Greetings From Janeland Read online

  And as the story goes, I ultimately reconnected with someone I’d known in high school. She’d been a star basketball player back then, and while we were not friends, I recalled us giving each other the tall girl nod when we passed in the halls. She went on to play in college and still, almost forty years later, plays basketball with the men at her local YMCA. She is a Reiki Master Practitioner and, as we like to say, is the steady tortoise to my hurried hare. She’s kind and rooted in the present like a wise oak. This woman brings out the best in me, and, above all, we travel the road of self-discovery side by side, learning and sharing our individual journeys. We are remarkably athletic for our ages. Every single day, even after eight years together, I awaken wanting to know more about her, and us.

  When Candace invited me to co-edit Janeland, I didn’t hesitate for one minute. I knew how vital Dear John, I Love Jane was to myself and other women, and I believed that an updated version would bring such stories to the forefront once again. Candace calls the essays in this book “truth bombs,” and I couldn’t agree more. Whereas I was once “left for dead” from the explosion that was my life, reading about the courage of other women inspired me to gather up a truer version of myself and forge ahead. There is a certain grace inherent in “meeting” those who’ve also experienced such awful, wonderful awakenings. The incredible essays in Janeland serve as continuing assurances that we, in all of our complexities, are not alone.

  Sir, May I Have a Pack of Marlboros?

  BY BK LOREN

  I’M STANDING IN THE THRESHOLD WEARING A TANK TOP and torn boxers, my hands gripping the top of the doorway. I arch my body forward like a bow and arrow when I talk. “I don’t even like women,” I tell her. “They bug me. Even when I was a kid, I never really liked girls.” My body is lean and muscled, the elastic of my boxers stretching like a bridge across the gap between my hip bones. “I’m not a lesbian!”

  She is some kind of beauty queen—that kind of lilting loveliness that makes people look on from afar, afraid to get too close. I’ve seen childhood photos of her wearing a lacy dress, baby-doll shoes, a delicate way about her that I never had as a kid. I was always muddy, skinned up, bruised. My childhood photos are an embarrassing mix of me in only white underwear or, occasionally, wearing chaps and holsters over those white undies, a toy gun swinging from my side. I was rarely fully dressed, and I never brushed my long blonde hair.

  But Sawnie, she has delicate features and smooth dark hair. Her eyes have this way about them. They are dark, quiet, confident. The man I’ve lived with for the past several years, the man I’m going to marry, calls her “Beautiful Sawnie.” Never just Sawnie. He lets me know that if he could, he’d be with her. But he is short, and she is tall, and to him, that’s the end of the equation.

  My equation is a little less clear. As I state my disavowal of women to Sawnie, we’ve just gotten out of bed. Together. We were not sleeping. I watch her dress, and she looks at me in this elegant way, a side-glance of disbelief. “Listen to yourself,” she says quietly. She brushes past me in the doorway as she leaves the room.

  A few days later, I’m with David. We walk into the bedroom, and there’s a broken wine glass on our bed. Under the shards stained with red is a book by Adrienne Rich. The title refracts through the glass: A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far.

  Sawnie has been here, in this house, in this room.

  When I was a kid, I was a martial artist. Because Chinese martial arts were rare in the US at that time, I was the only girl in most classes. I fought against men. More often than not, I won. When I was done sparring, I heard people whisper, “Wow, what a dyke.” I was twelve. I didn’t know what the word meant. I thought they were calling me a dick.

  Before the day I declared my dislike of women, David, Sawnie, and I shared the kind of friendship you can only have in college. You live together, become a family. You stay up until midnight becomes dawn, talking about all the ways you’ll shake up the known world, make it a better place. You philosophize, dream.

  The three of us had that kind of friendship: intense, intellectual, intimate. Sawnie and I also had the quintessential girl-to-girl friendship that blooms in college. We talked about the boys Sawnie dated and about my relationship with David.

  Then came the tectonic shift.

