David stands on the corner of Market and Castro, a wide grin spreading under his bottlebrush mustache, a Bible clasped in one hand while the other brushes a thick shag of brown hair from his eyes; his bantam chest strains against the obligatory neatly-pressed plaid shirt tucked into the equally obligatory jeans molded around strong young legs set akimbo.

Around David the Castro teems with men. They lean out of cars, shouting and waving; they spill over the sidewalk and sway in the curbs; they drape their bare, well-toned torsos over the fire escapes of the slightly frayed Victorians lining Castro Street, kibitzing among themselves while they eyeball the boy-toys, handsome young fellows who weave sinuously through the wriggling masses or loll hip to hip on a sunny patch of concrete in front of Hibernia Bank—Hibernia Beach, they call it—rubbing suntan oil on their innocent chests. Two immense flags striped with peacock fields undulate above the crowds, their fly ends snapping in the crisp coastal breeze.

It is an immaculate late June afternoon smack in the middle of the most perfect summer of 1978. It is Gay Pride weekend, and this revelry is the sacramental afterglow of that holiest of observances, the Freedom Day Parade. The official parade route was far from the Castro, from Market and 2nd Street through Civic Center, and the official post-parade celebrations are still held on Polk Street, the fusty old gay district of yore; but anyone who is anyone is in the Castro this afternoon. Harvey Milk was elected last November and can be seen wandering with his doting entourage, his narrow basset-hound face split by his wide clown grin; young men are bursting with health and optimism; the Castro reigns supreme.

David is laughing. He gestures with his Bible, shaking the book so its page ribbons dance, as twin streams of cars on Market Street swerve and honk behind the teaming masses and dark grey fog hurries in to cloud the pale blue ocean sky, fog that comes in every night to cool and moisten the city and remind us of the impermanence of sunshine. God loves me as I am, David is saying, as I watch him in this dreamscape that I cannot fully remember within my own mind, a borrowed memory that I have been patiently exhuming and animating from conversations, photographs, and newspaper clippings, but I am told is real as real can be.

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I wake up at 2 a.m. in a pool of my own sweat and stumble from the bedroom so I do not wake up Sandy. Before menopause crept up on me, I did not realize how many parts of my body could perspire, particularly at once, particularly without the provocations of heat or exercise. Not just the warm infolded recesses—armpits and such—but my back, my arms, my calves, my stomach, my scalp, the underside of my breasts: all are slick with fresh, warm perspiration rapidly cooling on my goosebumped skin now that I have yanked off my sweat-dampened pajamas and am standing stark naked in the shadowy living room, fanning my middle-aged flesh with the front section of yesterday’s New York Times.

Dot, our thin, nervous tabby, followed me from the bedroom, and now sits, considering. The cats seem to know when we are troubled or ill; if, at the end of a long, bad day, I fling myself on the bed and cry, or if Sandy is prone on the couch with a pounding sinus headache, not just one but both feline sentries usually materialize to knead our shoulders and hum in our ears. But the cats seem undecided about menopause, and tonight Dot looks frankly dubious. “Should I really leave that cozy spot on the bed for the second time this week,” she seems to ask, “or is it ok if I leave you here? You don’t seem that sick, and look—you’re already settled in with the latest Atlantic.” Apparently that was a rhetorical question, as Dot then wanders out of the living room, tail up.

In all these points, Dot is correct: menopause is not going away any time soon, I seem to be resigned if not exactly adjusted to the situation, and menopause is not an illness—or so I keep telling myself in a too-loud voice. …

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My eccentric one-woman campaign to prevaricate about my marital status might seem a sort of unraveling. After all, no one noticed or cared; it took me a surprisingly long time to realize that anyone reviewing the forms I so defiantly lied on would assume I was married to a man. For that matter, our other de facto married friends had not been led to civil disobedience. Gail and Dinah were annoyed, but did not simmer or steep over the invalidation of their marriage; they pressed on, getting ready for the fall church concert, buying a new car, planning trips. Other friends seemed equally sanguine. “Oh yes,” said one, “We were married, too. Wasn’t that nice? So good of Gavin” (every gay person in North America now being on a first-name basis with the mayor of San Francisco).

It was Sandy’s response that stirred the most doubt in me about my outlaw behavior. After her initial anger, she too returned to life as usual, a life of work and preaching and laundry and crochet and thick biographies from the library and persimmons from the neighbor’s tree and trying to decide if it was cold enough yet for the first fire of the season, a life where an entire Saturday can dissolve in a series of tiny errands as we progress down sleepy suburban streets from CostCo to the farmer’s market to Albertson’s to the hardware store and then back to CostCo for the thing we forgot, our car windows rolled down so we can hear the brown leaves of autumn crunching under the wheels of our car, hours luxuriously drifting by as we talk and talk, talking about nothing, talking about everything, occasionally patting one another on the knee as if to say, Mrs. Oatmeal, I am glad you exist.

