Given Up for You Page 6

  I also tried to get as much God into the ceremony as Chris would allow.

  “What would you think about being married by a minister?” I asked Chris near the end of the summer. And then, before she could answer, I added, “If we can find the right one.”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “But not in a church.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said, trying not to appear too excited.

  I called an old friend of mine who had gone to Union Theological Seminary, and she gave me the name of a colleague who had recently been ordained in the Metropolitan Community Church, a Protestant denomination dedicated to LGBT-friendly liturgy and worship. This minister, whom I began referring to as Reverend Jen, had been raised in an evangelical home and was now a chaplain at Brown. After our first phone call I knew she was the one: a lesbian who believed in a resurrected Jesus. Who could be better? Because despite my insistence on all I was still entitled to, I wanted a lesbian to perform our wedding. I wanted the person who married us not to just accept or approve of our love affair, but to intimately know its territory, its shadows and its pleasures.

  We met with Jen in her office at Brown. She looked to be in her midthirties, with dark hair cut close to her head. She had broad shoulders and an angular face. It was Saturday and she wore a T-shirt and jeans, smelled slightly of mint gum and even more slightly of cigarettes. Her office was sunny and comfortable, with a couch and a few soft chairs, the walls decorated with posters commemorating various interfaith gatherings. After a few minutes of small talk, Jen asked us what we wanted our ceremony to be about, what we wanted it to include.

  “Well, I want to use all the strong words,” I said. “Marriage, marry, wedding, even wife.”

  Chris cringed at that last one. She didn’t like wife. “Okay, maybe not wife,” I said. “But I hate partner, and I really don’t like commitment ceremony. It sounds like we’re having a ritual to commit each other to an asylum.” This is what I didn’t say: I want all the things I’ve always wanted.

  Jen asked Chris if there was anything she did or didn’t want to be part of our wedding. “I want Bach’s cello suites,” she said, without hesitation. “And an E. E. Cummings poem.” Chris looked at me, smiling. In our early days, she often left E. E. Cummings’s lines around my apartment, scribbled them on slips of paper before she left in the morning: possibly i like the thrill of under me you so quite new. And: because I love you) last night. When we had been together for a few months and she was beginning a new trial, I gave her a pair of earrings as a good-luck present. On the card I wrote: nobody, not even the rain, has such small ears.

  Chris and I paid for the wedding ourselves, with our own savings. I say our, although in reality the money was Chris’s. I made a small graduate student teaching salary and had health benefits, but Chris supported both of us. Even though she had taken an in-house counsel job when we moved to western Massachusetts from Philly, she still made plenty of money. Regardless of Chris’s salary, I always worked, always brought in some small amount of income. I taught and worked as a nanny. And in the weeks before we were married, I took a job grading placement exams so that I could buy Chris a painting, which I surprised her with on the morning before our wedding.

  In the fall, when we had been engaged for nearly six months, Chris finally called her parents to share the news. “What did they say?” I asked Chris when she came downstairs after the troublingly short phone call.

  “Not much,” she said in a tight voice. “Not that I’m surprised,” she added, and I knew she was trying to sound detached. “Not that I expected anything else.”

  I knew that an expected disappointment was a disappointment nonetheless. “Maybe you should go there,” I suggested. “Not now,” I clarified, seeing the alarm on her face. “In a few days. Give them some time to take it in, and then go and have a real conversation about it, face-to-face. I’ll go with you, if you want.” I hoped this offer sounded more genuine than it was. I didn’t want to go with her. I was still a little afraid of her parents.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  In the end she went to Worcester without me. I never really knew what happened between Chris and her parents that day. I know that she told them she wanted them in her life, but that her life was changing now. She was getting married. And if they couldn’t celebrate that, if they couldn’t stand up and offer their love and support, then they could no longer be part of her life. I don’t know exactly what they said in response to her ultimatum. I do know that Chris came home late that night and everything about her was different. She came into our dark bedroom, and even though I couldn’t see her, even though she didn’t speak because she thought I was asleep, I knew what had happened while she was away. The air around her was different then. And in the morning, when I saw her face, when I listened to her tell me that her parents would be at the wedding, there was a new softness around her jaw, around those bones that she had, since I met her, often rubbed in the evenings before sleep, complaining of a soreness that would not go away.

