Originally mailed on January 14, 1995

Well, how were your holidays? Mine were sort of up and down, but they started off nice. I went to my grandma's on Christmas Day, and we had a nice dinner. Not the traditional turkey routine, though; Grandma said she'd had seventy some-odd years of that and I could just fix her something different. So I made her filet mignon with mushrooms, a salad with every green thing I could think of except that everlovin' iceberg lettuce she eats all the time, and escargot for an appetizer. She was disappointed to find out that the snails don't come with shells, just the snail meat in the can. It spoiled the illusion for her to see me stuffing the little carcasses into a set of shells I've used over and over, but I told her she should just stay out of the kitchen when I was cooking if she wanted it to seem like magic when the food appeared on her table. She made some crack about cooking a meal being like a woman getting ready for her "man," how she doesn't want him to see her in curlers and face cream, just the beautiful result, and I said, "Women get ready for each other, too, Gram." She said, "You don't have to remind me. I've always supported your lifestyle, Harriet, and I don't need you to preach at me. Besides, I know you funny girls leave off all that hair curler and makeup routine, so it don't apply." I told her some lesbians do all that stuff, and she suggested I date one next time, instead of that "ruffian" I'm seeing now (she meant Splash). "What about that nice Louella? That was a woman who knew her way around a cosmetics counter." I hated to tell her Louella wasn't talking to me anymore, especially since Grandma assumed it was because I'd done something mean to her.

Grandma gave me a big box of school supplies for Christmas, for college. I gave her a couple of bottles of a nice white wine for her spritzers. Don't frown at me. I know I shouldn't support her habit, but I just couldn't think of anything she'd rather have. She's usually counting pennies, so she buys cheap wine by the box, but I know she appreciates the good stuff.

My mother called while I was there, to ask when she should send Al over to pick Grandma up so she could see the grandkids. It was weird hearing Grandma talk to her, especially when she mentioned me: "No, don't save me a plate, Ellen. Harriet's here and she made me a nice dinner. Escargot and steak. I'm full up." I wonder how my mother feels when she hears my name. When Grandma answered the phone and I heard her say, "Oh, hello, Ellen," my stomach cramped and my face got hot. I started to move things around on the coffee table, tidying up. Nervous energy. I wonder if my mother looks at the pictures of me Grandma's got on her TV, and what she thinks if she does. And I wonder why I care.

I was still there when Al came to get her, but I was in the kitchen doing the washing up and I didn't go into the living room at all when he came to the door. Grandma came into the kitchen to hug me good-bye, and she said, "I don't want it to hurt your feelings that I go over there. I love my other grandkids as much as I love you, and I love your mother no matter what mistakes she's made. And believe me, I know she made a terrible mistake when she shut you out of her life. I pray every Sunday that she'll come to her senses, just like I've done since the first Sunday you lived here with me." My Grandma's pretty swell.

So Christmas was quiet and mostly nice, but my New Year's Eve was positively riotous. I went to a party the Avengers put on. I hung out with Splash some, but it's like her youth is multiplied when she gets in a group of her friends her age -- when it's just the two of us, I don't notice too much how young she is, but I sure notice how young four or five twenty-year-olds are. So I was wandering, going over where Splash and her friends were and hanging out for a little while, then circling the room, then finding a place where I could stand unobtrusively and drink my beer. Well, once when I'm standing unobtrusively, I notice this lovely femme woman in a blue satin dress looking my way, and then looking away. I notice this two or three times, so I surreptitiously check her out, and she is just too pretty for words -- a big woman, with curly blonde hair down to her shoulders, and a sweet mouth in a pinkish lipstick. I was just thinking, "Grandma would approve," when she comes over and says, "Excuse me, but aren't you Harriet McGee?" I correct her, "Mageehan. Do I know you?" and she says, "I didn't know if you'd remember me. I'm Esther Williams, but not the swimming movie star one. We went to school together at J. Dubs." I said, "My god, the last time I saw you, you were a teeny weeny cheerleader. You were too perky for words. Every time I saw you, you were giggling at some guy."

I didn't mean to offend her, just to remember who she was, but it must have seemed rude, because she said, "Every time I saw you, you were drunk and cutting class." Looking pointedly at the beer bottle in my hand, she said, "I've changed." I was about to come back with something clever and devastating, but before I could think what, she said, "Look, I came over to be friendly, and because I've waited ten years to run into another dyke I went to high school with. But I can go away again if we're going to be rude to each other." I apologized, and we chatted for a few minutes about people we both knew in school (there weren't many; we really did move in different circles) and when she came out and so on, and then a slow song came on, and she asked me to dance.

