girlfriending

ZERO

DURING THE NINE WEEKS that I knew Z, we sent each other one hundred texts a day. 

Once, she sent a text that said You are sooooooo amazing, and once she sent a text that said I can’t believe how lucky I am to have met you, and once she sent a text that said I am nowhere near your neighborhood . . ., and once she sent a text asking if I’d walk the Camino de Santiago with her one day, and I said yes, then looked up the Camino de Santiago. I cannot wait to walk the Camino de Santiago with you, I wrote, and she gave that message a heart. 

Excitement = fun + fear, I remind my children, but sometimes the portions get wonky. 

Once, Z and I laughed so hard I stopped the car in the middle of the street to keep from crashing. Once in bed we laughed so hard that I smeared snot all over her beautiful belly. Once she said she loved how I cry when I laugh, and it was the first time in my life I didn’t wipe away those laughing tears in mild embarrassment. Once, we lay naked together and I told her things about myself I didn’t like, things I’d done that I wasn’t proud of. There was something between us that was safe and thrilling and very precious, a mixture that was as unfamiliar to me as was the speed of it all. I’d fallen before, but never like this: hard and fast and feet-first, unafraid.

To end it, she sent a late-night text: I’ve been thinking a lot and I’ve decided you’re not right for me. I asked to speak by phone or in person, assuming that we could come to some sad but humane parting of ways. She didn’t respond. My best friend Amanda tells me that, technically speaking, this isn’t ghosting. Whatever it is, it makes me feel inhuman. An inconvenience, a nuisance. Left alone on a scorched island, haunted by memories of all that lush splendor. 

In middle age, it’s sacrilege to wish for a failing memory. I will not do it.  

ONE

I’M FORTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD, swimming naked in a cold lake in my midsize Midwestern city, when I get my first-ever black eye. When the woman’s elbow meets my ocular bone, I feel the blow in my sinuses and the sky darkens woozily. I swallow a mouthful of lake water flavored by blood and sneeze painfully several times. Nova Weston, a stranger whose name I will not know for a year, treads water with me as dozens of women swim past us, round a buoy, and splash back toward shore. “Oh my word, oh my word,” she says. “I’m so sorry!” “I’m OK!” I say through my watery shock.

It’s October, sunny and windy, and the rough water shoves us around. Her lips are lavender and her eyes are green. There’s a dark mole in a crease of her neck and plenty of silver in her wet hair. She’s my age, maybe a little older. Over her freckled shoulders, the modest skyline glints in the morning sunlight.

“Let’s go,” I say, coughing into a wave.

The stranger puts her face in the water. My nose stings and I have trouble syncing my limbs. I slap the base of the buoy, start back the way we came, and catch sight of Amanda in the distance. She’s waiting on the boat ramp, holding my backpack, her light blond hair blowing. The organizers of the annual Goddess Plunge—my participation fee will go to a local food bank—unfurled a red carpet down the ramp, and now the swiftest goddesses lurch shakily toward their people. After I crawl onto land and find it in myself to stand, Amanda appears at my side with a towel and a paper cup of apple cider. “Holy moly,” she says about the blood, which trickles between my breasts.

“But no sharks!” I say. I down the cider, which is tepid.

Amanda pulls me out of the fray, sits me down, trades my towel for a sweatshirt, and presses the towel to my nose. 

“Ouch.” I swallow a mouthful of warm blood, then vomit bloody bits of granola onto the grass.

“It’s not broken,” says Amanda, rubbing my back.

The possibility had not occurred to me. I inhale and air flows wetly. “I need my underwear.”

Amanda fishes through my backpack and hands them to me, and I put them on and lie back in the grass. My teeth knock against each other and my head aches. Then the sunlight dims and there stands Nova Weston, wearing overalls and eyeglasses.

During the minute we spent treading water together, I glimpsed her nipples: small, dark coins. 

“I did this,” she says to Amanda.  

“It was an accident,” I say. “I’m fine.”

“She’s fine!” says Amanda cheerfully. When I asked her months ago to join me at this event, I’d hoped we’d swim together. She’d laughed a long time before offering to be my ride. 

Nova’s lips have regained some of their color. “There’s a medic around here somewhere,” she says.

“Was someone hurt?” I say, and both women look at me. “Oh. Anyone else?”

“Someone’s wearing a warming blanket, but I don’t know. What size t-shirt are you?”  

This stranger is very cute in a bookwormy way—I like her eyes and the squarish shape of her chin—so I feel shy about answering, but then again I’m lying half-naked beside my own bloody vomit. “Large,” I say, and she springs up, saying she’ll be right back.

Amanda examines my face. “The bleeding stopped,” she says. 

“Pants?”  

She hands them over and I wriggle them on. I hobble to stand. “How do I look?”

“That eye will be swollen shut in half an hour. Otherwise, so cute.”

My stranger returns with an ice pack and a black t-shirt, across the bosom of which is a drawing of three women lounging against our city’s skyline in togas and tiaras. This image does not feel true to my experience. “I’m really, really sorry,” she says, backing away. “I shouldn’t be allowed to swim in crowds.”

“Please don’t worry,” I say. It hurts to smile.

