I Go Swimming

I Go Swimming

TEN

The summer between my junior and senior years at Princeton, I had an internship at the Village Vanguard, the oldest and most attitudinous of the alternative newsweeklies in the country.

It was a wretched three months. For one thing, it was the hottest summer in years. Manhattan was boiling. Every morning I’d start sweating the instant I exited the shower, keep sweating through the subway ride downtown, and basically continue sweating the whole day.

I worked for a horrible woman named Kiki. Six feet tall and skeletally skinny, with henna’d hair, cat-eye thrift shop eyeglasses, and a permanent scowl, Kiki’s summer uniform was a miniskirt paired with thigh-high suede boots, or, alternately, the noisiest clogs in the world, topped with a tight T-shirt advertising Sammy’s Rumanian Restaurant, or the Boy Scouts Gymboree, or something else so square that it was hip.

Initially, Kiki confounded me. The hipster garb made sense, and the bad attitude was par for the Vanguard course, but I couldn’t figure out when she was getting any work done. She showed up late, left early, and took two-hour lunches in between, and seemed to spend most of her time in the office on the phone with a cadre of interchangeable-sounding friends. The mosaic nameplate on the white picket fence she’d ironically erected around her cubicle read “associate editor. ” And while she associated plenty, I’d never seen her edit.

She was, however, the master of delegating unpleasant chores. “I’m thinking about women and murder, ” she’d announce on a Tuesday afternoon, idly sipping her iced coffee while I stood before her, sweating. “Why don’t you see what we’ve done? ”

This was 1991. The back issues of the Vanguard weren’t stored online, or even on microfilm, but in huge, dusty, falling-apart, oversized binders that each weighed at least twenty pounds. These binders were housed along the hallway that linked the offices of columnists to the feeding pen of metal chairs and cigarette-scarred desks that served as workspace for the Vanguard’s lesser luminaries. I spent my days hauling the binders off the shelves, lugging them over first to my desk, then to the copying machine, all the while trying to avoid the gin breath and wandering hands of the nation’s preeminent gun rights activist, whose office was right next to the shelves, and whose favorite summer hobby seemed to be accidentally on purpose brushing against the sides of my breasts when my arms were loaded down with binders.

It was miserable. After two weeks I gave up on the subway and started taking the bus. Even though it made the ride twice as long and just as hot, it kept me out of the sweltering, fetid pit that the 116th Street subway stop had become. One afternoon in early August, I was sitting on the M140, minding my own business and sweating as usual, when, just as the bus lurched past Billy’s Topless, I heard a very small, perfectly calm voice that sounded as if it was coming from the precise base of my skull.

“I know where you’re going, ” said the voice. The hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood straight up. I got goosebumps, and was suddenly freezing cold, and I was completely convinced that what I was hearing was … not human. A voice from the spirit world, I might have said that summer, laughing it off with my friends. But really, I thought it was the voice of God.

Of course it wasn’t God, just Ellyn Weiss, the small, strange, androgynous-looking Village Vanguard contributing writer who’d sat down behind me and decided to say, “I know where you’re going” instead of “hello. ” But in my mind, I thought that if I ever got to hear the voice of God, it would sound exactly like that: small and still and sure.

Once you’ve heard the voice of God, it changes things. That day, when the preeminent gun rights activist waggled his fingertips against the side of my right breast as he made his lurching way back to his office, I accidentally on purpose dropped 1987 on his foot. “So sorry, ” I said, sweet as pie, when he turned the color of a dirty sheet and stumbled away, never to lay a finger on me again. And when Kiki told me, “I’ve been thinking about women and men, and how they’re different, ” and asked whether I could start pulling pages, I told her a bald-faced lie. “My advisor says I won’t get credit for this if all you’ve got me doing is photocopying, ” I told her. “If you can’t use me, I’m sure the copy editors can. ” That very afternoon I slipped Kiki’s skinny, angered clutches and spent the rest of the summer writing headlines, and going out for cheap drinks with my new copy-editing colleagues.

Now, seven years later, I sat cross-legged on a picnic table, my face turned up to the pale November sunshine and my bike parked beside me, waiting to hear that voice again. Waiting for God to take notice as I sat in the center of Pennwood State Park in suburban Pennsylvania five miles from the house I grew up in, for God to look down upon me and intone either, Keep the baby, or Call Planned Parenthood.

I stretched out my legs, lifted my arms over my head, breathing in through my nose, out through my mouth, the way Samantha’s yoga instructor boyfriend said would rid my bloodstream of impurities and increase clear thoughts. If it had happened the way I figured — if I’d gotten pregnant the last time Bruce and I were together — then I was eight weeks along. How big was it, I wondered? The size of a finger-tip, a pencil eraser, a tadpole?

I’d decided that I’d give God another ten minutes, when I heard something.

“Cannie? ”

Ugh. That most definitely was not the voice of the divine. I felt the table tilt as Tanya hoisted herself on top of it, but I kept my eyes closed, hoping that maybe, for once, if I ignored her she’d go away.

“Is something wrong? ”

Silly me. I was forever forgetting that Tanya was a participant in a clutch of self-help groups: one for families of alcoholics, another for sexual-abuse survivors, a third called Codependent No More!, with an exclamation point as part of its name. Leaving well enough alone wasn’t even a possibility. Tanya was all about intervention.

“It might help if you talk about it, ” she rumbled, lighting a cigarette.

“Mm, ” I said. Even with my eyes shut I could feel her watching me.

