An Improvisation

For Pride

Our gingham laid table holds a bounty. The scent of roasted garlic rises in wave shaped wafts off a bowl of oil soaked pasta. Lettuce, fresh cut from one of our gardens, crisp with the taste of the earth, drips lemon dressing. The barbecue is still too hot to touch. Grilled sweet onions, portobello mushrooms, half a head of cabbage, chili and thyme chicken thighs, cheeseburgers that run pink at their core. We cook like an improvised dance. 

It’s June and our rainbow flag swings in the wind, declarative on our front porch. I can catch its color in the very edge of my peripheral vision, a monument. My mommy is speaking. The remnants of her Long Island drawl cling to the ends of each word, a reminder. 

“My first Pride was in 1986. I was on 6th Avenue and the Gay Men's Health Crisis group was walking by. It was the heart of the AIDS crisis. All of these gorgeous, gay men who had lost so much. I was just so moved. I joined the parade. I thought, ‘I don’t give a shit if anyone sees me.’” 

We’ve spent the day in an improvised dance. Life is an improvisation which sometimes feels like dancing and sometimes feels like falling or crashing or smashing but this day is one of the days that feels like dancing.

I try to hold onto these days.

It’s my mommy’s 63rd birthday and my 26th Pride. I was 9 months old during my first. I wore a blue and white hat to shield the June sun from my eyes and rode on the shoulders of my mommy and then my mama and then my mommy again. We marched, hand in hand, down 6th Avenue. It was 1997. 

I was four years old at the first Pride that I remember. I had blonde curls and was one year and one month into being a big sister. It was 2000, a new millennium. I wore a yellow dress and one of the moms painted a pastel rainbow onto each of my cheeks. There were always so many moms. We, the children of the first moms to have children as two moms, marched down 6th Avenue. I remember the cheering. The crowds erupting in ecstatic joy at our existence. We laughed and danced in the street and collected colorful condoms to pass out to our admirers. This only made them cheer louder.

Nothing makes life feel more like an improvisation than death. My mama’s death races at us. It picks up speed with each day she spends in bed. Gains inertia with each dose of morphine. Builds power with every visit from a hospice nurse. We try to keep dancing. It gets harder each day. 

Around our gingham laid table is a bounty of women. My mommy’s best friends and my best friends, generations of women, women, more women. They hold us up in the face of life and of death. 

Our women bring flowers, and paintings, and wide smiles, and tear filled eyes, and they cook. One of the women picks lettuce from her garden and transfers it wrapped in wet paper towels to our kitchen. Another slices potatoes and onions and fresh dill and makes a recipe we inherited from another woman’s mother. The generations of women blend and meld and mix before my eyes. 

One of the women flies 15 hours to hold me for 36, she is jetlagged as hell and she never shows it. Another paints my mama and me on my favorite beach in Tel Aviv. She captures our movements and joys, our expressions and connections. She wraps us in flowers and light and when she hands me the painting I cry and cry. 

 These women are the dance in our lives. This is what I was raised to believe. What I know. 

My first 10 years of life were spent in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. In a lesbian haven of women, women, more women. On Sunday mornings, moms made pancakes — blueberry, banana, chocolate chip, and plain — and us kids watched The Lizzie McGuire Movie. Hillary Duff on a motorcycle in Rome. A mom, another mom, more moms, handed me milk seeped in strawberry syrup. After, we’d lay out on blankets on the grass beside Bleecker Street playground. Moms and mommys and mamas and imas.

At 10, my moms moved us from New York City to Maplewood, New Jersey. I had a snobbish, city kid attitude about the prospect of the Holland Tunnel but Maplewood turned out to be a lesbian haven too.  Moms, moms, and more moms. Two of the moms brought a babka to our new house on move in day. They rang the doorbell and smiled, “You’ve been babka-ed! Welcome!” These women grew into family too.

At 23, I moved to Williamsburg into a 25 foot ceilinged apartment full of women. We hosted Shabbats on Friday nights and filled bountiful tables with dishes that fed 40. We collected toothbrushes like souvenirs on our bathroom counter and played music from a speaker we’d named Lola. We laid in piles with overlapping arms and legs on the softest couch I’ve ever sat on and built ourselves a family, a foundation.  

On my mommy’s 63rd birthday and my 26th Pride, all of our women surround us. They hold us up in the face of death. We improvise together.

At Maplewood Pride, we slurp cherry ices from paper cups and order Arnold Palmer’s sweet with sugary lemonade. We lay in piles, heads on laps, hands in hands, easeful with the memory of all the piles we’ve laid in before. We take photos and I smile with a smile that reaches my eyes. When a woman who can sing, like really sing from that place somewhere deep inside where really good singing is born, takes the stage, we rise from our piles and we dance. My mommy is next to me. Her best friends on one side, my best friends on the other. We dance and dance. 

There is one woman missing from our bounty of women. My mama. This part of life mimics death. The gaping hole that is her absence, like a premonition. She’s having a hard day which means rising from bed is difficult and a plastic dropper disposes .25mg of morphine beneath her tongue more than once. We track her morphine doses in a green folder. .25mg at 4PM on June 11th. 

At dinner her absence is an empty chair. We can cook and cook and cook and never fill that empty chair. We can grill and paint and dance and fly across the world and never fill that empty chair. That empty chair like a stark reminder: sometimes improvising feels like falling. 

“To me, Pride is about how far we’ve come.” One of the Maplewood moms with short cropped blonde hair and a voice brimming with reminders of her English upbringing says. She tells us about going to gay bars in England in the 80s. Dark alleys and hidden faces. Praying you wouldn’t be seen or recognized. “Pride is about being recognized,” she concludes. 

We’re talking about Pride to avoid talking about the empty chair and we’re talking about Pride because we have so much to be proud of. We pass the ketchup and scoop out extra servings of potato salad and give our compliments to the chef who is all of us, together. 

We’re talking about Pride when my mama comes to the table. She arrives with pale skin and a big toothed smile. Morphine induced large pupils and a perseverance born from years of Pride. 

We cheer and cheer. “You’re here! You did it!” Her blue t-shirt reads “Not Dead Yet.” She is epic. 

“What does Pride mean to you, mama?” I ask as she fills her empty chair. 

“Pride is freedom, love, a little bit of sex.” My mama, undeniably not dead yet, makes us laugh and laugh. Her improvisation is an endless dance. 

Later that night, we have a Carvel ice cream cake for my mommy’s birthday and my mama lays on the couch in her “Not Dead Yet,” shirt. Another .25mg of morphine is droppered under her tongue. Across the floor of our living room, women scatter like a painting. They hold my mama's hand and tell her jokes and I listen as conversations break off into a happy hum. 

My friends write cards for each of my moms. Birthday cards for my mommy. Life cards for my mama. They leave them on the thick, dark wood of our dining room table. They are lipstick stained glasses, indelible reminders of the presence of all our women. When I hug them each goodnight, I cry and cry.

I haven’t been able to read these birthday and life cards all the way through yet because each time I start my throat feels thick with emotion. Each time I am overcome with pride, with the beautiful, bountiful, improvisational life we’ve built. 

Instead, I read one card at a time. One woman's words per day. Their words are my daily anchoring, my reminder: even when my mama’s chair is empty, there will still be days that feel like a dance.