Cooking as Fast as I Can (7 page)

My inauspicious college career began under this domestic cloud. I was the living, breathing definition of clueless, and I had an incurable case of the fuck-its. My friend Sandy was going to nearby Hinds Community College and living in the dorms and asked me to be her roommate. I didn't see why not. What else was I going to do? I had been a B student in high school. My college degree–crazed parents believed with dread and certainty that I would skip out on college, and going to Hinds was a good compromise.

Early on I discovered I had an aptitude for drinking. I started with the easy stuff—beer. Eventually I would discover Crown Royal and Diet Coke, and later still, the virtues of a good wine. But back then, a Mississippi girl looking for a buzz had three options: Miller Lite, Coors Lite, and Bud Lite. Without much effort, Sandy and I were able to find a party to get drunk at most nights of the week.

The yard helper/house helper/kitchen helper rules my mom had enforced when my brothers and I were in grade school had long since been dropped, and the other basic chores I used to do before my mom went off to get her PhD were a dim memory. I'd become used to being waited on, living in a house with miraculously dust-free surfaces, and wearing clothing that magically washed and folded itself and appeared in a neat pile in the center of my apparently self-making bed. I'd become soft, spoiled, and petulant. And a picnic to be around, I'm sure.

Without Alma on duty to provide nourishing meals, I gained weight. Cooking in our dorm room consisted of heating up soup and making Top Ramen in an electric hot pot Sandy and I had bought. One night I came home late, drunk,
and hungry. Sandy was still out with her friends. I found a can of ravioli, opened it, dumped it into the hot pot, cranked that sucker up to high, then decided I was in desperate need of a shower. After the shower, I was exhausted and fell into bed.

In the morning, I awoke to the smell of burned tomato paste and the sound of Sandy swearing. The hot pot was ruined. Overnight the ravioli had been transformed from something marginally edible to a concrete slab you might employ in building a prison. The incident was a metaphor for everything that was wrong with my life, and my parents, who were busy but not completely oblivious, insisted I move home. I'm sure they were worried I'd wind up like many wayward Mississippi girls, pregnant and without direction.

By my nineteenth birthday I was out of the closet, at least in my head. My family and high school friends knew nothing about my personal life, and I didn't have any gay friends. But I'd started working at a bodybuilding gym—not a health club, but a serious, no-frills gymnasium, complete with clanking weight plates, booming music, and the tangy smell of sweat. There I met some gay people. Some gay
women
. I had found my tribe, sort of. At least I didn't have to focus on keeping my desires a secret around them. They introduced me to the lone lesbian bar in Jackson, a hole-in-the-wall within walking distance of the capitol building, and one weekend we drove to New Orleans after work and I had a torrid one-night stand with a smokin' hot girl named Holly.

The night I officially came out was nothing I'd planned. It was a typical humid Mississippi summer night. The air smelled of dying grass. Frogs hopped around on our back patio. They appeared every evening just after sunset, attracted to who knows what. I'd gotten myself gussied up, and my mom and dad thought I was going to meet a bunch of girls from school
for a drink. In reality, I was going on a blind date with Holly. I've always liked girly girls, an uncommon preference back in the dyke era of the old lesbian South. Her name was Holly, and it turned out she was the cousin of a woman in Jackson known around town as the Queen of the Lesbians. She was a full-blooded southern eccentric who'd opened an oyster bar with family money.

When I met Holly in Jackson, I knew immediately it wasn't going to happen. Maybe what we'd felt before had been the sexy buzz of being in New Orleans, mingled with the cheap drinks. Back in Jackson, things between us were comically awkward. She might as well have been straight.

I came home miserable and steeped in self-pity. The house was dark, the hum of the central air-conditioning the loneliest sound on earth. My situation crashed down upon me. This was what it was going to be like for the rest of my life. Lying about where I went and with whom. Lying about whom I loved. Lying about who I was.

My parents and Grandmom Alma were at a dinner party down the street. My mom and I had been butting heads of late. Some of it was the usual stuff: I had a few too many ear piercings for her taste, and also sported a silver ear cuff that she despised. My brothers, even with Mike's behavior problems and Chris's occasional surliness, were simple southern boys she could handle. They were buttoned up and she was buttoned up and I wanted to express myself. Plus, I was holding her secretly responsible for everything in my life that was going wrong.

Still, when everything felt the most bleak I wanted my mom. I knew they would be home in a few hours, but I was bursting. This could not wait another minute. Without giving it a thought I picked up the phone and called her.

“I need
to talk to you right now!” I said. Hearing the urgency in my own voice caused me to start crying.

“Right now?” she said. “It can't wait?”

“No!” I said.

“Are you okay?”

“I'm not hurt. I'm okay. But no, I'm not okay.” As the words left my mouth I knew they made no sense.

I went into my bedroom and threw myself facedown on my bed, waiting to hear the sound of the front door. I didn't have to wait long.

“What's going on?” my mom said. She sat down on the edge of my bed.

“I think I'm gay!” I cried. I had no doubt that I was gay, but I impulsively added
I think
to soften the blow, both for my mom and for me. I'd never said anything remotely like this aloud, not even to Jordan.

