The Fixed Stars

by Molly Wizenberg

You looked like a lesbian, he said. Shit, did I?

I was not discouraged from rocking the boat, but I also was not inclined to rock it more than gently.

The women of my childhood came in two varieties: doctors’ wives and fitness instructors.

On a good day, she could have been in a Robert Palmer video. On an average day, she was beautiful, my radiantly eighties upper-middle-class mom.

Now I think, What the fuck kind of superman does that?

When he was already sick, we posed for a picture in the driveway at Know Creek Ranch, nose to identical nose, and you can tell we’re saying cheeeeeeese.

The way his legs work, the sun in his hair like tarnished brass: it really does look like me.

I had an important job to do: me, skinny hips and moussed bangs and too-big teeth, guarding an epidemic’s graveyard.

They were sexy in a way even a preteen girl could understand.

He was so cute that the sight of him panicked me, as though I’d narrowly missed being hit by a car.

Katie and I had grown up analyzing, appraising, and envying women’s bodies in movies and on the covers of magazines. To study them felt natural.

Her voice sounded like she had a cold. She worked hard and made cooking look easy.

A ruggedly handsome ecology major who consistently arrives forty-five minutes late and whose sheets are scratchy with soil and dog hair?

Across the aisle was the cheese department. Laura was its manager. Her hair was dirty-blond and boy-short, and when she rolled up the sleeves of her white T-shirt, she was River Phoenix in Stand by Me. Here was a lesbian.

They called her Sin, which I later learned was spelled Cyn.

The brand-new Sade album Lovers Rock spun in the CD player. I wondered if this was a date.

Her voice was gentle but gravelly, like extra-fine sandpaper.

I wanted to glide my nose like a cat along the line where her T-shirt met her neck.

She was on the rebound, didn’t need a project: a brand-new, straight-off-the-lot baby dyke. She’d shut me down accordingly.

Is there another universe where the story could have gone otherwise? How good is my imagination?

But my father’s death was the first time I felt grief inside my own skin. I didn’t know what to do with it, how to keep from bursting open as I watched my father’s body fail on a rented hospital bed in the living room.

It felt wrong to be making life while Tina was leaving it.

That was the year that I learned their name. I’d never cared about flowers, but this was different. Here was a flower that bloomed in time with our baby.

Can I be someone who can live with this? A quieter corollary: Who is that someone? Who was I, to ask for something other than everything I’d been given?

But, writes Annie Dillard, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”16 Did we really want the same thing at all?

I would not revise this assessment. But I would add something now: that one cannot live at one’s limits for long. One cannot stay there indefinitely, not even for love.

The fear that I’d planted that summer in our marriage, I watered it. I was what we were afraid of. I was the one who’d brought this into our house, the credible fear of our undoing. I should be the one to rout it out.

But the ground did not resolidify. It was porous now, and fertile. I watched my desire spread like seeds on a stiff wind, stick to women in coffee shops and on the street and outside school. The seeds bloomed, proliferated like invasives.

A square of white light falls from the high windows, and June sits on the floor where it lands, perched on the edge of a two-by-four, with the doll she calls Big Baby. She’s wearing a pair of grape-purple Puma high-tops with Velcro straps, and she’s looking somewhere above the camera, eyebrows a little up, mouth pursed, like she’s about to say something. She looks like a doll herself.

In the cabin, the heat vent was too close to the bed. I couldn’t sleep, so I watched my husband and our child, these people I called mine, sweat sticking their twin hair to their twin faces.

I told him about a thing I’d recently heard her say, that she’d pointed at her own belly and said there was a baby there. She wanted to call the baby Juicebox. We laughed, wheezing, not wanting to wake her.

I think I would feel okay if you only dated women, he said. No other men. I don’t want to date other men.

Nonmonogamy would be troublesome and difficult, but monogamy is troublesome and difficult too. To look at them side by side, to interrogate them both as valid ways of living—we’d never done this, never thought to.

We commiserated, encouraged each other. We were both afraid of failing, and of succeeding.

I, I, I. There was so much I. Even I could hear it. We never worried about him falling in love, only me. Of course we knew.

You should reach out to Nora, she said, righting herself. No, no—it was all in my head, I said. There wasn’t anything there. Well, you should find out for sure.

What I heard was: while I was out kissing a woman, my three-year-old fell on her face in the street.

I thought about kissing my friend, and my gut turned over like a page.

Can you tell me what’s been going on? the nurse asked. I’ve been having kind of a weird time, I said. I figured out that I don’t think I’m straight. My husband and I just opened up our marriage. It seems you’ve had a panic attack, the nurse said. She patted me on the shoulder. Let’s get you some rest. Then she handed me an Ativan and a paper cup of water. This was how I came out to my mother.

I could have filled swimming pools, municipal reservoirs, with shame.

So I do this whole archeological dig on myself, comb through every story of every person I’ve ever wanted or dated or loved, looking for glimmers of gayness.

What if the one constant thing about you is that you’re changeable?

Then she said it: Are you queer? I must have been plain as a sheet of glass. How long had she been thinking of asking this? I thought I’d hidden myself so well. I fumbled. I talked obliquely about a recent crush on a woman, said my husband and I had opened our marriage, were trying it out. Words came from my mouth like they were someone else’s. I’ve dated people in open relationships, she said. A thought: If this were fiction, a good editor would scratch this scene out.

She continued. I’ve had a crush on you since the trial, she said. I’d love to date you.

I was walking beside a woman who was gay, and who looked gay, and I was not walking beside this woman because she was my friend. I was walking beside her because we wanted to put our tongues in each other’s mouths.

Can I kiss you? I asked, and then I did.

I’d never collided this way with familiar and foreign, like-me and not-me.

This was a new intimacy: the pleasure of sameness.

We fit, because she was made like me. She whispered into my mouth and I pulled in her words like air.

No, really, she said. I don’t want to be the first pancake. You know how people always throw out the first pancake? I laughed. I never do that! I said. I love the first pancake. Then I leaned in closer and said: I wouldn’t do that to you.