved, a case study that could enrich our collective self-knowledge.
“She just seems to be having sort of an intense time recently,” Summer said, lingering on the N’s. What did she know, what did she know? We each called up whatever meager intelligence we had about M, and Summer nodded knowingly, distantly. We had clearly failed to give her anything new. “Never mind,” she said. “That’s all.” But we knew there was more. She was fat with it. We egged her on, she resisted obligingly, and then she set her elbows on the table and locked her fingers under her chin. “I can’t really give any details,” she began. But M had been on the left-behind end of a middle-of-the-night bed-hop with someone who was also sleeping with her own housemate’s girlfriend. Instantly we set to guessing like jackals upon a fresh carcass, ripping away fur until we found the wound and gorged ourselves on thrilled outrage.
This mark would stay on the girl’s record for years. The way we gossiped, there was no statute of limitations. The fucked-up thing you said at a Riot Grrrl meeting in 1992 could be revived as evidence in 1998. Our institutional memory was indelible—perhaps in the absence of any official institutional record of queer girl lives. We archived each other through an endless oral history, telling and retelling, anecdote into history into lore. And yet: you couldn’t write anyone off, or out of the story, because our numbers were not all that huge. If no one ever slept with anyone’s ex, if missteps and bad behavior disqualified people for life, we would all soon be single and sexless. So we condemned, censured, and kept on coupling in new and used configurations.
Given all I knew, Flynn and Vivian should not have surprised me, but still I couldn’t believe it. These friends around the table, this family—I would have found them one way or another, but it was Vivian who first brought me in. Who made me, we used to joke.
I was a week shy of eighteen when I arrived at Reed College. Here, instead of being the queer girl invisible to the straights, I found myself the queer girl who was invisible to the queers, still so Midwestern, my dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, new sneakers, jeans from the department store. Most of my fellow freshmen arrived in band T-shirts and Doc Martens and haircuts I had never even considered a possibility, as if they’d already taken AP Cool I and II at their suburban magnet schools. They walked right past me.
I looked for the Riot Grrrls I’d read about in zines, but the local chapter had already closed up shop. A heart-pounding visit to the orientation-week meeting of the gay student group yielded a hangout and then a date with a junior named Siri, who showed up at the proposed coffee shop in a long skirt and hiking boots and a deadly little hat. Siri had sunny freckles and had already bought tickets to the Melissa Etheridge concert coming in December. She took me to a party off Division Street that was not only students but adult lesbians. I had still hardly met any lesbians my own age, much less an adult of the species, and the house was packed. These lesbians were pros, labrys-bearers with full libraries of everything woman-on-woman written since the seventies. I ran my finger over the spines of books named Lesbian/Woman and Daughters of a Coral Dawn and the complete works of Elana Dykewomon and miles of mystery paperbacks. Purple was everywhere: the front door, the blouses, the frames of eyeglasses, the collar of the cat inevitably named Luna. The place had a warm, herbal smell. It was a house where I would have liked to curl up in the afternoon and take a long nap.
But it was evening and lesbians were everywhere. Siri was utterly at home, stocked with knowing laughs, pausing to sing along to a favorite righteous line in the background music. I sat on a hard dining chair in the living room and tried to interact competently, my voice oddly strangled. All this herstory. I was so far behind. The magnitude of the studies I’d need to do loomed over me. I was in another kind of church. I missed, for the first time, Nebraska, where at least I knew the terrain and how to make my way through a conversation.
At the bus stop Siri turned to me and tilted her chin down coyly. A pit formed in my stomach. It was my second chance ever to kiss a girl, and I couldn’t do it. I gave her a quick hug and said, “Thanks so much, see you at the next meeting.” And scurried onto my bus. I glanced back as it pulled away. A breeze had picked up, and Siri stood there with one hand holding her hat to her head, the other hanging uncertainly at her side. I gave an apologetic wave, and her hand rose as if it were tied to a deflating balloon.
Maybe I’m not cut out to be lesbian after all, I thought. Maybe I had just loved Zoe, a fluke. Lonesomeness belted my heart. I went back to my dorm room and put on my headphones and lay on the floor, thin carpet over concrete, a surface that had never lived. The Discman rested on my chest, spinning inside.
Then in October, on the way back from a trip to Goodwill with my roommate, I was carrying a bag full of boy-sized T-shirts and acrylic cardigans and corduroys—an attempt to step away from my past by wearing someone else’s—when I heard a girl screaming at the other end of the hall. We both stopped. The drums kicked in. It was a record. It sounded terrible and fantastic, raw, pissed. My roommate made a face.
“I’m going to go check on that,” I said.
“Tell them to turn it down,” said the roommate, a psych major from Wisconsin who res life had thought would be a good match. It wasn’t really their fault. Sitting at my parents’ kitchen table, I had accidentally filled out the form for their Andrea instead of the real one. Oops.
I followed the sound to an ajar door at the end of the hall, and knocked.
“Come in,” said an alto voice, and the door opened to a girl kneeling on the floor with scissors and a long navy slip.
“This music—” I started.
“Oh, sorry, is it bothering you? I didn’t realize the door was open. I can turn it down.”
“No! No, it’s not bothering me. I think it’s great. I wanted to ask what it was.”
The girl sat back on her heels and smiled. “That would be Blatz. I’m Vivian. Shut the door.” She craned her chin forward. “What do you have in that bag?”
