Chapter 18 #2
With a gasp, Anne twisted toward her, wrapped her arms around Claire’s waist and squeezed hard.
Neither of them moved for a long while.
Eventually, once Anne’s tears subsided, Claire spoke up. “You know I said ‘gay’ and not ‘gray,’ right? We’re not operating under some hilariously awkward misunderstanding where you burst into tears because you think I’ve finally realized you’ve been dyeing your hair for the last fifteen years?”
“I don’t dye my hair. I maintain the color nature gave me. And, yes.” She lifted her head, looking up at Claire. “I heard what you said.”
“So—?”
She pulled away and found the tissue again, wiping quickly at her wet cheeks. At least she’d had the foresight to wear just a light coating of mascara today. “It’s true. I’m a lesbian.”
“Ah,” Claire said. Then, still staring at Anne, she added, “all right. That is—God, that is definitely a thing you just said.” She took a deep breath and blinked a couple of times, then seemed to steady herself. “Well. Okay.”
“Okay?” Anne was startled. “Really, Claire? You mean that?”
Claire’s tiny smile seemed bigger, somehow, than it actually was. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. Dad’s a massive homosexual, I’m enormously bi, apparently you’re a huge lesbian, and, in totally unrelated news, this year, I would personally like to renew the Lowell family holiday card tradition.”
“You don’t—? Your sister, she thought this was too fast.” It hurt still, even though Anne and Brooke had talked it out. “She thought I should take more time. You don’t agree with her?”
“Mom.” Instead of reclaiming the seat behind her desk, Claire took the other client chair next to Anne. “Bee thinks going from platinum-blonde highlights to light-blonde highlights is a drastic change. Why do you care about her opinion?”
“For the same reason,” Anne said quietly, “that I care about your opinion. Because she’s my daughter. Because you’re my daughter. And at the end of the day, while I won’t let anyone else dictate how I live my life, I’d prefer not to go through this process without the full support of my children.”
“That makes sense.” Claire tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “You really want to know what I think?”
“I’m not asking for my health.”
“Okay. Speaking as a fellow queer person, and also as someone who recently threw away the best relationship she’s ever had because she couldn’t talk about her feelings—”
Anne felt a twinge of guilt. What she’d modeled for Claire, her daughter had learned well.
“—I can’t believe I’m about to say this, because clichés normally make me break out in hives, but look: Life’s too short to spend it not going after what’s right for you.
If this is who you are—and it sounds like you’re pretty positive it is—then you deserve to have what makes you happy. Don’t wait.”
“Claire.” Anne had the strange sense that her life was slowly expanding to fill the possibilities waiting for it. “Thank you. Very much.”
Claire looked away into the corner of the room and brushed a fast finger under her right eye.
“So. You’re a lesbian. Which you apparently realized at some point between lunch on Sunday and right now.
What happened? Did you binge-watch a bunch of L Word episodes?
Spend a lot of quality time at the Sherman Oaks Subaru dealership? Hook up with Sadie?”
Shit. “I,” Anne stammered, “I, um—”
Her face had to be turning bright red, the truth written all over it, because Claire was staring at her in absolute astonishment.
“I was kidding. I was totally—Mom? You’re not seriously telling me—fuck, you went for it? Oh shit, is that why she took the lead role in Escape from Topanga Canyon? Of course that’s why.”
Denial seemed entirely pointless. “I’d pick a different phrase than ‘hook up,’” Anne managed, “but let’s just say that isn’t entirely off the mark.”
“You’re telling me that you had”—Claire stage-whispered it—“sex with Sadie after straight up denying to Brooke and me that you were stupidly and completely in love with her? By the way, please know that if I could outsource asking this question to one of Xiomara’s prissy interns without risking a lawsuit, I would do it so fast, their little bowties would spin. ”
“Can a lesbian really ‘straight up’ deny something?” Anne asked before she could stop herself.
“Okay, cool, you’re a comedian now, in addition to being gay and super evasive. Focus, Mom. Or should I start calling you Mom One now?”
“We—had an encounter.” Anne’s cheeks boiled. “I guess it really depends on the definition of—”
“No, no, no, no, no. Stop right there. I am one hundred and fifty percent okay with not establishing in any detail whatsoever the exact parameters of the sex you did or didn’t have with Mom Two. What I would like to hear about is if, you know, things. If they’re okay.”
