And There I Will Be Buried

A woman in Cherry Hill kicked the bucket and her daughter found the prints in the attic. She had no idea why her mother had an envelope of 1960s lesbian wedding photos. She sold them on eBay to a collector, who gave them to a historian, who asked around and found me, blah blah blah. I am so young I am a different person, in my tailored shift dress and my hair up in a twist. But the photos could be of any couple, it wouldn’t matter. My wife will never see them.

My niece Shirin disagrees; she thinks it’s amazing. Shirin has blue hair and a ring poked through her nose like a bull that she calls a septum piercing. She takes pictures of everything with her cell phone and does not stop talking about “liberation,” but usually I don’t mind having her around. Company is company. She’s eighteen, my sister Firoozeh’s grandkid and the only reason I wish that old bitch was still alive, to see her face when she learned her granddaughter turned out to be a dyke, too.

At the table in my apartment we sip steaming glasses of Persian tea, sweetened with saffron-infused rock candy. Ruth had diabetes and in the cabinet remain stale packets of Splenda. Shirin is asking about the photos, the wedding, what it was like, and I am not in the mood. I say to Shirin, “It was like now, except you could get arrested so you did everything in secret.” 

“People are still closeted, khaleh,” my niece points out. “It can still be dangerous.”

“Fine, sure.” My tea is too hot and I scald my tongue. “You’re not wrong.”

Shirin’s phone vibrates and she slips it into her pocket so she can “be present.” I am friends with her on Instagram, so I see all her photos and friends’ attempts at witty comments. (Yes, I know how to use a smartphone; I’m old, not hopeless.) Shirin blows on her tea and I want to tell her she’s not a peasant, she can wait for it to cool, but she is the only person I will see today and I don’t want to ruin the visit. I can tell she wants to talk about the photos again and sure enough she says, “Pretty wild they just turned up in that woman’s attic.”

We rehash the story: how the woman in Cherry Hill worked at a pharmacy in North Philadelphia, the one my wife paid to develop the negatives, how the pharmacist pulled the prints from their chemical bath, saw two brides smiling beneath the chuppah, and refused to deliver the “inappropriate photos.” (This from a man known in the neighborhood as someone not to be left alone with teenage daughters.) One of his employees, the woman in Cherry Hill, kept them and hoped to deliver them to my wife on the sly. But Ruth knew better than to return to that pharmacy. 

At the time she told me the film had spoiled and for years I did not know what happened. It came up one year on our anniversary. I was not doing a very good job paying attention to her.      (On the anniversary night or in those years of marriage.) I was busy with accounting work and being angry with my sister. “I’m glad we don’t have the album,” Ruth said. “There’s nothing to celebrate.” We fought about her developing the film; the pharmacist could have done worse than withhold the photos. I called her reckless and she called me heartless. We shared a one-bedroom (a fact my parents ignored) on Wyoming Avenue and for a week I slept on the couch. Ruth was a better person than me, and like usual she apologized first. “I don’t know how to stay mad at you,” she said. And I wished I could say it back and mean it.

I don’t tell Shirin any of this last part. Anyway, she is now busy taking pictures with her cell phone (so much for being present). She pulls her chair over and asks for a selfie, though she doesn’t use the word “selfie,” thinking I wouldn’t know what it means. I remain where I am, but I allow Shirin to tilt her head toward mine.

“Smile, khaleh,” she says, the screen displaying my apathetic expression next to her beaming one. Her hair is the color of a mermaid’s ass. “This isn’t some nineteenth-century portrait.”

When Ruth got sick two years ago I stopped smiling in photos and I see no reason to start again. I consider telling Shirin this, adding that my parents and grandparents didn’t take the gift of a portrait for granted. But even before the words leave my mouth I hear how they make me sound, and I admit I appreciate Shirin’s sense of humor, how she doesn’t treat me as incapable of understanding a joke.

“Cheese,” I say humorlessly, but I turn up the corners of my mouth and Shirin snaps the picture. She brings the phone to her face and works her fingers across the screen. “How many people will see that?” I ask.

“Not many,” Shirin answers.

“Charming,” I say. I retrieve my phone from my dress pocket and examine the picture on Shirin’s profile, where I see she has nearly five hundred followers. I do not feel as old as I look, lined face and white hair, and I remind myself to apply lipstick next time. At least I am wearing a stylish, collared shirt dress Ruth and I bought together, not one of those inane, floral old lady tunics. “My body’s old but my brain doesn’t know it,” Ruth would say. I scroll to a post of Shirin’s from a few months ago, my seventy-ninth birthday, too many candles in a grocery store fruit tart. I sit in front of the cake and Shirin stands behind me, leaning her face next to mine, smiling her orthodontically-corrected smile. A hundred people have “liked” the picture. I estimate less than a dozen have seen my wedding photos. That may change. The gay men historians want to include me in a documentary and record an “oral history,” which if you ask me sounds dirty. Shirin is thrilled by the idea. But every time I consider it, Ruth’s absence is carved into my body anew.