Vivian was nineteen and her world extended way beyond campus. School had defined my whole life thus far, but it didn’t for the girls Vivian knew—some had graduated, some had left, some had never gone, and it didn’t really matter. All of us were refugees of the nuclear family and its fallout, and some, like me, still embedded secret agents in our homes of origin but full citizens here. It was the world I’d glimpsed in Zoe’s zines times one hundred, and real. Girls cut their own hair, built bikes, silkscreened T-shirts, taught each other self-defense, formed bands on the spot, and did not hesitate to turn up the volume. I had read some of their zines before and it made me shy, to know them but not to be known. One had a patch that said, NO APOLOGIES/NO ASSIMILATION/QUEER FOREVER, the bravest thing I had ever read; I repeated it again and again in my mind. I hung out at Vivian’s side, doing my best to join a conversation I had been dying to have, and now I could hardly speak, I was so giddy and full of longing. People knew things: everyone’s names and nicknames, bands of every -core, unlisted show venues, the encyclopedic subtleties of what was butch and what was femme, how to play the drums. They talked about sex accessories and practices I had never heard of, nouns I did not know could be verbs. I was a tabby among tigers.
“You don’t have to be good at it, Andy,” said Vivian as I groped stiffly at the neck of a borrowed bass. “Just do it. Expertise is a weapon of the patriarchy.” Our band fell amicably apart after three songs and one show; I attempted a zine but could not write a word in first person (how did people confess themselves, construct themselves, so artfully?). But I could draw and letter, and people started asking me to do flyers and posters. I proved my mettle at Scrabble. I made myself brave and my new friends made me braver. After I cut off my ponytail and the sleeves of my T-shirts, I made out with two different girls in one week, dead-end make-outs but crucial evidence that I was one of them. Then Vivian got wind of it and pushed me up against a wall at a Bratmobile show, slid her leg between mine, and claimed me with a long, conspicuous kiss that would carry on for a year.
My grades slipped for the first time into B territory, but my life had surged into an all-encompassing present. I declared an art major and told my parents it was economics. I verbed some nouns. I crossed that border. I entered a whole world that no one in my hometown, least of all my family, had known existed, where I was not One of Them but One of Us. The split life I had been living—one for everyone else, one for me—merged into a single whole. My notebooks shifted back into first person.
Oh, Vivian. I put my head in my hands. My palms cupped my eyes with soothing darkness.
“Andy, you okay?” Lawrence said.
I dropped my hands. All five of them were watching me. Here we sat, grown-ish, around the table. The people who’d stuck around after the fallout. Low light warmed everyone’s faces. The caramel lace glistened atop the remains of the cake. Since the breakup, I had avoided talking about Flynn if I could help it—she had once been a part of family dinner—and I tried to take the high road. I loathed the thought of my hardship being discussed. But why hide it? Maybe for once it was time to hold Flynn accountable. It was crucial to shape your own narrative. And it would pave the way for my coup de grace, the story of the night: my tragicomic man-kiss. I never got to drop the biggest bomb of the night, and here I had two right in my pocket.
“Okay.” I folded my napkin and set it on the table. I cleared my throat. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but. Something funny happened at the show last night.”
“Do tell.”
“You’re not going to believe it. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it.”
Everyone leaned in. Summer bounced in her seat.
“The first thing was, I saw Flynn. With her latest trophy. And who, of all people on earth, would that be?” I set both hands on the table and lowered my voice. “Vivian.”
I awaited the cry of outrage.
Summer and Meena exchanged a glance.
“Oh boy,” Meena said. Lawrence pursed her lips. Topher and Robin looked down at their plates.
“Oh my god.” I sat back. I needed the hard chair to hold me up. “You already knew.”
“There were a couple clues, but . . .” said Robin.
“I heard a rumor from my Olympia sources,” Meena conceded, “but I didn’t want to believe it.”
Summer widened her eyes and refilled her wine.
“You didn’t tell me?” I said to Summer. “You tell everyone everything.”
“I do not. Honestly, I didn’t think you needed to know.”
“Did you want to know?” Meena said.
“No! I wish I could un-know it right now. Forever.”
“I rest my case,” Summer said. “You were doing well. Or not so well. You didn’t need it.”
“I just can’t believe you all knew,” I said with a dismayed smile.
“This information,” said Summer soberly, “it’s not a gift.”
“It certainly isn’t. Can I exchange it?”
“So what’s the rest?” Robin said. “You said ‘the first thing.’”
They looked at me hungrily, and for once, I didn’t want to feed them. To feed myself to them. “Oh, that’s all,” I said. “That was the beginning and end of the story. Turns out you guys know the rest.” I choked out a sardonic laugh and reset my face.
They offered to help me process it all. They started to disparage Flynn and Vivian, but the more they said, the more they revealed. Each remark made me feel like I was being flayed with a tiny vegetable peeler. I stopped them after only a few. I reached for the knife to cut another slice of cake and said, “Please, let’s move on. I’m done thinking about Flynn. Tell me something new.”
We turned to another recycled plot. I knew that mine would be reserved for later, for my absence. It was how we bonded: shared concern for a friend.
Meena tipped a bottle of wine toward my glass. I wanted to undrink everything I had drunk, or drink so much I forgot everything I knew. I knew I shouldn’t say yes. But knowing better, alas, has never stopped me from wanting. I said, “More, please.”