“But why?” I lean towards her as if to draw the good sense out of her like a magnet. “All you’re going to do is go over there and say, wow, what a neat orchid, that’s a terrific yucca plant. Then you can go home if you want.”
She looks at me as if she’s not sure whether or not she can trust me. As if what’s really going to happen is she’s going to go over there and this guy is going to trap her in his basement with his dormant bromeliads and force her to make love to him. So what would be so bad about that? I feel like asking her.
“Why don’t you come with me? We’ll just pretend that we were driving by and you wanted to see his bromeliads, too.” Even she has to smile when she says this.
“I’m sure that’ll go over well—you bringing a chaperone.”
“You see,” she says, narrowing her eyes at me, “you do think he’s going to try something.”
“Yolanda García,” I say, laying my hands down flat on the table like I’ve had it with her. “I’m going to tell you the truth now and you can go blab on me to the group if you want. It’s time you got over all this meshugaas about men.” She’s looking at me with those big intense eyes like I caught her with my high beams crossing the road. “Till you let those juices flow, you’re not going to be able to write worth shit!”
Her mouth drops open and thunder and lightning come out of those eyes. “I thought you said you loved my poetry,” she cries out. Thank God, we’re at Amigo’s, our town’s one ethnic watering spot, if by ethnic you mean turquoise walls with orange-magenta trim and a cactus in the corner. But with those mariachi and ranchera tapes going full blast, two loud-mouthed ladies don’t make a dent. Still, there’s a guy I’ve had my eyes on since we walked in, sitting by himself, having a burrito, and I want to make a good impression.
“I do love your poetry,” I say in a hushed voice. “But, Yo, face it, you haven’t been writing much. You’ve put a lid on everything, including your muse.”
By now, I’m holding her hands, and she’s crying, and the cute guy, who maybe isn’t so cute with sideburns that look like he’s trying to prove something, has lost interest, probably thinking we’re gay or something. But I don’t care anymore. I’m so sure I’m right about Yo, I give it all I got. “Please, just try, okay. This guy might turn out to be a friend, and that’ll be a perfect re-entry for you with men. To make friends with them first.”
Big talker here. It’s not as if I’m making friends with the near strangers I’m bedding down.
She wipes her eyes, and this determined look comes on her face like she’s headed for the front lines of the gender war. “Okay,” she says, “I’ll try.”
And hey, I should hang out my prophet shingle, because Yo and this Tom guy become good friends. Of course, the poor guy soon wants more. Late nights the phone rings, and I pick up my end quick, thinking something’s happened to one of my boys—they’re with their father for the summer. But it’s for Yo, who’s moved in with me before heading north for a new teaching job. I hear the longing in Tom’s voice as he greets her, “I just called to say goodnight.”
“Why don’t you let him come over?” I ask her the following morning. Down the hall, we can hear my Israeli in the shower that he himself fixed months ago.
Yo cocks her head in the direction of the bathroom. “It takes me longer.”
“Well, you don’t have much longer,” I remind her.
She leaves for New Hampshire in late August, and the group has decided to break up then as well. We’re done with our work, as Brett tells us. The gay politician’s wife is out of the closet herself, the woman with the disappearing lover has started dating a cop, and everyone else is in the last throes of their divorces and writing or composing or painting like mad. I don’t know what magic dust Brett threw in the air, but even Yo and I are writing poems again. Every few nights when I don’t have a guest over, we get in my bed like sisters and read each other what we’ve written.
Some of the stuff she’s writing is pretty good—and I keep urging her to come to our open mike readings on Fridays at the Holy Smokes Cafe, but she just makes a face. “It’s not my scene,” she says. The Holy Smokes has gotten a reputation as a place to go pick up someone easy. “All those guys drooling over my sestina? No way!” She makes a face over the poem she’s been reading out loud to me.
“Such an attitude!” I shake my head at her. She has shared some of her poems with the group, and of course, with me. But she won’t let guys near her stuff. She says every guy she ever showed her poems to used reading them to get her to do something else—like jump in bed with them. Even her favorite professor from college kept telling her to get a Ph.D. instead of wasting her time writing.
