The Reluctant Daughter Part 2

"Not all the Jews," I mumble into her soft skin. "Some of us are still here."

"Yes, Professor Pinkowitz," Allie chides me. "Crystal Night, which occurred on Sunday, May 29th, 2005, was also the beginning of the end."

"The end of what?" I ask her.

"The end of dealing with your family. For a while, anyway."

"Really?" I push back to look into her dark Spanish eyes. There is so much love there, I almost start to weep. "But Allie, you're the one who always wants me to be in touch with them. You're always telling me I should call them, send cards to them, make more of an effort..."

"I know," Allie says. "I'm sorry, Lydia."

" You're sorry?" I frown at her. "It's not your fault, Allie. If anyone should apologize, it's me. I'm the one who made you take me down to see them."

"But it was my idea," Allie insists. "I always think that visiting your family isn't going to be that bad and then it isn't that bad. It's worse."

"You really think so?" I sit up and prop my pillow behind me. "Whenever I try to explain to people why I can't stand seeing my family, they never get it." Mishmosh resettles himself on my lap as I lean back with a sigh.

"I guess you had to be there," Allie says, as if she's talking to a group of people who don't laugh after she's told them about a situation she thought was funny.

"I mean, there's just no room for me in that family. I can't be myself with them," I say forcefully, as if I'm arguing the point with Allie, even though she's clearly on my side. "It's not even that they don't accept me so much, it's that they don't care about me. I don't even matter ." I thump Mishmosh on his hefty side for emphasis. "Think about it, Allie. Did my mother ask me even one question about my life? No, she did not. Oh, wait, let me correct myself. She did ask me one question. She asked me if I'd lost any weight. Can you believe she still won't let up about that?" I don't give Allie a chance to answer before continuing my tirade. "And I hate the way she talks about me like I'm not even there. Plus, her memory of my childhood is completely different than my memory of it. I never washed a dish or a cup or a spoon? Are you kidding me?" My voice rises with a note of hysteria. " I'm the one who did the supper dishes every night. I'm the one who made the beds every morning. I'm the one who did the laundry, I'm the one who vacuumed, I'm the one who dusted. What do you think turned me into such a G.o.dd.a.m.n feminist?"

"Okay, okay. Lydia, calm down. I believe you. You don't have to convince me." Allie sits up, too, and puts an arm around my shoulder.

"It's like they shun me, Allie," I say, still feeling the need to explain. "I mean, they don't give me the silent treatment-that would be too obvious. It's more insidious than that. My mother talks to me, all right, but she doesn't ask me anything about my life because clearly my life isn't worth knowing about. She acts as if I haven't done one single thing since I left home thirty years ago. So it's like I'm sitting there and I'm invisible at the same time and I just can't take it anymore."

"You're not going to take it anymore," Allie says firmly. "You're going to give yourself a break. You're not going to visit them, talk to them, or even think about them for a while. Doctor's orders, Lydia. It's too painful for you."

"It really is," I whimper like the hurt child I am, despite my grown-up status.

"Come." Knowing there aren't any words that will make me feel better, Allie pulls me close and hugs me tight. I sink into her embrace, and Mishmosh, disgusted that I can't keep still so he can sleep, uses my legs as a springboard to leap onto my dresser, where he hopes to catch some shuteye.

"All right now?" Allie asks after a little while has pa.s.sed. When I nod, she reaches behind me to turn off my reading lamp. We lie down together and I roll onto my side and close my eyes. Allie kisses my cheek and bids me good night. "I don't want you to lie there tossing and turning and thinking," she warns gently, knowing me all too well. "Especially about your family. Shut down your brain and get a good night's sleep, Lydia. I mean it. Okay?"

"Okay," I whisper, but before I can drift into dreamland, Allie, without meaning to, undermines her own suggestion by uttering a phrase that makes me instantly think of my mother. "I'm serious, Lydia," Allie murmurs into the darkness. "Enough is enough."

MOTHERS, MOTHERS EVERYWHERE, as far as the eye can see. Now that I've decided not to think about my own mother, I see other mothers everywhere I look. Buying fruits and vegetables at the supermarket with their babies waving chubby arms about and gurgling in backpacks strapped behind their shoulders. Lifting weights at the gym with their newborns napping in car seats/baby baskets parked down at their feet. Strolling around campus hand in hand with their pint-sized offspring skipping beside them when I stop by once a week to pick up my summer mail. It seems like all winter long the mothers of Paradise were in hibernation and now that summer's here they've come crawling out of the woodwork with their infants, toddlers, pre-schoolers, kindergarten-through-sixth-graders, tweens, and teenagers in tow. And both the mothers and their offspring love interacting with me. They smile, they strike up conversations, some even flirt.

