You Can't Buy Love Like That Page 19

  On a day we had planned and struggled to claim together with joy, raising our glasses of champagne, she was embarking on a new life with someone else, while I was starting out again on my own. Most of all, the years together had taught me that before I entered into any relationship with someone new, I needed to know myself far better than I did right now, and that became my primary focus going forward.

  Just prior to graduation, I had moved out of the house into a small apartment a mile away. Linda’s new love moved into the house we owned together and paid me rent for the half that was mine. Some friends came and helped me transfer my belongings along with a few pieces of furniture to my new living space. I got the dog, Casey, in the dissolution of our partnership, and she, of course, got the children.

  My one new acquisition for my apartment was a waterbed that I had been coveting for some time, and, in an effort to console myself, I made the purchase. In spite of my exhaustion on moving day, I pressed forward, filled up the mattress with water, and made the bed before putting a few more things away. An hour later, as I readied myself to sleep, I pulled back the covers and noticed they felt damp around the edges. As I slid my fingers down the inside of the liner, I felt a faint touch of moisture. It was not a lot—just enough to let me know there was a leak somewhere. What were the odds that the full 158 gallons would gush out before morning, I wondered.

  By now, it was midnight, and I was completely out of steam, out of patience, out of luck. My brain furiously scanned for possible options. I registered that there were two: either get out the hose and drain the mattress right now, or turn out the light, pray for mercy, and sleep on the couch. I chose the latter, grabbed my pillow, and traipsed back out to the living room, where I lay down on the black vinyl sofa. Casey followed my lead and jumped up beside me, and we both slept until morning. Fortunately the leak was small and I was able to find and fix it before any serious damage was done. I only hoped this was not an omen for life on my own.

  While I had no formal rights regarding time with the children, both Linda and Joe knew we had a special bond and they were both supportive of my spending time with them. On their first visitation, they wanted to make chocolate chip cookies. I had no baking supplies or pans in the house as all of that had been left for Linda, so I rose early and went to the store. By the time I was finished I had spent twenty-five dollars on all the paraphernalia needed for this special engagement.

  Linda dropped them off later that morning, and they ran to the door, greeting me with hugs that lingered for minutes. My arms surrounded them both as we dragged each other from the doorway into the kitchen. On the table, neatly arranged, were the chocolate chips, the unsalted butter, the dark brown sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, flour, and baking soda. Molly eyed the chips and ripped them open to make sure they were edible.

  For an hour I watched them measure and pour the ingredients into the new sparkling bowls and use all their strength to mush everything together, fighting over whose turn it was to put in the next ingredient. My heart ached with the knowledge that they would grow up without me in their daily lives, and while living with them had been the most challenging thing I had ever done, leaving them was even more difficult.

  They stayed the whole day, devouring multiple samples of their product until their dad came to pick them up. After he had settled them in the car and as I cleaned up the mess left behind, I heard a knock at the door. Joe had returned, and I motioned him to come in.

  “I want you to know how much it means to me that you are staying connected to the kids,” he said. “They think the world of you, and I know they miss you.” He leaned forward and gave me a hug, then turned around and left. My heart was heavy and light. Their absence left an unfillable void, but his words lifted me with hope, and his generosity in sharing them carried me forward with the faith we would stay in touch far into the future.

  The same month I finished school, my mentor, Roger, invited me to work on another project, this one outside of Ford at a paper mill in South Carolina. My one-year leave of absence as a school psychologist was up, and I needed to decide if I was going to return or not. If I accepted Roger’s offer, I would have to quit my job permanently, yet he could promise me no more than forty days of work. It was a choice between security and my dream of being a consultant. The timing was awful, given my new living situation and the uncertainty of any future financial opportunities, yet this project was completely enticing. It was focused on the design and implementation of an employee-involvement program for all the hourly workers in the plant. The approach was based on a newly embraced and effective concept in organizational development, in which a group of employees met regularly to identify, analyze, and solve work-related problems. The goals were improving performance and motivating employees through meaningful involvement with the things that affected them.

  As I weighed the pros and cons, I remembered that the risk I had taken in leaving my job as a teacher to go back to school had proven to be among the best of my life. It had not only opened me up to new work, but also put me on the path toward owning my sexuality and finding peace within. There had not really been a downside, in spite of my initial worries. The hardest part, as always, would be telling my mother.

  I got through the conversation with Mom, reminding her of her oft-repeated phrase to me when she once left employment—“I was looking for a job when I found this one.” In fact, it was her boldness in the face of challenge that had been an inspiration throughout my life, and she had faced difficulties far greater than mine. It was curious to me that she didn’t grasp the contradiction between the way she lived her life and the advice she often gave me.