Our tea has cooled. The bitter-spicy aroma smells like long nights as a little girl, when my parents invited their friends to our apartment in Tehran and stayed up talking and playing cards and singing. One night I was exhausted and my mother wasn’t paying attention to put me to bed. My sister Firoozeh called me a crybaby and said our parents wouldn’t love me anymore if I bothered them. I wet my pants and my sister ran to our mother, who to Firoozeh’s chagrin didn’t scold me. Even as children my sister sensed I was different from other girls and, worse in her eyes, that our parents willfully overlooked my difference. That as the younger child I was loved despite my “shortcomings” and as the elder she carried the burden of our parents’ expectations and no matter what she did it would never be enough. If I am honest it is not only Ruth whom I wish could see the photos—it is my sister. I want to parade, to flaunt—see, I had a wedding just like you and there was nothing you could do about it. But like Ruth, she is gone.

Shirin is scrolling, and this combined with her insistence I speak with the historians and memory of her grandmother, annoys me. “I ought to take a nap,” I say. “Part of growing old.”

Shirin sets down her phone. “Let’s finish our tea.”

“Here, I have to-go cups.” I rise and walk a few steps to the linen closet (everything is close in this beige carpeted one-bedroom I moved into after Ruth died) and take down a sleeve of Styrofoam cups. Ruth purchased them years ago, I don’t remember why, some party. I told her we didn’t need so many but she said it was cheaper to buy in bulk. I hand one to Shirin who frowns, feelings hurt.

“At least let me wash the dishes,” she says.

I wave her off. “It’s fine.”

“Taarof nakon,” she says to me. Don’t be polite. This and calling me khaleh, maternal aunt, is the extent of her Farsi.

“Taarof nemikonam,” I answer—I’m not—but she is already in the narrow linoleum kitchen soaping the sponge. I ease my body into the crinkly leather armchair by the matching couch and drink my tea, listening to Shirin run water in the sink. The dishwasher is broken and I haven’t called a repairman. Washing dishes gives me something to do. Most days I wake up, brew coffee, bathe and dress, come up with ways to fill the hours ahead, grocery shopping or walking to Rittenhouse Square or entertaining a visitor like Shirin. Sometimes I see our friends, the ones who are still alive, but it’s not the same without Ruth. Nothing is. From the time we married, Ruth’s and my household breathed warmth. When I returned home from work, the kitchen air was scented with onions simmering in olive oil. After dinner I washed the dishes while Ruth read spy novels in our big armchair, a lock of dark hair twisted around her finger. She beat me in Scrabble and I beat her in backgammon. On weekends we went to the movies and bought our own boxes of Sno-Caps because we didn’t like sharing. We argued (about cleaning and coffee and money) and like every couple I know, stretches of time passed—years—when we were unhappy together. But we always came back to each other, always.

“Do you have dish gloves?” Shirin calls. I tell her to look under the sink and I prop my legs on the coffee table. Beneath my slippered feet, on the coffee table shelf, sits a gray box. I should not open it. If I do, Shirin will stay even longer and I will feel things I do not want to feel. But the sound of the sponge shushing against ceramic, the earlier indulgence in memory, soften me, and I remove the black-and-white photos from their vessel.

September, 1962. Ruth is twenty-eight and I am twenty-five. Over half a century later we went to City Hall, arranged our paperwork—but that night in September was our real wedding. Six women in our one-bedroom on Wyoming Avenue: four guests, Ruth, and me. The group photograph includes five of us, Deborah behind the camera. Grace and Jean wear suits. Everyone else in dresses. Ruth and me in white. Miriam and Grace hang their arms around each other, Jean crouches in front, Ruth’s hand on her head, laughing. We stand in the living room, where our officiant Miriam recited seven blessings, where Ruth and I promised each other in the Jewish tradition: With this ring, you are made holy to me, for I love you as my soul. You are now my wife. Ruth and I slide gold bands on each other’s fingers, we stomp wine glasses wrapped in cloth napkins, we cut the cake, we open presents, we kiss the bride. Grace and Jean raise the chuppah, a white sheet stretched across wooden poles. I wait for Ruth at the altar. The blinds are drawn, for only those present are meant to witness our union. We dance: Ruth and me, Miriam and Grace, Deborah and Jean. We take turns with the camera. Grace and Jean pose in their suits, dapper. We drink beer in the kitchen. A candid of Ruth and me from torso up, holding each other, mouths parted mid-speech.

