We Are Water

It’s ironic, really, that my son now seems to have an aversion to lesbians. He sure was curious about them when he was in high school. I remember that time when, after I’d told him a hundred times to go upstairs and clean his pigsty of a bedroom and heard “I will, Mom … I’m gonna” that I finally gave up. Decided to go up there and do the job myself. And I did—with a vengeance. Filled up three big garbage bags with crap that I was going to throw out, whether he liked it or not. I was a woman on a mission. And when I went to flip his mattress, I discovered his stash of dirty magazines and all those gym socks that never seemed to make it into the hamper, most of them stiff with I-knew-what … I didn’t much mind the Playboys and Penthouses. Half the teenage boys in America had those hidden away, I figured. But one of his socks was stuck to the cover of a magazine called Girl on Girl. I’d stood there, flipping through it—looking at all those hideous pictures of women having sex with cucumbers and other women wearing strap-on dildos. Fake sex, it was obvious to me, although it probably wasn’t to Andrew. They all had freakishly big breasts, and one of them, I remember, had areolas as big as the rubber jar opener down in our kitchen drawer. They all looked drugged. In the photo that infuriated me the most, two women were wearing nothing but cowboy hats and holsters cinched around their hips, and one was inserting the barrel of a gun into the other’s vagina. I flipped when I saw that one! Marched downstairs and out to the garage where Andrew was fiddling with the gears of his ten-speed. “Where did this come from?” I demanded, and when he saw what I was holding in my hand, even his ears turned red. He told me a kid in his homeroom had shoved it in his backpack without him knowing it. “Baloney!” I said. “You listen to me, young man. And look me in the eye, too.” I waited until he did. “Whoever took these pictures, and whoever publishes this garbage, is committing violence against women. You got that? And whoever’s looking at it is guilty, too. You have two sisters, Andrew. This junk is an assault on them and me and every other woman, including the ones in this picture.” He mumbled something that I didn’t catch. “What? I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”

“I said they posed for them, didn’t they?”

“Yes, they did. Probably in exchange for drugs. Or because they’d get beaten up by their pimps if they didn’t. This is violent male fantasy, Andrew. Do you think women want to have guns stuck up inside of them?”

“Okay,” he said. “You made your point.”

But I was just getting started. I waved the two “cowgirls” in his face.

“Do you think women really have breasts this size?”

He shrugged. “Some,” he said.

“Ha! Guess again. These poor girls have had their breasts sliced open and sacks of silicone put in so that men—and boys—can drool over them. Do you know what happens when that stuff starts leaking inside a woman’s body? I’m ashamed of you, Andrew. And if you ever bring this kind of garbage into my house again—”

“Your house? I thought it was our house.”

I rolled up his dirty magazine and whacked him across the face with it. “Don’t you dare smart-mouth me, Andrew Oh! What do you think your father’s going to say when I show him this ‘reading material’ of yours?”

The shrug again. “He’s probably not going to go mental about it like you’re doing.” The next thing I knew, the wrench he’d been using on his bike was in my hand. I took a swing at him and missed. He froze for a second or two, shocked. Then he shielded his head with his arm. “Jesus, Mom, stop! You’re my mother, for cripe’s sake!”

I dropped the wrench. Watched him run down the driveway and out into the road. “And from now on, put your dirty socks in the hamper!” I screamed. “And don’t stick anything inside them except your big, smelly feet!” That was when I realized old Mr. Genovese across the street was standing in his doorway, watching. Fired up still, I shouted over to him. “Mind your own business! Shut your goddamned door!” Lucky for him, he did what he was told.

Fueled, still, by self-righteous anger, I pounded back up to Andrew’s room, lugged those three garbage bags to the landing and flung them down the stairwell. Dragged them out to the car, drove to the dump, and took enormous pleasure in heaving them onto a mountain of trash. By the time I got back home, I had cooled down. I decided not to tell Orion about Girl on Girl after all, and I was grateful that Andrew didn’t tell his father that I’d swung at him with the wrench—something I now felt ashamed of having done. But I have to admit that, in the aftermath of my having cleaned out his room, I enjoyed it whenever he asked me about his stuff.

“Is my Alonzo Mourning jersey still in the wash, Mom?”

“Nope. It’s at the dump.”

“Mom, do you know where that blue notebook is where I’m recording my weight-lifting routine?”

“I guess it’s probably sitting over in the landfill.”

