A Place I've Never Been (6 page)

“But, Leonore,” I said, “the question is: Should I go to the wedding?” imagining myself, suddenly, in my red T-shirt that said BABY BUTCH (a present from Diana), reintroducing myself to her thin, severe, long-necked mother, Marjorie Winters.

“I think that would depend on the food,” Leonore said.

After I hung up, I poured myself some coffee and propped the invitation in front of me
to look at. For the first few seconds it hadn't even clicked who was getting married. I had read: “Mr. and Mrs. Humphrey Winters cordially invite you to celebrate the wedding of their daughter, Diana Helaine,” and thought: Who is Diana Helaine? Then it hit me, because for the whole year and a month, Diana had refused to tell me what her middle initial stood for—positively refused, she said, out of embarrassment, while I tried to imagine what horrors could lie behind that “H”—Hildegarde? Hester? Hulga? She was coyly, irritatingly insistent about not letting the secret out, like certain girls who would have nothing to do with me in eighth grade. Now she was making public to the world what she insisted on hiding from me, and it made perfect sense. Diana Helaine, not a different person, is getting married, I thought, and it was true, the fact in and of itself didn't surprise me. During the year and a month, combing the ghost of her once knee-length hair, I couldn't count how many times she'd said, very off-the-cuff, “You know, Ellen, sometimes I think this lesbian life is for the birds. Maybe I should just give it up, get married, and have two point four babies.” I'd smile and say, “If you do that, Diana, you can count on my coming to the wedding with a shotgun and shooting myself there in front of everybody.” To which, still strumming her hair like a guitar and staring into the mirror, she would respond only with a faint smile, as if she could think of nothing in the world she would enjoy more.

First things first: We were lovers, and I don't mean schoolgirls touching each other in exploratory ways in dormitories after dark. I mean, we lived together, shared tampons and toothpaste, had one bed to sleep in, and for all the world (and ourselves) to see. Diana was in law school in San Francisco, and I had a job at Milpitas State Hospital (I still do).
Each day I'd drive an hour and a half there and an hour and a half back, and when I got home Diana would be waiting for me in bed, a fat textbook propped on her lap. We had couple friends, Leonore and Callie, for instance, and were always invited to things together, and when she left me, we were even thinking about getting power of attorney over each other. I was Diana's first woman lover, though she had had plenty of boyfriends. I had never slept with a boy, but had been making love with girls since early in high school. Which meant that for me, being a lesbian was just how things were. But for Diana—well, from day one it was adventure, event, and episode. For a while we just had long blushing talks over pizza, during which she confessed she was “curious.” It's ridiculous how many supposedly straight girls come on to you that way—plopping themselves down on your lap and fully expecting you to go through all the hard work of initiating them into Sapphic love out of sheer lust for recruitment. No way, I said. The last thing I need is to play guinea pig, testing ground, only to be left when the fun's over and a new boyfriend shows up on the horizon. But no, Diana said. I mean, yes. I think I
do
. I mean, I think I
am
. At which point she would always have just missed the last bus home and have to spend the night in my bed, where it was only a matter of time before I had no more defenses.

After we became lovers, Diana cut her hair off, and bought me the BABY BUTCH T-shirt. She joined all sorts of groups and organizations, dragged me to unsavory bars, insisted, fiercely, on telling her parents everything. (They did not respond well.) Only in private did she muse over her other options. I think she thought she was rich enough not to have to take any vow or promise all that seriously. Rich people are like that, I have noticed. They think a love affair is like a shared real estate venture they can just buy out of when
they get tired of it.

Diana had always said the one reason she definitely wanted to get married was for the presents, so the day before the wedding I took my credit card and went to Nordstrom's, where I found her name in the bridal registry and was handed a computer printout with her china pattern, silver, stainless, and other assorted requirements. I was already over my spending limit, so I bought her the ultimate—a Cuisinart—which I had wrapped to carry in white crêpe paper with a huge yellow bow. Next came the equally important matter of buying myself a dress for the wedding. It had been maybe five, six years since I'd owned a dress. But buying clothes is like riding a bicycle—it comes back—and soon, remembering age-old advice from my mother on hems and necklines, I had picked out a pretty yellow sundress with a spattering of daisies, and a big, wide-brimmed hat.

