Originally mailed on December 13, 1994
Greetings during the festive holiday season! I'm not sure what holiday I'm celebrating, being neither Christian, Jew, nor pagan, but I do feel a little bit festive these days. I like christmas carols, so I'm singing a lot, and that lifts the spirits. Besides, I'm keeping warm on these cold winter mornings with Splash (her real name's Doris. Don't tell her I told you). I think I mentioned her before, she's this Lesbian Avenger babe I've been hanging out with. Twenty years old, can you imagine? I'm just like Dorothy, falling for some sweet young thing. Not that I've fallen for her. That would be out of the question. She's committed to radical non-monogamy and casual sex, so fuck-buddies is as intimate as it gets, although I have recently wheedled her into a couple of actual dates, during which we leave the apartment and go do things. This isn't exactly in keeping with her traditional fuck-buddy practices, but she keeps saying, "as long as you know it's not anything romantic," and I say, "yeah, yeah. What movie do you wanna go to?"
She also likes to tell me, "Don't fall in love with me. I'm not the settling-down kind. I'd just break your heart. I'm not going to stop seeing my other girlfriends, and I'm not going to fall in love with you." She's so earnest. She especially likes to give me that speech right after we've made love, because she knows she's really good at it (lovemaking, not the speech, though I think she's delivered that so many times that she has got it down pat, every nuance, every little pause and regretfully downcast look and tear waiting at the corner of her eye to fall in perfect synchronization with mine). I think she's used to girls falling in love with her during those post-orgasmic moments, used to having to break their hearts. It's a heavy burden she bears. She gets mad at me when I start singing in the middle of her speech: "I'm not saying you ain't pretty, all I'm sayin's I'm not ready, for any person, place or thing, to try to pull the reins in on me." You know that old song. I don't want to hurt her feelings but I just can't take her half as seriously as she takes herself.
Don't ever let on that I said anything like that. I remember getting pissed at Dorothy in the early days for treating me like a child. Her answer to every bad mood I had, every disappointment, every new political passion, was, "How cute, you sweet little baby." So I would never patronize Splash that way, at least not out loud. Sure, I think that her arrogance is attributable to her age, as is the way she takes herself so seriously. And so is a lot of her charm and the attraction I feel for her. But, except in my head, and in letters to you, which I know will remain completely confidential, I don't comment about age to Splash.
The thing is, I do like her a lot. In about five years, she'll really be worth falling in love with. Besides being smart and political, she's completely hot and adorable in a super-trendy way I could never pull off. Doc Martins, baggy jeans hanging low on her stocky ass, hat turned backwards, little bald shaved head, left nipple and right eyebrow pierced. That's part of why I wanted to expand our relationship beyond the bedroom -- I wanted to be seen with this babe. Not that I'm looksist or anything. At least I try not to be. But, well, there's thousands of these young dykes around, they're very hip, and, for the moment, I've got one.
Of course, if I take her out to a dyke event in Lansing, about 3 of her other girlfriends are always there, and part of her creed of openness requires that we make polite conversation and sit with them (and their dates) if possible, though there's some rule that, after a "hello" hug and kiss, only the official date du jour gets to touch Splash. Which is a relief if you're the date du jour and a nightmarish seething cauldron of unsatisfied desire if you're not.
The fact that she's always dating some outrageous number of girls also makes her less effective as a status-symbol, I'm afraid. Like, "You've got her, Harriet? You and whose army?" Still, I get a thrill from standing around in the lobby at a concert with my arm around her. She's so cutting edge, so up to the minute. She kind of pulls me into the current scene with her, and it's a fun place to visit.
I don't feel too bad, even when I realize it sounds like I'm collecting her, because she's collecting me, too. I'm her oldest lover ever (at 28!), the only one who ever lived in Manhattan (well, I house-sat there for a month once, and it's the same to her). I think I may be the only lover she's ever had who doesn't still get money from home -- she mostly cruises in the college crowd, being a student herself. We just happened to meet because on-campus activities were not exempt from my frantic meeting-attendance. I went to some college lesbian social group meeting, and she picked me up. I don't know why she picked me, except that I stood out, what with having hair and my pants fitting snugly and all. I guess I seemed exotic.
Besides cheering me up with regular shots of sexually-released endorphins, Splash kind of cheers me up by her very existence. She's twenty, and came out when she was sixteen. She joined a support group for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Questioning Youth, met her girlfriend there, and ended up taking her to the senior prom, in matching tuxedos. All of this less than a hundred miles and less than ten years from my own beer-soaked adolescence. Here's Splash, who says to me with wide-eyed innocence, "Why would I ever have thought it was wrong to be a lesbian?" Amazing. It took Dorothy years to gentle me out of my internalized homophobia.
It's not like I'm so naive I think everyone's queer youth is a bed of roses these days. But Splash's has been, from Mom and Dad being supportive and loving to openly dating a girl in high school to being a bald-headed Avenger babe. And that cheers me up, just to know it's possible to have that kind of experience, to come out at sixteen and have it be OK. I mean, no wonder she has so much time to find and wear just the right outfits, to buzz her hair to the perfect length every other day, to date a thousand girls at once. She hardly has to waste any effort on coming to terms with herself.
It makes me hopeful, but it also makes me feel a little sad and old. If I'd had her parents, her Gay Youth Support Group, her girlfriend as my prom date, maybe high school wouldn't have been a torment, I might have done a little better than just barely graduating, I might have gone to a decent college and managed to stay there and graduate. And who knows where I'd be by now. I certainly wouldn't have this uncomfortable feeling that I'm just starting out at the age of twenty-eight.
