Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read online

  “Yeah. Sure. Why?” Rachel said.

  “Because.” Lana shot her a nudging look.

  “Ohmygod. Of course!” cried Rachel. “She’d be perfect.”

  “Listen,” Lana said, turning to me. “We’ve got an apartment in SoHo. It’s tiny, but it’s air-conditioned. And we’re leaving for Holland tomorrow morning for our honeymoon. Why don’t you housesit for us while we’re gone?”

  She reached into her pocket and actually took out her house keys.

  “Oh no,” I said with some violence, though the prospect of having my own place in SoHo was almost more fabulous than I could ever stand.

  “We’ll be gone only two weeks, but that should give you a little respite from your mother,” said Lana. “Believe me, I know what a bitch it is to have live with your family after being on your own.”

  “And it’s a great place to write,” added Rachel. “Good vibes. Totally quiet. Do you use a Macintosh? We’ve got a Mac.”

  “Frankly, we’d rather have someone in there,” said Lana. “Pick up the mail, water the plants.”

  “You’d be doing us a tremendous favor,” said Rachel.

  “And if you’re not out to your mom and want to bring a girlfriend back, well, you know, we’re cool with that,” Lana laughed.

  “Here.” Rachel slid her gleaming house keys across the table toward me, until, quite literally, they dropped in my lap.

  “That’s the thing,” I said desperately. “You see, I don’t have a girlfriend to bring back because I—”

  “Really?” said Bridgette, perking up. “I don’t have a girlfriend either.” She smiled and raised her wineglass. “To lonely-hearted lesbians.

  “Hey, no pity parties here,” Lana laughed. “Trust me. You’ll both find someone yet.” Then she, too, raised her glass. “To finding Ms. Right.”

  At that moment, with a precision timing seen only in sitcoms, the waitress arrived.

  “Good evening, lay-dees,” she said perkily, removing a pad from her apron. “My name is Cassidy. And I’ve got several specials tonight I’d like to tell you about. First, I’ve got a poached halibut with a cilantro-ginger puree over a bed of organic lentils with a soy milk and white wine reduction.”

  I looked beseechingly at Nicole and Kay for help, but they were sitting at the far end of the table, staring raptly into each other’s eyes and massaging each other’s hands, their faces awash with the oblivious, caramelized look of two people irritatingly in love.

  Clearly, I had to come out. But how? I couldn’t just blurt “Excuse me, but I’m a heterosexual” while the waitress distributed the menus and the busboy plopped bread baskets in front of us, could I? In getting to know people, there seemed to be a window of opportunity in which you established yourselves and communicated vital bits of information. Once that window closed, things got decidedly sticky, With names, for example: if you forgot someone’s name right after being introduced, it was fine to say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.” But the longer the conversation went on, the harder and more embarrassing it got to correct them. Once someone confessed to you, “So they dropped the sodomy charges against this guy, and now I’m addicted to painkillers,” you could not, in good conscience, reply, “Oh, I’m sorry, but what was your name again?”

  Now, there didn’t seem to be any opportune moments. As soon as we each had our menus, Rachel and Lana ordered a bottle of champagne. A bottle arrived at the table, glasses were passed around, more toasts were made. “To love!” “To romance!” “To same-sex marriages!”

  What was I going to do? Yell, “And to straight marriages, too”?

  In the wake of the toasts came laughter. A platter of bruchetta appeared, “Compliments of the chef,” said the waitress with a wink.

  “The chef used to date my friend Alan,” Lana informed us.

  “To the gay kitchen mafia,” Kay cheered, raising her glass in yet another toast. What was I going to do? Refuse to toast the gay kitchen mafia—especially after free bruchetta?

  Then, before I could think of some elegantly casual way to clarify things, everyone launched into a lusty debate over the merits of grilled ahi tuna with sun-dried tomato pesto versus pan-fried porto-bello mushrooms with wild herb polenta. I thought about subtly interjecting something corrective like, “Well, my boyfriend says sun-dried tomatoes are good for your immune system,” but just how asinine would that sound? Before I could come up with something else, the conversation veered into synagogue gossip, followed by questions about journalism, to a debate about whether the Guggenheim Museum should be expanded based on designs Frank Lloyd Wright had jettisoned before his death.

