Before today, it had never really occurred to me that cousin Emily was a normal person. No; that sounds wrong. She was too normal, that was the problem: a middle-aged woman with carefully-straightened hair, Christian husband, Christian kids — not Jewish like us. Maybe it was all to please her mother, a blonde and blue-eyed shiksa who had whittled her Jewish daughter into her own image until nothing ethnic remained; Dad says even Emily’s nose was fake, surgically flattened as soon as she was old enough. There seemed something sad about her life in Maine, where they ate lobster every night and lived quietly behind a white picket fence.<\/p>\n
But today Emily is smiling, happy like never before. Some women crumble after a divorce, unsure of themselves, but Emily has blossomed into a person she\u2019d never had the courage to be. Holding hands with Karen at the brunch table, Emily seems like someone else, someone bigger than life. Even her hair is bigger; tentative sprigs of frizz have sprung free in New York\u2019s August humidity. It’s funny: Emily’s old home with her husband was alien and WASPy, her three kids obedient like mice \u2013 a take-off-your-shoes-before-entering kind of thing. But this Emily, eating a bagel and lox beside her girlfriend, feels like family.<\/p>\n
Emily takes the reins of the conversation, telling the story of how they’d met (at the law firm where she worked). There are some omissions: whether she’d met Karen before or after leaving John; why she’d stayed with him so long (was it for the sake of her mother, or had it really been an honest mistake? Can you just wake up in your forties, suddenly gay? Or did she think that she could iron herself straight as easily as she had done her hair?).<\/p>\n
There\u2019s an old joke: two Jews, each with a nose job, marry. Then, when a baby comes along, it has a nose like a Macaw — and that\u2019s God\u2019s way of saying \u201cbooga booga\u201d. The moral: If you try to change who you are, it always comes back to bite you in the ass.<\/p>\n
In the kitchen, Mom and Grandma are huddled in private conversation:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do you think of Karen?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe’s a nice girl. A lawyer. John would have liked her.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPoor Betty. At least she got some grandchildren before it happened,\u201d Mom says. She turns to me. \u201cDon\u2019t you get any ideas. You, marry a man. Better to marry a goy, even, than to get into all of this mishegas.\u201d After a thoughtful pause, she adds, \u201cIt’s worse when it’s your own kid, isn’t it? Poor Betty.\u201d<\/p>\n
She pauses again as if waiting for an answer, but the conversation doesn’t call for a response, and they continue without one.<\/p>\n
When they leave, packing into a cab after the usual heartfelt goodbyes, Grandpa turns to Mom with a look in his eye of something like pride. \u201cShe’s the third one in my family.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe third what?\u201d she asks.<\/p>\n
\u201cLesbian,\u201d he declares. \u201cIt was Sylvia, then Muriel, and now her.\u201d He nods to himself, satisfied by the list. \u201cThree suicides too \u2013 Richie and Gladys and David.\u201d<\/p>\n
How absurd to count such a thing \u2013 as if lesbians were as bizarre as suicides, something to be classified and numbered.<\/p>\n
Three lesbians in the family. Well Mom, like it or not, pretty soon there’s going to be a fourth.<\/p>\n
\n
\nTess Tabak is a writer, filmmaker, and co-editor of The Furious Gazelle. She is a recent graduate of the Purchase College fiction program. Her short story, “The Miraculous,” will appear in the upcoming anthology Athena’s Daughter’s II from Silence in the Library. Tess can be reached at tesstabak@gmail.com or on twitter @tesstabak.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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