  Before accepting his offer and quitting my job, I knew I had to tell Roger that I was gay. I was through hiding, and though I didn’t find it necessary to tell everyone, I wasn’t going to keep it a secret from people with whom I was close—especially not a colleague who was offering me a coveted opportunity to partner with him on a new project. In spite of my resolve, I was quite nervous about the pending conversation. Roger was a former Catholic priest who left the order because he wanted to marry. While this suggested he had made some hard choices in his own life, I had no idea what his views were on homosexuality and how they might affect his desire to work with me. What if he thought it was an unforgivable sin? What if he wouldn’t want to be associated with me? I would lose out on an extraordinary chance to learn the consulting business while working with someone I respected. What if he decided to tell others at Ford and I lost some of those clients as well? All the old fears came rolling back the closer I came to having the talk. But now there was no alternative in my life but for me to tell the truth.

  We sat across the white pressboard tables at Afternoon Delight after placing our order for salads. This was the meeting where he would fill me in on the details of the project and the schedule for our workshops and set meeting times for us to develop the design together. Roger was his usual upbeat self, dressed in his khaki pants and button-down blue oxford shirt. His short gray hair was perfectly combed as he peered at me through his oversize wire-rimmed glasses—his smile revealing the gap between his two front teeth.

  “I’m delighted you are going to work on this project with me,” he said as he looked around for the silverware that was back at the salad bar. “I think you’re ready to do something more substantial.” He got up and retrieved his utensils and then returned.

  I thought I’d better dive right in before I lost my nerve. “I’m honored that you asked me, and I’m very eager to take on greater responsibility.” I pierced one of the tomatoes with my fork and went on. “Before we talk further about the details of the engagement, I want to tell you something about myself so you aren’t ever blindsided by it.” He looked up, put his silverware down, and gave me his full attention. “I want you to know that I’m gay, and I know from experience that that can be a concern for some people, and I just want to make sure it is not a concern for you.” Short and simple, I had said it. Now I held my
breath, awaiting his response.

  “That doesn’t bother me,” he said without a moment’s contemplation. “Is that Ranch dressing on your salad? Where’d you get that?” I pointed to the side table next to salad bar, and he went off to find some. When he returned, he thanked me for telling him, and we moved on to the agenda for the meeting.

  His response was a reassuring surprise. I don’t know what I had expected. I only knew telling him was the right thing to do. It made me curious how many others might have been as nonchalant and accepting about my revelation as he was. How many meaningful relationships had I passed over or denied out of my fear to share this information with them? What losses, besides my father, had I suffered? Even if the steps were small at first, they would be in the direction of truth and authenticity. I felt proud of myself for telling him.

  I loved the work at the paper mill in Charleston, and because Roger was still employed at Ford, he often sent me alone to work with the client when he couldn’t get off. My early success at Ford with union members was a great education in understanding the politics of large organizations and in winning the trust and respect of people, regardless of their level in the system. I had a special fondness for hourly workers, as my dad had been one for years while employed at the Rouge Plant—a part of the Ford Motor Company complex. Sometimes I imagined him sitting in a group that I facilitated and wondered how he would have responded to the new ideas being proposed. I pondered what he would have thought of me standing at the front, recording his opinions on a flip chart, as the group worked to solve a problem.

  One day, close to a year into the project, which, to my enormous relief, had grown substantially based on the success of the first forty days, Roger took me aside. “I need to tell you something that I think will really upset you. Let’s go somewhere private.” My gut twisted with worry as we made our way through the cacophony of paper machines that rolled on in the background, passing men in hard hats and overalls splattered with dirt from crawling on the ground under the giant rollers to do routine maintenance. Following Roger, eyes straight ahead, reminded me of the night David escorted me to his office, after canceling the class I was teaching, to relay the news that my father had died. I could almost hear the clack of my boot heels striking the tile floor as similar thoughts raced through my head. Was I in trouble? Had I said something out of line to one of the men? Was the president of the company upset with me?

  We turned the corner and entered the conference room, sparsely furnished with a small Formica table and three plastic chairs. The walls were bare with the exception of a large laminated poster listing safety rules in bold black print. He pointed to a seat and then sat kitty-corner from me. I fidgeted with my pen and notebook awaiting his words. Roger looked up as though reluctant to tell me. Finally, he leaned forward and said, “Barry, the HR guy, is spreading rumors that you are gay.”

  Surprisingly, I sensed my body relaxing. I exhaled and felt a smile come across my face. “Wow, what a relief. I thought you were going to tell me that people were unhappy with my work.” My reaction was a shock even to me. I had spent so much of my life in fear, especially careful to create the false impression that I was straight, that I was “normal,” that I belonged—in the stilted way one never can, when they are pretending. I had felt on many occasions that my life would be over if people knew the truth, that I would be shunned, damned, flung out of the kingdom, forever banished. The terror was so real it had made me guarded in all aspects of my life. I was careful in the words I chose, the activities I shared, the way I arranged my house, the people I invited over. It was a tidy external construction, yet I had created a prison with invisible bars that had constricted my interactions with others for decades.