“What were you talking about?” Shirin walks over in rubber yellow gloves and examines the photo over my shoulder. “Do you remember?”

She wants me to recall something profound. It is my favorite photo of Ruth and me, not just at the wedding, but ever.

“Probably I was telling Ruth I had to pee,” I say.

“Funny, khaleh.” She asks about the others. I tell her again how Deborah and I met at synagogue, which Ruth found very amusing, and Deborah took me to Rusty’s for the first time. It was a date that revealed immediately we were better as friends. We took a trolley car downtown and walked to Walnut and Quince and Deborah led us around the side of a building, up wooden steps and down a long corridor. We paid two dollars to a woman in a white shirt and dark slacks for a strip of drink tickets. Enter a paneled room with a bar, jukebox and dance floor, a cluster of tables with Deborah’s friends. Ruth looked like a cross between Lucille Ball and Barbra Streisand, with her cat eye liner and dark curls styled in a poodle cut. I felt frumpy in the pumps and blazer I had borrowed from my mother, my hair frizzy. Ruth asked where I bought my skirt and I simply replied, “Macy’s,” not realizing she was trying to strike up conversation.

“I can’t believe it was actually called that,” Shirin says, water dripping from the gloves on her way back to the kitchen. “Rusty’s.” Next, she will bemoan the latest closing of a lesbian bar in Philadelphia. I replace the photos in the box and wait. “I’m devastated about Sisters.”

“Well,” I say, not bothering to ask how she gets into bars at eighteen.

“I still think you should call back the documentary guys,” Shirin yells from the kitchen. After she finishes washing up she slaps the gloves on the counter. Afternoon light casts the room in gold tones. Shirin returns with the repurposed cardboard delivery box where I keep my medications. Between us Ruth and I managed to rack up an impressive list of conditions—arthritis, diabetes, kidney disease (her); atherosclerosis, hypertension, high cholesterol (me)—but in the end it was breast cancer, aggressive and absolute. Some of Ruth’s family came to the funeral, Shirin and her parents, too. But once your age begins with a seven, forget about an eight, it is no longer considered tragic when you die, even if you still radiate vitality like Ruth. People don’t want to listen to an old woman missing her wife. They don’t say it, but they think it. Aren’t you grateful for the love you shared? All those years together? Well, I wanted more time. What am I supposed to do by myself for the next ten years?

“Let’s do your pills,” Shirin says. She sets the box on the coffee table and sits across from me on the couch. “Then I’ll leave you for your nap.”

“Don’t baby me,” I say, twisting off a safety cap. “Hand me my water.”

“You know,” she gives me the glass and I lay pills on the table, “they make these daily organizers, so you don’t have to keep track in your head.”

I place a pill on my tongue and tilt my head back to swallow. I’ve taken them like that my whole life. Ruth teased me for it. She’d say, “What, are you afraid it’s going to get stuck?”

“What else do I have to keep track of?” I ask Shirin.

She shrugs. “Have it your way.” I pick up another tablet and she asks, “What’s that for?”

“Blood pressure,” I answer. I stop myself from adding, so I don’t end up like your grandmother. Five years ago Firoozeh dropped dead of a stroke and the only loss I felt was for Shirin, a dark-haired, pre-pierced nose, swollen-eyed adolescent in a black cotton dress. She spoke at the funeral, of how when she visited, her grandmother spent all day slicing eggplant and stewing meat for Shirin’s favorite dish. I learned my sister set up a college fund when Shirin was born and paid the fees for a school trip abroad. She kept the lilac yellow newborn hat they sent Shirin home in from the hospital. It struck me then, fanning myself in the second row of a humid funeral parlor—I spent so many years relishing my justified resentment toward my sister that it had blinded me to her generosity. Not generous with me, but with her children and Shirin, whom I loved, too. This is why I have never spoken ill of my sister in front of Shirin. Not only did she love her grandmother: her grandmother loved her.

