Juno's Swans by Tamsen Wolff

Author:Tamsen Wolff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2018-07-11T16:00:00+00:00

When did you know? Titch would ask squinting past my left ear. And later still, But how did you know? Are you gay? (This very quietly, so self-conscious but determined that her face was almost entirely scrunched up, like a ball of crumpled tissue.) I mean is that it? Do you know? When did you know?

Never. There was no moment that I knew.

The truth is I never thought of myself as one thing or another, as straight or gay or as anything other than Sarah’s person, as she was mine. That was the only category that made sense to me.

Sarah didn’t identify herself in any way either; she didn’t like to be aligned with any group as far as I could tell. The question seemed beside the point of us. It’s true that in classes I continued to be careful about how I behaved with and toward her because clearly she did not want to be in a couple while being our section leader and all. She never said she didn’t want to say anything about the two of us, but she didn’t have to. We never touched one another in class, or even put our heads together to whisper. She treated me very much the way she treated everyone else.

Out of class, away from the other students, we were immediately, emphatically, happily joined at the hip. Also at the hand, the shoulder, the forehead, the cheek, the mouth, the belly, the leg; whatever was handy. I never had any doubt about what I could make Sarah feel when we were alone, if I wanted to (and I wanted to). Publicly, we were entirely in one world or the other depending on the context: with her friends in Wellfleet or in Provincetown, we were physically merged, inseparable, a known commodity, an established pair, as we were in private; in class or anywhere near it, we were physically apart, removed, at a marked, strategic distance from one another.

Of course these apparently tidy distinctions tripped into uncharted territory before long. One evening after class, when we had nothing in the house for dinner we drove to Orleans to go shopping. On the way, I said I wanted to make cookies and Sarah said she didn’t want cookies around in the house because she didn’t want to eat a lot of them, so I said I would bake them and we would give them away to Luke and Eddy and Dennis. Then the house would smell like cookies—which is my favorite part of baking—and we would make the guys happy. She thought this was very funny for some reason.

Inside the store, I was in the baking aisle and Sarah had headed in the direction of produce, when I heard someone call my name. I turned around, holding a bag of chocolate chips in one hand. Titch’s stepsister Ruby was standing immediately in front of me, looking tan in jean shorts and carrying a shopping basket over one arm.

“Hey you!” she said.

“Hey!” I answered, more enthusiastically than I meant to.

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