A Theory of Small Earthquakes Read online

  “Are you okay?” Alison asked, pressed against Zoe’s velvet back, her hands cupping Zoe’s velvet breasts. “Are we okay?”

  Zoe rolled over, smoothed Alison’s hair back from her forehead, stroked the curve of her hip. “We’re fine,” she said. “And I’m more than fine. I’m happier than I’ve ever been, babe. I’m painting. I’m hanging out with other artists in my building. I have you. I’m living my dream life.”

  “I’m happy for you,” Alison said, wishing that was all there was to it.

  Looking into her eyes, Alison saw that this was true. Zoe still loved her. The difference was that she wasn’t living for Alison anymore. Zoe was doing exactly what Alison wished she herself could do: making art full-time, making friends, finding an audience for her work. Zoe was sated, and Alison wasn’t her only source of satisfaction anymore.

  “Poor baby,” Zoe said. “Coming home to a cold, empty house. Eating leftovers alone. You miss your little Maxwell Housewife.”

  “I miss you.”

  Zoe wrapped her hand in a hank of Alison’s hair. “You’re right,” she said thoughtfully. “Our lives are getting too separate. We need to find something to do together. Something that means a lot to both of us.”

  Her face brightened. “We can volunteer for the Dukakis campaign!”

  “Dukakis?” Alison was thinking candlelit, home-cooked meals that came from the stove instead of the freezer. And Zoe was thinking a presidential campaign for a dork known as Zorba the Clerk?

  “I know, I know,” Zoe said. “The guy’s a robot. But remember how bad we felt when he got the nomination and we hadn’t done squat for Jesse Jackson? We’ll feel worse if that asshole Bush wins and we didn’t do anything to stop it.”

  Zoe untangled her fingers from Alison’s hair. “I’ll call Dukakis headquarters tomorrow. See what they need.”

  “How romantic,” Alison said.

  Zoe laughed. She pulled Alison on top of her, feathered kisses up and down her neck. “What do you need, my love?” she asked.

  Her kisses grew more urgent. She slid a hand between Alison’s legs. “Do you need this?” She put her knees between Alison’s, spread them open. “Do you need this?”

  “I need you,” Alison whispered. “Stay with me. Please.”

  “I’ll never leave you,” Zoe promised.

  Alison remembered when Zoe used to beg her to stay.

  8.

  berkeley

  1988–1989

  They gave it a try. They showed up for training at Dukakis headquarters in Oakland. They memorized the canvassing script. They spent a few Saturdays knocking on doors and an agonizing afternoon attempting to register shoppers in the parking lot of an East Oakland Safeway store.

  The outcome of every front porch and telephone conversation was utterly predictable. The Democrats they spoke to promised, dispiritedly, to vote for “the lesser of two evils.” The Republicans sneered.

  The script instructed them to win people over based on Dukakis’s positions on capital punishment (he opposed it), the defense budget (he’d shrink it), and mandating school kids to recite the Pledge of Allegiance (he said it was unconstitutional). Instead they ended up defending Dukakis against his own reputation—for freeing repeat rapist Willie Horton; for saying he wouldn’t execute his own wife’s hypothetical murderer; for dressing up in full combat gear and posing on a tank, machine gun pointed at the camera like some kind of military clown.

  “We’re wasting our time,” Alison said a month before the election.

  “We’ll find something else to do together,” Zoe said.

  But they didn’t. Zoe went back to spending long days at her studio. When she talked about her days, her reports were sprinkled with names of people Alison had never met. Alison started buying takeout food on her way home for her solitary dinners. When Dukakis/Bentsen lost to Bush/Quayle by a landslide, she took it as a bad omen. Why had she and Zoe wasted their time bucking the inevitable?

  Zoe brought home flyers for ACT UP die-ins, demonstrations against nuclear testing in Nevada, teach-ins about the Iran-Contra scandal. She complained that her activism was taking too much time from her painting. But then she found time to join the planning committee for the annual Dyke March.

  “If you want to see dykes on parade,” Alison said, “can’t you hang out in the cat food aisle at Safeway instead?”

  Zoe didn’t laugh. “Dyke visibility is really important right now. We’re always there when gay men need us to help fight AIDS, but who’s fighting breast cancer with us?”