“You got fired, ” she suddenly announced.

My eyes flew open in spite of myself. “What? ”

Tanya looked inordinately pleased with herself. “I figured it out, didn’t I? Hah! Your mother owes me ten bucks. ”

I lay on my back, waving her smoke away from me, feeling a growing annoyance. “No, I did not get fired. ”

“Was it Bruce? Did something else happen? ”

“Tanya, I really don’t feel like discussing it right now. ”

“Bruce, huh? ” Tanya said mournfully. “Shit. ”

I sat up again. “Why does that bother you? ”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, your mother figured it was something with Bruce, so if she’s right, I’ve got to pay her. ”

Great, I thought. My poor life reduced to a series of ten-dollar bets. Easy tears sprang to my eyes. It seemed these days I was crying about everything, starting with my situation and continuing relentlessly to human-interest stories that ran in the Examiner’s Lifestyle section and Campbell’s soup commercials.

“I guess you saw that last article he wrote, huh? ” said Tanya.

I’d seen it. “Love, Again, ” it was called, in the December issue, which had hit stands just in time to ruin my Thanksgiving. “I know I should be focusing on E. by herself, ” he’d written.

I know that it’s wrong to compare. But there’s no way to avoid it. After The First, it seems that the next woman is, necessarily, The Second. At least in the beginning, at least for a little while. And E. is in every way different from my first love: short where she was tall, fine and delicate where she was broad and solid, sweet where she was bitterly, mordantly funny.

“Rebound, ” my friends tell me, nodding their heads like ancient rabbis instead of twenty-nine-year-old full-time temps and graduate students. “She’s your rebound girl. ” But what’s wrong with rebound, I wonder? If there was a first and it didn’t work out, then there has to be a second, a next. Eventually, you have to move on.

If first love was like exploring a new continent, I think that second love is like moving to a new neighborhood. You already know there will be streets and houses. Now you have the pleasure of learning what the houses look like inside, how the streets feel beneath your feet. You know the rules, the basic vocabulary: phone calls, Valentine’s Day chocolates, how to comfort a woman when she tells you what’s gone wrong in her day, in her life. Now you can fine-tune. You find her nickname, how she likes her hand held, the sweet spot just beneath the curve of her jaw …

And that was as far as I’d made it before running to the toilet for my second hurl of the day. Just the idea of Bruce kissing someone else on the sweet spot just beneath the curve of her jaw — even the thought of him noticing such a thing — was enough to send my already queasy stomach into revolt. He doesn’t love me anymore. I had to keep reminding myself of that, and every time I thought those words, it was like hearing them for the first time, in all-capital italic letters, being boomed out by the guy who did voice-overs for movie previews: HE DOESN’T LOVE ME ANYMORE.

“It must be tough, ” mused Tanya.

“It’s ridiculous, ” I snapped. And really, the whole situation was pretty ridiculous. After three years of resisting his pleas, his offers, his desperate importunings, and biweekly proclamations that I was the only woman he’d ever want, we were apart, I was pregnant, and he’d found somebody else, and I would, most likely, never see him again. (Never was another word I’d hear in my head a lot, as in: You’ll never wake up next to him again, or, You’ll never talk to him on the telephone. )

“So what are you going to do? ” she asked.

“That’s the big question, ” I said, and hopped off the table and onto my bike, heading back home. Except it didn’t feel like home any-more and, thanks to Tanya’s invasion, I wasn’t sure it ever would again.

The less you know about your parents’ sex lives, the better. Sure, you figure, they had to have done it at least once, to get you, and then maybe a few more times, if you had brothers and sisters, but that was procreation; that was duty, and the thought of them using their various openings and attachments for fun, for pleasure — in short, in the manner you, their child, would like to be using yours — was nothing short of sick-making. Particularly if they were having the kind of trendy, cutting-edge love life that was all the rage in the late 1990s. You don’t need to know about your parents having sex, and you especially don’t need to know about them having hipper sex than you are.

Unfortunately, thanks to Tanya’s self-help training, and my mother’s being rendered senseless by love, I got the whole story.

It started when my brother, Josh, came home from college and was rummaging in my mother’s bathroom for the toenail clippers, when he came across a small stack of Hallmark greeting cards — the kind with abstract watercolors of birds and trees on the front, and florid calligraphy’d sentiments inside. “Thinking of you, ” read the front of one, and inside, beneath the rhymed Hallmark couplet, someone had written, “Annie, after three months, the fire still burns strong. ” No signature.

“I think they’re from this woman, ” said Josh.

“What woman? ” I asked.

“The one who’s living here, ” said Josh. “Mom says she’s her swim coach. ”

A live-in swim coach? This was the first I’d heard of it.

“It’s probably nothing, ” I told Josh.

“It’s probably nothing, ” Bruce told me, when I’d talked to him that night.

And that was how I started my conversation with my mother when she called at work two days later: “This is probably nothing, but …”

“Yes? ” asked my mother.

“Is there, um, someone else … living there? ”

“My swim coach, ” she said.

“You know, the Olympics were last year, ” I said, playing along.

“Tanya’s a friend of mine from the Jewish Community Center. She’s between apartments, and she’s staying in Josh’s room for a few days. ”

This sounded slightly suspect. My mother didn’t have friends who lived in apartments, let alone who slept over because they were between them. Her friends all lived in the houses their ex-husbands had left, just like she did. But I let it go until the next time I called home and an unfamiliar voice answered the telephone.