“But you send him your stuff.” I’ve seen a couple of manila envelopes addressed to professor so-and-so in western Mass.
“Well, he’s far away,” she shrugs. “Besides, I think he’s gay.”
“He’s still a guy!” I give her a shove with my foot. “What? Is Brett not female?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she agrees. “But gay people are different. They’re not into conquest.”
“Oh no, kiddo?” I say, like I’m some old gangster guy you better listen to. “You need to come out of the woods and take a little walk in the real world.”
She gives me a coy smile, and then she says, “So does New Hampshire count as the real world?” We both fall silent, and this sadness comes over me thinking how she’ll be gone by the time the boys are back for school.
A few weeks before she’s to leave, Yo gets brave and invites this Tom guy over. All summer, she’s dropped in on him or they’ve met at what she calls some neutral space for breakfast of all things. According to Yo, breakfast is the ideal meal for a date if you’re not very sure about a guy. “Dinner can always stretch to bedtime and lunch can become the rest of the day, but everyone’s got to go to work after breakfast.”
“I don’t believe you,” I tell her. Here I’m always trying to think of a way to get a guy to come home with me after linguini or stir-fry, and Yo’s shooing them off to go earn the bacon after the scrambled eggs.
But finally she’s going to have Tom over for dinner, and I’m tickled as anything. I want her to leave for her new job having gotten over this anti-man thing. But then I overhear her on the phone, and I swear to you she says, “Just for supper because Tammy and I—we go to bed early.” When she hangs up, I ask her straight out, “Have you told this guy we’re gay or something?”
This little pressed smile comes on her lips like she’s starched and ironed it to wear for just this occasion. She looks away, because as she well knows, I can see right through to her soul. It’s the reason we’re best friends.
“Well?” I challenge, and she looks up at me, the truth written all over her face before she even tells it. “I just haven’t said, you know, one way or the other—”
“I can’t believe you! This is a small town. You’ll ruin my heterosexual reputation!” I had meant to give her this righteous scolding about using our relationship to protect herself. But I guess what I’m really upset about slips out. “I never was popular with guys before this,” I wail.
And that’s when she takes hold of my hands and sits down in front of me, and looks me in the eye. “Okay, Tammy Rosen, now I’m going to level with you. What I’ve seen going on in this house is not popularity or friendship or anything that’s going to keep. You’re running away from men just as fast as I am. And sure, you’re still writing great poetry, but your personal life stinks!”
And suddenly it’s me bursting into tears, and she’s crooning over me, and I’m thinking, God, what are we, emotional Bobbsey twins or something?
I know she’s right, and I finally bring it up in group, how unrenewing my relationships have been, how men have become an addiction for me, how I have to break the habit of staying on the surface with them. That’s when Brett gives me her big all-purpose diagnosis about being a borderline nympho, and I swallow it whole without my usual chunk of ther
apeutic salt. Then I cry and everyone holds me, and in the days following, in a great burst of coming-clean resolution, I break things off with my Israeli, my activist, my computer guy. Afterwards, I’m as shaky as if I just gave up smoking and I don’t know how I’m going to survive without a butt sticking out of my mouth.
For Yo’s big Friday date, I offer to stay with my ma who’s been down in the dumps since the boys left. Besides, it’s open mike at Holy Smokes. I pile up all these good reasons for me to stay in Boston. Finally, I level with her. “Hey, I’ve cleaned up my act. Now it’s your turn.”
She takes me by the shoulders. “You ain’t out of the woods yet, honeychile. You’ve been moping around like you just lost your best friend.”
“Well, it’s hard,” I say, all teary. “And soon, you’ll be gone too. I won’t have any friends.” Yes, folks, even forty-four-year-old women are sometimes emotional seven-year-olds.
“You ain’t losing me, babycakes,” she drawls, giving me a hug. It’s funny how Yo, a native Spanish speaker, thinks of southern redneck talk as affectionate English. “And those other bozos were never your friends. That’s what you really need, you know, a male friend. It’d be a perfect re-entry for you with men. To make friends with them first.”