  It was winter, snowing now for the third day in a row. There’s a particular beauty to the way snow falls on the front range of the Rockies in Boulder. The reddish-brown rock slabs that we call the Flatirons catch snow in their crevices, like lace draped on a dark background, the delicacy of early winter. David was out of town for holiday break, and at nine a.m., I was lying in bed, looking out at the Flatirons, ensconced in quiet. I curled up, pulled the blankets under my chin. I was swaddled in that sweet, liminal space between dreaming and waking, and Sawnie knocked on my door. My eyes opened halfway. “Yeah,” I said, “come in,” and she opened the door, stood there, her fingers and hands close to her mouth, fidgeting.

  “Wanna go to breakfast?” she said.

  I clicked my teeth, shook my head, no. “Too cozy in bed, Sawn.” I pulled the blankets tighter.

  She remained in the doorway, fingers still fidgeting. “I have to tell you something.”

  “So tell me now.”

  She shook her head. “Not in the house. No way. Not in this house.”

  Not in the house? What the hell did that mean? She said it with exaggerated conviction. It was part of her odd preoccupation—a recent change in her. Still, she had me hooked. What words could possibly have been so impossible to utter in this house, especially on a snowy morning when neither one of us had a reason to step outside?

  When we did step outside, I really began to question her. Slanted snow slapped my cheeks. Everything stung. The ice of the week’s storm sat in black mounds on the roads and sidewalks, fresh snow dusting it. It was so slick that Sawnie and I had to clutch each other’s arms and waddle so we didn’t fall.

  “Well, this is fun,” I told her.

  “Oh come on. You’re tough. It’s nothing.” She suggested I keep my mind on the hot coffee and cheese omelets awaiting us at the College Cafe. “It’s cozy there, too,” she said. She was wearing this long wool coat that made her seem simultaneously more sophisticated—like some highbrow artist from New York—and more scary. It fell around her shoulders like a black cape. In the weeks leading up to this day, she had been critical, distant, sometimes mean, one of the first fractures in our friendship. I had begun to think of her as utter darkness, something shadowy and nondescript.

  We walked under amber streetlamps haloed with snow. The sun struggled through haze. It took us about thirty minutes to walk less than a mile, and during that time, something happened. We began to laugh, to tell stories, to finish each other’s sentences, like we used to. She said, “Remember that time in the UMC . . . ”

  “ . . . when we crashed that display about Springsteen?”

  She nodded. We’d spent many days pumping our working-class fists to Springsteen’s lyrics, so when the Young Republicans put up a display at the UMC (Colorado University’s student union) celebrating Springsteen’s Born in the USA as a paean to war, we could barely stand it. So, late one night, when the UMC was virtually empty, we wrote Bruce lyrics on construction paper and plastered them over the misguided sentiments. When a janitor saw us, we ran like bandits out of the UMC, leapt over a wall, crouched low and huddled together, our hearts slamming our chests, our bodies close and afraid.

  As we walked in the snow that cold morning, we laughed about our prank.

  “Was there really a janitor chasing us?” I asked.

  “I think so, yes,” she said. We laughed ourselves to tears.

  Just before we reached the greasy spoon, she turned to me, and the scowl of worry darkened her face again. “I’m scared,” she said.

  “Of what?” It was ten below zero, and I was losing my patience.

  “I have to tell you something.”

  “So tell me. It’s fine. Just t
ell me.”

  “Okay,” she said, said it like she was steeling herself against some horrible news. She gritted her teeth and began to speak. Just then, I let go of the crook of her arm to open the door. The ice was slicker than we both imagined, and our feet skated to catch our balance. We laughed, and then Sawnie went down. Hard.

  Still laughing, I stretched out my hand to offer her a lift up. She shook her head no, grimaced in pain.

  Later that afternoon, I visited her in Boulder Community Hospital where she’d had surgery to put a steel shank on the broken bones in her leg. I brought her flowers, and I sat at the end of her bed, my hand resting on her cast. “Jesus Christ, Sawnie, I can’t believe it.”

  “Yeah, pretty shitty,” she said, and shrugged. “So, is David home yet?”

  I looked at my watch. “Yeah, he should be home by now.” I had brought her a stupid wind-up toy, a tiger that balanced on a ball, then flipped and landed upright again. I wound the key, let the tiger flip, then did it again. “So what were you going to tell me?” I asked. The tiger flipped, landed, flipped, landed. I wound the key tight over and over, waiting.

