Sing You Home

  "And how exactly does that jibe with turning the other cheek?"

  "I'm not judging you," Pauline explains. "I'm just offering my biblical worldview."

  "Well," Vanessa says, getting to her feet. "I guess I'm blind then, because that's far too subtle a distinction for me to see. How dare you tell me that what makes me me is wrong? How dare you say that you're tolerant, as long as I'm just like you? How dare you suggest that I shouldn't be allowed to get married to someone I love, or adopt a child, or that gay rights don't qualify as civil rights because, unlike skin color or disabilities, you think that sexual orientation can be changed? But you know what? Even that argument doesn't hold water, because you can change your religion, and religious affiliation is still protected by law. Which is the only reason I'm going to ask you politely to leave my home, instead of throwing you out on your hypocritical evangelical asses."

  Zoe stands up, too. "Don't let the door hit you on the way out," she says.

  On the way back home, it starts to rain. I listen to the windshield wipers keeping time and think about how Zoe, in the passenger seat, used to drum on the glove compartment along with the beat.

  "Can I ask you something personal?" I say, turning to Pauline.

  "Sure."

  "Do you . . . you know . . . ever miss it?"

  Pauline glances at me. "Some people do. They struggle for years. It's like any other addiction--they figure out that this is their drug, and they make the decision to not let that be part of their lives. If they're lucky, they may consider themselves completely cured and have a true identity change. But even if they aren't that lucky, they still get up in the morning and pray to God to get through one more day without acting on those attractions."

  I realize that she did not really answer my question.

  "Christians have been called upon to struggle for ages," Pauline says. "This isn't any different."

  Once, Zoe and I went to a wedding of one of her clients. It was a Jewish wedding, and it was really beautiful--with trappings and traditions I had never seen before. The bride and groom stood under a canopy, and the prayers were in an unfamiliar language. At the end, the rabbi had the groom stomp on a wineglass wrapped in a napkin. May your marriage last as long as it would take to put these pieces back together, he said. Afterward, when everyone was congratulating the couple, I sneaked underneath the canopy and took a tiny shard of glass from the napkin where it still lay on the grass. I threw it into the ocean on the way home, so that, no matter what, that glass could never be reconstructed, so the couple would stay together forever.

  When Zoe asked what I was doing and I told her, she said she thought she loved me more in that moment than she ever had before.

  My heart, it kind of feels like that wineglass these days. Like something that's supposed to be whole but--thanks to some idiot who thought he knew better--doesn't stand a freaking chance.

  "There is audio content at this location that is not currently supported for your device. The caption for this content is displayed below."

  Marry Me (2:59)

  ZOE

  Everyone wants to know what the sex is like.

  It's different from being with a man, for all the obvious reasons, and many more that you'd never imagine. For one thing, it's more emotional, and there's less to prove. There are moments that are soft and tender, and others that are raw and intense--but it's not as if there's a guy to play the dominant role and a girl to play the passive one. We take turns being protected, and being the protector.

  Sex with a woman is what you wish it was with a man but it rarely seems to be: all about the journey, and not the destination. It's foreplay forever. It is the freedom to not have to suck in your stomach or think about cellulite. It is being able to say, that feels good and, more important, that doesn't. I will admit that, at first, it was strange to curl up in Vanessa's arms when I was used to resting against a muscular chest--but the strangeness wasn't unpleasant. Just unfamiliar, as if I'd suddenly moved to the rainforest after living in the desert. It is another kind of beautiful.

  Sometimes when a male colleague finds out I am with Vanessa, I can see it in his eyes--the expectation that every night is a girl-on-girl porn video. My current sex life is no more like that than my former one was like a love scene with Brad Pitt. I could sleep with a man again, but I don't think I'd enjoy it, or feel as safe, or as daring. So if I am not filled by Vanessa--in the literal sense, anyway--I am fulfilled by her, which is way better.

  The real difference between my marriage to Max and my relationship with Vanessa has nothing to do with the sex, actually. It's about balance. When Max would come home, I'd wonder if he was in a good mood, or if he'd had a good day--and I would become the person he needed me to be accordingly. With Vanessa, I get to come home and just be me.

