Chapter 1

There comes a time in one’s life when things are going to change and you have the chance to direct how it’s going to happen. I was fast approaching one. I sat on my bed after a post-yoga shower. It was August and I was naked except for a towel draped over my hips. I noticed a photo on the dresser. It was of the three of us. Mattie in her white graduation gown between Tim and me, her proud parents.

It felt like yesterday but was actually in June. Mattie, our only child, was going to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Freshman orientation began in two weeks. Then the house would be empty except for Tim and me. This was the change hurtling towards me. No longer worried about the day-to-day care of my daughter—our daughter—would I want to continue with the day-to-day living with my husband?

Mattie was lightly knocking on my door. It awakened me from my trance. I told her to wait a moment as I got a robe. When covered, I asked her to come in. She was in her last week working at a restaurant in town. Work began at four, and it was just past eleven. She wore her usual sleepwear: sweatpants and T-shirt.

“What is it, sweetheart?”

She sat beside me on the bed.

“If I tell you something, do you promise not to get angry?”

My first thought, of course, was that she was pregnant. While she never went out on a formal date, she and most of her classmates spent their limited free-time hanging out together, with the occasional keg party at the house of parents gone for the weekend. Perhaps it happened at one of them?

That I didn’t answer her immediately upset her and she said, “Mom?”

“No. No, sweetie. I promise not to get mad.”

She stood and paced slightly.

“I think I’m gay.”

It didn’t register, my mind going in that other direction.

“Sorry?”

“Gay, Mom. I think I am gay.”

“How do you know?” It was a natural if stupid question.

“Because. Because it’s all I think about. Going to bed with another girl.”

She paused as she watched my brain work. “Is that so hard to understand? I don’t want to be with a boy. I dream of being with a woman.”

She was again sitting beside me. Now I got up. Paced.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” Shewas getting mad.

I stopped, feeling ridiculous having this conversation in my robe. But one cannot plan for these things.

“Sweetheart. I know all about wanting to be with a woman.” She stared. I sat, fighting to focus.

“I’ve never told anyone with two exceptions. I told a high school friend years after we graduated. And Helen knew. Before you were born, Helen was my lover.”

“You mean like a college fling?”

“No. Not a college fling.”

“So you mean—?”

“I mean I’m gay. I’ve always been gay. I’ve had one woman lover in my life. And I cheated on your father with her.”

“What do you mean just one woman? But Dad too, right?”

I would have told her eventually but was having difficulty with the words. I was cruel to my husband in what I did and in lying to him by not telling him what I did. In lying to him about staying with him; I loved him but not in the way that he deserved to be loved. It was unforgivable, what I did to Tim.

And Mattie. If possible I was crueler to her. By not telling her who I was. What I was. Her mother. I preached that she could tell me anything. Yet I did not tell her. Now she struggled in her life because I lacked the courage to come out to her. She went through this alone, afraid of what I would think when she told me. How many times did she look at me and want to tell me but was afraid to?

Was it a lie to make her and Tim and the rest of our world believe we were the perfect family? Tim, a partner at a New York City law firm. Me, a teacher in a nearby public high school. Living in a wealthy suburban village north of the city with an eighteen-year-old daughter going to Cornell. The perfect family.

Now I opened up to my daughter and feared what she would say and how she would look at me. Her eyes showed puzzlement more than anything. She flopped her back onto the bed, looking at the ceiling.

After a breath, I began. “My whole life. Just two people.”

“Jesus Fuck. Are you gay or bi?”

“Gay.”

“But Dad?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Does he know?”

“No. Only the girl from high school and, of course, Helen.”

“Helen. The woman you had the affair with.”

“Yes. Her. It was a long time ago.”

“So you’re not still seeing her?”

“It was long ago. Before you were born. The first and only.”

“But you were married, right?”

“I was married to your father, right.”

“Shit.”

I was now on the bed beside her, lying back next to her.