Like Me (9 page)

We were spending all day together at the store, but I never grew tired of her company. After three or four weeks or so of knowing her, I wondered if she could sense that I had a crush. I did nothing and said nothing about it, of course. I’d developed crushes on girls before and knew that I just had to deal with the feelings privately and hope that they would fade away. I had no intention of making my feelings known. I had promised myself years before that I would never act on my homosexual inclinations.
I wanted to have a successful career in music and I wanted to have a happy life. I was still working at Opryland, and I’d often been vocal with men in my cast about the sins of being gay. I was truly tortured and I knew that I was a hypocrite.

Brenda invited me to go to a party one Saturday night, and since it was the last weekend of Opryland for me, I told her that I didn’t want to go out. I wanted to be fully rested for my Sunday performances. I’d been working with the cast and crew for months and we had all become close. It would be an emotional day and I wanted to be in top form.

I got home that Saturday night at 9:30 p.m. Brenda’s car was in my driveway. She said she wanted to make sure I hadn’t changed my mind. She suggested that I go for an hour or so and said she’d bring me right home after that. I was planning to take a shower and watch some TV in the basement. There was a makeshift living room downstairs by my bedroom, and although I was certainly allowed to watch TV upstairs in the main living room, I seldom did. I told Brenda that she was more than welcome to come in for a while before she went to the party.

I got out of my makeup, took a quick shower, put on sweatpants, and flopped on the couch. She had already been surfing the channels and found a movie that was just starting. We were sitting on the couch with our feet up on the coffee table. I turned the lamp off because it was causing a glare on the TV. Also, looking at Brenda made me nervous. I wondered why she was there. I knew that she was expected at that party. I wondered if she had a crush on me and if she was feeling scared about it. I was scared that she did have a crush on me. On the other hand, I was scared that she didn’t.

I leaned away from her and put my head down on a pillow at the end of the couch. She invited me to put my legs in her lap, so I did. After a few minutes she asked if she could lie next to me. The couch was deep enough for two people, and I said yes.

She stretched out directly behind me and we covered up with
a blanket. Since the day we’d met, I’d loved how Brenda smelled, and I’d come to associate her perfume with a feeling of excitement. I breathed in her scent as if it were a cloud of gold dust, shimmering with little specks of magic that made me feel like I’d never felt before. It was the first time I’d ever had a girl’s body pressed against mine, and I was sure that she could hear and feel the pounding in my chest. She slid her arm around my waist and pulled me even closer to her. I was thankful that we weren’t facing each other and looking into each other’s eyes.

I felt her breathing on the back of my neck. Her heartbeat thumped between my shoulder blades. I’d been with boys before in similar situations, and I’d heard their breathing get heavy with excitement. It had always been easy for me in situations with boys who begged me to go further or to go all the way with them. I just said no every time. I was able to say no not because I was a good girl brimming with virtue and restraint, ready to resist the urges of physical pleasure for reasons of morality but simply because I was not aroused. I was never tempted. My heart never pounded, my breathing never changed, the private parts of my body never made themselves known with an urging for me to keep going, keep going. But now everything was different.

I didn’t have a fear that Laura-Grace or Gardnar would come downstairs and interrupt. It was nearly midnight. I’d already heard the familiar sounds of their bedroom doors being closed for the night, and there was a part of me that knew I needed to be drifting off to sleep as well. Every day at Opryland was a physical challenge. We performed four shows a day, and the added emotion of our last day would be draining. There I was—anything but sleepy.

I felt her lips gently touch my right ear. I rolled over onto my back, and with our faces now just inches from one another, I quietly said, “I’m scared.” “It’s okay, it’s just a kiss,” she whispered. Our lips touched, softly.

In my efforts to avoid going all the way with boys, kissing had become my specialty. Until that night with Brenda on the couch, kissing had been a menial chore that I performed.

My body was in full command, feeling things and doing things that I’d never known it to do. In the hours that followed, I started to understand conversations that I’d been a part of during high school. When other girls in my class and I would have “girl talk,” they’d go on about how difficult it was for them to say no to their boyfriends. I had often judged them for not resisting the temptations of sexual activity. Suddenly, I had a new and enlightened understanding. In the early hours of that morning, I felt whole.

