I thought she made you look noble, Kyle had comforted his parent. Like a hard worker, a really good worker.
Wendy was a nurse at a state hospital for the insane. This had really compromised Michelle’s adolescent fantasy of being locked up in a sanitarium. Hers would not be the manicured lawns and curving mahogany staircases traversed by wealthy friends sent to McLean in Belmont, the prestigious asylum of Anne Sexton and Girl, Interrupted. No, if Michelle lost her mind it would be off to a state loony bin, horrible places run by hardened New Englanders who looked down on the mentally weak. Get it together, she imagined a caretaker hissing, slamming Michelle’s meds down on her tray. New Englanders were more bitter and resentful than people of other regions. They couldn’t fake it like a Southerner, couldn’t make it passive-aggressive like a Californian.
What the fuck are you? local strangers routinely demanded from teenage Michelle, on buses and trains, in stores and in the street. Her beauty ideal then was hair erupting in a mushroom cloud around her head, bangs obscuring her face like a veil, lips blackened with the gummy Elvira-brand lipstick drugstores sold at Halloween.
You think that looks good? people she’d never met would challenge her. After a while Michelle began to think every cackle in a public place was aimed at her. If a stranger approached with an Excuse me, Michelle responded like she was ready to beat them with sticks. This was PTSD. Michelle was so damaged from it that when she finally arrived in the safety of San Francisco and a kindly ex-hippie looked at her hot-pink ponytail and chirped Nice hair! Michelle turned on the woman with a growling Fuck You! People had said Nice hair! to Michelle all the time in Massachusetts and never, not once, had anyone actually thought her hair was nice.
Teenage Michelle knew that everyone at the state hospital — the doctors, the nurses, the cooks and cleaners, the receptionists, the handymen and lunch ladies — all of them thought the patients were scamming the system, faking crazy so they wouldn’t have to work a day job while they were working their asses off as butlers to the pathologically lazy.
If Michelle were to give in to mental collapse she wanted to be gently caught, fed well, and given restorative craft projects. Her wealthy punk friends got to silk-screen Misfits T-shirts at McLean. At the state hospital there was only a television bolted to the rec-room wall, some board games with pieces missing, plastic furniture dotted with charred holes where patients nodded out on their meds while smoking. The room felt like the setting for a gang rape. Teenage Michelle kept it together.
The people who’d read Michelle’s book, who knew about her mothers and interrupted to tell her so when she spoke of them, made Michelle clam up in hot embarrassment. They deprived her of that basic human pleasure: sharing your story. The shame she felt! Like when you’re telling an anecdote and someone interjects—Yeah, you already told us that story. Oh, no — you are repeating yourself, you cannot stop talking, you are so checked out you cannot remember what you have said to whom, you are so self-involved. To hear a person say Yeah, I read that in your book is this shame times twenty. You so cannot stop talking that you actually wrote down your talk and then expected others to read it, and not even that will exorcize your narratives, you will in fact continue to talk and talk, expecting us to pretend we don’t know the story, which you have performed into actual microphones in public places. Guess what, Michelle? We know your mother is a chain-smoking lesbian psych nurse. Everyone does.
Michelle didn’t know how to rectify the situation. She supposed it was simply a consequence of her writing and she would have to man up to it.
So she spoke little of her family, but she had one. Two mothers, one a disabled intellectual and one an underearning caretaker of the crazy. Wendy could have gone back to school and upgraded her degree but she preferred to stay where she was and judge those with more success. Michelle was just like her, they both enjoyed scorning those who had taken steps to better their lives. Wendy felt she was too old to go back to school and Michelle understood, at twenty-seven she was also too old to attempt college. Too aged, too proud, too broke, and too hapless. They had selected their paths, Michelle and Wendy and Kym, and there was nothing to do but continue the trudge forward and see what happened.
After Kym got sick, Wendy got depressed, and the moms had been frozen in this configuration for about twenty years. The last time I had an orgasm was when I was conceiving you, Wendy overshared. And Kym only did it because we knew it helped my chances of conceiving and the sperm had been so expensive. Horrifed, Michelle urged her mother toward basic masturbation.
Do You Have A Vibrator? she cried into the phone. Do You Want Me To Get You One?
No, where would I get a vibrator, you think I go to the Combat Zone? I don’t want you going into those places either, you’ll get raped.
How, Michelle marveled, were her mothers lesbians? They were totally ignorant of feminist sex shops. They were lesbian townies.
There Is A Woman-Owned Sex Shop In JP! Michelle said. She could imagine her mother gesticulating a no way gesture, a wave of hand, a stink face, and a shrug.
That place is for college students, Wendy said.
Well, You Don’t Need A Vibrator To Have An Orgasm, Michelle counseled.
The conversation was creepy, a sort of reverse incest that left Michelle feeling like she’d been inappropriate with her mom. Now the woman would never be able to masturbate without thinking about her daughter wielding a vibrator and interrogating her.
Wendy had carried Michelle, pregnant with sperm from a sperm bank, and Kym had carried Kyle with sperm from a penis that had actually been inside of her. They’d chosen the old-fashioned way because the likelihood of impregnation was higher, the risk of complications lower, and it was free. Kym and Wendy did not have a lot of money and they were offended, as lesbians, to be forced to pay for something straight women received gratis, something men spilled on the ground all day long. The donor had been an old community college acquaintance of Kym’s. They’d selected him because he was smart and good-looking, and if he was a bit of a pompous jerk, well, that surely was not genetic, that was cultural, a man raised in a man’s world, they weren’t going to find a handsome, intelligent man who wasn’t arrogant, they let it slide. Kym got pregnant right away, but they kept at it for another week or so, just in case. Out came Kyle. He looked exactly like his dad, only gay.
Thank god you’re gay, Wendy would say. Both of you, and I would have loved you both no matter what, we had no idea we’d be lucky enough to have two gay kids, but you, Kyle, I thank god. You look so much like that donor, but then you look so gay, it breaks it up.
“That donor”? Do you mean my father? Kyle liked to dig. But he did look gay. He was tinier than Michelle, with impressive, compact muscles he did absolutely nothing to earn. Living in Los Angeles, Kyle spent most of his days on his ass in his car eating Del Taco and Burger King. The poison California sun had blonded his hair, which he kept in a stylish, gay haircut. His clothes were skintight and he swished. He had that excellent and scary gay-boy humor, a sharp, searing wit honed in the busted part of New England where they’d grown up. He’d gotten fucked with a lot. The same boys who messed with him in the street later sought out complicated scenarios in which blow jobs could occur. It had germinated in Kyle an affection for rough trade, for macho, bicurious straight dudes, self-loathing faggoty thugs, and Craigslist DL hookups.