but I was also sure they weren’t heartbroken. We’d all grown up. They had families. Kids. Our family had never been as close as some and never as distant as others. What we had worked, at least for us.
“What about your mom?”
“My mother doesn’t celebrate Christmas, remember?” I gave him my full attention, and a scowl. It had certainly been a bit of an issue when we were dating. Not as much as the eventual revelation that he preferred sausage to tacos, but it had caused some tension.
“I can’t believe you’re blowing me off for someone else.”
“Get out.” I pointed at the door, but not before Patrick danced closer, just out of reach, to smack his lips at me. I didn’t want to smile or laugh, but I had to. “Out! I have work to do! Isn’t Teddy waiting for you?”
“Teddy’s always waiting for me.”
“And I’m sure he has dinner all ready for you when you get home, too. Don’t be late, hanging around here. Go on. Go.” I shooed him. Patrick grabbed at my hand but missed.
I liked him this way, acting silly as he had when we’d been together long ago, before sex got in the way and he thought he had to be something he wasn’t. He was different now. We both were. But Patrick was really different with his new friends, his new partner. It might have been the “real” him, but this silliness was part of him, too. Time had passed, wounds had healed. In many ways Patrick and I were closer than we’d ever been as a couple. I knew in every part of me that mattered that if we’d gone ahead and done it, married, we’d have been miserable and divorced—or worse, miserable and not divorced—in less than a year. I was happy my Patrick had found his place in the world with someone who loved him the way he deserved and wanted to be loved, and I didn’t mope around wringing my hands, wishing for my prince to come. Or I tried not to.
Then I was feeling sad and nostalgic again and hating it. Part of it was the time of year, when I felt caught between my different worlds, anyway, but part of it would always just be…Patrick.
“Just don’t forget about me,” he said.
“Oh, Patrick. As if I ever could.” I stood to give him a hug and a kiss he didn’t deserve, but I couldn’t deny. “Now. Get out. I’m busy.”
“Call me,” he demanded.
“I will! I will. Now go!”
“Liv…”
“Yes, my dear one?” The words were sweet, my tone a little bitter.
“Nothing. Never mind.” Then he went out and closed the door behind him.
I turned to my computer and lost myself in work. It was better than being lost in anything else.
I wasn’t brought up stupid.
On the contrary, both my parents were part of the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll generation. Fans of the Grateful Dead. I had two much older brothers who hadn’t thought a lot about shielding me from the movies they watched or music they listened to. I knew about sex.
After my parents divorced, when I was five, my dad remarried almost immediately. His new wife, Marjorie, an enthusiastic member of Sacred Heart Catholic Church, had brought with her my two stepsisters, Cindy and Stacy, both a year or so older than me. My mom stayed steadfastly single, rarely even dating. My parents were cordial to one another as they shared me, neither ever making me choose, and if there was always a little bit of tension with my dad over my place in his new household, it was made up for by my mother’s complete indulgence in me. We were best friends, my mom and I.
I had my first “real” boyfriend at fourteen, gave my first hand job a year later. Most of my friends had lost their virginity by the time we were sixteen, but I waited another year before I gave it up in my boyfriend’s basement at a graduation party for his older brother. I wasn’t scarred by screwing him, even though we broke up shortly after that. I knew enough to use a condom and was smart enough to go all the way with a guy who’d already proved himself adept at getting me off. It was as fine a first time as I could ask for.
My life changed my senior year of high school. My mom, who favored f lowing gypsy skirts and long, unbound hair, had always been a reader, but her choices of material had changed over the past year from Clive Barker and Margaret Atwood to thick, leather-bound copies of the Tanakh and journals on Jewish commentary. I knew about Judaism, though we’d never practiced anything more religious than spinning the dreidel. But now…well, they say there’s nothing like the enthusiasm of a convert. My mother, born and raised Jewish, wasn’t technically a convert, but she was definitely enthusiastic.
Suddenly, most of what we’d done together as a family disappeared, tossed out in the garbage along with an entire pantry of food she deemed unfit to eat. She put away half her dishes to keep them unused for a year, the time it would take to make them kosher again. The others she koshered by pouring boiling water over them, and maintaining a completely meat-free house.
Suddenly we were Jewish and vegetarian. My mom had always been a devout carnivore. The Friday-night dinners I could’ve dealt with. The candle lighting, the baking of challah. But giving up cheeseburgers? No way.
I moved out to live with my dad and Marjorie, who took me in, but not quite without making it seem as though I were a burden. It was her duty, I heard her whisper to a girlfriend once, when they were gathered for coffee. Her Christian duty. It bothered her more that I hadn’t been baptized than the fact I was black—which was good, because there was always the chance I might accept Jesus Christ as my savior, but I could never change the color of my skin.
I loved my dad and didn’t mind having to share a bathroom with my stepsisters, or having a small, dank bedroom in the basement. I didn’t mind the prayers before meals, because at least they were giving me plenty of bacon, ohhh, bacon. Every morning, bacon and eggs. I didn’t even mind church so much, because the altar boys were cute.
My mother didn’t like any of this, but caught up in her own journey, she let a lot of things slide. So long as I was with her for the holidays she wanted to celebrate, she didn’t mind what I was doing the rest of the time. If I was there to light the menorah, she was all right with me going home to my dad’s to stuff the stockings. I was smart enough not to tell her about the youth group Marjorie encouraged me to join, or how my dad had been hinting that it might be a good idea for me to get baptized.
I escaped salvation by heading off to college. Where I met Patrick my sophomore year. He lived in my dorm, and the first time he smiled at me, I imprinted on him like a duckling. Tall, fair-haired, ruddy-cheeked…and Catholic. As in can-name-all-the-martyred-saints Catholic. I was smitten.
I like to think of life as an infinite jigsaw puzzle with so many pieces that no matter how many you fit together, the picture’s never finished. Meeting Patrick was the culmination of a hundred thousand choices. He was the end of only one path, but it was the one I took. No matter how it ended, he was the choice I made, and while I’d always felt I would never waste time in regretting it, I was beginning to think I might.
I thought I knew what love was with a handsome boyfriend who was a very good kisser. I thought I knew what it was for three years, all through college, even when all my friends were fucking like bunnies and the sheen of chastity was wearing off. Love is patient, love is kind, right? Love forgives all things?
That’s what I believed then. I wasn’t so sure now.
Our
