Straight Girls Don't Say That
It is spring after I turn eighteen, and Mom’s garden is overrun with wild foxglove that, if not relocated, will choke out any hope of summer fruits and fall vegetables. Not that there is much hope in Oregon for such bounties with the amount of sunlight we get, and especially not in the sad, dark corner where the previous owners put their greenhouse and garden beds. A greenhouse, I thought, was not much use when the soaring evergreens ate up any chance of light.
But my concerns were not with the peppers in their five-gallon buckets, and I had to leave soon, so I knelt down with my plastic pots from years of store-bought flowers, and began to dig.
I have a surprise for you! I’m bringing it with me. I send the text off, trying not to get dirt on my phone screen.
I load the foxgloves in my car and drive them to Charlie’s house. She is delighted with them, and we plant them in the stronger spring sunshine that comes from being just next to the California border. Her house is long and low, warm and comforting. The labradoodle bays at me, same as always, and same as always, Charlie chastises him: “Doodle!”
We head out the back door and down a curling stone staircase to the lower garden, where the basement entrance and the apple tree are. I carry the flat of foxgloves, and Charlie carries the gloves and the spades. The sun is warm and comforting, the dirt cool and moist, and we talk about feminism and books and dating. I hold back the urge, as I do every time, to ask Charlie what specifically she was attracted to in girls; I am so, so curious and I want to take my spade and dig the information out of her, hold it to the sunlight and inspect it, to understand it, to know what it was that she felt and why.
But that information is personal, and I do not want to pry. So instead, I finish planting a foxglove, rock back on my heels, and say, “Girls are just so pretty. I wish I was lesbian.” There is genuine regret in that last sentence. I reach for another foxglove.
Charlie doesn’t say it out loud, but later she tells me that all she could think at that moment is, “Straight girls don’t say that.”