802

A few weeks later Vanessa pulled Joanna over for another private conference.
“I need to tell you something,” she said, looking alarmed and apprehensive.
“What is it?” Joanna asked.
“Well, you see… my mother wants to visit.”
“Gee, Vanessa, that’s great! You haven’t told us much about your parents. It’ll be wonderful to get to know her.”
“Oh, Joanna! It may be a disaster!”
“What do you mean?”
“Just give it some thought! We’re already so used to how things are here that we’ve forgotten that outsiders might think us a bit–strange.”
Joanna paused for reflection. “Hmm, I guess you’re right. Why did she suddenly decide on a visit now anyway?”
“Well, I told her I had a boyfriend, and she got all excited. Naturally, I never told her about Jack–she’d totally flip if she knew I was with a guy so much older than me. And so I never told her I’d moved into this house. Now I had to let the cat out of the bag.”
“You mean about Jack–and me–and Eileen?”
“Oh, God, no! I just said I was living with ‘a real nice family.’ That’s how I put it. But when I mentioned that Sullivan–I’m claiming he’s my boyfriend–is living here, Mom got all quiet for a minute. I have a feeling she suspects something peculiar is going on.”
“I guess we’ll all have to be on our best behavior. Does she actually want to stay here?”
“I told her there was a spare bedroom for her.”
“Well, there’s a spare bedroom, but we don’t have a bed in it. I guess we could get one.”
“I think that would be best.”
Something in Vanessa’s manner gave Joanna some concern. “Is there anything else, dear?”
“Yeah,” Vanessa said, then trailed off. After a big sigh: “I think something’s troubling her–about her situation, not mine.”
“We’ll just have to find out.”
Vanessa’s mom, Merrilee, was scheduled to come a few days later and stay a week. When she arrived, she was greeted enthusiastically by everyone. Merrilee was a bit overwhelmed by her reception–all these people she didn’t know! The two men welcomed her with particular enthusiasm. They found her more than nice to look at: not quite as petite as Vanessa (five foot five), slender, but with heavenly curves in all the right places. But she would have looked a lot better if her face–framed by a cascade of wavy blond hair–didn’t have a look of perpetual worry and even a bit of fear on it.
Merrilee had trouble making sense of the household arrangements, but didn’t trouble herself about it. As Vanessa led her mom to the final guest bedroom, which had been fixed up nicely with a bed, dresser, and other essentials, Merrilee sat disconsolately on the bed and stared off into space.
Vanessa had begun unpacking her mother’s things, but stopped when she saw Merrilee looking as if she’d seen a ghost. She sat down next to her and said, “What’s bothering you, Mom?”
Merrilee’s expression seemed on the verge of crumpling into tearful remorse. She managed to croak, “Your dad…”
“What about Dad?” Vanessa said. She hadn’t heard from him in several weeks, and the silence suddenly struck her as ominous.
“Well, we–um, you see, we…”
“What is it, Mom? Just tell me!”
Merrilee paused a moment, then burst out: “He–he left the house!”
“What!” Vanessa cried. “He left? You guys are splitting up?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s all so confusing.”
“Why? What reason did he give?”
Merrilee suddenly fell silent and blushed as crimson as Vanessa had ever done.
“Mom,” Vanessa said in an almost sinister undertone, “what is it? Come on, out with it? Did he–did he cheat on you?” She couldn’t imagine her dad doing that–but with married couples, anything is possible!
Merrilee was now weeping. “No,” was all she said.
Vanessa was close to fainting. “Mom… did you cheat on him?”
The older woman’s silence was supremely ominous.
“Oh, Mom,” Vanessa exclaimed, “how could you? Who was the guy?”
That was when Merrilee whispered, “It wasn’t a guy.”
Vanessa leaped up from the bed and started walking around the small room aimlessly. “Mom, are you telling me–you had an affair with a woman?”
“Just once or twice!”
Vanessa looked upon her mother with a kind of dazed reverence. “I didn’t know you were like that.”
“I’m not ‘like that’! It was just a kind of spur-of-the-moment thing.”
“You’d better tell me the whole story.”
Merrilee sighed heavily. “Do you remember my friend Diane Weber?”
“Vaguely.”