Is there an echo in the room? “Well, anyhow, I want you to have the run of the place,” I tell her. “In case, you know—”
“Don’t start in,” she says, all huffy. “I’ve told you we’re just friends! And besides, Tom wants to meet you,” she insists. “You’re my best friend, you know?”
And suddenly, I’m all tearful again, and I’m thinking, maybe now that I’ve decided to behave like a grownup woman, meno pause is kicking in.
I don’t know what it is, but something feels different about Yo the week we’re preparing for our Friday supper party. Some edge that wasn’t there before that makes me think she’s more excited about this Tom guy than even she knows. Suddenly, her hair doesn’t look right—should she part it on the other side? Aren’t her legs kind of skinny, what do I think, are her legs skinny or not? Is there an exercise to build up the calves?
“In five days?” I ask her.
When she starts coming down for her cup of coffee in the morning with her eyes made up, I think: she’s going to sleep with this Tom guy before the summer’s over.
Me, I’m winding down just as she’s getting revved up. The first few days after letting go of the guys, I thought I’d have to go to a detox unit. What would be the methadone for coming off men? Cold showers under the good showerhead they fixed? Little boys?—I’m sorry, as the mother of sons, I shouldn’t joke that way. But anyhow, pretty soon, I’m loving the long mornings in my study working on my Sappho poems—Sappho, who lolls on couches reciting her Sapphics to doting devotees; Sappho, cool and in control. Afternoons I garden and sun and read the high-minded Rilke, then poetry readings with Yo every night, and finally I crawl into the big old bed where there’s no one nudging me awake—all of it seems such a luxury. The ascetic’s pleasures, Yo’s pleasures, I begin to understand them.
But the guys don’t give up that easily, which surprises me. Maybe they were getting more out of the relationship than I thought. They keep calling, when can they come over, can’t we talk about it. Suddenly, it’s me hinting that Yo and I have something going. But that doesn’t stop my activist friend Jerry.
“You can’t just unilaterally end a relationship like that,” he announces, like it’s in the U.N. charter or something.
“Who says?” I say. “You guys always bail out when you feel like it.” I think of Pete running off with his secretary, insulting me not just by abandonment but by such a cliché.
“Oh please,” Jerry says. “Don’t make me responsible for my whole gender. I’m just as much against sexism as you are, you know that.”
The truth is, I didn’t know that. Where was I when he told me? Too busy taking his pants off? But I turn it around so it’s his fault. “We never talked,” I accuse him. “I don’t even know who you are.”
“Well, why don’t you find out.” His voice has gone all gravelly and soft, the way men’s voices get when you get through to them. And then he says just the right thing. “And I want to find out who you are, Tammy. Give me a chance.”
“How about dinner tonight?” I ask him. It occurs to me that tonight will be more comfortable all the way around if we are two pairs. Besides, if Tom has any wrong ideas about me and Yo, Jerry’s presence will straighten him out.
Jerry jumps at the chance. “I’d love to. What shall I bring?”
“Just yourself,” I say gaily. My heart already feels lighter, shedding all those wimples and veils of good clean living. Sure, I can be a nun, but it’s a stretch for us Jewish girls, you know? I do add—for one thing, the group and Yo would kill me otherwise—“But, Jerry, it’s just dinner, okay? I need to go slower this time. I want to become friends first.”
There’s a disappointed silence on the other end, the kind I’m used to hearing when Tom calls Yo in the middle of the night. Finally, he says, “I understand, Tammy. Whatever it takes.”
Did I get lucky or what? And to think I almost sloughed off this mensch of a man! My new Sappho poem goes back in the drawer, and for the rest of the day, it’s me trying on outfits, insisting that the basil for our pesto be fresh-picked, getting out my Aunt Joan’s flowered dessert plates, driving all the way into town to Heart and Hearth to pick up those slow-burning, dripless candles that can go all night long.