  With Vanessa, I wake up and think: This is my best friend. This is the most brilliant person in my life. I wake up and think, I have so much more to lose.

  Every day is a negotiation. Vanessa and I sit down over coffee, and, instead of her burying herself in the newspaper--like Max used to do--we discuss what needs to be done. Now that I've moved in with her, we have a household to run. There's no man who's expected to change the lightbulbs that burn out, or take out the trash. If something heavy has to be moved, we do it together. One of us has to mow the lawn, do the bills, clean out the gutters.

  When I was married, Max would ask what was for dinner; I'd ask if he picked up the dry cleaning. Now, Vanessa and I map out our chores. If Vanessa needs to run an errand on the way home from school, she might pick up takeout. If I'm headed into town, I'll take her car for the day, so that I can fill it up with gas. There is a lot of talking, a lot of give-and-take, when it's just two women in a kitchen.

  It's funny--when I used to hear gay people using the term partner for their significant other, it seemed strange to me. Weren't heterosexual spouses partners, too? But now I see that this isn't the case, that there is a difference between someone you call your "other half" at a cocktail party and someone who truly completes you. Vanessa and I have to invent the dynamic between us, because it's not the traditional husband-wife deal. The result is that we're constantly making decisions together. We're always asking each other for opinions. We assume nothing. And that way, we're a lot less likely to get our feelings bruised.

  You'd think that by now, a month into this relationship, some of the blush has worn off, that I might love Vanessa but not be quite as in love with her--but it's not true. She's still the one I can't wait to talk to after something phenomenal happens at work. She's the one I want to celebrate with when, three months after my hysterectomy, I'm still cancer-free. She's the one I want to lounge around with on a lazy Sunday. For this reason, a lot of chores that we could divide and conquer on weekends take twice as long, because we do them together. Since we want to be together anyway, why not?

  Which is why we find ourselves in the grocery store on a Saturday afternoon in March, reading the labels on salad dressing, when Max walks up to me. I hug him, a reflexive habit--and try not to look at his black suit and skinny tie. He looks like the kid from high school who thought if he dressed like the cool guys he'd become one by default, except it never really works that way.

  I can feel Vanessa, burning behind me, waiting for an introduction. But the words get stuck in my throat.

  Max holds out his hand; Vanessa shakes it. This is hell, I think. The man I used to love and the woman I cannot live without. I know what Vanessa wants, what she expects. For all the protesting I've done to convince her that I'm not leaving her anytime soon, here is the perfect proof. All I have to do is tell Max that, now, Vanessa and I are a couple.

  So why can't I?

  Vanessa stares at me, and then her mouth tightens. "I'm just going to grab the produce," she says, but as she moves away, I feel something snap inside my chest, like a string too tightly wound.

  Max's friend appears, a clone in a similar suit, with an Adam's apple that bobs like the plumb bubble
in a level. I mumble through a hello, but I am trying to see over his shoulder to the root vegetable bins, where Vanessa stands with her back to me. Then I hear Max inviting me to his church.

  Fat chance, I think. I imagine showing up in front of that homophobic group and holding hands with Vanessa. We'd probably be tarred and feathered. I mumble a response and make a beeline for her.

  "You're pissed at me," I say.

  Vanessa is squeezing mangoes. "Not pissed. Just kind of disappointed." She looks up. "Why didn't you tell him?"

  "Why did I have to? It's nobody's business but yours and mine. I just met Max's friend, and he didn't say, Oh, by the way, I'm straight."

  She sets down the fruit. "I am the last person in the world who wants to wave a banner or march in a Pride parade," Vanessa says. "And I get that it's not easy to tell someone you used to love that you love someone else. But when you don't say it out loud, that's when people fill in the silence with their own stupid assumptions. Don't you believe that, if Max knew you were in a same-sex relationship, he might think twice before he pickets against gays again? Because all of a sudden it's not some faceless queer in a crowd, Zoe, it's someone he knows." She looks away. "And me. When I see you working overtime to not call me your girlfriend, it makes me think that, no matter what you say to me, you're lying. That you're still looking for that escape hatch."

