Rhiannon

by Kelsie Shaw

          She left me on a Tuesday, three years after we met, one year after I realized I loved her. We weren't together, though, not romantically anyway. Still, this felt like a breakup. I sat across from Rhiannon at a table at The Spot Cafe and stared at the small chai latte cooling in my hands while she told me she didn't want to talk to me anymore. I was too needy. I drained her. She needed space. I sobbed louder than I ever have in public, loud enough to catch glimpses of strangers peering at me from behind their laptop screens. She said we'd cross paths again someday, but I haven't seen her since.

          We were friends in high school; we tried to remain friends in college. When I think about Rhiannon, I have to remind myself that she was never my lover, that we were never anything beyond two young women who enjoyed each other's company. We were close, emotionally: We could talk about almost anything—my depression, her father's death, our mutual anxiety about our futures. But Rhiannon and I were never close physically, no matter how much I wished we were. Sex, love, and romance were the only topics we would never discuss: If she mentioned a boyfriend, an ex, or merely hinted at a sexual experience, my face would get hot; I'd squirm in my seat. I never found out if she identified as straight, or bi, or something else, not that I could answer that question for myself; I don't think I wanted to know. When she pointed out my awkwardness, I told her that my family never discussed intimacy (which was true), and that I just wasn't as comfortable with sexuality as she was. I could never admit that I wanted her to want those things with me.

          Sometimes, when I think back to the afternoon we met in September of 2011, I imagine falling in love at first sight: I tell myself that when I walked into my first day of German class, Rhiannon's voice or laugh or smile seized my attention and propelled me into a state of love-struck bliss. That would make a pretty story, but I know it's not true. I didn't think much of Rhiannon when I met her; although I thought she seemed likeable, friendly enough, she was just another acquaintance. In fact, I found her strange. She didn't talk the way other people I knew did: She thought before she spoke—you could see her looking inward and choosing her words—and everything she said verged on whimsical. Rhiannon could quote Winnie-the-Pooh in one sentence and Shakespeare in the next; she referenced The Sound of Music or The Wizard of Oz daily; she sang to herself, often her favorite "Que Sera Sera," never caring who heard. On the day we met, I was a new student at our tiny private high school, and the first thing Rhiannon asked me was to describe myself in three words. I don't think anyone had ever taken such an earnest and polite interest in me before, which was enough to make me think she was weird.

          I did notice immediately that we looked alike. Same wavy chestnut hair that frizzed in humidity, same slightly curvy build, same chocolate brown eyes, except hers were rimmed with rainbows when the sun hit them just right. But, unlike me, Rhiannon loved her body, and always seemed so comfortable in it; there was an effortless grace about her, from the way she flipped her hair over her shoulder to how she leaned back in a chair, that betrayed an innate strength of self and an awareness of that strength. It was this that first drew me to her: the sight of a girl who could pass as my sister inhabiting her body and her being in a way I had not yet figured out.

          I should not have been surprised that the first person I loved was a woman, but I was. I can't remember if there were any indications in my childhood that I wasn't exactly straight: I don't recall ever having a crush on a girl; I have always appeared traditionally feminine, if appearance indicates sexuality; I certainly never "experimented" with anyone, ever. But I do remember learning about sex, the straight kind, and thinking it a strange affair. When asked if I thought a guy was attractive, I'd shrug my shoulders or give a weak "yeah, sure." I know I was captivated by any same-sex relationship I found in literature or history. Most of all, I could never imagine being some man's wife.

          I wasn't aware of the word "queer" in its modern usage until my freshman year of college, around the time I was beginning to understand my feelings for Rhiannon. Not long before that, I discovered the Kinsey Scale; the thought that people did not come in only "straight" and "gay" varieties fascinated me. I spent many hours sliding myself up and down the scale, trying to figure out where to land—was I a three, capable of attraction to both men and women? Or was I just a one or a two, a mostly-straight girl with exceptions? I couldn't possibly be a six, could I? I never picked a number. Kinsey's spectrum was still too limiting. "Queer" seemed more spacious, more open to possibilities. But, being a word lover, "queer" to me meant strange, unsavory, downright peculiar. And although I was confused, and overwhelmed, and slightly scared of being a lesbian, I didn't think there was anything queer about love, in any form. So I couldn't be that, either.

          Did it really matter who I was attracted to, though, if I was too nervous to talk to anyone? I told myself it did not. What I remember most from my romantic development is that I tried hard not to have one. While other girls were identifying the classroom heartthrobs and, eventually, dating them, I was studying. I told myself I was above love: I was a thinker, a bright one, and caring about romance would only distract me from my studies, which I would not allow. I realize now that my strict adherence to intellectual life was a disguise that masked my true desire for a relationship. If I was honest with myself, I wanted to be loved more than I wanted to be brilliant, but I feared all non-familial love was off-limits to me, though I could not articulate why. I knew I couldn't talk to anyone without my throat tightening around my breaths and my heart racing as if for a trophy. Given my social awkwardness and anxiety, all romantic issues were incomprehensible: How do you even get into such a situation, first finding a potential partner, and then forming a relationship that would involve intimacy, emotional or physical? What are the steps involved, the rules to follow? I still cannot answer those questions. I was sure I was incapable of any kind of intimacy; I could not imagine anyone ever being attracted to anxious, emotional me. So I refused all labels, and love itself. It's easy to say you don't want what you think you can never have.

*

          Not long after we met, I discovered that Rhiannon played classical piano, like I did. Music became the glue that bound us: We played pieces for each other on our school's piano; we spent hours comparing Chopin to Tchaikovsky to Rachmaninoff; we made lists of the pieces we dreamed of playing, including duets to learn together.

