Chapter 19 #2
“No way.” Ryan moved his hands to the tops of Simone’s shoulders.
“Whatever she’s trying to do, you are not going to let it get to you.
Remember in Whistler, when you told me I was a miserable gargoyle and you were a delightful fucking sunflower?
” Simone nodded weakly. “That is the attitude you’re going to bring to this brunch. ”
She sighed. “I don’t know if I have it in me.”
Ryan kissed her forehead, then whispered in her ear: “I do.”
She led him through the house to the family room.
Before her nieces came along, they would have used the formal living room, but Kathy didn’t want almost-four-year-old Cecilia or eight-month-old Phoebe going anywhere near her white couches.
Channeling as much VFE—Venus flytrap energy—as she could, she looped her arm through Ryan’s and marched through the archway.
Oh, lord.
There were garlands of rainbow flags taped to the ceiling; one giant rainbow flag draped over the coffee table; rainbow streamers hanging over the windows; and three sequined throw pillows on the sectional, which together spelled out LOVE IS LOVE.
Simone cleared her throat. Her brothers and sisters-in-law looked up from the floor, where they’d all been helping her nieces solve a puzzle.
Matt and Jason both had the same ginger curls as Simone, which Matt kept short and Jason wore in a medium-length flow, parted down the middle.
“Everyone, this is my boyfriend, Ryan,” she announced.
“Ryan, this is Matt; his wife, Megan; Jason; his wife, Callie; and those are my nieces, Cecilia and Phoebe—they’re Matt and Megan’s daughters. ”
Matt got to his feet and walked over, Jason following closely behind. “Nice to meet you, man,” Matt said.
Ryan shook hands with her brothers and sisters-in-law—none of whom wore T-shirts that proclaimed them a PROUD anything.
Matt must have noticed the way Simone was eyeing the sequined pillows. “For the record, I told Mom that all this Pride stuff was a little over-the-top.”
“Not that we’re anti-Pride,” Megan chimed in.
“It just seemed like it might be whiplash after the way she first reacted,” Matt said.
Not only was it whiplash, but there was something hollow about it, too.
Her brothers and their wives had sent her sweet, supportive texts in the wake of her coming-out post. Matt had even had that nice conversation with her on the drive up to Whistler.
Those things meant more to Simone than T-shirts and sequined pillows.
“I just don’t get where it’s all coming from,” she confided in the group. “What made her go from one end of the spectrum to…” She gestured around at the cheesily decorated family room.
Her brothers looked at each other and shook their heads. Jason shrugged. “Better late than never, though, right?”
SIMONE WASN’T SURE. SHE HATED THE thought, but some twisted part of her—one she could recognize was steeped in privilege—wished her mother had been spewing homophobic nonsense.
At least then Simone would have felt queer in her mother’s eyes.
Now, sitting next to her straight boyfriend at the dining room table, she just felt like rain on Kathy’s Pride parade.
“So, how’d the two of you meet?” George asked.
Simone and Ryan took turns telling a G-rated version of the story as they passed around quiche, corn muffins, salad, and roasted vegetables.
They explained how they’d gotten off on the wrong foot, only to end up spending a week together in Whistler.
They talked about their guide group; about Simone dropping her phone off a chairlift; about Ryan breaking it down at drag bingo.
Eventually, Ryan took Simone’s hand and told her family how he’d asked her to be his girlfriend.
While Megan and Callie swooned, Simone’s mother dabbed at the corners of her downturned mouth with a napkin. “Well, darling, it’s lovely to see you in such a nice relationship. I just wish I could have had a heads-up before I went and bought all these decorations!”
Simone’s vision went blurry, and she looked at her plate, tried to focus on the half-eaten food.
“I’m sorry,” she said, because that was what she’d always said when other people were upset—until she’d met Ryan, and she’d realized how good it felt to stand up for herself.
At the moment, under her mother’s withering gaze, she couldn’t remember how to do that.
But then Ryan stepped in. “What do you wish you had a heads-up about?”
Simone looked up in time to see her mother arching her eyebrows. Kathy clearly hadn’t been prepared to be challenged. “What I meant,” Kathy said slowly, “is that it sounds like Simone has decided she’s going to be straight now.”
Simone sank so low in her chair that she could have slid right under the table, but Ryan sat up even taller. “Simone’s still bi.”
“But now she has a boyfriend.”
“So?”