"Who are you making eyes at?" a woman standing in front of me at the post office asks the little boy squirming in her arms. There I am minding my own business at the post office, waiting to mail an article about the rising popularity of drag kings on college campuses to a stuffy academic journal that I'm sure will never accept it, when a toddler dressed all in blue, bats his long eyelashes at me, grins, and then buries his face against his mother's chest. A minute later he lifts his head, peers up at me, and starts playing peek-a-boo all over again.

"He likes you." The boy's mother turns around and smiles at me, then speaks to her son. "Don't you, Matthew?"

Matthew responds by kicking his mother in the kidneys several times with great enthusiasm. As she s.h.i.+fts him around in her arms like a lopsided bag of groceries, I feel obligated to return the compliment.

"He has beautiful blue eyes," I say, which is true.

"He gets them from his daddy," the woman says proudly. "Don't you, sweetheart?" Matthew doesn't answer, just blinks at me again. The woman laughs. "He's going to be a real lady-killer," she says, taking a step forward as the line moves ahead. As a card-carrying feminist, it takes everything I have to restrain myself from challenging the violent implication of Matthew's mother's word choice, not to mention the a.s.sumption that her bouncing baby boy is going to grow up to be a healthy, happy heteros.e.xual. But I know from past experience that if I do open my big mouth, the only thing I'll accomplish is proving what most people already think about feminists: we're a bitter, angry lot with absolutely no sense of humor.

"Do you have any children?" The woman smiles at me again as her question cuts through my thoughts like a knife.

"Who me? Oh my G.o.d, no." Without thinking, I laugh at the very idea, and then watch the smile on the woman's face freeze before her expression transforms into a look of sheer horror. Luckily the postal clerk calls out "Next!" rescuing the poor thing from the nutcase standing behind her who obviously doesn't understand that being a mother is the most wonderful thing in the world.

I have never wanted to be a mother. Growing up, I had no interest in playing with dolls, though my bed was covered with a legion of stuffed animals: dogs, cats, elephants, lions, tigers, and giraffes, each one named, fussed over, and adored. As a teenager, I just couldn't understand the attraction of motherhood. "Why should I gain fifty pounds, get varicose veins and stretch marks, spend hours in pain giving birth, and then take care of someone for eighteen years who is only going to grow up and hate me?" I asked my best friend Colleen, who came from a large Irish family and not only wanted to be a mother, but wanted a dozen kids. At least.

When Allie and I got serious about each other, which, in true lesbian fas.h.i.+on, happened on our second date, I knew I had to bring up some difficult issues. Untangling myself from her steamy embrace, I said the four words n.o.body likes to hear: "We have to talk."

"Did I do something wrong already?" Allie asked, her voice full of concern. We had just left the crowded dance floor of a club that dubbed Tuesdays "alternative lifestyle night." Among a horde of sweaty gay men and lesbians doing the hustle (it was the tail end of the eighties, after all) Allie plastered her body against mine, belly to belly, and taught me her favorite Latin dance. "You can't have a Puerto Rican girlfriend if you don't know how to merengue," she said, showing me how to move my hips and guiding me across the floor. When the song ended we continued dancing out the door and began making out like two teenagers before we even hit the street. Allie led me to a bench in a nearby school yard, sat me on her lap, and glued her lips to mine. If I thought I had been living in Paradise before, now I knew I was in Heaven.

But before I could let things go where they were heading and where I certainly wanted them to go, there were a few things I had to find out. So though I didn't really want to, I made myself slide off Allie's lap, took her hand in mine, and began the conversation.

"Alicia Maria Taraza," I said, the newness of her name a delicious treat on my tongue. "Are you non-monogamous?"

"h.e.l.l no," she said, giving me a look that would become very familiar over time and which basically meant, what are you, loco?

"Excellent." I made an imaginary check mark in the air. "Next question: if we ever decided to live together, would you insist on having a Christmas tree in the house?"

"Well..." Allie pretended to think the matter over. I knew, and she later confessed, that she wasn't pondering how she felt about Christmas trees; she was trying to figure out the answer I wanted to hear so she wouldn't say the wrong thing and blow her chances of having her way with me that night.