“H’lo? ” the strange voice growled. It was, at first, impossible to tell whether I was talking to a woman or a man. But whoever it was sounded as if they’d just gotten out of bed, even though it was almost eight o’clock on a Friday night.

“I’m sorry, ” I said politely, “I think I have the wrong number. ” “Is this Cannie? ” demanded the voice.

“Yes. Who’s this, please? ”

“Tanya, ” she said proudly. “I’m a friend of your mother’s. ” “Oh, ” I said. “Oh. Hi. ” “Your mother’s told me a lot about you. ” “Well, that’s … that’s good, ” I said. My mind was churning. Who was this person, and what was she doing answering our telephone?

“But she’s not here right now, ” Tanya continued. “She’s playing bridge. With her bridge group. ” “Right. ” “Do you want me to have her call you? ” “No, ” I said, “no, that’s okay. ” That was Friday. I didn’t speak to my mother again until she called on Monday afternoon at work.

“Is there something you want to tell me? ” I asked her, expecting her to say some variation of “No. ” Instead, she took a deep breath.

“Well, you know, Tanya … my friend? She’s … well. We’re in love and we’re living together. ”

What can I say? Subtlety and discretion run in the family.

“I’ve got to go, ” I said, and hung up the phone.

I spent the whole rest of the afternoon staring blankly into space, which, believe me, did nothing to add to the quality of my article about the MTV Video Music Awards. At home, there were three messages on my machine: one from my mother (“Cannie, call me, we need to discuss this”); one from Lucy (“Mom said I have to call you and she didn’t say why”); and one from Josh (“I TOLD you so! ”).

I ignored all of them, instead rounding up Samantha for an emergency dessert and strategy session. We went to the bar around the corner, where I ordered a shot of tequila and a slab of chocolate cake with raspberry sauce. Thus fortified, I told her what my mother had told me.

“Wow, ” murmured Samantha.

“Good God! ” said Bruce, when I told him later that night. But it wasn’t long before his initial shock turned into … well, call it shocked amusement. With a heavy helping of condescension. By the time he arrived at my door he was in full-blown good liberal mode. “You should be glad she’s found someone to love, ” he lectured.

“I am, ” I said slowly. “I mean, I guess I am. It’s just that …”

“Glad, ” Bruce repeated. He could get a little insufferable when it came to toeing the P. C. party line, and to mouthing the beliefs that were practically mandatory among graduate students in the northeast in the nineties. Most of the time I let him get away with it. But this time I wasn’t going to let him make me feel like a bigot, or like I was less open-minded and accepting than he was. This time it was personal.

“How many gay friends do you have? ” I asked, knowing what the answer was.

“None, but …”

“None that you know of, ” I said, and paused while he let that sink in.

“What does that mean? ” he demanded.

“It means what I said. None that you know of. ”

“You think one of my friends is gay? ”

“Bruce, I didn’t even know my own mother was gay. How do you expect me to have any kind of insight about your friends’ sexuality? ”

“Oh, ” he said, mollified.

“But my point is that you don’t really know any gay people. So how can you assume it’s such a terrific thing for my mom? That I should be happy about it? ”

“She’s in love. How can that be a bad thing? ”

“What about this other person? What if she’s awful? What if …” I was starting to cry as the horrible images piled up in my head. “What if, I don’t know, they’re walking somewhere and someone sees them and, and, throws a beer bottle at their heads or something …”

“Oh, Cannie …”

“People are mean! That’s my point! It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, but people are mean … and judgmental … and rotten … and, and you know what my neighborhood’s like! People won’t let their kids trick or treat at our house” Of course, the truth was that nobody’d let their kids trick or treat at our house since 1985 when my father began his downhill slide by neglecting the yardwork and getting in touch with his inner artiste. He’d brought a scalpel home from the hospital and turned half a dozen pumpkins into unflatteringly accurate renditions of members of my mother’s immediate family, including a truly hideous pumpkin Aunt Linda that he’d perched on our porch, topped with a platinum blond wig that he’d swiped from the hospital’s lost and found. But the truth was also that Avondale wasn’t an especially integrated community. No blacks, few Jews, and no openly gay people that I could recall.

“So who cares what people think? ”

“I do, ” I sobbed. “I mean, it’s nice to have ideals and hope that things will change, but we have to live in the world the way it is, and the world is … is …”

“Why are you crying? ” Bruce asked. “Are you worried about your mother, or yourself? ” Of course, by that time, I was crying too hard to answer, and there was also a mucus situation that needed immediate attention. I swiped my sleeve across my face and blew my nose noisily. When I looked up, Bruce was still talking. “Your mother’s made her choice, Cannie, and if you’re a good daughter, what you’ll do is support it. ”

Well. Easy for him to say. It wasn’t as if the Ever Tasteful Audrey had announced over one of her four-course kosher dinners that she’d decided to park on the other side of the street, as it were. I would bet a week’s pay that the Ever Tasteful Audrey had never even seen another woman’s vagina. She’d probably never even seen her own.

The thought of Bruce’s mother in her whirlpool bathtub for two, discreetly dabbing at her own privates from beneath an Egyptian cotton washcloth with a high thread count, made me laugh a little.

