Sing You Home: A Novel Read online

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  Marry Me (2:59)

  ZOE

  Everyone wants to know what the sex is like.

  It’s different from being with a man, for all the obvious reasons, and many more that you’d never imagine. For one thing, it’s more emotional, and there’s less to prove. There are moments that are soft and tender, and others that are raw and intense—but it’s not as if there’s a guy to play the dominant role and a girl to play the passive one. We take turns being protected, and being the protector.

  Sex with a woman is what you wish it was with a man but it rarely seems to be: all about the journey, and not the destination. It’s foreplay forever. It is the freedom to not have to suck in your stomach or think about cellulite. It is being able to say, that feels good and, more important, that doesn’t. I will admit that, at first, it was strange to curl up in Vanessa’s arms when I was used to resting against a muscular chest—but the strangeness wasn’t unpleasant. Just unfamiliar, as if I’d suddenly moved to the rainforest after living in the desert. It is another kind of beautiful.

  Sometimes when a male colleague finds out I am with Vanessa, I can see it in his eyes—the expectation that every night is a girl-on-girl porn video. My current sex life is no more like that than my former one was like a love scene with Brad Pitt. I could sleep with a man again, but I don’t think I’d enjoy it, or feel as safe, or as daring. So if I am not filled by Vanessa—in the literal sense, anyway—I am fulfilled by her, which is way better.

  The real difference between my marriage to Max and my relationship with Vanessa has nothing to do with the sex, actually. It’s about balance. When Max would come home, I’d wonder if he was in a good mood, or if he’d had a good day—and I would become the person he needed me to be accordingly. With Vanessa, I get to come home and just be me.

  With Vanessa, I wake up and think: This is my best friend. This is the most brilliant person in my life. I wake up and think, I have so much more to lose.

  Every day is a negotiation. Vanessa and I sit down over coffee, and, instead of her burying herself in the newspaper—like Max used to do—we discuss what needs to be done. Now that I’ve moved in with her, we have a household to run. There’s no man who’s expected to change the lightbulbs that burn out, or take out the trash. If something heavy has to be moved, we do it together. One of us has to mow the lawn, do the bills, clean out the gutters.

  When I was married, Max would ask what was for dinner; I’d ask if he picked up the dry cleaning. Now, Vanessa and I map out our chores. If Vanessa needs to run an errand on the way home from school, she might pick up takeout. If I’m headed into town, I’ll take her car for the day, so that I can fill it up with gas. There is a lot of talking, a lot of give-and-take, when it’s just two women in a kitchen.

  It’s funny—when I used to hear gay people using the term partner for their significant other, it seemed strange to me. Weren’t heterosexual spouses partners, too? But now I see that this isn’t the case, that there is a difference between someone you call your “other half” at a cocktail party and someone who truly completes you. Vanessa and I have to invent the dynamic between us, because it’s not the traditional husband-wife deal. The result is that we’re constantly making decisions together. We’re always asking each other for opinions. We assume nothing. And that way, we’re a lot less likely to get our feelings bruised.

  You’d think that by now, a month into this relationship, some of the blush has worn off, that I might love Vanessa but not be quite as in love with her—but it’s not true. She’s still the one I can’t wait to talk to after something phenomenal happens at work. She’s the one I want to celebrate with when, three months after my hysterectomy, I’m still cancer-free. She’s the one I want to lounge around with on a lazy Sunday. For this reason, a lot of chores that we could divide and conquer on weekends take twice as long, because we do them together. Since we want to be together anyway, why not?

  Which is why we find ourselves in the grocery store on a Saturday afternoon in March, reading the labels on salad dressing, when Max walks up to me. I hug him, a reflexive habit—and try not to look at his black suit and skinny tie. He looks like the kid from high school who thought if he dressed like the cool guys he’d become one by default, except it never really works that way.

  I can feel Vanessa, burning behind me, waiting for an introduction. But the words get stuck in my throat.

  Max holds out his hand; Vanessa shakes it. This is hell, I think. The man I used to love and the woman I cannot live without. I know what Vanessa wants, what she expects. For all the protesting I’ve done to convince her that I’m not leaving her anytime soon, here is the perfect proof. All I have to do is tell Max that, now, Vanessa and I are a couple.

  So why can’t I?

  Vanessa stares at me, and then her mouth tightens. “I’m just going to grab the produce,” she says, but as she moves away, I feel something snap inside my chest, like a string too tightly wound.

  Max’s friend appears, a clone in a similar suit, with an Adam’s apple that bobs like the plumb bubble in a level. I mumble through a hello, but I am trying to see over his shoulder to the root vegetable bins, where Vanessa stands with her back to me. Then I hear Max inviting me to his church.

  Fat chance, I think. I imagine showing up in front of that homophobic group and holding hands with Vanessa. We’d probably be tarred and feathered. I mumble a response and make a beeline for her.

  “You’re pissed at me,” I say.

  Vanessa is squeezing mangoes. “Not pissed. Just kind of disappointed.” She looks up. “Why didn’t you tell him?”

  “Why did I have to? It’s nobody’s business but yours and mine. I just met Max’s friend, and he didn’t say, Oh, by the way, I’m straight.”

  She sets down the fruit. “I am the last person in the world who wants to wave a banner or march in a Pride parade,” Vanessa says. “And I get that it’s not easy to tell someone you used to love that you love someone else. But when you don’t say it out loud, that’s when people fill in the silence with their own stupid assumptions. Don’t you believe that, if Max knew you were in a same-sex relationship, he might think twice before he pickets against gays again? Because all of a sudden it’s not some faceless queer in a crowd, Zoe, it’s someone he knows.” She looks away. “And me. When I see you working overtime to not call me your girlfriend, it makes me think that, no matter what you say to me, you’re lying. That you’re still looking for that escape hatch.”

  “That’s not why I—”

  “Then why not? Are you ashamed of me?” Vanessa asks. “Or are you ashamed of yourself?”

  I am standing in front of the cartons of strawberries. I once had a client who, before she was in hospice with ovarian cancer, had been a botanist. She couldn’t eat solid food anymore but told me she missed strawberries the most. They were the only fruit in the world with seeds on the outside, and because of this, they weren’t even really berries. They were part of the rose family, not that you could tell by looking.

  “Meet me outside,” I say to Vanessa.

  It is raining by the time I catch up to Max at his truck. “That woman I’m with. Vanessa,” I say. “She’s my new partner.”

  Max looks at me like I’m crazy. Why would I run out in the rain to tell him this? Then he starts talking about my work, and I realize Vanessa is right—he’s misunderstood, because I haven’t told him the simple truth. “Vanessa is my partner,” I repeat. “We’re together.”

  I can tell the moment that he understands what I am saying. Not because of the invisible shutters that close over his eyes but because something bursts inside me, sweet and free. I don’t know why I thought I needed Max’s approval in the first place. I may not be the woman he thought he knew, but that goes both ways.

  Before I know it I am headed back to Vanessa, who’s waiting with th