  Eventually, she said, “David’s home. You should leave now.”

  In high school, I was known for three things.

  • My goal in life was to fake my way into a mental hospital. I believed I’d be happy there. In the outside world, I felt straight-jacketed.

  • I was imperturbable. I’d learned this from years of study in martial arts. People would try to make me angry. They’d throw fake punches at me. I’d dodge and never show an emotion.

  • I didn’t like guys. That was my mantra. “I don’t like guys.” No one ever questioned me. Until one day, Bobby Rossi asked me out on a date, and I said, “No thanks. I don’t like guys,” and Bobby said, “Well then what do you like?” I thought of the possibilities. Birds. Mountains. Drawing. Martial arts. Quiet days on the ocean when I ditched school. Carole King. James Taylor. Janis Joplin. Other than that, I had no idea what the answer could possibly be.

  Before winter break ended, David went out of town again. That afternoon, Sawnie clunked into my bedroom, full cast on her leg, and said, “I want to take you to dinner.” Déjà vu. She fingered her mouth nervously, and she said she had something to tell me outside of this house.

  The mystery had become a tick digging under my skin. I wanted to flick it off, but its tiny pincers had taken hold. So the three of us—me, Sawnie, and the massive white cast on Sawnie’s left leg—clunked up the stairs of the Rio Grande Cafe. We had barely been given menus before Sawnie said, “I just want you to know, I don’t want anything from you. I just need you to listen.”

  Ah, Jesus, really, here we go again with the drama. I struggled not to roll my eyes. I ordered a margarita. Sawnie drew in a huge breath, started to speak, and I took a huge gulp of tequila, because whatever she had been waiting weeks to tell me was finally on the tip of her tongue.

  “Okay,” she said. I leaned in. “You’re not in love with David.” I forced myself to maintain eye contact, sipped my margarita, puckered from the salt and lime, and she added, “You’re in love with me.”

  My eyes went droopy. I was suddenly emotionally exhausted, and I think I muttered something to the effect of, Oh, yes, this is very interesting; please do tell me your theory, because I do want to hear everything you have to say, and I have a very open mind, and I’m a progressive, forward-thinking liberal who has crawled my way out of a regressive, backward-thinking, redneck family, and so I want you to know that if you’re a lesbian, I fully support you. And I can’t wait to get home to David.

  She then methodically replayed all the times when I had “proven” this love to her. That time in the bar when the guys wouldn’t leave us alone and I wanted them to think we were lovers, so—as defense against their advances—I leaned forward to kiss her. I stopped just short, when the guys began to holler out in disgust. That time in our home, when David was not there, and we were laughing, and we brushed shoulders, and our lips got a little too close. That time, those several times, when David was trying to talk to me, but I could not stop looking at her.

  Halfway through her litany, a waiter passed, and I waived him down. “Sir, could I get a pack of cigarettes?”

  “What kind?” he asked.

  Up until this exact moment in my life, I did not smoke.

  I envisioned the tough guy on the horse. I needed him now. “Marlboro,” I said.

  A few seconds later, the server was back. I opened the package, lit a cigarette, inhaled, and looked back at Sawnie with my completely open mind.

  I was eighteen years old. Melissa was twenty-two. We shared an apartment together. I had helped Melissa through a relationship with a guy who had physically abused her. I was teaching her the self-defense aspects of martial arts. It was the 1970s. There were no safe houses for women in the state of Colorado. Melissa and I didn’t have the money for an apartment with bedrooms. So we shoved two beds into a studio, made them look like an L-shaped sectional, and called it home. Then one night I was taking a chicken casserole out of the oven when I turned and ran smack dab into Melissa. I bobbled the casserole dish; she helped me steady it, and our arms and hands got tangled up. The casserole was the only thing keeping us from accidental full-frontal contact. We stood there, face to face. A few seconds passed. Then Melissa said, “Sometimes I think I could kiss you,” and I said, “Would you like some chicken casserole?”