          Rhiannon and I went to a concert once during senior year. It was my first classical concert, given by a pianist at our town's college. That night, I spent an hour getting ready, assembling an outfit of my favorite cream-colored lace dress, a black shawl, and the glossy black stilettos I wore on only the most special occasions. Completely overdressed, I told myself that classical performances were more formal than a typical concert, so I must prepare accordingly. But, in retrospect, I think I really wanted to look good for Rhiannon. I had started admiring her style—black and white dresses almost daily, matching cardigan tied up around her waist, signature red paisley scarf, curled hair pinned in faux victory rolls. I found myself looking at her a lot, quick glances here and there when her attention was elsewhere; I thought I just wanted to see how she looked that day, to see if she had deviated from her almost formulaic wardrobe, but there was a deeper motive that I couldn't name, or didn't want to. My heart pounded as my eyes traced her form, following her profile down to the slope of her shoulders and lingering on her strong but slender hands. I had never felt sexual attraction before; I didn’t have a clue how to recognize it. So I ignored these impulses, denied them outright. I told myself I was simply appreciating a beautiful person, as if Rhiannon was walking art, an ancient statue of Aphrodite sprung to life. I was comfortable with admitting that much.

          I don't remember what Rhiannon wore the night of the concert, though I probably noticed then. All I do remember is that I could have stayed there in the shadowed seat of that concert hall for eternity, basking in the thought that next to me was someone who wanted me with her.

          I first heard the Fleetwood Mac song "Rhiannon" when I was three or four, on one of the afternoons when my mother, a long-time Stevie Nicks fan, would slide one of her CDs into our stereo and dance with me around our small, wood-paneled living room. Some days we would twirl in circles to "Bella Donna," and others we would jump around to "Edge of Seventeen;” on particularly special days we would sing "Leather and Lace" with me on Stevie's part, Mom on Don Henley's. Though I don't remember hearing "Rhiannon" specifically, I am sure my mother played it; the music didn't matter to me nearly as much as the fun I had dancing with her.

          When I started going to school, I forgot those afternoons in the living room. I didn't think about Stevie Nicks or Fleetwood Mac or "Rhiannon" again until my first semester of college. Driving home one evening in December and listening to the local oldies station, I heard the opening sixteenth-note guitar riff of "Edge of Seventeen" and was suddenly back in my old living room, bouncing around with my once thirty-five-year-old mother. I went straight to my computer the moment I got home, opened up YouTube, and listened to every Stevie Nicks or Fleetwood Mac song I could find.

          And then I found "Rhiannon." I must have listened to it ten times in a row. Stevie's lyrics, crooned over a simple a-minor chord progression, mesmerized me. The song tells of Rhiannon, the Welsh goddess of horses, birds, and the moon; flocks of birds follow her and chirp tunes that ease pain. With a name meaning either "Great Queen" or "White Witch," she appears in the first and third volumes of The Mabinogion, a Medieval collection of Welsh stories. According to legend, Rhiannon leaves her spiritual world when she falls in love with a human, but runs away from him when he attempts to return her affections—she'll lose her powers if she marries a mortal. In the end, the two do marry, but Stevie only wrote about the enchanting yet elusive goddess. I didn't know that story until after many months of listening to the song, not that it mattered. To me, "Rhiannon" was, and is, about a woman terrified of getting hurt, of people she loves leaving her. Maybe it's happened before; she wonders what she has to do to make them stay—must she promise them heaven? So she flies away "like a fine skylark," never stopping anywhere, letting herself be "taken by the sky." What she doesn't realize is that someone would "love to love her," if only she let herself get close.

          Somehow, I never thought about my own Rhiannon when I listened to the song—I thought only of myself. This song was mine.

          The summer after graduation brought on one of my more troubling depressive episodes. I've never handled changes or transitions gracefully. At least Rhiannon and I would be staying in the same town, and that knowledge was enough to keep me from a total breakdown—I had someone to see, someone to talk to. I called her a few times that summer, just to hear her voice. I don't remember what we talked about, if we talked about anything; sometimes I just cried, and she listened. I didn't mind though—even the sound of her breathing told me I wasn't alone.

          Many of those phone calls ended with us meeting at a coffee shop or her apartment, on the days my depression was dim enough to accept her invitation. We didn't do much beyond chatting about the music we were learning and the books we were reading—our relationship was comprised largely of conversations, with the occasional concert thrown in. Still, this was more than I'd ever had. I remember trying, subtly, to make everything we did together last longer: suggest another place to go; start a new conversation; ask her anything I could think of. Every minute with Rhiannon was a minute I was not alone. I think she caught on to my minor manipulations eventually.I wonder, now, how much they pushed her away.

          Although I cannot pinpoint a moment when I realized my love for Rhiannon was more than friendly, I know this summer was when things changed—on my end, anyway. Every time we met, I tried to ignore how her eyes brightened when she talked about something she loved, or how pretty she looked no matter what she wore or what she was doing. I began to think everything she said was perfect: Her references to old films I once found odd were now adorable; her singing under her breath became more beautiful than a Liszt melody. You could say I was infatuated, but I didn't think so then. I thought this was the simplest and most honest love there was, a love that was felt and given but did not demand anything in return. I struggle, now, to think it was anything else.

          You would have thought she died by how I reacted to Rhiannon's departure. I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep; I went to class but couldn't focus. I still managed to get As, if only because studying gave me something else to think about. Otherwise, it was always Rhiannon. When I wasn't in class, I either slept or banged out Chopin nocturnes, the tears in my eyes blending the black and white keyboard into a column of gray.

          Rhiannon's ghost followed me wherever I went. Everything reminded me of her: the cafes where we once sat; Rachmaninoff and Ravel; the hand-knit blanket she gave me; my own reflection. I avoided any place we had gone together; I drove miles out of my way so I wouldn't pass by her neighborhood. Even in sleep, I saw her: Nightly I dreamt I was searching for her through tangled woods or congested city streets, and I would come so close, within inches, only for her image to disappear. I'd wake up breathless and weeping, unable to fall back asleep.

