“Are you mad at me?” I asked when I joined her in line, surprised that she would walk off without even a “hey” to get my attention.
She looked ahead and didn’t answer. Again she followed along with the line as though I wasn’t there. We boarded the train on a middle row, one she had selected without asking me for any input. When I slid in next to her, she jerked her hand away from my body like I had tried to touch it.
“Okay, seriously,” I said with as much force as I could muster. “Knock off your shit and talk to me.”
A woman in front of me with two small, grimy children sitting on either side of her whipped her head around and glared. I apologized, feeling heat web across my cheeks. Suddenly I just wanted to get off the creaky wooden bench seating of the train and leave the zoo. The whole trip felt ridiculously wholesome in the midst of all this harassment and anger.
Just as suddenly as she shut down, she turned to me, her face stormy and her jaw clenched. I looked down and noticed that she was gripping the side of the bench so tightly her knuckles were bright white. It was like all the aggression and frustration she had inside her was being channeled into the side of the train car.
A crackly announcement came over the speakers that were positioned overhead and, though I saw her mouth moving, I missed what she was saying. For half a second I considered pretending I had heard because her expression told me that I wasn’t in store for a happy conversation. I could have kicked myself for being in such a hurry to convince her to talk to me. Mustering my courage, I asked her to repeat herself and she did, eyes rolled up at the red steel roof.
“This is why I can’t be gay,” she said. “Don’t you think I would like to just live my life like you, walking around school with my arm threaded through some girl’s arm as we saunter around in this fantasy bubble you think we live in where homophobia is our history instead of the present?”
My eyes welled up with tears and my cheeks stung so much that it felt as if the emotional slap I’d just been given was a real one. Fantasy bubble? Is that how she saw me, as some sheltered lesbian who didn’t know there was hate in the world? I knew there was hate in the world. I watched the news and knew about Kim Davis, and how an hour drive away from my front door she had disobeyed the Supreme Court and refused to grant marriage licenses to gay couples. I knew about the denial of wedding cakes, the comments people made in public places, the looks given through slit eyes. I knew about the death threats, the bullying, the suicides, and even the murders. I knew what we, as a community faced—I just hadn’t experienced it firsthand. With the back of my hand stiff, I wiped the tears away in a gesture so violent I accidentally elbowed Lennox in the chest. I didn’t even apologize as the anger welled up inside of me.
“Don’t tell me you can’t be gay because the world is too ugly, Lennox,” I hissed through clinched teeth. The woman from before turned around in her seat as if on cue, her eyes shooting daggers at my face.
“Will you two please change your conversation? I have children here who don’t need to hear ‘gay this’ and ‘gay that,” she muttered, and I could tell she was trying not to draw attention to herself as she scolded us.
In my mind, I cursed her with every expletive I could conjure. In terms of potential harassment, this petite, harried looking mom with bags under her eyes and a stained, oversized sweatshirt was a pretty mild threat, but the timing of the whole thing couldn’t possibly be worse. If it wasn’t for the context of her comments, I wouldn’t have batted an eye before shutting down her hate speech with an exercise of my own first amendment rights, but as it was, this was turning out to be the opposite of the day with Lennox I had envisioned. We were two for zero and going downwards fast.
Then suddenly it happened. As quickly as the dark cloud had settled upon us, God smiled at us and the clouds lifted. An elderly lady, the only other person sharing our row, leaned over to join the discussion.
“It’s not contagious, you know, your kids won’t catch gay from hearing these two girls exchange the word.”
With a sputter that vibrated her two narrow lips, the mom shook her head at us. “That’s hardly the point. They’re just kids, they don’t know what that means.”
The look that crossed the older lady’s face in that moment was priceless. I wish I could really describe it, but the best I could do would be to say it was kind of like that dog meme where the dog is all wrinkly, but you can tell he’s very no-nonsense. She looked like that, with her brows furrowed and her mouth pulled down in a frown.
“If you don’t want to explain simple things like word definitions to your kids, maybe you should just keep them home,” she said firmly. With a flip of her hand, she ended the conversation in a shooing manner that expressed that she wouldn’t be too happy to hear another response. With a hand over my mouth, I bit the inside of my cheek to suppress the shit eating grin that was fighting me to get out.
Red faced and shamed, the woman whipped her head back around with another audible huff. I was left trying to digest what had easily been the most awkward two minutes of my life and the only thing out of the whole interaction that I was sure of was that I had never in my life wanted to hug anyone as much as I wanted to hug the old woman sitting to my right on that zoo train. Instead, I simply turned and thanked her. She smiled at me before reaching over and giving my hand a squeeze, her cracked, age skin softer than it looked against my own.
“Don’t you worry, baby. Don’t you worry about their hate. That makes them something evil, not you.” She gave my hand one last firm squeeze before releasing it. “It doesn’t change anything about you.”
I didn’t want to look at Lennox and see her inevitably blank face staring ahead, but I couldn’t help a quick peek at her. To my shock, a small tear was leaking from the corner of her eye and she wasn’t making any moves to wipe it away. Still, she didn’t speak. She made no gestures, no moves to acknowledge that what had just taken place between me, the mom, and the elderly woman had involved her in any way. I didn’t know how to talk to someone with that capacity to just shut herself off, so I said nothing. We ended our zoo trip early and headed towards the parking lot.
Right before we passed the gates, I froze. There was a sudden fullness in my chest and I felt panicky, like if we didn’t resolve something before this trip was over, that would be it. There would never be any mending our friendship and this connection I felt to her, this sudden, fierce bond that I so needed in my life, would just be gone.
I grabbed the sleeve of her hoodie. “I’m so sorry for the way today went.”
She flinched away from me. “Not your fault,” she responded, but the low grumble in her voice told me that she didn’t mean even one of those three words. She started to walk away, but I called her back and she slowly turned around to face me. The edges of her eyes were lined in red and I wondered if she had cried again without me noticing as I’d struggled to meet her pace back towards the entrance of the park.
“What do you need to say so badly that it can’t wait until we are in the car?” she asked, yanking up her hood.
I bit my lip, unsure how to answer. There wasn’t any one thing I needed to say; it was something I needed to do. I needed to find a way to stop the gap that cracked between us from turning into a chasm. I needed to fix things, but it was pretty clear she wasn’t receptive to mending our friendship right then, so even though it made my legs feel heavy and my heart sick to do it, I shook my head and resumed the trudging walk back to the car.