Vladimir(28)
“We were going to go all the way.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You know, all the way. A kid, a house. A life.”
“But it seems like you didn’t want that.”
“I just wanted time.”
“It seems to me like you wanted to act in some way—to sabotage it. Because you weren’t ready.”
“Never mind.”
She slammed her cup onto the table and got up as if to leave. I asked her where she expected to go. She sat back down and asked me not to psychoanalyze her, that she needed a listener. I apologized, blamed my upbringing, and sat quietly until I saw her posture soften.
“Are you taking the week off work?” I asked her tentatively.
“No, that’s another thing.” After all her adolescent histrionics, her face took on the fatigue of a grown-up person, and I finally could imagine her sitting at a desk and being trusted with a task.
“You got fired?”
“No, I didn’t get fired,” she snapped. “But Charlie—”
“The other woman?” I clarified.
“She got a job there. I mean, of course she did, she’s brilliant. I asked to take leave. I think I have to find something else. It’s going to be too complicated, and Alexis will never take me back if she’s working there.”
“You love your job.”
“I can get another job I love. I think. If I don’t expect to get paid well for it.”
“This woman ruined your life.”
“It’s not her fault. Or it is, I don’t know. But it’s not like I can prevent her from getting hired. My ass would get sued every way but straight.” Every way but straight—one of John’s phrases. Sid laughed. She loved the old Texan/Midwestern expressions John and I traded. She used them to contrast with the rest of her overeducated liberalese. In high school she was fascinated when she learned that Bob Dylan lyrics were cited by judges to elaborate on obscure laws in court filings. The folksiness blended with the officiousness delighted her. More than doing good, and to my great pride, she was a do-gooder, far more than her father or I were or would ever be, she loved the language and jargon of the law. She loved the way phrases could become solid, and then could have their solidity stripped from them, all by interpretation, all by language, language, and more language. Fighting with words, she would call it when she participated in Lincoln-Douglas debates in high school. She was so awkward then, so homely and horse-ish, with bad makeup, poorly fitting clothes, and a sawing, toneless laugh. But when she stepped onto the debate stage her tongue was loose and her mind was quick and precise. She could find and dissect holes in the arguments of her competitors nearly instantaneously. It was when I saw her there at that podium that I knew, despite everything, despite all my weakness and guilt, that she had something in her she could use to take care of herself.
I, of course, was thrilled when she told me she was dating a woman. What a relief, I thought, to free oneself from the heterosexual prison. Straightness: the predictable container in which all possible outcomes seemed already etched into stone—happiness, unhappiness, complacency, strife—a life in which we were all operating inside of a story already told, even as we sought to live an authentic existence. Even as we tried to say to ourselves that it wasn’t who we mated with but the quality of the thoughts in our brain that made us radical, we knew that the patterns of our life were the patterns of our parents, were the patterns of all the dim, sorrel-chomping sheep living unexamined existences in all the homes all over this thoughtless, anti-intellectual country. We knew that the stuff of our lives was the stuff of normalcy, and how normalcy and its trappings and expectations were always there. There would always be couple friends who were a bit more square than you, who you would have to play some hetero game with. There would always be family who would ask the women to do the dishes while the men played chess. How fortunate for her, I thought, to be able to evade all that. She told us she was queer, attracted to men still, and that she would appreciate if we didn’t label her one way or another. She was Sid. Fine, fine, fine. As long as whatever she chose, she wouldn’t have to take on the identity of the anxious woman who got dinner on the table while the men sat on the porch. As long as she didn’t have to act the part of the schoolmarm to a good-natured rascal of a partner who did whatever he liked and was loved more because of it. And if she did choose to cook or clean or worry, at least she could maybe do all those things for a woman who understood, not a man who, by virtue of being born with a thing between his legs, had absorbed from an early age that it was all right to sit back and enjoy being served.
“How are you, Mom?”
She swung her attention to me abruptly. It was clear from the question that she had something to say about how I was, or how she thought I should be. Immediately I felt my face lengthen, my eyebrows lift and a frown form at the sides of my mouth.
“Fine,” I told her. I caught the eye of one of the Armenian daughters—she made a questioning gesture about the check and I nodded. “Let’s go on a walk. You should get some outside time today—you’ll feel better tomorrow.” Sid acquiesced. It was a joke in the family that I thought everything could be solved by exercise and fresh air, but over the years I had gotten Sid to share my view—she ran cross-country in high school after I told her she needed a sport for college and ran the marathon a couple of years ago. I could tell she was doing well when she spoke of running. She was compulsive, she needed replacements. When she wasn’t running she was probably drinking too much, or screwing too many interns, apparently.