“Things?”
“Well, obviously, not everything; everything clearly isn’t okay; the entire world is a giant apocalyptic trash heap. I guess I’m referring to a very specific part of the world that I happen to care about in this particular moment. More than most of the other parts.”
“Claire, are you trying to ask me how I’m feeling?”
“Yes,” Claire said with relief. “That.”
Anne felt like an arm, weak and withered, coming out of a three-month cast; like unstopped nostrils after a bad cold. She felt like an ear with chronic tinnitus that suddenly, blissfully, heard nothing at all.
She looked at Claire, who glanced down again, and away. For once, her daughter’s jaw was relaxed, not stiff with defensiveness. In the soft curve of it, Anne suddenly saw the familiar shape of her little girl, the flicker of Claire’s disappeared face.
“How did you feel?” she asked quietly. “When you came out?”
Claire’s head snapped up, eyes big and bright. “When I—?”
“I’ve never asked you, have I?” Claire hadn’t exactly ‘come out’ to her family; during her second year at Parsons School of Design, she’d casually referenced a girlfriend in the third paragraph of an email and then refused to discuss it further. “What was it like for you?”
The stunned expression on Claire’s face was completely foreign. Had she been here all along, this daughter Anne was beginning to see?
“When I was little, maybe four or five years old,” Claire said after a moment, “I got stuck in the old crawlspace under the house. No one knew where I was. Ring a bell?”
Terror like that didn’t ever fully leave your bones. “Of course.”
“You found me eventually—I’m sure I was crying loud enough for you to follow the sound. But you couldn’t come in and pull me out because the crawlspace was too narrow. I had to do it myself. You talked me through it.”
It had felt like it took hours, days, months. Anne had somehow managed to stay calm.
“And once I finally got out, I stood up—I was filthy—and I started to spin around in a circle, with my arms out wide.”
“Yes,” Anne said slowly. “You yelled, ‘Watch me, I can do this now!’ I remember.”
“I spun and I spun and I spun, and I didn’t want to stop. Because I was so damn grateful to be free.” Claire’s voice caught. “You wanted to know how I felt when I came out? Like that. That’s how I felt.”
The breath in Anne’s lungs shuddered. Grief and gratitude, both equally strong, boiled beneath her skin. She’d never known. She’d never asked.
She’d asked now.
“Oh, Claire,” she choked out.
“Maybe it’s been like that for you, too.” Claire stared down at her lap. “Or maybe not. I mean, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know I liked girls. But you always thought you were straight. I mean, you did, right?”
There was no good way for Anne to explain what she’d realized over the past few days: how a crawlspace could look exactly like a life, how you could spend decades inside it going deeper, convincing yourself that the narrow walls were what you wanted.
So she said instead, “I did. It took me sixty years to figure it out. Which is why I don’t want to waste a single minute of the time I have left. ”
“You know she’ll come back, right? She can’t stay away from you.”
Anne started. Maybe something in her voice had given away her longing.
“Sadie loves you. We’ve established this. Remember? Last weekend? Around the same time you informed Bee and me that you were heterosexually interested in having a heterosexual Boston marriage with your heterosexual best friend, heterosexually?”
“She’s coming home on Sunday.” Now it was Anne’s turn to look at her lap. She didn’t want to share the rest of it. Couldn’t bear to tell her daughter that Sadie was frightened to commit to Anne. “Four more days.”
“See? Then you and Mom Two can live in sweet sapphic bliss alongside Dad and Arthur’s adorable gay joy, and I get some pretty fucking conclusive evidence for the gay-gene argument. Everyone wins.”
“And you’d have the mother you’ve always wanted.”
It fell out of Anne’s mouth easily, like something loose. As though she hadn’t acknowledged a deep pain that had scratched at her since the day she’d introduced Sadie to Claire. From the very start, Claire had been so easy with Sadie, so open. So unlike the way she’d always been with Anne.
But maybe—maybe in future, things could be different. Anne, with more, might finally have more to give.
“Yes, Mom,” Claire said after a while, so carefully. “You’re right. Because I’ll have you. But happier.”