          I started listening to "Rhiannon" almost daily; I memorized all the lyrics to every version, and they flew around my mind constantly, chirping like the birds that follow the mythical goddess. If I was alone at home, I would don my most Stevie-esque black embroidered shawl, turn up my laptop's volume, and twirl around in circles to the music.

          It didn't hurt to hear her name repeated over and over, although I am still not sure why. Maybe it was because I was not aware of the song for the first two years of knowing my Rhiannon, and when I did hear it, we were still friends—the title was just a coincidence. But really, I think I identified with the mythical, musical version of Rhiannon too strongly to think of anyone but myself. Wasn't I as elusive and mysterious as the goddess, a fellow "cat in the dark"? I've flown away from everyone I've ever cared about like a "bird in flight," except for my own Rhiannon. So who would be my lover? Not her, I knew. But someone would "love to love" me, right? Would I ever win?

          "Did something happen between you and Rhiannon? You don't talk about her anymore."

          I don't remember what spurred my mother's question. We were eating lunch silently across from each other at our kitchen table, both typing on our laptops. I had never noticed that I talked about Rhiannon, apparently enough for my mother to notice that I stopped. She was right though—I didn't talk about her anymore. "There isn't anything to say." Although we both knew there was more to say, a lot more, the conversation ended there.

           A few weeks later, my psychologist asked a similar question: "What exactly went on between you two?" Dr. Sullivan was, at this point, the only person who knew Rhiannon and I were no longer friends, and the only one who'd seen me cry over my loss. But her question was different than my mother's: She wasn't asking me if the friendship ended, but if the friendship was strictly—platonically—a friendship. An inexplicable increase in the tension between us signaled her next question. "Kelsie, this might sound weird, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but ... did you maybe love her ... as more than a friend?"

          Shit, she knows. Somehow, I did not expect a psychologist with decades of experience to figure that out. I never answered Dr. Sullivan's question—my immediate bawling was enough to confirm her suspicions.

          "Are you ashamed of that, that you loved a woman?"

          I gasped for air, but hardly found any. "No." And it was true, I wasn't ashamed that I loved a woman. But I was ashamed of loving that woman, whom I knew wasn't interested in me in the same way, whose actual friendship I did value more than the imagined future I wished for. I was ashamed of not knowing better.

          What followed my appointment was the most intense panic attack I've ever suffered; it felt how I imagine suffocating feels, except the heart pounding and breathlessness lasted for hours instead of minutes. Although I really wasn't ashamed of my now-confirmed Sapphic tendencies, I told myself the day I knew I loved Rhiannon that I would go to my grave with that knowledge. But now the secret was out, spoken, known by someone other than myself. My body didn't know how to handle that stress. I almost drove myself to the emergency room, but I feared crashing my car on the way, and if I did get there, I sure didn't want to explain the problem.

          I pretended to be asleep on the couch when my mother came home from work that night. After she retreated to her and my father's bedroom to watch TV, I padded down the hall, crawled into her bed, and curled up under the covers. The television clicked off when I started crying.

          "Kels, what's wrong?"

          I turned my face away from her, choosing instead to examine the folds in her taupe linen sheets. "There's something I should probably tell you. I don't really want to, but Dr. Sullivan brought it up in our session today and now I can't stop thinking about it."

          A pause. "It's about Rhiannon, isn't it?"

          "Yeah." I don't remember what I said next. I must have sputtered out something about how I loved Rhiannon as more than a friend, and that's why I'd been so sad lately, because the loss of her was more painful than it should have been. I know I wrapped my arms around my knees and sobbed; my fingertips tingled, the cells there searching for oxygen.

          "I'm sorry, Kels. I'm sorry you hurt so much. I wish I could make you feel better." She patted my arm, stroked my hair. She was crying too.

          "I know, Mom. Thanks." I fell asleep right there, my face wet and eyes swollen, next to my mother in her bed. This became a habit for months, lying with my mother on nights when I was too sad to be alone. We hardly ever spoke; I'd cry, and she'd hug me. Never have I felt more like a child.

          I have been told many times, mostly by my family, that I would not know how to love someone. Rather, I would not know how to distinguish love from loneliness—I would love anyone who gave me any attention. Although she did comfort me on the night I told her about Rhiannon, my mother also said I was just "confused." I was "wrong about that." What I really loved, according to her, was having a companion, and not the companion herself. I couldn't help but wonder if she would have said the same thing if I was confessing my love for a man, but it didn't matter in the moment. I was afraid my mother was right, though I didn't want to believe her. I was lonely, I did long for someone to spend time with and talk to. Did that mean any affection I would ever have for someone would actually be a fear of loneliness, manifesting as love? Or are longing and loneliness two separate but easily conflated things?

          Just as I have to remind myself that Rhiannon and I were never in a romantic relationship, I have to remind myself that I did love her. I know I did. I felt most like myself when I was around her; I felt I could be myself around her, not only because she was someone like me, but because she liked me. Although I am sure our similarities were what drew me to Rhiannon, I truly loved her for her. I loved her for the ways she was like me, and I loved her for the ways she wasn't. Of course I loved having a companion, but I loved having her as my companion; I wouldn't have felt the same way about anyone else.

          I was not confused, as my mother believed and still believes. But, she was not entirely wrong: My longing for closeness did propel me toward Rhiannon. But isn't such a longing the basis of all friendships and partnerships and marriages? What are relationships, of any kind, if not remedies for loneliness?