  In March, my mother and I went to Neiman Marcus to find my wedding dress. “Wow,” my mother said, holding up a black, floor-length gown. “Try this one.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t want a white wedding dress, but I wasn’t sure I wanted a black one either.

  “It’s gorgeous, and it would be perfect on you,” my mother said, handing it to me.

  She was right. The dress was perfect. Black silk with white piping and a thin, white belt. It was Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn; it was elegant and perfect. The store was out of my size, but the saleswoman assured me that she could send for it, that according to her computer there was one in Dallas.

  A few days later the saleswoman called. “So I wasn’t actually able to find that dress,” she said. “But I can give you a full refund.”

  “But that’s my wedding dress!” I cried.

  “You bought a black dress for your wedding?” she asked.

  I hung up the phone and starting crying. Then I called my friend Stephanie, who worked at Neiman Marcus, and told her that my wedding dress was gone. “Oh, I’ll find it,” she said. “I’ll find that dress.” And she did. And when I went to pick it up in Boston the next week, Stephanie gave me a handbag filled with Chanel makeup and brought me to the couture dressing room, where she offered me cookies and champagne.

  Chris couldn’t decide what to wear to the wedding. Her mother wanted to go shopping with her, but Chris kept putting her off. Finally she sent Chris a picture of a dress from a bridal magazine. “This one would look good with Erin’s dress,” she wrote next to it. It was a lovely dress, deep-blue silk, two pieces, almost like a suit. But I thought Chris should wear pants. She always wore pants. She said she would think about it.

  “While you’re thinking about it,” I said, “why don’t you just go shopping with your mother? She’s making a gesture. You should accept it.” I wanted her to go shopping with her mother because I didn’t want to go shopping with Chris. I didn’t want to be responsible for her clothes. Or maybe I did, but I didn’t want to overstep what seemed like her decision. If she were a man, I might have bought her wedding suit, might have told her what looked good and what didn’t. And I might have also insisted she choose a simple platinum wedding band and not the ring she really wanted, the rough-hewn titanium band made by a friend of hers who also made bicycles. But she was a woman, and because of this I believed she deserved autonomy in matters of aesthetics, and I left those choices up to her.

  By April I was, quite honestly, devoting more of my time to wedding planning than I was to my classwork. Chris had virtually no interest in the endless details, and so I did most of the planning with my neighbor Emily, a slight and beautiful woman with a pixie haircut and an impeccable sense of style. Emily was an expert on midcentury furniture and eyeliner and lingerie. Politics meant nothing to her; she once told me she had never voted. But she adamantly supported marriage equality insofar as she believed my wedding was every bit as
real as anyone else’s. You should register, she insisted. And send engraved invitations. She said yes to the string quartet for the ceremony and yes to the jazz band for the reception. She took me to her hairdresser for a practice run on hairstyles; she advised me on nail polish. Emily was not interested in how my wedding would circumvent the patriarchal power structure. She was interested in getting me to buy two pairs of shoes in case I wanted to change after the ceremony.

  And when I would think, as I sometimes did, with a great rush of epiphanic anxiety, Oh my God, I’m marrying a woman! Emily would call and say, “What’s new with the brides?” And together we would ruminate over details and decisions as though there was nothing more normal in all the world than this lesbian wedding of mine, and I would think, it’s true, it’s really true: I can have everything I have ever wanted.