"It's not that important," Allie finally said. "Christmas was never a big deal in my house. I mean, we had a tree and everything, but the biggest holiday for Puerto Ricans is Three Kings Day. Could we celebrate that?"

"Sure," I said in the spirit of compromise. I wasn't all that familiar with Three Kings Day, so it didn't carry the oppressive weight of Christmas, a holiday that grated on my Jewish nerves from the day after Halloween when the first red-and-green store displays went up, right up until New Year's Eve when they were finally taken down.

"Anything else?" Allie asked, already moving in for another kiss.

"There is one more little thing," I said, trying to make light of the next question, which was the real deal-breaker. "How do you feel about having children?"

"Having children," Allie repeated, nodding. "Well, let's see." Since Allie hadn't known me long enough to know what I wanted her to say, she had no choice, really, except to be honest. "If I wound up with someone who really wanted kids, I would never stand in her way of having them. But it's certainly not in my game plan."

"Hooray!" I threw myself into her long, strong arms and gave her a kiss that let her know she had pa.s.sed the pop quiz I had sprung upon her with flying colors.

I always thought one of the perks of being a lesbian was not having to become a mother. But lately it seems that Allie and I are the only ones who feel that way. Every time I turn around, another birth announcement arrives in the mail. A friend who just turned thirty breaks down in the baby food aisle of Price Chopper and convinces her lover it's time to pick out a sperm donor and start inseminating. A colleague smack dab in the middle of menopause adopts a little girl from Guatemala. A woman Allie works with and who holds a very special place in our hearts since she set us up on our first date many years ago decides to "try out" motherhood by becoming a foster parent to a twelve-year-old. If I have to buy one more copy of Heather Has Two Mommies for a pair of new lesbian parents, I swear to G.o.d, I'll scream.

And I do scream one hot Sat.u.r.day night during the first weekend of August when Allie and I go to a potluck dinner given by two women on her softball team. Over hummus and tabouli and more variations on macaroni salad than I thought possible, a group of lesbians sit on the floor and pa.s.sionately discuss the consistency of their children's "p.o.o.p" in relation to the pros and cons of cloth versus disposable diapers. These are the same women who not too long ago spent their Sat.u.r.day nights arguing about world politics, social injustice, and articles from the latest issue of Ms. Magazine.

"Gag me with a pacifier," I whisper to Allie, who simply gets up to help herself to another slice of strawberry rhubarb pie. As I wait for her to return, a little girl named Aurora wearing a pink T-s.h.i.+rt that has the words "Future President" emblazoned across her future chest comes flying into the room and flings herself into one of her mothers' arms with a piercing, wounded shriek.

"What happened, honey bear? Did you fall down? Did you hurt yourself somewhere?"

Aurora nods tearfully and points to her head.

"Oh no, not your little head. That must have really, really hurt. Let Mommy make it all better. Here." Aurora's mother gathers her daughter onto her lap, kisses the top of her head, and then cradles her so lovingly, I have to turn away as a memory from over forty years ago enters my mind and fills my eyes with tears. I also fell and b.u.mped my head one day when I was Aurora's age and Colleen and I were playing jump rope outside. But when I burst into the house sobbing, my mother did not tenderly embrace me. She barely looked up from the soap opera she was watching, and when she did and saw no blood dripping down my face or broken bones poking through my skin, she said, "Lydia, you're fine. Nothing hurts. Stop crying. Don't be such a baby." And when I only howled louder, my mother snapped, "Lydia, stop crying right now or I'll give you something to really cry about." Which, I have to admit, was a very effective parenting technique: I shut up immediately. As does Aurora, who is now snuggled up against her mother's chest, the picture of contentment. Aurora's mother rests her cheek against her daughter's silky blond hair and rocks her back and forth, humming softly. Then, with a look of utter bliss on her face, she catches my eye and says to me, of all people, "You don't know what love is until you become a parent."

" I don't know what love is?" I ask Allie the moment we get into the car. " You don't know what love is? Only parents know what love is? How dare she?"

"Of course we know what love is," Allie says, looking over her shoulder to back away from the scene of the crime.

"I just can't believe she said that. What did, what does..." I'm so mad I'm sputtering.

Allie drives with one hand on the wheel, the other stroking my arm in a vain effort to soothe my ruffled feathers. "Of course that was an obnoxious thing to say." Allie slows for a stop sign. "But the woman can't help herself, Lydia. All new mothers are like that. It's called milk mind."