“Mom, Mrs. Kilgallen’s ragging me because I haven’t handed in my copy of Heart of Darkness. You didn’t toss that out, did you?”

“If it was on your bedroom floor, I did.”

“Mom, that was school property. What am I supposed to tell Kilgallen?” I advised him to tell her he’d go to the bookstore and buy her a replacement copy. “Can I have the money for it then?”

“Not from me you can’t. Use your own goddamned money.”

Poor Andrew. I was always harder on him than I was on his sisters. Maybe his being “too busy” to fly up here for the wedding is payback. Maybe I’m getting exactly what I deserve …

Unlike her brother, Marissa, our free spirit, is all for Viveca’s and my upcoming wedding. Her mother marrying a woman: she thinks it’s hip. And I’m a little concerned about the attention Viveca’s been giving her. They chat on the phone. They’ve gone out a couple of times, just the two of them. It’s not that I’m ungrateful that Viveca’s made an effort with my daughter. I appreciate that she has. But both times when they got back from those lunch dates, Marissa was carrying boxes and bags from Bergdorf’s. Viveca’s bought her that Jimmy Choo handbag she loves, the Prada platform pumps that I’d break my neck if I ever tried wearing. Designer things that an aspiring actress and part-time waitress could never afford. As good a kid as she is, Marissa’s always been a little too status conscious, and it’s almost as if Viveca is trying to buy her affection. And apparently it’s working. What was that thing Marissa said last week when the three of us were at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square? When she pointed out that children’s book? “Look. Heather has two mommies just like me.” It made me feel defensive on Orion’s behalf. She’s his daughter, not Viveca’s …

What’s wrong with me today? Why am I worrying about all these things that probably don’t even matter? I walk around the apartment, wandering aimlessly from room to room. Passing the guest bathroom, I look in at Minnie. She’s down on the floor, wearing her knee pads, scouring the grout between the floor tiles. Viveca’s a stickler about clean grout; she has Minnie use some bleaching agent to get it white. I walk past my poster, ANNIE OH: A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM! February 1–March 31 at viveca c gallery. She went all out for that show: ads in the Times, the New Yorker, and New York. Hired that publicist who got me those TV interviews that I was such a nervous wreck about … Back in the kitchen, I grab the remote and change the channel. On the Today show, that Dr. Nancy lady is cautioning Ann Curry about some new medical thing we all have to worry about. I channel-surf past Cookie Monster, cartoons, cake decorating. On CNBC, they’re talking about the global economy—the looming debt crisis in Greece that the Germans may or may not rescue them from. Viveca’s mentioned the possibility of Greece defaulting, too, and how, for some reason I didn’t understand, it could be good for her business if the euro is devalued. It’s funny: she identifies so strongly with her Greek heritage. You would think she’d be more concerned about the country’s balance sheet than her own … The old movie channel’s showing Mildred Pierce. There’s Joan Crawford with her shoulder pads and severe eyebrows, talking to her maid, who I recognize. Whom I recognize? It’s that little actress from Gone With the Wind—the slave with the squeaky voice who didn’t “know nothin’ bout birthing babies.” Slaves, maids: it wasn’t as if the studios were going to hire that actress to play anything else. At least Viveca doesn’t expect Minnie to show up at the apartment in one of those old-fashioned uniforms with the little hat and frilly apron. Minnie wears the same clothes most days: her beige Sean John sweat suit and her plaid canvas sneakers. Marissa tells me that Sean John is that rap guy, Diddy or P. Diddy or whatever he calls himself. One time when she was here, she complimented Minnie on her taste. Told her she liked Sean John clothes, too. And Minnie had smiled her toothless smile and told her she picked it up “for cheap” at a street fair in Newark … On the Christian channel, the pompadoured host is chatting about Jesus’s love with a plump old lady in a pastel party dress and bright red lipstick. I suddenly realize it’s Dale Evans. She died, didn’t she? This must be a rerun. My foster mother, the first one, used to send me to school every day with an American cheese and mustard sandwich and an apple inside a rusty Roy Rogers and Dale Evans lunch box. (No Thermos like the other kids; I had to drink from the fountain.) Roy and Dale were passé by then, and I was jealous of the cool lunch boxes some of the other girls in my class carried: Dr. Kildare, The Beverly Hillbillies, and then that crème de la crème of lunch boxes, Meet the Beatles …

Carrying Viveca’s package down the hall to our bedroom, I glance in again at Minnie. She’s seated on the edge of our soaking tub, taking a break from her grout cleaning. She’s got her knee pads on, her legs spread so far apart that she could be giving birth. I wave; she waves back. When I enter the bedroom, they startle me again: those dresses. The brides.