Brenda left my house around three o’clock in the morning. I fell asleep for a few hours. There was a beautiful antique mahogany wardrobe in my bedroom that belonged to Laura-Grace’s mom. It had shelves and drawers and a place to hang clothes. There was also a long, vertical door with a full-length dressing mirror, and when I awakened every morning and opened my eyes, the first thing I would see was the reflection of my face in that mirror. The morning after Brenda, when I realized that I had, indeed, been with a girl, I stared at myself in that beveled antique mirror. I wondered if this was a first for that hundred-year-old mirror. Was this the first time that a young girl of nineteen had ever stared helplessly into it the morning after having been consumed by passion for another girl?

I cried until it was time to get up. I showered, made my lunch, and drove myself to work. I usually listened to the radio during the thirty-minute commute to the park. My car had only an AM radio, and that was just fine with me because the station that I listened to—650 WSM-AM—was the home of the Grand Ole Opry. I didn’t even think to turn it on that morning. Instead I replayed a lot of what had happened the night before. Blood rushed to my face; my heart began to pound. I was certain that I smelled her perfume.

I took pride in being punctual, but I was late that day. My stage manager forgave me with a wink because it was the last day of the season. Many cast members had brought cameras, and there were continual flashes of light in the dressing rooms and backstage, followed by cheers and hugs. It was a festive occasion, and although we did have four shows to sold-out crowds to perform, the shows seemed to take a backseat to the emotions of the day.

I held it together until after the first show. I was resetting my costumes in the backstage area when I started to cry. The costume station next to mine belonged to Ray Kinman. He saw that I’d suddenly erupted with tears and grabbed me to hug and console me. “Shhhh, don’t cry, don’t cry,” he said. He reassured me that this wouldn’t be the end of all of us being friends and that he was confident that we’d both be back for Red Cast, which would be starting up again in the spring.

How was he to know that I was crying because my world had changed in the past twelve hours? How could he even imagine that I was scared and upset because I’d been sexual with a girl? I was crying because I was ashamed of the things I’d said to him about homosexuality. I cried so much into his shoulder that I messed up my eye makeup, most of which remained on his shirt. He gave me a kiss on the forehead and quipped in his best Southern diva voice, “Child, go fix yourself. You’re a mess!”

I
didn’t see Brenda that night. She called and left a couple of messages on the answering machine that was shared by everyone in the house. I didn’t call her back. I just needed to be alone with my thoughts and figure out what in the world I was going to do.

I showed up at Sport Seasons the next morning for work. I knew that I’d be seeing Brenda and spending the whole day with her. The entire workday passed before I could get the courage to ask her if we could talk. In the meantime, I could feel her genuine concern for me and I sensed her discomfort that we still hadn’t talked about what had happened. Just as we were closing the store, she asked me if I wanted to see her later that night. I told her I did because I wanted to talk to her about a couple of things.

There was really nowhere private for us to go except to my house, so we each headed that way in our own car. We went downstairs. I made sure every light in the basement living room was on.

I sat in a chair adjacent to the couch. “I’m not gay, Brenda. The other night was a mistake. I don’t want to lose you as a friend, but what happened the other night can’t happen again.” She stared down at the rug on the floor and with the toe of her
Nike cross trainers attempted to straighten the fringe that was stitched to the edges. I watched her progress because I couldn’t bear to look up at her. Every piece of the decorative maroon string was soon pointed perfectly in the same direction. She remained silent. I looked up and saw that her head was still hanging down. She was wearing a Sport Seasons T-shirt and a nice pair of tan pants. Her face was hidden from me. I saw that her pants, right at her knees, were wet with tears. Once I realized that she was crying, I got up and sat next to her on the couch. I put my arm around her and held on to her tightly. She finally lifted her head and said, “Okay, I’m sorry.”

We talked a little bit more that night, but not much. We worked together during the next few days, and although it was a little awkward, I was hopeful that everything was going to be all right.

