By Ali Barker
I came across Rachel’s website last week and was pleased to see she is thriving and her eyes still have the same spark of joy I remember. That was my first thought —lovely Rachel, always full of warmth. She’s a corporate attorney now, isn’t she? Do you ever stumble upon people from your past and test your memory? It’s good practice. That’s what I was doing as I composed this letter to you, which sort of wrote itself, really.
My second thought was of you. You were some sort of artist or house painter, weren’t you?
Your effervescent girlfriend, Rachel, was a friend of mine in the MFA program where we met, almost 20 years ago. Can you believe it’s been that long? You were her (much senior) girlfriend. What do they call that? A May-December romance? The one time Rachel displayed annoyance at me was when I mispronounced your name.
“Whoa, that’s not how you say her name.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s not Kuss-SAND-rah. It’s KusSahhhhhhhhndra.”
Sometimes I wondered if there was more than respect at stake in the correct pronunciation of your name. Sometimes I wondered if your pairing laced Rachel with a little bit of embarrassment: your mid-80’s essentialist feminism, that deep chip on your shoulder testifying to being abandoned by your parents, toiling in financial scarcity, dropping out of college. You had a condescending manner toward Rachel’s peers and me, as if we were children and our concerns were child’s play. You drove a hatchback with pounds of rocks in the back. It was a decades-old rock collection that took up the entire rear space of the vehicle.
We were at a yard sale once where Rachel bought a chair, but realized upon glancing into the back of the car that you couldn’t transport it home. “Can you bring it to my house?” she asked. “I can’t fit the chair in with all the rocks back there.” Too much baggage in the Subaru for any additional cargo.
Rachel got a dreamy look in her eyes when she talked about you, like you were an insect from another time trapped in amber. “Cassandra takes a rock from every chapter of her life. She’s been building her collection since she was 20.” You were at least 50 by then. Through Rachel’s eyes, you were a beautiful oddity, and the rocks kept you rooted in the world. To hear Rachel talk, you were a dreamer who had earned your flowers but had been handed handfuls of thorns. Maybe Rachel’s love was your flower collection.
I like that your rock collection was a handy metaphor. What a lot to haul around, Cassandra.
I had just turned 30, and we lived in a southern university town, full of toxic masculinity, misogyny, and limited sartorial choices for middle-aged women at football tailgate parties. That was probably the weightier reason I tucked my penchant for women under the radar and passed as straight while I lived there—one thing a bisexual person can usually do is play a wide field. But who knows—maybe I would have found more courage to let my freak flag fly, had lesbians like you not said what you did.
I had been there a year when you two moved to town, and I hadn’t met another queer person since I’d arrived. At the time, I was emotionally entangled with another writer in my graduate school cohort, a boy ten years my junior with pear-like curves and a blond ponytail. Two months after you two moved to town, you had me over for dinner in the adorable craft bungalow you and Rachel shared, and afterward, the three of us had gin and tonics garnished with mint from your garden. We shared the biographical highlights that new friends trade, giddy with fellowship. My guard was down, so thirsty I was for the companionship of gay women, having stuck it out for a year in the town, alternating between coaching the 20-year-old to eat pussy and crafting overwrought short stories about the dissolution of my marriage to my ex-wife. Your life had more chapters than Rachel’s and mine, and you peppered the conversation with explanations about why that was tiresome around Rachel’s same-age friends. You seemed lonely without a peer group, but in the way a vampire is lonely without other vampires. I told you and Rachel that I was bisexual. Back then, I was pretty cool with that label—it was 2007, and I had just ended a domestic partnership with the woman I thought was the love of my life. My first love in high school, a boy with a fade and a letterman jacket from an out-of-state high school, was equally heartbreaking. I could hold those two ideas in my hands simultaneously, and I took it for granted that other queer people could and did as well. But by using the “b” word, I chilled the vibe there on the back porch, lined with fairy lights and sweet olive blossoms. You shook your head. You told me, oh sweetie, there is a reason bisexuals are called unicorns. It was my job, you said, to figure myself out.
I remember your words. “You’re fooling yourself if you think bisexuality is a real thing. And fooling yourself is damaging to more than just you—you hurt the queer community by claiming bisexuality. You’ll have to sort out which you are, and the sooner you do, the better.”
Marooned in a backwater southern town, your words were a sharp incision. Later, in a fit of malaise, I would stumble upon the term episodic bisexual. Maybe desire was context-specific, I thought, sure, that’s me—someone who evaporates into the atmosphere.
The following year, wracked with the pain of self-hatred and a worsening drinking habit, a therapist gave me an assignment to place framed pictures of my ex-wife and my current ponytail boyfriend side by side in a prominent place in my apartment, hoping to help me cohere better.
What a trip down memory lane I’m taking! Granted, it’s giving you too much credit to trace my ensuing psycho-sexual existential crisis back to the way your words punctured me there that night over Hendrick’s. I had been vulnerable, and it had not served me.
After that night, I gave you a wide berth. Rachel and I tended a tenuous friendship in fits and starts.
I can see now that you were just saying what many people think, and your views weren’t special. Your attitude toward unicorns wasn’t rooted in wisdom; your idea about desire requiring application into a container wasn’t remarkable. You were probably heavy with hurt; why or for how long is not my business. And like many hurt people, you tried to disappoint anyone who allowed themselves to believe in mythical creatures.
A brief Google search confirms that you are still an artist, of a sort. And you and Rachel are still together. I think you have a child.
I remember one stultifying summer afternoon from that time, Rachel and I met for coffee in a cafe where people like us parked for hours with our laptops, banging out manuscripts to be chewed on and flayed apart by other aspiring writers. Creation, evisceration, digestion, begin again. Rachel and I would compare notes on coursework and vent about the irritations of living in a backwater town. Rachel’s writing was full of heart and embraced the fullness of people, both their angels and their demons. She and I sat on wrought iron chairs in the coffee shop courtyard, under a live oak’s fat, sinewy branches. As we sipped cold brews from tall glasses, the sides sweating with condensation, Rachel told me she had a confession. I remember she was brilliant at baring her soul without fanfare.
Sometimes, maybe even frequently, she said, when you and she lay naked and entangled in bed, at the height of your sexual pleasure together, she could not resist the intrusive thought that what you two were doing together was wrong. Not morally wrong, she clarified, but the plain fact of your nakedness against hers was not true to her nature–that what you two were doing was made up, that you were both fooling yourselves.
It’s funny the things others share with us that have the most weight to them, isn’t it?
I imagine how large your rock collection must be by now, what kind of work it does to root you in the world, and to what you’ve told yourself is real. It’s funny how memory makes its own symmetry.
Your unicorn,
Ali Barker
Ali Barker lives in New Orleans in the U.S. with her daughter and her cat.