The invitation had been addressed to Miss Ellen Britchkey and guest, and afterwards, in the parking lot, that made me think about my life—how there was no one in it. And then, as I was driving home from Nordstrom's, for the first time in years I had a seizure of accident panic. I couldn't believe I was traveling sixty miles an hour, part of a herd of speeding cars which passed and raced each other, coming within five or six inches of collision and death every ten seconds. It astonished me to realize that I drove every day of my life, that every day of my life I risked ending my life, that all I had to do was swerve the wrong way, or look only in the front and not the side mirror, and I might hit another car, or hit a child on the way to a wedding, and have to live for the rest of my life with the guilt, or die. Horrified, I headed right, into the slow lane. The slow lane was full of scared women, crawling home alone. It was no surprise to me. I was one with the
scared women crawling home alone. After Diana left me, I moved down the peninsula to a miniature house—that is the only way to describe it—two rooms with a roof, and shingles, and big pretty windows. It was my solitude house, my self-indulgence house, my remorse-and-secret-pleasure house. There I ate take-out Chinese food, read and reread
Little House on the Prairie
, stayed up late watching reruns of
Star Trek
and
The Honeymooners
. I lived by my wits, by survival measures. The television was one of those tiny ones, the screen smaller than a human face.

Diana—I only have one picture of her, and it is not a good likeness. In it she wears glasses and has long, long hair, sweeping below the white fringe of the picture, to her behind. She cut all her hair off as an offering to me the day after the first night we made love, and presented it that evening in a box—two neat braids, clipped easily as toenail parings, offered like a dozen roses. I stared at them, the hair still braided, still fresh with the smell of shampoo, and joked that I had bought her a comb, like in “The Gift of the Magi.” “Don't you see?” she said. “I did it for you—I changed myself for you, as an act of love.” I looked at her, her new boyish bangs, her face suddenly so thin-seeming without its frame of yellow hair. She was used to big gestures, to gifts that made an impact.

“Diana,” I lied (for I had loved her long hair), “it's the most generous thing anyone's ever done for me.” To say she'd done it for me—well, it was a little bit like a mean trick my sister pulled on me one Christmas when we were kids. She had this thing about getting a little tiny tree to put on top of the piano. And I, of course, wanted a great big one, like the Wagner family down the block. And then, about ten days before Christmas,
she said, “Ellen, I have an early Christmas present for you,” and she handed me a box, inside which were about a hundred miniature Christmas-tree ornaments.

I can recognize a present with its own motive.

If I've learned one thing from Diana, it's that there's more to a gift than just giving.

The next day was the day of the wedding, and somehow, without hitting any children, I drove to the hotel in Hillsborough where the ceremony and reception were taking place. A doorman escorted me to a private drawing room where, nervous about being recognized, I kept the Cuisinart in front of my face as long as I could, until finally an older woman with a carnation over her breast, apparently an aunt or something, said, “May I take that, dear?” and I had to surrender the Cuisinart to a table full of presents, some of which were hugely and awkwardly wrapped and looked like human heads. I thanked her, suddenly naked in my shame, and sturdied myself to brave the drawing room, where the guests milled. I recognized two or three faces from college, all part of Diana's set—rich, straight, preppy, not the sort I had hung around with at all. And in the distance I saw her very prepared parents, her mother thin and severe-looking as ever in a sleeveless black dress, her streaked hair cut short, like Diana's, her neck and throat nakedly displaying a brilliant jade necklace, while her father, in his tuxedo, talked with some other men and puffed at a cigar. Turning to avoid them, I almost walked right into Walter Bevins, who was Diana's gay best friend, or “hag fag,” in college, and we were so relieved to see each other we grabbed a couple of whiskey sours and headed to as secluded a corner as we could find. “Boy, am I glad to see a familiar face,” Walter said. “Can you believe this? Though I must say, I never doubted Diana would get married in
anything less than splendor.”

“Me neither,” I admitted. “I was just a little surprised that Diana was getting married at all.”

“Weren't we all!” Walter said. “But he seems like a nice guy. A lawyer, of course.
Very
cute, a real shame that he's heterosexual, if you ask me. But apparently she loves him and he loves her, and that's just fine. Look, there he is.”