  They say sucking cigarettes is sexual sublimation. I sublimated a whole pack of Marlboros as Sawnie talked. My throat felt like it had been scrubbed raw with steel wool. She talked. I smoked. I drank. I rested my chin on my twisted-up arms. I wanted to fall asleep. I was beyond exhausted. Two hours later, when she was finally done talking, my energy returned. “Okay. Ready? Let’s go!” I said.

  We walked down the stairs together, Sawnie leaning on one crutch and the bannister. “So, what do you want to do?” she asked.

  Dinner was over. It seemed obvious. “I wanna go home.”

  “David’ll be home tomorrow,” she said, another obvious thing.

  “Yeah. So, I’ll pick him up.”

  “That’s what you want?”

  I shrugged. “Yes.”

  When we reached her car—one of those trashed-out, boat-like Buicks that parents handed down to their kids in the 1980s—I had to help her and her cast into the driver’s seat. I took her crutches, leaned them against the back door, and she rested her hand on my shoulder for stability.

  She rested her hand on my shoulder.

  I was a martial artist precisely for this reason. The body needs defending. What touches the body makes an immediate impact on the soul. The body is fragile, the thing that holds the heart, the mind, the spirit. The body is the object of us, the thing that cannot be abstracted, the thing that cannot lie, the thing that finally broke down and made me give in to whatever I’d been fighting for years.

  She rested her hand on my shoulder.

  I was a kid again. I felt my body sweating, training, sparring, winning, and I heard the whispers, she’s a dyke, a dyke, a dyke, and I didn’t want to be that, whatever it was. I wanted to fight against it, the thing that diminished my power, that took away the fact that I had won, over and over, fair and square. I had won, and it did not matter, because I was a dyke. I felt the social straightjacket of high school, Then what do you like, and my utter silence that followed, and I watched my heart become something I could not fathom, could not see, name, hold, could not love.

  She rested her hand on my shoulder.

  There was the possibility of love. There was the possibility that I did not have to fight, that I could be me, whatever the fuck that was, because it had been lost beneath two decades of—what? Not lies. Not deception. Not denial, because I would’ve had to have been able to name the thing to deny it. I didn’t even have a word for the unnamable mechanism that had kept me from naming the unnamable thing that was smothering me.

  She rested her hand on my shoulde
r. She saw my body soften, maybe for the first time ever. She said, “My parents have a cabin in Estes Park. We can go there if you like.”

  My voice was shaking. I said, “Drive.”

  I called David the next day, told him I was spending the weekend with Sawnie in the mountains.

  “Beautiful Sawnie?” he said.

  “Yes, beautiful Sawnie.”

  I came back a few days later with bits of Sawnie’s cast embedded in my face, my hands, my legs, my body. I came back with the thing that was healing her bones embedded in my skin. I hoped those specks might sink into my bones, do some kind of healing of my own, something deeper than I could fathom. I came back, and I said, David, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I did not even know there was an option.

  Because there wasn’t.

  That weekend, Sawnie and I read Adrienne Rich’s Compulsory Heterosexuality. It explained why the word dyke scared me. It peeled back layers of culture, violence, and oppression, and revealed a whole new color wheel of possibilities, of truths, of ways to live my life with integrity. I’d spent my college days studying Greek, Latin, physics—anything that might prove a recovering redneck like me belonged in a university. Sawnie spent her college career learning about the various forms of oppression in our culture—one of the oppressions that we, right then, were both coming face-to-face with for the first time.

  When we were up at the cabin, she also showed me a story she had written. We both hoped to become writers someday. It was a vaguely fictionalized version of our lives over the past few months. In it, the main character’s mother asked her why she had chosen to be with women. The main character’s reply? “The only choice I’m making is whether or not to live an honest life.”

  There is a question of choice going around these days, the hot topic that allows others to define my life. Let me simplify it: Who I love is not a matter of politics or biology. It’s a matter of the human heart. I do not have any more choice over who I love than you do. As Andrew Solomon has said, “We don’t allow freedom of religion because Jews can’t help being Jewish; we grant it because we believe in the value of self-determination.”