As the weeks went on, I was unable to resist spending my free time with her. She was gentle and sweet, and one of the prettiest girls I’d ever seen. I had asked her shortly after we first kissed if she’d ever done anything like that before. She told me no and it made me feel better. I began to hope that we were both just normal girls and that this was an isolated incident, not indicative of any reality that would manifest itself in my life. Thinking of it in those terms, that it was a first for both of us, made it easier for me for some reason. But our mutually imposed sanctions on being physical and sexual with one another didn’t last long at all.

I worked throughout that fall at Sport Seasons and spent the rest of my time at Middle Tennessee State University. Most of my classes were in general studies, but I also took several political science courses. Brenda was a student there as well, and it was nice to have someone to share the burden of driving, as the campus was about forty-five minutes from Nashville. I was spending less and less time at home and seldom saw Laura-Grace and Gardnar. When I did go home, it made me nervous, because
Brenda was usually with me. I didn’t want them to know what was going on between us, so I ended up staying with Brenda at her grandmother’s apartment.

It made my stomach hurt to think about how I was living a dual existence. My belongings were in one place and I’d sleep in another. It was a very unsettling time in my life. When I was at Brenda’s place, I longed to be back in my basement living area because that’s where my keyboard was. Since I was a little girl of four years old, I’d played the piano nearly every day of my life. When I wrote songs, I leaned heavily on having a piano in front of me. Needless to say, I felt lost in so many ways and struggled to even recognize myself. I had no piano, and I was essentially living in two places and in a relationship with a girl. It started to scare me that I was choosing this unacceptable relationship over my music. I resented how this part of my life was forcing me to choose between my heart and my music. I felt so far away from my dreams at that time in my life. I just didn’t see a way for my existence and my dreams to intersect. My entire life, I’d been able to imagine, in chronological and linear steps, how I would accomplish my goals. I had been able to envision Point A, Point B, Point C, and Point D, and then I’d just have to plan on how to connect the dots. This situation was different. These dots simply could not be connected.

I went home to be at my house for a while, to be with my piano. I played it all day long and through the night, and a new song began to take shape. Typically, once I had a new song written, I’d type out a page with the lyrics on it for future reference. There was an old blue electric typewriter that sat downstairs on a table just off the basement living area. I set my spiral notebook down next to it and began to scour the table for a fresh piece of typing paper. There was a piece of paper in the typewriter already, which was not unusual, as all of us in the house used that machine for schoolwork and other things. I looked at the paper
already in the typewriter so I could determine which of my roommates was in the middle of a project.

I glanced down at the page. A single word was typed on the paper.

“Lesbian.”

I couldn’t imagine which one of my roommates had typed that. There were other people in and out of the house, but I speculated that whoever wrote it must have had enough knowledge about my comings and goings to know that I was spending a lot of time with Brenda. I pulled the page out of the machine hard, just the way my typing teacher in high school had told us not to do. I kept that piece of paper in my jewelry box for a long time. I eventually threw it away with a childish hope that the memory of it would go away too.

After the typewriter incident, I refused to allow Brenda to come over to the house. This was the time in my life when I started to learn how to hide on a whole new level. I had graduated from hiding my feelings of homosexuality to now having to hide my actions of homosexuality. It takes a lot of work to cover up an entire part of one’s life, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

I needed to get my own apartment.

Brenda was unhappy living with her grandmother, so we decided to find a place together. Sometime in January 1990, Brenda and I moved into Priest Lake Apartments. We got a two-bedroom place, of course. I didn’t know exactly how the situation would unfold, but somewhere in the back of my mind I suspected that we wouldn’t stay together. The life of hiding was already proving to be stressful and frightening to me. I found myself pulling away from my parents and not calling them on the phone as often as I usually did. When I did speak to them, everything felt like a lie, even if they just asked, “What’s been going on? What’s new? Catch us up on things.” My answers could
pass, technically, for the truth—but it wasn’t the truth and I knew it. I was telling lies by omission. It made me so sick that I developed a bleeding ulcer.