          About four months after Rhiannon ended our friendship, I read Cheryl Strayed's "The Love of My Life." Just what I need, I thought, looking at the title, another love story. But the essay is not a love story, not in the cheesy "rom-com" way I was expecting. Instead, Strayed attempts to cope with her mother's death through bouts of sexual promiscuity and heroin addiction. Meanwhile, an older and more healed Strayed intersperses her memories with critiques of modern attitudes toward grieving—she argues that grief doesn't progress in clearly-defined stages, and that all losses are not equal. But what struck me about the essay, what made me burst into tears the first time I read it, were the repeated lines, "I want my mother. My mother is dead," and "I cannot continue to live." I thought the pain of Strayed's loss resonated with my own; had I written this essay two years ago, I would have written, "I want my friend. My friend left me. How can I continue to live?"

          But I hadn't lost anyone, not really. No one died. I could still call Rhiannon's number and expect an answer; I could punch her name into Facebook's search bar and find out what she was doing and where she lived. I would have been one of the people who tells Strayed about their minor losses that they equate with death. Did that mean I had no right to grieve?

          I don't think so. But I am aware that there was no narrative for my grief, not when the intensity of grief I felt is reserved for the deaths of family members and real romantic partners. There is no Hallmark card that says, "I'm sorry for the loss of your best friend with whom you were in love even if nothing romantic ever happened between you." No one sent me flowers.

*

          I'm afraid I've written myself as a cold-hearted woman's innocent victim, but Rhiannon did not leave me without cause. I was not just a sometimes sad but otherwise loveable friend, as I often thought of myself. I could be clingy, and desperately so. I know I was, as she told me, needy. If she did not return my text messages within a few hours, I'd text again. I'd panic if she was late to meet me somewhere (resulting in more sent messages). I told her, on at least a few occasions, "I don't know what I'd do without you." That's a lot of pressure to put on one person. I'd need space too.

          I was worse after she left, though. I'd call her, and hit voicemail; I'd text to no reply. Eventually, I decided to write her a letter, partly because Dr. Sullivan suggested it, but mostly because I could not imagine anyone rejecting a beautifully-crafted letter of apology, written in my neatest cursive on my best stationary. I don't remember what I wrote, except that I was sorry, and that anxiety made connection hard for me, but depression made loss worse, and that I was a little bit crazy, but I'd be whatever friend she wanted me to be if she’d just come back. I would not admit it, but I believed—I wanted so badly to believe—that if I put the perfect words in the perfect order, in the perfect tone, at the perfect time, she would forgive me, and we could continue on as friends, laughing about the mistake we almost made. I sent out the letter. Nothing.

          About six months after sending that letter, I texted Rhiannon in a final effort to win her back. Actually, I don't think I wanted to "win her back" so much as I just wanted to see her, to know how she was doing, to remember she was real. I said I was feeling better, a lot better (an exaggeration). I asked if she wanted to get coffee sometime and catch up. Short and casual— how could she refuse? But she did refuse, and, apparently, had moved away. All I remember of her message is the last line: "Kelsie, you have an incredible future ahead of you." Somehow, reading that was worse than hearing her say goodbye, because I knew she was right. I did have an incredible future ahead of me, maybe even a future with someone who loved me back, but the thought that I would have to live that future without her tore me in two. Could I really be happy in this future? Could I possibly move on? What hurt was that the answer to both of those questions was "yes."

          I want to say that I accept Rhiannon's choice; I want to accept that she lives her own life, and is smart enough to know what she doesn't want in it, even if I am one of those things. But I'm not sure I can. Although I forgive her for the pain she caused me—and I do forgive her, I forgave her the moment she walked away from me—I wish she knew that I was not myself when I was depressed. I clung to her with all my might because I believed I would die if I lost her—the melancholic mind requires something to live for, and often grabs hold of the nearest person. I wouldn't do that now. Maybe it doesn't matter.

          I like to think, if I ever saw Rhiannon again, she would greet me as if it was only yesterday that we went to a concert together or talked about books over coffee. I like to think I would curse her out and saunter off, hips swaying, tables turned. But I know better. I know I would be happy to see her, overjoyed even. I don't think I would fall in love with her again, but I would want her friendship just as much as I did three years ago. Perhaps it is best, then, that we don't meet. I can't watch her leave again.

          When my mother would tell me on the nights I wandered into her room that "time heals all wounds," I would scoff at the clichéd truism and ask her when time started practicing medicine. I was positive that some wounds were irreparable, and that this was one of them. Though I still believe that you never fully heal from grief, I admit that thinking of Rhiannon is easier now, almost three years later, than it has ever been. Most of the time, I can recall the joy she brought me without feeling the stab of loss in my heart; I can imagine her out in the world, wherever she is, without yearning for her to return. I can write this essay.

          Despite experiencing what was obviously a "queer" attraction, I am still as ambivalent about sexuality, and my sexuality, as I was when I was younger. I don't identify as anything, not straight, gay, bi, or queer. I can understand the comfort such labels bring so many people, that feeling of "yes, this is me," but every identity sounds like a song I don't know the words to, or a piece I'm playing in the wrong key—there's no harmony. And yet, I find something attractive in defying definition. I guess I'm like the goddess Rhiannon in this respect too—I won't be pinned down.

          I still listen to "Rhiannon" frequently, sometimes dancing along, though I don't search for the same cathartic comfort in the lyrics like I used to. I hear hope instead. Maybe she is lonely, this Rhiannon, maybe she does fly away from love to protect herself from loss. But she's strong, too. She can survive on her own. Maybe someday, she'll find someone worth staying for. And someone who'd stay for her.

Kelsie Shaw is a writer from Saratoga Springs, New York. She holds a B.A. in English from Skidmore College, and is currently pursuing an M.A. in English at the University at Albany, SUNY. When not writing or studying, Kelsie teaches classical piano lessons.