When I was thirteen, Shirin’s age when her grandmother died, Firoozeh promised to take me to a party hosted by some girls at school. The kindness was uncharacteristic of her but our mother had recently caught her making fun of me, calling me a boy, and slapped her. We had come to this country the year before, and my mother said my sister ought to look out for me. The party was all anyone talked about that week at school—who would be there, what you were wearing. I did not have many friends; I was the mannish kid with an accent who brought strange-smelling foods for lunch. My sister was pretty, more popular. But the morning of the party, a girl in my history class asked if I was attending, and we agreed to find each other there and spend the evening together. I spent all afternoon taming my hair with setting gel and curlers, ironed the pleated skirt I had convinced my mother to buy for the occasion. My sister instructed me to be ready by six p.m. and at half past five I was waiting in the living room. Firoozeh had gone to buy a cake so we wouldn’t turn up empty handed. I sat on the couch, my legs crossed at the knee like a good girl. In the kitchen, my mother prepared estamboli polo for my father’s dinner break, cooking rice in tomato and boiling string beans and frying potatoes in onions. Six o’clock came. My father arrived home and my mother set the table for three.

“Why are you dressed up?” my father asked in Farsi, hanging his jacket in the closet.

“Didn’t Firoozeh tell you?” I answered. “We’re going to a party.”

My mother wiped her hands on a dish towel, her eyes narrowed. “Firoozeh left at five.”

“To buy a cake,” I explained.

“No,” my mother said. “For the party.”

“What party?” my father asked, spooning tomato rice onto his plate.

“A girl at school is throwing a party.” My skin prickled with heat, sweat dampening the underarms of my cotton blouse. A clock my parents had received as a housewarming gift ticked on the kitchen wall. I uncrossed my legs and stood.

“What time did your sister say you were leaving?” my mother asked. My father began eating, but she remained in the doorway to the kitchen and I turned away from her knowing expression. Telling on Firoozeh only made things worse, that much I had just learned.

“I got mixed up,” I said, unstrapping my patent leather pumps. “I got the time mixed up.” Before my parents could question me I escaped to the bedroom I shared with Firoozeh and stripped my clothes, leaving them on the closet floor to wrinkle. I wrapped my ridiculous hairdo in a scarf. At school on Monday, I tried to catch the eye of the girl whom I had promised to meet at the party, but she would not look at me. 

“What do you think?” Shirin is looking at me expectantly and I have no idea why.

“What?” I ask, probably affirming her fears of latent dementia.

“Have you thought about the documentary?” she repeats.

I take the last pill and dab my lips with a napkin. “Seems like a hassle.”

“Even just an oral history would be lit.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I say, even though I do. My wedding was lit. The parties Ruth and I threw in our home were lit. We had a turntable in our living room and we owned dozens of records, Joanie Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt. We drank beer with Miriam and Grace and Deborah and Jean, complaining about Nixon and Rizzo and laughing at each other’s impressions. When everyone went home, Ruth and I collected the bottles and dishes and played Joan Armatrading on the stereo. One night, years after we moved from the apartment on Wyoming Avenue to a rowhome in Graduate Hospital, years after Deborah elbowed me in Rusty’s and whispered she’s talking to you and I asked Ruth to dance, years after the cold night in early spring 1968 when men in blue uniforms unplugged the jukebox and raised the overhead lights, a crush of bodies toward the exit, the police shouting, calling us names I don’t repeat, years after all of that, after one of our parties, I pulled Ruth close to me, a trash bag in my hand, empty bottles in hers, and we didn’t need to speak, our bodies words enough.

“It means cool,” Shirin says. “It would be cool for, like, posterity. People should know we’ve always been here.”

“We weren’t special.” I replace the bottles in the box. “There were plenty of others. Some men Ruth knew from school. Forgot their names.”

“That’s exactly my point.”

“I’ll think about it.” The lids of my eyes are heavy, my body is heavy, my desire for a nap no longer an excuse for Shirin to leave.

“It’s an amazing opportunity,” she continues, and now she is reminding me of her grandmother, unrelenting. Our parents passed away, my mother then my father. Ruth had a fridge magnet that read How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. Well, my father spent his life from eight in the morning until eight at night working in a corner store under fluorescent lights that made his head ache, to sustain our family, to leave something for his daughters when he died. He named Firoozeh executor because she was older and married to a lawyer, even though I had my CPA license. When I asked Firoozeh for my share she said it all went to funeral expenses, but it didn’t add up. It wasn’t a life-changing amount of money, but Ruth and I had discussed the possibility of taking a trip together, Greece or Tokyo or someplace else we had never been. My sister and her fart of a husband lived in a McMansion on the Main Line and took an extravagant vacation every year. I showed up at Firoozeh’s with a letter from a lawyer. Ruth waited in the car around the block. “Don’t let her bully you,” she said to me.

