“Can’t I have my own preferences and desires without you telling me what I want?”
Dylan looks at Peter and chuckles. “Maybe you can tell me what she wants.”
“What if I don’t believe you know what you want?” Peter continues.
“And you know what I want?” I ask.
“Maybe I do,” he says. “Look, Callie, don’t take it so personally. Most people don’t know what they want.”
“So that means,” I say, “you could be interested in Dylan?”
“Yes, it means that.”
Dylan bats his eyelashes, “Peter, I didn’t know.”
“Oh my God.” I shake my head.
“Peter!” Dana throws her crumpled napkin at him from across the table. “What are you saying?” This is as loud as I’ve ever heard Dana speak.
“So, what are you saying, Peter?” I lift my glass, and, while I’m interested in his answer, I’m momentarily distracted by the impression my lipstick has left behind on the rim. I use my napkin to wipe it and turn to look at him. My hair falls in front of my face, a shield.
“I’m saying that everyone is everything.” He stabs a roasted potato and sticks it in his mouth. “Capable of anything, if you allow yourself.”
“Oh, really,” I say, shaking my head. “So, I personally could be a woman walking in the countryside, a woman at work in New York City, a mom, a hooker, and a lesbian?”
“Exactly.”
“Are you saying we could be any of them?”
Peter brings the glass of scotch to his lips. “I’m saying you could be all of them.”
“So, we pick which parts we’ll act? Like in a play?”
“Something like that.”
Dana leans in. “It’s about …”
“Choice,” Peter finishes.
I shake my head. “Homosexuality is not necessarily a choice.”
“No,” Peter says. “But not acting on one’s homosexuality might be.”
I think about this. How much of myself, I wonder, is an act?
Earlier that morning, I picked up Dylan’s wet towel from our bedroom floor and closed his closet doors. In the bathroom, I wiped off the toothpaste he left on the side of the sink, bent for his boxer shorts, and dropped them in the hamper. Dylan slinked up behind me and reached for my hair clip, snapping it off. The act, like the plucking of feathers from a chicken, felt as if he were snatchng a part of me.
“Do you wear hair clips?” I ask the women at the table, and realize that I have never seen any of them wearing one.
“No way,” Marisa answers. “Eric hates my hair up.”
“What about when you’re working in your house— cooking, gardening, or cleaning?”
“I’ll wear a ponytail sometimes, but never a clip,” Marisa informs me.
“Women who walk around like that look like housekeepers,” Dana says.
I bring the glass of wine that the waitress, Judy, has just set down on the table to my lips. “What if you’re actually keeping house?”
Dana scoops an olive out of her drink and says, “My father once threw a woman wearing curlers out of his office. Wouldn’t examine her with rollers in her hair. When she explained to my father that she had somewhere to go later on, he told her that she was already somewhere and that she shouldn’t walk around that way. According to him, it was unacceptable.”
Dana sits straight up with her shoulders pinned to the back of her chair. I watch her lips moving as she rolls the olive around in her mouth. Using two fingers, she removes the pit and says, “It’s like wearing flats—you just don’t.”
“But Dana, you’re five-foot-nine,” I say.
“You just don’t, Callie. Look at your legs in heels, and then look at them in a pair of flats.”
I’m not sure how to respond to this, so I don’t.
I think about the year before when I traveled to a spa in California, a man with messy hair and sunglasses wanted to know my name. I told him, and the next day, he asked me again. By that afternoon, he’d asked me my name four separate times.
“Why do you keep asking me that?” I said to him. “If you’re trying to flirt with me it would be a much better tactic if you could remember my name.”
He looked at me sincerely. “It’s just that when you say your name”—he lifted his sunglasses from his nose —“it’s like you don’t believe it.”
“Let’s play a game,” Marisa says.
“What kind of game?” Dylan asks.
“Each one of us has to use three words to describe ourselves.” She looks around. “Callie, you go first.”
Thoughts spin around in my head like clothes in a dryer. The colors and fabrics collide and separate. Should I reveal what I really think about myself, or should I tell them what I wish to be? I feel unnaturally troubled, like a turtle burdened by the weight of its own shell. I reach for dessert, as if this is the same as reaching for the truth, and in a moment of madness, an attempt at honesty, I think to say, flawed, secretive, and angry.
Instead, I take a bite of tiramisu, the white cream resting on my top lip, and the words emerge from inside me.
“Good, honest, and open,” I say.
I stick my tongue out of my mouth and lick the white cream off.
SUNNY SIDE UP
The day my family moved from an apartment on Robert E. Lee Street to a house on Canal Boulevard, it was boiling out. It was the fall of 1970. I was six, and my mother was eight months pregnant. While my father got ready for work, my mother lugged a box of shoes to the door, and by the look on her face, I knew something was wrong. She pushed back her thick, yellow headband and wiped her forehead. “It’s unbearable,” she said. She stood and lifted her arms, exposing her belly under her maternity blouse, held her long black hair with one hand, and fanned the back of her neck with the other. “You could fry an egg on the sidewalk in this city.”
My father reached for his watch and fastened it around his wrist. “You mean it’s hot. Can’t you just say it’s hot?”
“You can say it’s hot.” She bent and taped the box shut. “I want to say, you can fry an egg on the sidewalk.” My mother hated New Orleans and wanted desperately to move back to New York, and I could feel her nerves.
“After all,” she said, standing, “to each his own.”
“What do you want from me, Sharon? I don’t control the weather.”
“I didn’t say you did.”
Sometimes when I close my eyes, I see myself small and alone at the window watching my father walk away that day. I vividly remember wanting to go with him.
His leaving triggered something in my mother. She seemed distracted and teary-eyed. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
She inhaled deeply and transformed herself from a twenty-four-year-old into a full-fledged adult. “Nothing,” she said, wiping her eyes. “What could be wrong? Daddy went to work, and we get to move into our beautiful new house.” Busying herself immediately, she packed away her feelings along with her belongings. She placed her jewelry in a black velvet pouch, secured the pouch in her bra, and slammed the door to our apartment shut.