No One Belongs Here More Than You (15 page)

Excited to see you have the Saturn peaches in.

Don’t thank me; they’re not my Saturn peaches.

Well, technically, they are. Isn’t this place worker-owned?

Yeah, but you have to work here for more than a summer and, like, eat the manager’s pussy or something. Do you want a bag?

I joined PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). I bought books by and for lesbians and their supportive, surprised parents. When she went back to school I imagined her sitting in a dorm with her arm around a young woman’s waist, perhaps a young butch woman. I had read about the butch/femme dynamic and was sure that Lyon would be the femme. I wondered if Tom and Sarah knew about Lyon’s preference; my guess was that they did not because they were still quite self-involved. They probably had fewer dalliances, but a bitterness had replaced the mania; the past now looked almost carefree. In December, Tom called to invite me to Christmas dinner.

Lyon will be there. She’s coming home.

Oh, great.

And she has a new boyfriend. You’re going to flip out when you meet him.

I quit PFLAG and moved through the next few days in weepy wonderment. I knew nothing about her. It was really over and I really was not her mother. I was really almost fifty. I really did not feel okay about any of this, and there was really nothing I could do about it. Somehow losing the lesbianism, the butch girlfriend, the need for tolerance, was worse than losing Lyon herself, years before. Or, more likely, I was still feeling the old loss, just in a new way.

I arrived late. Lyon wasn’t even there; Tom and Sarah said she would show up by dessert. I talked to their other friends, some of whom I knew from our college days. I marveled at their nonchalant relationship to Lyon. One man thought she was still in high school. Just as we sat down for dinner, the doorbell rang. Someone in a puffy down jacket stumbled in, unwrapping his scarf. It was Ed Borger. He waved and said, Hi, everyone. And then he said, Lyon’s coming, she’s finishing a phone call.

These words were lost on me because I was consumed with Ed’s shirt. It was a particular kind of modern dress shirt, a reproduction of a dress shirt that would have been popular in the sixties but had been modified to appeal to people who could not remember the sixties. Therein lay the problem, because Ed Borger
would
remember the sixties, he would remember being a teenager in the sixties, and he would avoid such a shirt because it would not seem retro to him, it would just remind him of a time before he had really gained social confidence. So someone else must have bought this shirt for him, a person who could not remember the sixties. My thoughts were interrupted by Lyon’s entrance, her hand gently rubbing Ed’s back as she said her hellos. Tom poured a glass of wine for Ed.

So, how’s the family counseling business?

I can’t complain, Tom.

We ate quietly, those of us who knew Ed and those of us who only knew there was a funny feeling in the room.

I guess that’s true, you really
can’t
complain, can you?

We ate our yam casserole and our scalloped potatoes and our baked ham.

What are you saying, Tom?

Ed placed his hand over Lyon’s hand; we all looked from Ed to Tom. Tom looked at Lyon; we all did. She was staring intently at Sarah, who slowly looked up from her plate and at her daughter. And then, casually, Lyon slipped her hand out from beneath Ed’s and passed me the potatoes, though I had not asked for the potatoes. I took the dish and she did not release the dish and we held the dish together for a moment, it hovered over her parents’ dinner table. My eyes ventured slowly from the dish, to the front of her blouse, to her eyes. What did I fear I would find there? Meanness and gloating? Slyness? Shame? They were sparkling with the old love, the greatest love of my lifetime. And they were triumphant.

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank each of these people for their part in helping me make this book: Fiona Maazel, Rick Moody, Nan Graham, Sarah Chalfant, and Mike Mills.

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2007
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE

First published in the United States in 2007
by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of Americas, New York, NY 10020

This digital edition first published in 2008
by Canongate Books Ltd

Copyright © Miranda July, 2007

“The Shared Patio” was previously published in
Zoetrope
.

“The Man on the Stairs” was previously published in
Fence
.

“This Person” was previously published in
Bridge
.

“It Was Romance” was previously published in
Harvard Review
.

“Something That Needs Nothing” appeared in
Bridge
and
The New Yorker
.

“The Boy from Lam Kien” was originally published by Cloverfield Press.

“Making Love in 2003” appeared in
The Paris Review
.

“The Moves” appeared in
Tin House
.

“Birthmark” was previously published in
The Paris Review
.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 84767 392 3

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