Page 57 of Best Woman
“You’re my sister now,” she says. “And sisters tell each other this kind of shit. Clean up your mess. Do better.” She gives me another hug. “Now fix your eyelash and go take pictures with your brother.”
“What’s wrong with my eyelash?”
Mom is a looming presence just outside my periphery all through the photo shoot, and while I would love nothing more than to pound champagne and ignore her, I can feel her eyes on me and know a confrontation is imminent, so I switch to coffee in preparation. Sure enough, she approaches me on the patio when everyone inside is engaged in a slideshow of baby pictures organized by Rachel’s parents.
“See,” Rachel crows from inside, “Aiden was hung even as a toddler!”
“That’s not appropriate,” I mutter.
“Julia.” Mom is standing behind me, shielding her eyes from the light. “They only serve Pepsi here. Ride with me to McDonald’s?”
“Sure.” Inhale, exhale. Best get it over with now. “Where’s the car?”
Why does every serious discussion or major emotional moment with my mother have to happen in a car? Is it because in every situation, no matter how dire, she has a clear exit strategy? She can simply get out.
We pick her car up from valet and I assure Mom I’m fine to drive. Between the coffee and an adrenaline surge at looking into her eyes for the first time since she destroyed my world last night, I feel stone-cold sober.
“Should I take Powerline?” I ask, buckling my seatbelt.
“Military,” she says, checking her lipstick in the sun visor mirror. She turns to face me as I pull out of the parking spot, checking the rearview mirror for cars. “I’m very sorry that I hurt you, Julia. You know I didn’t mean to.”
I make a right turn out of the parking lot onto a winding drive and stop at a red light. Cars rush by, although one little white sedan seems tocrawl. I can see almost nothing but hands on the steering wheel, a Florida phenomenon that makes sense when you understand that people shrink as they get older.
The light turns green. I make a left.
“I know you didn’t mean to. That doesn’t make it better or hurt any less. And you did it in front ofeveryone.” My voice cracks, and I cough as I make a right turn a little sharper than I mean to.
“Careful, please,” my mother says, grabbing the handle on her door. “God, do you remember that horrible sharp right you made in the mall parking lot when I was teaching you to drive?”
Remarkably, I laugh. “Yeah, I went over the curb. You screamedsoloudly.”
She laughs too. “I was scared!” Out of the corner of my eye I can see her shake her head. “It was my fault, though. I don’t think I taught you to drive very well.”
My hands tighten on the wheel. “You’re not a very good driver.”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “I’m not.” She turns her head my way. “But you are. You learned well even though I was a bad teacher.”
“I had to,” I say. “Didn’t want to cause any accidents.”
“I’m sorry,” she says again. “You’re my daughter, Julia, and I love you. I’m not perfect, but I love you.”
And she does. I know that. I grew up with the unshakable knowledge that my mother would kill for me, die for me. But I’d also learned that wasn’t always enough. Not everything is life or death, some things just feel like them. You can support someone and care for them, and show your love through words and deeds, but some truths live too deep to root out. For my mother, on some level, I will always be the little boy she gave birth to and watched take his first steps. She can tell me to wear a bra and take me out for pedicures and use the correct name and pronouns and really, trulymeanthem, but it will never erase the life we lived together for the first two-thirds of my existence. I don’t want it to, nor do I want her to retcon her memories. A few years ago I might have wished that every recollection of my first twenty-five years on earth could be scrubbed from the minds of everyone who knows me, but now I understand how necessary it is to have people in my life who’ve known me for all of it, known every version of me. It helps me remember myself, and keep building the Julia I want to be for the rest of my life.
“I’ve been telling myself for years that my transition made us closer than we’d ever been,” I say.
“It has,” she agrees, sounding hopeful, as though we’ve moved past the hard part of the conversation.
“And yeah, maybe that’s true, but we weren’t that close before, so how much of a difference did it really make? I mean”—I take a deep breath—“I’ve spent most of my life too scared to reallytalkto you, so when I finally did and it was about something so monumental, that was this huge shift in our relationship, but it only got us to this somewhat even playing field. Or some kind of sports metaphor, I don’t know.”
“Maybe we should leave those to your brother.”
“I was so grateful that you were supportive when I came out—both times, if I’m being honest. I have one friend whose parents won’t ask if they’re dating anyone and another friend whose parents pretend she doesn’t exist. I’ve always felt so lucky that I got this baseline acceptance from you that I was afraid to ask for anything more.”
“What more can Ido,Julia? Really, tell me, what can I do more than love you?”
“You can loveme,not the me I might be if I lived up to your standards for womanhood. Or even just…personhood. You never criticized me forwantingto be a woman but ever since, you’ve been judging me for thekindof woman I decided to be.”
That’s the truth of it, and we both know it. We sit in silence for a moment, but of course she has to break it.