  I’d never had to come out before, and sitting there, I realized just how fucking hard it was. The timing alone was exasperating, like trying to grab the brass ring on a merry-go-round. You couldn’t interrupt a conversation to announce it, but presenting it as a non sequitur seemed equally awkward and lethal. Plus, how could you mention your sexuality without it seeming like any big deal? But, if it really wasn’t a big deal, why mention it at all? But what about Bridgette, casting fleeting glances at me across the candlelight? And then, what if I came out and it made everyone at the table uncomfortable? Certainly, it would be a conversation stopper. But then, what if it wasn’t? Then I’d look like an even bigger asshole—making a big deal out of nothing. Or, worse still, what if they thought I was telling them because I was uncomfortable with homosexuality and wanted to establish that I was “not one of them”? Or, would they think that I thought that they would have an issue with my being straight—that I didn’t trust them to be cool enough to like me regardless of my sexual orientation? But then again, what if they really didn’t like me because of my sexual orientation? What if they thought all straight women were mindless, self-hating wimps incapable of producing anything other than babies and needlepoint oven mitts?

  For years, I’d been hoping to hang out with Rachel. Now that I was actually doing it, sitting in her inner circle, I couldn’t absorb a single word she was saying because of the monologue unfurling in my own head: They wouldn’t have asked me to house-sit for them if they knew I was a heterosexual, would they? Why do I feel guilty? I shouldn’t feel guilty. I haven’t done anything wrong Why, they’ve made assumptions about me. But I feel like a fraud. But then, what if they think I’m a freak and take back their house keys? As the evening progressed, my distress only increased.

  It wasn’t lost on me that the profound ickiness I was experiencing was something that every other woman at that table had endured for a lifetime. No doubt, all of them had, at one point or another, been fixed up with a guy unwittingly. No doubt, they’d been ambushed at some bar or a party by an oblivious acquaintance gesturing eagerly, “Come on over here and meet Leonard.” Surely, they’d had to withstand overtures from men while their straight friends looked on encouragingly, winking and making lewd pantomimes across the table, then pulling them off to the ladies’ room for a grilling: “So? Do you like him? He certainly seems to like you!”

  Even I’d been guilty of that. Hadn’t I once tried to fix up a copy editor named Parker with my friend Maggie? “I really think you guys would be good together,” I’d insisted. Now, Parker was living with Richard in TriBeCa with two cocker spaniels and a Persian cat named Stonewall.

  Back at college, some of my straight friends and I had flirted with the idea of having a lesbian experience “just to see what it’s like.” Well, now I was truly having one, all right.

  By the time the check arrived, the only thing I’d succeeded in doing was drinking way too much and developing a massive headache.

  When people believe you’ve grown up, suffered, or loved the same way they have, they can be inordinately generous with you. Convinced you share the same religion, the same sexual orientation, or even the same alma mater, they will give you their business cards with their home phone number scribbled on the back. They will make painful confessions to you about their marriage. They will let their voices slide back i
nto the homey, regional accents they’ve struggled so hard to shed. It may be flattering at first, but if their assumptions about you are wrong, ultimately it becomes mortifying. As they take you into their confidences, you watch them violate themselves. Even if you’ve done nothing to mislead them, you can’t help but feel guilty and undeserving of their trust.

  “I don’t have anything against homosexuals,” a straight rabbi had told me when I’d interviewed him for my article. “It’s just that, why do they have to be so in-your-face?”

  But coming out isn’t something you simply do for your own benefit, I realized. You do it out of respect for other people, too, because you can’t stand to have them bare their hearts to you unwittingly. You don’t want to perpetuate their unknowingness, or see them played for a fool.

  For the next two weeks, I felt like a con artist as I slept in Lana and Rachel’s loft, recycled their newspapers, and dutifully collected their mail. Because what was I going to do: call them in Amsterdam, tell them I was straight, and abandon their houseplants? Yet it was hard to tell which was more uncomfortable: living back home with my mother, or ensconced in SoHo as a counterfeit dyke.

