True to the cliche about therapists, Sara’s past seems its own sort of mess when it’s not a blank altogether, and the girl realizes the divide in years is more remarkable for all the experience Sara never had. Whereas the girl’s first sexual encounter — with another girl — took place at eleven, Sara’s had been in her mid-twenties with an emotionally fetal man she wound up dating
river staring back at me, her shoulders sagging in defeat when she couldn’t
thirteen years, never marrying, never living together. After this relationship didn’t so much collapse as trail off into nothingness, with the man simply moving on to another job in another city, Sara’s next was with a woman, also a client like the girl, lasting eight months and then followed by a chasm of nearly ten years in which, as far as the girl can tell, Sara had no intimate human relations of any sort. So talk about spending your life making peace with your own nature. When you get right down to it, then, who’s really the senior partner here, the girl asks herself on the train now.
So as to establish some control in the relationship, the girl always made it a rule never to make the first move in these things. She broke the rule in Sara’s case, figuring it was the only way anything would ever happen. Now she wonders if this was a mistake. In any other situation she can’t help thinking a nineteen-year-old would never come on to a woman nearly thirty years older but perhaps that’s naïve; after all, nineteen-year-old girls come on to older men all the time. Within six months of their first doctor/patient session, the two moved in together. It’s been a year since, and was a lovely time up till the whole baby obsession that, the girl can pinpoint exactly, began one night four or five months ago. They went across town for dinner at the brownstone of another lesbian couple, who disclosed that without much luck they had been investigating ways of having a child. All the talk that evening of eggs going back and forth from one person to another boggled the girl’s mind so much it gave her a headache.
On the train now the girl feels trapped by how often and fervently she’s insisted to Sara the difference in age means nothing to her. Now, subway track rattling beneath them, that argument restrains her from giving voice to the fact that, in her view,
find the courage to face her small abandoned daughter who not so long
the daughter/mother nature of their relationship renders what Sara wants a bit bizarre. But is this really what troubles her most? the girl wonders. Leaving aside everything else — leaving aside even how it would be her body, after all, serving as laboratory, incubator, assembly line in the processing of some anonymous male sperm just so Sara’s long latent, now suddenly urgent maternal drive might be satisfied — what strange new dynamic would be loosed not only between them but within the girl herself? If, consciously or not, defined as such or not, on some level the girl plays the role of daughter in her relationship with Sara, then would a baby in some way be a grand-daughter? A sister to her own mother?
Like all those eggs being bandied about over dinner, this makes her head hurt. Perhaps she should get off the train. And naturally, she realizes, we keep talking about this baby as though it goes without saying it would be a girclass="underline" what if it’s a boy? Do we know how to raise a boy? Do I know how to raise a boy, if it should ever fall to me to do it alone given — muttered under the breath of her mind — how much older Sara is? Somehow the notion it could be a boy, it just makes the whole idea, monumental to begin with, that much more overwhelming, although the younger woman has to confess there’s something irresistible about someday reminding the young teenage barbarian, fumbling with girls in car seats to heavy metal on the radio, that he’s literally the son of a jerkoff; it wouldn’t be nearly so satisfying with a daughter.
You couldn’t have thought of all this ten years ago could you, the girl says to Sara in her mind, with such force of resentment that for a moment she’s sure she said it out loud. But then she realizes the illogic of her own bitterness: of course if Sara had thought of it ten years ago, in all likelihood she would be with someone else
afterward asked What’s missing from the world? and who then never dreamed,
now and they wouldn’t be together at all. “What was that last stop?” the girl finally says in one of the pauses between arguing that now have become longer than the arguing itself. A man sitting across the aisle stares at her; she pulls her coat to her but not too tight, folds her arms across her chest. Actually she really doesn’t hate men. Actually, sometimes they can be easier to deal with than women because everything’s so straightforward in terms of what they want, and it’s true, no getting ’round it, that women are often confounding labyrinths whereas men, they’re always simple sidestreets just calling themselves boulevards. Plus it’s one of the few advantages of the gender that almost none of the men always checking her out is especially keen for her to have his baby. “Chambers,” Sara answers.
“What?”
“Chambers was the last stop.”
Really? We’re that far downtown? The next station won’t be open this time of night. If she gets off at the stop after that, the girl thinks to herself, should she announce it to Sara, or just do it and see if the other follows? A power play of sorts, the act of just deciding to get off the subway: a way to get Sara to tip her hand, Sara who never tips her hand, who hides everything behind her veil of doctoral calm. A power play — but also an opportunity for the therapist to point out the girl is being unduly, provocatively petulant, even for a nineteen-year-old. So she does the grown-up thing. “I want to get off at the next one,” she says. Sara doesn’t answer; so much for mature behavior, the girl snorts to herself. But at the next stop, when the train doors slide open and the girl grabs her radio and walks off, Sara follows, slipping through the doors just as they close behind her.
never dreamed in all her nights of childhood, in all the nights of childhood
It makes the girl feel a bit more in control and she likes that. She knows they’ve been on the train a long time but she’s momentarily surprised anyway, as the two women walk up the steps from the subway, how dark it is and that it’s not still early twilight as it was when they got on. They’re not saying anything now, Sara just following as they cross the intersection and head for the open plaza. There’s an incongruity between the loveliness of the balmy moment and the women’s heavy tension. Sara won’t continue to follow silently much longer if I don’t concede something, the girl thinks, even if it’s nothing more than a kind word of regret; but even that would sound contrite and the girl realizes she’s beyond contrition, beyond concession — that in fact she’s angry: is it over then? Entering the plaza square, her head is filled with things it’s never been filled with before: the sense of betrayal, the sense of having been taken advantage of — she was my therapist, the girl thinks, but perhaps that’s not fair is it, in as how I made that first move, pursuing the romance with the naked aggression of need. Nothing’s more aggressive than need. But there’s that superiority of Sara’s that makes her so insufferable sometimes, that—
“Where are we going?” Sara finally says almost snappishly, Sara who never snaps, Sara of the endless empathy but no true sympathy. Sara who believes that, beyond the point of logical self-exhaustion, sorrow is only an illusion, a collapse of fortitude on the part of the afflicted.
“I want to go up,” the girl answers.
“Up?”
“To the top.”
when a girl dreams all the possibilities of her life in a way she ’ll never do