Splash doesn't get it, why being queer would lead to all that hellishness, but she's fascinated by the tale of my life in an anthropological, student-of-ancient-history kind of way. It's another way she collects me: I'm a survivor of the distant homophobic past, a walking relic. She's the only one I've ever told about being kicked out by my mom who hasn't gotten that sad look. The look Splash gets is more like, "Cool!" It's a story to her, far removed from reality, an exciting fantasy adventure. Harriet Mageehan in Die Hard. I even get exasperated with her sometimes, because she just doesn't get it that for me, growing up a lesbian hurt. But I guess all in all I'd rather that she didn't understand.
Besides, she says, "It all turned out OK." Like at 28 it's turned out at all. I don't think she gets it that life after 25 is still a process. Of course, I didn't either. I thought I'd sort of harden in my mid-twenties, take on the form I would maintain for the rest of my life. Ha!
Fooling around with Splash is also helping me deal with not seeing Louella. Louella got more and more insistent that we become lovers, guessing correctly that I was pretty interested in her, and getting more and more anxious to try "it" out herself. But I wouldn't sleep with her unless she told her husband first, because I've been on every side of that triangle before and they all suck. It's up front and honest for me from now on. Louella said she wasn't ready to talk to her husband, I said, "Let me know when you are. I'll put clean sheets on the bed." About a week later she told me that she can't tell her husband, and it's just too hard to be around me and not be sexual with me. So I haven't seen her in a couple of weeks now. I keep hoping she'll call me. I want to be her friend if nothing else, and I'm afraid of what she's going through all alone now. I miss her. I think about calling her up, saying, "Louella, it's a mistake for you to cut yourself off from a friend at a time like this. At least talk to me on the phone, if you don't want to see me." Or even, remembering how darn cute she is, "OK, Louella, hubby or no the sheets are clean." I'm not going to do that. I'll stick to my principles. Unfortunately, principles are little consolation in an empty bed. That's where Splash comes in! Sweet thing. Little warm sexy principle-reinforcer.
Speaking of warm, I am thrilled these days by my first real winter coat in a long long time. I've been muddling through in a leather jacket for years, but a few weeks ago I bought a parka in the men's department at J C Penney, and I can't tell you how much I love it. It's enormous and it has handy survival pockets everywhere, and a drawstring at the waist and another one at the bottom, which is just barely above my knees. Sometimes, walking from my car to a store, I actually feel hot wearing it (in the temperature, not in the fashionable sense. Fashion-wise, it makes me look like a big quilted barrel with feet). I feel so ready for the winter now. I keep hoping it will snow and snow, that the temperature will go down below zero and stay there, so that I can go outside in the cold in my enormous down parka, with all the drawstrings pulled tight and the hood up around my head, and feel myself triumphant over the elements.
I feel powerful in my parka, ready to follow Sir Edmund Hillary to the top of Mount Everest, or wait out an Arctic blizzard on an ice floe, huddled inside my wonderful coat, chewing my belt leather to survive, waiting for the storm to pass so I can snowshoe back to civilization. Failing that, it's swell for trips to the mall.
Did I tell you I got registered for college? Composition 2 (I tested out of Composition 1, so eat my dust!) and algebra. I figure two classes is plenty my first semester, what with working full time and all. So as of January 16 I'll be a freshman at Lansing Community College. I'm excited and scared all at the same time. I feel like this could be the start of something big, you know, getting to some kind of career or job I would really like instead of printing. But it also feels like my last chance at college, so I'd better get it right this time. I almost talked myself out of registering, telling myself I need to get more settled in Lansing before I take on extra work. I nearly had myself convinced it would be better to start next September, but that seemed an awfully long time away, and if this is the beginning of my New Life, I want to get started ASAP. I just wanted to put it off because I'm afraid of failing again, frankly. But I'm not going to (she said resolutely, squaring her shoulders and trying to still the thumping of her terrified heart).
Speaking of my new life, do you get all reflective this time of year like I do? Seems like the events of the past year are all running through my mind over and over, and I keep wanting to find some way to settle it all, make some sense of it. And it feels like all the pains are very present, too. How it felt to leave Dorothy (relief and grief all mixed up with guilt), the way it hurt when Pan dumped me (hot poker through the chest, pardon the cliche). It all seems very fresh right now, when the wheel's come around and it feels like every day of the past year is just as close as any other day, the day I left for Florida as present as yesterday. And not seeing Louella feels a little bit like the latest loss, the newest abandonment. I had high hopes for us. I thought she might be my new best friend, or even my new lover. Damn it! I think about what the last year has brought me and I can sum it up in one word: loss. Of my home, my lover(s), my self-esteem, my trust in myself (it was hard to trust myself after I'd cheated on Dorothy with Pan -- I knew if the person who relied on me most couldn't trust me, nobody could.).
But this is also the time of year for looking ahead, and while I don't believe in punitive New Year's Resolutions, I do think about how I want to live my life in the coming year, where I want to be when the circle of the year comes around again. A year from now I'll have two successful semesters at LCC behind me. I'll be planning a holiday gathering with friends. The pain of losing Pan and Dorothy will be a distant memory. Lansing will be my home instead of just the place I live. I will have been to Festival. I will have whittled away my debt and I'll be living in a one-bedroom apartment instead of a studio. I'll own a couch and a bicycle. I'll write you a long letter that ends, "Really, it's all for the best. Look at the swell way it's worked out. Sure I made mistakes, sure it hurt, but I wouldn't trade where I'm at for anything." You'll send me a Christmas card in which you'll write, "Harriet, I've loved watching the way you've grown and blossomed in the past year and a half."
Happy/Merry Hanukkah/Christmas/Solstice. I'll talk to you soon.
Love,
© Copyright 1994-1999 Su Penn. Design by David Dierauer.
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