“See? ” said Bruce. “You just have to roll with it, Cannie. ”

I laughed even harder. Having discharged his boyfriendly duty, Bruce switched gears. His voice dropped from his concerned-guidance-counselor tenor to a more intimate tone. “Come here, girl, ” he murmured, sounding for all the world like Lionel Richie as he beckoned me beside him, tenderly kissing my forehead and not so tenderly tossing Nifkin off the bed. “I want you, ” he said, and placed my hand on his crotch to remove any doubt.

And so it went.

Bruce left at midnight. I fell into an uneasy sleep and woke up the morning after with the telephone shrilling on my pillow. I unglued one eyelid. 5: 15. I picked up the phone. “Hello? ”

“Cannie? It’s Tanya. ”

Tanya?

“Your mother’s friend. ”

Oh, God. Tanya.

“Hi, ” I said weakly. Nifkin stared at me as if to say, what is this about? Then he gave a dismissive sniff and resettled himself on the pillow. Meanwhile, Tanya was talking a blue streak.

“… knew the first time I saw her that she could have feelings for me …”

I struggled to sit up, and groped for a reporter’s notebook. This was too bizarre not to be recording for posterity. By the time our conversation ended, I’d filled nine pages, made myself late for work, and learned every detail about Tanya’s life. I heard how she was molested by her piano teacher, how her mother died of breast cancer when she was young (“I coped with my pain with alcohol”), and how her father had remarried a not-nice book editor who refused to pay Tanya’s tuition to Green Mountain Valley Community College (“they’ve got the third-best program in New England for art therapy”). I learned the name of Tanya’s first love (Marjorie), how she wound up in Pennsylvania (job), and how she’d been in the process of ending a seven-year relationship with a woman named Janet. “She’s very co-dependent, ” Tanya confided. “Maybe obsessive-compulsive, too. ” At this point I had retreated into full reporter mode and wasn’t saying anything but “Uh-huh, ” or, “I see. ”

“So I moved out, ” she told me.

“Uh-huh, ” I said.

“And I devoted myself to weaving. ”

“I see. ”

Then it was on to how she’d met my mother (passionate glances in the ladies’ locker room sauna — I’d almost been forced to put the phone down), where they’d gone on their first date (Thai food), and how Tanya had convinced my mother that her lesbian tendencies were more than a passing fancy.

“I kissed her, ” Tanya announced proudly. “And she tried to walk away, and I held her by the shoulders and I looked her in the eyes and I said, ‘Ann, this is not going away. ’ ”

“Uh-huh, ” I said. “I see. ”

Tanya then proceeded to the analysis and reflection portion of the speech.

“The way I see it, ” she began, “your mother’s devoted her whole life to you kids. ” She said “you kids” in precisely the same tone I would have used for “you infestation of cockroaches. ”

“And she put up with that bastard …”

“Which bastard are we talking about here? ” I inquired mildly.

“Your father, ” said Tanya, who was obviously not going to tone things down for the benefit of the bastard’s offspring. “Like I was saying, she’s devoted her life to you guys … and not that it’s a bad thing. I know how much she wanted to be a mother, and have a family, and, of course, there weren’t other options for dykes back then …”

Dykes? I could barely handle “lesbian. ” At what point did my mother get promoted to “dyke”?

“… but what I think, ” Tanya continued, “is that now it’s time for your mother to do more of what she wants. To have a life of her own. ”

“I see, ” I said. “Uh-huh. ”

“I’m really looking forward to meeting you, ” she said.

“I have to go now, ” I said, and hung up the phone. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I wound up doing both at the same time.

“Beyond awful, ” I said to Samantha on the car phone.

“A freak like you wouldn’t believe, ” I told Andy over lunch.

“Don’t judge, ” Bruce warned me, before I’d even said a word.

“She’s … um. She’s into sharing. Lots of sharing. ”

“That’s good, ” he said, doing his squinchy-blinky thing. “You should do more sharing, Cannie. ”

“Huh? Me? ”

“You’re very closed with your emotions. You keep everything so tight inside you. ”

“You know, you’re right, ” I said. “Let’s find a total stranger so I can tell how my piano teacher groped me. ”

“Huh? ”

“She was molested, ” I said. “And she told me all the gory details. ”

Even Mr. Love Everyone seemed taken aback by this information. “Oh my. ”

“Yeah. And her mother had breast cancer, and her stepmother convinced her father not to pay her community college loans. ”

Bruce looked at me skeptically. “She told you all this? ”

“What do you think, I drove home and read her diary? Of course she told me! ” I paused to poach a few french fries off his plate. We were at the Tick Tock Diner, home of the enormous portion and the surliest waitresses south of New York. I never ordered fries there, but I used all my powers of persuasion to get Bruce to order them, so I could share. “She sounds seriously cracked. ”

“You probably made her uncomfortable. ”

“But I didn’t say anything! She’s never even met me! And she was the one who called me, so how could I make her uncomfortable? ”

Bruce shrugged. “It’s just the way you are, I guess. ”

I scowled at him. He reached for my hand. “Don’t get mad. It’s just that … you have this kind of judgmental thing going on. ”

“Says who? ”

“Well, my friends, I guess. ”

“What, just because I think they should get jobs? ”

“See, there you go. That’s judgmental. ”

“Honey, they’re slackers. Accept it. It’s the truth. ”

“They’re not slackers, Cannie. They do have jobs, you know. ”

“Oh, come on. What does Eric Silverberg do for a living? ”

Eric, as we both knew, had a full-time temporary job at an Internet startup, where, as best we could both figure, he spent his days trading Springsteen bootleg tapes, meeting girls on one of the three online dating services he subscribed to, and arranging drug buys.