Flo's House

by John Garcia

     The other week when I followed a dirt path in an industrial area of Kansas City, Missouri known as the West Bottoms, I found a kitten. Or, I should say, it found me. The trail twisted around trees and over rusted train tracks and past a camp of homeless army veterans. I was a reporter writing a story about federal budget cuts in programs for homeless veterans for The Kansas City Star. I wanted to ask them what they thought of the reductions.

             Just as I was looking for a place to sit, I felt something claw into the back of my right thigh. I jerked around and looked over my shoulder while swatting at my leg. Whatever it was, dug in deeper, and I turned faster and faster, cursing, and finally grabbed it but I lost my balance and fell. One of the vets stepped over me, bent down and picked up whatever it was that had been squirming in my hand. He looked down at me, the trees behind him towering above us blocking the sun.

         “Cat,” he said.

          He dropped it and I caught it and sat up holding a gray kitten.

          The vet helped me to my feet. After the interview, I searched my pockets for my cell phone and called my partner, Flo.

          “I found a kitten,” I told her.

          “A kitten?” Flo said. “Where?”

          I heard her ten-year-old daughter, Molly, shout, “A kitten! Bring it home. Let him bring it home, Mom!”

          “Well, it’s too late for me to say no now,” Flo said, sounding more flustered than annoyed.

          “I want it!” Molly shouted.

          “You hear that?” Flo said.

          “Flo,” I said, pausing to emphasize my point, “the kitten is mine.”

          My father had felt the same way about a Newfoundland we had when I was growing up as I did about the kitten. The dog, he said, belonged to him. For years, we had owned Great Danes. They always died at an early age, however, from painful stomach disorders common to their breed, and my mother and father grew tired of the heartbreak.

          When our veterinarian euthanized our third Great Dane just five years after we brought it home, my parents said, That’s it. No more Danes. A few years passed when we didn’t have a dog at all. Then my mother persuaded my father to buy a black Standard Poodle, a decidedly feminine dog in his estimation. The poodle accompanied my mother when she shopped, sat with her when she read the newspaper, and slept at the foot of her side of the bed. It was her dog, as much as my two older brothers and I were her children. She made our breakfasts, lunches, and dinners; bought our clothes, took us to doctor appointments, tucked us in at night. My father would come home from work, read the newspaper, and listen to the news. He became increasingly distant as our hormones raced and we grew into contrary teenagers.

          My father never warmed to the poodle. Two years after he gave it to my mother, he bought a second dog; a black Newfoundland, a much heftier breed than a poodle.

          “This is my dog,” he announced proudly, holding the fat, four-month-old, distressed-looking puppy in his arms.

          However, Gus, the name he gave it, was no more his dog than the poodle. My father was not home during the day as my mother was. He did not house train Gus, feed him, walk him and take him to the veterinarian. Gus followed my mother around the house when my father was home as much as the poodle did because, in the end, Gus was her dog, too.

          Twelve years later, I drove with my father to Becker Animal Hospital to have Gus euthanized. His hair was falling out in clumps and he could no longer walk. My father wept as Dr. Becker inserted a needle into Gus’s foreleg and pushed the plunger of the syringe. Standing over Gus, my father felt keenly the loss of an animal he knew had never loved him as it had my mother.

          I was twenty-two when Gus died and had just graduated from Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I was bouncing from state to state working temp jobs without a clue to a career. My father said I’d turned into a bum. He thought I should work at a bank or in retail and establish myself.

          Despite his criticism, however, he never stopped asking me about my travels. He traced my routes on a map. I have never visited that part of the country, he would say, poking at one place and then another. I always wanted to. What was it like? Did you like it? I’ll have to go there someday.

          I remember sitting on my father’s lap as a boy. He would hold my arms, spread his legs and I'd drop through the gap almost hitting the floor before he pulled me back up and I would laugh, eager for more.  

          I remember walking beside him trying to keep up with his long stride. We would play catch together in the backyard. I felt the hard smack of the ball when he hurled it into my hands.

          I remember when I spilled a glass of milk at the dinner table. I was about five or six. My father threatened to beat me with his shoe. I can still see the glass slipping from my grasp, the milk gushing out in slow motion as my father’s face blossomed with fury.

          I inherited his temper. When I was nine years old, my childhood friend Tom and his parents were late picking me up for a Chicago Cubs’ game. I thought we’d miss the first inning. I stomped back and forth in the kitchen and kicked the breakfast nook table.

          “Where are they?” I snapped.

          “You’re acting just like your father,” my mother scolded.

          Her words stopped me cold. I sat down. I took deep breaths, letting each one out slowly, until I calmed down. I would not be my father.

          Flo had been divorced for five years when we met in 2002. She had read a story of mine in The Kansas City Star about a puppy I had rescued from a dog fight in Kabul that year. In an email, she praised me for saving the dog. She also said she liked a photo of me that accompanied the story and suggested we get together. Intrigued by how direct she was, and flattered, I agreed.

          We met at Khaldi’s, a coffee shop in Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza, on a Saturday in mid-March. Flo wore a snug white blouse and blue jeans and I liked how her clothes hugged her body and the way her blond hair fell down her back. We soon realized we had several things in common. Flo was a social worker in a high school in Shawnee, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City. I told her about my work with the homeless in San Francisco. She had lived in Columbia, Missouri. I had too when I was traipsing across the country in my twenties. We were both vegetarians.

          At the time, I still lived on Summit. Flo owned a two-story home in Overland Park, Kansas. Molly and Flo’s two teenage sons, Barry and Danny, lived with her. Barry was about to graduate high school.

          Flo and I spent two hours together in the Plaza. I asked her out for dinner a few days later. We dated for more than a year before I moved in.

