The things you do for friends, I thought, when Marcia told me about what her daughter wanted. Sitting here listening to things that bore no relation to me and acting like I cared. That was friendship, I thought. Across the table Marcia was going on about what her daughter wanted. She wants to get married, the woman said. Jemima wants someone to marry her.
"Really?" I said. "How sweet." Privately I was thinking a little differently. Not sweet at all. It was predictable. Predictable anyway for the romantically inclined. There she was, a girl of eleven years old, and already thinking about wedding bells and receptions and of course, the dress.
Make that the The Dress. It's always important, isn't it? Long and white and with all the trimmings. A symbol of whatever it symbolised. Purity? Unlikely in most women who get married these days. Not something you were likely to catch me in.
I smiled back at my friend when she said little Jemima wanted to be married. "Don't we all?" I said, being polite. All? Not quite true in my case: I am a 39 year old woman who has no interest in getting married. Not in the conventional sense. But convention was all we had in our day and age. Women didn't marry women, sad to say and if they did, I was probably a bit too old for another woman.
"I am sure she will find someone one day," I continued, being the best purveyor of platitudes I could be. "I am sure she will be very happy with the right man."
Marcia had a look quite unlike any I had seen before on her face. "I don't know," she said, and looked away.
"Come on, Marcia. Jemima's pretty and she's smart and apart from having a terrible woman for a mother, she'll be fine." The platitudes were about to tumble out even more. "She will be very happy and give you the chance to be a wonderful grandmother."
"No." Said Marcia, looking awkward.
Some jokes go down badly: I understood at once that Marcia, being barely into her thirties, probably couldn't even begin to contemplate getting old. The prospect of being a silver haired granny didn't sit well with her. "Sorry," I said. "You'll be a very attractive and not at all old granny when Jemima has--"
"Stop," said my friend. "Stop right there, Connie."
I stopped. The woman opposite me had the strangest look on her face. It moved and flickered. An animation that I figured which sprang from some deep seated part of her, a bit of her soul that had never seen the light of day before. I waited, unsure what was about to happen.
"Jemima," began the woman and then suddenly she was crying. Not loudly, but a soft weeping.
"She's not ill is she?" I asked. I briefly had a devastating vision of a myriad child illnesses and diseases that wrench the heart and destroy a promising young life. "Is it bad? Is it terminal?"
"What?" Marcia stared at me.
"Is she, you know, going to be okay?"
"Of course she's going to be okay. What do you think I meant?"
I shrugged, unable to bring up topics such as kids dying in hospitals, attached to tubes and wires emerging from a machine. Or perhaps worse, the machine being turned off. "I don't know," I lied.
"She's fine," snapped Marcia. Now her face had a different look. It was one of anger.
"Good," I said, avoiding looking at Marcia's dark eyes and furrowed brow.
"Not good. Because she's like you!"
I blinked at my friend. "How like me?"
"She's that thing." The woman looked away, tears in her eyes. "The thing you are."
It was my turn. "What?"
"She's... one of you. She's not what I wanted."
I stared at Marcia, unable to quite form my thoughts. No, that's wrong: they were perfectly formed. I just didn't know how to express them. "I don't know what you mean," I said, lying again. I had known in an instant what she meant, so I said it. "You mean, you think an eleven year old is gay."
"I think," said Marcia coldly, "she's been mixing with the wrong people. Looking at... uh, at porn. Other kids at school telling her."
I blew the air from my lungs, but quietly. All the stereotypical things were about to come out, that children are gay because they are told to be by other children, that looking at dirty pictures (and I had no idea how Jemima would be looking at porn at her age unless dear daddy hadn't locked down his computer) would make them be something they weren't. Viewing pictures is not life-forming. I also had no idea who the wrong people were. Did she mean me? I had hardly met the child. I had no influence on Jemima.
What I was was simply what I was. I was not this child.
The gap between someone like me and Jemima was not only ten miles of countryside and town, as well as different social circles but it was the biggest one of all: age. She could have been my child if I had liked men and married late, but to this kid I would be ancient. She probably thought her mother was ready to draw her retirement benefits so God knows what she would make of a woman of my age. Middle aged, thicker set with age, boobs that carried more weight than they used to.
Yes, I was mad at Marcia, because she was being everything I detested in other people who were ignorant and selfish and unthinking. Still, there was no point in having a row here. The woman was free to get up and leave, so I waited for her to say something more if she was going to stay.
"Look," said Marcia finally. She turned her face back to me. She had blinked the tears away but she looked close to more. "It's not you, Connie."
"No," I said quietly. "It isn't." I wanted to say being gay wasn't some sort of virus that spread to unsuspecting people, but this wasn't the place to bring that brand of ignorance up.