Walter pointed to a tall, dark man with a mustache and beard who stood in the middle of a circle of elderly women. To my horror, his eye caught ours, and he disentangled himself from the old women and walked over to where we were sitting. “Walter,” he said. Then he looked at me and said, “Ellen?”

I nodded and smiled.

“Ellen, Ellen,” he said, and reached out a hand which, when I took it, lifted me from the safety of my sofa onto my feet. “It is such a pleasure to meet you,” he said. “Come with me for a second. I've wanted a chance to talk with you for so long, and once the wedding takes place—who knows?”

I smiled nervously at Walter, who raised a hand in comradeship, and was led by the groom through a door to an antechamber, empty except for a card table piled high with bridesmaids' bouquets. “I just want you to know,” he said, “how happy Diana and I are that you could make it. She speaks so warmly of you. And I also want you to know, just so there's no tension, Diana's told me everything, and I'm fully accepting of her past.”

“Thank you, Mark,” I said, horrified that at my age I could already be part of someone's “past.” It sounded fake to me, as if lesbianism was just a stage Diana had passed through, and I was some sort of perpetual adolescent, never seeing the adult light
of heterosexuality.

“Charlie,” Mark said. “I'm called Charlie.”

He opened the door, and as we were heading back out into the drawing room, he said, “Oh, by the way, we've seated you next to the schizophrenic girl. Your being a social worker and all, we figured you wouldn't mind.”

“Me?” I said. “Mind? Not at all.”

“Thanks. Boy, is Diana going to be thrilled to see you.”

Then he was gone into the crowd.

Once back in the drawing room I searched for Walter, but couldn't seem to find him. I was surrounded on all sides by elderly women with elaborate, peroxided hairdos. Their purses fascinated me. Some were hard as shell and shaped like kidneys, others made out of punctured leather that reminded me of birth control pill dispensers. Suddenly I found myself face to nose with Marjorie Winters, whose eyes visibly bulged upon recognizing me. We had met once, when Diana had brought me home for a weekend, but that was before she had told her mother the nature of our relationship. After Diana came out—well, I believe the exact words were, “I never want that woman in my house again.”

“Ellen,” Marjorie said now, just as I had imagined she might. “What a surprise.” She smiled, whether with contempt or triumph I couldn't tell.

“Well, you know I wouldn't miss Diana's wedding, Mrs. Winters,” I said, smiling. “And this certainly is a lovely hotel.”

She smiled. “Yes, isn't it? Red, look who's here,” she said, and motioned over her husband, who for no particular reason except that his name was Humphrey was called Red. He was an amiable, absent-minded man, and he stared at me in earnest, trying to
figure out who I was.

“You remember Diana's friend Ellen, from college, don't you?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Of course.” Clearly he knew nothing. I believe his wife liked to keep him in a perpetual dark like that, so that he wouldn't be distracted from earning money.

“Ellen's a social worker,” Marjorie said, “at the state hospital at Milpitas. So Diana and I thought it would be a good idea to seat her next to the schizophrenic girl, don't you think?”

“Oh yes,” Red said. “Definitely. I imagine they'll have a lot of things to talk about.”

A little tinkling bell rang, and Marjorie said, “Oh goodness, that's my cue. Be a dear, and do take care of Natalie.” Squeezing my hand, she was gone. She had won, and she was glorying in her victory. And not for the first time that day, I wondered: Why is it that the people who always win always win?

The guests were beginning to move outdoors, to the garden, where the ceremony was taking place. Lost in the crowd, I spied Walter and maneuvered my way next to him. “How's it going, little one?” he said.

“I feel like a piece of shit,” I said. I wasn't in the mood to make small talk.

“That's what weddings are for,” he said cheerfully. We headed through a pair of French doors into a small, beautiful garden, full of blooming roses and wreaths and huge baskets of wisteria and lilies. Handsome, uniformed men—mostly brothers of the groom, I presumed—were helping everyone to their seats. Thinking we were a couple, one of them escorted Walter and me to one of the back rows, along with several other young couples, who had brought their babies and might have to run out to change a diaper or
something in the middle of the ceremony.