Rainbow Rainbow

For my parents—thank you for putting me into this
weird world, and for everything that came after

Contents

Laramie Time

The Black Winter of New England

Pink Knives

A Fearless Moral Inventory

Pioneer

Counselor of My Heart

Sunny Talks

Cheerful Until Next Time

Ooh, the Suburbs

Boy Jump

Acknowledgments

Laramie Time

MAGGIE AND I HAD BEEN LIVING IN WYOMING FOR three months when I finally agreed we could get pregnant. We were walking on a boulevard downtown over snow that was crunchy and slushy by turns, heading home from a disappointing lunch of lo mein made with white spaghetti. The air was so sharply freezing, the meal churning so unhappily through our guts, that I longed to cheer the afternoon. I’d made up my mind the week before, but I didn’t find the right moment to tell her until we were trudging through uncleared drifts in front of the former movie theater. The Christian who’d bought the place for nothing had arranged the plastic letters into rhetoric on the marquee: GOD IS LISTENING GOD KNOWS YOURE ROTTEN.

“Maggie,” I said, taking her hand. “I’ve decided.” Last week’s test results had exposed her declining fertility. If we wanted to do this, it had to be now.

She aimed her freckled stub nose at me and studied my face. “Where to get dessert?” She spoke bluntly, the joke of what she really hoped in the deadness of her words.

“I want to have a kid with you.” I meant the words to sound natural but invested with meaning—inflected emotion on kid and you—those two words the sum total of my future reality. But the sentence bumbled out, awkward, half-swallowed.

“Amazing.” She spoke flatly, her unseasonable tennis shoes sinking into the slush. Why was she speaking flatly? Maggie had begged me for a kid for years. She should’ve jumped into my arms when I agreed. She should’ve fucked me right there on the boulevard, even though it was winter in Laramie, even though we’re lesbians and fucking wouldn’t help with getting the kid.

“Aren’t you happy?”

A tear occluded one eye, but she squeezed it to a slit, squeezed both eyes closed. When she opened them, they were clear and dry. “Thank you. I am happy.” She sounded mechanical. But sometimes she was like that—a sweet logic robot. She waited until we stepped onto the curb on Custer Street to clamp me in a cold hug.

That was it. After five years of debate. After crying and threatening to leave, after pointing out every child, even lumpy ones, after invoking hormones and decreased viability and geriatric pregnancies whenever worry or resentment surged through her. Not to mention last week’s meltdown over the test results. And now look at her, unsurprised. Maybe she figured I wouldn’t have moved across the country to spend a year deciding not to have a kid with her. But I was unpredictable and stubborn. She knew better than to count on me.

At thirty-seven, Maggie was three years older than me and beyond ready. I’d wanted to develop my career before motherhood—for the last few years I’d drawn a comic strip about lesbian turtles. Material success with comics seemed an impossibly distant goal, safe because it would take forever. No one bought the Sunday paper anymore and alt-weeklies were dead. And when would a comic strip about lesbian turtles ever hit the big time? Turtles are the least popular type of animal, and lesbians are the least popular type of human. But the strip launched briskly from a shabby online platform, with interest ballooning on social media. People fell in love with the painted turtle with her red dots by each ear and the bigger softshell turtle. People liked their warm, squinty eyes, I guess, their pointy overbites and the way they tried their best—flippers out, balanced on stubby flat feet—to press their plated chests together. The strip got syndicated in the surviving indie magazines and mainstream newspapers in cities like Portland and Portland. The pilot for a TV show had been funded and shot by a new, hip studio, which was considering buying a season. If the studio adopted the show, the turtles would appear on the small screen as black-and-white, stiff-moving cutouts, each character voiced by me, identically deadpan, and we’d move to LA. Whenever I remembered this possibility, I shuddered.

When the money for the pilot arrived, Maggie had asked to try. For years I’d given the excuse of my career—noble, logical, inarguable, and in the service, ultimately, of family. We needed money for a kid, of course, and Maggie didn’t deserve a co-parent who was harried and drawing in the shadows, sneaking away from milestones to ink in shell plates and beaky mouths.

Once my career turned toward the light, I had to face my issues that were harder to articulate. My father claimed I’d cried when he first held me, and he took this as a permanent rejection of physical affection. He’d been clear that I was a compromise, that he didn’t want kids. He demonstrated this, most days, by declining to participate. I was afraid my kid would feel the same—discarded, lonely. I’d never trust myself to be ready to welcome a little being to earth, though I was afraid to explain all this to Maggie, afraid she’d think I was loveless at my core. As months passed without my agreement, her frustrations accelerated.