  "That's not why I--"

  "Then why not? Are you ashamed of me?" Vanessa asks. "Or are you ashamed of yourself?"

  I am standing in front of the cartons of strawberries. I once had a client who, before she was in hospice with ovarian cancer, had been a botanist. She couldn't eat solid food anymore but told me she missed strawberries the most. They were the only fruit in the world with seeds on the outside, and because of this, they weren't even really berries. They were part of the rose family, not that you could tell by looking.

  "Meet me outside," I say to Vanessa.

  It is raining by the time I catch up to Max at his truck. "That woman I'm with. Vanessa," I say. "She's my new partner."

  Max looks at me like I'm crazy. Why would I run out in the rain to tell him this? Then he starts talking about my work, and I realize Vanessa is right--he's misunderstood, because I haven't told him the simple truth. "Vanessa is my partner," I repeat. "We're together."

  I can tell the moment that he understands what I am saying. Not because of the invisible shutters that close over his eyes but because something bursts inside me, sweet and free. I don't know why I thought I needed Max's approval in the first place. I may not be the woman he thought he knew, but that goes both ways.

  Before I know it I am headed back to Vanessa, who's waiting with the grocery cart under the dry overhang of the store. I find myself running. "What did you say to him?" Vanessa asks.

  "That I kind of want to be with you forever. Except forever's not long enough," I tell her. "I may be paraphrasing a bit."

  The expression on her face makes me feel the way I do when, after months of winter, I see that first crocus. Finally.

  We duck our heads in the rain and hurry to Vanessa's car to load the groceries. As she puts the bags into the trunk, I watch two children pass by. They are preteens, a boy with peach fuzz on his face and a girl who is smacking her bubble gum. Their arms are locked around each other, one hand in the other's back jeans pocket.

  They don't look old enough to watch PG movies, much less date, but no one even blinks as they walk by. "Hey," I say, and Vanessa turns, still holding a bag of groceries. I put my hands on either side of her face and I kiss her, long and lovely and slow. I hope Max is watching. I hope the whole world is.

  When most people hear screaming, they run in the opposite direction. Me, I grab my guitar and run toward it.

  "Hi," I say, bursting into one of the pediatric rooms at the hospital. "Can I help?"

  The nurse, who is valiantly trying to take an IV out of a little boy, sighs with relief. "Be my guest, Zoe."

  The boy's mother, who's been holding him down while he struggles, nods at me. "All he knows is that it hurt going in, so he thinks it's going to hurt coming out, too."

  I make eye contact with her son. "Hi," I say. "I'm Zoe. What's your name?"

  His lower lip trembles. "C-Carl."

  "Carl, do you like to sing?"

  Adamantly, he shakes his head. I glance around the room and notice a pile of Power Ranger figurines on the nightstand. Pulling my guitar in front of me, I begin to play the chords for "The Wheels on the Bus," except I change the words. "The Power Rangers . . . they kick kick kick," I sing. "Kick kick kick . . . kick kick kick. The Power Rangers they kick kick kick . . . all day long."

  Somewhere in the middle of the verse, he stops fighting and looks at me. "They also jump," he says.

  So the next verse we sing together. He spends ten minutes telling me everything else the Power Rangers do--the red one, and the pink one, and the black one. Then he looks up at the nurse. "When are you going to start?" Carl asks.

  She grins. "I already finished."

  Carl's mother looks up at me with utter relief. "Thank you so much . . ."

  "No problem," I say. "Carl, thanks for singing with me."

  I have no sooner exited the room and turned the corner than another nurse runs up to me. "I've been looking all over for you. It's Marisa."

  She doesn't have to tell me what's the matter. Marisa is a three-year-old who's been in and out of the hospital for a year with leukemia. Her father, a bluegrass musician, loves the idea of music therapy for his daughter, because he knows how much music can transport a person. Sometimes I go in when she is alert and happy, and we'll do a sing-along of her favorites--"Old MacDonald" and "I'm a Little Teapot" and "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt" and "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean." Sometimes I'll go in during her chemo treatments, which make her feel like her hands are burning, and I'll create songs about dipping her hands in ice water, about building igloos. Lately, though, Marisa's been so ill that it's been her family and me just singing for her, while she sleeps through a drugged haze.