"Are you defending her?" My voice rises and it is then that I scream.

"Wow." Allie pulls over to the curb and stops the car. "What the heck, I didn't need that eardrum anyway," she says, shaking her head to clear it. "Lydia, c'mon now. You can't take everything personally. Can't you see when somebody says something like that, it's more about her than it is about you? Obviously she never knew what love was until she became a parent."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah." I know Allie is right. But still, the comment rankles me. It's there in my head the next morning when I sit down in my study to check my e-mail. And what do I find waiting in my inbox? A slide show of not one, not ten, not thirty, not seventy-five, but one hundred and one photos of Colleen's youngest child-her fifth!-for me to peruse, admire, and purchase if I so desire. Serves me right for booting up my laptop on a Sunday morning instead of relaxing with the New York Times crossword puzzle, a steaming cup of hazelnut coffee, and a chocolate-covered biscotti or two.

As I mentally scold myself, I hear Allie's footsteps coming up the back stairs from her bas.e.m.e.nt workshop. "Are you finished sanding the tables?" I ask her, referring to some furniture she is building for our local battered women's shelter.

"Almost," Allie answers as she comes into the room and leans over my desk. "What'cha looking at?" Her white T-s.h.i.+rt is covered with sawdust like a donut sprinkled with cinnamon and she smells just as tasty.

"Baby pictures," I say, rolling my eyes. "Colleen's too old to pop out any more so now they're adopting. She's from China."

"She's a cutie," Allie says, and then notices the look of dismay on my face. "What? Don't tell me you're annoyed that Colleen adopted a baby, Lydia. Please. What kind of feminist are you?" I scowl at Allie, who knows that to me this is the ultimate insult. "C'mon. Lydia," she coaxes. "You told me that all Colleen ever wanted was to be a mother, so doesn't she get to make that choice? And besides, I'm sure she and her crew are giving little..." Allie narrows her eyes at my computer screen. "...Mei Lin a very good home."

"You're right," I admit, studying the drooling little girl, who looks like every other drooling little girl I've ever seen, more or less. "But honestly, Allie. How would Colleen feel if I sent her one hundred and one pictures of Mishmosh?"

Allie chuckles. "Try it and see."

"Maybe I will." I lean back in my chair and contemplate the possibilities. "Mishmosh sleeping on his back, Mishmosh sleeping on his stomach, Mishmosh sleeping on his left side, Mishmosh sleeping on his right side, Mishmosh sleeping on the bed, the sofa, the kitchen table..."

"Mishmosh chewing up the plants, Mishmosh dumping over the garbage, Mishmosh sharpening his claws on the living room rug..." Allie ticks off his less-than-fabulous attributes as the little devil comes trotting into the room. He marches straight toward me and b.u.mps his enormous head against my s.h.i.+n, which is his way of asking for affection. It's barely ten o'clock and it feels like the temperature has already hit eighty-five, but Mishmosh doesn't care. The warmer it gets, the more attention he craves; I don't know why. Allie, who also has a tendency to feel frisky in the heat, jokes that it's his Puerto Rican side.

"Hey, he's not that bad," I remind Allie. "Come up, Mishman." I pat my legs and eighteen pounds of cat jumps onto my lap, turns in a circle, and then collapses into a purring heap. "Look how adorable he is," I say to Allie. "He's as cute as that baby any day."

"Of course he is. Plus he outweighs her at least two to one." Allie scratches Mishmosh under the chin, then leans down to squash him between us, forming what is known in our household as a "Mishmosh pit." After listening to him purr for a minute, Allie straightens up. "I wouldn't tell Colleen that you think her new kid can't hold a candle to our cat, though."

"No, I guess not." I hit my Return key and Allie and I both stare at another picture of Colleen's daughter that pops onto my computer screen. She's wearing a tiny T-s.h.i.+rt that says "Spit happens," which makes me groan and Allie snicker.