Sometimes, when I was in a certain mood—a dangerous mood maybe, or cruel—I’d speculate on scenarios where the drudgery of domestic life provided me with a larger, more startling purpose, and I could almost justify making a child in my ambivalence. What if Maggie bore twins, one with my egg and one with hers? Our kids would bond so hard in the womb that it would be like me and Maggie combining in the popular, primal way. Maggie’s pinched-nosed kid stroking her lips like Maggie did, smoothing her T-shirt like Maggie did, laughing in a high keen like Maggie did, falling in sibling love with my kid with dark messy hair and skinny wrists. Did sperm banks provide an anonymous grab-bag option? We could spend years gathering data on the father through the behavior of our child—he must have short eyebrows, he must like cantaloupe with pepper, he must be mean.

We’d moved to Wyoming at the end of the summer to “think about it” in a neutral zone while we survived off the rent from our subletted apartment in New York. We nicknamed this period the Laramie Time. Maggie had abandoned her career in academic publishing to finish a novel. Our best friend, Arun, a chatty professor, had lured us out west, making the forgotten town with its slouching wood-frame houses and white men who stared at anyone who was not a white man seem cool. He assured us cougars crossed the highway and food was cheap. He secured us free housing from his colleague on sabbatical.

Maggie had been straight until me, and the idea of Laramie bothered her less. But when I fretted over the move, Arun insisted that the famous hate crime had unfairly stigmatized the town. He watched me closely while he explained that every resident knew that Matt Shepard and his killer had been lovers. The crime wasn’t homophobic or political but personal. As though that made it any easier to digest.

The colorful clouds and mountains, the antelopes and antelope-crushing brackets mounted to truck fenders, the beef, the clingy community of intellectual and creative semi-youths, they’d help the two of us decide one way or the other. And after three months of working side-by-side on the flower-patterned second-hand sofa, the tension of our future thickening the air and the results of Maggie’s fertility test landing on us like rotten whipped cream to top it all, I’d come around to the idea of creating a tiny third party to cheer us up.

When Arun, our sole visitor, was with us, Maggie and I had fun, setting bobcat skulls on our scalps and dancing, playing the same cute girls as always. Those days were the best: Maggie suggesting the three of us drive numbered country roads to Bamforth or Curt Gowdy or Hot Springs, or wander the foothills seeking buffalo while she spun stories about cows with warnings encoded in their spots or swingers sleepwalking over the prairie. Time, for me, dissolved when she got that way, all joy: the pharmacy, the dentist, stopped traffic behind a horse. But when we were alone, she scowled into the tiles, gruff and unpleasant. When she managed to leave the apartment at all, she wandered Safeway, buying cans of beans and desiccated nubs of ginger, gazing with reproductive lust at any man. She’d given up on her novel. She was unemployed in a borrowed apartment in the middle of Wyoming. A kid, I hoped, could bring her back.

That evening, Maggie and I ate buttered tangles of pasta around a mushroom-shaped ironwork table that was intended for outdoor use. Snow spattered the windows. It was only November and already it had snowed so often that we didn’t point it out anymore.

“So what should we name it?” I asked, to prove I was serious. Maggie had always taken care of me—financially and otherwise. I owed her this baby. I popped open my hands. “Let’s discuss.”

She laughed in her snorting way that made my heart lift. Her hand found mine under the table. She squeezed my fingers over and over. “Are we doing Theme Day? All these noodles.”

Back in New York, we used to sometimes focus all three meals on a color, or a texture, or some knobby vegetable pulled from the Chinatown market. I stroked her fingers so she’d relax her mechanical squeezing. Her hand seized up.

“I’m serious,” I said. “About the names. You must’ve thought of ideas.”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself,” she said. “It’s not even conceived.”

I shrugged. “But it’s fun to talk about, right?”

“Jane,” she said, anchoring her straw-colored hair behind her ear. “Or Michael. I’m sick of all those pretentious names.”

She returned to her pasta—the subject over, decided. What else would we talk about for however long it took to conceive plus nine months? Wasn’t jabbering about baby names, flapping through giant volumes, revisiting the hijinks of relatives long dead, how a couple worked up excitement over a forthcoming wrinkled intruder? What about Francine? What about Jiminy? What about Puck?

Maybe she’d reacted so glumly because of the lesbian turtles. Three weeks before, they’d agreed to adopt a gerbil with much more fanfare than I’d offered her. They’d cried. They’d crinkled their papery skin and performed their shell-slapping embrace.

The next morning, I found Maggie pouring coffee to fuel her standard day of calling friends, useless shopping, walks that went nowhere, window sessions watching fake cowboys saunter by. She freelanced, but that only filled a few hours a week, which she stretched out by typing extra slowly.