  At last, my genuine reaction was to be more concerned about what people thought of my work than their assumptions about my lifestyle. While revealing myself to Roger had been an enormous step, this was the ultimate reward. It was true I was gay and that I had no control over what people thought about that. I only had control over how I showed up in the world as a person and whether or not people could experience the value I brought to any situation. My response was a blinding revelation to me of how far I had come. I was giddy. The thing that had once scared me the most was no longer a threat to my existence.

  I knew I had gained the respect of the men and women with whom I was working and felt confident this would not jeopardize my relationships. I was especially glad now that I had told Roger in advance. He had chosen me based on my ability to do the job he needed, and that was all that mattered to him. The rumor faded from circulation as quickly as it had flashed into the open; the mutual respect between these employees and myself was the abiding antidote to that poison.

  The work with Roger expanded significantly. Within a couple of years he left his job at Ford while I retained a few clients in different departments there. Soon I had my own thriving business as an organizational consultant, strengthened by other clients outside of Ford that I had earned through word-of-mouth successes and new contracts with Roger.

  Most importantly, I took a nine-year hiatus from a long-term commitment with anyone. This time was spent getting to know myself, what I wanted and needed in a relationship, what I was willing and able to give. The gift of all these years of struggle through relationships with both genders was to become a woman who loved herself as she was. I reclaimed the pride my father always had in me, and I knew he would be cheering me on, gratified by my courage to finally stand up for what I believed in, to become the adult he had always seen in the child he nurtured with his unceasing faith and love. I still had a long way to go to heal the scars inflicted by a fundamentalist paradigm and to feel safe in the world to which I was born. But I could go forward with greater peace in my heart and a compassionate understanding of the forces that had shaped my past, certain I had become the artist who would craft her own future.

  EPILOGUE

  you can’t buy love like that

  My mother and I were in the fourteenth year of our monthly ritual of meeting for breakfast at the Big Boy restaurant. While she would still ask periodically if I was interested in meeting some guy at her church, she had generally accepted the fact that her hopes for a son-in-law would never come to fruition, and a greater tranquility had settled between us. Most importantly, there were no longer secrets that kept us apart.

  She shared her diagnosis of cancer in November of 1992. It wasn’t life-threatening, the doctor said, because it was caught so early. She’d undergo a small operation to remove a few inches of her colon, and she would be as good as new. At eighty-four, it didn’t turn out that way. In his single-minded focus on the cancer, the doctor overlooked the deeper cause of her difficulties: scleroderma, an autoimmune rheumatic disease. She continued to decline after the operation, making multiple trips to the emergency room through the winter, often because of congestive heart failure.

  On February 28, 1993, I made my usual trip to St. Joseph Mercy Hospital to visit her, a fistful of roses in my hand to brighten her room. When I arrived, one of the many specialists was finishing his exam, but he let me stay. Standing at a distance, I watched her lying under crisp white sheets staring past the thirty-year-old boy-man playing doctor. He sat upright on her bed, all starched and stiff with shiny oxfords and a pale pink shirt, writing with a black Pilot Razor pen. “Mrs. Anderson,” he shouted, as though my mother were deaf and not dying of cancer. “Do you know what day it is?”

  She squinted to see the calendar that hung beyond his left shoulder, rolled her eyes as though reflecting, and said, “Either the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth of February.” It was the weekend, and the days were split in half on the yellow paper across the room. He nodded, acknowledging her answer, and then he went on to reframe the question.

  “What day of the week is it?”

  She squinted again and said, “Saturday or Sunday.”

  In that moment I felt such love for her, all frayed around the edges of wrinkled skin that no longer fit li
ke a tight wet suit. I watched her eyes—they shut, lashes curled down, as the man rose from the bed and left the room. When she heard the door close behind him, she opened one eye and glanced in my direction, and we joined each other in a giggle.

  I sat on her bed and held her hand. Somewhere between thinking she would live forever and realizing that forever was here, I was hit with a wave of grief. Even after months of hospital treatments, late-night visits to the ER, and midday calls to her in-home nurse, my denial had been intact. But today was different. I could see that it took effort for her to lift her hand to rest it in mine and noticed her eyelids closed unexpectedly as she dozed off in the middle of a sentence. Her breathing was labored. Somehow I had expected more warning—that there would be an announcement the last time we were in line at Big Boy’s restaurant for cold bacon and crispy burnt toast at the all-you-can-eat buffet that it really was the last time. That after she came in September to spend the night at my house on Berkley Street, she would never come again. That eating Russian tea-cakes and drinking Constant Comment at her kitchen table was a monthly ritual never to be repeated.

  Now, all of those ordinary moments took on a sacred quality.