  Every so often, Nicole called the apartment, “Hello, is this Susie Gilman, professional lesbian house sitter?” she teased. She was as amused by my predicament as other friends had been about my job at The Jewish Week. I tried to laugh along. I tried to make jokes. “Well, I’m just here straightening up,” I’d say campily.

  But then, I’d sit down at Rachel’s desk. Above it was a bulletin board she’d decorated with Man Ray photographs, pro-choice buttons, and bumper stickers reading: Silence = Death.

  I had nothing to be ashamed of, I told myself. My sexuality was nothing to apologize for. Why, plenty of great people throughout history had been heterosexual. I couldn’t help the way I was born, dammit! Whom I chose to love was nobody’s business but my own. “I’m straight, I’m great, get used to it,” I tried chanting. But life in the closet can be gnawing and insidious, and in the end, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was doing something horribly, horribly wrong. I was sexually ambiguous, all right, and now I felt abhorrent—a case study for an unwritten exposÉ: I was Susie Q*. Not her real initial.

  Chapter 12

  My Father the Park Ranger, My Mother the Nun

  ONE THANKSGIVING when John and I were in elementary school, our parents decided to take us to Vermont for the holiday. A colleague of my father’s had purchased a farm outside Brattleboro. “You kids will get to see some real Holstein cows,” our mother said. “We’ll sleep in a barn and eat Thanksgiving dinner in front of a big stone fireplace. It’ll be very rustic. Very Norman Rockwell.”

  The problem with Norman Rockwell’s world, however, was that it was a bitch to get to. Driving our battered old VW minibus through the icy roads of New England was like maneuvering a giant breadbox across a skating rink. Halfway through our trip, we had an accident. Skidding across two lanes of traffic, we slammed sidelong into a guardrail on the edge of a mountain. This guardrail was the only thing between us and a 1,200-foot plunge into a frozen river, and for a moment, the minibus strained against the metal ribbing, the laws of physics willing us over the precipice. Then the bus lurched back and settled into a snowbank with a scrape.

  Once my father switched off the ignition and ascertained that all four of us were, indeed, okay, my brother and I could not have been more thrilled.

  “An accident! We’ve had an accident!” we yelled excitedly. Two summers before, our downstairs neighbors had been in a major car crash. They’d come home from the hospital with a stunning array of injuries and a truly impressive collection of medical paraphernalia. Our friend Naomi was in traction with a body cast up to her armpit. For months, she was the star attraction of the neighborhood. All the local kids vied to decorate her cast with their graffiti tags, and she received unlimited supplies of Archie comic books, Hostess Twinkies, and Scooby-Doo coloring books. Her exalted status as invalid had not been lost on us. “Can we go to the hospital?” we begged now as our parents climbed out to assess the damage to the fender. “Can we be in traction?”

  Instead, our parents simply pried the VW bus off the side of the guardrail, then drove the dented hulk of it to the nearest Howard Johnson’s Motor Inn Lodge.

  “Sorry, kids,” our father sighed, “but it looks like we’re here for Thanksgiving. I’m not going any further without snow chains.”

  He pointed to the churchlike turquoise and orange roof dispiritedly, as if Howard Johnson’s was a terrible consolation prize. But to John and me, it was even better than traction. The prospect of “sleeping in a barn” had not held the same appeal for us that it did for our parents. From what we’d learned, whenever grown-ups used the word “rustic,” what they really meant was “outhouse.” But a motel— we’d never slept in a motel before!

  “Yippeeeee!” we shrieked, dancing around the freezing parking lot. “We’re spending Thanksgiving at Hojo’s! We’re spending Thanksgiving at Hojo’s!”

  As soon as our parents unbolted the door, we tore through our room like maniacs. The entire place looked like it had been sterilized and shrink-wrapped. The Formica bureau, the polyester bedspreads, the laminated headboard all gave off fumes of plastic and room deodorizer, filling the air with a chemical cheerfulness. We were drunk with it, instantly.

  “LOOK,” we shouted dizzily, pointing, “A COLOR TV!” (At home we had a black-and-white portable.) “TWO DOUBLE BEDS! WALL-TO-WALL SHAG CARPETING!”

