“Can’t you?” said Sally, getting a bottle of beer from the fridge.
“No. I have no domestic skills. I could never do this,” I said, waving at the kitchen. “It’s so pretty here. I mean, I completely understand why you wanted this and not, you know, Brooklyn.”
“Well!” Sally smiled. “Those weren’t the only two options, you know. To be honest I never made this big decision: I. Like. Ithaca. I’m. Going. To Stay. In. Ithaca. I just … kind of got comfortable. So I stayed. And I like my house, and I like my job. I like my cat. And also, I’ve met someone.”
I looked at her. Was this going to be it? The big declaration? Obviously anticlimactic, but kind of awesome, too? See under Dyke, I remembered thinking, years ago, when I was twelve and Sally came down to the Vineyard for a couple of days. Of course they’d been throwing Gender and Sexuality in Society down our throats since third grade at the Walden School, and at least half the faculty and staff brought their same-sex partners to Founder’s Day, the annual school celebration, but I had also been taught not to make assumptions based on how a person looked, spoke, gestured, dressed, or wore their hair, which was confusing since it was ridiculous not to note the correlations. My own lesbian classmates at Walden had no discernible markers; they looked like everyone else and dressed like everyone else and in fact widely preferred newer terms like “pansexual” to the old-fashioned “gay” or even “bi.” But the lesbian teachers, mainly my siblings’ age, were all powerful women with short hair in button-down shirts and sometimes a tie, and they looked you in the eye and told you—silently!—that they’d taken far too much shit for far too long to tolerate your acting in any way like a dick about any aspect of who they were, so if you were not completely chill on the subject it was time to reconsider your decision to be a middle school student at the Walden School. Any questions?
I had no questions. I had ascertained, early on, that my own gender identity and sexuality were generally white-bread cis-hetero, and that was fine, but anything else would have been fine, too. And Sally was fine. I had never, for what it was worth, seen my sister in makeup, and only once—at our grandmother’s funeral in New Jersey—in a dress （and looking none too happy about it, either）。 I had also never, until now, seen Sally’s hair extend past her jawline. And I had never heard Sally so much as mention a companion of either （any） gender.
“Do tell,” I said simply. So Sally did.
Her name was Paula. She’d come to Ithaca for the vet school （large animal, Sally clarified） but turned out to hate the crack-of-dawn hours and the muck, so she’d gone into research. Now she taught at the vet school. “That’s her cat, actually,” said Sally, who seemed, for the first time, ever so slightly embarrassed.
“Nice cat.”
“Yes. His name is Pyewacket.”
“Well, that’s … unusual.”
“After the familiar in Bell, Book and Candle. You know that movie?”
I did. I had watched it with Lewyn one night the previous summer, after a long day of camp counseling. “You know,” I said, “I’m not really here to go on a tour of Cornell. I mean, I’ll do it, but it’s not why I’m here.”
“Okay,” said Sally, with caution.
“I want to talk about some things. I’m tired of us all being so … you know, nobody connected. I don’t know you enough. I don’t know Harrison at all.”
Sally smiled. “That might not be such a loss. I hate what he’s doing. Actually I hate everything he’s done since he left for college. Maybe we don’t all get an opportunity to make the world better, but can we at least not fuck it up more?”
“I don’t disagree,” I told her. “But he’s my brother, just as much as you’re my sister. I know we didn’t grow up together, but I’m an adult now. I’d kind of like us not to be this broken. I mean, if it can be helped. Maybe there’s something I’m not understanding.”