"You're right. Jemima is very smart but she said..." the woman hesitated.
"She said she was gay," I finished. "But girls of that age don't know what they are. Not yet. I didn't when I was eleven." I felt I might be lying again because certainly by 12 I had a pretty good idea of what and who I wanted, but there was no point in distressing Marcia any more. "Give her time. The young need time to work things out."
Marcia gulped. I thought she would at least agree with me but she had more to say about her daughter. "Jemima said she wanted to be married, to a woman." She looked at me and seemed on the verge of collapse. "I don't understand."
"I expect she likes the idea of weddings," I said as kindly as I could. "It's just dressing up, being the centre of attention. Having her hair done. Make-up too, I expect. A fuss being made."
"No, it's not." Marcia gulped again, but not so loudly this time. "She said she wants to see what it's like being married to a woman. I asked her if she wanted a white dress and she said..." the woman gulped. "Only if a woman could see her in it, she said. That a woman was the one she was marrying."
I gave a small, helpless gesture. What passed between mother and daughter was now a distant country to me. I thought of my mother and how she took my lesbian tendencies, when they came out. Badly, as it happened. I wondered if Marcia had screamed the way my mother did, but then I had been in bed with another 14 year old girl then. That made me wonder if little Jemima had been discovered in the arms of another girl. Or as Sophie was with me, our heads down between our legs. I admit the thought of all that still sent a fresh tingle through my belly. First-time tongues are always the sweetest.
"Jemima is..." another pause, more tears welling up. Marcia got hold of herself and finished the sentence. "She is sure that being the bride of a woman is what she wants. God knows I have talked to her about this. A lot. It's the one topic of conversation. I have to keep it away from Bob of course--"
"Of course," I said, remembering the boorish man Marcia had married. He gave the impression that understanding and sympathy were not for the likes of him.
"-Only because I need to make sure Jemima is sure."
"And is she?" I stopped myself saying: 'as sure as a pre-teen can be' but that wouldn't help. I was a pretty sure pre-teen myself. Certain, if I truly think back, who I wanted to be close to. Whose tongue in my mouth, or lodged in my slit, whose hand on my budding boobs.
"Yes, she is. We have spent hours talking and arguing and me begging and her refusing and she is still adamant. More so the more we talked about it."
I nodded. Kids can be so damned obstinate. I recalled the condition well.
"So what is this to do with me? Even assuming I am gay - and I am not sure how you think this - what your daughter thinks isn't down to me."
"I know you're gay because, well, you know."
"I don't."
Marcia took a very deep breath and bit her lip. And then she opened up. And I mean really opened. "Because that's what I wanted too, for myself, when I was a kid. I had to fight it down. I had to turn away from the girl I loved. I wanted her and I couldn't have her. Her name was Jemima too. Jemima Alice. Like my girl's called now. Where do you think I got my daughter's name from?" The confession was tumbling out and even worldly-wise me was astonished. "I loved Jemima Farley and I wanted to be married to her. I wanted her to make me happy but everyone said no, you have to be straight. You can't be you. You have to find a man and have a family because that's what women do. They don't have feelings for other women. That was what I was told. The priest and the teachers and my parents and all the rest of the experts who had never had love in their lives like I had! Everyone knew but they didn't know what was in me." Fresh tears ran down Marcia's cheeks. I wanted to reach out and brush them away but this woman wanted to cry. To let it all out.
"I've never told anyone before," said Marcia after a couple of minutes of sobbing to herself. "I pretended. I went on lying about who I was, what I wanted most. I was cured, everyone said. I wasn't damned any more. Fools! I met Bob and I thought I have to do this, for everyone else. I have to get married. Not for me because I had given up all that. No one knows how much I cried that day. I told people it was because I was happy but it was untrue. I was crying for what I couldn't be any more. I had closed the door on my life and my heart."
I reached out and took Marcia's hand. She didn't pull away, for which I was glad. I'm not much good at consoling the lost but I had to do what I could. "So you saw in me what you were. That makes sense," I said.
"I was jealous of you, because you'd never married. You didn't have to lie like I did." More tears, but a smile too. "I couldn't tell you I knew because all this would come out, when I wasn't ready."
"And are you ready now?"
Marcia nodded. "A little. But not for me. I don't want you to think I fancy you."
"No. You don't fancy me, or I would have noticed. You did very well hiding everything for the sake of everyone else. But I take it you argued with Jemima - your Jemima - that it was wrong to be attracted to women."
My friend nodded, biting her lip again. But she looked better now. "I tried to tell her hard it would be, how people would reject her and judge her and even think that they could cure her, whatever that is."
"And you can't."
"No. No one is cured of what they truly are. It isn't a game where you pretend to be brave and tough."