The simple observation, the very obvious lesson-learned, is that of course we are married. Marriage is not a simple square of fabric, a one-time event to hang on the wall, but a process slowly knitting lives together, a gradual weaving, row by row, that begins when we are able to set aside enough of ourselves to create a third entity from the union of two: I becomes the warp, and we becomes the woof. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay; and under the comfort of one garment, we will be redeemed. By that standard, Sandy pointed out on a winter evening, deconstructing a dark green afghan while a fire crackled, we have been married for well over a decade. We do not know the exact date, but there are many moments that could serve us well: the afternoon I took the PATH train from Manhattan to New Jersey, a cat hidden in my gym bag, to move into Sandy’s home; the time I chose not to live in Michigan; the time we each had a stiff shot of vodka in the garage before Thanksgiving dinner to fortify ourselves in advance of my mother’s political diatribes; the many times we have forgiven one another for the sulks and storms and minor transgressions of any relationship. I could continue to be angry that our legal marriage had been invalidated, and I could enjoy the brisk salt air of the realization that we were worthy of this social contract; yet I could not deny we were married.

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“You got a pet elephant?” asked the lady behind me at Costco as I piled five giant bags of unsalted peanuts in the shell on the checkout counter. It was my second trip to Costco that month. “Squirrels,” I replied, embarrassed. “No, not squirrels, please,” she said, rolling her eyes. Yes, squirrels, but not as I had intended.

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My decision to pursue my “craft” was not always obvious to those close to me, and when I am sitting before a monitor beaming back at me the computer equivalent of scribbles, I can see and hear my friends as clearly as if I were holding to my ear a shell that echoed their words.

“So exactly, what crafts do you do?” asked one friend.

“Craft. Writing,” I responded.

“Writing?” she asked. Her eyebrows leapt up and knit together; her mouth pursed. “You do that?”

“Never mind,” I replied, feeling cross and small. Screw you, I thought. Screw you.

I do everything I can think of to screw them, to send the skeptics and their leaping eyebrows far, far down into the watery drink. I tape a list of “the aspects of craft” to my computer monitor, I read and re-read essays about structuring nonfiction works, I write down every comment shared in my writing group and rewrite my notes when I get home. I study In Cold Blood so many times I memorize the hanging scene. When others in the group write better than I do, I let jealousy the color of seaweed wind through my brain, and when I read an awkward sentence or paragraph I know I could have swum circles around, I let myself feel a small hard knot of pleasure, no bigger than a cockle shell, something I can rub my fingers over when I need succor.

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Sandy sobbed when she gave away her cross-country skis a couple of weeks ago. “It’s the end of that part of my life,” she said. A neighbor we called in for a second opinion told her, “No one has used that kind of ski in twenty years,” but this did not help. I carefully did not add that Sandy had not used these skis in either New Jersey or New York for twenty-nine of the thirty years she has owned them, and that she was even less likely to use the skis in Palo Alto, which has the annual snowfall of, say, Cuba. This too would not have helped. When Sandy cried once more as she placed the skis on the curbside pile destined for the Salvation Army, even I briefly felt her grief and loss, though for over a decade I had secretly if unsuccessfully schemed for these skis to have an “accident” that would require their disposal, a fate that only rank cowardice prevents me from imposing on the cumbersome, unused rowing machine that has become part of my married life, smirking at me from the corners of a succession of garages.

Late that night, my eyes sprang open. The bedroom, once so comforting in its orthodox familiarity—bed, dressers, a chair to sit on while we pull on socks—now seemed like a place I no longer knew. Towers of boxes blocked the windows; I could not see the sky, or the city lights. The room even smelled different, its reassuringly female fragrances of drawer-sachets and face lotion replaced by the papery odors of stirred-up dust and new moving cartons.

I lay sleepless, torn by the fate of the bundt pan I had left on the curb, suddenly connecting with its humble orange self in a way I never had in the five years it had sat dusty and unused behind spare Christmas lights and our backup crockpot. The bundt pan was the only baking pan my mother had ever given me. I had assumed she had given it to me because she does not bake, and I do; though now, it occurred to me, perhaps she had baked a cake for some occasion in her own world, and when she gave me the pan it was a gentle cue for me to ask how it came in her life. Yet I had taken the bundt pan with barely a comment, as if I had been doing her a favor. Perhaps when she gave it to me she expected me to grab the car keys and run out for ingredients and then spend an afternoon baking a cake while we chatted—as if I, and for that matter, my sister, were not wary of sharing too much with my mother, who believes in broadcasting the details of her children’s lives to several hundred of her closest friends. Perhaps she would look for the bundt pan when she came to visit, and feel hurt that I had discarded it without asking her about it first. Perhaps she would tell her friends!

