Chapter 21 #2
The answer was yes. Obviously, I’d wondered who I had to be for Eleanor to want me to be hers and say so.
I’d kissed the mirror with my eyes open to try to see myself from the other side, but it’s hard to make sense of your face with your nose to the glass.
I’d kissed my inner arm many different ways to try to identify the best feeling, in case Eleanor gave me the chance to try again.
I didn’t want to be or act like someone other than myself, but I didn’t actually know yet who I was in the context of wanting another person. Desire makes us new to ourselves.
“Afterward, I thought she’d want to”—I paused, then went on—“claim me.” I didn’t want to ask my mom out loud what she thought I should do next, but then, I rarely needed to ask her a question for her to offer me the answer.
“Changing your relationship with Eleanor risks what you have with her and Margaret,” she said.
“It just does. All love is a risk. You risk who you’d be in its absence.
I guess I don’t feel ready for you to take risks.
I don’t want you to risk anything. I don’t know if I ever will.
But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t.
Eleanor is very protective of herself. She’s skeptical.
She didn’t really believe you and Margaret were her friends for at least a year after she began coming over here. Maybe she hasn’t known how to proceed.”
I asked her what she meant. She smoothed the patterned fabric of her nightgown across her thighs.
“None of you have any idea how to be with another person other than as a friend or a family member. If there’s a way you want Eleanor to treat you, then you should show her what that is.
If she can’t or won’t do it, then you have a problem.
But there’s always the possibility that she just doesn’t know what else to do. ”
—
Though my mom said it was alright I hadn’t told Margaret, her permission didn’t make me feel better.
In fact, over the next few hours, it began to make me feel worse.
It pulled toward the surface certain problems whose shape and weight I’d felt and frightened me.
I went for a walk. The air was heavy, laden with the promise of rain.
I welcomed the humid weather because I liked to feel held closely by the atmosphere.
I walked repeatedly around my own block and the blocks most adjacent.
When had I chosen not to tell Margaret? I thought I was waiting—for confirmation from Eleanor, for an opening from Margaret.
I thought the time that was passing didn’t count as more and more days together, days in each other’s digital and physical presence, in which I chose not to tell her this essential piece of information.
I hadn’t considered the decision made because it was a decision that undermined my sense of self, which for many years had been grounded in my relationship with Margaret and my faith in its total intimacy, the limits of which had only ever been imposed by her, not by me, or at least so it had seemed.
I approached a group of boys wielding lawn trimmers, long rods with rotating blades at the end.
They walked up and down the tree lawns wearing their landscaping company–branded T-shirts, raising verdant clouds of cut grass.
The whir of the blades put me at ease, the familiar summer sound layered over the thrum of cars passing and birds calling, the undercurrent of insects more audible in anticipation of rain.
The boys would pause their machines to let me pass if I remained on their side of the sidewalk, so I crossed the street.
Margaret and I had hardly been alone together all summer until the night of the fair.
No sleepovers just the two of us, not even any long conversations by ourselves on her porch.
All that time and she hadn’t asked me to explain myself, the way I usually insisted she fill in her own blanks once I became aware of them, before they took up too much space between us.
Maybe once I’d started keeping the secret, she’d wanted to see how deep I’d dig the hole.
Maybe she’d enjoyed the theatricality of having been wronged.
Maybe she’d still wanted to give me the chance to tell her unprompted, and then I never did, not for weeks and weeks, not even in that booth having dinner, the two of us finally alone together and having what felt like a real conversation.
Maybe she’d looked at me from across the table and waited for me to tell on myself, the way I always did, only to find that still I held my tongue.
I passed the boys with their lawn blades again, careful to cross the street.
The smell of cut grass hung so heavy in the humid air it felt like I was breathing the vaporized lawns of the neighborhood into my lungs.
Perspiration slid down my temples, between my breasts, behind my knees.
Feeling porous and alive, I kept walking, beginning the circuit away from my house again, not yet done, not yet allowing myself to retreat.
The problem with talking to Margaret about Eleanor was that I’d have to use words, aloud.
I didn’t want to, and I didn’t know how.
Not the way Margaret talked to me about the boys she’d kissed.
