Bear

When I was ten years old, my family moved from Baltimore to a small town in rural Maryland after twenty years in the city, citing a desire to live near the Chesapeake Bay and underestimating the steep slide across the political spectrum that is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Fieldston, Maryland is a place where the two aesthetics of American conservativism coexist—young men wild about hunting season, dressed in camouflage at school, drinking grain alcohol in cornfields late into the night; just as plentiful, girls and their mothers in matching Lilly Pulitzer, boys shedding Lacoste to play lacrosse, SUVs in the driveway and Doodles on the lawn. From my first day of fifth grade, it was clear I would spend more time in the latter world—not as a child, and never as an adult, but in the absorbent, alien state of adolescence.

Like many girls navigating puberty together, my group of friends in that tiny private school shared a level of bodily closeness never quite replicated with sexual partners later in life. When no one else was home, we would shed our school uniforms and leave them in the hallway, fix snacks in the kitchen with prelapsarian indifference. The prospect of someone’s parents walking in, finding us nude on their furniture, hands sticky with chocolate-covered Chex cereal, never struck us as anything but funny. Upstairs we sat on the tiled bathroom floor, our five pairs of legs forming the shape of a star, and calibrated our understanding of what constituted normal. We described the texture of the fluids that seeped between our legs, the coarse hairs that sprouted singly too far down our thighs. It was erotic only in the Audre Lorde sense, as in the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person—in this case, the pursuit of self-possession even as our bodies were repossessed and made strange.

In one of our sleepover games, we turned off the lights and whoever was designated Bear closed her eyes. While she counted to ten, the rest of us hid in closets or under the bed, or out in the open if we were quick. Then the Bear lunged about the room with arms outstretched, feeling for life. She tripped over beanbags and snapped her head toward stifled laughter. As we brushed past and dodged her, we tried not to make a sound, for the Bear had not only to catch a body but identify it in order to end her turn. But it was only a matter of form, being named. Even now I think we’d know each other blind.

∞

My cousin Lily says everyone is a lesbian now. I hear it on her podcast, Celebrity Book Club, the week she and her co-host read Abby Wambach’s memoir. When I was growing up women couldn’t even hold hands, Lily says, her crankiness false, her Boston accent real. She’s thirty-five and it’s her job to keep a finger on the cultural pulse, but I also wonder if she is referring to a text I sent her a few weeks prior, about how I date girls now, and one in particular. I just screamed in a parking lot, she texted back within seconds, an expression of shock that couldn’t have been genuine. Nearly all of our grandmother’s eleven children, her mother and my father included, either have queer children or are gay themselves. I took her scream as excitement that I had at last joined their ranks.

Then again, her podcast quip probably has nothing to do with me. It is the fall of 2021. Elvira has just come out. Jojo Siwa is making Dancing with the Stars history by dancing with her girlfriend. Drake’s “Girls Want Girls” is charting at number two. One consequence of embracing queerness at twenty-seven, I have noticed, is trouble distinguishing between what is new and what is simply new to me.

The girl I texted Lily about was named Grace, which is also my name. She was the motorcycle-riding, sketch-comedy-writing, blonde-crew-cut fantasy I only vaguely knew I had when I initiated contact on the app. Haven’t you always wanted…? A flawless opening line. She hailed from Cumming, Georgia, and she was my first time.

A strange thing happened the week after we slept together. My usual literotica (a portmanteau I won’t cite here), involving a skeevy middle-aged boss and his regrettably young and supple intern, was no longer doing it for me. Well, sure, I thought. Compartmentalized though my erotic fantasies were from my waking life, it followed that a new real-world erotic interest would eclipse the old fictional standbys. But neither did anything involving two women excite me. Not even a professionally successful woman and her eager mentee.

Scanning the website’s stories, I tried to relax my grip on my thoughts the way one does to summon the plot of a dream. I hoped lust would come bobbing to the surface, make its lazy way to some chosen bait, give that familiar tug. Nothing frustrates like a question you can’t think your way through, answers that scatter when you turn on the light. I closed the site and went on with my day.

In October, I come across Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex on the sidewalk and flip to her essay on porn. Much of the press around the book has focused on this essay, in which she challenges what one reviewer terms an ancient belief: that our most ardent desires dwell fully formed within us, only waiting to emerge. It is a belief I have wrestled with before, when I first started using dating apps and didn’t know whether to swipe instinctively or consider what I’d been socialized to want with every yes and no.

