“What, having a baby?”
“Right, yeah. My body, all of this equipment that I possess; I’ve never spent a lot of time thinking of it as reproductive. I had a movement therapist when I was a teenager who apparently thought I was denying my womanhood. But I wasn’t! I never have. I like being a girl. I just want to be the one who says what that means. My idea of hell would be to suddenly give birth without knowing it was going to happen.”
“That’s anyone’s idea of hell.”
Suddenly, urgently, Zee asked, “Will we definitely find out what happens to Shara and her baby? Can we go see her? And if she doesn’t come back to school, is this going to be the last we’ll hear?”
“I’ll make sure we hear, and that we find a way to help her if we can. I will try not to let her slip through the cracks.”
“She’s a mess, but she likes history. She’s good with dates,” said Zee. Maybe this was an exaggeration, but she wanted to say it. Someone had to stand up for Shara Pick, to declare her worthwhile as more than the carrier of a baby that she might soon turn over to someone else’s arms, and as more than a collection of uncontrollable parts. “She must have been so scared,” said Zee. The body did not always do what you asked it to. It had its own ideas, its own trajectory. Even now, she thought that her own body was like a tuning fork that was responding to Noelle’s very particular pitch.
“You look scared.”
Zee looked up. “It was very scary. Very shocking.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean now,” Noelle said in a constricted, nearly formal voice. “Because of me.”
“Okay,” Zee admitted. “You can be a little scary.”
“Is that all I am to you? A scary person?”
Zee took her time, trying to make sure she was understanding what was happening, the new voice Noelle was using, and what it meant. There was a familiar feeling here; Noelle had to be aware of it too. Think, think, Zee thought, wondering if she had missed an interpretation. Nothing else occurred to her. Crisis usually abated to reveal calm, but this one was revealing another, different kind of crisis. “No,” Zee said. “Not only.”
“Then what else?” This was said as a direct challenge.
All Zee would say was, “This is weird.”
“You don’t like it?”
“I don’t know what it is.”
“Are you sure you don’t?”
“Okay, I guess I do,” said Zee.
“Is it okay, then?” asked Noelle, and Zee nodded.
Neither of them knew what to say next. They went back to the business of eating dinner, and they drank their cold beers and shared a banana pudding for dessert, both spoons dipping into the same beige mass, reminding Zee of watching Noelle in the faculty lounge eating a cup of yogurt, which made that little galloping-hooves-on-plastic knock knock sound. It was the sound of a self-contained woman eating the international symbol of female food: yogurt. Women with their calcium needs. You could go so many places in the world and find women eating yogurt.
“Want to get the check?” asked Noelle. She waved an arm around for the waitress. She was a little drunk, Zee realized, and she felt worried that perhaps Noelle’s low-level drunkenness was the cause of her apparent interest in Zee. Maybe Noelle had been tricked into flirting only by virtue of the beer, and later she would be horrified with herself, because after all maybe she was a guidance counselor at a charter school who was as straight as the day is long.
“You’re tipsy,” Zee said. “That’s why you’re being this way? Three beers?”
“No,” Noelle said. “I deliberately had that third beer because I was starting to be this way.”
“‘This way.’”
“Attracted to you.”
“Oh.”
Noelle drew a finger down the side of the beer glass, bisecting the condensation. Why was it that the words attracted to you were like lightning? It slayed Zee that Noelle Williams, the imperious guidance counselor, an older, African-American woman with an impossibly elegant bearing, was attracted to her.
“Okay then,” said Zee, and they both laughed.
And how strange, too, that laughter would characterize so much of what they did from that night on, even if some of it was the laughter of helplessness in the face of what was unfixable. There were other bad things that happened at the school: a boy beaten so severely on his way home that his eye popped from its socket; another Teach and Reach faculty member giving up the ship; a broken boiler that rendered the school uninhabitable for two days.
But on the night after Shara’s baby was born, they walked from the restaurant out into the suddenly blowing snow—spring snow, because this was Chicago—onto a quiet street, and got on the train, which took them mostly in silence and fluorescence toward Zee’s six-flat, because it was closer than Noelle’s place, which was a good forty-minute ride, and in forty minutes the spell might well have been broken. Thank God the place was clean, Zee thought as she threw on the lights.
“Studenty,” Noelle declared, and Zee saw the room as Noelle saw it: The sofa that was covered with a generic Indian-print fabric. The small framed flyer on the wall advertising a college speech in the chapel several years earlier, given by Faith Frank. The clementines in a blue bowl. The photo of Zee and another woman, clearly her good friend, in graduation gowns. The new life that Zee Eisenstat was trying to settle into here in Chicago.
“Yeah, I can’t help it,” Zee said. “I was a student for so long that it’s the only way I know how to be.”
“I remember all this,” said Noelle, who then decisively brought Zee toward her by the shoulders, which was as much a relief as it was a thrill. They kissed for a long, leisurely time. When they lay down on the narrow mattress that Zee had purchased at a garage sale upon moving here, and had carried on her own back like a Sherpa the seven blocks home, she couldn’t help but think a little bit about power: who had it right now, the older woman or the younger one. Power was hard to understand sometimes. You could not quantify it or calibrate it. You could barely see it, even when you were looking straight at it.
“That’s what everyone was talking about at the first Loci summit,” Greer had said recently on the phone when the subject came up. “The meaning and uses of power.”
“The summit you missed, because of Cory’s brother.”
“Yeah. But everyone who was there—the rest of our team—said that it was clear that it’s a topic we’re going to return to, because no one can get enough of it. It excites everyone. Power! Even the word is powerful.”
“Right,” said Zee. “It has the word pow in it. Like in a comic book.”
To live in a world of female power—mutual power—felt like a desirable dream to Zee. Having power meant that the world was like a pasture with the gate left open, and that there was nothing stopping you, and you could run and run.
Noelle looked formidable with or without her clothes, though of course without them she was more vulnerable to Zee’s impressions of her. Their hands were on each other—on Zee with her curated boyish look and Noelle with her carefully feminine look that was slightly tempered by the nearly shaved head and prominent hipbones and the careful comportment, giving her the quality of one of those artist’s mannequins. The arms and legs could be rearranged any way you liked, link by link, and this was what sex was too, when power was fluid. You could rearrange the other person, and they could rearrange you.
Now the snow fell steadily, and after a long, expressive round of new-person sex, the two women finally settled themselves in for the night. Power had been there a moment ago, but now it wasn’t. How strange that Zee had just been thinking about it, and suddenly it was irrelevant. The day had been impossibly long and difficult, and all that she needed to do now was collapse.
“Sweet pea,” Noelle called her before they slept, in a third and entirely different use of that term of endearment.
PART THREE
I Get To Decide
EIGHT