I am speeding along a sinuous, narrow road, my old bike bumping every time the tires hit a root or a rock on the way up the mountain. I am trying to focus on my black Newfoundland, Ellie, named after Eleanor Roosevelt, jogging at my side, her gaze following an annoying blue jay that keeps circling right over her head. I am trying not to think, to forget, if only for a second, the decision I have to make and Sarah’s hurt, angry eyes pleading with me even as she spoke the words, “You have one day.” How cliché – deciding the rest of my life in one day! Those eyes seem to haunt me, consuming my mind to the degree that not even a nice ride up the mountain or Ellie’s bark at the jay can distract me. The road takes a slight turn, and the rays of warm June sun fall for a second onto a blooming rhododendron bush before I leave it behind, once again entering the shade of trees. Rhododendrons are Sarah’s favorite flowers.
Sarah—Sarah Hughs—brought me a whole bouquet of them two days ago half an hour after I called to invite her to a sleepover.
“What about your parents?” she said on the phone, sounding pleased and surprised. I knew she was smiling.
“They are gone,” I whispered, chuckling. “They are visiting my aunt for her birthday.”
“And what about you? You’re not going to miss your aunt’s birthday, are you, Deb?”
“I’d rather spend time with you and go to that Gay Pride Parade over in the city,” I whined and tried to catch a speckle of light, which somehow managed to get through my curtained window, with the tip of a pencil, but it quickly moved away. My joyous anticipation was slowly dissipating. Did Sarah not want to spend the night with me? “And anyway, it’s aunt Nettie,” I continued; “you know, the one who told me right after I started volunteering at the animal shelter, ‘Now, Debbie (my full name is Deborah Carson, but I can’t stand anyone calling me anything other than Deb), it’s okay for you to work there, but don’t you go become one of those hippies who hate people for wearing furs and stuff,’” I raised my voice, trying to imitate aunt Nettie’s nagging tone and maybe to make Sarah laugh. She did not. “Okay, I told my parents I was coming down with something,” I admitted. “I didn’t want to tell you and ruin our time together, and anyway, I feel guilty for lying to them and for having to lie to be with you, but I suppose that part couldn’t be helped.” She did not answer. “Sarah?” I said after a while, afraid she was mad at me.
But her voice was cheerful again as she answered a moment later, “I’ll be there in a few. Love you.”
“I’m sorry, and I love you, too.”
She appeared on my porch a little later, carrying a bouquet of rhododendrons she bought for me on her way and a yellow clothes bag. Her light hair tied in a high ponytail swung softly, and her gray eyes sparkled as she got up on her tiptoes to kiss me, putting her arms around my waist.
“Hello,” she purred, gazing up into my brown eyes.
“Hi,” I said, touching my forehead to hers. We looked into each other’s eyes for a very long time. Soft waves of her breath caressed my face in the rhythm of her chest rising up to meet mine and then falling again. Finally, I shook myself out of our reverie and gazed around. The wind teased a pink curtain on the window of the house next door; little kids’ playful voices sounded somewhere at a distance; a squirrel washed its face on the pristine porch of a gray Victorian across the road, and a garbage truck slowly crept down my street. I caught Sarah’s hand and quickly pulled her inside.
Sarah’s eyes flew wide open and, once in the darkness of our stuffy hall, she yanked her hand away from me. I leaned back on the closed door, feeling coldness spread over my chest and watching rhododendron petals shake free of the bouquet. “What’s the matter?” she said quietly, looking concerned and hurt at the same time, as if she had already guessed the answer, but wanted me to prove her wrong. I knew that look; it was the same one she gave me at our anniversary last September when we exchanged rings and I put mine on a chain around my neck so as not to wear it on my finger. “Why?” she asked then. “It’s closer to my heart this way,” I said the way I read in some cheesy novel, but I think both of us knew the truth.
So, separating from the door, I put a hand on her arm, hesitated briefly, and said, my voice raspy, “Sarah, please don’t.” She stared at me for a moment, then covered my hand with hers, steadying it, and nodded. “Thank you,” I sighed with relief.
Sarah readjusted the bag on her shoulder and replied lightly, “Come on. Let’s go to your room and see if we can brighten the mood a bit.”
“Do you want to see what I’m going to wear for Gay Pride tomorrow?” she asked once we got upstairs, dumping her bag onto the green quilt covering my bed. Ellie, resting on my pillow after an exciting morning of sniffing my parents’ suitcase, raised her head to gaze at my girlfriend. Sarah ruffled the fur behind her ear, whispering, “Good doggy.” She loved animals; we met our freshman year of high school when she began volunteering at the animal shelter right after her family moved here, to Vermont, from New York. She missed her home state, and we were going to go to NYU together this fall. I sat on my bed in the dusk that always seemed to fill my tiny room, a smile almost unwillingly spreading over my face. Sarah’s body moved to the rhythm of some inaudible melody. The golden ring I gave her for last anniversary flickered as she turned on the green-shaded lamp set on the nightstand next to a volume of Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Her wavy ponytail touched the back of her long graceful neck when she turned her head, holding a yellow sundress against her distractingly low-cut T-shirt with a picture of a skyrise.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, looking at her face.
“Thanks. Emily helped me choose it.” Emily was one of her numerous friends from school. Sometimes, Sarah used to invite them to our table at lunch, and they spent the entire period chatting about movies they would like to see, cars they would like to drive, or cities they would love to live in. I usually just sat in the corner, quietly reading something by Gerald Durrell, my animal rights hero, or maybe Virginia Woolf. It felt like her friends were intruding on our privacy.
“What are you going to wear?” Sarah asked, dropping the dress on my bed.
“I don’t know. Jeans, I guess, and a T-shirt or something.”