If the ancient belief is true, and desire is uncovered rather than learned, then knowing what you want involves surrender in both the good and bad sense: on the one hand, the pleasure of relinquishing control, an inherently erotic act for many; on the other, the relinquishing of pleasure to forces with which you would never choose to align—predatory bosses, for example. If ancient wisdom has it wrong—that is, if our desires arrive to us from without, like language—then at least we can play a conscious role, surrounding ourselves with the behaviors we want to emulate. But still we can only want what we have seen wanted, still cannot separate personal preference from cultural trend. This is the problem with porn, Srinivasan argues. Imagination is limited to imitation, riffing on what it has already absorbed. But even granted this positive feedback loop, what draws you to watch (or read) or swipe at something in the first place?

One of the great pleasures of dating women in my twenties has been tracing queer desire to its earliest manifestations. (Of course, straight people can do this, too—you just rarely hear the click of something locking into place.) Until Grace mentioned Unadilla, the motocross race in upstate New York she’d been looking forward to all summer, I had completely forgotten about Motocrossed, the Disney Channel adaptation of Twelfth Night in which a crew-cut Alana Austin poses as her own brother. Obviously, Grace said, when I asked if she was familiar.

Three weeks into our dalliance, I left Brooklyn for a writer’s residency on a farm in Virginia. Everyone said these residencies were ripe for affairs—like minds, starry evenings, real life held at bay—but for once I wasn’t looking for anything new.

On the train south, I composed a first sentence in my head: Ours was a world of bathrooms and bedrooms, places easy to make sacred with a closed door.

∞

Every group of friends is held together by its original bonds, and Ava was mine. She invited me to a sleepover that crucial second month of fifth grade, when I was new and things could still go any way. We slept in a room with deer heads on the wall. Their antlers cast shadows on the carpet. Ava had an older brother who taught us lewd definitions; I had sisters and knew how to share. We were both taller than most of the boys our age, and this, combined with uncontrollable fits of laughter during class, saved us from being wanted by them.

My memories of middle school are characterized not by homoerotic desire but a collective sexuality from which boys and men—the presumed objects—were in most important ways absent. Movie stars, the Ryan Goslings and James Marsdens, provided a public forum for lust, targets at which to safely direct the intense longing of seventh grade. The real but unreachable—the teacher, the classmate’s dad—gave math class a shared subtext, brought sex into the everyday. Slightly more real, just as unreachable, the camp counselor, the older brother’s friend—they served as parameters for our future selves, co-stars of the imagined future. And of course, there were the boys at school, flesh repositories for the idea of boys, which is to say of being objects of lust ourselves. Sex with Brian F. could never have been hotter than it was in our collective imagination; like any compelling god, his absence was key.

As boys began to take notice of Ava, she developed contempt for them in parallel. She seemed to take special pleasure in testing how much lunacy she could now afford, how absurdly she could behave before her beauty was no longer compensation enough. In eighth grade, one of my neighbors developed a crush after meeting her once at my house. He asked for her number and then texted relentlessly, inviting her to dinner, to his school’s homecoming dance, even on a family vacation. For a while she responded with nonsense words and non sequiturs, the occasional picture of her baby brother. When Kyle was undeterred, she left a video on his Facebook wall in clownish makeup, bright pink lipstick jaggedly framing her mouth, slowly licking the dull edge of a butcher’s knife. He commented hahaha wtf, and when she didn’t respond he deleted the video, and she left an identical one, and he deleted it, and eventually he left her alone.

Our group of friends remained close. At separate high schools, we collaborated in the acquisition of sexual experience, each doubling back—still, after years of reeducation, the shape of sexual acts in my mind is a straight line forward—to fill the others in, so that every new encounter was mediated by the others’ reactions, if I was first, or advice, if I was not, or corroboration, if we had planned it so perfectly as to have done whatever it was at the same time.

But this arrangement—not queer, but certainly more populous than one man and one woman—eventually conflicted with the demands of heterosexuality, fearful as it always is of someone at the door. To continue to grant entry was to “kiss and tell,” and so we told each other less.

∞

In preparation for this residency, I looked for novels that take place during the narrator’s adolescence but are illuminated by an adult’s understanding—the kind of books I would have found miraculous at twelve had they not been, by definition, inaccessible. Recommendations converged around a few titles: Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, Emma Kline’s The Girls, Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. I consumed them one after another, marveling at Sittenfeld’s ability in particular to remember exactly what was at stake in those years, as acutely as Beverly Cleary seemed to remember being six. But why, I wondered, had no one mentioned that these books were gay as hell? None of their jackets advertised this. Seeking grown women’s recollections of adolescence, I had compiled an archive of girls obsessed with each other, as if the former so plainly encompassed the latter as to go without saying.

