The Namesake
By Gale Massey
Mom’s hands were blue and purple, bruised from the IV that had pumped essential fluids into her eighty-five-year-old body. She was sitting up in bed, buffeted on every side by pillows meant to keep her upright, and biting her overgrown nails that she ripped off with her teeth and spit on the floor.
“Someone keeps taking my clippers,” she said, gnawing at a cuticle.
It’s true. Stuff goes missing all the time in this place and she needs a new pair of clippers almost monthly. Televisions are bolted to walls not so much for viewing convenience but because they disappear. Smaller things like remotes and combs are hopeless and have to be worked into the budget. Her wedding band has been locked in a safe for years though, and the indentation on her ring finger has finally filled in.
I sat next to her bed in a blue plastic chair, annoyed at the volume of the television across the hall. That old man had been snoring for a half hour but anytime I tried to turn down the volume he woke up and cursed me. Every five minutes I told myself I could leave in just five more. But I wouldn’t leave until she drifted off to sleep.
Having forgotten that I was sitting next to her bed, she startled when she noticed me. She stared for a moment, then said, “I never realized how pretty you are.” I had to laugh, having been told my whole life that I could be her twin. I sometimes wondered if I’d been cloned in a secret government laboratory.
~
Once, when I was thirteen and wearing cut-off jeans, Mom had complimented me. She was standing at the stove working through a supper of green beans and meatloaf when I came inside to set the table. “You have nice legs,” she said. My teenage self was stunned with self-consciousness. Mom didn’t hand out compliments often, so I accepted her words as true. Never have I doubted my legs.
~
Now, meeting her eyes as she bit another nail, I felt that same weird sense of pride. I was the prodigal daughter. Part of me longed to be the small child standing behind her, folded into her skirt, anticipating the moment when she found something pleasing about me. I wanted to ask why she sent me away all those years ago, but I couldn’t ask. She had suffered loneliness in her old age, and I didn’t want to add to the pain she’d endured through the death of two husbands and her own physical demise.
And I didn’t ask because I was afraid of the truth. I was afraid she’d say what she’d never said before: that I got to do what I wanted.
~
For one year, the year before WWII ended, Mom got to do what she wanted. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, she played softball at North Shore Park in downtown St. Petersburg where a league of old men who had not gone to war played against a team of high school girls. Mom’s nickname was Ace and she was their best pitcher. Halfway through the first inning they would pass the hat around the bleachers. The girls almost always won but they split the money with the old men. Mom made enough to ride the bus, buy sodas and lipstick, sometimes a new blouse.
She and her high school girlfriends volunteered at the veteran’s hospital on Boca Ciega Bay. She turned eighteen a month before the soldiers came home. They were boys, thin, wounded, and handsome, determined to create the future their country had promised and the war had threatened to destroy. They wore starched uniforms with caps cocked sideways and took the girls to the movies, bought them hamburgers and ice-cream floats, and eventually, inevitably, gold bands.
Mom met Dad the summer after she graduated high school and by fall, they were married and expecting. She had five kids in eleven years and then Dad died.
~
On my sixteenth birthday Mom gave me a beat-up Chevy and I got a job at the mall. Within a few months I had met a girl. The first time we kissed I decided I understood the world more than anyone ever had. But that same month the church’s music director’s wife divorced him because it turned out he was queer. Everyone hated him. Anita Bryant was on television condemning homosexuals to hell and I started keeping to myself. Mom didn’t notice. She was busy with her job at Sears, a bowling league, and the church softball team. We rarely spoke. Not that it mattered. I was reading Walt Whitman by then, convinced I knew more than she ever would. Eventually I broke up with that girl and started going to seedy bars. That’s what you did back then, if you were queer. I never saw the music minister again and soon enough Bryant’s career as an anti-gay activist tanked.
~
Sometimes on my way out at night I drove by the ballpark to watch Mom pitch. For a moment after she released the ball, she’d be poised like a ballerina on one foot, the floodlights of the outfield softening the red clay of the infield. The ball rose in an impossibly high arc and dropped straight over home plate. Nothing for the batter to do but swing and miss.
~
Small town queer bars in the seventies were windowless and dank, converted garages with low ceilings and pot-holed parking lots, and filled with joyful broken drag queens and dykes dressed like men. Felons were comfortable in these places. One night a freakish looking old man extinguished a book of matches on his tongue, told me he’d just gotten out of jail, and asked if he could buy me a drink. I fled. Alone, I would drive the bridges and byways along the southern edge of Tampa Bay, comforted by long stretches of desolate beaches, wondering where, if anywhere, I belonged.
