Patricia had always flowed like a river, sweeping Libby right along with her, in a friendly way.
Patricia wanted to move in, flood her small apartment with stones and reeds and frogs, fill every available drawer, bring drawers of her own. And so Libby found herself drowning. She loved Patricia in a way that felt like drowning. Or the idea of losing her, in an effort to preserve some arbitrary order in her apartment, felt like drowning. And yet bringing her in, welcoming her, felt just as bad.
Libby’s love for Patricia felt barely containable. She looked at this woman and wanted to kiss her shoulder, run the back of a finger down her temple, slide her ponytail between the ring of her thumb and forefinger. Libby loved that Patricia diffused arguments with friends, coworkers, even school parents with the simple words, “Well, I am from Spain.” Mostly she meant, “Your stupid American customs are unimportant to me,” but people interpreted it as, “You’re the expert here, and I am simply a visitor.” Libby loved that during their last faculty meeting she and Patricia had ended up giving a spontaneous presentation on the Reggio Emilia approach. Libby lobbed out statistics about student-led learning, while Patricia filled the whiteboard with a drawing of a plant-filled classroom lined with windows. It was essentially a continuation of a conversation they had started the night before. It had begun as a diagnosis/if-I-ran-the-zoo prescription for their favorite student, a kindergartener, who asked questions like “How did mermaids evolve?” and whose parents believed in the educational properties of first-person shooter games.
“You know we’d love to have her up here? Right, Bibs?” Danny asked. He had both hands up now, an impromptu visor. “That we’re cool with that?” He uncrossed his legs and scraped the mud from the bottom of his foot on the railing. Libby had the urge to tell him to rinse it with the hose, not to scrub his feet on the railing. But she knew this was the hat talking, so she kept her mouth shut.
“Not everyone, I bet.”
But she wasn’t just talking about Tom. She was glad Patricia hadn’t come, that she could sit in the dirt and postpone her decision, put it out of her mind.
“The only thing Tom cares about up here is if the Whaler’s working. Keep her out of that boat, and you won’t have a problem.”
Danny didn’t quite understand. He was in a different world from Libby or Gwen or Tom. By the time he was in high school there was the internet and cell phones, gay kids out at school. Then again, the summer he graduated, their father had died. Modern conveniences, technology, changing political climates—none of these could stop death. After their father’s death, when Libby and Danny leaned against their mother and watched his ashes go into the sea, the ten years between them was nothing. The rest of the time, it was an ocean between them.
“Tom has issues with more than just the boat,” she said. The house, her, lobsters, gays, Gwen, Medicare, mandated retirement. Now, with the offer, he had 3.1 million new opinions, new reasons to support his way of thinking. His politics and his life were all tangled together. She tried to keep things far neater.
Though maybe that worked better in theory. She sat next to a clump of marigolds, slowly digging around their roots. Here she was battling Scarlet’s floral demons. Maybe she should do the opposite, plant marigolds all over their land. Invite the demons in. But she kept pulling them up. Just like she kept coming to family dinners, to Christmases, to the Fourth of July weeks up here. But those lines were much easier to draw in the rest of her life.
Libby wasn’t out at the school where she worked. The distance between her life with women and the life everyone assumed she had was vast and hazy, a mountainous region enveloped in low clouds. Setting up her classroom in the mornings, she thought, I’m sure there are men out there that I could find attractive; I just haven’t met them yet.
Patricia and Libby were careful at school. They would never leave together, never arrive together. Having met Patricia at work, having no way to reliably separate her two sides, gave Libby headaches, which often left her nauseated in the ladies’ room after breakfast. She laughed to think that, if she slept with men, she would’ve thought she was pregnant.
Patricia was out at work. Unlike Libby, she saw no reason to hide. Being an administrator, rather than a teacher working with the kids, gave her a certain freedom. Patricia’s sexual preference, then, was public knowledge, like her love of cold apples or strong black iced tea. Some people knew, some didn’t. She never made any kind of announcement, and neither did she hide it. If the subject of spouses came up in conversation, if she needed to use a pronoun, then she did. There was no pause or pressure and no arousing curiosity or suspicion. She just was.
This ease infuriated Libby; Libby saw herself as less of a lesbian than Patricia, and therefore better able to fit into mainstream culture. So why was it Libby who found herself skulking around with secrets, unable to relax? Patricia would laugh and tell her that no one who loved to fuck the way Libby did was part of mainstream culture, except maybe men. Libby wondered if that wasn’t an excellent reason to start sleeping with them. They, that great army of libido, liked sex the way she did, liked women the way she did. Common interests. This would’ve made her mother happy.
The hat had a spray of fake lilacs on it; this was unlike her mother. It must have been a gift. Libby liked them, though, the fake flowers. She took off the hat and tucked a few tiger lilies beside the plastic lilacs in the hatband. The hat was becoming hers now, she thought, the dirt smudge now darker on the right, instead of the left side of the brim. Her mother had been left-handed.
Suddenly she wanted to cry. To take her baby brother in her arms and cry into his long, unwashed hair. To tell him that she had fed him, put him down for naps as a baby. He knew this, she had told him before. She was sure he had grown up knowing that she, more than the others, took care of him. And here he was, like a salamander on a rock, gray on gray. He needed to be brought back from wherever he had been, wherever he left himself when he wasn’t at school. There would be no watchband secrets with this one.
She didn’t need a baby. The boy, the house, she raised them. Even at ten, she raised them. She didn’t want to play house with Patricia. She knew how those games ended.