Sarah sprung to her feet and opened my closet door, the golden ring I gave her catching the sunlight for a fraction of a second before the hand wearing it disappeared somewhere between the clothes neatly hanging inside. “How about this one?” she said enthusiastically, pulling a dark green short-sleeved shirt out. “It’s your favorite color.”
“Hmm,” I pretended to consider it, standing up and moving towards her. “Why don’t you try it on so I can see it better?” Sarah laughed. “And while you’re at it,” I continued, encouraged by her laugh, “try this one, and this one, and this one,” I pulled one thing after another out of the closet. “Don’t you think they’d all be perfect for Gay Pride?” Sarah laughed even harder. She ended up trying all of them on.
Next morning, we woke up in each other’s arms. Ellie was under our bed sleeping on the pair of jeans I wore the day before. Sarah and I had to make way across the floor strewn with my clothes in order to get to the bathroom for a shower and then to the kitchen for a quick breakfast. We had already loaded some food into the trunk of my mother’s car, got Ellie into the backseat, and got in ourselves, when Sarah remembered something. “I’ll lock the door,” she said, jumping out, lovely concern on her face, but then I saw an elderly neighbor in a pink dress coming out of the nearby house and replied, “Come back in. It’s okay. Let’s just go.”
The road turns and plunges into a forest. The pine trees seem to stand guard on both sides. Their dark green canopy obstructs the way for even the tiniest rays of sun. The slope of the road becomes steeper as Ellie and I approach the mountaintop. I have to pedal harder, trying to concentrate whatever vestiges of mental and physical energy I have left on the bike. It does not work, and a memory of Sarah’s eyes, strangely dark in contrast with her shining tears, comes back to me. She did not lower her head as my parents berated her. I push the pedals harder. I take a fast turn and fall, grazing my elbow and thigh. Ellie is immediately at my side, licking my knee. I clench my teeth in pain and push the dog away. I don’t cry; I don’t deserve to cry. The memories persist: the worry and fear on my parents’ faces slowly turning into anger; the door still wide open after my girlfriend and I had walked into the hall tired from the parade and the long drive from Montpelier; Sarah’s scared gaze begging me to do something; my incongruous thought that not even Mom and Dad could stand more than one day with aunt Nettie; my silence and my paralysis after they asked us where the hell we have been; the iridescent sweater on the floor and a white ice cream stain on my left sneaker; and finally my parents blaming Sarah for being a bad influence on me, for making such a “good girl” as their daughter lie and keep secrets from them… .
I get back on my feet, rolling the bicycle along side me as I continue my journey up the mountain. The ancient pines let through so little light that the rhododendron bush near which I fell has only a few wilted flowers, candles burning out.
“I’m sorry for making you worry, Mr. and Mrs. Carson,” Sarah said after my parents’ tirade; then she turned around and ran out of the house, a cacophony of floor tiles screeching under her feet. I hurried after her, ignoring my parents. She stopped only after reaching our driveway, head down and fists clenched. I called her back, but she did not turn around. I ran up to her and put my arms around her from behind. She leaned on me, her body shaking as she tried to contain sobs.
“Don’t be mad,” I begged, putting my hand on her arm. She yanked in free.
“I am not mad at you!” she yelled. “Well, no, you know what, I think I am mad at you!” We both fell quiet for a minute.
“Sarah, you know I can’t come out to my parents,” I said softly, trying to placate her. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, but you could come out to thousands of people at the parade?”
“It’s anonymous there. Nobody knows who I am, and even if the do, they’re all gay themselves, or most of them are, anyway.”
“A lot of good that tells about gay pride!” she said with a sarcastic chuckle so uncharacteristic that somehow it felt worse than the yelling. Her eyes again filled with tears. “How long are you planning to hide from everyone we know? Deb, how long is it going to be until I can be truthful with people about my sexuality?”
“You can be truthful with them now,” I said, knowing it was not true since Sarah would never betray me. “We can go to NYU in the fall and tell everyone there that we’re gay.”
Sarah shook her head with a sigh, “It’s been four years, Deb. Four years! I wish I could believe you. I love you,” she whispered in a moment, a tear sliding down her cheek, “but this—the two of us I mean—I can’t do it anymore. I’m gay, Deborah, and, frankly, if you love me, so are you.”
“It sounds like an ultimatum.”
“It is one.”
We were silent again. The air was still and quiet; even the crickets in my parents’ yard seemed to suddenly disappear. Finally, I managed to draw a breath to say, “What do you want from me?”
“For you to come out to your parents, damn it! You have one day,” she cried out and ran away. I could not will myself to run after her. Something soft touched my leg. It was Ellie. I ignored her.
The last couple of yards are always the hardest. It is the steepest part of the mountain, and the road runs through a thick shrubbery, which catches my black shoulder-length hair so I have to stop and untangle myself. I have lost my momentum after the fall and have to work twice as hard on my bike again to maintain a decent speed. Ellie knows we are approaching the apex and pretends to be tired; it’s strange for a dog to have acrophobia. “Just a few more yards,” I cheer her on. “It’s okay. It’s not that bad up there, really.” The bicycle flies over a root of a giant oak tree and, in a minute, I am at the mountaintop, the light breeze gently blowing my hair and the sun shining onto my face. It reflects off of something bright on my chest. It is the ring—Sarah’s ring. I put it on my open hand and look closely at its smooth golden surface. The sun warms my face. Birds sing in the forest, which is almost entirely visible from the top of the mountain, and Ellie sniffs something under a blooming rhododendron bush as far away from the edge of the cliff as she can possibly get, but never far enough to lose me out of sight. Smiling, I tug at the fragile chain… and it breaks.
