Diary of a Misfit, page 28
I put my highlighter down. My head throbbed. I had always thought of Oregon as the antidote to the South, the place where I could be free. I’d forgotten that it had banned gay marriage the same year Louisiana and Mississippi had.
In 2004, when I was a junior in college, more than a dozen states took steps to prevent same-sex couples from getting married. I didn’t have a girlfriend then. I wasn’t even sure I would ever want to marry, but when Louisiana held its vote that September, I drove the two hours home from college to log my dissent. I waited in line behind a group of men wearing Confederate flags as pants, so I didn’t have high hopes as I drove back to Mississippi. Later that night, I checked the results online. Seventy-eight percent of Louisiana voters had approved a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil unions.
I told myself it didn’t matter. I lived in Mississippi, not Louisiana. But that November, as John Kerry and George W. Bush fought for the presidency, Mississippi lawmakers proposed their own constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
On election day, after my post-colonial lit class let out, I drove through a thunderstorm back to Louisiana to vote. The line to get into the precinct was so long, it wound around the parking lot twice. I stood in the rain behind a middle-aged couple, and we made small talk for a while. They asked me where I went to school and what I wanted to become. Eventually, they brought up the amendments.
“It’s what the people want,” the woman said. “It’s what we good Christians want.”
She told me she hoped all heathen homosexuals stayed away from her children, and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. I was twenty-one, and I had no interest in spending time with anyone’s kids. We moved forward, closer to the precinct, and I looked at myself in the reflection of one of the car windows. My hair was buzz-cut short, angled into a little mohawk, and I was wearing checkered Vans slip-ons with mismatched socks. How could this woman not realize I was gay? At the very least, I looked liberal.
“They want to take the Bible out of everything,” she said. “If they want to separate church and state, I want my mail on Christmas and Thanksgiving. I want them to have to work on Christian holidays.”
I nodded along without disagreeing—nodding along, I’d learned working at a weekly newspaper called the Jackson Free Press, was a fundamental journalistic skill—but later that night, as I drove through darkness toward Mississippi, I wondered what this woman’s pastor had taught her. Thanksgiving isn’t mentioned in the Bible. It’s not a Christian holiday.
I made it to Jackson just as the first returns trickled in. All my liberal friends were waiting at a restaurant called Hal & Mal’s for election officials to call the races, so I drove straight there. I jammed into a diner booth filled with every gay person I knew in town.
Maybe I ordered a drink. Red Stripe, the only beer I liked then. We called ourselves the Queer Young Adult Network, but most of us had nothing in common outside of our shared outsider status. One of the girls was a jock who played basketball, a sport the rest of us never watched. Another loved Korn and System of a Down, nu metal bands I couldn’t stand listening to. There was a computer programmer, a Chaucer expert, and a thirty-five-year-old woman who’d tried to kiss all of us. I can’t remember most of their names, but that night, they were my force field. We linked arms and looked up at the TV as the news host announced that the results were in.
I’m not sure what I was expecting. Defeat, probably, but not a resounding rejection. Jackson always felt more liberal than West Monroe, and I was young and stupid enough to think that meant all of Mississippi was more liberal than all of Louisiana. I thought it would be a close race, maybe the kind that warranted a recount.
It wasn’t. Eighty-six percent of Mississippi’s voters approved the amendment banning gay marriage. I looked around the table at the jock and the computer programmer. The thirty-five-year-old started to cry. Eighty-six percent of Mississippi had voted against us.
A decade and a half later, I sometimes lose sight of how gutted I felt that night. Same-sex marriage is legal in every state now—so legal that my brother chides me when I call it “gay marriage.” “It’s just marriage,” he tells me. “You don’t need a qualifier.” But after that night in Mississippi, I eyed everyone with suspicion. Had the gas station worker voted against me? Had the grocery store clerk? At red lights, I looked at the cars idling next to me and knew that most of the drivers had likely waited outside a precinct in the rain to make sure I never married a woman.