“She’s a couple years older than me–late forties, I’d say. Well, she went through a divorce a few months ago after being married for years and years. I thought their marriage was good, and I liked Steve, her husband, so I was just stunned when they split up. Anyway, she started coming over–just to get some sympathy, I thought. I don’t know if you remember what she looks like, but she’s just a wee bit on the heavy side, but still really pretty. But her usual cheerful self had just disappeared, and she seemed really down in the dumps.
“Well, I did what I could to cheer her up, but it didn’t seem to work very well. I could just sense that she was holding something back about what had happened with her and Steve. Finally she just broke down one day and started crying on my sofa–almost wailing, really. I’d never seen anything like it.
“So I just wrapped my arms around her and held her tight as she sobbed. She’d thrown her arms around me and buried her face in the crook of my neck. I was stroking the back of her head, just as you would a little girl. I think I may have done that to you when you were small.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Anyway, she pulled her head away, held my shoulders with both hands, and stared at me right in the face, the tears streaming down her face. Somehow she managed to gasp out a single sentence: ‘Merrilee, I like… women.’
“You could have knocked me over with a feather! I mean, we–Walter and I–had gone out to dinner with them dozens of times, and they looked like the happiest married couple you’d ever seen. She even let Steve grope her a bit in public, which I’d never let Walter do.”
“Mom, you can’t be serious!”
“Oh, it was nothing much–just little pinches on the bottom, things like that. Nothing too extreme. Steve joked about it, saying, ‘Well, if you can’t pinch your wife on the butt, who can you pinch?’ And Diane always laughed at that. In fact, I recall Walter telling me that Steve told him that Diane was really quite something in the bedroom.
“So I was flabbergasted at what Diane was now telling me. It just didn’t compute.
“All I could say was, ‘You do?’
“‘Yes,’ she said, now unable to look at me. ‘Don’t get me wrong–I like men too!’
“‘So you think you’re bisexual?’
“‘I know I am.’
“‘Well, what difference does it make? Surely a guy like Steve wouldn’t care.’
“‘He does care. In fact, that’s why he left me.’
“‘You mean he found out?’
“‘I told him.’
“‘Why did you do that?’
“‘I just couldn’t keep it in anymore. It just seemed so–deceitful.’
“‘And he didn’t take it well?’
“‘Got it in one, Merrilee! You should have seen the look of horror and disgust and disappointment on his face.’
“‘That really surprises me. I thought Steve was more open-minded than that.’
“‘Yeah, me too.’
“‘So that’s why he left?’
“‘Uh-huh.’
“‘Well, if you ask me, you’re well rid of him. You don’t need to be around a pig-headed fellow like that.’ I paused a moment. ‘Pardon my asking, Diane, but did you ever–act on this feeling?’
“She stared off into space. ‘A few times.’
“That shook me, but I said, ‘So what? What’s the harm? I mean, it’s not as if you’d done it with a guy. That might be something to get upset about, but a woman?’
“‘Well, that’s how it was.’
“‘I think that’s just silly. How you express your sexuality is your own business. Anyway, I’m not at all surprised that you like women, and that women like you. You’re awfully cute.’
“And with that, I took hold of her head with both hands and pasted a long, wet kiss on her mouth.
“She just accepted the kiss as if she were a statue, and it was several seconds before she began to kiss back. But then she did, and she also threw her arms around my neck–just as a woman would with a man kissing her.
“When our lips parted, I saw that her eyes were shining–not from tears anymore, but from wonder and curiosity. It took her a while to whisper to me, ‘Merrilee, what are you trying to say?’
“I was breathing hard and had trouble getting out the words. ‘Diane, I’ll tell you… I fooled around with girls a bit in college. It was fun. So–‘”
“Mom!” Vanessa cried. “You never told me!”
“Well, I guess I felt a little ashamed.”
“Ashamed? But you’d just told Diane–”
“I know what I’d just told her. But it was something I’d never told Walter, and somehow I came to think of it as just part of my wild youth.”
“Mom, you never had a wild youth.”
“Maybe not, but there it was. Somehow I just felt it was something I couldn’t confess to anyone. But Diane, obviously, was an exception. So when I said those words and gave her that long kiss, she gazed at me with those shining eyes and said, ‘What do you want to do?’