In the dark bedroom, huge cartons heaped with hangered clothes loomed like fantastic monsters erupting from the depths of some strange sea, shaking their serpentine heads at my dilemma. Was it morally defensible to retrieve the bundt pan? Would it be fair to Sandy, who had to give up her cross-country skis, which had a much longer provenance in her life? That argument had merit, I considered, twisting my head on the pillow in a useless attempt to get comfortable; after all, she had bought the skis herself, which was a much different case than if her mother had given her the skis. Surely the parental gift trumps the personal purchase. Then again, maybe she had purchased the skis with money that had special meaning—a gift from a parent, or a well-earned work bonus.

Perhaps, it occurred to me, Sandy’s tears over the departure of the skis were not simply over the abrupt, even cruel recognition of life’s passages that a household move can foist on us: the forgotten dresses now far too jeune fille, the once-favorite jeans we will never squeeze into again, the many bittersweet reminders that we are not only moving forward in space but in time, toward a final destination that shifts closer every decade. Perhaps there was a significant event in Sandy’s own personal history (that strange, sad, lonely, pre-Karen era) that I in my caddish self-absorption had not thought to probe for.

Why had I not asked her about the skis? We had spent twelve years following one another’s dreams and passions, packing and unpacking our lives, two nomads willingly balancing pots on our heads and wandering into the deserts of the unknown; and yet I had been so absorbed in divesting our world of those hated, cumbersome objects that I had not asked her what the skis meant to her. I lay in the dark, feeling lumpen and callow, unworthy of her investment in me, and wondering why she even bothered.

Sacrificing the bundt pan would be my small atonement. I saw myself watching the Goodwill truck trundle down the hill as I said to Sandy, So tell me about the skis—oh, and here’s the story of that bundt pan…

But I could not erase the image of my mother shyly handing me the bundt pan, no doubt while I was prattling on unthinkingly about old-growth forests or the price of gasoline. The pan grew in my mind until it was a massive orange orb floating above me accusingly.

I scrabbled my hands over several carton-tops until I found my glasses, donned my left slipper, then crept out of the bedroom and out of the house (biting my lower lip so that my squeals were muffled when I stubbed my bare right foot on half-filled boxes, as happened every other step). I crouched in my nightgown by the pile of goods at the curb. The midnight fog wisping in from the bay curled around my shivering shoulders as I debated with myself one last time. Control gave way: I was possessed by my possessions. Still torn by my conflicting loyalties and ashamed of being such a cheat, I rescued the bundt pan and whisked it into the house, pushing it under a large wad of packing paper in a half-filled carton.

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On the weapons range I lay prone, my gun ready. I silently begged our weapons instructor, Sergeant Ireland, to give us the order to fire. The wet heat of a summer afternoon in Texas pressed through my uniform, flattening my back like a huge unseen hand, but a broad green awning shaded my novice eyes from the fierce August sun, and my belly and breasts and thighs were deliciously comfortable from the cool, immaculate cement floor of the firing line. My breathing rasped harsh in my head, all other sounds muffled behind huge red Air-Force-issue ear defenders wrapped tight around my sweating skull. I was supposed to be eyes-forward, focused on the concentric paper target positioned in front of me across fifty feet of scruffy tan dirt, but I slid my eyes sideways just to see if the airman to my right was as excited as I was. She caught my eye and tilted a grin in my direction. We quickly slid our eyes forward again as Sergeant Ireland walked behind us, lecturing twenty-four recruits one last time about Attention to Detail, Safety (which, he frequently reminded us, was Paramount), and Never Pointing Your Weapon At Anything You Don’t Plan To Shoot.

Guns, I am told, are dangerous. But women are dangerous, too. A woman can rip your heart from your chest and drop it like a child discarding a candy wrapper, or stand in front of you, a disdainful smile on her face, tossing your heart from one hand to another while your blood drips through her fingers. It is much worse when your heart is not left behind. No one explains the cruelest trick of life. You are happy, and life is good, and the years roll on, until you wake up one night, terrified, because you realize that the worse thing that can ever happen to you is for something to happen to her, and there is no way to avoid that eventual tragedy other than dying first, which is almost as frightening. It is all infinitely worse because she is a woman and the logic of your heart insists there is nothing better than a woman, particularly this woman. You are caught in this conundrum; your attention to detail failed you miserably and completely, way back when it was still possible to leave. So you lie fretting in the dark, the cats humped at your feet while your beloved breathes in and out in the night air, and you sense the entrapment of desire, the very danger of life itself.

