Unlike me, she’d never walked down an aisle. She’d never been fed wedding cake or danced until there were blisters on her feet. If that was what she wanted, then I wasn’t going to deny her the experience.
I wanted everyone to know how happy I was with Vanessa, but I didn’t need a wedding to do it. I just wasn’t sure if that was because this was still new to me or because I had heard loud and clear what Max thought—that a gay marriage isn’t arealone.
I cannot explain why this even mattered. We weren’t going to be asking Pastor Clive to officiate, after all. The people who would be invited to our wedding loved us and wouldn’t be judging the fact that there were two tiny brides on the cake, instead of a bride and a groom.
But to get married, we had to cross the Rhode Island border. We had to find a minister who was supportive of gay marriage. Eventually we would have to hire a lawyer to draw up papers to give each other power of attorney for medical decisions, to become beneficiaries on each other’s life insurance policies. I wasn’t ashamed of wanting a lifetime with Vanessa. But Iwasashamed that the steps I had to take in order to do it made me feel like a second-class citizen.
“I’m happy,” I tell my mother, although I am bawling.
My mother looks at me. “What you need,” she says, waving her hand dismissively at the bridal salon behind us, “is none of this. What you need is elegant and understated. Just like you and Vanessa.”
We try three stores before we find it—a simple ivory, knee-length sheath that doesn’t make me look like Cinderella. “I fell in love with your father during a fire drill,” my mother says idly, as she fastens the buttons on the back. “We were both working at a law firm—he was an accountant and I was a secretary—and they evacuated the building. We met next to a chain-link fence, and he offered me half a Twinkie. When the building got the all clear, we didn’t go back inside.” She shrugs. “At his funeral, a lot of my friends said it was just bad luck that I fell for a guy who died in his forties, but you know, I never saw it that way. I thought it wasgoodluck. I mean, what if there hadn’t been a fire drill? Then we never would have met. And I’d much rather have had a few great years with him than none at all.” She turns me so that I am facing her. “Don’t let anyone tell you who you should and shouldn’t love, Zoe. Yes, it’s a gay wedding . . . but it’syourwedding.”
She turns me again so that I can see myself in the mirror. From the front, this could be any pretty, simple dress. But from the back, everything is different. A row of satin buttons gives way, at the waist, to a fan of pleats. It’s as if the dress is opening like a rose.
As if someone watching me walk away might think,That’s not what I expected.
I stare at myself. “What do you think?”
Maybe my mother is talking about the dress, and maybe she’s talking about my future. “I think,” she says, “you’ve found the perfect one.”
When Lucy walks into our conference room, I am already picking out a melody on my guitar and humming along. “Hey there,” I say, glancing up at her. Today her red hair is matted and twisted. “Trying for dreadlocks?”
She shrugs.
“I had a roommate in college who wanted dreads. She chickened out at the last minute because the only way to get rid of dreadlocks is to cut them all off.”
“Well, maybe I’ll just shave my head,” Lucy says.
“You could do that,” I agree, delighted that we are having what could almost be called a conversation. “You could be the next Sinéad O’Connor.”
“Who?”
I realize that, when the bald musician ripped up a picture of the Pope onSaturday Night Livein 1992, Lucy wasn’t even alive yet. “Or Melissa Etheridge. Did you see her perform at the Grammys when she was bald from chemo? She sang Janis Joplin.”
I take out my pick and begin the chord progressions for “Piece of My Heart.” From the corner of my eye, I watch Lucy staring at my fingers as they move up and down the frets. “I remember hearing that performance and thinking how brave she was, as a cancer survivor . . . and how it was the perfect song. Suddenly it wasn’t about a woman standing up to a guy—it was about beating anything that thought it could take you down.” I play a thread of melody and then sing the next line:“I’m gonna show you, baby, that a woman can be tough.”
With a strong chord I finish. “You know,” I say, as if this thought has just occurred to me, instead of being a lesson I’ve planned all along, “the thing about lyrics is that they work really well when they connect personally to the musician—or the listener.” I start playing the same melody again, but this time I improvise the words:
Didn’t you ever feel like you were all alone, well yeah,
And didn’t you ever feel that you were on your own.
Honey, you know you do.
Each time you tell yourself that you’re out of luck
You wonder how you ever, ever got so stuck.
I want you to listen, listen, listen, listen already
Gotta know that I am ready to help you, Lucy.
Gonna show you I am ready to help you, Lucy—
Just as I am beginning to really rock out, Lucy snorts. “That is the lamest crap I’ve ever heard,” she murmurs.
“Maybe you want to take a stab at it,” I suggest, and I put the guitar down and reach for a pad and a pen instead. I write out the lyrics mad lib style, leaving gaps and spaces where Lucy can instead substitute her own thoughts and feelings.