“George has a real job. ”

“George spends every weekend in a Civil War reenactment brigade. George owns his own musket. ”

“You’re changing the subject, ” Bruce said. I could tell he was trying to stay angry, but he was starting to smile.

“I know, ” I said. “It’s just that a guy who has his own musket is such an easy punchline. ”

I stood up, crossed the table, and sat down next to him on his side of the booth, squeezing his thigh and resting my head against his shoulder. “You know the only reason I’m judgmental is because I’m jealous, ” I said. “I wish I could have that kind of life. No college loans to pay, rent taken care of, nice, stable, married heterosexual parents who’d set me up with their slightly used furniture every time they redecorate and buy me a car for Chanukah …” My voice trailed off. Bruce was staring at me hard. I realized that, in addition to describing most of his friends, I’d just described him, too.

“I’m sorry, ” I said gently. “It’s just that sometimes it feels like everybody’s got things easier than I do, and that every time I get close to having things be kind of okay … something like this happens. ”

“Did you ever think that maybe these things happen to you because you’re strong enough to take them? ” Bruce asked. He reached down, grabbed my hand, and moved it up on his thigh. Way up. “You’re so strong, Cannie, ” he whispered.

“I just, ” I said, “I wish …” And then he was kissing me. I could taste ketchup and salt on his lips. Then his tongue was in my mouth. I shut my eyes and let myself forget.

I spent the weekend at Bruce’s apartment. It was one of those times where we got it just right: good sex, a nice meal out, lazy afternoons trading sections of the Sunday Times, and then I was on my way home before we started grating on each other. We talked about my mother a little bit, but mostly I got to just lose myself with him. And he gave me his favorite flannel shirt to wear home. It smelled like him, like us: like dope and sex, his skin and my shampoo. It was too tight across my chest — all of his things were — but the sleeves fell to my finger-tips, and I felt enclosed, comforted, as if he was there hugging me tight, holding my hands.

Be brave, I thought back home in my bed. I pulled Bruce’s shirt tight around me, tilted my cheek toward Nifkin so he could give me an encouraging lick, and phoned home.

Thankfully, my mother answered. “Cannie! ” she said, sounding relieved. “Where have you been? I’ve been calling and calling …”

“I went to Bruce’s, ” I told her. “We had theater tickets, ” I lied. Bruce didn’t do well in theaters. Short attention span.

“Well, ” she said. “Well. Um, I want to tell you that I’m sorry for springing things on you like that. I guess I should have … well, I know I should have waited and maybe told you in person …”

“Or at least not at the office, ” I said.

She laughed. “Right. I’m sorry. ”

“It’s okay. ”

“So …” I could almost hear her testing half a dozen opening remarks in her head. “Do you have any questions? ” she finally asked.

I took a deep breath. “Are you happy? ”

“I feel like I’m in high school! ” my mother said jubilantly. “I feel … oh, I can’t even describe it. ”

Please, don’t try, I thought.

“Tanya’s really terrific. You’ll see. ”

“How old is she? ” I asked.

“Thirty-six, ” said my fifty-six-year-old mother.

“A younger woman, ” I observed. My mother giggled. You have no idea how disturbing that was. My mother has never been the giggling type.

“She does seem to have a little problem with … boundaries, ” I ventured.

My mother’s voice got very serious. “What do you mean? ”

“Well, she called me Friday morning … I guess you weren’t there”

A quick intake of breath. “What did she say? ”

“It might take me less time to cover what she didn’t say. ”

“Oh, God. Oh, Cannie. ”

“I mean, I’m sorry she was, you know, molested …”

“Oh, Cannie, she didn’t! ” But underneath the shocked, horrified tone, my mother sounded … almost proud. As if underneath the anger, she was indulging a favored child in the child’s favorite prank.

“Yup, ” I said grimly. “I got the whole saga, from the piano teacher who tickled her ivories …”

“… Cannie! ”

“… and the wicked stepmother, to the obsessive-compulsive co-dependent ex-girlfriend. ”

“Ack, ” said my mother. “Jeez. ”

“She might want to consider some therapy, ” I said.

“She goes. Believe me, she goes. She’s been going for years. ”

“And she still hasn’t figured out that you don’t go blurting your whole life story to a complete stranger the first time you speak to them? ”

My mother sighed. “I guess not, ” she said.

I waited. I waited for an apology, an explanation, something that could make sense of this. Nothing came. After a moment of awkward silence, my mother changed the subject, and I went along, hoping this was a phase, a fling, a bad dream, even. No such luck. Tanya had arrived for good.

What does a lesbian bring on a second date? goes the joke. A U-Haul. What does a gay guy bring on a second date? What second date?

An old joke, true, but there’s a certain amount of truth to it. After they started dating, Tanya did in fact move out of the basement of her codependent obsessive-compulsive ex-girlfriend’s condominium and into an apartment of her own.

But for all intents and purposes, she’d moved in on the second date. I realized this when I came home six weeks after what my siblings and I were referring to as Mom’s Outage, and saw the writing on the wall.

Well, the poster on the wall. “Inspiration, ” it read, above a picture of a cresting wave, “is believing we can all pull together. ”

“Mom? ” I called, dropping my bags on the floor. Nifkin, meanwhile, was whining and cringing by my legs in a most un-Nifkin-like manner.

“In here, honey, ” yelled my mother.