Mississippi’s initiative passed by the largest margin in the country, but eleven other states voted the same way that night. Michigan and North Dakota banned same-sex marriage. Ohio and Montana did, too. And in Oregon, the one place I’d imagined would accept me, more than a million people voted to change the constitution so it specified that marriage could only be between a man and a woman.
Sitting at work with my highlighter uncapped, I thought that the bakers had made a solid, scary point. Oregon voters had already decided: They didn’t want me to marry Frankie.
After I read those documents, I started eyeing people in Portland the way I had in Mississippi. I decided not to look for rings in person because I didn’t want to tell a clerk I was hunting for a men’s band in size four and a half. Frankie wouldn’t want a woman’s ring, I knew. She wouldn’t accept a diamond. She wouldn’t even like a rounded band. Searching online felt safer, but even after I found the one I wanted—a silver palladium circle that would sit flat on Frankie’s ring finger—I stalled. If she said yes, we’d have to order a wedding cake. What if a baker turned us away? I didn’t want to become front-page news.
I left the ring in my Etsy shopping cart, unpurchased, until mid-September. Later, in my journal, I wrote that the night I bought Frankie a ring was the kind of evening I hoped we spent the rest of our lives having. We’d planned to make habanero hot sauce and tacos from scratch, but I stayed late at work, and we were both too hungry by the time I made it home. Frankie opened a bottle of Txakoli, a slightly sparkling Basque wine, and I dumped a box of macaroni into boiling water. We ate dinner on the couch. We stayed up late drinking until we were tipsy, watching and rewatching a video where a gay man proposes to his boyfriend in a Home Depot in Salt Lake City.
The gay man had choreographed an entire flash mob featuring their friends and family dancing down an aisle. He’d enlisted his own parents, as well as his boyfriend’s, and when they bopped through the frame, dorky dancing to support their sons, I started crying. I wanted that. Not the Home Depot spectacle, but parents willing and able to help me propose to a woman even though it was not yet legal. I was so moved—by the parents, by the man proposing in a state that banned gay marriage in 2004—that I sneaked off to my computer and bought the ring while Frankie was brushing her teeth. By the time it arrived in late October, I knew how I wanted to propose.
In high school, every time I ate one of my mother’s salty eggs, I tried to imagine the moment a man would ask me to marry him. I pictured fireworks and rings floating in glasses of champagne, but none of those clichés ever moved me. The proposal remained as much of a mystery to me as the man did. With Frankie, I didn’t need to brainstorm. We’d first bonded over seafood and sea creatures, so I knew I wanted to propose on the coast. I knew, too, that I wanted to ask in late November.
Thanksgiving had always been my family’s worst holiday. Some of the bad things that happened aren’t my stories to tell, but we spent one in the lobby of a mental hospital. My parents separated one Thanksgiving, and on another, my boom box accidentally picked up the cordless-phone conversation my mom was having with a strange man. She told the man that my dad had thrown her across the trailer and burned her nightgowns in the front yard. Neither of those stories was true. My dad had spent the entire morning at Walmart, and all my mom’s nightgowns were folded in her bottom drawer. But the man believed her. He called her “baby,” and he sighed in a way that suggested he loved her. I unplugged my boom box just as he started to tell my mom all the ways he’d make her feel better.
I’d tried, as an adult, to reclaim Thanksgiving. My first year in Portland, I ruined a pumpkin pie by using salt instead of sugar. The next, I attempted to make banana pudding, but every batch came out wrong in a new way. The pudding burned once and didn’t congeal another time. The last attempt—the one I took to a friend’s house for dinner—had more tears than bananas in it. The next year, I volunteered to work. Someone had to listen to the cop scanner every holiday, and for the next five years, I was the Thanksgiving girl. While my friends shared Tofurky roasts and green bean casseroles made with chanterelle mushrooms, I sat close to the scanner, listening for holidays worse than mine. I didn’t mind the shift. The pay was double, and the crime briefs tended to distract me. I figured I’d spend all my Thanksgivings transcribing dispatch calls, but the year Frankie and I started dating, she asked me to go with her to Boise to celebrate with her family instead.
