Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(41)

The farther we got down 95, the worse the panic got until finally, she pulled off the highway and pulled into a motherfucking Cracker Barrel. I just started laughing like it was a great joke, because it was. When I finally caught my breath, I asked her if she’d lost her fucking mind. She was working on backing into the spot and I said, “Don’t bother. I’m not eating here.” Maybe I would’ve argued with a kidnapper after all.

   She looked at me like I was the crazy one and pulled the hand brake and said they have great brunch. I looked at the crowd outside the restaurant who used the word “brunch” twice a year—Mother’s Day and Easter. White-haired men in Sunday suits sitting on the rocking chairs. Little kids in patent leather shoes jumping off the patio while their parents milled around in varying pantomimes of impatience. They looked like people who drink milk with dinner.

I said, “We’re in the fucking suburbs, in Virginia, and you want to walk into a fucking Cracker Barrel on a Sunday.” A mom in a church dress walking past the car yanked her kid closer to her. I may have been shouting. Who knows. I felt like a guitar string wound too tight by a queer folk singer.

Rhonda stared at me like she was actually confused. And I remembered the magnets on her fridge—rainbows and “Queer as FUCK” and “Sorry I missed church. I was busy practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian.” The shit tourists buy in a gay bookstore the first time they walk into a gay bookstore. It’s only sort of funny the first time because it’s so aggressively gay and you’ve been in the closet. I looked at her in that haircut, my haircut. The cutoff flannel shirt. The Doc Martens. She was wearing boxers nowadays instead of panties. And it finally hit me. I asked her how long she’d been out. I’m sure I worded this sympathetically, something like, “Jesus fucking Christ, did you come out yesterday? What the fuck.”

I knew the answer by the time I formed the question and I still wasn’t prepared. She’d only been separated from her husband a few months. She was thirty-six, and she’d waited until she was thirty-six to come out. I said, “Do you not understand it’s not safe to be here?”

   She said, “That’s crazy.” And opened the door like we’d be getting out of the car. I held onto my door like it might open on its own.

There’s safety in the closet. It’s why people stay. As long as you act like them, look like them, dress like them, and live like them, husband and all, you can walk among them. They won’t suspect you because to them, assuming someone is gay is rude, because to them, being gay is wrong.

I had no plans of getting out of the car. I figured, in that Cracker Barrel parking lot, I was the subject matter expert on where it was and was not safe to be gay. I thought she was an idiot to not believe me. But then, she hadn’t been visibly gay long enough to know. I had to calm down and get her on my side if I had any chance of convincing her to leave. The survival strategy I’d mastered in my youth: make them like you, pity you, anything to make peace. I said, “Listen, best case, we get a few weird looks. A few people will stare, and they’ll want us to see they’re staring. I won’t feel safe. That’s the best case. It only gets worse from there.”

She said, “That’s crazy. No one cares.”

I said, “Have you seriously not seen the looks we get? Do you understand Cracker Barrel fires gays, as a policy?” She told me I had a victim mentality. I wondered what it would take for her to even notice they hated her. But then, she thought she was one of them. Why shouldn’t she? High-paying job with a government contractor, a husband to confirm she belonged. She even talked like them—the bumper sticker patriotism of post–9/11 America—and up until she decided to become me, she had looked like one of them. Ambiguous enough for corporate America to tolerate as, sure, she could be a lesbian, but she’s not one of those gays. She’s not shoving it in anyone’s face. She’d lost that privilege with a haircut. She just didn’t know it yet.

   She said I was imagining things. She said this to me. She knew I had a car that had been torched, that I’d been kicked out of the Air Force. That I’d received death threats. For being gay. I was fucking shaking. I wanted to leave so fucking bad. I wanted her to turn the car around and take me back to the city, back to safety. I tried to keep my voice flat, but it just made me sound angrier. I said, “It gets worse. They won’t serve you, they’ll call you a dyke, they’ll tell you you’re going to hell, they’ll spit on you, they’ll ask you to leave, and you do have to leave. That’s if you don’t use a bathroom. God fucking forbid one of us has to pee. They will call the manager. They will call the cops. That’s what they feel safe doing with witnesses.”

A guy in a Redskins jersey approached and I tensed again. But he hit the button on his key chain and unlocked the car beside us.

She said, “You’re being paranoid. This is Virginia.” I shook my head. I was gearing up for a hell of a monologue. I’d start with the Air Force. Alabama. I’d tell her about the time I got jumped walking out of a gay bar in Columbia. I’d tell her about the death threats. I’d tell her about the threats Jay received. I’d tell her about Matthew Shepard. Arthur Warren. Barry Winchell. Brandon Teena. The Backstreet Café. The Otherside Lounge. Julianne Williams and Lollie Winans. I’d tell her every goddamn story I’d ever heard or read. I was going to make her understand she wasn’t safe. I hated her for feeling safe. I was going to take that from her if it was the last fucking thing I did. But I didn’t have to.