Amanda gives me her arm and I hold the ice pack to my face as we weave through the crowd. We step into her car and the world goes quiet. She hands me her phone. On the screen is a photo of me on the red carpet, waving at the camera, my breasts bouncing blurrily. It is not a flattering picture—I’m wearing many chins and there’s something lopsided about my eyes—but I look unapologetically gleeful. I still feel gleeful, though my skull hurts.

No phones allowed at the event, for obvious reasons. “I sneaked it,” says Amanda. She pulls away from the beach and the lake slides by my window. Shadows of elm trees reach toward the lake’s dark, choppy center. Life is passing, and fast.

A DAY LATER, still emboldened by the swim, I’m sitting in my car outside the diner where I’m meeting Amanda and our friend Gwen for breakfast when I absentmindedly open social media on my phone. I don’t have a conscious desire to seek out or avoid posts from Z, but when her face appears on my screen, my heart clenches and my breath holds itself. Three selfies, dinner out with friends. She looks so happy. I want to say her face is beautiful, and this is true, but it’s not the right word. What is the word for something you want to hold in your palms and admire? What’s the word for something you want to study in every light, at every angle?

A minute ago I was calm, and now I am sweating from my hairline, so I make a move I’ve been deliberating for weeks: I force my fingers to my little keyboard and remove Z from my followers and myself from hers, check that I’ve done it correctly, then take deep breaths. There’s a shaft of strong morning sunlight coming in through the windshield, and I close my eyes and show it my face. 

Inside, Amanda is unstrapping her bike helmet and unwinding her scarf, and Gwen is sitting with a cup of tea and her needlepoint. Each of them welcomes me with a side hug and I slide into the booth. “I just disconnected from Z online,” I say. “What have I done?”

Gwen puts down her needlepoint and covers my hand with her own. “Good,” she says. “That one has worn a groove in your brain.”

“Did she get an alert?” says Amanda, who is not on social media.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. She won’t know unless she checks.”

“I approve, but why?”  

“I want to stop thinking she’s someone I know. She’s not.

She doesn’t want to be.”  

“You were pushed out of a plane,” says Gwen, speaking metaphorically. “You’re going to need some help getting back up. How do you feel about psychics?”

Last month, Gwen gave me a tarot reading. My card was the Knight of Swords, which means I have something urgent to say and it’s important I get it out. The people I’m drawn to—lesbians, witches, social workers—tend toward astrology and mediums. What a thing, to believe the universe owns stock in your personal life. 

“Skeptical,” I say to Gwen. “But I’ll try anything.”

Did Z push me out of a plane? It’s as apt an analogy as any, except the plane was safe and warm and wonderful. The hard ground was the hard ground.

Gwen and Amanda use Z’s real name, which I can say only with effort. She is Z because my ex-husband of three years is X, and my first-ever girlfriend, who left me for a semi-pro mountain bicyclist, is Y. And after Z? 

I can’t take another ending.

Amanda and Gwen both vacillate between unhappyish and miserable in their long marriages. Amanda’s husband talks to her like she’s an alien who landed in his home, as if her essential needs—connection, equality, passion, shared goals, mutual respect—are strange, inconvenient chores. The bottom line is that he’s not very nice to her and they don’t love each other in an active way, yet he believes everything is fine and wants nothing to change. 

Gwen’s husband spends all their money on vintage records and marijuana and has never once loaded the dishwasher.

X and I have two kids who just started middle and high school. We keep things on pretty good terms, all told. A little friction, a lot of warmth. We pledged from the start of our separation to make it through with love and kindness. One reason we’ve succeeded is that, despite three years separated, we’ve been too lazy to make it legal. It’s only one piece of the whole shebang—we worked out the custody and financial stuff right away—but I can’t pretend it’s not essential. In this, we’re the opposite of the couples I’ve known, most of whom lead with the legal part and let the really important stuff follow. What results is bruising and disillusioning and chaotic, a private emotional mess sorted by spectators and handed back in a scorching, steely bundle. What if we all just cooled our jets for a while, then came up with an agreement based on what we’ve learned instead of what we’ve predicted? Because anger is cleaner, and cleaner is easier. 

Gwen completes a stitch, then tell us that she’s consulted a psychic named Mila a few times. She says, “If you’re open to it, there’s a chance she could help.” “Send me the link?” I say.

It’s true that I’ll try anything, but at the same time I have no desire to consult a psychic or an astrologer or anyone else, including the therapist who saw me through the end of my marriage. My brother is an internet-famous relationship guru, and he’s told me half a dozen times that what’s happening with me—the sadness, the anger, the confusion, the perseverating, the inability to conceive of my own future happiness—is grief. Grief disorders the brain, he tells me. Grief takes time. 

We order, and then Amanda folds her hands on the table like she’s in a meeting and says to me, “You need a plan.”

It’s not the first time she’s said it, but this time I’m listening. “What kind of plan?”

Gwen, who is a nurse with the school district—years ago, she pulled a nail out of my younger son’s foot and we’ve been friends ever since—is nodding in agreement. “Steps. Milestones. Rewards,” she says. “Like AA.”

“Dates,” says Amanda. “You need to go on dates. Lots of them.”

I haven’t so much as glanced at the apps in weeks. What’s the point?

“How many, do you think?” says Gwen to Amanda.

“A thousand,” says Amanda, nodding sympathetically at me. “Or ten?”

I allow myself to imagine this. Ten dates, ten women, ten potential goodnight kisses. My heart might be broken, but the rest of me works. Why not?