All three of the Vera Wangs are beautiful, but none is me. What is me is the dress I’d already bought off the rack at that vintage dress shop I like in Tribeca: a basket-weave shift, bright yellow with bold diagonal turquoise stripes—two hundred dollars marked down to $129.99. I like those funky stripes, its above-the-knee length. The label says Mary Quant. I looked her up. Wikipedia says she was a mod British designer, popular during the 1960s. Cool, I thought, but when I tried it on and showed it to Viveca, she said, “Sweetheart, it’s cute and it looks adorable on you, but to me it says sundress, not wedding dress. It’s … youthful. On our special day, I’d love to see you in something a little more elegant and celebratory. Just think of all the lesbians over the years who couldn’t be brides. We’re honoring them, too. In another era, we would have had to pass as spinsters who couldn’t find men to marry them.” She’d laughed when she said “spinsters,” it’s so far out of the realm of who she is, who she thinks we are.

Lesbians: that’s what I am now. Right? I’m marrying a woman, aren’t I? And I’ve slept with another woman—Priscilla, the wiry tomboy I used to waitress with at Friendly’s. But I don’t see our marrying as something that necessarily balances the scales of justice or honors the dykes of yesteryear … Spinsters who couldn’t find men to marry them: why had she said that? We’ve both been married to men. Viveca says I should pack the dress and bring it along on our wedding trip—that I can wear it when we shop or go out for lunch. She’s also suggested I go with her the next time she gets a bikini wax. “There’s more nudity than not on the beaches in Mykonos and hairless pussies are de rigueur,” she said. Viveca gets a massage and a wax every other week. Her pubic patch is a fashionably thin vertical line that stops just above her labia. I might go topless at those beaches when we’re over there, but I am not going bottomless. And anyway, I don’t even like the beach that much. It’s different for Viveca. She’s Greek. Her given name is Vasiliki, not Viveca. She’s anglicized the name for commercial reasons. She tans so effortlessly. But with my red hair and Irish complexion, I have to be careful. I could burn to a crisp.

I look over toward the bureau, and there’s that index card I scrawled on yesterday. I pick it up and read what I’d written down. After Chaos arose broad-breasted Gaia, the primordial goddess of the Earth … Among their children were the Cyclopes, the Hundred-Handed giants. Monsters, like the monsters that are being birthed in the poster hanging in the hallway, the hundred-handed monster in my life—the shark who swims in the waters of my memory. Whose voice I both dread and entertain because it drives my art … I’m hit by a pang of missing Viveca: the sound of her voice, the warm safety of her body next to mine. I approach the Gaia dress. Touch it, run the beautiful green silk between my fingers. After Chaos arose broad-breasted Gaia. I sit on our bed and open the Neiman Marcus box. Unscrew the top of Viveca’s perfume bottle and inhale her scent: orange blossoms, vanilla. I love her. Miss her the way Diane Sawyer misses Mike Nichols when he’s away and she puts on his shirt …

I read the index card over and over, and as I do, I begin to feel the agitation, familiar and strange. Gaia … Gaia. Am I on the verge of something? Is it coming?

Maybe not. Maybe my comfortable life here has begun to snuff out my creativity. Maybe I’ve peaked and it’s all downhill from here.

I shake my head. Shake off my self-doubt. My brain is spinning. My fingers are flexing, making invisible art. It’s exciting and scary when it comes, like watching an approaching cyclone and standing defiantly in its path. Maybe before this day is out, the weather inside my brain will set me spinning. Maybe I’ll find myself in my studio, facing my need to scream out. Fight back against the monster. Make art.

Chapter Two

Orion Oh

The sharks and I both arrive at the Cape this first Saturday in September. As I inch over the Sagamore Bridge in this god-awful Labor Day weekend traffic, they’re saying great whites are swimming the coastal waters, heading north. According to the car radio, warning signs are being posted along the oceanside beaches from Chatham to North Truro. North Truro? I reach over and turn up the volume, drowning out the annoying cell phone ring tone that’s playing inside the glove compartment. Everybody’s movin’, everybody’s groovin’, baby. Love shack, baby love shack, bay-ayy-be-ee. “What do you want for a ring tone?” Marissa had asked me that day when she was programming my phone. “Anything,” I’d said. “You pick.” And she picked that awful song I’ve always hated.