Growing up is nothing if not a straightening procedure. I read that once in a Wesleyan student’s undergraduate thesis, but it could be a tagline for so many young adult novels.

∞

We were juniors in high school when a man named Ron Winter walked into the café on Maple Street where Ava was working as a hostess. He was a Manhattanite with a real estate fortune. She was seventeen. Later, the timeline became muddled, such that one day she was seating the Winter family at their table by the window and the next she was helping the Winter children with their homework after school. No one seemed to care that Ava was just two years older than the oldest Winter daughter, and that the youngest, at ten, could look after himself. You work for me now, their father had said, encircling her wrist as she set down their menus.

First it was helping with homework, and then it was keeping the kids company, and then it was joining the family on vacations. Places none of us had ever been: Bermuda, Santorini, Napa Valley. She arrived to our sleepovers with leather Coach baggage, her wrists and earlobes twinkling. The kids aged past babysitting. We asked questions gingerly. No, she said, I swear, she said, and we left it at that.

Ava’s life is not mine to tell. Given how rarely we’ve spoken in recent years, it is not even mine to know.

∞

In the ten years since we graduated high school, I moved to California, joined a co-op named after a vegetarian cookbook, got a liberal arts degree, and then moved to Brooklyn for an M.F.A. program. In none of these settings have I ever felt pressure to sleep with men exclusively, and have, in fact, often understood this to be an outdated mode of living.

Last time I visited my parents, they gave me the tour of downtown Fieldston—“Winterville,” as it is now called. Ron Winter owns more than fifty percent of Fieldston’s real estate, and operates, as of this writing: an ice cream shop, a cold-pressed juicery, a Roman-style pizzeria, a nautical coffeeshop, a Scotch bar and lounge, a wine and gnocchi bar, an Austrian fine-dining restaurant, an independent bookstore, an appointment-only porcelain and crystal boutique, and a farm-to-table café. His money funds the schools, both public and private, the hospital, the synagogue, the YMCA, the Rotary Club, the Historical Society, and the local Maryland Democrats chapter.

His takeover has not been without strife. There have been protests outside his restaurants, T-shirts that read You Don’t Own Us, Ron Winter, furious op-eds in the local paper. I don’t envy the job of his Director of Marketing and Public Relations, though I do know her, because she was my first and best friend in the town. Ava seems happy now, secure.

Haven’t you always wanted…?

A few nights later, an Internet investigation of a retired middle school teacher led me to a donor report from 2004, the year I entered fifth grade. The list of donors was divided into tiers based on the heft of their donation. Very few names populated the first three tiers, and I recognized them all as parents of popular students. But in the top left corner, among the four families granted entrance to the “Gold Star Society” by virtue of a ten- to fifteen-thousand-dollar gift, was a couple whose children did not attend the school, that year or ever—a Mr. and Mrs. Ron B. Winter. Such generous donors, I knew, would later play a role in choosing the school’s leadership and redesigning its curriculum. Which is to say, by the time he walked into Ava’s café in 2012, he had been pulling strings in Fieldston for at least eight years.

Last year The Washington Post ran a story about Ron Winter and the Maryland town he has remade in his image. No major news outlet has written about Ava, to my knowledge and likely her relief. But to me the two stories contain each other. In Winter’s inexorable march across Fieldston, his repossession of buildings and land, his way of fixing their futures so far in advance that the results begin to seem inevitable, true from the beginning—like fulfillment, even—I see how choices can be made before we know we’re making them. Inertia has to do some of the work of living. I sympathize deeply with the new kid in class, and who among us is not new to the world, who adjusts to blend in only to find real pleasure in the adjustment, and who then cannot tell, looking back, what of her was built in those years and what was revealed.

I’m not saying all my old friends are repressed queers. I’m saying, in another town, things might have been otherwise. They might still be. Everyone is a lesbian now, after all.

∞

By the time I returned from my residency in Virginia, Grace had moved onto someone else. Someone less green, I imagine. But before I knew that, still in a sweetbrier trance, I sent her a voice recording of the sentence I had composed on the train. She told me she liked it. Then she sent a video of herself astride her motorcycle, revving the engine with decisive flicks of the wrist. She is wearing a navy blue handyman’s jumpsuit and a red bandana low across her forehead. Someone behind her lets out a whoop and she tosses her blonde head, grinning back at them. With my head on my pillow I watched it over and over, the engine revving on a loop, hitting play each time it stilled—as if the next time it might end some other way.

Photo by Madison Greathouse.