“Have you been keeping up with your schoolwork?” she asked, checking out the pristine lawn and pretty flowers as she talked.
“Not really,” I admitted. “I go to the library a lot, but mostly I read whatever I feel like. I am teaching myself French, though,” I added.
“French?” Frowning, she turned back to me.
“You didn’t tell me that,” said Jillian with a surprised grin. “I could have helped. J’adore le français,” she said, with the requisite guttural pronunciations.
I saw my mom tighten her mouth, so I changed the subject. “I bought a dress,” I said. “Want to see it?”
She looked wounded. Too late, I reflected that for years she had tried to get me to buy a dress of my own accord—with no success whatever. And now, here, I’d finally done it. Without her.
The afternoon wasn’t going well.
Julie came out, as fresh as a breeze of summer flowers, carrying glasses of lemonade on a tray. She was such a caretaker, it was almost funny, a real Wilma Flintstone. Not that Jillian was flat-footed Fred to her Wilma, just that Julie was so concerned with keeping things running clean and smooth. I envied her easy way with both housekeeping and people. Remembering how she effortlessly handled Nathan in his caveman wake-up mode, I admired once again her ability to smooth people’s feathers as she graciously handed my mom her glass of lemonade, doing a little dip at the knees to keep the tray steady.
“Oh, look at you with your bunny dip,” Jillian teased her.
I was confused. Bunny? Seeing my confusion, Jillian explained. “Julie used to be a waitress in Toronto for a while at this gentleman’s club—”
“Read: strip club,” interjected Julie.
“—and they taught her how to do something called the ‘bunny dip’ so she could serve drinks without bending over and showing her cleavage,” Jillian said.
“Yeah, showing cleavage was strictly reserved for the girls on the poles,” Julie joked.
“The move was invented by the Playboy Bunnies, for their club,” Jillian explained.
My mother was less and less amused as the moments ticked by. “You worked in a strip club?” She made it sound like Julie had made a living selling crack outside a kindergarten or something.
“It was only for a couple of months, when I was an undergrad,” Julie said. I liked how she said it without tension, as if there was nothing to be ashamed about. As if it was just a job.
Mom’s top lip was curling farther and farther into a sneer. “Doesn’t sound like a great place for a woman to work,” she said.
“Actually,” Julie replied, “it wasn’t bad at all. Management was very strict about customers not being able to touch the employees. And the tips were great,” she threw in with a wink.
As fascinated as I was by the idea of strip clubs and bunny dips, I was anxious to get to the meat of the discussion. So was my mother, apparently, as she cut to the chase first.
“Jillian, it’s time for this child to come home with me.”
There were tears in my eyes.
I couldn’t help it. I was sad, angry, frustrated, but mostly horrified at the thought of going home. I just wasn’t ready yet to face the same old places where nobody cared about me, the school where I didn’t feel like I belonged. In any case, hardly anybody tried to actually teach us anything there; they had given up on us before we had even started. As a school clerk herself, my mother ought to have known that but she didn’t seem to care much whether I did well or didn’t; whether the school I went to was good, bad, or indifferent; whether the kids I sat next to in class were going to grow up to be pharmacists or drug dealers. If she cared, she did an awful lot not to show it. If she cared, she was awfully good at pretending otherwise.
It wasn’t just the school. I didn’t hate it all the time; it was okay some days. It wasn’t anything specific that made me unhappy there. The teasing didn’t happen all the time, and mostly the other kids left me alone. And it wasn’t really my mother. It was the whole country—the smallness of it—that seemed to close in on me sometimes. I could understand why some people like Jillian couldn’t really be comfortable living in a small place like that, where to be gay or lesbian or whatever they wanted was a shameful secret you could hint at but never discuss, not openly. So to people at home, Jillian was a spinster. In fact, she was as good as married to Julie, a woman who was her life partner, with whom she kept a nice house, and who loved Jillian as much as Jillian loved her. Home home was full of people like my mother who couldn’t separate a person from their sexual and domestic arrangements—which weren’t really their business anyway—and whose judgment was flawed regarding anything they couldn’t understand. “Different,” to my mom, meant “unacceptable.”
My eyes started leaking and I could feel my face getting hot and swollen as I tried to hold in my screaming, boiling rage and helplessness.
I wanted to tell my mother all these things, but I couldn’t. It was one of the things I had to work on in therapy, I guess, expressing the feelings I had bottled up inside of me. But that was for another day. Today, I just wanted to scream.
Jillian’s hand was cool around mine. She didn’t say anything but seemed to communicate through touch: It’s okay.
I took deep, gulping breaths as the tears rolled slowly down my hot face. “I don’t want to go home,” I said. “I just don’t.”
My mother was getting angrier by the second, especially after Jillian took my hand.
“Child, whether you like it or not, you are coming home with me when I leave. You have a week to resign yourself to the fact.”
I felt like I did the time I tried to hurt her with a knife. I wanted to injure her. I didn’t have a knife but I had my tongue.
“I hate you! I wish I had died when I took those pills, just so I wouldn’t have to live with you ever again!” I sobbed. And, jerking my hand from Jillian’s cool grasp, I ran to my room and locked the door.
A few minutes later I heard tapping on my door. From the light touch I knew it could only be Julie. My mother would have banged on the door with a clenched fist; Jillian would have tapped louder. But these taps sounded just like Julie: kind of delicate but not weak. “Muffin, open the door,” she called.
I was in the midst of my enraged tantrum and couldn’t move if I tried. Over the sobbing and screaming, I could hear her persistent knocking. After a while I had wound down enough to get up and open the door to her.
She didn’t look happy. “Hey. You going to be okay?”
I nodded, still gulping and weeping.