  Dyke visibility? Zoe sounded like the lesbians she and Alison used to make fun of at Oberlin.

  “I really want to go to this meeting,” Zoe said. “And I really want you to come.”

  Alison heard the warning in her words. “Should I wear my flannel shirt and work boots,” she said, “or is it casual dress?” Again she waited for Zoe to laugh, to tease her back. Zoe rolled her eyes.

  They took BART to Sixteenth Street, rode the long escalator up to the street, and emerged into the uproar of the Mission. Alison had spent years training Zoe not to make public displays of affection, especially in neighborhoods like this one where openly gay people were routinely harassed or worse. But now, desperate for connection, she took Zoe’s hand.

  They walked to the Women’s Building on Eighteenth Street and stood on the sidewalk, gazing up at the mural that climbed the walls. A couple of heavily tattooed women in men’s work clothes walked by, glanced at Alison blankly, cruised Zoe blatantly, and swaggered inside.

  “Gosh,” Alison said, “you think they’re gay?”

  Zoe dropped Alison’s hand and gave her a chilling look. “What a wonderful world it would be, Alison,” she said coldly, “if only everyone were as femmy as you.”

  Zoe turned on her heel and walked into the building. Alison stood there, stunned. Through the glass door, Zoe gestured angrily for Alison to follow her. Alison walked into the lobby, expecting an apology, a hug. “Come on,” Zoe said.

  They took the stairs to a conference room on the second floor. A note on the door read, “This meeting is smoke-free, scent-free, and testosterone-free.” The walls were lined with posters of Rosa Parks, Amelia Earhart, Emma Goldman, and young Sandinistas brandishing AK-47s. Zoe nodded to a few women, all of whom ducked their heads back at her. Alison wondered how Zoe knew them. What else didn’t she know about Zoe’s life?

  For the next two hours, Alison sat on a folding chair, listening to twenty-five lesbians arguing loudly about whether male-to-female transsexuals were real women and therefore eligible to participate in the Dyke March. To signal their agreement with a comment, they snapped their fingers in the air like the women in Mariandaughter’s class. Like the women in Mariandaughter’s class, they either glared at Alison or ignored her. She kept glancing at Zoe, trying to initiate a little conciliatory eye rolling. But Zoe seemed engrossed in the debate.

  For the first time in years, she felt like the old Alison, the odd woman out she’d been until she met Zoe. Zoe was changing, just as Alison had feared she would. Maybe she’d finally seen Alison for who she really was. Or maybe they were both reverting to their true selves: Zoe, Miss Outgoing; Alison, Misanthrope.

  When the meeting ended, Alison waited around awkwardly while Zoe hugged one woman after another. Watching Zoe talking intently to a short, heavy woman with a huge ring of keys dangling from her Ben Davis jeans, Alison thought, Maybe Zoe would be happier with her. Or her, Alison thought, hearing Zoe’s laughter merge with the giggles of a red-haired, punked-out girl who looked all of seventeen.

  “What did you think?” Zoe asked as they left the building, headed toward Mission Street.

  “If that’s what it means to be a real lesbian, I’d rather be a fake bisexual.” Alison answered as she would have before, when she and Zoe lived inside their bubble built for two, peering out together at a highly imperfect world, finding it all ridiculous.

  Zoe laughed, but humorlessly. “My little homophobe. I gue
ss queer activism is a little too queer for you.”

  Alison was stung. Again. “But not for you, apparently,” she said.

  “It’s a big world, Alison. There’s room in it for everyone.”

  I liked our little world better, Alison thought.

  They turned left on Mission, their silence roaring against the clamor on the street. Women rummaged through deep plywood bins that spilled from bustling open-air markets, hefting jicamas, avocados, tomatillos. Dealers on every corner offered heroin, crack, weed. In the doorways of photo shops and copy stores, Latino teenagers hawked fake California IDs. The window of a stripper supply store called Foxy Lady was a leather-and-lace landscape of peekaboo negligees, black lace-up corsets, shocking-pink feathered mules.

  As they approached Sixteenth Street, a late-model BMW pulled to the curb. The driver rolled down the passenger-side window and beckoned to a woman in spiked heels, a skin-tight cherry-red vinyl miniskirt, a skimpy white tube top, and a massive platinum wig. The woman leaned into the car, her red vinyl ass in the air. After a brief exchange with the driver, she got into his car.