         

          Few things in Flo’s house belonged to me. If I put something away where it hadn’t gone before she would call me on it. Not because it didn’t make sense but because I was breaking an established order. Molly treated me like the younger sibling she never had, a cross between friendship and total disregard. Barry and Danny were deep into their teenage worlds and had little use for me.

          Flo and I referred to her house as “our house.” However, I wasn’t fooling myself. The house remained very much hers. In stressful moments, she talked as if she still lived alone. She complained, “My grass needs to be cut,” or, “My bedroom is a mess,” or, “My kitchen is too small.” At these moments, I was reminded who the house belonged to and I felt like a tenant who was sleeping with the landlady. I lived inside Flo’s house but outside it, too, an observer one step removed from the activity around me. Our life together took on the feel of another reporting assignment that would end.

          Week days Flo and I would wake up about six and get ready for work. Molly would catch a bus to school about seven-thirty. At night, Flo cooked dinner. Afterward, she went over Molly’s homework and then we read or watched television together. In no time at all, it seems, it was time for bed.

          On weekends, I still got up early. Flo slept in. I made coffee and waited for her to come downstairs. Then we’d eat breakfast, clean the house and take Molly to a movie. Before I knew it, we were having dinner and then kissing one another good night, long kisses sometimes that put the night on hold before it raced ahead again towards dawn. Hours later, I rose to the surface of a deep sleep awake to another day in Flo’s house.

          Shortly after I moved in, we discussed buying a house that would be truly “ours” but neither one of us had the money and we didn’t want to go into debt. After some consideration, we arrived at an alternative plan. We decided to replace the tiled floors in the kitchen, living room, and front hall of Flo’s house with hardwood. Altering the interior, we thought, would make the house mine as much as hers.

          The morning I found the kitten, the house was in upheaval. Carpenters had been in the previous day and had begun work on the floors. Piles of shorn tile took up corners. Living room rugs had been heaped on top of chairs. End tables appeared to have been thrown without regard to any out of the way place.

          “Look what they’ve done to my house,” Flo said greeting me at the door.

          Kitten in tow, I had parked on the street outside Flo’s house. She kept her car in the garage. She got home from work before I did and felt that entitled her to the space.

          I didn’t argue. It made sense, I supposed. What I did know was that I left my car on the street. It meant I locked the doors every night. It meant my car was exposed. It meant I hoped some kid didn’t vandalize it. Sometimes, such little patterns of our life ignited and I wanted to explode and leave Flo.

          Then I would recall when we got together at Khaldi’s Coffee. Her blond hair, the sparkle in her eyes. The way she said good-bye with a cock of her head and twist of her hips. Remembering these moments, I felt the same rush of warm feelings as I had when we first met. I was sure I would miss Flo, even the moments when she upset me, because these moments are part of her companionship, part of what fills me and makes me not alone.

          Still a little annoyed, I’d return to the house after my walk and not say anything. My father would have stormed back inside and let rip a hurricane of fury. I, instead, engaged in silence and retreated to the study and turned on the computer and cut myself off from Flo, from Molly, from everyone, allowing the flame of my anger to smolder and sputter out.

          “You Okay,” Flo asked.

          “I’m fine,” I told her.

          I carried the kitten inside and Molly met me at the door and lifted the kitten from my arms.

          “Can I keep her in my room?” she asked Flo.

          “I don’t see why not.”

          “Wait,” I said. “We don’t even know if it’s litter trained. We’ll put it in our bathroom tonight and see how it does.”    

          “We’ll put it in the bathroom now and if it’s OK in a couple of hours, I don’t see why she can’t have it in her room,” Flo answers.

          She looked at me with a what-do-you-want-me-to-do expression. I gave her my don’t-give-your-daughter-everything-she-wants look.

          What? Flo said with her eyes. What are you saying?          “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing.”

          “This is a big step,” Flo said when I decided to move in with her.

          “Are you sure?”

          “Of course.”

Until then we had a routine: I’d spend several nights a week with her and then return to my apartment. Sofa, chair, futon bed, television, bare walls. I met friends after work at bars, or, I drove home and watched television. A day or two later, I’d stay with Flo again. Something was missing. I felt alive only when I traveled abroad as a reporter, invigorated by the impermanence and uncertainties of the journey. I had nothing to to look forward to in Kansas City until I met Flo. I thought moving in with her would be the start of our lives together. I thought I’d feel settled. I thought I’d be content.

          “Of course,” I said again. “I have to do something.”

          “We have to,” she corrected.

          That night, I thought of my parents. My father was thirty-two and my mother twenty-nine when they married, old by the standards of their World War II generation. They had to do something. I don’t think, however, that they were desperate.

          A black and white photo of my parents shows them sitting in a restaurant. I don’t know where. They are at a table filled with other people. Baskets of flowers hang above their heads. My mother wears a light-colored dress, my father a suit and tie. They are smiling at one another. Their eyes dance with mischief. I imagine them reaching beneath the table toward one another in this room crowded with other couples oblivious to their desire.

          I understood just how much my parents loved one another not long ago when my mother tripped walking into the kitchen from the living room and fell against a wall. She slid to the floor bleeding from her forehead.

          My father helped her back up and then grabbed her coat. He insisted on taking her to the emergency room no matter her objections. I was home visiting. I drove and he directed me although I knew the way. I kept quiet and let him take charge in the only way he could since his failing eyesight prevented him from driving.

          Seated on a gurney waiting to be examined, my mother muttered about how she hated hospitals. My father, she said, was making a fuss over nothing. He laughed. He patted her knee and she reached over and covered his hand with hers.

          My mother did not stop complaining until the doctors released her. My father kept smiling and laughing and holding her hand. Her fingers entwined with his and he put his other hand over hers and for a moment they looked at one another as if I wasn’t there. I blushed. I could not recall ever having seen them kiss, let alone hold hands.