“Well . . .” she said, buying herself a little time, putting on her psychiatric nurse bedside manner. “How do you know?”

“I went on a date with a girl tonight. And I wanted it to be so good and it was so bad! What am I going to do?”

“You're not going to worry about it at all,” said my mom.

I cried until my eyes were swollen shut, so relieved to be no longer alone in my secret. I didn't have to hide whom I was attracted to; whom I liked a little; whom I loved; who, one day, would be my soul mate. After years of hiding I was out, but also worried what Dad and Grandmom would say. Both of them were more traditional than my mom, and this was the Deep South. Mississippi is one of the least progressive states when it comes to gay people. The state doesn't recognize same-sex marriages, same-sex couples are not allowed to adopt, there are no laws against discrimination against gay people, and there is no hate-crime legislation. On the night I
came out to my mom, same-sex sexual activity was illegal, and would remain so until 2003. I could have been arrested and tossed in jail for having dated Jordan.

My mom rubbed my back until I stopped hiccupping, then called my dad to say she would see them at home. She sat on the edge of my bed and we talked until I fell asleep, relieved that after holding in my secret, the truth was out. Somewhere between then and the next day she broke the news to each of them, separately, and the response was weirdly identical: “It doesn't matter. She's still our girl.”

Confessing to my mom had brought me some relief, but I remained depressed by my options. Most of the women I came across in Jackson who were fully out were pretty butch and not what I was attracted to at all. I started dating Deborah, who lived in Biloxi. She was a good twenty years older than me, and still closeted. She had long blond hair and a strong bone structure, handsome without being masculine, the way some women are. Her sister was the only person who knew she was gay, and once Deborah had come out to her the subject was never mentioned again, to the point where it was as if she'd never come out at all.

I'd drive down on the weekends to see her. The highway south was as dark as any wilderness at night. I felt lonely and crazy, tooling south in my little red Fiat. I'd arrive and we'd go to a bar with her straight friends, play footsie under the table, then sneak off to some crazy-ass apartment—I never knew whom it belonged to—so we could fumble around. It was all so tawdry and sad. I yearned to fall in love, to find my soul mate.

My mom became increasingly concerned about AIDS. Since she worked in the health field, she was more aware than most people I knew, but still, in 1986, little was known about
the disease, especially in Mississippi. It was thought only gay men and intravenous drug users contracted it, but my mom worried. If gay men got it, couldn't gay women get it, too? We started having arguments every time I got dressed up to go out. She feared that I was sleeping with every lesbian who would have me. This was so far from the truth it drove me crazy, and I would lose my temper. I was as picky as a fairy-tale princess, and despite all the making out and groping, practically still a virgin.

She'd also read somewhere that lesbians often resorted to wearing lavender to signal they were free and wanting to hook up. The Gap and the Limited and all the stores I frequented were showing purple that year. I came home with a lavender pantsuit and my mom let out a shriek like she just heard someone had died. Her face turned the color people associate with heart attack or stroke. She was bouncing on her toes, practically levitating. “Oh my God, what on earth are you doing? When you go out in . . . in . . .
that
, every girl you come across is going to think what you're saying is ‘I want sex! I want a lover!' ” She babbled on about Lesbos and the Greek goddesses. I had no idea what this lady was talking about. The cool, liberal psychiatric nurse I knew as my mom had been replaced by a wild-eyed wacko.

“What are you talking about? Lavender is in style. It's in fashion. It's a
trend
.”

We stood in the kitchen and hollered at each other for a while. If anyone else was home, he wasn't about to show his face. My mom is a tall woman, much taller than I am. She towered over me, red-faced and frantic, fists clenched. Finally she got a grip and suggested we sit down at the kitchen table and talk like civilized people. I assured her I was the opposite of promiscuous, selective to a fault. My mom is not a crier,
but she dabbed at her eyes, confessing her fear. She could not imagine what I was facing, the discrimination and perhaps the outright danger.

About a month later she made some private resolution. She joined our local chapter of PFLAG: Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. At the medical center where she taught nursing, she put a pink triangle on her door. I told her people were going to think
she
was gay, but she said she didn't care.

“I want my students to know that I'm open-minded. I want them to know that if they need to talk, they can come to me.”

After the advent of the Internet, she became an avid e-mailer, forwarding me information on Supreme Court decisions and various protests and marches in favor of gay rights. Much later, when gay marriage started becoming legal, she would forward me images her friends had sent, of the Statue of Liberty embracing Lady Justice, the first gay couple married in Massachusetts, and pretty much every other pro–gay rights picture that dropped into her in-box.

Somewhere during that time, I returned the promise ring to Johnny and told him the truth. He still worked at Lowe's, and I remember waiting for him in the parking lot one day. He came out untying his tie, then slipped it into his pocket. It struck me how much more mature he was than anyone else our age. He took the news surprisingly well, didn't say much other than the usual platitudes. Years later I was relieved to hear he'd married well, and had three beautiful children.

The only thing I felt committed to as my teen years were winding down was bodybuilding. I had stopped playing softball when I'd graduated from high school, and I'd lost my
appetite for the extracurriculars at Hinds. I went to class and did my schoolwork without enthusiasm.