Page 56 of Leaving the Station
“Ineverwent on a second date,” she adds, looking out onto the river.
“Was it because you won’t drink coffee or because you’re a know-it-all?” I joke, but her face is deadly serious. I stand up straighter and speak softer. “How is that even possible? You’re...” I trail off. There are many ways I could finish that sentence, such as “gorgeous”or “stunningly gorgeous”or“a stunningly gorgeousgenius.” But in the end, I use the only words that encompass all that. “You’re Oakley.”
She shrugs. “No one ever asked.”
“Youcould’ve askedthem.”
“I wasn’t used to that,” she says. “I was used to being pursued. I went on, like, a thousand dates in high school, once I turned sixteen. But that was with Mormon boys who my parents approved of.”
“It’s hard,” I say after a beat, like I know anything at all about her life, “to be the pursuer.”
I’m not sure if what I did with Alden counts as pursuit, and I’ve never dateda girl; I’ve never doneanythingwith one.
“It is,” she agrees. “But I thought, I don’t know... that maybe being in New York would be easier. That there would berulesto this kind of thing. But it wasn’t, and there weren’t.”
The more Oakley tells me about her time in New York, the sadder I feel. She ate pizza alone. She never went on a second date.
“But was it easier than Ritzville?” I don’t want her to stop talking.
“Of course.” She laughs humorlessly. “But there’s no comparison. In Ritzville I couldn’t be out at all. And I used to imagine New York as this queer utopia with lesbians running around topless through Central Park.”
“And was it?”
“Honestly? Kind of.”
I laugh at that. Oakley doesn’t.
“That doesn’t meanIdid any of that, mind you,” she says. “I felt like a bird who got pushed out of the nest too soon.”
“That makes sense.”
“Does it?”
“Sure,” I say. “I mean, I grew up in a city known for being super queer and with liberal Jewish parents and it wasstillhard.”
I don’t know fully what I mean by “hard,” and Oakley doesn’t rush me to finish my thought.
“I never felt like I had to hide who I was,” I tell her. “But that didn’t make it any easier. Maybe it made it evenharderbecause it felt like everyone else had it figured out and I didn’t.”
“Exactly!” Oakley looks at me then, and her face is alight with what I now know is herthis idea is exciting tomeand I want to talk about it moreexpression.
She steps closer, moving into the glow of a streetlight; she’s radiant. “I’ve known I was queer since I was a little kid. I knew it from the moment my bishop’s wife first smiled at me once her husband accepted his calling. So I thought that when I went to New York I could quickly put those feelings into action. I thought I’d be able to prove to myself and my family and my ward, my community, that none of it was a blip, that I was who I’d always said I was.”
She’s huddled close to me now; the cold caught up to her after relinquishing her jacket. I pull my arm out from where she’s pinned it to my side and wrap it hesitantly around her. As I do, she leans in so that she’s curled against me, the way the tiny girl from the orchard might’ve curled into her giant boyfriend.
Hopefully there are enough layers to keep her from hearing how fast my heart is beating.
“When I got to New York, all that confidence I had in my identity went away. To everyone else, being queer wasn’t a big deal. But for me, I needed it to be everything, or it couldn’t be anything.” She shakes her head, frustrated. “What I mean is, if being queer can’t be a core part of who I am, then what’s the point?”
“It’s—” I start, but she cuts me off.
“I know what the point is. But I didn’t know how to exist in this new life, and no one else knew what to do with me either. I was like a baby. An ignorant baby.”
There was so much else to say, but I settle on, “Babies aren’t ignorant.” It was silly, but I had a point. “They’re just new to the world. Sometimes a baby has to touch a hot stove before they find out it’ll burn them.”
“Are you speaking from experience?”
Now we’re back to familiar territory. The conversation before was too intense—I don’t want to think about Oakley floundering at anything. She’s so competent.