          When I moved in with Flo, I stored my sofa, chair and futon in her basement and covered them with a plastic sheet. A room upstairs had been cleared for me to use as a study. I had suggested putting my futon there and use it as a couch, but Flo said it did not go with the pink carpet. The study was just off the front door and would be the first room a visitor would see entering the house. She wanted me to get new furniture. I bought two wicker chairs with red cushions. She liked the chairs at first but when I brought them home she thought they were uncomfortable and she hated the Southwestern design of the cushions.

          “You didn’t want the futon and now you don’t like the chairs,” I said.

          We ignored each other the rest of the day. The following afternoon, I dropped by her work and brought her roses. She cried. We had lunch and stitched our life back together.

         

          We called the kitten Zoey. Molly decided on the name. When she went to bed, Molly took it into her room. Flo and I would stay up and watch television. Then Flo went to bed. If I wasn’t tired, I’d go into the kitchen and pour a glass of red wine. Then I’d open a can of cat food and wait. In seconds, Zoey ran downstairs. I took satisfaction watching her eat. When she finished, I walked into the living room and considered the disaster the carpenters had made.

          Moving through the clutter, I began to organize things. I pushed the sofa against the wall and placed the end tables on either side of it. I lay the rugs over the exposed sub-floor and plugged in a lamp and set up some chairs. It didn’t look much better but now it was my mess.

          I carried Zoey downstairs to the basement and sat on my futon. The plastic sheet crinkled beneath me. It had the same smell as a new car. My father used to tell me stories about his first job as a salesman with a Baltimore canning company before he later went to work for his father. He’d drive to Omaha, Denver, Santa Fe. Rolling past farm fields and silent houses. No radio. Cocooned in his car floating in the silence of early morning. He enjoyed talking about it and drifted off for seconds with his eyes closed before he turned to me, opened his eyes and waited for the present to reassert itself.

         

          I continued feeding Zoey at night and she stopped sleeping with Molly. Now, she follows me around until I’m ready for bed. She wants to sleep with me but her loud purr keeps Flo awake. I lock Zoey out of the room but some nights she scratches at the door waking us both.

          “We need to put Zoey in the basement at night,” Flo told me last night before dinner.

          We faced one another in the kitchen. I poured two glasses of wine.

          “If you ignore her, she’ll stop,” I said.

          “I can’t keep taking sleeping pills every night.”

          “She won’t understand what you’re doing if you lock her in the basement.”

          “Listen to you. She’s a cat.”

          “Well, it’s your house, isn’t it? Do what you want.”

          “I don’t even know what you mean by that.”

          I stepped back into a corner, gripping my wine glass. I stared at the floor and fought back my temper. Flo crossed her arms and looked away. I waited, feeling we were at a defining moment in our relationship, that when we spoke again we would either cobble together an acceptable agreement, or, we would not and that would be it. Or, the start of being it.

          Flo turned away from me and began emptying the dishwasher. A dessert plate slipped from her hand. I watched it fall, watched it shatter near my feet.

          “I’m sorry,” Flo said, her voice breaking.

          I nudged pieces of glass with my shoe. I now felt calm, almost serene. The noise of the broken plate had dispersed my anger into the silence that followed. I felt a calm so total I didn’t need to say one word. I just stood there and reset, holding my wine glass and listening to Flo cry.

          The two young men installing the floor, Craig and Dennis, look about the same age I was when I worked on a construction crew one summer during college in Cedar Rapids. We were building a hotel. The morning they started work, I helped them unload boxes of nails and glue from their truck. They appeared uncomfortable with my assistance but not quite sure what do about it. I told them stories about my summer in Cedar Rapids; the incompetence of the supervisor, the sweltering heat, the twelve-to-fifteen-hour days. That day, I kept pace with Craig and Dennis until we finished working.

          When we finished, I invited them into the kitchen and made coffee and offered them donuts. I told more stories. They stopped calling me, Mr. Garcia. They said if I wanted to, I could work with them the next day.

         

          When I look back on that college summer, I remember a wheelbarrow filled with cement and the weight of its wood handles in my hands as I lift it and I feel the muscles in my arms tense when I push forward and just when it seems the wheelbarrow will not budge it begins to roll, carried by the weight of the cement, and I push it up a wobbly board, nothing below me but a trench of gravel and mud, and onto the second floor of the hotel and tip it, dumping the cement into a trough, and then let go of the handles and the wheelbarrow stands for a moment and then falls sideways and I pace back and forth catching my breath free of its weight, sweating, my arms inflated from the strain, and I look out at Cedar Rapids and the flat roofs and the splashes of green between houses and the long roads like tentacles that ensnare neighborhoods as well as lead out of them, and I see my father on one of those roads thinking that if my pounding heart does not slow down I will walk on air, by God, walk on air right over everything and follow him out of town.

          One morning, Craig told me we had a problem. He had removed the toilet to lay the floor in the second-floor bathroom and found that the mount for the toilet had rotted.

          “You need a plumber to take care of this,” he said.

          “I need my bathroom,” Flo said.

          “I don’t do plumbing.”

          “But. . .,” I began.

          “Dude,” Craig said. “I don’t do this kind of work.”

          He walked downstairs. Shadows dappled his body and it appeared for an instant he was descending into water. He stopped at a plate of donuts and popped the last one in his mouth. The camaraderie was over. He didn’t care about my summer in Cedar Rapids. I had worked beside him and Dennis and they were the ones getting paid. He was probably laughing at me.

“Where’re you going?” I said.

“Truck.” He opened the door and Zoey darted outside.

          “Oh, Christ,” I said.