  "Her doctor says within the hour," the nurse murmurs to me.

  I quietly open the door to her room. The lights are off, and the gray light of late afternoon is caught in the folds of the hospital blanket that covers the little girl. She is still and pale, a pink knit cap covering her bald head, glittery silver nail polish on her fingers. I was here last week when Marisa's big sister applied it. We sang "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," even though Marisa slept through it. Even though Marisa wasn't conscious to know that someone cared enough to make her look pretty.

  Marisa's mother is crying softly in her husband's arms. "Michael, Louisa," I say. "I'm so sorry."

  They don't answer, but they don't have to. Illness can make family of strangers.

  A hospital worker sits beside the bed, making a plaster cast of Marisa's handprint before she passes, something that is offered to the parents of any terminal pediatric patient. The air feels heavier, as if we are all breathing in lead.

  I step back, beside Marisa's sister, Anya. She looks at me, her eyes red and swollen. I squeeze her hand, and then, in keeping with the mood, I begin to improvise on my guitar, instrumental riffs that are somber and in minor keys. Suddenly Michael turns to me. "We don't want you playing that in here."

  Heat rushes to my cheeks. "I-I'm sorry. I'll go."

  Michael shakes his head. "No--we want you to play the songs you always play for her. The ones she loves."

  So I do. I play "Old MacDonald," and one by one, her family join in. The hospital worker presses Marisa's hand to the plaster, wipes it clean.

  When the machines connected to Marisa begin to flatline, I keep singing.

  My Bonnie lies over the ocean. My Bonnie lies over the sea.

  I watch Michael kneel down at his daughter's bedside. Louisa curls her hand over Marisa's. Anya jackknifes at the waist, an origami of grief.

  My Bonnie lies over the ocean. Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me.

  There is a h
igh-pitched hum, and then a nurse comes in to turn off the monitor, to rest her hand gently on Marisa's forehead as she offers her condolences.

  Bring back.

  Bring back.

  Bring back my Bonnie to me.

  When I finish, the only sound in the room is the absence of a little girl.

  "I'm so sorry," I say again.

  Michael holds out his hand. I do not know what he wants, but my body seems to. I hand him the pick I've been using to strum the guitar. He presses it into the plaster, just above the spread of Marisa's handprint.

  I hold myself together until I walk out of the room. Then I lean against the wall and slide down until I am sitting, sobbing. I cradle my guitar in my arms, the way Louisa was cradling the body of her daughter.

  And then.

  I hear a baby crying--that high, hitched shriek that grows more and more hysterical. Heavily I get to my feet and trace the sound two doors down from Marisa's room, where an infant is being held down by her tearful mother and a nurse while a phlebotomist attempts to draw blood. They all look up when I enter. "Maybe I can help," I say.

  It has been a hellish, busy day at the hospital, and my drive home is consumed by the thought of a large glass of wine and collapsing on the couch, which is why I almost don't pick up my cell phone when I see Max's name flash onto the screen. But then I sigh and answer, and he asks me for just a few moments of my time. He doesn't say what it's for, but I'm assuming it has to do with paperwork being signed. There is, even after a divorce, no shortage of paperwork.

  So I am completely surprised when he arrives with a woman in tow. And I'm even more shocked when I realize that the reason he's brought her is to save me from the newly degenerate life I'm living.

  I'd laugh, if I didn't feel like crying quite so much. Today I watched a three-year-old die, but my ex-husband thinks that I am what's wrong with this world. Maybe if his God wasn't so busy paying attention to the lives of people like Vanessa and me, he could have saved Marisa.

  But life isn't fair. It's why little girls don't make it to their fourth birthdays. It's why I lost so many babies. It's why people like Max and my governor seem to think they can tell me who to love. If life isn't fair, I don't have to be, either. And so I channel all the anger I'm feeling at things I cannot change or control, and direct it at the man and woman sitting on the couch across from me.