Page 32 - WTP Vol. IX #2

Oprah Will Die (continued from preceding page)
You don’t know how to ease your mother’s anxiety; actually the truth is probably that you don’t really have any interest in easing your mother’s anxiety. Maybe you enjoy her anxiety, maybe you think there may be some reason for her concern, given your long stretch without a guy, but most of all you can’t imagine saying to your mother, “Don’t worry, mom, I’m not a lesbian.” Such words don’t come up in your family. It’s more of a, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in all matters related to sex.
Because you are not one to let any idea, however preposterous, go unexplored sometimes you wonder whether you are a lesbian and are just repressing it. Certainly, Marla who goes to graduate school with you and is a lesbian and her friends who are also lesbians are always proclaiming that everyone is bisexual. Louder, it seems to you since Linnea’s death and as the manless years have gone on. The subtext is clear. You have chosen to ignore it. In the end, you think Marla and her friends and your mother want things—love and sex and grief particularly—to be simpler than they are.
On the other hand, becoming a lesbian would be the icing on the cake of disappointment your parents al- ready feel that you’ve baked them. It might be freeing in a way, even though thus far your parents’ disap- pointment has not felt particularly liberating.
You have a piece of pumpkin pie and decide to face Aunt Patsy’s death head on. Know what her death will mean: your heart will melt out of your chest, leaving a large empty cavity. This happened when Linnea died.
Think not for the first time that there’s a reason people talk about broken hearts. You really felt Lin- nea’s death in the middle of your chest. But a heart breaking makes you think of the sharp shards of glass left after you drop a drinking glass. And half a heart like half a glass is still intact and can be felt. That’s why you favor the heart melting, dissolving and disappearing, leaking perhaps into the stomach for a while, leaving that empty cavity in your chest. Where there should be a heart, there remains only an ache of outsized proportions. And you will feel this ache for every single person in this room, and you did not choose them to begin with, probably let’s face it, might not have chosen them if given the opportunity.
When you were a child, your mother told you a story about your cat Callie. God, she said, offered the gift of brains to Callie, but Callie thought he said, ‘trains’ and so said, “No thanks.”
So you think, “No thanks” to cousin Bill’s wife Betty’s ruminations on America’s Top Model, and “No thanks” to your cousin Colleen who usually talks to you about shopping when you in fact do not shop because of the aforementioned lack of a job or am- bition, and “No thanks” to your sister’s ridiculous grudges. “No thanks” to your mother’s orphaned lesbians and Velveeta cheese dish, and “No thanks” to your father’s Think Big book. “No thanks,” to your heart dissolving again and again. “No, thanks.”
~
You are elbow deep in suds and fine china. Following family tradition, the dinner dishes are being done immediately after the feast. In your family, this has always meant work for the women of the family, usu- ally you and your mom, your Aunt Patsy, your cousins Colleen and Sheila and your sister and your cousin Bill’s wife Betty. But now that your sister and cousin Bill’s wife Betty have children, they often escape
the chore. The men have always retired to the rec room to watch TV, and the advent of children has not changed this tradition.
You are opposed to this sexism, took a stand on it once years ago, dramatically and pointedly joining the men to watch football. But what you considered to be a bold move did not have the desired effect
of inspiring massive rebellion among the women
or deep shame from the men. Instead, you only felt bored and wished you could return to the kitchen without losing face to hear your mom and Aunt Patsy tell the family stories. The next holiday you quietly did just that and since then have focused on dishes and stories and blocked out all other consid- erations.
Tonight your mom and Aunt Patsy talk about their Aunt Kathleen, your Great Aunt Kathleen, who you only vaguely remember, since she died when you were seven.
“A piece of work, that one,” your mom says.
“Thought she had the right to interfere,” your Aunt Patsy says.
“‘Only two girls,’ she said to me,” your mother says, indignantly. “‘Where are the other children?’”
It strikes you as shocking that in your Irish Catholic family, in which sex is not mentioned, never mind discussed, that your Aunt Kathleen blatantly told your mother she needed to have more sex with your father, even if she couched it in terms of babies. You
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