“So she’s chosen men, hasn’t she?”
Then Matt and Jason piped up.
“She doesn’t have to ‘choose’ anything.”
“Yeah, that’s not how it works, Mom.”
Simone had never loved her brothers as much as she did right now. She’d never loved Ryan as much as she did right now. Her heart was a red balloon inflating with air…
… until it was punctured by her mother’s next words.
“Be that as it may, if I were the one who’d just come out in such a public way, I’d care about the way things looked.”
Simone was flailing and falling at the same time—which perhaps explained why she made the split-second decision to defensively blurt out: “Ryan has lesbian moms!”
Everyone fell silent, presumably as they tried to work out what Ryan’s lesbian moms had to do with Simone’s bisexuality.
The answer, of course, was nothing; but for some reason, Simone had still felt the need to scream it out of nowhere, and now her boyfriend was looking at her with a mix of bewilderment and horror.
“Why don’t I get started on these dishes?” George suggested.
Simone was on fire with shame. She needed to get as far as humanly possible from this cursed conversation, so she jumped to her feet. “I’ll help, Dad.”
They gathered the empty plates, Simone making it her mission not to make eye contact with Ryan. In the kitchen, George washed and Simone dried, while in the dining room, Kathy could be heard saying: “Two mothers? How fascinating. Tell me about that.”
“Sorry your mother was giving you a hard time in there,” George muttered. “For the record, I don’t care who you date, as long as you’re happy.”
Would have been nice if you’d said so in the moment, Simone thought bitterly, but she knew George would never be so bold.
She’d gotten her aversion to conflict from someone, and it certainly hadn’t been Kathy.
Instead, Simone asked her father: “Why’s Mom suddenly so obsessed with having a queer daughter? ”
“Well, let’s see. I think it might have had something to do with some neighbors of ours down in Florida—the Murrays.”
Ah. Simone had heard plenty about the Murrays, a wealthy family from Manhattan who’d recently purchased a condo in Naples in the same gated community as her parents.
Her mother had referred to the Murrays as “new friends of ours,” but Simone was pretty sure that Kathy saw the Murray family matriarch, Joan, as more of a rival than an ally.
She hadn’t met the Murrays when she was in Florida over the holidays, but she’d felt their presence in her mother’s offhand comments: about how owning a speedboat, like the Murrays did, would be “more trouble than it was worth”; how it was good that they didn’t own a golf cart, either, because Kathy liked to get her steps in, and she was probably in better shape than Joan.
“What happened with the Murrays?” Simone asked warily.
“Their kids were down visiting in February, and we spent a bit of time with the whole family. They have a son and a daughter around your age, and the son is, uh…” He gestured at the nearest rainbow flag.
“Queer?”
“Yes.” In true Whitaker fashion, his ears had turned red. “He brought his, uh—his husband.” The redness deepened.
Simone was beginning to sense what was going on here. Kathy might not have had a speedboat, or even a golf cart, but she did have a queer child to rival the Murrays’.
And then Simone had shown up with Ryan, and Kathy had presumably wondered what good it was having a queer daughter if the whole world saw her as straight.
If I were the one who’d just come out in such a public way, I’d care about the way things looked.
Simone imagined what Lucy would say if she were here.
She’d probably accuse Kathy of performative allyship, a phrase Simone had learned from her Rainbow Museum colleagues.
Kathy had shelled out for T-shirts and decorations, but she hadn’t even learned what bisexuality meant.
Case in point, she seemed to think you were only bi until you decided what you really were—that bisexuality was just a stepping stone on the way to being gay or straight.
Simone wasn’t gay, and she wasn’t straight, either. But even though she logically knew that her mother was wrong, there was still a vulnerable little girl inside her—one who trembled in the wings before her dance recital, afraid to go onstage, but even more afraid to disappoint her mother.
When Simone reentered the dining room, Ryan was explaining to Kathy that yes, he knew the identity of the man who’d donated sperm to his mothers, and in fact, they still caught up once a year around Ryan’s birthday, but no, he didn’t think of the man as his “father,” nor did the man think of Ryan as his “son.” It seemed like an awfully invasive line of questioning between people who’d just met.
But Ryan was still gamely responding to Kathy, and Kathy was nodding, wide-eyed, like he was the most fascinating person she’d ever encountered, so Simone didn’t interrupt them as she returned to her seat.
But when she put a hand on Ryan’s knee, he tensed. She took it away.