Free The Child by Sarah Schulman Page A

there is a straight woman in the room, she’ll have to remember not to flirt with her, and not to be smarter than her in front of him. Sisterhood and all that. What if there’s a lesbian in the room? There won’t be.
    “What time are you meeting Hockey?”
    “We said he’d come pick me up at seven-thirty, so he’ll be here at seven.” Eva placed the vase of flowers on the table. Then she sat down on the couch. She touched her lover’s sloping shoulder with private gratitude and grace. “What are you doing to do?”

    “I got a tape of the first five episodes of that new series , OB/GYN . I’m gonna watch them, try to figure out the formula.”
    “Have I ever seen that one?”
    “Yeah.” Mary was excited. She had her pad and pencil ready. “Remember? The black guy got shot. The white girl got breast cancer and died. The nurse used to be a dominatrix, and the radiologist needed a green card?”
    “They’re all like that.”
    “No, no, no. In this one a blind girl was kidnapped, someone stole a Six train, the orderly fell in love with the elevator, and the opera singer got breast cancer and died?”
    “Oh, okay.… Honey,” Eva said softly. “Something really creepy happened.”
    Mary stopped, looked up. She saw the expression on Eva’s face.
    “What happened?”
    “At the Bar Association cocktail party. My sister. It’s so ridiculous.”
    Mary cared. “Of course you’re upset.”
    “Yeah, I’m upset.”
    “What happened?”
    Sometimes love is just asking an open-ended question, then sitting back and listening with compassion. It can be a question like What happened? Or it can be something even smaller, like What is a poem? Or What was it like when you were young? It’s the opening of a window, the creation of space. The interest. The time.
    “Well,” Eva said, now feeling it. Now having her turn. Now being in her home with her lover, having her moment. “It was bad enough when we found out that she’d had a baby and didn’t tell us.”

    “That was awful.”
    “But today I actually ran into someone who had been invited to the baby shower. Isn’t that bizarre? I had to confess that we didn’t know anything about it.”
    “Your sister, I want to kill her.”
    “No one’s killing anyone.” Eva did want to kill her sister, but she would never say so. Mary would say so. Eva depended on her for it.
    “Did you finally find out if it’s a girl or a boy?”
    No, Eva had been too embarrassed to ask.
    “Mary, do you think it’s child abuse to keep your kids away from their lesbian aunts?”
    “Legally? How would I know?”
    “Can I go into court and sue for the right to be an aunt?”
    “I don’t think you can win that way.”
    All the way home from the cocktail party, she had looked at little children on the street and thought about their phantom niece/ nephew. It felt so bad. Eva didn’t know how to fight this thing.
    “What if I offer to meet our niece/nephew with a chaperone?”
    “No.” Mary was certain. “Absolutely not. I am not going to let you do that to yourself. This is not your fault.”
    It felt so good to have someone say This is not your fault when in fact it was not. And yet in some way she wished it were, because then she could change it. If the problem was that Eva was an alcoholic, she could go to detox, rehab, endless AA meetings, and many cups of coffee later change it all. It would be in her hands. But when the cruelty comes from the outside–in some stark, unwanted reality–she is at its mercy. Unless her sister changed, Eva would be spending the rest of her life following little girls on the street wondering
Is that my niece? Always longing for justice—to be treated the way that she deserved. To know how to make that real.
    “Look,” Mary said, refilling her glass. “There are a lot of lost kids around. Remember yourself. What if there was a child who really needed you?”
    “If she needed me?”
    “Or he?”
    “If he needed me?”
    “Well, maybe