Sing You Home Read online

  In the end, though, I shouldn't have worried. The girl who was my lab partner in biochemistry invited me to her dorm room for a study session, and pretty soon we were spending all of our free time together. When I wasn't with her, I wanted to be. When a professor said something ridiculous or sexist or hilarious, she was the first one I wanted to tell. One Saturday at a football game we shivered in the stands underneath a wool tartan blanket, passing a thermos of hot cocoa laced with Baileys back and forth. The score was close, and during one really important fourth down, she grabbed on to my hand, and even after the touchdown, she didn't let go. The first time she kissed me, I truly thought I'd had an aneurysm--my pulse was thundering so loud and my senses were exploding. This, I remember thinking, the only word I could hold on to in a sea of feelings.

  After that, I could look back with twenty-twenty vision and see that I never had boundaries with my female friends. I wanted to see their baby pictures and listen to their favorite songs and fix my hair the same way they fixed theirs. I would hang up the phone and think of one more thing I had to say. I wouldn't have defined it as a physical attraction--it was more of an emotional attachment. I could never quite get enough, but I never let myself ask what "enough" really was.

  Believe me, being gay is not a choice. No one would choose to make life harder than it has to be, and no matter how confident and comfortable a gay person is, he or she can't control the thoughts of others. I've had people move out of my row in a movie theater if they see me holding hands with a woman--apparently disgusted by our public display of affection when, one row behind us, a teenage couple is practically undressing each other. I've had the word DYKE written on my car in spray paint. I've had parents request that their child be moved to a different school counselor's jurisdiction, parents who, when asked for a reason why, say that my "educational philosophy" doesn't match theirs.

  You can argue that it's a different world now than the one when Matthew Shepard was killed, but there is a subtle difference between tolerance and acceptance. It's the distance between moving into the cul-de-sac and having your next-door neighbor trust you to keep an eye on her preschool daughter for a few minutes while she runs out to the post office. It's the chasm between being invited to a colleague's wedding with your same-sex partner and being able to slow-dance without the other guests whispering.

  I remember my mother telling me that, when she was a little girl in Catholic school, the nuns used to hit her left hand every time she wrote with it. Nowadays, if a teacher did that, she'd probably be arrested for child abuse. The optimist in me wants to believe sexuality will eventually become like handwriting: there's no right way and wrong way to do it. We're all just wired differently.

  It's also worth noting that, when you meet someone, you never bother to ask if he's right-or left-handed.

  After all: Does it really matter to anyone other than the person holding the pen?

  The longest relationship I've ever had with a woman is with Rajasi, my hairdresser. Every four weeks I go to her to get my roots dyed blond and my hair trimmed into its shaggy pixie cut. But today Rajasi is furious and punctuating her sentences with angry snips of the scissors. "Um," I say, squinting at my bangs in the mirror. "Isn't that a little short?"

  "An arranged marriage!" Rajasi says. "Can you believe it? We came here from India twenty years ago. We're as American as it comes. My parents eat at McDonald's once a week, for God's sake."

  "Maybe if you told them--"

  A hunk of hair flies past my eyes. "They had my boyfriend over for dinner last Friday," Rajasi huffs. "Did they honestly think I'd ditch the guy I've been dating for three years because some decrepit old Punjabi is willing to give them a bunch of chickens for a dowry?"

  "Chickens?" I say. "Really?"

  "I don't know. That's not the point." She is still cutting, lost in her rant. "Is it or is it not 2011?" Rajasi says. "Shouldn't I be allowed to marry whomever I want?"

  "Honey," I reply, "you are preaching to the choir."

  I live in Rhode Island, one of the only states in New England to not have recognized same-sex marriage. For this reason, couples who want to get hitched cross the border into Fall River, Massachusetts. It seems simple enough, but it actually creates a thicket of issues. I have friends, two gay men, who tied the knot in Massachusetts and then, five years later, split up. Their property and assets were all in Rhode Island, where they lived. But because their marriage was never legal in the state, they couldn't actually get divorced.

  Rajasi stops. "And?" she says.

  "And what?"

  "Here I am going on about my love life when you haven't mentioned a single thing about yours . . ."

  I laugh. "Rajasi, I have a better chance of hooking up with your Punjabi than anyone else right now. I think my romantic pool has gone bone-dry."

  "You make it sound like you're sixty," Rajasi says. "Like you're going to sit home all weekend crocheting with a hundred cats."

  "Don't be silly. Cats are much better at cross-stitching. Besides, I have big plans for the weekend. I'm headed to Boston to see a ballet."

  "Isn't it supposed to snow?"

  "Not enough to stop us from going," I say.

  "Us," Rajasi repeats. "Do tell . . ."

  "She's just a friend. We're celebrating her anniversary."

  "Without her husband?"

  "It's a divorce thing," I say. "I'm trying to get her through a rough spot."

  Zoe and I had become pretty good friends in the weeks since our encounter at the Y. I must have called her first, since I was the one who had her home number. I was going to be picking up a painting from a frame shop near her house, and did she want to meet for lunch? Over deli sandwiches, we talked about the research she was doing on depression and music therapy; I told her about broaching the topic with Lucy's parents. The next weekend, she won two tickets to a movie preview on a radio giveaway, and asked me if I wanted to go. We began spending time together, and in that bizarre exponential way that new friendships seem to snowball, it grew hard to imagine a time when I didn't know her.

  We've talked about how she found out about music therapy (as a kid, she broke her arm and needed a pin put in surgically, and there was a music therapist in the pediatrics wing of the hospital). We've talked about her mother (who calls Zoe three times a day, often to discuss something completely unnecessary, like last night's Anderson Cooper report or what day Christmas falls on three years from now). We've talked about Max, his drinking, and the rumor mill that now puts him at the right hand of the pastor of the Eternal Glory Church.

  Here's what I hadn't expected about Zoe: she was funny. She had a way of looking at the world that was just off-kilter enough to surprise me into laughing:

  If someone with multiple personality disorder tries to kill himself, is it attempted homicide?

  Isn't it a little upsetting that doctors call what they do "practice"?

  Why are you in a movie but on TV?

  Isn't a smoking section in a restaurant a little like a peeing section in a pool?

  We had a lot in common. We'd grown up in households with single parents (her father deceased, mine running off with his secretary); we had always wanted to travel and never had enough money to do it; we both were freaked out by clowns. We had a secret fascination with reality TV. We loved the smell of gasoline, hated the smell of bleach, and wished we knew how to use fondant, like pastry chefs. We preferred white wine to red, extreme cold to extreme heat, and Goobers to Raisinets. We both had no problem using a men's room at a public venue if the line for the ladies' room was too long.

  Tomorrow would have been her tenth wedding anniversary, and I could tell she was dreading it. Zoe's mom, Dara, was away in San Diego this weekend at a life coaching conference, so I suggested that we do something Max would never in a million years have wanted to do. Immediately, Zoe picked the ballet at the Wang Theatre in Boston. It was Romeo and Juliet, Prokofiev. Max, she had told me, never could handle classical dance. If he wasn't remarking on t