Well, it was the damnedest thing. I don't think of myself as butch or femme, you know. Just a dyke. And my lovers have been just dykes, too, you know? But Esther was so lovely and so femme that when I put my arms around her I started to feel butch -- something about her blue satin and pumps and my jeans and boots. I loved the way her skirt swished against my legs, and how gentle her hand was on my shoulder. My hand on her lower back felt huge and strong, and when I looked at our two hands clasped, I liked the way her polished nails looked against my skin. I almost got dizzy from the strangeness of it. She had powder on and her cheek felt so soft I had to be conscious not to start rubbing mine against it. I wanted to step away from her so I could look at her, at the shape of her in that dress, at the shape of her calves in those pumps, and at the same time I wanted to pull her tightly against me. I wished the music was something old-fashioned and tender, like Natalie Cole singing, "Smile [Though Your Heart is Breaking]" instead of some modern thing I didn't recognize. I pretended it was.

By the time the dance was over, I'd kissed her about a thousand times in my mind, and when we pulled apart I didn't want to look at her, because I thought I'd blush and she'd know what I'd been thinking. But she just said, "We should get together sometime, if you want. Here's my business card -- wait, I'll write my home number on it, too. There. Give me a call, sometime, Harriet. It's fun to run into someone from the old old days." And she left me standing there on the dance floor. I think I'd managed to say, "Uh. OK. Yeah." I watched her walk over to her friends. She had a sharp quick walk with a good hip-roll in it, matter-of-fact and sexy all at the same time, and the effect on me was hypnotic.

I finally snapped myself out of my trance, and when I turned around to head back to my beer I practically slammed chest-to-chest into Louella, who was just coming onto the dance floor holding hands with a woman I didn't know. My brain was reeling. Louella said, "Harriet, it's so good to see you [kiss on the cheek]; I've been thinking of you a lot. I miss you. I'm sorry I haven't called. I guess I was scared you'd be mad. Are you mad? Call me this week, I'd like to see you." I said, "Uh. OK. Yeah."

I stood in my old inconspicuous spot and sipped my warm, flat beer and watched Louella and her friend make out on the dance floor, thinking, "You bet I'll call, Louella. What the hell is going on?" Just then Splash comes up and says, "Harriet, this is turning into a weird night for me. I think my ride just abandoned me. Can I come sleep at your place? It'd be a comfort to wake up together. I'll buy you breakfast." I said, "Huh? OK. Yeah." Which at least was some variation on the snappy repartee I'd managed with the other girls, though probably not an improvement.

Well, Splash drove me home, and told me the story of her evening. Turns out one of her friends' girlfriends brought some coke to the party, and they were all going to try it, and it turned into a big row when Splash protested. She told her friend she was stupid to try it just because her jet-set new girlfriend did it, and the rest of her friends they were even stupider, and they told her she wasn't adventurous. They called her a stick-in-the mud, and she said she didn't want to hang out with a bunch of coke-heads, and the friend whose girlfriend had the drugs said, pointing at me, "No, just with a drunk."

Splash told me that reluctantly, and then said, "And it upset me pretty much, Harriet, because I do think you drink too much, and it worries me, because I love you." Now, I was still trying to process feeling butch while I danced with Esther, so it took a few minutes for all the ramifications of what Splash was saying to sink into my brain. In fact, I'm ashamed to say I fell asleep while trying to make sense of it, and we didn't get to finish our discussion until the next morning.

I woke up hungover -- just a little, and you're right I'm defensive so don't even mention it -- and Splash and I went to Denny's for breakfast. She said, "I'd like to continue our talk from last night." I told her, "I've been thinking about what you said, and I'm not sure there's much to talk about. First of all, how much I drink or don't drink is nobody's business, not your friend's and not yours, so that takes care of that topic. And second, we don't discuss love because you declared categorically that our relationships could be about sex, friendship, mutual warm feelings, but that love was under no circumstances to enter into it, so that takes care of that topic."

Splash said, "Harriet, I'm not trying to pull anything on you. I'm don't want to change our relationship -- I'm not suddenly going to turn all mushy and monogamous just because I have these feelings for you. But I believe in honesty, so I wanted to tell you the truth about my feelings. I want to open up the topic of love."

I said, "Splash, you've been telling me on a semi-weekly basis since we met not to fall in love with you. I just want to please you, so I haven't. I've only been obeying orders."

"You're being mean," Splash said. And I had to admit I was. But I was mad at her for complicating things, and I was mad at her for what she said about my drinking, which you know as well as I do is not excessive. So we hung out at Denny's for a couple of hours drinking coffee and hashing stuff out. And I do have to give Splash credit; she's got her head on straight. I think so more and more the better I get to know her. She hasn't gone all mushy and clingy on me; she told me she just wanted to keep seeing me, but that she thought I ought to know how she felt. And after Denny's we went to a movie and then back to my place to bed, and it was a nice way to start the year, overall.

It has been a little weird since then -- Splash says, "Let me be responsible for my own feelings. Just be the same." But that's hard to do, when I know she's in love. Little silly romantic gestures I might have made unselfconsciously before, I stop and think about now, because I expect it's pretty hard to be in love with someone who's not in love with you, and I don't want to make it harder. And I wonder, "What's the meaning behind that?" if she does something sweet or makes a double entendre. I like her better and better all the time, and my respect for her grows, too, but I get tempted to stop seeing her because the pressure is too much. It's mostly that I'm worried about her, though, and I need to remember it's her decision to stay in this situation. To give her credit, I don't think she's hanging on in the desperate hope I'll fall in love. She's just too darn rational for that.