  Emily had no other gay friends, knew no lesbians other than Chris and me, but was wholehearted in her enthusiasm for us, as was her husband, a foul-mouthed yet affable financier with whom Chris spent many Sunday afternoons, watching sports on his flat-screen TV. We were all pleased and amused by the synchronicity of our coupling. This would often happen with straight couples we were friends with; the man would be taken by Chris’s masculinity, by the ways in which she was one of the guys. It was a comfortable arrangement for everyone, this gendered contrast between Chris and me, these ways in which we were just like them. Eventually, though, Chris would surprise these men, eventually the conversation would turn to the wage gap, or girls in Afghanistan, or Madeleine Albright, and suddenly they would remember she was a woman. And they would change the subject, offer her a beer. They would, it seemed, try to forget that even though she was a match for their strength and their confidence, she lived in a different world.

  A few months before our wedding, we went to Spain. It was an early honeymoon, because our wedding was planned for September when I would be teaching and unable to get away. In Barcelona, in a gift shop across the street from the Sagrada Família, I bought two flamenco dancer dolls for the top of our wedding cake. Chris and I both thought it was a grandly clever idea, but in the end I decided not to use them. I wasn’t ready for the jokes. I was earnest in my efforts and resolute in my beliefs. Which is to say I was very nervous and a little sad. I knew that my future was with Chris, but I didn’t honestly know what that meant. This, of course, is marriage: we join hands and walk into the unknown, together, but in my case I was also walking into a private unknown, and a future unlike any I had ever dreamed for myself. Hence the perfect flowers and the perfect dress. Hence the flamenco dancers wrapped in tissue paper and packed away in the attic.

  This is what I remember about our wedding: It didn’t rain. Chris wore a dress, but not the one her mother had chosen for her. I didn’t change my shoes for the reception; Chris didn’t wear shoes at all. “I’m the father of the bride,” Chris’s father said to the bartender before the ceremony began. “Can I get a beer?”

  The ceremony was on the wooded grounds of an inn, on a stone patio in a grove of pines. A cellist played the Bach suites and also my favorite hymn, “Lord of All Hopefulness.” Our friends and family stood for the service, all except my eighty-year-old grandmother and our forty-weeks-pregnant friend, Alisa. Reverend Jen wore a clerical collar and black suit, and she embodied church authority and queerness, and I adored her for both. She spoke so confidently of God’s love and of our union that even though there was no assertion of the power vested in her by the state of Massachusetts, it was wonderfully, perfectly clear that a power was vested in her, and we were bound by it.

  My sister read an E. E. Cummings poem, not one from our courtship, but another we both loved, one that was a little more about sky and green trees than it was about sex. I married Chris with that ring I didn’t like, and she married me with one I had deliberated over for weeks, a ring that she claimed to like, but who knew? It hardly mattered now. We were married.

  When the ceremony was over, Chris and I joined hands and turned away from our guests to walk back down the stone path toward the inn. Before we had gone more than a few steps, Chris looked at me and whispered, “My family.” And we turned back again. “We forgot something,” I said, and everyone laughed as we each walked into the embrace of our own parents. My father kissed my cheeks, my mother smoothed my hair, and I quickly kissed my brother and sister. But Chris’s parents held her in a shared embrace for a long time, and then opened their arms for her sisters, and for a moment we all stood and watched.

  8

  A Harmonious Match

  You know,” Chris said, during one of our many conversations about how and when we might start trying to have a baby, “I remember the first time we talked about having kids. I told you that I might not want to, and you said that was fine.”

  I was entirely certain that conversation never happened. “I would never have said that. Not having children was never fine with me.”

  “So you would have left me if I had said I definitely didn’t want kids?” Chris asked.

  Yes, I thought, I would have left you. But I didn’t say that. Instead I leaned over and kissed her. “Just think,” I said, “when I’m pregnant my boobs will be fantastic.”

  What I didn’t understand then, as I joked and flirted, was that when Chris brought up that old conversation (which I still, to this day, do not remember), she was asking me to confirm my loyalty, and also her primacy. She was asking me to want her more than I wanted anyone else. More than I wanted a baby.