Not the way we always talked about everyone else on earth to each other, as though they were merely figures, as though they were representatives of themselves instead of people in their own right, as though Margaret and I were the only ones who were real.
Eleanor becoming our other best friend three years prior had complicated this dynamic with Margaret only somewhat.
We loved and respected her. We treated our friendship with her as equal to our own, but also we didn’t.
In our heart of hearts, it mattered that she hadn’t been there when we were children.
She didn’t borrow our clothes. She didn’t sit around naked or get into the shower with us, a hesitance I now began to understand in a different light.
This unspoken hierarchy of closeness had never led to a real impasse between the three of us because Eleanor held herself at a distance and because treating Eleanor as our additional best friend didn’t challenge or impede the ways in which we’d always loved each other.
But the way I felt about Eleanor putting her tongue into my mouth might.
I’d thought Eleanor was the one afraid of changing our friendship dynamic, but she’d told Margaret about kissing me, right away, and I hadn’t.
All love is a risk, my mom said. I hadn’t allowed myself to contemplate how loving Eleanor might change loving Margaret, how I would manage what I owed to both of them, what I wanted to owe, to give, when I’d never done it before and when I had so little evidence of how girls could love each other, when I’d spent years thinking Haruka and Michiru were cousins, when Nayan was the first woman I’d met with a wife, and her wife hadn’t even been there.
I realized I had to start asking these questions I’d withheld from myself, because I wanted to date Eleanor, and I didn’t know how.
I returned home, sweaty and smelling like myself. I put away dishes and swept the kitchen floor before ascending to my bedroom. I wanted my mom to feel justified in leaving me alone. I turned off my phone and read about sexually active fairies on my laptop.
Ginevra, having recently instituted complete peace and the ready availability of healthcare for her people, decided to leave her woodland territory for a brief trip.
She wanted to visit one of her best friends and closest neighbors, Amphisbaena.
She packed several diaphanous nightgowns, her pearl wand, and a special gift for her friend.
Whenever she left to pay such a visit, she found herself inevitably warned off by her people, even begged by them not to leave.
“Amphisbaena is known to be violent,” her advisers pointed out.
“But she is not known to be treacherous,” Ginevra countered. “She is only known to be capable of treachery, and the same could be said of any of you.”
“But regardless of ill intent, we cannot hurt you,” the advisers reasoned, for none of them possessed magic of Ginevra’s ilk.
“Well, perhaps that is why I find Amphisbaena such an essential friend,” Ginevra responded, and then flew off on lilac wing.
The reunited friends gallivanted through the stately gardens of Amphisbaena’s court, speaking of all that had passed with each of them since their last meeting.
Amphisbaena admitted that in a fit of disturbance she had cut off the hand of one of her lovers.
She was still waiting for it to finish growing back.
“Oh, my dear,” Ginevra said. “You must feel terrible. I hate whenever I accidentally dismember one of my loved ones on account of a mood. But I’ve brought something that will cheer you up.”
She withdrew from her sack a scoop of very small beadlike blue mushrooms, native to her forest, and stuck them to the blades of Amphisbaena’s collarbone. Luminescent blue tendrils began to extend from the mushrooms like veins across her chest.
“Stop!” Amphisbaena’s advisers cried, as they leapt from their hiding place in a bush. They clamored to remove the glowing fungi from her body, but the mushrooms clung to her skin. The advisers turned with their shaking weapons raised at Ginevra.
“Oh, it’s fine,” she said, and stuck a handful of the mushrooms onto her own chest.
Their pale-blue fire spread until both Ginevra’s and Amphisbaena’s whole bodies glowed through their sheer nightgowns, their nipples dark blue and luminescent against the new night. Several of the advisers swooned to see their beauty and had to be recovered.
“I brought enough for all of us,” Ginevra said.
And so there was a great revelry that night, the whole court dancing glow-in-the-dark through the gardens. In the morning, Ginevra and Amphisbaena celebrated their reunion by making excellent shared use of Ginevra’s new pearl wand and then going to sleep for a month.
I pushed the hot computer off my stomach and writhed against my blanket until I found some half relief. Then I read the story again. At least I managed for a stretch not to think beyond these very narrow parameters.
Several hours later, my mom knocked on my door.
“Forget about me please,” I said.
When I heard her feet retreating, I called, “I love you.”