Honey? I wondered, and walked into the family room with Nifkin cowering behind me. This time, the new poster was of frolicking dolphins. “Teamwork, ” it said. And beneath the dolphin poster were my mother and a woman who could only be Tanya, in matching purple sweatsuits.

“Hey! ” said Tanya.

“Hey, ” my mother repeated.

A large tangerine-colored cat leapt off of the windowsill, stalked insolently up to Nifkin, and stretched out a paw, claws extended. Nifkin gave a shrill yip and fled.

“Gertrude! Bad cat! ” called Tanya. The cat ignored her and curled up in a patch of sunlight in the center of the room.

“Nifkin! ” I called. From upstairs I heard a faint whine of protest — Nifkin-speak for no way, no day.

“Do we have employees that we’re trying to motivate? ” I asked, pointing at the teamwork dolphins.

“Huh? ” said Tanya.

“What? ” said my mother.

“The posters, ” I said. “We’ve got the exact same ones in the printing plant at work. Right next to the “27 Days Injury Free” sign. They’re, like, motivational artwork. ”

Tanya shrugged. I’d been expecting a standard-issue gym teacher, with sinewy calves and ropy biceps and a no-nonsense haircut. Evidently I’d been expecting wrong. Tanya was a tiny boiled pea of a woman, barely five feet tall, with an aureole of frizzy reddish hair and skin tanned the color and consistency of old leather. No chest or hips to speak of. She looked like a little kid, right down to the scabby knees and the Band-Aid wrapped around one finger. “I just like dolphins, ” she said shyly.

“Uh-huh, ” I said. “I see. ”

And those were just the most obvious of the changes. There was a collection of dolphin figurines above the fireplace where the family pictures had been. Plastic magazine racks were bolted to the walls, giving our family room the look of a doctor’s office — the better to display Tanya’s copies of Rehabilitation magazine. And when I went to drop my bags in my room, the door wouldn’t open.

“Mom! ” I called, “there’s something wrong up here! ”

I heard a whispered consultation going on in the kitchen: my mother’s voice calm and soothing, Tanya’s bass grumble rising toward hysteria. Every once in a while I could make out words. “Therapist” and “privacy” seemed to comprise a dominant theme. Finally my mother walked up the stairs, looking troubled.

“Um, actually, I was going to talk to you about this. ”

“About what? The door being stuck? ”

“Well, the door’s locked, actually. ”

I just stared.

“Tanya’s kind of been … keeping some of her things in there. ”

“Tanya, ” I pointed out, “has an apartment. Can’t she keep her things there? ”

My mother shrugged. “Well, it’s a very small apartment. An effi-ciency, really. And it just kind of made sense … maybe you can sleep in Josh’s room tonight. ”

At this point I was getting impatient. “Ma, it’s my room. I’d like to sleep in my room. What’s the big deal? ”

“Well, Cannie, you don’t … you don’t live here anymore. ”

“Of course I don’t, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to sleep there when I come home. ”

My mother sighed. “We made some changes, ” she murmured.

“Yeah, I noticed. So what’s the big deal? ”

“We, um … well. We kind of got rid of your bed. ”

I was speechless. “You got rid of …”

“Tanya needed the space for her loom. ”

“There’s a loom in there? ”

Indeed there was. Tanya stomped up the stairs, unbolted the door, and stomped back downstairs, looking sullen. I entered my room and saw the loom, a computer, a battered futon, a few ugly pressboard bookshelves covered with plastic walnut veneer, containing volumes with titles like Smart Women, Foolish Choices, and Courage to Heal, and It’s Not What You’re Eating, It’s What’s Eating You. There was a rainbow-triangle suncatcher hanging in the window and, worst of all, an ashtray on the desk.

“She smokes? ”

My mother bit her lip. “She’s trying to quit. ”

I inhaled. Sure enough, Marlboro Lights and incense. Yuck. Why did she have to plant her self-help guides and her cigarette smells in my room? And where was my stuff?

I turned toward my mother. “You know, you really could have told me about this. I could have come down and taken my things with me. ”

“Oh, we didn’t get rid of anything, Cannie. It’s all in boxes in the basement. ”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, that makes me feel a lot better. ”

“Look, ” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to balance things here”

“No, no, ” I said. “ ‘Balance’ involves taking different things into account. This, ” I said, sweeping my hand to indicate the loom, the ashtray, the stuffed dolphin perched upon the futon, “is taking what one person wants into account, and completely screwing the other person. This is completely selfish. This is absolutely ridiculous. This is …”

“Cannie, ” said Tanya. She’d somehow come up the stairs without my hearing.

“Excuse us, please, ” I said, and slammed the door in her face. I took a perverse pleasure in listening to her work at the door handle after I’d locked it with her lock.

My mother started to sit down where my bed used to be, caught herself mid-sit and settled for Tanya’s desk chair. “Cannie, look. I know this is a shock”

“Have you gone completely crazy? This is ridiculous! All it would have taken was one lousy phone call. I could have come, gotten my stuff …”

My mother looked miserable. “I’m sorry, ” she said again.

I wound up not staying the night. That visit occasioned my first — and, so far, my last — stint at therapy. The Examiner’s health plan paid for ten visits with Dr. Blum, the smallish, Little Orphan Annie –looking woman who scribbled frantically, while I told her the whole crazy-father-bad-divorce-lesbian-mother tale. I worried about Dr. Blum. For one thing, she always looked a little scared of me. And she always seemed a few twists behind the current plot.

