• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 526 0

twice. I used to rub my palm against the smooth skin on the back of Dan’s neck after he got his hair cut. I’d sit on his lap in his eating club’s common room and carry on conversations as if he were an anthropomorphized chair. I wasn’t wild about public displays of affection, but I wasn’t averse to a little hand-holding, an arm around a waist or over my shoulders, a kiss hello or goodbye. Kimmie and I didn’t do any of that. We couldn’t, without people labeling and judging . . . and even in a city as big as Manhattan, where there were plenty of gay men and women, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of publicly declaring that I was one of them. Given my long hair, my high heels, the skirts and blouses and makeup I wore to work, people gave me the benefit of the doubt. They gave it to Kimmie, too, I figured, if they stopped to think of her as sexual at all. With her clothes on, she still looked more like a little boy than a woman. With her clothes off . . . I gave a little shiver, thinking of it.

“You know I love you,” I said. My voice was low.

She touched my cheek. I felt myself tense. Women touch each other this way, I told myself. They do it all the time. But, out of the corner of my eye, I saw, or thought I saw, that the guys in ties were staring. They’d been joined by a construction worker in workboots and khaki pants white with drywall dust. He was holding a falafel folded in his hand, and he was definitely looking at us, staring like we were a porno movie that had just started playing, one that he could hardly wait to rewatch alone, in private.

I pulled away, faster than I’d meant to. Kimmie got to her feet. I stood up, reaching for her, wanting to touch her hair or her hand, barely managing to make contact with one bare shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She nodded, sighing. “Sure you are. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Is this what it’s going to be like, our whole life? Always hiding, always afraid someone’s going to see?”

I lowered my voice. “We’re not hiding. We’re just not, you know, taking out a billboard.”

“So are we just going to lie to everyone, about what we are? Tell everyone that we’re friends?”

Her cheeks were flushed. I wanted so badly to hold her . . . and I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. It was as if I were paralyzed, frozen with shame. Back at work, after the funeral, when people had asked what had happened with my father, I’d said, heart attack, and told myself that it was the truth. His heart had stopped. True, it had stopped after he’d done an unknown quantity of street drugs. But that was nobody’s business but mine.

I tried that line with Kimmie, hoping it would soothe her. “Look. You know I love you. But what we do, what we are to each other...”

“So we hide.” Her voice was flat. She bent and, with staccato jerks of her arms, began picking up our trash.

“So... I’ll see you tonight? At home?” Had I ever called her place “home” before? I didn’t know. But it felt like home. I could picture every part of it: the glass Coke bottle with a single gerbera daisy on the windowsill next to her futon; the two-burner stove that Kimmie wiped down every time after we’d cooked something, the yellow teapot and the cups from Chinatown that she kept on a shelf we’d hammered into the wall.

Kimmie picked up her backpack and slung it over her shoulders. She paused, and it felt like my heart stopped beating before she gave a curt nod and walked away.

I watched her go. The three guys with ties walked down the sidewalk, laughing. A cloud blew across the sun. The construction worker balled up his trash, tossed it in the bin, then came and sat beside me.

“Fight with your girlfriend?”

I turned, bracing myself for the leer, the salacious smile, but saw, instead, mild blue eyes that held nothing but sympathy. For a second, I wondered whether all the people I’d been afraid of, the ones I’d thought would judge me—my coworkers, my former classmates, my horrible boss—had someone in their lives, a cousin or a sister or a daughter, who was gay. Or maybe I was too optimistic. Maybe he’d just meant “girlfriend” in the most innocent way,