"Though you did have to pretend to be brave and tough, so it was a game." I squeezed Marcia's hand gently as I spoke. "You played it very well. Someone else's game."
"I don't want Jemima to be hurt," blubbered Marcia looking at me. "What if she meets a woman and this woman hurts her?"
"Everyone gets hurt," I said quietly. "Sometime or other. But you cannot protect her all the time, and anyway, sometimes around the hurt there is a whole lot of love." I thought back to Sophie and how we swore we would always love each other, no matter what. But she was dead now, killed in a car crash on the other side of the world when she was twenty. At least she had some love from me before she died. I am grateful for that if nothing else. Then I turned my thoughts back to Marcia's daughter. "You have I take it finally accepted she is gay."
"Yes." The response was barely audible, the nod almost invisible.
"Now you have to find someone to be her groom." I smiled. "Someone to wear black while she wears white."
Another small agreement. The woman's eyes were wet and she wasn't looking at me.
"You want my help to find her someone to marry?" I had no idea how I would, but Marcia just needed right now to know people were with her, that they understood. Sympathy and understanding, A shoulder to lean on when you felt weary.
"No," said Marcia, and now she looked at me, a light blazing in her eyes. "I want you, Connie, to be the one she marries."
---
I was going to wear a black trouser suit but in the end I wore a short, somewhat tight black knee-length skirt with a short black jacket over a black satin blouse. Don't ask me why, but something told me I should be the opposite of Jemima while still being a woman. I wasn't a substitute man; I wasn't going to be pretend to be what I wasn't because I was a woman who happened to be marrying a girl who would be dressed, I believed, in a long white dress. As tradition dictates, I hand't seen it before the ceremony.
Anyway, the short skirt was best as I still have good legs and they looked good in sheer black tights. If you've still got it, flaunt it. I flaunted it as best I could, and Jemima had said she liked me in high heels. Black, polished high heels with the sort of cruel spike that makes people gasp and gives my calves the shape that makes me feel good. The shape of my legs that made Jemima want to stroke them, which is a particular delight of mine.
The chapel - heaven knows where Marcia had found this place willing to do this complete with a female who would officiate - wasn't exactly packed but there were quite a few people there. I knew a few of them; I had grown my social circle with Marcia's encouragement and she had expanded hers with my help. Among the congregation was Marcia's newly found lover, a woman of her own age by the name of Jemima Alice. Yes, it was her, after all those years. To see them together was a joy. They couldn't bear to be separated now and as well as happiness, divorce from the old lies came swiftly to Marcia's home.
Almost eight months had passed since Marcia's tearful confession to me over her then eleven-year old daughter's desires, and now Jemima was twelve. Still pretty, probably prettier than when I first met her, and very smart. She was also stunning in her white wedding dress. I stood at the front of the chapel, with all eyes on me and when I turned to look at Jemima everyone's eyes followed to look at this little vision of loveliness.
The girl I was going to marry, just as she wanted. Just as I wanted.
Jemima and I had dated and fallen in love. I think we would have fallen in love even if there wasn't a wedding planned. We had spent time in bed making love, exploring all our senses, being happy. We had gone shopping together, made meals together, entertained other lesbians together and drawn admiring looks wherever we went. Me in my high heels, Jemima in her tight jeans and crop tops with her small, high barely discernible breasts. Mother and daughter, some may have thought, or aunt and niece. But some would have known by the way we stood close together that we were more than that.
If they saw us in bed, they'd know beyond a shadow of a doubt what we were. We were lovers and we were happy and we were going to be married.
Now Jemima walked down the aisle towards me in her white satin dress that brought gasps from the people watching. She was holding a small posy of flowers - blue and pink - and she walked with an unhurried grace on the arm of her mother, who would give her way. Behind Jemima was someone I never expected to see, someone I confess until six months before I had no idea existed. It was Sophie's daughter Eleanor. She had been nine months old when her mother died, and now she was here. A lovely, quite heterosexual young woman who having discovered some letters of mine to her mother had sought me out. She understood who her mother was, what Sophie meant to me. When she found out about the wedding, she begged to be a bridesmaid.
"I want to see you the way my mother wanted to see you," Eleanor had said one day over a meal. "I want to be my mum as much as I can on the day."
Sophie was gone but Eleanor, in her pastel pink bridesmaid's gown and holding Jemima's train, walked behind and radiated the sort of joy I recall on her mother's face. Sophie was here, and more importantly was Jemima for her lover, tearful but overjoyed Marcia.
Beautiful little Jemima was here too, and she smiled at me the way a bride should, and if there was any of my heart left unmelted, it melted now.
The service was wonderful, and I was in love. But it was only when I was asked: "Do you, Constance White, take Jemima Alice to be your wedded wife for all time," that I knew I would be in love forever.
The End