Allie heads back to the bas.e.m.e.nt and I turn away from my email and open a new empty page on my laptop. I'm supposed to be writing an article-just because I have tenure doesn't mean I can slack off in the publis.h.i.+ng department-and besides, I need something new to present at the Women's Studies conference I'm attending this fall. But my mind is as blank as the computer screen before me. "What's wrong with me, Mishy?" I ask the purring puddle on my lap, who responds by swiveling his ears back and stretching his toes. "Any idiot can write an article." It's something my mother said to me years ago when I was home visiting and still foolish enough to believe I might be able to convince her to give up cigarettes though she'd been smoking since she was fourteen years old. I doubt I really thought my argument could persuade her; rather I felt some sense of guilt about my mother's bad habit since she told anyone who asked that the only reason she still smoked was because her daughter made her nervous. So during this particular visit, I was telling her about a new form of hypnotherapy that was supposed to be very effective. She pooh-poohed the idea, of course, and I foolishly defended it. "Mom," I said, "I'll send you the article I read about it and you'll see. It was published in this really great holistic health magazine called-"

"Lydia," my mother interrupted, looking me right in the eye. "Any idiot can write an article." So much for asking what she thought of the article I'd written about Jewish feminist rebels from Lilith to Emma Goldman. I'd sent the academic journal my work had been published in to my parents months earlier but neither of them had ever mentioned it. For a while I had an index card with my mother's words tacked to my bulletin board to look at whenever I was having trouble with my writing, figuring if "any idiot can write an article" I could, too. But Allie thought the message wasn't exactly a loving one and made me take it down.

"Maybe I have Purina Cat Chow mind instead of milk mind," I say to Mishmosh, scratching him under the chin. Since motherhood seems to be in my thoughts so much lately, maybe I should write about that. But I'm not really thinking about motherhood; I'm thinking about non-motherhood. Am I the only woman left on the planet who doesn't have a burning desire to be called Mommy? And even if I were the last non-mother (un-mother?) on earth, who cares? I'm happy with my life and my choices. Aren't I?

"Aha!" I say, startling Mishmosh, who jumps off my lap and heads for the doorway, his tail swis.h.i.+ng in anger. Halfway there he stops, stretches his front paws forward, and raises his rear end toward me, making sure I am aware of his extreme displeasure before leaving the room. As I watch him stalk off in search of quieter sleeping quarters, I realize that Allie is right-Allie is always right-there is a reason why all these women having babies annoys me so much. The thought hits me as hard and fast as a bucket of ice water thrown in my face: somewhere, deeply buried beneath my steely feminist core, I don't believe I'm a worthwhile human being because I am not a mother. I am so stunned by this realization, I know it must be true.

"But how can that be?" I ask the walls, which unfortunately do not answer. Do I really think that all the academic work I've done, all the political activism I've been involved in, all the teaching, the writing, the research, all that adds up to nada just because I've never warmed a bottle of formula, rocked a crying baby at three o'clock in the morning, or changed one single cloth or disposable diaper in my entire life?

In an effort to banish this realization as quickly as it arrived, I start typing furiously. And what appears on my computer screen is a list of childless (child-free?) women who pop randomly into my head, all of whom I admire. Oprah Winfrey, the G.o.ddess of daytime TV. Marilyn Monroe, the s.e.x G.o.ddess of the fifties. Katharine Hepburn, the G.o.ddess, period. Georgia O'Keeffe, whose artwork hangs on my walls; May Sarton, whose journals line my bookshelves; Julia Child, whom I hereby dub Julia Childless and whose cookbooks gather dust in my kitchen. Celia Cruz, the Queen of Salsa and Allie's favorite female vocalist. Allie herself. My great-aunt Selma, who never married and whom my parents always talked about in whispers as though being a "spinster" was a fatal disease. My high school English teacher Miss Hennessy, who wore pantsuits and men's shoes and was rumored to live with another "old maid" on the outskirts of town. Mishmosh's vet, who calls herself Dr. Cynthia and owns a big farm with horses, cows, dogs, cats, ferrets, and a parrot named Wynona. Frida Kahlo, Susan B. Anthony, Mother Theresa, Rosa Parks...

And then there are the lesser known women whose stories I've been collecting for years. It's one of my Sunday morning rituals, along with sleeping in for an extra hour, eating something that involves chocolate for breakfast, and doing the crossword puzzle in the New York Times . Every Sunday when I am well rested and well fed and before I feel ready to try and figure out a six-letter word for "whine" (snivel) or remember who played the t.i.tle role in the 1944 film Laura (Gene Tierney), I turn to the last page of the first section of the paper and comb the obituaries in search of a woman who is survived by "several nieces and nephews" or who died "surrounded by many loving friends." And there's always at least one. A women who was active in the arts, in social services, or in the world of business. A women who lived to be one hundred and two and swore the secret to her longevity was drinking a gla.s.s of red wine and smoking a fat cigar every evening before she went to bed. I love these women and faithfully clip their death notices every week and file them away. I look at them often, and feel comforted to know that they lived New York Times worthy lives even without perpetuating the species. If they can do it, I can do it, I think as I open the top drawer of my desk to take out a thick folder of yellowing newsprint. "At least I'm in good company," I tell myself just as Allie comes back upstairs and pokes her head into my room.

