23 She was forty-three years old. Now, when the heart resigns itself to sorrow, its veins and arteries are filled with a dense and lugubrious grief that changes the very sound of its beating. It is that solemn change in the beating of life that keeps you in mourning long after someone is dead. As you might’ve guessed, this thick-blooded presence became my Aunt Lil. She walked the streets at night and stood knee-deep in the lake on the west end of town; she sat in the last row of any place she went and did not return phone calls to anyone. She listened for Patsy and forgot to eat; she drank until she fell asleep sitting at the kitchen table and didn’t shower before going to work. She lived without being present until the darkness passed and she finally stopped struggling to see Patsy in everything around her. Life was different but it slowly began to crawl back into its rightful speed. Aunt Lil grew past Patsy’s passing but not her memory. She put away her intimacies, trading them for a careful and thorough stance in my eighteen year old life; a life that was, well, that’s the next part of the story.
T
here are times when the first thing that happens is the last thing you expect. Then there are other times when the things you thought could never happen, do. Both of these truisms applied to my parents, Douglas and Margaret Atwood, or Dusty and Mitts, as they affectionately referred to each other. In 1958, the first time these two recent college graduates had sex—after marriage, of course—they got pregnant with me. Then in the late 70s, when all of my friends were getting married, I sat down with Dusty and Mitts to inform them that I was a lesbian. My mother commented that she did not know how such a thing could happen again in one family and wondered if it was in our genes or the result of some vitamin that she had taken while pregnant. My father asked me to go fishing. “Uh, Dad, I said, I’m a lessssbiiiiiaannnn. I like women, not fish.” Thankfully, that was the end of that discussion. After the initial quaking wore off, my family settled into a generic acceptance that there were two lesbians in the family; one at full gal-
Khimairal Ink lop and the other at the starting gate. My grandmother was sure that having Aunt Lil as one of my role models had somehow affected my ability to be straight but I knew the truth. I knew back in 1971, when I was twelve years old, that the sound and feel of women would define me and draw me into a place of sensual refuge. The alternative was just too awkward and unnatural to consider. My parents named me Shirley Delores Atwood after the actress Shirley Temple but, like Aunt Lil, I would forever be called Leedee because anything else would, well, just be too awkward and unnatural to consider. People call me a “beauty,” like my mother, and I could sense her uneasiness with the close resemblance ever since she found out that I was girl-crazy. It doesn’t fit to her that a beautiful woman, especially one who looks like her, would only have eyes for another woman. Me, on the other hand, I live for that. I was—and am—an admittedly hopeless romantic. Back then, I was frequently in love again for the last time, and my Aunt Lil was always there with a word of encouragement when I needed it. As far back as my memory stretches, she and Patsy were my mentors, role models and surrogate parents. After I had identified myself as a lesbian and Patsy had died, Lil and I became even closer. I knew that I somehow reminded Lil of Patsy in those first fresh days of grief and, while it might have been a painful awareness for her, she ultimately took comfort in that fact. She looked so intently at me sometimes, like she was catching a glimpse of a familiar ghost, and then she’d fall into a distant stare, shaking it off after a moment or so. Lil never told me what she was thinking at those times. I guess I mostly believed that Patsy was sending her grief-stricken lover a message that there is memory and connection after death, that she is never far away, and that life is worth living because of those very facts. After all, most of the things that we truly know we learned from those who are already gone. As the grief of Patsy spread through me, I came face-to-face with greatest loss of my young life, my apparent inability to love. Never truly loving is a cruel and square thing. It is hard-edged and razor sharp. Even thinking of it