We spent the 2012 holiday in Idaho the way I assume Americans everywhere do. We woke up early and watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. We played board games. We shared a big turkey and half a dozen caloric sides. I walked around all weekend, dazed by every detail. I’d never seen the parade. I’d never gone a whole holiday without crying. I hadn’t even eaten Thanksgiving dinner at a table before. My family always sat on the floor, crowded around a big TV to watch whatever football game was on.
Frankie’s family augmented the American traditions with Basque ones. On Thanksgiving morning, we took sol y sombra shots, which they made with a mix of anisette and Canadian whisky. The shots were sharp-tasting, a little too bitter and a lot too sweet, but I felt warm as soon as I swallowed mine. Frankie’s mom spent hours baking and rolling a dessert called brazo gitano, a kind of oversized jelly roll she filled with lemon pudding. And on Black Friday, we drove downtown to wander the Basque Block, a street lined with restaurants that served tiny bites of food called pintxos. I ate skewered anchovies and at least a dozen fried balls of béchamel and cod, then we tiptoed across the street to the Basque Center bar for a round of Bud Lights.
At the end of the weekend, Frankie’s mom covered their long table with leftovers, and everyone listed the things they were thankful for. When my turn came, my voice gave out as I tried to speak. I didn’t want them to know how I’d spent my holidays before, but I did want to tell them that I wanted the rest of my life to be different.
“I’ve never had a good Thanksgiving before,” I said. “I’m thankful for this one.”
* * *
—
I KEPT FRANKIE’S RING in a drawer at work until mid-November. Her family had been such a huge part of why I wanted to marry her that I decided that fall I wanted to ask for their blessing before I proposed. I’d imagined asking in person, but we couldn’t make it to Boise for Thanksgiving in 2013. I didn’t want Frankie to know I was going to ask, and I didn’t yet have any of her family members’ phone numbers, so I waited until Thanksgiving morning, until Frankie looped her parents and her siblings into one big video chat to take the early-morning sol y sombras. While they were distracted, comparing recipes, I sneaked a second one, hoping the whisky would embolden me. I downed the shot and reached for Frankie’s cell phone.
“Hey,” I said, a bit too peppy and slurred. “Can I talk to your family alone? I want to ask them about Christmas presents for you.”
I’m a terrible liar—usually Frankie can spot even the tiniest exaggerations—but that day she handed me the phone, then turned back to the turkey she was basting. I carried her cell to the bedroom we used as an office. My heart was beating so hard, I could feel it knocking behind my eyes. I looked into the phone. Frankie’s parents were sharing a screen in Boise, and her brother and sister were on, too, squished into frames with their significant others. I can’t remember what I told the six of them that morning, but I remember that both Frankie’s mom and I were crying before I finished.
Asking for permission was a dorky, gentleman’s move, the kind I’d never imagined myself making. I felt vulnerable in a way I hadn’t experienced before, but it was worth it, I thought. I wanted every Thanksgiving to be as good and easy as the one we’d spent together. I wanted in-laws and forever access to those fried balls of béchamel and cod.
“Of course,” her mother said. “We love you.”
I hadn’t talked to my mom in a few months, but I tried calling her that night. She’d want to know that I was going to propose, I thought. She’d want to start planning a wedding. I knew my parents wouldn’t be able to help me pay for anything, but I thought my mom would have ideas. Maybe she’d want me to eat one last boiled egg, just to make sure. My hands sweat into my cell phone case as I waited for her to answer, but she never picked up.
I woke up the next morning to the pinkest sky. It burned through our curtains and cast a pastel shadow across Frankie’s thin shoulders. Usually, she doesn’t talk much when she first wakes up, but the sunrise roused her from a dream, and she squinted and smiled at me, then said she needed to ask me something.
“What kind of wedding cake do you want one day?”
It was a funny question. She never talked about weddings, and I didn’t think she suspected I was about to propose. I kissed her cheek.
“Anything but raspberry fantasy.”