  Alison glanced at Zoe, hoping for a bonding moment. But Zoe was walking five steps ahead of her. She’d missed the whole thing.

  “Perdón,” said a voice behind Alison. She turned to see a woman in a brightly striped serape cradling a baby-size bag of oranges under one arm and a squealing toddler under the other, trying to squeeze through the crush. Alison pressed herself against the window of a check-cashing store to let the woman by.

  “Gracias.” As the woman paused, her baby reached out a chubby fist and grabbed Alison’s shirt.

  “No, mijo,” the woman scolded.

  “It’s okay.” Alison offered the baby her index finger. He grabbed it, his round brown eyes fixated on her face. Alison felt an easing of the tension in her belly. The baby stuffed her finger into his mouth and started sucking, pulling on something deep inside her.

  His mother laughed, put the bag of oranges down, and gently pried Alison’s finger out of her son’s mouth. She kissed his thick thatch of black hair, smiling at Alison over his head. Then she rearranged the bag of oranges under her arm and walked on.

  Wait for me, Alison wanted to say.

  As the mother and child passed her, Zoe turned back to Alison. “You coming?” she called, annoyed.

  Alison barely heard Zoe over the voice in her head.

  I want a baby, it said. I want a baby now.

  The next morning, Alison was toweling off after her shower. She glanced at herself in the blurry gilt-framed mirror and dropped the towel.

  She cupped her breasts in her hands, wondering what they’d look like, feel like, swollen with milk.

  With the palms of her hands, she traced the contours of her body: her blessing, her curse. She looked at herself sideways, imagining her belly nine months pregnant. What would it be like to feel a baby kick from inside her, to be the first home of a child?

  “You want toast, babe?” Zoe shouted from the kitchen.

  “Sure,” Alison called back. She shrugged into her fuzzy chenille robe, knotted the belt around her narrow waist, and summoned her inner Scarlett O’Hara. I’m only twenty-six, she told herself. I don’t have to worry about this today.

  But on BART an hour later, she was too distracted to read the paper. All her life she’d dreamed of having children, of doing right what her mother had done so wrong. A sperm bank hadn’t figured into her plans. But she hadn’t imagined loving Zoe either, and now she did. She hadn’t imagined herself a lesbian, and now, apparently, she was one.

  Alison closed her eyes and saw herself heavily pregnant, ripe and bursting, filled with warmth and light. She’d look like a regular pregnant woman. No one would be able to tell that she hadn’t had sex with her baby’s father, that a doctor had inseminated her with a child who would be hers and Zoe’s. Pregnant is pregnant. She’d be a real mother. A good mother—so much better than her own.

  She winced, imagining what her mother would say: A good mother gives her children a father. That’s the best thing I gave you.

  Alison told herself that she wouldn’t ask for her mother’s advice if she were alive. Why should she take it when her mother was dead?

  You always do what you want to do, even when it hurts other people—even when it hurts your child.

  Just this once, her mother’s voice was right. Life would be hard for a kid with two mothers and no father. It would be selfish for a mother to impose that on her child.

  Alison imagined taking her baby to the pediatrician—with Zoe. She imagined going to parent–teacher meetings at her child’s school—with Zoe. She imagined her child’s second-grade classmates making Father’s Day cards while her kid made a card for Zoe. Walking down the aisle—with Zoe?

  Having a baby with Zoe was irrevocable. Whatever happened between them after that, their son or daughter would be forever branded the child of lesbian moms. And whatever happened to Alison in the future, whatever turn her love took, whatever sexual label she adopted or shed, that child would forever be a vestige of her love for Zoe.

  I want to have a baby the normal way. It was a certainty, more than a thought. For once in my life, I want to do what other women do, the way they do it.

  The problem was, despite the distance that kept widening between them, Alison wanted Zoe too.

  Without discussing it, they started working at having the kind of good times they used to have effortlessly, straining for a spark of the electric connection they used to feel.

  They’d planned a walk in Tilden Park for the first Saturday in June. When the day dawned foggy, it seemed too risky to cancel. They locked the car near the trailhead, and Zoe pulled Alison into the playground next to the parking lot. Her seemingly light-hearted laughter sounded forced to Alison’s ear.