  “Mom, Dad, look!” we cried, running out of the bathroom brandishing the miniature guest soaps wrapped like party favors we’d found on the side of the sink. “Free soaps!”

  “Look!” we cried again, running back in a minute later to show off the doll-sized bottles of shampoo we’d found by the tub. “Free shampoo!”

  We then spied a Styrofoam ice bucket atop the bureau. “A FREE ICE BUCKET,” we yelled, then immediately took turns wearing it on our heads like a fez while jumping up and down on the bed.

  Our parents stood by the doorway looking stunned, their glazed-over faces suggesting that they could not quite believe they’d created us—two offspring who were capable of going bazookies over a Styrofoam ice bucket and a piece of Howard Johnson’s guest soap. The ice machine by the elevator amazed us. That our bathroom had not one, but two sinks was incredible. Best yet, however, was the Thanksgiving dinner itself. The chef at Howard Johnson’s was clearly a culinary genius. Why, he’d managed to cook a Thanksgiving dinner identical to that of our favorite TV dinner. The tissuey slices of turkey came smothered in sweet, brown, gelatinous gravy—just the way we liked it—accompanied by a troika of starches. Tater Tots. Mounds of processed mashed potatoes. Dinner rolls. Not a green bean or a cranberry in sight. And afterward, Oh! None of those awful Thanksgiving pies in which vegetables tried to pass themselves off as desserts. There were simply, gloriously, twenty-eight flavors of Howard Johnson’s ice cream.

  “Oh, Mom! Oh, Dad!” we proclaimed rapturously as we dug into parfait glasses dripping with chocolate syrup. “This is the best Thanksgiving ever!”

  And so we inscribed it in our annals of the family: The best Thanksgiving ever. Occasionally, as teenagers, John and I prompted, “Hey, remember that Thanksgiving we spent at Howard Johnson’s?” Then we’d lovingly recall each detail, reliving our pleasure, our naive delight at the voluptuousness of it all. Oh, it had seemed like such an adventure, didn’t it? Remember when we made a fort using the luggage rack and extra pillows? Remember playing “The Flying Wallendas” by jumping off the dresser? Remember those hot fudge sundaes for dessert?

  Only years later, when we were waxing nostalgic about it again one morning, did our father audibly groan: “Augh. That Thanksgiving we spent at Howard Johnson’s. Was that ever a fucking nightmare.”

  “Oh, it was horrible,” our mother agreed. “The absolute worst.”

  My brother looked stunned. “What are you talking about? That was, like, our best Thanksgiving
ever.”

  Our father chuckled. “For you kids, maybe,” he said. “For you kids, it was the Thanksgiving when we let you run up and down the halls of Howard Johnson’s playing with the ice machine.”

  “But for your father and me,” our mother interjected, “it was the Thanksgiving when we nearly drove off a cliff.”

  “Boy, I will never forget hitting that guardrail,” our father said soberly, staring down into his coffee cup. “I was sure that was it. We were going over.” He shook his head. “Driving up to Vermont in that old VW What were we thinking?”

  “We were young. Young and stupid,” our mother said gently.

  “And remember? I had to plead with the receptionist at Howard Johnson’s to take a personal check because we didn’t have enough cash for the rooms?”

  “And we couldn’t find a garage—”

  “And I got a nosebleed from the stress—”

  “Oh, that blood in your beard. All over your shirt—”

  “I sat in the motel lobby with an ice pack so it wouldn’t scare the kids—”

  “And then we had that disgusting Thanksgiving dinner—”

  “That turkey was like Alpo—”

  “Nobody else in the whole place except for those two drunken farts feeding dinner rolls to their beagle. And one of them yelled at you, David, when you asked her to put out her cigarette because John was just getting over the mumps, and he was congested—”

  “I had the mumps?” said John.

  “Oh, was that ever depressing,” said our mother.

  “I can’t believe you guys,” I cried. “It wasn’t that way at all. That meal was delicious. That motel was a palace. We jumped on the beds. We watched color TV. We loved every minute of it.”

  Our parents laughed. “Well, you two did, sweetie,” said my father. “And that was the only redeeming thing about the whole holiday. Otherwise …” His voice trailed off.

  “That day was horrendous,” our mother declared. “That day was criminal.”