“Now, back up, ” she’d say, when I’d segue abruptly from Tanya’s latest atrocity to my sister, Lucy’s, inability to keep a job. “Your sister was, um, dancing topless for a living, and your parents didn’t notice? ’

“This was ’86, ” I’d say. “My father was gone. And my mother somehow managed to miss the fact that I was sleeping with my substitute history teacher and I’d gained fifty pounds during my freshman year of college, so yeah, she pretty much believed that Lucy was babysitting until four every morning. ”

Dr. Blum would squint down at her notes. “Okay, and the history teacher was … James? ”

“No, no. James was the guy on the crew team. Jason was the E-Z-Lube poet. And Bill was the guy in college, and Bruce is the guy right now. ”

“Bruce! ” she’d say triumphantly, having located his name in her notes.

“But I’m really worried that I’m, you know, leading him on or something. ” I sighed. “I’m not sure I really love him. ”

“Let’s go back to your sister for a minute, ” she’d say, flipping faster and faster through her legal pad, while I sat there and tried not to yawn.

In addition to her inability to keep up, Dr. Blum was rendered less than trustworthy by her clothes. She dressed as if she didn’t know there was such a thing as the petite section. Her sleeves routinely brushed her fingertips; her skirts sagged around her ankles. I opened up as best I could, answered her questions when she asked them, but I never really trusted her. How could I trust a woman who had even less fashion sense than I did?

At the end of our ten sessions, she didn’t quite pronounce me cured, but she did leave me with two pieces of advice.

“First, ” she said, “you can’t change anything anybody else in this world does. Not your father, not your mother, not Tanya, not Lisa …”

“… Lucy, ” I corrected.

“Right. Well, you can’t control what they do, but you can control how you respond to it … whether you allow it to drive you crazy, or occupy all of your thoughts, or whether you note what they’re doing, consider it, and make a conscious decision as to how much you’ll let it affect you. ”

“Okay. And what’s thing two? ”

“Hang on to Bruce, ” she said seriously. “Even if you don’t think he’s Mr. Right. He’s there for you, and he sounds like a good support, and I think you’re going to need that in the coming months. ”

We shook hands. She wished me good luck. I thanked her for her help and told her that Ma Jolie in Manayunk was having a big sale, and that they made things in her size. And that was the end of my big therapy experience.

I wish that I could say that, in the years since Tanya and her loom and her pain and her posters moved in, that things have gotten easier. The fact is, they haven’t. Tanya has the people skills of plant life. It’s like a special kind of tone-deafness, only instead of not hearing the music, she’s deaf to nuances, to subtleties, to euphemisms, small talk, and white lies. Ask her how she’s doing, and you’ll get a full and lengthy explication of her latest work/health crisis, complete with an invitation to look at her latest surgical scar. Tell her that you liked whatever she cooked (and Lord knows you’ll be lying), and she’ll regale you with endless recipes, each with a story behind it (“My mother cooked this for me, I remember, the night after she came home from the hospital”).

At the same time, she’s also incredibly thin-skinned, prone to public crying fits, and temper tantrums that conclude with her either locking herself in my ex-bedroom, if we’re home, or stomping away from wherever we are, if we’re out. And she dotes on my mother in the most annoying way you could imagine, following her around like a lovestruck puppy, always reaching to hold her hand, touch her hair, rub her feet, tuck a blanket around her.

“Sick, ” pronounced Josh.

“Immature, ” said Lucy.

“I don’t get it, ” is what I said. “Having somebody treat you that way for, like, a week would be nice … but where’s the challenge? Where’s the excitement? And what do they talk about? ”

“Nothing, ” said Lucy. The three of us had come home for Chanukah, and we were sitting around the family room after the guests had gone home and my mother and Tanya had gone to bed, all of us holding the gifts Tanya had woven for us. I had a rainbow-colored scarf (“You can wear it to the Pride Parade, ” Tanya offered). Josh had mittens, also in the gay-pride rainbow, and Lucy had an odd-looking bundle of yarn that Tanya had explained was a muff. “It’s to keep your hands warm, ” she’d rumbled, but Lucy and I had already dissolved into gales of laughter, and Josh was wondering in a whisper whether such a thing could be dropped to the bottom of the pool for a little summertime muff diving.

Nifkin, who’d been given a little rainbow sweater, was in my lap, sleeping with one eye open, ready to bolt for higher ground should the evil cats Gertrude and Alice appear. Josh was on the couch, picking out what sounded like the theme song from Beverly Hills, 90210 on his guitar.

“In fact, ” said Lucy, “they don’t talk at all. ”

“Well, what would they talk about? ” I asked. “I mean, Mom’s educated … she’s traveled …”

“Tanya puts her hand over Mom’s mouth when Jeopardy comes on, ” said Josh morosely, and switched to “Sex and Candy” on the guitar.

“Ew, ” I said.

“Yup, ” confirmed Lucy. “She says it’s obnoxious how Mom shouts out the answers. ”

“It’s probably just that she doesn’t know any of them herself, ” said Josh.

“You know, ” said Lucy, “the lesbian thing is okay. It would’ve been all right …”

“… if it had been a different kind of woman, ” I finished, and sat there, picturing a more appropriate same-sex love: say, a chic film professor from UPenn, with tenure and a pixie haircut and interesting amber jewelry, who’d introduce us to independent film directors and take my mother to Cannes. Instead, my mother had fallen for Tanya, who was neither well-read nor chic, whose cinematic tastes ran toward the later works of Jerry Bruckheimer, and who didn’t own a single piece of amber.