  But in truth I didn’t want anyone more than I wanted a baby. I didn’t say this out loud, or at least I hardly ever said it out loud. But it was true. Occasionally the longing overwhelmed me with its urgency, its bright greed, but mostly it was an even wanting; it was the single drop of methylene blue that turned every cell wall, every nucleus, a coppery indigo. It was the gold coin hidden in my pocket, heavy and warm in my fingers.

  My desire for a baby was oversized. It was preoccupying. It wasn’t great for my career, or my marriage. I knew all those things, but I didn’t care. My desire for a baby felt like an inalienable part of me, and it seemed if Chris loved me as she did, then surely she didn’t mind the force of it; surely I did not need to temper it for her sake.

  Chris didn’t want children in the same way I did; she had not, in fact, planned on having them. But I attributed this to the reality of growing up gay in the seventies and eighties. She knew she wouldn’t have a husband, so then how would she have children? She could not have imagined becoming a non-gestating, non-lactating, married-to-a-woman, lesbian mom. She couldn’t have imagined becoming a mother and still remaining herself.

  But now the lesbian baby boom was well underway, and couples were using sperm donors and artificial insemination to grow their families with relative ease. And while second-parent adoption (the legal extension of parental rights to the nonbiological parent) was legal in only a few states, Massachusetts was one of them. I was certain we could—and would—have children. I felt fertile; we could afford the cost. And like getting married, having a baby was something to which I still felt entirely, inherently, entitled.

  In the fall, after our wedding, I joined a mentoring organization called Sisters Inc., which paired women with tween girls, whom we referred to as our little sisters. We all gathered once a month for an art workshop with a girl-power theme, and then got together in pairs a few other times each month to do something fun. The women in the group were artists and musicians, bakers and potters. Some rode horses with their little sisters; others taught theirs to play guitar and drums. Most of the little sisters were from multigenerational rural families; their parents and grandparents were sheep and maple-syrup farmers, lumbermen. My little sister’s parents were in jail, and she lived with a foster family in town. Allie was one of the oldest girls in Sisters Inc., but she seemed like the youngest. She was outspoken and earnest, and spoke with a drawl whose origins I could not place. She concentrated deeply on the monthly art projects and went back for third and fourth helpings of
the snack.

  Allie didn’t want to play music or ride horses when we were together, which was lucky because I could do neither. She wanted to knit, which I taught her to do, and go to the movies. She also liked to go to Walmart. I hated Walmart, but I took her anyway. I bought her markers and paper, yarn for her knitting, and goldfish crackers. Chris and I lived a few blocks from Allie’s school, and some afternoons she walked to our house and did her homework at our dining room table. I often fed her an early dinner, rich and comforting foods like chicken pot pie, which Chris and I both loved but didn’t often make for ourselves. Allie’s grandparents, with whom she lived until she entered the foster care system, were fundamentalist Christians, but Allie seemed entirely unconcerned that I was married to a woman. She asked me if we were going to have kids. I told her I hoped so. “Two moms!” she said, shaking her head in disbelief. “That’s going to be so cool.”

  One night, after Allie had left and we were getting ready for bed, I asked Chris if she would ever consider adopting a child from foster care. She thought about it for a moment and then said, “I would, I think.”

  “One as old as Allie?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “But you miss out on so much,” I said, as though Chris were the one trying to convince me of something. “And there’s so much you can’t control.”

  “I think when you decide to adopt, it’s not really about what you can control. It’s about loving a child.”

  I stayed quiet then, because anything I said would make me sound like a terrible person. I didn’t want to adopt Allie, or any other child. I couldn’t forsake my dream of motherhood through physical transformation or, quite honestly, my need for control.

  When we got into bed, I said, “I really don’t want to adopt.”

  “I know,” Chris said.

  “I want to be pregnant, and give birth, and nurse, all those things.”