~
Mom and I rarely spoke and we never fought. But three months after I turned eighteen, still living under her roof, I felt in all fairness I should tell her I was gay. Menopause had made her fierce and I misread that for open-minded. Instantly, I realized my mistake. Speechless and horrified, she walked out and slammed my bedroom door behind her.
The next morning I was still asleep when she blew back into my bedroom as angry as the night before. She told me that when she’d been my age, she’d kissed a girl and that after my father had died, she’d been tempted by her best friend. For a moment I thought she was commiserating, but then she said, “If I can resist temptation, so can you.” Then, she told me to pack my things and get out of her house because the Lord would not want her to house a homosexual.
~
I headed to the closest big city, Atlanta, Georgia, where I disappeared into menial jobs, books, and the bar scene. Eventually, I put myself through college. Sometimes I thought about my mother, a woman who had kissed another woman and found it tempting. I wondered if she’d married her second husband, a hyper-religious man, to thwart what might have been her true nature. Had she been born a couple of decades later, she would have had more choices. Choices that I, her doppelgänger, had the latitude to pursue.
We hardly spoke for twenty years. Sometimes I called on Christmas, sometimes she called on my birthday. Once, when her second husband left her for a waitress at their local diner, she called me, distraught and at the edge of a breakdown. I bought a Greyhound bus ticket and headed south. Rolling down I-75 watching the billboards fly by, I was heady with the notion that I was needed and that Mom was finally getting her freedom, but by the time I got home husband number two had come to his senses and dumped the waitress. Deflated, I turned around and headed back north.
~
Many years later, I met the woman who would become my life partner at a party in Mexico. She was the opposite of my bookish self. While I had read about the world, she had traveled it. It was clear that any chance at happiness rested in getting to know her. I began commuting from Atlanta to St. Petersburg. How odd, it seemed, that love led me back to my roots. She and I settled within miles from Mom who was a widow again and in her eighties.
Proximity gave me and Mom a chance to spend some time together. There were lunches and family birthday dinners. She was always up for a party if it included ice-cream and cake. Somewhere along the way she and I fell into the habit of kissing each other goodbye. We didn’t talk about it and I don’t remember which one of us started it. I like to think it was her. Maybe it was a fad, something she’d seen other people do but over time it became natural, as though we had always been kind to each other.
We spent an afternoon going through old photographs and letters and she came across a letter from a high school friend. She softened, touching the letter with her fingertips, seemingly lost in a memory. I’d met this woman once and it dawned on me that this was the girl Mom had kissed. At that moment I understood why Mom had named me after this particular friend and it gave me a lofty sense of belonging, like a queen’s illegitimate child. Later I realized the second woman Mom had loved was my old Sunday school teacher. After their husbands died, she and Mom had grown close again, going to baseball games and church together. When they got too old to leave home, they’d watch the games on TV keeping each other company on the phone, complaining about bad calls, and waiting for the umpire to call the final out.
~
She had moved into an assisted living center after losing her house in the last recession, and her medical needs demanded twenty-four-hour care. We sat together while the sun slanted low and orange in the window. I showed her the ring my partner had given me and she was happy because she loved the woman who would soon be my wife. Mom folded her hands over the soft rise and fall of her belly. In our earlier clumsiness we had botched the act of letting go. She had needed anger in order to set me free, when all she meant to say was, “Go now, go while you can.”
One winter afternoon in her last year, I visited her. She was sitting in her wheelchair wrapped in a blanket and waiting for me on the porch outside her building. The trees were bare and the grass had gone brown. A shadow crossed her eyes. She looked up and pointed, proud that she’d seen them first and could now show them to me. High in the clean blue air a migration of geese flew in from the north. As they came closer, we heard them calling out over and over again, harsh and exciting, until Mom thrilled, grabbed my hand and cried out, “They’re back! They’re back. Oh look, they’ve come back.”
About the Author:
Gale Massey’s debut novel, The Girl from Blind River, received a Florida Book Award and was a finalist for the Clara Johnson award for women's fiction. She has received fellowships at The Sewanee Writers Conference and Eckerd College’s Writers in Paradise. Her stories and essays have appeared in Lambda Literary, Crimereads, Sabal, the Tampa Bay Times, Tampa Bay Noir, and Saw Palm. Massey, a Florida native, lives in St. Petersburg.
About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQIA+ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as "queer," while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream. Submissions are open from June 1 to July 1. Poetry, prose, visual art, reviews and interviews will all be considered. Visit Submittable for more details.