Compared to that, a gun is harmless.

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In his hands, big as briskets, the box of bullets was plain as plain could get, a small tan cardboard box with numbers on the side. But the gun was flat-out sexy: a classic six-chamber Colt .38 with a 4” barrel, perfectly tooled, immaculate, well-oiled, and gleaming blue-black, the choice of discerning airmen worldwide. This Colt could be shot single or double-action, which is bass-ackwards from what it sounds like. Single-action requires two steps—cock the hammer, pull the trigger—while double-action means you pull the trigger, and blam. Both methods, we had been taught in military weapons classes, had their advantages. Sometimes you have time to think, and sometimes you have just enough time for blam.

I took the .38 from the chief nose-down, enjoying its cool metal heft in my hand. The chief watched me carefully as–first checking the safety–I popped the chamber and fingered it forward six times, once for each bullet. Each chamber fell into place with a decisive snick, the dull gleam of the rim of each bullet barely visible in the dim light of the garage. I pretended not to notice the chief’s brief nod of approval.

“Since it’s loaded, I take it you want me to use this,” I said, trying not to smile. I snapped the Colt’s barrel shut with one hand and thumbed the safety again, just to be sure, before tucking the gun in my purse.

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Three months into my tour, I meet Pat in the laundry room of our barracks one evening, a few days after she arrives at Suwon. A pilot had alerted me that a new lady captain was on base. Out of 800 airmen, only a few of us are women, and even fewer are officers, and it is expected that we will befriend one another. Pat is leaning against a dryer reading a paperback, rangy and handsome in that definite way of tall brunettes. When I walk in, she looks up and smiles.

“Oh, hello,” she says, as if she were waiting for me, and shuts her book.

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When I got away from Hahn [Airbase], it was as far as I could get, not so much in miles from base as in distance from the endless war training machine, in search of beer and skittles, hungry for another adventure.

I didn’t have to go far. Nearly every Saturday “Fraulein Schneider” drove three kilometers to market, mingling with stocky townspeople who moved with brisk efficiency between shop-keepers and bakers and butchers along streets as cute and perfect as a town in a train set. Many nights I grilled German meat or sausage in my backyard while chatting with my neighbors in what my landlord called KinderDeutsch:

“How are you? I am fine. I like sausage very, very much!”
“Your house is very, very clean!”
“Yes, thank you, I would like a glass of wine, very, very much!”

Or I would buy fresh sliced German cold cuts from ruddy-cheeked German butchers, a bit of buttery cheese tasting of that luscious German milk, and a loaf of dark, dense, moist German bread, all to be washed down with a malty local beer or a bone-dry Mosel-Saar wine. During holidays—and Germany seems to have a lot of them—several of us would hop in a car and head to the nearest Schweinfest, where cooks would saw thick, juicy slices of pit-roasted pig, ensuring everyone got a bit of the crackling skin with the moist, smoky meat. Roast pig is such a Pied Piper that I once stood under a drizzling sky for nearly an hour, softly crooning “Singing in the Rain” with several friends while Germans on line with us smiled in our direction. Waiting in the rain for roast pig makes sense to Germans, and I admire their priorities.

I also had many sessions of psychic healing at the Hotel Morbach, a few kilometers from the house I rented in the tiny village of Bischofsdhron. The maitre d’ took a ken to me, with my German-sounding name, my stuttering German, my puckish habit of dining alone with a book, and my enthusiasm for her cuisine, which sailed above the usual gasthaus schnitzel-mit-pommes-frites affairs. “Have the lamb shank in wine,” she would whisper in German, one arm draped around my shoulder, as I leaned back in a huge, comfortable chair under a stained glass window, a glass of Mosel wine in my hand. “We have asparagus wrapped in bacon today. We have the trout you love”—Forelle Blau, whole trout boiled live so it curls in a perfect circle with an lake-blue sheen on its skin, an impeccable companion to the ubiquitous but irresistible Salzkartoffeln, small, firm boiled potatoes drenched in milk-sweet German butter. What the Germans lack in driving etiquette they make up for in good potato-growing soil. Later, the maitre d’ would come by the table, eyebrows raised, hands together as if in prayer. “Gut?” In my bad German I would enthuse, “The food is very, very good! I am very, very happy!” She would beam and sail through the dining room, hands triumphantly on hips, as I turned pages, nibbled lamb, and sipped wine.

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