It’s not one of the kids calling me; they text me now. Before I left this morning, I deliberated about whether to take the damned cell phone with me or leave it back in Three Rivers. But what if there was an emergency? So I threw it in the glove compartment and locked it. I thought I turned the damn thing off, but I guess not. Ahh, relief. The call has gone to voice mail.

“It’s a little unusual to see them in these cooler Massachusetts waters at this time of year,” the shark expert tells her interviewer, a guy who, for some reason, is calling himself the Mad Hatter. “But the gray seal population’s been on the rise, and we think that’s what’s probably luring them.”

The Mad Hatter chortles. “So you’re saying the problem is that there’s been too much seal sex? Too many pinnipeds puttin’ out?”

“Uh, well …”

The Diane Rehm interview I’d been listening to faded away somewhere between Braintree and Buzzards Bay. Conversely, the Mad Hatter is coming through so loudly and clearly that he might as well be broadcasting from the backseat. “Time now for traffic, news, and weather. And when we come back, we’ll have more with Dr. Tracy Skelly from the Division of Marine Fisheries.”

Despite my initial resistance to the idea, I’m staying rent free at Viveca’s place in North Truro for the month, hoping that a Cape Cod retreat might allow me, after a summer’s worth of drifting and wound licking, to anchor myself. Figure out how to shed my bitterness, forgive myself and others and start over. Orchestrate a reinvention, I guess you’d say. Thirty days has September: it’s a tall order.

My game plan, once I survive this hideous holiday traffic and get settled in, is to eat healthy, cool it on the drinking, exercise. I’ll jog and journal every morning, then bike to the beach for an afternoon swim. After dinner, I’ll read and research—Google phrases like “new professions after 50,” “change career paths.” But with sharks in the water, it doesn’t sound like I’ll be doing a whole lot of swimming. Of course, there’s always the placid bayside, but what I want is turbulence—bodysurfing along the crest of the five- or six-foot swells and getting roughed up a little by the waves I misjudge—the ones that, instead of carrying me, crack against me. I’ve been hoping the wildness of the water might somehow both cleanse me of my failings as a university psychologist and baptize me as … what?

What do you want to be when you grow up? The adults were always asking me that when I was a kid, and because I liked to draw—reproduce the images in comic books and Mad magazine—I’d say I wanted to be an artist. I’d enjoyed my high school art classes, had gotten good grades for my work. And so I’d entered college with a vague plan to major in art. In my first semester, my Intro to Drawing professor, Dr. Duers, had said during my portfolio review that I had a good sense of composition and a talent worth developing. But the following semester, I’d run up against Professor Edwards, an edgy New York sculptor who was disdainful of having to teach studio art to suburban college kids—who had come out and told us he was only driving up from the city twice a week because of the paycheck. It had crushed me the morning he’d stood over my shoulder, snickered at the still life I was drawing, and walked away without a word. But that same semester, I got an A in an Intro to Psych course I really liked. And so I had put away my sketch pad and gone on to the 200-level psychology classes. And then the summer between my sophomore and junior years, I got a job as a second-shift orderly at the state hospital.

I liked working there. Liked shooting the shit with the patients. Not the ones who were really out of it, but the ones who were in there for shorter-term stays. The “walking wounded,” as the nurses called them. Some of those patients would be admitted in pretty rough shape—straitjacketed and sputtering nonsense, or in such deep depressions that they were almost catatonic. But two or three weeks later, with their equilibrium restored by meds and talk therapy, they’d be discharged back into the world.

The psychiatrists were off-putting. Tooled around the wards like they walked on water. But the psychologists were different. More humane, less in a hurry. “You’re good with the patients,” one of them, Dr. Dow, told me one day. “I’ve noticed.” For him, it was nothing more than a casual observation, but for me—a kid who, up to that point, had never gotten noticed for much of anything—it was huge. On my day off, I drove up to the Placement Office at school and took one of those tests that identifies your strengths, suggests what career paths you should consider. When I got my results back, it said I had scored high on empathy and should consider the helping professions: social work, psychology. And so, at the beginning of my fifth semester, I declared psychology as my major.

I kept my job at the hospital. Worked there on weekends. They assigned me to the adolescent unit mostly: boys who had lit fires or tortured the family pet; girls who had attempted suicide or were taking the slow route via eating disorders. And then one night—Christmas Eve it was; I was covering for another orderly who wanted to be with his family—I met a new arrival who’d been admitted because of a holiday meltdown.