We’re in the screened-in back porch, having dinner, the candles flickering whenever a breeze blows in. It’s one of those humid, crickety summer nights that feels as if we’re way down south rather than just north of Boston. Yo and I are sitting side by side, the men facing us. Jerry, of course, is familiar to me, but I’m seeing him in a new light tonight. Especially after four glasses of wine. He’s dark and gabby with a looseness and easiness to his movements that make him very sexy, though I’m trying not to think of that.
Beside him, Tom seems almost stiff—in fact his looks surprise me in a way. I thought Yo, being Latina and all, would choose someone more exotic and swarthy looking. Someone like . . . well, my Jerry. But Tom—and believe me, we can’t keep ourselves from joking about Tom and Jerry—Tom has a neat blond look that makes you want to mess up his hair. Which Yo keeps doing whenever she goes by him. Later, watching her serve him a fat wedge of her guava flan, licking the syrup on her fingers, her bright eyes on Tom, I think, yep, tonight’s the night.
We’re discussing our pasts. Among us there are six divorces, incredible! “What’s going on?” I ask the table, as if they know.
“The old connections don’t work,” Yo pipes up. Most of the real conversation tonight is between the two of us, the guys joining in every now and then. Sometimes, I think that it’s the intensity between us they’re drawn to, like the moths flapping against the screens, wanting in. “We all have to figure out new ways of relating,” Yo continues.
“You said it,” Jerry says, nodding knowingly. His voice is thick and slurred. It reminds me of how my boys say they’ve colored over the lines in their drawing book. Jerry just can’t keep his voice inside the tidy pronunciation of words. I don’t know how he’s going to drive himself home tonight.
“That’s why I went celibate,” Yo says openly to the table. “I just kept falling back into my old habits with men. I had to break the pattern, you know?”
Tom looks down at his piece of flan as if studying where to cut the next mouthful. But I can tell by the tilt of his head that he is listening carefully. He has not had too much to drink.
“So how are you. . . . How are you,” Jerry starts up again, hazily recalling where he was heading, “you know, going to get back in the saddle—” He flashes me the silliest ear-to-ear grin. That decides it. He’s too drunk to drive himself home. He’s sleeping in Jamie’s room tonight.
Now it’s Yo’s turn to look down at the table, embarrassed. “I don’t know,” she says. “I guess I?
??ll know when it’s time.” At this, Tom gets this distant look on his face—one of those brown studies that people in the nineteenth century got into when they couldn’t just come out and say what they were thinking. Suddenly, I know who Tom reminds me of besides Barbie’s Ken, the guy in Pride and Prejudice, Darcy what’s his name, who’s good and wise and kind but needs some livening up. Enter our heroine, Yo García.
As for me, I’m hanging on to my good resolutions, so when dinner is long over, and those slow-burning candles are down to nothing but their wicks, I announce that I’m calling it a night. Jerry looks up hopefully at me. “Let’s get you to bed, too,” I say. He flashes the table a triumphant grin and grabs hold of my arm. As I kiss Yo goodnight, I whisper in her ear, “Don’t worry, he’s going in Jamie’s room.” By her baffled look, I see she’s completely forgotten to police my good intentions about men.
Upstairs after a slow, swaying climb, Jerry is too drunk to put up much of a fuss. “Where are you going?” he asks when I’ve tucked him into the small twin bed. He could be my boy, lying there with the quilt up to his neck and his head poking up, afraid to be left in the dark bedroom all by himself.
“I’ll be right back,” I hush him, and I go out to the bathroom and get him two aspirin and a glass of water.
Later, lying in my bed, I can make out voices on the back porch, whispers and giggles, a voice persuading, a voice resisting but not really. I doze off, and when I next come awake, I hear the same whispers and giggles coming from the direction of Yo’s bedroom. And then, much later, when I wake, the house is still, that three o’clock in the morning stillness that sends a shiver of mortality through me and makes me reach out for the extra pillow and hold on to it.
Someone is crawling in bed with me! At first, I think it’s Jerry, but when I turn, almost grateful for the intrusion, I realize it’s Yo.
“What’s the matter?” I whisper.
“It wasn’t time,” she says, taking the extra pillow I’ve been using as my substitute man.