And the other one sang, “And I’m a little bit les-bi-an.”
Then they pretended to French kiss, one girl dipping the other girl back. It was meant to be both disgusting and hilarious, but much later, back at home on Heather Lane, when the Eisenstat family sat in the living room opening the last of the presents—all the Lucite picture frames, and the gift cards from Barnes & Noble and Candles N’ Things that would soon get lost and never cashed, and all the checks in variants of eighteen dollars, because eighteen corresponded to the lucky number chai, Hebrew for “life”—Franny rose from the whitecaps of wrapping paper, shuffling through it all, ankle-deep, and went upstairs to her own room, where she lay in bed and thought about those two girls from her class singing that hideous old song.
But what she held on to, what stayed, as specific as something that could be placed inside one of the picture frames she’d been given, was the image of the two girls kissing. Other than that, the whole day had been a festival of falseness, from the recitation of her Torah portion, which she’d performed terribly, for she had never been a good student, to the Truth or Dare game that she and all her friends eventually played in one of the other banquet halls, during which Franny had ended up French-kissing Lyle Hapner, whose claim to fame was his impression of the president of the United States getting laughing gas at the dentist. Lyle had a strange-looking mouth that seemed in danger of swallowing her, the way a snake might swallow a mouse. She felt small with him, and as if she wasn’t inhabiting her full self.
That was it: why did she have to go through life feeling half-full? She wondered if some people got to feel fully full, or whether it was everyone’s fate to feel as if the state of being human was one in which the self was like a bag of something wonderful that had already been half-eaten.
But lying in the dark at night in the splendor of her house, the much-loved youngest child of two highly accomplished judges, she began her mission toward fullness. Which maybe was the same as realness. Again, there weren’t words for this, not yet. Words would come later, and lots of them. Words spoken to other women, in beds or leaning against a wall in an alley, in a new voice that shocked her—shocked her that the strong feelings she had always felt meant this. That those feelings = being gay. Who would have thought? Everyone but her, apparently.
The mission started at thirteen, and was revisited at sixteen, when Franny managed to make her way into the city to the East Village, to a women’s bar called Ben-Her. Her parents thought she was with two friends from school that day seeing Wicked. Franny had worked out something convincing to say about the Broadway show. If anyone asked her about it, she would tell them, “I particularly loved the song ‘For Good.’ It’s really haunting.”
But while her friends went in a cluster to the Gershwin Theatre, she headed down to the bar she had read about on Fem Fatale, in an article titled “Where the Girls Are: A Roundup of the U.S.’s Best Lesbian Watering Holes.” The words themselves were disorienting—“lesbian watering holes” suggestive of female anatomy—and as with the time that her friends had sung that song after her bat mitzvah, she felt herself called to attention and yearning, like an alien who has received a message from its home planet.
So there she was at Ben-Her, underage and underprepared for what she would find. In the heat of a spring night, jammed into a narrow storefront that in its last incarnation had been a Polish pierogi joint, the women in their tank tops and other thin warm-weather clothes stood talking face-to-face, chest-to-chest, everyone as close and intimate as it got without kissing. Franny wore a pocket T and cutoffs and Doc Martens; she looked like a hot butch Girl Scout or hot femme Boy Scout, take your pick. Her blond hair was cut medium-short and blunt, in a fashion that to her was mild but distinctly sexual, subconsciously designed to draw in women who looked like this, as well as others who looked more feminine. She liked those women too, was excited by their femininity but also by what struck her as their more secret, encrypted desire for women. The bar smelled both woodsy and spiced. Zee took out a fake ID that belonged to a friend’s older sister, and showed it to a bartender in a retro bowling shirt, a small tattoo of Betty and Veronica stamped onto her neck. “What can I get you, cutie?” asked the bartender, and Franny shivered in happiness at being spoken to this way.
“A beer,” she said, not knowing you were supposed to request a particular brand. But the bartender found her one, cementing Franny Eisenstat’s lifelong love of beers, in particular Heineken, which she would always picture being held in that curved hand. Franny perched on a wobbling stool in the corner and drank her beer while watching the anthropological scene all around her. The music was from her parents’ twenties, Eurythmics’ old classic “Sweet Dreams,” played loud in that shoe box of writhing women, and she leaned her head back against the wall and just watched. Soon she became aware that someone was observing her, and she flushed in self-consciousness, ducking away and then looking back. The self-consciousness shattered into confusion as the person was revealed to be her mother’s big blond law clerk, Linda Mariani, who kept staring and finally pushed toward her through a wall of women.
“Franny?” she shouted. “Franny Eisenstat? You’re here?”
Linda took Franny by the hand and led her outside to the stoop beside the bar. Both of them were sweating; Linda was soaked through her silk shirt, her face glazed with melting makeup. She was forty years old and a lesbian, and she asked Franny, “Have you ever been here before?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. I’ve never seen you here. Does your mother know?”
“No.” Franny said this with emphasis. “You’ve been here before?”
Linda laughed. “Oh sure. Listen,” she said, “you shouldn’t be at a bar. You’re too young.”
“I can make my own decisions.” Even speaking with such a swagger, Franny felt ashamed. She was trying on a whole new self here, and the experience was getting strange.
“Don’t be cocky. You’ll get hurt.” Linda wiped at her own face with a tissue, and Franny saw that it came away smeared with flesh-colored makeup. Suddenly she had an uneasy image of Linda Mariani having sex, her makeup coming off on a pillow.
On another night, a visit to Ben-Her led to Franny’s first sexual adventure, which was with a woman whose power was simply in the moment and not in the world. She had power because Franny was attracted to her. Alana was eighteen, with an overbite and the kind of hair that had submitted to one too many flat irons. She worked in retail, she said, and though she was an ordinary-looking person and not particularly articulate, when she took Franny back to her older sister’s studio apartment in a tenement building around the corner from the bar, simply that Alana was female and desired Franny was enough to make the encounter monumental. The sixth-floor walk-up apartment was decorated with knickknacks and bamboo furniture. The shelves held no books, only stuffed animals wearing tiny T-shirts with sayings on them. A raccoon wore one that said I’M WITH STUPID, and the tiny stuffed zebra beside it wore one that said STUPID. Franny, raised in a large, tasteful house filled with original art and books—and in fact personally named after someone in a book—could not help but feel snobbish.
But when Alana said, “Lie down,” in a voice that Franny would later come to understand had been almost suffocated with sexual arousal, Franny obeyed. Above her, Alana crossed her arms and lifted off her own shirt, revealing small, slightly pessimistic breasts. Then she removed Franny’s shirt and skinny jeans, saying to her, not unkindly, “Is this your first time?”