Siobhan was a pretty seventeen-year-old with auburn hair and pale skin. She’d been a competitive Irish step-dancer until a torn ACL had brought all that to a halt. She was type A all the way, and a big reader. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Tess of the d’Urbervilles: the kinds of books that, back in high school, it had been torture for me to get through. Siobhan told me, straight-faced, that she was misplaced in time—that she should have been born in an earlier, more romantic era. Fashioned herself as a tragic heroine, I guess. We weren’t friends, exactly—that was against hospital policy—but we were friendly. I liked her sarcastic sense of humor and she liked mine. And believe me, humor was in short supply at that place. She nicknamed me Heathcliff—because of my “dark, swarthy looks,” she said. My “big, soulful brown eyes.” One time, she asked me what kind of a name “Oh” was, and when I told her, she wanted to know why I didn’t look Chinese. “Because I’m Italian, too,” I told her.

She reached out and touched my face when I said that. Studied it so intently that I had to look away. I was, at the time, an insecure, blend-in-with-the-woodwork twenty-year-old, not used to such focused attention. “Now I can see it,” she finally said.

“It?”

“The Orient. It’s in your eyes. It makes you uniquely handsome, but I suspect you already know that.” Handsome? Me? I laughed. After that exchange, she stopped calling me Heathcliff. Now I was Marco Polo.

Sometimes, if things were slow on the ward after I had cleared away the dinner trays, I’d play Scrabble or Monopoly with her and some of the other patients. More often than not, Siobhan would win, and after a while I figured out how. She’d cheat. I didn’t call her on it. Didn’t really give a shit who won. But she knew that I knew. “Better watch out for that one,” one of the old guard nurses warned me. “She’s got a crush on a certain someone.”

At the nurses’ station one night, Siobhan’s chart was out on the counter and I took a peek. It read: “Manic-depressive disorder. Psychomotor agitation during manic phase that manifests itself as oral fixation.” The latter wasn’t surprising. For one thing, Siobhan smoked like a chimney. And when she was out of cigarettes and couldn’t bum them, she would put other things in her mouth and chew on them: hard candies, pens and pencils, the cuffs of her shirts. The covers of her paperbacks were crisscrossed with teeth marks.

One February night I was doing bed checks, and when I went into her room, no Siobhan. I walked down to the rec room to see if she was there and found her running in circles, gagging, blue in the face. We’d been trained to give the Heimlich, so I got behind her, put my fists under her diaphragm, and yanked. Out popped the plastic Checker she’d been sucking on. It had gotten lodged in her windpipe. As soon as it came out, she started crying, taking gulps of air, clawing me and hugging me so hard that, for a few seconds, it was like I’d just saved her from drowning. When she tried to kiss me, I pushed her away. After that, she started referring to me as her “knight in shining armor.”

“Don’t be so melodramatic,” I’d say. “I was just doing my job.” But secretly I was pleased. And when, at the next staff meeting, Dr. Dow presented me with a certificate of gratitude, I went down to Barker’s discount store, bought a frame, and hung it on my wall.

After Siobhan was released, she started contacting me. I hadn’t given her the name and number of my dorm, but she had gotten it somehow. “Hey, Orion! Phone call!” some guy would shout from down the hall, and I would walk toward the phone, hoping it wasn’t her. She kept asking me to meet her for coffee. Begging me. The one time I agreed—met her at the Dunkin’ Donuts just off campus—I was nervous as hell. This was the kind of thing I could lose my job over if anyone from the hospital saw us together. That didn’t happen, but something else did. She was acting manic for the hour or so we sat and talked. Chewing on her coffee cup, talking a blue streak, lighting one cigarette after another. After my second cup of coffee, I told her I had a test to study for and got up to leave. That’s when, out of the blue, she asked me if I was still a virgin. It wasn’t until later that I thought of what I should have said: that her question was inappropriate, out of bounds. But what I did say was, “Me? Pfft. Not hardly.” It was a bluff. The sum total of my sexual experience up to that point had been a drunken encounter with a so-so looking girl I’d danced and made out with at a dorm mixer and then taken upstairs to my room. Groping her in the dark, I’d kept trying to figure out how to undo her complicated underwear until she had finally done it herself, put me inside of her, and said, “Go. Move.” I was done in under a minute, so technically I was not still a virgin. But Mr. Experience I wasn’t.