Meanwhile, I called Louella the very first chance I got, and as soon as I finished gushing about how happy I was she wanted to talk to me again, grilled her about what was up on New Year's Eve. Turns out she moped around for awhile after we stopped hanging out, and then it hit her like the proverbial thunderbolt that I am not the only lesbian in the world and that another one might be perfectly happy to take her to bed. It even occurred to her she might find one she liked even better than me. And she did, pretty quickly, and has been having an affair with her for a couple of weeks. No, her husband doesn't know yet. Louella doesn't see the point to bringing it up until she's pretty sure, because she doesn't want to make trouble if this is going to be just a passing fancy. I said, "Do you think it's going to be a passing fancy?" and she said, "No, but as long as I can keep pretending it might be, I don't have to face the consequences." I can certainly sympathize with that.

Louella and I have had a couple of lunches, once even with Buddy, her girlfriend. That felt a little strange. I kept having to bite my tongue not to say, "So, how do you reconcile sleeping with a woman who's cheating and lying to be with you?" Not just to be critical, either. I'm genuinely curious. I mean, I had so much trouble living with my guilt that I called Dorothy from Florida the morning after the first night with Pan. I lived with my guilt for about twenty waking minutes and it was more than I could take.

Am I jealous? A little. But also relieved that Louella took her coming out into her own hands, and left me out of it. I can certainly be her friend, and am glad to be seeing her again. It's a role I'm comfortable in. Lover, I couldn't have handled.

Meanwhile again, I spent the first week of the year gazing at Esther's business card and wondering if I should call. The memory of her in that swishy blue satin made me breathless, and that scared me a bit. What is it about her femminess that I'm attracted to? I went to the Real World Emporium, this new gay/lesbian bookstore that just opened in Lansing, and bought A Persistent Desire, a femme-butch anthology by Joan Nestle, and Stone Butch Blues. Stone Butch Blues got to me the most -- the story's horrible (I mean, it's a good book, but there's a good deal of violence that's hard to take) but the relationships between the butch and femme women are very erotic. I found myself imagining me and Esther in some of those scenes.

Which is completely out of control. I don't believe in having a lot of explicit erotic fantasies about women I barely know. In the first place, if I ever do get to bed with a woman I don't want to be comparing her to some perfect fantasy I've had about her; in the second place, it seems invasive and rude, somehow, to put a woman, even in fantasy, into a place sexually she hasn't consented to be. I mean, what if Esther likes to dress that way, but isn't into a butch/femme thing? Not that I am; at least, I've never been before. I've been asking myself if I feel butch, and the answer is No, at least not any more butch than I ever have. I just feel like a dyke, you know? I look in the mirror and it's just me in jeans and shirt. Dykey, but not particularly butch. And I still have skirts in my closet, and I still wear them sometimes in the summer. But I've been having these fantasies. Something about Esther in that blue dress. I can't stop thinking about her, and when I think about her, I feel butch.

So I decided to call her before it got too out of hand. She seemed pretty happy to hear from me, and we went for coffee at one of the ten thousand cappuccino places in town. Thank goodness, Esther showed up looking a smidge less fabulous than she had on New Year's Eve, in a pair of loose pants and a Michigan Womyn's Music Festival sweatshirt. We laughed because I was also wearing a Michigan sweatshirt (different year). So we were dressed alike, but I could still feel this energy going on. I mean, even in a sweatshirt she looks femme. Maybe it's the hair. And I could feel myself changing, acting more butch. God, I'm lucky I didn't make a fool out of myself, call her "Little Lady" or something hideous like that. I did hold her chair for her; where the hell did that come from? And I made her sit there while I got our coffee. And I held the door for her on the way out.

I feel like I'm confessing to you: forgive me, lesbian, for I have held the door open for another woman. Did she like it? I can't say. We did have a good talk -- she talks as good as she looks. She sells computers for a living, and it seems like she knows just about everything about them. I hated telling her the only thing I've ever used that even resembles a computer are the ones they have in restaurants for cash registers. Esther says I'll need to learn for school, that under no circumstances should I try to do college without word-processing. And then she offered to teach me! So for our second date I'm going to her house for Intro. to Computers.

I'm just thrilled that she wants to see me again. I've kissed her about a million times in my mind now, but on our coffee date all I managed was to touch her back as she went through the door ahead of me. It was enough. Do you think it's too soon for me to be in love?

I'll keep you posted. Talk to you soon -- oh, wait. I meant to tell you that I had my re-evaluation at work last week. I had to remind Pete. No way he was going remember on his own, not when it might mean a little more money the shop had to pay me. But he did move me off probation. I got a small raise and the key to the shop back. That's good news. The bad news is that I had to drop a class because I didn't have enough money to pay tuition for two. It's $168 per class plus application and registration fees. So I 'm just taking Composition this semester. At this rate I'll finish college in fifteen years. That's discouraging, but I figure I might as well get started, even if I'm getting started slowly.

Love,

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