"You know, if you never learn to flirt you will die alone with a thousand cats who all have middle names. The National Guard will have to come in to clear away the sea of books so someone can get to your body. They will find you buried under the Steinbeck."
The Organs and Concord to Seas concert at Avenue 209 was just starting up when the redhead sat down next to me. She plopped a huge tote down on the table, rummaged around inside, and pulled out paper and a pen. She introduced herself, but I couldn't hear her name over the music. I introduced myself. I don't think she heard me, either. She bent over the paper and started writing in huge, slanting loops; I went back to my book.
Hey, said the little voice in my head. There's a pretty redhead sitting next to you. Any self-respecting single lesbian on the planet would take full advantage of that.
I studied the redhead out of the corner of my eye. Her skin was milk-pale, her arms a mass of freckles. She had a fleur-de-lis tattoo on her bicep. Her green eyes were rimmed carefully with mascara.
Say something to her, you half-wit.
I waited for a lull in the music. "This is a great place to write." I offered. She looked at me blankly, asked if I knew the date. Scrawled my answer at the top of her paper. Again, I turned to my book.
You completely suck as a conversationalist. You're absolutely hopeless; you know that, right? Next time you score a chick's number, it'll be the director of your assisted living facility.
Screw off.
Just saying.
Fact: I love to talk. I can talk a thousand 3-point vocab words a minute if you let me. I can talk the bark off a tree and the hide off a squirrel. But when it comes to women, I become dumb as a stump. "Dogs need walking," was my crowning-glory line, the one I spouted off to a woman I had a crush on a few summers ago when I saw her in the alley with her dachshund on a leash. I haven't lived it down yet. My attempts at flirting are either pathetically obvious or too veiled to be noticed. I would love to find Happy Medium Land, but I'm pretty sure by now that no such place exists. I ran through my options:
Offer to buy her a coffee. Too obvious.
Ask her what she's writing. Too nosy.
Ask if you can bum one of her cigarettes. You stopped smoking three years ago.
Keep reading and hope she likes intellectuals. Okay.
For the billionth time in my life, I sat wishing I was still the deliciously curvy little 130-pound walking lady-slayer with the hair to her butt that I said farewell to at nineteen. I thought I was ugly then. I'm dying to get back there now. Not that I was slaying ladies then, either. Then, I was walking a path in the carpet of my bedroom and worrying myself dumb over the idea that I might be gay. Then, I spent a night tangled on my stupid college-issue plastic mattress with a man who did not attract or arouse me because I was afraid of the alternative. Realizing my own lesbianism was an experience kind of like being slammed into by a freight train while sitting on the tracks in a car that won't start. It took my middle-class, bread-and-butter world of carefully entrenched religious patriarchy, turned it upside down, and shook it till everything fell out. I had no idea what to do with all the bits and pieces.
It's funny: when I realized I was attracted to women, I started seeing Sapphic goddesses everywhere. Maybe that's normal. I have no idea. All I knew was that suddenly, I was surrounded by such an array of desirable women that my brain fogged up and I checked off the planet for a little while. That semester I had a Classic Lit class, and it's a good thing my reading comprehension was good, because I spent too much time staring at theprofessor to actually absorb anything she had to say. All the lusting I had had neither the time nor the inclination to do earlier in my adolescence caught up with me, grabbed me by both hands, and dragged me along with it to places I was afraid to go. In high school, I pretended to like boys because all my friends did. I put posters of Leonardo DiCaprio on my walls because my friends had posters of boys on their walls, and it was "normal" and therefore I copied it. But I didn't understand it. I hadn't quite articulated the fact that I might like girls (given my sheltered upbringing, I was only half-aware that such a like even existed,) but I knew that whatever my friends felt for boys was not something I felt. I couldn't have cared less. A boy took me to the Prom my senior year and I genuinely liked him, but when it came to intimacy, I felt wrong in my own skin. Something was off. Something about me was different.
And so began the amusement park ride that was a small-town girl from a backwoods church and Bible-quoting parents arriving at the gates of homosexuality. These days, I'm cool with it. I'm comfortable in my own mind and with my own theologies, and I couldn't imagine being anyone other than the woman I am. If you want to know whether or not I am gay, I will tell you. If you don't want to know whether or not I'm gay, I will tell you. Then, I was imagining gruesome scenes from Dante's Inferno and the destruction of Sodom. I was in moral Hell. I thought for sure that if anyone found out I'd be cast out of respectable society and sentenced to wander the earth with "Lesbian" tattooed on my forehead. It got easier when I moved away. Pennsylvania was a chance to start over, fresh and clean. I began to realize that I could stop living for my parents and my grandparents and my aunts and my uncles and my preacher and everyone else and start living for myself: after all, no one but Tiffany can make peace with Tiffany before she closes her eyes at night. I've learned to find contentment in lesbianism. I know I could completely shock myself and fall in love with a man tomorrow -- nothing is ever completely out of the question; sexuality is a pendulum, etc, etc -- but I'm not trying to force that to happen anymore. I'll be quite fine and perfectly happy if it doesn't: to me, loving a woman is as natural as breathing. It's the other side of the coin that feels wrong. If I could get over this little socially-gauche-idiot-savant-can't-flirt-to-save-her-life- bit and actually get a love life, I'd be peachy keen. Trust me: you guys will know when it happens. I'm seriously considering taking out a billboard the next time I get a date
Posting From Over the Rainbow,
Tif
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