you, not realizing the search was useless.
Lovers don’t meet somewhere along the way.
They’re in one another’s souls from the beginning.
When she is through, I can hear my mother sniffling. I pull out of my mind the ribbon of words I’ve memorized for Vanessa, an E. E. Cummings poem with syllables full of music.
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet)i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
There are rings, and we are both crying, and laughing.
“Vanessa and Zoe,” the minister says, “may you avoid splits and always play a perfect game. As you’ve pledged in this ceremony, in front of family and friends, to be partners for life, I can only say what’s been said thousands of times before, at thousands of weddings . . .”
Vanessa and I both grin. It took us a long time to figure out how to end our ceremony. You can’t very well sayI now pronounce you husband and wife.By the same token,I now pronounce you partnerssounds somehow lesser-than, not a true marriage.
Our minister smiles at us.
“Zoe? Vanessa?” she says. “You may kiss the bride.”
Just in case you aren’t sure that the Highlands Inn is lesbian-friendly after you call its phone number (877-LES-B-INN), there is a row of Adirondack chairs in all the colors of the rainbow set on a hilltop. It hasn’t escaped my sense of irony that this little corner of open-minded paradise is set in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, that maybe this sleepy namesake town at the edge of the White Mountains could be the birthplace of a new way of thinking.
After our wedding ceremony—which may have been the only ceremony in the world that has included both a chocolate–Grand Marnier ganache cake with real gold leafanda midnight game of cosmic bowling in the dark—Vanessa and I wait out the storm to drive to our honeymoon destination. We have plans to cross-country ski, to go antiquing. But we spend nearly the first twenty-four hours of our honeymoon in our room—not fooling around, although there are lovely interludes of just that. Instead, we sit in front of the fireplace, drinking the champagne the inn owner has given us, and we talk. It seems impossible to me that we haven’t exhausted our stories, but each one unfolds into another. I tell Vanessa things I have never even told my mother: about what my father looked like the morning he died; how I’d stolen his deodorant from the bathroom and kept it hidden in my underwear drawer for the next few years so that, when I needed his smell for comfort, I’d have it. I tell her how, five years ago, I found a bottle of gin in the toilet tank and I threw it out but never told Max I’d stumbled across it, as if not speaking of it would mean it hadn’t really happened.
I sing the alphabet for her, backward.
And in return, Vanessa tells me about her first year of school counseling, about a sixth grader who confessed that her father was raping her, who ultimately was moved out of the school and the state by the same father, and who—periodically—Vanessa still tries to Google to see if she survived. She tells me about how, when she buried her mother, there was still a bitter, hard nut in her heart that hated this woman for never accepting Vanessa the way she was.
She tells me about the one and only time she tried pot in college, and wound up eating an entire large pepperoni pizza and a loaf of bread.
She tells me that she used to have nightmares about dying alone on the floor of her living room, and it being weeks before some neighbor noticed she hadn’t left the house.
She tells me that her first pet was a hamster, which escaped in the middle of the night and ran into the radiator vent and was never seen again.
Sometimes, when we’re talking, my head is on her shoulder. Sometimes her arms are around me. Sometimes we are at opposite ends of a couch, our legs tangled. When Vanessa had first given me the brochure for this place, I had balked—did we have to hide out with the other quarantined lesbian couples during our honeymoon? Why couldn’t we just go to New York City, or the Poconos, or Paris, like any other newlyweds?
“Well,” Vanessa had said, “we could. But there wewouldn’tbe like any other newlyweds.”
Here, weare.Here, no one bats an eye if we’re holding hands or checking into a room with a queen-size bed. We take a few excursions—to the Mount Washington Hotel for dinner, and to a movie theater—and each time we leave the grounds of this inn, I find us automatically putting a foot of space between us. And yet, the minute we come back home, we are glued at the hip.
“It’s like tracking,” Vanessa says, when we are sitting in the inn’s dining room at a breakfast table one morning, watching a squirrel dance across a lip of ice on a stone wall. “I nearly got kicked out of graduate school for writing a paper that advocated separating students by ability. But you know what? Ask a kid who’s struggling in math if he likes being in a mixed-level class, and he’ll tell you he feels like a moron. Ask the math genius if he likes being in a mixed-level class, and he’ll tell you he’s sick of doing all the work during group projects. Sometimes, it’s better to sort like with like.”
I glance at her. “Careful, Ness. If GLAAD could hear you now, they’d strip you of your rainbow status.”