We took my beat-up Toyota Matrix, but Frankie drove as we headed south toward a part of the Oregon coast called Cape Perpetua. The drive was nearly three hours, and I spent most of it aiming my video camera out the window. I turned the lens toward Frankie, and she crinkled her nose in protest, but I didn’t stop filming.
“What if one day I want to remember the trip we took to the coast for Thanksgiving?”
She doesn’t love to be documented, but she’s used to me taping everything, so eventually, she turned back to the road and shrugged. We listened to a Janelle Monáe album, and when it ended, I switched to the Bee Gees, my mom’s favorite group. I imagined calling her later that night to tell her Frankie and I had listened to “You Should Be Dancing” right before we got engaged.
We made it to the ocean around 3 p.m. The ring box bulged in my Patagonia pocket, so I kept my left arm glued to my side in an attempt to hide the square lump. Frankie had been telling me about Cape Perpetua since we first met. The cape had tide pools, she told me, pockets of water the Pacific Ocean’s receding waves left filled with sea creatures. Her family used to visit the pools every year when she was young, but I had never seen one. That afternoon, we climbed over big black rocks and piles of barnacle-covered mussels, then Frankie motioned toward a dark basin in the distance.
I thought the pools would be the color of the ocean, but they swirled with neon hues. We bent close to the water, and Frankie pointed out purple urchins and bright orange sea stars. She told me the green anemones would close around my finger if I poked their centers, so I reached through the water, brushing past the hard-shelled starfish, to touch every one. The anemones were squishy, water-squirting creatures, and I laughed so hard mashing them that I accidentally stepped into the water. I fell back against the barnacles and shook my foot dry.
I wanted to propose near the water, but when I looked around, I saw an elderly couple circling the adjacent pool. My blood went hot. Old people don’t like gay people, I thought. If these old people see me propose, they’re going to judge me or attack us. They’re going to ruin what might be the most important moment of my life.
Frankie stepped back from the pool and peered down at me as if she wanted to know what I was thinking.
“I wish those people would leave,” I told her.
“Why?”
The wind stung my face. I told her I wanted us to have the cape to ourselves. We lingered for twenty minutes, touching all the sea anemones until every one had closed up, but the elderly couple never disappeared. My stomach hurt so badly I could barely stand. Eventually, I stopped looking at the sea creatures and stared at the couple, willing them to leave.
All these years later, I mostly feel sad for my younger self. I spent all my big happy moments worrying someone else would spoil them. The first time I kissed Ellen, I couldn’t stop thinking about Hell. And that day by the water with Frankie, I spent more time thinking about the elderly couple than the woman I hoped to marry. My chin quivered, and Frankie drew closer to me. I asked her if we could walk away, down a slope to a spot no one could see.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Are you hungry?”
I shook my head no and sat on a boulder. Frankie kneeled in front of me.
“I just have something for you,” I said.
Every dream I had about proposals always involved a great speech. The man would know what to say to me, I thought as I lay in bed, waiting for the boiled egg to work its magic. He’d recite a poem or find the kind of happy-ever-after verbs no one else had ever thought to use. Once I made up my mind to do the proposing myself, I sketched out a few lines I wanted to say. I walked around our neighborhood the week before Thanksgiving, practicing. I don’t remember those lines now, in part because I didn’t remember them that day on the rocks. I struggled to get the ring out of my pocket, and by the time I did, Frankie looked like she knew what I was going to do. I don’t think I even asked her to marry me. I handed her the box and started crying.
“We had a good Thanksgiving,” I said.
She must have said yes, and we must have kissed or cried or celebrated in some way, but I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t remember those moments. We called her family members from the parking lot, then I tried to call my mother. The phone rang until an automated message said my mom’s voicemail was full. I called my brother, and I squealed, and we laughed about how artless my proposal had been. I tried my mother again. I called her the next morning from the hotel we were renting on the beach, and I called her as we drove back to Portland. I must have told my father, but I don’t remember the conversation. All I remember about what I’d imagined would be the biggest day of my life is dialing my mom’s number over and over again, listening to a robot tell me she had no space available.