“So what is it? ” I asked. “What’s the attraction? She isn’t pretty …”

“That’s for sure, ” said Lucy, shuddering dramatically.

“Or smart … or funny … or interesting …”

We all sat, silent, as it dawned on us what the attraction might be.

“I’ll bet she’s got a tongue like a whale, ” said Lucy. Josh made retching noises. I rolled my eyes, feeling queasy.

“Like an anteater! ” cried Lucy.

“Lucy, cut it out! ” I said. Nifkin woke up and started growling. “Besides, even if it is just sex, that’ll only get you so far. ”

“How would you know? ” said Lucy.

“Trust me, ” I said. “Mom’ll get bored. ”

We all sat for a minute, thinking that over.

“It’s like she doesn’t care about us anymore, ” Josh blurted.

“She cares, ” I said. But I wasn’t sure. Before Tanya, my mother had liked to do things with us … when we were all together. She’d visit me in Philadelphia, and Josh in New York. She’d cook when we came home, call us a few times a week, keep busy with her book clubs and lecture groups, her wide circle of friends.

“All she cares about is Tanya, ” said Lucy bitterly.

And I didn’t have an argument for that. Sure, she’d still call us … but not as often. She hadn’t visited me in months. Her days (not to mention her nights) seemed full of Tanya — the bike trips they went on, the tea dances they attended, the weekend long Ritual of Healing that Tanya had taken my mother to as a special three-month-anniversary surprise, where they’d burned sage and prayed to the Moon Goddess.

“It won’t last, ” I said, with more conviction than I felt. “It’s just an infatuation. ”

“What if it isn’t? ” Lucy demanded. “What if it’s true love? ”

“It’s not, ” I said again. But inside, I thought that maybe it was. That this was it, and we’d all be stuck, saddled with this horrible, graceless emotional wreck of a creature for the rest of our lives. Or at least the rest of our mother’s life. And after …

“Think of the funeral, ” I mused. “God. I can just hear her …” And I dropped my voice to a Tanya rasp. “Your mother would want me to have that, ” I growled. “But Tanya, ” I said in my own voice, “… that’s my car! ”

Josh’s lips twitched upward. Lucy laughed. I did the Tanya-growl again.

“She knew how much it meant to me! ”

Now Josh was out-and-out smiling. “Do the poem, ” he said.

I shook my head.

“C’mon, Cannie! ” begged my sister.

I cleared my throat, and began to recite Philip Larkin. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. ”

“They fill you with the faults they had …” continued Lucy.

“And add some extra, just for you, ” said Josh.

“But they were fucked up in their turn, by fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern, and half at one another’s throats. ”

And we joined in together, the three of us, for the last stanza — the one I couldn’t even bring myself to think of in my present predicament. “Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like the coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself. ”

Then, at Lucy’s suggestion, we all got to our feet — Nifkin included — and dropped our knitted items into the fireplace.

“Begone, Tanya! ” Lucy intoned.

“Return, heterosexuality! ” Josh implored.

“What they said, ” I echoed, and watched the pride muffler burn.

Back at home, I parked my bike in the garage, next to Tanya’s little green car with its “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” bumper sticker, hauled the gigantic frozen turkey out of the garage freezer, and set it in the sink to defrost. I took a quick shower and went into the Room Formerly Known as Mine, where I’d been camped out since my arrival. In between short bike rides and long baths and showers, I’d dragged enough blankets out of the linen closet to turn Tanya’s futon into a triple-lined oasis. I had also dug a crate of books out of the basement and was working my way through all the hits of my childhood: Little House on the Prairie, The Phantom Tollbooth, the Narnia chronicles, and The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. I was regressing, I thought bleakly. A few more days and I’d be practically embryonic myself.

I sat at Tanya’s desk and checked my e-mail. Work, work. Old Person, Angry (“Your comments about CBS being the network for viewers who like their food prechewed were disgraceful! ”). And a note from Maxi. “It’s 98 degrees here every day, ” she wrote. “I’m hot. I’m bored. Tell me about Thanksgiving. What’s the cast? ”

I sat down to reply. “Thanksgiving is always a production in our house, ” I wrote. “Start off with me, and my mother, and Tanya, and Josh and Lucy. Then there’s my mother’s friends, and their husbands and kids, and whichever lost souls Tanya recruits. My mother makes dried turkey. Not intentionally dried, but because she insists on cooking it on the gas grill, and she hasn’t quite figured out how to cook it long enough so that it’s done, but not so long that it’s not leathery. Mashed sweet potatoes. Mashed potato potatoes. Some kind of green thing. Stuffing. Gravy. Cranberry sauce from a can. ” My stomach turned over even as I typed. I had pretty much stopped being nauseous during the last week, but just the thought of turkey jerky, Tanya’s lumpy gravy, and canned cranberry cocktail was enough to make me grab for the saltines I’d packed.

“The food’s not really the point, ” I continued. “It’s nice to see people. I’ve known some of them since I was a little girl. And my mom builds a fire, and the house smells like wood smoke, and we all go around the table and name one thing we’re thankful for. ”

“What will you say? ” Maxi shot back.

I sighed, wriggling my feet in the thick wool socks I’d swiped from Tanya’s L. L. Bean stash, and tugged the afghan I’d lifted from the family room tighter around me. “I’m not feeling especially thankful right now, ” I typed back, “but I’ll think of something. ”

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