  The playground was empty except for a woman pushing a giggling blond toddler on a swing. “She’s adorable,” Zoe told the woman. “How old is she?”

  “I’m free,” the little girl piped up. Her mother stopped pushing and beamed at her daughter.

  Zoe crouched in front of the girl. “Only three. And you can talk so well already. What’s your name?”

  “Molly.” She looked at Zoe curiously. “What’s yours?”

  “I’m Zoe.” She looked up, grinning her old ear-to-ear grin. “And this is Alison.”

  Alison smiled at Molly, trying to look at her without really seeing her, willing herself not to melt into the little girl’s round brown eyes. Since that afternoon on Mission Street, Alison had been wrestling with her baby lust, beating it down one day, struggling to fit it into her life with Zoe the next. Wanting a baby would lead to harder stuff: breaking up with Zoe or committing to her forever. Alison hadn’t been able to make either decision.

  “Can Zoe push me, Mommy?” Molly asked.

  “If she doesn’t mind.”

  Zoe turned her thousand-watt smile on Molly’s mom. “We love kids.” She turned to Alison. “Don’t we?”

  Alison nodded and sank onto the swing next to Molly’s. Zoe pushed the little girl from behind.

  “Higher!” Molly demanded.

  “I don’t want to scare you,” Zoe said in a sweet, lilting voice.

  Alison scuffled her hiking boots in the dirt, watching her beautiful lover playing with beautiful Molly. Zoe’s face was as open, as innocent, as radiant as the little girl’s.

  “You’re flying!” Zoe trilled.

  “Mommy, look!” Molly scissored her short, plump legs in the air.

  Alison’s chest felt full to bursting with love for Zoe. She’s my one, Alison thought. My person on earth. Who else could I ever love as much as I love Zoe? Who else could I raise a child with? Only Zoe.

  For six years Zoe’s happiness had buoyed Alison, grounded her, shown her a better way to be. Zoe’s confidence, her optimism, had given Alison a shot at her own. We’ve hit a rough patch, Alison told herself. Every relationship goes through hard times.

  During their six y
ears together, the world had changed, too—the Bay Area world, at least. It wasn’t as strange or as difficult for lesbians to have kids. The little boy Alison had seen five years ago in the photo exhibit at Mama Bear’s would be in kindergarten by now, and he might not be the only kid in his class with two moms. Private schools had started advertising themselves as “gay family friendly.” The Berkeley public schools had instituted a “gay-affirmative curriculum.” Berkeley High freshman were required to take a Social Living class that treated gay and straight sexuality as equally viable choices.

  It was happening slowly, but it was happening. Being gay, and being the kid of gay parents, was becoming less stigmatized. Who knew what would be considered normal by the time a child of hers and Zoe’s was making a Father’s Day card in school, or graduating high school, or getting married? As long as Alison and Zoe raised their child in the Bay Area, would they really be imposing a hardship on him or her?

  “Mommy!” Molly chirped. “Can Zoe come over to our house?”

  “Maybe sometime,” her mother said, exchanging a smile with Zoe.

  No one knew better than Alison what a great mom Zoe would be. Until their trouble started, Zoe had been a great mom to her.

  Just like that, Alison’s yearning for a baby and her yearning to be happy with Zoe became one. All she had to do was say the biggest yes she’d ever said to Zoe. And saying yes to Zoe had always been the right thing to do.

  9.

  berkeley

  August–September 1989

  Alison and Zoe were perched on an earth-toned Her-culon couch in the waiting room of the East Bay Sperm Bank. Alison was flipping through the current issue of Newsweek, surreptitiously checking out the two straight couples in the room.

  One of the wives caught Alison’s eye, her lipsticked mouth quivering into a small, self-conscious smile. Alison turned back to the cover story, “The Summer of ’69 and How It Still Plagues Us in ’89.”

  She glanced at Zoe in her lavender Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival T-shirt, pin-striped men’s vest, orange harem pants, and black Doc Martens boots with rainbow laces. She remembered when Zoe’s clothes used to amaze and attract her. Used to had been Alison’s operative phrase lately. But she couldn’t let herself think that way. Not here. Not now.