“I better finish my work,” she said, a bite in her voice already. “Wouldn’t want to disappoint all the clamoring souls who rely on me.” She splashed coffee into her bowl until it spilled over.

Maggie admitted to thinking about her novel sometimes while she lazed around, though she maintained that she’d given up, that there was no point pouring your life into some document no one would ever read. What worried me was how she discussed the project of art: miserable, challenging, like she wanted me to quit my comic and mope around with her. I refused to get sucked into hopelessness. My grip on my work was shaky enough.

I snagged Maggie’s sleeve as she passed.

“Watch out.” She brushed my hand away to protect her coffee. She looked like a mole, like she always did at this hour, which was sweet. But today she looked worse than usual. The skin at the corners of her eyes was blue, and her cheeks were rough-textured the way they got when she was stressed. I’d hoped my agreement would make her happy. The turtles had hosted a garden party to celebrate their choice, frogs and tortoises emerging from under lily pads to fete the future moms.

Maggie jiggled her coffee bowl. “Can I sit, please? Am I allowed?”

“Here.” I pushed away my sketches. She scowled.

Most mornings I headed straight to my brush and dish of ink. Lately I had conference calls too, and sometimes I was in LA. I had treatments to rewrite and producers to please and animators to supervise. Half of what I did for the show—which the producers had dumbed down to Bisexual Turtles—I did in a trance. Whenever Maggie asked about moving to LA, wringing her hands and fretting about highways and smog and glad-handers talking shop, I told her not to worry. She was such a New York girl, striding through Manhattan in her black coat, snapping her way through editorial meetings while clinging to paper cups of coffee, acquiring her first-choice titles, always. Laramie was a way station, but LA was permanent, and the enemy.

I’d take my commitment one step further by discussing the sperm donor. The turtles only had to visit Gerbil-O-Rama—the shop that appeared on their shore the moment they needed it. We, on the other hand, had a process to slog through. Why not start? Maggie had abandoned her career and writing and left herself with nothing. Maybe she wanted a kid to distract herself from losing her novel. That was fair. I wanted that for her too.

I laced my fingers. “So,” I said. “The journey begins.”

She took a sip of coffee, squinting through the steam. “Excuse me?”

“So,” I said. “The journey begins.”

She set her bowl down. “I heard you. I just don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

Had she forgotten what we’d decided? “Our journey to have a child.”

Brightness flamed over her face, then extinguished. “What did you want to discuss?”

“We decided to do it,” I reviewed. “We settled on names. What’s left?”

“To get pregnant and have a baby and raise it to adulthood.” She spared a smile for her own joke. “If something’s on your mind, just say it.” One eye checked me curiously.

“The sperm,” I said proudly.

“Jesus, Leigh.” She peered at me up and down. “You’re really jumping in, aren’t you? You’re really on honor roll all of a sudden.”

“We have to select a man who embodies our values and love. We could have a fun ceremony where friends help choose from the sperm bank.” We’d be leagues more thorough than the turtles, who’d simply reached for the cutest gerbil in the box. We’d invite our Laramie acquaintances to debate dad options. I’d brandish placards with photographs of males and statistics. Did we want a San Francisco engineer who’s Boastful, Fun, and Curious? Or a math teacher who’s Creative, Wry, and Caring? Did we want a soccer buff who enjoys Potatoes, Chats, and Items? Or an oak tree fan with a Meaningful Childhood I Long to Replicate in a Baby Version of Myself?

“But Arun,” she said, studying me.

“What?”

“Who else?” The top of her face shone with anticipation, while her mouth remained downturned.

“Are you okay?” I inched my chair closer. I longed to embrace her, but she looked prickly.

“I’m fine.” She kissed me, sending a leak of molasses from my mouth to my core. If we weren’t discussing such urgent matters, if she wasn’t in a rotten mood, I’d have invited her upstairs to hide with me in the covers.

“Are you sure?”

“Certainly,” she said, in her professional voice, her hand sliding off my shoulder. “You’ve thought about it, haven’t you?”

But, of course, Arun was better than anyone narcissistic or desperate enough to peddle their bodily fluids. He was handsome and brilliant, an innovative critic whose mission was to write accessibly and increase public access to literary analysis. And he was our best friend. We’d known him since he was a graduate student in New York. We had endless fun in our group of three, while both of us were also close with him on our own. Still, I was disappointed not to debate. “He’s a start. But wouldn’t it be fun to throw around options?” I was desperate to discuss the decision, to comb through details, to convince myself this was real. Her vagueness, her rush to wrap up, was disturbing. “What about Rudyard?”