KarMel Scholarship 2008

Fictional Story

“Chris”

By Elizabeth Ward

Desciption of Submission: “A short story set in Chicago focusing on the issues of "coming out" while coming of age. The main character is a lesbian from a MidWest background who is unsure of her place in society even as she falls in love with a radical lesbian New Yorker.” - Elizabeth

Chris 1

Life always seemed so much easier for Chris than for me. She wore her sexuality comfortably and proudly, like the silky kimonos she often fluttered about our apartment in. My process felt more like shedding a hair shirt. I was often reticent, uncomfortable and withdrawn. For me, encompassing that one part of my personality seemed impossible because my world had been constructed from childhood as a system of basic “right” and “wrong” concepts, and I was most definitely a “wrong.”

Chris had grown up in New York with her vivacious mother Susan, a victim of a bitter marriage and divorce at twenty, and her mother’s best friend, Vanessa, a soft and beautiful woman from Pennsylvania who had lived with them for as long as Chris could remember. They were never referred to as a “couple;” I never saw them touch or kiss. They simply lived together, slept in the same room, and were. Chris revealed to them that she was a lesbian at fifteen, which they hugged and kissed her for, and then life went on as normal.

I will never forget the first Christmas Chris took me home with her. Susan and Vanessa welcomed me with hugs, and our first night in town we drank copious amounts of wine at a winter solstice party in the village where Chris was welcomed like a princess and seemed to know everyone. I felt horribly out of place in my turtleneck and wool skirt among caftans, robes, and jeans. I remember that Chris was wearing a babydoll dress that night, and those opaque cableknit tights everyone was so fond of when we were doing our undergrad work in Chicago, where we had met the previous year.

If Chris’ coming out process seemed like an after-school special, then mine was more akin to a horror film. I grew up a classic Mid-West closet case. My parents, devout Sunday Catholics, raised me on a steady diet of beef, Republicanism, and Christian platitudes. They refused to patronize the two

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businesses in our small town that were run by openly gay proprietors. They were not overtly critical, but neither were they accepting. When my high school boyfriend came out at sixteen, they banned me from seeing him; never mind that he was my best friend. I had already realized before George came out that I wasn’t very interested in men—he and I were security for each other more than we were lovers—but I would never have admitted my feelings to my parents, who would probably have had me committed or exorcised. I worked hard in high school to get away, and I did—to Chicago.

By the time I arrived at university, I was so terrified of how people might react to my desired lifestyle that I buried myself in books and my dorm room to avoid any friendships and their necessary disclosures. Second semester, I had just returned from a less-than-happy Christmas holiday with my parents, so I enrolled in a women’s literature course as a silent rebellion. On the first day of class, I saw Chris for the first time. She strode in sporting combat boots, ripped jeans, and a sexy little black vest covered in radical buttons—a rainbow, the pink triangle, “The Clash,” “Operation Ivy,” “Rancid,” “I am loved,” and the ever-humorous, “Nixon Now.” She looked like everything I wanted, and everything I wanted to be. Because I thought I must be drooling, I averted my eyes, even when she sat down right next to me. I could feel her staring at me, waiting to start a conversation, but I buried my head in my textbook until class started. I don’t remember anything the professor said that day, because all I could do was revel in the proximity of this woman, even if I couldn’t look her way. After the class was excused, she tossed a note on my desk and sauntered out the door.

I unfolded the paper with trembling hands. “We need to talk. Love, Chris” was scrawled among the doodles. In a rare moment of bravery, I shoved my books into my knapsack and raced out the door after her. She was not in the hallway. I tried to look casual as I walked to the courtyard; she wasn’t there either. Crestfallen and relieved at once, I headed toward the coffee shop in the middle of campus; I had

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two hours before my next class. As I walked in, I heard a whistle, and I looked to my left. There she was, relaxed on a couch in the corner with two cups in her hands. As I turned toward her, she called,

“I didn’t know your taste, so I got you my favorite instead.” I hate sweetened lattes, but I sipped the vanilla soy beverage in ecstasy as she chattered on about Susan and Vanessa, her art history course, and the painting of an apple she was doing in studio. I could say little. I just stared at her as if this was some mistake, or she was only talking to me by accident, and I needed to remember every detail of her in case I never got to look at her again. She had large, almond-shaped hazel eyes. Her chin sunk in toward her neck a little, and her thin upper lip was an odd juxtaposition to her full lower one. Her face was round and gave her an appearance most would call “cute” as an easy way out of admitting she was not traditionally pretty. Short hair suited her because it only made her eyes more luminous. I was completely sure she was the most beautiful, amazing, attractive, and the smartest, funniest, hippest person I’d ever seen or spoken with. I was completely awestruck by the miracle that she’d even speak to me. She talked for hours, never mind our missed classes, eliciting only guarded responses from me to her pointed questions. We went to a party that weekend as a date—she actually called it a date, which seemed deliciously dangerous to me-- and were inseparable after that.