"Now what are you doing?" she asks, standing in my doorway with a piece of folded sandpaper in her hand.

"I'm making a list of women who never had children but still led a worthwhile life," I tell her, adding Gloria Steinem-how could I have possibly forgotten her?-to my list.

" But still led a worthwhile life?" Allie tilts her head to the side and stares at me. " But? Lydia, do you feel okay?" Allie steps into the room and presses her lips to my forehead, checking to see if I have a fever.

"Of course I feel okay."

"Then what's going on?"

"I don't know." I save my doc.u.ment, t.i.tling it "Women Who Don't Know What Love Is" in honor of the remark Aurora's mother made last night. "Maybe I'm missing out on something by not having a baby."

"Whoa. Close that folder and shut down that computer." Allie waits until I put my laptop to sleep and then takes me by the hand and leads me away from my desk through the kitchen and out the door into our backyard. "Sit down." She parks me at the picnic table in the middle of the lawn and goes inside to get us some iced tea.

"Bring out my sunhat," I call after her, squinting in the bright midmorning light. While I wait for Allie to return, I feast my eyes on her magnificent garden. Our yard is the biggest on the block and the main reason we bought this house, so that Allie could continue her mother's tradition of growing the most beautiful flowers in the neighborhood. Allie works the same magic on her garden that she works on me; tiger lilies, daisies, irises, roses, bleeding hearts, and other plants and shrubs I can't even name all blossom magnificently under her touch.

"Here." Allie returns, plops my straw hat onto my head, and hands me a tall gla.s.s. "Bottoms up." She clinks her drink against mine before taking a long sip. "Now Lydia," Allie says. "Either you're having heatstroke, menopause has finally kicked in and your hormones are making you crazy, or alien beings have entered your body and taken over your brain. Which is it?" Allie pulls a lawn chair up next to me, drops into it, and leans forward, her elbows on her knees and her eyes full of concern.

"I don't know," I say again. I don't seem to know anything lately. "Allie, look at me. I'm forty-eight years old-"

"Forty-nine next weekend," Allie reminds me. "And we've got big plans, remember?"

"I remember," I say, with an obvious lack of enthusiasm.

"What?" Allie asks. "Did you change your mind about going away for a romantic weekend? Do you want a party instead?"

"No, Allie."

"Then what's the matter?"

"It's just that..." I shoo away a fly that has perched on the rim of my iced tea gla.s.s. "I'm about to turn forty-nine and what have I done with my life? Nothing."

"You're kidding, right?" Allie's look of concern has crossed over into worry. "Do you want me to go back in there," she points toward the house, "and print out your resume? Do you want me to pull out all the letters you've gotten from former students saying how having you as a teacher changed their lives? Do you want me to tell you once again all the ways that you've changed my life?"

"Oh, Allie, what does it all add up to?" I ask, looking down at my lap. "Even Jackie Kennedy said the accomplishment she was most proud of was the way she raised Caroline and John."

"Lydia, maybe it's time to lift the embargo. What do you think? Maybe you should call your mother." Allie folds her arms across her chest and sits back, bracing herself for my response.

"Why would I want to do that?" I ask Allie in a voice that conveys I'd rather swallow my own kneecap. "And anyway, you're the one who said I should take a break."

"Break time's over," Allie announces, like we're co-workers who have to get back to our jobs. "It's been a few months, Lydia. You can't ignore your family forever. And who knows? Maybe they've missed you. Maybe things have changed."

"I doubt it. Nothing ever changes."

"The only thing constant is change," Allie reminds me, though I'm hardly in the mood for plat.i.tudes. She studies me for a minute, lost in thought, and then leans forward with a look on her face that says she's figured it all out. "Listen, Lydia," Allie says. "Think back to when you first came out as a lesbian."

"What in the world does that have to do with anything?"

"Just work with me here for a minute, okay?"

"Sure." I can't for the life of me make sense of this segue, but I'm happy to go along with it. Anything to get Allie off her "call your mother" kick. "Go on," I tell her.

"Remember when you first came out and you threw away all your skirts and heels, buzzed your hair, and took a car mechanics cla.s.s?"

"Of course I remember." I look at her. "So?"