          Zoey dashed across the yard to some trees. I ran after her. She took off again bounding further away. I kept running. Flo shouted after me. I ran faster and faster disconnected from a lonely desire to hold her one last time until I heard nothing but my feet cutting through the damp grass, and I passed trees and more trees and continued running towards what I don’t know, Zoey crying below the sound of my father calling me back yet urging me on.

(Author's note: Some names have been changed to protect privacy.)

John Garcia lives in central Florida. A former social worker, he now works as a freelance writer.

Black Baby Born

by Toni Martin

            My ninety-six-year-old mother, shrunken two inches under five feet, sits in her recliner and waits. She says that she has never lived like this, in a place where she has to wait for everything—to go to meals, to come back from meals, to wash, to dress, to go to bed. As though it is the fault of the help in assisted living that she is stuck in a wheelchair. Because of this limitation, she would have to wait wherever she was. A few years ago, after fourteen years living with one daughter and the next, she wanted her own apartment. In those years, when she could still walk, she said she wanted to be independent, as though she were twenty-one and setting out from her parents’ home. She has never seen herself as others see her.

When my mother visited the passport office for the first time in the nineteen fifties, they thought she was white because of her light skin color, and they thought she was crazy because the birth certificate she offered them as proof of her identity read, “Black baby born, April 21, 1914.” She had to locate her baptismal certificate, which included her name and sex, before they would issue her a passport.

She left one senior apartment in a huff because the white people there couldn’t tell that she was black. Always her father’s daughter or her husband’s wife, even when she held a job, she had never faced explaining to white people on a daily basis how she could be black. Lucky her.

             Lucky, too, that her father was a wealthy man who owned an insurance company, a funeral parlor, real estate, and the only movie theatre in the ‘colored” community of Savannah, Georgia. At a time when most white people didn’t finish high school, both her parents were college graduates, from Tuskegee and Fisk.  In the winter, my grandmother took all the children to live in Columbus, Ohio, where they attended integrated public schools. In the summer, my mother sat on the porch and read. She never needed a summer job. Lucky her.

            But marriage was a shock, because she did not marry a man as rich as her father. She had to learn to cook at least, though she never learned to clean.

 “Why did you have so many children, Mommy?’

            “Because your father liked babies and I always had full time help.”

            My maternal grandfather’s two brothers went north and passed for white. My mother only met her New York cousins once (they didn’t know that their father was “colored”), and now they are lost to our family. When I asked why her father stayed in Savannah, Mother said, “He was a businessman, and he saw more opportunity in Savannah.” Opportunity to make money: he was much more successful than his brothers. But the family couldn’t eat in the restaurants downtown or shop in the white stores. The police could arrest them for drinking from the wrong water fountain. They kept to their own. As a small child, I didn’t think that there were white people in Savannah, since we never saw any.

            My father, the son of a doctor, also grew up in segregated Savannah. His father was Cuban, and his skin color gives me my ambiguous ethnic look. Jewish? Arab? Latina? People never know. My bone densitometry results, like my mother’s, lists my race as “white”. No one asked us.

            Anger fueled the ambitions of my parents, who both held masters degrees. My father became the editor of Negro newspapers and then a politician. My mother worked as a free-lance editor until age 90 and wears her Phi Beta Kappa key on a chain around her neck. But anger does not burn clean. The legacy of segregation hung over our family of five girls like a toxic cloud. The unspoken question in our household was, “What would white people think?”  

Since the stereotype of black girls is that we are loose and sexual, we were raised to be uptight and inhibited. “Don’t draw attention to yourself.” Chewing gum, blue jeans, short skirts, made us look like whores. “Jitterbugging and fingerpopping” were forbidden. Although we were “just like other black people.” my father refused to buy watermelon in the supermarket, in case someone might see him. The song from “Porgy and Bess”, “I got plenty o’ nuthin, and nuthin’s plenty for me” sent my mother into a rage. How dare that white man Gershwin imply that black people enjoyed poverty. They were always looking for racism and they always found it.

Their intent was to protect us, but my parents didn’t give me much hope. My father said that white people would hate us because we were light-skinned and educated, too much like them to dismiss. And black people would hate us because we were light-skinned and educated, too different from them to embrace. We all coped in different ways but once I left for college, I never spent a summer at home. I moved to California from the east coast, I married a darker-skinned man whose optimism is a balm, and I became a doctor. I couldn’t breathe in their house, and I wanted to see all the stars in the sky

My mother’s backbone has collapsed from osteoporosis and she can’t walk, but she still nurses her grudges. She is afraid that we will forget. How could we forget? She lived to see the end of segregation, traveled the world and dined with presidents, including the young black one, but in her mind, it is too little, too late. Nothing about her life was lucky. She is jealous of the opportunities we had, and says that her primary role, a mother, was “worth nothing.” None of us were ambitious enough for her, despite our careers. The toxic cloud still hovers above her, threatening to envelope me again at each visit.

I type her fantasy memoirs, where she imagines that but for segregation she would have become a Nobel prize-wining psychiatrist, called in to counsel heads of state. This woman who avoided cafeterias because she couldn’t make choices quickly and worried about making the people behind her wait, thinks she was tough enough for medical school in the nineteen forties. If she were white, she could probably fly, too.

 I wish, in her old age, that she could not forgive, not forget, but escape the segregation of her youth. Ignore who’s watching and act the fool. (I wish that for myself, too.) Take pride in what she did accomplish. Create her own happiness. But my mother will die believing that there was another, better life she could have lived, if only she had been born white.

Toni Martin is a physician and writer. Her second book of non-fiction, When the Personal was Political: Five Women Doctors Look Back, was published in 2008. Her work, medical essays, memoir and fiction, has appeared in the East Bay Monthly, The Threepenny Review, ZYZZYVA, LiteraryMama.com, The Los Angeles Review, and The Bellevue Review. She lives with her husband in Berkeley, CA, where they raised their three children. Visit her website.