Chris was my best friend, my first love, my mentor, but I could never say which came first. You could define my feelings as love at first sight, but perhaps that is too much a device of fiction. Chris didn’t need labels—she never required a “girlfriend” talk; she introduced me as her girlfriend, her lover, her partner, or whatever else she felt like saying, within the first month or two of our relationship. Titles were just words for Chris, but for me they were tidy little boxes to keep people in. I was terrified to be with Chris. When she would grab my hand on a public street, I would feel elated—she wanted everyone to know we were together. But fear would soon creep in—everyone knew my deep, dark secret. I wasn’t

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the all-American college girl, I was a ……lesbian….. it was always a guilty whisper in my head. As terrified as I was to be with her, I was more terrified to be without her. She once introduced me to a girl from her art class as her friend, and I nearly imploded. For all I was unsure about how society would accept my sexuality, I was unwilling to accept that a pretty artist would not know Chris was mine; my girlfriend, my friend, mine! For Chris, lesbian was a battle-cry, and refusing to define herself by hetero standards was part of the battle. I could not lose Chris. If she wasn’t my girlfriend, then she could walk away and be someone else’s girlfriend. I needed the security of the label even as I cried out inside against the truth it meant about me.

At that first solstice party with Susan and Vanessa and their friends, I sat in a corner and watched Chris circle the room. It may have been the pinot, but she was like a lovely star in a shiny haze of strangers. She was beautiful; she was confident; she had brought me home to meet her family, and that was a huge step. She had conferred an honor on me, her girlfriend, but one I could, regrettably and inexplicably, not return. My parents knew I was dating Chris, but I had neglected to correct their assumption that she was a he. I remember the first phone call with my parents when I mentioned Chris. I told them I was going home with Chris for the holidays. They asked where he was from, and I simply said “New York.” How could I say more? I had never even hinted to them about who I really was. And Chris, although she knew that everyone was not as lucky in family as she, could never accept that my parents had absolutely no idea that I loved a woman. She would never be supportive of my silence—she was too brave. She would probably march me to their house, rainbows blazing, and sit them down for her “beautiful history of lesbianism” speech. She couldn’t; I couldn’t! So I remained stoic on the topic of family. I hated lying to my parents—those society told me to love above all others, but even more, I hated lying to her—who I actually did love above all others. My relationship seemed based in lies.

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After we finished our undergraduate work, I was accepted into a graduate program, and Chris and I moved into a terrible two-bedroom apartment. One bedroom was the studio, where she painted and I studied, and when she asked me why I never wanted to go out anywhere, I used the plausible lie that I was busy with school. Chris was a relatively successful Modernist painter, and she sold most of her work at a gallery in New York. With a guilty conscience, I would accept my classmates’ offers to go out on the town only when she was away for a showing. I loved Chris, but the longer we were together, the harder it became to tell her that I was uneasy with my sexuality and to explain why I’d never taken her to meet my parents. It’s odd, because usually relationships work the other way around; you’re afraid and then you experience the relationship and the fear eases—most fear is just unfamiliarity. For me it was the opposite. The magic of Chris had swept me away, and I had never had time to confront my fears. Now we were too close, too comfortable; how could I tell her I had doubted, and worse, that I doubted still?

My last year in graduate school, we started to fight. I would deliberately keep the fights going when she would try to apologize, even if they were stupid ones, like why she had finished the milk and not gone to get more. I made not replacing the milk seem like a deliberate betrayal. When graduation came, she fled to New York. The last thing I told her before she left was how much I hated the pressure she put on me to be a super-lesbian like her.

I took a position teaching in Chicago, at our alma mater, and moved in with a man, partly out of spite for Chris, and partly because it felt like a step toward normalcy. I wasn’t happy, but I felt like I fit in, and I thought that was enough. On the fifth anniversary of my first winter solstice party in New York, Susan called to tell me Chris had been in a car accident. I rushed to New York contrite, in tears, but she was gone. I stayed with Susan and Vanessa through the funeral.

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“You were the love of her life, you know,” Susan said to me one night over a bottle of whiskey, amazingly without rancor or judgment or malice. I knew, and she was mine, but I had been far too scared to admit it. I left New York to go back and teach. I moved out of the man’s apartment—unafraid to be who I was only now that it was too late—and mourned Chris alone.

Two years later, I was sitting in the coffee shop in the center of campus when I met Janet, an assistant librarian starting her first year of work at the university. We dated for a few months before we moved in together. When I took her home to meet my parents, it didn’t really matter that they closed the door on us; family is defined by love, not blood. We went to New York for a solstice party with Susan and Vanessa, who welcomed Janet with hugs and kisses. Our gift from them that year was the last painting Chris ever did—a beautiful self-portrait. In it, Chris smiles out, her eyes sparkling and brilliant—but deep within them lies pain, the pain I caused. Her hair is spiky and wild, and she has streaks of paint on her hair and tank top—she was even honest in a painting most would employ some vanity in. She painted herself surrounded by her favorite things—the crystal figurines I bought her for our anniversaries, Susan and Vanessa’s cat Charles, her favorite chair with a stack of books and a vanilla latte, and in one corner, the framed picture of us that was her favorite. The painting shines with honesty, humor and love—some of Chris’ most wonderful traits. That portrait graces the wall of our living room so that we will never forget my best friend, first love, mentor, and the woman who taught me how to be whole, proud, and truly alive.

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