When I rang the doorbell Firoozeh said, “Come in,” as if she were expecting me. Shirin’s mother was a teenager by then and out with friends, the husband off doing God knows what, playing golf or screwing a secretary. Firoozeh brewed us tea and it was all unnervingly civil. She inquired about my work and I admired the framed family portrait on the wall. When we circled around to the question of the will, I showed her the letter from the lawyer.

“No,” she said. Just that: no.

I told her our father’s will stipulated that I was entitled to the money.

“Did she put you up to this?” my sister asked.

“This has nothing to do with Ruth.”

My sister’s face twitched when I said Ruth’s name.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

“What?”

“Make a face like that.”

“You wear that ring,” she pointed to the gold band Ruth slid on my finger two decades before, “like it means something.”

I placed my cup on the table. It was one of a matching set my sister bought at a department store. Even her mugs were barren of personality. “My marriage isn’t up for discussion.”

“You’re going to spend our father’s money on her.”

“What I do in my house—”

“It isn’t natural,” Firoozeh cut in, striking the table with her palm. Tea sloshed over the lips of our mugs. It occurred to me that it was precisely because my mother and father wanted me to have the money that Firoozeh did not want to give it to me. I never told our parents I loved women but after I moved in with Ruth, they stopped asking about marriage. Firoozeh did everything right. She married a rich husband and produced children and cooked khoresht every Friday. In Tehran she peeled potatoes with my mother while I played in the dirt with boys. And I was the favorite anyway. We both knew—from the way our parents talked to us, about us. This fact had made my sister suffer since her girlhood, and in turn, she made me suffer. I imagine now her face if I could have shown her the photos then, the glee her horror would provoke in me.

But I didn’t have the photos. I stood and put on my coat. “I’ll mail the letter certified.”

“I’m just glad Maman and Baba—”

“You’re just glad, what? That they’re dead so you can spend their money on another fucking trip to Cancun?”

“That they never found out their daughter was a fucking invert.”

The word rotted in the air—and I am back in Rusty’s, Ruth grabbing my hand—or maybe Deborah, Miriam, Jean, Grace—male voices yelling that we are whores and predators and inverts—and even though I am safe now, even though I never sent the lawyer’s letter, even though Ruth and I worked Saturdays for two years and took a trip to Greece and Tokyo we never forgot—I still felt as violated when my sister said it as I did that night in Rusty’s.

“I am tired, Shirin,” I snap at my niece. I pick up the Styrofoam cup of cold tea and shove it into her hand, amber liquid escaping the lid and dripping onto the carpet. “I need to rest.”

“I’m sorry, khaleh, I thought—I didn’t realize.”

“You think if people see these photographs, my photographs, it will change something. But some things cannot be fixed.”

Shirin holds the tea and doesn’t speak. Then she says, “I know about Maman-joon.” That’s what she called my sister, mother dear. “That she disapproved of you and Ruth.”

A feeling between longing and tenderness passes through me when I hear my niece speak Ruth’s name. I say, “Oh, disapproved. That’s one way to put it.”

Shirin says, “She was awful to you. I heard her talking to my mom once, about you and Ruth. I was only twelve but I already knew about myself and I decided I would never let Maman-joon find out. You think I don’t notice things, that I live in some kind of fantasy world. But I do notice. I miss Ruth, too. I loved her, too. That’s why I want people to see the pictures.”

The revelation settles around us and my niece pauses, the ring hanging askew in her nose. Ruth would have told me to let the ring be, that everyone was young once including us. We were young. Ruth’s arm around me and mine around her. Miriam and Grace put a record on the turntable, Jean and Deborah bring the cake from the kitchen. The room smells of lavender perfume and cologne. 

“Our vows are real,” Ruth says.

“Yes,” I say. “They are.”

Then Deborah snaps the picture, exposing the cellulose acetate film roll to light. The first person to see the image is a pharmacist in North Philadelphia, and the next is a woman who brings them home to Cherry Hill where they remain for more than fifty years. Shirin is saying something about driving home, having overstayed her welcome, leaving me to rest. I want to tell her to stay, to wrap her in my arms the way my mother wrapped me in hers when we arrived in this country, but first, I need the photos. I need to look at them and remember why Ruth risked bringing them to the pharmacy. Why? As Shirin said: because she wanted to see them, because she wanted people to see them. Not to flaunt them in my sister’s face—not every action must be a retaliation against her. Firoozeh held power over me, but only as an old woman, Firoozeh buried years since, do I finally realize the power I held over her. 

I will take my niece in my arms and later, if my mood persists, I may call the historian whose number is on the notepad I keep on Ruth’s nightstand. But if I do, first I will pluck one from the stack, handle it by the edges, careful, don’t smudge it. This one, I will keep for myself.